Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  By the end of the Peace of Amiens, Napoleon’s authoritarian rule seemed to be comprehensively established, with all aspects of national life under his control. Yet a crucial element in the whole structure was missing: the continuity of succession. It was abundantly clear to all Paris that everything depended on the survival in power of this one remarkable being. As early as Christmas Eve 1800, six months after Marengo, the First Consul’s mortality was brought dramatically home. On his way to a Haydn oratorio at the Opéra he had narrowly escaped death when a massive bomb hidden under straw in a wagon exploded in the Rue Saint-Nicaise. The blast destroyed the carriage in which Hortense and Napoleon’s sister Caroline Bonaparte were being conveyed, killing one of the horses and splashing Hortense with blood. Fifty-two bystanders and part of the escort were killed or maimed. The sinister Fouché had two Chouans (Royalist guerrillas from the south-west) guillotined and almost a hundred former Jacobins deported. In true Parisian tradition, the executions of the guilty were watched by enormous crowds, thronging all the bridges and the quays on the route to the scaffold.

  The explosion in the Rue Saint-Nicaise had some long-term consequences. In the first place, it strengthened the hand of Fouché, lending the regime the trappings of authoritarianism which it had not possessed before. Secondly, the structural damage caused to so many old buildings in the vicinity of the Louvre determined Napoleon to launch a major rebuilding programme. Thirdly, it focused the attention of the childless First Consul on the problems of his succession. At the beginning of 1804, two more plots against him would be uncovered in Paris; they were followed by one of the few mass guillotinings of Napoleon’s rule, and one of the suspects, General Pichegru, was found strangled in prison. These three attentats would lead, in 1804, to Napoleon’s greatest error of judgement—the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. One night in March 1804, the thirty-two-year-old d’Enghien (a totally harmless princeling, but one feared by Napoleon—doubtless egged on by Fouché—as a potentially dangerous claimant to the Bourbon throne) was kidnapped from his retreat in Germany by French cavalry. Spirited off to the Château de Vincennes, a week later, after a perfunctory court martial which produced no evidence against him, he was executed by firing squad, together with his inseparable dog, and buried in a grave which had been dug well in advance. It was, in the immortal phrase of Talleyrand, whose own hands were far from clean, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.”

  CIVIL REFORMS

  It was during these fleeting years of peace that Napoleon, acting with the speed and energy which he brought to his military operations, carried through the civil reforms that were to be his most durable achievements. He was, of course, helped by the radical changes already effected by the Revolution, which had got rid of all those institutions it considered to have outlived their usefulness. Even if Napoleon had never fought a battle, these reforms would still entitle him to acclaim as one of history’s great rulers.

  Impelled by the disastrous floods of the previous winter, which had left the Champs-Elysées partly submerged, Napoleon embarked on the reorganization of the quays of the Seine. He began in 1802 by ordering the construction of the Quai d’Orsay, which was eventually to stretch all the way to the Ecole Militaire. Ambitious plans for canals and reservoirs were drawn up, providing Paris with her modern water supply. Named the Musée Napoléon, the Louvre was completed in 1803 to display the Italian art treasures looted in the First Consul’s recent campaigns. Before long there would come the grandiose architecture inspired by military conquests. There were also works of purely economic significance, like the Bourse and the giant Halle des Vins—intended to make Paris the main entrepôt for wine in northern Europe.

  The list of construction work started is an impressive one, especially given how little time Napoleon was able to devote to the home front: the Rue de Rivoli, Rue de Castiglione, Rue Napoléon (later renamed Rue de la Paix), the Conseil d’Etat and the Cour des Comptes, four new bridges, the Madeleine transformed into a Temple of Victory with the portico of the Palais Bourbon, facing it across the Concorde, remodelled in matching Roman style. Everywhere new fountains and parks were constructed.

  Napoleon’s views on education, as expressed at a session of the Conseil d’Etat held at the Tuileries in 1804–5 were simply stated and non-revolutionary. “Up to the present,” he declared,

  the only good education we have met with is that of the ecclesiastical bodies. I would rather see the children of the village in the hands of a man who knows only his catechism, but whose principles are known to me, than of some half-baked man of learning who has no foundation for his morality and no fixed ideas.

  In 1795 the Directory had introduced a new secular system of education, on to which stem, accepting the best and rejecting the worst, Napoleon grafted in 1802 one of the most favoured and long-lasting of all his reforms—the lycées, or state secondary schools. As with so many of his reforms, his intention at least in part was to provide a steady flow of military and administrative cadres essential to the Napoleonic machine. He also converted the high-grade Ecole Polytechnique, founded by the Convention in 1794, into a military college for gunners and engineers. He next set his seal on the Ecole Normale Supérieure, likewise initiated by the Convention and still today the breeding ground for French intellectual leaders.

  Both the latter innovations were created within the embrace of the Sorbonne, which—like every other function in Paris—swiftly felt the imprint of the new master. Under the Revolution the great University founded by Abélard had once more fallen on hard times. On account of its clerical orientation it had received rough treatment from the revolutionaries, who stole its marbles and left it to crumble. Suppressed, it remained empty until Napoleon took a hand in 1806, establishing the Académie de Paris and the Facultés des Lettres, des Sciences et de Théologie in its buildings. Once again the Sorbonne thrived—but only briefly. Then, as before, it was allowed to fall into decay. For the first part of the nineteenth century following the fall of the Empire, arguments continued on its rebuilding, but nothing was done until Haussmann came along.

  Though the Directory had done something to improve France’s political structure, between 1799 and 1804 her constitution was extensively remodelled by Napoleon, to the great advantage of his personal power of course. As it did in his military technique, rationalization drove his civil reforms. In February 1800, the various départements were placed under the charge of prefects; the following year the metric system was set up; and in 1802 a new national police force was raised. France was to become more tightly centralized on Paris than ever it had been under the Roi Soleil. Before Napoleon, France had been plagued by 360 separate local codes; he now began the prodigious labour of unifying them into one set. By 1804 the Code Civil (better known as the Code Napoléon) had been voted through the legislature. Though comprising over 2,000 articles, it took only four years to complete and is still for the most part in force. Typical both of his energy and of his personal interest in administrative reform, Napoleon attended no fewer than 57 of the 109 meetings devoted to it. Regulating virtually every function of life, the Code imposed inter alia the equal division of property among sons—thereby doing more than the Revolution had done to break up the big estates.

  The precarious French economic and financial system also benefited from Napoleon’s attention, accompanied by often ruthless measures. From the Revolution France emerged with a tax burden at least as great as at the end of the ancien régime, but the Directory had at least managed to straighten out some of the chaos of the nation’s finances. Taxation had been thoroughly overhauled, with taxes restructured, and—for almost the first time—actually collected with pitiless efficiency. Fines were imposed on those who did not pay promptly, and even the workers were subject to taxes; thus both the Consulate and the Empire were able to benefit from these sweeping reforms. Bonaparte swiftly reduced the number of tax collectors from 200,000 to fewer than 6,000; at the same time, the yields doubled. The Banque de France was established in 180
0, and given complete control over the national debt and the issue of paper money. Unemployment in Paris was kept to a low level, but labour was hard and the hours long. Outside Paris, in the countryside, the life of the average peasant was not much affected by either the Consulate or the Empire. The great roads built by Napoleon radiated out from Paris towards frontiers with distinct military purposes, but did little to bring rural France into contact with the modern world.

  In general, however, both peasant and urban working classes seem to have been better fed than they were either before 1789 or after 1815—partly thanks to strict government controls on corn exports and price levels—and they came to regard the Napoleonic era as one of relative prosperity. Napoleon claimed to have gained the allegiance of the working classes by “bread and circuses,” and certainly the appeal to native jingoism of great victories such as Marengo did much to alleviate dissatisfaction over any loss of civil or political liberties. But, as with most dictators, it would also mean that he had to keep on going, producing one triumph after another abroad.

  A CORONATION

  In December 1804, Napoleon mounted the greatest public entertainment that Paris had seen since the famous spectacles of Louis XIV—his coronation as emperor. It had not been entirely a good year: the abduction from Germany and summary execution of the Duc d’Enghien had lost him considerable goodwill at home and, together with his proclamation of the Empire on 18 May, had precipitated the Third Coalition against him. But now, by the ceremony on 2 December, Bonaparte—and his dynasty—would be confirmed in everlasting power.

  Preparations had been going on for months. To the eternal credit of the about-to-be-Emperor, restoration work demanded by the Coronation had saved Notre-Dame (which had only recently been formally handed back to the Roman Catholic clergy) from the terrible ravages of the Revolution. With the declared intention of clearing the area round the cathedral for aesthetic reasons, so that it could be better seen, but also to allow access for the vast retinue of cavalry, troops and coaches designated for the Coronation, Napoleon had started to demolish many of the medieval houses that hemmed it in. A first instalment of his own grandiose schemes for rebuilding the city as “the most beautiful that could ever exist,” this began what Haussmann would complete under the Emperor’s nephew. To get it all completed on time, from the summer of 1804 workmen had laboured all night by the light of torches. In the Concorde, a huge star had been erected on the exact spot where Louis XVI had been executed, and imposing Ns surrounded by laurel wreaths were placed atop all the surrounding buildings.

  To perform the ceremony, Napoleon—exploiting the new Concordat—had summoned or coerced Pope Pius VII all the way from Rome. It was an extraordinary display of arrogance for a ruler so recently under excommunication. In bitter cold at the end of November, Pontiff and future Emperor met on the road near Fontainebleau. Weary from his long journey, the Pope was obliged to descend from his carriage and stand in the mud to be received by Napoleon. He was then conducted into the inferior position in the imperial coach. Paris had never seen a pope before, and the frail, mild-mannered man made the most favourable of impressions. Even the hard-line Jacobins bowed their heads before him. Parisian vendors of rosaries did a roaring trade—one was said to have made a net profit of 40,000 francs in January 1805 alone.

  On the morning of the Coronation, Napoleon once again kept his captive Pope waiting, chilly and apprehensive, before having him escorted from the Tuileries by four squadrons of dragoons and six carriage-loads of cardinals, bishops and priests; as someone noted, the last time so many clerics had been seen on that route they had been bundled into tumbrils. After waiting patiently in the cold, thousands of Parisians watched the Emperor’s giant coach go past—on its roof the crown of Charlemagne, no less, supported by eagles. As church bells pealed and cannon sounded out in their hundreds, 8,000 outriders accompanied the procession, far outdoing even the excesses of Louis XIV. Some bystanders noted the eight horses now harnessed to the great coach, a number properly reserved exclusively for royalty. George Sand’s father wrote to his wife, “Goodbye to the Republic. Neither you nor I will miss it.” It was a view echoing that of many a Parisian.

  Waiting at Notre-Dame were sixty bishops with their clergy, the Senate, the Legislative Body, the Conseil d’Etat, and ministers of the various European powers. Closest to the Emperor were generals mostly from plebeian backgrounds, some of whom had been Jacobins and regicides only the previous decade, now all bearing resounding titles: Grand Chamberlains, Grand Marshals, Grand Masters of the Hounds. In the west end of the cathedral, and opposite the altar, on a platform twenty-four steps high sat an immense throne. Here Napoleon, not the Pope, placed the imperial crown on his own head, as Josephine knelt before him. There were moments of dissonance, which threatened to introduce farce into a scene of high majesty. Between the altar and the throne, an altercation broke out between Josephine and the jealous sisters-in-law carrying her train, which momentarily arrested her procession. Chagrined by receiving only two tickets for the coronation, David, the court painter, sought his revenge by painting himself into the ponderous formal tableau. On the return journey to the Tuileries, there was an unfortunate omen when the weighty crown toppled off the coach.

  At this point, when he had taken to himself a concentration of power comparable only to that of the Roman Caesars, of Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman emperors, Napoleon was still only thirty-five. Le petit caporal or le Tondu, as the army fondly called him, was beginning to show just a few signs of filling out; his cheeks were plumper, the waistband of his breeches tauter, his skin sallower. Already he had been cocu by Josephine (and vice versa). Soon it would be time to do once again what he did best: to demonstrate to the world the military supremacy of France.

  ELEVEN

  * * *

  “The Most Beautiful City

  That Could Ever Exist”

  If the Heavens had granted me another twenty years and some leisure, you would have looked in vain for the Old Paris …

  NAPOLEON ON SAINT HELENA

  RETURN FROM AUSTERLITZ

  The Peace of Amiens had reached the end of its short life in May 1803 when England, alarmed by Napoleon’s naval activity, resumed her blockade of France. Napoleon was determined to invade England and assembled 177,000 men and more than 2,000 craft in the Channel ports, only to be frustrated repeatedly by adverse winds. When the new Third Coalition—in which Britain was joined by Russia, Austria, Sweden and Naples—menaced him from the east, the French Emperor acted decisively, even precipitately. On 1 October 1805, finally abandoning all thoughts of invading perfide Albion, Napoleon reversed direction and headed eastwards for the greatest military triumph of his career. It was one of his rare campaigns without a female consort. Never would he be more admired and worshipped by his soldiers than during this brief and dazzling operation. Nevertheless, he left an ill-humoured and extremely anxious Paris. In the Senate there had been little more than token enthusiasm when he explained the causes of the new war, laying the blame squarely on the Allies. Since the ending of the Peace of Amiens and of its accompanying boom, the French economy had nosedived. A poor harvest had made bread prices soar, and the national finances were soon in a mess once again, with the budget showing an immense deficit and taxes rising. All of this provoked something akin to panic on the Bourse. Thus it was absolutely imperative for Napoleon to win a swift and conclusive victory; otherwise the country would be in serious danger of bankruptcy. A call-up of 80,000 troops had done little to enhance his popularity in the capital. Leaving the Tuileries on his long march, the Emperor had been vexed by the unwonted lack of warmth towards him shown by the citizenry.

  Yet, within the month, after marching through Germany at a prodigious speed, Napoleon at the head of the Grande Armée had trapped a whole Austrian army at Ulm and received its surrender. By 14 November he was entering Vienna in triumph. Two weeks later, brought to bay—so it seemed—far away in the heart of what is now the Czech Republic, he then tu
rned and defeated the vastly superior combined forces of Austria and Russia. The Battle of Austerlitz, one of the most perfectly conceived and executed in the history of warfare—though an immensely risky affair—would always remain the jewel of all military jewels in Napoleon’s crown.

  But this was not how Paris saw it when the news came through on 26 November. The city was still in an ill humour. With such a hands-on ruler, anxiety was often rife during his absences on campaign, and Paris was never more nervous. Up to 1803, Napoleon had appeared to Frenchmen as a peacemaker, but thenceforth it was as the conqueror and founder of a new empire—a change of role that, as of 1805, was by no means to every Parisian’s liking. Vienna was the first Allied capital ever to be occupied during all the wars of the previous decade, yet news of Napoleon’s triumphal entry was greeted in Paris with a momentary froideur. What was Napoleon getting himself into? Unmistakably the hand of the police could be seen fomenting the “spontaneous” joy in the streets, and “inviting” householders to display all their lights. The rejoicing did not last long; and it would be dimmed by the news of the loss of Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet at Trafalgar. But much more menacing in its immediacy was the awareness that the Banque Récamier had stopped payments. And what a terrifying predicament—the Grande Armée with the Emperor himself so many hundreds of kilometres from home, surrounded by powerful enemies in the heart of Europe!