The Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte: Volume 2: The Fall

By Robert B AspreyLittle, Brown, stg£25

The Man who broke Napoleon's Codes: The Story of George Scovell

By Mark UrbanFaber & Faber, stg£17

In 1800 the image of the modern man was a soldier of France. From field marshal to conscript, the French were faster, stronger and more clever than their opponents; they did not march, they flew.

With their backs to the wall, and abandoned by the majority of the old officer corps, the French army had beaten off the combined forces of Austria, Russia and Britain, and saved the Revolution.

The success of this citizen army made a mockery of claims by nobles to have a particular vocation for the military life. The French army was a meritocracy; Louis-Lazare Hoche had started as a stable boy and died a general commanding an army. Every conscript could aspire to emulate him or even Napoleon Bonaparte, who went on from generalship to lead the Republic and eventually found an empire.

In the next six years the armies of France would defeat every army in Europe. Compared to this glory, the old elites of Europe were pitiful failures.

By 1815, these elites had thrown up a set of heroes to contest the image of the armed revolutionary. The dashing Alexander, Tsar of Russia, personally leading his troops into Paris, rescued the idea of kingship. He was a far better image than the overweight and indolent Louis XVI who had lost his kingdom and his life.

Germany had found a new generation of tough professionals such as Scharnhorst and Clausewitz to restore the reputation of Prussian arms humbled at Jena. The biggest cast of conservative heroes was provided by Britain.

William Pitt had defined the wars against revolutionary France and then Napoleon as an ideological crusade, a struggle between two opposing ideals. Nelson and his captains, his band of brothers, were the first men to embody the conservative hero.

Tory to his backbone, ostentatiously loyal to the unpopular George III and proud of his eccentricities, Nelson created the role of the conservative paladin. After Nelson's glorious death at Trafalgar, the Anglo-Irish Arthur Wellesley, later Lord Wellington, became the model of the old guard.

Wellington created the aloof, ironic, detached demeanour that would characterise conservative chic for 200 years. His victory at Waterloo brought an end to decades of revolution.

Both Robert Asprey and Mark Urban help us to understand this period of conservative reassertion. Asprey's book is the more conventional of the two. A military man by profession, he organises his account of the fall of Napoleon as a narrative of military overstretch from 1806 to his death.

Asprey is very much a partisan of Bonaparte. He sees him as the legatee of the Enlightenment, the man who destroyed an outdated and oppressive feudal order. The fall of Bonaparte is therefore a tragedy.

He argues that Bonaparte was undone by his ambition to destroy British economic power. His strategy of closing the ports of Europe to British goods drove him to endless expansion. There was always another border to cross, another port to close, until he found himself at war with every state.

Even if he had managed to conquer every state and close every port, the strategy could not have worked. Only Britain could supply the colonial goods that had become necessities for the population of Europe, and even in France smuggling was rampant.

No matter how well Bonaparte waged war, he could not escape the demands of a modern economy. His inevitable defeat ushered in a conservative reaction.

One of the rocks that shattered Bonaparte was the Iberian peninsula. He never understood that he had provoked national uprisings in Spain and Portugal through his efforts at creating new kingdoms for members of his families.

One side of Mark Urban's study of George Scovell is a fairly standard account of the military campaigns conducted by Anglo-Portuguese forces, along with their Spanish guerrilla allies, against Napoleonic troops from 1809 to 1813.

As you would expect of someone who has been rocketed in the Gulf and shot at in Kosova, Urban does a very good job of communicating the experience of soldiers giving and returning fire. He makes something of a speciality of descriptions of assaults on towns and fortresses, dwelling on the carnage in the breaches as troops make the final assault.

The Peninsular War was a chaos of confused command structures, strategic mistakes and the bloody horrors of civil war, and Urban reduces this complexity to some kind of order.

But the most interesting part of this book is not the description of battle but the analysis of a relationship. Scovell was not an aristocrat. A cockney by birth, he had been apprenticed to an engraver and had only become a soldier as a volunteer in the Warwickshire fencibles (reserve cavalry) in the invasion scare of 1800.

Military life captivated this intelligent and competent man, and he abandoned the security of civilian life to take up a commission in the 4th Dragoons. Scovell was, ironically, the mirror image of the new volunteer French officers. He was intelligent, diligent and took on the awkward tasks that more traditional officers would have avoided.

In the first British expedition to Iberia, under General Moore in 1809, Scovell had the task of organising the Corps of Guides. These were the local mercenaries employed to scout out the ground and provide intelligence for the army. Scovell acquired this necessary but unglamorous task because he spoke four languages and was a brilliant organiser. He dreamed of earning glory, not inheriting it, and sought out where he could display his talents.

Arthur Wellesley could not have differed more from the enthusiastic Scovell. Wellesley thought any display, particularly of talents, to be vulgar. The offspring of a military family, he took his position of command as an absolute right. He had little time for meritocracy and despised reform.

He distrusted artillery and engineering officers -- in fact any officer with technical abilities -- as potential revolutionaries with no connection to property, meaning landed wealth.

For Wellesley, an officer was valued because of his social position, and he built his network of trusted colleagues out of a supply of young, landed aristocrats. Wellesley was all silence and immobility by comparison with the busy Scovell.

His style of command reflected his temper. He was a brilliant defensive general. He sought out positions where he could draw the French forces onto him and defeat them through dogged resistance. He was to all appearances conservative all the way down, in demeanour, social habits and fighting style.

Mark Urban's fascinating story reveals how much that conservative style was a performance, the extent to which the inscrutable aristocrat depended on the struggling 'meritocrat'.

Wellesley barely recognised Scovell but completely relied on him to run the Peninsular Army's communications. Most dramatically, Wellesley owed his greatest victories at Vitoria and Salamanca to Scovell's ability to decipher French military codes, particularly the 'Great Paris Cipher', used for the most secret communications and assumed to be unbreakable.

Wellesley outmanoeuvred his French opponents and set up his defensive walls because he knew what they were trying to do. All the inscrutable doggedness in the world would have been useless without the despised technician's abilities. The real relationship between Scovell and Wellesley reflects the fictional relationship between Steven Maturin and Jack Aubery in Patrick O'Brian's novels. In both cases the more intelligent and reflective technician has to play second fiddle, in Maturin's case literally, to the socially predominant conservative.

Both the fiction and the history have important things to tell us about the manner in which Britain survived revolutionary challenge. The forces that promoted revolution in France -- meritocracy, ambition, new kinds of knowledge -- were captured and harnessed to a revived conservatism in Britain.

The Iron Duke, as he became known, was not above accepting the demands of efficiency which he claimed to reject.

When Major-General Charles Stewart, brother of Castlereagh, socially impeccable and completely stupid, nearly destroyed the British cavalry once too often, he found himself promoted to a position of irrelevance by Wellesley, a manoeuvre that became known as the 'Stewart method'.

Wellesley could not become an English Bonaparte, who had started as an artillery officer. He had to stand for different values.

Byron said of the supposedly radical Thomas Moore that he loved a lord. The great achievement of the British elite was to find a way to make themselves loveable. What Mark Urban reveals to us is part of the machinery behind that performance.

Dr James Livesey teaches cultural history at Trinity College Dublin