The Age of Napoleon (Modern Library Chronicles) - Softcover

Buch 16 von 33: Modern Library Chronicles

Horne, Alistair

 
9780812975550: The Age of Napoleon (Modern Library Chronicles)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812975553 ISBN 13: 9780812975550
Verlag: MODERN LIB, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The age of Napoleon transformed Europe, laying the foundations for the modern world. Now Alistair Horne, one of the great chroniclers of French history gives us a fresh account of that remarkable time.

Born into poverty on the remote island of Corsica, he rose to prominence in the turbulent years following the French Revolution, when most of Europe was arrayed against France. Through a string of brilliant and improbable victories (gained as much through his remarkable ability to inspire his troops as through his military genius), Napoleon brought about a triumphant peace that made him the idol of France and, later, its absolute ruler.

Heir to the Revolution, Napoleon himself was not a revolutionary; rather he was a reformer and a modernizer, both liberator and autocrat. Looking to the Napoleonic wars that raged on the one hand, and to the new social order emerging on the other, Horne incisively guides readers through every aspect of Napoleon’s two-decade rule: from France’s newfound commitment to an aristocracy based on merit rather than inheritance, to its civil code (Napoleon’s most important and enduring legacy), to censorship, cuisine, the texture of daily life in Paris, and the influence of Napoleon abroad. At the center of Horne’s story is a singular man, one whose ambition, willpower, energy and ability to command changed history, and continues to fascinate us today.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ALISTAIR HORNE is the author of numerous books, including The Price of Glory, How Far from Austerlitz, and Seven Ages of Paris. A fellow of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, he was educated at the Millbrook School in New York. He lives in England.

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Chapter 1

The Will to Power

At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since. -Salvador Dalí

How, first of all, was it possible for a poor Corsican boy, born with limited horizons, to scale such heights? By the time he had reached Tilsit in 1807, dictating terms to the Tsar of All the Russians, which represented the peak of his military successes, he was still only thirty-seven. Because of his youth at the conclusion of that most famous run of victories, one tends to forget that he was born under the reign of Louis XV and started his military career under Louis XVI. If he was a child of the ancien régime, he was also very much a product of that event dubbed by Thomas Carlyle "the Death-Birth of a World." He was steeped in the French revolutionary heritage, without which he would surely never have gotten as far as Tilsit.

Commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1785 at the age of sixteen, from the harsh military academy of Brienne, somewhat derided as a "skinny mathematician," this scion of the lesser Corsican nobility made his first real mark on military affairs some eight years later, at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. The key naval base was then held by an English fleet under the command of Admiral Hood; Napoleon, as a twenty-four-year-old artillery captain, was brought in to advise the not very distinguished commander of the French revolutionary forces besieging it. With his genius for the swift coup d'oeil, which was later to stand him in such good stead, young Napoleon Bonaparte's strategy succeeded, and the British were driven out. He became a hero in the ranks of the incompetent revolutionary army (though still unknown outside it), and was promoted to the dizzy rank of général de brigade when still only twenty-four, and made artillery commander to the Army of Italy.

After a brief, fallow period of considerable frustration, his next opportunity came when, by chance, he happened to be in Paris on sick leave during the autumn of 1795. A revolt was pending against the Convention, and Napoleon was called in by his friend and protector Paul Barras (one of the five members of the governing Directoire) to forestall it. He positioned a few guns (brought up at the gallop by a young cavalry captain called Murat) on the key streets leading to the Tuileries Palace. Three years previously he had witnessed the mob storm the same palace, and the weakness of the King on that occasion had made a lasting impression on him. "If Louis XVI had shown himself on horseback, he would have won the day," Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph. He was determined not to repeat the same error and showed no hesitation in giving the order to fire. Discharged at point-blank range, the historic "whiff of grapeshot" of the Treizième Vendémiaire put the mob convincingly to flight. For the first time since 1789 the Paris "street," which had called the tune throughout the Revolution, had found a new master whom it would not lightly shrug off. Barras, grateful but also nervous at having Napoleon so near the center of power, now appointed him-at the age of twenty-seven-commander in chief of the French Army of Italy.

Ever since 1792, France had been at war with the First Coalition of her enemies, who were bent upon reversing the revolutionary tide that seemed to threaten all Europe, and restoring the status quo ante in France. As Thomas Carlyle saw it, the guillotining of Louis XVI ". . . has divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies . . ."; on the other hand, in the view of Friedrich Engels and others, had it not been for the stimulating effect of foreign intervention, the Revolution might quietly have choked on its own vomit. The fortunes of war had swung back and forth; lack of adequate preparation and incompetence among the new leaders of the revolutionary French forces had been matched by differences of interest and lethargy among the Allies; the stiff forms of eighteenth-century warfare, unaltered since the days of Frederick the Great, had encountered a new revolutionary fervor, but it was poorly supported with guns and equipment. Marching into France, the Duke of Brunswick and his Prussians were halted and turned about, surprisingly, by the cannonade at Valmy in September 1792, the first harbinger of a new form of warfare.

In 1793 the French forces, resurgent under the organizational genius of Lazare Carnot (whom even Napoleon was to rate "the organizer of victory") and fired up by their first victories to carry the Revolution to all the "oppressed nations" of Europe, swept into Belgium and threatened Holland. By June 1794, Jourdan had chased the last Coalition soldier across the French frontier. The British bungled a landing at Quiberon Bay, while-defeated, and invaded in its turn-Prussia abandoned the First Coalition the following year. But, overextended, underequipped, and unhelped by the dithering and corrupt rule of the Directoire, France's new "Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse" now experienced a series of defeats across the Rhine at the hands of the Austrians.

It was at this point that Napoleon was sent to Italy by Barras to wrest the initiative from the Austrians. He found the army unpaid, hungry, poorly equipped, and on the verge of mutiny. Stendhal cites the example of three officers who owned but one pair of shoes, one pair of breeches, and three shirts between them; elsewhere in The Charterhouse of Parma, he relates how, at Napoleon's legendary action on the Bridge at Lodi, another French officer had the soles of his shoes "made out of fragments of soldiers' caps also picked up on the field of battle." By his extraordinary capacity to inspire, Napoleon totally transformed the forces under him within a matter of days, and over the next eighteen months caused them-with minimal resources-to win a series of victories. These ended with the Battle of Rivoli, as impressive a battle as any the world had yet seen. By October 1797, Napoleon captured 160,000 prisoners and more than 2,000 cannon, and chased the Austrians to within a hundred miles of Vienna. Here, for the first but not the last time, he forced the beaten Austrians to sign a peace with France, thus marking a definitive end to the wars of the First Coalition.

The victorious young general now became the idol of France, his star irresistibly in the ascendant as he returned in triumph to Paris. "You are the hero of all France," the Directoire told him. Even his recently married Josephine was dubbed "Notre Dame des Victoires" on the streets of Paris. "From that moment," Napoleon wrote after the first Italian campaign, "I foresaw what I might be. Already I felt the earth flee from beneath me, as if I were being carried into the sky." In France, now, one man and one man alone could claim a prestige that was unsullied. For France-and for Europe-it signified that the war party had triumphed.

Following Napoleon's Italian victories, at the Treaty of Campoformio (October 17, 1797), France was ceded Belgium and control of the left bank of the Rhine. Henceforth the Belgians were "as much French as the Normans, the Alsatians, the people of Languedoc or Burgundy . . ." But could the English ever be persuaded to accept this notion of a French Belgium? In return for Venice and its territories, Austria recognized France's establishment of an Italian satellite state, the Cisalpine Republic-from which seed, eventually, was to germinate the modern united nation of Italy. Of her foes of the First Coalition, only England remained at war with France, but with no weapon to strike at her across the Channel; so France contented herself by extending her empire at the expense of both enemy and allies. After Campoformio, however, in exchange for a durable peace, England too declared herself ready to accept France's "natural frontiers" and even to hand back...

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Verlag
MODERN LIB
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812975553
ISBN 13 
9780812975550
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
218
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
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