The Little Man Who Started These Great Wars

Some years ago an American tennis player in Paris for the French Open was taken on a rapid limousine tour of the City of Lights. When asked at the end what she had best liked, she replied that it was “the tomb of the little dead dude,” Les Invalides. Napoleon Bonaparte, who was actually of about average height for the time, continues to fascinate. By one count — not mine — by 1980 about 220,000 books and articles had been published on him. Here’s another one, “Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799” (Yale University Press, 672 pages, $35), by Philip Dwyer, an excellent history and a very good read.Mr. Dwyer takes the story of Napoleon from his birth in Ajaccio on the Mediterranean island of Corsica in 1769 to the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799), which brought Napoleon to power. This coup put an end to the period known as the Directory (the latter government, with an executive authority of five directors, had followed and ended the Terror, and was unstable and corrupt enough to have been dubbed the “War of the Chamber Pots”). The coup prepared the way for Napoleon’s unchallenged power in France. Bonaparte would not have had it any other way.Mr. Dwyer hates Napoleon. (The Napoleon buffs will not like this one.) But he knows an enormous amount about the man, and we can perhaps understand his distaste.Over the long run, the costs to France and to Europe of Napoleon’s monumental ambition — indeed megalomania — were enormous. The disastrous Russian campaign of 1812 is particularly significant in this respect. It was only a few years ago that remnants of a handful of the soldiers who had had the bad fortune to be with Bonaparte were finally uncovered in Lithuania. Napoleon’s Grand Army lost 370,000 men to death and another 200,000 to Russian captivity. When Bonaparte returned to Paris, a military bulletin cheerfully announced: “The Emperor’s health has never been better.” That was true enough, and Napoleon blithely began to rebuild his armies for the next campaign. Napoleon once said, “A man like me does not give a damn about the lives of a million men.” For a million people, however, the romance of the emperor’s adventures led simply to death.This all had to start somewhere, of course, and Mr. Dwyer tells the story of how a provincial Corsican for whom French was a second language and who never lost his accent became not just the leader but the personification of a rejuvenated, imperial France. As a very young Corsican patriot in the military in France, Napoleon was teased as an isolated outsider who best spoke the patois of his island, a mix of Genovese and Tuscan. During the summer of 1789, he penned a history of Corsica in which the French were portrayed as murderous exploiters and tormenters, and Corsicans their victims.He soon changed his mind. Demonstrating his remarkable ability to adapt to circumstances, as well as the likely impact of having read Rousseau — he, too, had been a foreigner in France — and other philosophers, Napoleon rode the wave of the French Revolution. As Bonaparte himself put it with clarity: “It is better to eat than be eaten.” Good fortune had him back in Corsica when, after becoming a Jacobin, he might later have perished in Paris, and in Paris when it came time to select someone to command the Italian army.The careful attention Napoleon paid to image-building is highlighted throughout Mr. Dwyer’s account, and will strike many readers as quite modern. It begins with the Battle of Arcola near Verona in November 1796, when Napoleon’s forces finally succeeded in crossing a bridge and taking the small village on the other side. Napoleon used this minor victory to help him win a reputation as a hero of the French Republic, immortalized by the painter Antoine-Jean Gros. (Readers may tire of embarrassingly dark, dingy black-and-white illustrations of paintings and engravings, some barely able to be deciphered.) It was a key piece of the kind of orchestrated propaganda that built Bonaparte’s fame and for which the very republic itself could later be easily dispensed. Napoleon modestly portrayed himself as “the savior,” and, although not a religious person, encouraged comparisons with Jesus Christ. He would continually help construct his own image; “for him the truth never got in the way of a good story,” Mr. Dwyer writes. That story was of the military man who alone could save France.But that military man could not save France from Napoleon, nor, for that matter, could he save Italy, where, in the name of “liberty,” Napoleon oversaw the pillage of most anything that could be carried away, including great works of art (many of which are still in Paris). At the same time, he ordered the gunning down of rebels and civilians alike, while rewarding those faithful to him with promotions and booty. It was at the time of the Battle of Lodi in 1796, again in northern Italy, he related, “that I believed myself to be a superior man, and that the ambition came to me of executing the great things which so far had been occupying my thoughts only as a fantastic dream.” Believing that destiny guided all that he did, Napoleon warned the people of Gaza, El Ramble, and Jaffa: “All human effort against me is useless, for I succeed in all that I undertake. Those who declare themselves my enemies die.” The massacre at Jaffa perhaps predictably followed.The sections of “Napoleon” on the expedition to Egypt, with a good number of scientists along for the ride; on Napoleon’s fantasies of conquering India, and on the debacle in Syria — portrayed by Bonaparte as a glorious victory — are compelling (and perhaps may encourage some readers to make comparisons with a more recent invasion of a Middle Eastern state by a Western power). So is the account of the coup d’état in 1799, when Bonaparte briefly faltered in the face of outrage, shouts of “Outlaw!” and even physical opposition when he brought the bad news to the Council of Elders and the Council of Five Hundred at the château of Saint-Cloud. His brother Lucien, the president of the Council of Five Hundred, bailed him out, maintaining his own calm and stalling for time until the revived Bonaparte could do what he did best, take control backed by troops.We learn lots about Josephine, who was one of the constants in Napoleon’s life. This despite her notorious infidelity (he followed in turn): An earlier paramour, the sleazy politician Paul Barras, got it right when he said that Josephine would have eagerly drunk gold out of the skull of her lover.Another constant for Napoleon was loyalty to his Corsican family — he, of course, rewarded brothers with kingships in various conquered places. When he snatched the crown away from the compliant pope and crowned himself in 1804, he supposedly said to his brothers, “If only Dad could see us now!”Mr. Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University. His recent books include “The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time” (2002); “A History of Modern Europe from the Renaissance to the Present,” 2nd edition (2004), and “Police Stories: Building the French State” (2006).

The Little Man Who Started These Great Wars

The Little Man Who Started These Great Wars

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