Dave Hollins'review of The Fall of Napoleon by David Hamilton- Williams sparked of correspondence both in favour and against. Of the (very) few letters we received complaining of its tone, needless to say one was from the author himself. Although satisfied that Dave's review was honest and disinterested, we asked Paddy Griffith to let us have his comments on the same book. Reader may be aware that there are several rumours flying around the hobby regarding Mr Hamilton-Williams. This is why our original intention of publishing a selection from the letters has gone by the board, to all those who wrote in, thanks. We have however decided that Paddy's review is sufficiently thought provoking that it is worth printing.

The Fall of Napoleon is a wide-ranging book which follows the Emperor in politics and war from 1813 to 1815, and then to his imprisonment and murder on St Helena. It is not primarily a work of military history, although campaigns and battles naturally play an important part in the story; but it is rather an explanation of why and how Napoleon was betrayed to the point where he lost first his throne and then his life. Much of the book is concerned with treachery and the secret machinations of the hated Bourbons, since it is argued that someone as clever and popular as the great Emperor could not possibly have been prised out of power by any fair or straightforward means.

Historians have, of course, often been involved with secret services, whether we look at Anthony Blunt's spying for Russia, Hugh TrevorRoper's work for British Intelligence in 1945, or Brigadier James Edmonds' establishment of M15 before he went on to write the official history of the Great War. This last case perhaps gives us a clue to the fascination, since it is a large part of the historian's job to compare and contrast the 'official' or public account of events with the 'private' or secret understanding of what is really happening. Edmonds seems to have taken a particular delight in knowing what he believed was the true inside story, but doling it out to other people only in proportion as he thought it could further his own interests.

To him that thrill was possibly the main reason why he practised History at all, although more professional followers of the discipline would surely have said that it was his duty to tell everything to everyone.

However, even without any deliberate attempt to deceive or to manage the news', there will still always inevitably be a subtle difference of some sort between public and private history, as anyone will know who has ever had personal knowledge of an event that has been reported in the press. By the same token, there has never been a motoring accident in which both parties have agreed on absolutely every detail of what happened. But of course when we add to this an active use of concealment and misinformation for political ends, it is easy to see how the inner an outer appearance of any given event can rapidly come to be very different indeed. One does not have to be a believer in conspiracies to see that governments are often deliberately economical with the truth', or that they will have an interest in portraying their opponents as liars. Nor need one necessarily be scandalised by such behaviour, since it is often fully consistent with the accepted, codified and well- understood practice of the law courts. If politics is a form of 'legal argument pursued by other means', then it is surely quite legitimate for it to have eloquent barristers who bend the truth for the benefit of the 'jury', or who try to win arguments by exploiting inside information. Just as informers ('mouchards' in French) provide the backbone of most detective work, so intelligence agents will always surely be inseparable from most politics,

That was certainly the case during the period 1792-1821, when the normal processes of politics were intensified dramatically by the addition of two extra ingredients - revolution and war. If 'all's fair in love and war', then absolutely nothing will be unfair in civil war - and the French revolution was a civil war so fierce that it soon became endemic and ineradicable. (It still keeps on reappearing from time to time, normally in Paris, and we ourselves have seen it as recently as 1944 and 1968.) The least unexpected feature of the 1792-1815 period, therefore, is that it quickly became marked by a dramatic increase in secret service activity, espionage, plotting and dirty undercover deeds of every description. Resistance networks for real-life 'scarlet Pimpernels' proliferated, just as the secret police of every nation redoubled their efforts to sniff out real or imagined agents of the enemy. Political assassination was often attempted, with or without a cloak of legality, while bribery, corruption and subversion became very much the norm rather than the exception. All of this has best been captured in recent years in the historical works of Professor Richard Cobb (author of Les Armees RevoIutionnaires and many related studies) and in the fictional works of Patrick O'Brien (whose Maturin character epitomises the ideal Napoleonic spy), so it unfortunate that neither of these two names appear in Sir David Hamilton-Williams' bibliography.

It is also odd that Hamilton-Williams should express horror and dismay that the British, in collusion with the Bourbon royalists, could secretly dare to plot Napoleon's downfall and death since at least 1800. In their place, wouldn't anyone have done exactly the same, since Napoleon was in every way their arch enemy? It is doubly unsurprising since they were scarcely keeping it a 'secret', any more than the Gulf War allies of 1991 were reluctant t debate the possibility that Saddam Hussein might not survive in his Baghdad bunker? When Napoleon is finally administered death by arsenic on St Helena in 1821 by his pro-Bourbon friend Montholon (apparently this has now been proved conclusively, although it is outside the present reviewer's area of expertise), it is even more oddly presented to us here as the worst and most awful crime that could possibly be imagined. It is as if Napoleon had not personally terrorised the whole of Europe for two decades!

It does, however, seem to be open to debate whether Napoleon himself was particularly adept in the field of 'dirty tricks'. He was happy to advance his political career in 1795 by the unsubtle expedient of firing artillery at short range into a group of Parisian demonstrators, just as he was happy to send a squad of troops into neutral Baden in order to arrest and then execute the Duc d'Enghien. He maintained a generally efficient secret police within the territories he controlled, and he certainly made both his own laws and his own morality. He kept on shooting or guillotining his opponents from time to time throughout his career (perhaps because he did not have the milder British alternative of giving them a free ticket to Australia - although he did in fact sometimes dispose of the 'dry guillotine' of transportation to Guiana).

Yet we do not see much evidence that Napoleon was particularly effective in penetrating and turning his enemies' inner councils unless they were already - like the Pope or the Spanish monarchy - effectively his prisoners. We do not see a battalion of French maids, restaurateurs and waiters in London who were secretly corresponding with Persons of Importance. He seems to have had no Mata Hari in Vienna: no Philby in the court o the Romanovs: no Judas in Berlin. One suspects that Napoleon was the sort of man who would generally have preferred to win his point with a noisy battle in which thousands died, rather than by a subtle political manipulation in which the only real casualties were the honesty of a few politicians. One gets the feeling that the handful of expert clandestine manipulators that he kept within his entourage (such as the Talleyrands and the Fouches) were so vitally necessary to him - mainly because he did not understand the inner secrets of their art - that he felt compelled to rely only too fatally upon them.

Indeed it was they who would do for him in the end, as Sir David chronicles at some length, to scarcely less a degree than the scheming Comte d'Artois. But doubtless this was because the Emperor lacked the necessary subtlety, and was at root not really very much more than a 'simple soldier', a provincial bully and a poseur.

Napoleon surely owed his greatness mainly to his hyper-active energy, his psychic aggression, and to his pure luck in emerging at just the right moment in a France in which any sort of leadership was at a desperate premium. He wanted to get on personally, as well as to impose his own sort of order upon a generally pretty chaotic state of affairs and so indeed he did. to that extent he was a great man, and admiration is justified. However, it seems to have escaped committed Bonapartists, such as Hamilton-Williams in the present book, that in the process Napoleon set up a governmental system that cold boast only too few redeeming features (if any!). Economically, it relied almost entirely upon a series of ever-expanding wars of deliberate aggression, which brought in a new crop of plunder from each campaign but which thereafter created no lasting long term basis for financial prosperity (interestingly, this was precisely the same system that Charlemagne Napoleon's self -acknowledged model - had also used , and which had been his undoing, too). Politically, the Napoleonic state was not 'democratic' in any way at all since all decisions were entirely centralised in the Emperor's own hands. He did not 'ask' his fellow citizens what they wanted France to do next - he told them. If what he wanted was actually unrealistic (e.g. the instant clothing of his army with greatcoats, after Jena in October 1806, in time for the previously unplanned Polish winter campaign of 1806-7), then no matter how much he might rant and rage, and allege he had been betrayed, his orders remained very dead letters indeed. (In fact, most of the greatcoats arrived only in May or June 1807.)

Just like Hitler, in fact, Napoleon was highly vulnerable to the danger of believing that his orders would automatically be followed to the letter, simply because he had issued them. He often imagined that he possessed armies which in reality existed only on paper, or that he understood the inner working of his enemies' minds simply because he hoped they would be thinking in some particular way. Because he systematically surrounded himself with yes-men, no- one (or no organisation) proved capable of keeping him rooted in reality or following up his orders that had not been properly executed. Many of the post 1871/ pre-1914 French general staff studies highlighted these problems, but perhaps the best recent analysis of it has been Correlli Barnett's recommended Bonaparte (London 1978) - which again is unfortunately absent from Sir David's bibliography.

No claim that Napoleon somehow enshrined the revolutionary principles of Liberty or Equality (and don't even THINK of Fraternity) can possibly be substantiated. His finger on the political pulse was so wildly insensitive that he totally alienated the French people by his repeated and ever-increasing levies of conscripts; he totally alienated the Spanish and Portuguese people by his attempt to republicanise and dechristianise them; and he totally alienated most of the remainder of Europe by his remorselessly aggressive campaigns of extortion and murder. there is little that can today be said in favour of Napoleon except that he was politically successful (as opposed to popular) for a short time within France - maybe for as many as ten years rather than for the five that he really deserved - and that he pushed the 'art of war' a couple of notches further forward than the very many notches that Cannot, his immediate predecessor, had already pushed it during the revolutionary era. Such things as the legal code, the administrative unification of Germany and Italy, or the national mobilisation of science, were not truly Napoleon's own personal products, and it is unfair to credit him with very much of the responsibility for them. They would all surely have happened without him, anyway - but probably with many fewer young artisans or farm ]ads being forced to die in far flung battlefields in the process.

Unfortunately, Hamilton-Williams seems to be wedded to the idea that the Emperor was the single-handed creator of everything that was constructive in the France of his time, and was the innocent victim of fools or blackguards whenever things went wrong. The ultimate hyperbole is perhaps the idea that napoleon embodied the great Revolution itself, even though it is obvious that he was more than ready to act as the bloody swordsman of the bourgeois Thermidorian counter-revolution in the mid-1790s, or that he wished to establish his own ersatz 'empire' in its place. We may perhaps agree that Napoleon displayed considerable military flair when he commanded on the spot and in person; but it is surely quite wrong to assume that his main military errors were created by the aberrant subordinates, let alone 'traitors'.

If Ney failed to exterminate the allies at Bautzen just because he 'failed to understand his role', then the key question must surely be a matter of examining the extent to which his Emperor had explained his role properly in the first place. If brother Joseph prematurely abandoned Paris to a benign occupation (as opposed to a vicious street battle and sack), then the key questions must be why Napoleon ever allowed himself to be caught out so far away from his capital in the first place; why he should ever have believed that Joseph - the mega-loser at Vitoria in 1813 - could possibly have been a tower of strength, or why anyone today should purport to believe that any real hope at all was left for the Napoleonic empire even in January 1814, let alone April.

To say that Napoleon lost his campaign in the spring of 1814 because he was 'betrayed' seems to imply that that the loss of three quarters of a million men in Russia, Saxony and Spain since 1811 was somehow a military irrelevance, or something that the French generals could quickly shrug off without thinking to blame the man who was responsible.

The Fall of Napoleon is revisionist history, which is actually quite a big point in its favour. It is always refreshing and stimulating to be given a new perspective on a familiar story. The problem in the present case, alas, is that this revision seems to be aiming at the wrong sort of targets to attain its intended objectives. Thus if the author wants to show that Napoleon was a far better man than is commonly believed, then it does not help very much to stress and catalogue just how widely he was hated and deserted. It would be much more effective to analyse his strengths and constructive contributions in detail, rather than merely to assert them as self-evident.

But if, on the contrary, the aim is to show how nasty his opponents really were, then the book should show that they were behaving in a manner that was quite unusual and inappropriate for the times or the situation. It should have to be demonstrated, for example, that the murder of the Duc d'Enghien by Napoleon was somehow a far less blatant act than the murder of Napoleon by Montholon, or that the mass rape of Portuguese peasants by Napoleon's army was somehow less serious than the British 'Peterloo massacre'. Unfortunately, the Portuguese peasants are not mentioned at all - and by a doubtless Freudian slip the single brief reference to the poor old Duc d'Enghien is wildly misfiled in the index, so that the present reviewer now finds himself unable to re-check it.

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Napoleon and Waterloo
The Fall of Napoleon