The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  People in France and beyond were clearly fascinated by tales of Napoleon’s exile and escape from Elba, especially the first stretch of his march from Antibes to Grenoble, known as the “Flight of the Eagle.” In 1836, Joseph Beaume painted a massive (nearly ten feet by six feet) rendering of the scene at Portoferraio on Napoleon’s last day on Elba, with all the supporting characters behind him and crowds hailing his departure, though sad to see him go. Two years later, Stendhal went to question villagers at Laffrey about their memories of that fateful day on the fields. A few months after Stendhal’s trip, Chateaubriand—certainly no admirer of Napoleon’s—made a kind of pilgrimage to Golfe-Juan to see where “Bonaparte, in debarking, changed the face of the world and our destinies.” The following year found Victor Hugo, who as a one-year-old army brat lived in Portoferraio for a few months in 1803, at the same beach fueling his romantic imagination by “walking on the same sand where this man walked twenty-four years ago.” A few years later, with The Count of Monte Cristo, came Dumas’s description of “a return which was unprecedented in the past, and will probably remain without a counterpart in the future,” when, “at a sign from the emperor the incongruous structure of ancient prejudices and new ideas fell to the ground.” Today, plaques, busts, and massive columns topped by gilded eagles guide hikers and bikers along the officially designated Route Napoléon, the two-hundred-mile path marking the Flight of the Eagle, and at Laffrey an oversized equestrian statue of Napoleon looms over the lake.

  Looking back from Saint Helena, Napoleon remembered the march from Golfe-Juan to Paris as the happiest time of his life. After complaining that his life would have had a more glorious end if only he’d died at Moscow, Las Cases ventured that if he’d died then he wouldn’t have had the chance to live “the extraordinary episode of the return from Elba,” to which Napoleon answered, “Well, maybe there’s something to that. All right then, let’s say I should have died at Waterloo.”

  Instead, the man born on an island died on one as well, most likely of stomach cancer, in 1821. Henri and Fanny Bertrand were at his bedside at Longwood House in the last moments of his life. “The Emperor is what he is,” Henri had written during the final exile, “and we cannot change his character. It is because of that character that he has no friends, that he has so many enemies, and indeed that we are at Saint Helena.” In 1840, Bertrand returned to Saint Helena to bring Napoleon’s remains back to Paris, a round trip of several months. “The return of the ashes,” as the event came to be known, marked another milestone in building the modern Napoleonic myth, thanks in part to poetic descriptions of the funeral cortege through Paris from Hugo and others. Four years later, Bertrand was buried at the Invalides, not far from Napoleon.

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  IN THE CLOSING MONTHS of the Vienna congress, delegates debated whether Marie Louise’s claims to her Italian duchies should be nullified since her husband had broken the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau on which she based her claims to these lands. She finally attained sovereignty over her Italian duchies in June 1815. A few weeks later, after learning her husband would be sent to Saint Helena, she wrote to her father:

  I hope that we shall have a lasting peace now that the Emperor Napoleon will no longer be able to disturb it. I hope he will be treated with kindness and clemency and I beg you, dearest Papa, to make certain that is so. It is the only request I feel I can make, and it is the last time I shall busy myself with his fate. I owe him a debt of gratitude for the calm unconcern in which he let me pass my days instead of making me unhappy.

  Neipperg had gone to southern Italy to fight Murat, who in a desperate bid to keep control of Naples had declared war on Austria. Spurred by Napoleon’s return, Murat had promised his subjects an alliance between his kingdom and France. Neipperg’s corps played a decisive role in forcing Murat into the battle of Tolentino that led to his fall in late May 1815. Murat escaped into southern France and then Corsica. A few months later he attempted his own Golfe-Juan, landing at the Calabrian seaport of Pizzo with a few dozen men, to reclaim his kingdom. He was beaten close to death by an angry mob. Facing a firing squad made up of his own soldiers, Murat told his executioners to aim for his heart and spare his face.

  Neipperg’s wife died of a chest infection while he was on campaign, and by the start of 1816 he was living openly as Marie Louise’s companion in Vienna. They moved to Parma so Marie Louise could assume her place as August Sovereign. She also took possession of the horses that Napoleon had sent there two years earlier, when he was still expecting her to pass through Tuscany on her way to join him on Elba. In 1817 she gave birth to a daughter; a son was born two years later. She married Neipperg in the summer of 1821, a few weeks after learning of Napoleon’s death, and gave birth to a daughter that same summer, but the child did not survive infancy; Neipperg died in 1829.

  Her son with Napoleon hadn’t been allowed to travel with her to Parma because Francis thought it too dangerous. When the boy’s tutor wrote to her to ask what he should tell the boy about Napoleon, she advised him to “speak truthfully . . . while never saying that he was a bad man and mentioning only his brilliant qualities, persuade him that it was inordinate ambition which led him from the finest throne in the world to the prison where he is today, so that his son never conceives the idea of imitating him.”

  In the end, the boy who had been born the King of Rome and was then demoted to Prince of Parma died as the Duke of Reichstadt. The title had been invented by his grandfather, who set aside some Habsburg land for him to inherit in what is now Zákupy, in the Czech Republic, hoping this would be enough to keep him from being tempted to claim any kind of rule in Italy or France. He was forbidden from having any communication with his father for the same reason.

  Napoleon, in the valediction of his will at the end of his life, his final public utterance, had made a declaration that ended with him saying, “The love of glory is like the bridge that Satan built across Chaos to pass from Hell to Paradise: glory links the past with the future across a bottomless abyss. Nothing to my son, except my name!” The inheritor of this name never had a chance to consider any bold move one way or the other. His cloistered, unhappy life ended at twenty-one at the Schönbrunn palace, after a bout with tuberculosis.

  Marie Louise wrote to the eighty-two-year-old Madame Mère in Rome to inform her of her grandson’s death, the last contact she ever had with the Bonaparte family. She married for a third time, to a pleasant widower, and lived a quiet life in Parma. Unlike so many who were close to Napoleon, she didn’t write a memoir. She died in 1847 at fifty-six, having lived to see an older age than her first two husbands.

  In the late fall of 1940, a few months after seeing Paris for the first time in his life—a three-hour victory tour alongside the Nazi architect Albert Speer that culminated at Napoleon’s tomb—Hitler arranged for the Duke of Reichstadt’s remains to be transferred from Vienna to Paris to be placed alongside his father’s at Les Invalides.

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  • • •

  CAMPBELL WASN’T ASSIGNED as an attaché to any headquarters of the allied armies to join in the fight against Napoleon because, as he wrote in his journal, it “was feared that my presence might excite irritating discussions with me upon this subject.” He was still a member of the 54th Regiment, part of the armed force under the command of the Duke of Wellington gathering in Belgium. He rejoined the regiment in Brussels on June 15, carrying a letter from Castlereagh that excused him from any wrongdoing when it came to Napoleon. He missed connecting with Wellington, who was already marching to Charleroi in response to Napoleon’s surprise attack there.

  Brussels was in such upheaval that Campbell was delayed in getting equipped for battle, and he only caught up with headquarters on June 18, when he witnessed, but didn’t participate in, the battle of Waterloo. He was later given command of the light companies of the 35th, 54th, and 91st regiments, which stormed Cambrai on June
24, for which Campbell received the Waterloo Medal. He returned to Britain and was invalided by his own request, still struggling from his pierced lung, the first time he’d been on half-pay since starting his service in 1797.

  He continued to be skewered in pamphlets and newspapers. One caricature showed him dozing while Napoleon tiptoes over him. His reputation wasn’t helped by Marshal Ney’s trial that autumn, in which Ney swore that when he met the first of Napoleon’s emissaries after the landing they showed him a letter from Bertrand saying that “England had favored his escape.”

  During public debates in the House of Commons, Castlereagh made excuses while trying to distance himself from the mission that he’d helped to conceive. He said that if he and his colleagues were guilty of anything, it was only “an excess of deference to the feeling of the French people, and a great desire for reconciliation.” He suggested that rather than attack the drafters of the Treaty of Fontainebleau people should focus their anger on “the man who had a thorough contempt for all treaties and engagements.” It wasn’t as if Bonaparte had been locked away in some tower under allied guard, he said, and besides which, trying to blockade Elba to prevent an escape “would have been beyond the power of the whole navy of Britain.”

  Castlereagh specifically avoided condemning Campbell and thereby condemning himself for choosing him. Instead, he said that

  as to diplomatic agents, we had none resident in the isle of Elba. Colonel Campbell only accompanied Bonaparte to the island, but he afterwards had been permitted to reside there or at Livorno. He never, however, supposed that he could have exercised any sort of daily inspection over Bonaparte, or that such an attempt would have been tolerated. The fact was, that he resided but for a short time on the island. If he had been, however, there when Bonaparte mediated his expedition, he could have by no means prevented it.

  Campbell bounced around for the next few years, traveling through Spain and France. Along with his brother and two sisters he settled in Normandy in 1817. He seems to have felt most at ease in Paris, where he became something of a roué during the decade after Waterloo, often dining with the marquis de Canisy in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and counting Bernard François de Balzac, father of the novelist, as a friend. He never married.

  As with many nineteenth-century Europeans dissatisfied with life at the nominal center of things, Campbell evidently sought some other answer at the outskirts of empire. In 1826, restless for a permanent assignment, he found one when the governor of Sierra Leone died of yellow fever. That man’s predecessor had also died early, shot in battle by an Ashanti soldier. Campbell petitioned for the governorship and was granted the post as well as the rank of major general. He ruled ruthlessly and died of yellow fever in the summer of 1827 after nine days of intense suffering. He was buried at the Circular Road Cemetery in Freetown, though his tombstone no longer exists. None of the three Campbell sons produced heirs, and the family lands in Scotland eventually fell into other hands.

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  THREE HUNDRED FRENCH SOLDIERS and eighty Corsicans had been left to defend Elba under Lapi’s governorship. After pushing off Campbell, Lapi next resisted a ruse by Bruslart, whose aide-de-camp arrived at Portoferraio in a French ship on March 9 to announce that Napoleon had been captured and that Lapi was to cede the island to the Corsicans. Lapi had the officer detained. A few days later a Neapolitan ship arrived, and its captain announced that he would unload three hundred men to help hold Elba. Lapi refused him as well.

  From the Tuileries, Napoleon ordered Bertrand to have anything valuable left behind on Elba to be sent to Paris. “I attach great importance to my Corsican horse, if he be not sick,” he wrote. “The yellow travelling carriage, the big carriage, and the gala carriages are worth bringing back, as well as the body linen. I make a present of my library to the town, also my house, which can serve as a casino.”

  Elba became a kind of colony of the empire, with the three-bee flag replaced by the tricolor. Napoleon coaxed the original governor, Dalesme, out of retirement to replace Lapi. In early June 1815 the delegates at the Congress of Vienna decreed that with Napoleon’s imminent defeat, Elba would fall under the control of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and by June 20 British ships had enforced a blockade around the island, cutting the Elbans off from the continent. News of Waterloo only reached Dalesme in late July. He ceded the island to Tuscan troops under orders from the restored Louis XVIII. The last of the soldiers to have followed Napoleon into exile left Elba in September. His Elban residences became property of the ducal government. Elba became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.

  Napoleon left a few paved roads where there had once been dirt ones. Properties had been refurbished and the fortifications were better armed. Some new trees had been planted and water and drainage systems implemented. The silkworm had been introduced and potatoes became a more regular crop. There was a small and handsome theater. Unresolved legal issues no longer had to be taken to Florence but could be handled locally at the new court of appeal. The mining industry was left little better than it had been before Napoleon’s arrival, and he’d taken its effective administrator along with him on his misadventure.

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  • • •

  THE LEGACY OF HIS BRIEF STAY may be minimal, but I have found no other place in Italy where they seem so genuinely fond of Napoleon as they do on Elba. Though its economy is far from booming, Elba is better off than other places in the region, especially in terms of infrastructure. And there is profit to be made from Napoleonic nostalgia. Collectively, the island’s imperial residences compose the second most visited museum site in Tuscany after the Uffizi. Wandering Portoferraio, you see Napoleon beer to be bought, Napoleon honey soap, Napoleon eau de cologne. My own guilty purchase was a solar-powered Napoleon, with a hand that goes hypnotically in and out of his greatcoat. But Elba is quite sleepy outside of the summer season and even on the busiest July weekend Portoferraio can hardly match the glitz of Capri or Palermo. There must be something here that goes deeper than gratitude for tourist dollars.

  For a lot of people the point of going to an island is to leave it, returning to one’s mainland refreshed by the experience. But islanders don’t want to think of their home as a kind of purgatory. Only natural, then, for them to yearn for some sense of permanence. Perhaps Elbans value the association with Napoleon, for all his tremendous faults, because it makes them feel something people in Beijing, New York, Paris, and elsewhere take for granted every day: the sense that at one point in history, outsiders were truly concerned about the place where they live, and that what happened there once changed the world.

  POSTSCRIPT

  My great talent, what characterizes me the most, is that in everything I see clearly. . . . I can see, under all its aspects, the heart of the matter.

  —NAPOLEON, on Saint Helena

  What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon’s devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention. . . . How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?

  —PAUL VALÉRY, Mauvaises pensées et autres

  AT SOME POINT IN his decades of reading, Napoleon likely encountered the following meditation offered by another emperor, Marcus Aurelius:

  In man’s life his time is a mere instant, his existence a flux, his perception fogged, his whole bodily composition rotting, his mind a whirligig, his fortune unpredictable, his fame unclear. To put it shortly: All things of the body stream away like a river, all things of the mind are dreams and delusion; life is warfare, and a visit to a strange land; the only lasting fame is oblivion.

  Napoleon would have found such ideas terrifying. His version of existence was a constant battle against flux, fogginess, and oblivion. He lived as though constantly feeling the need to show himself to
be alive, to make his life story heroic, monumental.

  Why did he leave the comforts of Elba to make war? Because he thought it was what Napoleon ought to be seen to do.

  As editor of an exhaustive collection of Napoleon’s written and spoken words, The Mind of Napoleon, the scholar J. Christopher Herold likely spent as much time as anyone pondering what exactly drove Napoleon to do the things he did. In a brief introduction to his book, Herold offered as cogent a summary of Napoleon’s career as has anyone in the half century since he wrote it: “In his ‘romantic and epic dream’—the words are his—he created a hero to suit the needs of his imagination, a humanity to suit the needs of this hero, and a background to suit the magnitude of the action.”

  Elba, then, was a stage of insufficient magnitude on which to perform his romantic epic. Napoleon the happy retiree, puttering around an island idyll, simply didn’t look right, which to so visually attuned a man living in so visually attuned an age meant it didn’t feel right either. One hears the stifled emperor reborn as Norma Desmond, around the time Herold was compiling his volume: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” As with the chatelaine of Sunset Boulevard, Napoleon was an actor. Feeling compelled to act, he also felt compelled to return to the stage that best suited him, which waited in Paris. He felt these compulsions so strongly that he was willing to risk starting another massive war to sate himself.