1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence

  For one of conquest, losing sight of all

  Which they had struggled for …

  Harsh and realistic words from a Romantic poet better known for his poems about clouds and daffodils.

  Everyone knew, though, that no floating castles or invasion barges were coming anywhere near Dover as long as the British fleet reigned supreme on the seas – which was where Napoleon needed one of his cunning tactical schemes. So he decided to send his two fleets, based in Brest and Toulon (the latter being bolstered by Spanish ships), across the Atlantic to make the Brits think he was planning something in the West Indies – a massive rum festival, perhaps. Then, as soon as all his ships had met up, they would speed back to Europe to support the Channel invasion force and destroy any British ships that hadn’t been lured away on the wild-goose chase to the Caribbean.

  It couldn’t fail, n’est-ce pas?

  Meet you in Trafalgar

  In January 1805, the scheme was set in motion, and the southern French fleet slipped out to sea from Toulon. It was commanded by one Admiral Pierre-Charles-Silvestre de Villeneuve, an aristocrat turned pro-revolutionary with a decidedly un-Napoleonic trait – caution.

  Nelson, who had been ordered to keep a watch on Villeneuve, set off in pursuit but then, in an error of judgement that would haunt him for the ten remaining months of his life, lost the French fleet entirely. He hunted Villeneuve from Sardinia to Egypt, from Naples to Cadiz, going mad with frustration that his instincts had failed him and that no one had seen any sign of a French sail.

  The letters and despatches he wrote during the chase paint a vivid picture of the national hero floundering across the globe, unable to find anyone to fight. ‘I am very, very miserable,’ he wrote, and: ‘O French fleet, if I can but once get up with you, I’ll make you pay dearly for all that you have made me suffer.’ He didn’t even take time to stock up with fresh supplies: ‘Salt beef and the French fleet is far preferable to roast beef and Champagne without them.’ He finally returned to Portsmouth in defeat, furious that his cannons had remained unfired.

  In fact, though, he had nearly caught up with Villeneuve. As well as scouring practically the whole Med, Nelson had also made a search of the Caribbean, and spooked the over-cautious French admiral into returning to Cadiz instead of making for the Channel as Napoleon had ordered him to do.

  In September, Nelson heard the news that the Franco-Spanish fleet was back in Cadiz, and sailed off at once in the optimistically named Victory. He was a veritable torpedo launched at Napoleon’s navy.

  With a massive, all-important battle at last a certainty, Nelson seems to have attained a fatalistic serenity. On hearing that Villeneuve had finally left Cadiz to head for the Channel and was now vulnerable to attack, the Admiral made preparations for the heroic death of everyone in his fleet, encouraging his men to write last letters home, and doing the same himself. ‘My mind is calm,’ Nelson wrote, ‘and I have only to think of destroying our inveterate foe.’ As the communications ship was sailing away from Victory carrying the letters, a coxswain appeared on deck looking agitated. Nelson asked why. When he was told that the man had not got his letter into the mail sack on time, the Admiral gave the order to recall the ship: ‘Who knows that he may not fall in action tomorrow. His letter shall go with the rest.’ Like Napoleon, he was a leader who understood that men fight better if they know they are respected.

  Nelson formulated his battle plan: he would sail at the Franco-Spanish fleet at right angles and smash its line in two, from the centre. It was as unconventional as his tactics at the Nile, and involved considerable personal risk to Nelson himself – his would be one of the first ships into action, and would come into French cannon range long before the Victory could bring its guns to bear.

  But as he sailed into battle on 21 October 1805 just off the Cape of Trafalgar, about 40 kilometres along the coast from Cadiz, he retained his deadly cool.

  ‘I will now amuse the fleet with a signal,’ he announced, and dictated: ‘Nelson confides that every man will do his duty’ – ‘confides’ here meaning ‘is confident that’ – a message of trust from the Admiral to his men.

  When an officer suggested making it more official-sounding by putting ‘England’, Nelson accepted, but then got a little irritated when the signaller asked whether he could send ‘expects’, because ‘confides’ would have to be spelt out, whereas there was a single flag for ‘expects’. Nelson told him to get on with it, because he had other signals to send before the cannonballs started flying, and his famous message was quickly broadcast to the fleet in its edited version.

  Things now got very sticky for Victory. It was the fastest ship in the fleet and sailed in first, taking a full forty minutes of punishment from the French flagship, the Bucentaure, without replying. As was the custom, Nelson and his officers simply stood on deck watching the cannons puff and the lumps of hot metal fly towards them. It would have been dishonourable to do anything else. The Admiral’s secretary was killed, as was his replacement, but the ship held its course despite ripped sails, shattered woodwork and tumbling sailors.

  Soon, though, it was the crew of Bucentaure that was panicking, as Victory headed steadfastly for its stern. The French knew that unlike their ships, which had most of their guns aiming high to topple masts and disable an enemy at a distance, Nelson liked to set his cannons low, to get up close and fire short-range broadsides right into the body of ship.

  Sure enough, as Victory swung astern of the Bucentaure – so near that its yardarms grazed the French ship – Nelson gave the order to light the fuses. At last, Victory unleashed its firepower. The cannons had been loaded with regular cannonballs as well as chainshot – two or more balls linked by chains – and musket rounds. From a range of just a few metres, this varied collection of British projectiles smashed through the length of the Bucentaure’s gun deck, doing horrific damage. Each chainshot decapitated dozens of French gunners as it flew by, and many others were killed just by the shockwave of passing cannonballs. It is estimated that some 400 men were killed in that first salvo, almost a quarter of all Franco-Spanish deaths in the battle. Villeneuve could be in no doubt about what his fleet was in for.

  Nelson didn’t stop there. Pulling alongside a second French ship, the Redoutable, he fired point-blank into that one, too. A hellish close-range battle between the two interlocked ships began, as they exchanged cannon fire into each other’s hulls and masts, while Nelson and his right-hand man, Captain Sir Thomas Hardy, stayed on deck discussing strategy, despite the fact that French musketeers were posted in the rigging almost directly above them. Their one concession to the need for self-defence was to walk back and forth on the far side of the ship, even though this took them only fifteen or twenty metres from the Redoutable’s side.

  Sure enough, a musket shot from above hit Nelson in the shoulder. Captain Hardy noticed that he was talking to himself, and turned back to see Nelson fall to his knees, then collapse flat out.

  ‘Doctor, I am gone,’ the Admiral told the surgeon, and this time he was right. The bullet had passed through his lung and smashed his spine.

  Above decks, the battle raged on for four hours, with all the British ships adopting similarly destructive tactics, and Nelson died just before the Franco-Spanish fleet surrendered. As everyone knows, shortly before expiring, he asked the bald, portly Sir Thomas to kiss him – which he did, on Nelson’s battle-scarred forehead. The Admiral’s very last words were not ‘kiss me, Hardy’ though. They were probably ‘drink drink, fan fan, rub rub’ – gasped requests for water, more air, and for the doctor to massage his chest to relieve the pain. But for obvious historical reasons, what sound like a pop star’s demands for a groupie to do obscene things to him have been replaced by the phrase Nelson kept repeating on that surgeon’s table, ‘Thank God I have done my duty.’

  That he certainly had. Eighteen French and Spanish ships had been captured and one destroyed, and yet agai
n Napoleon’s great invasion plans had been sunk. There was no way those French barges were going to risk setting out across the Channel now.

  Buy French? Non merci!

  The second prong of Napoleon’s anti-British toasting fork was a trade embargo that he called his Blocus continental. After the failure of his invasion, as of 1806, he set about trying to force all the countries where he had troops or influence to stop doing business with the Brits. In this he would be helped by his brothers – Louis, whom he had made King of Holland, Joseph, King of Spain, and Jérôme of Westphalia – as well as allies or occupying armies in Russia, Poland, Italy and Denmark.

  Forbidding all British imports, and even confiscating any ship that had docked in Britain before arriving in the French Empire, Napoleon wanted to put a clamp on the artery of Britain’s wealth – foreign trade – and bankrupt his enemy into submission.

  It was a bold plan, and quickly started to have an effect. Between 1806 and 1808, Britain’s exports dropped by 12 per cent, and imports of raw cotton, vital for the new mills clattering away in the North of England, fell by a terrifying 80 per cent, causing widespread unemployment. But there was a fatal flaw in Napoleon’s scheme. The Bostonians might have started a revolution because of high-priced English tea, but most people actually wanted to do business with the Brits. Their cotton and steel were amongst the best and cheapest in the world. Their scissors and razors were highly sought after – Napoleon himself shaved with a British blade. Chocolate, spices, sugar, rum and tobacco all had their European addicts, and Britain was their dealer of choice.

  The result was that soon everyone was ignoring Napoleon’s orders. Smugglers set up huge warehouses in Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily, Greece and Heligoland (a group of islands just off the northwest coast of Germany), and with the British fleet usually willing to lend a hand as bodyguards, the traffickers were able to open up supply lines as regular and reliable as before the blockade, even into France itself, where soldiers often took bribes to escort smuggled goods past the customs men. The racket was so organized that a German company even started selling the bigger smugglers insurance against loss of their cargoes.

  As the Anglo-Saxons say, the customer is always right, and even Napoleon had to admit defeat in the face of overwhelming market forces.

  But he seems to have given a French shrug of the shoulders at this setback, because he began to plan another scheme to beat the treacherous Anglais.

  And this one was sure to work …

  * This impatience and misjudgement of the wind was to scupper Napoleon’s British invasion plans some twenty years later.

  * As if to prove Vergniaud right, he was guillotined at the height of the Terreur.

  * The Louvre had been transformed into a national museum in 1793.

  * There is a remarkable historic parallel with President Sarkozy, who is often compared to Napoleon because of his height and need to be in constant control. When Sarko’s second wife, Cécilia, was reported to be having an affair, news was immediately leaked that he was seeing rather a lot of a beautiful French journalist.

  * Though you should never believe what someone called Clarke tells you about what he’s been up to in a back street.

  * Though to see how big a mistake that was in the long run, see Chapter 13.

  18

  Wellington Puts the Boot in on Boney

  As Londoners and Parisians know, Anglo-French history is all about railway stations. In 1805, rail passenger travel was still a couple of decades away, but the score for future station names was 1–0 to France. The French already had Austerlitz (Paris’s only mainline station named after a battle), a victory won by Napoleon six weeks after the defeat of the French fleet at Trafalgar, whereas the Brits were a long way from Waterloo.

  Napoleon was feeling fairly confident. Nelson might have destroyed or stolen most of his ships, but his armies ruled dry land. And Britain didn’t have a land-based Nelson, did it?

  No, but (unfortunately for Napoleon) it soon would have – a certain Arthur Wellesley, former Irish MP and ex-Governor of Mysore in India. Wellesley was, of course, the future Duke of Wellington. He had returned home to England in 1805, coincidentally stopping off at the rocky island of St Helena and staying in a house that would soon have a very famous French guest, and had taken part in the Anglo-Austro-Russian campaign that foundered at Austerlitz.

  At the end of 1805, Wellesley’s career was at a low, but he was about to pick himself up and give London the railway station name that the French would never forget.

  From Russia without love

  It wasn’t until 1808 that Wellesley started to give Napoleon headaches.

  The Empereur had recently installed his elder brother Joseph as King of Spain, and Wellesley was sent there to stir up revolt. Napoleon was busy occupying Berlin and Warsaw, but was obliged to come all the way down to Spain to chase the irksome Brits out of his brother’s kingdom. The French army forced the invaders to re-embark for the UK, but the troublemaker Wellesley would soon be back.

  Meanwhile, Napoleon gave in to two distractions from his ultimate aim of ending British interference in his affairs. First, he decided that, as an emperor, he needed a royal wife. He therefore walled up the doorway connecting his room to Josephine’s and, as if this wasn’t enough of a hint, explained to her that he was granting himself a divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences in social status. There was nothing poor Josephine could do except go out to her country house (which she got in the divorce settlement) and prune her roses.

  In a beautiful piece of historical irony, Napoleon set his sights on Marie-Louise, daughter of the Austrian Emperor Franz II and a grandniece of Marie-Antoinette. Yes, just fifteen years after France had guillotined its Austrian queen, it was getting a new one. Napoleon was in such a hurry to marry Marie-Louise that he had the ceremony performed by proxy and then, when she arrived in France by carriage, rode out to meet her and insisted on having sex immediately. The eighteen-year-old apparently liked the rough touch, because afterwards she told him, ‘You can do it again if you want.’ Although a cynic might say that this was Napoleon’s version of events, and how do we know she didn’t say, ‘Is that it, then?’ And an even crueller cynic might go further and say that even if she did say, ‘You can do it again if you want’, it would imply that the first time was rather brief. But those are just typical Anglo remarks, and perhaps it is kinder to conclude that the new Empress of France was not unhappy to be married to the dashing forty-year-old general. After all, she could have ended up with an ancient madman like George III. And just a year later, she gave birth to a son, whom Napoleon named Napoleon (of course – hadn’t France just had a series of Louis?). As a christening present the baby was given Rome. Not a model or a picture, but the city itself, of which Napoleon Junior was immediately crowned king.

  Napoleon’s other, and far more destructive, distraction was Russia. As we now know, this was a big mistake, but at the time it seemed like a very good idea indeed. Russia was, after all, a vast empire in itself, and ruled by a tsar who had an army about the same size as Napoleon’s – great odds to a gambler like the Empereur. And the French didn’t go in alone – all told, the invading army consisted of over half a million soldiers from all the countries of Napoleon’s empire, supported by a 10-kilometre-long wagon train of supplies that included 28 million bottles of wine and 2 million bottles of brandy. It was going to be the biggest party ever.

  In the event, of course, the party was well and truly pooped. Everywhere Napoleon went, the Russians left a trail of destruction, and there’s just no fun in conquering a wasteland – no vodka for the troops to steal, no icons to send back to the Louvre. And when he occupied Moscow, the Russians simply set fire to it. Napoleon then made the tactical error of trying to dash back to France ahead of the winter, and his Grande Armée was soon transformed into a shivering mass of frostbitten extremities, its once glorious soldiers reduced to disembowelling horses so that they could curl up inside the rib cage an
d keep warm. Of his half a million men, only about 25,000 made it back to France. Not all the others were dead – some 100,000 had been taken prisoner, and German and Austrian troops simply stopped off on the way back west. But it was a catastrophic defeat.

  Strangely, Napoleon blamed it on England. ‘If the Anglais had left me alone,’ he said as he rode in a sleigh towards Warsaw, ‘I would have lived in peace.’ Whether this was true or not, peace was something he would rarely enjoy again. Well, not in France, anyway. The Brits were planning to give him lots of peace elsewhere.

  Wellington hits the jackpot

  While things were going so horrifically for Napoleon in the east, Britain had never let up on his western weak point. By 1813 Spain and Portugal were as full of pasty-faced men as they would ever be in the tourist boom 150 years later. At their head, instead of a travel rep, was the Marquess of Wellington, who had been ennobled for winning a battle near Madrid.

  He was now back in Spain and, like Nelson, fired up for vengeance on the French. Even more fiery were the Spanish guerrillas, who had had enough of their French King Joseph and were doing all kinds of unpleasant things to any French soldiers and officials they could lay their hands on.

  Together, the Anglo-Spanish forces were driving Joseph’s army steadily back towards France, and on 21 June 1813 Wellington forced a showdown in the Basque country on the north coast of Spain, at a place called Vitoria.

  While Joseph was otherwise engaged with a mistress, Wellington’s men pounced on the unprepared French troops, who simply turned tail and ran. Joseph himself only just escaped – a British cavalryman fired a shot into his carriage but was then distracted by the vast amounts of booty to be had. While a few focused soldiers made sure that the French kept running, the rest fell upon Joseph’s supply train, snatching all his artillery (151 cannons) and millions of bullets, as well as more glittering prizes – the whole royal bankroll, all of Joseph’s jewellery and hundreds of women, the French officers’ ‘travelling companions’.