The ten rules governing how our new world really works (Rule 5: Napoleon and Getting to Goldilocks)
Napoleon’s France: A Country on Military Steroids
In his bedazzled, gilded youth, Napoleon Bonaparte shone like the sun. Beyond Alexander the Great, it is difficult to think of any other leader in the history of the world to whom fame and fortune came so early, and so overwhelmingly. Even later on, when some of the lustre had worn off—after the retreat from Moscow and the decisive defeat of his army at the Battle of Leipzig in October 1813—his nemesis the Duke of Wellington openly admitted that Bonaparte’s mere charismatic, talismanic presence on a battlefield was worth 40,000 troops.
Supremely competent, decisive, preternaturally driven, eloquent, quick-witted, and far-seeing, Bonaparte was capable of inspiring almost religious devotion in both his Marshals and his men. When he slipped his exile in Elba and dramatically returned to France in 1815, Marshal Michel Ney, the hero of the retreat from Moscow, promised his new overlord Louis XVIII that he would bring back Napoleon in a cage. Instead, upon seeing Bonaparte in the flesh, Ney was so emotionally overcome that he immediately switched sides and joined the march to retake Paris.
The recent intellectual argument over whether Napoleon was a great man, sparked by Andrew Roberts’s fine 2014 Napoleon; A Life, seems to me to somewhat miss the point. In weighing whether the fabled French emperor ultimately did more good things than bad, the basic reality of the complicated, mixed historical record of any human being—and certainly the life of a contradictory genius like Napoleon—gets thrown all too easily out the window. Instead, the reality is the Napoleon, more than most, is a fascinating mix of the great and the disastrously wrong.
For behind all his highly impressive domestic reforms was a single-minded effort to militarise French society, to make it fit for purpose to take on the rest of continental Europe for almost a generation. This imbalanced reliance on war was to doom the glorious Bonaparte.
The process of militarising France characterised the whole of Napoleon’s political dominance of his country. Soon after seizing power from the Directorate on November 9, 1799 (he was only 30 years old at the time), Bonaparte set about his monumental efforts to remake French society itself.
His acceleration of the process of conscription, revolutionary France’s highly successful innovation to ward off its legion of foes, was one of the centrepieces of the Napoleonic strategy to transform the country. During the 1790s, nearly 1.25 million ordinary Frenchmen were incorporated into the army, where they shared a common, highly militarised experience.
Napoleon took this revolutionary innovation—which had the salutary twin benefits for him of meeting his ever-pressing need for manpower while at the same time remaking French society—and ran with it. During his rule, two million more Frenchmen joined the army, heightening the military socialisation that had already occurred during the earlier revolutionary period. However, the overriding point of Napoleon’s acceleration of conscription was obviously to keep the French war machine ticking over.
Bonaparte also transformed French schools, founding what became an especially excellent system of centralised and standardised secondary education, which up until then had been highly uneven across the country. But the basic purpose of this highly useful reform was to provide an intellectually superior officer class for the next French military generation. It was not a coincidence that students were summoned to their lessons by drumroll.
A third great innovation was the desperately necessary reform of France’s civil legal codes. In 1804, he established the Napoleonic Code, which finally did away with the last vestiges of feudalism, undoing ancient laws that still dominated French jurisprudence, disorganised and contradictory as they were. The Code greatly extended the right to own property, opening France up to a far more meritocratic age than the fading feudal world had allowed for. The Code further enshrined equality before the law and religious toleration, at a stroke lessening what had been endemic French social tensions.
At the time of the Code’s adoption, France was using 42 separate legal codes; Napoleon standardised these into just one. This great, lasting legal achievement has been adopted in various forms by around one-quarter of the world. As Andrew Roberts, grandly but wholly rightly, claims, the Code amounts to ‘the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.’
When Napoleon became First Consul in late 1799, France was teetering on the abyss. The chaos of the Revolution had left it with massive inflation and the terrible after-effects of a bitter royalist civil war in the Vendee in eastern France; the whole country having suffered through excruciating rounds of The Terror as the French Revolution—very unlike the American experience of Adams and Jefferson—came to eat its own children.
The reforms of the Consulate did nothing less than to dramatically transform France’s fortunes. France rose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of being a near failed state to become the greatest and most important power in Europe. Napoleon first saved the country from chaos; with his reforms, he then set about making it the first modern European state.
Bonaparte also greatly encouraged science and the arts, beautified Paris, established the Bank of France (the first central bank in French history), ushered in an era of sound finance, reformed the tax code, established the public accounts system, and imposed the uniform metric system on the country. All of these innovations have stood the test of time, enduring for these past 200 years.
But the overweening purpose of all these highly admirable transformations was nothing more and nothing less than supporting and expanding the French war machine. As Simon Schama has put it, ‘Militarisation spread like poison through French society.’ The emperor’s (he gave himself the imperial title on December 2, 1804) incessant centralising urge, the common theme of all his reforms, was at base a policy strategy designed to make France more uniform, putting it on what was for the time a constant war footing.
While analogies between Napoleon and Hitler are generally unfair to the Corsican, over one basic and decisive political risk point they are entirely congruent. As was true for Hitler, the French emperor transformed his society, making it fit for total war and thereby unleashing Napoleonic France’s basic expansionistic dynamic. Both are classic examples of revolutionary powers, which have no desire to co-exist in the present power structure they find themselves in, but instead want to overturn it, making way for their complete dominance. While it is possible for revolutionary powers to mellow into status quo powers over time, if they do not they either come to dominate the world or are destroyed. There is no middle way for them.
It was all or nothing for both the Austrian corporal and the French artillery lieutenant, as well as for the societies they remoulded in their image. Both Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany were at their essence war machines, pursuing the endlessly expansionistic strategy of a revolutionary power. And it is this common dynamic that explains why their strategic overstretch and ultimate ruin were almost inevitable. For all his glittering domestic achievements, Napoleon’s colossal efforts to dominate Europe cost the continent 17 years of almost unremitting war, leaving six million Europeans dead.
The Continental System, another of the emperor’s flagship reforms, was to directly lead to his ultimate demise. Imposed on a prostrate Europe in 1806, in theory it prohibited all French conquered territories and his terrified allies from trading with Britain, the last of his enemies standing and by far the most implacable of Bonaparte’s many foes. This effort to militarise economics—there is a reason that in modern international relations embargoes are seen as highly aggressive acts—failed in two fundamental ways, as the Continental System was habitually violated.
First, as Britain possessed a maritime and global empire, the embargo—even if it had been successfully applied—would not have amounted to an economic knock-out blow, forcing London to accept Napoleon’s dominance on the continent. Second, trade is a two-way street. With much of Europe dependent on its commerce with Britain—even then the manufacturing powerhouse of the world—and with France unable to fill London’s central trading role, the rest of the continent grew increasingly restive at this unintended threat to its own economic well-being. It is little wonder that the Continental System was highly unpopular and regularly breached, even at the height of French power. Napoleon’s efforts to bend macroeconomics to military ends were to end in disaster.
Bonaparte’s Predictable Fall As Leader of a Revolutionary Power
It was in his vain attempt to try to enforce the Continental System that led Bonaparte to his two greatest military calamities: the Peninsular War in Iberia, and the epic assault on Moscow. But in reality, it was the militaristic, self-perpetuating expansionism of Napoleon’s France that ultimately led to the decisive setbacks in Spain and Russia. The Continental System was just Bonaparte’s policy tool for implementing the strategy of a revolutionary power. Both the Spanish and Russian disasters arose out of Napoleon fighting wars of choice, conflicts that a status quo power would have entirely avoided.
Enraged at Portugal’s brazen violations of the Continental System—Lisbon had long had well-established and lucrative trading ties with Britain—Napoleon ordered its invasion. Along with its Spanish allies, Portugal was quickly brought to heel in 1807. However, befitting its status as a revolutionary power, France simply could not bank its strategic winnings and leave well enough alone.
In 1808, the throne of Spain was unoccupied. Spying his chance, Napoleon seized Madrid for his older brother, Jospeh, whom he had crowned as the new king in the summer of that year. This high-handed blunder enraged Spain’s deeply religious and conservative Catholic populace, particularly in its rural areas. Thus commenced a six-year struggle that morphed into a vicious guerrilla war sapping French strength and ultimately tying down 300,000 troops in a never-ending struggle to pacify the Spanish countryside.
Britain immediately capitalised on France’s strategic blunder, in 1808 sending troops under the Duke of Wellington to bolster the Spanish and the Portuguese, as well as ferrying them vital supplies and economic backing. By 1814, with Wellington having masterfully made his name in the Peninsular campaign, Napoleon was faced by the crisis in Russia to withdraw French troops from Iberia; the British, Portuguese, and Spanish at last managing to dislodge the French, pushing them out of both countries. Napoleon’s over-fixation with the military tool of power—in this case, to the exclusion of basic economics—had led directly to France’s ruin in Spain.
But even worse was yet to come. A major strain on the always tenuous Franco-Russian alliance between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I was this self-same violation of the Continental System by Moscow. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, and hearing reports of ongoing Russian treachery with England, Napoleon fatefully invaded Russia on June 24, 1812.
Due to the Russian army’s scorched-earth tactics, Napoleon’s troops found it increasingly difficult to forage for food for themselves, and crucially for their horses, which began dying in the thousands. Even when the Russians finally gave Napoleon the fixed battle he so longed for, at Borodino on September 7, 1812, his usual decisive victory eluded him. As the emperor put it himself at the time of Borodino, ‘The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves to be worthy of being invincible,’ Napoleon was, as so often, on the mark. For the tactical success at Borodino did not yield the strategic success that Napoleon desperately required—the dispiriting of the Czar and his docile return to the negotiating table. Instead, the war went on, as summer became autumn and the weather grew colder.
Of course, the unendurable tragedy of the Russian winter lay ahead for the Grand Armee. The proud French army had been the campaign with over 400,000 frontline troops. By its calamitous end, fewer than 40,000—or one-tenth—made it back from the desolate Russian steppes. Though there were still brilliant moments ahead for him—from the genius of his desperate campaign within France itself in 1814 to the glory of the Hundred Days in 1815—Napoleon’s empire never recovered from the Russian calamity. It was an entirely unforced strategic error, only explained by the excessive militarism of French society under the emperor, the imbalance in his political risk assessments, and the inherently expansionistic strategic outlook that flowed so seamlessly from that lack of balance.
The final, devastating proof of the over-militarisation of French society under Napoleon—and the disastrous revolutionary power mindset that it enabled—is the French diplomatic record of the early nineteenth century. It makes for frustrating reading as Bonaparte spurned numerous chances to save his throne, all because if he could not have the whole world, he wanted none of it. It is hard to think of a better example of the revolutionary power mentality in all of history.
In late 1813, even after the Russian campaign and the Battle of Leipzig, where he had been soundly thrashed, as Napoleon fell back from Central Europe and his many enemies circled him for the kill, the emperor still rejected peace terms that would have allowed him to remain on the throne of a France bigger than it had been before the revolution in 1789. Yet, extraordinarily, he refused this highly advantageous offer.
The Frankfurt Proposals of November 1813 stipulated that Napoleon could remain Emperor of the French and be succeeded by his son, but that France would be reduced in size. However, it would still keep the gains it had made in Belgium, Savoy, and the west bank of the Rhine. In turn, it would be forced to cede back Spain, the Netherlands, and most of Italy and Germany. The only explanation for such highly favourable terms, given France’s then-parlous military state, was that the myth of Napoleon was still alive and well. His enemies may have beaten him at Leipzig, but they still feared him.
Astoundingly, in the face of such terms, Napoleon dithered, and by December 1813 the allies had withdrawn their offer. Surely this amounts to a canary in the coal mine for any good analyst, the telling sign that the over-militarisation of French society had led the country to adopt a radical, utopian foreign policy that knew neither limits, balance, nor compromise.
Professor Charles Esdaile says of this diplomatic blunder that Napoleon ‘forgot that statesmanship is the art of the possible.’ But this is to miss the point of Napoleon, and to think like a conventional person. The whole point of a revolutionary power is to indeed ignore the art of the possible and use the dream of creating a different world as the basis to run a utopian foreign policy that ignores the half-measures that status quo powers—which make up the vast majority of countries—trade in. If Napoleon had done the sensible thing, if he had settled for less than everything, then the myth of French military gloire—which itself was based on the over-militarisation of French society—would have been exposed as a fraud. That ultimately mattered more to the emperor than being just one of a series of dull, time-serving European monarchs, who history soon forgot.
Of course, Napoleon paid the ultimate price for his utopian folly. Forced to abdicate on April 6, 1814, and exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean, the genius of his era once again could not simply fade away, as the allies so hoped he would. Instead, Napoleon stormed back to the French mainland, briefly regained power, and then lost the decisive Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 to Wellington. This time the emperor was not to escape. Napoleon was again exiled by his British rivals to far-away St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic, 1,162 miles from the west coast of Africa. On May 5, 1821, the great man died there, far from the trappings of his once-supreme power, an unwitting victim of having legendarily using the military lever of politics, without ever learning that there might be other motive forces of history as well.
Conclusion: The Benefits of Balance
Napoleon was laid waste because he could not overcome a basic rule for how the world works; some sort of balance is called for. The sword had made Bonaparte the most famous man in the world and had given him, a minor Corsican aristocrat, first a throne and then the dominant position in Europe.
It is human and understandable that even a man of Napoleon’s first-rate intellect, having personally experienced how far the military component of power could take both a genius and a country, failed to see that his over-reliance on the martial component of power left his policies highly skewed, to the exclusion of a more balanced strategy, such as that pursued by Pitt’s England throughout this period. It is understandable, but Napoleon’s sad end makes it clear that his failure of analysis was also absolutely toxic.
We moderns would do well to take note of Napoleon’s historical example. There are many forces of history and the major ones must always be taken into analytical account altogether if political risk analysis is to get anywhere. To forget the absolute need for ‘getting to Goldilocks’—finding analytical balance—is to get every big thing wrong, no matter how right one might be about details. For both analysis and policy require people understand that there is always more than merely one basic insight into how our complicated world works.