The settlement was hard on Austria, but it was an even more severe blow to Britain, which lost her principal ally and proxy on the Continent. Worse still, by a separate treaty the kingdom of Naples ceded the island of Elba to France and closed its ports to British shipping, while further treaties with Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli enhanced France’s position in the Mediterranean. Malta and Egypt were still in French hands, and an agreement signed in February 1801 guaranteed France the support of the Spanish fleet.
The situation begged for a general settlement, to include all the powers involved since the outbreak of war in 1792, but that would not be easy to achieve, given the nature of the conflict; its roots reached into the second half of the eighteenth century, when traditional dynastic considerations were superseded by the need to keep up with rivals and seek security through a ‘balance of power’. If one state made a gain, others felt they must make an equivalent one, precipitating a Darwinian process in which stronger states grew at the expense of weaker ones. Recent wars and the partition of Poland had demonstrated that no frontier could be considered immovable and no throne permanent. The process was accompanied by the disintegration of old networks of alliance and restraining rivalries – Franco-Austrian control over the smaller states of Germany, the French-Swedish-Polish-Turkish barrier against both Russia and Austria, the Franco-Spanish family compact to check British ambitions in the colonies, the Anglo-Dutch equivalent, and so on. The situation was complicated by the spirit of the times: anachronistic structures such as the Holy Roman Empire and feudal monarchies came under fire from the intellectual forces unleashed by the Enlightenment and from nascent nationalism.
Two powers were growing faster than the rest. To the east, Russia had moved her frontiers 600 kilometres into Europe in the space of fifty years while advancing eastwards and reaching the Pacific Ocean. To the west, Britain was extending her overseas dominions. The only power to rival them was France, which alone could help Austria check Russia’s westward expansion and, with her Spanish ally, stand up to Britain’s drive for control of the seas.
The Revolution had curtailed French ambitions and its leaders had sent out pacific messages to all nations, but as their doctrines challenged the social order, they drew monarchs and ministers all over Europe together in its defence. In August 1791 the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and King Frederick William II of Prussia issued a declaration after a meeting at Pillnitz in Saxony in support of the beleaguered Louis XVI. In France, this was received as a challenge, and led to the outbreak of war in 1792 and an invasion by Austria and Prussia aimed at restoring the ancien régime. The invaders were defeated and the French proceeded to ‘liberate’ the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium). The French Convention issued an Edict of Fraternity pledging to support all nations struggling for freedom from feudal oppression. Britain, along with Sardinia, the United Provinces, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, joined the coalition against revolutionary France. The army of émigrés at Koblenz and popular risings in the Vendée and the south of France were financed, armed and supported with troops. While Britain did not have a standing army of any significance on hand, she paid others to fight on her behalf. But while both sides made much of the ideological crusades they were fighting, this thinly veiled what remained essentially opportunistic policies.
At the beginning of 1793 Georges Danton had put forward the idea that France had ‘natural’ frontiers designated by the Channel, the Atlantic, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, the Alps and the Rhine, which meant the annexation of large areas that had not lain within the borders of 1789. While ‘liberating’ oppressed sister nations, the French Republic shamelessly relieved them of their riches. Austria saw the possibility of reinforcing its grip on Italy and of helping itself, along with Russia and Prussia, to what remained of Poland. Russia acquired a longed-for naval base in the Mediterranean by occupying the Ionian islands. Britain seized France’s colonies and those of her Dutch allies. Prussia was not averse to taking the British royal family’s fief of Hanover.
Although it was through war that he had achieved power, Bonaparte knew that only peace could ensure his survival. His first success came on 3 October 1800, with the signature at Mortefontaine of a treaty with the United States brokered by Joseph. It took place in the presence of Lafayette, who had fought alongside George Washington, and was celebrated with a banquet followed by theatricals and fireworks. (A prolonged downpour marred the proceedings by turning the gardens into a sea of mud and delaying the building of the stage, providing time for the workers to join the artificers in helping themselves to the wine meant for the banquet, which did not begin until midnight, to the accompaniment of an erratic firework display.1)
The next step had been peace with Austria, then Naples, followed by the signature of new treaties with Spain and Portugal, negotiated by Lucien. That left Britain and Russia. Since Britain refused to enter into negotiations, Bonaparte sought to apply pressure by isolating her, which could best be done through alliance with Russia, which resented Britain’s command of the oceans and felt threatened by her colonial reach in Asia.
The tsar, Paul I, had grown disenchanted with his partners in the coalition and withdrawn his troops. Increasingly resentful of the Royal Navy’s high-handed searching and confiscation of neutral vessels, he combined with Sweden, Denmark and Prussia in setting up the League of Neutrals, which denied British ships access to the Baltic. Using the opportunity provided by the presence in France of Russian troops taken prisoner in Switzerland in 1799, Bonaparte opened negotiations and suggested a similar league in the Mediterranean. ‘It is in the interests of all the powers of the Mediterranean, as well as those of the Black Sea, that Egypt remain in French hands,’ he wrote to Paul on 26 February 1801. ‘The Suez Canal, which would connect the Indian seas with the Mediterranean, has already been drawn; the work is simple and requires little time, and it would yield incalculable benefits to Russian commerce.’ He urged the tsar to pressure the Porte to allow the French occupation of Egypt to continue.2
Bonaparte also pointed out that their two countries had no quarrel and many common interests, and that only British perfidy had turned them against each other. He even raised the possibility of joint action to despoil the Ottoman Empire, and, knowing that Paul had assumed the role of protector of the Order of St John, he threw in a present for the tsar – the sword of Grand Master Jean de la Valette, taken after his capture of Malta on the way to Egypt. It was a gesture bound to appeal to the impetuous tsar, with his chivalric fantasies. Paul despised the French on account of the Revolution, but he was fascinated by Bonaparte, and he sent two envoys to Paris.3
At the beginning of March Paul ordered the British ambassador, Lord Whitworth, to leave St Petersburg. Before his departure Whitworth encouraged and gave funds to a group of noblemen who were conspiring against the tsar, and on the night of 23 March 1801 Paul was assassinated in his bedroom. Bonaparte had no doubt as to who was behind the act. On 2 April the Royal Navy bombarded Copenhagen and the Armed Neutrality rapidly unwound, the new tsar, Alexander I, making peace with Britain in June.
Britain was nevertheless isolated, internationally unpopular, and threatened with unrest at home. The Armed Neutrality had interrupted grain shipments, leading to a rise in the price of wheat and a number of ‘bread or blood’ riots. The crisis over the Act of Union with Ireland precipitated Pitt’s resignation on 16 February 1801. He was succeeded by Henry Addington, whose foreign secretary Lord Hawkesbury began talks in London with the French envoy Louis Otto.
Coming to terms was made no easier by the role played in the wars by propaganda. British public opinion was moulded by the rhetoric of Edmund Burke, a raucous press and a flood of scurrilous cartoons, all of which demonised the French Revolution as a disgraceful, bloodthirsty breakdown of civilisation. Its key figures were represented as degenerate, vicious and ridiculous, and ‘Boney’ came in for the most vile, if often amusing, treatment. The French response was to represent the toiling masses of Britain as the slaves of th
e monster Pitt and the oligarchy of lords ruling the country. They were accused of wanting to dominate the world and behaving like, in Talleyrand’s words, ‘vampires of the sea’ who needed to be ‘exterminated’ in the interest of ‘civilisation and the liberty of nations’. The rhetoric on both sides incited hatred, and Nelson instructed his men that ‘no delicacy can be observed’ when making raids on the French coast. British treatment of French prisoners of war shocked Bonaparte. ‘Is it possible that the nation of Newton and Locke has so far forgotten its standards?’ he wrote to Talleyrand.4
The negotiations were complicated by the two countries still being engaged in military operations against each other, with minor stand-offs in various colonial outposts, continual clashes at sea, and a major confrontation in Egypt; Bonaparte was doing everything he could to supply and support his forces there. A British force had landed on the Red Sea coast, and on 1 March another 15,000 British troops landed at Alexandria. But Kléber had been succeeded by General Menou, who unlike his predecessor did believe that Egypt could be held. He had married an Egyptian woman and converted to Islam, taking the name Abdullah, which earned him some popularity with the locals, as did a number of sensitive improvements in the administration of the country. He managed to hold off the British force which had landed at Alexandria in an inconclusive battle, but was hemmed in there while General Belliard was besieged in Cairo. On 31 August 1801 Menou capitulated, ending France’s Egyptian venture.
This helped bring matters to a head, since the British cabinet had not wished to sign a peace with the French in Egypt, and there was now some urgency in London to conclude. Britain’s ally Portugal had been forced by the Treaty of Badajoz on 6 June to give up the province of Olivenza to Spain, to cede part of her colony in Guyana to France, and to close her ports to British shipping. France had reached agreement with Russia, and a treaty would be signed in Paris on 8 October, further isolating Britain. Preliminaries of peace were signed in London on 1 October, and Lord Cornwallis was delegated to France to negotiate the treaty.
He was greeted at the Tuileries on 10 November with a splendid reception followed by a banquet for 200 people. The sixty-two-year-old Englishman, who had been in public service all his life, fighting in America and governing in India and Ireland, made a favourable impression on the first consul. He then went to Amiens, where he would flesh out the details with Joseph Bonaparte. Cornwallis thought Joseph ‘a very sensible, modest and gentlemanlike man’, and the negotiations assumed a cordial tone. In recognition of his military past, Bonaparte placed a regiment at Cornwallis’s disposal so he could distract himself by making it parade and manoeuvre.5
Bonaparte sent his brother detailed instructions, providing him with arguments to use against the British, but Joseph was confident that with ‘patience and firmness’ he would be able to stand up to and wear down his opponent. He argued that the British ‘have in previous treaties always triumphed over what they like to call French petulance’ with their chief weapon, which he identified as ‘imperturbability and inertia’, and by keeping calm himself he would disarm his opposite number. The negotiations were complicated by Bonaparte, who had a habit of upping his demands on a matter just as it had been settled. He also introduced new ones, such as access to the Newfoundland fisheries and expansion of the French enclaves in India. Cornwallis stood firm on many of these points, but his superiors were impatient to conclude, as the country was exhausted and desperate for peace after nearly a decade of war during which the lower classes of the population had suffered serious hardship.6
Bonaparte would not allow considerations of foreign policy to distract him from his principal task of rebuilding the French state, and hardly a day passed during the first eight months of 1801 without a session of the Council of State or of the three consuls, dealing with everything from the legal system to the repair of roads, and including the reorganisation of the government itself, with the creation of a new Ministry of the Treasury. When the price of bread had risen because of shortages, causing discontent and even riots in the spring, he reacted not just with characteristic speed and decisiveness, purchasing large quantities of flour in order to produce subsidised bread, he also put in place a mechanism whereby such events could be anticipated and crises avoided in the future.
He had returned from Egypt with a pulmonary inflammation, and was still afflicted with scabies contracted at Toulon. A succession of doctors had failed to alleviate his condition, which was aggravated by his punishing work schedule, not to mention the exertions of the Marengo campaign. His lifestyle, with its irregular eating and sleeping hours and frequent overnight travel by jolting carriage, cannot have helped. By the end of June 1801 he was so ill some thought him moribund. It was then that he engaged the services of Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, an eminent physician with an empirical and holistic approach to medicine. Soon after, Josephine was delighted to note that his spots were clearing up. By means of poultices and other natural expedients, Corvisart cured Bonaparte of his ills, so much so that over the next months his appearance would be transformed, his complexion losing its sallow sickliness and his face its hollow look.7
Partly on account of his health, Bonaparte had spent most of the summer of 1801 at Malmaison. Thanks to Josephine, the house had acquired neo-classical interiors filled with furniture by Jacob and vases of Sèvres porcelain. She had transformed the gardens, filling them with roses and rare plants, and landscaping the park in the English manner. She also collected animals in a menagerie, which would with time contain a kangaroo and an orangutan, while llamas and gazelles roamed the park. It was characteristic of Bonaparte that while he kept quibbling with the architect Fontaine over the expense of every bit of work he carried out there, he had installed as librarian his erstwhile French master the ageing Abbé Dupuis, and as gatekeeper with a generous pension the man who had been the concierge at Brienne.8
Although he worked just as hard there as in Paris, holding meetings of the consuls and the Council of State, interviewing ministers and generals, and sometimes staying up at night dictating to Bourrienne, after dinner, which was usually at six o’clock, Bonaparte would take his leisure in a way that he never could in the Tuileries. There were several guest rooms, and there was usually a house party. They would put on amateur theatricals, stroll in the garden or play children’s games, with Bonaparte taking off his coat and rushing around to catch or get away from others like a schoolboy – and often cheating. He was amused to discover that the gazelles liked snuff, and would regularly treat them to some. Glancing out of the window during his toilette one morning, he noticed some swans on the ornamental canal and told Roustam to bring his guns. He then started shooting at them, laughing like a child. When a horrified Josephine rushed in and snatched the guns away from him, he said, ‘I was just having some fun.’9
At Malmaison he was approachable, relaxed and affable. ‘I was expecting to find him brusque and uneven of temper,’ recalled Joseph’s secretary Claude-François Méneval, ‘instead of which I found him patient, indulgent, easy in his manner, not remotely demanding, of a gaiety which was often boisterous and provocative, sometimes of a charming bonhomie, though this familiarity on his part did not encourage reciprocity.’ It did not discourage the painter Isabey, who, seeing Bonaparte leaning over to inspect a flower one day, leapfrogged him.10
Bonaparte was now regularly having affairs – with Giuseppina Grassini earlier that year, then with Mollien’s wife, then Adèle Duchâtel, the wife of one of his functionaries, not to mention the odd conquest among others of his entourage. Josephine was jealous, and made her servants and ladies patrol the corridors in the Tuileries. With her husband’s elevation and the talk of who might succeed him, she felt threatened by her thirty-seven years and her inability to produce an heir. She had consulted Corvisart, and that summer went to take the waters at Plombières in the hope of enhancing her fertility, accompanied by Letizia. Bonaparte himself did not attach much importance to the lack of an heir, and showed no signs of dissatisfac
tion with his marriage. ‘You should love Bonaparte very much,’ Josephine wrote to her mother on 18 October. ‘He is making your daughter very happy; he is kind, amiable, he is in every way a charming man, and he loves your Yéyette.’11
He had for years treated his younger brother Louis as more of a son than a sibling, and noticing this, Josephine had determined that he should marry her daughter Hortense. She was eighteen, pretty and endowed with her mother’s charm (and bad teeth), and Bonaparte had immediately taken to her. She would keep him company when Josephine was away taking the waters, and a deep friendship developed between them. He had adopted her along with her brother Eugène, and if she were to marry Louis their son would be as good as his grandson.
This incipient assumption of Bonaparte’s heritage by the Beauharnais clan was not the least of the sources of discord between him and his siblings, who insisted on maintaining a degree of independence while riding on his success. Joseph, who had amassed immense wealth over the past few years and set himself up as a grandee, hosting house parties and hunts at Mortefontaine, maintained close links with many of those who voiced their opposition to Bonaparte and blocked his plans in the Tribunate. He was also, for family reasons, close to Bernadotte, whom Bonaparte despised and would long ago have destroyed had he not been married to Désirée Clary. Joseph considered himself the intellectual equal of his brother and, influenced by liberals such as Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, often argued with him.
Lucien had returned from his posting as ambassador in Madrid vastly enriched, having won the favours of the queen of Spain and exacted bribes at every step in the negotiation of treaties with Spain and Portugal – along with twenty paintings from the Retiro collections (to add to his already impressive 300, including works by Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo, Poussin, Caracci, Rubens, Titian and Leonardo), a sack of diamonds and a large quantity of cash (a portion of which he invested in London) – and he brought back a Spanish marqueza whom he installed in his Paris mansion and the château at Le Plessis he now acquired. Unlike Joseph’s, his house parties there were anything but sophisticated, with childish games being played and guests subjected to apple-pie beds and itching powder. That did not stop him taking a high tone with Bonaparte, denouncing him as a tyrant and encouraging others in opposition to him.12
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