Isegoria

Andrew Roberts describes (in Napoleon: A Life) the hard fought Battle of Marengo:

The French refused to abandon the Fontanone line when the Austrians counter-attacked; soldiers urinated on muskets that had become too hot to handle from the constant firing.

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‘Bonaparte advanced in front,’ recalled Petit, ‘and exhorted to courage and firmness all the corps he met with; it was visible that his presence reanimated them.’

At this point the Austrian Archduke Joseph, Archduke Charles’s younger brother, crossed the Fontanone with his infantry – the sides were too steep for cavalry or artillery. The French failed to dislodge him and his men started building a trestle bridge, covered by artillery firing canister shot which flayed the French brigade sent to stop them. By 2 p.m. Marengo had fallen: the Austrians had brought eighty guns into play, the Fontanone was being crossed everywhere and Gardanne’s division was broken, fleeing the field, though not before it had bought Napoleon 3 ½ hours’ respite with which to organize his counter-attack. Only Kellermann’s cavalry brigade, carefully retiring squadron by squadron, intimidated the Austrians from releasing their numerically superior cavalry force.

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By this point the Austrians were taunting the French, twirling the bearskins of dead French grenadiers around on their sabres.

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Napoleon, who now had only Monnier’s division and the Consular Guard in reserve, had sent desperate word to Desaix at 11 a.m. to return with Boudet’s division as quickly as possible. ‘I had thought to attack the enemy, instead it is he who has attacked me,’ went his message; ‘in the name of God, come back if you still can!’

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The French moved backwards in good order, one battalion at a time, fighting as they went. It was an utter test of discipline not to succumb to the temptation to break ranks under those circumstances, and it paid off. The day continued very hot, with no water, little artillery support, and sustained attacks from the Austrian cavalry, but some units retreated steadily from 9.30 a.m. to about 4 p.m. over 5 miles, never breaking ranks.

Napoleon calmly called out encouragement and exuded leadership ‘with his accustomed sangfroid’, in the words of one of his guards, ensuring that his infantry, cavalry and paltry artillery each supported one another.

‘The Consul seemed to brave death,’ recalled Petit, ‘and to be near it, for the bullets were seen more than once to drive up the ground between his horse’s legs.’

He had now completely used up his reserves, had barely 6,000 infantry across a 5-mile front, with 1,000 cavalry and only 6 usable guns, and his army was exhausted, desperately thirsty, low on ammunition and one-third hors de combat, but he behaved as if victory were certain.

He even managed to be light-hearted; noticing that the horse Marbot was riding was slightly wounded in the leg, he ‘took me by the ear and said, laughing, “You expect me to lend you my horses for you to treat them in this way?”

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‘We have gone back far enough today,’ Napoleon harangued his men. ‘Soldiers, remember it is my custom to bivouac on the field of battle!’

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When the Austrians came forward at 5 p.m., the front of their centre regiments were ripped apart by canister fire from Marmont’s battery. As at Rivoli, a lucky shot hit an ammunition wagon that exploded and caused chaos. The Austrians recoiled sharply and the shock effect was serious, especially once Boudet’s division advanced upon them. Aggressive Austrian charges soon threw Boudet on the defensive, but just as nearly 6,000 Austrian infantry fired a musket volley and then charged with their bayonets, Kellermann unleashed his cavalry, which had moved up concealed by vines in the trees.

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The French army then advanced across the whole front. It was at this triumphant moment that Desaix was struck in the chest and killed. ‘Why am I not allowed to weep?’ a grief-stricken Napoleon said on being told the news, but he had to concentrate on directing the next assault.

Kellermann’s next attacks sent Austrian cavalry charging back into their own infantry, completely disorganizing them and giving Lannes, Monnier and the Consular Guard the chance to complete the victory by moving forward on all fronts. ‘The fate of a battle is the result of a single instant – a thought,’ Napoleon was later to say about Marengo. ‘The decisive moment comes, a moral spark is lit, and the smallest reserve accomplishes victory.’

Austrian troops who had fought bravely all day simply cracked under the shock and strain of seeing victory snatched from them, and fled back to Alessandria in disorder.

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When the news of Marengo reached Paris, government bonds that had been standing at 11 francs six months earlier, and 29 just before the battle, shot up to 35 francs.

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Napoleon had worked his three arms of infantry, artillery and cavalry together perfectly at Marengo, but it was still a very lucky victory, won largely by the shock value of Desaix’s arrival on the field at precisely the right psychological moment, and Kellermann’s superbly timed cavalry charges. The French reconquered a plain in one hour that it had taken the Austrians eight to occupy. The conscript French troops, guided by the veterans, had acquitted themselves very well.

‘After a great battle,’ wrote Captain Blaze, ‘there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.’

Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away.

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Napoleon also invented some last words for Desaix: ‘Go tell the First Consul that I die with the regret of having not done enough to live in posterity.’ (In fact he had died instantaneously.)

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The view of Desaix’s aide-de-camp Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary was that ‘If General Desaix had delayed an hour in arriving, we’d have been driven into the Po.’

The day after the battle, Napoleon wrote to the other consuls that he was ‘in the deepest pain over the death of the man I loved and respected the most’.

He took Savary and Desaix’s other aide-de-camp, Jean Rapp, onto his staff as a sign of respect, and he allowed the 9th Légère, which Desaix had been leading when he was killed, to sew the word ‘Incomparable’ in gold onto their standard.

He had Desaix’s corpse embalmed, and a medal struck in his honour, as well as one commemorating Marengo.

All that he said to Kellermann after the battle was, ‘You made a pretty good charge,’ which infuriated him, especially as he had gushed to Bessières, ‘The Guard cavalry covered itself with glory today.’

(Kellermann is supposed to have replied in anger, ‘I’m glad you are satisfied, general, for it has placed the crown on your head’, but it is doubtful that he really did.

Privately, Napoleon admitted to Bourrienne that Kellermann had ‘made a lucky charge. He did it just at the right moment. We are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circumstances decide these affairs.’

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Perhaps the best summing up of the battle was Napoleon’s terse statement to Brune and Dumas: ‘You see, there were two battles on the same day; I lost the first; I gained the second.’

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On June 16 Napoleon offered Emperor Francis peace once again, on the same basis as Campo Formio, writing: ‘I exhort Your Majesty to listen to the cry of humanity.’ In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’.

John Antal composed a nightmare scenario for the US military, The Dictator’s Dream:

A world away, the war in Gaza continued unabated, and after suffering nearly 6,000 Hezbollah rocket and missile attacks in northern Israel, the Middle East had exploded. Israel launched a full-scale invasion into Lebanon to push Hezbollah forces north of the Litani River. Reacting swiftly, Hezbollah launched thousands of missiles towards Israel. A day later, Iran and its surrogates in Yemen launched massive rocket, missile, and drone attacks aimed at Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and other Israeli cities and settlements.

Israel’s Iron Dome could not handle the overwhelming attack, and as a result, Israeli casualties dramatically mounted, and towns and villages burned. Hoping to avoid a war prior to the Presidential election, the United States first hesitated and then finally committed military forces to support their Jewish allies. In a massive movement of combat power, the United States military engaged with significant naval and air forces against Iran and its proxies. Consequently, Iran and its surrogates targeted American forces in the Middle East. The United States was now in a shooting war and taking casualties.

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Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russian forces were attacking relentlessly, regardless of their horrendous losses in men and equipment. The Ukrainians were fighting bravely, desperately, but the weight of the Russian attacks forced a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defenses. Ukrainian forces fell back in disorder and a mass refugee exodus from Ukraine began. The US and NATO rushed to respond with an emergency resupply operation, but it was proving to be too little, too late. With mounting Ukrainian losses in both manpower and territory, the dictator expected Kyiv to surrender to a triumphant Russia despite American efforts.

As the Americans were contending with a war in the Middle East and a faltering Ukraine, they were experiencing chaos at home. The contentious Presidential election erupted in violence. On November 7, when the winner of the election was announced, riots broke out in major American cities. The dictator’s hybrid warfare forces, already surreptitiously positioned in the US, facilitated, and supported these riots. Sabotage and violent “false flag” killings raged in cities across the US. Nuclear power plants and oil refineries were attacked by explosive laden drones. Forest fires raged across the American southwest, started by the dictator’s hybrid special forces teams and facilitated by drug cartel gangs. America’s national, military, and police forces struggled to maintain order. Sabotage, mass shootings, transportation disruptions, internet and communications outages, and attacks on the electrical grid, along with cyber-attacks from “unknown actors,” disrupted American society. Just in time logistics broke down. Store shelves were soon bare, and looting was rampant. Several major metropolises plunged into darkness. Disorder consumed America at home and abroad.

As this hybrid war played out in the United States, the dictator decided it was time to act against the renegade province that he had sworn to bring to heel. Rather than an outright invasion, his plan was more subtle, involving a siege and an ultimatum for a “peaceful” surrender. First, his military forces imposed a naval blockade, having practiced it multiple times in the prior 18 months during massive “punishment drills.” To increase the seriousness of this blockade, the dictator’s naval and air forces deployed sea mines to block the major trade routes. The dictator then ratcheted up the pressure by imposing a naval quarantine. This included halting, boarding, and detouring every ship sailing into the quarantine zone to the mainland for confiscation. The dictator dared any foreign power to challenge these actions and declared that his air, sea, and rocket forces would only respond with force if provoked.

You can also listen to Antal read the story and discuss it:

• “Useful fiction” presents possible scenarios intended to develop creativity and strengthen foresight — solving problems in the short term and creating solutions for the long-run.
• The increasing speed of battlefield adaptation requires the U.S. Army to innovate and develop courses of action very rapidly.
• American deterrence has been dramatically affected by events in the past several years.

Andrew Roberts summarizes (in Napoleon: A Life), Napoleon’s first few months in power:

In less than fifteen weeks Napoleon had effectively ended the French Revolution, seen off the Abbé Sieyès, given France a new constitution, established her finances on a sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vendée, set up a Senate, Tribunate, Legislative Body and Conseil d’État, appointed a talented government regardless of past political affiliations, rebuffed the Bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, won a plebiscite by a landslide (even accounting for the fraud), reorganized French local government and inaugurated the Banque de France.

‘Today I’m a sort of mannequin figure that’s lost its liberty and happiness,’ Napoleon wrote to Moreau, the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, on March 16 as France prepared to re-engage Austrian forces. ‘Grandeur is all very well, but only in retrospect and in the imagination. I envy your happy lot; you are going to accomplish grand things with your gallant men. I would willingly exchange my consular purple for the epaulette of a brigadier under your orders… I strongly hope that the circumstances may allow me to come and give you a helping hand.’ Three weeks later circumstances would allow just that, when the Austrian General Michael von Melas defeated General Nicolas Soult at the battle of Cadibona, pushing him back towards Savona and forcing Masséna into Genoa, which was subsequently besieged. It was time to return to the battlefield.

He had ordered the covert formation of a 30,000-strong Army of the Reserve based at Dijon on January 7, 1800:

He was counting on an element of surprise: no one had taken an army over the Alps since Charlemagne, and before him Hannibal. Although Napoleon wouldn’t be travelling with elephants, he did have Gribeauval 8-pounder and 4-pounder cannon, whose barrels weighed over a quarter of a ton, to heave over the mountain range. Snow was still thick on the ground in early May, when the advance began, so Marmont devised sledges for the barrels made out of hollowed-out tree-trunks, which one hundred men at a time hauled up the Alps and then down again, to drumbeats. (Since the Italian side is much steeper than the French, they found it harder going down than up.)

Money and supplies were sent ahead to the monasteries and hostelries along the route, and local guides were hired and sworn to secrecy.

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‘An army can pass always, and at all seasons,’ Napoleon told a sceptical General Dumas, ‘wherever two men can set their feet’.

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In the strategy meeting he allegedly asked Bourrienne where he thought the decisive battle would be fought. ‘How the devil should I know?’ answered his Brienne-educated private secretary. ‘Why, look here, you fool,’ said Napoleon, pointing to the plains of the River Scrivia at San Giuliano Vecchio, explaining how he thought Melas would manoeuvre once the French had crossed the Alps. It was precisely there that the battle of Marengo was fought three months later.

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In all 51,400 men crossed the Alps, with 10,000 horses and 750 mules. They went by single file in some places, and had to start at dawn every day to reduce the risk of avalanches once the sun had risen.

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Napoleon rode a horse for almost the whole journey over the Alps, and a mule (as it was more sure of foot) for the iciest stretch around Saint-Pierre.

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It was at this stage of the campaign that the sheer ruthlessness that helped make Napoleon so formidable a commander revealed itself once again. Instead of marching south to relieve starving Genoa, as his troops and even his senior commanders assumed he would do, he wheeled eastwards towards Milan to seize the huge supply depot there and cut off Melas’s line of retreat towards the Mincio river and Mantua. Ordering Masséna to hold out for as long as possible so that he would tie down Ott’s besieging force, Napoleon outfoxed Melas, who had taken it for granted that Napoleon would try to save Genoa. He had therefore left Nice and marched back from Turin to Alessandria to try to head Napoleon off.

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At 6.30 p.m. that same day Napoleon entered Milan by the Verceil Gate in the pouring rain and installed himself at the archducal palace, staying up until 2 a.m. dictating letters, receiving Francesco Melzi d’Eril, who had run the Cisalpine Republic, setting up a new city government and releasing political prisoners interned by the Austrians, who had used Milan as their regional headquarters. He also read Melas’s captured despatches from Vienna, which told him the enemy’s strengths, dispositions and state of morale.

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Genoa surrendered on June 4, by which time around 30,000 of its 160,000 inhabitants had died of starvation and of diseases associated with malnutrition, as had 4,000 French soldiers. Another 4,000 soldiers who were fit enough to march out were allowed to return to France with the honours of war, and a further 4,000 sick and wounded were transported to France in Royal Navy ships under Admiral Lord Keith, who had blockaded the port but saw the advantage of evacuating so many French away from the theatre of war.

Masséna’s health was broken, not least because he had insisted on only eating what his troops did. He never wholly forgave Napoleon for not rescuing him. Equally, Napoleon – who was never besieged in the whole of his career – criticized Masséna for not having held out for ten days longer, recalling when in exile on St Helena, ‘A few old men and some women might have died of hunger, but then he would not have surrendered Genoa. If one thinks always of humanity – only of humanity – one should give up going to war. I don’t know how war is to be conducted on the rosewater plan.’

Having pulled off a coup the previous day, Napoleon was intent on conducting a second as soon as was practicable, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), against his chief co-conspirator:

Sieyès had already written two constitutions for France, in 1791 and 1793, and Napoleon did not believe the Revolution would be safeguarded by his third, which was packed with checks and balances to centralized power. He later wrote of Sieyès, ‘He was not a man of action: knowing little of men’s natures, he did not know how to make them act. His studies having always led him down the path of metaphysics.’

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Sieyès clearly saw himself as this philosopher-king, with Napoleon as his consul for war and Ducos for the interior. This was very different from how Napoleon viewed the situation.

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Article 41 of the new constitution stated: ‘The First Consul promulgates laws; he names and dismisses at his pleasure members of the Conseil d’État, ministers and ambassadors and other chief foreign agents, officers of the army and navy, the members of local administrations and government commissioners attached to the courts.’

He also had treaty-making powers, would live at the Tuileries and would receive 500,000 francs per annum, fifty times an ambassador’s salary. It was thus very clear, right from the beginning, where true power lay; the second and third consuls would also live at the Tuileries but they would draw only 150,000 francs per annum for their roles as constitutional figleafs.

The Consulate issued a spate of decrees aimed at making the new regime popular and, in its own phrase, ‘completing the Revolution’. Versailles was turned over to wounded soldiers; a vicious anti-émigré law was repealed, with Napoleon going personally to the Temple prison to set hostages free; the police were ordered not to harass returning émigrés or to make them take out forced ‘loans’; and the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and 1 Vendémiaire (the republican New Year’s Day) were made public holidays. Pensions would be awarded to the war-wounded as well as to soldiers’ widows and orphans and non-juring priests were no longer deported for refusing to take the Constitutional Oath.

A full ten days of mourning was ordained for George Washington, who died in December, despite the fact that France and America were still fighting the Quasi-War; in the public eulogies to ‘the American Cincinnatus’, analogies were drawn between Washington and Napoleon.

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‘A newly born government must dazzle and astonish,’ he told Bourrienne at this time. ‘When it ceases to do that it fails.’

The appointment of a distinguished scientist like Laplace to such a high-profile post made it clear that, just because Napoleon was a soldier and Brumaire had been a military coup, this was emphatically not a military dictatorship.

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‘If I die within three or four years of fever in my bed,’ Napoleon told Roederer the following year, ‘I will say to the nation to watch out against military government. I will tell it to appoint a civil magistrate.’

Fouché predictably became minister of police and Martin Gaudin, a former high official in the treasury who had served every regime since Louis XVI, was appointed finance minister. Gaudin quickly set about reforming the fiendishly complex French tax code and lowering rates. Financial management moved from local authorities to the finance ministry and the whole public accounting system was eventually centralized.

Napoleon quickly established a central system for the payment of the army, hitherto done through the departments, a classic example of how he was able to slice through bureaucracy and implement a much-needed reform without delay.

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Napoleon’s second coup had taken a little longer than the first, but it was just as bloodless and successful.

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As he was to write of Julius Caesar, ‘In such a state of affairs these deliberative assemblies could no longer govern; the person of Caesar was therefore the guarantee of the supremacy of Rome in the universe, and of the security of citizens of all parties. His authority was therefore legitimate.’ His attitude to the government of France in 1799 was identical.

‘Frenchmen!’ Napoleon proclaimed on December 15, ‘A Constitution is presented to you. It ends the uncertainties … [in] the internal and military situation of the Republic … The Constitution is founded on the true principles of representative government, on the sacred rights of property, equality and liberty … Citizens, the Revolution is established on the principles which began it. It is finished.’

The placing of property rights before those of equality and liberty was indicative of how Napoleon intended to defend the interests of tradesmen, employers, strivers and the owners of the biens nationaux — the kind of people who struggled to run small businesses like a mulberry orchard. These were France’s backbone; he understood their concerns and needs.

Article 94 of the ninety-five-article constitution (less than a quarter the length of the previous one) stated categorically that the property and lands of the monarchy, Church and aristocracy which had been taken and sold during the Revolution would never be returned to their original owners. These were promises Napoleon reiterated in 1802 and 1804, but he did not promise further redistribution.

When he spoke of equality, he meant equality before the law and not of economic situation.

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So long as they were respectful, members of the Conseil were invited to be as outspoken as they felt was necessary, and Napoleon encouraged debate between them. Under the new constitution the Conseil was both the final court of appeal in administrative law cases and the body responsible for the examination of the wording of bills before they went before the legislature, functions it still retains today.

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At 8 a.m. on December 25 (Christmas Day was not officially recognized again until 1802) the Constitution of the Year VIII came into force.

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There was plenty more in the new constitution to calm the nation: authorities could enter a Frenchman’s home without invitation only in the case of fire or flood; citizens could be held for no more than ten days without trial; ‘harshness used in arrests’ would be a crime.

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Within a week of Brumaire, as a result of the new sense of stability, efficiency and sheer competence, the franc–dollar and franc–pound exchange rates had doubled. By the end of January 1800 100-franc government bonds that had been languishing at 12 francs had soared to 60 francs. Two years later, partly by forcing the tax-collecting authorities to make deposits in advance of estimated yields, the finance minister Martin Gaudin had balanced the budget for the first time since the American War of Independence.

On taking power, Napoleon had made it clear that the new Constitution of the Year VIII would be legitimized by a nationwide plebiscite of all French citizens, taking place over several days at the end of January and beginning of February 1800. All adult males could vote by signing a register, which was kept open for three days. In order to make certain of a positive outcome Napoleon replaced Laplace as interior minister with his brother Lucien in December. On February 7 Lucien formally announced the results of the plebiscite, asserting that 3,011,007 Frenchmen had voted in favour of the Constitution of the Year VIII and only 1,562 against.35 It was of course ludicrous to claim that 99.95 per cent of Frenchmen had voted yes, even on the low turnout of 25 per cent – which can in part be blamed on the weather and lack of transportation for a rural population – not least because the Midi and Vendée were still rife with royalism.

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There are over four hundred bundles of votes in the Archives Nationales which show clear proof of the systematic falsification of the results by Lucien in his own handwriting.

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Napoleon was always going to win by a huge landslide, yet the Bonapartists simply couldn’t resist exaggerating even those numbers, thereby allowing the opposition – neo-Jacobins, royalists, liberals, moderates and others – to argue in their salons and underground cells that the whole process was a fraud. So often, when it came to manipulating battle casualties, or inserting documents into archives, or inventing speeches to the Army of Italy, or changing ages on birth certificates, or painting Napoleon on a rearing horse crossing the Alps, Napoleon and his propagandists simply went one unnecessary step too far, and as a result invited ridicule and criticism of what were genuinely extraordinary achievements.

While the United States is largely immune to extrahemispheric invasion, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), there are any number of potential routes that the Americans could — and during World War II did — use to invade Europe and Asia:

By the end of the war the Americans had not only extensively used launching points such as Iceland, Sicily, and Great Britain, but the postwar NATO alliance brought islands like Zealand, the Azores, Cyprus, and the Faroes into the American defense network.

Asia’s sea approaches are even more favorable to the Americans. Off the East Asian coast are not simply a series of archipelagoes, but a series of well-established, populous nations: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. All, like the United Kingdom, are full-on powers in their own right. What do they have in common? A fear that another regional power might one day be powerful enough to end them. In the past this has made them hostile to Japan (and friendly to the United States), and in the present this has made them hostile to China (and friendly to the United States). As of 2014 all — including Japan — are allies.