He summoned the best minds and talents from all over Europe into his service, and his court was deliberately peopled with able young men – rising stars – from all over the lands of his vast hegemony: Dutch, German, Italian and even Polish “auditors” worked in the highest offices of his imperial civil service and served – often with valour and distinction - in the ranks of his Grande Armée. He was a great admirer of the great German poet Goethe, even offering his the post of poet laureate of the Empire. He was an early and often ferocious proponent of Jewish liberation and integration, levelling the walls of ghettos wherever his armies passed. He had ruled Egypt for a short time and took an interest in Islamic culture. To Napoleon, however, this proved not only just how cruel the British were, but how very odd: “The English have lost.3,000 horses, which they slaughtered themselves, according to their bizarre custom.” He was convinced he was dealing with something alien and unhinged.
More had to be killed on the beaches at La Coruña, something which upset the hardened British soldiers deeply, and many memoirs recount that “the incessant cracking of hussars’ pistols, as the unfortunate chargers were shot was the thing the lingered longest in their memories of all the sounds of those unhappy days.” As he drove the British army out of Spain in the first weeks of 1809, and finally closed in under what was left of the redcoats on the beaches near La Coruña in the country’s far north-west, he witnessed a small incident that opens a window on his mind.Īs the horses of the retreating British fell victim to disease and exhaustion, their riders shot their mounts by the roadside to prevent them falling into enemy hands.
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