The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Trafalgar was one of the “decisive battles” of history. It decided for a century Britain’s mastery of the seas. It ended Napoleon’s chance to free France from the cordon that the British fleet had drawn along her shores. It forced him to give up all thought of invading England. It meant that he must fight land battles ever more costly, and ever leading to more. He thought to cancel Trafalgar by his massive victory at Austerlitz (December 2, 1805); but this led to Jena, Eylau, Friedland, Wagram, Borodino, Leipzig, Waterloo. Sea power would win.

  Even so, Pitt, who had lived through a hundred crises to rejoice over Trafalgar, agreed with Napoleon in thinking that Austerlitz had matched and canceled Nelson’s victory. Worn out by a succession of crises in domestic as well as foreign affairs, he withdrew from London for a rest in Bath. There he received the news that Austria, the pivot of his coalitions, had again collapsed. The shock gave the finishing touch to physical ailments deadened and doubled by brandy. On January 9, 1806, he was taken to his home in Putney. In that house, on January 23, 1806, he died, aged forty-seven, after having been prime minister of Great Britain through nearly all his adult life. In those nineteen years he had helped to guide his country to industrial, commercial, and maritime supremacy, and had reformed its financial system masterfully; but he had failed either to chasten and confine the French Revolution or to check the dangerous expansion of Napoleon’s authority in Europe. The Continental balance of power, so precious to England, was disappearing, and hard-won domestic liberties of speech, assemblage, and press had been lost for the duration of a war that had now gone on for twelve years, and gave no sign of an end.

  IV. ENGLAND MARKS TIME: 1l806–12

  The scope of our canvas will not allow us to describe in detail the four ministries that succeeded Pitt’s. Barring a year of Fox, their energies went to personal and party problems rather than to statesmanship and policy, and their sum total, internationally, was more of the same to the same result: the descent from prosperity to destitution, and from enterprise into procrastination.

  The brief “Ministry of All the Talents” (1806–07) was brightened by the efforts of Charles James Fox, as secretary for foreign affairs, to arrange peace with France. His unsteady career had been marked by a patient liberalism and his capacity to accept the French Revolution, and even Napoleon, into the tolerable eccentricities of history. Unfortunately he came to power when his strength of body and mind had suffered from his reckless enjoyment of food and drink. He made a handsome approach to negotiations by sending word to Talleyrand (February 16, 1806) that a British patriot had come to the Foreign Office with a plan for assassinating Napoleon, and adding assurances that the zany was being carefully watched. The Emperor appreciated the gesture, but he was so elated with his triumph over Austria, and Britain was so exalted by Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, that neither would make the concessions required as preparatory to peace. Fox succeeded better with his proposal to Parliament for ending the traffic in slaves; after a generation of effort by Wilberforce and a hundred others, the measure became law (March, 1807). By that time Fox had died (September 13, 1806), aged fifty-seven, and British politics fell into a treadmill of hopeful inertia.

  This, however, would hardly be the just word for the dominant figures in the ministry (1807–09) of William Cavendish Bentinck, Duke of Portland. George Canning, secretary for foreign affairs, sent a fleet to bombard Copenhagen (1807); and Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, secretary for war, sent a disastrous expedition to Walcheren in an attempt to capture Antwerp (1809). The two secretaries, matched in ability and passion, quarreled over each other’s enterprises, and fought a duel, which scratched Canning. Doubly tarnished by internal comedy and external tragedy, the Portland ministry resigned.

  Spencer Perceval, as minister (1809–12), had the double misfortune of seeing Britain reach its nineteenth-century nadir, and of being assassinated for his pains. By the fall of 1810 Napoleon’s Continental Blockade had so injured British industry and commerce that thousands of Britons were unemployed, and millions were on the edge of destitution. Unrest had come to revolutionary violence; the Luddite weavers began to smash machines in 1811. In 1810 British exports to northern Europe had brought in £7,700,000; in 1811 they brought in £1,500,000.23 In 1811 England was slipping into a second war with America; as part of the cost her exports to the United States fell from £11,300,000 in 1810 to, £1,870,000 in 1811. Meanwhile taxes were rising for every Briton, until, by 1814, their burden threatened the collapse of Britain’s financial system, and the credit of her currency abroad. Hungry Britons cried out for a lowering of import duties on foreign grain; agricultural Britons opposed such a move lest it reduce the price of their product; Napoleon eased the crisis for England (1810–11) by selling export licenses to French grain producers; he needed cash for his campaigns. When the Grand Army set out for Russia in 1812 England knew that victory for Napoleon would mean the more rigid closing of all Continental ports against British goods, and Napoleon’s fuller control of Continental shipments to Britain. All England watched and worried.

  Except George III. He was spared awareness of these events by his final lapse into deafness, blindness, and insanity. The death of his best beloved daughter Amelia (November 1810) was the last blow, snapping all connection between his mind and reality; now he was privileged to live in a world of his own, in which there were no rebel colonies, no ministerial Foxes, no unmannerly, murderous Napoleons. He must have found some satisfaction in this condition, for otherwise his health improved; he lived on for ten years more, talking cheerfully, without bond or burden of logic or grammar, amid every comfort and service, and through a postwar depression worse than that of 1810–12. His popularity grew with his disease. His starving people pitied him, and wondered, with old myths, had he not been touched and taken by God.

  On May 11, 1812, in the lobby of the House of Commons, Prime Minister Perceval was shot dead by a bankrupt broker, John Bellingham, who felt that his commercial enterprises had been ruined by the policies of the government. In June, under the Earl of Liverpool, a new cabinet was formed, which, by miracles of tact and circumstance, endured till 1827. In that same June the United States declared war upon England, and Napoleon’s 500,000 men crossed the Niemen into Russia.

  FIG. 47—SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. Wellington Museum, Apsley House, London.

  FIG. 48—GEORGE ROMNEY: William Pitt the Younger. The Tate Gallery, London.

  FIG. 49—SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE: George IV as Prince Regent (1814). The National Portrait Gallery, London.

  FIG. 50—GEORGE ROMNEY: Lady Hamilton as Ariadne. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, the National Maritime Museum, London.

  FIG. 51—L. F. ABBOTT: Nelson after Losing His Arm at Teneriffe. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, the National Maritime Museum, London.

  FIG. 52—HENRY SCHEFFER: Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 53—Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 54—JACQUES- LOUIS DAVID: Pope Pius VII Louvre, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)

  FIG. 55—ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE: Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich. (The New York Society Library)

  FIG. 56—PAINTING AFTER A PORTRAIT BY DROUAIS: Emperor Joseph II. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 57—ENGRAVING: Queen Louise of Prussia. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 58—Karl Friedrich Gauss. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 59—Statue of Alessandro Volta at Como, Italy. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 60—The Brandenburg Gate, DESIGNED BY KARL GOTTHARD LANGHANS, WITH THE Quadriga BY JOHANN GOTTFRIED SCHADOW. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 61—WOODCUT AFTER A DRAWING BY JOHANNES VEIT: Friedrich von Schlegel. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 62—ENGRAVING BY F. HUMPHREY: August Wilhelm von Schlegel. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 63—PORTRAIT AFTER AN 1808 PAINTING BY DAHLING: Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (The
Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 64—DRAWING: Johann Christian Friedrich von Schiller. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 65—CHARCOAL DRAWING BY GEBBERS: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, age 77. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 66—WOODCUT: Ludwig van Beethoven. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 67—JOHN CAWSE: Carl Maria von Weber (1826). Reproduced by permission of the Royal College of Music, London.

  FIG. 68—ENGRAVING BY H. P. HANSEN AFTER A PAINTING BY RIEPENHAUSEN: Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 69—SKETCH: Esaias Tegnér. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 70—EGRAVING BY X. A. VON R. CREMER AFTER A PAINTING BY GEBBERS: Hegel in His Study. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 71—EGRAVING: The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 72—FRANÇOIS GÉRARD: Czar Alexander I. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

  FIG. 73—ENGRAVING: Marshal Michel Ney. (The New York Society Library)

  FIG. 74—PAINTING AFTER AN EYEWITNESS SKETCH BY J. A. KLEIN: The Retreat from Moscow. (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 75—DRAWING BY ALFRED CROQUIS: Talleyrand, author of “Palmerston, une Comédie de Deux Ans:’ (The Bettmann Archive)

  FIG. 76—JEAN- BAPTISTE ISABEY: Louis XVIII, Sepia drawing. louvre, paris. (Cliché des musées Nationaux)

  FIG. 77—GEORGE DAWE: Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

  FIG. 78—J. JACKSON: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (c. 1827). The National Portrait Gallery, London.

  FIG. 79—MARCHAND: View of Longwood, WATERCOLOR. Musée de Malmaison, Paris. (Cliché des Musées Nationaux)

  FIG. 80—LITHOGRAPH BY JOSEF KRIEHUBER AFTER A PAINTING BY MORITZ MICHAEL DAFFINGER: Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstadt. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

  FIG. 81—Napoleon at St. Helena. (The New York Society Library)

  FIG. 82—Napoleone’s Tomb in the Hôtel des Invalides, paris. (Photo Hachette)

  BOOK IV

  THE CHALLENGED KINGS

  1789–1812

  CHAPTER XXV

  Iberia*

  I. PORTUGAL: 1789–1808

  NEWS of the French Revolution came to a Portugal that was struggling to return to the quiet order of the Middle Ages after the violent and scandalous attempt of the Marquês de Pombal to bring it abreast, in culture and law, with the France of Louis XV and the Spain of Charles III. The Pyrenees obstructed the flow of ideas between France and the Peninsula; the movement of ideas from Spain was hindered by Spain’s recurrent eagerness to swallow her sister state; and in both countries the agents of the Inquisition loomed like lions at a palace gate to repel any word or thought that might question the ancient creed.

  At the bottom of the social scale stood other guardians of the past: the simple, mostly unlettered commoners—peasants, craftsmen, tradesmen, soldiers—who were fondly habituated to their transmitted faith, comforted by its legends, awed by its miracles, thrilled by its ritual. At the top were the feudal barons, models of manners and owners of the soil; a timid, feebleminded Queen Maria Francisca, and her son John, regent (1799) and then (1816–26) king; all dependably protective of the Church as the indispensable support of private morals, social order, and absolute, divine-right monarchy.

  Amid these diverse sentinels lurked a small minority—students, Freemasons, scientists, poets, businessmen, a few officials, even a noble or two—who were irked by the despotism of the past, furtively flirted with philosophy, and dreamed of representative government, free trade, free assembly, free press, free thought, and a stimulating participation in the international of the mind.

  Upon that timid minority, those shocked commoners, those startled dignitaries and Inquisitors, the news of the French Revolution, however dulled by delay, came as an exhilarating or terrifying revelation. Some reckless spirits openly rejoiced; Masonic lodges in Portugal celebrated the event, the Portuguese ambassador in Paris, who may have read Rousseau or heard Mirabeau, applauded the French National Assembly; the Portuguese Minister for Foreign Affairs allowed the official gazette to salute the fall of the Bastille; copies of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1791 were sold by French booksellers in Portugal.1

  But when Louis XVI was deposed by a Paris uprising (1792), Queen Maria felt her throne tremble, and surrendered the government to her son. The future John VI turned with fury upon the liberals of Portugal, and encouraged his intendant of police to arrest, or expel, or keep under unremitting surveillance, every Freemason, every important alien, every writer who advocated political reform. Francisco da Silva, leader of the liberals, was imprisoned; liberal nobles were banished from the court; Manuel du Bocage (1765–1805), leading Portuguese poet of the age, who had written a powerful sonnet against despotism, was jailed in 1797, and supported himself in prison by translating Ovid and Virgil.2 In 1793, infuriated by the execution of Louis XVI, the Portuguese government followed Spain in a holy war against France, and sent a squadron to join the British fleet in the Mediterranean. Soon Spain negotiated a separate peace (1795); Portugal asked for a like accommodation, but France refused, alleging that Portugal was in effect a colony and ally of England. The quarrel simmered till Napoleon, after conquering half of Europe, reached out for the little state that was refusing to join in his Continental Blockade of Britain.

  Behind the military and political situation of Portugal lay the precarious structure of its economic life. As with Spain, the nation’s wealth depended upon the importation of precious metals from its colonies; this gold and silver, rather than domestic products, went to pay for imported articles, to gild the throne, enrich the rich, and purchase luxuries and slaves. No middle class grew to develop natural resources with progressive agriculture and technological industry. When command of the seas passed to England, the supply of gold became subject to evading the British Navy or making terms with the British government. Spain chose to fight, and almost exhausted her resources to build a navy excellent in everything but seamanship and morale. When that navy, reluctantly merged with the French, was defeated at Trafalgar, Spain became dependent upon France; and Portugal, to avoid absorption by France and Spain, became dependent upon England. Enterprising Englishmen filled important posts in Portugal, opened or managed factories there. British goods dominated Portugal’s import trade, and Britons agreed to drink port wine from Oporto (”the port”) in Portugal.

  The situation irritated and tempted Napoleon. It defied his plan to bring England to peace by excluding her products from Continental markets; it gave him an excuse for conquering Portugal; a conquered Portugal could share with France in imprisoning Spain within French policy; and a subject Spain might provide another throne for another Bonaparte. So, as we have seen, Napoleon persuaded the Spanish government to join with France in invading Portugal; the Portuguese royal family fled in an English vessel to Brazil; and on November 30, 1807, Junot led a French-Spanish army, almost unresisted, into Lisbon. Liberal leaders in Portugal flocked to the new government, hoping that Napoleon would annex their country and give it representative institutions.3 Junot humored these men, secretly laughed at them, announced (February 1, 1808) “that the House of Braganza has ceased to reign,” and more and more behaved like a king.

  II SPAIN: 1808

  Spain was still in the Middle Ages, and preferred it so. It was a God-intoxicated country, crowding its somber cathedrals, making devout pilgrimages to sacred shrines, multiplying monks, comforted with indulgences and absolutions, fearing and revering the Inquisition, kneeling as the consecrated Host was borne in awesome processions through the streets, cherishing above all else the faith that brought God into every home, disciplined children, guarded virginity, and offered Paradise at the end of the burdensome testing called life. A generation later George Borrow found “the ignorance of the masses so great,” at least in León, “that printed charms against Satan and his host, and against every kind of misfortune, are publicly sold in the shops, and are in great dema
nd.”4 Napoleon, still a son of the Enlightenment while signing concordats with the Church, concluded that “the Spanish peasants have even less share in the civilization of Europe than the Russians.”5 But the Spanish peasant, as Byron testified, could be as “proud as the noblest duke.”6

  Education was almost confined to the bourgeoisie and the nobility; literacy was a distinction; even the hidalgos seldom read a book. The ruling class distrusted print;7 and in any case widespread literacy was not needed in the existing economy of Spain. Some commercial cities, like Cádiz and Seville, were fairly prosperous, and Byron, in 1809, thought Cádiz “the prettiest city in Europe.”8 Some industrial centers prospered; Toledo was still famous for its swords.9 But the country was so mountainous that only a third of the soil could be profitably cultivated; and the roads and canals were so few, so difficult and ill-kept, so obstructed with provincial or feudal tolls, that corn could be more cheaply imported than domestically produced.10 Disheartened by a difficult soil, the peasants preferred the pride of conspicuous leisure to the precarious fruits of tillage; and the townsmen found more pleasure in smuggling than in ill-paid toil. Over all the economic scene lay the burden of taxes rising faster than income, and demanded by a widening officialdom, a pervasive police, and a degenerating government.