Napoleon

by Adam Zamoyski

  Bonaparte had been fostering the emergence of this governing caste from the moment he came to power. Although property was the fundamental qualification, his experience of the ‘scoundrels’ who had followed his army in Italy left him ambivalent about the rich. ‘One cannot treat wealth as a title of nobility,’ he said in the Council of State. ‘A rich man is often a layabout without merit. A rich merchant is often so only by virtue of the art of selling expensively or stealing.’ He wanted people whose wealth derived from honest service to the state, military as well as civil, and encouraged Freemasonry, which he saw as an instrument of civic formation. He aimed to fuse this new hierarchy with the old aristocracy by encouraging intermarriage. His growing court, to which he attracted members of the old aristocracy and returning émigrés, provided the framework for mixing them with his predominantly low-born military entourage. He introduced the court ceremonial that had existed before 1789, and for similar reasons insisted on attaching four dames du palais, drawn from the highest aristocracy, to Josephine. He encouraged young noblemen to join the army, frequently promoting them and giving them posts as aides. He would not have been human if he had not relished having young men with names redolent of the Crusades trotting along in his suite, but vanity was not the primary motive. Yet his desire to achieve social and political ‘fusion’ was ineluctably beginning to affect his own status.23

  His nomination as consul for life demanded changes to the constitution, and he wasted no time in preparing a new one, which came into force on 5 August. ‘A constitution should be fashioned in such a manner that it will not hinder the actions of the government, and will not oblige it to violate it,’ he argued. ‘Every day one is obliged to violate positive laws; one cannot do otherwise, or it would be impossible to proceed. […] The government should not be tyrannical […]; but it is impossible for it not to carry out some arbitrary actions.’24

  The new constitution replaced Sieyès’ pyramid democracy with an even more theoretical version of universal suffrage, since it was dominated by local electoral colleges of notables, which put forward candidates for the assemblies and other offices for the first consul to choose from. Even the justices of the peace were now nominated by him. The Tribunate was cut down by half, the Legislative Body shackled by procedural changes, while the Senate was expanded. The first consul chose five-eighths of its members and presided over it himself, which meant he could legislate by means of senatus-consultes. Both the Senate and the Council of State had become little more than administrative tools. He could make and break treaties without consultation or need for ratification by the chambers. He had arrogated the right to nominate his successor and the traditional prerogative of kings, the right of pardon, abolished in 1791.

  Bonaparte’s thirty-third birthday on 15 August was celebrated with royal pomp. In the morning the members of the assemblies came to the Tuileries with their congratulations, followed by the diplomatic corps. They were entertained with a concert by 300 musicians, after which all drove to Notre Dame for a Te Deum. Bonaparte then retired to Malmaison, where the evening ended with amateur theatricals and dancing while Paris was regaled with illuminations and fireworks.

  On 21 August he drove alone in a coach drawn by eight horses (another royal attribute) to the Luxembourg to swear in the senators. The route was lined by a double rank of soldiers. He was escorted by a glittering group of aides and generals, and followed by six carriages bearing his fellow consuls and the ministers. As his coach trundled into the courtyard it was greeted at the foot of the stairs by ten senators who conducted him to his seat, which resembled nothing less than a throne. In their reports, the Russian and Prussian ambassadors both remarked that there was but one more step left for him to take – to monarchy.25

  The next step may not have taken him to Versailles, as Sieyès had once suggested, but Malmaison was a little far from Paris, and too small to be anything but a place for relaxation in intimate company. The road was difficult to police, and there had been more than one plot to abduct or assassinate Bonaparte between there and Paris. Yet he craved fresh air and felt constricted in the Tuileries. The solution was to provide him with an official residence in the palace of Saint-Cloud. The original idea had been to give him the palace and rename it Marengo, following the example of Blenheim in England, but he had rejected it as ridiculous. He moved into the palace on 20 September, and six days later, on Sunday, 26 September the first court mass was held in the chapel, Bonaparte making his entrance with what was supposed to be the debonair gait affected by the later Bourbons, surrounded by courtiers, many of them regicides, who had frequently sworn to strike down any who reached for supreme authority.26

  Bonaparte understood that ordinary people liked the idea of a head of state, the more exceptional and grander the better, and both he and those close to him had begun to see the new regime as inseparable from his person. That person must therefore be made dear to the people. At the end of October he set off with Josephine on a two-week progress through Normandy, meeting local authorities, functionaries and notables, inspecting the National Guard and military garrisons, visiting factories, hospitals and schools, reviewing building works and planning infrastructure projects.

  They travelled in only two carriages, attended by a small entourage, but one ‘service’ preceded them by twelve hours and another followed them with the same time-lapse. Each consisted of a full, if reduced, replica of the establishment at the Tuileries which took care of all their needs. By the time they reached a given place, the accommodation provided had been adapted to their requirements, clothes were laid out, food was ready, a bath was waiting, and, most important, an office was ready, with papers, files and a travelling library, so Bonaparte could get down to work immediately. As soon as he arrived, he would call in the local authorities and question them on the needs of the locality and their plans, and often mount up immediately to ride out and see for himself.

  He hated having to attend the accompanying receptions, and wanted to get them over with as quickly as possible, but realised their value. He instructed Josephine to wear all the jewellery she could physically display and to behave like a queen – she needed little prompting. Wherever they went they were mobbed by the people, who often travelled long distances to see them, and would stand under his windows half the night waiting for him to show himself. ‘The people do not know what to call him,’ Josephine wrote to Joseph from Rouen. ‘Some call him the pacification of the world, others the father of the people, one man came forward and said: “After God, it’s you!” Another told him: “My soul belongs to God but my heart to You!”’ He would soon belong to them in more traditional mode: on 12 March 1803, accompanied by Josephine, he went to the Paris mint to watch the first coins being struck with his effigy.27

  The advent of peace had opened frontiers, and people from all over Europe came to Paris. The French capital had always attracted visitors avid for fashion and culture, and it was now made more enticing still by the frisson of seeing the battleground of the Revolution and the hero or ogre, depending on viewpoint, who had tamed it. The majority were British. They had been starved for a decade of the opportunity of making a Grand Tour, and an estimated 20,000 of them passed through Paris, some going on to Italy or Switzerland, but all stopping long enough to at least catch sight of the man of the moment. They included no fewer than eighty-one Members of Parliament who came to see how his new political system functioned, among them Charles James Fox. Scientists eager to assess the achievements in the field of building, engineering and physics were able to visit an exhibition of French industry at the Louvre. Many noted artists, including Maria Cosway, Flaxman, Fuseli, Hoppner, Turner and West came to see the museum in the Louvre, which provided them with a unique opportunity to study and copy the works of the masters. Few travelled the other way, from France to Britain, notable exceptions being the sculptor in wax Marie Tussaud and the portrait painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.

  Bonaparte ordered Fontaine to ransack the royal furniture stor
es to fit out the Tuileries in splendour, as he was determined to show the visiting British that France was not bankrupt. He ordered him to clear the area around the palace and to place the horses of St Mark’s on the pillars of the gates in front of it. He also had all the remaining liberty trees planted during the Revolution cut down. Foreign visitors were welcome in his apartments following his regular parades, and he encouraged his generals and ministers to give balls and entertainments for them.

  The Russian Elizaveta Petrovna Divova thought Paris ‘an earthly paradise’, and found everything about Bonaparte and his court enchanting. The Polish Wiridianna Fiszerowa thought the court ‘striking by its lack of manners and dignity’. Another Polish aristocrat remarked that the servants did not seem to know what they were supposed to be doing. Mary Berry was overwhelmed by the luxury of the first consul’s apartments, which she thought surpassed Versailles and Trianon.28

  Everyone who left accounts found Josephine charming and the atmosphere in her apartments and at her receptions ‘very fine and princely’, as one Englishman put it. Reactions to her husband were more varied. Divova found him ‘amiable, charming, kind, honest, polite’; Maria Edgeworth was less complimentary about his ‘pale woebegone countenance’, and thought him ‘very little’; the eccentric Bertie Greathead was disappointed to find him not as ‘melancholy’ and ‘not so picturesque’ as he had imagined, adding that ‘his person is not only little, but I think, mean’. The landscape painter Joseph Farington noted that ‘He picked his nose very much.’ Fiszerowa thought he looked ill at ease, and noticed that ‘When he spoke with the ministers of foreign courts, he twisted the buttons of his coat like a schoolboy.’ Fanny Burney was transported by his face, in which ‘care, thought, melancholy, and meditation are strongly marked, with so much of character, nay, genius, and so penetrating a seriousness, or rather sadness, as powerfully to sink into the observer’s mind’.29

  ‘The nations admire you. France, made greater by your victories, has placed her hope in you,’ wrote Chateaubriand in the dedication to the second edition of Génie du Christianisme, which came out in May 1803. ‘One cannot help but recognise in your destiny the hand of the Providence which has marked you out a long time ago for the fulfilment of its prodigious designs.’30

  25

  His Consular Majesty

  ‘It is certain that some of our travelling Nudes of Fashion intended to conquer the Conqueror of the Continent,’ reported The Times of 12 January 1803. ‘What glory would it have brought to this Country, if it could have boasted of giving a Mistress, or a Wife, to the First Consul.’ It would have taken more than that to maintain a peace that many in Britain were beginning to see as little more than a truce. There had been five treaties signed between the two countries since 1697, and only one had lasted more than ten years.1

  For Britain, the principal benefit of peace was access to European markets – without which dominance of the seas and colonial trade, not to mention its industrial primacy, were worthless. Shortly after the signature of the treaty, Cambacérès warned Bonaparte that it would not last without a commercial one. ‘This suggestion appeared to displease him,’ he noted. Bonaparte reminded him of the catastrophic effect on the French textile industry of the previous treaty, signed in 1783, which had opened French markets to British imports.2

  Whether he wished the peace to last or not is impossible to establish, but his inability to see the other’s point of view meant that he did not waste time developing good relations with Britain, concentrating instead on using the opportunities offered by the cessation of hostilities to rebuild France’s economic and political power. He may not have been a great economist, but he did grasp one thing: whether they were formally at peace or not, France and Britain were in economic conflict. In peacetime, British manufactured goods undercut French ones, hurting France’s industries, particularly in the important textile sector. In wartime, British dominance of the seas wrought havoc with France’s overseas trade.

  As he believed in developing French industry and enriching the country by acquiring hard currency, Bonaparte wanted to export as much as possible while importing as little as possible. This inclined him to protectionism, in which he was backed by many in his entourage, such as his interior minister Chaptal, a chemist by training and a keen supporter of the textile industry. Given the possibility of war breaking out once more, France needed to provide itself with sources of raw materials and markets beyond the reach of the Royal Navy. This seemed possible, since a large part of the Continent was under greater or lesser French control. That in turn suggested the desirability of binding such areas into the French economic sphere and developing them in the service of the metropolis. This entailed the harmonisation of their administrative and judicial systems, and the implementation of infrastructure projects such as roads over the passes into Italy, all of which would in time make their incorporation into France seem no more than an administrative formality: Piedmont, for example, linked directly by the new Simplon road, would become essential to the manufacturing centre of Lyon, and vice-versa.

  Although France recovered her overseas empire by the Treaty of Amiens, reasserting control over it presented a challenge; the Revolution had encouraged local elites to assert their independence and seek greater autonomy, mainly to enable them to resist socially progressive and abolitionist tendencies emanating from Paris. In Saint-Domingue (Haiti) the local assembly had passed its own constitution. When the Convention had abolished slavery in 1794 many in the colonies refused to accept its authority and in some cases welcomed occupation by the British, who maintained it.3

  Restoring France’s authority was complicated by the existence of a powerful creole lobby defending the planters’ interests in Paris. This opposed Bonaparte’s intention of maintaining slavery only where it had not been abolished, and accepting the status quo in colonies such as Guadeloupe and Guyana, where it had. His views on the subject were pragmatic. ‘If I had been in Martinique, I would have opted for the English, because above all else one has to think of one’s own life,’ he told Thibaudeau. Such reasoning was not enough to resolve the conundrum presented by the colony of Saint-Domingue along with the Spanish one of Dominica (Santo Domingo), occupying the eastern half of the island, which was ceded to France by Spain in 1795.4

  At the outbreak of the Revolution, Saint-Domingue produced three-quarters of all the sugar imported into Europe, as well as large quantities of coffee and indigo. It made up a significant element in the French economy, and nourished the port cities of the Atlantic coast, with half of the trade of La Rochelle dependent on it. It is estimated that, directly or indirectly, one Frenchman in ten lived off the Saint-Domingue trade.5

  The Revolution had unleashed animosities between the various strata of society, ranging from ‘grands blancs’ (white planters), through envious ‘petits blancs’ and various degrees of mulattos, quadroons and octoroons, down to the black African slaves, which jostled against each other, often in bizarre alliances dictated by local politics. It inspired slave revolts which were savagely repressed. After much violence, the former slave Pierre-Dominique Toussaint Louverture assumed leadership of the blacks and gained control of the colony. In 1795 the Directory appointed him military governor of Saint-Domingue. He began acting as its master, expelling French officials and confiscating plantations, which he gave to his henchmen, introduced a system of forced labour differing little from slavery, and opened the colony’s ports to British and American shipping, thereby breaking the convention of the exclusivity of trade between colonies and their metropolis.

  Shortly after coming to power, Bonaparte wrote Toussaint a flattering letter, confirming that France recognised the abolition of slavery, holding out a vision of a new ‘pacte social’ and calling on him to show loyalty to France by breaking off contact with its slave-trading enemies the British and Americans. He named Toussaint Captain-General and encouraged him to form a national guard and an army. These overtures were ignored by Toussaint, which strengthened
the case of the creole lobby and soured Bonaparte’s attitude to him. He nevertheless continued to make conciliatory gestures. ‘Whatever your origins and your colour,’ he wrote in a proclamation to the inhabitants of the colony on 8 October 1801, ‘you are French, you are all free and all equal before God and the Republic.’ His recognition of their freedom was confirmed by the assemblies and the Senate a month later. Toussaint defied France by invading the eastern part of the island, which was still administered by Spain pending the arrival of a French force. He entertained ambitions for his country and himself no meaner than those of Bonaparte, and the two were set on a collision course.6

  The colonies France had recovered in the area included the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Marie-Galante, La Désirade, Les Saintes, Saint-Martin, Saint-Lucia and Tobago, and French Guyana on the South American coast. In 1795 she had also recovered from Spain the vast territory of Louisiana (comprising all of present-day Louisiana, Arkansas, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Oklahoma). This opened up the prospect of creating an important colonial empire which would enrich France by providing natural resources and a market for its manufactured goods, not only within its territory but in the neighbouring United States and New Spain (Mexico).

  A week after the signature of the Treaty of Amiens, Bonaparte set out for the minister of the navy Denis Decrès his plan for the colonies. He was to show the flag in India, where France had recovered her five trading posts, reoccupy or reinforce the islands of Réunion, Île de France (Mauritius) and the Seychelles, along with the colony of Senegal in Africa and the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the North American coast. A force of 20,000 men was to take back control of Saint-Domingue, another 3,600 to do the same on Guadeloupe, and with time 3,000 in Louisiana.7