Napoleon Called Torture Worthless—But Did He Stop It?

On November 11, 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte sat in Egypt and wrote something remarkable. In a letter to his chief of staff, General Louis Alexandre Berthier, he condemned torture as both barbarous and useless. "The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished," he wrote. His reasoning? Torture victims "say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."

This wasn't flowery philosophy—it was a direct military order. Napoleon called the practice contrary to "reason and humanity," arguing that beaten prisoners would confess to anything just to make the pain stop. Worthless intelligence, in other words.

The Mind of a Military Pragmatist

What's fascinating is that Napoleon opposed torture on practical grounds as much as moral ones. He wasn't making a human rights speech—he was telling his generals they were wasting their time. False confessions extracted under duress don't win wars. They send armies chasing ghosts and trusting lies.

This perspective was actually ahead of its time. In 1798, judicial torture had only recently been abolished in France (1789), and many European powers still used it. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign letter suggests he understood what modern interrogation research has confirmed: torture is a terrible way to gather accurate information.

The Uncomfortable Reality

Here's where the story gets complicated. While Napoleon wrote eloquently against torture, his empire's track record was messier. During the 1802 suppression of resistance in Guadeloupe, French forces under his authority systematically massacred prisoners. Some were subjected to medieval punishments like the wheel and burning at the stake.

Napoleon didn't order these atrocities, and sources suggest he learned about them only afterward. But he never publicly disavowed the officers responsible. His Penal Code of 1810 even reinstated branding, which earlier revolutionary codes had abolished.

So what do we make of this contradiction? Napoleon clearly believed torture was ineffective—his 1798 letter is genuine and well-documented in official correspondence. But believing something and enforcing it across a vast empire are different challenges entirely. His subordinates sometimes acted with brutal autonomy, and Napoleon, ever the pragmatist, didn't always punish them when they delivered results.

Why It Still Matters

Napoleon's letter is quoted today in debates about enhanced interrogation and torture policy. His argument—that tortured prisoners tell interrogators what they want to hear, not the truth—remains central to modern discussions. Intelligence agencies and human rights organizations both cite the same principle Napoleon articulated in 1798.

The gap between his stated position and his empire's practices also highlights an uncomfortable truth: official policy and actual practice can diverge dramatically. Napoleon was right about torture being worthless for gathering intelligence. Whether he did enough to stop it is a different question entirely.

The letter to Berthier survives in France's national archives, a reminder that even history's most authoritarian figures sometimes recognized limits that reason and humanity demand—even if enforcing those limits proved harder than writing about them.