Napoleon Bonaparte

Revolutionary or Tyrant?

Napoleon was a towering phenomenon, a prolific genius who two centuries ago dominated Europe and changed its history.

He was a military paragon, a natural-born warrior and a ruthless conqueror bent on controlling ever more nations and territory. He was a brilliant politician who changed seamlessly from a leftist revolutionary to an autocrat. And most astonishingly, he was a cerebral author of liberal political reforms and lasting guidelines for civic progress and decency.

Historians have written scores of books about Napoleon, but to this day they don’t agree on what manner of man he was, and what was his legacy.

Rise to Power

There is no question about Napoleon’s overwhelming, single-minded, and for a time triumphant drive to expand his power and rule all of Europe. He set out on that quest already as a young lieutenant in the French Army when, following the 1792 fall of the French monarchy, he left his native Corsica and moved to Paris.

A member of a low-ranking nobility, he made allies with important leaders of the French Revolution and was quickly promoted to general. In 1795, he won his first battle by defeating a royalist uprising, and the same year he fought against the armies of Austria and Italy.

He later told an aide that after one of his early victories, “I no longer considered myself a mere general, but a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples.”

Napoleon was 26 years old, and the way he answered his calling was by fighting what one biographer called a series of “unnecessary wars.”

In 1798, he persuaded the revolutionary Directorate that ruled the French Republic to put him in charge of an ambitious expedition to Egypt and Syria. It was his first major attempt to undermine the power of Britain by cutting its trade route to India.

Napoleon failed dismally to accomplish that objective, but his career continued to flourish. In 1799, upon his return to France, he organized a coup against the five-man Directorate and became the First of the three Consuls who seized control of the Republic.

In 1803, he sold 827,000 square miles of territory west of the Mississippi River to the administration of President Thomas Jefferson. For $15 million – about $250 million in 2016 dollars – it was a tremendous bargain for Uncle Sam: the so-called Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of what was then the United States.

But Napoleon needed the money for a planned invasion of Great Britain and to launch a campaign against the coalition of Russia, Prussia and small German states called the Holy Roman Empire.

While fighting that war, in 1804, Napoleon climbed the ultimate political rung by prevailing on Pope Pius VII to coronate him the Emperor of France.

In 1805, he added to his title the King of Italy, and by 1806 he won all of his ground battles against the three European enemies. His attempt to invade England, however, failed disastrously in the Battle of Trafalgar, where the British navy – without losing a single vessel – sank 22 of the 33 ships in the Franco-Spanish Armada.

Undeterred as the aggressor and expansionist, in 1808, Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula and installed his brother Joseph as the King of Spain.

Finally in 1812, at the age of 42, Napoleon made his fatal blunder. He assembled la Grande Armée of 500,000 soldiers and, driven by the same obsession that had taken him to Egypt, invaded Russia. His goal again was to cripple Great Britain, this time by forcing Czar Alexander I to join a Europe-wide blockade of British trade.

Napoleon reached Moscow on September 14 only to find it deserted and put to torch by order of its mayor. Russia’s notoriously long and bitter winter was coming; the invading troops were exhausted and starved after fighting an enemy who’d destroyed the harvest to deny them food; and Napoleon, who was an epileptic, remained for ten days in a Kremlin bedroom before emerging to take command of his desperate army.

He ordered a retreat through the snowy and desolate territory. The long, exhaustive trek to France was survived by no more than 10,000 troops of the Grande Armée – one of history’s great military disasters that was made immortal by the 1812 Overture of Russian composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky.

Thrilled by Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, the European nations, now thoroughly fed up with his wars and mayhem, formed an alliance of seven countries: Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain, Portugal, Sweden and Spain. Between October 16 and 19, 1813, they decisively defeated Napoleon in the Battle of Leipzig.

The victorious armies invaded France and the next April, the Emperor of France was deposed by the French Senate. Napoleon was exiled to Elba, an island near Rome, and made one more attempt to seize the reins.

In February 1815 he escaped from the island, resumed command of the French Army, and for 100 days ruled France. He was then defeated by British and Prussian troops at the Belgian town of Waterloo, and exiled again, this time to Saint Helena, a remote island in the Atlantic.

He remained there in British custody until his death in 1821, at the age of 51.

Napoleon’s Legacy

In retrospect, Napoleon should have stopped fighting wars in 1799 when he first took control of France as the First Consul of the Republic.  It was during this period that he ordered, supervised, and significantly contributed to the drafting of laws that became known as the Napoleonic Code. Most of Napoleon’s biographers agree that this was his greatest lasting achievement.

For example, Andrew Roberts, a prominent British journalist and historian, wrote that “The ideas that underpin our modern world—meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on—were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon.”

Roberts also praised Napoleon’s “rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.”

The biographer added that:

“Napoleon directly overthrew feudal remains in much of Western Europe. He liberalized property laws, ended seigneurial dues, abolished the guild of merchants and craftsmen to facilitate entrepreneurship, legalized divorce, closed the Jewish ghettos and made Jews equal to everyone else. The Inquisition ended as did the Holy Roman Empire. The power of church courts and religious authority was sharply reduced and equality under the law was proclaimed for all men.”

German historian Dieter Langewiesche, another admirer of “the new Alexander the Great,” as Napoleon was hailed in France, described the Napoleonic code as a “revolutionary project” that extended the right to own property and a speeded the decline of feudalism. He credited Napoleon with reducing the 1,000-odd city states and other minor entities of the Holy Roman Empire into a forty-state Confederation of the Rhine, as an important step toward the unification of Germany in 1871.

A strikingly different conclusion about Napoleon’s achievements is described in impressive detail by Alan Schom, an American scholar, in his 888-page biography titled Napoleon Bonaparte. Schom, who depicts Napoleon the individual as immoral and despicable—he calls him “The most destructive man in European history since Attila the Hun”—questions the sanity of his attempt to invade England, and takes a dim view even of Napoleon’s liberal views by pointing out that as the First Consul he shut down critical French newspapers.

The documents left behind by Napoleon, in Schom’s judgement, were “at best legal fictions and at worst blatant lies” concocted “for the sake of whitewashing…the historical record.”  

For example, Schom claims that Napoleon lied in his reports from Egypt to disguise that the expedition was a “fiasco.” The author quotes one of the French generals accusing Napoleon of ordering him to “poison” his plague-stricken soldiers to speed up their retreat from Syria—a flight that culminated, Schom writes, when Napoleon left his troops without a fleet to “save his own skin” by escaping the plague to France.

Napoleon’s worst sin, in Schom’s eyes, was his cruelty to his own soldiers as well as his enemies. He accuses the commander of the Grande Armée of executing “in cold blood…thousands of prisoners of war,” rendering homeless “hundreds of thousands of civilian refugees,” letting his soldiers rape “thousands upon thousands of old women and young girls,” ruthlessly looting “hundreds of towns and cities,” and “[leaving to rot] across the face of Europe… three million or so of dead soldiers of all nations [and] millions of wounded and permanently handicapped…”

Schom concludes that “The memory of Genghis Khan paled in comparison” with Napoleon’s record. It’s a verdict that Napoleon himself might have feared when, in summing up his career, he downgraded his military accomplishments: “My true glory is not to have won forty battles,” he said. “...Waterloo will erase the memory of so many victories.... But...what will live forever, is my Civil Code.”