Napoleon Bonaparte

I'm gonna show you how great I am. Yeah, I'm a tiny fella. I just wanna say I'm gonna be home with my heart. I'd like to take this chance to apologize. It's absolutely nobody. [MUSIC] Hello and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. For this first episode, we're gonna be talking about Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general, king, emperor, and reformer. And to start off with, why am I doing this, my very first episode of How to Take Over the World, about Napoleon? I think many people know him as the short angry guy. You've heard of the Napoleon complex and that's what you think of when you hear Napoleon. So it might seem like a strange place to start for many people. And there's a few reasons I wanna start with Napoleon. The first is his absolute brilliance and the volume of his accomplishments. And when you think of what you would consider a successful life, what do you hope to do before you die? Maybe start a successful business, you might consider yourself successful if you did that. Or what about founding a university? I mean, that would be big, right? Or becoming president. Well, Napoleon went from being a penniless refugee in a foreign country to becoming emperor of the largest empire since ancient Rome. It stretched from Spain to Poland, from Denmark to Italy, covered most of Europe. He won 54 of his 62 battles, despite almost always being outnumbered. He pioneered numerous military innovations. He reformed the legal code in France and did the same in many other countries throughout Europe. He founded multiple universities in schools, spanning multiple continents. He modernized the French bureaucracy, founded two newspapers. He wrote novels and political propaganda in his spare time. And there's more. The volume of his accomplishments is truly mind-blowing and hard to capture. So I wanted to see and to learn how could someone do this much in one lifetime? The other reason I wanted to focus on Napoleon is he falls at an interesting time in history. On the one hand, he's the last great conqueror. You think of these guys who established these great European or Mediterranean empires. Like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Cyrus the Great. And Napoleon is the last man to single-handedly craft an empire out of nothing like that. So in some ways, he feels very ancient. It's easy to project him backwards and compare him to those guys that I just mentioned. But on the other hand, in some ways, he feels very modern. You look at what he was doing all day. And most days, it was making plans, having meetings and reading and writing letters. And what does a modern CEO do? Well, mostly they make plans, have meetings, and read and write emails. Some of his greatest innovations were in very modern sounding things like supply chain and organizational structure. He had the first modern chief of staff like a CEO would have. So when you listen to his life story, it's also easy to project him forward and compare him to guys like Warren Buffett or Elon Musk or Steve Jobs. And he's the only guy I can think of who's easy to compare to both Alexander the Great and Warren Buffett. So I wanted to start with him because he's an easy point of comparison for everyone else we will talk about no matter the time period. Now having said all of that, before we get started, I want to give special thanks to Andrew Roberts and David Markham, both of whose research and writing I use heavily throughout this episode. The number one source that I use, and I'll quote from it extensively, is the excellent biography Napoleon Alife by Andrew Roberts. I also want to briefly note that Napoleon's life is way too dense and complex to cover in one episode of a podcast. So there is a lot I leave out. I'm 100% focused on teasing out the elements of his personality, habits, approach, and leadership style that made him great. So if you notice something is missing, for example, I leave out the entire war of the fifth coalition, please know I didn't just forget about it. I know the history, but I just, I have limited time. And so some things had to be skipped. Okay. So having got all that of the way, I present to you episode one Napoleon Bonaparte. Let's start with the background. Who was this Napoleon guy? He was born in 1769, and he comes onto the scene at a time of really rapid change. You think about it, and most countries, at the time in Europe were ruled by kings and queens, but this is about to be upended. The French Revolution would happen in his lifetime. Warfare was also rapidly going under change. You have cannons and muskets, but also bayonets and sometimes even pikes and swords being used in battle. So you've got some of these weapons that are very modern in some ways, but in literally at the same time cavalry charges where men on horses with swords are charging at the enemy. So these are the times into which Napoleon is born. He was born on the island of Corsica. His birth name was Napoleon de Bonaparte. And if you're thinking to yourself, that doesn't sound very French, you're right. Corsica is an island, and it's off the coast of both Italy and France. It's about the same distance from each, and for most of its history it was for all intents and purposes, Italian. The language spoken on the island, Corsica is an Italian dialect. But Napoleon is born a French citizen because Corsica became a part of the French Empire in 1769, the same year he was born. So Napoleon was, in many ways, an outsider and a foreigner in France. He didn't learn French until he was 9 or 10, and always spoke it with a heavy accent. And by the way, if you're asking yourself, you said his name was Napoleon de Bonaparte, so how come I know him as Napoleon Bonaparte? It's because he changed his name when he became a general to sound more French. As a boy, Napoleon was bright. One of the things that's interesting to think about is, are these kinds of people destined for greatness? Are they just born to take over the world? Or do they do things to develop that ability and become that? And at least in Napoleon's case, it seems you can make a strong case that this was at least somewhat learned or developed. If you read the reliable first hand accounts from his family members about his childhood, everyone thought he was smart, but no one had any idea that he would become an emperor, some sort of great man that would affect history. I mean, for one thing, no one on Corsica even really had those kinds of dreams. It was an unimportant backwater. And by the way, while we're talking about his origins, let's dispel a myth about Napoleon. He wasn't that short. He was about 5'7", which was average height for a commoner, maybe a little short for an officer, but Napoleon was sort of medium to medium short. And the whole thing about him being this short angry man and the Napoleon complex and all that, and it was just propaganda. His height, I mean, if you read his biography and read the people who talked about him, his height just wasn't that big of a deal in his life. And this isn't me just sticking up for the short guy. I'm 6'4". I'm not a dog in this fight, but that's just the truth. Sorry to disillusion you from what you know about the Napoleon complex, but it's not accurate about his life. The Bonaparte days were a prominent family on the island, and that was good enough to entitle Napoleon to a royal education. So when he was 9 years old, they were able to ship him off to a boarding school to get a good education in France. And again, he's viewed as bright, more intelligent than average at an elite institution, but not as the most brilliant guy that they have ever seen. The remarks that his examiner gives on the referral papers, graduation, are positive, but not ecstatic. He says, in part, quote, "He has always been distinguished for his application in mathematics. He's fairly well acquainted with history and geography. This boy would make an excellent sailor." I like his rather modest origins, because it gives me hope. I've done a few semi-cool things, but I'm not a billionaire yet. Napoleon didn't do anything all that remarkable until he was in his mid to late 20s. And the point isn't that you have to have accomplished something by your mid to late 20s, but rather that greatness can be cultivated at any time in life. So after this boarding school, he gains admission to the elite, Ecole Milita. And I have to apologize for my French pronunciation. I don't speak French. Never took it all in school. My pronunciation's pretty bad. You're just going to have to deal with it for this episode. I apologize. And at this Ecole Milita, he graduates, becoming an artillery officer, after just one year. After graduation, he takes some minor posts of little note, and he's not doing a whole lot of great importance in his career. And during this time, the French Revolution occurs. The Revolutionaries take control of the government, do away with the king, and establish a republic. And the whole thing is very bloody. They kill the king, the exile, or kill most of the nobles. And the kings and queens of other nations in Europe are looking at this, and they don't like it at all, as you can imagine. And if you're a king of Germany or England or Austria, you don't like the precedent being set here of throwing out the king and killing him. So many of them declare war on France and its revolutionary government. They want to stamp this thing out before it spreads and people start getting ideas in their countries. They want to have a revolution in their own country and have their heads roll. These outside countries, who are declaring war on France, one of the things they try to do, is ally with people still loyal to the king inside France. The Revolution isn't popular everywhere in France, it's especially true, in the countryside and areas of France that are far from Paris. One place where this plays out is a city called Toulon. And there are a lot of people there still loyal to the crown, so the British are able to sail their fleet into the harbour at Toulon, and with the help of some royalists, the people still loyal to the king, they take and they hold the city. the French send forces to siege Doulon to try to take it back and at first things don't go particularly well for the French. They don't have very good or active commanders, so they're just sitting there. That's not going to work because too long is a port and the British are just sailing supplies in so you can't just siege it and sit outside the city and starve them out. Well the French start to realize hey we need some new leadership here if this is going to be successful. So they're looking for new leadership they're especially looking for a new artillery commander. Nanopolean had caught the eye of a couple higher ups because of a political pamphlet he had written. Nanopolean was a very progressive guy and strongly supported the revolution. He had written this very pro-revolution pamphlet. It had caught the eye of a higher up named Augustan Robespierre and Augustan really liked this pamphlet and Nanopolean had written. So he's looking for an opportunity to give Nanopolean a chance. And so here at Too Long they say hey things aren't exactly working out. We need some new leadership. Let's put Nanopolean in charge of the artillery and see if he can make some things happen. And this is the first time here at Too Long that you start to see you know Nanopolean the things that would make him great. You start to see the habits and characteristics that would lead to his success later in life. The first thing he does is he comes in and takes a look at the cannas that they have and he says that's it. This is pitiful. It's a rag-type group of cannons. The horses who pull them are poorly trained and men don't really know what they're doing. There's not nearly enough gunpowder or cannonballs. And rather than accepting this and saying okay well you know make the best of a bad situation or saying hey well this isn't really my fault because I'm coming into a bad situation where I'm under supplied. Nanopolean decides he's not going to put up with this. So he starts doing everything in his power to get better supplied. He starts riding back to Paris where the government is and says hey we need more of everything. More gunpowder, more cannons, more horses and he keeps pestering them for more stuff all throughout the siege. He also sends men out to the countryside and has them go to nearby towns and see what they can scrounge up and they do. They find a few extra cannons that way just scattered throughout local towns. He takes cannons from city walls of nearby cities that aren't currently seeing combat. He takes control of a foundry and starts manufacturing more ammunition himself. I mean I love this part of the story. This guy is so fixated on getting more supplies than when he doesn't have enough and the army won't supply it. He says forget it. I will literally manufacture it myself. And all these little things work. I'm reading from the Andrew Roberts biography now. He says quote the result of all this hectoring, bluster, requisitioning and political string pulling was that Nanopolean put together a strong artillery train in very short order. By the end of the siege, Nanopolean commanded 11 batteries, totaling nearly 100 cannon and mortars. And by the way, he used there the term battery, which is something you'll hear throughout the episode. That's just a unit of cannons. Okay, so at the same time that he's doing all this, he's also training his men and using a very hands-on personal style of leadership. One of the generals who is in charge of the siege overall who has super vision over Nanopolean wrote quote, "I always found him at his post. When he needed rest, he lay on the ground wrapped in his cloak. He never left his batteries." And that was one of Nanopolean's skills. His ability to really focus on and obsess over a problem. This isn't a commander who is telling other men what to do during the day, and then enjoying a nice meal with the other officers at night. He's obsessed with getting things right. He's working on getting his cannons ready day and night. And when he gets so tired that he literally just can't work anymore, he pulls his cloak around him and sleeps there on the ground by the cannons. Imagine if you're one of the men working under Nanopolean, you see this, you're going to be working pretty hard to try and keep up with your commander. Well once Nanopolean has his battery in order, he turns his eye toward an actual attack. And what is needed isn't terribly complicated, strategically speaking. There are two high points in the city, and if you can control them, you have the ability to fire your cannons down on the rest of the city. This is obvious to everyone so the British have heavily fortified these two high points. Nanopolean plans, organizes, and launches multiple assaults on these hills. And true to form, he personally leads the attacks, a great risk to himself. At one point, his horse is shot out from under him. You imagine how close that call is, the bullet had been a little higher, it would have shot and killed him. Another time, he's on the ground, literally fighting hand to hand, and he is stabbed through the thigh by a pike. In another instance, one of the men manning the cannons is shot, so Nanopolean picks up his gloves and ramrod and starts helping to fire the cannon himself. He exposes himself to a lot of danger, but this inspires his men. You can imagine if you're a soldier and you've got some commander saying, "Hey, go take that fort, it's heavily fortified, you'll probably die, and I'm not going with you, good luck." You'd be pretty skeptical compared to a commander who is leading the charge, and he's going to be there with you. Well, Nanopolean inspires his men, and with them, he's able to take these two hills, and once they have taken the hills, they start firing heated cannonballs down onto the British Navy that's in the port. They destroy a number of ships and completely eject them from Toulon. As sort of an exclamation mark, one of the cannonballs hits the gunpowder storage on one of the ships, and it explodes into a giant fireball. The siege of Toulon ends up being a huge victory for the French, and Nanopolean is seen by the government as a hero. They love this guy. Nothing was going on. They really hadn't seen any big victories until now, and now they have one, and it's mostly due to this guy, Nanopolean. And so now, he's made a general at the very young age of 24, and his career really starts to take off from here. After Toulon, Nanopolean has brought back to Paris where he helps plan grand strategy for the French military. And while he's there in Paris, something really important happens. As I previously mentioned, not everyone was happy with the French revolution, and in many ways, it had not been going particularly well so far. In particular, the revolutionary government had implemented some reforms that were antagonistic toward the Catholic Church, and they were extremely unpopular. If you know anything about France, it's a very Catholic country, and so people didn't want to see the Church hurt. So many people wanted to throw out the revolution areas and put the king back. Others don't want to go that far, but they're united by this idea that the current government has to go. Eventually, the government realizes they are in serious danger, and there's about to be another revolution in Paris. So they come to Nanopolean and tell him, "You're in charge of saving the government. Keep a safe, safe, stop a counter revolution from happening." Well, Nanopolean flies into action as he does. The first thing he does is ask where the cannons are, and it turns out they're not in Paris. There are a few miles outside. So Nanopolean sends out his cavalry and tells them to ride as fast as they can and bring the cannons into Paris immediately. They take off and get there to retrieve the cannons just before the revolutionaries show up, and then they bring the cannons back to Paris to Nanopolean. This is one of those moments where you look back and realize everything could have gone differently if this had been different. If they had just been 15 minutes later, and these revolutionaries had got the cannons before Nanopolean, maybe the Napoleonic epic, and this whole saga never happens because the revolutionary government has thrown out. We'll never know, but it's one of those interesting what ifs. Now to understand Napoleon's mindset with what is going to happen next, you have to understand that he had actually been there at the Toulary Palace when the king was taken at the beginning of the French Revolution. And the king had refused to let the men that were guarding him fire on the mob, because while he was the French king and they were his French subjects and he didn't want to shoot his own subjects. Well for his kindness, all his guards were massacred and he had his head chopped off. And so Napoleon isn't about to let this happen again because he's on the government side now, he wants to keep his head. With this in mind, Napoleon sets up the cannons and the streets outside of the government buildings, and the mob starts to pour out of the side streets and toward Napoleon and his men. Keep in mind, there is no army in Paris, so Napoleon only has a few men at his disposal. And he has the cannons loaded up with canister shot. You think of cannons as firing cannonballs, but at close range you can basically use a cannon as a shotgun. Instead of loading it with a cannon ball, you load a canvas bag packed with tiny metal balls. It was informally known as a "grape shot" because these tiny cannonballs are about the size of grapes. And at short range, it's just devastating. Instead of the area of one cannonball, you could wipe out an entire swath of people, a few meters or yards wide. Well, legend has it that Napoleon says, as this mob is advancing toward his men, "give them a whiff of grape shot." And it's likely he never actually said this, but it's quite poetic. And it does reflect some of the realities that Napoleon believed about warfare. He later did say, "If you treat the mob with kindness, these creatures fancy themselves invulnerable. If you hang a few, they get tired of the game and become as submissive and humble as they ought to be." His viewpoint was, it's better to be harsh and kill some people at the beginning of an insurrection than to let it carry on and turn into a full-on war in which a bunch of people are going to suffer and die. In any case, this whiff of grape shot works. Only about a half- dozen of his men die. About 300 revolutionaries are killed. After Napoleon's men shoot a few rounds of grape shot, these revolutionaries scatter and it dissolves. The government is saved, and Napoleon is a hero once again. Well, the government is extremely grateful to Napoleon. They're glad to still be alive. So because of this episode, they reward Napoleon by putting him in charge of an army for the first time. He gets put in command of the army of Italy. Now really quickly, I should clarify the way these things are named because some of you might be thinking, "Wait, what? Why is he not?" charge of an Italian army now. The French were fighting on a few different fronts at this time with a few different enemies because a bunch of people were trying to come after them as we previously discussed. The forces in each distinct area were referred to as an army and the armies were called by the location they were fighting in. So if the army was fighting in the Alps, it was called the army of the Alps. If it was fighting in Germany, it was called the army of Germany, you get the idea. So this army is fighting in Italy, so it's the army of Italy, so it's the French army fighting in Italy. And why are they fighting in Italy? Well, the Austrian Empire was one of the great empires of the day. They controlled most of Central and Eastern Europe. They're trying to cross Italy and punish France for their revolution, so the French are fighting the Austrians in Italy. Napoleon comes into command of the army of Italy and he immediately sees that just like it too long, they're in really bad shape. They're poorly equipped. They lack shoes and sufficient ammunition. The men are upset because they haven't been paid what they've been promised and they never get paid on time. They haven't been moving or fighting for quite a while, so the men are complacent and lazy. It's a bad situation all around. And what Napoleon does with the army of Italy is, in my opinion, one of the greatest examples of his leadership. He's only 26. He's got very little experience and he's supposed to take over this huge army that has a number of commanders who are nearly twice his age and a way more experience. Some of them have been commanding armies for almost as long as Napoleon's been alive and he's supposed to be giving them orders. Furthermore, he got this post not through being a great battlefield commander, but by putting down a mob in Paris, so the generals who he's supposed to be commanding are not favorably disposed towards him. They're not looking forward to taking commands from him. So this is what Napoleon does when he first comes into command. Here's a quote from one of the fellow officers who was there when he first comes and takes command. He says, quote, "I can still see the little hats her mounted by a pickup plume, his coat cut anyhow, and a sword which in truth did not seem the sort of weapon to make anyone's fortune." Flinging his hat on a large table in the middle of the room, he went up to an old general named Creeg, a man with a wonderful knowledge of detail and the author of a very good soldier's manual. He made him take a seat beside him at the table and began questioning him, pen in hand, about a host of facts connected with the service and discipline. Some of his questions showed such a complete ignorance of the most ordinary things that several of my comrades smiled. I was myself struck by the number of his questions, their order, and their rapidity. But what struck me still more was the sight of a commander in chief, perfectly indifferent about showing his subordinates how completely ignorant he was of various points of a business, which the youngest of them was supposed to know perfectly. And this raised him a thousand qubits in my opinion. Now this is an interesting tactic. You might wonder, shouldn't you be showing confidence as a leader? Why is he basically admitting to being ignorant? When Napoleon does have the certain confidence, he knows he's really smart. At this point, he's pretty sure he's a good leader, so he doesn't really care about looking stupid. He doesn't have to pretend like he knows things that he doesn't actually know. Think about it this way, if you're interviewing someone for a position, who's most likely to be totally honest about their flaws? It's the guy who knows he's qualified. He knows he's going to do a good job in this position. He knows he's got the goods. He doesn't need to embellish. He can just say, "Hey, here's who I am, weaknesses and strengths." So Napoleon isn't afraid to admit where he has gaps in his knowledge. Here's another quote from a different officer on the same situation. "He questioned us on the position of our divisions, their equipment, the spirit and active number of each core, gave us the directions which we had to follow, announced that the next day he would inspect all the core, and the day after that, they would march on the enemy to give battle." I think this is such an interesting decision, isn't it? His army is under-supplied, and in bad spirits, and he says, "Step one, we're going to attack the enemy right away." Now, he's still doing exactly what he did at too long at the same time. He's flying into a rage, riding back to Paris. "Do you want us to fail? This is a disgrace. We need more shoes. We need more uniforms. We need more gunpowder." And he writes these letters, pestering them for more supplies over and over again. But he doesn't wait for all the supplies to arrive. He marches right away. I think there are a number of reasons for this. One, he was just extremely impatient, he loved speed, he always wanted to move faster and surprise the enemy. He was obsessed with moving his army quickly, but a big part of this was morale, the spirit of his troops. And a whole later said, "In war, moral factors account for three quarters of the whole relative material strength accounts for only one quarter." Now, your first thought might be, well, wait a minute, how is marching these grumpy underpaid under-supplied soldiers right into paddle going to improve their morale? If anything, you would think it would decrease it. We're under-supplied and under-paid, and now we're also going to get shot at and killed. But he knew that inactivity, bread inactivity, he wanted his troops to get used to marching and fighting. He didn't want them to stay lazy. And fighting might hurt morale if you lose, but there are few things that improve it as much as fighting and winning. He had the confidence that he was going to win, and as we will see, he did. He marches his little army into Italy, and really has no problem kicking the Austrians around, and one way he does this is by adopting what he calls the strategy of the central position. There's a quote from Napoleon that gives a pretty good summary of the philosophy behind it. He said, "During the Revolutionary Wars, the plan was to stretch out, to end columns to the right and left, which did no good. To tell you the truth, the thing that made me gain so many battles was the evening before a fight. Instead of giving orders to extend our lines, I tried to converge all our forces on the point I wanted to attack. I masked them there." So the Austrians are trying to spread out their army, while Napoleon is trying to concentrate his. What happens time and again is Napoleon will march toward the Austrians with a smaller army. Let's say, Napoleon's got 30,000 men against their 40,000. So their strategy is to try to envelop him. They want to flank him, attack him from the sides. So they send 20,000 men to the left, 20,000 to the right, thinking to attack him from both sides. As I previously mentioned, Napoleon is a fast marcher. He was obsessed with covering more miles per day and doing things faster. He did a number of things to get his men to be able to move faster. He had them live off the land, instead of waiting for supply wagons. He would force march them, have them sleep under the stars, instead of taking the time to set up and take down tents. Sometimes he would even march his men all night. So when the Austrians split up, he just marches right into the middle of their trap and very quickly turns, beats one half of their army, which isn't too hard because now he outnumbers them. And before they have a chance to spring the trap, he then turns around and marches back and beats the other half of their army. And this strategy is totally revolutionary at the time. So he's beating up on the Austrians in Italy and they start to retreat from him. And as they do, he has one of the most important battles of his career at a place called Lodi. As the Austrians retreat, they leave a small rear guard in this town called Lodi and it sits right on a river and only has one narrow bridge across it. So they think that they can keep Napoleon from chasing them with a small detachment because you can defend a bridge with very few men. And if you think about it, you understand why. Think about what it would be like to charge across this bridge. The enemy's got cannons set up on the end and you're going to be marching right at them. If you're at the front of the charge, you're basically marching into certain death. They're firing grape shot and mowing down you and your friends as you come across. If you happen to make it through the cannon fire, they've got infantry firing muskets at you. And if by some miracle, you make it through the musket fire and get across the bridge, then you're going to be charged by cavalry who are going to run you over and try to stab you. And if you somehow survive all that, well, you still haven't even started fighting yet. You've just made it to the other side of the bridge. You still have to fight the battle. Well, at the Battle of Lodi, Napoleon is spectacular. He's on the ground in the action. He's personally leading attacks. He's helping to position and fire artillery. It's at this battle that he gains a new nickname. Here's this big important general and he's literally on the ground positioning cannons himself. So they call him Lepetite O'Rod. A corporal is a very low ranking officer, so they're jokingly saying he's like a corporal out here moving around artillery. It's a term of affection. They view him as a soldier's commander, someone not afraid to get his hands dirty. So Napoleon is out there on the ground positioning cannon and it comes time to storm the bridge. He gives this great speech to his men and whips them into a fury and sends them across this bridge. They're thrown back a number of times in this brutal bloody crossing. But eventually they make it across and take the bridge. Napoleon later said of this battle, quote, "I no longer regarded myself as a simple general, but as a man called upon to decide the fate of peoples. It came to me then that I really could become a decisive actor on our national stage. At that point was born the first spark of high ambition." And you left to wonder why it was this moment. It wasn't a particularly large battle. I think it's because before this he knew what he could personally do, but now he sees that he can inspire other men to do great things. And so for the first time he starts to think, "Huh, maybe I am special." Well he goes on and continues to kick the Austrians around Italy. One of my favorite stories is of a battle where the Austrians counterattack the French. And for a while it's looking a little dicey. This French division, the 32nd Demi Brigade, is able to just barely hold the line and eventually beat back the Austrians. When Napoleon asked what he was thinking when this happened, he said, "I was tranquil." The brave 32nd Demi Brigade was there. I mean, think about it if you're that Demi Brigade. His rising star general, who's quickly becoming famous throughout all of Europe, says that about you and your brigade. I wasn't worried. The 32nd was there. He's deflecting his credit to you. Think of the pride that that would stir in you. What would you do for a man who said that about you and your comrades? Consequently, they had those words sewn into all their flags, and they became some of his most reliable and fierce soldiers, as you can imagine, and just goes to show how well he could use his words to inspire men, which is one of his most important attributes. So the Austrians were marching through Italy to attack France, but they're soon finding the situation flipped on them. And the Austrians have been ruling Italy previously. And as Napoleon conquers these areas, he implements major reforms. He gives them new constitutions with Republican governments instead of princes and kings. And he makes other reforms as well. Listen to what he does in just one area, Lombardi, again from the Robert biography quote, "He established the Lombardic Republic, abolished Austrian governing institutions, reformed Pavia University, held provisional municipal elections, founded a National Guard, and conferred with the leading Milanese advocate of Italian unification." Now, how is he able to do all this at the same time as organizing and leading a major army? Now, Levin Napoleon's own description of how his mind worked. He said quote, "Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wished to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers, and there I am. A sleep." One of his staff raised it a little differently. He said quote, "We all admired the strength of mind and the facility with which he could take off or fix the whole force of his attention on whatever he pleased." Napoleon had this amazing control of his own mind, could flip his whole attention on something and forget everything else in the world, and then just a few minutes later, flip it to something else. Well, so he's doing all this at the same time. He's reforming, he's also kicking the Austrians all around Italy. And eventually, he kicks them all the way out of Italy and defeats their forces. He turns his army toward their capital, Vienna, and he only asks the march a short way before they come to him and say, "Hey, you know what? Sounds pretty great right now. Peace." And Napoleon negotiates peace with them. Now, this is pretty significant. Remember, he's just a general. He really doesn't have the authority to be negotiating a peace treaty between France and Austria. But he's starting to get political. So he comes back to Paris, and people are ecstatic. He's the hero of France, and the directory, the government in charge, is pretty anxious to see him out of Paris. He's way too popular for them to try to make a move against him or anything like that, but they don't want him in a position where he could potentially overthrow them. Remember, he's both very popular with the peace that he just negotiated, and it's also clear that he has political ambitions because he negotiated it himself. Well, there had been some plans lying around for an invasion of Egypt. The supposed purpose of this invasion is to disrupt British interests in the Middle East. And all of a sudden, this seems like a great idea. Egypt is very far away. It's a chance to give Napoleon a command that both seems prestigious, while also getting him as far from Paris as possible. And it's attractive to Napoleon as well. He adored practically worshiped men like Alexander the Great and Caesar, and most of those guys had had military adventures in the Near East. And he was anxious to emulate them, so he gets sent off across the Mediterranean with an army to invade Egypt. I'm going to breeze through the invasion of Egypt pretty quickly because it doesn't contribute significantly either to Napoleon's rise to power or to his fall from grace. Napoleon and his army hop aboard a fleet of ships to cross the Mediterranean. It's worth mentioning that he's doing his usual reforming thing on the way. They stop at Malta, which is a little island right in the middle of the Mediterranean for six days. And this is what he does in those six days, quoting again from the Robert's biography. He says, quote, "In his six days in Malta, he replaced the island's medieval administration with a governing council, dissolved the monasteries, introduced street lighting and paving, freed all political prisoners, installed fountains, and reformed the hospitals, postal service, and university, which was now to teach science, as well as the humanities." When he lands in Egypt, he does pretty much the same thing, building schools and universities, reforming, you get the picture. Capturing Egypt proved to not be terribly difficult. The existing regime there is pretty backwards in terms of technology and organized fighting force. So he beats them, captures Egypt, and marches north against the Ottomans, who are much better organized and armed than the Egyptians. And he, Napoleon, has a tough time with them. He's pushed back, but is eventually able to settle down in Egypt and hold it. However, there is a big problem, which is that shortly after the army arrived in Egypt, the British Navy showed up and destroyed the French fleet, that was transporting Napoleon. This leaves them stranded, and so there's really not much that they can do. They have conquered Egypt, but they just kind of have to hang out there. And in the meantime, war has started up again in earnest in Europe. And France is not faring well. It doesn't make a lot of sense for their best general to be stuck in a side show across the Mediterranean in Egypt. So Napoleon boards a small, quick vessel and races across the Mediterranean. Luckily, he isn't caught by the British Navy. From our perspective, a couple hundred years later, Egypt was sort of a mixed success. It's kind of a pointless side adventure that doesn't accomplish a whole lot. So yes, Napoleon's successful, he does, he conquers Egypt. But for what purpose? Now remember, Napoleon is a master of propaganda. So he returns a year later and he's telling everyone that it was a smashing success. And the French are so happy to see him return and what it means for their prospects on the home front that they don't really care. They're happy to believe that yes, you are the masterful conqueror of Egypt. Sure, whatever you say. And he gets a hero's welcome back in Paris. Well, back in Paris, the government is teetering. Their finances are not sound. They're losing ground in the wars they're fighting. The economy isn't doing well. And everyone knows that the government is on edge. There are multiple plots to overthrow them. And Napoleon walks into this environment in a very strong position. And he decides that what France needs at that very moment is a little more Napoleon. He joins up with a few other co-conspirators and throws a coup. He puts himself in power. And it starts out as a supposedly republican government. But they go through a few iterations relatively quickly. And he ends up as the facto dictator. So he's still called the first console, a title that hearkens back to the Roman Republic. And you can probably guess what kind of stuff he does next. He gets busy reforming, as usual. Again, from the Roberts biography quote, "In less than 15 weeks, Napoleon effectively ended the French Revolution, gave France a new constitution, established her finances on sound footing, muzzled the opposition press, started to end both rural brigandage and the long-running war in the Vande. Set up a senate, tribune, legislative body, and conseitat. Rebath the bourbons, made spurned peace offers to Britain and Austria, reorganized French local government, and inaugurated the Banque de France." It's a lot of stuff to do in a very short amount of time. And you think of setting up a bank. And how complicated that would be. That's just one, that's just a small, small item on this list of tons of stuff that he accomplishes in a very, very short amount of time. Well, despite all this, the French are still not doing great on the battlefield. The Austrians are back in Italy, and without Napoleon there to leave the troops, the Austrians are winning. So what does Napoleon do next? There's a quote of Napoleon that I like. He said quote, "A newly born government must dazzle and astonish. When it ceases to do that, it fails." And it was time for Napoleon to dazzle and astonish. He's going to go back to Italy. So Napoleon has this shiny new toy. He's now the first consul of France, and he loves reforming stuff and making things work. And so he wants to be able to govern France, but he needs to go fight this war in Italy. He wants to end it quickly so that he can get back to governing. So in order to understand what happens next, you need to know a little bit about the geography of the area. France and Italy have a history of warfare going back thousands of years, literally to the time of Julius Caesar, who invaded modern day France from Rome, probably before that too. And there are really only two ways to get back and forth between France and Italy. You can go next to the coast through a region called Piedmont. It's a nice flat plain the whole way. It's perfect for marching your troops. This is the route that 99% of armies take. And then to the north you have Switzerland and the Alps. And the Alps are very high, very treacherous mountains. But it is possible to go over them. It had really only been done twice. Hannibal did it when he was invading Rome. And Charlemagne did it about a thousand years before Napoleon. And the reason that no one had done this for a thousand years is kind of obvious. Their big steep mountains and a big snowstorm at the wrong time or a landslide or any number of things can really damage your army. It's tough to move them through high mountains. And Napoleon being the master organizer and planner that he is manages to pull it off. He shows up out of nowhere behind the Austrians after moving his army over and through the Alps. And at first the Austrians can't be. believe it. They think it must be some small detachment. Napoleon wrote back to his brother, quote, "We have struck like lightning. The enemy wasn't expecting anything like it and can hardly believe it. Great events are going to take place." Well, there's some cat and mouse armies searching for each other, and when they finally meet, despite Napoleon's surprise crossing of the Alps, it's going to be in pretty difficult circumstances for Napoleon. So he's chasing the main Austrian army, and they retreat across a river at the town of Murengo. Napoleon has a spy reporting for him, but the Austrians flip this spy to become a double agent, and he gives Napoleon some bad intelligence. He says, "Oh yeah, they're definitely retreating." So Napoleon splits his army to go looking for the Austrians to try to chase them down. Well, it turns out they're not retreating, and as soon as Napoleon splits his army, they turn around and attack his main force. He thinks he's facing just the rear part of their army at first. It takes him a while to realize exactly what's going on. But when he does realize what's happening, he knows he's in serious trouble. The Austrians have more men, they're organized, they're ready for a fight, they've initiated the fight, Napoleon only has half his army and is not ready for, or expecting, a major battle. So as soon as he realizes that a major battle is what he has on his hands, he sends word right away for General Desai, who was leading the right wing of his army, and is still kind of close by to turn around and come back ASAP. And in the meantime, he's getting his men to fight very stubbornly. Remember, they're outnumbered, and they're not as prepared, so they can't actually win and beat the Austrians, but what Napoleon is doing is having them back up very slowly and fight very hard just to not be wiped out. And the entire battle, which goes on for basically the entire day from 7am to 4pm, they're just this close to turning tail and running. So Napoleon is riding his horse everywhere, he's all over the field, encouraging his men to not run and to stand and fight. One officer recalled, quote, "The consul seem to brave death and be near it, for the bullets were seen more than once to drive up the ground between his horse's legs." At this time, and for most of history, the reasons battles were won and lost was because people turned and ran. Killing people is hard, and it was extremely rare for an army to actually get totally wiped out when everyone in it slaughtered. Usually what would happen is an army starts losing, and before long people start looking around saying, "I don't want to die," and they high-tail it out of there. Napoleon expressed as well, he said, quote, "More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood." So he's running through the ranks, making sure his men don't lose hope. He's in good spirits. There are even reports that he was joking around with his commanders. In the face of defeat, he's trying to exude calm and make it seem like victory is inevitable. Despite this, basically for nine hours straight, his men are on the verge of running, and it's only his superb leadership that is keeping them from doing so. Well, towards the end of the day, the Austrians can tell the French are finally about to break, so they form up for a final assault, one last charge to break their lines and make the French turn and run. Well, as they're forming up, for the first time, Napoleon looks out and sees the dust rising in the distance, and he knows that that general decide the guy who he called for at the beginning of the day and said, "Turn around, come back as soon as you can." Well, he's finally come back. He's made it back just in the nick of time. Reportedly at this time, as is one of these great moments, he turns to his men and says, quote, "We have gone back far enough today." Well, when the Austrian charge, they expect to encounter exhausted French troops who are just about ready to run. Instead, they encounter a mixture of fresh troops from Dessai and Napoleon's men who are newly invigorated because they just saw reinforcements arrive. Not to mention Dessai brought more artillery with him, so the Austrians charge, and it's a blood bath. They get countercharged almost immediately by the French, and the battlefield that it took them a whole day to gain is lost in an hour. They're routed, and the army breaks apart. Under the Battle of Murengo, the Austrians have to sue for peace. The war in Italy is effectively over in less than a month. It's a masterstroke for Napoleon, and now he's confirmed in his position and named First Consul for life. His first move is to make peace with everyone in a treaty called the Treaty of Amian. Not just the Austrians, but also the Russians, and for the first time in Napoleon's political career, the British as well. And for the first time in a very long time, France is not at war with anybody. So things are looking very good for Napoleon. He's wildly popular, everyone is sick of war, and they're thrilled with this peace he just negotiated. And so this is when he makes his move to drop the pretense of a republic. He is named Emperor France, and one of the most stunning images in world history, he crowns himself. Usually you would have the Pope, or the last king, or someone already in authority crown you. You want to maintain a sense of continuity. You want to seem like the rightful heir to the throne. This is the way things are supposed to be going. But Napoleon didn't want to recognize anyone as having authority to say who is ruler of France. So during the coronation ceremony at Notre Dame in Paris, he has the crown brought to him, and he takes it and places it on his own head. It definitely displays a certain amount of arrogance, but it is a stunning image of really the ultimate self-made man, a man who literally crowns himself Emperor of France. But over the next year, he makes mistakes. People keep trying to assassinate him, and he gets paranoid. There's this guy, the Duke of Unghain, probably mispronouncing that, sorry, my German pronunciation is as bad as my French. But this guy, the Duke of Unghain, may or may not have been involved in some assassination plots. He actually probably wasn't, but Napoleon thought he was, and he certainly was antagonistic toward Napoleon. The Duke of Unghain lived in a place called Bodden, and Napoleon has him kidnapped and executed. This makes the other rulers throughout Europe very upset because for one, it violated Bodden's sovereignty, and secondly, because after the French Revolution, they're still pretty touchy about aristocrats being executed. Throw on top of the fact that he was probably innocent, and it's not a good look for Napoleon. Additionally, at the same time, there are some territorial disputes going on with the British, and so this piece that was made of Amiens, it breaks down, and everyone goes right back to war. Now again, the odds are stacked against Napoleon. The major players in Europe are France, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, which corresponds kind of to modern-day Germany. The British are the first to declare war, and then they get everyone except for Prussia to declare war on France as well, plus Sweden for good measure. This is called the War of the Third Coalition, and at this point, a normal person would probably give up some concessions to make peace or barring that, draw their troops in and prepare for some defensive positions, but not Napoleon. The whole world declares war on him, and what does he do? He attacks, he goes on the offensive. Now, Napoleon had just implemented a totally revolutionary system for organizing his army, called the Corps system. Typically, you would have your infantry, your artillery, and your cavalry, and you'd march them as one army, but what Napoleon does is splits them into what are called Corps, which are units with enough cavalry, cannon, and infantry to survive for one day against the enemy's main force. So they can just engage with the enemy, hold them off for a day, and then the other Corps can come on the sides and surround the enemy. This gives him unlimited strategic flexibility. At this time, turning your army and changing front is a very difficult thing to do, but the Corps system makes it relatively easy. So he moves his army so fast and so flexibly that the first Austrian army he encounters, he just marches his men around them, cutting them off from their supply and communication lines, and forces them to surrender with basically no fighting. There's a story that a captured Austrian sees Napoleon, and Napoleon is in the mud with the cannons helping to navigate them in giving orders, and this Austrian soldier he's surprised. Napoleon has just declared himself the emperor of one of the largest empires in Europe, but he's wearing a simple soldier's uniform, it's spattered with mud, and he's down there with the artillery, and the Austrian soldier remarks on this. And Napoleon responds to him with a quote that I love, he says quote, "Your master wanted to remind me that I am a soldier. I hope he will own that the imperial purple has not caused me to forget my first trade." And what a cool response. You remember wanting to cut me down to size and remind me that, "Hey, I'm nobody special, I'm just a soldier." Well, he's right, I haven't forgotten I'm a soldier, and look what I'm doing, I'm a pretty good one too. Well, the Austrians have just surrendered one army because Napoleon marched around them, but they still have another, and they meet up with the Russians to attack Napoleon and continue this war. And even though he's captured one army, Napoleon is still outnumbered. And even though they outnumber him at this point, everyone is so scared of Napoleon because he's obviously such a successful and brilliant general that they don't want to engage him, they don't want to fight him. And Napoleon wants to fight. He wants to have a big confrontation, big battle, and this war, and go home, and govern France. So what does he do? He's trying to fight, and his enemies, the Austrians and Russians don't want to. Well, in the area where the French and the Allied Austrian in Russia. armies are, in what is now the Czech Republic, there's this very advantageous area that you want to occupy. It's called the Pratsyn Heights. And the Pratsyn Heights are an elevated plateau, and you want to possess them because it's a pretty steep climb to get up there, and from there you can fire down on the surrounding areas, and organize your army to march down at the enemy. And Napoleon gets there first, he's got possession of the Pratsyn Heights, and of course they're not going to attack them there. They already don't want to fight him, and especially not if he's got this really advantageous high ground. So he starts letting on to them to the Austrians and Russians. He's not so sure about this fight. He does things like call for negotiations with the Russians, and when a Russian commander comes to negotiate, he says, "Hey, we're not so sure about fighting. Maybe we should just declare a ceasefire, and as he's negotiating with this Russian commander, he just so happens to have some orders lying around that seem to indicate that they're about to retreat." They're not sure they believe it, but Napoleon retreats off the Pratsyn Heights, so now they start thinking, "Okay, he seriously doesn't want to fight us because if he did, there's no way that he would vacate the best ground in the area." And they're kind of right. Basically no one except for Napoleon would do that, and so they fall for it. They take the Pratsyn Heights and they decide, "Okay, we've got the good ground. Let's attack." The closest town to where this battle is fought is called Austrelitz, and the Battle of Austrelitz will go down as the greatest battle, the greatest stroke of genius of Napoleon's storied career. So the allied Austrian and Russian army is at the top of the Pratsyn Heights, and Napoleon is waiting at the bottom. Now he's got a center, which is right below the Pratsyn Heights, and a right flank, and a left flank to either side. And he intentionally weakens his right flank to make it an attractive place to attack. But he places good troops there, who will be able to defend it for a while, even though they'll be hugely outnumbered. And he places them in a couple of villages, where they'll be able to hide behind walls and in houses, and really dig in and defend the place. So on the morning of the battle, the first thing the allies do is attack his right flank, just as he planned. And the French are defending it very stubbornly, just like he wanted. So after a couple hours of fighting, the allies decide to send more troops to the right flank, to really push through. And most of the troops are at the center up on the Pratsyn Heights, so they send troops from the Heights towards these villages to attack. We'll just below the Pratsyn Heights are these sort of rolling ridges, and in the morning, there's quite a bit of fog, and Napoleon has hidden a large portion of his troops at the center, right at the base of the Pratsyn Heights, covered in this fog. The allies have no idea that they're there. While the timing works out perfectly. Just as the allies move a big chunk of the forces off the Pratsyn Heights in order to attack the right wing, the sun comes out, and burns off the fog, and Napoleon's hidden forces are revealed. But it's too late to do anything. He launches a surprise attack on their center and takes the Pratsyn Heights. Once he does so, he's effectively split their forces, brings up his artillery, and starts firing down on the retreating troops. It's early December, and some of the retreating Russians and Austrians attempt to flee over a frozen lake, and the French shoot down at the lake, breaking apart the ice and drowning a number of the men. He absolutely smashes their army. Some historians actually think that this is where Napoleon's downfall started. They think he was so successful at Ausdorlitz. It was such an incredible success, that he didn't believe that he was capable of losing anymore and lost as good sense. I don't think that's true. I don't find that compelling since he still had a number of incredible victories after Ausdorlitz. But it tells you something about how amazing this victory was for him, that people thought that maybe he believed he was not even capable of losing anymore. Remember, Napoleon had fewer men. He had just given up the best ground he was fighting on the low ground, and yet he just crushed this army, despite all of the circumstances being against him. It truly was a remarkable victory. Well, after Ausdorlitz, the Austrians have to sue for peace, which Napoleon grants, but he takes some of their territory as compensation. Russia actually decides to fight on. They still have another army, and they join up with the Prussians, who now join the war to form the Fourth Coalition. We won't get into it, but Napoleon marches straight into Prussia and smashes the Allied Prussian and Russian forces in the War of the Fourth Coalition. He wins major battles at Friedland and Jaina, and we won't get into it because it's a little anticlimactic after Ausdorlitz, but they are also impressive crushing victories. And so everyone makes peace again. This is called the Peace of Tilsit, and everyone agrees to it except for Britain, which remains at war with France. This is in many way the height of Napoleon's career. He has taken land from Russia, Prussia, and Austria. He controls what is now France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, as well as having satellite states friendly to him that he basically controls in Western Germany, Denmark, and Poland. And even the places he doesn't control like Austria are now forced to be allied with him, so things are looking good for Napoleon. He basically controls all of Europe. And yet, this is when things begin to unravel. There's a quote I couldn't find the exact wording, but it's something to the effect of. Napoleon was master of Europe, but he was also a prisoner there. And what does that mean? Well, you may have heard of the Battle of Trafalga. If you have been to London, Trafalga Square is the central square in London, and it commemorates this battle. It was a naval battle, and in it, Lord Nelson, the British Admiral, completely destroys the French fleet, giving the British total mastery of the seas. After this Napoleon complained that he couldn't even launch a fishing boat without it being captured by the British. And because of this, they dominated international trade. Napoleon's thought, and I have to admit, it seems pretty rational as, well, if they're going to cut off trade outside of Europe and stop me from being able to launch any ships, all cut off trade for the British inside of Europe. He developed something called the Continental System, and in it, he tries to get everyone to agree not to trade with the British. European trade is to be totally cut off for them. And of course, Europe was a huge market for the British, and the intention was to bring them to their knees economically and force them to make peace. Well, the problem is, the British really are the conduit to international trade. If you're cutting off trade with Great Britain, you're basically cutting off trade for Europe with the rest of the world. And if there's even one crack, one port where the British can smuggle their goods, then the goods just start pouring into Europe from there. Napoleon is trying to get everyone into the system, but even from the very beginning, there are cracks everywhere. The first place where there are major cracks and the British are trading extensively is Spain and Portugal. So Napoleon invades Spain. He places his brother on the throne. He doesn't have a very hard time taking Spain, but keeping it as a different matter altogether. You may have heard the term guerrilla warfare. And if you've ever wondered where it came from, it doesn't come from guerrillas. It's actually Spanish. The Spanish word is guerrilla. It means little war. And the term originates from this time period from this war. Many of the Spanish are not happy about being invaded, as you can imagine. So they start this guerrilla war. There's an insurgency. They're laying ambushes, taking potshots from behind trees, intercepting messages, raiding supply lines. It's guerrilla. It's little war. Instead of big troops that are facing the French troops who under the command of Napoleon would probably crush them. They're fighting little wars. They're doing these little battles, little raids. This saps French strength considerably over the next few years. The continental system is also the reason the Russians turn on Napoleon. The nobles in Russia hate not being able to trade with the British. And they're mad about the last war, so eventually they turn and declare war on France. And rather than defend his empire against the Russians, Napoleon decides he's going to invade and teach them a lesson. And that is going to be his most fateful choice and what ultimately leads to his downfall. One of Napoleon's more famous quotes is from the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. And for him, that step was into Russia. And I'm going to breeze over Napoleon's fall relatively quickly. Maybe that exposes my pro-Napolean bias, but I think what made him great is much more interesting than what led to his downfall. When he invades Russia, he invades during the summer. And his army is enormous. Remember, his empire is bigger than it has ever been. He starts with more than a half a million men. And it's a different experience for Napoleon. He's used to moving fast and being nimble. But this army is so big, it's unwieldy. It's very limited mobility. And he marches into Russia. He wins a number of battles, but they're all taxing and they slow him down. And none of them is the large-scale major victory that he's looking for. He is finally able to win one fairly big battle at Borodino. And he marches all the way to Moscow. He figures if he can take Moscow, which is the the traditional capital of Russia, the Russians will surrender. it will be over. But when he gets to Moscow, he finds a ghost town. Everyone has evacuated the city. And by this time it's getting late in the season, and they start having to think about where they're going to winter. And as they occupy the city of Moscow, fires start to pop up around the city. The Russians left behind a few criminals, a few prisoners, to burn the city down so that it couldn't be kept and used by the French. The French are able to save part of the city, but for the most part, it's gone. Well now they have to decide what to do. And in unusual fashion, Napoleon vacillates. After a few weeks he decides, well there really aren't enough supplies in Moscow, which they're weren't, he's right, and they have to retreat. So they turn around and try to march out of Russia as winter falls. There are Russian forces who harassed them the whole way back. And an extremely brutal winter starts early that year. So they're being picked off at the sides by a Russian Kossak cavalry. It's so cold and they're so under-supplied that some men will go to sleep by the fire and just never get up in the morning. They just stay there to die beside the fire because it's better than what they might face on the road. When it's all said and done, Napoleon, who started into Russia with half a million men, comes back out with less than 40,000. The Russian winter did what no general could, it decimated Napoleon's army. Now technically everyone else, except for the British and the Russians, was at peace with France during this invasion of Russia. But seeing Napoleon's weakness, all the usual suspects declared war on him again, the Austrians and the Prussians joined the Russians in British to form the sixth coalition. And this time it's too much. Napoleon just has two few men having lost so many in Russia. He's able to scrounge together enough of an army to defeat the Allies at the Battle of Dresden, but then he suffers a defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. The Allies actually offer Napoleon peace. Under terms that you might consider fine, he would be able to keep what we now call France. It would basically keep the borders of what is now France. He would lose Belgium and other than some things he was used to having, but he gets to stay emperor and stay in power. But he's unwilling to make territorial concessions, so they continue to fight. He has only about 70,000 men, and the Allies have more than three times that number. Nevertheless, Napoleon withdraws back to France and continues to fight. He uses this small army to bounce back and forth and win battle after battle in France. His chief rival, the British general Arthur Wellesley, also known as the Duke of Wellington, said of this time period, quote, "The 1814 campaign has given me a greater idea of his genius than any other. Had he continued that system a little longer, it is my opinion, he would have saved Paris." Napoleon was always better with a small, fast, highly mobile army. And this is no exception. It's interesting that he walks into Russia with half a million men and it's a disaster. But then his back is to the wall, with only 70,000, and he's spectacular once again. Well, nevertheless, it's too much. He's winning battle after battle, but the Allies have multiple armies, and at a certain point they just march around him and lace each to Paris, at which point the French force him Napoleon to abdicate the throne. They exile him to a small island off the coast of France, called Elba. And while on Elba, he's under British supervision, and he does his usual thing. From the Roberts biography, again, quote, "He grew avenues of mulberry trees, reformed customs and exise, repaired the barracks, built a hospital, planted vineyards, paved parts of Port de Fario for the first time, irrigated land, organized regular rubbish collections, set up a court of appeal, and an inspectorate to widen roads and build bridges." After a year, he's going crazy. It's just too small of a sandbox for him. So when he sees a narrow window to escape back to France, he does so. His return to France is amazing in its own way. He saw the chance, and he jumped at it. The Allies had restored the King of France to the throne in Napoleon's absence, and people were very annoyed with the King. He hadn't been doing a great job of governing. There was no widespread conspiracy to bring Napoleon back, but certainly many people were ready and willing to see him take power again. Because there was no widespread conspiracy, when Napoleon first arrives, he's basically just a traveler and an adventurer, with no army and no backing. So the first thing he does is just heads to a military base, and through sheer force of will and personality manages to convince the soldiers that he's back and they should follow him. So he goes from military base to military base, picking up soldiers, and amassing an army as he goes. The King and Queen of France flee, and all the usual actors seeing him take power, declare war on him and France again. And Napoleon leads his army out to attack their forces, as by now you probably expect. And they meet at the notorious and famous Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon loses at Waterloo, he's crushed. And what's most surprising is that he displays none of the characteristic trademarks of Napoleonic leadership. He's lethargic, his tactics are straightforward and unoriginal, he divides his forces, rather than concentrating them the night before the battle. Something he never did, something that flies in the face of his core strategy. It's difficult to say exactly why his decision-making fails him at this point. Some people have tried to diagnose him with physical ailments. He had hemorrhoids, which made it difficult for him to stay on horseback and scout the ground. He hadn't had a solid night sleep in about six days. He may have had the flu he threw up the night before the battle. Some say he was just getting old. No one really knows. But I think the best thing to do is to take Napoleon at his own word. He said, about this time period, quote, "I sensed that fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success. And if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing." You remember, he said, "More battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood." Well, I think in my mind, Napoleon was starting to lose hope. He was starting to lose faith and confidence in himself. So he's beaten. And this time the British exile him to the island of St Helena, which has been described as further away from anywhere else in the world. And it's a pretty true description. It's in the middle of the Atlantic, between Africa and South America. There he lived out his days for about six years and eventually died of stomach cancer. And there our story ends. As we've seen, Napoleon was an inspiring leader, a brilliant strategist, an attireless reformer. But what was it that made him so special? Let's dive into what set him apart and allowed him to accomplish so much. There are a few character attributes, things inherent to his nature, that you can't necessarily replicate. The first was his capacity for hard work. Napoleon simply had boundless energy. I think that kind of capacity for work is something that you either have or you don't. And it's very rare to have energy on the level that he did, but it made him remarkable. And the second thing was he was smart as hell. He had an incredible memory and an extremely keen mind. There's a story of him meeting a veteran in late in his career. And Napoleon says, I remember you and he asks him about his two children. During a previous campaign, the soldier's house had been on the road and Napoleon had stopped there and happened to meet his children and padded them on the head and said some nice words before he left. It had been ten years. That gives you an idea of the kind of ridiculous memory that Napoleon had. So he was able to work extremely hard through sheer energy that he possessed and he was very, very intelligent. Now those things are true. But there are many people who are smart and have a large capacity for hard work and they don't accomplish anything near what he did. So what set him apart above and beyond his natural skills? Well, the first thing, many of his contemporaries use the same word to describe Napoleon. Impatient. Speed was one of the most important things to him. He wanted to do everything faster. He was obsessed with moving his troops faster. It even extended to his personal life. Listen to how the guy ate dinner. He said, quote, if you want to dine well, dine with Compassaris. If you want to dine badly, dine with Lebron. If you want to dine quickly, dine with me. Camp Compassaris and Lebron were two of his top advisors and assistants. And he meant it. He generally ate dinner in less than ten minutes. If Napoleon had a life mantra, it was probably faster. And it's not a bad one to abide by. Look at what his impatience did for him. It allowed him to surprise his enemies and keep them off balance and win almost every battle he fought. And not only was Napoleon good at moving fast, he was obsessed with it. He was constantly looking for ways to move his army faster, from night marches, to living off the land, to crossing the Alps. I see this as a pattern in life. From sports to business to geopolitics, it isn't the rich or the strong who succeed most, but those who can move quickly and flexibly. Think of the Facebook motto, move fast and break things. That almost sounds like it could be Napoleon's motto. I think of the Golden State Warriors who have had one of the most successful runs in NBA history, in part, by having a fast team that is flexible, they can switch almost every position on defense. Napoleon's impatience made him move faster, and this was ultimately one of his greatest sources of success. This leads to one of his strategies that I think is not understood, but is one of the most important. If you can master this, you can almost guarantee for yourself success. Napoleon was a master of gaining and maintaining the initiative. Now what does this mean? Well, let me start to explain this with two quotes from Napoleon himself, the first is something he said of his warfare strategy. Quote, "I engage, then I figure out what to do." It seems kind of backwards, doesn't it? Why would you start a battle without a plan? This next quote helps to explain it a little," he said, quote, "It is an approved maximum in war, never to do what the enemy wishes you to do, for the reason alone because he wishes it. A field of battle, therefore, which he has previously studied and reconnoitered, should be avoided." During Napoleon's lifetime, action always occurred on his terms. He could pull this off, in part, because he moved so quickly. Sometimes his plans were not fully formed, and he didn't appear completely ready, but he never waited for the enemy. Why? Well, for one thing, waiting would allow his enemies to make plans. It's better to have a good, but imperfect plan, and your opponent to have no plan, than for your best plans to go against each other. This was the story of many of Napoleon's battles, his hurried plans against their total confusion. For another, having the initiative preserves momentum, remember, he was a master of morale, he knew how to inspire his men. And complacency and lethargy breeds more of the same. Seasbreeds activity, seizing the initiative, gives you and the people you lead, an advantage in terms of motivation. So that was the second great advantage that Napoleon possessed, gaining and maintaining the initiative. The third thing is focus. We've already talked about his cupboard-like mind. He could close the drawer on one subject and open it on another. He could focus intensely. He had the ability to shut other considerations out of his mind and focus completely on one thing at a time. There's a true story of when Warren Buffett and Bill Gates met, and their host asked them to write down the most important factor in their success. So they both wrote down one word, and when they showed their papers, they had written the same thing. Focus. This is not one of those urban legends. This is actually a true story about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Well, Napoleon also had an incredible ability to focus. He was able to accomplish so much in part because he could shift his focus on a dime. If you want to be more like Napoleon in this area, you might try meditation or read stoic philosophy. Both of those are excellent at teaching you the ability to control your own focus. Fourth. He used every conceivable advantage. There was no such thing as enough for Napoleon in terms of advantage. We talked early about how he would constantly complain for more shoes, more gunpowder, more supplies, more men, more and more. Well he did that his entire career, and those little advantages added up. It's worth asking, wasn't that annoying for everyone else? And you know what? If you read the sources, it was. But people forget about how annoying you were once you're successful. And I've seen this a lot in my career. You have one manager who gets along great with everyone, doesn't rock the boat, and then when all her initiatives fail, she suffers for it. But everyone still likes her. But then you have the annoying manager who is always asking for more resources and complaining she's not getting enough more money, asking people to do stuff for her. And she's annoying. And then her project is a success. And no one cares how annoying she was. She's a rock star. Napoleon was the second type of manager. Be the annoying person who wins in the end because you got the resources you needed. Don't play fair, stack the deck in your favor. 6. He understood the importance of motivation. Some people look down on motivation as a leadership tactic. They think it's all about smart leadership and smart strategy. Those things matter, but motivation is still huge. It's still true that more battles are lost by loss of hope than loss of blood. For business, you could change that to more companies or more startups are lost by loss of hope than loss of money. Napoleon is an extremely important part of leadership. Think of Napoleon whipping up his men across the bridge at Lodi. There are times when nothing else will do. So learn how to motivate. 7. Napoleon understood minutiae. Napoleon knew about his soldiers' buttons, shoes, and rations. He knew how his artillery was being trained and what size of shot they were using even when he was emperor of half of Europe. When you are leading big initiatives, projects, or organizations, never forget to investigate and understand what is happening at the ground level. 8. And I'll finish on this. He had supreme confidence in himself. And why not? Maybe you're not as smart as Napoleon. I mean, I certainly am not. Maybe you think that the level of self-confidence would be misplaced if put in yourself. But I'll tell you what, you're definitely not going to succeed without believing in yourself. If you're going to take over the world, you need self-confidence. No one will follow you if you don't believe in yourself. So you might as well. One last thing, a quick word on why he lost. Because let's not forget that Napoleon did die out of power on a small island in the middle of nowhere. So what happened? Well, I think the first thing is he had blind spots. Remember, he basically never lost battles. And yet he lost the war of the sixth coalition. Which led to his downfall. How? He was a combination of the Russian winter and too many enemies at the same time. He succeeded in war, but failed in diplomacy. Don't let your advantages, the things you're good at, blind you to your areas of weakness. Second, Napoleon risked too much, too often. I can think of about ten times when his entire career was on the line. And eight of those times, it paid off for him. He won. But when you're risking that much, it only takes once to ruin you. Essentially, once you've found success, you have to find a way to limit your downside. And Napoleon really never did figure that out. This is a tricky one because his willingness to take risks is one of the reasons that he came to power in the first place. And if you're going to come to power, if you're going to find success, it's necessary to take risks. But at some point, you have to figure out how to cap your downside so that you won't face complete ruin if something doesn't pan out for you. Third, I can't remember the exact quote, but Napoleon said something along the lines of, "Every person has their weaknesses. Myself, I cannot bear insults." Napoleon could not stand to lose. He cheated at cards and chess. Michael Jordan, it's interesting though, Michael Jordan also cheated at cards. So maybe that's an essential element of greatness. You have to be willing to cheat at cards. He had to, but Napoleon had to win at everything. He could have had peace after being defeated in Russia, but he couldn't stand to lose even a little bit of territory and he continued fighting. He should have swallowed his pride and all of us need to learn to do the same from time to time. Well, we've just about reached the end. You're probably as tired of hearing my voice as I am of hearing my own voice right now. So I'll end here, but just as some things up, some things you can't copy. So some things you can, you can move faster, you can seize and maintain the initiative. You can focus and work on being able to control your focus. You can work on your motivational skills, have confidence in yourself, and remember to swallow your pride from time to time. Not everyone can be Napoleon Bonaparte, but everyone can learn from his life. Thank you for listening. For links, show notes and more, please visit httpotw.com. Tell me on Twitter and feel free to give me a feedback @httotw. If you're having trouble remembering that, remember it's the acronym for How to Take Over the World, HTTOTW. Thanks very much for listening, and until next time, good luck taking you over the world! 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