what characteristics of napoleon will eventually lead to his downfall?

Napoleon Bonaparte's rise and fall are 1 of the almost spectacular in recorded history. The French general and statesman turned self-appointed emperor revolutionized the nation's war machine, legal and educational institutions. But after some of his most audacious expansionist campaigns failed, he was forced to abdicate and was ultimately exiled in disgrace.

What propelled Napoleon upward—transcendent genius, vaulting ambition, destiny? What brought him down—ability craze, hubris, fate? Or is the answer more prosaic?

A close look behind the heroic portraits and beneath the gorgeous uniforms reveals some surprising things nigh the not bad little man. (He was small.) Perhaps most hit? The number of complexes he suffered from, including grade inferiority, money insecurity, intellectual envy, sexual anxiety, social awkwardness and, not surprisingly, a persistent hypersensitivity to criticism. Taken in whole, these traits collection his stark ambition, undermined his grandiose endeavors—and ultimately crippled his celebrated legacy.

READ More: six Things You Should Know About Napoleon

'Determined to climb'

Napoleon Bonaparte was born into a family that counted itself among the elite of the port metropolis of Ajaccio in France's island territory of Corsica. But they were far from rich and lived frugally, crammed into a few rooms in a decrepit house. His father, a crashing snob, managed to obtain noble status and had far-reaching ambitions for his sons. But Napoleon could not assist being aback of him, afterward albeit he constitute him 'a trivial too fond of the ridiculous gentility of the times.'

However, he also was adamant to climb.

He became brutally aware of social barriers when, at the age of nine, he left domicile and entered the armed forces academy at Brienne in northern France. His foreign origins, awful French (he had grown up speaking a Corsican Italian patois) and dubious noble status laid him open up to the taunts of his schoolmates.

Although he did make a few friends—and could exist remarkably open with children or simple soldiers and servants—Napoleon continued throughout his life to distance himself from those effectually him with a prickly defensive arrogance.

The sense of being on his own against the globe spurred him to testify that he could outsmart others. While working hard to excel in his career as an artillery officeholder, he read voraciously and even tried his hand (not very successfully) at writing philosophical and political essays—and even novels. When, in 1797, he was elected to the French Constitute, he liked to impress its members with learned soapbox on every subject field from music to science. Afterwards, at Erfurt in 1808, he would take fourth dimension off negotiations with the Czar of Russia to dazzle Goethe with his noesis.

Chasing dingy lucre

He welcomed the outbreak of the French Revolution in July 1789, when he was a calendar month brusk of his 20th birthday—not just because he was a republican, but as well because by removing class barriers it opened upwardly new prospects politically and personally. But when he constitute himself in revolutionary Paris five years later, 26-year-former general Napoleon faced an alarming world governed past 2 things he had never had much experience of: coin and sex.

He was horrified past the gratis-for-all that followed the finish of the then-called Reign of Terror, when speculators chased fortunes in a fevered economical climate. Napoleon reviled their behavior, yet couldn't resist joining in. When his begetter died in 1785, he had left merely debts, leaving Napoleon to back up his mother and vii siblings, principally on his officer's pay.

The lure of making money briefly eclipsed his military ambitions as he speculated on buying and selling the properties of émigré or guillotined nobles, and importing oft-smuggled luxuries such as coffee, saccharide and silk stockings. Although his dislike of what he chosen "men of business" never left him, neither did his determination never to be short of fix cash. When he came to power he always had with him a cassetteof gold coins. He besides saw money equally the key to achieving the goals he fix himself, creating new institutions and building public works.

During his first entrada in 1796-7, in which he and his army stripped Italia of everything, down to its art treasures, he discovered war could be profitable. Thereafter he made sure that every campaign fabricated a turn a profit. It was the two that did non—his Spanish venture and the invasion of Russia in 1812—that were to prove his undoing.

Empress Josephine and Napoleon after their divorce.

Historical Picture Archive/Corbis/Getty Images

A distrust of sexual activity

The other thing that unnerved him in revolutionary Paris was the sexual license that accompanied the relief following the end of the Terror. His own sexual experience was desolate, and his mental attitude defensively puritan. At military school he had complained the authorities did not do enough to protect them from "depravity," and attacked a friend who was homosexual. He first had sex activity at 18, with a prostitute, and the next morning he wrote up the experience as though it had been a scientific experiment. He would later write "A dialogue on the nature of love," arguing that it was "a mere sensation" that was actually "harmful to guild."

It was but when he had been set upwards with Josephine, an accomplished courtesan half-dozen years his senior, that he discovered the joys of sex activity and idea he had gone to sky. He married her, but she cheated on him outrageously, which merely confirmed his original mental attitude. He would enshrine his view of women and sexual practice as potentially disruptive in his greatest piece of work, the Code Napoléon, setting strict limits on their freedom of action. The conviction that women needed to be controlled would also merely have confirmed him in his urge to micromanage and control all human activity.

READ More: How Napoleon Plotted One of History's Greatest Prison Breaks

Fear of being perceived as weak

His sexual insecurity and distrust of women only deepened his unwillingness or inability to engage with others, hampering his diplomatic relations, which he saw equally showdowns in which he had to be seen to win. He could never run into that a judicious concession might win him greater advantages; had he prolonged the peace of Amiens by allowing Great britain to keep Malta in 1803, for example, he could have used the respite to reinforce his position, rebuild France's economy and his navy.

Whorl to Continue

The combination of this fearfulness of existence seen as weak in negotiations with his desire to extract as much coin from the defeated party meant that every treaty he always made left the other side hungry for revenge. He drove such a difficult and humiliating bargain with Austria in 1805 later Austerlitz that the Austrians were bound to try and retrieve some of their lost provinces, and they fabricated war once more in 1809. Although he defeated them again and imposed an fifty-fifty harsher peace on them, the episode had prevented him from pacifying Spain, with fatal consequences—and it meant Austria would participate in his downfall.

READ More: Why Napoleon'due south Invasion of Russia Was the Beginning of the End

Scrambling to go along up with nobles

Every bit appalled as he was by Josephine's promiscuity, Napoleon was entranced past her supposedly aristocratic background. He would be fifty-fifty more excited by that of his second wife, the Austrian archduchess Marie-Louise. As she was a great-niece of the late Marie-Antoinette, he would refer to his 'uncle' male monarch Louis XVI and reveled in the fact that his begetter-in-police was the Emperor of Austria.

Past so Napoleon was main of Europe, having crowned himself Emperor and placed several of his siblings on thrones. But while he derived satisfaction from associating with older royals and forcing them to marry members of his family, he remained pathetically enlightened that they secretly despised him as a commoner.

This profoundly affected his beliefs and his policy, and goes a long manner to explaining its disastrous course. "Don't y'all run into," he explained to his family, "that I was not built-in on the throne, that I take to maintain myself on it in the same way I ascended information technology, with glory, that an private who becomes a sovereign similar me cannot end, that he has to keep climbing, and that he is lost if he stands yet."

A portrait of Napoleon afterwards his abdication in 1814.

Leemage/Corbis/Getty Images

His rising had begun in the leap of 1796, when he had been given control of the Army of Italy—a piteous, badly armed and underfed rabble. He knocked them into shape with a combination of victories and flattery, and sent false bulletins dorsum to Paris inflating the importance of every skirmish, praising their bravery and suggesting his own brilliance. He needed to make the government believe he was indispensable, simply he also felt a need to enhance his own prestige. Inside months he managed to persuade his troops, the regime and public opinion that he was an infrequent being.

He continued to build on this image so successfully that he could turn a less-than-glorious episode in Egypt into the stuff of legend and persuade many in France that he was the predestined savior of the nation. This enabled him to seize power and begin rebuilding France from the ruins of the Revolution.

But his innate insecurities fabricated him acutely sensitive to any criticism. While Napoleon now wielded unprecedented power, he kept striving to build upwardly his image, by censoring the press and eliminating those who spoke up in the legislative assemblies. He particularly raged at the British press, which published scurrilous articles dwelling on the lowly origins and bad beliefs of his family, and at cartoonists such as Rowlandson who represented him as a buffoon, a slight which, with his limited sense of humour, struck deep.

The British government also supported plots that threatened non only Napoleon's life, but the stability of the state he had synthetic. It was this more than annihilation that led to his assumption of the purple crown, although a desire to bring together the club of monarchs did play a role. Yet the higher he rose, the more he felt the demand to bolster his image, by laying on the royal splendor, which impressed nobody. With time, even his armed services triumphs had begun to bore his subjects.

While he was destroying the might of Austria, Russian federation and Prussia by his spectacular victories at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, he received reports from Paris that people were longing for an end to the fighting so they could go on with their lives. Past then, his extraordinary luck, leading from triumph to triumph, had begun to brand him believe his ain propaganda, that he was the darling of destiny. Even so the aureola of celebrity could non mask an underlying frailty.

WATCH: The Death of Napoleon

The need to evidence strength, at all costs

When Czar Alexander began to defy him, Napoleon felt then threatened that he gathered the greatest ground forces the world had ever seen in an attempt to make him stand down. It did not, and the result was the ill-blighted invasion of Russia. His ministers and marshals begged him to brand peace on the best terms available, simply he felt he could non.

While he was on the retreat from Moscow, a grouping of generals tried to seize power by announcing he had been killed in battle. The plot failed, but it revealed to Napoleon that his whole building of regal glory had feet of clay. On hearing of his death, nobody reacted equally they would have had he been a real monarch—by saying 'the Emperor is dead, long alive the Emperor' and proclaiming his son's accretion to the throne.

This undermined his brownie in his own eyes. During the campaigns of 1813 and 1814, when he was fighting on three fronts confronting the whole of Europe, he repeatedly rejected the opportunity to make peace and save his throne, feeling he could not make the necessary concessions. "Your sovereigns, built-in on the throne, tin afford to let themselves be beaten twenty times and withal return to their capitals; I cannot, considering I am a parvenu soldier," he said to the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich.

He went on fighting a boxing that was long lost, desperate for a resounding victory he believed might redeem what, for all the bluster, was his irredeemably depression self-esteem. Ironically, it was simply subsequently he had lost his throne and was even denied the courtesy of being addressed as a monarch past his British jailers on the isle of Saint Helena, that he managed to recover this and project an image of grandeur in defeat that still fascinates people today.

Author and historian Adam Zamoyski has written more than a dozen books on European history, including the best-selling 1812: Napoleon'due south Fatal March on Moscow and his recent acclaimed biography Napoleon: A Life .

History Reads features the work of prominent authors and historians.

quinlivanlicninhat.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.history.com/news/napoleon-bonaparte-downfall-reasons-personality-traits

Share this post