You're Dead to Me - Young Napoleon

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Never mind the famous battles, who was the real Napoleon? Where did he come from? What events conspired to turn him from a young Corsican officer to one of history’s greatest figures? How intense was his relationship with his wife Josephine? What part of his body was recreated in plaster, and how much was somebody willing to pay for it? And just how did one man manufacture his own hype way before the days of social media? Greg Jenner is joined by comedian Dan Schreiber and historian Dr Laura O’Brien. It’s history for people who don’t like history! Produced by Dan Morelle Script and research by Emma NagouseA Muddy Knees Media production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a history podcast for people who don't like history. Or at least people who forgot to learn any at school. My name's Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. Do you fancy some funny with your facts? Then you have come to the right place. Every episode, I am joined by an expert historian who is book smart and a comedian who is joke smart. And today we are donning our Bicorner hats, having a paddle

across the English Channel and spending some quality time with young Napoleon Bonaparte, looking at how he went from random Corsican teenager to top dog in Republican France. In History Corner, she's a lecturer in modern European history at Northumbria University. She's an expert on Napoleon's reputation and political cartoons. It is Dr. Laura O'Brien. Hi, Laura. How are you? And in Comedy Corner, he is a renaissance man. He's a stand-up comedian, a writer, a radio producer, former QI elf, no pressure, and co-host of the international mega smash hit podcast, No Such Thing As A Fish.

It is Dan Schreiber. Hey. Dan, thank you for joining us. You've just been on a ludicrous European tour with the podcast. Did you feel that Napoleon? Well, I fortunately for this format know nothing about him. So I might have, but I didn't know it. Dan, you basically don't know anything about Napoleon?

I've got the basics. I know, yeah, Waterloo. I know a few details about his life, Josephine, all that sort of stuff. But his early life, I know absolutely nothing about. Well, that's today's episode. We are looking at the young Napoleon, basically him from small child up to about the age of 30 or so when he becomes a very

senior politician in France, but before he's the emperor. So that'll be another episode another day. So what do you know? We begin as ever with the so what do you know? This is the segment where I have a little guess on what you at home might think you know about Napoleon. And because we're looking at his youth, it's maybe not so much. So in pop culture, we think of Napoleon as a short man with a short temper. Depending on who you ask, he's either a hero or a tyrant. Either way, he's one of the most famous people in history and certainly one of the most famous military commanders, a battlefield genius.

Famous, of course, for losing at Trafalgar, losing at Waterloo, losing in Russia. Actually, I'm being a bit unfair, aren't I? Because he did win like 50 battles. His skill at war meant that he went from being the little corporal to emperor of France in 1804. Oh, and yes, as Dan has mentioned, he had a wife called Josephine. Although, was she called Josephine?

These are the things we might know about Napoleon. But is it true? Dr. Laura, as we've mentioned, Napoleon is a Corsican, which is sort of... Well, actually, what is Corsica? At the point that he's born, is it Italian? Is it French? Is it independent? It's kind of a mix of everything.

I mean, I think Corsica is an island off the coast of France in the middle of the Mediterranean. It is technically, under the time of Napoleon's birth, technically under the control of the Republic of the Mediterranean. It is technically under the time of Napoleon's birth, technically under the control of the Republic of Genoa, or they call it the Republic of St. George, which is quite a formal name. But it is politically a very unstable place. When Napoleon is born, his father has just come out of supporting

an attempted uprising. Right. Led by a guy called Pasquale Paoli. The Paulis are this dynasty of rebel leaders. But Carlo rapidly attaches himself to the French who have taken over Corsica in 1768. OK, so he grows up Corsican, but there is a sort of French influence there.

And his father is Carlo. His mother is Maria? Maria Letizia, we usually call her Letizia. OK. And they're not called Bonaparte at this point, they're Bonaparte. Now, that's a terrible accent. They're Italian. They're essentially Italian.

Bonaparte. Napoleone Bonaparte. His uncle is Napoleone. Napoleone Bonaparte. Napoleone Bonaparte. It sounds like an ice cream manufacturer. It does. Oh, this is awful.

I'm just going to sound like Super Mario. So, anyway, there's Giuseppe, there's Napoleone, and there's Maria Letizia. Letizia, who is a formidable woman, supposedly the most beautiful woman on Corsica, has Napoleon when she's 19. Carlo, they get married, I think, when they're set. She's about 16, I think.

Carlo is immediately packed off to Rome to study. I'm using inverted commas here, study. He studies having a good time. And then he comes back to Corsica. But he does make it as a lawyer. Napoleon loves his mother. He remembers her very, very fondly. She was a disciplinarian and beat him up

as a kid. I've got this horrible story that would send parenting experts into a spin where he acted up at a mass in Ayakio as a child. he would have been about seven or eight and he thought he got away with it and she hadn't noticed and the next day she said to him oh napoleone you know your uncle wants to take you out for the day you better go change so he skips

off to his little room and he's taking off his little pantaloons i don't know um and at that point as soon as she sees the trousers drop she walks in and starts slapping him on the earth to punish him. She had let it sit and then she came in. Oh, brutal. Yeah. Is it a pick in your moment, though? Yeah. I mean, why strike when you have to do so much sort of admin to get to the bum for the actual slap? I'm not advocating it. I'm just saying if I was going to slap a child's bum,

my own son. Let him prepare himself. Let him take the trousers down. But he still gets the shock. Exactly. It's horrible. It's a sort of, you know, it's good practice, I guess, for Napoleon's future invasions to sort of strike

when it's least expected. Well, they do say that his personality is very much Letizia's personality. I think he resents Carlo because they sent him to school in France as a child. He feels Carlo is a bit of a bootlicker. He's very embarrassed when Carlo comes to see him in school in about 1782. And Carlo is sort of kowtowing to all the priests who ran the school.

And Napoleon's just like, you know, get off this. But I think they did share some interest because when Napoleon's in school in France, he becomes intensely Corsican and gets obsessed with Corsican identity and Corsica will be free. And asked his dad to send him books

about Corsica, including James Boswell's History of Corsica, which had been translated and was really popular. So they share some traits, but I think he always felt Curlow was a bit feckless

and had been unfair to Letizia and so on. How far do they make it into his story? Do they make it to the end of this episode? Oh yeah, Letizia outlives him. Does she? Yeah, 1836. Carlo dies in 1785 of we think stomach cancer, which we think

then killed Napoleon as well. He's gone to school in France, and this is military school, isn't it? He's not doing colouring in. He's presumably learning, you know, war. How to be a soldier man. He's sent to a military academy at Brienne, which is not a cuddly environment. The French monarchy have this idea

that they're terrible at war. So we need to toughen up our boys and we need to not just have the idiots of the upper crust of the aristocracy coming through. So we need to toughen up our boys and we need to not just have the idiots of the upper crust of the aristocracy coming through. So we need to be able to bring through the lower end of the aristocracy as well. And this is what the Bonapartes are. So he goes to this tough school, disciplined,

but they didn't use corporal punishment. But they're learning about the art of war. They're learning how to be men. But they're also learning about the heroes of the past. They're studying the great strategies of Alexander but they're also learning about the heroes of the past. They're studying the great strategies of Alexander the Great and Hannibal and Julius Caesar. And this is the environment that Napoleon lives in at the age of nine. Is he a nice guy, age nine? Do we know? He's a bit of a lonely boy.

Is he? So he's a bit sad. It's a bit sad. I mean, he probably did have, you know, a couple of little pals. But I think, you know, he's a little boy that's been sent off to school in a country where he doesn't really speak the language. He's what they call an élève du roi, which is like a scholarship boy. There's about 50 of them at the academy. But he kind of gets a bit bullied because people think Corsica is this crazy place where everyone's a bandit and a bit backwards.

He feels a bit isolated. People took the mick out of his accent. And he probably was lonely. Can you sympathise, Dan? Because you were born in Hong Kong. Yeah, yeah. And then moved to Australia. Yeah. And then you came to Britain, where we all mock your accent. Yeah. Well, no one where I come from thinks I'm from there or believes that I'm from there. So if I say I'm Australian, Australians say you're not. And if I say I'm English, they say you're not. So I'm left with saying I'm Chinese, which

blatantly not. So it's, yeah, I was actually more relating to that sort of in between of not being the upper crust and not being lower. No, but in a weird way, I was buying a belt the other day, and I've discovered that I'm in between a a large and an extra large there's just one hole on the belt buckle that's missing that fits my size you need a schreiber hole i need i need a sort of middle of large and extra large i'm this weird gap in the shop and i felt like what am i who else has got this frame that they haven't made holes for so he graduates in 1785 um he's done pretty well but he's not like a sort of brilliant genius. He wouldn't have seen this guy coming out and been like a superstar in the making.

He was, I think it's 42nd out of the 58 pupils who graduate from the École Militaire in Paris as commissioned officers. Sort of mediocre. How do you prove that you're the top of the war sort of chain when you're studying? Is it playing a lot of board games and winning risks a lot? I think they have sort of chain when you're studying is it is it looking is it playing a lot of board games and winning risk a lot they have sort of strategy tests and things like that um send the a pluses first there's no no no i mean he proves himself with kind of skill he goes to become an artillery officer so obviously he's trained in how to you know use equipment and stuff like that he wanted to go into the navy but he hadn't done enough time at brienne because the navy was the sexy glamorous branch of the french army but then

he couldn't go into that so he went into the artillery instead right um hate to say this because i know it's such a pop culture thing but i'm all i'm thinking is alexander hamilton's story of how he crossed over to america and he was from this place and he was a no one and i have a feeling for the rest of this podcast i'm going to be bringing up washington and i mean he also fancies himself a bit of a writer he writes a no-one. And I have a feeling for the rest of this podcast, I'm going to be bringing up Washington. I mean, he also fancies himself a bit of a writer. He writes a little bit of a novel. Oh, he writes more than a little bit of a novel. Well, he has a go at a Gothic novel, doesn't he?

He has a go at a Gothic novel. Does it survive? Is it still in print? I don't know. Some of his writings do survive. I don't know if the novel survives. I'm not sure if the novel survives. He wrote a lot. He read a lot. This is not a sort of gun-toting, macho idiot.

This is someone who's an intellectual figure as much as he is. He's a nerd. He is a nerd. He's a complete nerd. Still a young man. France is not yet revolutionary, so he goes back home to Corsica, does he? He does a couple of postings in Nice and Auxon.

He goes back to Corsica quite a bit. Now, a lot of this is because of Carlo's death. So when Carlo dies in 1785, it's Napoleon, not Giuseppe, who becomes the de facto head of the family. Now, this kind of annoys Giuseppe. He's supposed to be training to be a priest. He does not become a priest. Spoiler. But Napoleon sort of becomes, and you can see the character traits of someone who takes stuff in hand,

and he's sorting out the money, he's sorting out his siblings, he has a lot of younger siblings, some of whom he had never met when he went back to Corsica. Well, he's, you know, Letizia had eight children, so there were really young Bonapartes

that he hadn't met until he came back. So the French Revolution, Dan, you presumably know it starts 1789, but obviously the French Revolution takes quite a long time to really produce what we all famously think of, which is the execution of the king, Louis XVI. So how does Napoleon get sucked into this revolutionary fervour?

I mean, is it a really slow burn where he very, very gradually rises up the ladder? Or is there a moment where he suddenly, you know, he's in there? I'm in. Well, firstly, I think it's important to note that he likes the revolution. Certainly, I mean, with his early letters, he is based in France in the summer of 1789. He does have to put down kind of popular uprisings, but he writes letters to his brothers

where he talks about that the enemies, what he calls the enemies of liberty and the nation are getting their comeuppance. What we do know is that having been educated alongside the upper ranks of the aristocracy, he thought the Ancien Regime was a pile of nonsense and therefore the upsetting of that order, he felt, was an opportunity for the nation,

for him personally, of course, because it meant that he could rise up through the ranks really quickly, but also he felt for Corsica as well. But in time, he eventually starts to believe that Corsica is better being part of revolutionary France than being an independent state. He really comes to prominence between September and December 1793 at the siege of Toulon. Toulon has risen up against the Republic based in Paris.

And the British have, who are fighting against France, as pretty much everybody is in 1793, have popped along to Toulon because, of course, they have superior naval force and destroyed quite a lot of the French fleet. So the French put Toulon under siege. Napoleon is dispatched there. He goes above the heads of the other commanders and says to the convention in Paris, these guys don't know what they're doing. Their tactics are terrible.

Let me be in charge of the artillery. I'm going to move some light guns around and we're going to blow these Brits away. So he's sitting on the subs bench and he's saying, put me in game boss yeah i've got this yeah he is yeah that's what he's doing or he's going to like a network party where it's just everyone's it's a book launch and he's just sidled up to the publisher going you know i've written the real account of this you need to you need to drop this kid um it's interesting isn't it hearing the trajectory of these big characters? Because in my head, it must have been some sort of connection through wealth or whatever,

but he's literally rising through the ranks. He's only a captain, isn't he? He's only a captain, yeah. He's not senior at all. He's minor in ability, but not really. He's not, yeah. The aristocracy have either been executed or they've done a runner, they've gone abroad. They're now joining armies to come attack France. Yeah.

So Napoleon essentially is seizing the moment here because actually presumably there's not many talented soldiers out there. It's an opportunity for actually talented people who don't have, you know, not just the people who have the right dad to rise up. But it is an opportunity, yeah. And he knows how to use

that. And Toulon is a great victory for him. Yeah. The dispatchers mention Dugommier quite a lot who becomes a key general of the revolutionary wars um they mention him quite a lot probably more than napoleon but the important point is that napoleon is the one who makes the most of the opportunity and it too long is is seen as his victory that's his breakthrough yeah what was he bad at it sounds really he sounds really competent at everything. Are there accounts of him being like, oh, after the victory, he pulled out the banjo

and, oh, mate, put it away? He's not saying. Yeah. Do we know much about sort of his flaws? Brushing up on my first 30 years of Napoleon, there's no one like Napoleon to make you feel like the most underachieving person in the history of humanity.

Like, you're just going, oh, and you're emperor. Well done, Napoleon. He's socially a bit awkward. He's not great. You know, it's not like he goes into a room and opens the doors and everyone's like, hey, Napoleon's here. It's kind of, do we really want to talk to this weirdo? He's described as being quite shabbily dressed. You get sort of reports in Paris about his hair being a bit straggly and not very well powdered and he's very socially weird and a bit awkward he's very intense um he has these kind of rapid infatuations with loads of women and he sends them these kind of quite sad i mean i say sad in a kind of a pitying sense love letters or it's like i love you please pay attention to me and they're like please don't talk to me anymore um it's emo yeah he is Yeah, he is quite emo. I mean, he is, like, there's something very...

Gothic novels. Young Napoleon is well emo. There's something real, there's something really emo about him. So you've mentioned the ladies. He's a sort of desperate romantic, but he's not particularly charismatic. But there is one woman who he meets in 1795 and immediately he's like, oh, this is the one. I love her.

I love her so much. And she is called dan josephine yeah she's not actually called josephine is she not so this is where it gets quite weird yeah she's called rose okay so she's called rose de boharnay laura why does he call her josephine this is a thing napoleon does it's really weird um He has a tendency to call people the names that they're not. Well, women. I don't know whether that's a control thing or what. So Josephine is Marie-Rose Joseph

Taché de la Pagerie. Joseph is her dad. And he calls her Josephine. He loves giving people these little names. I don't know why. It's a bit weird. It's a sort of daughter of Joseph. It's an honorary nickname. Yeah, kind of. I mean, I relate to that. It's very Australian. Is it? Yeah, you meet someone, you just give them a new name.

There's not many Aussies you'll meet who won't call you by something else. What would you call me, Dan? I mean, we've known each other for years, but what's... Ah, you know, the Gen Dog. The Gen Dog? Yeah. The Gregonator. There's a number of things I would have used before actually saying Greg.

I'm just being formal on this podcast by calling you by your name. But yeah, I don't see that as too weird. Did she then go, OK, I guess that's my new name? She just fell in, I think, with that. I mean, I'll be honest, I don't think she was complaining when he started rising up through the ranks of being a superstar. Yeah. To be honest, when you start meeting someone for the first time and they get your name wrong, if it's a boss or something,

you think, oh, it's going to be really inappropriate for me to correct so if i'm just being called james now by this boss i'll let him do it just that's my name now that's what am i gonna do he's used it seven times i haven't said anything it'd be rude napoleon is giving other people nicknames yes uh he's also got his own little nickname he's known as the little corporal yeah that sounds like a slight insult. Sometimes. I mean, there is this thing in French, you know, as you know, there's a lot of, you know, mon petit chou, mon petit, ma petite and it's kind of an affectionate thing. But sometimes they are kind of

sort of trying to make him diminutive. He's trying to be a sort of big, tough soldier and people are going oh, you're adorable. It's a little bit, yeah, I mean, this is you know, by the time he's met Josephine, he's even more of a star than he'd been before because he's put down a royalist rebellion in Paris and everyone's calling him General Vendemier,

which is the month of the revolutionary calendar that the revolt had happened in. I just would point out that it happened on Great Pumpkin Day in the revolutionary calendar because the revolutionary calendar is named after fruit and veg, basically. Best day of the year, Great Pumpkin Day. Great Pumpkin Day. He has kind of become,

he's a bit more in Parisian society and that's how he meets her because she's I don't want to say, I don't know how to put this politely, a bit of a sort would be the politest way I can put this. She has a good time. Napoleon said she had, and again I quote,

the prettiest little backside possible. This was after he met her. I don't think he'd actually seen the real thing at that point. He'd just seen it through clothes. Yeah, her husband got executed in the terror. She's a survivor as well. She was in prison in the terror and her kids were taken away from her.

But she gets them back when she's released. So there's Eugène and Hortense. And Hortense is not only the daughter-in-law or the stepdaughter of a French emperor, she also becomes the mother of a French emperor because she marries Napoleon's brother, I know, Luigi, Louis, and

they have a kid called Louis Napoleon. It's very Mario Kart, isn't it? Hey, Luigi, it's terrible. I'm sorry, again. Italy, I'm so sorry. It'd be great if in Mario Kart there's a code where you can unlock the entire Napoleon clan. Racist Napoleon, eh? Or Luigi, or Mario. It's only Gerolamo. That's Jerome. where you can unlock the entire... The Bonaparte clan. You racist Napoleone.

Or Luigi. It's a me, Gerolamo. That's Jerome. So he's a little corporal. How little are we talking? We think of him as like this tiny little man, but he's not tiny, is he? He's not that small.

Really, I think the tininess thing, it's the English cartoonist Gilray's fault. He's compact. I think he's very tough. He's quite like wiry. Certainly early on. I think we have this image of tubby Napoleon later on and kind of balding and a bit hair receding. And that's late Napoleon, whereas at this point he's very thin.

But he's probably about five, six, seven ish, which is sort of average height. For the time it's average height. How tall are you, Dan? I'm six foot one. Yeah. I've hung out with Brian Blessed a few times and he is surprisingly smaller than what you would expect. Yeah, I think he's about five, I'd say five, nine, maybe? Yeah, I'm five nine.

Five nine? But Brian Blessed, you get the impression of this ginormous character because of his personality, which is where you can. But it's only when you sort of look at him and you go, hang on, you're actually not six foot three. Yeah. You're not this giant man stomping into a room. Yeah, but he exudes the personality of a giant. Yeah. And Napoleon must have done the same.

Napoleon would have, yeah. So Napoleon, he never had a box that he stood on when he was, I don't know, is that Tom Cruise? I'm confused. That's Tom Cruise. The stack heels is probably a Tom Cruise thing or a Bono thing. But that was never a thing that he did himself. Not to my knowledge, no.

I don't think he needed shoe lifts. Yeah, he was not particularly into his heels. He tends to wear little military shoes. Boots. Which were apparently terrible. Everyone mocked his boots. They weren't the right style for Directory Paris. The Directory is the regime that follows the terror.

So Napoleon is very much an austerity kind of... I mean, obviously not always, as we can see in the amount of flounce he breaks out for the coronation. But he has this kind of twofold image of like serious soldier, simplicity. I prefer to wear nice, normal, basic clothes. I'm not into the kind of flouncy fashion of the period. And this kind of gets him mocked. The paintings that I've seen of him oral military gear i can't picture him wearing you know going to the beach for example or or

pajamas i don't know what that style would be for him um but he was he was just rough and ready he he was a bit early on he was a bit rough and ready i think josephine probably sort of polished him up a little bit because she was like we're not going out if you're looking like that that's not happening so let's talk a little bit about a couple of his big military victories. He gets given the army of Italy, which is a huge deal. And that goes very well for him. And then he's also given this sort of power to invade Austria, essentially. Yeah.

So these are two big enemies gone great for him. Militarily, he's proving himself. Yeah. But there's also he's starting to use propaganda, isn't he? Yeah. Dan napoleon at this point in 17 late in the 1790s what are you going to do to try and big up your uh your brand um i'm gonna say i'm six foot one you are six foot one oh if i if i was myself yeah i'd come up with a logo oh yeah i'd come up with a logo I'd come up with my Dan Shriver logo I would arrange a merchandise a lot of

I'd seed a lot of sort of godlike truths about myself that were blatant lies I would I would just hire people just to be like god that guy's cool just that nothing more you just want your own hype man

Dan's not far off the he's not it's not far off at all he plays with news and he plays with the image really effectively so off he pops to italy the army of italy is in a bad way when he takes over but he has really he does really well um and he is rapidly starting to commission paintings of himself um selfiesies. Selfies. Do me a painting, please. He doesn't like posing for them. There's that painting, him on the bridge of Arcoll, and it's this painting by a guy called Antoine Jean Gros, and it's a famous one.

My husband always says he looks like Rod Stewart. And then he pays Gros, the artist, to get engravings made so that, obviously, now everyone's going to have the painting, but you can buy a print. You can put it on your wall. You can think about general bonaparte who's a legend he has newspapers some of which are for the army some of which are for france for his audience in paris there's a really clever thing which is to put stories in about ordinary heroism so reports

about ordinary soldiers doing really good things and also little stories about how ordinary soldiers think he is the business so he's both playing on their kind of support for him but also hyping himself up so i think we would often assume he can only do this when he's the emperor when he's in power really he does this from the very beginning of his career certainly we see it in toulon but italy is where he really gets good at this um that's amazing is that how many examples do we have of someone creating turning themselves into a poster for the bedroom walls of kids? It's quite a common thing in the 18th century. So I'm writing a book at the moment on history of celebrity and a lot of actors like David Garrick

did exactly that. He's a superstar and I think he, and it's not just for France, at this point this is the point where we start to see the reputation of General Bonaparte spreading across Europe as this liberating force. He becomes this kind of cultural figure of liberation and there's songs about him but we also see that in other parts of Europe as well and so much of that is his own making. If you were in charge of a bunch of soldiers, how are you going to get them on side? What would be your technique for

winning over your men? Holiday. Good clothes. Good food. Good sleeping arrangements, toilets. Gym membership. Gym membership, yeah. Netflix accounts.

Sure. And pay, I guess, is a massive thing. Well, that's a huge thing, isn't it, really? He rewards talent and he invests in people that he trusts, doesn't he? He cares. That's awful. It makes Napoleon sound like some terrible corporate shill. But he instigates a policy of paying them up front so now they're getting paid on the regular

he also says lads you go over those alps what's over there a load of riches and art and stuff you can have um so he's kind of promising the land it's not just promising stuff though he's also promising glory you can be the son of a i don't know like a carpenter that's a very jesus reference sorry um you can be the son of you know a farmer from provincial france and you can rise up through the ranks and you can become a marshal of france european campaigns go really really well and then he's like okay north africa let's do this and this is where he gets to sort of fanboy his own childhood loves because Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great had both conquered Egypt. And in fact, Alexandria is named after Alexander the Great.

And he is now leading this invasion force across the Mediterranean. He arrives, troops get off the ship, and then the British Navy turns up and destroys the French fleet. So it's got a bit wrong. That's called the Battle of the Nile. And that's Lord Nelson, isn't it? Yeah, that's the first time they have their sort of encounter. It's the first head-to-head. Oh, really?

Do they meet? I don't know. Or is it quite distant at that point? Well, I think it's, if you can imagine a kind of mental picture of, like something in an Indiana Jones movie, those kind of maps they use where people are travelling across on planes. But boats floating around the Mediterranean. And Nelson is sort of saying, is he going to India?

Is he going to the West? I think they're going to go to the East. Because the idea is that they've given up on the idea of an invasion of Britain at this point. They decide what we'll do is we'll try to cut off their route to India. Because if we cut off that, then the British won't be able to get their sort of money coming in from the Indian territories. So Nelson is following him around, essentially, and that's how they know where they're going to be. Nelson wins a huge victory at the Battle of the Nile,

which is when Nelson becomes famous for the first time. So Napoleon has had his fleet basically knackered behind him. Fleet knackered. I mean, he has had some success. He took Alexandria. Yeah, so he's invaded Egypt fine. Yeah, he's got there now. But he can't get home.

He's gone to Egypt. They've all thought this is going to be super cool and amazing. So he's invaded Egypt fine. Yeah, he's got there. But he can't get home. He's gone to Egypt. They've all thought this is going to be super cool and amazing. And they get there and they defeat the Mamelukes at the pyramids, the Battle of the Pyramids. But they also have to deal with heat stroke, a lack of food, a lack of water, copious amounts of diarrhoea. Copious.

You never want to hear that word, just eating diarrhoea. Not some diarrhoea, Dan. Copious. Because they thought, you know, we'll live off the land. You get to Egypt, there is nothing to live off. So some of them went mad with heat stroke and killed themselves. It's terrible. And the ones that did find food found fruit, which they loaded up on.

But of course, if you're not used to a fruity diet, you will get severe diarrhoea. And that's what happened. And then some of them got eye infections. And it was, I mean, it was like a really, really, really bad holiday. They had a terrible time. One of the things that's most extraordinary about Napoleon, apart from all the military stuff, is that he brings across this hand-picked team of scientists and archaeologists and artists and engineers

and people who are going to go and they're going to study Egyptology for the first time. And they find the Rosetta Stone. That's one of the things they do Egyptology for the first time. And they find the Rosetta Stone. That's one of the things they do. Napoleon found the Rosetta Stone? They find the Rosetta Stone. But really, without them, there wouldn't have been the foundation of the modern study of Egyptology

without Napoleon doing that. And as Greg said, he picked them by himself. He wanted to bring the scientific and intellectual expedition as well as the military expedition. So again, this is a sign of a man with considerable intellectual interests as well as military expertise. This is incredible.

And sounding more and more like an Indiana Jones novel. I think it is. It's awesome. I mean, it's a Frenchman who deciphers the Rosetta Stone later on as well. Is it? Champollion. Champollion, yeah.

So Napoleon goes in, gets the Rosetta Stone. It's Nick. And he gets the golden skull. And then Meloch takes it. Bloody Nelson's out there. It's amazing, yeah. I mean, this is why you end up with treasures of Egypt in places like the Louvre as well.

Yeah. Because they bring a lot of stuff back with them as well. Yeah. But he's not just, I mean, he's out there as a military commander and he's doing some nasty stuff too. He can be ruthless. If a city doesn't surrender straight away he doesn't show much forgiveness, does he?

No. You know, some historians and some of his biographers I think most notably it's a kind of turning point in his personality. The famous one is Jaffa. It's technically now Israel, right? I guess back then it would have been known as Levant, probably. Yeah, it's sort of Syria-Palestine, but it's a town that surrenders, that they conquer and then they go in.

And this is normal for the time. There's rape, pillage and murder for a couple of days. Now, the important point is that it went on for longer than normal. Then the garrison, two of the French representatives go to negotiate with the garrison at Jaffa to negotiate surrender. One of these is Eugène de Beauharnais, who's Josephine's son from her first marriage. And they negotiate with the Jaffa garrison about surrender, several thousand men. And they surrender and they've been told, we're just going to keep you as prisoners of war. When Napoleon sees the sight of thousands of prisoners coming towards him, now remember, it's not like they've got loads of supplies or the capacity necessarily to have to look after prisoners of war. And that's the point where he just goes into

a rage and he says, what are you doing? What are you doing? How could you take these men? We can't keep them. And then you have further massacres when they are slaughtered. It's not unusual in the time because there's examples of Frederick the Great in Moravia. There's atrocities in the Seven Years' War. Everyone's at them. British East India Company conducts massacres in India in the 1790s and in Spain during the Peninsular Wars.

But the fact that it's happening after surrender is seen as really problematic. So at this point, we see this ruthlessness starting to come through. Some of his biographers would argue this is a really rare loss of self-control on his part, that he loses it and just says, well, kill them all. It's so interesting for me, who's not a historian, to see where the line is drawn on someone who's following the rules of war and stepping over the line. So every example you just gave, would biographers be seeing that as,

okay, that's just the way it was. Everyone's a nice, not nice person, but everyone's just playing by the rules. But now Napoleon, I can't like him as much as I did because it's so weird. The problem is, of course, that he had kind of presented himself as this great, and I think he really believed this,

a sort of liberator figure. He had also made lots of speeches about, you know, oh, it was terrible how people repressed uprisings in other parts of Europe and so on. And then, of course, he goes in and does something similar. Now, as I said, it remains kind of a point of contention as to why this happened. Some more sympathetic biographers point out that he had just found out that Josephine was at it with someone else. Cheating on him. In France, yeah. I mean, that's not an excuse, right?

That's a bit of an overreaction. So he goes full Daenerys Targaryen. He does, yeah. He goes from being the kind of hero, everyone's like, oh yeah, we love Daenerys, to like oh my god, you just said Fight for City. Burn it down. Yeah. I mean, on top of that, if we've got an army that's being run by Napoleon who love him, who are seeing his guidance as the right way, it's not one person who's had a flip.

He's mentally flipping this entire army. But he emerges out of this largely unscathed. He's lost his fleet. That's been a disaster. Not that anyone in France knows that. Sure. Well, there are people in France who are like, yeah, guys, where are the boats?

Yeah, exactly. I'm sure we sent you with 20 boats and now there are four boats. But he now returns to France, leaving his army out there. I mean, he's sort of leaving the French Egyptologists still digging away. But he returns to France and this is where he suddenly sees his power. So the coup is bloodless, but it is still a coup. Yeah, I love Brumaire because it's campy and ridiculous in a lot of ways. The Directory is a five-man team that runs France.

There's a feeling that the government is fundamentally unstable, which it is because they have royalists on one side and Jacobins on the other, and they don't know how to necessarily steer a course of moderation and order between these two extremes. So there are conspiracies going on. And some of the people who are thinking about this kind of need to stabilize power are people like Abbasiez, who's a veteran revolutionary, Fouché, who becomes Napoleon's chief of police and has quite a brutal reputation as well. Napoleon has missed out on all the kind of down and dirties of directory politics so in a way as you said Greg

him being in Egypt is good because while it's a total mess at the same time at least he's not associated with political factions in France so when these boys are plotting to put someone in they decide well we want a military figure because then we can get the army on side

the plan is we'll get someone in we'll have a bit of a sort of transition period but then we'll be in charge. And obviously that's not what Napoleon did. So he's meant to be a puppet. Yeah, he's meant to be

essentially a puppet. So Napoleon returns in October 1799 to mega parties. There's lots of people throwing parties in his honour celebrations, acclaim there's a really naff play

put on in Lyon called Return of Bonaparte to Lyon. So when the plot gets going, Napoleon starts to outmanoeuvre the civilian plotters. So we can start to see him making a move. 18th and 19th Brumaire, which is the 9th and 10th of November 1799. Napoleon's brother, Lucien, Luciano, Lucien, who is now the head of the Council of 500, which is like the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament.

Lucien starts spreading a rumour and telling the Council of 500 that there's a Jacobin plot against them. So he says, we all need to get out of Paris. We're going to go to Saint-Cloud, Chateau of Saint-Cloud, where it will be safe. Now, this was kind of standard fodder of conspiracies at the time,

so they all went off to Saint-Cloud, and people probably had some inkling that something was going on. And the person they put in charge of the Parisian army is Napoleon because we need stability and he's a hero. So anyway, when they get to St. Cloud, very theatrical situation. You need to also picture 500 men wearing togas over 18th century clothes. Jacques-Louis David, who is brilliant, he designs red togas that you wear over 18th century clothes and big hats with plumes. And Lucien Bonaparte trying to tell them, you know, right, we need to restore order.

And who do we need to do that? Guess who? This lad. My brother, conveniently enough. So Napoleon goes into the room. Lucien cannot control this at all. Shouting, screaming, people saying, down with the Caesar, down with Cromwell. Interesting. But they make a really big mistake because they say, we're all going to just we're going to talk about this,

but we're all going to take some time now and individually swear allegiance to the Constitution of France. So that's 500 people having to say, I swear that is going to take hours. Lucien has been been lucky. So Napoleon and all the other plotters are a bit anxious about this. Napoleon is not a patient man. He pounces off to the Council of Elders, who are the upper house, and he goes in and does this really crappy speech where he says,

remember, I march accompanied by the god of war and the god of fortune. He'd wheel that out in Cairo, which is fine on your troops. But the Council of Elders are sort of sitting there going, what is this? Who are you? I don't know, you figured that would work for a room for the toga wearing.

Yeah. The Council of Elders, I think, had a different costume. Oh, what did they have? Sort of like Jedi outfits. Yeah, they had quite tall kind of feathery things. So Napoleon's back to the Council of 500. It's mental in there, still chaos. Lucien in the middle going, I don't know what I'm doing.

They still start yelling about Caesar and tyrants. Some people try to physically attack him. Napoleon gets out. Lucian goes out and tries to get a bit of time. Another debate. Let's have another debate. At this point they do this ridiculously theatrical scene where Lucian says, if my brother were to attack the

constitution of France, I would, and he takes out a sword to prove this, I would drive a dagger through his heart. And at this point they're like, his heart. And at this point, they're like, seems all right. And at this point, Napoleon then has military support

to dissolve the chamber. And at that point, they then institute the consulate with three consuls. And Napoleon is, surprise, surprise, first consul. And the idea was that

they would change around. Nah. Then he becomes first consul for life in 1802. And then after that, emperor. After that, emperor. So France has gone from having a king to ending up with an emperor. But that's for another episode.

We haven't got time for that today. I mean, the only other important thing we talk about is Napoleon's penis, because that's what we all come for. Finally. So where is it? Between his legs. Okay. So the story is there's a thing called, well, actually,

it's called Napoleon's Item. Very euphemistic. And it's supposedly one and a half inches long. It lives in New Jersey. A urologist bought it at a Paris auction for $3,000 and he's handed it down to his daughter. Bit weird. Have you ever handed down a... I know you've got a young son.

I mean, would you... Yeah, I mean, I don't know what answer I could give that won't get me in huge amounts of trouble. But no, obviously not handed any. You've never inherited a... I've never inherited a... No, a pickled penis. Suddenly that Boney M song is never going to sound the same.

But it is that sort of interesting thing that Napoleon, one of the most famous people in history, he's perhaps the greatest of all the military commanders of all time, but it's sort of odd that his body gets turned into this little relic, isn't it? It's almost like he's a saint or a celebrity. Yeah. His penis, we don't know if it's his penis at all, it probably isn't, but the fact that someone's got it in a jar and they paid $3,000 for it

is quite a weird thing. I don't know. Are you okay with buying penises? Yeah, I think I am, actually. Well, if they belong to someone as historically famous as Napoleon, I wonder if it's almost, it must be the whole sum of

a body in its all various parts that you could put together as one ultimate character from history like a frankenstein of history frankenstein of history so napoleon's penis with the leg of you know we must have legs that have survived yeah we had sarah bernhardt the celebrity actress she had her leg amputated it became a celebrity leg there we go we got sarah bernhardt's leg we've got napoleon's Napoleon's son she played Napoleon's son yeah well this is it's right in itself isn't it if it can connect

we've got Einstein's brain yeah we do we've got someone's regrown Van Gogh's ear using some DNA so we could actually use a scientifically

just whack one of them on yeah whack an ear on we can rebuild we can rebuild the ultimate historical greatest person from history yeah well I mean

that was a low moment in the podcast let's raise the bar. Let's do some proper highbrow history. This is the part of the show where we do the nuance window. The nuance window! This is where we allow our expert historian to have two minutes to launch into their own thesis about what we should really think about and care about

in this subject. So I'm going to get my little stopwatch up here. And without much further ado, you have two minutes. Okay, starting now. Okay, so many Napoleonic biographies profess to bring us closer to the real Napoleon can read every one of or every one of his surviving letters. But I sometimes wonder about the futility of looking for the real Napoleon. After all, from the very beginning of his career, as we've heard, he consciously sought to create his own myth.

So where then does the myth end and the real man begin? Napoleon should be seen as a kind of modern celebrity figure, one who actively sought to shape his own image, persona and reputation. And we can see this in, for example, the story of the Battle of Arcol in 1796 during the Italian campaign, which we have heard about. It's at this point that we start to see the emergence of what

Jean Toulard, French historian, one of the sort of great writers on Napoleon, has called the myth of the saviour figure that Napoleon used throughout his career. But what's interesting when we look at Arcole is how he altered the narrative a little bit. So there's a bridge, the Austrians are on one side, the French are on the other, and a soldier called Augereau, a general called Augereau, tries to cross the bridge waving one of the French standards. He is repelled and Napoleon takes up the flag and repeated the action. Victory at Arcole was only secured a couple of days later by doing a sort of through-the-back-door attack on the Austrians. But the popular image of Arcole is all about Napoleon.

But the other side of that is the British take on it, which is the creation of what we would call the Black Legend, the character assassination that the British tried to conduct immediately as soon as Napoleon became a prominent figure. So this was an incredibly personalised series of attacks, unprecedented in terms of British criticism of the French.

And this, I think, has created the lasting popular image of Napoleon in Britain. Small man with a big ego, a Corsican ogre by turns monstrous and ridiculous. Fake biographies accused him of nailing a dog to a door

when he was a child, of poisoning some girlfriends and of his mother being a whore. They even tried to kill him through some bombs in 1800. These were French bombs, but funded by Britain. And I would argue that this black myth still shapes the kind of professed revulsion, but simultaneous fascination towards Napoleon in this country. And I think he's an extremely important example of how the legacies of historical figures,

whether we view them positively or negatively, are shaped by ideological forces. Lovely, thank you. He's a pretty extraordinary character, isn't he? And we've only really done the first 30 years of his life. Yeah, that's amazing. The thing that fascinates me, vanboying that he did, following in the footsteps of, because I've been thinking about that a lot recently, you hear about people who want to become unique individuals, do their own thing, but actually, so if you take the Beatles, for example, and you look at the blatant obsession that the Gallagher brothers of Oasis had, they rose to the top by just trying to emulate the greatest formula of pop music, unashamedly, following in the footsteps completely. I never knew that he would be, you know, I'm going to the

places that Alexander went or Julius Caesar went. And that's a side of him that I'd never thought about before. It seems fascinating. So that's what we need to do. All of us just copy the greats. Just do what they did. Edit out the bad stuff and do the good stuff. But don't kill people on mass.

Don't go across the line. Don't cross the line. Don't pull a Napoleon. All right, Dan. Well, it's time now for your quiz. It's the end of the show. At the beginning of the show, we had the So What Do You Know, which is where we introduced some of the concepts. Now it's the So What Do You Know Now.

So what do you know now? You get 60 seconds on the clock. I've never won a quiz. You work on a very famous podcast about knowledge, so you should hopefully have learned some stuff here, otherwise you might get fired. Ten questions, they're pretty straightforward, but let's see how much you remember.

Starting now, where was Napoleon born? Corsica. Yes. What was Napoleon's wife called? One of her names. Rose. Yes, or Josephine, yes. How much did a urologist pay for his item?

Oh, no, I don't know. $30,000. $3't know. $30,000. $3,000. $3,000. What was Napoleon's nickname? Le Petit Man. The Petit Commander. Corporal, yeah.

What year did the French Revolution begin? 1789. Yep. Which city, named after his boyhood hero? Alexandria. Alexandria, yep. How did he convince the French people of his genius while in Italy? 1989? Yep. Which city named after his boyhood hero? Alexandria. How did he convince the French people of his genius while in Italy? Posters. Yes, posters and newspapers.

What did Napoleon want to be when he grew up? Fireman. Sort of a great writer really, or a commander. Which monarch had his head chopped off in 1793? Louis XVI That's right

And when did Napoleon become first consul of France? In 1799 Yes! Bang on! Wow! I mean that felt almost like a 10 out of 10 I'm going to give you 9.5 out of 10 I got the 3 right in the 30,000

It's pretty good Oh my god Strong score Genuinely, heart is racing in a way it never has for a long time. Wow. That's a victory.

That's a cute answer. What? Oh yeah. What's it going to be when he grows up? Fireman. Lovely. I hope you've enjoyed

learning about Napoleon, Dan. Yeah. It's been really great having you here. For now, I'm going to have to say a big thank you to my guests.

In Comedy Corner, the fantastic Dan Schreiber from No Such to my guests. In Comedy Corner, the fantastic Dan Schreiber from No Such Thing As Fish. And in History Corner, the fantastic Dr Laura O'Brien from North London University. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, please do share it with your friends, leave a review online, and make sure to subscribe to You're Dead To Me, so you never miss

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