Abstract
This book will remain the essential work of reference for Napoleon’s maxims, judgements, thoughts, and analyses of war in almost all its aspects. Bruno Colson’s edited volume, first published in French in 2011, is an impressive achievement because of its meticulous scholarship. While many previous volumes reprinted materials from earlier published collections, Colson has, wherever possible, gone back to the original sources, which has allowed him to correct errors, to restore passages, and, importantly, to understand what materials were used by those who have previously attempted to collate Napoleon’s thoughts – and those that were omitted or overlooked. The pithy introduction to this volume is testament to this documentary detective work. Napoleon on War, moreover, is organized in a way that is both user-friendly and intellectually rigorous. Colson takes as his model Carl von Clausewitz, using as far as practicable the same book and chapter headings as the great German work, Vom Kriege. This serves a structural purpose, since it enables Colson to marshal into a coherent order the quotations which range from pithy one-liners to passages spanning across several pages and which are drawn from an eclectic range of sources from across Napoleon’s entire career. Yet the mirroring of Clausewitz’s approach is also entirely apt, since Clausewitz experienced Napoleonic warfare firsthand and organized his text not just to inform his readers, but to encourage them to delve deeper and reflect on the issues that he addresses. Just as Clausewitz’s purpose was ‘not so much [to] teach as to stimulate a desire to understand’ (p. 5), so Colson’s volume reaches the same goal. Napoleon’s utterances and writings on war were so much shaped by the circumstances of the moment, driven by an urge to self-glorify, to obfuscate, and to shroud his true intentions from his opponents, or to sculpt his own legacy, that organizing them under a range of themes (broadly, the nature and theory of war, strategy, the engagement, military forces, defence, attack, and planning) invites the reader to think about Napoleon’s intentions and the contexts in which he was operating. At the same time, it provokes an interest in seeking out consistencies in Napoleon’s thinking across time – and this volume shows that there is a considerable bedrock of these, particularly when Napoleon was discussing the strategic and tactical levels. At the same time, one – slowly but surely – gets a deep and full sense of Napoleon not only as a military commander but also of one who witnessed war in all its dimensions, across time and in many different locations. Napoleon’s own authorial voice – or the records of those to whom he dictated his thoughts and maxims – frequently comes out clearly, often terse, blunt, and at times aphoristic. At the same time, as Colson himself recognizes at the outset, it is simply not possible to provide a gloss or critique of every single text or quotation presented in this impressively detailed and sensitively edited compilation. Inevitably, therefore, it is Napoleon’s own perspective that speaks unchallenged. There are exceptions, as in a long and revealing discussion on the law of nations with one of his state counsellors, the former revolutionary Antoine-Claire Thibaudeau (pp. 22–24), or when he admits to his own errors, as he does repeatedly when discussing his tactics at Borodino (p. 323). So this book – which is, after all, as Colson intends, an invitation to further enquiry by the reader – can be read with particular profit with an awareness of the gap between what, on the one hand, Napoleon said and how, on the other hand, he actually behaved in practice, or what motivated Napoleon to say or write certain things at certain times. And, particularly in his references, Colson provides the clues needed for this kind of understanding. Thus, we learn that Napoleon’s staunch defence of the maritime rights of neutrals (‘the sea is the property of all nations’, pp. 38–39) was uttered in exile on Saint Helena and driven by an acute awareness, drawn from his failure to break the British through economic warfare, of French dependence upon the seaborne commerce carried under non-belligerent flags. On the other hand, it is hard to challenge Napoleon’s sincerity, when, in captivity, he admonished British officers against the flogging of soldiers, for the victim ‘loses all feeling, and would as soon fight against as for his country’ (p. 133). This was not disingenuous, for during his first Italian campaign two decades earlier, the General Bonaparte had scolded one of his officers for having some of his men whipped, as a barbarous punishment unworthy of citizen-soldiers. So Colson’s brilliant book does not seek to present conclusions, but to encourage the reader to engage and debate with Napoleon’s ideas. This makes Napoleon on War a worthy companion to the great work upon which it is modelled, namely, Clausewitz’s timeless classic.