Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts was given to me by my partner because she got tired of hearing me say, “I know nothing about Napoleon” anytime his name was mentioned.

I have really, really enjoyed learning about Napoleon and, it turns out, France in general! I’ve always been a history fan but not-so-shockingly my understanding of that whole time period is very American-centric, so I’m learning tons of cool stuff.

My bookmark looks like it’s almost perfectly in the middle of the book, which is wild because I’ve been semi-actively reading it since late 2022 and it really doesn’t feel like I’ve been reading that slowly. Regardless, it’s a big ole book and as much as I have loved it, I’m getting a little burnt out. I think I’m going to leave the bookmark and take a break for a while.

Highlights

Introduction

• “He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee”
• “he fought sixth battles and lost only seven”
• “the Terror had finished five years before he grabbed power, the Jacobins were a powerful force who could always return”
  • The Jacobins are featured a bunch in the parts of the book I’ve read so far — I would love to learn more about them.
• “the fifteen-year rule of Napoleon”
• “Because many of the principles of the Revolution threatened the absolute monarchies of Russia (which was to practice serfdom until 1861), Austria and Prussia, and the nascent industrial kingdom of England, they formed seven coalitions over twenty-three years to crush revolutionary France.”
• “Britain, which had already had its revolution 140 years earlier and thus enjoyed many of the legal benefits that the Revolution brought to France”
• “Since the Second World War, two generations of historians have seen Napoleon through the utterly distorting prism of the Führer, portraying him as a kind of proto-Hitler whose secret police, press censorship, aggressive foreign policy and desire for a new European order all presaged the horrors unleashed by the Nazis.”

Corsica

• “Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August I5, 1769.”
• “Napoleon urged his junior officers ‘to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.”
• “This inspiration was so profound that when posing for paintings he would sometimes put his hand into his waistcoat in imitation of the toga-wearing Romans.”
• “He idolized Rousseau, who wrote positively about Corsica, writing a paean to On the Social Contract at seventeen and adopting Rousseau’s beliefs that the state should have the power of life and death over its citizens, the right to prohibit frivolous luxuries and the duty to censor the theatre and opera.”

Revolution

Desire

• “Napoleon generally saw women as lesser beings”
• “her but by memoirs”
  • This was about the socialite Laure d’Abrantes and something about the author describing someone as bitchy rubs me the wrong way. But…. maybe they were bitchy?
• “His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre and the opera. Tragedy excites the soul, he later told one of his secretaries, lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.”
• “The use of grapeshot on civilians was hitherto unknown in Paris, and was testament to Napoleon’s ruthlessness that he was willing to contemplate it. He was not about to be a coglione. ‘If you treat the mob with kindness,’ he told Joseph later, ‘these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable; if you hang a few, they get tired of the game, and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be?’”
• “‘The whiff of grapeshot’ — as it became known — meant that the Paris mob played no further part in French politics for the next three decades.”
• “when a lady asked him how he could have fired so mercilessly on the mob he replied: ‘A soldier is only a machine to obey orders.’“
• “Another task was to oversee the confiscation of all civilian weaponry”
• “since pregnant women weren’t guillotined until after giving birth, the sound of sexual couplings with the warders could be heard in the hallways at night.“
• “It is a well-known historical phenomenon for a sexually permissive period to follow one of prolonged bloodletting”
• “I can still see the little hat, surmounted by a pickup plume, his coat cur anyhow, and a sword which, in truth, did not seem the sort of weapon to make anyone’s fortune. Flinging his hat on a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general named Krieg, a man with a wonderful knowledge of detail and the author of a very good soldiers’ manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table, and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order and their rapidity, no less than the way by which the answers were caught up, and often found to resolve into other questions which he deduced in consequence from them. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander-in-chief perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business which the youngest of then was supposed to know perfectly, and this raised him a thousand cubits in my opinion.”

Italy

• “An astonishing number of his letters throughout his career refer to providing footwear for his troops.”
• “Montenotte was Napoleon’s first victory in the field as commander-in-chief”
• “Several of his future battles were to follow the same parameters: an elderly opponent lacking energy; a nationally and linguistically diverse enemy confronting the homogeneous French army; a vulnerable spot which he would latch on to and not let go. The French had moved significantly faster than their enemy, and he had employed a concentration of forces that reversed the numerical odds for just long enough to be decisive.”
• “Another recurring feature was the fast follow-up after victory”
• “Napoleon was able to exploit their differing strategic imperatives”
  • Regarding splitting the Austrians and the Piedmontese at Millesimo, the follow up victory to Montenotte
• “The strength of the army, he stated, like power in mechanics, is the product of multiplying the mass by the velocity.”
• “At 1 a.m. on April 28 he took out his watch and said: ‘Gentlemen, I give you notice that the general attack is ordered for two o’clock, and if I am not assured that the fortress off Coni will be placed in my hands before the end of the day, this attack will not be delayed for a moment.”
  • During Armistice negotiations with the Piedmontese. This reminds me of how Dan Carlin talks about how a ruler who has a little flair is going to beat one who doesn’t — this feels like something from a movie.
• It sounds like Napoleon ends up laying for foundations for the Louvre, via confiscating paintings and other art from people he conquers.
• “Yet it was this frenzied spirit - known as the French fury’ - that often gave Napoleon an edge in battle once his harangue had played on regimental pride and whipped up patriotic fervour.”
• “The storming of the bridge at Lodi quickly became a central story in the Napoleonic legend”
• “The systematic exaggeration of enemy losses and diminution of his own was to be a persistent feature throughout all Napoleon’s campaigns”
• “it must be acknowledged that Lieutenant Charles Hippolyte Charles did have some courage to cuckold Napoleon Bonaparte in an era when duelling was common.”
• “Where he abolished the Inquisition, obscure feudal practices, anti-Semitic regulations and restraints on trade and industry such as the guilds, Napoleon also brought genuine enlightenment to peoples who, without his armies’ victories, would have remained often without rights or equality before the law.”
• “Ten years later Napoleon would write in a postscript of a letter to Junot: ‘Remember Binasco; it brought me tranquillity in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands. Nothing is more salutary than appropriately severe examples.” ‘If you make war, he would say to General d’Hédouville in December 1799, wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.”
• “I have never believed in happiness. Death flutters about me every day … Is life worth all the fuss and clatter we male about it Adieu, Josephine … A thousand daggers stab my heath done lunge then in deeper. Adieu my happiness, my life, all that had any real existence for me on this earth.

Victory

• “Josephine also brought along her boudoir-hussar Hippolyte Charles.”
• “Napoleon arrived leading elements of Masséna’s division. He ordered the 32nd Line into ‘columns of platoons’ and without pause, and with drummers and musicians playing, sent them into a bayonet charge, supported by the iSth Line.”
• “Napoleon wrote in his post-battle bulletin. ’The brave 32nd Demi-Brigade was there.’ The 32nd had those words embroidered in large gold letters on its colours, and their pride spurred them to greater courage. ‘It is astonishing what power words have over men,’ Napoleon said of the 32nd years later.”
• “On the moring of August 4, Napoleon was at Lonato with only 1200 men when more than 3,000 lost Austrians, who had been cut off tan Ouadanovich’s command, suddenly blundered into the town. Napoleon calmly informed their parlementaire (officer sent to parley) that his whole army’ was present, and that ‘If in eight minutes his division had not laid down its arms, I would not spare a man. 32 He supported this ruse by issuing orders to Berthier about grenadier and ariley units that Berthier knew were entirely bogus. The Austrians only discovered once they had surrendered and been disarmed that Napoleon with ease. Die were no French forces nearby, and that they could have captured Napoleon with ease.”
• “The second battle of Lonato saw the first use by Napoleon of the bataillon carre system.”
• “When the news arrived that Lusignan had got behind him, staff officers looked anxiously at the preternaturally calm Napoleon, who simply remarked: ‘We have them now.‘“

Peace

• ‘Winning is not enough if one doesn’t take advantage of success.’
• “Napoleon understood the power that spectacle held over the public imagination”
• “Placing oneself in the limelight while seeming modestly to edge away from it is one of the most skilful of all political moves, and Napoleon had mastered it perfectly.”
• Napoleon said: ‘The true conquests, the only ones that cause no regret, are those made over ignorance?’

Egypt

• “Napoleon prepared for the first French military action in the Middle East since the Crusades with his usual mastery of minutiae. In addition to all the military equipment necessary for his army, he collected astronomical telescopes, ballooning equipment, chemical apparatus, and a printing press with Latin, Arabic and Syriac type.12 ‘You know how much we will need good wine, he wrote to Monge, telling him to buy 4,800 bottles, most of it his favoured red burgundy, but also to find a good Italian singer’ 13 (In all, the expedition took 800,000 pints of wine to Egypt.)“
• “He pronounced that novels were ‘for ladies’ maids and ordered the librarian, Only give them history books. Men should read nothing else.”7 He was apparently overlooking the forty novels, including English ones in French translation, he himself had brought out.”
• “Malta had survived sieges before — notably in 1565 when in four months the Turks had fired some 130,000 cannonballs at the forts of the knights — and would do so again during thirty months of bombing during the Second World War.”
  • The Knights of St John sound like they’d be worth Googling!
• “On July 19, while they were at Wardan on the way to Cairo, Junot confirmed what Napoleon might have already have suspected: that losephine had been having an affair with Hippolyte Charles. (Although Joseph Bonaparte had long known it, he seems not to have told his brother at the time of their fraught interview with her.)”
• “To Napoleon’s understandable embarrassment, the British government published annual books of intercepted correspondence, covering 1798, 1799 and 1800.”
• “Because the Mamluks traditionally went into battle carrying their life savings, a single corpse could make a soldier’s fortune.”
• “Napoleon won the sobriquet ‘Sultan Kebir’ (Lord of Fire) from the Egyptians”
• “The moment that separates us from the object we love is ter-rible; it isolates us from the earth; the body feels convulsions of agony. The faculties of the soul are changed; it only communicates with the universe through a nightmare that distorts everything.”
• “‘It seems you like this country,’ Napoleon told his staff at breakfast on August 15, the morning after he heard the news, ‘that’s very lucky, for now we have no fleet to carry us back to Europe.’”
• “Napoleon suggested very practical subjects as topics for its (The Institut) con-sideration, such as how the army’s baking could be improved; was there any substitute for hops in the brewing of beer; could Nile water be made drinkable; were watermills or windmills better for Cairo; could Esypt produce gunpowder; and what was the state of Egyptian law and education?”
• “At the time he ordered that all rebels captured under arms should be beheaded and their corpses thrown into the Nile, where they would float past and terrorize the rest of the population; their heads were put in sacks, loaded on mules and dumped in piles in Ezbekyeh Square in central Cairo.”
• Pauline Fourès
  • “exceedingly pretty and lively young woman”
  • “If the beautiful round face and long blonde hair described by her contemporaries are indeed accurate, Lieutenant Foures was unwise to have brought his wife out on campaign. It was six months since Napoleon had discovered Josephine’s infidelity and within days of his first spotting Pauline they were having an affair.”
  • “She later made a fortune in the Brazilian timber business, wore men’s clothing and smoked a pipe, before coming back to Paris with her pet parrots and monkeys and living to be ninety.”

Acre

• “To cross the then unmapped Sinai Napoleon would have to over. come problems of food, water, heat and hostile Bedouin tribesmen. His is of a dromedary camel corps, fast-firing drill by alternating ranks, and pieux (hooked stakes for swiftly erected palisades) were to be stained by French colonial armies up to the Great Wars We have crossed seventy leagues (over 170 miles) of desert which is exceedingly fariguing,’ he wrote to Desaix on the journey; we had brackish water and often none at all. We ate dogs, donkeys and camels.” Later they also ate monkeys.“
• “Napoleon wrote the governor of Jaffa a politelater calling on him to surrender, saying that his heart is moved by the evil that will fall upon the whole city if it subiects itself to this assault?. The governor stupidly replied by displaying the head of Napoleon’s messenger on the walls, so Napoleon ordered the walls o be breached and by s p.m. thousands of thirsty and angry French. nen were inside. ‘The sights were terrible; wrote one savant, the sound of shots, shrieks of women and fathers, piles of bodies, a daugh-fer being raped on the cadaver of her mother, the smell of blood, the groans of the wounded, the shouts of victors quarrelling about loot: The French finally rested, ‘sated by blood and gold, on top of a heap of dead’.”
• “Napoleon’s treatment of the prisoners captured at Jaffa, of whom some, though not all, were men who had given their word at El-Arish and then broken it, was extremely harsh. On March 9 and 1o, thousands of them were taken to the beach about a mile south of Jaffa by men of Bon’s division and massacred in cold blood.”
  • From a footnote, “Cities that refused to surrender when given the chance were considered to deserve sack-ing; the British subjected Badajoz to three days of looting and mass rape in 1812 so severe that Wellington finally regained control over his men only by erecting a gallows in the main square (it wasn’t used). He no more approved of rape and pillage than did Napoleon.”
• “There was, of course, a racial element to this; Napoleon would not have executed European prisoners-of-war. Napoleon himself gave the number killed at fewer than 2,000, sal-ing: They were devils too dangerous to be released a second time so that had no choice but to kill them.”
• “Napolconappedis incompromising - indeed lethal - measures if he felt the situation semanded them. He was particularly interested in ensuring that the sight hundred trained Turkish artillerymen weren’t able to fight against him again … Having accepted their word once, he couldn’t have been expected to do so again. And in a war against the seventy-nine-year-old Jezzar, fabled for his spectacular cru-ely, who that year had had four hundred Christians sewn into sacks and thrown into the sea, he might have felt the need to be seen as equally ruthless.”
• “In an all-too-rare example of poetic justice in history, the French ought the plague off Jaffa’s inhabitants whom they had raped and pillaged.”
  • From a footnote, “When the plague had appeared in Alexandria in January, Napoleon had invented another of his unusual punishments. Surgeon Boyer, who had refused to attend to its victims, was forced to walk the streets dressed as a woman and wearing a placard stating: Unworthy to be a French citizen: he fears death.’”
• “Napoleon was orcas outering coror from the cliffs above Haifa as his flotlla of nine vests thin. commodore Pierre-Jean Standelet, carrying his entire siege artileryand equipment, rounded the Mount Carmel promontory straight into the duiches of Tigre and Theseus. Six ships were captured and only thee escaped to Toulon. Most of Napoleon’s heaviest weaponry was then taken into Acre and turned against him.”
• “He was also convinced that Sir Sid. ney Smith was a kind of lunatic’, because the British commodore had challenged Napoleon to single combat under the walls of the city. (Napoleon replied that he didn’t see Smith as his equal, and would not come forth to a duel unless the English could fetch Marlborough from his grave?“
• “Easily Smith’s finest piece of psychological warfare, however, was neither disinformation nor misinformation, but simply supplying Napoleon with true information. Under a flag of truce, he sent over severe editions of recent British and European newspapers, from which Napa leon was able to piece together the series of disasters that had recent, overtaken French arms. Napoleon had been actively trying to obtain newspapers since January; now he could read of Jourdan’s defeats in Germany at the battles of Ostrach and Stockach in March and Schérers at the battle of Magnano in Italy in April - only Genoa was left to France in Italy. Napoleon’s brainchild, the Cisalpine Republic, had collapsed and there were renewed risings in the Vendée. The newspapers made him realize, as he explained later, that ‘it was impossible to expect reinforcements from France in its then state, without which nothing further could be done’“
• “Smith cleverly collected all Napoleon’s proclamations to the Muslims and gave them to these ho and Lebanese Christians).”
• “Napoleon had suffered the first significant reverse of his career (since Bassano and Caldiero could hardly count as such), and he had to abandon any dream of becoming another Alexander in Asia.”
• “The march through the desert back to Cairo, featuring terrible thirst in the scorching heat - Napoleon reported 47°C temperatures - was a desperately low point”
• “According to a letter intercepted and published by the British, another soldier recounted: *Discontent is general .. .. Soldiers have been seen to kill themselves in presence of the general-in-chief, exclaiming “This is your work!””
• “Napoleon also took with him a young - between fifteen and nineteen, accounts differ - Georgian-born, Mamluk-dressed slave boy called Roustam Raza, who had been a present from Sheikh El-Bekri in Cairo. Roustam became Napoleon’s bodyguard, sleeping on a mattress outside his door every night for the next fifteen years, armed with a dagger.”
• “The Egyptian adventure was over for Napoleon after nearly a year and five months, though not for the French army he had left behind. They would remain until Menou was forced to capitulate to the British two years later.”
• “Nonetheless, he had captured the country as ordered, fought off two Turkish invasions and returned to help France in her hour of peril.”

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