The main problem with Napoleon was that he was self-consciously a military super-star, who deliberately set himself in the same league as Alexander, Caesar or Frederick. Napoleon fancied himself as a self-made (and even self-crowned) genius who owed his position not to his family tree, political doctrine or social status, but to his skill with both the sword and with propaganda. By the time of Marengo he was already addicted to successful wars of aggression designed to pay for themselves in a way that had not previously been seen in modern times; but he was also a very energetic self-propagandist. He applied a variety of techniques for maintaining the morale and loyalty of his army, [2] while for the general population he mixed an extensive secret police apparatus with an equally ambitious programme of public monuments, Bonapartist art and control of the press. Hence the Napoleonic legend was initially his own creation. It owed much to the shock of his great victories -- and even the epic scale of his later defeats -- but it was also a carefully-nurtured exercise in public relations.

The legend grew in France after Waterloo, since demobilisation threw a mass of dissatisfied soldiers into unemployment, for which they blamed the unpopular and deeply anti-Bonapartist Bourbon monarchy. Instead of blaming Napoleon himself for the mess that he had unquestionably created, they retained a fierce pride in themselves, their campaigns and their sacrifices, in a way that would have been familiar to many former Nazis in Germany after 1945. 'Glory' (or 'Gloire') became a Cult [3] which excused many evils and avoided many tricky political subtleties.

Eventually it led to a second Bonapartist empire between 1851 and 1870, and a corresponding intensification of Napoleon- worship. We owe a major proportion of our image of Napoleonic warfare to the official artists who were working in France at this time, as well as to the mass of documents and analyses that were published.

By 1870 the cult had become highly respectable and widespread, but paradoxically defeat in the Franco-Prussian War served to reinforce it rather than to weaken it. The German victory reminded Frenchmen that Napoleon had walloped the Prussians at Jena in 1806, and so a careful analysis of his methods would help his successors to do the same in future. The period between 1870 and 1914 stimulated the best of all the tactical and operational analyses of Napoleonic warfare - at the Section Historique de l'Armee de Terre ('SHAT') and elsewhere but the hidden agenda was always the need to liberate AlsaceLorraine from the evil Teutons.

The Great War brought an abrupt end to many of these studies (and indeed to many of the students themselves, from Commandant Colin to Colonel de Grandmaison, who both fell on the field of honour).

After 1919 Napoleon somehow lacked the intense attraction that he had exercised in the past. There nevertheless continued to be many worshippers, although the rise of Hitler provoked a wave of anti-Bonapartism among historians who saw some obvious parallels. Indeed, it continues to be the case that each generation interprets Napoleon and his achievement through the eyes of its own obsessions, changing the focus every few years, as is admirably illustrated in Peter Geyl's essential text Napoleon: For and Against . [4]

There is even evidence that during the 1980s French treatments of the Emperor tended to be more concerned with his moves towards a 'European Community' than with his more obvious Corsican nationalism or hostility towards so many of France's neighbours. A political Bonapartist movement does still exist into the present day, although admittedly it tends to be overshadowed by the right-wing and deeply Catholic ultra- royalists. 1799 today represents a less significant revolution, it seems, than 1789.

But at least inside France the Bonapartists have always represented only one strand of the argument about what had really happened between Marengo and Waterloo: they have had to defend their views against various types of Republicans and Royalists who interpreted things in some very different ways. Elsewhere, however, the Bonapartists sometimes became almost the anti- Bonapartist victor of the wars. For Britain the wars were fought by proxy in most of Europe outside the Peninsula and Waterloo, so the general public had little direct experience of (or concern with) what had happened in the major land campaigns.

The story of the operations in central Europe had to be pieced together later, and in the event this was done via largely Bonapartist sources. During the late nineteenth century there therefore grew up a rather odd brand of British Napoleon-worship which somehow managed to co-exist quite peacefully alongside the home grown (and hence naturally stronger) Wellington-worship. It was reinforced at that time by a growing perception that Britain might soon have to fight a very major war in continental Europe, so it would therefore be wise to study recent examples of major wars on the continent. As in France, much of the best British analysis of Napoleonic warfare came in the few decades immediately preceding the Great War, and many of that war's warriors were noted students of Bonaparte. [5]

In the USA, which had fought as Napoleon's ally against the redcoats, the influence of Bonapartism was even stronger than in Britain, whereas Wellington's genius was somehow deemed to have been negated by a combination of the Boston Tea Party and the battle of New Orleans. [6]

In the late nineteenth century the USA was also increasingly being populated by immigrants from central Europe rather than from the British Isles. The family background of such immigrants was likely to have included not only wide and diverse skills in European languages, but also a direct encounter with the Grande Armee (either within its ranks or fighting against it - or even more probably, both). Despite the extensive English-language literature of Wellington's campaigns, therefore, it has always been the campaigns of Napoleon himself which have dominated US thinking about the military history of 1800-1815.

We must remember that Americans and Britons no longer even speak or write the same language. At the time of the civil war (ie the American one, although the same is true even more so for the English one), there had still been a considerable unity of phrasing, pronunciation and spelling between the two sides of the Atlantic. Since then, however, the two sides have wandered down ever-divergent paths until we have reached a point at which the root assumptions behind and by given pieces of writing appear to be very different.

If we take the case of French Napoleonic assault tactics, it seems that Americans in general will tend to agree with Commandant J. Colin [7] that the French relied mainly on firepower from deployed lines, whereas Brits in general will tend to agree with Sir Charles W Oman [8] that the French relied mainly on shock action from heavy columns. Your Yankee somehow seems to feel inwardly comfortable with a linear and 'firepower' explanation of French tactics, whereas your 'Rosbif' feels inwardly more comfortable with the idea that psychological shock was the true determinant. But why should this be?

The most obvious explanation must surely be that, if it is really true that Americans value Napoleon and the Grande Armee more highly than Wellington and his redcoats, then they will also prefer more modern French experts like Colin to the equivalent British experts like Oman. So far so good, and it also seems to be fair to say that American society generally values engineers and scientists more highly than does British society. Therefore Americans will like to look to 'hardware' explanations more readily than do their more literary British colleagues. [9]

More importantly, however, is the difference between the types of evidence that the two sides are using in their search for clues as to what the French actually did in their assaults. Whereas British historians will naturally tend to look at the large mass of eyewitness accounts of tactics, in English, which have come down to us from the Peninsular War, US commentators will often look instead to whatever (non-English language) accounts are left over from Napoleon's campaigns on the Danube, the Po, the Oder or the Vistula.

If that evidence proves to be frustratingly sparse for low level tactics -- as it usually is -- then it will be supplemented by reference to theoretical drill manuals rather than to first hand accounts by British observers. Thus on one side we have plenty of biased but very detailed British impressions of what the French did in their Iberian sideshow, while on the other side we have a highly unsatisfactory mixture of poor eyewitness accounts from 'the big league', combined with a detailed body of theoretical precepts for what the drill masters believed ought to have happened. Clearly these two sets of evidence cannot fairly be taken as equivalent to each other, and each of them has its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

The strength of the British evidence from the Peninsula is that most of it was written by lowly soldiers for whom the local details of their experience were personally very important. They therefore give us an authentic 'worm's eye' view of combat, in a quality and quantity that is unobtainable in any other language for any other part of the Napoleonic wars. I do not believe that this point is widely appreciated; but I believe that it should nevertheless lie at the very root of our understanding of Napoleonic tactics. However, the weakness of these accounts is also glimpsed only dimly by modem commentators - namely that we must not take every word as Gospel Truth. When a British soldier says he was attacked by a 'column', he may mean nothing more than a line four or six deep (which is almost a 'regulation' line, if you remember that one or two of the ranks will consist of serre-file ncos).

When he says he was attacked by '2,000 men', he will invariably mean at best a half of that figure. From Vimeiro to Waterloo the point has been proved so repeatedly that I will not labour it further. And by the same token, when he tries to describe what the French officers were telling their men to do at the critical moment, he is just as likely to be mistaken as when he reports the supposedly 'verbatim' words of his own officers (There are no less than eight fully documented -- but different -- accounts of what Wellington said to Maitland's brigade at Waterloo, when it was assaulted by the Imperial Guard).

Against all this, it must be admitted that the strength of the 'continental' evidence lies mainly in the drill manuals. There, written out in explicit detail, and in many different languages, is the official prescription of just how an ideal army was supposed to manoeuvre on an ideal battlefield. But - just wait a minute! this is also surely the major weakness as well, because surely everyone knows that drill manuals fall apart almost as soon as they are exposed to the real stress of real combat? Such a fate often befell the British manuals, as we know from the accounts of eye- witnesses, so why should it not also have overtaken the French, Austrian, Prussian and Westphalian manuals, too?

Second Weakness

The second major weakness in our evidence for 'continental' tactics seems to be that there really are very few detailed first hand accounts of low-level tactics, written by genuine eye-witnesses, which have been left to us by either the Grande Armee or its enemies -- and that applies to 1806 as much as to 1813. We have political, strategic and 'operational art' accounts in profusion - but not many truly 'tactical' accounts. [10]

I really would like it to be true that -- for reasons of national or linguistic bias -- I have simply failed to locate the massive body of evidence for low-level .'continental' tactics that is probably lying around unreported and unexploited, somewhere out there, such as might equal the quantity and quality of the well- known body of British first-hand accounts for the Peninsular War and Waterloo. But after thirty years of searching, I am starting to lose hope that it actually exists. So please can you help?

Notes