Within France he was secure, so long as he continued to deliver military successes, until about 1808. Then he began to lose support among the key elites personified by Talleyrand. He remained in power because thenceforth he modified his image as an aggressor to become a constitutional monarch at peace with his neighbours, although an overwhelmingly preponderant one. When faced by Russian obduracy, he abandoned his new image in favour of a gamble, which cost him much of his domestic constituency and eventually led to his overthrow.
Yet to survive domestically he felt he had to re-establish himself as a military genius. This led to the disastrous Leipzig campaign, which went well at first and collapsed when he over-extended himself: Napoleon as a commander, although gifted, never realized his own limitations. From then on he was doomed, defeated by Wellington in the south-west and the allied armies in the east. His domestic base crumbled until he was left only with the support of his military chiefs, who also finally deserted him. In all this he can be seen not to be a megalomaniac or a genius, but a leader reflecting domestic imperatives who only occasionally allowed his manic self-confidence to overcome his sense of realism. For the most part, it was revolutionary and expansionary France which guided Napoleon’s policies, not he who guided them.
This judgement, obviously, qualifies any judgement about his greatness or wickedness. If this book’s thesis is correct, he emerges as a much more human and limited figure than the superman painted by his supporters, or the globe-conquering megalomaniac portrayed by his detractors. As a national leader, he was a superb protagonist of French national interests who went too far, retrenched, was attacked and blundered to his doom: the responsibility for the horrors inflicted upon Europe during the period belonged to pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary France, of which he was but the helmsman, sometimes inspired in his steering, sometimes disastrously inept.
As for his political skills – on which he prided himself – they were virtually non-existent: he seized power in a brutal military coup, his treatment of allies and enemies alike was that of the martinet throughout the ages – gruff patronage towards his supporters and furious anger towards his enemies. As a diplomat, on which he also prided himself, he was a figure of fun: he was seduced by Alexander at Tilsit, duped by Francis II through an imperial marriage, and completely outwitted by both Talleyrand and Metternich.
As a thinker, his philosophy was that of the highly intelligent man of action that he was, but bereft of true insight. His musings on St Helena were typical.
Man loves the supernatural. He meets deception halfway. The fact is that everything about us is a miracle. Strictly speaking, there are no phenomena, for in nature everything is a phenomenon: my existence is a phenomenon; this log that is being put into the chimney is a phenomenon; this light that illuminates me is a phenomenon; my intelligence, my faculties, are phenomena; for they all exist, yet we cannot define them. I leave you here, and I am in Paris, entering the Opera; I bow to the spectators, I hear the acclamations, I see the actors, I hear the music. Now if I can span the space from St Helena, why not that of the centuries? Why should I not see the future like the past? Would the one be more extraordinary, more marvellous than the other? No, but in fact it is not so.
He was an obsessive egotist. He could even be amusing:
When I was at Tilsit with the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia, I was the most ignorant of the three in military affairs! These two sovereigns, especially the King of Prussia, were completely au fait as to the number of buttons there ought to be in front of a jacket, how many behind, and the manner in which the skirts ought to be cut. Not a tailor in the army knew better than King Frederick how many measures of cloth it took to make a jacket. In fact, I was nobody in comparison with them. They continually tormented me with questions about matters belonging to tailors, of which I was entirely ignorant, though, in order not to affront them, I answered just as gravely as if the fate of an army depended upon the cut of a jacket. The King of Prussia changed his fashion every day. He was a tall, dry looking fellow, and would give a good idea of Don Quixote. At Jena, his army performed the finest and most showy manoeuvres possible, but I soon put a stop to their coglionerie, and taught them that to fight and to execute dazzling manoeuvres and wear splendid uniforms were very different affairs. If the French army had been commanded by a tailor, the King of Prussia would certainly have gained the day, from his superior knowledge in that art!
As a human being he was kind, perhaps excessively so, towards his family and friends; he was temperamental but not vindictive towards his subordinates and enemies. Yet he showed a professional soldier’s utter indifference to the suffering of lesser people – whether his own soldiers, the enemy or civilians – as to inflict suffering across Europe on a superhuman scale that appeared not to bother him at all.
As a soldier, the criterion by which he really wanted to be judged, he was a superb professional, perhaps the greatest leader of small armies in history, brilliant at outwitting and outflanking his opponents, inspiring his soldiers, and rewarding them amply, making them capable of almost incredible marches, endurance and feats: his early Italian campaigns and his last-ditch campaign in defence of France in 1814 are rightly military classics. His record in larger battles is more mixed, and to a great extent depended on the abilities of his subordinates as well as his capacity for improvisation, surprise, and the flexible management of army corps – his brilliance during the 1805–7 campaigns was not recaptured during 1807–9 and, 1812–15, apart from the defensive French campaign.
As an inspirer of his men he was perhaps without parallel, remembering the lowliest subordinate’s name, regaling them with the most ringing before-battle bombast in military history, fearlessly risking his life in his youth and always understanding the importance of esprit de corps, morale boosting and regimental pride. He was a superb opportunist and improviser. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest soldiers in history.
He was also a born propagandist and his ability to tell every story so that it resounded to his credit has rarely been exceeded – hence the Napoleonic myth, fashioned ultimately in the forge of St Helena’s steely climate: for Napoleon’s final victory was not achieved in war, but in exile, where several years’ outpouring of self-justification formed the basis for a Napoleonic legend that has survived to this day. Add to this his extraordinary capacity for dreaming, for articulating great visions which has inspired reformers and monsters alike in later years, and he was certainly what he would call a ‘phenomenon’, although a more limited one than he would have liked to believe.
In essence he was a military dictator, a superb general, and a conqueror utterly unprincipled and ruthless in the pursuit of his own self-promotion, subordinating France to his own glory even though his country and the French people sacrificed themselves in the hundreds of thousands in his cause – and then, after much suffering, destroyed it. He was a military genius, a political and diplomatic third-rater, and a monster.
* * *
How then, in retrospect, should Britain have responded to the challenge posed by revolutionary France and, later, Napoleon? As this book has tried to recount, the early period, that of revolutionary war, was met with by much wishful thinking, indecision and appeasement by William Pitt’s government, which sincerely did not want to go to war. The military outcome of the early British expeditions were catastrophic, as was too their failure to support the resistance in France. The West Indies’ campaign was militarily successful only at a huge cost in life.
As the war progressed, Pitt, his foreign secretary Grenville and William Windham, his war secretary and chief spymaster, became more resolute and pursued a skilful policy of building continental coalitions against Napoleon, supported by colossal amounts of British money, coupled with a dazzling naval campaign which has never been exceeded in history. All the time, however, both Pitt and Grenville preached peace and reconciliation.
When Napoleon came to power both men decided to continue the war, Pitt eventua
lly dying of nervous exhaustion and Grenville acting only briefly as his successor. Foreign policy devolved, after a brief interlude dominated by the mercurial George Canning, to the unlovely triumvirate of the brilliant but cold Lord Castlereagh, the mediocre figurehead Lord Liverpool and Richard Wellesley and his brothers. Ironically, this was one moment when peace might have been possible, albeit with the continent under French domination and Napoleon content to rest upon his laurels. Instead, probably rightly, the British prosecuted the Peninsular War and sought to bribe and persuade their continental allies into re-entering the fight. They succeeded in both. By this time the British army had been transformed from being brave but inefficient under incompetent commanders to being brave, effective and well-officered. When war broke out on the continent again, Britain’s confrontational policy was implacably pursued and ended in a total victory, first in 1814 and then in 1815, with the charmless Castlereagh pursuing a carefully structured settlement for Europe.
Pitt and Grenville can be faulted for rising to the French challenge too slowly, then complimented for pursuing it vigorously. Castlereagh and Liverpool can be faulted for ignoring the possibility of peace with France, and instead seeking war regardless. While many mistakes were made by both administrations, it is hard to fault Britain’s implacable commitment to the war in the belief that the war party under Napoleon would learn nothing except from defeat.
With the bumbling Louis XVIII’s restoration, France was neutralized for decades as a political or military power: Britain could be said to have attained its objective. For Britain the Napoleonic war was a thrice-just war – Britain had to take arms against the disruption caused to British commerce, the slaughter wrought throughout the continent, and the threat to British interests not just in the Baltic, the Mediterranean and the Low Countries, but around the world.
Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon? All the coalition members at one time or another now claim to have been the principals. Dogged Austria deserves a large share of the credit for rising from defeat again and again. Prussia, after its lamentable initial performance, renewed some of its national pride at the end. Russia can claim credit for the 1812 campaign, in which although there was no great feat of Russian arms, the French were completely routed.
Yet the lion’s share must surely go to Britain, with Pitt and Grenville’s policies of coalition-building on the continent, the astounding feats of Britain’s navy under Nelson and a host of other outstanding commanders, and Wellington’s relentless performance during the Peninsular War. It was the failure of France to invade or strangle Britain economically that first frustrated revolutionary and Napoleonic France when continental Europe lay prostrate at its feet: and it was the Peninsular War that first exposed France’s weakness and tied down huge French armies, encouraging first Russia and then Austria and Prussia back into the war. Waterloo was, for all its fame, essentially a postscript, the coup de grâce for an indomitable fighter who had failed to accept his own demise the year before. Nor was it a brilliantly fought battle, although Wellington prevailed: Wellington’s true greatness lay in the Peninsular campaign and the resistance of his Spanish and Portuguese allies which brought down a continental giant by the feet. It was through men like him, Moore and Hill in the British army and Howe, St Vincent, Duncan, Nelson, Cochrane and Collingwood in the navy that Britain achieved its deliverance and continental Europe its independence.
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