Greatest Military Leaders of all Time (Part II)

WAR IS THE BUSINESS OF BARBARIANS.  – Napoleon Bonaparte

         

By Elizabeth H. Elys

On February 9, 1801 France signed peace with Austria; the formal peace treaty was signed at Amiens on March 27, 1802. Napoleon had been made consul for 10 years, on August 1802 he was made consul for life, with the right of choosing his successor. On May 1804 he was proclaimed emperor of the French and pope Pius VII came to Paris of Napoleon coronation.

The new reign was founded on a double ambiguity; the tricolor flag and even the word “Republic” were preserved. Napoleon welcomed back the “émigré” aristocrats and the old titles were honored as much as ever.

Great Britain could not accept a firmly united Europe. Napoleon prepares to invade England and assembled a vast camp at Boulogne; he claimed that if he had control of the Channel for a few days, England would be at his mercy. But even before his gigantic naval moves ended in disaster at the Battle of Trafalgar (October 21, 1805), he had to turn his attention elsewhere, upon the formation of the Third Coalition in 1805. 

Austria, urged on by England and Russia, had declared war. Napoleon arrived on Vienna and December 2, 1805 he defeated the forces of Austria and Russia at the Battle of Austerlitz. Later he dictated to Austria the Treaty of Pressburg.

On July 8, 1807 Tsar Alexander I and Napoleon met in the Lithuanian territory and vowed eternal enmity to England. They constituted themselves a kind of “Big Two” over the whole Europe. 

Napoleon was not only emperor of France, but he was also king of Italy, mediator of Swiss Confederation and protector of the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon’s empire rivaled in territorial extent those of Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Only A. Hitler was to control through conquest or alliance an even vaster domain.

Napoleon met in 1808 again Tsar Alexander I at Erfurt. He appeared in splendor as the overlord of the West, but at this time Napoleon made a mistake. He blockaded against England’s commerce, later was the quarrel with the pope, and reached a climax in 1809 when Napoleon annexed the states of the churches.

His worse mistake was the intervention in Spain. He removed Spanish king Charles IV from throne and promoted his brother Joseph from Naples to Madrid.

The liberals (Anfracesados) supported the new regime but the masses rebelled. 
                                                                                                                                  Austria declared war on France 1809. Napoleon captured Vienna and defeated the Austrians. Meanwhile a series of annexations extended the Empire from southern Spain to Baltic Sea, to Illyria on the Adriatic Sea.

Here were many pretexts for Napoleon quarrel with Russia. The break came over question of Russian enforcement of blockade against Britain.

Napoleon moved his Grand Army to the border of Russia, he decided with Alexander I to fight at Borodino. Both sides suffered great losses in the battle on September 7, 1812. French occupied Moscow; the Russian had deliberately set fire to the city to render it uninhabitable. For terrible winter it was the impossibility of keeping a huge army supplied, in hostile territory.

The epic crossing of the Berezina River was actually a victory for Russians. French army escaped, announced the catastrophic end of the Grand Army. Napoleon left the army went to Paris incognito and unaccompanied.

On 1813 at the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig, the French were crushed and again Napoleon abandoned his army. 

With magnificent, desperate energy Napoleon once more drew an army together in 1814. The allies invaded France, and reached Paris, which capitulated on March 31, 1814.

Napoleon abdicated in favor of his son and attempted to poison himself, the Bourbons, returned in the person of Luis XVIII. Bonaparte was taken to island of Elba off the coast of Italy near Corsica. He preserved his imperial title with a court, an army and a navy. 

Bonaparte knew that Luis XVIII had aroused no support in France, and on February 26, 1815 Napoleon sailed from Elba for France. He landed near Cannes on the French Riviera on March 1, 1815 with 1,500 men and disappeared four days in the Alps. Napoleon reached Paris on March 20, 1815, Luis XVIII had vacated the Palace of the Tuileries the night before.

To win support, Napoleon improvised a new Empire with a constitution of the British type. He rushed the army into Netherlands before the allies had coordinated their forces. Napoleon pushed back the Prussians at Ligny and then attacked the Anglo-Dutch army under the General Wellington, “Iron Duke” near Waterloo (June 18, 1815).

It was a stubborn, unimaginative battle without any attempt at maneuvering; there was a stalemate and then almost a French victory-until General Blucker’s Prussians troops arrived. Wellington then attacked, and the remnants of the Grand Army fled in a rout. 

Once more Napoleon left his army behind and returned to Paris. The assemblies elected under the new constitution, accepted his second abdication on June 22, 1815 and acclaimed his son as Napoleon II.

Napoleon had planned to sail for America, with two frigates offered him by the French government. But he had tarried too long at Malmaison and so had to escape the clutches of the returned Bourbons. 

So Napoleon boarded the British ship trusting himself to the hospitality of his former foes. The British ignored the classical allusion and jailed him on the Island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean of the coast of Africa, where he arrived on October 15, 1815.

When Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, there were not a lot of emotions to be observed in Europe.

The Holy Alliance and the conservative policies which it sought to impose on all of Europe, as well as the Bourbon Restoration in France, had all lost their glamour. Europe was turning to liberals ideas again. 

The result was Napoleon’s image was transformed into that of martyr to the reactionary monarchs. 

Culturally, it was the age of Romanticism, and Napoleon was transmuted into one of the gigantic myth of the time, along with Faust, Don Juan and Prometheus.