Transcription
He was creative. He was fluid. And he wasn't obsessed with control.
Because life is inherently chaotic and random. Things happen that you never expect. You cannot control.
[Music]
This. I've heard that there is a Napoleon movie coming out. I think Joaquin Phoenix is going to be playing Emperor Napoleon himself. I don't know about the specifics of it. I'm always a bit wary of of these film projects. I hope it's going to be accurate.
The question somebody wanted to know is my relationship to Napoleon and why I devoted really one book to him or or he was sort of the main figure in The 33 Strategies of War. He certainly figures in The 48 Laws of Power. What is my particular interest in Napoleon? And I'll tell you.
You know, in this world, there are a lot of leaders and people who are so bland. They're so corporate. They're so cookie-cutter. They're just like everybody else, right? They have no spirit. They have no drama. They just want to be like everyone else in the world. They want to follow. But other people have done okay.
And in warfare, it's the same dynamic. 99.9% of generals are not creative on any level. They're just very worried. They're very anxious. They're trying to control as much as possible. And suddenly arrives on the scene a young man, Napoleon Bonaparte, who comes from a different background. Although his family originally has aristocratic roots, he grows up very poor on the island of Corsica. He doesn't have any privilege to him. No reason why he should ever be a general because generals came from the aristocracy.
The French Revolution erupts, and he's already in the military as a cadet. And the French Revolution turns everything over. And that old order of things where it's very stodgy, the aristocrats, it's suddenly the world is upside down. And he reveals very early on this powerful sense of boldness and confidence. And you know, we think of people being fearless today or whatever, or generals being great. This man was literally on the battlefield facing bullets flying at his face in battle after battle after battle. Earlier on his career as an artillery corporal, later on as a general, he would lead from the front. He was not afraid of facing battle. He was courageous. He was bold. And he was incredibly creative.
The source of his creativity was this incredible organizational mind. He had a mind almost like a computer in the amount of information he could hold. When he went into battle, he would get every single detail of that battle available to him. He had lines of communication from his lieutenants where real-time things going on on the ground among the soldiers, among the foot soldiers, would reach Napoleon. So he knew everything that was going on actually in the battle. And before the battle, all the different possibilities. He was the Western exemplar of Sun Tzu's idea of maneuver warfare, which I explained very deeply in The 33 Strategies of War.
He was creative. He was fluid. And he wasn't obsessed with control. And that is the main thing that drives me crazy about CEOs, about leaders, about politicians. They want to control everything. And you can't control everything in life. And that sense of wanting to control, like a Vladimir Putin is the ultimate example of that, comes from deep levels of insecurity.
Because life is inherently chaotic and random. Things happen that you never expect. You cannot control. This. The power lies in what I call controlled chaos. You let chaos into your system. You move with it. And you try and adapt it, sub to your plans and to your strategies. Napoleon was the genius of that. He created a system where his armies could answer in the moment to what was happening. The chaos of the battlefield, the famous fog of war, as Clausewitz called it. He could adapt. He could go this way, this way, this way, this way. He wasn't a control freak.
And with this creativity, with this bravery, with this audacity that he had for 10 years, 1796 to 1806 approximately, he led a series of the most amazing battles ever. And if you read about them, pure a war nut like I am, there's a book by David Chandler, it's mostly out of print, called The Campaigns of Napoleon. It's immense. It's this thick. It's like well over a thousand pages. Amazing maps. Every battle is mapped out. Beautiful maps. Goes into every single campaign. Boy, do you really understand the genius of Napoleon when you get finished with that book. But those first 10 years, unbelievable.
And then what happens? He goes into this decline. And the decline is almost as interesting as the rise to power. And it's very human. And it's tragic because millions of young Frenchmen are killed in the course of this decline. All of that creativity and that energy and that chaos, he now becomes somebody who wants to control things because the power goes to his head. He's now an emperor. He turns conservative. He starts wanting to overpower enemies with artillery instead of overpowering them through maneuver. He does a campaign in Spain, which is, as they say, the beginning of the end of Napoleon, where the Spanish kind of grind him down and defeat him, just like Afghanistan did to the Russians and did to us. And then it gets worse and worse and worse. And it eventually leads to his disastrous campaign in Russia. And it leads to the way we all know what happens after that.
It's a very important lesson that your rise to power comes from your ability to let go, to be creative, to let that chaos into your system, to be in the moment, and to create something that is adapted to the situation. But then with power and success comes a conservative instinct that will destroy you. And it destroyed him, tragically. If he could have kept that energy, that revolutionary spirit, history would have been very different.
But he stands so much above all of the blandness in history. The uniforms, the pageantry, the weirdness, all the different battles. It's so dramatic. I really hope this movie captures the essence of Napoleon. That it doesn't fall into the moralizing crap that movies nowadays do, where we have to judge people as good or evil. You know, because Napoleon had a good side and he had a bad side. He was a human being. So I really hope this movie doesn't fall into that that preaching nonsense that drives me crazy. That it tries to capture the full human being that was Napoleon.
I call him the Mozart of warfare, the great genius of war. He completely influenced the future of warfare in a huge sense. The Prussians adapted it. Our military has followed his form of maneuver warfare. He changed the face of war. I really hope the movie captures that spirit because, as you can tell, I'm a Napoleon aficionado, or whatever the word would be. I love Napoleon. So that's my relationship to it.