October 1815–May 1821
England is alone responsible for all the miseries by which Europe has . . . been assailed.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 18161
Destiny took nails, a hammer, chains,
Seized pale and alive the thief of thunder,
And gleefully nailed him to the ancient rock,
Where the vulture England tears at his heart.
VICTOR HUGO
Quel roman pourtant que ma vie!
[My life – what a story!]
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
Waterloo did not end Napoleon’s struggle against perfidious Albion. His first thought was to escape to the United States, recently at war with Britain. But the elephant surrendered to the whale: he was trapped by the Royal Navy. He declared that he would pay a great compliment to ‘the most powerful, the most constant, the most generous of my enemies’ by settling in England. He envisaged life as a country gentleman – and, no doubt, as a huge political celebrity. Although the object of popular and official detestation, ‘Buonaparte’, ‘the Corsican ogre’, was also the subject of avid curiosity, admiration and even sympathy, increased by his Hundred Days exploit. This was not confined to the Whig opposition and dissident intellectuals.2 Wellington, like many military men, was passionately interested in him (as would be Winston Churchill). His carriage, displayed in several towns, and a collection of memorabilia shown in London, attracted hundreds of thousands. When the warship carrying him reached Torbay, it was surrounded by crowds, and sympathizers tried to use habeas corpus to keep him in Britain. But the Allies were in no mood to trifle, and he was dispatched to St Helena, far in the South Atlantic – Wellington’s idea, not least because he feared the Bourbons or the Prussians were thinking of shooting him. From there it would be impossible to escape. But not impossible to be rescued. Bonapartist exiles in America wanted to set up a ‘Napoleonic Confederation’ including Mexico and south-western areas of North America. The swashbuckling British ex-Admiral Cochrane planned to snatch him from the island and make him emperor of newly independent South America. So, unlike on Elba, ‘General Bonaparte’ was not a prince, but a prisoner, reduced to gardening, dictating his memoirs, and negligently rogering the wives of his entourage. He also formed a touching friendship with the teenage Betsy Balcombe, the only English person he ever really knew.
Napoleon, and sympathizers then and since, have condemned his treatment as the monstrous persecution of a great man. It gave him the opportunity, eagerly grasped, of reinventing himself. The Corsican ogre became the European martyr: Prometheus suffering from the weather, and confined to the damp and gloomy Longwood House. The island’s governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, was cast as tormentor, and features as the villain in practically every succeeding account. He had been chosen as a man who could get on with his prisoner: a fighting soldier who spoke Corsican, having served in the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom and commanded (not very tactful, this) a Corsican unit that had fought Napoleon in Egypt. But Napoleon was not in the mood for fireside reminiscences in patois about the good old days. He and his entourage were soon at loggerheads with Lowe. Every breach of imperial etiquette or restriction on movement was denounced as vindictive humiliation, and treasured as a means of rehabilitation: ‘Every day strips me of my tyrant’s skin.’ Lowe ruefully noted that his prisoner created an imaginary Napoleon, an imaginary Europe, and even an imaginary St Helena.
Suffering was not enough. On St Helena, as J. Christopher Herold nicely puts it, the flesh was made word.3 Napoleon’s flood of rumination was transcribed by his entourage for profitable publication after his death in 1821. The first book to appear, Las Cases’sMémorial de Sainte-Hélène (1823), was the greatest European bestseller of its time. This and later publications, including a Last Testament, portrayed Napoleon as a peace-loving philanthropist who had served France and its people, defended the revolution, aimed to liberate all nations, and planned a glorious future. ‘I wished to found a European system, a European code of laws, a European judiciary . . . There would be but one people in Europe.’ His idealism had been frustrated above all by the insatiable hatred and jealousy of Britain – a theme passionately debated ever since. Yet the future was his: ‘Outside the ideas and principles . . . which I made triumph I see nothing but slavery and confusion for France and Europe alike.’ Even ‘you British’ would ‘weep for your victory at Waterloo’.4
St Helena made Napoleon the most important political propagandist in modern French history. It confirmed the admiration of many of the elite for the ‘successor of Caesar and Alexander’, who also personified the Romantic fantasy of the restless, doomed hero. Victor Hugo, after a period of royalism, surrendered to hero-worship and fictionalized his conversion in Marius, of Les Misérables. The patriotic liberal Adolphe Thiers wrote a monumental History of the Consulate and Empire (1845–62), which fortified the Napoleonic version not by unalloyed praise, but by measured criticism outweighed by admiration: ‘he lost our greatness, but left us glory, which is moral greatness, and in time restores material greatness’.5 The St Helena message fed a spontaneous grass-roots mythology, strongest in France but not confined to it, spread by former soldiers and officials nostalgic for the glory days, and propagated by astute populists such as the songwriter Béranger:
The hero went down in defeat
And he whom a Pope had crowned
Died far on a desert isle.
For long none thought it true;
They said: he will return.
By sea he is coming again.
The foreigner he’ll bring low.
But we found it was not so,
How bitter was my pain.
For decades, all over Europe, political dissidence had a Bonapartist tinge. In Britain, critics of the post-war order, most famously Byron, Shelley and Hazlitt, indulged in hero-worship of Napoleon, the genius who had defied the world. Byron bought his carriage and followed his footsteps round Europe. Young Benjamin Disraeli wrote a verse drama about him. Reports of his escape, sightings, stories that he was returning to liberate France with armies of Americans or Turks, and stubborn refusal to believe in his death were common as late as 1848, even after his body was returned by the British in 1840 and buried with pomp in the Invalides. This ‘cult of Napoleon’ brought his nephew to power in 1848 as president and then as Emperor Napoleon III. He bought Longwood House in 1858 and it is still conserved as a distant shrine by the French state. Hardy pilgrims take away a handful of soil, some spring water, and a leaf from the willow that shaded the emperor’s original grave.
Napoleon remains an ambivalent presence in French political culture. After de Gaulle he is France’s favourite hero.6 The modern French state is largely his design. Yet no Paris street bears the imperial name. (The British have one in St Helena.) The very centrality and attractiveness of the Napoleonic legacy causes intellectual embarrassment, and a tendency to avoid the subject.7 Several recent writers, however, have turned again to Napoleon. In 2002 France’s flamboyant foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin (subsequently prime minister), published a fervently nationalistic history of the Hundred Days, lauding Napoleon as a genius like Caesar or Alexander, raised above banal morality by ‘exaltation’, ‘imagination’, and ‘passion’. Although
J.M.W. Turner ‘The Exile and the Rock Limpet’: the sunset of power. But Napoleon managed to turn his exile into an effective propaganda weapon.
Waterloo sealed the historic victory of ‘England over France’, in defeat France discovered ‘another nobility’. For Villepin, the sacrifice of the Garde at Waterloo inspired ‘the spirit of resistance’ incarnated later in another genius, de Gaulle. This still nourishes ‘the French dream . . . the idea we have of ourselves’: ‘an authoritative State, contempt for parties and compromise, a shared taste for action, obsession with . . . the grandeur of France . . . refusal to bow to the inevitable, and dignity in defeat’.8