The War of Wars (128 page)

The second issue that must be addressed is that of the ‘Napoleonic myth’. To what extent is it believable that Napoleon himself was the instigator of the Napoleonic wars, or was the phenomenon altogether more complex? Most historians have of course taken this myth for granted, supported not just by much – certainly not all – of French historiography and Napoleon’s own self-serving account, but by the opprobrium and denigration heaped upon him by his detractors.

Yet if the concept of one-man rule in a small state as far back as the Middle Ages has to be heavily qualified, it seems absurdly far-fetched in the case of a colossal machine such as that over which Napoleon presided. He was certainly one of the greatest autocrats in history, as the undisputed leader of perhaps the most authoritarian military machine presiding over the biggest empire in history, spanning the most prosperous continent in the world.

But he was also a child of his own age and circumstances – in particular French history and the French Revolution – and the nature of his power, and indeed personality, evolved over time. Napoleon emerged from the turmoil of the Revolution to pursue specifically French national objectives, of a kind that had existed for centuries under the Bourbons, with a newly mobilized population and army at his disposal.

It was Dumouriez, the French revolutionary general who ended up becoming a counter-revolutionary, who first won the string of victories that prevented revolutionary France being invaded. It was under Robespierre and the Jacobins that mass mobilization and totalitarian terror were instituted – under penalty of death. This in turn created the first great conscript army of Europe to face the old-style aristocratic volunteer forces or peasant levies and feudal armies of the rest of
Europe. It was Carnot who really created the
levé en masse
and the huge military machine that was to terrorize Europe at a time when Napoleon was just a rising junior officer. Carnot presided over France’s revolution in military tactics, including the division of armies into semi-autonomous corps with great flexibility and freedom of action; the idea of striking in columns at the centre of traditional lines; the importance of flanking attacks or attacks on the ‘derrière’ – always a French obsession. Carnot too was responsible for the promotion of esprit de corps and the army as a privileged, well-paid, self-contained caste separate and above the mass of the people from which they were recruited (as opposed to the downtrodden militia of feudal rulers); and the virtual liberation of those military castes from normal conceptions of law and civilized behaviour to live off the land and plunder and rape as they pleased.

Most of these ideas had been pushed by reformers in the French army in the half-century prior to the Revolution, and some of them had been pinched from the Prussian ruler Frederick the Great’s military innovations. Napoleon was not original in these ideas; but he was picked and promoted by his superiors, including Carnot and the Directory’s Barras, because he was enormously energetic, pragmatic and skilful in their execution. When he finally staged his coup d’état in 1801, it was because a consensus had developed that a strong leader was necessary to end the corruption and near paralysis of the Directory and to prosecute France’s wars.

However, dynamic though he was, Napoleon at that stage was anything but omnipotent: he had been promoted by conservative financial interests to abort further revolutionary agitation and to avoid a Bourbon restoration. He enjoyed support from the peasantry and depended on continuing military success. Above all he was the choice of a group of senior generals, and what the army had proposed, it could also dispose of. After becoming Emperor in 1804, whether as a personal vanity, in resignation to the anxiety of his supporters about a Bourbon restoration or as a simple reminder to its lingering and aspiring followers that the Revolution was over, he still depended on the loyalty of his generals and a coalition of civilian interests to stay in power.

His hand was immensely strengthened by the string of crushing military successes from 1805 to 1807 against Austria and Prussia which also boxed in Russia; and it was at this stage that his hubris really seemed to get the better of him. He no longer felt he had to kowtow to domestic supporters and he believed that he was militarily invincible. But his legitimacy derived not from his ludicrous coronation robes or laurel crowns or Roman emperor-style statues but from the fact that he had restored stability and leadership to France and delivered handsome victories and plentiful spoils – which were now a substitute for nonexistent economic development. Realistically and shrewdly he had to call off his projected invasion of Britain, while less realistically he hoped that he could strangle France’s oldest and most powerful foe economically.

In examining Napoleon’s pronouncements, it is always necessary to disentangle bombastic rhetoric designed to inflame his followers, which fuelled ideas that he was simply a megalomaniac, from the realism underneath, which sometimes evidently became confused in his own mind, particularly in the later years. He then made the colossal and hubristic blunder of invading Spain, which posed no threat to France and which he regarded as a province to be annexed with little resistance. Ostensibly this was part of his anti-British strategy, in fact it was merely to add to the empire. Within a short time he understood the scale of his mistake – as his refusal to command the troops after the first campaigns showed – but he could not admit his errors in public, and the war continued as a vast, futile haemorrhage of French armies and men.

At that point Napoleon seemed to abandon his hubristic phase, and grew into – or in the modern phrase reinvented himself as – a peaceful statesman determined to maintain French domination of Europe, but seeking alliances, as through his marriage with Marie Louise of Austria, and engaging in no further territorial land grabs, other than occasionally bullying small states. The Spanish quagmire had, in a sense, tamed him. If Europe had been prepared to settle down to a period of French domination, Napoleon might perhaps have died peacefully on his throne as the founder of a new, long-lasting French dynasty.

But the resistance in the Iberian Peninsula, abetted by the British
expeditionary force, became increasingly lethal and widespread; and Europe had not been prepared to accept peace on French terms. Napoleon’s own penchant for blustering to secure his ends had been more effective when countries were recoiling from his military successes than when he was exposed to be a merely mortal, if outstanding, military commander. At that stage diplomacy was required.

Finally Napoleon’s erstwhile but unreliable ally, the Tsar of Russia, himself effectively declared war on France. This initiated the third phase of Napoleon’s rule: from peaceful despotism he was forced to resort again to war, this time under pressure from a hostile foreign power. The Russian campaign has been presented as aggressive and madcap and initiated by Napoleon; but it was in fact a hugely mishandled defensive campaign. Only in his wilder moments did he declare he would conquer the whole country or use it as a gateway to the east. He blundered forward in the hope of inflicting a single huge defeat on the Russians and preventing them ever threatening his eastern dominions. After the retreat from Moscow he could still have preserved his empire. But his inept diplomacy and his enemies’ sense of his vulnerability ultimately led to the disaster of Leipzig which brought about his downfall.

Thus the revolutionary wars and the career of Napoleon can be divided into four entirely distinct phases – those of revolutionary change and French aggrandisement from 1792 to 1801, those of French imperialism from about 1803 to 1808, those of imperial consolidation from 1808 to 1812, and those of self-defence and eventual collapse from 1812–1814.

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 ex
istence 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.