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Dan Snow's History Hit
The Rise of Napoleon
00:42:05
Dan traces the rise of Napoleon during the French Revolution
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- [00:01]
Dan Snow
Hi, I'm Dan Snow and if you would like Dan Snow's History Hit ad free, get early access and bonus episodes. Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
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- [01:18]
Dan Snow
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- [01:25]
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We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years. But the good news is we don't have to figure out life all alone. I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of ted's how to Be a Better Human podcast and our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life. Actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day to day better. Whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house, each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life's ups and downs. Find how to be a better human wherever you're listening to this.
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- [02:06]
Dan Snow
Acast.com hi folks. Welcome down to knows. History hits. It's a new year. New content hunt. We're all doing it. We all want a little something to help us get a bit smarter. Entertain us. Make us better informed. Particularly if you live in northern climes like I do and you really need a bit of help getting through these months. The long commute and the dark. The cold, the wet. I'm here to share with you an episode that I was lucky enough to take part in. It's part of an excellent history podcast. It's hosted by history's very own Matt Lewis. It's called Echoes of History and Matt investigates the historical setting of the Assassin's Creed games. Now, if you're not a gamer, don't worry. This is not a podcast about gaming. It's a podcast about history, the history that has inspired some of those iconic games. Each Assassin's Creed is set in a historical world that the player explores through gameplay. A famous example, one game was set in ancient Greece in during the Peloponnesian wars. Another in Viking Age Britain and Ireland. Another in the era of the Samurai in medieval Japan. So Echoes of History podcast delves into the true history behind these game settings. A few weeks back, I got the call up. I joined Matt for their series on Assassin's Creed Unity, which puts players through the melee of the events of the French Revolution to discuss the man who witnessed so much, played his part in it, and would emerge as its ultimate beneficiary. The man who changed Europe, the man who crowned himself Emperor of France and who's divided us into armies of critics and admirers ever since. The master of the battlefield, the high priest of reformers. It is, of course, Napoleon Bonaparte. So we thought we'd share on this feed the episode in which I was a guest on Echoes of History with Matt Lewis when I was talking all about the life, the times and the contradictions of Napoleon. Enjoy.
- [03:55]
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T minus 10 atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
- [03:58]
Dan Snow
God save the King.
- [04:00]
Matt Lewis
No black white unity till there is first some black unity.
- [04:04]
Dan Snow
Never to go to war with one another again.
- [04:07]
Matt Lewis
And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower. The streets of Paris are alive with the adrenaline of insurrection. A sight you never dared imagine, even in your wildest dreams meets your eyes. Ordinary men and women and children march alongside columns of the National Guard. An alliance of regular bluecoats with their muskets and cannon, and civilians with pikes and cudgels. They excitedly bellow over the beat of the marching drum. Vive la nation. The seeds for this uprising were planted long ago. After generations of feudalism, years of starvation, and months of pretending to respect the people. With his national assemblies, King Louis XVI has now crossed the final line in the sand. Enough wars, enough inequality. The people are marching to take control. Their destination is the same as yours, the Tuileries palace. But your purpose is very different from theirs. On a secret mission, you rush ahead of the angry crowd as fast and as stealthily as you can. You steal through the streets of the city until you reach the royal residence. If you had the time, you would pause to marvel at the sheer grandeur of the imperial palace, expanded and enhanced over centuries. It's reached its zenith under Louis xvi, and you might suspect it will never be this immense or spectacular again. There don't seem to be any guards to prevent your entry. They're busy preparing for the onslaught of their countrymen. Nevertheless, you sneak to a less observed facade of the building and jimmy a window to climb inside within. If you had time to take it in, you'd be gobsmacked at the luxury that surrounds you. But there's no time to waste. You can hear the rebels have arrived outside the palace. Already. The clamors to open fire overwhelm the calls for peaceful surrender. Tonight there will be violence. You hurry through the seemingly endless rooms of gold and alabaster and silk until you reach the King's quarters and his private study. The object you seek is somewhere within. You open the door, ready to grab the item and escape, only to find the business end of a pistol aimed straight at your head. You freeze. Beyond the barrel is the calculating face of a young officer. Although he wears his uniform well, he's a far cry from the aristocratic dandies you often see promoted up the ranks. This fellow is serious and bears the thoughtful countenance of a capable soldier. With a smirk, he lowers his pistol. You don't look like a bloodthirsty revolutionary, he says. You return the compliment. He lets you into the room and asks what you're doing there. You reply that you're looking for something, something important that the revolutionaries mustn't get. When you ask why he's been posted to guard the King's rooms, he replies that he's not officially here. He doesn't often get the chance to rifle through the King's personal papers. He's making the most of the moment. Suddenly, a blast of cannon fire shakes the building. Then the crackle of musket volleys and the smash of doors breaking down as the shouts of the revolutionaries echo down the hallways, getting louder as they approach. The young officer suggests you cooperate to find what you're looking for and make your escape together. With few options, you accept. He curtly introduces himself. Napoleon Bonaparte. Pleased to meet you. Welcome to Echoes of History. Dan, it's fantastic to have you here with us.
- [08:17]
Dan Snow
Well, this is a great honor. Thanks for having me on, Matt.
- [08:19]
Matt Lewis
No, it's great fun. Keen to get to know more about Napoleon because he's one of those names that everybody knows the name. But do we know the man?
- [08:26]
Dan Snow
Well, I am thrilled I have lured you away from the medieval period, about which you know so much and always make me feel so insignificant and small. And stupid. So now we can have a more equal conversation. I'm looking forward to sharing some of my early modern passion with you, bud.
- [08:39]
Matt Lewis
Fantastic. I'm looking forward to it, too. I guess it strikes me that someone who lives through the French Revolution, maybe he's been away from France for a couple of years, gets back in 1804 and thinks, Hang on, we've got an emperor now. What is going on? That must have seemed weird. So can we start off with a little bit about who Napoleon Bonaparte is and where he comes from?
- [08:58]
Dan Snow
Actually, that explorer did come back in 1804. As long as he came back right at the end of the year, he'd have discovered that Napoleon had crowned himself, in fact, Emperor of the French. He'd taken the crown from the Pope in the cathedral and placed it on its own head in such an amazing and symbolic way. One of the things that Ridley Scott got right in the recent Napoleon film. And so, yes, France has been through absolute turmoil. And as you know, from the periods that you have written about and podcast about so richly, in every great crisis and every great upheaval, there is opportunity. There is opportunity for the astonishing talent, the maverick, the genius. You see this as Chinese dynasties come and go. You see peasants who go on to become emperors, like the founder of the Han dynasty. You see it in British history. Actually, not that much. I don't think. You do see it with Oliver cromwell in the 17th century. This guy from, who's a kind of pretty random provincial gentleman, turns out to be one of the greatest cavalry commanders in world history and. And becomes Lord of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, forging this remarkable British state with him as its, well, king, but in all but name. And so that's what's happened here. The French Revolution has torn up the old rule book. It's set Europe aflame. It's ignited a series of astonishing wars. The old regime's been scoured away. The army's looking for new leadership, the navy's looking for new leadership. And Napoleon is one of the many bright young things that just emerge that see opportunity. In this carnage and chaos, he rises to power in a series of ways I think we're probably going to talk about. And then, like all great leaders, whether they're in business or politics or the military, huge luck is involved. Key competitors fall by the wayside for reasons way outside his control. Opportunity comes his way, and then he's got the genius. He's got the talent to seize that opportunity and really run with it. When he's given command of an army in Italy. He brings astonishing energy to it. He wipes the floor with the Austrians in northern Italy. He launches a series of astonishing. He's very, very fast moving. He's a brilliant man at moving people from A to B and then. And then surprising the enemy. Great at being where he's not supposed to be, and he's great at motivating his troops, rewarding his troops, and he ends up seizing power, not unlike Julius Caesar or Augustus Caesar in Rome. He sees his power initially as part of a small group, then he slowly gets rid of the other people. Eventually, it's just him alone and he decides to make it official in December 1804 and crowns himself Emperor. So he's now got a status in his mind, certainly alongside the Emperor of Austria, the Habsburg and the Emperor, the Tsar of Russia, from the Romanovs. So he is one of, you know, the world's leading statesman. That explorer would have been fairly surprised because he came from. Unlike the advertising for the movie, he didn't come from nothing. He came from a sort of minor aristocratic background, a sort of comfortable background on an outlying island, Corsica, a distant part of the French world. So he is unexpected. Didn't really speak French very well when he arrived in France, went to military school. So he is from a very unexpected corner of his country. And he rises to supreme power. And briefly, his empire will stretch in the years that follow, if the explorer can stay in Europe, that. That empire will stretch from Portugal to the gates of Moscow. Enormous European empire that Napoleon carves out, but it survives only very briefly.
- [12:25]
Matt Lewis
You mentioned then that he didn't speak French when he arrived in France. What language would he have been speaking?
- [12:30]
Dan Snow
They spoke Corsican, which is a bit more like Italian, really. And indeed, his name, he was actually christened Napoleone di Buonaparte. So, as you can see, sounds a little more Italian than French. So he was an outsider because of his sort of aristocratic lineage. He was given the French king because it was still a monarchy at that time. It was pre revolution. The French king enabled all boys of that lineage to come and have a free military education in France. And so Napoleon turns up, he's bullied very badly, bullied for being an outsider, being a Corsican being a bit common. He's not as posh as the other kids in the academy. And so he's. Yeah, he's an outsider.
- [13:08]
Matt Lewis
Fascinating. What kind of sources do we have for Napoleon's early life and how reliable are they? Because if he's a guy, you know, not quite coming up from nothing, but Relatively coming from nowhere. How much do we know about his. His younger years and how do we find those things out?
- [13:24]
Dan Snow
Well, we have got his own account, which is biased and brilliant and weird. Actually, we do have some accounts of him at school. He was said to be a very brilliant student. He actually makes a note in one of his textbooks when he's doing geography, he makes a note about the island of St. Helena. She sort of said, well, this is a very small island, long way from anywhere. Little did he know that his fate and that of St. Helena would be inextricably linked for reasons that we may cover at the. Towards the end of the podcast. So we have little snippets like that. And then this is an era where there's a popular press, there's a market for books, and so this is an era where people that knew Napoleon would write memoirs. Not unlike today. He became the biggest celebrity of the 19th century in many ways. So actually, many books were written about him by people that knew him or historians who looked closely into him at the time of his life and in the years following his death. So we have many stories and obviously we have to be very careful because as you know better than anybody as a medievalist, there are biases to these stories. There's no gender. But we can. We think we can piece together a pretty. Pretty interesting picture of him as a young man.
- [14:22]
Matt Lewis
So we've got good sources, we just have to be slightly careful with them.
- [14:25]
Dan Snow
As ever, stick it on a T shirt. Matt.
- [14:29]
Matt Lewis
Can we always describe Napoleon in those younger years as a kind of passionate patriot? We will associate him inextricably with French patriotism. Was he always like that? You know, he's clearly. He's gone to France to get a military education. Is he kind of devoted to the French state at this point?
- [14:48]
Dan Snow
No, it's very weird. And probably partly because he was bullied and he didn't have a great time in France. He became a passionate. A very passionate believer in Corsican nationalism, Corsican independence. And this is one of the great ironies now. There are many, many young people who go on to do quite remarkable things in history, who, as young people, you see them veering wildly from, whether it's from fascism to communism and back again, flirting with nationalism, testing things out, going to the cafes and the bars, having ferocious arguments with friends, passionate, passionate debates, doing what young people should do and testing out their ideas. And so initially, yeah, Napoleon is a huge fan of Corsican independence, and that was a very real prospect. I mean, there was a huge separatist movement in Corsica and it would come to blows. And Napoleon would take part in that conflict during the Revolution. But yes, so his commitment to France was not evident right from the beginning.
- [15:43]
Matt Lewis
It's interesting how many of these key figures from history, as you say they are willing to open themselves up to a whole range of ideas that might seem contradictory. But what you're seeing, I guess, is a personality that's willing to try anything and dabble with anything and invest in something to find out whether it's right or not.
- [16:02]
Dan Snow
That's precisely correct. And I think Philip Pullman told the story beautifully in the Northern Lights book when he comes up with this idea of a demon beside you. And as a kid it changes shape radically and as an adult it settles. And I think all of us go through a period. We decide who we want to be. Do we want to be a scholar, we want to be a jock, do we want to be right? Do we want to be left? Do we care about politics? Not. It's harder to pick up and put down those identities when you get older. But as a teenager, it's a cauldron. It's a time to do exactly that. Have contradictory views, argue them out, try and walk with different crowds. It's exciting. And Napoleon certainly took advantage of the freedom offered by not just his youth, but also the revolution, because when it came, he was a very junior second lieutenant in an artillery regiment. He couldn't afford to join a fashionable regiment, so he joined an artillery regiment. It's where the clever people went, because the cavalrymen and the infantryman, to a certain extent, the guardsmen would have been there for the social scene and the balls, the connections, the lovers. The artillerymen were men of science and engineering and math. And so it was. It sort of suited him, it suited his social status, his lack of money and also his brain. He was very, very good at it. So he's the most junior officer in the French army, in an unfashionable part of the French army, stuck away there looking at graphs and diagrams how to make a mortar fire and artillery fire more efficient. And there suddenly the revolution breaks out and all bets are off. So suddenly everybody is going, do we want a monarchy? Do we want a constitutional monarchy like the Brits? Do we want total egalitarian? They're tracing 17th century social movements in England, you know, the levelers. Should we outlaw private property? You know, everyone is going bonkers. So these discussions are going on and people are veering from one place to the next. It's an exciting time in many ways, but a dangerous time.
- [17:48]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, I was going to say that as someone who will have himself crowned as an emperor afterwards. I would have imagined Napoleon being on the side of the crown and the King during the French Revolution. But maybe if we're at this stage where he's playing with ideas in his life, maybe that's not right. I don't know. Where does Napoleon sit in the revolution?
- [18:05]
Dan Snow
We could have a whole podcast about that. Matthew, let me tell you, initially he does seem to have welcomed the end of absolute monarchy for people like him. There was no question that his career was going to be enhanced in a world where there was a little bit more meritocracy. So, you know, and remember a lot of these people initially lobbying for revolution, we might describe them as upper middle class people who want a piece of the action as well. These are not people absolutely committed to full democracy. Enfranchised everyone, including women, for example. There are all sorts of different shades of revolution. And it seems like Napoleon initially welcomed it and also very much welcomed it because he believed it would help Corsican nationalism, it would help Corsica become independent. And he thought the revolution would loosen the use of autocratic ties that bound France together and therefore Corsica could drift further away from France, have its own identity, have its own parliament and constitution. It does seem though that he didn't want outright independence at this point. He liked the idea of Corsica within a revolutionary, more modern French state. So he thought that Corsican aspirations could be met if they were treated with respect and had a measure of self government within this French state. So you then get a three way fight in Corsica, which he plays a part in. He commands a battalion at one point, which is approximately 500. So he's fighting in Corsica. Royalists who just want the ancien regime, they want King Louis back and they don't want any change. There are revolutionaries and then there are cor. Outright nationalists, outright separatists. And so. So he's walking the middle path. He's trying to represent the French Revolutionary government in Corsica.
- [19:44]
Matt Lewis
Interesting. So he's. He's already made that shift from Corsican independence to being able to see a role for Corsica in a new France, a revolutionary France. So that Corsica maybe maintains power of being associated with France but becomes a much more modern place too.
- [20:00]
Dan Snow
Exactly. And in which, surprise, surprise, Corsicans like him can flourish within the wider French state. So he's like, oh, I no longer need to secede from France in order to kind of meet my ambitions, which a motivation as old as time.
- [20:15]
Matt Lewis
How then? Do we start to see Napoleon begin to rise to prominence? So we've had him as a really junior officer during the French Revolution. How does he begin to climb up and become much more prominent?
- [20:29]
Dan Snow
Well, this is the most extraordinary moment. This is where in the lives of all the great leaders, certainly the great leaders who've pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps in those careers, there is always the most astonishing bit of luck. Napoleon's driven out of Corsica. He ends up as a pretty marginalized, itinerant guy wandering around the south of France, taking part in the local and regional discussions around the revolution. At this point, speaking up for what's going on in Paris, the Jacobins, the National Convention, speaking up for the revolutionary regime effectively in Paris, is knocking about in the south of France. And then something astonishing happens. French royalists, so anti revolutionaries, take the city of Toulon, which is the HQ of the French Mediterranean Navy. So enormously important naval base, like Portsmouth in the uk, but in France. And they invite the British, can you believe it, they invite the British in. And together the French royalists and the British have this foothold in France. They control Toulon, hoping it would be a sort of a nodal point from which royalists could spread out and recapture, wind back the revolution. This would be the engine of counter revolution. And it just turns out that one of Napoleon's fellow Corsicans was sent there by the republican forces trying to contain or try and take on this threat in Toulon. And he knew that Napoleon knew about artillery. And he's like, geez, I just need to find someone who knows about guns. He calls up Napoleon, he says, come, give me a hand. You're in the area, give me a hand. So geography, timing, enemy action and personal connection all come together in this potent cocktail and they blast Napoleon onto the French stage, the world stage, the European stage, and he never, ever looks back. Key thing is, luck gets him there and he capitalizes on that luck with brilliance and hard work. He is a very good artillery officer. He is very smart. He scours the surrounding countryside for old guns, guns left over from the seven Years wars, sitting outside pubs and restaurants and sitting in town squares, whatever it is lying around in old arsenals. And he gathers them all together, works out what he's gone, he melts down, he creates shot for these guns and he positions these guns brilliantly, really. He comes up with a plan to besiege Toulon. He reduces these outlying forts one by one and then makes Toulon completely untenable for the Royal Navy. Now, unlike the film, sorry to mention this again, he does not set fire to the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy sort of withdraw to avoid that eventuality. The revolutionary government of France recapped the city in December 1793 and Napoleon is the star of the show.
- [23:11]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, as you say, it's very interesting how often even the most brilliant people do need that moment of luck to get them there. It's a combination of, you say the luck to get there and the brilliance to remain there. It's interesting how often that happens.
- [23:25]
Dan Snow
I think you listen to Dan Snow's history, you listen to me talking about Napoleon. More coming up.
- [23:32]
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- [24:28]
Matt Lewis
How do we then progress from a man who has shot up the ranks, come to prominence, been a core part of the French Revolution? How does this man go about making himself emperor of France? That seems like a real step too far.
- [24:44]
Dan Snow
The next key moment, he's now a star. He's a star of the revolution. He gets no politicians, he gets no senior army commanders. He's given some interesting jobs. Revolutionary governments are guillotined each other, rising and falling in Paris like chopping and change. I mean, it's a time of chaos in many ways. Literal chopping and changing, literally chopping heads and changing governments. That's a good point. Perhaps that's where the expression comes from. But in all chaos there is opportunity for ambitious young men, and he is one of them. But it's also great danger. I mean, he spends a couple of weeks in prison at one point because that one regime he's particularly associated with falls from power. And he sort of manages to distance himself enough from them just in time to avoid their fate. He knows what it's like. It's the Game of Thrones here in some ways. But the key moment comes in October 1795, when again, royalists, those pesky royalists they raise their heads again, this time in Paris. They are sick of the revolution. They managed to get a mob, a crowd of people, and they threaten the, you could call it a parliament, the National Convention. This kind of executive body is, well, actually this sort of executive slash legislative body that's running the revolutionary government. And one of the leaders of that government knows Napoleon. He just knows he's a reliable, decent guy, knows what to do and he gives him command of troops protecting, well, the French government. And Napoleon famously deploys cannon on the streets of Paris. He blasts canister rounds, which is when you don't fire a cannonball, you fire a sack or a box of musket balls effectively out of a cannon. Now the heat and velocity of that blasts the box that it frees all the little musket balls from that box. So it turns it into a giant shotgun. So you spray bullets effectively across a wide area. It's a brutal anti personnel weapon and if used on the streets of Paris, it can be devastating. You can create a killing zone on a street of Paris. And he kills hundreds, some people say well over a thousand Parisians, enemies of the regime. It's later the expression people may have heard of is a whiff of grapeshot. So with a whiff of grapeshot, Napoleon saves the government. He wins the undying loyalty of the French Directory. This French government, as a treat, they appoint him head of the army of Italy. Now they may have also seen ambition in this man. At this point, things are chopping and changing so fast. The problem is whenever you do find someone who's brilliant and very, very able and capable, particularly a military commander, you're already half thinking, well, hang on a second, is he after my job? Because everyone's seen that anything's possible, so they give him this plum job. But it's also a job that is out of the way and it's also slightly a dead end job because the army in Italy is going nowhere very quickly. And so they give him this job and they see what he can do with it. And that, whether they intended it or not, is just another great launch pad for Napoleon because he is like a fish to water. He arrives in northern Italy and his effect on that theatre of operations is profound. He rides through northern Italy like a whirlwind.
- [27:37]
Matt Lewis
He just seems like one of those people who give him any task and he'll do it. Those annoying people who are just good at everything. And even when you send him to Italy to try and trip him up, turns out he's actually quite brilliant.
- [27:48]
Dan Snow
At it, the kingdom in north West Italy at that point, slightly, various names, but it's Piedmont. And Napoleon knocks it out in a fortnight. And then he turns his focus on the Austrians who at that point have control lands in northern Italy and drives them back again and again and again, humiliates the Austrians. And with every victory, his men gain more supplies, gain more courage, gained more belief. He is very good at rewarding his men. The French armies loot and pillage their way across northern Italy. He enriches his men, he understands, he motivates them, he knows what they want. And he's a kind of charismatic, talismanic figure. You start to see him, he is not usually on the front line. There was a point at one battle, the battle of Arkilie, where he seizes the fight. The people may have seen portraits of him in the thick of the action. He seizes the flag trickle r and he runs forward and he comes under fire and his troops surge to go and rescue him. But that's not his absolute strong point. He's just a phenomenal organizer. He looks at maps, he sees the routes along which army should travel. He knows when to spread his troops out so that they don't get too hungry. The problem is in this period you can't bring food to an army. You have to bring the army to food is the old expression in the 19th century. You got railways and tinned food and then you get, later you get frozen beef and stuff. You can bring enormous amounts of supplies from anywhere to anywhere. In fact, you can sustain an army on the Western Front for four years in muddy trenches. You can't do that in this period, this early modern period. So if you gather 50,000 men together, you eat all the food in the area within two days. You have to disperse them again, beginning to gather them again to beat the enemy. So it's this game of constant dispersal and concentration. And he makes a virtue of that. So what he does, he sends junior subordinate commanders with whom he has an excellent understanding. He sends them along different roads. They get gather the food and move along separate roads. You avoid traffic jams. Everyone can eat their way through the countryside like a plague of locusts. And then boom, you gather together at this key point, inflict a stinging defeat against the enemy, and then bang, you separate out again. So you're moving like the Mongols in many ways. You're moving like poison flooding through a network of capillaries. You're just moving across northern Italy and coming together, moving apart again. And the Austrians don't have A clue what is going on. And in the end, by 1797, so he's been there about two years, he goes in 96. By the end of, by the spring of 1797, he's advanced 100 kilometers from Vienna. He hasn't just humiliated the Austrians in northern Italy, he is threatening the Austrian homeland. I mean, this is catastrophic stuff and is a sense of what's to come.
- [30:26]
Matt Lewis
It feels like the revolutionary government, the Directory in Paris must have been looking at him and thinking, oh, I mean, he's quite a good guy to have on side when he's doing what you want. But as you said, when there's all this chopping and changing going on, those brilliant people can very easily look like a threat. Do you think they saw Napoleon's big takeover in France coming or does that come out of the blue?
- [30:47]
Dan Snow
No, I mean, already after about 15 minutes in Italy, he's sitting there at dinner parties talking about how he's very similar to Alexander the Great. He has a very strong sense of his own place in history. So I think his enemies are already saying at this point that he wants to become a dictator. You know, he's doing extraordinary things. He ends a thousand years of independence for Venice. Venice has pretty much been independent since the post classical era, basically. And Bonaparte marched on Venice, threatens to batter it with artillery. You know, he's an artilleryman, he's great quote from Bonaparte. It is with the guns that one makes war. And that's very prescient because that's the 20th century, first and Second World War. You make war with artillery, you blast enemy positions, you make them untenable. Then you send infantry into to secure. Still a hard job, still miserable job. The gun takes ground, the infantry hold it. And today people see in Ukraine, it's all about artillery fights, all about shells. It's overwhelming firepower. Drive an enemy out, kill an enemy out, drive them out, make them surrender, demoralize them. And then you take that ground and hold it within with your own infantry. And Napoleon gets that. I mean, he pioneers that and he wins. In northern Italy, he wins nearly 20 pitch battles. He extracts astonishing amounts of wealth from northern Italy, steals paintings and jewels. Went to Genoa once and I held this beautiful. A jar of vase. And it's got a crack in it and it was, it's been fixed and it was, it was cracked because Napoleon dropped it on the floor when he was looting with the Genoese treasury there. He's acting like a politician. He's. He starts newspapers to become sort of PR engines for him. This is not a man who's like, I'm just interested in military affairs. Please direct all political questions my civilian overseers. Like, this is someone who from the beginning is. Well, it's clear he's got political ambition. Yeah.
- [32:34]
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- [33:30]
Matt Lewis
And and how then does he go about justifying appointing himself as emperor of a newly un royalised France? You know, there is no monarchy, there is no king. How does he suddenly justify becoming an emperor?
- [33:47]
Dan Snow
Well, there's a series of coups. More and more people are purged from the government and then people go, well look, let's use Napoleon to get rid of our enemies in Paris. So he does that for them. And then of course they realize now we depend on Napoleon, aren't we? So he just gets closer and closer and closer to the very heart of government until he is the de facto ruler of France. We should say he does go via Egypt. I mean it's a completely bonkers episode in his life. He decides that he's going to partly to emulate Alexander the Great, he's going to conquer Asia and partly to destroy the British in India. He's going to go to Egypt, he's going to march across the Middle east and then he's going to go to India, make common cause with anti British Indian princes and drive the British out of India. And having done that, that will bankrupt the British. I mean it's a long way around. That shows how hard it was across the English Channel. If you're going to India to try and hurt the Brits, it just shows how safe the Brits felt in their home island. Anyway, so he goes to Egypt. He manages to conquer Egypt briefly, but the Brits catch up with him there. Nelson famously destroys Napoleon's fleet off the coast of Egypt. Napoleon is forced to sneak Home, abandoning his army in Egypt, who then wither on the vine and have a terrible time. And he then sneaks home. When he sneaks home, he overthrows the government again, this time with even sort of a small band, one of whom was one of his brothers. In fact, look, he's now the most important politician in France. There are two other consuls who sort of rule alongside it. But he's the first consul, and you'll be surprised to learn the first consul is the most important consul.
- [35:07]
Matt Lewis
Is he seeing himself now, as well as Alexander the Great, as something like Caesar?
- [35:12]
Dan Snow
He's calling himself a consul, then he calls himself a dictator again, a word drawn from Roman history. He knows exactly what's going on here, and in the end, he just decides to make it official, really. He doesn't want to become king because a king is discredited in France. They've got rid of the king. They've executed the king. So he chooses the fanciest title of all, which is Emperor, which puts him on a par with the Austrian Emperor in Vienna and the Romanov Emperor in.
- [35:39]
Matt Lewis
St. Petersburg, and kind of matches his ambition, I guess, just to go straight for the absolute top of the title tree.
- [35:46]
Dan Snow
Yes, that's it. He goes absolutely for the top of the title tree. He tries to. It's throwing a bit of shade on people who are merely kings. And the remarkable thing is he's very good at organizing referenda. This hereditary empire, this new empire in which Napoleon and his heirs would rule in perpetuity, was confirmed by a vote In June of 1804, I think it was. You know, over three and a half million people voted for Napoleon. They voted yes, and only 3,000 people voted no.
- [36:15]
Matt Lewis
Sounds slightly familiar with certain places in the world today, maybe. Do we see Napoleon then? He will become a dictator and absolute ruler. Do we see him using any of the kind of tricks that we still see used by modern dictators today?
- [36:31]
Dan Snow
Well, yes, he uses plebiscites to give a pattern, give the appearance of legitimacy to his regime. He's obsessed with pr. He's obsessed with newspapers, what they're printing, spin stories, hates gossip about himself and his wife Josephine despises it. Hates to be mocked. Yes, incredibly modern in all of those respects. He promotes family members to senior positions. He promotes old allies that he feels he can trust. This great cavalry commander man called Murat Joaquim Murat said to me, one of the most handsome men in Europe. He actually married Napoleon's sister. Napoleon gave great titles out to his henchmen. He became known as the First Horseman of Europe. Actually, he helped Napoleon's early career clear the streets of Paris in that anti revolutionary government riot. He promotes his siblings, famously, as he starts to conquer bits of rest of Europe. One of his brothers becomes King of the Netherlands, another brother becomes king of a sort of new state. In Germany, he creates another brother, slightly hopeless one, becomes King of Spain, puts his sister on the throne of Naples. It's dictator playbook stuff, particularly, I guess, in Britain.
- [37:36]
Matt Lewis
We have a view of Napoleon ultimately as a guy who will lose. We think about Nelson defeating his forces, we think about Waterloo and Wellington defeating him. Finally, where would you put Napoleon on the kind of scale of military commanders? Was he good or was he just lucky? Did he lose as often as he won?
- [37:59]
Dan Snow
Oh, that's such a hard question. I mean, he was astonishingly brilliant tactically, strategically. Of course, he lost in the end. You're not allowed to give him high marks for that. You know, you're on the losing side. He's actually catastrophically defeated not once but twice, you know. In 1814, he is Abdicates as Emperor of the French. He goes to Ireland in the Mediterranean, gets bored, comes back, tries again. This time he's imprisoned on the island of St. Helena by the British, this little tiny speck in the Atlantic Ocean, one of the most remote places on planet Earth. And I've been there, and his house is remote on St. Helena, so he's living in the most remote part of the most remote islands on Earth. And that's where he spends his final years, furious, raging at his subordinates who left him down, not taking much of the blame himself for his failures. So strategically he made errors, but my goodness, he was at his peak. At his peak in 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz, he was astonishing. At Battle of Marengo, he's astonishing. And this is something I didn't think the film captured. The astonishing personal loyalty to him he provoked among the men who served him. Like Joan of Arc, almost. In fact, his presence on the battlefield was worth 5,000 men. They fought harder for Napoleon. When he made his comeback in 1815, French armies, he walked up to them and they just threw down their muskets and surrendered to him, flooded around him, kissed him, begged him forgiveness, one to touch him. He aged badly by 18, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. He's suffering. We think he had stomach very bad. He was in pain, stomach ulcer. He may have had cancer, but he had, I think, probably multiple medical ailments by that stage. Piles, for example, it was not comfortable to sit on a horse. So he was not the same man he'd been at Austeritz when he stayed up all night placing units, making sure everybody knew the plan, acting with such energy and decision. Astonishing. He came to rely on overwhelming numbers. His battles got less subtle as he went on. He just used great battering rams. He didn't care for the suffering of his own men. He would use troops. He would send troops forward in overwhelming numbers until enemy positions were taken. The slaughter of some of his later battles, like the battle outside Moscow, the Battle of Borodino in 1812, which was a victory, but one of the bloodiest battles in history to that point. So he becomes slightly lazier, but he is an astonishing, astonishing commander. In the end, overreached himself. Invaded Spain, the Spanish campaign, became an ulcer, that something like a quarter of a million French soldiers were killed, disabled, in that Spanish campaign. He invaded Russia, which destroyed an army of 600,000 men, left him with a handful of men staggering back across Europe as half fugitive. He just went too far.
- [40:34]
Matt Lewis
It's amazing. I mean, this is. None of this is my period, but it strikes me as incredible that no one ever learns the peril of fighting a battle on two fronts, particularly when you invade Russia. Whether it's overconfidence or believing their own myth, you seem to get these leaders who just decide to open fronts of war everywhere, and that is ultimately their downfall.
- [40:56]
Dan Snow
Yes, that's a very good point. I think you believe your own invincibility. You believe somehow that the hand of destiny is touching you, fate has singled you out. And of course, that's the problem. It can feel like that if you're Napoleon. Everything goes right, everything you touch turns to gold for about five or six years. And you think, well, there you go, that's just luck. And that can stop and it can change. I think that's an element of that. The other element. You know, if you and I were French, we're having this conversation, we'd be talking about British belligerence. I have to be open to this, the critique that actually Napoleon sort of may have wanted peace at some. I personally don't think. I do buy this critique, but historians argue about it, that there's a point at which Napoleon's like, look, just let. Just leave me alone. Leave me alone. You enjoy your empire, the rest of the world. I want to run Western Europe, and we can normalize relations. And I won't have to attack Spain, I won't have to attack Russia, I won't have to extend this war, because what he was doing when he's attacking Spain and Portugal and Russia and all these, he's trying to get at the Brits, like Hitler, like Hitler in 1941. It seems crazy given what we know and we think of Hitler. Of course he wants a big empire in the east, he wants to smash Bolshevism, but he needs to defeat the British. And Napoleon needed to defeat the British because they were intransigent in their opposition to both Napoleon and Hitler. And so both of them decide that the easiest thing to do is not to sail across the English Channel because the Royal Navy is the most powerful fleet in the world and will destroy them. That's not an option. The only other option then is knock out Britain's ally or potential ally on the continent, and that is Russia or the Soviet Union or whatever. Both of them discovered that the road to London lay through Moscow. That's a crazy thought, but it's true. And, and so there is a group in France who will just say Napoleon was fine. It's the Brits who forced him into this, making these decisions time and again to prolong the war, to expand the war. I'm not sure I'd buy that person.
- [42:38]
Matt Lewis
What would you say are some of the legacies of Napoleon? Because weirdly, for an absolute ruler, he's considered to have a fairly significant legacy around democracy in Europe, which seems like a bit of a juxtaposition to me.
- [42:51]
Dan Snow
Yeah, that's a really good question, Matt. And this is super complicated and very much is tied up with how the 19th century came to see Napoleon, how he's remembered. But all sorts of things are true at once and it can be very confusing. If Napoleon's troops arrived in a city, it was a time of slaughter and abuse and savagery and plunder. But he would also then break the hold of the Catholic Church. He would break the hold of traditional aristocracies. He would introduce a more egalitarian law code. He would make sure that modern ideas around sanitation were introduced. He would encourage citizens to have rights, albeit within the universe of his absolute power. These Napoleonic conquests of nearly all of Europe awakened aspiration in those people. And it was an aspiration that would be rekindled through the 19th century. Every time there was a revolution, a revolution against those ancient, those ancien regime, those old school forces that had reasserted themselves after Napoleon, that the church had come back in, the traditional hierarchies had been reintroduced. The prince bishops, the dukes, the kings. Some people were able to look back this Napoleonic period and think that was a time when the door was opened. We had a vision of the future, albeit at the barrel of a musket, at the end of a bayonet, and albeit accompanied by hardship and brutality. But the door opened a chink there. And that's the future we want. And so you're right. So strangely, Napoleon in some places across Germany, across Italy, and even across parts of Spain in some places becomes associated with modernity and a rights based, I don't, I don't want to say democratic system, but a rights based liberal order.
- [44:35]
Matt Lewis
Yeah, really interesting. And I guess we ought to deal with the myth that he was a very short man.
- [44:40]
Dan Snow
It's an important one. Everyone never ceases to amaze. Napoleon was 5 foot 7 inches. He was 1.7 meters tall. He was not a tall man, but he was an average height. For the time he was average. He was dismissed as small in British propaganda, in satirical magazines, in cartoons, in the popular press, literally trying to belittle Napoleon. And the reputation has stuck. So next time you go around saying someone's got Napoleon complex, they may be a megalomaniac, but it's not because they are particularly short, because Napoleon was average.
- [45:16]
Matt Lewis
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dan. I mean, I would also say that anyone who stands next to you is going to look tiny. So I'm sure Napoleon would have looked like a very small man next to you. But it's been absolutely fantastic to have you join us on Echoes of History and to find out a whole load more about this man right at the center of the French Revolution, of Assassin's Creed Unity. Thanks very much, Dan.
- [45:35]
Dan Snow
What a treat. Thank you very much. Hey everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History. It's a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. You can listen to more fascinating expert interviews about the history behind the Assassin's Creed series by listening to Echoes of History, available wherever you get your podcasts, of course. Thanks for listening to this one. Bye bye. Acast Powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend.
- [46:14]
Chris Duffy
We all have bad days and sometimes bad weeks and maybe even bad years. But the good news is we don't have to figure out life all alone. I'm comedian Chris Duffy, host of Ted's how to Be a Better Human podcast. And our show is about the little ways that you can improve your life. Actual practical tips that you can put into place that will make your day to day better, whether it is setting boundaries at work or rethinking how you clean your house. Each episode has conversations with experts who share tips on how to navigate life's ups and downs. Find how to be a better human wherever you're Listening to this.
- [46:49]
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- [46:50]
Dan Snow
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