The War of Wars (120 page)

Nor had the Revolution or Napoleon wrought so great a transformation in the French social fabric as they liked to believe. With a population of nearly 30 million, France was still an overwhelmingly agricultural land. Of the 670 richest people in France around that time only a fifth did not derive their fortunes from the land. (Around 75 per cent were nobility either from before, or ennobled by, Napoleon.) France may actually have deindustrialized during the period when industrialization was transforming Britain, thanks to the chaos caused by the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

Marseilles and Bordeaux were in decline, and Paris’s population had fallen by 50,000 to some 600,000. Fewer than 20 per cent lived in towns of more than 2,000 people. The Revolution had redistributed land to a much lesser extent than is believed. Between 1789 and 1804 it is estimated that the nobility’s share of the land had fallen from 21 to 15 per cent, while church lands had been entirely expropriated. The middle classes’ share rose from 16 to 28 per cent, and the peasantry’s from 30 to 42 per cent. As Mansel observed:

Land-ownership and government office or military position were indeed perhaps even more important after than before the Revolution, since they had become the most reliable sources of wealth. The great seaports of eighteenth-century France were now declining for lack of trade, for France was almost permanently at war. After his release from prison in 1794, the great eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert had no need to go to Rome to paint ruins. There were enough in and round Paris. A report addressed to Louis’s agent in Vienna in 1804 noted that commerce was languishing, bankruptcies were frequent and only agriculture was flourishing. The
Revolution, far from being ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois’, had delayed France’s industrial development by fifty years.

The monarchy had been restored to the throne, not by the French people, but by occupying powers; and they were themselves divided.

The main concern of both the British and the Austrians had been to prevent the other predatory power that they considered most dangerous in Europe, Russia, from taking France into its orbit for traditional dynastic reasons. The Tsar detested the French Bourbons, but had been forced to acquiesce in Louis’s accession. During the last days of Napoleon’s regime, Alexander had continually toyed with the idea of setting up Napoleon’s son, the infant King of Rome, as regent. Talleyrand remarked: ‘The Emperor Alexander is capable of the unexpected; one is not the son of Paul for nothing.’ The Prussians sided with their allies, the Russians. A continent of two separate blocks seemed indeed possible.

Talleyrand wanted to dissuade the Tsar with all the diplomatic dexterity at his fingertips. One contemporary remarked:

There was this advantage with him, that no question surprised him, and that the most unexpected ones pleased him the best . . . The whole policy of the Provisional Government was the
laisser-aller
and the
laisser-faire
of Monsieur de Talleyrand; his genius hovered above all the intrigues and lurked behind all the business . . . I overcame my awe of this famous statesman; his reputation was more imposing than his personality – he was easy to get on with; phantoms disappear when one is close to them. It was in the simplest conversation that Monsieur de Talleyrand let fall the remarks to which he attached the greatest importance, they always had an object; he sowed them carelessly, like the seed that nature scatters, and, as in nature, the majority perished without produce.

Talleyrand persuaded Alexander that any such regency would be but a figleaf for continuing Napoleonic rule and would swiftly result in the Emperor’s restoration. But fortune had indeed proved capricious; for
Alexander, Napoleon’s bitterest enemy of 1812, was now a covert sympathizer of the exiled Emperor, with Austria and Britain, who had questioned the wisdom of invading France, the main supporters of the Bourbon restoration, largely because they favoured a weak government in France; Britain was confident that it could control Louis.

Louis from the first disliked having been recalled by the old senate, composed of revolutionaries and Napoleonic sycophants, who had issued a liberal constitution similar to that of 1791 with a two-chamber parliament, a ministry responsible to it and a King who derived his authority from ‘the people’. He lost no time in insisting that, on the contrary, the new constitutional regime derived its authority from the monarchy, not the other way around.

Yet he was a paternalist, not an absolutist, unlike the vicious Ferdinand VII of spain, who on his restoration after the Peninsular War promptly abolished parliament. Louis granted equality of religion, including that of the Jews, whom Napoleon had persecuted in 1808. Political prisoners were released and censorship eased, although not abolished. Louis’s governments consisted of moderates like Talleyrand.

However, he revived the unpopular splendours of Versailles. And within months discontent was spreading across France like wildfire. The government from the first showed itself to be disunited and venal, with the bureaucracy expanding rapidly. Worse, it was treated with contempt by the hardline royalists, known as the ultras, who sought to revenge themselves against the revolutionaries, and to return to the old pattern of landholdings and absolutist rule. Many people in France, especially the new landowners, were terrified at the prospect of the ultras coming to power.

Louis also became unpopular for his friendship with his country’s traditional enemy, Britain, whose tourists swarmed to paris. The Prince Regent himself was invited over and Wellington, France’s most hated enemy general, became British ambassador, who many suspected gave Louis his orders. The Duke’s nomination, was, in truth, one of Castlereagh’s most disastrous mistakes, a direct provocation that suggested to the French that they were under British military occupation.

The Duke was far from unenlightened. He charmed many French noblemen with his observation of their customs and his courtly
manner, and played a role in getting the French to abolish the slave trade. He was also thoroughly French, embarking on a string of love affairs with a score of pretty women, two at least of whom had been lovers of Napoleon – Guiseppina Grassini, the opera singer, and Marguerite Josephine Weimar, the actress, who remarked: ‘
Le Duc était de beaucoup le plus fort
’ He also may have bedded Marshal Ney’s pretty young wife. Harriet Wilson, the famous British courtesan, was also seen in passionate embrace with the Duke in the Bois de Boulogne. The Duke had long become bored sexually by the decent, fussy, short-sighted Kitty with her plain dress, who remained in Britain for several months.

At the sumptuous new British embassy in the Faubourg St Honoré, Wellington entertained lavishly, marvelling at the King’s ability to eat an entire serving dish of strawberries. He met old adversaries, including Ney and Soult. Masséna remarked: ‘My Lord, you owe me dinner for you positively made me starve.’ ‘You should give it to me, Marshal, for you prevented me from sleeping,’ was Wellington’s dry retort. He was devastated by news of the death of Ned Pakenham, his adoring young brother-in-law, during the brief war with America.

He sent another young protégé, Colonel Harvey, with urgent despatches to Beresford, now running the British army in Lisbon. Harvey made the ride across immensely dangerous territory in record time, drawing the admiration of the British press.

He performed the journey of nearly 1,400 miles, from Paris to Lisbon on horseback in fourteen days, a feat rarely accomplished by an equestrian, and one which may be truly considered of an extraordinary character, considering the season of the year, the nature of the country to be passed, and the dangers to which he was exposed. That those dangers were of no ordinary character may be gathered from the fact that in passing through Spain, Colonel Harvey was stopped by banditti (who after the war infested every portion of the country), who robbed him of everything but his despatches, and a few pieces of silver which he managed to save from them by pleading that he ‘had fought for their country’. His knowledge of the language, and of the people of the various
countries through which he passed on this journey, must have stood Colonel Harvey in good stead. A single anecdote may be narrated as an illustration of the mode in which he turned such knowledge to account. On arriving at Salamanca very late at night, the colonel and his guide found the gates of the city closed to travellers. The guide called, as usual, on the Virgin. The colonel, knowing the Spaniards, as he was accustomed to observe, enquired for the breach that was made last year in the Town Walls. ‘I can take you to it,’ said the guide. ‘Then there will be no difficulty in getting into the town,’ said the colonel, ‘for I am quite certain they have not thought of repairing it, or of placing any one to guard it, so let us go in.’ And go in they did, for on arriving at the breach they found it precisely in the condition the colonel had predicted, unrepaired and entirely unprotected.

Nearly a century and a half later Harvey’s great grandson Oliver was to return as British ambassador in the splendid establishment of Rue de Fauborg St Honoré after the Second World War.

Wellington also visited London, where he was rapturously received in society as well as by the crowds. ‘It is a fine thing to be a great man, is it not?’ he remarked grandly to Lady Shelley, who became a close companion of his, as the crowds parted respectfully to let them through after an opera. Wellington was not a modest man.

A large part of the destroyed Napoleonic army grew increasingly sullen: many were demobbed and unemployed, roaming the country. Most believed they had not been defeated but betrayed by Talleyrand and other civilian intriguers. Nationalism, always a hugely potent force in France, reared its head again: the country was seething under foreign occupation.

Talleyrand was denounced for selling his country’s interests at the Congress of Vienna when the exact opposite was true: with scarcely any cards at his disposal he actually secured a peace which expanded France’s territorial size from what it had been in 1789 and required it to pay no reparations to the allies for devastating a continent for two generations. He explained his task:

The role of France was singularly difficult. It was very tempting and very easy for the Governments which had so long been hostile to keep her excluded from the major questions affecting Europe. By the Treaty of Paris France had escaped destruction, but she had not regained the position that she ought to occupy in the general political system. Trained eyes could easily detect in several of the principal plenipotentiaries the secret desire to reduce France to a secondary role. It was necessary above all that the French representative should understand, and should make it understood, that France wanted nothing more than she possessed, that she had sincerely repudiated the heritage of conquest, that she considered herself strong enough within her ancient frontiers, that she had no thought of extending them, and, finally, that she now took pride in her moderation.

Talleyrand sought the friendship of Austria and Britain to impede the ambitions of Russia and Prussia. He had the effrontery to chide the Tsar: ‘Liberal principles are in accordance with the spirit of the age, they cannot be avoided; and, if Your Majesty will take my word for it, I can promise you that we shall have monarchy combined with liberty; that you will see men of real merit welcomed and given office . . . I admit, Sir, that you have met many discontented people in Paris, but what is Paris after all? The provinces, they are the real France – and it is there that the return of the House of Bourbon is blessed and that your happy victory is proclaimed.’

To Metternich he said: ‘There are people here who ought to be allies in the sense that they ought to think in the same way and desire the same things. How have you the courage to put Russia like a belt around your principal and most important possessions, Hungary and Bohemia? How can you allow all the patrimony of an old and good neighbour [the King of Saxony] to be given to your natural enemy [Prussia]?’

In fact, as Castlereagh also saw, Russia’s ambition to swallow Poland whole and Prussia’s to devour Saxony were as potentially dangerous as an act of Napoleonic aggression. With extraordinary foresight Talleyrand declared that if Prussia succeeded, ‘she would in a few years form a
militarist monarchy that would be very dangerous to her neighbours’. He pointed out that the Russians and Prussians were so closely allied precisely because the former would be able to pursue its old goal of dismantling the enfeebled Ottoman empire in the south, outflanking Austria, while the latter could expand steadily to absorb all of Germany.

A second treaty was at last signed at Vienna between Britain, France and Austria to provide a force of 150,000 in case any of them should be attacked by either Russia or Prussia. Triumphantly Talleyrand wrote to Louis: ‘The coalition is dissolved . . . France is no longer isolated in Europe . . . Your Majesty possesses a federal system which fifty years of negotiations might not have constructed. You are acting in concert with two of the greatest powers and three states of the second rank, and will soon be joined by all the states whose principles and politics are not revolutionary.’

Castlereagh wrote to his government ‘The alarm of war is over’, as a result of the deterrent effect upon Russia and Prussia of the treaty. The actual deal, however, was an unsatisfactory compromise over Poland and Saxony. But Talleyrand’s success was reviled in nationalist circles who denounced him for conducting an alliance with hated enemies – Britain and Austria.

Thus in the space of under a year the restored Bourbon regime had succeeded in creating a powerful coalition of domestic enemies: nationalists, discontented Bonapartists, army veterans, those seeking repossession of their lands, those fearing dispossession from their newly acquired properties, those disappointed in the hope of a quick economic revival, the old revolutionaries, those who had hated Bonaparte and even welcomed the restoration of the monarchy but feared vengeance if the ultras came to power, and constitutional reformers who suspected Louis would reinstate absolutist rule. Well-meaning as he was, Louis paid the price of indecision. By wavering between his hardliners and his moderates, he made enemies of both.