Following the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte could do nothing but reminisce. Exiled to Saint Helena, he spent the twilight of his life imprisoned by the British. An ocean away from the land-roaming and strategising of a few years prior, Bonaparte was relegated to comparatively dull pastimes. He spent the hours complaining (probably justly) about his living conditions at Longwood House; playing cards with the small band of Frenchmen permitted to travel with him and, most productively, dictating memories of his storied career to them. At one point, Napoleon Bonaparte had ruled everything between the Atlantic and the Niemen; no activity would prove an adequate substitute, but writing his memoirs had to suffice.
Napoleon's tales were duly recorded and published by Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, as Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. With a preface that refers to Napoleon Bonaparte as "the most extraordinary man that ever existed", the writer's goal - glorifying Napoleon - is candidly conveyed. Las Cases strikes against contemporarily popular portrayals of Napoleon as a harbinger of destruction; Le Mémorial seems more concerned with convincing its readers that Napoleon was a great liberal reformer than with elucidating his military exploits. This is best evidenced in the chapter entitled (in the English translation) The Invasion of England. Napoleon, speaking to Las Cases, hopes to highlight his rationality as a strategist and his benevolence as a statesman.
Napoleon challenges the idea that he was impulsive in his strategy by arguing that the invasion of England had a reasonable chance of success. Las Cases himself concedes that "in the saloons of Paris we laughed heartily at the idea of an invasion of England; and the English who were there at the time did so too". Challenging the mockery, Napoleon replies, "I had taken measures to ensure the possibility of my landing. I had the best army in the world; I need only say it was the army of Austerlitz." This comment seems dismissive, but Napoleon goes on to detail the full extent of his preparation:
I had dispersed all our French ships; and the English were sailing after them to different parts of the world. Our ships were to return suddenly and at the same time, and to assemble in a mass along the French coasts. I should have had seventy or eighty French or Spanish ships in the Channel; and I calculated that I should continue master of it for two months. Three or four thousand small vessels were to be ready at a signal. A hundred thousand men were every day drilled in embarking and landing, as a part of their exercise. They were full of ardour, and eager for the enterprise, which was very popular with the French, and was supported by the wishes of a great number of the English. After landing my troops, I calculated upon only one pitched battle, the result of which could not be doubtful; and victory would have brought us to London. The nature of the country would not admit of a war of manœuvring.
By alluding to the sheer scale of his army, the disorganised English defence and the apparent enthusiasm of his men, Napoleon convinces his entourage that an invasion of England had been a reasonable endeavour. His analysis entirely neglects the constant British blockade of French harbours, further buttressed by defensive fleets closer to the English coast. Las Cases, in failing to provide any challenge to Napoleon's perspective, seemingly ignores that Napoleon's preparations had, on occasion, failed. Owing to Napoleon's lack of preparation, La Grande Armee had lost nearly six hundred thousand men in a failed invasion of Russia. Nevertheless, Las Cases presents his defeated hero as incapable of erring.
Interwoven into an apologia of his military planning is a utopian political vision. "I should have been another William III..." he begins, suggesting he would rule benevolently, advancing the great liberal causes - universal male suffrage, for instance - of his day. Napoleon, who had once attempted to starve the British people into submission with his Continental Blockade, here feigns fraternity. "We should have presented ourselves to them... as brothers." Napoleon concludes with pan-Europeanism at which a Liberal Democrat would grin, "In the course of a few months, the two nations [England and France] ... would have thenceforward composed only one people, identified in principles, maxims and interests."
Las Cases is not entirely deceptive in his presentation of Napoleon as a reformer. As Emperor of the French, Napoleon was devoted to discarding the relics of pre-Enlightenment Europe. This is evidenced by his transformation of state bureaucracy from a plaything of the aristocracy to a meritocracy. The absolute monarchy of pre-Revolution France was advised by the Conseil du Roi, an administrative body perpetual dominated by a few noble families, the slightest slither of French society. While the anti-noble attitude of the early Revolution saw men like Denis Decrès barred from the rank of captain, Napoleon Bonaparte found a meritocratic medium, ignoring background entirely in his appointments. The sons of shopkeepers, like Emmanuel Cretet, and the sons of aristocrats, like Talleyrand, equally served the Empire. Napoleon's political reforms substantiate the idea that Napoleon would have been altruistic in his governance of England.
Napoleon's liberal vision, however, cannot reconcile his hypothetical magnanimity with previous intentions to see "every subject of England ... found in the countries occupied by our troops... made a prisoner of war", under the terms of the Berlin Decrees. His vision cannot answer for his career-long, continent-wide aggression. It cannot convince astute historians that Napoleon Bonaparte would have treated the people of England just as he treated the people of his adopted homeland. Las Cases' unending praise helped formalise the mythology of Napoleon, by presenting him as a man of might and morality. In the decades following Napoleon's 1821 death, Bonapartist politicians were a legitimate political force. Among the French public, the pro-Napoleon sentiment was so great that, with the exception of a few on the royalist right, there was "popular enthusiasm" when his casket was delivered to Paris in 1840.
Napoleon Bonaparte, aided by Las Cases, took deliberate action to permanently alter the public's perception of his character and career. His semi-autobiography was a dying bid for influence over the French people. By providing the material for Le Mémorial, Napoleon relieved his ever-present desire to affect his legacy. While defeat and deportation had destroyed any hopes of restoring his empire, Napoleon endeavoured to influence future opinion of him by shaping the narrative of his life and career.
The powerful have long attempted to mislead the public about events, past and present, in order to influence public opinion on individuals, ideas and policies. In recent times, the term "manufacturing consent", popularised by the eponymous book, refers to the idea that mass media ventriloquises the opinion of the individuals and organisations that own them. However, we do not often think of the beneficiaries of such messaging as penning the propaganda themselves. A political party might pay for the distribution of a favourable newspaper, or even publish its own official communications, but we rarely imagine Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer writing newspaper accounts to prise a polling advantage.
The statesmen of old were markedly different in that regard. Two men in particular surpassed Napoleon in their attempt to shape the past. Where Napoleon (via Las Cases) played autobiographer, Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill went further, playing historian. Their works, Commentarii De Bello Gallico and The Second World War, blend autobiography with history by conveniently centring the author in the course of events while purporting to be comprehensive and objective. A more purely autobiographical work, like Tony Blair's A Journey, rightly makes no claim to being a history of Britain between 1997 and 2007. If Blair announced tomorrow that he was publishing The Iraq War or Britain and The War on Terror, furore would be imminent.
Julius Caesar's attempt at scholarship, Commentarii de Bello Gallico, was written and published alongside the campaign. Its succinct Latin has inducted the text into every classical studies curriculum in the Western world, but its comments on Caesar's military engagements in Gaul betray the fact that the Commentarii were published to help maintain Caesar's political influence in Rome. Nearly every reference to the scale of Gallic troops can be ignored; modern historians have taken particular issue with the claim that, after crossing the Rhine, Caesar's troops faced an enemy camp of 430,00, an implausible size for the period, and won without any men lost. Gross overestimations of this sort occur, according to David Henige, "some sixty times". Having cited vague censuses in Greek letters Caesar's accounting returned convenient figures (note the claim that exactly one-quarter of the Helvetii and their allies were fit to bear arms) that convinced contemporary Romans of his brilliance.Unencumbered by the duties of the premiership, Churchill spent the years after his election defeat writing a history of the years gone. The fruit, The Second World War, is distinctive in its authorship: no other major leader published an account of the conflict. Equally, however, knowledge of its authorship explains the work's incompleteness. In the volume entitled The Grand Alliance, Churchill's comments on the Atlantic Charter seem incongruent with the staunch imperialism traditionally associated with Churchill. Acknowledging claims that he held to anachronistic values, he writes "Considering all the tales of my reactionary, Old War outlook... I am glad that the Atlantic Charter was in first draft a British production cast in my own words." Here, Churchill, who had stood alone in the 1930s in opposing greater Indian autonomy, declared support for a document which touted self-determination for indigenous peoples. In 1945, the Empire-focused Conservative Party had been defeated by a Labour intent on domestic regeneration. Churchill's 1950 work sought, in a similar fashion to Caesar, to assume the values of his constituents. Aside from standing as a new declaration of values, the gradual publication of The Second World War preceded and coincided with Churchill's political decline. The series reminded the British people what their (although now frail) Prime Minister had once accomplished.
At some point in the last seventy years, statesmen left history entirely to historians. This concession has been disastrous. While impersonal accounts tend to lack the inaccuracies found in the works of politicians, autobiographical histories colourfully reflect their authors' characters. Political memoirs, therefore, should be accepted with less cynicism; while they will never suffice independently as histories, the writings of statesmen should be welcomed as unique vantage points from which to view history.
Bibliography
Memoirs of the Life, Exile And Conversations of the Emperor Napoleon, Emmanuel, comte de las Cases (1836)
Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler, Frank McLynn (1987)
Napoleon, Alan Forrest (2011)
Heroic Genesis in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, Göran Blix (2007)
He came, he saw, we counted: the historiography and demography of Caesar's gallic numbers, David Henige (1998)
The Veracity of Caesar, JPVD Balsdon (1957)
Commentarii De Bello Gallico, English translation, W. A. MacDevitt and W. S. Bohn (1869)
The Contextual Audiences of Caesar's De Bello Gallico, Timothy Kimbrough (2014)
Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Adrian Goldsworthy (2006)
Comments
Post a Comment