Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  The will gave away a number of belongings that weren’t his either, such as ‘Frederick II’s alarm clock, which I removed from Potsdam’, and listed the contents of his linen cupboard, including ‘1 pair of braces; 4 pairs of white cashmere underpants and undershirts; 6 scarves; 6 flannel vests; 4 pairs of drawers . . . 1 little box full of my snuff . . . 1 pair of slippers, 6 girdles’, and so on.165 His ‘golden toilet case for teeth, left at the dentist’s’ was to go to the King of Rome. Not relinquishing his penchant for organizing other people’s marital lives, he gave orders for Bessières’ son to marry Duroc’s daughter, and for Marchand to marry the widow, sister or daughter of an officer or soldier of the Old Guard. He was unrepentant over the Duc d’Enghien, saying that ‘it was necessary to the security, interest and honour of the French nation . . . In like circumstances I would do as much again.’166 He bequeathed a pair of golden shoe buckles to Joseph, ‘a little pair of golden garter buckles’ to Lucien, and a golden collar clasp to Jérôme.167 Bracelets of his hair were sent to Marie Louise, Madame Mère, each of his siblings, nephews and nieces, ‘and a more substantial one for my son.’ The servants did far better than Napoleon’s family out of his will, excepting the King of Rome, although he did say: ‘I have always been well-pleased with my most dear spouse Marie Louise; to the last I retain most tender feelings for her.’ He might not have done so had he known of her liaison with Neipperg, by whom she had two children during his lifetime, and whom she married after his death.*

  ‘I thank my good and most excellent mother,’ he wrote, ‘the cardinal [Fesch], my brothers Joseph, Lucien, Jérôme, Pauline, Caroline, Julie [Joseph’s wife], Hortense, Catarina [Jérôme’s wife] and Eugène for their enduring concern.’168 Caroline’s inclusion in the list was particularly magnanimous considering her betrayal of him. Elisa had died in Italy the previous August. Although he wasn’t in the list, Louis was also forgiven for ‘the libel he published in 1820, full of false assertions and forged evidence’. (He had published a compendium of historical documents relating to his reign in Holland, which drew attention to the way he had stood up to Napoleon in defence of the Dutch.)

  By April 26 Napoleon was vomiting blood and the next day a dark, coffee-coloured fluid. He asked for his draped campaign bed to be moved into the drawing room where there was better airflow, and Bertrand noted that he hardly had the strength to spit, so his vest was stained by a reddish spittle.169 Marchand recalled that he nonetheless showed ‘dignity, calm and goodness’, even while complaining that the pain in his right side ‘cuts me like a razor blade’.170

  Eight codicils to Napoleon’s will were drawn up before April 29, some antedated to the 27th, and on the 29th and 30th he started repeating the same sentences continuously. Although his last words before he lost the power of speech were scarcely audible ramblings – either ‘France . . . Army . . . head of the Army’ or ‘France . . . the head of the Army . . . Josephine’ – more interesting were his last lucid words.171 In a copy of the book on Caesar that he had dictated to Marchand, his valet-cum-executor noted that between eight and nine o’clock on the evening of May 2 Napoleon dictated the words: ‘I bequeath to my son my estate in Ajaccio; two houses in the environs of Salines and their gardens; all my property in the area of Ajaccio which are capable of raising 50,000 francs a year in rent.’172 Marchard noted this down in pencil in the preface of the book and then carefully sewed it into the lining of a small red-leather box embossed with the Emperor’s coat of arms, given by his descendants to the Napoleonic scholar Henry Lachouque, whose family still possess it. So, having been master of Europe and living the most adventurous life of modern times, Napoleon reverted on his deathbed to what he had been when he was trying to negotiate over the mulberry trees thirty years earlier: a Corsican landowner of the petit noblesse keen to maintain his family’s property rights.

  On May 3 Napoleon received extreme unction in private from the Abbé Ange-Paul Vignali. An only nominal Catholic in life who had made war on one pope and imprisoned another, he was received back into the bosom of the Church in death. Shortly before he died, he asked Bertrand to close his eyes afterwards, ‘Because they naturally stay open’, something he must have noticed, and been haunted by, from his experience of sixty battlefields.173 During the 4th, Napoleon suffered from prolonged hiccups, and in the evening he slipped into delirium, asking the name of his son. The next day, Saturday, May 5, 1821, after a very blustery and stormy morning, the fifty-one-year-old former Emperor gave three sighs at long intervals and died at 5.49 p.m., just after the firing of the island’s sunset gun.174 What Chateaubriand called ‘the mightiest breath of life that ever animated human clay’ had ceased.

  • • •

  Napoleon was buried with full military honours in Torbett’s Spring, a beautiful spot a mile from Longwood punctuated by willow trees where he had sometimes visited. He was dressed in his uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs à Cheval. The coffin was borne along a goat-path to the grave by British grenadiers of the 66th and 20th Regiments, prompting one spectator to note ‘the irony that the regimental colours under which the Emperor was being buried had the golden letters of “Talavera”, “Albuera”, “Vitoria” and “The Pyrenees” woven on them in strange mockery’.175 Three salvoes of fifteen guns and three volleys of musketry were fired, creating ‘a succession of fine echoes from the hills and ravines’.176 Yet the tomb was unmarked, because even after the former Emperor’s death, Lowe would not allow his gravestone to feature the imperial title ‘Napoleon’, while Bertrand and Montholon would not accept Lowe’s wording of the non-royal ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’, so it was left blank.177 (It can be seen today in the courtyard of Longwood, still without wording.) His remains were removed from the grave and taken to Paris in 1840 by Bertrand and Gourgaud and given a magnificent funeral on December 2, the anniversary of his coronation and the battle of Austerlitz. Though the day was freezing, an estimated one million Frenchmen lined the route of the cortège through Paris. Attending his interment at Les Invalides were four of his marshals: Soult, Moncey, Oudinot and Grouchy. Others who were still living but who had turned against him – Bernadotte, Marmont and Victor – did not attend.

  • • •

  After Napoleon’s death, Louis Marchand drew up a list of the 370 books in the library at Longwood, which testifies to the Emperor’s eclectic literary taste and interests. They included Northanger Abbey, Paradise Lost, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and Tour of the Highlands, various Army Lists, Robinson Crusoe, a history of Egypt, a biography of George III, Voltaire’s Charles XII (which he had read in Moscow, complete with its strictures on the Russian weather), Monarchy by Chateaubriand, no fewer than twenty books on religion, the comic novel Castle Rackrent, several of Byron’s works, some Shakespeare, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book on ‘coquetry’, Debrett’s Peerage, eight volumes of the Spectator, Edmund Burke’s violently anti-Jacobin Reflections on the Revolution in France, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (whose precepts he would have saved himself a great deal of trouble by following) and a biography of Admiral Nelson.178

  Ancient history was well represented, of course, and the list included a very recent edition of Cornelius Nepos’ Vies des grands capitaines, a book he had first read over forty years earlier. By the time he went to St Helena, Napoleon could be certain that it would be impossible to write a modern book entitled Lives of the Great Captains without including a chapter on him too. The ambition he had conceived as a schoolboy at Brienne, and from which he had never wavered, had been achieved. He had transformed the art of leadership, built an empire, handed down laws for the ages, and joined the ancients.

  Epilogue

  After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in June 1815, and the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna later that year, the Great Powers coalesced against Europeans’ demands for liberal constitutions and national self-determination. Tsar Alexander I was left as the most powerful monarch in Europe, and ruled in an increasingly mys
tical and autocratic manner, putting down liberal revolts in Naples, Greece and Germany, until his death in 1825. Francis I of Austria relied on Metternich more and more. Having received back Austria’s ancient dominions, he established the reactionary Holy Alliance but never resuscitated the Holy Roman Empire. He died in 1835 aged sixty-seven. Frederick William III of Prussia also became deeply reactionary, ignored his promises of 1813 to give Prussia a constitution, and died in 1840. Metternich remained a central figure in European diplomacy, maintaining a system of balances established by the Congress, until he was forced to escape Vienna dressed as a washerwoman in the 1848 Revolution; he died in 1859. Pius VII also turned against the Enlightenment, reinstating authoritarianism in the Papal States, which were returned to him by the Treaty of Vienna. He died in 1823. King Ferdinand VII of Spain was compelled to accept a liberal constitution in 1820, was overthrown by the Spanish people and then restored to power by the French in 1823, whom he then alienated through his lust for vengeance. He died unlamented in 1833.

  Thanks in large part to the legal and political reforms undertaken by Napoleon, the Bourbons were unable to reintroduce the old ways upon their second Restoration in 1815. Louis XVIII spent his reign trying to find a middle course between his reactionary brother, the Comte d’Artois, who sought to roll back any democratic concessions, and the liberal constitutionalists, who pressed for France to follow the English model and to become a constitutional monarchy. He died in 1824, whereupon the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X. He was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830, which brought in the more moderate King Louis-Philippe (Charles’s cousin), and died in exile in Italy in 1836. The hopes of the unreconstructed royalists died with Charles.

  Much of Napoleon’s family lived under papal protection in Rome after Waterloo, including his mother, who retired there with her half-brother Cardinal Fesch. At eighty-five, blind and huddled in an armchair, she dictated reminiscences to Rosa Mellini, her lady-companion. ‘Everyone called me the happiest mother in the world,’ she said, ‘yet my life has been a succession of sorrows and torments.’ She died in February 1836. Fesch died there three years later, surrounded by his fabulous art collection, much of which he donated to the cities of Ajaccio and Lyons. Louis followed his literary pursuits in Rome, but visited Holland incognito once in 1840, where he was recognized and found himself acclaimed by his former subjects. He died in Livorno in July 1846. His long-separated wife Hortense bought the Swiss chateau of Arenenberg in 1817, where she lived until her death, aged fifty-four, in October 1837. Her illegitimate son by General Flahaut would later be made Duc de Morny by Napoleon III. Eugène de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, lived quietly in Munich with his wife and seven children, one of whom became Empress of Brazil. He died in February 1824. Another of his daughters, Princess Josephine, married Prince Oscar, the heir to the Swedish throne and son of Bernadotte, in 1823; their son Maximilian married the daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.

  Lucien was arrested after Waterloo, but allowed to retire to the Papal States, where he died, leaving eleven children from two marriages, in June 1840. Joseph stayed in Bordentown, New Jersey, using the title the Comte de Survilliers for sixteen years, and sensibly refused the crown of Mexico in 1820. For a short while he lived in Surrey, England. He defended his brother’s reputation ably, and died in Florence in July 1844. In 1816 Jérôme settled into exile in Trieste and he took the name Comte de Montfort, but he always considered himself a monarch. He returned to France in 1847 and became governor of Les Invalides in 1850, and president of the Senate, dying in 1860. Caroline Murat remarried after her husband’s execution and lived in Florence until her death in May 1839, with the self-invented title Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli). Pauline claimed to have been about to travel to St Helena when the news of her brother’s death arrived. Even though he had a mistress of ten years’ standing, Camillo Borghese allowed Pauline back to his house in Florence three months before her death in June 1825. (He was involved in Bonapartist plots until his death in 1832.)

  Charles-Louis-Napoléon, the youngest of King Louis of Holland’s three sons, took part in the Italian Revolution of 1831, attempted to invade France at Strasbourg in 1836, visited the USA in 1837, attempted another invasion of France in 1840 and was imprisoned, but escaped in 1845. In 1848 he was elected president by 9.9 million votes, and effected a coup in 1851, becoming Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. He was overthrown after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and died in exile in 1873. Thus the imperial epic that had started in Ajaccio in 1769 fizzled out in Chislehurst, Kent, 104 years later. To the end of his life he wore the wedding ring his uncle had given his grandmother Josephine.

  Marie Louise contracted a morganatic marriage with Neipperg four months after Napoleon’s death. They had one legitimate child after their first two illegitimate ones before Neipperg’s death in 1829. Marie Louise then married the Comte de Bombelles and died in December 1847, having ruled Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla since 1814.

  Napoleon’s children experienced very different fates. Napoleon II, the King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt, was tutored by Marmont, who tried unsuccessfully to poison his mind against his father. He joined the Austrian army but died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn on July 22, 1832, aged only twenty-one; his death mask can be seen in the Museo Napoleonica in Rome. His remains were sent to Les Invalides by Adolf Hitler in 1940 to foster friendship between Austria and the Vichy government in France. Count Alexandre Walewski was only seven when his mother Marie Walewska died, but he was given a good education by his uncle, an officer in the French army. He joined the Foreign Legion and fought in North Africa, and later became ambassador to London, where he arranged his cousin Napoleon III’s visit there and also Queen Victoria’s to France. He became President of the Corps Législatif and died of a heart attack at Strasbourg in 1868, aged fifty-eight. Charles Denuelle, Count Léon, Napoleon’s natural son by Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, grew so to resemble his biological father that passers-by stared at him in the street. He fought a duel against an orderly of Wellington’s in February 1832, and attributed his survival to a button he carried given to him by Hortense. He grew into an argumentative drunken wastrel, who, though Napoleon III paid his debts and a pension, died poverty-stricken of stomach cancer in Pontoise in April 1881. His mother was widowed in the 1812 campaign. She married Count Charles-Émile-Auguste-Louis de Luxbourg in 1814, with whom she remained until his death thirty-five years later. She died in 1868.

  Of Napoleon’s marshals, Mortier was killed, along with eleven other people, by a bomb at a military review in 1835. It had been let off by a disgruntled Italian who hoped to assassinate King Louis-Philippe. The king wept at Mortier’s funeral. Nicolas Soult, Duc de Dalmatie, went into exile in Germany until 1819, but later became a minister under the Bourbons and President of the Council and a reforming minister of war under Louis-Philippe. He represented France at Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, when Wellington gave a dinner in his honour. He died in 1851. Bernadotte became King of Sweden in 1818 and reigned until his death in 1844; his descendant sits on the Swedish throne today. Marshal Jourdan, despite refusing to sit on the court martial that condemned Ney, became a count and member of the House of Peers in 1819. He supported the 1830 Revolution, and died three years later. Marmont, the Duc de Raguse, was briefly tutor to the King of Rome. He died in 1852, the last of the Napoleonic marshals. When his memoirs were published posthumously, a critic likened him to ‘a sharpshooter who hides behind his own tombstone to pick off people who cannot reply’.

  Of Napoleon’s former ministers, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès escaped to Brussels during the second Restoration, but was allowed to return to France in 1818, where he remained in very comfortable retirement until his death in 1824. Louis-Mathieu Molé became director-general of roads and bridges under the Restoration, later becoming minister of marine, then foreign minister under King Louis-Philippe and prime minister from 1836 to 1839; he died in 1855. Armand de Ca
ulaincourt’s name was placed on the proscribed list by Louis XVIII, who was persuaded to remove it by Tsar Alexander. He died in 1827. Hugues Maret, the Duc de Bassano, was made a peer by Louis-Philippe and became prime minister of France for eight days in November 1834; he died in Paris in 1839. René Savary wrote eight volumes of memoirs which he published in 1828, and briefly served as commander-in-chief of the French Army in Algeria in 1831, where he showed considerable cruelty. He died in 1833.

  The group on St Helena quickly dispersed after Napoleon’s death. Henri Bertrand went back to Paris and lived at Napoleon and Josephine’s old house in the rue Chantereine. He died in January 1844. Count Montholon shared the captivity of Napoleon III at Ham prison from 1840 to 1846 – the same length of time, six years, as he had shared that of his uncle. He died in Paris in August 1853. Albine de Montholon had long since separated from her husband, carried on her affair with Basil Jackson in Brussels, and died in March 1848 at a ball given in her honour by her grandchildren. Emmanuel de Las Cases published Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène in four volumes in 1823 and constantly re-issued revised editions throughout his life. He was elected a deputy of the National Assembly in 1831, and died in 1842. Louis Marchand wrote his memoirs in comfort in Auxerre. In 1822 Betsy Balcombe married Charles Abell, who subsequently deserted her. She moved to Sydney, Australia with their only child, but returned to London to teach music. On the publication of her memoir she was given land in Algiers by Napoleon III, but chose to stay in London, where she died in 1871. Francesco Antommarchi published The Last Moments of Napoleon in 1825 and tried to sell copies of Napoleon’s death mask in 1833, but was sued over its authorship, which properly belonged to Dr Francis Burton. On his tombstone he had inscribed the words: ‘An Italian doctor at the service of the Emperor and the poor’. Sir Hudson Lowe left St Helena after Napoleon’s death and commanded the British troops in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) between 1825 and 1830, but was not appointed its governor. He died aged seventy-four in January 1844. Dr Vignali was murdered at his house on Corsica in June 1836.