Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  Iberia was in fact the true test for Napoleon, the true indicator that something was gravely wrong in his life, in his seemingly resplendent career. With more unchallenged power at his personal command than either the king of England or the Austrian emperor, Napoleon was going downhill rapidly. For the first time in his career, he refused to rejoin a major, deadly military campaign, for in his heart of hearts he probably realized he could not win, at least not for many years, in a land where half a dozen major battles might be fought in half a dozen distant places, seconded by Spaniards and Portuguese who were determined to fight to the last man and in the process carry out such barbarous atrocities as to frighten even him. The captured General Foy had been paraded stark naked through city streets. There were reports of captured French officers having their eyes and tongues cut out, or being castrated and left just barely alive, for all to see, insult, jab, and jeer at, while others had fingers, hands, arms, and legs chopped off. Soldiers and female collaborators were tortured and disemboweled. The women, reported eyewitness Capt. Charles François, were eviscerated from the navel to the vagina and their breasts hacked off. But it was the large numbers of men who suffered most frequently over the years, the Spaniards even placing live officers between two boards and sawing them in two. Others were buried alive up to their shoulders and left to die, some were hung upside down over fires, their heads roasted over the flames, and in one case at least Thiébault tells of a general officer captured by the Spaniards and boiled alive in a huge caldron of water, like a human lobster. It was a nightmare. What had Napoleon done? What had he gotten himself into?

  So Bonaparte escaped into the unreal world of wedding preparations, not stopping for a moment, faster and faster, until all could be forgotten. He was a genius, everyone said so. If he worked harder than ever, took a new wife, begot many sons, he could save his mighty empire, as mighty as any seen since the fall of Rome, even surpassing that of Charlemagne. To be sure Louis, Jérôme, and Joseph were letting him down. But he needed no man’s help. He could do the work of all of them. What is more he could even expand his frontiers. This marriage with Marie-Louise marked the rebirth of Napoleon, the rejuvenation of a prematurely aging man, while serving as a colorful illusion of present and future stability.

  They had come for three days from Compiègne to St.-Cloud, with all thirty-two cardinals attending (including the large delegation from Rome), where on April 1 the French civil ceremony was carried out, despite the continuing heavy rain. The following day “the solemn entry into Paris made by the emperor and empress was magnificent.” A procession of some three dozen elegant carriages passed beneath the temporary canvas facade of the Arc de Triomphe, which although begun four years earlier had scarcely advanced. Clouds had finally given way to radiant sunshine, bathing the long procession of polished carriages and their large, handsome military escort as they made their way up the still largely uninhabited Champs-Elysées, across the spacious former Place de Louis XV and through the tree-covered gardens to the Tuileries. “It could not have been more touching or magnificent,” commented the scathing Fouché, adding, “What a beautiful day. What light-heartedness so prodigiously affirmed!” Hundreds of minor prisoners were released throughout the land, and some six thousand soldiers would receive special pensions and dowries for their daughters. Thousands of small gold and silver medallions bearing the likeness of Napoleon and Marie-Louise were to be distributed among the populace, as a government-organized food lottery was preparing to distribute thousands of chickens, geese, and legs of lamb, all to be washed down by large vats of wine imported into the center of the city. Throughout the capital on his wedding day every bell and church belfry would ring out, and cannon at the Invalides would thunder. Napoleon would show them all; he would prevail and continue to recast the whole of French and European life in his own image.

  Following a brief respite, the unrelenting schedule resumed, as a procession on foot slowly formed in the Galérie de Diane of the Louvre and proceeded to the large Salon d’Apollon, where a temporary chapel had been installed for the occasion, the bride’s long train borne by Queen Julie Bonaparte of Spain, Queen Hortense of Holland, Queen Catherine of Westphalia, and Princesses Elisa and Pauline — Queen Caroline Murat had adamantly refused to participate — and surrounded by some four hundred select guests. Although Napoleon’s uncle Cardinal Fesch naturally performed this religious ceremony, as he had that of Napoleon and Josephine six years earlier, only eleven of the thirty-two cardinals summoned agreed to appear, the other places reserved for them remaining conspicuously empty, although these same gentlemen had been seen parading through the Tuileries earlier in their bright red costumes. (As Napoleon looked at the two empty rows he became infuriated. Following the marriage ceremony he ordered the imprisonment of most of them and had their estates seized. When they were later released, Napoleon was to forbid them from wearing red; hence thereafter they became popularly known as the Black Cardinals.)

  Napoleon was soon distracted by the religious ceremony and subsequent celebrations. He and his bride then appeared on the balcony of the Pavillion de l’Horloge, as the Imperial Guard, thousands strong, marched by in the courtyard in all their shining splendor.

  Inside, the reception rooms were filled with royalty, though for the most part self-made Bonaparte royalty. All of them partook of the imperial banquet in the theater of the Tuileries, at 6:00 P.M., followed by a concert in the towering Salle des Maréchaux as well as a fireworks display and the illumination of the principal buildings of the capital, reflected in the waters of the Seine.

  Although Napoleon had hoped that his two wives, past and present, would meet, Marie-Louise proved jealous and defiant, demanding the banishment of Josephine and the confiscation of Malmaison. Despite assurances that Malmaison would remain hers, Josephine wrote back in panic: “Bonaparte! You promised that you would never abandon me! I need your advice. You are the only friend I have left...I have been banished completely from Your Majesty’s memory.” He stoically replied:

  You will need courage to maintain yourself and to find happiness, and in particular to maintain your good health, which is so precious to me. If you are attached to my well-being and love me, you must get a good grip on yourself. You can never doubt my friendship for you, and indeed, must know very little about my real feelings toward you if you ever thought I could possibly be happy knowing you are not. Adieu, mon amie, good night.

  Although he did come to see her a few times before the marriage, afterward his jealous young new wife kept a firm grip on the mighty Bonaparte, forbidding any contact. After temporary moves to both Malmaison and the Château de Navarre, Josephine decided that a year’s travel away from Paris was the best answer for getting over this difficult period, and set out for Aix, Savoy, and Switzerland. Hereafter Josephine would never again appear at Court.

  A few days after the marriage ceremonies, they had returned to the Palace of Compiègne, where one evening in one of the long series of reception rooms, the Salon de Jeu, Empress Marie-Louise was seated at a table playing whist while all about her a veritable bevy of royalty mingled with German and Russian princes, French marshals, and high military brass of Europe, and the principal diplomats of the day. Everyone wanted to be seen talking with the great man himself, of course, and he insisted on walking slowly from table to table, exchanging a few bland words or nodding in acknowledgment, and addressing a few gallant, and for once startlingly polite, words to the ladies. His bride was already having a civilizing influence on him. How far he had come from those days in the early 1790s when, as a nearly starving junior officer, he had importuned his former classmate Bourrienne and his wife for a hot meal.

  “Having reached the end of the game room, and finding himself before the large open connecting doors, he entered the next room, and immediately almost everyone got up...and formed a long procession behind him,” General Thiébault recorded. “Strolling slowly he reached the middle of the salon, then stopped, crossed his arms across his chest, stare
d at the floor six feet before him, and did not budge.” The kings, queens, princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, and the other eminent personnages following him also stopped suddenly. Those closest to Napoleon drew back and hesitantly formed an immense circle about the emperor, leaving him immobile in the center, the vast room with its hundreds of candles and sparkling crystal chandeliers. “At first, embarrassed, everyone even avoided looking at one another,” Thiébault continued.

  Then, curious, little by little they raised their eyes and looked about them. Several moments later, however, their expressions changed to puzzlement, seeming to ask what sort of game Napoleon was now up to. But no one spoke a word as the moments continued to tick away, the French in particular quite ill at ease before so many distinguished foreigners. In fact this abrupt, unexplained act by Napoleon, which seemed as bizarre as it was out of place, made me at first think that he had suddenly remembered something of importance and had stopped to think about it. And yet all the while he did not even bat an eye, and after five, six, seven, eight minutes had passed, no one could make any sense whatsoever of his action. But he remained the master, apparently pleased with this singular spectacle he was presenting, and under the circumstances it seemed best to do nothing at all.

  After a quarter of an hour of this, the fifty-two-year-old Marshal Masséna, now known as the duke of Rivoli, had had enough and stepped out of the circle, walking slowly over to Napoleon. “No one else dared move, or even considered] doing so, as they watched spellbound.” Not a breath could be heard in the vast salon lined with liveried footmen in powdered wigs, as Masséna addressed a few words very quietly to him. “Without lifting his eyes, or making any movement whatsoever, the Emperor suddenly bellowed at him in a thunderous challenge. ‘Why are you pestering me!’...he little caring how he was mortifying this great military leader by this cruel game of his.” His face turning scarlet, the dapper Masséna in his magnificent uniform bedecked with prestigious decorations returned to his former place in the circle as if nothing had transpired. “I had never been so ashamed,” Thiébault acknowledged. “Never before had Napoleon appeared so arrogant and impudent by so harshly addressing one of our oldest and most illustrious warriors. His action was as gratuitous as it was cruel, and at once insulting to France itself before all those foreign dignitaries.”

  Napoleon remained standing there for another minute or two in “his statuary scene,” and then finally, ever so slowly, raised his head “as if coming out of a dream,” uncrossed his arms, looked about the circle of dozens of perplexed courtiers surrounding him, and without a word or change of expression turned back in the direction of the Salon de Jeu. As he reentered the room, on a sign from him, Empress Marie-Louise, obviously confused, put down her cards and rose. Passing before her, Napoleon said “in a dry voice, ‘Let us go, Madame,’” and continued to walk on, Marie-Louise following three paces behind him, the double doors at the end of the long room suddenly closing behind them as they disappeared from sight.

  “It was not yet nine-thirty in the evening, but Napoleon had been coughing a great deal and seemed tired. Such is the scene I cannot yet get out of my head.” Thiébault added, “I am still trying to find some sort of explanation for it.” The next day Thiébault, against his will, was ordered back to Burgos and the terrible war in Spain, a war to which, after nearly two years of grim fighting, no end appeared in sight.

  Though no one had understood what Thiébault called “the bizarre scene” that April day at Compiègne, they all instinctively suppressed it from their memoirs. It was perhaps the only time during his career that Napoleon lapsed into an epileptic state in public, in this case a rare epileptic trance of which he later remembered nothing. His long history of epileptic seizures generally followed a pattern, usually occurring in the evening or late at night, after weeks of hard and tense work. Ever since his return from Vienna the previous autumn, the long, detailed marriage negotiations and subsequent preparations, combined with a series of other problems, including his family, had preoccupied him to the exclusion of all else and induced the inevitable result.

  One of the deeper, compounding causes triggering this extraordinary epileptic trance no doubt stemmed from a letter of congratulations on his marriage from brother Lucien, still confined on his estate of Canino in Italy. Lucien had closed, however, by affirming that he would never abandon his devoted second wife, Alexandrine.

  First Louis, then Jérôme, then all that bother with Joseph’s growing problems in Madrid. This was simply too much, and Napoleon now had a message dispatched to yet another recalcitrant Bonaparte. Things had in fact changed very much since Lucien’s self-imposed exile from France back in the spring of 1804. Then the entire clan had taken Lucien’s side when he refused to rid himself of his second wife, the former Madame Jouberthon. Madame Mère had even preferred to remain in Italy with Lucien rather than attend Napoleon’s imperial coronation. By the spring of 1810, however, with the Bonapartes now linked in marriage with the Habsburgs, opinion had veered 180 degrees, with even his mother and brother Joseph, resigned to the inevitable, advising Lucien to give in and be done with it. Napoleon — who had initially demanded the annulment of Lucien’s marriage and had insisted on declaring all his offspring by Alexandrine as bastards — had generously agreed to demand only that Lucien divorce his wife, not that his children be treated as bastards. “Your position, that of your family, mine, that of us all, depends upon you,” Letizia Buonaparte pleaded with Lucien in the stilted language of a letter clearly dictated by Napoleon: “It is no longer simply a question of logic, my dear son. Nothing you can tell me will make me change my mind now...This is the last time I shall ask you. There is only one thing that would render my happiness complete, and that is seeing your differences with the Emperor resolved.”

  Lucien was staggered by this betrayal by his own mother, demanding that he abandon his wife and take their children from her. The pressure Napoleon had put on him since 1804 was enormous. Despite Lucien’s vast independent wealth, and his new title as a Roman prince, his lot was not enviable, with France’s complete occupation of the Papal States now placing all of his numerous estates in French territory. He was a virtual prisoner on his own land, not permitted to leave it even to visit the nearest city or another one of his properties without permission from the French military governor of that region.

  Thus it was at the beginning of April that Lucien had written brother Napoleon one last time. Even Alexandrine, desperately threatened, pleaded with her brother-in-law. “Sire, I throw myself at your feet. It is as impossible for me to separate myself from Lucien, if only secretly, as it is for him to leave me publicly. We belong to each other till death do us part...Sire, we ask only that you permit us to live peacefully together in some quiet corner of your Empire.” But Napoleon was unrelenting in his determination to rid Lucien of his wife. “I don’t want any part of her,” he said, quickly explaining, “I base this decision solely on political reasons.” He then dispatched an official to Lucicn to argue with him one final time, but Lucien remained intransigent. “I cannot, without dishonoring myself, divorce a woman who has given me four children...I shall instead go to America, if forced to do so.” But, he added, he would prefer to remain in Europe with Napoleon. “In the Imperial administration I could perhaps usefully serve my brother. Why can I not be allowed to prove my devotion to him by holding a nonhereditary post, where the position of my wife and children would not matter?” Finally repeating, “In the event it proves utterly impossible to work with the Emperor under these circumstances, then leaving for America would be the least painful alternative after all.”

  “I know France,” Napoleon reflected. “I know better than anyone else what she wants. All men of common sense would be indignant to see my throne associated with the wife of a bankrupt,” he said, referring to Alexandrine’s first husband, who had fled the country because of debts. (He apparently forgot that the entire Bonaparte clan had been forced to leave Corsica, bankrupt, years earli
er.)

  So be it! Let him live and die as he pleases. I know what I must do, what politics dictates. Lucien implores my clemency. That clemency would include my recognition of his children, provided that he rids himself of that wife of a bankrupt...What he has proposed, however, is quite absurd. Lucien can assume a proper role in my empire only by assuming the role of a dynastic prince, nothing less, and his children can serve me properly only as princes of my house. Lucien cannot accept that. All right! It is all over! I charge you with instructing my family never again to speak to me about this matter.

  When in June Lucien received this final refusal to recognize his wife and marriage, he made secret arrangements to start selling his estates, crating hundreds of pictures and pieces of statuary, not to mention a fortune in jewels, dispatching them in the night to the port of Civitavecchia, near Rome, where he hired a small American ship out of Salem, Massachusetts. He was indeed resolved to go to the United States, but to leave Italy he needed “passports” from the French, the king of Sardinia, and the British, who controlled Italian waters, Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar. On August 7 Lucien and Alexandrine were given French passports, and at 4:00 P.M. the couple and their six children set sail, still hoping for British authorization when they reached Cagliari in Sardinia. By August 22, still without a decision by the British, and with the family living in tight quarters aboard the small American vessel, they sailed without authorization, only to be seized immediately by the Royal Navy and taken to Malta, prisoners of the British and of the governor, Gen. Sir Henry Oakes. Through the intervention of the British Ambassador accredited to Constantinople, who happened to be in Italian waters at this time, Lucien applied directly to the British Foreign Secretary, the Marquis of Wellesley (General Sir Arthur Wellesley’s brother) for permission to sail.