by Alan Schom
One of Joseph’s closest friends and advisers, predating even the creation of the Consulate, was Count Miot de Mélito, who thought Joseph himself was not really sure of what he wanted: “The truth of the matter is that he cannot positively make up his mind. The lust for greatness does not disappear easily from the souls of those who feel themselves made for just such power.” This was only partially true, for the fact was that Napoleon had not only displaced Joseph as head of the family but forced him to move, first from Marseilles, and then from the quietly influential life of Mortefontaine, first as king of Naples, then as king of Madrid, against his will and instincts. He was a wealthy man in his own right and did not need it. But he was resentful and jealous of Napoleon and could not allow his younger brother to supersede him.
“If I have lost your friendship, then simply permit me to retire in complete obscurity,” Joseph pleaded with Napoleon. “If not, I shall find a glorious death through the risks with the name that I bear, at the head of the troops I command, troops that hitherto have brought only victory. Regardless of what happens, however, never forget that you never had a friend more worthy of you, or a brother with more tender thoughts for you, than I, and above all, do not recall this when it is too late to act.” When the chips were down, he was in fact the one brother, the one person, on whom Napoleon could count, as he was to prove one summer’s day at the Ile d’Aix a few years hence.
By March 1811 Joseph had had quite enough, having found himself, as he informed Julie, “reduced to the abject state of a mere criminal or of the most humble of men...Therefore announce to the Emperor that I shall be leaving [for Paris]...I feel the agony of political death in this country; however, I shall not cede...and I shall not of my own free will declare myself dead and assist at my own political funeral.”
Napoleon of course was already annexing Spanish territory, and in February of that same year he had published in the Moniteur Universel his intention of annexing all of Spain to the French Empire.
Setting out for Paris on April 23, 1811, Joseph stayed till June 16, but only meeting Napoleon a few times. He pleaded for more political and military independence for himself and more financial help for the country. Joseph’s French and Spanish troops had been unpaid for more than half a year, and his ministers and high officials remained unpaid for more than a year, so indeed impoverished that they had to plead for army rations for themselves and their families. Joseph reluctantly left the French capital in mid-June after Napoleon had promised to restore to him complete civil and military command, bolstered by substantial loans. But on June 22, scarcely four days after his brother’s departure, Napoleon issued an even more humiliating decree regarding his sibling kings, establishing that all members of the Bonaparte clan then serving as ruling monarchs within his empire were thereby reduced from kings to mere French princes. Joseph’s journey to Paris had been a failure; war would continue. “Joseph,” the Cortes of Cadiz announced, “is more than ever a marionette in the power of the French, a man without authority...[and] can be considered only an object of profound contempt by all Spaniards who love the independence and honor of their country.”
Despite all that, Joseph remained at his post in Madrid. “If we have war with Russia,” he had perceptively written Julie even before setting out for Paris, “the emperor must send me money and show much confidence in me, and I shall second him perhaps more than he expects.” The following year, although Napoleon had not improved Joseph’s position, his brother still stood by him as he prepared for the Russian campaign, while lamenting that he had “to hopelessly watch the devastation of this land that I have so hoped to render happy.”
By then Wellington was meeting with increasing success throughout the Iberian Peninsula against the French. Napoleon, however, saw it differently, announcing that England was “compromising [Spanish] independence and integrity.” France of course had not even begun to conquer Spain, whose independence and integrity Napoleon had been determined to overthrow, forcing Spain to invite England to come to its rescue. But Napoleon always had a perverse way of looking at events. When he now failed against the English, he blamed the Spanish débâcle on El Rey José, just as he had blamed the Egyptian débâcle on Kléber. There was always someone to blame. “He [Joseph] was the most incompetent man I could have chosen there,” he later told Las Cases. “All the follies in Spain are due to the mistaken consideration I have shown the King [Joseph],” he complained to War Minister Clarke, “who not only does not know how to command, but who is incapable of recognising his own limitations.” Of course the example did not apply to Napoleon himself. “It is hard to imagine anything so inconceivable as what is now going on in Spain,” Bonaparte lamented to General Savary later, with the fall of Vittoria. “With 100,000 good men, the King could have defeated the whole of England.”[760] And yet when Napoleon had earlier led 300,000 French troops in Spain he had failed as well, as had every commanding general and marshal under his command thereafter, including Junot, Ney, Soult, Masséna, and Marmont. As for El Rey José, he would keep his word and hold on, until 1813, when Napoleon himself was defeated on the field of battle.
Back in the autumn of 1811, Count Miot had already considered Spain a lost cause, though for very different reasons:
Scarcely five months had elapsed since our return [Joseph’s return from Paris] and we have already sunk...into the same position that had forced us to leave Madrid in the first place. The same financial difficulties, the same scarcity of food, the same political situation, generals as independent as ever before the King’s authority, and no master plan on which to work. Moreover, we had lost all hope of improvement there and even the delusions that had formerly sustained us were gone.
In the end, with the Spanish economy shattered and the Spanish government foundering in debt, Napoleon read a balance sheet prepared for him by Finance Minister Gaudin. It made the growing imperial debt elsewhere in Europe appear almost reasonable in comparison: Iberian indebtedness to France approached 1 billion francs. But still Napoleon blamed Joseph, blamed Wellington, or anyone else he could think of at the moment.
What in fact had Napoleon achieved since his coup d’état of November 1799? Every country under his control was staggering under the weight of debt. An entire generation of French manhood had been annihilated by the annual military harvest, and France itself suffered and staggered like the most heavily occupied land. Instead of withdrawing all his troops from eastern and central Europe — from the Netherlands, the Balkans, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula — and realistically consolidating his position and admitting the self-evident failure of his economic, military, and geopolitical plan, Napoleon persisted, even in the face of the gradual Russian withdrawal from his sphere.
Following Napoleon’s epileptic episode at Compiègne near the end of April 1810, Napoleon and Marie-Louise had set out on their honeymoon, a long tour of northern France, “Belgium,” and Holland. He stopped to inspect France’s major naval shipyards and personally to launch the mighty eighty-gun ship of the line, the Friedland, the pride of the new fleet he was rebuilding to replace the one Nelson had destroyed at Trafalgar back in 1805. His pleasure was marred, however, when on April 27 he received an explosive confidential report informing him that brother Louis, Police Minister Fouché, and even Talleyrand were in the midst of separate, secret, top-level negotiations with London.
It had all begun back in November 1809, Napoleon now learned, when Fouché had secretly dispatched an Irish army officer by the name of Fagan with a note for the marquis of Wellesley, Wellington’s elder brother, then serving as foreign secretary in the Percival government. Meanwhile, unknown to Fouché, Louis Bonaparte had made separate contact with the British Foreign Office through the good offices of the Dutch banker, Labouchere. Napoleon would deal with Louis later. It was Fouché who roused Napoleon’s ire as no one else could, this same Fouché whom he had just rewarded with a peerage as duke of Otranto. Fouché had also been employing Ouvrard in the transfer of these communica
tions to Amsterdam and London. A cultivated man of the world, Ouvrard was Napoleon’s long-standing bugbear; indeed there was no businessman and bourgeois in the whole of France he loathed more. What were they up to, this traitorous Louis Bonaparte and the ex-schoolmaster-mass murderer, Joseph Fouché? Carrying out secret peace negotiations with perfidious Albion! All this behind Napoleon’s back even as he was waging a tough commercial war to destroy England.
The day after his return to St.-Cloud on June 1, via Lille, Le Havre, and Rouen, Bonaparte summoned an extraordinary meeting of his council of ministers, including Decrès, Clarke, Champagny, Gaudin, Mollien, Regnier, Biget, and Fouché. “You are in charge of making war and peace now?” he scathingly harangued Fouché. “Do you know what the penalty is for such a betrayal? I should march you right up to the guillotine!” But the main event occurred following mass on June 3, when the meeting resumed (without Fouché). This time, in addition to the ministers, various officials and “grand dignitaries” of the realm were summoned, including Talleyrand (of course no longer a minister), Archchancellor Cambacérès, Pasquier, and Maret. “What do you think of a minister who abuses his position by insulting his sovereign and communicating secretly with a foreign power, and opening diplomatic negotiations without authorization and in contradiction to the foreign policy of his own government?”
Napoleon, his temper rising, roundly denounced Fouché’s treachery in detail. How dare he open peace negotiations! Napoleon did not want peace. Peace — that was utter treason!
Following the meeting, his temper having cooled, he dictated a long letter to Fouché, in surprisingly civilized language given his public tirade. Despite his detestation of this “traitor,” so persistent in acting as the kingpin in the peace negotiations, the fact is that Fouché was simply too powerful to dismiss out of hand. Since the 1790s he had stealthily been gathering detailed, embarrassing files on every member of the Bonaparte clan, their illegal financial dealings, their accumulated profits, the sexual exploits of Joseph, Jérôme, Pauline, and Caroline, not to mention a numerous litter of bastard progeny. Napoleon had to tread very warily indeed.
“I am aware of all the services you have rendered me over the years, and I believe in your attachment to my person,” Napoleon’s letter began:
Nevertheless, it is impossible for me to leave you with your portfolio without harming my own position. The post as minister of the Police requires a full, absolute confidence, and that confidence simply no longer exists...because you have compromised my tranquillity and that of the state, which even the legitimate motives you claim for your actions cannot excuse in my eyes...The singular manner in which you have interpreted the powers of your ministry of police in no measure squares with the well-being of the state...As a result I am forced to keep a close, continuous watch on you and your activities, which I find quite taxing, and in any event, totally unacceptable. [Through] your overtures with England...their minister [Foreign Secretary Wellesley] inevitably thought that you were acting on my behalf.
This in turn could result in “a total upheaval in all my political affairs, and were I to countenance it, it would reflect badly on my character as well...You clearly have no idea of all the harm you might have caused me.” The situation quickly became public knowledge. “The downfall of the Duc d’Otrante,” Austrian Minister to Paris Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg informed Vienna, “has produced the greatest consternation here.”[761]
On the evening of March 19, 1811, carriage after carriage clattered into the Carrousel, pulling up before the main entrance of the Tuileries. Dozens of court dignitaries, ministers, and senior army commanders and their wives, in formal attire, gathered to attend a special evening in the “Petits Apartements” of Empress Marie-Louise. Tonight, however, was different from hundreds of previous such entertainments given here, for the mighty and influential had come to await the birth of Napoleon’s child.
Drs. Dubois (the imperial obstetrician), Corvisart, Yvan, Bourdier, Bourdois, and Auvity — the senior members of the Faculty of Medicine — had arrived at 7:00 P.M., when the first telltale labor pains had begun.
Then suddenly the widow of Marshal Lannes, the lovely if distraught-looking duchess of Montebello, appeared, still only half dressed for the evening’s event, to consult hastily with Napoleon, then just as quickly disappeared. The voices grew loud and more excited, the ladies gesticulating, the gentlemen wagering one thousand ducats to one hundred that the nineteen-year-old empress would be delivered of a boy, as Napoleon had been boasting for months. The hours passed, and at midnight Napoleon ordered a cold collation of wine, punch, meats, chocolate, and fruit to be served. More hours passed, and the voices and partylike atmosphere grew subdued.
At six o’clock the next morning, Napoleon had a brief medical bulletin read to those still present, tersely announcing that “Her Majesty is in the best of health,” awaiting the happy outcome. A tense and tired Napoleon withdrew to his private apartments to bathe and breakfast, only to be interrupted in his bath at seven o’clock by a pale, anxious Dr. Dubois, the obstetrician. “Eh bien! What is it! She hasn’t died!” was Napoleon’s first reaction. Her water had broken, he was informed, and it would be a breech birth. Clearly Dubois was most distraught. As for Napoleon, everyone knew how anxious he was, having divorced Josephine for the sole purpose of being presented with an heir. Now seeing the effect of the mounting pressure on Dubois, Napoleon tried to calm him. “Relax, pretend she is just another shopgirl from the Rue St.-Denis. Forget that she is the empress.” “But, Sire, I shall now have to use forceps.” “Ah! Mon Dieu!” Napoleon exclaimed in horror. “Will it be dangerous?” “Sire, it may be a case of having to make a choice, of saving the mother or the child.” “Come along now, Dubois! Don’t panic. Save the mother, I am behind you,” and Dubois hurried down the stairs again. If it was a question of life and death, the empress had to be saved. She could always have another child. Dried hastily by Constant, and wearing only a bathrobe, Napoleon followed Dubois down his small private staircase, past the crowd of astonished onlookers.
“He went up to her bed, pretending to be cheerful. Kissing her tenderly, he spoke soothingly and reassuringly to her,” Méneval recalled. Dubois, who was by now in a real state, insisted that Corvisart, Napoleon’s personal physician, stay at his side. The cries were agonizing, and grew worse as Dubois Corvisart, Bourdier and Yvan struggled to deliver the baby.
When it was over, Napoleon “glanced at the infant on the blanket, thinking the lifeless creature dead, turning immediately to his wife, saying nothing about the silent, still baby.” Madame de Montesquiou, to whose care the child would be entrusted hereafter, lifted and cleaned it, and put a few drops of eau-de-vie in its mouth, then covered the silent red baby with warm towels. Seven entire minutes passed before at last the baby gave its first cry, its first sign of life. Only now did they notice that it was a boy, twenty inches long, weighing nine pounds. “In the fever of his joy, Napoleon leaned over the infant and suddenly took it in his arms and walked toward the outer salon where by now all the great personnages of the empire were again congregating, as he proudly held up the child proclaiming: ‘Voila! The King of Rome!’”
The signal was given to the celebratory batteries waiting to announce the news to Paris: twenty-one cannon to fire in the event of the birth of a girl, one hundred for a boy. The Imperial Guard’s artillery began their thunderous announcement, echoed far to the east by the batteries of Vincennes. One after another they discharged as tens of thousands of people gathered in the courtyard, in the Tuileries Gardens, in the Place de la Concorde, in the Rue de Rivoli, in the Cité, in the Latin Quarter, everyone counting attentively eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one...and then twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five...as cheers and applause filled the French capital, and a veritable flow of carriages converged on the Tuileries.
Meanwhile Prince Eugène and the grand duke of Würzburg, after serving as official witnesses to the birth, returned to the salon where Archchance
llor Cambacérès ordered the drawing up of the birth certificate for Napoleon-François-Joseph-Charles. François for the father of Marie-Louise, Emperor Franz I of Austria; Joseph for brother Joseph and for one of the godfathers, the grand duke of Würzburg; and Charles of course after Napoleon’s father. After fifteen painful years of waiting and uncertainty, a legal child was at last born.
This long-awaited son was to be royally pampered. Madame de Montesquiou was to be permanently in charge, attended by deputy governesses, guards, equerries, chamberlains, and servants. The baby would never be alone, never unguarded. Meanwhile whole platoons of imperial couriers were dispatched with the news of the imperial birth and that Empress Marie-Louise herself was all right. Off they went, to the Senate in the Luxembourg Palace, to the Hôtel de Ville, to the embassies, to Josephine at the Château de Navarre — “He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes,” Napoleon informed her. “I trust that he will fulfill his destiny.” Off they went to Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, to every prefect of every department, and to every military governor of Napoleon’s vast empire, to every mayor and garrison of the country, aided by the Chappe system of military telegraph towers informing Brest, Boulogne, Metz, Strasbourg, Brussels, Lyons, and Milan. A Te Deum was chanted in the chapel of the Tuileries, a literal fountain of wine flowed in the Châtelet, fireworks dazzled the eye before the Hôtel de Ville (which had presented the baby with a priceless solid gold-and-silver cradle), every bell in every church, convent, school, and mairie (local town hall) in the French capital — thousands of them — ringing out. It was deafening, hour after hour. The infant in the arms of Madame de Montesquiou, preceded by four pages, army officers, one of Napoleon’s aides-de-camp, four chamberlains, two equerries, and his own master of ceremonies arrived in the baby’s apartments, where he was presented with the cordon of the Legion of Honor and Charlemagne’s famous Iron Crown. Three more batteries then repeated the one hundred salvos. Napoleon in his ecstasy rewarded everyone. First a string of pearls worth 500,000 francs to his beloved wife, tens of thousands of francs to the successful Dubois and the other doctors. In the name of the empress 250,000 francs were distributed among the poor of the city.