There is a long history of determined Napoleon denigration and of contrasting Napoleon-worship, both in his adopted country, France, and in his arch-enemy, England. During his lifetime, Hazlitt and Byron were admirers, both of them seeing him as a kind of benevolent and enlightened Caesar, while conservatives portrayed him as a virtual Antichrist, the great threat to Europe's liberties and an enemy of religion, morality and hereditary monarchy. Both cases have been pleaded with passion, but a balanced viewpoint is usually much harder to find. Robert Asprey sometimes writes rather awkwardly, yet his approach is consistently open-minded and non-partisan (the fact that he is American may be a factor in this).
Asprey's first volume traced the obscure young Corsican's rapid rise to military command in the turmoil following the French Revolution, the brilliant campaign against the Austrians in Italy, his assumption of power as First Consul, his coronation as Emperor (an elective one, incidentally) and his victory at Austerlitz in 1805, which in several respects marked his apex.
There he stopped, and there this second volume opens, on the frosty Moravian battlefield strewn with corpses. The "Battle of the Three Emperors" had almost smashed imperial Austria and driven back Czarist Russia, making Napoleon virtually the arbiter of Central Europe. The ensuing negotiations bore down terribly hard on the Habsburg ruler and his hereditary lands, but Napoleon was out to revenge himself for what he saw as Vienna's duplicity and stab in the back. As a result, he made one of those punitive peace treaties which recur in his career, and which tended to recoil on him eventually.
These years were probably his most triumphal, with his chief opponents cowed excepting England, and with the Low Countries and Switzerland reduced to little more than client states. The "new Charlemagne" was hugely popular in France, as the ruler who had restored its primacy and revenged past defeats, and the Confederation of the Rhine which he set up marked the spread of French ideas abroad and the end of feudalism in Germany. Paris was on its way to becoming the most splendid capital in Europe, great public works and projects were launched all over France, while the Emperor's Continental System, designed to shut out England's ships and ruin her trade, was enforced on all conquered or allied nations.
Reactionary Prussia, moving belatedly and clumsily against Napoleonic hegemony, was quickly beaten at Jena and Auerstadt, while the crushing victory at Friedland forced the Russian Czar into half-reluctant, half-dazzled alliance.
It was an extraordinary achievement inside a few years, one of the greatest in history, but the foundations were insecure. Military conquest meant unavoidably that great numbers of French troops had to be maintained abroad, putting a huge financial burden both on France's exchequer and on the conquered nations. The Continental System, from the start, did not work and perhaps could never have worked, given that it damaged Continental trade almost as much as England's; so smuggling and evasion became endemic, and France itself was a frequent offender.
Meanwhile, England's enmity was active and relentless, and her huge fleet meant that Napoleon could not challenge her effectively at sea - especially since the Revolution had ruined the French Navy, traditionally an aristocratic preserve. But above all, the New Charlemagne could not give either France or Europe any kind of lasting peace, since British gold was always ready to finance yet another coalition against him.
Austria rose again and was beaten at Wagram, though not before the Archduke Charles had won a victory at Aspern-Essling which claimed the life of one of France's finest fighting soldiers and the Emperor's close friend, Marshal Lannes. Even Napoleon's marriage to an Austrian archduchess, Marie-Louise (he had divorced the childless Josephine) did not guarantee him the long-term friendship of the Habsburgs or their devious chief minister, Metternich.
Imperial Russia, losing trade and money through the Continental System, drifted gradually into hostility, at first covert and later overt. And worst of all, Napoleon interfered in Spain, which he should have left alone, and placed his incapable brother Joseph on the throne there, instead of using the useless Spanish Bourbons as client kings. The "Spanish Ulcer" relentlessly consumed men and money, especially when Wellington and his English force came to the aid of native resistance and began beating French armies in the field. .
The crowning disaster was the 1812 invasion of Russia, which is too familiar to need description. The legend of invulnerability was now gone, French manpower was short, and, almost as significant, Europe had been swept almost bare of horses, so that at Lutzen and Bautzen the Emperor could not clinch his victories with cavalry.
Defeat followed at Leipzig, the gigantic "battle of the Nations", and the remarkable campaign which Napoleon fought to keep France free from Allied invasion merely postponed the inevitable.
In Asprey's words, he had failed to recognise "that his once omnipotent and beautiful army had weakened and withered into halting old age, that the political elixir which he had brewed to save Europe from itself had turned poisonously bitter and impotent". With most of Europe ranged against him, and Talleyrand and Fouche intriguing against him at home, he abdicated in favour of his little son and went into exile at Elba. The Hundred Days and Waterloo formed little more than a dramatic postscript; since history had by then declared irrevocably against him. He never saw his wife and child again.
Andrew Roberts' highly interesting book deals with the rivalry of Napoleon and England's best field commander, the Irish-born Wellington. The two men were of an age, both born in 1769.
They never encountered each other personally and met in battle only once, at Waterloo in 1815, where the Prussians under Blucher arrived in time to save the battered English-Dutch-Belgian army from probable defeat. Otherwise, Wellington had made his reputation in Spain, and before that in India, winning a reputation as an outstanding organiser, a shrewd infantry tactician, a harsh disciplinarian and a man of iron will and considerable ruthlessness. There is little point in comparing the two men as soldiers, since Wellington never functioned as a commander-in-chief of great armies. Even his victories in Spain against a series of French marshals have often been overblown - Talavera, for instance, was little more than a drawn battle, Busaco was essentially a delaying action, Albuera bloody and indecisive. Nevertheless, Wellington did beat the highly regarded Marshal Marmont very thoroughly at Salamanca, and at Vittoria he routed Napoleon's unmilitary brother Joseph, a battle which virtually finished French power in Spain. And though he began ineptly in the Waterloo campaign, his steadiness and tactical resource saw him through on the decisive day, helped greatly by the blunders of Ney and the absence of Grouchy.
Though it is often claimed that Napoleon despised and underrated Wellington, Roberts shows that this was not so and that the two men in fact had considerable respect for one another militarily. Napoleon, however, later grew embittered by his treatment on St Helena and blamed Wellington for sending him there, though in fact the Duke had nothing to do with it, nor with the choice of Napoleon's jailer, the stupid and narrow-minded Sir Hudson Lowe.
However, the two great soldiers were born to misunderstand and dislike each other as individuals and Wellington, the aristocratic snob and reactionary, had decided from early on that Napoleon was "no gentleman". Yet in the end, the Ancien Regime which Wellington shored up lasted barely another generation, while today Napoleon's dream of a united Europe has become a political reality..
The final years of exile on St Helena, from 1815 to 1821, have been described many times and it cannot be said that Frank Giles supplies much that is new. That Napoleon was badly and humiliatingly treated there seems quite unarguable, while the bickering and faction-fighting of his own small court added to his trials. His own health, too, was declining rapidly. However, much of the book is taken up with the Emperor's posthumous cult and how he was judged over many years by British opinion, which makes for stimulating reading. Meanwhile, it is at least good to know that the odious Lowe ended up unwanted, unemployed and unemployable - belated justice.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic