Napoleon’s War Crimes – Why Was He Never Punished?
When we think of Napoleon, we might envision the great victory at Austerlitz or his crushing defeat at Waterloo. Some might even recollect his vain attempt to defeat Russia, losing his army while retreating from the burnt ruins of Moscow. Others might laude his reforms in the fields of society and law which have shaped our modern western world. Most probably will think of him as being a small person with an inferiority complex.
However, the sheer cruelty of the wars he pushed on Europe, Asia and Northern Africa, as well as on the French colonies, are all but forgotten. Indeed, most of his contemporaries, including French who have suffered under the French Revolution and his regime, despised him. Napoleon’s armies committed atrocities, including the slaughter of whole towns and villages, sparing nobody. Raping and looting was commonplace. Public torture of captioned enemy soldiers and officials, including their wives and children, was normal. All these crimes would be considered war crimes nowadays, leading to the prosecution of those who have participated in them, especially leaders – like Napoleon.
Even though Napoleon and his legacy were meet with levels of hatred in the 19th century that only compare to the despise we nowadays have for Hitler, Stalin, Mao and their likes, Napoleon was never put on trial for these acts; to the contrary, Napoleon was forced to surrender to his enemies twice: both times, the coalition fighting him, including Russia, the United Kingdom, Austria and Prussia refrained from putting Napoleon on trial for this events but even allowed him to live a life of luxury, first on Elba and then on St. Helena in the Southern Atlantic. The coalition finally did not send him to this isolate place as a punishment but to prevent him from returning to France for another round. Note that they refrained from killing him outright, which would have been the more efficient solution to this problem.
That being said, let’s have a look at some of the events that contemporaries would have associated with Napoleon:
I. The Siege of Jaffa and Other Atrocities
On March 7, 1799, the French Army under the command of Napoleon himself was able to capture the City of Jaffa in Palestine during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. A two day massacre commenced, leading to the murder of countless civilians and captured enemy soldiers. At some point, the officers ordered their troops to use their bayonets to save ammunition. Captured civilians and soldiers were brought to the beach, where they were surrounded by French troops who stabbed them to death. Needless to say, women and girls usually faced an even more brutal fate, being raped, regardless the age. At one point, as it was common, the victorious troops started to barter with captured women and other spoils of war. Napoleon saw this activity as a thread to the army’s discipline since his soldiers started to fight over the poor women and ordered the women to be collected at the hospital’s courtyard. Once there, by his order, they were shoot.
Another example is the siege of Tarragona. When the walls of the Spanish city were breached on June 29, 1811, the French Army of Aragon under the command of Louis Gabriel Suchet killed all defenders and numerous civilians, leading to around 15.000 deaths.
Next to these sieges, villages identified with the resistance against French occupation were destroyed as well, with every building burned and every inhabitant killed, including women and children. Often, local resistance at one place would spark campaigns by the French troops that would destroy the surrounding area. When the French Army was forced to retreat, villages and other infrastructure would be destroyed and the inhabitants killed – only scorched earth to be left.
Besides these eruptions of violence, violence was a normal part of the day to day of the occupying armies: Caught partisans or people who had resisted the French’s orders were tortured in public. Raping and looting committed by soldiers were common, especially when the army was on the move and civilians were ordered to take in soldiers and provide them with food. There is a reasons why the Third Amendment of the US Bill of Rights prohibits and restricts soldiers being quartered in any civilian house.
In all fairness, atrocities were committed by all parties of this war; The coalition’s forces also massacred sieged cities and French armies were faced with civilians, partisans, who fought them and were indistinguishable from any other civilian. They would brutally torture and murder any French soldier caught, including their families who would often accompany them. Also, locals who supported the French would face the same fate, their mutilated bodies put on trees for everybody to see. Last but not least, in the final years of Napoleon’s rule when the coalition’s forces put foot on French soil, they would show exactly the same cruel behavior as occupying force.
II. Why was Napoleon never Punished?
After all these atrocities, why were Napoleon – or any of his generals and supporters – never punished or put in front of a court? Why was there never a Nuremberg trial or a Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, even though the atrocities would warrant such nowadays? The answer is quite simple: The idea of sovereignty and statehood, derived from absolutism, prevented such. The very idea of war crimes – even though there was a generally acknowledged code of conduct in war at this time – is indeed a concept of the late 19th and early 20th century, foreign to those living, fighting and dying in the early 19th century. Nobody would have expected to be tried in court for committing such, except, in rare cases, by their own government and their own government alone.
To understand this issue, we have to talk a little bit about international law and domestic or national law. When the medieval age came to a close, there was no distinction between law within a nation and the law between nations, simply because there were no nation states as we know them today but a set of individual relationships and connections between groups, nobles and the church. Any law was understood as being derived from God; any leader was expected to follow these laws and whoever would violate them would be brought down; needless to say that the church wielded huge influence on politics and often acted as mediator in disputes. The church was the final instance that would settle any dispute, her decisions enforced by the temporal lords and nobles.
However, with the reformation and the loss of the church’s unity in Europe, the Catholic church lost this central function and an age of ultraviolence ensued, where kings and local nobles would fight over influence and religious believes, culminating with the 30 years’ war. Nowadays forgotten to most, this war was so brutal and inhuman, that probably no other war can match it. In the end, more of a third of nowadays Germany’s population, which was the primary theatre of war, was dead.
With the end of the war, a new order for Europe had emerged, the so called Westphalian system or ius publicum europaeum. The cornerstone of this system was the idea of sovereign states, then embodied by the sovereign ruler, the absolutist monarch. The sovereign ruled over his territory alone and free from any supervision; he was responsible to no one. Thus, absolutism derives from the term de legibus absolutus, free from law. This lead to the common idea that sovereigns would respect the other sovereigns rule and meet him as equal in war, not as an wicked and evil hostile that deserved destruction. Even though all armies committed atrocities, every sovereign could rest assured that he or his supporters would not be punished or treated unjust. It was his sole responsibility to deal with any atrocity that happened under his supervision. He might lose influence or territory in war but never his status as a sovereign. Thus, the idea of organized punishment of a sovereign for atrocities committed was unthinkable, because this would have trespassed on his sovereignty. This maybe sounds strange, but this indeed helped to restrain the scope of war: Since every sovereign knew that he would not face death or prosecution, he was more willing to limit war and adhere to a certain code of conduct. The worst that could happen was the loss of territory, influence and prestige, nothing that warrants a total war. Moreover, any sovereign wanted to keep a balance between the great powers of Europe, which guaranteed his own survival. It was better to live and let live than running a deadly battle royal. These restrictions and ideas would prevent another 30 years’ war until World War I.
Napoleon, obviously, tested the limits of the Westphalian system, especially since he was a newcomer to the world of dynastic monarchs. However, the ultimate winners of this conflict, being absolutist monarchs, adhered to the system and spared Napoleon’s and his supporters’ lives. Thus, there were never any trials or punishments enacted against them for things they did under Napoleon’s rule. Sure, some of his supporters who had switched side to Napoleon were executed for treason by their former masters and others had to relinquish territory they had been granted by Napoleon, but there was no organized prosecution or trials. The fact that Napoleon was banished to St. Helena was indeed an anomaly, since usually the winners would respect the sovereign’s rule and not force him to abdicate.
The Westphalian system collapsed finally with World War I, when the winners tried to blame the war on the defeated; this was the consequence of this war being charged with ideology, being escalated to a total war. At this moment, the total war was born and punishment for the losing sovereign and his supporters, for better or worse, became possible again.
Special thanks to Philip Dwyer’s “'It Still Makes Me Shudder': Memories of Massacres and Atrocities during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars”.