Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  * He had nothing like that amount in the Tuileries, of course.

  * A crude but fairly effective estimation of Napoleon’s troops who were killed, wounded or captured in combat in 1812 can be made by simply adding up the casualties in each engagement and deducting them from the overall loss of 524,000. Adding together the Grande Armée’s losses in the forty-six battles, clashes, skirmishes, sieges and ambushes between the first engagement on July 9 and the last on November 26, there were 186,500 killed and wounded. Rounded up to 200,000 to take into account the lesser actions for which there are no accurate figures, this means that Russian regular military action in significant confrontations accounted for just under 40 per cent of the overall losses that Napoleon’s army suffered in Russia. Disease, exposure, starvation, partisan action, suicide and all of the myriad other ways in which death sought out soldiers in that campaign accounted for the other 60 per cent, with as many men losing their lives when advancing on Moscow as retreating from it (Muir, Tactics and Experience of Battle p. 9, Smith, Data Book pp. 379–408).

  * Even at this moment of crisis, Napoleon ensured that the actors of the Théâtre-Français got back to Paris before hostilities recommenced (Bausset, Private Memoirs p. 395). He gave Mademoiselle George 20,000 francs on August 12, which might have been just for her singing (Branda, Le prix de la gloire p. 57).

  * Today it is best viewed from the 270-foot-high platform atop the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations).

  * The mill forms the centrepiece of the magnificent diorama at the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt.

  * Today it can be seen in the excellent Armoury Museum next to the Royal Palace in Stockholm.

  * Wellington fully agreed with this estimation: when asked in 1814 if he had ever been across a field of battle from Napoleon, he replied: ‘No, and I am very glad I never was. I would at any time have rather heard that a reinforcement of forty thousand men had joined the French army, than that he had arrived to take command.’ (Longford, Years of the Sword pp. 248–9)

  * Whereas the Prussians and Austrians fought in half the battles each during the 1814 campaign, such was the Tsar’s insistence on taking Paris (on which he was advised by Napoleon’s old enemy from Corsica, Count Pozzo di Borgo) that the Russians fought in every major battle except Montereau.

  * Excepting the Cossacks, the Allied armies were actually remarkably well disciplined in France in 1814. At the museum dedicated to Napoleon’s 1814 campaign at Saint-Dizier one can see the requisition chits signed by Allied officers for cash payments to peasants and merchants for their produce.

  * In 1814 men like Talleyrand and Fouché could desert Napoleon because their positions under a restoration would by now be secure; if the Bourbons had returned much earlier, regicides like them, even turncoat regicides, would have been executed.

  * The fighting at the battle of Montmirail took place not where the memorial is today, but in and around the neighbouring village of Marchais; locally the battle is known as Marchais-Montmirail. When one visits the battlefield it is noticeable how topographically accurate Horace Vernet’s splendid painting of it is, in London’s National Gallery.

  * When Colonel Josef Simonyi led his Hungarian hussars into Fontainebleau Palace and emptied his pipe on Napoleon’s throne, it was a conscious re-enactment of an earlier Hungarian hussar commander, Count Andreas Hadik, who in a daring raid on Berlin in 1757 had emptied his pipe on the throne of Frederick the Great (Hollins, Hungarian Hussar p. 44).

  * Sadly the phrase that Napoleon is supposed to have uttered that day – ‘Never fear, my friends, the cannonball that will kill me has not yet been cast’ – was one of a number that seem to have been invented later by a journalist writing for the Journal Général de France.

  * This letter, which was not published in the original volumes of Napoleon’s correspondence in the 1850s, is in the Archives Nationales.

  * This was a characteristic pose of his when facing adversity, but also might have been the result of the headaches which, as he told his doctor, ‘occasionally troubled him the greater part of his life’ (BL Lowe Papers 20156 fol. 28).

  * San Martino is worth visiting for the superb exhibition of original caricatures of Napoleon, kept in an absurdly grandiose extension built by a distant relative in 1851.

  * In 1818 a Bonapartist ex-soldier, Marie-André Cantillon, attempted to assassinate Wellington as his carriage entered his residence, but he and his accomplice were acquitted when the bullet he fired could not be found.

  * To gauge the effect of being forced to live on half-pay, consider the naked lust for renewed war against France felt by Horatio Nelson when he was reduced to it between 1788 and 1793 (Knight, The Pursuit of Victory pp. 118–30).

  † Nevertheless, when he did encounter such variety, as in the shape of a Norwegian gentleman, Mr Kundtzow, who was presented to him in January 1815, he could be a pedantic show-off. ‘What is the population of Norway?’ Napoleon asked Kundtzow, who answered, ‘Two millions, Sire.’ Napoleon corrected him: ‘One million eight hundred thousand’ (ed. North, Napoleon on Elba p. 171).

  * ‘Napoleon stayed here,’ says a sign at the entrance to the village, ‘why don’t you?’

  * It wasn’t an ideal guide, as that particular coin shows the right profile of a much younger Napoleon with a full head of curly hair, a strongly defined jaw and a laurel-leaf crown.

  * He kept Carnot up to the mark as he had all his earlier interior ministers. ‘You will notice in the printed report’, Napoleon wrote of a table outlining troop distributions in mid-May, ‘that the department of the Pyrénées-Orientales has been omitted’ (CN28 no. 28198).

  * Napoleon had secured Lafayette’s release after five years of Austrian captivity in 1797, but the time for gratitude was long past.

  * Probably a reference to King Codrus, who provoked the Dorians to kill him in c.1068 BC after the Delphic Oracle prophesied that their invasion would succeed only if the King of Athens stayed unharmed.

  * Napoleon’s decision to disband the aérostatier unit of military balloonists soon after becoming First Consul proved disastrous, as its use at Waterloo would have given him more than three hours’ notice that the Prussian corps were on their way (ed. Chandler, Military Maxims pp. 19–20).

  * The contours of Wellington’s line are almost impossible to discern today because of the Lion Mound, a 141-foot-high artificial hill that was built on top of it after the battle.

  * One possible reason for his decision may have been that Ney, d’Erlon and General Pierre Binet de Marcognet, one of the divisional commanders, had all fought in Spain, and knew that the British had often successfully prevented deployment into line by concentrating fire on the flanks of units attempting it. But the result of deploying his men in wide lines was that command quickly collapsed because the men were too far from their officers and non-commissioned officers (interview with John Lee, June 21, 2013).

  * When Waterloo is war-gamed, France usually wins: the Napoleon player attacks early, masks Hougoumont with a maximum of one division, has the rest of Reille’s corps support d’Erlon’s historical attack, which uses a columnar formation and is accompanied by two divisions of Lobau’s corps with the Reserve Cavalry corps in close support. Ney’s cavalry charge is supported by infantry and artillery, which pulverize Wellington’s squares long before the Prussians arrive.

  * This was just south of where the Victor Hugo monument is today, on the same side of the road, before the turning to Plancenoit.

  * The Prussian Major von Keller captured the carriage and found in it Napoleon’s hat and sword, a pair of pistols, a green velvet cap, a steel bedstead with merino mattresses, a diamond tiara, the imperial mantle, several boxes of diamonds and a large silver clock. The carriage and many of its effects were put on display in Piccadilly in London.

  * Fouché’s absence from the conference was considered ominous, since he was known never to be on the losing side, and Joseph had advised that he be arrested and inter
ned at Vincennes, but it didn’t happen. Napoleon later wished he’d had him shot (ed. Latimer, Talks p. 195).

  * Napoleon received regular remittances from Lafite, his banker in Paris, and spent a total of 1,818,245 francs of his own money during his captivity, of which the destination of over 1 million francs remains a mystery (Branda, Le prix de la gloire p. 81). Madame Mère helped out financially with 60,000 francs per annum, but Fesch, Joseph, Lucien and Jérôme, after they had originally promised to send 100,000 francs, contributed nothing (Martineau, Napoleon’s St Helena p. 62). Eugène reimbursed the staff 650,768 francs when they returned to Europe in 1821.

  † Lowe was knighted in 1816.

  * ‘Although I never entertained strong sentiments of any kind for him,’ Marie Louise wrote after Napoleon’s death, ‘I cannot forget that he is the father of my son, and far from treating me badly, as most people believe, he always showed the deepest regard for me, the only thing one can wish for from a political marriage … I could have wished him many years of happiness and of life – so long as it would be far away from me’ (Palmer, Napoleon and Marie Louise p. 213).

  * Though there is a fine biography of Elizabeth I by Elizabeth Jenkins which calls her ‘Elizabeth the Great’.

  * Disease accounted for more than battle in most of the armies of Europe: indeed in the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1815, where 6,663 men were killed in action and 13,621 by wrecks, fire and drowning, an extraordinary 72,102 succumbed to disease, mostly in the West Indies.

  * Their decrying of Napoleonic imperialism was of course pure hypocrisy. The British were expanding across the globe, especially in Asia; within living memory Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great and Joseph II had all attempted to expand their territories in Europe. Their successors were not objecting to imperialism per se, simply to being on the losing side.