Just beaten the Austrians . . . and the Russians. I am a bit tired! BOOKS
BOOK OF THE WEEK NAPOLEON: THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
THE parts of Napoleon’s life we tend to know most about are his early years ( the Corsican midget bullied at his military academy, but made an army general by 24) and his final ones (return from Elba, defeat at Waterloo, desolate death on St Helena).
This masterly second volume of Michael Broers’s biography illuminates the middle years of Napoleon’s career — 1805 to 1810, from the Battle of Austerlitz to his divorce from Josephine and marriage to ‘fat, ugly and silent’ but fertile Marie-Louise of Austria.
Do those years sound a bit dull and middle- of- career-ish? Too many successful battles in places that now have Parisian railway or metro stations named after them? That’s what I expected.
If you dread a tedious history lesson, fear not. First, Broers, who must be one of the least boring professors of Western European history at the University of Oxford ever, knows how to enthral us.
His accounts of Napoleonic battles are suffused with the characters and psychology of their chief protagonists. He evokes the brilliance of one, the flaws of the other, the bitterness of the slaughter, the apocalyptic aftermaths, the glory and the pity of war.
He brings out unforgettable details — such as the resourceful French doctor improvising soup tureens out of the breastplates of the dead after the Battle of Aspern-Essling, and making broth for the wounded from the meat of butchered horses. AND
second, those years were far from dull or relaxing in any way. There’s not a dull or relaxing moment, in fact. Such is the life of a monomaniac.
You might think that, after the Battle of Austerlitz, for example, Napoleon would be able to put his feet up for a day or two.
As he wrote to Josephine: ‘I have beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors . . . I just changed my shirt — the first time it’s happened for eight days. I am a bit tired.’ As well he might be. But his Grande Armee was now stranded 1,400 kilometres from home with nothing to eat.
‘On a frozen cabbage patch in the middle of nowhere, the heroes of Austerlitz wrapped themselves in their threadbare greatcoats and slept.’
What’s more, the cost of the battle had plunged France into a financial crisis.
For Napoleon, life was just a succession of anxieties.
Broers’s fascination for Napoleon the man — his genius, his weaknesses, what drove him, what worried him, what obsessed him — is palpable and contagious, to such an extent that, half the time, I was on Napoleon’s side, even as he rampaged across Europe causing mayhem. In these years, we see both his brilliance as a military commander, as well as the flaws and mistakes that would eventually bring him crashing down.
At his most dazzling, Napoleon outshone his opponents in a way that makes you cringe for them.
While Prussian and Austrian commanders were floundering around, not communicating with each other and causing log-jams as their troops became entangled with their baggage trains, Napoleon’s hyper-fit troops were marching efficiently in neatly divided sections towards the right place at the right time. He obeyed the military maxim: ‘Always get there first, with the most.’
Napoleon had ‘an acute ability to absorb detail’, writes Broers. He marked off required marching distances and the most suitable routes on a huge master map, allowing his troops to rest for five minutes every hour and inspiring them on the eve of battles. HE
kEPT a clear head, even as he sent them into battle with a slug or two of gut-busting brandy inside them.
All war is nasty, brutal and hideous if you look closely, which Broers does — but he also stands back and describes almost ballet- like battle manoeuvres, the French Army moving ‘in the manner of a door swinging on its hinges’, cutting an Austrian commander off from his Russian allies and
escape route. When Napoleon was on top strategic form, harnessing all his inventiveness, adaptability and energy, a battle could be over by lunchtime. The whole Austrian empire would be prostrate at his feet, their army routed by the French cavalry who knew how to ‘scatter a defeated army, to splinter it into fragments, and so reduce it to rubble’.
Napoleon forbade religious services on campaigns, so soldiers were cut off from their home customs and comforts and developed an unbreakable sense of fraternity with each other. His dream was that all Europe should be ruled by him and his brothers: the forward-looking Napoleonic dynasty, which he ran as a ‘family business’.
But those brothers didn’t have his genius and didn’t live up to his high hopes for them. When the time was ripe, he deposed them with clinical coldness. He also demoted his nasty, plotting foreign minister Talleyrand, whom he named ‘a s*** in a silk stocking’. Talleyrand, in his turn, brilliantly summed up the difference between the Russian Tsar Alexander and Napoleon: ‘One is a civilised prince reigning over a barbarous people; the other is a barbarian reigning over a civilised people.’ Those French were good at pithy epigrams.
Like all tyrants who gradually become deluded into a sense of their own omnipotence, Napoleon over- reached himself, and it’s satisfying to sit on a sofa with this book and watch the inevitable begin to play out. He started to lie when battles didn’t go well. After the carnage of the Battle of Eylau, he vastly under-reported the number of French casualties. This brought into being a new expression, ‘to lie like a bulletin’ (in other words, to purvey fake news). His obsession with bringing Britain under his yoke after the naval defeat at Trafalgar led to his most momentous mistake: ordering a total Continental Blockade, aiming to cut Britain off from trade with Europe and thus force it into economic submission. ‘ By his drive to enforce the blockade,’ Broers writes spinetinglingly, ‘Napoleon had signed the death warrant of his empire.’ The blockade was unworkable — and the British wouldn’t have it. It sucked Napoleon into a war in the alien landscape of Spain, where the cracks started to show. His divorce from Josephine is painful to read about. Dynastyobsessed, he needed an heir, so sacked his wife in favour of the 18-year-old Marie-Louise of Austria, whom he’d never met — ‘marrying a womb’, as some have called this. Josephine nobly went along with it. Broers discusses their last night together: ‘After a silent dinner, Napoleon poured his own coffee, which was usually Josephine’s role, drank it in haste, and dismissed the page from the room. ‘He was summoned back moments later, to find Josephine had collapsed.’ She was in hysterical tears. The two of them spent one last night in each other’s arms. Pity the new wife, who had to spend the ‘ honeymoon’ (Broers’s inverted commas) travelling in a freezing carriage (Napoleon liked the windows open) around Belgium, where all the citizens loathed him because his blockade had brought terrible poverty. But Marie-Louise wrote to her father: ‘There is something very engaging and eager about him that is almost impossible to resist.’ She came back pregnant. One final, intriguing detail: the great Napoleon, who straddled Europe like a Colossus and could face down vast armies, was terrified of cats.