Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Etruria was only nominally independent, of course; despite having Bourbons at its head it paid heavily to maintain its French garrison.27* Napoleon’s creation of a kingdom rather than a sister-republic was rightly seen in France as a step towards conditioning the French people for a monarchy at home, but when King Louis I of Etruria visited Paris in January 1802 and Napoleon took him to the Comédie-Française to watch Oedipus, the audience heartily cheered Philoctetes’ line from Act II scene 4: ‘I have made sovereigns, but have refused to become one.’28 Napoleon still needed to tread with caution.

  The Lunéville peace was greeted with huge relief in France, especially when it was announced that most of the conscripts who were going to be called up from the class-year 1802 would not now be needed, and that soldiers who had served in four campaigns – up to one-eighth of the army – could be demobilized.29 In his message to the Senate of February 13, Napoleon declared that he would ‘fight only to secure the peace and happiness of the world’, although he could not resist threatening to ‘avenge’ the ‘insults’ suffered from a boundlessly ambitious Britain, which he always called England.30 Yet Britain too was tired of continual conflict, and almost ready to sheathe the sword after nearly a decade of war.

  On February 17, Napoleon attended Talleyrand’s fête to celebrate the Peace of Lunéville held at the foreign ministry, the Hôtel Galifet in the rue du Bac, which extended southwards from the Pont Royal through the Faubourg Saint-Germain and contained a long gallery with a theatre attached. Among those present was the American consul-general Victor du Pont.† ‘It was the most magnificent thing of the kind I ever saw,’ du Pont recorded of the fête.* Giuseppina Grassini ‘displayed all the charms of a most delicious voice. She is a very handsome woman and had more diamonds on her neck, head, breast and arms than I remember to have seen on any woman before.’ It was said that Napoleon had given these to her in Italy when she became his mistress, although diamonds were ‘very abundant since generals and commissaries of the government get them so cheap’. Napoleon ‘seemed very much pleased during her singing and Madame Bonaparte quite out of humour; for she is very jealous’. Josephine, too, wore ‘very large’ diamonds.

  After the concert, the actors of the Théâtre de Vaudeville performed a light comedy about the peace ‘in which almost every verse was a praise of Bonaparte’ and of what du Pont inaccurately but prophetically termed ‘the royal Family’. After a short ballet sequence, the waltzing began. ‘I have never seen such a display of human flesh,’ wrote the thirty-four-year-old diplomat. ‘Their arms are naked up to the armpit, their breasts entirely uncovered and their shoulders bare below the middle of their backs.’ Moreover their petticoats were short, thin and few, ‘to expose all the shape of their limbs’.31 Napoleon walked from room to room with four tall handsome aides-de-camp in hussar uniform whose cap-feathers were ‘as high as the ceiling’. Meanwhile Talleyrand, ‘dandling along on his lame feet, kept close, to do honours of the fête’.32 These were celebrations he could well afford. Knowing that under one of the clauses of the treaty Austrian bonds issued in Belgium would be honoured at par, Talleyrand had made a fortune buying them up at their discounted rates.33 Even in an age where insider-dealing was considered almost a perk of the job and had few of the moral or legal implications of today, Talleyrand was in a class of his own.

  An even more momentous peace treaty came into prospect in March 1801, when Lord Hawkesbury, the foreign secretary in Henry Addington’s new government in London, opened discussions with the French diplomat Louis-Guillaume Otto, who had been in the British capital for several years organizing prisoner-of-war exchanges. William Pitt the Younger’s government had fallen in February over the issue of Catholic Emancipation and Hawkesbury, although a follower of Pitt, cautiously began to explore the possibility of an accommodation with France, which had been anathema to the Pitt ministry. At the same time, a British expeditionary force landed at Aboukir in Egypt on March 8. With generals Friant, Belliard, Lanusse and Menou still unable to evacuate their troops because the Royal Navy was off Toulon blockading Admiral Ganteaume, who was supposed to go to pick them up, Napoleon faced a seriously deteriorating position in Egypt.

  The assassination of Tsar Paul I on March 23 came as a blow to Napoleon, who is said to have cried out in rage at the news. He suspected British spies were behind the murder, although the actual perpetrators were a group of Russian nobles and the Hanoverian General Levin von Bennigsen.34 Paul was mentally unstable, although not certifiably insane like George III of Britain, Christian VII of Denmark and Maria ‘the Mad’ of Portugal, who all occupied European thrones at the time, albeit with regencies exercising actual control. Paul’s policies supporting the middle classes had been seen as threatening the Russian nobility. His twenty-three-year-old son and heir Alexander, who was in the palace at the time of the assassination, may have had an intimation that the nobles were going to demand his father’s abdication (which they did indeed secure, before they stabbed, strangled and kicked the Tsar to death). Alexander was crowned tsar later that year. Although he theoretically had absolute power, he knew that he had to work with the nobility if he were to escape his father’s fate.

  Alexander I was a riddle. Reared in the Enlightenment atmosphere of his grandmother Catherine the Great’s court, and taught Rousseauian principles at a young age by his Swiss tutor Frédéric de La Harpe, he was nonetheless capable of telling his justice minister, ‘You always want to instruct me, but I am the autocratic emperor, and I will this and nothing else!’ He has been described as combining a theoretical love of mankind with a practical contempt for men. Well-meaning, impressionable and egotistical, he was so good at playing a part that Napoleon later dubbed him ‘the Talma of the North’, and on another occasion ‘a shifty Byzantine’. He claimed that he would happily abolish serfdom if only civilization were more advanced, but never genuinely came close to doing so, any more than he ever carried through the codification of Russian law that he promised in 1801 or ratified the liberal constitution he had asked his advisor Count Mikhail Speranski to draw up a few years later. Although La Harpe had initially enthused Alexander about Napoleon’s reforms as First Consul, when the tutor returned from Paris he was so disillusioned that he wrote a book, Reflexions on the True Nature of the First Consulship for Life, that described Napoleon as ‘the most famous tyrant the world has produced’, which had a great effect on the young tsar. Since Alexander ultimately did more than any other individual to bring about Napoleon’s downfall, his emergence on to the European scene with his father’s assassination was a seminal moment.

  Napoleon rightly feared that Alexander and the Russian nobility, which tended to be pro-British because they profited from the Baltic trade with them, would now make Russia leave Tsar Paul’s League of Armed Neutrality. The League was badly weakened on April 2 when Nelson attacked Copenhagen and captured twelve Danish ships and destroyed another three. When, years later, Napoleon met a Royal Navy officer called Lieutenant Payne who had fought at the battle of Copenhagen, he said: ‘You had warm work there for the time it lasted.’35 It was true; the Danes put up a strong fight and remained thereafter loyally in Napoleon’s camp. Napoleon ordered the Moniteur to state ominously in its report of the Tsar’s assassination and the attack on Copenhagen: ‘History will unveil the connection which may exist between these two events.’36 (It hasn’t.) To the courier carrying his message of friendship to Tsar Alexander, Napoleon said: ‘Go, sir, gallop, and don’t forget that the world was made in six days.’37

  On April 14, Hawkesbury proposed that the French should evacuate Egypt in return for the British evacuation of Minorca, thus leaving Britain with Malta, Tobago, Martinique, Trinidad, Ceylon and the Dutch Guianan sugar colonies of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice as the price of peace. Napoleon refused, demanding instead that Britain give up all of those wartime gains as well as the territory taken from the late Tipu Sahib in India. The mutual outrageousness of both proposals implies that both sides knew these to be merely
opening gambits with months of haggling ahead, and so it turned out. On April 24 Napoleon sent Duroc to see the King of Prussia in Berlin and the new Tsar in St Petersburg and ‘speak as if we are sure of being able to hold Egypt’ – a clear sign that they weren’t. Duroc was told to say that if the British expedition there ‘should succeed, it will be a great misfortune for Europe’.38 Time seemed to be on Britain’s side, however, as Paul’s assassination led to the collapse of the League of Armed Neutrality in May and June when first Sweden, then Denmark and finally Russia herself signed peace treaties with London.

  Napoleon spent May attempting to cajole admirals Bruix, Ganteaume, Villeneuve, Rosily and Linois to relieve the army in Egypt. They used news of missing Spanish ships, vessels going aground, epidemics and anything else that occurred to them to avoid sailing across the Mediterranean on what they feared might be a suicide mission against the Royal Navy. (Napoleon’s understanding of naval affairs was dismal. He never truly grasped that the British ability to fire broadsides far more often per minute made the sheer numbers of ships in any engagement largely irrelevant, and that blockading France at sea strengthened rather than weakened British fighting ability.) Frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations, the British began besieging Alexandria, intending to expel the French from Egypt altogether.

  On August 5 Hawkesbury told Otto that he might allow Malta to become independent. This – denying the use of the strategically vital island to the Royal Navy – was the concession Napoleon had been seeking. When he learned that Menou had capitulated to British forces on September 2 after a two-week siege, he ordered Otto to offer a French withdrawal from Egypt, Naples and the Papal States in exchange for peace, before the news reached the British Government.* Not knowing that the French had been defeated in Alexandria, Hawkesbury agreed.

  On October 1, 1801 Otto signed the fifteen articles of an accord, and celebrations broke out in both France and Britain. ‘The public were so impatient to express their feelings on the occasion of the news of the preliminaries of peace being signed’, reported The Times, ‘that almost all the public streets were illuminated last night.’39 Otto’s portrait was exhibited in shop windows and his praises sung by balladeers. When Napoleon’s aide-de-camp General Jacques de Lauriston arrived in London with the official ratification a few days later, the crowd detached the horses from his coach and pulled it themselves from Oxford Street to St James’s Street, and then from Downing Street to the Admiralty and through St James’s Park, while celebrations carried on throughout the night despite a thunderstorm and torrential rain.40 All this was deeply unwelcome to Hawkesbury, who believed it would only strengthen Napoleon’s negotiating position prior to the ratification of the full treaty.41†

  Under Article 2 of the preliminary treaty, Britain restored to France, Spain and Holland nearly all the territories she had captured since 1793, encompassing the Cape of Good Hope, Dutch Guiana, Tobago, Martinique, St Lucia, Minorca and Pondicherry, retaining only Trinidad and Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka). Article 4 stipulated that Britain would return Malta to the Knights of St John within a month, who would then be protected by a third power to be decided by the final treaty (it was eventually six powers); Article 5 returned Egypt to the Ottoman Empire; Article 7 required France to evacuate Naples and the Papal States and Britain to evacuate Elba and ‘all the ports and islands which she may occupy in the Mediterranean or in the Adriatic Seas’. Other, unremarkable articles, covered the Ionian Islands, prisoner exchanges and fishing rights in Newfoundland.42

  Napoleon had been able to extract great concessions due to the British desire for peace, which, because of the disruption of trade with Europe from nine years of war, amounted almost to desperation. The treaty was a massive diplomatic coup, since Egypt was being evacuated anyway after Menou’s defeat, as the British discovered on October 2, the very day after its signature. The whole of France’s overseas empire was returned to her for the cost of parts of Italy that Napoleon was under pressure from Russia – which retained interests in the Mediterranean and had an army in Switzerland as recently as 1800 – to give up in any case, and which he could easily recapture if necessary. Territorially, all Britain had gained after nearly a decade of war and £290 million – which more than doubled her National Debt – were Trinidad and Ceylon, neither of which had belonged to France anyway.43 By contrast, French troops were on the Rhine, in Holland and in north-west Italy, and France had hegemony over Switzerland and influence over her ally Spain – none of which the treaty mentioned.

  Despite all that, London continued to celebrate. ‘The Peace is an event which had excited a tumult of joy such as I never before saw equalled,’ a friend wrote to the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson.

  The Funds were falling and the expectation of an invasion very general … The demonstrations of joy have risen almost to madness. Illuminations have been general throughout the kingdom … It is said that ‘Long live Buonaparte!’ was repeatedly cried in the streets … Indeed it is curious to observe the change of style in the Government papers. The ‘Corsican adventurer’, ‘the atheistical adventurer’, is now ‘the august hero’, ‘the restorer of public order’, etc, etc, in fact everything that is great and good. It reminds one of the transformation in a pantomime, where a devil is suddenly converted into an angel.44

  Napoleon signed a treaty of friendship with Bavaria in August 1801, then a peace treaty with Russia on October 8, 1801, by which 6,000 Russian prisoners were returned home with their arms and uniforms. The next day a peace treaty was also concluded with Turkey, by which each country’s ports were opened to the other. Thus within the space of a year, Napoleon had made peace with Austria, Naples, Turkey, Russia, Britain and the émigrés. Prussia would follow in the early summer of the following year. On October 14 the sixty-three-year-old Lord Cornwallis, the British general who had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1781, was welcomed to Calais with a salute of cannon and a guard of honour and conducted first to Paris, where there were celebrations and public illuminations,* and then to Amiens to conduct the detailed negotiations of the treaty with Joseph and Talleyrand.45 (Amiens was chosen for its good omens; Henry VIII and François I had signed a peace treaty there in 1527.)

  On November 20, 1801, Napoleon appointed the first functionaries for the Tuileries: chamberlains, chancellors, almoners, equerries, footmen and even tranchants (carvers), whose job it was to cut his meat for him.46 Miot de Melito noted that instead of high cavalry boots, sabres and cockades there were now knee-breeches, silk stockings, silver-buckled shoes, dress swords and hats carried under the arm.47 These liveried flunkeys and courtiers were instructed in etiquette by Marie Antoinette’s former first lady of the bedchamber, who explained who might approach the First Consul, when and under what circumstances.48 Within six months the Marquis de Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, was reporting that ‘Everything around the First Consul and his wife is resuming the general character and etiquette of Versailles.’49 Small wonder that men like Moreau wondered why France had gone to the bother of decapitating Louis XVI.

  A week after Cornwallis arrived in France, Otto informed Hawkesbury that now that the Atlantic Ocean was safe to cross, France was going to send an expedition of 12,000 men from Rochefort and Brest ‘to re-establish order on Saint-Domingue’ (present-day Haiti).50 In the early 1790s the produce of this former slave colony of 8,000 plantations was greater than all of Europe’s other Caribbean and American colonies combined, providing 40 per cent of Europe’s consumption of sugar and 60 per cent of its coffee, and accounting for 40 per cent of all of France’s overseas trade.51 By 1801, however, because of the slave revolt led over the course of the previous six years by Toussaint l’Ouverture, sugar exports were a mere 13 per cent of their 1789 total and cotton 15 per cent.52 The effects on French trade, and thus on the prosperity of ports such as Bordeaux, Nantes and Le Havre, had been devastating, and merchants were calling loudly for the reintroduction of direct French control – and that meant slavery too. The Jacobins
who had abolished slavery and the slave trade in 1794 were either dead, in disgrace or in prison. Napoleon was keen to return to the days when Saint-Domingue produced 180 million francs per annum for the French treasury, gave employment to 1,640 ships and thousands of seamen, and kept the French Atlantic ports thriving. He hoped it might even provide a strategic springboard for a new French empire in the western hemisphere, especially now that France had exchanged Tuscany for Louisiana.

  Although Napoleon wrote proclamations to the Saint-Dominguans about how all men were free and equal in the sight of God, and to l’Ouverture – significantly for the first time using the royal ‘we’ – of ‘these brave blacks whose courage we like and whom we would be most regretful of punishing for rebellion’, this was only for show.53 Napoleon had bought slaves when in Egypt, and he now ordered his brother-in-law, the twenty-nine-year-old General Charles Leclerc (married to his sister Pauline), whose expedition of 20,000 men arrived on the island on January 29, 1802 and was soon reinforced by 8,000 more the next month, to reintroduce slavery as soon as he safely could.54 As Napoleon warned the local population, anyone daring to ‘separate himself from the Captain-General [Leclerc] shall be considered a traitor to his country, and the wrath of the Republic shall consume him as the fire burns up your withered sugar-canes’.55 He ordered Leclerc to follow a three-stage plan: first, to promise the blacks anything and everything while he occupied the key strategic positions on the island, secondly, to arrest and deport all potential opponents, and only then to embark on the reintroduction of slavery.56