For many people Napoleon is a recognizable and well-known figure, having to do with something something Waterloo something Elba something something St. Helena something else hand in jacket. And Josephine.
For anyone who wants to fill in all the murky details of things Napoleonic, this is the book. For those whose understanding is not so sketchy, this is still the book. Dwyer’s work is high-level historiography, and there is a wealth of information here. A biography obviously ought to be more than recycled biographies, and a history ought to be more than a mash-up of earlier history books. This volume really is fine work. Many places Dwyer puts together his account of the events by relying on an impressive knowledge of private correspondence of both players and bystanders and then weaving that together with what might be called the “public history”—what everybody in principle knows about. The result is stunning and memorable, reading like an insider’s account.
One of the most informative things about the book came out in Dwyer’s expertise concerning the interpretation of 19th-century political paintings. When we think of political propaganda, we tend to think of shutter speed and things that move—Nuremberg rallies, or message movies, or street agitprop for the television cameras, or scrolling Twitter feeds. For the perennial handlers, who are always around somewhere, the populace always needs to be shaped, moved, and directed, so someone is always in the business of seeing to it that the populace heads off in the preferred direction. Dwyer spends a good bit of his time explaining how grandiose oil paintings played this role in Bonaparte’s day. Modern visitors of art galleries may have wondered why this particular painting of a battle, or a coronation, or a dying colonel needed to take up a quarter of an acre. Whose living room was that supposed to fit in? But these paintings were designed to serve as the focal point for some very public events. They were designed to cause a stir, as they often did. People pored over them, examining every detail—and the details paid that examination back. Not only did the people pore over the paintings, political operatives themselves pored over the numbers of how many people were showing up to view the paintings.
This always happens. Kings have always wanted informed advice and counsel, and so in the days of Babylon men were adept in reading the entrails of a goat. In Napoleon’s day men were skilled in understanding the traffic flow when a new painting was unveiled. In our day we have lots of pollsters.
A good example of this from Citizen Emperor is Jacques-Louis David’s painting of the coronation of Josephine. David originally wanted to paint Napoleon crowning himself (which is what Napoleon had actually done, believe it or not), but it is hard to paint something like that in a seemly fashion. It just sort of looks like what it is—insufferable. The way the painting came out, Josephine is kneeling before him, passive and submissive, but Napoleon is at least bestowing something on somebody else. Napoleon’s sisters, who had in the actual ceremony been in quite a snit about having to carry Josephine’s train, are quite well-behaved and demur in the painting. Josephine is painted to look decades younger than she actually was, so that was a plus. Napoleon’s mother is in the painting (although she was in Rome at the time) in order to underscore the reality of Napoleon’s dynastic ambitions. Pius VII has a very passive role in the painting, at the insistence of Napoleon, doing little more than raising his right hand slightly for a blessing. He was sidelined in the painting, just as he had been in the actual ceremony. These commissioned paintings were press releases in oil, on a large scale, and they were potent.
Another bit of common knowledge about Napoleon concerns his retreat from Moscow. I had known that Napoleon had invaded Russia, and that the entire event was a debacle and fiasco. But I had not known that the words needed to be capitalized—it was a Debacle. It was a full-scale Fiasco. Napoleon marched on Moscow, took it, and after a number of weeks, marched home again, costing in human lives approximately one million souls—and all for nothing.
The withdrawal from Moscow was terribly organized, and the two great adversaries of the retreating armies were starvation and the cold, topped off and made complete with raids from pursuing Cossacks. Dwyer describes how soldiers desperate for food would cut pieces of flesh off living horses walking beside them, and with the horses too cold to notice it.
For all that, and despite the occasional disaster brought on by his hubris, Napoleon was a great tactical genius who could perform truly remarkable feats on the battlefield. Beset by the allied forces of Russia, Austria, Prussia, and assorted others, he was still formidable. But after a time, his foes figured out what to do about it. In baseball, if you are up against an impressive slugger, one of the things that you can do is limit him to “singles” by walking him every time. The stratagem the allies developed came to be known as the Trachenberg Plan, and it was, as Dwyer notes, both “elegantly simple” and tremendously effective: “[W]herever Napoleon appeared, the allies would not give battle. Wherever one of his commanders appeared, the allies would attack and preferably with superior numbers.” Napoleon’s broader European empire unraveled, and he was now fighting to retain control of France. He was eventually forced to surrender, but in return was given a number of remarkable concessions:
Napoleon was formally granted sovereignty over the island of Elba, off the Tuscan coast, with a pension of six million francs, and he was allowed to keep the title of emperor, despite the fact that Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne.
This meant that when Napoleon was finally relegated to Elba, he was not technically a prisoner there. He was the ruler of the island and had a few troops with him as part of his entourage. He was supposed to stay there, but nobody was stationed there to make him. So one day he simply sailed away from Elba, planning to land in France with just a few hundred troops. The idea was to gather troops to himself again by means of the gravitational field of his charisma. Because the restored Bourbon monarchy was not all that popular, and not all that competent either, this was something that Napoleon was able to do rather handily. The next big event, appearing on the horizon almost immediately, was Waterloo.
Dwyer does a masterful job in showing how Waterloo was a last desperate grasping. It was not the downfall of Napoleon; rather, the outcome of that battle revealed he had fallen, irretrievably, years before. When Napoleon was at the height of his powers, he won a series of battles that most of us have never heard of. When we hear of Waterloo, we know that Napoleon lost that battle, but the background assumption is that if Napoleon had not been defeated by Wellington there, he might have been able to go on to do great things. But Dwyer shows that even if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo, it really wouldn’t have made much of a difference long term. The great deeds were all in the past. They were necessarily in the past. Wellington was an English general, commanding an English army, but he was also in command of a number of troops from other armies—the English were actually less than half of the soldiers there. What this meant is that all the rest of Europe had had it up to here with Napoleon, and were allied against him. If he had not been taken out at Waterloo, he would have been on another battlefield a few months later.
Reading Citizen Emperor created an odd juxtaposition for me. Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, the same year that war broke out between the United States and England. Having been brought up understanding England to be our great foe from that era, it was a strange sensation for this American to be reading an account of Napoleon in that same fateful year, and to read the account yearning for the English to show up. There was a strange overlap of issues as well. Napoleon was able to raise his armies by conscription, and replace them again in the same way after losing them in lots of 100,000 or so. The casus belli between America and England was the cavalier British habit of stopping our ships and impressing American sailors. This was a big deal for us (as it ought to have been), but compared to what was going on at the same time in Europe, what we were dealing with was pocket change—and in the European way of doing things then, England was actually pretty mild. If you think about it long enough, and squint, it all resolves nicely.
And of particular interest to modern Christians, who always need to be reminded of the dangers of newspaper exegesis, is the extent to which Napoleon was easily dropped into a prophetic story line. “It was common enough,” Dwyer writes,
to portray Napoleon as a blood-thirsty tyrant, “the enemy of the human race.” To depict him as “tyrant” is also to underline the illegitimacy, the evilness, of his reign. It was the first stage in portraying him as Antichrist. Satan, Lucifer, the Great Horned Serpent or the Devil was an image that flourished not only in most parts of Europe, but as far afield as the United States and Guatemala, regardless of religious affiliations. It appears to have been part of the millenarian movement at the end of the eighteenth century.
Alexander, the Russian czar—Napoleon’s erstwhile ally who then became his deadly foe—was also greatly influenced by the apocalyptic imagery of Scripture:
He had always had religious convictions, but with the French invasion he increasingly turned to the Bible for inspiration, and especially to the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which the King of the North (read Alexander) defeats the King of the South (read Napoleon). Napoleon’s defeat became, in his mind, synonymous with God’s will, and hence Alexander became His instrument. The Tsar got his way. The Russian army was ordered to pursue the French into Germany.
This would not be the last time that great historical events were driven by bad exegesis.
Douglas Wilson is pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a faculty member at New Saint Andrews College. He is the author most recently of a new verse rendering of Beowulf (Canon Press).
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