1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Their affair became highly public, but old Sir William was just as star-struck as Emma with their famous guest, and didn’t seem to mind that his wife was receiving broadsides under his own roof.

  Nelson’s good luck was all the more galling for poor Napoleon back in Egypt, because his defeat at Aboukir had had a highly embarrassing side effect. The French fleet had been Napoleon’s only means of communication with France, and alongside his official despatches he had sent personal letters, including some very private ones to Josephine.

  While Napoleon was away, she had been getting friendly with a dashing cavalry officer who, instead of lecturing her on the art of warfare and reading her passages from books on alpine geography, preferred to tell jokes and show off his riding skills, as it were.

  Nelson was now able to intercept French communications easily, and one of the treasures he captured in late 1798 was a lovelorn letter from Napoleon about the pain of Josephine’s affair (although it no doubt also contained a few lines on the topography of the Nile Delta). Forgetting for once the tradition of honour amongst officers, Nelson sent the letter home to be published in the London newspapers. The story was soon picked up in Paris and Napoleon suddenly found himself living every Frenchman’s nightmare – he was the cocu, the guy whose wife was getting it elsewhere.

  Predictably, Napoleon immediately began riding around Cairo in the company of the pretty blonde wife of one of his infantry officers. He had to show Paris that if his marriage had hit a rocky patch, it wasn’t because of his lack of virility.*

  The Brits didn’t restrict themselves to making fun of Napoleon’s love troubles, though, and launched a propaganda offensive about the wimpish campaign that Napoleon was carrying out in Egypt. Instead of surging straight across the desert to overrun the surrounding countries and dig a canal through to the Red Sea (an idea that had been doing the rounds for quite a while), the Frenchman was getting scientists to crawl inside pyramids and dig up old heaps of stone like that ridiculous Sphinx thingy. He even had artists copying out hieroglyphs, as if a few sideways-walking pharaohs and gods with cats’ heads might be of any military use. Arty-farty French nonsense, what?

  The British government also persuaded Turkey to declare war on France, and suddenly Napoleon had a serious opponent in the desert. His planned stroll across the Middle East had turned into a hellish, flies-in-the-wine, sand-in-the-sandwiches slog across the desert, pursued by Turks who combined the fury of the medieval Crusades with the might of modern (British-subsidized) military technology. Eventually giving up, Napoleon sneaked home on a little frigate in August 1799, leaving his army to fend for itself.

  Napoleon gets stoned

  This ignominious exit must have hurt, but worse was to come.

  The Brits realized that Napoleon had really cared about Egypt. He had had windmills built there and founded a large hospital. He had started a programme to combat the bubonic plague, which was still at epidemic levels in the country. And of course he had launched a campaign to record and understand ancient Egyptian culture. One of the key finds his scientists made was the Rosetta Stone. This was a vital lump of (as its name suggests) stone, inscribed in around 200 BC with a text in three scripts: Greek, Demotic (an Arab-like alphabet for writing ancient Egyptian) and hieroglyphs.

  The 760-kilo slab of granite-like rock was found by French soldiers while they were building a fort to defend themselves against the British in the Nile Basin. Its importance as a tool for translating hieroglyphs was immediately recognized by Napoleon’s scientists, which was why, when the Brits invaded Egypt and kicked out the remaining French troops, they demanded that the stone be sent back to its rightful home, the British Museum (at that time, it never occurred to anyone that the rightful home of an ancient artefact was where it was originally found). The French were so incensed that they threatened to burn all the priceless ancient manuscripts in the Alexandria Library if they weren’t allowed to leave with their treasures, casting something of a shadow on their devotion to ancient culture. But according to a British scholar called Edward Clarke, the French were trying to smuggle the stone out of Egypt when he and some colleagues caught up with them in a Cairo back street* and appropriated it. The huge trophy was escorted back to London, where someone at the museum duly defaced it by painting on two inscriptions – ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’. Now no one could doubt its Britishness.

  A foggy day in Paris town

  Napoleon’s excursion to Egypt may have ended in failure, but back in Paris things were looking promising. In his absence, France had gone down the toilette, and it was now at war not only with Britain and Turkey but also with Russia, Austria and Nelson’s friend the King of Naples. France had lost all the territory Napoleon had gained in Italy, as well as its possessions in Holland and Switzerland. And the Royalists were feeling cocky enough to announce the imminent arrival in Paris of London’s most prominent French exile, King Louis XVIII.

  The returning General Bonaparte saw only one solution to the nation’s troubles: himself. Along with two political nobodies called Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès and Pierre-Roger Ducros, whom he quickly discarded afterwards, Napoleon organized a coup, the so-called Coup d’état du 18 brumaire, this being the Revolutionary Calendar date for 9 November 1799. It was an apt name – brumaire comes from the French word for mist, brume, and that Saturday was apparently very foggy.

  First, Napoleon went to the Orangerie to try and persuade Parliament into accepting him as their leader (or First Consul), but the statesmen howled the uncouth young soldier down. He was, after all, still a fresh-faced thirty-year-old. So, no doubt recalling his more modest campaign to become head of the Corsican branch of the Garde nationale, he pulled out his trump card – a troop of soldiers with fixed bayonets – and was delighted to see the politicians jump out of the windows of the Orangerie and flee through the Tuileries gardens. He had effectively taken power.

  Napoleon promptly designed himself a new uniform (a long red velvet jacket with gold buttons and braid, over very fetching tight white trousers with swirling gold embroidery down the thighs) and an outfit for his servants (pale blue with silver lace) and on 17 February 1800 he moved into Louis XVI’s old apartments in the Tuileries Palace.

  One of his first acts was to erect a gallery of sculptures which included Alexander the Great, Caesar, Hannibal, George Washington and – ominously, perhaps – Britain’s great general, the Duke of Marlborough.

  Like all efficient military dictators, Napoleon then got himself voted leader for life and began to complain about his wife’s reputation for extravagance. Josephine, who had dumped the cavalry officer in the light of her husband’s increased social status, was a real fashion victim and soon became notorious for her dressmakers’ bills. She did, however, make a concession. Given that hubby was now in public office, she gave up wearing the low-cut, almost transparent, dresses that she and her circle had been fond of wearing, in favour of more prim, opaque styles. She also exchanged partying for gardening, and it is a little-known fact that she is responsible for a revolution of her own, in horticulture. At the time, the rose (Josephine’s real name, of course) was a small, short-lived and unfashionable bloom. Wanting to improve its image, she began to create hybrid varieties, and eventually crossed the Provence and China roses to produce the Tea rose, a repeat-flowering variety. This was developed further by the Victorians to produce the Hybrid Perpetual, the basis for most garden roses today. In short, the much-maligned Josephine’s work in the garden was to prove just as long-lasting as her husband’s future achievements with law books.

  Napoleon got busy reforming his new country. He was a total control freak, and would spend his days (when he was not off battling the Austrians, Italians, Dutch, Poles, Brits, Germans and Russians) making laws on every aspect of French life. Between 1800 and 1810, he oversaw the drafting and implementation of, amongst others, his code civil, code pénal and code du commerce, many elements of which are still a
pplied in modern French courtrooms. He set up a state education system, including a university, law schools and the École normale supérieure, the teacher-training college that produces France’s most elitist academics today. And he introduced an efficient, and fair, system of taxation that soon balanced the country’s accounts. In this he was helped by the cash he got from selling off what he considered the least important item in his real-estate portfolio, Louisiana.*

  Napoleon’s sense of democracy was a product of the Revolution, but he also helped the upper classes to prosper, allowing the bourgeoisie to get rich by buying up land and pretending to be aristos. He actually created a new aristocracy of 1,000 barons, 400 counts, 32 dukes and 3 princes, and even granted the émigrés an amnesty, permitting them to return to Paris society after their hard years of exile in England and elsewhere as dancing teachers, gigolos and eaters of horses’ willies. Some 40,000 families returned.

  All of which was a prelude to the obvious next step – if the country was now overflowing with new and old aristocracy, and Napoleon was its leader for life, shouldn’t he have the poshest title of all? Which was why in 1804, at the ripe old age of thirty-five, he appointed himself Emperor of France. The new uniform? White silk with a short purple cape embroidered with the emblem he chose for himself – the bee, a motif dating back to the Franks, a royal dynasty before Louis XVI’s family, the Capets, had taken power.

  No one except the snootiest returned aristos seemed to mind this self-elevation. By now, everybody in France loved Napoleon, especially the men, the biggest beneficiaries of his code civil, which was more egalitarian than the old regime’s laws, but a disaster for women. They couldn’t sign contracts or vote, and all education beyond primary school was for boys only – Napoleon thought that ‘young women are best educated by their mothers.’ The code civil also decreed that a wife couldn’t work without her husband’s permission, and even then he would receive her salary. As another of Napoleon’s sexist maxims expressed it: ‘If there is one thing that isn’t French, it’s that a woman should be able to do as she pleases.’

  Men, on the other hand, needed to be free, which was why the Emperor cooked up some highly unfair laws on adultery. He decreed that a wife could only sue for divorce if her husband kept a mistress in an apartment that he rented for her – just having sex with another woman was fine. The wife, of course, had to reserve her favours for hubby, or risk being thrown out of the house (even if it was hers when they got married). And if a man had sex with a prostitute, that wasn’t adultery at all – it was human nature. Napoleon thought that ‘prostitutes are a necessity. Without them, men would attack respectable women in the street,’ which was why he legalized prostitution. Prostitutes had to be registered and undergo regular health inspections, and if they obeyed these rules they could work legally in a quaint-sounding maison de tolérance or brothel. These institutions could be set up in any town or city, their only concession to public modesty being that the windows should be shuttered so that passers-by and neighbours wouldn’t be shocked by what went on inside – hence the brothel’s other name, maison close.

  Napoleon’s ambition was to have them installed all over his empire, which, he hoped, would soon include Britain. Not that he was a regular client of prostitutes, though he had lost his virginity to one, whom he ‘got talking to while out walking one evening’. No, his reasoning was that venereal disease was a real headache (if that’s not a mixed metaphor) for his generals – syphilis and other STDs could ravage a campaigning army, especially if, like Napoleon’s, it was usually trailed by a horde of female ‘camp followers’ providing services for any soldier who had money, loot or a bed for the night. Getting prostitutes registered and health-checked was therefore part of Napoleon’s military strategy. Marching wasn’t the only thing an army did on its stomach.

  Angleterre, here I come

  It was of course the Brits who would put an end to Napoleon’s imperial idyll of law-making and institutionalized sexism, but like so much in French history, the debacle to come was all France’s own fault.

  In 1802, Napoleon had persuaded the British that he sincerely wanted peace. He wrote a personal letter to King George III saying so. Far from believing that it had been written by a tree, the temporarily sane King called the Empereur a Corsican tyrant and refused to reply. But after the Prime Minister, William Pitt, resigned from office, Britain’s anti-war campaigners got the upper hand, and in the same year France and Britain signed a treaty, the Peace of Amiens, which included an exchange of captured territories and even – a huge political concession – an agreement whereby George III crossed ‘King of France’ off the long list of the British monarch’s historic titles. Napoleon was so pleased that he put a bust of his old English tormentor Nelson on his dressing table.

  Opinions differ as to whether Napoleon was sincere about peace or, like Hitler in 1938, just wanted a breathing space to get himself ready for war. In fact, it seems that neither side was playing things entirely straight. The Brits failed to honour parts of the peace treaty, including the promised evacuation of Alexandria, and the British press waged a campaign of vicious anti-Napoleon propaganda. Cartoons appeared showing him as a rotund dwarf; racist allegations were made about the dark hue of his skin; and French-language émigré newspapers in London regaled their readers with rumours about Napoleon’s impotency and, illogically, his habit of sleeping with Josephine’s daughter from her first marriage.

  It was now that Napoleon became completely obsessed with crushing Britain, and conceived an ambitious two-pronged campaign – both parts of which were to fail spectacularly.

  Prong one: he would mount a serious invasion attempt, and predicted that he would be received like a new William of Orange – perhaps forgetting that William had invaded England to do away with a pro-French King, James II.

  He also boasted that England would become just another French island like Corsica or Oléron. For those who don’t know it, Oléron is a 25-kilometre-long sandbank off the west coast of France, and never possessed a fleet of several hundred warships crewed by rabidly anti-French sailors like Admiral Nelson.

  The Empereur’s blood was up, and his first concrete move was to establish an immense base for his invasion force in Boulogne, just opposite the White Cliffs of Dover. Here, in full view of the English (on a sunny day, of course) he began to amass troops, and eventually had 200,000 men languishing by the seaside, mugging up on English irregular verbs and demanding to know when they were going to be let loose in the pubs just a few kilometres north. To placate them, Napoleon made frequent morale-boosting visits to the camp, handing out campaign medals before any actual campaigning had been done, and even getting the men to erect a rather presumptuous triumphal column.

  Meanwhile, Napoleon was making the plans that inspired the cartoon included at the beginning of this chapter. An engineer called Albert Mathieu really did suggest a secret road tunnel running under the Channel, and a contemporary drawing shows horse carriages travelling through it, breathing air supplied by chimneys sticking up out of the water – which would have been a bit of a giveaway, and might have attracted the unwelcome attention of British warships. One bomb down the chimney and Napoleon’s carriage would have got rather wet, which was probably why he rejected Mathieu’s project as unrealistic. Apart from anything else, in the drawing the sea looks about 4 metres deep, and Napoleon knew they would have to dig a bit deeper than that.

  He wasn’t against new methods of warfare, though, and appointed a woman called Sophie Blanchard his Chief Air Minister of Ballooning. She was the wife of the man whose balloon Napoleon had cut adrift in his École militaire days, and had since made a name for herself as a kind of artiste of the sky, putting on shows that included dropping fireworks from the air and throwing dogs out of her balloon (equipped with parachutes, of course). Napoleon consulted Madame Blanchard on the feasibility of sending troops across the Channel in balloons, but she told him that the winds would be too unreliable to take them across. She kne
w all about the dangers of primitive air travel, and, like her husband, was to die in a flying accident, after fireworks set light to her balloon.

  A piece of new technology that Napoleon was probably also wise to turn down was the submarine. An American called Robert Fulton, who was living in Paris, had offered to build the French a submarine for use against the all-powerful British fleet, ‘a machine which flatters me with much hope of being able to annihilate their navy’, Fulton said. There was a precedent for such an attack. In 1776, an American pedal-powered submarine called the Turtle had attempted to drill a hole in a British warship in New York harbour, and had come close to succeeding. Fulton carried out tests with his own prototype, which was capable of reaching depths of 7 metres and an underwater speed of 4 knots, but every time he went near a British ship, it saw him and sailed away. The French naval minister is reported to have told Fulton, ‘Go away, monsieur. Your invention is perfect for the Algerians or pirates, but we have not yet abandoned the sea.’

  Instead, Napoleon decided to develop his own war machines, and asked for public sponsorship to help him build a fleet of invasion barges capable of carrying 110 men each, precursors to the ones that would cross the Channel in the other direction in 1944. And the ‘your name here for only 20,000 francs’ campaign was very effective, unlike the barges themselves. When, against the advice of his navy, Napoleon ordered a test run in choppy seas, several of the vessels sank, causing many deaths and denting morale so much that the story had to be hushed up.

  On the other side of the Channel, the Brits were taking the threat of an invasion very seriously. Fortifications were built and public panic was taking hold. One English drawing of the time depicts a totally unrealistic French floating castle, supposedly able to carry 60,000 men and 600 cannons. Even the poet Wordsworth, who initially supported the Revolution, now turned against France, writing in his Prelude: