1808: The Flight of the Emperor

by Laurentino Gomes

  This context frames the sense of abandonment and irreparable loss that the Portuguese felt in the streets of Lisbon that cold morning at the end of autumn. With the flight of the monarchy, Portugal itself, an independent country with its own government, ceased to exist as all had known it. It had become an empty territory, without identity, its inhabitants unwittingly delivered to the interests and greed of any adventurer who could invade its cities and seize the throne.

  So why then did the monarchy flee?

  First things first: The throne of Portugal was occupied not by a king but by a prince regent. Dom João reigned in the name of his mother, Dona Maria I, the nation’s first sovereign queen. But having been declared insane and incapable of governing in 1792, she lived in virtual imprisonment in the Palace of Queluz, outside Lisbon. Furthermore, as the second son of this mad queen, Dom João hadn’t grown up to direct the destiny of the country. His older brother, Dom José, heir apparent, had died unexpectedly of smallpox in 1788 at the age of twenty-seven.2 Besides being unprepared to reign, Dom João, a naturally solitary person, was enduring serious marital problems. By 1807 he and his wife—Princess Carlota Joaquina, an ill-tempered and bossy Spaniard, with whom he had had nine children—already had been separated for three years. The couple hated each other intensely. Not only did they sleep in separate beds, but they lived in separate palaces far away from each other. Carlota lived in Queluz with the mad queen while Dom João resided in Mafra in the company of hundreds of friars and monks who lived at the expense of the Portuguese court.

  About twenty miles from Lisbon, the Palace of Mafra—iconic of the era of abundance and glory of the Portuguese empire—contained a mix of palace, church, and convent, with an 865-foot façade, 5,200 portals and windows, 114 bells, and a dining hall 330 feet long. Construction of the palace took thirty-four years and required the work of some 45,000 men. The marble came from Italy, the wood from Brazil, and it was completed in 1750 during the height of gold and diamond mining in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil. In addition to serving as the residence of the court and its servants, it included three hundred monastic cells that housed hundreds of friars.3 In this gigantic, somber structure, Dom João passed his days, far from his family, dividing his time among government meetings and prayer, mass, and religious chants.

  The principal trait of the timid, superstitious, and ugly prince regent’s personality, reflected on all of his work, was his indecision. When squeezed between groups of conflicting opinions, he always hesitated to make decisions until the last minute. The most elementary measures of governance tormented and anguished him beyond limits. As a result, he delegated much to the ministers who surrounded him. But in November of 1807, Dom João, up against the wall, had to make the most important decision of his life. The flight to Brazil resulted from the irresistible pressure exercised by the greatest military genius the Western world had seen since the age of the Caesars: Napoleon Bonaparte.

  In 1807, Napoleon, who had by now crowned himself emperor of the French, ruled as absolute lord of Europe. His armies had brought every king and queen on the continent to their knees in a succession of brilliant and surprising victories. Only Great Britain he hadn’t succeeded in subjugating—yet—and not for lack of desire. Protected by the English Channel, the British had avoided direct confrontation with Napoleon’s armies, having consolidated their role as masters of the seas in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 when Admiral Nelson destroyed the combined fleets of France and Spain.4 Napoleon reacted by decreeing a continental blockade, a measure that closed all European ports under either his control or influence to British goods. Every country immediately obeyed—with one exception: small, unprotected Portugal. Pressured by England, Portugal’s traditional ally, Dom João remained reluctant to surrender to the emperor’s demands. So in November 1807, French troops marched toward Portugual, ready to invade and dethrone the prince regent.

  Suddenly corralled between the two greatest economic and military powers of the era, Dom João found himself confronted by two mutually exclusive and bitter alternatives. The first: Cede to Napoleon and conform to the blockade; the second: Accept the highly unorthodox offer of his British allies and embark to Brazil, taking with him the entire royal family, the nobility, treasures, and apparatus of the state. On the surface, it seemed a generous offer on the part of Britain, but in practice it was blackmail. If Dom João opted for the first alternative and caved to Napoleon’s demands, Britain would repeat in Portugal what they had done months earlier in the similarly reluctant Denmark. On the morning of September 1, 1807, Copenhagen awoke to a barrage of cannon fire from British ships docked in their harbor. The bombardment lasted four days and four nights, during which some two thousand people perished. On September 7, Copenhagen surrendered. The British seized their ships, materials, and munitions, thereby leaving the city defenseless.5

  In Portugal, the consequences could be even worse. If the prince regent yielded to Napoleon, the British not only would bombard Lisbon and capture the Portuguese fleet, but they would quite likely seize their colonies as well, upon which Portugal depended for economic survival. With the support of Britain, Brazil—the largest and richest of these colonies—would no doubt declare its independence, following the example of the United States of America and its neighboring Spanish territories. Without Brazil, Portugal would falter.

  But a third alternative remained, one that Dom João considered: Remain in Portugal, face Napoleon, and fight alongside the British in defense of his country. That move ran the considerable risk of losing the throne and the crown, but later analysis shows that there was a decent chance of success in this case. In 1807, however, the insecure and fearful prince regent, incapable of resisting and facing an enemy he and many others judged as far too powerful, decided to flee. “Preferring to abandon Europe, Dom João proceeded with precise self-knowledge,” writes historian Tobias Monteiro. “Knowing himself to be incapable of heroism, he chose the peaceful solution of spearheading an exodus, and searching within the dull torpor of the tropics that tranquility and inactivity for which he was born.”6

  II

  The Era of Deranged Monarchs

  The dawn of the nineteenth century offered a time of nightmares and terror for Europe’s kings and queens. Two of them recently had gone mad. In England, King George III had been seen wearing a nightgown in palace corridors, his head wrapped in a pillowcase, as he cradled a pillow rolled up in the form of a newborn baby, which he claimed to be a prince named Octavius. At the same time in Portugal, demons were chasing Queen Maria I. In the cold and foggy early mornings, her screams of terror echoed throughout the Palace of Queluz. During these increasingly frequent bouts of madness, she reported seeing the image of her father, Dom José I—dead since 1777—as “a calcified mass of ashes atop of a pedestal of blackened and horrific molten iron, all the time ravaged by a phantasmagoric horde,” according to the marquis of Angeja, one of her ministers.1

  Two explanations might account for these patterns of bizarre behavior. The first and most obvious is that the two sovereigns suffered from severe mental disturbances, the nature of which doctors and scientists have not yet deciphered. Recent research suggests that they both had an illness called mixed porphyria, a hereditary disease with symptoms similar to schizophrenia and manic-depressive disorder. Descriptions of their behavior fit this diagnosis.

  Psychotic outbreaks periodically interrupted the sixty years during which George III reigned over Great Britain. In one of them, he spent seventy-two hours awake, talking nonstop for sixty of them. On another occasion, he gathered the court to announce that he had conceived a new doctrine of the divine trinity, composed of 1) God, 2) his own private doctor, and 3) the countess of Pembroke, the maid of honor of his wife, Queen Charlotte. “Our king is mad,” declared Dr. Richard Warren in 1788. In the final stages of his illness, George III fell under the care of the doctor and priest Francis Willis, who used shock treatment and a straitjacket and c
hair to immobilize him during bouts of madness.

  Trained at Oxford University and a pioneer of a science until then unknown—psychiatry—Willis was enticed to Portugal in 1792 to care for Dona Maria I with an honorarium of £20,000, equivalent today to $1.7 million.2 But it was all in vain. George III spent the final years of his life imprisoned in an isolated wing of Windsor Castle amid bouts of dementia each tragically more intense than the last. Maria I grew equally incapable of making decisions by 1799, when the regency of Portugal passed to her son, the future King João VI.3

  The second interpretation of the monarchs’ madness is more symbolic. Besides dementia and a political alliance, George III and Maria I had another peculiarity in common. Both belonged to a species condemned to extinction in the Europe of 1807: enthroned monarchs. Never had European rulers lived through times as turbulent and tormented. Kings and queens were persecuted, rendered destitute, imprisoned, exiled, deported, and even executed in public squares.

  Napoleon Bonaparte stood at the height of his power in 1807. Three years earlier he had declared himself the emperor of France. “I am not the heir to King Louis XIV,” he had written to his minister of external relations, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, “I am the heir to Charlemagne.”4 The comparison reveals the heights of his pretensions. Louis XIV, the Sun King, had been one of the most powerful kings of France, but Charlemagne, founder of the Holy Roman Empire, controlled territory that covered the vast majority of Western Europe. In other words, for Napoleon, France was not enough; he wanted to be emperor of Europe. In practice, he already was. One year later, in 1808, he practically doubled the original territory of France with the virtual annexation of Spain and Portugal. His territory also extended over Belgium, Holland, Germany, and Italy to say nothing of the surrounding nations that he controlled more indirectly.

  Over the course of a decade, Napoleon led innumerable battles against the most powerful armies of Europe without facing a single defeat. He repeatedly trounced a dynasty of kings considered unbeatable, the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He subdued the Russians and the Germans in Austerlitz and Jena, two of the most memorable battles of the Napoleonic wars. Kings, queens, princes, dukes, and nobles had fallen from their thrones, and Napoleon installed upon them members of the Bonaparte family.

  “If we were to cast our eyes over Europe in 1807, we would see an extraordinary spectacle,” writes historian Manuel de Oliveira Lima.

  The King of Spain, on French soil, begging for Napoleon’s protection, the King of Prussia ousted from his capital after the invasion of French soldiers, the . . . would-be King of Holland taking refuge in London, the ruler of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies exiled from his beloved Naples; the dynasties of Tuscany and Parma, vagrant; . . . Scandinavia ready to beg for an heir among Bonaparte’s marshals; the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papal States obliged to abandon the thrones that they said were eternal and untouchable.5

  The triumph of Napoleon ended the age of European history known as the Ancien Régime, in which monarchs dominated their countries with absolute power. France had once stood as the paradigm of this system. Louis XIV, the most exuberant of all monarchs in this epoch, ruled for more than seventy years and became known for the phrase “L’état, c’est moi” (I am the State). The Sun King also fought interminable wars. As a result, at the end of his rule, the French monarchy was broke. At that point, France’s national debt equaled seventeen times the operating budget of the French government. The court at Versailles supported more than 200,000 people.6

  Louis XV continued his predecessor’s lavish spending, and on the eve of the French Revolution many criticized Marie Antoinette for her expenditures on jewels, clothing, and all-night gambling binges with her friends. Her enemies called her Madame Deficit, as if she held total blame for the chronic financial problems of the government. These problems drastically worsened over time under the rule of her husband, Louis XVI, during the French involvement in the American Revolution. Supplying arms and funds to the army of General George Washington would help expel the English from North America, but it also left France in financial ruin. To cover its expenses, the government had to raise taxes, generating enormous discontent among the bourgeoisie, the emerging merchant class that had grown rich without direct dependence on the goodwill or favor of the king.

  This combination of poor financial management and lack of individual rights resulted in the French Revolution of 1789. The people, incited by the bourgeoisie, occupied the streets, dethroned the monarchy, and installed a new regime—an act unheard of in modern times—which promoted justice and popular participation in government under the motto “Liberty, Equality, Brotherhood.” What nobody could have imagined was that to implement these ideas still more bloodshed had to take place. Within a short time, the Revolution escaped the control of its leaders and the Reign of Terror spread through France. In 1793, King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were decapitated at the guillotine. Chaos overwhelmed the country. A young Corsican official named Napoleon Bonaparte assumed command of the army in 1796 with two objectives: to restore order at home and to stand against the other European monarchies at war with revolutionary France.

  Thereafter an incredible series of events radically altered the map of Europe. Napoleon created the most powerful war machine known to modern man and managed devastating victories over opponents stronger both in force and numbers. Regimes that had maintained relatively stable power for centuries began to fall, one after another. The long respected privileges of the nobility ceased to exist virtually overnight. The Napoleonic wars, which lasted some two and a half decades, left millions dead across countless battlefields and changed the course of world history.

  In the last two centuries, more books have been written about Napoleon than any other individual in history except for Jesus. More than 600,000 works refer to him directly or indirectly.7 His immeasurable ambition and vanity stood inversely proportional to his minimal stature of 5'5". Napoleon liked to call himself the Son of the Revolution, and, a military genius by nature, it was the Revolution that gave him the opportunity to demonstrate his talent on the battlefield. He was, therefore, the right man in the right place at the right time—depending of course on how one views the situation. Born in 1769, he was the scion of a family of the petty nobility. During military school, he gained a reputation as a republican and established links with future revolutionary leaders. At sixteen years old, still an adolescent, he became a lieutenant in the French army.

  Those revolutionary links placed him in 1793 at the frontlines of the artillery in the Battle of Toulon, a rebel city defended by the English. So decisive was his participation that in the following eight weeks he rocketed from captain to general at a mere twenty-four years old. Three years later he was army commander in Italy, where he distinguished himself for bravery and the boldness of his military maneuvers. Three years after that he became the first consul of France, a position that granted him unrestricted powers. In 1804 he proclaimed himself emperor, at the tender age of thirty-five.

  Napoleon transformed the art of war. His armies moved with more rapidity and agility than any other. He always took the offensive and assumed the most advantageous positions on the battlefield, surprising the enemy who quite often withdrew or surrendered without firing a single shot. In December 1805 on the eve of his most memorable victory at the Battle of Austerlitz, a squad of his troops traversed more than sixty miles in just two days—when there were no trucks, tanks, airplanes, or helicopters to transport personnel and equipment. This tremendous mobility allowed his armies to surprise their enemies with unexpected maneuvers in battles that sometimes seemed lost before they even began. Such unpredictable tactics were devastating to his opponents, accustomed to slower, conventional maneuvers.

  Before Napoleon, it took months and sometimes years to recruit, train, and mobilize troops for a battle.8 “In the century before the French Revolution wars had become formal
affairs, pursued with limited means for limited objectives by highly trained and brutally disciplined professional armies, commanded, especially in the higher ranks, by an aristocratic cousinage,” writes Gunther Rothenberg, military specialist at the Smithsonian Institute and author of The Napoleonic Wars. “Battles were avoided because heavy casualties, coupled with desertions, proved too costly for victors and vanquished alike. Wars commonly ended with the exhaustion of finances and manpower rather than with a decisive battle.”

  Two factors contributed to this change of scene. First, new agricultural techniques increased the yield of food supplies at the end of the eighteenth century and produced a drastic demographic change in Europe. In just a few decades, the population of the continent nearly doubled. France, which had 18 million inhabitants in the middle of the eighteenth century, increased to 26 million by 1792, thereby becoming the second most populous country in Europe (if you count Russia, which had a population of 44 million). More people of course meant more soldiers for the armies involved in the Napoleonic wars. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution, the second factor, allowed for mass production that increased the yield of iron for cannons and rifles, textiles for uniforms, and other equipment necessary for military campaigns.

  Napoleon boasted of being able to replace losses on the battlefield at a rate of 30,000 soldiers per month. In 1794, France counted 750,000 men who were trained, equipped, and highly motivated to defend the ideals of the Revolution. This gave him an army on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire. But what mattered to the emperor—a practical, methodical, and cold general—was the result of his combined forces and not the individual destiny of soldiers who fell by the wayside. He planned battles meticulously and shared command with nobody: “In war, one lousy general is better than two good ones,” he said.9 But he was also charismatic and capable of rapidly rousing the spirits of his officials and soldiers. “Morale and the army’s attitude are half the battle,” he claimed.