Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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over whether Britain or France was primarily responsible for the second

outbreak of war since 1793. Some British historians such as J. Holland Rose

believe they could prove without doubt that Napoleon’s lust for conquest

doomed the Treaty of Amiens, while others – often French – have blamed a

bellicose English government with equal vigour and certitude, often using

the same archives and documents to support their case.

Lefebvre is probably not far off the truth when he concludes that during

the fourteen-months of peace:

If Bonaparte’s provocations are undeniable, nonetheless it is a fact that

England broke the treaty and took the initiative to wage preventive war

from the moment that she could hope for Russia’s collaboration. Britain’s

justiﬁ cation was the preservation of the European balance of power, but

this grave concern did not extend to the sea, since in her eyes God had

created the oceans for the English. The conﬂ ict between Bonaparte and

England was in reality a clash between two imperialisms.

British foreign policy had indeed long been one of opposition to any single

power dominating the European Continent – and thus the Channel ‘inva-

sion’ ports – as Philip II of Spain and Louis XIV of France had previously

seen, and Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler were to ﬁ nd subsequently. It

was a policy of self-preservation as much as imperial expansion, but Lefebvre

was right to assume that the two imperialisms could not mutually thrive.

Because Napoleon is extremely hard to pin down in class and nationalist

terms, Lefebvre considers him ‘something of the uprooted person’ who had

only become French relatively late, without having identiﬁ ed himself with the

traditions and interests of France during his youth. Lefebvre also describes him

as ‘something of the déclassé . . . He was neither entirely a gentleman nor entirely

common. He served both the king and the Revolution without attaching

himself to either.’ As well as of course making him all the more interesting a

political phenomenon as a result, Lefebvre spotted how this helped Napoleon

in placing him above the political parties of his day, so that ‘neither in the ancien

régime nor in the new order did he ﬁ nd principles which might have served as

a norm or a limit.’ With this extraordinary hybrid human, Lefebvre seems to

be arguing, anything was possible, which makes for a biography that is almost

as much a personal adventure story as an intellectual treatise.

Where Lefebvre, at least to English eyes, does seem to have had a blind

spot is in his overall negative depiction of Napoleon’s nemesis, the duke of

Wellington, whom he sees merely as a cold martinet without a scintilla of

Napoleon’s genius. His description of the Iron Duke as coming from ‘the

introduction

aristocratic morgue’ is perhaps the dominant one amongst French histo-

rians, who on the whole do not ascribe martial glory to the man who none-

theless soundly defeated Napoleon on the only ﬁ eld of battle where the two

men met. Lefebvre was perfectly capable of accepting that Wellington ‘had a

clear and precise mind of a positive cast, with good organising ability’, and

‘was a man of cool and tenacious will-power, though this did not exclude

an ability to take bold and calculated risks’, but these qualities were not

enough for Lefebvre to consider Wellington a great man, and it is hard not

to conclude that this was primarily for class reasons, since Wellington was

the son of an Anglo-Irish earl.

‘His expression was marked by an aristocratic pride’, writes Lefebvre of

Wellington,

hardened still further by his long years among the Indians. He treated his

ofﬁ cers with a haughty disdain, and had an unlimited contempt for the

common people, and for his own soldiers . . . At any rate his pride of country

bound him closely to his own social caste and to the land in which they

were, in his view, the lawful owners, and his only thought was to serve

them. With a hard and dry character in which imagination and affection

were equally wanting, he was at any rate preserved from the romantic indi-

vidualism that was the ruin of Napoleon, but his talent lacked the unending

fascination exercised by the genius of the emperor.

So much as a glance at Elizabeth Longford’s two-volume life of Wellington

– still the best biography of him after four decades – shows us that in fact

the duke was indeed proud, but also romantic and affectionate, and served

far wider interests than merely the narrow ones of the Anglo-Irish Protestant

Ascendancy from which he sprang.

Lefebvre’s Marxism enters his life of Napoleon, but it never infects it to

the detriment of the narrative. ‘Like all enlightened despots’, he wrote,

Napoleon always devoted great attention to economic progress; not,

indeed, because it improved the lot of mankind and permitted the common

people to share in the fruits of civilisation, but simply for political reasons.

He was interested in sound ﬁ nance, in the growth of population and the

consequent fresh supply of recruits to the army, and in ‘order’, that is, a

minimum of idleness and an abundance of commodities.

This is classic Marxist analysis, but coincidentally also the correct one.

Although many of the Annales school of French historians sought to

introduction

xii

represent Napoleon as ‘a prisoner of the demographic and social structures

he encountered’, Lefebvre was far less ideologically strait-jacketed, merely

stressing, in the words of a recent study, ‘Bonaparte’s dependence on his

inheritance from the bourgeois revolution’.

This, too, makes sense. Jules

Michelet, whose history of the Revolution was published in 1847, stated

that ‘ l’acteur principal est le peuple ’ He was, along with Jules Guesde and Jean

Jaurès, a powerful intellectual inﬂ uence on Lefebvre, but in Napoléon the prin-

cipal actor was always the emperor. In that sense this is emphatically not a

Marxist work.

The love-hate relationship that Lefebvre had with his subject stemmed

from the emperor’s many fascinating contradictions, summed up in the

following lines, which should serve to whet the appetite of any reader for

the pages that follow:

A successful soldier, a pupil of the philosophes , [Napoleon] detested

feudalism, civil inequality and religious intolerance. Seeing in enlightened

despotism a reconciliation of authority with political and social reform, he

became its last and most illustrious representative. In this sense he was

the man of the Revolution. His headstrong individuality never accepted

democracy, however, and he rejected the great hope of the eighteenth

century which inspired revolutionary idealism – the hope that some day

men would be civilised enough to rule themselves.

That Napoleon did not believe in this millennial concept is clear from

Lefebvre’s work, but the extent to which that is because Napoleon genuinely

thought democracy impossible, or merely recognised that it would hamstring

his personal ambitions, is not so clear. Lefebvre presents us with the facts

and, like all good historians, stands back to allow us to use them to make up

our own minds.

Napoleon himself deﬁ ned history as ‘a myth that men agree to believe’,

but Lefebvre enjoyed digging below the surface of Napoleonic myth-

making, and stayed remarkably free of making value judgements, even in

the conclusion of his work. ‘The moralist must praise heroism and condemn

cruelty’, Lefebvre is quoted as having said, ‘but the moralist does not explain

events.’ That is done by the historian. I believe that Lefebvre refused to inﬂ ict

his Marxist views on this biography because he was simply too good and

too honest a historian. He was also a Frenchman, who could write of how

* Malcolm Crook, ‘Time for a Hero?: Reappraising Napoleon on the Bicentenary of his Rise

to Power’, History , vol. 87, no. 288 (2002), p. 544.

introduction

xiii

Napoleon’s ‘springs of action, his unconquerable energy of temperament,

arose from the depths of his imagination’.

Lefebvre eschewed imposing a determinist rationale on the life and

achievements of Napoleon partly because he saw the absurdity that resulted

when Leo Tolstoy had tried to do the same thing in his notorious passage in

War and Peace , but also because, as he himself admitted, ‘Marx clariﬁ ed the

dominant inﬂ uence of the mode of production, but it was never his inten-

tion to exclude other factors, especially Man . . . It is Man who makes history.’

Of no-one could that be truer than of Napoleon Bonaparte, as this well-

written, scholarly and – thanks to the Folio Society – highly attractive

volume so conclusively demonstrates.

ANDREW ROBERTS

May 2009

* To Book One.

introduction

F OREWORD

At the time when Napoleon Bonaparte assumed control of France, Europe

and the French Revolution had been at war for over seven years, and except

for a brief interruption, this conﬂ ict was to last until 1815. The 18 Brumaire

did not in itself mark the end of an epoch. It might be more logical to say

that the period of peace which followed the Treaty of Amiens was the

dividing point between two eras. True, when considering the internal

history of France, one sees that the coup d’état of Brumaire opened the way for

the restoration of personal power. In this respect, the contrast between the

Napoleonic and revolutionary periods is well deﬁ ned, but their essential

unity cannot be ignored. It was to the Revolution that Bonaparte owed his

marvellous destiny. He was able to force himself upon republican France

precisely because an internal necessity fated that country to dictatorship as

long as the partisans of the ancien régime strove to re-establish the monarchy

with the help of foreign powers.

In his methods of government, Bonaparte had more in common with the

Committee of Public Safety than writers are generally willing to admit. It

was because he respected the social legislation of the Constituent Assembly

that he was able to remain the leader of France. His military victories assured

that the work of the Constituent Assembly would endure and become

permanently rooted in French society. More than that, his victories enabled

French ideas to sweep over the Continent with a rapidity and an efﬁ cacy

which neither propaganda nor spontaneous diffusion could have equalled.

Had he not implanted the fundamental principles of the modern state and

society in all the countries which he dominated, no trace would have ever

been left of his lightning campaigns. In vain did he attempt to create a new

legitimacy and a new aristocracy. His contemporaries always saw him as the

xvforeword

soldier of the Revolution, and it was as such that he made his mark upon

European civilisation.

All this notwithstanding, from the moment that Bonaparte became master

of France, he was elevated to a place in the very centre of universal history.

And so, despite the fundamental unities linking his reign with the tragedy

that was the Revolution, the traditional dividing point – his accession – has

much to be said for it, and is the one used in this work.

It is hardly necessary to point out that this book is not a biography of

Napoleon. An attempt has been made to cast light not only on the essential

features of the collective life of the French people and those who were

subjugated by the emperor, but also on the operation of forces independent

of his will and on the distinguishing characteristics of nations which escaped

his domination. England and the United States maintained their liberal

tradition; capitalism continued its progress; and the bourgeoisie, growing in

strength, was well on its way to assuming complete political power. Religious

life followed its course, and Napoleon was unable to modify it. Nations

reacted against the universal empire whose foundations he was laying. Above

all in Germany, Romanticism fostered new ways of feeling, thinking and

acting; and Latin America threw off the Spanish yoke. Even the Far East,

in a negative way, experienced repercussions of the great conﬂ ict, for it

would have been subjected to European assaults much earlier had not the

Napoleonic Wars monopolised the energies of Europe. The nineteenth

century, so shifting and varied in its character, was visible beneath the

apparent uniformity which Napoleon’s genius tried to impose. But during

the course of this period, otherwise so brief, everything seemed to yield

before him. It was he who dominated history. What then could be more

natural than that this volume should bear his name?

From 18 Brumaire

to Tilsit

1799–1807

The Legacy

of the Revolution