The great soldier-statesman/ 나폴레온 일생 재조명

The great soldier-statesman/ 나폴레온 일생 재조명
The great soldier-statesman   by Conrad Black   A review of Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts   The New Criterion/November 2014   The distinguished historian Andrew Roberts has written his greatest book to date and has made an important contribution to the vast Napoleonic literature. His Napoleon: A Life (whose British title is Napoleon the Great) is a monument of research and organization, adheres to the author’s well-established high-stylistic standard, and reaches a new summit of thoroughness and balance in his treatment of probably the most gigantic personality in the history of the world (barring those widely regarded as partially divine).1 Every significant or interesting aspect of Napoleon’s life is dealt with: the general, the administrator and reformer, the law-giver, the academician and intellectual, the promoter of science, the ardent womanizer and lover, the public relations genius, the politician, and the creator of an immense mystique whose power has survived the two centuries following his death. And Roberts examines all elements of Napoleon’s administration, including its financial record and fiscal and social consequences, as well as Napoleon’s intricate diplomatic history. At many points throughout the work, Roberts considers alternative steps Napoleon might have taken and makes apt historical comparisons.   Napoleon was possibly the most prominent personality in the world from shortly after he took over the tattered and demoralized ragamuffin Army of Italy in 1796 until his death in 1821, after six years of exile following Waterloo. And few people have remotely approached him in celebrity: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Lincoln, and a few twentieth-century statesmen, evil and benign (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Churchill, Roosevelt), but it remains to be seen if they will have the same staying power. It need hardly be said that Napoleon remains a figure of intense controversy and that biographical treatment of him by respectable authors runs the gamut from hagiography to demonization. Hard though it is to believe, there are significant quantities of new correspondence and documents that have recently emerged. There is also here a relentless and entirely successful effort by the author to address each point of controversy fairly: to present the arguments and to give his reasoned and persuasive judgment of each issue.   To refresh the memory of the casual Napoleonic reader: with unpaid, half-equipped stragglers and conscripts, Napoleon effectively bundled the Austrian Empire out of Italy and moved on to take over Egypt and part of what is now Israel. But with his fleet demolished by Nelson, he returned to France and led a coup d’état, outwitting many other factions, elder politicians, and revolutionaries to become master of France at the age of thirty, initially as First Consul, and then, for eleven years, including a ten-month exile in Elba, as Emperor (“of the French Republic” at first and then, less discordantly, “of the French”). He fought sixty major battles (won at least fifty-four and drew several) and was frequently victorious against heavy odds and in unpromising conditions, often by recourse to audacious and brilliant tactics. He revolutionized almost every aspect of land war: training, rapid deployment, logistics, coordination of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, as well as the scope of operations. The Duke of Wellington reckoned Napoleon’s presence opposite was the equivalent of adding 40,000 good soldiers to the forces of any other contemporary commander (and remarked that, with Napoleon’s death, he was now the world’s foremost commanding general).   At one point Napoleon was effectively governing almost all of Europe, from the gates of Cadiz to Moscow, and from Copenhagen to Naples, and he did so with astonishing energy and thoroughness. He promulgated the Civil Code, which he had partly written, and which was widely influential in Europe and beyond (including in Louisiana and Quebec). He brought in the metric system, abolished the tenacious vestiges of feudalism, promoted science, education, libraries, museums, and art galleries in France and elsewhere, and generally suppressed official anti-Semitism. Though he largely squandered the exaltation that the French and many other Europeans felt for the soul of the egalitarian Republic, he also buried for all time the worst offenses of the ancien régime, and ran a distinguished meritocracy that cleared away the worst abuses of the class system in France and much of Europe.   Andrew Roberts deals with the usual leading charges against Napoleon very judiciously, from the massacre of 3,000 Turkish prisoners at Jaffa (a shabby business with some extenuating circumstances), to the murder of the Duc d’Enghien (a drumhead execution, but one which followed on egregious royalist provocations and plots against Napoleon and his family), as well as the familiar accusation that he was a warmonger, a man with no human qualities, a hubristic (a word that here, as in some other works of this author, is slightly over-used) ruler, and a monster who was indifferent to casualties and without any empathy or concern for anyone. In all of the circumstances, Napoleon was much more sinned against than sinning, and was inexplicably forgiving of ceaseless treachery from Talleyrand, his egregious foreign minister; the equally infamous police minister, Joseph Fouché; most of his own family; and a number of his own marshals, as well as a large number of people who owed him much, but betrayed him shamelessly. Of particular value is Andrew Roberts’s severe debunking of the widely held British historical view that Napoleon was essentially the precursor to Hitler: that the many hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were as explicitly murdered by Napoleon as the victims of the death camps of the Third Reich were by Hitler. Part of this theory is that Napoleon, almost alone, was responsible for the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, and for the continuance of war through seven successive coalitions bankrolled by Great Britain.   These are the views of familiar historians such as Alistair Horne, Max Hastings, and Paul Johnson (though A. G. Macdonell and David G. Chandler are conspicuous exceptions), and they reflect the British propaganda of the time and the judgments of contemporary British leaders, including Wellington, who, though he conceded that Napoleon was the world’s greatest general, thought him in other respects a thug and a “bully.” He took no account of Napoleon’s status as an intellectual much admired by Goethe; a respected member of the French Academy; a statesman; an overpowering and almost always charming personality; and a man who loved his wives and children. Napoleon was always philosophical, famously remarking, early in the retreat from Moscow, “From the sublime to the ridiculous is a single step.” He was beguilingly charming, even on the trip to St. Helena, was unshakably physically courageous, indeed fearless in mortal combat, and was an infallibly eloquent orator and frequent writer. Roberts debunks the theory that he had a “Napoleon complex,” as he was of average height; shows that he was generally courteous and popular with those who were subordinate to him; and proves that the collapse of the Peace of Amiens was at least as much the fault of the British government as of the French.   Napoleon was treated with provoking insolence and disingenuousness by a number of European statesmen, especially the long-serving Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Klemens von Metternich, “the coachman of Europe.” Napoleon’s monarchic contemporaries—the mad “Farmer George III” and dissolute Prince Regent, the deranged Czars Paul and Alexander, and the mediocre sovereigns in Vienna and Berlin—were not his peers; the only foreign statesmen of stature were Pitt, Fox, and Castlereagh; Metternich; the papal foreign minister, Ercole Cardinal Consalvi; and Washington and Jefferson.   If, instead of setting up the Empire and inflicting on occupied Europe his generally rather incompetent and avaricious siblings as national kings, he had created a Second Republic with renewable seven- to ten-year terms for himself as president, he would have kept much of the esprit of the Revolution and led a much stronger state. The entire French political tradition had consisted of a combination of Richelieu’s absolute, centralized monarchy and Colbert’s state-directed economy, which in the hands of less talented successors deteriorated into the inefficacy and disaffection that became the Revolution and ultimately the Terror, before slackening into the unfathomable corruption of the Directory. By the standards of these predecessors, Napoleon was a comparative liberal, and it will never be known whether the constitutional monarchy and free press that he established in the Hundred Days of his restoration would have lasted if the Waterloo campaign had gone differently.   While his performance as commander and statesman was almost flawless from 1796 to 1806, where Napoleon did disappoint was in compounding his lack of understanding of naval affairs with his unshakeable conviction that he could win an economic war with Great Britain by endlessly forcing his continental blockade of Britain on all Europe from Portugal to Russia. Britain was undoubtedly inconvenienced by the Continental System (which purported to bar British goods and services from Europe), but its navy could secure most of what Europe had supplied Britain from Latin America and could induce smuggling all over Europe. While British exports fell sharply, the home market could pick up much of the slack. Britain was strained, but not near to cracking, by Napoleon’s counter-embargo and, in the end, the continental bar on trade with Britain could not be rigorously imposed, particularly on Russia and Spain. The attempt to do so alienated all Europe, including much of France.   Once Napoleon swaddled himself in the monarchist largesse of the Empire, dumped the popular Josephine to marry a Hapsburg and get an heir, and was drawn into endless quagmires at both ends of Europe, in Spain and Russia, he steadily lost his ability to defeat his enemies as they learned from his ten years of successful war-making and reconstructed their armies along modern lines. He also misjudged the French themselves, whom he imagined capable of conducting a brutal guerrilla war like that of the Spanish or of the Russians, which culminated in the burning of Moscow by its inhabitants. The French grew so tired of war, taxation, conscription, and casualties that they greeted the invading Allies in 1814 as liberators. And the strain of fighting seven wars against coalitions, while administering most of Europe with his unbounded curiosity and energy, resulted in a reduction of the brilliance of Napoleon’s generalship. He was still inspired in crossing the Beresina out of Russia and in the frontier campaign of 1813–1814, but Leipzig was misconceived and the Waterloo campaign was thoroughly bungled. He could have salvaged an expanded France and the guardianship of much of Germany and Italy after the Russian debacle, and could still have kept his throne, though over a shrinking France, as his enemies closed in, in 1813, but he was always too late in taking stale-dated peace offers and did not understand the extreme animus of Metternich, Czar Alexander, Pope Pius VII (whom he had imprisoned for four years), and the Prussians, though he was never in any doubt about the objectives of the British.   All of this is presented in a well-paced narrative by Andrew Roberts, with exactly the right balance of detail to avoid superficiality, but never so much as to cause this always-gripping epic to flag. There are asides to note Josephine’s sexual prowess (including the mysterious “zig-zag”), the cameo roles played by Napoleon’s more than twenty mistresses, and a great many other piquant and often humorous but apposite vignettes. Apart from the life of its central character, an endless procession of adventurers, charlatans, psychopaths, and crooks is described, as well as many heroes among a rich cast of the ignoble and the tragic. The pictures and maps are excellent and the story, supported by a formidable and exhaustive 4,000 footnotes, surges along at the speed achieved by the Emperor in his “seven-league boots,” right to the last of what Chateaubriand (an opponent) called “the mightiest breath of life that ever animated human clay.” Napoleon was one of the greatest military commanders and rulers in history, a dazzling personality at which the world still marvels. He “built an empire, handed down laws for the ages, perfected the art of leadership, and joined the ancients,” wrote Andrew Roberts in justifying the original title, Napoleon the Great. The book was aptly named, and, so worthy of its subject, that as a biography it too will be regarded as great in a very crowded field.   1 Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts; Viking, 976 pages, $45.
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