The War of Wars (72 page)

Looking at Napoleon’s pronouncements at the time, it is hard not to conclude that Austerlitz and Ulm – his greatest major military victories to date – had turned the Emperor’s head. On 28 February he boasted to Berthier: ‘I have 510,000 men with the colours; I have ordered heavy expenditures for the ports and the increase of the navy; I am going to increase the army by 100,000 men, and I am going to impose additional taxation on France.’ He added later, crazily: ‘In the report on burials I see that in the average year there are 14,000 deaths in Paris; this is equal to a splendid battle.’

This bizarre militarism was accompanied by lordly proclamations to the French.

I want to create in France a lay state. Up till now the world has only known two forms of government, the ecclesiastic and the military. Constantine was the first to establish, by means of the priests, a sort of civilian state; Clovis succeeded in founding the French monarchy only with this same support. Monks are the natural enemies of
soldiers, and have more than once served to check them. The lay order will be strengthened by the creation of a teaching body, and even more strengthened by the creation of a great corporation of magistrates. I think it is unnecessary to take into consideration a system of education for girls, they can get no better teaching than that of their mothers. A public education does not suit them, for the reason that they are not called on to live in public; for them habit is everything, and marriage is the goal.

The education of young people, he felt, should be taken away from the church, which he despised, and made a task of the military.

In the teaching body we must imitate the classifications of military rank. I hold strongly to the idea of a corporation, because a corporation never dies. There need be no fear that I want to bring back the monks; even if I wanted to I couldn’t. The vices and scandal that arose among the monks are well known; I had opportunities for forming my own opinion in that matter, having been in part educated by them. I respect what religion holds in respect; but as a statesman I dislike the fanaticism of celibacy; it was one of the means whereby the Court of Rome attempted to rivet the chains of Europe by preventing the cleric from being a citizen. Military fanaticism is the only sort that is of any use to me; a man must have it to get himself killed. My principal object in instituting a teaching body is to have some means of directing political and moral opinion.

He was deeply cynical about religion.

At Cairo, and in the desert, the mosques are inns as well; as many as 6,000 persons may shelter and eat in them; or even use the fountains and water for bathing. Our ceremony of baptism comes from this; it could not have arisen in our climate, in which water is not precious enough – this year we are deluged. When water fails the Egyptians baptize with sand. As for me, it is not the mystery of the Incarnation that I see in religion, but the mystery of social order. Heaven
suggests an idea of equality which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor. To look at it another way, religion is a sort of inoculation or vaccine which, while satisfying our sense of the supernatural, guarantees us from the charlatans and the magicians.

He was quite willing to pick a quarrel with the Pope who, to his intense irritation, showed few signs of being overawed by his new, mighty temporal responsibilities: ‘On the 13th of November the Pope wrote me a letter of the most ridiculous, most insane, character: those people think I am dead! I am a religious man, but I am not a bigoted idiot. For the Pope I am Charlemagne, because like Charlemagne I unite the Crowns of France and of the Lombards, and my Empire touches the East. I will reduce the Pope to be the mere bishop of Rome.’

Napoleon believed that the Pope had inspired a rising in Parma in 1806 and was behind continuing Italian resistance to French rule; he considered Rome a hotbed of British spies. Napoleon introduced a new Catechism which called upon Catholics to state their allegiance to the Empire:

We in particular owe to Napoleon I, our Emperor, love, respect, obedience, loyalty, military service, the dues laid down for the conservation and defence of the empire and of its throne; we also owe him fervent prayers for his safety and for the temporal and spiritual prosperity of the state. . . .

Are there not particular reasons which should attach us more closely to Napoleon I, our Emperor?

Yes, because it is he whom God has sustained, in difficult circumstances, so that he might re-establish public worship and the holy faith of our fathers, and that he might be their protector. He has restored and maintained public order by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the state with his powerful arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord by the consecration he has received from the sovereign pontiff, head of the universal Church.

What must one think of those who should fail in their duty to our Emperor?

According to the apostle Paul, they would resist the established order of God himself, and would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.

Napoleon’s underlying ruthlessness was if anything sharpened. When a small revolt broke out in Hesse, Napoleon ordered the village where it occurred to be razed to the ground and 200 people to be shot, in a foretaste of Nazi occupation tactics the next century. To his brother Joseph, whom he considered too soft-hearted, he issued instructions that make the brutality of the old Bourbon court of Naples pale. ‘Shoot without pity any lazzaroni who indulge in dagger play. You can keep an Italian population down only by holy fear. Impose a war contribution of 30 millions on the kingdom. Your policy is too hesitating.’

Paranoia, although probably in this case justified, was never far below the surface:

You trust the Neapolitans too much, especially in the matter of your kitchen and your personal guards, which means that you are taking chances of being poisoned or assassinated. You have not known enough of my domestic arrangements to realize that, even in France, I have always been guarded by my most faithful and my oldest soldiers. No one should enter your room at night except your aide-de-camp, who should sleep in the room next to your bedroom; your door should be locked on the inside, and you should not let your aide-de-camp in before having recognized his voice, and he should not knock at your door until after closing the door of his room, so as to be sure no one can follow him. These precautions are important; they are not troublesome, and they inspire confidence, quite apart from the fact that actually they may save your life. You should regulate your way of living this way once and for all. Don’t be obliged to adopt it in an emergency, which would be humiliating both for you and for those about you. Trust my experience.

Joseph had, in fact, been uncharacteristically active. He forged an alliance with the local anti-Bourbons in Naples, and abolished feudal rights in his kingdom in April 1806; he also introduced land reform,
breaking up the large estates and handing out small parcels to the peasants. He set up a ruling council in a small bow to democracy, and introduced the Code Napoleon. He seized the monasteries and their estates and used the proceeds to pay the national debt of some 130 million ducats, a familiar French revolutionary method. He stripped most of the clergy of their rights (there were some 82,000 clerics and 31,000 nobility owning two-thirds of the land in this kingdom of 5 million people). He also introduced an income tax. Most of the measures were taken in order to raise revenues to maintain the 50,000-strong army of French occupation. He lived with a Neapolitan mistress, Maria Giulia Colana, and regarded himself as the ‘people’s King’ – or ‘philosopher king’, but was genuinely shocked when an uprising broke out against him in the summer which was quickly suppressed.

Louis, now King of Holland, was almost ludicrously ill-equipped to become a king, being physically crippled, unable to talk properly, mentally unstable and prone to acute jealousy. Yet Louis was ultimately to gain popularity in Holland by seeking to defy Napoleon’s ban on trade with Britain and through his gentle treatment of anti-French partisans, as well as his decision to end conscription. Napoleon wrote angrily to him: ‘A prince who gets a reputation for good nature in the first year of his reign is laughed at in the second. The love that kings inspire should be virile – partly an apprehensive respect, and partly a thirst for reputation. When a King is said to be a good fellow, his reign is a failure. How can a good fellow – or a good father if you prefer it so – bear the burdens of royalty, keep malcontents in order, and either silence political passions or enlist them under his own banner?’ The Emperor described Louis as ‘a Dutchman, a dealer in cheese’, but he eventually became known as ‘Good King Louis’ among his subjects before Napoleon finally relieved him from command in 1810.

The family spoils system soon extended to the youngest brother, Jérôme, who was given the new kingdom of Westphalia. After Napoleon had pensioned off his first wife, the American Elizabeth Patterson from Baltimore, Jérôme had married Catherine, the good-natured daughter of the former king. Jérôme was of generous disposition, encouraging the arts, and vaccinating his people. But he too was
singularly ill-fitted for kingship. Napoleon had issued precise instructions: ‘What is above all desired in Germany is that you will grant to those who do not belong to the nobility, but possess talents, an equal claim to offices, and that all vestiges of serfdom and of barriers between the sovereign and the lowest class of people shall be completely done away with. The benefits of the Code Napoleon, legal procedure in open courts, the jury, these are points by which your monarchy should be distinguished . . . your people must enjoy a liberty, an equality, a prosperity unknown in the rest of Germany.’

Jérôme, however, ran up colossal debts which were paid for by exacting punitive taxes. He kept ninety-two carriages and 200 horses. He had fourteen chamberlains dressed in scarlet and gold to administer extravagant parties and private theatricals. He also was sexually incontinent, conducting an open affair with Josephine’s cousin, Stephanie de Beauharnais (whom Napoleon himself admired); and in Westphalia he was said to sleep with any girl who was willing to say yes. He became known as the ‘merry monarch’.

Lucien Bonaparte alone had eschewed becoming a viceroy of Napoleon’s empire – he was offered Italy – having quarrelled with Napoleon over his choice of wife, whom he refused to give up on the orders of his older brother. However, when she died after an agonizing mysterious 24-hour illness, some alleged she had been poisoned. The only one of the brothers who stood up to Napoleon and with real political talent, he had left-wing, Jacobin convictions. He decided to leave France to start a new life in America; en route he was captured by the British who kept him in comfortable confinement in Ludlow and Worcestershire.

Of all Napoleon’s siblings, his somewhat masculine sister Elisa was the one who showed greatest talent as a ruler, and she was, needless to say, given the smallest kingdom. She was appointed Princess of Lucca, where she ruled quite well, and had responsibility for the marble quarries at Carrara, from which she had innumerable busts of her brother made. She was then appointed Grand Duchess of Tuscany, where she renovated the Pitti Palace in Florence.

Napoleon’s second sister, Caroline, married Joachim Murat, who was later to succeed Joseph as King of Naples with distinctly mixed
results; Caroline was intelligent and had earned a reputation as a schemer, not least against her brother, while Murat was one of Napoleon’s greatest generals but also far from overwhelmed by the talents of his leader.

The sole real success story as a King of Napoleon’s family circle was not one of his own blood line, but his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, who was appointed regent of Italy, a job he performed with detachment and efficiency, the qualities he also brought to the battlefield.

The Emperor’s appointment of his inadequate and unqualified family to thrones across Europe demolished any pretence that he was an idealist: he was in fact a throwback, strutting and posing as a dynastic monarch and appointing his Corsican clan as its princes. One reason he did so was because he felt he could trust his mediocre family better than more talented proconsuls. In this he was mistaken.

The issue remained whether Napoleon could mutate into a pacific and wise ruler creating a new Europe under French hegemony but at least at peace. However his bullying had at last galvanized feeble and opaque Prussia into action. A senior British diplomat in Dresden, Henry Williams Wynn, commented that ‘the king is well disposed. But unfortunately he is a coward and is surrounded by a set who know how to attack the weak side.’ Yet faced with the possibility of losing Hanover – its bribe for not entering the last war against France – Prussia, although alone and isolated in Europe, was affronted into declaring war. Napoleon viewed this spectacle with contempt, and even amusement.

He was offered the double chance to emasculate Prussia and to deal a knock-out blow to the enemy he really feared, Russia, which was in alliance with Prussia. On 10 September he wrote witheringly:

the attitude of Prussia is still provocative. They need to be taught a good lesson . . . Prussia is arming in ridiculous fashion: she will, however, soon disarm, or pay dear for it. Nothing could be more foolish and more hesitating than the conduct of the [Prussian] cabinet. The Court of Vienna makes great protestations of friendship, which its extreme weakness makes me believe in. Whatever happens I can and will face it out. The conscription which I have just levied is coming in on all sides; I shall call-up the reserves; I am thoroughly supplied, and lack nothing. I may possibly take command of the Grand Army in a few days. It numbers about 150,000 men, enough to put down Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg.

On 6 October he proclaimed boldly to his soldiers: ‘Fools! the lessons of experience fade away, and with some men hatred and jealousy never die. Soldiers! Not one of you would wish to regain France by any other path than that of honour; we must return only under triumphal arches. Forward, then! Let the Prussian army meet with the same fate as it did fourteen years ago.’ A few days later he remarked incredulously: ‘Their generals are perfect idiots. It is inconceivable how the Duke of Brunswick, who has a reputation, can direct the operations of his army in so ridiculous a fashion.’ Yet he was in for a shock: it was not to be so easy.