Transcript: TRIGGERnometry Interview w/ Historian Andrew Roberts on Napoleon

So he was very keen for it to return to its former glory.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:06:34 – 00:06:35) “Make France great again.”

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:06:35 – 00:07:03) “Make France great again.” Exactly that. And he hoped that he would be part of that. Just to complicate that, though, of course, he was also a Corsican nationalist. And the Corsicans, for the early part of his life, wanted independence from France. So he was torn emotionally and intellectually, and certainly politically, between his father’s dream of an independent Corsica and his own dream of a very powerful France.

The Whiff of Grapeshot

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:07:04 – 00:07:17) Because what’s really interesting about Napoleon is that he had this meteoric rise, and partly, I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s the fact that he proved himself indispensable to the Republic. Through his talents?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:07:17 – 00:08:20) He did, and also through his ruthlessness. And this, Francis, is a tremendously important aspect because in October 1795, he was appointed by the government to crush a rebellion in Paris, a royalist uprising in Paris, which he did using what Thomas Carlyle later called “a whiff of grapeshot.”

He got a large number of cannon, 40-plus cannon, from outside Paris. This was actually done by someone called Joachim Murat, who was to become tremendously important as one of his leading marshals. And they used these cannons to kill about 300 Frenchmen as they crossed the bridges over the Seine and tried to take over the central part of the Tuileries Palace, which is where the government was at the time.

He just cut them down. He used grapeshot, which are lots of very small little musket balls inside a canvas bag that explodes as soon as it leaves the cannon’s mouth, and so kills the maximum number of people.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:08:21 – 00:08:33) And what’s interesting about that is that we see, I think, the rise of Napoleon where he becomes more and more indispensable, which means that he becomes more and more powerful, doesn’t he?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:08:33 – 00:09:12) That’s right. And actually, one of the people who was in the government at the time says that— there’s a statement he makes to cabinet meetings where he says, “As soon as a general considers himself to be indispensable, that’s the time we must dispense of him.” And they don’t.

They allow him, after the Whiff of Grapeshot, to go and fight in Italy. They don’t give him enough troops or money or ammunition or supplies or anything, but nonetheless, he manages, through a series of brilliant victories at the beginning of the Italian campaign, to win that campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy.

Napoleon’s Military Genius

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:09:13 – 00:09:30) And I want to delve into what made him so special as a general, because he was someone who was truly great because he was an innovator, tactically and strategically. So let’s explore that. What was it about tactics and the strategies that he used that made him so brilliant?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:09:30 – 00:11:28) He ripped up the rulebook completely. There were actual rulebooks that were written about what armies needed to do, and he just took no notice of them, or he took on ideas of the new younger thinkers who were writing revolutionary, radical new ideas.

The first is you don’t stick your army outside cities and besiege cities. You go around the cities, leaving enough men to make sure that the people in the city don’t rally out. But nonetheless, you keep moving. Speed and maneuver is vital. You don’t wait for your baggage train, you live off the land. So you basically just take whatever’s there and push on.

You employ something called the corps system, which means breaking up your divisions into armies, sort of mini armies essentially, which can hold the enemy in place while your other corps go around the outside and envelop them. In some cases in the Italian campaign, double envelopment. So you have this new form of warfare.

He was very lucky as well. I mean, he was in his mid-20s, and some of these Austrian generals were in their 70s and 80s. So he was much more energetic then. He also had a superb eye for his lieutenants. He did choose people who were very good, very trustworthy, very brave, and so on. And so you have all of these things come together.

And he used to plunder cities and therefore pay his men, who, a lot of them after the French Revolution, hadn’t been paid for years. And that obviously made him popular and brought the morale of the army up. And yeah, there were sort of 10 or so, I list them in the book, new aspects of soldiering which he brought to bear.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:11:29 – 00:11:37) And let’s explore that. Which ones do you think were the most important, the most innovative, and also the ones that are most impactful?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:11:37 – 00:12:59) I think the speed, this whole idea of speed. He also had an idea which is later written about by Carl von Clausewitz, who watched Napoleon very carefully, and he calls it the strategy of the central maneuver, which means that if you have 2 enemies, and he very often did, in the Italian campaign he had Piedmont and Austria, what you do is you strike at the hinge between the 2 and push one off, push the stronger one off, defeat the less strong one, and then you turn onto the other one. So it’s a thing that you see many times.

The interesting thing actually is that the Allies are very, very— the coalition forces against France are very, very slow at working out what Napoleon’s maneuvers are. They don’t really come up to understand the strategy of the central maneuver until 1813. They don’t adopt the corps system until 1812. They still indulge in very long costly sieges right the way up through to 1813, 1814. So actually, they take a decade, virtually more, to work out what Napoleon’s doing.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:12:59 – 00:13:10) Andrew, and where does this young man get both the confidence and the knowledge to be able to, as you say, rip up the rulebook?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:13:11 – 00:13:53) Study. He spends an enormous amount of time, both at home, of course, but also in his 2 military academies. Is, discussing, debating, learning, reading every book on strategy and so on, and working out for himself what he thinks is going to work and what isn’t.

So he’s tremendously professional, and all of the people who commanded him in these various academies write about how good he is, basically, at all of this. He’s a deep thinker, and he works out also just the practical side. Of how to put these intellectual theories into practice on the battlefield.

From Jacobin to Pragmatist

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:13:53 – 00:14:21) Wow, that’s really interesting. And just before we move on with the chronological side of things, if we stick with the revolution aspect of it, is he ideological? Does he have a view of how society domestically ought to be structured? Does he think that getting rid of the monarchy is the right thing, not because it gives him a chance to then become the ultimate leader, but for other reasons? Does he have a vision of how society ought to be? Yes.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:14:21 – 00:15:58) In 1793, he and his family that summer are expelled from Corsica because he’s a Jacobin. He’s a supporter of the French Revolution, and they are chucked out off the island because the island is going down the independence route. Not for very long because independence is crushed, but nonetheless.

He is an ideological supporter of Maximilien de Robespierre. He supports the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He is a really sort of harsh, radical revolutionary until the fall of Robespierre on the 28th of July, 1794, when he then is arrested down in the south of France, put in jail for 10 days, is in fear of his life because he doesn’t know whether or not the anti-revolutionaries are going to execute him as well as the 30 or so people that they executed back in Paris.

And there he seems to have a major conversion where he recognizes that the dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the other encyclopedists and so on actually are— they’re just utopian ideals and not something that’s going to actually work on the ground. And he turns against that kind of politics, still embracing the Republic, and willing, of course, a year later to cut down the enemies of the Republic in the streets of Paris with 300 dead. But he’s no longer that kind of ideologue.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:15:58 – 00:15:58) Wow.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:15:59 – 00:16:04) So in the modern parlance, he sort of nearly gets canceled and realizes the woke one went a bit far.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:16:05 – 00:16:06) Should we say he sees the light?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:16:06 – 00:16:12) Yes, that’s— I mean, that’s an extraordinary thing for somebody to change their views to that extent.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:16:12 – 00:16:19) Well, he’s still only in his mid-20s, and I think that’s a time when you can be quite fluid in your ideological convictions.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:16:19 – 00:16:36) That’s really interesting. And so having gone through the French Revolution as a keen supporter, then having this moment when he sees that maybe the extremism was less appropriate than he thought, what is left at that point in terms of how he sees the world?

Meritocracy and the Marshalate

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:16:37 – 00:17:22) A fierce French nationalism. Is there, a belief that the royals, the Bourbons, should not be allowed to come back, a very strong sense of meritocracy. And this is a very important aspect of the Marshalate when we come on to that by 1804.

He actually does believe, even though he’s an aristocrat himself, of course, that the best men must be allowed to rise, especially in the army. That talent must be allowed to be harnessed for the good of the country. And that means that all of the assumptions made for the last 1,000 years in France whereby you could not rise above the rank and status of your grandfather and father has to be done away with.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:17:23 – 00:17:47) So that’s arguably one of the most revolutionary ideas. The idea of, in the modern world until quite recently, we thought meritocracy was a sort of self-evident, obvious, best way to do things. But actually, in that moment, this is a revolutionary way of looking at it. Completely. And is that part of the bedrock of his success as a commander and general and ultimately leader of France?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:17:47 – 00:19:04) Undoubtedly. Because when it comes to choosing his marshals, so his most important lieutenants, what he’s trying to do, as well as obviously get good soldiers, is to recreate a form of aristocracy in France that has got nothing to do with birth, and it’s all to do with talent, especially military talent, and governing talent as well. Several of these marshals were very fine administrators.

But what he’s trying to do, therefore, is to unleash the incredible energies of all Frenchmen who suddenly learn that they can get to the top by their talents, rather than just have to spend their entire time staying where they are.

So it’s a fantastic— there’s a quotation that was said about him that he allowed the French army to understand that “inside every soldier’s knapsack is the baton of a Marshal of France.” And that was the case. Of the 26 marshals, about half of them were the sons of innkeepers and barrel coopers and peasants and domestic servants and people who had never— whose children had never been able to get to the top of society before.

Inspiring the Men

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:20:23 – 00:20:33) And that was one of the things that was truly revolutionary about Napoleon is the relationship he had not only with his marshals, but with his men on the ground. They truly loved and adored him, didn’t they?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:20:34 – 00:21:30) They certainly did. It’s the marshals who actually don’t, and I’m sure we’ll come on to that later on. But oh, yes. The way in which he was able to inspire his men was partly through his charisma, partly through his writing ability, actually. He would write these orders of the day, proclamations, bulletins, and so on, which would really get the men excited.

There’s the moment before the Battle of the Pyramids when he says, “40 centuries look down on you.” So you are being watched by 4,000 years of history, and how you fight today, essentially, is more important than just you. You’re taking part in history.

And that was a part of what he said was about trying to “electrify the soul.” If you can electrify the soul of your men, you can get them to do things that otherwise normal soldiers wouldn’t necessarily do.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:21:31 – 00:22:01) And that was obviously because at that time, well, armies are all— have always been hierarchical, but there was this attitude at the time that the men were basically peasants, and then you had the people at the top, and they were the brains, and they were in charge. And there was this huge disconnect.

But with Napoleon, you read these stories about how if a man was fighting bravely on the front line, he would ride up to them and take off his Légion d’honneur and put it round his neck. I mean, which you listening to that hundreds of years on, it doesn’t fail to be moving.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:22:02 – 00:23:03) And of course, if you did get the Légion d’honneur because of your bravery, that also, as well as making you tremendously respected by your fellow soldiers, you also got a pension. And so you didn’t have to worry about working after you left the army for the rest of your life. So there was a real sort of added practical side, as well as the glory.

But overall, yeah, you’re right. I mean, this lust for glory is something which does grip the French army. And it becomes a problem with the marshals later on because it turns into such an obsessive lust for glory that they start starting battles early in order to grab glory before they’re actually supposed to be attacking. And that obviously isn’t a good thing.

But overall, that esprit de corps, the élan that you have in the French ranks, that does come very much from a deliberate policy of Napoleon’s to adopt meritocracy.

The Plan to Invade England and the Egyptian Campaign

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:23:04 – 00:23:10) So let’s go back to the story. So he’s— this is the— well, it wasn’t Italy at the time, but let’s just call it the Italian campaign.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:23:10 – 00:23:10) Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:23:11 – 00:23:26) I mean, stunning success, victory after victory. Comes home to a hero’s welcome. So it starts to go a little bit wrong afterwards with the Egyptian campaign. What happens in the interim?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:23:27 – 00:23:37) Well, in the interim, he makes a plan to invade England. And actually, they go quite far with this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:23:37 – 00:23:42) Andrew, I’m sorry to interrupt. Just for my clarity, when you say he makes a plan, is he the leader of France already?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:23:43 – 00:23:54) No, absolutely not. He is the successful general who’s returned from Italy garlanded with honours. But he has no, other than his military rank, he has no political power.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:23:54 – 00:23:56) So how is he making this planning?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:23:56 – 00:24:01) Because the Ministry of War want to know what to do with him next. They recognize—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:24:02 – 00:24:05) They know if he stays around, he’s going to cause problems.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:24:05 – 00:24:40) Yes, they want to get him out of the country, either on an expedition to England, or, as Francis mentioned, going off to Egypt, which will very comprehensively take him out of Europe, of course. When they realize that the English, that they’re not ready to try and cross the Channel because of course the Royal Navy is the strongest in the world and able to protect England, they then think seriously about Egypt.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:24:41 – 00:24:54) And so he moves into Egypt, and reading about his story, it seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems the most tenuous of reasons, doesn’t it, to actually go into Egypt?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:24:55 – 00:25:48) There are the public reasons that they’re trying to cut off British trade in the Mediterranean, which is perfectly true. They did want to sort of stop the increase in British influence in the Near East.

And then there are his private reasons that he only vouchsafes to a few friends, including some of the marshals, when he talks about how he wants to wear a turban, hold the Quran as he enters Delhi on an elephant. Delhi’s 1,800 miles away. It’s all sort of pretty nutty stuff, frankly.

But in the short term, yes, he wants to take Cairo and make sure that that becomes part of the French Empire and denies trade routes. But his secret plan is to become a new Alexander the Great.

The Savants and the Birth of Modern Egyptology

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:25:49 – 00:25:53) But it also comes with a fascination of Egyptology, doesn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:25:53 – 00:25:53) Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:25:54 – 00:25:59) And he’s a lover of ancient history. And yes, so let’s talk about that and the Rosetta Stone in particular.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:25:59 – 00:27:40) The Rosetta Stone, the— he goes, he takes with him on this big expedition 30,000 men in over 300 ships. He takes 167 intellectuals, what were called savants. And the savants were going to map out Egypt. They were going to look at all of the ancient pyramids and the Philae, and they were going to visit all of the great places, Memphis and so on, and actually make a 21-volume, what’s called the Description of Egypt, which is published years later, which is still one of the great cultural and intellectual achievements of the Western world, effectively.

It’s an extraordinary thing. The volumes now cost half a million pounds each, so we’ll all have to save up to own them. But they’re beautiful, utterly beautiful. And page after page, the amount of work that’s gone into these as they note down all the hieroglyphics and they essentially start modern Egyptology.

Now, that’s not, of course, one of the primary reasons for him to have done this. That was all about strategy and politics and so on. But it’s an amazing byproduct, and it also shows an aspect of Napoleon which surprised some of his marshals because, up until now conquering was conquering. It wasn’t sitting down and making incredibly detailed illustrations of everywhere that you’ve seen.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:27:41 – 00:27:47) And the Egyptian campaign starts off very successfully, doesn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:27:47 – 00:27:47) Yeah.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:27:47 – 00:27:55) And then with Alexandria. So let’s talk about that. It starts off successfully and then it starts to go awry the further it goes.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:27:55 – 00:28:37) Yes, but the people in France don’t know this. This is the key thing. There’s a huge difference between what’s happening on the ground and propaganda back home.

So he starts off, as you say, he lands without loss. He marches to Cairo and takes Cairo after the Battle of the Pyramids, which is a huge victory. Virtually no French killed. Thousands of Mamelukes, who were the people who ruled Egypt at the time, nominally in the name of the Turkish Sultan, but actually they were a sort of warlord race that had dominated Egypt for hundreds of years.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:28:38 – 00:28:40) Well, they were former warrior slaves, weren’t they, the Mamelukes?

Nelson at Aboukir and the Siege of Acre

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:28:40 – 00:30:14) Yes, exactly that, they were. But they had built themselves up into this warrior caste, which for hundreds of years ruled over Egypt. So for the ordinary Egyptian, it was basically a choice between the French and the Mamelukes, and they considered both of them to be foreigners.

What you get after the fall of Cairo is this terrible news which comes, which is that Admiral Nelson has sailed his British fleet into Aboukir, which is where the French fleet was at anchor. And in a totally brilliant maneuver where he managed to get ships between the coastline and where the French were moored, he essentially sank the French fleet. So there was no way home. And this, as you can imagine, was devastating news as far as the morale of the French army was concerned.

It didn’t hold Napoleon back. He decided then to invade Syria. Or at least what is in modern-day Israel and Syria. And so he gets all the way up to Acre. He goes through Gaza and gets up past Haifa to put Acre under siege, and then can’t take Acre because it’s defended, as well as by the Turks, also by the British. And some French royalists as well.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:30:14 – 00:30:38) And so I want to just go back to the naval battle with Horatio Nelson, because this might be very simplistic, and correct me if I’m wrong, which I’m sure that I might be, but there is this image of Napoleon that he was a brilliant land general, strategist, military expert, but when it came to the naval aspect of warfare, he was deficient.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:30:38 – 00:31:50) Yes, I think that’s very fair. And it’s extraordinary, really, because it’s not as though he didn’t understand the sea. He came from an island. He was later, obviously, exiled to another island and died on another island. So he wasn’t just a landlubber.

But he never really, as a soldier, he never really looked into what admirals and sailors were doing. He often sent his admirals letters asking them to do things that were actually just technically impossible. It was said that he didn’t know the difference between windward and leeward, which obviously is going to be a major problem if you want to— So, it is a huge lacuna in his knowledge and understanding, everything to do with the naval aspect.

Now, whether he could have stopped Admiral Nelson, who obviously was a great genius, from sinking his fleet anyway, he was in Cairo at the time, hundreds of miles away, but his admiral, Admiral Brueys, ought to have been able to have moored his ships in a way that was more intelligent and wouldn’t allow Nelson to do what he did.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:31:50 – 00:32:11) But don’t you find it fascinating, Andrew, that this is a man who was intellectually curious, fascinated by all aspects of history, military strategy, yet when it comes to something as essential as naval warfare, particularly when your main enemies are the Brits, you’re going to be incurious at best?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:32:12 – 00:32:43) Yes, and especially as, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the thing that drove him was the desire to avenge the Seven Years’ War. And the Seven Years’ War was, to quite a large degree, a naval war. I mean, obviously, yes, you do have big battles like Minden and so on in Central Europe, but otherwise, what’s going on all around the world, in the West Indies, in the East Indies, in the Mediterranean, and so on. These are naval battles. And so, yes, as I say, it’s a big lacuna in his understanding.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:32:43 – 00:32:57) Then again, to be fair to him, I mean, I don’t know if I’m right about this, but I imagine people in history who are able to be geniuses at land warfare and naval warfare in one human being are quite unusual.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:32:57 – 00:33:11) Very, very. I mean, one can think of a few from the ancient world. But otherwise, yes, I mean, the two do bifurcate, don’t they, as areas of expertise, certainly by the time of the ’80s.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:33:11 – 00:33:17) Well, that’s what I mean. The more specialized these fields become, yes, the more difficult it is for one person to know everything about both.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:33:18 – 00:33:18) Yes.

Return to France

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:33:18 – 00:33:27) So the campaign stalls, the Egyptian campaign stalls. Well, he’s not Egyptian anymore, he’s out in Syria. In Syria, yeah. What happens from there?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:33:28 – 00:34:23) Well, he comes back into Cairo and brings back his army, having not been able to capture Acre, and decides that he is going to go back to France. And there’s some debate amongst historians about whether or not he intends to overthrow the government of France and set himself up as first consul.

The government in France, then known as the Directory, was corrupt, inefficient, and unpopular. There was huge inflation, and the war hadn’t been going well back in Europe. So he, I believe, did have plans to return and overthrow the government, especially if he found enough supporters in Paris, which he certainly did do. So he returns and—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:34:24 – 00:34:26) Wait, how does he return? He’s got no ships.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:34:26 – 00:34:30) He manages to get on board a frigate which comes after the Battle of—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:34:30 – 00:34:32) But what happens to his men?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:34:32 – 00:35:16) His men all stay back in Egypt, to tremendous fury and resentment from them, as you might imagine. But their resentment isn’t communicated back to France because you can’t get— the British are in control of the Mediterranean, essentially.

And apart from this ship that does manage, the Muiron, does manage to get back to first Corsica and then to the south of France, really, there are no communications. And this works hugely to his advantage, of course, because the people of France have heard about the victories and not about the defeats.

Napoleon the Myth-Maker

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:35:18 – 00:37:30) I think this is a very important point now to talk about the idea of myth-making. Yeah, which Napoleon was again a genius at. He was almost Trumpian in the way that he could have a terrible outcome in Egypt yet portray it as this huge success.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:37:30 – 00:37:33) “Some say the greatest victory.” I wish I could do the accent.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:37:34 – 00:38:31) Yes, that’s right. And also, he didn’t just manipulate the news, although he was very good at that. He brought along— he was the first person, for example, to bring along a printing press on his campaigns with him so that he would be able to put his point of view out, but to the army. But he knew they that it would get wider traction.

But also, he had painters like David who would paint wonderful portraits. The most famous one, of course, is him crossing the Alps on his horse. He, in fact, crossed the Alps on foot and sometimes on a donkey. But you look at that painting where he’s on this wonderful sort of steed, and he’s pointing towards Italy and so on. So he had a great form of sort of nous for propaganda.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon Movie

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:38:31 – 00:38:37) And this— it’s interesting because I don’t know if you saw the movie that came out a couple of years ago.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:38:38 – 00:38:40) I did, I did.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:38:40 – 00:38:41) You’re not a fan?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:38:41 – 00:39:55) No, it was a terrible movie. It’s such a tragedy. $300 million Ridley Scott had to work on that. He had Napoleon bombarding the pyramids. He puts the Battle of Austerlitz, the victory at Austerlitz, down to putting cannonballs through the ice and the Coalition forces sort of falling into it and drowning.

He has him, Napoleon, having sex under the table at the Tuileries, whereas in fact Napoleon was very, very keen on the dignified court. The idea of him having sex with Josephine when there were sort of attendants and courtiers present, it’s just ludicrous. He has Napoleon and Wellington meeting in Plymouth. I mean, it just basically seems to almost go out of his way to get everything wrong.

And when he was asked about this, and various historians including I, me, criticized him. He said— his exact words were, “Effing historians, what do they know? They weren’t there, were they?” Which is true, we weren’t there. However, loads of people were, and they wrote down what happened, and we’ve read it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:39:55 – 00:40:39) Yeah. Oh well, the reason I bring it up— but it’s interesting that you say that, of course, from people who’ve watched the film. And so may have drawn conclusions that are inaccurate, is he’s— you almost don’t see him communicating with anyone in any way. And he’s portrayed as this very aloof character.

And from what little I know about leadership, those are not compatible. You can’t be someone who’s not capable of inspiring people and communicating with them. And also, like Francis alludes to, propaganda and managing the sentiments of the nation. You can’t do that and be an effective leader for very long at all, if ever. And so that aspect of his portrayal, I imagine, is also greatly inaccurate.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:40:40 – 00:41:13) Yes, he comes over— the Joaquin Phoenix character of Napoleon is glowering and ill-tempered, and you wouldn’t follow him anywhere. No. And yet this, the actual Napoleon was somebody who people were willing to follow across the deserts to Cairo and through the snowy wastes of Moscow and across every country you can think of in Europe. It just doesn’t compute at all. And that’s why I think it was great.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:41:13 – 00:41:34) Yeah, there’s this weird scene in that movie, isn’t there, where he sort of comes back and the men who are sent to stop him immediately turned to his side. But watching that scene, you’re going, what? Why did they do that? This grumpy twat has turned up. We’re like, what? Where’s the inspiration here? You know what I mean?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:41:34 – 00:41:35) Exactly.

Was Napoleon Short? Debunking the Myths

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:41:35 – 00:41:36) So was he a great orator?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:41:37 – 00:41:55) No, interestingly not. He was a very good writer, as I mentioned, with the proclamations and orders of the day and so on. But in fact, he wasn’t a great orator. And that’s partly because he had a Corsican accent, which the French laughed at. They—

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:41:55 – 00:41:56) Doesn’t sound like them.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:41:56 – 00:42:05) They mimicked, and generally, that didn’t give him— Also, he had a slightly high-pitched voice as well, which is a surprise.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:42:05 – 00:42:07) And he was very short, was he not?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:42:07 – 00:42:08) No, no, no, no. This is a— No?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:42:09 – 00:42:11) The lies are all getting debunked here.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:42:11 – 00:43:14) This is a myth. He was 5 foot 6, which was the average height for a Frenchman in those days. And I also like to point out, exactly my height. So I don’t like it when people call him a midget. I hope— understandable. Somebody as tall as you, Konstantin, might think I’m, or at least Napoleon was a midget, but he wasn’t.

The reason that that comes about is also propaganda, but in this case British propaganda, because the genius— I mean, he was unfortunate in a sense that his time in power also coincided with the 3 great geniuses of British political caricature, Gillray, Rowlandson, and Cruikshank.

And those 3 made him out to be tiny, but at the same time dangerous. It’s interesting. Usually, you can have one or the other, but they managed somehow to make him into a physical small person at the same time a threat to England.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:43:14 – 00:43:22) But there’s a history of that. If you think about the old— I wouldn’t— it’s not a meme, but to use modern parlance, it is, “Hitler’s only got one ball.”

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:43:23 – 00:43:25) Do we know that that’s not true though?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:43:25 – 00:43:27) Well, we know that the other is not in the Albert Hall.

The Brumaire Coup

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:43:34 – 00:43:53) So it’s a bit of a segue, but coming back to our story from that, so he comes back from Egypt, and what happens when he returns? He’s managed to keep his defeats out of the public eye. Yes, the government is corrupt and vapid and not working. Yeah, what happens from there?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:43:53 – 00:45:47) He stages a coup, a military coup, and several of the people who are going to become his marshals are in key positions to help him. He has one friend, Murat, who takes care of the cavalry. Jean Lannes takes care of the infantry. His friend Berthier— Marmont takes care of the artillery, and his friend Berthier organizes the staff.

And what they do, the general staff, what they do is to have a 2-day essential uprising. The first forces the Parliament to move out of Paris to Saint-Cloud. And then on the second day, he goes to Saint-Cloud and tries to persuade the parliament to adopt him as dictator, essentially, which it doesn’t do. It’s furious and very resentful.

And so he has to then go outside the parliament building, or at least the Saint-Cloud palace and send grenadiers with fixed bayonets in to arrest the opponents and to essentially get rid of the Parliament. They have to climb out of the window of the Orangery at Saint-Cloud.

And they’re all wearing— in those days, the Parliamentarians were wearing great big red togas. And so they jump out of the windows and run away. And of course, every state opening of Parliament in the House of Lords, I wear essentially a red toga, these sort of cloaks. The idea of climbing through a window and running away wearing one just is next to impossible. So as you can imagine, quite a lot of them are arrested and they’re exiled, and Napoleon takes power as First Consul of France.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:45:47 – 00:45:55) And is this a purely intra-elite battle, or are the French people with Napoleon?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:45:55 – 00:46:58) The ordinary citizens of Paris don’t mind that the Directory has been overthrown. They have only ever heard good things about Napoleon since the Italian campaign. They recognize that he’s essentially, in this case, he argues that he’s saving the Republic from this sort— He makes up terror plots as well, says that the British are planning terror plots. He also thinks that he’s under threat of assassination, which there’s no evidence of. So he creates a sort of security fear.

And through it all, he grasps power. And the French people do nothing. They seem to be perfectly happy with this. And then he appoints 2 other consuls, so the 3 of them are supposed to rule France. He then brings in a reformed parliament, which is essentially full of his own cronies. And he’s done it.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:46:59 – 00:47:14) And sort of touching on the marshals aspect, but also cronies, there are lots of people who clearly he can trust. He can trust someone to run the artillery, he can trust someone to run the staff, he can trust someone be the other 2 consuls. Where does he get all his friends from?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:47:15 – 00:48:00) Well, partly they are people who’ve been with him since the beginning. So Berthier, who runs the general staff and becomes Minister of War in his new government, was with him from the first day, indeed before the first day, of the Italian campaign. Murat, who was the man who brought the cannons from outside Paris to put down the uprising back in October 1795, and in 1800 becomes his brother-in-law. These are sort of really close part of the family, essentially.

And then of course, as there always are whenever power is shifting, there are the ambitious people who want to be on the side of the rising sun rather than the setting sun.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:00 – 00:48:08) Yeah, this is the boat to jump in if you want to. Yeah, if you want to make way. So he’s been through the wars with a lot of these guys that are around him.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:48:09 – 00:48:31) And some of the opponents. The interesting thing is that there are some people who he appoints as marshals later, who actually opposed the Brumaire coup, on political grounds, because they were still Jacobins. They wanted a republic, and they feared that if Napoleon takes over the country, he might bin republicanism. And sure enough, of course, he does.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:31 – 00:48:33) Because he wants to be dictator.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:48:34 – 00:48:34) Yeah.

The Enlightenment on Horseback: Napoleon vs. Hitler

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:48:35 – 00:48:46) And so he has overthrown the Republic. He’s got himself and the 2 other consuls. Does he immediately turn his eyes on war again externally?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:48:46 – 00:49:21) Yes. He puts in a few popular measures. He makes sure that bread stays cheap, which of course is absolutely vital if you’re not going to be overthrown yourself. He institutes the Bank of France, which tries to get inflation under control and very quickly actually does very successfully. He brings in various reforms, Enlightenment reforms, that are popular with the people. And then he goes off and crosses the Alps and tries to recapture Italy, which had been lost in the time that he was in Egypt.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:49:22 – 00:49:22) Did it—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:49:22 – 00:49:45) I remember, I can’t remember which historian, it may even have been John Mearsheimer, with whom obviously, I probably have a few disagreements, but same here, by the way. I imagine, I imagine. But he did describe Napoleon and Hitler, I think, as 2 “congenital aggressors,” as he put it. Is this true about Napoleon? Is this just a guy who loved war so much that he was just going to invade everyone until someone stopped him?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:49:45 – 00:50:40) No, he deeply believed in the Enlightenment. In a sense, he was the Enlightenment on horseback. He wanted to bring French revolutionary ideas, including meritocracy, to the rest of Europe.

And secondly, he had many more wars fought against him than he fought against others. The one that I mentioned, the 1800 campaign, yes, he went off to fight it, but that was only after war had been declared against him. And that was true in 1805, 1809.

There were 7 Wars of the Coalitions, they’re called, between 1792 and 1815. And of those, Napoleon only started 2, and the other 5 were started either against him or revolutionary France by the coalition powers who hated the concept of meritocracy because, of course, it put their own positions and thrones in danger.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:50:40 – 00:51:12) I see. So he’s almost like, as you know, in the Soviet Union, there were 2 types of communists, those who believed in communism within one country and those who really saw for communism, the only way communism would work is if you exported it everywhere. Yeah, he was the exporting type, very much.

And the other powers were very aggressive and hostile to him because I guess they would have seen effectively what they saw as the French Revolution being, which is the great unwashed overthrowing and upending the existing order and killing the king.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:51:12 – 00:51:23) And obviously all of these other countries, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Britain, are monarchies. And so they strike absolute terror into the idea of—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:51:23 – 00:51:25) He sets a terrible example for their own citizens.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:51:25 – 00:52:18) Precisely. And another way, whilst we’re on the Mearsheimer equation of Napoleon and Hitler, I think it’s also worth pointing out that actually these 2 men have nothing in common. Apart from the fact that they fight wars, but then so do all sorts of democracies as well.

When the French armies entered places in Germany and Italy and elsewhere, one of the first things they did was to open up the ghettos and let the Jews have religious and civil liberties for the first time since before the Middle Ages. So you have this sense of the French Revolution being an enlightened thing that was, in this case, very good for the Jews. Completely opposite, obviously, to what you get from the Nazis.

Napoleon and Josephine

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:52:19 – 00:54:54) And also as well, there’s the private aspect of Napoleon. And one of the things I found so interesting is, on the one hand you have this military and strategic genius, and on the other hand you have this relationship and marriage with Josephine, which is, shall we just say, chaotic, to put it mildly.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:54:54 – 00:56:12) It certainly was chaotic, not least because when he was out in Egypt, she was unfaithful to him with a cavalry captain called Hippolyte Charles, and he found out about it. And so when he came back from Egypt, they had this almighty row, and he had all her stuff put out into the courtyard, and she begged him, and then the stuff was brought back again, and they obviously had fabulous sex, and it was all right.

But he did embark on the first with them after he heard about this infidelity, the first of 27 affairs with mistresses. So he believed in meritocracy everywhere. Yeah, it’s a complicated story.

But you see, also his marshals were— I mean, their sex lives were like something like the Rolling Stones tour 1969. I mean, they were absolutely— there were lots of them tremendously handsome. They were rich. They were made into counts and dukes and princes and kings. And they were very attractive to women. And one thing led to another.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:56:12 – 00:56:32) Well, you talk about it in the book, the early stages, it kind of sounds like— it just sounds like a band, really. They’re going around having these— and I can’t remember the name of one of the marshals, wrote these posthumous— or it was released posthumously, and he was eulogizing about how it was the greatest time of his life. Yeah, just lads on tour.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:56:32 – 00:56:45) Yes, exactly. And that they thought nothing for anything apart from glory and lust and fame. And yeah, no, it was a very exciting time for them, of course, until it went wrong.

Marengo and the Building Blocks of Modern France

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:56:46 – 00:56:52) Right, so let’s come back to the story. He becomes dictator. He goes off to Italy, you said?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:56:53 – 00:57:43) Yes, he crosses the Alps into Italy and fights and wins the Battle of Marengo in the June of 1800, which essentially totally stabilises his rule back in France. He pushes the Austrians out of Italy again for the second time, and then he comes back to France.

And this is the period where he does all the big sort of popular stuff. He creates the Code Napoléon, he builds 4 bridges over the Seine, he entirely changes the education system, he organizes the administrative system of France as well with the Conseil d’État and the Cour des comptes and so on. He gets the financial system under control. He invents the Légion d’honneur. That is the period where he does all this.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:57:43 – 00:57:44) So he’s truly a great ruler?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:57:45 – 00:57:59) Yes, he’s a visionary figure when it comes to creating what is essentially the building blocks of modern France. There are criticisms. The Code Napoléon was tremendously sexist.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:57:59 – 00:58:00) Tell us about the Code Napoléon.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:58:00 – 00:59:11) Well, France had, at the time of his, what’s called the Brumaire Coup, the coup that took place at the Palace of Saint-Cloud. France had a series of overlapping and competing legislative codes, laws essentially, which some of them go back to Roman times, others were Bourbon, and they were complicated. Some parts of the regions of France adopted one set of codes and others, others.

So what he did was to standardize the entire thing. Into one book called the Code Napoléon. He didn’t actually put that much of his own work into it. He oversaw it. It was done by committees of lawyers, and it simplified the entire French legal system, basically.

But it was very sexist. The entire— all power, essentially, in the family resided with the patriarch and not the wife. So it’s very unpopular now, but it has survived into the legal systems of many European countries.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (00:59:12 – 00:59:17) Wasn’t one of the laws, if you found your wife cheating on you, you could have her killed?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:59:17 – 00:59:28) Or, I think you had to kill her yourself. Okay, you’ve got to have some, yeah, because otherwise, all hell would break loose.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (00:59:28 – 00:59:47) Yeah, exactly. Clearly speaking from experience, he took it quite personally, I take it, with Josephine. Okay, so this is an aspect that frankly, I’m just being honest here about my own ignorance, is I really hadn’t appreciated the extent to which his domestic achievements were significant and hugely contributory to the history of France.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (00:59:47 – 01:00:38) Roads, reservoirs, drinking fountains that you can still see in around Paris, which were— to bring clean water into the center of Paris meant that you basically got rid of cholera, which killed tens of thousands of people. So that was useful.

Everything to do with killing the inflation was tremendously popular because you actually got rid of that terror that anything that you owned and possessed would be worthless. So he was very good at that. Provided mass employment, obviously also in his armies. But he was a really efficient, hard-working, but also visionary man who wanted to and did change France forever.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:00:39 – 01:01:02) And where is he getting the money for all of this, Andrew? Because the French Revolution, as I understand it, happens because the country is basically bankrupt, partly because they helped the Americans so much. Yeah, with their revolution. So he inherits this poor country fighting wars, which are expensive. Yeah. And then you’re telling us within a decade or two, the country’s flourishing, is spending money building this, building that. Yeah.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:01:02 – 01:02:19) How’s that happened? Partly through the increase in trade that takes place when he signs a peace treaty with Britain in 1802. So, it’s called the Peace of Amiens. It doesn’t last terribly long, but it allows the French to trade, because up until then, of course, the Royal Navy had entirely blockaded all French ports.

Partly also because he encouraged things like trade fairs. He encouraged luxury goods, which the French have always been very good at. Lyon, during the French Revolution, was devastated by the fact that people didn’t buy silk and lace and velvet, because if you did, you looked like an aristocrat, you could have your head chopped off. So he started up those, the luxury trades as well.

And also stealing. That was the other massive way in which he injected huge amounts of cash. When he went to Rome, for example, he insisted on the Vatican handing over hundreds of manuscripts and lots of paintings and so on, but also cash. And he would do this to town after town and city after city. He would impose— outside France, obviously, he would impose these, what were called, dotations.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:02:20 – 01:02:22) So somewhat civilised pillaging of the conquered territories.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:02:22 – 01:02:31) Yes. And you can still today actually see in the Louvre, there are still paintings that were stolen from Italy in the Italian campaign.

Peak Napoleon: The Battle of Austerlitz

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:02:32 – 01:02:37) And so this is essentially peak Napoleon, really?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:02:38 – 01:02:47) Yes. And then some historians would argue 1806, 1807, but certainly by 1805, you’ve got peak Napoleon.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:02:47 – 01:02:51) Peak Napoleon, and peak Napoleon really is the Battle of Austerlitz, isn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:02:51 – 01:02:52) Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:02:52 – 01:02:58) So let’s talk about that. Why did it happen? Who was it against? And why was it such a magnificent victory?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:02:58 – 01:03:00) Well, what was the war, in fact? Perhaps tell us that.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:03:00 – 01:08:02) Yes, it’s called the War of the Third Coalition, and it takes place when the Austrians rather stupidly invade Bavaria, which is Napoleon’s ally. And Napoleon, at that point, has his entire army on the Channel coast, looking out towards Britain and waiting for a moment that the Royal Navy can be tricked away from England, and he can then cross the Channel and march on London, which is one of his great dreams. And that doesn’t take place. The Admiralty in Britain knows exactly what he is trying to do.

But the corps system, which we mentioned earlier, of each of these sort of mini armies, are by that stage commanded— each of the corps are commanded by a marshal, and they have headquarters all the way along the coast. And at the moment that he hears that Bavaria is about to be invaded, i.e., before it is actually invaded, because he has spies all over Europe, he turns. It’s called the Pirouette of Boulogne. He turns the entire army round and marches straight towards Bohemia.

And it’s an extraordinary, and still today is taught actually in military academies, extraordinary genius of this man, Berthier, Alexandre Berthier, who was an aristocrat. He was the chief of staff, and many people, many historians think he’s still the greatest chief of staff in military history.

And what he did was to plot the entire army, right the way down to the last man, how they got 600 miles across Europe without overlapping, managing to keep all the supplies and food and everything going with them. This time, they actually brought everything with them, and it didn’t slow them down because this man was an absolute genius at maneuver.

And they managed to free Bavaria and then do a pirouette inside the Black Forest. So as the Austrians, who were being supported by the Russians, thought they were coming in one direction, actually, in the middle of the Black Forest, they changed directions 90 degrees, which you can do under the corps system because you just move the units around, and then came south and captured Vienna.

And then after that, they met the huge, much larger Austro-Russian army at the Battle of Austerlitz on the 2nd of December, 1805, which coincidentally was— not entirely coincidentally— was the first anniversary of the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France.

And it’s an extraordinary set-piece battle, Austerlitz. When you go, I do recommend you, if you’re ever in that part of the world near Brno in Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, you can see the battle from the place where Napoleon was, a little hill called Žuráň.

And you can look down and see the way in which he, first of all, hid an entire corps under Marshal Soult in the valley, which was covered in mist. And so the Coalition troops couldn’t see that it was there. And as the sun burnt off the mist, he sent Soult in a sort of surprise attack up the Pratzen Heights. At the same time that he was using Bernadotte and Davout, these great marshals of his, to hold the left hand of his line. And then he had a very powerful right flank maneuver as well.

And frankly, the Austrians and Russians, who weren’t very good at coordinating between them either, didn’t know what hit them, and they were pushed off the Pratzen Heights. And in just a series of absolutely brilliant maneuvers entirely coordinated by him, but which he had explained to the marshals the night before the battle, he managed to win easily the greatest victory of his career, which ended the Third Coalition, knocked them out, and essentially left him master of Europe.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:08:03 – 01:08:09) And this was an essential part as well of the myth-making because this was essentially one man against 2 armies.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:08:09 – 01:10:09) Well, and also this myth that you see in fact in the movie where he supposedly fired the cannonballs onto the lake and the Russians and Austrians who are marching all fall through the holes in the lake and drown and everything. They’ve dredged those lakes. There are a couple of cannons, there are a few breastplates, there’s the odd lance, there, but nothing significant. That was not how he won Austerlitz.

He won Austerlitz not by some kind of clever trick, but by a series of brilliantly coordinated attacks. And the way he was able to do that was through the use of this thing, the corps system. So each corps would have its own artillery, cavalry, and infantry, but also its own staff, its own supplies, its own medical. It was essentially a mini army, and each of them were commanded by marshals.

The Creation of the Marshalate

And he had created this thing. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the Marshalate because it had been created the previous May, in May 1804. This idea of— he appointed 18 of his best generals, both to be— they were called marshals. The history of the Marshalate goes back to the 13th century in France, but a few of them had been guillotined and there weren’t any by 1804.

He announced this new rank of Marshal and gave it to his 14 top generals in the field and an extra 4 senatorial Marshals who were heroes of France. And over the next 11 years, up until Waterloo, he appointed another 8, so you get up to 26 marshals in all. And so the way in which he did that was partly because they were the best soldiers, but also partly because he wanted to sort of set up a new meritocratic aristocracy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:10:11 – 01:10:26) Which is fascinating, particularly because the marshals, they were so different in their characters. Berthier was incredibly loyal, essentially right-hand man, and there were others that proved to be a little bit more disloyal.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:10:27 – 01:12:13) Yes, that’s right. And actually, people who had opposed the coup, the Brumaire coup, like Marshal Bernadotte and Marshal Jourdan and Marshal Augereau, these people actually were hardline Jacobins, but he appointed them because he needed to have people from right the way across the political spectrum. He also needed to have people from the Army of Italy, as well as the Army of Germany and various other previous French revolutionary armies. So it didn’t seem that he was favoritizing.

He, as we mentioned earlier, had people who came from incredibly lowly backgrounds. Then there were some aristocrats like Davout and Berthier. And so with educational qualifications. There’s everything from Marshal Ney, who was virtually illiterate, hardly went to school at all, to some really highly intelligent people who were very good writers like Marmont and Davout.

And so you have this really broad spectrum, but they did have— they all had one thing in common, which was extraordinary raw courage. The 26 of them added together suffered no fewer than 94 wounds in their lives. They averaged 3.6 wounds per Marshal, and 5 of them weren’t wounded. They emerged unscathed.

So you can imagine some people you had— Lannes was wounded 11 times, Grouchy 14 times, and Marshal Nicolas Oudinot was married— sorry, married, was wounded no fewer than 32 times. He was nicknamed the—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:12:13 – 01:12:16) Interesting Freudian slip there, Andrew. Wounded and married.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:12:16 – 01:12:40) Yes, apologies for that. But isn’t it amazing to think that one person— there were bayonet thrusts, there were, he was hit by ricocheting cannonball. He was very nearly killed on any number of occasions by sword thrusts and by bullet wounds and everything. He had so many holes in his body that his nickname was “the Sieve.”

A Band of Brothers or a Nest of Vipers?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:12:40 – 01:12:54) Wow. But what’s really interesting is how he inspired that devotion and loyalty, yet at the same time there was— I mean, this is modern vocabulary, but there was a toxic element to it, wasn’t there?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:12:55 – 01:13:56) Yes, that’s right, because I mean, he was attempting to create a band of brothers, but he wound up really creating a nest of vipers. Because what really happened was that because they all got the same marshalate, the same rank, they were desperate to outdo each other.

The sense of competitiveness between them absolutely was to wreck campaigns. There were 4 occasions when they drew swords on one another or they wanted to fight duels against one another. The hatreds between them were extraordinary.

There were some friendships. Marshals Victor and Soult had mistresses who were sisters, and that helped them get on with one another. Could have gone either way, that one. But it was something that he soon found, that this lust for glory, and also having the same rank, was to prove disastrous.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:13:56 – 01:14:11) And would you say that’s a failure of leadership on Napoleon’s part, failure to contain that, to channel it correctly, to organize that in such a way that it was towards the common good as he saw it rather than the internal fighting? Or do you think that was just the inevitable reality?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:14:11 – 01:15:03) I think it has to be put ultimately down to him. He’s the person who created the Marshals and who tried to keep these guys in order. He deliberately encouraged competition between them.

He was to say, after the Treaty of Tilsit, which ended the War of the Fourth Coalition in 1807, when he was negotiating with the Tsar Alexander I, he said, “I never let my generals know what I’m thinking, and I encourage them to outperform one another.” And I therefore can sort of stay above it and see what they’re up to. And so that was a deliberate attempt to foster what was ultimately to be an unhealthy form of—

The War of the Fourth Coalition: Jena-Auerstedt

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:15:04 – 01:15:17) And it’s really interesting you mentioned the Fourth Coalition now. I mean, after Austerlitz, is there no one, the Russian Emperor and others in Europe, “We— look, we’ve had our asses handed to us, maybe we should just let this guy crack on with it.”

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:15:17 – 01:15:18) Yeah, you’d have thought, wouldn’t you?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:15:18 – 01:15:18) Yeah.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:15:19 – 01:15:47) But the people who don’t do that are the Prussians, who in the autumn of 1806, i.e., less than a year after Austerlitz, they think that they can take on France on their own. They do get support from the Russians later on, but they reckon that their army, which of course was trained under Frederick the Great, but nevertheless, Frederick the Great was long dead by then.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:15:48 – 01:15:50) And they’re well drilled and all that, but they’re a small country.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:15:50 – 01:16:24) They’re a small country. And what they don’t have is universal conscription. And the French, of course, since 1792, when they brought in universal conscription, have much, much larger armies.

Plus, they should have had a look and see what Napoleon had done, as you say, not just at Austerlitz, but in earlier campaigns, in the Marengo campaign, in the Italian campaign, and so on. And they didn’t. They were mad really to have started that war. And within 2 weeks of the war being fought, Napoleon was in Berlin.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:16:25 – 01:16:39) And why would— look, Prussia is militaristic culturally. Frederick the Great has created this well-disciplined army that outperforms others, etc. Why are you invading? What are they trying to achieve?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:16:40 – 01:18:41) They are trying to essentially stay as the most important power in Central Europe. They recognize Austria has been defeated badly, and they want to be as important as France, essentially.

Which isn’t going to happen under Napoleon, at least not under Napoleon at this stage when he’s riding high and he’s got this incredibly talented bunch of marshals who did very well. And they hadn’t fallen out by the time of the Austerlitz campaign. A couple of them had. Ney and Murat had a shouting match, but other than that, they were working very well together. The corps system was working very well.

So, yeah, the Prussians were sort of mad to have declared war. And when they did, soon after doing that, and Napoleon was expecting them to, and his spies were telling him this was about to happen, it was actually the Queen of Prussia who is thought to have put pressure on her husband to have started this war. She hated Napoleon, and— That’s a good reason. It seems to have been enough.

And you get this extraordinary double battle on the 14th of October, 1806, called Jena-Auerstedt. And at Jena, Napoleon and Ney and various other marshals fight against what they think is the main Prussian army, but actually the main Prussian army is just the rearguard. The main Prussian army is 8 miles away, and that is being taken on by Marshal Davout. It’s Davout’s greatest victory. He somehow fights a force that’s over twice his size, and he manages a double envelopment.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:18:41 – 01:18:41) Wow.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:18:42 – 01:19:42) Crushes it. And when Napoleon finds out, he makes Davout a prince and appreciates that this incredible. At that point, the whole of the French army then just sweep across Prussia, led by Murat and the cavalry. Murat is the finest cavalryman of the era, and followed up by Marshal Lannes and Marshal Bernadotte.

And they capture city after city after city, and they capture entire garrisons. In some cities, they capture 60 cannon, and they push the Prussians right the way up to the Baltic Sea, which is in fact Kaliningrad, now Russian territory, isn’t it? And that’s when the Prussians and Russians come together to fight these 2 massive battles at Eylau and Friedland in mid-1807.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:19:43 – 01:20:11) And, by the way, before we get into that, the one thing I thought it’d be worth coming back to your point about courage and the wounds that so many of these marshals had suffered, is this because they’re all meritocratically created and therefore in order to become a marshal you’ve had to have fought for 10, 15, 20 years in lower ranks? And/or is it also because as marshals they are sometimes leading from the front and still taking wounds while in these high positions?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:20:11 – 01:21:27) Very much both of those, exactly that. So yes, they’ve been fighting since, most of them since 1792. They have therefore had to come up the ranks, often by sheer bravery. Lannes, who is wounded 11 times, is at the forefront all the time with his grenadiers in the many battles, 14 major battles in the Italian campaign. And then he’s wounded very badly also in Egypt.

But they have to be at the front, because in order to be able to spot what is going on, it’s so different from the First World War, where a general can sit in a château 5 miles behind the front. They absolutely have to be there. Because they need to work out the timings of everything that they’re doing.

And also, of course, they’re getting orders sent by aide-de-camp on horseback from Napoleon, and they have to carry out his orders as well. So it’s not surprising that quite so many of them get hit by shot and shell, and Lannes loses his life when his kneecaps are taken off by a cannonball at the Battle of Aspern, and he dies of gangrene.

Eylau, Friedland, and the Treaty of Tilsit

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:21:28 – 01:21:33) Yeah. And so they’ve got the Prussians and the Russians pushed up against the Baltic Sea.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:21:33 – 01:21:34) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:21:34 – 01:21:35) Well, how do those battles go?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:21:36 – 01:23:22) He wins both of them. He’s about to lose the Battle of Eylau when he unleashes Murat, who makes the largest cavalry charge in history. I think it still is the largest cavalry charge in history, 16,000 is the maximum number. Some historians argue it’s a bit less than that, but it’s a huge number, and certainly the biggest one of the Napoleonic Wars.

And he basically just drives them through the center of the Russo-Prussian army. And once they’ve punched through the center, they’re able basically to split the armies in two. So he wins that battle, huge losses on both sides, but much bigger losses on the Russo-Prussian side.

And then there’s the Battle of Friedland a little bit later, which is another huge victory where they managed to trap the Russians in a town, the town of Friedland, which has the River Alle going behind it, and there are only 2 bridges to get over. And once they force them into the town, the enemy can’t get over the bridges in time, and they’re massacred and lots of them surrender.

So the war ends with these 2 big victories, and Napoleon then imposes a peace in which he essentially splits up Europe. Between Russia and France at the Treaty of Tilsit, which is negotiated on a barge— no, it was a raft in the middle of the River Niemen.

The Continental System and the Beginning of the Unraveling

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:23:23 – 01:23:29) So wonderful. He’s doing great. Yeah. How does it begin to unravel from there?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:23:30 – 01:24:39) It’s sort of slightly begun to unravel already, because in the December of 1806, when he’s still in Berlin, he passes what’s called the Berlin Decrees, which are the start of the Continental System, which is a massive protectionist measure that is intended to cover the whole of Europe and which is intended to force Britain to the negotiating table because no merchant in Europe is allowed to trade with Britain. And that’s what he also gets Tsar Alexander I to agree to it in the Treaty of Tilsit.

So actually, protectionism is the major thing, I think, that brings him down, because it’s in order to impose the Continental System that he goes to war against Portugal, which is a longstanding ally of Britain and ignored the Continental System in 1807, and then ultimately against Russia, which turns against the Continental System in 1811, which leads to his catastrophe of 1812.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:24:40 – 01:24:56) Before we get on to that, was one of the signs that he was— that his grip was starting to lessen and weaken, is that the fact that even though the French won significant battles, they were starting to get more and more casualties inflicted upon them?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:24:57 – 01:26:00) Especially at Eylau. That was really heavy. What happened was that Augereau, Marshal Augereau, who’s an amazing character, and we must talk about him at some stage, his 7th Corps was ordered to attack the Russians. There was a blizzard, and the blizzard came down, he carried on marching, and it turned out straight into the guns of the Russian artillery. And the first they knew about it was as the snow was swirling around them, they suddenly saw the flashes of the Russian guns.

Do you remember that bit in Master and Commander at the beginning of the movie, the Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander, where they can suddenly see the flashes in the mist and then they start— exactly like that. And it wiped out 7th Corps. So Napoleon couldn’t sustain that kind of series of losses forever, especially if he’s fighting the whole of Europe.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:26:00 – 01:26:05) So at that point, why was it that he decided to invade Russia?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:26:08 – 01:27:20) Well, he was forced to in a way, if he wanted to defend the Continental System. Instead of doing what we now— I think, especially people from the kind of political background that we’ve got, we’d have allowed free markets to deal whether or not you wanted to trade with whoever. That would have actually been the way to have gone about it.

But he instead imposed what was called Colbertian economics, which was all about closing down free markets and free enterprise as much as possible. And so when the Russians in 1811 decided that they were going to resume trade with Britain because they really needed to, he invaded Russia to try and force them back into the Continental System.

And of course, by then also, he had invaded Portugal and then went on also to invade Spain, even though Spain wasn’t threatening the Continental System. And so he had a war on 2 fronts. He had a massive war in which he was to lose a quarter of a million men in the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal, and he lost half a million men in Russia in 1812.

The Peninsular War and the Feuding Marshals

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:27:20 – 01:27:29) And by the way, just to jump in, from what I understand, the Spanish and Portuguese campaign was largely so brutal and painful and so many losses because of the British involvement.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:27:30 – 01:28:24) No, no, no, no. The actual, the Portuguese and Spanish, a good deal of work’s been done on this historically. That assumption was true until, believed widely, including by me, I hasten to add, until 10 years ago or so. But now a lot of work’s been done on quite the number of Frenchmen killed by Spanish regular troops, but also partisans.

And what the British did was constantly to allow the Spanish and Portuguese to stay in the war. There was no point at which they sort of gave up, because the Duke of Wellington in Spain was constantly able to attack the French, and it was very good for morale and so on. But actually, if you look at each individual Frenchman who dies, the Spanish and Portuguese kill more than we do.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:28:24 – 01:28:31) And it’s interesting that we talk about Wellington, because this was obviously the first time these 2 great military minds encountered each other.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:28:32 – 01:29:36) Well, no, they didn’t. I mean, they encountered each other in a strategic sense, in that they knew what the other was doing. But the only time they actually faced each other across the battlefield was at Waterloo. Absolutely. Yeah.

Because Napoleon didn’t spend enough time in Spain. He went over just for 3 months in 1808, 1809, just January 1809. And then he went away and fought the Austrians again. And got married and so on, and never concentrated on what he should have done, which was to close down the Peninsular War.

And so he left it up to his marshals, who, as I mentioned earlier, all hated each other and refused to help each other. And Masséna had to sack Ney. Marmont didn’t help Masséna. Soult didn’t help anybody. He just stayed in Andalusia and refused to help anybody. There were 18 marshals who served in Spain and Portugal, and only one of them, Suchet, emerges with any credit.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:29:37 – 01:29:52) So at this point, the marshals had— it had worked, and it worked spectacularly well in Austerlitz. But we see now the real fractures starting to appear and the various personalities start to fragment?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:29:53 – 01:30:52) Particularly in Spain, where they all fell out with one another, but also in Russia. Because although it went well at the beginning, by the time they got to Moscow and then started to retreat from Moscow and the weather turned, they all argued about which route to take back, and viciously. There’s one moment where Davout and Murat have to be physically restrained from fighting one another over this.

And one can understand, the passions are high, the testosterone’s running, it’s matters of life and death. And so of course they really, and they deeply believed their own strategic thinking. So you can understand why there were these clashes. But Napoleon, all too late, ever steps in to try and stop from happening. And in Spain, he never appoints somebody who is sort of top marshal, and that’s a disaster for him.

Napoleon the Micromanager

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:30:53 – 01:31:04) But it’s also as well, and it’s a really powerful one, it’s literally the last line in the book where you basically say he gave them everything except the one thing they craved, which was respect.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:31:04 – 01:32:04) Yes, his respect they wanted, but instead he was incredibly transactional. With them. He gave them princedoms, and 2 of them became kings. He gave them huge amounts of just sheer cash. They also got beautiful estates in the country. They got these wonderful Parisian townhouses.

But they wanted more than that. They wanted to feel that he admired them. And instead, he just slapped them down the entire time. The letters he wrote, 40,497 letters that are published in the Correspondence volumes. And they are full of him slapping them down, saying, “I’m disappointed. I’m disenchanted. You’ve failed. You’re useless.”

I mean, he was incredibly— although he was a wonderful man-manager when it comes to his soldiers, he was a terrible one when it came to the leadership. Techniques that he used to his marshals.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:32:05 – 01:32:05) And why?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:32:07 – 01:33:14) Partly because when things had started to go wrong, he was genuinely extremely irritated by any reverse. But he was also such a massive micromanager and essentially a control freak that he would exaggerate things that were going wrong. And he tried to involve himself into the minutiae of absolutely every decision. And this meant that the marshals weren’t able to use their own initiatives.

And very often, there were some very good marshals. Davout, Masséna were first-class strategists, but they were being deluged all the time with blizzards of letters from Napoleon telling them even things that they really knew about, like how fast men should march to get from A to B and so on.

And some of the— there were 4 marshals who were actually officers in the army before Napoleon was born, and he was telling them where bread kilns should be made and how tents should be put up and things like that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:33:15 – 01:33:27) So he didn’t really— even though he had the system of meritocracy which promoted the best, he nonetheless was so convinced of his own greatness. Yeah. That he couldn’t let them make some of the decisions at a lower level.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:33:27 – 01:34:00) Exactly. And this was all the more weird when it came to Spain, because in Spain, you have this situation where he can’t get a message to them and back for sometimes 3 months, because the partisans would intercept the aide-de-camp. You had to send these messages with huge amounts of troops if they’re going to get through to Paris. And it takes weeks and weeks and then to come back also takes weeks and weeks. So he really needed a man on the spot and never appointed one.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:34:00 – 01:34:07) And so that was a major failure. Why didn’t he? Was he just— he believed in the system so much because it had been so successful?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:34:07 – 01:34:41) At one point he— well, first of all, he believed in himself so much and thought that he would be more likely to be right, even though it was a long time behind the times, as it were, with regard to how long messages got there.

The other thing was a straightforward political one. He didn’t want to have another general who was in charge of a quarter of a million of his men. And he made that clear. He didn’t want to give any marshal that kind of power.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:34:42 – 01:34:44) And was he right to worry about that?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:34:44 – 01:34:53) Well, he’d himself taken power in a military coup. So that was the only way that he was likely to be overthrown.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:34:53 – 01:35:06) But were they hatching plots against him until, before the very late stages? Were his marshals genuinely thinking, “Oh, I’ll get a quarter million troops and then I can be Napoleon”? Or were they loyal to him?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:35:07 – 01:35:59) One of them was. Bernadotte was always thinking about how he could become a king or emperor. Of France. And some of them, especially Augereau, after the loss of his division, he turned against Napoleon, wasn’t helpful to Napoleon pretty much at all after that.

And then Marmont surrendered Paris in 1804, even though he was Napoleon’s closest friend from school. And that was particularly painful for Napoleon. And Murat, after the retreat from Moscow, go join the Allies and betrayed him completely. And even though he was married to Napoleon’s sister, in fact, she, Caroline, was the person who was behind this and thought that they needed to jump ship in order to stay King and Queen of Naples. So as things started to go wrong, a lot of the marshals started to jump ship.

The Invasion of Russia

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:36:00 – 01:36:23) So we got in the story about as far as Russia. So he invades Russia, initially it’s going well, and then the famous General Winter comes into effect. And as someone who is from Russia, it always surprises me reading history books— and this may be a very superficial reading of it— but these great military commanders don’t realize there’s winter in Russia and it’s quite bad.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:36:23 – 01:36:23) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:36:23 – 01:36:26) Is that actually what happens, or is it more complicated than that?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:36:26 – 01:37:42) It’s a bit more complicated than that, but overall Napoleon, he owned almanacs which said what the winter was like in Russia. And when the snow started to fall, he’d studied Voltaire’s history of the campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden in Russia, when the catastrophe at Poltava. So yeah, he knew that this was going to happen. And in fact, he did plan to be able to get back to Smolensk in less time than it had taken him to get from Smolensk to Moscow.

But on the 25th of October, 1812, at Maloyaroslavets, which is about 75 miles southwest of Moscow, he suffered a reverse, or at least his stepson Eugène suffered a reverse. And then he took the wrong sort of long dogleg back via the battlefield of Borodino.

And he did this because he was advised to by some of his marshals. It’s virtually the only time that he actually takes his marshals’ advice. And it turns out to be catastrophic advice, because that’s when the blizzards hit.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:37:43 – 01:37:52) And it’s also, we talk about a Russian winter, but what we also need to talk about is a Russian summer. And the effect it has on troops and disease. So let’s discuss that.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:37:52 – 01:38:59) Yes, well, typhus in particular hit the 100,000-strong central thrusting force of the French army and killed tens of thousands. Actually, it’s interesting, quite recently there’s been a mass grave that’s been found in Vilnius, and they’ve done a lot of testing of the bones of the soldiers in that grave, and they’ve discovered 14 different viruses and illnesses and diseases, including typhus, that can kill people. So the army was horribly— and these are people going into Russia rather than coming out.

Once you’re coming out, then Marshal Ney, who’s in charge of the rearguard, who’s nicknamed “the bravest of the brave,” is tremendously, extraordinarily brave. But he’s unable, really, to save many more than a few thousand. And in all, of the 615,000 that go into Russia, only 93,000 come back.

Leipzig, the Six Days’ Campaign, and Abdication

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:38:59 – 01:39:02) And that really is the beginning of the end, isn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:39:02 – 01:39:40) Yes, that’s it. That’s it. I mean, it’s not it, finally, because you still need the Battle of Leipzig, in 1813, which is also a huge catastrophe for him when a bridge explodes and Marshal Poniatowski is drowned crossing over the river. Marshal Macdonald does manage to get over, but it’s pretty much all over.

Although he does fight a very successful series of battles in 1814. In the 1814 campaign, what’s called the Six Days fighting. He wins 5 battles in 6 days.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:39:41 – 01:39:45) And there are many scholars actually who think that those are his greatest achievements militarily.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:39:46 – 01:39:47) As good as Italy?

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:39:47 – 01:39:49) Yeah. And why is that?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:39:50 – 01:40:15) Because he’s going back to the original things really— speed, strategy of the central position. He’s got quite small forces. Who are winning very good tactical victories day after day. And of course, he’s fighting in France, which gives him some added sort of home team, home turf advantage.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:40:15 – 01:40:28) So just coming back to the chronological side of this, Andrew, so he flees Russia effectively with a fraction of the men that he entered it with. What happens from there?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:40:28 – 01:41:29) Well, he then goes all the way back to Paris and he leaves Murat in charge of the army. And Murat doesn’t want to be there because he wants to go back to Naples to try and protect his kingdom. And so he hands over— and Berthier is running the army anyway, along with Davout. And so together they try and turn the army into something worthwhile, but the Russians are coming.

And then at the key moment in December 1812, the Prussians change sides. And then halfway through the next year, the Austrians change sides. So suddenly these marshals who are far too far east have to bring themselves, get themselves back. Sometimes they leave people in important places like Dresden and Hamburg. But otherwise, they pull back for the great reckoning in 1814.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:41:29 – 01:41:34) And it’s 1814, what year does he abdicate? In April 1814.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:41:34 – 01:43:05) In April 1814. As the result of the marshals coming together at Fontainebleau and insisting on it. Because by that stage, Marmont has surrendered Paris, at the end of March 1814. And you’ve got to make the decision at Fontainebleau, his palace there, his hunting lodge. Do you try to recapture Paris?

And the men are all up for it. The Guard, the ordinary squadrons, these guys are up for the fight. The marshals, by that stage, are not. They’ve seen the size of the Allied armies that are coming. They’re sick of war by then, actually, a lot of them anyway. They want to go back to their estates and their families. They haven’t seen their families for many months, years in a couple of cases.

And they’ve gone through the 1812 campaign, which has seen frostbite and cannibalism and appalling losses and drownings and so on. And they just, by that stage, they want peace, and they impose it on Napoleon.

Now, there’s a big historical debate, and I come down very strongly on one side, about quite how rude people like Ney and Oudinot and others were to Napoleon’s face. I don’t believe they were. I think they treated it like a council of war. But nonetheless, there was no way out for Napoleon by then.

Exile on Elba

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:43:05 – 01:43:12) And this is where it gets really, really interesting, because the fact that he was emperor kind of saved his bacon a little bit, didn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:43:13 – 01:43:28) Yes, because he went off to the Isle of Elba, rather than— he was in charge of Elba. He was the sovereign prince of Elba, and he kept the title emperor. And he wasn’t just sort of imprisoned because—

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:43:29 – 01:43:39) And the reason was is because even because he crowned himself as emperor, he was treated like royalty, whereas if he wasn’t, the punishment would have been somewhat harsher, wouldn’t it?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:43:39 – 01:44:07) Also, he did have the loyalty of the soldiers, and they didn’t want any more fighting. And if he’d called upon them to, they probably would have. He just wouldn’t have had his marshals with him.

And the other reason, of course, is that in the meantime, in 1810, he married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria. And so in that sense, he was definitely royal by marriage, if not obviously by birth.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:07 – 01:44:11) And so killing him or executing him would have been out of the question at this point?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:44:11 – 01:44:11) Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:11 – 01:44:12) So he gets exiled to Elba.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:44:13 – 01:44:21) There’s one point as well, because everybody agreed actually that this was a great idea, apart from the Brits who were…

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:44:22 – 01:44:46) Well, they had the frigates that would keep an eye on him. In Elba, and they recognized that it was quite a difficult thing to do. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the British governor kept going off to Florence to visit his eye doctor and his mistress, in that order.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:44:46 – 01:44:52) You want to make sure you can see. The mistresses play a heavy role in all of this.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:44:52 – 01:45:05) We’re talking about the French. Well, and the British in this. But he, so he was then on Elba and he actually, when he was Emperor of Elba, which is a grandiose title, but made a pretty good fist of it, didn’t he, for a while?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:45:05 – 01:45:27) Oh yeah, if you go to visit Elba now you can see the fountains that he built and he organized street lamps and new forms of mining and things like that. No, he was, I mean, this is what he did when he went to a city, he imposed Enlightenment ideas and reforms.

The Hundred Days

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:28 – 01:45:30) But Elba turned out to be a little bit too small for his ambitions.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:45:31 – 01:45:54) Yes, and he was there 10 months and he escaped. And unfortunately, over the next year or so, it was, well, much less than that really. He landed on the 1st of March and the Battle of Waterloo was on the 18th of June. So in that period, a huge, tens of thousands of people were to be killed and wounded.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:54 – 01:45:56) Wait, so he comes back in March?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:45:57 – 01:45:57) Yeah.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:45:57 – 01:45:58) Musters an army?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:45:59 – 01:46:27) Musters an army, yes, absolutely. He lands with only 300 men. By the time he gets to Paris, Marshal Masséna has essentially let him get away. Marshal Ney has said that he will bring Napoleon, has told King Louis XVIII that he bring Napoleon back in an iron cage, and then goes off and changes sides and actually joins Napoleon. Marshal Soult, who’s the Minister of War, also changes sides.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:28 – 01:46:33) And why do they do this, Andrew? Seeing their old leader back again, bring the band back together?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:46:33 – 01:46:47) There’s an element of the Blues Brothers, but much more seriously, the Bourbons have, even in those short 10 months, managed to irritate everybody.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:47 – 01:46:51) So you’ve brought back the monarchy, the monarchy is just as useless as it was before.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:46:51 – 01:46:51) Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:46:51 – 01:46:54) Everyone realizes it’s a failed experiment, let’s give Napoleon another go.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:46:55 – 01:47:53) Yes. And also, the army is all on half pay, which they don’t like. The return of Napoleon means that they’re going to be paid properly. You have people like Davout, who have never taken an oath of allegiance to the Bourbons and weren’t about to. So he’s absolutely fine to fight back.

But the interesting thing is that of the 26 marshals, by the time he lands in France, there are, well, 3 of them had died. Lannes, who I mentioned earlier, his great friend Bessières took a cannonball to the chest in 1813, and Poniatowski drowned in the Battle of Leipzig.

And then a couple of weeks later, Berthier dies on the 1st of June. We don’t know why, it’s a mystery. He either fell from the window, or he jumped from the window, or he was pushed from the window.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:47:55 – 01:47:56) Sounds like modern Russia.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:47:56 – 01:48:15) Yeah, well, the Russians were actually marching through the town at the time. And so would it have been so difficult for the Russian commanders to think, “We don’t want Berthier at the battlefield of—” they wouldn’t have known it was Waterloo, but “we don’t want Berthier helping Napoleon again. Let’s just send a squad round to chuck him out the window.”

Napoleon vs. Wellington

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:48:16 – 01:48:31) And this is where we come to Sir Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington. Yeah. And how does he compare with Napoleon in terms of military expertise, brilliance, genius? Are they equally matched? Is one better than the other?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:48:33 – 01:49:24) Well, on the day of Waterloo, Wellington is his best self, and he outmaneuvers, out-generals Napoleon. But Wellington hasn’t lost a battle in his life. He’s never lost a gun, even. I mean, he’s had to retreat from Burgos, but otherwise, he has a completely unblemished record when it comes to fighting battles. Some have been very heavy. He’s lost a lot of men, like at Talavera.

But otherwise, I mean, he is a proper military genius, and so is Napoleon. But Napoleon’s fought, whereas Wellington’s fought sort of 35, it depends how you define a battle, obviously, but 35 engagements, significant engagements. Napoleon’s fought 60, and by the end of it, he had won 47, drawn 6, and lost 6.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:49:24 – 01:49:36) And there was a fascinating part of this story where— didn’t Wellington have the chance to get rid of Napoleon right at the very beginning of the battle but thought it was ungentlemanly? This is a great story.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:49:37 – 01:49:37) Yeah, he—

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:49:37 – 01:50:26) Yes, one of his artillery commanders saw Napoleon on the other side of the battlefield, and it’s quite easy to see because of distinctive hat and the gray coat, and also the fact that he’s followed by these marshals. And marshals wear the most extraordinary uniforms, fantastic plumes in their hats and enormous brocaded collars and gold all over them and everything like that. And he’s also followed by aides-de-camp, other members of the staff.

And so the artilleryman said, “Shall we take a potshot at Napoleon?” And Wellington wouldn’t have it. He said— he’s supposed to have said at least— that “gentlemen do not take potshots at one another.”

The Battle of Waterloo

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:50:27 – 01:50:41) How things have changed in more ways than just war. But Andrew, he’s mustered the army in March. I just want to understand how we get to Waterloo. Is the reaction to him coming back to France, “Okay, we’ve got to deal with this guy now”?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:50:41 – 01:50:53) From the coalition. Yes, I mean, it’s very fortunate for them that they are in Vienna, at the Congress of Vienna, all talking to one another.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:50:53 – 01:50:56) They’re trying to decide the world order, effectively.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:50:57 – 01:51:49) World order post-Napoleon. And then they all hear on the 6th of March that he’s back. On the 13th of March, they declare him an outlaw. And they organize huge armies, 350,000 Russians, 150,000 Austrians, and then there are this Anglo-Prussian army up in the Netherlands.

So again, sticking to his strategy of the central position, Napoleon decides in early June to go north and to strike at the hinge between the Prussian army and what’s called the Anglo-Allied army, because there are lots of, as well as the British army obviously, there are lots of other soldiers, German, Belgian, Dutch, and so on.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:51:50 – 01:51:55) And that’s how the Battle of Waterloo happened? Yes. And how does it go?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:51:56 – 01:53:58) Well, I see it, of course, through the eyes of the marshals, because he’s come back, he only has 6 marshals declare for him, and he leaves Davout, perhaps his greatest soldier, and the man who had done the double envelopment at Auerstedt, leaves him in Paris, which is an insane mistake. You need to have your best men on the field with you. He gave him very important jobs in Paris, governor of Paris and Minister of War, head of the National Guard, and so on. But he should have been on the battlefield.

He takes with him Marshal Ney, who he only warns that they’re going on campaign the day before the army actually leaves. And he also takes Marshal Soult, who hadn’t been a chief of staff for 15 years, since the Siege of Genoa in 1800, but makes him Chief of Staff, which he shouldn’t have been because he was actually a very good defensive general against Wellington in the Peninsular War latter stages.

Suchet, who’s another very good soldier, he leaves down in the middle of France. Then he was going to have Mortier in charge of his Imperial Guard, but Mortier got sciatica the day before and so wasn’t able to be at the battle.

So one of the great questions, actually, that I ask in this book is, how is it that of the 26 marshals, he only actually enters the Battle of Waterloo with 2, Ney and Soult, who are both in the wrong positions, and they hate each other?

And the other marshal who he has created since he landed from Elba, Marshal Grouchy, he sent off to— after a victory 2 days before Waterloo, sent off with 33,000 men and 93 guns that could have made all the difference at the Battle of Waterloo. And Grouchy wasn’t able to get back in time for the battle.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:53:58 – 01:54:03) So do you really think that the reason he loses Waterloo is that?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:54:03 – 01:55:02) I think the lack of marshals is— I mean, he fought the Battle of Borodino with 10 marshals. He’s down to 2. And as I say, they’re in the wrong position and they don’t get on with one another either.

I think that Wellington, one must never take away the fact that Wellington out-generalled and outmaneuvered Napoleon. His defense at Hougoumont was superb. Holding onto La Haye Sainte farmhouse in the center of the battlefield until 6:30 was also crucial. The way in which D’Erlon’s central attack up the center was turned back and then heavily punished by the charges of the Union and Household Brigade.

Lots of things are going on at the Battle of Waterloo, but I think it’s— what this book tries to argue, at least, is that the lack of marshals is a serious problem for Napoleon.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:55:02 – 01:55:12) Because there’s a lot of people, Andrew, who think, obviously the Battle of Waterloo was the end of Napoleon, but if it hadn’t have been Waterloo, it would have been another battle, such were the French outnumbered.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:55:13 – 01:55:13) Exactly.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:55:13 – 01:55:29) Well, as I mentioned, if you add the 150,000 Austrians and the 350,000 Russians, you’ve got half a million men who are marching. So even if Napoleon had won Waterloo, he’d have found it impossible, I think, to have defended Paris.

Exile and Death on St. Helena

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:55:29 – 01:55:37) And from there, he gets exiled to St. Helena, where he meets his, well, kind of very peaceful end, right?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:55:38 – 01:55:54) Not that peaceful in that he had cancer. He had very bad cancer. So it was painful for him. But he doesn’t sort of threaten the peace of Europe between 1815, when he lands on St. Helena, and ’21 when he died.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:55:54 – 01:56:04) Why don’t they just lop his head off the second time? Because at this point you must be thinking, “Come on, this guy’s gone too far now.”

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:56:04 – 01:56:05) Well, he—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:56:06 – 01:56:10) Very Russian question of me, I appreciate it.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:56:10 – 01:57:05) First of all, he surrendered, and so there’s that. Secondly, the Prussians could— they possibly would have shot him. But he very sensibly surrendered to the British, who considered that that was a bad idea.

There were political reasons why not to, in that it would’ve probably started civil war amongst Frenchmen. As it was, Marshal Ney was shot by the Bourbons, Marshal Murat was shot by the Neapolitans, Marshal Brune was ripped to shreds by a royalist crowd in Avignon. And years later, Marshal Mortier was assassinated in the streets of Paris. So you do have a strong sense, I think, that the bloodshed should end. And killing Napoleon wouldn’t have done that.

Napoleon’s Legacy

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:57:06 – 01:57:24) And to wrap it up, what is the legacy of Napoleon? Because some people say, well, a lot of his vision and his ideas were inspirational in creating the European Union. There’s a left-wing version in France of people, how they look at Napoleon. There’s a right-wing version. How do you see this man and his legacy?

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:57:25 – 01:58:32) I think he was very important for a lot of the aspects of modern France that are positive. I’m not including the European Union in that, by the way. The battles and the wars and the campaigns, which is ultimately the reason that we think of him as a sort of conqueror, actually are not the most important things ultimately about Napoleon.

What he did was to expand the Enlightenment into Prussia and Poland and Italy and so on. And the Code Napoléon, for example, was still in effect in the Rhineland in 1900.

And so yes, I think one sees his educational reforms, the lycée, the Sorbonne, and so on, the people still crossing the bridges that he built over the Seine. I think these are the sort of blocks of granite. That have survived of Napoleon’s legacy.

FRANCIS FOSTER: (01:58:33 – 01:58:58) It’s very interesting because when I was taught about Napoleon, from the way that I was taught, it was like, well, he had his moment, but then it all ended in failure. But reading your book, doing the research for the interview, I mean, this was a man who changed history, particularly European history, and therefore can’t be seen as a proto-Hitler figure.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:58:58 – 01:59:20) It’s completely ridiculous. I think largely that was because a lot of the British historians of the previous generation had grown up during the Second World War and were pretty obsessed with Hitler and wanted to sort of look back in history and try and find Hitler equivalents. Napoleon was emphatically not one of them.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (01:59:21 – 01:59:28) Well, I actually came here thinking that you might have a grudging admiration, but I don’t think it’s that grudging in your case. I do think you respect Napoleon.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (01:59:29 – 02:00:37) I do, but unfortunately, with this Napoleon and His Marshals book, I have seen a side of him which is the micromanager, the control freak, the person who denounces his marshals. He doesn’t show— 10 years ago, when I wrote my Napoleon biography, I thought of his compartmentalization of his brain as being one of the best things about him.

But now I actually see, and especially as I’ve been able to read all of the letters that have been published by the Fondation Napoléon that weren’t there for my original book, I now see a much more nuanced but sort of negative side of him where he wasn’t good at inspiring and leading his top team.

He was very, very good all the time, right to the end. You remember, he was— they were— the men were willing to march on Paris in 1814. But when it came to his top team, he wasn’t very good at mobilizing his lieutenants.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:00:37 – 02:00:53) Lord Andrew Roberts, what a pleasure it’s been to have you back. I hope everybody gets Napoleon and His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, and Betrayal. Great title. We’re going to head over to triggerpod.co.uk where our supporters are going to ask you a few of their questions. Thank you again for coming on.

ANDREW ROBERTS: (02:00:53 – 02:00:56) Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed it, Konstantin and Francis.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: (02:00:59 – 02:01:09) France seems to have difficulty maintaining any form of democratic government for a long time. Are they due for another change in their form of government in light of the rise of populist dissent?

Related Posts

• Transcript of This Past Weekend #688: w/ Candace Owens
• Transcript: Dana White Interview on Diary Of A CEO Podcast  
• Transcript: Scott Galloway Interview: Middle Class Is A Lie – FO570 Raj Shamani
• Transcript of Rupert Spira Interview: Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown
• Transcript of Shawn Ryan Interview on Diary Of A CEO Podcast