In one of the great publishing endeavours of the twenty-first century, the Fondation Napoléon in Paris has since 2004 been publishing every one of the more than 33,000 letters that Napoleon signed. The culmination of this immense project demands nothing less than a complete re-evaluation of this extraordinary man. Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback. His letters show a charm, humour and capacity for candid self-appraisal. He could lose his temper—volcanically so on occasion—but usually with some cause. Above all he was no totalitarian dictator, as many have been eager to suggest: he may have established an unprecedentedly efficient surveillance system, but he had no interest in controlling every aspect of his subjects’ lives. Nor did he want the lands he conquered to be ruled directly by Frenchmen. He believed that one can control foreign lands only by winning over the population and sought accordingly to present himself in terms that would make him sympathetic to the locals, feigning sympathy for their religion as a means to an end. (It is notable that his strategies varied considerably in Italy, Egypt and Germany.) In the one instance where this was not the case—Haiti—he later acknowledged that the brutality of his policies had compromised his effectiveness and mused with foresight that one could not keep people subject for long at a great distance. Above all he hoped to modernize Europe.
‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person,’ he said after the failure of the royalist assassination plot of 1804. ‘I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’ His characteristic egotism aside, Napoleon was right. He personified the best parts of the French Revolution, the ones that have survived and infused European life ever since. Although the Terror had finished five years before he grabbed power, the Jacobins were a powerful force who could always return. Similarly, a royalist restoration which would have wiped away the benefits of the Revolution was also possible. Instead, the fifteen-year rule of Napoleon saved the best aspects of the Revolution, discarded the worst and ensured that even when the Bourbons were restored they could not return to the Ancien Régime.
The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire. At the same time he dispensed with the absurd revolutionary calendar of ten-day weeks, the theology of the Cult of the Supreme Being, the corruption and cronyism of the Directory and the hyper-inflation that had characterized the dying days of the Republic. ‘We have done with the romance of the Revolution,’ he told an early meeting of his Conseil d’Etat, ‘we must now commence its history.’
For his reforms to work they needed one commodity that Europe’s monarchs were determined to deny him: time. ‘Chemists have a species of powder out of which they can make marble,’ he said, ‘but it must have time to become solid.’ Because many of the principles of the Revolution threatened the absolute monarchies of Russia (which was to practice serfdom until 1861), Austria and Prussia, and the nascent industrial kingdom of England, they formed seven coalitions over twenty-three years to crush revolutionary France. In the end they succeeded, but, thanks to Napoleon, the Bourbons were too late to destroy the revolutionary principles he had codified into law. Many of those who opposed him were forced to adopt aspects of his reforms in their own countries in order to defeat him.
‘There are two ways of constructing an international order,’ Henry Kissinger wrote in A World Restored, ‘by will or by renunciation; by conquest or by legitimacy.’ Only one of these was open to Napoleon. In Britain, which had already had its revolution 140 years earlier and thus enjoyed many of the legal benefits that the Revolution brought to France, Napoleon faced William Pitt the Younger, who saw in the destruction of French power—be it revolutionary or Napoleonic—an opportunity to translate Britain’s maritime trading success into global great power status. Napoleon’s threat to invade Britain in 1803 ensured that successive British governments would remain determined to overthrow him. Their decrying of French imperialism was pure hypocrisy as Britain was busy building a vast empire at the time. Napoleon boasted that he was ‘of the race that founds empires’—but he had a different kind of empire in mind, more in keeping with those of Caesar, Alexander and Frederick the Great.
Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others. France and Britain were at war for nearly half the period between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and Waterloo, and Napoleon was only a second lieutenant when the Revolutionary Wars broke out. He launched the Peninsular War and the war against Russia in 1812 in the hope of extending the reach of his ‘Continental System,’ a misguided protectionist answer to Britain’s control of the seas, and thereby force Britain to sue for peace. It was thus Colbertian protectionism that brought him down, far more than the bloodlust and egomania of which he is so often accused.
His decision to invade Russia was not in and of itself his worst mistake. The French had defeated the Russians three times since 1799, so it was understandable that he should believe he could do so again. He had fought in blizzards at Eylau and in the Sierra de Guadarrama, and at the end of long lines of communications at Austerlitz and Friedland. It was the very size of his army in 1812 that forced the Russians to adopt their strategy of constant retreat, and their adroitness in avoiding battle until they had lured him to within 75 miles of Moscow accounted for much of their victory. He could not have known how to block the ravages of the typhus epidemic that killed around 100,000 men in his central striking force as its origins and cure would not be discovered for another century. Despite this, had Napoleon chosen either one of two other possible routes back from Malojaroslavetz, he would have saved enough of the Grande Armée to preserve his crown. He thought he could bring the enemy to a decisive battle and pushed his forces too fast and hard in pursuit of that goal. He failed to appreciate that the Russian army had fundamentally changed and that Alexander I would stop at nothing to annihilate him.
Overall, however, Napoleon’s capacity for battlefield decision-making was astounding. Having walked the ground of fifty-three of his sixty battlefields, I was astonished by his genius for topography, his acuity and sense of timing. A general must ultimately be judged by the outcome of the battles, and of Napoleon’s sixty battles and sieges he lost only Acre, Aspern-Essling, Leipzig, La Rothière, Lâon, Arcis and Waterloo. When asked who was the greatest captain of the age, the Duke of Wellington replied: ‘In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.’
He convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment and a story whose sheer splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries. He was able to impart to ordinary people the sense that their lives—and, if necessary, their deaths in battle—mattered in the context of great events. They too could make history. It is untrue that he cared nothing for his men and was careless with their lives. He lost a friend in almost every major battle, and his letters to Josephine and Marie Louise make it clear that these deaths, and those of his soldiers, affected him. Yet he could not allow that to deflect him from his main purpose of pursuing victory, and he would not have been able to function as a general if it had, any more than Ulysses Grant or George Patton could have done.
Napoleon certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, ‘Because I had my own.’
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Historians who have tried to explain Napoleon before the publication of the Fondation’s new correspondence have been working with only two-thirds of the puzzle’s pieces. The missing letters unveil the intimate tho
ughts of a protean multitasker, a profound thinker and talented wordsmith whose intellect impressed Goethe. They reveal the leadership secrets of the most interesting personality to have sat on a European throne since Elizabeth I. Over half concern military matters and lay bare the workings of the mind of a soldier who is rightly considered on a par with his own heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Napoleon faced many of the same problems as other great soldier-statesmen such as George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, and his correspondence shows how, like they, he negotiated the interlocking but often contradictory requirements of the political and the military in periods of acute crisis.
The complete correspondence is also interesting for what is absent. Not one letter to his wife Josephine for nearly two years after he was apprised, while on campaign in Egypt, of her affair with the prancing cavalry captain Hippolyte Charles. Hardly any letters to the mistresses he took in consequence, who instead of billets-doux received significant amounts of cash from the French Treasury, as recently discovered in his secret account book. (Although he admitted in exile to having had ‘six or seven’ mistresses, evidence now points to at least twenty-one.)
A persistent untruthfulness in the telling of his own life has made the task of Napoleon’s biographers challenging. In youth he was a novelist manqué, and all his adolescent writings and essays were deeply autobiographical. So keen was he to burnish his legend and legacy while imprisoned on the mid-Atlantic island of St Helena that he wildly exaggerated his accomplishments and minimized or altogether ignored his errors, failures and occasional brutalities. ‘The historian, like the orator, must persuade,’ Napoleon told his chamberlain General Henri Bertrand. ‘He must convince.’ So in June 1816, while on St Helena, he began dictating to his private secretary Emannuel de Las Cases and others—sometimes for up to twelve hours a day—what was to be published two years after his death in four volumes under the title Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. It was the greatest international bestseller of the nineteenth century, outselling such other classics as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. ‘What a novel my life has been!’ he once said while on the island, and his retelling of his life certainly owed as much to fiction as to fact. Although he was often self-deprecating in private and admitted the mistakes that led to his myriad disasters to his friends and secretaries, he chose not to do so in his memoirs. As politicians tend to, he exaggerated his achievements and underplayed defeats. He pretended to a pan-Europeanism that never existed, and Las Cases even inserted a fraudulent document intended to absolve him of culpability for the harsh crushing of the Madrid revolt of May 1808. So Napoleon himself certainly can’t be considered an objective curator of his own legend. This distortion of his image was then reinforced by the embellishing gloss of such pro-Bonapartist writers as Stendhal, Balzac, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. It was perhaps inevitable that there would be a backlash.
All too often historians have taken at face value the biographies written by people around Napoleon, whereas many of them were deeply compromised, to the point of being worthless unless confirmed by a second source. The lure of employment or a pension or merely the right to publish under the Bourbons wrecked objectivity. Claire de Rémusat’s letters to her husband, one of Napoleon’s courtiers, written between 1804 and 1813, were affectionate in their references to Napoleon, but by 1818 her memoirs painted him as a monster ‘incapable of generosity’ with ‘a satanic smile.’ What happened in between was that her husband wanted a job as the prefect of a department from the Bourbons. She’d burnt her contemporaneous notes in 1815 and tried to resuscitate what the writer René Chateaubriand called her ‘memories of memories.’ Napoleon’s valet Louis Constant Wairy didn’t write a word of his own memoirs, but had them ghostwritten by at least five people, including the fantasist Charles-Maxime de Villemarest (also one of the ghostwriters for Napoleon’s secretary Louis de Bourrienne, whose memoirs have been treated by historians as generally objective despite the fact that Napoleon had sacked him twice for embezzlement). The famous snowball battle during Napoleon’s schooldays at Brienne wasn’t even mentioned in the ill and impecunious Bourrienne’s scrappy and incomplete notes to his ghostwriters, and appears to have been taken from a translation of an anonymous English pamphlet. In 1830 a two-volume book totalling eight hundred pages was published by people who knew Napoleon well, including his brothers Joseph and Louis, which forensically demolished scores of Bourrienne’s claims.
The Comte de Montholon, who was with Napoleon on St Helena, wrote his supposed narrative of his time on the island twenty years later without contemporaneous notes. His memoirs were ghosted by the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who also ghosted the reminiscences of Napoleon’s favourite actor Talma. Laure d’Abrantès was banned from Paris by Napoleon, and by the time her memoirs appeared in the 1830s she was an opium addict who nonetheless claimed to remember verbatim long, intimate conversations that had taken place decades before. Several of the eighteen volumes of her memoirs were ghosted by Balzac and written to stave off creditors. Napoleon’s police chief Joseph Fouché’s Memoirs were actually written by the hack writer Alphonse de Beauchamp; the receipts exist to prove as much. Nor did Napoleon’s advisor Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe write so much as a word of his. One of Napoleon’s favourite mistresses, Mademoiselle George, also had her memoirs drawn up by a ghostwriter, but she found them so boring that she sexed them up with stories of Napoleon shoving wads of banknotes down her corset.
In the period before copyright laws, one could publish entirely fictitious memoirs supposedly written by living people such as Joseph Bonaparte, Marshal Marmont and Napoleon’s foreign minister Armand de Caulaincourt, and their ostensible authors would have no legal recourse to block publication. A fraud called Charlotte de Sor published what she claimed were Caulaincourt’s memoirs in 1837, on the basis of having briefly met him in 1826. His real memoirs weren’t published until they were discovered in 1934 and bore no resemblance to her effort. Although the Napoleonic sections of Talleyrand’s memoirs were written by him in the 1820s, they were extensively rewritten in the 1860s by the profoundly anti-Napoleon Adolphe de Bacourt. Prince Metternich’s memoirs were ghosted too, and immensely self-serving, whereas Paul Barras’ are a monument to malice, self-pity and revenge. The man Napoleon overthrew to become head of state in the Brumaire coup, Louis Gohier, promised in the introduction to his memoirs that he was ‘an impartial writer’ who would ‘give full justice to Napoleon,’ before embarking on two volumes of bitter ranting. The minister Lazare Carnot and Marshal Grouchy’s memoirs weren’t written by them either, and were cobbled together from documents they left, some contemporaneous, others not, and Miot de Melito’s so-called memoirs were written by his son-in-law over half a century after the events they describe.
This nonetheless leaves plenty of objective memoirs from people close to Napoleon who did keep contemporaneous notes and didn’t exaggerate their contact with him in order to pay the rent or find jobs under the incoming regime. These are the accounts that I’ve tended to concentrate on. The credibility of Caulaincourt’s actual account of events from 1812 to 1814, and of Henri Bertrand’s diary of his time with Napoleon on St Helena and of Jean Jacques Cambacérès’ memoirs are greatly enhanced by the fact that they emerged only in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s, respectively, and were thus untainted by the politics of the Restoration. The memoirs of the little-known Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort, who as prefect of Napoleon’s palace was closer to him than Bourienne, were bravely published during the Bourbon period, and equally positive portraits were drawn by Napoleon’s two private secretaries after Bourrienne, namely Claude-Francois de Méneval and Baron Agathon Fain. Of course they all need to be checked against other sources, and against each other, but they tend to present a more honest portrait than the ‘Black Legend’ painted by his enemies and their ghostwriters soon after his death. The portrait that emerges from these accounts is of a man who bears very little resemblance to the caricature we have come to think of as Napole
on. To understand why this is so, one must revisit more proximate history.
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In the early morning of Sunday, June 23, 1940, 119 years after his death, a long shadow fell over the reputation of Napoleon. Having captured Paris the week before, Adolf Hitler visited Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, stayed for an hour and had himself photographed staring down at the Emperor’s pink porphyry sarcophagus. He later had the remains of Napoleon’s son disinterred from Vienna and reburied in Paris. A fatal connection was thus made in the public imagination between the two dictators born outside their countries who sought to dominate Europe, both of whom, after initial military successes, went to their downfalls due to a failed invasion of Russia, their own insatiable hubris and the efforts of a group of tenacious Allies who coalesced against them.
‘I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler,’ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in September 1944, ‘as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to compare him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher.’ And yet Churchill conjured up the spectre of Napoleon’s fleet in his speeches in the summer of 1940 and his invocation that October of a ‘determination to fight on, as Pitt and his successors fought on, till we in our turn achieve our Waterloo’ fixed the correlation in British minds permanently. To demonize the character of an enemy while the war is being fought is perfectly understandable—an opponent’s personality is fair game, after all—but is unnecessary two centuries after his defeat. Elsewhere, Churchill described Napoleon as ‘the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar,’ a plaudit of which Napoleon would profoundly have approved.
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