Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  The diatribes of Peltier, Jacques Régnier, Nicolas Dutheil and other writers published in England led to bad blood, and Napoleon could never quite accept that the British government were as powerless and uninvolved as they claimed to be. He inserted no fewer than five articles in his own hand in the Moniteur on this issue and also produced ideas for political cartoons that he ordered to be drawn up and distributed.51 After the machine infernale episode he thought it reasonable to expect that a now supposedly friendly power would help restrict incitements to terrorism.

  Napoleon was unlucky that his time in power coincided with the flourishing of the first fully professional British political caricaturists – James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank – still among its greatest exponents, who all fastened on him as their victim. Gillray fought in the Duke of York’s Flanders campaign and never saw Napoleon, but virtually single-handedly created the image of him as physically small – ‘Little Boney’. Yet even the British caricaturists never reached the level of pure loathing achieved by the Russian Ivan Terebenev or the Prussian Johann Gottfried Schadow, let alone the Bavarian Johann Michael Voltz, whose caricature The Triumph of the Year 1813 depicted Napoleon’s head entirely composed of corpses.52 Of course there were also pro-Napoleon engravings on sale in London for as much as 2s 6d in 1801, a reminder that he had his British admirers.53 Yet overall, British Francophobia easily matched French Anglophobia. The market for highly abusive prints of Napoleon was much larger than for positive images of him, and the standard work on English anti-Napoleonic caricature and satire covers two full volumes, even without the illustrations.54 Meanwhile, as one contemporary noted, the sheer number of British biographies of Napoleon published in the years after 1797 meant that they had ‘to out-Herod each other in the representations they give alike of the hateful and malignant cast of his features, and of the deformity and depravity of his moral character’.55 As well as newspapers, caricatures, books and even nursery rhymes, Napoleon was the regular butt of British ballads, songs and poems. In an age when absolutely everything was regarded as a fit subject for an ode – one was entitled ‘On a Drunken Old Woman Who was Accidentally Drowned on a Ferry Crossing’ – Napoleon’s supposed crimes excited an avalanche of poetry, none of it memorable.56

  There was a good deal of hypocrisy in Napoleon’s objections, since the Moniteur roundly abused the British government, likening it to Barbary pirates and Milton’s Satan virtually on a monthly basis from August 1802 to March 1803.57 It even claimed that the Chouan terrorist Georges Cadoudal would have been awarded the Order of the Garter if the machine infernale had succeeded.58 Napoleon’s attempts to have Cadoudal deported from Britain to Canada at this time came to nothing, but in a gesture of support for the British monarchy he nonetheless expelled any Stuarts taking refuge in France, even though the last Jacobite rebellion had taken place fifty-eight years before.59

  Under pressure from France, the British attorney-general, Spencer Perceval, finally decided that Peltier – a strange man who charged people a shilling each to watch him behead geese and ducks in his garden on a miniature guillotine made of walnut – could be tried for criminal libel, and the case was heard at the Court of King’s Bench on February 21, 1803. He was found guilty by the unanimous vote of the jury after just one minute’s deliberation, but as war resumed shortly afterwards he was never imprisoned, and went on violently lampooning Napoleon.60 When Peltier later published an anti-Napoleonic work by the French Gothic-Romantic vampire-novelist Charles Nodier, who had not taken the rather obvious precaution of emigrating first, the author was imprisoned for several months in the Saint-Pélagie prison.61

  That Napoleon suspected that the Amiens peace might be short lived is clear from his orders to General Mathieu Decaen, whom he sent to India with four men-of-war and 1,800 sailors in March 1803 to ‘communicate with the peoples or princes who are most impatient under the yoke of the English [that is, East India] Company’. He also wanted Decaen to report on the strength of the British forts in India and the chances of maintaining a French army there, taking into account the fact that the French would ‘not be masters of the sea’ and so he could ‘expect little significant help’.62 Napoleon told Decaen that, if war should break out before September 1804, he would be ‘in a position to acquire that great glory which hands down the memory of men beyond the lapse of centuries’. He was treading the thin dividing line between the grand and the grandiose – but his instructions to Decaen show that he didn’t expect the treaty to break down as early as it did.

  By September 1802, Napoleon was reverting to his habitual Anglophobia; that month he wrote to the interior ministry to complain that during his three-hour visit to the Louvre, he had seen a Gobelins tapestry of the 1346 siege of Calais by the English. ‘Such subjects should not be available for public viewing in Paris.’63 On December 28 he wrote to Talleyrand from Saint-Cloud, ‘We do not seem to be at peace, but only in truce … the fault lies entirely with the British Government.’64 The problems facing the Amiens peace – the Sébastiani and Decaen expeditions, Cadoudal’s continued residence in London, the émigré press, compensation for the King of Sardinia and Prince Willem V of Orange, Swiss independence, the non-evacuations of Holland, Alexandria, Pondicherry, the Cape of Good Hope and, especially, Malta, and France’s tariff regime – all of those might have been resolved given trust and goodwill, but there wasn’t any on either side. With his customary good sense – at least when he was sane – George III described the peace as ‘experimental’, which is all the British government ever considered it to be, and for Britain it soon became apparent that the experiment had failed.65

  On January 30, 1803 Sébastiani’s report of his Levantine tour, which claimed that Egypt could be retaken with an expedition of fewer than 10,000 men, was published across eight pages of the Moniteur. It was a deliberate provocation and Britain’s fears of a Franco-Russian dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire were naturally rekindled. ‘As no one imagined that Bonaparte did anything without a motive,’ recorded State Councillor Pelet, ‘the inference was obvious.’66 Napoleon refused to discuss the report with Ambassador Whitworth, or even to give a clarifying statement. Yet the fact that the report was published at all showed it was meant as a diplomatic tool rather than a serious plan of action: if Napoleon had truly been contemplating a return to Egypt he would hardly have trumpeted the fact in the Moniteur. He did not want a return to war in 1803, but he was not willing to lessen France’s position in order to prevent it. ‘Every day weakens the deep impression of their late defeats and lessens the prestige we have gained by our victories,’ he told a councillor of state at this time. ‘All the advantage of delay is on their side.’67

  On February 9 the British announced a halt to all further withdrawals until France had provided a ‘satisfactory explanation’ for its recent actions over Etruria, Switzerland and the Levant. Nine days later Napoleon complained to Whitworth about both Malta and Alexandria and about the lack of progress in quelling press attacks on him. ‘Let us unite rather than fighting over this,’ he concluded, encompassing all the issues threatening peace, ‘and together we will decide the future of the world.’ Whitworth took this as mere rhetoric, but as Napoleon’s later proposal of the same tenor to Tsar Alexander at Tilsit was to show, he may well have been perfectly serious. Whitworth didn’t consider it even worth engaging with, however, and responded by raising the question of Parma, Piedmont and Switzerland, which Napoleon dismissed as mere ‘bagatelles’. Napoleon was denounced in Britain after the resumption of war for being cavalier about these small countries, but when seen in the context he intended – that of a partnership whereby the world’s future could be decided between Britain dominating a vast overseas empire and France dominating Europe – the remark made perfect sense.68 In other respects, he must have used forceful language on that occasion (perhaps calculatedly so), as Whitworth reported to Addington: ‘I thought I was listening to a captain of dragoons and not to the head of the greatest State in Europe
.’69

  On February 20, Napoleon told the Paris legislature that due to ‘the abdication of the sovereign and the wishes of the people, the necessity of things have placed Piedmont in the power of France’.70 Similarly, he said, Swiss sovereignty had been violated to ‘open up a triple and easy access to Italy’. More ominously he referred to the British troops still occupying Malta and Alexandria, and said that France’s half-million troops were ‘ready to defend and avenge’.71 The next day the British handed over Cape Town to the Dutch East India Company, but no blandishments or threats would persuade them to honour their commitments over Malta and Alexandria.

  On February 25 the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire passed the Final Declaration of the Imperial Deputation (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss), which put the Lunéville peace terms into effect in Germany. To compensate German states and princes for France’s gain of the west bank of the Rhine, it was necessary for Austria and the other large German states to ‘mediatize’, or rationalize, the over two hundred states of Germany into forty, largely by secularizing ecclesiastical territories and connecting the ‘free’ and ‘imperial’ cities to their more substantial neighbours. This was to be the largest transfer of statehood and property in Germany before 1945, with nearly 2.4 million people and 12.7 million guilden per annum of revenue going to new rulers. It came as a result of months of bartering between Talleyrand and the rulers who would benefit from this wholesale takeover of the smaller, hitherto self-governing entities. Those that survived tended to receive far more territory to the east of the Rhine than they had had to give up to France to its west. Baden received seven times more, for example, Prussia nearly five times, Hanover gained the bishopric of Osnabrück despite losing no territory to France, and Austria made large gains too. Württemberg lost 30,000 citizens but gained 120,000, and between 1803 and 1810 it doubled its territory at the expense of seventy-eight other political entities and the Swabian imperial knights.72 Prussia lost 140,000 but gained 600,000. The map of Germany was hugely simplified, in return for the extinction after centuries of hundreds of tiny states such as the hereditary county of Winneburg-Bilstein that belonged to Prince Klemens von Metternich’s father.

  Mindful of his hero Frederick the Great of Prussia, who had built up his Fürstenbund (Princes’ League) as a check to Austria, Napoleon now sought to present France to these newly expanded German states as a check to the power of both the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs, and he promoted marriage alliances with Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg to complement strategic alliances that he had already concluded with those three powers by the time of the outbreak of further European hostilities in 1805.73 By July 1804 he had spotted the sixteen-year-old Princess Augusta of Bavaria as wifely material for Eugène; in April 1806 Stéphanie de Beauharnais, a cousin of Josephine’s by marriage, married Prince Karl of Baden; and in August 1807 the twenty-two-year-old Jérôme married Princess Catharina of Württemberg.

  On March 8, 1803 George III delivered a King’s Speech asking parliament for war supplies and mobilizing Britain’s militia, blaming the French for making major military preparations in French and Dutch ports, even though a despatch from Whitworth afterwards made it clear that the French weren’t doing anything of the sort. Like the publication of Sébastiani’s report, the speech was a threat rather than a declaration of war. ‘England is not asleep,’ he wrote to Charles IV of Spain on the 11th, ‘she is always on the watch, and will not rest until she has seized all the colonies and all the commerce of the world. France can alone prevent this.’ He wrote this despite the fact that Britain had already disgorged Martinique, Tobago, St Lucia and Minorca under the terms of Amiens.74

  Spotting Whitworth at his levée at the Tuileries on Sunday, March 13, Napoleon, according to the ambassador’s account, ‘accosted me evidently under very considerable agitation. He began by asking me if I had any news from England,’ to which Whitworth said he had received letters from Hawkesbury two days before.75

  NAPOLEON: ‘So you are determined to go to war.’

  WHITWORTH: ‘No, First Consul, we are too sensible of the advantages of peace.’

  NAPOLEON: ‘We have already been at war for fifteen years.’

  WHITWORTH: (after a pause) ‘That is already too long.’

  NAPOLEON: ‘But you wish me to fight fifteen years more, and you force me to do it.’

  WHITWORTH: ‘That was very far from His Majesty’s intentions.’

  Napoleon then walked over to talk to the Russian and Spanish ambassadors, Count Markov and the Chevalier d’Azara. ‘The English want war,’ Napoleon said, ‘but if they are the first to draw the sword, I will be the last to return it to the scabbard. They don’t respect treaties. From now on they must be covered with black crêpe.’76 Whitworth reported that Napoleon then returned to him, ‘to my great annoyance, and resumed the conversation, if such it can be called, by saying something personally civil to me’. He then returned to the point at issue:

  NAPOLEON: ‘Why the armaments? What are these precautionary measures aimed against? I don’t have a single ship-of-the-line [being built] in French ports, but if you are arming, I must also; if you want to fight, I will fight too. You might perhaps kill France, but you won’t intimidate her.’

  WHITWORTH: ‘No one wishes to do either. We want to live on good terms with her.’

  NAPOLEON: ‘Then one must respect treaties! They will be responsible for this to all of Europe.’77

  Whitworth added that Napoleon was ‘too agitated to make it advisable to prolong the conversation: I therefore made no answer, and he retired to his apartment repeating the last phrase’.78 This exchange was heard by as many as two hundred people, all of whom, according to Whitworth, felt ‘the extreme impropriety of his conduct, and the total want of dignity as well as of decency on the occasion’.

  Yet was what Napoleon said truly so appalling? A warmonger would not have been ‘agitated’ in the way Napoleon was, but only someone sincerely worried that peace was about to break down, perhaps through a misunderstanding about maritime armaments. Napoleon has been accused of being threatening and abusive to Whitworth at this levée, but, although one cannot know the tone of voice or gestures used, the words employed do not themselves imply it. (Certainly the later accusation that Whitworth was in fear of being struck by Napoleon is not borne out by any eyewitnesses, and was not made by Whitworth himself; it can safely be ascribed to British propaganda.79) By the time they met again on April 4, the phlegmatic Whitworth reported, ‘I had every reason to be satisfied with his manner towards me.’80

  With the Saint-Domingue expedition still underway, Decaen sailing towards India and the economic reconstruction of France proceeding, Napoleon did not want war in the spring or summer of 1803. France had 42 ships-of-the-line, of which only 13 were ready for active service, against the Royal Navy’s 120. He knew, however, that they should be prepared. ‘What’s the best way, in the current position and in the case of a maritime war,’ he asked his navy minister, Admiral Denis Decrès, on March 13, ‘of doing the most harm to English commerce?’81 Sending Brigadier Colbert to Tsar Alexander two days later, Napoleon accurately summed up his stance as being ‘very busy mapping canals, establishing factories, and dealing with matters of public education’; nonetheless, ‘If war with England be spoken about, you will say that the French nation desires nothing more than to measure swords with her, seeing the amount of antipathy which exists.’82 As usual he attended at the same time to other matters, telling the police chief of Rouen the next month to order two kept women, called Lise and Gille, to move 60 miles from Rouen and to forbid prostitutes (filles publiques) from appearing in the principal boxes of the theatre there.83

  On April 23, Britain demanded the retention of Malta for another seven years, the ceding of the lightly populated Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, 70 miles from Tunisia, as a naval base, the evacuation of Holland by France, and for compensation to be paid to the Sardinians for Piedmont. ‘Show yourself cold, haughty, and even somewhat proud,’ Napo
leon instructed Talleyrand on May 10 when telling him how to deal with Whitworth. ‘If the Note contains the word “ultimatum”, make him understand that the word means war … If the note does not contain this word, make him insert it, remarking that we must really know where we are, and that we are weary of this state of uncertainty … that once the ultimatum is given, everything is broken.’84 In fact Whitworth merely asked for his passports, the traditional ambassadorial request prior to a declaration of war. ‘It’s difficult to conceive how a great, powerful, and sensitive nation can undertake to declare a war which will necessitate such terrible misfortunes,’ Napoleon told him as the ambassador left Paris, ‘the cause of which will be so small since it’s merely a miserable rock.’85 At Brooks’s Club in London on May 6, the 9th Earl of Thanet wagered the 5th Baronet Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, the former Lord Mayor of London Harvey Combe MP and Humphrey Howarth MP 50 guineas each ‘that hostilities do not commence between France and England within a month from this date’ – a bet he comprehensively lost.86

  Napoleon summoned the seven members of the foreign affairs section of the Conseil d’État to discuss the British demands on May 11; of these seven, only Joseph and Talleyrand wanted France to continue negotiations. The next day Whitworth left Paris, and on the 16th General Andréossy, the French envoy to London, embarked at Dover just as Britain issued letters of marque and reprisal authorizing the seizure of all French ships in British ports and waters.87 ‘It is manifest Buonaparte still is very anxious for peace,’ wrote William Pitt’s confidant and mentor the Earl of Malmesbury the next day, ‘rather dreads war and at this very hour I have a misgiving he will end by agreeing to all our proposals, and that for the present war will be evaded – postponed but not lost altogether.’88 After the collapse of Amiens Whitworth told Malmesbury that ‘the effects of war will soon be so severely felt in France as to produce great disgust and disaffection; that it will shake Buonaparte’s power; that the army is not so much attached to him as it was. If he trusts an army to Moreau, he will risk its acting against him.’89 In those predictions at least, Whitworth got absolutely everything wrong.