Citizen Emperor (47 page)

Once again, the prefects were enlisted to make sure that everyone understood exactly what was expected of them. Letters were sent to the mayors of the towns and villages throughout France instructing them that this was the occasion to ‘express their appreciation and gratitude’, and to ‘take all appropriate measures to give this festival the greatest solemnity’.
¹⁴
It was meant to celebrate ‘the memory of our internal regeneration’, and to encourage local communities to celebrate the state and the head of state. It was then as much an exercise in state building as it was an exercise in the cult of the personality.
¹⁵
The creation of a feast day of St Napoleon combined the religious obedience of Napoleon’s subjects with his own heroic cult.

Anonymous,
Saint Napoléon Officier romain, Martyr
(St Napoleon, Roman officer, martyr), no date. One of the few iconographic pieces from the Empire depicting St Napoleon. On the left-hand side is a frame containing an image of the martyr in prison.

The Feast of St Napoleon was celebrated every year till the end of the regime, and always followed the same pattern – a religious ceremony at Notre Dame, public games, bunting, illuminations. The celebrations were low-key; the most outlandish public display occurred during the inaugural official celebration in Paris when an illuminated star nine metres in diameter was hoisted from the towers of Notre Dame, but even that was tame by the standards of the day.
¹⁶
This modesty is possibly why they do not appear to have generated much enthusiasm,
¹⁷
and why the day was usually set aside for laying the first stones of public works and monuments.
¹⁸
Plays, poems and pamphlets – homages to Napoleon – all lent weight to the idea that this was a national feast day to honour the man responsible for dragging France back from the political abyss that was the Revolution.
¹⁹
‘The season of tears is past,’ declared one pamphlet, ‘the Angels, protectors of this nation, have made a clear sky shine over it; they have dissipated, for ever, those horrible clouds that contained death within them; they have turned off the thunder, closed the tombs, and have delivered peace and happiness to France.’
²⁰
It would not be the last time that an author drew a parallel between the heavens and Napoleon, but this does not mean to say that it had much of an impact on the imaginations of those who were called on to celebrate it. On the contrary, the invention of a St Napoleon exasperated rather than pleased Catholics in the Empire outside France, and its substitution for the Assumption was to prove a two-edged sword. When relations between the imperial state and the Church were good – and they were for a short while – then things played in Napoleon’s favour. When relations turned sour, priests often used the occasion if not to preach against Napoleon, then to preach instead about the Virgin Mary.
²¹
In Belgium and in Italy, some clergy sidelined the new festival and continued discreetly to celebrate the Assumption.
²²
It was a risky business; priests who openly flouted imperial edicts could be arrested and could have their churches closed.

‘He is the One God Created’

Napoleon went a step further, using religion to lay the basis for what would become a personal cult. In 1806, he decided to introduce an imperial catechism, which was meant to render religious instruction uniform throughout the Empire, and which children were required to recite at Sunday schools from May 1806; it was never approved by the pope. Napoleon rewrote parts of the old catechism, and included the following remarkable clauses:

Q. – Are there not particular reasons that should attach us more strongly to Napoleon I, our Emperor?

A. – Yes, for he is the one God created in difficult circumstances in order to re-establish public worship and the holy religion of our fathers, and in order to become its protector. He has restored and preserved public order, by his profound and active wisdom; he defends the State by his powerful arm; he has become the anointed of the Lord, by the consecration he received from the Sovereign Pontiff, head of the universal Church.

Q. – What should we think of those who fail in their duty towards our Emperor?

A. – According to the apostle, St Paul, they would be resisting the order established by God Himself, and would render themselves worthy of eternal damnation.
²³

The Imperial Catechism was an attempt by Napoleon to define a subject’s duties by placing himself within the tradition of European monarchs anointed by God. As such, it represents a radical shift away from the secular nature of the French polity towards a more traditional notion of rule by divine right. Those who now failed in their duty towards Napoleon would find themselves facing ‘eternal damnation’.

However, not all Catholics were going to heed these imperatives. There was a good deal of passive resistance to the adoption of the Catechism both among the Church hierarchy and among the faithful.
²⁴
In Belgium, in the annexed Rhine departments and in Italy, its introduction in 1806 met with strong resistance, to the point where it had to be abandoned.
²⁵
Over time, a number of ‘Catechisms’ sprang up in reaction to the Imperial Catechism. In Spain, for example, a
Catecismo civil
(Citizens’ catechism) was published in 1808, distributed in hundreds of thousands of copies, and translated into almost every European language.
²⁶
Not long afterwards, the Prussian poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote a strongly anti-Napoleonic
Katechismus der Deutschen
(Germans’ catechism).
²⁷

Q. – Where do I find it, this Germany of which you speak, and where does it lie?

A. – Here, my father. – Do not confuse me.

Q. – Where?

A. – On the map.

Q. – Yes, on the map! – This map is from the year 1805. – Don’t you know what happened in the year 1805 when the Treaty of Pressburg was concluded?

A. – After the treaty, Napoleon, the Corsican Emperor, laid waste to it through an act of violence.

Q. – Well? And yet it exists all the same?

The Bonapartes in Europe

At the end of December 1805, while Napoleon was in Munich awaiting the ratification of peace with Austria, he sent a missive to Joseph that was clearly meant as an order. He intended, he informed his brother, to take over the Kingdom of Naples and Joseph was being named commander-in-chief of the Army of Naples. On receiving the letter, Joseph had forty-eight hours to leave Paris for Rome.
²⁸
He himself could not be there in person, Napoleon wrote, because affairs in Paris would keep him occupied. The directive surprised Joseph; there was a good deal of conjecture in Paris at the time about whether his departure for Italy was to be seen as a disgrace or a promotion.
²⁹
Certainly, there were rumours that he was going to be crowned king – this was about the time Napoleon was negotiating with Holland to have Louis installed as its king – but given that he had refused the Italian throne, the Neapolitan throne would have had little attraction for Joseph. For the moment it was a military posting; Joseph was promoted to the rank of general for the occasion and given the unusual title of ‘Lieutenant of the Emperor’.
³⁰
Joseph was meant to win his kingdom at the head of an army.

The Kingdom of Naples was ruled by King Ferdinand IV, married to Maria Carolina, daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa.
³¹
She hated the French for what they had done to her younger sister, Marie-Antoinette, and vowed to crush anything that smacked of revolution. Tensions between the French Republic and the Neapolitan House of Bourbon, in other words, went back some way. While Napoleon was engaged in campaigning against Austria and Russia, Ferdinand reluctantly signed a treaty in which he agreed to remain neutral. That promise was fleeting. Under the influence of his prime minister, the English-born Sir John Acton, and no doubt with a little prodding from Maria Carolina, Ferdinand allowed an Anglo-Russian expeditionary force to land in the Bay of Naples in November 1805.
³²
As a result of what Napoleon considered a betrayal, he decided to intervene. This was not, it should be underlined, the first time the French had tried to control the kingdom. In 1799, the Neapolitan Bourbons were chased from their home and a short-lived (from January to June of that year) Parthenopean Republic was set up that, if it was not under French control, was entirely dependent on a French armed presence for its existence.
³³
The Republic was overthrown by a counter-revolution and those who had supported it were brutally murdered.

Napoleon used the breach of neutrality as an excuse to invade and conquer.
³⁴
Contemporaries like Nelson had predicted it years before; Napoleon had been thinking about such an invasion for some time; northern and central Italy were already firmly under French control; by occupying Naples he would have the whole peninsula. The advantages that would ensue were enormous: he would be able to eliminate Naples as a centre of French émigré activity; and he would be able to exclude the British from Italy and use the ports to help rebuild his navy. Besides, he had not entirely given up on his plans to dominate the Mediterranean and to invade Egypt again. There was the illusion too that Naples was rich since it was one of the largest cities in Europe with a population of over 550,000 people. In reality, it was socially and economically backward. It has been calculated, for example, that there were more than 100,000 ecclesiastics living in the kingdom, approximately one for every fifty inhabitants.
³⁵

Francois Pascal Simon, Baron Gerard,
Portrait de Joseph Bonaparte, roi d’Espagne
(Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain), after 1808.

The temptation, then, to drag Naples into the modern era and to unlock its wealth was too great. Days before Napoleon informed Joseph that he was being sent to Naples, even before French troops had marched south, he issued a proclamation from Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace declaring that the ‘dynasty of Naples has ceased to reign’.
³⁶
The expedition to Naples, with Joseph nominally in charge, was meant to oust the Bourbons and replace them with a prince of his own House. ‘You,’ he told Joseph, ‘if that suits; another if it does not at all suit.’
³⁷
Napoleon, in other words, does not seem to have cared whether Joseph took up the offer or not. Joseph accepted. We do not know why; there is nothing in his letters or memoirs that indicate what he was thinking, and his biographers are surprisingly silent on this point. We can assume that discussions of a kind went on behind the scenes between the two brothers, especially around the sticking point that decided Joseph to renounce the throne of Italy in 1805, namely, his right to the French succession. But there are no records of those negotiations. It is possible that Napoleon simply confronted Joseph with an ultimatum: accept the Neapolitan throne or lose everything.
³⁸
At the end of March 1806, Napoleon conferred on him the title of ‘King of Naples and Sicily’; he retained the French title ‘Grand Elector’ and his rights of succession.
³⁹
It was a watershed moment in the creation of a ‘Grand Empire’, a phrase that was used for the first time in Joseph’s succession.
⁴⁰