00:05:04.820And in the initial fighting that took place in Toulon,
00:05:09.200because the Royalists and the British and various other navies
00:05:15.620managed to take the centrally most important Mediterranean port,
00:05:22.860naval port of Toulon, and the French needed to get it back.
00:05:27.820The revolutionaries needed to get it back,
00:05:29.740and Napoleon was extremely successful with that in 1793,
00:05:33.780and that's how he became a general in 1794.
00:05:36.180Mm. And just painting the broader picture a little bit, Andrew, obviously, in the modern
00:05:42.960world, we have this meme about France being, you know, cheese-eating surrender monkeys. But of
00:05:46.700course, throughout history, it's actually one of the great powers, military powers in Europe,
00:05:52.100and in fact, the world. What was the military position of France at this time that Napoleon
00:05:57.520is coming through? Weak. It had lost the Seven Years' War in 1763. So six years before he was
00:06:05.300born, France had lost its primacy in Europe, which as you're right in saying, absolutely over
00:06:12.000the previous hundred years, it had been the great military power of Europe. Louis XIV brought it up
00:06:18.800to that stage. But by the time he was growing up, it had been humiliated in this war on four
00:06:27.060continents. So he was very keen for it to return to its former glory. Make France great again.
00:06:35.140And made France great again, exactly that. And he hoped that he would be part of that.
00:06:41.660Just to complicate that, though, of course, he was also a Corsican nationalist. And the Corsicans,
00:06:47.780for the early part of his life, wanted independence from France. So he was torn emotionally and
00:06:53.760intellectually, and certainly politically, between his father's dream of an independent Corsica
00:07:00.180and his own dream of a very powerful France.
00:07:03.940Because what's really interesting about Napoleon is that he had this meteoric rise.
00:07:09.780And partly, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong,
00:07:12.520it's the fact that he proved himself indispensable to the Republic through his talents.
00:07:17.320He did, and also through his ruthlessness.
00:07:19.420And this, Francis, is a tremendously important aspect because in October 1795,
00:07:25.260he was appointed by the government to crush a rebellion in Paris, a royalist uprising in Paris,
00:07:32.540which he did using what Thomas Carlyle later called a whiff of grapeshot. He got a large
00:07:40.780number of cannon, 40 plus cannon, from outside Paris. This was actually done by someone called
00:07:46.640Joachim Murat, who was to become tremendously important as one of his leading marshals.
00:07:51.080And they used these cannons to kill about 300 Frenchmen as they crossed the bridges over the Seine and tried to take over the central part of the Tuileries Palace, which is where the government was at the time.
00:08:06.300He just cut them down. He used grapeshot, lots of very small little musket balls inside a canvas bag that explodes as soon as it leaves the cannon's mouth and so kills the maximum number of people.
00:08:21.720And what's interesting about that is that we see, I think, the rise of Napoleon where he becomes more and more indispensable, which means that he becomes more and more powerful, doesn't he?
00:08:33.360That's right. And actually, one of the people who's in the government at the time says that there's a statement he makes to a cabinet meetings where he says, as soon as a general considers himself to be indispensable, that's the time we must dispense of him.
00:08:48.000And they don't. They allow him, after the whiff of grapeshot, to go and fight in Italy.
00:08:55.720They don't give him enough troops or money or ammunition or supplies or anything.
00:09:01.640But nonetheless, he manages, through a series of brilliant victories at the beginning of the Italian campaign,
00:09:08.120to win that campaign against the Austrians in northern Italy.
00:09:12.720And I want to delve into what made him so special as a general, because he was someone who was truly great because he was an innovator, tactically and strategically.
00:09:22.880So let's explore that. What was it about tactics and the strategies that he used that made him so brilliant?
00:09:30.140He ripped up the rulebook completely. There were actual rulebooks that were written about what armies needed to do. And he just took no notice of them, or he took on ideas of the new younger thinkers who were writing revolutionary radical new ideas.
00:09:48.840The first is you don't stick your army outside cities and besiege cities.
00:09:55.780You go round the cities, leaving enough men to make sure that the people in the city don't rally out.
00:10:01.120But nonetheless, you keep moving. Speed and manoeuvre is vital.
00:10:06.280You don't wait for your baggage train. You live off the land.
00:10:09.340So you basically just take whatever's there and push on.
00:10:13.620You employ something called the core system, which means breaking up your divisions into armies, sort of mini-armies essentially, which can hold the enemy in place while your other cores go around the outside and envelop them, in some cases in the Italian campaign, double envelopment.
00:10:34.800So you have this new form of warfare. He was very lucky as well. He was in his mid-20s
00:10:41.440and some of these Austrian generals were in their 70s and 80s. So he was much more
00:10:48.800energetic then. He also had a superb eye for his lieutenants. He did choose people who were very
00:10:58.640good, very trustworthy, very brave and so on. And so you all have all of these things come together
00:11:04.400and he used to plunder cities and therefore pay his men, who a lot of them after the French
00:11:11.760Revolution hadn't been paid for years. And that obviously made him popular and brought the morale
00:11:17.120of the army up. And yeah, there were sort of 10 or so, I list them in the book, new aspects of
00:11:26.240soldiering, which he brought to bear. And let's explore that. Which ones do you think were the
00:11:31.620most important, the most innovative, and also the ones that are the most impactful?
00:11:37.100I think the speed, this whole idea of speed. He also had an idea that, which is later written
00:11:45.540about by Carl von Clausewitz, who watched Napoleon very carefully. And he calls it the
00:11:52.340strategy of the central manoeuvre, which means that if you have two enemies, and he very often
00:12:01.220did in the Italian campaign, he had Piedmont and Austria, what you do is you strike at the hinge
00:12:07.620between the two and push the stronger one off, defeat the less strong one, and then you turn
00:12:17.920on to the other ones. So it's a thing that you see many times. The interesting thing actually
00:12:25.100is that the Allies, the coalition forces against France, are very, very slow at working out what
00:12:31.540Napoleon's manoeuvres are. They don't really come up to understand the strategy of the central
00:12:38.100manoeuvre until 1813. They don't adopt the core system until 1812. They still indulge in very long
00:12:47.880costly sieges right the way up through to 1813, 1814. So actually, they take a decade virtually
00:12:56.480more to work out what Napoleon's doing.
00:12:59.240Andrew, and where does this young man get both the confidence and the knowledge to be able to,
00:24:08.520Either on an expedition to England or, as Francis mentioned, going off to Egypt, which will very comprehensively take him out of Europe, of course.
00:24:20.680And when they realise that they're not ready to try and cross the Channel
00:24:29.300because, of course, the Royal Navy is the strongest in the world
00:24:33.620and able to protect England, they then think seriously about Egypt.
00:24:40.580And so he moves into Egypt and reading about his story,
00:24:47.160it seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong,
00:24:49.620But it seems the most tenuous of reasons, doesn't it, to actually go into Egypt?
00:24:54.860There are the public reasons that they're trying to cut off British trade in the Mediterranean,
00:25:56.740So let's talk about that, and the Rosetta Stone in particular.
00:25:59.580The Rosetta Stone. He takes with him on this big expedition, 30,000 men in over 300 ships. He takes 167 intellectuals, what were called savants. And the savants were going to map out Egypt.
00:26:19.460They were going to look at all of the ancient pyramids and the Philae, and they were going to visit all of the great places, Memphis and so on, and actually make a 21 volume, what's called The Description of Egypt, which is published years later, which is still one of the great cultural and intellectual achievements of the Western world, effectively.
00:27:25.380And it also shows an aspect of Napoleon, which surprised some of his marshals.
00:27:29.960Because, you know, up until now, conquering was conquering.
00:27:33.240It wasn't sitting down and making incredibly detailed illustrations of everywhere that you've seen.
00:27:41.140And the Egyptian campaign starts off very successfully, doesn't it?
00:27:46.960And then with Alexandria. So let's talk about that. It starts up successfully and then it starts to go awry the further it goes.
00:27:55.660Yes. But the people in France don't know this. This is the key thing.
00:28:00.500You know, there's a huge difference between what's happening on the ground and propaganda back home.
00:28:05.680So he starts off, as you say, he lands without loss. He marches to Cairo and takes Cairo after the Battle of the Pyramids, which is a huge victory.
00:28:19.740virtually no French killed thousands of Mamelukes who were the people who ruled
00:28:26.640Egypt at the time, nominally in the name of the Turkish Sultan, but actually they were a sort of
00:28:33.760warlord race that dominated Egypt for hundreds of years. Well, they were former warrior slaves
00:28:39.440weren't they? Yes, exactly that, they were. But they built themselves up into this warrior caste,
00:28:45.760which for hundreds of years ruled over Egypt. So for the ordinary Egyptian, it was basically a
00:28:52.760choice between the French and the Mamelukes, and they considered both of them to be foreigners.
00:28:58.040What you get after the fall of Cairo is this terrible news which comes, which is that Admiral
00:29:07.500Nelson has sailed his British fleet into Abilkir, which is where the French fleet was
00:29:14.100was at anchor. And in a totally brilliant manoeuvre where he managed to get ships
00:29:21.560between the coastline and where the French were moored, he essentially sank the French fleet.
00:29:29.560So there was no way home. And this, as you can imagine, was devastating news as far as the
00:29:35.140morale of the French army was concerned. It didn't hold Napoleon back. He decided then to invade
00:29:42.880Syria, or at least what is in modern day Israel and Syria. And so he gets all the way up to Acre,
00:29:51.120he goes through Gaza and gets up past Haifa to put Acre under siege and then can't take Acre,
00:30:04.400because it's defended as well as by the Turks,
00:30:08.940also by the British and some French royalists as well.
00:30:14.200And so I want to just go back to the naval battle with Horatio Nelson,
00:30:20.940because this might be very simplistic, and correct me if I'm wrong,
00:30:25.460which I'm sure that I might be, but there is this image of Napoleon
00:30:28.420that he was a brilliant land general, strategist, military expert.
00:30:34.880But when it came to the naval aspect of warfare, he was deficient.
00:30:40.880And it's extraordinary, really, because it's not as though he wasn't...
00:30:45.740He didn't understand the sea. He came from an island.
00:30:50.360He was later, obviously, exiled to another island and died on another island.
00:30:54.200You know, he wasn't just a landlubber, but he never really, as a soldier, he never really looked into what admirals and sailors were doing.
00:31:05.700He often sent his admirals letters asking them to do things that were actually just technically impossible.
00:31:12.140It was said that he didn't know the difference between Wynwood and Leawood, which obviously is going to be a major problem if you want to.
00:31:19.080So it is a huge lacuna in his knowledge and understanding, everything to do with the naval aspect.
00:31:28.320Now, whether he could have stopped Admiral Nelson, who obviously was a great genius, from sinking his fleet anyway.
00:31:35.500He was in Cairo at the time, hundreds of miles away.
00:31:37.680But his Admiral, Admiral Brees, ought to have been able to have moored his ships in a way that was more intelligent and wouldn't allow Nelson to do what he did.
00:31:50.320But don't you find it fascinating, Andrew, that this is a man who was intellectually curious, fascinated by all aspects of history, military strategy.
00:32:00.800Yet when it comes to something as essential as naval warfare, particularly when your main enemies are the Brits, you're going to be incurious at best?
00:32:12.060Yes, and especially as, of course, as I mentioned earlier, the thing that drove him was the desire to avenge the Seven Years' War. And the Seven Years' War was, to quite a large degree, a naval war. I mean, obviously, yes, you do have big battles like Minden and so on in Central Europe.
00:32:29.800But otherwise, what's going on all around the world in the West Indies and the East Indies and the Mediterranean and so on, these are naval battles.
00:32:39.020And so, yes, as I say, it's a big lacuna in his understanding.
00:32:43.900Then again, to be fair to him, I mean, I don't know if I'm right about this, but I imagine people in history who are able to be geniuses at land warfare and naval warfare in one human being are quite unusual.
00:32:57.120Very, very. I mean, one can think of a few from the ancient world, but otherwise, yes. I mean,
00:33:03.140the two do bifurcate, don't they, as areas of expertise, certainly by the time of the 18th century.
00:33:11.040Well, that's what I mean. The more specialized these fields become, the more difficult it is
00:33:15.580for one person to know everything about both. So the campaign stalls, the Egyptian campaign
00:33:22.420in store as well. He's not Egyptian anymore. He's out in Syria. What happens from there?
00:33:27.760Well, he comes back into Cairo and brings back his army, having not been able to capture Acre,
00:33:37.000and decides that he is going to go back to France. And there's some debate amongst historians about
00:33:45.320whether or not he intends to overthrow the government of France and set himself up as
00:33:51.040First Consul. The government in France then known as the Directory was corrupt, inefficient and
00:33:59.760unpopular. There was huge inflation and the war hadn't been going well back in Europe. So he,
00:34:09.280I believe, did have plans to return and overthrow the government, especially if he found enough
00:34:16.800supporters in Paris, which he certainly did do. So he returns. How does he return? He's got no
00:34:25.680ships. He manages to get on board a frigate, which comes after the Battle of... What happens
00:34:31.740to his men? His men all stay back in Egypt to tremendous fury and resentment from them.
00:34:39.300I'd imagine. But their resentment isn't communicated back to France because you can't
00:34:49.080get the British in control of the Mediterranean, essentially. And apart from this ship that does
00:34:55.260manage the mural, does manage to get back to first Corsica and then to the south of France,
00:35:05.060you really there are no communications and this works hugely to his advantage of course
00:35:10.260because the people of france have heard about the victories and not about the defeats
00:35:16.440rich first sponsored this show nearly six years ago i've still got one of their wallets in my
00:35:23.120pocket right now and i promise nobody told me to say that rich makes wallets power banks luggage
00:35:28.700the stuff that actually ends up in your pocket or your bag every single day not sitting in a drawer
00:35:34.740somewhere. This year, Ridge is running their sweepstakes for the sick time, and they've gone
00:35:39.940bigger than ever. It's live now, running until the 8th of September, and Tony Hawk is fronting it,
00:35:46.580so you know they've taken this seriously. Two winners are going to get to choose between a
00:35:51.820Lamborghini Huracan Starato, a Hennessy Velociraptor, a custom-built Ford Bronco wrapped in
00:35:58.620kevlar armor or a hundred thousand dollars in cash the lambo alone is one of only 1500 in existence
00:36:05.100and naturally aspirated v10 with 610 horsepower built to go off-road which sounds like a
00:36:11.220contradiction until you see it the velociraptor is a twin turbo with 558 horsepower basically an
00:36:18.440american muscle car that's been let loose on a truck take your pick you can enter completely
00:36:24.240free at Ridge.com, no purchase necessary. But if you're already planning on picking up a wallet or
00:36:30.300a power bank, every order during the sweepstakes earns you extra entries. So there's genuinely no
00:36:37.100reason not to. Head to Ridge.com and use the code Trigonometry at checkout for 10% of your first
00:36:43.840order. And a shot at the biggest giveaway Ridge has ever run. A Lamborghini Huracan Starato,
00:36:49.700a Hennessy Velociraptor, a Ford Bronco, or $100,000 in cash.
00:36:54.680Every dollar you spend gets you more entries,
00:36:57.680but you don't need to spend anything to enter.
00:37:15.660Which Napoleon was, again, a genius at.
00:37:18.920He was almost Trumpian in the way that he could have a terrible outcome in Egypt, yet portray it as this huge success.
00:37:30.200Some say the greatest victory. I wish I could do the accent.
00:37:34.380Yes, that's right. And also, he didn't just manipulate the news, although he was very good at that.
00:37:41.360He was the first person, for example, to bring along a printing press on his campaigns with him so that he would be able to put his point of view out to the army, but he knew that it would get wider traction.
00:37:57.340But also he had painters like David who would paint wonderful portraits. The most famous one, of course, is him crossing the Alps on his horse. He, in fact, crossed the Alps on foot and sometimes on a donkey.
00:38:16.600But you look at that painting where he's on this wonderful sort of speed
00:38:21.200and he's pointing towards Italy and so on.
00:38:25.280So he had a great form of sort of mouse for propaganda.
00:38:31.540And it's interesting because I don't know if you saw the movie
00:40:52.260And yet this, the actual Napoleon was somebody who people were willing to follow across the deserts to Cairo and through the snowy wastes of Moscow and across every country you can think of in Europe.
00:42:30.700Well, somebody as tall as you, Constantine, might think I'm, or at least Napoleon was a midget, but he wasn't.
00:42:36.460The reason that that comes about is also propaganda, but in this case, British propaganda.
00:42:40.720Because the genius, I mean, he was unfortunate in a sense that his time in power also coincided with the three great geniuses of British political caricature, Gilray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank.
00:42:56.740And those three made him out to be tiny.
00:43:53.040He stages a coup, a military coup, and several of the people
00:43:58.740who are going to become his marshals, are in key positions to help him. He has one friend,
00:44:06.800Murat, who takes care of the cavalry. Jean Lannes takes care of the infantry. Marmont takes care of
00:44:16.500the artillery. And his friend Berthier organises the staff. And what they do, the general staff,
00:44:23.780What they do is to have a two-day essential uprising. The first forces the parliament to move out of Paris to Saint-Cloud. And then he, on the second day, he goes to Saint-Cloud and tries to persuade the parliament to adopt him as dictator, essentially, which it doesn't do.
00:44:46.800It's furious and very resentful. And so he has to then go outside the Parliament building, or at least the Saint-Cloud Palace, and send grenadiers with fixed bayonets in to arrest the opponents and to essentially get rid of the Parliament.
00:45:08.240they have to climb out of the window of the orangery at Saint-Cleu.
00:45:13.320And they're all wearing, in those days,
00:45:15.400the parliamentarians were wearing great big red togas.
00:45:19.680And so they jump out of the windows and run away.
00:45:23.600And of course, every state opening of parliament in the House of Lords,
00:45:28.540I wear essentially a red toga, these sort of cloaks.
00:45:33.220The idea of climbing through a window and running away, wearing one.
00:45:37.740Just next to impossible. So as you can imagine, quite a lot of them are arrested and they're exiled, and Napoleon takes power as First Consul of France.
00:45:46.980And is this a purely intra-elite battle, or are the French people with Napoleon?
00:45:55.540The ordinary citizens of Paris don't mind that the Directory's been overthrown.
00:46:01.700They have only ever heard good things about Napoleon since the Italian campaign.
00:46:05.960They recognise that he's essentially, in this case, he argues that he's saving the Republic from this sort of, he makes up terror plots as well, says that the British are planning terror plots.
00:46:22.980pots. He also thinks that he's under threat of assassination, which there's no evidence
00:46:28.480of. So he creates a sort of security fear. And through it all, he grasps power. And the
00:46:37.480French people do nothing. They seem to be perfectly happy with this. And then he appoints
00:46:46.160two other consuls. So the three of them are supposed to rule France. He then brings in
00:46:52.020a reformed parliament, which is essentially full of his own cronies. And he's done it.
00:46:59.420And sort of touching on the marshals aspect, but also cronies, there are lots of people who clearly
00:47:05.680he can trust. He can trust someone to run the artillery. He can trust someone to run the staff.
00:47:10.680He can trust someone to be the other two consuls. Where does he get all his friends from?
00:47:15.360Well, partly they are people who've been with him since the beginning.
00:47:18.980So Berthier, who runs the general staff and becomes minister of war in his new government, was with him from the first day, indeed before the first day of the Italian campaign.
00:47:31.500Murat, who was the man who brought the cannons from outside Paris to put down the uprising back in October 1795, and the following year becomes his, in 1800, becomes his brother-in-law.
00:47:45.560These are sort of really close part of the family, essentially.
00:47:50.060And then, of course, as there always are whenever power is shifting,
00:47:54.280there are the ambitious people who want to be on the side of the rising sun
01:00:21.260He provided mass employment, obviously also in his armies.
01:00:25.600But he was a really efficient, hardworking,
01:00:32.960but also visionary man who wanted to and did change France forever.
01:00:39.240And where is he getting the money for all of this, Andrew?
01:00:41.720Because the French Revolution, as I understand it, happens because the country is basically bankrupt, partly because they helped the Americans so much with their revolution.
01:00:50.480So he inherits this poor country, fighting wars, which are expensive.
01:00:54.240And then you're telling us within a decade or two, the country is flourishing, is spending money, building this, building that.
01:01:12.700It doesn't last terribly long, but it allows the French to trade
01:01:16.860because up until then, of course, the Royal Navy had entirely blockaded all French ports.
01:01:22.480Partly also because he encouraged things like trade fairs.
01:01:28.560He encouraged luxury goods, which the French have always been very good at.
01:01:33.040Lyon, during the French Revolution, was devastated by the fact that people didn't buy silk and lace and velvet
01:01:39.380it, because if you did, you looked like an aristocrat, you could have your head chopped
01:01:42.980off. So he started up the luxury trades as well. And also stealing. That was the other
01:01:50.240massive way in which he injected huge amounts of cash. When he went to Rome, for example,
01:02:00.020he insisted on the Vatican handing over hundreds of manuscripts and lots of paintings and so on,
01:02:08.760but also cash. And he would do this to town after town, city after city. He would impose,
01:02:14.560outside France, obviously, he would impose these, what were called, dotations.
01:02:20.020So somewhat civilised pillaging of the conquered territories.
01:02:22.820Yes. And you can still today actually see in the Louvre, there are still paintings that were
01:02:28.440stolen from Italy in the Italian campaign. And so this is essentially peak Napoleon,
01:02:36.420really? Yes. Some historians would argue 1806, 1807, but certainly by 1805, you've got
01:02:46.820Pete Napoleon. Pete Napoleon. And Pete Napoleon really is the Battle of Austerlitz, isn't it?
01:02:51.880Yes. So let's talk about that. Why did it happen? Who was it against? And why was it such a
01:02:57.780magnificent victory? Well, what was the war, in fact, perhaps? Tell us. Yes, it's called the
01:03:01.440War of the Third Coalition. And it takes place when the Austrians, rather stupidly, invade
01:03:10.360Bavaria, which is Napoleon's ally. And Napoleon at that point has his entire army on the Channel
01:03:21.480Coast, looking out towards Britain and waiting for a moment that the Royal Navy can be tricked
01:03:27.500away from England, and he can then cross the Channel and march on London, which is one
01:03:34.820of his great dreams. And that doesn't take place. The Admiralty in Britain knows exactly
01:03:42.680what he is trying to do. But the core system, which we mentioned earlier, of each of these
01:03:53.240sort of mini-armies, are by that stage commanded, each of the corps are commanded by a marshal,
01:04:00.920and they have headquarters all the way along the coast. And at the moment that he hears that
01:04:12.320Bavaria is about to be invaded, i.e. before it is actually invaded, because he has spies all over
01:04:17.900Europe. He turns, it's called the pirouette of Boulogne, he turns the entire army round and
01:04:29.160marches straight towards Bohemia. And it's an extraordinary, and still today is taught actually
01:04:39.420in military academies, extraordinary genius of this man Berthier, Alexandre Berthier,
01:04:46.580who was an aristocrat. He was the chief of staff, and many people, many historians think he's still
01:04:53.140the greatest chief of staff in military history. And what he did was to plot the entire army,
01:05:00.020right the way down to the last man, how they got 600 miles across Europe without overlapping,
01:05:07.660managing to keep all the supplies and food and everything going with them. This time,
01:05:14.860they actually brought everything with them and it didn't slow them down because this man was an
01:05:20.740absolute genius at manoeuvre. And they managed to free Bavaria and then do a pirouette inside
01:05:32.900the Black Forest. So as the Austrians, who were being supported by the Russians,
01:05:38.980thought they were coming in one direction, actually in the middle of the Black Forest,
01:05:42.360They changed directions, 90 degrees, which you can do under the core system, because you just move the units around.
01:05:51.540And then came south and captured Vienna.
01:05:57.940And then after that, they met the huge, much larger Austro-Russian army at the Battle of Austalitz on the 2nd of December 1805,
01:06:09.960which coincidentally was, not entirely coincidentally, was the first anniversary of the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor of France.
01:06:20.940And it's an extraordinary set-piece battle, Auslitz.
01:06:26.200When you go, I do recommend you, if you're ever in that part of the world, near Bruna in Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, you can see the battle from the place where Napoleon was, a little hill called Zoran.
01:06:43.860And you can look down and see the way in which he, first of all, hid an entire corps under Marshal Salt in the valley, which was covered in mist.
01:06:57.380So the coalition troops couldn't see that it was there.
01:07:01.220And as the sun burnt off the mist, he sent the salt in a sort of surprise attack up the Prats and Heights.
01:07:09.980At the same time that he was using Bernadotte and Davout, these great marshals of his, to hold the left hand of his line.
01:07:21.440And then he had a very powerful right flank manoeuvre as well.
01:07:26.540And frankly, the Austrians and Russians, who weren't very good at coordinating between them either, didn't know what hit them.
01:07:33.880And they were pushed off the Pratsen Heights.
01:07:35.980and in just a series of absolutely brilliant manoeuvres
01:08:34.580That was not how he won Auslitz. He won Auslitz, not by some kind of clever trick, but by a series of brilliantly coordinated attacks.
01:08:44.580And the way he was able to do that was through the use of this thing, the core system.
01:08:49.580So each core would have its own artillery, cavalry and infantry, but also its own staff, its own supplies, its own medical.
01:09:00.580It was essentially a mini-army, and each of them were commanded by marshals, and he had created this thing.
01:09:08.800Maybe this is a good time to talk about the marshall, because it had been created the previous May, in May 1804.
01:09:17.360This idea of he appointed 18 of his best generals, both to be, they were called marshals, the history of the marshall, it goes back to the 13th century in France,
01:09:28.320But a few of them have been guillotined and there weren't any by 1804. He announced this new rank of marshal and gave it to his 14 top generals in the field and an extra four senatorial marshals who were heroes of France.
01:09:48.000And over the next 11 years, up until Waterloo, he appointed another eight.
01:12:41.400But what's really interesting is how he inspired that devotion and loyalty,
01:12:49.100yet at the same time there was, I mean, this is modern vocabulary,
01:12:52.580but there was a toxic element to it, wasn't there? Yes, that's right, because he was
01:12:58.340attempting to create a band of brothers, but he wound up really creating a nest of vipers because
01:13:04.100what really happened was that because they all got the same martial arts, the same rank,
01:13:12.740they were desperate to outdo each other. The sense of competitiveness between them
01:13:18.180absolutely was to wreck campaigns. There were four occasions when they drew swords on one
01:13:24.040another or they wanted to fight duels against one another. The hatreds between them were
01:13:29.440extraordinary. There were some friendships. Marshal Victor and Salt had mistresses who
01:13:35.400were sisters, and that helped them get on with one another. Could have gone either way, that one.
01:13:40.500But it was something that he soon found that this lust for glory and also having the same rank was to prove disastrous.
01:13:56.520And would you say that's a failure of leadership on Napoleon's part, failure to contain that, to channel it correctly, to organize that in such a way that it was towards the common good as he saw it rather than the internal fighting?
01:14:08.940or do you think that was just the inevitable reality?
01:14:11.360I think it has to be put ultimately down to him.
01:14:15.020You know, he's the person who created the Marshallette
01:14:16.840and who tried to keep these guys in order.
01:14:20.520He deliberately encouraged competition between them.
01:14:25.040He was to say, after the Treaty of Tilsit,
01:14:27.900which ended the War of the Fourth Coalition in 1807,
01:14:31.100when he was negotiating with the Tsar Alexander I,
01:14:34.560He said, I never let my generals know what I'm thinking and I encourage them to perform one another and I therefore can sort of stay above it and see what they're up to.
01:14:51.640And so that was a deliberate attempt to encourage, to foster what was ultimately to be an unhealthy form of competition.
01:15:03.720And it's really interesting, you mentioned the fourth coalition now.
01:15:07.240I mean, after Austerlitz, is there no one, you know, the Russian emperor and others in Europe who go,
01:15:12.520no, we've had our asses handed to us, maybe we should just let this guy crack on with it.
01:15:17.200Yeah, you'd have thought, wouldn't you?
01:15:18.420But the people who don't do that are the Prussians, who in the autumn of 1806, i.e. less than a year after Austerlitz, they think that they can take on France on their own.
01:15:34.300They do get support from the Russians later on, but they reckon that their army, which of course was trained under Frederick the Great, but nevertheless Frederick the Great was long dead by then.
01:15:48.080And they're well-drilled and all that, but they're a small country.
01:15:50.600They're a small country, and what they don't have is universal conscription.
01:15:56.460And the French, of course, since 1792, when they brought in universal conscription,
01:21:35.660He wins both of them. He's about to lose the Battle of Ilau when he unleashes Muirah, who makes the largest cavalry charge in history. I think it still is the largest cavalry charge in history. 16,000 is the maximum number. Some historians argue it's a bit less than that, but it's a huge number and certainly the biggest one of the Napoleonic Wars.
01:22:02.540and he basically just drives them through the centre of the Russo-Prussian army.
01:22:12.280And once they punch through the centre, they're able basically to split the armies in two.
01:22:19.120So he wins that battle. Huge losses on both sides, but much bigger losses on the Russo-Prussian side.
01:22:26.860And then there's the Battle of Friedland a little bit later, which is another huge victory where they managed to trap the Russians in a town, the town of Friedland, which has the river Alla going behind it.
01:22:46.540And there are only two bridges to get over. And once they force them into the town, the enemy can't get over the bridges in time. And they're massacred and lots of them surrender.
01:23:00.320So the war ends with these two big victories and Napoleon then imposes a peace in which
01:23:09.780he essentially splits up Europe between Russia and France at the Treaty of Tilsit, which
01:23:16.060is negotiated on a barge, a sort of raft in the middle of the River Neiman.
01:23:27.320How does it begin to unravel from there?
01:23:29.540It's sort of slightly begun to unravel already because in the December of 1806, when he's still in Berlin, he passes what's called the Berlin Decrees, which are the start of the continental system, which is a massive protectionist measure that is intended to cover the whole of Europe and which is intended to force Britain to the negotiating table.
01:23:58.660because no merchant in Europe is allowed to trade with Britain, and that's what he also gets
01:24:05.940Tsar Alexander I to agree to in the Treaty of Tilsit. So actually protectionism is the major
01:24:13.100thing, I think, that brings him down, because it's in order to impose the continental system
01:24:18.900that he goes to war against Portugal, which is a long-standing ally of Britain and ignored the
01:24:26.500continental system in 1807, and then ultimately against Russia, which turns against the continental
01:24:34.100system in 1811, which leads to his catastrophe of 1812. Before we get on to that, was one of
01:24:42.180the signs that his grip was starting to lessen and weaken is that the fact that even though the
01:24:49.200French won significant battles, they were starting to get more and more casualties inflicted
01:24:56.460upon them. Especially at Ilau. That was really heavy. What happened was that Marshal Ogerow,
01:25:04.440who's an amazing character, and we must talk about him at some stage, his Seventh Corps
01:25:12.480was ordered to attack the Russians. There was a blizzard, and the blizzard came down.
01:25:20.600He carried on marching, and it turned out that he marched straight into the guns of the Russians.
01:25:26.460artillery. And the first they knew about it was, as the snow was swirling around them,
01:25:32.140they suddenly saw the flashes of the Russian guns. Do you remember that bit in Master and
01:25:36.460Commander at the beginning of the movie, the Russell Crowe movie, Master and Commander,
01:25:40.540where they can suddenly see the flashes in the mist, and then they start exactly like that,
01:26:12.560if he wanted to defend the continental system.
01:26:15.200Instead of doing what we now, I think, especially people from the kind of political background that we've got, we'd have allowed free markets to deal whether or not you wanted to trade with whoever.
01:26:30.720That would have actually been the way to have gone about it.
01:26:33.680But he instead imposed what was called Colbertian economics, which was all about closing down free markets and free enterprise as much as possible.
01:26:44.360And so when the Russians in 1811 decided that they were going to resume trade with Britain,
01:26:50.400because they really needed to, he invaded Russia to try and force them back into the continental
01:26:56.120system. And of course, by then also, he had invaded Portugal and then went on also to invade Spain,
01:27:03.100even though Spain wasn't threatening the continental system. And so he had a war on two
01:27:09.540France. He had a massive war in which he was to lose a quarter of a million men in the Peninsular
01:27:14.480War in Spain and Portugal, and he lost half a million men in Russia in 1812. And by the way,
01:27:21.300just to jump in, from what I understand, the Spanish and Portuguese campaign was largely
01:27:25.660so brutal and painful and so many losses because of the British involvement.
01:27:30.580No, no, no, no. The actual, the Portuguese and Spanish, a good deal of work's been done on this
01:27:38.300historically. And that assumption was true until believed widely, including by me, I hasten to add,
01:27:45.400until 10 years ago or so. But now a lot of work's been done on quite the number of Frenchmen killed
01:27:50.980by Spanish regular troops, but also partisans. And what the British did was constantly to allow
01:27:58.760the Spanish and Portuguese to stay in the war. There was no point at which they sort of gave up
01:28:05.160because the Duke of Wellington in Spain
01:28:10.720was constantly able to attack the French
01:28:16.020and it was very good for morale and so on.
01:28:18.500But actually, if you look at each individual Frenchman who dies,
01:28:22.240the Spanish and Portuguese kill more than we do.
01:28:24.380And it's interesting that we talk about Wellington
01:28:26.360because this was obviously the first time
01:28:28.200these two great military minds encountered each other.
01:28:32.940I mean, they encountered each other in the strategic sense in that they knew what the other was doing, but the only time they actually faced each other across a battlefield was at Waterloo, absolutely, yeah.
01:28:43.500Because Napoleon didn't spend enough time in Spain.
01:28:46.280He went over just for three months in 1808, 1809, just January 1809.
01:28:53.060And then he went away and fought the Austrians again and got married and so on, and never concentrated on what he should have done, which was to close down the Peninsular War.
01:29:06.300And so he left it up to his marshals, who, as I mentioned earlier, all hated each other and refused to help each other.
01:29:13.680And Masséna had to sack Ney. Marmont didn't help Masséna.
01:29:18.620Masséna. Their salts didn't help anybody. He just stayed in Andalusia and refused to help anybody.
01:29:26.260There were massive, there were 18 marshals who served in Spain and Portugal, and only one of
01:29:33.220them, Suchet, emerges with any credit. So at this point, the marshals had, it had worked,
01:29:41.920and it worked spectacularly well in Austerlitz, but we see now the royal fractures starting to
01:29:48.040appear and the various personalities start to fragment. Particularly in Spain where they all
01:29:56.160fell out with one another but also in Russia because although it went well at the beginning
01:30:02.360by the time they got to Moscow and then started to retreat from Moscow and the weather turned
01:30:07.440they all argued about which route to take back and viciously you know there's one moment where
01:30:15.280Davout and Murat, have to be physically restrained from fighting one another over this.
01:30:21.580So, and one can understand, you know, the passions are high, the testosterone is running,
01:30:26.660it's matters of life and death. And so, of course, they really, and they deeply believed
01:30:33.880their own strategic thinking. So you can understand why there were these clashes.
01:30:39.980But Napoleon, all too late, ever steps in to try and stop it from happening.
01:30:45.280And in Spain, he never appoints somebody who is sort of top marshal.
01:31:29.240They wanted to feel that he admired them.
01:31:31.920And instead, he just slapped them down the entire time.
01:31:34.980The letters, he wrote 40,497 letters that are published in the correspondence volumes, and they are full of him slapping them down, saying, I'm disappointed, I'm disenchanted, you've failed, you're useless.
01:31:53.580You know, I mean, he was incredibly, although he was a wonderful man-manager when it comes to his soldiers, he was a terrible one when it came to the leadership techniques that he used to his marshal.
01:36:26.380It's a bit more complicated than that.
01:36:27.780But overall, Napoleon, he owned almanacs, which said what the winter was like in Russia.
01:36:36.000And when the snow started to fall, he'd studied Voltaire's history of the campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden in Russia when the catastrophe at Voltaire.
01:36:51.020So, yeah, he knew that this was going to happen.
01:36:53.600And in fact, he did plan to be able to get back to Smolensk in less time than it had taken him to get from Smolensk to Moscow.
01:37:02.600But on the 25th of October, 1812, at Malayaroslavets, which is about 75 miles southwest of Moscow,
01:37:15.140he suffered a reverse, or at least his nephew suffered a reverse,
01:37:23.400and then he took the wrong sort of long dog leg back via the battlefield of Borodino.
01:37:31.720And he did this because he was advised to by some of his marshals.
01:37:35.000It's virtually the only time that he actually takes his marshals' advice,
01:37:38.900and it turns out to be catastrophic advice, because that's when the blizzards hit.
01:37:43.760And it's also, we talk about a Russian winter,
01:37:46.520but what we also need to talk about is a Russian summer
01:37:48.920and the effect it has on troops and disease.
01:40:35.780because he wants to go back to Naples to try and protect his kingdom.
01:40:39.020And so he hands over, and Berthier is running the army anyway, along with Davout. And so together they try and turn the army into something worthwhile, but the Russians are coming.
01:40:54.800And then at the key moment in December 1812, the Prussians changed sides.
01:41:02.760And then halfway through the next year, the Austrians changed sides.
01:41:06.320So suddenly these marshals, who are far too far east, have to bring themselves, get themselves back.
01:41:16.040Sometimes they leave people in important places like Dresden and Hamburg.
01:47:19.360But the interesting thing is that of the 26 marshals, by the time he lands in France, there are, well, three of them have died.
01:47:31.060Lann, who I mentioned earlier, his great friend Bessier took a cannibal to the chest in 1813, and Poniatowski drowned in the Battle of Leipzig.
01:47:40.680And then a couple of weeks later, Berthier dies on the 1st of June.
01:56:14.080Secondly, the Prussians could, they possibly would have shot him, but he very sensitively surrendered to the British, who considered that that was a bad idea.
01:56:27.320There were political reasons why not, too, in that it would have probably started civil war amongst Frenchmen.
01:56:36.440As it was, the Marshal Ney was shot by the Bourbons.
01:56:40.640Marshal Murat was shot by the Neapolitans.
01:56:44.620Marshal Brun was ripped to shreds by a royalist crowd in Avignon.
01:56:52.240And years later, Marshal Mortier was assassinated in the streets of Paris.
01:56:56.460So you do have a strong sense, I think, that the bloodshed should end.
01:57:02.660and killing Napoleon wouldn't have done that.
01:57:06.320And to wrap it up, what is the legacy of Napoleon?
01:57:09.600Because some people say, well, a lot of his vision and his ideas
01:57:13.460were inspiration from creating the European Union.
01:57:17.500There's a left-wing version in France of people,
01:59:49.040Ten years ago when I wrote my Napoleon biography,
01:59:52.120I thought of his compartmentalization of his brain as being one of the best things about him.
02:00:00.380But now I actually see, especially as I've been able to read all of the letters that have been published by the Fondation Napoleon that weren't there for my original book,
02:00:11.180I now see a much more nuanced but sort of negative side of him
02:00:17.280where he wasn't good at inspiring and leading his top team.
02:00:23.360He was very, very good all the time, right to the end.
02:00:25.900You remember, the men were willing to march on Paris in 1814.