by Paul Johnson
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - The Corsican Background
CHAPTER TWO - Revolutionary, General, Consul, Emperor
CHAPTER THREE - The Master of the Battlefield
CHAPTER FOUR - The Flawed and Fragile Empire
CHAPTER FIVE - The Graveyards of Europe
CHAPTER SIX - Elba and Waterloo
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Long Good-bye
Further Reading
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GENERAL EDITOR: JAMES ATLAS
VIKING
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First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Copyright © Paul Johnson, 2002
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eISBN : 978-1-440-68448-7
1. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769-1821. 2. France—
History—1789-1815. 3. Emperors—France—Biography.
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Introduction
FEW INDIVIDUALS have had more impact on history than Napoleon Bonaparte. He is the grandest possible refutation of those determinists who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than by the powerful wills of men and women. Though Bonaparte exercised power only for a decade and a half, his impact on the future lasted until nearly the end of the twentieth century, almost two hundred years after his death. Indeed, his influence may not yet be spent. People love reading about him and his spectacular rise, just as in Roman and medieval times they read about Alexander. And they ponder the question: Might I, in comparable circumstances, have done as well? Few persons of ambition have failed to see Bonaparte as an exemplar or a spur. It is significant how many of those who exercise various forms of power, and wish for more—media tycoons, for example—have decked their offices or even their persons with Napoleonic memorabilia.
It is one of the contentions of this book that Bonaparte was not an ideologue but an opportunist who seized on the accident of the French Revolution to propel himself into supreme power. I say “accident” because the example of Britain and the Scandinavian countries showed that all the desirable reforms that the French radicals brought about by force and blood could have been achieved by peaceful means. As it was, the horrific course of the Revolution led, as was almost inevitable, to absolutism, of which Bonaparte was the beneficiary. And once installed in power he relentlessly sought further power by extending his rule to encompass most of Europe. It does not seem to have occurred to him to study the example of his older contemporary George Washington, who translated military victory into civil progress and renounced the rule of force in favor of the rule of law. But Bonaparte always put his trust in bayonets and cannon. In the end, force was the only language he understood, and in the end it pronounced a hostile judgment on him.
In the meantime, though, Bonaparte unleashed on Europe the most destructive wars the continent had ever experienced. For the first time, large-scale conscription played a notable part in swelling the armies, and their encounters became battles of entire nations. As the wars proceeded, the military casualties increased relentlessly, but the civilian populations also suffered in growing measure. First Italy, then Central Europe, finally Spain and Russia became victims of Bonaparte’s wars of conquest. The German-speaking lands in particular were fought over again and again, and the eventual revulsion against Bonaparte played a critical part in creating a spirit of German nationalism that was to become aggressive and threatening itself. A new concept of total warfare was born, and alongside it grew other institutions: the secret police, large-scale professional espionage, government propaganda machines, and the faking of supposedly democratic movements, elections, and plebiscites. France herself, though fought over only in the final phases of the wars, suffered bitterly, and some of her losses were permanent. At a time when other European populations were growing fast, France’s slowed down and began to stagnate, and in due course France inevitably began to slip from her position as the leading power in Europe to second-class status—that was Bonaparte’s true legacy to the country he adopted.
The statesmen who gathered in Vienna after the military collapse of Bonapartist France were determined to restore not only the old legitimist thrones but, so far as they could, the old conventions and rules of law that had kept the peace, or limited the impact of hostilities when war broke out. The Congress of Vienna must be regarded as one of the most successful peace settlements in history. With some exceptions, it determined the frontiers of Europe for a century, and though it did not prevent all European wars, it made a general conflagration far less likely. The nineteenth cen
tury was, in general, a time of peace, progress, and prosperity in Europe, until the old system finally broke down in 1914-18.
Thereafter, however, the Bonapartist legacy, aided by France’s decision to treat the dead ruler as a national hero and exemplar to the world, came into its own. The First World War itself was total warfare of the type Bonaparte’s methods adumbrated, and in the political anarchy that emerged from it, a new brand of ideological dictator took Bonaparte’s methods of government as a model, first in Russia, then in Italy, and finally in Germany, with many smaller countries following suit. The totalitarian state of the twentieth century was the ultimate progeny of the Napoleonic reality and myth. It is right, therefore, that we should study Bonaparte’s spectacular career unromantically, skeptically, and searchingly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, anxious as we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the twentieth, we must learn from Bonaparte’s life what to fear and what to avoid.
CHAPTER ONE
The Corsican Background
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE was born on 15 August 1769 at Ajaccio on the island of Corsica. It is a paradox that this man who thought in terms of conquering entire continents should have had his life bounded by three islands: Corsica, less than half the size of Wales, no bigger than Vermont; Elba, much smaller, where a parody of his glory was enacted; and Saint Helena, a mere speck on the ocean, his death-prison. It was a vintage time to be born: 1769 was also the birth year of Bonaparte’s nemesis, the duke of Wellington, and the politician who backed him, Viscount Castlereagh; and in and around this date were born many of the greatest spirits of the coming age: Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël, two more of Bonaparte’s dedicated enemies; Wordsworth and Coleridge, who cursed him in prose and verse; Beethoven, who dedicated his Eroica Symphony to the First Consul, then tore out the page in anger when he became emperor; and a host of others—Hegel and Schlegel, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, George Canning, Metternich, and Sir Walter Scott.
It was a vintage year in other ways. The Industrial Revolution was just taking off in Britain, with textiles leading the way; and Captain Cook, landing at Botany Bay, brought the final continent, Australasia, into the West’s compass. But Corsica was very remote from these and other great events. It was poor, wild, neglected, exploited, politically and economically insignificant. Exactly a hundred years later, the English artist Edward Lear descended on the island with his sketching materials and produced a scintillating visual record of its appearance, unchanged in a century: spiny, vertiginous mountains, almost impenetrable pine forests, vast fields of rocks and rare cataracts, and endless barren scrubland, known locally as le maquis, a word that was to become synonymous with guerrilla country. Its total income was tiny. The courts of Europe regarded it as almost worthless. The British took it twice in the eighteenth century, and twice relinquished it as more trouble than it was worth. It had belonged for hundreds of years to the Italian city-state of Genoa, which had acquired it in the age when Genoa was, next to Venice, the richest maritime power in the Mediterranean. But Genoese rule had never penetrated much inland from the sea towns, Bastia, Calvi, Bonifaccio, and Ajaccio. There was no profit in it. So local insurgents ruled the interior and occasionally struck at the walled coastal towns. In the 1760s, increasingly weak Genoa turned to the French for assistance, which the French provided. But they disagreed with Genoa’s policy of allowing in the hated Jesuits, banned in France. They withdrew their forces, and in 1767 the insurgents took Ajaccio. For Genoa, this was the last straw, and in 1768 it sold the entire island to France by treaty, in return for a paltry sum. This was a critical event for Bonaparte for, born the next year, he automatically became a French citizen.
Not everyone despised Corsica. In his Du contrat social (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked that, while government corruption was universal in Europe, one tiny country was still capable of legislating against it, in a spirit of primitive simplicity. That was Corsica, and he added that he had a presentiment that this island of nature would one day astonish Europe. In consequence, the sage was invited by the insurgents to come to Corsica and draw up a constitution, which would serve when they won their independence by the sword. He did not go. But he persuaded his young friend James Boswell, the future biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, to include the island in his grand tour, and arranged for him to see the leader of the insurgents, Pasquale Paoli, who bore the title of “General of the People.” Boswell went, formed a lifelong admiration and friendship for Paoli, and left a vivid record of his journey, both in his diaries and in the book about Corsica he published on his return to Britain. The book made him famous—he was known as “Corsica Boswell”—and it was widely read in Europe. Among his readers was the young Bonaparte. It gave him ideas.
Not that Bonaparte ever had the ambition to become Corsica’s liberator. That was Paoli’s thankless role, and a small-time part at best. To people of Bonaparte’s background, the future lay not inland but outward—on the high seas and the great landmasses beyond. People moved into and out of Corsica all the time. Among the ambitious of the coastal towns, there was no such thing as the timeless stability of the interior. The Bonapartes originally came from the minor nobility of sixteenth-century Tuscany. In Ajaccio they had become, as it were, hereditary lawyers, while retaining their titles of nobility, sixteen quarterings (ancestors with titles of nobility), and so forth. They operated on a small scale and were just rich enough to own their own house and garden and to employ servants. Carlo Mario da Buonaparte, as he called himself, married the fourteen-year-old Letizia, also of distant Italian noble extraction, but from a family that had heavily intermarried with the squireens of the wild interior. She gave him eight children who lived, of whom Napoleon, or Nabulion as he was registered, was the second. The name, eventually to give itself to an age, was of no significance. The father, from some notion of family pietà, simply repeated the name given by his great-grandfather to his second son. Bonaparte scarcely ever used it. An analysis of Napoleonic autographs, of which thousands exist, shows that he always signed himself Buonaparte, then later Bonaparte. This was the name by which all his friends, and even his first wife, Josephine, knew him and addressed him, both officially and familiarly, and it is the name I use throughout this book. When he became emperor, he reluctantly adopted Napoleon as his name, for reasons of royal protocol, and his second wife called him such. But he rarely signed the name Napoleon in full, simply scribbling “Nap” or “Np”; and sometimes he forgot his new rank and signed “Bonaparte.”
Bonaparte has had more books written about him than any other individual, with the sole exception of Jesus Christ. They continue to appear at brief intervals, especially in English and French but also in many other languages, and they are read: publishers regard a Napoleon book as more likely to sell, by virtue of its subject alone, than any other biography. Nearly all these books speculate on the family or genetic origins of Bonaparte’s soaring ambitions. Virtually all agree that the hardness in his nature came from his mother, not his father, an apparently ineffectual person who died young. Madame Mère was of sterner stuff. Some biographers therefore see his bellicosity as deriving from his wild Corsican forebears, with their cult of the iron law of revenge, the vendetta. Oddly enough, the one form of ferocity in which Bonaparte was a little deficient was revenge; he was uncharacteristically, if unpredictably, forgiving of injuries—not always or even usually, but often enough to surprise. Beyond reading Boswell’s book and deriving from it lessons that had nothing to do with the island, he took no interest in the place once he had left it. He never visited it. It never figured in his geopolitical calculations. On the other hand, he gave no sign that he was ashamed of his origins. He simply dismissed it from the forefront of his mind as carrying no importance in the economy of his ambition.
The alternative theory of biographers is that Bonaparte was a throwback to the distant condottiero of his Tuscan ancestors, a soldier of fortune who would sell his sword to whoever would pay handsomely for it, and found a dyn
asty on the profits of war. It is true that, until France took over in 1768, Corsica looked to Italy, which was much nearer, and supplied its written language and culture. But Bonaparte never showed any affection for Italy as a country—he agreed with Metternich’s definition of it: “a mere geographical expression”—and when he called his son and heir king of Rome, he was reincarnating a quite different and much earlier entity. He showed no sentiment toward any of its historic cities either, treating them like mere gold or silver coins to be snatched from enemies and awarded to members of his family or allies. The Italians themselves he despised.
Looking outward, to the sea, as a Corsican in Ajaccio would, he formed a boyhood admiration for the Royal Navy, which rode the Mediterranean waters, so far from home, so confidently. He expressed a desire to join the British navy as a midshipman cadet, and in due course to command one of those wonderfully polished, burnished, pipe-clayed, and smartly painted—and formidable—three-deckers that occasionally anchored in the harbor. But that required money, and even more “interest” (influence or pull), neither of which his family possessed. So the moment passed. But it is curious to reflect on this, his earliest ambition, and to wonder at how differently history would have evolved had his boyhood whim been satisfied. As a boy Bonaparte was distinguished by his gift for mathematics, which remained with him throughout his life and was of inestimable value in his profession. But it would have served him well at sea, too, and there can be no doubt he would have risen high in naval service and become a rival to Nelson. As it was, the sea, so inviting to ambitious Corsicans, became and remained his mortal enemy. He did not understand its true strategic significance, and the naval dimension of geopolitics always eluded him—his last, terminal mistake was to step aboard the HMS Bellerophon, on 15 July 1815, never to be a free man again. Bonaparte’s bitterness against the British sprang partly from his belief that the power their supremacy at sea gave them was somehow unnatural, even unfair. It was his frustration at the unjust success of blockade that led him into the endless labyrinth of the Continental System, which proved a salient part of his undoing.