While researching my 2014 biography, Napoleon The Great, I worked through a vast collection of contemporary accounts and other historical sources.
However, I did not yet have access to the complete 15-volume collection of more than 40,000 letters written by Napoleon. Compiled by France’s Fondation Napoleon, the extraordinary archive was not finished until 2018.
I have now been able to study it, and the letters revealed a side of the emperor that I had not fully appreciated. Napoleon may have been an inspirational leader of ordinary soldiers, but with his marshals—the 26 highest-ranking commanders in his inner circle—he was an obsessive controller. In modern terms, he was the boss from hell.
His micromanagement extended to the smallest and most trivial details. He worried about when particular soldiers should receive new eagle buttons for their uniforms, whether an adjutant was entitled to wear the ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur and even whether the windows of a military hospital in Germany needed to be opened.
Ultimately, I believe this relentless interference contributed to Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. By then, many of his marshals—brilliant and experienced soldiers in their own right—were increasingly unwilling to work with him.
The Duke of Wellington captured Napoleon’s all-consuming attention to detail when he wrote of his adversary: ‘Nothing was too great or too small for his proboscis.’
So, if you believe your own employer is difficult, spare a thought for the men who had to serve under the power-obsessed Corsican.
Many of Napoleon’s marshals, whom I examine in my new book, were already household names in France by the time they received their appointments.
Napoleon paid the ultimate price for defeat at Waterloo and was exiled to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic
Micromanagement ultimately helped cost Napoleon the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, argues historian Andrew Roberts
Among them was Michel Ney, who later commanded the rearguard during the infamous French retreat from Moscow.
Of the 600,000 French troops who marched bravely into Russia, only 100,000 made it back. Frozen, sick and emaciated, they struggled west through blizzards while fighting off Cossack attacks. Ney led from the front, cutting and shooting his way through Russian forces as he fought to bring the survivors home.
Nicolas Oudinot was no less courageous. Over the course of his career, he was wounded 32 times by musket balls, lance points, grapeshot, bayonets and sabres.
Then there was Louis-Alexandre Berthier, perhaps the greatest chief of staff in military history. He could assemble enormous armies on the battlefield at extraordinary speed—and tolerate almost any degree of belittlement and condescension from his superior.
Between March 1796 and December 1797 alone, Napoleon sent Berthier 457 letters. That was more correspondence than he exchanged with his wife, Josephine, prompting the troops to nickname Berthier ‘the Emperor’s Wife’.
Nothing was considered too insignificant for Napoleon’s attention. In one typically pedantic order, he instructed Berthier to make sure that ‘the staircase of one of the barracks on the main square of [the Corsican capital of] Ajaccio be adapted’.
When Berthier permitted his younger brother to take leave in France for the birth of his child, Napoleon reacted furiously. ‘I do not want to see him and I will not receive him,’ he declared of his marshal. ‘I regard a general who leaves his troops as dishonoured… My wife could have died in Munich or Strasbourg, that would not have disturbed for a quarter of an hour the execution of my plans.’
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Is it ever right for a leader to crush morale and trust in pursuit of total control?
In his new book, Napoleon And His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal, Roberts examines how Napoleon’s team of rivals helped him rise to power—and later orchestrated his downfall
Another of the emperor’s management techniques was the doctrine of divide and rule. ‘You see,’ Napoleon told Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1807, ‘I am careful to keep my generals at variance among themselves, in order that each may reveal to me the faults of the other.
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‘I keep around me a continual jealousy… One day, one thinks himself the favourite, the next day another – so that no one is ever certain of my favour.’
This approach might have been intended to create a team of rivals but instead it created a nest of vipers.
The result was that whenever the emperor was not personally present during a campaign, the marshals fell out with each other, often spectacularly.
There were at least four occasions when marshals drew swords during arguments or challenged each other to duels.
Their lust for glory encouraged them to start battles earlier than agreed, and during the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain between 1807 and 1814, they point-blank refused to co-operate. Given the agonies their boss put them through, you have to ask why they put up with it all.
The answer is simple: wealth, fame and status. The marshals were immensely glamorous figures in French society, their exploits recorded in bulletins and proclamations that spread their fame nationwide.
They wore impossibly grand uniforms, with gold braid, red silk sashes, huge brocaded collars that came up to their ears and heavily plumed bicorn hats. Several had love lives that rivalled the Rolling Stones on tour in the 1960s.
Joaquin Phoenix played the French emperor in the 2023 film Napoleon
Yet despite Napoleon loading his marshals with grand titles – six became dukes – and vast country estates and beautiful Parisian townhouses, as well as millions of francs in hard cash, only two of the 26 rode with him onto the battlefield of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.
Four had died by then – from cannonballs, drowning and a fall from a high window – but what of the other 20?
Yes, many would have been put off by the fact that Napoleon had by then spent ten months in exile on the small Mediterranean island of Elba after being defeated by a coalition of European forces.
But within weeks of returning to mainland France, he had once again raised a vast army. So why were so few marshals ready to rally to his flag?
I came to the conclusion that they had simply had enough of a man who was undoubtedly a genius but was also an exhausting individual for whom to work.
The phrases ‘express my dissatisfaction’, ‘convey my disappointment’ and ‘please convey my extreme displeasure’ pepper Napoleon’s correspondence with Berthier, for example, who received more than 5,000 letters in all.
There was something almost pathological about the way that Napoleon expected these men to accept criticism without resentment.
He said of one marshal: ‘When he does something well, I will not say anything; when he does something that displeases me, I will tell him. That is my way of doing things.’
This might have been true – but it was a terrible leadership technique. And there is a lesson there for anyone managing people, from employing a builder to running a business.
In the end, of course, Napoleon paid the ultimate price for his terrible management style: defeat at Waterloo and exile by the British to St Helena, the grim South Atlantic island.
If only he had mastered the art of managing people better – who knows, he might have conquered the entire continent of Europe and our history might have been very different.
Napoleon And His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal by Andrew Roberts, published by Allen Lane, is out on October 8