On Thursday, June 13, 1793, a slim twenty-three-year-old artillery lieutenant stepped ashore at the port of Toulon in the south of France having escaped from a political maelstrom on his homeland island of Corsica. Napoleon Bonaparte was a penniless, almost friendless, refugee, with a mother and six siblings to support. Yet six years later he became First Consul and dictator of France, and five years after that emperor of the French. Soon afterward he made France indisputably the most powerful nation on the Continent. How did he do it?
Part of the explanation was undoubtedly luck: Napoleon was fortunate to be nineteen years old when the French Revolution broke out, allowing him to rise up the ranks of the French Army to become a general at the age of only twenty-four, in part because the aristocrats who had hitherto officered the French Army had either fled the country or been guillotined. Napoleon’s own noble background in Corsica was enough to allow him to be educated for free in pre-Revolutionary France, but not enough to send him to the tumbrels.
As well as luck, there was Napoleon’s own fine sense of political and military timing and his utter ruthlessness—he was ready to kill three hundred Frenchmen who were attempting an insurrection in the streets of Paris in 1795. Yet ultimately his success depended on his techniques of leadership, which allowed him to become, in Winston Churchill’s words, “the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar.”1
That reference to Caesar was apposite because Napoleon’s leadership techniques were carefully copied from his heroes of the Ancient World. Napoleon was an omnivorous reader from childhood and devoured historical and military biographies in his father’s large library in Corsica and then at the three French military academies at which he studied from the age of nine. He came to see himself as a direct descendant, at least in terms of European imperial leadership, of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. This would imply a prima facie case of psychological disorder in most people, except that today Napoleon is indeed seen as one of the seven classical great captains of history, alongside Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great, and the 1st Duke of Marlborough.
Napoleon had an extraordinary ability to inspire the soldiers of what he dubbed his Grande Armée to the extent that they would literally follow him anywhere. This would eventually include across the sands of Egyptian deserts, into almost every capital city of Europe, and through Russia’s frozen wastelands. “No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person,” a French sergeant recalled of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. “If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and everyone charged blindly into the fire.”2 Small wonder, therefore, that Wellington considered that Napoleon’s mere presence on a battlefield was worth the equivalent of twenty thousand men.
Napoleon recognized that the best way to inspire his people was through two means: imbuing people with the belief that they were fighting for honor and ideology, and rewarding good work. “In my opinion the French do not care for liberty and equality, they have but one sentiment, that of honour,” he said. More practically, he added that “the soldier demands glory, distinction, rewards.”3 He thus gave rewards liberally to his bravest troops in the shape of medals, pensions, promotions, lands, and titles.
Meritocracy was one of the greatest inventions of the French Revolution, unleashing the talent of a generation that had hitherto been held back by the rigid class system of the ancien régime. For centuries before 1789, Frenchmen were unlikely to rise in life much further than their fathers and grandfathers, yet suddenly meritocracy permitted talented people to reach the very apex of society. Of the twenty-six marshals of the First Empire appointed by Napoleon, ten had risen from the ranks, and they included the son of a cooper (Michel Ney), a tanner (Laurent Saint-Cyr), a bailiff (Claude Victor Perrin), a brewer (Nicolas Oudinot), a peasant (Édouard Mortier), a miller (François Lefebvre), an innkeeper (Joachim Murat), a household servant (Pierre Augereau), and a storekeeper-smuggler (André Masséna). Indeed, one might even bring the number up to eleven because although Jean Sérurier proudly boasted to have a father who was in royal service, he had in fact been the royal mole-catcher. Because of their brilliance on the battlefield, all but one of the marshals became dukes, several of them also became princes, and Murat became king of Naples and Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte king of Sweden. The saying was attributed to Napoleon that every soldier carried in his knapsack the baton of a marshal of France. Such a thing was unimaginable before the Revolution, and it partly explains the determination of the other European powers to try to crush Revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic France.
Napoleon believed in rewarding service. He invented the Légion d’Honneur to reward both soldiers and civilians of his First Empire, which underlined his belief that honor was the primary sentiment that motivated at least the former. After the successful storming of the town of Landshut in Bavaria in 1809, for example, he asked the colonel of the 13th Infanterie Légère (Light Infantry) who had been the bravest man in the unit. The colonel hesitated, thinking it invidious to pick any particular man in an officers’ mess full of heroes, so Napoleon asked the officers, who fell similarly silent. Finally an elderly captain replied that it had been the drum major who had shown the greatest courage in the storming of the city. “You have been designated the bravest in a brave regiment,” Napoleon told the drum major, to cheers from the men, and he made him a chevalier in the Légion d’Honneur on the spot.4 After the Battle of Ratisbon, a veteran asked Napoleon for the cross of the Légion d’Honneur, claiming that he had given him a watermelon at Jaffa on the Syrian campaign when it “was so terribly hot.” Napoleon refused him on such a paltry pretext, at which the veteran added indignantly, “Well, don’t you reckon seven wounds received at the bridge of Arcole, at Lodi and Castiglione, at the Pyramids, at Acre, Austerlitz, Friedland; eleven campaigns in Italy, Egypt, Austria, Prussia, Poland . . . !” at which a laughing emperor cut him short and also made him a chevalier of the légion with a 1,200-franc pension, fastening the cross onto his breast there and then.
If Napoleon witnessed a particular act of bravery, he would on occasion take his own medal of the légion off his uniform and present it to the soldier concerned. One can imagine the pride that such a gesture would engender in that soldier, probably for life, and the even more useful envy it would arouse among the man’s comrades, eager for a similarly signal sign of the emperor’s approbation. “It was by familiarities of this kind that the Emperor made the soldiers adore him,” noted General Marbot, “but it was a means available only to a commander whom frequent victories had made illustrious: any other general would have injured his reputation by it.”5
Unlike some commanders, such as the duke of Wellington, who regarded most of his men as what he called the “scum of the earth” (while not denigrating their fighting abilities), Napoleon genuinely liked spending time with his men. He had an almost democratic openness that endeared him to them. So long as they were not overtly rude, they were permitted to call out to him directly from the ranks, to question him, and to ask him for favors.
Of course not all such requests could be fulfilled, and it would have lessened their impact if they had been. Not all could have prizes. Napoleon’s court chamberlain, Louis-François de Bausset, recalled how the emperor “heard, interrogated, and decided at once; if it was a refusal, the reasons were explained in a manner which softened the disappointment.”6 During one campaign a soldier came up to him asking for a new uniform, pointing to his ragged coat. “Oh no,” replied Napoleon, “that would never do. It will hinder your wounds from being seen.”7 Such immediate accessibility to the commander in chief is impossible to conceive in the Legitimist armies of Prussia, Austria, or Russia, but in post-Revolutionary France it was a useful way of keeping Napoleon in touch with the needs and concerns of his men.
Napoleon always read petitions from soldiers and civilians, and granted as many as he reasonably could within France’s budget. As First Consul at inspection parades at the Tuileries—which could last up to five hours—he would inquire in great detail about the men’s food, uniforms, health, living quarters, amusements, cooking pots, brandy flasks, and regularity of pay, and he expected to be told the truth. (He was particularly obsessed with the state of his men’s shoes and boots throughout his career; his was of course an army that did a good deal of marching across Europe.) “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.”8 The assumption that le petit caporal was on their side against les gros bonnets (big hats) was held throughout the army. “Pay great attention to the soldiers, and see about them in detail,” Napoleon ordered Marshal Marmont in 1803 when Marmont’s corps was based at Utrecht.
The first time you arrive at the camp, line up the battalions, and spend eight hours at a stretch seeing the soldiers one by one; receive their complaints, inspect their weapons, and make sure they lack nothing. There are many advantages to making these reviews of seven to eight hours; the soldier becomes accustomed to being armed and on duty, it proves to him that the leader is paying attention to and taking complete care of him; which is a great confidence-inspiring motivation for the soldier.9
Napoleon cemented his popularity in the eyes of his men by doing his best to take care of them when they were wounded or ill. The horrors of late-eighteenth-century military hospitals were never far from his troops’ thoughts, and Napoleon paid attention to his doctors’ requirements, at least by the generally low standards of the day. In 1812 Count Philippe de Ségur, his aide-de-camp, noted how “if he happened to meet with convoys of wounded he stopped them, informed himself of their condition, of their sufferings, of the actions in which they had been wounded, and never quitted them without consoling them by his words or making them partakers in his bounty.”10
“The tone which the officers, and sometimes even the soldiers, assumed towards the head of the government would have been indecent in any other nation,” recalled the Saxon cavalry commander Baron von Odeleben, “but it was not so with the French, whose character is naturally vehement. An officer, whom Napoleon had perhaps reproached with the failure of some enterprise, might be seen defending himself from his horse on the parade, in the presence of a hundred persons composed of generals and other officers, with a vivacity and gestures which occasioned some alarm on his account. But Napoleon took no notice of these acts of presumption, and remained silent.”11 On one occasion in the extremely harsh 1813 campaign in Germany, when Napoleon had complained to General Horace Sebastiani that he commanded a “mob, not soldiers,” Sebastiani flatly contradicted him, and was supported by General Jacques Macdonald, “and both together succeeded in reducing the Emperor to silence, while [the Marquis de] Caulaincourt, to avoid the disgrace of the occurrence, begged all those who were present to depart.”12 Napoleon had recognized that he had gone too far and forbore to act like a dictator in front of his senior commanders. If any anecdote was needed to explode the ludicrous view that Napoleon and Hitler were similar, that is it. Such a response from underlings toward the Führer would not have been countenanced for a moment, and retribution would have been swift and profoundly unpleasant.
Napoleon tweaked his soldiers’ earlobes (sometimes quite painfully), joked, and reminisced with them and was constantly inquiring about their conditions of service. His guiding principle was “Severe to the officers, kindly to the men.”13 This stemmed partly from the knowledge that he knew that the troops appreciated the way he seemed to prefer them to his officers, but also from the knowledge that since the Revolution, the army was the citizenry in arms—raised by the levée en masse (mass uprising)—and so ordinary soldiers had much more political influence than before 1789. They were going to be the people on whom his political power ultimately depended. Napoleon thus meant what he said and worked hard to ensure that his men’s needs were met. When campaign marches halted for lunch, he and his chief of staff, Marshal Alexandre Berthier, would invite the aides-de-camp and orderlies to eat with them. Bausset recalled this practice as “truly a fête for every one of us.”14 Napoleon also always made sure that wine from his own table was given to the sentries outside his door. These were small things, perhaps, which cost Napoleon little, but they were deeply appreciated and inspired lifelong devotion among the old grognards (translatable as “grumblers,” but also “veterans”).
Napoleon had a capacious memory for faces and names. It was highly flattering to his troops that their emperor recognized them and singled them out, reminiscing about past battles and constantly asking them questions. Nor did such familiarity ever breed contempt in them, but merely loyalty. Of course efficient staff work helped in Napoleon’s ability to “recognize” individual grognards in the ranks, but he also deployed his phenomenal memory. “I introduced three parliamentary deputies of the Valais region to him,” Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Napoleon’s interior minister, recalled in his memoirs:
he asked one of them about his two little girls. This deputy told me that he had only seen Napoleon once, at the foot of the Alps, when he went to [fight the Battle of] Marengo. Problems with the artillery, added the deputy, forced him to stop for a moment in front of his house; he petted his two children, mounted his horse, and since then he had not seen him again.15
That incident had taken place a full ten years before.
Napoleon’s memory was put to full use when it came to military dispositions. In 1812 he dictated the complete war establishment for the army to General Mathieu Dumas, the intendant general of the army (and grandfather of the novelist Alexandre Dumas). This incorporated where all the conscripts needed to go and the effective force of all the corps of the army. “He walked rapidly up and down, or stood still before the window of his cabinet” for half an hour, Dumas recalled, and “dictated with such rapidity that I had scarcely time to set down the figures clearly.” Dumas finally looked up and realized that the emperor had achieved this formidable task entirely without reference to the table of notes he had been given. “You thought that I was reading your table,” Napoleon said. “I don’t want it; I know it by heart. Let us go on.”16
Dumas was also astonished by the way that Napoleon could demonstrate intuitive foresight about how campaigns would develop, a hugely important quality in any war leader. In October 1800 he spoke to Dumas of his plans for attacking the Austrians in the Tyrol, telling him, as they looked together at a giant map of the Alps from the Rhine to the River Adige:
We shall deprive them, and almost without fighting, of this immense fortress of the Tyrol; we must manoeuvre on their flanks, and threaten their last point of retreat; they will then immediately evacuate all the upper valleys. . . . I well see that there are difficulties, in all probability greater than at any other point in the chain of the Great Alps. But I hold that there are no asperities on the globe which man cannot surmount. Tell [General] Macdonald that an army can pass always, and at all seasons, wherever two men can set their feet. . . . It is not by the numerical force of an army, but by the object, the importance of the operation, that I measure that of the command.17
Napoleon’s regular proclamations and Orders of the Day greatly inspired his troops. They were phrased in a classical style that sounds florid to modern ears, even belabored, but which sounded majestic at the time, especially when read around the campfire by noncommissioned officers to their largely illiterate rank and file. “Remember from those monuments yonder,” Napoleon famously proclaimed on the morning of the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, “forty centuries look down upon you.”18 The day after the Battle of Abensberg at the start of the 1809 campaign against the Hapsburg empire, he told his troops, “The fire of Heaven, which punished the ungrateful, the unjust, the disloyal, has struck the Austrian army.”19
Proclamations and bulletins were very often not true in the literal sense, in that Napoleon used them for propaganda, and certainly no numbers in them could be trusted. “To lie like a bulletin” even entered the French idiom, but such exaggerations were taken for granted, rather as Jacques-Louis David’s painting of Napoleon crossing the Alps on a rearing horse was not intended to be thought historically accurate, either. Artistic license was as evident in inspiring proclamations as in art itself.
Napoleon inspired his men verbally, too, as when he delivered a speech to the grenadiers, encouraging them to brave Austrian fire as they were about to storm the long narrow bridge across the River Adda during the Battle of Lodi in the first campaign in which he was commander in chief. “One must speak to the soul,” he later said of that occasion; “it is the only way to electrify the men.”20 When in the Eylau-Friedland campaign of 1807 Napoleon told the 44th Line Regiment, “Your three battalions could be as six in my eyes,” they shouted back: “And we shall prove it!”21 This was the classic expression of the concept of esprit de corps, also known at the time as the Sacred Fire, the French fury (by their enemies), and summed up in the word élan.
A good way of speaking to the soul and electrifying the men was to add words of glory to their regimental battle honors after engagements in which they had distinguished themselves. In the Italian campaign, for example, Napoleon gave certain demi-brigades the opportunity to distinguish themselves on parade. In March 1797 he approved the 57th Demi-Brigade’s right to stitch in gold onto their colors the words THE TERRIBLE 57TH DEMI-BRIGADE WHICH NOTHING CAN STOP, because of their courage at the battles of Rivoli and La Favorita in Italy. Such names stitched onto the standards of certain demi-brigades—such as LES INCOMPARABLES (9th Légère)—showed how fundamentally Napoleon understood the psychology of the ordinary soldier and the power of regimental pride.22 The 18th Line Regiment was called Les Braves for their battlefield performance at the Battle of Aspern-Essling, which they thereafter repeated often, especially at Borodino. The 84th Line was given the soubriquet “Un Contre Dix” (“One Against Ten”) in 1809 for defeating a force of Tyrolean rebels estimated at ten times their number. Any soldiers in any army throughout history have been enthused by the slightest distinction that lifts them above the rest.
Yet Napoleon could be harsh with his men, too. Leaders need to understand mass psychology and he recognized that shame could occasionally work almost as well as lavishing praise and heaping rewards on troops. “Soldiers of the 39th and 85th Infantry Regiments,” he once told two units of the French Army serving in Italy—known as the Army of Italy—that had fled during a battle in 1796:
you are no longer fit to belong to the French Army. You have shown neither discipline nor courage; you have allowed the enemy to dislodge you from a position where a handful of brave men could have stopped an army. The Chief of Staff will cause to be inscribed upon your flags: “These men are no longer of The Army of Italy.”23
With his acute sense for what would energize and what demoralize a unit, Napoleon correctly gauged that this public humiliation would ensure that both demi-brigades would fight harder and with more determination over the coming battles in order to regain their good name. He knew that this would not have worked unless they had a sense of collective self-identity, which was always the primary purpose of the demi-brigade, just as it was of the regiment in the British Army.
Napoleon had learned that leadership lesson from Julius Caesar. He recounted in his book Caesar’s Wars the story of a mutiny in Rome in which Caesar had agreed laconically to his soldiers’ demands for release from service, but afterward addressed them with ill-concealed contempt merely as “citizens” rather than as the customary “soldiers” or “comrades,” and how, “finally, the result of this moving scene was to win the continuation of their services.”24
Napoleon ensured that plays were written to glorify the Grande Armée, songs and operatic arias sung, proclamations made, festivals inaugurated, ceremonies held, standards and medals distributed. He designed glorious uniforms for his army, to encourage esprit, differentiate units from afar, and impress the opposite sex. (“Rarely has a more colourful band of warriors been assembled in a single generation, army or country,” wrote the historian Dr. David Chandler.)25
Napoleon instinctively understood the power of symbols and what soldiers wanted.26 Above all, at least until the Battle of Aspern-Essling in 1809, he gave them what they wanted more than anything else: victory. Yet even when things had clearly gone badly wrong Napoleon’s army stayed loyal to him far longer than any other body in the rest of French society.
The Swiss military historian General Antoine-Henri de Jomini, who served in both the French and Russian armies during the Napoleonic Wars, was greatly impressed by the way that Napoleon understood “that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because should you find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it.”27 Instead, Napoleon openly recognized the worth of enemy units, thereby increasing his troops’ morale when they overcame them. In the 1806 campaign against Prussia, Napoleon praised the enemy cavalry to one French corps, although he took care to promise “it could do nothing against the bayonets of his Egyptians!”*28
Napoleon would also praise enemy generals he despised and ignore ones he admired in the hope that the bad ones would be promoted and the good ones dismissed. In the Italian campaign of 1796–97, Napoleon recognized that Field Marshal József Alvinczi was the best general Austria had, which was why he never mentioned him in his bulletins, while he praised Generals Johann Beaulieu and Dagobert von Wurmser and Archduke Charles Hapsburg, whom he knew he could beat. He also showed great respect to General Giovanni di Provera in his proclamations and Orders of the Day, whom he privately thought the worst of all.
Praise of his own soldiers was by no means directed solely to the rank and file. “My trust in you is as great as my appreciation of your military talents,” he once wrote to Marshal Bessières, “your courage and your love of order and discipline.”29 Overall, however, he was much harder on the marshalate and the upper ranks than on the ordinary soldier, and toward the end of his career he worried—with reason—that his scorn had curtailed the marshals’ capacity for independent action. “I have accustomed them too much to knowing only how to obey,” he complained in 1813.30
MUCH OF NAPOLEON’S extraordinary capacity for work derived from his ability to compartmentalize his mind, to concentrate entirely on whatever problem was before him, to the exclusion of all else. “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.”31
He nonetheless had relatively little time to sleep, regularly working up to eighteen hours a day. He used every moment he could find, spending a maximum of only half an hour over meals and having newspapers read to him while he was in the bath and shaving. Some of his twenty-two mistresses complained about how little time he spent in foreplay, and when he met civil servants he was uncommonly direct with them. “Where are we with the Arc de Triomphe?” he would demand of his architect, and “Will I walk on the Jena bridge on my return?”32
One aspect of Napoleon’s leadership that proved essential, especially in the retreats and defeats of the latter part of his reign, was his Olympian calmness under pressure. “In my own case it’s taken me years to cultivate self-control to prevent my emotions from betraying themselves,” he said in 1813.
Only a short time ago I was the conqueror of the world, commanding the largest and finest army of modern times. That’s all gone now! To think I kept all my composure, I might even say preserved my unvarying high spirits. . . . Yet don’t think that my heart is less sensitive than those of other men. I’m a very kind man but since my earliest youth I have devoted myself to silencing that chord within me that never yields a sound now. If anyone told me when I was about to begin a battle that my mistress whom I loved to distraction was breathing her last, it would leave me cold. Yet my grief would be just as great as if I’d given way to it . . . and after the battle I should mourn my mistress if I had the time. Without all this self-control, do you think I could have done all I’ve done?33
This self-control allowed Napoleon to crack jokes during the battles of Marengo in Italy in 1800 and Wagram in Austria in 1809, even when shot and shell were flying around him.
To achieve success on the battlefield, it was not necessary for Napoleon to invent new strategies and tactics for the French Army: Instead he brilliantly adapted the new thinking of others for the wars he had to fight. Tactical formations such as the battalion carré (square battalion) and the ordre mixte (mixed order) were the concepts of French military thinkers dating from the aftermath of France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, as was the corps system that Napoleon perfected to move bodies of men of twenty thousand to forty thousand with exceptional effectiveness during a campaign. From 1812 (when Napoleon’s enemies also adopted it) until 1945 the corps system remained central to European war making. Leaders do not necessarily have to have good ideas themselves, but they do need to be able to spot the good from the bad, and adopt and adapt the former.
One of Napoleon’s hallmarks—at least in his early campaigns—was speed, just as it had been with Julius Caesar and was to be with the Wehrmacht in 1940–41. “Activité, activité, vitesse! [Action, action, speed!]” Napoleon ordered André Masséna.34 Wherever possible he attempted to avoid long sieges (one of the characteristics of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century warfare), to live off the land, and, crucially, to retain the initiative. In 1805 the use of corps allowed him to move the Grande Armée from their cantonments on the Channel coast to Ulm on the River Danube in a matter of weeks, completely outmaneuvering his Austrian enemy. By 1812, however, the Grande Armée had grown too big for that kind of lightning campaigning to be possible. The army with which Napoleon invaded Russia numbered 615,000—roughly the same size as the population of Paris. Generals entered Russia in their domestic carriages, taking their evening dress, chefs, porcelain services, and so on. The days of dash and tactical flexibility in attack seen in the Italian campaign of 1796–97 were over, and in that sense Napoleon’s ultimate downfall was a result of too much success earlier on.
What was also seen in Italy was Napoleon’s vicious destruction of resistance to his rule, especially at Pavia in 1796. Great leaders occasionally need to be utterly ruthless, as Oliver Cromwell was at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649, Admiral Nelson was in Naples in 1799, and Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt were over the Combined Bomber Offensive in the Second World War. For Napoleon the “whiff of grapeshot” in Paris in 1795, the bloody pacification of Pavia, and above all the punishment of Jaffa in 1799—where he had around three thousand Turkish prisoners of war massacred by bullet and bayonet on the beach outside the city—were the moments that he descended to the use of sheer terror to win his campaign and terrify local populations into no longer opposing him. For all that he was thoughtful and considerate while looking after his own army, he could on short and isolated occasions resort to terror tactics. These almost always rebounded badly against the French Army, especially in Spain during the Peninsular campaign, when they prompted torture on a large scale against captured French soldiers. The cruelty that Napoleon showed was, however, on an ad hoc basis, and certainly not built into the entire ethos of his government, as for example the massacring of millions was for Stalin’s rule.
Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 was in retrospect of course disastrous, but it was much more rational than it seems with the benefit of hindsight of that catastrophic campaign. Napoleon had beaten the Russians twice before in the Austerlitz campaign in 1805 and the Eylau-Friedland campaign in 1807. He wanted only a short, sharp campaign on Russia’s borders and never intended to penetrate deep inside Russia, let alone go all the way to Moscow. His army was over twice the size of the Russian Army at the start of the campaign; indeed, it was the largest invasion force in the history of mankind to that point, comprising an exceptionally broad coalition of no fewer than twenty-one states. The disease that destroyed much of the central column of his invasion—typhus—was not to be diagnosed until 1911. Furthermore, it was not true that he did not know about the harshness of the Russian winter. A highly intelligent and well-read man, Napoleon had studied the disastrous campaign of King Charles XII of Sweden, as recounted by Voltaire. He, therefore, allowed more time to get back from Moscow to Smolensk than it had taken to get from Smolensk to Moscow.
He could have stopped at Vitebsk or Smolensk on the way into Russia, but it seemed to make little sense to halt at Vitebsk in July when he had advanced 190 miles in a month and suffered fewer than ten thousand battle casualties. Audacity had always served him well up until then, and he would cede the initiative if he stopped at Vitebsk so early in the year. Czar Alexander I had called up the 80,000-strong militia in Moscow on July 24 and was arming 400,000 serfs, so it made sense to attack before they were trained and deployed. Murat also pointed out that Russian morale must have been devastated by the constant retreats, wondering how much more of Russia could the czar see ravaged before he sued for peace. Napoleon could not have known that Alexander had declared in St. Petersburg that he would never make peace, saying: “I would sooner let my beard grow to my waist and eat potatoes in Siberia.”35
These were all logical attitudes, not the result of the insane hubris of which Napoleon is regularly accused.* He undoubtedly made a key mistake in choosing the wrong route for the army’s retreat after the Battle of Maloyaroslavets in late October 1812, but that should not lull us into thinking the whole campaign was doomed as soon as he had crossed the Niemen that June.
NAPOLEON’S CAREER from the siege of Toulon in 1793 to the disaster at Waterloo in 1815 is replete with leadership lessons, several of which will be seen in the careers of other leaders in this book. At Toulon he learned not to be afraid to take control, even from those older, senior, and more experienced officers than himself, because he knew he had the support of the overall commander. He mastered the art of working with close colleagues in a cooperative but necessarily competitive atmosphere. At the Battle of Arcola in 1796, Napoleon learned how to control the message and how what really happened is often not as important as what people think happened. A messy skirmish around a bridge was turned into a heroic myth, teaching Napoleon that public relations could not be ignored.
At the Brumaire coup d’état of 1799, Napoleon surrounded himself with the best people for each situation, whom he was prepared to change as the situation changed. The creation of the new honors system based on the Légion d’Honneur in 1800 allowed everyone in France to recognize that it was Napoleon himself who controlled promotions, with all the accretion of power that went with that knowledge. The establishment of the Napoleonic Code in 1804 allowed Napoleon to take the ultimate credit for the ideas and hard work of experts working under his overall supervision. Indeed, a visitor to Napoleon’s tomb today might be forgiven for thinking the entire code—which still informs the French legal system today—sprang entirely from Napoleon’s brain unaided.
In the Austerlitz campaign and in his escape from Elba in 1815, Napoleon showed how timing was everything. His patient study of his opponents’ psychology helped him work out precisely the best moment for him to strike. In his escape from the Russian campaign and flight to Paris in 1812, Napoleon demonstrated the importance of protecting and defending his power base. On landing back at Golfe-Juan near Antibes on the southern coast on March 1, 1815, Napoleon proved that given courage and steady nerves, leaders can make extraordinary comebacks, as was seen in the careers of Churchill, de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, and others. At Laffrey six days later—where he faced down the troops sent by Louis XVIII to arrest him—Napoleon showed himself more than capable of playing on his veterans’ raw emotions, appealing to the romantic streak in the French soul. He maintained his sangfroid after the allies rejected his overtures on March 13, not letting either antagonists or supporters see his inner turmoil.
The Waterloo campaign was similarly replete with leadership lessons; although he was not hubristic when he invaded Russia, he showed bad judgment after the Battle of Ligny on June 16, 1815, when he sent Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy off to chase the Prussians with a large force that he would desperately need on the battlefield of Waterloo two days later. During June 17, as the allied army retreated in the rain, Napoleon—who once said that he could afford to lose an army but never an hour—wasted time. Leaders need to be energetic, or at least convey a sense of energy to their followers.
At the Battle of Waterloo itself, Napoleon seemed to ignore all of the military maxims that he had spent a lifetime propagating. Instead of playing to his strengths and his opponent’s weaknesses, he did the opposite. He failed to retain the initiative. He delegated overall personal control, including vital decisions over the timing and direction of attacks, to lieutenants, which he had not done earlier in his career, however much he trusted them or how well they had performed in the past. He had the wrong marshals in the wrong places, and the best of all of them—Louis-Nicolas Davout—he left far away in Paris. Waterloo was an entirely atypical Napoleonic battle, and it ended in an atypical result for him: final, catastrophic defeat. Why he failed to stick to his tried, trusted, and hitherto largely successful rules of warfare is down to several factors. They had failed him in the 1813 campaigns in Germany; many of his best marshals had refused to rejoin the colors when he returned from exile on Elba; he was unsure exactly where the Prussians had retreated to after the Battle of Ligny, and guessed wrong; the heavy rain on June 17 slowed down his army chasing Wellington’s and robbed him of the initiative; his health (a severe attack of hemorrhoids) might also have been a factor, although equally that could have been an excuse provided afterward by his followers to explain his defeat.
For all that, it is worth recalling the leadership qualities that Napoleon demonstrated elsewhere in his career, not least in the forty-six battles that he won of the sixty he fought. They will be qualities that we will encounter to a greater or lesser degree—generally lesser—in many of the following chapters. For Napoleon’s career demonstrated the importance of compartmentalization, meticulous planning, knowledge of terrain, superb timing, steady nerves, valuing the importance of discipline and training, understanding the psychology of the ordinary soldier to create esprit de corps, the issuing of inspirational speeches and proclamations, controlling the news, adapting the tactical ideas of others, asking pertinent questions of the right people, a deep learning and appreciation of history, a formidable memory, utter ruthlessness when necessary, the deployment of personal charisma, immense calm under unimaginable pressure (especially in moments that look like defeat), an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail, rigorous control of emotions, and the ability to exploit a momentary numerical advantage at the decisive point on the battlefield—and, not least, good luck. Even though he was ultimately defeated, Napoleon is the wartime leader against whom all the others must be judged.