14

Amiens

‘The French people need to support me with my flaws, if they find in me some advantages. My flaw is being unable to bear insults.’

Napoleon to Roederer, 1800

‘Ambassadors are essentially spies with titles.’

Napoleon to Eugène, 1805

At 9 p.m. on Monday, January 4, 1802, Napoleon’s brother Louis was married to Josephine’s daughter Hortense by the mayor of Paris’ 1st arrondissement. It was only one of a large number of marriages arranged by Napoleon, whose involvement in the nuptial lives of others was almost uniformly disastrous – certainly so in this case, as very soon Louis, who was in love with someone else at the time, could hardly bear to share a room with Hortense, and vice versa. Napoleon treated Hortense as his own daughter. Everyone liked her except the man Napoleon selected to marry her. (She later described her schooldays as the only happy time of her life; there can be no sadder statement.) Josephine was also to blame for the match, which tied her family closer to her husband’s at the cost of her own daughter’s happiness.

Although Joseph had shown himself a skilful negotiator over the Concordat and ending the Quasi-War, and Napoleon was pleased with his youngest brother Jérôme, who had entered the French navy, his siblings were now becoming a mixed blessing to him in public life. Lucien, in particular, was hard to control. Napoleon was reportedly furious in November 1800 that Lucien, as interior minister, had permitted the publication of Louis de Fontanes’ pamphlet Parallèle entre César, Cromwell, Monk et Bonaparte which, although predictably sycophantic in its conclusion, Napoleon rightly feared would draw attention to the fact that none had come to power constitutionally. ‘There can be no comparison between me and Cromwell,’ he later stated. ‘I was three times elected by my people; and besides, in France my army has never made war on Frenchmen, but only on foreigners.’¹ (The fédérés of Toulon, people of the Vendée and the Paris Sections might have taken issue with that last remark.) Fontanes was one of Napoleon’s chief propagandists, so it is doubtful the publication came as a complete surprise; he may in fact have been feigning anger because the public reaction to the pamphlet, which effectively hinted by historical analogy that Napoleon should become an absolute ruler, was immediately hostile. Printing was halted and Lucien was sent off to Spain as ambassador soon afterwards. After Lucien’s first wife, Christine Boyer, died in May 1800, he married, again for love, the widow Alexandrine Jouberthon, by whom he was to have ten children. Napoleon disapproved of his second marriage because he would have preferred a more advantageous match for the family, upon which Lucien broke with his brother and retired to live in Rome.²

Reviving the old royal practice by which generals and senior dignitaries had to ask the head of state’s permission to marry, Napoleon attempted to marry his generals into Ancien Régime families. The marriages that Napoleon opposed, such as Lucien’s and Jérôme’s (to his first wife), tended to be happier than the ones that he and Josephine matchmade. Even when the marriages he had organized were successful, he did little to help them; when Murat asked permission to leave Italy to see his wife, Napoleon’s sister Caroline, and their new-born baby, Napoleon refused on the ground that ‘A soldier must remain faithful to his wife, but only wish to see her again when it’s judged that there is nothing left to do.’³ Napoleon’s difficult relations with some members of his family were undoubtedly self-inflicted.

 • • •

At midnight on January 8, 1802, Napoleon left with Josephine for Lyons, where he was going to be offered the chief magistracy (that is, presidency) of the new Italian Republic, which would be made up of the Cisalpine Republic and those provinces of Italy taken from Austria by the Treaty of Lunéville. The next day Cambacérès, who was left in charge in Paris, wrote the first of what were to total 1,397 letters detailing everything of interest going on in France, allowing Napoleon to keep in close touch with events wherever he was in Europe. In an early letter, Napoleon learned that Les Halles central food market was well procured, the mayor of Brussels had apologized for condoning smuggling, General Belliard wanted a particular paragraph inserted in the Moniteur, the navy minister reported good winds at Flushing, a Senate commission had met to discuss constitutional reform, and Junot had received a report about the secret seditious activity of a tribune.⁴ In many respects these letters were the precursors of the reports that the ministry of police would send Napoleon daily between 1804 and 1814.

The Consultation of Lyons lasted for two weeks and was marked by many parties, parades, receptions and factory visits, but the key moment came on January 25 when Napoleon, after reviewing the troops that had returned from Egypt in the Place Bellecour, was elected chief magistrate of the Italian Republic at a meeting in the Jesuit College (today the Lycée Ampère). A Committee of Thirty, headed by Francesco Melzi d’Eril, proposed Napoleon’s name to the 450 Italian delegates present, with the gavel banged down immediately after the question was put just in case anyone had the temerity to demur.⁵ Melzi had organized the delegates into sections according to whether they had come from the Austrian, Piedmontese, Venetian or Papal areas, thereby deliberately maximizing disunity and minimizing the chances of opposition. Though it was humiliating that the new Italian Republic should be founded in France, where Talleyrand could better keep an eye on the delegates, this was the first time that the word ‘Italy’ had appeared on the political map of Europe since the collapse of Rome in the fifth century AD. Napoleon wrote a constitution that was a far cry from the universal suffrage favoured by the Revolution, with elective power resting firmly in the hands of landowners, clergy, professionals, academics and merchants voting in electoral colleges for the legislative bodies.

Back in Paris on March 18, while Napoleon examined medals of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar at the Louvre and handled the sword of Henri IV at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Cambacérès carried out a constitutional coup, purging the Legislative Body and the Tribunate through a sénatus-consulte.⁶ ‘One cannot work with an institution so productive of disorder,’ Napoleon had said of the Tribunate in a discussion in the Conseil shortly before leaving for Lyons. Those considered idéologues and ‘zealous republicans’ were therefore now excluded from it, including Chénier, Daunou, Benjamin Constant, the ex-Girondin Maximin Isnard and the political economist Charles Ganilh.⁷ Much of the liberal opposition to Napoleon was made up of Enlightenment thinkers and disciples of the late Marquis de Cordorcet, such as the philosopher Pierre Cabanis, Antoine Destutt de Tracy (who coined the term ‘ideology’), the history professor and editor Dominique Garat, the Constitutionalist bishop Henri Grégoire, the author Pierre-Louis Guinguené, and the lawyer-politician Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, men who always played by the rules and didn’t plot assassinations.⁸ Although Napoleon took occasional action against them – he suppressed the Institut de France’s moral and political science section, exiling Constant and de Staël, for instance – he left the ones whom he called honnêtes gens (honest men) pretty much alone (except when he could persuade them to serve him, as Jean de Bry did as prefect of the Doubs department).⁹ Napoleon even had Cabanis buried in the Panthéon and Chateaubriand elected to the Institut, making it clear that he didn’t see the people he pejoratively termed idéologues as a serious political threat.

 • • •

On Thursday, March 25, 1802, after nearly six months of negotiations, the Anglo-French peace treaty, to which France’s allies Spain and Holland were also signatories, was finally signed in the hôtel de ville at Amiens. Discussions had ranged over the Falkland Islands, whaling, Barbary pirates, salutes to flags on the high seas, and so on, and had been characterized by mutual suspicion of bad faith, not least when the British came up with the idea of having a Bourbon appointed grand master of the Knights of St John of Malta.¹⁰ Nonetheless, there was great public rejoicing in France, and colour engravings were made of angels and female representations of France crowning busts of the ‘pacificator’ Napoleon with laurel leaves, above poems stating: ‘The whole world reveres / the Hero of France / He is the God of War / He is the Angel of Peace.’¹¹ This impression was further underlined on June 26 when Napoleon signed another treaty, with Turkey, that opened up the Dardanelles to French trade.

The provisions of Amiens were substantially similar to the preliminary treaty, with Britain promising to leave Malta and declare it a free port within three months of ratification, returning the island to the Knights of St John, and to cede its control over Pondicherry, and France regaining her colonies for the price of evacuating Naples, Taranto and those parts of the Papal States such as Ancona that were not in the Italian Republic. Yet Amiens was almost as important for what it left unsaid as for what it actually stipulated. There was no mention of commerce, and although the treaty provided for ‘an adequate compensation’ for the exiled Prince Willem V of Orange-Nassau for the loss of his Dutch estates and revenues when Holland had become the Batavian Republic in 1795, there was no mention of the futures of Holland, Switzerland or Piedmont, or any recognition of the Italian, Ligurian or Helvetian republics. There had been a Franco-Dutch convention in August 1801 which stipulated that French troops would leave Holland when the general peace was signed, and the Peace of Lunéville guaranteed Swiss independence, so the British didn’t feel the need to address either in the treaty itself.

The lack of a commercial treaty attached to the political one meant that the powerful British merchant class soon came to oppose a peace that gave them no privileged access to the markets of France, Holland, Spain, Switzerland, Genoa and (later) Etruria. This has been regarded as a deliberately hostile act by Napoleon, and contrary to the ‘spirit’ of Amiens, but no state is required to enter into a commercial treaty she knows would work to her disadvantage.¹² Napoleon wanted to levy tariffs on British imports, and the fact that he didn’t intend to return to the conditions of the badly skewed 1786 Anglo-French trade treaty delighted French merchants in places like Rouen, who could continue to operate behind the French protective tariff – which made British goods more expensive – but also with newly opened seas free of the Royal Navy. France now saw a flourishing of her maritime economy, with raw cotton supplies flooding in from abroad. The prisoner-of-war exchanges were popular in France, since by then there were nearly 70,000 French prisoners-of-war in Britain, almost all sailors captured in the dozens of minor naval engagements Britain had won since 1793, many of whom had been kept for years in extremely bad conditions on crowded and insanitary prison hulks moored off the south coast and in the Thames estuary.¹³*

When Joseph returned to Paris from Amiens, Napoleon ushered him to the front of the state box at the Opéra to receive the cheers of the audience. France had kept all her ‘natural’ frontiers up to the Rhine and the Alps, retained hegemony over western Europe, and had all her colonies restored to her. Yet in a sense Joseph and Talleyrand had been too successful: because Britain gained so little, her commitment to the peace was correspondingly weak. Britain was obliged to return Malta to the Knights of St John after the election of a new grand master overseen by the Pope within three months of the treaty’s ratification; the neutrality and independence of the island were then to be guaranteed by France, Britain, Russia, Austria, Spain and Prussia, with no French or British to be admitted into the Order, which was now based in St Petersburg as the former grand master had been the assassinated Tsar Paul. But although the Pope appointed an Italian nobleman, Giovanni Battista Tommasi, as grand master in March 1803, the British refused to recognize his rights and exiled him to Sicily. France evacuated all of the possessions stipulated in the treaty even before the three-month time limit, but Britain prevaricated over Pondicherry and Malta, partly because she (wrongly) feared that France and Russia were preparing to dismember the Ottoman Empire.¹⁴ Pondicherry stayed in British hands until 1816.

 • • •

On the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, around 5,000 Britons descended on Paris. Some were curious, some wanted to see the Louvre collections, some wanted to use that excuse to visit the fleshpots of the Palais-Royal (which did a roaring trade), some wanted to renew old friendships and almost all of them wanted to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the First Consul. Napoleon was delighted to oblige, and ordered his ministers to throw dinners for distinguished foreigners at least once every ten days.¹⁵ The Irish MP John Leslie Foster attended one of Napoleon’s levées at the Tuileries, and described him as:

delicately and gracefully made; his hair a dark brown crop, thin and lank; his complexion smooth, pale and sallow; his eyes grey, but very animated; his eyebrows light brown, thin and projecting. All his features, particularly his mouth and nose, fine, sharp, defined, and expressive beyond description . . . He speaks deliberately, but very fluently, with particular emphasis, and in a rather low tone of voice. While he speaks, his features are still more expressive than his words. Expressive of what? . . . A pleasing melancholy, which, whenever he speaks, relaxes into the most agreeable and gracious smile you can conceive . . . He has more unaffected dignity than I could conceive in man.¹⁶

Similarly, a former captive of the French called Sinclair wrote of ‘the grace and fascination of his smile’, and a Captain Usher said he had ‘dignified manners’.¹⁷ Charm is a notoriously hard phenomenon to describe, yet when he so chose, Napoleon was clearly suffused with it. He certainly went out of his way to show Anglophilia at this time, displaying busts on either side of a chimney-piece at the Tuileries of the Whig leader Charles James Fox and Admiral Nelson.¹⁸ The Francophile Whig politician Fox one might have expected, but to honour the man who sank his fleet at Aboukir Bay only four years earlier was truly extraordinary. (We can be certain that Nelson wasn’t displaying a bust of Napoleon on his mantelshelf.)

For some British Radicals and Whigs, admiration for Napoleon hardly abated even up to Waterloo. The future prime minister Lord Melbourne wrote odes to Napoleon at university, Keats had a snuffbox with his portrait on it, Byron ordered an exact replica of his coach in which to travel the continent, and William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register and Daniel Lovell’s Statesman praised him in extravagant terms. His reforms appealed to British liberals, who thought their own country was itself mired in an ancien régime. Fox himself visited Paris with three members of his family for a very friendly series of meetings with Napoleon in September 1802; other Britons presented to him included another future prime minister the Earl of Aberdeen, the Irish conspirator Thomas Emmet, the classical scholar the Rev. G. H. Glasse, Lord and Lady Holland, Lord Henry Petty (later the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne), Sir Spencer Smith, and scores more prominent people. So many British visitors rushed to Paris that James Gillray drew a caricature entitled The First Kiss this Ten Years! showing a thin French officer embracing a buxom representation of Britannia.¹⁹ Nor was it just one way; commenting on the ‘astonishing’ number of French people arriving at Dover, the naturalist James Smithson remarked that the two countries seemed likely ‘completely to exchange their inhabitants’.²⁰

Napoleon took this opportunity to infiltrate spies to make plans of Irish harbours, but they were soon unmasked and repatriated. When years later a Briton put to him the theory that the British government had not thought Napoleon sincere in his desire for peace because of this, he laughed and said: ‘Oh! That was not necessary, for every harbour in England and Ireland was known.’²¹ Of course the usefulness of the operation wasn’t the point: the fact that it was embarked upon at all was understandably taken as an indication of hostile intent. Naturally, British intelligence used the peace to spy on French harbours too.

 • • •

Although the ten-year term of the Consulate was not due to expire until 1810, in May 1802 a Senate motion to extend it for a second ten-year term passed by sixty to one, only the ex-Girondin Comte Lanjuinais voting against. This led to seemingly spontaneous but in fact well-orchestrated calls for a new Constitution of the Year X, under which Napoleon would become First Consul for life. ‘You judge that I owe the people another sacrifice,’ he disingenuously told the Senate. ‘I will give it if the people’s voice orders what your vote now authorizes.’²² Like Julius Caesar refusing the Roman diadem twice, he wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power. It was a complete reversal of the principles of the Revolution, yet the French people supported it. The plebiscite’s question was: ‘Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?’ and the result, which was fixed even more completely and unnecessarily than that of February 1800, was 3,653,600 in favour to 8,272 against.²³ It was the first plebiscite in French history where turnout was, supposedly, over half of those eligible to vote, although double-voting for the ‘yes’ camp was not questioned in some areas; once again the large proportion of the country that was illiterate had no way of telling how their mayor had cast their ballots.²⁴

Napoleon was duly declared First Consul for life on August 2, with the power to appoint his successor. ‘His manner was neither affected nor assuming,’ recorded the pro-Bonapartist British peer Lord Holland, who was present when the Senate deputation conferred the honour on him, ‘but certainly wanted that ease and attraction which the early habits of good company are supposed exclusively to confer.’²⁵ Joseph was nominated as Napoleon’s successor, but on October 10, 1802 Louis and Hortense had a son, Napoléon-Louis-Charles, who was later spoken of as a possible heir (although, with typical viciousness, Louis cast doubts on his own son’s paternity). With Josephine nearing forty, Napoleon had given up expecting an heir from her. ‘I love you as on the first day,’ he wrote to her as she once again took the spa waters at Plombières in June, which were supposed to help with infertility, ‘because you are good and above all amiable.’²⁶ He had written to her about taking care of her ‘little cousin’ on her previous visit, but it was all a far cry from the way he loved her ‘on the first day’.²⁷

 • • •

The bad 1801 harvest had led to worrying food-price increases by the following spring, and on May 16, 1802 Napoleon told Chaptal: ‘My intention is to take all possible measures to prevent bread prices going up in the city. It is necessary to have directors of the soup kitchens come to you and for you to give them 12,000 francs per month, more if necessary, so that they double and treble their distribution . . . Divulge absolutely nothing about such a delicate matter.’²⁸ By such means, and with the help of a better harvest in 1802, Napoleon staved off a danger of which he was always highly conscious. He started to build and stock strategically placed granaries to minimize the risk. As well as bread, Napoleon provided circuses: there were fêtes to celebrate his birthday – he was thirty-three in August 1802 – the uncovering of the plots against him, his becoming Life Consul and the anniversary of the Brumaire coup. At the same time the celebration of the fall of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI were carefully and gradually downgraded as the First Consul came closer to declaring himself a monarch.

In early July, as soon as the British had evacuated Elba, Napoleon ordered Berthier, who had returned to the post of war minister, to secure the island as a department of France (and not of the Italian Republic), disarm the inhabitants of Portoferraio, take a dozen prominent hostages for good behaviour and send the children of twelve of the best families to school in France as a way of Gallicizing them.²⁹ (It had worked for him, after all.) Elba was officially annexed in August, after Berthier had given 3,000 francs each to the three deputies from the island.³⁰ None of this contravened the Peace of Amiens, and was fully anticipated by Britain.

When the Constitution of Year X, France’s fifth since the Revolution, became law in early August, Napoleon – now using only his Christian name in his message to the Senate, as monarchs did – announced that all adult males of each district could vote for the members of the electoral colleges for their arrondissements and departments from among the six hundred people who paid the most taxes (plus imposés), who would then hold their offices for life.³¹ Thereafter the electoral colleges would nominate two candidates for both the Legislative Body and the Tribunate, from whom Napoleon would choose one each. He was carefully building up a cadre of political supporters who owed their positions to him. Many of the Legislative Body’s powers went to the Senate, which also had the power to dissolve it and the Tribunate. The number of tribunes was also halved to fifty and could now debate only in secret session, where, as Napoleon said, ‘they could jabber as they liked’.³² Even the Conseil d’État had its powers circumscribed and handed to a privy council within it. The new constitution therefore had the appearance of political involvement, but genuine power rested completely with Napoleon. In the fervour of approbation won by Napoleon’s victories, reforms, Concordat and peace treaties it wasn’t surprising that those initially elected to the electoral colleges were often his most vocal supporters.

 • • •

On September 5 Napoleon ordered Brigadier Horace Sébastiani, the officer who had been so supportive of him during the Brumaire coup, to go on a four-month tour of Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Acre and Jerusalem, to promote French interests in a region that could be forgiven for feeling that it had seen quite enough of the tricolour.³³ His report when he returned was to be explosive. Later that same week Napoleon invited King Charles Emmanuel of Piedmont to return to his throne, effectively as a French puppet. Safe in his second kingdom of Sardinia, the king refused, so Napoleon formally annexed Piedmont on the 21st and turned it into six new French departments. This disappointed the leaders of the Italian Republic, who had wanted Elba and Piedmont to join Italy, but it gave France direct access over the western Alpine passes such as the two St Bernards, which led to the rich Lombard plain that produced rice, grain and raw silk, the last of which was needed for Lyons’ luxury clothes and furniture industries.³⁴

The outcry in London, where Napoleon was seen as violating the spirit, albeit not the letter, of Amiens, helped to derail the implementation of the treaty and made it even less likely that the British would evacuate Malta or Pondicherry. British hawks were further enraged when Napoleon acted in another region that was also unmentioned at Amiens, but that had long been within the French sphere of influence, and where had Britain never had any national interests. On September 23 Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand saying that since he needed the border at Franche-Comté to be secure, there had to be either ‘a Swiss Government solidly organized and friendly to France’ or ‘no Switzerland’.³⁵ Remembering his need to cross the Alps two years before, he required the ceding of the Valais region so that he could build a military road across the Simplon Pass, which some of the thirteen cantons that had governed confederated Switzerland for three centuries – though by no means all – refused to give him.

Swiss politics were complicated by rifts between the aristocratic and the populist cantons and between the German-speaking, Italian-speaking and French-speaking ones. On September 30, 1802, Napoleon’s Act of Mediation reorganized Switzerland into nineteen cantons, with a very weak central government and an army of only 15,200 men (fewer than the 16,000 it had to provide to Napoleon under a recent Franco-Swiss defence pact). ‘There are no people more impudent or more demanding than the Swiss,’ he was later to say. ‘Their country is about as big as a man’s hand, and they have the most extraordinary pretensions.’³⁶

The Act of Mediation violated the Treaty of Lunéville, especially when Napoleon sent General Michel Ney into Switzerland with 40,000 men to see it enforced on October 15, but Austria gave him a free hand, the Russians and Prussians failed to protest, and those Swiss who weren’t already in favour swiftly acquiesced. ‘The possession of Valais is one of the matters closest to my heart,’ Napoleon told one of his Swiss supporters, the republican philosopher Philipp Stapfer, one that ‘the whole of Europe would not make him give up’.³⁷ Despite the silence of Amiens on Switzerland, Britain now halted the return of Pondicherry to France and the Cape of Good Hope to Holland, and her troops remained in Alexandria (which she had promised to evacuate under Article 8) and Malta.

Napoleon was impressed by the activity of Ney in the Swiss affair. The son of a cooper from the Saar who had married one of Marie Antoinette’s chambermaids, Ney was born in the same year as Napoleon and joined the hussars in 1787.³⁸ He was to gain the reputation of being almost insanely brave. Having served with distinction in the Army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, he did not encounter Napoleon until May 1801, when he was invited to Paris to meet the consuls. In October 1802 he was ordered by Talleyrand to go to Switzerland with a small army to support the pro-French elements there, which he did with speed and success, occupying Zurich without bloodshed, closing the anti-French Diet of Schwytz, releasing pro-French sympathizers from prison, putting down an insurrection that had been led by the government of Berne, overseeing the installation of a pro-French successor governor and extracting 625,000 francs to pay for the operation, which was all achieved in two months.³⁹

The official report of Napoleon’s meeting with Swiss cantonal deputies at Saint-Cloud on December 12 stated: ‘It is recognized by Europe that Italy and Holland, as well as Switzerland, are at the disposition of France.’ The trouble was, Britain recognized nothing of the sort. Two months earlier, the Bourbon Duke Ferdinand of Parma had died. The duchy was annexed by France, as had been agreed at Lunéville, and Napoleon sent the French official Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry to impose French law there. This was not an unwarranted annexation, but the new British ambassador to Paris, Lord Whitworth, chose to take it as such and demanded compensation, as also for the annexation of Piedmont and the invasion of Switzerland, hinting that as Prussia and Russia had not yet agreed to guarantee Maltese independence, that island might be a suitable exchange. As things turned out, it wouldn’t have been a bad compromise for Napoleon to have made.

 • • •

The Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon a breathing space to pursue plans to stimulate economic growth through state intervention and protectionism, a policy originally pioneered by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802, but considered Britain’s Industrial Revolution too advanced for France to be able to compete against her in open markets. Instead he put his faith in government subsidies in strategic industries, technical training schools, prizes for inventions, visits to British factories (that is, industrial espionage), technology fairs, the improvement of the Jacquard silk-weaving process, an industrial exhibition in Paris (at which the cotton-spinning business of Richard Lenoir took 400,000 francs’ worth of orders) and the setting up of twenty-two chambers of commerce across France in December 1802.⁴⁰ Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.⁴¹ ‘I never saw him reject a proposition that was aimed at encouraging or supporting industry,’ recalled Chaptal. But for all Napoleon’s efforts, and especially once war broke out again, French industrialization was only ever on a small scale compared to that of the powerhouse across the Channel.⁴² (In 1815 there were still only 452 mines employing 43,395 workers in the whole of France, 41 ironworks with 1,202 workers, 1,219 forges with 7,120 workers, and 98 sugar refineries with 585; Marseilles, centre of the French soap-making industry, employed a thousand workers in seventy-three workshops.⁴³)

The Colbertian use of tariffs furthermore skewed trade so that high customs barriers in Italy meant that raw silk from Piedmont which used to go to Lombardy was instead sent to Lyons; Dutch producers had to pay duties on goods sold in France, but not vice versa, and so on.⁴⁴ It was economic imperialism in action, which could hardly fail to stoke resentment in France’s satellite states. Napoleon had managed greatly to increase confidence in France’s finances and in her ability to honour her government’s bonds, but even so they never managed to match Britain’s in this period. At his best, he was forced to borrow at higher rates than Britain at its worst.*

 • • •

After the machine infernale explosion, Otto, the French envoy in London, had sent Talleyrand copies of British newspapers, journals and gazettes which implicitly, and on occasion explicitly, expressed the hope that the next attempt would succeed.⁴⁵ French newspapers published by émigrés in London particularly infuriated Napoleon, such as Paris Pendant l’Année and L’Ambigu, both edited by Jean-Gabriel Peltier, which used classical and poetical allusions to call for his assassination. He even went so far as to undertake a prosecution of Peltier in the British courts.⁴⁶ State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère recorded that the English press drove Napoleon ‘into a fury that resembled the lion in the fable, stung to madness by a swarm of gnats’.⁴⁷* Eventually, in August 1802 he banned all British newspapers from France. The Bourbon family had close connections with the émigré press, as the British government knew from intercepting, copying, decoding and resealing letters sent through the Post Office (just as Lavalette’sbureau noir was doing in Paris).⁴⁸

Hawkesbury told Otto repeatedly that Britain could do nothing to curtail ‘the liberty of the press as secured by the constitution of this country’, but Otto pointed out that under the 1793 Alien Act there were provisions for the deportation of seditious foreign writers such as Peltier.⁴⁹ Talleyrand added that far from being immutable, the British constitution was unwritten and even habeas corpus had been suspended at various moments during the Revolutionary Wars. It has been alleged that Napoleon was too authoritarian to understand the concept of freedom of the press; in fact the question was not simply one of freedom or repression, since there were ‘ministerial’ papers which were owned by members of the government, and the prime minister’s own brother, Hiley Addington, even wrote articles for them. He also knew that London had been the place of publication of equally vicious libelles against Louis XV and Louis XVI written by disaffected Frenchmen.⁵⁰

The diatribes of Peltier, Jacques Régnier, Nicolas Dutheil and other writers published in England led to bad blood, and Napoleon could never quite accept that the British government were as powerless and uninvolved as they claimed to be. He inserted no fewer than five articles in his own hand in the Moniteur on this issue and also produced ideas for political cartoons that he ordered to be drawn up and distributed.⁵¹ After the machine infernale episode he thought it reasonable to expect that a now supposedly friendly power would help restrict incitements to terrorism.

Napoleon was unlucky that his time in power coincided with the flourishing of the first fully professional British political caricaturists – James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank – still among its greatest exponents, who all fastened on him as their victim. Gillray fought in the Duke of York’s Flanders campaign and never saw Napoleon, but virtually single-handedly created the image of him as physically small – ‘Little Boney’. Yet even the British caricaturists never reached the level of pure loathing achieved by the Russian Ivan Terebenev or the Prussian Johann Gottfried Schadow, let alone the Bavarian Johann Michael Voltz, whose caricature The Triumph of the Year 1813 depicted Napoleon’s head entirely composed of corpses.⁵² Of course there were also pro-Napoleon engravings on sale in London for as much as 2s 6d in 1801, a reminder that he had his British admirers.⁵³ Yet overall, British Francophobia easily matched French Anglophobia. The market for highly abusive prints of Napoleon was much larger than for positive images of him, and the standard work on English anti-Napoleonic caricature and satire covers two full volumes, even without the illustrations.⁵⁴ Meanwhile, as one contemporary noted, the sheer number of British biographies of Napoleon published in the years after 1797 meant that they had ‘to out-Herod each other in the representations they give alike of the hateful and malignant cast of his features, and of the deformity and depravity of his moral character’.⁵⁵ As well as newspapers, caricatures, books and even nursery rhymes, Napoleon was the regular butt of British ballads, songs and poems. In an age when absolutely everything was regarded as a fit subject for an ode – one was entitled ‘On a Drunken Old Woman Who was Accidentally Drowned on a Ferry Crossing’ – Napoleon’s supposed crimes excited an avalanche of poetry, none of it memorable.⁵⁶

There was a good deal of hypocrisy in Napoleon’s objections, since the Moniteur roundly abused the British government, likening it to Barbary pirates and Milton’s Satan virtually on a monthly basis from August 1802 to March 1803.⁵⁷ It even claimed that the Chouan terrorist Georges Cadoudal would have been awarded the Order of the Garter if the machine infernale had succeeded.⁵⁸ Napoleon’s attempts to have Cadoudal deported from Britain to Canada at this time came to nothing, but in a gesture of support for the British monarchy he nonetheless expelled any Stuarts taking refuge in France, even though the last Jacobite rebellion had taken place fifty-eight years before.⁵⁹

Under pressure from France, the British attorney-general, Spencer Perceval, finally decided that Peltier – a strange man who charged people a shilling each to watch him behead geese and ducks in his garden on a miniature guillotine made of walnut – could be tried for criminal libel, and the case was heard at the Court of King’s Bench on February 21, 1803. He was found guilty by the unanimous vote of the jury after just one minute’s deliberation, but as war resumed shortly afterwards he was never imprisoned, and went on violently lampooning Napoleon.⁶⁰ When Peltier later published an anti-Napoleonic work by the French Gothic-Romantic vampire-novelist Charles Nodier, who had not taken the rather obvious precaution of emigrating first, the author was imprisoned for several months in the Saint-Pélagie prison.⁶¹

 • • •

That Napoleon suspected that the Amiens peace might be short lived is clear from his orders to General Mathieu Decaen, whom he sent to India with four men-of-war and 1,800 sailors in March 1803 to ‘communicate with the peoples or princes who are most impatient under the yoke of the English [that is, East India] Company’. He also wanted Decaen to report on the strength of the British forts in India and the chances of maintaining a French army there, taking into account the fact that the French would ‘not be masters of the sea’ and so he could ‘expect little significant help’.⁶² Napoleon told Decaen that, if war should break out before September 1804, he would be ‘in a position to acquire that great glory which hands down the memory of men beyond the lapse of centuries’. He was treading the thin dividing line between the grand and the grandiose – but his instructions to Decaen show that he didn’t expect the treaty to break down as early as it did.

By September 1802, Napoleon was reverting to his habitual Anglophobia; that month he wrote to the interior ministry to complain that during his three-hour visit to the Louvre, he had seen a Gobelins tapestry of the 1346 siege of Calais by the English. ‘Such subjects should not be available for public viewing in Paris.’⁶³ On December 28 he wrote to Talleyrand from Saint-Cloud, ‘We do not seem to be at peace, but only in truce . . . the fault lies entirely with the British Government.’⁶⁴ The problems facing the Amiens peace – the Sébastiani and Decaen expeditions, Cadoudal’s continued residence in London, the émigré press, compensation for the King of Sardinia and Prince Willem V of Orange, Swiss independence, the non-evacuations of Holland, Alexandria, Pondicherry, the Cape of Good Hope and, especially, Malta, and France’s tariff regime – all of those might have been resolved given trust and goodwill, but there wasn’t any on either side. With his customary good sense – at least when he was sane – George III described the peace as ‘experimental’, which is all the British government ever considered it to be, and for Britain it soon became apparent that the experiment had failed.⁶⁵

On January 30, 1803 Sébastiani’s report of his Levantine tour, which claimed that Egypt could be retaken with an expedition of fewer than 10,000 men, was published across eight pages of the Moniteur. It was a deliberate provocation and Britain’s fears of a Franco-Russian dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire were naturally rekindled. ‘As no one imagined that Bonaparte did anything without a motive,’ recorded State Councillor Pelet, ‘the inference was obvious.’⁶⁶ Napoleon refused to discuss the report with Ambassador Whitworth, or even to give a clarifying statement. Yet the fact that the report was published at all showed it was meant as a diplomatic tool rather than a serious plan of action: if Napoleon had truly been contemplating a return to Egypt he would hardly have trumpeted the fact in the Moniteur. He did not want a return to war in 1803, but he was not willing to lessen France’s position in order to prevent it. ‘Every day weakens the deep impression of their late defeats and lessens the prestige we have gained by our victories,’ he told a councillor of state at this time. ‘All the advantage of delay is on their side.’⁶⁷

On February 9 the British announced a halt to all further withdrawals until France had provided a ‘satisfactory explanation’ for its recent actions over Etruria, Switzerland and the Levant. Nine days later Napoleon complained to Whitworth about both Malta and Alexandria and about the lack of progress in quelling press attacks on him. ‘Let us unite rather than fighting over this,’ he concluded, encompassing all the issues threatening peace, ‘and together we will decide the future of the world.’ Whitworth took this as mere rhetoric, but as Napoleon’s later proposal of the same tenor to Tsar Alexander at Tilsit was to show, he may well have been perfectly serious. Whitworth didn’t consider it even worth engaging with, however, and responded by raising the question of Parma, Piedmont and Switzerland, which Napoleon dismissed as mere ‘bagatelles’. Napoleon was denounced in Britain after the resumption of war for being cavalier about these small countries, but when seen in the context he intended – that of a partnership whereby the world’s future could be decided between Britain dominating a vast overseas empire and France dominating Europe – the remark made perfect sense.⁶⁸ In other respects, he must have used forceful language on that occasion (perhaps calculatedly so), as Whitworth reported to Addington: ‘I thought I was listening to a captain of dragoons and not to the head of the greatest State in Europe.’⁶⁹

On February 20, Napoleon told the Paris legislature that due to ‘the abdication of the sovereign and the wishes of the people, the necessity of things have placed Piedmont in the power of France’.⁷⁰ Similarly, he said, Swiss sovereignty had been violated to ‘open up a triple and easy access to Italy’. More ominously he referred to the British troops still occupying Malta and Alexandria, and said that France’s half-million troops were ‘ready to defend and avenge’.⁷¹ The next day the British handed over Cape Town to the Dutch East India Company, but no blandishments or threats would persuade them to honour their commitments over Malta and Alexandria.

 • • •

On February 25 the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire passed the Final Declaration of the Imperial Deputation (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss), which put the Lunéville peace terms into effect in Germany. To compensate German states and princes for France’s gain of the west bank of the Rhine, it was necessary for Austria and the other large German states to ‘mediatize’, or rationalize, the over two hundred states of Germany into forty, largely by secularizing ecclesiastical territories and connecting the ‘free’ and ‘imperial’ cities to their more substantial neighbours. This was to be the largest transfer of statehood and property in Germany before 1945, with nearly 2.4 million people and 12.7 million guilden per annum of revenue going to new rulers. It came as a result of months of bartering between Talleyrand and the rulers who would benefit from this wholesale takeover of the smaller, hitherto self-governing entities. Those that survived tended to receive far more territory to the east of the Rhine than they had had to give up to France to its west. Baden received seven times more, for example, Prussia nearly five times, Hanover gained the bishopric of Osnabrück despite losing no territory to France, and Austria made large gains too. Württemberg lost 30,000 citizens but gained 120,000, and between 1803 and 1810 it doubled its territory at the expense of seventy-eight other political entities and the Swabian imperial knights.⁷² Prussia lost 140,000 but gained 600,000. The map of Germany was hugely simplified, in return for the extinction after centuries of hundreds of tiny states such as the hereditary county of Winneburg-Bilstein that belonged to Prince Klemens von Metternich’s father.

Mindful of his hero Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had built up his Fürstenbund (Princes’ League) as a check to Austria, Napoleon now sought to present France to these newly expanded German states as a check to the power of both the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs, and he promoted marriage alliances with Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg to complement strategic alliances that he had already concluded with those three powers by the time of the outbreak of further European hostilities in 1805.⁷³ By July 1804 he had spotted the sixteen-year-old Princess Augusta of Bavaria as wifely material for Eugène; in April 1806 Stéphanie de Beauharnais, a cousin of Josephine’s by marriage, married Prince Karl of Baden; and in August 1807 the twenty-two-year-old Jérôme married Princess Catharina of Württemberg.

 • • •

On March 8, 1803 George III delivered a King’s Speech asking parliament for war supplies and mobilizing Britain’s militia, blaming the French for making major military preparations in French and Dutch ports, even though a despatch from Whitworth afterwards made it clear that the French weren’t doing anything of the sort. Like the publication of Sébastiani’s report, the speech was a threat rather than a declaration of war. ‘England is not asleep,’ he wrote to Charles IV of Spain on the 11th, ‘she is always on the watch, and will not rest until she has seized all the colonies and all the commerce of the world. France can alone prevent this.’ He wrote this despite the fact that Britain had already disgorged Martinique, Tobago, St Lucia and Minorca under the terms of Amiens.⁷⁴

Spotting Whitworth at his levée at the Tuileries on Sunday, March 13, Napoleon, according to the ambassador’s account, ‘accosted me evidently under very considerable agitation. He began by asking me if I had any news from England,’ to which Whitworth said he had received letters from Hawkesbury two days before.⁷⁵

NAPOLEON: ‘So you are determined to go to war.’

WHITWORTH: ‘No, First Consul, we are too sensible of the advantages of peace.’

NAPOLEON: ‘We have already been at war for fifteen years.’

WHITWORTH: (after a pause) ‘That is already too long.’

NAPOLEON: ‘But you wish me to fight fifteen years more, and you force me to do it.’

WHITWORTH: ‘That was very far from His Majesty’s intentions.’

Napoleon then walked over to talk to the Russian and Spanish ambassadors, Count Markov and the Chevalier d’Azara. ‘The English want war,’ Napoleon said, ‘but if they are the first to draw the sword, I will be the last to return it to the scabbard. They don’t respect treaties. From now on they must be covered with black crêpe.’⁷⁶ Whitworth reported that Napoleon then returned to him, ‘to my great annoyance, and resumed the conversation, if such it can be called, by saying something personally civil to me’. He then returned to the point at issue:

NAPOLEON: ‘Why the armaments? What are these precautionary measures aimed against? I don’t have a single ship-of-the-line [being built] in French ports, but if you are arming, I must also; if you want to fight, I will fight too. You might perhaps kill France, but you won’t intimidate her.’

WHITWORTH: ‘No one wishes to do either. We want to live on good terms with her.’

NAPOLEON: ‘Then one must respect treaties! They will be responsible for this to all of Europe.’⁷⁷

Whitworth added that Napoleon was ‘too agitated to make it advisable to prolong the conversation: I therefore made no answer, and he retired to his apartment repeating the last phrase’.⁷⁸ This exchange was heard by as many as two hundred people, all of whom, according to Whitworth, felt ‘the extreme impropriety of his conduct, and the total want of dignity as well as of decency on the occasion’.

Yet was what Napoleon said truly so appalling? A warmonger would not have been ‘agitated’ in the way Napoleon was, but only someone sincerely worried that peace was about to break down, perhaps through a misunderstanding about maritime armaments. Napoleon has been accused of being threatening and abusive to Whitworth at this levée, but, although one cannot know the tone of voice or gestures used, the words employed do not themselves imply it. (Certainly the later accusation that Whitworth was in fear of being struck by Napoleon is not borne out by any eyewitnesses, and was not made by Whitworth himself; it can safely be ascribed to British propaganda.⁷⁹) By the time they met again on April 4, the phlegmatic Whitworth reported, ‘I had every reason to be satisfied with his manner towards me.’⁸⁰

 • • •

With the Saint-Domingue expedition still underway, Decaen sailing towards India and the economic reconstruction of France proceeding, Napoleon did not want war in the spring or summer of 1803. France had 42 ships-of-the-line, of which only 13 were ready for active service, against the Royal Navy’s 120. He knew, however, that they should be prepared. ‘What’s the best way, in the current position and in the case of a maritime war,’ he asked his navy minister, Admiral Denis Decrès, on March 13, ‘of doing the most harm to English commerce?’⁸¹ Sending Brigadier Colbert to Tsar Alexander two days later, Napoleon accurately summed up his stance as being ‘very busy mapping canals, establishing factories, and dealing with matters of public education’; nonetheless, ‘If war with England be spoken about, you will say that the French nation desires nothing more than to measure swords with her, seeing the amount of antipathy which exists.’⁸² As usual he attended at the same time to other matters, telling the police chief of Rouen the next month to order two kept women, called Lise and Gille, to move 60 miles from Rouen and to forbid prostitutes (filles publiques) from appearing in the principal boxes of the theatre there.⁸³

On April 23, Britain demanded the retention of Malta for another seven years, the ceding of the lightly populated Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, 70 miles from Tunisia, as a naval base, the evacuation of Holland by France, and for compensation to be paid to the Sardinians for Piedmont. ‘Show yourself cold, haughty, and even somewhat proud,’ Napoleon instructed Talleyrand on May 10 when telling him how to deal with Whitworth. ‘If the Note contains the word “ultimatum”, make him understand that the word means war . . . If the note does not contain this word, make him insert it, remarking that we must really know where we are, and that we are weary of this state of uncertainty . . . that once the ultimatum is given, everything is broken.’⁸⁴ In fact Whitworth merely asked for his passports, the traditional ambassadorial request prior to a declaration of war. ‘It’s difficult to conceive how a great, powerful, and sensitive nation can undertake to declare a war which will necessitate such terrible misfortunes,’ Napoleon told him as the ambassador left Paris, ‘the cause of which will be so small since it’s merely a miserable rock.’⁸⁵ At Brooks’s Club in London on May 6, the 9th Earl of Thanet wagered the 5th Baronet Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, the former Lord Mayor of London Harvey Combe MP and Humphrey Howarth MP 50 guineas each ‘that hostilities do not commence between France and England within a month from this date’ – a bet he comprehensively lost.⁸⁶

Napoleon summoned the seven members of the foreign affairs section of the Conseil d’État to discuss the British demands on May 11; of these seven, only Joseph and Talleyrand wanted France to continue negotiations. The next day Whitworth left Paris, and on the 16th General Andréossy, the French envoy to London, embarked at Dover just as Britain issued letters of marque and reprisal authorizing the seizure of all French ships in British ports and waters.⁸⁷ ‘It is manifest Buonaparte still is very anxious for peace,’ wrote William Pitt’s confidant and mentor the Earl of Malmesbury the next day, ‘rather dreads war and at this very hour I have a misgiving he will end by agreeing to all our proposals, and that for the present war will be evaded – postponed but not lost altogether.’⁸⁸ After the collapse of Amiens Whitworth told Malmesbury that ‘the effects of war will soon be so severely felt in France as to produce great disgust and disaffection; that it will shake Buonaparte’s power; that the army is not so much attached to him as it was. If he trusts an army to Moreau, he will risk its acting against him.’⁸⁹ In those predictions at least, Whitworth got absolutely everything wrong.

To avoid the (in fact non-existent) danger of Napoleon accepting her demands, Britain formally declared war on May 18, 1803. Napoleon responded by interning all male Britons of military age who were still on French soil, many of whom were subsequently exchanged but some of whom stayed under house arrest for the next decade.⁹⁰ His message to the Senate of May 20 was pure propaganda, arguing that in Britain the Peace of Amiens ‘was the object of bitter censure; it was represented as fatal to England, because it was not shameful for France . . . vain reckoning of hatred!’⁹¹ Two days later he ordered Decrès to construct a prototype of a flat-bottomed boat which could carry one cannon and one hundred men across the English Channel, and to contact Cambacérès, Lebrun and Talleyrand to find individuals who would privately sponsor the building of these transports, which would be named after them.⁹² The collapse of Amiens was meanwhile commemorated by one of Denon’s bronze medals, depicting a leopard – the traditional if somewhat laudatory beast signifying Britain – tearing up a treaty in its teeth.

 • • •

At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore. On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.⁹³ ‘Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon . . . I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’⁹⁴

After the Saint-Domingue debacle and the collapse of Amiens, Napoleon concluded he must realize his largest and (for the immediate future) entirely useless asset, one that might eventually have drawn France into conflict with the United States. Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’⁹⁵ Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

The negotiations were carried out by the treasury minister François Barbé-Marbois, partly because he had lived in America, was married to an American and knew Jefferson, but also partly because Napoleon suspected that if Talleyrand led them – he had initially opposed the deal – he would inevitably demand bribes from the Americans.⁹⁶ Joseph and Lucien pleaded with Napoleon not to sell, and even threatened to oppose the sale publicly. Lucien recorded Napoleon half rising from his bathtub and telling his brothers that no opposition would be brooked, and certainly no discussions in the legislature. He then fell back into the tub with a splash that drenched Joseph.⁹⁷ In rage over their opposition he also broke a snuffbox featuring Josephine’s portrait.

When Robert Livingston, one of the American plenipotentiaries, asked the French negotiators precisely where the Purchase territories extended north-westwards, since very few Europeans, let alone cartographers, had ever set foot there, he was told that they included whatever France had bought off Spain in 1800, but beyond that they simply didn’t know. ‘If an obscurity did not already exist,’ Napoleon advised, ‘it would perhaps be a good policy to put one there.’⁹⁸ The deal was done after nearly three weeks of tough haggling in Paris with Livingston and his fellow negotiator James Monroe, all conducted against the backdrop of the deteriorating situation over Amiens, and was concluded only days before the resumption of war. The financing was arranged via the Anglo-Dutch merchant banks Barings Brothers and Hopes, which in effect bought Louisiana from France and sold it on to the United States for $11.25 million of 6 per cent American bonds, meaning that the American government did not have to provide the capital immediately.⁹⁹ As a result, Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France. When the prime minister, Henry Addington, asked the bank to cease the remittances Barings agreed, but Hopes, based on the continent, continued to pay and were backed by Barings – so Napoleon got his money and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal.

‘We have lived long,’ said Livingston when the deal was concluded, ‘but this is the noblest work of our whole lives. The treaty which we have just signed has not been obtained by art or dictated by force; equally advantageous to the two contracting parties, it will change vast solitudes into flourishing districts. From this day the United States take their place among the powers of first rank.’¹⁰⁰