by Simon Winder
Foreign observers all looked on in incredulity as the French generalissimo, Achille Bazaine, dithered and havered, seemingly unable to function under the sheer weight of Napoleon’s ghost on his back, ludicrously missed the open goal of the Battle of Mars-la-Tour and then, with his 180,000 troops, retreating into the Metz fortress complexes and starving. The besieging Prussians refused to let out deserters, pushing them back in so that they could do the useful work of helping to chew through the last foodstocks. What had been a major army which could have retreated to the French interior, grossly overstretching Prussian forces and perhaps doing a Valmy, therefore stayed stuck on the border, rotting to pieces and eventually surrendering in the most humiliating moment in nineteenth-century French history. Throughout the major fighting, the Prussians would only ever pause because they assumed they were being led into a cunning trap, which in each case turned out to be simply a piece of rank incompetence. The Prussians won partly by default and partly because of their amazing ability to keep marching over huge distances, hypnotizing and baffling French troops who could not believe where the enemy had already reached – the wonderful term Kilometerschweine (kilometre pigs) sums up this achievement. This great marching legend would, however, effectively ruin the German army in 1914.
The main surviving French army was trapped against the neutral Belgian border at Sedan and unable to manoeuvre. It was surrounded and destroyed, with 120,000 troops killed, wounded or made prisoner. After this the fighting became bitter but minor. One crucial French hot-air balloon from Paris with instructions for a fresh military gathering in Tours was unfortunately blown to Norway. One last reasonable size force, led by General Charles-Denis Bourbaki, found itself in winter, running out of supplies. Bourbaki tried and failed to shoot himself and then led some 87,000 troops across the Swiss border where, as per neutral convention, the Swiss disarmed and accommodated them in what was itself an extraordinary humanitarian epic – commemorated in Edouard Castries’s colossal and endlessly enjoyable panoramic painting in Lucerne. This was a major event in Swiss history as it showed the value of staunch neutralism. Some ten thousand troops wound up in Neuchâtel – an extraordinary number when the town itself at the time only had around twelve thousand inhabitants. Auguste Bachelin did a number of sketches and paintings, including a superb one which wallows in the sheer oddness of the military life, with scarlet baggy-trousered Zouaves, breastplated cuirassiers and spike-helmeted Prussians (prisoners of the French swept up in the mêlée), bearded and phlegmatic, reduced to weaponless impotence, marshalled along by a handful of armed Swiss troops. For many years a French exclamation for a total shambles was ‘Quelle armée de Bourbaki!’, which it would be fun to revive.
One of the smaller but nonetheless despairing tragedies was the Siege of Strasbourg. The speed of events was overwhelming. The disastrous Battle of Froeschwiller on 6 August suddenly put Strasbourg in the front line with a state of siege declared the next day and buildings blown up to clear fields of fire. At the time Strasbourg Cathedral was the tallest structure ever built and from its spire it was possible to see twenty-five thousand Badenese troops on the march, the grand duchy’s German nationalism easily trumping any sense of Rhineland solidarity. Incoming French troops thought that the German-dialect-speaking locals must be traitors and, even before the siege had begun, nationalist tensions had been hydrated that would poison the region for many years. The siege lasted forty-four days, during which time 194,722 projectiles landed in the city. The cathedral roof was burned off (the gargoyles vomiting molten lead) and the spire only held together because of its lightning rod. At one point the bombardment coincided with a severe thunderstorm which caused the town dogs to howl – apparently a uniquely eerie combination. The most lasting disaster, aside from 861 military and 300 civilians dead and 10,000 homeless, was the destruction of the New Church, France’s second library and the great depository for French Protestant texts: some 400,000 books were destroyed and thousands of ancient manuscripts. A vast number of items by Gutenberg were burnt (he had lived and worked in Strasbourg), but the greatest loss was Herrad of Landsberg’s The Garden of Delights, a masterpiece with some 330 brilliant illustrations, created by a nun a generation younger than Hildegard of Bingen. Scholars from Berlin had specifically written to the military pleading with them to watch out for The Garden of Delights, but to no avail.
One curious element in the siege was intervention by the Swiss. In 1576 during discussions between different Imperial cities about how they could work together to defend their Protestantism, the city of Zürich proved it could bring effective aid by successfully getting a boatload of still-hot porridge all the way to Strasbourg down the Rhine in less than twenty-four hours. This rather odd precedent (still celebrated today – and part of the original pot survived the New Church fire) led a group of Swiss citizens to approach the Prussian military and propose escorting non-belligerents from the city. This showed Swiss neutrality in action (the French, Prussians and Badenese had been unsure about whether to trust the Swiss) as almost two thousand residents left before what it was assumed would be a truly horrible final assault. In a strangely Swiss touch each individual had to prove they had enough money to pay for their own keep.
The issue of Strasbourg’s survival became urgent. The garrison town of Belfort, far to the south, held out until the final French surrender and remained French. It became clear that if Strasbourg gave in then, like Metz, it would be on the Prussian shopping list for annexation. Despite attempts to create a revolutionary atmosphere in the walls, the position eventually became hopeless and the town indeed surrendered. The only positive beneficiary of this awful sequence of events was the Alsatian sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi, who was involved in the defence of Colmar, traumatized by the fate of his homeland and now created the two great monuments to the war: the statue that greets you as you walk down the avenue from Basle railway station commemorating Swiss help for Strasbourg (and featuring a jaunty relief of the boatload of porridge) and the colossal, brilliantly strange and disturbing seventy-foot-long Lion of Belfort, which glowers on the side of the fortress of Belfort and must make just going to the shops in the streets below seem both heroic and somewhat bathetic. He went on to become the world’s most famous sculptor with the Statue of Liberty – twice as high as the lion was long. The idea came to him just after the war as the new German Empire was proclaimed (as insultingly as possible) in Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles, and Alsace and a chunk of Lorraine, including French-speaking Metz, were absorbed into that empire as the Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen. Bartholdi’s home town became Kolmar, Séléstat Schlettstadt, Strasbourg Straßburg and some fifty thousand people left their homes for ever. The Statue of Liberty has undoubtedly become the great symbol of New York, but the torch she is carrying is at least as Alsatian as it is American.
French exiles
If you turn left out of the car park in front of the railway station of the southern English town of Farnborough, cross a particularly hostile and depressing giant roundabout and stand at a specific time on a Saturday afternoon by a locked metal gate at the bottom of a wooded hill, there will be a click and the gate will open, allowing you to walk up a driveway to one of Europe’s oddest sites: the last resting place of Napoleon III, his Empress and his son.
If you were the ruler of the United Kingdom or Prussia, say, much of the nineteenth century had the potential to be almost uniformly enjoyable – lots of money, respect, stability (with one Prussian wobble in 1848), terrific outfits to wear, coins with your face on, relatives to visit, parties. France was very different and Europe is dotted with memorial sites to the chronic instability that was only resolved in the wake of Napoleon III’s crushing defeat by Prussia in 1870 at Sedan. I have a shaky-handed inability to stay away from sad scenes of French royal failure. I know I shouldn’t be in Farnborough but, nonetheless, here I am once more breathing in the cold, mouldering air of another nécropole dynastique.
There are four of these spots. The first and
grandest is of course the Church of St Denis to the north of Paris. In two spasms of frenzied Revolutionary violence in 1793 the tombs of some hundred and fifty of these royals were jemmied open and their contents, from Clovis onwards, tipped into a trench and smothered in quick-lime. After Napoleon’s departure, Louis XVIII (who had spent a number of unhappy years in Essex and Buckinghamshire) had the grim job of reconsecrating the legitimacy of his line. This was done through the can-this-get-any-worse expedient of shovelling all the surviving bits and bobs behind a marble wall in St Denis and then engraving on several big tablets a solemn contents list of names and ages. Presumably what is behind the wall is something like the inside of a terrible Hoover, with scraps of Louis XIV entangled with Philip Augustus’s desiccated hair. The wall is really one of the worst places in France and easy to imagine bursting outwards, deluging bystanders in horrors.
As usual with burial grounds the main purpose is to offer consolation to those who survive the individual’s death – as they or their grandchildren die, the grief/relief/pleasure associated with that death drifts off, and we are left with what is emotionally a mere stone husk. For dynasties though, the stakes are much higher. For centuries St Denis was the site that validated the monarchy, with every new king crushingly aware of being only the latest link in a chain going back to Clovis, Peppin and friends. Each ceremony carried out also implied an unending future sequence, matching and then outrunning the mere present – like the scene in Macbeth where the witches show Banquo his myriad royal descendants.
Louis XVIII completed his work at St Denis by having himself buried under a smart black slab. His younger but elderly brother Charles X then managed to alienate everybody by his insane devotion to camp, ‘brocade’ Catholicism and his pretence that nothing had happened since 1788. Kicked out in 1830 and exiled in Habsburg-ruled Gorizia, Charles died there and was buried at the Franciscan monastery of Konstanjevica (now in Slovenia). Once this accidental burial place was established it became, like St Denis, the unavoidable destination for his pretender descendants on their deaths: the notional Louis XIX and Henry V, their wives and a stray sister. In both life and death they underwent all kinds of indignities: the memories of greatness blown and deference ended; selling jewels and scrounging for cash. But in death at least they managed to continue an eternal future claim to the throne – one which has been disregarded by everyone except a tiny handful of legitimists who still leave long-life plastic wreaths on the chilly tombs.
Louis XVIII and Charles X spent many years on their various ‘travels’, cadging abroad to dodge the guillotine. England became the invaluable safety valve for French royal instability, with the Channel ports intermittently crowded with blowsy courtiers and carts full of battered paintings and dinner sets. Everyone knew the drill – if things get rough, head to Boulogne. After Charles X’s removal, the throne was handed to Louis-Philippe, a member of a cadet branch of the family. He precariously clung on for eighteen years before also getting the message and hot-footing it to England in the wake of the 1848 Revolution. He ended up living in Surrey and being buried in a Catholic chapel in Weybridge (now a Korean church). Before it had all gone wrong though, Louis-Philippe’s family poured money into the absolutely staggering necropolis at Dreux, west of Paris, a crazed mass of white-marble, full-length statues of leading family members and, again, designed to be merely the starting point of a great sequence of French rulers.
Louis-Philippe’s brief tenure mocks the necropolis. All in all, it is a shame that such places should wind up being just unintended commentaries on human vanity. It is fun for the rest of us, but unfortunate for the families, and for the priests who have to keep offering prayers there, without themselves tactlessly alluding to the all-flesh-is-grass folly around them. In the end, in the firmly republican French world of the 1870s Louis-Philippe’s corpse was allowed to leave Weybridge and settle down in Dreux.
After Napoleon III seized power, Louis-Philippe’s family held their nerve and continued to treat Dreux both as a dignified reproach to an upstart and as the ante-chamber in which to wait to regain power. As the rest of nineteenth-century France’s history played out, they were completely ignored, with dead family members piling up and each getting a pricey and elaborate tomb paid for. Some of these are superb – Louis-Philippe’s great-grandson was an explorer who discovered the source of the Irrawaddy and died of malaria in Saigon in 1901. For perhaps the only time white marble is used as a medium for showing someone in a tropical suit holding a white marble map and, his head convulsed to one side, in the throes of a malarial spasm. It is one of the last great uses of a traditional funerary framework to do something quite new and strange. But while he may have lucked out after his premature death by getting a superb sculptor, Henri of Orléans was never really going to become king. His tomb was a last gasp – three generations on from royal power and the family now began to cut costs, with mere plaques and standard-issue near-bourgeois memorials.
Which brings us back to Farnborough and to Napoleon III, nemesis of the Orléans family, but a man who had always been more familiar with the south of England than he would have liked, having spent chunks of time there in earlier exiles. When his own final moment of disaster came with his capture after the cataclysmic Battle of Sedan, Napoleon and his Empress Eugenie followed in the now well-worn footsteps of Bourbon and Orléans to southern England, sulking in a house which is today the headquarters of the Chislehurst Golf Club.
He died in 1873. Again, every effort was made to maintain the dynasty for future use, but his and Eugenie’s only son, ‘Lou-Lou’, was killed in the Zulu War and the line came to an end. Eugenie, who lived on for many years, created the Farnborough necropolis and endowed a small monastery to pray for the family’s souls. A handful of monks remain but the abbey is the near helpless victim of surrounding, spreading Farnborough, with many objects stolen and with the lead repeatedly stripped from the roof, making the Imperial resting place a gloomy spot. All the elaborate trappings on the tombs, including fun Zulu material for the Prince Imperial, have either been pinched or locked away. One great oddity is that back in 1873 the French government objected to Napoleon being buried on British soil – but for obvious reasons did not want the body returned to become yet another revanchist focus. The ingenious – albeit insane – decision was taken to import neutral Swiss soil to form a layer under Napoleon’s coffin. And so the last Emperor of France appears to have finished up his restless life in Hampshire but is actually in Switzerland.
Metz and the nationalist frontline
Nationalism seems to be a universal side effect of specific levels of literacy and communication. There is little point in grumbling about it. Even the most seemingly low-self-esteem nation will come out fighting the moment anyone suggests problems with its honesty, womenfolk, national stew, etc. Every country at some level assumes that other countries are worse – the dial can always be moved favourably to turn others’ success into mere brashness and materialism or cultural confidence into mere narrowness and jingoism. Nationalists prop themselves up by imagining they are living in a circle of virtue outside which shamble those not so blessed, despite their having near-identical beliefs and stews. Perhaps a distinction can be made between patriotism, which is a legitimate, sometimes vexed affection for and pride in the world one grows up in and knows well, and nationalism, where that central space tends to be hollow but given shape by the imagined foibles, vices and plots of those others about which, in practice, one knows little or nothing.
The highly contested decision by Bismarck to grab Alsace and much of Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War was spurred by nationalism and was the founding disaster of the twentieth century. Strategically it made sense – Bismarck rightly pointed out that the French had trundled through Alsace many times before and it would prove true that the Germans easily defended it in 1914. Only five years previously the Habsburg Empire, threatening Prussia’s ever more dynamic role in the German-speaking world, had been rapidly defeated, but with
no annexations, and then became as meek as a lamb until destroyed in the First World War fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the Germans. Many argued against the Alsace-Lorraine annexation, but there was such a wave of nationalism – from newspapers, politicians, academics – that the Germans took the fatal decision.
Alsatians largely spoke German dialects and the decision to absorb them was meant to be for ever. In a spirit of stern Nibelung justice the Germans let the fortress town of Belfort, which had successfully held out for a hundred and three days, remain French, creating both a strange little department that exists to this day and, indirectly, the euphonious Métro station Denfert-Rochereau, named after the fortress’s vigorous commandant. Lorraine was split, with the Germans taking much of its industrial land in the north-east and the city of Metz.
