I just finished reading three books by Michael Broers. Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny ends with a cliffhanger of sorts as Napoleon marches his newly created Grande Armée into the War of the Third Coalition in 1805. Napoleon: The Spirit of the Age covers Napoleon’s best years and greatest victories in 1805-10. Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire picks up in 1811 and tells the last part of the story.
It is the first biography of Napoleon to use a huge body of his personal correspondence recently made public by the Paris-based Fondation Napoléon. Most Napoleon’s biographies were written by people who either worshipped or hated him; this time the author tries to stay impartial but clearly can’t help admiring his subject.
I like this biography a lot. It is also an informative window into European politics of the time. I didn’t know that young Napoleon and particularly his father were deeply involved in Corsica’s fight for independence – unusually because they were part of the coastal society of Italian colonizers rather than “proper” Corsicans of the interior. Nor did I know that Napoleon was fiercely anti-colonialist in his youth (he was a fan and later a friend of Guillaume Raynal, the father of anti-colonialist discourse) – also a bit ironic because his later politics were imperialistic to the extreme.
Napoleon’s haters often compare him to genocidal maniacs like Hitler or Stalin, or to obsessively vindictive and cruel mediocre populists like Putin or Trump, but he was totally unlike them. He was absolutely not vindictive and occasionally too forgiving (although he always returned favors, sometimes many years later). He had excellent, broad education, and loved learning, particularly applied math (which helped him become a genius artillery theorist). He was often quick to use violence, particularly against rioting mobs, but was never cruel for fun. He was never afraid to surround himself with strong, smart people, and earned their loyalty. (He had an interesting method of making appointments according to candidates’ political views: for example, he knew that leftist revolutionaries made excellent policemen and security chiefs, former clergy was best for diplomatic positions, and old-guard monarchists were great for meticulous bureaucratic work).
As a matter of fact, he wasn’t afraid of much at all. At the age of 26 he designed a plan to wrestle northern Italy from Austrian occupiers, got himself appointed as the commander in charge of the plan, won the war against stronger and more experienced enemy, and created a country for himself without anyone back in France knowing. He even managed to get northern Italy out of total chaos and set it on a path to prosperity (only for a short while, but that wasn’t his fault).
What I didn’t realize until I read the book was that Napoleon was as gifted as an administrator as he was as a military commander. Some of his reforms and innovations were copied by every country in Europe, including his sworn enemies, and are still around today. His approach based on reaching consensus and uniting diverse social groups for common goal almost always worked. The exceptions were the cases when Napoleon, a man intelligent, rational, and deeply logical, had to deal with people who were exactly the opposite, such as fanatical clergy, be it Egyptian Muslims or French Catholics (Swiss Protestants and French Jews got along with him well.) His main achievement, to which he devoted years of his life, was the Napoleonic Code, a smart and flexible legal system on which laws of many countries (and one US state) are still based.
But Napoleon had major flaws. He didn’t realize the limits of his competence. For example, he never understood the adaptive nature of naval warfare but still tried to micromanage it, losing his new, very expensive fleet as a result (although Trafalgar was won by Nelson with great difficulty and at great cost – ironically, Nelson’s military talent was in many ways similar to Napoleon’s). He poured even greater resources into preparing an invasion of Britain that was totally impossible for many reasons. He often veered into realpolitik with predictable results. For example, although he wasn’t racist, he agreed to restore slavery in French colonies to appease Britain and particularly the United States, and that ultimately cost him France’s most profitable colony, the modern-day Haiti.
As all authoritarian rulers, he believed that he could do better than a democratically elected government, and for a few years this seemed to be true (in part because his democratic predecessors, the first ones in France’s history, were predictably lame; in part because they did some of the most difficult work for him, but mostly because he really was better). But his rule ended in disaster anyway, and his mistakes eventually wiped out most of his achievements.
By 1812 he began to lose his grip on reality. He started a war on two fronts while being unable to win on one (in Spain). His invasion of Russia with an army too big to manage or sustain turned into a total screwup even before the first shot was fired; it proceeded to a totally senseless but unprecedently bloody battle of Borodino and ended with losing virtually the entire army to cold, disease and Russia’s British cannons. The only thing that saved Napoleon from perishing there completely was Russian high command’s incompetence.
After that he kept winning – or, increasingly, almost winning – battles but losing wars. He always had poor health and, like many in his family, aged prematurely – or perhaps it was the inevitable effect of decades of extreme stress that would have killed most people much sooner. By 1813 he sometimes failed to personally command his troops even in most important battles, and whenever he delegated command, it ended badly. Napoleon never minded lying to the public, and loved plebiscites because he always published fake results, but in later years he lied constantly, even to his closest associates, and that led to chaos.
The end result of Napoleonic was six million dead, untold millions of maimed, raped, and destitute, most of Europe turned into wasteland (even Britain, which never saw fighting on its soil, was nearly destroyed by economic fallout), loss of any hope of liberation for French colonies, Italy, Finland and Poland, and restoration of inept monarchy in France (with a lame constitution, concocted by the king himself upon insistence by the Tzar, of all people).
So bad, in fact, was that restored monarchy that just a few months later northern and eastern France and much of the army welcomed Napoleon back (the south was always too Catholic and the west too Royalist to support him), resulting in the exact repeat of the disastrous end of his first rule. By that time every country in the world except the United States was France’s enemy, and French army was outnumbered six to one, but Napoleon still wanted to keep conscripting and fighting. His only motivation by that point seemed to be keeping power for himself and, eventually, for his son. It backfired: Napoleon was sent to rot on a remote island where he soon died of hereditary stomach cancer; his innocent son lived his short life under virtual house arrest. His nephew later did become his successor, France’s last (and very effective), monarch, but Napoleon didn’t live to see it.
So Napoleon’s successes are not a good argument against democracy. And he was the kind of leader that some countries get once per century, and others never at all. Most authoritarians do much less good, and some do even more damage.
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Naturalist on Earth 