Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  By February 6 Napoleon no longer thought it worth tying his hands over Poland for Anna, and he ordered Champagny not to ratify the signed treaty, calling it ‘ridiculous and absurd’. Disavowing Caulaincourt’s actions, he stated, ‘I cannot say that the kingdom of Poland will never be re-established because that would mean that if one day the Lithuanians or any others would re-establish it, I would be forced to send some troops to oppose it. This is contrary to my dignity. My goal is to tranquillize Russia.’58 He proposed an alternative convention promising not to help any other Power re-establish Poland, but the Tsar considered that insufficient.59 The result was that Napoleon felt snubbed, and started to look to Vienna for his future bride, and Alexander, for his part, realized that Napoleon could not be trusted over Poland.60 He also soon suspected that a dual courtship had been taking place and was offended over that too, or at least pretended to be.61

  ‘I don’t know what is required after all this,’ Napoleon wrote to Alexander on the last day of 1809, hoping to keep the friendship alive. ‘I can’t destroy chimeras and fight against clouds.’62 By early February 1810 Alexander was pushing ahead with thoroughgoing reforms of the Russian army.63 In January he had appointed the modernizer General Barclay de Tolly as minister for war, and plans for defending Russia’s western border along the line of the Dvina and Berezina rivers were drawn up. That year also saw a nationalist propaganda movement start in Russia, and criticism of France was once more allowed in the press. Francophobic literary and philological clubs were also permitted.64 When Marie Walewska gave birth to Napoleon’s son on May 4 1810, the baby was given the name Alexandre. It didn’t help.

  Years later, Napoleon recalled briefly considering taking a Parisian wife. He said he had made a list of five or six women, but at a vote at the Tuileries five councillors had supported the Austrian alliance, two the Saxon, with Fouché and Cambacérès still holding out for Anna. Napoleon suspected that the last two opposed the Austrian marriage only because they had voted for the execution of Marie Louise’s great-aunt, Marie Antoinette. Cambacérès denied it, saying that he knew Napoleon would end up going to war with whichever country wasn’t chosen, and ‘I dread a march to St Petersburg more than a march to Vienna.’65

  The initial auguries for Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise were not good: as a child she had played with ‘a ferocious effigy’ of him in her nursery, and at fourteen and eighteen she had been forced to leave her home to escape his armies. ‘I pity the poor princess he chooses,’ she wrote before she had any inkling it would be her. Once she realized it would be, she wrote: ‘I resign my fate into the hands of Divine Providence’, asking a friend to ‘Pray that it may never happen.’66 Napoleon was much happier with the situation. ‘When I heard Marie Louise was fair I was very glad,’ he recalled.67 She was better than just fair; Lavalette described her as ‘tall, well made, and in excellent health. She appeared adorned with all the grace and beauty that usually accompany youth’, and also had an ‘air of kindness, and, unlike the rest of her family, her smile was amiable and sweet’.68 The first of Napoleon’s 318 surviving letters to Marie Louise was his marriage proposal from Rambouillet on February 23, 1810, written by a secretary:

  Ma cousine, The brilliant qualities that distinguish your person have inspired us with the desire to serve and honour you by approaching the Emperor, your father, with the request that he shall entrust to us the happiness of Your Imperial Highness. May we hope that the feelings which prompt us to take this step will be acceptable to you? May we flatter ourselves with the belief that you will not be guided solely by the duty of obeying your parents? Should the feelings of your Imperial Highness be partial to us, we would cultivate them so carefully and strive so constantly to please you in every way that we flatter ourselves with the hope of succeeding some day in winning your regard; such is the aim that we would fain encompass, and in respect of which we beg your Highness to favour us.69

  It was a gracious proposal to an eighteen-year-old from a forty-year-old man. Two days later he addressed her as ‘Ma Soeur’ in his own (execrable) handwriting, before settling into ‘Madame’ until they were married, and thence ‘ma chère Louise’, ‘Ma bonne Louise’ and other variations.

  The nuptials between the continent’s oldest and newest monarchies involved a complex process, whereby Marie Louise married Napoleon by proxy in the Capuchin Chapel of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna on March 11, Archduke Charles standing in for her at the ceremony and Berthier for Napoleon. When the aristocratic Archbishop Ferdinand de Rohan, who held the ancient honorific title First Almoner of France, wrote an absurdly oleaginous letter congratulating him on his coming marriage, the Emperor told Duroc that he must ‘pay 12,000 francs to the First Almoner out of the theatrical fund’.70

  Napoleon choreographed his first meeting with his bride minutely for Tuesday, March 27, 1810, after the proxy marriage but before the civil one. They were going to meet 3 miles from Soissons in a tent, he was going to bow to her, but as she was bowing before him in response he was going to raise her up. Instead it rained and anyway he was too impatient so he and Murat drove past the tent to intercept Marie Louise’s carriage, which they did in front of the church at Courcelles. ‘Madam,’ he told her rather less imposingly as he got into her coach, ‘it gives me great pleasure to meet you.’71 He then took her in his coach to his palace at Compiègne, where they arrived at 9.30 p.m. and defied protocol by dining together, with close family, including Caroline (who as Queen of Naples had usurped the position of Marie Louise’s other great-aunt, Queen Maria Carolina).72

  During the dinner in the François I Gallery at the palace, Napoleon asked the ever-useful Cardinal Fesch in Marie Louise’s presence whether they were legally already married, and was assured that they were because of the proxy ceremony in Vienna. Napoleon was supposed to be staying in the nearby Hôtel de la Chancellerie while she slept at the palace that night, to observe propriety, but Bausset thought that, judging by the breakfast Napoleon had caused to be served at the Empress’s bedside at noon the next day, ‘we think it probable that he did not sleep at the Hôtel de la Chancellerie’, any more than he was to sleep in the Italian pavilion at Saint-Cloud on the night of their civil marriage.73

  Recalling that first night he made love to Marie Louise, Napoleon later told a confidant: ‘She liked it so much that she asked me to do it again.’74 Despite her trepidation it started out as a happy marriage; they spent every night under the same roof from July 1810 until September 1811 and Napoleon dropped Marie Walewska, whom he had installed in Paris, when he remarried. Indeed it is not clear that Napoleon was ever unfaithful to Marie Louise, at least until after she had been unfaithful to him. ‘Neither of his wives had ever anything to complain of from Napoleon’s personal manners,’ Metternich wrote, recalling how Marie Louise had once told him, ‘I have no fear of Napoleon, but I begin to think that he is afraid of me.’75 She was not the love of his life, however. ‘I think,’ he said years later, ‘although I loved Marie Louise very sincerely, that I loved Josephine better. That was natural; we had risen together; and she was a true wife, the wife I had chosen. She was full of grace, graceful even in the way she prepared herself for bed; graceful in undressing herself … I should never have parted from her if she had borne me a son; but, ma foi …’76 Napoleon was eventually to come to regret his second marriage, blaming it for his downfall. ‘Assuredly but for my marriage with Marie I never should have made war on Russia,’ he said, ‘but I felt certain of the support of Austria, and I was wrong, for Austria is the natural enemy of France.’77

  After their civil wedding in the Grand Gallery at Saint-Cloud on Sunday April 1, 1810, at which the Austrian ambassador, Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, wore a field marshal’s uniform that made him look ‘white as a miller’ and which Madame Mère attended, they went to the Tuileries the next day for a religious wedding and public celebrations.78 At a silver-gilt altar erected in the Salon d’Apollon at the Louvre, a square room usually used to exhibit paintings, Card
inal Fesch gave the nuptial blessing. Paris celebrated with fireworks, 3,000 legs of mutton and 1,000 sausages given to the poor, dances in the Champs-Élysées, a prisoner amnesty, horsemanship displays, concerts, parades and a hot-air balloon flying on the Champ de Mars. No one understood the importance of ‘bread and circuses’ as well as the modern Caesar, and the 6,000 veterans who married on the same day as him received 600 francs each.79 Marie Louise didn’t represent a very significant cost-saving for Napoleon, even vis-à-vis Josephine, who had cost him an average of 899,795 francs each year, since his new wife cost him (or at least the French treasury) 772,434 francs per annum.80

  Marie Louise had 1,500 people presented to her on her wedding day. ‘I felt ill all the time because of the diamond crown,’ she told a friend afterwards; ‘it was so heavy that I could scarcely bear it.’ The template used was Marie Antoinette’s wedding to Louis XVI in 1770 – about as unromantic a precedent as can be imagined but the one that best fitted Napoleon’s view of what royal nuptials should be like. The day after his wedding, Napoleon wrote to Tsar Alexander of ‘the feeling of perfect esteem and tender friendship with which I am, Monsieur mon frère, Your Majesty’s good brother’.81 Brother he might be according to the official courtesies of the day, but they were not going to be brothers-in-law. Only two days after Napoleon wrote those words Alexander predicted to his Polish confidant and former foreign minister, Prince Adam Czartoryski, that there would be a crisis in Franco-Russian relations ‘nine months from now’.82 The Tsar stayed in touch with Czartoryski, asking him how loyal the Duchy of Warsaw truly was towards Napoleon. The Electorate of Bavaria, Grand Duchy of Württemberg and region of Westphalia had been turned into kingdoms by Napoleon as recently as 1807, and Alexander feared the Duchy of Warsaw might be next.

  Three months after Napoleon’s wedding, on July 1, Schwarzenberg threw a celebratory ball at his embassy in the rue de Mont Blanc. A candle set alight a muslin curtain and then the whole building, killing four people of the six hundred present, including Schwarzenberg’s sister-in-law who could be identified afterwards only by the rings she had been wearing. ‘I wasn’t frightened but if the Emperor had not forced me to leave the room, I would have burned because I hadn’t the slightest idea of the danger,’ Marie Louise told Pauline a week later. After taking his wife to safety, Napoleon returned to oversee the rescue operation, and was so unimpressed with the response times that he completely overhauled Paris’s fire-engine system, creating the sapeurs-pompiers.83 His superstition about the incident led him to believe that either he or Schwarzenberg lay under a curse.

  It was fitting that Napoleon’s wedding should have taken place at the Louvre, because the visual arts were vital to the perception of his Empire, both by contemporaries and by succeeding generations. ‘My intention is to turn the arts towards subjects which could tend to perpetuate the remembrance of what has been accomplished these last fifteen years,’ he told Daru, and his lavish patronage bore extraordinary fruit.84 If Napoleon is to be criticized, as he sometimes is, for the paucity of great literature during his reign, then logically he must also deserve praise for the great art produced in the Empire period, which he did so much to encourage. Of course he used culture for political propaganda, as had Louis XIV, the French revolutionaries and indeed the Emperor Augustus and the many other Roman emperors Napoleon admired.85 But any period that can boast painters as talented as Jacques-Louis David – who once said of Napoleon, ‘In the shadow of my hero I will glide into posterity’ – François Gérard, Théodore Géricault, Anne-Louis Girodet (who in 1812 was commissioned to paint no fewer than thirty-six identical full-length portraits of Napoleon; he managed twenty-six before the first abdication), Antoine-Jean Gros, Jean Urbain Guérin, Jean-Auguste Ingres, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Carle Vernet and his son Horace, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, as well as the miniaturists Augustin and Isabey, must be entitled to the overused soubriquet ‘golden age’.86 (In Spain, even Goya worked in King Joseph’s court for a time.) Napoleon had a 60,000-franc annual budget to encourage painting, and he regularly overspent it. At the Salon of 1810 alone he bought twenty paintings for 47,000 francs for the Louvre.87

  Napoleon’s image and deeds were immortalized in paintings, prints, tapestries, medals, porcelain, objets d’art and sculpture as a way both of legitimizing his rule and, in one art historian’s phrase, of ‘inscribing himself permanently on the French memory’.88 He would sit for a painter and a sculptor simultaneously, so long as they came at lunchtime and didn’t talk. In the age before photography no one expected precise verisimilitude in art. Nobody thought Napoleon actually crossed the Alps on a constantly rearing stallion, as in David’s painting, for example; rather it was intended as a magnificent allegorical comment on the glory of the achievement. In the bottom left-hand corner the graffiti on the Alpine rocks read ‘Hannibal’, ‘Karolus Magnus’ (that is, Charlemagne) and ‘Bonaparte’.

  Opponents dismissed Napoleonic art as mere propaganda, but many discerning non-French connoisseurs appreciated, collected and even commissioned it. The 10th Duke of Hamilton commissioned David to paint Napoleon in his Study at the Tuileries in 1811, for example; the Prince Regent bought Isabey’s The Review at the Tuileries. The 2nd Marquis of Lansdowne bought a good deal of Napoleonic art, while Sir John Soane collected Napoleonic book-bindings and John Bowes hung portraits of Napoleon’s marshals on the staircase at Barnard Castle.89

  On occasion Napoleon displayed modesty; he refused to have himself depicted as a demi-god and when in April 1811, just prior to its public exhibition, he viewed Antonio Canova’s marble statue of him as ‘Mars the Peacemaker’, for which he had given a record five sittings, he immediately ordered it into storage, hidden behind a wooden and canvas screen for the rest of his reign.90 He feared people might laugh at its near-nudity and compare his physique when Canova had started the statue in 1803 with his much stouter self eight years later. (Today it can be seen in the stairwell of Apsley House in London, where the Duke of Wellington’s guests used to hang their umbrellas on it.)

  The patronage of Napoleon, and much more actively that of Josephine, launched an entire neo-classical artistic style, which came to comprise houses, furniture, clocks, dining rooms, tableware, textiles, wallpaper, bedrooms, painted decorations, chandeliers, mirrors, lighting and gardening. The lavish decor of the Ancien Régime had already made a mild reappearance in the Directory, but it really took the Napoleonic Empire to define the style.91 Napoleon’s fascination with Ancient Greece and Rome meant that classical architecture would always be favoured, and his Egyptian expedition inspired architects like Percier, Fontaine and Berthault and many interior decorators to experiment with Egyptian themes too.92

  Many of the glories of the Empire style can still be seen today, and reinforce the idea that under Napoleon French architecture and decorative arts led the world. They include, taken at random: the ballroom and library at Compiègne, the façade of the Château Margaux near Bordeaux, Maison Prelle’s textiles, the Grand Salon of the Hôtel de Beauharnais and the ground floor of the Hôtel Bourrienne (by Étienne Leconte) in Paris, the staircase of the Élysée Palace, Jacob-Desmalter’s secrétaires, Canova’s statue of Madame Mère at Chatsworth, Josephine’s boudoir at Saint-Cloud, Martin Biennais’ silver mustard pots, Pius VII’s bed and Josephine’s bidet at Fontainebleau, Blaise Deharme’s varnished metal tea-tables, the Emperor’s salon in the Grand Trianon at Versailles (where Napoleon had apartments rather than in the chateau of Versailles itself, because of its Ancien Régime overtones), Antoine-Denis Chaudet’s bronzes, Auguste Famin’s bathroom decorations at Rambouillet (which admittedly Napoleon didn’t much like), Pierre Bellangé’s armchairs, Darte Frères’ swan-shaped cups, Joseph Revel’s clocks, Percier’s library ceiling and Berthault’s Temple of Love at Malmaison, Sallandrouze’s carpets from Aubusson, Joseph Thouvenin’s book-bindings, the Lancelot firm’s two-candle lampshades, Josephine’s champagne flutes from the Montcenis factory at Le Creusot, Joseph Dufours’ wallpaper, the Gobe
lins factory’s tapestries and Marie-Joseph Genu’s silver sauceboats.93 Such an astonishing explosion of artistic creation during the Consulate and First Empire cannot be entirely detached from Napoleon, who was for over a decade the greatest art patron in Europe. Of course many of these craftsmen would have found employment anywhere in Europe – and many flourished before 1799 and after 1815 – but the sublime Empire style is unlikely to have developed as it did without the encouragement, and inspiration, of the Emperor and his wife.

  On April 16, 1810 Napoleon appointed André Masséna to command the new Army of Portugal, against the marshal’s own pleadings. Masséna had been suffering from respiratory problems ever since his fall from his horse on Lobau, and was nearly blinded when Napoleon shot him in a hunting accident in September 1808. (‘Being wounded during a shoot is such a stroke of bad luck after all the dangers you’ve escaped’ was all the apology he got.94) But when he and Masséna met face to face, Napoleon managed to persuade him to take on the Portuguese command, not least because he promised him control over strategy and assured him that ‘You will lack nothing in supplies.’95 Yet he was only given three corps, totalling fewer than 70,000 men, to recapture Portugal from Wellington, despite the fact that when Napoleon had contemplated undertaking the campaign himself he had earmarked over 100,000. By May 29, Napoleon’s mania for micro-management had got the better of him, and he started sending Masséna detailed orders about where to march and when, through the medium of Masséna’s hated enemy Berthier.