The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  On May 9 a considerable procession, including Sir Hudson Lowe, escorted the corpse to a grave outside Longwood, in the “Valley of the Geraniums”; Napoleon himself had chosen the location. On the coffin lay the mantle he had worn at Marengo, and the sword which had been a proud part of his official costume, and an emblem of his life. There he remained for nineteen years, until France, loving him again, brought him home.

  CHAPTER XL

  Afterward

  1815–40

  I. THE FAMILY

  HIS mother survived him by fifteen years, dying at the age of eighty-six. Her career was almost a summary of motherhood through the ages: uncertain mate, many children, joys and sorrows, fulfillment and bereavement, horror and loneliness, wonderment and hope. She had seen all the triumphs, riches, and misfortunes of her children, had saved for the day when they might need her; “Who knows but I may one day have to provide for all these kings?”1 She lived abstemiously to the end, protected and honored by the Pope whom her son had abused. From the standpoint of the race she was the strongest and sanest of all the Bonapartes.

  Joseph, her oldest child, fond of books and money, happily married to Julie Clary, loved and burdened by his imperial brother, served him to the best of his limited ability, found a refuge in America after the Empire collapsed, returned to Europe, lived in rural peace near Genoa, and died in Florence in 1844, aged seventy-six.

  Lucien, after rising to place under the Directory, and helping his brother to overthrow it, opposed Napoleon’s dictatorship, married against the imperial will, abandoned the scramble for power, became a papal prince, sailed for America, was captured by a British ship, was kept under surveillance in England, found his way to Napoleon’s side in the Hundred Days, defended him in the chambers, fled to Rome after the Second Abdication, and died at Viterbo in 1840.

  Louis Bonaparte, after abandoning his Holland throne, and separating from Hortense, lived in Bohemia, Austria, and Italy, and died six years before his third son became Emperor Napoleon III.

  Jérôme enjoyed his royal wealth in Westphalia, failed as a general in the first month of the Russian campaign, returned to his throne, lost it to the Allies in 1813, fought valiantly at Waterloo, and was almost the last Frenchman to leave the field of defeat.2 After the Second Abdication he wandered from country to country, returned to France in 1847, saw his nephew rise to power, became president of the Senate under Napoleon III, and died in 1860 after seventy-six years of a full life in an age when every year was a decade in events.

  Elisa Bonaparte Bacciocchi was the oldest and ablest of Napoleon’s three sisters. We have noted her success as ruler of Tuscany, the cultural Attica of Italy. When it became evident that her brother could not withstand the united Allies, she withdrew to Naples, and joined her sister Caroline in helping Murat to preserve his throne.

  Murat, after leading the cavalry for Napoleon at Leipzig, returned to Naples, entered into an alliance with Austria (January 8, 1814), and pledged the use of his army to the coalition against Napoleon, in exchange for Austria’s support of his authority in Naples. The Allies refused to sanction this pact. When Napoleon escaped from Elba, Murat risked everything by appealing to all Italy to join him in a war of independence against all foreign rule (March 30, 1815). His wife, Caroline, and her sister Elisa left him and found refuge in Vienna. Murat was defeated at Tolentino by an Austrian army (May 2) and fled to France, then to Corsica; Ferdinand IV recovered his Neapolitan throne. After the battle of Waterloo, Murat, now a man without a country, crossed from Corsica to Calabria with a handful of men, was captured, court-martialed, and shot (October 13). Napoleon at St. Helena described him fondly but mercilessly as “the bravest of men in the face of the enemy, incomparable on the battlefield, but a fool in his actions everywhere else.”3

  The most interesting of Napoleon’s relatives was his sister Pauline (1780–1825). She was fated to spread happiness and trouble, for she was rated the most beautiful woman of her time. The men who saw her never forgot her, and the women who saw her never forgave her. She was not well adapted for monogamy, but she was apparently a loving wife to her first husband, General Leclerc, sharing his danger and yellow fever in St.-Domingue. When he died (1802) she returned to Paris; after a decent period of mourning she grew a new wealth of hair, bathed in five gallons of fresh milk every day,4 opened a salon, and charmed husbands by her beauty, and some by her generosity. Napoleon, who himself was chastely moved by her Pheidian form, hurried to marry her to the rich and handsome Prince Camillo Borghese (1803).

  In Florence (1805) Canova asked her to pose for a statue of Diana the huntress; she was inclined to consent; but when she heard that Diana had asked Jupiter to endow her with eternal virginity, she laughed the idea away. She was persuaded, however, to pose for a nearly nude figure of Venus Victrix, which has made the Galleria Borghese one of the most frequented places in Rome. Borghese himself, conscious of his inadequacy, left for his military duties as an officer under Napoleon. Pauline amused herself scandalously, with some injury to her health, but there is no clear evidence that she contracted syphilis.5

  This scandalous goddess was also a model of kindness, except to Josephine, against whom all the Bonapartes except Napoleon waged unremitting war. She gave abundantly, won many lasting friendships, even among her discarded lovers, and was more loyal to Napoleon than any other Bonaparte except her mother. She went out of her way to meet and console her unhappy brother on his journey to Fréjus in 1814, and soon she followed him to Elba. There she played hostess for him, and enlivened his life, and that of the island, with her parties, plays, and joie de vivre. When he left for the last gamble she gave him her finest necklace. Marchand managed to get it through to St. Helena. She was planning to go there when she received news of Napoleon’s death. She survived him by only four years, surrendering to cancer6 (June 5, 1825) at the age of forty-four. Her husband forgave her sins, rejoined her in her last year, and closed her eyes when she died.

  Josephine had died (May 29, 1814) of a chill caught while receiving a visit from Czar Alexander at Malmaison.7 Her daughter, Hortense de Beauharnais (1783–1837), after her separation from Louis Bonaparte, had been protected by the Emperor, and later by the Czar. She did not live to see her son become Napoleon III. Hortense’s brother, Eugène, remained faithful to his adoptive father until the First Abdication; five days thereafter he retired with his wife to Munich, and was joyfully received by his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria. When he died there (February 21, 1824), aged only forty-three, all factions united in honoring him.

  Marie Louise, taken from France against her will, was received in Vienna as a faultless princess rescued from a sacrificial altar. She was allowed to keep Méneval as her devoted gentleman-in-waiting, and he did his best to counter the influences that daily sought to detach her from fidelity to Napoleon. Méneval tells us that in her five weeks in Vienna she received several letters from her husband, found no way of sending a reply, but secretly hoped to join him in Elba.8 Her father, fearful for her health in a Vienna preparing for a triumphant Congress of the Allies, sent her to take the waters at Aixles-Bains; and on July 1, 1814, he appointed Count Adam von Neipperg to join her there as her personal aide. Though he was thirty-nine and she only twenty-two, propinquity had its way, and she accepted him as a lover when all chance seemed gone of reunion with Napoleon. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna awarded her the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla. Neipperg accompanied her, and shared in the government. In 1817 she bore him a daughter. Napoleon heard of this in St. Helena, but he never took her picture down from the wall of his Longwood room, and, as we have seen, spoke of her tenderly in his will. After Napoleon’s death she married Neipperg, and lived with him in apparently faithful union till his death (1829). She married again in 1834, and died in 1847. All circumstances considered, she seems to have been a good woman, not deserving of the stones that have been thrown upon her memory.

  Her son by Napoleon—called “King of Rome” (the traditional titl
e of the heir to the Holy Roman Emperor) and “L’Aiglon” (the young eagle)—had been separated from his mother on leaving Paris, had been rechristened Duke of Reichstadt, and had been kept at the court of Vienna under constant tutelage in Hapsburg traditions. He remained faithful to the memory of his father, dreamed of having someday a kingdom of his own, suffered from repeated illnesses, and died of pulmonary tuberculosis, in the Palace of Schönbrunn, Vienna, on July 22, 1832, at the age of twenty-one.

  II. HOMECOMING

  Even as that pretty visage faded from French memory the image of Napoleon himself took on a new living form in recollection and imagination. As time closed old wounds, and filled the places—in families, fields, and shops—of those millions who had gone to the wars and never returned, the picture of the age of Napoleon grew brighter and more heroic beyond any remembered precedent in secular history.

  First of all, the old soldiers recalled their exploits and forgot their “groans”; they embellished Napoleon’s victories, and seldom blamed him for a defeat; they loved him as probably no other commander has ever been loved. The aging grenadier became an oracle in his village, and was enshrined in a thousand poems, tales, and songs. In “Le Vieux Drapeau” (The Old Standard) and a hundred other lays Pierre de Béranger (1780–1857) idealized Napoleon and his campaigns, and satirized the domineering nobles and the land-hungry bishops with such point and verve that he was imprisoned by the Bourbon government (1821, 1828). Victor Hugo wrote an “Ode to the Column,” celebrating the Vendôme pillar and its historical reliefs and crowning figure of the Emperor, taken down (1815) and then restored (1833). Balzac in Le Médecin de campagne (1833), vividly pictured a proud veteran denouncing the Bourbons for issuing the report that Napoleon was dead; on the contrary, he affirmed, Napoleon was still alive, and was “the child of God made to be the father of the soldier.”9 Stendhal not only sprinkled his novels with praise of Napoleon, he published in 1837 a Vie de Napoléon whose tenor was announced in the preface—”The love of Napoleon is the only passion that is left in me”; and he called Napoleon “the greatest man the world has seen since Caesar.”10

  Napoleon would probably have accepted this estimate, with some uncertainty about Caesar. He had never lost hope that France would come back to him. He solaced his exile with the hope that Gallic resentment of his imprisonment would restore French devotion to him. “When I am gone,” he told O’Meara, “there will be a reaction in my favor…. It is my martyrdom that will restore the crown of France to my dynasty…. Ere twenty years have elapsed, when I am dead and buried, you will see another revolution in France.”11 Both of these predictions were fulfilled.

  So he dictated his memoirs to revitalize his image, and they served their purpose well. His account of the battle of Waterloo, told to Gourgaud, was smuggled out of St. Helena and was published in Paris in 1820; Las Cases tells us that it made a sensation.12 In 1821–22 six more volumes of his dictated autobiography were issued in France. Rapidly the Emperor’s own story made its way, and played a major part in molding the “legend” that made him, dead, a living force in France.

  His companions became his apostles. O’Meara defended him bravely (1822) in the land of his sturdiest enemies. Las Cases made him faultless in four volumes (1823) that became the bible of the new inspiring creed. The Comte de Montholon’s extensive report did not appear till 1847, Gourgaud’s and Bertrand’s only after their deaths; but meanwhile their living testimony fed the faith. Montholon brought back, also, the Emperor’s “Deathbed Instructions to His Son,” recommending virtues that might improve upon the imperial past: caution, moderation, constitutional rule, freedom of the press, and, toward the world, a policy of peace. Now, too, came a favorite counsel: “Let my son often read, and reflect on, history; this is the only true philosophy.”13

  Even in the testimony of his devout companions the great Emperor, amid the irritations of confinement and disease, had developed the faults natural to old age; but these weaknesses were now forgotten in the perspective of his martial triumphs, his administrative legacy, and the penetrating sharpness of his mind. He had in effect repudiated most of the Revolution, replacing liberty with absolutism, equality with aristocracy, fraternity with discipline; but in his refurbished image he was again the Son of the Revolution, and the Jacobins, once his devoted and persecuted enemies, now gathered around his memory. But, while Napoleon was purifying his record with punishment, the Bourbon rule that had replaced him outwore its initial acceptance; Louis XVIII, himself a reasonable man, touched with the Enlightenment, had allowed his court to be dominated by royalists who had forgiven nothing and wanted everything, including their old estates and authority, and a government unhampered by representative institutions. Resistance had been met with a “White Terror” of spies and hunts and hasty executions. Old soldiers could not forget the hounding and shooting of Ney. Against all this the Army still cherished its memory of the Petit Caporal who had chatted with conscripts around a campfire, who had promoted them without class prejudice or bureaucratic delay, and who had made the Grande Armée the terror of kings and the pride of France. The peasants remembered that Napoleon had protected them against the demands of the nobility and the clergy; the proletariat had prospered under his rule; the middle classes had grown in wealth and social acceptance. Millions of Frenchmen felt that with all his autocracy Napoleon had preserved the essentials of the Revolution: the end of feudalism and its toilsome tolls and dues; the opening of advancement to ability of whatever class; the equality of all before the law; the administration of justice according to explicit, written, and nationally uniform law.

  So, within twenty years after his death, Napoleon had been reborn, and again dominated the minds and imagination of men. “The world belongs to Napoleon,” wrote Chateaubriand; “… living, he failed to win the world; dead, he possesses it.”14 The modest Revolution of 1830 was helped by the new Bonapartist sentiment. The direct Bourbon line ended with the abdication of Charles X; the new King, Louis Philippe, of the Orléanist branch of the Bourbons, was the son of Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d’Orléans, who had called himself Philippe-Égalité and had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. The new King for a time courted the support of the Bonapartists; he adopted the tricolor emblems of the imperial regime, and ordered the restoration of the figure of Napoleon to the top of the Vendôme Column.

  Meanwhile the dead man’s will had been published, and its second clause seemed to be the final imperial command: “It is my wish that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people, whom I have loved so well.” Throughout France, quietly here and there, then more widely and audibly, rose the appeal of the nation: “Bring him home!” Let France give its hero the funeral that such a man deserved: let the Triumph of the Ashes (so it came to be called) redeem the shame of that dreary imprisonment! The cry reached the government; its Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877)—who would write the greatest of all histories of Napoleon,*and who was to be elected (in 1871) first president of the Third Republic—was apparently the one who suggested to his associates, and then, with them, to the King: Let us ask Great Britain’s consent for the removal of Napoleon’s remains to Paris. Louis Philippe agreed; to identify himself with such a move would win the hearts of the French people. The Cabinet sounded out the heads of the British government. Lord Palmerston replied at once and handsomely: “The government of her Britannic Majesty hopes that the promptness of its answer may be considered in France as a proof of its desire to blot out the last trace of those national animosities which, during the lifetime of the Emperor, armed England and France against each other.”15

  The King commissioned his son François, Prince de Joinville, to go to St. Helena, and bring back the remains of Napoleon. On July 7, 1840, the Prince sailed from Toulon on the Belle Poule, accompanied by Generals Bertrand and Gourgaud, the Comte de Las Cases, and Napoleon’s most intimate servant, Marchand, who together would decide the authenticity of the corpse. T
hey reached St. Helena on October 8; after many formalities they saw the body exhumed; they identified it; and on November 30 they arrived with it at Cherbourg.

  There began what was surely the longest funeral in history. The coffin was transferred to the steamer Normandie, which took it to Val de la Haye, on the Seine below Rouen; there it was transferred to a river barge, on which a small temple had been improvised; under this temple—guarded, one at each corner, by Bertrand, Gourgaud, Las Cases, and Marchand—the coffin was borne in leisurely state up the Seine, stopping at major towns for celebrations on the bank.16 At Courbevoie, four miles north of Paris, it was transferred to a decorated funeral coach, which was drawn in a procession of soldiers, sailors, and diverse dignitaries through Neuilly, and under the Arc de Triomphe, and along the Champs-Élysées lined on either side by applauding and rejoicing multitudes.17 Late on that bitter-cold day, December 15, 1840, the corpse at last reached its destination, the magnificently domed church of the Hôtel des Invalides. The aisles and nave were crowded with thousands of silent spectators as twenty-four seamen bore the heavy coffin to the altar, where the Prince de Joinville addressed his father the King: “Sire, I present to you the body of the Emperor of France”; to which Louis Philippe replied, “I receive it in the name of France.” Bertrand laid Napoleon’s sword upon the coffin; Gourgaud added the Emperor’s hat; a requiem Mass was sung to Mozart’s music; and the Emperor was at last where he had wished his remains to be—in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine.

  III. PERSPECTIVE

  Recovering from him, we too, authors and readers, fulfill his prediction—that the world would greet his death with an exhalation of relief. He was an exhausting force, a phenomenon of energy contained and explosive, a rising, burning, waning flame that consumed those who touched him intimately. We have not found in history another soul that burned so intensely and so long. That will, at first so hesitant, fearful, and morose, discovered its weapons and resources in a piercing mind and eye; it became confident, rash, imperious, rioting in grasp and power; until the gods, seeing no measure in him, bound lesser wills in union to pursue him, corner him, seize him, and chain him to a rock until his fire should burn out. This was one of the great dramas of history, and still awaits its Aeschylus.