The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill. Some of his techniques he learned from the ancients — especially his heroes Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar — and others he conceived himself in response to the circumstances of the day. The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds.
Napoleon was able to compartmentalize his life to quite a remarkable degree, much more so even than most statesmen and great leaders. He could entirely close off one part of his mind to what was going on in the rest of it; he himself likened it to being able to open and close drawers in a cupboard.
The ideas that underpin our modern world — meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances and so on — were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added rational efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman Empire.
He convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment and a story whose sheer splendor would draw the attention of posterity for centuries. He was able to impart to ordinary people the sense that their lives — and, if necessary, their deaths in battle — mattered in the context of great events. They too could make history.
Napoleon certainly never lacked confidence in his own capacity as a military leader. On St Helena, when asked why he had not taken Frederick the Great’s sword when he had visited Sans Souci, he replied, “Because I had my own.”
The missing letters unveil the intimate thoughts of a protean multitasker, a profound thinker and talented wordsmith whose intellect impressed Goethe. The reveal the leadership secrets of the most interesting personality to have sat on a European throne since Elizabeth I. Over half concern military matters and lay bare the workings of the mind of a soldier who is rightly considered on par with his own heroes, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.
To demonize the character of an enemy while the war is being fought is perfectly understandable— an opponent’s personality is fair game, after all — but is unnecessary 2 centuries after his defeat. Elsewhere, Churchill described Napoleon as “the greatest man of action born in Europe since Julius Caesar,” a plaudit of which Napoleon would profoundly have approved.
All too often, biographies of Napoleon adopt the suspiciously easy trope by which his deranged hubris — tied up with what has erroneously become known as “the Napoleon Complex” — inevitably led to his well-deserved nemesis. This cliched paradigm of Ancient Greek drama sometimes comes with the comforting suggestion that such is the fate that overtakes all tyrants sooner or later.
The reading of history very soon made me feel that I was capable of achieving as much as the men who are placed in the highest ranks of our annals.
When the French senate proposed that Napoleon become emperor in 1804, Lanjuinais expostulated: “What! Will you submit to give your country a master taken from a race of origin so ignominious that the Romans disdained to employ them as slaves?”
Later in life, Napoleon urged his junior officers “to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfo’s, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.” Ancient history provided him with an encyclopedia of military and political tactics and quotations that he would draw on throughout his life.
While his contemporaries played sports outside, he would read everything he could about the most ambitious leaders of the ancient world.
His acceptance of the revolutionary principles of equality before law, rational government, meritocracy, efficiency and aggressive nationalism fit in well with his ethos but he had little interest in equality of outcome, human rights, freedom of the press or parliamentarianism, all of which, to his mind, did not. Napoleon’s upbringing imbued him with a reverence for social hierarchy, law and order, and a strong belief in reward for merit and courage, but also a dislike of politicians, lawyers, journalists and Britain.
Sometimes he had to skip meals in order to afford books, which he continued to read with the same voracious appetite as before.
On July 12, 1790, the National Assembly passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, providing for government control over the Church and abolishing the monastic orders. The demand for priests to take the Constitutional Oath of loyalty to the state split the First Estate between juring (that is, oath-taking) and non-juring priests, and was denounced by Pope Pius VI the following March.