Napoleon
Page 40
The Americans and the British did not warm to the prospect of a resurgence of French power in the area, but they relished even less that of the existence of republics ruled by rebellious slaves. There was also the possibility that if thwarted, France might subvert British colonies and the southern states of the United States by fomenting slave rebellions against their British and American masters.8
Bonaparte gave command of the expedition to Saint-Domingue to Pauline’s husband General Leclerc, who had a good track record not only as a soldier, but also as administrator of Marseille and then Lyon – and he was diplomatic, which would be vital when dealing with Toussaint and later with Spanish and American neighbours: once Saint-Domingue had been secured, he was to sail on to Louisiana. Pauline would go with him, partly to prevent her from behaving scandalously if left to herself, partly to make sure he did not take it into his head to betray her beloved brother. Bonaparte notified Toussaint of Leclerc’s impending arrival in a flattering letter holding out promises of honours and riches if he cooperated.9
His instructions to Leclerc were to support Toussaint and gradually get into a position in which he could decapitate the black liberation movement. There was nothing in them about slavery. ‘The question is not whether one should abolish slavery, but whether one should abolish liberty in that part of Saint-Domingue,’ he said to Roederer. ‘I am convinced that this island would be in English hands if the negroes were not attached to us by their liberty.’ It was therefore best to let things be. ‘They will, perhaps, produce less sugar than they would as slaves, but they will produce it for us, and they will serve us, if need be, as soldiers.’ As far as he was concerned, the only issue was to regain control of the colonies.10
When Leclerc’s armada reached Saint-Domingue in February 1802, Toussaint tried to prevent him from landing. Leclerc came ashore, defeated him and forced him to come to terms. He then attempted conciliation, but this was undermined by developments in the neighbouring colonies. Under pressure from the creole lobby and business interests, slavery was being reimposed in Guadeloupe and Martinique, where the slaves had rebelled and thrown off their shackles. As Leclerc struggled to win over the black population of Saint-Domingue, news of this drifted in, arousing suspicion that the same would be done there. He urged Bonaparte to check this, arguing that Saint-Domingue being the most important part of the empire, he should give it priority.11
Leclerc’s expedition had been under-equipped and under-financed, which limited his potential. But that was as nothing to the threat posed by yellow fever. Within a month of his disembarking, some 3,500 of his men had fallen victim, and they were soon dying at the rate of a thousand a month. Reinforcements could not keep up. By September 1802 only about 10,000 men, some 6,000 of them in hospital, remained of the 29,000 who had sailed from France.12
Hostilities had resumed, and Leclerc did his best to navigate the complicated internal politics dividing the black leadership. He succeeded in capturing Toussaint, who was sent back to France and imprisoned as a traitor to the Republic in the Fort de Joux in the Jura, where he would die of tuberculosis on 7 April 1803. Exactly three months earlier, on 7 January, Leclerc himself succumbed to the fever. ‘Damned sugar, damned coffee, damned colonies,’ Bonaparte burst out when he heard the news. By then the expedition had cost the lives of four other divisional generals, a dozen brigadiers and 30,000 other ranks. He would later admit that he had committed one of the greatest mistakes of his life in not leaving Toussaint in place as a kind of semi-independent viceroy who would inevitably have sided with France and undermined British colonial power in the area.13
Meanwhile, relations between London and Paris were growing tense. The choice of Lord Whitworth as Britain’s ambassador did not help. His connection with the assassination of Tsar Paul I was not calculated to endear him to Bonaparte. He was a professed Francophobe, ruthless and prepared to cross the bounds of diplomacy in what he saw as his country’s interest, and he made no effort to ease tensions or inspire trust. Not that there was much he could do, given that his instructions, which were ‘to state most distinctly His Majesty’s determination never to forgo his right of interference in the affairs of the Continent on every occasion in which the interest of his own dominions or those of Europe in general appear to require it’, were directly opposed to those of the French ambassador in London, General Antoine Andréossy, which were ‘to prevent on every occasion any intervention of the British Government in Continental affairs’.14
The British cabinet regarded Bonaparte’s unwillingness to open negotiations for a commercial treaty as evidence of bad faith. Bonaparte complained that Britain was harbouring thousands of hostile émigrés, some of them hatching plots against his life. He was incensed that apart from giving shelter to people who openly professed their desire to overthrow him by any means, the British government did nothing to prevent the publication of calumnies and slanderous articles vilifying him, as well as a slurry of scurrilous cartoons by the likes of Rowlandson. One London-based émigré paper openly called for his assassination. He could not accept the British excuse of the freedom of the press, as the Home Office regularly clamped down on the radical press and impounded the writings of those campaigning for parliamentary reform. The British press published lurid accounts of his poisoning plague victims and burying alive his own wounded, and titillated readers with scandalous stories on Josephine’s past, on Bonaparte’s alleged sexual orgies with his sisters and affair with Hortense, and even on his supposed African origins. His insecurity and limited sense of humour meant that he found this deeply hurtful as well as infuriating. He blamed the British cabinet for everything, for, as Cambacérès put it, ‘he had the strange conviction that the greater part of the population of England was well disposed to him’.15
There had been much pro-French feeling in Britain in the 1790s, fuelled by the movement for parliamentary reform and the excessively repressive policies of Pitt’s government, but this had now evaporated, and would soon be succeeded by a new spirit of antipathy and belligerence, largely as a consequence of Bonaparte’s behaviour. He had assumed that the return of peace meant France could resume the pursuit of her international interests with no thought of the effect of his actions on public opinion in Britain.
In August 1802 the Imperial Diet met at Ratisbon (Regensburg), as stipulated in the Treaty of Lunéville between France and Austria, to rearrange what was left of the Holy Roman Empire. Bonaparte had as a mark of courtesy (and to neutralise him) invited Tsar Alexander to participate as a fellow arbiter. But it was Bonaparte – through the agency of Talleyrand on the spot, who took hefty bribes from all concerned – who decided everything. The Pope was persuaded to cede the prince-bishoprics of Mainz, Cologne and Trier to France, and that of Hanau to Austria, which would hand it to Ferdinand of Habsburg in compensation for Tuscany, which was now Etruria. Rulers who lost territory to France on the left bank of the Rhine were compensated at the expense of others in Germany: by the Imperial Recess of February 1803, three electorates, twenty bishoprics, forty-four abbeys, forty-five free cities and a number of smaller states, 112 in all, were disestablished and some three million people acquired new rulers. By favouring their claims, Bonaparte gratified Prussia and turned Hesse-Darmstadt, Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg into French client states. The result was a considerable extension of French influence, mainly at the expense of Austria. It had all been done in accordance with the Treaty of Lunéville, but instead of being flattered the tsar felt offended, and the British government could only see French power expanding to an alarming degree. The pattern continued to unfold.
As the Treaty of Amiens had stipulated that all French troops should leave the Batavian Republic (the Netherlands), Bonaparte engineered a political crisis as a result of which the Dutch government requested they remain. To add insult to injury, the former ruler of the Netherlands had not been paid the financial compensation promised. French troops also remained in Etruria. In September 1802 Bonaparte turned Piedmont and Elba, both
acquired under the Treaty of Lunéville, into departments of France. But he did not pay the promised indemnities to the King of Sardinia. Taken with the transformation of the Cisalpine into the Italian Republic, with Bonaparte as president, this amounted to a consolidation of French power in Italy acceptable neither to Austria nor to Britain.
It was his actions in Switzerland that tipped the scales for British public opinion. Ironically, this was an area where Britain was not blameless, since it had been using the country as a listening post and point of entry for secret agents, as well as fomenting anti-French feeling there. Switzerland had also been a convenient point of entry into France for Austrian and Russian armies. ‘I can see no middle course between a well organised Swiss government friendly to France and no Switzerland at all,’ Bonaparte explained to Talleyrand. In the autumn of 1802 the tensions between the pro-French authorities of the Helvetic Republic and anti-French reactionaries developed into armed conflict. The former appealed to France for support, the latter to Britain. British public opinion responded in favour of what it assumed to be the freedom-loving party of independence, and the British ministry felt impelled to act. Before it could do so effectively, French troops had restored order and the crisis was over. On 19 February 1803 an Act of Mediation created a Helvetic Confederation, of which Bonaparte assumed the role of guarantor and effective arbiter.16
On 17 October the British secretary of state for war Lord Hobart wrote to the commanders in Malta, the Cape and India ordering them to delay implementing the terms of the Treaty of Amiens. The British cabinet was growing alarmed at French moves beyond Europe. A fleet commanded by General Decaen was on its way to reassert French authority over the Indian Ocean island colonies of Île de France and Réunion and the trading posts of Pondicherry, Karikal, Mahé, Yanaon and Chandernagore in India itself, all of which was in accordance with the Treaty of Amiens. But Decaen’s instructions included investigating the possibility of enlisting the support of local rulers in India in the event of war breaking out again.17
Bonaparte had sent General Brune as ambassador to the Porte, General Sébastiani to Egypt and Syria, and Jean-Baptiste Cavaignac to Muscat. He opened relations with the pasha of Tripoli, the bey of Tunis and the dey of Algiers, and established French consulates throughout the Middle East. A major gaffe was the publication of Sébastiani’s report, in which he suggested that it would be easy to oust the British from Egypt and reoccupy it. Talleyrand and the French ambassador in London Andréossy dismissed the report as mere speculation, and Bonaparte attempted to placate an indignant Whitworth. But by then what trust there had been was gone.18
Britain felt its monopoly in India was under threat, and suspected France of imperial designs in the Mediterranean. It could not countenance the banking centre of Amsterdam and the Dutch ports being in French hands. British trade was suffering, with France imposing tariffs on imports not only to France, but to all areas it controlled, such as the Netherlands and much of Italy. When pressed over Malta, which the British were supposed to hand over to the Order of St John, the foreign secretary Lord Hawkesbury declared that he would only do so if France evacuated Piedmont. Whitworth was subjected to a lambasting by Bonaparte, who pointed out that Piedmont had nothing to do with the Treaty of Amiens, and had been ceded to France under a different treaty to which Britain had not been a party.
Whitworth’s reports from Paris were consistently unfavourable to Bonaparte, often retailing gossip as fact. He nurtured an invasion scare that gripped Britain in March 1803 by exaggerating the number of French troops in the Netherlands. On 8 March the cabinet decided to enlist 10,000 more sailors and embody the militia, a move probably meant as a show of force and a signal to Bonaparte. All it did was provoke him, and Whitworth was given a second dressing-down at a diplomatic audience on 18 March 1803.19
Over the next two months both sides sparred over the issue of Malta, proposing a variety of solutions: Bonaparte suggested Britain hand it over to Russia, Prussia or even Austria, then that Britain keep it for ten years provided the Neapolitan ports of Otranto and Taranto remained under French occupation for the same period, and so on.20
On 27 April Whitworth delivered a verbal ultimatum to Talleyrand demanding the immediate evacuation of the Netherlands, acceptance of a continued British occupation of Malta and compensation for the King of Sardinia for Piedmont. He refused to put it in writing, so he may have been bluffing. He raised the temperature by reporting that Masséna had told him Bonaparte was about to invade Hanover, Hamburg, Naples and Sardinia.21
This may have been idle gossip, but the thirty-three-year-old Bonaparte was certainly full of bluster and unwilling to back down. When the tsar’s envoy told him that Europe could not accept his incorporation of Piedmont into France, he sneered that Europe could come and take it from him. He was in reckless mood. When he went riding or hunting in one of the former royal parks, at Versailles, Marly, Fontainebleau or Rambouillet, he would gallop around madly, bent over his horse’s neck with the reins held loosely in his right hand and his left swinging by his side (he was a bad rider, and swayed about on horseback). His disregard for danger alarmed his entourage, who were often left behind, desperately trying to catch up. On other occasions he would leave Saint-Cloud incognito with Hortense and go to a country fair, where he was easily recognised, without any escort or attendants. On 8 May, as he was being driven back to Saint-Cloud with Josephine, Hortense, his sister Caroline and Cambacérès, he suddenly climbed onto the box, and taking the reins, insisted on driving the six-horse team himself, which he had never done before. He drove too fast, struck a bollard at the gate with one of the wheels, and the shock sent him flying so far he knocked himself out on landing; he later claimed he had died for a moment.22
The power he had amassed, the conquests he had made and the praise being heaped on him cannot have failed to affect his judgement. He had seen his effigy on the first piece of solid currency the country had known in ten years. There was talk of according him the address of ‘His Consular Majesty’. A statue was planned to top a column similar to that of Trajan in Rome. His military instincts inclined him to seize every opportunity and rebelled at the idea of retreat, and were backed up by his innate sense of insecurity.
He was profoundly conscious of his origins. His brother Louis had come up with the idea of exhuming the body of their father, who had been buried in Montpellier, where he had died, and interring it with some pomp in Paris. Bonaparte was horrified by the idea – the memory of his father was an embarrassment. (Louis did quietly exhume the body, sent it through the public messageries hidden in a grandfather clock, and had it laid to rest in a mausoleum on his estate at Saint-Leu.) Bonaparte believed his only claim to status derived from glory – his own and that of his associates. That is why when he heard of the death of Leclerc he declared an official period of mourning lasting ten days, as was traditional in royal courts. It singled out his former brother-in-law and brother-in-arms as a national hero, and equated him with royalty, thereby subtly enhancing his own status.23
‘A first consul is not like one of those kings by the grace of God who view their states as an inheritance,’ Bonaparte said to Thibaudeau. ‘He needs brilliant actions, and therefore war.’ It was a theme he would return to more than once during his life. He believed that his only title to rule rested on his making France greater than she was when he had come to power. Whatever the failings of the Directory, France had at that point been in possession of a great deal of territory, and he felt he could not preside over loss of any part. By the beginning of 1803, as the first anniversary of the Treaty of Amiens approached, he had enlarged France, which now counted thirty-seven million inhabitants, exceeding Austria with its population of twenty-four million, Britain with sixteen and Prussia with nine. He had placed France where Richelieu and Louis XIV could only have dreamed of it – dominant in western Europe, checking Habsburg influence in Germany and excluding that of Britain from most of the Continent. He equated this with his right to rule.24
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The probable loss of Saint-Domingue and the possibility of the resumption of hostilities put in question the continued control of other colonies, particularly that of Louisiana, which France would certainly not be able to defend. The United States was keen to acquire it, and since Bonaparte needed to refill his war chest, he agreed to sell it. On 10 April the former governor of Virginia and future president James Monroe disembarked at Le Havre, and before the end of the month Bonaparte had ‘with the greatest distaste’ sold him the territory for fifteen million dollars, equivalent to fifty million francs.25
He was just in time. At the beginning of May 1803 the British prime minister, Addington, issued orders to all commanders in the area to prepare to capture French colonies. He was also planning to take New Orleans and hand it to the United States, as a bribe to join in the coming war on the British side. On 14 May Lord Hawkesbury received an offer to mediate from Tsar Alexander. He had previously advised the British cabinet against giving up Malta, a base that had been in Russia’s sights for some time, but had become alarmed at the possibility of the outbreak of war. In the words of his ambassador in Paris, Arkadyi Morkov, the victory of neither side suited Russia, as it would lead to ‘either despotism on the seas or despotism on land’. It was too late.26
On 15 May 1803 the Admiralty issued orders for the detention of all French ships in British or British-controlled ports and at sea. The following day the frigate HMS Doris attacked and took the French naval lugger l’Affronteur close to the French coast, as the Privy Council reached a decision to make war on France. The declaration of war was published on 18 May, by which time more than a thousand French and Dutch ships had been seized in British-controlled ports.