The Age of Napoleon
by Alistair Horne
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99, pp. 182, ISBN 029760791X
More words have been written about Napoleon than about any other historical figure, even Abraham Lincoln. Whether he betrayed, or carried on, the French Revolution is a question that agitates historians. Certainly the seeds of the French urge to mastery over Europe were sown before Napoleon swept the Directory aside and installed himself as the autocrat of France. By 1807, having routed the Austrians and Prussians at Jena and Austerlitz and made peace with Alexander I of Russia at Tilsit, he commanded the Continent. One enemy remained, but after the destruction of the French navy at Trafalgar the ambition to conquer Great Britain lay in ruins. Did Napoleon seriously contemplate absorbing the Ottoman empire, thereby opening up a route to prise India from Great Britain? The failed campaign in Egypt in 1798 suggested that he did. After Trafalgar it was the care of British governments to make sure that he did not.
Tom Pocock, no stranger to the subject, informs us in a nicely understated way about the nature of warfare and the conduct of diplomacy in the Napoleonic era: the brutish life of naval ratings (boredom, followed by drunkenness and floggings), the unedifying jealousies and scrambling for advancement among the admirals and generals, and the tenuous control over strategic operations exercised by His Majesty’s government in London and, in the case of a disastrous expedition from Sicily to Egypt, of the near-treacherous intelligence from the British ambassador on the spot. Military buffs will be delighted with the compendiously detailed, expert analysis of military and naval operations which Pocock provides and there are plenty of bonbons along the way. The battlefield of Maida, in Italy, in 1807, the site of the first British victory on land in the Napoleonic wars, was described by Captain Charles Boothby as ‘smoking with recent carnage, peopled with prostrate warriors distorted with the death agony, harnessed for battle in gay colours, feathers and gold but stained and bathed in their own life-blood’.
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