Napoleon
Page 48
‘One of these days, I am convinced, we will see the Empire of the West reborn as tired peoples rush to place themselves under the rule of the best-governed nation,’ Napoleon told his Council of State. In this, as in other things, he was ahead of his time. Yet as he started constructing his new pan-European system, he unaccountably began to look back. Not only did he base his diplomatic strategy on that of Louis XIV – his new ‘Empire of the West’ resembled a medieval system of personal vassalage.22
He began at home, introducing statutes to govern the imperial family, of which he was ‘head and father’. They were modelled on similar documents governing the ancient royal houses of Europe, but included concepts pertaining to Corsican family lore together with a dash of military discipline. They laid down rules of precedence, guidelines on conduct, restrictions on marriage and travel, so that nothing could be done or undertaken without his consent. They included a table of penalties, incarceration and exile among them.
The Continent was to be bound together not by a modern administration but by the Bonaparte dynasty and those established royal and ducal houses of Europe prepared to associate with it. Joseph was King of Naples, Louis King of Holland, Caroline’s husband Murat Grand Duke of Berg, Élisa Bacciochi Duchess of Lucca and Piombino. Further layers of control were provided by those closest to the imperial throne, with Berthier becoming prince of Neuchâtel (a former Prussian fief), Bernadotte prince of Pontecorvo and Talleyrand prince of Benevento in the kingdom of Naples. Other fiefs, such as Dalmatia, Istria, Friuli, Cadora, Belluno, Conegliano, Treviso, Feltre, Bassano, Vicenza, Padua and Rovigo in what had been Venetian territory went to ministers and marshals.
In France itself, by a senatus-consulte of 14 August 1806, Napoleon created an imperial nobility, granting titles of prince, duke, count, baron and knight. The language accompanying these acts and investitures was redolent of another age; the costumes, forms of address and fabulous endowments were an insult to the spirit of the Enlightenment and all that was dear to most Frenchmen about the Revolution. ‘Dare I say it, when in a full council he posited the question of whether the institution of hereditary titles was contrary to the principles of equality which we professed, almost all of us replied in the negative,’ admitted the old revolutionary butcher of nobles Fouché. ‘In fact, the Empire being a new monarchy, the creation of grand officers and dignitaries and the bulwark of a new nobility seemed indispensible to us.’ He became Duke of Otranto.23
Human vanity had triumphed over the so-called Age of Reason. Murat, Louis and Joseph instituted new orders of chivalry, exchanged decorations, designed refulgent uniforms for themselves, their regiments of Guards, and court officials. They published etiquettes and granted titles of nobility to their friends. They sent ambassadors to each other’s courts and played the part of monarch to a degree that even Napoleon found ludicrous. Marshals, ministers and generals, and particularly their wives, vied for titles and resented each other’s, and former revolutionaries applied themselves to inventing arms to paint on their carriage doors. When Jérôme instituted an Order of the Union featuring the imperial eagle, a serpent eating its tail as a symbol of eternity, the lion of Hesse, the horse of Brunswick, and another eagle and lion, Napoleon told him there were ‘too many beasts in that order’.24
‘Few people in his position would have retained such a degree of modesty and simplicity,’ maintained the prefect of the palace, Louis Bausset, and there was a grain of truth in this. When a group of people declared the desire to open a subscription for an equestrian statue of him, Napoleon forbade it. ‘Very simple in his way of being, he liked luxury in his surroundings only because it seemed to him that great show was a way of imposing, which made the business of government easier,’ according to Fain, who saw in him ‘a sure friend and the best of masters’. He spoiled his servants and made sure they did not lack for anything, even after they retired. If he did lose his temper with them, or upset them in any way, he would make up for it royally.25
His view of himself and what he believed he embodied is reflected in his court ceremonial, which grew ever more ponderous, and in his artistic patronage, particularly his building programme and the monuments he erected. During his consulship, he wanted to celebrate soldiers. His early schemes included an ambitious rebuilding of the Invalides centred on a temple of Mars in which great French commanders would be suitably commemorated. Dead brothers-in-arms such as Desaix were immortalised in sculpture. In 1806 he laid the foundation stone of a triumphal arch to be built in front of the Tuileries on the place du Carousel, and of a column modelled on that of Trajan in Rome, to be cast from the bronze of the cannon captured at Austerlitz, on the place Vendôme. Another, larger, triumphal arch was also projected for the other end of the Champs Élysées. These works were balanced by a concurrent project to rebuild the church of La Madeleine as a temple to the glorious dead, but this was to be the last of the monuments dedicated to soldiers.
His next plan was for a vast palace on the heights of Chaillot, effectively a new imperial city with military barracks, a university, archives, a ‘palace of the arts’ and other buildings. His programme did continue to benefit the public: between 1804 and 1813 he spent 277 million francs on roads, 122 on canals, 117 on sea-ports, 102 on embankments, roads, squares and bridges in Paris, thirty on bridges elsewhere, and sixty-two on imperial palaces and buildings such as ministries and the stock exchange. Yet from 1806 onwards the monuments centred not on the nation, the army or even great victories, but on the person of the emperor. He does not, however, appear to have worked out in his own mind the ultimate purpose or the limits of the empire he was building.26
30
Master of Europe
The peace negotiations in the spring and summer of 1806 with Britain and Russia were bedevilled by mistrust on all sides. While professing its peaceful intent, the British cabinet not only issued Orders in Council putting France and much of Germany under blockade, it continued to support the Bourbon King of Naples against Napoleon’s brother Joseph, landing troops in southern Italy and in July scoring its first mainland victory for a century at Maida. Napoleon was also stalling. He had negotiated a treaty with the tsar’s envoy Peter von Oubril which had been sent to St Petersburg for ratification; he was probably hoping that this would put him in a stronger negotiating position vis-à-vis Britain.
It unsettled the King of Prussia, who feared that Napoleon would make a deal at his expense. He had acquired Hanover by a treaty with France in December 1805, and it seemed probable that an agreement between Britain and France would entail its loss. He also suspected that the price of peace between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander might be the cession of some of his eastern lands to Russia. Having marginalised Prussia, Napoleon had no wish to reduce it further, and tried to reassure the king, going so far as to order at the beginning of August the withdrawal of French troops still in Germany. Frederick William wanted nothing more than a preservation of the status quo, but he was being influenced by his belligerent queen and his minister Karl August von Hardenberg, who played to a body of public opinion which felt that Prussia had been humiliated, and an officer corps which believed its army was the best in Europe and longed to prove it. On 9 August, in response to a false report by General Blücher of French troop concentrations threatening Hanover, Prussia began to mobilise.1
Although Napoleon responded with assurances of his desire for peace, he was outraged. When he learned of the publication in Bavaria of a violently anti-French pamphlet bemoaning the humiliation of Germany, he had its publisher Johann Philipp Palm tried by a military court and shot on 26 August. This provoked reactions among German nationalists and a surge of anti-French feeling in Prussia, where officers demonstratively sharpened their sabres on the stone steps of the French embassy in Berlin. Quick to take offence himself, Napoleon was seemingly incapable of appreciating that he could give it.
He also suspected there was more to Prussia’s belligerence. ‘The idea that Prussia can single-handedly engage against me seems to me so rid
iculous that it is not worth discussing,’ he wrote to Talleyrand. When on 3 September he learned that Tsar Alexander had rejected the treaty negotiated by Oubril he realised that Britain, Russia and Prussia had reached an understanding. Failing to grasp that he had pushed them into each other’s arms, he could see only perfidy. ‘These kings will not leave me alone,’ he said to Caulaincourt. ‘They seem determined to convince me that I will have no peace and quiet until I have destroyed them.’2
He instructed Talleyrand and his ambassador in Berlin to assure Frederick William that he had no wish to make war, pointing out that it was not in his interests to disturb a peace he had just concluded. He may have been sincere in this, as it would have been difficult to see what advantages such a war could bring him. But he had taken umbrage at what he called ‘a little kingdom like Prussia’ defying him in front of the whole of Europe. It was, as he put it to Caulaincourt, ‘like some little runt impudently raising its leg to piss over a Great Dane’. By this stage, peace could only have been maintained if the runt lowered its leg, but that was not going to happen.3
Buoyed by the prospect of 100,000 Russians marching to his aid, and anticipating that Austria, Bavaria and Sweden would seize the opportunity to join in the fight against France, the usually undecided Frederick William set his troops in motion. On 12 September they invaded Saxony in order to prompt its ruler into an alliance against the French. Two weeks later he issued an ultimatum to Napoleon to pull all his forces back behind the Rhine. ‘They want to change the face of Europe,’ Napoleon said to Caulaincourt. He went on to speculate that perhaps his ‘Star’ meant him to fight this senseless war which would, as he put it, ‘open up a vast field for great questions’. He also intimated that since mere treaties could not guarantee peace, some new system would have to be put in place.4
He wrote a last letter to Frederick William on 12 September professing his peaceful intentions and warning him not to start a pointless war. But he had ordered his maison militaire to take the road two weeks earlier, and on 25 September he left Saint-Cloud for Mainz, accompanied by Josephine. On 2 October he was at Würzburg with his ally the King of Württemberg, aiming to confront the Prussians in Saxony.5
On 10 October Lannes, commanding the advance guard, attacked and defeated a Prussian corps at Saalfeld. Its commander, the Prussian king’s cousin Prince Ludvig, was cut down and killed by a French hussar. Napoleon sent one of his aides with a letter for Frederick William proposing peace talks, but on reaching the Prussian lines the aide was held back, and the letter never reached its destination.
The Prussian corps manoeuvred erratically, and Napoleon had some difficulty in guessing their intentions, but he reacted with extraordinary speed and attacked what he believed to be their main force at Jena on 14 October. In fact it was a body of about 40,000 men under Prince Hohenlohe. Not realising in the thick morning mist (he was shot at by his own pickets as he reconnoitred) that he outnumbered them heavily, possibly by as much as two to one, Napoleon operated cautiously and defeated them, putting them to flight by the early afternoon. Some fifteen kilometres to the north, Davout, with 30,000 men, who had been ordered to outflank what Napoleon took to be the left wing of the Prussian force, had run into the main Prussian army numbering some 70,000 men under the Duke of Brunswick and King Frederick William at Auerstadt. Bernadotte, who was marching alongside Davout with his corps, failed to come to his aid. But although he suffered heavy losses, in a brilliant action Davout routed Brunswick, who was mortally wounded, and as the retreating remnants collided with those fleeing from the battlefield of Jena, the Prussian army disintegrated. Entire corps and fortresses surrendered to advancing platoons of French cavalry, bringing Prussian losses in killed, wounded and captured to 140,000 in the space of a few days.6
On 24 October Napoleon was at Potsdam, where like Tsar Alexander before him he visited the tomb of Frederick the Great, stealing his hat and sword to take back to the Invalides as trophies. He reported to Josephine that he was well and that he found Frederick the Great’s renowned retreat of Sans-Souci ‘very pleasant’. Davout made a triumphal entry into Berlin, where Napoleon joined him three days later, riding down Unter den Linden to take up residence at the royal palace, escorted by his Guard in parade-ground order.7
Frederick William had written him a pathetic plea for a suspension of hostilities, but Napoleon was not in generous mood. He had been so incensed by Bernadotte’s behaviour that he would have had him court-martialled and shot had he not been the husband of Désirée. He did order the execution of the governor of Berlin, Prince Hatzfeld, as a spy. After an amiable meeting with Napoleon, the prince had written to Frederick William’s headquarters giving details of French dispositions, and the letter had been intercepted. The prince’s wife came to beg for mercy, and Napoleon pardoned him. But his mood did not improve. Riding along with his Mameluke Roustam at his side, he drew a pistol from his saddle-holster and aimed at some crows. The gun did not go off, so he angrily threw it to the ground and berated Roustam in the foulest language. He was obliged to apologise after the Mameluke reminded him he had ordered a new safety-catch fitted to the pistol.8
Napoleon was not impressed by Prussia. Its army had been little better than an eighteenth-century military machine, with the soldiers showing scant devotion to their officers or their country. ‘The Prussians are not a nation,’ he kept saying to Caulaincourt. He likened the desk of Frederick the Great at Sans-Souci to that of a French provincial notary, and having meant to take the four-horse chariot from the triumphal arch at Charlottenburg to adorn one in Paris, he was disgusted to discover that it was made of sheets of iron. He described Prussia and its monarchy as a tinsel stage-set hardly worth preserving, and began turning over in his mind various options regarding the reorganisation of its territory.9
Count Metternich, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, believed that if Napoleon had made peace with Frederick William on the basis of a reduced Prussia incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine, France would have been unassailable and Russian influence would have been entirely excluded from Germany. But Napoleon was slow to respond to Prussian overtures, and his conditions – that Prussia give up her possessions west of the Elbe, pay heavy war reparations and join France in alliance against Russia and Britain – were too harsh. Negotiations never got going before Frederick William took refuge in Königsberg to await salvation by Russia.10
Meanwhile Napoleon decided to strike at the paymaster of all the coalitions against France. Like most Europeans at the time, he believed that the British economy, which was heavily reliant on credit, would implode if the trade supporting that credit were destroyed. Responding to the British Orders in Council of 16 May 1806, which decreed a blockade of French ports and seizure of French shipping, on 21 November he signed decrees which closed all European ports under his control to British ships, British goods and British trade. The aim was to deny British industry its markets and cut off vital supplies of grain, timber and raw materials, particularly from the Baltic. Napoleon would increase the pressure the following year, when he ordered that any ship which had docked at a British port could be confiscated, and then broadened this to include any vessel which had been searched by the Royal Navy, and to allow French corsairs to confiscate British goods on neutral ships. The British responded in kind.
The Berlin Decrees had far-reaching implications, since they made it essential that France control, directly or indirectly, every port in Europe. Allies would have to be forced and neutrals coerced into what Napoleon would call his Continental System. As a first step he ordered General Mortier to occupy the Hanseatic towns of Hamburg and Lübeck, and Swedish Pomerania. But enforcing the decrees was going to take a great deal more than a few regiments. Napoleon had entered into an open-ended commitment which he was never going to be able to fulfil. As if that were not enough, he now opened a Pandora’s box.
On 19 November he had received a delegation of Polish patriots from Posen (Poznań), the capital of a Polish province annexe
d by Prussia a decade earlier. The collapse of Prussian might had raised hopes throughout Poland of the recreation of that country, which had been divided up by Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1795. The Prussian part of it was now effectively free, and the patriots had come to find out his plans for the area. He had none.
Like most western Europeans, Napoleon felt residual sympathy for the Poles following the loss of their country. During his first Italian campaign he had come to value several Polish officers, and particularly his aide Sułkowski. When he realised that among the Austrian prisoners there were Poles who had been drafted by the Austrians and were keen to fight against them, he formed them up into a legion which fought alongside the French. But when they were no longer of any use he felt no compunction in sending them off to Saint-Domingue, where most of them perished. Back in March 1806 he had instructed Fouché to insert articles in the press describing Russian repression and violence against the Poles, probably only to embarrass Russia, with which he was then negotiating a treaty.11
Many Poles drafted into Prussian ranks had also deserted to the French, and Napoleon had them formed up into a legion under General Józef Zajączek, who had served under him in Italy and Egypt (1,500 were incorporated into a legion made up of Irish insurgents of 1798 who had been sold by the British government to the King of Prussia to work in mines, but had subsequently been pressed into the Prussian army). On 24 September Napoleon had instructed Eugène to despatch all Polish staff officers in the Italian army to join the legion under Zajączek. Less than a week after reaching Berlin, on 3 November, he wrote to Fouché in Paris instructing him to send the Polish general Tadeusz Kościuszko, the universally respected leader of a Polish national insurrection in 1794, along with any other Poles he could find in Paris, to join him in the Prussian capital. On 17 November, two days before his meeting with the delegates from Posen, he had given instructions for it to be said that he was intending to recreate a Polish state. Talleyrand was keen on the idea, and had been sounding out Austria on the possibility of her giving up her Polish province of Galicia in exchange for the richer Prussian one of Silesia.12