The War of Wars (127 page)

The ex-Emperor’s health began to deteriorate mysteriously with headaches, feverish symptoms, swollen gums and loose teeth. He believed the British were trying to poison him, although it seems more likely that his household had been infiltrated by a hostile French spy. In March 1821 his health abruptly deteriorated and on 5 May he died after serious internal bleeding, officially of a cancerous ulcer but more probably of hepatitis or arsenic poisoning, of which he displayed many symptoms; traces of the poison were found in his hair. His body was surprisingly fat and well preserved and he appears to have suffered from a rare condition slowly transforming his sexuality to that of a woman which may account for some of the hysteria he often displayed.

Napoleon had survived his two greatest British adversaries, Pitt and Nelson. Of the others, Grenville lived on until 1834 but never held high office again, and Wellington, who became prime minister, lived until 1852. Cochrane was rehabilitated after performing spectacular feats in the Chilean, Peruvian and Brazilian wars of independence and lived to the ripe age of eighty-four, dying in 1860. Castlereagh killed himself in 1822 out of despair at the unravelling of his plans for Europe.

Of Napoleon’s chief mainland European opponents, Metternich died in 1859, Talleyrand in 1838, Tsar Alexander in 1825, General Barclay de Tolly in 1818, the Prussian King Frederick William in 1840, Marshal Blücher in 1819, General Gneisenau in 1831, the Emperor
Francis of Austria in 1847 and Marshal Schwarzenberg in 1820. General Kutuzov had died in 1813.

Of Napoleon’s personal intimates, Marie Louise went on to rule the Grand Duchy of Parma with her second husband, Count Adam von Neipperg, and died in 1847. Josephine had died in 1814. The indomitable Letizia Bonaparte lived on until 1836, Caroline Bonaparte until 1839, Pauline Borghese until 1825, after being remarried to her husband Prince Camillo Borghese, Eliza died in 1820 near Trieste, while Jérôme Bonaparte became president of the French senate and died in 1860. Joseph died in Florence in 1844, Louis in 1846, Lucien in 1840 and Marie Walewska in 1817.

Of his generals and associates, Marshal Augereau died in 1816, Eugène de Beauharnais in 1824, Bernadotte in 1844 after becoming King of Sweden in 1818 (his dynasty still occupies the throne): Berthier had committed suicide in 1815; Bessières had been killed at Rippach in 1813; Bertrand died in 1844; Bruce was lynched by a royalist mob in 1815; Carnot died in 1823, Caulaincourt in 1827, Davout in 1823. Desaix had been killed in 1800, while Druot had died in 1847. Duhesme was killed at Plancenoit in 1815; Dumouriez died in 1823, Fouché in 1820, St Cyr in 1830, Grouchy in 1847. Joubert had died in 1799. Jourdan died in 1833, Junot in 1813 after jumping from a window, Kellerman in 1835, and Langeron in 1831. Lannes had been killed in 1809, Lefebvre died in 1820, MacDonald in 1840, Marmont in 1852, Masséna in 1817. Moreau had been killed in 1813 at the Battle of Dresden. Murat was shot by firing squad in Calabria in 1815 and Ney was executed in 1815. Mortier died in 1825, Oudinot in 1847. Poniatowski had perished at Liepzig in 1813. Villeneuve had committed suicide or been murdered in 1806.

These were the main protagonists of the longest European war of recent history, the first total war in the modern sense embracing whole populations and waged by huge conscript armies.

Such was the course of the War of Wars. But in the poet’s phrase, ‘What good came of it at last?’ Napoleon, building on the French Revolution, saw himself as the great modernizer of Europe after centuries of absolutism; Britain saw herself as defending Europe from a more monstrous despotism than had ever been experienced before. Who was right? It is time to attempt to assess the significance of Napoleon’s achievements and defeat.

The wheel of history had turned full circle: in fact it may even have gone into reverse. The regime of Louis XVIII was more autocratic and reactionary than that of his more intelligent older brother, Louis XVI. It was less reformist and enlightened and was dominated by a seesaw struggle between the ultras and aristocratic moderates like the Duc de Richelieu and Decazes. Worst of all it was propped up by an army of humiliating occupation under the didactic Wellington.

It can safely be said that France after 1815 was more backward economically, probably politically and, intellectually, and certainly socially – with large numbers of former soldiers and bandits marauding around that devastated country – than it had been before the Revolution of 1789. In a quarter of a century, both the Revolution and Napoleon had succeeded in returning the country back to what it was before the whole process had begun, with a poorer economy than the one expanding sharply under Louis XVI.

Yet many subsequent historians claimed that there were much greater underlying changes, that the revolutionary and Napoleonic period precipitated a great leap forward in European history from the
dynastic autocracies that had frozen the region for so long. In particular, the revolutionary period is said to have ushered in a greater thirst of ordinary people for their rights: the Napoleonic period was a middle-class revolution. Marxist historians have long held this view.

There is a truth here; but it may be that the economic changes that preceded the Revolution under Louis XVI were primarily responsible for both the emergence of a ‘proletariat’ – the Paris mob – and a bourgeoisie. As the historian Alfred Cobban has shown, the main instigators and beneficiaries of the Revolution were not the new middle classes, but minor functionaries and civil servants under the
ancien régime
, a class of intellectuals who felt they had not received their true deserts in life. Certainly by 1815 the Paris mob was utterly cowed and the bourgeoisie was little more politically dominant than before the Revolution, while aristocratic reactionaries were more powerful than before 1789. Equally this return to an aristocratic ice age was accompanied by economic progress and the general evolution of political thought into a continuing struggle between reactionaries and progressives.

Yet it is possible to argue that this exact process was underway in the enlightened and progressive, if politically autocratic, period before the Revolution. Who was the more enlightened – Voltaire, Robespierre or Napoleon? The process might have moved peacefully ahead in an evolutionary way and perhaps faster through gradualist reform, inevitably so if new industrial methods were imported from Britain, than through the violent upheavals of revolution and wars of conquest.

Further, France, a state at least as powerful as Britain before the industrial revolution, was crippled politically and economically for decades after 1815. It remained a largely backward agrarian country: its own industrial revolution was seriously postponed, its bourgeois economic class in its great trading cities had lost money and competitive advantage with Britain, and it had deindustrialized, if it had ever really industrialized. Possibly the same would have occurred if there had been no revolutionary or Napoleonic periods: yet given the pace of economic change in France before the Revolution, and the intellectual ferment of the period, it seems unlikely.

What is undeniable is that France was considerably worse off economically and more backward politically in 1816 than in 1788,
and that the industrial revolution had been limited to military-related manufacturing, which was not particularly efficient. While Britain was undergoing a dramatic industrial revolution during this period, France in many respects fell way behind, and ceased to be a major economic and political rival to Britain until the late twentieth century.

In political terms, the stability of French institutions before 1789 was never to recover – arguably to this day, with nearly two centuries of unsatisfactory constitutional experiments succeeding each other, from an absolute monarchy to bourgeois constitutions, to a Second Empire to a bourgeois struggle with the working class represented by the Paris Commune, to the chaotic Third Republic. This was followed by an era of weak governments under the Fourth Republic and then a renewed ‘strong’ government with an unsatisfactory coexistence of president and parliament in the Fifth.

Even France’s population growth became sluggish after the Napoleonic period. The enduring legacy of the revolutionary-Napoleonic period was quite different to that intended: a massive further centralization of the French state with the elimination of traditional local legal freedoms and autonomies and an independent aristocracy and gentry. If the court of Versailles was too centralized, the court of Napoleon was virtually all-powerful, a military dictatorship. France never recovered from this: right up to modern times, it has veered between a parliamentary and an autocratic centralist system with the latter usually winning, most recently with the imposition of the Gaullist constitution after 1959.

Napoleon sought to impose the same upon the countries he conquered, sweeping away local ‘feudal’ privileges, many of them arbitrary and unsatisfactory, ancient structures of princedoms, merchant guilds and complex legal demarcations in favour of a unified Code Napoleon. This has been cited as one of his greatest and most lasting achievements. In fact the Code Napoleon was far from ideal, too inflexible to take account of local circumstances and traditions; it was also state-centred, lacking the guarantees and pluralisms that defined and defended the rights of individuals, insisting that the individual prove his lack of guilt rather than the presumption of innocence, and giving central authority through the magistrature virtually absolute
powers over the citizens. Local circumstances over the past two centuries have modified its often harsh and arbitrary, if effective, application. But it is far from certain that the Code Napoleon was an improvement upon existing legal systems, complex, fragmented and sometimes iniquitous as they might be.

The much shorter-lived attempt by revolutionary and Napoleonic France to ‘liberate’ other countries from archaic and oppressive feudal rulers was, if this interpretation is correct, almost entirely bogus. Napoleon looted and extorted colossal taxation and tributes from France’s subject systems on a par with the Aztec empire in Mexico. He imposed his own extended clan as rulers of most of his dominions in a fashion that harked back to the Middle Ages; the clan ruled arbitrarily and without check by either constitutional institutions or local traditions.

He dispensed with revolutionary institutions, substituting an empire and monarchy far more showy, absolute and despotic than those of their traditional rulers and creating a phoney new aristocracy which depended upon his favour. He behaved more like an Emperor of China or oriental despot than any kind of progressive political modernizer rooted in enlightenment thinking or political philosophy.

It has been said that he catalysed a ‘bourgeois’ revolution in those countries, advancing the middle class and destroying the feudal aristocracy. In fact he and his clan of flashy nepotistic neo-monarchs promoted their own friends and sympathizers, whether from the old aristocracy – some of whom were happy to collaborate – or the merchant bourgeoisie. But there was no attempt to transform the economies of these countries and seed a new capitalist bourgeoisie of the kind being created for example in Britain. Countries like Italy and Spain remained steeped in agrarian poverty until well into the twentieth century.

He has been credited with stimulating a sense of ‘modern’ ‘nationalist’ sentiment which never existed before, and has even been described as the father of the modern European nation state. Neither revolutionary France nor Napoleon ever intended anything of the kind: invasion, domination, subjugation and the reduction of these countries to tributary status were France’s objectives. Napoleon
stamped vigorously on any spark of Prussian nationalism, for example. The emergence of Prussian nationalism had occurred long before 1789, and France was determined to crush it. The emergence of a Prussian-dominated Germany – for good or ill – took place decades later.

In Italy, the widespread admiration for Napoleon which emerged towards the middle of the nineteenth century was merely an expression of hostility to autocratic Austrian domination reimposed, along with Papal domination of the centre and the Bourbon state in the south, after 1815. Its unification was neither advanced nor held up during the Napoleonic period: it was merely frozen for a quarter of a century.

In Austria, the revolutionary and Napoleonic interregnum had virtually no impact on the hold of the Habsburgs upon their far-flung, mostly peasant empire: nor until the 1914–18 war did this change. In Spain, Napoleon’s defeat was followed by the imposition of the most repressive, reactionary monarchy the country had endured for half a century, that of Ferdinand VII. True, his exactions provoked an angry struggle with liberals; but the latter had been emerging before the Napoleonic intervention and might indeed have taken power gradually and constitutionally had the ravages of Napoleonic rule never occurred.

Russia, of course, was not affected at all by revolutionary and Napoleonic ‘progress’ for more than a century, its Romanov dynasty becoming largely entrenched in resistance to change during the Napoleonic wars. In Britain, it is possible to ascribe the coming to power of a deeply conservative clique under Lord Liverpool, Castlereagh and the Wellesleys to a reaction against Napoleon (although there were other reasons too). The wars virtually squeezed out the moderate centre represented by Pitt, Grenville and Canning.

In 1816 Europe in fact was far less ‘progressive’, ‘middle-class’, ‘democratic’, ‘nationalist’, ‘anti-feudal’ and even democratically evolved than in 1788. The revolutionary Napoleonic period had set the clock back, not forward, except in one crucial respect: the expansion of the role of the central state, fuelled by the military imperative – in Napoleon’s case to conquer, in other cases to resist him – a legacy that was to last well into the twentieth century and which in many respects is continuing.

In other important ways, Europe had regressed: its peoples had been decimated by wars which reduced Europe’s population by anything up to a tenth, left few regions untouched, conscripted enormous quantities of cannon fodder, wrecked farmland, trade and commerce and left barely a family unaffected by the first modern, total war, scything through not just particular regions, elites and armies but entire populations.