Napoleon Bonaparte - The man to bring down

From "Destin Français", by Éric Zemmour

Napoleon is no longer understood. He can no longer be understood. Bonaparte, on the other hand, is understood better and better: the ambitious, the self-made man, the upstart, has become our daily lot. Any of our heads of state who are determined or imperious are compared to Bonaparte. Bonapartes are legion, in every country and every field. We are all Bonapartes, at least in our dreams.

Napoleon is not Bonaparte. “Napoleon is a synthesis of the superhuman and the inhuman,” said Nietzsche. “He is out of line, out of frame, neither a Frenchman nor a man of the 18th century,” added Taine. Bonaparte is a man of the Enlightenment; Napoleon is the quintessential romantic figure. Bonaparte is an avid reader of Rousseau; Napoleon “disgusted himself of Rousseau since [he] saw the Orient; the savage man is a dog.” Bonaparte is a young man full of passions; Napoleon is a man governed by reason. Bonaparte is obsessed with his destiny, Napoleon with History. Bonaparte is his mother's son; Napoleon is the heir of Charlemagne. Bonaparte is Corsican, Napoleon is Roman. Bonaparte has a numerous, cumbersome, and arrogant family; Napoleon “has no family unless it is French.” Bonaparte is an Italian condotierre of the 15th century, a contemporary of Dante, of Michelangelo, of Cesare Borgia. Napoleon is the Diocletian of Ajaccio, the Constantin of the Concordat, the Justinian of the Civil Code. “Napoleon belongs to ancient humanity,” says Nietzsche. Bonaparte has the fury of the ambitious; Napoleon, the ridicule of the parvenu. It is Bonaparte within himself who exclaims: “What a novel that is my life!”; it is Napoleon who never ceases to regret: “Ah, if only I was my grandson.”

THE SAVIOR OF THE REVOLUTION

“The left does not forgive him for having liquidated the Revolution. Yet, he saved it. This left should reread Ernest Renan: “If the royalist reaction had prevailed in 1796 and 1797, the Restoration would have occurred then with much more forthright attitudes, and the Republic would have been in the history of France what it is in the history of England, an inconsequential incident. Napoleon saved the Revolution, gave it form, organization, and unparalleled military prestige.” The right does not forgive him “for making France smaller than when he took charge of it,” according to the famous words of Bainville, echoed by de Gaulle, forgetting that it was he who saved the Directory from a military debacle that would have led to the partition of France among the victors. It is precisely the gratitude of the French that will earn Napoleon his crown, as Stendhal analyzed: “General Bonaparte could say to each Frenchman: ‘By me, you are still French; by me, you are not subject to a Prussian judge or a Piedmontese governor; because of me, you are not a slave to some irritated master who fears revenge. Thus, suffer of the fact that I am your Emperor.’”

Our era thinks like Chateaubriand, long misunderstood when he admitted: “My admiration for Bonaparte has always been great, even when I attacked Napoleon with more vigor.” We reproach him for having loved war too much, when he merely defended himself against four successive coalitions; that he ended the war that the Revolution had declared on all of Europe through a series of peace treaties, as soon as he came to power, with England, Austria, Naples, and Turkey. We are pacifists who swear only by just wars, while Napoleon considers that “inevitable wars are always just.”

His limitless imperialism is denounced, yet the bulk of French expansion occurred under the Directory. The English pursued him with vengeance for having made the port of Antwerp a “pistol to England's head,” even though Belgium had become a French province by the will of the same Directory. Paul Kennedy taught us in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that empires ultimately die from their economy and finances when these are drained beyond sustainability by military expenditures. It is forgotten that Napoleon had his military expeditions financed by the vanquished and refused, on principle, to incur debt. It is for this very reason that the financiers of the City had decided on his downfall.

We speak of the “wars of Napoleon” when we should say the “wars of the Revolution”; and even, following the historian Pierre Gaxotte, of a “second Hundred Years' War” between France and England, from the League of Augsburg (1688-1697) to Waterloo (1815), including the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713), the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the American War of Independence (1776-1783), and the wars of the French Revolution since 1793, culminating in the final French surrender. Napoleon implemented the projects of the Committee of Public Safety, which, after beheading the king, had continued the work of his Capetian ancestors. Napoleon completed the French Europe that Louis XIV had dreamed of. Napoleon fulfilled a thousand years of French history. He is the apotheosis of the French dream; in both senses of the term: completion and definitive failure.

The Emperor is ahead of France, ahead of Europe, ahead of the world. He instinctively understood that the world was changing in scale. He does not know it, but his rise to power in 1800 coincides with the inflection point of humanity’s demographic curves, which took millions of years to reach its first billion inhabitants and is now beginning its exponential growth that will lead to seven billion in two centuries. With its twenty-five million inhabitants, France was the “China of Europe” in the 18th century. A privileged position on the continent. But its birth rate will collapse between 1793 and 1799, not because of the wars of the Empire, as demonstrated by the demographer Jacques Dupâquier in his book Révolution et population. France will enter its demographic winter, which will make it a “country of the elderly” by the end of the 19th century, frightened and dominated by the youthful powers of Germany, England, Russia, and the United States.

The French Empire was the only solution to avoid this fatal demotion. Napoleon drew from Charlemagne’s Western Empire what would allow him to embrace the future from a position of strength. This magnificent isolation of a prophet did not escape Paul Valéry a century later: “Napoleon seems to be the only one who foresaw what was to happen and what could be undertaken. He thought on the scale of the modern world, was not understood, and said so. But he came too early; the times were not ripe; his means were far from ours. After him, people went back to considering the neighbor's hectares and reasoning about the short-term…” Another century later, only a high dignitary of the American Empire would be able to grasp the magnitude of the stakes: “During the Napoleonic episode, [France] extended its hegemony over almost the entire continent. Had this enterprise succeeded, France would have become a true global power. However, its defeat by a European coalition restored the continental balance of power.”

THE PAST BLINDS US

To understand Napoleon, one must, like Léon Bloy was still capable of in 1912, “feel oneself the contemporary of the men of 1814; this history is so alive for me that I truly suffer from the abandonment of the project to invade England, just as I previously suffered from the evacuation of Egypt; despite knowing this cruel series of disasters, it is impossible for me not to hope, at every moment, that they will not happen.” The past blinds us. The unchallenged dominance of the English navy on the seas and England's industrial power in the 19th century give us the illusion that the same was true in 1800. This is not the case.

The battle is then undecided, nothing is yet written. The leaders in London are aware that between France and them, “it is a fight between two giants.” England defends the freedom of trade and its dominance over global exchanges. It aims to destroy the French and Dutch Empires in the Antilles or the Indian Ocean. Napoleon, on the other hand, intends to catch up with France's economic lag through politics and the conquest of territories. It is the battle of Land and Sea. Napoleon will say to Caulaincourt: “I abuse power. But it is in the interest of the continent. While England truly abuses its strength, its haughty power amidst the storms and solely in its own interest. The merchants of London are ready to sacrifice Europe to their speculations! But England's mask will fall. If I triumph over England, Europe will bless me!”

The idea of annihilating England was a common one in France at the end of the Ancien Régime. Napoleon said that “nature had made England one of our islands.” Robespierre “hated the English people.” Napoleon expressed well public sentiment well when he said: “There is not a single Frenchman who would not prefer death to submitting to conditions that would make us slaves to England and erase France from the ranks of the powers.” The French thirst to avenge six centuries of insults, dating back to the Hundred Years’ War. After making the Revolution and daring to guillotine their king, they feel that they are the only reasonable beings in Europe.

We have since then distanced ourselves so much from this fierce nationalism that we no longer understand it, or we are ashamed of it. It is as if we are reading Cioran: “As long as a nation is aware of its superiority, it is cruel and respected; as soon as it loses that awareness, it becomes humane and no longer counts.” In 1800, the French are driven by a spirit of conquest. Military conquest is accompanied by a conquest through ideas, language, law, and even administrative principles, which our Italian and Rhineland neighbors are eager to adopt. A delegation from Cologne requests to be annexed to the French Republic. Genoa, following a referendum, asks for its annexation, after that of Piedmont.

The English realize, to their dismay, that peace favors French influence even better than war. This is what will drive them to break the Peace of Amiens, only a year after signing it, in 1802. We have been taught that Napoleon’s major weapon, after his failure at Trafalgar, was the “Continental Blockade.” This blockade led Napoleon to send his customs officers, and subsequently his soldiers, from Madrid to Moscow, from Lisbon to Hamburg. To excess and to ruin. In a recent book¹, a clever historian reverses the traditional analysis. Psychological logic favors his argument: the blockade is, for Napoleon, merely a retaliatory measure, a response to violence with violence, “injustice for injustice, arbitrariness for arbitrariness.” It is a reaction to the blockade that the English navy had already deployed to prohibit trade with the French colonies. He does not make it the end-all and be-all of his policy. The blockade is a means of pressure to foment political tensions in London, to attempt to topple a belligerent Tory government; it can even promote, behind these customs barriers, the growth of French industry, as well as Belgian, Swiss, Rhenish, and Tuscan industries.

Napoleon does not have in mind the creation of a great continental common market, as the Europeans would build in the 1950s. Napoleon’s project is primarily political: to unify the continent around France, in the interest of France. Napoleon is not the father of Europe, but of a greater France. His gigantic project has only one enemy and one obstacle: England. And England has only one shield: its navy. To destroy Carthage, Rome had to build a navy powerful enough to defeat its rival on its own terrain. Napoleon, once again, follows in the footsteps of his illustrious model. He undertakes an enormous project: the construction of a navy that can rival the Royal Navy. This navy existed: it had been built by Louis XVI. It had defeated the English Navy during the American War of Independence. The revolutionary turmoil and the emigration of aristocratic officers destroyed it. Everything must be started anew. The Emperor devotes all the money he can and all the men he can to this endeavor. His entire policy is illuminated by his maritime challenge. And first among these are his annexations of territories, starting in 1810: Holland, Spain, Portugal, countries of both sailors and coasts. He would smugly say: “Louis XIV only had Brest, me I have all the coastlines of Europe.”

The Spanish rebellion is an unpleasant surprise for him and a festering wound for his Grande Armée; many historians have wondered why he did not personally intervene to quell it and drive out Wellington's English forces. Some have seen in this a weariness of a mature man, decided to indulge in the carnal pleasures of his young new wife, Marie-Louise. One can also discern a deliberate strategy to draw as many English troops as possible to deplete the British soil. He then confides to Caulaincourt: “It is because England is in Spain and obliged to stay there that it does not worry me. You understand nothing of affairs.” He is already preparing invasion plans via Ireland, where General Hoche, sent by the Directory, had failed. He awaits his moment, or rather that of his ships. 1812? 1813? He rejoices when the Royal Navy suffers its first setbacks in a clash with the American navy. Napoleon immediately sends a message of encouragement to the President of the United States. But this is a Napoleon after the retreat from Russia. A weakened, exhausted Napoleon, living on borrowed time. The Russian alliance had, however, been the great affair of his reign.

THE IMPOSSIBLE RUSSIAN ALLIANCE

At Saint Helena, Napoleon would confide that the Tilsit Conference (1807) was the happiest moment of his life. He believed he had seduced and convinced the Tsar of the utility and effectiveness of the “alliance of the two greatest powers in the world.” As usual, he moves too quickly; he does not realize that one does not sign an alliance treaty when the ink on the peace treaty is barely dry. He presses the Tsar to join his fight against England. He describes the grandiose prospects of their sharing of the world: France will reign over Western Europe while Russia, seizing the European lands of the Ottoman Empire from Constantinople to the Dardanelles, will exert its influence over the East. Napoleon is ready to give the Tsar guardianship over the two German powers, Prussia and Austria. He keeps Germany and Italy, with the consent of the medium-sized German powers (Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, united in the Confederation of the Rhine), not forgetting Piedmont, Lombardy, or Genoa: Napoleon invents NATO a hundred and fifty years before the Americans.

Once again, Napoleon took up a project of the Directory, which, with rare insight, had understood that an alliance with distant and autocratic Russia was the best choice for France, since that country, due to its very remoteness, both geographical and cultural, had the least to fear from the ideological contagion of the revolutionary armies. The reverse Russian alliance was born, but unfortunately, it would only take shape a century later, when a France weakened by defeat at the hands of Bismarck's Prussia sought support to resist German hegemony.

It will then be a defensive strategy, whereas Napoleon was on the offensive. He draws up grandiose plans where the French army and the Russian army would go as far as India, not to retake their empire from the English, but to harass them, frighten them, and open another front. The English do not take the threat lightly: already, when Bonaparte landed in Egypt, the London Stock Exchange collapsed; the squadrons of the Indian Ocean were put on alert and the garrisons of the British trading posts were reinforced, before Nelson destroyed the French ships in the Battle of the Nile. Napoleon uses every means at his disposal in his strategy to encircle the British Empire in India. He even goes so far as to ally himself with the Shah of Iran, to whom he sends weapons and instructors to train his army.

The Tsar is fascinated by the personality of the “king of battles.” The fascination will not last. The young prince is harassed by his family and court, who despise the child of the Revolution, a regicide and deicide. The Tsar will soon descend into a mysticism that will ultimately drive him mad. He gradually falls under the influence of the priests, who assure him that he will vanquish the Antichrist and be the sword of God. While Alexander showers Napoleon with affection, he writes to his sister, his mother, his ‘cousins,’ the Emperor of Austria, and the King of Prussia, ‘that the hour of vengeance will one day come.’ He continues to receive English money to prepare for revenge and fears the British secret services, who had already assassinated his father with his tacit approval.

THE EMPEROR’S NAIVETY

Napoleon has no choice. He must trust him. His entire system depends on it. When the court of Saint Petersburg refuses to give him one of its daughters in marriage, he swaps the Russian for the Austrian. He will go from Charybdis to Scylla, as he will soon discover. The Pole Poniatowski informs him that the Tsar is preparing for war against France. We are at the beginning of 1811. Napoleon decides, with a heavy heart, to preempt him. The cohort of six hundred thousand men he has assembled cannot remain idle for long in a purely defensive position. The mobilization of such a force is horribly expensive, in any case beyond what the French budget allows. And Napoleon refuses, on principle, to borrow. He has no desire to venture into the vastness of Russia, when his eyes are fixed only on England. As in 1805, he is forced to abandon the descent on the British coasts to stop an adversary coming from the continent. A fateful destiny. He says to Savary as he departs: “Whoever could have spared me this war would have done me a great service; but here it is, we must see it through.”

Dostoevsky claims that it was neither the winter nor patriotism that defeated the Grande Armée, but the incoherence and disorder of its adversary. Napoleon was ultimately swallowed by the Russian chaos. As Moscow burns, Napoleon, dismayed yet impressed by the heroic fanaticism of his enemies, writes to the Tsar: “The beautiful and magnificent city of Moscow no longer exists… Humanity, the interests of Your Majesty and of this great city, demanded that it be left in trust… it should have been left with administrations, magistrates, and civilian guards. This is how it was done twice in Vienna, as well as in Berlin and Madrid.” The Tsar will ultimately win this Homeric struggle: a Pyrrhic victory. He hopes to replace the Napoleonic system on the continent with his Holy Alliance. In his history of Russia, Solzhenitsyn will acknowledge that Alexander made a grave strategic error by sacrificing the French alliance. He believed he could impose Russian tutelage over Europe; he will discover too late that he has pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for English hegemony over Europe and the world. This British imperialism that his successors will soon confront in the famous “Great Game” in Afghanistan.

The history of the Russian alliance is a condensed version of Napoleon’s fate. Contrary to the image we have retained of him, it was not his brutality, arrogance, insensitivity, insatiable appetite for conquests, or dreams of grandeur that caused his downfall. It was quite the opposite. His eagerness to make peace led to the Emperor’s ruin; his leniency toward the monarchies that had attacked him, his relentless pursuit of allies who continuously deceived him, and, let’s face it, his naivety.

The new French Republic could only survive by surrounding itself with other republics. For once, Napoleon did not continue the work of the Directory and its so-called “sister republics.” This was a grave mistake. He tried to imitate the Bourbons by placing his family on thrones. After Marengo (1800), Austerlitz (1805), and Wagram (1809), he spared the Habsburgs, who would later deliver the final blow. After Jena (1806), he allowed the Prussian dynasty to survive, and they eagerly prepared their revenge, which would come at Leipzig in 1813. At Austerlitz, Tsar Alexander pleaded with his magnanimous victor to withdraw with the remnants of his army, provoking the prophetic anger of General Vandamme: “To spare them today is to invite them to be in Paris in six years.” After Friedland (1807), Napoleon did not touch Russian territory, much to the Tsar’s astonishment, who believed it to be a miracle from God. At Wagram, he neglected to break apart the Austrian monarchy. As a good Mediterranean, he could not imagine that the Emperor of Austria would ever turn against him after he had given him a grandson.

Each time, Napoleon realized too late that the ally he had chosen — whether Prussian, Austrian, or Russian — had deceived him. He would even go so far as to entrust his fate to England’s generosity, demonstrating how unwilling he was to recognize the hatred the English bore him. He did not do what the Allies would later impose on the Habsburg Empire in 1919, or on Germany in 1945, nor what Stalin would impose on Eastern Europe, conquered by Russian tanks at the end of World War II. Bonaparte’s hand was not as firm as Napoleon’s spirit. He was not the monster he would have needed to be. We all know Joséphine’s famous remark: “You humiliate too much and punish too little.” Élie Faure responded to the Empress, a century later: “He did not have time to be cruel. The strong man may curse the stone he stumbles over or the thorn that tears him, but he forgets the stone and the thorn a second later. He even forgets that there are still other stones and thorns on the path ahead.”

FRANCE FALLS BACK IN LINE

Napoleon always forgave and was never forgiven. He tried to curb England's emerging hegemony over the world and paid for it with an unrelenting war. He sought to unify the continent behind France and failed in his Herculean attempt. His successor, Louis XVIII, would prove to be more realistic. It must be said that he had no choice: exile had made him a hostage to the enemy of his family and his nation. Before leaving London to reclaim his throne in the spring of 1814, he ostentatiously expressed his “eternal gratitude to the British royal family, which restored to him the throne of his ancestors and brought about this happy state of affairs, promising to heal wounds, calm passions, and restore peace, rest, and happiness to all people.”

France falls back in line and accepts its role as a middle power within a system of “balance” dominated by England. The English “balance” has triumphed over the Napoleonic “system.” “Perfidious Albion” is at the height of its craft. It never abandoned its goal of reducing France to its former borders, those before 1792 and the conquests of the Revolution. It allowed its continental allies to portray Napoleon as a monster, an enemy of humanity, to better isolate him from the French people, and then declared itself ready to negotiate with France. But without him.

Napoleon guessed the intentions of his enemies. He constantly repeated that “in defeat, one should always retreat as in victory, one had to keep advancing.” Revoke the treaties of 1809, 1807, and 1805, and one would be back to 1800, then to 1792. But reducing France to its size under the old monarchy is not the same as restricting it to its former power because Europe is no longer the same.

Napoleon understood everything but lost everything. And France lost with him. The entire history of the 19th century is a tragic continuation of that defeat and the futile attempt of the Emperor’s successors to remedy it. From now on, France would no longer dare to stand up to Europe. It would seek an ally at any cost. It would hesitate between Germany and England. And it would lose on both fronts. Napoleon was about to face disillusionment, betrayal, abandonment. The insults of those he had elevated. He would flee, disguised, to escape the people's wrath. At Erfurt, just a few years earlier, everyone had wanted to see and approach the man who bestowed everything: thrones, misery, fear, hope. Talleyrand, shocked, would write: “Baseness had never shown such genius.” He was the master of the world. God. He was compared to the sun, with an inscription on stage that read: “Less great and less beautiful than him.” He would muse bitterly to himself: “These people must think me a fool!”

Napoleon thought in global terms in a world that was not yet globalized. He foreshadowed the fury of the total wars of the future, while Chateaubriand, naively, believed that “he had killed war by exaggerating it.” This was not megalomania, but clarity — or rather, heightened clarity. The Tuileries Palace was then what the White House has since become: the center of the world. It is no surprise that the Communards burned it down and that the Third Republic refused to rebuild it. These two French leftist movements, despite being heirs of the Revolution, no longer wanted — or could no longer pursue — France's millennial dream. Since then, Napoleon has been misunderstood. Over the years and centuries, through unexpected defeats and hollow victories, people burned what they had once adored and adored what they had once burned. We were taught to hate what we had loved, and to love what we had hated. The dream was called a “nightmare,” and English propaganda was accepted as “historical truth.”

And what was vast and grand was simply declared madness.

1. Nicola Todorov, La Grande Armée à la conquête de l’Angleterre