Napoleon had two crowns during the coronation: the first was a golden laurel-wreath one that he entered the cathedral wearing which was meant to evoke the Roman Empire and which he wore throughout; the second was a replica of Charlemagne’s crown, which had to be specially made because the traditional French coronation crown had been destroyed during the Revolution and the Austrians wouldn’t lend him Charlemagne’s. Although he lifted the Charlemagne replica over his own head, as previously rehearsed with the Pope, he didn’t actually place it on top because he was already wearing the laurels. He did however crown Josephine, who knelt before him.156 Laure d’Abrantès noted how Josephine’s tears rained onto her hands joined in prayer.157 Napoleon took great care fitting her small crown behind her diamond diadem, and patting it gently until it was safely in place. When the Pope had blessed them both, embraced Napoleon and intoned ‘Vivat Imperator in aeternam’, and the Mass had finished, Napoleon pronounced his coronation oath:
I swear to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic: to respect and to cause to be respected the laws of the Concordat and of freedom of worship, of political and civil liberty, of the irreversibility of the sale of the biens nationaux; to raise no taxes except by virtue of the law; to maintain the institution of the Légion d’Honneur; to govern only in view of the interest, the wellbeing and the glory of the French people.158
Napoleon’s crowning of himself was the ultimate triumph of the self-made man, and in one way a defining moment of the Enlightenment. It was also fundamentally honest: he had indeed got there through his own efforts. It is possible that he later regretted doing it, however, because of the vaulting egoism it suggested. When the great classical painter Jacques-Louis David, who was commissioned to commemorate the coronation, wrote to Napoleon’s senior courtier Pierre Daru in August 1806 about the ‘great moment’ that had ‘astonished spectators’ (his sketch of the self-crowning is reproduced as Plate 31), he was instead ordered to paint the moment when Napoleon crowned Josephine.159 His formal painting, Sacre de L’Empereur Napoléon Ier et Couronnement de l’Impératrice Joséphine, which was exhibited at the Louvre to huge crowds in February 1808, wasn’t intended to be historically accurate: Madame Mère was included, and Hortense and Napoleon’s three sisters were depicted standing well away from Josephine’s train, which in fact they had been prevailed upon to carry at the moment of Josephine’s coronation.160 Cardinal Caprara didn’t like the look of his bald head in the painting, and demanded of Talleyrand that he force David to depict him in a wig, but at that David baulked.161 The Bolivian dictator Manuel Malgarejo was later laughed at for his ignorance in contrasting the relative merits of Bonaparte and Napoleon, whom he thought were two separate people, but on some level he was right. The Emperor Napoleon felt the need to stand on ceremony in a way that General Bonaparte rarely had.
The Bourbons sneered, of course. A commentator likened Napoleon’s tabard to that of the king of diamonds in a pack of playing cards. ‘It was an invention worthy of a painting master in a young ladies’ academy,’ sneered another.162 Yet the occasion was intended for the soldiers and spectators rather than for Ancien Régime sophisticates, who were anyway going to hate it whatever form it took. The people of Paris enjoyed it, not least because that evening there were massive firework displays, cash distributions and public fountains flowing with wine.163 Although Madame Mère hadn’t attended the coronation, when she was congratulated on her son’s elevation to the imperial purple her reply was replete with her natural fatalism and great common sense. ‘Pourvu que ça dure,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope that it lasts.’164
16
Austerlitz
‘There is a moment in combat when the slightest manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority; it is the drop of water that starts the overflow.’
Napoleon on Caesar at the battle of Munda
‘For myself, I have but one requirement, that of success.’
Napoleon to Decrès, August 1805
A few days after the coronation the army’s colonels descended on Paris to receive eagle standards from the Emperor in a ceremony on the Champ de Mars. ‘Soldiers!’ he told them, ‘here are your colours! These eagles will always be your rallying point … Do you swear to lay down your lives in their defence?’ ‘We swear!’ they ceremoniously replied in unison.1 Cast out of six pieces of bronze welded together and then gilded, the eagles each measured 8 inches from eartip to talons, 9½ inches between wingtips, and weighed 3½ pounds.* They were mounted on a blue oaken staff with the regimental colours and the role of eagle-bearer was much prized, although with the customary irreverence of soldiers the standards were soon nicknamed ‘cuckoos’.2 In the 55th bulletin of the Grande Armée in 1807, Napoleon stated: ‘The loss of an eagle is an affront to regimental honour for which neither victory nor the glory acquired on a hundred battlefields can make amends.’3
Training continued at the camps along the Channel coasts in readiness for the invasion of Britain. ‘We manoeuvre by division three times a week, and twice a month with three divisions united,’ Marmont reported to Napoleon from the Utrecht camp. ‘The troops have become very highly trained.’4 Napoleon ordered him to
pay great attention to the soldiers, and see about them in detail. The first time you arrive at the camp, line up the battalions, and spend eight hours at a stretch seeing the soldiers one by one; receive their complaints, inspect their weapons, and make sure they lack nothing. There are many advantages to making these reviews of seven to eight hours; the soldier becomes accustomed to being armed and on duty, it proves to him that the leader is paying attention to and taking complete care of him; which is a great confidence-inspiring motivation for the soldier.5
In December 1804 William Pitt signed an alliance with Sweden; once Britain had also signed the Treaty of St Petersburg with Russia in April 1805 the core of the Third Coalition was in place. Britain was to pay Russia £1.25 million in golden guineas for every 100,000 men she fielded against France. Austria and Portugal joined the coalition later.6 Napoleon used his full capacity for diplomatic threat to try to prevent others gathering round. As early as January 2, he wrote to Maria Carolina, the queen consort of the joint kingdom of Naples and Sicily, who was Marie Antoinette’s sister and Emperor Francis’s aunt. He warned her plainly: ‘I have in my hands several letters written by Your Majesty which leave no doubt with regard to your secret intentions’ of joining the nascent coalition. ‘You have already lost your kingdom once, and twice you have been the cause of a war which threatened the total destruction of your paternal house,’ he wrote, alluding to Naples’ support for the two earlier coalitions against France. ‘Do you therefore wish to be the cause of a third?’ Napoleon prophesied that should war break out again because of her, ‘You and your offspring’ – she and her husband, King Ferdinand IV, had an extraordinary eighteen children in all – ‘will cease to reign, and your errant children will go begging through the different countries of Europe.’7 He demanded that she dismiss her prime minister (and lover) the Englishman Sir John Acton, and also expel the British ambassador, recall the Neapolitan ambassador from St Petersburg and dissolve the militia. Although she did none of these things, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies* did sign a treaty of strict neutrality with France on September 22, 1805.
Napoleon took no holiday after his coronation; even on Christmas Day he was ordering that an Englishman named Gold should not have been arrested for duelling with a Verdun casino-owner, as ‘a prisoner-of-war on parole may fight duels’.8 Later in January he wrote to the Sultan of Turkey adopting the informal ‘tu’ throughout, as befitting of fellow sovereigns: ‘Descendant of the great Ottomans, emperor of one of the greatest kingdoms in the world,’ he asked, ‘have you ceased to reign? How comes it that you permit the Russians to dictate to you?’9 (There had been problems with Russophile governors of Turkish-owned Moldavia and Wallachia.) He warned that the Russian army in Corfu would, with Greek support, ‘one day attack your capital … Your dynasty will descend into t
he night of oblivion … Arouse yourself, Selim!’ Shah Fat’h Ali of Persia also received a letter written in the flowery language Napoleon had adopted in addressing Eastern potentates since the Egyptian campaign: ‘Fame, which broadcasts everything, has informed you of who I am and what I have done; how I have raised France above all nations of the West, and in what a startling manner I have displayed the interest I feel in the kings of the East.’ After mentioning some great shahs of the past, Napoleon wrote of Britain: ‘Like them, you will distrust the counsels of a nation of shopkeepers [nation de marchands], who in India traffic the lives and crowns of sovereigns; and you will oppose the valour of your people to the incursions of the Russians.’10* If Pitt was going to buy allies in an attempt to stave off an invasion of Britain, Napoleon was hoping to flatter them at least into neutrality. In April 1805 Napoleon wrote to the King of Prussia, saying he had little hope of staying at peace with Russia, and laying all the blame on the Tsar: ‘The character of the Emperor Alexander is too fickle and too weak for us reasonably to be able to expect anything good for general peace.’11
Pitt had set the precedent for subsidizing France’s enemies as early as 1793 when he had started hiring troops from the German princes to fight in the Low Countries, but he was often deeply disappointed with his investments, as when the Prussians seemed happier to fight the Poles than the French in 1795, or Austria took the Veneto at Campo Formio in 1797 in return for Belgium (and peace). Overall, however, the subsidy policy was seen by successive British governments as well worth the cost. Napoleon naturally characterized it as Britain being willing to fight to the last drop of her allies’ blood. ‘Please have caricatures drawn,’ Napoleon ordered Fouché in May 1805, of ‘an Englishman, purse in hand, asking different Powers to take his money, etc.’12 In 1794, payments to allies amounted to 14 per cent of British government revenue; twenty years later, with Wellington’s army actually inside France, it was still 14 per cent, although the British economy had grown so considerably in the intervening period that this now represented £10 million, a vast sum. The heir to the French Revolution’s debts, Napoleon was fighting against a government fuelled by the Industrial Revolution’s profits, which it was willing to share round in support of its cause. Although the grand total of £65,830,228 paid to France’s enemies between 1793 and 1815 was astronomical, it was markedly less than the cost of maintaining, and then fielding, a huge standing army.
On February 1, 1805, Baron Louis de Bausset-Roquefort was appointed Prefect of the Palace. This involved personally attending on Napoleon along with Grand Marshal Duroc, Napoleon’s closest friend. As one who knew him well at the end of his life put it, ‘unless Napoleon’s ambition, to which every other consideration was sacrificed, interfered, he was possessed of much sensibility and feeling, and was capable of strong attachment’.13 True friendship at the apex of power is notoriously difficult to maintain, and as time went on and death in battle claimed his four closest friends, there were fewer and fewer people who were close enough to Napoleon to tell him what he did not want to hear. Bausset, though a courtier rather than a friend, spent more time near Napoleon than almost anyone else outside his family, and served him loyally until April 1814, accompanying him on almost all his tours and campaigns. If anyone can be said to have known him intimately, it was Bausset, whose memoirs were published six years after Napoleon’s death, when pro-Bonapartist books were severely discouraged. Moreover, Bausset was politically a royalist, and hadn’t been mentioned in Napoleon’s will, unlike scores of others. But even so he had nothing but admiration. ‘Genius and power were expressed on his large high forehead,’ wrote Bausset. ‘The fire which flashed from his eyes expressed all his thoughts and feelings. But when the serenity of his temper was not disturbed, the most pleasing smile lit up his noble countenance, and gave way to an indefinable charm, which I never beheld in any other person. At these times it was impossible to see him without loving him.’ Napoleon’s charisma didn’t lessen for Bausset over the decade that he lived with and worked for him, serving his food, running his household and allowing him to cheat him at chess. He reported that Napoleon’s ‘deportment and manners were always the same; they were inherent and unstudied. He was the only man in the world of whom it may be said without adulation, that the nearer you viewed him the greater he appeared.’14
Napoleon accepted the crown of the newly created kingdom of Italy in a grand ceremony in the throne room at the Tuileries on Sunday, March 17, 1805. Having been chief magistrate of the Italian Republic, it was only logical for him to become king of Italy once he had been made emperor of France. Writing to the Emperor Francis he blamed his decision on the British and Russians, arguing that while they continued to occupy Malta and Corfu, ‘the separation of the crowns of France and Italy is illusory’.15 Two days later he appointed his sister Elisa and her husband, Felice Baciocchi, as rulers of Lucca and Piombino.16*
On his way to Milan to be crowned king of Italy, Napoleon spent six days in Lyons, where he slept with the wife of a rich financier, Françoise-Marie de Pellapra (née LeRoy), despite the fact that Josephine was accompanying him on the journey.17† The coronation in Milan’s magnificent Duomo on May 26 was celebrated in the presence of Cardinal Caprara, seven other cardinals and an estimated 30,000 people. ‘The church was very beautiful,’ Napoleon reported to Cambacérès. ‘The ceremony was as good as the one in Paris, with the difference that the weather was superb. When taking the Iron Crown and putting it on my head, I added these words: “God gives it to me; woe betide any who touches it.” I hope that will be a prophecy.’18 The Iron Crown of Lombardy, a heavy oval band of gold containing metal supposedly from one of the nails of the True Cross, had been worn by every Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick Barbarossa in 1155. Napoleon’s use of it was thus a further sabre-rattle against the present incumbent, Francis of Austria.
Napoleon visited Marengo on the fifth anniversary of the battle, wearing a uniform that Bausset recalled as ‘threadbare, and in some places torn. He held in his hand a large old gold-laced hat pierced with holes.’19 It was the uniform he had worn at the battle, and whether the holes were bullet-holes or not it is a reminder of Napoleon’s genius for public relations. He spent the next month in Brescia, Verona, Mantua, Bologna, Modena, Piacenza, Geneva and Turin, before returning to the palace of Fontainebleau – a former Bourbon hunting lodge that Napoleon enjoyed visiting – on the night of July 11, only eighty-five hours after leaving Turin 330 miles away. It turned out to be the last time that Napoleon set foot in Italy. He appointed as viceroy his twenty-three-year-old stepson Eugène, whose good-natured reasonableness made him quite popular among ordinary Italians.20 Over three days that June Napoleon sent Eugène no fewer than sixteen letters on the art of ruling – ‘Know how to listen, and be sure that silence often produces the same effect as does knowledge’, ‘Do not blush to ask questions’, ‘In every other position than that of Viceroy of Italy, glory in being French, but here you must make little of it’ – even though the actual day-to-day running of the country continued to be undertaken by Melzi, the former vice-president of the Italian Republic, whom Napoleon had refused to allow to retire despite endless complaints about his gout.21 Melzi had no difficulty in finding talented Italians to run the government, believers in the modern French administrative ways. Joseph and Louis felt chagrin at Eugène’s elevation, of course, even though either could have become king of Italy if they had been willing to renounce their rights to the throne of France.22
‘My continental system has been decided,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand in June 1805. ‘I don’t want to cross the Rhine or the Adige; I want to live in peace, but I will not tolerate any bad quarrel.’23 Although Napoleon did not have territorial aspirations beyond Italy and the Rhine, he did expect France to remain the greatest of the European Powers and the arbiter of events beyond her borders, and was quite prepared to take on any country or group of them that wished to ‘quarrel’.
In the early summer it seemed that he might at last
be able to gain the upper hand against the nation which was so determinedly challenging his vision for Europe. On March 30, taking advantage of a storm that blew Nelson’s blockading fleet off-station at Toulon, Admiral Villeneuve had escaped and sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar, rendezvoused with a Spanish fleet from Cadiz and headed off for Martinique, which he reached on May 14. Once Nelson realized that Villeneuve was not sailing to Egypt, he crossed the Atlantic in pursuit, reaching the West Indies on June 4. The next part of Napoleon’s master-plan for the invasion of Britain was in place. ‘It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only,’ Napoleon wrote to Decrès on June 9, ‘and England will have ceased to exist. There is not a fisherman, not a miserable journalist, not a woman at her toilette, who does not know that it is impossible to prevent a light squadron appearing before Boulogne.’24 In fact the Royal Navy had every intention of preventing a squadron of any size from appearing at Boulogne or any of the invasion ports. Yet with Villeneuve now re-crossing the Atlantic and hoping to break the blockade at Brest, Napoleon was convinced by mid-July that the long-awaited invasion might at last take place. ‘Embark everything, for circumstances may present themselves at any moment,’ he ordered Berthier on the 20th, ‘so that in twenty-four hours the whole expedition may start … My intention is to land at four different points, at a short distance from each other … Inform the four marshals [Ney, Davout, Soult and Lannes] there isn’t an instant to be lost.’25 He also gave orders that letters from Italy should no longer be disinfected with vinegar for a day before being sent on: ‘If plague was going to come from Italy, it would be through travellers and troop movements. This is simply bothersome.’26
Napoleon the Great Page 46
