How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  While in exile, Hugo wrote his greatest works about Waterloo. In his poem ‘L’Expiation’ (meaning ‘penitence’, or, for those who use the word in English, ‘expiation’), he invented one of the Napoleonic sayings that has entered the French language. If someone says of a town, a café or a dull party that ‘c’est morne plaine’, they mean it’s as dead as a doornail. This comes from Hugo’s famous line in ‘L’Expiation’: ‘Waterloo, Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine’, meaning that the battle, so bad he named it thrice, took place on a ‘mournful plain’.

  Not that it would have been mournful if Napoleon had won, because Hugo also claims in the poem that ‘victory followed this man everywhere’, and that it really should have accompanied Napoleon to Belgium. As we saw in Chapter 2, Hugo even suggests that God was at Waterloo, and that it was there that He ultimately decided Napoleon was simply too big a hero for the good of the planet. Even so, the poem explains that this didn’t mean that God was an anti-Bonapartist. As his soldiers flee the battlefield, Napoleon appeals directly to heaven:

  My empire has been smashed like glass.

  I am beaten, my soldiers are dead!

  Is this a punishment, God, that you bring down on my head?

  Then above the cries and the rumble of cannon fire

  He heard a voice that answered: Non!fn4

  ‘L’Expiation’ does an excellent job of publicising the glorious version of the battle that Napoleon dictated in his memoirs. As darkness fell, Hugo wrote, Napoleon ‘almost had victory’, and Wellington was ‘pinned up against a forest’. But then triumph slipped out of Napoleon’s grasp, abandoning him like a deserting soldier: ‘Tu désertais, victoire’. It is almost as if Hugo assumed that victory owed its allegiance to the French army. The tragic heroes of the poem, and the battle, are of course the Garde Impériale, ‘regiments of granite and steel’ that march forward fearlessly only to melt in the furnace of British cannon fire.

  All in all, ‘L’Expiation’ is a masterpiece of hero worship that has coloured French memories of Waterloo just as strongly as Shakespeare did when he immortalised Agincourt in Henry V – the difference being, of course, that Hugo was idolising the losers.

  The idolatry was sincerely meant, and the battle scenes are brilliantly written, even though Hugo didn’t actually visit the ‘morne plaine’ himself until several years after he wrote ‘L’Expiation’. He felt that the wound was too fresh in his, and France’s, memory to be probed so directly. Hugo finally plucked up the courage to go to Waterloo in May 1861, for the fortieth anniversary of Napoleon’s death, when he took up residence in a hotel on the battlefield and, as he put it, ‘performed the autopsy on the catastrophe. I spent two months bent over the corpse.’

  During his mournful months in Belgium, Hugo finished off the text of his great five-volume historical novel Les Misérables, adding details to the long chapter on Waterloo that he had already written.

  As we have already seen, in Les Misérables Hugo turned Waterloo into a glorious moral victory. In doing so, he also managed to set in literary stone the image that Bonapartists still carry in their hearts today (and express in countless books, articles and talks). Hugo does in many ways the opposite of the job that Shakespeare did for England’s Richard III. Until very recently, almost everyone in Britain thought that Richard was nothing more than an evil hunchback, whereas in fact he was an enlightened king who, for example, ensured that laws were written in English rather than Latin so that ordinary people could understand them. In a similar way, Hugo describes the sheer greatness of Napoleon and his regime in a way that makes it practically impossible for a French reader to resist feeling an upsurge of patriotic nostalgia. He has the character of Marius exclaim that ‘To be the empire of such an emperor, what a splendid destiny for a nation, when that nation is France and it adds its genius to the genius of that man!’ Vive la France, indeed.

  In Les Misérables, Hugo also expresses the slight sense of paranoia that has crept into French patriotism in the past couple of centuries, the feeling that everyone is against them: ‘What was Waterloo? A victory? No, a lottery won by Europe and paid for by France.’ Hugo could almost be describing France’s attitude to the European Union today.

  Hugo also makes a startling comparison between the reserved Wellington and the more artistic, expressive Napoleon. Waterloo was a battle, Hugo says, between British ‘precision, planning, geometry, prudence, a safe line of retreat, well-managed reserves, stubborn calm … nothing left to chance’ and Napoleon’s very French ‘intuition, feeling … superhuman instinct, flamboyant vision … prodigious art and scornful impetuosity, all the mysteriousness of a profound soul’.

  Hugo could almost be comparing Margaret Thatcher and Eric Cantona. It is a self-image of flamboyant France that still goes down well with the French today.

  All in all, this message at the heart of Hugo’s greatest novel is simple: Waterloo turned Napoleon, and thereby the French spirit, into the very essence of heroism. Hugo sums it up, as usual, in a very quotable quote: ‘Defeat increased the stature of the vanquished. Napoleon fallen looked bigger than Napoleon standing.’ (And that was almost certainly not a height-related joke.)

  To be fair to Hugo, he did temper his out-and-out hero worship of France’s greatest warlord with a touch of compassion. He wrote, for example, that ‘Waterloo was more of a massacre than a battle’, and expressed the hope that the slaughter on all sides had achieved something: ‘While Napoleon was dying at Longwood, the sixty thousand men who fell on the battlefield at Waterloo were peacefully putrefying, and something of their peace spread across the world.’

  In Les Misérables, Hugo also gave us one of the most vivid pieces of anti-war writing ever put to paper by someone who never fought. It must have been inspired by standing on the battlefield and imagining the last moments of one of the soldiers: ‘There is something terrifying here, a reality that breaks through the dream: to live, to see the sun, to be in full possession of virile life, to laugh out loud, to run towards glory, to feel in your chest a lung that breathes, a heart that beats, a will that reasons, to speak, think, hope, love, have a mother, a wife, children, to see light and then suddenly, in the space of a single cry, to fall into darkness, to tumble, roll over, crush, be crushed, to glimpse the corn stalks, the flowers, the leaves, the branches, but be unable to hold on to anything, to realise that your sword is useless, to feel men beneath you, horses on top of you, to struggle in vain, your bones smashed by the kick of a horse, a hoof squashing the eyes out of your head, to bite furiously into a horseshoe, to suffocate, shout, twist, be buried, and to say to yourself: just a moment ago I was alive!’

  Nonetheless, the overriding theme in Hugo’s Napoleonic writings, like that of Stendhal and Balzac, is that Napoleon was a figure whom the French should be proud to venerate for the rest of time.

  And these Bonaparte fans weren’t the only ones to be broadcasting the message. The last word on Napoleon’s place in nineteenth-century French literature has to go to an unlikely source – the nobleman Viscount François-René Chateaubriand (1768–1848), an ardent royalist whose cousin was shot in 1809 for anti-Bonapartist activities. In his most famous work, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (‘Memoirs from Beyond the Grave’), Chateaubriand pays Napoleon a back-handed but highly prescient compliment: ‘The world belongs to Napoleon. That which the destroyer could not conquer, his reputation usurps. When alive he lost the world; dead, he possesses it.’

  III

  Unsurprisingly, Britain’s most feared enemy also inspired some of its most famous writers. Napoleon’s greatest English-language publicist in the early nineteenth century was Sir Walter Scott, author of historical novels like Rob Roy and Ivanhoe, who in 1827 published The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French – nine volumes and more than a million words long.

  Scott was of course a Scot, and might have been naturally inclined to feel sympathetic towards a Frenchman – Auld Alliance oblige. But as the use of the Italian form of Napoleon’s name in t
he title suggests, Scott was not a French-style Napoleon fan. His book is as obsessively detailed as any Bonapartist history book, but a lot more balanced. Throughout, he is just as liable to lambast Napoleon for his despotism (‘his system of government … aimed at the subjugation of the world’) as he is to praise the man for his ‘patriotic attention to the public welfare’ of France. And as we saw in Chapter 6, Scott takes a strictly impartial line when discussing Napoleon’s ‘persecution’ at the hands of his jailer, Sir Hudson Lowe.

  For the modern reader, the book’s attention to detail is hard going, just as it must have been for most people in the 1820s. How many nineteenth-century Brits would have been fascinated to learn, for example, the exact responsibilities of Napoleon’s Legislative Body, or its precise relationship to his Tribunate and Council of State?

  Even some of the dramatic scenes in Napoleon’s career make for unusual reading because they are treated with such resounding neutrality. In 1814, for example, when Napoleon crosses France after his adieux at Fontainebleau, Scott notes drily that ‘cries of vive l’Empereur’ were frequently heard, but that in some places people ‘insulted his passage with shouts of vive le Roi’. The whole episode feels curiously undramatic, like a no-score draw.

  But elsewhere, Scott’s moral judgements shine through the mass of neutrally reported historical detail. He understands – but still criticises – Napoleon’s tantrums on Saint Helena. He also disapproves of Napoleon’s talent for self-deception, and before describing the Battle of Waterloo, he huffs that ‘Napoleon’s extravagant speculations [that Britain would stop fighting him if they lost there] can only serve to show how very little he must have known of the English nation’.

  Scott pours scorn on early Bonapartist accounts of the battle: ‘The French authors have pretended, that [English] squares were broken, and colours taken, but this assertion, upon the unified testimony of every British officer present, is a positive untruth.’ (And who is going to doubt the word of a British officer against a few Frenchies, what?)

  Scott’s insistence that the truth be told forces him to smash some especially sacred French idols. When describing the final stand of the Vieille Garde, he rubbishes the ‘fictions’ that have been ‘industriously circulated by the friends of Napoleon’ about Cambronne defying the English and saying that the Garde preferred to die rather than surrender. Scott even denies that Cambronne did anything particularly heroic: he simply ‘gave up his own sword, and remained prisoner’. He also dismisses the notion that the Vieille Garde were determined to die, saying that it would be absurd to glorify them for ‘an act of regimental suicide’.

  As for Napoleon’s own account of the battle, in which he heaped all the blame on his generals, Scott calls it ‘a mere military romance, full of gratuitous suppositions’. He says that Napoleon and his apologists ‘concur in a very futile attempt to excuse the defeat at Waterloo’, and that ‘it has been a favourite assertion with almost all the French, and some English writers, that the English were on the point of being defeated, when the Prussian force came up. The contrary is the truth.’

  Clearly, Scott didn’t write a million-word biography because he was a Napoleon fan. In fact, he chose his subject because he and his publisher thought that history’s most famous Frenchman would sell books. This was a tale of blood and thunder, ending in the most celebrated British victory since Agincourt, and it earned Scott more than £10,000 – a fortune in those days. But Scott was interested in more than money – despite Napoleon’s moral weaknesses, Scott constantly reminds us that he was an exceptional human being compared to those, including Scott himself, ‘whose steps have never led them beyond the middle path in life’.

  Predictably, Scott’s criticism of Napoleon’s character faults infuriated Bonapartists when the book came out. One of Napoleon’s compagnons d’exil, General Gaspard Gourgaud, published a virulent Réfutation des calomnies de la vie de Napoléon par Walter Scott. But overall, Scott’s criticisms only seem to have galvanised Bonapartist historians in their determination to deify their idol. Ever since his million-word cannonade was published, they have mounted their own last stand to perpetuate the legend of Cambronne’s tragic heroes, and the idea that Napoleon beat Wellington before the Prussians finally showed up. And Scott’s biography is often cited, if not quoted at length, in Bonapartist histories of Napoleon’s life. After all, anyone who merits nine volumes of English prose must be a hero, n’est-ce pas?

  IV

  Sir Walter Scott was in his fifties when he wrote his biography of Napoleon. He was an old-school, moralistic historian, a kind of Scottish judge whose book was a nine-volume summing up, leaning towards a guilty verdict. Napoleon had to rely on a younger, more Romantic, British soul for French-style idolisation: and this he received in both word and deed from England’s most famous – or infamous – poet of the time, Lord Byron.

  As a schoolboy at Harrow at the turn of the nineteenth century, Byron was fired up with Bonapartist bravado, and kept a bust of the all-conquering Napoleon in his study. At the time, such an unpatriotic gesture must have been very daring, a bit like putting a poster of the Sex Pistols on your bedroom wall in 1976.

  When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, the adult Byron wrote in his diary: ‘Oh my head! – how it aches! – the horrors of digestion! I wonder how Buonaparte’s dinner agrees with him?’

  Understandably, his digestion was even more disturbed when Napoleon abdicated in 1814, and it looked as though he had tamely given up the fight. In ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’, Byron wrote about his former hero with the pain of a disappointed fan:

  A lion in the conquering hour!

  In wild defeat a hare!

  Thy mind hath vanished with thy power,

  For Danger brought despair.

  The dreams of sceptres now depart,

  And leave thy desolated heart

  The Capitol of care!

  Dark Corsican, ’tis strange to trace

  Thy long deceit and last disgrace.

  However, after Napoleon’s dramatic escape from Elba in 1815, Byron changed his tune again, and was with his idol in spirit at Waterloo, unlike most of his fellow Englishmen. Instead of indulging in patriotic triumphalism, on 15 July 1815 Byron wrote ‘Napoleon’s Farewell’, in the defeated Emperor’s own voice, sagely predicting that France would miss him sorely. The sentiments in the poem are almost French:

  I have warr’d with a world which vanquish’d me only

  When the meteor of conquest allured me too far …

  Farewell to thee, France! When thy diadem crown’d me,

  I made thee the gem and the wonder of earth …

  The violetfn5 still grows in the depth of thy valleys;

  Though withered, thy tears will unfold it again.

  In 1816, accused in England of sodomy and incest, Byron fled to the continent, vowing to model himself on Napoleon and become a pan-European traveller and warrior. He was self-aware, though, and admitted that ‘With me there is, as Napoleon said, but one step between the sublime and the ridiculous.’fn6 True to his word, Byron had an absurdly de luxe version of Napoleon’s captured carriage made, and travelled in it to Brussels, Geneva and on to Italy. The carriage was kitted out with facsimiles of Napoleon’s travel bed, his portable library, and even his dining utensils. It was enormous, requiring between four and six horses to pull it, and cost £500 – approximately fifteen times the annual salary of the men who made it. Or rather, it would have cost £500, but Byron never paid the bill. Perhaps it was only poetic justice, as well as its excessive weight, that made the carriage break down three times before it even got to Brussels. Byron eventually reached Waterloo, and hired a Cossack horse to tour the battlefield. This was only a year after the battle and the atmosphere must have been eerie to say the least. The third canto of Byron’s famous poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written in 1816, was partly inspired by the visit. He opens it with a stark anti-British, anti-royalist, line inspired by arriving at the hallowed battlefield: ‘Stop
– for thy tread is on Empire’s dust!’

  Byron was horrified at the number of deaths caused by Britain and its allies in their determination to do away with Napoleon and reinstate the royalists on the French throne. He had lost one of his cousins at Waterloo, and described the horrors of battle in heart-rending terms:

  The earth is covered thick with other clay,

  Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,

  Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent!

  When Byron visited the battlefield, there must still have been human remains in open view. No one could have collected, buried or ploughed over all those human fragments. Byron’s cousin, Major Frederick Howard, was one of the casualties whose grave could be identified, and he was eventually dug up and repatriated to England.

  Despite the horrors, Byron indulged in some souvenir shopping, acquiring a breastplate, a plumed helmet and a sword, then continued his tour of Europe on a decidedly Napoleonic theme. Near Milan he saw a partially built Arc de Triomphe in honour of Napoleon’s victories, and wrote that it was ‘so beautiful as to make one regret its non-completion’. And on Isola Bella, in Lago Maggiore, he visited the laurel tree on which, a few days before the Battle of Marengo in 1800, Napoleon had carved, with impeccable Italian spelling, the word ‘Battaglia’ (battle).

  Incidentally, some sixty years later that same tree and its still-visible graffiti was visited by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the man who first said that the pen was mightier than the sword, who was far less Bonapartist than Byron. He wrote a poem that includes the verse: