29 The Napoleonic era

“What will history say?” Napoleon once asked. “What will posterity think?” Both his contemporaries and those who came after him were divided in their judgments of Napoleon Bonaparte, the young Corsican artillery officer who became Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, and ruler of the largest empire in Europe since the days of the Romans.

In France itself Napoleon is still widely revered, and his burial place in Les Invalides in Paris has become a shrine to that most sacred of French sentiments, la gloire. Beyond the frontiers of France, many—particularly in the 19th century—hailed him as a colossus, the archetype of the “great man,” who through sheer energy and willpower came to straddle the globe. Others denigrated him as a vainglorious tyrant who in the name of liberty would have reduced the whole world to slavery.

From brigadier to emperor The two and a half decades of European conflict known as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars commenced in August 1792, when Austria and Prussia attacked Revolutionary France. Britain and other European allies joined in the following year, and it was in December 1793 that Napoleon Bonaparte first came to national prominence, when he played a leading role in the recapture of the naval port of Toulon from the British. Bonaparte was promoted to the rank of brigadier general—aged only twenty-four.

Subsequently Bonaparte became involved in internal upheavals, quelling a royalist mob in Paris in October 1795 with his famous “whiff of grapeshot.” He went on to conduct a brilliant campaign against the Austrians in Italy in 1796–7, obliging the Austrians to hand over the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium) to France. Although his campaign in Egypt in 1798 ended in defeat at the hands of the British, his star in France remained in the ascendant, and in November 1799 he seized power as “first consul,” with virtually dictatorial powers. After a brief period of peace in 1802–3, the war continued, and in 1804 Bonaparte horrified many of his republican admirers around the world when he declared himself to be the Emperor Napoleon I. He had rightly calculated that his military successes against the enemies of France had earned him sufficient popularity at home, not least in the army, to make such a bold step.

Although his intention of invading Britain was thwarted by Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar in 1805, Napoleon was triumphant on the continent of Europe, inflicting defeat after defeat on the Austrians, Russians and Prussians. By 1809 they had all made peace with France, leaving Britain to fight on alone. Much of western, southern and central Europe was now under Napoleon’s control—as a part of the French empire, or as a kingdom ruled by one of his family (as in Spain and Naples), or as a dependent state—such as the Confederation of the Rhine, established by Napoleon in Germany to replace the Holy Roman empire.

“So he too is nothing but a man. Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant.”

Ludwig van Beethoven, on hearing that the hero and defender of the French Republic had made himself emperor, May 1804. Beethoven tore up the title page of his third symphony, with its dedication to Napoleon, and renamed it the Eroica.

Folie de grandeur Napoleon’s imposition of his brother Joseph as king of Spain in 1808 proved to be a costly mistake, bogging down large numbers of French troops in a brutal war against Spanish guerrilla forces. Napoleon made an even bigger misjudgement in 1812, when he decided to invade Russia. The French Grande Armée, although defeating the Russians at Borodino, found itself ill-equipped to deal with the freezing Russian winter, and found it could not follow its usual practice of living off the land, as the Russians had conducted a ruthless scorched-earth policy as they retreated toward Moscow. Nearly half a million French soldiers had begun the campaign; less than one-tenth returned.

Napoleon as a commander

Napoleon’s effectiveness as a general lay in a combination of factors. These included an ability to keep the enemy guessing as to his intentions, followed by a sudden concentrated strike at the enemy’s weakest point. Such tactics required a mastery of maneuver and rapid deployment, combined with flexible logistics. France had responded to the outbreak of the Revolutionary Wars by conscripting a massive citizen army, and with a huge reserve of conscripts at his disposal, Napoleon could afford to expend men: “You can’t stop me,” he once boasted to the foreign minister of Austria, Count Metternich, “I spend 30,000 men a month.” Despite this callousness, his troops held l’Empereur in reverence, not least because he recognized talent over privilege, and promoted many men from the ranks, most famously Marshal Ney.

The Russian disaster persuaded Prussia and Austria to again ally themselves with Britain against Napoleon. They scored a major victory at Leipzig in 1813, and the following year the Duke of Wellington, who had been fighting the French for years in the Iberian Peninsula, led his British forces over the border into France itself. With Paris in the hands of the allies, Napoleon abdicated and went into exile on the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy. The restored French monarchy was not popular, however, and Napoleon returned from exile to try one more throw of the dice. The French army rallied around him, and in June 1815 faced the British and the Prussians at Waterloo. It was, in Wellington’s words, “a close-run thing,” but Napoleon was defeated, captured and sent into exile on the remote island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. He never returned.

The impact of Napoleon Maximilien Robespierre, before engineering the Great Terror, had warned his fellow citizens against one of their victorious generals establishing a “legal dictatorship.” This is precisely what Napoleon did in 1799, although he declared at the time he seized power that “the Revolution is established upon its original principles: it is consummated.” Although Napoleon’s rule was far from liberal—he believed, for example, that freedom of the press made the job of governing impossible, and dealt ruthlessly with his domestic political opponents—he did preserve some of the values of the French Revolution, which he feared was degenerating into anarchy. His most enduring legacy was the Napoleonic Code, a system of civil law rolled out across his empire and its dependent states and allies. This embodied many of the values of the Revolution and the Enlightenment, including equality (although not, in Napoleon’s version, for women), individual liberty, separation of church and state, and religious toleration. To this day, the Napoleonic Code provides the model for many civil law codes in Europe and around the world.

“Conquest has made me what I am; only conquest can maintain me.”

Napoleon Bonaparte, December 30, 1802

Following Napoleon’s defeat, the victorious allies sought to undo the new dispensation, restoring the old, absolutist monarchies and empires that cut across ethnic boundaries. After 1815, the forces of reaction in power across Europe did all they could to extinguish the radical and nationalist aspirations that had been kindled by the French Revolution. But after decades of repression, these were to burst into flames once more in 1848.

the condensed idea

Whether as tyrant or liberator, Napoleon transformed Europe