The exhausted French indeed slept that night on the battlefield. In total, 963 Austrians were killed, 5,518 wounded and 2,921 captured; 13 guns indeed were seized and a further 20 dumped in the Bormida. Just over 1,000 Frenchmen were killed, 3,600 wounded and 900 captured or missing, but the numbers mask what was a crushing strategic victory for Napoleon.42 According to the terms of the armistice that Melas signed soon afterwards, Napoleon would be given the whole of Piedmont, Genoa, most of Lombardy, 12 fortresses, 1,500 guns and massive ammunition magazines. When the news of Marengo reached Paris, government bonds that had been standing at 11 francs six months earlier, and 29 just before the battle, shot up to 35 francs.43 After the battle, Napoleon gave orders to Masséna on July 22 to ‘plunder and burn the first village which revolts in Piedmont’, and to Brune on November 4: ‘All foreigners, but especially Italians, need to be dealt with severely from time to time.’44 But now that the Austrians had been expelled for the second time, northern Italy was swiftly pacified with a minimum of repression, and was to remain quiescent for the next fourteen years. Marengo confirmed Napoleon in his position as First Consul, and added to the myth of his invincibility.
• • •
Napoleon had worked his three arms of infantry, artillery and cavalry together perfectly at Marengo, but it was still a very lucky victory, won largely by the shock value of Desaix’s arrival on the field at precisely the right psychological moment, and Kellermann’s superbly timed cavalry charges. The French reconquered a plain in one hour that it had taken the Austrians eight to occupy. The conscript French troops, guided by the veterans, had acquitted themselves very well.
‘After a great battle,’ wrote Captain Blaze, ‘there is plenty of food for the crows and the bulletin-writers.’45 Napoleon had made three major errors: in going onto the plain in the first place, in not anticipating Melas’s attack and in sending Desaix so far away. But he had won, and for political reasons it was imperative that Marengo be seen as his triumph, or at least one shared with the dead Desaix. The post-battle bulletin was thus pure propaganda, implying that the Austrians had fallen into his trap. ‘The battle appeared to be lost,’ it stated somewhat fancifully. ‘The enemy was allowed to advance within musket range of the village of San Giuliano, where General Desaix’s division was drawn up in the line of battle.’46 Napoleon also invented some last words for Desaix: ‘Go tell the First Consul that I die with the regret of having not done enough to live in posterity.’ (In fact he had died instantaneously.) Berthier’s official history of the battle had to go through three revisions before Napoleon approved it. By January 1815 Napoleon was uncharitably claiming that Marengo had been won before Desaix arrived.47 The view of Desaix’s aide-de-camp Anne-Jean-Marie-René Savary was that ‘If General Desaix had delayed an hour in arriving, we’d have been driven into the Po.’48
The day after the battle, Napoleon wrote to the other consuls that he was ‘in the deepest pain over the death of the man I loved and respected the most’.49 He took Savary and Desaix’s other aide-de-camp, Jean Rapp, onto his staff as a sign of respect, and he allowed the 9th Légère, which Desaix had been leading when he was killed, to sew the word ‘Incomparable’ in gold onto their standard.50 He had Desaix’s corpse embalmed, and a medal struck in his honour, as well as one commemorating Marengo.* All that he said to Kellermann after the battle was, ‘You made a pretty good charge,’ which infuriated him, especially as he had gushed to Bessières, ‘The Guard cavalry covered itself with glory today.’51 (Kellermann is supposed to have replied in anger, ‘I’m glad you are satisfied, general, for it has placed the crown on your head’, but it is doubtful that he really did.52) Privately, Napoleon admitted to Bourrienne that Kellermann had ‘made a lucky charge. He did it just at the right moment. We are much indebted to him. You see what trifling circumstances decide these affairs.’ Kellermann was given his own division within a month, and later in his career Napoleon turned a blind eye to his outrageous looting. Perhaps the best summing up of the battle was Napoleon’s terse statement to Brune and Dumas: ‘You see, there were two battles on the same day; I lost the first; I gained the second.’53
• • •
On June 16 Napoleon offered Emperor Francis peace once again, on the same basis as Campo Formio, writing: ‘I exhort Your Majesty to listen to the cry of humanity.’ In his Order of the Day he claimed the Austrians had recognized ‘that we are only fighting each other so that the English can sell their sugar and coffee at a higher price’.54 The next day ‘the Liberator of Italy’ was back in Milan again, enjoying the charms of Giuseppina Grassini, whom he invited to sing in Paris at the Quatorze Juillet celebrations and at Desaix’s obsequies. ‘Berthier informs me that he is counting on sending either Mrs Billington or Madame Grassini,’ he wrote somewhat disingenuously to Lucien on June 21, ‘who are the two most famous virtuosi in Italy. Have a fine piece composed in Italian. The voices of these actresses should be known to Italian composers.’55 Grassini complained that Napoleon’s ‘caresses were on the furtive side’, and often left her unsatisfied, and in this she wasn’t alone. He never took time over his lovemaking, once reporting to an aide, ‘The matter was over in three minutes.’56
• • •
For all his military genius, intellectual capacity, administrative ability and plain hard work, one should not underestimate the part that sheer good luck played in Napoleon’s career. In May 1800 there was a gap in the weather for crossing the Alps, and in June the rains slowed Desaix’s march away from Marengo enough so that he could return to the battlefield in time to save his commander-in-chief. In 1792 Colonel Maillard’s report on the events in Ajaccio was swamped under war ministry paperwork on the outbreak of war; in 1793 the pike-thrust at Toulon didn’t go septic; in 1797 Quasdonovich’s ammunition wagon received a direct hit at Rivoli, as Melas’s did at Marengo; in 1799 the Muiron had perfect winds on leaving Alexandria; the same year Sieyès’ other choices for the Brumaire coup were unavailable, and Kléber’s report on the Egyptian campaign didn’t arrive in Paris before the coup, during which Thomé’s sleeve was torn enough to anger his comrades. Napoleon recognized this, and spoke more than once of ‘the goddess Fortune’. Later in his career he would believe that the goddess was spurning him, but for now he was persuaded that she was on his side.
12
Lawgiver
‘I must give the people their full rights in religion. Philosophers will laugh, but the nation will bless me.’
Napoleon to Chaptal
‘My true glory is not to have won forty battles . . . What nothing will destroy, what will live for ever, is my Civil Code.’
Napoleon on St Helena
Napoleon had no intention of resting on his laurels after Marengo. With his political capital rising, he decided on a gamble which, if it paid off, would significantly deepen his domestic support. ‘The boldest operation that Bonaparte carried out during the first years of his reign’, wrote Jean Chaptal, ‘was to re-establish worship upon its old foundations.’1 Napoleon wanted to ensure that no independent Church would provide a focus of opposition to his rule, and the simplest solution was to co-opt the Pope.
Anti-clericalism had been a driving force during the French Revolution, which had stripped the Catholic Church of its wealth, expelled and in many cases murdered its priests, and desecrated its altars. Yet Napoleon sensed that many among his natural supporters – conservative, rural, hard-working skilled labourers, artisans and smallholders – had not abjured the faith of their fathers and yearned for a settlement between the Roman Catholic Church and the Consulate they were growing to admire. Any settlement, however, would have to ensure that those who had acquired biens nationaux previously owned by the Church (known as acquéreurs) should be allowed to retain their property, and there could be no return to the old days when the peasantry were forced to pay tithes to the clergy.
Napoleon had for some time respected the Pope’s ability to organize uprisings in Italy,
telling the Directory in October 1796 that ‘it was a great mistake to quarrel with that Power’.2 In his post-coital meeting with the Milanese priesthood on 5 June, 1800, he had promised ‘to remove all obstacles in the way of a complete reconciliation between France and the head of the Church’. Pius VI had died the previous August, aged eighty-one. The new Pope, Pius VII, was at heart a simple and holy monk whose views on social questions were not thought to be overtly hostile to the French Revolution.3 Napoleon knew that any negotiations would be delicate and occasionally hard fought, but the prize was great: the adherence of Catholic France to the Napoleonic cause. A papal agreement would remove one of the central grievances of the remaining rebels in the Vendée and might improve relations with Catholics in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the Rhineland too.
The population of France was about 28 million, only one-fifth of whom dwelt in urban areas of over 2,000 people; most of the rest lived in 36,000 rural communes of a few hundred residents.4 Napoleon appreciated how invaluable it would be if the person who played an important social role as the centre of information in those communities, who was often the most educated person and who read out government decrees, was also on the national payroll. ‘The clergy is a power that is never quiet,’ Napoleon once said. ‘You cannot be under obligations to it, wherefore you must be its master.’5 His treaty with the Papacy has been accurately described as attempting ‘to enlist the parish clergy as Napoleon’s “moral prefects”’.6
As we have seen, Napoleon himself was at best sceptical about Christianity.7 ‘Did Jesus ever exist,’ he asked his secretary on St Helena, Gaspard Gourgaud, ‘or did he not? I think that no contemporary historian has ever mentioned him.’8 (He was clearly unfamiliar with Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews which does indeed mention Jesus.) He nonetheless enjoyed theological discussions and told his last doctor, Antommarchi, ‘Wishing to be an atheist does not make you one.’9 ‘Although Bonaparte was not devout,’ Chaptal reported, mirroring these ambiguities, ‘he did believe in the existence of God and in the immortality of the soul. He always spoke about religion with respect.’10 When the Sermon on the Mount was read to him on St Helena, he told Bertrand: ‘Jesus should have performed his miracles not in remote parts of Syria but in a city like Rome, in front of the whole population.’11 On another occasion he said, ‘Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the sun – the source of all life – the real god of the earth.’12 On yet another he said: ‘I like the Muslim religion best; it has fewer incredible things in it than ours.’13 On that score he dictated a note logistically disproving the biblical claim that Moses could have quenched 2 million Israelites’ thirst by striking a rock.14 A major problem with Christianity, as he told Bertrand, was that it ‘does not excite courage’ because ‘It takes too much care to go to heaven.’15
Despite his own attitudes to the substance of the Christian faith, he was in no doubt about its social utility. ‘In religion,’ Napoleon told Roederer, one of the few state councillors allowed into the secret of the negotiations, ‘I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation, but the mystery of the social order. It associates with Heaven an idea of equality that keeps rich men from being massacred by the poor . . . Society is impossible without inequality; inequality intolerable without a code of morality, and a code of morality unacceptable without religion.’16 He had already shown in Egypt how flexible he was in using religion for political ends; as he once remarked to Roederer: ‘If I ruled a people of Jews, I would rebuild the Temple of Solomon!’17 This essentially pragmatic view of religion was common among Enlightenment thinkers and writers. Edward Gibbon famously wrote in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that ‘The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful.’18 ‘The idea of God is very useful,’ Napoleon said, ‘to maintain good order, to keep men in the path of virtue and to keep them from crime.’19 ‘To robbers and galley slaves, physical restrictions are imposed,’ he said to Dr Barry O’Meara on St Helena, ‘to enlightened people, moral ones.’20
In June 1800, as soon as he returned to Paris from Milan, Napoleon opened negotiations with the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Hercules Consalvi, offering to restore full public worship in France if all French bishops resigned their sees and allowed Napoleon to select new ones who would then be ‘nominated’ by the Pope.21 (Since 1790 French bishops had been split between the Orthodox, who recognized only the authority of the Pope, and the Constitutionalists, who had taken an oath of obedience to the government.) The negotiations, conducted by Joseph Bonaparte and the former Vendéen leader Étienne-Alexandre Bernier on the French side, and Consalvi, the papal legate Cardinal Giovanni Caprara and the Pope’s theological advisor Charles Caselli on the Vatican’s, were conducted in secret, without informing even the Conseil d’État. A total of 1,279 documents were sent back and forth over the course of a year, and there were no fewer than ten draft agreements. ‘One should render unto God that which is God’s,’ Napoleon was later to say, ‘but the Pope is not God.’22 Cardinal Consalvi visited the Tuileries in April 1802 and Napoleon had the rooms perfumed before his arrival. When the chemist Fourcroy commented on the smell, Napoleon teased him: ‘It’s a saintly odour which is going to purify your old sins.’23
As the negotiations reached their climax in early July 1801, Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand: ‘I had a second blister on my arm yesterday. It is a fitting moment to come to terms with the priests when one is laid up ill.’24 Although the Concordat was officially signed in July, it wasn’t ratified and published until nine months later, once Napoleon had tried to calm the deep opposition to it in the army and legislature. ‘The Government of the Republic acknowledges that the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman religion is the religion of the great majority of French citizens,’ the Concordat began. ‘His Holiness, in like manner, acknowledges that this same religion has derived, and is likely to derive, the greatest splendour from the establishment of the Catholic worship in France, and from its being openly professed by the consuls of the Republic.’25 In the course of the next seventeen articles it stated that the Catholic faith ‘shall be freely exercised in France . . . conformable to the regulations . . . which the Government shall judge necessary for the public tranquillity’.
There were to be new dioceses and parishes. Ten archbishops (each on a 15,000-franc annual salary) and fifty bishops (10,000 francs each) would be appointed by Napoleon and the Pope together; bishops would swear to do nothing to ‘disturb the public tranquillity’ and would communicate all information about those who did to the government; all divine services would include a prayer for the Republic and the consuls; although the bishops would appoint the parish priests, they couldn’t appoint anyone unacceptable to the government. The Concordat cemented the land transfers of the Revolution; all former Church property belonged to the acquéreurs ‘for ever’.
Napoleon made a number of concessions, none too onerous. The ten-day week was suppressed and Sunday was restored as the day of rest; the Gregorian calendar eventually returned in January 1806; children were to be given saints’ or classical rather than wholly secular or revolutionary names; salaries were paid to all clergy; orders of nuns and of missionaries were reintroduced in a minor way, and primary education was restored to the clergy’s remit.26 Meanwhile, the Church would sing Te Deums for Napoleon’s victories, read his proclamations from its pulpits and depict conscription as a patriotic duty. On all the major points of contention, Napoleon got what he wanted. With the end of the schism, no fewer than 10,000 Constitutional priests returned to the bosom of the Roman Church and one of the deepest wounds of the Revolution was healed.27 Any trust Pius might have had in Napoleon’s good faith was however undermined on April 8, 1802, when, without prior consultation, a whole new raft of restrictions and regulations, known as the Organic Articles, was appended to the Concordat, which protected the rights of France’s 700,
000 Protestants and 55,000 Jews.*
Although it was generally welcomed in France, especially in conservative, rural France, the Concordat was deeply unpopular in the army, the Conseil and the Tribunate – where there were still plenty of former revolutionaries and ex-Jacobins. It was formally proclaimed with huge pomp at a Te Deum Mass at Notre-Dame on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1802, when the tenor bells rang out for the first time in a decade and Napoleon was received by the recently nominated archbishop of Paris, Jean-Baptiste de Belloy-Morangle. Senior state officials were ordered to arrive with suitable grandeur, but it was noticed that some of their coaches were actually hackney-carriages with their numbers painted over.28 Generals scraped their spurs and sabres on the floor of the cathedral, refused to give up seats to the clergy and talked during the ceremony, making plain the anger of the very anti-clerical army over the Concordat. Augereau requested permission to be absent, which Napoleon refused. Moreau simply ignored the order and smoked a cigar ostentatiously on the Tuileries terrace. When General Antoine-Guillaume Delmas was heard to remark, ‘Quelle capucinade [what banal moralizing], the only thing missing are the one hundred thousand men who died to get rid of all this!’ Napoleon exiled him 50 miles from Paris.29
The Concordat won Napoleon the soubriquet ‘Restorer of Religion’ from the clergy, though few clerics went as far as the archbishop of Besançon, who described him as ‘like God himself’.30 Within a month the Tribunate had approved it by seventy-eight votes to seven. In the hamlets and small towns across France it had its intended effect. ‘Children listen with more docility to the voice of their parents, youth is more submissive to the authority of the magistrate, and the conscription is now effected in places where its very name used to arouse resistance,’ Napoleon told the legislature in 1803, illustrating that he primarily saw religious reconciliation in terms of propaganda and public discipline.31 The Concordat remained the basis for relations between France and the Papacy for a century. A recent study of Rouen during the Consulate concluded that Napoleon’s most popular measures to have been the Concordat, the defeat of brigandage and the guaranteeing of the land-ownership rights of the acquéreurs, in that order.32
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