Dan Snow's History Hit - Napoleon Bonaparte: Rise to Power

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

In this archive episode, Dan talks to Adam Zamoyski, a historian who has written a biography of Napoleon, about the early life and rise to power of one of the most remarkable men in history.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. 200 years ago this week, Napoleon died in St Helena, one of the most remarkable lives and careers in the history of Europe. He died a British prisoner on one of the most remote scraps of land in the world. I visited St Helena last year and we've got a lot of content about Napoleon and his death available at historyhit.tv. Please go and check it out. Historyhit.tv, it's like a digital history channel where you get documentaries, you get podcasts, you get audio, you get all sorts of things there. You're going to love it.

And we got a documentary of me visiting the place, the room where Napoleon died. It's all laid out just as it was 200 years ago. Big anniversary, folks. Go and check it out there. And also, while you're there, you can enjoy some of the more remarkable other history of a really wonderful island, St. Leon. I fell in love with the place. So please go and check that out on historyhit.tv. It's like Netflix, but just for history. And there's a big focus on Napoleon this week. There's a focus on Napoleon on this podcast too, because a few years ago, I talked to the very brilliant historian, Adam Zamoyski. We were meant

to discuss the whole of Napoleon, because he's written a biography. But in the end, we didn't really get past his early life, because it wasyski. We were meant to discuss the whole of Napoleon because he's written a biography, but in the end we didn't really get past his early life because it was so interesting. We just decided to make the whole podcast about that. I need to have a follow-up actually. I need to book the guy. Adam, if you're listening, call me. So this is a podcast from our archive. We discuss Napoleon, his birth, his rise to power, who he was, and whether he was short. You're going to love it. So here, before you head to history.tv, is Adam Samoisky talking about Napoleon Bonaparte. Enjoy. Adam, thank you very much indeed for coming on to the podcast. Thank you.

Another giant book about Napoleon. You must have approached this with a bit of trepidation. Thank you. where other people haven't been. And also, you know, biographies are, on the face of it, they're much simpler than other subjects because they're not so complicated. You know, there's a beginning, a middle and an end, and it's one life. But actually, the problem is that if you're going to do a biography properly, you've really got to get right into the person. And that has to start off with understanding the landscape in which they grew up and I mean the cultural emotional psychological ideological landscape of their particularly their formative years you know I sometimes say to people you know you couldn't write a biography of say Tony Blair in 30 years time without explaining what was going on in the pop world of the 1970s.

Because that whole atmosphere of the time had a huge impact on him, the way he behaved, the way he thought, the way he liked to present himself and so on. And so for Napoleon, what you've got to begin by doing, and this is where a lot of particularly Anglo-Saxon historians fall short, but even some of the French, is to really understand and know, have a knowledge of 18th century French literature and culture. And I'm fortunate enough to have actually studied that rather a lot. Indeed, I studied that in depth at

Oxford beyond the call of duty, actually, because I was just fascinated in the way that the mind, the way people thought was developing as they shed religious beliefs and began to create a new cultural and ideological belief system, which in some ways came into being, you know, was brought into fact by the French Revolution and so on. I think it's one of my favourite Apollonian quotes. You're probably going to say it's misattributed now, but to understand a man,

work out what the world looked like when he was 21 or something. And I've always thought that was, you mentioned about Tony Blair and it must be true of everybody. Yes, I think it is true. And that's why I'm always ambivalent about biographies so I did groan slightly for that reason but also um because of course there have been thousands of books on Napoleon and I thought do we really need another but then when I thought about it I thought thought, well, yes, we do need one, or at least I need one. And I always think this is what decides me. I can only really write a book if I feel, actually, you know, I'd really

like to get to the bottom of what that was all about. And actually, I suddenly realized that I had read a number of books on Napoleon. I had written about his invasion of Russia, about his fall. But actually, I still, I didn't really understand what made the wretched man tick. What, you know, how was it that this, you know, this little guy from, you know, Hicktown, Corsica, which is one of the most backward places in the world at the time, a smelly fishing village, really. Ayacho, although it had a sort of supposed cathedral, I mean, it's tiny. And the house you visit now as a tourist has absolutely no,

bears absolutely no relation to what the house he grew up in looked like. You know, it was the most obscure place he sprang from. And, you know, I thought, you know, how did it come about? What did he think he was doing? How did it happen? Because I don't buy all this, you know, he was a genius and just sort of sailed out and, you know, sort of came forth and it was natural. So actually I then became intrigued and so I thought, OK, I'll do it.

So tell me then about the intellectual and cultural ferment in which he came of age which shaped him as a boy and a young man. As a boy, when he started reading, he obviously ingested the literature of the French Enlightenment, on the one hand the political literature, and by the time he was 20 he was a firm Republican, not a rabid revolutionary but a Republican. But he also read the actual literary literature,

so he read all the sentimental novels of the 18th century. And of course, what was beginning to come through was the early Romanticism. So he read and reread certain books. It's quite extraordinary. I mean, he obviously he loved Rousseau's La Nouvelle Louise, but then afterwards said it was all rubbish. Véla Louise, but then afterwards said it was all rubbish. But his favourite book was Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, which is a lovely book, but it's terribly sentimental. And he read and reread and reread that thing. He was still rereading it at the end of his life. The other thing he absolutely loved was The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe's book. He adored Ossian.

And even when he was told that it was phony, he didn't care. And indeed, you know, he used to insist on telling people in his entourage once he'd come to power whom to marry and how to name their children. And he was always choosing names either from antiquity, such as Ulysses or something, or from Ossian, which is why the Swedish royal family are all called Oscar. It comes from Ossian because he ordered Bernadotte to name one of his sons Oscar. because he ordered Bernadotte to name one of his sons Oscar. So he read this sentimental but heroically sentimental literature.

But also he was brought up on, as was his entire generation, in the French military academies, Lutarch's Lives and various texts of classical texts and Caesar's campaigns and so on were absolutely standard reading. And his generation, not just him, did grow up in the spirit of emulation of the great figures of antiquity. They all wanted to be Caesar, Alexander, Achilles, and so on. And so that explains a great deal. And Madame de Stael, the Baron de Stael, wrote a very interesting text in the 1790s, explaining that this whole thing, how the pursuit of a concept which she defined as gloire, which is not the same as we mean as glory, it meant a kind of layman's ascent to sainthood.

It was the lay modern equivalent, for then modern equivalent, of a fully fulfilled Christian life. And she explained that this generation, these young men, because they believed so much that by willing themselves to achieve Blois, they actually came to believe that they were capable of quite exceptional and supernatural things, which goes a long way to explaining how in those early campaigns he managed to get so much out of his troops. And there were all these young people, both troops and officers,

who would simply storm batteries and do, perform unbelievable feats of dashing derring-do, which, of course, they gradually stopped doing with quite so much élan, panache, as they grew older. So that is the climate in which he grew up. And there was a sort of auto-suggestion which flourished into really giving, lending them remarkable powers simply because they believed in themselves and in what they were doing and were determined to achieve their ends. And that does come from their their as i say their literary cultural landscape so nebelian is a student at the french military academy serving the king louis the 16th and how old is he and where exactly is he when the bastille falls and how important is he in the early bit of the french revolution 70 8989 to 92, 93, is he prominent? Well, he's exactly a month short of his 20th birthday when the Bastille falls. And he's a second lieutenant in an artillery regiment, the best in France.

Like most of his comrades, he welcomes it, not just because he's a Republican and realises that France needs to be reformed, but also because it promises to break the monopoly on promotion and advancement of the aristocracy. Because artillerymen were sort of engineers, they were there on that, They were different from infantrymen, weren't they, and cavalrymen? Yes, they were. I mean, they were all noblemen, technically, but they were from pretty, they were really from gentry families. Some of them actually, not even that, but on the whole, they were. But they were pretty low down the scale, and they didn't have influence and patronage at court. So they would advance in the artillery, but they would never, well, they wouldn't advance in other ways, and they would always remain fairly obscure. So, for all of them, this was good news. he hardly knew his father because his father was away from home a lot. And then at nine, he was sent away and only saw him possibly only once thereafter before the father died. And he was a little bit embarrassed by his father's pushiness and snobbery. Napoleon was nevertheless, had quite sort of middle class views on things and didn't like disorder. And he was appalled by the fact that the soldiers in his unit, they didn't mutiny, but they started sort of a bit of a riot. And that horrified him. And all riots, popular riots, really appalled him. He was disgusted by them.

And then when, in 1792, he witnessed, well, he witnessed first the day that the crowd broke into the tuileries and forced the king to drink an oath to put the red bonnet the Phrygian bonnet on his head and drink the toast of the French people and he witnessed that and he was appalled by that he thought although he was a republican he thought this was he believed in authority because he thought authority, you know, like an army can only function if there's a proper man in charge and discipline is observed. He believed in authority. So he was appalled by that. actually witness it, but he arrived on the scene shortly after the 10th of August storming of the Tuileries and the massacre of the Swiss guards and the defenders and the mutilation of their bodies by a sort of frenzied crowd of the lowest orders of Paris. And that horrified him, filled

him with disgust, but also with fear. And he never shed, to the end of his life, he never shed the fear of the Paris mob, which actually, you know, he was wrong because they grew to love him. And in 1814, if he had armed them, and in 1815, if he had armed them and in 1815 if he'd armed them, which they were begging him to do, the Allies would not have attempted to storm Paris. And certainly no Bourbon would have liked to climb over the bodies of dead Parisian citizens to get on a throne. It simply wouldn't have happened. So had he had the faith to do that, he might well have survived. But he didn't. Those moments of the revolution did.

They remained with him for life, as they did with so many rulers. It's fascinating that Charles X, who was quite gung-ho about defending his position, suddenly lost his nerve and ran. The French king in the 1820s? Yes. And in 1848, Louis-Philippe, again, because they had all seen the mob during the revolution. And, you know, it was something that haunted them. And, you know, the the crucial moment they just thought help i'm getting out of here well napoleon dealt with the mob in a very particular way slightly later in the 1790s didn't he yes in fact that wasn't so much the mob and and actually we

we don't really know it's fascinating the whole thing about Vandermeer, the famed whiff of grapeshot. So I've skipped it. I'm getting overexcited. So Napoleon, we should say, rises to prominence because of the siege of Toulon, the British seize Toulon, Napoleon helps gain it back? Yes. It wasn't that spectacular. That became the legend. He had a lucky break at Toulon because they needed an artillery officer. And so he arrived on the scene. He was immediately promoted from captain to the equivalent of major and told to take control of the artillery. And what he discovered was that there were about eight quite light guns and that was about it. So his real merit there was that he just scoured the countryside and he grabbed anybody who'd ever served in the artillery or indeed in supply columns and knew how to drag guns or do anything like that. He confiscated everything he could in order to make up for lack

of gun carriages and this and that. He seized bits of cannon that was sitting on various battlements in the area, brought them all together and built up a proper artillery force. And then he worked out, and it was not that original because the people in Paris had also worked it out, although not his commanders on the spot. He worked out, well, he just took one look at the terrain and said, look, you know, the taking Toulon by storming the defences was going to be long and exhausting and very costly. Whereas if you could remove its lifeline, which came from the sea, Admiral Hood's fleet, then the whole thing would fold up in five minutes. And so the key was to secure a vantage point which controlled the access to the inner roadsteads of Toulon, and indeed the outer roadsteads.

And because if you had guns on there, no ships were going to pass underneath them. So he concentrated on that and managed to... And the Brits who'd realised this as well had put up some batteries there, but he managed to knock them out and storm them and turn their guns and his own guns onto the inner roads and start sending incendiary cannonballs onto the British and Spanish ships there. And they began to evacuate

the place PDQ as some of their ships started blowing up and catching fire. So that gave him a break. He was then promoted to brigadier general, you know, which at the age of 25, which wasn't that remarkable, because thousands of generals had emigrated, and senior officers had emigrated. And there were quite a few generals younger than him already by then. So, but still, that was a lucky break. But he sort of lay, you know, it wasn't like they said, Oh, this guy's so brilliant, we must put him in command of an army here or there. They put him in command of the coastal defences of the south, which was a fairly important job. The Royal Navy kept on sort of patrolling, looking for a weak spot to land British and Sardinian and Spanish troops.

But it wasn't a key position. and Spanish troops. But it wasn't a key position. And he came to prominence rarely when he happened to be hanging around in Paris at a bit of a loose end in 1795 when the Directory was threatened by a revolt and of really royalist leaning sections of the Parisian National Guard and they he was brought in to help with the defense now nobody really knows because his account is certainly not entirely true but nor are those of most of the other people involved. And we don't know whether he did fire a great shot, whether he fired blanks thereafter, as he claims. The casualties were pretty small, but it was successful and he must have shown some kind of ruthlessness or determination or some quality because he was then put in charge of in effect about 40 000 troops in and around the capital which actually made him one of the most powerful people in the land. But this is what's so extraordinary about Napoleon,

is that although he had from early years, like most of his generation, dreamt of heroic deeds and so on and so forth, he was actually terribly interested in money. And again, I come back to this rather middle class thing about, you know, he had to make, set up his family. And he spent the months following getting this nomination to command the army of the interior, it was called, to place all his siblings and cousins and everybody he could in lucrative positions and to get hold of money we don't quite know how but he certainly suddenly became quite wealthy and to set himself

up and he was more interested at that stage in property speculation in paris because there was a fantastic market at the end of the revolution with um there were all these properties that had been confiscated from um emigre or guillotine noblemen which were all being sort of flogged off at a discount and people were buying them up and selling you know selling them on back-to-back deals and whatever. He was fantastically interested in that. He even got interested in importing luxuries, of which there was a shortage in Paris, which had suddenly become a kind of roiling centre of pleasure after the fall of the Terror, of Robespierre and the end of the Terror.

Suddenly Paris became just, you know, a sort of carnivalesque city. And so, you know, there's silk stockings and things like that were in short supply. And he busied himself importing and sometimes indeed smuggling these things to make some money. So it's quite charming in a way. You see this man, if you really look at what's going on and read his letters, which of course have been republished from the originals, and the previous editions had all been bowdlerized because they were published during the Second Empire. And a lot of this stuff about property speculation had been cut out of them, about property speculation had been cut out of them,

being deemed to be less than glorious. And here you get such a sort of sense of the guy just trying to get ahead, you know, the little Corsican man trying to get himself and his family, because remember, you know, in Corsica, it's the family, it's the Cosa Nostra, it's, you know, it's, we all hang together. So there he is setting himself up and it's rather charming. And then he thinks, I must get married. And his brother marries this wealthy merchant's daughter and he wants to marry her sister because he thinks a decent dowry and, you know, and having a wife around, it'll help and so on. You know, so suddenly he becomes a kind of very bourgeois creature

trying to set himself up. You listen to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Napoleon, obviously, more after this. Romans, gods, Spartans, the wars of Alexander the Great's successors in incredible, entirely necessary detail. The Ancients podcast is kind of like Dan's show, except it's just ancient history. We've got the leading experts. We've got the big topics, from ancient Vietnam to the fall of Rome. Subscribe to the Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

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If we're going to talk about greatness, does that come when he's assigned to northern Italy? Yes, and then suddenly there's this extraordinary thing happens that, and I suspect that Varane, the other directors, thought, well, hang on, this guy is just... He began to just sort of do as he pleased and he'd call in at the offices of the directory and actually sort of tell them, you know, he said, no, no, you're doing this all wrong.

You should do it this way and that way, you know, because he was very clever and very practical. And this began to get their goat. And also they began to worry, hang on, this guy might just, you know, he's got the army, he can do anything. So they thought of two things. First of all, Barras, the chief director, was terribly keen to park his ex-mistress, Josephine de Beauharnais, somewhere because she had no means of subsistence. She was, you know, growing a little bit past her prime. He was sick of her. And so he thought he must marry her off. So he thought possibly by marrying Napoleon, that might calm him down a bit and take his mind off politics. And so he did that. And then very quickly, soon after that, he also decided, after deciding to set up this marriage, getting them together,

he decided to send him off and give him a command in Italy, which was really like sending him to the least interesting theatre of war. The army down there, the army of Italy, was a complete mess. It was a rabble. They had no shoes. Most of them didn't have uniforms. They didn't have hats. They had most, a lot of them didn't have arms. I mean, they were deserting all over the place.

They were ill-fed. They weren't paid. And they weren't supposed to do much. They were supposed to go and really just kind of threaten the Austrians and the Sardinians and stop them invading southern France. But that was really all. But of course, Napoleon being Napoleon, he thought, right, he raided every library he could in Paris and borrowed, begged or stole maps. And he spent a couple of weeks shut up in his rooms, just reading everything about... He'd already studied a bit the whole Italian theatre

before he came up to Paris. But he again went over it. He reread the campaigns of the French in the, you know, in the times of Francis I and then in Andalusia XV. And he just studied and studied maps and the topography and, you know, working out which rivers could be forded, which couldn't, where you could ford them, where you couldn't ford them which passes could be negotiated you know whether you could get artillery over some bridge or not and that kind of thing and not just for his lines of advance but also putting himself and this was what he was so good at he then turned the tables look at it from the enemy's side and said, well, where would I, which routes would I advance along?

And indeed, if I were threatened from here, where would I retreat to? And so he raced down there, knocked the army into some kind of shape by every means at his disposal. They weren't particularly impressed by him to begin with, but he promised them rich booty over the mountains. And they were so desperate and bored that they thought, well, why not? And he delivered a series of lightning strikes. They weren't huge battles, they were quite small engagements, very often with just a few thousand on each side. But he inflated their significance and he would address his men afterwards saying, you know, you've won the greatest battle since whatever and your heroes and France will glory in your deeds and so on.

And, well, first of all, they could all pick proper boots off the the Austrian prisoners or dead um and and sort of jackets and things and get a few slightly better muskets secondly they could sort of loot and rape a bit um and fill their bellies and thirdly there he was telling them they were heroes. And so they began to feel better and better and more and more excited about the whole thing. And he built up this sense of excitement and enthusiasm, which really did turn them into a very, very agile and reactive force, sort of ready up for anything. And of course, the other thing is he sent back these bulletins to Paris,

which were sort of 95% fiction, inflating every engagement, turning it into a great battle and saying how many prisoners he'd taken and how many cannon he'd captured and so on, inflating the figures shamelessly. And this was really what created Napoleon because the directory were unpopular. And, you know, if you're an unpopular government, what better thing to do than to plaster the street corners and the newspapers with accounts of heroic daring do by your armies. So they started, you know, sending all this, you know, his propaganda, diffusing it

throughout France. And it was some time before they realized that, hang about, we've created a hero. But because by then he was also sending back money. You know, he'd require what he called contributions from all the locals and grab any money he could, and he'd send him back to Paris. And, of course, this was absolute manna from heaven to this unpopular and rather bankrupt government. So they gradually became totally dependent on him for money. And they'd created a monster that they couldn't control. Right. So he's making a name for himself in Northern Italy.

Yes. And he comes back to Paris. And the wretched directory has to, willy-nilly, has to give a huge festival and pretend to give him a hell of a homecoming because not only has he won all these terrific victories and has the whole population of France come to see him as a hero he's also brought peace a peace which actually the directory didn't really want but which the population did So he was the hero of the day, but he realised that he was extremely unpopular amongst the political classes and liable to be poisoned. Every time they gave an official banquet, he'd bring his own loaf of bread and a bottle of wine. And he never, when he dined out, he never had anything except hard-boiled eggs

or boiled eggs or anything he brought, because he was convinced that he was going to be poisoned. And so they wanted to get him out of the way as quickly as possible. So the first thing they did was make him commander of the army of England, saying, right, this will test him. It's an impossible mission. So he's bound to fail. But then he says, look, I'm not doing this because it's not going to work. So then they think up, Talleyrand actually thinks up and they say, well, let's send him off to Egypt. We need a new colony because the Brits have taken all our West Indians colonies. So

how about this for a colony? And let's send him off there. He'll be far away and can't cause too much trouble. So they send him off there. And of course, he lands there and captures Cairo, and that would be good enough. And he was intending to come back after having done that. But of course, the Brits did him the greatest favor of all with Nelson sinking his fleet in the Battle of the Nile, because it meant he was stuck there. And suddenly, he couldn't be ordered about by the Directory. And he suddenly became an autonomous ruler of a huge land, the land of the pharaohs. And he had his own army. He had nobody telling him what to do. And he really tasted power. And not just military power, but civil power. He began, you know, a land registry. He started lighting the streets of Cairo. He started a sewage system for Cairo, a street

sweeping system. You know, he actually started to enjoy being a ruler. And that gave him a taste for power and a sense that actually he'd be quite a good ruler. And the second outcome was that because the Ottomans were sending an army down through Syria and Palestine, he went off to head it off, and there followed this grueling campaign through the desert and through scorching sands and then through the mud of Palestine and then up to Acre, where he met his first defeat, his first failure. And by then his army was, you know, they had an epidemic of plague, they were running out of supplies, morale was incredibly low, his generals,

most of whom were senior to him, were beginning to complain horribly. And he managed by sheer ruthlessness and determination to keep them together, to whip them into line, to bring them back and announce that it had been a great victory. And that tested his mettle. And even old Clibber, who hated him, said, God, well, he's got one thing which nobody else has, this horrid little bugger. He dares and he dares to dare things that nobody else will dare. And he took his hat off to him. He took his hat off to him. Land a Viking longship on island shores.

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brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. He then abandoned them, right? Well, he didn't abandon them because, in fact, he had been recalled by the directory, but the letter never got to him. But he saw that France was being attacked, and it looked as though she might fall. And that would have been very bad for France and very bad for General Bonaparte and his army. So he decided to go back to Paris, leaving his army, regarding

himself then almost as a sort of monarch or at least a political lieutenant. He felt he could hand over his command to General Clébert, which was a perfectly sensible thing to do, and he made a dash back to Paris to organise proper supplies for it and see what was going on. And of course, he landed just a few days after the news of his very good victory, his resounding victory at Aboukir reached France. And so suddenly there was a piece of good news on the horizon,

you know, suddenly a victory for French arms. And lo and behold, a couple of days later, there is the hero himself. And everybody said, and France seemed to be in the mess, she was threatened by invasion. And they thought, goody good, he's going to save France. And, you know, that was it. And from that moment, it was just a question of how he was going to, how he was going to do it. And ironically, it was the directors themselves, the government, the members of the government, who wanted to, you know, carry out a coup. It's just that each of them wanted to carry it out in a different way. And so, in a sense, he suddenly found himself born on a wave,

which he served brilliantly, although I have to say, on the actual day of Brumaire of the coup d'etat, he almost buggered up the whole thing. But he was born to power, really, by the will of a great, great many people. Well, that was a remarkable... Thank you for the rise of Napoleon in 40 minutes. You've got everything you need to know there. Adam, the book is called... It's called Napoleon, The Man Behind the Myth.

The idea is to actually get to the bottom of who he was, what he thought he was doing, and how he did it. And the rise is fascinating and exciting and terribly impressive. And then there's this extraordinary and quite long decline and fall, which is extraordinary. He could have stopped it so many times. He could have saved himself and his throne and he could have done anything. And what's so interesting is why he couldn't. And he couldn't bring himself to do it because he lacked faith in himself.

to do it because he lacked faith in himself ultimately. He was riven by insecurities and he felt that only when he could deliver great victories and powers of glory would people accept him and he felt that they weren't going to accept him just for himself. Well you've, I'm fascinated by this period of history and you've already taught me so much so thank you very much i'm also very glad to hear that greatness is a product of hard work not being touched by the finger of fate definitely hard work and um clever use of the right people although later then he laid too much faith in the wrong people marshall nay the bravest of the brave on the field of Waterloo. What a disaster. I want to come back and hassle you another time

while we complete this conversation, but good luck with the book. Thank you very much. On sale now, everybody. Thank you. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money, makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very,

very grateful. Thank you. you