As a major new film explores the life of the French emperor, Matt Elton asks historians Laura O’Brien and David Andress how we can make sense of the diverse and contradictory aspects of Napoleon’s character and career
Matt Elton: Before we start thinking about Napoleon’s legacy, we should explore a key aspect of his story: just how great a military commander was he, and what were his greatest successes?
David Andress: He’s one of the greatest military commanders of all time. He was also a highly charismatic individual and, every time you talk about Napoleon, you have to bear that in mind alongside the fact that he was a terrible person, politically speaking. He was staggeringly successful at doing things with military force – the problem was, that wasn’t always a good idea. The story of Napoleon’s life from the mid-1790s onwards is essentially one of balancing his personal charisma, drive, ambition and outstanding leadership qualities with what he actually did in the political sphere, the systems he set up, and what they said about what he thought about everyone else who wasn’t him.
Laura O’Brien: I completely agree. One of the reasons he continues to excite such interest is the tendency to view him through a binary prism: he is either the worst person who ever lived, or a perfect genius who was really hard done by. This is the classic historian’s answer, but we need to think about his reputation in a more complicated, nuanced way. We have to recognise what Napoleon achieved – which was exceptional – and the way he was able to capture the imagination to such an extent that he still informs how we understand leadership.
How did Napoleon’s early life shape his worldview and how he saw himself?
LOB: Probably the most important early formative event was being sent to a military academy in 1779, when he was nine. He spent the next five years in that very austere environment, and noted later how it taught him to survive in hard situations. He was likely very badly bullied: people joked about his accent, and the fact he didn’t speak French very clearly. He became interested in the idea of Corsican independence in this period, and in the fact that he was Corsican above all.
Although he did have a difficult time, and wasn’t an academic superstar by any means, he did get on quite well. He probably wasn’t the lone genius – the isolated child ploughing a lonely furrow towards a future destiny – that he and some of his future biographers wanted him to be viewed as.
DA: Thinking of yourself as a lonely genius was the thing of the moment in the 1770s and 1780s. It was an era in which the late Enlight- enment began shading towards Romanti- cism, and for the young people of that generation who were going to become the Romantics, one of the key ideas was that you had to be distinctive and have a personality. That included the idea that, if your circum- stances were making you miserable, you had to surmount them and move forward. In a sense, the French Revolution fell into the lap of this generation as an opportunity to show off their greatness in all kinds of ways.
LOB: It’s vital to think not just about the boots-on-the-ground aspect of his military successes but also how those victories were relayed back to France and around the world. Napoleon was aware of having an audience at all times, and of existing for that audience. That projection of an image of himself – his military success and his political leadership – explicitly intended for wider consumption was very modern.
He essentially created a form of modern leadership, and you can see that from early on in his career. Le Courrier de l’Armée d’Italie, for instance, which was the newspaper of the Army of Italy, was essentially a write-up of how well Napoleon had been doing and how great all his military successes had been. It was notionally for the soldiers but, really, it was for the people at home in France, who were starting to put pictures of Napoleon up on their walls and buy prints of him in battle.
Was this image management central to how he was seen?
DA: You always have to see that aspect of it. He didn’t even bother posing for the famous image of him crossing the Alps sitting on a horse as it rears up, for instance. He just said: “Knock me up a picture in which I look great.” That was an act of propaganda in itself, part of a movement to set himself up as a hero to people desperate for such a figure after a decade of chaos – and to then take power on the assumption that they need it rather than having to actually ask them if they want it.
During the coup of 1799, Napoleon wanted to ratify the fact that he’d taken power (albeit having seized it brutally), so decided to have a popular plebiscite, or referendum – and then faked the results.
In order to vote in that referendum, you had to sign a book in your local administrative office: if you wanted to vote against Napole- on, you had to literally sign your name in front of the officials. Approximately 1,500 brave people did so, but more than a million people voted for him – and then that number was just doubled randomly, because it sounded better. That’s another pattern we can follow through Napoleon’s story: paying lip service to democracy, but in reality just using power to do anything he felt like.
LOB: It is about manipulating the idea of democracy, but also the idea that Napoleon can connect with people to such an extent that they almost don’t need the thing in the middle. Napoleon’s idea was that he could connect to the public because he knew what they wanted – and what they wanted was him, because he was such a legend.
Returning to that painting of him crossing the Great St Bernard Pass, Napoleon knew his history – being a child of the classics- focused system of the Enlightenment – and there are plenty of references to leaders of the past in that image. For instance, the rocks in the foreground are inscribed with the names of Hannibal and Charlemagne. So Napoleon was very explicitly inserting himself into this continuum, this legacy of leadership that unified the military and the political.
Did this self-mythologisation obscure darker, more complex aspects of this story – of the Napoleonic Wars, for instance?
DA: The crowned heads of Europe fought each other a lot. But they also understood at some level that this was a system in which wars had limits, and that the objective of every war was some kind of just diplomatic settlement. That was an idea that had gone back hundreds of years.
What Napoleon did, notoriously, was to break that system: partly through his use of magnificent, glorious force, but partly by being a shameless oath-breaker. He thought that treaties were things you used to make other people do things – and, if you didn’t like the outcome, you’d just declare war on them again. He did this for reasons his propagandists outlined at length and in detail but, in the end, he did them because he could. When you look at the relationship between war and politics through the decade after Napoleon’s coronation in 1804, it’s clear he never accepted that anyone else could limit what he wanted to do. That was the real dark side, internationally speaking.
Of course, within the French empire there was also authoritarianism at a civil level: censorship, no free elections, and no meaningful concept of democracy in action. France was a police state, and it’s only in light of the worse examples from the 20th century that you might be tempted to downplay that authoritarianism.
LOB: It’s important not to see this era as being a sort of 20th-century totalitarian police state, but there was an authoritarian element. And there was also, of course, the decision to send the French army back into the Caribbean and to reimpose slavery on some French colonies – although Napoleon did later say that he shouldn’t have done it, if only because he would then have been able to use military and political force to play off against Britain and Spain in their imperial possessions. While people have long been aware of this aspect of the story, the 2021 bicentennial of his death acknowledged it very explicitly, and it’s now something I think you can’t avoid talking about.
It seems to me there’s increasing scope for understanding Napoleon in a way that is not just about explicit, blanket denunciation or heroisation but instead about looking at him and his legacy in a more holistic way that goes beyond the good or bad binaries of the past.
We should talk about the Napoleonic Code. What was it, and why is it important in understanding this wider story?
DA: Since early in the French revolutionary process, France’s finest legal minds had been trying to solve the problem that, even after revolution, people would still say you couldn’t change the law because it was so grounded in history it was as if it just existed. They spent more than a decade working on new systems of law, and what eventually became the Napoleonic Code was drawn from that work.
The extent to which you think Napoleon was personally responsible for shaping it depends on how much of the propaganda you want to believe. It was discussed in front of him, and there was lots of talk about what he wanted it to include. But we can see one of the good aspects of monarchy in Napoleon’s ability as a single figurehead, a single authori- tative will, to push forward the work of a state political class. He got things done, including producing these law codes at the same time as pacifying the nation, which had seen a real breakdown of law and order in the late 1790s. It was just one of the ways in which Napoleon was the physical manifestation of what the revolution had been trying to do for a decade.
LOB: [Historian] Geoffrey Ellis wrote that, although we tend to see Napoleon as either Caesar or Charlemagne, he was more compa- rable to [Eastern Roman emperor] Justinian in that his big legacy was civil reorganisation and the implementation of a new revolution- ary structure. Many of its elements still hold sway in some form in the legal systems of France and other European nations.
Modern French history is in many ways a story of centralisation and decentralisation, of people handing off power and taking it back to themselves, culminating in the system we have now, which is much central- ised in that power is concentrated much more in the figure of the president than had been the case beforehand. That in many ways is a product of the story that began in the process of setting up these different codes.
So I think one of Napoleon’s biggest legacies is bureaucratic structures and systems, certainly in terms of the aspect that people in France and other European nations live with on a daily basis. I’m not sure that’s necessarily the legacy he would have wanted to leave, but it probably is his biggest ongoing impact.
When was Napoleon’s reputation at its highest, and why?
LOB: In terms of his military success, I think the emergence of the Grande Armée [Napole- on’s main fighting force], victory at Austerlitz and the events of 1804 and 1806 represent a period in which he was very dynamic, rising to power, and pushing things forward. There were mini downfalls within that period – but then there were minor downfalls all the way through Napoleon’s career.
This wasn’t a life or a reign that was straight up or straight down. People also pick and choose the version of Napoleon they want to celebrate, and the version they maybe don’t want to think about too much. That isn’t a very direct answer, but it does, I think, reflect the complexity of his story.
DA: You could also take a different view – as some of his critics on the political left have – that the era of ‘peak Napoleon’ was around 1810 and 1811, when he clearly saw himself as master of Europe. He had monarchs coming to pay court to him, and he was rude and dismissive to all of them. He was in the process of trying to bully Russia into more strongly resisting Britain, and had no diffi- culty imagining defeating Russia militarily
– or, indeed, finally smashing any of his enemies that he’d always wanted to get his hands on. There is ample evidence of the massive scope of his vision of himself, and his capability of dragging along his whole extended family as junior monarchs.
Another peak was in 1813, when he used a truce with Austria to build up his military forces – because, when the peace settlement was over, he was just going to start fighting again, and nobody could stop him. He had an unshakeable belief that he could defeat his enemies and impose his will on them.
Yet another peak came just months later, during those terrible winter battles of early 1814. With only small numbers of troops at his disposal, Napoleon was shuttling back- wards and forwards around the frontiers of France, repeatedly punching Allied armies in the face and making it very difficult for them to advance on Paris. Eventually, of course, they simply mobilised overwhelming num- bers and couldn’t be stopped. Yet there was
a lightning flash there of the Napoleon of 20 years earlier – proof that he could still act like his younger self on the battlefield.
David, you caused something of a stir this summer when you wrote on Twitter that “Napoleon used the entire resources of state and empire to make himself look cool to future generations”. Do you think people still see Napoleon as being cool?
DA: Absolutely, yes – and the response to making simple, factual statements on the internet demonstrates that quite clearly. You can really annoy a lot of people by suggest- ing that Napoleon is not a stainless hero, or is an anti-democrat or, in the end, a tyrant in the sense in which tyranny had been under- stood since ancient times. He was unaccount- able: he broke things, he broke systems, he broke people.
My old mentor, the historian Norman Hampson, used to say that the reason he couldn’t stand him was because Napoleon said: “My income is 100,000 men a year.” That’s 100,000 deaths on the battlefield, from diseases in the camp, from horrible, festering wounds, and from all the other things that the pursuit of power via warfare inevitably led to – and from all the moments when Napoleon didn’t have to start another fight but did so anyway.
We need to come to terms with the fact that, in civil life and in politics, he just wasn’t interested in what anyone else thought, and was never going to cede power even when he paid lip service to doing so.
LOB: Napoleon wasn’t the only person who tried to harness the entire resources of the state to make himself look good. He was doing what people had done in political and monarchical leadership for centuries, and what politicians still try to project today. In his [2020] book Men on Horseback, historian David Bell is eloquent on the link between image and charisma, and the importance of the global age of revolutions in forging the image of leadership we have today, which is fundamentally a legacy of Napoleon’s era.
David, you noted that you can annoy a lot of people by suggesting that Napoleon isn’t a stainless hero, but I think you can also annoy an awful lot of people just by mentioning his name. The implication sometimes seems to be that you can’t engage with Napoleon’s legacy because he was simply a very bad man. He was, but that’s why he’s so annoyingly interesting: because he was simultaneously terrible and fascinating, and was able to use his charisma all through his life.
He wasn’t as short as British propaganda would have you believe, but he was very slight, and certainly quite unimpressive as a young man. Yet the fact he was still able to persuade people to such an extent says something about the level of charisma we’re dealing with here.
We’re talking ahead of the release of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. Does the fact that a film of this scale and budget is being released now, in 2023, surprise you?
LOB: I’m fascinated by the fact it looks like a very traditional Napoleon film, in the sense that it is a straight biopic. It was originally pitched as being just about his rise to power, which seemed like a more sensible approach, but it now looks as if it’s going to be a start- to-finish retelling. That’s interesting, because films made about Napoleon across the past 20 or 30 years have tended to move away from battlefield dramas to focus much more on the man on a human scale. I’d want to ask Scott about the decision he’s seemingly made to explore the story beyond Napoleon’s rise to power. Could he not resist the lure of big battle sequences?
The initial reaction to the trailer in some parts of social media was, shall we say, people rubbing their hands with glee at those sequences, whereas I’m more interested in thinking about how Napoleon is going to appear as played by Joaquin Phoenix.
DA: The casting is very strange: Phoenix is almost 50, so a generation older than Napole- on was in the 1790s – almost the age he was when he died, in fact. If they’d done the whole thing as Napoleon sitting on St Helena reminiscing, that would have made sense, but from what we’ve seen there’s no evidence of that. As a historian, thinking about Napoleon and his charisma, I don’t understand that decision, especially when they have cast a very young actor [Vanessa Kirby] as Joséphine.
LOB: And, of course, a key aspect of the real Joséphine was that she was older than Napoleon. There was a dynamic of survival and power, and of people using each other as well as having a romantic connection.
Given all this complexity, how might people see Napoleon in 50 years’ time?
DA: In the 1940s, the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl wrote Napoleon: For and Against, which summarised more than a century of furious argument – and admitted that there was no resolution. And here we are, 80 years on, still capable of getting riled up by the discussion.
That’s partly because we’re still in a kind of modernity shaped by the Napoleonic legacy – by its legal codes, but also by a charismatic, demagogic leadership that came into exist- ence in the age of Napoleon and which was fundamentally different from the traditional leadership of the old European monarchies. The ability of leaders to persuade people that they’re going to take them somewhere better sits in permanent contradiction with the idea we have experienced a democratic age. One of the ironies of democracy is that people still very often vote to be ruled rather than to rule themselves. I suspect that, as long as those tensions exist in our culture, people will still go back to Napoleon to look for examples of how to behave – and how not to behave.
LOB: I agree. I think historians will probably still be having this conversation in 50 years. My only caveat is that I hope some of the shifts we’re already starting to see, away from the old-school for-and-against approach, continue into the future. The ways of think- ing about his legacy through such prisms as gender, culture and imperialism help shift it away from Napoleon in isolation and towards a more complex, nuanced discussion.
One final thought. While I was in Paris over the summer, out of curiosity I went to Les Invalides, where Napoleon is buried,
on 15 August – his birthday. It was rammed. I’d have liked to ask people why they were there, and what relationship they had with him. That this figure still manages to pull people into his orbit to such an extent that they crowd to see this huge sarcophagus and horrible statue is fascinating. I don’t think even historians are able to fully explain it.
David Bell, who we mentioned earlier, wrote that Napoleon gives us a sense of human possibility for good and bad. The idea that you can make your own destiny is something that Napoleon was obsessed with. I think that continues, and that it probably explains a lot about why he continues to exert such fascination – and why we’ll doubtlessly still be talking about him in 50 years.
Laura O’Brien is associate professor at Northumbria University. Her current research examines representations of Napoleon in popular culture
David Andress is professor of modern history at the University of Portsmouth. His books include The French Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2019)