Until now, there has been no study of the significant errors that Napoleon made himself which, though apparently trivial at the time, proved to be major factors in his downfall. Digby Smith tracks his rise to power, his stewardship of France from 180415, and his exile. He highlights his military mistakes, such as his unwillingness to appoint an effective overall supremo in the Iberian Peninsula, and the decision to invade Russia while the Spanish situation was spiralling out of control.
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Yes, you can access Decline and Fall of Napoleon's Empire by Digby Smith in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Military Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
IN 1802 (YEAR X) NAPOLEON was elected Consul for life, with the right to nominate his own successor, apparently by a massive majority of over three million ayes to a few thousand nayes. But was the decision so clear-cut? At that point about five million French citizens were entitled to vote. In actual fact, it would appear that Napoleon’s younger brother, Lucien Bonaparte (then head of the Ministry of the Interior which ran the election) fudged the figures. There were only 1.5 million ayes; Lucien’s willing minions added half a million for the men of the army and navy and a further nine hundred thousand for good measure. On top of this, the number of abstentions (sure indicators of electoral apathy) was also high. As Jean Tulard said: ‘There was more antipathy for the fallen government than sympathy for the new one.’
Perhaps Napoleon’s first major error was committed on 2 December 1804, when he crowned himself ‘Emperor of the French Republic’. Prior to this event, he had declared:
The name of king is outworn. It carries with it a trail of obsolete ideas and would make me nothing more than the heir to dead men’s glories. I do not wish to be dependent upon any predecessor. The title of emperor is greater than that of king. Its significance is not wholly explicable, and therefore it stimulates the imagination.
Again, as in 1802, the five million voters were asked for their opinion as to whether the fate of France should be placed in the hands of Napoleon, this time as hereditary emperor: 3,572,329 said yes; 2,569 said no. We assume that some 1.4 million abstained, and thus roughly this number of people were not positively in favour of giving Napoleon the throne. Carnot was not alone in his opposition to Napoleon becoming emperor.
The ailing edifice of the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations was given its final deadly blow with this victory. Kaiser Franz of Austria had been elected Emperor Franz II of this ramshackle house of cards in 1792; in early 1806 he renounced this title and became Kaiser Franz I of Austria, leaving the now leaderless sheep of the defunct empire to mill aimlessly about in an area roughly occupied by that of modern Germany, with the Kingdom of Prussia to the north-east. These sheep came in several different breeds: some were electorates, some duchies, some counties and other minor principalities, some independent imperial city states. The map of the Holy Roman Empire’s German nations resembled nothing so much as a patchwork quilt that had been stitched together by several witless geriatrics, with many states owning tiny parcels of territories acquired by marriage over the centuries, scattered over the length and breadth of the place, all divided by foreign soil.
The member states were all absolute monarchies, with more or less benignly inclined rulers, firmly embedded in the feudalistic age. Many strove to emulate the Prussian example, particularly in the military sphere. Customs barriers between all these mini-states inhibited trade and drove up consumer prices. Many of the tiny entities were on or below the verge of national viability. Literacy was very limited and the press frequently subject to censorship -although this latter feature had also become an established practice in Napoleon’s supposedly enlightened and exemplary republic. Early in the Revolutionary period, there had been flourishing republican political movements in many of the western German states, but these had withered on the vine as the excesses of the Terror flared out of control in 1793 and 1794.
Despite this, the ‘orphaned’ states of the Holy Roman Empire presented Napoleon and his increasingly grandiose political ambitions with a spectrum of possibilities. He was Emperor of the French. He had crushed her enemies and destroyed their institutions. Why not salvage all that was left of these old liabilities and convert them, at one masterful stroke, into assets for himself -and for France? There was no effective, coherent opposition to his plans: Austria was too preoccupied with trying to live on reduced means to bother; Russia was in disarray; Prussia was dithering, and England, although very concerned to recover the Electorate of Hanover (the origin of her royal house) had no field army that could achieve the slightest successes against the French in mainland Europe.
Those old German (and Bourbon) rulers that had crossed Napoleon’s path, or did not fit his plans, were simply dispossessed and exiled. Their realms were then shuffled with other territories to form the new kingdoms, grand duchies and principalities, upon whose thrones Napoleon would place grateful, and hopefully reliable, new sovereigns, pliable to his imperial orders and whims at the expense of their own new realms.
From 2 December 1804 Napoleon was an emperor. But he was the emperor of a republic, with none of the usual tiers of aristocracy below him; in their place he had only republicans, some of them regicides. He recognised that any society needs a system of rewards and baubles with which to motivate and steer the aspirations of the upper classes. In a traditional absolute monarchy, such as almost all other European states of this time, the hereditary aristocracy automatically headed the class race. But France had bloodily rooted out her aristos. There was a vacuum in the state structure. In post-revolutionary Russia, Heroes of the Soviet Union were invented to fill the vacuum; Napoleon was much less radical than Lenin.
In late 1806, to reward those who had served him outstandingly, he recreated a titled aristocracy for France. This system he extended to all those vassal states where his writ ran. An entire panoply of kings, princes, dukes, counts and barons, a sort of crowned cosa nostra, not perhaps so different from the traditional aristocracies, sprang up. And with it returned all the tortuous ritual and etiquette of the medieval courts as practised in those of the absolute monarchs whom he – and France – had despised. With the fervour of the convert, he embraced it all.
Some of these new aristos were created in reward for services rendered on the battlefield, some for diplomatic or commercial skills in his service. In most cases the system was a genuine meritocracy and the titles were for the lifespan of the recipient only. They often carried considerable financial bonuses and pensions, often drawn from states outside France, such as Westphalia.
The marshals were the leaders who had fought his victorious battles and campaigns: it was only right that they should benefit accordingly. The bestowed wealth and titles of some of them are shown below. What they looted from the lands they conquered, in cash and in kind, is over and above these sums. Many of them bought expensive houses in Paris:
Among those to benefit from this significant political move were all of Napoleon’s relatives. Nepotism occurred – and occurs – in most societies; with his Corsican upbringing, Napoleon was just as liable to come under family pressure to share the spoils of his im...
