Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  The following month Napoleon had the satisfaction of hearing that Captain Wright had been captured after a two-hour fight when his brig was becalmed off Port Navalo in Brittany. Recognized by a French officer who had served in Syria, Wright was sent back to the Temple prison from which he had escaped years six years earlier. On October 27, 1805, eighteen months after Pichegru’s death, Wright’s corpse was found in his cell with his throat cut. Sir Sidney Smith, who investigated the death ten years later, alleged that he had been murdered, but the authorities again stated it had been suicide. Napoleon claimed in 1815 that he hadn’t heard of Captain Wright until Lord Ebrington mentioned him the previous year on Elba, and said he had been of too inferior rank for him to have ‘attached importance to his death’.78 In fact Napoleon had written to Admiral Federico Gravina, the Spanish ambassador, expressing satisfaction at Wright’s capture, observing: ‘It’s for posterity to stamp the seal of infamy upon Lord Hawkesbury and those men who are base enough to adopt murder and crime as a method of war.’79 That does not mean he was lying – he sent tens of thousands of letters in the intervening years and might have just forgotten. Yet the argument that someone was of too ‘inferior a rank’ to warrant his attention is unconvincing. Only the month before Wright’s death Napoleon had written to his religious affairs minister ordering him to ‘Convey my dissatisfaction to M. Robert, the priest of Bourges, who gave a very bad sermon on 15 August.’80

  The deaths of d’Enghien, Pichegru and Wright have been presented as conclusive proof that Napoleon was a vengeful ruler, but this is too much of a construction to put on what happened. D’Enghien’s judicial murder was an utterly ruthless, if misjudged, act of self-defence, and the other two are unproven as murders, let alone murders ordered by Napoleon. Prisoners about to be condemned to death (in Pichegru’s case) or imprisoned for the duration of a long war (in Wright’s) become depressed, though the circumstances in both cases point elsewhere.* The most likely explanation is that an overzealous underling such as Fouché or Savary was doing what he thought Napoleon wanted, rather in the manner of Henry II’s knights who murdered Thomas à Becket. The trials of Cadoudal, Moreau and the other plotters were set for June.

  Shortly after the failure of the Cadoudal plot, Napoleon said to the Conseil: ‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.’81 He clearly believed it, and to some extent it was true, yet it was precisely at this moment that he took his most visible turn away from the republicanism that the Revolution had proclaimed. A few days after the Duc d’Enghien’s death, the Senate had adopted a message of congratulation to Napoleon that suggested, in Fouché’s wording, that ‘other institutions’ might be needed to destroy the hopes of any future plotters.82 ‘Great man,’ it urged him sycophantically, ‘finish your work; make it as immortal as your own glory.’83 The only way to make his work ‘immortal’ was to create an ‘other institution’ that would secure his legacy and guarantee the stability of the state in the event that a future assassin should succeed. It was felt that the uncertainty of succession would serve to fuel plots.

  On March 28 Napoleon told the Conseil that ‘the subject deserved the greatest attention, that for his part he wanted nothing; he was perfectly content with his lot, but that it was his duty to consider also the lot of France, and what the future was likely to produce’. He had revised his former estimation of the legitimacy of monarchs. ‘The hereditary principle could alone prevent a counter-revolution’, he added in similar vein.84 Afterwards, petitions started arriving from the departments begging Napoleon to take the crown. Newspapers began running articles praising monarchical institutions, and officially inspired pamphlets such as Jean Chas’s Réflexions sur l’hérédité du pouvoir souverain were published suggesting that the best way to foil the conspirators would be to found a Napoleonic dynasty.85

  By late March this carefully arranged campaign had become so successful that the Conseil d’État debated the best title for Napoleon to take. ‘No one proposed to say King!’ noted Pelet. Instead ‘consul’, ‘prince’ and ‘emperor’ were discussed. The first two sounded too modest, but Pelet believed the Conseil thought ‘that of Emperor too ambitious’.86 Ségur, whose father the Comte de Ségur was present at the meeting and later became the imperial grand master of ceremonies, stated that twenty-seven of the twenty-eight state councillors approved of Napoleon taking an hereditary title of some kind. When the committee chairmen reported, they all recommended that the title ‘of Emperor is the only one worthy of him and of France’.87 Napoleon told the actor Talma, who happened to be present, ‘At this moment we are talking as if we are having a conversation, well, we are making history!’88

  By the time Napoleon was ready to declare himself emperor, many of the great republican generals who might have objected were gone: Hoche, Kléber and Joubert were dead; Dumouriez was in exile; Pichegru and Moreau were about to go on trial for treachery. Only Jourdan, Augereau, Bernadotte and Brune remained and they were about to be placated with marshals’ batons. The explanation Napoleon gave Soult – ‘An end should be put to the hopes of the Bourbons’ – was of course not the whole reason; he also wanted to be able to address Francis of Austria and Alexander of Russia as equals, and perhaps also Augustus, Hadrian and Constantine.89 France was de facto an empire by 1804, and it was only acknowledging that fact that Napoleon declared himself an emperor de jure, just as Queen Victoria would become for the British Empire in 1877. Astonishingly few Frenchmen opposed the return to an hereditary monarchy only eleven years after the execution of Louis XVI, and those who did were promised the opportunity to vote against it in a plebiscite.

  On May 10, 1804, William Pitt the Younger returned to the British premiership, replacing the shaky Addington government and committed to building a third coalition against France, on which he was willing to spend £2.5 million and to which he hoped to recruit Russia and Austria.90 Eight days later Napoleon was officially proclaimed emperor in a fifteen-minute ceremony at Saint-Cloud, in which Joseph was appointed Grand Elector and Louis became Constable of France. He henceforth took the somewhat convoluted and seemingly contradictory style ‘Napoleon, through the grace of God and the Constitution of the Republic, Emperor of the French’.91 At dinner that evening he drily mused over the way his family were squabbling over the spoils: ‘Really, to listen to my sisters, you’d think that I’d mismanaged the inheritance of our father, the late king.’92

  Should Napoleon die without an heir it was resolved that Joseph and then Louis would inherit the crown, with Lucien and Jérôme cut out of the line of succession due to the marriages of which their brother disapproved. Napoleon was furious that while Jérôme, who was serving in the French navy, had been on shore leave in America in December 1803 and had married the beautiful Baltimore heiress Elizabeth Patterson rather than holding himself back for a European dynastic union. Napoleon did everything in his power thereafter to end the marriage, including importuning the Pope to have it annulled and ordering French officials to ‘say publicly that I do not recognize a marriage that a young man of nineteen has contracted against the laws of his country’.93 All of his brothers except Louis had married for love, as he himself had, which was of no use to France.

  ‘Sole instrument of my destiny, I owe nothing to my brothers,’ he told the French ambassador to America, Louis Pichon, on April 20, insisting that he find a way of annulling Jérôme’s marriage. He later told Cambacérès, ‘there was no more of a marriage than between two lovers united in a garden, upon the altar of love, in presence of the moon and stars’.94 The Pope disagreed, and declared the marriage indissoluble, yet Napoleon continued to refer to Elizabeth as Jérôme’s ‘mistress’ and ‘the woman with whom he lives’ and in April 1805 he even threatened to have Jérôme arrested.95 The following month Jérôme buckled, rejoined the navy and disowned his pregnant wife. Elizabeth fled to London and gave birth to a son before returning to America, where she was taken in by her father’s family. (In due
course, her grandson became attorney-general.)

  Napoleon severely reprimanded Pauline for her infidelities in Rome. ‘Do not count on me to help,’ he warned her, ‘if at your age you let yourself be governed by bad advice.’96 Of her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, he added: ‘If you quarrel with him it will be your fault, and France will be closed to you.’97 He ordered their uncle Cardinal Fesch to tell the vain but undeniably sexy twenty-three-year-old, ‘on my behalf, that she is no longer pretty, that she will be much less so in a few years, and … she should not indulge in those bad manners which the bon ton reproves’. Despite these warnings her relations with her husband deteriorated further and she never forgave him for the death by fever of her six-year-old son Dermide Leclerc that August.98

  The day after he was proclaimed emperor, Napoleon appointed four honorary and fourteen active ‘Marshals of the Empire’. The fourteen active marshals were Alexandre Berthier, Joachim Murat, Adrien Moncey, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, André Masséna, Pierre Augereau, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Nicolas Soult, Guillame Brune, Jean Lannes, Édouard Mortier, Michel Ney, Louis-Nicolas Davout and Jean-Baptiste Bessières.* Between 1807 and 1815 a further eight were created. The marshalate wasn’t a military rank but an honorific one intended to recognize and reward something that Napoleon later called ‘the sacred fire’, and of course to incentivize the rest of the high command.99 The title came with a silver and velvet baton studded with gold eagles in a box of red Moroccan leather and indicated that Napoleon considered these men to be the fourteen best military commanders in the French army.† Not everyone was impressed: when his staff congratulated Masséna, he merely snorted, ‘There are fourteen of us!’ Masséna was lucky to get his baton at all, having voted against the Life Consulate and criticized the coming Moreau trial, but his military capacity was undeniable.100 Davout was appointed despite not having yet commanded a division in combat, though he did have a command in the Consular Guard; he probably wouldn’t have been elevated in the first creation if his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, had lived.101 Marmont felt chagrin that he wasn’t one of the original eighteen, and Junot wasn’t considered of marshal – or even sometimes martial – calibre.

  Napoleon ensured a seven–seven balance between the Armies of the Rhine and Italy, which was roughly retained in the later elevations of Victor, Marmont and Suchet from the Army of Italy, and Macdonald, Oudinot, Saint-Cyr and Grouchy from the Army of the Rhine. Mortier and Soult came from the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and although Napoleon didn’t know them well they were clearly good fighting soldiers, and Soult had the capacity for independent command. There was an attempt at political balance too; Brune conciliated the Jacobins, Jourdan and Moncey had led important republican armies. Bernadotte was Joseph’s brother-in-law, but also a dissident whom Napoleon thought it best to tie firmly to his regime.

  The saying went that every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and the working-class origins of many of the marshals served as a powerful reminder of this. Ten of them had risen from the ranks, and they included the son of a cooper (Ney), tanner (Saint-Cyr), bailiff (Victor), brewer (Oudinot), wealthy peasant (Mortier), miller (Lefebvre), innkeeper (Murat), household servant (Augereau) and storekeeper (Masséna).102 Only Prince Józef Poniatowski and the Marquis de Grouchy (who won their batons in 1813 and 1815 respectively) were aristocrats, although Pérignon, Macdonald, Marmont, Berthier and Davout were scions of the Ancien Régime noblesse.103 Sérurier used to boast that his father held ‘a royal appointment’, but it turned out he was mole-catcher at the royal stud at Lâon.104 Whatever their social origin, Napoleon addressed all the marshals as ‘Mon cousin’ in correspondence, as he did Cambacérès and some of the senior imperial dignitaries.*

  The marshals were awarded titles, such as the Prince de Ponte Corvo (Bernadotte), the Prince de Neufchâtel (Berthier), the Duc d’Istrie (Bessières) and the Prince d’Eckmühl (Davout). As well as titles and batons, Napoleon gave dotations (land presents) to his marshals, some of which were huge. Of the twenty-six eventual marshals, twenty-four received dotations – only the crypto-republicans Brune and Jourdan received none, although Brune became a count.105 Napoleon’s favouritism was evident in the very unequal distribution of the dotations over the years. The top four marshals – Berthier with 1 million francs, Masséna 933,000 francs, Davout 817,000 francs and Ney 729,000 francs – received over half the total of 6 million francs. The next four – Soult, Bessières, Lannes and Bernadotte – got between 200,000 and 300,000 francs each. All the rest received less than 200,000 francs, with Saint-Cyr, whom Napoleon respected as a soldier but couldn’t warm to as a man, getting only 30,211 francs.106

  As well as founding the marshalate, on May 18, 1804 Napoleon formally constituted the Imperial Guard, an amalgamation of the Consular Guard and the unit that guarded the Legislative Body. It consisted of staff, infantry, cavalry and artillery components, with battalions of sappers and marines attached. It was later split into the Old Guard of long-standing veterans, the Middle Guard of soldiers who had fought in the 1807–09 campaigns and the Young Guard who were the cream of each year’s conscript intake. A burgeoning elite corps that numbered 8,000 men in 1804 but 100,000 by 1812, the Imperial Guard was conscious of its superiority to regular Line regiments, and was often used by Napoleon as a strategic reserve, only to be flung into battle at the critical moment, if at all. Their morale was generally considered the highest in the army, though they incurred resentment from the rest of the Grande Armée, which correctly believed that Napoleon treated them with favouritism, scoffing that their nickname, ‘the Immortals’, derived from the way that the Emperor protected them.

  The great Moreau–Cadoudal conspiracy trial of June 1804 was nearly botched by the authorities. The evidence against Moreau, who was still widely regarded as France’s greatest popular hero after Napoleon, was largely based on hearsay and circumstantial evidence, as he never wrote down anything compromising. He spoke movingly to the special tribunal of civilian judges and admitted that the conspirators ‘proposed to me (as is very well known) to put myself at the head of a popular commotion, similar to that of 18th Brumaire’, but he claimed to have rejected them because, although he was adequate to command armies, he ‘had no wish to command the republic itself’.107 The tribunal, arraigned under emergency legislation, witnessed scenes of genuine popular sympathy for Moreau, and much to Napoleon’s fury it handed down the lightest possible sentence of two years’ imprisonment, which Napoleon subsequently revised to exile in the United States. When Madame Moreau visited Napoleon to plead for a remission of the sentence, he expostulated: ‘The judges have left me nothing to remit!’108 Moreau’s former lieutenant in Germany, General Claude Lecourbe, who had publicly shaken hands with him during the trial, attended the Tuileries shortly afterwards, whereupon Napoleon exclaimed: ‘How dare you sully my palace with your presence?’109

  Although twenty-one people were acquitted, four others besides Moreau were sentenced to prison terms, while Cadoudal and nineteen others – including one of the aristocratic Polignac brothers – were sentenced to death.110 Two weeks later, after Moreau had left for Philadelphia, Napoleon commuted some of the death sentences, including those of Bouvet de Lozier, Polignac and another aristocrat, the Marquis Rivière. The rest, including Picot, were guillotined in the Place de Grève on June 25 in the only mass guillotining to take place in Napoleon’s reign.111 Murat was furious that Armand de Polignac’s sentence had been commuted, he thought on class grounds, but it also might have helped that he had been at Brienne with Napoleon. ‘We have achieved more than we intended,’ Cadoudal remarked on the way to the scaffold. ‘We came to give France a king; we have given her an emperor.’112 He insisted on being executed first, so that his co-conspirators wouldn’t believe a rumour that he had accepted a pardon timed to arrive after their deaths.

  On June 12, 1804 the new Imperial Council (essentially the old Conseil d’État) met at Saint-Cloud to decide what form Napoleon’s coronation should take
. Reims (where coronations of French kings had traditionally taken place), the Champs de Mars (turned down because of the likelihood of inclement weather) and Aix-la-Chapelle (for its connections with Charlemagne) were briefly considered before Notre-Dame was decided upon. The date of December 2 was a compromise between Napoleon, who had wanted November 9, the fifth anniversary of the Brumaire coup, and the Pope, who had wanted Christmas Day, when Charlemagne had been crowned in AD 800.113 The Council then discussed heraldic insignia and the official badge of the Empire, with Crétet’s special committee unanimously recommending the cockerel, emblem of Ancient Gaul, but if that was not accepted the eagle, lion, elephant, Aegis of Minerva, oak tree and ear of corn also had their supporters. Lebrun even suggested commandeering the Bourbons’ fleur-de-lis.114 Miot rightly denounced the fleur-de-lis as ‘an imbecility’ and instead proposed an enthroned Napoleon as the badge.

  ‘The cock belongs to the farmyard,’ said Napoleon, ‘it is far too feeble a creature.’ The Comte de Ségur supported the lion as it supposedly vanquished leopards, and Jean Laumond supported the elephant, a royal beast that according to (incorrect) popular belief couldn’t bend its knee. Cambacérès came up with the bee, as they have a powerful chief (albeit a queen), and General Lacuée added that it could both sting and make honey. Denon suggested the eagle, but the problem with that was that Austria, Prussia, the United States and Poland were already represented by eagles. No vote was taken, but Napoleon chose the lion, and they moved on to the question of inscriptions on the new coinage, rather strangely agreeing to keep the words ‘French Republic’ on it, which remained the case until 1809. Shortly after the meeting broke up Napoleon changed his mind from the lion to an eagle with spread wings, on the basis that it ‘affirms imperial dignity and recalls Charlemagne’.115 It also recalled Ancient Rome.