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First published by Allen Lane 2014
Published in Penguin Books 2015
Copyright © Andrew Roberts, 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design by Leo Nickolls
Cover photograph © Chesnot/Getty Images
ISBN: 978-0-241-29466-6
List of Maps
List of Illustrations
The Bonaparte Family Trees
Introduction
PART ONE
Rise
1 Corsica
2 Revolution
3 Desire
4 Italy
5 Victory
6 Peace
7 Egypt
8 Acre
9 Brumaire
PART TWO
Mastery
10 Consul
11 Marengo
12 Lawgiver
13 Plots
14 Amiens
15 Coronation
16 Austerlitz
17 Jena
18 Blockades
19 Tilsit
20 Iberia
21 Wagram
22 Zenith
PART THREE
Denouement
23 Russia
24 Trapped
25 Retreat
26 Resilience
27 Leipzig
28 Defiance
29 Elba
30 Waterloo
31 St Helena
Conclusion
Illustrations
Envoi
Bibliography
Notes
Acknowledgements
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‘An epic joy… Never before have the scope and sweep of Napoleon’s life been encapsulated so cogently’ Roger Lewis, Daily Mail
‘Magisterial and beautifully written… Napoleon could have few biographers more dedicated to their subject. Not only has Roberts worked his way through Napoleon’s 33,000 extant letters but he has also walked the ground of 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields… What is more, he made the long and still arduous journey to St Helena… The result of these labours is a richly detailed and sure-footed reappraisal of the man, his achievements – and failures – and the extraordinary times in which he lived’ Jeremy Jennings, Standpoint
‘Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer, capable of synthesizing vast amounts of material and rendering it in clear, elegant prose. The result is a thrilling tale of military and political genius, and easily the finest one-volume biography of Napoleon in English’ Michael F. Bishop, Washington Post
‘Masterly… beautifully written and a pleasure to read’ Economist
‘There have been more books written about Napoleon than there have been days since he died. Do we really need another? The answer to that question, at least if the book is by the distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, is an emphatic yes. Napoleon is the most well-rounded and nuanced biography of this astonishing man to be had. In the masterly hands of Andrew Roberts, one of the most extraordinary – and consequential – human beings who has ever lived has been brought to vivid and exemplary life’ John Steele Gordon, Commentary
‘An enthralling account of his rise and fall… Whether or not he was “great” will continue to be debated – I was convinced, just – but there is no doubt that this is a great biography’ Miriam Gross, Evening Standard, Books of the Year
‘Andrew Roberts’s impressive Napoleon the Great stands as a laudatory obelisk to the unknown moody soldier with a craving for suicide who ended the French Revolution, gave France a new constitution and was crowned Emperor. His Napoleon is a protean, sympathetic figure, considerate of his men… and obsessively well read. Preparing to invade England, Napoleon instructed books to be published about Julius Caesar’s successful invasion, referred to Britain as Carthage, and had a medal designed that featured him in naked combat with a merman. On the reverse: ‘Struck in London 1804’” Nicholas Shakespeare, Daily Telegraph, Best Biographies of 2014
‘This book is simply spectacular. Roberts writes beautifully and, aided by meticulous historical research, brings Napoleon alive before the reader, with grapeshot and cannon fire splattering across the page’ Kevin J. Hamilton, Seattle Times
‘The great man has found in Roberts a worthy biographer. He has written a superbly nuanced portrait of a complex, likeable and never less than fascinating character that will stand as the benchmark for a generation’ Saul David, Evening Standard
‘Entertaining, even addictive… Roberts writes with great vigour, style and fluency… whisks the reader along so briskly that you barely question Napoleon’s destiny’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times
‘An epically scaled new biography… Roberts brilliantly conveys the sheer energy and presence of Napoleon the organizational and military whirlwind who, through crisp and incessant questioning, sized up people and problems and got things done.… His dynamism shines in Roberts’s set-piece chapters on major battles like Austerlitz, Jena, and Marengo, turning visionary military maneuvers into politically potent moments’ Duncan Kelly, The New York Times Book Review
‘My non-fiction book of the year is Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon the Great: superb narrative history grounded in new research’ Michael Gove, New Statesman, Books of the Year
‘I like Roberts and as for Napoleon, I cannot get enough of him’ Julian Fellowes, Observer, Books of the Year
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To my siblings, Ashley Gurdon and Matthew and Eliot Roberts
Jacques-Louis David, sketches of Napoleon, 1797. Musee d’Art et d’Histoire, Palais Masséna, Nice. Photograph: Giraudon / Bridgeman Images
Baron Dominique Vivant-Denon, title page of ‘The Description of Egypt’, 1809. Photograph: akg-images / Pietro Baguzzi
Charles-Joseph Minard, Graph to illustrate the successive losses in men of the French army in the Russian Campaign of 1812–13, pub. 1869. Photograph: © Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
Sèvres Manufactory after Antoine Denis Chaudet, Bust of Emperor Napoleon I, 1806. Bibliothèque Marmottan, Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris. Photograph: Giraudon / Bridgeman Images
Having now spent longer researching and writing this book than Napoleon himself spent on St Helena and Elba put together, I’ve collected a disconcertingly large array of people whom I would like to thank for their unfailing generosity, good nature, time and help. They include President Nicolas Sarkozy for his insights into the state of thinking about Napoleon in France today; David Cameron and Rodney Melville for allowing me to research the Napoleon correspondence at Chequers; Xavier Darcos of the Academie Française and Institut de France for introductions in Paris; Mervyn King for his thoughts on French and British debt-financing of the Napoleonic Wars; Carole Aupoix for showing me a louse such as the ones that spread the typhus that devastated Napoleon’s armies in Russia; the late Archduke Otto von Hapsburg for his views on Marie Louise’s ‘déclassé’ marriage to Napoleon; Lady Mary Berry for showing me the chairs used at the Congress of Vienna; Jayne Wrightsman for showing me her collection of Napoleonic book bindings; Robert Pirie for his encouragement; the late Lady Alexandra Dacre for her memories of the Empress Eugénie; Dušan Frýbort at Austerlitz, for letting me fire his Napoleonic musket; Ms Evan Lattimer for allowing me to see what is purported to be Napoleon’s ‘tendon’; Charles-Henry and Jean-Pascal Tranié; Jerry and Jane Del Missier for their wonderful hospitality on Lake Geneva; Nicholas Steed for his reports on Napoleon in Malta; the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon for showing me Napoleon’s chair from Fontainebleau and desk from the Tuileries; Robin Birley for his great generosity; the Countess of Rosebery for showing me the Emperor’s travelling library; Dr Henry Kissinger for his thoughts on the Congress of Vienna; Prof. Charles Esdaile for inviting me to his excellent Napoleon at the Zenith conference at Liverpool University in 2007; Deborah Edlmann; Rurik Ingram; my cousins Philip and Sandra Engelen for putting me up in Cape Town on my St Helena journey (which took me a fortnight, largely by Royal Mail ship); Zac Gertler for his hospitality and generosity in Tel Aviv; Caroline Dalmeny for lending me a lock of Napoleon’s hair, which has sat on my desk throughout, inspiring me, and Baudouin Prot of BNP Paribas for allowing me to visit the room in which Napoleon and Josephine were married. I would also like to apologize profoundly to Jérôme Tréca and the staff of Fontainebleau Palace for setting off the burglar alarms in Napoleon’s throne room no fewer than three times.
A military historian who doesn’t visit battlefields is akin to a detective who doesn’t bother to visit the scene of the crime. In the course of researching this book I have visited fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battlefields, most of them in the company of the distinguished military historian John Lee. It has been one of the greatest pleasures of writing this book to have walked with John over the ground of Montenotte, Mondovi, Lodi, Mantua, Arcole, Castiglione, Rivoli, Rovereto, Dego, Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Abensberg, Landshut, Eggmühl, Ratisbon, Aspern-Essling, Wagram, Maloyaroslavets, Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden, Leipzig, Reichenbach, Brienne, La Rothière, Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Vauchamps, Montereau, Craonne, Lâon, Reims, Arcis-sur-Arbe and St-Dizier. John’s advice and insights in our blizzards of emails have been sans pareil, his battle-notes from Napoleon’s campaigns have proved completely invaluable, and his friendship is a joy. I cannot thank him enough, as well as his wife Celia, who has put up with him coming battlefielding with me so very often.
In the sixty-nine archives, libraries, museums and research institutes that I’ve visited in fifteen countries during the course of my researches, I’ve met with nothing but helpfulness and friendliness, and I would in particular like to thank:
France: Sacha Topalovich and Florence Tarneaud at the Archives Nationales, Paris; Y. Bamratta and Laurence Le Bras at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s Tolbiac and Richelieu sites respectively; Anne Georgeon-Liskenne at the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, La Courneuve; Claude Ponnou and Thisio Bernard at the Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes; Sylvie Biet and Danièle Chartier at the Bibliothèque Thiers; Gérard Leyris at the Musée Carnavalet; the British ambassador to Paris, Sir Peter Westmacott, and his butler, Ben Newick, for showing me around Pauline Borghese’s house in Paris, now the British Embassy; Susanne Wasum-Rainer, the German ambassador to Paris, for showing me around her residence, l’Hôtel de Beauharnais, Josephine’s immaculate present to her son Eugène; Léonore Losserand at St-Joseph-des-Carmes; David Demangeot, curator at the former palace of St-Cloud; Aurore Lacoste de Laval at the École Militaire; Christopher Palmer, First Secretary at the US Embassy in Paris, and Mrs Robin Smith, the Directrice of the Marshall Center at the Hôtel Talleyrand; Angelique Duc at the Musée Napoléon de Brienne-le-Château; Fanny de Jubecourt at Les Invalides and the Musée de l’Armée; Dr Thierry Lentz and Prof. Peter Hicks for being so welcoming at the superb Fondation Napoléon; Alain Pougetoux at the Château de Malmaison; Xavier Cayon at the Conseil d’État in the Palais-Royal (formerly the Tribunate); Mme Marianne Lambert at Marshal Lannes’ Château de Maisons-Laffitte; M and Mme Benoit D’Abonville; Quentin Aymonier at the Fort de Joux in the Jura; my son Henry and daughter Cassia for accompanying me to Corsica; the staffs of the Palais et Musée de la Légion d’Honneur, Paris; the Musée de la Préfecture de Police, Paris; the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur at St-Denis; the Panthéon, and the Musée Fesch and the Musée National de la Maison Bonaparte in Ajaccio, Corsica.
Russia: Alexander Suhanov and Elvira Chulanova of the State Museum of Borodino for showing me around the battlefield of Borodino; Oleg Aleksandrov of Three Whales Tours for taking me to the battlefield of Maloyaroslavets; Maciej Morawski of City Events for taking me to the battlefields of Eylau and Friedland in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad; Konstantin Nazarov at the Maloyaroslavets Military History Museum; Alexandr Panchenko of the Bagrationovsk Historical Museum on the Eylau battlefield; Valery Shabanov and Vladimir Ukievich Katz of the Russian State Military Historical Archive in Moscow, and Marina Zboevskaya of the Borodino Panorama Museum in Moscow.
Belarus: Prof. Igor Groutso for showing me the battlefield of the Berezina river, and Rakhovich Natalya Stepanovna of the Borisov Combined Museum.
Israel: Dr Eado Hecht for showing me the battlefields of Kakun, Jaffa and Mount Thabor, and Dr Alon Keblanoff for showing me the siege sites of Acre; Prof. Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University, and Liat Margolit at the Tel Dor Archaeological Museum.
St Helena: Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, the supremely diligent French Honorary Consul and Conservator at Longwood for my hugely enjoyable days there; Aron Legg for showing me Mount Pleasant, Diana’s Peak, Prosperous Bay, The Briars, Sandy Bay and Jamestown, and Andrew Wells, the former Chief Secretary of St Helena.
Belgium: Ian Fletcher and Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, who showed me Waterloo; Benoît Histace, President of the Museum of the Battle of Ligny, who took me around the battlefield of Ligny, and Count François and Countess Susanne Cornet d’Elzius, the owners of La Haie Sainte.
Great Britain: Lucy McCann at the Rhodes House Library, Oxford; Leigh McKiernan at the Special Collections Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Prof. Nick Mayhew of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Allen Packwood at the Churchill Archives, Cambridge; Josephine Oxley at Apsley House; Paul Roberts at the British Museum; Katy Canales and Pim Dodd at the National Army Museum; Hilary Burton and John Rochester at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea; Richard Daniels at the London College of Communication; Richard Tennant of the British Commission for Military History, and the staffs of the Royal Navy Museum at Portsmouth, the British Library and the London Library.
Italy: Lario Zerbini at the Rivoli Museum; my daughter Cassia for accompanying me to Elba; Nello Anselmi at the Santuario della Madonna del Monte at Marciana, Elba; Elisabetta Lalatta of the Fondazione Serbelloni at the Palazzo Serbelloni in Milan; Riccardo Bianceli at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and the staffs of the Museo Napoleonico in Rome, the Marengo Museum at Spinetta Marengo, the Villa Reale at Monza, and the Villa di San Martino, Elba.
The Czech Republic: Simona Lipovska of the Cairn of Peace Memorial Museum and Jana Slukova of Slavkov Castle at Austerlitz.
Austria: Helmut Tiller of the Aspern and Essling Museums; Rupert Derbic of the Wagram Museum, and the staffs at Schönbrunn Palace and the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum in Vienna.
Portugal: Mark Crathorne and Luiz Saldanha Lopes for showing me around Forts 40, 41, 42, 95 of the Lines of Torres Vedras; and the staff of the Military Museum of Lisbon.
Germany: The staffs of the Bavarian Army Museum at Ingolstadt, the 1806 Museum at JenaCospeda, and the Torhaus Museum in Markkleeberg on the Leipzig battlefield.
The United States: Jay Barksdale of the Allen Room and Elizabeth Denlinger of the Pforzheimer Room at the New York Public Library; Declan Kiely at the Pierpont Morgan Library; Kathryn James at the Beinecke Library and Steve Ross at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale; Elaine Engst and Laurent Ferri at the Carl A. Kroch Library’s Manuscript Collections at Cornell University; the Merrill family, who so generously funded my visiting professorship at Cornell; Prof. Barry and Dr Marcia Strauss at Cornell for their delightful hospitality and my students there who came up with their own reasons for why Napoleon invaded Russia; Prof. Rafe Blaufarb, Director of the Institute on Napoleon and the French Revolution, for making my stay at Florida State University so enjoyable; Eric Robinson of the New-York Historical Society Library; Katie McCormick at the Robert Manning Strozier Library at Florida State University Special Collections; Elisabeth Fairman at the Yale Center for British Art; Dr Robert Pickering, Curator of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Dr William J. Lademan, Director of the Wargaming Division at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
Sweden: Aviva Cohen-Silber for showing me the Bernadotte Rooms at the Royal Palace in Stockholm.
Switzerland: Paola Gianoli Tuena at the Château Le Coppet on Lake Geneva.
Canada: Bruce McNiven for showing me around the Napoleon galleries at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
I would also like to thank Josh Sutton, Charlie Mitchell, Katie Russell and especially the indefatigable Gilles Vauclair for their historical research, as well as Julie di Filippo for German translations, Beata Widulinska for Polish, Timothy Chapman for Spanish, Eado Hecht for Hebrew, Dr Galina Babkova for Russian, and Annaliese Ellidge, Helena Fosh, Maxine Harfield-Neyrand, Gilles Vauclair and Carole Aupoix for French. Maxine was particularly encouraging and helpful in negotiating through the sometimes arcane byways of five Parisian research institutions.
This book was written while I was filming a BBC TV documentary series about Napoleon, and I would like to thank David Notman-Watt, Simon Shaps, David Barrie, Anna Dangoor, Patrick Duval and Tony Burke for making the whole process so enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Since Napoleon’s death has become – needlessly in my view – so controversial, I took expert medical advice about the Emperor’s death from Dr Tim Barrie, Prof. Ira Jacobsen of Cornell, Dr Albert Knapp, Dr Robert Krasner, Dr Archana Vats, Dr James Le Fanu, Dr Pamela Yablon, Dr Guy O’Keefe and Dr Michael Crumplin, to whom I extend my thanks. I should also like to thank Dr Frank Reznek for his diagnosis on Napoleon’s dental problems on St Helena.
For reading my manuscript and their invaluable suggestions for its improvement, I would like to thank Helena Fosh, Sudhir Hazareesingh, John Lee, Stephen Parker, Jürgen Sacht and Gilles Vauclair.
My agent Georgina Capel of Capel & Land and publishers Stuart Proffitt and Joy de Menil of Penguin have been their usual perfect models of efficiency, professionalism and charm, as were my inspired copy-editors Peter James and Charlotte Ridings. The painstaking work that Stuart and Joy put into this book improved it enormously, and I really cannot thank them enough for it. I am very grateful also to Richard Duguid, Imogen Scott and Lisa Simmonds of Penguin. Cecilia Mackay researched the illustrations with resourcefulness and flair.
My fabulous wife Susan Gilchrist has examined guillotine blades with me, counted the skulls of massacred monks in the crypt of the church where Josephine was imprisoned, driven with me along the Route Napoléon, and went to the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo with me, not just for its inherent architectural and cultural interest, but because it was where the 1798 revolt began and ended. I couldn’t have written this book without her constant love and support; she’s my Josephine, Marie Louise and Marie Walewska all rolled into one.
This book is dedicated to my siblings Ashley Gurdon and Matthew and Eliot Roberts, for putting up with their know-all big brother for so long and so graciously.
Andrew Roberts
2, rue Augereau, Paris
www.andrew-roberts.net
In October 1944, just as the Netherlands was being liberated from the Nazis, the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl completed one of the most original books of the many tens of thousands about Napoleon which have appeared over the past 215 years. Its originality lay not in Geyl’s own view of Napoleon (though the book certainly made plain what he thought of him) but in its recounting of the views of others, and in the way it traced the different phases of Napoleon’s reputation between 1815 and his own time. Because Napoleon was such a gigantic figure in the political as well as the historical landscape throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, both romanticized and vilified to a high degree, the views which Geyl distilled were (unsurprisingly) often diametrically opposed to each other, generally reflecting their authors’ own political stances. After Geyl wrote – also unsurprisingly, but I believe misleadingly – the experience of Europe during the Second World War coloured many interpretations of events on the continent during Napoleon’s era, and still sometimes casts a shadow over them.
In writing this book, I have tried not to be overly influenced by previous interpretations, but to go back so far as possible to Napoleon’s own words and the words of those who knew him personally. Of course, visceral disagreement about him extends there too: almost all the contemporary accounts are heavily slanted according to the situation their authors had occupied during Napoleon’s lifetime or afterwards. For those writing immediately after his abdication, the lure of employment or a pension, or merely the right to publish under the Bourbons, wrecked objectivity in dozens of cases. For example, the letters of Claire de Rémusat to her husband, one of Napoleon’s courtiers, between 1804 and 1813 were affectionate about the Emperor, but by 1818 her memoirs painted him as a monster ‘incapable of generosity’ who, moreover, had ‘a satanic smile’. What happened in between was that her husband wanted a job as the prefect of a department from the Bourbons. She had burned her contemporaneous notes in 1815, and tried to resuscitate what Chateaubriand called her ‘memories of memories’.
Or again: much of our received understanding of Napoleon has been coloured by the highly dubious memoirs written by his former classmate Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne. Appointed Napoleon’s private secretary during the negotiations with Austria in Leoben in 1797, Bourrienne was then no longer permitted to use the familiar ‘tu’ with Napoleon, which he said was ‘an easy sacrifice’ for the honour of becoming head of his cabinet (private office), but Napoleon had to sack him twice for corruption and they parted on bad terms. His memoirs have been treated as being generally objective by historians, even though they were actually written by (among others) the fantasist Charles Maxime de Villemarest. In 1830 a two-volume book totalling eight hundred pages was published by people who knew Napoleon well, including his brother Joseph, which forensically demolished scores of Bourrienne’s claims. I have used Bourrienne sceptically, and only to illustrate my accounts of occasions when he was known to have been personally present.
Such contemporary ‘sources’ which need to be treated with caution are everywhere in the Napoleonic canon. The Comte de Montholon, who was with Napoleon on St Helena, wrote his supposed ‘narrative’ of his time on the island twenty years later, without contemporaneous notes, and his memoirs were ghosted by the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who also ghosted those of Napoleon’s favourite actor Talma. Laure d’Abrantès was banned from Paris by Napoleon in 1813, and by the time her memoirs appeared in the 1830s she was an opium addict who nonetheless claimed to have remembered verbatim long, intimate conversations with the Emperor. Several of her eighteen volumes of memoirs were ghosted by Balzac and written to stave off creditors. Those of Napoleon’s police chief Fouché were actually written by the hack-writer Alphonse de Beauchamp; those of one of Napoleon’s favourite mistresses, Mademoiselle George, were also drawn up by a ghost-writer, but she found them so boring that she sexed them up, with stories of Napoleon shoving wads of banknotes down her corset.
In the period before copyright laws, people could even publish memoirs that were supposedly written by living participants such as Joseph Bonaparte, Marshal Marmont and Napoleon’s foreign minister Armand de Caulaincourt without their having any legal recourse. A fraud called Charlotte de Sor published what she claimed were Caulaincourt’s memoirs in 1837 on the basis of having briefly met him in 1826 (his real memoirs weren’t published until 1934). Although the Napoleonic sections of Talleyrand’s memoirs were written by him in the 1820s, they were extensively rewritten in the 1860s by the profoundly anti-Napoleonic Adolphe de Bacourt. Prince Metternich’s memoirs were ghosted too, as well as being immensely self-serving; those of Paul Barras, who at one time was Josephine’s lover, are a monument to malice, self-pity and would-be revenge against Napoleon. The man Napoleon overthrew in the Brumaire coup, Louis Gohier, promised in the introduction to his memoirs that he was ‘an impartial writer’ who would ‘give full justice to Napoleon’, yet they are in fact little more than two volumes of bitter ranting. Neither the minister Lazare Carnot nor Marshal Grouchy wrote their own memoirs either, but had them drawn up from documents they left, some contemporaneous, others not. The diplomat André-François Miot de Melito’s so-called memoirs were written by his son-in-law over half a century after the events they describe.
Nonetheless, because so many people wanted to record their impressions of this extraordinary man, there are also plenty of memoirs from people close to Napoleon who kept contemporaneous notes and didn’t decry him so that they could find jobs under the incoming regime or exaggerate their intimacy with him in order to make money. The credibility of the Marquis de Caulaincourt’s accounts of 1812–14, of Henri Bertrand’s diary of events on St Helena and of Cambacérès’ memoirs, for example, is greatly enhanced by the fact that they were not written for immediate publication, only emerging in the 1930s, 1950s and 1970s respectively. The memoirs of the little-known Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort, who as prefect of Napoleon’s palace was closer to him than Bourrienne, were bravely published during the Bourbon period, and equally balanced pictures were drawn by Napoleon’s two private secretaries after Bourrienne, namely Claude-François de Méneval and Agathon Fain. Of course they all need to be checked against what we know from other sources, and against each other, but once that is done they tend to present a more coherent and credible portrait of the Emperor than the ‘Black Legend’ painted by his enemies and their ghost-writers soon after his death.
In threading a way through this labyrinth, the biographer of Napoleon writing in 2014 has one tremendous advantage over those of all earlier generations: since 2004, the Fondation Napoléon in Paris has been superbly editing and publishing Napoleon’s 33,000 extant letters, as many as a third of which have not been published before or which
Two hundred years after his defeat at the battle of Waterloo, every aspect of Napoleon’s life has now been documented, explored and picked over in the most astonishing detail. On Thursday, July 19, 1804, for example, he stopped for a cup of milky coffee at a blacksmith’s house near Buigny-St-Maclou in Picardie and distributed some gold coins to its surprised and delighted inhabitants. A fifteen-page treatise has been written about that event alone. Yet the extreme scrutiny and avalanche of facts about him has not led to general agreement about his personality, policies, motives or even his achievements. My book clearly stands in a long tradition of argument about Napoleon, which began, as I recount in Chapter 1, before he was thirty, when the first biography of him was published. In 1817 the Swiss historian Frédéric Lullin de Châteauvieux wrote that ‘With cyclonic intensity he swept away the petrified barriers to progress and achieved more for the race than the 800 years of the Habsburgs or the 600 years of Bourbon rule.’ In 1818 Madame de Staël posthumously called him a ‘Condottiere without manners, without fatherland, without morality, an oriental despot, a new Attila, a warrior who knew only how to corrupt and annihilate’. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest literary figure, who met Napoleon in 1808, described him as being ‘in a permanent state of enlightenment’. Was he a destroyer or an architect? A liberator or a tyrant? A statesman or an adventurer? ‘The argument goes on,’ said Geyl in the last sentence of his book. At the end of mine, I hope that the reader will be in no doubt why I have called it Napoleon the Great.