How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  Now, year by year, the warrior’s iron mark

  Crumbles away from the majestic tree

  The indignant life-sap ebbing from the bark

  Where the grim death-word to humanity

  Profaned the Lord of Day.

  Byron, on the other hand, remained a staunch fan of the man who defaced trees, and even began signing himself with Napoleon’s initials ‘NB’ – for Noel Byron – after taking the name of his mother-in-law in a bid to inherit her wealth.

  He also amassed a collection of Napoleonic memorabilia that, if put up for auction today, would pay off any bankrupt poet’s debts. He bought, among other things, a lock of Napoleon’s hair, imperial notepaper, snuffboxes featuring Napoleon’s portrait, gold coins struck by Napoleon’s mint, a Napoleon cameo pin, and he even put in an unsuccessful offer for Napoleon’s coronation robes, which came up for sale in London, and would have made a wonderful travelling outfit for the roving English rake.

  Right up until his death in 1824, while fighting to liberate Greece from Turkish rule, Byron was turning out pro-Bonapartist lines. In a letter sent from Italy in 1821 he wrote of his scorn for British politicians since the fall of Napoleon: ‘Since that period, we have been the slaves of fools.’ And in the ninth canto of his poem Don Juan, written between 1822 and 1823, he poured scorn on Wellington himself, ironically asking the Iron Duke:

  And I shall be delighted to learn who,

  Save you and yours, have gained by Waterloo?

  A poem called ‘Age of Bronze’ provides Byron’s final word on the battle, and sounds very French in the way it toes the line set out in Napoleon’s memoirs, which were published, like this poem, in 1823:

  Oh, bloody and most bootless Waterloo!

  Which proves how fools may have their fortune too,

  Won half by blunder, half by treachery.

  Napoleon couldn’t have put it better himself.

  V

  Bizarrely for a man who spent much of his career fighting Prussia, Napoleon also had admirers among the Germans, especially philosophers who were attracted to the Frenchman’s ‘man of action’ image.

  Georg Hegel, one of the founders of modern European philosophy, was fascinated by the French Revolution, which he saw as the first time that individuals had achieved true political freedom in European society (he probably hadn’t noticed all the individuals who were being imprisoned, decapitated or conscripted at the time). And when, on the day before the Battle of Jena in October 1806, Hegel watched Napoleon and his men march into the town of Jena, he wrote excitedly to a friend as though he had seen the embodiment of this new French freedom: ‘I saw the Emperor – this world soul – riding around the city, reconnoitring. It is a truly wonderful feeling to see such an individual, who, sitting on his horse, is entirely focused on one point, embracing the whole world, and dominating it.’

  Napoleon certainly dominated Jena – his men were billeted in Hegel’s own house and Hegel himself was forced to leave the town and get a job 200 kilometres away in Bamberg. But he seems to have borne his eviction with true philosophical stoicism, because he adopted Napoleon as the model for his notion of the soul or mind at the heart of history, acutely and uniquely conscious of the ‘end purpose’ of events, and shaping them accordingly.

  Napoleon, like a select few emperors and conquerors before him, was admirable, Hegel thought, because they alone knew ‘the truth of their times and of their worlds’. They were, Hegel said, ‘aware of historical necessity: which is why, like Alexander the Great and Caesar, Napoleon is a wise man – he knows the true nature of his era’.

  Like Alexander and Caesar, Napoleon also acted upon this knowledge: according to Hegel, he knew ‘what is necessary and what to do when the time comes’. He was a man of action, not a mere thinker; he was what he did. Hegel saw Napoleon as an ‘instrument of the Absolute’, affirming human power over the flux of history.

  All this applied perfectly while Napoleon was enjoying success, of course. Once he was ousted from power, the theory that the French superman was imposing himself on history seemed to collapse somewhat. When Napoleon abdicated in 1814, Hegel decreed that it was ‘a tremendous genius destroying himself. It is the most tragic thing ever.’ But, undeterred, Hegel also explained that Napoleon was doomed to fall (like the murdered Caesar and the probably poisoned Alexander) because, as an instrument of the Absolute, he was vulnerable to the greater necessities of history. This dovetails nicely with Victor Hugo’s view that Napoleon was just too big for the nineteenth century to cope with, and that God (that is, the Christian Absolute) had decided it was time for Napoleon’s reign to end.

  And just like Stendhal, who suffered terribly while serving l’Empereur but went on to idolise him, Hegel, the man who lost his home to French invaders, forgave Napoleon, and founded a whole philosophy of history on him, elevating him to the pantheon of immortal heroes.

  This heroic status was confirmed by the inventor of the superman, Friedrich Nietzsche, the German with the hugest moustache in the history of philosophy.

  In 1882, Nietzsche published a book called Fröhliche Wissenschaft, which was originally translated as Gay Science but which might be better rendered these days as Joyous Knowledge, to avoid misconceptions.fn7 This was a series of essays and poems on power, in which Nietzsche praised Napoleon, describing him as a mixture of Unmensch (inhuman) and an Übermensch (superman).

  Nietzsche thought that Napoleon’s greatness lay in his ability to transcend the boundaries of mere nationalism – like many Germans at the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche was obsessed by his country’s recent evolution into a nation, after centuries of being a collection of tiny princedoms. Nietzsche especially admired Napoleon’s vision of ‘one Europe, which was to be mistress of the world’, and said that he was ‘the only Mensch strong enough’ to achieve this goal.

  Nietzsche also credited Napoleon with inventing a modern era of scientific warfare and of total war, while being soundly rooted in ancient values. Like some Greek colossus, Napoleon was, Nietzsche thought, a ‘block of granite’ against the weakness of the modern world, and that he had, for a short time at least, ‘virilised Europe’.

  These were the kinds of ideas that made Nietzsche so popular with his own countrymen a few decades later, when they were preparing their own bid to become mistresses (or rather, masters) of Europe. Not that any Bonapartists would countenance for an instant a comparison between Hitler – genocidal maniac trying to impose his world view on Europe by means of the latest tank and aeroplane technology – and Napoleon – heroic visionary trying to impose his world view on Europe by means of the latest artillery technology. Absolutely no similarity at all.

  Nietzsche also alleged that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, the most famous character in all German drama, a kind of Teutonic Hamlet, was influenced by Napoleon. Here, Nietzsche seems to have gone too far: Goethe actually met Napoleon in Erfurt in October 1808, but didn’t take the opportunity to flatter the French Emperor by informing him that he had a starring role in German literature. Instead, during their conversation Napoleon managed to browbeat the seventy-year-old Goethe into admitting that certain parts of his youthful novel The Sorrows of Young Werther were ‘not natural’, and then informed Germany’s greatest dramatist that tragedy had nothing to do with destiny. Destiny, Napoleon said, was controlled by politics. Goethe quickly asked if he could be excused.

  While on the subject of Germans, it would be a mistake to forget Beethoven, a composer who was highly influenced by current affairs. His opera Fidelio, first performed in 1805, was based on a French revolutionary play about a political prisoner; and in 1804 Beethoven dedicated a symphony to Napoleon – his third, the Eroica. The original manuscript bears the title ‘Buonaparte’, because Beethoven was a fervent admirer of the young Napoleon, whom he, like Hegel, saw as the embodiment of French democracy.

  Beethoven later withdrew the dedication, and some Bonapartists would like us to believe that it was simply so that he co
uld replace it with the name of the man who was paying him, the Bohemian Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz. However, the truth is that when Napoleon declared himself Emperor of France, Beethoven was furious and shouted that the Frenchman had become a petty tyrant: ‘He is nothing but an ordinary mortal! Now he is going to trample on everyone’s rights just to appease his ambitions.’ The great composer immediately walked over to his desk, ripped up the title sheet with the ‘Buonaparte’ dedication and replaced it with ‘Eroica’.

  Nevertheless, Beethoven later admitted that he had written the work for the idealistic revolutionary general that Napoleon had originally been, and when the score was first printed in 1806, it bore an Italian inscription saying that the symphony had been composed ‘in memory of a great man’. Beethoven was contributing to Napoleonic nostalgia before the Frenchman had even been deposed.

  By comparison, Europe’s most famous composer of the time almost forgot Wellington completely. To celebrate the Englishman’s victory over the French army at Vitoria in 1813, Beethoven wrote just a fifteen-minute work called Wellingtons Sieg (‘Wellington’s Victory’). And poor old Blücher got nothing.

  Beethoven was fairly typical of the artistic community in nineteenth-century Europe, especially its more Romantic, visionary members. In terms of cultural immortality, for Beethoven as well as a whole flock of famous European writers, only one of the protagonists at Waterloo was the winner.

  * * *

  fn1 These anecdotes from Napoleon’s life are very often timed and dated to the minute.

  fn2 Napoleon had several horses, more than one of them white. He rode Marie on the morning of 18 June to inspect his troops, before switching to the more famous Marengo during the battle. Marengo was wounded and left at Napoleon’s billet, the farmhouse at Le Caillou. Marie was also at Le Caillou when it was captured by the Prussians, and Blücher returned the white mare to the German stud farm from which Napoleon had ‘requisitioned’ her in 1813.

  fn3 This was probably a reaction to the famous quotation ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, which comes from the play Richelieu, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, first performed in 1839. Bulwer-Lytton was well known throughout Europe and his plays were translated into French.

  fn4 It is best to leave God’s answer in its original form, because He was obviously speaking French at the time.

  fn5 Napoleon’s favourite flower, and his emblem.

  fn6 This phrase is one of Napoleon’s inventions. He once said that ‘du sublime au ridicule, il n’y a qu’un pas’ (‘there is only one step’).

  fn7 Nietzsche’s original German title was inspired by a Provençal concept of gai saber and, like the French word savoir, saber means ‘knowledge’.

  8

  NAPOLEON’S GLORIOUS AFTERLIFE

  ‘Le grand orateur du monde, c’est le succès.’

  ‘The world’s great orator is success.’

  – Napoleon Bonaparte

  ‘L’homme de génie est un météore destiné à brûler pour éclairer son siècle.’

  ‘The man of genius is a meteor, destined to burn and enlighten his century.’

  – Napoleon Bonaparte

  I

  IF YOU ARE driving along the main east-west highway in the south of the Czech Republic, and need a toilet stop or a snack, you might well pull into a service station near the town of Slavkov u Brna. If you do so, you will probably park outside a large glass building decorated with the welcoming letters ‘WC’ and the logo of a famous American hamburger restaurant.

  As you leave your car, you will notice that it is being watched over by a moustachioed, rifle-bearing soldier. This is no vigilante security guard – it is a life-size, life-like statue of a Napoleonic infantryman, who seems to be waiting for his colleagues to finish their burgers or come out of the toilets. In fact, the battlefield of Austerlitz is only a few kilometres away, and the statue is mounting a permanent guard over Napoleon’s reputation in the region. Every year there is a giant re-enactment of the battle, with Napoleon fans hiking for miles across the countryside to play their part in one of the Emperor’s great victories.

  Drive closer to the battlefield and Napoleon’s presence can be felt even more strongly. Just off the highway is a large cement works. It consists of three tall gantries beside a long conveyor belt that carries raw materials up into the central cement mixer. It would be unremarkable in the industrial landscape were it not for a few decorative details – the three gantries have been wrapped in canvas and painted to resemble Napoleonic artillerymen, while the conveyor belt and factory now look like a giant cannon, mainly thanks to the addition of two painted wheels and a huge bronze-coloured barrel pointing out at the highway. As Napoleonic souvenirs go, it is a gem.

  It’s hard to imagine any other general inspiring such a gigantic personal monument, especially a foreigner who invaded a country some two centuries earlier. But then Napoleon has inspired more monuments, both conventional and quirky, than possibly any other historical figure in Europe.

  It’s a similar story in Warsaw, the Polish capital. In the city’s most patriotic location, Warsaw Uprising Square, there stands a bust of Napoleon, in instantly recognisable petit caporal hat and waistcoat, above two rampant Napoleonic eagles. It was erected in 2011, on the 190th anniversary of his death, as if the city couldn’t wait another ten years for a more meaningful anniversary.

  And it is not the only manifestation of Poland’s love for the man who annexed the country (sorry – liberated it from Russia, Prussia and Austria) in 1807. Every time the Poles sing the full version of their national anthem, they are reminded of their debt to Napoleon. It is a song of resistance dating back to 1797 and the lyrics, written by Jozef Wybkici, include the lines:

  We shall be Polish,

  Bonaparte has given us the example,

  Of how we should prevail.

  Wybkici first sang it to soldiers of the Polish Legion of Napoleon’s army, which had been formed with the idea of throwing out their country’s Russian, Prussian and Austrian occupiers. Sadly for these valiant patriots, most of them died fighting for Napoleon in Germany, Italy and Haiti, but the French Emperor has obviously been forgiven, and now stands proud in Warsaw, reminding Poles that they were once part of his empire.

  Other countries have more surprising homages to history’s most famous Frenchman. In 2014, for example, Norway celebrated the 200th anniversary of its constitution – which is based on Napoleonic law – by installing a permanent monument in honour of France in front of Oslo’s National Museum of Art. Being Scandinavian, it is less formal than Warsaw’s bust of Napoleon: the Norwegian statue consists of three French public toilets, one painted red, one white and one blue, and inscribed ‘Liberté’, ‘Egalité’ and ‘Fraternité’. Tricolour toilettes. But then it is often hard to understand when a Scandinavian is joking.

  Even stranger than these toilets, however, is a monument in Belgium, at the site of Waterloo itself, which looks conventional until you realise that it makes you feel as though Napoleon must have won the battle. We have met it already: Le Panorama de la Bataille de Waterloo, the 110-metre-long, 12-metre-high picture painted in 1912 by the French artist Louis Dumoulin, who was the official artist to the French navy. The painting was designed to be set inside a round, purpose-built gallery beside the battlefield museum, and depicts the fighting at its fiercest, with cannons blasting, horses charging, and men shouting, shooting and dying. It is a splendidly dramatic picture, and is enhanced by 3D elements like a dummy corpse, discarded weapons and debris-strewn mudbanks, as if it were a huge, gory department store window display.

  As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the strangest thing about Dumoulin’s work is that it represents a French cavalry charge, and that Wellington, almost hidden in one corner, appears to be on the verge of getting killed. Napoleon, meanwhile, is calmly directing his troops’ assault. If a visitor to the building didn’t know better, they would assume that the British had been overrun at Waterloo by a horde of snort
ing Frenchmen. It naturally begs the question why a French artist was invited to paint the grandest memorial on the battlefield. It is as though a German had been asked to decorate a D-Day beach with a panoramic view of machine guns wiping out Allied soldiers as they landed. And it is, of course, proof of the strength of Bonapartist legend, as promulgated by Napoleon’s many, and highly influential, admirers.

  Right across Europe, Napoleon has left his footprint. Every town in France where he spent any amount of time sells itself to tourists as a ville impériale. In Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland and elsewhere, there are monuments on his battlefields, plaques at inns where he spent the night, ‘Napoleon’ restaurants where he stopped for a snack, streets and boulevards where his army marched, museums wherever he forgot a pair of socks, even commemorative public toilets in places where he never set foot.

  Today, every European knows who the leader of France was in June 1815. Who could say the same about Prussia, Russia, Austria or even England? Bonapartists might accept (grudgingly) that Napoleon lost Waterloo (well, the second half of the battle, anyway), but they can rightly claim that his memory has triumphed. He has been history’s winner.

  II

  The transformation of Napoleon from dead hero to permanent monument began very quickly. In August 1855, when Queen Victoria paid her first state visit to Paris, there was one building she was determined to see. Not the Eiffel Tower, because it wouldn’t be built for another thirty-four years; not Notre-Dame, because it was a Catholic church; no, what interested the Anglo-German Queen was a private pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb. It was dark, there was a terrible thunderstorm brewing, and the torches were spluttering in the wind, but she insisted on going into the gloomy chapel at the Invalides, accompanied by Emperor Napoléon III and several limping old veterans of Napoleon’s battles. Not only this, she took her teenaged son, the future King Edward VII, with her, and forced him to kneel before the coffin to pay his respects. All this for the man whom she called in her diary entry for that day ‘England’s bitterest foe’.