• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2642 0

ambition desire? From a private individual he saw himself raised to the first throne of the world; his reign had been one continued series of victories; and to complete his happiness, a son, the object of his most ardent wishes, was born to succeed him. The people, though oppressed under his government, became accustomed to it, and seemed desirous to secure the crown to his family. All the foreign princes who were subjected to his power were his vassals . . . Nothing was wanting to make him happy! Nothing - if he could be happy who possessed not a love of justice. To that sentiment Napoleon had ever been a stranger and consequently knew not enjoyment or repose. Agitated by a reckless spirit and tormented by ungovernable ambition, the very excess of his fortune was his ruin . . . Continually tormented by spleen and melancholy, the least contradiction irritated him . . . and poisoned the happiest moments of his glory . . . Despot over his people . . . and a slave to his ungovernable passions, he . . . adopted a false line of politics, and converted . . . the most useful and powerful of his allies into a dangerous enemy.76

10

Downfall

The first rule of warfare, Field-Marshal Montgomery once said, is not to march on Moscow. When the grande armée poured across the river Niemen on 24 June 1812, however, there was no thought of marching so far into the depths of Russia: what was intended was a very different campaign that would have given Napoleon fresh allies in Eastern Europe and in effect blackmailed Alexander into submission. To the surprise of most observers, this scheme went wrong, and in the process an essentially eastern conflict was subsumed into the broader history of the Napoleonic Wars and ended up becoming a general onslaught on France of a sort not seen even in the great crisis of 1793 . In this development, the terrible human catastrophe that resulted from the march on Moscow was to play its part, but it should be remembered that in the end even defeat in Russia was not enough to bring about the general uprising against the Napoleonic imperium that was finally to bring it down. The retreat from Moscow did not shake the emperor’s hold on France, Italy or Germany, and even in the dark days of 1813 he could have escaped with much of his power intact. That Napoleon did not do so is related not so much to the intransigence of the ancien régime as to his own lack of realism and failure of perception, not to mention his tacit acceptance that he was either a successful warlord or he was nothing. As he said, ‘Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.’ The result being a refusal to compromise even in the face of the most desperate odds, the ranks of his foes grew so numerous that even Napoleon could not hold his own against them and, in trying to do so, strained the loyalties of France to such an extent that she turned her back on him.

Once again, then, the personal dimension was crucial. To the end Napoleon claimed he was fighting for France and that he could not accept a peace that was dishonourable for France. But if he truly believed this argument, the wholesale identification of his own interests with those of France is but one more example of the way in which the emperor deceived himself, if not those around him. Just as unhelpful was the way in which he constantly stressed, even after defeat in Russia, that there was no challenge that he and his armies could not surmount. The litany was a constant one: ‘Victory belongs to the most persevering’; ‘The moral is to the physical as three is to one’; ‘How many things apparently impossible have nevertheless been performed by resolute men who had no alternative but death?’; ‘Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools’, ‘Great men seldom fail in their most perilous enterprises’; ‘The word impossible is not in my dictionary.’ In short, just as Napoleon had not understood the realities of strength in victory, in defeat he did not understand the realities of weakness, all his bravura coming down to little more than