The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (46 page)

NAPOLEONIC WARS

Death toll:
4 million (3 million soldiers and 1 million civilians died, including the French Revolutionary Wars)
¹

Rank:
26

Type:
world conquest

Broad dividing line:
Supporters of Napoleon would say it pitted the virtues of the Enlightenment against the decadent Ancient Regime. The rest of Europe would just call it Napoleon against the world.

Time frame:
1792–1815

Location:
Europe, Levant, Caribbean

Major state participants:
Austria, France, Prussia, Russia, United Kingdom

Minor state participants:
Bavaria, Brunswick, Denmark, Egypt, Naples-Sicily, Netherlands, Ottoman Turkey, Piedmont-Sardinia, Portugal, Saxony, Spain, Sweden, United States, Wurttemberg

Who usually gets the most blame:
Napoleon Bonaparte

Another damn:
European balance-of-power war fought with muskets

Liberty, Equality, Etc.

By the end of the 1780s, France was clearly heading toward bankruptcy. The legendary extravagance of the big-wigged courtiers at Versailles was part of it, but the bulk of the Crown’s debt had been racked up in foreign wars, which had been financed by borrowing from the emerging entrepreneurial class. The way things were heading, the middle class was going to get bled coming and going—first as the only wealthy class that actually paid taxes, and then again if the Crown defaulted on its loans. The middle class agitated for reform.

Finally, in order to calm the overtaxed commoners and to straighten out his messy finances, King Louis XVI was forced to call the first meeting of the French parliament in over a century. The first two legislative houses (or
estates
), the nobility and the clergy, refused to budge on their tax exemptions, so the Third Estate—representing the commoners, both rich and poor—declared itself the only legitimate legislative body.

A liberal agenda was quickly enacted. Privileges of the upper classes and the clergy were revoked. Finances were fixed, and the budget was balanced. After fierce debate, church lands were confiscated, and the clergy was bundled into the civil service.

Unfortunately while all this was going on, scattered mobs of angry poor rampaged through the streets of Paris, lynching random nobles and royal officials who crossed their paths. The royal family panicked and tried to flee to the safety of their Austrian in-laws (the French queen, Marie Antoinette, was the daughter of Maria Theresa), but they were caught, paraded back to Paris, and imprisoned. Horrified by this nasty outbreak of liberalism, and afraid it might be contagious, the monarchs of Europe banded together into the First Coalition and set out to rescue the king of France.

This backfired. With foreign armies converging on the homeland, politics in France turned even more radical, and the Jacobin faction of Maximilien Robespierre took control. The nobility was abolished as a legal class, and to make it final, the king was beheaded. His wife, Marie Antoinette, soon followed him to the guillotine, while the dauphin, their son and heir, disappeared mysteriously into the dungeons of the new republic. His fate remained the nineteenth century’s greatest mystery, with several claimants making the salon circuit a few decades later.
*

Now that the sacred taboo against killing the king had been broken, France erupted. Nobles were dragged from their homes and slaughtered in a variety of horrible and imaginative ways. The Reign of Terror saw the decapitation of some 40,000 enemies of the state, most without the bother of a trial.

In the Vendee region of west-central France, peasants counter-revolted against the central government in favor of the king and church, and Paris dispatched commissioners to restore order by any means necessary, which often meant mass executions of entire families. Disposing of so many state enemies required perverse ingenuity. In Nantes condemned prisoners of all ages and genders were stuffed naked aboard river barges, sealed below decks, and then sunk into the Loire River. After sitting underwater long enough to rinse out all of the air pockets, the barges were raised again, emptied out, and loaded with more prisoners for another round.

All in all, a quarter million people died in this civil war.
²
Eventually, however, the anger subsided. Robespierre himself was shoved into the guillotine, and sensible, middle-class rule returned to France.

The Revolutionary Wars

Although every nation in Europe was swept up in the wars that followed the French Revolution, you need to know only the five great powers: France at one end of Europe; Russia at the other end; Prussia and Austria now backed up flush against Russia after dividing up Poland among themselves. England hovered off the coast. No other nation mattered because none could field an army capable of standing up to one of the great powers all by itself. The lesser nations of Europe were at best pawns, and at worst the chessboard.

The First Coalition that invaded France in 1793 from almost every direction on behalf of monarchism figured that France would be an easy conquest. The revolutionaries had executed or exiled all of their officers and sent an undisciplined rabble out to defend the homeland. What the old monarchies didn’t realize was that now that Frenchmen ran France, the country was worth fighting for. For the first time in generations, authentic patriotism motivated an army. The French turned back the invaders and rolled forward over all of the little lands beyond the eastern border, spreading the gospel of revolution.

The revolutionaries were serious about remaking the world into a rational order, down to the smallest detail. All of the odd little measurements that varied from village to village were standardized into a new decimal system of meters, liters, and grams. All of the random and arbitrary medieval laws that varied from province to province were recodified along sensible lines that incorporated logic, mercy, and the rights of man. The calendar was reformed into sensible decimal units with equal months, natural names, and the year of the revolution set as Year One. Churches were reconsecrated as temples of reason. It was a new world where anyone was allowed to rise as high as his talents could take him. The downside of this quickly became apparent when a dangerously talented individual showed up.

Enter Napoleon

Born to a large, respectable, influential family on the small, disreputable, inconsequential island of Corsica in the Italian part of France, Napoleon Bonaparte never really fit in. Although Napoleon originally was hoping for the priesthood like his brother, his father sent him to military school in France instead, where he learned his trade and made very few friends. He dreamed of someday liberating Corsica from France, but as the French Revolution unfolded, he was swept up into grander visions of liberating the whole world.

In his first major combat experience, Bonaparte commanded the artillery that drove the royalists and their British allies from the Mediterranean port of Toulon. His skill and determination at scrounging and deploying enough artillery to challenge the British guns impressed his superiors. Bonaparte and his sponsors narrowly survived the purge of the radicals, but his patrons deftly tacked to follow the new winds and finagled appointments to the new government. Bonaparte followed them to Paris as the commander of the capital’s artillery. When his cannon shredded an angry mob that was storming the main government building, it became obvious that his ruthlessness was just as impressive as his generalship. Here was a man the government could use.

At the age of twenty-six, and newly wed to his patron’s mistress, Josephine, Bonaparte was given command of the ragged French army that was battling the Austrians in the north Italian plain. He quickly endeared himself to his soldiers by admitting that the government in Paris had failed them, had left them unpaid and unfed, and had sent a succession of incompetent political generals out to have them killed in humiliating defeats. Bonaparte instead offered his soldiers the wealth of Italy to be plundered, and they loved him for it.
³
Rather than rely on erratic supplies from France, his army would live off the land, but to do that, he would have to break up into smaller scattered corps and keep on the move. In the hands of a lesser general this would have invited disaster, but Bonaparte proved a master juggler, always keeping his scattered corps close enough to support any strategic opening that presented itself.

The Italian people had originally been tempted to welcome the French as liberators from the Austrians and their puppets, but they now suffered rape and pillage at the hands of a conquering army. Even when Milan surrendered without a fight, Bonaparte let his men loot unhindered for several days, and when the locals rose up, he sent troops into the nearby village of Binasco. They burned the houses, lined up all of the men and boys, and shot them down.
⁴
Very quickly, Bonaparte began to ship enough loot back to the French treasury for the invasion to turn a profit. By April 1797, he had outclassed all of the armies that Austria had thrown at him and was closing in on Vienna. It was either a bluff or sheer audacity because he clearly did not have enough men left to take and hold the city, but the enemies of France blinked first and sued for peace.

Bonaparte’s career path was never smooth, and during the two decades of his dominance, Europe was dragged along on his wild oscillations depending on whether he gambled and won, or gambled and lost. At the close of the Italian campaign, Bonaparte had reached a dizzying peak. He returned to a hero’s welcome in Paris and basked in the adulation of the French people. Then he gambled and lost.

The Egyptian Campaign

No one really knows why Bonaparte invaded Turkish-controlled Egypt. Ostensibly, it was to be the first step in attacking the British in India. Publicly, it was the announced policy of the French to bring rational, republican civilization to the backward peoples of the Orient. Bonaparte’s enemies in the French government (and there were more enemies all the time) wanted to get him as far away as possible, and Bonaparte himself wanted to play Alexander and Caesar. The planning, however, went poorly, with many supplies and troops failing to materialize as promised at the embarkation ports. In the only bit of luck that fell his way, the French armada managed to slip all the way across the Mediterranean without being caught and captured by the superior British fleet.
⁵

In July 1798, after a nauseating landing on the beach, Bonaparte pulled his wobbly soldiers up off their knees and led them into the desert without enough water or any current maps, aiming vaguely for Cairo. Harassed the whole way by Bedouin guerrillas, the column finally stumbled into the suburbs of Cairo, and Bonaparte declared Egypt liberated from centuries of Turkish misrule. Meanwhile, the British fleet under Lord Nelson found the French ships at Aboukir Bay, in the Nile Delta, and bloodily reasserted British naval superiority, leaving Bonaparte’s expeditionary force stranded a thousand miles from home.