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 Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Adam Zamoyski

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Basic Books
Hachette Book Group
1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104
www.basicbooks.com
First Edition: October 2018
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Zamoyski, Adam, author.
Title: Napoleon: a life / Adam Zamoyski.
Description: First edition. | New York: Basic Books, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018015891| ISBN 9780465055937 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781541644557 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821. |
France—Kings and rulers—Biography. | France. Armâee—History—
Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815. | Napoleonic Wars, 1800–1815.
Classification: LCC DC203 .Z36 2018 | DDC 94405092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015891

ISBNs: 978-0-465-05593-7 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-4455-7 (ebook)

E3-20180827-JV-NF
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Preface

1 A Reluctant Messiah
2 Insular Dreams
3 Boy Soldier
4 Freedom
5 Corsica
6 France or Corsica
7 The Jacobin
8 Adolescent Loves
9 General Vendémiaire
10 Italy
11 Lodi
12 Victory and Legend
13 Master of Italy
14 Eastern Promise
15 Egypt
16 Plague
17 The Saviour
18 Fog
19 The Consul
20 Consolidation
21 Marengo
22 Caesar
23 Peace
24 The Liberator of Europe
25 His Consular Majesty
26 Toward Empire
27 Napoleon I
28 Austerlitz
29 Emperor of the West
30 Master of Europe
31 The Sun Emperor
32 The Emperor of the East
33 The Cost of Power
34 Apotheosis
35 Apogee
36 Blinding Power
37 The Rubicon
38 Nemesis
39 Hollow Victories
40 Last Chance
41 The Wounded Lion
42 Rejection
43 The Outlaw
44 A Crown of Thorns

Photos
About the Author
Also by Adam Zamoyski
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
 In memory

of

GILLON AITKEN
 Maps

Europe in 1792
Toulon
The Italian Theatre
Montenotte
Lodi
The Pursuit
Castiglione
Würmser Outmanoeuvred
Arcole
Rivoli
The March on Vienna
The Settlement of Campo Formio
Egypt
Europe in 1800
Marengo
Ulm
Austerlitz
The Campaigns of 1806–7
Europe in 1808
Aspern–Essling
Wagram
Europe in 1812
The Invasion of Russia
Borodino
The Berezina
The Saxon Campaign 1813
The Defence of France 1814
The Waterloo Campaign 1815
 Preface

A POLISH HOME, English schools, and holidays with French cousins

exposed me from an early age to violently conflicting visions of
Napoleon—as godlike genius, Romantic avatar, evil monster, or just
nasty little dictator. In this crossfire of fantasy and prejudice I
developed an empathy with each of these views without being able
to agree with any of them.
Napoleon was a man, and while I understand how others have
done, I can see nothing superhuman about him. Although he did
exhibit some extraordinary qualities, he was in many ways a very
ordinary man. I find it difficult to credit genius to someone who, for
all his many triumphs, presided over the worst (and entirely self-
inflicted) disaster in military history and single-handedly destroyed
the great enterprise he and others had toiled so hard to construct.
He was undoubtedly a brilliant tactician, as one would expect of a
clever operator from a small-town background. But he was no
strategist, as his miserable end attests.
Nor was Napoleon an evil monster. He could be as selfish and
violent as the next man, but there is no evidence of him wishing to
inflict suffering gratuitously. His motives were on the whole
praiseworthy, and his ambition no greater than that of
contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia, Wellington, Nelson,
Metternich, Blücher, Bernadotte, and many more. What made his
ambition so exceptional was the scope it was accorded by
circumstance.
On hearing the news of his death, the Austrian dramatist Franz
Grillparzer wrote a poem on the subject. He had been a student in
Vienna when Napoleon bombarded the city in 1809, so he had no
reason to like him, but in the poem he admits that while he cannot
love him, he cannot bring himself to hate him; according to
Grillparzer, Napoleon was but the visible symptom of the sickness of
the times, and as such bore the blame for the sins of all. There is
much truth in this view.1
In the half-century before Napoleon came to power, a titanic
struggle for dominion saw the British acquire Canada, large swathes
of India, and a string of colonies and aspire to lay down the law at
sea; Austria grab provinces in Italy and Poland; Prussia increase in
size by two-thirds; and Russia push her frontier 600 kilometres into
Europe and occupy large areas of Central Asia, Siberia, and Alaska,
laying claims as far afield as California. Yet George III, Maria
Theresa, Frederick William II, and Catherine II are not generally
accused of being megalomaniac monsters and compulsive
warmongers.
Napoleon is frequently condemned for his invasion of Egypt, while
the British occupation which followed, designed to guarantee
colonial monopoly over India, is not. He is regularly blamed for re-
establishing slavery in Martinique, while Britain applied it in its
colonies for a further thirty years, and every other colonial power for
several decades after that. His use of police surveillance and
censorship is also regularly reproved, even though every other state
in Europe emulated him, with varying degrees of discretion or
hypocrisy.
The tone was set by the victors of 1815, who arrogated the role
of defenders of a supposedly righteous social order against evil, and
writing on Napoleon has been bedevilled ever since by a moral
dimension, which has entailed an imperative to slander or glorify.
Beginning with Stendhal, who claimed he could only write of
Napoleon in religious terms, and no doubt inspired by Goethe, who
saw his life as ‘that of a demi-god’, French and other European
historians have struggled to keep the numinous out of their work,
and even today it is tinged by a sense of awe. Until very recently,
Anglo-Saxon historians have shown reluctance to allow an
understanding of the spirit of the times to help them see Napoleon
as anything other than an alien monster. Rival national mythologies
have added layers of prejudice which many find hard to overcome.2
Napoleon was in every sense the product of his times; he was in
many ways the embodiment of his epoch. If one wishes to gain an
understanding of him and what he was about, one has to place him
in context. This requires ruthless jettisoning of received opinion and
nationalist prejudice and dispassionate examination of what the
seismic conditions of his times threatened and offered.
In the 1790s Napoleon entered a world at war, and one in which
the very basis of human society was being questioned. It was a
struggle for supremacy and survival in which every state on the
Continent acted out of self-interest, breaking treaties and betraying
allies shamelessly. Monarchs, statesmen, and commanders on all
sides displayed similar levels of fearful aggression, greed,
callousness, and brutality. To ascribe to any of the states involved a
morally superior role is ahistorical humbug, and to condemn the lust
for power is to deny human nature and political necessity.
For Aristotle power was, along with wealth and friendship, one of
the essential components of individual happiness. For Hobbes, the
urge to acquire it was not only innate but beneficent, as it led men
to dominate and therefore organise communities, and no social
organisation of any form could exist without the power of one or
more individuals to order others.
Napoleon did not start the war that broke out in 1792 when he
was a mere lieutenant and continued, with one brief interruption,
until 1814. Which side was responsible for the outbreak and for the
continuing hostilities is fruitlessly debatable, since responsibility
cannot be laid squarely on one side or the other. The fighting cost
lives, for which responsibility is often heaped on Napoleon, which is
absurd, as all the belligerents must share the blame. And he was not
as profligate with the lives of his own soldiers as some.
French losses in the seven years of revolutionary government
(1792–99) are estimated at four to five hundred thousand; those
during the fifteen years of Napoleon’s rule are estimated at just
under twice as high, at eight to nine hundred thousand. Given that
these figures include not only dead, wounded, and sick but also
those reported as missing, whose numbers went up dramatically as
his ventures took the armies further afield, it is clear that battle
losses were lower under Napoleon than during the revolutionary
period—despite the increasing use of heavy artillery and the greater
size of the armies. The majority of those classed as missing were
deserters who either drifted back home or settled in other countries.
This is not to diminish the suffering or the trauma of the war, but to
put it in perspective.3

MY AIM IN THIS BOOK is not to justify or condemn, but to piece together

the life of the man born Napoleone Buonaparte, and to examine how
he became ‘Napoleon’ and achieved what he did, and how it came
about that he undid it.
In order to do so I have concentrated on verifiable primary
sources, treating with caution the memoirs of those such as
Bourrienne, Fouché, Barras, and others who wrote principally to
justify themselves or to tailor their own image, and have avoided
using as evidence those of the duchesse d’Abrantès, which were
written years after the events by her lover, the novelist Balzac. I also
ignore the various anecdotes regarding Napoleon’s birth and
childhood, believing that it is immaterial as well as unprovable that
he cried or not when he was born, that he liked playing with swords
and drums as a child, had a childhood crush on some little girl, or
that a comet was sighted at his birth and death. There are quite
enough solid facts to deal with.
I have devoted more space in relative terms to Napoleon’s
formative years than to his time in power, as I believe they hold the
key to understanding his extraordinary trajectory. As I consider the
military aspects only insofar as they produced an effect, on him and
his career or the international situation, the reader will find my
coverage very uneven. I give prominence to the first Italian
campaign because it demonstrates the ways in which Napoleon was
superior to his enemies and colleagues, and because it turned him
 2

Insular Dreams

THE MAN WHO had everything was born into a family of little
consequence in one of the poorest places in Europe, the island of
Corsica. It was also one of the most idiosyncratic, having never been
an independent political unit and yet never been fully a province or
colony of another state. It had always been a world of its own.
In the late Middle Ages, the Republic of Genoa established bases
at the anchorages of Bastia on the northeastern coast and Ajaccio in
the southwest to protect its shipping lanes and deny their use to
others. It garrisoned these with soldiers, mostly impoverished nobles
from the Italian mainland, and gradually extended its rule inland. But
the mountainous interior held little economic interest, and although
they penetrated it in order to put down insurgencies and exact what
contributions they could, the Genoese found it impossible to control
its feral denizens and largely left it alone, not even bothering to map
it.
The indigenous population preserved its traditional ways,
subsisting on a diet of chestnuts (from which even the local bread
was made), cheese, onions, fruit, and the occasional piece of goat or
pork, washed down with local wine. They dressed in homespun
brown cloth and spoke their own Italian patois. They were in
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