Napoleon Bonaparte: pocket GIANTS E-Book

William Doyle

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 117

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the space of less than twenty years, Napoleon turned Europe upside down. Rising from obscure origins to supreme power by a mixture of luck, audacity and military genius, he was able to harness the energies released by the French Revolution to resolve the internal problems which it had created, before turning his restless ambition to remodeling the political structure of the whole continent in a series of brilliant military victories. He was never able to finally subdue all his foreign enemies, and in the end they came together to bring him down; but by then it was impossible to restore what he had destroyed, or, in France, to destroy much of what he had created. The memory of his epic exploits, carefully refashioned during his last years in exile, haunted Europe for over a century, while the more distant effects of his career changed the whole destiny of the Americas and of the world.

Leseprobe

Acknowledgements

Warmest thanks to Tony for suggesting, to Mike for reviewing, and to Christine for insisting.

Contents

Title

Acknowledgements

Introduction: A Giant at 5ft 6in

Family Tree

1The Revolutionary Legacy

Maps

2A Corsican’s Luck

3Ending the Revolution

4Building a Future

5Napoleonic Wars

6Upending Europe

7Resistance

8Downfall

9Aftermath

Timeline

Further Reading

Web Links

Copyright

Introduction

A Giant at 5ft 6in

I am apart from everybody, I accept nobody’s conditions.

Napoleon, 18061

Bonaparte Family Tree

From the earliest stages of the French Revolution there were predictions that it would end in the rule of a soldier. Everybody knew about Julius Caesar, who had destroyed the ancient Roman Republic, or Oliver Cromwell who had seized supreme power in the British Isles after the execution of Charles I. Nobody was sure who the usurping general might be. Until he defected to the enemy in 1792, the most likely figure seemed to be the Marquis de Lafayette, self-styled ‘hero of two worlds’ who had served with George Washington in America and commanded the National Guard which policed the early Revolution. Then the threat seemed to come from Charles Dumouriez, who defeated France’s invading enemies and conquered Belgium in the winter of 1792–93. But he in turn defected, and by 1795 many eyes were on Charles Pichegru, who had led a successful French invasion of the Dutch Republic. Nobody gave a thought to a young Corsican artillery officer with an ambiguous political record who found himself defending the Republic that October, the revolutionary month of Vendémiaire, in command of troops who shot down royalist rebels in Paris.

So there was widespread incredulity when ‘General Vendémiaire’, as Napoleon Buonaparte was now derisively known, was appointed a few months later to command the Army of Italy. He had no field experience beyond commanding units of artillery. He was short, scruffy, sallow and spotty, and he spoke French with a strong Italianate accent. The senior staff of the Army of Italy were prepared to despise him. But, despite themselves, they came away from their first meeting curiously impressed. He exuded an air of confidence and command – especially, as one said, when he put on the general’s hat which would become his trademark. He promised to lead his small, neglected and undersupplied force over the Alps and into the most fertile plains on earth: ‘Rich provinces, great towns will be within your power; there you will find honour, glory and riches.’2

Over the next year he proved as good as his word. In a series of brilliant marches and battles he defeated all France’s enemies in Italy, above all the power against which war had originally been declared in 1792: Austria. The Austrians signed peace preliminaries at Leoben in April 1797, with Napoleon’s army only a few days’ march from Vienna. Virtually unknown only two years earlier, he had won not just the Italian campaign, but the entire war on the continent. Thus he began to change the face of Europe several years before he took power in France.

He had done it without authorisation from Paris. Under the peace terms finalised at Campo Formio in October, former Austrian territories in Italy became the Cisalpine Republic – in effect, the general’s personal state. The Austrians were compensated with the territories of Venice, the oldest republic in Europe, now simply snuffed out. Some of the changes wrought by this newcomer on the international stage would prove transient, but after him Italy would never look or feel the same again. Redrawing boundaries that had been the work of centuries, the young general began to think of himself as a man of destiny. ‘What I have done so far is nothing,’ he told an enquirer. His intention was to be as powerful in France as he now was in Italy: ‘I declare to you that I can no longer obey; I have tasted command and I cannot give it up.’3

As yet, however, he thought ‘the pear was not ripe’, and until it was he had no interest in lasting peace. On returning to France, he was given command of an army to invade Great Britain, the Republic’s last remaining enemy. But he saw this as a dangerous trap and looked for a better opportunity to keep his military glory bright. Ever since his youth he had dreamt of emulating the exploits of Alexander the Great, and now he fixed his sights on Egypt. The government in Paris, the Directory, was only too glad to be rid of his threatening presence, and in the spring of 1798 allowed him to go, along with the flower of the French army and navy.

In strategic terms it was a disaster. Egypt was conquered swiftly enough, but the British navy destroyed the French fleet and left the invaders marooned. Meanwhile this unprovoked invasion of a territory of the Ottoman Empire led to a hostile diplomatic chain reaction, reigniting war in Europe. A new coalition of powers expelled the French from most of Italy and seemed poised to invade France itself. By the summer of 1799 the Republic’s government was plunged into crisis. Largely as a consequence of his own adventures in the east, the general’s ‘pear’ was now ripe. As soon as the bad news from Europe reached him, he ruthlessly abandoned his army and made a dash back to France.

Welcomed as the Republic’s one undefeated general, he was rapidly recruited to front a coup d’état aimed at replacing an unworkable constitution. When the coup was over he refused to be sidelined. He was appointed as one of three consuls to oversee the transition to a new regime, but his military prestige and the force of his personality overawed his two colleagues from the start. Under a new constitution promulgated as 1799 ended, Napoleon officially became the First Consul, invested with supreme power. A 30-year-old soldier was now the ruler of France.

Thus the nineteenth century began with triumph for Napoleon Bonaparte (now spelling his name the French way). His exploits would dominate its first fifteen years, and the memory of them would haunt the whole of it. He began by winning the war he had done so much to prolong, but which had carried him to power. Within two years, the Austrians, Russians and even the undefeated British had made peace. Simultaneously, the First Consul made peace with the Catholic Church, which had been at loggerheads with revolutionary France since 1790. He also began to lay institutional foundations which would reinforce the legacy of the Revolution in social and economic terms. Most of the country sighed with relief. If the representative institutions which the revolutionaries had tried to establish were now supplanted by an authoritarian government, it seemed a price worth paying for the return of order and stability.

The chief remaining uncertainty was that all this hinged on the life and energies of one man – against whom extremists plotted several assassination attempts. Napoleon, and men whose careers now depended on his authority, concluded that the only way to perpetuate his achievements was through heredity. And so in 1804 he crowned himself a monarch, the Emperor Napoleon. One contemporary at least was disgusted. This was the moment at which Beethoven, who had dedicated his ‘Eroica’ symphony to the hero of French republicanism, scratched out the dedication, declaring that he was nothing more than an ordinary man after all.

Napoleon’s empire soon embraced far more than France. He never expected the general peace of 1802 to last, nor did he desire it. ‘Nothing’, he told a close collaborator almost as soon as peace was concluded, ‘can sound as loud as military success. A new-born government like ours needs … to amaze and astonish.’4 There was nothing Napoleon enjoyed more than fighting, and he looked forward to the moment when beaten enemies would give him an excuse to beat them again. He briefly dreamt meanwhile of re-establishing the former empire of sugar and slaves in the Caribbean, which had been blighted by revolutionary upheavals. A huge expedition sent to achieve this failed, but the results were still momentous: triumphant former slaves founded the black republic of Haiti, while the vast territory of Louisiana – considered useless with few island plantations to supply – was sold off to the United States. Giving up on an American empire was to have consequences far more significant, in world-historical terms, than all Napoleon’s imperial ambitions closer to home.

For ten years, however, the emperor turned Europe upside down. French domination of northern Italy, recaptured by his victory at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, was steadily extended to the whole peninsula, the south transformed into a sub-kingdom ruled by his relatives. A brilliant defeat of the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805 opened the way for a complete reorganisation of Germany, including the end of the thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire. Victory over the Prussians the following year at Jena led to a consolidation of French hegemony east of the river Rhine and the recreation of vanished Poland as the Duchy of Warsaw.

Napoleon’s ambition now extended to control of the whole European coastline. By this means he sought to exclude British trade and so bring his most persistent but least accessible enemy to its knees through economic warfare. The policy led to the attempted occupation from 1808 of the Iberian Peninsula, with Napoleon’s brother a puppet king in Madrid. The uprooting of legitimate authority in Spain and Portugal sent shockwaves worldwide, especially in the Americas (even if, thanks to British intervention and native resistance, neither Iberian kingdom was ever thoroughly subdued). When the Austrians tried to take advantage of Napoleon’s Spanish entanglement, however, he defeated them once again in 1809 at the Battle of Wagram. There followed a further redrawing of maps, and the victor took a Habsburg princess as his trophy bride. She gave him the son he longed for to perpetuate an imperial Bonaparte dynasty.

Yet Wagram was Napoleon’s last victorious campaign. From this point on, his ‘star’ – that sense of destiny which had driven him ever since 1796 – began to fade. Having overawed the whole of Germany, in 1812 he turned the full force of his empire against Russia, with the biggest army ever assembled in Europe. The continent was drained of resources in men, money and materials to mount this assault. But most of those who invaded Russia with Napoleon never came back. Though the French reached Moscow, the Russians refused to negotiate, and eventually the invaders began a long march back as winter closed in. The retreat from Moscow is one of the most complete disasters in military history, and the whole campaign left an enduring mark in Russian historical memory. It provided the setting for Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, perhaps the greatest novel ever written.

Tsar Alexander was now determined to destroy the upstart Corsican who had so brutally violated the Russian Empire; but it took another year of fierce fighting to drive the French forces out of Germany and back across the Rhine. Now Prussia and Austria grasped the chance to throw off their French oppressors and, supported by British money, allied armies crossed into France itself. Unused to defeat, Napoleon still believed he could repel them and managed to fight some brilliant battles against the odds during the early spring of 1814. But, with Anglo-Portuguese forces also pushing up from Spain, it was clear that resistance was doomed. By the end of March the emperor’s leading lieutenants were demanding that he abdicate. Surviving attempted suicide, he was humiliatingly endowed by the victorious allies with a tiny island kingdom on Elba – within sight, on a clear day, of his native Corsica.

For nearly a generation Napoleon had been the dominant figure in Europe. Almost every corner of the continent, and some repeatedly, had experienced his campaigns and the depredations of his soldiers. Between 3 and 5 million lives were lost in the course of conflicts which he had instigated or provoked. Detested and feared throughout Europe, he was also idolised by many in that Romantic age as a hero to whom ordinary rules and constraints did not apply.

His career ended with yet another episode of breathtaking boldness. After eleven months on Elba, he made a dash for France, where disillusion with the restored Bourbon regime had already set in. Soldiers he had once commanded could not bring themselves to stop his triumphant march to Paris. Napoleon claimed to be a new man, chastened by his previous experience, but the powers who had defeated him declared him an international outlaw. After a mere 100 days the army that had rallied to him was defeated at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

Napoleon spent the last six years of his life reflecting on how he ought to have won; the Duke of Wellington, who had beaten him, admitted that it had been a close-run thing. But even if Waterloo had been another Napoleonic victory, the coalition which had taken so long to unite against him would undoubtedly have fought on until he was brought down again. The other powers of Europe recognised, from bitter experience, that there was no dealing with a warlord who never felt bound by anything that did not suit him and who had come to believe that he could always impose his will by boldness and force. The ‘Corsican Ogre’, as his enemies called him, was a giant who had to be locked up. And even on St Helena, a tiny isle in the midst of the South Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles from the continent where he had so often triumphed, his vanquishers surrounded him with hundreds of soldiers and constantly patrolling warships, unable to believe even now that the remotest of exiles was enough to contain his giant presence.

Notes

1  Quoted in Herold, J. Christopher, The Mind of Napoleon (New York, 1955), p. 7.

2  Quoted in Chandler, David, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 1966), p. 53.

3Mémoires du Comte Miot de Mélito (Paris, 1873), vol. 1, pp. 154, 184.

4  Pascal, François (ed.), Antoine Claire Thibaudeau, Mémoires sur le Consulat 1799–1804 (Paris, 2013), p. 205.