14

Life after Death

Napoleon had shown repeatedly throughout his career that he was a master of persuasion and an arch-propagandist, aware of the power of words and phrases, images and music to win over public opinion to his cause. His victories at Toulon and Marengo, his venture into Egypt, his coronation and marriage to Marie-Louise, his relations with his men, his youthful experience as a revolutionary general, and his long hours spent as a ruler and legislator in the interests of his people – every aspect of his colourful career was carefully publicised in newspapers and bulletins to construct a heroic image that would be passed down to posterity.

Throughout his career, Napoleon had demonstrated an insatiable desire to project his chosen image, to reserve his place in history. And so, in exile he spent much of his time, especially during his early months on Saint Helena, with purpose and deliberation. There was at first no brooding over the past, no preparing for death, and no planning his return to Europe. What he engaged in was the black art of propaganda, of which he was a master, telling and retelling his story to make sure that his side of events would survive for future generations. He discussed past strategies, the outcomes of his campaigns, the ways he had intended things to work out, often justifying his actions, sometimes expressing regrets, and characteristically blaming others for their weakness or indecisiveness. That was the point of the long hours spent in his study, dictating his thoughts to his ‘apostles’ certain in the knowledge that they would record his views faithfully when his composition was complete. Of course, there was a more immediate purpose, too, in that they helped while away boredom and gave shape to his days. But his real aim cannot be in doubt: this was a tactical campaign as complex as any he had won on the battlefield.

On Saint Helena he convinced himself and his listeners that he had been consistent in his aims, that his had indeed been a liberal empire which he had created and governed in the interests of his people. The Emperor of these final years turned full circle to be reborn as the revolutionary of 1793, the man of the people who identified with the populace and remained loyal to the liberty and fraternity of the First Republic, breaking down privilege and spreading the values of individualism and economic freedom.¹

His arguments and self-justifications, as they are recorded by Las Cases in the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, are less a record of his achievements than a plea to be understood as a son of the Revolution, a man of principle who had remained loyal to his republican ideals. Napoleon was carefully placing himself in history as a democrat who reflected the popular will and who listened to the French people, in stark contrast to the Bourbons and the politicians of the Restoration. He was, in a quite explicit way, making a pitch to be seen by the French public as a man of the Left, a man of democratic instincts. Las Cases records him talking of ‘the irresistible rise of liberal ideas’, for which he claimed that his Empire was largely responsible. The claim was bold and audacious. ‘Nothingshould henceforth destroy or efface the great principles of our Revolution’, he declared, adding that they were noble truths that would last for ever, and that the glory with which he had embellished them had made them ‘immortal’. In this process, revolutionary politics and imperial arms had played complementary roles. ‘The product of the political rostrum, cemented by the blood of battles, decorated with the laurels of victory, saluted by popular acclamation, sanctioned by the treaties and alliances of rulers, they should never again be forced to retreat.’ By carrying the torch for these ideals, he adds, he will forever be linked to them and to their success across the globe.² He talks the language of rights and of citizenship, and carefully presents this for export across Europe as the rights of peoples to win freedom from their empires and monarchies and establish themselves as nation states. He even alludes to the Empire as ‘the regularisation of the republican principle’.³

Napoleon also took the opportunity in his discussions with his entourage to mount attacks on his critics, especially those intellectuals who had, whether through ideological conviction or personal spite, denounced his policies or denied his virtue. Napoleon might relish power, but he was vain enough to value his reputation, too. He cultivated artists and authors, and he resented the continual sniping that he suffered from one or two key literary figures – writers whom he had admired and whom he read. It should not be forgotten that he had been an omnivorous reader ever since his early days on garrison duty, when he confessed that he read novels as a means of killing boredom.⁴ He was certainly far too conscious of the power of words not to recognise the damage they were doing him. Even on Saint Helena he could not let their criticisms rest unanswered.

Chateaubriand who, like Napoleon, had begun life as a young army officer in the Revolution, was a conservative and a royalist. He became quickly disillusioned as the monarchy gave way to the Republic and pluralism to authoritarian centralism. He joined the army of the counter-revolution and launched his literary career in exile in London. After 18 Brumaire, he briefly rallied to Napoleon before becoming angered and disgusted by the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, which drove him into opposition. By the end of the Empire his attacks on Napoleon had become unremitting, not least the venomous tract he published in 1814, within days of the Allied entry into Paris – a time when it could be calculated to do the greatest psychological damage. Here, he not only challenged the legitimacy of Napoleon’s rule but hit at the heart of his military reputation, accusing him of being a mediocre general who had made crass decisions in the field and squandered the lives of his men. ‘Born largely to destroy,’ he wrote, ‘Bonaparte carries evil in his breast just as naturally as a mother bears her offspring, with joy and a sort of pride.’⁵ His most famous work, the Mémoires d’outretombe, was a passionate indictment of the Empire. For Napoleon this constituted an act of betrayal by a convinced reactionary. Yet he remained an admirer of Chateaubriand as a writer, even as he deplored his disloyalty and denounced the virulence of his prose. On Saint Helena Napoleon would insist that his 1814 pamphlet had been so vituperative and libellous that it could inspire only disgust, before adding, with surprising indulgence, that ‘it is to be believed that he now regrets writing them’, and that ‘such a fine talent as his would not prostitute itself by reproducing them today.’⁶

The liberal Benjamin Constant also threw in his lot with the Restoration, making clear in a piece he contributed to the Journal des Débats just why his conscience would not allow him to compromise with the Empire. It represented, he suggested, the worst of compromises, since ‘on the King’s side are constitutional liberty, security and peace; on that of Bonaparte slavery, anarchy and war’. The contrast could not be emphasised more starkly, and Napoleon resented it deeply.⁷ Benjamin Constant’s conversion from liberalism to support for the legitimist monarchy had seemed dramatic – too dramatic not to arouse Napoleon’s suspicions. Who could be responsible for this sudden volte-face and apparent betrayal of liberalism? Napoleon’s animus focused on one of his long-termbêtes noires, the liberal author Madame de Staël who, over a career built on acerbic writing and brilliant salon conversation, had evoked a bitter hatred for Napoleon and all the values he stood for. Her major political works, which were published posthumously, were thinly veiled attacks on his regime.

Germaine de Staël resented almost everything about Napoleon: his origins in Corsica, his military background, and the manner in which he had seized power, all of which helped convince her that he was little more than a tyrant and a usurper. The political allusions and allegorical references to the Emperor that littered her texts were intended to be recognised across Europe, and thus to wound him.⁸ In De l’Allemagne, arguably her most political work, Napoleon is portrayed as a new Attila, a comparison that caused the book to be pulped by the French censors. And though the subject focused on Germany rather than France, the German rulers were not its principal target. The book was a denunciation of tyranny, and to her European readers in 1810 the very use of the word ‘tyrant’ conjured up images of Bonaparte.⁹

Of greater significance than her dislike of tyranny, however, was a contempt that resulted from her personal vanity and her fierce family loyalty. Germaine was widely admired for her sparkling conversation, but not for her beauty; and Napoleon, on the few social occasions when they met, either treated her rudely or chose to ignore her altogether. For one of the most prominent socialites of her day, a woman who had had a succession of equally prominent lovers and may have set out with an infatuation for the young Bonaparte, his contempt was unbearable, and she alleged that Napoleon had no appreciation of women, that, indeed, he was uncomfortable in their company. Just as important was the resentment she felt towards a man who did not share her passionate belief in her father’s genius. She was the daughter of Jacques Necker, the most reformist controller-general put in charge of France’s finances under Louis XVI. Necker was not only her dear father, he was also her hero, and the offhand treatment he had received at Napoleon’s hands shocked and angered her. She pursued him relentlessly throughout his reign, and so wearied Napoleon that he sent her into exile to rid himself of her attentions. On Saint Helena he continued to marvel how she had continued to ‘fight with one hand and beg with the other’.¹⁰ Of her family relations he remarked that hers was indeed a ‘singular family’: ‘her father, her mother and herself, all three on their knees in constant adoration of one another, and breathing in reciprocal incense for the better edification and mystification of the public’.¹¹ It was, as so often, a well-aimed rapier-blow before the tribunal of History.

Like so many modern political memoirs, the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène was an exercise in self-justification that presented the Emperor in the best possible light and gave coherence to his policies and decisions. It was a work of creative literature that gave a narrative overview to the period which impressed and excited its readers, since it bore the stamp of experience, the authenticity of Napoleon’s own voice. First published in Paris in 1823, shortly after his death, it became an instant best-seller and was rapidly translated into a number of European languages, including English and German. The memoir became one of the most influential works of the first half of the nineteenth century, providing sustenance to those who had shared the Napoleonic dream and who regretted the passing of the Empire. It would also have a crucial political role in disseminating the Napoleonic legend across nineteenth-century Europe.

The Mémorial was the first, and by far the most influential, of the memoirs and autobiographical accounts to emerge from the years of exile. Montholon and Gourgaud published an account of Napoleon’s Italian campaigns in 1823, whereas Bertrand’s two-volume work on the war in Syria and Egypt only appeared in 1847, almost a generation later.¹² But their more personal accounts of Napoleon on Saint Helena and reflections on his years of exile had to wait much longer: Gourgaud’s journal from 1815 to 1818, in two volumes, was published only in 1899; while, astonishingly perhaps, Bertrand’s Cahiers de Sainte-Hélène lay undiscovered until after the Second World War.¹³ Napoleon’s two valets, Marchand and Ali, also published their memories of their master’s exile, managing to work in some domestic anecdotes that betrayed their affection for their master.¹⁴ Marchand, who was one of Napoleon’s executors, gives considerable space to the terms of his will, and notes the air of sadness that engulfed Longwood when he died.¹⁵

Others who were not with him in his exile were also moved to contribute their reflections and memories. A Napoleonic publishing industry came into being, dispensing the Napoleonic myth both to veterans of the Empire nostalgic for the world they had lost, andto a new generation of young men, growing up after 1815 and avid for the glory and political excitement that Napoleon personified. If Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël sowed the seeds of a black legend, Napoleon and his apostles made sure that the world knew his side of the story, and their writings appealed to the romantic imagination of the nineteenth century. Bertrand, by this time reinstated in the Restoration army, phrased it memorably when he wrote that the Emperor ‘remained our Standard, our rallying-point. The memory of our glorious past made us forget for a moment the miseries of our country, and we felt that our heart, with all our soul, went out to him, even though army discipline made us obedient to the White Flag.’¹⁶ Even Britain was not immune from his appeal: a generation of poets and novelists, from Scott and Byron to Southey, de Quincey and Thackeray, fell under the spell of the Emperor. In the words of one leading literary critic, in their work is ‘a desire that eschews abstinence and order in favour of indulgent fantasies of violent becoming – indeed, the very stuff of Napoleonic identity.’¹⁷

If Napoleon can claim credit for creating his new identity as a man of the people and the legitimate heir to the ideas of 1789, his enemies gave him huge assistance. Every action of the Restoration monarchy, it seemed, intensified the equation of Revolution and Empire in the popular mind: the encouragement given to Catholic missions, which toured southern villages annihilating every vestige of the Republic; the uprooting of liberty trees and banning of the tricolour; and the purging of men known for republican or Bonapartist sympathies from any form of public office, all symbolised the monarchy’s determination to return to an old order where the people were once more subjugated and nobles and clergy were secure in their wealth and prestige.¹⁸ In some parts of the south, White Terror returned as well, as those who had suffered the excesses of the Jacobin period joined forces with returned émigrés and newly empowered priests in a concerted campaign of denunciation and revenge killing. Against this background it was not difficult to develop nostalgia for a more egalitarian age, and Napoleon’s apologists exploited those feelings with consummate skill. Political realities gave way to an idealised image of a time of equality and opportunity. In a particularly unrealistic portrayal of the Empire in 1840, the liberal novelist Frédéric Soullié wrote, ‘Remember, that equality was the law under his reign. It is because of this that he is our hero; it is for this reason that he has remained so great and revered in our memories.’¹⁹ Seldom has the history of a regime been so single-mindedly concentrated on that of a single man.

Prefects worried about the secret ambitions of former soldiers, now demobilised on half-pay, and throughout eastern France miniature statues of Napoleon and Marie-Louise were reported to be in high demand.²⁰ For some, unconvinced by the news of his death, he remained a living hero, a man who, they hoped, would play a part in the future life of the nation just as he had done in the past. Police and administrative reports made repeated references to individuals who claimed that he was not dead, some who expressed the hope that he would return, some who had even seen him in the flesh. Unsurprisingly, these were most common in peasant France, in the depths of countryside where superstitious beliefs remained widely held and where visions of the Virgin Mary were not unknown. In the Creuse, not far from the town of Guéret, a rumour spread that Bonaparte had appeared, almost Christ-like, ‘escorted by angels’, to a mother and her child at the very moment when the story of his return was being recounted.²¹ Religious themes were often strong in the imagery surrounding these visions, as simple countrymen struggled to put their faith into words. Some even alleged that the tale of Napoleon’s death had to be false since he was not as other men, and would not die. In 1815, indeed, in the Massif Central, one man was overheard to say simply that Napoleon was ‘immortal’, a belief that easily led to expectations of a Second Coming.²² Such an event would be eagerly awaited, too, since the return of the Emperor would put bread on their tables and guarantee the return of prosperity, and the government was alert to the possibility that support for Napoleon lay at the root of sedition and conspiracy. The fact that many young conscripts, instead of turning in their weapons or breaking them to show their contempt for the new order, had preferred to keep them for future use, only added to the sense of emergency.²³

In 1819 the government’s approach became more repressive, following the murder of the Duc de Berry late at night in Paris as he accompanied his sick wife home from the theatre. He was the younger son of the Comte d’Artois, the King’s brother and future Charles X, and though the murder was demonstrably the work of a lone fanatic intent on destroying what remained of the Bourbon line, it unleashed a huge political backlash, and police spies worked hard to unearth new plots.²⁴ In the years that followed they devoted particular attention to the activities of freemasons, and secret republican societies calling themselves Carbonari who combined an enlightened or progressive view of the state with a taste for intrigue and conspiracy. Romantics and neo-liberals were among those most prone to get caught up in such conspiracy, not least those who had served under the Emperor during his military career. But to the Bourbons they represented an intolerable threat, and they were determined to eliminate every trace of Napoleonic sympathies. Youthful or romantic dreaming was not taken as an excuse by a government concentrated on repression. The Four Sergeants of La Rochelle, who had been arrested for membership of a secret society and for plotting against the monarchy in 1822, were among the most high-profile victims of this juridical campaign. Denounced to the authorities, they were offered no quarter, were summarily condemned to death, and were guillotined before the public’s obvious sympathy for four romantic young soldiers risked becoming politicised. Their martyrdom could only play into the hands of the liberal opposition.²⁵

The Paris crowd was especially feared by the authorities in view of its past record of political activism, both in the Revolution and during the Old Regime. Disillusionment with the restored monarchy combined with high levels of unemployment to heighten the appeal of the past, and here, in the bars and drinking dens of the capital, the cult of Napoleon rapidly took root. Singing was a favourite pastime among Parisian workers at the time: recalling his memories of his Parisian youth, Pierre Vinçard describes the years around 1818 as a time when singing societies (or goguettes) were being established in a number of working-class districts. These societies, he explains, were mainly composed of workers; they operated freely with tacit authorisation from the local police, and the songs they sang were those most popular in the workers’ repertoire of the day, including many that were critical of the government and the Catholic church.²⁶ It was a time when singing was becoming increasingly political, a form of popular resistance to authority. And among the songs that were especially popular were nostalgic ditties about the Empire, notably those written by Pierre-Jean Béranger and Emile Debraux, whose song sheets contributed significantly to the mood of nostalgia. The workers’ voices rose in denunciation of the aristocracy and of a Church which they saw as a rampart of the social elite; they sang to the memory of Napoleon and of the armies he led; and they turned the Napoleonic legend against the authority of the restored monarchy. Debraux’s verses about his exile on Saint Helena and Béranger’s evocations of the spirit of the departed Emperor were emotionally highly charged; sentimental songs that brought tears to the eyes.²⁷ But they were as nothing compared to Béranger’s most powerful and haunting lyric, sung with force and passion. The title, in the 1820s or 1830s, called for no explanation: ‘He is not dead’. Or so they would convince themselves as they fantasised about their Emperor’s return:

We soldiers know, that from his jailer-band

A ship at midnight carried him away;

Since then, disguised, through his beloved land

He wanders, lonely, hunted, day by day.

That weary horseman, with his furtive glance,

That poacher, hiding in the woods his head,

’Tis he, perhaps; he comes to rescue France!

It is not true, oh God! He is not dead!²⁸

Where song sheets helped politicise workers in the towns, others consumed the Napoleonic legend in visual form, through popular woodcuts and images d’Epinal, the brightly coloured images that were so popular in the French countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century. The first images, produced in the Vosges by the workshop of Jean-Charles Pellerin, had dealt primarily with religious subject matter, pictures of saints and scenes from the Bible, along with moral tales about human behaviour. By the early nineteenth century these had become part of popular culture, sold at markets and country fairs to a largely peasant audience. And their range had increased exponentially, however much they relied on a staple of traditional themes and well-worn visual clichés likeThe Ages of Man and The Wandering Jew. Pellerin was an admirer of Napoleon and, with his team of artists and engravers, devoted great energy after the 1830 revolution to popularising images of the Empire. Those of François Georgin are probably the best-known: a series of detailed battle scenes that evoked all the glory of the imperial armies, from the Battle of the Pyramids during the Egyptian Campaign through to the touching moment when Napoleon took his final leave of the army at Fontainebleau. There were more than forty in all, produced in large format and offering a memorable tribute in pictures to the Grande Armée. They represented good business for Pellerin, too, as they sold in huge numbers across the country and were reprinted many times in the course of the century. In the countryside especially, they had an important role in spreading the imperial myth.²⁹

After 1830 the cult of the Emperor became more open and respectable; it was no longer something that had to be practised in secret, concealed from the authorities. His former soldiers now spoke openly of their affection for him, in cafés and cercles and in those places where old soldiers met to reminisce. He was spoken of with awe as well as affection, the awe that soldiers have for a great leader, but one whom they considered as one of their own. He had brought them victory, respect and glory, and had rewarded them with medals and battle honours. He had led them to the end of Europe, to the ends of the world as they knew it, and had opened their eyes to different cultures and exotic civilisations. It had been – as they saw it twenty years later – a wonderful adventure, a moment when they had been present at the making of history. Even the fact that it had ended in defeat and disappointment, and that Napoleon had lived out his final years in solitary exile, added to the poignancy of his legend, turning their Emperor into yet another of those tragic heroes of war the French treasure so much – a hero undone by his enemies, badly treated by his captors, and left to rot and die in the dank wilderness of Saint Helena. Defeat, in other words, became part of his legend, a necessary ingredient in a romantic hero, and one that placed him – as it would in the school textbooks of the Third Republic – in the exalted company of those other French heroes and heroines of war, Roland, Duguesclin, Bayard and Joan of Arc.³⁰ In the paintings of the period these comparisons were often made quite explicitly, as in Delacroix’s great canvas on the death of Charles the Bold before the walls of Nancy, a work that hinted at the dangers of vaulting ambition and was seen by many as a direct reference to Napoleon’s own career.³¹

With the fall of Charles X in 1830, the government no longer lived in fear of the Emperor’s legacy, and a new generation of political leaders competed for the honour of appealing to his memory. They actively sought to share in the public esteem that flowed from associations with the First Empire, going to ever-greater lengths to link the memory of the Empire to their current political cause. Following the 1830 revolution the Bourbon monarchy had finally ended, and power passed to the Orléans line and to the ‘bourgeois monarchy’ of Louis-Philippe. The new king had reached adulthood around the outbreak of the French Revolution, in which his father had briefly become a popular hero before being arrested and guillotined under the Terror. The son, however, did not break with the Revolution, serving bravely as an officer in the republican armies, which allowed him to appear in later years as a man of compromise who could, perhaps uniquely, unite warring factions and avoid unnecessary bloodshed after 1830.³²

Louis-Philippe was well aware of the power of Napoleonic symbolism, and he did not hesitate to cultivate the notion that he was the real heir to the imperial tradition. At his coronation in 1831 he was ostentatiously surrounded by four Napoleonic marshals; in 1833 he approved the placing of Seurre’s iconic statue of Napoleon atop the Vendôme Column, a permanent reminder to Parisians of the man who had once been their Emperor; in 1836 he inaugurated the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Elysées to honour the memory of the Napoleonic legions; and in 1837 he admitted Napoleon to his cultural showpiece, the Museum of the History of France at Versailles.³³ Even in death, it seemed, Napoleon continued to exercise as much influence and fascination over the French people – civilians and old soldiers alike – as he had during his lifetime. The huge and expectant crowds that lined the banks of the Seine in 1840 to welcome their Emperor home bore eloquent testimony to the awe and affection that he still commanded two decades after his death.

His reputation as a strategist and battlefield technician also seemed secure, with public and professional memory focusing on his victories rather than his downfall. It is interesting to look, for instance, at the course programmes at the French military academy at Saint-Cyr during the 1880s and 1890s, a time when the new republican government felt vulnerable to outside attack. Despite the intensely republican ethos of the school, and the widespread belief that France’s debacle in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – when an army widely believed to be the best in Europe had been utterly overwhelmed by the Prussians in only a few weeks, leading to an ignominious surrender at Sedan and the collapse of the regime – had been caused by the abandonment of mass conscription in the course of the nineteenth century, it is interesting that the French revolutionary armies were presented more as a lesson in civic responsibility and public morality than as a tactical exemplar. Valmy was seen as a clarion call to arms, not as a model of battlefield tactics, and in the course on military history taught on the eve of the First World War, the royal army of the eighteenth century, pre-revolutionary tactics and the campaigns of the French Revolution were each dismissed in a single lesson. A fourth lesson was devoted to the transformation of the army in Italy by Bonaparte; then a further ten sessions were devoted to Napoleon’s campaigns.³⁴ The professional perception was clear – that here was a great French general, from whose tactics and approach to war there was still much to be learned. If he was finally overwhelmed by superior numbers, he still had his place with the great generals of history, among whom they counted Alexander the Great from the Ancient world and Frederick the Great from their own.

That is also, largely, how the public sees him, even today; and how the history of the Empire continues to be presented in art, in the galleries of the Louvre or in the Great Gallery at Versailles.³⁵ Of course there is a tendency in any country to celebrate victories rather than bemoan defeats, especially in history painting, so this imbalance may not seem so surprising. But though Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, it is interesting to reflect on how that battlefield is presented to the visitor today, and on what it is that the tourists who flock there want and expect to see. Neither Wellington nor Blücher is really the main attraction. The Butte, the mound constructed in 1826 to commemorate the battle with the Lion of Waterloo at its summit, and to some degree also the museum and visitor centre on the battlefield, are dedicated principally to the memory of the French, and of the Great Man whose imperial adventure ended there. The classic Belgian travel guide by Fierens-Gevaert expresses this admirably: ‘There is no place more suited to dreaming of the majesty of Napoleon, to evoking the legendary grandeur of his reign, to appreciating with a look into the past the epic task of his soldiers, than the summit of this triangular tomb raised on the corpse of imperial heroism. I have seen many visitors, scorning their guides, sunk in prolonged contemplation of the mighty battlefield. Rarely have they turned towards Waterloo and the heights occupied by Wellington; almost always, their eyes were fixed on the bluish haze of the horizon where the imperial glory finally faded.’ For the museum and its visitors, as for European memory more generally, Waterloo was about Napoleon, his defeat, and the beginning of his myth.³⁶

And so it remains for our own times, and not only for France. Just as Napoleon remained one of the towering influences in nineteenth-century literature, so he would be translated into the mass media of the twentieth, and especially to cinema, as a tragic hero and a giant on the European stage. Since the great silent movie by Abel Gance in the 1920s, through to modern French cinema and Hollywood, the Emperor has continued to fascinate and confound audiences across the globe. The Napoleonic Wars featured in many ofthe films produced in Europe between the two world wars, when parallels could readily be drawn between the Napoleonic Empire and the problems of the present. In this period no fewer than fifty-five films on the subject were made in Germany, considerably more than in either France or Britain. All nations drew on the period to glorify their national histories, with Napoleon presented either as the hero of the nation or as the greatest threat to liberty and national identity. Audiences in France, for instance, enjoyed literary films about Napoleon and glorified accounts of veterans of the Grande Armée. But Germany was a case apart, a country becalmed by political and societal crisis, and here the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon became critical points of reference. As the contemporary film historian Oskar Kalbus explained, one reason for this interest lies in the uncertainties of life under the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, as a result of which ‘sentiment is more receptive to the great epochs of history and their men’. The entry of Napoleon on to the European stage, with the destruction and reconstruction it caused, was one such ‘great epoch of history’.³⁷

Napoleon also left a significant political legacy that continued to resonate in France and would inspire popular insurrections abroad, especially in Central and Latin America. Bonapartism remained a strong political tradition in France, one that was revived not only (and most obviously) by Napoleon III but also, in different ways, by General Boulanger in the 1880s and by Philippe Pétain and Charles de Gaulle in the twentieth century. The idea of linking strong personal authority to popular support, to a leader thrown up by the people, who would rule without constant interference from intermediary bodies or elected politicians, became an accepted, if for many rather threatening, theme in modern French politics.³⁸ If the July Monarchy was tempted to play on Napoleon’s memory in order to curry favour with the electorate, it was playing with fire. In 1848, elections were held for the presidency of the newly declared Second Republic, elections which for the first time involved universal manhood suffrage. The result was staggering. The popular appeal of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte – the appeal inherent in his great-uncle’s name – was so great that the other candidates were swept aside, and he was elected by a substantial majority. Three years later, in 1851, he would imitate the great Napoleon by staging his own coup d’état, overthrowing the Republic to declare a second empire.

But there the parallel stops. Louis-Napoleon had none of the incisiveness of the first Emperor, no clear vision of the policies he wished to pursue. He had little of the personal charisma, either, that had contributed so much to Napoleon’s success. A coup that was derided by Karl Marx as the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ did not herald a return to international glory, as Louis-Napoleon’s supporters had hoped. Republicans were horrified to be robbed of the political gains they had fought so hard to achieve, and across France people took up arms, proclaiming revolutionary commissions in over a hundred communes and clashing violently, sometimes bloodily, with troops and gendarmes. Repression followed, and, if exception is made for Paris, it resulted in the most ruthless political purge between the Jacobin Terror of 1794 and the Resistance movement during the Second World War.³⁹ There would be no triumphant second coming in 1851. If history did repeat itself, as Marx inferred, it repeated itself as farce.⁴⁰