Two hundred years after his defeat at Waterloo in June, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte remains as controversial as he is important to the history of France. For his admirers, the First Emperor is as great a figure as any in his country’s past, a military genius who triumphed in at least fifty of his sixty battles and gave France its legal code, its administrative structure and a decade and a half of glory.
The British historian, Andrew Roberts, titled his monumental biography of the man simply: Napoleon the Great. In the opposing camp, another leading historian, Simon Schama, depicts Bonaparte as ‘the mortal enemy of freedom’ at the head of a social reactionary, militarised empire with ‘something inhuman about his brilliance, expended as it ultimately was entirely on himself’. Hearing that Napoleon had declared himself emperor, Beethoven removed the title page of his Eroica symphony, which he had dedicated to “Buonaparte” since ‘he is no more than a common mortal. Now he too will trample underfoot the rights of man, indulge only his ambition’.
More books have been written about him than any other French figure along with films from Hollywood and Paris. Recent works have appeared on both sides of the Channel evaluating and re-evaluating his life and achievements. The successes and the paradoxes of the Corsican who rose from a humble officer to dominate Europe make for fascinating reading.
Here we have a man who claimed to embody the principles of progress set out by the Revolution of 1789 but who presided over an authoritarian regime which rigged its plebiscites in cavalier fashion, re-introduced slavery in the colonies, created its own aristocracy, plundered occupied countries and imposed a legal code that discriminated harshly against women. Here is a military leader who claimed to care for his troops but who inflicted on them a disastrous invasion of Russia which resulted in the loss of half-a-million men through death on the battlefield, starvation and captivity. Here we have a strategic genius who never grasped the importance of the sea power and financial muscle which enabled Britain to withstand him.
Such conflicting currents run through French history since the Revolution and are a theme of my new book, The History of Modern France covering the last two centuries from 1789 right up to 2015. One thing is for sure, the debate will go on and will reflect the way the French see their own history.
The Currents of French History Run Deep
Napoleon’s meteoric rise from the rank of captain at the age of twenty-two to emperor at thirty-five, at the head of a highly personalised regime that sought to conquer Europe, created the image of a superman and bequeathed a powerful Napoleonic cult. Only Russia, Britain, Scandinavia and the European domains of the Ottomans escaped his imprint at one time or other.
His greatest victory, at Austerlitz in 1805 against a coalition of Austria, Britain, Russia and their smaller allies, led the following year to the end of the Holy Roman Empire as the humiliated Hapsburg Franz III became simply ruler of Austria, ceding territory in Italy and Bavaria to France, which reorganised wide areas of central Europe to its liking.