Napoleon's Opinions on Past Military Leaders

arrhidaeus said:

Personally I think Alexander was superior to Napoleon strategically. He effectivley mixed political and military objectives. He was also brilliant at personal diplomacy and propaganda. At the moment I don't recall him making any strategic errors during his campaigns. Napoleon strikes me as a more mixed bag of successes and failures as a strategist.

Tactically Napoleon may have an argument as he has far more large scale battles than Alexander...

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Lord Oda Nobunaga said:

The problem with Napoleon's political-strategic aims is that they were based on modern issues of state building and modern diplomacy. Napoleon was not a conqueror, that is the biggest misconception about him. If you look almost all of the places that he conquered he only did so out of necessity because they formed the 1000th coalition against France. Even then most of those places were governed by puppet rulers that almost all switched sides at the end, or in the case where he put his family members as monarchs, they all lost their crowns and became fugitives or were deported, and in the case of Murat who was outright executed.

Also in terms of modern states the general idea is that he ruled France, and France did not necessarily extend into a foreign empire. He was not going to annex all of Italy or all of Germany into France. He annexed a few parts of Italy into France, and the west bank of the Rhine. Eventually he deposed his brother in the Netherlands and governed it as part of France. But that is actually really minimal territory in so far as actual annexation. The one area that was slightly different was that he organized Lombardy-Veneto-Romagna as what was originally an Italian Republic, and after assuming the throne of France then proceeded to also crown himself King of Italy as a separate kingdom. Also when he dissolved the Papal States he reorganized Rome into a Kingdom given to his infant son, that was more or less administered as an extension of the French state.

There was not a state policy to literally conquer foreign territories or a campaign to assimilate foreign people into the French culture or promote the French language as the new language. In the majority of places that Napoleon took over they actually promoted local culture and language. So Poland and Croatia are good examples of this. But aside from the basic French conquests that followed natural boundaries like the Rhine and the Alps, there was no real desire to keep expanding the French state indefinitely. Napoleon's empire was more a means to an end in order to bring over crucial states to his side, and to weaken enemy states like Prussia and Austria. He more or less conquered Prussia, didn't dismantle it for various reasons.

But he never actually conquered Austria and that empire temporarily became a French ally, only losing very few territories in the process (Flanders, Tyrol, Lombardy, Veneto, Croatia). The worst thing he did to Austria was actually take away their redundant title of Holy Roman Empire so that he could then bring over all those German states to his side. But his foreign policy just revolved around weakening those enemy states like Sweden, Prussia, and Austria within Germany, and try to cow them into diplomatic submission. That was it. The French never had the means to outright conquer and occupy all of the Austro-Hungarian-Bohemian state. So that was the whole problem of his rule, that Prussia and Austria would never submit, and there was basically nothing that he could do about Russia and Britain. None of them were willing to accept a militarily and politically dominant France on the continent, that was simultaneously a revolutionary state that put all these kings in jeopardy, which happened to be ruled by what they deemed to be a usurper.

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A glimpse of the rulers’ interest in the archetypal Caesar is offered by one of the rulers, Napoleon III, in the introduction he prepared for the second volume of his very scholarly but never completed Histoire de Jules César (1866). ‘In publishing this second volume of the Histoire de César, written by the Emperor,’ writes the publisher, clearly prompted by the imperial author, ‘it is not without interest to recall the names of the sovereigns and rulers who have taken an interest in this subject.’ He then lists some names which are salient enough to deserve mention: Charles VIII, ‘who was particularly fond of Caesar’s Commentaries’, to the extent that he persuaded the monk Robert Gaguin to prepare a translation of the commentaries on Caesar’s Gallic War (1480); and Charles V, who left a copy of the Commentaries with marginal notes in his own hand. Charles V was so interested in the strategic aspects of Caesar’s account that he dispatched a scientific mission to France to study the topography of the Gallic campaigns. The result was Giacomo Strada’s high-quality publication (1575) of some forty maps, one of which features the siege of Alesia.

A contemporary and emulator of Charles V, the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, ordered searches throughout all Europe for editions of Caesar’s Commentaries. He had them collected and classified, and initiated their translation into Turkish, and they became part of the sultan’s daily reading. Henri IV and Louis XIII translated, respectively, the first two Commentaries and the last two. (An edition containing both translations was published in 1630 ‘au Louvre’, that is, by the royal publishing house.) Louis XIV (who did not exert himself unduly) retranslated the first Commentary, already translated by Henri IV, and produced a sumptuous illustrated edition in 1651, when he was still under the tutelage of Mazarin.

The publisher of Histoire de Jules César then goes on to mention the Grand Condé, who had made a serious study of Caesar’s campaigns. He had Perrot d’Ablancourt translate all the Commentaries, and this translation became the best known and the most widely used in the eighteenth century. After a note on the biographical work on Caesar by Queen Christina of Sweden and the map of the Gallic campaigns commissioned by Philippe of Orléans, the real precursor of Napoleon III’s impressive work is listed: Le Précis des guerres de César, dictated by Napoleon I to Count Marchand on St Helena and published by Marchand in Paris in 1836.

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Julius Caesar: The People's Dictator 9780748629008 - DOKUMEN.PUB

This book is a splendid profile of an extraordinary man, and a radically new interpretation of one of the most controver...

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book 6 of Polybius was studied by Macchiavelli, Justus Lipsius and Frederick II of Prussia with a view to developing a modern ‘art of war’

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Napoleon Bonaparte really did identify himself with Caesar. In his Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, the faithful Las Cases recorded some comparative musings which certainly originated with the emperor: ‘Napoleon fought sixty battles; Caesar no more than fifty.’3 And the emperor confided a prediction to Count Marchand: ‘his death would be marked in the way that Caesar’s was’ (a reference to the appearance of a comet at the moment of Caesar’s death).4 In conversation with Las Cases the emperor claimed to have planned to drain the Pontine Marshes, like Caesar before him.5 Overturning these analogies, the Baron de Pommereul declared in his Campagnes du général Bonaparte en Italie (1797) that, compared to Bonaparte, Caesar was merely a candidate for military glory.

But unlike some of his predecessors who embraced the ‘cult of Caesar’, Napoleon did more than adopt a model of leadership. He was also extremely conscious of Caesar’s special relationship with ‘the people’: le peuple was a term much in vogue in the years of the French revolution (Marat’s newspaper had the title L’Ami du peuple); the word denoted the politically active part of the lowest social strata that actually shaped political life and influenced the holders of power.

We have only to mention a few typical observations which help us understand what Napoleon meant by ‘le peuple’: in January 49 bc Pompey could have taken up position to confront Caesar in Rome, but ‘the people were against him’ (p. 209); ‘the people were overwhelmingly in favour of Caesar’ (p. 125); ‘when Caesar, still a very young man, delivered a eulogy for Julia, his father’s sister and the wife of Gaius Marius, the people enthusiastically welcomed the return of the images of Marius in a public ceremony’ (p. 26). He uses ‘le peuple’ in the same sense as Suetonius in some parts of his Life of Caesar uses ‘plebs’: it is the mass of the working people but also the social pressure group which had played a crucial role in the civil war.

Napoleon seized on one core element: he identified an initial strategy which allowed Caesar to use all possible tactics to get the better of his adversaries, a strategy from which he never deviated. Napoleon was right to locate the cause of ‘discontent in the parti populaire and the army’ in certain concessions to the aristocracy after Caesar’s victory in the civil war. Napoleon focuses his attention on one point which lay very close to his own heart: the ‘legitimacy’ of the personal power of Caesar,6 who remained the leader of ‘the people’ even in his new role of sole ruler (‘perpetual dictator’).

Having in mind the decline of the Senate, the perversion of its operations, and the presence in Italy of a great number of veterans, ‘attendant tout de la grandeur de quelques hommes et rien de la République’, Napoleon proposed the theory of the ‘person of Caesar as the guarantee of Roman supremacy’ and the guarantee of ‘the security of the citizens of all parties’.

The emphatic way in which Napoleon dismisses as libellous inventions all reports that Caesar aspired to the title of king is further evidence of his self-identification with Caesar: with Caesar not as king, but as ‘perpetual dictator’, and thus the guarantee of Roman supremacy and the security of all.

This self-identification should come as no surprise (Napoleon’s Italian campaign was to him what the Gallic campaign was to Caesar: a preparation for more decisive and critical battles). In France’s military academies Caesar’s Commentaries were required reading:7 a page such as that in the Précis where Napoleon discusses – seriously and with expert knowledge of the logistical difficulties – which kind of attack would work best against the Parthians, and by which routes, is also a textbook exercise in military studies.8

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Pue Saness said:

Just joshin'.

Anyway, I saw a discussion in this thread earlier about Robespierre and it reminded me that I once read Napoleon saying of the Robespierre brothers something to the effect that they belong to history and should not be judged too harshly. The closest to this wording I could find was in a Quora answer which renders the quote as "a character who belongs to the domain of history. Despite what is commonly said against them, they are singular, and do not have despicable characters. Few men have left the mark that they have.", but provides no source, and searching up this specific quote in Google gives no results outside of the Quora answer. Does anyone know what I'm thinking of?

I did find something similar in Jordan's Napoleon and the Revolution, which seems like the longer argument for the sentiment. It does not have the quotation itself, however, and either the Google Books preview version of the text I'm accessing is missing the superscript for sources or these are missing in the original text. The Google Books preview doesn't reach the bibliography anyway, though.

Spoiler

Napoleon's attachment to Robespierre goes back to the siege of Toulon when Maximilien's brother, Augustin, as a representative en mission, discovered the young artillery captain and saw to it that he was instantly promoted. Napoleon entered the French Revolution as a robespierriste. He never met Maximilien: 'I regret not having known him,' he told Bertrand. When the brothers were purged he privately expressed regret in a letter, realizing he could well have gone to the guillotine as part of the queue of Robespierre, many score of whom were arrested, convicted, and killed in the days following 9 Thermidor. The elder Robespierre was destroyed 'for having wanted to stop the Revolution'. '[Robespierre] wanted, by sacrificing [Tallien, Billaud Varennes, and Collot d'Hérbois] to make himself popular ... and to put an end to so much bloodshed. These revolutionaries, seeing where he was headed, resolved to sacrifice him.' The Incorruptible laid out his determination to destroy the terrorists in 'a very admirable speech' on the eve of his death in which he unmasked the Paris Commune as riddled with extremists whose careers depended on perpetual terror, and he attacked the (unnamed) extremists. 'Cambacérès has often spo- ken to me about it. I wanted to have the speech printed as an historic document and regret never having done so.'

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Robespierre was 'no ordinary man'. He was vastly superior to those around him. His speech on the Supreme Being proves it. So too does his public celebration of the revolutionary martyrdom of the children Viala and Bara, which 'inculcated enthusiasm in all the thirteen-year- olds. It was a great political stroke'. Robespierre's civic religion was a subject close to Napoleon's heart and politics: finding a way to restore religion to France without reestablishing the old Catholic Church with its superstitions, worldly pretensions, and reactionary politics often dictated from Rome. Napoleon's Concordat proved far more durable than Robespierre's Supreme Being and revolutionary festivals, but the affinity between the two rationalist revolutionary leaders is striking. Had Robespierre not become its sacrificial lamb, a phrase Napoleon uses a few times, 'he would have been the most extraordinary man' of the Revolution.

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Discussing Robespierre, Napoleon has nothing to say about ideology, which was the instrument of The Incorruptible's long hold over his contemporaries. Napoleon is interested in the political leader not the Jacobin ideologue, in the practicalities of governing a revolution, not utopian visions. Robespierre's major fault was sacrificing Danton, another revolutionary Napoleon admired. The Emperor liked to quote Danton's famous call to arms in September 1792: 'De l'audace, puis de l'audace et encore de l'audace!' ['Audacity, more audacity, and even more audacity']. Together Robespierre and Danton had 'made the Commune tremble. They marched in the same line, they should never have separated'. Danton's personal acquisitiveness, the millions he pocketed while en mission in Belgium, 'altered his character'. Even so Robespierre should not have destroyed him. The friends of Danton, and there were many, never forgave the betrayal.

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pg. 199-200, from 'Napoleon Explains the Revolution'


If I'm not just hallucinating the quotation in my memories, it's probably somewhere in Jordan's source for this, which contextually seems to be Betrand's memoirs.

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Having left Marseille on May 8, they [Napoleon's entourage] stopped for a few days in Châtillon-sur-Seine, at the home of Marmont’s parents. Their son had spoken of the general with so much enthusiasm that they were astonished to see this taciturn young man who scarcely replied to questions and allowed painful silences to emerge. Mme de Marmont, in despair and reluctant to address this “Blue” who served a revolution she detested, called upon her neighbors for help. The neighbor’s daughter Victorine—the future Mme de Chastenay—was assigned to make the young man more sociable. At first she didn’t know what to say to this general, whom her neighbors considered to be almost an “imbecile.” Thinking it would please him, she sang an Italian song, but when she had finished he told her only that her pronunciation was defective. Later [...] he became more animated, speaking of war and politics, and literature as well, singing the praises of Ossian, criticizing Paul et Virginie, and reciting maxims by Condillac of which he claimed to be the author. [...] And then, without saying good-bye, he left.
-p.163

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Pue Saness said:

Beyond 'Napoleon on other people', Gueniffy's book also presents 'other people on Napoleon', and the picture that emerges of young Bonaparte is often very based (or as I imagine Rendall would translate, 'very superior'):

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Lord Oda Nobunaga said:

What year did he go to the Marmont house?

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