The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  But who, really, was to blame for those compulsions? Napoleon lived in a martial age. He and his collaborators had worked skillfully to craft their generation’s image of the great man, perfectly suited to the culture in which they lived: as brilliant a conqueror as he was a statesman, a warrior gripped by a fiery genius and wrestling with an unyielding life force that urged him to forge ahead through all the world’s snowy mountain passes while weaker men fell all around him, the tamer of wild chargers that were in reality mules.

  From his first military triumphs, which were simultaneously triumphs in media manipulation, Napoleon promised those who followed him that they would be forever bathed in glory and forever on the right side of power, that they too could achieve greatness by supporting him. “I walk with the God of war and the God of victory!” he intoned during the 1799 coup that brought him to power as First Consul, after which he declared the Republic’s need to be “respected abroad and feared by its enemies.” To walk with gods required him to be forever fighting and forever unbeatable, even while perpetually claiming that he made war only to one day yield a permanent peace.

  Napoleon didn’t force this image of himself onto a bunch of unthinking dupes. To have any meaning, an image must be created and recreated in an ongoing conversation between producer and viewer. Napoleon and his supporters gave many people—not all people, but many people—exactly what they craved, and they responded with devotion. It isn’t accurate, however comforting it might be, to assume that this devotion was solely the blind kind.

  By returning from Elba in the role of undaunted adventurer, was Napoleon not demonstrating his great ability to see, as he put it, “the heart of the matter”? Did he not give people what they and the era itself wanted most from him? Herold again offers insight: “It may be a costly process for humanity to produce Napoleons, but if humanity should ever cease to produce them it would be a sign that its energies are exhausted. In order to turn its Napoleons to better enterprises than conquest and war, humanity first would have to turn away from war. To prove Napoleon wrong humanity must change.”

  Perhaps. But Napoleon, too, must be held to account. On Saint Helena, explaining why he left Elba, despite being “so well off,” he said, “I was insulted in all their newspapers! Well! I’m a man, and being a man, I felt that I should show them I was alive.”

  But his show had only ever been meant for an audience of one. Though he presented the landing at Golfe-Juan as the start of a daring bid to lead the world toward something new, it was never anything more than a desperate retreat into the only version of himself he ever understood or inhabited with any comfort, his last flailing attempt to make sense of Napoleon. Tens of thousands died at Waterloo because of one restless, middle-aged man’s crisis of identity, which was, above all, a crisis of vision. A failure to see what really mattered.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to the staffs of the Biblioteca Foresiana, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Museo Nazionale della Villa dei Mulini, Stanford University Libraries, Teatro dei Vigilanti, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver Public Library, and Villa de San Martino.

  The people of Porto Azzurro were wonderful hosts. Thanks to Dianora, Elena, and especially Paola, who arranged for me to tour the former Spanish citadel at Forte Longone, now a high-security prison.

  Thank you to Giovanna Ceserani for sharing her memories of Elba and for offering sage advice concerning research in Italian sources, as did Deb Harkness, Paula Findlen, and Hannah Marcus.

  Talking about this project with Ann Godoff and Will Heyward has been one of the highlights of my career, and I’m delighted to have found a home at Penguin Press. Will edited the book with great skill and understanding. I picture a world in which everyone would turn to Will for guidance before saying anything out loud, and it’s a world filled with elegant people, saying smart things, and understanding one another perfectly. Thanks also to Matt Boyd, Colleen Boyle, Bruce Giffords, Sarah Hutson, and Roland Ottewell. Christopher King and Darren Haggar produced the gorgeous jacket.

  Becky Sweren is a force of nature and an all-around wonderful person. I’m honored to call her my agent. I thank her also for pulling me out of traffic on Hudson Street while I was in a joyful daze following our initial meeting at Penguin. David Kuhn was the first person to really get excited about all things Elba, several years ago, before I’d written the proposal for my first book. His enthusiasm for the idea has given me a great deal of confidence and comfort since then. At Aevitas, thanks also to Chelsey Heller, William LoTurco, Kate Mack, Laura Nolan, and Allison Warren.

  Very special thank-yous to David Bell, J. P. Daughton, Dan Edelstein, Matthew Fox-Amato, Chris Friedrichs, Stéphane Gerson, Karen Halttunen, Pico Iyer, Colin Jones, Ross King, Ed Lake, Zack Silverman, Tobias Wolff, and the students in my seminars on celebrity culture and on travel writing. Vanessa Schwartz has shaped my understanding of—and love for—history and visual culture more than anyone.

  Love and gratitude to the Averills, Braudes, Cowens, Dixons, Fine-Poquets, Irene Jarman, the Leysers, Myers, Pokroys, Rittles, Smiths, Taubs, Tulks, Ayelet, Chris, Daylan, Giorgio, Graham, Josh, Jon, Marc, Mike, Reuben, and Poppy.

  As always, none of this would have been possible, or any fun, without Laura Braude: enemy of clichés, clunky words, and unnecessary dad jokes; lover of Italian beaches, Italian food, and Italian wine.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  Any text within quotation marks comes from a primary or secondary document. I’ve tried to limit my use of words such as “reportedly,” “allegedly,” and “it was said”—too many of which would be tedious. Unless I had sufficient archival material to do so, I tried to avoid making definitive statements about any historical actor’s mental state or psychological motivations, difficult enough to do among the living, let alone the long dead with only the archival record as guide. I’ve used “perhaps,” “likely,” “might,” and “it may be” when it felt necessary to do so. I trust that readers can deduce my degree of certainty about any given claim made within this text by its supporting footnote.

  Place names are referred to as they would have been in 1814–15, with spellings that reflect how they would have been spelled by the local population, hence Portoferraio and Livorno, rather than Porto Ferrajo and Leghorn, as they appeared in the British correspondence I consulted. I’ve modernized the spelling and punctuation of quoted sources wherever it seemed helpful to the reader to do so. On very rare occasions, I’ve changed certain words of French sources that I read in translated English and from whose context I felt confident in divining the original French word being translated. I did this only if I couldn’t track down the original French source myself, and if I felt that making the change would diminish the jarring effect of translations that draw more attention to the time and place of their translation than to the language of the original source itself.

  Several secondary sources served as valuable guides during my research, not only for the information and arguments they contained but because their footnotes often pointed to additional materials that I could track down and explore on my own. Some especially useful and recently published books include David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It and Napoleon: A Concise Biography; Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History; Pierre Branda, La Guerre Secrète de Napoléon; Gregor Dallas, The Final Act: The Roads to Waterloo; Steven Englund, Napoleon: A Political Life; Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History; Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte: 1769–1802, translated by Steven Rendall (the publication of Gueniffey’s second volume of his biographical project will no doubt shed new light on the period covered in this book); Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena; Sheryl Kroen, Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830; Thierry Lentz, Nouvelle Histoire du Premier Empire, IV, Les Cent-Jours: 1815; Phil
ip Mansel, Paris Between Empires: Monarchy and Revolution, 1814–1852; Alan Palmer, Napoleon and Marie Louise: The Second Empress; Munro Price, Napoleon: The End of Glory; Andrew Roberts, Napoleon the Great; Emmanuel de Waresquiel and Benoît Yvert, Histoire de la Restauration: 1814–1830; Jenny Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815; and Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  From the towers: Chateaubriand, Memoirs, 259; Horne, Age of Napoleon, 173; Mansel, Paris, 7. For a detailed firsthand account of the fall of Paris, see Boigne, Memoirs, 290–95; for descriptions of Paris on March 31, 1814, in secondary sources, see Bew, Castlereagh, 349; Englund, Napoleon, 416; Hussey, Paris, 221; Jones, Paris, 262; Lieven, Russia, 519; Mansel, Paris, 8–14.

  Cossacks crouched round: Underwood, A Narrative, 73.

  Though the result: Houssaye, 1814, 427; Mansel, Paris, 6–8; Price, Napoleon, 218; Zamoyski, Rites, 176-178. The Paris National Guard was a bourgeois militia whose task since its formation in 1789 had been to protect the propertied classes of Paris from the threat of the “vile populace” as much as from any outside invader. By 1814, fear of a popular uprising had prompted the local prefect to allow men with known royalist sympathies into the ranks. In reference to “beyond the gates,” note that the Parisian Wall of the Ferme générale had been built for the purposes of taxation and offered little in the way of military defense. On the lack of a defensive wall, see Jones, Paris, 262.

  “fashionable loungers of both sexes”: Underwood, A Narrative, 90.

  Each side suffered: Houssaye, 1814, 519.

  After a year and a half: Collectively these forces were known as “the Sixth Coalition,” which also comprised armies from Portugal, Sweden, and Spain. I use “allies” in the rest of this text to refer to these four major powers.

  Joseph Bonaparte warned: Sauvigny, Bourbon Restoration, 17. In similar fashion to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Hugues-Bernard Maret, duc de Bassano, had tried, unsuccessfully, to suggest by way of an elegant metaphor that Napoleon was misguided in thinking that the failure to secure a crushing victory automatically meant an embarrassing defeat; pointing to some desperate soldiers who adopted the old revolutionary battle cry of “Victory or Death!,” he argued that the binary was far too simple to be applied to an entire country. Nations never died, he told Napoleon, but they did “tire of the need for constant victory.” The various representatives of the principal allied powers struggled to agree among themselves about how or even if they should negotiate with their common enemy. “You scarcely have an idea of how insane people in this country are on the subject of any peace with Buonaparte,” the British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had written to Castlereagh before Napoleon’s defeat. Napoleon had meanwhile tried to tear apart the coalition by making vague overtures to the Austrians about separate terms. Maret as quoted in Price, Napoleon, 250; Liverpool as quoted in Zamoyski, Rites, 157.

  Having risen from: Several biographers have made this point; see, for instance, Price, Napoleon, 3.

  But by the time: Marchand, Mémoires, II (Marchand consulted in e-book format without page numbers; chapter numbers will be referenced by numerals); Price, Napoleon, 225; Thompson, “Napoleon’s Journey,” 2; Zamoyski, Rites, 177. Napoleon had scrambled to attack the rear of the force descending on Paris, but it was too far gone by that time.

  They brought down: Note that the displays described didn’t necessarily reflect an overwhelming or uniform support for the Bourbons, though the allies were quick to think so, and that many Parisians adopted white symbols to show peaceful intentions, just as some allied troops had pinned white cockades to their uniforms to demonstrate that they likewise wanted to avoid a bloodbath. On Napoleon’s promise to make Paris the most beautiful city that had ever existed, see Rowell, Paris, 14.

  At Fontainebleau, surrounded: Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 231–53; Éloi-Vial, “4, 6 et 11 avril,” 3–24; Houssaye, 1814, 604; Lentz, Nouvelle histoire, I (Lentz consulted in e-book format without page numbers; chapter numbers will be referenced by numerals); Macdonald, Souvenirs, 265–67; Price, Napoleon, 223.

  Every village and town: Hobsbawm, Revolution, 92–93; Schom, One Hundred Days, 5. Hobsbawm, stressing that any estimate of the number of war deaths from 1792 to 1815 would be mere guesswork, puts the number somewhere between one and two million, while other estimates range between four and six million. The path of destruction stretched well beyond Europe, from the West Indies to Egypt.

  Most of these deaths: Hobsbawm, Revolution, 73–74. “Between 1800 and 1815 Napoleon lost 40 per cent of his forces (though about one third of this through desertion),” writes Hobsbawm. “But between 90 and 98 per cent of these losses were men who died not in battle but of wounds, sickness, exhaustion and cold. In brief, it was an army which conquered all Europe in sharp bursts not only because it could, but because it had to.”

  It was common: Mansel, Paris, 2.

  “Nothing but abdication . . . to act out”: Houssaye, 1814, 604; Price, Napoleon, 233.

  “What a novel my life has been!”: As quoted in Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 1. This statement originates with Emmanuel de Las Cases’s Memorial de Sainte Helene, but the recent discovery of an original manuscript of Las Cases’s book has brought into question whether Napoleon actually said this to Las Cases of if the latter added Napoleon’s supposed remark a few years after their time together on Saint Helena.

  1: THE MORNING OF THE POISON LUMP

  Through the thin wall: “Ali” (Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis), Napoleon, 69; Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 262–65, 361–63; Fain, Manuscrit, 395–97; Marchand, Mémoires, II; Roncière, Napoleon’s Letters, 261–62; Roberts, Napoleon, 715. Some accounts have the valet on duty that night at Fontainebleau as Hubert, not Pelard, and describe the valet seeing the drink being made rather than hearing it. Caulaincourt claims that he sat with Napoleon through the night, while Napoleon’s secretary, Baron Fain, who was at Fontainebleau that morning but not actually present in the bedroom, makes no mention of Caulaincourt’s presence in his own memoirs. Fain claimed to be describing the event exactly as it was relayed to him by witnesses who were in the room, while remaining self-conscious about dealing in hearsay. The construction of this sentence nods in homage to the opening of Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth. While writing the history I often thought about Márquez’s stories of strongmen and solitude.

  It was three: I have calculated two days’ hard ride based on a distance of sixty kilometers between Fontainebleau and central Paris and a single rider going at a fair clip.

  Napoleon was forty-four: Regarding Napoleon’s children: Some biographers suggest that Napoleon may have fathered more than one illegitimate child. Françoise-Marie LeRoy in 1805 gave birth to Émilie Pellapra; Eléonore Denuelle gave birth to Charles Léon in 1806; and Albine de Montholon gave birth to Hélène de Montholon on Saint Helena in 1816—Napoleon has been named as the biological father of each of these children at different times by different writers, but these claims are based only on speculation, which is why I do not add them to my tally. The claim that Alexandre Colonna-Walewski, to whom I refer when saying that Napoleon had two young sons, is descended from Napoleon is, on the other hand, supported by deeper research in several sources, as well as a recent sequencing of DNA materials.

  Yvan ordered hot drinks: Branda, La guerre secrète, 38–39, 419; Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 364; Fain, Manuscrit, 394–96; Marchand, Mémoires, II; Roncière, Napoleon’s Letters, 262; Roberts, Napoleon, 715. There is some disagreement on Yvan’s precise remedy. Roncière, for instance, says “compresses and hot beverages,” while Roberts writes that Yvan “induced vomiting, possibly by forcing him to swallow ashes from the fireplace.” Other accounts have Napoleon demanding that Yvan give him something to put him out of his misery for good, with Yvan refusing, and that no real remedy was appl
ied besides waiting. On Saint Helena, when pressed about the lump he swallowed at Fontainebleau, Napoleon said to Charles Tristan, marquis de Montholon, that “time had taken away its strength.” Branda is skeptical about that statement and wonders if Napoleon was trying to reshape his legacy by claiming that he knew all along that he would survive, or if perhaps Montholon had already been influenced by so many other accounts of the night that were in circulation by the time he published his own book. I agree with Branda that Caulaincourt’s account seems the most accurate of all, given its relatively evenhanded language and the closeness of Napoleon and his grand equerry. One question remains, unanswered: Why was Yvan, whom Napoleon had named to the Legion of Honor and provided with a healthy salary, so riled by the night’s work that he would suffer a minor breakdown and quit Napoleon’s staff forever? He would have known his services were largely unnecessary, given that he was dealing with just a small bit of nearly two-year-old poison. It may be that in the course of his task the doctor worked himself into an anxious state by anticipating that whatever change of events might have driven Napoleon to such a desperate act would surely lead to some horrible future for France and for himself. It may also simply be that Yvan had by the morning reached his limit as to how much of Napoleon’s dramatics he could stomach.

  “The allied Powers”: Fain, Manuscrit, 389.

  “respect the integrity”: Guizot, History of France, VIII, 109.

  Talleyrand—brilliant, elegant: Talleyrand-Périgord, Mémoires, II, 122. “Fittingly for a statesman longer on talk than performance,” writes Colin Jones, “the street-names with which [Napoleon] supplied the city—usually commemorating his military victories (Castiglione, Pyramides, Rivoli, Ulm, Iéna, Austerlitz, Montebello and so on)—are one of his most enduring legacies.” Jones, Paris, 259.