Napoleon

The Corsican

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica — the son of a minor noble family that had only become French when the island was purchased from the Republic of Genoa the previous year. He was not born French. He was not born powerful. He was born ambitious. He trained as an artillery officer, read voraciously, and rose through the chaos of the French Revolution — a period that destroyed the old order and created opportunities for men of talent and ruthlessness.

By 1796, he was commanding the French army in Italy. By 1799, he had seized power in a coup and become First Consul. By 1804, he crowned himself Emperor of the French. In twenty years, he went from an obscure Corsican officer to the master of Europe. He rewrote the map, created modern administrative law (the Code Napoléon), abolished feudalism across the continent, and defeated every army sent against him — until he met the Russian winter.

Austerlitz · December 2, 1805

The Battle of Austerlitz — the “Battle of the Three Emperors” — was Napoleon's masterpiece. Facing a combined Austro-Russian army of 90,000 men, he deliberately weakened his right flank, lured the allies into attacking it, and then smashed through their center on the Pratzen Heights. The allied army collapsed. Tsar Alexander I fled the field. The Austrian Emperor Francis I sued for peace. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved.

In War and Peace, this is the battle where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, carrying his regiment's flag, charges into the fighting and is gravely wounded. Lying on his back, looking up at the sky, he has his revelation:

Tilsit and After · 1807–1812

After crushing Russia again at Friedland (June 1807), Napoleon met Alexander I on a raft in the middle of the Neman River, at Tilsit. The two emperors embraced, divided Europe between them, and became allies — or so it seemed. In reality, the alliance was a sham. Napoleon needed Russia to enforce the Continental System (a boycott of British trade); Alexander chafed under the economic damage this caused and resented Napoleon's creation of a Polish state (the Duchy of Warsaw) on Russia's border.

The years 1807–1812 were a tense armed peace. Napoleon was bogged down in Spain (the “Spanish Ulcer” that bled his army for years). Alexander quietly prepared for war. Both men knew the alliance would break. The only question was when.

The Grande Armée

In June 1812, Napoleon crossed the Niemen River with an army of roughly 600,000 men — the largest military force Europe had ever seen. It was not a French army; it was a European one. Only about half were French. The rest were Poles, Germans, Italians, Austrians, and others — drafted from Napoleon's empire and its allies. It was a army of nations, and it was aimed at Russia.

Napoleon expected a quick victory. He planned to cross the border, fight a decisive battle within weeks, force Alexander to surrender, and be home by autumn. Instead, the Russians retreated. They burned their own supplies, destroyed bridges, and dragged the French deeper and deeper into a vast, empty country. The Grande Armée followed — and shrank. Desertion, disease, hunger, and Cossack raids wore it down long before it reached Moscow.

Tolstoy's Napoleon

Tolstoy's portrait of Napoleon is one of the most controversial aspects of War and Peace. It is not flattering. Where conventional historians saw genius, Tolstoy saw a man who believed his own mythology — a small, self-important figure who gave orders that had no relation to reality and took credit for events he did not control.

This is not the Napoleon of legend. But it is not pure invention, either. Tolstoy was making a philosophical point: that the “great man” theory of history is an illusion. Napoleon did notcause the events of 1812; he was carried along by them, like a drowning man clutching at waves. His orders were routinely ignored, misinterpreted, or rendered irrelevant by circumstances. He thought he was directing the march of history. History was marching over him.