The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  There is no such agreement about the imperial stomach. “In all my life,” he told Las Cases on September 16, 1816, “I never had either a headache or a pain in my stomach.” Méneval corroborated him: “I have never heard him complain of pain in the stomach.”16 However, Bourrienne reported having more than once seen Napoleon suffering such stomach pains that “I would then accompany him to his bedchamber, and have often been obliged to support him.” In Warsaw, in 1806, after violent stomach pains, he predicted that he would die of the same disease as his father—i.e., cancer of the stomach.17 The doctors who performed an autopsy on him in 1821 agreed that he had a diseased—apparently a cancerous—stomach. Some students would add gonorrhea and syphilis to his woes, and suggest that some by-products remained with him to the end.18

  He refused to treat his ailments with medicine. As a general accustomed to wounded soldiers, he admitted the need of surgery; but as for drugs, he distrusted their side effects, and preferred, when ill, to fast, drink barley water, lemonade, or water containing orange leaves, to take vigorous exercise to promote perspiration, and let the body heal itself. “Up to 1816,” Las Cases reported, “the Emperor did not recollect having ever taken medicine”;19 but the imperial memory was then susceptible to wishful forgetting. “Doctor,” he explained to the physician of the S.S. Northumberland on the way to St. Helena, “our body is a machine for the purpose of life; it is organized to that end—that is its nature. Leave the life there at its ease; let it take care of itself; it will do better than if you paralyze it by loading it with medicines.”20 He never tired of teasing his favorite physician, Corvisart, about the uselessness of medicine; finally he led him to agree that, all in all, drugs had done more harm than good.21 He amused his final physician, Francesco Antommarchi, by asking him which of the two groups, the generals or the doctors, would, at the Last Judgment, be found responsible for the greater number of deaths.

  Despite his ailments, he had in him a fund of energy that never failed till Moscow burned. An appointment to service under him was no bureaucratic sinecure, but almost a sentence to slow death; many a proud official crept away exhausted after five or six years of keeping the Emperor’s pace. One of his appointees complimented himself on not being stationed in Paris: there “I should die of application before the end of the month. He has already killed Portalis, Crétet, and almost Treilhard, who was tough; he could no longer urinate, nor the others either.”22 Napoleon admitted the high mortality among his aides. “The lucky man,” he said, “is he who hides away from me in the depths of some province.”23 When he asked Louis-Philippe de Ségur what people would say of him after his death, and Ségur replied that they would express universal regret, Napoleon corrected him: “Not at all; they will say ‘Ouf!’ “in profound and universal relief.24

  He wore himself cut as he did others; the engine was too strong for the body. He crowded a century of events into twenty years because he compressed a week into a day. He came to his desk about 7 A.M., and expected his secretary to be available at any hour; “Come,” he called to Bourrienne, “let us go to work.”25 “Be here tonight at one o’clock, or four, in the morning,” he said to Méneval, “and we will work together.”26 Three or four days a week he attended the meetings of the Council of State. “I am always working,” he told Councilor Roederer; “I work when I am dining, I work at the theater; in the middle of the night I wake up and work.”

  We might have supposed that these full and exciting days would be paid for by sleepless nights, but Bourrienne assures us that the Emperor slept well enough—seven hours at night, and “a short nap in the afternoon.”27 He boasted to Las Cases that he could go to sleep at will, “at any hour, and in any place,” whenever he needed repose. He explained that he kept his many different affairs arranged in his head or memory as in a closet with several drawers; “When I wish to turn from a business, I close the drawer that contains it, and I open that which contains another. … If I wish to sleep I shut up all the drawers, and I am soon asleep.”28

  II. MIND

  Goethe thought that Napoleon’s mind was the greatest that the world had ever produced.29 Lord Acton concurred. Méneval, awed by the nearness of power and fame, ascribed to his master “the highest intellect which has ever been granted to a human being.”30 Taine, the most brilliant and indefatigable opponent of Napoleolatry, marveled at the Emperor’s capacity for long and intense mental labor; “never has a brain so disciplined and under such control been seen.”31 Let us agree that Napoleon’s was among the most perceptive, penetrating, retentive, and logical minds ever seen in one who was predominantly a man of action. He liked to sign himself as a “member of the Institute,” and he once expressed to Laplace his regret that “force of circumstances had led him so far from the career of a scientist”;32 at that moment he might have ranked the man who adds to human understanding above the man who adds to man’s power.*However, he could be forgiven for scorning the “ideologues” of the Institute, who mistook ideas for realities, explained the universe, and proposed to tell him how to govern France. His mind had the defects of a romantic imagination, but it had the realistic stimulus of daily contact with the flesh and blood of life. His persistent mental activity was part and servant of persistent action at the highest level of statesmanship.

  First of all, he was sensitive. He suffered from the keenness of his senses: his ears multiplied sounds, his nose multiplied odors, his eyes penetrated surfaces and appearances, and discarded the incidental to clarify the significant. He was curious and asked thousands of questions, read hundreds of books, studied maps and histories, visited factories and farms; Las Cases was amazed at the range of his interest, the scope of his knowledge about countries and centuries. He had a memory made tenacious and selective by the intensity and character of his aims; he knew what to forget and what to retain. He was orderly: the unity and hierarchy of his desires imposed a clarifying and directive order upon his ideas, actions, policies, and government. He required from his aides reports and recommendations composed not of eloquent abstractions and admirable ideals but of definite objectives, factual information, practical measures, and calculable results; he studied, checked, and classified this material in the light of his experience and purposes, and issued instructions decisive and precise. We know of no other government in history that worked with such orderly preparation to such orderly administration. With Napoleon the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order.

  By projecting his memories into anticipations, he became skilled in calculating the results of possible responses, and in predicting the plans and moves of his foes. “I meditate a great deal,” he said. “If I seem equal to the occasion, and ready to face it when it comes, it is because I have thought the matter over a long time before undertaking it. … I have anticipated whatever might happen. It is no genie [djinn] which suddenly reveals to me what I ought to do or say, … but my own reflection.”34 So he prepared in detail the campaigns of Marengo and Austerlitz, and predicted not only the results but the time they would require. At the summit of his development (1807) he was able to keep his wishes from obscuring his vision; he tried to anticipate difficulties, hazards, surprises, and planned to meet them. “When I plan a battle no man is more pusillanimous than I am. I magnify to myself all the evils possible under the circumstances.”35 His first rule in case of unforeseen emergencies was to attend to them immediately, at whatever time of the day or night. He left permanent instructions with Bourrienne: “Do not wake me when you have good news to communicate; with such there is no hurry. But when you bring bad news rouse me instantly, for then there is not a moment to lose!”36 He recognized that despite all foresight he might be surprised by some unexpected event, but he prided himself on having “the two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage”—the ability to think clearly and act promptly and effectively, after a sudden awakening.37 He tried to be on his guard against chance, and repeatedly told himself that “it is only a step from victory to disaster.”38

  Hi
s judgment of men was usually as penetrating as his calculation of events. He did not trust appearances or protestations; a person’s character, he thought, does not appear on his face until he is old, and speech conceals as often as it reveals. He studied himself ceaselessly, and on that basis he presumed that all men and women were led in their conscious actions and thought by self-interest. He who was the object of so much devotion (from Desaix, Lannes, Méneval, Las Cases … and those soldiers who, dying, cried “Vive l’Empereur!”) could not conceive of a selfless devotion. Behind every word and deliberate deed he saw the tireless grasp of the ego—the strong man’s ambition, the weak man’s fear, the woman’s vanity or stratagem. He sought out each person’s ruling passion or vulnerable frailty, and played upon it to mold him to imperial aims.

  Despite all forethought and foresight he made (to our hindsight) an ample variety of mistakes, both in judging men and in calculating results. He might have known that Josephine could not bear a month of chastity, and that Marie Louise could not tie Austria to peace. He thought he had charmed Alexander at Tilsit and Erfurt, while the Czar, with Talleyrand’s coaching, was deceiving him elegantly. It was a mistake to intensify British hostility in 1802 by so boldly extending his power over Piedmont, Lombardy, and Switzerland; a mistake to put his brothers on thrones too big for their brains; a mistake to suppose that the German states in the Confederation of the Rhine would submit to French sovereignty when a chance came to break away; a mistake to publish a document that showed him thinking of conquering Turkey; a mistake (as he later confessed) to waste the Grand Army in Spain; a mistake to invade endless Russia, or remain there as winter neared. Supreme over so many men, he was subject, as he said, to the “nature of things,” to the surprises of events, the frailties of disease, the inadequacies of his power. “I have conceived many plans,” he said, “but I was never free to execute one of them. For all that I held the rudder, and with a strong hand, the waves were a good deal stronger. I was never in truth my own master; I was always governed by circumstance.”39

  And by imagination. His soul was a battleground between keen observation enlightening reason and vivid imaginings clouding it with romance, even with superstition; now and then he dallied with omens and horoscopes.40 When he went to Egypt he took with him many books of science and many of sentiment or fancy—Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Goethe’s Werther, Macpherson’s “Ossian”;41 he confessed later that he had read Werther seven times;42 and in the end he concluded that “imagination rules the world.”43 Stranded in Egypt, he fed on dreams of winning India; struggling through Syria, he pictured himself conquering Constantinople with his handful of men, and then marching upon Vienna like a more invincible Suleiman. As power drove caution out of his blood he ignored Goethe’s warning of Entsagen—the acknowledgment of bounds; his proliferating successes challenged the gods—violated the calculus of limitations; and in the end he found himself petulant and helpless, chained to a rock in the sea.

  III. CHARACTER

  His pride had begun with the self-centeredness natural to all organisms. In his youth it swelled defensively in the clash of individuals and families in Corsica, and then against the class and racial arrogance of students at Brienne. It was not by any means pure selfishness; it allowed devotion and generosity to his mother, to Josephine and her children; love for the “King of Rome”; and an impatient affection for his brothers and sisters, who also had selves to pamper and preserve. But as his successes widened, his power and responsibilities, his pride and self-absorption, grew. He tended to take nearly all the credit for his armies’ victories, but he praised, loved, and mourned Desaix and Lannes. Finally he identified his country with himself, and his ego swelled with her frontiers.

  His pride, or the consciousness of ability, sometimes descended to vanity, or the display of accomplishments. “Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.” “Why, General?” “Are you not my secretary?” “Tell me the name of Alexander’s.” “Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.”44 He wrote to Viceroy Eugène (April 14, 1806): “My Italian people must know me well enough not to forget that there is more in my little finger than in all their brains put together.”45 The letter N, blazoned in a thousand places, was occasionally graced with a J for Josephine. The Emperor felt that showmanship was a necessary prop of rule.

  “Power is my mistress,” he declared to Roederer in 1804, when Joseph was angling to be declared heir; “I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me, or even to covet her. … Two weeks ago I would not have dreamed of treating him unjustly. Now I am unforgiving. I shall smile at him with my lips—but he has slept with my mistress.”46 (Here he did himself injustice; he was a jealous lover, but he was a forgiving man.) “I love power as a musician loves his violin.”47 So his ambition leaped from bound to bound: he dreamt of rivaling Charlemagne and uniting Western Europe, forcibly including the Papal States; then of following Constantine from France through Milan to the capture of Constantinople, building classic arches to commemorate his victories; then he found Europe too little, a mere “molehill,”48 and proposed to rival Alexander by conquering India. It would be hard work, for himself and a million troops, but it would be repaid in glory, for him and them; and if death overtook them on the way it would not be too great a price to pay. “Death is nothing; but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.”49 “I live only for posterity.”50 La gloire became his ruling passion, so hypnotic that for a decade nearly all France accepted it as its guiding star.

  He pursued his aims with a will that never bent except to leap—until he had exhausted the sublime and became pitiful. His unresting ambition gave unity to his will, direction and substance to every day. At Brienne, “even when I had nothing [assigned?] to do, I always felt that I had no time to lose.”51 And to Jérôme in 1805: “What I am I owe to strength of will, to character, application, and audacity.”52 Daring was part of his strategy; time and again he surprised his enemies by quick and decisive action at unexpected places and times. “My aim is to go straight toward my objective, without being stopped by any consideration”;53 it took him a decade to learn the old adage that in politics a straight line is the longest distance between two points.

  Sometimes his judgment and conduct were clouded and perverted with passion. His temper was as short as his stature, and it shortened as his power spread. He had the heat and wilds of Corsica in his blood; and though he usually managed to check his wrath, those around him, from Josephine to his powerful bodyguard Roustam, watched their every word and move lest they incur his wrath. He became impatient with contradiction, tardiness, incompetence, or stupidity. When he lost his temper he would publicly berate an ambassador, swear at a bishop, kick philosopher Volney in the stomach, or, faute de mieux, boot a log on the hearth.54 And yet his anger cooled almost as soon as it flared; often it was put on, as a move in the chess of politics; in most cases he made amends a day or a minute afterward.55 He was seldom brutal, often kind, playful, good-humored,56 but his sense of humor had been weakened by hardship and battle; he had little time for the pleasantries of leisure, the gossip of the court, or the wit of the salons. He was a man in a hurry, with a pack of enemies around him, and an empire on his hands; and it is difficult for a man in a hurry to be civilized.

  He spent too much of his energy conquering half of Europe to have much left for the absurdities of coitus. He suspected that many forms of sexual desire were environmentally learned rather than hereditary: “Everything is conventional among men, even to those feelings which, one would suppose, ought to be dictated by Nature alone.”57 He could have had a covey of concubines in the full Bourbon tradition, but he made do with half a dozen mistresses spaced between campaigns. Women thought themselves immortal if they amused him for a night; usually he dispatched the matter with brutal brevity, and talked about his late partners with more coarseness than gratitude.58 His infidelities caused Josephine many hours of worry and grief; he explained to her (if we may believe Mme. de R
émusat) that these divertimenti were natural, necessary, and customary, and should be overlooked by an understanding wife; she wept, he comforted her, she forgave him.59 Otherwise he was as good a husband as his cares and wanderings would allow.

  When Marie Louise came to him he accepted monogamy (so far as we know) with new grace, if only because adultery might lose him Austria. His devotion to her was doubled when he beheld her agony in giving him a son. He had always shown a fondness for children; his law code gave them especial protection;60 now the infant King of Rome became the idol and bearer of his hopes, carefully trained to inherit and wisely rule a France giving laws to a united Europe. So the great ego enlarged itself with marital and parental love.

  He was too immersed in politics to have time for friends; besides, friendship implies a near-equality of give and take, and Napoleon found it hard to concede equality in any form. He had faithful servitors and devotees, some of whom gave their lives for his glory and their own; yet none would have thought of calling him a friend. Eugène loved him, but as a son rather than a friend. Bourrienne (never quite trustworthy) relates that in 1800 he often heard Napoleon say: