Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  From April 22, 1794 until shortly after her husband’s execution on July 22 that year, Josephine was herself imprisoned as a suspected royalist in the crypt underneath the church of Saint-Joseph-des-Carmes in the rue de Vaugirard.* One of her cellmates, an Englishwoman named Grace Elliott, recalled how ‘the walls and even the wooden chairs were still stained with the blood and the brains of the priests’.60 Josephine had to endure truly inhumane conditions: air came only from three deep holes to the underground cells and there were no lavatories; she and her cellmates lived in daily fear of the guillotine; they had one bottle of water a day each, for all uses; and since pregnant women weren’t guillotined until after giving birth, the sound of sexual couplings with the warders could be heard in the hallways at night.61 It is cold down in the Saint-Joseph crypt even in midsummer, and inmates’ health broke down fast, indeed it is possible that Josephine survived only because she was too ill to be guillotined. Her husband was executed just four days before Robespierre’s fall, and had Robespierre survived any longer Josephine would probably have followed him. There was a paradoxical symmetry in the way that the Thermidor coup released Josephine from one prison and simultaneously put Napoleon into another.

  The stench, darkness, cold, degradation and daily fear of violent death for weeks on end makes the Terror well named, and it is likely that for months, possibly even years, afterwards Josephine suffered from a form of what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. If she was later sexually self-indulgent, became involved in sleazy business deals and loved luxury – her dress bills became higher than Marie Antoinette’s – and married for stability and financial security rather than for love, it is hard to hold this against her after what she had been through.62 Josephine has often been seen as a seductive, shallow, extravagant hussy, but she certainly wasn’t shallow culturally, having good taste in music and the decorative arts. She was also generous – albeit usually with public money – and one of the most accomplished diplomats of the age, Clemens von Metternich, referred to her ‘unique social tact’.63 She was a skilled harpist – although some said she always played the same tune – and she did something in bed known as ‘zigzags’.64 She couldn’t draw, did a bit of tapestry, and played backgammon occasionally, but she received callers all day and enjoyed gossipy lunches with her many girlfriends.

  By late 1795 this undeniably sexy femme fatale in her mid-thirties (with an inimitable closed-mouth smile) needed a protector and provider. On leaving prison she had an affair with General Lazare Hoche, who refused to leave his wife for her but whom she would have liked to marry, even up to the day she reluctantly married Napoleon.65 Another lover was Paul Barras, but that didn’t last much longer than the summer of 1795. ‘I was long since tired of and bored with her,’ recalled Barras in his memoirs, in which he ungallantly described her as a ‘cajoling courtesan’.66 It is a well-known historical phenomenon for a sexually permissive period to follow one of prolonged bloodletting: the ‘Roaring Twenties’ after the Great War and the licentiousness of Ancient Roman society after the Civil Wars are but two examples. Josephine’s decision to take powerful lovers after the Terror was, like so much else in her life, à la mode (though she wasn’t as promiscuous as her friend Thérésa Tallien, who was nicknamed ‘Government Property’ because so many ministers had slept with her). Whatever ‘zigzags’ were, Josephine had performed them for others besides her first husband, Hoche and Barras; her éducation amoureuse was far more advanced than her near-virginal second husband’s.

  Josephine took the opportunity of the post-Vendémiaire arms confiscations to send her fourteen-year-old son Eugène de Beauharnais to Napoleon’s headquarters to ask whether his father’s sword could be retained by the family for sentimental reasons. Napoleon took this for the social opening that it plainly was, and within weeks he had fallen genuinely and deeply in love with her; his infatuation only grew until their marriage five months later. As fellow outsiders, immigrants, islanders and ex-political prisoners, they had a certain amount in common. At first she wasn’t attracted to his slightly yellow complexion, lank hair and unkempt look, nor presumably to his scabies, and she certainly wasn’t in love with him, but then she herself was beginning to get wrinkles, her looks were fading and she was in debt. (She sensibly didn’t admit the extent of her debts until she had Napoleon’s ring on her finger.)

  Josephine always took a great deal of trouble over her make-up and clothing. She had mirrors placed in the bedrooms of her houses and palaces, was charming and affable – though not intelligent enough to be witty – and knew perfectly what kind of attentions successful men liked. Asked whether Josephine had intelligence, Talleyrand is said to have replied: ‘No one ever managed so brilliantly without it.’ For his part, Napoleon valued her political connections, her social status as a vicomtesse who was also acceptable to revolutionaries, and the way she compensated for his lack of savoir-faire and social graces. He wasn’t good at drawing-room repartee. ‘Out of his mouth there never came one well-turned speech to a woman,’ recalled the accomplished smooth-talker Metternich, ‘although the effort to make one was often expressed on his face and in the sound of his voice.’67 He spoke to ladies about their dresses or the number of children they had, and whether they nursed them themselves, ‘a question which he commonly made in terms seldom used in good society’. While he was gauche around women, she was extremely well-connected in Paris society, with entrées into the influential political salons run by Madames Tallien, Récamier, de Staël and others.

  The Revolution had removed responsibility for registering births, deaths and marriages from the clergy, so Napoleon and Josephine married in a civil ceremony at 10 p.m. on Wednesday, March 9, 1796, before a sleepy mayor in the 2nd arrondissement on the rue d’Antin. The bride wore a republican tricolour sash over her white muslin wedding dress,68 and the groom arrived two hours late. The witnesses included Barras, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Jean Lemarois (who was technically a minor), the Talliens, Josephine’s son Eugène and his eleven-year-old sister Hortense. In order to minimize the six-year disparity of their ages, Napoleon claimed in the marriage register to have been born in 1768 and she simultaneously shed her customary four years, so they could both be twenty-eight.69 (Later the Almanach Impérial recorded Josephine as having been born on June 24, 1768.70 Napoleon was always amused by his wife’s insistence on lying about her age, joking: ‘According to her calculations, Eugène must have been born aged twelve!’71) As a wedding gift, Napoleon gave her a gold enamelled medallion engraved with the words ‘To Destiny’.72

  The reason Napoleon had been so late for his own wedding, and why his honeymoon then lasted less than forty-eight hours, was that on March 2 Barras and the other four members of France’s new executive government, the Directory, had given him the best wedding present he could ever have hoped for: command of the Army of Italy. Barras later wrote that to persuade his colleagues – the ex-Jacobins Jean-François Reubell and Louis de La Révellière-Lépeaux, and the moderates Lazare Carnot and Étienne-François Le Tourneur – to choose Napoleon for the coming campaign in the Ligurian Alps he told them that, as ‘a highlander’ Corsican, he was ‘accustomed since birth to scale mountains’.73 It was hardly a scientific argument – Ajaccio is at sea level – but he also said that Napoleon would lift the Army of Italy out of its lethargy. That was a good deal nearer the mark.

  In the nine days between receiving the appointment and leaving for his headquarters in Nice on March 11, Napoleon asked for every book, map and atlas on Italy that the war ministry could provide. He read biographies of commanders who had fought there and had the courage to admit his ignorance when he didn’t know something. ‘I happened to be at the office of the General Staff in the Rue Neuve des Capucines when General Bonaparte came in,’ recalled a fellow officer years later:

  I can still see the little hat, surmounted by a pickup plume, his coat cut anyhow, and a sword which, in truth, did not seem the sort of weapon to make anyone’s fortune. Flinging his hat o
n a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general named Krieg, a man with a wonderful knowledge of detail and the author of a very good soldiers’ manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table, and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order and their rapidity, no less than the way by which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve into other questions which he deduced in consequence from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.74

  Napoleon left Paris in a post-chaise on March 11, 1796, along with Junot and his friend Chauvet, the new chief ordonnateur of the Army of Italy. In a letter to Josephine of March 14, written from Chanceaux on his journey south, Napoleon dropped the ‘u’ in his surname. The first time his name had appeared in the state newspaper, the Moniteur Universel, had been in 1794 when it was hyphenated as ‘Buono-Parte’.* Now he Gallicized it in a conscious move towards emphasizing his French over his Italian and Corsican identities.75 Another bond with the past had been broken.

  He reached Nice in fifteen days. When someone made the rather otiose point that he was very young, at twenty-six, to command an army, Napoleon replied: ‘I shall be old when I return.’76

  4

  Italy

  ‘On 15 May 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of a youthful army which had just crossed the bridge at Lodi and let the world know that after all these centuries, Caesar and Alexander had a successor.’

  Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma

  ‘A general’s most important talent is to know the mind of the soldier and gain his confidence, and in both respects the French soldier is more difficult to lead than another. He is not a machine that must be made to move, he is a reasonable being who needs leadership.’

  Napoleon to Chaptal

  Some would later claim that Napoleon was an unknown quantity when he arrived at the headquarters of the Army of Italy in Nice on March 26, 1796, and that his divisional commanders all despised him when they met him for the first time because, as a sneering contemporary put it, he had ‘won his reputation in a street riot and his command in a marriage bed’.1 He had in fact served as head of artillery of the same force only two years before, was known to many from his success at Toulon, and had written no fewer than three detailed reports for the Topographical Bureau on how to win the coming campaign. It was only natural that there should be some initial resentment at his having been appointed over the heads of more experienced generals but Napoleon’s officers knew perfectly well who he was.

  He was in charge of five divisional commanders. The eldest, Jean Sérurier, had thirty-four years’ service in the French army. He had served in the Seven Years War and was considering retiring from soldiering when the Revolution broke out, but had fought well in the years afterwards and had been made a divisional general in December 1794. Pierre Augereau was a tall, swaggering, somewhat coarse thirty-eight-year-old former mercenary, clock-seller and dancing-master whose nicknames were ‘child of the people’ and ‘proud brigand’. He had killed two men in duels and a cavalry officer in a fight and only escaped torture by the Lisbon Inquisition through the good offices of his spirited Greek wife. André Masséna, also thirty-eight, had gone to sea as a cabin boy at thirteen but switched to the army in 1775 and became a sergeant-major before being discharged just before the Revolution. He became a smuggler and fruit trader in Antibes before joining the National Guard in 1791 and rapidly rising up the ranks. His services in the siege of Toulon won him promotion to divisional general in the Army of Italy, where he served with distinction in 1795. Amédée Laharpe was a thirty-two-year-old heavily moustachioed Swiss. Jean-Baptiste Meynier had fought in the Army of Germany, but in mid-April Napoleon reported to the Directory that he was ‘incapable, not fit to command a battalion in a war as active as this one’.2 All five men were experienced veterans, whereas Napoleon hadn’t commanded so much as an infantry battalion in his life. They would be a tough group to impress, let alone inspire. As Masséna later reminisced:

  At first they did not think much of him. His small size and puny face did not put him in their favour. The portrait of his wife that he held in his hand and showed to everyone, his extreme youth, made them think that this posting was the work of another intrigue, but a moment after, he donned his general’s cap and seemed to grow by two feet. He questioned us on the position of our divisions, their equipment, the spirit and active number of each corps, gave us the direction that we had to follow, announced that, the next day, he would inspect all the corps and that the day after that they would march on the enemy to give battle.3

  Masséna misremembered the last part – they didn’t give battle for a month – but he captured the spirit of activity that Napoleon radiated, his confidence, his obsessive demand for information, which was to be a feature throughout his life, and his love of his wife.

  In that initial meeting, Napoleon showed his commanders how the Savona–Carcare road led to three valleys, any one of which could ultimately lead them into the rich plains of Lombardy. Piedmont had opposed the French Revolution and had been at war with France since 1793. Napoleon believed that if his army could push the Austrians to the east and take the fortress stronghold at Ceva, it could knock the Piedmontese out of the war by threatening their capital, Turin. This would mean pitting 40,000 French troops against 60,000 Austrians and Piedmontese, but Napoleon told his commanders he would use speed and deception to retain the initiative. His plan was based both on Pierre de Bourcet’s Principes de la guerre des montagnes (1775), and on an earlier strategy intended for use in a campaign against Piedmont of 1745 which had been aborted by Louis XV but which had also concentrated on capturing Ceva. Bourcet wrote of the importance of clear planning, concentration of effort, and keeping the enemy off balance. Napoleon’s campaign in Italy was to be a textbook operation in both senses of the term.

  For the Directory, Italy was something of a sideshow. They had concentrated their resources in western and southern Germany where the two principal forces of the Republic, the Army of the Rhine and Moselle under General Jean Moreau, and the Army of the Sambre and Meuse under General Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, launched an offensive in June that had seen some initial success. The formidable Archduke Charles von Habsburg, younger brother of the Emperor Francis of Austria, fighting at his very best, defeated Jourdan at Amberg in August 1796 and at Würzburg in September. He then turned on Moreau and beat him at Emmendingen in October, before driving both French armies back across the Rhine.

  As a result of the sidelining of military efforts in Italy, Napoleon was given only 40,000 francs – less than his own annual salary – to pay for the entire campaign.4 According to one possibly apocryphal story, in order to help transport himself and his aides-de-camp from Paris to Nice, he sold his silver-hilted sword and had Junot stake the proceeds at the gambling tables.5

  When Napoleon arrived in Nice, therefore, he found his army in no state to move anywhere. It was freezing and the men had no overcoats. No meat had been issued for three months and bread arrived only irregularly. Mules pulled the artillery, since all the draft-horses had died of malnutrition, and entire battalions were shoeless or in clogs, wearing makeshift uniforms often taken off the dead. Some of the men were only identifiable as soldiers because they carried army-issue cartridge pouches, and many of their muskets lacked bayonets. They hadn’t been paid for months, prompting mutterings of mutiny.6 Fever was rampant, killing no fewer than six hundred men of the 21st Demi-Brigade in twenty days.* Mariana Starke, an English writer in Florence, accurately described the ‘wretched state’ of the French
army before Napoleon’s arrival: ‘a total want of necessities, and a pestilential fever, the natural consequence of famine … dejected and enfeebled by sickness, and destitute of horses, cannon, and almost every other sinew of war’.7

  Napoleon’s response to the ‘wretched state’ of his army was to demote Meynier and give his quartermaster Chauvet a brief to reorganize the commissariat completely, including, as he told the Directory on March 28, to ‘threaten the contractors, who have robbed much and who enjoy credit’.8 He also ordered Citizen Faipoult, France’s minister in Genoa, to solicit ‘without noise’ 3 million francs in loans from the Jewish financiers there and he recalled the cavalry from its winter pastures in the Rhône valley. Within two days of arriving in Nice, Napoleon had disbanded the 3rd Battalion of the 209th Demi-Brigade for mutiny, dismissed its officers and NCOs from the army and distributed the other ranks in groups of five to other battalions. He believed it was essential for everyone to be treated according to the same rules, appreciating, as he put it, that ‘If there were a single privilege granted to anyone, no matter whom, not one man would obey the order to march.’9 On April 8 he reported to the Directory that he had been forced to punish his men for singing anti-revolutionary songs, and he had court-martialled two officers for crying ‘Vive le roi!’10

  Napoleon’s divisional commanders were immediately impressed by his capacity for hard work. Subordinates could never say they would attend to something and then let it slide, and the staff who had been stationary in Nice for four years suddenly felt the pulsating effect of Napoleon’s energy. In the nine months between his arrival in Nice and the end of 1796 he sent more than eight hundred letters and despatches, covering everything from where drummer-boys should stand in parades to the conditions under which the ‘Marseillaise’ should be played. Augereau was the first of his generals to be won over, followed by Masséna. ‘That little bastard of a general actually frightened me!’ Augereau would later tell Masséna.11