He has 3 million victims on his conscience. He believed that "the army is formed so that soldiers can be killed," and with a light hand he sent his own troops to their deaths. He restored slavery in his empire, and drowned the rebellions against his rule in his blood. Who really was the legendary "god of war" and "symbol of progress"?
Victory and partition ran before and after him. The fame of so many deeds, pregnant with the names of knights, from the Nile went roaring towards the north - wrote Adam Mickiewicz about Napoleon Bonaparte. The bard called the French emperor "the god of war". And he was not the only one who was seduced by Napoleonic legend. For over 200 years, the ambitious Corsican has presented himself as a military genius. In the eyes of many, he is a worthy successor to Caesar and Alexander the Great, the idol of his soldiers, a true hero. It is high time to deconstruct this myth.
Hero with bloody hands
There are historians who challenge Napoleon's white legend. More than a decade ago, a heated discussion was sparked by a famous book by Claude Ribbon, a French historian with Caribbean roots. In an emotional pamphlet, he juxtaposed the French emperor with Hitler.
A more balanced, though equally harsh, assessment is given by historian Frank Fabian in his latest book, The Greatest Lies in History. This is the summary of the rule of the "genius of war":
The ground Napoleon walked on turned red with blood (...) By careful estimation, he has three million dead on his conscience . During his reign, he lost one million French soldiers and about two million enemy soldiers (...) How many wounded and crippled he has on his account, one can only speculate. Five million? Six?
Hard to believe? And yet! Successive war campaigns and bloody battles claimed thousands of lives. The most brilliant victory of the French commander at Austerlitz cost the life and health of "only" 25,000 soldiers, but ten years later as many as 47,000 were wounded and killed at Waterloo. The most tragic, however, was the balance sheet of the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. All troops lost a total of 130,000 people! If you think about how many battles Napoleon has fought in two decades, three million seems like a reasonable estimate ...
Napoleon (here in imperial dress, in the painting by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres) is still for many a war hero and a promoter of the progressive ideas of the French Revolution. In fact, the wars he induced claimed millions of lives ... (source:public domain).
The victims of bullets, bayonets and sabers also include losses caused by other factors. The armies did not pay much attention to caring for the wounded. So gangrene was harvesting a lot among them. Epidemics, such as the plague in Africa and yellow fever in Haiti, were also deadly. 80,000 soldiers of the Grand Army were eliminated by typhus in a month. The losses caused by the harsh winter that led to the defeat of the 1812 expedition to Russia are also legendary. It was mainly frost and disease, not fights killed 570,000 people (almost 90% of the entire French army!) And 200,000 horses in six months ...
Soldiers are there to die
How did Napoleon himself comment on the gigantic war losses? His indifference, which Fabian points out in "Greatest Lies Ever," can be terrifying. I don't give a shit about a million people's lives - the little chief was said to have spoken. He believed - emphasizes the German historian - that the army is created so that soldiers can be killed.
The disregard for the lives of his own soldiers explains many of the Emperor's decisions, which resulted in unnecessary sacrifices. He left his troops in Egypt in 1799 to their fate. He abandoned them, having concluded that in the land of the pharaohs there was nothing left to do worth his ambition.
Napoleon, regardless of the losses in his own army, also engaged - unnecessarily - in the opinion of some - in the bloody war with Spain. Nay! In some battles, instead of brilliant tactical maneuvers, he used frontal attacks, later known from the actions of the Red Army. The victories obtained in this way have been occupied by a huge number of victims.
Even worse, the "god of war" treated his allies. This is best shown by the fate of our compatriots. Until the establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw, Polish legions fighting alongside French troops lost 10,000 soldiers. The emperor used some of the white and red troops ... to suppress the Negro uprising in Haiti. Brutal fighting in an unfavorable climate and numerous tropical diseases meant that only 350 of the 5,000 sent legionnaires returned to Europe.
Polish Legions fought alongside Napoleon in the hope that he would support the cause of Polish independence. The emperor, however, used them for his own purposes. He sent some Poles ... to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to suppress the slave uprising there (photo:January Suchodolski, source:public domain).
Others followed his example. When the Mantua fortress surrendered in 1799, its commander, François-Philippe de Foissac-Latour, negotiated a free return to his homeland… but only for the French defenders. At the same time, gave the victorious Austrians over 1,100 Polish legionnaires - deserters from the Habsburg army.
Crimes against the civilian population
Not only soldiers die in the war. However, Bonaparte did not hesitate to act also against the civilian population. This trait of his character was revealed even during the Directorate, four years before his rise to power. On October 5, 1795 (or, according to the revolutionary calendar, the 13th Vendemiaire IV), a young general suppressed a royalist uprising in the capital. He ordered his soldiers ... to shoot them with cannons. Several hundred adherents of the old order were killed. After this event, Napoleon gained national fame and the nickname of General Vendemiaire.
Bloody pacifications and cruelty towards civilians became the showpiece of the commander climbing up the levels of power . In 1799, during the Egyptian campaign, on his orders, the French murdered between 2.5 and 4 thousand Turkish prisoners in Jaffa. In turn, in 1808, French troops led by his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, bloodily suppressed the uprising of the inhabitants of Madrid.
About 500 Spaniards died during the clashes. The next several hundred French firing squads were executed the very next day. Similarly, without a trial, but with absolute ruthlessness, the French shot several hundred Russians in 1812. The suspicions that the accused might be arsonists wanted by the military were enough to carry out the execution.
Poles also helped the French to conquer Saragossa. The balance of the siege was terrible - half of the city's inhabitants died as a result of the clashes and diseases (image by Federico Jiménez Nicanor, source:public domain).
The ruthlessness of Napoleon's army was also known to the inhabitants of Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon. The French - with the help of Poles - captured the city in February 1809. No prisoners were taken in fierce battles, and civilians were also killed. Additionally, they decimated her during the siege of the disease. By the time of surrender, nearly 54,000 civilians had died. It was more than half of the city's population.
The burden of a white man in French
It is said that Napoleonic troops spread in Europe the ideals of equality, freedom and fraternity proclaimed by the French Revolution. Napoleon is said to have been a promoter of progressive legislation. An example is usually his civil law reform. It is forgotten, however, that in other matters the solutions he was pushing were simply backward.
One of the most counter-revolutionary moves by Bonaparte was ... the restoration of slavery in France. It was abolished by the Jacobins in 1794. At the same time, the Convention reaffirmed the equality before the law of all French citizens, irrespective of their skin color. As early as eight years later, in 1802, Napoleon with a few decrees prevented the implementation of these arrangements in at least some of the French colonies. Thus, the then first consul demoted a large part of the black French. All this to serve the interests of the white colonialists. It was in line with the motto attributed to him: I am for white because I am white myself!
Napoleon's racism manifested itself in the particular cruelty with which he suppressed the uprisings of black slaves fighting for their own freedom. As Claude Ribbe writes, the "god of war" had only one concern. He was looking for an answer, how to eliminate in the shortest possible time, with minimum costs and personnel, as many people as inferior as possible .
In most cases, he used traditional methods. Slaves were killed by bullets and bayonets or drowned in the sea in tied bags. Sometimes solutions were used straight from the Roman games - the captives were torn apart by hungry dogs in the amphitheater arenas.
The French also perfected the methods that were then creatively developed by the leaders of the Third Reich. During the expedition to Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti) to restore French sovereignty, they used gas to kill former slaves. They gathered Haitians in the holds of ships, where they then pumped smoke with poisonous sulfur dioxide . Dead bodies were thrown into the sea.
Napoleon, when he was still the first consul, restored slavery in part of the French colonies with a few decrees. The photo shows a fragment of a decree recreating pre-revolutionary colonial relations in Guadeloupe (photo Jfniort, license CC BY-SA 4.0).
Similarly, Napoleon's envoys crushed the slave revolt in Guadeloupe with blood. There, too, the locals were murdered, regardless of gender or age. As mass shootings and punitive expeditions only fueled the resistance, the French invented increasingly sadistic methods of execution. More humane methods were used only when prisons had to be quickly emptied and made room for new prisoners.
International tribunal to try Napoleon's crimes
The cruel actions of the French emperor aroused indignation already in his time. In 1814, the publicist Lewis Goldsmith threw the idea of an international tribunal for "all of Bonaparte's crimes." A year later, he even prepared a publication entitled "Appeal to the Governments of Europe on the Necessity of Bringing Napoleon Bonaparte to Public Justice".
However, those who, as Polish journalist Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz wrote, were attracted by the "poetry of Napoleon's battles and victories" prevailed. The emperor was not judged, but only sent to the island of Saint Helena. Old governments have returned to Europe. About the fact that - as Frank Fabian emphasizes in "The Biggest Lies in History" - Napoleon was a butcher and executioner, murderer of millions - almost forgotten. And the white legend of the "god of war" grew stronger.