The Great Years: Jena to Wagram, 1806–1809.

A study note dictated at Longwood, the first part of the gap my memoirs leave between Marengo and Elba. I wrote no memoir of these years at the time, and I will not have them told only by others. The years 1810 to 1814 will follow in their place.

1806. The Prussian army thought itself Frederick's school; I had already broken that school at Austerlitz. They marched without waiting for the Russians. On 14 October I beat Hohenlohe at Jena with the main army; at the same hour Davout with his single corps beat the principal Prussian army at Auerstedt. Two battles, one day. I entered Berlin on the 27th. At Potsdam I took Frederick's sword and his sash — the bulletin names them as trophies, and they were. From Berlin I signed the decree of 21 November that declared the British Isles under blockade. The Continental System was my answer to their sea power: if I could not reach their ships, I would reach their trade.

1807. The winter campaign in Poland was another thing. Eylau, on 7 and 8 February, in a snowstorm that froze the blood in the wounds. I did not call it a victory. My bulletin put my losses at 1,900 dead and 5,700 wounded; the real figure was heavier, though I never published a correction. I wrote to Joséphine from the field that the land was covered with dead and wounded, and that the enemy's greater loss did not console me. That is true. The campaign dragged on through spring. Then Friedland, on 14 June, the anniversary of Marengo: I crushed the Russian army. On 25 June I met Tsar Alexander on a raft with a pavilion in the middle of the Niemen at Tilsit. My letter to Talleyrand of that day describes it. The treaties of 7 and 9 July cut Prussia in half, created the Duchy of Warsaw with the Code civil, and made Jérôme King of Westphalia. To Jérôme I wrote on 15 November 1807, sending the constitution: "What the peoples of Germany impatiently desire is that individuals who are not noble and who have talents should have an equal right to your consideration and to office; that every kind of serfdom and intermediate bond between the sovereign and the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished." And again, in the same letter: "The benefits of the Napoleonic Code, public procedure, the establishment of juries, will be so many distinguishing marks of your monarchy." I believed that. The Code was to travel with the tricolour.

At Tilsit I thought I had won Russia as an ally. I wrote to Alexander on 2 February 1808: "An army of 50,000 men, Russian and French and perhaps a few Austrians too, marching by Constantinople into Asia, would not yet have reached the Euphrates before it made England tremble and brought her to her knees before the continent." That was the grand design: to strike at England through India. It came to nothing. At Erfurt in October 1808 Alexander danced while I stood aside — forty is forty, I wrote to Joséphine — and he would not pledge himself against Austria. The alliance was already cracking.

1808. While I negotiated at Erfurt, Spain rose. On 19 July at Bailén a French army under Dupont surrendered in the field for the first time since the Revolution. The news reached me at Erfurt. I should have understood then what Spain would cost me. I did not. I went into Spain myself in November, took Madrid, and thought I had finished it. The war went on another five years.

1809. Austria tried again. I took the army from Spain, fought at Eckmühl, took Vienna, and won Wagram on 5 and 6 July after six weeks on the island of Lobau. My letter of 8 July boasts of 550 guns firing 100,000 rounds. That is a boast, but the guns were real. The armistice of Znaim on 12 July led to the peace of Schönbrunn in October. I made Macdonald, Marmont and Oudinot marshals on the field of Wagram. I married Marie Louise the next year. That was the Empire at its height: from the Elbe to the Tiber, from Hamburg to Rome.

I should have stopped there. But I did not stop.

This is the first part of the gap: the years when I believed I could fix the world with treaties and constitutions, and the flaws were already there. Spain bleeding from 1808. Russia arming. The Continental System hurting my own ports — Hamburg rotting with goods that could not be sold. I dictated no memoir of these years, and no one else shall tell them for me. The rest — the marriage, the son, the Russian road — will follow when I have set it down honestly.