Tamerlane, who at Angora in 1402 overwhelmed the Ottoman Turks
under Bayazid, fresh from his triumph over the flower of Christian
chivalry at Nicopolis.
Paradoxically, Napoleon often failed in his endeavours because he was
not ruthless enough. When raison d'etat demanded it, or seemed to, he
could be almost monstrously cold-blooded, as in the notorious cases of
the Chouan leader Frotte, the Jacobins unscrupulously sent to Devil's
Island after the machine infernale, the due d'Enghien and the Tyrolean
leader Andreas Hofer. But a Stalin, a Hitler or even a Franco would not
have wasted five minutes pondering what to do about the intrigues of
Bernadotte, Fouche, Talleyrand or Murat. Napoleon responded to the
almost invariable base ingratitude of his followers with a stoical shrug or a
homily on the baseness of human nature. His story is the catalogue of an
endless list of ingrates: all his family, almost all the marshals, including
many pro-Bonaparte figures like Augereau, Ney and Berthier, childhood
friends like Bourrienne, valets like Constant, physicians like Dr Yvan and
even personal servants like the Mameluke Roustam.
Napoleon can be convicted on the count of callousness, rather than
cruelty or ruthlessness. He was an autocrat but not a totalitarian dictator;
he could not be that as he lacked the necessary technology. Napoleon had
many blemishes, but he did not cause the loss of millions of his people
through famine, as Mao did in China; he did not kill off hundreds of
thousands of prisoners in a sadistic regime of 'redemption through
suffering' as Franco did in Spain; he did not liquidate his peasants as
Stalin did his kulaks, and he did not consign the Jews to genocide
through holocaust. Even when it came to his treacherous and venal
followers, Napoleon was forgiving: there is no 'Night of the Long Knives'
or 'Great Terror' in his biography. He was unmoved by the human cost
of his campaigns, though he sometimes shed crocodile tears about the loss
of favourites or about the Army as an abstraction.
Into any moral scale when judgement on Napoleon is entered must be
placed the huge death toll from his wars. Historians always.· tend to
underestimate this and some have put the numbers of dead resulting
from his wars as low as one million. This will not do. Napoleon lost half a
million men in Russia in 1812 and almost the same number in Germany
in 1813, while the Peninsular War cost France 220,000 men. Civilian
casualties in these wars are unknown, but must have been enormous. The
war dead in the Haitian campaign alone amounted to 55,000 Frenchmen
and 35o,ooo of the island's blacks and mulattoes. If we estimate the loss to
France between 1796 and 1815 as a million killed in battle and a further
two million who died from disease, cold and hunger, the correct figure for
marcin
(Marcin)
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