• • •
On the conclusion of the Peace of Amiens, around 5,000 Britons descended on Paris. Some were curious, some wanted to see the Louvre collections, some wanted to use that excuse to visit the fleshpots of the Palais-Royal (which did a roaring trade), some wanted to renew old friendships and almost all of them wanted to meet or at least catch a glimpse of the First Consul. Napoleon was delighted to oblige, and ordered his ministers to throw dinners for distinguished foreigners at least once every ten days.15 The Irish MP John Leslie Foster attended one of Napoleon’s levées at the Tuileries, and described him as:
delicately and gracefully made; his hair a dark brown crop, thin and lank; his complexion smooth, pale and sallow; his eyes grey, but very animated; his eyebrows light brown, thin and projecting. All his features, particularly his mouth and nose, fine, sharp, defined, and expressive beyond description . . . He speaks deliberately, but very fluently, with particular emphasis, and in a rather low tone of voice. While he speaks, his features are still more expressive than his words. Expressive of what? . . . A pleasing melancholy, which, whenever he speaks, relaxes into the most agreeable and gracious smile you can conceive . . . He has more unaffected dignity than I could conceive in man.16
Similarly, a former captive of the French called Sinclair wrote of ‘the grace and fascination of his smile’, and a Captain Usher said he had ‘dignified manners’.17 Charm is a notoriously hard phenomenon to describe, yet when he so chose, Napoleon was clearly suffused with it. He certainly went out of his way to show Anglophilia at this time, displaying busts on either side of a chimney-piece at the Tuileries of the Whig leader Charles James Fox and Admiral Nelson.18 The Francophile Whig politician Fox one might have expected, but to honour the man who sank his fleet at Aboukir Bay only four years earlier was truly extraordinary. (We can be certain that Nelson wasn’t displaying a bust of Napoleon on his mantelshelf.)
For some British Radicals and Whigs, admiration for Napoleon hardly abated even up to Waterloo. The future prime minister Lord Melbourne wrote odes to Napoleon at university, Keats had a snuffbox with his portrait on it, Byron ordered an exact replica of his coach in which to travel the continent, and William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register and Daniel Lovell’s Statesman praised him in extravagant terms. His reforms appealed to British liberals, who thought their own country was itself mired in an ancien régime. Fox himself visited Paris with three members of his family for a very friendly series of meetings with Napoleon in September 1802; other Britons presented to him included another future prime minister the Earl of Aberdeen, the Irish conspirator Thomas Emmet, the classical scholar the Rev. G. H. Glasse, Lord and Lady Holland, Lord Henry Petty (later the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne), Sir Spencer Smith, and scores more prominent people. So many British visitors rushed to Paris that James Gillray drew a caricature entitled The First Kiss this Ten Years! showing a thin French officer embracing a buxom representation of Britannia.19 Nor was it just one way; commenting on the ‘astonishing’ number of French people arriving at Dover, the naturalist James Smithson remarked that the two countries seemed likely ‘completely to exchange their inhabitants’.20
Napoleon took this opportunity to infiltrate spies to make plans of Irish harbours, but they were soon unmasked and repatriated. When years later a Briton put to him the theory that the British government had not thought Napoleon sincere in his desire for peace because of this, he laughed and said: ‘Oh! That was not necessary, for every harbour in England and Ireland was known.’21 Of course the usefulness of the operation wasn’t the point: the fact that it was embarked upon at all was understandably taken as an indication of hostile intent. Naturally, British intelligence used the peace to spy on French harbours too.
• • •
Although the ten-year term of the Consulate was not due to expire until 1810, in May 1802 a Senate motion to extend it for a second ten-year term passed by sixty to one, only the ex-Girondin Comte Lanjuinais voting against. This led to seemingly spontaneous but in fact well-orchestrated calls for a new Constitution of the Year X, under which Napoleon would become First Consul for life. ‘You judge that I owe the people another sacrifice,’ he disingenuously told the Senate. ‘I will give it if the people’s voice orders what your vote now authorizes.’22 Like Julius Caesar refusing the Roman diadem twice, he wanted it to look as if he were being dragged reluctantly to lifelong power. It was a complete reversal of the principles of the Revolution, yet the French people supported it. The plebiscite’s question was: ‘Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?’ and the result, which was fixed even more completely and unnecessarily than that of February 1800, was 3,653,600 in favour to 8,272 against.23 It was the first plebiscite in French history where turnout was, supposedly, over half of those eligible to vote, although double-voting for the ‘yes’ camp was not questioned in some areas; once again the large proportion of the country that was illiterate had no way of telling how their mayor had cast their ballots.24
Napoleon was duly declared First Consul for life on August 2, with the power to appoint his successor. ‘His manner was neither affected nor assuming,’ recorded the pro-Bonapartist British peer Lord Holland, who was present when the Senate deputation conferred the honour on him, ‘but certainly wanted that ease and attraction which the early habits of good company are supposed exclusively to confer.’25 Joseph was nominated as Napoleon’s successor, but on October 10, 1802 Louis and Hortense had a son, Napoléon-Louis-Charles, who was later spoken of as a possible heir (although, with typical viciousness, Louis cast doubts on his own son’s paternity). With Josephine nearing forty, Napoleon had given up expecting an heir from her. ‘I love you as on the first day,’ he wrote to her as she once again took the spa waters at Plombières in June, which were supposed to help with infertility, ‘because you are good and above all amiable.’26 He had written to her about taking care of her ‘little cousin’ on her previous visit, but it was all a far cry from the way he loved her ‘on the first day’.27
• • •
The bad 1801 harvest had led to worrying food-price increases by the following spring, and on May 16, 1802 Napoleon told Chaptal: ‘My intention is to take all possible measures to prevent bread prices going up in the city. It is necessary to have directors of the soup kitchens come to you and for you to give them 12,000 francs per month, more if necessary, so that they double and treble their distribution . . . Divulge absolutely nothing about such a delicate matter.’28 By such means, and with the help of a better harvest in 1802, Napoleon staved off a danger of which he was always highly conscious. He started to build and stock strategically placed granaries to minimize the risk. As well as bread, Napoleon provided circuses: there were fêtes to celebrate his birthday – he was thirty-three in August 1802 – the uncovering of the plots against him, his becoming Life Consul and the anniversary of the Brumaire coup. At the same time the celebration of the fall of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI were carefully and gradually downgraded as the First Consul came closer to declaring himself a monarch.
In early July, as soon as the British had evacuated Elba, Napoleon ordered Berthier, who had returned to the post of war minister, to secure the island as a department of France (and not of the Italian Republic), disarm the inhabitants of Portoferraio, take a dozen prominent hostages for good behaviour and send the children of twelve of the best families to school in France as a way of Gallicizing them.29 (It had worked for him, after all.) Elba was officially annexed in August, after Berthier had given 3,000 francs each to the three deputies from the island.30 None of this contravened the Peace of Amiens, and was fully anticipated by Britain.
When the Constitution of Year X, France’s fifth since the Revolution, became law in early August, Napoleon – now using only his Christian name in his message to the Senate, as monarchs did – announced that all adult males of each district could vote for the members of the electoral colleges for their arrondissements and departments from amo
ng the six hundred people who paid the most taxes (plus imposés), who would then hold their offices for life.31 Thereafter the electoral colleges would nominate two candidates for both the Legislative Body and the Tribunate, from whom Napoleon would choose one each. He was carefully building up a cadre of political supporters who owed their positions to him. Many of the Legislative Body’s powers went to the Senate, which also had the power to dissolve it and the Tribunate. The number of tribunes was also halved to fifty and could now debate only in secret session, where, as Napoleon said, ‘they could jabber as they liked’.32 Even the Conseil d’État had its powers circumscribed and handed to a privy council within it. The new constitution therefore had the appearance of political involvement, but genuine power rested completely with Napoleon. In the fervour of approbation won by Napoleon’s victories, reforms, Concordat and peace treaties it wasn’t surprising that those initially elected to the electoral colleges were often his most vocal supporters.
• • •
On September 5 Napoleon ordered Brigadier Horace Sébastiani, the officer who had been so supportive of him during the Brumaire coup, to go on a four-month tour of Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Acre and Jerusalem, to promote French interests in a region that could be forgiven for feeling that it had seen quite enough of the tricolour.33 His report when he returned was to be explosive. Later that same week Napoleon invited King Charles Emmanuel of Piedmont to return to his throne, effectively as a French puppet. Safe in his second kingdom of Sardinia, the king refused, so Napoleon formally annexed Piedmont on the 21st and turned it into six new French departments. This disappointed the leaders of the Italian Republic, who had wanted Elba and Piedmont to join Italy, but it gave France direct access over the western Alpine passes such as the two St Bernards, which led to the rich Lombard plain that produced rice, grain and raw silk, the last of which was needed for Lyons’ luxury clothes and furniture industries.34
The outcry in London, where Napoleon was seen as violating the spirit, albeit not the letter, of Amiens, helped to derail the implementation of the treaty and made it even less likely that the British would evacuate Malta or Pondicherry. British hawks were further enraged when Napoleon acted in another region that was also unmentioned at Amiens, but that had long been within the French sphere of influence, and where had Britain never had any national interests. On September 23 Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand saying that since he needed the border at Franche-Comté to be secure, there had to be either ‘a Swiss Government solidly organized and friendly to France’ or ‘no Switzerland’.35 Remembering his need to cross the Alps two years before, he required the ceding of the Valais region so that he could build a military road across the Simplon Pass, which some of the thirteen cantons that had governed confederated Switzerland for three centuries – though by no means all – refused to give him.
Swiss politics were complicated by rifts between the aristocratic and the populist cantons and between the German-speaking, Italian-speaking and French-speaking ones. On September 30, 1802, Napoleon’s Act of Mediation reorganized Switzerland into nineteen cantons, with a very weak central government and an army of only 15,200 men (fewer than the 16,000 it had to provide to Napoleon under a recent Franco-Swiss defence pact). ‘There are no people more impudent or more demanding than the Swiss,’ he was later to say. ‘Their country is about as big as a man’s hand, and they have the most extraordinary pretensions.’36
The Act of Mediation violated the Treaty of Lunéville, especially when Napoleon sent General Michel Ney into Switzerland with 40,000 men to see it enforced on October 15, but Austria gave him a free hand, the Russians and Prussians failed to protest, and those Swiss who weren’t already in favour swiftly acquiesced. ‘The possession of Valais is one of the matters closest to my heart,’ Napoleon told one of his Swiss supporters, the republican philosopher Philipp Stapfer, one that ‘the whole of Europe would not make him give up’.37 Despite the silence of Amiens on Switzerland, Britain now halted the return of Pondicherry to France and the Cape of Good Hope to Holland, and her troops remained in Alexandria (which she had promised to evacuate under Article 8) and Malta.
Napoleon was impressed by the activity of Ney in the Swiss affair. The son of a cooper from the Saar who had married one of Marie Antoinette’s chambermaids, Ney was born in the same year as Napoleon and joined the hussars in 1787.38 He was to gain the reputation of being almost insanely brave. Having served with distinction in the Army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, he did not encounter Napoleon until May 1801, when he was invited to Paris to meet the consuls. In October 1802 he was ordered by Talleyrand to go to Switzerland with a small army to support the pro-French elements there, which he did with speed and success, occupying Zurich without bloodshed, closing the anti-French Diet of Schwytz, releasing pro-French sympathizers from prison, putting down an insurrection that had been led by the government of Berne, overseeing the installation of a pro-French successor governor and extracting 625,000 francs to pay for the operation, which was all achieved in two months.39
The official report of Napoleon’s meeting with Swiss cantonal deputies at Saint-Cloud on December 12 stated: ‘It is recognized by Europe that Italy and Holland, as well as Switzerland, are at the disposition of France.’ The trouble was, Britain recognized nothing of the sort. Two months earlier, the Bourbon Duke Ferdinand of Parma had died. The duchy was annexed by France, as had been agreed at Lunéville, and Napoleon sent the French official Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry to impose French law there. This was not an unwarranted annexation, but the new British ambassador to Paris, Lord Whitworth, chose to take it as such and demanded compensation, as also for the annexation of Piedmont and the invasion of Switzerland, hinting that as Prussia and Russia had not yet agreed to guarantee Maltese independence, that island might be a suitable exchange. As things turned out, it wouldn’t have been a bad compromise for Napoleon to have made.
• • •
The Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon a breathing space to pursue plans to stimulate economic growth through state intervention and protectionism, a policy originally pioneered by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Napoleon had read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in translation in 1802, but considered Britain’s Industrial Revolution too advanced for France to be able to compete against her in open markets. Instead he put his faith in government subsidies in strategic industries, technical training schools, prizes for inventions, visits to British factories (that is, industrial espionage), technology fairs, the improvement of the Jacquard silk-weaving process, an industrial exhibition in Paris (at which the cotton-spinning business of Richard Lenoir took 400,000 francs’ worth of orders) and the setting up of twenty-two chambers of commerce across France in December 1802.40 Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.41 ‘I never saw him reject a proposition that was aimed at encouraging or supporting industry,’ recalled Chaptal. But for all Napoleon’s efforts, and especially once war broke out again, French industrialization was only ever on a small scale compared to that of the powerhouse across the Channel.42 (In 1815 there were still only 452 mines employing 43,395 workers in the whole of France, 41 ironworks with 1,202 workers, 1,219 forges with 7,120 workers, and 98 sugar refineries with 585; Marseilles, centre of the French soap-making industry, employed a thousand workers in seventy-three workshops.43)
The Colbertian use of tariffs furthermore skewed trade so that high customs barriers in Italy meant that raw silk from Piedmont which used to go to Lombardy was instead sent to Lyons; Dutch producers had to pay duties on goods sold in France, but not vice versa, and so on.44 It was economic imperialism in action, which could hardly fail to stoke resentment in France’s satellite states. Napoleon had managed greatly to increase confidence in France’s finances and in her ability to honour her government’s bonds, but even so
they never managed to match Britain’s in this period. At his best, he was forced to borrow at higher rates than Britain at its worst.*
• • •
After the machine infernale explosion, Otto, the French envoy in London, had sent Talleyrand copies of British newspapers, journals and gazettes which implicitly, and on occasion explicitly, expressed the hope that the next attempt would succeed.45 French newspapers published by émigrés in London particularly infuriated Napoleon, such as Paris Pendant l’Année and L’Ambigu, both edited by Jean-Gabriel Peltier, which used classical and poetical allusions to call for his assassination. He even went so far as to undertake a prosecution of Peltier in the British courts.46 State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère recorded that the English press drove Napoleon ‘into a fury that resembled the lion in the fable, stung to madness by a swarm of gnats’.47* Eventually, in August 1802 he banned all British newspapers from France. The Bourbon family had close connections with the émigré press, as the British government knew from intercepting, copying, decoding and resealing letters sent through the Post Office (just as Lavalette’s bureau noir was doing in Paris).48
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