Citizen Emperor (57 page)

In fact, the order to occupy Rome had already gone out. The last-minute negotiations attempted by Alquier may have been nothing more than a smokescreen, or an attempt to lull the Vatican into a false sense of security. Besides, Alquier was not really trusted in Paris; he came across as too conciliatory.
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Napoleon had been holding back from outright annexation for about two years, no doubt afraid of the reaction from both the pope – excommunication was a possibility – and Catholics in general.
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He ordered French troops under General Sextius Alexandre de Miollis to march on Rome. Miollis entered the Eternal City on 2 February 1808, took possession of the Castel Sant’Angelo, marched up to the doors of the pope’s residence, the Quirinal, and aimed eight cannon directly at it. It was going a little overboard; the pope, surrounded by his cardinals, was praying in the Pauline Chapel. The occupation of Rome had taken a few hours and met with little resistance. The French arrested any English visitors and those Neapolitans who had remained loyal to Ferdinand IV found loitering in the city.

The next day, General Miollis was granted an audience with the pope, who declared that he considered himself a prisoner. If you think that the pope is a ‘simple, sweet, easy’ man, warned the French ambassador, then you would be mistaken. Pius VII was physically frail, but he boasted to the ambassador that if his predecessor had lived like a lion and died like a lamb, he, who had lived like a lamb, would die like a lion.
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This was not mere rhetoric. The pope was just as determined – or intractable, depending on one’s point of view – as Napoleon. He boasted to Alquier that he would rather be hacked to pieces, or skinned alive, than enter into Napoleon’s system.

Once again we see how Napoleon’s mind operated in this affair. By invading the Papal States he had in fact acted rashly. Not only was it now impossible for him to evacuate the pope’s territories without some sort of arrangement, but he had no idea what he was going to do next (we will see this behaviour repeated when he occupied Moscow). He was of course persuaded that Pius VII would come to see reason once French troops were living on his doorstep, but this was to underestimate the pope’s determination. Two motives govern Napoleon’s diplomatic behaviour: impatience, and an inability to make the least concession to his adversary. As a result, he always opted for force as a solution to his problems. He presented Pius VII with an ultimatum – join the Empire or suffer annexation – that necessarily had to be rejected. His actions from then on were even more heavy-handed than usual. By annexing outright the Papal States, he had in one stroke undone everything he had achieved through the Concordat – namely, religious peace – and now risked putting not only the ecclesiastical hierarchy offside, but also Catholics throughout the Empire.
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His dealings with the pope show a lack of understanding that is stunningly obtuse, born of an inability to see his opponent’s point of view. This would point to a lack of intelligence on the part of any other head of state, but how does one explain this ingrained inability in Napoleon to come to workable arrangements with his interlocutors? The answer is simple – he was an inveterate bully who could have no equals, only vassals, and who could not understand the pope’s spiritual strength and determination. In his own mind, Napoleon’s temporal power was bound to win out over the pope’s spiritual authority. He approached his differences with the Church in much the same way he would approach a battlefield, determined to subdue his opponent. He was never to understand the depth of this misconception.

A
consulta
had been meeting throughout the first half of 1809 – it was convoked when the French occupied Rome – and was to deliver its findings on what to do with the Eternal City on 1 January 1810. Annexation, it would appear, was the only solution left open to Napoleon. If he restored the pope to his temporal states, relations between the Catholic Church and France would be back to square one.
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He still had to decide how the Papal States were going to be integrated into the Empire. He could either give them to one of his relatives, or incorporate them within the Kingdom of Italy or the Kingdom of Naples. In the end, he decided to annex them outright and transform them into French departments. This was not going to happen without repercussions on Catholic opinion, even in France. The terrain had to be prepared by a propaganda campaign that was aimed at convincing the French that the popes had always been the enemies of France and that direct French intervention in Italy had not been without historical precedent.
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The Famine March

The same can be said of Napoleon’s intervention in the Iberian Peninsula. A number of traditional views explain why Napoleon got involved in Portugal, and then Spain.
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The most obvious one has already been mentioned – his unrestrained ambition, his need to conquer, his need for fresh triumphs, so that others would continue to fear him. That kind of explanation belies the complexity of the problems facing him and is a somewhat pat response: Napoleon did what he did, because he was Napoleon.
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The most obvious alternative explanation, one with which most historians would agree, is that the invasion of the Peninsula was born of the need to eliminate any country that was aiding and abetting France’s enemies, especially Britain. Napoleon himself admitted that all his wars of conquest were designed to gain control of the coasts of Europe.
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Conquest and expansion were simply a means of getting at the British by extending a blockade that would bring the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ to its knees through economic strangulation.
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To that extent, Napoleon simply implemented an economic policy that had begun during the Convention and the Directory, and which he continued to implement after coming to power. France signed a number of preferential economic treaties with other states (Naples, Spain, Portugal and Russia in 1801, the Ottoman Empire in 1802, Spain again in 1803, the Kingdom of Italy in 1803 and again in 1806) that excluded British goods from those states’ ports.
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Of course, for the blockade to work, it had to become universal, and France had to control the ports of all of Europe. There is a disarming simplicity to this logic, one that is difficult to fault, namely, that the implementation of economic measures to defeat Britain led to the expansion of the Empire. All Napoleon’s conquests and annexations after 1802, his whole foreign policy – including the invasion of Russia in 1812 – can be explained from this perspective.

So, too, can the invasion of Portugal. To simplify, relations between Lisbon and Paris had been tense for some time, largely because the Portuguese, despite signing the Treaty of Badajoz in June 1801, had not entirely closed their ports to English trade. Moreover, the British often used Lisbon to refit and supply their ships in the Mediterranean. French diplomatic efforts to exclude the British came to naught, provoking a frustrated and angry reaction from Napoleon.
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If we are to allow the logic of Napoleon’s economic system against Britain, there was little choice but armed intervention, with all the complications and uncertainties which that brought with it. But one should also keep in mind that Napoleon was doing little more than continuing a policy adopted by the Directory, which had also considered an invasion of Portugal as a means of striking at Britain, but which it had never been able to carry through.
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Napoleon delivered an ultimatum to the Prince Regent, Dom João of Portugal: close the country’s ports to the British by 1 September, or face a declaration of war.
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He threatened the Portuguese ambassador, Lourenço Lima, that if his court did not comply, ‘in two months the House of Braganza would cease to reign in Europe’.
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Napoleon was in the habit of dictating to smaller powers and expected that his orders would be obeyed. In any event, Portugal was hardly in a position to resist, and it did not. In reply, Dom João declared war on Britain – although he did not arrest British subjects as Napoleon had requested – closed ports to British shipping, closed off Britain’s naval bases in the Atlantic and its access to the Mediterranean, and offered his nine-year-old son in marriage to Napoleon’s niece. João believed that Napoleon would be flattered to form an alliance with one of Europe’s oldest monarchies. He was mistaken; Napoleon rejected the offer.
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In fact, Portugal was playing a double game. The chief minister, António de Azevedo, was at the same time reassuring London that any measures against it were show, and secretly requested Britain’s assistance. Portugal had, after all, been allied to Britain since 1703. Clearly, it had absolutely no intention of breaking off relations with Britain.

Napoleon was no dupe; he was perfectly aware of what the Portuguese were up to. It is possible that he was contemplating overthrowing the House of Braganza, and putting one of his relatives in its place,
as early as 1804.
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The other alternative was to partition Portugal between the King of Spain, Carlos IV, the Queen of Etruria, Maria Luisa, regent for her young son Charles Louis, and the Spanish favourite, Don Manuel Godoy, the Prince of Peace.
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The partition was even formalized in a treaty at Fontainebleau in October 1807. That plan never materialized because of the rupture between France and Spain. That same month, Napoleon ordered General Junot through Spain – that the Spanish king allowed this was without precedent in the country’s history – to arrive in Lisbon by forced marches.
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The invasion took place in terrible conditions, in heavy rain, with limited shelter and in a country so poor that there was little in the way of food to pillage.
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Junot pushed his men so hard – covering around 1,000 kilometres in four weeks, an average of about thirty-four kilometres a day – that only 1,500 of the original 25,000 troops managed to drag themselves that far.
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One general dubbed it the ‘famine march’ and estimated that between 1,700 and 1,800 men died of hunger, exhaustion, drowning and rock falls. The expedition was meant to strong-arm Portugal into submission. In other words, Napoleon again used force as a tool in his diplomatic armoury, ignoring what the French consul general in Lisbon, France Hermann, had been warning would happen. Junot arrived in Lisbon only to find that Dom João, along with thousands of courtiers, had boarded ship and fled, sailing for Brazil, persuaded in part by a British threat to bombard Lisbon if they did not (Copenhagen had been bombed for three days only a few months before). It was an embarrassment for Napoleon, gazumped by the English just as his troops were in reach of their goal – the Portuguese fleet.
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A Despised Family

If the reasons for Napoleon intervening in Portugal appear reasonably straightforward, the same cannot be said for Spain. The fact that he was thinking of partitioning Portugal and handing over suzerainty to the King of Spain should put paid to any assertion that he was always bent on eliminating the House of Bourbon in Europe. There was very little long-term thinking in his foreign policy choices, most of which were short-term responses to specific developments, even if that development was the consequence of his own actions.
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What happened then in the six months between the Treaty of Fontainebleau at the end of October 1807 and April 1808 when Napoleon deposed the ruling house of Spain and put his brother on the throne?

Political intrigue and a family dispute that got out of hand is the short answer. The Spanish royal family was possibly the most dysfunctional of all the dysfunctional royal families in Europe. The queen, Maria Luisa, granddaughter of Louis XV, an empty-headed, vain, ardent, unpredictable woman who meddled in politics and dabbled in love affairs – she was accused by contemporaries of being a modern-day Messalina, promiscuous wife of the Emperor Claudius – inflicted her ‘odd tastes’ and ‘scabrous fantasies’ on the rest of the country.
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An unflattering portrait by the Russian ambassador to Madrid has her completely withered at the age of thirty-eight; she had lost all her teeth by then and wore a set of ill-fitting dentures.
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The king, a ‘hale, good-humoured, obliging man’, often remarked, albeit jokingly, that she was ugly and getting old, and this was at least fourteen years before Napoleon invaded Spain.
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The royal couple had virtually handed over power to Godoy, who had ruled over Spain for fifteen years. Godoy was one of those
favoritos
(royal favourites) littered across Spanish history. Rumour had it that he slept with the queen, though little but gossip supports the assertion.
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