The Illustrious Dead Read Free Page A

was a duty.
    The makers of the French Revolution called a pause in the acquisition of colonies and satellites, asking for an end to all “wars of conquest.” But Napoleon, driven by a new utopian ardor, rampaging personal ambition, and the need to safeguard his borders, reignited the drive to empire. “The genie of liberty,” Napoleon wrote, “which has rendered the Republic since its birth, the arbiter of all Europe, wishes to see it mistress of faraway seas and foreign lands.” The 1798 invasion of Egypt had been disguised as a scientific mission to rediscover the secrets of the ancient world. But by 1812 the hostile response of many of the recipients of their “liberation” had hardened French attitudes into something far older and more recognizable: what one historian called “egotistical nationalism.” Success had proved to the French that they were better and stronger than their rivals, and that they deserved whatever they could take. By the time they headed for Russia, the banner of intellectual and cultural progress was faded and torn.
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    T HE NORMATIVE NINETEENTH -century leader of a European empire would have been more than satisfied with Napoleon’s achievements. His enemies were chastened and his empire at least reasonably secure. Napoleon saw things differently. Five-eighths of the world’s surface—the oceans—was controlled by his enemy, England, whose navy outmatched France’s in every way. His ally, Russia, “the barbarian North,” was slipping outside of his sphere, having recently broken its agreement to stop English ships from entering its harbors and trading with its merchants, a key defection in Napoleon’s intent to strangle England commercially before defeating it militarily.
    Bonaparte didn’t compare himself to his contemporaries, none of whom (except perhaps for the French diplomat Talleyrand) could match his intellect or energy. Instead, he saw himself in a world-historical continuum, with Alexander the Great and the Caesars of Rome as his peers. “I am the successor,” Napoleon said, “not of Louis XVI, but of Charlemagne.” He believed that he had been chosen to remake human society. To do that, first he must grasp and then control the levers of power. Ruthlessly, if necessary.
    To accept peace and turn to the work of civic administration (which he always claimed that he yearned to take up full-time) would be to spurn his own gifts. Napoleon was enough a child of the Revolution to see warfare not only as a practical means to power but as a test of himself as a whole man. He believed that every person should exhaust his possibilities, and his were near-infinite. To turn away before a perfect empire was created, an empire stronger and more enlightened than any that had gone before, was unacceptable.
    England for the moment was out of reach. But Russia, too obstinate and too powerful for its own good, was not.
    A LEXANDER I OF R USSIA was much closer to a recognizable nineteenth-century monarch than his counterpart in Paris: bright but intellectually lazy; an aesthete who played at military affairs and never really mastered the basics; a vain man not cut out for leadership who could nevertheless on very rare occasions take a position and hold it against everything. Raised in the hothouse climate of the royal palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Alexander had led a cosseted life unsettled only by the murderous strains between his father and grandmother. He was more fluent in English and French than he was in his native language and was completely unfamiliar with the Russia of the steppes or the brutal degradation of the serfs on the estates. Napoleon would say later that he found Alexander to be deeply intelligent but that there was a piece of his character missing. The tsar rarely had the will to carry out intentions to the end, no matter how bitter. Deeply curious, he read prodigiously, but rarely finished a book.
    Alexander led from fear: fear of the military, of his