Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  In writing this book, I have tried not to be overly influenced by previous interpretations, but to go back so far as possible to Napoleon’s own words and the words of those who knew him personally. Of course, visceral disagreement about him extends there too: almost all the contemporary accounts are heavily slanted according to the situation their authors had occupied during Napoleon’s lifetime or afterwards. For those writing immediately after his abdication, the lure of employment or a pension, or merely the right to publish under the Bourbons, wrecked objectivity in dozens of cases. For example, the letters of Claire de Rémusat to her husband, one of Napoleon’s courtiers, between 1804 and 1813 were affectionate about the Emperor, but by 1818 her memoirs painted him as a monster ‘incapable of generosity’ who, moreover, had ‘a satanic smile’. What happened in between was that her husband wanted a job as the prefect of a department from the Bourbons. She had burned her contemporaneous notes in 1815, and tried to resuscitate what Chateaubriand called her ‘memories of memories’.

  Or again: much of our received understanding of Napoleon has been coloured by the highly dubious memoirs written by his former classmate Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne. Appointed Napoleon’s private secretary during the negotiations with Austria in Leoben in 1797, Bourrienne was then no longer permitted to use the familiar ‘tu’ with Napoleon, which he said was ‘an easy sacrifice’ for the honour of becoming head of his cabinet (private office), but Napoleon had to sack him twice for corruption and they parted on bad terms. His memoirs have been treated as being generally objective by historians, even though they were actually written by (among others) the fantasist Charles Maxime de Villemarest. In 1830 a two-volume book totalling eight hundred pages was published by people who knew Napoleon well, including his brother Joseph, which forensically demolished scores of Bourrienne’s claims. I have used Bourrienne sceptically, and only to illustrate my accounts of occasions when he was known to have been personally present.

  Such contemporary ‘sources’ which need to be treated with caution are everywhere in the Napoleonic canon. 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, and his memoirs were ghosted by the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who also ghosted those of Napoleon’s favourite actor Talma. Laure d’Abrantès was banned from Paris by Napoleon in 1813, and by the time her memoirs appeared in the 1830s she was an opium addict who nonetheless claimed to have remembered verbatim long, intimate conversations with the Emperor. Several of her eighteen volumes of memoirs were ghosted by Balzac and written to stave off creditors. Those of Napoleon’s police chief Fouché were actually written by the hack-writer Alphonse de Beauchamp; those of one of Napoleon’s favourite mistresses, Mademoiselle George, were also drawn up by a ghost-writer, 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, people could even publish memoirs that were supposedly written by living participants such as Joseph Bonaparte, Marshal Marmont and Napoleon’s foreign minister Armand de Caulaincourt without their having any legal recourse. 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 1934). 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-Napoleonic Adolphe de Bacourt. Prince Metternich’s memoirs were ghosted too, as well as being immensely self-serving; those of Paul Barras, who at one time was Josephine’s lover, are a monument to malice, self-pity and would-be revenge against Napoleon. The man Napoleon overthrew 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’, yet they are in fact little more than two volumes of bitter ranting. Neither the minister Lazare Carnot nor Marshal Grouchy wrote their own memoirs either, but had them drawn up from documents they left, some contemporaneous, others not. The diplomat André-François Miot de Melito’s so-called memoirs were written by his son-in-law over half a century after the events they describe.

  Nonetheless, because so many people wanted to record their impressions of this extraordinary man, there are also plenty of memoirs from people close to Napoleon who kept contemporaneous notes and didn’t decry him so that they could find jobs under the incoming regime or exaggerate their intimacy with him in order to make money. The credibility of the Marquis de Caulaincourt’s accounts of 1812–14, of Henri Bertrand’s diary of events on St Helena and of Cambacérès’ memoirs, for example, is greatly enhanced by the fact that they were not written for immediate publication, only emerging in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s respectively. The memoirs of the little-known Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort, who as prefect of Napoleon’s palace was closer to him than Bourrienne, were bravely published during the Bourbon period, and equally balanced pictures were drawn by Napoleon’s two private secretaries after Bourrienne, namely Claude-François de Méneval and Agathon Fain. Of course they all need to be checked against what we know from other sources, and against each other, but once that is done they tend to present a more coherent and credible portrait of the Emperor than the ‘Black Legend’ painted by his enemies and their ghost-writers soon after his death.

  In threading a way through this labyrinth, the biographer of Napoleon writing in 2014 has one tremendous advantage over those of all earlier generations: since 2004, the Fondation Napoléon in Paris has been superbly editing and publishing Napoleon’s 33,000 extant letters, as many as a third of which have not been published before or which were cut or bowdlerized in one way or another in the previous edition that appeared in the 1850s and 1860s. This titanic new edition allows a true re-evaluation of Napoleon, and it has been the bedrock of my book.

  Two hundred years after his defeat at the battle of Waterloo, every aspect of Napoleon’s life has now been documented, explored and picked over in the most astonishing detail. On Thursday, July 19, 1804, for example, he stopped for a cup of milky coffee at a blacksmith’s house near Buigny-St-Maclou in Picardie and distributed some gold coins to its surprised and delighted inhabitants. A fifteen-page treatise has been written about that event alone. Yet the extreme scrutiny and avalanche of facts about him has not led to general agreement about his personality, policies, motives or even his achievements. My book clearly stands in a long tradition of argument about Napoleon, which began, as I recount in Chapter 1, before he was thirty, when the first biography of him was published. In 1817 the Swiss historian Frédéric Lullin de Châteauvieux wrote that ‘With cyclonic intensity he swept away the petrified barriers to progress and achieved more for the race than the 800 years of the Habsburgs or the 600 years of Bourbon rule.’ In 1818 Madame de Staël posthumously called him a ‘Condottiere without manners, without fatherland, without morality, an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knew only how to corrupt and annihilate’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest literary figure, who met Napoleon in 1808, described him as being ‘in a permanent state of enlightenment’. Was he a destroyer or an architect? A liberator or a tyrant? A statesman or an adventurer? ‘The argument goes on,’ said Geyl in the last sentence of his book. At the end of mine, I hope that the reader will be in no doubt why I have called it Napoleon the Great.

  Part One

  RISE

  1

  Corsica

  ‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent … All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’

  Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars

  ‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’

  Napoleon to the Marqui
s de Caulaincourt

  Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769. ‘She was on her way home from church when she felt labour pains,’ he would later say of his mother, Letizia, ‘and had only time to get into the house, when I was born, not on a bed, but on a heap of tapestry.’1 The name his parents chose was unusual but not unknown, appearing in Machiavelli’s history of Florence, and, more immediately, being the name of one of his great-uncles.

  The Buona Parte family were originally landowners living between Florence and Livorno – a Florentine first took the surname in 1261. While the senior line remained in Italy, Francesco Buonaparte emigrated to Corsica in 1529, where for the next two and a half centuries his descendants generally pursued the gentlemanly callings of the law, academia and the Church.2 By the time of Napoleon’s birth the family occupied that social penumbra encompassing the haute bourgeoisie and the very minor nobility.

  After he came to power in France, when people attempted to trace his family’s descent from the thirteenth-century emperors of Trebizond, Napoleon told them that his dynasty in fact dated back only to the time of his military coup d’état. ‘There are genealogists who would date my family from the Flood,’ he told the Austrian diplomat Prince Clemens von Metternich, ‘and there are people who pretend that I am of plebeian birth. The truth lies between these two. The Bonapartes are a good Corsican family, little known for we have hardly ever left the island, but much better than many of the coxcombs who take it upon themselves to vilify us.’3 On the rare occasions when he discussed his Italian ancestry, he would say he was an heir to the Ancient Romans. ‘I am of the race that founds empires,’ he once boasted.4

  The family was far from rich, but it owned enough land for Napoleon’s great-uncle Luciano, the archdeacon of Ajaccio, to claim that the Bonapartes never had to buy their wine, bread or olive oil. One can still see the millstone used for grinding flour in the basement of the large, three-storey Casa Bonaparte on the rue Saint-Charles in Ajaccio, where his family had lived since 1682. Napoleon’s parents had another home in the countryside, some property in at least three other towns, a flock of sheep and a vineyard and employed a nanny, maid and cook. ‘There’s no wealth in Corsica,’ Napoleon’s elder brother Joseph wrote years later, ‘and the richer individuals hardly have 20,000 livres of savings; but, because everything is relative, our wealth was one of the most considerable in Ajaccio.’ The young Napoleon agreed, adding that ‘Luxury is an unwholesome thing in Corsica.’5

  In 1765, four years before Napoleon’s birth, the Scottish lawyer and man of letters James Boswell visited the island and was enchanted with what he found. ‘Ajaccio is the prettiest town in Corsica,’ he later wrote. ‘It hath many very handsome streets, and beautiful gardens, and a palace for the Genoese governor. The inhabitants of this town are the genteelest people in the island, having had a good deal of intercourse with the French.’ Three years later these people – some 140,000 in total, most of them peasants – were to experience considerably more intercourse with the French, who numbered around 28 million, than most had ever hoped for or wanted.

  The Italian city-state of Genoa had nominally ruled Corsica for over two centuries, but rarely tried to extend her control beyond the coastal towns into the mountainous interior, where the Corsicans were fiercely independent. In 1755 Corsica’s charismatic nationalist leader, Pasquale Paoli, proclaimed an independent republic, a notion that became a reality after he won the battle of Pedicoste in 1763. The man the Corsicans nicknamed Il Babbù (Daddy) quickly set about reforming the island’s financial, legal and educational systems, built roads, started a printing press and brought something approaching harmony between the island’s competing clans of powerful families. The young Napoleon grew up revering Paoli as a lawgiver, reformer and genuinely benevolent dictator.

  Genoa had no appetite for the fight that she knew would be required to reassert her authority over Corsica, and reluctantly sold the island to King Louis XV of France for 40 million francs in January 1768. The French foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, appointed the Corsican Matteo Buttafuoco to rule the island. Paoli naturally opposed this, so the French sent a force of 30,000 men under the command of the harsh Comte de Vaux with the task of putting down the rebellion and soon replaced Buttafuoco with a Frenchman, the Comte de Marbeuf.

  Carlo Bonaparte, Napoleon’s father, and his pretty young wife Letizia supported Paoli and were campaigning in the mountains when Letizia became pregnant with Napoleon. Carlo acted as Paoli’s private secretary and aide-de-camp, but when Vaux smashed the Corsican forces at the battle of Ponte Nuovo on May 8, 1769, Carlo and the by now heavily pregnant Letizia refused to go into exile with Paoli and 340 other irreconcilables.6 Instead, at a meeting between Marbeuf and the Corsican gentry, Carlo took an oath of loyalty to Louis XV, as a result of which he was able to retain his positions of responsibility on the island: assessor of the Ajaccio court of justice and superintendent of the island’s forestry school. Within two months of Ponte Nuovo, Carlo had dined with the Comte de Vaux, something that was held against him by his former compatriots whose resistance to French rule continued. Hundreds would die over the next two decades in sporadic anti-French guerrilla actions, although major incidents were rare after the mid-1770s.7 ‘He became a good Frenchman,’ Joseph Bonaparte wrote of their father, ‘seeing the huge advantages his country was taking from its union with France.’8 Carlo was appointed to represent the Corsican nobility in Paris in 1777, a position that saw him visit Louis XVI at Versailles twice.

  It is often alleged that Napoleon, who proclaimed a fierce Corsican nationalism throughout his adolescence, despised his father for switching his loyalties, but there is no proof of this beyond the bitter outpourings of his classmate and private secretary Louis Antoine de Bourrienne, whom he twice had to dismiss for gross peculation. In 1789 Napoleon did write to Paoli denouncing those Corsicans who had changed sides, but he didn’t refer to his by-then-deceased father. He chose to call his son Charles, which he would hardly have done if he had imagined his father as a quisling. The Bonapartes were a thrusting, striving, close-knit family of what Napoleon later called petits gentilshommes, and understood that no good would have come of being caught on the wrong side of history.

  French rule over Corsica turned out to be relatively light-handed. Marbeuf sought to persuade the island’s elite of the benefits of French rule, and Carlo was to be one of the prime beneficiaries. If Paoli was Napoleon’s early role model for statesmanship, Carlo personified precisely the kind of non-Frenchman whose willingness to collaborate with France was later vital to the smooth running of the Napoleonic Empire.

  Carlo was tall, handsome, popular and a fine horseman. He spoke French well, was familiar with the Enlightenment thought of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau and Hobbes, and wrote Voltairean essays sceptical of organized religion for private distribution.9 Napoleon later described him as ‘a spendthrift’, and he certainly got through more than the patchy income he earned, building up debts for the family.10 He was a loving father, but weak, often impecunious and somewhat frivolous. Napoleon inherited little from him beyond his debts, his blue-grey eyes, and the disease that would lead them to their early deaths. ‘To my mother’, he would say, ‘I owe my fortune and all I’ve done that’s worthwhile.’11

  Maria-Letizia Ramolino, as she had been christened, was an attractive, strong-willed, wholly uneducated woman from a good family – her father was Ajaccio’s governor and subsequently Corsica’s inspector of roads and bridges. Her marriage to Carlo Buonaparte on June 2, 1764, when he was eighteen, was arranged by their parents. (The burning of Ajaccio’s archives during the French Revolution leaves her exact age unclear.) They didn’t marry in the cathedral as Carlo regarded himself as a secularized Enlightenment man, although Archdeacon Luciano later altered the church records to record a nuptial Mass there, an early indication of th
e Bonapartes’ willingness to doctor official records.12 Letizia’s dowry was valued at an impressive 175,000 francs, which included ‘a kiln and the house adjoining’, an apartment, a vineyard and 8 acres of land. This trumped the love that the raffish Carlo is believed to have felt for another woman at the time of his wedding.13

  Letizia had thirteen children between 1765 and 1786, eight of whom survived infancy, a not untypical ratio for the day; they were eventually to number an emperor, three kings, a queen and two sovereign princesses. Although Napoleon didn’t much like it when his mother beat him for being naughty – on one occasion for mimicking his grandmother – corporal punishment was normal practice in those days and he only ever spoke of her with genuine love and admiration. ‘My mother was a superb woman, a woman of ability and courage,’ he told General Gourgaud, near the end of his life. ‘Her tenderness was severe; here was the head of a man on the body of a woman.’ This, from Napoleon, was high praise. ‘She was a matriarch,’ he added. ‘She had plenty of brains!’14 Once he came to power, Napoleon was generous to his mother, buying her the Château de Pont on the Seine and giving her an annual income of 1 million francs, most of which she squirrelled away. When she was teased for her notorious parsimoniousness she replied: ‘Who knows, one day I may have to find bread for all these kings I’ve borne.’15

  Two children died in infancy before Napoleon was born, and the girl who came immediately after him, Maria-Anna, lived to only five. His elder brother, Giuseppe (who later Frenchified his name as Joseph), was born in January 1768. After Napoleon came Luciano (Lucien) in March 1775, a sister Maria-Anna (Elisa) in January 1777, Louis – significantly, the name of the kings of France – in September 1778, Maria-Paola (Pauline) in October 1780, Maria-Annunziata (Caroline) in March 1782, and Girolamo (Jérôme) in November 1784. Letizia stopped having children at thirty-three when Carlo died at thirty-eight, but Napoleon speculated that if his father had lived longer she would have had twenty.16