He went hunting more often than before, mainly to get some exercise and exhaust himself; he dashed about on his horse wherever his fancy took him, to the exasperation of Berthier, who as grand huntsman planned the hunt with his usual thoroughness. It did not prevent him putting on weight, and those around him felt he had slowed down and declined physically. He was not eating more than usual, so there must have been another cause to his slide into obesity. It has been convincingly argued that it was probably the failure of his pituitary gland, which can affect men around the age of forty, leading to weight-gain and genital shrinkage, from which he also suffered according to post-mortem examinations.3
His workload remained impressive, but less strenuous. In the past he had been continually on the road, obsessed as he was with taking matters in hand and judging on the spot before making decisions. He was now travelling less; he had never before spent such a long time in Paris and its environs. Many saw in this an encouraging development. At the marriage banquet in April 1810, Metternich had proposed a toast ‘To the King of Rome!’ – the title traditionally borne by the heir to the Holy Roman Empire. The Austrian chancellor’s toast suggested that the Habsburg monarchy had ceded its rights to the new emperor of the West, and the age-old struggle between the House of Austria and France was at an end. It implied that the birth of a King of Rome would seal a lasting peace, and as soon as it was confirmed that the empress was pregnant people began to pray for it.4
As she went into labour on the evening of 19 March 1811, the court gathered at the Tuileries, while doctors Corvisart and Dubois took charge, attended by two surgeons. Expectation gripped the city. The stock exchange closed, and many employers gave their workers the day off. The birth would be announced, as were victories and major events, by the firing of cannon: twenty-one shots for a girl and one hundred for a boy. On the esplanade in front of the Invalides, the gunners of the Imperial Guard primed their pieces and waited for the order to fire.
They had to wait all night, as the birth proved a difficult one. Napoleon remained at his wife’s bedside from the moment the labour started at about seven in the evening, showing signs of distress at her pain. This subsided at around five o’clock in the morning and she fell asleep, so he went to have a bath. It was not long before a nervous Dr Dubois came hurriedly up the hidden staircase to tell him that there were complications, as the baby was presenting itself badly. Napoleon asked whether there was any danger, and the doctor replied that the empress’s life was threatened. ‘Forget she is the empress and treat her as you would a shopkeeper’s wife from the rue Saint-Denis,’ Napoleon interrupted him, adding, ‘And whatever happens, save the mother!’ He dressed and joined the doctors at her bedside, calming her as Dr Dubois took out his forceps. The baby came out feet first, and it took some time to get the head clear, during which Marie-Louise screamed so much Napoleon was in tears. At around eight in the morning the child was born. Having satisfied himself that the mother was out of danger, Napoleon took the child in his arms and stepped into the adjoining salon where the dignitaries of the empire were waiting, bleary-eyed after their long vigil. ‘Behold the King of Rome!’ he declared. An aide ran through the rooms and out to his waiting horse, to give the gunners their orders.5
At the first shot, the city came to a standstill. People opened their windows and came out of shops, carriages and wagons pulled up, pedestrians stopped. The first twenty-one were fired at intervals of several seconds so everyone could count them. When the twenty-second was heard, ‘there rang out across the town a long shout of joy which ran through it like an electric current’, in the words of one lady. It was accompanied by the remaining seventy-eight shots delivered in quick succession, and the pealing of bells from every church in Paris. A police report noted that two porters at Les Halles who were on the point of coming to blows paused at the first shot, and embraced at the twenty-second. Even opponents of the regime and enemies of Napoleon felt joy. To many it seemed as though the future was secure, and a pax gallica would descend on Europe. In a poem dedicated to Marie-Louise, Goethe represented her union with Napoleon in cosmic terms, referring to her as ‘the beautiful bride of peace’.6
That evening, while the people of Paris celebrated, the child was baptised according to the rites of the French royal family – he had already been assigned as governess the same comtesse de Montesquiou who had brought up the children of Louis XVI. The next morning, seated on his throne, Napoleon received the congratulations of the Senate, the Legislative and other bodies of the government and administration, the diplomatic corps and the municipal authorities, after which they accompanied him to view the infant as he lay in a cradle donated by the city of Paris, featuring a figure of Glory holding a crown, with an eagle ascending towards a star representing Napoleon. Over the next days congratulations poured in from every corner of the empire, and from every foreign court except that of St James’s.
Aside from the satisfaction he felt at the birth of an heir, Napoleon was as moved as any man by the experience of fatherhood; he immediately sent a page to inform Josephine of the birth. He may even have taken the child later to Malmaison for her to see. He still felt deep affection for her, and every year after the divorce he would send her a million francs in addition to her settlement. When Mollien informed him that she wanted three more officers to attend her, Napoleon told him ‘not to make her cry’ and let her have them. He had hoped that Marie-Louise would come to accept her as a friend, and that he would be able to accommodate them both in his life, and was, according to Hortense, put out by the younger woman’s jealousy.7
The notion that the blessings of peace were about to descend on France was enhanced by numerous depictions of Napoleon as a father figure of the nation and a pacific family man. An engraving published in Vienna showed a nativity scene, with Marie-Louise as the Virgin, Napoleon’s son as the infant Christ, the kings of Saxony, Bavaria and Württemberg as the three wise men and the other rulers of the Confederation of the Rhine as the shepherds, and, hovering on a cloud, Napoleon himself as God the Father declaring, ‘This is My Son, in whom I am well pleased.’8
On 9 June 1811 Napoleon and Marie-Louise drove in the coronation coach to Notre Dame for the ceremonial christening of their son. The two-month-old baby was baptised by Cardinal Fesch in a church packed with marshals, members of the court, the public bodies, representatives of all the cities of the empire, foreign princes and the diplomatic corps. This was followed by a banquet at the Hôtel de Ville at which Napoleon, his consort and the royals present sat at table wearing their crowns. There followed a court ball and, in the Champs-Élysées, fireworks and free food, wine and dancing for the people of Paris.
‘Now begins the finest epoch of my reign,’ Napoleon declared shortly after the birth of his son, and appearances seemed to bear this out. Miot de Melito, who came to Paris for the baptism after an absence of five years, was astonished at the change the city had undergone. Everywhere he saw new buildings, bridges and monuments, he drove down elegant quais and across open spaces, visited the Louvre and other museums, and was overwhelmed by the city’s magnificence.9
Paris, with its wide streets, grand buildings, fountains and gardens was only the centre, from which fourteen grand imperial roads and as many improved lesser ones, supported by 202 subsidiary ones, radiated to the furthest points of the empire. Travel time was cut by at least half in the course of Napoleon’s rule, and with a network of 1,400 posting stages and 16,000 horses, the Messageries impériales could carry people and post at unprecedented speed. The telegraph had been extended to Amsterdam, Mainz and Venice. There was a plan to link the river Seine to the Baltic with a new canal. Decrees had been issued for the cleaning of the Roman Forum and the dredging and banking of the Tiber, and, after the birth of the King of Rome, for a new imperial quarter on the Capitol. Antwerp, Milan and other cities throughout the empire were improved or, as in the case of La Roche-sur-Yon, built from scratch in deprived areas. Paris boasted the greatest library on earth, but doz
ens of public libraries had sprung up in medium-sized towns, each the seat of a literary and/or scientific learned society. The empire and its allied states had seen spectacular industrial growth, encouraged by the blockade which excluded outside competition, with the development of metallurgical industries in north-eastern France, Belgium and Saxony, of textile industries in France and northern Italy, and of the sugar-beet industry across northern Europe.
The French empire, with its 130 departments stretching from Amsterdam to Rome and its population of 40 million out of a European total of 170, was the greatest power on the Continent, and to the outside observer looked set to remain so. But in effect, it was a deeply flawed structure with profound problems.
While it had continued to grow on the Continent, it had been shrinking overseas, losing its last colonies to the British: La Petite Terre in 1808, La Désirade, Marie-Galante, Guyana, Saint Louis, Santo Domingo, Saint Lucia, Tobago, Martinique and the Danish Antilles in 1809, Réunion (renamed Bonaparte in 1806), Guadeloupe and Île de France in 1810, and Mauritius, Tamatave and the Seychelles in 1811. Napoleon planned to build up to a hundred ships of the line, but in the hurry to achieve this poor timber was used, while the cannon were of such poor quality, and so prone to explode, that the British did not use captured guns. French privateers did prey on British shipping, taking 519 prizes in 1806, and 619 in 1810, but that was only a pinprick to the British sailing stock, and with the introduction of convoys even that was reduced.10
The real problems were economic: Napoleon’s grand projects and imperial splendour required money, and his need kept growing. His budget went up from 859 million francs in 1810 to 1,103 million the following year. The cost of the land army rose from 377 to 500 million. His court was taking a greater share of government income than that of Louis XVI before the Revolution. He raised taxes, and imposed customs duties and other means of indirect taxation (these had more than doubled in the past five years), while looking for economies by eliminating imagined waste. He spent hours inspecting accounts, adding up figures and delighting in discovering a discrepancy of a few francs, discussed the necessity of every expense and quibbled with architects, engineers and builders, accusing them of trying to cheat, and insisting that any, even the smallest, extra-budgetary expense be authorised by himself, even in dependent territories such as the Grand Duchy of Berg. He went through the court accounts looking for waste, and haggled with suppliers. He kept lists in his notebooks of everything he had authorised and referred to them to check that nothing had been slipped in without authorisation. At the same time, the published budgets and accounts were as fictitious as his Bulletins.11
His military expenditure was enormous. In the past, war had paid for it, and the treaty signed after Wagram had yielded a huge sum in indemnities. Part of the reason for the harshness of its terms was that the campaign had been more costly than previous ones on account of the size of the armies and the quantity of ordnance involved. It had also been more costly in terms of casualties. The war in the Iberian Peninsula was proving equally costly, and brought in nothing. Napoleon had raised a loan on the income of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to finance his foray into Spain in 1808 (‘Bayonne-like sums’ is still a proverb in Poland today to denote untold riches), looted whatever he could and sold off as much Church property as he could lay his hands on. He sent as many non-French units as possible to fight there in order to reduce the expense – Westphalian, Dutch, Polish and Italian troops were equipped and paid by their respective governments, and their casualties did not have an impact on public opinion in France. But the war dragged on, and the cost to his treasury was growing.12
He had meant to return to Spain in the autumn of 1809 to take charge, drive out the British and impose order. But his divorce and remarriage had distracted him, and when, in the spring of 1810, he discovered the joys of life with his new bride, he put off going. There seemed to be no urgency, as the military situation did not look bad: Joseph and Soult had occupied Andalucia and Seville, where they recovered all the standards lost at Bailén, Suchet had taken control of Aragon, and Masséna had pushed Wellesley, now Viscount Wellington, back into Portugal. But Napoleon’s policy of sending German, Dutch and Italian troops to serve in Spain had a deleterious effect, as many of them took the first opportunity to desert, creating a climate which communicated itself to their French comrades who also went over to the enemy.13
Joseph had no control over the French troops supposed to support his rule. Berthier was nominally in command of the Army of Spain, but remained in Paris. In February 1810 Napoleon divided Spain into military provinces whose commanders had extraordinary powers, which, since there was nobody in overall command, only dispersed the military effort further. The administration put in place by Joseph was undermined, taxes collected by his officials were seized, and his attempts to impose his authority were ineffectual. By the middle of 1810 he was in conflict with every one of the commanders operating in Spain, and Napoleon ignored him, not bothering to reply to his letters.
Joseph was so exasperated that one day in August he emptied a pair of pistols at a portrait of Napoleon. He wrote to his wife Julie saying he had decided to leave Spain, sell Mortefontaine and find a place far from Paris to retire to. He begged Napoleon to allow him to abdicate, arguing that his health could no longer stand the strain. He came to Paris unbidden for the christening of the King of Rome to plead his case, only to be told to go back to Madrid and wait for Napoleon to come and take things in hand.14
But the possibility of his doing so was receding, as other financial and political problems loomed. One was a severe economic crisis at the beginning of 1811 which caused a recession across northern Europe and hit France badly, with multiple bankruptcies, a rise in unemployment and strikes, along with riots against conscription and anti-war slogans daubed on walls. Napoleon took measures to provide emergency food for the poor, but he had to look further for additional sources of income, which aggravated an already difficult international situation.
The economic war with Britain was damaging both sides while failing to deliver a result. Just as Britain began to suffer, the French intervention in Spain provided her with a lifeline; the Spanish colonies in Central and South America took advantage of the change of dynasty in Madrid to declare independence and open their ports to British shipping, creating a market for British manufactured goods. And if Britain was economically damaged by the Continental blockade, the effect on France was hardly better: maritime trade had withered, French ships rotted in port and the treasury was starved of customs revenue. Under pressure to find new sources of income, in 1809 Napoleon allowed merchants to purchase licences to trade with Britain, and not long afterwards the British government did the same with regard to France, as the country was running short of grain. Thus, by the end of the year France was exporting brandy, fruit, vegetables, salt and corn to England, and importing timber, hemp, iron, quinine and cloth. This made a mockery of the Continental System, and had profound political consequences, as it was an insult to France’s principal ally, Russia.15
As soon as his marriage to Marie-Louise had been agreed, Napoleon had written to Alexander tactfully announcing his intention. His letter crossed one from Alexander informing him that while he still hoped their two houses would one day be united, the dowager empress had ruled out his marrying the Grand Duchess Anna for another two years on the grounds of her age. It was a polite refusal, and it should have been Napoleon who felt affronted. Yet it was Alexander who was made to look foolish; he had championed the entente with France in the face of hostile public opinion at home, and it now looked as though his ally had snubbed him. The announcement of the Austrian marriage also suggested that Napoleon had been conducting parallel negotiations with Austria, which raised the question of what else might have been agreed. ‘Russia acts only out of fear,’ Metternich had said to Napoleon during his visit to Paris for the wedding in March 1810. ‘She fears France, she fears our relations with her, and, with fear generating more fear, sh
e will act.’ He judged right.16
At Tilsit, Napoleon had declared to Alexander that there were no points of friction between the interests of France and those of Russia, and that he had no wish to extend French influence beyond the Elbe, adding that the area between that and the Niemen should remain a neutral buffer zone. Yet he had established a French satellite there, and a provocative one at that; the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 was seen in Russia as the first step in a restoration of the kingdom of Poland, which raised the possibility of Russia having to give up some if not all of the 463,000 square kilometres, with a population of some seven million, acquired when Poland was liquidated. Many Poles, whether they were citizens of the Grand Duchy or not, did see it as the nucleus of a restored Poland. When Austria went to war with France in 1809 and the Polish army of the Grand Duchy invaded Galicia, the part of Poland ruled by Austria, local patriots rose in support. In the peace settlement, Napoleon allowed only a small part of the liberated territory to be added to the Grand Duchy, and awarded the greater part to Russia. It was a typically Napoleonic compromise: it disappointed the Poles without pacifying Russian public opinion, which saw it as a second step in the restoration of Poland.17
Napoleon never intended to restore Poland. All his statements to the contrary date from later, when he was trying to keep the Poles on his side or salvage his reputation. At the time he dismissed the idea firmly and frequently; he regarded Poland as ‘a dead body’, and did not think the Poles capable of reviving it as a viable state. But he could not deny himself a vast pool of soldiers (most of them to fight in Spain), so he encouraged the Poles in thinking he favoured their cause.18
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