Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  Talleyrand conceded, ‘One can say without the slightest exaggeration that at the time of the Peace of Amiens, France enjoyed, in foreign relations, a power, a glory, and an influence beyond any the most ambitious mind could have desired for her. And what rendered this situation even more wonderful was the rapidity with which it had been accomplished.’99 In effect, in the space of about two and a half years, between November 1799 when Bonaparte came to power and June 1802 when the Consular regime signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, France ensured that it was not at war with anyone for the first time since April 1792. Bonaparte was consequently referred to as the ‘august pacifier of the world’.100 To bring the point home, the festivities celebrating Amiens were timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the coup of Brumaire, confirming the trust that many people placed in Bonaparte; he had ushered in a period of peace in which the peoples of Europe were now ‘united in one single family’.101 Some contemporaries at least believed Amiens to be not only the end of the war, but also the end of the Revolution.102

  On 8 November 1801, Paris was awoken by salvoes of artillery; the city had been decked out for celebration. Balls, receptions and fireworks punctuated the official ceremonies. A hot-air balloon with the different flags of the European powers floated over the city. A flotilla of rowing boats with musicians and actors in the national dress of the main European powers floated down the Seine from the Concorde to the Théâtre du Commerce. The peoples of Europe were represented, dancing to the music of Méhul, Gossec and Haydn, announcing a peace built on friendship and understanding. The revolutionaries had dared dream of a universal peace; Bonaparte seemed on the verge of accomplishing that dream.

  On 9 November, on the Place de la Concorde, a mock battle was organized in which cannon roared, drums were beaten and trumpets sounded to military tunes, and towns made of cardboard were stormed. At the beginning of this huge theatrical performance, the doors of the Temple of Peace were closed and an actor dressed as Discord and accompanied by ‘infernal divinities’ rode around the square in a chariot drawn by black horses. He was soon chased from the scene so that peace was restored.103 Much later, when Bonaparte visited Amiens in 1803, he was received with an enthusiasm ‘impossible to describe’.104 The horses were unharnessed and the crowds pulled his coach along, triumphal arches were constructed in his honour and everywhere he was greeted and portrayed as the restorer of France.

  Before Bonaparte came to power, none of the military victories in Italy made as much of an impact as the announcements of peace at Leoben and Campo Formio. The same can be said of the French public after he came to power. It was peace, just as much as victory (of course they are two sides of the same coin), that enhanced Bonaparte’s prestige. Public sentiment found an outlet in the newspapers acceptable to the regime where any number of odes and panegyrics were to be found.105 To give but one example, a piece in the Journal des arts described Bonaparte as ‘A great being, who in the century of the Caesars would have been elevated to the level of the gods’, who could have continued to make war, but who instead hastened to make peace.106 This falls within the ‘rhetoric of praise’ used in the eighteenth century, although it would in other circumstances have applied to a sovereign, not to the head of a republican state.

  Pierre Adrien Le Beau, Traité de Paix signé à Amiens le 24 [25] Mars, An 10 (Treaty of Peace signed at Amiens on 24 [25] March in the Year 10), 1803. Bonaparte, in the centre of the picture, is surrounded by Europe’s monarchs, dressed in their regalia, in contrast to the simple uniform he is wearing. All of them have come to offer homage to him.107 The caption reads, ‘Bonaparte pacificateur de l’Europe unit les puissances qui jurent la paix sur l’autel de la bonne foi’ (Bonaparte, pacifier of Europe, unites the powers, which swear peace on the altar of good faith). Note the King of England who is a little to one side of the other group of monarchs (to the right of Bonaparte). Minerva is to the left, fighting off the dark forces; Abundance to the right.

  Bonaparte’s Paris

  With peace, Paris became une grande auberge for foreigners. A tourist entering the city in 1802 or 1803 would have encountered what was still essentially a medieval town with streets so narrow and dirty that ‘not a ray of sunshine can penetrate the whole year round’.108 It took about four and a half hours to walk around the walls of Paris.109 As for the broader streets, they were covered in jet-black dirt, quite ‘troublesome’ when it rained. The vicinity of the Tuileries Palace was marred by a collection of small slum dwellings, many of which were cleared after the assassination attempt against Bonaparte in the rue Saint-Nicaise. The city was, in effect, growing so quickly – an English tourist guide compared Paris to ‘the root of a monstrous tree, which, watered by a stream, and, planted in a happy climate, has shot forth enormous branches both in height and width’110 – and there was so little room to put the population that people tended to crowd together in areas designated by the geographical origins of the migrants: masons from the Corrèze gathered around the Place de Grève; labourers from Lorraine and the west of France chose the Marais; water carriers came from the Cantal, the Puy-de-Dôme or Aveyron and clustered around the Place Vendôme.111 Then of course there was the smell, of dirt, of human waste, and the hordes of beggars that tourists would have to fend off. The walls were covered in posters of all shapes, sizes and colours advertising everything from plays at the theatre to balls, concerts, restaurants, hotels, tailors, doctors, schools, fencing masters, charlatans selling universal cures and rewards for lost pets.112

  Much of the daily commerce took place on the streets, bridges and quays of Paris where hawkers peddled their wares using expressions that only the servants could make sense of. ‘Here is the mackerel which isn’t dead; it’s coming, it’s coming.’ ‘Herrings on ice, new herrings!’ ‘By the boat, by the boat, the oyster seller!’ ‘Baked apples!’ For cold cakes, ‘They’re burning, they’re burning, they’re burning!’ For almond biscuits, ‘Here is the delight of the ladies, here is the delight!’ For oranges, ‘Portugal, Portugal!’ On top of this came the cries, the confused clamour of second-hand clothes dealers, wandering glaziers, sellers of parasols, of old iron, water carriers, all in a perpetual din of barking and yelling. Worst of all were the ink sellers: ‘It’s me, here I am, it’s him, here I am. Like that, madam, no one has ever seen anything like it, mia, mia, mia, mia, mia, mia, never, never, anything like it.’113 When they all came together at a busy intersection, the noise was indescribable. People on the whole were polite, although one English visitor to Paris complained of the ‘somewhat abrupt and familiar manners’ of the lower classes.114 Even the manners of the upper classes were not exactly refined; it was customary for example to spit indoors, something done ‘to excess’.115

  Fashionable young men and women were to be found strolling in the gardens of Paris,116 or eating at restaurants, a by-product of the Revolution, such as Véry, no longer the first restaurant in Paris since the arrival of Naudet on the scene, or the Rocher de Cancale and the Trois Frères Provençaux, which became famous for Chicken Marengo, or at the gambling houses and cafés at the Palais Royal.117 There were over 3,000 restaurants to choose from, and more than 4,000 cafés.118 At some, one could get a fixed-price menu for between thirty-six and forty sous, for which one received soup, a bouilli, two entrées, an entremets, as much bread as one could eat, a dessert and half a bottle of good wine.119 If dining alone, it was possible to choose from an à la carte menu. Dinner was served between four and seven, supper as late as two in the morning.120

  French social life seems to have resumed with a vengeance. The Duchesse d’Abrantès estimated that in the course of the winter of 1801–2, in Paris alone, there were as many as 8,000–10,000 balls and hundreds of dinner parties.121 Even taking into account some exaggeration, it was clear that the winter of that year was ‘brilliant’ compared to those that had preceded it. Salons were encouraged to open their doors again, in the knowledge that a revival of high society was bound to be good for the economy as
well as reclaiming Paris’s place as a centre of European elegance, intellect and pleasure.122 The salons were made to serve the state by shoring up the legitimacy of the new regime.123 They were also a means of keeping an eye on what was being said. The opening of the salons was a sign that things were starting to return to normal, that relations between the elites and the new regime were beginning to improve. The regime worked hard to bring them around by its astute use of the politics of reconciliation it had been pursuing since coming to power.124

  ‘No One Dares Now Talk Politics’

  In Britain after Amiens, everything French was back in fashion. English ladies and gentlemen of the upper classes flocked to Paris to catch up with the latest fashions, while businessmen and merchants renewed their contacts. But they all came to catch a glimpse, if they could, of the First Consul in person. In the face of so many tourists wanting to visit the country – possibly as many as 10,000, including two-thirds of the House of Lords125 – there was a fear on the part of some British politicians and writers that the English tourists would somehow succumb to radical ideas and return as proselytizing Jacobins.126 There was no need to worry; the vast majority of these tourists were people of means who travelled with large baggage trains. Lord Mount Cashell, for example, travelled with his wife, her companion, two daughters, three sons, a tutor, a governess and four servants.127

  Calais, an ugly town according to one English tourist, was often the first port of call, after a five- to ten-hour journey across the Channel.128 Francis William Blagdon arrived there on 16 October 1801; he claimed to be the first non-official Englishman to have reached the Continent. It was another fifty hours by coach to Paris across 197 English miles of poor roads and dirty inns.129 Once there, tourists had to register with the police, but they then moved about as they pleased, renting furnished apartments or staying in fashionable (or not so fashionable) hotels near the Palais Royal in the rue de Richelieu – there were more than 3,000 in Paris at the beginning of the Consulate130 – where they were sometimes ‘skinned alive’.

  The accounts English tourists later wrote of their travels are revealing of what they thought of post-revolutionary France. Henry Redhead Yorke, a Francophile, published one of the most famous travelogues of this period. He had initially, like many educated Britons, been in favour of the Revolution, and had visited in its early days in 1792. Ten years later, his description of the country and its people reflects his own ideas about the Revolution and Bonaparte, whom he referred to even then as the ‘tyrant’. Yorke was at pains to portray the new regime as one with police spies prowling around in every coffee house, where ‘no one dares now talk politics’.131 English tourists came away with the impression that this was indeed a military regime, that Bonaparte needed the military to stay in power, and that the political situation was still deeply unstable.132

  Tourists in Paris in the eighteenth century, ably led by one of the first English tourist guides of the city, a Practical Guide During a Journey from London to Paris, did what they do today: they headed for the Louvre where, for the first time and mingling with the ‘people’, they were able to see the treasures looted from Italy by Bonaparte’s army. Alternatively they went and pestered the artist David.133

  Above all, however, the object of English curiosity was Bonaparte. Visitors were always keen either to get an introduction or to catch a glimpse of the man. Bonaparte, or his reputation, made an impression on many who saw him.134 Lord Aberdeen, William Pitt’s ward, was given the unusual honour of dining with him at Malmaison.135 Joseph Farington caught a glimpse of the First Consul at the monthly review of troops, Place du Carrousel, and described him as ‘of a higher style than any picture or bust of him’ that he had seen.136 Samuel Romilly, who would become solicitor general a few years later, saw Bonaparte in public in conversation with one of the Montgolfier brothers (French balloonists, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier). He was pleasantly surprised. ‘He has a mildness, a serenity in his countenance which is very prepossessing; and none of that sternness which is to be found in his pictures.’137 Others, however, remained steadfastly unmoved. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him nothing more than a ‘little Italian’.138

  Nor was Charles James Fox, the leading opposition figure in the British House of Commons, an admirer. He went to France accompanied by a large party that included, among others, Lord Holland, an influential Whig politician, and his wife.139 Fox hesitated over paying his respects to Bonaparte while in Paris; it was clearly in Bonaparte’s interests to be seen with Fox, a man who had pursued peace for some time, but it was not altogether in Fox’s interests to be seen with Bonaparte, for fear of being branded an apologist. In the end, he succumbed and was introduced to Bonaparte at a lever on a hot summer’s day, at which most of the diplomatic corps were present, as well as a number of other prominent English personalities. Bonaparte heaped praise upon Fox, calling him ‘the greatest man of one of the greatest countries in the world’. Fox, however, had always had trouble with public acclamation, indeed treated it with contempt, to the point where he could be positively rude to those who flattered him. Bonaparte was no exception. Before Amiens, Fox had always been against the war with France, but he seems to have come away with the impression that liberty was ‘asleep’.140 He took exception to the French army remaining on a war footing even after the signing of peace – Bonaparte was ‘startled, surprised and displeased’ by Fox’s reaction141 – but was especially disappointed by what he saw as the First Consul’s intellectual failings, ‘very deficient upon every subject, no powers or extent of mind – the predominance of Bonaparte [is] the greatest imposition that was ever practised upon the whole world’.142 More worrying perhaps, Fox believed that Bonaparte was acting virtually as king, and presciently predicted that he would be elevated to emperor.143 Fox was not the only one to be disenchanted. Lord Holland, who was later to criticize the British government for its decision to send Napoleon to St Helena, described him aptly as ‘impatient of contradiction, to a degree not only amounting to a blemish in his moral character, but to weakness in his understanding’.144

  5

  The Politics of Fusion

  The Return of the Emigrés

  When François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, returned to Paris from self-imposed exile on Holy Friday in the spring of 1800, he entered the city on foot by the Barrière de l’Etoile, part of the customs wall around Paris, walked down the Champs-Elysées, and then across the Place de la Revolution. He had fled the Revolution after seeing his family château in Brittany burnt down by peasants. His mother was arrested and died in prison; other members of his family were guillotined during the Terror. He walked not far from the spot where they were executed, afraid, he said with some embellishment, ‘of putting my foot in blood, of which there remained no trace. I found it impossible to take my eyes away from that place where the instrument of death had been raised. I thought I saw before me in their shirts, bound near the bloody machine, my brother and my sister-in-law; there had fallen the head of Louis XVI.’1 The sentiments were exaggerated, but Chateaubriand was nevertheless one of the many aristocrats to rally to the new regime during the months that followed Brumaire. He was ready to offer his services and had solicited the protection of Bonaparte’s sister, Elisa Bacciochi, to facilitate his return.2

  Chateaubriand’s walk into Paris shows the extent to which people hoped the Consulate would reconcile the opposing factions in France to create a semblance of political harmony. ‘The government no longer wants,’ wrote Lucien, as minister of the interior, ‘no longer recognizes factions and only sees in France Frenchmen.’3 Beneath the façade of harmony deep divisions still existed, but enormous progress had been made towards healing the rifts in French society created by the Revolution. And that, in many respects, was what the Consulate was all about: a strong executive, national reconciliation and peace through military conquest. One of the most remarkable steps along the path to political reconciliation and social appeasement was the abolition of all
penalties against émigrés and an invitation for them to return to France.

  During the Revolution, somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000 people had fled France; not all of them appeared on the official list of émigrés, which was made up of about 100,000 names.4 As well as members of the nobility, they included domestics, priests, labourers and peasants as well as members of the bourgeoisie.5 Between October 1800 and October 1801, almost 3,500 people had been crossed off the list of émigrés, thus allowing them to return to France.6 In April 1802, a general amnesty was granted that saw thousands more come back. Even before that, émigrés like Fontanes and Chateaubriand had been secretly returning to France, something the authorities had been turning a blind eye to. All of this was perfectly in keeping with Bonaparte’s policy of reconciliation, and was part of a larger strategy of pacification.7 This was not some vain impulse to surround himself with the cream of ancien régime society; it was a political calculation that, at best, became an uneasy alliance. Once again, however, Bonaparte had to overcome the resistance of staunch republicans for whom a return of the émigrés was unthinkable.