ELEVEN
Oh, French people, how frivolous you are! You show us the leash and you prove that you need to be led . . .
—Mme. de Sade, letter to Gaspar Gaufridy
BECAUSE OF HIS BRILLIANT YOUTH and early death, one tends to forget that Napoleon was born—in 1769—under the reign of Louis XV and started his military career under Louis XVI. At the peak of all his military successes, at Tilsit in 1807, he was still only thirty-seven and he saw final defeat at Waterloo in his mid-forties. Yet, if he was a child of the ancien régime, he was also very much a product of the revolution. Commissioned as a second lieutenant at the age of sixteen, from the harsh military academy of Brienne, he made his first real mark on military affairs at the siege of Toulon in 1793. The key naval base was then held by an English fleet under the command of Admiral Hood; Napoleon, as a young artillery captain, produced a winning strategy for the ragged French revolutionary forces besieging it. He became a hero in the ranks, promoted to the dizzy rank of général de brigade when still only twenty-four.
His next opportunity came when, in Paris on sick leave during the autumn of 1795, he was called in by Barras to forestall the revolt of Treizième Vendémiaire. Barras, grateful but also nervous at having Napoleon too near the centre of power, then appointed him—at the age of twenty-seven—Commander-in-Chief of the French Army of Italy.
Ever since 1792, France had been at war with the First Coalition of her enemies, bent upon reversing the revolutionary tide that seemed to threaten all Europe. Lack of adequate preparation and incompetence among the new leaders of the revolutionary French forces had been matched by differences of interest and lethargy among the Allies; the stiff forms of eighteenth-century warfare, unaltered since the days of Frederick the Great, had encountered a new revolutionary fervour. The British bungled a landing at Quiberon Bay, while Prussia abandoned the First Coalition the following year. But, over-extended and unhelped by the dithering and corrupt rule of the Directoire, France’s new “Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse” experienced a series of defeats across the Rhine at the hands of the Austrians.
Napoleon’s mission in Italy was to wrest the initiative from the Austrians, entrenched in the north. He found French forces unpaid, hungry, poorly equipped and on the verge of mutiny. Stendhal cites the example of three officers who owned but one pair of shoes, one pair of breeches and three shirts between them. By his extraordinary capacity to inspire, Napoleon transformed the forces under him within a matter of days, and over the next eighteen months led them—with minimal resources—to a series of victories culminating in the momentous battle of Rivoli. By October 1797, he had defeated seven armies, captured 160,000 prisoners and over 2000 cannon, and chased the Austrians to within 100 miles of Vienna, to force his beaten enemy to sign a peace with France, and definitively end the wars of the First Coalition.
His star was irresistibly in the ascendant as he returned in triumph to Paris. “You are the hero of all France,” the Directoire told him. “From that moment,” Napoleon wrote after the first Italian campaign, “I foresaw what I might be. Already I felt the earth flee from beneath me, as if I were being carried into the sky.” For France—and for Europe—it signified that the war party had triumphed. Following Napoleon’s Italian victories, at the Treaty of Campo Formio (17 October 1797), France gained the Cisalpine Republic—which was to germinate the modern Italy—together with Belgium and control of the left bank of the Rhine. Henceforth the Belgians were “as much French as the Normans, the Alsatians, the people of Languedoc or Burgundy.”
But could England ever be persuaded to accept a French Belgium? Of her foes of the First Coalition, only England remained at war with France, but with no weapon to strike at her across the Channel; so England contented herself by extending her empire at the expense of both enemy and allies. After Campo Formio, however, in exchange for a durable peace, she too declared herself ready to accept France’s “natural frontiers.” At last, revolutionary France was offered the security for which she had fought so passionately over the previous five years; it looked like a good time to make peace with England.
Success, though, went to the weak head of the Directoire. Back in 1790, the Assembly had declared the noble ideal: “The French nation renounces the undertaking of any war with a view to making conquests, and it will never use its forces against the liberty of any people.” Inflated by Napoleon’s achievements, however, the Directoire now let itself be enticed into a war of expansion and enrichment. It is instructive that France’s wars of aggrandisement began, not under the Consulate or the Empire, but under the revolutionary movement. The new hero was now put in command of the Army of England, charged with carrying the war across the Channel. But the previous year, 1796, General Hoche with 14,000 troops had made an abortive descent on Ireland, disrupted by storms, and Napoleon considered it “too chancy to risk La Belle France on the throw of a dice.” Instead, he placed in the mind of the Directoire the daring idea of striking at British sea-power in the eastern Mediterranean—the key to England’s empire and trade in the Orient.
With England’s Pitt still under the misapprehension that he was heading for Ireland, Napoleon sailed for Egypt. With him he took as reading matter the Koran, to reinforce his hopes of setting the Muslim world afire against England—and also the Campaigns of Julius Caesar. (This and other similar works were being studied at the same time by an unknown young general then stationed in India, Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. Had the Egyptian enterprise succeeded, the two arch-enemies might well have met and fought it out at a much earlier date than they did.) But Egypt was to prove a disastrous campaign. The French won repeatedly on land, notably at the battle of the Pyramids, but a junior English admiral, Horatio Nelson, swept the seas at Aboukir Bay and the Nile. Fighting moved up into Palestine and the Levant. In his massacre of prisoners at Jaffa, Napoleon revealed himself at his most ruthless and cruel. Meanwhile, this twenty-nine-year-old—a man of so many contradictions—had recently issued inspiring instructions for the creation of an Institute of Science and Art in occupied Cairo. It was typical that to accompany his military campaign Napoleon took with him Champollion, the Egyptologist. He lost the war in Egypt, but discovered the Rosetta Stone; though many looted treasures of antiquity went down with the French flagship, l’Orient, at Aboukir Bay, lost for ever in the sands of the Nile delta.
Although Napoleon himself seemed immune to the plague that decimated his men, the revolutionary General Kléber growled that he was “the kind of general who needed a monthly income of ten thousand men.” Encouraged by British naval successes, in 1798 a Second Coalition was formed against the French, comprising England, Naples, Austria, Russia and Turkey. But Napoleon abandoned his battered army in the Middle East upon the news that at home the Directoire was in political trouble. Dodging Nelson’s patrols, he landed secretly back at Fréjus on 9 October 1799. In Paris, he found the Directoire tottering. After a brief moment of historic indecision, when it was not certain whether his grenadiers would support him or arrest him, until Murat shouted “Vive la République!” and “Vive Bonaparte!,” on 9 November (18 Brumaire in the Revolutionary Calendar) Napoleon effected a coup d’état that ended the rule of the Directoire. “Hypocrites, intriguers!” he castigated them, promising that he would “abdicate from power the instant the Republic is free from danger.” Of course, he would not. The revolution was over; France had a new master.
AT FIRST, Napoleon made himself one of three Consuls (the others being Sieyès and Ducos, its two illustres inconnus). The terminology of Consul was significantly borrowed from ancient Rome, but Napoleon swiftly found an excuse to establish himself as First Consul, with a tenure of ten years and dictatorial powers greater than those of Louis XIV at the height of his glory. It was perfectly clear that “France had not been raped; she had yielded.” Tactfully, the new master now dressed himself in civilian clothes to stress the fact that, rather than rule as a general, his priorities would be domestic.
The war, however, continued. Consolidated in power politically, Napoleon set off once more to chastise the Austrians in Italy. By transporting an army of 50,000 secretly over the 8000-foot Great Saint Bernard Pass, still covered in snow in the May of 1800, he struck the unwary enemy from the rear. June brought stunning victory at Marengo, a copy-book classic of manoeuvre combined with opportunism. The coup de grâce was administered by Moreau’s victory at Hohenlinden in December. Although the following summer, General Abercromby’s British expeditionary force was to expel Napoleon’s abandoned Army of the Orient from Egypt, the Second Coalition had now collapsed in ruins.
Military supremacy belonged to Napoleon. In 1801 and 1802, the Austrians agreed to retreat from northern Italy, and a smarting England agreed to part with most of her recent colonial acquisitions. A grateful France confirmed Napoleon as Consul for life—in a plebiscite, by a huge majority of 3.5 million to 8000. For the first time in a decade, there was even a possibility of lasting peace among the battered European nations, but this was more of a hopeful desire than a realistic end. As Napoleon had written prophetically to his lieutenant and potential rival, Moreau, during the more ecstatic moments of 1800: “Greatness has its beauties, but only in retrospect and in the imagination.”
ON NAPOLEON’S RETURN to Paris following his victory at Marengo, the city went wild. A dense crowd converged on the Tuileries where he and Josephine had installed themselves, and he had to show himself several times on the balcony “amid a tempest of cries of joy.” According to the remarkable French historian Laborie,49 “never since Henri IV, had a conqueror been so triumphally fêted, not even Condé, Turenne or Villars.”1
The Marengo campaign would give Napoleon nearly five years of peace, the longest in his career, to devote to restoring and reforming the social fabric of France. There was much to be done; the country was bankrupt, but imbued with the singular urge to reinvent itself. As Balzac was to explain several decades later, “The overall longing for peace and tranquillity, that everyone felt after the violent upheavals, produced a total obliteration of the most sinister prior occurrences. History aged very quickly, its ageing accelerated by ever new and burning interest.”2 The last days of the Directoire, in reaction against the Terror, were probably among the most dissipated in the city’s history. Suddenly the city appeared to discover, or rediscover, “a moneyed upper bourgeoisie clad in Greco-Roman clothing,” and—for the women—very diaphanously transparent clothing at that. With it revolutionary morals had gone out of the window.
Returning to France in 1800 after seven years’ self-exile, the writer Chateaubriand had been deeply shocked by the ravages that he found still left by the Revolution, particularly in its excesses of atheism: “the ruinous castles, the belfries empty of bells, the graveyards with never a cross and the headless statues of saints.” At Saint-Denis, the resting place of French monarchs from time immemorial, tombs had been defaced, decapitated or totally destroyed, their royal contents sacrilegiously scattered. In Paris, though horribly vandalised, Notre-Dame had escaped by a whisker—scheduled for destruction, its stones were actually put up for auction. In Paris the great houses of the nobility and the bourgeoisie had been pillaged, with barely a courtyard gate still left on its hinges.
Although the massacres perpetrated on the royalist Vendée far exceeded the Terror in Paris,3 apart from the destruction, human as well as physical, the mess left behind by the revolutionary Commune would have daunted any lesser man than Napoleon, but he wasted no time in pursuing a grand reform of French society, from the top to the bottom. He found religion in post-revolutionary France in a state of chaos, if not jeopardy. In some regions, “refractory priests” were still hiding out as outlaws, while in Paris each church, renamed “Temples of Concord,” of “Hymen,” etc., had its own cult. Under the Revolution and the Directoire, marriage had been a simple affair, the couples usually dispatched in batches at “decadal” temples to the accompaniment of derision from layabout onlookers. With divorce made equally simple, marriage became regarded as a short-term obligation. “What could be more immoral,” declared a contemporary, “than to allow a man to change his wife like a coat, and a woman to change her husband like a hat?”4 It was the ambition of Bonaparte, the good Corsican Catholic, to make the family once more the pivot of society, so the marriage tie was encouraged to regain its former significance. An exception was made for speedy marriages of soldiers on leave from the front (under almost everything Napoleon did, one could discover a pragmatic military relevance). Of course, Napoleon himself had numerous love affairs, but—true Mediterranean to the core—was loath to tolerate them in others.
NAPOLEON ALLOCATED some £4 million for the restoration of churches, and had the synagogues reopened. He was influenced less by architectural values than by an appreciation of the underlying importance of the Catholic Church when it came to winning over the French nation. In place of the Revolution’s phobic anti-religious zeal in the last years of the old century came a marked religious revival. As ever sensitive to the popular mood, Napoleon healed the wounds that still divided France with the brilliant gesture of a Concordat with Pope Pius VII. It was an integral part of his programme to enlist every element of French life behind him. For similar reasons he supported a liberal-minded emancipation of French Jews; stating at the siege of Acre, a hundred and fifty years before the State of Israel was declared, that Jewry had “the right to a political existence as much as any other nation.” Speaking to ultra-Catholic Vendéean leaders when First Consul, he made his thinking abundantly clear: “I intend to re-establish religion, not for your sake but for mine.”
The Concordat re-established the Roman Catholic Church as “the religion of the greater majority of Frenchmen”; but at the same time it clearly demarcated its powers. It removed the main grievances that had sustained civil war in the Vendée, and helped ease Napoleon into the sympathies of Catholics both at home and in other soon-to-be subject nations. Although rejected by Louis XVIII’s government-in-exile, the Concordat was supported by most of the returning aristocracy, including Chateaubriand who found a Paris where “the émigré was returning and talking peaceably with the murderers of his nearest and dearest.”
On Easter Day 1802, Napoleon sealed his diplomatic coup of the Concordat with a grand Te Deum sung at Notre-Dame, where he was received under the portico by the recently nominated archbishop. Cynics noted that, of those present, only two defrocked priests, Talleyrand and Fouché, knew properly how to genuflect. Others wondered if all military guards were there solely to “prevent God the Father from being burgled!” But Napoleon presented himself as the champion of old France, a hero-leader who would restore its values and repair the depredations of Robespierre. The fall of the Terror and its replacement by the inept and corrupt Directoire left a vacuum that was moral, military and political—and into it Napoleon slid easily. From St. Helena he would admit: “I had but one goal: to reunite all, reconcile all, have all hatreds forgotten, bring everyone together, gather together so many divergent elements and compose them anew in one whole: one France and one patrie.”
IN MARCH 1802, Napoleon concluded the Peace of Amiens with England. What the English uncharitably dubbed “the peace which passeth all understanding” heralded for both France and Napoleon a halcyon period. English tourists, and two-thirds of the House of Lords poured across the Channel in their tens of thousands to spend willingly and savour the abandoned joys of post-Directoire Paris. Tickets could be purchased at Charing Cross for £5.
It was during this fleeting period of peace that Napoleon, acting with the same speed and remarkable concentration of energy that characterised his military operations, established the majority of the civil reforms that were to provide France with a new constitution, set her finances in order and produce a durable modern political and social structure for France.
After coming to terms with the Church, Napoleon abolished the savage Law of Hostages, which had made the illegal return of émigrés punishable by death. In 1802, he proclaimed a general amnesty, mindful again of gaining the support of the monarchists for his future plans of continental conquest. Within a year over 40,000 families returned. The titles of Madame and Mademoiselle once more replaced the appellation of citoyenne, with all its fearful associations. The revolutionary calendar disappeared in favour of the old Gregorian Calendar, so that “18 Brumaire, An VIII” once more became 9 November 1799; and traditional festivals like Christmas and Easter returned.
In May 1802, Napoleon instituted the new award of the Légion d’Honneur—a new society, he reasoned, needed a new elite, an aristocracy not of birth, but of merit. Boundless in his own ambition, Napoleon derided it in others, remarking cynically of the Légion: “it is by such baubles that one leads men by the nose!” Yet under the Empire no fewer than 48,000 rubans rouges were distributed, denoting the Légion. The cynics may have derided the institution as “hanging by a thread,” nevertheless it would continue to be a source of power and influence for even Republican regimes long after Napoleon’s demise.
THOSE BRIEF TWO YEARS of the Peace of Amiens, in retrospect, certainly seem like one of the nation’s Golden Ages—comparable to the advent of Henri IV, or Louis XIV after the Frondes. For Napoleon and Josephine personally it would rate as the “happiest time of their lives.” They had their idyllic retreat at Malmaison, an hour’s drive out of Paris (about the same now). And they had each other; in the longest time they would spend together. At Malmaison also Napoleon had a better chance of keeping the voracious sexual appetite of the hot-blooded Creole under control; she could even keep a reasonable tab on his passing infidelities. Anyway, she loved it; Malmaison was Josephine’s “creation and her paradise.”50
In the country at large Napoleon’s rule seemed unshakeably established, with the constitution of 1802 leading all wires back to his one pair of hands. He had the authority of a monarch, but there was still no arrangement for the succession. Already in December 1800, the fact that the First Consul might be less than immortal had been suggested when, on his way to the opera, he had narrowly escaped the explosion of a powerful mine in the Rue Niçaise which killed several bystanders. Then, at the beginning of 1804, two further plots were uncovered; one led by a Vendée royalist from Brittany called Georges Cadoudal, the other by two generals, Pichegru and Moreau. Cadoudal (with whom the British government had rashly connived) was swiftly picked up by that master counter-spy, Fouché. Cadoudal’s involvement in the Rue Niçaise bomb was revealed, and he was executed on 25 June 1804. Pichegru died in prison, garrotted by his own neckerchief; while Moreau, as the popular hero of the battle of Hohenlinden, was permitted to disappear into exile, thereby removing one of the few potential rivals to Napoleon.
The Cadoudal plot provided Napoleon with just the excuse he needed to present himself with an imperial crown, thereby ensuring the hereditary succession of the Napoleon dynasty; but it was also to lead to his most deplorable miscalculation, the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. A fairly distant, and disinterested potential claimant to the Bourbon throne, d’Enghien was an attractive young man of thirty-two who made occasional secret visits to the German state of Baden, in the pursuit of love. On one such visit he was kidnapped on Napoleon’s orders, and brought to France (along with his inseparable dog).51 After an arbitrary trial on charges of conspiracy, he was summarily shot, in the fortress of Vincennes. Totally innocent, d’Enghien was even unaware that any conspiracy against the First Consul existed. The shots rang around Europe; in the famous phrase attributed (wrongly) to Talleyrand, whose own hands were far from clean, the deed was “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” Certainly no other single act did Napoleon more harm, showing as it did what pointless evil this glamorous hero was also capable of. Combined with his forthcoming coronation, the greatest spectacle Napoleonic Paris was ever to see, the two events would provoke a Third Coalition against France. “We have achieved more than we intended,” declared the royalist conspirator Georges Cadoudal, with acid humour as he courageously faced the scaffold in June 1804. “We came to give France a king; we have given her an emperor.”
EACH OF NAPOLEON’S STREAM of important reforms between 1799 and 1804 incremented his personal power. Though heir to the revolution, Napoleon was however in no way himself a revolutionary, rather a reformer and a moderniser prepared to graft innovations on to the stock of both the ancien régime and the few sensible benefits bequeathed by the revolution. In February 1800, the various departments were placed under the charge of prefects, the following year the metric system was introduced, and in 1802 a new national police force was raised. France was to become more tightly centralised than ever it had been even under the Roi Soleil. Prior to Napoleon, the country had been bedevilled by the existence of 360 separate local codes; he now set about the immense task of unifying them into one set.
By 1804 the Code Civil (later, and better, known as the Code Napoléon) was voted through the legislature. Though comprising over 2000 articles it took only four years to complete. It remains Napoleon’s most solid and enduring achievement, and is still largely operative today—not only within the EU. Regulating virtually every function of life, the Code insisted on the equal division of property among sons, which in fact did more than the revolution to fragment the big estates. Reflecting Napoleon’s own very Corsican disbelief in feminine equality, heavy emphasis was laid on the authority of the male, removing many of the contractual rights that women had enjoyed under the ancien régime. The père de famille was granted almost dictatorial rights over the family, including the right to imprison his child for a month, while illegitimates were barred from inheritance. Wives were forbidden to give, sell or mortgage property and could acquire it only with their husband’s written consent. In this respect Frenchwomen were better off under Louis XVI, or even Louis XIV.
The Civil Code, which became law in 1804, was followed by the Codes of Civil Procedure, of Commercial Law, of Criminal Procedure and the Penal Code. All embodied the key achievements of the revolution—national unity and the equality of citizens—and were to survive as the basis for most civil law throughout the modern world. Napoleon may be accused of being an opportunist, but he carried with him from Corsica no burden of class distinction or privilege, which was to help him immeasurably in founding his own elite regardless of whether they were former aristocrats, revolutionaries or of the humblest proletarian stock. In this sense, he did succeed in uniting France—to his own advantage. Of the three democratic institutions nominally governing France, under the Consulate the Tribunate could discuss proposed legislation, but not vote on it; in the Legislative Body it was voted on but not discussed; while the Senate came to have no powers at all.
UNDER THE ANCIEN RÉGIME education in France had resided largely in the hands of village priests and religious orders. Napoleon’s views on education were simply stated, essentially traditionalist, and certainly non-revolutionary. At a session of the Council of State in 1804–5, he declared:
the only good education we have met with is that of the ecclesiastical bodies . . . An Ignoranti friar knows enough to tell a working man that this life is but a passage. If you take faith away from the people you end up producing highway robbers.5
In 1795, the Directoire had introduced a new secular system on to which stem, accepting the best and rejecting the worst, Napoleon grafted, in 1802, one of the most favoured and enduring of all his reforms—the lycées, or state secondary schools. Principles were applied similar to those by which Napoleon had obtained uniformity in his artillery pieces, with education organised as for the training of an army. In all France’s secondary schools, for instance, it could be reckoned that the same Latin passage was being translated at the same hour. Pupils would be summoned to recitations by drum-roll—and remarkably, a century later the drums were still rolling in unison across the country.
The system provided a steady flow of military and administrative cadres essential to the Napoleonic war machine. At the same time, the high-grade École Polytechnique, founded by the Convention in 1794, was transformed into a military college for gunners and engineers, and state funds were allocated to the École Normale Supérieure, likewise initiated by the Convention and still today the breeding ground of a particular genre of French intellectual leadership. For all the talk about égalité, it was all extensively elitist; by the last year of Empire there were still only thirty-six lycéeswith 9000 pupils in all France, and most of them came from the middle and upper classes.
Paris’s Sorbonne University swiftly felt the new broom. Under the revolution, the great university, founded by Abelard and expanded by Richelieu, had received rough treatment from the revolutionaries on account of its clerical orientations. Closed down, the Sorbonne remained empty until Napoleon took a hand in 1806. Then he established the Académie de Paris, the Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences et de Théologie in its buildings. Revitalised, the Sorbonne thrived anew.
Typical of Napoleon’s fervent intervention in cultural matters that went pari passu with military campaigning was his “living encyclopaedia” of scientists, geographers, orientalists, chemists, zoologists and artists, 160 strong. They included Monge, the great mathematician, and Champollion, the Egyptologist, whom Napoleon had taken with him on the expedition to Egypt. Equally typical had been his tireless touring of provincial France, during the Peace of Amiens, to encourage the manufacturers of cities like Lyons, Rouen, Elbeuf and Le Havre, as had been the many occasions when he presided in person over meetings of the Conseil d’État to work out the new Civil Code.
By the end of 1804, Napoleon had concentrated every aspect of power within his own hands. Now his immediate goal could be the imperial crown, and those guarantees of succession it would carry with it.
THE CORONATION of 2 December, a day of intense cold in Paris, was an extraordinary mixture of spectacle and farce. There was a most brisk sale of rosaries in Paris—one operator made ff40,000 that January alone; while the police estimated that some 2 million persons were present in the capital for the event. Acting with a grandeur befitting the status that he had already acquired in Europe, and in consequence of the Concordat, Napoleon had managed to bully the Pope, Pius VII, to come to Paris to officiate in person and bestow the imperial crown on him at Notre-Dame. Upon his arrival Napoleon alternately cajoled and threatened the frail old man, weary from his long journey. Napoleon’s relations with the Pope would always be paradoxical; he would despoil him of Vatican treasures, intern him, and get himself excommunicated, yet remain the official master of France’s clergy.
The whole façade of Notre-Dame had been clad with a cardboard Gothic exterior for the occasion, provoking the comment from a wit that “so much work has been done that God Himself would lose his bearings!” As he ascended the steps to an immense throne, Napoleon is said to have murmured to his brother: “Joseph, if only our father could see us now!” Napoleon elected to place the imperial crown on his own head, as Josephine knelt before him in obeisance. There were moments of dissonance in this scene of high majesty. Between the altar and the throne, an altercation broke out between Josephine and her jealous Bonaparte sisters-in-law carrying her train. The mauvaises langues, too, whispered that the imperial coach was over-the-top; that in the attire he had chosen, the Emperor, his short, plump body encased in a bejewelled costume inspired by the huge frame of François I, ludicrously resembled the King of Diamonds. Returning to the Tuileries, now no longer Bonaparte but henceforth Napoleon I, the Emperor encountered an unfortunate omen. The weighty crown toppled off the coach.
In a state of post coitum triste, the new Emperor gloomed to his secretary the following day: “I have come too late; men are too enlightened; there is nothing great left to do.” This was not, however, a view generally shared by the denizens of a Paris bemused by the “bread and circuses” feat par excellence, or by European leaders alarmed by this extraordinary fantasia of power and sheer machismo. There were critics, too: in Vienna, when Beethoven learnt that Napoleon had proclaimed himself emperor, in a rage he scratched out his name from the dedication of the Eroica. Napoleon, he is said to have exclaimed, was “nothing more than an ordinary mortal”; he would, Beethoven predicted, “trample on all human rights . . . [and] become a tyrant.” It was a fair prediction.
AS NAPOLEON now had vested himself in the pomp and circumstance of power comparable only to that of the Roman Caesars, of Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman Emperors, he stood at his zenith both physically and intellectually. Still only thirty-five, “Le Petit Caporal” or “Le Tondu,” as the army called him affectionately, was beginning to show just a few signs of thickening; his cheeks were fuller, the waistband of his breeches tighter, his complexion sallower. Already he had been cuckolded by Josephine (and vice versa). Even at Malmaison he preferred to live in the martial simplicity of the camp. He was no gourmet; fifteen minutes, he always said, was enough for any meal—and about the same for making love. He condemned sexual love as “harmful to society and to the individual happiness of men,” and was known to have derided it as merely “an exchange of perspirations”; yet he was incapable himself of avoiding both its entanglements and torments of jealousy. There was hardly a woman in his entourage he did not attempt to seduce, including wives of his generals, and he could be relentless when rebuffed. He was attracted by the certainties of mathematics and sciences of the reason, while mistrusting anything to do with human passions; yet he could never quite escape from being a child of the Romantic Movement himself. He was bred on the egalitarian ideals of the revolution, but was to found a new aristocracy and a new despotism of his own. “The terror he inspires is inconceivable,” wrote his enemy Mme. de Staël. “One has the impression of an impetuous wind blowing about one’s ears when one is near that man.”
As for his relationships with his soldiers, perhaps the single most remarkable feature was the total dedication he was able to exact; the grognards would march to Moscow and back for him—and then, once again, pick up their muskets during the Hundred Days. There were manifest rewards; it being no exaggeration to say that every soldier of the Grande Armée marched with a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Only two of twenty-six Napoleonic marshals had noble antecedents (the Revolution, partly, had seen to that) and by the time of Austerlitz in 1805 half of the officer corps had risen from the ranks. The flamboyant cavalry genius, Murat, was the twelfth son of a humble Cahors innkeeper; Ney, “the bravest of the brave,” was the son of a cooper; Masséna, one of Napoleon’s finest marshals, was the orphaned son of a grocer who had gone to sea as a cabin-boy; Bernadotte rose from the ranks to become, eventually, King of Sweden; Lefebvre, whose wife was a washer-woman who proudly looked and played the part, had also risen from the ranks. They were young, insofar as Bonaparte reckoned that no commander had any gumption left by the time he was forty-five. 6 And the same considerations applied throughout his civil administration.
At the other end of the social scale, there were also great (and often scandalous) opportunities for self-enrichment. Typical of both the regime and the man, Talleyrand was permitted to make a fortune by buying up bonds, knowing of the stipulations of a treaty that these would subsequently be honoured. There was hardly ever a worse case of “insider-trading.” Meanwhile, by 1804 the bourgeoisie owned approximately twice as much land in parts of northern France as it had done in 1789.
Napoleon had thus contrived to gain successively the loyalties of most elements of French life: the Catholics, the bureaucracy, the peasantry and the bourgeoisie. With the old aristocracy his policy of reconciliation had been less successful, and it had continued to keep a mistrustful distance—at least until Napoleon’s staggering successes began to have a look of permanence; much in the same way that the German upper classes were to react to Corporal Hitler. So Napoleon created his own Empire nobility of 1000 barons, 400 counts, 32 dukes and 3 princes (not to mention a handful of kings from his own family). “The Government,” he declared in one of his earliest proclamations, “neither wants, nor recognises parties any more, seeing in France only Frenchmen.” 7
INDISPENSABLE TO NAPOLEON in all matters were two ex-priests; Joseph Fouché, thoroughly odious, unscrupulous but eminently efficient police chief, and the notorious Charles Maurice de Talleyrand de Périgord. Fouché started life in the Church; typically, although he had ruthlessly suppressed a revolt against Robespierre in Lyons, when Thermidor arrived Fouché acted with equal zeal against Robespierre and the Jacobins. Under the Directoire he had worked as a spy for Barras in Holland. Operating always like a mole, underground, Fouché was made Napoleon’s dreaded Chief of Police after Brumaire, and stayed there for the next decade. In 1810, Napoleon sacked him for holding secret peace talks with the British. After the retreat from Moscow in 1812, Napoleon, no longer trusting him to remain behind in Paris working behind his back, dispatched Fouché first to Prussia, then as ruler of Illyria. But Fouché was reinstated as police chief at the beginning of the Hundred Days. Napoleon saw him and his ubiquitous intelligence service as “living in everybody’s boots”; Fouché was essential to him in both his rise and maintenance of power.
Fouché and Talleyrand, the greatest and the wiliest diplomat and politician of them all, were forever coupled by Chateaubriand’s devastating remark, as the two entered the room, arm in arm, at the time of the Restoration: “A vision of Vice supported by Crime.” One Scottish peer thought Talleyrand was “the most disgusting individual I ever saw. His complexion is that of a corpse considerably advanced in corruption.”8 When death finally overtook him, Louis-Philippe’s reaction to the news was: “But there is no judging from appearances with Talleyrand!”
Talleyrand had escaped the Terror by fleeing to America as a royalist exile. There, working in a Philadelphia bookshop, his patron, Saint-Méry, as a sideline to books had introduced contraceptives to the grateful Americans. In his two years in America, Talleyrand took on board the useful lesson that the young United States remained at heart still more English than not; therefore, in the event of renewed war with England, France would have to lean over backwards to prevent America from falling into the enemy camp.
It was against the background of such sensible advice that Bonaparte was persuaded to transact the Louisiana Purchase, thereby presenting Washington with the best bargain—at $15 million—in US history and roughly doubling the size of the nation. Talleyrand was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs by the Directoire on his return from America in 1797, aged forty-three. In the well-chosen words of his biographer, Duff Cooper, the difference between Talleyrand and Fouché was that for the former “politics meant the settlement of dynastic or international problems discussed in a ball-room or across the dinner-table; for Fouché the same word meant street-corner assassination, planned by masked conspirators in dark cellars.” 9
FOR ALL NAPOLEON’S ACCRETION of power by 1805, alas for imperial grand design in the words of Winston Churchill “the tourist season was short.” The Peace of Amiens was to turn out to be little more than a brief unnatural truce which both sides sought to vitiate, while laying the blame on the other. Soon France and England were at war again. Already in the year preceding his coronation, Napoleon had been massing barges on the Channel coast with the intention of invading that implacable, relentless enemy—Pitt the Younger’s England. Admiral Villeneuve and the French Navy were sent doubling off to the West Indies in an attempt to lure the Royal Navy away from the Channel. However, beaten to the trick by a vigilant Nelson, Villeneuve let Napoleon down. So, at the end of August 1805, he switched plans with precipitate speed, left the Camp of Boulogne, and marched eastwards.
There the Austrians and Russians, backed by a hesitant Prussia, were combining forces to attack; but with incredible speed Napoleon struck out across Europe to forestall them. At every turn he outwitted and out-fought the dazed Allies with their cumbersome armies. Morale in the Grande Armée was never higher: but the risks for it, heavily outnumbered and far from its bases, were enormous. First he defeated the Austrians at Ulm; at Austerlitz on 2 December, Napoleon, however, carried off his finest victory, one of the greatest in the history of warfare. From there he would head north, still further into the dangerous depths of Europe, to crush the recalcitrant Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt the following year.
But, as with most dictators, these triumphs would only demand the next; as Wellington once remarked of him, Napoleon was like a cannon-ball—he had to keep in motion, as the moment he ceased it was all over. The quest for la gloire led him into Poland, in pursuit of the not-quite-defeated Russians, masters in the art of fighting withdrawals—and into the arms of Marie Walewska in Warsaw. The campaigns of 1805–7, Napoleon’s most triumphant, ended with the bloody battles of Eylau and Friedland in distant East Prussia. Had he but realised it, those two battles were harbingers of the future; the “glory days” were over.
What looked like a decisive, definitive conclusion came with the Peace of Tilsit, signed on the raft midstream on the River Niemen, the very frontier of Russia, between Napoleon and all the rulers of continental Europe, whose armies he had defeated one after the other. It was indeed a historic, head-turning moment. Yet one nation was absent, and uncowed—England. The month before Napoleon had trounced his land-borne enemies at Austerlitz, so unseen far to his rear Nelson and his “distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked”10 were winning at Trafalgar the sea battle that eventually would lead to the destruction of all Napoleon’s imperial hopes.
DOMESTICALLY, THE DISASTER at Trafalgar was obscured by the sequences of news from eastern Europe. In fact, the victories of the Grande Armée had come only just in time to halt, and reverse, a major disaster at home.
The French economic and financial system had still not recovered from the Revolution. The wheels of commerce turned but they were still shaky. Under the Directoire, taxes had been restructured and—for almost the first time—actually collected with remarkable efficiency. The Banque de France was established in 1800, and granted total control over the national debt and the issue of paper money. Industrial prosperity was stimulated by ubiquitous government intervention, and various innovations of social welfare were encouraged, though along largely paternalistic lines. Nevertheless, trade unions were ruthlessly stamped on as “Jacobin” institutions, or as diseases exported by the insidious British. Unemployment was kept at a low level, but labour was hard and the hours long. In summer, builders worked from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m.; the life expectancy of bakers was under fifty, and until 1813 children under ten were still employed in the mines. From 1803 onwards every working man had to carry a registration book stamped by his employer, without which he was treated as a vagabond. When it came to litigation it was always the employer’s word that was accepted. In rural France, the average peasant was not much affected by either the Consulate or the Empire. The great roads built by Napoleon radiated out towards frontiers with distinct military purposes, and did little to bring the countryside into contact with the modern world.
At least, both peasant and urban working classes seem to have been better fed than they were before 1789, partly thanks to strict government controls placed on corn exports and price levels. Then, in 1805, the French economy plummeted. A poor harvest made bread prices soar, the budget was in deficit and huge manufacturing stocks piled up. There was serious unemployment, which recruitment for the Grande Armée only partially sopped up. That autumn, just as Napoleon stood on the threshold of his greatest military successes, Paris was rocked by the collapse of the Banque Récamier. The bank suspended withdrawals, resulting in a sequence of bankruptcies and industries brought to a standstill.
The shock at the Banque Récamier failure was immense; the bank was a rocklike institution, the elderly Jacques Récamier a tower of respectability. Indeed, it was almost certainly only by the success of Napoleon’s triumphs on distant battlefields that Paris escaped serious disorders. After Austerlitz, miraculously the economy appeared to recover with government bonds rising dizzily from 45 to 66 per cent. The winter of 1806–7 continued with difficulty and hardship as the English naval blockade hit not only Paris but cities as far away as Lyons. Then, on 7 July 1807, cannon thundering out from the Invalides announced the triumphal peace that Napoleon had imposed at Tilsit. Once again the stock exchange rose dramatically—but artificially.
Emulating Louis XIV after the Peace of Nijmegen in 1678, the Emperor bestowed upon himself the title “le Grand” following Tilsit. Indeed, he gazed down on an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Niemen, ruled over either by puppet sovereigns or by members of his own clan—an empire greater than anything achieved by Louis XIV, greater (at least, in appearance) even than the world of Charlemagne. Ruling a France intoxicated with glory, after Tilsit the Emperor was no longer in a mood to listen to anybody. He closed down the Tribunate. Talleyrand resigned, to offer his services, questionably, to Napoleon’s enemy, the Tsar. He was replaced by the docile Minister of the Interior, Champagny. Thus Napoleon became surrounded by sycophants, a sure sign of the corruption of power.
The Peace of Tilsit seemed to give him endless options, but would the peace last, any more than the Peace of Amiens had? Seldom had peace terms been harsher; the defeated nations would not accept them for ever. Older Frenchmen wondered where it would all end. Talleyrand’s intuition dictated that general war was going to begin again, and he wished no part in it; sure enough, within barely a year, Napoleon had got himself involved in Iberia, where eventually the “Spanish Ulcer” would prove his undoing.
MEANWHILE, from his far-flung army HQs in eastern Europe, Napoleon had never ceased to bombard the administration in Paris with plans for his civil innovations, managing amazingly to run his empire of 70 million people hands-on, involving himself in almost every fact of life. He had sent off no fewer than 300 bullying, chivvying and commanding letters in the spring of 1807 alone. It was as a dictator that France now began to see him, and no one could say “no” to his plethora of edicts. Censorship was introduced. In Paris, the number of newspapers was reduced from over seventy to thirteen, and the number of theatres alike shrank to eight. The once lively press became uninformative and unchallenging. From the programmes of Talma’s Comédie-Française to the operation of the fountains of Paris, from the rebuilding of the city to the reorganisation of the German states, there was absolutely no aspect of life in which Napoleon would not intervene— sometimes with brilliant, but often with disastrous results. From Tilsit, after settling the destiny of Europe, he sent a warning note to Champagny, then his Minister of the Interior, “ Monsieur le Ministre, peace has been made with the foreigners; now I am going to make war on your offices.” He was swift to carry out his threat, sweeping away the inefficient city administration of Paris that he had inherited from the Directoire, and presiding over the new administrative bodies himself.
Under equally sweeping plans for making Paris “the most beautiful city that could ever exist,” Napoleon cleared away the old medieval huddle of buildings around the Louvre to create the majestic Rue de Rivoli (named, of course, after a famous victory). The Louvre he turned into the Musée Napoléon, under Vivant Denon, the genius who had accompanied him to Egypt. Together they filled it with artefacts looted from Italy and other conquered territories. To mark his victories he built the Vendôme Column, out of melted down Austrian cannon captured at Austerlitz, and the Carrousel Arch topped with the magnificent horses plundered from Venice. He reburied the grateful dead of Paris out at leafy Père Lachaise Cemetery; but, among numerous projects he was unable to complete was the great Arc de Triomphe. Perhaps it was fortunate for Paris that Wellington cut Napoleon short before he could achieve some of his more dramatic ambitions: 11 on St. Helena, he declared that “If only the Heavens had granted me another twenty years and some leisure, you would have looked in vain for the Old Paris; you would not have been able to see the slightest trace of it.”12
ONE OF THE PERENNIAL DISCUSSIONS of the novels of Jane Austen is how she could have lived through all the Napoleonic era, have written so much, but mentioned virtually nothing about the brutal war going on all round. It becomes perhaps somewhat less remarkable when one considers equally how little life in France and particularly the bourgeois enclaves were affected by the war—until the Allies arrived on the doorstep in 1814. What is far more significant is how few writers of distinction were thrown up in France at all during the periods of the revolution, the Consulate and the Empire. Yet this was a time when, across the Channel, England was enjoying one of its greatest ages of literature, dominated not only by Jane Austen but also by the poetic forces of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge. It was also a time when Schiller, Goethe and Kleist produced their greatest works in Germany. Yet, not a single French play of any value dates from the Napoleonic period. For true poetic talent comparable to the great contemporary Romantics of England, one has to reach out for a master of prose, Chateaubriand. Together with Chateaubriand, the other founder of the French Romantic tradition, Germaine de Staël, spent most of her working life under the Empire abroad in exile. Disenchanted, she soon found that her France had become “a garrison where military discipline and boredom rule.” She was forced into exile in Switzerland in 1803, again in 1806, and—definitively—after the seizure of her highly critical De l’Allemagne, in 1810. With some courage, she would repeatedly endeavour to return, but would repeatedly be expelled. It was also this atmosphere and its essential lack of liberties which, once their gaze had penetrated the shiny surface of Napoleonic France, gradually disenchanted the liberal visitors from England during the Peace of Amiens, making them think themselves perhaps better off after all in their own backward but libertarian society.
Suspicious as he was of any kind of intellectual and artistic ferment, if Napoleon’s relations with great literary figures of the time like Mme. de Staël and Chateaubriand were strained, his dealings with the scientific intelligentsia were much more serene—and deserving of praise. One of his ministers of the interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, was also a scientist, authorised by Napoleon to endeavour to synthesise politics with industry. Among scientists who benefited under the Empire were Louis XVI’s mathematician and astronomer, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who in his old age was brought back from Berlin, given an important position in the Académie des Sciences and made senator and Count of the Empire, and Claude-Louis Berthollet, discoverer of the use of chlorine for bleaching, also one of the founders of the Polytechnique. Napoleon helped him to set up a laboratory in Arceuil as an important semi-official centre of scientific research. When circumstances of war made it possible, British scientists like Humphry Davy and John Dalton from the Royal Society derived considerable benefit from the work of their counterparts in France. Robert Fulton, too, the brilliant American inventor of the first submarine prototype, was encouraged by Napoleon. Altogether, under the Empire science in all its ramifications was accorded the highest privileges and priorities, and made enormous strides.
Yet, for all these advances in science and technology—where Napoleon’s interests clearly lay—in the world of the imaginative arts imperial France remains something of a cultural desert. Napoleon seemed unable to inspire in that miraculous manner in which he could repeatedly call forth remarkable military deeds, or even great administrative achievements. Great music of the epoch was left to foreigners abroad, like Ludwig van Beethoven. In furniture design, the decorative arts did flourish under the Empire, but there was little painting of distinction. The elegance of the eighteenth century, the exquisite draftsmanship of Watteau, Fragonard, Greuze and Hubert Robert, all designed to lift the spirits—where had that all gone? France could mourn its passing, but there would be little to celebrate until the advent of Delacroix and Géricault with the Restoration. Most of the best French talent, like Ingres—disappointed by cool Parisian reactions to his work—drained off to Italy. Thus the field was largely left open to Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), the historical painter turned Romantic, court painter to Louis XVI, who disowned the court to become the “Raphael of the sans-culottes.” Backed by the Emperor, David came to exercise a semi-dictatorship over contemporary French art. Under David—shamelessly ambitious, and greedy—it became “imperial, pompous and allegorical.” There was his pupil and protégé, François Gérard, the portraitist commissioned by Bonaparte to decorate Malmaison—and to paint the famous battle triumph of Austerlitz; there was Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, another pupil of David, and equally employed in the glorification of the regime with his massive canvas of Eylau;52 and there was Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, famed for his commissioned portraits of Napoleon and Josephine. But few others.
It was following the Austerlitz campaign that massive paintings of Napoleonic victories began to be commissioned. Artists were paid handsomely: for nine big paintings, David received ff12,000 each; and ff6000 for seven smaller ones. His huge painting of The Sabines had already brought in ff72,000, which enabled him to buy a farm in Brie; he then tried to double his profit by reselling the same painting to the Emperor for a further ff72,000. Napoleon, however, angrily riposted with a brusque “Adjourned.” Under pressure from Denon, Napoleon haggled over the payment of the famous coronation picture—from ff100,000 down to ff30,000; so, in protest, David painted himself into the scene. Eventually by his importuning, David killed the goose that laid the golden egg, finding himself replaced as court portraitist by the famous Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Welcomed fulsomely by Napoleon— “Here is the capital of the arts; you must stay here”—Canova nevertheless sought every possible excuse to return to Rome.
DESPITE THE ALARM which Napoleon’s dynamism, and the legacy that he had inherited, continued to arouse among his neighbours, Napoleon’s positive cultural impact was probably greater abroad than at home. The Great Revolution had shaken the whole European dynastic system so fundamentally that beyond France’s frontiers there was also barely a nation whose institutions had not been affected. In Poland in 1794, Kościuszko, sparked by what he had experienced in America and observed in France, had launched an abortive insurrection against the Russian oppressor. In Prussia, where intellectuals like Kant and Hegel, Goethe and Schiller were sharply divided by the revolution, Silesian peasants in 1792 had refused to pay their tithes to their Junker landlords; in Piedmont, Italian peasants had rioted for land reform. In England, radical agitation had spread through liberal “Corresponding Societies” —although perhaps a more influential phenomenon was the religious revival (especially within the Nonconformist Churches) provoked by outrage at the excesses of French atheism.
To many thinkers and writers in foreign lands at the time, Napoleon—at least initially, and perhaps superficially—appeared as a hero of the Romantic Movement. At home in France, the movement would fail to bloom until late in the nineteenth century. Even in hostile England, where he found sympathy among liberal Whigs, to whom the ideals of the revolution of 1789 appealed, there were chords to be struck among the Romantics. Writing far from the realities of war, attitudes towards Napoleon among British litteratitended to be highly personalised, and depictions of him often idealised. Some of the poets were also very young; Keats was not born till the year Napoleon fired off his “whiff of grapeshot”; Shelley, the year the monarchy fell; while Byron was still at Harrow (where he proudly displayed a bust of Napoleon in his room) when the Grande Armée was encamped at Boulogne. Only Wordsworth (b. 1770) and Coleridge (b. 1772) were relatively more mature.
In the early days, at least, Napoleon appealed as embracing the “human rights” expectations of the revolution—or as an embodiment of the hero “in an age in which the artist was increasingly seen as heroic,” observes Simon Bainbridge in his excellent book,Napoleon and English Romanticism.Keats would damn Napoleon for having done “more harm to the Life of Liberty than anyone else could have done”; yet was not beyond adopting him as a symbol. Shelley would rate him as a hero, then as “Tyrant of the World” (while still at school), and finally damn him for the war in Spain, “where ruin ploughs her gory way.” With high subjectivity, Byron tended to swing with every prevailing wind, seeing in Napoleon something of his own self-willed, isolated heroes (at least until he invaded Spain); while Wordsworth became increasingly vehement in his detestation of Napoleon as the wars against him progressed— shocked, particularly, by Napoleon’s cruelty to the simple country-dwellers of the countries he invaded. In 1804, he was writing how the French had
. . . become oppressors in their turn,
Frenchmen had changed a war of self defence
For one of conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, it was in the lands invaded by Napoleon that his star burned brightest. Saxony’s Goethe, as late as 1811, was writing:
What centuries have dimly meditated
His mind surveys in brightest clarity;
All that is petty has evaporated,
Here nothing is of weight save earth and sea.
Nowhere was Napoleon’s influence stronger than among the litterati of invaded Germany. Hegel was said to have stood with bareheaded reverence in the street, even when the French soldiery stole his possessions; to him Napoleon represented the “Embodiment of the Absolute Ideal.”
IN THE PROVINCES of France, Napoleonic life was more prosaic. In a nation of 33 million no city apart from Paris and Lyons had a population of more than 100,000. Heavily centralised under the Roi Soleil and before, under Napoleon France came to assume an even more lopsided aspect. Edicts and propaganda rallied the nation yet, even two generations after Napoleon, for half of its citizens French would remain a foreign language. Travel and communication were still so laborious that communities were kept apart, their inhabitants forced to live an isolated life, as if in a chemical retort. An existence of unrelieved tedium as suffered by Mme. Bovary in her mid-century Normandy village was probably even more the norm at the time of Napoleon several decades earlier. But the plight of the ruined nobles, who had survived the revolution living in the countryside, making the best of a dull existence in the small plot of land still remaining to them, was particularly dreary. Hospitality was perhaps their one and only luxury; there would be no butler, but still a cook. How much worse was it for those lower down the social scale?
Denizens of Paris were contemptuous of what they found in the provinces; to Stendhal, Dijon and Rouen was each one “an execrable hole, inferior even to Grenoble”—though he confessed a certain indulgence for Marseilles where he had had a few jolly love affairs. After attending a ball in Moulins in 1805, Julie Talma complained: “I don’t think you would find such a senseless canaille [rabble] anywhere but here.” Nevertheless, she noted how the theatre was an important focal point; by 1813 the provinces could boast no fewer than 128 regular theatres—despite the high fees demanded by visiting stars from Paris.
When time, and campaigns, permitted Napoleon would make frequent visits to the provinces, and indeed a new era of closer oversight and involvement had begun with the nomination of prefects by the Consulate, instead of as perks doled out among local grandees. As in Paris, there was substantial reconstruction of old cities such as Lyons and Cherbourg—canals were dug, marshes drained and bridges thrown over rivers. The peasant population and the middle classes felt the benefit of all this, but war and the collapse of the Empire was to bring a premature end to all such new development.
AT ERFURT IN 1808, Napoleon had been rather more successful in charming Goethe than Tsar Alexander II, still aggrieved by the defeats of the preceding years, and humiliated by Tilsit. For Napoleon things had begun to go sour since Tilsit the previous year, as the British naval blockade bit ever harder at home, with sugar (from the cut-off West Indies) becoming almost a luxury of the past. In his attempt to break the stranglehold, Napoleon allowed himself to become embroiled in his greatest strategic folly to date. He would chase Sir John Moore all the way across Spain, killing him and expelling his “contemptible little army” from Corunna, and all but expel Wellington from the Iberian Peninsula.53 He made his inept brother King of Spain, his brother-in-law Murat King of Naples, and so on; the conquest of Europe might seem complete, yet on her thrones were only relatives, cronies or time-servers.
Like Hitler in the mountains of Yugoslavia in the Second World War, in Spain Napoleon would be defeated by guerrilla warfare and the same brutal living-off-the-country which he himself had invented. Eventually the “Spanish Ulcer” cost him a quarter of a million men, soldiers the Grande Armée could well have used in Russia in 1812. Provoked by this disarray, Austria rose up to strike again in 1809; Napoleon won once more, but Wagram was his last victory—and a costly one at that. At the same time as he was endeavouring to conquer all Europe, he was arousing just that popular nationalism which had made the revolutionary France he himself had inherited so formidable in the first place.
NAPOLEON HAD RETURNED to Paris from Spain in January 1809 to find morale there disquietingly low. The stock exchange was nose-diving, once more. Ever desperate to ensure the permanence of his dynasty, Napoleon had decided to divorce Josephine, since she had proved unable to present him with an heir. Now the superstitious groaned; even the Emperor had admitted that the popular Empress was his guiding “star.” To replace her, Napoleon contracted a marriage with the daughter of his recently defeated enemy, the Emperor of Austria, the nubile nineteen-year-old Archduchess Marie-Louise. Riding out to meet her cortège at Compiègne, the impatient Emperor, making sure of his deal in the best Mediterranean tradition, bedded her then and there, without waiting for the elaborate state wedding that was to follow. The following year an imperial heir was indeed produced: Napoleon II, the unhappy and short-lived “l’Aiglon.” His father named him King of Rome, possibly in cynical remembrance of the defunct Holy Roman Empire that he had liquidated after Austerlitz. Yet France would never bestow upon his mother, the new empress, an Austrian princess, anything like the affection it had felt for the beautiful and elegant Josephine. Too many recalled the hated autrichienne, Marie-Antoinette.
Meanwhile, only a few years after the crisis precipitated by the Banque Récamier collapse, France was hit by another. The causes lay in the chaotic legacy of the Revolution, the flaws within the imperial system itself, but, most immediately, in the ever tightening grip of the British trade embargo and the impact it had on European commerce as a whole. England, too, was feeling the pinch by 1808; business prospects were gloomy, with mounds of unsold manufacturing goods piling up at the docks. Her economy, however, was rich enough and sound enough to take the strain; France’s was not. Within days of rejoicing at the birth of his heir, on 24 March 1811 Napoleon was presented with some unpleasant home truths. Despite constantly raising the level of taxation, the national deficit was ff50 million. He was forced to pass an Imperial Decree cancelling the arrears of pay owed to the soldiers who had died for him, and thereby—in effect—cheating even the dead. There were intermediaries selling goods they never possessed, without paying, and without delivering. Speculation was rife in illegal goods run through the blockade. Even some of the generals were involved; Dupont, for instance, was supposed to have lost ff800,000 in 1810, in the collapse of a business. In the spring of 1811, a major consignment of contraband muslins and other fabrics were seized in the Rue Le Peletier, in the elegant centre of Paris.
IN JUNE 1812, driven over the brink by the double-dealing of his ally, Tsar Alexander, with the English arch-enemy, Napoleon recrossed the Niemen to invade Russia and teach the Tsar a lesson. It was within twenty-four hours of the date that would be chosen by Hitler, 22 June 1941—with equally disastrous consequences.
With his eyes solely on Russia, Napoleon failed to turn to his advantage that most foolish of all England’s wars, the War of 1812 against the USA. At home, to the renewed financial crisis was added the Disette, or famine, of 1811–12. Initially the harvest of 1811 promised to be excellent; then repeated thunderstorms caused damage. By the beginning of 1812 the price of flour and bread was beginning to spiral. With the bakers of Rouen charging four times the price of 1803, there were riots in the provinces—with less trouble in the cities only because of the black market and Fouché’s ubiquitous secret police. On 3 May, Napoleon held an emergency meeting at Saint-Cloud—right on the eve of his departure for Russia. Reserves of grain had all but run out. In January 1813, the grain “reserve” made its last distribution of flour to the bakers—ending a duration of more than fourteen months; then a very abundant harvest that summer finally brought relief. If it shook the faith of France that the modern nation should face starvation while its great leader was away campaigning, that faith was tested further by the sombre news of defeat coming from Germany.
TO TALLEYRAND, out of office and under a cloud, news of Napoleon’s defeat at Borodino, on the way to Moscow, in September 1812 marked “the beginning of the end,” and he felt “the end itself could not be far distant.” Though it had been swiftly crushed by Savary’s secret police, while Napoleon was away in Moscow there had been a warning in the shape of an abortive rising by one of his disaffected generals. By the spring of 1813 the vengeful Russians, pursuing Napoleon, had entered Prussian territory, threatening the German states still allied to him. Marie Walewska’s Poland disappeared once again into the Tsarist maw, while the defeated Germans saw their opportunity to launch into a war of liberation, known as the Battle of the Nations. Napoleon had brought it on himself, by sweeping away—in 1806—the old political structure of the German states, and—in 1807—by his foolishly harsh treatment of proud Prussia. It had left her territorially truncated, and made her the leader in the eventual uprising against him. Added to this was the Grande Armée’s brutal policy of living off the land (copied from the revolutionary levée en masse, and perfected by Napoleon) in the German territories they marched through, whether allies or conquered. This heedless pillaging would feed a German nationalism that would return to plague future generations of French, and Europeans.
Despite the disaster of 1812 in Russia, Napoleon was able once more to raise a new army 700,000 strong. But, in the summer of 1813, for the first time he found himself having to confront simultaneously the armies of Russia, Austria and Prussia. In the south-west there was Wellington, grinding forward relentlessly towards the Pyrenees. In October, Napoleon suffered a decisive defeat at Leipzig, the bloodiest battle of them all, where a total of nearly 100,000 men fell. The triumphant Allies closed in remorselessly on France itself—for the first time since 1793. The following spring Napoleon fought one of his most brilliant campaigns, rallying his tattered forces with the rousing cry of “La patrie en danger!” But by March he was cornered in Paris, and sought refuge at Fontainebleau. Empress Marie-Louise abandoned him, returning home to Vienna with the crown diamonds, worth some 18 million francs—something in return for all the Habsburgs had suffered. As she took Napoleon’s son with her too, the little King of Rome, heir to it all and for whom so much had been sacrificed, screamed: “I don’t want to go away!” Behind them Paris was to experience all the horrors of occupation.
RUSSIAN TROOPS entered through the east of the city, on their third assault carrying the fortified redoubt which brave students of the Polytechnique had run up among the tombs of Père Lachaise. On 30 March the city came under the first cannon-fire: “Only the roar of the cannon and the sight of peasants who had fled to the suburbs with their families, belongings and domestic animals, overcame the general disbelief,”13 wrote one observer, incredulous that things should have come to this, that la ville lumière could actually be subjected to the fate Napoleon had meted out to other European capitals. Wounded men dragged themselves towards hospitals, unaided by the Parisian populace. Lunatics were driven out of asylums by the army to make way for the hordes of wounded. Refugees from the country hurried in pell mell with their cows, their sheep and their scanty baggage, cursing the severity of Napoleon’s conscription. Close on their heels came the Prussian cavalry and Russian infantry—“like a merciless dark tide of green uniforms and bright plumes,” on a day of superb weather. They were said to know only two words of French, “Brûler Paris.” Yet somehow defeat went hand in hand with a sense of deliverance for the Parisians. In a sudden change of mood, cries were heard of “À bas le Corse . . . Vive notre libèrateur.” Orders by Napoleon to blow up the main Paris powder store were fortunately disobeyed.
Cossacks clattered down the Champs-Élysées, and then encamped there—the first time since the Hundred Years’ War that an invading foreign army had entered the proud city. “Mon Dieu! Not Cossacks in the Rue Racine!” exclaimed Mme. de Staël from the safety of her Swiss retreat at Coppet. Their behaviour was far from immaculate—but, after what Moscow had suffered, it was surprising that it was not far worse.
On 6 April Napoleon abdicated, having ill-advisedly refused Allied terms which might have allowed France to retain the frontiers of 1793. On the 28th he was dispatched aboard HMS Undaunted for Elba, the Allies thereby (in the words of André Maurois) “bestowing on Caesar the kingdom of Sancho Panza.” Europe breathed a sigh of relief, though it was a temporary exile that would last less than a year. Many Parisians turned out to welcome the return of an obese Louis XVIII, his court transported in imperial carriages hastily painted over with Bourbon colours, passing corpses of soldiers being buried in indecent haste. A fortnight after Empress Marie-Louise’s precipitate departure, the Comte d’Artois, future Charles X, was sleeping in the Tuileries. Parisiennes were reported to be showing “a very agreeable and polite restraint” towards the Allied troops. The Tsar arrived, acclaimed at the opera—when accompanied by King Louis and the indestructible Talleyrand—by cheers of “Vive Alexandre!” that resounded for over half an hour. Austria’s Prince Metternich, arriving to make a peace treaty, was greeted with similar enthusiasm; and, once again, curious English tourists flooded into Paris. Yet, within a matter of months Paris had become so unsafe that even the Tuileries were kept lit up all night, the main problem being the swarms of unemployed and penniless veterans of the Grande Armée dumped by the new regime.
Disillusion with the new/old regime followed with astonishing rapidity; vicious caricatures of Louis’ obesity appeared as he proved Talleyrand’s adage about the Bourbons having “learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing.” The economy sagged, and inflation took over. Some 12,000 ex-officers on half-pay took to meeting in cafés, to lament the “good old days” of the Empire and to conspire for the Emperor’s return. Fretting on his tiny prison “empire” of Elba, Napoleon learned that Louis was refusing to pay his pension, and that there was talk about transferring him to a more remote island. One day his unfortunate “guardian” on Elba, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, was visiting his mistress in Florence, and Napoleon slipped away aboard a French brig, L’Inconstant. On 1 March, accompanied by a thousand men, he landed in the Golfe Juan near Cannes, and began marching swiftly upon Paris, collecting supporters as he went in the most remarkable fashion. In Paris a shaky King Louis told an aide: “It is revolution once more” and prepared one more hasty getaway.
THERE NOW BEGAN the miraculous Hundred Days, “the episode in his adventurer’s life which came nearest to pure adventure story,” in the words of Napoleon’s critical contemporary biographer, Correlli Barnett. A brief daily report on his progress was provided by the government newspaper, Le Moniteur Universel, calling initially on Frenchmen of goodwill to resist, with the words: “The ogre has left his den.” Swiftly, as Napoleon moved upwards from Grenoble, gathering generals and loyal grognards as he went: “The Emperor has arrived at Fontainebleau.” And, finally, “His Imperial and Royal Majesty yesterday made his entry into his Tuileries Palace amid his faithful subjects.”
When the “ogre” reached Paris, against all calculations, there took place yet another astonishing volte-face which amazed even Napoleon himself. “They let me come back just as easily as they let the others go!” he exclaimed. In the Tuileries Palace, seamstresses who had been busy unpicking the Napoleonic bees from the carpets, and replacing them with hastily sewn fleurs-de-lys, started putting them back as the portly King left his kingdom for the second time in a year.
AS THE ALLIES BEGAN TO MASS in Belgium, at remarkable speed and with a view to marching once again on Paris, Napoleon’s former staff (except for the several generals who, wanting no more Napoleonic adventures, had defected) “calmly and quietly” resumed their duties. It was as if he had returned from “only a short journey,” commented Alexandre Laborde, then serving on the Paris National Guard. On a forebodingly cold day in May, Napoleon reviewed his swiftly reconstituted new armies on the Champs de Mars. It must have seemed, to Parisians, like a long hundred days as Napoleon then set off to meet his fate at Waterloo.
As the Iron Duke famously admitted, “it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw”—a miracle that, with all the circumstances against him and so short a time to whip together another army, Napoleon did as well as he did on the field of Mont Saint-Jean. Some of his best marshals, such as Berthier, Marmont, Oudinot, Davout and Murat, were no longer at hand. Instead there was the brave but unreliable Ney, and the freshly promoted Grouchy. The deluging rain made it hard for Napoleon to wheel his cannon into position, and sodden ground swallowed up their deadly ricochet effect. Nevertheless, on 16 June he struck a devastating blow at the main body of Blücher’s army at Ligny, which recoiled backwards, only 25 miles south of Brussels. He exchanged hard knocks with Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras, the first time the two had actually fought each other. Wellington withdrew, while Napoleon made the mistake of giving him a respite in which to prepare a defensive position on the reverse slopes of Mont Saint-Jean. The decisive day of the 18th was almost certainly lost to Napoleon by Blücher’s courageous decision to obey his ally’s appeal—to reinforce Wellington at a critical moment instead of falling away from him. Inspecting his sodden troops on the night of the 17th/18th, Napoleon declared, “We shall sleep in Brussels tonight.” But his “star” had finally deserted him. Less than twenty-four hours later, the Imperial Guard had made its last heroic charge and had broken on the “thin red line” of the British Brigade of Guards. Some 40,000 soldiers and 10,000 horses lay dead and dying on the battlefield, as Napoleon abandoned his army in the field for the third and last time, and hastened back to Paris.
In the immediate aftermath of the great battle, false rumours about victory percolated through to Paris. Then came the tattered relics of the once proud Grande Armée with their true eye-witness accounts of what had happened. The Place Vendôme was covered with wounded soldiers lying on straw. They received little care from a populace apprehensive at what was to come. France had become simply too inured to the horrors of war. Paris prepared for siege, but it was only a gesture. Then entered the conquerors, this time an enraged Blücher leaving a “desolate path” of destruction all the way from Waterloo to Paris. Determined to wipe out the dreadful slight to Prussians at Jena, he intended to destroy Napoleon’s eponymous bridge; only Wellington forestalled him by posting British sentries to guard it (British forces controlled the right bank, Prussians the left). At one moment in the occupation, Prussian cannon were actually trained on the Tuileries Palace.
On the 22nd, Napoleon bade farewell to a loyal Marie Walewska and abdicated a second time. He then headed for Rochefort, in a final delusion that his implacable enemy at Waterloo might either grant him asylum in some comfortable country house in England, or else let him follow other “asylum seekers” to the USA, to Boston or New York. But they had other plans for the man who had wrecked the peace of Europe over the past twenty years, and on 15 July 1815 he was taken aboard HMS Bellerophon for Saint Helena—“the ugliest and most dismal rock conceivable,” in the opinion of a British surgeon accompanying him.14 (Incongruously, British sailors cheered him as he boarded ship.) On the other hand, had he been a surrendering enemy in 1945, he would almost certainly have shared the fate of Ney before the firing squad. Certainly compared with the Russian rape of conquered Berlin that year, the depredations of the Allies in Paris were extremely restrained. But these were more civilised times; warfare of the nineteenth century was a gentler and more humane affair than the genocidal struggles of the twentieth.
The same might well be said of the peace that was about to be imposed on a prostrate France by the Congress of Vienna.