Titans of History
Mozart’s last composition, the Requiem that became his own, is surrounded by mystery. Legend has it that Salieri, a jealous fellow composer, poisoned Mozart as he worked frantically on this composition, which had been anonymously commissioned by letter. But an acute attack of rheumatic fever (and a noble patron intent on passing off Mozart’s compositions as his own) is probably nearer the truth. Even so, Mozart’s modest burial—although not quite the pauper’s of repute—sealed the myth of the neglected genius.
ROBESPIERRE
1758–94
That man will go far, he believes everything he says.
Comte de Mirabeau on Robespierre at the outset of the Revolution
Maxmilien Robespierre was the prototype for the modern European dictator: his sanctimonious vision of republican virtue and terror, and the brutal slaughter he unleashed in its name, were studied reverently by the Russian Bolsheviks and helped inspire the totalitarian mass killings of the 20th century. Known as the Sea-green Incorruptible, his name has become a byword for the fatal purity and degenerate corruption of the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution of 1789 and climaxed with the execution of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793. The Terror illustrated not only the corrupt dangers of utopian monopolies of “virtue,” but how ultimately such witch hunts consume their own children.
Born in the Artois region of northern France, Robespierre’s family was financially secure, but his childhood was not a happy one. His father was a drunk and his mother died when he was just six. Nonetheless, the young Maximilien won a place to study law at the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris and soon made his name as a populist, defending the poor against the rich.
Like many of the other young professionals who were to drive the French Revolution—such as the fanatical lawyer Louis de Saint-Just (later nicknamed the angel of death) or the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat—Robespierre eagerly absorbed the theories of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose notion of a “social contract” held that a government had to be based on the will of the people to be truly legitimate.
Although fussy about his appearance, often wearing the powdered wigs associated with the profligate aristocrats of ancien régime France, Robespierre—with his weak voice, small stature and pallid complexion—did not cut an imposing figure. But as the comte de Mirabeau said of him at the outset of the Revolution: “That man will go far; he believes everything he says.”
In the wake of the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, the event that triggered the Revolution, Robespierre aligned himself politically with the far left. As the representative for Artois in the Constituent Assembly, set up in July 1789 to decide on a new constitution, he became closely involved with the radical faction called the Jacobins, rivals of the more moderate Girondins. His ideas gained a sympathetic hearing among the Parisian bourgeoisie, and he rose swiftly, in 1791 becoming public accuser (giving him the power of life and death over all citizens, without recourse to trial or appeal) and then first deputy for Paris a year later.
An implacable paranoia about potential enemies of the Revolution haunted him and in December 1792, when Louis XVI was brought to trial, Robespierre—a fierce critic of the king—insisted that “Louis must die, so that the country may live.”
Above all, it was as a leading member of the Committee of Public Safety that Robespierre forged his bloody reputation. Set up by the National Convention in April 1793, this was a revolutionary tribunal invested with unlimited dictatorial powers. Robespierre was elected a member in July 1793 and swiftly instigated the so-called Terror. Tens of thousands of “traitors”—ostensibly those who had expressed sympathy with the monarchy or who thought the Jacobins had gone too far in their relentless pursuit of “enemies of the people”—were rounded up without trial and lost their heads on the guillotine. In reality, anyone Robespierre counted an enemy was liquidated, the apparatus of the state ruthlessly employed to silence them. Robespierre himself personally ensured that his rivals Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins were executed in April 1794.
Robespierre and his allies turned their attention to growing opposition to the Revolution in Lyon, Marseilles and the rural Vendée in western France. After more than 100,000 men, women and children had been systematically murdered on Robespierre’s orders the revolutionary general François Joseph Westermann wrote in a letter to the Committee: “There is no more Vendée. I crushed the children under the feet of the horses, massacred the women … exterminated. The roads are sown with corpses.” For Robespierre, revolutionary virtue and the Terror went hand in hand. As he put it in February 1794: “If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.”
Increasingly alienated by his tyranny, the National Convention turned decisively against him when he accused them of a conspiracy to oust him. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he retreated to his power base at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. As troops entered the building to seize him, Robespierre, surrounded by his henchmen Georges Couthon, Louis de Saint-Just, Philippe Le Bas, and François Hanriot, tried to commit suicide but instead shot himself in the mouth, leaving his jaw hanging off. Bleeding heavily, and howling in agony, he was quickly taken away and finished off at the guillotine, suffering the fate of so many of his opponents before him.
Some see Robespierre as one of the founding fathers of social democracy, his revolutionary excesses occasioned by his championing the cause of the people. Many more though view him as a hypocritical despot whose terror was the precursor of the totalitarian butchery of Hitler and Stalin in modern times.
NELSON
1758–1805
Before this time tomorrow, I shall have gained a peerage, or Westminster Abbey.
Horatio Nelson, on the eve of the Battle of the Nile (1798)
Horatio Nelson was one of the most daring naval commanders in history, who, through a series of stunning victories, assured British supremacy at sea during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. He was adored in his own day, despite a complicated and very public love life, and has been celebrated ever since as the man who, by defeating the French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar in 1805, saved Britain from invasion. His death at the moment of victory wins him a special place in the pantheon of British military heroes.
When Nelson was thirteen, his uncle, a naval captain, took him to sea aboard the Raisonnable. For the next eight years Nelson learned the trade of a naval officer in the West Indies and on an expedition to the Arctic. He first saw action in the American War of Independence, and by the age of twenty-one he was captain of the frigate Hinchinbrooke. He was brave and often impatient; this endeared him to some but could make him unpopular.
When war broke out with Revolutionary France in 1793 Nelson was sent to the Mediterranean. He lost his right eye during the siege of Calvi in 1794, having been hit in the face by stones thrown up by enemy shot. In March 1795, as captain of the sixty-four-gun Agamemnon, he took a leading role in taking two French ships.
The arrival of Sir John Jervis as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean fleet was very useful to Nelson, for Jervis gave him free rein to exploit his natural abilities as a leader. During the Battle of Cape St. Vincent, Nelson was at the head of the boarding party that took the Spanish ship San Nicolas and then the larger San Josef. It was unprecedented for an officer of Nelson’s rank to throw himself into the heat of battle in such a manner, and he lapped up the public admiration that followed his success, along with the knighthood and promotion to rear admiral.
Despite Nelson’s personal fame, morale amongst the ordinary seamen of the Royal Navy was low, and 1797 saw mutinies in British waters. Nelson was given command of the Theseus and once again led raiding parties from the front, dragging his crew’s spirits up by sheer force of character—something that became known as the Nelson Touch. While attempting to storm the town of Santa C
ruz, Tenerife, Nelson was seriously wounded, and his right arm had to be amputated. In 1798 he won a stunning victory over the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile. Although massively outgunned, the British fleet blew up the massive 120-gun L’Orient and took or sunk ten more ships of the line and two frigates. “Victory is not enough to describe such a scene,” wrote Nelson, soon to be Baron Nelson of the Nile. All of Europe was watching, and the anti-French coalition was boosted immensely by the performance of the Royal Navy.
Between 1798 and 1800 Nelson spent much of his time in Sicily in the arms of Emma, Lady Hamilton, a liaison that caused great scandal, as the young Emma Hamilton was married to the elderly British envoy to Naples. Lady Hamilton bore Nelson a child in 1801, on the same day that Nelson learned he was to be posted as second-in-command of the British fleet off the coast of Denmark. In April the British demolished the Danish fleet at Copenhagen. During the battle, when his commander, Vice Admiral Parker, raised a flagged signal for a withdrawal, Nelson famously ignored the order by placing his telescope to his blind eye.
Nelson was made a viscount, and in 1803 he was sent back to the Mediterranean as commander-in-chief of the fleet there. Much of 1804 was spent chasing the French fleet back and forth across the Atlantic—a pursuit that captivated the British public. On his return to London, he was mobbed in the street wherever he went.
In 1805 Nelson achieved his apotheosis. On October 21 he engaged the combined French and Spanish fleets, under his archenemy Admiral Villeneuve, off Cape Trafalgar. He took twenty-seven ships to engage thirty-three enemy vessels, signaling by flag to his own men “England expects that every man will do his duty.” Five hours of fighting began at noon, and, thanks to Nelson’s bold and ingenious tactics, by 5 p.m. the British were comprehensively victorious. But early in the battle Nelson had been hit by a musket shot, which punctured his lung and lodged in his spine. He died at 4.30 p.m., allegedly whispering to a comrade officer, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
WELLINGTON
1769–1852
Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
Duke of Wellington, in a dispatch from Waterloo (June 1815)
Arthur Wellesley, duke of Wellington, was one of the ablest generals of his age, and—with Oliver Cromwell, Admiral Nelson and the duke of Marlborough—stands among the greatest British military leaders of all time. His victory over Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, which he described as “a damned nice thing—the closest run thing you ever saw,” was a clash of the two most brilliant European generals of their day.
Wellesley, who was born in Dublin to an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, the earl of Mornington, was not an exceptional young man, intellectually or physically. He gave up his one striking talent, for playing the violin, in 1793, burning his instrument in a fit of melodrama. He entered the army and relied on the patronage of his more successful eldest brother to rise through the officer ranks to the position of lieutenant colonel and head of his regiment.
Wellesley went to India in 1797, studying books on war and military tactics during the long voyage. The effort paid off. In 1802 he confronted a force of 50,000 French-led Maratha soldiers at Assaye. Through an unconventional choice of field positions and brave leadership in a bloody battle, Wellesley won against imposing odds. He later called it the finest thing he had ever done in the fighting line.
Returning home in 1805, Wellesley was knighted, married the short-sighted, timid Kitty Pakenham (with whom he was never happy) and was sent for brief stints of duty in Denmark and Ireland, where he distinguished himself further. But it was his departure to fight the French on the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 that almost ended his career: frustrated by shared commands with inept generals, he rashly signed a treaty with the French without reading its foolish terms. He was hauled before an inquiry and criticized—but survived to advise the secretary of war, Viscount Castlereagh, on how he would wage cheap but effective war. Castlereagh gave him the job that marked the start of Wellesley’s ascent to greatness.
Here, the British army had enough men to conduct defensive campaigns, and even to besiege large towns and castles, but insufficient strength to take advantage of these successes. He defeated the French at Talavera (for which he received a peerage, becoming Viscount Wellington), and managed to defend Lisbon from French attack by secretly building a network of fortifications. Despite a succession of British victories, at Vimeiro, Busaco, Almeida and elsewhere, Viscount Wellington was often frustrated in his ambitions to press on from Portugal into Spain.
By 1812 things had improved. Wellington fought his way to Madrid and persuaded the Spanish government to appoint him generalissimo of its own armies. By 1814 the French had been pushed back to their own border and he invaded Napoleon’s own country. Wellington made sure his armies were better organized and better supplied than the French. He imposed superior discipline on his troops, and he did his best to respect the religion and property of the Spanish people, valuable lessons learned in India. He described his troops as “the scum of the earth.” He had defeated Marshal Massena, perhaps the finest French general, but had never faced Napoleon himself and hoped he would never have to do so.
By now Wellington was the most famous man in England. He had won a dukedom, the ambassadorship to France, and the role as British representative at the Congress of Vienna. He was the recipient of honors from governments of Europe. But in 1815 he was to face the ultimate test of his military mettle.
Napoleon, who had abdicated and then been exiled to Elba in 1814, had escaped and begun to rally troops around him. Wellington was the only man in Europe considered worthy enough to command the allied forces against the emperor as he plotted to attack the Low Countries. Wellington was unimpressed by his own combined forces, calling them “an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped.” He also had little knowledge of Napoleon’s plans for the battlefield and was taken aback when French troops began to move on June 15, 1815. “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” he exclaimed; but when the two armies met on June 18, Wellington had arranged his forces into a defensive formation that was to prove extremely resilient against the waves of bludgeoning French attacks that Napoleon launched.
Throughout the long, hard battle, Wellington remained calm, though his Prussian reinforcements, under Marshal Blücher, arrived late and virtually every man of his personal staff was killed or wounded. “I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near being beat,” he wrote afterward. But this victory, his last, was resounding, and Wellington was lauded right across the continent.
As a commander, Wellington was distinguished by his acute intelligence, sangfroid, planning and flexibility but also by his loathing for the suffering of battle. As a man, he was sociable, enjoying close friendships with female friends and a long line of affairs with high-born ladies and low-born courtesans, including a notorious French actress whom he shared with Napoleon himself. When one such courtesan threatened him with exposure, he replied: “Publish and be damned.”
After Waterloo, Wellington’s prestige gave him great influence on government. By the 1820s he had been drawn into partisan politics, not his natural territory, although he was at heart a Tory and a reactionary. He served, with difficulty, as prime minister (1828–30), but he secured an agreement on Catholic emancipation—political representation for Catholics, especially important for Ireland. However, his opposition to the clamor for parliamentary reform led him to resign the premiership. He was briefly prime minister again in 1834, holding every secretaryship in the government. In 1842 he resumed his position as commander-in-chief of the British army, a post he held until his death.
A million and a half people turned out to see his funeral cortège make its way to St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1852. “The last great Englishman is low,” wrote the poet laureate Alfred Tennyson.
NAPOLEON I
1769–1821
Napoleon was a man! His life was the stride of a demi-god.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Conver
sations with Eckermann (1828)
Napoleon Bonaparte bestrode his era like a colossus. No one man had aspired to create an empire of such a magnitude since the days of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne. Napoleon’s ambition stretched from Russia and Egypt in the east to Portugal and Britain in the west, and even though he did not succeed to quite this extent, his brilliant generalship brought Spain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Italy and much of Germany under French domination—albeit at the cost of two decades of war and some 6 million dead. Although his enemies regarded him as a tyrant—and indeed much about his rule was oppressive—Napoleon introduced to mainland Europe many of the liberal and rational values of the Enlightenment, such as the metric system of weights and measures, religious toleration, the idea of national self-determination, and the Napoleonic Code of civil law. He was the quintessential autocrat but he was tolerant of all beliefs and ideas, provided he enjoyed political control. He did not—with a few exceptions—abuse his power. He lacked malice and he was certainly no mass-murdering sadistic dictator in the mode of the 20th century. Yet millions died for the sake of his personal ambition in the wars that he promoted.
After an unruly childhood, a youthful military education, and service in his native Corsica during the French Revolution, Napoleon rose to prominence as an artillery expert in the defense of the town of Toulon against the British in 1793. Two years later he was in Paris, taking command of the artillery against a counter-revolutionary uprising. He boasted that he cleared the streets with “the whiff of grapeshot.”