1794, the future of France is here and it’s…
[A crowd of Parisians hoist the guillotine, singing a tune from the Scarlet Pimpernel]
It’s rough.
It’s real rough.
Citizens of Paris were executed for the crime of being nervous about all the executions,
and I didn’t even get to mention the casualties of the ongoing civil wars in the provinces
or the thousands of people killed by mass drowning.
“Do you hear that?
That’s the sound of forgiveness” “That’s the sound of people drowning, Jean Baptiste
de Carrier” “That is what forgiveness sounds like.
Screaming and then silence”
Things continued to get worse until eventually a certain national barber threatened to execute
the entire government and the government finally decided it was time to do something about
him.
So hip hip hurrah, but uh… now what.
[intro]
This video is sponsored by MagellanTV, a documentary streaming service made by filmmakers for filmma-
wait no, for you!
There’s a lot of chapters of Napoleon’s life I’ve had to cut out in the interest
of time and one of those is the story of how he caught the attention of the committee of
public safety, which 9 times out of 10 is a bad thing but not when you recapture the
city of Toulons!
I am once again recommending Warriors, which has got to be my favorite series on the platform,
I’m so bummed I’ve covered 5 out of 6 episodes already!
They have one on Napoleon that does such a good job of capturing the tension of the reign
of terror, and the ways in which Napoleon was a real, ordinary guy even while puffing
himself up as a hero and it’s crazy to think this was just a few years before becoming
emperor.
You can watch it for free with a 30-day trial at try.MagellanTV.com/jackrackam and while
I'm here they have an excellent documentary on the battle of Trafalgar as well.
Cheers!
Well first things first they had to dump all the blame onto Robespierre, can’t have anyone
thinking there was more than one person responsible for the actions taken by a republic after
all, just imagine if the people discovered that the government was still run by the same
people who voted to execute the proudest voices of the revolution.
No no, instead the government is going to rebrand once again and put five directors
in charge so that no one can go off the deep end and take all of France with him.
But without a clear leader at the helm, the new government had no idea what direction
to go, but maybe centrism is okay for now, everybody just wanted a break from Jacobins
and Monarchists killing each other, as long as they got food on their plate.
Oh except the directory removed the price cap on food so prices skyrocketed, which is
the exact thing that got this whole thing started in the first place!
The government tries shutting down the political clubs so people will stop getting so political
about starving to death, but all they manage to do is piss off everybody on both sides!
Guess what folks it’s the start of the revolution all over again!
Tired of your old 1789-94 revolution, why not trade up for the newest model!
It’s got everything you’ve come to expect: riots in the streets, massacres in the prisons,
civil war, and for a limited time, ask about this dude named after a Roman plotting an
underground proto-communist conspiracy!
It was a day like any other when a bunch of pissed off royalists from the provinces came
flooding into Paris led by this pirate-looking dude who was famous for making owl noises.
The director Paul Barras hunkers down with the rest of the directory in the old royal
palace, biting his nails because if the last eighteen uprisings are anything to go by he’s
currently sitting in the least secure place in the city.
The revolution (or what’s left of it) could die here and now.
He has no choice but to leave the future of France in the hands of a young commander who
happened to be in town.
“Vive le roi!
Vive le roi! [tawny owl noises]!”
“Kaboom”
It was a massacre.
Overnight this low-ranking officer who’d been spending his time writing crappy self-insert
romance novels became a national hero and Barras goes “Mister Buonaparte, you have
saved the people of France!
Here, you’re from Italy right -” “Well, a-Corsica but-” “Your accent says enough,
here’s an army, we need you to invade Italy, bon chance!”
Well luckily, it turns out Napoleon Bonaparte was an all right general.
His basic strategy was to win the war not with his men’s bayonets, but with their
feet.
He moved incredibly quickly, scavenging for food along the way, allowing him to get in
behind the enemy and force a huge battle when they least expect it, thereby knocking one
of his opponents out of the war before their allies ever got the chance to help out.
But the real secret sauce was his PR.
Napoleon wouldn’t have made it this far if he simply won battles, he made sure everyone
knew he was an inscrutable genius who balked at authority and led his men to glory no matter
the odds, and in Italy he would bring triumph to the motherland and forge a new era in Europe!
In reality, I mean he was tactically brilliant and incredibly charismatic, but he basically
improv’ed his way through the war and just took any opportunity that looked good to him.
Napoleon chased the Austrians out of Italy and went “I’m here, I’ve got all the
guns… hey who wants to make a new country!”
Kinda did the same thing in Egypt, Nelson shredded his entire fleet so Napoleon goes
“Welp, I guess I’m stuck being-a king of Egypt for a while.”
And then he straight up ditches the war in Egypt and goes home without telling anyone,
then shows up in France like “What’s up, check this out!
Huge victory, the biggest, don’t read-a the newspapers.”
And well, Egypt might not have been a success, but frankly the rest of the war of the second
coalition has been an even bigger failure in his absence.
Everybody Napoleon “liberated” in Italy got recaptured by the Austrians, and uh the
French government is collapsing.
In fact as soon as Napoleon arrives in Paris, one of the directors pulls him aside to say
Sieyes: “Hey, these guys are on their way out, I say we make a new government.
I need the goodwill of the people and I need the army, you’ve got both”
Napoleon: “What’s in it for me?”
Sieyes: “Directory goes bye-bye, consulship goes hi-hi.
I’ll need someone to share power with.”
Napoleon: “I see… just you and me, splitting power?”
Sieyes: “Well there would be three people, but -”
Napoleon: “What?
Three people?”
Sieyes: “Yeah, first consul, second consul, third consul-”
Napoleon: “No no no, no third consul!”
Sieyes: “What do you mean no third consul?”
Napoleon: “That’s not what a consulship is, that’s a triumvirate”
Sieyes: “Well what’s wrong with a triumvirate?
Lots of people have made triumvirates over the years!”
Napoleon: “And-a did it ever work for-a those people?”
Sieyes: “Pfft, no, it never does, one person always ends up becoming a dictator or an emperor,
y’know they somehow delude themselves into thinking it might be different, but… but
it might work for us.”
Napoleon: “I’m in.”
And so one fateful morning, Napoleon’s brother Lucien tells everyone that there’s a Jacobin
uprising about to take place and everyone needs to take shelter, and who better to defend
the government than the man who saved the revolution.
All he’ll need is complete control of the armed forces in Paris.
But as the hours stretch on Napoleon’s general arrests a couple of directors, Congress starts
to realize it’s not the Jacobins who’re planning this coup.
In an effort to gain a hold of the situation, Napoleon strides into the lower chamber with
an indomitable spirit, and everyone inside goes “Get him!” and they beat the crap
out of him.
Lucky for Napoleon his brother gets him out safely, and while the men inside are passing
a motion to make Napoleon an outlaw, Lucien lays him down at the feet of the guards and
cries “My boy!
Look what they’ve done to my boy!
Congress is being held hostage by conspiracists, they must be disbanded!
For the safety of France!
...Okay you owe me big time”
The coup goes according to plan, and boy howdy, who would’ve thought, one of the consuls
ended up with significantly more power than the other two, and guess who that would be!
At which point Napoleon speedruns his way to monarchy, “Hey everybody, who thinks
I should be consul for life!
I’ll know who you are if you say no!”
The best part comes after Napoleon survives a couple assassination attempts and thinks
to himself, “Hmm…
I may be the supreme leader for life, but if I died people might try to put the Bourbons
back in charge, right?”
“Right you are, sir, your safety is of the utmost importance” “But you know what
might-a stop that?
What if, hear me out, what if… my family… were written into the constitution as supreme
leaders for life” “...sounds a lot like a king-” “No no no, as an emperor, totally
different!” “...[sigh] I guess it sounds better than anarchy.
Just don’t overdo it-”
“Behold your new Augustus!
The heir to Charlemagne!
Emperor of France, King of Italy, and Master of all Europe!
From this moment hence, I am France!”
Time for more war!
After that last assassination attempt Napoleon has his men charge into Germany to kidnap
some old French Duke who wasn’t even involved and plop him down in front of a firing squad,
which was very not cool and the rest of Europe had a bone to pick with this dude.
This was their chance for revenge!
The Allies lost so badly that the Holy Roman Empire exploded.
Just, poof!
Thousand years of history, gone.
Now to take care of Britain, oh wait, Fourth Coalition!
Prussia wasn’t happy with Napoleon making satellite states in Germany so it’s time
for revenge!
“Okay, Napoleon, maybe if we didn’t shake up continental politics everytime we won a
war, they wouldn’t keep coming back for revenge-” Napoleon crushes them before anyone
else has time to intervene.
Back to Britain!
“Your majesty, our navy is in no position to win a naval battle any time soon after
the Trafalgar incident”
Nelson: "Cowabungaaaa!"
Napoleon:“Not to worry, I have a plan.
We shall conquer the ocean… on land.
All we have to do is force everyone on the continent to stop trading with Britain and
they’ll choke.”
“Sir-” “I know.
It’s big.
It’s ballsy.
It just might work.”
except it didn’t.
Portugal immediately noped out of that one, but hey, Napoleon’s crushed his enemies
before, what’s one more?
“Two more” “Two more?”
“We’re at war with Spain” “Spain is our ally!”
“Was our ally, monsieur.
As you’re well aware, the situation in Spain was... turbulent.”
“The king was unpopular and his son replaced him, no?”
“Yes, but they both came to me for help.”
“And so you chose the son who was very popular and would depend on you for power for the
rest of his life.
Napoleon...”
“They wanted me to choose a king, and I chose my brother!
And then they betrayed me.”
Fifth coalition!
Austria’s back for revenge!
Again!
Napoleon smashes them and steals 20% of their population, “At least marry a princess so
we can pretend to be on good terms.”
“Fine! ya sh*t-stocking” “I heard that!”
Napoleon is now in charge of nearly everything from Spain to Poland, but there’s uprisings
everywhere.
Russian Tsar Alexander I takes one look at the situation and, considering what happens
to Napoleon’s friends, *cough* Spain *cough*, he decides now is a good time to stop being
Napoleon’s friend.
He starts trading with Britain again and Napoleon can’t take that lying down so he decides
that what he still hasn’t managed to do in Portugal, he can easily do in Russia simultaneously,
but the Russians are wise to Napoleon’s tricks.
They cull the countryside of anything forageable, Napoleon’s men are dropping like flies,
and even when he finally makes it to Moscow-
[the sound of Moscow burning] Officer: “Well… at least it’s warmed
up.”
There’s no choice but to retreat, and by the time he crosses the border, his grand
army of 400,000 has been reduced to 10,000.
And the rest of Europe?
They like those odds.
Within months, a new alliance was forged between Russia, Prussia, Austria, Spain, Portugal,
Sweden, and of course Great Britain.
Finally placed on the back foot, Napoleon’s old strategies are failing him.
There are no vanquished foes to feed the war machine, no foreign lands to pillage, no way
to force apart the allies, all he can muster are Pyrrhic victories but France has given
all she can give.
Paris is captured and Napoleon is told he’ll still be an emperor, but not in France.
He’s sent to the little island of Elba and kept under watch.
In France, the Bourbons are back, baby.
Twenty-some years and a million corpses later it’s another Louis back in action.
The Allies are determined: there will be no empire, no emperor, not even a memory.
If they can help it, the man who conquered half of Europe will have no legacy, not even
as a martyr.
But of course, they could never succeed, the HRE was gone for good, Italian and Polish
nationalism were on the rise, and all across Europe the seeds had been planted for the
revolutions of 1848.
Oh yeah and Napoleon came back in less than a year.
He steals across the sea in a boat with a thousand men and marches towards Paris.
He meets the king’s men one misty morning and approaches them alone.
“Citizen Bonaparte, on charges of insurrection…
d’aww just messing with you, welcome back big guy!” and this kept happening!
Wave after wave, every time the army was supposed to arrest him they switched sides and brought
Napoleon right back to his throne in Paris without firing a single shot.
The Allies scramble to respond, and though France was in no better shape, things were
set up just as Napoleon liked them, with the whole world against him.
Before Europe could mobilize together, he would first cut off the British and stomp
out his enemies one by one.
But the British hold firm, Napoleon knows the taste of defeat and for the first time…
he hesitates.
The Prussians arrive in time to route the French and Napoleon pleads
“Okay, okay, we’ll give the empire to my son, yeah?
Or how about I go to the US?
I could be a farmer in Louisiana!
Please, I’ll even take New Jersey!”
"...shoot.
Guess it beats the guillotine.”