last two batons to representatives of the 'old Army', Serurier and
Kellermann.
Of mixed social origins, but with a predominance of looters and glory
hunters, the marshalate has been construed as either Napoleon's biggest
mistake or his most ingenious piece of machiavellianism. The main aim
was to divide and rule, to set one military faction against another so that
the Army never united to attempt a political coup. Napoleon shrewdly
calculated that once inside the web of honours, titles and riches, with
their women as princesses and duchesses, few would want to give up such
privilege for reasons of ideology. And he realized, as few rulers or ruling
classes have since, that it is not wise to give supreme honours to people
who already have great financial privilege. While making sure his
marshals were the equivalent in our terms of millionaires, the Emperor
kept them in their place by putting the marshalate only fifth in the
pecking order of Court precedence, after the Emperor and Empress, the
imperial family, the grand dignitaries of the Empire and the ministers.
And, since their formal appellation was 'Monseigneur', they could receive
the deference due to them only if they in turn acknowledged Napoleon as
Emperor and addressed him as 'Sire'.
Napoleon easily achieved his aims of ensuring acceptance of the
Empire by the 'top brass' and integrating military lead�rship into a new
civilian aristocratic hierarchy. The individuals he elevated were a very
mixed bunch. Some were meritocrats but most were purely political
appointments; this partly explains the generally lacklustre performance of
the marshals on the battlefield. It was, in mean terms, a body of youngish
men, with an average age of forty-four; like Hitler's stormtroopers in
1933 or Mussolini's blackshirts in 1922 Napoleon's elite military class was
drawn, in the main, from the youthful. Eyebrows were raised at the
appointment of the thirty-four-year-old Davout, but Napoleon knew
what he was doing, as Davout later proved himself the most talented of
the original bunch.
The marshals were the 'share options fat cats' of their day. Each of
them was given money and income drawn on French lands or, in the later
period of the Empire, on conquered territory. Looked at from one
perspective, the marshalate was little more than a racket and the marshals
little better than mafiosi - scarcely an exaggeration on kinship basis alone,
since no fewer than 240 of Bonaparte's top generals were related to each
other. Berthier, for example, was later created Prince of Neuch:itel and
Wagram and received 'endowments' (donataires) of the value of 1, 254,000
francs a year. Ney, who later bore the titles Duke ofElchingen and Prince
of the Moskova, received 1,o28,ooo francs from eight awards, while
marcin
(Marcin)
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