If a cultured American is one who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, then an educated Briton is someone who gets the jokes in 1066 and All That, W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman’s 1930 pastiche of patriotic legends and schoolroom clichés. In that loving spoof, history is the struggle of the English to become “top nation.” All actors and events are judged Good or Bad. The Roman Conquest, for example, was “a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.” George III was “a Bad King,” but “to a great extent insane and a Good Man.” The French Revolution started out “very interesting and romantic,” but turned into a Bad Thing: the executions and purges, the 20 years of war as the French exported their interesting and romantic idea, and the imperial rampage of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Andrew Roberts surely knows his Sellar and Yeatman. He also knows his Gibbon and Churchill. Roberts is a storyteller in the old style, a sweeper of epics and a buckler of the swash. His books include The Storm of War (2011), an acclaimed history of the Second World War, and paired biographies like Churchill and Hitler (2003) and Napoleon and Wellington (2001). Fond of an intellectual punch-up, Roberts has defended the Raj and Mrs. Thatcher as Good Things, and argued that Neville Chamberlain’s foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was a Good Man. Here, he attempts the contrarian’s equivalent of invading Russia: rehabilitating Napoleon as “the Enlightenment on horseback.” This is a little like calling Hitler “modernity in a tank,” or FDR “liberalism in a wheelchair.” It begs the question: Was it a Good Thing that Napoleon tried to make France Top Nation?
Born in 1769, the driven and intelligent son of a distressed gentleman of Corsica, Napoleon was a professional soldier, but an amateur politician. Educated at a military academy and commissioned as an artillery officer, he was slow to see the potential of the French Revolution, but caught on quickly as it turned into a European war. Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia ganged together against revolutionary France, and most of Napoleon’s fellow officers were royalists. Napoleon capitalized brilliantly on these opportunities for gloire. Winning fame for an artillery action at Toulon, he was a brigadier general by 1793. In 1795, aged 25, he rendered himself indispensable to the revolutionary regime by wafting a “whiff of grapeshot” towards the mob outside the Paris legislature.
After that, Napoleon rose like a rocket, a new technology whose battlefield use the aristocratic Duke of Wellington thought unsporting. He restored his family’s fortunes as he ascended the ladder and, as the new commander of the Army of the Interior, married Joséphine de Beauharnais, a planter’s daughter from Martinique whose first husband had been guillotined during the Terror. In 1796, Napoleon launched the first modern war. He was expert in logistics, and he was the first commander to use a chief of staff. This professional discipline permitted a different kind of fighting: Rapid, multi-prong-ed flanking movements converged in a merciless concentration of force, a head-on collision on his terms. The Austrians surrendered before he took Vienna.
Napoleon glossed his legend for domestic consumption by sending fictionalized “bulletins” to Paris. His men loved him but spoke wryly of “lying like a bulletin.” Napoleon believed his own mythology. To emulate Alexander and eviscerate the British Empire, he turned to India. Landing at Alexandria with Egypt’s first printing press—stolen from the Vatican—he declared himself a Muslim, then smashed the medieval army of the Mameluks at the Battle of the Pyramids. But another professional, Admiral Lord Nelson, cut Napoleon’s supply line at the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon’s Indian dream sank with his fleet, and he abandoned his army in the desert.
Still, the French acclaimed him as a hero. Joining the Consulate, the ruling triumvirate, he soon rose to first consul. In 1800, the Austrians returned to the field. A lucky victory at Marengo forced the anti-French coalition to the table. The Treaty of Amiens gave Europe two years of peace, but it collapsed when Napoleon excluded Britain, the chief funder of the anti-French coalition, from the European economy. Nelson again thwarted Napoleon’s global plans at Trafalgar; but on land, Napoleon smashed the Russians and Austrians at Austerlitz, and the Prussians at Jena.
When asked to name the greatest captain of all time, Wellington replied, “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”
Enraptured by his military achievements, and aided by newly published correspondence, Andrew Roberts re-con-structs Napoleon’s maneuvers in battle, and in bed, in superbly dramatic detail. Roberts also claims that Napoleon “championed, consolidated, codified, and geographically extended” the modern ideas of “meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances.”
Napoleon replaced Europe’s old dynasties and quaint laws with modern bureaucracies and the Napoleonic Code—but the metric system was the decree of an arbitrary dictator. Crowning himself emperor in 1804, Napoleon combined the worst aspects of the ancien régime and the revolution. In France, he censored all opposition, centralized every power, and created a new aristocracy in his image, a “meritocracy” of generals. Abroad, he installed his dim brothers on every empty throne, forced his sisters to marry those kings he had not deposed, and stole everything that was not nailed down.
Napoleon talked about fraternité but took égalité to mean an equality of submission, and he was thoroughly intolerant of liberté. As a lawgiver, he resembled Sellar and Yeatman’s Henry II: He “laid down the great Legal Principle that everything is either legal or (preferably) illegal.” His ideas on “property rights” included looting the continent’s art, collecting over 50,000 jewels, and distributing estates among his cronies. His “sound finances” depended on theft and the tributes of his enemies, and his 39 palaces were the state’s sixth-largest expenditure. Roberts praises Napoleon as a “profound thinker” and a “protean multitasker,” but the figure he describes resembles a micromanaging narcissist and a vain bully—like the Napoleon of War and Peace, who rehearses the heroic pose in a mirror.
As Napoleon’s pomp swelled, his talent faltered into thud and blunder. In 1807, the Russians forced a draw in the snows of Eylau. Next, Napoleon bungled the invasion of Spain; Goya recorded the results of this vicious exercise. Fatally, after dumping Joséphine for the daughter of the Austrian emperor in 1812, Napoleon led a half-million men into Russia. Always free with his soldiers’ lives, he cared little as the body count rose: At Austerlitz, 15 percent of the combatants died; at Eylau, 25 percent; at Borodino (where Pierre nearly dies in War and Peace), 31 percent; at Waterloo, 45 percent. The Russians refused to surrender, and winter arrived. Disgracefully, Napoleon abandoned his army yet again, fleeing in a sledge. Defeated at Leipzig in 1813, he retreated to Elba, then burst out in time, as Sellar and Yeatman put it, to take part in Waterloo. Imprisoned on St. Helena, he died of cancer in 1821, aged 51.
Napoleon won 53 of his 60 battles, but he lost the political war. As Winston Churchill observed, the “greatest man of action since Caesar” left a sour legacy: His flash of military glory cost between four and six million lives. His “legend of invincibility” resounded to malign effect, encouraging dangerous dreams of gloire and Caesarism.
Roberts compares Napoleon’s retinue of 60 carriages to a “presidential motorcade,” and says that those “other great soldier-statesmen,” Washington and Eisenhower, faced similar challenges. To compare the Napoleonic method to “modern” governance, we need only apply the question on the hypothetical bumper sticker—“What Would Napoleon Do?”—to, say, the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern problems. Following Napoleon’s example, the president would conscript a massive army with promises of booty and glory, declare himself a Muslim, and announce (as Napoleon did at Venice) that he was the second coming of Attila the Hun. If the gambit failed, Obama would flee, and make no effort to repatriate his army; if it succeeded, Obama would distribute the mansions of Tehran among his generals, furnish the White House with loot from the mosques of Damascus, and ennoble John Kerry as the marquis of Boston. Now emperor for life, Obama would install his feckless brother as king of Jordan and divorce Michelle in order to sire a dynasty upon Mrs. Bashar al-Assad. There isn’t much “modern” in this scenario.
Andrew Roberts’s portrait has the volume and verve of a massed charge, but, like Napoleon, it has some strategic flaws. Sellar and Yeatman hold the line: “The French Revolution caused great loss of life, liberty, fraternity, etc., and was, of course, a Good Thing, since the French were rather degenerate at the time; but Napoleon now invented a new Convention that the French should massacre all the other nations and become top nation, and this, though quite generate, was a Bad Thing.”
Dominic Green is the author of The Double Life of Doctor Lopez and Three Empires on the Nile.
