How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (17 page)

He denies having seized power in 1799 with a
coup d’état
: ‘I didn’t usurp the crown. I picked it up from the gutter. The people put it on my head.’

He claims that his only true goal as ruler of France was ‘the reign of reason’ – that is, to educate the people. ‘What a younger generation I will leave! They are my creation. Their achievements will be my revenge.’

He recalls his great battles, of course, dishing out praise and condemnation to the officers who served him well or otherwise, and marvelling at his own judgement on the battlefield. ‘Success in war,’ he opines, ‘hangs so much on insight and seizing the moment’ – which he did, over and over again.

He also predicts that his future detractors will be wasting their time, or ‘biting into granite’ as he puts it: ‘My memory consists of facts,
^fn3
and mere words will not be able to destroy them.’

In this, of course, Napoleon was absolutely right, and his own war of words, the
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène
, has since proved to be a resounding victory in allowing Bonapartists to disregard Waterloo as a minor blot on the otherwise spotless record of a national hero.

Back in France, it was a simple matter to turn absence into nostalgia in the years after Waterloo, because the man supposedly ruling in Napoleon’s place was such an obvious disaster. Louis XVIII was totally subservient to the British and their allies. Céleste de Chateaubriand, the wife of the writer of the same name, summed up the feeling of many French people about the King in one simple sentence: ‘Bonaparte came back at the head of 400 Frenchmen; Louis XVIII returned behind 400,000 foreigners.’

The corpulent monarch knew which side his bread was buttered on (both – and it was buttery brioche), and always put the allies’, and his own, interests above those of France.

He didn’t even gain any vicarious glory from being on the winning side at Waterloo. Louis and his ‘army’ of only 1,500 men had simply sat around in Ghent, fattening themselves while the real soldiers were battling it out. Napoleonic veterans poured scorn on them in their memoirs. A French officer called Rilliet de Constant alleged that the battle cry of Louis XVIII’s army had been ‘We demand to die for our good king, and, while awaiting this beautiful moment, we demand decent lodgings and food from the Lion d’Or [Ghent’s best inn]’. There, Louis was rumoured to gulp down a hundred oysters in one sitting, and gained the nickname
le roi restaurateur
(a play on ‘restoration’ and ‘restaurant’). The townspeople would go and stare through the windows at him, and christened him ‘Louis de Zweet’ – a Flemish pun. When spoken, it sounds like ‘Louis dix-huit’ (Louis XVIII), but literally translated, it means ‘Louis who Sweats’ – a cruelly witty description of the gluttonous monarch.

As soon as Louis was re-established on the throne, he sent Catholic missionaries around France, ‘cleansing’ sensitive regions of their fanaticism for Napoleon, as though Bonapartism were a religion (which, in some ways, it was – and still is). There was also a brief ‘Terreur Blanche’ (white being the royal colour) in 1815, during which royalists massacred some 500 known Bonapartists in the south of France. This of course only redoubled hatred of Louis XVIII’s regime, and made Napoleon appear more martyr-like before he was even dead. Faithful followers prayed for his return.

There were constant rumours that Napoleon was on his way back, either physically or in spirit. In Aube – the region where Napoleon had mounted his heroic resistance to the Prussian invasion of 1814 – a chicken was confiscated by the local gendarmes after laying an egg on which it was possible to make out an image of
l’Empereur
.

Similarly, when a street trader was arrested in Paris in 1818 for selling statues of Napoleon, he confessed (or boasted) that he had already offloaded 4,000 idols of the exiled hero.

On the other hand, in 1816, the people of Carcassonne, in the (pro-British) south-west of France, were so afraid that he would return that they burned alive a poor eagle that probably had no idea it was a Napoleonic emblem.

In short, Napoleon was still well and truly present in French minds when, in 1821, the national obsession with him was suddenly cranked up to fever pitch.

A recurrent theme running throughout Las Cases’ book is the outrageous disrespect shown by the British – and especially Hudson Lowe – once they had delivered the fallen Emperor (Las Cases always refers to Napoleon as ‘l’Empereur’) safely into exile. And this general climate of British abuse quickly provoked Bonapartists into seeing darker forces at play when their hero fell ill.

Napoleon had often suffered from stomach pains, and after a six-week spell in bed that Lowe initially suspected was play-acting (he suggested that someone should burst into Napoleon’s bedroom and shock him into getting up), he died, on Saturday, 5 May 1821, at the premature age of fifty-one. His last words were probably the very apt ‘tête d’armée’ (‘head of an army’), though we can’t be sure because various patriotic and romantic sources also have him whispering sweet nothings about France and Josephine.

Napoleon once said of Lowe that ‘he has crime engraved on his face’, and there have long been rumours that the governor murdered his captive. Although Napoleon’s father had died of stomach cancer, and it seems almost certain that Napoleon succumbed to this genetic disposition and a succession of gastric ulcers, it has often been alleged that he was poisoned with arsenic. After his death, the toxin was discovered both in samples of Napoleon’s hair and in the wallpaper at Longwood. Proof, according to many Bonapartists, of foul play.

But at the time, arsenic was used as a treatment for baldness, and Napoleon often used to wash his receding locks with this toxic shampoo. Not only that, arsenic was a common component in dyes, and it would have been unwise to lick any British wallpaper of the early nineteenth century – if that is what Napoleon was driven to do by the frustration of captivity.

Nonetheless, rumours of assassination by the representative of
Perfide Albion
only served to heighten Napoleon’s almost Christ-like image of martyrdom. Alongside Victor Hugo’s suggestion that God decided the outcome of Waterloo, Napoleon’s memoirs read like one long cry of ‘why have you forsaken me?’

The Christ analogy is not an idle one. Before Napoleon died, there was already a version of the Lord’s Prayer in his name, which reads something like a call for resurrection rather than a return from exile:

Notre Empereur qui êtes à Sainte-Hélène

Que votre nom soit respecté

Que votre règne revienne

Que votre volonté soit faite

Contre tous les ultras qui nous ôtent nos pensions

Débarrassez-nous des maudits Bourbons

Ainsi soit-il.
^fn4

The loud grumblings in France about the possibility that the British had poisoned the exiled Emperor were in no way quashed when the
Anglais
ignored Napoleon’s dying wish that ‘my ashes should rest by the Seine, among the French people whom I have loved so much’, and dropped him into a tiny grave on Saint Helena, some 5,000 kilometres from his favourite river.

Not that Napoleon would have objected too much to his grave site on the island – it was his second choice after the Seine, in a lush valley where his servants would go and collect fresh water. And the Emperor’s body was very well looked after. It was sealed inside three coffins so as to postpone putrefaction (maybe eternally, so that he could rise again?) – an outer lead casing, a walnut casket and an inner iron lining.

But this was not good enough for France, and there was always a movement within the country campaigning for their hero’s homecoming. It was of course politically impossible to repatriate Napoleon’s remains while the considerable bulk of Louis XVIII – or Cochon XVIII (‘Pig the eighteenth’) as Bonapartists had now renamed him – was occupying the throne.

Louis died in 1824, literally rotting away with gout and gangrene, to be replaced by his brother Charles X, who proved to the French that this foreign-imposed monarchy really was a bad idea by reintroducing press censorship and dissolving parliament. The MPs revolted, and Charles adopted the Bourbon family’s usual tactic of fleeing into exile, updating traditions only slightly by running away to Scotland instead of England.

In 1830, France was briefly embroiled in another Napoleonic war, as the Emperor’s former soldiers fought against Bourbon troops, the offshoot of which was an almost entirely bloodless revolution which swept a different style of monarch into power.

Louis-Philippe was from a different branch of the French royal family, descended from King Louis XIII. In 1789, to differentiate himself from King Louis XVI (and to save his head), Louis-Philippe had supported the Revolution, and had even served in the French Revolutionary army, helping to defeat the Prussians at Valmy in 1792. As a result, he had made a name for himself as a kind of ‘people’s royal’, in much the same way as Napoleon wanted to be a ‘people’s emperor’. He had been forced into exile in England during the Terreur of 1793, but had never inspired the same hatred that revolutionaries and Bonapartists felt for Louis XVIII and Charles X, the brothers of the guillotined King Louis XVI.

Louis-Philippe was a supporter of constitutional monarchy, and did his best to soothe frayed tempers on all sides. Resisting countless insurrections and several waves of violent fighting, he consistently chose ministers who were known to be moderates, and even reinstated the revolutionary tricolour as the national flag.

This PR campaign worked, and Louis-Philippe became known as the
roi citoyen
, or citizen king. He turned the former royal palace of Versailles into a national museum, sent his sons to a state school in Paris, the Lycée Henri IV near the Panthéon (although then, as now, it was accessible only to the Parisian elite), and often walked around Paris dressed as a
bourgeois
, in an ordinary suit, with an umbrella under his arm.

Louis-Philippe’s masterstroke, though, was to negotiate the return of Napoleon’s remains from Saint Helena. Astutely putting national glory above sectarian politics, and banking on the hope that the French would unite around the memory of their former hero, he oversaw the completion of the Arc de Triomphe in 1836, commissioning frescoes for its façade in honour of Napoleon and all the armies that had fought for France between 1792 and 1815.
^fn5

The inauguration ceremony had to be cancelled because of a terrorist attack, but the gesture worked, and the novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote that when the Arc was complete, ‘all hearts, even those hostile to the Emperor, said ardent prayers to heaven for the glory of the nation’.

Now all the Arc needed was for its instigator, Napoleon, to give it its final consecration. Louis-Philippe was understandably nervous about bringing back a political rival, albeit a dead one, but he went ahead and put in a request to the British for the return of Napoleon’s remains. It was accepted immediately (the Brits had long since realised that the French were much too busy fighting among themselves to pose any military threat elsewhere), and in May 1840, French MPs voted to back what they called ‘le retour des cendres’, or ‘the return of the ashes’.

Incidentally, one of the few parliamentary speeches against the idea was a brilliant one, given by the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, who warned parliament to ‘be careful in encouraging the notion that we must create a genius. I don’t like men whose official doctrine is freedom, legality and progress, but whose symbols are the sword and despotism.’ Before the debate began, Lamartine also said that ‘the ashes [of Napoleon’s career] have not gone out, and we are blowing on the sparks’ – which was prophetic as well as poetic.

On 7 July 1840, a frigate left Toulon, the scene of Napoleon’s first victory, for Saint Helena. Things were not as solemn as Napoleon himself would probably have liked: the ship was called the
Belle Poule
– the ‘Beautiful Chicken’, but also slang for a ‘cute chick’. And en route for the South Atlantic, the crew (commanded by Louis-Philippe’s twenty-one-year-old son François) stopped off in Bahia, Brazil, for two weeks of partying.

But the
Belle Poule
duly arrived in Saint Helena on 8 October, and handover of the remains was scheduled for the 15th, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Napoleon’s arrival on the island. At midnight on the 14th, British soldiers began to dig, and after several hours, the coffins were raised and opened. Inside, Napoleon’s body was found to be miraculously intact – French sources mention only that the nostrils were ‘altered’, the lips drawn back to reveal some teeth, and that there was a certain drying of the skin. Once death had been confirmed (after all, miracles do happen where martyrs are involved), the lead casket was re-sealed and placed inside two more coffins, made of ebony and oak. The whole funereal package now weighed some 1,200 kilos, and needed forty-three soldiers to lift it on to a carriage that a team of four horses was only just capable of pulling.

It took several hours to drag the coffins to the harbour and load them on to the
Belle Poule
, while the rain beat down and French cannons sounded a continuous salute for France’s best-known artilleryman.

On 18 October, the ship set sail, and ran straight into trouble. Impossible as it seemed, Britain and France were practically at war again. The British had intervened to protect Syria against attack from Egypt, an ally of France, and old sabres were being retrieved from the Napoleonic cupboard and loudly rattled. The streets of Paris echoed to renewed cries of ‘Guerre aux Anglais!’ (‘War on the English!’), no doubt louder because of the imminent return of
l’Empereur
.

The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston (who had rubber-stamped the return of Napoleon’s remains), reminded the French that Britannia now ruled the waves, and declared that ‘if France begins a war, she will to a certainty lose her ships, colonies and commerce’ – he could of course have added ‘remaining’ in his sentence, and made things even more provocative. Privately, Palmerston also confided to colleagues that ‘we ought to make up our mind to have war with France before many years have passed’. Here was one man for whom the Napoleonic Wars were far from over.