Napoleon after 200 years.
Walsh, Patrick J.
Of Napoleon, Lord Rosebery wrote, "No name represents so
completely and conspicuously dominion, splendor and catastrophe."
His sympathetic yet evenhanded assessment of Napoleon appeared in 1901.
Another Englishman, Andrew Roberts, in his new 926-page biography
appearing on the two hundredth anniversary of Waterloo, writes in a
similar vein.
In formulating an opinion on Napoleon one needs reminding that his
rise to power came about as a result of the French Revolution. He did
not start the revolution, though he did try to contain it. It was the
extraordinary circumstance of that revolution that made Napoleon
possible. Perhaps he understood this in declaring, "I am the
revolution." Bonaparte believed in luck and in a mystery enveloping
the visible world. He wrote "hundreds of years will elapse before
circumstances will arise similar to those which concentrated such a mass
of power to me."
His own synopsis of an extraordinary career is as succinct as was
his writing style (much admired by Stendhal): "Corsican by birth,
French by adoption, and emperor by achievement."
Napollione Buonaparte was born on the island of Corsica in 1769.
His father, an impoverished nobleman, secured a place for his son
(funded by the king's charity) in a military school at Brienne,
France, in 1778. With a poor command of the French language, the
nine-year-old Corsican was ridiculed by fellow students for his Italian
accent. Yet this outsider would one day command them, their country, and
half of the European population. Upon graduation in 1784, Napoleon
gained admittance to the Ecole Militaire, an officer's school. At
sixteen, he became second lieutenant of artillery. One teacher described
him as "knowing mathematics and geography extremely
well...taciturn, loves solitude, very egotistical, ambitious and aspires
toward everything." Interestingly the young student Napoleon once
wrote in his geography notebook: "St. Helena, small island."
He could not have foreseen his later exile, imprisonment, and death
there.
Combining an outstanding intelligence with practical ability and
unalterable determination to succeed, Napoleon rose swiftly. Two thirds
of French artillery officers were among the aristocrats fleeing France.
This situation led to Napoleon's rapid advancement. At the siege of
Toulon, in 1793, he demonstrated great expertise in artillery placement
and was promoted to general. In 1795, after he had saved the Directory
from an uprising, the appreciative directors awarded the
twenty-six-year-old general supreme command of the Army of Italy.
Bonaparte's conquest of Italy gained him international fame.
He now changed the spelling of his name to sound French. Artists painted
him. The French people cheered him. But some politicians feared him.
They dispatched the hero to Egypt to open up Asian markets to French
products and to establish a colony and a base to attack British
possessions in India. In Egypt, Napoleon saw and conquered, but with
destruction of the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile by Nelson, the
project was soon abandoned. The expedition did, however, meet with
scientific success: one of Bonaparte's soldiers uncovered the
Rosetta Stone, and Egyptology began.
Returning to France in 1799, Napoleon received an invitation to
join a coup to topple the failing Directory. Weary of perpetual
revolution and instability, while facing a new allied coalition against
France, the people looked to Napoleon as a corrective. Elected consul
for life, Napoleon stabilized France's economy and reformed her
legal structure. His Code Napoleon still exists in Europe. Turning his
attention to religious reform, Bonaparte signed a concordat with the
pope, which Hilaire Belloc applauded as a tremendous Christian act,
although the restoration of public worship was not popular with the
revolutionary left, whose policy called for a de-Christianized France.
Nevertheless, as Roberts writes, Napoleon "dispensed with the
absurd revolutionary calendar of ten week days and the theology of the
Cult of the Supreme being."
In 1804, partly to discourage assassination and create a political
permanence, Napoleon crowned himself emperor, saying, "I found the
crown of France in the gutter and I picked it up." Napoleon secured
France from internal revolution, but as Stendhal, one of his soldiers,
pointed out, "it was a chimera to believe in any lasting peace
between the new republic and old European aristocracies." For a
French republic, even an imperial republic, in an age of kings had to be
fought for and found itself dependent on military conquest for survival.
Andrew Roberts says that "war was declared on Napoleon more often
than he declared it on others."
Too often Napoleon has been compared to Hitler. Roberts quotes
Churchill in an address to the House of Commons in 1944 saying, "it
seems an insult to the great emperor and warrior to compare him in any
way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher." Proof that Napoleon
was not like Hitler or Stalin is that he never executed Foreign Minister
Talleyrand or his minister of police, Fouche, though they continually
conspired against him.
Napoleon fought sixty battles and lost only seven, but he could not
win forever. A guerrilla war in Spain funded by England bled his
resources and led to a falling out with his Russian ally and the
subsequent disastrous invasion. Defeated by England and the allies in
1814, Napoleon was given a Lilliputian kingdom on the isle of Elba off
the Italian coast. But unlike Gulliver, he was not a man to be pinned to
the ground. Foolishly the restored French king refused to send Napoleon
his pension agreed upon by treaty. Napoleon waited for an opportune
time. After a year on Elba, he returned to power in France without
firing a shot till his final defeat at Waterloo in 1815. This time the
allies sentenced him to exile on St. Helena in the South Atlantic, where
Napoleon died in 1821, thousands of miles from any continent.
Andrew Roberts's book is highly readable and wonderfully
illustrated. But I found some aspects of it provincial. Allen Tate
defined provincialism as an inability to transcend one's own time
and its influence. Roberts is provincial in dismissing Napoleon's
genuine religious nature, downplaying it as mere social utility and
saying he was "at best skeptical of Christianity." There is
much evidence to the contrary. I fondly remember reading in James
Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man about Napoleon
saying to his generals that the happiest day in his life was not in his
glorious achievements but in receiving First Holy Communion. Belloc
attests to this in his Napoleon: "His preparation for his First
Communion he always remembered and that day stood out for him all his
life."
We live in an oppressive age of secularism, which disregards
religious belief. But a good historian must look beyond this to the
historical record. For in exile on St. Helena, Mass was celebrated on
Sundays and Holy days by priests sent by the pope at the urging of
Napoleon's mother (who incidentally had given birth to her son on
the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1769). Cardinal Fesch,
Napoleon's uncle, picked the two priests dispatched to that island
prison.
On his deathbed, jousting with his atheist doctor and fellow
Corsican Dr. Antomarchi, Napoleon said: "Only a fool says he will
die without a confessor. There is so much that one does not know, that
one cannot explain." "I believe in God: I am of my
father's religion. We cannot all be atheists.... How can you not
believe in God? For all, everything proclaims his existence, and the
greatest geniuses have believed it. But then you are a doctor. You
people deal with nothing but matter: You never believe anything."
Before his death, Napoleon confessed his sins, received Communion,
and his last will and testament reads, "I die in the Apostolic and
Roman religion, in the bosom of which I was born fifty years ago."
Andrew Roberts touts "Napoleon as representing the
Enlightenment on horseback." A voracious reader, Napoleon certainly
read all the Enlightenment writers but was not of their mind-set. He was
devoted to classical history and to French drama and tragedy, rather
than to any work by French philosophes. Napoleon himself wrote a short
history of Corsica and a novella. The Kennedy and Johnson
administrations could have benefited from his insight that "savants
and intellectuals are like coquettes; one may see them and talk with
them but don't make one your wife or minister."
Napoleon's love of Plutarch and history put him at odds with the
optimism and excesses of Enlightenment thinking. His was of an older,
more conservative outlook.
Appalled at the violence of the French Revolution, both Alexander
Hamilton and John Adams predicted the appearance of a general like
Napoleon restoring order to France. And in old age, John Adams delighted
in discovering a new word coined by Napoleon. It would have pleased his
English counterpart Edmund Burke, too. The word is ideologue and is
credited to Napoleon. He used it in criticizing philosophes and Jacobin
extremists and all those who try to make an idea reality despite the
actuality of what exists.
Writing to Thomas Jefferson in old age about his discovery, Adams
teased and suggested that the word must be equated with the word idiocy,
calling ideology the "science of lunacy" and "Non Compos
Mentacism," to the great chagrin of Jefferson, a supporter of the
French Revolution.
John Adams, who witnessed Napoleon's rise and fall, should be
allowed the final word on this unparalleled historic figure--"a
whirlwind raised him and a whirlwind blowed him away to St.
Helena." [dagger]
Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts (New York: Viking, 2014)
Patrick J. Walsh is a writer in Quincy, Massachusetts.