Everything You Know About Napoleon Is Wrong – Historian Andrew Roberts

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Andrew Roberts (1:06)

He was very keen for it to return to its former glory.

Konstantin Kisin (1:10)

Make France great again.

Andrew Roberts (1:11)

Make France great again, exactly that. Napoleon then imposes a piece in which he essentially splits up Europe between Russia and France.

Konstantin Kisin (1:23)

How does it begin to unravel from there?

Andrew Roberts (1:25)

When the Russians in 1811 decided that they were going to resume trade with Britain, he invaded Russia to try and force them back into the continental system. Of the 615,000 that go into Russia, only 93,000 come back.

Konstantin Kisin (1:41)

So he gets exiled to Elba.

Andrew Roberts (1:43)

He was there 10 months and he escaped. He lands with only 300 men. If you add the 150,000 Austrians and the 350 Russians, you've got half a million men who are marching. So even if Napoleon had one more clue, he would have found it impossible to end it in Paris.

Konstantin Kisin (2:03)

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Konstantin Kisin (2:28)

Lord Andrew Roberts, welcome back to TRIGGERnometry.

Andrew Roberts (2:30)

Thank you so much, Konstantin. It's great to be back.

Konstantin Kisin (2:33)

What a pleasure it is for Francis and I to have you back. I was saying before we started our first interview, which was about Winston Churchill. To me, it's a definitive interview about The Great Man.

Still people watching it in the tens of thousands. I know it had a huge impact on book sales for you, for Walking with Destiny. It's a pleasure to have you back to talk about another great man, but sort of slightly inadvertent commerce, because obviously, it was a bit of an enemy of this country, a bit. Napoleon and his Marshals, which your latest book is about. So let's get straight into it.

Andrew Roberts (3:06)

Let's do that.

Konstantin Kisin (3:07)

Napoleon, who was he? Where did he come from? His early life, perhaps. Let's start with that.

Andrew Roberts (3:13)

He was born in Corsica in 1769 He was an aristocrat, but really, Corsica didn't have an aristocracy. So they didn't have any money, but they had a grand background and they had a sense of themselves as aristocrats. His father was a lawyer. He spent a lot of time in his father's extensive library and took on the ideas of the Enlightenment. He read Voltaire and Diderot and so on.

And he joined the army quite early because they didn't have enough money to send him to the grand schools. But if you were an aristocrat, you could get free education at military academies. And so he went to two military academies and winded up being an artillery officer in 1794

Konstantin Kisin (4:01)

And tell us about France in this period of time. This is before the French Revolution, which I imagine therefore necessarily means there's quite a turbulent time.

There are lots of things going on, various social movements going on. What is the environment in which he's sort of culturing and growing into a man?

Andrew Roberts (4:21)

He was...

Actually, he very much agrees with that concept. He said that if you show somebody what they were like at 20, what the world was going on there and happening in the world when you're 20, you can understand the whole of the rest of the man's life. And there's a lot to that, I think. And when he was 20, of course, as you mentioned, the French Revolution broke out. And so he was still a cadet at that stage, an army cadet, but he was very ambitious. He was extremely well-read because of that time he spent in the library. He was very hardworking. And he suddenly saw an opportunity for himself and for all the other army officers who weren't going to be guillotines, essentially, of which hundreds were, indeed thousands. And so there was going to be an opportunity for driven young men like him to get into the very top echelons of the army early, as it were. And he took huge advantage of that.