Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  The only factor in Portugal’s favor now was the choice of Junot to command this invasion force. Junot was of course completely loyal to his chief and usually quite dynamic, but he was erratic and unbalanced, and an incompetent organizer and commander. He was the wrong man for such an assignment, as his army of approximately 25,000 men quickly discovered as they advanced into Portugal under soaring temperatures. Lacking the most elementary logistical support, including food, water, and proper clothing, their numbers dwindled away at a staggering rate, less than two thousand ragged troops finally reaching Lisbon on November 30, 1807.[737] The French arrived too late to kidnap the Portuguese royal family, however, who had sailed for Brazil less than twenty-four hours earlier under a British naval escort commanded by none other than Napoleon’s old bugbear and opponent of Acre fame, Sir William Sidney Smith.

  More interested in trysts with Portuguese women and in looting Portuguese strongboxes than in making necessary defensive military preparations in the almost inevitable event of British reprisals, Junot took no substantive countermeasures. The result was that Gen. Sir Arthur Wellesley was able to land his initial force of nine thousand men safely at Mondego Bay in August of the following year, finally giving England a tenuous military foothold on the continent. Although Junot’s dawdling had helped temporarily delay Bonaparte’s campaign in late 1807, Napoleon was relatively satisfied with events.

  As noted, Portugal was meant to serve as the wedge of a vast French invasion, Spain to follow, to permit in turn the seizure of Gibraltar and the making of the Mediterranean into Napoleon’s very own mare nostrum. This would allow him to move his armies into North Africa, in imitation of the Roman legions of yore, while another French army from Naples would invade Sicily and a separate special fleet would take and secure the Cape of Good Hope. This breathtaking plan also required another separate army “of fifty thousand Russians, French, and perhaps Austrians” to march on Constantinople — “the center and seat of universal domination,” as Napoleon referred to it[738] — and beyond, Delhi beckoning him on eastward, not to mention the shimmering chimera of the Indies — East and West — and of course South America itself. All these plans of conquest were drawn up in a sweeping master plan he had first conceived in February 1806 and finalized in March 1808 — the whole thing intended to destroy all British trade everywhere and place uncontested control of most of the world in his own hands. In breadth, scope, and imagination the scheme was dazzling, involving hundreds of thousands of troops and many dozens of ships of the line that France and Spain in fact no longer possessed. But among other things, Bonaparte had somehow managed to forget about the English navy, which controlled the seven seas, and of course the technical and logistical impossibility of such a worldwide operation. Without Talleyrand there to attempt to keep him in check, Napoleon’s surging megalomania was clearly out of hand. Nevertheless Bonaparte — on whose personal orders their very existence depended — was still taken very seriously by most officials and generals.

  At this early stage, two more key elements for the enacting of this fresh blueprint for conquest were absolutely necessary: Russian and Spanish cooperation. Napoleon could not commit a major army in Spain without securing his flanks, in particular against an agitating Austria. For this he needed Russian assurances of help and direct military intervention. The second problem involved Spain itself, where Napoleon had foolishly anticipated full cooperation from the Spanish people, thereby permitting his armies to seize the country and then march on to Gibraltar for the next phase of his plan in North Africa. Napoleon did realize, however, that “the aristocracy and the clergy are the masters of Spain. If they fear for their privileges and existence,” he explained to Marshal Murat, “they will oppose me and fight on forever. At this time I have partisans there, but if I arrive as a conqueror [at the head of a large army], I will no longer have any.” The Spaniards, a most defiant and independent people, had no intention of obliging the French, or any other invader.

  With Portugal safely out of the way — and a whopping 100-million-franc war indemnity slapped on it (as compared to Prussia’s 140-million-franc reparations) — Napoleon could begin phase two, the invasion of Spain. Fortunately for him, the Spanish royal family was to prove most cooperative, thanks to its general incompetence, compounded by its internecine quarrels and jealousies. Indeed, they literally scampered into the Napoleonic web, although even before Junot’s arrival in November, Bonaparte had slipped three small French corps into northern Spain. As for the Spanish army, Napoleon considered it an absurdity that no intelligent commander could take seriously. As for that even greater absurdity, the Spanish Bourbons, they would fit nicely into the plan. King Carlos IV — who had been placed in a secondary position by his ugly wife’s lover, the insinuating and ambitious Godoy (a former army private and now virtual dictator of the land) — was as jealous of Godoy and his wife as he was wary of his ever-plotting son, Fernando, prince of Asturias. Promised his very own miniature kingdom of the Algarve, Godoy had proved most cooperative. For Napoleon, who despised the whole lot — Fernando “eats four square meals a day and hasn’t an idea in his empty head” — and loathed the corrupt and decadent Godoy as well, neither the timing nor the situation could have been more opportune. As Napoleon pointed out, “To choose the right moment in which to act is the great art of men. What one can do easily in 1807 perhaps cannot be done under any circumstances in 1810.”

  And then it happened. Carlos IV ordered the arrest of his son, charging Fernando with treason (for plotting to overthrow him). But as tempers cooled, a reconciliation of sorts took place, and the Spanish king, who had called for French military intervention, relented, informing Napoleon that this would not be necessary after all. Meanwhile French officers in Spain and Portugal were ordered to prepare intelligence reports on logistics, feasible roads, the strength of Spanish garrisons, and so on, accompanied by government-directed attacks in Parisian newspapers against Godoy. Complicating matters was Napoleon’s great plan for marrying brother Lucien’s eldest daughter, Louise, to Fernando (which in the end, however, came to nought). Nevertheless, by February 16, 1808, Napoleon was finally ready to strike.

  On that day French troops seized the Spanish frontier and the cities of Pamplona, Barcelona, San Sebastian, and Figueras. So far, so good.

  Meanwhile, if Carlos had had his change of heart about prosecuting Fernando, his son, however, had not yet played all his cards. He in turn now appealed to Napoleon to help him overthrow his father! By this stage even Napoleon was bewildered — first the father, then the son — but in any event he had the excuse he sought for bringing in French troops, 118,000 men to be exact. Godoy advised his masters to flee to South America, following the successful example of the Braganzas, and they rushed for the Atlantic port of Cadiz. News of the attempted royal flight led to national uprisings on March 17, including a revolt in Madrid. Now on the excuse of attempting to save the royal family, Napoleon dispatched Marshal Murat at the head of a French army with orders to seize the Spanish capital, which he duly entered on March 24. (Murat had informed his troops that they were marching south to campaign in North Africa.)

  As for the royal family, stopped by hostile crowds at Aranjuez, they panicked, the hapless king abdicating on March 19 in favor of his son, to be known as Fernando VII. Within a few days Don Carlos repented as usual. He did not want to abdicate after all, and he appealed to Napoleon, and to the very French army he had been in the midst of fleeing, for help. An incredulous Napoleon, still at Bayonne, could not believe his good fortune. The whole royal family was mad. He could not have devised a better plan himself. Summoning King Carlos, Queen Maria Luisa, Fernando, and Godoy, Napoleon kindly agreed “to mediate” for them and settle the issue once and for all there at Bayonne (on French territory).

  The Spaniards, all lured across the French frontier and obligingly into the spider’s web, reached Bayonne by April 30, 1808, when Napoleon put his simple but effective plan into action. First he got the dimwitted Carl
os secretly to confirm his abdication made earlier at Aranjuez but with one modification: Instead of assigning the throne to his son, he would hand it over to Napoleon, “temporarily,” until a solution could be found. Then on May 6 Napoleon in a secret meeting with Fernando convinced him to restore his father to the throne, assigning all his rights to him. Having done this, a beaming Bonaparte produced Carlos’s freshly minted modified abdication. Thanks to this sleight of hand, there was no longer either a king or a direct heir to the Spanish throne. Voila! The Spaniards suddenly found themselves exiled from their native land and, under tight military security, escorted to their respective — if luxurious — new prisons, where they would remain under house arrest for the next several years: ex-king Carlos, the ex-queen, and Godoy en route for the Château of Compiègne, and Fernando and his retinue to Talleyrand’s sprawling renaissance estate at Valençay. Within a matter of three weeks Bonaparte had polished off the lot of them, the bewildered state prisoners still not quite fathoming what had befallen them.

  With Spain now seemingly his for the taking, Napoleon looked for another Bonaparte to succeed to the vacant Bourbon throne. Lucien, his initial choice, still could not be persuaded to discard his second wife, by now the mother of a numerous family. Napoleon denounced his ungrateful, unreasonable brother in a private letter to Joseph on March 11. “Lucien is acting more self-righteous than the Pope!” And he retaliated (as he invariably did when rebuffed) by exiling Lucien from Rome to the provinces. “I thought he was intelligent, but I see now that he is just a fool.” Napoleon could never understand any man giving up a kingdom and immense power for a woman.

  Napoleon now turned to Louis, who also rejected the Spanish throne but for entirely different reasons. Kings, he lectured brother Napoleon, were not mere government officials to be shunted from post to post. “I am not some simple provincial governor,” he reminded him. “The only other promotion possible for me is in heaven...How could I possibly take an oath to faithfully serve another people, when I had not even remained faithful to Holland?” For the hypochondriacal Louis, who spent more time at foreign spas than attending to government business in Holland, it was a surprising remark. Napoleon had no answer for it. Meanwhile Jérôme also declined Spain.

  Down to his last choice, Napoleon twice called on King Joseph of Naples. Though his offer was rejected out of hand the first time around, Joseph accepted the second time on April 18, and then most reluctantly, when among other things Napoleon promised to extend Spanish boundaries to include the Ebro River and the Pyrenees. Joseph agreed to exchange the Bourbon throne of Naples for the Bourbon throne of Spain. He came to regret it almost immediately.

  On the very day that Prince Fernando relinquished his claims to the throne, May 6, 1808, Napoleon proclaimed Joseph the new king of “Spain and the Indies,” the appointment to become legally effective on August 1, although Joseph was to take up his new post immediately. The news quickly spread through the leading aristocratic circles of the country, the very circles whose support Napoleon himself recognized as being vital to him if he were to execute a quiet, unopposed military occupation of the country. Alas, this ruling elite did not accept Joseph Bonaparte’s accession to their throne. “You must be quite aware,” Cardinal Desping y Dasseto confided to the archbishop of Granada, “that we cannot recognize as our king someone who is a freemason, a heretic, and a Lutheran, as are all the Bonapartes and indeed all the French people.”

  Joseph had accepted on the understanding that relinquishing the Neapolitan throne would not result in its falling into unfriendly hands. As he explained to his brother Lucien, with whom he remained on close and friendly terms, “Prince Murat will not be king. The emperor has explained himself on this count by stating...that only his brothers are to have thrones.”[739] Joseph did not learn of Napoleon’s latest deception in this matter until he had crossed the Spanish frontier, thereby adding another grudge against a brother whom he by now loathed as heartily as he distrusted, this brother who had so disrupted the calm, comfortable life he had made for himself under the shade of the chestnut trees of Mortefontaine. On May 5 Prince Murat, though himself strongly covetous of the Spanish crown, gratefully accepted the lesser Neapolitan jewel “with tears of gratitude streaming from my eyes,” although having in return to sign over to Napoleon the Grand Duchy of Berg as well as Caroline’s Elysée Palace.[740]

  The imperial French hornets’ nest was finally calming down and sorting itself out. Napoleon now had five European crowns “in the family,” in addition to that of France: Louis in Holland, Jérôme in Westphalia, sister Caroline and brother-in-law Joachim in Naples, and an obliging Joseph in Madrid (with an increased official income alone of 16 million francs), not to mention his genial young stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, holding down the fort for him as viceroy of Italy (although Napoleon had gone back on a formal promise actually to hand over that crown to Eugène). Napoleon’s master plan for world domination could now proceed.

  Joseph made a triumphal entry into Vitoria on June 6, 1808, and was officially recognized as the successor to Carlos IV by the governing aristocratic junta, or council, albeit at French bayonet point. Thereafter the new king was proclaimed as “Don Joseph, by the grace of God, King of Castile, Aragon, of the Two Sicilies, of Jerusalem, of Navarre, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia, Majorca, Minorca, Seville,” and so on, the list of historic titles read filling an entire page, including “Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, and the West and East Indies.” The Bonapartes had indeed arrived.

  Nonetheless, in spite of a trunkful of ancient, golden, jewel-encrusted crowns, all was not quite as wonderful as Napoleon declared it to be in the pages of the Moniteur, for on May 2, even before Fernando had officially signed over all his rights to the crown, tens of thousands of people in Madrid revolted against Marshal Murat and the powerful garrison commanded by General Grouchy, the newly installed governor-general. They were saved only by emergency reinforcements rushed in by Moncey. The results: well over a thousand French and Spanish killed — some put the estimate at close to twenty-five-thousand — and a new rallying symbol of Spanish rebellion against the French invader and usurper resounding through the peninsula: “Dos de Mayo” words that were to haunt the French to the very end. But for the unheedful Napoleon, who was at this moment frolicking in the Atlantic surf with Josephine on a well-guarded beach near Bayonne, it was but a minor incident, or so he declared, as was the further dismaying news reaching France later that month of the Spanish bombardment and capture in Cadiz harbor of the few remaining French vessels that had sheltered there ever since their ignominious defeat at Trafalgar.

  Under sunny blue skies Napoleon — having just added two kingdoms to the glorious French Empire — and Josephine duly began their triumphal return journey to Paris, and to the refreshing elegance of St.-Cloud, the heavily censored press kindly omitting the less agreeable details of a few setbacks. But despite official cheers and outward self-congratulation by French imperial officials in the capital, neither Foreign Minister Cham-pagny nor War Minister Clarke could long put off the influx of disconcerting news now reaching them almost daily. Within a single week in May, three French military governors — of Badajoz, Cadiz, and Cartagena — had been assassinated, and three other provinces around Asturias, Seville, and Valencia were already in a state of open rebellion. Indeed, by the end of the first week in June, almost the entire Kingdom of Spain was rising up against the French army of occupation, the Spaniards appealing directly to London for military assistance.

  In fact Bonaparte had received news of several major setbacks while en route from Bayonne, in particular by Joseph Bonaparte’s new, disliked commander in chief, General Savary (the newly promoted duke of Rovigo), who had caught up with the imperial couple while they were still at Tours.

  The assassinations and revolts had taken place chiefly as a result of the Dos de Mayo uprising and subsequently after the news of the defeat and surrender of General Dupont’s corps of twenty-three thousand men to the Spanish
generals Redding and Castaños at Bailen on July 22. Napoleon was particularly concerned about the Dupont catastrophe, which seemed to toll a knell at St.-Cloud and in the War Ministry. It appeared that Dupont’s troops, after taking Cordoba, savagely sacked the city and raped thousands of its women and girls, then evacuated with a booty train reminiscent of Napoleon’s campaign back in Italy in 1797. Thousands of mules and horses hauled some five hundred wagons crammed with loot, greatly delaying Dupont’s escape from the angry Spanish civilians (“rebels,” the French called them) and troops that had set out after him, General Redding’s garrison at Bailen then preventing his advance north to Madrid.

  “If I thought it [the conquest of Spain] were going to cost me 80,000 men, I would not attempt it, but it will not involve more than 12,000 lives,” Napoleon had lightly quipped at Bayonne back on April 18, as if twelve thousand lives were a trifle. In fact, however, as he was already beginning to realize, French armies would be able to occupy the whole of Spain only by overcoming vigorous opposition. “I am truly perplexed,” he had confided to Marshal Murat. “Do not for a minute lose sight of the fact that you are dealing with a different sort of people there. They have all the courage and enthusiasm one encounters only among men clearly determined to defend their homeland.”[741]

  It is not that this Spanish resistance surprised Bonaparte so much as the fact that he thought that any good French general, as Dupont had proved himself to be against the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians, at the head of twenty-three thousand or so crack French troops, could easily quell any Spanish force of equal or even larger size. The French were unbeatable, unstoppable. He was dead wrong, as Savary related the defeat at Bailen, accompanied by the incredible news of the flight of “£/ Rey Josef’ from Madrid all the way to Burgos. Napoleon was simply stunned.