Why Napoleon was truly the boss from hell - and why that might be the REAL reason he lost at Waterloo... argues top historian ANDREW ROBERTS

When I researched my biography Napoleon The Great in 2014, I read an enormous amount of contemporaneous sources and other material.

But I didn’t have access to all of the vast, 15-volume compendium of more than 40,000 of the emperor’s letters, which was compiled by France’s ‘Fondation Napoleon’ and completed in 2018.

Well, now I have. And their contents showed me a side to the emperor I had not fully comprehended. It turns out that, despite being an inspired leader of ordinary soldiers, when it came to his marshals – the 26 most senior military commanders of his inner circle – Napoleon was a total and utter control freak. To put it simply – he was the boss from hell.

He was such a compulsive micromanager that he concerned himself with the most pettifogging minutiae, such as when a certain group of soldiers should have new eagle buttons on their uniforms, whether an adjutant had the right to wear the ribbon of the Legion d’Honneur, and even the need to open the windows of a particular military hospital in Germany.

In the end, I believe that it was this micromanagement that ultimately helped cost him the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 – because many of his marshals, all immensely talented soldiers in their own right, were by that point refusing to work with him.

As the Duke of Wellington wrote of his enemy: ‘Nothing was too great or too small for his proboscis.’

In short, if you think your employer is bad, spare a thought for those who had to toil under the power-crazed Corsican.

Many of Napoleon’s marshals, the subject of my new book, were household names in France when they were appointed.

Napoleon paid the ultimate price for defeat at Waterloo and was exiled to the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic

Micromanagement ultimately helped cost Napoleon the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, argues historian Andrew Roberts

One was Michel Ney, who years later was to command the rearguard during the notorious ‘Retreat from Moscow’.

Of the 600,000 French troops that bravely marched into Russia, only 100,000 returned. And they had to trudge their way, frozen, diseased and emaciated, through blizzards, fighting off Cossacks as they headed westwards, with Ney leading from the front, slashing and shooting his way through the Russian ranks.

Nicolas Oudinot was no less courageous. He was injured no fewer than 32 times as he took the impact of musket balls, lance points, grapeshot, bayonet thrusts and sabre strokes.

Then there was Louis-Alexandre Berthier, perhaps the greatest chief of staff in history, a man who could put enormous armies onto the battlefield at a moment’s notice… and put up with almost any amount of belittling and condescension from his boss.

Between March 1796 and December 1797 alone, Napoleon sent him 457 letters. This was far more than the general exchanged with his wife Josephine, leading the troops to dub Berthier ‘the Emperor’s Wife’.

No detail was too trifling. One typically pedantic missive ordered Berthier to ensure that ‘the staircase of one of the barracks on the main square of [the Corsican capital of] Ajaccio be adapted’.

When Berthier allowed his younger brother to return to France on leave to attend the birth of his child, Napoleon exploded. ‘I do not want to see him and I will not receive him,’ he raged of his marshal. ‘I regard a general who leaves his troops as dishonoured... My wife could have died in Munich or Strasbourg, that would not have disturbed for a quarter of an hour the execution of my plans.’

Roberts examines how Napoleon's team of rivals helped him rise to power – and then orchestrate his downfall – in his new book Napoleon And His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal

Another of the emperor’s management techniques was the doctrine of divide and rule. ‘You see,’ Napoleon told Tsar Alexander I of Russia in 1807, ‘I am careful to keep my generals at variance among themselves, in order that each may reveal to me the faults of the other.

‘I keep around me a continual jealousy... One day, one thinks himself the favourite, the next day another – so that no one is ever certain of my favour.’

This approach might have been intended to create a team of rivals but instead it created a nest of vipers.

The result was that whenever the emperor was not personally present during a campaign, the marshals fell out with each other, often spectacularly.

There were at least four occasions when marshals drew swords during arguments or challenged each other to duels.

Their lust for glory encouraged them to start battles earlier than agreed, and during the Peninsular War in Portugal and Spain between 1807 and 1814, they point-blank refused to co-operate. Given the agonies their boss put them through, you have to ask why they put up with it all.

The answer is simple: wealth, fame and status. The marshals were immensely glamorous figures in French society, their exploits recorded in bulletins and proclamations that spread their fame nationwide.

They wore impossibly grand uniforms, with gold braid, red silk sashes, huge brocaded collars that came up to their ears and heavily plumed bicorn hats. Several had love lives that rivalled the Rolling Stones on tour in the 1960s.

Joaquin Phoenix played the French emperor in the 2023 film Napoleon

Yet despite Napoleon loading his marshals with grand titles – six became dukes – and vast country estates and beautiful Parisian townhouses, as well as millions of francs in hard cash, only two of the 26 rode with him onto the battlefield of Waterloo on June 18, 1815.

Four had died by then – from cannonballs, drowning and a fall from a high window – but what of the other 20? 

Yes, many would have been put off by the fact that Napoleon had by then spent ten months in exile on the small Mediterranean island of Elba after being defeated by a coalition of European forces.

But within weeks of returning to mainland France, he had once again raised a vast army. So why were so few marshals ready to rally to his flag?

I came to the conclusion that they had simply had enough of a man who was undoubtedly a genius but was also an exhausting individual for whom to work.

The phrases ‘express my dissatisfaction’, ‘convey my disappointment’ and ‘please convey my extreme displeasure’ pepper Napoleon’s correspondence with Berthier, for example, who received more than 5,000 letters in all.

There was something almost pathological about the way that Napoleon expected these men to accept criticism without resentment.

He said of one marshal: ‘When he does something well, I will not say anything; when he does something that displeases me, I will tell him. That is my way of doing things.’

This might have been true – but it was a terrible leadership technique. And there is a lesson there for anyone managing people, from employing a builder to running a business.

In the end, of course, Napoleon paid the ultimate price for his terrible management style: defeat at Waterloo and exile by the British to St Helena, the grim South Atlantic island.

If only he had mastered the art of managing people better – who knows, he might have conquered the entire continent of Europe and our history might have been very different.

Napoleon And His Marshals: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal by Andrew Roberts, published by Allen Lane, is out on October 8