Napoleon by Frank McLynn. Cape 739pp, £25 in UKNapoleon was 46 years old when Waterloo finally brought him down, and he lived for another seven years in isolation on St Helena before dying there of stomach cancer, it was believed for many years, but very possibly he was poisoned. The theory that he died from arsenic administered over a period of time is not, apparently, the semi-fantasy it once seemed when it was popularised over 30 years ago.
There is a solid body of proof, and suspicion falls not on his British captors but on members of his private entourage, who were probably spies for the Bourbons. The restored dynasty had already seen Napoleon return in triumph from Elba for the Hundred Days, and though St Helena was a remote island in the Atlantic, as long as Napoleon lived he was an obvious focus for discontent in France.
He is a very big and intricate subject, one of the most remarkable and most controversial figures in history, on whom any kind of final agreement or consensus does not seem possible. Napoleon, who had a very clear and far-seeing intellect, was fully aware of this himself and forecast with considerable accuracy what people would say about him after his death. He split opinion in France both during and after his lifetime; he divided the allegiances of Europe; he has proved an inspiration for many both on the Left and Right, and, for others, a negative example, even a monster.
Few men contain in their lives so many major contradictions as he did: he carried on the French Revolution's wars against the Ancien Regime, yet he suppressed the remnant of the old Jacobins and set up an imperial dynasty and court of his own, as well as encouraging members of the old nobility to return from exile. He emancipated the Jews and encouraged the rising commercial middle class, while curtailing press freedoms (such as they were) and exiling liberal intellectuals such as Madame de Stael.
While encouraging a new kind of meritocracy and filling the army and the bureaucracy with men of talent rather than of high birth, he set members of his own (largely useless) family up as kings and peers, and was rewarded by them with intrigues, treachery and administrative incompetence.
The would-be successor to Charlemagne sometimes behaved like a Corsican god-father, enmeshed in family ties and feuds, and henpecked by his domineering mother. So Mr McLynn has an enigma of gigantic scale to deal with, which he does capably enough, though his accounts of Napoleon's chief battles contain some factual errors.
The rise inside a few years of a penniless, unprepossessing, undersized Corsican artillery officer to European fame could scarcely have happened in peacetime. The Revolution, however, had turned things in France upside down and inside out, so that men of obscure birth, and with no wealth or connections, could become famous and/or rich inside a short span of time through energy, ability, intrigue and exact timing - and Napoleone Buonaparte, as he was originally named, was a master of all four. He was also studious and a deep thinker, with a profound sense of history.
His early mastery of his own weapon, artillery, served him well both in driving the English expeditionary force from Toulon and in quelling the mob in Paris with the famous "whiff of grapeshot." In his mid-twenties, as an almost untried general, he virtually swept the Austrians out of Italy and then, in a coup which was poorly managed and very nearly failed, took over power in Paris from the last of the ephemeral revolutionary regimes, the so-called Five Hundred. From First Consul it was a short step to (literally) crowning himself as Emperor, with the approval of a national plebiscite which gave him a big majority.
However, while Napoleon could give France military glory and prestige, dynamic administration, a degree of prosperity, a modern legal system in the Code Napoleon, new industries, new roads and new harbours, he could never give her peace for more than a few years at a time. How far this was his own fault can be argued over for a lifetime, though in extenuation it should be remembered, that he had inherited the ongoing revolutionary wars and the undying hatred of the old European dynasties.
He had also to face the political and commercial rivalry of Britain, who had humiliated France in the Seven Years' War, driven her out of India and most of North America, and was determined to resist Napoleon until the last guinea- piece in the Bank of England was exhausted. England was the great, inveterate enemy, as Napoleon always recognised, and the Peace of Amiens he patched up with her did not last long.
THOUGH Napoleon kept promising his adopted country peace, he either failed to win it or else threw away the chance to do so with one more campaign, one more attempt at expansion or conquest, one more throw of the dice of history. His early invasion of Egypt gave him dizzy visions of an empire in the East, which included throwing the English out of India, but he only managed to set Turkey against him and to antagonise Russia, who herself wanted mastery of Asia.
Mr McLynn is much more explicit than most of Napoleon's biographers about his erotic life, which was extensive after he became Emperor in 1804. At first he was still madly in love with the experienced Josephine, but as he cooled he went through one mistress after another, until (mainly for dynastic reasons, since she had not given him children) he divorced her and married the Archduchess Marie-Louise of Austria, hardly more than a schoolgirl.
He seems to have been genuinely fond of the sweet-natured Pole, Countess Maria Walewska, by whom he had a son, yet in the end she was sent back to her aged and complaisant husband. Women, however, never meant very much to him except as bed-partners or potential mothers, and he was sometimes coarse or abusive in his behaviour towards them, in fact almost a parody of the macho Corsican. Napoleon was always essentially a man's man, whose outlook and social habits had largely been formed in camp and in barracks.
In recent years it has become almost habitual to regard him as the ancestor of modern dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini, but this is far-fetched and shows an ignorance of history. Napoleon was in many respects a man of the 18th century, when the concept of the benevolent autocrat was common and was encouraged even by intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Democratic freedoms, in the sense that we know them today, scarcely existed, so it is illogical to talk of him suppressing them.
Napoleon had begun as a believer in liberte egalite, fraternite and the doctrines of Rousseau, but he suffered acute disillusionment in the political realities he found in Paris and in most of the public men he met there. It is in this disillusionment (infecting a whole generation) that the roots of his later political attitudes should be sought, and of the impatient, sometimes brazen cynicism he often expressed about men and their motives.
He never quite understood the forces of nationalism, which rose against him in Germany and Spain, nor could he realise that a nation will often prefer native misrule to a rule imposed from outside, however enlightened. Though very often callous and sometimes brutal, as in his kidnapping and shooting of the emigre Duke of Enghien, he was not as a rule cruel or vindictive personally and in his eleven years as Emperor of France the prisons were remarkably free of political prisoners. In fact, he was over-indulgent towards many people who intrigued against him, such as Talleyrand and Bernadotte, and he endured a great deal from his own quarrelsome family who gave him little respect or loyalty in return.
The truth is that moral judgments do not seem very apposite in dealing with Napoleon, who was primarily a phenomenon of pure energy and ambition and powers of concentration, driven by a daemon which would not allow him to stand still. Part cynical pragmatist, part visionary, his all-round abilities were extraordinary, for peacetime administration and diplomacy as well as for war - though Mr McLynn, strangely enough, maintains that "he cannot be counted among the handful of peerless commanders".
However, the tactics which had swept him to victory in Italy in his twenties, and later vanquished army after army on the Continent, were studied by his enemies, who learned how to organise and put in the field huge, well-equipped modern armies and so take him on at his own game. As the French army grew bigger it declined in quality, until the original revolutionary fervour was dissipated and the great marshals whom Napoleon had created (and enriched) grew lazy and fond of civilian good living. For years Napoleon could usually beat his opponents singly, or even in pairs - Russia and Austria together at Austerlitz in 1805, Prussia in 1806-7, Austria again in 1809, but he could not win when finally they all ranged themselves against him under a unified command, as they did after the 1812 debacle in Russia.
By then France was weary of war, with her economy in a depressed state and young men cynically anxious to avoid military service, so that even defeat at Waterloo in 1815 was welcome to many French men and women as the lesser of several evils. In the words of the novelist Stendhal, "the most vital nation in Europe was little better than a corpse," ready to accept back the despised, discredited Bourbons rather than face another round of European warfare and trade blockade.
The ancien regime, however, could not turn the clock back after its restoration, and within a few decades of his death, Napoleon's reputation hadentered into a new period of posthumous gloire with his countrymen. The pettiness of his royal successors helped to throw a retrospective halo of heroism and grandeur over his regime, so that the posthumous myth was almost as potent as if he had come back in person from exile and the grave (as in fact his body did). Like Louis XIV, for a time at least he had made France la grande nation and Paris the political capital of Europe, or even of the world, the successor to imperial Rome. In recent times, it is not hard to see his thinking and example behind many of the actions and policies of Charles de Gaulle.
Brian Fallon is Chief Critic of The Irish Times.