What Every American Should Know About Europe

by Melissa L. Rossi

  Napoleon’s little brother, nineteen-year-old Jerome, snuck off and married Baltimore beauty Betsy Patterson, whom he’d met on a yachting trip, in 1803. Napoleon did not approve, and annulled the two-year marriage, shuttling Jerome off to reign as King of Westphalia in Germany Jerome and Betsy’s offspring, Jerome Napoleon, grew up in Baltimore, and his son, the witty Charles Joseph Bonaparte, became a popular magazine writer—and U.S. Attorney General under President Theodore Roosevelt. Besides being the first royal in U.S. government, Napoleon’s great-nephew stood out for assembling the first federal “G-Men”—better known as the FBI.12

  After thirteen years of unbridled successes, Napoleon slipped in the Russian snow. Ignoring advice, he marched over 300,000 soldiers toward Moscow, in a brutal war made crueler by the wretched Russian winter. He briefly took Moscow, but couldn’t rule her, and quickly retreated. Barely a fifth of his soldiers limped back with him, and many deserted. Following another defeat at Leipzig the next year, he abdicated in 1814, and was exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. That “vacation” didn’t last long. While European leaders assembled in Vienna, toasting Napoleon’s downfall and dividing up his empire, Napoleon slipped back and ruled France for another 100 days. That reign ended with the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, where he arrived late and fought poorly. British general Wellington’s army easily walloped Napoleon’s, defeating it in twelve hours. The ex-emperor was packed off to British-run St. Helena—far out in the Atlantic—where he dictated his memoirs and complained about British food, saying Brits were poisoning him. When he died six years later in 1821—probably from stomach cancer—arsenic was found in his hair, although the toxin was also used to treat syphilis, which Napoleon may have contracted.

  France’s fallen leader had requested burial in Paris, but was denied that honor until 1840, when his remains were shipped from St. Helena. A formal procession to Les Invalides, where he is entombed, passed under the Arc de Triomphe that he’d ordered built in 1805.

  The French Revolution still wasn’t over—at least not ideologically. The search for fair and balanced government continued throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Monarchs returned and were toppled, the power of the commoner was ripped away and restored, the Church regained tremendous power and lost it, and France was in such upheaval that in the 1800s she called a second, then a third republic. France also continued her colonization kick, claiming new territories in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and battling with Brits around every bend.

  ALGERIA AND THE SWAT THAT LED TO COLONIZATION

  Until that day in 1827, Algeria, the Mediterranean-edged African land of sinewy mountains and sweeping Saharan dunes, was, for the French, simply a place to buy wheat. Decades after huge shipments of grain had been delivered to feed Napoleon’s soldiers, France still hadn’t paid off the multimillion-dollar bill. The debt led to a showdown: in 1827, after being brushed off by French king Charles X, the enraged Algerian leader Hussein Dey beckoned the French ambassador in Algiers to a meeting; Dey called the diplomat a number of unflattering names, then slapped him with a flyswatter and booted him from the palace.13 King Charles soon settled the dispute: he sent in the military and declared Algeria a French colony. Given the clash of cultures—Algeria was Arab-Berber, Muslim, and tribal—it would never have been a happy cohabitation, but it began on an excessively violent note. Claiming to be on a “civilizing mission,” French soldiers raped the women, robbed the treasury, pillaged villages, defaced cemeteries, and looted mosques14—and then grabbed the prime agricultural lands. France shipped in farmers—pied-noirs—and turned Algeria into an agricultural annex. Many pied-noirs fell in love with the exotic land, but few Algerians were in love with the French, and it all led to an ugly blowout when Algeria tried to shake off France 130 years later and France wouldn’t let go.

  Outside Napoleon, France’s most remarkable nineteenth-century ruler was his nephew, Louis Napoleon, who in 1848 was elected to the presidential chair in Élysée Palace, where by law he could sit for only one term. Stupid law, thought Louis, who changed the law (with a military coup in 1851), his name (to Napoleon III), and his title (to emperor). Napoleon III modernized Paris, hiring Baron Haussmann to redesign the city, creating the wide boulevards and Mansard buildings that are her trademarks today. Beyond that, he was a nightmare.

  VICTOR HUGO (1802–1885)

  The 1800s are often described as “The Century of Victor Hugo,” reflecting the immense power of the man of letters who ran one of the era’s most raucous salons (attendees flounced about in medieval costumes while puffing cigars) and whose best-known works are Les Misérables (the dense novel about a convict and a jailer in postrevolutionary France, begun in the 1840s, finished 1862) and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (which he’d signed a contract to deliver in 1828 and finally began writing two years after the deadline). Elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 1848, he fled France under threat of being jailed for treason in 1851, but returned and served as parliamentarian again twenty years later. The poet, painter, and playwright had a libido as big as his impact. Into his seventies, Hugo insisted on taking on a lover a day for his insatiable “lyre”; he’s said to have blown through dozens of new paramours a month.15

  Generally well-meaning, Napoleon III was a dilettante and dabbler in international affairs. His worst error: declaring war on German state Prussia in July 1870. Otto von Bismarck’s Prussian forces quickly captured the emperor and pounded Paris for four months; with food supplies cut off, Parisians ate cats and rats, and Leon Gambetta, the emperor’s fill-in, floated out of town in a hot air balloon.16 Napoleon III’s foolish move lost France’s strategic and resource-rich region Alsace-Lorraine, and once released, he threw down his crown and fled Paris, leaving France financially crippled after Prussia hit her with a $1 billion war reparations bill.

  The constant clash of political forces, the occasional bloody revolt, and the ideas batted around at salons and literary cafés launched an era of decadence, made blurrier by absinthe, opium, and laudanum. The creative crowd (painters Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Monet, and Manet, and poets Rimbaud and Verlaine among them) found new edges to fall over, and plenty frolicked in brothels, many contracting syphilis, the AIDS of that day.

  By the early twentieth century, France had a new reason to twitch. Newly unified Germany was turning into a military and industrial powerhouse, invading in 1914. World War I devastated France, killing or injuring 11 percent of the population.17

  Stagnant trench warfare led to huge losses, as shown in 1916 at Verdun, where Marshal Philippe Pétain stupidly directed French soldiers to protect the strategically worthless fortress. The French and Germans dug in, and 600,000 died within the year.

  Once that dark war was over, France exploded in Les Années Folles (The Crazy Years), a creatively frenzied era of debauchery, dance halls, and disposable spouses, when cultures and classes mixed in the cafés of St. Germain and the bars of Montmartre, and new art forms emerged—gypsy jazz, journalizing, and automatic writing among them. Intellectuals, iconoclasts, and outcasts from all corners (Marc Chagall, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and George Orwell were a few) flapped toward the creative flame of postwar Paris and the renowned École des Beaux-Arts. “Lost Generation” Americans (including Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot) arrived en masse after 1920, when Prohibition dried up their alcohol-guzzling muses. Josephine Baker can-canned in the buff save for a belt of bananas; Picasso designed sets for experimental Jean Cocteau ballets, set to Erik Satie’s music of typewriters and sirens that kept audiences hissing; Surrealists rioted during plays, brandishing guns and swinging from chandeliers. Travelers such as André Malraux brought the Orient to literature, Colette penned tales of bedroom romps with foppish lads, Anäis Nin captured steamy escapades with Henry Miller (and his wife, June) in her diaries, Céline depressed the hell out of everyone with the monsters unleashed in his books, and the status of mail pilots soared when Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote Night Flight, m
ade into a Clark Gable flick. The Great Depression of the 1930s drained wallets and bank accounts, but not the vitality of the Crazy Years.

  MARCEL PROUST (1871–1922)

  For a man who spent most of his life in bed—suffering from asthma and hypochondria—Proust made up for lost time when he ventured out, charming Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Edgar Degas, and Sarah Bernhardt at the literary salons and dinner parties of Parisian high society, gallivanting through the Ritz with fashionable friends in tow, and paying butlers to detail the soirées that he had missed. His first two novels flopped, but the notebooks he filled with his detailed observations of the elite held his masterpiece. Eating little but ice cream and beer in a soundproof room lined with cork, he painstakingly reworked the notes into a staggering 3,000-page, thirteen-volume novel considered by many to be the most brilliant of the twentieth century. Called À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Remembrance of Things Past), the first volume appeared in 1913; the second volume, published in 1914, was such a rage that it garnered the prestigious Prix Goncourt and prompted him to write five more volumes. Six more came out after his death. In fact, the obsessive scribe hadn’t finished editing the final chapters when he died, leaving it to his publisher to sort out what the man known to edit at the printing press had actually intended.

  Were they too snockered or simply in denial? France snoozed right through all the warning signals that Germany was gearing up for another war. French leaders slept peacefully, assured that any attack from Germans would be stopped by the Maginot Line, underground fortifications designed for trench warfare. At least one person knew that France was facing big trouble: Colonel Charles de Gaulle. But he couldn’t wake anyone up.

  CHARLES DE GAULLE (1890–1970)

  With a huge, bulbous nose and sad brown eyes that seemed to reflect the battlefield misery he had witnessed, towering Charles de Gaulle was Nostradamus and Napoleon rolled into one. Like the sixteenth-century mystic, de Gaulle was a seer, although his predictions, many uncannily accurate, were derived through military strategy and Machiavellian logic. As early as 1905—long before World War I—he was obsessed with Germany’s impending rise, writing term papers about a future Franco-German war, and even short stories in which the fifteen-year-old cast himself as General Charles de Gaulle fighting back Germans. Like Napoleon—to whom he was derogatorily likened by his professors at military school—he was arrogant, autocratic, and a skilled military strategist—and (later) a profoundly powerful leader. After fighting in the trenches, he foresaw how wars would move away from stagnant fighting fronts. Future military clashes, he reasoned, would be multifront blitzkriegs using modern vehicles—tanks and fighter planes—that would bombard from land and sky. France needed to modernize her armed forces and update her war thinking, he warned in the 1920s. Germany, he predicted shortly after World War I ended, would be back.

  As military instructor and assistant to Marshal Pétain, de Gaulle feverishly campaigned right up until 1940. He wrote books demanding that France update her army and anticipate attacks from multiple sources; he gave lectures, he dashed off memos, and he bent the ears of the powerful, gaining only a reputation of being a doomsayer. In 1940, when Nazi Germany rolled in with tanks, using the exact methods and routes that he had foreseen, Colonel de Gaulle was promoted to brigadier general and helped to draw up battle plans. Even then the French military was slow to employ coordinated attacks using armored vehicles. On one occasion, however, de Gaulle led a battle and demonstrated how to aggressively use tanks, forcing Nazis to retreat. It marked the only military victory for France in the war.

  Lacking a modernized military, France couldn’t hold her territory. Some generals advocated continuing attacks from Algeria; others suggested running the war from Britain. “Non,” said Marshal Philippe Pétain, who was wheeled out to conduct the war. He instead negotiated an armistice.

  PÉTAIN AND VICHY

  Elegant Marshal Philippe Pétain was a grandfatherly sort, whose questionable valor in directing millions of World War I soldiers to fight at the same battle line for a year led to his nickname “the hero of Verdun.” Twenty-two years later, Grandpapa Pétain, then eighty-four, was half-batty But a mighty symbol he was, so they whisked him out as leader in May 1940, when France was under Nazi attack. Pétain engineered France’s quick surrender, handing over the north and west for Nazi occupation and setting up his government in the southern resort town of Vichy; he was cheered as a hero for saving France. Unbidden by Nazis, the man who personified kindliness, and whose beaming likeness hung from store windows above the slogan “Work, Family, Motherland,” hastily wrote up anti-Semitic laws that banned Jews from cinemas and public pools, and forbade them from holding high posts or even owning radios or bicycles. He unleashed a vicious secret police, the Milice, and, starting in 1942, deported 75,000 Jews, rounding up 13,000 on one day that June. While his people (subjected to strict food rationing) went to bed hungry, Pétain lived a luxurious life, feasting in grand Burgundian style. By August 1944, when the Allies and de Gaulle’s Free French forces liberated France, 150,000 political hostages had been shot, 750,000 were forced laborers in German factories, and 270,000 had been deported due to their political conviction, religion, or race. Tried and convicted of treason in 1945, Pétain’s sentence read “The death penalty and national disgrace.”18 President Charles de Gaulle spared him execution and commuted the punishment to life imprisonment. Pétain spent the next six years looking out over the Bay of Biscay from his cell. Upon his death in 1951, his death certificate was supposed to have said “Philippe Pétain, without profession.” A last-minute change allowed it to read as he would have preferred: “Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France.”19

  The news that France had so easily surrendered came as a shock, particularly to de Gaulle, who had just negotiated continuing the war from Britain, only to discover that Pétain was signing an armistice. De Gaulle turned on his heel and ran back to London, where he appointed himself savior of France and set up the Free France resistance. He encountered several problems. First, he had few troops to command, and second, the Allied leaders couldn’t stand him. Prime Minister Winston Churchill considered de Gaulle arrogant and dictatorial and often ignored him; President Franklin D. Roosevelt found the pushy man distasteful, instead recognizing Pétain as legitimate leader of France. Frustrated, de Gaulle finally bolted to Algeria in 1943, where he set up the French Committee of National Liberation; Churchill and Roosevelt refused to recognize it. They didn’t even let de Gaulle in on “Operation Overlord” and the D-day landing in Normandy until hours before it was launched.

  Anglo-American snubs continued after the war: de Gaulle was not invited to attend the 1945 Yalta Conference, where the fate of Germany was decided.

  De Gaulle’s moment finally arrived in 1944. On August 26, he led the liberation march down the Champs-Elysées to wild cheers. Appointed provisional president in 1945, and voted in the following year, the general created the Fourth Republic and set about penning a new constitution. De Gaulle envisioned a government with a much weaker parliament and a well-muscled president. When his constitutional plan was shot down, de Gaulle stormed out after a mere six months in office. He had to wait nearly fourteen years before being called back.

  In the meantime, Europe began pulling herself back together. Jean Monnet, a behind-the-scenes diplomat, put forth an idea for preventing Europe from self-destructing again. Instead of competing, European countries should pool their resources—particularly the two most instrumental to war: coal and steel. By becoming more united economically—merging their assets, sharing their profits, and jointly overseeing production—Europe’s disparate countries, Monnet believed, would be less likely to knock themselves out in war.

  HERO: JEAN MONNET (1888–1979)

  Economist, thinker, and diplomat Monnet—a one-time cognac salesman with a high school education—profoundly affected France and Europe. The deputy secretary general of the League of Nations (precursor to the United Nations), Monnet later
convinced the United States to sell arms to the Allies; his actions shaved at least a year off the Second World War. He helped Romania and Poland stabilize their postwar economies, aided China in revamping her ailing railway system, and helped kick-start postwar France. Most important, he realized that France and Germany would function more harmoniously through joint economic ventures and drew up plans for the Coal and Steel Agreement that ultimately led to the European Union. “There is no future for the people of Europe other than in union,” Monnet pronounced, and his vision brought the disparate European countries more closely together than before dreamt possible.20

  France and Germany signed the Coal and Steel Agreement in 1951—along with Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Over the next five decades, the economy-merging concept snowballed into free-trade agreements, atomic energy agreements, agricultural subsidies, open borders, common military, umbrella policies, and a shared currency, with France and Germany mostly running the EU show.