How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  Large black seashell that the waves have brought,

  And in which one’s ear, when held close, hears

  The wave of sound that a great nation makes as it marches.

  The warm round of applause the auctioneer received for his poem said a lot more about French nostalgia than his reciting skills. He got the second and third lines completely wrong, but no one cared: in everyone’s minds, just for this day France was on the march again, rather than being bogged down in post-credit-crunch austerity. And all thanks to Napoleon.

  The last two bidders in the race for the hat after the price broke the million barrier were a Chinese woman and a Korean man. When the Korean won,fn6 there was more applause. No one seemed particularly worried that this important Napoleonic artefact would be leaving France – for a start, there are several of his hats in French museums and private collections; but perhaps most importantly, Bonapartists probably saw the outrageous price as satisfying proof that Napoleon’s star is starting to shine far beyond the borders of France and his European empire.

  But perhaps the most notable thing about all these sales was that the auctioneers referred to Napoleon throughout as ‘l’Empereur’. Each time, for a few hours, he was back on his throne.

  Several times a year, in France and throughout his former empire, Napoleon really does return. Whenever there is a battle re-enactment, the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ are almost as loud as the barrages of blank-firing artillery. And Napoleon himself is always there to acknowledge them.

  Every period of military history has its re-enactors – at the 2014 commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of D-Day there were even uniformed Nazis (though it is to be hoped that they don’t re-enact all the Nazis’ exploits). Napoleonic battles are probably the most frequently commemorated in Europe, and attract large numbers of enthusiasts from all sides, no doubt because the uniforms are so brightly coloured and the formations of lines and squares so aesthetically pleasing. A Napoleonic battle was a grand, highly choreographed affair, unlike, say, a re-enactment of Passchendaele that would involve little more than waves of men in dirt-coloured uniforms tumbling face-first into mud.

  The difference between the re-enactors in Napoleon’s armies and the others seems to be that some of them are not pretending.

  In 2014 I witnessed this at first hand at Brienne le Château, the site of the battle – a skirmish, really – that took place in January 1814, when Napoleon was fighting his last-ditch stand against the invading Prussians. Two hundred years later, the town decided to celebrate the Emperor’s victory – in May, so that re-enactment soldiers would not get too cold or wet – and to follow the fighting with a huge public picnic rather than the looting of corpses and the crude amputation of shattered limbs.

  At the re-enactment, about 400 or so French cavalry and infantry, all dressed in authentic uniforms and carrying realistic weapons, charged about twenty valiant Prussians who were ‘holding the castle’ (or more accurately, occupying part of the lawn).

  The line of French infantry advanced, stopping periodically to fire their muskets, and occasionally getting a bit over-enthusiastic. One volley (of blanks, naturally) was aimed straight at the French spectators, who were turned into accidental Prussians. Another group of footsoldiers fired as their own horsemen were riding past, forcing the announcer to admit that ‘the French infantry shooting at the French cavalry is a bit embarrassing’.

  But the mass of Napoleonic troops so outnumbered the enemy that they could afford a few casualties from friendly fire, and after no more than fifteen minutes, the lines of French infantry had walked right up to the Prussians, provoking a brief waving of bayonets, a rapid retreat of the invaders, and a rapturous cry from the announcer that ‘The allies have been routed! Victory has been won!’

  The only problem was that the French artillery didn’t seem to agree. The battle had been so short they had only had time to fire one or two salvoes, so even as a very convincing Napoleon imitator was congratulating his victorious troops, his cannons kept up a ceaseless barrage of deafening explosions.

  At first, the announcer politely asked for a ceasefire – ‘Arrêtez, s’il vous plaît!’ – but when they carried on regardless, he lost his temper, yelling, ‘L’artillerie, stop!’ Yes, an English word aimed at French artillerymen. No wonder they ignored him, and one cannon, luckily firing nothing more dangerous than shreds of newspaper, almost blew Napoleon’s head off as he was walking towards them to impose some discipline. At which point the announcer, dressed as a nineteenth-century gentleman, strutted over and confiscated the artillerymen’s plungers. A tactic that proved so effective that it’s a wonder Wellington didn’t try it sooner at Waterloo.

  Overall, though, morale in the French camp was high. The Napoleon imitator, his safety now assured, toured the battlefield, instantly recognisable in his bicorn hat and grey overcoat, congratulating each unit in turn. His troops saluted him, waving their busbies and helmets in the air, just like the good old days, while the announcer informed the crowd that ‘if we still had the French empire, we could have saved all the lives lost during the First World War. Vive l’Empereur!’

  Reassuringly, perhaps, most of the spectators were stunned into silence by this radical rewriting of history, and only the soldiers took up the cry. But it is hard to imagine similar speeches being made at other re-enactments. Would a man in Viking costume bemoan the fact that Scandinavians are no longer allowed to pillage England? Does someone dressed as Wellington tell his modern redcoats: ‘If we still had George III, we could all wear white wigs and talk to trees without anyone laughing at us’? No, and surely only the more fanatical of the Napoleonic re-enactors really wish that the past would return.

  After the battle, I talked to some of the troops, and asked a footsoldier why he didn’t get himself an officer’s uniform so that he could wave his sword about, give orders, and maybe even have a drink with the Napoleon impersonator. (Only a select few plumed officers were allowed to sit down with l’Empereur himself outside his fenced-off imperial bivouac.) Oh no, I was told, that wouldn’t go down well. You can’t just decide to be an officer in the official Napoleonic re-enactment groups. And besides, it costs a fortune to be an officer – an authentic, hand-made uniform (the only ones permitted) would cost more than 10,000 euros. Even an ordinary infantryman’s shoulder straps cost 100 euros from the official suppliers. This is a cause that requires true devotion.

  At the time of writing, fresh epaulettes and shoulder straps are no doubt being stitched and starched for the 200th anniversary re-enactment of Waterloo. And guess who is depicted on the home page of the official ‘Waterloo 2015’ website, and who is the most visible figure on the official poster, about five times bigger than his two rivals. Wellington? Blücher? No, Napoleon – or rather a Napoleon imitator, the reincarnation of the Emperor. Bonaparte is back. The modern-day Bonapartists have taken possession of the battlefield.

  Apparently, in June 2015 over 5,000 uniformed enthusiasts will be replaying the Battle of Waterloo, which will be spread over two days instead of trying to cram all the action into one, as the original combatants had to do. And this time, you can bet the French will be going for a victory.

  In some ways, of course, they have already won that victory. As we have seen, Napoleon is already the biggest star of the battlefield museum. His is the name, and the silhouette, that everyone recognises from that period of history. His shadow looms over modern French institutions and those he set up all over Europe. He is also the general whose tomb dominates his former capital city’s skyline, and whose naked statue holds pride of place in Wellington’s former home in London. And now he is even conquering Asia.

  * * *

  fn1 These, by the way, were not named by Napoleon himself, or as part of his nephew Napoléon III’s later campaign to glorify the family’s image – they were created in the 1920s, just after the slaughter in the trenches, when France decided to look to the more distant past to boost its patriotic image. This was
also when the French adopted Joan of Arc as their patron saint. Napoleon and Joan – the twin saviours of the nation.

  fn2 The Mona Lisa wasn’t one of them because it had been bought legally by King François I soon after Da Vinci’s death in 1519.

  fn3 The statue of the naked Napoleon is still on show at Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner, alongside an impressive selection of artworks given to Wellington by the Spanish as thanks for chasing out its French invaders. Significantly, the English Heritage website declares that ‘pride of place’ in the whole collection goes to Napoleon.

  fn4 The Middle Ages was apparently the time when French males first decided to divide themselves into two distinct groups: intellectuals and men of action.

  fn5 By the way, crème brûlée isn’t entirely French, either – it’s a seventeenth-century adaptation of the ancient Arabian recipe for crème caramel.

  fn6 He was bidding on behalf of a Korean poultry company that wanted to display the hat, a sword and other items acquired at the sale in its Seoul head office, to prove to its staff and customers that the company was, like Napoleon, a winner. News of Waterloo, it seems, never reached Korea.

  9

  FRANCE WON WATERLOO, EVEN IF NAPOLEON DIDN’T

  ‘Napoléon a laissé la France écrasée, envahie, vidée de sang et de courage, plus petite qu’il ne l’avait prise.’

  ‘Napoleon left France crushed, invaded, drained of blood and courage, smaller than when he took it.’

  – Charles de Gaulle in his book La France et son armée (1938)

  ‘Le bonheur de la France dépendait de la perte de la bataille.’

  ‘France’s happiness depended on losing the battle.’

  – nineteenth-century French publisher (and royalist) Jean-Gabriel Dentu

  I

  WHEN NAPOLEON WAS shipped off to Saint Helena, the returning Louis XVIII and his entourage weren’t the only people in France who thought that the South Atlantic wasn’t far enough. The same goes today. There are plenty of French people who despise everything that Napoleon stood for – his despotism, the number of lives he threw away in battle, the way he has inspired every foreigner to giggle at any authoritative Frenchman.

  These people willingly accept that Napoleon was beaten in Belgium on 18 June 1815. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that they think France lost the battle. For them, getting rid of Bonaparte simply gave the country the breathing space to become the great nation that it is today. They view Waterloo as a victory for France itself. To them, the British and the Prussians were almost unimportant by-standers in France’s great leap forward.

  Before Waterloo, there were already voices complaining about Napoleon’s reign, though they had to tread carefully for fear of reprisals. In December 1813, Joseph Lainé, the MP for the Gironde in south-western France, made a daring speech in parliament complaining that ‘trade has been destroyed, and industry is dying. What are the causes of this unspeakable misery? A vexatious administration, excessive taxation … and crueller still, the way our armies are recruited.’ Lainé represented the Bordeaux region, which was suffering more than most from Napoleon’s droits réunis, a VAT-style duty on everyday goods to raise money for his warmongering. Wine was taxed at a staggering 94.1 per cent. Not only that, Napoleon had forbidden the region’s ports from selling wine to their traditional buyers, the thirsty Brits.

  This was why, when Wellington chased Napoleon’s army across the Spanish border and invaded southern France in 1814, Bordeaux greeted him as a liberator. At the same time, French royalists began campaigning in the area, promising ‘an end to tyranny, war, conscription and droits réunis’. It was a message that many wanted to hear.

  When talking about Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, Bonapartist historians often fail to mention that he only just made it alive to the south coast of France because of the hostility of his own people. Even Walter Scott’s account of French people ‘insulting his passage’ doesn’t paint the full picture. As Napoleon’s convoy of carriages passed through Orgon, in Provence, there was a minor riot, and he had to disguise himself as a messenger to save his skin. He also insisted on taking a British warship across to Elba, because the French navy was under the command of his rival, the treacherous Talleyrand, and Napoleon suspected that he might ‘fall overboard’ during the crossing. The French sailors designated to escort the Emperor were sent away at the last minute, and Napoleon entrusted himself to the hated – but apparently more honourable – British enemy.

  Today, even some of the French historians who admire Napoleon, like Jean Tulard, author of Le Dictionnaire Napoléon, acknowledge the dictatorial tendencies that created such hostility while the Emperor was still in power. Tulard quotes the story of Cincinnatus, the dictator of Rome who, as soon as a crisis was resolved, went back to farming his fields. This Napoleon never did (despite a short period of exile spent planting chestnut trees on Elba) – he hung on to his throne too long, and therefore took away the lustre of his great achievements.

  By 1815, almost everyone in France except Napoleon was exhausted by his war effort. Since the Revolution, about 1.4 million Frenchmen had died in battle.fn1 In total, around 30 per cent of French males born between 1790 and 1795 were killed or wounded in uniform.

  This is why anti-Bonapartists insist that Napoleon – not France – lost Waterloo. If he had won the battle, they say, the allies would have continued attacking, whereas his defeat ushered in a period of fifty-five years of relative peace in Europe – which only ended when Napoleon’s nephew provoked Prussia in 1870. France then got rid of the last Bonaparte emperor, and enjoyed forty-three more years of European peace until World War One. All in all, they would say, Waterloo was the first step in ‘curing’ the Bonaparte problem that would otherwise have dogged France throughout the nineteenth century.

  Nevertheless – a Bonapartist would argue – even statements like that place Napoleon at the heart of French history, as the catalyst for everything that succeeded his reign.

  II

  It has not always been easy to voice anti-Bonapartist views in France. A telling example is Pierre Larousse’s fifteen-volume encyclopedia, Le Grand Dictionnaire Universel, completed in 1876. It contains two separate definitions of Napoleon: under ‘Bonaparte’, in volume two which was first published in 1867, he is ‘the greatest, most glorious, most striking name in history … a name that is easy to remember, simple, unified, military, with hard, short, dry consonants, a name that was unknown before him, but which was to engrave itself in the memory of all who heard it’. It reads like an advert for a French perfume.

  However, at the entry for ‘Napoléon 1er’, in a volume published in 1874, there is an editor’s note explaining that seven years earlier the dictionary had been forced to praise Napoleon ‘for fear of compromising our publication’. The former Emperor is then defined as ‘a man who was the cruellest enemy of freedom … a political and military dictator, an imitator of the Caesars’.

  The explanation for this apparent schizophrenia is that the early volumes were published while Napoléon III, Bonaparte’s nephew, was in power, the later ones just after his fall.

  But the most interesting thing about all this is that in 2014, in a special Napoleonic edition of the French magazine L’Histoire, an article about the Grand Dictionnaire’s differing definitions failed to mention the time gap between the two volumes of the dictionary. It described the contrasting opinions as a sign that France has never been able to make up its mind about Napoleon.fn2 In fact, though, the French have always divided themselves into two factions – pour and contre Napoleon. The thing is that bitterly negative opinions, like the definition of him as ‘the cruellest enemy of freedom’, have become much rarer since he and his nephew were ousted from power and their tyrannical tendencies stopped causing resentment. Now that the French can say what they like about Napoleon, it is simply the Bonapartists who are much more vocal.

  III

  Even though in 1815 France had ousted Napoleon for the second ti
me in two years, with many French people calling for his head and the returning royalist aristocracy hungry for revenge against almost everything that had happened in France for the previous twenty-five years, post-Napoleonic France remained a surprisingly Napoleonic place – the key difference being that Napoleon himself was no longer there to force the French to obey all his rules and keep all his institutions.

  Naturally, there were also sweeping political changes. During his first short reign from 1814 to early 1815, Louis XVIII had signed (albeit with the allies holding the pen) his so-called ‘Charte constitutionelle’, which ushered in some major anti-Bonapartist reforms. These were reintroduced after Waterloo. The Charte guaranteed the freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and opened up careers such as the law and medicine to poor but talented citizens. It also confirmed the property deeds of everyone who had bought land and property from dispossessed aristocrats and the royal family.

  Astonishingly, Louis XVIII allowed the newly created Napoleonic aristocracy to keep its noble titles – though it is doubtful whether the average French citizen found having two aristocracies better than one. After all, a double layer of crème de la crème makes even the sweetest dessert taste sickly.

  Louis XVIII stopped short of handing total power back to the aristos, however. Even he knew that they were incapable of ruling the country. The Charte therefore installed the new elite that still governs France – the technocrats, who were largely a product of the Napoleonic system, and who were now freed of subservience to either an emperor or a king.