Napoleon Bonaparte

by Alan Schom

  But, as ever in the face of adversity, above all the British were a nation of singers; the most popular war song, “The Invasion,” heard in pubs throughout the capital, reminding one and all: “Bright honour now calls each true Briton to arm,/ Invasion’s the word which hath spread the alarm.”

  With the resumption of hostilities between France and England in May 1803, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl St. Vincent, had dispatched warships into the Channel, ordering them to hug the French coast and bombard the impressive new port construction as well as the new port batteries. Even as old a sea hand as Lord Keith was visibly staggered by the reports reaching his flagship off the Downs: “The new works...proceed night and day with the basin and entrance of Ambleteuse,” one dispatch read. At Boulogne another 2,400 laborers were estimated to be working. “At Wimereux...they work incessantly, and have a camp adjoining which has latterly increased much, and an additional 1,900 men were seen to work there as well, hundreds of torches alight at the new works far into the night. The camp on the heights northeast of Boulogne appears also increased in extent...” Keith grimly acknowledged now, “I think the plot begins to thicken on the other side [of the Channel],” and after personally reporting sixty-one very large artillery pieces just installed on the cliffs of Cape Gris Nez alone, the forty-year veteran confessed, “I never saw a shore so covered with artillery in my life...We are all alert here. I have the secret orders: everything is as ready as possible, and myself too. I have ordered all the ships [of the Home Fleet] to their stations as fast as possible.”[564]

  British ships began a rigorous, unrelenting series of attacks from Flushing to Boulogne that would last for more than the next two years. Napoleon himself witnessed one such bombardment by three English warships on June 29, 1803. He was furious that the enemy could carry out such destructive acts more or less with impunity, because few French batteries were yet in place — and the artillery pieces and mortars that were lacked the power and range to reach the British ships.

  Boulogne was in such a weak position that initially even the normally optimistic Inspector-General Forfait was dejected. “How can you promise the port and city that they will be protected from a bombardment?” he asked the first consul. “This work simply cannot be carried out while we are at war.”[565] Napoleon ordered the creation of a series of forts at Boulogne, and the improvement of the existing ones. Within a matter of weeks the first of dozens of powerful twenty-four-, thirty-two- and thirty-six-pound cannon and ten- and twelve-inch mortars were in place.

  The ultimate result, some two hundred cannons, mortars, and howitzers, covered a two-mile-long line on the cliffs and beaches of Boulogne. Similar batteries were being constructed all the way up to Ostend and Antwerp, to form an impenetrable wall of fire such as had never been seen before by Lord Keith or any other British admiral. But that was still months away.[566]

  A group of 150 master masons was set to cut and place stone for each of the big batteries in Boulogne, aided by hundreds of unskilled laborers. The task was enormous and the work slow. “Here the dominant feeling is still that of fear,” Decrès informed Napoleon while on an early tour of inspection at Ostend, “fear of bombardment [from the British]...disrupting all work.” “What is more, [French] short-range mortars along the coast have permitted the British ships to get close to our forts, their artillery reaching them and even beyond, while our batteries could not even begin to reach them in return,” the director of fortifications at Boulogne informed Paris. “I intend to have the work continue on the forts,” Napoleon angrily riposted. “Regardless of the cost, it must be done. Have fires lit all night long at the end of the jetties and in the batteries and have our naval forces spend every night out of doors, ready to man their stations at a moment’s notice.”[567] He had done it at Toulon, why couldn’t they?

  The result was as inevitable as the morning tide. Napoleon was there in person, pacing, inspecting, dictating, and correcting. Whether in his green-and-yellow traveling coach, filled with stacks of engineers’ plans, maps, and artillery officers’ reports, or in the saddle, he was relentless; he was everywhere, and neither soldier nor sailor could predict where he would appear next. French officers feared his lightning inspection tours almost as much as they did the big British naval guns.

  The batteries at Boulogne naturally came in for the greatest scrutiny, and the first consul’s initial reaction on arrival was hardly cheering. “It is indeed curious that four months after receiving the king of England’s message [regarding the resumption of hostilities], I find the coasts still undefended.” After inspecting one new battery on a still-uncompleted jetty at Boulogne, he angrily dispatched a courier to War Minister Berthier: “The engineering officer’s report [claiming that unit to be fully operational] is not at all correct. I spent four hours at that battery, which was unable to fire a single round!” The war minister at this stage was still responsible for building and manning the new batteries, and when a nervous Berthier, gnawing on his well-mauled nails, blamed the whole thing on the navy, Napoleon snapped: “It is not the naval engineers who are fault, it is army engineers and the War Minister.”

  Yet even a Napoleon could not be everywhere along the coast all the time. He had a country and growing satellite empire to administer and had to depend on the daily reports reaching him at the Tuileries, or more frequently, at his favorite palace, St.-Cloud. Both Berthier and Decrès came in for a withering barrage of criticism, sometimes receiving three, four, or five messages a day. No battery was too small for him, no detail too minor.

  Napoleon, once made aware of such a glaring problem as the vulnerability of the nation’s coasts, pursued the matter with his usual indefatigable, relentless resolve. He ordered Berthier to transfer sixty thousand regular army troops from the interior to man coastal defenses. With the appearance of the first division of newly completed gunboats, he created flying (horse-drawn) artillery batteries of four twelve-pound guns each, attended by a fifty-man cavalry rescort, to shepherd each new group as it proceeded along the shoreline. Special roads were built along the beaches and clifftops for these mobile batteries, extending all the way from Lorient to Ostend. No point along that long coast was to be left unguarded. On occasion, however, the British would slip through and bombard or land and seize some of the new chaloupes or even small French warships, despite all the first consul’s precautions and adamant orders. Fuming, he would demand reports from the officers in charge and then frequently descend on them as well. He would suddenly appear in the midst of a gale, or during the darkest hours of the night, guided by young aides-de-camp carrying torches to light the way. In fair weather or in the more typical foul Channel variety, Napoleon Bonaparte seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

  But his vigilance paid off, and after the first several months of such intensive efforts on the coast, powerful guns were finally in place, trained on the British warships that were now forced to withdraw to a more respectful distance. Napoleon was slowly achieving his end, but at a dreadful financial price to the nation.

  As if Napoleon did not have enough to cope with in his preparations for the invasion of England, he was simultaneously involved with several major controversial personal and political changes. In May 1802 Napoleon announced his intention to reintroduce slavery in the French colonies — slavery that had been abolished years earlier by the French revolutionary government. But when that same month Napoleon declared his decision to name himself consul for life, Joseph, Lucien, and Letizia had opposed the idea vigorously, opposition repeated even more vehemently in May 1804, when Napoleon ordered the Senate to proclaim him emperor. And although he spent most of his time now on the English invasion preparations, he stubbornly overruled his entire family regarding his new empire, as he decided to establish an international Bonaparte dynasty linking him with all the crowned heads of Europe. What is more, he would order Pope Pius VII himself to officiate at his coronation ceremony, which he proposed for the end of 1804. War or no war, Napoleon’s long-term plans fo
r the domination of the Continent continued apace — plans that were not only to alter his life but to change the map and history of Europe for the next hundred years.

  Chapter Twenty-One – The Coronation

  ‘I have been called upon to change the face of the world.’

  At six o’clock on the evening of December 1, 1804, the salvos of hundreds of cannon, from the Champ de Mars and the Invalides to the quays and the Hôtel de Ville, began firing and continued on the hour until midnight. Even with the much reduced ceremonial charges, however, the thunder was infernal. Ears and heads ached, conversations and chamber music were drowned out, and medieval buildings that had withstood the catastrophes of the ages shook to their deep stone foundations. The Empire that had been announced at the Palace of St.-Cloud by the hand-picked Senate on May 18 and confirmed by a national plebiscite on November 6 had given Emperor Napoléon I the final “legalized” approval he required, rendering his position seemingly impregnable.[568]

  The vote announced — 3,572,329 for the creation of the Empire, 2,569 against — reflected less than half of the votes actually cast. Even by government figures this meant that in just under half the nation’s six thousand or so cities, towns, and villages, only a single negative vote each had been registered in rejection of the Empire, or from another perspective, that in 57 percent of those communes, not a single person had opposed Napoleon. Approximately 99.9993 percent of the French people had approved the Empire, a virtual statistical impossibility.[569] But Napoleon controlled the nation’s armed forces, police, press, publishing, and theater. There existed no independent means of contesting or questioning the voting procedure and results. The coronation could now take place, and Napoleon just laughed, for all had been foreordained on his personal orders.

  It was cold and damp under ominous gray skies, threatening more rain and snow for the French capital. The original idea of holding the ceremony in the Invalides had been canceled with the belated, if reluctant, agreement of Pope Pius VII to perform the ceremony himself. For this a cathedral was required.

  Throughout the night the ladies of the court and of the new imperial society had been up with their seamstresses and hairdressers, some, according to Laure Junot, with their hair stacked so elaborately high they were forced to sit bolt upright all night. Before the crack of dawn on December 2, eighty-four senators in their blue velvet cloaks and culottes, and wearing black felt hats with large white feathers, led by their president, the pliable Neufchâteau, in almost a precise repetition of their performance at St. Cloud on May 18, set out for the Ile de la Cité and the Palace of Justice to take the new Imperial Oath of Allegiance. By 7:00 A.M. they were walking the remaining few hundred yards, past thousands of troops in dress uniform, to Nôtre-Dame Cathedral.[570] At that same hour deputations of soldiers, sailors, and National Guardsmen, some five thousand of them, were forming in the Place Dauphine. At eight o’clock members of the Legislative Body, the State Council, the Tribunate, and the Court of Appeals set out in streams of carriages or on foot from their respective palaces, each escorted by between eighty and one hundred cavalry and infantry. An hour later, also under strong military escort, the diplomatic corps assembled, including the Turkish ambassador and dozens of German princes (although emissaries from the three most powerful European states, Great Britain, Russia, and Austria, were noticeably absent).

  At that same hour Pope Pius VII, led by a full squadron of dragoons, set out from the Carrousel. The cortege of carriages following him bore cardinals, bishops, and lower church personnel totaling some one hundred in all. Monsignor Speroni, mounted on a gray mule, immediately preceded the pope’s carriage. “That is the pope’s ass,” some irreverent Parisian called out. “That’s what you have to kiss!” The pope, ignoring the crowd, sat thoughtfully, quietly resplendent in a cape of gold and silver, the rest of his costume white. His silver tiara and three separate slender golden crowns, encrusted with emeralds, rubies, diamonds, and pearls, had been presented to him by Napoleon. For the pope it was a strange moment, as he passed through this city whose population just a few years earlier had so loudly denounced Christianity while rampaging through and desecrating every church and cathedral of the land, humiliating, torturing, and in some instances, executing priests and nuns.

  As late as September 15 the pope still had not accepted the invitation to participate in this coronation. A panicked Napoleon first implored and then threatened (“I will reduce him to the status of a mere Bishop of Rome”) if he did not obey the summons.[571] After two postponements and much haggling, chiefly over the new role and power of the church in France, with assurances (most of which he had no intention of honoring) from Napoleon, a still reluctant Pius VII had acquiesced at the very last moment and set out on the arduous journey over the snow-covered Alps for this very country where his predecessor, Pius VI, had recently died a French state prisoner — and to which he would one day return himself a captive.

  For Napoleon it was a tremendous coup, this recognition throwing the full support of the Vatican behind him, raising his stature across the civilized world, giving his regime and coronation a prestige and acceptance such as even the greatest military victory could never confer.

  At 10:00 A.M. fresh artillery salvos announced the departure of Napoleon himself from the Tuileries, preceded by the Imperial Guard, trumpeters, and kettle-drummers, all giving the appearance more of an imperial Roman procession than of a French coronation. Security was very tight, troops three deep on either side of the street, totaling some eighty thousand men. Marshal Murat, as military governor of Paris, resplendent in his uniform, led the way, followed by his staff and four squadrons of carabiniers, another four squadrons of glistening cuirassiers, one regiment of chasseurs à cheval of the Imperial Guard and a squadron of Mamelukes in Egyptian costume, then by the heralds-at-arms, on horseback, followed by eleven elaborate state carriages bearing the master of ceremonies, the comte de Ségur, the grand officers of the Empire, the ministers of state (including Talleyrand, Berthier, and Fouché), another carriage bearing the grand dignitaries of state, yet another with imperial princesses Caroline, Pauline, and Elisa, and finally the emperor’s.[572]

  Napoleon’s carriage was paneled in glass and bore a gilt-covered frieze containing medallions representing each of the departments of the Empire, while its doors bore the Emperor’s coats of arms, four allegorical figures holding up the heavens encircled by a garland of laurel in gilded bronze, with golden eagles, and four more eagles in the middle, as well as the crown of Charlemagne on a golden altar. Napoleon sat on the back seat of white velvet embroidered in gold, golden lightning bolts traversing the ceiling, on which a double crown of olive and laurel appeared, along with two golden Ns also crowned with laurel. This coach was driven by Napoleon’s favorite coachman, César (who had saved his life during the bomb attack that fateful Christmas Eve back in 1800), drawn by eight isabelle (gray) horses caparisoned in white, their manes braided and adorned with red and gold cocardes set off by bright red Moroccan leather harnesses and bronze-colored reins. Napoleon’s aides-de-camp — all general officers — led the horses, with two colonels general of the Imperial Guard riding along each side of the vehicle, which was mounted by equerries standing at the rear, the carriage followed by the inspector general of the Gendarmerie.

  Napoleon was wearing a Spanish costume of purple velvet, embroidered in gold and covered with precious stones. To his left sat Josephine in a mantle of white satin embroidered in gold and silver, her only jewels diamonds in a dazzling profusion — a diadem, a necklace, earrings, and even a belt. Facing them, also in Spanish costume, sat the only two Bonaparte brothers who had agreed to partake in the events of the day, Joseph and Louis. Of the four, only Josephine was smiling, at least at times, while Napoleon sat as grimly as his brothers. To be sure, it was the great day he had been planning for such a long time.[573] France was practically being presented to him on a golden platter, but at a price he would be paying until the very end — the enmity and j
ealousy of the entire Bonaparte clan, personified by Joseph and Louis, who were all but glowering as they turned in the direction of the Pont-Neuf and the Ile de la Cité. The battle over the political inheritance of the newly born Empire had resulted in colossal scenes between Napoleon and his siblings. Who was to be his successor? Josephine had of course been the number one “enemy” in the eyes of the family ever since her marriage with Napoleon, the entire clan setting themselves against her with an unrelieved Corsican determination that had frequently left her in tears. If she had not wanted the Empire itself, once decided upon, she had been determined to secure her own place in it and was even desperate enough to achieve this to sacrifice her daughter’s happiness.

  The marriage of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Beauharnais had been an utter disaster from the very start. Louis’s military career, on which Napoleon had set so much store during the Italian campaign of 1796-97, had by the time of the Egyptian fiasco already begun deteriorating. Then Louis, along with the vast majority of the French officers, rebelled, demanding early repatriation to France and leaving Egypt and a much embarrassed Napoleon in the lurch in midcampaign. Once a quiet, charming young man and a cheerful, pleasant member of his regimental mess, Louis changed noticeably after a long and painful treatment for gonorrhea. The enthusiastic young soldier, although proficient as an officer, began to lose interest in everything military, much to Napoleon’s consternation. Preferring literature to military exercises, Louis withdrew from army activities, eschewing society and the company of soldiers in favor of a few artistic and literary companions. He grew melancholy, introspective, suspicious of everyone, reclusive, and violent. On very rare occasions he revealed a sense of integrity and idealism not seen in the rest of the family (with the exception of Joseph, later). Although, thanks to his brother he was ultimately to rise to the rank of general officer, he spent very little time with the army. He became the despair of the Bonaparte family — of Napoleon in particular — he was so unlike the good-natured Joseph, the optimistic, outgoing Lucien, or the hell-raising Jérôme. They simply did not know what to make of the young man. And then, when he showed an interest in Josephine’s niece, Emilie de Beauharnais, the clan panicked.[574] They who had been so determinedly against Josephine from the very beginning — indeed, it was one of the few unifying themes in the family — were hardly about to permit her to strengthen her position by allowing another Bonaparte to marry another Beauharnais, and Emilie was expeditiously married off to Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Chaman Lavalette.