Napoleon: A Concise Biography by David Bell

Author:David Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2015-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4 The Emperor, 1804-1812

Perhaps because Napoleon mythologized himself so insistently, it is easy to imagine him as a series of figures from Greek mythology. For the early Napoleon there is Hercules, accomplishing apparently impossible feats and sweeping out the Augean stables of French government with his consul’s broom. For the late Napoleon, one thinks of Prometheus: the titan chained to his South Atlantic rock, pecked at by English vultures. And for the emperor in his heyday, the figure that comes irresistibly to mind is Icarus, soaring higher, higher, and higher still, until suddenly his wings fall apart and he plummets from the sky. Except that in Napoleon’s case it is not the heat of the sun that prompts his fall but the howling chill of the Russian winter.

But such images are deceptive, and none more so than the last. One can certainly write Napoleon’s career between 1804 and 1812 as a series of battles won (Austerlitz, Jena, Friedland, Borodino) or enemy capitals triumphantly entered (Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Moscow). One can also write it by tracing the expanding borders of the First Empire on the map. By 1812 they extended across northern Germany to the borders of Denmark, down the Italian peninsula to Rome, and across the Pyrenees to Barcelona. The rest of Italy and Spain were satellite states, along with Poland’s "Grand Duchy of Warsaw,” and the “Confederation of the Rhine” in Germany. A shrunken Prussia and Austria had become subservient allies. By these standards, the period looked like one of steady ascent.

Napoleon certainly relished his victories and his conquests, which only confirmed his belief in his unique, transcendent destiny. But in truth, as the years passed after 1804, on almost every level he controlled events less and less. The new political and military forces unleashed by the French Revolution, which had made possible his astonishing conquests and reforms, did not allow him to consolidate and preserve them. Instead, a different geopolitical dynamic took shape. On the level of grand strategy, Napoleon felt increasingly forced into incessant war and annexation, above all because of his inability to overcome his greatest and most supremely frustrating enemy, Great Britain. On the battlefield the contending armies grew exponentially, becoming far more difficult to manage—and more and more of the battles themselves were either lost or barely won, and at a frightful cost. And the conquered territories refused to stay conquered, with insurgents dragging the French into a series of painful and draining guerrilla wars. In retrospect, the bloated boundaries of the empire in 1812 look less like the markers of a new Roman Empire than the skin of a bubble about to burst. This trajectory was not immediately apparent when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. Indeed, the next two years saw him win some of his greatest triumphs. But they also saw two key setbacks that over time would tell more and more heavily against him.

These setbacks both involved naval power, and the fatal disadvantages France had at sea in comparison with Great Britain.

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