Napoleon

"Soon after his arrival at the Tuileries, Napoleon collected twenty-two statues of his heroes for the grand gallery, starting, inevitably, with Alexander and Julius Caesar but also featuring Hannibal, Scipio, Cicero, Cato, Frederick the Great, George Washington, Mirabeau and the revolutionary general the Marquis de Dampierre. The Duke of Marlborough, renowned for his victory at the battle of Bleinheim, was included, as was General Dugommier, whose presence alongside such genuine military giants as Gustavus Adolphus and Marshal Saxe must have been based on his perspicacity in spotting Napoleon’s worth at Toulon. Joubert was there too, since he was now safely dead."

"It was only in 1812, under French occupation and on an initiative of Napoleon who had attended a conference by a doctor from Aix-la-Chapelle, Gerhard Reumont, that over ten thousand children in the Roer department could be vaccinated against smallpox."

"I know, when necessary, to shed the lion's skin to wear that of the fox. Napoleon"

""A land with a known heart and an uncertain periphery," according to Giorgio Bocca, another true Piedmontese. "From Pliny, who writes of it and its capital Alba as a 'fertile land and a distinguished city, among those that make the region between the Apennines and the Po splendid' to Saint Bernard who tells the bishop of Milan about this 'country of Paradise', to the Corsican Napoleon, rhetorical as much as greedy, who first joyously announces 'Alba is ours, we are here in the best and most fertile country in the world' and then immediately drains the municipal coffers and empties the pockets of the landowners." He then concludes: "Surely, to the starving and ragged sans-culottes who followed Bonaparte through the poor lands of Millesimo and Cairo Montenotte, Alba and the Langhe must have seemed like the promised land, just as they did to us partisans of the mountain when we came down in '45. A happy place, fertile, distinguished but, I repeat, within what borders? One of the mysteries of the Langhe, one of its charms, is precisely this indefinability.""

"Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook’s three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar. He also brought biographies of Turenne, Condé, Saxe, Marlborough, Eugène of Savoy, Charles XII of Sweden and Bertrand du Guesclin, the notable French commander in the Hundred Years War. Poetry and drama had their place too, in the works of Ossian, Tasso, Ariosto, Homer, Virgil, Racine and Molière.6 With the Bible guiding him about the faith of the Druze and Armenians, the Koran about Muslims, and the Vedas about the Hindus, he would be well supplied with suitable quotations for his proclamations to the local populations virtually wherever this campaign was finally to take him. He also included Herodotus for his – largely fantastical – description of Egypt."

"A contemporary recalled Napoleon withdrawing to the school library to read Polybius, Plutarch, Arrian (‘with great delight’) and Quintus Curtius Rufus (for which he had ‘little taste’).39 Polybius’ Histories chronicled the rise of the Roman Republic and offered an eyewitness account of the defeat of Hannibal and the sack of Carthage; Plutarch’s Parallel Lives included sketches of Napoleon’s two greatest heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; Arrian wrote the Anabasis of Alexander, one of the best sources for Alexander’s campaigns; Quintus Curtius Rufus produced only one surviving work, a biography of Alexander."

"‘The hero of a tragedy, in order to interest us, should be neither wholly guilty nor wholly innocent . . . All weakness and all contradictions are unhappily in the heart of man, and present a colouring eminently tragic.’ Napoleon, on François-Just-Marie Raynouard’s play The Templars"

"Napoleon was able to compartmentalize his life to quite a remarkable degree, much more so even than most statesmen and great leaders. He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard."

"‘The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.’ Napoleon to the Marquis de Caulaincourt"

"Napoleon was the first commander to employ a chief-of-staff in its modern sense, and he couldn’t have chosen a more efficient one. With a memory second only to his own, Berthier could keep his head clear after twelve hours of taking dictation; on one occasion in 1809 he was summoned no fewer than seventeen times in a single night.15 The Archives Nationales, Bibliothèque Nationale and the Archives of the Grande Armée at Vincennes teem with orders in the neat secretarial script and short concise sentences that Berthier used to communicate with his colleagues, conveying Napoleon’s wishes in polite but firm terms, invariably starting ‘The Emperor requests, general, that on receipt of this order you will . . .’16 Among Berthier’s many qualities was a diplomatic nature so finely attuned that he somehow managed to persuade his wife, the Duchess Maria of Bavaria, to share a chateau with his mistress Madame Visconti (and vice versa). He rarely opposed Napoleon’s ideas directly except on strict logistical grounds, and built up a team that ensured the commander-in-chief’s wishes were quickly put into action. His special ability, amounting to something approaching genius, was to translate the sketchiest of general commands into precise written orders for every demi-brigade. Staff-work was rarely less than superbly efficient. To process Napoleon’s rapid-fire orders required a skilled team of clerks, orderlies, adjutants and aides-de-camp, and a very advanced filing system, and he often worked through the night. On one of the few occasions when Napoleon spotted an error in the troop numbers for a demi-brigade, he wrote to correct Berthier, adding: ‘I read these position statements with as much relish as a novel.’17"

"Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles."

"On the rare occasions when he discussed his Italian ancestry, he would say he was an heir to the Ancient Romans. ‘I am of the race that founds empires,’ he once boasted.4"

"This was deliberate; even at twenty-seven Napoleon was beginning to use his aides-de-camp, secretaries and domestic staff to regulate his accessibility and enhance his status."

"‘blunt in his manners, bold, enterprising and even ferocious’ – four adjectives that would serve to describe him for the rest of his life.48"

"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.’78 ‘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.’79"

"He proposed that three members of the town council be removed from office. ‘This measure is violent, possibly illegal, but essential,’ he wrote, ending with a quotation from Montesquieu: ‘Laws are like the statues of certain divinities which on some occasions must be veiled.’13 In this instance, he didn’t get his way."

"‘I no longer regarded myself as a simple general,’ Napoleon later said of his victory, ‘but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage. At that point was born the first spark of high ambition.’51 He repeated this to so many different people on so many different occasions throughout his life that Lodi really can be taken as a watershed moment in his career. Vaunting ambition can be a terrible thing, but if allied to great ability – a protean energy, grand purpose, the gift of oratory, near-perfect recall, superb timing, inspiring leadership – it can bring about extraordinary outcomes."

"Napoleon believed that ‘bloodletting is among the ingredients of political medicine’, but he also thought that quick and certain punishments meant that large-scale repression could largely be avoided.76"

"(‘One must speak to the soul,’ he once said of his battlefield speeches, ‘it is the only way to electrify the men.’50)"

"Like all athletes, boxers, cyclists capable of sustaining prolonged effort, but also like those great impassive figures, self-mastered, Napoleon, General de Gaulle, Boussac has a slow-beating pulse. He belongs to the race of men of the last quarter-hour. Built for conquest, with iron health, Herculean energy, and an inflexible character, he knows he was born for victory. When it happens, why should he be moved? But while the heart remains cold in the face of triumph, the mind that conceived everything, planned everything, surely does not remain indifferent. In these victories, what part is luck, the merit of personal intuition, or the value of the advice received?"

"analyze how people succeed or fail. (Napoleon and Hitler launched majoxcampaigns without adequate con!ingeTicypiaTmTn|^ likesto point out. McCaw has never been one~To~start Plan A unless Plan B isih readiness.)"

"Never go through the front door unless you've got a back door, and the hardest thing to get people to do is to not commit themselves to one course of action ... [to think] about what you're going to do next. Playing chess with my father, I give him credit for that. I mean, if you haven't thought three moves ahead and what if he does this, and what if that happens, and what if that happens, in today's world you can't predict what's going to happen. . . . You can take chances, but you never, ever play the game without an out. Maybe that's from being a history major, [studying] everybody in history who has failed to have a back door, whether it's Hitler, Napoleon, and down the list. If you take a chance, always have a back door. That's the fun of it."

"Napoleon, a porcelain figurine of Admiral Nelson, and a photograph of the South African prime minister Jan Smuts."

"Napoleon had the requirement to appoint generals himself—to say nothing of marshals—and used to ask the question: "A-t-il de la chance?"—Is he lucky? I am well aware that I am not entirely deserving of everything I own, and it can probably be said that in business, luck is often close to 50 percent of success. The imbalance between what was given to me and what was made available to me makes me inclined to gather wisdom along the way and in my professional practice seek out people with whom I can create value together, preferably those with that little extra Napoleon wanted to see in his leaders. For human creativity is the most"

"Napoleon had the requirement to appoint generals himself—to say nothing of marshals—and used to ask the question: "A-t-il de la chance?"—Is he lucky? I am well aware that I am not entirely deserving of everything I own, and it can probably be said that in business, luck is often close to 50 percent of success. The imbalance between what was given to me and what was made available to me makes me inclined to gather wisdom along the way and in my professional practice seek out people with whom I can create value together, preferably those with that little extra Napoleon wanted to see in his leaders. For human creativity is the most important resource in our world. With that knowledge, Latour has evolved."

"Ortega offers an explanation of how such a person can get an enterprise started. In the context of the career of Julius Caesar, an entrepreneur who started without power, Ortega says of the state: Human life, by its very nature, has to be dedicated to something, an enterprise glorious or humble, a destiny illustrious or trivial. . . . The State begins when groups, naturally divided, find themselves obliged to live in common. This obligation is not of brute force, but implies an impelling purpose, a common task which is set before the dispersed groups. Before all, the State is a plan of action and a Programme of Collaboration. The men are called upon so that together they may do something. . . . It is pure dynamism, the will to do something in common, and thanks to this the idea of the State, is bounded by no physical limits. . . . Never has anyone ruled on this earth by basing his rule essentially on any other thing than public opinion. . . . Even the man who attempts to rule with janissaries depends on their opinion and the opinion which the rest of the inhabitants have of them. The truth is that there is no ruling with janissaries. As Talleyrand said to Napoleon, “You can do everything with bayonets, sire, except sit on them!” (The Revolt of the Masses, chapter 14, “Who Rules in the World?”)"

"A self-described student of history and economics and an avid reader of biographies, Desmarais was once asked who had served as his models. “I respect greatly men of strong personalities,” he re¬ plied. “If I have to name some I’d say Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Franklin Roosevelt, Mao Tse-Tung.”1 At other times he has admitted to a fascination with Napoleon."

"Napoleon was decreeing that ‘Horse-racing shall be established in those departments of the Empire the most remarkable for the horses they breed: prizes shall be awarded for the fleetest horses.’46 Of course there was a military application to this but it is illustrative of the cornucopia of his thinking even, or perhaps particularly, in a crisis. In the same month he also declared that dancing near churches shouldn’t be forbidden, for ‘Dancing isn’t evil . . . If everything the bishops said was to be believed, then balls, plays, fashions would be forbidden and the Empire turned into one great convent.’47"

"‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles . . . What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.’ Napoleon on St Helena"

"‘I must give the people their full rights in religion. Philosophers will laugh, but the nation will bless me.’ Napoleon to Chaptal"

"‘For myself, I have but one requirement, that of success.’ Napoleon to Decrès, August 1805"

"What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.84"

"‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority; it is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’ Napoleon on Caesar at the battle of Munda"

"Even at this hour, before this great day shall pass away and be lost in the ocean of eternity, your emperor must address you, and say how satisfied he is with the conduct of all those who have had the good fortune to fight in this memorable battle. Soldiers! You are the finest warriors in the world. The recollection of this day, and of your deeds, will be eternal! Thousands of ages hereafter, as long as the events of the universe continue to be related, will it be told that a Russian army of 76,000 men, hired by the gold of England, was annihilated by you on the plains of Olmütz.121"

"‘During the Revolutionary wars the plan was to stretch out, to send columns to the right and left,’ Napoleon said years later, ‘which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was that the evening before a fight, instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I massed them there.’41"

"In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.103"

"Each corps needed to be large enough to fix an entire enemy army into position on the battlefield, while the others could descend to reinforce and relieve it within twenty-four hours, or, more usefully, outflank or possibly even envelop the enemy. Individual corps commanders – who tended to be marshals – would be given a place to go to and a date to arrive there by and would be expected to do the rest themselves. Having never commanded a company, battalion, regiment, brigade, division or corps of infantry or cavalry in battle, and trusting to his marshals’ experience and competence, Napoleon was generally content to leave logistics and battlefield tactics to them, so long as they delivered what he required.38 Corps needed to be capable of making significant inroads into an enemy force on the offensive too.39 It was an inspired system, originally the brainchild of Guibert and Marshal de Saxe.40 Napoleon employed it in almost all his coming victories – most notably at Ulm, Jena, Friedland, Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden – not wishing to relive the perils of Marengo where his forces had been too widely spread. His defeats – particularly at Aspern-Essling, Leipzig and Waterloo – would come when he failed to employ the corps system properly. ‘During the Revolutionary wars the plan was to stretch out, to send columns to the right and left,’ Napoleon said years later, ‘which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was that the evening before a fight, instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I massed them there.’41 Napoleon pioneered an operational level of warfare that lies between strategy and tactics. His corps became the standard unit adopted by every European army by 1812, and which lasted until 1945."

"Napoleon expostulated, ‘Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.’8"

"Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon . . . I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’94"

"war.70 The cynical remark made about d’Enghien’s execution – ‘It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder’ –"

"‘We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.’ Napoleon to the Conseil d’État, 1804"

"‘We must show the Bourbons that the blows that they strike at others will rebound on their own heads.’ Napoleon on the Duc d’Enghien"

"The word ‘impatience’ recurs often in Ségur’s narrative, and might almost be considered the most constant of all Napoleon’s military, indeed personal, traits. Of those closest to him on this campaign – Berthier, Mortier, Duroc, Caulaincourt, Rapp and Ségur – all mention his great impatience throughout, even when his plans were ahead of schedule."

"Napoleon made little effort to conceal his role-model as a lawgiver, civil engineer and nation-builder. ‘He reformed the calendar,’ he wrote of Julius Caesar, ‘he worked on the wording of the civil, criminal and penal codes. He set up projects to beautify Rome with many fine buildings. He worked on compiling a general map of the Empire and statistics for the provinces; he charged Varro with setting up an extensive public library; he announced the project to drain the Pontine marshes.’77 Although it is too early to say whether the institutions Napoleon put in place will last as long as Caesar’s, he clearly put down what he called ‘some masses of granite as anchors in the soul of France’."

"‘After great revolutions all sorts of events are to be expected, before things calm down.’ Napoleon to Jourdan, January 1800"

"‘The masses . . . should be directed without their being aware of it.’ Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804"

"‘What a pity the man wasn’t lazy.’ Talleyrand on Napoleon"

"‘The art of appointing men’, Napoleon told Mollien, ‘is not nearly so difficult as the art of allowing those appointed to attain their full worth.’32"

"‘If he lasts a year, he’ll go far.’ Talleyrand on Napoleon’s consulship"

"‘The frontiers of states are either large rivers, or chains of mountains, or deserts. Of all these obstacles to the march of an army, the most difficult to overcome is the desert.’ Napoleon’s Military Maxim No."

"‘I returned to France at a fortunate moment, when the existing government was so bad it could not continue. I became its chief; everything else followed of course – there’s my story in a few words.’ Napoleon on St Helena"

"‘The decision that Caesar took to have a hand cut off all the soldiers was completely atrocious. He was clement towards his own in civil war, but cruel and often ferocious towards the Gauls.’ Napoleon, Caesar’s Wars"

"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."

"‘The men who have changed the world never succeeded by winning over the powerful, but always by stirring the masses. The first method is a resort to intrigue and only brings limited results. The latter is the course of genius and changes the face of the world.’ Napoleon on St Helena"

"‘If I had stayed in the East, I would have founded an empire, like Alexander.’ Napoleon to General Gourgaud on St Helena"

"‘In my opinion the French do not care for liberty and equality, they have but one sentiment, that of honour . . . The soldier demands glory, distinction, rewards.’ Napoleon to the Conseil d’État, April 1802"

"‘Winning is not enough if one doesn’t take advantage of success.’ Napoleon to Joseph, November 1808"

"Napoleon flattered his troops with references to the ancient world – though only a tiny minority would have been conversant with the Classics – and when with a special flourish he compared them to eagles, or told them how much their families and neighbours would honour them, he captivated the minds of his men, often for life."

"During military reviews, which could last up to five hours, Napoleon cross-examined his soldiers about their food, uniforms, shoes, general health, amusements and regularity of pay, and he expected to be told the truth. ‘Conceal from me none of your wants,’ he told the 17th Demi-Brigade, ‘suppress no complaints you have to make of your superiors. I am here to do justice to all, and the weaker party is especially entitled to my protection.’88 The notion that le petit caporal was on their side against les gros bonnets (‘big-hats’) was generally held throughout the army."

"His constant references to the ancient world had the intended effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense that their lives – and, should it come to that, their deaths in battle – mattered, that they were an integral part of a larger whole that would resonate through French history. There are few things in the art of leadership harder to achieve than this, and no more powerful impetus to action."

"Napoleon learned many essential leadership lessons from Julius Caesar, especially his practice of admonishing troops he considered to have fallen below expectations, as at Rivoli in November 1796. In his book Caesar’s Wars, which he wrote in exile on St Helena, he recounts the story of a mutiny in Rome: Caesar had laconically agreed to his soldiers’ demands to be demobilized, but then he addressed them with ill-concealed contempt as ‘citizens’ rather than ‘soldiers’ or ‘comrades’. The impact was swift and telling. ‘Finally,’ he concludes, ‘the result of this moving scene was to win the continuation of their services.’90 Far more often, of course, he lavished praise: ‘Your three battalions could be as six in my eyes,’ he called to the 44th Line in the Eylau campaign. ‘And we shall prove it!’ they shouted back.91"

"When campaign marches halted for lunch, Napoleon and Berthier would invite the aides-de-camp and orderlies to eat with them, which Bausset recalled as ‘truly a fête for every one of us’. He also ensured that wine from his dinner table was always given to his sentries. Small things, perhaps, but they were appreciated and helped breed devotion."

"‘In war,’ he was to say in 1808, ‘moral factors account for three-quarters of the whole; relative material strength accounts for only one-quarter.’82"

"Napoleon had fought against Austrian forces that were invariably superior in number, but which he had often outnumbered on the field of battle thanks to his repeated strategy of the central position. A profound study of the history and geography of Italy before he ever set foot there had proved extremely helpful, as had his willingness to experiment with others’ ideas, most notably the bataillon carré and the ordre mixte, and his minute calculations of logistics, for which his prodigious memory was invaluable. Because he kept his divisions within one day’s march of each other, he was able to concentrate them for battle and, once joined, he showed great calmness under pressure."

"It was in the early Italian campaigns that Napoleon’s military philosophy and habits first became visible. He believed above all in the maintenance of strong esprit de corps. Although this combination of spirit and pride is by its nature intangible, he knew an army that had it could achieve wonders. ‘Remember it takes ten campaigns to create esprit de corps,’ he was to tell Joseph in 1807, ‘which can be destroyed in an instant.’83"

"Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come."

"‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard,’ he once said. ‘When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am – asleep.’92"

"‘In order to lead an army you have ceaselessly to attend to it, be ahead of the news, provide for everything.’ Napoleon to Joseph, April 1813"

"‘There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.’ Napoleon to Talleyrand, October 1797"