Napoleon and the Art of Leadership

How a Flawed Genius Changed the History of Europe and the World

William Nester

• Publisher: Frontline Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526782786
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This deep dive into the mind of the complex, controversial political and military leader is "a great addition to the field of Napoleonics" ( Journal of Military History ). No historical figure has provoked more controversy than Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he an enlightened ruler or brutal tyrant? An insatiable warmonger or a defender of France against the aggression of the other great powers? Kind or cruel, farsighted or blinkered, a sophisticate or a philistine, a builder or a destroyer? Napoleon was at once all that his partisans laud, his enemies condemn, and much more. He remains fascinating, because he so dramatically changed the course of history and had such a complex, paradoxical character. One thing is certain: If the art of leadership is about getting what one wants, then Napoleon was among history's greatest masters. He understood and asserted the dynamic relationship among military, economic, diplomatic, technological, cultural, psychological—and thus political—power. War was the medium through which he was able to demonstrate his innate skills, leading his armies to victories across Europe. He overthrew France's corrupt republican government in a coup, then asserted near dictatorial powers. Those powers were then wielded with great dexterity in transforming France from feudalism to modernity with a new law code, canals, roads, ports, schools, factories, national bank, currency, and standard weights and measures. With those successes, he convinced the Senate to proclaim him France's emperor and even got the pope to preside over his coronation. He reorganized swaths of Europe into new states and placed his brothers and sisters on the thrones. This is Napoleon as has never been seen before. No previous book has explored his seething labyrinth of a mind more deeply and broadly or revealed more of its complex, provocative, and paradoxical dimensions. Napoleon has never before spoken so thoroughly about his life and times through the pages of a book, nor has an author so deftly examined the veracity or mendacity of his words. Within are dimensions of Napoleon that may charm, appall, or perplex, many buried for two centuries and brought to light for the first time. Napoleon and the Art of Leadership is a psychologically penetrating study of the man who had such a profound effect on the world around him that the entire era still bears his name.

Chapter 1

The Rebel

‘There was never a social revolution without terror … It enriches but does not at all satisfy the poor. It convulses everything. During the first stage it brings unhappiness to all; happiness to none.’

‘The wind having freshened the night … This spectacle was grand, the striking cannon shots, the shores covered with fires, the sea surging and roaring … My soul was between eternity, the ocean and the night … I went to sleep feeling I was in a romantic and epic dream.’

‘Time reverses empires, destroys the world and changes all our affections. Thus we must anticipate and prejudge the future.’

Napoleon Bonaparte was a born troublemaker, even literally.1 His mother was attending Mass for the Feast of the Assumption in the cathedral of Ajaccio, Corsica, when the contractions overwhelmed her. Assisted by her family she waddled home to release him to the world on 15 August 1769. He was the second son of Carlo Bonaparte and Letizia Ramolino. He would have seven surviving siblings, one elder, Joseph (1768), then Lucien (1775), Elisa (1777), Louis (1778), Pauline (1780), Caroline (1782) and Jérôme (1784).

His actual name was Napoleone Buonaparte. The island of Corsica where he was born had been a province of the Republic of Genoa from 1284 until 15 May 1768, when France took over in return for annually paying 200,000 livres for ten years.2 So, although he was born a subject of the French king, rather than French he grew up speaking Genoa’s dialect of Italian. His father was absent from much of his early life then died in 1785, when Napoleon was just 16 years old. Carlo apparently lingered at home not much longer than it took to sire another child. He was ambitious, passionate, loquacious and opportunistic, one who advanced by currying favour with powerful patrons. He backed the rebel leader Pasquale Paoli until his defeat then, after the takeover, pledged allegiance to the French king and his governor, Louis Marbeuf.3 After buying a Pisa University law degree, he returned to become a lawyer for Ajaccio’s tribunal court in 1771, a judge assessor and Corsican assemblyman in 1772 and received a royal land grant in 1778. As for Napoleon’s mother, Letizia was only about 15 when she began conceiving children; she managed her growing brood with tough rather than affectionate love. Apparently with her husband’s acquiescence, she wielded her beauty and body to extract favours for Carlo, herself and her children from Governor Marbeuf. Napoleon later paid her this tribute: ‘All that I am, all I have been, I owe to the habits of work I received in my childhood and the good principles given to me by my excellent mother.’4

Although Carlo was a sporadic husband and father, he played three decisive roles in laying the foundations for his family’s rise to the heights of power, although he would not live to see that ascent. With Marbeuf’s intervention, the French government approved two applications from Carlo, in 1771 to be recognized as a French noble and in 1778 to educate his sons in France. On 1 January 1779, Carlo enrolled Joseph and Napoleone, then just 9 years old, at the Jesuit College at Autun. Finally, Carlo made a critical decision on their career paths. Normally the first and second-born sons of nobles become military officers and priests respectively. Carlo reversed the order. He sent his naturally rebellious, aggressive son Napoleone to the military school at Brienne, one of twelve across France, and kept the gentle, quiet son Joseph at Autun. How different history would read had he followed tradition!

Buonaparte studied at Brienne from 15 May 1779 to 17 October 1784. The experience was Spartan. Students attended classes six hours a day from Monday to Saturday in an eleven-month school year. Buonaparte excelled at mathematics and did well in history and geography. When he entered l’Ecole Militaire in Paris on 19 October 1784, he exchanged austerity for extravagance. He recalled that ‘we were magnificently nourished, served and treated in all things like officers enjoying a great ease, more grand certainly than most of our families’.5 Like Brienne, l’Ecole Militaire offered few military studies, let alone training; reading about the lives of famous generals provided an idealized conception of war. Instead, the emphasis was on polishing nobles in etiquette. Instruction in dance was as important as instruction in fencing. Then there were all the attractions of Paris.

Amid these pleasures Buonaparte learned that stomach cancer had killed his father at Montpellier in France on 24 February 1785. The son wrote a moving elegy, in which he did not dilute his bitterness toward God or France. He described his father as ‘a zealous enlightened citizen’ who ‘heaven made die … in a foreign country indifferent to his existence, far from all that he held precious’, prevented ‘from the grand consolation of the joyous sadness’ of expiring ‘at home with his wife and family’. It was ‘the Supreme Being … who deprived us of what is most dear but at least left us a few cherished people capable of replacing him in our affections’.6 With these words Buonaparte at once vented and projected his own angry feelings of being forsaken by his father six years earlier in ‘a foreign country indifferent to his fate, far from all that he held precious’. During that time his parents only visited him briefly once and he never left school, although Lucien did join him as a student at Brienne in 1784.

Buonaparte graduated from the l’Ecole Militaire as a second lieutenant on 28 October 1785. Although he was 42nd in a class of 58 students, he squeezed his studies into one year when most others needed two years or more to graduate. His aptitude for mathematics made him a top candidate for the artillery or engineers. He joined the La Fère artillery regiment at Valence on 3 November 1785. He was only 16 years old.

* * *

What was Buonaparte like in those days? His childhood nickname was ‘rabulione’, which means ‘rambunctious’. He later described himself as a ‘taciturn, sombre and morose’ youth. His moods swung from exuberance to indifference to depression, but were mostly melancholic and introspective. At times his alienation pushed him to the edge of the abyss: ‘Alone in the midst of mankind, I return to my room to muse and to succumb to all the force of my melancholy … Because I have to die anyway, should I not kill myself?’7 Those natural dispositions were exacerbated by being taken away from his family and native land when he was just 9 years old and being installed in a boarding school where the boys teased him for his accent and puny appearance. A teacher there found him ‘quiet, loving solitude, capricious, arrogant, extremely inclined to egoism, speaking little, spirited in his answers, quick and harsh in his replies, having much pride and boundless ambition. This young man deserves to be encouraged.’8

He dreamed of escaping the dreary, lonely routine with adventures in exotic faraway places, of escaping his lowly outsider status by becoming a hero, a conqueror and a liberator. As a schoolboy the books he voraciously devoured offered fleeting diversions. He relished tales of great military leaders and was deeply affected by Romanticism, especially Jean Jacques Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloise, Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther and James Macpherson’s epic poem ‘Fingal’ by the fictional author ‘Ossian’. He enjoyed venting his thoughts and feelings on paper and longed to be renowned as a great writer. He was acutely aware that life was uncertain and fleeting: ‘Time reverses empires, destroys the world and changes all our affections. Thus we must anticipate and prejudge the future.’9 Throughout his life the world’s hard realities capped by the horrors of war eroded but never extinguished his youthful romanticism. In July 1804, he penned these words to Josephine after reviewing grand manoeuvres of his army and fleet at Boulogne: ‘For four days I have been far from you … The wind having freshened the night … This spectacle was grand, the striking cannon shots, the shores covered with fires, the sea surging and roaring … My soul was between eternity, the ocean and the night … I went to sleep feeling I was in a romantic and epic dream.’10

As an 18-year-old second lieutenant, he looked ahead at a mostly pleasant, secure, monotonous career probably broken by a war or two. Was that how he wanted to spend his life? He resolved to supplement his military career with a writing career and make a history of Corsica his first book. The peacetime army offered a writer the leisure he needed. He could mull what to write on duty then write it down later. He entered but did not win an essay contest to answer this classic Enlightenment question: ‘What principles and institutions instil the greatest possible happiness in man?’ That literary venture spurred him to others. Somehow between 1786 and 1793, he squeezed time between his regimental duties in France and his family duties and political ambitions in Corsica to produce an astonishing number of works. In all, he wrote four novels, Le Comte d’Essex (1789), La Masque Prophète (1789), La Nouvelle Corse (1789) and Clisson et Eugénie (1795), Histoire de Corse (1790), philosophical essays like ‘Parallele entre l’Amour de Patrie et l’Amour de la Gloire’ (1786), ‘Le Discours de Lyon’ (1791), ‘Le Dialogue de l’Amour’ (1796) and political essays like ‘Les Corses ont-ils eu le droit de secouer le joug des Genois?’ (1786), ‘La Constitution de la Calotte du regiment de la Fère’ (1789), ‘Lettre a Matteo Buttafoco’ (1791) and ‘Souper de Beaucaire’ (1793). Like most budding writers, his works were more precocious and passionate than skilled and profound. With time he might have become a first-rate writer but his career took a very different path.

He had served merely ten months before he wangled leave to go home. He reached Ajaccio in September 1786. He had not seen his family for over seven years. His father was dead and his mother was struggling to raise six children on a limited income from her husband’s various investments. Most of his surviving letters from his teens and early twenties concern his family’s financial welfare, whose ‘sad state … afflicts me’.11 To alleviate that he sought to provide his family additional income by developing a nursery for mulberry plants whose leaves nourished silkworms. He claimed a medical excuse to extend his leave and did not finally leave Corsica until September 1787, a year after arriving. Yet he did not immediately rejoin his regiment, now stationed at Auxonne, but instead sojourned from October to December in Paris, where he received his latest leave. He was back in Corsica in January 1788 and remained until June 1788, when he finally rejoined his regiment. In January 1789, he began an intensive course on artillery under the tutelage of General Jean Pierre Du Teil, who was very impressed with his student.

* * *

As Buonaparte embarked on his career, a series of extraordinary events were shaking France. For several years the realm had teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Within two previous generations, France had fought the extremely costly Seven Years War and the American War of Independence. The national debt had soared and the government was falling further behind paying its creditors. The king’s power was not absolute. France was divided among thirteen regions, each with a parlement (parliament) whose chief duty was to register laws and decrees. In November 1787, a political crisis erupted when the Paris Parlement refused to register a loan of 10 million livres that King Louis XVI had submitted to avoid bankruptcy. The king’s advisors devised a package of financial reforms that Louis submitted in October 1788, but the Paris Parlement rejected that too. In desperation, Louis called for the Estates General, which last met in 1614, to convene in May 1789. The Estates General was a type of legislature composed of 300 priests, 300 nobles and 600 commoners.12

When the king convened the Estates General on 5 May 1789, he and his advisors hoped that the delegates would rubber-stamp the package of financial reforms submitted by Finance Minister Jacques Necker. The commoners, or Third Estate, declared itself the National Assembly on 17 June and called on the other estates to join. When, on 20 June, the National Assembly delegates found themselves locked out of their meeting place, they crowded into a nearby indoor tennis court and vowed to persist until the king recognized the National Assembly. Louis resisted for a few days then ordered the First and Second Estates to join the National Assembly.

And then there was the Parisian mob. Power seesawed between the National Assembly’s reformers and the Parisian radicals. The revolution turned increasingly violent, beginning when, on 14 July, Parisians stormed the Bastille, a castle and hated symbol of royal oppression, and equipped National Guard battalions with arms captured there and at other arsenals. The National Assembly asserted a major progressive act by passing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on 26 August. The Parisian mob retook the initiative on 4 and 5 October, when 10,000 mostly women marched the dozen miles to Versailles and intimidated the royal family into returning with them to the Tuileries Palace in the city’s centre.

Like millions of other French men and women, Buonaparte was trapped in the whirlwind of revolution and desperately tried to grasp anything to survive.13 That meant appearing to support whichever faction then held power, while looking for a stronger alternative. For the first few years, he backed the moderates over the radical Jacobins. In June 1792, he derided ‘Jacobins as fools who lack common sense’.14 His loathing for the radicals soared on 10 August 1792, when he gingerly stepped through the blood-soaked, body-strewn Tuileries Palace shortly after a Jacobinled mob had slaughtered and mutilated hundreds of Swiss Guards. But after the Jacobins took power in April 1793 and unleashed the Terror on their opponents, he affiliated with them to avoid being among their thousands of victims. He later described revolutions as among ‘the worst evils’ that could afflict humanity. ‘There was never a social revolution without terror … It enriches but does not at all satisfy the poor. It convulses everything. During the first stage it brings unhappiness to all; happiness to none.’15

Meanwhile, Buonaparte’s identity and loyalty were torn between being more Corsican or French. Naturally the appeal of his Corsican roots echoed far louder. In comparing the fate of France and Corsica, he wrote that while revolution was bringing a rebirth to France, ‘must Corsicans continue to kiss the insolent hand of those who repress them’.16 That was no exaggeration. Corsica’s Genoan and French rulers exploited but never truly conquered the native people. Most Corsicans deeply resented the foreign presence and longed to be free. The outsiders remained a minority that dominated trade, finance and administration in the towns of Bastia, Ajaccio, Corte, Calvi and Bonifacio, while most Corsicans...