Redefining Napoleon
“THIS NEW INTERPRETATION REVEALS A MAN WHOSE WILL TO SUCCEED LED TO GREAT POWER, BUT WHOSE COMPLEX INSECURITIES BROUGHT ABOUT HIS OWN DOWNFALL”
Adam Zamoyski reassesses the Emperor ahead of his talk at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival
Napoleon Bonaparte famously rose from being an obscure Corsican artillery officer to a renowned general, which eventually led to him to become Emperor of the French. Despite being defeated and exiled in 1815, he is still considered one of the greatest commanders in history, whose military and political legacy endures.
Nevertheless, Napoleon also polarises opinion among historians who heavily debate his achievements, including the Polish-british historian Adam Zamoyski. The author of over a dozen books, including the bestselling 1812:
Napoleon’s Fatal March On Moscow, Zamoyski
has now written a new biography Napoleon: The Man Behind The Myth, which is published by Harpercollins.
Zamoyski has stripped away the self-serving propaganda created by Napoleon himself to examine a fascinating human being. This new interpretation reveals a man whose will to succeed led to great power, but whose complex insecurities brought about his own downfall. WHAT WAS THE IDEA BEHIND Napoleon: The Man Behind The Myth? It was really to try to find out what all the fuss was about because people go on about this ‘genius’ and God-like figure. The French often see him as a superhuman creature while the British seem to regard him either as a nasty little tick or a military genius. I don’t really buy that he was a genius of any kind and think that term is usually applied to luck and a bit of hard work.
Above all I was interested to find out how this man – who was just a bloke – managed to crawl out of the absolute backwater of Corsica to not only become a remarkable general but then rise to supreme power. Also, to put it quite simply, what was it that made him bugger it all up? He was emperor of France and had the greatest army in Europe but he almost compulsively destroyed the whole thing. WHAT WAS THE KEY TO HIS RISE TO POWER? In one sense the key is the military reputation he built up on his first Italian campaign. I’d been brought up to believe that Napoleon was brilliant and it was all done with panache and glory. There are all these wonderful pictures of him leading people across bridges with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other. Actually, it wasn’t like that at all. A lot of it was pretty shambolic but it was interesting that he won battles. Many were little more than skirmishes but he mainly won because he really tried.
He studied the terrain, looked at where the bridges and water crossings were fordable and which passes you could get cavalry or artillery through. Napoleon was very good at seeing the mistakes made by the other side and responding quickly. Of course, during that campaign his enemies were traditionally drilled troops led by elderly field marshals. They were used to a completely different kind of warfare.
Napoleon kept turning up in their rear or on their flank and then disappeared by moving very quickly. He would appear where he had no business to and it completely threw all their calculations. He ran rings around them.
Also he inflated every single victory he won with propaganda. Skirmishes would be turned into major battles and he would send back reports that were largely fictional of the numbers of prisoners taken, people killed and guns captured. Napoleon gave the French public what they wanted to hear and turned himself into a hero. He was a combination of fact and fiction. CONSIDERING HIS HISTORICAL REPUTATION, WHY DO YOU CONSIDER NAPOLEON TO BE AN “ORDINARY” MAN? We have been fed by his own propaganda and a lot of historians have been fascinated by his success and swallowed it. They love the idea of the hero and people love a fairy tale. What is remarkable is that he was determined to succeed. He never sat back and put his feet up. He was always getting on with the next thing and whether it was wine, women or song it had to be dealt with quickly.
That’s psychologically very interesting because he came from this background with a socially ambitious father and supposed noble status, which wasn’t really that great. There was also no money so there was a spur to succeed. There was actually a stage where he was more interested in property speculation than advancing his military career.
Also, what people tend to forget is that once you’ve achieved a certain level, even if it’s just as an officer, you can’t stand still in a revolutionary situation. If you don’t stab somebody else in the back, they’ll stab you. It was very dangerous and many officers were being guillotined or imprisoned. Napoleon
had to make himself indispensable and unassailable and that’s where the propaganda – the urge to make himself important – came through. I don’t think it came out of vanity, it was a calculated, intelligent move.
He did have undoubted abilities. He was an “ordinary” man in the sense that he was as chippy about things as the next person. However he did have a very good deductive brain. He didn’t speculate and would approach a question by saying, “What do we know? What is important? What is unimportant? This is what we’ll do.” He could make decisions very quickly and act on them. He also had a phenomenal memory and was intensely practical.
He was of course a remarkable man but what was really striking is that he turned what could have been a fairly average career into something larger, almost completely through propaganda.
WHAT WERE HIS STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES AS A COMMANDER?
Napoleon was absolutely great when he really tried. During his first Italian campaign he had to keep trying because every time he stopped another Austrian army would come pounding down the valleys. He had to keep winning because he didn’t have enough troops and had to strike hard.
The next time he really tried was at Marengo where he was extraordinary. He went over that battlefield about three times and then decided where to take up his positions to draw the Russians and Austrians in. He guessed that there would be all these puffed-up young Russian aristocrats with a lust for glory and more courage than brains. He knew they would fall forward into his trap, which is exactly what they did.
Whenever Napoleon really set his mind to it and thought it through he was pretty much unbeatable but he became less so with age. He got lazy, had bigger armies and just thought, “Why make the effort? Just chuck a load of artillery at these positions.” He did this at Wagram and I think by then he was getting a bit disgusted with war.
During that campaign he keeps commenting on the carnage and he was already horrified by the casualties at Eylau. After Wagram he lost his appetite for fighting. He got old, fat and couldn’t really be bothered.
Then, when he should have dealt with Spain in 1809-10, he spent his whole time having a protracted honeymoon. It’s a very interesting thing, Napoleon was a great tactician but no strategist. That goes for his politics as well as his military career. There was no master plan or defined aim. He wouldn’t fix on one single ally and kept making provisional treaties. He was brilliant at improvising but you can’t improvise all your life because the whole point is to achieve something. In the end it meant that everybody felt, “There’s no point making peace with him because it won’t last.”
TO WHAT EXTENT DID THE 1812 CAMPAIGN IN RUSSIA EXPOSE NAPOLEON’S FLAWS?
Russia was a classic campaign where the tactics were useless because of the terrain and intelligence. Napoleon couldn’t do quick strikes in what was fought as a strategic campaign. The Russians didn’t originally intend to retreat or burn Moscow but in the end they had to adopt something that was strategically sound. This meant avoiding fighting Napoleon if possible and to let him destroy his own army by taking it too far and not looking after it.
What’s fascinating is that Napoleon was playing at power diplomacy and not war.
He sat around in Moscow thinking that if
Tsar Alexander I got the impression that he
“NAPOLEON WAS A GREAT TACTICIAN BUT NO STRATEGIST. THAT GOES FOR HIS POLITICS AS WELL AS HIS MILITARY CAREER. THERE WAS NO MASTER PLAN OR DEFINED AIM”
would spend the winter there he would crack and negotiate. Instead of sending all of his dismounted cavalrymen back to remount depots in Poland and Germany, Napoleon kept them all there. He also didn’t send his trophies, stores and the wounded from Borodino back and brought them all forward. Had he not done any of those things he would have been sitting pretty in 1813. Had he even started his retreat a week earlier he would have been fine. He was allowing politics to dominate his military judgement, which is always a problem.
Napoleon presided over the greatest military disaster in history and entirely blundered into it. It wasn’t the Russian winter that caught him unawares because everyone had told him about it. His grand equerry Caulaincourt told him to get his horses shod for the winter but he ignored him and said that everything would be fine. He wouldn’t take advice and if he had heeded any of it he could have avoided disaster. It was extraordinary.
HOW DOES NAPOLEON COMPARE TO OTHER CONTEMPORARY COMMANDERS?
My impression is that most commanders then were pretty hopeless. In the 18th century
armies there were professional generals who went into the military because they were the younger sons or minor noblemen who needed a career. If they were brave and relatively competent they would reach quite a high rank and then overall commanders were appointed because they were princes or archdukes.
Some of them may have been extremely brave and could rally troops but most of them were not really very competent.
For example, very few of them had knowledge about artillery range or tried very hard [to learn]. They didn’t study terrain that well because the tradition was that you’d position your army, look at each other, fire a few volleys, move forward and see who would run first.
That didn’t require a great deal of imagination and this was where Napoleon was different. This is also where Wellington was different. Most of his older contemporaries had been in America where they’d been hopeless but Wellington had been in the Maratha Wars. He had to keep a close eye on the ball and be careful with his men and equipment because it wasn’t easy to find more. Nevertheless, I didn’t get the impression that he was brilliant. He was rather a very competent commander who was careful with his troops.
I would rate Napoleon higher than Wellington in terms of sheer feats of arms. Wellington never won a battle like Austerlitz, which was an extraordinary victory. That took calculation, hard work and derring-do. Napoleon had more dash and that element of being able to wrench astonishing victory out of a very unpromising situation, particularly when he was younger. He was undoubtedly the greatest general of his age, but this was largely out of the hard work he put in.
The other thing that goes a long way to explaining Napoleon’s success is the way he used to address his troops. He made those young men and they were an extraordinary generation. They were bred in the French Revolution and believed they were starting a new age. Napoleon built on this feeling and would shower the most lavish praise on them after a battle. He gave the French Army that self-confidence and dash, particularly in the early stages.
Although Wellington was very proper with his troops, it was a different style. He kept them steady and gave them the confidence to fight but Napoleon had a unique way of galvanising young men. You get accounts of people saying that they only wish they had a second life to offer him. These were not just Frenchmen but Italians, Croats, Portuguese, Spaniards and Germans – they all fought for him like iron.
HOW IS NAPOLEON REGARDED IN POLAND?
The Poles loved him at the time partly because they hadn’t shone on the battlefield for 100 years, but then suddenly won battle honours under his standards. They thought they were fighting for Poland but it didn’t get its independence [from Russia] in the 19th century.
The fact that Napoleon actually treated Poland as a pool of manpower and cannon fodder is largely glossed over. He occasionally said that he would like to re-create Poland and this idea lingers that Napoleon loved the Poles. He didn’t really, although he did have a few favourite aidede-camps. Above all, there were glorious feats of arms such as the Battle of Somosierra in 1808, which was the Polish equivalent of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the sort of thing that people get goosebumps over.
Prince Poniatowski was also a glamorous figure so they have a great fondness for the whole Napoleonic ‘epic’. It is quite unfounded and irrational but you would have thought people would like to forget about things like the Charge of the Light Brigade!
Beyond Poland, Napoleon’s international appeal, even in England until 1804, was extraordinary. There were large bodies of opinion that were fascinated by him and he did seem to encapsulate the spirit of the new age. A lot of young people particularly thought he was their man and the hero. People like Goethe, other German writers and even British poets were initially bedazzled by him because there was a bit of Mick Jagger about him. People thought they could achieve glory under him, which many did.
WHAT WAS HIS IMPACT ON EUROPEAN HISTORY?
His impact is huge. He took all the practical aspects of the French Revolution and reinforced the idea that the state is the most important thing. It replaced the king and the individual existed as a servant of the state. The whole system, through which the state operated from the top down, became state-controlled. The idea that the system is regulated and everybody has to be qualified is also something that he imposed on large parts of Europe. Many countries then copied it and it certainly lies as the absolute foundation of the European Union.
The whole ethos of the EU is very much built on the Napoleonic legacy, including his civil code, and it may be one of the reasons that Britain voted to leave. It is so entirely alien to the English way of doing things, which is essentially from the bottom up and against regulation. By contrast, most of Europe has gone along with that, even if they continually subvert it. It is ultimately, in theory, all about the state, which comes from the French Revolution. Nevertheless, Napoleon enshrined it and put it into the basis of most modern
European states.