1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  He also committed a much graver mistake in underestimating Wellington. Napoleon is reported to have said that ‘Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad troops and it will be a walkover.’ Overconfidence is never a good weapon, especially against Wellington, the kind of Englishman who used to say things like ‘we always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France’.

  The problem was that Napoleon had been out of the battle game for a while, and was not au fait with the latest tactical developments. Wellington knew that the best defence against the conventional opening gambit of a Napoleonic army – an artillery bombardment – was to withdraw slightly behind a ridge of high ground. This simple strategy meant that many of Napoleon’s cannonballs splatted harmlessly into the rain-sodden Belgian earth.* This English-style rain, the French allege, was the key to Wellington’s victory, because even if Napoleon’s artillery fire fell short, he always counted on causing havoc amongst his opponents with murderous ricochets. But nothing ricochets off wet mud.

  The French give several more unconvincing explanations for their subsequent defeat. According to one story, before every battle, Napoleon drank Champagne. One of his mottos was: ‘In victory you deserve it, in defeat you need it.’ He had developed a taste for bubbly while studying in the Champagne region and thereafter, the story goes, he never failed to stop off on his way to foreign parts to stock up. It is a credible theory because the road from Paris to Prussia, Russia, Poland and Belgium leads through Champagne (although the theory doesn’t work quite so well for Austria, Italy or Spain). Anyway, before Waterloo, Napoleon apparently didn’t drink Champagne, and paid the price for his abstinence. All in all, it sounds like a neat bit of drinks marketing rather than a credible explanation for losing a battle.

  An even more outlandish story is that Napoleon’s fighting abilities were impaired because of haemorrhoids. These were usually treated with leeches, but apparently on 16 June, between battles against the Prussians, the leeches were lost or escaped. It was therefore painful for Napoleon to stay in the saddle and be mobile during Waterloo, and the laudanum he took to alleviate the pain dulled his mental faculties. This, though, would seem to be an absurd myth – apart from the fact that Napoleon was seen galloping ferociously across the battlefield of Waterloo to order his cavalry into the attack, once Wellington and Blücher’s troops finally joined up as planned, there was no way the most alert French commander could have won.

  As so many battles before it, Waterloo consisted of men and horses charging, or in many cases walking, straight into hails of gunfire. No camouflage uniforms, body armour, tanks, air support or laser-guided missiles. You just headed for the enemy and hoped they would either die or run away before they killed you. At that time, generals joined in, too, rather than sitting in comfy command posts and radioing in their orders while sipping tea. As we’ve seen, Napoleon and Nelson were not averse to getting shot at, and at Waterloo Marshal Ney personally led several cavalry charges at the Thin Red Line, having several horses shot from under him.*

  On 18 June, it is estimated that about 25,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, along with around 15,000 of Wellington’s army and 7,000 of Blücher’s. In a ten-hour battle, that amounts to 4,700 casualties an hour, or more than one man falling, dead or injured, every second. And given the medical technology of the day, the chances of surviving a musket-ball impact, lead poisoning, or an operation to have a smashed limb sawn off without anaesthetic were slim.

  The French poet Victor Hugo wrote a poem about the demise of Napoleon, and described the gore of Waterloo very effectively: ‘The plain,’ he wrote, ‘where torn flags shuddered, was transformed, in the death rattles of dying men having their throats cut, into a flaming abyss, red as a forge.’ Not the stuff of army recruitment brochures.

  If the battle had been a boxing match, at the end of it, the two battered, broken-nosed, puffy-eyed, blood-blinded fighters would have been slumped in their corners, with the victory given on points to the heavier man simply because he had landed more blows. But for history’s sake, let’s call it a victory. Not a British victory, of course – without Blücher, Wellington wouldn’t have won. Indeed, the Duke was heard uttering a prayer in the afternoon of 18 June: ‘Give me night or give me Blücher.’ And Wellington’s own army was not entirely British, either. In fact less than half of them were – the rest were soldiers from Holland and small German states like Hanover, Brunswick and Nassau.

  But, as at Agincourt, it was the Brits who got to name the battle. It could have been called Mont Saint-Jean, after the high ground where Wellington started the fighting, but he wanted a more English-sounding name and chose the handy village nearby.

  In French minds, the Battle of Waterloo has gone down as a Franco-British horror story. It can be no coincidence that in 1940, General de Gaulle chose to make his famous appeal from London for the French to resist Hitler on 18 June, thereby wiping the national shame off the calendar. And in the popular French imagination, it is still the defeat to end all defeats, and has entered the language, as I found out for myself soon after arriving in France. I knew that a colleague had been having trouble with his boss, and asked what the mood was like in the office.

  ‘Oh, c’est Waterloo!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Très bien.’ I smiled, assuming that things were obviously on the up. He had to explain to me that, no, he meant that it was all-out war, and he was coming off worst.

  Yes, almost 200 years later, Waterloo still has the ability to make the French suffer.

  Reunion with Nelson

  The pain wasn’t over for Napoleon yet. He fled back to Paris to be told that the Assemblée (the Parliament) wanted him to abdicate. He did so, in favour of his son, who was (as he put it) a prisoner in Vienna. At least this way, he might get to see the boy again, and even play at regent. But Wellington came and sabotaged his plans, warning the Assemblée that there was no way that Britain or its Prussian friends, who would be here soon,* were going to let a Bonaparte stay in charge of France.

  Napoleon decided that the only thing for it was to take exile in America. Unlike in the early twenty-first century, the French were highly respected there, and with the ploughing and fishing skills he had learned on Elba, as well as the gardening tips he had picked up at school, he hoped to make a new life for himself.

  He made a run for it to the Atlantic port of Rochefort on the west coast of France, but found it blockaded by the British ship Bellerophon, popularly known as ‘Billy Ruffian’, a warship that had seen action both at the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar. Nelson had come back to haunt Napoleon.

  After much hesitation, the French fugitive decided to surrender to the British, remembering perhaps his old fantasy of living out his days in the English countryside, and thinking that he would be allowed to reminisce with old soldiers about the scraps they’d enjoyed in their youths. He was received gracefully, and even given the captain’s cabin as the ship set sail for England. But the British government had already decided that it would send its most important political prisoner since Mary Queen of Scots somewhere a bit further away than an English village.

  Saint where?

  If you ask Google Maps how to get from Paris to St Helena, you will get the response: ‘We could not calculate directions between Paris France and Saint Helena Island.’

  Actually, you’ll get the same response about the island and practically any destination in the world, and that is in the twenty-first century. In 1815, getting exiled to the volcanic hump situated some 2,000 kilometres from the nearest continent was like being sent to the Moon. It was a real statement of intent, as were the conditions of Napoleon’s detention – he was isolated from the other islanders, guarded by 125 sentries, and if a ship came in sight, all St Helena’s cannons were pointed in its direction and a warning shot was fired. Napoleon was not meant to return to Europe unless the British went to fetch him. He certainly wasn’t going to nip home to France and dispossess the newly reinstalled Louis XVIII. />
  There was to be no playing at king on St Helena either, no turning the island into a miniature Napoleonic empire. The climate was about as far from the Mediterranean balminess of Elba as you could get – it was characterized by Atlantic rainstorms and lashing winds, especially at his new residence of Longwood, a rat-infested farmhouse some 500 metres up on a damp plateau.

  Napoleon did manage to add a courtly touch to some elements of his life there. He designed a posh uniform for his maître d’hôtel – a silver-embroidered green coat, black silk trousers and white silk stockings – and after dinner the former Empereur would read scenes from Molière, Racine or one of the other great French dramatists to the group of friends who had been allowed to accompany him.

  He spent most of his days dictating his memoirs, but reserved his greatest energy for battles with his British captors. A constant war of petty sniping went on. Napoleon would deliberately hide so that the officer charged with personally setting his eyes on the prisoner twice a day would get into trouble. In return, the Brits would seize gifts sent to St Helena, and on one occasion even refused to allow Napoleon to order a new pair of shoes unless he personally presented an old pair to the British governor, a slightly sadistic soldier called Sir Hudson Lowe.

  The ex-Emperor also objected to Lowe’s insistence on calling him General Bonaparte, and in a fit of pique declared that he wanted to change his name altogether, to Baron Duroc (the Baron of the Rock). The Governor forbade this too.

  More than ever, the odds were against Napoleon, though, and the war of attrition gradually wore him down. He stopped going for rides because he objected to being followed by British officers, and at one point stayed indoors for two months so that he would not be seen by his guards. His physical condition declined, and serious stomach aches began.

  Napoleon put in a request for a personal physician, and his letter was sent to France. The French duly added their own dose of cruelty to the British mistreatment, and a full eighteen months later, a certain François Carlo Antommarchi arrived. He had a medical degree, but had until recently been employed as a prosector, or dissector’s assistant, preparing corpses for anatomy classes at the University of Florence. Not exactly the top Paris physician that the ailing Napoleon had hoped for.

  His stomach pain grew steadily worse, a condition initially diagnosed as hepatitis, and treated by Antommarchi with laxatives, which only made the pain worse. Governor Lowe thought Napoleon was faking, or at the very least imagining things, and suggested that someone should rush into his bedroom and scare him into getting up.

  By April 1821 Napoleon was bedridden and declining rapidly, unable to keep food or painkilling medicines down. He dictated his last wishes, asking for his body to be buried ‘on the banks of the Seine’ (in Paris, of course, rather than Le Havre). His second wife, Marie-Louise, was also in his mind, though spookily it was in a request to have his heart preserved and sent to her as a farewell gift.

  He also had enough fight in him for one last stab at the Brits: ‘I die prematurely,’ he said, ‘assassinated by the English oligarchy’ (an oligarchy being a system of government by an elite, like Napoleonic France, for example).

  The former Emperor of most of Europe died at 5.49 p.m. local time on 5 May 1821, and his death at last gave Antommarchi a chance to perform the job he had been trained for. At Napoleon’s request, he did an autopsy, and found a large stomach cancer. As Napoleon had feared, it was the same disease that had killed his father, and he wanted to be sure so that his son could be forewarned. A British doctor present at the post-mortem added a detail to Antommarchi’s report, noting that Napoleon’s penis and testicles were ‘very small’. Even at the end, the Brits couldn’t resist kicking the Emperor when he was down.

  Though if we are to believe certain allegations, an even crueller blow was struck after the autopsy. It has been suggested that, once the witnesses had dispersed, Antommarchi secretly removed Napoleon’s penis and gave it to Ange-Paul Vignali, the priest who had administered the last rites and conducted the funeral service. Napoleon’s valet even alleged in a magazine article that Vignali cut the Emperor’s ‘baguette’ off himself as a souvenir – and this was in 1852, long before it became fashionable to accuse Catholic priests of sexual perversion.

  Either way, when Vignali’s family sold off his collection of Napoleonic souvenirs in 1916, they included a lock of the Emperor’s hair, a death mask and an item described as ‘a mummified tendon taken from Napoleon’s body during the post-mortem’, which was listed in the auction catalogue as ‘rare’ (though, if it was the penis, ‘unique’ would surely have been more accurate). The curios were bought by an American collector called A. S. W Rosenbach who put the gruesome piece of flesh on show at New York’s Museum of French Art in 1927, where it was confidently identified as the imperial organ. Amused onlookers described the exhibit as a shrivelled eel, a shoelace, a sea-horse and a raisin. Not very flattering.

  The Petit Caporal’s petit caporal came up for sale again in London in 1969, but didn’t sell, and when it came under the hammer (apologies to male readers for that image) in Paris in 1977, the French state did not try to acquire it. It was bought by John Kingsley Lattimer, a New Jersey urologist (a man with a specialist knowledge of the nether regions) to add to his collection of macabre historical objects that included Abraham Lincoln’s bloodstained collar, Hermann Goering’s empty cyanide capsule and pieces of the upholstery from JFK’s Dallas limousine. Lattimer refused to exhibit Napoleon’s specimen, although according to one person who saw it after the collector’s death in 2007, it looked like ‘a baby’s finger’. If so, it had clearly grown, since it was a mere shoelace in 1927.

  All in all, the story whiffs strongly of Anglo-Saxon mischief, and when I asked a member of Napoleon’s family to comment, she told me, ‘I’ve never heard of this story, and I can’t help you.’ It is not a subject that worries modern Bonapartes, or the French in general, which must cast doubt on the object’s authenticity.

  But the Emperor’s ‘baguette’ is not the only part of his body that has caused controversy. His hair, too, has had tongues wagging ever since he died. There are those, and they are mostly French, who accuse the Brits of poisoning, and point to traces of arsenic found in locks of Napoleon’s hair. A piece of wallpaper from Longwood House was examined and found to contain the poison.

  Exactement! the accusers cried – before Napoleon moved in, his captors fiendishly poisoned the décor, certain that over the years bits of it were bound to flake off and fall into the imperial coffee cup or wine glass. And wasn’t it a well-known fact that Frenchmen like to lick walls?

  The actual explanation for the presence of poison in the house is far more prosaic. In those days, green dye commonly contained arsenic, and the same colours, and levels of toxicity, would have been found in practically every house on the island. Which is not to say that it is safe, of course. No one wants toxic wall coverings. But it wasn’t a British plot. The banal truth is that poor old Boney died of hereditary cancer at the premature age of fifty-one.

  His body wasn’t sent back to be enshrined by the Seine, of course, or put on the mantelpiece by his widow. Governor Howe was under orders not to let it leave the island, and it was not until December 1840 that it returned to France, and was driven on a carriage under his Arc de Triomphe, which had only been finished four years earlier. It was finally laid to rest in the Invalides, although the shrine-like tomb that France commissioned wasn’t completed until 1861.

  Not that France can let the matter rest. Ever since the Emperor’s coffin was repatriated, there have been rumours that it was either empty or contained the body of a valet called Cipriani. Even today, there are French historians who maintain that Napoleon’s remains were smuggled off St Helena by the Anglais and secretly buried in Westminster Abbey. It seems rather bizarre that they haven’t spotted the weakness in their own theory – it would mean that in the early nineteenth century the Brits accorded their former enemy numéro un the honour of a resting
place alongside their greatest monarchs and poets. Incredible to say the least, but the allegation is still made at regular intervals, the most recent outbreak of paranoia being a book published in 2000 called The Enigma of the Exhumed Body of 1840.

  There is, however, one intriguing thing about Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides that is rarely discussed. Interestingly, a space was left for Napoleon’s son, Napoleon Junior, who died in 1832, but his remains weren’t transferred there until 1940, by an avid Austrian fan of the Empereur – Adolf Hitler.

  Napoleon wins the Eurovision song contest

  So what was Napoleon’s lasting legacy? There’s ‘not tonight, Josephine’, of course, and the tendency to compare any autocratic Frenchman (and there are lots of them) to him. There is the deep-seated British glee at winning Waterloo and Trafalgar, and the two national heroes Napoleon helped to create, Nelson and Wellington. There are his laws, of course, which still shape France’s entire way of thinking. Not forgetting Abba’s Eurovision-winning first hit, which name-checks Napoleon in the first line and gives no mention of either Wellington or Blücher.

  But to my mind, his true legacy has nothing to do with wars or politics.

  When Napoleon went to invade Egypt, he didn’t have to fill his ship with scientists. He could have done it the conventional military way and taken extra troops, cannons and gunpowder – that was what his own soldiers wanted him to do. But he defied them, and it was his archaeologists who found the Rosetta Stone, which in 1822, just months after Napoleon’s death, enabled Jean-François Champollion to make one of the biggest breakthroughs in the study of ancient history – the deciphering of hieroglyphics. Surely that is a much greater gift to humanity than legal reforms, a few elitist schools and a couple of railway stations named after battles?