Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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Napoleon

‘Magisterial . . . a biography that is almost as much a personal

adventure story as an intellectual treatise.’

Andrew Roberts

‘A penetrating interpretation . . . No one with a serious interest in

the Napoleonic period can afford to ignore it.’

Times Literary Supplement

G e o r g e s

Lefebvre

Napoleon

With an introduction by Andrew Roberts

Napoléon originally published in 1935 by Presses Universitaires de Frances

This translation ﬁ rst published in two volumes in 1969 by Routledge Kegan Paul Ltd

Volume 1 translated by Henry F. Stockhold

Volume 2 translated by J. E. Anderson

First published in one volume Routledge Classics 2011

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lefebvre, Georges, 1874–1959.

[Napoléon. English]

Napoleon / Georges Lefebvre ; With an introduction by Andrew Roberts.

p. cm. – (Routledge classics)

Napoléon was originally published in 1935 by Presse Universitaires de Frances; this

translation was ﬁ rst published in two volumes in 1969 by Routledge Kegan Paul, Ltd.

“First published in one volume Routledge classics 2011”–T.p. Verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. History–Consulate and First Empire, 1799–1815. 2. France–History, Military–1789–1815,

3. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821. I. Title.

DC201.L3413 2011

944.05092–dc22

[B]

2011003623

ISBN: 978–0–415–61009–4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978–0–203–82830–4 (ebk)

ISBN 0-203-82830-5 Master e-book ISBN

This edition published in the

aylor & Francis e-Library, 2011.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s

collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

C ONTENTS

INTRODUCTION vii

FOREWORD xiv

FROM 18 BRUMAIRE TO TILSIT, 1799–1807 1

I The Legacy of the Revolution 3

1 The Conﬂ ict between the Ancien Régime and the

Revolution 5

2 The Consequences of the War and the Terms of the Peace 24

3 The Coming of Napoleon Bonaparte 53

II The Paciﬁ cation of France and Europe

(1799–1802) 61

4 The Organisation of the Dictatorship in France 63

5 The Paciﬁ cation of Europe 84

6 Bonaparte Consul for Life 107

III Imperial Conquest to the Treaty of Tilsit

(1802–1807) 139

7 France and England: The Struggle Renewed

(1802–1805) 141

8 Napoleon’s Army 182

9 The Formation of the Grand Empire (1805–1807) 197

FROM TILSIT TO WATERLOO, 1807–1815 235

I The Imperial Conquests after Tilsit (1807–1812) 237

1 The Continental System (1807–1809) 239

2 The War of 1809 265

3 England’s Successes (1807–1811) 306

4 The Continental Blockade 327

5 The Preliminaries of the Russian Campaign (1811–1812) 361

II The World in 1812 369

6 Imperial France 371

7 The Continental System 409

8 The Independent Forces 457

III The Fall of Napoleon (1812–1815) 495

9 The Disintegration of the Continental System (1812–1814) 497

10 The Restoration and the Hundred Days 533

CHRONOLOGY 548

FURTHER READING 554

INDEX 557

contents

I NTRODUCTION

There is a paradox that lies at the heart of Georges Lefebvre’s magisterial

biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, published in this ﬁ ne edition by Folio for

the ﬁ rst time as a single volume in English. The author, who held the Chair

of the History of the French Revolution at the Sorbonne from 1937 until

1945, was one of the great Marxist intellectuals of the second quarter of the

twentieth century; indeed it was he who invented the soubriquet ‘History

from below’. Yet his two-volume Napoléon , ﬁ rst published in 1935–36 and

translated into English in 1969, is emphatically of the ‘Great Man’ school of

history so despised by Marxists. It is pure history from above, and accepts

that the actions and will of a single extraordinary man could counteract

those of the proletarian masses that Lefebvre himself idolised. So how

could this be?

Born to relatively poor parents in Lille in August 1874, Georges Lefebvre

attended the local lycée and only matriculated into the University of Lille by

means of a series of scholarships that were early testaments to his burgeoning

intellect. He became a teacher after graduating in 1898 and began writing

in 1904, but it was not until 1925, when he was over ﬁ fty, that he published

his doctoral thesis, Les Paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution Française . This posited

the thesis that it had been the peasantry that ignited, supported and sustained

the French Revolution, which he depicted as developing through four

distinct phases between the Fall of the Bastille in 1789 and Napoleon’s

Brumaire coup ten years later.

In 1935 – the year of the publication of this life of Napoleon – Lefebvre

was honoured by becoming the president of the Société des Études

Robespierristes (he admired the ‘Sea-Green Incorruptible’ for his frugality,

integrity and application) and also the director of the Annales Historiques de la

viii

introduction

Révolution Française, home of the Annales school that was to dominate French

historiography. Two years later he was raised to his professorship at the

Sorbonne, which he held until his retirement from active teaching in 1945.

The Marxist interpretation which Lefebvre applied to the French

Revolution was fully developed in his book Quatre-vingt-neuf , which was

published in English as The Coming of the French Revolution in time for its 150th

anniversary in 1939, but the Second World War intervened before it could

become well known in France. Although Lefebvre survived the German

Occupation, Quatre-vingt-neuf was banned by the Vichy regime, and its initial

print run of eight thousand copies was burned. After the war, the two

volumes of his history of the Revolution before and after 1793, with their

concentration on dialectical materialism as the central explanation for its

causes and course, were published in 1951 and 1957. These books, utterly

dominant in their day, sought to impose a classical Marxist dialectic on

the French Revolution, whereby the monarchy and nobility were initially

overthrown by the bourgeoisie and clergy, who were themselves toppled by

the workers and peasants, a conceptual framework that has since been

comprehensively deposed by successive waves of revisionists. Lefebvre died

in Boulogne-Billancourt on the outskirts of Paris on 28 August 1959.

In Pieter Geyl’s historiographical masterpiece Napoleon: For and Against ,

published in 1949, the ﬁ nal chapter was devoted to Lefebvre’s life of the

emperor, which was lauded as ‘free from parti pris . He has an eye for the posi-

tive achievements and above all he can appreciate the greatness of the ﬁ gure

. . . He writes vividly and to the point and shows himself a man of imagination

. . . The portrait as a whole shows a remarkable tact and a ﬁ ne balance.’ This

encomium still stands. Geyl was impressed by the way that although Lefebvre

pointed out that Napoleon was indeed bent on world domination,

The beauty of Lefebvre’s book consists in the fact that he is able to present,

and continually to recall, this general vision upon Napoleon and his regime,

without neglecting the endless multiplicity of facts which determine and

modify each particular instance. English imperialism, Austrian reaction,

the personal policy of [Tsar] Alexander, none of these is blurred in order to

make Napoleon stand out with more sharpness.

Lefebvre criticised Napoleon’s hatred of free speech and his willingness

to close down newspapers that indulged in it too freely, but this may well

have reﬂ ected the author’s contemporaneous view of Adolf Hitler, who had

* Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (London, 1949), pp. 421–2.

introduction

been Chancellor of Germany for two years by the time of the publication

Napoléon , and who had already closed down newspapers, imprisoned polit-

ical opponents, withdrawn from the League of Nations and set Europe on

the path to war.

Described by Robespierre’s biographer Colin Haydon as an ‘austere

republican’,

Lefebvre also took Napoleon to task for his lack of trust in

the French people, pointing out the paradox in the emperor’s attitude towards

the general will, and likening it to that of Frederick the Great. ‘The fewer

obstacles he met, the more jealous and irritable he became,’ wrote Lefebvre.

‘Like Frederick II, he continually emphasised the personal character of his

government. Judging by the constitutions he gave to the realms of Naples and

Westphalia, his intention was to eliminate ﬁ nally the elective principle.

However, neither the electorate nor the assembly did anything to hinder him.’

Lefebvre highlighted the Treaty of Lunéville of February 1801 as the

moment when the true interests of France began to diverge from those of

her First Consul, a date far earlier than most of Napoleon’s other biogra-

phers. ‘Bonaparte had slashed the Gordian knot with a single blow,’ he states

when summing up the treaty. ‘The victory over Austria had done far more

than conﬁ rm and consolidate the conquest of the natural frontiers . . . he

clearly indicated that he intended to keep Austria out of Italy altogether . . .

The paciﬁ cation of Europe, pursued along these lines, could only result in a

temporary truce.’ In such strictures against Napoleon’s hectoring and

bellicose foreign policy it is again hard not to discern contemporaneous

criticism of Adolf Hitler.

Yet even that needs to be seen in the context of Lefebvre’s equivocating

conclusions about Napoleon back in 1935, because when considering

whether ‘Napoleon’s work was doomed to fail’, the author wrote: ‘It would

perhaps be salutary for all would-be Caesars and for the good of the human

race if this judgement could be held beyond a doubt. But this cannot for one

moment be admitted.’ For, Lefebvre argues, Tsar Alexander I’s ‘will-power

might well have failed at Moscow, and the allied army might have been

destroyed at [the Battle of ] Lützen. The only solid certainty is that the risks

were tremendous, and that France, hazarding her all, lost all that the

Revolution had conquered in her name.’

Lefebvre sees Napoleon’s second tragedy as stemming from the break-

down of the Anglo-French Peace of Amiens in May 1803, and it is hard to

disagree with him. Fierce historiographical battles have been fought ever

since, not least by Napoleon himself in his memoirs dictated on St Helena,

* Colin Haydon and William Doyle (eds), Robespierre (Cambridge, 2006), p. 6.