Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  The European Empire of Napoleon was a vast machine that provided soldiers and supplies for his armies and a cascade of kingdoms, principalities and fiefs in Italy, Germany and Poland to satisfy the greed and vanity of his brothers, dignitaries and marshals. Three of his brothers became kings, while his stepson Eugène Beauharnais became viceroy of Italy. Foreign minister Talleyrand became prince of Benevento, police minister Fouché duke of Otranto. Marshals were titled according to their fiefs or military victories. Berthier became prince of Neuchâtel and prince of Wagram, Bernadotte prince of Ponte-Corvo, Davout duke of Auerstädt, Lannes duke of Monte-bello, Masséna duke of Rivoli, Macdonald duke of Tarento, Soult duke of Dalmatia, Ney duke of Elchingen and Lefebvre duke of Danzig. These honours entitled the holder less to land than to a large income drawn from the occupied territories, the flow of which depended on the continued occupation of the territory. The generals and marshals were the elite of Napoleon’s loyalists, but the rank and file of grognards or grousers had an even deeper affection. These were eligible for the Legion of Honour, instituted in 1802, numbering 38,000 by the end of his reign, and overwhelmingly used to reward soldiers. One of them, Jean-Roche Coignet, beaten by his stepmother and fleeing the family farm in Burgundy, found a surrogate family in Napoleon’s army. Conscripted in August 1799, he was one of the troops commanded by Bonaparte at Saint-Cloud on 19 brumaire, was recruited to the Imperial Guard and awarded the Legion of Honour at the Invalides in June 1804. He was at the camp of Boulogne and then on the forced march to Strasbourg and Ulm, grumbling that ‘our emperor makes war not with our arms but with our legs’. Such endeavours were compensated by the leadership of the emperor who visited his troops by torchlight the night before Austerlitz and was greeted by the massed cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ For Coignet the emperor was in the midst of his troops at Jena and entered Berlin at the head of 20,000 grenadiers with a ‘small hat and one-sou cockade… the worst-dressed man of such a splendid army’. Promoted corporal in 1807 after the battle of Eylau, still unable to read and write, sergeant after the capture of Vienna in 1809, and captain after the battle of Lützen in 1813, Coignet had a healthy disdain for ‘all the men who [Napoleon] had raised to prominent positions’ and had ultimately let him down.25

  In the hope of consolidating his Empire Napoleon created an imperial nobility in 1808. By 1815 this nobility numbered 3,364, a hierarchy of thirty-four princes and dukes, 459 counts, 1,552 barons and 1,319 knights. Nearly 60 per cent of the new nobles were military men, 22 per cent high civil servants and 17 per cent notables such as senators and mayors. The title of prince was reserved for marshals and grand dignitaries of the Empire, that of count for generals, ministers, senators and presidents of the Legislative Body, that of baron for colonels, top magistrates, mayors of large towns and the presidents of electoral colleges.26 One of the purposes of creating a nobility was to win over the old nobility from its loyalty to the Bourbons in pursuit of what Napoleon called a strategy of ‘amalgamation’ or ‘fusion’ of the Ancien Régime elite with that forged by the Revolution. ‘I offered them ranks in my army, but they did not want them,’ he said, ‘offices in my administration, but they refused them. But I opened the antechambers of my household, and they rushed in.’27 This witty analysis was not quite exact. Napoleon’s armies did include figures such as the Alsatian noble Kellermann, the Burgundian nobles Davout and Berthier, whose father was en nobled by Louis XV, together with the Polish noble Poniatowski, who was made a marshal in 1813. The rapid turnover on the battlefield nevertheless meant that among generals the proportion of nobles fell from 33 per cent in the period 1792–1812 to 22 per cent under the Empire, although it still stood at 25 per cent in 1814.28

  In the civil service, Napoleon used the post of auditeur in the Conseil d’État to win over young men of old noble families to the higher echelons of state service. The fathers of Mathieu-Louis Molé and Victor de Broglie had both been guillotined during the Terror, but Molé was appointed auditeur of the Conseil d’État at the age of twenty-five in 1806, and went on to become prefect of the Côte d’Or in 1807, director-general of the Ponts-et-Chaussées in 1809, count of the Empire, and minister of justice in 1813. De Broglie was appointed auditeur aged twenty-four in 1809, and was attached to the French armies in Austria in 1809 and Spain in 1811, then to the French embassy in Warsaw in 1812.29 Stendhal, from a non-noble magistrate’s family of Grenoble and serving in the Ministry of War, became an auditeur in 1800 and took part in the Russian campaign, but did not forge a brilliant administrative career such as his noble contemporaries Molé or de Broglie achieved.30 Forty-two auditeurs went on to become prefects and the prefectoral body in fact became more dominated by nobles as the Empire reached its apogee, the percentage of noble prefects rising from 23 per cent in 1800 to 43 per cent in 1814.31

  The court lent itself much more readily to the recruitment of the old nobility. Claire de Rémusat, great-niece of Louis XV’s foreign minister Vergennes, became Joséphine Bonaparte’s lady-in-waiting; her husband, Augustin de Rémusat, whose office at the Cour des Comptes of Provence had been abolished at the Revolution and was looking for ‘office, of any kind’, became prefect of the palace.32 On the other hand, while the Duc de Luynes accepted nomination to the Senate in 1808 his wife, a former lady-in-waiting of Marie-Antoinette, dressed in the Ancien Régime fashion and never went near the Tuileries. Their daughter, the Duchesse de Chevreuse, was persuaded against her will to be a lady-in-waiting to the empress, but when she was required to attend the deposed Queen of Spain, in 1808, she refused, saying, ‘I have been a victim, but I shall never be a gaoler.’ For her sins Napoleon exiled her 50 leagues from Paris and she sickened and died, aged twenty-eight, in 1813.33 Only 22 per cent of the imperial nobility were composed of old nobles, and 80 per cent of old nobles refused to rally to a regime which they regarded as illegitimate, tyrannical and warlike, and preferred to await the return of the Bourbon dynasty. This majority frequented each other’s salons on the Faubourg Saint-Germain or hunted on the country estates they had recovered after returning from exile, waiting upon the return of the monarchy. Two very different nobles who remained on their estates were the Marquis de Lafayette and the Comte de Villèle. Lafayette refused a seat in the Senate and an embassy in America and remained on his estate in the Seine-et-Marne. Villèle, of an old noble family of Toulouse, joined the navy in 1788, spent most of the Revolution in the Indies, and bought property and married in Réunion in the Indian Ocean. He returned to France in 1807 where he recovered the family estate, became mayor of his village in the Haute-Garonne and president of the conseil général, but abstained from politics until 1814.

  The survival of Napoleon’s regime was entirely dependent on his ability to dominate Europe, and this became much more difficult after 1808. In order to contain British power he persuaded the Bourbons of Spain to partition Portugal with him in 1807. French forces under Murat occupied Madrid, and a revolt against them on 2 May 1808 was put down with extreme brutality. Napoleon now persuaded the Spanish king, Charles IV, and his son Ferdinand to renounce their claims to the throne, and he moved Joseph from the Kingdom of Naples, which he gave to Murat, to that of Spain. Unfortunately, French rule in Spain was opposed by Catholic royalist and liberal revolutionary opposition, supported by the British, and never established itself with any effectiveness. Meanwhile the Austrians now challenged French rule in southern Germany and Italy. Napoleon responded by annexing the Papal States and taking the pope prisoner, then by defeating the Austrians at the battle of Wagram on 5 July 1809 and annexing Trieste, Slovenia and much of Croatia, forging what he called the Illyrian Provinces on the Adriatic. Napoleon was now obsessed by the succession to his rule, for Joséphine who was now forty-five had not borne him an heir. The tsar refused him his fourteen-year-old sister Anna, so he fastened on Marie-Louise, the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Habsburg emperor. He divorced Joséphine in January 1810, and married Marie-Louise by proxy. The new imperial couple arrived in Paris on 1 April, p
arading through the unfinished Arc de Triomphe. Although half the French cardinals refused to accept the divorce and boycotted the ceremony, much to Napoleon’s fury, his marriage into one of the European royal houses eased relations with the old French nobility and an heir, titled the King of Rome, was born in 1811.

  Napoleon’s invasion of Russia with a multinational army of 600,000 in June 1812 was supposed to complete his domination of a European empire of eighty million people. Despite the victory of Borodino in September 1812 and brief occupation of Moscow, however, he was forced to retreat and lost most of his army to attacks by Russian troops and partisans aided by the freezing winter. The absence of Napoleon provided an opportunity for a coup d’état by disgruntled republican generals Malet, who had resigned from the army after the coronation of Napoleon, and Lahorie, who was one of Moreau’s men and the lover of Victor Hugo’s mother. On 23 October they announced that Napoleon had died in Russia and attempted to seize power in Paris, but they were arrested, tried and shot.34 Other military leaders who had resented Napoleon’s rise to power now also entered the fray again. Marshal Bernadotte, who had invaded Sweden and was elected its crown prince in 1810, met up with General Moreau who returned to Europe from the United States in 1812. Bernadotte became commander-in-chief of a coalition of Russian, Prussian and Swedish forces which drove Napoleon’s armies back after the retreat from Moscow. Madame de Staël, expelled from France again after the manuscript of On Germany had been seized, and fleeing to Britain by way of Russia and Sweden, corresponded frantically with Bernadotte and Moreau, whom she saw as the best options for liberal government in France and a guarantee against it falling under the sway of the royalists and Cossacks.35 Unfortunately for Madame de Staël’s hopes, Moreau died in September 1813, mortally wounded at the battle of Dresden, and Bernadotte refused to lead his army across the Rhine.

  As Napoleon’s military power collapsed, with Paris surrendering to the Allies on 30 March 1814, so the political class also deserted him. The key role was played by the once servile Senate, which sought to manage its transition to the new regime. In this it was guided by Talleyrand, who had resigned as Napoleon’s foreign minister in 1807 and had been described by him in 1809 as ‘a shit in silk stockings’.36 On 31 March Talleyrand hosted a meeting with Tsar Alexander and the Prussian King Frederick William III in his Paris house and persuaded them to issue a proclamation that they would not treat with Napoleon. Then, on 2 April, he convened the Senate and persuaded it to depose the emperor, appoint a provisional government dominated by himself, and approve a draft constitution which preserved the main gains of the Revolution and, as an inducement, converted the Senate from an appointed to a hereditary body in which they would all keep their jobs. Marshal Ney, who had covered himself with glory during the retreat from Moscow and had been promoted prince of the Moscowa, finally convinced the emperor that he must abdicate unconditionally, went off to join Louis XVIII at Compiègne, and rode behind the royal carriage as it entered Paris on 4 May 1814. The girouette or weather-vane, changing loyalty with every puff of wind, became a commonplace of political satire.37

  This attempt to bind the hands of Louis XVIII was only partially successful. Louis was forced to concede a greater degree of representative government than the despotic Napoleon had allowed, but did not wish to receive a constitution from an assembly. He therefore rejected the Senate’s draft constitution and issued his own Charter to the assembled Chambers on 4 June, replacing the hereditary Senate by a Chamber of Peers. However, he too had to attempt some degree of fusion of the political class between the Napoleonic elite and the returning émigrés, hungry for power. In the new Chamber of Peers, therefore, eighty imperial senators, including Talleyrand, were carried over, fifty-three new peers were created from the ranks of returning royalists, and fifty-seven of Napoleon’s senators were excluded as politically unacceptable, including twelve regicides of the Convention.38 Old noble families which had rallied to the Empire were cold-shouldered. Augustin de Rémusat, who had become superintendent of theatres under Napoleon, was not offered a post at the Restoration because, as his son Charles recalled, his family were ‘sufficiently marked by the stigmata of the imperial regime to have only negative claims on the new regime’.39 More fortunate were aspiring bourgeois like François Guizot. Though he later claimed that ‘I entered public life only in 1814; I had served neither the Revolution nor the Empire,’ he was in fact appointed professor of modern history at the Sorbonne, aged twenty-five, in 1812.40 Despite this debut as an imperial functionary he made an easy transition to the restored monarchy, appointed secretary-general of the Ministry of the Interior, and drafting a law on the press.41

  Building a consensus around the regime was if anything more difficult for the restored monarchy than for the Empire. Returning royalists wanted to recover office from the revolutionary–Napoleonic political class and had no particular love for the constitutional Charter. Under pressure from them, Madame de Staël observed, ministers defended it in public but mocked it in private. Benjamin Constant objected to the new press law drafted by Guizot, which reimposed press censorship, and argued for a British-style monarchy in which the king was above politics while his ministers were responsible to parliament.42 As the political elite was reconfigured it became clear that the old rifts between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries were opening up. Lazare Carnot, who had criticized Napoleon’s bid for a hereditary empire in 1804, attacked the restored monarchy in July 1814. His Mémoire au roi argued that while the return of the king had been universally acclaimed, even by ex-republicans, as ushering in a new consensus, the regime had marginalized what he called ‘patriots’ as ‘suspects’ and ‘révoltés’, whereas ‘if you have the fortune to be a chouan, a Vendean, an émigré, a Cossack or an Englishman, then your loyalty is praised to the rooftops, and you are showered with tender thanks and decorations by the whole royal family.’43 Meanwhile almost half of the imperial army was disbanded to save money and please the Allies and 12,000 officers were put on half-pay.44 The Imperial Guard was replaced by a King’s Household staffed by returning émigrés, and the officer corps filled up, Marshal Macdonald recalled, with ‘a lot of beardless boys dressed in uniforms resplendent with gold lace, nearly all decorated with ribands, and with the epaulettes of senior officers’.45 Finally, although Louis reassured those who had bought church properties during the Revolution that their titles were safe, country people feared that the returning nobles and clergy would soon restore the feudal dues and tithes that had gone with the Ancien Régime.

  THE RETURN OF CIVIL WAR

  The consensus built around the restored monarchy was therefore fragile when, on March 1815, Napoleon, escaping from his prison island of Elba, landed once again in the south of France and marched on Paris. By all accounts he should have been repulsed, but as he moved from Cannes to Grenoble and from Lyon to Paris he was greeted by the rural populations and old soldiers, many of them of peasant stock, like Captain Coignet, who rejoined the emperor at Auxerre. Napoleon later claimed, with only a little exaggeration, that ‘I am not only, as has been said, the emperor of the soldiers; I am that of the peasants, the lower ranks in France… the popular fibre responds to mine.’ The ruling class was paralysed and Napoleon boasted, ‘I have but to make a sign, or rather to turn away my eyes, and the nobility will be massacred in all departments… But I will not be the king of a Jacquerie,’ of a peasant revolt.46 Popular support was crucial, but even more so was the attitude of the army. Before he set out to check Napoleon’s progress Marshal Ney kissed Louis XVIII’s hand and said that Napoleon was a madman who should be sent to Charenton madhouse or brought home in an iron cage. At Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura, however, he received a handwritten note from the emperor, then at Lyon, asking the marshal to join him: ‘I shall greet you as on the morning of the Moskowa’ (Borodino). The next morning, 14 June 1815, Ney drew up his troops and told them, ‘The cause of the Bourbons is lost for ever… Vive l’Empereur!’47 The defection of Ney toppled the
monarchy and Louis and his court were obliged to abandon Paris and make for Ghent. Guizot, who went with them, deplored the way in which the return of Napoleon rekindled:

  the old quarrel that the Empire had stifled and the Charter sought to extinguish, the quarrel between old France and new France, between the émigration and the revolution. In 1815 the struggle of 1789 began again, not only between political parties, but between rival classes… In the twinkling of an eye the Hundred Days destroyed the work of social pacification that had been pursued in France for sixteen years.48

  Napoleon refused to preside over another popular revolution or Terror, but in order to avoid this he had to win sufficient support among the political class, and most of the political class was no longer willing to serve him. Comte Molé, for example, was offered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or of the Interior, but declined such a high-profile post. He nominally resumed his old job as director of the Ponts-et-Chaussées, but soon disappeared to Plombières ostensibly to take the waters, returning to Paris only after Waterloo.49 Napoleon was forced back on regicides as ministers, Carnot as minister of the interior and Fouché as minister of police. Of huge importance then was the decision of Benjamin Constant, who as late as 19 March had denounced Napoleon as worse than Genghis Khan or Attila, to rally to the new regime in an attempt to steer it towards liberal government. Since Louis XVIII had granted a Charter, he argued, Napoleon must match it in order to win over propertied classes now used to liberty. Constant met Napoleon at the Tuileries on 14 April, was made a member of the Council of State and drafted an Additional Act to the Constitutions of the Empire, soon nicknamed ‘la Benjamine’, which was designed to turn Napoleon into a constitutional monarch like William of Orange.50 The new constitution was put to a plebiscite at the end of April but mustered only 1.5 million votes in support against 5,700 against out of an electorate of 7.5 million.51 The truth was that the regime had control of very little of the country, with the west and south in particular in the hands of counter-revolutionaries. After the flight of Louis XVIII in March 1815 his nephew, son of his brother the Comte d’Artois, Louis-Antoine, Duc d’Angoulême, gathered a volunteer militia of 100,000 counter-revolutionaries to sustain what was effectively a separate kingdom in the south. He was forced to surrender on 8 April and go into exile in Spain. However, after the collapse of Napoleon’s armies at Waterloo on 18 June counter-revolutionary militias took over a vast area from Toulouse to Toulon, under the Duc d’Angoulême’s quasi-official authority, wreaking vengeance against those who had actively supported the Revolution and Napoleonic regime in what became known as the White Terror.