1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The greatest find of all, though, was a chamber pot. This had nothing to do with a lack of British toilet facilities. There were plenty of Spanish trees to pee against, and the more refined members of Wellington’s army had no doubt packed their trunks with all the necessities for a long stay abroad. No, this was a very special chamber pot, a gleaming silver receptacle belonging to King Joseph himself, and when the 14th Light Dragoons found it, they instantly adopted it as their regimental mascot. They christened it ‘The Emperor’, and no doubt had a soldierly laugh performing symbolic acts in it and imagining that they were doing those things to Napoleon himself. This chamber pot is still used to drink Champagne in the regiment’s mess today, and is placed on the drinker’s head after each toast. Like the Marlborough family’s banner (see Chapter 10 on Louis XIV), it’s an anti-French joke that has remained alive across the generations.

  Wellington was less pleased with the trophy, however, and was furious with his men for not finishing off the French while they were down. He even wrote a letter to England complaining that ‘we have the scum of the Earth as common soldiers.’ But he got a consolation prize – promotion to Field Marshal – and he needn’t have worried because, despite being loaded down with booty, his men kept pressing forward and swept Napoleon’s army right back across the border. They didn’t stop there, either, capturing Toulouse and Bordeaux, where Wellington was hailed as a liberator. It was like the days of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II all over again. Southwest France was in British hands, and Napoleon, the keen historian, must have been heartbroken.

  Camping it up on the Champs-Élysées

  Meanwhile, further north, things weren’t going any better for the Emperor – Napoleon, that is, not the chamber pot. The Prussians were marching into France, led by the wonderfully named Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. This was doubly hurtful for Napoleon. Apart from the basic fact that a vast army was coming to attack him, half the troops belonged to his father-in-law, Franz II of Austria. People tell mother-in-law jokes, but the male version can be a lot less funny.

  To make matters worse for Napoleon, one of his old sidekicks, Talleyrand, the French diplomat who negotiated the sale of Louisiana, had turned traitor and was going around Paris telling everyone that the so-called Emperor would ‘crawl under his bed and hide’.

  But Napoleon wasn’t that kind of man. He took an army out to meet Blücher and, in yet another historical coincidence, fought him at Brienne, where he had been to school. Inspired perhaps by the symbolism of it, the French troops forced the Austro-Prussians to retreat, and, despite incurring heavy losses that they couldn’t afford, kept up the fight for a full month, with Napoleon always in the thick of things, exposing himself to death as if he preferred to go out in a blaze of glory rather than ending it all with a meek surrender. At a place called Arcis-sur-Aube in the Champagne district (the birthplace of the Revolutionary leader Georges Danton), Napoleon was particularly suicidal. He galloped his horse past a time-delay shell, killing the poor animal and sending himself, singed and bruised, crashing to the ground. But he took another horse and continued his charge, as musket and cannon fire whistled around him and slashed holes in his uniform (a plain grey overcoat – the time for gold braid was past).

  Determination and suicidal bravery weren’t enough, though, because Napoleon simply didn’t have enough troops to keep up his resistance, and soon Paris was under attack from Prussians, Austrians and Russians, all of whom were in the mood for a bit of payback for all the damage that the French had done while marching through their own countries. It is something that the Parisians forget, but in March 1814 there were Cossacks camping on the Champs-Élysées, near the building site where Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe was slowly, and not very surely, being erected.

  To his credit, Napoleon did not flee into exile. Instead, he tried to talk his way out of trouble. He even attempted to soften his father-in-law’s hard imperial heart by sending him an engraving of his grandson, Napoleon Junior.

  His Eastern European enemies weren’t all set on deposing him, either. When Tsar Alexander of Russia, King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia and the Austrian Emperor’s representative Prince Schwarzenberg arrived in Paris at the end of March 1814 (the Brits were still in the southwest of France), they were open to suggestions. All they really wanted was a guarantee that Napoleon would never come back to visit them with his Grande Armée.

  The worm in France’s apple, though, was – as so often – a Frenchman. Talleyrand was acting as the nation’s self-appointed negotiator and kept the anti-Napoleon poison flowing. He was already in the pay of the Prussians, and now he sucked up to the Tsar, telling him that lasting peace would only be assured if Napoleon abdicated and the royal family returned. The Tsar wasn’t at all convinced – crossing France, he had never heard anyone say a good word for the old royal regime, and he had seen French soldiers shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ with their dying breath. But Talleyrand was an experienced and unprincipled smooth talker (hence Napoleon’s quip that he was ‘a shit in silk stockings’), and had the clincher in his pocket – a document demanding that Bonaparte abdicate in favour of Louis XVIII. All the Tsar had to do was sign, and peace would come. The Russian was an affable, easy-going man, and in the end he took the proffered pen. Napoleon’s fate was sealed.

  Unless, of course, he refused to go. He still had 60,000 loyal men at his disposal, all of them more than willing to bayonet Boches and Russkies. But the one moderating influence on Napoleon’s megalomania had always been the voice of his generals, and now his closest and oldest associates argued that it was a lost cause. They had seen what had happened to occupied Moscow, and didn’t want the same thing to happen to their own favourite city. It was one thing to see a few Russian Orthodox churches go up in flames, but Notre-Dame? The Louvre? The maisons de tolérance?

  Finally, after one of his marshals went even further and defected to the Austrians with 16,000 soldiers, Napoleon agreed. And to be fair, more than losing his throne and his set of uniforms, what seems to have pained him most of all was that the royals might undo his reforms. He dearly hoped that they would do nothing more than ‘change the sheets on my bed’. (In fact, he wasn’t far off the truth – one of the first changes the returning King made was to have fleurs-de-lis sewn over the bees on the Tuileries’ carpets.)

  On 6 April 1814, Napoleon abdicated. It was his all-time low – worse than his arrest as a traitor in Nice, worse than Moscow, worse even than when the British newspapers published the stories about Josephine having it off with a hussar. It was that moment in a Hollywood film when the hero wanders off alone and gets mugged after selling his last possession, the gold watch he bought himself when he made his first million.

  In Hollywood, of course, things turn around, and twenty minutes later he is taking off an even bigger watch before getting into bed with the female lead, but Napoleon’s low point was to last much longer. He rather unrealistically asked to be sent with his family into exile in England, where he saw himself retiring as a country gentleman (plenty of scope for tweed uniforms). But he obviously hadn’t seen all the propaganda directed against him. His request was refused, and Marie-Louise and Napoleon Junior were spirited away to rejoin Vater-in-law. Napoleon was never to see them again.

  He tried to commit suicide, but took poison that was past its sell-by date and vomited it up. In the end, he accepted a lesser fate – exile to the Italian island of Elba, just east of Corsica. It wasn’t going to be that unpleasant. He was to be made king of the island (this might have been a British joke, but he took it very seriously), granted a very generous French pension and escorted into exile by 600 of his most loyal soldiers. This last condition would later seem, in retrospect, a little unwise.

  After a heartfelt speech to the troops he was to leave behind, which had everyone in tears, including the Prussians, Austrians and Brits overseeing his departure, Napoleon grabbed hold of the Old Guard’s standard, inscribed with the long list of its victories, and told his men, ‘Adie
u, and don’t forget me.’ It was a great ‘hasta la vista’ moment, and his troops would have less than a year to wait before the Napoleonator made his triumphant comeback.

  Napoleon gets the Elba

  In May 1814, the blobbish Louis XVIII, trussed up in a British naval coat and ridden with gout, flopped on to the throne vacated by his brother Louis XVI, and set about making his family unpopular in France all over again. He had Napoleon’s Constitution ceremonially burnt (in the Royalist town of Bordeaux, just to be safe), ignored the Senate’s demands for him to adopt the post-revolutionary tricolour flag, gave confiscated properties back to returning aristos, and quickly reneged on his promises to cut taxes on the people’s pleasures (cigarettes and alcohol).

  There were celebratory parties, of course, but relations with the King’s benefactors were strained. Wellington was appointed British ambassador to France – a provocative choice. At one dinner, when he was given the cold shoulder by French courtiers, the Field Marshal retorted, ‘Tis of no matter, I have seen their backs before.’ Touché.

  Napoleon, meanwhile, was enjoying himself in his new kingdom. Just like France in 1800, there was plenty of room for improvement in Elba. It didn’t have a flag, for one thing, so he designed a new one, adding three gold bees to the old Medici family standard, a red diagonal stripe on a silver background. The island had virtually no agriculture and depended on imports (a concept Napoleon hated because of Britain’s stranglehold on the seas), so he had vegetables, olive trees and chestnut trees (Corsica’s favourite) planted. He found a spring that produced sparkling water and got the islanders to market it. He learned to plough with oxen and to spear tuna, and even invaded the nearby islet of Pianosa and claimed sovereignty over it. He slept on his old camp bed in a town house, and seemed to see the whole exercise as yet another foreign campaign.

  Clouds did pass over his island idyll, however. In May, Josephine died of diphtheria, and although he hadn’t exactly treated her gently during their divorce, he was so devastated by the news that he mourned in isolation for two solid days.

  The more permanent annoyance was an Englishman by the name of Sir Neil Campbell, the British Commissioner to Elba – in other words, Napoleon’s jailer. He observed and reported the ex-Emperor’s every move, and Napoleon knew that he had to be careful because Talleyrand was still out there lobbying European leaders to have him moved even further away, to the Azores.

  Talleyrand was nervous because there was an underground campaign to bring Napoleon back to France, where it was clear to all but the most privileged aristos that the restoration had been a huge, foreign-influenced mistake. Paris had been given back to the powdered fops, the most powdered and foppish of the lot being the King. A popular song mocking Louis XVIII blamed it all on the Brits, ending with the line ‘I owe my crown to the English’.

  But if Louis and co. hoped to keep Napoleon on his island, they shouldn’t have made a fatal error. They neglected to pay the pension he had been promised, and few things annoy a Frenchman more than someone meddling with his pension rights. Napoleon duly started to plot his escape.

  In February 1815, he got his chance. Sir Neil Campbell announced that he had to go to Florence to see a doctor about his hearing problems (unofficially, it is said that he wanted to spend some time with his mistress) and would be away for ten days.

  No sooner had the Englishman left the harbour than Napoleon sprang into action. He had a ship painted in British colours, fitted out with cannons and loaded up with all his gold. Knowing that the island was crawling with Talleyrand’s spies, he sent his silverware and carriages to Naples and, to create a semblance of normal continuity, had his soldiers start to dig flowerbeds.

  His plan was almost revealed when a spy learned that he was really intending to sail to France, but the only way of getting a message out would have been to pass it on to a British ship that came to see how things were going in Campbell’s absence, and the French spy didn’t want to share information with the ennemi.

  Napoleon’s secret was safe, and on 26 February he set sail for France with 600 members of his Old Guard, 300 Elban and Corsican volunteers and 108 cavalrymen who had saddles but no horses. And on the afternoon of 1 March, this determined but undersized army of liberation landed on the French mainland near the town of Antibes.

  The Emperor was back.

  The Emperor’s old clothes

  For once, Napoleon didn’t design a new uniform, choosing to play the nostalgia card and stick to his old grey coat, white waistcoat and black hat. He did need a new battle standard, though, and got his men to make a wooden eagle out of some pieces of a bed. He then set off for Paris, minus twenty-five of his soldiers who had gone to liberate Antibes and got locked inside the town walls.

  News of the Emperor’s return spread quickly, and he was well received, with some of his old subjects giving him bunches of violets (his signature flower because it was imperial purple), and others contributing horses and donkeys – at a price – for his mountless cavalrymen. He made startlingly fast progress, and on 4 March, his small army popped up near Grenoble in the Alps, to be faced by their first real test – a force of 700 men sent out to oppose him. Napoleon had numerical superiority for the moment, but didn’t want to provoke hostilities. After all, France had a good deal more than 700 soldiers waiting for him further north.

  So he rode slowly towards the opposing lines and, a few dozen metres from their muskets, dismounted and continued on foot. With a dramatic gesture, he swept open his grey coat to give the troops a clear shot at his white waistcoat, and asked if they wanted to kill their emperor. A young captain told his men to fire, but they ignored the order, calling out: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  Similar incidents were repeated in almost every garrison in the country. In Lyon, the King’s brother, Charles, comte d’Artois, personally went to organize the resistance, but when a general ordered the city’s troops to shout ‘Vive le roi!’ his lone voice echoed across the parade ground. The comte politely asked one of the soldiers to show the others how it was done, but the man courageously kept mute. The comte saw the way things were going and fled straight back to Paris. On 19 March, in the middle of the night, his brother the King followed his lead and sneaked off to Belgium.

  Back in 1803, when Napoleon was planning to invade Britain, he had said that he wanted to be a new William of Orange. Now he had become just that in France, leading a bloodless revolution to oust an unwanted monarch. It was a happy ending, surely? Cue credits and soaring music over a shot of Napoleon standing on the Arc de Triomphe as his exiled son comes up behind him and shyly takes his hand. The Emperor turns and sees his wife smiling from the top of the stairway. The camera pulls away and, as the reunited family embraces, we pan out over the streets of Paris, where can-can dancers, accordion players and similar anachronisms capture the mood of French celebration. The End, Fin, gather up your half-empty popcorn bucket and leave the cinema.

  Well, not quite.

  Nap nips to the ’Loo

  It was in Napoleon’s interest to keep the peace. Sure, his troops were prepared to shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ to anyone who would listen, but there weren’t enough of them to take on the whole of Europe. And Napoleon had to undo Louis XVIII’s damage, and reintroduce a more democratic form of government. To make things more complicated, the restoration had dented the Emperor’s aura of omnipotence, so there were demands for greater liberties – trial by jury, for example, and freedom of expression. Parliament wanted a whole new constitution. There was a lot of work to be done.

  But that old scoundrel Talleyrand had seen this coming and had his speech ready. By coincidence (probably) he was at a ball in Vienna with Wellington, Tsar Alexander and the Austrian Emperor’s Minister of State, the Prince von Metternich (full unpronounceable name Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein) when a messenger burst in with news that Napoleon had landed in France. Immediately, Talleyrand set about whipping up an armed response, and extracted
promises from the British, Austrians, Prussians and Russians to provide 150,000 troops each. It was a massive force against France’s 200,000 men, but Napoleon had no choice but to prepare for war.

  In mid-June, Wellington and Blücher marched into Belgium, planning to meet up and invade France. Unfazed, Napoleon rode out from Paris in his carriage, and said that he was looking forward to this new challenge. For some reason, he had never personally led an army into a pitched battle against the Brits. First, though, he was going to attack the Prussians – he knew how they operated, and it would give him a chance to see whether he’d still got that old Boney magic up the sleeve of his famous overcoat.

  He joined his troops near Charleroi in Belgium on 15 June, and over the next couple of days he beat up the Prussians pretty successfully. He even came close to capturing Blücher when the Prussian fell off his horse. Meanwhile, Napoleon asked his old friend Marshal Ney to keep the Brits occupied until he was ready to knock the two enemy’s heads together and drive them out of Belgium. He confidently predicted that they would grab Brussels that night, and the war would be over within a day or two.

  Ney, though, committed a mistake that was to cost Napoleon his throne and rob the French of the chance to score the killer goal in the battle to name railway stations. Ney hesitated, and instead of attacking, waited long enough for Wellington to draw up his troops on high ground near an unknown village called Waterloo.

  To be fair to Ney, though, Napoleon must share some of the blame. On the morning of 18 June 1815, he heard a rumour that the British and Prussians were planning to join forces in a combined attack. Unlike Nelson, who always took intelligence into account, Napoleon ignored the rumour. He was convinced that he had given the Prussians too much of a beating already, and that they would continue to retreat. He was wrong.