Napoleon buried the old order for all time

(Napoleon: život - Napoleon: A Life; Andrew Roberts; Viking, New York; 2014; 926 p.)

The main question answered by recent biographies of Napoleon is whether the great military leader was really a progressive military genius and statesman. Or he was just a reckless tyrant, dreamer and mythomaniac, similar to Hitler and Stalin. Andrew Roberts is an obvious apologist, but he is also an excellent historian. He seems to have no fear that the author's admiration for Napoleon will obscure the evidence he will present in full light.

So the advantage that this biography has over others does not consist only of the extraordinary walkability and the author's effort to visit 53 of the 60 locations where Napoleon's battles took place, as well as the extensive digging of 70 archives in 15 countries, but actually the use of Napoleon's complete correspondence with more than 33.000 signed letters, only recently disclosed for the first time.

"A historian who doesn't visit a battle scene is akin to a detective who doesn't bother to go to a crime scene," says Roberts.

The author also notes that previous biographies are flawed due to persistent reliance on falsehoods with which Napoleon, with a clear tendency to create myths about himself similar to those of idols such as Caesar and Frederick the Great, adorned all narratives about himself. Roberts therefore notes Napoleon's bureaucratic agility when, in just one day, October 1804, he wrote 22 dispatches to people in all spheres of government, where he criticized, scolded, charmed, but also humbly apologized for his famous outbursts of anger.

After all, Roberts also asks himself the question that still bothers - and maybe doesn't bother - historians today. Napoleon is most often accused of being a militarist, but war was declared on him twice as many times as he declared it on others. For the invasion of Portugal, Spain and even Russia, Roberts will blame British politics, propaganda and finance. That is, one of the decisions that will lead Napoleon to focus on Russia was not in itself his biggest mistake, primarily because Napoleon himself "defeated the Russians three times since 1799 (...), so it is understandable that he thought that can repeat that success," even in the middle of winter.

The Battle of Borodino (1812) was the bloodiest battle in history until the First Battle of the Marne 100 years later. It was a Pyrrhic victory that could have been a heavy defeat. Despite the disaster that, at the end of the Russian campaign, cost the French half a million soldiers, those who survived still wanted to fight for the emperor. That may say something about Napoleon as a general.

Roberts claims that Napoleon never even wanted to go to Moscow, due to the lack of reliable enough logistics for such a maneuver. He was allegedly drawn to it by the guerilla war that the Russians wisely waged. They pushed the French deeper and deeper into their territory, thus spoiling their plans to fight the Russians only along their border, face to face. Be that as it may, a general must ultimately be judged by his battles won, and of Napoleon's 60 battles and sieges, he was definitively defeated in seven (he won 46). And the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), pointed out that his enemy was the greatest military leader of all time, without competition.

Some historians dispute these military achievements of his, claiming that he shamelessly exaggerated them, and that is why they have acquired mythical proportions. Parallel to that, Tolstoy's emphasis on Kutuzov in War and Peace, which later continued in Stalinist Russia - that he was a greater general than Napoleon - makes no sense from a historical point of view. War and Peace ends anyway in December 1812, halfway through the war against Napoleon, but Kutuzov certainly cannot be denied the obvious military virtuosity he possessed. If you ask Tolstoy, the valid Russian army did not get Napoleon, but the mere improvisation and happy circumstances of ordinary, poor Russians whose moral strength and patriotism was embodied in the figure of Kutuzov, which also makes no sense.

Let's not forget that the era of 1812-15. was the era of creating nationalist myths about the future absolutist monarchies of Britain, France, Germany and Russia. There is no better recipe for such a thing than a global heroic war.

Adam Zamoyski's anti-Napoleonic book, 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow (2004), states, albeit crudely, that Napoleon won his greatest victory at Austerlitz (1805) only because Tsar Alexander I rejected Kutuzov's plans and decided to accept the order of the Austrian general. In Russia Against Napoleon (2009), one of the first "Western" studies of only the Russian war effort and logistics against the French, Dominik Lieven does not draw that conclusion, although he presents much the same facts. There is certainly an impression that Kutuzov, whom Alexander I disliked, was rather neglected in that battle.

If Napoleon was as evil as Hitler, as most biographies of him claim, why did he have such a great sense of humor, Roberts wonders. If he had no regard for people and practiced Corsican revenge vendettas, why didn't he punish any of the people who repeatedly betrayed him? If he was chasing world domination, which is why he divided Europe with the Russian emperor during the signing of the peace in Tilsit (1807), when, by the way, he declared that at that moment "he was probably happier than ever before".

If he was such a beast, why did the emperor's closest people decide to write positive memories of Napoleon years after his death, while supporters of the pre-revolutionary Old Order tried 30 times to take his life? Why did many liberal Britons constantly visit him in Paris, Elba and St. Helena?

Alexander Dumas, despite the injustices committed against his beloved father whom Napoleon did not tolerate, Thomas-Alexander, a great French general on the battlefields in Italy, Austria and Egypt, wrote a biography of Napoleon; he even presented him as a kind of martyr in The Count of Monte Cristo. Dima's father was not awarded the Legion of Honor, because the Napoleonic law did not allow medals to be awarded to blacks (see the book The Black Count by Tom Rice). During 1802/03. Napoleon will legalize the decision by which dark-skinned people will be forbidden to live in Paris and its surroundings, and the right to mixed marriages will be annulled. Roberts, unfortunately, does not record these injustices.

Napoleon's fifteen-year reign, Roberts says, preserved the best aspects of the French Revolution, rejected the worst, and made sure that, even when the Bourbons came back to power, they could not restore the Old Order. Undeniably, Napoleon gave birth to the modern French republic and was the first to consolidate and expand meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious tolerance, modern secular education, etc., but also the largest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire, which, over time, was embraced by about forty countries Around the world. Napoleon also created a secret police, and would expel anyone he disagreed with (see Zweig's book, Joseph Fouche).

This is not Roberts' first book about Napoleon, but it will certainly be one of the must-haves, at least when dealing with that topic; the British edition bears the even more enthusiastic title, Napoleon the Great. Most important of all, it seems that in the end the reader is left alone to make his own judgement.