Books
Bliss was that dawn. Another year, another batch of books about Napoleon. Frank McLynn on our never-ending fascination with the "Corsican ogre"
Published 17 December 2001
Napoleon and Wellington
Andrew Roberts Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £25.00
ISBN 0297646079
Far more books have been written about Napoleon than there were days in his life, and the fascination with him never ends. What other personality could arouse the impassioned interest of Hazlitt and Tolstoy, Byron and Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray and Thomas Hardy, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley, Chateaubriand, Hugo and Stendhal, to name just a few of his celebrated 19th-century aficionados and students? Who else is so famous that his mere silhouette is instantly recognisable, or so universally known that the inmates of asylums claim him as their alter ego?
But Napoleon also elicits violent passions, for and against. To the English, especially those on the right, he is usually a diabolical figure. To the French, he is a symbol of national greatness, the mark against which successive "Caesarists" - Louis Napoleon, Clemenceau, Petain and de Gaulle - have measured themselves. Recipients of hereditary privilege usually hate him, because he and his ilk threaten the very foundations of their existence. Natural rebels tend to favour him. He is detested by both the "moderate" bourgeoisie and the hard left, while right-wing authoritarians and meritocrats on the soft left see favourable qualities in him.
This year's crop of books on the emperor does not really advance this debate, as all but one are monographic in their treatment and intention. By far the best is Napoleon and Wellington by Andrew Roberts (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which examines what each man thought about the other (like Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, they never met), and culminates with the battle of Waterloo. Wellington v Napoleon will always be the story of the methodical slugger against the inspirational improviser - a kind of military version of Frazier v Ali - except that, at Waterloo, Napoleon turned in one of his most inept, orthodox and unimaginative displays.
The Man Who Broke Napoleon's Codes by Mark Urban (Faber and Faber) is the detailed story of Wellington's spy George Scovell and his great talents in cryptanalysis in the Peninsular War, which in effect enabled Wellington to have his own primitive version of Ultra while defeating Napoleon's marshals in Spain. Napoleon Bonaparte, England's Prisoner: the emperor in exile, 1816-21 by Frank Giles (Constable Robinson) is a great opportunity wasted. Instead of providing a grand synthesis of the dismal years on St Helena, Giles is content to stitch together a number of thoughts, asides and apercus. He does not seem abreast of all the latest scholarship and, in particular, offers no significant thoughts on the raging controversy surrounding the emperor's death. It now seems certain that he was poisoned slowly by his "follower" the Comte de Montholon. Giles reports the theory, but makes nothing of it, remarking merely that such an idea will win favour only with "French Napoleonists and/or Anglophobes". Ad hominem with a vengeance. The most disappointing of all recent works is Robert Asprey's two- volume The Rise and Fall of Napoleon (Little, Brown). A dry and one-dimensional history of the emperor's campaigns, this is the kind of book that could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, and Asprey seems, almost perversely, to go out of his way to avoid all the really interesting issues about Napoleon.
Perhaps there have already been enough conventional biographies of the "Corsican ogre", and I must plead guilty to having added to the Ossa of volumes piled on Pelion. What one needs now, I think, is a new version of Pieter Geyl's Napoleon, For and Against, particularly because pro-European factions have begun to claim that Bonapartism was a forerunner of the European Union. That this view is arrant nonsense will do nothing to diminish its popularity. Napoleon had a brilliant intellect, he was a superb administrator and, pace his vociferous critics such as Correlli Barnett, he was a military genius.
His original and creative mind was able to accommodate both mysticism and logic, the yogi and the commissar. But he was never a proto-apostle of European unification, and to imagine that he was is to think unhistorically. What he wanted was a series of fiefs for his useless brothers and in-laws, and a succession of client states and puppet regimes that would fit in with his general design for the control of Europe. The Mafia provides a better key to the reality of Napoleonic Europe than does the European Commission. Napoleon realised that, in power politics, every man has his price. To deal with any possible challengers to his imperial position, such as his own marshals, he simply worked out the scale of the bribe necessary to keep them quiet. Admittedly, he sometimes overstepped the mark, such as when he allowed the dreadful Bernadotte to become King of Sweden. To claim that Napoleon foreshadowed the European Union is as absurd as claiming that the Mongol empire was an attempt to set up a Greater Asian Free Trade Zone.
As for Napoleon being a "great dictator", in some sense the forerunner of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, this, too, is risible and unhistorical. Napoleon was an old-style autocrat, with none of the access to technology that makes totalitarian dictatorship possible. That both Napoleon and Hitler came to power when young, were alien rulers (Napoleon Corsican, Hitler Austrian), fought a war on two fronts and invaded Russia in June are held, in some quarters, to be grounds for a meaningful comparison of the two men. Similarly, that he made his peace with the men of the Thermidorean reaction and became a dictator is supposed to align him with Stalin (both men perverters of a revolution). One need not labour the manifold ways in which the Nazi movement was an utterly different phenomenon from 19th-century Caesarism, or how a regime dedicated to preserving the interests of the bourgeoisie that had bought property confiscated from the French aristocracy can scarcely be compared to the failed experiment of "socialism in one country". It can scarcely be repeated too often that Napoleon had almost nothing in common with the dictators of the 20th century, even the non-totalitarian variety. The vindictiveness, harshness and cruelty of Franco's "redemption through suffering" had no place in the Napoleonic mindset. Although Napoleon had crimes to his credit (the murder of the Duc d'Enghien is the best-known and most reprehensible incident), in general he lacked ruthlessness in personal relations. Time and again, he overlooked the egregious idiocy of his useless, scheming siblings and forgave his marshals their stunning incompetence and venality. For treachery and desertion in the face of the enemy, Bernadotte should have faced the firing squad on at least three separate occasions. Napoleon was also betrayed many times by Talleyrand, Fouche and Murat, but all three escaped the executioner, solely because of Napoleon's distaste for letting blood and, yes, his weakness.
This is not to say that Napoleon was, as they say in Hollywood, "a wonderful human being". He was a man of extraordinary talents but with average human emotional reactions. Unlike our 20th- century dictators, he exhibited none of the traits of the sociopath. Many lives were lost in his wars, but no Chinese famines, liquidation of the kulaks or "final solutions" stain his record. It is true that he was impossible when it came to international relations, and that his ambitions entailed endless warfare. But the English propaganda version of Napoleon as an ogre has been overdone. When one contrasts him with the leading trio of his opponents in England - Castlereagh, Liverpool and the Prince Regent - all men with the moral status of a louse, a more nuanced picture of the "dictator" begins to emerge. When weighing up the balance sheets between the flawed romantic dreaming impossible dreams that cost millions of lives in battle and devastation, and his repressive, vacuous, amoral and despicable opponents in England who condemned millions of their countrymen to death from starvation, the Bloody Code and naval impressment, to say nothing of the 90 per cent of the population who were condemned to lives of agonising death-in-life poverty and meaningless hand-to-mouth existence, only one judgement is possible: "a plague on both your houses".
Frank McLynn is the author of Napoleon (Jonathan Cape)
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