Europe has much to learn from the Battle of Waterloo

As Thursday’s 200^th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo approached, an old pal of impeccably leftwing views gave me a copy of Andrew Roberts’s new biography of Napoléon. In doing so he apologised because Roberts, though a talented and successful historian, is also a boisterous cheerleader for rightwing causes. “But he writes well.”

And so he does. Mark Mazower’s Guardian review is one on many lauding Napoléon the Great. But Roberts is a Tory of Napoleonic physique who can comfortably embrace great man theory. What still puzzles me is why lefties like my pal (does he remember giving me another Bonaparte biography 20 years ago?) still nurture an approving soft spot for Boney?

The superficial affirmative answer is obvious. Emerging from obscurity in Corsica, the young general swept all before him, overthrew ancient and despotic regimes, put a reactionary Catholic church in its place, liberated the oppressed and imposed a modern legal code on vast swathes of Europe, albeit at the point of a sword. His legacy lives on in the lives, as well as the imaginations, of men and women (though his civil codes did not treat the latter well).

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall are marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo by visiting one of its key sites on Wednesday. Charles and Camilla, alongside Belgium’s Princess Astrid, will tour Hougoumont Farm, a complex of buildings that played a crucial role in Wellington and the allies’ victory over Napoléon.

It was this Bonaparte to whom Beethoven dedicated his Third Symphony. But, as everyone knows, the composer also got it right when he later withdrew the dedication after the first consul of France made himself emperor (“so he is no more than a common mortal…” a tyrant in the making).

And so it proved. You can variously apportion blame for 25 years of warfare following the French revolution of 1789, but 5 million Europeans died – here’s one summary of the butcher’s bill – including at least a million Frenchmen. France’s demographic profile has never recovered: twice the size of Britain, but roughly the same population today, as had never been the case before 1800. Bonaparte’s genius for war and, increasingly, his addiction to it as his central strategy was a major contributory factor.

As we constantly see in our own times, knowing when to stop is a vital component of military, political and commercial affairs. Oliver Cromwell, the only republican military dictator this country has experienced, is also admired on the left (I admire him myself), but was a more reluctant ruler, one with a good handbrake, both at home and abroad. Voters can often keep autocrats in check as Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has just been reminded. Tyrants can only discipline themselves.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

At this point the contrast with Napoléon’s nemesis on the pastures south of Brussels on 18 June 1815 is instructive. The Duke of Wellington was an Anglo-Irish Tory, colourful enough as a character (his robust selection of quotes in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations stand the test of time very well), a consistently successful commander, but lacking Bonaparte’s multi-faceted brilliance. I like to regard his victory in what was their first direct encounter as the triumph of character over genius. Napoléon dismissed Wellington as “a bad general”. Wellington did not reciprocate the error and, besides, he had Blücher’s Prussians closing in.

But Wellington was also a politician, not such a successful one. As prime minister (our only general to occupy No 10) during turbulent times from 1828 to 1830, he carried Catholic emancipation, an important modernisation (he fought a duel over it), but resisted urgent parliamentary reform, what became the Great Reform Act of 1832. Yet, as Bertrand Russell once wrote – to illustrate progress in human affairs –the greatest soldier of his day did not lift an unconstitutional finger against it when the popular will finally prevailed.

So Wellington had a handbrake, as Napoléon did not. The emperor’s reckless return from exile on Elba – the Hundred Days’ campaign that ended at Waterloo – gave final proof. It cost France lives and hard-won territory since 1792 (peace negotiators at the congress of Vienna had been quite generous up to then). It also condemned much of Europe to decades of paranoid political reaction. Before the onset of the reformist 1830s, even in relatively liberal Britain the Manchester massacre at Peterloo (1819) followed Waterloo (and led to the founding of the Guardian).

But if the left sometimes indulges Napoléon the warlord, the Euro-phobe right is making a complete shambles of the meaning of Waterloo two centuries on. Just as the jingoists annually turn the evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940 into a sentimental mish-mash (“wars are not won by evacuations,” Churchill dryly observed at the time) so it currently presents Waterloo as a purely British victory, copyright Daily Mail.

It duly hopes that David Cameron’s ill-judged “renegotiations” will deliver another Waterloo to the EU tyranny located 10 kilometres up the Waterloo road at its Brussels HQ .

But such talk is not the lesson of Waterloo, far from it. The flight from Elba had galvanised the stalled Vienna conference (“what we need is Bonaparte to escape” someone joked until he did) where the great powers each agreed to commit large armies to his defeat. Napoléon planned to divide and defeat them one by one, starting with the British and Prussians in what is now Belgium.

Having pushed back both armies in prior skirmishes he attacked Wellington on 18 June. There are thousands of accounts of the most famous and decisive battle of the 19^th century – including those by Victor Hugo and Thackeray. Here’s Wiki’s basic summary.

By the end of the century, when Bismarck’s Prussia was shaping up for its own bid for domination of the continent, it became fashionable in Germany to call Waterloo a “German victory”. Wellington had later been ungenerous to the late afternoon intervention by the Prussians in his own day. And, of course, as every Frenchman still believes deep down, Napoléon really won. The battleground souvenir shop reflected that view the last time I was there.

We could argue for ever about such things. Wellington was the allied commander who chose to offer battle on terrain of his own choosing at Waterloo and won, though it was touch and go. Only when the French imperial guard’s attack finally faltered, then retreated before a British general advance, came the rightly famous moment that marked the end of the first empire and the revolutionary era.

Not only was Blücher’s Prussian intervention on Wellington’s left pretty important, but the French advance was stopped in the centre of the battleground for most of the day at the farmhouse and orchard known as La Haye Sainte by other Germans. Cambridge historian Prof Brendan Simms has just issued a short account, The Longest Afternoon, arguing that the 400 men who held the farm “decided the battle of Waterloo”. They were mostly Germans, members of King George III’s Hanover-based King’s German Legion (KGL). Their role was acknowledged at the time, though later succumbed to Anglo-German rivalry.

In fact, if we set aside the 50,000 Prussians, Wellington’s army was only 36% British – including lots of Irish – with 13% Dutch and almost half Germans of one kind or another, including 6,000 men (10%) of the KGL.

No wonder former defence chief Lord Bramall called Waterloo “the first Nato operation”. Even more remarkable is the fact that Byron refers to the “united nations” in the Waterloo passage of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a point picked up by well-read Winston Churchill when discussing the allied war aims after Pearl Harbor.

They became the Declaration of the United Nations of January 1 1942, forerunner of the UN. That’s the real lesson of Waterloo. Not national chauvinism, however tempting, but international cooperation to keep the peace.

Far from being the Napoleonic tyrant of Fleet St oligarch imaginings, the EU is rather fragile. It doesn’t have an army, has a struggling currency and hesitates to knock the skin off a Greek rice pudding.