How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  And this was while Napoleon was lying in state in the small Chapelle de Saint-Jérôme, before the completion of the immense mausoleum his nephew Napoléon III was having built below the church. Today, even though Napoleon’s tomb doesn’t attract the kind of crowds that you see clamouring for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa or trying to climb the Eiffel Tower, on a sunny day the gold-encrusted roof of the Invalides dominates the Paris skyline like a torch permanently lit in honour of the former Emperor lying inside.

  It is certainly the grandest monument to a dead leader in the whole Paris region. The body of the Sun King, Louis XIV, was shared out in small portions – his heart donated to the church of Saint Paul in Paris, his entrails to Notre-Dame, the rest of his body to the basilica of Saint-Denis, a suburb that now has an unfortunate reputation for poverty and riotousness, but where French kings were traditionally entombed. Among more than seventy royal tombs dating back to the fifth century, the basilica houses Henri IV, the first of the Bourbons, as well as the fondly remembered François I.

  During the Revolution many of the coffins in Saint-Denis were opened and the bodies thrown into mass graves. Most have been reassembled since, but they now seem to huddle together for protection out in the banlieue, far from the safety of central Paris where Napoleon reigns supreme in a mausoleum ten times bigger than anything erected for a French king. Even the Chapelle Expiatoire, the memorial built for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette by Parisians expressing belated guilt for the double guillotining, is much smaller, and the tragic couple are usually ignored by tourists and Parisians alike.

  Visiting Napoleon’s tomb, the last word you could possibly imagine is ‘loser’. Like the Arc de Triomphe, it is a celebration of victories, though unlike the Arc, which now plays host to an unknown World War One soldier, more recent events don’t get a look-in.

  The tomb is an underground temple constructed around a brown sarcophagus that looks like a gigantic soft-centred chocolate. The sarcophagus is carved from quartzite, set on a granite plinth, and is guarded by twelve sexy (if somewhat butch) angels who wear off-the-shoulder gowns that reveal large amounts of leg and some hefty cleavage. The angels represent Napoleon’s twelve victorious campaigns, though cynical visitors might pick up on the fact that the marble floor is inscribed with only eight victories, including Moscow, which can only be counted as a victory if you ignore the humiliating retreat that followed it.

  Around the sarcophagus is a covered walkway decorated with sculpted frescoes. Predictably, one of these contains Napoleon’s military record, which was, after all, impressive. He definitely won a lot more battles than he lost (even if you take in the Bonapartist accounting system that divides successful campaigns into several victories and lumps defeats together in a single mass). But, like the inscription on the floor, the record indulges in some dubious barrel-scraping – should the list of victories really include crossing the Saint Bernard’s Pass or ‘the entry into Madrid’? They sound like stopovers on a coach tour rather than military successes.

  Elsewhere, we are confronted by a topless Napoleon (with an enviable six-pack) represented as a Greek god and accompanied by more angels pointing out the extent of his great civil works. An inscription tells us that ‘wherever my reign reached, it left lasting traces of its benevolence’. Curiously, these traces include ‘la route de Bordeaux’, ‘le canal de l’Ourcq’, and ‘les travaux hydrauliques de Dunkerque’. We are also reminded that Napoleon organised a ‘five-yearly exhibition of industrial products’ and that we have him to thank for the ‘renovation of Lyon’s factories’. It all reads less like an emperor’s boasts than a French engineer’s CV.

  There is another panel dedicated to Napoleon’s cour des comptes (national auditors’ administration), on which we see the guardian angel of accountancy watching over receipts and outgoings, as well as one given over to Napoleon’s introduction of centralisation administrative. In short, the tomb seems to be telling us that if heaven needs a technocrat with excellent organisational skills, Napoleon is the man for the job.

  It is true that many – if not most – of the people visiting the Invalides are going there principally to see the army museum rather than the tomb, but then Napoleon is the star of that too. And after all, what foreign visitor would dream of visiting France’s army museum for anything other than Napoleon’s Grande Armée? There hasn’t been much to shout about since.

  The museum doesn’t disappoint – if, that is, the visitor is fascinated by the legend of the Napoleonic soldier. There are rooms full of their glossy weapons – richly engraved swords, muskets made of polished wood and topped by the famously intimidating bayonets – as well as the campaign uniforms of many of Napoleon’s regiments. It is a parade rather than a battlefield.

  The museum frankly admits that Napoleon was a war-maker, but doesn’t seem to disapprove. ‘Combining revolutionary ideas and his own glory,’ one inscription reads, ‘Napoleon created a great empire that remodelled the face of Europe.’ (Non-Bonapartists might interpret this ‘remodelling’ as breaking Europe’s nose and smothering its mouth in French lipstick.) ‘The enemies of France were neutralised,’ another caption tells us, an aggressive boast that it is rare to find in a modern military museum. Most countries now play down their former attempts at ‘neutralising’ other nations.

  Napoleon’s ultimate defeat is acknowledged in the tiny Waterloo Room, which is maybe 10 feet square. Here, for once, the museum recognises the existence of Napoleon’s opponents, who are represented by three English swords and a frilly black Hussar’s jacket that looks like something out of a Parisian madame’s boudoir, a stark contrast to the manliness of the Grande Armée’s uniforms – a subliminal suggestion, perhaps, that these effete Englishmen really didn’t deserve to win at Waterloo (if, indeed, they won at all).

  An electronic display describes the course of the battle in five minutes, while the audioguide toes the Bonapartist line, telling us that everything was going more or less to plan when the Prussians arrived and ‘upset the course of the battle’, as if its true course ought to have been a French victory. An inscription on the wall sums up the outcome of Waterloo as ‘an accumulation of bad luck, errors and communication problems’. At least they don’t blame the weather.

  The film on this electronic display is very restrained, with little arrows to indicate the movement of the different armies, tiny electronic puffs of smoke to simulate cannon fire, and bangs and neighing horse effects to add a little atmosphere.

  The only sign that the battle might have involved anything more violent than neighing and puffs of smoke is a breastplate with a large cannonball-shaped hole in the front. A certain Carabinier Antoine Fauveau was one Napoleonic soldier who never made it back to France.

  The Napoleon section of the national army museum is less a commemoration of the men who gave their lives for their Emperor than a celebration of Napoleon’s sense of style and grandeur. Even while he was alive, he turned himself and his entourage into monuments.

  Napoleon’s sense of style is, of course, one of the reasons why he remains so firmly fixed in modern minds. He created a personal look that is as unmistakeable as Marilyn Monroe’s blond curls or the skinny silhouette of Michael Jackson.

  The green jacket and tight white trousers (the uniform of a chasseur, a light cavalryman); the grey greatcoat and white waistcoat that he showed to royalist troops in March 1815, defying them to shoot at their instantly recognisable Emperor; and of course the black bicorn hat. With these simple elements, Napoleon created the mould for all military dictators since – design yourself a personal uniform so that the people will think of you as an active soldier, no matter how flabby and battle-shy you really get (not that Napoleon became either before he was deposed).

  Napoleon wanted to distance himself from the silk-and-satin rulers who had preceded him, as well as impose a forceful new image of military power, with himself as the charismatic protector of the nation. In reality, he often fought battles wearing a green velvet cap or barehe
aded (as he was at Waterloo), but he created his iconic image as early as 1801, when the painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey first sketched him in green jacket and black hat, with his hand inside his waistcoat – not because of stomach pain or to hide a paunch but because this was seen at the time as a noble orator’s stance.

  During his fifteen-year on-and-off reign as consul and Emperor, Napoleon had about fifty of the bicorn hats made out of felt or beaver skin by a Parisian hatter in the Palais Royal, and from 1801 onwards all his official portraits depicted him wearing it – the only exceptions being the pictures painted for his two coronations. In 1806, for example, two years after his enthronement as Emperor, he commissioned a portrait from Europe’s most fashionable painter, Ingres, for which he posed in a Roman emperor’s crown of golden laurel leaves, wearing a jewelled broadsword and sporting a manly (and physiologically inaccurate) cleft chin – all in all, every bit as godlike as France’s most elitist kings. But this, and the even more pompous painting of his second coronation, are rare departures from the brand image that his soldiers loved and (while their glory lasted) his people idolised.

  This sense of design extended throughout his regime, which was characterised by its mass of new uniforms and its ever-present golden eagles. Napoleon even seems to have invented the ministerial red box – all generals and ranking administrators in Bonapartist France had their own official document case, which was often red, and inscribed with their title.

  The Napoleonic look found favour outside France, too: after all, ever since the Battle of Waterloo, Britain’s Household Cavalry and Guards regiments have worn the French breastplates, busbies and eagles that they picked up from the battlefield. One could interpret this as a kind of scalping, decorating yourself with symbols of your defeated opponents. But surely it is more of a testimony to the attractive design – we have never seen British or American troops sporting swastikas or jackboots (except perhaps when a British soldier-prince goes to a fancy dress party).

  And talking of Nazis, it has to be said again: in matters of design Napoleon seems – inadvertently of course – to have inspired Hitler. All those eagles, the personalised uniforms of the Third Reich’s leaders, the highly choreographed processions of adoring soldiers, the charismatic portraits. Even Hitler’s floppy black fringe – it’s all Napoleon. And it’s the only historical tribute the modern Bonapartist would prefer to do without.

  III

  Aside from grand monuments like Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon and his short reign have left a mark on everyday life in modern France in a way that no other period of history has done.

  There is, for instance, an Avenue Charles de Gaulle and a Place 8 Mai 1945 in many a French town, but the sheer multitude of Napoleonic streets in Paris is dizzying. The city is ringed by the boulevards des maréchaux, just inside the modern périphérique, as if Napoleon’s men were now defending Paris against attack from the notoriously unruly banlieusards. Out of his twenty-six marshals, nineteen of them have a boulevard named after them, the most notable exceptions being Grouchy, who went AWOL at Waterloo, and the traitors Marmont (who defected to the royalists in 1814) and Bernadotte (who, bizarrely, left Napoleon’s army to become King of Sweden in 1810, and later signed an alliance with Russia agaist France). Even Ney, whose rashness and indecision scuppered Napoleon’s battle plan at Waterloo, gets a boulevard.fn1

  Throughout Paris there are countless other testimonies to Napoleon – the rue Bonaparte, leading from Saint Germain des Prés to the River Seine; streets like Friedland, Iéna (Jena), Pyramides, Wagram, Marengo and Rivoli named after his victories, a couple of which get bridges too (Iéna and Austerlitz), and one a railway station: Austerlitz is the anti-Russian and anti-Austrian equivalent of London’s Francophobic Waterloo.

  There is nothing forcing the French to maintain these nostalgic names. After the Revolution, for example, most royal street names were expunged, but no such fate has befallen Napoleon.

  The only exception was the rue Napoléon itself, a grand street in central Paris that he commissioned in his own honour in 1806, to replace a demolished convent – proof that in Napoleon’s world view, emperors took preference over divinities. The street led to the Place Vendôme, where Napoleon erected a column in honour of the Grande Armée, made from 1,200 bronze cannons captured at Austerlitz. As soon as Napoleon abdicated in 1814, the street was renamed rue de la Paix – Peace Street – the obvious implication being that Napoleon’s name was synonymous with war.

  His column in the Place Vendôme survived the invasion by British, Austrian and Russian troops, but was pulled down in 1871 by the Communards (Parisians who resisted the Prussian siege of 1870–1 and then staged a short-lived revolution), who called it a ‘symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult by victors to the defeated’ – probably the strongest-ever condemnation of Napoleon’s rule by the French themselves. However, the Commune lasted only a few months, and as soon as it fell, the column went up again, even though the new government was theoretically a republican regime. Even today, 42 metres above one of Paris’s most luxurious squares, Napoleon in his Roman toga looks down on his old capital, apparently keeping his eye out for dubious goings-on at the Ritz Hotel.

  The column even survived World War Two, when the hotel was squatted by the Luftwaffe and adopted as the epicentre of Nazi nightlife. The occupiers clearly didn’t object to being lorded over by Napoleon. Here was one Frenchman whom even these descendants of the warlike Prussians could respect.

  IV

  Napoleon’s legacy in everyday France is not confined to road names and military mementoes. Far from it.

  It was during his reign that European streets first got their present numbering system, with even numbers on one side, odd on the other. It was also his engineers who designated that pavements should be slightly convex, with gutters collecting the run-off (although efficient sewers were still decades in the future and much of the run-off would have made disgusting stains on the Emperor’s shiny boots).

  Napoleon, who as we saw above was the French god of centralisation, also decided that Paris should have one big central market at Les Halles, and that the city needed large abattoirs on the outskirts, so that butchers would stop cutting animals’ throats in their shops and courtyards and offending sensitive Parisians.

  Napoleon also decreed that Parisians needed to be centralised after death, and created the large cemeteries of Père Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre.

  Modern tourists have plenty of reasons to be grateful to Napoleon, too, even if they don’t want to visit his tomb, or be entombed themselves alongside Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise. Because the Louvre owes much of its collection to l’Empereur and his empire-building instincts.

  A national art collection had been started in 1793, largely consisting of works that had been ‘liberated’ from the Church or the royal family during the Revolution. Napoleon began to contribute to the collection as soon as he was named chief of the French army based in Italy in 1796. All French generals were under orders to ‘send to France all the artistic and scientific monuments that they consider worthy of entering our museums and libraries’, and Napoleon fulfilled his mission with the same thoroughness he applied to any task, pillaging Europe’s art collections – including that of the Vatican – of its finest pictures, sculptures and manuscripts. In 1800, on seizing power, he moved the collection to the Louvre, ironically evicting a large group of artists who had been squatting there since the Revolution. He also decided that the country’s art collection needed to be centralised, and dispossessed many provincial museums of their prize exhibits.

  Inevitably, after he lost power in 1815, the occupiers returned the compliment and tried to relieve France of its stolen property. By November of that year, five months after Waterloo, 5,203 works of art, including 2,065 paintings, among them several dozen Rembrandts, seventy-five Rubens, fifteen Raphaels, as well as Da Vincis,fn2 Van Dyc
ks and Titians, and hundreds of ancient Roman and Greek statues, had been sent back to their previous owners.

  The Pope commissioned an artist, Antonio Canova, to retrieve works that had been looted from the Vatican, no doubt on the grounds that Canova knew Napoleon’s collections well – he had previously made a sculpture of Napoleon as a giant Greek athlete, naked except for a fig leaf, which was later bought by Wellington and displayed in his London town house, in the same way that a big-game hunter might have shown off the skin of a tiger he had shot.fn3 Seeing these foreigners loot the Louvre’s (largely looted) collection, the museum’s director, Dominique Vivant Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt to requisition ancient artefacts, complained to King Louis XVIII that ‘We conquered Europe to construct this trophy; Europe has now joined forces to destroy it.’

  Fortunately for modern visitors to Paris, Monsieur Denon was over-dramatising somewhat. Because even while Wellington was (so French historians allege) personally climbing ladders to unhook paintings from the walls of the museum, the Parisians were hiding large quantities of stolen art from the prying eyes of the invaders. At the same time, in typical Parisian fashion, the Louvre informed provincial museums that they wouldn’t be getting their exhibits back. Which is why today, visitors to Paris can still enjoy the cream of France’s art collection – as well as a large number of pieces that were never returned to other countries – all under one roof. Vive la centralisation napoléonienne.

  V

  After 1815, Napoleon’s family was banned en masse from France. This enraged one of his greatest fans, the writer Victor Hugo, who turned his most withering irony on Louis XVIII’s administration. What had the Bonapartes done wrong? Hugo asked, and ironised: ‘Here are their crimes – religion restored, the Civil Code written, France expanded beyond its natural borders, Marengo, Iéna, Wagram, Austerlitz; it is the greatest legacy of power and glory that any great man ever gave to a great nation.’