The Council of State met regularly when he was away, with his chair standing empty on its dais. Whoever was presiding, be it Cambacérès, Lebrun, Joseph or one of the other grand dignitaries or princes, sat in another chair beside it. According to councillor Jean Pelet de la Lozère, as Napoleon grew older business progressed more rapidly when he was absent, as he would suddenly fall into a reverie or go off on some digression which, fascinating as it might be, did not advance the matter in hand. Napoleon himself believed that things did not work properly unless he was present, and the members certainly paid greater attention when he was.7
Among the matters addressed on his return from Vienna were education, prison reform, the judiciary, the status of the Jews, the provision of free funerals for the indigent, and subsidy for the opera and the national theatre. What comes through all his ideas on these and other subjects is that he was now more interested in building a society than just the state. On 10 May 1806 he founded the University of France, ‘a body exclusively concerned with the education and instruction of the public throughout the Empire’, with a special brief to ‘direct political and moral opinions’. It was a pyramidal establishment crowning the entire educational system, bringing under a single management all existing institutions of learning. While Napoleon was particularly keen on developing the sciences, as he hoped to build up a large cadre of technocrats, he appeared more concerned with the morality of the teachers and the uniformity of the curriculum than anything else. ‘I prefer to see the village children in the hands of a monk who knows nothing beyond his catechism and whose principles I know than of a half-educated man with no moral base,’ he declared on the subject of primary schools. As for teachers in higher education, they should be incorporated along semi-military lines and make a ceremonial commitment, like a priest taking holy orders. ‘When it comes to education, I feel that the Jesuits have left a great void,’ he told the Council of State. ‘I do not wish to bring them back, nor any other corporation subject to a foreign power, but I feel I should organise the education of the next generation in such a way as to be able to control its political and moral outlook.’ He therefore felt that teachers ought to remain celibate until such time as they had proved themselves to be mature and reliable, but they should marry with time, as marriage was in his eyes the perfect social stabiliser, and they should then go on to achieve status, even as high as the Senate. ‘I wish to create a corporation not of Jesuits who would have their sovereign in Rome, but Jesuits who would have no other ambition than that of being useful and no other interest than the public interest.’8
A similar prejudice against individualism is manifest in his complaints about the members of the judiciary, whom he regarded as a kind of independent corporation. He wanted to see their sentencing standardised rather than left to their own judgement. He was also bothered by the Jews, of whose existence he had only become aware on his visits to north-eastern France and western Germany. Aside from his natural dislike of ‘people of business’, which prompted him to see Jews as usurers preying on the innocent poor like ‘veritable flocks of crows’, ‘sucking the blood of real Frenchmen’ and ‘a vile, degraded nation capable of every baseness’, he did not like the idea of them as a nation apart, and suspected them of disloyalty and spying. The fact that their presence was most notable in the border region of Alsace bothered him, and the best thing to do with them, he suggested, was to spread them more evenly over the territory of France. He would convene a great Sanhedrin, bringing together the rabbis and elders in a body, in consultation with which he would regulate their status.9
Much of Napoleon’s most cherished legislation was aimed at integrating people into society. He introduced the ‘livret’, which every worker had to carry, defining his profession. He was inordinately proud of having overseen the introduction of the ‘cadastre’, the land registry, which he described as being tantamount to a new constitution in itself, since it fixed everyone’s rights to the property they possessed but also because it fixed their taxable status and therefore their position in society. They no longer needed to fear having their property seized, but in return had to submit to the state, in which they thereby gained a stake.10
The gruelling workload he assumed was reflected in the routines he had adopted, which were carefully recorded by Agathon Fain, who now joined Méneval in Napoleon’s private office as archivist. After his coronation Napoleon no longer shared a bedroom with Josephine. He did on occasion visit her for the night, and sometimes he would ask her to come and read to him before he went to sleep. This left him free to follow his own routine, which involved rising at around two o’clock in the morning to work with his secretary, who had to be on call at all hours of the day and night. After a couple of hours’ work he would take a hot bath, and sometimes go to bed for an hour or two’s sleep, before rising at seven to begin his toilette and dress. In Paris he always wore the blue uniform of a colonel of the grenadiers of the Guard, with white stockings and buckled shoes, or if he were going hunting, his green hunting dress, and only occasionally the ‘habit habillé’, the former court dress which he had reintroduced but hated wearing, referring to it as ‘cet accoutrement’. On campaign, he wore the green uniform of a colonel of the mounted chasseurs of the Guard, with high top-boots.11
He had not moved his quarters in the Tuileries, but they had been altered. His inner study was, in the words of Fain, ‘but a dependency of his bedroom’, and he would work there in his dressing gown. The outer study or salon he only entered when fully dressed. Between the inner study and the bedroom was a room containing a store of maps and a large table on which they could be spread. At one end there was a partition with a hatch, behind which was a staircase and a station manned twenty-four hours a day by a garde de portefeuille who passed incoming communications through it. There were two of them, working alternate shifts, eating and sleeping at their station, entering the private study only to tidy and to light the fire.12
Napoleon’s study was dominated by a table designed by himself, with two indentations facing each other on the long sides so he could sit at it facing his secretary with plenty of space for papers on either side. He would sit with his back to the fire, facing the door to the outer study or salon. The room had one window, opening on the gardens, in the embrasure of which stood a small writing table, at which the secretary would take dictation with his back to the room. At the other end of the room was a bookcase with a clock mounted in it, and in front of that a long mahogany table on which spread-sheets and maps could be unfolded. Beside the fire was a comfortable settee with a small round occasional table beside it.
Having dressed, Napoleon was usually back in his study by eight o’clock, ready to start work. His secretary would sit opposite him at the desk, passing him papers to sign. He would then go over to the fireplace and read the despatches and letters piled on the table next to the settee. He would dictate replies to some, dropping them on the floor for filing, and place those which needed reflection on the table to be dealt with later. He also read various reports and letters from his correspondents, the ‘friends’ all over the country who kept him abreast of opinion and gossip, which he would throw into the fire after reading, and would sometimes peruse a book, which also went into the fire if it displeased him. He would also look through the red morocco briefcase marked ‘Gazettes étrangères’, containing transcripts of letters intercepted by the cabinet noir, the postal intercept and decryption office.13
If there was need for a map, the emperor’s cartographer Louis Albert Bacler d’Albe was summoned. After finding the requisite map in the cases of a room which was little more than a passage between the bedroom and the study, he would spread it on the large, sturdy table built for the purpose and produce a pincushion full of pins with different-coloured heads, together with coloured pencils and a pair of compasses to measure distances. If it was a large map, they would both climb onto the table and lie down on it. ‘More than once I saw them both lying on that great table, interrupting their wor
k with a sudden exclamation only when one of their heads hit the other too hard,’ records Fain.14
At nine o’clock the chamberlain of the day would scratch on the door to announce that it was time for the lever. Napoleon would pass into the larger study or salon, where the chefs de service of the court would be waiting to receive their orders for the day, along with those of the ministers who had something to report or orders to receive. The room contained two tables covered in green cloth placed diagonally in the corners at the end nearest his private study, at which Napoleon would sit and interrogate a minister or make him sit and take dictation. But on the whole he would receive people standing up in order to save time. The minister of police and the prefect of the Seine were always there to regale him with the latest information and gossip on the night’s doings. Unless he needed to discuss some matter at length, the lever might last as little as five minutes, after which he would go back to his study to work. He breakfasted in a few minutes, taking only one cup of strong coffee. On Thursdays there was a grand lever, to which all those who had entry would come, which included most of the court. The morning’s work usually concluded in an interview with the secretary of state, Maret, a man some loathed but who was perfectly mannered and was one of the few who enjoyed Napoleon’s complete confidence.15
Napoleon dined at six or seven, usually with Josephine, and with members of his family on Sundays. The dinner consisted of no more than two or three dishes, and usually lasted closer to fifteen than twenty minutes. Sometimes not a word was uttered. After dinner he might go back to work or join the empress in her salon. At the end of the evening there was a brief coucher, at which he would give the heads of the household services their orders for the next day. He was normally in bed by ten o’clock. ‘In his private life, Napoleon was almost a military monk and everyone in his immediate service had to accommodate themselves to his rule,’ recorded Fain.16
The workload did not prevent the military monk from going to the theatre, hunting, planning new works and even philandering. The new sleeping arrangement gave him greater freedom, and he used it. He would take advantage of some of Josephine’s young ladies-in-waiting, who were in no position to resist. He also liked going with Duroc to the public masked balls at the Opéra, where he acted as though nobody could recognise him, propositioning women and spreading salacious gossip. At one of these, early in 1806, he met Éléonore de la Plaigne, a nineteen-year-old protégée of Caroline Murat, newly married to a dragoon captain by the name of Revel, by all accounts an undesirable character. Shortly after Napoleon had noticed her, the captain was arrested, demoted and roughly dealt with by the police before being pressured into divorcing her. Éléonore was taken in by the Murats as a member of their household and lodged in a small pavilion of their house at Neuilly, where Napoleon visited her.17
‘He would sometimes spend a whole day without working, but without leaving the palace or even his study,’ according to Méneval. ‘He might go and spend an hour with the empress, then he would come back, sit down on his settee and either fell asleep or seemed to for a while. He would then come and perch on a corner of my desk, or on the arm of my chair, sometimes even on my knees. He would then put his arm around my neck and amuse himself by playfully pulling my ear or smacking me on the shoulder or on the cheek.’ He would wander about the room, pull out a book, quote from it and discuss it, or declaim some verses by Corneille, and sometimes he would sing – horribly out of tune.18
In the course of the past year Napoleon had defeated the combined might of the two greatest powers on the Continent, reducing one emperor to begging for peace and the other to ignominious flight. The experience cannot have failed to give him a sense of almost limitless power – his troops enthusiastically proclaimed that under his leadership nothing was impossible. He had also gained closer experience of the other states of Europe, at the diplomatic, administrative and military levels, and was not impressed. He had met rulers who were pusillanimous, ineffectual, corrupt, stupid, treacherous, weak or just lazy. He had seen for himself how poorly and nonsensically most of Europe was administered, and how people were ill-treated and resources wasted, and had come to view all rulers with varying degrees of contempt.
One who fully deserved it was the King of Naples. Back in September 1805 he had signed a treaty with France pledging to remain neutral on condition French troops withdrew from the Neapolitan ports which they had occupied against British and Russian landings. Knowing through his spies that the king had already signed treaties with Britain and Russia against France, Napoleon wrote to Queen Maria-Carolina warning her not to make any hostile moves. Three weeks after French troops started pulling out, in mid-October an Anglo-Russian squadron appeared and landed 12,000 Russian and 8,000 British troops which, along with the 40,000 strong Neapolitan army, began operations against the kingdom of Italy. On hearing news of Austerlitz, the Anglo-Russian contingent fell back and re-embarked. On 26 December Napoleon issued a proclamation from Schönbrunn declaring that by their faithlessness the Bourbons of Naples had forfeited their right to reign. On 6 January 1806 he put his brother Joseph in command of a French army with orders to occupy their kingdom. Maria-Carolina wrote an abject letter declaring that she had recovered from the blindness which had led her to act the way she had, and appealing to Napoleon’s generosity to leave her husband his throne. But Joseph was already making his entry into Naples, and on 30 March Napoleon nominated him King of Naples – for the sake, as he put it, of the tranquillity of Europe. This, in Napoleon’s view, required curbing British and Russian ambitions in the Mediterranean. With the whole of the Italian and Illyrian coasts now in French hands, and Spain as an ally, it seemed possible.
Following the death of Pitt on 23 January and the formation of a ministry under Lord Grenville with Charles James Fox as foreign secretary, an accommodation with Britain also seemed possible. On 6 March Talleyrand received a letter from Fox passing on intelligence about a planned royalist plot against Napoleon and suggesting peace talks. The British cabinet appeared willing to proceed, but nevertheless imposed a blockade on the coast of Europe from the Elbe in Germany to Brest in France. Napoleon took the precaution of pre-empting any discussion of the status of the Netherlands by converting the Batavian Republic into the kingdom of Holland, with his brother Louis as king.
Ten days after Louis ascended the throne, on 5 June 1806, the Earl of Yarmouth arrived in Paris to negotiate a peace treaty. The British were prepared to make peace, their only demand being that King Ferdinand be allowed to keep the Sicilian half of his former kingdom and that Joseph content himself with the mainland part of Naples. Napoleon declared that Joseph must also have Sicily, and promised to find Ferdinand a replacement kingdom in northern Germany or possibly Dalmatia. Oubril, who had been sent to Paris by Tsar Alexander to negotiate a treaty, suggested that Ferdinand be compensated with the Balearic islands. This set alarm bells ringing in London, where it was seen as a ploy to provide Russia with a naval base in the western Mediterranean. The new British negotiator, Lord Lauderdale, who reached Paris on 5 August, suggested Ferdinand be compensated somewhere in South America. For reasons that are hard to fathom, Napoleon kept changing his demands, undermining Talleyrand and eventually replacing him as negotiator with the less than diplomatic General Savary. Napoleon seems to have begun entertaining an entirely new vision of how Europe should be reordered, and of France’s position in it.19
A striking aspect of his elevation of ‘Joseph-Napoleon’ to the throne of Naples and Sicily was that it entirely bypassed the French Senate. So did the transformation of the Batavian Republic into a kingdom with Louis as king. The Senate was simply informed that ‘We have proclaimed Louis-Napoléon, our beloved brother, King of Holland.’ He went on to redraw the political map of Europe and transform the manner in which a great swathe of the Continent was governed. Having reduced Austria and enlarged Bavaria, Württemberg and Baden, he bound those three states, along with the remaining thirteen German political units, into the Confedera
tion of the Rhine, of which he nominated himself protector. It was an updated version of the Holy Roman Empire, part of a Continental security system with each of the members obliged to provide a certain number of troops in the common defence: France 200,000, Bavaria 30,000, Württemberg 12,000, Baden, Cleves and Berg 5,000 each, Hesse-Darmstadt 4,000, and the rest 4,000 between them.
There was a logic to this arrangement, insofar as it protected the German heartland from outside interference and invasion; but the logic required the successor to the Holy Roman Emperor, this ‘Emperor of the West’ as people had begun to allude to him, to govern in the universal interest. Yet France was not actually a member of the Confederation, although it was clear that the whole enterprise was to function in her interest. The same went for the supposedly sovereign kingdoms. ‘Do not ever cease to be a Frenchman,’ Napoleon instructed Louis after making him King of Holland.20
The internationalism of the Revolution had been gradually subsumed into the cult of the Nation, which had in turn been subjected by Bonaparte to that of the State, and this was now being transformed into a vision of empire. The terminology of the Grande Nation had been superseded by that of the Grand Empire. Buried somewhere in this was the ideal of a Europe without frontiers, a common patrie of the Enlightenment with a universal legal system and currency in which, as Napoleon put it, ‘while travelling, everyone would never cease to be at home’. It was a dream that appealed to many and held out promise to millions, as most of the Continent was ruled in ways that were at best not benign, by corrupt and incompetent administrations geared to the benefit of the few.21
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