Vive l’Empereur!

How has Napoleon Bonaparte remained such a potent force in our imagination? Why is it that even now, two centuries after his death from cancer on a tiny Atlantic outcrop aged only 51, his image is still instantly recognisable and his myth still evergreen? In the first sentence of a new book about the role that gardens played in his life, the historian Ruth Scurr states that Napoleon is “a figure still recognised by his silhouette 200 years after his death”. It is true; but why?

Napoleon’s silhouette, of course, is dominated by his bicorne hat. “Never before in history,” wrote Victor Hugo of Napoleon’s Hundred Days adventure in 1815, “was an empire won simply by showing a hat.” Napoleon landed in the Golfe Juan on 1 March, and the news flashed to Paris, forcing the recently-restored King Louis XVIII to flee the Tuileries Palace. It was said that Napoleon sat down at the Tuileries to eat the dinner that had been cooked for the King that same evening.

Napoleon gave his name to an era, something his conqueror, the Duke of Wellington (who himself never lost a battle) never did. In art, cinema, literature, interior decoration, the decorative arts, and so many other areas, Napoleon lives on, something that is celebrated in Napoleon Bonaparte: The British Sale at Bonhams in October. This is not primarily because he was a conqueror – indeed he left France smaller by the end of his career than she was when he became First Consul at the Brumaire Coup of 1799. He himself rightly noted in exile on St Helena that his conquests across Egypt and Europe would not be the thing for which he was primarily remembered. Even though the horrific retreat from Moscow in 1812 is one of the great military catastrophes of all time, it does not define the Emperor as it would almost any other soldier in history. For when Wellington was asked who was the greatest captain of the age, he replied: “In this age, in past ages, in any age: Napoleon.”

Napoleon is politically controversial in France today, in a way that is inconceivable with any of his British contemporaries, even the greatest of them, William Pitt the Younger. President Macron admires Napoleon and wishes to commemorate the bicentenary of his death, but many on the French Left decry le petit caporal over his reintroduction of slavery in Haiti in 1802 and the sexism of the Napoleonic Code. (These detractors rarely point out that Napoleon also abolished slavery in the Hundred Days, and that sexism stayed rampant in France until long after Napoleon; women only received the franchise in France in 1945.)

It is not even for his political and administrative reforms that Napoleon captures our imagination today. We, of course, admire the fact that he created the Banque de France, Légion d’Honneur, Conseil d’Ētat, Cour des Comptes, and so on, that he built four of the bridges over the Seine, signed the Concordat restoring religion to France, started the Arc de Triomphe, stocked the Louvre, and reformed France’s education system from the Sorbonne to the lycées. We are reminded of all these achievements and many more whenever we visit his superb tomb at Les Invalides as they are displayed on the walls of his splendid crypt, and also feature in his autobiography, Memorials of St Helena, which became the biggest bestseller of the 19th century. When Napoleon’s mother was complimented on her son’s achievements, she replied: “Mais pourvu que ça dure!” (“Just so long as they last!”) Well, they have.

The Emperor Napoleon’s hat Early 19th century An Imperial black felt bicorne winter campaign hat, possibly worn at the battles of Jena and Auerstadt, 1806, attributed to Poupart & Co. circumference 59cm, width 47.5cm, height 24.5cm printed marks for Leopold Verch, Charlottenburg, Berlin Estimate: £100,000 - 150,000

A bone apple corer carved by a British army guard of the 20th regiment of foot on St. Helena dated 5 May 1821 15cm high Estimate: £3,000 - 5,000

Right A Dihl et Guérhard bust of Napoleon (French, 1781 -ca.1824) Estimate: £30,000 - 40,000

Napoleon’s shirt worn on St Helena, circa 1820 White cambric ‘toile de batiste’ linen, discreetly embroidered with a crowned N in red silk above the left vent. Front panel 85cm long, rear panel 90cm long, sleeves 60cm long Estimate: £60,000 - 80,000

Napoleon Bonaparte, Autograph letter to his companion in exile and English teacher, Emmanuel, Comte de Las Cases. Longwood, 4.30 am, 9 March 1816. Estimate: £130,000 - 180,000

For all of these great accomplishments (which Napoleon himself called his “blocks of granite”), and the fact that he won no fewer than 47 of his 60 battles, Napoleon might have just become yet another important and well-known high-achieving figure from 19th century history, on a par, say, with Otto von Bismarck or William Gladstone. What sets him apart for us today, however, is his remarkably magnetic personality, for he was a truly fascinating combination of polymath, workaholic, intellectual, wit, and micro-manager. Eloquent, heroic, exhorting, charming, persuading, seducing, occasionally abusing, the true, Promethean Napoleon was much more than merely the founder of modern France.

He was also an accomplished writer. Napoleon wrote 33,000 letters in his lifetime, many of them poetically beautiful, while his love-letters to Josephine were passionate and erotic. “Remember from those monuments yonder,” he proclaimed to his men on the morning of the Battle of the Pyramids in 1799, “forty centuries of history are looking down upon you.” He inspired his men verbally too, as when he delivered a speech to the grenadiers about to storm the long narrow bridge across the River Adda during the battle of Lodi in the Italian campaign in 1796. “One must speak to the soul,” he once said of his speech on that occasion, “it is the only way to electrify the men.” “Activité, activité, vitesse!” he wrote to Masséna in April 1809, and there was no more characteristic Napoleonic command.

Napoleon’s life and career also stand as a rebuke to the determinist and Marxist theories of history which explain events in terms of vast impersonal forces and minimise the part played by individuals. We should find this uplifting. As George Home, a midshipman on board HMS Bellerophon, the Royal Navy frigate to which Napoleon ultimately surrendered, put it in his memoirs, “He showed us what one little human creature like ourselves could accomplish in a span so short.”

So, of course, Victor Hugo and Stendhal would write novels about him, Jean-Louis David and Robert Lefèvre and so many other great artists would paint him, Abel Gance would direct a film about him, Rod Steiger would play him, the Empire Style would be rendered timeless, and his iconography – bees, eagles, the letter ‘N’, his light grey overcoat, and, of course, his hat – would become instantly recognisable symbols. Napoleon represented the Enlightenment on horseback, and, for all his very occasional dark moments, deserves to be admired as such. Vive l’Empereur!

Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great is published by Penguin

Hat trick

The Emperor Napoleon's Hat. Estimate 40,000-60,000

The Emperor Napoleon's Hat. Estimate 40,000-60,000

‘If you want to get ahead get a hat’ ran the 1940s’ advertising slogan. It could have been made for Napoleon Bonaparte although he was already doing pretty well when around 1799, he started to sport his trademark bicorne. Wearing the hat sideways so that he would be instantly identifiable to his soldiers on the battlefield, Napoleon was thereafter rarely portrayed without one – most memorably in that PR masterpiece Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass. The hats were made by Poupart & Co. of Paris which produced about 120 of them specifically for the emperor. Only 20-30 are known to have survived – until now. An exciting new discovery to be offered in Napoleon: The British Sale is believed to be the first hat to contain traces of Napoleon’s DNA. The winter campaign hat – most probably worn during the battles of Jena and Auerstadt in 1806 – has a fascinating history. It was owned by the theatrical costumier Leopold Verch who, on his travels round Europe, acquired a personal collection of hats which he used as templates for his stage costumes. The bicorne can be dated to the early 19th century, the material is felt and beaver fur exactly as in the Poupart hats and – crucially – the DNA research has established beyond all reasonable doubt that this was indeed the hat of the Emperor Napoleon.