1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  As it happened, the British crowds cheered him. ‘The English are grateful because I know them well enough not to hate them,’ he told Victor Hugo. But, as the King had feared, this rapprochement didn’t go down well at home. Britain’s industrial powerhouse was accused of causing unemployment in France, and the expansion of the British Empire by their detested and still all-powerful fleet was seen as a direct threat to French prestige.

  The Anglophobes weren’t the only ones complaining. Louis-Philippe might be the ‘people’s king’, but the people he was fondest of were his rich friends, to whom he started to give lucrative contracts to build the country’s new railways. The poor were getting left out again, and their survival was still index-linked to the slightest variation in bread prices, just as it had been in 1789.

  Advisers begged Louis-Philippe to make concessions. He was, for example, spending fortunes on all the royal chateaux. ‘But I have such a big family,’ he is said to have answered. He had ten children and pleaded that he needed to make sure they had decent places to live. Which was not an entirely unfair claim – in the past, French kings had often requisitioned whole palaces for their mistresses.

  Unfortunately for Louis-Philippe, his family housing plan came to an abrupt end in February 1848, when the wave of revolution that was sweeping across Europe broke over Paris. The mob put up the barricades, soldiers fired at demonstrators and the Second Republic was proclaimed. Louis-Philippe slipped out of the side door of his palace, just as every monarch since Louis XVI had done. He headed, naturally enough, for England and his chum Victoria.

  The lead pipes of peace

  Alexandre Dumas gives a wonderful cloak-and-dagger account of the royal dash to safety in his book Histoire de la vie politique et privée de Louis-Philippe. He describes the King, shorn of his trademark bushy whiskers, disguised in dark glasses (lunettes vertes) and a scarf, and speaking with an American accent so that people will think he’s a foreigner fleeing the troubles.

  Louis-Philippe, or Bill Smith as he introduced himself to all-comers (seriously – that is not a joke), first tried to escape via Trouville. There, he paid a captain 5,000 francs, but when the man’s boat was prevented from sailing by a storm, he asked for his money back and the sailor betrayed him to the authorities.

  Rushing along the coast in a simple cart, the King found an English steamer, the Express, which took him on board at Honfleur and sailed him, accompanied by only his wife and a servant, to Newhaven, from where they took the train to London.

  Freedom at last. The only trouble was that the bumbling King, who seems to have been a French version of P. G. Wodehouse’s hapless Lord Emsworth,* had forgotten to bring any money. He remembered distinctly bundling up a wad of cash and putting it on his desk, but that was the last he saw of it.

  Louis-Philippe’s old friend Victor Hugo paints a tragic picture of the royal in exile. In an entry in his memoirs for 3 May 1848, Hugo notes that the King and his family have only three servants and ‘are literally in poverty. There are 22 of them at table and they drink water’ (lack of wine being, of course, a sign of extreme famine in French eyes).

  The only cash they had was the Queen’s income from her Italian family and the interest on some spending money that the absentminded King had deposited in a London bank during his visit to Victoria in 1844 and forgotten about. When Sir Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen came to see him, they felt so sorry for the refugee family that they discreetly slipped them a gift of £1,000.

  Perhaps because of this poverty, Louis-Philippe was being allowed to stay free of charge at Claremont House near Esher in Surrey. Some historians suggest that this was a kind of banishment from court by Queen Victoria, who didn’t want to appear too friendly to the deposed monarch so that relations with the new regime in France could stay at least workable if not cordial. But in fact, the Queen loved Claremont, and had been a frequent visitor there in her youth. The house belonged to her Uncle Leopold, who had moved out when he became King of Belgium. Leopold was also married to Louis-Philippe’s daughter Louise-Marie, so Claremont was a family home.

  It was a beautiful new house designed by Capability Brown, with landscaped gardens so picturesque that they have since been bought by the National Trust (the house itself is now a school). But one of the mod cons in this state-of-the art residence was running water, and pipes at the time were made of lead. The French royals, as Victor Hugo pointed out, were drinking water instead of wine at mealtimes and fell ill. The King began suffering from severe weight loss, and his doctors sent him to the chic new seaside resort of St Leonards near Brighton for some invigorating fresh air. It is not certain whether they forced him to go in the sea, but the English climate seems to have finished the job that the running water started, and by August 1850 Louis-Philippe was so ill that they sent him home to Claremont to die.

  When the doctors told him that he would soon be joining his ancestors, the affable old man apparently said, ‘So what you’re telling me is that it’s time to pack my bags?’

  The last King of France was buried in Weybridge, Surrey, the funeral procession watched by a mix of French expats and bemused English countryfolk. Dumas describes the scene in his book about Louis-Philippe, and is so shocked by the obituaries in the English papers that he quotes them at length.

  The Morning Chronicle’s obit writer trumpets: ‘We can’t say that a great and good man has just expired. He won his crown by duplicity and held it by oppression.’ The Times talks of the King’s ‘absence of mental faculties’. The Daily News says that ‘in the 18 years of his reign, not one great or generous idea emerged’. And, true to form, The Sun jeers: ‘Old Pear Head falls out of his tree.’ No, it didn’t really say that – the paper wouldn’t go tabloid for another 100-odd years – but it criticized the King for trying to suppress the Republic that he saw emerging, and said that he had finally got his ‘just punishment’.

  And poor old Louis-Philippe thought that the Brits liked him. If the lead piping hadn’t killed him, the obituaries would have.

  Napoleon III: any Southport in a storm

  Napoleon III (original name Charles-Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte) was the son of the first Napoleon’s brother Louis and the famous Josephine’s daughter from her first marriage, Hortense. The Bonapartes believed in keeping it in the family.

  After 1815, Hortense took little Charles-Louis-Napoléon into exile in Switzerland, leaving her husband behind in France. Hortense had followed in Josephine’s footsteps and got herself a reputation as something of a femme fatale, and her husband wasn’t sure that he was the father of any of their children.

  By 1836, the Bonaparte genes (if there were any) had come to the fore, and the 28-year-old Charles-Louis, etc. returned to France and tried to stage a coup. His plan was to enter France in Strasbourg, get the garrison on his side and then do what Uncle Boney had done after his exile on Elba and march on Paris, gathering support as he went. In the event, though, no one was interested, and King Louis-Philippe had the young rebel put on a ship and sent to America.

  But he wasn’t giving up yet. He returned to Europe and tried exactly the same trick again in 1840, sailing from England to Boulogne, trying to convince the local troops to support him, and getting arrested yet again.

  This time Louis-Philippe was less indulgent, and had Charles-Louis, etc., who was now calling himself Prince Louis Napoleon, imprisoned in a fortress called Ham, in the Somme, which had once played host to the Marquis de Sade. Here, the prisoner enjoyed himself in a Sade-like way, fathering two children with the fortress’s laundrywoman before eventually deciding to escape. In 1846, he switched clothes with a guard and fled to Southport* in Lancashire.

  Southport proved to be an inspiration to the exiled wannabe emperor. At the time, it was a chic seaside resort, visited by the grandees of Lancashire industry, and the self-appointed Prince Louis Napoleon lived on a wide, tree-lined boulevard called Lord Street. It has been suggested that Lord Street inspired the future Napoleon III to redesign the centre of P
aris when he became emperor, and that the capital of France should really be known as ‘the Southport of the South’. There are even those who say that when Prince Louis Napoleon returned to Paris, he thought to himself: Let’s build Southport here, only bigger.

  But we are getting ahead of ourselves. It wasn’t until 1848, after the turmoil of the Revolution had cleared up, that Louis Napoleon headed back to France to stand for election as the President of the Second Republic. To everyone’s surprise, he won by a landslide. Not content with this, he staged yet another coup d’état, from the inside this time, and became a dictator in 1851. It was only one typically Bonapartist step from this to declaring himself Emperor Napoleon III the following year.

  At this point, the French decided to enjoy a period of relative peace and spectacular growth. Instead of arguing amongst themselves and changing their system of government for the umpteenth time in sixty years, they kicked back and prospered. The industrial revolution finally set up shop in France, railways spread like vines across the country, new mines positively spurted out coal, share prices rocketed, and Napoleon III had Paris’s slums knocked down and the Southport-style Haussmann boulevards built. (Though this was also a means of creating wide access routes for troops should another Parisian mob try to take power. And it is also much harder to barricade a boulevard than a medieval lane.)

  Napoleon III believed in free trade, and sent French products all over the world. It was a French company that brought his uncle’s Egyptian plans to fruition by building the Suez Canal. The new Emperor even took the air of change to its extreme and formed an alliance with the enemy, Britain, in the Crimean War – the only friction here being that the French thought the heroic Charge of the Light Brigade an absurd waste of men and horses. (Which it was.)

  The Brits spoilt the new friendship, however, by trying to have Napoleon killed in 1858. It wasn’t a government plot, of course, just a bit of typically English private enterprise.

  Britain finishes off an Italian job

  One of Napoleon III’s grand plans was to take over Italy (another idea borrowed from his uncle), which didn’t go down too well with a group of Italian nationalists exiled in London. They got a Birmingham engineer to make them some fragmentation grenades, which were tested by their English allies and then taken to Paris. On 14 January 1858, three Italians, led by a man called Felice Orsini, whose father had served with the first Napoleon’s army in Russia, sent their English grenades into action. As Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie were on their way to the opera in Paris, the Italians hurled the bombs. They didn’t aim too well (maybe they should have got some training from English cricketers in the art of throwing), and managed only to blow up some horses and kill eight passers-by. As with Louis-Philippe’s carriage attack, the intended victims were unharmed, and increased their popularity by carrying on as if nothing had happened. Napoleon and Eugénie took up their seats at the opera and watched William Tell, no doubt flinching during the arrow-firing scene.

  During Orsini’s subsequent trial,* the plot’s English connection came to light and caused a major diplomatic flurry, with the British government eventually having to resign after it became impossible to appease both the French (who were, strictly speaking, allies) and the Francophobe Brits. It was Napoleon III himself who defused the crisis, inviting Victoria and Albert to a party to celebrate the opening of a naval base in Cherbourg.

  So it was all ami-ami again, and Britain had to wait another dozen years before it got its chance to kill a French emperor – until 1870, in fact, when Napoleon III’s plans for continental expansion finally got the better of him. Trying to emulate his uncle again, Napoleon III attacked the Prussians, only to lose the Battle of Sedan to Otto von Bismarck and end up as a prisoner of war. This stirred up bad memories of Waterloo, and Napoleon III was deposed. After a short bout of imprisonment, he headed for England to join Eugénie and their teenage son, Napoléon-Eugène-Louis-Jean-Joseph, who had already sought refuge chez Victoria.

  The deposed Emperor and his family took up residence at a house called Camden Place in Chislehurst, Kent, which had been given a French flavour by its English owner – he had imported French furniture, installed wooden panelling salvaged from a French chateau and bought the wrought iron gates from the entrance to the 1867 Exposition universelle in Paris. The rent was a comparatively modest £300 a year, but Napoleon didn’t plan on staying for ever. He was already plotting his return to power.

  It was a British doctor who put a stop to that.

  Ever since the mid-1850s, Napoleon III had been plagued by stomach ailments, which ran in the Bonaparte family. He had suffered from painful prostate and bladder infections, kidney problems and bladder stones, and had once called in a London specialist called Dr Robert Ferguson to treat him in Paris. Ferguson had betrayed the Hippocratic Oath (which presumably didn’t apply to foreigners back then) and gleefully reported to the British government that the Emperor was suffering from nervous exhaustion that had a ‘debilitating effect upon sexual performance’.

  Now, in 1873, the deposed Napoleon III was suffering from bladder stones, and was again at the mercy of English doctors. The eminent surgeon Henry Thompson, a specialist in sexual diseases and author of a fun-sounding treatise on the Health and Morbid Anatomy of the Prostate Gland, was summoned to Chislehurst. He had already performed a successful kidney stone operation on Leopold of Belgium, Queen Victoria’s uncle, using lithotripsy, a method of disintegrating the stone with acoustic shockwaves. This is a non-invasive process, but can be very painful because the sound waves cause bones to vibrate, so Thompson decided to knock the Emperor out with chloroform and perform the operation in two stages on 2 and 6 January. At first, everything went swimmingly, but Napoleon died during the second operation, and Thompson and his anaesthetist Dr Joseph Clover (a pioneer in his field) quickly signed the death certificate giving kidney failure as the cause of death.

  Whether this diagnosis was true or whether, as some allege, Thompson bungled the operation, the fact is that the last Emperor of France, the nephew of the great Napoleon Bonaparte, died at the hands of the British medical profession in 1873 and was buried in Chislehurst.

  But wait – there was a successor, his son, the dashing young Louis Napoleon. Perhaps France would have another Emperor after all?

  Well no, actually, because the Brits were about to nail him too, in even more farcical circumstances.

  Emperor Napoleon III with his son, whom the French later nicknamed Napoleon the Third-and-a-Half. Both were to suffer bizarre deaths while in exile chez the Brits.

  Napoleon the Third-and-a-Half

  Napoléon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph (Louis to his friends) had seen military action when he was only fourteen. He had ridden with his father against the Prussians at Saarbrücken in Germany, and only fled to England when the tide of war turned against the French.

  So, after a brief spell studying physics at King’s College London, the young man applied for a place at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He had big ambitions for the future – there were rumours of an engagement to Victoria’s daughter Beatrice, and he hoped that his country would one day call on him to lead them out of their political confusion.

  However, being invited to rule France as Napoleon IV didn’t look like an imminent prospect. On his father’s death, the French Republicans dubbed him Napoléon Trois et Demi (three and a half). He therefore opted for a spell in the British army, which would pass the time and might also prepare him to lead a military power struggle in France.

  A Frenchman in a British military school – he must have felt like his great-uncle, the Corsican amongst the French mainland aristocrats. Young Louis was good at horseriding and fencing, but was no academic, and was even beaten in the French exam by an English cadet. He graduated, though, and was sent to join the Royal Artillery, yet another homage to his great-uncle the cannon expert.

  In 1879, Britain declared war on the Zulu nation, which was impolitely demanding that the colonials give
back its homeland in South Africa, and the young ‘Prince Impérial’, as Louis styled himself, decided that this was a playground where he would be able to prove his worth as a soldier and a man.

  Britain’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was horrified at the political ramifications of sending a French emperor-in-waiting to fight a British war, and refused permission. But Louis’s mother Eugénie begged Queen Victoria to let the boy go and have some fun, and finally Disraeli agreed to have the Frenchman sent out as an observer. He would be allowed to wear an artilleryman’s uniform, but must display no insignia or any sign of rank, to avoid attracting any dangerous attention.

  The French were furious: the Republicans because a Frenchman was serving in the army of the traditional enemy, and the Imperialists because they suspected that a war in Africa might be a dangerous place for their Last Hope to be dashing around. Louis himself told his partisans not to worry – a quick and highly publicized military outing would have France clamouring for his return.

  Louis arrived in South Africa in May 1879, and spent the next couple of weeks hassling commanders to let him see action and chasing any Zulu he saw, despite orders not to expose himself to risk.

  Finally, the British commander in South Africa, Baron Chelmsford, allowed Louis to accompany him into Zululand, but assigned him to help the Royal Engineers rather than putting him into a battle unit. The orders were not to let the Prince near any fighting, and that he should not go anywhere without a strong armed escort.

  Strange, then, that the man in charge of the Royal Engineers, Colonel Richard Harrison, let Louis go out on a scouting mission with a certain Lieutenant Carey, a Guernsey native who spoke French. Carey would regret accepting the tagalong Frenchman for the rest of his short life.