• • •
When Queen Louise of Prussia arrived at Tilsit on July 6, only three days before the Franco-Prussian treaty was signed, she had a two-hour meeting with Napoleon in which she begged for the return of Magdeburg on the west bank of the Elbe. She was an extremely attractive woman, so much so that in 1795 Johann Gottfried Schadow’s statue of her and her sister Frederike was determined to be too erotic for public display.42 (Napoleon merely remarked that she was ‘as handsome as could be expected at thirty-five’.43) Reporting their meeting to Berthier, he wrote, ‘The beautiful queen of Prussia really cries,’ after which he added, ‘She believes I came all the way here for her nice eyes.’44 He was fully aware of the strategic importance of Magdeburg from his studies of Gustavus Adolphus’s campaigns, and it was never likely that he would do anything so frivolous as concede a vital military stronghold because he succumbed to a lachrymose queen.* He later likened Louise’s entreaties over Magdeburg to Chimène begging ‘in the tragic style’ for Count Rodrigue’s head in Corneille’s play Le Cid, ‘“Sire! Justice! Justice! Magdeburg!” At last to make her stop I begged her to sit down, knowing that nothing is so likely to cut short a tragic scene, for when one is seated its continuance turns into comedy.’45 He claimed that during the whole of dinner one night all she talked of was Magdeburg, and that after her husband and Alexander had withdrawn, she kept on pressing. Napoleon offered her a rose. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but with Magdeburg!’ ‘Eh! Madam,’ he replied, ‘it is I who is offering the rose to you, not you to me.’46
Magdeburg instead went to Westphalia, a new 1,100-square-mile kingdom carved out of the territories of Brunswick and Hesse-Cassel, as well as Prussian territory west of the Elbe, to which were later added parts of Hanover. To this strategically important new entity, however, Napoleon sent as monarch a boy who had achieved nothing in his twenty-two years beyond taking unauthorized leave in America, making an ill-advised marriage which had been only semi-legally annulled, and then serving perfectly competently (but no more) in charge of Bavarians and Württembergers in the recent campaign.47 Jérôme didn’t have a good enough curriculum vitae for a crown, but Napoleon continued to feel that he could depend upon his family more than anyone else – despite the clear indications to the contrary from Lucien’s exile, Jérôme’s marriage, Joseph’s weakness in Naples, Pauline’s insubordinate infidelities and Louis’ blind eye to British smuggling in Holland.
Napoleon wanted Westphalia to be a model for the rest of Germany, encouraging other German states to join the Confederation, or at least to stay out of the Prussian and Austrian orbit. ‘It is essential that your people enjoy a liberty, an equality, a well-being unknown to the people of Germany,’ he wrote to Jérôme on November 15, sending him a constitution for the new kingdom and predicting that no-one would want to return to Prussian rule once they had ‘tasted the benefits of a wise and liberal administration’. He ordered Jérôme to ‘follow it faithfully . . . The benefits of the Code Napoléon, public trials, the establishment of juries, will be, above all, the defining characteristic of your rule . . . I count more on their effects . . . than the greatest military victories.’ Then, ironically given to whom he was writing, he extolled the virtues of meritocracy: ‘The population of Germany anxiously awaits the moment when those who are not of noble birth but who are talented, have an equal right to be considered for jobs; for the abolition of all serfdom as well as intermediaries between the people and their sovereign.’ This letter wasn’t written for publication, but it nevertheless represents Napoleon’s finest ideals. ‘The people of Germany, as those of France, Italy and Spain, want equality and liberal values,’ he wrote. ‘I have become convinced that the burden of privileges was contrary to general opinion. Be a constitutional king.’48
As he did with Joseph, Louis and Eugène, Napoleon constantly criticized Jérôme, even admonishing him on one occasion for having too good a sense of humour: ‘Your letter was too witty. You don’t need wit during times of war. You need to be precise, display backbone and simplicity.’49 Although none of his brothers made competent rulers, Napoleon’s endless carping didn’t help. ‘He has it in him to become a man of quality,’ he told Joseph of Jérôme. ‘However, he would be surprised to hear this, as all my letters to him are full of reproach . . . I purposefully put him in a position of isolated leadership.’50 Napoleon knew how demanding he was being of his family, but his approach failed every time.
• • •
‘By the time you read this letter,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine on July 7, ‘peace with Prussia and Russia will have been concluded, and Jérôme recognized as King of Westphalia, with three million in population. This piece of news is for you alone.’51 The last sentence indicates how much Napoleon usually regarded his letters to Josephine and others as a sophisticated propaganda tool. The day before he had written ‘the little Baron de Kepen has some hope of receiving a visit’, which implies that he was telling the truth when he wrote: ‘I very much wish to see you, when destiny decides the time is right. It’s possible that could be soon.’52 Marie would be left behind in Poland.
He returned to Saint-Cloud at 7 a.m. on July 27 after a 100-hour night-and-day carriage ride, moving so fast that his escort had no time to remove the barrier in front of a triumphal arch that had been specially built for him (he simply ordered his coachman to swerve round it).53 He had been away from France for 306 days, the longest absence of his career. ‘We saw Napoleon return from the depths of Poland without stopping,’ recalled Chaptal, ‘convene the Conseil when he arrived and show the same presence of mind, the same continuity and the same strength of ideas as if he had spent the night in his bedroom.’54 Sending Marie Walewska his portrait and some books, he wrote from Saint-Cloud: ‘My gentle and dear Marie, you who love your country so much, will understand the joy I feel at being back in France, after nearly a year away. This joy would be complete had you been here too, but I carry you in my heart.’55 He didn’t contact her again for eighteen months.
20
Iberia
‘There is no country in Europe in the affairs of which foreigners can interfere with so little advantage as in those of Spain.’
The Duke of Wellington to Lord Castlereagh, 1820
‘That unfortunate war destroyed me; it divided my forces, multiplied my obligations, undermined morale . . . All the circumstances of my disasters are bound up in that fatal knot.’
Napoleon on the Peninsular War
Napoleon was conscious of the need for a new social hierarchy in France, one based on service to the state rather than accident of birth, and on his return to Paris in the summer of 1807 he set about putting it in place. ‘It was at Tilsit that the main titles of a new nobility were launched,’ recalled Anatole de Montesquiou, the son of Napoleon’s grand chamberlain, who served as an artillery officer under Davout. ‘For a long time, all the European cabinets were reproaching the Emperor for the lack of titles around him. According to them, it gave France a revolutionary appearance.’1 The Légion d’Honneur had gone some way towards inaugurating a new system of privilege based on merit, but couldn’t provide the basis for an entire social system. In May 1802 Napoleon had complained that his new order would remain as ‘grains of sand’ unless it could be anchored by ‘some masses of granite’.2 As an army officer, his mind naturally gravitated towards a hierarchical structure of ranks and titles, but he also wanted to avoid the damning flaws of the Ancien Régime – those of heredity and legal privileges. As ever he looked to the ancient world for guidance. ‘A prince gains nothing from the displacement of the aristocracy,’ he wrote later in Caesar’s Wars, ‘on the contrary he puts everything back in order by letting it subsist in its natural state, by restoring the old houses under the new principles.3
In March 1808 the ranks of count, baron and chevalier of the Empire were created. By introducing nobility based on merit – one in which 20 per cent came from the working classes and 58 per cent from the middle c
lasses – Napoleon harnessed the revolutionary Frenchman’s ambition to serve his country.4 He did not see the reintroduction of nobility as contradicting the spirit of the Revolution. ‘The French people fought for only one thing: equality in the eyes of the law,’ he told Cambacérès. ‘Now, my nobility, as they style it, is in reality no nobility at all, because it is without prerogatives or hereditary succession . . . its hereditary succession depends on the will of the sovereign in confirming the title on the son or nephew of the deceased holder.’5 Unlike anywhere else in Europe, a French family’s noble status simply lapsed if the next generation hadn’t done enough to deserve its passing on.6 Napoleon’s new titles were therefore analogous to the British concept of the life peerage, which wasn’t instituted until 1958.
What has been described as Napoleon’s ‘re-hierarchization’ of French life involved a complete reordering of the social system.7 At the top were high-ranking army officers, ministers, councillors of state, prefects, presidents of the electoral colleges, senior judges, the mayors of the larger cities, and a few academics, professionals and artists. Below them came the more than 30,000 members of the Légion d’Honneur. Further down were around 100,000 sub-prefects, mayors of lesser cities, officials of the educational, judicial and administrative arms of the state, members of the electoral colleges, chambers of commerce, prefects’ councils and other office-holders and notables.8 These were Napoleon’s true ‘masses of granite’. Lying deep within the French Revolution were the seeds of its own destruction because the concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity are mutually exclusive. A society can be formed around two of them, but never all three. Liberty and equality, if they are strictly observed, will obliterate fraternity; equality and fraternity must extinguish liberty; and fraternity and liberty can only come at the expense of equality. If extreme equality of outcome is the ultimate goal, as it was for the Jacobins, it will crush liberty and fraternity. With his creation of a new nobility Napoleon dispensed with that concept of equality, and instead enshrined in the French polity the concept of equality before the law in which he believed wholeheartedly.
Under the Ancien Régime the noblesse had numbered anywhere between 80,000 and 400,000 people; under Napoleon the figures were much more exact and limited. In 1808 he created 744 nobles, in 1809 502, in 1810 1,085, in 1811 428, in 1812 131, in 1813 318, and in 1814 55. So whereas seven in 10,000 Frenchmen had been noble in 1789, by 1814 it was only one in every 10,000.9 Of the 3,263 nobles Napoleon created, 59 per cent were military, 22 per cent fonctionnaires and 17 per cent notables.10 Several doctors, scientists, writers and artists were ennobled too.* No fewer than 123 of Napoleon’s 131 prefects were ennobled, and the Paris appeal court boasted four counts, three barons and eleven chevaliers. In 1811 all but three ambassadors were titled. The system also allowed Napoleon to perpetuate the names of military victories, with principalities and dukedoms bearing such names as Castiglione, Auerstädt, Rivoli and Eckmühl.*
Separate from the new nobility, though often overlapping with it, he also introduced donations in 1806, whereby loyal subjects, the donataires, received lands and property confiscated from defeated enemies in the conquered territories. With them often came endowments, generally from Italy, Germany and, later, Poland. By 1815 there were 6,000 recipients of such land gifts, totalling 30 million francs.
The creation of the imperial aristocracy coincided with a hardening of Napoleon’s attitude towards internal dissent. On August 9, 1807 he told an extraordinary meeting of the Conseil d’État that he wanted the Tribunate, ‘whose name and object seemed foreign to a monarchical government’, to be abolished. This was duly done by a sénatus-consulte ten days later.11 A minority of the Tribunate had spoken and voted against the Concordat, the Légion d’Honneur, various sections of the Civil Code and the proclamation of the Empire. Even though it was precisely in order to hear different voices that the Tribunate had been created, Napoleon increasingly took an army officer’s view of these expressions of dissent in the legislative ranks; indeed it is remarkable that such a body had survived under him for as long as eight years. Savary explained in his memoirs that Napoleon never minded people disagreeing with him, so long as they did it in a loyal spirit and in private: ‘He never resented anyone who frankly showed opposition to his opinion; he liked his opinions to be discussed.’12 While he liked discussing his views with Cambacérès and the Conseil, he was less enthusiastic about tribunes such as Constant, Daunou and Chénier doing so. ‘Keep an eye on Benjamin Constant,’ he told Cambacérès about the notorious philanderer, ‘if he meddles with anything I’ll send him to Brunswick to be with his wife.’13 At the same time that the sénatus-consulte abolished the Tribunate, Napoleon raised the lower age limit for all members of the legislature to forty. He himself was still only thirty-eight.
• • •
Once back in Paris, Napoleon could concentrate on improving French finances, a task that was greatly helped by his recent victories. In September 1807, Daru drew up a detailed list of the cash and supplies that twenty-two Prussian cities would have to pay as part of the Tilsit settlement, which totalled 72,474,570 francs and 7 centimes in cash, and 30,994,491 francs and 53 centimes in supplies. Once other regions were included, the total came to over 153 million francs.14 This, as well as the declaration of peace, saw a huge surge in confidence in Napoleon’s government on the Paris Bourse: 5 per cent government stock, which had been trading at 17.37 in February 1800, rose to 93.00 on August 27, 1807, and thereafter stabilized in the mid-80s.15
This period back from what he called the Polish War was not all work for Napoleon. On October 4, 1807 he is recorded as having given 30,000 francs to the Comtesse de Barral, Pauline’s mistress of the robes and the wife of one of Jérôme’s notoriously adulterous chamberlains in Westphalia.16 He also displayed his controlling nature when in September 1807 he ordered the arrest of Mr Kuhn, the American consul in Genoa, for wearing the Order of Malta awarded him by the British. In the same month he demanded to know which Bordeaux aristocrats had boycotted Senator Lamartillière’s ball and why. He even assumed the role of amateur sleuth in a murder mystery, instructing Fouché to reopen a poisoning case from May 1805 concerning ‘a certain Jean-Guillaume Pascal, from Montpellier. This scoundrel is said to have murdered his wife.’ Napoleon ordered M. Pascal’s brother-in-law be interviewed by police and a post-mortem conducted on the couple’s dog, which he suspected might also have been poisoned.17
After such a long absence on campaign he was able to enjoy domestic life for the first time in nearly a year. While Napoleon was in Egypt, Josephine had borrowed money to buy the lovely Malmaison, a chateau 7 miles west of Paris, and she and Napoleon had split their time between there and the Tuileries. Featuring an aviary, a botanical hothouse for exotic plants, a summer pavilion, a tower, a ‘temple of love’, vineyard and fields adjoining the Seine, the Malmaison estate grew to three hundred acres of gardens, woods and fields, and a magnificent collection of statuary.* Josephine also kept there a menagerie of kangaroos, emus, flying squirrels, gazelles, ostriches, llamas and a cockatoo that had only one word (‘Bonaparte’) which it repeated incessantly. She would occasionally invite a female orang-utan dressed in a white chemise to eat turnips among her guests at table.18 Napoleon brought back gazelles from Egypt, to which he would occasionally give snuff.* ‘They were very fond of tobacco,’ recalled his private secretary, ‘and would empty the snuffbox in a minute, without appearing any the worse for it.’19 Although Napoleon kept a carbine in his study at Malmaison, with which he would sometimes shoot at birds through an open window, Josephine persuaded him not to open fire on her swans.20 (He would probably have missed; his valet Grégoire recalled that he ‘didn’t hold his gun properly on his shoulder, and as he asked for it to be tightly loaded, his arm was always black after he’d fired a shot’.21 He once took seven shots to kill a cornered stag.)
At its height, Napoleon’s imperial household covered thirty-nine palaces,* almost amounting
to a state within a state, even though he never visited several of them.22 Taking Louis XIV as his model, he reintroduced public Masses, meals and levées, musical galas and many of the other trappings of the Sun King.23 He was certain that such outward displays of splendour inspired feelings of awe in the populace – ‘We must speak to the eyes,’ he said – as well as encouraging the French luxury-goods industry.24 The palaces had an annual budget of 25 million francs, comprising the sixth largest outlay in the whole of French public expenditure. In all he amassed a total of 54,514 precious stones in his personal treasury, which he saw as indistinguishable from that of France (although that wasn’t uncommon: the British Civil List only started in 1760).*
When he toured France, his entourage drove in sixty coaches in a deliberate attempt to impress, not unlike today’s American presidential motorcades that can number forty-five vehicles, a similarly visible metaphor for the power of the office. In private, however, he retained the modesty of the petit noblesse army officer that was always his true persona. ‘When he received on his throne,’ recalled Chaptal, ‘he displayed himself with great luxury. His orders were made of beautiful diamonds, as was the hilt of his sword, the cord and button of his hat and his buckles. These clothes ill became him, he seemed embarrassed, and he took them off as soon as he could.’25 His daily wear was either the blue undress uniform of a colonel of grenadiers of his Imperial Guard or the green uniform of its Chasseurs à Cheval, and when it was discovered that no cloth could be procured of the right shade of green on St Helena, he simply turned his coat inside out.
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