1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The officer in charge of the army was a typical product of the French Revolution – a painter who had decided that he would make a good general. When he ordered Napoleon to fire at the nearest ships, the young officer pointed out that it would be pointless, given that they were at least two miles out of cannon range. Impressed by the young man’s expertise, and ignoring grumbles from fellow officers that this newcomer was a treacherous aristo, the general decided to give Napoleon carte blanche, an opportunity that was too good for the ambitious Corsican to miss. He had cannons towed to Toulon from as far away as Monaco, and brought in 100,000 sacks of soil to build a massive gun emplacement on the seashore. Within a few weeks, the artillery aimed at the British fleet was not only within firing range but had also grown from just five to almost 200 cannons. When Napoleon let fly, the ships began to take serious punishment, and the shots they fired in reply just embedded themselves in Napoleon’s soft earthworks. The ships were forced to back off, weakening their hold on the port.

  Emboldened by this success, Napoleon put forward a daring plan to retake the town from its Royalist occupiers using his cannons. He had spotted that a single section of Toulon’s ramparts, a fort known as Little Gibraltar, held the key to the British defences. If it fell, the French would be able to use it as a base to bombard the other enemy outposts and end the siege. Brilliant, the new general (a former sugar planter) said, much better than our old plan of randomly firing at the city walls now and again and hoping that the Brits would go away.

  So Napoleon built another of his gun emplacements outside Little Gibraltar, and began a forty-eight-hour slogging match with the enemy artillery, grabbing short bouts of sleep lying on the ground, wrapped up in his overcoat. He then mounted up and led a cavalry charge at the weakened fortress, during which his horse was shot from under him and he was stabbed in the thigh by a British blade.

  As Little Gibraltar fell, closely followed by the whole of Toulon, a star was born.

  Napoleon himself expressed it nicely: ‘In revolutions, there are two types of people – those who make them, and those who take advantage of them.’ The newly promoted Brigadier General Bonaparte was the living embodiment of this. As a reward for his actions in Toulon, he was appointed Inspector General of Coastal Defences for the whole Côte d’Azur, and given a luxurious villa outside Antibes. Things were looking decidedly rosy.

  Not now, Horatio

  Unfortunately for Napoleon, just out of telescope range of the new Bonaparte residence, a British sailor was finding out that what he enjoyed most in life was firing cannons at Frenchmen.

  This was Horatio Nelson, the humble son of a rector in Norfolk, who had joined the navy at the age of twelve and was now gaining his first experience as a captain in wartime.

  Nelson possessed a contemporary Englishman’s instinctive loathing for the French. When, in 1783, he visited France, he concluded simply, ‘I hate their country and their manners.’ And after spotting British officers adopting the dandyish French fashion for wearing epaulettes, he declared, ‘I hold them a little cheap for putting on any part of a Frenchman’s uniform.’ When he took up his command in 1793, he went even further, telling a new midshipman: ‘You must hate a Frenchman as you hate the devil.’

  And so it was that, in 1794, Nelson flung himself into action, blockading Corsican ports in support of a British army invasion of the island. The Brits eventually abandoned their plans to use Corsica as a Mediterranean base and withdrew, but Nelson had got a taste for the kind of in-your-face cannon battles that Napoleon himself enjoyed, and left the area with his reputation for bravery established. As he wrote to a friend, ‘even the French respect me’.

  Soon they would do much more than that.

  Napoleon would have loved to come and defend his island, of course, but he was marooned on the mainland. As the French Revolutionary politician Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud said, ‘It is to be feared that the Revolution, like Saturn, will devour all of its children one by one.’* This was a reference to the Greco-Roman myth about a god who, fearing that his children would overthrow him, ate each one at birth. Napoleon himself, so recently the hero, now almost became one of those devoured children.

  While Nelson was bombarding Corsica, Napoleon was under investigation for being Italian and therefore a potential traitor. Accused of being too close to the brother of the guillotined leader Robespierre, he was only saved from a similar fate when the appetite for political bloodletting suddenly subsided, and France regained a semblance of sanity.

  But Napoleon’s reputation was in tatters because of the allegations against him, and he considered suicide, and then (more seriously) emigration to Turkey, where artillery officers were much in demand. He was in Paris getting together the necessary papers when fate again presented him with an unmissable opportunity.

  In September 1795, Paris was in turmoil as moderate Republicans wrestled for power with Royalists, many of whom had adopted English accents, calling themselves the ‘Incoyables’ – the word incroyable pronounced à l’anglaise, without the letter R. When the British landed (or rather dumped) a Royalist army in western France, things came to a head and counter-revolutionaries marched on the Tuileries Palace, the seat of government.

  Always wanting to be at the heart of the action, Napoleon went to the public gallery of a parliamentary debate, where he was spotted and offered the chance to defend the Republic. His reply was one characteristic sentence: ‘Where are the cannons?’

  The answer was that there were forty guns out in Neuilly (the suburb where President Sarkozy began his political career), so Napoleon sent troops to fetch them, and positioned his artillery at strategic points around the Tuileries. And when the massive rebel army of 30,000 men stormed into central Paris, it was Napoleon’s deadly cannon fire that enabled 8,000 Republican troops to rout them.

  In just one day of action, he had repaired all the political damage of the previous year. In October 1795, aged only twenty-six, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Armée de l’intérieur. He wasn’t allowed to design his own uniform, but the gold-braided coat was pretty fancy, and he wouldn’t have long to wait before he would be his own stylist.

  Rose by any other name

  Soon afterwards, Napoleon won an even greater prize: Josephine, she of ‘not tonight’ fame. The French will tell you that he never uttered those words and that they were just another piece of anti-Bonaparte propaganda invented by the Brits, but, as we’ll see, the story probably wasn’t far off the mark.

  Josephine, real name Rose Beauharnais, was six years older than Napoleon and a mother of two. She was the widow of a guillotined aristocrat, and had narrowly escaped the chop herself. This seems to be why she decided to enjoy life to the full, entertaining a series of lovers including the national hero General Hoche and one of France’s political leaders, Paul Barras. Probably the last thing she expected was the slavish devotion of a youthful Corsican soldier who decided he didn’t like her name and began calling her Josephine. She slept with him, of course – he was a novelty in Parisian society – but was disconcerted when the serious young man wrote her a long love letter at seven the next morning and then began interrogating her about whether she’d also slept with Barras.

  It was only when he offered to marry her that he got her full attention. She was a widow with no income except her friends’ generosity. He was a newly promoted general with excellent prospects and, if the worst came to the worst, a decent pension. So she accepted, and Barras sportingly gave Napoleon a wedding present – command of the Army of the Alps.

  This was not just so that the newly-weds could go on a skiing honeymoon, however. The Armée des Alpes was due to invade Italy, and Napoleon was being sent into action. Josephine must have been as delighted as English King Henry V’s bride, who was taken on a besieging honeymoon.

  Napoleon made things even worse – for the trip, he loaded up with books on military history and alpine topography. And when Josephine suggested doing something more amorous than re
vising geography, he told her: ‘Patience, my darling. We will have time to make love when the war is won.’

  Which is just a less catchy version of ‘not tonight, Josephine’.

  Denying the Nile

  Napoleon found his new army literally in tatters. The 40,000-odd men stationed in Nice were in ragged trousers and patched tunics, some of them still sporting the white jackets worn under Louis XVI. Their hats ranged from hairless bearskins to dented helmets, and their footwear from clogs to simple lengths of cloth wrapped around their feet. They were underfed and demoralized, hardly able to march in time across a parade ground, let alone ‘liberate’ Italy from Austrian occupation.

  Napoleon’s first act was to spend all his available funds on food and brandy, and to borrow enough money to buy a three-month supply of flour and 18,000 pairs of boots. This won him the instant adoration of his troops, and boosted morale so much that just a few weeks later, on 10 May 1796, he won his first great victory and gained a new nickname.

  At Lodi, near Milan, he managed to persuade his footsoldiers, who had so recently been on the verge of starvation and enforced nakedness, to carry out a suicidal charge across a narrow bridge. At the same time, using the sense of strategy that was to make him such a dangerous opponent, he sent some cavalry to cross the river upstream and surprise the Austrians by galloping down on them when they had all eyes and guns fixed on the river. The plan worked like a dream, the bridge was taken and the victorious Frenchmen, many of them long-serving veterans, dubbed their young leader ‘le petit Caporal’, little realizing that the Brits would later use the nickname to make jokes about his height.

  Over the following year, the ‘little man’ was to win more battles in Italy than any French army for the previous three centuries, in the process capturing over 1,000 highly valuable Austrian cannons and vast amounts of loot. One of the principles of the Revolution was that works of art that had been in the possession of royalty, aristocrats or the Church became the property of the people. Napoleon applied this principle to the Italians, and it was now that Paris’s collection* of great Italian paintings and documents was founded, with works by Raphael, da Vinci, Correggio and Mantegna being shipped north for the greater glory of the Revolution. Even the Pope was made to contribute, and Napoleon personally chose some of the hundred works of art pillaged from the Vatican. It was hardly surprising that he was later excommunicated – no one robs the Vatican without incurring divine discontent.

  Napoleon’s next move was the one that would bring down Nelson’s wrath upon him.

  It was the end of 1797, and Napoleon had been made commander-in-chief of the Armée de l’Angleterre. No, the Brits had not yet begun buying up French talent, and this was not a football-style transfer. The French had formed a whole army dedicated to invading Britain, but after inspecting the troops available to him up on the Channel coast, Napoleon decided that an invasion was (for the moment at least) too risky, and turned his sights to Egypt. This, he claimed, was to capture the land routes to the East and threaten Britain’s presence in India, although cynics might say that he’d caught the art bug and just wanted to add a few sarcophagi to his rapidly growing collection.

  In a move that baffled his superiors, Napoleon declared that he didn’t just want to take soldiers with him. He also assembled a small army of scientists to study what he confidently expected to be a new French territory, as well as artists and poets to record his victory for posterity. Was a touch of megalomania creeping in, perhaps? His officers certainly disapproved, and christened the civilian hangers-on ‘the Pekinese’, because they followed Napoleon around like lapdogs.

  The French invasion fleet sailed out of Toulon on 18 May 1798, stopped off to capture Malta, and then won Egypt in a single battle, proving the first of Napoleon’s theories about Egyptian culture – namely that scimitars are not effective against cannonballs.

  Napoleon proceeded to grab the money and jewels belonging to the country’s rulers, the Mamelukes, but showed that his sense of equality, liberty and fraternity was limited by giving the spoils to the officers rather than letting all his troops benefit from the pillaging.

  All in all, though, it had been a highly effective expedition. Not only had Napoleon won a new colony for the Republic, but he had also come up with one of his most famous quotations. To motivate his troops, he had told them: ‘Soldiers, from the crest of these pyramids, forty centuries are watching you.’ Slightly inaccurate – the pyramid of Gaza was forty-three centuries old at the time – but eminently quotable.

  What Napoleon didn’t know was that the sailor from Norfolk was about to spoil the party.

  The Brits had been wondering for a few months what Napoleon was up to. The wily Frenchman had initially thrown his enemies off the scent by spreading false rumours about a planned invasion of Ireland, and when this didn’t materialize, the alarm bells sounded. Nelson (who had now been promoted to Rear Admiral) had been sailing around the Med looking for signs of French activity, using all the search facilities available before the invention of satellite reconnaissance – spies, rumours overheard in harbourside taverns, spottings of masts on the horizon, and his own instincts about what the sneaky Corsican might be plotting. And in August 1798 Nelson struck floating gold. He stumbled across the French fleet riding peacefully at anchor in Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria.

  The fleet’s Vice-Admiral, François-Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers, was an aristocratic survivor of the Terreur. He had prepared for a potential British attack by chaining his thirteen battleships together in a defensive prow-to-stern line close to the shore, with his main force of guns pointing out to sea. He saw Nelson’s fourteen warships approaching at sunset on 1 August, and thought that he had plenty of time to prepare for a fight or escape. Surely no one would attack such an impregnable line of ships in darkness, especially with the risk of running aground?

  Grande erreur. The Frenchman didn’t know that he was up against a man who was just as daring and unconventional as Napoleon, and he couldn’t believe his telescope when the Brits, with the wind behind them, not only sailed straight into attack, but also began sweeping around to the landward, undefended flank.

  Nelson’s fleet took the French on from both sides, battering away with a double blast of broadsides while the unattacked ships further down the line looked on helpless, chained up and unable to sail into action against the wind. Vice Admiral Brueys’s flagship, the Orient, caught fire and was destroyed in an immense explosion that so shocked both fleets that they actually stopped fighting to watch the fireworks.

  The boy stood on the burning – ouch

  It was an explosion that would echo down the years.

  Giocante de Casabianca sounds like an Italian wine, but he was a boy sailor aboard the Orient, who stayed at his post while the ship blazed and was killed in the subsequent explosion. He was immortalized by the English poet Felicia Hemans in 1826 in her poem ‘Casabianca’, which opens with the famous line: ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’. Hemans tells the tragic story of Giocante’s heroism, although she rather spoils the poignancy by saying that he was waiting for an order from his father (an officer on the Orient) to abandon ship while other sailors were jumping overboard. Only around 100 of the 1,000-strong crew survived, all of them by swimming for it before the unstoppable fire reached the ship’s powder magazine. It is heroic but perhaps a little silly to stand there while your more experienced shipmates tell you to jump for your life. As the comedy writer Spike Milligan once said:

  The boy stood on the burning deck

  Whence all but he had fled -

  The twit!

  Nelson meets his Josephine

  Nelson was another sailor who very nearly ended his career at Aboukir. He was hit on the forehead by a piece of shrapnel and so badly cut that a flap of flesh was left hanging down over half his face. ‘I am killed,’ he told his crew, but for once he was wrong. He was stitched up and able to enjoy the sweet taste of victory. Of thirteen enemy ships, only two escaped destructio
n or capture. The French Mediterranean fleet was non-existent.

  As a reward, the victor was ennobled as Baron Nelson of the Nile (a clear message to Napoleon that Egypt didn’t belong to him), and became an even bigger hero, attracting the attention of a famous groupie, Lady Hamilton.

  She was very much Nelson’s Josephine – a woman with a colourful past and a changed name. She was born into poverty in Cheshire as Amy Lyon, and went to London as a teenager to become a maid. After getting the sack for her immoral night-time activities, she became a stripper and prostitute, and finally struck lucky at the age of sixteen – while on long-term hire to a drunken aristocrat, she met a dull-but-nice earl’s son called Charles Greville who set her up as his mistress. He renamed her Emma Hart in a vain bid to limit a scandal, but when he decided that the time was right to marry an heiress, he couldn’t take any risks, so he sent Emma to stay with his uncle, Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples.

  Greville fully intended to reclaim his mistress once he’d got his wedding out of the way, and didn’t think it necessary to explain his plan to Emma, who believed she was being sent on a long Italian holiday. When she realized what was happening, opportunistic Emma turned on her charms and got gullible old Sir William to marry her, much to Greville’s annoyance.

  Lady Hamilton was the shining light of Naples society when Nelson first met her in 1793, and on his return trip after the Battle of the Nile, she fainted into his arms at the sight of his wounds and whisked him away to her villa to nurse him back to health.