Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  God helps those who help himself,

  I approve of that idea myself.80

  Napoleon’s next surviving piece of prose is only one page long. Dated Thursday, November 22, 1787 and written from the Hôtel de Cherbourg, on what is today the rue Vauvilliers off the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, which he was visiting to pursue the pépinière affair, it was entitled ‘A Meeting at the Palais-Royal’. The private note, written for himself, chronicles his encounter with a prostitute he picked up in that notoriously louche area of central Paris, a neighbourhood of gambling houses, restaurants and bijouterie shops:

  I had just come out of the Italian Opera, and was walking at a good pace along the alleys of the Palais-Royal. My spirit, stirred by the feelings of vigour which are natural to it, was indifferent to the cold, but when once my mind became chilled I felt the severity of the weather, and took refuge in the galleries. I was just entering the iron gates when my eyes became fixed on a person of the other sex. The time of night, her figure, and her youth, left me in no doubt what her occupation was. I looked at her; she stopped, not with the impudent air common to her class, but with a manner that was quite in harmony with the charm of her appearance. This struck me. Her timidity encouraged me, and I spoke to her. I spoke to her; I, who, more sensible than any to the horror of her condition, have always felt stained by even a look from such a person. But her pallor, her frail form, her soft voice, left me not a moment in suspense.81

  He walked with her into the gardens of the Palais-Royal and asked her if there wasn’t ‘an occupation more suited to your health’, to which she replied, ‘No, sir; one must live.’ ‘I was charmed; I saw that she at least gave me an answer, a success which I had never met with before.’ He asked her where she was from (Nantes), how she lost her virginity (‘An officer ruined me’), whether she was sorry for it (‘Yes, very’), how she’d got to Paris, and finally, after a further barrage of questions, whether she would go back with him to her rooms, so that ‘we will warm ourselves, and you can satisfy your desire’.82 He ends by writing: ‘I had no intention of becoming over-scrupulous at this stage. I had already tempted her, so that she would not consider running away when pressed by the argument I had prepared for her, and I did not want her to start feigning an honesty that I wished to prove she did not possess.’83 He was not originally looking for such an encounter, but the fact that he thought it worthy of chronicling suggests that this was probably the occasion on which he lost his virginity. The conversational method of quick-fire questions was pure Napoleon.

  A few days later, still in Paris, he began to write a history of Corsica, which he abandoned after only a few lines. Instead he took up writing a rhetorical, declamatory essay entitled ‘A Parallel between Love of Glory and Love of Country’, which took the form of a letter to an unnamed young lady in which he came down strongly in favour of the former. Love of glory finds its examples in French military history – he mentions Marshals Condé and Turenne – but there is also a great deal about Sparta, Philip of Macedon, Alexander, Charlemagne, Leonidas and ‘the first magistrate, the great Paoli’.84

  In September 1786, after an absence of nearly eight years, Napoleon returned to Corsica and met his three youngest siblings for the first time. It was the first of five trips home between 1786 and 1793, some lasting many months, largely in order to deal with the various problems left by his father’s estate. On April 21, 1787 he wrote to the war minister asking for five and a half months’ paid leave ‘for the recovery of his health’.85 He was either a good actor or had a pliant doctor, because although he wasn’t genuinely ill he enclosed the necessary medical certificates. He would not return for almost a whole year. This long absence from his regiment should be seen in the context of a peacetime army in which two-thirds of infantry officers and three-quarters of cavalry officers left their regiments in winter.86 Joseph had by then been forced to give up any hopes of going into either the army or the Church in order to help his mother look after the family, but he did take a law degree at the University of Pisa in 1788. All the younger siblings were still at school, with Lucien showings signs of intelligence and ambition.

  By late May 1788 Napoleon was stationed at the School of Artillery at Auxonne in eastern France, not far from Dijon. Here, as when he was stationed with his regiment at Valence, he ate only once a day, at 3 p.m., thereby saving enough money from his officer’s salary to send some home to his mother; the rest he spent on books. He changed his clothes once every eight days. He was determined to continue his exhaustive autodidactic reading programme and his voluminous notebooks from Auxonne are full of the history, geography, religion and customs of all the most prominent peoples of the ancient world, including the Athenians, Spartans, Persians, Egyptians and Carthaginians. They cover modern artillery improvements and regimental discipline, but also mention Plato’s Republic, Achilles and (inevitably) Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

  The School of Artillery was commanded by General Baron Jean-Pierre du Teil, a pioneer in the latest artillery techniques. Napoleon had classes in military theory for up to nine hours a week, as well as advanced mathematics every Tuesday. Artillery was recognized as increasingly important now that advances in metallurgy meant that cannon could be just as effective at half the weight as previously; once big guns became mobile on a battlefield without losing firepower or accuracy, they could be battle-winners. Napoleon’s favourites – his ‘pretty girls’ as he later called them – were the relatively mobile 12-pounders.87 ‘I believe every officer ought to serve in the artillery,’ he was to say, ‘which is the arm that can produce most of the good generals.’88 This was not merely self-serving: French artillery commanders of his day were to include the fine generals Jean-Baptiste Éblé, Alexandre-Antoine Sénarmont, Antoine Drouot, Jean de Lariboisière, Auguste de Marmont and Charles-Étienne Ruty.

  ‘There is nothing in the military profession I cannot do for myself,’ Napoleon was to boast. ‘If there is no-one to make gunpowder, I know how to make it; gun carriages, I know how to construct them; if it is founding a cannon, I know that; or if the details of tactics must be taught, I can teach them.’89 For all this, he had the Auxonne school to thank. That August saw him in charge of two hundred men testing the feasibility of firing explosive shells from heavy cannon instead of just from mortars. His report was praised for its clarity of expression. His military memoranda from those days were terse and informative, and emphasized the importance of taking the offensive.

  A few days after the successful conclusion of the shell-testing project, Napoleon wrote the first paragraph of his ‘Dissertation sur l’Autorité Royale’, which argued that military rule was a better system of government than tyranny and concluded, unambiguously: ‘There are very few kings who would not deserve to be dethroned.’90 His views were authoritarian but also subversive, and would have got their author into trouble if published under his name, even in the increasingly chaotic political situation in which France found herself in the months preceding the fall of the Bastille. Luckily, just as he was about to send his ‘Dissertation’ to a publisher, the news arrived that Étienne-Charles de Loménie de Brienne, Louis XVI’s finance minister, to whom the essay was dedicated, had been dismissed. Napoleon quickly rescinded publication.

  His writing mania extended to drafting the regulations for his officers’ mess, which he somehow turned into a 4,500-word document full of literary orotundities such as: ‘Night can hold no gloom for he who overlooks nothing that might in any way compromise his rank or his uniform. The penetrating eyes of the eagle and the hundred heads of Argus would barely suffice to fulfil the obligations and duties of his mandate.’91 In January 1789 he wrote a Romantic melodrama, ‘The Earl of Essex: An English Story’, not his finest literary endeavour. ‘The fingers of the Countess sank into gaping wounds,’ begins one paragraph. ‘Her fingers dripped with blood. She cried out, hid her face, but looking up again could see nothing. Terrified, trembling, aghast, cut to the very quick by these terrible forebodings, the Co
untess got into a carriage and arrived at the Tower.’92 The story includes assassination plots, love, murder, premonitions, and the overthrow of King James II. Continuing in this melodramatic style, in March 1789 Napoleon wrote a two-page short story called ‘The Mask of the Prophet’, about a handsome and charismatic Arab soldier-prophet, Hakem, who has to wear a silver mask because he has been disfigured by illness. Having fallen out with the local prince, Mahadi, Hakem has his disciples dig lime-filled pits, supposedly for their enemies, but he poisons his own followers, throws their bodies into the pits and finally immolates himself.93 It is a disturbing tale, full of violent late-teenage angst.

  The next month Napoleon was sent 20 miles down the Saône river to Seurre as second-in-command of an operation to put down a riot in which a crowd had killed two grain merchants. ‘Let honest men go to their homes,’ the nineteen-year-old is reported to have shouted to the crowd, ‘I only fire upon the mob.’ Although he did his duty efficiently and impressed General du Teil, the political situation was such that before long rioters were attacking public buildings and burning down tax offices in Auxonne itself. It was from this provincial vantage point that Napoleon saw the first harbinger of the great political event that was to transform the history of France and of Europe, and his own life.

  The French Revolution, which broke out on July 14, 1789 when a Parisian mob stormed the state prison, the Bastille, was preceded by years of financial crises and turmoil such as the minor uprising Napoleon had been sent to put down. The first stirrings of instability can be dated back to 1783, the last year of the American War of Independence in which France had supported the rebellious colonists against Britain. Other protests over low wages and food shortages besides those in Seurre were put down violently in April 1789, with twenty-five deaths. ‘Napoleon often said that nations had their illnesses just as individuals did, and that their history would be no less interesting to describe than the maladies of the human body,’ recorded one of his ministers in later years. ‘The French people were wounded in their dearest interests. The nobility and the clergy humiliated them with their pride and privileges. The people suffered under this weight for a long time, but finally wanted to shake off the yoke, and the Revolution began.’94

  By the time the Estates-General of France was called on May 5, for the first time since 1614, it seemed that the king might be forced to share at least some of his power with the representatives of the Third Estate. But thereafter events moved swiftly and unpredictably. On June 20 the deputies of the Third Estate, who were by then calling themselves the National Assembly, took an oath not to dissolve itself until a new constitution was established. Three days later two companies of royal guards mutinied sooner than put down public unrest. The news that Louis XVI was recruiting foreign mercenaries to suppress what had by then become an insurrection led the radical journalist Camille Desmoulins to call for the storming of the Bastille, which resulted in the deaths of the governor of Paris, its mayor and the secretary of state. On August 26 the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and on October 6 the Palace of Versailles was stormed by the mob.

  For a man who was to exhibit such acute political sharpness later in his career, Napoleon completely misread the Revolution’s opening stages. ‘I repeat what I have said to you,’ he wrote to Joseph on July 22, a week after the fall of the Bastille, ‘calm will return. In a month, there will no longer be a question of anything. So, if you send me 300 livres [7,500 francs] I will go to Paris to terminate our business.’95 At the time, Napoleon was more concerned with the pépinière saga than with the greatest political eruption in Europe since the Reformation. He returned to writing his history of Corsica, and summoned up the courage to write to his hero Paoli, who was still in exile in London. ‘I was born when the country was perishing,’ he declared with a flourish. ‘Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited onto our coasts, drowning the thrones of liberty in seas of blood, such was the odious spectacle which first met my eye. The cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, the tears of despair surrounded my cradle from my birth.’96 These were extraordinary sentiments from someone who had taken an oath to serve the King of France when he was commissioned as an officer. With the advent of the Revolution, and the return of Paoli to Corsica in July 1790, Napoleon’s divided loyalties could not endure much longer. He was going to have to choose.

  2

  Revolution

  ‘In whatever time he had appeared he would have played a prominent part, but the epoch when he first entered on his career was particularly fitted to facilitate his elevation.’

  Metternich on Napoleon

  ‘At twenty-two many things are allowed which are no longer permitted past thirty.’

  Napoleon to Elector Frederick of Württemberg

  ‘Amid the noise of drums, arms, blood, I write you this letter,’ Napoleon told Joseph from Auxonne, where rioting had broken out again eight days after the fall of the Bastille.1 He proudly reported to his brother that General du Teil had asked his advice on the situation. Napoleon arrested thirty-three people and spent the better part of an hour exhorting the rioters to stop.

  Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire. He embraced its anti-clericalism and did not mind the weakening of a monarchy for which he had no particular respect. Beyond that, it seemed to offer Corsica prospects of greater independence, and far better career opportunities for an ambitious young outsider without money or connections. Napoleon believed that the new social order it promised to usher in would destroy both of these disadvantages and would be built on logic and reason, which the Enlightenment philosophes saw as the only true foundations for authority.

  The Bonapartes were in the minority among Corsica’s gentry in supporting the Revolution, although not quite ‘the only persons’ on the island to do so, as Napoleon later claimed.2 What does appear to be true is that he was the only artillery graduate of his year from the École Militaire to support the overthrow of Louis XVI, and one of only a handful of officers from his corps, many of whom fled France in 1789. Although Napoleon faithfully carried out his military duties, putting down food riots in Valence and Auxonne – where some men from his own regiment mutinied and joined the rioters – he was an early adherent of the local branch of the revolutionary Society of the Friends of the Constitution. Back in Ajaccio his fourteen-year-old brother Lucien, whose commitment to radical politics was much more profound and enduring, joined the extremist Jacobin Club.3*

  On August 8, 1789, when Paris was in uproar and a large part of the French officer corps in disarray, Napoleon was once again granted sick leave to return to Corsica, where he stayed for the next eighteen months, throwing himself energetically into the island’s politics. Again, there is no indication that he was genuinely ill. In his Account of Corsica, Boswell described how the island was politically split between its cities, its nine provinces and its many ecclesiastical pieves (groups of parishes which were ‘as much used for civil affairs as for those of the church’). The power of the governor, based in the capital, Corte, was limited. There were traditional rivalries between towns, villages and clans, and strong attachments to the Catholic Church and to the exiled Paoli. Napoleon stepped into this maelstrom with gusto, and over the next four years would be far more concerned with Corsican politics than his career as a French officer.

  As soon as he arrived in Ajaccio, Napoleon, supported by Joseph and Lucien, urged Corsicans to adhere to the revolutionary cause, fly the new tricolour flag and wear it as a cockade in their hats, form a revolutionary ‘Patriots’ club, and organize a regiment of Corsican Volunteers, a National Guard militia that it was hoped would one day match the governor’s force. When the governor closed the club and banned the Volunteers, Napoleon’s name topped the petition sent in protest to the National Assembly in Paris.4 In October, he wrote a pamphlet den
ouncing the French commander in Corsica and criticizing the island’s government as insufficiently revolutionary.5 While Napoleon led the revolutionary party in Ajaccio, Antoine-Christophe Saliceti, a Corsican deputy to the National Assembly, radicalized the larger town of Bastia.