I've just finished reading "To Befriend an Emperor" by Betsy Balcombe, and prior to that I read "Billy Ruffian" by David Cordingly. The very end of the latter book deals with Napoleon's surrender to the captain of HMS Bellerophon and the former book deals with his interactions with a teenage girl when he was escorted to St. Helena for his second exile. The transition of his personality is absolutely unbelievable. In just four months he went to commanding the French in one of the most significant battles in history up to that point, to playing Blind Man's Bluff with Betsy and her sister, to the bafflement of the generals who chose to share his exile.
Napoleon has always struck me as somebody who chided excellence, because nobody was as excellent as him. Furthermore he conversed with private soldiers and other non-entities and showed interest in their dreams and accomplishments because they were so far beneath him that they couldn't possibly compete with him. In his time Napoleon brought the greatest generals and monarchs to their knees. In 1807 he humiliated Tsar Alexander and Emperor Frederick William III and forced them to sign his treaty of Tilsit commanding them to abide by his Continental System.
His own marshals, who were the cream of an army comprised of a million soldiers, he rarely had complimentary words for. He knew that most of what they did he could have done better if only he could replicate himself. On Marshal Murat, the swash-buckling cavalry general he said, "In battle he was perhaps the bravest man in the world; left to himself, he was an imbecile without judgment." To Marshal Soult and his other generals before the battle of Waterloo he ironically uttered, "Just because you have all been beaten by Wellington, you think he's a good general. I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad troops, and this affair is nothing more than eating breakfast." When Marshal Massena refused to join him in the one hundred days, when next Napoleon saw him he challenged him on whether Massena would have dared obey the king and gone to war against Napoleon. Even Marshal Ney, veteran of 30 years of war, was destroyed by Napoleon's ire and was never the same again. He famously promised to bring Napoleon to Paris "in an iron cage", and when approaching Napoleon's army declared of his men "They shall fight; I will begin the action myself, and run my sword to the hilt in the breast of the first who hesitates to follow my example." The closer he came to his former commander, the more hesitant he himself became. He finally agreed to side with the Emperor, on the condition that Napoleon no longer seek war. But he had already betrayed too much weakness and Napoleon sent him away and assumed command of Ney's army. I believe this to be the moment that Ney was finally mentally defeated, and paved the way for his erratic performance at Waterloo, his careless attempts to escape capture afterwards and his imminent execution.
There are many other quotes of Napoleon that suggest him to be extremely intolerant of incompetence, which he thought to affect the whole world, and suggest him to have been especially arrogant and horribly aggressive in everything he did:
“An order that can be misunderstood, will be misunderstood.”
“He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
“I have never found the limit of my capacity for work.”
“We walk faster when we walk alone.”
“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”
“Impossible is a word to be found only in the dictionary of fools.”
“Friendship is only a word, I care for nobody.”
“Circumstances? I make circumstances!”
“Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
After the Battle of Waterloo he appears to have undergone a remarkable change. he marched with his generals and a few loyal soldiers through France, not knowing what to do next. His army was completely routed and the Prussians had captured many and were marching on Paris. His advisors begged him to try to escape at the port of Rochefort but he insisted he should wait a little longer. The Bellerophon, and two British sloops were guarding the harbour, but it is thought he could have easily evaded them. Then his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, and probably the next most wanted in the family, visited him at Rochefort and tried to persuade Napoleon to go with him to America. Napoleon refused, Joseph escaped and lived without incident in New York for the next 20 years. Napoleon decided to surrender to the British, and naively expected to be given political exile in Britain like his brother Lucien had been given years before. His interactions with the officers and crew of the Bellerophon, who were in awe of the most famous and previously most powerful person in the world, are quite comical. He watched them perform a play and was amused at the larger men wearing women's clothing. He must have wondered how these cross-dressing buffoons could comprise the best sailors in the world.
Furthermore, there is a definite change in Napoleon's comments about Britain. Previously he had been known to call them "Perfidious Albion" and had mocked his generals in the Peninsular War for being so horrendous as to lose to the British. Now he said to the ship's crew, "You have the honour of belonging to the bravest and most fortunate nation in the world", and referring to Britain as "the most generous of my enemies." Possibly these compliments were merely designed to incite mercy in the British who he saw as his only hope for a peaceful retirement. Certainly this theory is consistent with his previous quote, “I would kiss a man's arse if I needed him.” When the Bellerophon docked at Torbay Napoleon would come out of his quarters every day and wave at the crowd who had encircled the ship in little boats just to see the former Emperor. He would look at the crowd through his telescope and proclaimed how beautiful the English women were. He didn't seem to view his defeat as a humiliation, but rather the beginning of a new stage in his life. A truly remorseful and bitter person would have shut themselves away from the baying crowds and simply refused to converse with those who had been his enemies. At the news that he was to be exiled on St. Helena he said:
"I am come here voluntarily to throw myself on the hospitality of your nation, and to claim the rights of hospitality. I am not a prisoner of war. If I were a prisoner of war, you would be obliged to treat me according to the law of nations. But I am come to this country a passenger on board one of your ships of war, after a previous negotiation with the commander"
"What danger could result from my living as a private person in the heart of England under surveillance, and restricted in any way the Government might imagine necessary?"
I'm trying to make allowances for hindsight, but it just seems plain foolish that he would be allowed the same treatment as his harmless brother. Some of the British estimated that Napoleon had caused the death of a person for every minute he had reigned in France, which considering that he reigned for about 15 years is a lot of bloodshed he was responsible for. For a man who had proclaimed that "Death is nothing. But to live defeated and without glory, is to die every day", the prospect of living in a cottage on an intolerably hot island with nothing to do and nobody to see and little news of the outside world was his idea of Hell. Even if he could never be allowed any of his previous power he wanted to at least be some way involved in the world.
When he arrived at St. Helena he commented that “It is not an attractive place. I should have done better to remain in Egypt. By now, I should be Emperor of all the East.” It seems that he was resigned to his fate, and intended to adapt to his new life. On his first day on the island he was introduced to the Balcombe family who he was to live with until his cottage had finished being constructed. He and Betsy, who was 13 when he first met her, began an unlikely friendship, playing childish games and pranks on each other. Before they met, Betsy had proclaimed that she deeply feared Napoleon, for all British children had been taught that Napoleon was a horrible monster who would rather eat them than greet them. On first meeting her he quizzed her on European capitals. When she answered "Petersberg, formerly Moscow" as the capital of Russia, Napoleon asked her, "Who burned Moscow?" It's generally accepted that Moscow was burned by Russians while Napoleon occupied it, in order to diminish any resources he might procure there, but when Betsy proffered the Russians as the arsonists, Napoleon replied, "You know very well that it was I who burnt it." Later she tells us that one day a much younger girl, Miss Legg, was visiting the Balcombe household and was sitting in the garden. Betsy came outside and told her that Napoleon was about to come down the garden path. Miss Legg began trembling and crying at the prospect of meeting the monster, and Betsy went inside to tell Napoleon of her fears. Napoleon then decided to come running out howling at her and making scary faces, which made the girl hysterical and left Napoleon in fits of laughter.
Napoleon used to joke to her that she should marry the son of one of his generals, Les Cases, which infuriated her. One day she decided to get revenge on him, when she, her sister, young Les Cases, old Les Cases and Napoleon were walking in single file along a steep narrow path. She pushed her sister hard until Les Cases ingloriously pushed into Napoleon causing him to slip. At the disgust of such a dishonourable attack on the Emperor, Les Cases pushed Betsy against the wall hurting her.
"`Oh sir! He has hurt me!' `Never mind', replied the Emperor, 'do not cry - I will hold him while you punish him.' And a good punishing he got; I boxed the little man's ears until he begged for mercy; but I would show him none; and at length Napoleon let him go, telling him to run, and that if he could not run faster than I, he deserved to be beaten again. He immediately started off as fast as he could, and I after him, Napoleon clapping his hands and laughing immoderately at our race round the lawn. Les Cases never liked me after this adventure, and used to call me a rude hoyden."
Another time they were playing whist, and Betsy's younger brother took a card representing a Mogul emperor and said "This is you, Bony". Napoleon couldn't understand what was meant by "Bony", and one of his followers translated it as meaning "thin", to which Napoleon laughed and said "I am not at all bony".
These anecdotes are all quite entertaining, but we mustn't distinguish the playful and friendly conversationalist with the violent oppressor of nations. They are the same person. Betsy once asked him about a famous story involving him. In Jaffa he was alleged to have killed hundreds of wounded French soldiers who were too ill to march. Napoleon replied that he had wanted to kill them with opiates, because they would not have lived a day and the Turks would have tortured them when they found them. His Surgeon-general refused to kill them so Napoleon ended up ordering a rearguard to defend them until they had died. But Napoleon clearly didn't feel like telling her about the surrendered inhabitants of Jaffa he had executed. Betsy says of this, and other cruel acts attributed to Napoleon:
"It is true that this dreadful deed will always remain a deep stain upon Napoleon's character, but it would be uncharitable to view it as the indulgence of an innate love of cruelty, for nothing in Bonaparte's history shows the existence of such a vice. It was one of the numerous and sad results of boundless ambition, united to unlimited power. In aiming at gigantic undertakings, he forgot to calculate the waste of human life which the execution of his projects necessarily involved."
This, I think, is a good assessment of Napoleon. In his own words, “War must be made as intense and awful as possible in order to make it short, and thus to diminish its horrors.”
It's also worth mentioning that various authors have written about suspected plots to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and place him on a South American throne. Some people even thought that he might establish a great South American empire, and Lord Cochrane thought the same, seeing as he attempted to spring the former Emperor from St. Helena but was too late as Napoleon was already dead. Reading these recent works I'm inclined to think that Napoleon never considered his escape possible, or even wanted to set up a new empire. He wanted a peaceful retirement and enjoyed small pleasures. He also suffered small annoyances very severely. The governor of the island infuriated him by having him escorted around the island by armed guards, and even refused permission to the only local piano-tuner to come and fix Napoleon's piano.
In the end it is middle age that resulted in Napoleon's downfall. After the battle of Austerlitz in 1805 he proclaimed “We are granted only a limited time for making war; I give myself another six years, after which even I ought to come to a stop.” Had he heeded his own advice his name might very well still be associated with a modern French Empire, as his troubles really began in 1812 with his disastrous invasion of Russia. On St. Helena he used to re-enact his past battles with chess pieces to determine how they would have developed had he tried something else. I wouldn't say he was consumed with regret, but to some extent he knew that he could have shaped the world much differently.
“What I did is immense. What I had decided to do, and what I had projected were still more so.”
