Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Do you think that if I had been capable of secretly poisoning my soldiers, or of such barbarities as have been ascribed to me, of driving my carriage over the mutilated and bleeding bodies of the wounded, that my troops would have fought under me with the enthusiasm and affection they uniformly displayed? No, no; I should have been shot long ago; even my wounded would have tried to pull a trigger to despatch me.58

  While the Jaffa mercy-killings were twisted by propagandists to blacken Napoleon’s reputation, there seems no reason not to accept his aide-de-camp Andréossy’s conclusion that ‘those few who were killed were past recovery, and that he did it out of humanity’.59

  The march through the desert back to Cairo, featuring terrible thirst in the scorching heat – Napoleon reported 47ºC temperatures – was a desperately low point, with incidents of amputee officers being thrown off their stretchers though they had paid men to carry them. An eyewitness noted how such utter demoralization was ‘destroying all generous sentiments’.60 Although they didn’t know it, the water table is fairly close to the surface along the coastal route they marched, and if they had only dug a few yards down they would have found water along almost its entirety. ‘Bonaparte rode his dromedary, which forced our horses to adopt a tiring pace,’ recalled Doguereau.61 This was because, as Napoleon reported to the Directory, ‘eleven leagues [29 miles] had to be covered per day to get to the wells where there was a little hot, sulphurous salty water, which was drunk with more eagerness than a good bottle of champagne in a restaurant’.62 According to a letter intercepted and published by the British, another soldier recounted: ‘Discontent is general … Soldiers have been seen to kill themselves in presence of the general-in-chief, exclaiming “This is your work!” ’63

  Napoleon re-entered Cairo on June 14, having sent orders ahead that celebrations were to be organized for his victorious troops’ parade, featuring captured standards and prisoners-of-war. ‘Although we put on all that we had of finery,’ recalled Doguereau of the event, ‘yet we presented a miserable appearance; we lacked everything … most of us were without hats or boots.’64 The leading sheikhs came to Cairo to welcome Napoleon, and ‘expressed the utmost satisfaction on his return’, though with how much sincerity might be doubted.65 Napoleon lost around 4,000 men in the Syrian expedition, far more than the 500 killed and 1,000 wounded he reported to Paris.66 A week after returning to Cairo, he ordered Ganteaume to go to Alexandria to prepare the Venetian-built frigates Carrère and Muiron (named after his former aide-de-camp) for a long, top-secret voyage.

  ‘We are masters of all the desert,’ Napoleon told the Directory on June 28, ‘and we have disconcerted enemy projects for this year.’67 The former wasn’t much of a boast and the latter wasn’t true, since an Ottoman fleet was on its way. On July 15, just as he was coming out of the Great Pyramid with Monge, Berthollet and Duroc, Napoleon was told of the arrival of the Turks off Aboukir.68 He wrote to the Grand Diwan saying that among the invasion force was a Russian contingent, ‘who abhor those who believe in the unity of God, because, according to their lies, they believe that there are three’, which was a clever way of trying to use the Russians’ Orthodox faith against them and to appeal to Muslim beliefs.69 He sent Marmont, whom he assumed would soon be besieged in Alexandria, a list of tips, such as ‘only sleep in the day’, ‘sound the reveille well before dawn’, ‘make sure no officer undresses at night’, and to keep a large number of dogs tied up outside the city walls to warn against stealth attacks.70

  Napoleon gathered together every available man from Cairo to march to Alexandria, which he reached on the night of July 23. At night many of the soldiers slept under the stars, wrapped in their cloaks. On approaching Alexandria, they learned that the small French garrison in the fort at Aboukir had been overwhelmed and beheaded in front of the Turkish commander, Mustafa Pasha. ‘This news had a very bad effect,’ recorded Doguereau; ‘the French do not like this cruel way of making war.’71 Hypocritical as that may sound after Jaffa, it meant that few prisoners were taken two days later, when Napoleon’s 8,000 men inflicted a devastating defeat on the 7,000-strong Turkish, Mamluk and Bedouin forces under Mustafa Pasha at the battle of Aboukir. ‘We were obliged to kill them all to a man,’ wrote Lavalette, ‘but they sold their lives dearly.’72 Many of the Turks were simply driven into the sea by Lannes, Murat and Kléber. ‘If it had been a European army,’ said Doguereau, ‘we should have taken three thousand prisoners; here there were three thousand corpses.’73 In fact there were probably closer to five thousand. It was a stark confession of complete indifference to the fate of non-white, non-Christian enemies.74

  With the second Turkish invasion force destroyed and Egypt safe, Napoleon decided to return as soon as possible to a vulnerable France facing a new Coalition led by Britain, Russia and Austria. Long accused afterwards of deserting his men, in fact he was marching to the sound of the guns, for it was absurd to have France’s best general stuck in a strategic sideshow in the Orient when France itself was under threat of invasion. He left Egypt without warning Kléber or Menou – indeed he even ordered Kléber to meet him at Rosetta as a diversion while he headed for the sea. Trying to sweeten the pill of being ordered to assume command, in a very long letter of instructions Napoleon promised Kléber that he would ‘take particular care’ to send him a company of actors, which he said was ‘very important for the army, and also to start changing the customs of this country’.75 When Kléber discovered that Napoleon – whom he took to calling ‘that Corsican runt’ – had left Egypt, the plain-speaking Alsatian told his staff: ‘That bugger has deserted us with his breeches full of shit. When we get back to Europe we’ll rub his face in it.’76 That pleasure was denied him, for in June 1800 a twenty-four-year-old student named Soliman stabbed him to death. (Soliman was executed with a pike driven into his rectum up to his breast.)77

  Far from showing cowardice, it took a good deal of courage for Napoleon to cross the Mediterranean when it was virtually a British lake. He sailed on August 23 from Beydah, 9 miles from Alexandria, with most of his senior staff, including Berthier, Lannes, Murat, Andréossy, Marmont, Ganteaume and Merlin, as well as the savants Monge, Denon and Berthollet. Napoleon also took with him a young – between fifteen and nineteen, accounts differ – Georgian-born, Mamluk-dressed slave boy called Roustam Raza, who had been a present from Sheikh El-Bekri in Cairo. Roustam became Napoleon’s bodyguard, sleeping on a mattress outside his door every night for the next fifteen years, armed with a dagger.78 ‘Don’t fear anything,’ Napoleon told Roustam, who had been sold into slavery at eleven and was scared of sailing. ‘We’ll soon be in Paris, and we’ll find a lot of beautiful women and a lot of money. You’ll see, we’ll be very happy, happier than in Egypt!’79 He ordered Desaix, who was still chasing Murad Bey, and Junot, who was too far away from the embarkation point, to stay behind, writing to Junot of the ‘tender friendship that I devote to you’, using ‘tu’ throughout.80

  Napoleon told the army he had been recalled to France by the government, which was true.81 ‘It’s painful to me to leave soldiers to whom I am so much attached,’ he said, ‘but it shall not be for long.’82 He boarded the Muiron on August 22 and, accompanied by the Carrère, set sail at eight o’clock the next morning with a north-easterly wind that blew for two days and, with his customary good fortune, took him away from where British cruisers might have been. The two slow-moving Venetian-built frigates followed a circuitous route to France down the African coast to the Gulf of Carthage, and then northwards towards Sardinia. ‘During the whole of this tedious coasting, we had not descried a single sail,’ recalled Denon. ‘Bonaparte, as an unconcerned passenger, buried himself with geometry and chemistry, or unbent his mind by sharing in our mirth.’83 On the journey, as well as learning from the savants, Napoleon ‘would tell us ghost stories, in which he was very clever … He never mentioned the Directory but with a severity that savoured of contempt.’84 Bourrienne read him history books late into the night, even when Napoleon was f
eeling seasick. ‘When he asked me for the life of Cromwell,’ Denon recalled, ‘I believed that I would not go to bed.’85 Oliver Cromwell, the conservative revolutionary general who effected a coup d’état against a government he despised, was about to become more of a role-model for Napoleon than Denon could have guessed.

  Denon recorded that Corsica was ‘the first sight of a friendly shore’. Coming into Ajaccio on September 30 ‘the batteries saluted on both sides; the whole population rushed to the boats and surrounded our frigates’. Lavalette recalled that the sight of Ajaccio left Napoleon ‘deeply affected’, a phrase generally used at that period to denote tears.86 Napoleon’s time there was spent dining with old partisans and retainers, picking up some ready cash from Joseph Fesch and ‘reading in the public papers the melancholy story of our disasters’ in Italy and Germany.87 One can still see the room he occupied on that occasion in the Casa Bonaparte; it was the last time he set foot in his childhood home.

  On October 6 Napoleon and his entourage left Ajaccio for Hyères. When, two days later, the sails of some English ships were spotted at 6 p.m., Ganteaume wanted to turn back to Corsica. Giving his first and last navigational order of the journey, Napoleon told him to head for the port of Fréjus on the Côte d’Azur, not far from Cannes. At noon on Wednesday, October 9, 1799 he stepped ashore in France at an inlet at nearby Saint-Raphaël. That same evening he was on his way to Paris. It had been a remarkable journey, and after 1803 Napoleon kept a scale-model of the Muiron on his desk; later he ordered that the ship herself ‘be kept as a monument and placed somewhere where she will be preserved for a few hundred years … I would feel very superstitious if anything bad happened to this frigate.’88 (She was scrapped in 1850.)

  The Egyptian adventure was over for Napoleon after nearly a year and five months, though not for the French army he had left behind. They would remain until Menou was forced to capitulate to the British two years later. In 1802 he, his army and the remaining savants were allowed to return to France. Napoleon admitted to the loss of 5,344 men in his expedition, which was a considerable underestimation since by the time of the surrender in August 1801, around 9,000 soldiers and 4,500 sailors had died, and relatively little fighting had taken place after he left, even in the final siege of Alexandria.89 Nonetheless, he had captured the country as ordered, fought off two Turkish invasions and returned to help France in her hour of peril. Kléber wrote a devastating report to the Directory denouncing Napoleon’s conduct of the campaign from its inception, describing the dysentery and ophthalmia and the army’s dearth of weapons, powder, ammunition and clothing. But although this document was captured by the Royal Navy it wasn’t published in time to damage Napoleon politically – yet another example of the luck that he was starting to mistake for Fate.

  The greatest long-term achievements of Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign were not military or strategic, but intellectual, cultural and artistic. The first volume of Vivant Denon’s vast and magisterial Description de l’Égypte was published in 1809, its title page proclaiming that it was ‘published by the order of His Majesty Emperor Napoleon the Great’. Its preface recalled that Egypt had been invaded by Alexander and the Caesars, whose missions there had been the models for Napoleon’s. For the rest of Napoleon’s life, and indeed after it, further volumes of this truly extraordinary work appeared, finally numbering twenty-one and constituting a monument in the history of scholarship and publishing. The savants had missed nothing. From Cairo, Thebes, Luxor, Karnak, Aswan and all the other sites of Ancient Egyptian temples, there were immensely detailed scale drawings (20 inches by 27) in both colour and black and white of obelisks, sphinxes, hieroglyphics, cartouches, pyramids and sexually aroused pharaohs, as well as mummified birds, cats, snakes and dogs. (According to volume twelve, King Ozymandias didn’t have a ‘wrinkl’d lip and sneer of cold command’ as Shelley suggests, but a rather engaging smile.) Off-duty soldiers were occasionally shown lounging around in the foreground of prints, but for scale rather than propaganda.

  As well as Ancient Egyptology, the volumes contained exceptionally detailed maps of the Nile, modern cities and towns, prints of minarets and landscapes, sketches of irrigation courses, and drawings of monasteries and temples, different types of columns, views of shipping, souks, tombs, mosques, canals, fortresses, palaces and citadels. There were encyclopaedic architectural blueprints with longitudinal and lateral plans of elevation, accurate down to the last centimetre. Although not politically triumphalist, the multiple volumes of the Description de l’Égypte represent an apogee of French, indeed Napoleonic, civilization, and had a profound effect on the artistic, architectural, aesthetic and design sensibilities of Europe.

  Additionally, having narrowly escaped being bitten by a ‘horned serpent’ in a Theban grotto, Citizen Ripaud, the librarian of the Institut de l’Égypte, wrote a 104-page report for the Commission of Arts on the existing state of the antiquities from the Nile cataracts to Cairo.90 The savants’ greatest discovery was the Rosetta Stone, a stele in three languages found at El-Rashid in the Delta. They made copies and translated the Greek portion before starting to work on the hieroglyphics.91 Under the peace agreement covering the French withdrawal in 1801, the Stone was handed over to the British and sent to the British Museum, where it still safely resides. Tragically, the Institut near Tahrir Square in Cairo was burned down during the Arab Spring uprising on December 17, 2011, and almost all its 192,000 books, journals and other manuscripts – including the only handwritten manuscript of Denon’s Description de l’Égypte – were destroyed.

  9

  Brumaire

  ‘I returned to France at a fortunate moment, when the existing government was so bad it could not continue. I became its chief; everything else followed of course – there’s my story in a few words.’

  Napoleon on St Helena

  ‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’

  Napoleon on St Helena

  Napoleon made his way to Paris from Saint-Raphaël via Aix (where he had his luggage stolen), Avignon, Valence, Lyons and Nevers, arriving in the capital on the morning of Wednesday, October 16, 1799. He enjoyed ‘a triumphal march’ along the route, and was given a hero’s welcome everywhere as France’s saviour.1 When he arrived in Lyons a play entitled The Hero’s Return was staged in his honour in front of large crowds who thronged the streets. They cheered so loudly that the lines were drowned out, which was probably just as well as they had been written overnight and were unrehearsed. The seventeen-year-old future cavalry officer Jean-Baptiste de Marbot recalled: ‘People were dancing in the open spaces and the air rang with cries of “Hurrah for Bonaparte! He will save the country!” ’2 He marvelled at Napoleon and his senior colleagues, especially ‘their martial air, their faces bronzed by the eastern sun, their strange costumes, and their Turkish sabres, slung by cords’.3

  Before he could determine what to do politically, Napoleon needed to decide what he wanted matrimonially. Although he didn’t know it, Josephine had made an attempt at ending her affair with Hippolyte Charles in February 1799. ‘You can be assured, after this interview, which will be the last, that you will no longer be tormented by my letters or by my presence,’ she had written to him. ‘The honest woman who has been deceived retires and says nothing.’4 In fact she continued writing to him about various sleazy business dealings they had had over Army of Italy contracts as late as October, and she tried (unsuccessfully) to find a job for a friend of his even after that. It was Charles who finally rejected the bereft Josephine romantically, whereupon the dapper boulevardier-hussar strolled off the pages of history. When Napoleon came to absolute power very shortly afterwards, he made no attempt to pursue or punish him.

  It had been sixteen months since he had learned of Josephine’s infidelity, so much of his anger wa
s spent, and he had retaliated comprehensively with Pauline Fourès. A divorce might damage him politically, especially with devout Catholics, and Josephine was helpful to him politically with her royalist and social connections, as well as in smoothing over the sensibilities of those rebuffed by his brusqueness. Although her overspending was pathological, the bills her tradesmen sent were negotiable, and they were often happy to settle for fifty centimes in the franc, which still gave them sizeable profits.

  Napoleon went first to rue de la Victoire, perhaps in itself an indication that he was going to forgive her, and when on October 18 Josephine arrived from Malmaison – a lovely chateau 7 miles west of Paris bought for 325,000 (borrowed) francs while Napoleon was in Egypt – having taken the wrong road to intercept him, they had a full-scale domestic scene. There was shouting, weeping and pleading on knees outside locked doors. Bags were packed, Hortense and the wounded Eugène were recruited by their mother to appeal to Napoleon’s step-fatherly sensibilities (which were strong and genuine), and finally there was a dramatic reconciliation. When Lucien arrived to see his brother the next morning he was shown into the bedroom where the couple were sitting up in bed.5 It is hard not to suspect that Napoleon stage-managed at least part of the titanic row to ensure total domination over her for the rest of their marriage: afterwards she was faithful to him, though he certainly wasn’t to her.

  Other theories as to why he stayed with her have been that he was ‘softened by her tears’, was sensually aroused and didn’t care, believed her denials (the least likely), was too concerned with politics to have time for domestic strife, wanted a child, and that he did love her despite everything. Whichever was the true explanation, or combination of them, he forgave Josephine totally, and never made allusion to her infidelity again, either to her or to anyone else. Thereafter, they slipped into comfortable domestic happiness, until dynastic considerations emerged a full decade later. She seems now genuinely to have fallen in love with him, although she always called him ‘Bonaparte’. The story of Napoleon and Josephine is thus certainly not the romantic Romeo-and-Juliet love story of legend, but something subtler, more interesting and, in its way, no less admirable.