History is rewritten and rehashed—in the lingo, it is “revised”—for many reasons, some of which have nothing to do with politics, ideology, or current academic trends. Sometimes, the reason is the sudden availability of never-before-seen documents; sometimes it’s a historian’s more thorough exploitation of long-known documents. In the case of Munro Price’s latest book, it’s both: Some of the sources he exploits in this fresh take on an old, if rarely focused-on, subject have lain unused for 200 years. Slowly do the mills of historical knowledge do their work.
Its publication coinciding with the bicentennial of Napoleon’s final time in power, Napoleon covers the 18 months between the emperor’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812 and his removal from rule by the other European powers in 1814. Those months have often taken second place to historians’ preferred focus on Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815, at the hands of Wellington and Blucher after the fiasco of his return to France from exile on Elba. Price treats those Hundred Days as an afterthought and brings their more consequential prelude into the foreground.
Readers should not expect the grand gestures of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which covers part of the same period, especially Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. This is traditional history—war, diplomacy, politics—at its traditional best, as long as you have a taste for it. Sometimes, as with War and Peace, you need a crib sheet to keep track of all the figures who pass through the scenery. (Price thoughtfully provides one, although it’s too spare.) You also have to be comfortable with a Great Man approach to the past: Price doesn’t even bother to genuflect to the genres of historical knowledge that paint into the history of warfare and diplomacy the social composition of armies or the cultural context of foreign relations. This book could have appeared 50 years ago, when it would have fallen snugly into place beside many similar ones; today, it’s a bit of an outlier. But that says nothing about its high quality as history.
No power has ever successfully invaded and held Moscow from Western Europe. Napoleon was no luckier than Hitler would prove to be. Napoleon’s failure in late 1812 inaugurated the beginning of the end for the man who has fascinated successive generations with his military and political genius—genius of a kind that, like all others, eventually flagged and gave out. This is the setting of the history that Price relates. It’s the story of still-brilliant military leadership and congruent diplomatic cunning that slowly went awry through illness, the skills of adversaries, and the turn in French public opinion that, eventually, even Napoleon could no longer satisfy. Introducing public opinion into the story is where Price offers his principal addition to previous scholarship.
Until Napoleon invaded Russia, he seemed indomitable. After that, distance, winter weather, and Russian generalship made Napoleon look seriously vulnerable for the first time. On his return from Moscow in the following months, and until he lost his imperial throne in 1814, he struggled to make up, in actual strength and reputation, what he’d lost in both. In effect, he failed in that campaign, too, but only after many subsequent battles, large and small, and especially his disastrous defeat at Leipzig in 1813. While he struggled to reclaim the initiative on the battlefield and negotiation table, his adversaries across the continent—Russia and Austria, especially—worked hard to create a military and diplomatic coalition that could check him. The prize was always the German states, namely Prussia. Part of Price’s tale involves Napoleon’s efforts to hold onto his Prussian ally while his adversaries attempted to peel it away (as they eventually did) from the French. Once they succeeded in doing so, the die against Napoleon was cast.
Or so it seemed. As long as France stood behind the emperor, the various internal threats to his rule—from royalists hoping to restore the Bourbon monarchy to republicans hoping to end imperial government—could be held at bay. Price’s attention to French public opinion gives Napoleon its revisionist flavor. Historians’ research into public opinion has blossomed in recent years, and Price is no pioneer in this effort, but he is the first to view public opinion in 1812-14 as a critical factor in Napoleon’s hold on power as well as a scholar’s barometer of the changing realities that the emperor faced. Price relies principally on the unexploited reports of the prefects of France’s départements (themselves a creation of the revolution, and still in existence). Many of these officials made clear to the emperor the mounting war-weariness of the people as the Napoleonic wars dragged on and casualties mounted to insupportable levels. Reports from police surveillance provided similar information.
It seems unlikely that, had Napoleon not been defeated on the battlefield, he would have been forced by eroding political support to sue for peace. But he couldn’t absorb the information about the collapse of French morale his prefects were giving him, or the news of armed revolts against conscription in the provinces. What’s more, he remained obtusely faithful to diplomatic demands that the other European powers wouldn’t accept. Once the armistice concluded at Prague in 1813 came to an end, so did the hopes of the French people in Napoleon. The result was the resumption of war, this time on French territory ever closer to Paris. It also marked the end of critical political support at home, conspiracies to oust Napoleon in favor of a regent or a Bourbon, and ultimately exile. Not for the last time, the end was symbolized by the entry of foreign troops into the French capital, this time led by none other than Czar Alexander I.
Price has also dug more deeply than his predecessors into other existing but under-examined archives. This would not be of much interest were the papers not those of two of Europe’s leading figures: Austria’s celebrated foreign minister, Prince Metternich, and his French counterpart, Napoleon’s confidant and foreign minister, Armand de Caulaincourt. Price has also gained access to the private papers of a man with the Kafka-esque name of Carl Clam-Martinic, aide to Field-Marshal Schwarzen-berg, the great Austrian commander of the forces facing Napoleon.
Price concludes this complex yet always clearly told tale with what one senses is a rueful, if sharp, verdict on the emperor. If only he had compromised with his European enemies at the negotiating table, and if only he had accepted the restoration of France’s pre-revolution borders, he might have retained his crown. But in continuing to think, in the face of irrefutable evidence, that he might regain his people’s backing on the battlefield, Napoleon was “catastrophically wrong.” Though his genius had ebbed and he had at last been checked by others, Napoleon might have been able to spend his last years in Paris as head of the French state. Instead, he was left to a lonely existence on distant islands, his glory following him into history but not into what remained of his life.
James M. Banner Jr. is a historian in Washington.
