22

Zenith

‘Everyone knows that the ties of family count for very little in political calculations, and are nullified after twenty years. Philip V waged war against his grandfather.’

Napoleon to Tsar Alexander, July 1808

‘Ought princesses to fall in love? They are political chattels.’

Napoleon on St Helena

‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the other powers,’ Napoleon baldly stated, ‘with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is best placed for that purpose.’¹ When he came to power, France’s population (then the largest in Europe), agricultural production, scientific advances, opera, furniture, painting, design, theatre and literature, together with the ubiquity of its language and the size and beauty of Paris, all combined to make it the leading as well as the predominant nation in Europe.

In his belief in rational progress and in the possibility of benificent dictatorship, Napoleon was the last of the Enlightened absolutists who had emerged so frequently in Europe since the late seventeenth century; his own reverence for its most famous exemplar, Frederick the Great, underscored this identification. He believed, as many Frenchmen did, that modern ideas of governance could be spread across Europe through the agency of the Grande Armée.² ‘You have nothing but special laws,’ he told an Italian delegation at Lyons in 1805, ‘henceforth you must have general laws. Your people have only local habits; it is necessary that they should take on national habits.’³ For many German and Italian public officials, Napoleon’s Empire, in the words of the British historian H. A. L. Fisher, ‘shattered the obdurate crust of habit and substituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, slovenly, lethargic provincialism’.⁴ By 1810 he was moving towards a progressive unitary Empire with uniform laws based on the Napoleonic Code, enlightened secularism and religious toleration, equality before the law, and uniform weights, measures and currency.⁵ Yet the French administrative model was almost never simply imposed on conquered territories so much as adapted subtly according to prevailing local circumstances. If the Code was likely to create resistance and impede ‘contributions’ and recruitment, then its implementation was delayed.⁶ In Bavaria and Baden, for example, administrators totally overhauled all the state structures in the Napoleonic manner, whereas in less Francophile Mecklenburg and Saxony next to no reforms were made.⁷

Napoleon’s political support from inside the annexed territories came from many constituencies: urban elites who didn’t want to return to the rule of their local Legitimists, administrative reformers who valued efficiency, religious minorities such as Protestants and Jews whose rights were protected by law, liberals who believed in concepts such as secular education and the liberating power of divorce, Poles and other nationalities who hoped for national self-determination, businessmen (at least until the Continental System started to bite), admirers of the simplicity of the Code Napoléon, opponents of the way the guilds had worked to restrain trade, middle-class reformers, in France those who wanted legal protection for their purchases of hitherto ecclesiastical or princely confiscated property, and – especially in Germany – peasants who no longer had to pay feudal dues.⁸ Yet although Napoleon wanted all traces of feudal entitlements, entailments and privileges abolished, some parts of the Empire, such as Westphalia, Poland, Spain, Illyria (the western Balkans) and Calabria, were so backward that they remained feudal in all but name.⁹ If his system was to work smoothly, what it most needed was time.

Of course some Legitimist governments had attempted to modernize before Napoleon, but they had tended to encounter resistance from Church hierarchies, privileged orders, entrenched guilds, obstructive judiciaries, penny-pinching parlements, reactionary nobilities and a suspicious peasantry.¹⁰ Because the Napoleonic state had so much more capacity than any of its predecessors Napoleon could slice through these Gordian knots and deliver what has been described as a ‘systematic reorganisation of the administrative, bureaucratic and financial institutions’ of the wider Empire.¹¹ The result was a hierarchical and uniform administration controlled from Paris in which, in the words of an admiring contemporary, ‘the executive chain descends without interruption from the minister to the administered and transmits the law and the government’s orders to the furthest ramification of the social order’.¹² It was the fulfilment of the dream of the eighteenth-century enlightened despots.

To large numbers of people across Europe Napoleon seemed to represent the ideas of progress, meritocracy and a rational future. When Count Maximilian von Montgelas, effectively the prime minister of Bavaria, secularized the monasteries, introduced compulsory education and vaccination, instituted examinations for the civil service, abolished internal tolls and extended civil rights to Jews and Protestants in Bavaria between 1806 and 1817, he did so because it conformed to what he called the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age).¹³ Why should an Italian, Dutch, Belgian or German lawyer, doctor, architect or businessman prefer to be ruled by some inbred princeling than by Napoleon, a member of the Institut de France who believed in opening careers to the talents? Of course practically they often had little choice but to serve the French in the short term, but for many the advent of French military victory gave them an opportunity to adopt modern practices from a revolutionary system shorn of the guillotine and the Terror. Nor were they required to like Napoleon or the French to appreciate that their ways were more efficient. In Italy, for example, the system of tax collection instituted by Napoleon lasted for a century after his fall, and the Rhineland kept the Code Napoléon as its system of law until 1900.¹⁴ It is a myth, however, that Napoleon was a believer in pan-Europeanism; in 1812 he propagated the idea that he was the defender of European Christian civilization, holding back the barbarian Asiatic hordes of Russia, and made much of the idea of European unity when constructing his legacy, but his Empire was always primarily a French construct, not a European one.

 • • •

One of the many areas in which Napoleon’s commitment to the Continental System damaged him was in his relations with the Papacy. Pius VII refused to join his European blockade against British trade and produce. Taken together with Pius’ refusal to grant Jérôme a divorce or to recognize Joseph as king of Naples, this seemed to Napoleon to suggest that he had an enemy in the Vatican. In February 1808 he sent General Sextius Miollis down the west coast of Italy to occupy the Papal States, including the Castel Sant’Angelo, the papal fortress on the Tiber. French cannon could soon be seen pointing directly at St Peter’s. The Pope nonetheless refused to declare war on Britain, and was unmoved when Napoleon pointed out that it was an heretical power. Once it became clear that the Pope would not bow to his will over the expulsion of British goods and merchants from the Papal States, on June 10, 1809 Napoleon annexed them to the French Empire, and in retaliation Pius immediately excommunicated the Emperor of the French.

 • • •

Back in July 1807 Napoleon had scoffed at the notion of papal punishment to Talleyrand. ‘It only remains for them to shut me up in a monastery, and to have me whipped like Louis le Débonnaire.’¹⁵ (Charlemagne’s son Louis I had whipped himself for having red-hot stilettos poked into the eyeballs of his nephew, Prince Bernard.) Excommunication was no laughing matter, however, since in Poland, Italy and France there were millions of pious Catholics who now had to rethink their loyalty to an infidel emperor. This was especially problematic at a time when he was hoping to win the allegiance of the ultra-Catholic Spaniards, whose priests were to use Napoleon’s new heretical status as a potent propaganda tool against the French occupiers.

Franco-Vatican relations had continued to deteriorate over the next thirteen months, and on the night before the battle of Wagram, on July 5, 1809, under orders from Napoleon, Savary took the extraordinary step of having General Étienne Radet arrest the Pope in the Vatican, giving him half an hour to pack his bags before escorting him to the bishop’s palace in the small Italian Riviera port of Savona. This allowed Pope Pius to make one of the wriest remarks of the nineteenth century. ‘Assuredly, my son,’ he told Radet, ‘those orders will not bring divine orders upon you.’¹⁶ Napoleon meanwhile told his brother-in-law Prince Camillo Borghese, who was governor-general of the Alpine region which included Savona, that ‘The guard of the Pope should have all the appearance of a guard of honour.’¹⁷*

Pius behaved with great dignity, but it was a sorry tale of strong-arm tactics with absolutely no advantage for Napoleon. The only material change was that British goods now had to be smuggled into Livorno rather than landing openly on the docks as hitherto. While pious Catholics privately fumed at the treatment meted out to the Vicar of Christ, Napoleon found an historical precedent for his action, declaring that Rome had always been part of Charlemagne’s Empire. He added that now it would be an ‘imperial free city’, ‘the second city of the Empire’, and France would donate 2 million francs per annum to cover Church expenses.¹⁸ Canova also had no difficulty persuading him to spend 200,000 francs per annum preserving Roman antiquities. ‘The Pope is a good man,’ Napoleon told Fouché on August 6, ‘but ignorant and fanatical.’¹⁹ Those adjectives alas better describe Napoleon’s behaviour towards the pontiff.

 • • •

On July 27–28, 1809 Joseph, Jourdan and Victor were soundly defeated at the hands of Wellington and the Spanish Captain-General Cuesta at the battle of Talavera. Napoleon was particularly incensed by the way Jourdan misled him in his report, claiming that Wellington had lost 10,000 men – that is, one-third of his army – and possession of the battlefield. When Napoleon discovered that the number was really 4,600 and that the French had been ‘repulsed all day long’, he described Jourdan’s lies as ‘a straightforward crime’, and was furious that they might well have influenced his strategy in Spain. ‘He may say what he likes in the Madrid newspapers,’ he wrote, thus acknowledging the endemic untruthfulness of press accounts, ‘but he has no right to disguise the truth from the Government.’²⁰ Napoleon tended to believe the accounts in the British papers over those of his own generals, telling Clarke: ‘You must also tell General Sénarmont that he has not sent a correct account of his artillery; that the English captured more guns than he admits.’²¹ (It wasn’t six as Sénarmont reported, but seventeen.) ‘As long as they will attack good troops like the English, in good positions without making sure they can be carried,’ he continued, ‘my men will be led to death to no purpose.’²²

 • • •

Napoleon celebrated his fortieth birthday on August 15, 1809 by making Masséna, Davout and Berthier princes, each title coming with a large dotation. That night, after a grand parade, a review of the Guard at Enzersdorf and a gala dinner, he and Berthier slipped incognito into Vienna, an enemy capital under occupation where he might have been recognized, to watch the firework display in his honour.²³ He nonetheless worked as hard as ever during the day, writing from Schönbrunn to Cambacérès about a message to the Senate, his ambassador to Moscow, General Caulaincourt, about rumoured British attempts to buy muskets in Russia, the war minister General Clarke about Spain, and ordering the intendant-general of the Army of Germany, Pierre Daru, to give 300 francs to every child whose father had died at Austerlitz. Further letters that day went to Murat about setting up duchies in Sicily once their enemies were ‘purged’ from there and to Berthier about building boats that could transport 6,600 men across the Danube.²⁴

By September Francis was obliged to start negotiations. ‘Your master and I are like two bulls,’ Napoleon told the Austrian negotiator, Colonel Count Ferdinand Bubna, ‘who wish to mate with Germany and Italy.’²⁵ To Murat’s aide-de-camp (and Hortense’s lover) Colonel Charles de Flahaut, he went on to say: ‘I need Germany and I need Italy; for Italy means Spain, and Spain is a prolongation of France.’²⁶ This virtually guaranteed the eternal enmity of Austria, which had been the predominant power in both Italy and Germany for generations before the French Revolution. ‘I am not afraid of him,’ Napoleon said privately of Francis, ‘I despise him too much. He is not a knave; on the contrary, he is a simple soul like Louis XVI, but he is always under the influence of the last person to whom he has spoken. One can never trust him.’²⁷ As for the coming negotiations: ‘What matters it to them if they give up a few provinces; they are so dishonest that they will seize them again whenever they get the chance?’ The experiences of 1796–7, 1800–01, 1805 and 1809 certainly suggested that that was true. ‘Here’s the second time I’ve been to the battlefield of Austerlitz,’ Napoleon said, dining with his generals at Brno on September 17. ‘Will I have to come here a third time?’ ‘Sire,’ they replied, ‘according to what we’re seeing every day, nobody would dare bet against it.’²⁸

The Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed on October 14 by Champagny and Liechtenstein and ratified the next day by Napoleon and soon afterwards by Francis. Given that Francis had launched the war after several warnings, he could hardly complain of its harsh terms. Confining her armed forces to 150,000 men, and almost cutting her off from the sea by annexing the Illyrian provinces (she retained Fiume), Napoleon effectively reduced Austria to a second-rate power. She ceded Istria and Carinthia to France, and Salzburg, Berchtesgaden and parts of Upper Austria to Bavaria; was made to join the Continental System, and had to recognize all of Napoleon’s changes in Iberia and Italy. Austrian Galicia was split, the western four-fifths going to the Duchy of Warsaw and one-fifth (mainly eastern Galicia) to Russia. Despite the fact that 400,000 people had been added to the Russian Empire, this nevertheless raised new fears in St Petersburg that Napoleon intended to recreate the Kingdom of Poland.²⁹ In total, Austria had to give up 3¹/₂million of her population and to pay large indemnities. Francis also had to promise ‘peace and friendship . . . in perpetuity’, a similar phrase to the one he had assented to only four years earlier, which he did with the same degree of sincerity.³⁰

On the day the treaty was signed, Napoleon ordered Eugène to help the Bavarians crush a pro-Austrian rebellion that had broken out in the Tyrol in April.³¹ On October 17 Eugène took 56,000 Bavarian and French troops into the region to crush the resistance movement led by the charismatic former-innkeeper Andreas Hofer, who was betrayed and captured in the village of St Martin in the South Tyrol in late January. (The soldiers who seized him tore at his beard till his cheeks bled, wanting souvenirs of their formidable enemy.)³² Eugène pleaded for clemency, but on February 11, 1810 Napoleon replied that with the negotiations over his approaching marriage in full swing he didn’t want matters complicated by an official Austrian request for Hofer to be spared, so a military tribunal needed to be convened and he would have to be shot within twenty-four hours.³³

The Treaty of Schönbrunn has been criticized as a Carthaginian peace, which ultimately worked against Napoleon’s interests because it forced the Austrians to go to war against him yet again, but that happened only after he had been catastrophically defeated by Russia in 1812. At the time it seemed that a new kind of Franco-Austrian relationship was necessary to prevent these constant wars of revenge. Metternich, who was appointed foreign minister on October 8, had already concluded that Austria’s only alternative after her fourth successive defeat in twelve years was to join France as her junior partner. He spoke of ‘adapting to the triumphant French system’.³⁴ This could be achieved at a stroke, of course, if Napoleon were to divorce Josephine and marry Francis’s daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, who would be eighteen that December. Tentative preliminary soundings were taken. By 1809, Napoleon hadn’t given up the idea of marrying a Romanov princess, but neither an Austrian nor a Russian bride was possible while he was still married to Josephine.

Two developments, one two years previously and one very recent, may have concentrated Napoleon’s mind on the prospect of the succession and have renewed his desire for a child of his own to continue his dynasty.³⁵ In the early hours of May 5, 1807, Louis and Hortense’s four-year-old son Napoléon-Louis-Charles, the Crown Prince of Holland, whom Napoleon might have been considering as his ultimate heir, had died at The Hague of a croup-like illness. Hortense fell into a deep depression that could not have been much helped by letters such as Napoleon’s of June 16 that read, ‘I am touched by your suffering, but I wish that you were more courageous. To live is to suffer, and a human being who is worthy of honour must always struggle for mastery of self.’ He ended three sentences later, writing of Friedland: ‘I had a great victory on 14 June. I am well, and I love you very much.’³⁶ The child’s death ended any lingering attachment Hortense might have had to Louis, and she later had a child by the Comte de Flahaut.³⁷ ‘I could wish to be near you, to make you moderate and sensible in your grief,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine of her grandson’s death. ‘You have had the good fortune not to lose any children, but such loss is one of the conditions and pains attached to our human misery. Might I only learn that you have been reasonable and are well! Would you add to my sorrow?’³⁸ Although Napoleon himself might not have immediately spotted the way in which the infant’s death would increase the pressure on his own marriage, the far more emotionally intelligent, now forty-five-year-old Josephine did. Part of the reason why she could not be ‘sensible in her grief’ was that she was grieving not just for her daughter and grandson but for her own marriage, realizing that Napoleon might now wish to produce his own heir. Napoleon knew himself to be capable of this, because he had already had an illegitimate son, Count Léon, by his former mistress Éléonore de la Plaigne, and in the late summer of 1809 Marie Walewska also became pregnant.

Then, at 9 a.m. on Thursday, October 12, as Napoleon was about to interview some released French prisoners-of-war not far from the horseshoe-shaped double staircase at the back of Schönbrunn Palace, Friedrich Staps, the eighteen-year-old son of a Lutheran pastor from Erfurt, attempted to assassinate him while pretending to hand him a petition. He would have succeeded had Rapp not seized him a few paces away, whereupon Rapp, Berthier and two gendarmes found a large carving knife on him. ‘I was struck with the expression of his eyes when he looked at me,’ Rapp recalled, ‘his decided manner roused my suspicions.’³⁹ Napoleon interviewed Staps soon afterwards, in the company of Bernadotte, Berthier, Savary and Duroc, with the Alsatian-born Rapp interpreting. The Emperor hoped that the young student was insane and thus might be pardoned, but Corvisart pronounced him healthy and rational, albeit a political fanatic. When asked by Napoleon what he would do if he were freed, he replied, ‘I would try to kill you again.’ He was shot at 7 a.m. on the 17th, crying ‘Long live Germany!’ to the firing squad, and ‘Death to the tyrant!’⁴⁰ It had been impressed upon Napoleon in a very direct, personal manner that a new and uncompromising spirit of German nationalism was now alive in the lands that only three years before had been slumbering in the centuries-old embrace of the Holy Roman Empire.* ‘I’ve always had a dread of madmen,’ Napoleon told his secretary, recalling an evening when he’d been accosted at the theatre by an escapee from the Bicêtre lunatic asylum. ‘I am in love with the Empress!’ the man had cried. ‘You seem to have chosen an extraordinary confidant,’ Napoleon replied.⁴¹*

 • • •

Napoleon’s ruthlessness came out starkly in his next move. The close, comfortable, companionable marriage that he and Josephine had built up since his return from Egypt – in which she complained about his affairs but stayed faithful to him – was now a block to his political and dynastic ambitions and what he conceived to be the best interests of France, and so it had to end. His close proximity to men killed on many battlefields, lucky survival of the machine infernale, injury at Ratisbon, and the recently failed assassination attempt, now helped to concentrate his advisors’ minds. He left Schönbrunn on October 16 and arrived back at Fontainebleau at 9 a.m. on the 26th. (Pauline and one of her ladies-in-waiting, the plump and pretty twenty-five-year-old Piedmontese reader Baroness Christine de Mathis, came to visit that evening and Napoleon embarked on an affair with Christine almost immediately, which was to last until the night before his wedding. He would later say of her, ‘she accepted presents’.⁴²) He ordered that the connecting door between his and Josephine’s bedrooms be walled up; there was nothing metaphysical or ambiguous about this message of rejection. ‘All tenderness on the Emperor’s part, all consideration for my mother had vanished,’ wrote Hortense of this painful time, ‘he became unjust and vexatious in his attitude . . . I wished that the divorce had already been pronounced.’⁴³ The family left for the Tuileries on November 15 and by the 27th Bausset, who watched closely as the marriage entered its pathological final stage, had noticed ‘a great alteration in the features of the Empress, and a silent constraint in Napoleon’.⁴⁴

Had his Empire been an ancient, established one it might have survived the accession of a brother or nephew, but Napoleon’s Empire was not yet five years old, and he came to the conclusion that for the Bonaparte dynasty to survive he needed a son. After thirteen years of trying, the forty-six-year-old Josephine clearly wasn’t going to produce one. Napoleon knew all about the bloody power struggles that had followed the deaths of the childless Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. His current heir was Joseph, whose wife Julie Clary had not borne him any sons, and who was manifestly failing in Spain. As early as July 1806 the Duc de Lévis, an émigré who had returned after 18 Brumaire, had warned the Emperor, ‘Atlas carried the world, but after him came chaos.’⁴⁵

On November 30 Napoleon told Josephine he wanted to annul their marriage. ‘You have children,’ he said, ‘I have none. You must feel the necessity that lies upon me of strengthening my dynasty.’⁴⁶ She wept, said she couldn’t live without him, implored him to reconsider. ‘I have seen her weep for hours together,’ Rapp recalled of this period; ‘she spoke of her attachment for Bonaparte, for so she used to call him in our presence. She regretted the close of her splendid career: this was very natural.’⁴⁷ She wore a large white hat at dinner that night to hide the fact that she had been crying but Bausset found her ‘the image of grief and of despair’.⁴⁸ Dining alone together, neither Napoleon nor Josephine ate much and the only words that passed were Napoleon asking Bausset about the weather. At one point during dinner, Napoleon recalled, ‘she gave a scream and fainted’, and had to be carried away by her lady-in-waiting.⁴⁹ On another occasion, or perhaps the same one but differently remembered, Bausset heard ‘violent cries from the Empress Josephine issue from the Emperor’s chamber’, and Bausset entered to find her lying on the carpet ‘uttering piercing cries and complaints’ saying she would ‘never survive’ a divorce. Napoleon asked Bausset and a secretary to take her to her bedroom up the private staircase, which they managed to do although Bausset nearly tripped over his dress-sword as he was doing so.

Eugène’s arrival on December 5 helped calm his mother, and the Bonapartes and Beauharnaises were soon able to get down to discussing specifics. In order to qualify for the Church ceremony that Napoleon needed for his next wedding, his religious marriage to Josephine on the eve of his coronation had to be declared invalid, even though it had been performed by a prince of the Church, Cardinal Fesch. So Napoleon argued that it had been clandestine, with insufficient witnesses, and that he had been acting under Josephine’s compulsion.⁵⁰ Josephine agreed to go along with this absurdity, but no fewer than thirteen out of France’s twenty-seven cardinals refused to attend Napoleon’s next wedding. (When Napoleon banned them from wearing their scarlet robes of office, the dissenters became known as ‘the black cardinals’.) In nullifying the marriage, the government law officers took as their precedents the divorces of Louis XII and Henri IV.⁵¹

At the meeting on December 7 at which Josephine had to declare before the grand officers of the Empire that she consented to the divorce, her niece’s husband, the minister Antoine Lavalette, recorded: ‘She displayed so much courage and firmness of mind that all the spectators were deeply moved. The next day she left the Tuileries, never to return more.’⁵² When she got into her carriage with her lady-in-waiting, ‘not one single person remained to show her a grateful face’. Such is the cruelty of courts. She was hardly exiled from Paris, however, as she kept the Élysée Palace as part of her settlement. Napoleon gave her Malmaison and the fourteenth-century Château Navarre in Normandy, which had cost him 900,000 francs, and she maintained her rank of empress, all honours and prerogatives, while her debts of 2 million francs were paid off and she enjoyed 3 million francs per annum in income for life.⁵³ As Frederick the Great said of Maria Theresa at the time of the first partition of Poland: ‘She wept, but she took.’

The financial aspects worked well for both of them: Josephine was given a vast income, and it is a fortunate man who has his divorce settlement paid by the state. Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon, who would become the next emperor of France and her direct descendants who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. His sit on none.

 • • •

Even before breaking the news to Josephine, Napoleon had written to Caulaincourt, the French ambassador to Russia, on November 22, to ask him privately to sound out the Tsar over the prospect of his marrying his sister, the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna: ‘I do not make a formal request, I solicit an expression of your opinion.’⁵⁴ So began a dual courtship with the Russians and the Austrians. Napoleon made it clear in mid-December, that his preference was for Anna and he didn’t care about the religious considerations involved – to a man who had flirted with Islam and embraced excommunication, the fact that she was Russian Orthodox was not an insurmountable problem. There was an alternative princess available in Saxony, but she would not have brought the geopolitical benefits of a marriage to Tsar Alexander’s sister or Emperor Francis’s daughter. The age gap – Anna wouldn’t be fifteen until January – would probably have meant that she would have stayed in St Petersburg for a few years before moving to Paris.

On December 16 Napoleon’s marriage to Josephine was dissolved by a four-sentence sénatus-consulte, and immediately afterwards he ordered Caulaincourt to propose to Anna on his behalf, asking for a response in two days. The Russians took thirty-eight. ‘I tell you frankly,’ Alexander told Caulaincourt, ‘my sister could not do better.’⁵⁵ He wasn’t being frank: the Tsar did not want a mésalliance between the Romanovs and a Corsican upstart any more than did his mother. Equally, he couldn’t afford to offend Napoleon while France was so much in the ascendant and Russia had no allies. He wanted at very least a signed agreement with France on the future of Poland as the price for his assent, and to that end Caulaincourt and the Russian foreign minister Rumiantsev drafted a convention on December 28, the first article of which was a ‘Reciprocal engagement never to permit the re-establishment of Poland’, and the second suppressed the word ‘Poland’ and ‘Poles’ in all public acts, while Article 5 forbade any further territorial extension of the Duchy of Warsaw.⁵⁶ When the Tsar implied he could remove his mother’s objection to the marriage, Caulaincourt signed. The Tsar of All the Russias was therefore perfectly willing to sacrifice his teenage sister to the man his family saw as a forty-year-old Corsican parvenu in order to keep Poland partitioned. What Napoleon’s brave Polish lancers would have made of all this is impossible to say. On January 10 Caulaincourt received orders from Napoleon to obtain a definite reply to the proposal within ten days of receipt, at a time when couriers took nearly three weeks to get from Paris to St Petersburg.⁵⁷

By February 6 Napoleon no longer thought it worth tying his hands over Poland for Anna, and he ordered Champagny not to ratify the signed treaty, calling it ‘ridiculous and absurd’. Disavowing Caulaincourt’s actions, he stated, ‘I cannot say that the kingdom of Poland will never be re-established because that would mean that if one day the Lithuanians or any others would re-establish it, I would be forced to send some troops to oppose it. This is contrary to my dignity. My goal is to tranquillize Russia.’⁵⁸ He proposed an alternative convention promising not to help any other Power re-establish Poland, but the Tsar considered that insufficient.⁵⁹ The result was that Napoleon felt snubbed, and started to look to Vienna for his future bride, and Alexander, for his part, realized that Napoleon could not be trusted over Poland.⁶⁰ He also soon suspected that a dual courtship had been taking place and was offended over that too, or at least pretended to be.⁶¹

‘I don’t know what is required after all this,’ Napoleon wrote to Alexander on the last day of 1809, hoping to keep the friendship alive. ‘I can’t destroy chimeras and fight against clouds.’⁶² By early February 1810 Alexander was pushing ahead with thoroughgoing reforms of the Russian army.⁶³ In January he had appointed the modernizer Barclay de Tolly as minister for war, and plans for defending Russia’s western border along the line of the Dvina and Berezina rivers were drawn up. That year also saw a nationalist propaganda movement start in Russia, and criticism of France was once more allowed in the press. Francophobic literary and philological clubs were also permitted.⁶⁴ When Marie Walewska gave birth to Napoleon’s son on May 4 1810, the baby was given the name Alexandre. It didn’t help.

 • • •

Years later, Napoleon recalled briefly considering taking a Parisian wife. He said he had made a list of five or six women, but at a vote at the Tuileries five councillors had supported the Austrian alliance, two the Saxon, with Fouché and Cambacérès still holding out for Anna. Napoleon suspected that the last two opposed the Austrian marriage only because they had voted for the execution of Marie Louise’s great-aunt, Marie Antoinette. Cambacérès denied it, saying that he knew Napoleon would end up going to war with whichever country wasn’t chosen, and ‘I dread a march to St Petersburg more than a march to Vienna.’⁶⁵

The initial auguries for Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise were not good: as a child she had played with ‘a ferocious effigy’ of him in her nursery, and at fourteen and eighteen she had been forced to leave her home to escape his armies. ‘I pity the poor princess he chooses,’ she wrote before she had any inkling it would be her. Once she realized it would be, she wrote: ‘I resign my fate into the hands of Divine Providence’, asking a friend to ‘Pray that it may never happen.’⁶⁶ Napoleon was much happier with the situation. ‘When I heard Marie Louise was fair I was very glad,’ he recalled.⁶⁷ She was better than just fair; Lavalette described her as ‘tall, well made, and in excellent health. She appeared adorned with all the grace and beauty that usually accompany youth’, and also had an ‘air of kindness, and, unlike the rest of her family, her smile was amiable and sweet’.⁶⁸ The first of Napoleon’s 318 surviving letters to Marie Louise was his marriage proposal from Rambouillet on February 23, 1810, written by a secretary:

Ma cousine, The brilliant qualities that distinguish your person have inspired us with the desire to serve and honour you by approaching the Emperor, your father, with the request that he shall entrust to us the happiness of Your Imperial Highness. May we hope that the feelings which prompt us to take this step will be acceptable to you? May we flatter ourselves with the belief that you will not be guided solely by the duty of obeying your parents? Should the feelings of your Imperial Highness be partial to us, we would cultivate them so carefully and strive so constantly to please you in every way that we flatter ourselves with the hope of succeeding some day in winning your regard; such is the aim that we would fain encompass, and in respect of which we beg your Highness to favour us.⁶⁹

It was a gracious proposal to an eighteen-year-old from a forty-year-old man. Two days later he addressed her as ‘Ma Soeur’ in his own (execrable) handwriting, before settling into ‘Madame’ until they were married, and thence ‘ma chère Louise’, ‘Ma bonne Louise’ and other variations.

The nuptials between the continent’s oldest and newest monarchies involved a complex process, whereby Marie Louise married Napoleon by proxy in the Capuchin Chapel of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna on March 11, Archduke Charles standing in for her at the ceremony and Berthier for Napoleon. When the aristocratic Archbishop Ferdinand de Rohan, who held the ancient honorific title First Almoner of France, wrote an absurdly oleaginous letter congratulating him on his coming marriage, the Emperor told Duroc that he must ‘pay 12,000 francs to the First Almoner out of the theatrical fund’.⁷⁰

Napoleon choreographed his first meeting with his bride minutely for Tuesday, March 27, 1810, after the proxy marriage but before the civil one. They were going to meet 3 miles from Soissons in a tent, he was going to bow to her, but as she was bowing before him in response he was going to raise her up. Instead it rained and anyway he was too impatient so he and Murat drove past the tent to intercept Marie Louise’s carriage, which they did in front of the church at Courcelles. ‘Madam,’ he told her rather less imposingly as he got into her coach, ‘it gives me great pleasure to meet you.’⁷¹ He then took her in his coach to his palace at Compiègne, where they arrived at 9.30 p.m. and defied protocol by dining together, with close family, including Caroline (who as Queen of Naples had usurped the position of Marie Louise’s other great-aunt, Queen Maria Carolina).⁷²

During the dinner in the François I Gallery at the palace, Napoleon asked the ever-useful Cardinal Fesch in Marie Louise’s presence whether they were legally already married, and was assured that they were because of the proxy ceremony in Vienna. Napoleon was supposed to be staying in the nearby Hôtel de la Chancellerie while she slept at the palace that night, to observe propriety, but Bausset thought that, judging by the breakfast Napoleon had caused to be served at the Empress’s bedside at noon the next day, ‘we think it probable that he did not sleep at the Hôtel de la Chancellerie’, any more than he was to sleep in the Italian pavilion at Saint-Cloud on the night of their civil marriage.⁷³

Recalling that first night he made love to Marie Louise, Napoleon later told a confidant: ‘She liked it so much that she asked me to do it again.’⁷⁴ Despite her trepidation it started out as a happy marriage; they spent every night under the same roof from July 1810 until September 1811 and Napoleon dropped Marie Walewska, whom he had installed in Paris, when he remarried. Indeed it is not clear that Napoleon was ever unfaithful to Marie Louise, at least until after she had been unfaithful to him. ‘Neither of his wives had ever anything to complain of from Napoleon’s personal manners,’ Metternich wrote, recalling how Marie Louise had once told him, ‘I have no fear of Napoleon, but I begin to think that he is afraid of me.’⁷⁵ She was not the love of his life, however. ‘I think,’ he said years later, ‘although I loved Marie Louise very sincerely, that I loved Josephine better. That was natural; we had risen together; and she was a true wife, the wife I had chosen. She was full of grace, graceful even in the way she prepared herself for bed; graceful in undressing herself . . . I should never have parted from her if she had borne me a son; but, ma foi . . .’⁷⁶ Napoleon was eventually to come to regret his second marriage, blaming it for his downfall. ‘Assuredly but for my marriage with Marie I never should have made war on Russia,’ he said, ‘but I felt certain of the support of Austria, and I was wrong, for Austria is the natural enemy of France.’⁷⁷

After their civil wedding in the Grand Gallery at Saint-Cloud on Sunday April 1, 1810, at which the Austrian ambassador, Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, wore a field marshal’s uniform that made him look ‘white as a miller’ and which Madame Mère attended, they went to the Tuileries the next day for a religious wedding and public celebrations.⁷⁸ At a silver-gilt altar erected in the Salon d’Apollon at the Louvre, a square room usually used to exhibit paintings, Cardinal Fesch gave the nuptial blessing. Paris celebrated with fireworks, 3,000 legs of mutton and 1,000 sausages given to the poor, dances in the Champs-Élysées, a prisoner amnesty, horsemanship displays, concerts, parades and a hot-air balloon flying on the Champ de Mars. No one understood the importance of ‘bread and circuses’ as well as the modern Caesar, and the 6,000 veterans who married on the same day as him received 600 francs each.⁷⁹ Marie Louise didn’t represent a very significant cost-saving for Napoleon, even vis-à-vis Josephine, who had cost him an average of 899,795 francs each year, since his new wife cost him (or at least the French treasury) 772,434 francs per annum.⁸⁰

Marie Louise had 1,500 people presented to her on her wedding day. ‘I felt ill all the time because of the diamond crown,’ she told a friend afterwards; ‘it was so heavy that I could scarcely bear it.’ The template used was Marie Antoinette’s wedding to Louis XVI in 1770 – about as unromantic a precedent as can be imagined but the one that best fitted Napoleon’s view of what a royal wedding should be like. The day after his wedding, Napoleon wrote to Tsar Alexander of ‘the feeling of perfect esteem and tender friendship with which I am, Monsieur mon frère, Your Majesty’s good brother’.⁸¹ Brother he might be according to the official courtesies of the day, but they were not going to be brothers-in-law. Only two days after Napoleon wrote those words Alexander predicted to his Polish confidant and former foreign minister, Prince Adam Czartoryski, that there would be a crisis in Franco-Russian relations ‘nine months from now’.⁸² The Tsar stayed in touch with Czartoryski, asking him how loyal the Grand Duchy of Warsaw truly was towards Napoleon. The Electorate of Bavaria, Grand Duchy of Württemberg and region of Westphalia had been turned into kingdoms by Napoleon as recently as 1807, and Alexander feared the Grand Duchy of Warsaw might be next.

Three months after Napoleon’s wedding, on July 1, Schwarzenberg threw a celebratory ball at his embassy in the rue de Mont Blanc. A candle set alight a muslin curtain and then the whole building, killing four people of the six hundred present, including Schwarzenberg’s sister-in-law who could be identified afterwards only by the rings she had been wearing. ‘I wasn’t frightened but if the Emperor had not forced me to leave the room, I would have burned because I hadn’t the slightest idea of the danger,’ Marie Louise told Pauline a week later. After taking his wife to safety, Napoleon returned to oversee the rescue operation, and was so unimpressed with the response times that he completely overhauled Paris’s fire-engine system, creating the sapeurs-pompiers.⁸³ His superstition about the incident led him to believe that either he or Schwarzenberg lay under a curse.

 • • •

It was fitting that Napoleon’s wedding should have taken place at the Louvre, because the visual arts were vital to the perception of his Empire, both by contemporaries and by succeeding generations. ‘My intention is to turn the arts towards subjects which could tend to perpetuate the remembrance of what has been accomplished these last fifteen years,’ he told Daru, and his lavish patronage bore extraordinary fruit.⁸⁴ If Napoleon is to be criticized, as he sometimes is, for the paucity of great literature during his reign, then logically he must also deserve praise for the great art produced in the Empire period, which he did so much to encourage. Of course he used culture for political propaganda, as had Louis XIV, the French revolutionaries and indeed the Emperor Augustus and the many other Roman emperors Napoleon admired.⁸⁵ But any period that can boast painters as talented as Jacques-Louis David – who once said of Napoleon, ‘In the shadow of my hero I will glide into posterity’ – François Gérard, Théodore Géricault, Anne-Louis Girodet (who in 1812 was commissioned to paint no fewer than thirty-six identical full-length portraits of Napoleon; he managed twenty-six before the first abdication), Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Urbain Guérin, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Carle Vernet and his son Horace, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, as well as the miniaturists Augustin and Isabey, must be entitled to the overused soubriquet ‘golden age’.⁸⁶ (In Spain, even Goya worked in King Joseph’s court for a time.) Napoleon had a 60,000-franc annual budget to encourage painting, and he regularly overspent it. At the Salon of 1810 alone he bought twenty paintings for 47,000 francs for the Louvre.⁸⁷

Napoleon’s image and deeds were immortalized in paintings, prints, tapestries, medals, porcelain, objets d’art and sculpture as a way both of legitimizing his rule and, in one art historian’s phrase, of ‘inscribing himself permanently on the French memory’.⁸⁸ He would sit for a painter and a sculptor simultaneously, so long as they came at lunchtime and didn’t talk. In the age before photography no one expected precise verisimilitude in art. Nobody thought Napoleon actually crossed the Alps on a constantly rearing stallion, as in David’s painting, for example; rather it was intended as a magnificent allegorical comment on the glory of the achievement. In the bottom left-hand corner the graffiti on the Alpine rocks read ‘Hannibal’, ‘Karolus Magnus’ (that is, Charlemagne) and ‘Bonaparte’.

Opponents dismissed Napoleonic art as mere propaganda, but many discerning non-French connoisseurs appreciated, collected and even commissioned it. The 10th Duke of Hamilton commissioned David to paint Napoleon in his Study at the Tuileries in 1811, for example; the Prince Regent bought Isabey’s The Review at the Tuileries. The 2nd Marquis of Lansdowne bought a good deal of Napoleonic art, while Sir John Soane collected Napoleonic book-bindings and John Bowes hung portraits of Napoleon’s marshals on the staircase at Barnard Castle.⁸⁹

On occasion Napoleon displayed modesty; he refused to have himself depicted as a demi-god and when in April 1811, just prior to its public exhibition, he viewed Antonio Canova’s marble statue of him as ‘Mars the Peacemaker’, for which he had given a record five sittings, he immediately ordered it into storage, hidden behind a wooden and canvas screen for the rest of his reign.⁹⁰ He feared people might laugh at its near-nudity and compare his physique when Canova had started the statue in 1803 with his much stouter self eight years later. (Today it can be seen in the stairwell of Apsley House in London, where the 1st Duke of Wellington’s guests used to hang their umbrellas on it.)

The patronage of Napoleon, and much more actively that of Josephine, launched an entire neo-classical artistic style, which came to comprise houses, furniture, clocks, dining rooms, tableware, textiles, wallpaper, bedrooms, painted decorations, chandeliers, mirrors, lighting and gardening. The lavish decor of the Ancien Régime had already made a mild reappearance in the Directory, but it really took the Napoleonic Empire to define the style.⁹¹ Napoleon’s fascination with Ancient Greece and Rome meant that classical architecture would always be favoured, and his Egyptian expedition inspired architects like Percier, Fontaine and Berthault and many interior decorators to experiment with Egyptian themes too.⁹²

Many of the glories of the Empire style can still be seen today, and reinforce the idea that under Napoleon French architecture and decorative arts led the world. They include, taken at random: the ballroom and library at Compiègne, the façade of the Château Margaux near Bordeaux, Maison Prelle’s textiles, the Grand Salon of the Hôtel de Beauharnais and the ground floor of the Hôtel Bourrienne (by Étienne Leconte) in Paris, the staircase of the Élysée Palace, Jacob-Desmalter’s secrétaires, Canova’s statue of Madame Mère at Chatsworth, the garden at Malmaison, Josephine’s boudoir at Saint-Cloud, Martin Biennais’ silver mustard pots, Pius VII’s bed and Josephine’s bidet at Fontainebleau, Blaise Deharme’s varnished metal tea-tables, the Emperor’s salon in the Grand Trianon at Versailles (where Napoleon had apartments rather than in the chateau of Versailles itself, because of its Ancien Régime overtones), Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s bronzes, Auguste Famin’s bathroom decorations at Rambouillet (which admittedly Napoleon didn’t much like), Pierre Bellangé’s armchairs, Darte Frères’ swan-shaped cups, Joseph Revel’s clocks, Percier’s library ceiling and Berthault’s Temple of Love at Malmaison, Sallandrouze’s carpets from Aubusson, Joseph Thouvenin’s book-bindings, the Lancelot firm’s two-candle lampshades, Josephine’s champagne flutes from the Montcenis factory at Le Creusot, Joseph Dufours’ wallpaper, the Gobelins factory’s tapestries and Marie-Joseph Genu’s silver sauceboats.⁹³ Such an astonishing explosion of artistic creation during the Consulate and First Empire cannot be entirely detached from Napoleon, who was for over a decade the greatest art patron in Europe. Of course many of these craftsmen would have found employment anywhere in Europe – and many flourished before 1799 and after 1815 – but the sublime Empire style is unlikely to have developed as it did without the encouragement, and inspiration, of the Emperor.

 • • •

On April 16, 1810 Napoleon appointed André Masséna to command the new Army of Portugal, against the marshal’s own pleadings. Masséna had been suffering from respiratory problems ever since his fall from his horse on Lobau, and was nearly blinded when Napoleon shot him in a hunting accident in September 1808. (‘Being wounded during a shoot is such a stroke of bad luck after all the dangers you’ve escaped’ was all the apology he got.⁹⁴) But when he and Masséna met face to face, Napoleon managed to persuade him to take on the Portuguese command, not least because he promised him control over strategy and assured him that ‘You will lack nothing in supplies.’⁹⁵ Yet he was only given three corps, totalling fewer than 70,000 men, to recapture Portugal from Wellington, despite the fact that when Napoleon had contemplated undertaking the campaign himself he had earmarked over 100,000. By May 29, Napoleon’s mania for micro-management had got the better of him, and he started sending Masséna detailed orders about where to march and when, through the medium of Masséna’s hated enemy Berthier.

Masséna’s wholly justified complaints by late July – that his troops hadn’t been paid for six months, that thousands of rations had to be abandoned for lack of wagons, that one-third of the artillery had to be left behind in Spain for lack of mules, that the promised reinforcements hadn’t arrived, and so on – fell on Berthier’s unsympathetic ears. Nonetheless, in less than a month Masséna had pursued Wellington to within 20 miles of Lisbon, where he came up against the formidable defensive Lines of Torres Vedras and was forced to halt. With heavy guns and large-scale reinforcement, Masséna might have found the weakest place of the Lines to storm, but he did not have them. Napoleon assumed that Masséna’s much larger force would easily overcome Wellington’s 25,000 men, entirely failing to take into account the additional 25,000 Portuguese serving with Wellington. Having never seen the Lines himself he underestimated their defensive capacity, until it was explained to him on November 24 by General Maximilien Foy.

To visit the Lines today, especially in those places where they are being expertly restored to their 1810 condition, one appreciates the almost insurmountable problem that Masséna faced. Seven thousand Portuguese labourers had constructed no fewer than three lines across the 29-mile Lisbon peninsula, including 165 fortified redoubts, defended by 628 guns.⁹⁶ The Royal Navy established a telegraph system for rapid communication along each of them and the flanks were covered by gunboats anchored in the Tagus.

Napoleon might deride Wellington as a mere ‘sepoy general’ in the Moniteur, but in private he was impressed with Wellington’s ruthless scorched-earth policy on the retreat to Torres Vedras, telling Chaptal: ‘In Europe only Wellington and I are capable of carrying out these measures. But there is this difference between him and me, which is that France . . . would blame me, while England will approve of him.’⁹⁷ It was true; Wellington has not generally been criticized for the scorched-earth tactics he employed in Portugal, while Napoleon has been castigated for using much the same methods in the Holy Land, Prussia and later Russia. By January 1811, reinforced only by Drouet and 6,000 men, Masséna’s army at Santarém outside the Lines was starving, deserting and marauding. Masséna stayed until the retreat could not be put off any longer, and on the night of March 5, erecting scarecrows stuffed with straw to resemble sentries, he left Santarém. ‘He is used up,’ Napoleon said of Masséna, ‘he isn’t fit to command four men and a corporal!’⁹⁸

 • • •

In May 1810 the heir to the sixty-one-year-old King Charles XIII of Sweden died.* The Swedes alighted upon the idea of offering the future throne to Bernadotte, who had been kind to Swedish prisoners-of-war during the Eylau campaign. They clearly didn’t mind that their future monarch was a former rabid republican who had had ‘Death to Kings’ tattooed on his chest, and assumed that after their defeat by Russia and the loss of Finland, having a French marshal on their throne – especially one related to Napoleon by marriage – would bring them a useful alliance.

Yet, as we have seen, Napoleon and Bernadotte were not at all on good terms, as the Swedes assumed they were. ‘The vanity of that man is excessive,’ Napoleon had written to Fouché from Vienna the previous September. ‘I’ve ordered the War Minister to recall him. His talent is very mediocre. I’ve no kind of faith in him. He lends a willing ear to all the intriguers who inundate this great capital . . . He almost made me lose the battle of Jena; he behaved feebly at Wagram; he wasn’t at Eylau, although he might have been, and he didn’t do all he might have done at Austerlitz.’⁹⁹ It was all true, and he might have added plenty more slights going back beyond Brumaire – Bernadotte had married Désirée, after all. Yet when the Swedes, who could have been invaluable in any future war against Russia, asked Napoleon’s permission to offer Bernadotte the (eventual) crown, he agreed, albeit hesitantly enough to irritate Bernadotte, who was still smarting over the sarcastic words directed at him during Wagram.

Tsar Alexander chose to regard Bernadotte’s move to Sweden, like the spurning of Anna Pavlovna, as an insult and a provocation. Only in the army was the apparent meritocracy of the elevation admired. ‘The example of Bernadotte turned all heads,’ recalled Captain Blaze; ‘we all fancied that we had a sceptre in the sheath of our sword. A soldier had become a king; each of us thought we might do the same.’¹⁰⁰

 • • •

On June 3, 1810, Napoleon dismissed Fouché for conducting unauthorized secret peace negotiations with Britain. ‘I’m aware of all the services which you have rendered me,’ he wrote, ‘and I believe in your attachment and your zeal; however it is impossible for me to allow you to keep your portfolio. The post of minister of police requires an absolute and entire confidence, and that can no longer exist because you have compromised my tranquillity and that of the State.’¹⁰¹ Employing the banker Gabriel Ouvrard (who used invisible ink in his correspondence with Fouché), the British banker Sir Francis Baring and other intermediaries, Fouché had indulged in detailed peace negotiations with the British foreign secretary, Lord Wellesley, Wellington’s elder brother, without Napoleon’s knowledge.¹⁰²

Napoleon was understandably furious when he discovered that Wellesley had been led to believe that Fouché was acting on his behalf, which would have meant ‘a total change in all my political relations’, as well as ‘a stain upon my character’. Napoleon was hoping to force Britain to sue for peace through the pressure of the Continental System, but this unauthorized démarche could only have sent a mixed message to London. Fouché’s intrigues, Napoleon complained, meant that ‘I am obliged to keep up a constant supervision, which fatigues me.’¹⁰³ He sent Fouché to Rome as governor, and appointed his rival Savary as police minister.¹⁰⁴ Ouvrard was sent to the debtors’ prison of Saint-Pélagie, where he stayed for three years playing charades and whist in conditions of some luxury.¹⁰⁵

 • • •

By July 1810 Napoleon appreciated that the Continental System was not working as he had hoped, but rather than scrap it altogether he decided to modify it, introducing ‘Le Nouveau Système’, which permitted the selling of special licences that allowed certain individuals and companies to trade with Britain in a number of named products. The sale of these was open to abuse – Bourrienne skimmed off millions of francs selling them in Hamburg, for example – and rife with accusations of favouritism. Non-French manufacturers within the Empire were rightly convinced that the granting of licences tended to be skewed towards the French, and they deeply resented it. Between 1810 and 1813, Bordeaux received 181 general licences and 607 one-off permits to trade with America, for example, against Hamburg’s 68 and 5 respectively.¹⁰⁶ Even the treasury minister Mollien suspected that Napoleon ‘wanted to take a part of the monopoly of [trade with] England through a system of licences, at the expense of the Continent’.¹⁰⁷ By April 1812 Napoleon was writing to Berthier to say that ‘as there is no customs service in Corsica, there are no objections to sugar and coffee going in, without permitting it however, but by turning a blind eye’.¹⁰⁸

Bureaucracy plagued the licensing system as further decrees were promulgated over the years. In the area between Antwerp on the Channel and Lorient on the Bay of Biscay for example, one-sixth of all exports had to be of wine, with the rest composed of brandies, seeds (except grass) and non-prohibited French merchandise. The area of the Charente Inférieure could export grains, but half of exports there too had to be wines and brandies. Ships from ports between Ostia and Agde could go to nine named ports in the Levant and Spain, but no others. Further circulars in July 1810 authorized prefects to refuse licences to non-French vessels.¹⁰⁹ Different types of licences costing different amounts authorized different companies from different departments to trade in different prescribed commodities with different foreign ports. The rules were constantly changing, seemingly capriciously, with endless clauses and sub-clauses covering every likely combination and permutation. Napoleon oversaw all this with his customary attention to minutiae. ‘Who authorized the admission of the Conciliateur which arrived on Genoa on July 11th with a cargo of ebony?’ he asked the excise chief in Paris on August 14.

The Russians considered Le Nouveau Système to be an outrage against them, since they were still banned from trading with Britain, whereas French manufacturers seemed to be evading the blockade. A sign of how far Alexander had come from the friendliness he had shown Napoleon at Tilsit, and even the good nature of Erfurt, may be judged from the visit in July 1810 of Frederick William’s aide-de-camp, Baron Friedrich von Wrangel, who announced the death of Queen Louise from damaged lungs and a heart polyp. ‘I swear to you to avenge her death,’ a clearly upset Alexander told Wrangel, absurdly blaming Napoleon’s behaviour towards the queen at Tilsit for her demise, ‘and her murderer is to pay for it.’¹¹⁰ He added that he was rearming fast, not in order to help Napoleon invade India, as one unfounded rumour went, or even to prosecute the wars he was currently fighting against both Turkey and Persia, but to fight France. ‘By 1814,’ he said, ‘I can, according to my most exact calculations, enter the lists with a well-equipped army of 400,000. With 200,000 I will cross the Oder, while another 200,000 will cross the Vistula.’¹¹¹ He added that he expected Austria and Prussia to rise up at that point, and follow his lead.

 • • •

While Napoleon expected family obligations to keep Austria in France’s political orbit, they didn’t prevent him from dethroning his own brother Louis on July 3, 1810, for putting his Dutch subjects’ interests over those of the French Empire, especially with regard to conscription and the Continental System. ‘In spite of all his faults I cannot forget that I brought him up as a son,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise.¹¹² ‘When I was a lieutenant of artillery,’ he told Savary, ‘I raised him on my pay; I was sharing what bread I had with him, and this is what he does to me!’¹¹³ Holland was annexed and run as a series of imperial departments, while Louis went into exile in various Austrian spa towns, where he had hot baths in grape-skins and wrote anti-Napoleonic tracts under his cadet title, the Comte de Saint-Leu.

Napoleon was not naive about his worsening relations with Alexander. In early August he wrote to the King of Saxony, asking him secretly to strengthen his armaments and in particular to reinforce the Polish fortress of Modlin against a possible Russian attack. ‘My relations are very good,’ he said of Alexander, ‘but one must be prepared.’¹¹⁴ With Russia seemingly coming to terms with Turkey, Napoleon told Caulaincourt to warn Alexander that although he was content for Russia to take Moldavia and Wallachia and the left bank of the Danube, ‘Russia would violate her agreements with me should she keep anything on the right bank, and if she interfered with the Serbians’, because ‘a single place kept by Russia on the right bank of the Danube would destroy the independence of Turkey, and would entirely change the state of affairs.’¹¹⁵ Napoleon asked for intelligence on Russian troop movements, and by mid-October he was starting to strengthen his forces in Danzig and northern Germany, while the Russians fortified the Dvina and Berezina rivers. The number of flashpoints between the two superpowers was multiplying dangerously.

 • • •

The year 1810 had been a mixed one for Napoleon; although his Empire had reached the zenith of its power and territorial extent, he had made mistakes that boded ill for its future. Most of these errors had been unforced, and many of his problems, we can now see, were self-inflicted. He need not have quarrelled publicly with the Pope, certainly not to the point of arresting him. Impatience to make a dynastic alliance had offended Alexander and made him suspicious over Poland, even though Napoleon had no intention of restoring that kingdom. The Austrian marriage was never going to be enough to assuage the harsh peace of Schönbrunn. Masséna should have been supported properly, or not sent to Portugal at all; better still, Napoleon should have gone there himself to fight Wellington. It was an error of judgement to let an untrustworthy, resentful Bernadotte go to so strategically important a place as Sweden, and another to have left Fouché’s prima facie act of treason go essentially unpunished. Similarly, Napoleon should have seen the Continental System’s new licensing regime for the hypocrisy that it was in the eyes of the Empire, his allies and especially the Russians. Although Alexander was rearming and planning a war of revenge, the Grande Armée in its present state would be more than capable of taking care of a border war against Russia in Germany, especially with Austria tied into the marriage alliance. None of his opponents could threaten the existence of the largest European empire since Ancient Rome, larger even that Charlemagne’s. Only Napoleon himself could do that.