Reading Napoleon in Vienna

Perhaps my favorite one-volume Napoleon biography is J. Christopher Herold’s The Age of Napoleon, which was published in 1962 and manages to do justice, in accessible and often graceful language, to the emperor’s personal life, military genius, and political career, but in a way that is neither fawning nor dismissive. Too many other biographies run to 1000 pages and get lost in the tactics of Waterloo or the language of the code Napoleon (which is better than any laws that will be left behind by the wannabe emperor, Donald J. Trump).

As an example Herold writes:

The achievements of the first two years of Napoleon’s rule seemed stupendous indeed; in the eyes of the general public he appeared a second Augustus, a demigod, who not only restored the world to order and peace but also was proof incarnate that greatness had finally come back to dwell on earth. Then, with seeming suddenness, came the flagrant crime and usurpation—the murder, in 1804, of the duc d’Enghien and Napoleon’s coronation as emperor. Some thought the murder a trifle or an unfortunate mistake, and experienced no shock at usurpation—and tyranny.

To which later in the book he adds:

Though the immediate political effects of Napoleon’s action were favorable to him on the whole—after all, it secured him the imperial crown—the moral effect was incalculably damaging, and the murdered duke’s ghost was to haunt him for the rest of his life.

I only discovered Herold’s books in the 2000s, when I bought of a copy of his biography Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Stael and read his page-turning Bonaparte in Egypt (in which he comments: “Bonaparte, [French General Jean-Baptiste] Kléber once remarked, was the kind of general who needed a monthly income of ten thousand men.”).

I was surprised that I had not before known his name or work, and when I looked at the flyleaf of one of his books, it stated simply: “The late J. Christopher Herold was born in Czechoslovakia and educated in Geneva before taking American citizenship. He was a cosmopolitan qualified to write about an era [during and after the French revolution] which affected the world and left a lasting imprint on history.” He died at age 44 in 1964.

I later looked up his obituary in the New York Times, and it read: “He was born in Czechoslovakia of Austrian parents….Mr. Herold, who spoke six languages fluently, served with Army intelligence in World War II….After the war, he joined the Columbia University Press as assistant editor, and he later said that he ‘rewrote some 10 million articles’ for the Columbia Encyclopedia.”

I still wonder if maybe the “10 million articles” was a misprint, but I take their point that he was the right person at the right time to write fluently about the age of Napoleon.

Given his great skill at deconstructing pomposity with language that sings, I am sorry Herold didn’t live long enough to write up a life of Trump, maybe under the title: Apprentice Gigolo.

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Perhaps one of the reasons The Age of Napoleon works so well in capturing both the emperor’s brilliance and his fatal flaws is that it came after Herold’s earlier, prize-winning biography of Germaine de Stael, the daughter of financier Jacques Necker who after Napoleon came to power was exiled to Coppet, near Geneva. From her salon, she waged a one-woman campaign to remove Napoleon from power.

Herold writes: “To Madame de Stael Napoleon was the embodiment of egoism, a cynical opportunist whose sole principle was self-aggrandizement, a foreigner who raised himself to power by trampling on French liberty and who maintained himself in power by gambling, from day to day, with the lives of Frenchmen, a Satanic figure to whom men, ideas, virtues, religions, and even God were mere tools to be manipulated.” (Imagine what she would have to say about Trump.)

Earlier in their dealings, Germaine had tried to charm, possibly seduce The Corsican, but these flirtations came to nothing with hard-hearted Napoleon, who famously asked: “What does this woman want?”

Once Napoleon’s imperial stripes became clear—this was after he had crowned himself emperor and conquered most of Europe, save for Britain—de Stael wanted to return to the France of the idealistic phase of the Revolution, not its successor empire. Herold describes it:

Madame de Stael also loved Christianity, but as a Protestant she distrusted the Roman Church and as a liberal she distrusted Bonaparte. In her salon, which she called a “hospital for defeated parties,” she united all shades of the opposition to the consular regime as well as some of the most prominent members of Bonaparte’s administration, including his brother Joseph. “At the time of the Concordat,” Napoleon reminisced at St. Helena, “she suddenly united the aristocrats and the republicans against me. ‘You have not a moment to waste,’ she cried to them. ‘Tomorrow the tyrant will have 40,000 priests at his command.’”

Even though Herold’s biography is that of the age more than an account of Napoleon’s life, he does well setting Napoleon’s military ventures within the larger context of European politics, and he writes in a style that dances with grace and wit.

In the run up (spring 1809) to the battles of Aspern and Wagram (where I was now having a picnic off my bike), Herold writes that many of Napoleon’s opponents lacked the cohesion of the attacking French, notably the Austrians and Germans:

It was in the name of the German people that Emperor Francis made war on Napoleon, yet the larger part of the population of his empire was not German but Czech, Polish, Croatian, and Hungarian. His wife was Italian. It was not out of patriotism but out of loyalty to their monarch that his non-German soldiers fought in his cause. On the other hand, a large part of Napoleon’s army consisted of German units, and they fought bravely. The German peoples were still far from united; it took Napoleon four more years to unite them against himself.

I also think Herold does concise justice to the battle of Aspern-Essling, describing it this way:

On May 21, after ordering part of his forces to cross the Danube on a single bridge, Napoleon attacked the far superior army of Archduke Charles, which had re-formed on the left bank. The Battle of Aspern and Essling raged for two days, with hardly a pause during the night. Both sides fought with desperate determination—the French because their retreat across the Danube was threatened, the Austrians because they saw a chance to annihilate Napoleon’s army. Napoleon managed to extricate himself after losing nineteen thousand men in casualties, among them Marshal Lannes; the Austrian army, however, had suffered even heavier casualties—more than twenty-four thousand—and was unable to pursue its advantage. For practical purposes, the battle was a stalemate; Napoleon had been repulsed but not defeated. On the other hand, he had never come so close to being completely routed. To restore his reputation of invincibility, a “thunder clap” like that of Austerlitz was necessary.

At Wagram a month later, Napoleon got his thunderclap, as he defeated the Austrian coalition. In the peace treaty that followed—that of Schönbrunn [a Vienna palace and summer residence of the Habsburgs]—Napoleon did his best to suppress any further ideas of a Russian-Prussian-Austrian coalition rising against him, although that’s precisely what happened to him after his invasion failed.

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Even though at Wagram the museum was closed, I found much to do and see in the surrounding landscape, despite the overcast weather. There were memorials to inspect in town and along the banks of the small Russbach River (essentially the front line in the battle), and I spread out my picnic on a table that overlooked one of the river crossings used in the fighting.

Herold writes: “The Austrian position was centered in the village of Wagram, eleven miles northeast of Vienna. The main attack on that position began shortly after sunrise on July 6 and reached its climax when Napoleon ordered a battery of one hundred guns to concentrate its fire on the Austrian columns. Then, while [General] Davout battered the Austrian left wing and Massena the Austrian right, Napoleon sent a compact column of thirty thousand infantry and six thousand horse against the enemy center.”

There (near my picnic table) Napoleon broke the Austrian center and won the battle, but in another sense Wagram marked an evolution in Napoleon’s tactics that would not serve him well at Leipzig [1815] or Waterloo [1815]—namely, the acceptance of thousands of casualties, including those of many generals, in headlong charges straight into the enemy’s guns.

Gone were the brilliant flanking movements, as at Austerlitz, or the surprise element of Jena. In their place Napoleon became a World War I general, basically sending his men “over the top”.

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In retrospect, all that his Wagram victory brought to him was a second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, who was the daughter of Emperor Francis II and the great-niece of Marie Antoinette, thus marrying Napoleon into several European royal families.

Poor Josephine, his first wife, was cast aside for a less barren empress, although clearly she was the love of his life. (The whimsical Herold writes: “At St. Helena, Napoleon once confided to General Henri Bertrand that he had married Josephine because he thought she had money. If so, this was a pity, because Josephine Beauharnais married General Bonaparte in the belief that he could pay her debts.”)

You wonder who Trump will marry to pay down his own debts: Elon Musk?

This is the fifth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week the Trump Rackets and Extortion Ring shook $15 million in protection money loose from ABC News and sued the Des Moines Register for not kissing Trump’s pinky ring in the polling run-up to the 2024 election.)