Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  * Orders of the Day were usually informational and administrative, read out during the 1 p.m. roll-calls in camp or during rest-halts on marches. These were different from proclamations, which read like speeches and were intended to be inspirational.

  * Although the French army didn’t resort to flogging as the British army did, it was much freer with the death penalty. When twelve clerks in the victualling department were caught selling the Imperial Guard’s rations before the battle of Wagram, they were shot a few hours later (Blaze, Life in Napoleon’s Army, p. 190). In Spain a man was shot for eating a bunch of grapes (they were thought to cause dysentery), and an indication of violence towards a superior would invite the death penalty. One voltigeur (light infantryman) was even shot during a later campaign in Spain for making a woman’s black apron into a cravat.

  * Although he often rode his mount to exhaustion, Napoleon was a fine horseman; he established ‘complete mastery’ over his horses and on occasion even got them to perform tricks (Balcombe, To Befriend pp. 41–2).

  * Wellington’s British army was not blameless in this regard. We have relatively few memoirs from enlisted men in the Peninsular War, but one by Friedrich Lindau of the King’s German Legion makes it clear that they thieved off the local population and would beat up peasants who refused to give them produce and livestock (eds. Bogle and Uffindell, Waterloo Hero passim, Mars & Clio, No. 26 pp. 89–90). Napoleon did have a corporal and two soldiers shot who stole sacred vases from a church, which in his own mind was not comparable to his own removal of much of northern Italy’s Renaissance art treasures from churches and palaces. French generals regularly enriched themselves at the expense of the conquered, with some, like Masséna, taking greed to outrageous limits; Napoleon would later make him disgorge millions of francs. It was common practice at that period for commanders to reward themselves handsomely: Wellington returned from his campaigns in India having paid off all his debts and amassed a fortune of £42,000, the equivalent of over 1 million francs, all of it perfectly legally (Weller, Wellington in India pp. 257–9).

  * This is essentially the argument justifying the Elgin Marbles remaining in the British Museum today, although they were acquired under different circumstances.

  * It was about 15 yards upstream from today’s bridge.

  * Crossing bridges and seizing bridgeheads in the presence of the enemy was to be a constant feature of Napoleonic campaigns. It would be seen again at Arcole in 1796, in the Danube campaign in 1805, at Jena in 1806, during the Polish campaign of 1807, at Aspern-Essling and Wagram in 1809, at the Berezina in 1812, at Leipzig in 1813, at Montereau in 1814 and at Charleroi in 1815.

  * It was not all triumph that day, however. After the battle was won, Napoleon learned that Laharpe had been killed in a skirmish near Piacenza. He wrote to the French ambassador at Berne to ensure that his estate, which had been confiscated by the local authorities during the Revolution, was returned to his six children. The Bernese cantonal government was not about to refuse the demands of the victor of Lodi.

  * ‘Nothing is so important in war as an undivided command,’ Napoleon pronounced later in life. ‘There should be only one army, acting upon one base, and conducted by one chief’ (ed. Chandler, Military Maxims p. 213).

  * It was supposedly on this occasion that he remarked to Marmont: ‘Fortune is a woman, and the more she does for me, the more I will require of her’ (Rose, Napoleon I p. 118).

  * The word ‘missing’ covers a multitude of possibilities in the warfare of the day, including dead but impossible to find or identify; hiding; deserted; accidentally or deliberately lost; malingering; captured; concussed; murdered by partisans; wrongly entered in the post-battle roster rolls; temporarily absorbed into a different unit; unconscious and unidentifiable in a field hospital; blown to smithereens or merely absent without leave. Men who were ‘missing’ therefore often re-entered the combat strengths later on, although of course many didn’t.

  * Napoleon had an active imagination when it came to devising unusual punishments. Believing that it was ‘abominable women’ camp-followers who were responsible for ‘exciting the soldiers to pillage’, in mid-April 1797 he ordered every woman still with Bernadotte’s division within twenty-four hours of the publication of the order to ‘be smeared with soot and exposed for two hours in the market-place’ (ed. Bingham, Selection I p. 151).

  * Napoleon couldn’t ignore the Directory entirely. When in June Pius VI had an apoplectic attack, he asked for ‘a positive instruction regarding the course I must take if the Pope dies. Should I allow a new Pope to be instated?’(CG1 no. 1725 p. 1030). Pius recovered and lived another two years.

  * In fact King Charles Emmanuel stayed on his throne until his abdication in favour of his brother in 1802.

  * If Austria turned out to prefer a return to war, the army would have to be ready, so Napoleon was also writing letters such as that to Citizen Haller, its financial administrator in Paris, saying: ‘Please go to the place where they make buttons, and tell me what the situation is; the entire army is still naked because the buttons haven’t been made.’ The postscript to the letter merely states: ‘Money, money, money!’(CG1 no. 2146 p. 1243).

  * A reference to Pantalone, the commedia dell’arte character who was mercenary and greedy.

  * Redeveloped extensively in 1865, this house, now number 60, is a bank; unusually for Napoleonic sites it is not worth a detour.

  * A general was paid roughly 5,000 francs per annum in this period.

  * He was the father of Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Count of Monte Cristo.

  * It was hardly an ideal totem; Pompey had been murdered on stepping ashore in Egypt in 48 BC. Of the 150 men mentioned by Boyer, only 40 were killed; the rest were wounded.

  * In fact forty-four centuries separated 1798 from the construction of the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

  * He was referring to Muslim iconoclasm after the conquest of Mecca in 630.

  * He once proposed to a French bishop that polygamy be permitted in the French West Indies, ‘but Monseigneur would hear none of it’ (ed. Kerry, The First Napoleon p. 99).

  * That day he also wrote to Berthier to ask that Sergeant Latreille of the 75th Line receive double pay for two months for meritorious service, as well as eleven other letters (CG2 no. 2798 p. 265). Between landing in Egypt in July 1798 and leaving it thirteen months later, Napoleon sent 2,196 surviving letters and despatches.

  * Village-burning was a standard method of controlling potentially hostile areas in Asia; the British army in India routinely ‘restored tranquillity’, as an historian of Wellington’s campaigns there put it, ‘usually by the wanton torching of villages and stealing of livestock’ (Davies, Wellington’s Wars p. 25).

  * Even today, the north-eastern shore has many salt-water marshes with areas of dry land in between; the tidal flow in this area is ferocious. One can be crossing a stretch of what looks like an ordinary beach when suddenly the tide comes in and covers it rapidly.

  * The Maghrebians came from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Mauretania and Libya; the Arnautes from as far afield as Albania.

  * Cities that refused to surrender when given the chance were considered to deserve sacking; the British subjected Badajoz to three days of looting and mass rape in 1812 so severe that Wellington finally regained control over his men only by erecting a gallows in the main square (it wasn’t used). He no more approved of rape and pillage than did Napoleon.

  * Using aerial photos taken by the German army in 1917 it is possible to identify the beach where the massacre took place just south of Old Jaffa, which is today under a car park; the rocks to which the victims swam are now part of the beach’s breakwater.

  * Napoleon never set foot in Jerusalem, although that didn’t deter the Israeli tourist board’s poster campaign on the Paris Métro in 1996 stating: ‘Napoleon enjoy
ed many a siesta in Jerusalem; why don’t you?’

  * When the plague had appeared in Alexandria in January, Napoleon had invented another of his unusual punishments. Surgeon Boyer, who had refused to attend to its victims, was forced to walk the streets dressed as a woman and wearing a placard stating: ‘Unworthy to be a French citizen: he fears death.’

  * A few were found in 1982 and can today be seen at the Tel Dor Archaeological Museum, including a cannon with the crest of Charles IV of Spain cast in 1793 and a mortar with Selim III’s calligraphic monogram that was captured at Jaffa.

  * Moulin rejoined the army and served under Napoleon; Gohier retired to his estate, and later became Napoleon’s ambassador to Holland.

  * The son of the deputy Auguste-Louis Petiet later claimed that Thomé had merely caught his sleeve on a comrade’s weapon (Lentz, 18-Brumaire p. 329, Sciout, Le Directoire IV p. 652 n. 1).

  * It was not officially the Consulate until ratified by plebiscite.

  * A further medal was struck to celebrate the opening of the Quai Desaix in Paris later that year, and yet another when Desaix’s body was moved to a tomb in the Great St Bernard Hospice in 1805 (Crowdy, The Incomparable pp. 94–7; Petit, Marengo p. 47).

  * From 1804 Protestant ministers were also paid by the state. Religious toleration was not by any means universal across Europe at the time; in Britain, for example, Catholics were banned from entering the House of Commons until 1829, as were Jews until 1858.

  * Despite this, Napoleon put down his own family’s relative wealth in Ajaccio to the fact that their property hadn’t been sub-divided for more than a century.

  * Labour laws were tough on workers throughout Europe at this time; on New Year’s Day 1812, the bishop of Durham, interpreting his ecclesiastical powers widely, ordered the British army forcibly to break up miners’ strikes in northern England.

  * Nonetheless, the labour-shortages caused by constant war meant that wages rose by a quarter in real terms during the fifteen years of his rule.

  * France had ceded Louisiana to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau (1762).

  * Since demolished, the rue Saint-Niçaise started where today’s rue de l’Échelle meets the rue de Rivoli.

  * The bomb’s firing mechanism is on display in the Musée de la Préfecture de Police in the rue de Carmes in Paris.

  * Napoleon wrote to Jourdan on January 13 saying ‘England seems to be very much involved in all this’ (CG3 no. 5913, p. 513).

  * Destrem died on the Île d’Oléron in 1803; Talon was back in government by 1809.

  * Because the departing Grand Duke of Tuscany had stripped his Florentine palace bare before the new king and queen arrived, the Infanta noted in the third person that ‘This was the first time that the daughter of the King of Spain, accustomed to be served on gold and silver, saw herself obliged to eat off porcelain’ (Etruria, Memoirs p. 309).

  * Son of the economist Pierre du Pont de Nemours who had left France after two imprisonments to set up a successful commercial enterprise in the United States (today’s chemical giant DuPont).

  * The party management might have been improved, however. With 1,200 people arriving at an average of three people per carriage, and each carriage having ninety seconds to unload its passengers from 9 p.m. onwards, du Pont noticed some people still arriving at six o’clock the next morning.

  * Napoleon absolved Menou from any personal responsibility for the Egyptian disaster, but he was never given a battlefield command again.

  * Napoleon’s correspondence on September 30, 1801, the day before the preliminary treaty was signed, perfectly represents his compartmentalized mind. He sent off eleven letters: three to Chaptal (one appointing a prefect to the Liamone department), one to Fouché ordering the incarceration in the Ham prison of anyone caught exporting wheat, one each to François Barbé-Marbois the treasury minister and André Abrial the justice minister, three to Talleyrand and two to Berthier demanding that beds be found for the men of the 23rd Division garrisoning Bastia, who were still sleeping on straw (CG3 nos. 6525–35 pp. 795–8).

  * Napoleon was worried that paintings and statues in the Louvre were being disturbed during the celebrations ‘to make space for foreigners to be able to see out of the windows’. When visitors asked for stoves to be installed to warm the museum he sensibly rejected the idea as far too dangerous (CG3 no. 6624 p. 836).

  * The plaster-cast of one of Pauline’s breasts taken by Canova in 1804 can be seen today in the Museo Napoleonica in Rome. She was beautiful, although Laure d’Abrantès claimed she had over-large ears.

  * General Sir Charles Napier, who had been a prisoner-of-war of France, denounced ‘the idea of shutting up honourable soldiers . . . in the hulks of ships for years, a punishment far beyond that inflicted on the most infamous felons . . . [which] was disgraceful to the government of those days, and forms a strong contrast to the honourable treatment which the English prisoners received in France, by order of the Emperor Napoleon’ (Blaze, Life in Napoleon’s Army p. 66).

  * After the Peace of Amiens, the 5 per cent French consolidated bonds were quoted at 48 to 53 francs, while the 3 per cent British consols had a spread of between 66 and 79 francs, despite the lower rate of return they promised (Lefebvre, Napoleon p. 132).

  * The Annual Register described Josephine as ‘wanton almost from birth for at the age of thirteen she was debauched by her mother’s two servants, a black and a mulatto, by whom she proved pregnant’. According to this publication, founded by Edmund Burke, Josephine apparently gave birth to a mixed-race son while married to Beauharnais, and Napoleon ‘was determined to marry the Pope to his mother’ (Annual Register 1809 p. 342).

  * He continued, as always, to immerse himself in the minutiae of public administration, ordering Gaudin to dismiss the postmistress at Angers ‘for violating the confidentiality of correspondence’ (something he had an entire government department busily doing for himself) (CG4 no. 8520 p. 547).

  * The French security services, led by Fouché and Savary, estimated the number of would-be assassins of Napoleon in the capital at this time at around forty, though they may have overestimated as far fewer were ever identified (Ségur, Memoirs p. 97).

  * Talleyrand had form for escapades of this kind; in late 1797 he had proposed to the French ambassador in Berlin that Louis XVIII be abducted from Blankenberg and taken to France (Mansel, Louis XVIII p. 81).

  * Tourists who in 1814 were shown the very patch of carpet at Fontainebleau on which she had pleaded on her knees, clasping Napoleon’s legs in tears while begging for the duke’s life, were misled; they were both at Malmaison at the time (ed. North, Napoleon on Elba p. 30).

  * The theory that Napoleon had Wright killed in revenge for the defeat at Trafalgar is negated by the fact that Wright died on October 27 and Napoleon first learned about the battle on November 18.

  * The honorary marshals were François Christophe de Kellermann, Dominique-Catherine de Pérignon, Jean Sérurier and François-Joseph Lefebvre.

  * One of the batons can be seen today in the Bernadotte Gallery of the Royal Palace at Stockholm.

  * Lower down the ranks, Napoleon tended to appoint roughly one-third of the officers himself and left his colonels to choose the rest. He often behaved like the middle-class, conservative army officer that he essentially was when it came to promotions. Young men from good families who’d graduated from the military academies tended to do better than those who had been educated ‘at the drumhead’, who found it hard to rise to major and colonel unless they were particularly talented. This tendency wasn’t too noticeable at a time when high casualties meant that commissions were constantly falling vacant, but Napoleon’s social bias is apparent in retrospect. Even so, Napoleon’s army was far more open to talent than the Bourbon army had been, or any other European army of the day.

  *
The coronation cost 194,436 francs, nearly four times the original budget.

  * Six of them can be seen today in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea in London; several more are in the Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides.