So much more than a tinpot dictator

Andrew Roberts has written a superbly nuanced portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte
Last stand: Napoleon leading his troops at Waterloo in 1815 (Picture: The Bridgeman Art Library)
The Bridgeman Art Library
Saul David2 October 2014

Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts (Allen Lane, £30)

Napoleon Bonaparte’s claim to greatness seems indisputable: by 1799, just six years after returning to France as a penniless political refugee and junior army officer, he was both a full general and First Consul, effective dictator in all but name (his nemesis Wellington, by contrast, was then just a colonel).

He revolutionised warfare, losing just seven of 60 battles and sieges and, as Consul and Emperor of the French Republic (from 1804), enacted civil reforms — unifying France’s 42 legal codes into a single Napoleonic Code, introducing public accounting, the lycée system of centralised education, the Conseil d’Etat and public works — that still anchor French society today.

Yet some historians still dismiss Napoleon as merely a warmonger, and not a particularly successful one at that. They point to the fact that the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars cost three million military and one million civilian deaths, including 1.4 million French, as if all those casualties can be laid directly at Napoleon’s door; and they argue that he lost the battles and campaigns that mattered, including Russia in 1812 and Waterloo.

Andrew Roberts will have none of this — the clue is in the title — and in just over 800 pages of elegant, judiciously argued and compelling prose he produces a case for the defence that, ultimately, is impossible to gainsay.

The author acknowledges that Napoleon enjoyed his fair share of luck, made mistakes and could be ruthlessly brutal (like when ordering the execution of Turkish prisoners at Jaffa). Yet, says Roberts, he was more an Enlightened authoritarian than a totalitarian dictator and his occasional human failings should not be allowed to obscure his quite astonishing achievements.

The book is underpinned by extracts from some of Napoleon’s 33,000 extant letters. They include correspondence with astronomers, chemists, mathematicians and biologists, and are, says Roberts, “extraordinary testimony” to Napoleon’s “protean mind”.

An avid reader, even at military school (where intellectualism would have been frowned upon), he devoured the classics, literature, philosophy and, of course, military history. It is surely no coincidence that Napoleon’s two greatest heroes were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. In certain respects he would outdo them both.

His first military expedition — a little- known attempt to liberate three small Sardinian islands in 1793 — was a disastrous humiliation for the new would-be Caesar, yet it “taught him the importance of morale, logistics and leadership more powerfully than any number of academic lectures”.

Thereafter his military and political star rose rapidly, thanks to an impressive performance commanding the artillery at the siege of Toulon in 1794, his ruthless suppression of the Vendémiaire royalist coup in 1795 and his masterful handling of the Italian campaign of 1796-7 when, at the age of 27, he repeatedly defeated superior Austrian and Piedmontese forces, winning 12 victories and inflicting 120,000 casualties. Roberts attributes the secret of his success in Italy to the fact that he “taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure… whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come”.

From 1801 Napoleon began an ambitious programme of civil reform to standardise law and justice, centralise education, introduce uniform weights and measures and a fully functioning internal market. That achievement alone makes him one of the giants of history.

The great man has found in Roberts a worthy biographer. He has written a superbly nuanced portrait of a complex, likeable and never less than fascinating character that will stand as the benchmark for a generation. “He showed us,” wrote a young British naval officer of Napoleon, “what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short.”

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £24, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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