The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  But he also thought, and often spoke, of Charlemagne, who, in a reign of forty-six years (768–814), had brought order and prosperity to Gaul, had spread the laws of the Franks, as a civilizing force, into Germany and Italy, and had won—or commanded—consecration by a Pope; had not he, Napoleon, done all these things? Had he not restored in France the religion that was checking the pagan riot let loose by the Revolution? Did he not, like Charlemagne, deserve the crown for life?

  Augustus and Charlemagne, those great restorers, had no faith in democracy; they could not subject their trained and considered judgments, their far-reaching plans and policies, to carping criticism and inconclusive debate by the corruptible delegates of popular simplicity. Caesar and Augustus had known Roman democracy in the vote-buying days of Milo and Clodius; they could not have governed at the behest of mindless mobs. Napoleon had seen Parisian democracy in 1792; he felt that he could not decide and act at the behest of impassioned crowds. It was time to call the Revolution closed, to consolidate its basic gains, and end the chaos and anxiety and class war.

  Now, after chastening the royalists with an execution, he was ready to accept their basic claim—that France was not prepared, emotionally or mentally, for self-government; and that some form of authoritarian rule was indispensable. In 1804, according to Mme. de Rémusat, “certain persons, somewhat closely connected with politics, were beginning to assert that France felt the necessity of absolute right in the governing power. Political courtiers, and sincere supporters of the Revolution, seeing that the tranquillity of the country depended upon one life, were discussing the instability of the Consulate. By degrees the thoughts of all were once more turned to monarchy.”100 Napoleon agreed with them. “The French,” he remarked to Mme. de Rémusat, “love monarchy and all its trappings.”101

  So, to begin with, he gave them the trappings. He ordered official costumes for the Consuls, the ministers, and the other personnel of the government; velvet was made prominent in these garments, partly to encourage its Lyons manufacturers. Napoleon gathered to his personal service four generals, eight aides-de-camp, four prefects, and two secretaries (Méneval had begged for assistance). The consular court took on a complexity of etiquette and protocol rivaling that of established royalty. Comte Auguste de Rémusat was put in charge of this ritual, while his wife Claire headed the four ladies who attended Josephine. Liveried servants and ornate carriages added to the ordained complexity of official life. Napoleon observed all these forms in public, but soon took refuge in the simplicity of his private ways. However, he smiled consent upon court festivities, fancy-dress or masked balls, and formal visits to the opera, where his wife might display gowns reminiscent of another extravagant queen, lately pitifully dead. Paris indulged him, as he indulged Josephine; after all, might not some flourishes and frippery be allowed to this young ruler, who was adding the statesmanship of Augustus to the victories of Caesar? It seemed so natural that imperator should become empereur.

  Strange to say, many groups in France heard without resentment the rumors of an impending crown. Some 1,200,000 Frenchmen had bought, from the state, property confiscated from the Church or from émigrés; they saw no security for their title deeds except in preventing a return of the Bourbons; and they saw in the permanence of Napoleon’s power the best protection against such a calamity. The peasants reasoned likewise. The proletariat was divided; it was still fond of the Revolution as having been so largely its work, but with a fondness fading as it enjoyed the steady employment and good wages that the Consulate had brought; and it was not immune to the rising cult of glory, or to the glamour of an empire that might surpass in splendor any of those that contended with France. The bourgeoisie was suspicious of emperors, but this would-be emperor had been faithfully and effectively their man. The lawyers, brought up on Roman law, were almost all in favor of transforming France into an imperium that would resume the work of Augustus and the philosopher-emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius. Even the royalists, if they could not have a pedigreed Bourbon, would think it a step forward if monarchy should be restored in France. The clergy, though they knew that Napoleon’s piety was political, were grateful for the restoration of the Church. Almost all classes, outside of Paris, believed that only a stable monarchical government could control the individualistic passions and class divisions that rumbled under the crust of civilization.

  But there were negative voices. Paris, which had made the Revolution and had suffered for it in body and soul, could not without some audible or secret regrets lay it to rest with all its more or less democratic constitutions. The surviving Jacobin leaders saw in the contemplated change an end to their role in the guidance of France; and perhaps to their lives. The men who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI knew that Napoleon despised them as regicides; they had to rely on Fouché to protect them, but Fouché could be dismissed again. The generals who had hoped to divide and share Napoleon’s power cursed the movement that was preparing to clothe in royal purple that “whippersnapper” from Corsica.102 The philosophers and the savants of the Institute mourned that one of its members was planning to drown democracy in an imperial plebiscite.

  Even in the nearly royal family there was a division of sentiment. Josephine was fearfully opposed to any move toward empire. Napoleon, made emperor, would even more powerfully itch for an heir, and therefore for a divorce, since he could expect none from her; so her whole dazzling world of dresses and diamonds could fall in ruins at any moment. Napoleon’s brothers and sisters had long since urged him to get divorced; they hated the Creole as a wanton seducer, an obstacle to their own dreams of power; now they supported the drive toward empire as a step toward displacing Josephine. Brother Joseph formulated the argument that

  the conspiracy of Cadoudal and Moreau decided the declaration of an hereditary title. With Napoleon as consul for a period, a coup-de-main might overthrow him; as consul for life the blow of a murderer would have been required. He assumed hereditary rank as a shield; it would thus no longer suffice to kill him; the whole state would have to be overthrown. The truth is that the nature of things tended toward the hereditary principle; it was a matter of necessity.103

  Councilors, senators, tribunes, and others in the government moved to complaisance with Napoleon’s wishes, and for simple reasons: consent would merely lessen their freedom of debate—which was already vestigial; opposition might cost them their political lives; early complaisance might earn a rich reward. On May 2, 1804, the legislative bodies passed a triple motion: “1. That Napoleon Bonaparte … shall be appointed Emperor of the French Republic; 2. That the title of Emperor, and the Imperial power, shall be hereditary in his family. … 3. That care shall be taken to safeguard Equality, Liberty, and the rights of the people in their entirety.” On May 18 the Senate proclaimed Napoleon emperor. On May 22 the registered voters of France, by ballots individually signed, approved this fait accompli by 3,572,329 yeas to 2,569 nays. Georges Cadoudal, hearing the news in his prison cell, remarked, “We came here to give France a king; we have given her an emperor.”104

  CHAPTER VIII

  The New Empire

  1804–07

  I. THE CORONATION: DECEMBER 2, 1804

  NAPOLEON slipped contentedly into imperial ways. Even before the plebiscite, he had begun (May, 1804) to sign his letters and documents with only his first name; soon, except in formal documents, he reduced this to a simple N; and in time that proud initial appeared on monuments, buildings, garments, carriages … He began to speak of the French people no longer as “citizens” but as “my subjects.”1 He expected more deference from his courtiers, readier assent from his ministers; however, he bore in grim silence Talleyrand’s aristocratic ways, and accepted with some relish Fouché’s irreverent wit. Appreciating the help Fouché had given in ferreting out conspirators, he restored him (July 11, 1804) to his former post as minister of police. When Napoleon thought to subdue Fouché’s independence of thought and speech by reminding him of his having voted fo
r the death of Louis XVI, Fouché replied, “Quite true. It was the first service I had the occasion to perform for Your Majesty.”2

  One thing was still lacking to this majesty: it had not been recognized and sanctified, as with other crowns, by the highest representative of the nation’s religious faith. There was something, after all, in that medieval theory of divine right: to a people predominantly Catholic the anointment of its ruler by a pope who claimed to be the viceregent of God signified that this ruler had in effect been chosen by God, and therefore spoke with an almost divine authority. What idea could be more helpful in facilitating rule? And would not such anointment put Napoleon on a level with all European sovereigns, however rooted in the past? So he set his diplomats the task of persuading Pius VII that an unprecedented trip to Paris to crown the Son of the Revolution and the Enlightenment would symbolize the triumph of the Catholic Church over the Revolution and the Enlightenment. And would it not be useful to His Holiness to have, as a new defensor fidei, the most brilliant warrior in Europe? Some Austrian cardinals opposed the notion as a veritable sacrilege, but some canny Italians thought it would be quite a victory, not only for religion but also for Italy; “we should be placing an Italian family on the throne of France to govern those barbarians; we should be avenging ourselves on the Gauls.”3 The Pope was probably more practical: he would consent in the hope of bringing a repentant nation back to papal obedience, and regaining several papal territories that had been taken by the armies of France.

  Napoleon made as careful preparations for this mutual triumph as for a major war. The coronation rituals of the Old Regime were studied, adapted, and amplified. Processions were planned as by a choreographer, and each movement was timed. New dresses were designed for the ladies of the court; the best milliners gathered around Josephine, and Napoleon bade her wear the jewels of the Treasury as well as her own; despite the protests of his mother, brothers, and sisters, he was resolved to crown her as well as himself. Jacques-Louis David, who was to commemorate the event in the greatest painting of the age, rehearsed her and her attendants in every move and pose. Poets were paid to celebrate the event. The Opéra was instructed to prepare ballets that might stir a papal breast. Arrangements were made to protect the major streets with troops, and to line the nave of Notre-Dame with the Consular Guard in a veritable marriage of Caesar and Christ. Princes and dignitaries from other states were invited, and came. Multitudes arrived from the city, the suburbs, the provinces, and abroad, and bargained for places of vantage in the cathedral or on the routes. Shopkeepers hoped to reap fortunes, and did. Jobs and spectacles kept the people contented as perhaps never since the panem et circenses of Imperial Rome.

  The affable Pius VII made his way leisurely, November 2–25, through cities and ceremonies in Italy and France, and was met by Napoleon at Fontainebleau. From that moment till the coronation the Emperor gave the Pope every courtesy except deference; the Emperor was not to be awed into admitting any superior power. The people of Paris—the most skeptical on earth at that time—welcomed the Pontiff as a spectacle; an escort of soldiers and priests led him to the Tuileries, where he was guided to a special apartment in the Pavillon de Flore. Josephine welcomed him, and seized the occasion to tell him that she had not been united with Napoleon in a religious marriage; Pius promised to remedy that defect before the coronation. On the night of November 29–30 he remarried them, and Josephine felt that a blessed obstacle had been raised against a divorce.4

  Early on a cold December 2 a dozen processions left from different points to converge on Notre-Dame: deputations from the cities of France, from the Army and Navy, the legislative assemblies, the judiciary, and the administrative corps, the Legion of Honor, the Institute, the chambers of commerce … They found the cathedral nearly filled with invited civilians, but soldiers made way for them to their appointed places. At 9 A.M., from the Pavillon de Flore, the papal procession set forth: Pius VII and his servitors, the cardinals and the grand officers of the Curia, in gaily decorated coaches drawn by horses chosen for their spirit and beauty, all led by a bishop on a mule and bearing aloft the papal crucifix. At the cathedral they descended and walked in formal array up the steps, into the nave, and through lanes of stiff soldiers to their assigned stations—the Pope to his throne at the altar’s left. Meanwhile, from another point of the Tuileries, the imperial cavalcade proceeded: first, Marshal Murat, governor of Paris, and his staff; then some specially distinguished regiments of the Army; then, in six-horse carriages, the leading officers of the government; then a carriage for the Bonaparte brothers and sisters; then a royal coach marked with a blazoned N, drawn by eight horses, and bearing the Emperor in purple velvet embroidered with gems and gold, and the Empress, at the peak of her precarious splendor, robed in silk and sparkling with jewelry, “her face so well made up that,” though forty-one, “she looked like four-and-twenty.”5 Then eight more carriages, bearing the ladies and officers of the court. It took an hour for all these carriages to reach the cathedral. There Napoleon and Josephine changed to coronation robes, and took their places at the right of the altar; he on a throne, she on a smaller throne five steps below him.

  The Pope ascended the altar; Napoleon, then Josephine, mounted to kneel before him; each of the two was anointed and blessed. Emperor and Empress stepped down to where General Kellermann stood with a crown on a tray. Napoleon took the crown and placed it on his head. Then, as Josephine knelt in piety and modesty before him, he—”with a kind of noticeable tenderness”6—placed a crown of diamonds upon her jeweled hair. All this was no surprise to the Pope, for it had been so arranged in advance.*The patient Pontiff then kissed Napoleon on the cheek, and pronounced the official formula, “Vivat Imperator in aeternum” The Pope sang Mass. His assistants brought a book of the Gospels to him, and Napoleon, placing his hand on the book, recited the oath that still affirmed him to be the Son of the Revolution:

  I swear to maintain the territory of the Republic in its integrity; to respect and enforce the laws of the Concordat and the Freedom of Worship; to respect and enforce Equality before the Law, political and civil liberty, and the irreversibility of the sales of national property; to lay on no duty, to impose no tax, except according to law; to maintain the institution of the Legion of Honor; and to govern only in accordance with the interests, the happiness, and the glory of the French people.8

  By three o’clock the ceremony was complete. Through an acclaiming crowd, under falling snow, the various groups proceeded back to their points of origin. The genial Pontiff, fascinated by the glamour of Paris and the hope of fruitful negotiations, remained in or near the capital for four months, frequently appearing on a balcony to bless a kneeling crowd. He found Napoleon politely immovable, and bore patiently the secular entertainments offered him by his host. On April 15, 1805, he left for Rome. Napoleon resumed his imperial projects and ways, confident that now, being as holy as any ruler, he could face unbendingly the powers that would soon unite to destroy him.

  II. THE THIRD COALITION: 1805

  By the end of 1804 all the European governments except England, Sweden, and Russia had recognized Napoleon as “emperor of the French,” and some kings had addressed him as “brother.”9 On January 2, 1805, he again proposed peace to George III, and now addressed him as

  SIR AND BROTHER:

  Having been called by Providence, and by the voice of the Senate, the people, and the army, to the throne of France, my first feeling is a desire for peace.

  France and England are wasting their prosperity. They may contend for centuries, but are their Governments rightfully fulfilling their most sacred duty, and does not their conscience reproach them with so much blood shed in vain, for no definite end? I am not ashamed to take the initiative. I have, I think, sufficiently proved … that I do not fear the chances of war. … Peace is my heartfelt wish, but war has never been adverse to my renown. I implore Your Majesty not to deprive yourself of the happiness of bestowing peace on the world. … Never was there a
better occasion … for imposing silence on passion, and for listening to the voice of humanity and reason. If this opportunity be lost, what term can be assigned to a war which all my endeavors might fail to terminate? …

  What do you hope to attain by war? The coalition of some Continental Powers? … To snatch her colonies from France? Colonies are objects of but secondary importance to France; and does not Your Majesty already possess more than you can keep? …

  The world is large enough for our two nations to live in it, and the power of reason is sufficient to enable us to overcome all difficulties if on both sides there is the will to do so. In any case I have fulfilled a duty which I hold to be righteous, and which is dear to my heart. I trust Your Majesty will believe in the sincerity of the sentiments I have expressed, and in my earnest desire to give you proof of them.

  NAPOLEON10

  We do not know what private assurances of pacifist intent may have accompanied this proposal; in any case it did not swerve England from basing her security upon a balance of Continental Powers, and preserving this by encouraging the weak against the strong. George III, not yet a “brother,” did not answer Napoleon, but on January 14, 1805, his Foreign Secretary, Lord Mulgrave, sent Talleyrand a letter that frankly stated England’s terms for peace:

  His Majesty has no dearer wish than to embrace the first opportunity of once more procuring for his subjects the advantages of a peace which shall be founded on bases not incompatible with the permanent security and the essential interests of his States. His Majesty is convinced that this end can only be attained by an arrangement which will provide alike for the future security and tranquillity of Europe, and prevent a renewal of the dangers and misfortunes which have beset the Continent.