44 The New York Review
in leadership. The soldiers’ allegiance
shifted from the republic to the army
and its commanders.
Although Popkin cannot stop his
narrative long enough to provide ex-
planations for the weakness of the re-
public or the involvement of the army
in alternately forging and undoing it,
he succeeds brilliantly at showing how
the actual collapse was far from pre-
destined. Bonaparte’s eventual co-
conspirators would have preferred
another, more pliable general, and
when he secretly abandoned his army
in Egypt and raced back to Paris in
1799, members of the government con-
sidered having him arrested. Then, on
the decisive day in November, when he
tried to bully the deputies into giving
in to him, he swooned when he heard
cries of “Down with the dictator!” and
had to be saved by his brother Lucien.
As president of one of the legislative
assemblies, Lucien was able to con-
vince the soldiers posted outside to
intervene. Similar uncertainties shad-
owed the crucial months that followed,
in which Bonaparte consolidated power
that no one expected him to get. When
it comes to showing how events can
scramble the prospects of even the
most determined plotters, Popkin has
no equal, and readers will find in his
pages a deeply satisfying account of the
inevitable messiness of rapid change.
Since Mikaberidze’s focus is on war,
it might be expected that he would
devote much more space than Popkin
does to the structures and practices
of the French armies. In fact, neither
of these excellent historians has much
to say about military organization or
battlefield strategies, much less about
the experience of ordinary soldiers.
Mikaberidze demonstrates the incred-
ible reach of the Napoleonic Wars but
does so by concentrating primarily on
the diplomacy and geopolitical calcula-
tions that preceded and followed overt
hostilities, rather than on the combat
itself. He is determined to write a truly
global history, and the Napoleonic
Wars certainly lend themselves to that.
Yet because he feels it necessary to give
the back story of every theater, from
the Americas to Asia, he must devote
many pages to more general histories
of the European great powers’ interac-
tions with one another, with their colo-
nies, and with non-European powers
from Iran and the Ottoman Empire to
China and Japan.
Many historians have been drawing
attention to the global ramifications
of the Napoleonic Wars, with much
attention given recently to the forma-
tion of the state of Haiti and its conse-
quences for the rest of the hemisphere.
Mikaberidze builds on this work to
offer his own reading. Napoleon only
gradually came to support the reintro-
duction of slavery in what was then Saint-
Domingue, but by 1802 he was ready to
send off an expeditionary force to re-
establish control that eventually num-
bered 40,000 men alongside two thirds
of the ships of the French navy. Louver-
ture was captured and sent to prison in
France, where he died not long after-
ward. Despite using appallingly brutal
tactics, the French forces could not over-
come local resistance, and yellow fever
carried off even the French commander,
Charles Leclerc, a brother-in-law of Na-
poleon. As the French effort unraveled,
Napoleon decided to sell the Louisiana
Territory to the United States in order
to keep it out of British hands. The sizeof the United States doubled, slavery
expanded, and Native Americans faced
even more catastrophic uprooting. The
success of the Haitian rebels terrified
slaveholders in the Caribbean and the
United States, and in response white
planters did everything they could to re-
inforce their domination.
Such entanglements, with their unin-
tended consequences, could be found in
every part of the globe, and Mikaberidze
overlooks none of them, from the Latin
American independence movements
that were made possible by Napo-
leon’s invasion of Portugal and Spain in
1807–1808 to the less significant Naga-
saki affair of the same period, in which
a British frigate disguised as a Dutch
trading ship penetrated the Bay of Na-
gasaki in an attempt to capture Dutch
traders. The British captain forced the
local Japanese to provision his vessel,
thereby prompting, Mikaberidze ar-
gues, the effort of the Japanese to learn
more about the outside world.
In this instance, Mikaberidze over-
reaches in his eagerness to show the in-
fluence of the Napoleonic Wars. While
it is no doubt true that the British cap-
tain was pursuing British war aims by
targeting Dutch traders (at the time,
the Kingdom of Holland was ruled
by Napoleon’s brother Louis), the im-
pact of his intrusion was largely nega-
tive, because it strengthened Japanese
determination to keep out foreigners.
Japanese resistance to Western influ-
ence predated the Napoleonic Wars
and lasted long after they were over;
Commodore Matthew Perry did not
sail into Tokyo Bay to force the open-
ing of trade with the United States until- The Napoleonic Wars did not
cause everything that happened at the
time or afterward.
Th o s e w a r s d i d c h a n g e m a ny t h i n g s fo r
many people, however, and Mikaber-
idze’s well-informed and evenhanded
account makes a truly impressive case
for the extraordinary range of global
disputes set in motion by them. It is
perhaps understandable, then, that he
leaves aside some big questions about
Napoleon’s military leadership, the
changing composition of the armies,
and the underlying reasons for French
dominance on the Continent over two
decades. He concludes his brief de-
scription of the Battle of Austerlitz of
1805, at which the French defeated a
Russian and Austrian army, with the
assertion that it was “the masterpiece
of Napoleon’s military strategy” but
has little to say about that strategy. He
mentions the innovations that are com-
monly cited: the corps system bringing
artillery, cavalry, and infantry together
in self-contained units that could move
quickly on their own; the concentra-
tion of military and political authority
in one man; and the establishment of a
general staff to coordinate every aspect
of a campaign. But it is the man who
matters most; Mikaberidze does not
hesitate to assert that the hero of his
youth was “arguably the most capable
human being who ever lived.”
The socially challenged young artil-
lery captain did enjoy a meteoric ascent
after reaching a low point in Septem-
ber 1795, when he was briefly removed
from the list of officers for refusing to
take up a post. As a scion of a minor
Corsican noble family, he would never
have been named commander of an
army at age twenty-six under the for-mer regime, and he was hardly alone
in benefiting from the new order. More
than two thousand men held the rank of
general in the French armies during the
revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; at
the beginning of the war in 1792, nine
out of ten generals were aristocrats, but
by 1794 only two in ten were. Joachim
Murat, the future king of Naples and
brother-in-law of Napoleon, was the
son of an innkeeper; Michel Ney, made
a duke and then prince by the grateful
emperor, was the son of a cooper; André
Masséna, later made prince of Essling,
was the son of a shopkeeper. As mar-
shals of the empire, they had won fame
and fortune because of their military
prowess. Mika beridze recounts their
participation in various battles but says
nothing about what their careers meant
for them or for the army.
The French were able to maintain
dominance on the Continent (the seas
were another story) for three main
reasons: their enemies failed to unite
against them until 1813, Napoleon de-
veloped a successful diplomatic and
military strategy of divide and con-
quer, and as commander-in-chief he
kept the officers, in particular, on his
side through an adroit use of propa-
ganda, patriotism, and rewards, both
monetary and honorific. Mikaberidze
offers a very convincing account of the
division of the allies and of Napoleon’s
diplomatic skills. He says little about
the esprit de corps of the army, how-
ever, which was crucial to Napoleon’s
ability to keep fielding one, especially
after the disastrous invasion of Russia
in 1812. The word “propaganda” never
comes up in relation to Napoleon, who
was a master of it, both for home con-
sumption and for the armed forces.
This lack of attention to the inner
workings of the army and to Napo-
leon’s relentless image-making re-
flects Mikaberidze’s general lack of
interest in cultural and gender issues,
which are far from trivial in explain-
ing wars. Morale is critical to any war
effort, which means convincing women
to support it, too. Napoleon used every
means, from army bulletins he wrote
himself to paintings and monumental
arches, to impress the home audience
and his soldiers with his personal brav-
ery, charisma, and power.
Because the commander-in-chief
and his officers had come up through
the ranks, they had a ready rapport
with ordinary soldiers. Napoleon al-
ways visited the troops before a battle,
and excited cries of “Vive l’Empereur!”
greeted him everywhere. He ordered
displays of the prisoners, horses, and
cannon that were captured in battle,
and back home the art objects ripped
out of German and Italian churches
graced the Napoleon Museum—the
newly renamed Louvre.
Napoleon infused French society with
military values; the all-male students in
his newly invented lycées wore uniforms
and heard drum rolls rather than bells at
the end of class. Values in the army also
changed; the soldiers still fought for the
nation but, over time, more for honor,
manhood, and, of course, for Napoleon
himself.^2 What had been the school of
the republic became the cradle of the
Napoleonic legend. Q(^2) See Michael J. Hughes, Forging Na-
poleon’s Grande Armée: Motivation,
Military Culture, and Masculinity in
the French Army, 1800 –1808 (NYU
Press, 2012).
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