Napoleon was excellent at prioritization, dealing immediately with urgent matters, placing important but not urgent papers in a stack to be dealt with afterwards and throwing anything he considered unimportant onto the floor. Whereas Louis XVIII had a stamp made up for his signature, Napoleon always read letters through before signing them personally, not least because his speed of dictation meant that secretaries could sometimes take words down incorrectly. ‘The ideas go on fastest,’ Napoleon said in explaining his need for secretaries, ‘and then goodbye to the letters and the lines! I can only dictate now. It’s very convenient to dictate. It’s just as if one were holding a conversation.’38 He virtually never sat down at his desk except to write to his wives and mistresses (who received the only letters he didn’t dictate) and to sign documents. His three private secretaries – Bourrienne, who held the post from 1797 to 1802, Claude-François de Méneval (1802–13) and Agathon Fain (1813–15) – all developed their own shorthand to keep up with his torrent of words at their small desks while he sat on a green taffeta sofa in his study at the Tuileries near a folding screen that shielded him from the fire, an arrangement that was replicated in all his palaces. If they were still working at 1 a.m., Napoleon would sometimes take his secretary out incognito to the rue Saint-Honoré, where they would drink cups of hot chocolate.39 (On one occasion he complained to the prefect of police the next morning that the lamps at the palace gates had gone out: ‘He could not imagine how I had found it out.’40)
Each of his secretaries and ministers had his own story of Napoleon’s prodigious memory and dictating capacity. His interior minister Jean Chaptal’s tale of when he wanted to establish a military academy at Fontainebleau might be taken as entirely typical. Napoleon sat Chaptal down and dictated 517 articles to him, entirely without notes. Chaptal spent all night drawing them up, after which Napoleon ‘told me it was good but incomplete’.41 He once told Méneval that after he had left Brienne he started to work sixteen hours a day and never stopped.42 Everything around Napoleon happened at a tremendous pace. Molé recalled him going from a Mass to a levée at Saint-Cloud in the summer of 1806, ‘walking fast, with an escort of foreign princes and … grand French dignitaries, who were out of breath in their efforts to keep up with him’.43 He hated wasting a minute of the day, and was constantly performing several tasks simultaneously. He loved taking long hot baths which, unusually for early nineteenth-century Europeans, he did most days, but during those one or two hours he would have newspapers or political writings read to him, as he also did when his valet shaved him, and sometimes during breakfast. He was almost masochistic in listening to the British newspapers, which his secretaries hated translating for him: he insisted on hearing everything written about himself, however abusive.44 On long journeys in their carriage, Josephine read novels to him, chosen from the précis of newly published ones that he had the historical novelist the Comtesse de Genlis draw up for him every week.45
Although he worked them inordinately hard, Napoleon was considerate to his staff, who almost universally admired him. He was indeed a hero to his valets, aides-de-camp and orderlies, and far more of his personal servants volunteered to go into exile with him than the British could allow, a remarkable tribute to his talent as an employer. Mademoiselle Avrillon, who worked for Josephine, remembered him as being ‘extremely polite’ and ‘very indulgent when small errors were committed’. His chamberlain, the Comte de Bausset, wrote: ‘I can categorically say that few men were more level in their character and gentle in their behaviour.’ Agathon Fain thought ‘Napoleon was a loyal friend and the best of masters’, not least because ‘he would spoil everybody’.46 An alcoholic coachman was kept on the payroll years after he should have been sacked, because he had driven a wagon at Marengo.
‘I had expected to find him brusque, and of uncertain temper,’ recalled Méneval, ‘instead of which I found him patient, indulgent, easy to please, by no means exacting, merry with a merriness which was often noisy and mocking, and sometimes of a charming bonhomie.’47 The one secretary who wrote critically of Napoleon was Bourrienne, whose gross corruption had led to his demotion in 1802. Napoleon had later given him another job, as governor of Hamburg, which Bourrienne also abused for personal gain, and he went on to repay his master’s kindness with years of libels.
Insofar as there was ever an average evening in the life of Napoleon, it featured many of the pleasures of normal French bourgeois family life. As Méneval recalled:
He dined with his family, and after dinner would look in on his cabinet [office] and then, unless kept there by some work, would return to the drawing room to play chess. As a general rule he liked to talk in a familiar way. He was fond of discussions, but didn’t impose his opinions, and made no pretension of superiority, either of intelligence or of rank. When only ladies were present he liked to criticize their dresses, or tell them tragic or satirical stories – ghost stories for the most part. When bedtime came, Madame Bonaparte followed him to his room.48
He danced at the little balls given at Malmaison on Sunday nights, praised his stepchildren for their playlets and ‘found a charm in this patriarchal life’.49 He hunted stags and wild boar, but more for the exercise than the pleasure of the chase, and occasionally cheated at board and card games – though he usually repaid the money he won in that way. He simply could not bear not winning.
By early 1808 Prussia had been subdued and there was a grand understanding with Russia. Napoleon could now turn his mind to the means by which he might force Britain to the negotiating table. After Trafalgar it was clear that he could not revive plans to invade, but the British were still actively encouraging smuggling across Europe in an attempt to wreck the Continental System, blockading French ports and showing no signs of wanting to end the war. So Napoleon looked southwards in his hopes to damage British trade, which he had always thought was the key to bringing the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ to heel. Ever since November 1800, when he had written to Joseph, ‘The greatest damage we could inflict upon English commerce would be to seize upon Portugal’, Napoleon had seen Britain’s oldest ally as her Achilles heel.50* While he was galloping through Dresden on July 19, 1807 he had demanded that Portugal close her ports to British shipping by September, arrest all Britons in Lisbon and confiscate all British goods. Portugal had been defaulting on the indemnity she had agreed to pay when she sued for peace in 1801. She let British ships into her ports to buy wine, her largest export, and had large colonies and a substantial fleet, but an army of only 20,000 men. The country was ruled by the lazy, obese and slow-witted but absolute Prince João, whose Spanish wife Carlota had attempted to overthrow him in 1805.51
After the French had invaded Etruria on August 29, 1807 to try to suppress its chronic smuggling of British goods, the Spanish premier, Don Manuel de Godoy y Álvarez de Faria, knew he would need to co-operate with Napoleon in order to get suitable compensation for the Infanta María Luisa, Queen of Etruria and daughter of Charles IV of Spain, whose husband King Louis I had died of epilepsy in May 1803. Napoleon didn’t like or trust Godoy; when in 1801 Godoy had asked Lucien for a picture of Napoleon, he had retorted: ‘I shall never send my portrait to a man who keeps his predecessor in a dungeon [Godoy had imprisoned the previous prime minister, the Count of Aranda, after a Spanish defeat at the hands of the French in 1792] and who adopts the customs of the Inquisition. I may make use of him, but I owe him nothing but contempt.’52 He was highly suspicious when Godoy mobilized the Spanish army on the same day as the battle of Jena, only to demobilize quickly on hearing of its outcome. Godoy decided that it would be wise to allow French troops through Spain to attack Portugal.
‘Above all Portugal must be wrested from the influence of England,’ Napoleon wrote to King Charles IV on September 7, 1807, ‘so as to oblige this latter Power to sue for peace.’53 On October 27 Godoy’s representative signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which contained secret clauses planning for the partition of Portugal into three, the north going to Infanta
María Luisa as compensation for Etruria, the centre coming under Franco-Spanish military occupation, and the south becoming the personal fiefdom of the handsome, wily, vulgar and ostentatious Godoy himself, who would become prince of the Algarves. He already carried the self-aggrandizing title the Prince of the Peace, a reference to the Treaty of Basle he had negotiated in 1795 with France.54 (He preferred either title to the popular nickname ‘The Sausage-Maker’, attached to him because he came from Estremadura, the centre of Spanish pig-breeding.) The treaty guaranteed Charles IV’s domains and would allow him the title ‘Emperor of the Two Americas’.55
Napoleon ratified the treaty on October 29, by which time French troops were already deep inside the Iberian peninsula. On October 18 Junot had crossed the Bidasoa river into Spain en route to Portugal. He met no resistance even at Lisbon, and on November 29 the Portuguese royal family escaped to Rio de Janeiro in good time on Royal Navy warships, booed at the docks by the crowds for their desertion.56 Napoleon ordered Junot to ensure that his engineers sketched Spanish roads along the way. ‘Let me see the distances of the villages, the nature of the country, and its resources,’ he wrote, indicating that even then he was contemplating invading his ally.57
Spanish politics were so rotten, and the Spanish Bourbons so decadent and pathetic, that their throne seemed ripe for the taking. Charles IV and his domineering wife, María Luisa of Parma, hated their eldest son and heir, the twenty-four-year-old Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias (later Ferdinand VII), a feeling that was entirely reciprocated. Although he had both a wife and a mistress living in his house, Godoy was also the lover of the queen. The king was so compliant that when Godoy had intercepted a letter from Napoleon to Charles warning him of Godoy’s cuckolding some years earlier, he merely passed it on. Godoy’s power in Spain was such that he was appointed an admiral without once having been to sea. Ferdinand, who was just as weak and pusillanimous as his father, loathed Godoy, a sentiment that was mutual. Godoy was in fact hated throughout Spain for the sorry state to which he had brought the country by 1808, and in particular for the loss of her colonies to Britain, the catastrophe at Trafalgar (where Spain lost eleven ships-of-the-line), the weak economy, corruption, famines, the sale of clerical land, the abolition of bull-fighting and even for the yellow fever outbreak in the south.58
A tantalizing prospect presented itself in October 1807, when Ferdinand wrote to Napoleon – or rather to ‘that hero who effaces all those who preceded him’, as the prince sycophantically put it – asking to marry into the Bonaparte family.59 His father had had him arrested for treason (under false pretences) that month, only to release him with ill grace, and he probably wanted to outmanoeuvre his parents as well as to protect the throne from a French invasion. It would have been the ideal solution, saving Napoleon from what he was later to call ‘the Spanish ulcer’, but the best candidate, his eldest niece, Lucien’s daughter Charlotte, was only twelve. During her brief sojourn at Napoleon’s court she had written several letters to her parents in Rome complaining of its immorality and begging to be allowed to go home, to which Napoleon, who had intercepted the letters, acceded.60*
Once Junot had occupied Lisbon he formally deposed the absent Braganza dynasty and confiscated their property, imposed a ‘contribution’ of 100 million francs and promulgated a constitution which included religious toleration, equality before the law and the freedom of the individual.61 He declared that roads would be built, canals dug, industry and agriculture improved and public education fostered, but the Portuguese remained wary. Napoleon decreed that Junot’s troops were to receive, in addition to their normal rations, a bottle of Portuguese wine a day.62
With Portugal seemingly secured, Napoleon sent troops under Murat into northern Spain in January 1808, ostensibly to aid Junot but in fact to take over the great fortresses of San Sebastián, Pamplona, Figueras and Barcelona, all with the support of Godoy, who was determined to become a sovereign in his own right under the secret terms of the Fontainebleau treaty. Spain was being invaded in all but name, with her prime minister’s support. By March 13 Murat was in Burgos with 100,000 men, and moving towards Madrid itself. To lull the Spaniards, Napoleon gave orders to ‘spread the word that it is part of my plan … to lay siege to Gibraltar and go to Africa’.63*
On the night of March 17, 1808 Godoy was overthrown by ‘the Tumult of Aranjuez’, a popular uprising 25 miles south of Madrid where the royal family had their winter palace, which had been whipped up by the rumour that he was planning to take the king and queen to America via Andalusia. A mob burst into his house to lynch him, but he successfully hid in a rolled-up carpet (or possibly some matting) in his attic.64 Prince Ferdinand supported the revolt, and two days later Charles IV abdicated. The previous day he had reluctantly been pushed into dismissing Godoy, leading to huge celebrations in Madrid. ‘I was well prepared for some changes in Spain,’ Napoleon told Savary on hearing the news, ‘but I believe I see that affairs are taking another course from the one I expected.’65 Napoleon, seeing an opportunity to extend his influence, refused to recognize Ferdinand as king, saying that Charles had been his loyal ally.
When, desperate for food and water after thirty hours in hiding, Godoy tried to surrender himself to the authorities, the mob grabbed him, nearly blinded him in one eye and wounded him in the hip, but he was nevertheless arrested alive.66 His finance minister was murdered in Madrid and the mob sacked the houses of his family and friends before moving on to the wine shops. At the time, Napoleon was seen by the Spanish public and British press as the instigator of the Tumult, which he was not. He was, however, about to try to exploit the opportunity it presented by playing each party off against the other. Spain was strategically and economically far too important to be allowed to remain in the hands of Ferdinand, whom Napoleon suspected of being the pawn of reactionary aristocratic and Church elements (which he was) and in secret alliance with the British (which – for the moment – he wasn’t).
Napoleon could ill afford to have a chaotic state on his southern border, especially one that had hitherto been providing him with a steady 5 million francs a month and even after Trafalgar possessed a large navy that he would need if he were ever to resuscitate his dream of invading Britain. Power abhors a vacuum, and the Bourbons – who had ruled Spain only since 1700, when they were installed by Louis XIV – had effectively created one. As 18 Brumaire had demonstrated, Napoleon was perfectly willing and capable to carry out a coup if he deemed it advantageous. Now, after Tilsit, the Grande Armée had no continental commitments beyond garrison duty and some anti-guerrilla activity in Calabria.
‘[I] did not invade Spain in order to put one of [my] own family on the throne,’ Napoleon was to claim in 1814, ‘but to revolutionize her; to make her a kingdom of laws, to abolish the Inquisition, feudal rights, and the inordinate privileges of certain classes.’67 He hoped that the modernization formula that seemed to have gone down so well in Italy, Belgium, Holland and the western parts of the Rhine Confederation might also reconcile Spaniards to his rule. There was a good deal of post facto rationalization in all of this of course, but he did genuinely expect his reforms to be popular with some classes in Spain, and to an extent they were. Denying that he wanted her vast Latin American treasures, he said that all he needed was 60 million francs a year to Frenchify Spain (pour la francifier).68 Despite these aspirations, however, this was to be a dynastic war, unlike any of his previous ones, and in that sense it represented a break from the Revolutionary Wars of the past.
On March 21 Charles IV withdrew his abdication on the perfectly reasonable grounds that it had been made under compulsion.69 Two days later, Murat occupied Madrid with 50,000 men of Moncey’s and Dupont’s corps. Initially all seemed quiet, even after Ferdinand had arrived in Madrid to wild scenes of welcome the next day. Ferdinand was under the impression that Napoleon wanted only Godoy’s removal from office, and on April 10 he left Madrid bound for a conference with Napoleon near the Spanish border at Bayonne, where his par
ents were also headed separately. On his way to Bayonne ordinary Spaniards took off their jackets and placed them under the wheels of his carriage in order to ‘preserve the marks of a journey which occasioned the happiest moment of their lives’, assuming – as did Ferdinand himself – that Napoleon would recognize him as the rightful king of Spain.70
Napoleon arrived in Bayonne on April 15, 1808 and installed himself at the nearby Château de Marracq, where he was to remain for over three months with a detachment of the Imperial Guard bivouacked on the lawn. On the battlefield he always sought to take advantage of his opponents by striking at the hinge point where their forces were weakest: now he would do the same in his negotiations with the Bourbons. Charles and María Luisa’s hatred for their son Ferdinand, and his for them, was much greater than any feelings any of them had for him. He was perfectly willing to intrude on that highly dysfunctional family’s private grief, and as he had 50,000 men stationed in Madrid neither side could reign without his support. This enabled him to engineer a truly remarkable construct.
Under the terms of a series of agreements at Bayonne, Ferdinand would cede the crown of Spain back to his father Charles IV, on condition that Charles should then immediately cede it in turn to Napoleon, who would then pass it to his own brother Joseph.71 Meanwhile, Godoy was spirited out of Spain by Murat, to the delight of María Luisa who could now be with him, and it seemed that yet another country had fallen into the lap of the Bonaparte family. ‘Unless I am mistaken,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand on April 25, ‘this tragedy is in Act Five; the denouement will soon play out.’72
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