by Philip Dwyer
The hardening of Napoleon’s outlook was also reflected in the regime’s attitude towards public opinion and the press, and towards any form of opposition. Criticisms were taken very personally by Napoleon. Thus, in late 1807, he used an unflattering comparison between himself and Nero made by Chateaubriand as a pretext to close down the newspaper Mercure de France.122 That year, the number of political newspapers in Paris was reduced to four: the Moniteur, the Journal de l’Empire, the Gazette de France and the Journal de Paris. Increasingly the government was interested in controlling the content of articles before they appeared in the press.123 This was another stage on the road to despotism. Almost as soon as Bonaparte was in power, his enemies castigated him as a tyrant, a despot and a usurper.124 Napoleon certainly worked against the revolutionary principle of elected assemblies and the notion of popular sovereignty, of the power residing in the people, by increasing the power of the executive (and hence of the imperial administration).125
But was he for all that a ‘despot’? If one examines Bonaparte’s political beliefs as a revolutionary, it is quite clear he leant towards a strong executive and a strong leader. In 1797, for example, at a time when Robespierre was considered a ‘monster’ by many, Bonaparte praised him as leading the only strong government in France since the origins of the Revolution.126 As ruler, there can be no doubt that Napoleon was authoritarian – he applied the rules of a military camp to running the state – but he was also a populist, and a nationalist. What we see then is the evolution of his reign towards what has been dubbed ‘democratic absolutism’, which consisted of Napoleon moving away from revolutionary concepts like the sovereignty of the people and advancing gradually towards the notion of absolutism by divine right, all the while maintaining a footing in popular sovereignty.127 The years from 1804 to 1807 witnessed the evolution between these two phases. Any association of Napoleon’s regime with the words ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ is anachronistic. He was not a precursor of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators.128 Rather than look forward, we should look to the past. If Napoleon is to be compared with anyone, a closer approximation would be Louis XIV. Napoleon was an absolutist monarch, the last of the enlightened despots.129
This raises the question of whether Napoleon was himself looking back or forward, in an attempt to create new political structures. He was doing both. He paid lip-service to the French Revolution by maintaining certain revolutionary principles – equality before the law, freedom of religion, the protection of property. Yet, at the same time, and more and more as his regime progressed, he adopted ancien régime-style trappings at court. Many of these developments had the approval of the French political elite. Direct democracy as it was known during the Revolution had already been on the wane during the Directory.130 There was also a decline in the direct vote, something of which the elite approved. One of the best ways of obtaining strong and stable government, they argued, was to distance the people from politics by placing severe restrictions on their voting rights.131
Napoleon’s attitudes, like those of the elite, were rooted in his own experiences during the Revolution, and as a result he had a profound conviction that elected assemblies were useless.132 As institutions they had already been abased during the Directory. The rest was a face-saving exercise designed not to worry diehard republicans and democrats, a façade motivated by a concern not to appear to break abruptly with the Revolution. ‘I alone am the representative of the people,’ he liked to say, intimating that he had been chosen by them.133
13
‘The Devil’s Business’
The Lion and the Lamb
What might have happened, what could have been, had Napoleon been less driven, more complacent, or more determined to pursue peace rather than conquest? What if he had paid heed to the words of Fontanes: ‘Woe to a sovereign who is only great at the head of his army’?1 But that would be to argue against Napoleon’s very nature. He possessed a ‘drive to glory’, an innate desire to control and to dominate.2 Anyone who stood in his way was brushed aside, any who resisted were crushed and eliminated. Over the next few years, three things were to stand in the way of his complete domination of the Continent; Alexander, England and Pius VII. Napoleon’s conflict with the pope, as we shall see, was to evolve into a prolonged and bitter struggle between the secular power of the French state and the spiritual power of the Church.
After the coronation, Pius VII stayed for several months in Paris, in the hope of obtaining something concrete for the effort he had put into the voyage. After all, Cardinal Fesch had held out to him the possibility of a normalization of relations between the Church in Italy and France and the new imperial state. Each time Pius attempted to meet with Napoleon to discuss the issue of returning the papal territories that had been annexed in the course of 1802, he was brushed off.3 The showdown really came, though, when the Civil Code was introduced into the Kingdom of Italy in January 1806. The Code brought two things that were anathema to the Church: divorce, and the primacy of civil over religious marriage. Pius reacted in the only way he could, by not approving the investiture of four new bishops in the kingdom. He did not refuse outright so as not to infuriate Napoleon; he simply adjourned the investitures.
There were other occasions for increased tensions between the two. In October 1805, Marshal Laurent Gouvion Saint-Cyr occupied the port town of Ancona on the Adriatic, part of the Papal States, supposedly in order to avert the danger of an Anglo-Russian landing. Similarly, Civita Vecchia, not far from Rome, was occupied in May 1806. In both cases, the French did not even bother to inform the papacy of their intentions and simply walked in, in violation of the pope’s neutrality. At the same time as writing a letter to Napoleon in which he virtually threatened to break off relations, the pope also instructed the papal administrators in occupied territory not to co-operate with the French. Rather than see this for what it was, namely, the head of a territorial state unnerved by a seemingly unwarranted French incursion, Napoleon suspected that the papacy was about to change sides, and spat out the proverbial dummy. This was on the eve of Austerlitz, so Napoleon was no doubt anxious about his southern flank. That is why he wrote to the pope asking for assurances that he would remain loyal in the face of the enemies of the Empire.4
Napoleon considered Italy, all of Italy, his by right of conquest, and said so in a letter to the pope. ‘If I leave sovereigns in Italy,’ he continued, ‘it is not so that they favour my enemies and give me issues to worry about.’5 The bottom line is that the Papal States could not remain independent of or neutral towards the Empire. They were expected to integrate into the Continental System, and cease all contact and commerce with England. This was, moreover, the advice that Cardinal Consalvi gave to Pius.6 Napoleon was prepared to pull out all the stops and go over the head of the pope to hold a Council to discuss the religious future of Italy and Germany.7 This blustering and bullying worked, for a while. The pope invited Napoleon to Rome to negotiate an accord, something Napoleon would never have contemplated. In the end, after much toing and froing, Cardinal de Lattier de Bayane was sent to Paris to try to smooth things over.
The cardinal did not succeed. Diplomatic relations were broken off at the end of 1807 with the recall of the papal envoy to Paris, Monsignor della Genga; in diplomatic terms, it was a kind of declaration of war. At the beginning of 1808, Eugène received orders to prepare to march on Rome.8 Napoleon had for a short time envisaged an Italian confederation that would bring together the Kingdom of Italy, Naples and the Papal States. In order to put some pressure on the pope, Napoleon tried to isolate him, sending a number of cardinals back to their dioceses. It was not until 20 April that the pope confirmed his refusal to adhere to Napoleon’s geopolitical plan for Italy. The refusal resulted in Napoleon annexing a number of papal territories (Urbino, Macerata, Ancona and Camerino) to the Kingdom of Italy. The French ambassador in Rome, Jean-Marie Alquier, was warned only three weeks later so as not to fritter away the advantage of surprise (
not that there would have been much armed resistance anyway). Alquier was nevertheless to attempt to negotiate one more time, and to make sure that the pope knew what the consequences would be if an agreement were not reached.
In fact, the order to occupy Rome had already gone out. The last-minute negotiations attempted by Alquier may have been nothing more than a smokescreen, or an attempt to lull the Vatican into a false sense of security. Besides, Alquier was not really trusted in Paris; he came across as too conciliatory.9 Napoleon had been holding back from outright annexation for about two years, no doubt afraid of the reaction from both the pope – excommunication was a possibility – and Catholics in general.10 He ordered French troops under General Sextius Alexandre de Miollis to march on Rome. Miollis entered the Eternal City on 2 February 1808, took possession of the Castel Sant’Angelo, marched up to the doors of the pope’s residence, the Quirinal, and aimed eight cannon directly at it. It was going a little overboard; the pope, surrounded by his cardinals, was praying in the Pauline Chapel. The occupation of Rome had taken a few hours and met with little resistance. The French arrested any English visitors and those Neapolitans who had remained loyal to Ferdinand IV found loitering in the city.
The next day, General Miollis was granted an audience with the pope, who declared that he considered himself a prisoner. If you think that the pope is a ‘simple, sweet, easy’ man, warned the French ambassador, then you would be mistaken. Pius VII was physically frail, but he boasted to the ambassador that if his predecessor had lived like a lion and died like a lamb, he, who had lived like a lamb, would die like a lion.11 This was not mere rhetoric. The pope was just as determined – or intractable, depending on one’s point of view – as Napoleon. He boasted to Alquier that he would rather be hacked to pieces, or skinned alive, than enter into Napoleon’s system.
Once again we see how Napoleon’s mind operated in this affair. By invading the Papal States he had in fact acted rashly. Not only was it now impossible for him to evacuate the pope’s territories without some sort of arrangement, but he had no idea what he was going to do next (we will see this behaviour repeated when he occupied Moscow). He was of course persuaded that Pius VII would come to see reason once French troops were living on his doorstep, but this was to underestimate the pope’s determination. Two motives govern Napoleon’s diplomatic behaviour: impatience, and an inability to make the least concession to his adversary. As a result, he always opted for force as a solution to his problems. He presented Pius VII with an ultimatum – join the Empire or suffer annexation – that necessarily had to be rejected. His actions from then on were even more heavy-handed than usual. By annexing outright the Papal States, he had in one stroke undone everything he had achieved through the Concordat – namely, religious peace – and now risked putting not only the ecclesiastical hierarchy offside, but also Catholics throughout the Empire.12
His dealings with the pope show a lack of understanding that is stunningly obtuse, born of an inability to see his opponent’s point of view. This would point to a lack of intelligence on the part of any other head of state, but how does one explain this ingrained inability in Napoleon to come to workable arrangements with his interlocutors? The answer is simple – he was an inveterate bully who could have no equals, only vassals, and who could not understand the pope’s spiritual strength and determination. In his own mind, Napoleon’s temporal power was bound to win out over the pope’s spiritual authority. He approached his differences with the Church in much the same way he would approach a battlefield, determined to subdue his opponent. He was never to understand the depth of this misconception.
A consulta had been meeting throughout the first half of 1809 – it was convoked when the French occupied Rome – and was to deliver its findings on what to do with the Eternal City on 1 January 1810. Annexation, it would appear, was the only solution left open to Napoleon. If he restored the pope to his temporal states, relations between the Catholic Church and France would be back to square one.13 He still had to decide how the Papal States were going to be integrated into the Empire. He could either give them to one of his relatives, or incorporate them within the Kingdom of Italy or the Kingdom of Naples. In the end, he decided to annex them outright and transform them into French departments. This was not going to happen without repercussions on Catholic opinion, even in France. The terrain had to be prepared by a propaganda campaign that was aimed at convincing the French that the popes had always been the enemies of France and that direct French intervention in Italy had not been without historical precedent.14
The Famine March
The same can be said of Napoleon’s intervention in the Iberian Peninsula. A number of traditional views explain why Napoleon got involved in Portugal, and then Spain.15 The most obvious one has already been mentioned – his unrestrained ambition, his need to conquer, his need for fresh triumphs, so that others would continue to fear him. That kind of explanation belies the complexity of the problems facing him and is a somewhat pat response: Napoleon did what he did, because he was Napoleon.16
The most obvious alternative explanation, one with which most historians would agree, is that the invasion of the Peninsula was born of the need to eliminate any country that was aiding and abetting France’s enemies, especially Britain. Napoleon himself admitted that all his wars of conquest were designed to gain control of the coasts of Europe.17 Conquest and expansion were simply a means of getting at the British by extending a blockade that would bring the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ to its knees through economic strangulation.18 To that extent, Napoleon simply implemented an economic policy that had begun during the Convention and the Directory, and which he continued to implement after coming to power. France signed a number of preferential economic treaties with other states (Naples, Spain, Portugal and Russia in 1801, the Ottoman Empire in 1802, Spain again in 1803, the Kingdom of Italy in 1803 and again in 1806) that excluded British goods from those states’ ports.19 Of course, for the blockade to work, it had to become universal, and France had to control the ports of all of Europe. There is a disarming simplicity to this logic, one that is difficult to fault, namely, that the implementation of economic measures to defeat Britain led to the expansion of the Empire. All Napoleon’s conquests and annexations after 1802, his whole foreign policy – including the invasion of Russia in 1812 – can be explained from this perspective.
So, too, can the invasion of Portugal. To simplify, relations between Lisbon and Paris had been tense for some time, largely because the Portuguese, despite signing the Treaty of Badajoz in June 1801, had not entirely closed their ports to English trade. Moreover, the British often used Lisbon to refit and supply their ships in the Mediterranean. French diplomatic efforts to exclude the British came to naught, provoking a frustrated and angry reaction from Napoleon.20 If we are to allow the logic of Napoleon’s economic system against Britain, there was little choice but armed intervention, with all the complications and uncertainties which that brought with it. But one should also keep in mind that Napoleon was doing little more than continuing a policy adopted by the Directory, which had also considered an invasion of Portugal as a means of striking at Britain, but which it had never been able to carry through.21
Napoleon delivered an ultimatum to the Prince Regent, Dom João of Portugal: close the country’s ports to the British by 1 September, or face a declaration of war.22 He threatened the Portuguese ambassador, Lourenço Lima, that if his court did not comply, ‘in two months the House of Braganza would cease to reign in Europe’.23 Napoleon was in the habit of dictating to smaller powers and expected that his orders would be obeyed. In any event, Portugal was hardly in a position to resist, and it did not. In reply, Dom João declared war on Britain – although he did not arrest British subjects as Napoleon had requested – closed ports to British shipping, closed off Britain’s naval bases in the Atlantic and its access to the Mediterranean, and offered his nine-year-old son in marriage to Napoleon’s niece. João believed that Napoleon would
be flattered to form an alliance with one of Europe’s oldest monarchies. He was mistaken; Napoleon rejected the offer.24 In fact, Portugal was playing a double game. The chief minister, António de Azevedo, was at the same time reassuring London that any measures against it were show, and secretly requested Britain’s assistance. Portugal had, after all, been allied to Britain since 1703. Clearly, it had absolutely no intention of breaking off relations with Britain.
Napoleon was no dupe; he was perfectly aware of what the Portuguese were up to. It is possible that he was contemplating overthrowing the House of Braganza, and putting one of his relatives in its place, as early as 1804.25 The other alternative was to partition Portugal between the King of Spain, Carlos IV, the Queen of Etruria, Maria Luisa, regent for her young son Charles Louis, and the Spanish favourite, Don Manuel Godoy, the Prince of Peace.26 The partition was even formalized in a treaty at Fontainebleau in October 1807. That plan never materialized because of the rupture between France and Spain. That same month, Napoleon ordered General Junot through Spain – that the Spanish king allowed this was without precedent in the country’s history – to arrive in Lisbon by forced marches.27 The invasion took place in terrible conditions, in heavy rain, with limited shelter and in a country so poor that there was little in the way of food to pillage.28 Junot pushed his men so hard – covering around 1,000 kilometres in four weeks, an average of about thirty-four kilometres a day – that only 1,500 of the original 25,000 troops managed to drag themselves that far.29 One general dubbed it the ‘famine march’ and estimated that between 1,700 and 1,800 men died of hunger, exhaustion, drowning and rock falls. The expedition was meant to strong-arm Portugal into submission. In other words, Napoleon again used force as a tool in his diplomatic armoury, ignoring what the French consul general in Lisbon, France Hermann, had been warning would happen. Junot arrived in Lisbon only to find that Dom João, along with thousands of courtiers, had boarded ship and fled, sailing for Brazil, persuaded in part by a British threat to bombard Lisbon if they did not (Copenhagen had been bombed for three days only a few months before). It was an embarrassment for Napoleon, gazumped by the English just as his troops were in reach of their goal – the Portuguese fleet.30
