[review in progress]
Napoleon was out of place for his time. In Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts catalogues the everyday behaviors that made Napoleon exceptional.
I was not very familiar with Napoleon or the Napoleonic Wars before reading this history. As such, I came in with the popular assumptions about who Napoleon was: “short, big ego”. These associations were so strong that psychologists coined the “Napoleon complex”.
As it turns out, these ideas entered the cultural mainstream largely as a result of British propaganda produced during Napoleon's life. To start, Napoleon was not actually short (although perhaps he appeared so next to his guards).
When I say that Napoleon was out of place for his time, I mean that he did a number of things that may be relatively common today, but were uncommon in the 1700s. He was a genuine innovator, and this is what drove his rise to power—not “ego”.
Here are a few of Napoleon's practices that stood out:
- Napoleon was uncommonly well-read, particularly in history. As one of the poorest students in his military college, he would choose to buy books for his personal reading over food or clothing. Later in life, Napoleon urged his junior officers “to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great.”
‘Do you know how I managed?’ Napoleon later recalled of this period of his life. ‘By never entering a café or going into society; by eating dry bread, and brushing my own clothes so that they might last the longer. I lived like a bear, in a little room, with books for my only friends… These were the joys and debaucheries of my youth.’
- Napoleon communicated much more frequently than his contemporaries. He would often send dozens of letters in a single day.
At 1 a.m. on the night of June 4, Colonel Maleszewski, one of Napoleon’s staff officers, heard the Emperor pacing up and down his room in Thorn, singing the verse from ‘Le Chant du Départ’ that includes the line ‘Tremblez, ennemis de la France.’ On that day alone, Napoleon had written letters to Davout complaining of the marauding of Württemberger troops in Poland, to Clarke about raising a company of Elban sappers, to Marie Louise to say that he had been twelve hours in the saddle since 2 a.m., to Cambacérès that the frontier was quiet, to Eugène ordering 30,000 bushels of barley, and no fewer than twenty-four letters to Berthier about everything from a paymaster who should be punished for incompetence to a fever hospital that needed to be relocated. Preparing for the attack on Russia caused Napoleon to write nearly five hundred letters to Berthier between the beginning of January 1812 and the crossing of the Niemen, and another
- Napoleon genuinely cared about the well-being of soldiers. This was a break from the monarchies that took their armies and fealty for granted. Napoleon knew that the day-to-day conditions of the average solider was what kept an army together.
An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops.
He also made certain to treat officers much differently than the general infantry.
The avalanche of praise he generally lavished on his troops was in sharp contrast to the acerbic tone he adopted towards generals, ambassadors, councillors, ministers and indeed his own family in private correspondence. ‘Severe to the officers,’ was his stated mantra, ‘kindly to the men.’
- Napoleon was obsessed with details, and was capable of performing every job in the army (e.g. loading artillery). This coordination allowed him to field so many more soldiers than had ever been done before. He was the first to implement the corps system.
- Napoleon simply outworked most of his peers.
He needed seven hours’ sleep in twenty-four, but he slept, as one secretary recalled, ‘in several short naps, broken at will during the night as in the day’. Since his bedroom was close to his study in all his palaces, he could be at work in his dressing-gown at any time of the day or night, with his secretaries on rotations to take dictation.
He once told Méneval that after he had left Brienne he started to work sixteen hours a day and never stopped. Everything around Napoleon happened at a tremendous pace. Molé recalled him going from a Mass to a levée at Saint-Cloud in the summer of 1806, ‘walking fast, with an escort of foreign princes and … grand French dignitaries, who were out of breath in their efforts to keep up with him’.43 He hated wasting a minute of the day, and was constantly performing several tasks simultaneously. He loved taking long hot baths which, unusually for early nineteenth-century Europeans, he did most days, but during those one or two hours he would have newspapers or political writings read to him, as he also did when his valet shaved him, and sometimes during breakfast.
He was progressive, to an extent. While he ultimately reinstated several facets of the monarchy after the revolution, The Napoleonic code was often an improvement on the status quo for many people.
By direct decree Napoleon established a postal system, street lighting and cleaning, a coach service between Cairo and Alexandria, a mint and a rational tax system with lower impositions on the Egyptian fallaheen (peasantry) than the Mamluks’ extortionary demands. He also abolished feudalism, replacing it with rule by the diwans, set up a new French trading company, built modern plague hospitals and produced Egypt’s first printed books (in three languages).
Napoleon's mistakes
A common mistake Napoleon is associated with is the decision to march on Moscow. However, I can see how this was the rational decision at the time. It’s hard to fault Napoleon for not anticipating that the Russians would rather burn down their own capital than fight outside of Moscow.
He claimed he could have stayed in the well-stocked city throughout the winter had it not been for the burning of Moscow, ‘an event on which I could not calculate, as there is not, I believe, a precedent for it in the history of the world.
The Continental System
This is perhaps Napoleon’s most significant mistake. He was so insistent on harming the British, that he ignored the economic consequences the continental system. This caused substantial resentment amongst France’s allies.
Napoleon compromised his meritocratic principles, putting his family in positions they were not capable of handling. For example, Jerome in Russia.