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, self-obsessed”. These associations are 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 common today, but were uncommon in the 1700s. He was a genuine innovator, and this is what drove his rise to power.
Some notes on the practices that made Napoleon successful:
Napoleon was well-read, particularly in history. As one of the poorest students in the military college he attended, Napoleon would choose to buy books for 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 with his staff much more frequently than his contemporaries. He would often send dozens of letters in a single day, dictating short messages as if he were texting. This coordinated his staff in a way that was previously unheard of.
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 631 to Davout, Clarke, Lacuée and Maret between them.
Napoleon genuinely cared about the well-being of his soldiers. This was a departure from the attitude of monarchies that took their soldier’s loyalty for granted. Napoleon knew that the day-to-day conditions of the average solider was what made an army successful.
An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops.
He also treated officers differently than the general infantry, knowing that berating the troops would only hurt morale.
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 logistics, and was capable of performing every job in the army (e.g. loading artillery). His emphasis on the military supply chain allowed him to field many more soldiers than had ever been done before. He was also the first to implement the corps system, which allowed for subsections of the army to operate independently.
Napoleon simply outworked most of his peers. Coming from outside of the monarchy, he brought a new level of intensity to the role. He was likely the only leader to keep a team of secretaries on-call so he could dictate messages at any time of the day.
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’. He hated wasting a minute of the day, and was constantly performing several tasks simultaneously.
Even though France took territory by force, the Napoleonic code was often an improvement on the status quo for many people. The populous occasionally welcomed French soldiers, since Napoleon ended feudalism in lands that France occupied. Many things Napoleon established still exist to this day.
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).
A common mistake associated with Napoleon is the decision to march on Moscow. However, I can see how this was a rational action at the time. The French army reached Moscow well ahead of winter. 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 is perhaps Napoleon’s most significant blunder. He was so insistent on harming the British, that he ignored the economic consequences of the system on France’s allies. This caused substantial resentment, and was a cause of the war with Russia.
Finally, Napoleon's insistence on putting family members in positions of power proved to be a significant weakness. Despite their lack of administrative experience or military talent, he appointed his brothers as kings of Spain (Joseph), Holland (Louis), and Westphalia (Jerome). His sister Caroline and brother-in-law Murat were given control of Naples. These appointments often led to poor governance and strained relationships with allies, as his relatives frequently prioritized their personal interests over Napoleon's objectives.