The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  IV. MORALS AND MANNERS

  The Revolution, by breaking down political and parental authority, and dismissing religious belief, had let loose the individualistic instincts of the French people—moderately in the provinces, catastrophically in the capital; the center of law found itself struggling within the center of chaos and crime. Napoleon, himself lawless, determined to restore stability to morals and manners as vital to the regeneration of France, the sanity and contentment of its people, and the success of his rule. He made it clear that he would keep a stern eye on all business relations in or with the government, and would punish severely all detected dishonesty. He set his face against immodest dress in society or on the stage; he reprimanded his brother Lucien and his sister Elisa for displaying too much of their flesh in private theatricals; and when, at a soiree, he found himself confronted by Mme. de Staël in low and ample décolleté, he remarked pointedly, “I presume that you nurse your children yourself?”45 He insisted that Talleyrand marry his mistress. Mme. Tallien, who had directed Directory morals by the curve of her hips, disappeared into the provinces; Josephine said goodbye to adultery, and her frightened milliners cut their bills in half. The new Code gave the husband almost Roman powers over his wife and children; the family resumed its function of turning animals into citizens, at whatever cost to personal freedom.

  The mood of the age suffered some darkening as part price of the new discipline. The reckless gaiety of the sexes and the classes under the Revolution yielded to bourgeois propriety and proletarian fatigue. The class barriers that had graded and steadied the population in Bourbon days gave way to a restless fever of competition as “career open to talents” built stairs between all tiers,46 and set rootless youths climbing the slippery pyramids to power. Such deductions made, Napoleon was justified in feeling that under his rule morality returned to France, and manners regained some of the courtesy that had eased and graced prerevolutionary life in literate France.

  He felt that despite all efforts to equalize opportunity some form of class distinction would inevitably develop from the natural diversity of abilities and environments. To keep this result from being merely an aristocracy of wealth, he established in 1802 the Legion of Honor, to be composed of men, chosen by the government, who had distinguished themselves by special excellence in their fields—war, law, religion, science, scholarship, art … It was to be half as democratic as life: all men were eligible, but no women. The members swore, on admission, to support the principles of liberty and equality; but they were soon graded into classes according to their merit or influence or tenure. Each received from the French government an annual stipend: 5,000 francs for a “grand officer,” 2,000 to a “commander,” 1,000 to an “officer,” 250 to a “chevalier.”47 To distinguish them, the members were to wear a ribbon or a cross. When some councilors smiled at such “baubles,” Napoleon replied that men are more easily led by decorations than by authority or force; “one obtains everything from men by appealing to their sense of honor.”48

  The Emperor took another step toward a new aristocracy by creating (1807) the “Imperial Nobility,” conferring titles upon his relatives, his marshals, certain administrative officers, and outstanding savants; so, in the next seven years, he made 31 dukes, 452 counts, 1,500 barons, 1,474 chevaliers. Talleyrand became prince of Benevento, Fouché became Duc d’Otrante (Otranto); Joseph Bonaparte was suddenly grand elector, Louis Bonaparte was grand constable; Murat, cavalry leader, was surprised to find himself grand admiral; Marshal Davout was christened Due d’Auerstedt; Lannes, Duc de Montebello; Savary, Duc de Rovigo; Lefebvre, Duc de Dantzig. Laplace and Volney became counts, and Napoleon’s sisters blossomed into princesses. With each title went a colorful and distinctive uniform, an annual revenue, sometimes a substantial estate. Moreover—and here Napoleon frankly turned his back upon the republic—most of these titles were made hereditary. Only with transmissible property, in Napoleon’s view, could his new aristocrats maintain their position and authority, and thereby serve as a support to the ruler. The Emperor himself, to keep a step or two ahead of the new aristocracy—which soon flaunted its titles, uniforms, and powers-guarded himself with chamberlains, equerries, prefects of the palace, and a hundred other servitors; and Josephine was equipped with ladies-in-waiting whose titles came from the Bourbons or beyond.

  Still unsated, he turned to the survivors of the old nobility, and used every lure to draw them to his court. He had called many of them back to France as a foil to the still revolutionary Jacobins, and in the hope of establishing continuity between the old France and the new. This seemed impossible, for the returning émigrés scorned Napoleon as a parvenu usurper, denounced his policies, satirized his manners, looks, and speech, and made fun of his new aristocracy. Gradually, however, as his prestige mounted with his victories, and as France rose to such power and wealth as not even Louis XIV had won for her, this lofty attitude bent: the younger sons of the émigrés gladly accepted appointments in the Upstart’s service;49 grandes dames came to attend Josephine; and at last some nobles of ancient vintage—Montmorencys, Montesquious, Ségurs, Gramonts, Noailles, Turennes—added their aura to the imperial court, and were rewarded with partial restoration of their confiscated estates. After the marriage with Marie Louise the reconciliation seemed complete. But much of it was superficial; the newer sons and daughters of the Revolution did not relish the superior manners and prestige of the pedigreed; the Army, still fond of its revolutionary ideals, grumbled to see its idol exchanging bows with ancient foes; these looked down upon the tall generals, the nervous savants, and the ambitious Bonapartes, who had presumed to replace them.

  To keep this den of lions from open war with words or swords, Napoleon insisted upon a code of etiquette. He commissioned some specialists to draw up, from the best Bourbon models, a manual of manners designed to meet every situation courteously; they did, to a bulk of eight hundred pages;50 philosophers and grenadiers studied it; and the imperial court became a model of brilliant dress and empty speech. The courtiers played cards, but, as Napoleon forbade playing for money, the cards lost their value. Plays were performed, concerts were given, there were stately ceremonies and massive balls. When the excitement of comparing costumes and matching wit declined, the more intimate members of the court moved with Emperor and Empress to St.-Cloud, or Rambouillet, or Trianon, or, most happily, to Fontainebleau, where formality loosened its stays, and hunting warmed the blood.

  No one was so irked by this regal ritual as Napoleon, and he avoided it as much as he could. “Etiquette,” he said, “is the prison of kings.”51 And to Las Cases: “Necessity compelled me to observe a degree of state, to adopt a certain system of solemnity—in a word, to establish etiquette. Otherwise I should have been every day liable to be slapped on the shoulder.”52 As for ceremonies, they too had their rationale. “A newly established government must dazzle and astonish. The moment it ceases to glitter it falls.”53 “Display is to power what ceremony is to religion.”54 “Is it not a fact that the Catholic religion appeals more strongly to the imagination by the pomp of its ceremonies than by the sublimity of its doctrines? When you want to arouse enthusiasm in the masses you must appeal to their eyes.”55

  As usual in history, the manners of the court passed down, tapering, to the literate population. “It took only ten or twelve years,” said the learned “Bibliophile Jacob” (Paul Lacroix) “to make of the grand monde of the Directory a decent, polished, and well-brought-up society.”56 This was especially true of Lyons and Bordeaux, not to speak of Paris where, said Mme. de Staël, “so many persons of intellect came together, … and so many were accustomed to employ that intellect in adding to the pleasures of conversation.”57 Napoleon, reported Las Cases, “rendered justice to the delicate tact which distinguished the inhabitants of the French capital; nowhere, he said, could be found so much wit, or more taste.”58 A hundred cafés gathered a gregarious people to sit and sip, to exchange news and repartees, while before them the mobile world pas
sed in unwilling parade, each animalcule centering the world around itself. Fine restaurants had disappeared during the Terror, had reopened under the Directory, and began now their reign over the tastes and purses of the French people. It was during the Consulate and the Empire that Anthelme Brillat-Savarin accumulated the facts and legends that swelled his classic of gastronomy, La Physiologie du goût, which reached print only a year (1826) before his death.

  Styles of speech and dress were changing. Citoyen and Citoyenne were being replaced by the prerevolutionary Monsieur and Madame. Men of fashion reverted to knee breeches and silk stockings, but pantaloons regained supremacy as the Empire waned. The ladies, abandoning the style grecque of the Directory, returned to skirts and bodices. Décolleté remained generous, with bare shoulders and arms; Napoleon opposed the fashion, Josephine approved of it; her pretty arms and shoulders and buttressed bosom won.59

  The Emperor gave his approval to masked balls, for he was glad to see social life revive. He did not care for the salons that were flourishing in Paris. They were becoming a refuge of politicians, authors, and “ideologues” critical of his increasingly dictatorial regime. His brothers Joseph and Lucien organized frequent receptions where the talk was necessarily favorable to the Emperor and generally hostile to Josephine; Fouché and Talleyrand held their own courts, where criticism was polite; the returned émigrés excoriated all the Bonapartes in somber soirees in the Faubourg St.-Germain; and Mme. de Staël maintained her famous salon as part of her fifteen years’ war against Napoleon. Mme. de Genlis, returning to France after seven years as an émigrée, devoted her salon and her writings to defending the Emperor against Bourbons, Jacobins, Mme. de Staël, and Mme. Récamier.

  V. MME. RÉCAMIER

  La Récamier’s salon owed its success to her enticing beauty and her husband’s complaisant wealth. Born in Lyons in 1777, named Jeanne-Françoise-Julie-Adélaïde Bernard, and known to her friends as Julie or Juliette, she was endowed with a loveliness of face and figure that survived even when she had become seventy and blind. She developed almost every charm of the feminine character—kindness, sympathy, tenderness, taste, grace, tact … She added to this a sensuous pliancy that stirred a hundred males without any known harm to her virginity. In 1793, aged sixteen, she married Jacques-Rose Récamier, who was forty-two but a banker. He was so pleased to contemplate her beauty, to hear her singing, to watch her delicate hands drawing sentiment from her piano or her harp, that he cushioned her in every comfort, financed her career as a salonnière, bore with paternal indulgence the conquests that she made, herself unconquered, and apparently did not insist on his marital rights.60

  In 1798 he bought the Parisian home of Jacques Necker, on the Rue du Mont-Blanc. During that transaction Juliette, twenty-one, met Mme. de Staël, thirty-two; it was only a casual encounter, but it began a lifelong friendship that even rivalry in love could not end. Inspired by the success with which the older woman had brought to her salon the most prominent statesmen and authors of the time, Juliette in 1799 opened her new home to periodical gatherings of men and women prominent in the political, cultural, or social life of Paris. Lucien Bonaparte, the minister of the interior, lost little time in declaring to her his imperishable love. She showed his flaming letters to her husband, who advised her to treat Lucien with patience lest the Récamier bank incur the hostility of the rising dynasty. Napoleon extinguished Lucien’s fire by sending him as ambassador to Spain. Perhaps he himself had cast an eye upon Juliette as a “morsel for a king.”61 She had quite other inclinations. Despite her husband’s cautions, and her father’s precarious position as postmaster general in the consular government, she welcomed to her salon royalists like Mathieu de Montmorency, anti-Napoleon generals like Bernadotte and Moreau, and others who resented the First Consul’s increasingly imperial ways.

  She was now in the prime of her beauty, and the leading painters were glad to have her sit for them. David portrayed her in the favorite pose of current goddesses—reclining on a couch, and loosely dressed in a Grecian gown that left bare her arms and feet. M. Récamier felt that David had not caught the demure loveliness of his wife; he challenged François Gérard, David’s pupil, to rival his master; Gérard succeeded so well that David never forgave him.62

  In 1802 Juliette and her mother visited England, where dignitaries like the Prince of Wales and belles like the Duchess of Devonshire received her with all the honors due to her beauty and her anti-Bonapartist sentiments. Soon after her return to France her father was arrested for having connived at secret negotiations between Parisian royalists and the rebel Chouans of the Vendée; he was arrested, and was in danger of being sentenced to death, when his distracted daughter persuaded Bernadotte to go to Napoleon and intercede for M. Bernard’s release. Napoleon consented, but dismissed him from his post. “The government,” Juliette admitted, “had a perfect right to remove him.”63

  In 1806 her husband appealed to the Bank of France to save him from bankruptcy by lending him a million francs. The directors referred the request to Napoleon, who, returning from Marengo, found the bank itself involved in difficulties; he forbade the loan. Récamier sold the house on the Rue du Mont-Blanc; Juliette sold her silver and jewelry, and, without complaint, accepted a simpler life. But she came close to a breakdown when, on January 20, 1807, her mother died. Hearing of this, Mme. de Staël invited her to come for a stay in the Necker château at Coppet in Switzerland. M. Récamier, absorbed in a struggle to regain solvency, gave her his permission to go. On July 10 she reached Coppet, and began the most amorous period of her career.

  A succession of suitors attended upon her there, including Mme. de Staël’s lover Benjamin Constant. She enjoyed and encouraged their attentions, all the while (we are told) guarding her citadel. Some critics have accused her of dealing recklessly with men’s hearts, and Constant wrote bitterly: “She has played with my happiness, my life; may she be cursed!”64 But Constant too played with hearts and lives, and the Duchesse d’Abrantès remembered Juliette as quite unblemished:

  One cannot expect to find, in future times, a woman like her—a woman whose friendship has been courted by the most remarkable persons of the age; a woman whose beauty has thrown at her feet all the men who have once set eyes upon her; whose love has been the object of universal desire, yet whose virtue has remained pure. … In her days of gaiety and splendor she had the merit of being always ready to sacrifice her own enjoyments to afford consolation … to any friend in affliction. To the world Mme. Récamier is a celebrated woman; to those who had the happiness to know and appreciate her she was a peculiar and gifted being, formed by Nature as a perfect model in one of her most beneficent moods.65

  In October, 1807, Juliette came so close to commitment with Prince August of Prussia, nephew of Frederick the Great, that she wrote to her husband asking for release from their marriage. Récamier reminded her that he had through fourteen years shared his wealth with her, and had indulged her every wish; did it not seem wrong of her to desert him in his efforts for financial recovery? She returned to Paris and her husband, and the Prince had to comfort himself with her letters.

  As Récamier grew rich again, and Juliette inherited a fortune from her mother, she resumed her salon, and her opposition to Napoleon. In 1811, when Mme. de Staël was in hot disfavor with the Emperor, and Mathieu de Montmorency had just been exiled for visiting her, Juliette dared fortune, and, over the warnings of Germaine, insisted on spending at least a day with her at Coppet. Napoleon, upset by bad news from Spain and Russia, forbade her to come within 120 miles of Paris. After his first abdication (April 11, 1814) she returned, reopened her salon, and entertained Wellington and other leaders of the victorious Allies. When Napoleon returned from Elba and recaptured France without a blow, she prepared to leave the capital, but Hortense promised to protect her, and she remained, temporarily subdued. After the second abdication (June 22, 1815) she resumed her hospitality. Chateaubriand, whom she had met in 1801, now reentered her life, and gave he
r a second youth in a strange and historic romance.

  VI. THE JEWS IN FRANCE

  The emancipation of the European Jews came first in France because France led in the emancipation of the mind, and because the Enlightenment had accustomed a rising proportion of adults to interpret history in secular terms. Biblical research had revealed Jesus as a lovable preacher critical of Pharisees but loyal to Judaism; and the Gospels themselves had shown him as gladly heard by thousands of Jews, and welcomed by thousands as he entered Jerusalem. How, then, could an entire people, through thousands of years, be punished for the crime of a high priest, and a handful of incidental rabble, demanding his death? Economic hostilities remained, and fed the natural unease in the presence of strange speech and garb; but even that animosity was declining, and Louis XVI had encountered no popular resistance to his removal of taxes that had specifically burdened the Jews. Mirabeau, in an essay that barbed logic with wit, had pleaded for the complete emancipation of the Jews (1787), and the Abbé Grégoire had won a prize from the Royal Society of Science and Arts in Metz, in 1789, for his treatise The Physical, Moral, and Political Regeneration of the Jews. It seemed only a logical consequence of the Declaration of Human Rights when the Constituent Assembly, on September 27, 1791, extended full civil rights to all the Jews of France. The armies of the Revolution carried political freedom to the Jews of Holland in 1796, of Venice in 1797, of Mainz in 1798; and soon the Code Napoléon established it automatically wherever Bonaparte’s conquests reached.

  Napoleon himself came to the problem with the soldier’s customary scorn of tradesmen. Stopping at Strasbourg in January, 1806, on his return from the Austerlitz campaign, he received appeals to help the peasants of Alsace from their financial misery. Suddenly released from feudal servitude, they had found themselves without employment or land to give them a living. They had asked local bankers—mostly German Jews—to lend them the substantial sums they needed to buy acres, tools, and seed to set themselves up as peasant proprietors. The bankers provided the funds, but at rates reaching sixteen percent interest, which, to the lenders, seemed justified by the risks involved. (Borrowers in America today pay similar rates.) Now some of the farmers could not meet their payments of interest and amortization. Napoleon was informed that unless he interfered many peasants would face the loss of their lands; he was warned that all Christian Alsace was up in arms over the situation, and that an attack upon the Jews was imminent.