1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  In February 1797, 1,400 French troops, including 800 convicts, were dressed up in British uniforms captured at Quiberon and sent to attack Bristol under the command of an Irish-American soldier called William Tate (who couldn’t speak French). The ships got lost, however, and landed in Wales, where the hungry ex-cons went on a scavenging spree and then gave themselves up to a group of red-cloaked Welsh women whom they mistook for soldiers. Twelve drunk Frenchmen were captured by a lone woman wielding a pitchfork. The French regular soldiers occupied a farm but were then tricked into accepting an unconditional surrender by a local militia leader called John Campbell who told them (falsely) that they were outnumbered. The Frenchmen and their American leader simply marched down on to the beach and piled up their weapons. It was a thirty-six-hour fiasco that France can proudly claim as the last foreign invasion of British soil.

  Revolution – what is it good for?

  If this Anglo-French war seems to have been a tepid affair (it wouldn’t heat up until Nelson and Wellington got involved), it was partly because France was having greater success attacking more accessible neighbours like Holland, Prussia and Italy, and was also very busy killing its own people.

  Anti-Royalist massacres plunged Brittany and the Vendée (southwest of the Loire) into genocide that hadn’t been seen since the English chevauchées during the Hundred Years War. In Nantes, thousands were executed by drowning. In the Vendée, Revolutionary troops were told to ‘burn windmills and demolish ovens’ (the two vital tools for making bread and feeding the population) and ordered: ‘If you find women and children, shoot them – they all support our enemies.’ Today, if the northwest of France is a hotbed of support for the right-wing National Front and extreme Catholic Royalists, it might well be a reaction to the atrocities committed there during the Revolution.

  Generally, though, after Robespierre was guillotined by a rival faction in 1794, the violence subsided and the Revolution began to peter out. It was as if the French had had enough of politics. After all, apart from a flowery calendar and some bloodletting therapy, the Revolution hadn’t brought much benefit to the poor it was meant to help. True, the top layer of privileged aristocrats had been stripped away, but they had been replaced by bureaucrats wielding just as much power and violence as the aristos. At the end of 1795, six years into the Revolution, the economy was still in a state of collapse, and the poor were dying in droves of famine and cold. Meanwhile, the nouveau riche bourgeoisie was amassing fortunes in black-market trading, and making sure it would hang on to its wealth by dishing out backhanders to corrupt officials. In 1797, free speech was ended when press censorship was introduced. In 1802, slavery was legalized again and an amnesty was granted to all the aristos who had run away to Britain and other countries and survived the hardship, humiliation and horse’s willies. Within a few years, France would have a military dictator who would call himself emperor, create a new ‘imperial aristocracy’ and marry a great-niece of Marie-Antoinette. To crown it all (if that’s not a bad pun), in 1814 King Louis XVIII, a grandson of Louis XV, would arrive in Paris to cheers of ‘Vive le roi!’ Twenty-five years after the Storming of the Bastille, France would be more or less back where it started. Not what you would call lasting change.

  Democracy had come to certain aspects of French life, though, notably the military. If it hadn’t been for the Revolution, a Corsican with an incomprehensible regional accent and bad grammar would never have risen through the ranks of the French army by merit alone. An aristocratic general would have made sure that the young upstart Bonaparte was kept in his place – ordering horsefeed, perhaps, or going on suicidal charges.

  Yes, Napoleon, the so-called ‘little Corporal’, was probably the most important product of the French Revolution, an enemy as dangerous to Britain as anyone since William the Conqueror – and with similar ambitions.

  And strictly speaking, as we shall see, Boney was a British product …*

  Napoleon dreamt of invading England using all the latest technology at his disposal, and some that didn’t exist – the Channel Tunnel, for example. In the end, he abandoned his plans because even the supposedly reliable technology didn’t work: his invasion barges sank.

  * ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ rules itself out as a comparison, because it has a gruesome line about kicking anti-revolutionary forces out of America: ‘Their blood has washed out their vile footsteps’ pollution.

  * The novel, published in 1859, paints a balanced picture of the climate of exhilaration, idealism and pure savagery during the Revolution, as the book’s famous opening words suggest: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …’

  * Although MPs might have been asleep – Burke’s speeches were known to last eight hours.

  * Though none of them came anywhere near the huge success of Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, published more than fifty years later, which has since become the bestselling English-language novel of all time, with 200 million copies sold. The sales figures seem to imply that no literary subject fascinates Anglos as much as the French Revolution. The French would be proud to know it.

  * Although Marie-Thérèse has her defenders, too, who argue that the remark could actually have been a pertinent suggestion. At the time, if there was not enough bread, bakers would lower the price of brioche.

  * Or nearly afresh. The scheme was voted in on 5 October 1793, eleven days before Marie-Antoinette was executed, but was deemed to have begun a year earlier in 1792, which was posthumously named Year One, thus depriving the people of a New New Year’s party.

  * So much so that I have opted throughout the book to use the English spelling for Napoleon, without the accented é. In a spirit of equality I have done the same for Josephine.

  17

  Napoleon: If Je Ruled the World

  The illustration opposite is a cartoon of Napoleon’s planned invasion of Britain. It was drawn in around 1804, at a time when the attack was a real possibility and lookouts along the south coast of England were on constant alert for the first sighting of a Corsican in a sailboat.

  The drawing shows hot-air balloons wafting troops over Britain’s Channel defences, invasion barges being rowed across a surprisingly narrow Straits of Dover, and a tunnel crowded with French footsoldiers, cavalry, cannons and even what looks like a small collection of prostitutes. In F. E. Halliday’s Concise History of England, the cartoon is laconically captioned ‘Napoleon’s projected invasion of England by tunnel, sea and air. A French fantasy’.

  It may seem like a fantasy to us now, but for a few years in the early nineteenth century it was the keystone to Napoleon’s plans for global domination. He thought that if he could just annex England, he would rule the world.

  Designing a new uniform for the Emperor of Earth (Napoleon adored inventing uniforms, flags and coins for his new possessions) was a dream that was largely inspired by the British – and destroyed by them, too. Which is why Napoleon, like Joan of Arc and the Six Nations rugby tournament, provokes outbursts of acute Anglophobia in French patriots. When the Empereur died, there were Frenchmen who claimed that he had been murdered in a cunning British poisoned-wallpaper plot, even though all the medical evidence pointed to a hereditary disease.

  And the fervour lives on today. In March 2008, when former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin sold his collection of Bonapartist books and documents (modestly catalogued as ‘The Imperial Library’), the Parisian auction room was crowded with bidders and spectators. Books that had belonged to ‘His Majesty the Emperor’, as the supposedly Republican auctioneers referred to Napoleon, sold like hot croissants, and an autograph went for 28,000 euros.

  But one of the most emotive moments came when a British anti-Bonaparte pamphlet was snapped up by the Musée Napoléon Premier in Fontainebleau, just south of Paris. No doubt celebrating that it hadn’t fallen into the hands of the enemy, spectators cheered and shouted, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  This continu
ing hero worship is understandable. In his few short years as military dictator and then self-appointed Emperor of France, Napoleon won more battles than France had done for centuries, and has done since. At one point, he had annexed more of Europe than Hitler ever managed with his aeroplanes and Panzer tanks. And Bonaparte wasn’t just a warmonger – he balanced France’s disastrous finances and almost personally wrote the law books still used in modern French courts. He even created one of the nation’s proudest cultural traditions – the maison de tolérance, or legal, state-regulated brothel.

  His only real mistake was to scare the Brits into taking him prisoner and exiling him on the most godforsaken island in their empire – alone and vulnerable to attack by fiendish wallpaper poisoners …

  The not-so-little corporal

  There are two myths about Napoleon that get in the way of people’s judgements of who he was and what he achieved.

  Numéro un, he was a poor prole from Corsica who made it good. Actually, no: he was born into the island’s aristocracy. Of course, as far as a Parisian marquis was concerned, the noblest Corsican was about as aristocratic as a chamber pot, but Napoleon came from a privileged background, and would never have made it to military academy otherwise.

  Numéro deux, he was a midget. Wrong again: Napoleon was just over five feet six inches or 168 centimetres tall, a respectable height for the times. Stories of his extreme shortness seem to come from Englishmen wanting to throw doubts on his masculinity, and from a mistake by the doctor who performed his autopsy – an incompetent French quack who got the metric-to-inch conversion wrong.

  So let’s look at the facts about the man who was to be both France’s most successful ruler since Charlemagne, and then its most spectacular failure.

  Napoleon’s family, the Buonapartes, came to Corsica from Italy in the twelfth century. An ancestor of his called Ugo is listed in the army of Frederick the One-Eyed, Duke of Swabia, who invaded Tuscany in 1122. Ugo’s nephew later became one of the ruling councillors of Florence. The Corsican branch of the family had very little money, however, and rather than any flashiness of lifestyle, their rank was reflected in the size of their houses and their prominent position in society. Napoleon’s grandfather, for instance, served the island as Inspector General of Roads and Bridges, an enviable post because Corsica had almost none of either.

  When King Louis XV of France bought Corsica from the Italians in 1768, Napoleon’s father Carlo was one of the leaders of the short-lived resistance campaign, and fought the French invaders in the maquis, accompanied by his pregnant wife Letizia. When she gave birth on 15 August 1769, they decided to name their son Napoleone after an uncle who had died in the struggle for independence. Yes, France’s future national hero was born an anti-French guerrilla.

  Louis XV’s men soon gained full possession of Corsica, and instead of punishing the resistance fighters, the King set about winning over the most influential locals by offering them membership of France’s aristocracy. Families only had to prove that they had lived on the island for 200 years, and had noble ancestry – which was easy for Carlo Buonaparte, who got his Tuscan cousins to vouch for him. As soon as his application was accepted, Carlo began to sport a powdered wig and silk stockings, and bought a library of 1,000 books as if to prove his poshness, trappings which he could now afford because, like all French aristocrats, he was exempt from taxation.

  Another privilege, of even greater consequence to the young Napoleone, was that the children of French aristocrats could go free of charge to France’s most prestigious schools. And in May 1779, the nine-year-old took up a scholarship to the military academy in Brienne, in the Champagne countryside.

  His fighting instincts were tested as soon as he arrived, because as a weedy, dark-skinned, non-paying student with a coarse provincial accent, he instantly became something of a social outcast. He adapted well, though – he lost the telltale accent and even began to develop his talents as an invader by annexing other boys’ spaces in the college’s garden. Every student was allocated an area to cultivate, but not all of them could be bothered, so Napoleone took over their land, erected a defensive palisade and declared it his territory. When some students on an adjoining plot accidentally damaged Napoleone’s trellis, he attacked the perpetrators with a hoe and sent them running for cover. The pattern for his future military behaviour was set in a vegetable patch.

  When, at the age of twelve, Napoleone decided that he wanted to join the navy, he began sleeping in a hammock. A school inspector approved of his choice: ‘He is very bad at dancing and drawing. He will make an excellent sailor.’ And when, in 1783, Britain and France lapsed into a temporary peace, he applied to transfer to an English naval college, giving rise to a fascinating historical possibility – the Corsican serving under Nelson at Trafalgar (‘Kiss me, Napoleon’), or even becoming the country’s military dictator and forcing Queen Victoria to win the throne as a counter-revolutionary warrior.

  But it was not to be. Napoleone Buonaparte was offered a place at the crack École militaire, and left Brienne for Paris, a self-confident teenager with a French name, Napoléon Bonaparte (he’d conveniently lost the Italian spellings), excellent skills in mathematics and gardening, and atrocious grammar. It was just five years before the Revolution, and he was off to join the King’s army.

  At the École militaire, the new Corsican student showed even more of the belligerence that had won him respect in the Brienne vegetable garden. During a drill exercise one day, he made a mistake and was rapped on the knuckles. Hitting students was against regulations, and Napoleon launched his rifle at the instructor’s head, swearing that he would never attend a lesson with him again. Judging that an attitude like this might be useful in battle, the school simply found him a new instructor.

  And Napoleon was punished, but not expelled, for his most serious breach of discipline. During a balloon display by the pioneer aviator Blanchard (of whom more later), Napoleon got impatient because take-off was delayed by unfavourable winds,* and eventually took matters into his own hands, cutting through the ropes with a knife and sending poor Blanchard floating away out of control. Blanchard survived, only to die falling from another balloon a few years later.

  In 1785, Napoleon graduated from the École (in only one year instead of the standard two), and because there were no places in the navy, accepted a post as an artillery officer, a job that would enable him to use his mathematics and get aggression out of his system by firing large lumps of metal at people. Napoleon was sixteen and his military career was beginning in earnest. He received his commission from Louis XVI in person, the man he would soon (albeit briefly) replace on the throne of France.

  Napoleon got himself posted in Valence in southern France and as well as attending lectures on cannonball trajectories, started reading history books. One of his favourites was a history of England from the Roman invasion to the present day, which stopped early so that French readers wouldn’t be traumatized by all of Marlborough’s famous victories against the army of Louis XIV. (This was nothing unusual – the textbooks Napoleon had studied at Brienne omitted to mention any English victories during the Hundred Years War, claiming that Agincourt and Crécy were won by Gascons – that is, other Frenchmen.)

  The conclusion Napoleon drew from his favourite history book was a typical one for the time – like many Frenchmen just before the Revolution, he came to admire Britain’s constitutional monarchy and made notes to this effect, writing that if the British King abuses ‘his great power to commit injustice, the cries of the nation grow to a thunder, and the King backs down’. He decided that this might be a good thing for Louis XVI’s regime to think about.

  In the event, of course, Louis did no such thing, and the Revolution began, with the new National Assembly’s laws hitting straight at Napoleon’s privileges. Under royal rule, his family hadn’t paid tax, and his siblings were getting a free education at the poshest schools.

  Napoleon could have been forgiven for becoming a Royalist,
but he embraced the Revolution in its initial, moderate form and pledged allegiance to the new state. He even congratulated people who bought up houses that had been confiscated from aristocrats and the clergy – safe in the knowledge, of course, that no one in Corsica would dare try the same thing with his own family’s property for fear of provoking a vendetta.

  He did feel the need to be closer to home, however, and in 1791 he went to Corsica and put himself forward to be elected leader of the local Garde nationale, the voters being the guards themselves. In order to guarantee that the electorate got it right, he billeted 200 guardsmen in his mother’s house, where they were fed on Mama’s best home cooking. He also had one of the election officials kidnapped, and got a gang of 500-odd guardsmen to intimidate his main opponent during a campaign speech. He was only twenty-two, but he had already learned to combine his Corsican heritage with his military training, a terrifyingly efficient mix that he would soon be trying out on the rest of Europe.

  A chance to bash the Brits

  It was only during the Terreur that Napoleon became disenchanted with the direction the Revolution was taking, and he was highly relieved when France went to war with Britain in 1793. At last, he was going to get the chance to put everything he had learned in artillery class to practical use against some uppity foreigners.

  On 27 August, the port of Toulon rebelled against the Revolutionary government, tore down its tricolour and beckoned in some British and Spanish ships that happened to be sailing nearby. Napoleon begged to be allowed to go and evict the invaders, even if they had been invited in. Luckily for him, the local artillery commander had recently been wounded, and Napoleon was given the job of bombarding the ships in the harbour.