4
After they had come to power, Napoleon and Hitler were faced by very similar problems. Their countries were in economic chaos, there was substantial opposition to their régimes, there were difficulties with the Church. The First Consul saw his primary task as healing the wounds inflicted by the French Revolution, while Hitler was determined to ‘save’ Germany from the Jews and Bolshevism. Both their foreign policies were aggressive in the extreme. Bonaparte wished to assert France’s dominance over western and central Europe besides retaining her ‘natural’ frontiers; Hitler intended to create a Greater Germany and then to conquer eastern Europe. In addition, each was intent on building a new type of state with a new social order.
A comparison of this period of their careers will at once reveal resemblances. Both men enjoyed the advantage of more or less unlimited power, swiftly removing all constraints, yet they had to go carefully since at first neither was entirely secure. A serious military defeat (which very nearly happened at Marengo) would almost certainly have toppled Napoleon, while Hitler was justifiably nervous of the generals, who might easily have moved against him. Nevertheless, they gradually transformed a tenuous control over their countries into an iron grip, even if the saviour rather than the despot was more in evidence during the early stages. They showed extraordinary skill in selecting the right experts to assist them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in their restoration of the French and German economies.
The Consulate is generally regarded as a golden age of French prosperity. This was largely due to Napoleon’s gifts as administrator and his flair for choosing the right men. Just as he had centralized the administration with the college of prefects, he set up tax offices in every département, each staffed by eight collectors, the principal tax being on income. He picked experienced officials to rebuild the country’s financial machinery. A sinking fund to buy back stock from the national debt was established, the Bank of France was founded, and paper currency was replaced by gold and silver; the franc would remain stable until 1914. In 1802 the budget was to be balanced for the first time in seventy years. Gold reserves were built up steadily (quite apart from Bonaparte’s secret hoard beneath the Tuileries). A Commercial Bank, a Discount Bank and other institutions to assist trade were set up. Industry was encouraged, interest-free loans being granted to a number of manufacturers. Roads and communications were improved, ports built. When famine threatened grain was rushed in from abroad; in winter soup-kitchens and public shelters were erected in Paris. Within three years there was full employment and prosperity was returning. Some of this was due to the end of an economic depression, some to the work of gifted ministers. However, the First Consul was given the credit, much of which he indeed deserved. He had above all restored France’s self-confidence.
In 1799 Bonaparte was still only thirty. The Duc de Broglie (Mme de Staël’s son-in-law) saw him that year ‘striding vigorously through the Tuileries, his right arm in that of his secretary and a little Turkish sword under the other, slim and easy, olive skinned and fierce eyed’. Another secretary, Baron de Méneval – who hero-worshipped him – describes the First Consul as 5 feet 2 inches tall, well built, with piercing grey eyes, good teeth, a straight nose and fine chestnut hair which he now wore short. Méneval adds that ‘the nobility and dignity of his head and neck were unsurpassed by the finest antique busts’, that he had a charming smile and a loud, cheerful laugh, but that if angry ‘his countenance grew stern, even terrible’. The far from worshipping Mme de Staël has a very different picture. Bonaparte had ‘a little body and a big head, with something arrogant and awkward about him, at the same time both contemptuous and sheepish, combining the gaucherie of a parvenu with a despot’s insolence’. As for his smile, while admitting that it had been praised, she herself found it ‘more mechanical than coming from the heart – his eyes never matched the expression of his mouth’. From a window at the Tuileries the German playwright Kotzebue watched him at a review:
He arrived escorted by generals and aides-de-camp, all splendidly accoutred, while he himself wore the plainest of uniforms without gold lace … on several occasions I saw him being stopped, even by women who were allowed to go up and talk to him and hand in petitions … if he stayed silent his gravity might seem coldness, giving an alarmingly stern impression. Yet the instant he speaks a kindly smile gives a gracious impression to his mouth.
Frenchmen who saw Bonaparte only from the crowd would no doubt have agreed with Kotzebue that he ‘inspired trust’.
We have a more intimate picture of the real man from Mme de Rémusat, Mme Bonaparte’s lady-in-waiting. Her testimony is often questioned, since not only is she critical but she also wrote after Napoleon’s fall.8 Yet her picture tallies strikingly with that ofMme de Staël, while she had far more opportunities for observing him, at close quarters over many years. It is not an attractive portrait. ‘I have never known him admire, I have never known him appreciate a noble action,’ she tells us. ‘Every appearance of good nature met with the utmost suspicion; he placed no value whatever on sincerity and had no hesitation at saying that he judged a man’s mettle by the way he lied. Having said this, he then commented with considerable smugness that when he was a child one of his uncles had prophesied he would rule the world since he was such a liar.’ ‘Monsieur de Metternich’, he added, ‘is growing into something more like a statesman – he lies very well.’ She also informs us that Napoleon dreaded ties of affection and tried to isolate people, that he believed in destroying a man’s reputation as the best way of ensuring his loyalty. She quotes him as telling Talleyrand, ‘I am mean minded, basically mean. I can promise you that I have no scruples in doing what the world calls dishonourable.’ Louis de Bourrienne (his secretary until 1802) also seems to confirm a basic cynicism and suspicion. Recalling Bonaparte during the first years of the Consulate, he writes: ‘How often have I heard him say “Friendship is only a word. I care for nobody”.’ In Bourienne’s words, he was ‘très peu aimant’.
Yet he knew very well how to please. ‘I would kiss a man’s arse if I needed him’, he once remarked. When an erring minister offered him his head he asked ‘Just what do you expect me to do with it?’ Many years later Metternich, of all people, would recall that ‘conversation with him has always had for me a charm difficult to define.’
Mme de Rémusat’s analysis of his intellect – which is seldom given in full – has certain resemblances to reminiscences of Hitler:
It would be very difficult, I think, to find a more powerful or a more many sided mind. It owed absolutely nothing to education as in fact he was quite ignorant. He read little and what he did he read hurriedly, but he quickly absorbed what he had taken in and with his imagination built so much on it that he easily passed for a well educated man. His conversation usually consisted of long monologues though he did not object to people interrupting if he was in a good mood. His court listened to his slightest word with the sort of respect normally given to military orders. Listening attentively was a sure way of pleasing him. And he was very fond of talking about himself.
His attitude to women would hardly appeal to a modern feminist. Perhaps it was this which antagonized Mme de Rémusat as it had Mme de Staël. She claims with all too much justification that he despised them, ‘regarding their weakness as an unanswerable proof of their inferiority and the power they have in society as an intolerable usurpation’. She blames such an attitude on his spending too much time with adventuresses during the Directory and on the Italian campaign. ‘He took no notice of a woman unless she was beautiful or at any rate young. He would quite probably have been ready to accept the view that in a well-run country we should be slaughtered when we have borne our children – just as some insects are destined by nature to a speedy death as soon as they give birth.’ She concedes that he felt genuine affection for Josephine, and may have been in love two or three times, recording his irritation at Josephine’s jealousy and how he told her she must put up with it – ‘You ought to think it perfectly natural that I allow myself amusements of this kind.’ Admittedly such ‘amusements’ were purely physical, scarcely very romantic. On one occasion he greeted a terrified actress, clutching at the rags of her dignity, with ‘Come in. Undress. Lie down.’
Napoleon himself bears out Mme de Rémusat. In his opinion ‘We treat women too well and by doing so have spoilt everything. We have been very wrong indeed to raise them to our own level. The Orientals are much more intelligent and sensible in making women slaves.’ As he saw it, their sole function was to bear man children and satisfy his sexual needs. Since no woman could do the latter when she was ill or having a period, it was natural for men to take several wives. ‘What do most ladies have to complain of? Don’t we acknowledge they have souls … They demand equality! Pure madness! Woman is our property … just as the fruit tree belongs to the gardener.’ Only inadequate education could make a wife think she was on the same level as her husband. Convinced of ‘the weakness of the female intellect’, he considered his brother Joseph extraordinary in enjoying the other sex’s company as well as their bodies – ‘He’s forever shut away with some woman reading Torquato Tasso and Aretino.’
However gracefully phrased, his opinion of adultery revealed utter cynicism. In the end it is ‘a joke behind a mask … not by any means a rare phenomenon but a very ordinary occurrence on the sofa’. He had surprisingly modern views on women as soldiers. ‘They are brave, incredibly enthusiastic and capable of the most frightful atrocities … In a real war between men and women the only thing which would handicap women would be pregnancy, since the women of the people are just as strong as most young men.’ (In this he was far more progressive than the Führer.)
The Consul’s assured style of leadership appealed to the majority of Frenchmen. In particular he was able to convince them that they were the best soldiers in Europe; while the troops were flattered by their role as the sword of the nation-in-arms, even civilians were proud of their army’s exploits – though they took most pleasure in the belief that victories would lead to security and peace. The soldier’s erroneous conviction that there was a Field Marshal’s baton in his knapsack was echoed by the bureaucrat’s assurance of a career open to talent. A whole host of new Consular officials, prefects, tax-collectors, schoolmasters or auditeurs to the Council of State – the nucleus for a mandarin civil service – considered they had a stake in society. The notables, the rich and powerful, felt that their wealth was safe. The institution of a Consular order of chivalry, the Legion of Honour, was only the first step in the creation of a new ruling class. ‘Monsieur’ replaced ‘Citoyen’ as equality began to go out of fashion. Many of the émigrés who were now allowed to return were attracted by the sheer vigour and purpose of the régime. The exceptions were royalists, Jacobins, anyone averse to tyranny, and those who did not care to entrust their future to one man. Yet even critics recognized the Corsican’s genius.
Count Chaptal tells us that, when he began to rule, Bonaparte had no idea of administration or of law, had never studied properly, that his knowledge of mathematics was slight. Nevertheless, Chaptal says that during the Consulate (when he presided over several councils a day) Napoleon’s comments showed such acumen that they astonished the experts – though even the adoring Méneval concedes that if he never forgot a face the First Consul could not remember names or get his sums right. He could work for eighteen hours without impairing his concentration. All observers, including the most hostile, accept that he was a genius.
According to Count Roederer, a Counsellor of State and a very shrewd observer, Napoleon’s knack of getting to the bottom of a problem at once was outstanding. He always asked two questions. ‘Is that accurate? Is it useful?’ (Cela est-il juste? Cela est-il utile?) He had ‘a capacity for remembering facts which seemed more than human’.
The First Consul was determined to make use of the Catholic Church. It was in complete disarray, Catholicism appearing to be in greater danger than during the Reformation. In France its bishops, priests, monks and nuns had been killed or driven into exile; a handful of clergy survived in disguise, ministering in cellars or the depths of the forest. The churches of ‘Constitutionalist’ priests, who had taken a schismatic oath of allegiance to the Republic, were deserted. The previous Pope, Pius VI, had died a prisoner on French soil. As a Deist, Bonaparte believed in a Supreme Being, but whatever he claimed at certain times, he was in no sense a Christian. (Although he once remarked, ‘I know men and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man.’) Mme de Rémusat tells us, ‘I do not know whether he was a Deist or an atheist but in private conversation he constantly ridiculed everything concerned with religion.’ However, she adds, ‘Bonaparte made use of the clergy even if he disliked priests.’
He recognized that the vast majority of the French were Catholics, and saw religion as a stabilizing force which could be useful to him. He observed, ‘If you take away faith from the people, you’re going to end up with nothing but highway robbers.’ He wanted to make the Roman Church a buttress of the régime he planned – just as he had used the mullahs in Egypt. By doing so he would deal the royalist cause a mortal blow; everyone was convinced that Catholicism could only return with the monarchy, and the devout were all supporters of Bourbons. He knew that Pius VII and his advisers were badly shaken, that it might be possible to transform them into pliant instruments of government. In July 1801 he signed a concordat with Pius; France was to have ten archbishops and fifty bishops nominated by the First Consul, and be paid salaries by the State. In April the following year the concordat was approved by a plebiscite, Bonaparte attending a Mass of thanksgiving at Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday; a canopy was carried over him, just as formerly one had been carried over the Kings of France on similar occasions. Many republican officers disapproved; General Delmas grumbled, ‘All that was missing was those hundred thousand Frenchmen who died to be rid of all this.’ Nevertheless, Napoleon had his way. For the moment Pope and clergy were profoundly thankful, amazed at being rescued by a son of the Revolution.
It is too easily forgotten that the Consulate was a police state from the very beginning. On 26 Brumaire, a week after the coup, 59 Jacobins were proscribed; 22 were sent to a species of concentration camp on the Ile d’Oléron, and 37 were transported to the living hell of Guiana. The machinery of repression was constantly reinforced. Admittedly, Bonaparte had inherited much of it from the Directory, and could not survive without such repression. He was menaced by royalists, the ‘Chouan’ guerrillas of Brittany and the Vendée against whom he sent troops. The Comte de Frotté was lured into an ambush by the promise of a free pardon, and summarily shot. ‘I didn’t order it but I can’t say that I’m sorry for his execution’ was Napoleon’s comment. Although most of the Chouan leaders surrendered in 1801, the irreconcilables went underground, posing an even worse threat, since they concentrated on the assassination of the First Consul; among their allies were a whole host of returned émigrés and royalist sympathizers, while they included some leaders of real distinction – notably Georges Cadoudal. There were also many Jacobins, former terrorists, who were no less determined to bring down the régime, which would not be really secure until the victory at Marengo in the summer of 1800. Stendhal believed that Bonaparte hated the Jacobins more than anyone else – though he had once been a Jacobin himself. He survived largely because Fouché ran an extremely efficient security service, employing not only police but a swarm of spies, informers and secret agents. He used money, free pardons and countless other inducements, just as he did midnight arrests, brutal interrogation and the threat of transportation, the guillotine or the firing squad. He had two gifted assistants in the ex-Jacobins Charles Desmarets, a former seminarian who was his police chief, and Pierre-François Réal; both had a genius for extracting confessions, the first by blandly questioning, the latter by less gentle means. The First Consul had a very high opinion of Réal in particular.
Joseph Fouché, the Minister of Police, was a most dangerous instrument. He had been educated by the clergy (like Voltaire!) but even his appearance was sinister; eyes of terrifying penetration in a passionless yellow face with bony, reptilian features – a filthy tongue did not improve him. A regicide who had voted for Louis XVI’s death, a former terrorist popularly known as the Butcher of Lyons (on account of having executed sixty royalists in one batch with cannon-fire), he had betrayed the Girondins, the Jacobins and the Directory in turn; one day he would desert Bonaparte too. He inspired as much revulsion as fear – ‘a monster begotten in the Revolutionary stew-pond by anarchy mating with despotism’ is Chateaubriand’s comment.
‘Intrigue was as necessary to Fouché as his daily bread’, said his master. ‘He intrigued at all times, everywhere, in all ways and with everybody.’ While the First Consul valued his ruthless efficiency in co-ordinating the work of his ministry with that of the High Police, half a dozen other police forces and a vast, omnipresent espionage network, he always distrusted and feared him.
He employed Fouché’s assistant and successor, Réné Savary, to keep an eye on him, as far as was possible. Savary was a tall and strikingly handsome cavalryman, still in his twenties; once Bonaparte’s ADC, he was appointed Colonel of the Gendarmerie d’Elite, a crack force of mounted military police used only for the most dangerous assignments. According to Bonaparte, Savary ‘loved him as a father’. Blindly loyal, brutally energetic and a little stupid, he constantly sent in reports on Fouché – once to the effect that he was in league with the Chouans. He would play a key role in the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. (Savary’s later achievements included forging Austrian banknotes for the campaign of 1809 and Russian notes for that of 1812, and making a clockwork time-bomb to dispose of the Bourbons in 1814.)
Both Jacobins and Royalists decided that their only hope lay in assassination. In October 1800 a band of the former, armed with pistols and stilettos, lay in wait for the First Consul at the Opéra but were betrayed, arrested and guillotined; they had been under police observation from the beginning. On Christmas Eve the same year, when Bonaparte was driving to the Théâtre Française (to hear a Haydn oratorio) he fell asleep in his carriage, to be woken by a terrible explosion only half a minute after passing a cart. It had been laden with barrels of gunpowder, scrap-iron and broken glass. Many bystanders were hurled into the air, 35 being killed or maimed. Only the accident of his coachman being drunk and driving too fast had saved him. He blamed the Jacobins – ‘men of mud and blood’.
Fouché knew perfectly well that the Jacobins were not responsible, but he arrested their leaders. It was a heaven-sent chance to break what remained of the hard-line Terrorists of the Revolution by eliminating their ‘general staff’. No less than 129 were transported to the swamps of Cayenne and to the Seychelles; among them were General Rossignol, a former sans-culotte, and René Vatar, once editor of the Journal des Hommes Libres, with many other extremists who had been members of revolutionary committees or army officers in the days of Danton and Robespierre. By the time they were shipped off the Consul too knew they were innocent. The real perpetrators were a group of royalist fanatics, all save a handful of whom were tracked down and executed. (The forensic methods employed were astonishingly modern, the single intact horseshoe of the animal which had drawn the cart being identified by a blacksmith.) But it was the end of Jacobinism.
Bonaparte’s obsession with power grew stronger every day. ‘I have no ambition’, he told Roederer. ‘Well, if I do, it is so natural to me, so much part of my being, that it’s like the blood flowing in my veins, like the air I breathe.’ On another occasion he informed Roederer ‘I’ve only one passion, one mistress, which is France. I make love to her and she never fails me, lavishing her blood and treasure on me. If I ask her for half a million men, she gives them.’
He soon found the Constitution of 1799 far too liberal. Sieyès and his friends were powerless to stop him, and he grew more like a monarch every day. Court dress reappeared, with knee-breeches and cocked hats for men who had only recently affected the trousers of sans-culottes. However, he wanted the substance as well as the trimmings of authority. In 1801 the legislative chambers opposed a bill against ‘anarchists’ which would have enabled him to arrest anyone he chose. Even after new elections had been rigged to make them more biddable, they refused to appoint him First Consul for life, offering ten years instead. Although it had no constitutional right to do so, the régime held a plebiscite – ‘Is Napoleon Bonaparte to be made Consul for life?’ After a well-organized vote in favour – and not uninfluenced by the sight of grenadiers ringing the Luxembourg – the Senate surrendered; in addition it gave him the right to appoint his fellow-Consuls and to nominate his successor, together with machinery for suspending the Constitution and overturning legal rulings by the courts. He now possessed absolute power, civil and military, and was above the law.
Bonaparte’s greatest mistake was not to restore the monarchy, the real alternative to the Directory. Although the French would never have accepted a return of the ancien régime or given up the freedoms won by the Revolution, a constitutional monarchy like that of 1791-2 might well have been viable. Even Sieyès toyed with the idea. Among the candidates for the throne was the Duke of Brunswick, who had commanded the Austrian and Prussian armies in 1792 when they had tried unsuccessfully to invade France; during the Consulate Roederer told Joseph Bonaparte, ‘In 1792 people had Brunswick in mind.’ He received the reply, ‘People still thought of him at the time Bonaparte returned from Egypt – Talleyrand spoke of him to me as our last hope in the circumstances, and so did Sieyès.’ Another was the sister of the Dauphin (‘Louis XVII’) who had died in the Temple; Sieyès seems to have taken her quite seriously. There was also the young Duke of Orléans, Philip, Égalité’s son, who had Talleyrand’s support. And there was Louis XVIII, the late King’s brother, with whom Barras had negotiated. As early as 1797 Louis offered to make Napoleon a Marshal of France and Viceroy of Corsica if he would restore him.
But in Italy that year General Bonaparte confided in Miot de Meliot, ‘I most certainly don’t want to play the role of Monk. I don’t want to play it and I don’t want anyone else to play it.’ In 1800 Louis wrote, ‘You are taking a long time to give me back my throne; there is a danger you may lose the chance. Without me you cannot make France happy while without you I can do nothing for France. So hasten to let me know what positions and dignities will satisfy you and your friends.’ Josephine would have been only too happy for her husband to be a Marshal-Duke. He wrote back, ‘You must not think of returning to France – you could not do so without marching over a hundred thousand dead bodies.’ This was untrue. With the army solidly behind him, he could have restored Louis without bloodshed. Bourrienne tells us that the Consul was obsessed by the exiled royal family, saying that he must build ‘a wall of brass’ between it and the French. Yet a restoration would have regained the legitimacy whose lack has been the bane of every French régime since 1792. However, Bonaparte, as Sieyès discerned after Brumaire, was determined to rule France himself.
In February 1804 another plot to assassinate ‘the tyrant’ was discovered. Its leaders were unusually dangerous: General Moreau, the victor of Hohenlinden; General Pichegru (Bonaparte’s mathematics tutor at Brienne), who had been deported after the coup of Fructidor in 1797; and Georges Cadoudal, the Vendéen hero who was the most unrelenting of all the First Consul’s enemies. Moreau and Pichegru were soon caught, but Cadoudal could not be traced, although he was known to be in Paris. Fouché was deeply concerned, warning Bonaparte that ‘The air is full of daggers.’ However, on 9 March Cadoudal was hunted down at last. Moreau was sentenced to two years imprisonment, then banished; his victories were too much admired for him to punished more severely; Pichegru was found dead in his cell, officially from ‘self-strangulation’; many people believed he had been murdered on Napoleon’s orders. Cadoudal was guillotined. It is only fair to record an act of mercy. Among many other conspirators involved were two brothers, Armand and Jules de Polignac; when the former was condemned to death Jules offered to take his place, whereupon the sentence was altered to life imprisonment.
Bonaparte grew angrier and angrier. ‘Am I a dog to be killed in the streets?’ he shouted. As a Corsican accustomed to vendetta he decided to respond in kind, encouraged by Fouché and Talleyrand. The Duc d’Enghien, the ablest member of the exiled royal family, lived just over the French frontier in Baden. He had commanded a corps of émigrés with distinction during the Revolutionary wars, and was wrongly suspected of having taken part in the plot. On the night of 14 March a squadron of dragoons surrounded his hunting lodge. He was taken back over the border to the military fortress of Vincennes, just outside Paris. Here, a week later, he was tried illegally at midnight by a military tribunal presided over by General Murat, without counsel to defend him, condemned to death, denied a priest and at 2.30 a.m. – immediately after the trial – shot in the moat, where a grave had already been dug. His death had been decided before his abduction; it was murder, and not even legal murder. Murat, Governor of Paris and the First Consul’s brother-in-law, a man whose conscience was not exactly delicate, had had to be bullied into signing the order for the court-martial; shortly after, he received a grant of 100,000 francs from the Civil List. The comment (usually attributed to Fouché or Talleyrand) is famous: ‘It was worse than a crime – it was a mistake.’9 All that can be said in extenuation is that Bonaparte genuinely believed Enghien had been plotting against him. Later he tried to excuse himself. ‘I was threatened on all sides by enemies employed against me by the Bourbons; menaced by air-guns, infernal-machines and devices of every sort. There was no court I could petition for protection, so I had to protect myself. In putting to death one of the men whose followers were threatening my life I was entitled to strike healthy terror into the rest of them.’ He added, ‘I am the French Revolution. I say so, and I intend to maintain it.’ He had done more than strike at the Bourbons; he had made it clear that under no circumstances would he restore the pre-1789 monarchy. Mme de Rémusat records that ‘the Jacobin leaders said “He belongs to us now”.’ By Jacobins she did not mean extremists but ‘Jacobins grown rich’ – Notables. (Two years later, not less than 21 prefects and 42 magistrates were regicides who had voted for Louis XVI’s death.) She also tells us that the popular view of Napoleon changed abruptly, many believing the murder to be ‘the beginning of a blood-stained reign’. She considered that it marked his abandonment of moderation, an increasing disregard for moral values.
In order to impress France with a sense of his semi-royal position Bonaparte held frequent parades on the Carrousel outside the Tuileries, or the Champs-Élysées. Surrounded by a glittering staff and wearing his red velvet uniform of First Consul, he reviewed the Consular Guard from his charger. They marched or trotted past in dazzling yellow uniforms to stirring military music, massed bands playing Partant pour le Syrie or the Chant du Départ (both written by his stepdaughter Hortense de Beauharnais) – though not the Marseillaise, nowadays considered Jacobin and seditious. These men, hand-picked, were fanatically loyal. They were deeply admired by the vast majority of their fellow-countrymen.
The man who had once been a starving half-pay officer living in a seedy lodging-house quickly acquired expensive habits, if not perhaps those of luxury. Even though he dressed plainly, his pistols were chased with gold, his sword-hilt set with diamonds. His valet Constant described him approvingly as ‘a man for men servants’, and it took three of them to prepare him for the day. (Admittedly such dependence was not unusual for the period; at his most poverty-stricken Mozart never went without a valet.) He liked to linger in his bath, sometimes for hours, though dictating to secretaries. He was then rubbed down with eau-de-cologne from head to foot, after which he allowed himself to be dressed like a child. He ate abstemiously (until he married Marie-Louise), his favourite meal being a roast chicken preceded by soup and washed down by a glass of Chambertin and a cup of coffee. He also took the occasional glass of Madeira. He does not seem to have touched brandy.
When he had time he read. One of his Ministers for the Interior, Count Chaptal, who observed him closely, thought he was very poorly educated:
He knew almost nothing of Greek and Latin authors. He had skimmed through the works of some historians and remembered a few details … He said Tacitus was the ancient world’s worst historian, perhaps because he based his view on the author’s portrait of Tiberius. Horace was only for lovers of luxury. He approved of Homer alone. Among modern writers he had no great opinion of Voltaire, Racine or Rousseau. His favourite French poet was Corneille.
This is not quite fair. He himself said on St Helena, ‘The more I read of Voltaire the better I like him … I even like his historical works.’ However, he certainly lost his taste for Rousseau, the hero of his youth. ‘Since I have seen the East I find Rousseau repellent – the wild man without morals is a dog.’ He kept his taste for Ossian’s verse and enjoyed modern novels. Mme de Rémusat, a conventional and indeed puritanical lady, was shocked at his presenting Marie Louise with Restif de la Bretonne’s Les Contemporains, achoice which would nowadays be considered imaginative.
His sole languages were French and Italian. According to Chaptal, who is borne out by Mme de Rémusat, he spoke neither well – ‘When he was talking French one could easily see that he was a foreigner! His secretaries read extracts from the British and German newspapers to him, but he was unable to pronounce properly a single word of English or German. When he met Goethe he called him Monsieur Goet.’
His most unpleasant indulgence was his temper. Bourrienne tells us, however, that even at the beginning of the Consulate his insults, epithets and outbursts of rage were all carefully calculated. Yet he often lost control of himself, as when during the same period he kicked the senator Volney – a trusted friend from Corsican days – in the stomach, knocking him to the ground. (Volney had to stay in bed for a few days.) The worshipping Baron Méneval has to admit that his face ‘grew terrible’ when he was angry. He could lose his temper with the humblest people, such as Josephine’s unfortunate milliner, Mlle Despeaux, at whom he is recorded as ‘yelling like a maniac’. (Though the fact she was a notorious lesbian may have been partly responsible.) When he quarrelled with his wife he would smash the bedroom furniture. Giuseppina Grassini, who had also shared a bedroom with him, says he could ‘pass abruptly from the intoxication of love to that of wrath and fury – it was volcanic, Etna roaring while covered in flowers’. These fits of fury made dangerous enemies, such as the row when he called Talleyrand ‘shit in a silk stocking’ or at the crucial meeting with Metternich at the Marcolini Palace in 1813 at Dresden in which by Metternich’s own account he grossly insulted him. He was capable of publicly hitting a general in the face, as he did during the German campaign of that year.
‘I have very irritable nerves,’ he once confessed. ‘In such moods, but for my low blood pressure I would run the risk of going mad.’ He could sob for a quarter of an hour on end and sometimes suffered from stomach cramps or fits of vomiting. His rages were so ungovernable as to indicate a minor form of epilepsy – the petit mal.
Josephine, an amiable if frivolous and not very intelligent consort, led a miserable life despite spending far more money on clothes and pleasure than Marie-Antoinette. She was always insecure, terrified that one of her husband’s mistresses might suddenly bear a child to prove that she herself was now barren, and that he would then divorce her – in order to marry a more fertile wife – which was exactly what happened. It made his countless infidelities a constant nightmare, let alone a betrayal. In any case, his treatment of Josephine was scarcely sensitive. When she was suffering from an excruciating migraine he would force her to ride in a jolting barouche, making her scream with pain. At other times he would shoot at the swans in the park to torment her. It must be admitted that Eva Braun never knew such wretchedness and humiliation.
On St Helena Napoleon boasted, ‘I found the crown of France lying in the gutter and picked it up on the point of my sword.’ Yet he felt his way very carefully before assuming it. ‘Talleyrand wanted me to make myself king but the title “King” is worn out,’ he informed La Rémusat. Lazare Carnot courageously told the Tribunate that he would have preferred an American-style President – ‘abuse of despotism has far worse consequences than abuse of democracy’, he warned. He also rebuked Bonaparte personally, ‘You should have stayed First Consul. You were the only one in Europe and look at the company you’re in now!’ On 2 December 1804 Napoleon was crowned Emperor of the French by Pope Pius VII. He had made the Church bestow its blessing on his régime, and abandon the Holy Roman Empire, which was dissolved the following year.
He took the ceremony very seriously indeed. While he was planning it his brother Joseph infuriated him by insisting on a right to succeed him if he died. ‘It’s something I can never forget,’ he confided to Roederer. ‘It’s as though he told a lover he had slept with his mistress or hoped to. Power is my mistress.’
‘For the last two years power stayed in my hands so naturally that people began to think I was not going to assume it formally’, he explained more calmly to Mme de Rémusat and her husband a few days after the coronation. ‘I decided it was my duty to exploit the situation in order to end the Revolution legally. Why I chose to be Emperor instead of dictator is that one acquires legitimacy by occupying familiar ground.’ He wanted every European sovereign to build a palace in Paris, to attend the crowning of future French Emperors. ‘Men like the Abbé Sieyès’, he went on, laughing, ‘may complain of despotism but my government will always be popular. The army and the people are on my side and with that sort of support a man would have to be an absolute fool not to be able to reign.’
Nevertheless, he was not popular with everybody. A jingle circulated in Paris at this time:
On loans and alms I long supported life,
I fawned on Barras, took his drab to wife;
I strangled Pichegru, shot Enghien down,
And for so many crimes received a crown.’
There was an opposition, however crushed and disunited, and this was what it thought of the saviour of France. On the other hand, a sycophantic Norman prefect could tell his officials, apparently in all seriousness, ‘God created Bonaparte and rested.’
For all his self-confidence, the Emperor used every means available to bolster up his régime and discourage dissent. The Church was forced into yet more humiliating compliance. (Cardinal Caprara, the Papal Nuncio, was sweetened by the gift of a palace in his diocese of Bologna.) A servile catechism taught French Catholics that they owed Napoleon ‘love, respect, loyalty, military service and the taxes specified for the maintenance of the Emperor and his throne’, that those failing to do so ‘resist the order laid down by God and render themselves worthy of eternal damnation’. The feast-day of St Napoleon, a ‘Roman officer and martyr’ who never existed, was introduced into the liturgical calendar.
Despite deep respect for blue blood and ancient lineage, he resented privilege of the sort which had threatened to block his career as a young man. It had given him real pleasure to evict the Knights of Malta, a brotherhood which he himself could never have hoped to enter, from their island home; he described the order as ‘an institution designed to support in idleness the younger sons of certain privileged families’. It gave him no less pleasure to confiscate the commanderies of the Teutonic Knights.
Napoleon established a new nobility of princes, dukes, counts, barons and knights – not to mention chevaliers of the Legion of Honour. In 1810 all prefects were made counts or barons and told to assume coats-of-arms. ‘I act as a monarch in creating hereditary rank but in a Revolutionary spirit since my nobility is not exclusive.’ He was building ‘an intermediate caste … between himself and France’s vast democracy’ while he had to have a Court like every other European sovereign. Admittedly, ‘I created princes and dukes, gave them fortunes and estates, but because of their humble origins I could not make noblemen of them. So I tried as far as possible to marry them into the old families.’ On St Helena General Gourgaud noted resentfully, ‘His Majesty has a weakness for the [old] nobility.’
He ensured that as many people as possible had a stake in the Empire. The great fortunes acquired by the members of the Bonaparte family, besides their kingdoms, are notorious. So too are those of men like Fouché and Talleyrand, the latter taking huge bribes from foreign powers to insert clauses in treaties. It is less well known how much the marshals profited; Berthier’s estate was worth over 1,300,000 francs a year, Davout’s nearly a million, Ney’s 728,000 and Masséna’s 638,000. (Their magnificent hôtels in Paris and the great châteaux of their country estates were filled with masterpieces; Davout owned a Breughel, a Poussin, a Rubens and a Van Dyck, while Soult had countless works by Murillo, Ribera and Zurbaran – looted in Spain.) It is even less appreciated how many others benefited. Every Imperial title was accompanied by a hereditary endowment – 200,000 francs for a dukedom and 3,000 for each of over two thousand knighthoods. There were also cash gratuities; on one occasion General de Lasalle received a million francs. There were highly paid careers in administration. And there were enormous opportunities for government contractors.
Much as Napoleon had employed Gaudin, an ancien régime financial official, so Hitler depended to a large extent on Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reich Bank. A different economic mood came swiftly into being after the Gleichschaltung. Schacht’s measures were what would later be termed Keynesian. They had first been tried in Germany during the Great War (when they were called ‘war socialism’) and were far from novel; other European countries implemented them during the 1930s, but none with such vigour or success as in Hitler’s Reich – he supported Schacht with ruthless thoroughness. The first step was the Four-Year Plan to End Unemployment drawn up by Georg-Hans Reinhardt, which began in June 1933. Industrial expansion was encouraged by tax-exemption for profits ploughed back into industry or technology. Similar incentives were offered to landowners and farmers. Financial reserves did not exist, so Schacht simply printed the money, backing his notes with the vague security of future tax receipts. Public works were begun on a large scale to provide jobs; they included the construction of autobahnen (motorways), which were Hitler’s own idea and partly financed by a general tax on transport. The labour service, engaged on other public works such as railways, provided employment too. There were tax rewards for employing women as domestic servants, to stop them competing for jobs with the men. The Second Four-Year Plan, the Hermann Goering Plan (again drawn up by Reinhardt) offered long-term contracts with built-in profits to firms if they would concentrate on new technology and extracting raw materials in order to make Germany less dependent on foreign imports; this resulted in the production of such new substances as coal, oil, artificial rubber and aluminium alloys. State factories were founded. Rearmament, the introduction of military service and the expansion of the bureaucracy also helped. The national income doubled in four years, the national debt disappeared. Whereas unemployment had been 6 million in 1933, there was full employment and genuine job security by 1938. There were huge new housing estates for workers, sports facilities and State-financed holidays; 6 million people went on such holidays in 1936. It was a very far cry from the terrible misery of recent years. Adolf Hitler became the most popular man ever to rule Germany. The Olympic Games of 1936, brilliantly stage-managed, seemed like a species of coronation or jubilee.
Once it was generally believed by (non-Nazi) observers that this economic miracle was entirely due to rearmament, even that economic collapse was only averted by the outbreak of war in 1939. There is still considerable debate. What is indisputable is that for all her bluster, Germany was inferior in armaments to her opponents in 1939. It is coming to be believed increasingly that, in Norman Stone’s phrase, ‘Hitler had seemingly stumbled on modern economics.’ But he could not have done so without Schacht and Reinhardt.
Confidence surged through Germany, which recovered that conviction of superiority over all other nations it had enjoyed in 1914. Every recruit who joined the army – renamed Wehrmacht instead of Reichswehr – felt that he was no less a member of the nation-in-arms than Napoleon’s troops had done, was aware that it was rearming to make it stronger than any other European army, and wore his uniform with pride. Uniforms were not confined to the Wehrmacht; the SS (or Schutzstaffel), SA (or Sturmabteilung), Labour Corps, Hitler Youth and many other organizations had them. The régime’s racial policies induced a feeling of superiority, consciousness of Aryan blood giving a gratifying sense of aristocracy to the humblest. Fear of a Bolshevik revolution became merely an unpleasant memory. Everyone faced the future with confidence – save for Jews, political opponents and those antipathetic to rule by a despot. Naturally inclined to like firm rule, Germans were ill prepared to resist. Moreover, Hitler’s success, both at home and abroad, seemed uncanny when contrasted with the inept performance of the Weimar régime.
One of the few academics to meet Hitler and leave a description was Professor Schramm of Göttingen University (and also of Harvard). Schramm, a major in the Wehrmacht who was responsible for keeping the High Command’s War Diary in 1943-4, had many opportunities of watching Hitler, and as an historian his account is peculiarly interesting. When Schramm first saw him close to, the Führer was in his mid-fifties. He was of medium height, but ‘The man’s head seemed to dominate his entire body; torso, arms, legs – all seemed to hang down from it … He strode on his heels and, keeping his knees straight, walked quickly. His other movements were quite deliberate.’ His nose was ugly, ‘having something of the shape of a pyramid’, which was why he trimmed his moustache to minimize his broad nostrils. He concealed his high forehead by a hanging forelock. Schramm insists that Hitler ‘fascinated people with his deep blue, slightly protruding, almost radiant eyes. Many who met him were unable to stand up to his gaze; knowing this, Hitler looked people straight in the eye without blinking.’ Describing his own first meeting with Hitler in June 1932, Papen tells us ‘He was wearing a dark blue suit and seemed the complete petit-bourgeois. He had an unhealthy complexion and with his little moustache and curious hair style had an indefinably Bohemian quality.’ Just as Bonaparte had studiously appeared in a plain uniform, he normally wore the simplest Party uniform, though this did not make him any the more impressive; at Berchtesgaden the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was to mistake him for a footman.
None the less, he impressed deeply everyone who worked with him. Von Papen refers to his ‘extraordinary gifts and will power’. Schramm emphasizes his ‘amazing ability to judge people to the extent that he was able to sense immediately whether the person standing in front of him was for him, could be won over, or would be immune to his personal dynamism. In this respect he had a sort of “sixth sense”.’
He was capable of deceiving the shrewdest observers. In 1931 Group Captain Malcolm Christie of MI6 gave him a lift in his car for some three hundred miles, after which he told friends that his passenger had an uncanny resemblance to another European statesman – Eamonn de Valera.10During the spring of 1933 the young Prince of Pless went to see him at the Chancery in the Wilhelm-strasse on behalf of some mining directors who had been arrested in Lower Silesia. He recalled ‘a very polite, agreeable, middle class Austrian addressing me. He was very sympathetic, polite. There was no peculiar aura around him and I could not detect anything hypnotic about his eyes, which I afterwards heard of. I found him a pleasant man with whom I might have discussed any subject.’ He told the Prince (who later fought against him in the British army) that he would look into the matter, ‘but one had to remember in times like these that where there was a strong light, there was also bound to be a dark shadow’. The directors were released a few days later.11
Indeed, Albert Speer went so far as to state in his memoirs ‘Hitler possessed many likeable personal qualities.’ Schramm concludes:
Whenever anyone tries to understand Hitler the final result somehow never adds up correctly. His contact with children and dogs, his joy in flowers and culture, his appreciation of lovely women, his relationship to music were all quite genuine. But no less genuine was the ferocity – morally inhibited, ruthless, “ice-cold” – with which Hitler annihilated not only real but even potential opponents.
Many other writers have commented on his Janus-like character, on his two faces – one charming and seemingly kindly, the other diabolically cruel and evil.12 Behind all the joking, comradeship and sensitive friendship lay a mind always prepared to kill, to kill not just a close comrade like Rohm but millions, proud of its readiness to kill. Schramm comments that, like Medusa’s, the Führer’s true face would have turned even the most loyal member of his circle to stone had he glimpsed it. Trevor-Roper (writing of Hermann Rauschning, a Danzig Nazi, who saw through Hitler early on) says, ‘Above the crunch of the cakes and the tinkle of tea cups he heard, if not the cry of the tortured in the prison camps, at least the blood curdling paean of universal destruction.’
Like the Emperor, the Führer was extremely nervous. Rauschning speaks of ‘convulsions of weeping at all emotional crises’, claiming that Hitler would weep if one of his canaries died. (Goering once said, before a difficult political meeting, ‘We can always send Adolf to cry.’) He suffered from frightful insomnia and nightmares, like some tyrant of legend. Such nerves made for uncontrollable rages which verged on frenzy – he would yell for hours on end, screaming abuse, stamping, banging on the table or the walls, his face purple and distorted. Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador, reported in 1935 how Konstantin von Neurath had confided in him that ‘Herr Hitler … raved at him for five hours without, I hear, stopping to eat or drink.’ Bewilderingly, he would suddenly reestablish complete control over himself. Rauschning observes, ‘Dostoyevsky might well have invented him, with the morbid derangement and pseudo-creativeness of his hysteria.’13
Nevertheless, his gift for inspiring devotion and hero-worship was extraordinary. There seemed to be an almost orgiastic element in his relationship with the vast crowds whom he whipped up into a frenzy. Josef Goebbels writes about him like a woman in love.
If we have little information about the Führer’s sex-life, we possess a good deal about his views on women. They are far more complex than might be thought, even though he said, ‘A man has to be able to stamp his imprint on any woman.’ Like Napoleon, he regarded them as an inferior species whose job was to bear children, be good mothers and make homes for men. (Kinder, Kirche, Küche was one of the Nazi slogans.) In his opinion there was ‘no worse disaster than to see them grappling with ideas’. ‘Women who have no children finally go off their heads.’ On the other hand, unlike the Emperor, his personal relationships with them were based on more than physical gratification. ‘What I like best is to dine with a pretty woman,’ he told Bormann. Beyond question he admired feminine beauty and enjoyed feminine company. He also differed from Napoleon – who was frequently rude and even coarse – in being unfailingly charming and gallant with women, including his female staff. When he explained condescendingly that ‘Woman’s universe … is man’ he added, ‘She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that’s why she’s capable of loving so deeply.’ He accepted the possibility of partnership between the sexes. ‘Marriages that originate only in sensual infatuation are usually somewhat shaky…. Separations are particularly painful when there has been a genuine comradeship between man and wife … a meeting between two beings who complete one another, who are made for one another, borders already, in my conception, upon a miracle.’ His interpretation of much of feminine behaviour was characteristically cynical. ‘In the pleasure a woman takes in rigging herself out, there is always an admixture of some trouble-making element, something treacherous – to awaken another woman’s jealousy by displaying something that the latter doesn’t possess. Women have the talent, which is unknown to us males, for giving a kiss to a woman-friend and at the same time piercing her heart with a well-sharpened stiletto.’ He justified female possessiveness by his own brutal criteria. ‘The gentlest woman is transformed into a wild beast when another woman tries to take away her man … Must one regard this innate savagery as a fault? Is it not rather a virtue?’
His relationship with the wretched Eva Braun was almost banal in its domesticity except that he would not marry her. She suited him perfectly. As he told Albert Speer, in her presence, ‘A highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman.’ Yet he was undoubtedly fond of the colourless little blonde photographer’s assistant, whose father worked for a baby food firm, although not in the same fashion he had loved Geli Raubal; some observers thought she looked uncannily like his poor mousy mother. Over twenty years younger, fond of dancing and skiing, with no interests in common, she was none the less deeply attached to him, and on two occasions tried to commit suicide when he neglected her – much to his irritation. Although there were no children, their physical relations appear to have been normal enough. Even so, he gave the impression of treating her as a pet rather than a fellow human being. Speer, who liked her, felt sorry for Eva Braun. What is so strange is the way Hitler made her avoid publicity, allowing her to meet only his intimate circle. He seems to have felt that, as the embodiment of Germany, he must appear to be alone. He loved her in his own weird way – as he would show by his marriage to her just before their joint suicide – but he had no desire for the Third Reich to have a First Lady in emulation of Napoleon’s Empresses.
Oddly, the Führer expressed admiration for ‘the lovely Josephine … the woman who, at Napoleon’s side, had climbed the rungs leading to the highest post in the State’. He considered that the Emperor had made a serious mistake in casting her off to make room for a Habsburg alliance. In his eccentric opinion, Josephine had been ‘the model of the strictly Republican Frenchwoman’. (One wonders if her contemporaries would have recognized this description of the Empress.)
Meanwhile he was tirelessly consolidating his régime. It is hard to exaggerate how powerful German Catholicism seemed at the beginning of 1933. A third of the population was Catholic. It was fifty years since the Church had defeated Bismarck’s attempt to shackle it in the struggle known as the Kulturkampf, while its political party, the Zentrum, was influential and well supported. Rome had misgivings about the NSDAP, yet many priests were attracted to a party opposed to communists and freemasons, and which (in theory), supported ‘the old moral values’. This confusion enabled Hitler to secure a considerable triumph by negotiating a concordat with the Vatican – something which had eluded the Weimar Republic. The man who did the bargaining in Rome was von Papen, a practising Catholic and a Knight of Malta, who acted in all good faith. The Church gained protection for its schools and the continuation of State subsidies; no doubt it was encouraged by the concordat with Mussolini only four years before. In reality Hitler detested Catholicism and all forms of Christianity. Despite his pious mother’s example, and although he is said to have taken Communion in the 1914-18 war, he had totally abandoned Catholic belief as well as practice if only, as he himself admitted, ‘after a hard struggle’. While admiring Christ’s gifts as a propagandist, he disliked intensely what he termed the ‘Jewish Christ-creed with its effeminate pity ethic’. (His religion was very like the Emperor’s deism; whereas the former had believed in a supreme intelligence, the latter was a monist, acknowledging a single ultimate reality which he called Providence.) He particularly resented the Catholic Church’s natural hostility to his racial theories; to be a practising Catholic in Nazi Germany was to incur automatic suspicion of ‘political unreliability’. Nevertheless, he feared the Church’s hold over the consciences of millions of Germans, and like Napoleon, he hoped to harness it in the service of his new society. Indeed, he instructed Goebbels to remain a Catholic – so Speer informs us.
On 2 May 1933 trade unions were declared illegal in Germany. On 7 July Social Democrats were deprived of seats in the Reichstag and on 14 July the NSDAP became Germany’s only political party. The first concentration camp had been set up even before the Enabling Act, in a disused munitions factory at Dachau, while in April a purge of Jewish civil servants and a boycott of Jewish shops was imposed. On 26 April the Geheime Staatspolizei – better known as the Gestapo – was founded by Goering in Berlin. The country swarmed with informers. Not only political opponents were arrested but gypsies, homosexuals and those who tried to leave the country. By 1937 the camps held over 35,000 prisoners.
Hitler’s principal policeman was Heinrich Himmler, who by 1936 had outmanoeuvred Goering to become head of the security forces throughout Germany, including Prussia. This unimpressive figure, pale and bespectacled, half crank, half demon, was the régime’s Fouché, and in his own way even more sinister. A Bavarian and a lapsed Catholic of lower middle class origin, he had been born in 1900, joining the Party just before the 1923 Putsch as a protégé of Röhm. Like his leader, in ordinary life he was a total failure, supporting himself by marriage to a chicken farmer eight years older than himself. He worshipped Hitler, modelling himself on ‘the hardest man for centuries’, but was known to faint at the sight of blood. However inadequate as a human being, he was a genius as a secret policeman. His tools were the SS, the SD Intelligence Service (or Sicherheitsdienst) and the Gestapo. By 1935 there were forty separate Gestapo offices in Germany, while in the following year they ceased to be answerable to the law of the land.
Himmler’s deputy was Reinhard Heydrich – ‘the Hangman’. Tall and icily handsome, this archetypal Aryan ‘blond beast’ was a quarter Jewish. Cashiered from the Navy in 1930 after a scandal over a girl, he was a bitter and twisted if brilliant young man, ferociously cruel, totally without humanity. Even his chief feared him.
Hitler indulged his taste for martial pomp. Not only were there frequent parades in every city by the Wehrmacht in their field-grey but his own SS lifeguards, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler in black and silver, goose-stepped through the streets of Berlin or Munich to the strains of his favourite march, the Badenweiler. (A surprisingly frivolous tune, something from a third-rate operetta, today it is banned in Germany.) The marching song was the raucous Horst Wessel Lied. More sonorous was Wenn alle untreu werden, an old German chorus sung by the massed SS as a touching hymn of Nazi loyalty – ‘If everyone were to be untrue.’ Like Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, these undeniably superb troops knew themselves to be invincible, as did the cheering crowds who watched them swagger past. Here was another vivid testimony to the Dolchstoss, that shameful stab in the back which in 1918 had so unjustly deprived Germany’s magnificent troops of their victory over inferior foes.
A comparison of the SS and the French Imperial Guard may perhaps seem as far-fetched as the Führer’s own comparison (in a conversation with Lord Halifax) of the former to the Salvation Army. Yet no less than the Guard, the SS provided its master with Praetorians on whom he could depend. Like the Guard, too, it was the ultimate, savage symbol of the new régime.
Hitler could certainly have restored the German Empire. In Italy the King reigned with Mussolini as his Prime Minister. Most of the Right (probably including most of those who voted for the NSDAP, if a minority in the the Party) hoped for a restoration. As has been seen, many in the centre, such as Brüning, wanted it. In 1932 Papen and Schleicher assured Crown Prince Wilhelm that in the political climate which was developing it was only logical to expect the return of a Kaiser; they were convinced that after Hindenburg’s death the nation would feel the need for some permanent repository of authority.’ In March 1934 Papen proposed a a restoration, and was agreeably surprised by Hitler’s reaction. He told Papen that he did not think the Crown Prince suitable but that his sons would do better – he was seemingly impressed by Prince Louis Ferdinand’s taking a job in the Ford works at Detroit. Such a move would have been enormously popular, especially among the predominantly monarchist officer corps, without diminishing his control over Germany. He was on excellent terms with the Hohenzollern family; not only did Crown Prince Wilhelm support him, but two Hohenzollerns had joined the NSDAP. Secretly he hated the idea of a restoration: during the War he was to send a message to a former Social Democrat saying how grateful he was to his party for having rid the country of monarchy. (Members of former ruling families were to be forbidden to serve in the armed forces after 50,000 Berliners had flocked to the funeral of a Hohenzollern killed on active service in 1940.) He wanted to be Kaiser himself, in his own way.
Some observers expected that attempts to rearm would run into difficulty. It was too easily forgotten that Germany had been planning to rearm, even rearming secretly on a very small scale, ever since the Versailles peace treaty. Gustav Stresemann had wished Weimar to do so, and joint manoeuvres between German troops and the Red Army had taken place discreetly in Russia, providing valuable training in tank management. When in 1928 Horace Findlayson, the Financial Adviser to the British Embassy in Berlin, was replaced after attributing discrepancies in the German budget to concealed expenditure on armament it was rumoured that it was because the Ambassador, Sir Ronald Lindsay, did not wish to upset the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin.14
The Führer not only had to train an army for future conquests but needed rearmament to placate the generals. He knew that if he provoked them they would move against him.
The army was becoming increasingly irritated by the noisy pretensions of Ernst Röhm and the SA, as indeed was Hitler himself. Early in the spring of 1933 Röhm, when the worse for drink, grumbled about that ‘ignorant war-time corporal’ to Hermann Rauschning, an aristocratic Nazi who was already growing disenchanted with his saviour. ‘Adolf is a swine … he will give us all away. He only associates with reactionaries now. His old friends aren’t good enough for him!’ He went on, ‘He’s bought himself a tail coat now!’ Most significantly, he added, ‘Adolf knows exactly what I want. I’ve told him often enough. Not a second edition of the old Imperial Army. Are we revolutionaries or aren’t we?’
After all, from the very beginning one of the key points in the NSDAP’s programme had been the creation of a ‘people’s army’ – as Röhm put it to Rauschning, ‘something must come out of our élan, like the mass armies of the French Revolution’. The SA had been invaluable to Hitler, a true army of party militants who had not only spread his gospel but, by their rallies and street-fighting with the communists, had helped polarize the Germans into Left and Right. However, they had more than outlived their usefulness; ifanything they were a liability, with their rowdiness and rioting, and their leaders’ reputation for homosexuality. Above all, they were announcing openly their intention of taking over and replacing the Reichswehr. While the Führer would occasionally volunteer such soothing remarks as ‘It is madness to make revolutionary wars with a reactionary army,’ he did not see ‘the bowlegged and knock-kneed SA’ as material for his new military élite. Moreover, in the SS he now had a reliable instrument with which to break the storm-troopers and to kick down the ladder by which he had climbed. What finally decided him to strike was the growing suspicion – possibly justified – that Röhm intended to kidnap him and set in motion a further ‘Brown Revolution’, coupled with the generals’ increasing anger at the SA’s impertinence.
In May he took advantage of the ceremonial launching of the pocket battleship Deutschland to reach an agreement with the generals. He would bring the SA to heel if the Wehrmacht would support him as head of state when Hindenburg died – an event which was clearly going to happen fairly soon. Meanwhile Himmler and Goering had been forging a devil’s alliance against Röhm, who stood in the way of their ambitions. Finally in June 1934 the Defence Minister, General von Blomberg, informed him that Hindenburg was threatening to call in the army unless he curbed the wild men of the ‘Brown Revolution’. On 30 June he struck in what he called ‘Operation Kolibri’ (‘Operation Humming Bird’), usually known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives.’ The pretext, dreamt up by Himmler and Goering, was that Rohm was planning a putsch, after which he would merge the army with SA under his command and take Papen’s place as Vice-Chancellor. Perhaps as many as a thousand people were shot during this one night and on the following day; they included not just Rohm and his henchmen but other political opponents such as General von Schleicher (with his wife) and Gustav von Kahr, who had crushed the 1923 putsch. The world was horrified but also curiously relieved, in the delusion that the Nazi revolution had at last come to an end – just as many Frenchmen had been reassured by the crushing of the last Jacobin terrorists after the Infernal Machine Plot of December 1800.
Less than two months later, in August 1934, Hindenburg died. Hitler now took advantage of his bargain with the military leaders, becoming Head of State and commander-in-chief. He assumed the title of Führer and Chancellor, the Presidency being abolished. Moreover, the entire armed forces were required to take a personal oath of loyalty to him.15
The significance of the oath has been generally underestimated. The special traditions of pre-1918 Lutheran Germany must be taken into account. Luther had abolished the episcopate, replacing it by the monarch – ‘the Godly Prince like unto David’. In consequence the head acquired an almost spiritual aura, the oath of allegiance to him a semi-sacramental quality, especially among army officers. Even in Catholic Bavaria and Austria the officers’ oath to be treue und fest was taken very seriously indeed. It was this, not merely monarchist nostalgia, which had caused German officers such anguish when the Kaiser and the princes had abdicated in 1918. An oath to a Head of State for life seemed eminently reasonable, filling a void, particularly to Lutheran officers – Lutheranism being the religion of most Prussians. (General von Rundstedt attended service every Sunday.) It also made it correspondingly more difficult to act against the Führer.
Hitler’s new status was confirmed by a plebiscite, just as a similar plebiscite had once confirmed Bonaparte’s assumption of the Consulate for life.
In his Table Talk the Führer condemned Bonaparte for turning himself into a monarch:
It was Napoleon’s greatest error and at the same time a proof of bad taste on his part, to have renounced the title of ‘First Consul’ in order to have himself called ‘Emperor’ … he denied the Jacobins, his former companions in the struggle, and lost their support. At the same stroke he alienated, both at home and abroad, countless partisans who saw in him the personification of the moral resurrection that the French Revolution was to bring with it. To understand the effect produced by this wilful action, it’s enough to imagine the effect on the people of Munich, and on the rest of the world, if I had myself carried through the streets of Munich in a gilded coach. In any case Napoleon gained nothing by committing this fault, for the old monarchies did not fail to display the scorn they felt for a self-made man.
He cited Beethoven erasing the Eroica’s dedication to Napoleon on hearing he had made himself an Emperor, and exclaiming, ‘He’s not the extraordinary man I believed, he’s only a man!’ He criticized him for placing his brothers and sisters on thrones – ‘Such illogical behaviour can be explained only by the feeling Corsicans have for their families, a feeling in which they resemble the Scots.’
Nevertheless, Hitler was himself a species of monarch. ‘In the National Socialist form of State, the title Führer is the most suitable. It implies, amongst other things, that the Head of State has been chosen by the German people, he considered. ‘This title is associated with the very form of the State itself.’ He termed the concept of a leader elected by the people ‘German democracy’ – as distinct from parliamentary democracy – but basically the Führerprinzip was not so very different from that of Napoleon’s concept of the ‘People’s King’. Significantly, he felt a certain kinship with the elected Kaisers of the medieval Reich, apparently regarding them as his forerunners.
Like the Emperor, Hitler paid keen attention to the Churches, both as a source of support and as a potential focus of opposition. To some extent he controlled the Protestants by setting up a Lutheran ‘Reich Church’, appointing a ‘Reich Bishop’ who with his pastors took an oath of allegiance to the Führer. He chose the pliable Ludwig Müller to be Reich Bishop, while regretting he was not a man of more stature; otherwise ‘Through me the Evangelical Protestant Church could have become the Established Church as in England.’ Despite the heroic example of the Confessional Church and such noble ministers as Bonhoeffer and Niemöller, Lutheranism was by order and tradition ill equipped to oppose the National Socialist state.
Catholicism posed more of a problem. In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (‘With burning heart’), drafted in German instead of Latin, almost certainly by Cardinal Pacelli – the former Nuncio in Germany. It has been described as ‘one of the greatest condemnations of a national régime ever pronounced by the Vatican.’ It totally rejected the racial theory of Blut und Boden (‘Blood and Soil’) and castigated Hitler for ‘aspirations to divinity … placing himself on the same level as Christ’, calling him ‘a mad prophet possessed of repulsive arrogance’. Although infuriated, the Führer was shrewd enough not to launch a full-scale persecution.
In his private life the man whose home had been a tramps’ hostel took to luxury with ease, becoming – like Napoleon – dependent on servants, unable to exist without a valet. ‘Bourgeois comfort’ is perhaps a better description than ‘luxury’, since his sole indulgence was cream cake; he neither drank nor smoked, living on nut cutlets and vegetable soup. He had a curious relationship with his personal staff, whether valets, chauffeurs, cooks, secretaries, doctors or adjutants, treating them almost as a substitute family. The gentlemanly senior officers of the Wehrmacht referred contemptuously to this entourage as the ‘Chauffeureska’.
His friend Hanfstängl has given us a list of the books in the Führer’s library. Among these were predictably Ludendorff’s Publikationen über den Krieg, Stegemann’s Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs, Treitschke’s Deutsche Geschichte, Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s life of Wagner, Kugler’s history of Frederick the Great and, of course, Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. Other volumes included Sven Hedin’s Kriegserinnerungen, detective novels and Westerns, even works on erotic art. He enjoyed Don Quixote (‘the world’s most brilliant parody of a society that was in the process of becoming extinct’) and thought Robinson Crusoe gathered together in one man the history of all mankind. He considered that ‘a great basic idea’ was contained in Gulliver’s Travels and – somewhat surprisingly – in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He seems to have read Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. He is known to have read at least twice Ernst Kantorowicz’s superb study of the medieval Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (despite Frederick preferring Italy to Germany). Even during the war he went through a book a day, apparently after going to bed or before he got up. The verdict of Schramm – the finest mind among all his historians – is that if his determination in acquiring knowledge was ‘nothing short of amazing’, the end result was essentially ramshackle.16
The Führer had a slightly greater aptitude for foreign languages than the Emperor, possibly because of his ear for music. He had been taught some French at school, and improved it before picking up a working knowledge of English – largely through watching French and British films. He even read American magazines. However, he seems to have been incapable of holding a conversation in any tongue other than German.
His only relaxation other than reading and the cinema (he was a Garbo fan) was music. Until the war he went to the opera or operettas, his tastes remaining unchanged since his youth – ‘When I listen to Wagner, it is like the rhythms of the primeval world.’ Before 1939 he always attended the Bayreuth Festival. He had seen Götterdämmerung over a hundred times. (During the war he played it constantly on the gramophone.) Weber’s Der Freischütz was a favourite, as was Eugène (or Eugen) d’Albert’s now seldom performed Tiefland (whose libretto was described in the 1920s as ‘ultra realistic, almost brutal’.) He enjoyed Richard Strauss, Verdi and Puccini – especially Aïda and Madame Butterfly – and heard Lehar’s Merry Widow and Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus over and over again. He was also fond of Bruckner’s symphonies.
As a young man the Führer admired the traditional Prussian officer, his deference to Ludendorff verging on the ludicrous, but when mature he disliked ‘the monocles’. He detested what he called ‘the horse people’ who subscribed to the chivalrous ideal of theRittmeister (or cavalry captain) so popular among the German artistocracy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it was they who provided those officers who made him feel so uncomfortable till the end of his life. Of course there were exceptions, like Gerd von Rundstedt, but on the whole he felt there was no room for such people in the new Germany. They had their own élitist ideals, were almost invariably Christians, and in consequence more or less impervious to the neo-pagan ideals of National Socialism. He loathed everything about them – ‘Hunting and horse-racing are the last remnants of a dead feudal world,’ he told Speer.17
Yet Hitler constructed a society no less hierarchical than the Napoleonic Empire. It had its princes, like the Reichsmarschall (Goering) and the Reichsführer (Himmler), while party office conferred such fiefs as that of a Gauleiter. The humblest party member prided himself on Ayran blood which bestowed a minimal ‘nobility’. While ‘revolutionary’, the SS included many of the old aristocracy.
The Führer was as anxious as Napoleon had been for his supporters to have a financial stake in his régime. They themselves used the phrase ‘planned corruption’. Rauschning observes that while it is nothing new for a revolution to help its sons enrich themselves, in Germany it was done with such shameless haste that it made spectators dizzy. ‘One, two or four houses, country estates, palaces, pearl necklaces, antiques, valuable tapestries and paintings, dozens of motor cars, champagne, farms, factories – where did all the money come from? Had not all these people been as poor as churchmice, up to their eyes in debt? They all had official posts, three, six, a dozen at a time …’ It was not just the great who profited (like Goering, who had solid gold tiles in his bathroom) but the humblest Nazi. ‘There were posts of all kinds, honorary directorships, and dividends, loans and bonuses’ says Rauschning. ‘Everyone was anxious to help; every bank and business enterprise required the protection of a party member.’ Even non-Nazi supporters of the régime profited – like the Emperor, Hitler rewarded his favourite marshals with country estates.
The most striking difference between Napoleon and Hitler was of course their attitude towards Jews. The Emperor believed sincerely that their religious and social disabilities should be removed, placing them on the same level as Protestants and Catholics; wherever his armies went he abolished ghettos. Nor was his attitude merely negative. He hoped to persuade Jews from all over the world to settle in France and take a full part in the nation’s life. On St Helena he wrote:
I have implemented part of my scheme. Some excellent Jewish soldiers joined the French army, considerable wealth entering the country as a result. Had it not been for the events of the year 1814 many more would have come to France, since eventually every Jew would have wanted to settle in a land where equality before the law was guaranteed and where they could aspire to any honour.
His approach was not as universal as might be thought. During the last years of the Directory there had been a rash of bankruptcies, and in consequence much hatred of the Jewish banking community; every moneylender was described as Jewish in a vicious outbreak of anti-Semitism which swept through the French Press – Jews were accused of being enemies to everyone in France save their coreligionists. No attacks of this sort were allowed under the Consulate and the Empire.18
In contrast, Hitler heaped disabilities and humiliations on German Jews from the moment he secured full control of the State in April 1933. They were purged from every profession, while in 1935 they were deprived of German citizenship and forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with ‘racially pure’ Germans; nor could they attend German schools or universities. During Reichskristallnacht (Reich Crystal Night, so called from the amount of broken glass), an attack by organized mobs on 7 November 1938, hundreds of synagogues went up in flames and seven thousand Jewish shops were gutted. By the end of that year 30,000 Jews were in concentration camps. There were no exceptions. Those who had fought gallantly during the 1914-18 war and those who were members of the Stahlhelm, all suffered ostracism and persecution.
The only similarity here is that Bonaparte and Hitler were each acting as typical products of their age. In this matter Napoleon was for once a true disciple of the Enlightenment at its most benign, Hitler of nineteenth-century German Romanticism and ‘historical science’ at their most perverted and evil.
But can peace be made? I think it may.
Charles James Fox to the House of Commons, May 1803
I am sure that some day the Czechs will see that what we did was to save them for a happier future.
Neville Chamberlain to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
letter of 2 October 1938