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chapter 2 Napoleonic Friendship at the Top Marshal Lannes, General Duroc, General Junot Alone in his tent, Napoleon sobbed into his soup. A seasoned soldier and military commander, Napoleon had seen thousands of men die in battle during his many bloody campaigns across Europe. Yet his grief over the death of Marshal Jean Lannes during the Austrian Campaign in 1809 was inconsolable. Gravely wounded in the knees on the battlefield at Essling on the far shores of the Danube River near Vienna, Lannes had survived the amputation of his mangled left leg by Napoleon’s chief army surgeon Dominique-Jean Larrey. Larrey’s best e√orts however, could not save Lannes from the excruciating pain and inevitable onset of fever, infection, and gangrene. Following Lannes’s agonizing death on May 31, 1809, Napoleon retreated to his tent where his valet Louis Constant later found the Emperor ‘‘seated, immobile, mute, and staring into space, in front of his hastily prepared meal. Napoleon’s eyes were inundated with tears; they multiplied and fell silently into the soup.’’∞ As Napoleon stared blankly into his bowl, his overwhelming grief spilled out of his weary eyes, down his despondent face, and into his neglected supper. This moving account of the Emperor’s private grief demonstrates his great a√ection for Lannes and his capacity to love and mourn his fellow soldiers and friends. There is overwhelming evidence that Napoleon did not limit his grief for Lannes to the privacy of his own quarters. While one might expect a toughened military leader to hide his feelings from his troops and drown his tears in his soup, Napoleon’s grief for Marshal Lannes took on the very public character of open lamentation. Rather than grieve behind closed doors and conceal his personal vulnerabilities in order to show public strength, Napoleon ’s mourning for his beloved friend became a matter of great public spectacle . Like Achilles mourning his beloved Patroclus, Napoleon wept publicly and openly expressed his a√ection in a way that was widely reported, discussed, and admired by the o≈cers and soldiers in his armies. More than mere tears, Napoleon’s grief over the death of Jean Lannes represented a new military ethos in which even the most hardened soldiers at the very top of the chain of command could express sorrow, tenderness, and a√ection for their military comrades and friends. Napoleon’s relationships with three of his most beloved senior o≈cers— Friendship at the Top: Lannes, Duroc, Junot 41 Marshal Jean Lannes, General Gérard Christophe Duroc, and General JeanAndoche Junot—provide models of Napoleonic friendship at the highest ranks of the Grande Armée. From Napoleon’s grief at the deaths of Lannes and Duroc, to Junot’s inverse fanatical devotion to Bonaparte, these friendships illustrate the Emperor’s a√ection for his men and their cult-like devotion to him. As figures of Napoleonic friendship at the top, these three friendships served as both exemplary and cautionary models for men throughout Napoleon’s armies, from senior and junior o≈cers to sous-o≈ciers and foot soldiers, many of whom emulated these military friendships with their own comrades and wrote about them eloquently in their military memoirs. Napoleon and Lannes Jean Lannes met Napoleon during the Italian Campaign in 1796 when Lannes was a mere colonel (chef de brigade) in the Revolutionary Army and Bonaparte was a young general. The son of a modest laborer and merchant, Lannes was born in 1769—the same year as Napoleon—and joined the Revolutionary Army in 1792 as a young volunteer. Having distinguished himself in the first Italian Campaign (1796–97), the Egyptian Campaign (1798–99), and the second Italian Campaign (1800), Lannes rose rapidly to the rank of general. Despite a military misappropriations scandal in 1801 for which the First Consul exiled Lannes to an ambassadorial post in Portugal (1802–4), the new Emperor promoted Lannes in 1804 to marshal, the highest rank in the imperial armies. And for Lannes’s victory over the Austrians in Italy on June 9, 1800, Napoleon later named him Duc de Montebello in 1808. In addition to these early victories , Lannes was instrumental in Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz (1805) and during the Prussian and Polish Campaigns (1806–7), Iberian Campaign (1808– 9), and Austrian Campaign (1809). Lannes was Napoleon’s friend of sixteen years, one of his most talented military leaders, and a decorated soldier who had been wounded an extraordinary thirteen times in...

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