Olivia: Everything you think you know about Napoleon is probably wrong. Not just the height thing—which we'll get to—but the idea that he was a simple tyrant. The real story is messier, and it starts with his so-called 'friends' lying through their teeth. Jackson: Whoa, okay, starting with some historical drama. I'm in. Usually, it's the enemies who write the nasty stuff, but his friends? That sounds like a reality TV show from the 1800s. Olivia: It basically was! And that's the exact puzzle that historian Andrew Roberts sets out to solve in his massive, widely-acclaimed biography, Napoleon the Great. He wades through two centuries of propaganda to try and find the actual man. Jackson: A 'massive' biography sounds like an understatement for a figure like Napoleon. How does anyone even begin to tackle that? Olivia: With incredible, almost obsessive, dedication. Roberts didn't just sit in a library. He visited 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields. And get this—he even traveled to the remote island of St. Helena and lay on Napoleon's actual deathbed. Jackson: Hold on. He lay on the deathbed? Why? What was he trying to find out, the ghost's opinion? Olivia: To confirm his height! He wanted to settle the myth once and for all. And for the record, Napoleon was 5'6", which was perfectly average for a Frenchman at the time. The 'Napoleon Complex' is based on British wartime propaganda cartoons. Jackson: That is an insane level of commitment. I'm impressed. So if he went to such lengths to debunk the height myth, what were these bigger lies you mentioned? The ones told by his friends?

Olivia: This is where it gets really fascinating. Roberts opens the book by essentially warning the reader that most contemporary accounts of Napoleon are completely unreliable. After Napoleon was defeated and the old monarchy was restored in France, a whole cottage industry of memoirs popped up. Jackson: Let me guess, everyone suddenly had a story to sell. Olivia: Exactly. And their stories conveniently changed depending on who was in power. The best example is a courtier named Claire de Rémusat. During Napoleon's reign, she was part of his inner circle. Her letters to her husband were full of affection for the Emperor. She was a fan. Jackson: Okay, so she's on Team Napoleon. Olivia: For a while. But then Napoleon falls, the Bourbon kings come back, and her husband needs a job in the new government. Suddenly, her perspective shifts. In 1815, she burns all her original notes and diaries. Jackson: Oh, that's not suspicious at all. You don't burn evidence unless you're about to change your story. Olivia: And she did. A few years later, she publishes her memoirs, and in them, Napoleon is no longer the man she admired. He's a "monster incapable of generosity," a cold-hearted manipulator with a "satanic smile." Jackson: A satanic smile? That is quite the pivot. So she basically torched her old diaries and wrote fan-fiction for the new king to help her husband get a promotion? Olivia: That's the argument. Her account became a key source for anti-Napoleon historians for a century, but it was written under immense political and financial pressure. And she wasn't the only one. Jackson: Give me another one. This is like historical gossip. Olivia: Alright, how about his own private secretary, Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne? This was a guy Napoleon had known since school. But Napoleon had to fire him—twice—for being corrupt. So, naturally, Bourrienne writes a ten-volume memoir trashing his old boss. Jackson: A ten-volume revenge project. I have to respect the pettiness. But how do we know he was lying? Olivia: Because years later, a group of people who actually knew Napoleon, including his own brother Joseph, published a two-volume book called Bourrienne et ses Erreurs—"Bourrienne and his Errors"—refuting his claims one by one. It gets even crazier. Another memoir from St. Helena was ghostwritten by Alexandre Dumas, the novelist who wrote The Three Musketeers. Jackson: Wait, what? So a primary source on Napoleon was actually written by a famous fiction writer? That's like finding out a presidential biography was secretly penned by Stephen King. Olivia: It shows the scale of the problem. You're dealing with bitterness, financial desperation, political maneuvering, and straight-up literary fraud. Jackson: Okay, but this all seems to be clearing the way for a more positive view of Napoleon. I've read that some critics feel Roberts is too sympathetic, that he's a big fan. Is he just cherry-picking the bad sources to discredit them, and in doing so, painting a rosier picture than reality? Olivia: That's the central critique, and it's a fair question. Roberts definitely admires Napoleon's abilities. But his solution to the problem of unreliable memoirs isn't to just ignore them; it's to go to a better source. The Fondation Napoléon recently published all 33,000 of Napoleon's surviving letters, many for the first time without censorship. Jackson: Thirty-three thousand letters. He was a busy guy. Olivia: Incredibly. And Roberts uses these letters as his foundation. He argues that while Napoleon is obviously presenting his own version of events, his contemporaneous letters to his generals, his ministers, and his family are a far more direct window into his mind than a bitter memoir written twenty years later to pay off debts. Jackson: That makes sense. You're getting his thoughts in real-time, not through the filter of someone else's agenda. Olivia: Exactly. And when you use those letters to cut through the fog, you find these moments of pure, undeniable competence that explain his rise. Which brings us to the event that basically created the Napoleon we know: the Siege of Toulon.

Jackson: Okay, so set the scene for me. What was the Siege of Toulon? Olivia: It's 1793. The French Revolution is in full swing, and it's absolute chaos. France is at war with most of Europe, and on top of that, there are civil wars breaking out all over the country. The city of Toulon, which was France's single most important naval base on the Mediterranean, has rebelled against the revolutionary government and invited the British Royal Navy right into its harbor. Jackson: That sounds... bad. Like, handing the keys to your biggest military fort to your mortal enemy. Olivia: It was a catastrophe. The French army sent to retake the city was a joke. The commander was a former painter who had no military experience. They were getting nowhere. And into this mess walks a 24-year-old artillery major, recently promoted and virtually unknown. A young Corsican outsider named Napoleon Bonaparte. Jackson: Hold on, he's 24, and he's just a major? He's not in charge of anything, right? Olivia: Not at first. He's just there to command the artillery. But he immediately sees what all the experienced generals are missing. They're all focused on a direct assault on the city of Toulon, which is heavily fortified. Napoleon looks at the geography and realizes that's a fool's errand. Jackson: So what's his big idea? Olivia: It's brilliantly simple. He sees a high promontory, a hill called L'Eguillette, that overlooks the entire harbor. The British have fortified it and nicknamed it 'Little Gibraltar'. Napoleon tells his commanders, "Forget the city. If we take that one hill, we can place our cannons there and rain hellfire down on the British ships. Their fleet will be forced to either sail away or be sunk. And when the fleet leaves, the city will fall." Jackson: So he's basically telling his bosses they're all idiots and he knows better? At 24? That takes some serious confidence. Olivia: Or arrogance. But he was right. He bombards the Committee of Public Safety in Paris with letters, demanding more cannons, more gunpowder, more men. There's this amazing quote from one of his letters: "One can remain for twenty-four or if necessary thirty-six hours without eating, but one cannot remain three minutes without gunpowder." Jackson: I love that. It's the 18th-century equivalent of "I'll sleep when I'm dead." He's all in. Olivia: Totally. He works relentlessly, building new batteries, training his men, and constantly fighting with his incompetent superiors. At one point, a general orders a retreat during a key attack, and Napoleon is furious, screaming that a "[expletive deleted] has beaten the retreat!" He knew they had victory in their grasp and the general blew it. Jackson: This is like a startup founder trying to get a project off the ground while the corporate middle-managers keep getting in the way. Olivia: That's a perfect analogy. Finally, a new, competent general named Dugommier arrives, recognizes the brilliance of Napoleon's plan, and puts him in charge of the final assault on 'Little Gibraltar'. Jackson: The big moment. Olivia: It's a brutal, hand-to-hand fight in a thunderstorm in the middle of the night. Napoleon is right there in the thick of it, leading the charge. At one point, he's wounded—a British sergeant stabs him in the left thigh with a bayonet. The wound is so severe they thought he might need to have his leg amputated. Jackson: He gets stabbed with a bayonet and just... keeps going? The adrenaline must have been off the charts. Olivia: He keeps going. And they take the fort. Just as he predicted, the next morning the British admiral sees French cannons being set up on the hill above his fleet and orders a full evacuation. Toulon falls back into French hands. The victory is entirely thanks to Napoleon's plan and his leadership. Jackson: Wow. And what happens to him after that? I assume he got more than just a pat on the back. Olivia: A bit more, yes. For his role at Toulon, Napoleon, the 24-year-old major, was promoted directly to Brigadier-General. He leapfrogged an entire rank. In the space of four months, he went from a complete unknown to a general in the French army. His career, and modern history, was never the same.

Jackson: That's an incredible story. So when you put it all together, what's the big picture here? We have this figure who is buried under layers of lies and propaganda, but at his core, there's this undeniable, explosive talent. Olivia: Exactly. Roberts's central argument is that you can't understand Napoleon by just reading the gossip columns of his day, the memoirs written by bitter rivals or fawning sycophants. You have to look at the actions. At Toulon, he wasn't a 'monster' or a 'saint'; he was a force of pure, focused competence in a world of chaos. Jackson: It wasn't about ideology or grand philosophy at that point. It was about seeing the solution. Olivia: Precisely. He saw the one move on the chessboard that mattered while everyone else was just staring at the pieces. Roberts shows that this ability to cut through complexity to find the simplest, most effective path forward is the essence of his genius. It's what he did at Toulon with a cannon, and it's what he would later do with legal codes, government administration, and entire armies. Jackson: The pattern was set right there, at age 24, with a bayonet wound in his leg. It makes you wonder how many other historical figures we've gotten completely wrong because we're still listening to the stories told by their rivals. Olivia: That's a great question. And it makes you think about who writes history and why. The story of Napoleon is as much about the man himself as it is about the battle for his legacy that began the moment he fell from power. Jackson: What's the one thing about Napoleon you believed that turned out to be a myth? Olivia: Besides the height, I think it was the idea that he was just a warmonger. Roberts makes a compelling case that he was a genuine, obsessive administrator and reformer who was also, unfortunately for Europe, a military genius. It's a complicated picture. Jackson: A complicated picture of a man who, for better or worse, shaped the world we live in today. Olivia: Absolutely. A great place to leave it. We'd love to hear from our listeners on this. What myths about Napoleon, or any other historical figure, have you had to unlearn? Let us know. We love hearing from you. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.