Seven Ages of Paris

by Alistair Horne

  The rickety state of the Paris Opéra evidently presented distinct physical dangers to dancers. At one performance, a “machine” collapsed, throwing Mlle. Aubery six metres from her throne, so that she suffered concussion and a broken leg. Acidly Napoleon would write from Eylau, in March 1807, in the middle of that bloody campaign, “I see that the Mademoiselle Aubery affair occupies the Parisians more than all the losses that my army have suffered!” In 1808, Napoleon instructed his architect Fontaine to draw up “a fine project” for a new home for the Opéra; it was to be “a little like that of Milan.” He laid down the details, but noted somewhat casually that it could be “located anywhere.” Work on the project, however, did not begin until 1813.

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  Readers of the novels of Jane Austen have often marvelled at how she could have lived through the Napoleonic era, have written so much, but have mentioned virtually nothing about the cataclysmic war that was taking place. But it becomes perhaps a little less remarkable when one considers how little life in Paris was affected by the war. There were the distractions of the new galleries in the Louvre, the new building works, the promenades, the theatre, the opera—and no serious press to report unpleasant realities from far-flung battlefields. Even the loss of the Grande Armée in the retreat from Moscow in 1812 hardly disturbed the rhythm of life in the capital. Only the actual appearance of Cossacks on the Champs-Elysées in 1814 could do that.

  TWELVE

  * * *

  Downfall of an Empire

  Spring will bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.

  FOUCHÈ, IN 1814

  IMPERIAL NUPTIALS

  When life in Paris was interjected with tidings from far-flung battlefronts, after Tilsit in 1807 they were rarely destined to bring great joy. From Madrid, where the “Spanish Ulcer” was beginning its deadly work of sapping French strength, Napoleon returned to Paris in January 1809 to find morale disturbingly low. The economy was in a less healthy condition than when he had embarked on his Spanish adventure. The war represented a heavy financial burden, on top of the ever growing expense of keeping up his imperial splendour. The British blockade in particular was causing problems; once again perfide Albion was frustrating his ambitions at every turn. There was mounting resistance to conscription for the Spanish campaign, the first of Napoleon’s military enterprises that had lacked the pretext of a foreign, royalist coalition united against revolutionary France. Desertion or self-mutilation was preferred by one in ten new recruits. “Spontaneous” public enthusiasm, Fouché warned him, could no longer be depended on. The imperial family had also become markedly less popular, as their prodigious greed increased the overheads of the Empire. Napoleon understood the implications of all this, bluntly remarking to Fouché that “This year is an inopportune time to shock public opinion by repudiating the popular Empress … she is responsible for attaching a part of Paris society to me which would then leave me.” He would have to wait until he could achieve another triumph on the battlefield.

  Meanwhile, in the east his once defeated enemies were moving again. On 13 April he departed Paris in haste for Vienna—attempting to leave before dawn, without telling Josephine. However, the about-to-be-abandoned Empress leaped out of bed and flew down to the courtyard in her bedroom slippers. “Crying like a child, she threw herself into his carriage; she was so lightly dressed that his Majesty threw his fur-lined coat over her shoulders and then issued orders for her luggage to be sent on to her.” There followed another frantic excursion in pursuit of war together. Strasbourg was as far as she would be permitted to go this time. For Josephine it would be their last, poignant journey together. In a thoroughly despondent Paris the stock exchange tumbled. Plainly, the fate of the Empire, and of the Emperor, rested on the outcome of a single battle—more so than at any time since Marengo. But Wagram, in 1809, Napoleon’s last victory, was so hard fought, so marginal, that it brought with it a sense only that “we victors now know that we are mortal.”

  When, following Wagram, the Peace of Vienna of that October was announced to a theatre audience, it produced only modest enthusiasm. Consistent bad news was to follow as the Empire reached and passed its apogee. There were, of course, the usual spectacles to distract an uneasy populace. Then, once Josephine—with dignity—had permitted herself to be divorced, in 1810 came the grandiose nuptials of the Emperor and the nineteen-year-old Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria (in shedding the bien-aimée Josephine, reckoned the superstitious, he had shed his lucky star too). Politically, the new match was an act of great cynicism on both sides: in the words of André Maurois, Francis of Austria had “sacrificed his Iphigenia in order to gain time; when the hour should strike, he would not scruple to dethrone the husband and take back the daughter.” For Napoleon, it was a matter of ensuring the continuation of his dynasty. Just five and a half years had passed since the historic ceremony in Notre-Dame, during which time Josephine had proved incapable of providing an heir. Whether driven by urgency or by Mediterranean virility, Napoleon had deflowered his new bride at Compiègne on her way to Paris, in advance of the official ceremony in the Tuileries. That day the route of the imperial cortège through the capital was lined with thousands of spectators. They seem to have been mostly curious, however, because—in contrast to the fallen Josephine—to Parisians Marie Louise’s plump Teutonic face produced “generally an unfavourable impression.” Manifestly ill at ease in the city which had murdered her aunt Marie Antoinette, the new Empress, moreover, never conquered the hearts of the French as had her predecessor.

  For the marital grand entrée, a full-scale replica of the still unfinished Arc de Triomphe was created out of painted paper on a wooden framework. But there was an unfortunate omen when carpenters working on it went on strike. The Inspector-General of Police applied a stern hand, giving the carpenters four francs for what they had previously refused to do for eighteen, while six of them were thrown into jail. An even worse augury for the imperial marriage of Austria and France followed that July when a dreadful disaster overtook the Austrian Embassy at the ball celebrating the wedding. As the dancing began, a violent storm blew the curtains on to some candles. Fire took hold, and in moments there was chaos, with the hostess, Princess Schwarzenberg, and many others burned to death. Benjamin Constant’s wife, Charlotte, who was there, recorded the scene for him:

  … I swear to you that I still think I’m living in a nightmare—a bare seven minutes covered the whole time from the moment we all started for the doors … the flames reached out into the garden after us … we heard the big mirrors cracking and the chandeliers crashing down … and through it the screams of the wretched beings who were still inside.

  Firemen who rushed to the scene turned out to be drunk, provoking from Napoleon his sole comment: “I have discharged the colonel.”

  On the night of 20 March 1811, a young Henri Beyle, better known as Sten-dhal, then a clerk at army headquarters in Paris, was abed with his girlfriend Angéline Bereyter when they were woken by the sudden, repeated booming of the cannon.

  We counted up to nineteen, when mad cheering broke out in the streets. We then realized that we had missed the first three salvos … the cannon went on booming. It was a boy all right … a young prince had been born. All around us people went wild with joy.

  It was “a grand and happy event,” interjected Stendhal with unusual pomposity, while totting up, boastfully—in English—rather more personal statistics of his amatory prowess: “I make that one or two every day, she five, sex [sic] and sometimes neuf fois.”

  Marie Louise had indeed produced an heir, Napoleon II, the unhappy and short-lived “Aiglon.” His father named him King of Rome, possibly in cynical remembrance of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, which he had liquidated after Austerlitz. To Josephine he duly reported, “My son is plump and well. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes … I hope he will fulfil his destiny.” It was news that must have been fairly agonizing for a discarded barren ex-Empress. In his jour
nal, Stendhal went on to record his current disillusion: “This capital of the greatest empire of modern times is used up for me, I have become blasé with regard to its pleasures … Obviously I haven’t the light, frivolous character necessary for enjoying Paris to the full.” He had by now come to look on the Parisians as “a surly, fretful, envious people, in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction … Even the pretty girls wore five or six wrinkles across their foreheads, etched in by envy.”

  Stendhal’s disillusion perhaps reflected something of the prevailing mood in the city. For all the natural relief that there was now an heir, spontaneous demonstrations of joy at the happy event were somewhat exaggerated by the police reports. In June there was an imposing ceremony for the christening of the King of Rome at Notre-Dame, but the crowds that turned out were described as being more curious than enthusiastic. Napoleon had hoped that the occasion would be the first of a sequence of dynastic celebrations; in the event it was to prove the last party of Empire.

  FAMINE

  Within days of Napoleon’s rejoicing at the birth of his heir, his two Councils of Commerce and Manufacturing presented to him some unpleasant home truths. Though, with the tightening of the British blockade, Paris had become the undisputed commercial centre of Europe, the problems that had shaken her in 1805—still unresolved—emerged once more with increased force. Despite constantly raising taxes, Napoleon’s treasury had run up a deficit of fifty million francs by the end of 1811. It forced him to issue a decree cancelling the arrears of pay owed to the soldiers who had died for him, thereby in effect cheating even the dead. Led by the Banque de France, the banks had got themselves enmeshed in a chain reaction of competitive discounting which the weaker brethren could not afford.

  A first warning came with the fall of the important house of Lübeck, which had repercussions all over Europe. In February 1811 Mollien, the Finance Minister, could report that there were not twelve banks in Paris that remained truly sound. For each of the succeeding months of December 1810 to March 1811 there were more than forty business failures. Part of the trouble was a shortage of credit, and too many middlemen chasing too few goods. There were intermediaries selling goods they never possessed, without paying and without delivering. Speculation was rife; Talleyrand had no compunction about getting involved, and now some of the generals were too.

  Much of the speculation concerned contraband run through the blockade, despite the penalties imposed by a despot increasingly enraged at the thwarting of his Continental System, by which—since 1807—he had closed continental ports to Britain. There was a seizure of substantial American cargoes in Antwerp, with painful repercussions in Paris. But still the trade went on with the commerçants of Paris, despite the risks that they exposed themselves to, preferring to continue to offer their clientele contraband English goods. In the spring of 1811, a major consignment of contraband muslins and other fabrics was seized in the Rue Le Peletier, at the elegant heart of Paris. By June 1812, Mollien was daring to observe to Napoleon that “Paris seems to have become the public market chosen by England to direct and consume all its transactions of currency.” The following week, driven over the brink by the double-dealing of his ally, Tsar Alexander, with the English arch-enemy, Napoleon recrossed the Niemen to invade Russia and teach the Tsar a lesson.

  For the average Parisian, far worse than the renewed financial crisis was the disette, or famine, of 1811–12, brought about by a combination of native incompetence and the increasing rigour of the Royal Navy’s blockade. Initially the harvest of 1811 promised to be excellent; then repeated thunderstorms caused serious damage, particularly in the Paris region. Administrators were caught out, because—although the harvest of 1811 was not demonstrably smaller than that of 1810—they had allowed surpluses to run down. In Paris, the first signs of the dreaded disette were of boiled potatoes being sold around Les Halles instead of grain, and the sudden increase in the price of rice and vegetables. Shortages were exacerbated by provincials coming in to buy their bread from Paris, because it was of better quality there. Between 1811 and 1813, Napoleon summoned no fewer than fourteen conferences exclusively dealing with food supplies.

  By the beginning of 1812 the price of bread was beginning to spiral upwards as the speculators got in on the act. A sack of flour fetching 93 francs in February (already an exceptional price) reached 115 by April. On 8 May, on the eve of his departure for Dresden and Russia, Napoleon signed an important decree releasing stocks of flour to the Parisian millers. The reserves had all but run out.

  Fortunately for Napoleon, and with the kind of luck that was now deserting his star, the harvest of 1812 turned out well, and that of the following year was abundant. The price of bread fell and normality returned—just in time to counterbalance, for a while, the sombre news of decisive defeat at Leipzig that was coming in from Germany.

  RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

  It was impossible for Napoleon to ignore the intensity and duration of the hardship that the disette had imposed on the Parisians. As the fateful 1812 campaign got under way, it was evident that the French nation, drawing on her revolutionary capital, could not for ever go on glorifying war for its own sake. Outside the army itself, always loyal to Napoleon, there was now little enough love for him in the country at large. Increasingly he had to rely on the terror of the omnipresent secret police, headed since 1810 by Fouché’s even more thorough successor, General Savary, the kidnapper of the Duc d’Enghien. Soon after assuming office in Paris, Savary had imposed his stamp by executing two clerks in the Ministry of War for passing information to the Russians. As the Grande Armée headed for Moscow, Paris, recorded Laure, the vivacious wife of General Junot:

  presented a curious but melancholy spectacle. Husbands, sons, brothers and lovers were departing to join the army; while wives, mothers, sisters and mistresses either remained at home to weep, or sought amusement in Italy, Switzerland or the various watering-places of France.

  Laure herself headed for Aix-les-Bains, where she listened to Talma recite from The Tempest in the middle of a storm, and then began a turbulent affair with the Marquis de Balincourt as her husband, increasingly demented, fought for his life on the Russian front.

  So life continued in Paris, while the Grande Armée confronted failure outside Moscow and, in a terrible reverse, was forced to turn for home, struggling for its existence through the ice and snow of the great retreat. At last, on 20 December 1812, Laure Junot recalled, “the cannon on the Invalides announced to the city of Paris that the Emperor had returned from Russia.” Three days later, lovesick and now abandoned by Balincourt, she tried to take an overdose of laudanum. The following January, Junot himself returned. In the place of the dashing young Governor of Paris who had left her a few short months before, “there appeared a coarsened, aged man, walking with difficulty, bent and supported with a stick, dressed carelessly in a shabby greatcoat,” his sanity overthrown by the vicissitudes of war. During the brief time he spent in Paris that dreadful winter, one colonel of the once indestructible Grande Armée found his family and friends:

  in general terror-stricken. The famous 29th Bulletin had informed France abruptly that the Grande Armée had been destroyed. The Emperor was invincible no longer. The campaign of 1813 was about to open … people were shocked to see the Emperor entertaining at the Tuileries. It was an insult to public grief and revealed a cruel insensitivity to the victims. I shall always remember one of those dismal balls, at which I felt as if I were dancing on graves.

  The mood in Paris darkened as the full horror of the Russian débâcle was brought home by the state of survivors like Junot—a preview of what was to come. In the words of Mlle. Avrillon, who looked after the Empress’s jewellery, “we were all the more terrified … because for twenty years so many uninterrupted successes had made us think reverses impossible.” The superstitious could not fail to note that the Russian campaign was the first which had been undertaken by the Emperor since his marriage to Marie Louise. There was a palpable, unspoken s
ense that Moscow heralded, as Talleyrand expressed it, “the beginning of the end, and … the end itself could not be far distant.”

  THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS

  After Napoleon had sacrificed the whole of the Grande Armée in Russia in 1812, abandoning its shattered remnants as he scurried home to a disbelieving and restive Paris, this remarkable warlord had still been able to raise a fresh army to fight a new campaign in eastern Europe the following year. There, pitted against all Europe in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, he had suffered his first decisive defeat, in the bloodiest encounter Europe would know until 1914. Now his star—deprived of Josephine, whom the grognards (or grumblers, the veterans of the Grande Armée) deemed integral to it—had clearly turned against him. Nevertheless, he was still able to create new forces and fight one of his most brilliant campaigns, albeit a hopeless one, as the Allies surged across the frontiers of France and closed in on Paris in 1814. And he would repeat the miracle once more, in 1815, on his escape from Elba—until Waterloo finally removed his grip on France.