The luck of the devil

Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent biography of Churchill comes this equally well-written life of another superman who bestrode his era and all Europe like a colossus.

Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains to insist that his subject was an ordinary mortal like any other, the simple facts of Bonaparte’s career somewhat belie any attempt to cut the little fellow down to size. How could this second surviving son of an impoverished minor nobleman from an obscure island come, within a few years, to dominate the entire continent, dictate terms to emperors, kings and popes, and set his own siblings on the thrones of the countries he had conquered?

Zamoyski’s answer is that Napoleon had the quality that he demanded of his own generals: luck. His spectacular success came from a combination of his own ability and ambition interacting with the special circumstances surrounding his rise to power. The chaos of post-revolutionary France allowed other humbly born men matching his military talents to become the marshals who marched beside him to innumerable victories.

He could not have achieved his triumphs without the aid of those who took similar advantage of smiling fortune: his brother Lucien, a politician who engineered the coup that made him First Consul; Murat, the flamboyant cavalryman who secured the guns with which Napoleon dispersed a rioting Paris mob with the famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’; and Berthier, his brilliant chief- of-staff, who translated Napoleon’s often incoherent orders into battle-winning action.

The refreshing distinction of Zamoyski as a biographer is that he humanises Bonaparte — in contrast to others who either hero-worship ‘Napoleon the Great’ (the title of Roberts’s recent adoring life of the emperor) or damn the Corsican usurper as a war-mongering mountebank who devastated Europe and slaughtered millions for the sake of his ego.