Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  55. Napoleon’s illegitimate son Count Alexandre Walewski, who became foreign minister and president of the National Assembly under Napoleon III.

  56. In 1806 Napoleon took a seventeen-year-old mistress, the ‘dark-eyed brunette beauty’ Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, by whom he had an illegitimate son, Count Léon, who looked so like the Emperor that in later life people stared at him in the street.

  57. The actress Anne Hippolyte Boutet Salvetat took the stage name ‘Mademoiselle Mars’. In 1815 she greeted him with violets, the symbol of his springtime return to Paris.

  58. Albine de Montholon was Napoleon’s last mistress, on St Helena, and possibly had a daughter by him whom she named Joséphine-Napoléone.

  59. A tall porcelain vase made by Sèvres which belonged to Napoleon’s mother and features David’s famous portrait of Napoleon crossing the Great St Bernard Pass in 1800.

  60. The Imperial Throne from the Legislative Body, 1805.

  61. Golden spice cellars in the form of a ship, called nefs, indicated the presence of a sovereign. This one was made by Henry Auguste for Napoleon’s coronation in 1804, with the lid featuring his personal emblem of bees. Other symbols represented were of Fame, Justice and Prudence, the rivers Seine and Marne, Egypt (palm trees), France (cockerels), Victory (laurel leaves), the crown of Charlemagne and the twelve arrondissements of Paris.

  62. The Vendôme Column, built between 1803 and 1810, carried a statue of Napoleon on its apex and praised ‘Napoleon the Great’ at its base. It was pulled down in the Communard uprising in 1870.

  63. The Palais Brongniart exemplifies Napoleon’s love of classical architecture and for nearly two hundred years housed the Paris Bourse.

  64. Claude-François Méneval was Napoleon’s devoted secretary from 1803 to 1813.

  65. Baron Agathon Fain took over from Méneval and was equally admiring of his master. Both Méneval and Fain provide intimate portraits of the Emperor at work.

  66. Francisco Goya’s depictions of ‘The Disasters of War’ in the Peninsular campaign, where guerilla warfare was invented and which saw horrific brutality on both sides.

  67. Napoleon at bivouac the night between the first and second days of the battle of Wagram in July 1809. Marshal Berthier is busy at the table behind the fire; Napoleon’s bodyguard, the Mamluk Roustam, is lying in the foreground.

  68. The interview between Emperor Francis of Austria (left), Prince Johann of Liechtenstein (centre) and Napoleon after the battle of Austerlitz in 1805. Five years later Francis was to become Napoleon’s father-in-law.

  69. Prince Clemens von Metternich, Austrian ambassador to France, foreign minister and eventually Chancellor, a subtle diplomat who timed Austria’s final move against Napoleon to perfection.

  70. Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, whose careful manoeuvring of far larger forces was critical to Napoleon’s defeat in 1813.

  71. The Empress Marie Louise, painted by François Gérard in the year she became Napoleon’s second wife; she was eighteen and he was forty but the marriage began very successfully.

  72. Napoleon doted on the son he had with Marie Louise, the King of Rome (later the Duke of Reichstadt). He died at the age of twenty-one of tuberculosis.

  73. The dashing one-eyed Austrian general Adam von Neipperg, whom Napoleon defeated on the battlefield in 1813 but who became Marie Louise’s lover after the Emperor’s first abdication the following year.

  74. The uniforms of the Grande Armée were often magnificent, as depicted here by Carle Vernet in 1812, who helped design French flags and standards. It was dressed like this that Napoleon’s troops invaded Russia.

  75. No sooner did the French capture Moscow in September 1812 than the Russians set fire to it, burning down more than two-thirds of the city.

  76. Napoleon (centre left) warming himself during the retreat from Moscow. ‘The brilliant army that crossed the Niemen’, noted Faber du Faur, the painter of this picture, ‘would scarcely recognize itself now.’

  77. The crossing of the freezing Berezina on two trestle bridges in late November 1812, a miracle of deliverance for Napoleon’s army.

  78. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, four times foreign minister of France, was made a prince by Napoleon but plotted against him from 1807. Two years later the Emperor called him ‘a shit in a silk stocking’.

  79. Joseph Fouché, the police minister, served every regime from the Jacobins to the Bourbons and managed never to be on the losing side.

  80. Marshal Charles-Jean Bernadotte, whom Napoleon allowed to become Crown Prince of Sweden, turned on him once the Grande Armée army was fatally weakened in 1812.

  81. Auguste de Marmont, Napoleon’s oldest friend and whom he raised to the marshalate, betrayed him by surrendering Paris to the Allies in March 1814.

  82. One of the most emotional moments in the Napoleonic epic came when the Emperor bid adieu to the Old Guard at Fontainebleau Palace before going into exile on Elba in April 1814.

  83. Napoleon fleeing the battlefield of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, as depicted by the British caricaturist George Cruickshank.

  84. Longwood House on St Helena, where Napoleon (in the doorway) lived for five and a half years.

  85. The obese, balding Napoleon on St Helena.

  86. Napoleon shortly after death on his iron campaign bed in the drawing room at Longwood, sketched by a Royal Navy captain.

  Envoi

  After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in June 1815, and the conclusion of the Congress of Vienna later that year, the Great Powers coalesced against Europeans’ demands for liberal constitutions and national self-determination. Tsar Alexander I was left as the most powerful monarch in Europe, and ruled in an increasingly mystical and autocratic manner, putting down liberal revolts in Naples, Greece and Germany, until his death in 1825. Francis I of Austria relied on Metternich more and more. Having received back Austria’s ancient dominions, he established the reactionary Holy Alliance but never resuscitated the Holy Roman Empire. He died in 1835 aged sixty-seven. Frederick William III of Prussia also became deeply reactionary, ignored his promises of 1813 to give Prussia a constitution, and died in 1840. Metternich remained a central figure in European diplomacy, maintaining a system of balances established by the Congress, until he was forced to escape Vienna dressed as a washerwoman in the 1848 Revolution; he died in 1859. Pius VII also turned against the Enlightenment, reinstating authoritarianism in the Papal States, which were returned to him by the Treaty of Vienna. He died in 1823. King Ferdinand VII of Spain was compelled to accept a liberal constitution in 1820, was overthrown by the Spanish people and then restored to power by the French in 1823, whom he then alienated through his lust for vengeance. He died unlamented in 1833.

  Thanks in large part to the legal and political reforms undertaken by Napoleon, the Bourbons were unable to reintroduce the old ways upon their second Restoration in 1815. Louis XVIII spent his reign trying to find a middle course between his reactionary brother, the Comte d’Artois, who sought to roll back any democratic concessions, and the liberal constitutionalists, who pressed for France to follow the English model and to become a constitutional monarchy. He died in 1824, whereupon the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X. He was overthrown in the July Revolution of 1830, which brought in the more moderate King Louis-Philippe (Charles’s cousin), and died in exile in Italy in 1836. The hopes of the unreconstructed royalists died with Charles.

  Much of Napoleon’s family lived under papal protection in Rome after Waterloo, including his mother, who retired there with her half-brother Cardinal Fesch. At eighty-five, blind and huddled in an armchair, she dictated reminiscences to Rosa Mellini, her lady-companion. ‘Everyone called me the happiest mother in the world,’ she said, ‘yet my life has been a succession of sorrows and torments.’ She died in February 1836. Fesch died there three years later, surrounded by his fabulous art collection, much of which he donated to the cities of Ajaccio and Lyons. Louis followed his literary pursuits in Rome, but visited Holla
nd incognito once in 1840, where he was recognized and found himself acclaimed by his former subjects. He died in Livorno in July 1846. His long-separated wife Hortense bought the Swiss chateau of Arenenberg in 1817, where she lived until her death, aged fifty-four, in October 1837. Her illegitimate son by General Flahaut would later be made Duc de Morny by Napoleon III. Eugène de Beauharnais, Duke of Leuchtenberg, lived quietly in Munich with his wife and seven children, one of whom became Empress of Brazil. He died in February 1824. Another of his daughters, Princess Josephine, married Prince Oscar, the heir to the Swedish throne and son of Bernadotte, in 1823; their son Maximilian married the daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.

  Lucien was arrested after Waterloo, but allowed to retire to the Papal States, where he died, leaving eleven children from two marriages, in June 1840. Joseph stayed in Bordentown, New Jersey, using the title the Comte de Survilliers for sixteen years, and sensibly refused the crown of Mexico in 1820. For a short while he lived in Surrey, England. He defended his brother’s reputation ably, and died in Florence in July 1844. In 1816 Jérôme settled into exile in Trieste and he took the name Comte de Montfort, but he always considered himself a monarch. He returned to France in 1847 and became governor of Les Invalides in 1850, and president of the Senate, dying in 1860. Caroline Murat remarried after her husband’s execution and lived in Florence until her death in May 1839, with the self-invented title Countess of Lipona (an anagram of Napoli). Pauline claimed to have been about to travel to St Helena when the news of her brother’s death arrived. Even though he had a mistress of ten years’ standing, Camillo Borghese allowed Pauline back to his house in Florence three months before her death in June 1825. (He was involved in Bonapartist plots until his death in 1832.)

  Charles-Louis-Napoléon, the youngest of King Louis of Holland’s three sons, took part in the Italian Revolution of 1831, attempted to invade France at Strasbourg in 1836, visited the USA in 1837, attempted another invasion of France in 1840 and was imprisoned, but escaped in 1845. In 1848 he was elected president by 9.9 million votes, and effected a coup in 1851, becoming Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. He was overthrown after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and died in exile in 1873. Thus the imperial epic that had started in Ajaccio in 1769 fizzled out in Chislehurst, Kent, 104 years later. To the end of his life he wore the wedding ring his uncle had given his grandmother Josephine.

  Marie Louise contracted a morganatic marriage with Neipperg four months after Napoleon’s death. They had one legitimate child after their first two illegitimate ones before Neipperg’s death in 1829. Marie Louise then married the Comte de Bombelles and died in December 1847, having ruled Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla since 1814.

  Napoleon’s children experienced very different fates. Napoleon II, the King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt, was tutored by Marmont, who tried unsuccessfully to poison his mind against his father. He joined the Austrian army but died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn on July 22, 1832, aged only twenty-one; his death mask can be seen in the Museo Napoleonica in Rome. His remains were sent to Les Invalides by Adolf Hitler in 1940 to foster friendship between Austria and the Vichy government in France. Count Alexandre Walewski was only seven when his mother Marie Walewska died, but he was given a good education by his uncle, an officer in the French army. He joined the Foreign Legion and fought in North Africa, and later became ambassador to London, where he arranged his cousin Napoleon III’s visit there and also Queen Victoria’s to France. He became President of the Corps Législatif and died of a heart attack at Strasbourg in 1868, aged fifty-eight. Charles Denuelle, Count Léon, Napoleon’s natural son by Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, grew so to resemble his biological father that passers-by stared at him in the street. He fought a duel against an orderly of Wellington’s in February 1832, and attributed his survival to a button he carried given to him by Hortense. He grew into an argumentative drunken wastrel, who, though Napoleon III paid his debts and a pension, died poverty-stricken of stomach cancer in Pontoise in April 1881. His mother was widowed in the 1812 campaign. She married Count Charles-Émile-Auguste-Louis de Luxbourg in 1814, with whom she remained until his death thirty-five years later. She died in 1868.

  Of Napoleon’s marshals, Mortier was killed, along with eleven other people, by a bomb at a military review in 1835. It had been let off by a disgruntled Italian who hoped to assassinate King Louis-Philippe. The king wept at Mortier’s funeral. Nicolas Soult, Duc de Dalmatie, went into exile in Germany until 1819, but later became a minister under the Bourbons and President of the Council and a reforming minister of war under Louis-Philippe. He represented France at Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, when Wellington gave a dinner in his honour. He died in 1851. Bernadotte became King of Sweden in 1818 and reigned until his death in 1844; his descendant sits on the Swedish throne today. Marshal Jourdan, despite refusing to sit on the court martial that condemned Ney, became a count and member of the House of Peers in 1819. He supported the 1830 Revolution, and died three years later. Marmont, the Duc de Raguse, was briefly tutor to the King of Rome. He died in 1852, the last of the Napoleonic marshals. When his memoirs were published posthumously, a critic likened him to ‘a sharpshooter who hides behind his own tombstone to pick off people who cannot reply’.

  Of Napoleon’s former ministers, Jean-Jacques-Régis de Cambacérès escaped to Brussels during the second Restoration, but was allowed to return to France in 1818, where he remained in very comfortable retirement until his death in 1824. Louis-Mathieu Molé became director-general of roads and bridges under the Restoration, later becoming minister of marine, then foreign minister under King Louis-Philippe and prime minister from 1836 to 1839; he died in 1855. Armand de Caulaincourt’s name was placed on the proscribed list by Louis XVIII, who was persuaded to remove it by Tsar Alexander. He died in 1827. Hugues Maret, the Duc de Bassano, was made a peer by Louis-Philippe and became prime minister of France for eight days in November 1834; he died in Paris in 1839. René Savary wrote eight volumes of memoirs which he published in 1828, and briefly served as commander-in-chief of the French Army in Algeria in 1831, where he showed considerable cruelty. He died in 1833.

  The group on St Helena quickly dispersed after Napoleon’s death. Henri Bertrand went back to Paris and lived at Napoleon and Josephine’s old house in the rue Chantereine. He died in January 1844. Count Montholon shared the captivity of Napoleon III at Ham prison from 1840 to 1846 – the same length of time, six years, as he had shared that of his uncle. He died in Paris in August 1853. Albine de Montholon had long since separated from her husband, carried on her affair with Basil Jackson in Brussels, and died in March 1848 at a ball given in her honour by her grandchildren. Emmanuel de Las Cases published Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène in four volumes in 1823 and constantly re-issued revised editions throughout his life. He was elected a deputy of the National Assembly in 1831, and died in 1842. Louis Marchand wrote his memoirs in comfort in Auxerre. In 1822 Betsy Balcombe married Charles Abell, who subsequently deserted her. She moved to Sydney, Australia with their only child, but returned to London to teach music. On the publication of her memoir she was given land in Algiers by Napoleon III, but chose to stay in London, where she died in 1871. Francesco Antommarchi published The Last Moments of Napoleon in 1825 and tried to sell copies of Napoleon’s death mask in 1833, but was sued over its authorship, which properly belonged to Dr Francis Burton. On his tombstone he had inscribed the words: ‘An Italian doctor at the service of the Emperor and the poor’. Sir Hudson Lowe left St Helena after Napoleon’s death and commanded the British troops in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) between 1825 and 1830, but was not appointed its governor. He died aged seventy-four in January 1844. Dr Vignali was murdered at his house on Corsica in June 1836.

  Among Napoleon’s other followers, General Charles Lefebvre-Desnouëttes was wounded in 1815, and emigrated to America. While returning to France in 1822 he was shipwrecked and drowned. Jean Rapp became a deputy of the Haut-Rhin department and later treasurer to Louis XVI
II, dying in October 1821. Jacques-Louis David settled in Brussels after 1815 and returned to painting classical subjects, dying in 1825. Antoine-Jean Gros found that fewer and fewer people wanted his historical and neo-classical paintings; he died in 1835. Roustam wound up dressing in Mamluk costume for the London shows, and died in December 1845 aged sixty-five. Claude Méneval published his memoirs in 1827, was present for the return of Napoleon’s body to Paris in 1840, and died in Paris in 1850. Octave Ségur, having survived being wounded and captured in Russia in 1812, returned to France after the war, but in 1818 drowned himself in the Seine on discovering his wife’s infidelity.

  Several of Napoleon’s opponents and detractors came to sad ends. Louis de Bourrienne published vicious memoirs denigrating Napoleon in 1829 and died in a lunatic asylum at Caen in February 1834. Laure, Duchess d’Abrantès, died poverty-stricken in a wretched lodging-house in 1838, aged fifty-four. Lord Castlereagh committed suicide by cutting his own throat with a penknife on August 12, 1822. Radical poets celebrated, but Britain had lost one of her greatest foreign secretaries.