Dan Snow's History Hit - 4. Napoleon: The Myth

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

Napoleon has become more than a man. His name is a concept, a way of being, a psychological term- the 'Napoleon' complex. Napoleon began working on his legacy during his exile on St Helena in the last years of his life, his journal- memoir 'The Memorial of Saint Helena' was Napoleon's own personal and political testament and served as the founding text of the cult of Napoleon and the ideology of Bonapartism that grew after his death in 1821.In the final episode of the series, Dan is joined by historian and biographer Lord Andrew Roberts to unpack the mythology of Napoleon. They delve into his final days, his lifetime achievements and failures and the commentary he gave throughout; the letters he wrote to rulers and lovers, the fiction he wrote, the political and military treaties he created and they try to answer the question- was he really a great man?Produced by Mariana Des Forges, Freddy Chick and edited by Dougal Patmore.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BLACKFRIDAYPOD and sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Napoleon was dismayed when he learned that he wasn't going to be sent to America by the British as he'd hoped, but rather he was going to be exiled, imprisoned, on a rugged volcanic island in the South Atlantic. St Helena is just about as remote an island as you can find on Earth. It's about 2,000 miles from any other significant landmass. The British had seen how he'd escaped from Elba in the Mediterranean and made his way back to France They were not going to let this happen again I've approached St Helena by sea from the same direction Napoleon did He was aboard a British battleship When you stare at the north coast of the island

there's no obvious natural harbour There's just a wedge sliced in the rampart of dark cliffs. This is where he landed and eventually made his way up into the interior, which was steep, rocky, jagged. He arrived there on the 15th of October 1815. He'd spent 10 weeks aboard the British ship HMS Northumberland. It was not until December until he was moved into Longwood House. It was inhospitable, some parts of it were falling down because of the damp

and it was said to be infested with rats. During Napoleon's time on the island, Sir Hudson Lowe was the governor of St Helena. His main duty was to ensure that Napoleon didn't escape. Lowe was petty-minded, he was rude, he was unnecessarily controlling. Napoleon did eventually elicit some kindness from Hudson Lowe and Lowe agreed to build him a new, sturdier, nicer Longwood house. But Napoleon never saw this property completed. He died after six years in exile on the 5th of May 1821.

Lots of people ask me about Napoleon's death, and the circumstances are somewhat contested. Some say he was poisoned, or even poisoned himself. Others say he died of boredom. In 1955, the Diaries of Napoleon's Valet, Louis Marchand, were published, and his description of Napoleon the months before his death have led some to suggest that perhaps Napoleon was deliberately poisoned. Arsenic was the method of choice in those days because it was undetectable when administered over a long period. And it was also noted that when Napoleon's body was exhumed in 1840, it was found to be well preserved and arsenic is a strong preservative. But there have been many more modern studies in which researchers analyse samples of Napoleon's hair from throughout his life, as well as samples from his family and other contemporaries. All those samples had high levels of arsenic, approximately 100 times higher than the current

average. And according to these studies, it does seem like Napoleon's body was already heavily contaminated with arsenic as a boy. It's the fact that people were constantly exposed to arsenic, from glues to dyes in wallpaper throughout their lives. What we do know is during the last few years of his life, Napoleon was confined for months on end in the damp and mould-infested Longwood House, which would almost have certainly taken a toll on his health. And he also went through years of isolation and loneliness. The results of an autopsy suggest that Napoleon suffered from terrible ulcers, which affected his liver and intestines. If you look at those famous portraits of Napoleon, you'll see him with his hand on his stomach, fuelling speculation he suffered from stomach pains for most of his life.

His father had died of stomach cancer, and the explanation that Napoleon died as a result of stomach issues definitely suits the British, who wanted to distance themselves from any responsibility because of the poor conditions that he'd been kept in. To this day, there's no absolutely conclusive cause of death for Napoleon. When he died, he was buried on the island in a beautiful spot overhung with bougainvillea. You can still go and visit it today, despite his request that he be laid to rest on the banks of the Seine among the French people he loved so much. But in 1840, the British government allowed his remains to be returned to France and entombed in the crypt at Les Invalides in Paris, where other French military leaders are interned, and you can still go and visit today. The enduring speculation around his

death is actually just symptomatic of an enduring fascination with all things Napoleon. People devote their lives to trying to figure out what he thought, how he ate, how he lived, what he's like as a child, a man, a lover, a leader. So much so that there's even a Wikipedia page, folks, I urge you not to Google this, dedicated to his penis. To save you the pain, I will give you the quick pricey. It's said that in autopsy, a doctor cut his penis off, after which it passed through several owners, and appeared on exhibit in New York City in 1927. In 1977, it was purchased by a man named John K. Latimer, and it's been kept in his family collection ever since. kept in his family collection ever since.

Everyone seems to want a piece of Napoleon, figuratively and literally. Why are we so obsessed with this Corsican who wasn't on Earth for that long an amount of time and whose imperial dreams ended up utterly defeated, wiped out? Well, this is the final episode of our Napoleon series on Dan Snow's history. I'm joined by Andrew Roberts, Lord Roberts, biographer and author of Napoleon the Great,

to unpick our obsession and the myths wrapped around Napoleon Bonaparte. Andrew Roberts, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. Thank you. You and I have both been to that remarkable house in St Helena. There's a really fascinating feel about it. The climate there is so unusual. You feel so isolated there. It's one of the most isolated scraps of land on the planet.

Was it a purgatory for Napoleon there? Yes. Yes. It was purgatory from the moment that he saw it. When he spotted, you know, as you come in on the ship to those enormous sort of 600 foot cliffs on both sides of the capital there, he said, I wish I'd stayed in Egypt. And he was right to think that because it was terrible for him, even the first two years. I was very lucky when I went there. I don't know about you, but it was actually very nice weather. But for 300 days of the year, it's actually in the clouds. So it was sticky and dank and everybody had colds the entire time. And then of course, two years later in 1817, he started to contract his cancer. So it was a time living on an island that's what, eight by 10 miles or something. And as you say,

indeed, it's actually the second most remote inhabited island in the world after Tristan the Conwer. So he hated every second of it. And the British, some British officials were all right, but one or two were particularly awful and just made him just a constant battle against petty bureaucracy. Well, really one in particular, Sir Hudson Lowe. The first of the governors was nice, but he only lasted a few months. And then for the rest of his time on St Helena for the next six years, you had Sir Hudson Lowe, who was this petty fogging

individual. Understandably, of course, he couldn't allow Napoleon to escape and didn't know that Napoleon had no plans to escape. But he'd also been the head of the Corsican Rangers, which was a group of anti-French Corsscans, and Sir Hudson Lowe had commanded these people. And so Napoleon thought of Hudson Lowe as somebody who essentially commanded a quizzling squadron. And so he would never have got on with him under any circumstances. But Hudson Lowe was small-minded enough to pass up the opportunity of trying to befriend Napoleon. Yeah. God, I've been chatting with him every night. Oh, it would have been fun. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? Oh, to be able to interview him, you'd scurry back and

write down everything he said. You'd publish the great history book, and it was petty. And Napoleon, he had to avoid the Prussians who wanted to hang him. He thought about trying to get to America, didn't he, after defeat at Waterloo? He thought about trying to get to America, didn't he, after defeat at Waterloo? He did, but the Royal Navy had a stranglehold on Rochefort where he'd escaped to, and there was no actual possibility. Joseph, his brother, did manage to escape, but Napoleon thought that it was more sort of seemly and honourable to surrender to the Royal Navy. He did have this rather strange expectation that he was going to be allowed to come and live in the home counties in some country house and sort of entertain weak politicians and so on, which is very weird considering that there were 100,000 casualties in the 100 days between him landing in March 1815 on the

South French coast and the Battle of Waterloo. So there was simply no way that the Allies were going to let him retire into private life. Describe the house, Longwood House. I mean, it's comfortable, isn't it? It's very damp. It was shoddily built, wasn't it? It's the wrong materials for the wrong climate. And termites would attack it. And it was so damp that they had to put the playing cards in the oven to dry them out every evening. They got so sticky otherwise. Can you imagine how damp it must be to have to do that? He's got a sort of little court around him. It's quite a strange setup. How many people

has he got with him? And it's quite formal, isn't it? Yes, he brought out 29 people. And this in itself, I think, is very interesting in that they weren't all paid terribly well. They went out because of Napoleon's charisma, because they had been serving him for a long time, because they loved and admired him. And they came out to serve him. Many of them actually did stay the entire seven years until he died. There obviously was something tremendously personally charismatic about Napoleon. He is thought to have slept with his Lord Chamberlain's wife. Very difficult to prove anything like that nowadays, but it was generally considered to be

true. Everyone was gossiping the entire time, both inside the entourage and also the British who had connections with the French court. But it was a tiny little sort of mini court with all of the things that you get in all courts, you know, jealousies and bitchiness and ill temper and very little money. But he does write his memoirs, and these prove to be rather important, don't they? I've been to the wonderful room where there are also some maps all over the tables, and he talks about his old campaigns. What is the purpose of his memoirs? Why did he start writing them?

Well, you're absolutely right that they're very important. They are, apart from Uncle Tom's Cabin, the biggest bestseller of the 19th century, which is completely extraordinary, really, because he is, of course, entirely just putting his point of view. There's no attempt at objectivity. There's no attempt at doing anything other than justifying himself all the way through. It's not that useful, frankly, quite a lot of it for historians. But boy, does it make a great read. And it, of course, completely solidifies the Napoleonic myth,

the myth of his greatness. The legendary status of Napoleon is created by this book, The Memorials of St. Helena. And that's why the French asked for his body to come back to Les Invalides in December 1840. That's why we're still talking about him today. That's interesting. I'm trying to think. I mean, Frederick the Great wrote bits and bobs, but is this in itself very modern? The idea of a great leader just... I mean, we think there's some missing ones from the ancient world, don't we? But I'm trying to think of another early modern or even medieval example of a great leader really writing out, trying to write the first draft of history and make themselves look as good as possible in a very engaging way, designed to be bought, to be read, to be popular.

There aren't that many other of those examples. Obviously, in more modern times, Winston Churchill's History of the Second World War, where you can pick apart actually some parts that are obviously designed to promote the Churchillian myth. But no, at the time, it was a hell of a thing to do. Ulysses Grant's autobiography, which isn't hugely self-serving, that was just done for the money. But it's a very fine book. But you're right, it's overall a pretty new genre for Napoleon. The idea that Chatham or someone would have just written down a really engaging account of their career, it must have been quite electrifying when it came out, the idea that you can read

the great man's story in his own words. I mean, that's very powerful. Yes. And as I say, it was a huge success. With Wellington, of course, you've got his dispatches, haven't you, and his supplementary dispatches. And so you can tell what was going through his mind at the time. And in a way, that's much more believable because he actually had to, he wrote them at the time rather than with the 2020 hindsight that Napoleon wrote his memoirs with. Napoleon famously said that history is a set of lies agreed upon. He was trying to create this myth, was he? I mean, sitting there at the end of his life, he didn't think this would

somehow get him back to France. What was his purpose in writing this? It was posthumous greatness. And remember that posthumous greatness really did matter to him. Ever since he was the schoolboy reading about Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and so on, he recognised that it wasn't just lifetime greatness he was after. He was after proper historical greatness. And he knew also that it wasn't all going to be about conquering because he did, after all, lose and wound up in exile and having been defeated at Waterloo. So when he spoke about the blocks of granite that he had thrown into France and Europe, what he was talking about were things like the Code Napoleon and the Concordat with the Pope and the Légion d'honneur and the

Banque de France and the infrastructure, all the great bridges and so on that he's built, and the Cour de Comte and so on. And so he wanted to make it clear that he wasn't just a soldier. He was a reformer. He was an administrator. His educational reforms, of course, which are still in existence today in France. These were the blocks of granite. And so one understands entirely that he was trying to create his own myth, his own legend, but at the same time, he did have a lot of blocks of granite to build it on. It strikes me, listening to you, that in this last battle, this is probably his most successful battle, turning himself into one of history's greatest men here in the 21st century. From our perspective,

we'd say that's true. I mean, his name is always mentioned alongside that of Caesar and Alexander, certainly in the West. So actually, this is a greater victory than Austerlitz. I think so. Oh, definitely. Yes. And, you know And I don't think Ridley Scott would be making a movie about him though, had he stopped on Elba and lived on Elba for the rest of his life. It required that last hundred days, the Battle of Waterloo, the whole of Europe against him, the return to Paris, all of those sorts of extraordinary stories. And then, of course, the six years on St Helena, slowly dying and living out his last days in exile. That is so much part of the Napoleonic epic that I think, as I say, this movie wouldn't have been made if he

just abdicated in 1814 and never been heard of again. So maybe the British should have let him have that stately home in southern England, hanging out with fat wigs and just drinking himself into obscurity. Or they should have had two frigates going round Elba 24 hours a day rather than just one. And the chap who was in charge, the British governor, whose job it was to keep an eye on Napoleon, he went off to Florence to his oculist and possibly to see his mistress. Some people say it was both. If you're going to see your oculist, you might well see your mistress as well. But whoever it was, he jolly well should have stayed on Elba and prevented Napoleon from leaving. You listen to Dan Snow's history at There's More Coming Up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So he dies in 1821. He's buried in a wonderful spot on St Helena in a big grave.

Then two years later, this memoir is published and it goes completely wild, does it? That is the reason that there was such a call to bring him back to Europe, is it? Yes, exactly that. And also, Louis-Philippe had a pretty sort of lacklustre and bourgeois government and it wasn't considered to have any glory. And so he thought that if he brought back Napoleon's, what were called the cinders, the ashes, but actually was the body, and buried it in great splendor in Les Invalides on the banks of the Seine, in accordance with Napoleon's will, that somehow the sort of stardust of Napoleon would land on Louis-Philippe, which it very seriously did not do. But there we

go. Yeah, that's like when politicians sort of hang out with rock stars today. It never seems to quite work for them. It never works, does it? So yeah, but is it possible to evaluate, just before the publication of the book, what Napoleon's reputation was in France and elsewhere, just in the months before the publication? Yes, the Bourbons tried everything they possibly could

to make Napoleon out to be a monster. They banned pro-Napoleonic, pro-Bonapartist books from being published. And so as a result, on occasion, they exiled people who were about to write pro-Napoleonic books, people who'd served with Napoleon. And so there was very much a sense of censorship and negative views of Napoleon, which were pretty much turned upside down once this book was published. And presumably Louis-Philippe would have allowed this book to be published. This is that Louis-Philippe, the last King of France, who swept in in 1830 and represents a sort of, they hoped, a slightly British constitutional form of monarchy. Would he have allowed the book to be published, do we think? Yes, yes. And that's what made it into

the great bestseller that it was, because he thought it would undermine the Bourbons. And of course, he was an Orleanist, and he didn't think that it would therefore undermine him. But it most certainly did, not least because Napoleon III, Napoleon's great nephew, was already attempting to overthrow Louis-Philippe's throne. The British had prevailed upon to allow his body to be brought back to France. There's a rather amazing account of the tomb being opened and what his body looked like and things. It was brought back. Did the British come to regret that, do you think? Or what was the thinking there? Wellington was asked about whether he minded this happening in 1840.

And he said, I couldn't give a tuppany damn what happens to Napoleon's body. And it was a way of solidifying the by then quite strong Anglo-French entente, which of course goes on only 14 years later to have both of us fighting on the same side in the Crimean War. It was important to have an Anglo-French understanding and it went some way to advancing that. So overall, the British government thought it was a good thing. I mean, they wouldn't have allowed it if they hadn't. And a million people attend the state funeral. So the cult, Napoleon cult, at this point, is fully underway. Yes, and it's held on the 2nd of December, which is a key thing, both because it was the anniversary of the coronation in 1804,

but also the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. And it's a very snowy day. It's freezing cold. There's lots of snow. But the marshals march, or at least the living marshals, who didn't betray Napoleon. Marchand wasn't invited, for example. But the living marshals march behind the coffin. And it's one of the great moments in the history of Paris. Speaking of snowy days, I've always been very sad. I was born the day after December the 3rd. And as a kid, I thought, I just wish I'd been born on the 2nd.

Because of that. I don't know what that says about you psychologically, Dan. I don't think it's anything good, by the way. Lots of bad things. Lots of bad things. I'm just a guy shouting into a podcast mic, wishing that I was a dictator. Anyway, that's enough about me. And presumably this event, you get histories coming out, you get the propagation of this myth of his greatness. It's now an industry. It's a huge industry. There have been more books written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death. So how about that? So you can imagine how hubristic I was when I decided that I would write the sort of 10,000th biography of Napoleon. But nonetheless, it's a wonderful thing to do. It allowed me to visit 53 of Napoleon's 60

battlefields in 10 countries. It was pure pleasure from beginning to end, I have to say. And so that was really interesting. The fact that he didn't have a Napoleon complex, there is such a thing as a Napoleon complex, but Napoleon didn't have one. It was also something that came as a sort of surprise to me. Can I unpack that quickly? Because he wasn't particularly short? He wasn't short. No, no, no. He was average for the time, average-sized Frenchman, and also the Napoleon complex, where you are just forced to carry on invading countries, regardless, willy-nilly. In fact, in the 1812 campaign, he had beaten the Russians twice before. He only intended to spend three weeks going about 50 miles

into their country. He had an army the same size as Paris at the time, 615,000 men. It was twice the size of the Russian army. It wasn't an insane, hubristic thing to have done in the way that history tends to relate about Napoleon. But the thing that struck me most really was the way in which he kept the best bits of the French Revolution, meritocracy, equality before the law, religious toleration. And he got rid of all the mad bits like the guillotine and the... I mean, some people were guillotined, but only if they attempted to assassinate him. He wasn't killing 40,000 people a year like Robespierre was. He also managed to

get rid of mad things like the 10-day working week and their abolition of Christianity and so on. He was able, therefore, to essentially set up what has turned into modern France. So that's interesting. I didn't know that about the Russian campaign. So he was hoping to fight a sort of limited campaign as he had in 1806-7, I think? Yes. To just force the Tsar to re-engage with the blockade of Britain, for example, just a sort of limited victory. Okay, interesting. Exactly that. He was hoping to do another Eille-en-Friedland of 1807,

or possibly the Jena Campaign of 1806, but he never intended to go all the way to Moscow. Yeah. The myth, as you say, did not help Louis-Philippe's regime in France. That toppled in 1848. Eventually, a new sort of dictator emerged, Napoleon III, who, fascinatingly, is some Napoleon's brother, isn't he, but also of Josephine's daughter by her first marriage or something. Yes, that's right. Queen Hortense married

King Louis of Holland, and Napoleon III was their second child. Fascinating. So he's got Josephine and Napoleon's blood in him. And he swept into office, but really on his name? Entirely on his name, yes. He had a certain sort of joie de vivre, I think you'd say, with Napoleon III. He was imprisoned in Ham prison for quite a time. He attempted two coups. Then he does get elected, of course, in 1851 as minister president. Then he declares himself that he does a sort of mini coup. And then he becomes emperor in 1852 on the 2nd of December, needless to say. And so there is a strong sense that none of this would have happened had he not had the name Napoleon and the surname Bonaparte, absolutely. And the French people by that stage, are they doing the careful,

considered Andrew Roberts approach to Napoleon's greatness and thinking about the way he's reshaped France and the relationship between church and state and stuff? Or is there a nostalgia for military victories, for greatness on the battlefield? I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. People by that stage had forgotten about the, or at least weren't thinking about the six million people who died in the Napoleonic Wars and Revolutionary Wars. They thought that France had become corrupt, which in many ways it had. They worried about robbery and breakdown in civil order and lots of other perfectly reasonable

things to worry about. But yes, there was still a sort of yearning for French greatness, which you saw nothing of in the Orleanist 1840 to 1848 period. But also, what Napoleon III rather cleverly did was to build up support from exactly the same areas, political areas, that Napoleon I had had support, i.e. the rural peasantry. That was the reason why Napoleon I won all those referendums, as well as cheating in them, by the way. There was quite a lot of that going on. But also because he was trusted by the rural peasantry. And so that was also where Napoleon III tried to, and succeeded in, getting his support from. On a side note, I'm always fascinated by Napoleon III when he was kicked out during the Franco-Prussian War disaster in 1870.

And then his son ends up fighting for the British army, the crown prince, and dies in the Anglo-Zulu War, fighting Zulus in South Africa. It's fascinating. It is. And then his father, Napoleon III, dies in 1873, six years before the Zulu War, but his mother doesn't die until 1920. So the Empress Eugenie, who's also buried in Chislehurst, is around for the First World War and becomes friends with Lady Haig, Earl Haig's wife. And so you have this Napoleonic, this Bonapartist epic, which starts in Ajaccio in 1769 and goes all the way through to Chislehurst in 1920. That is amazing, isn't it? When we talk about Napoleon, Burke, didn't he suggest that inevitably a dictator would emerge from the chaos of the French Revolution? Do you think that's true

or do you think only Napoleon could have, with someone of his extraordinary ability and talent and luck, required to fulfill that role. Revolutions do throw up dictators. The witness of history is pretty uniform in that, isn't it? But I think France was fortunate that it had a dictator who was interested in things like the Code Napoleon and the Banque de France and the education system and so on. There are an awful lot of people who could have wound up being the dictator of France. In fact, there were several who thought that they should, not least Bernadotte, who later became King of Sweden, who couldn't really understand how it was

that this thrusting young 30-year-old artillery captain should have wound up as the first consul. But it was him who undertook the Brumaire coup and not them. And so ultimately, I think France was very fortunate that it had a genuine genius, even though one who did commit war crimes and who was overall, of course, responsible for, as I say, these 100,000 casualties after he escaped from Elba. Yeah, you mentioned 100,000 casualties. I always remember that book written by Robert Toombs and his wife about Britain and France. And at the end of each chapter, when they couldn't agree, they wrote separate essays about what they thought about the history that they'd just written

together. And in the Napoleon complex, you mentioned that he just wanted to invade endlessly other countries. Where do you stand? For example, at the end of the Peace of Amiens, when Britain and France go back to war against each other, the Brits blamed Napoleon's bellicose-y, razing invasion fleet, looking towards Britain. He refused to evacuate a certain place he said he was going to evacuate. But he's got a fairly good argument against the Brits as well. Where do you stand on how far we should place the blame for this gigantic, catastrophic war, series of wars, on Napoleon himself? I think he's definitely responsible for the 1808 to 1814 Peninsular War. That was entirely unnecessary.

I think he was entirely to blame for the 1812 campaign. Again, he didn't have to invade Russia. campaign. Again, he didn't have to invade Russia. But those are two wars, and there were seven wars of the coalitions between 1793 and 1815. He certainly can't be blamed for any of the ones that broke out before he became First Consul. Then there were some, such as the 1805 war against Russia and Austria, which were clearly Russia and Austria's fault because they invaded Bavaria, which was France's ally. I think that the Italian campaign was just an extension, essentially, of the revolutionary fighting going on there. Both the 1813 and 1814 campaigns were perfectly understandable attempts by the coalition to crush Napoleon. So I think it breaks down out of the seven wars of the coalition, I think it breaks down two to five. And so the coalition, which again, completely

understandably, most of it, not Britain, but most of the other autocracies, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and so on, didn't like the idea of meritocracy. They were the exact opposite of that. And the idea that it was going to be a sort of flame that crossed Europe was understandably scary for them. And as a result, the Austrians fight against Napoleon again and again and again until, of course, the marriage of the Emperor of Austria's daughter, Marie-Louise, to Napoleon. But then soon after that, three years later, they're fighting against Napoleon again. It's bad for Napoleon that they should be called the Napoleonic Wars, really. They should be called the Wars of the Coalition, which is what we used to call them. But unfortunately, editors find it much easier to go for the shorter headlines.

Has Napoleon been more dangerous to ancien regime autocracies, monarchies, in death than he was alive through the rest of the 19th century and early 20th? Yes, and also one has to remember, of course, that as you mentioned earlier, he did put his own family onto thrones, left, right and centre. You know, the throne of Spain, the throne of Holland, the throne of Westphalia, and so on. And there are others, Naples. So one can't go too far with this argument about meritocracy. It was important for him amongst his soldiers and in some administrative jobs, but he did reintroduce the aristocracy. And of course, all these various universally useless kings who were his brothers and sisters. But overall, I think, yes, he has been more dangerous in death than in life. Because if you look at Balzac and Stendhal and so many other Bonapartist writers, they do take from Napoleon this sense of revolutionary ardour, stripped though, of this ghastly revolutionary bloodthirstiness.

It's interesting. So they can critique the present by saying, if only we had a man of that sort of revolutionary vigour who was prepared to overturn things, prepared to embrace reason, to build institutions and to build a better friar, but a present. Yes, Victor Hugo is a very good example of that as well, who hated and despised Napoleon III, partly because he was not Napoleon I. So when he writes the book explaining Waterloo in terms of the sunken road that the French cavalry was supposed to have destroyed themselves against, and so on, what he's attempting to do really is to say there is a greatness to France and its institutions, which could be seen in Napoleon, but certainly hasn't been seen

since and most definitely is not seen in this mountebank figure of Napoleon III. Just quickly about his own image while he was alive. We have various paintings of him crossing the Alps and other things. His hat, his great coat. Are these things that he worked on, his image, while he was alive? Or are those rather like horns on Viking helmets? Are they the product of Hollywood props people from the 1920s? Oh, no, the iconography is absolutely central to him. He wore the Chasseur à Cheval colonel's uniform deliberately

because he recognised quite how powerful it was to wear that. He loved the fact that nobody else wore bicorn hats in the way that he did, apart from obviously Nelson's Navy, but that was different. And he also had a real sense of giving away locks of his hair, for example, when he was on his deathbed. The way during battles he would take his own legendre from his own breast and put it on the breast of the person who he'd seen be particularly brave in battle. These are all absolutely clear indications that he understood the power of the icon. He said that men can be governed by baubles. He certainly understood the power of baubles. And through that memoir, and so the power of history and generations of us have been sort

of obsessed and repelled, but drawn to him over the centuries. Hitler visited his tomb in 1914, said it was the greatest and finest moment of my life. Oh, God. That's all that poor old Napoleon needs to be equated with. The two men, personally, could not be more different. When Napoleon's army enters the Jewish ghettos in European cities, he frees the Jews. He gives them the religious and social rights that they deserve. He does not act like Adolf Hitler in any way. But the powerful thing about myths is that they just become propagated. We talk about Napoleon because we're talking about Napoleon. When we just say he's one of the greatest great men, what do we mean by great? It's a very positive word in today's society. You say,

oh, that's great. How do you intend that word great to mean? Well, you're quite right. And there are some terrible people who are called the great. Peter the Great did some monstrous things in Russia, for example. And there are lots of greats that we have. Elizabeth I is never called Elizabeth the Great, for example. So yes, it is an interesting way. Frederick and Catherine both get it, but lots of other important people don't. The reason I called the book The Great was first to, I suppose, irritate an entire generation of British historians who do think that he was a proto-Hitler. People who, many of them good friends of mine, who grew up in the Second World War, and who relate their experiences back and try to impose on Napoleon this idea that he somehow was a proto-Hitler figure. Also because, actually, the dedication of the great Vivant-Denon's great description of Egypt, the 20-volume description of Egypt, was dedicated to Napoleon Legrand. I thought that that was something that was worth noting. But do we mean by greatness?

We mean having had an enormous impact? Or do we mean also there is an element of positivity around their legacy? Yes, I think both. And that's the difficult bit, isn't it? With Alfred the Great, yes. With Peter the Great, probably no. And so it's a sort of soubriquet that one should be very sparing with. But I do believe that Napoleon does deserve it.

Well, thank you very much, Andrew Roberts. Thank you very much. I've much enjoyed it. I think if you're into the great man school of history, Napoleon is the ultimate great man. He rose from relative obscurity to conquer a huge empire. He humiliated enemies on the battlefield. He revolutionized France and other conquered territories. And we know absolutely loads about him. We have his letters to Josephine, to rulers. We have his private and very public correspondence. We have fiction that he wrote.

We have political and military treatises that he wrote. He changed the course of history. And he also gave us a running commentary. He's just perfect for the lover of history. And for much of the following hundred years in particular, where to many history was simply the deeds of great men, well, Napoleon was the ideal subject. Thank you so much for joining me for our series about Napoleon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Dan Snow's History for more series just like this in the coming months. We're going to have another just like this

telling the astonishing story of Thomas Cochrane, the Seawolf, the most daring naval hero of the 19th century. A man whose story is absolutely more exciting and more dramatic than any fiction you'll ever read. A man who went on to command the national navies of no less than three other nations. You're not going to believe your ears when you listen to it. Be sure to sign up and get that when it comes out at the beginning of the new year. Thanks to all my guests, Lord Andrew Roberts, Dr. Zach White and Dr. Kate List. This series was produced by Freddie Chick and Marianna Day Forge with the assistance of Charlotte Long.

The editor was the long-suffering and ever-brilliant Dougal Patmore. Thanks for listening. Thank you. you