Trawling through Twitter earlier (I refuse to call it ‘X’ – the same way I still refuse to call Jif ‘Cif’), I noticed that today was Napoleon’s birthday. Seeing as he’s been dead since 1821, it is probably too late to send him a cake. Instead, I thought I’d have an ever-so-mini natter about him on here.
Nelson and Napoleon never met. My feeling is that Nelson saw Napoleon as a bigger enemy than Napoleon saw Nelson, if that makes sense. In fact, during the Peace of Amiens (a lull in the long-winded war between France and Britain), Napoleon reputedly kept a bust of Nelson on his dressing table.
Nelson made plentiful allusions to getting one over on Napoleon, yet comments the other way were minimal. Napoleon’s head and heart – and genius – were always focused on what could be achieved on land. Even Nelson’s rout of the French navy at Trafalgar initially played second fiddle to Napoleon’s land victory at Austerlitz.
The tide eventually changed. When it came to confronting the British at sea, Napoleon conceded that the French had been like an elephant fighting a whale. Years later, as he sailed away to be exiled at St Helena, he reflected that it wasn’t Wellington and Waterloo that had cut short his dreams of a Europe-wide revolution, but his sailors’ failure to get the better of the Royal Navy.
‘Let us be masters of the Channel for six hours,’ he had famously proclaimed in his pomp, ‘and we are masters of the world.’
Nelson never let the birthday boy get anywhere near it.
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Nelson The Sailor 