Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (30 page)

Lucien was little better: He told everyone he was responsible for the coup that had made his brother consul. Napoleon believed he had published an anonymous pamphlet,
A Parallel Between Caesar, Cromwell and Bonaparte,
and promptly sent him off to be ambassador to Spain. Napoleon was infuriated by his siblings’ failure to marry as he wished. Lucien refused a dynastic marriage with the queen of Parma, instead marrying Alexandrine Jouberthon, the widow of a bankrupt speculator. When Napoleon chastised his brother because he had “married a whore,” Lucien shot back “at least
my
whore is young and pretty.”
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After he departed in a terrible temper, Napoleon gathered Josephine in his arms. “It is painful to find in one’s own family such stubborn opposition to interests of such magnitude. Must I, then, separate myself from everyone? Must I rely on myself alone? Well! I will suffice to myself, and you, Josephine—you will be my comfort.”
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At the age of thirty, the man who ruled all France could not control his family. Even the youngest, Caroline, would not do as he wished. Seventeen, blond, and only just out of Madame Campan’s, she had fallen passionately in love with General Joachim Murat, a handsome, thuggish, vulgar man with a strong Gascon accent. Napoleon looked down on him, for he was an innkeeper’s son, and thought him stupid—and also hated him for boasting (untruthfully) that he had seduced Madame Bonaparte. But Murat, thirty-two and dripping with masculinity and ambition, was determined to marry Caroline. Napoleon refused, and it was actually Josephine who attempted to push his sister’s cause. She had always tried hard with Caroline, sending her presents and fond letters when she was at school with Hortense, and now she saw her chance to be helpful.
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Added to this, she knew Murat disliked her, and she wanted to win him around. On January 20, 1800, Josephine’s plan came to fruition: Caroline married Murat in an intimate civil ceremony at Mortefontaine, Joseph Bonaparte’s grand estate. Napoleon was annoyed, but with his wife and his family united, he had been unable to prevent the marriage from going ahead. Caroline was ecstatic. “Her beauty was striking,” wrote the Duchesse d’Abrantès. “She was fresh as a rose.” Her head was a little too big for her body, but her “skin looked as smooth as pink satin.”
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In encouraging the marriage, Josephine had made a major mistake: Together, the Murats were united in a mutual desire to unseat her—they still disliked her for her influence over her husband and saw no
reason to be grateful to her for pushing forth their marriage. And Napoleon, peeved at being outmaneuvered, took his revenge on his wife. He gave his sister a very small dowry of thirty thousand francs but supplemented it with a diamond necklace from Josephine’s own jewelry box.
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Josephine was furious. Not to be beaten, she hunted for an even more expensive replacement. She settled on a set of pearls worth 250,000 francs, designed by the fashionable jeweler Foncier, which once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Having identified her prize, Josephine found the money to buy it by asking General Berthier, minister for war, for a loan. It was a shrewd move. Berthier was anxious to stay in her favor, since he was hoping to get his Italian lover, Madame Visconti, accepted at the evening soirées at the Luxembourg.
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Josephine always listened patiently when Berthier needed to discuss his emotional problems, and he was keen to show his gratitude. He promptly offered some army contractors payment for a hospital service in Italy—if they paid him kickbacks. The money flowed in, and Josephine had her beautiful pearls. It was a story reminiscent of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace.

Josephine then had to fool Napoleon, who had an uncanny ability to remember each and every piece of jewelry in her collection. The necklace had to sit unworn in her jewelry box, shining temptingly at her whenever she opened the lid. Unable to face an impending party without her new pearls, she asked Bourrienne to remain by her side so he could tell Napoleon that the jewels had been long in her possession.

“How fine you are today!” said Bonaparte at the party. “Where did you get these pearls? I think I never saw them before.” “Oh! mon Dieu!” she replied, “you have seen them a dozen times! It is the necklace which the Cisalpine Republic gave me, and which I now wear in my hair.” Loyal Bourrienne backed up her lie, and Napoleon trundled off, satisfied.
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I
N HIS DAY-TO-DAY
life, Napoleon struggled to control the women of his circle. His sisters and his mother did as they pleased, and Josephine often outwitted him. In law, however, he was determined to put a control on all women; he carried a little bit of the young man who had
yearned after the glamorous Parisians who wouldn’t give him a second glance. Now, he decided, his ideal woman was one who remained at home, producing sons for his army.

Madame de Rémusat felt it no exaggeration to claim that Napoleon “despised women,” for “he regarded their weakness as unanswerable proof of their inferiority.”
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His views found their most public expression in the Civil Code, also known as the Code Napoleon.
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Before the consulate, there was no single set of laws to follow; instead, people were governed by local customs and charters, as in feudal times. Napoleon wished for one legal code that would define the lives of his people. The code was Napoleon’s monument, his attempt to show that he could be not only a great general but also a lawmaker and give “a direction to the public spirit.”
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“My greatest victory was my civil government,” he would later say while in exile on the island of St. Helena.
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Even though he would occupy the role of a monarch—with more powers than Louis XVI had enjoyed, thanks to his direct control of the army—Napoleon created the impression that his subjects were living in a world of post-revolutionary equality.

The Civil Code was, on its face, founded on the principles that had driven the Revolution in 1789: equality before the law and the secularization of the state. It put an end to privileges of birth and enshrined a meritocracy: Government jobs should go to the most qualified. The ever growing middle classes of France were pacified and convinced that the sacrifices of the revolutionary era had not been in vain. The code was meant to keep Napoleon’s key supporters on his side by abolishing feudalism and aristocratic rank, but also by preserving the rights of wealthy men of property and implying they would only get richer. The rights of workers were, of course, irrelevant. And the real losers in the Civil Code were women.

In his new laws, Napoleon instituted harsh limits on the rights of women. The laws granting them rights over property and money that they previously possessed were abolished and replaced with laws emphasizing their duty to be obedient to their husbands and fathers; they were essentially awarded the legal status of minors. “A wife must promise obedience and fidelity in marriage,” noted one of the articles. Acquiring
a divorce became a relatively straightforward process for men but very difficult to achieve for women. A man could divorce a woman for adultery, but a woman could do so only if the mistress had been brought into the family home. An adulterous wife could be imprisoned for two years and would be released only if her husband took her back. A straying husband simply paid a fine. Even the happily married were restricted: A wife’s right to handle money was very much reduced, unless she was a registered trader.

“Women these days require restraint,” he declared. “They go where they like, do what they like. It is not French to give women the upper hand.”
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Napoleon felt the family should be treated in the same way as France. The code promoted the family as the basic financial and social unit—and the way to keep the family together was through the submission of women.

The code also reflected Napoleon’s political desire to bind the bourgeois to him. By 1804, his grasp on France was complete, with backing from the military, the property-owning classes, and the peasantry. The peasants supported him because they had been able to buy confiscated land, while the booming economy had created more work and driven down the price of bread. The property-owning nouveau riche and businessmen, speculators, traders, and bankers were delighted by their new protector. The upper echelons of the army lined their pockets with the loot they had obtained.

Is it possible to see Josephine’s unreliable behavior as partly responsible for this enshrinement of female inequality in law? Certainly, Napoleon saw himself as surrounded by women who had excessive power, but he was not only resentful of his wife. Women on campaign had only hindered operations, in his opinion, and the intellectual women of the salons, such as Madame de Staël, infuriated him with their interest in female equality. Most of all, his plans for French world domination needed a constant supply of young, fit men to be sacrificed to his aims, and women who hoped for independence or a life of intellectual or financial endeavor were a threat to this. There was a fear across Europe at the time that men and women, particularly those of the gentility and aristocracy, were becoming too enervated or frivolous to have children, and Napoleon saw reinstituting the proper gender roles as the solution.
Paradoxically, he could not endure the sight of a pregnant woman, and
enceinte
ladies were not welcome at his gatherings (perhaps partly because of Josephine’s own failure to become pregnant).
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But he endlessly proclaimed that it was the duty of women to be mothers. As he had told Madame de Staël, the woman he most admired in history was the one “who had the most children.”

Napoleon was always trying to impose proper gender roles on his courtiers. On one occasion, he cornered Madame de Condorcet, the beautiful salon hostess. “Madame, I do not like women who meddle in politics,” he announced. “General, you are quite right,” she replied, “but in a country where their heads are cut off, it is natural for them to want to know the reason why.”
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“Do you still like men as much as ever, Madame?” he demanded of Josephine’s old friend Aimée de Coigny. “Yes, Sire,” Aimée replied, “when they are polite.” Few others had the chance to get the better of him. “The terror he inspires is inconceivable,” said Madame de Staël. “One has the impression of an imperious wind blowing about one’s ears when one is near that man.”

A
S WELL AS
bringing in civil reform and reminding everyone of his great military victories, Napoleon announced the return of the Catholic Church, abolished in the Revolution, but this time subordinate to the first consul. “Society cannot exist without inequality of wealth and inequality of wealth cannot exist without religion,” he had told Roederer. “Religion is a kind of inoculation … The people must have a religion and that religion must be in the hands of the government.”
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Only the Church could make inequality seem natural and death in war seem less senseless. “It is not we nobles who need religion,” Napoleon said loftily, “but it is necessary for the masses and I shall establish it.”

Those who had fought for the Revolution were infuriated by the idea of reinstalling religion, but the ordinary people craved the old ways, with women in particular practicing their religion in secret. Even the most cynical could see the benefits of resting every seventh day rather than every tenth.

On Easter Sunday 1801, the populace heard the bells of Paris ringing for the first time in ten years. Most churches were missing a few, as Napoleon had requisitioned them for the war effort. At seven in the morning,
in his carriage escorted by dragoons, hussars, grenadiers, and Mamelukes, he essayed forth. Josephine followed behind and seated herself by her husband in the front pew of Notre-Dame. The ceremony itself was lacking in dignity: Both Josephine and Napoleon had forgotten the rituals of worship; in fact, the only members of the congregation who seemed to remember were the ex-bishop Talleyrand and the former priest Fouché. Everybody else stumbled, knelt at the wrong times, and stood openmouthed through the prayers.

Still, the point had been made. Loire peasants, Lyon market stall owners, Breton farmers, and Dijon housewives poured into the churches. As in the old days, church became a place for the rich to show off their wealth. At some of the churches in the more fashionable areas of Paris, there was barely a free seat on Sundays as the rich elites jostled for the front pews, eager to show off their fine clothes and jewels. After a grand ceremony to celebrate the return of Catholicism, Napoleon turned to General Bernadotte, now married to his jilted fiancée, Désirée Clary. “Well, now everything was just as it had been before,” he said. “Yes,” said General Bernadotte, “except for two million men who died for liberty and who are no more.”
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L
ANGUISHING IN HIS
luxurious Château de Grosbois in Val-de-Marne, aged forty-five and in continued exile from Paris and political society, Barras wrote letters to Napoleon and Josephine. “Is this the reward for what you called my great services and for which you vowed eternal gratitude?” he demanded of Napoleon. “When you were buried in Italy and your enemies attacked your republican glory, I defended you … and when your brothers were threatened, they came to me for help.”
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The consul did not reply.

Josephine had been Barras’s companion, and he had covered up her affairs, lent her money, and kept the letters about her adultery out of the newspapers. Yet she did not reply to his letters, either. A year after Napoleon became consul, Barras was arrested at Grosbois and deported to Brussels. His papers and letters to the Bonaparte family were confiscated, denying him the chance to prove his service ever again. Of Josephine’s former circle, only Juliette Récamier was still feted by society, thanks largely to the position of her banker husband. Foreigners, dignitaries,
and even the Bonaparte siblings came to Juliette’s salons, where she performed the “Attitudes,” imitating the poses from Greek myths, borrowing from the celebrated performances of Emma, Lady Hamilton, wife of the envoy to Naples—and, by 1801, the flamboyant mistress of Horatio Nelson and mother of his baby daughter. A book by Friedrich Rehberg, with guidance on how to achieve Emma’s attitudes, had sold like hotcakes across Europe. Juliette performed the poses Emma had used to captivate Nelson, the most terrible enemy of France, but she did it to promote herself as a heroine of the consulate.