to feel that he alone counted. He had an amazing ability to sway other
men to his purposes. The musicality of his voice as he addressed the
troops at Marengo was said to have been worth an extra corps. Fond of
the theatre and the company of actors, he had a highly developed sense of
the histrionic and of stage management. Most of all, he was a skilled
manipulator. As he himself said: 'If I want a man, I am prepared to kiss
his arse.'
But the male beneficiaries of his charm had to be prepared for an equal
and opposite rage if crossed, when he would swear profanely, belabour
the offender with a riding crop on head and shoulders and even kick him
in the stomach. The fixed, motionless and unblinking eyes produced an
unsettling basilisk effect on victims. As with Hitler - with whom he is
often compared- and the Wehrmacht, so with Napoleon and his generals
and marshals. When the volcano erupted and he was in fu ll flight, nobody
dared gainsay him. Observers reported that the typhoon was fearsome:
the large grey eyes would spit with rage as if he were a leopard, but his
anger would subside very quickly. It is sometimes claimed that
Napoleon's tantrums were all part of the gallery touch, and it is true that
he could stage-manage them for effect when he chose. More usually,
however, the rages were genuine manifestations, as evidenced by the
volleys of obscene vituperation.
Napoleon could be supremely ruthless. He mowed down the royalists
in the square at Toulon in 1793, he tore the heart out of the Parisian
royalists at Vendemiaire in 1795, he butchered s,ooo Turkish prisoners
on the beach in Syria in 1799, he poisoned his own troops at Jaffa when
he might have got reasonable terms from Sir Sidney Smith had not his
own prestige stood in the way. There is no reason to doubt the
authenticity of the remark to Gourgaud on St Helena: 'I care only for
people who are useful to me- and only so long as they are useful.' But he
was ruthless only intermittently, harboured few grudges, and was
sentimental. H is sensibility was light years away fr om that of a Hitler or a
Stalin, and indeed he can be faulted fo r not being ruthless enough at
times. His indulgence of his worthless family and his repeated pardoning
of the treacherous Bernadotte, the duplicitous Talleyrand and the
treasonable Fouche are only the most obvious examples. Napoleon had
the temperament of an old-style autocrat but not that of a modern
totalitarian dictator.
Napoleon had not the grim peasant patience of a Stalin, the cold
remorseless ability to win a long campaign of attrition. His personality
was closer to Trotsky's in the romantic voluntarism, the grand gesture
and the impatience. The famous Napoleonic tantrums were often a
marcin
(Marcin)
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