Napoleon and His Marshals: an ‘irresistibly exciting’ book

In 1804, upon being proclaimed emperor, Napoleon decided that he needed a new office of state “to bind his most important military commanders to his regime”, said George Owers in The Times. The “Little Corsican” therefore resurrected the “medieval title of marshal, which had been abolished during the Revolution”. Initially, 14 marshals were created, but by the time of Napoleon’s “final, desperate throw of the dice” in 1815, he’d bestowed the title on 26 men.

The marshals were indispensable to his “imperial project”: they led the armies that conquered Europe, and several became “vastly rich”. Yet they were a fractious and unpredictable group, intensely rivalrous, and ultimately willing to turn on their master.

As Napoleon’s regime unravelled, his marshals “began quietly to abandon him”, and, “at Waterloo, just two fought by his side”. In his “ambitious” new book, Andrew Roberts tells the story of the marshals – a saga that is “Tolstoyan in scale”. At first, he struggles under the weight of his material but the book gains “momentum as it goes on”, and becomes “irresistibly exciting”.

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The marshals were envisaged as an “elite leadership team”, and many were supremely talented, said The Economist. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, was instrumental in devising the intricate system of orders and updates that enabled the emperor to keep a close watch on “every unit of the Grande Armée”. Louis-Nicolas Davout, one of five marshals who came from an aristocratic background, was a brilliant strategist.

Yet, while the system worked well at first, cracks increasingly began to show – partly as a result of Napoleon’s hectoring management style, and partly because of his deliberate policy of stoking “continual jealousy” between his various marshals. As a result, Roberts notes, these men came to view warfare as a “race among rivals for individual triumph”, and this left Napoleon critically bereft of support when he “desperately needed” it.

As the “colourful parade” of the Napoleonic era goes by, Roberts “proves an engaging Dimbleby in our ear”, said Jonathan Boff in Literary Review. He “gets the level of military detail just right, giving us enough to understand what happened without overwhelming us”. And the result is that his book rattles along like a “gun carriage charging into action”.

Roberts, who has “walked 53 of Napoleon’s 60 battlefields”, has an unparalleled grasp of the complexities of war, said Philip Mansel in The Spectator. This is “great military history”.