To avoid the (in fact non-existent) danger of Napoleon accepting her demands, Britain formally declared war on May 18, 1803. Napoleon responded by interning all male Britons of military age who were still on French soil, many of whom were subsequently exchanged but some of whom stayed under house arrest for the next decade.90 His message to the Senate of May 20 was pure propaganda, arguing that in Britain the Peace of Amiens ‘was the object of bitter censure; it was represented as fatal to England, because it was not shameful for France … vain reckoning of hatred!’91 Two days later he ordered Decrès to construct a prototype of a flat-bottomed boat which could carry one cannon and one hundred men across the English Channel, and to contact Cambacérès, Lebrun and Talleyrand to find individuals who would privately sponsor the building of these transports, which would be named after them.92 The collapse of Amiens was meanwhile commemorated by one of Denon’s bronze medals, depicting a leopard – the traditional if somewhat laudatory beast signifying Britain – tearing up a treaty in its teeth.
At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore. On the same day that Whitworth called for his passports in Paris, across the Atlantic President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at the stroke of his pen. The Americans paid France 80 million francs for 875,000 square miles of territory that today comprises all or some of thirteen states from the Gulf of Mexico across the Midwest right up to the Canadian border, at a cost of less than four cents an acre.93 ‘Irresolution and deliberation are no longer in season,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand. ‘I renounce Louisiana. It is not only New Orleans that I cede; it is the whole colony, without reserve; I know the price of what I abandon … I renounce it with the greatest regret: to attempt obstinately to retain it would be folly.’94
After the Saint-Domingue debacle and the collapse of Amiens, Napoleon concluded he must realize his largest and (for the immediate future) entirely useless asset, one that might eventually have drawn France into conflict with the United States. Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’95 Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.
The negotiations were carried out by the treasury minister François Barbé-Marbois, partly because he had lived in America, was married to an American and knew Jefferson, but also partly because Napoleon suspected that if Talleyrand led them – he had initially opposed the deal – he would inevitably demand bribes from the Americans.96 Joseph and Lucien pleaded with Napoleon not to sell, and even threatened to oppose the sale publicly. Lucien recorded Napoleon half rising from his bathtub and telling his brothers that no opposition would be brooked, and certainly no discussions in the legislature. He then fell back into the tub with a splash that drenched Joseph.97 In rage over their opposition he also broke a snuffbox featuring Josephine’s portrait.
When Robert Livingston, one of the American plenipotentiaries, asked the French negotiators precisely where the Purchase territories extended north-westwards, since very few Europeans, let alone cartographers, had ever set foot there, he was told that they included whatever France had bought off Spain in 1800, but beyond that they simply didn’t know. ‘If an obscurity did not already exist,’ Napoleon advised, ‘it would perhaps be a good policy to put one there.’98 The deal was done after nearly three weeks of tough haggling in Paris with Livingston and his fellow negotiator James Monroe, all conducted against the backdrop of the deteriorating situation over Amiens, and was concluded only days before the resumption of war. The financing was arranged via the Anglo-Dutch merchant banks Barings Brothers and Hopes, which in effect bought Louisiana from France and sold it on to the United States for $11.25 million of 6 per cent American bonds, meaning that the American government did not have to provide the capital immediately.99 As a result, Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France. When the prime minister, Henry Addington, asked the bank to cease the remittances Barings agreed, but Hopes, based on the continent, continued to pay and were backed by Barings – so Napoleon got his money and Barings and Hopes made nearly $3 million from the deal.
‘We have lived long,’ said Livingston when the deal was concluded, ‘but this is the noblest work of our whole lives. The treaty which we have just signed has not been obtained by art or dictated by force; equally advantageous to the two contracting parties, it will change vast solitudes into flourishing districts. From this day the United States take their place among the powers of first rank.’100
15
Coronation
‘We must show the Bourbons that the blows that they strike at others will rebound on their own heads.’
Napoleon on the Duc d’Enghien
‘We are here to guide public opinion, not to discuss it.’
Napoleon to the Conseil d’État, 1804
After the declaration of war on May 18, events moved swiftly. France invaded George III’s ancestral electorate of Hanover at the end of the month, and Napoleon ordered General Édouard Mortier, whose mother was English and who had been educated at the English College at Douai, to cut down timber from its forests to build the flat-bottomed boats needed for the invasion of Britain.1 The Royal Navy blockaded the mouths of the Elbe and Weser rivers in Germany in retaliation; Nelson closed off Toulon in July; and by September Britain had recaptured St Lucia, Tobago, Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo. Napoleon meanwhile sent the outstanding soldier (and failed artist) General Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, whose aloofness led to his being nicknamed ‘The Owl’ by his men, to re-garrison Taranto, Brindisi and Otranto, in Italy, in violation of a Franco-Neapolitan treaty signed in 1801, and despite a vigorous Russian protest.
In June Napoleon ordered the construction of five large invasion camps at Brest, Boulogne, Montreuil, Bruges and Utrecht. The Bruges camp was later transferred to Ambleteuse, near Boulogne, and soon the main camp there stretched along 9 miles of the coast, complete with kitchen gardens. ‘I am housed in the middle of the camp and on the edge of the ocean,’ Napoleon told Cambacérès from his headquarters at Pont-de-Briques on November 5, ‘where at a glance it is easy to measure the distance that separates us from England.’2
Support camps for cavalry and the reserve were set up at Saint-Omer, Compiègne, Arras, Étaples, Vimereaux, Paris and Amiens. The Army of England absorbed the men from the Army of the West in the Vendée and was renamed the Army of the Ocean Coasts. By January 1804 it numbered 70,000 men, and by March 120,000.3 Napoleon later claimed that he only ever meant to scare Britain, lull Austria and train his army, and had no real intention of actually invading. This was nonsense. Captain Édouard Desbrière’s five-volume work, Projets et tentatives de débarquement aux îles Britanniques (published in 1900–1902), reviewed Napoleon’s invasion plans and outlined in no fewer than 2,636 pages precisely where each demi-brigade was intended to land, and, despite the misprints of ‘Frey-Harock’ for Grays-Thurrock and ‘Green-hill’ for Greenhithe, makes it clear that Napoleon was not bluffing.4 He had books and articles published about successful invasions of England from Julius Caesar onwards, began to refer to Britain as Carthage, put the Bayeaux Tapestry on display in the Louvre and instructed Denon to strike a ‘Descent on England’ medal – depicting a near-naked Napoleon wrestling successfully with a merman – which states on the reverse: ‘Struck in London 1804’.5
The huge amount of work done on the canals which would enable him to maintain internal communications between Nantes, Holland, Antwerp, Cherbourg, Brest and Rochefort, and the expansion of the docks at Flushing to allow the entire Dutch navy to go to sea at twenty-four hours’ notice, all point
to the deadly seriousness of his intentions.6 So too do the mountains of detailed correspondence with his admirals and generals. In 1803 and 1804, Napoleon wrote to Berthier 553 times and to Admiral Decrès 236 times.7 When General Nicolas Jean-de-Dieu Soult, who was in charge at Saint-Omer (77 letters) reported that it was impossible to embark the entire force in twenty-four hours, Napoleon expostulated, ‘Impossible, sir! I am not acquainted with the word; it is not in the French language, erase it from your dictionary.’8
On December 23, 1803, Berthier drew up a list of the forces composing what he and Napoleon privately called in their correspondence l’armée d’expédition d’Angleterre. It consisted of 79,000 infantry, 17,600 cavalrymen with 15,000 horses, 4,700 artillerymen, 4,600 carters and 7,800 civilians, an unnumbered amount of caïques (each of which was to carry 20 men, 2,000 cartridges, 200 biscuits, 10 bottles of eau-de-vie and a haunch of mutton) and large numbers of semi-armed fishing boats.9 State Councillor Pelet put the size of the flotilla at 250 sloops with three guns each, 650 gunboats and pinnaces with one each, many 6-gun praams, and 750 transports with artillery.10 At its height the flotilla numbered over 1,831 craft of all descriptions, and 167,000 men.11
The flat bottoms of many of the boats, whose maximum draft was 6 feet fully loaded, meant that they could be run up on a beach, but although most were ready by the spring of 1804 they tended to ship water and sailed very badly unless the wind was dead astern, and south-eastern winds are rare in the English Channel.12 The pinnaces also needed to be rowed if they were not going dead ahead, which over 22 miles of sea would have been exhausting for the troops. Although a night attack was intended, a full eight hours of darkness came only in the autumn and winter, when the weather was too bad to risk a crossing in flat-bottomed boats.13 The Channel made up for its narrowness by its notorious unpredictability; there were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century (when she had been by land from Wales). By the early nineteenth she had the largest, best-trained and best-led navy in the world.
Napoleon was undeterred. On July 30, 1804 he told General Brune, we ‘only await a favourable wind in order to plant the imperial eagle on the Tower of London. Time and fate alone know what will happen.’14 On his tours of inspection of the camps, which could take up to twenty-five days, he checked everything from the fortifications to sanitary arrangements, but particularly enjoyed talking to the men. ‘He would mix with them freely,’ recalled an aide-de-camp, ‘entering into every little detail of their comfort and bestowing with discrimination his praise, his favours, and any well-merited advancement, thus provoking their utmost enthusiasm.’15 On July 22 he wrote to the naval ministry to complain that, due to non-payment of expenses, workers in the Channel ports were having to sell their silver sleeve-buttons. ‘They must absolutely not be the ones to suffer,’ he insisted, ‘no matter how things stand the workers must be paid.’16 They must also drink. Writing about the houses to be requisitioned in the Boulogne area for the billeting and provisioning of the invasion force, he told Decrès, ‘Make sure there are cellars for wine.’ He then added that the invasion of Britain would require 300,000 pints of brandy.17
Napoleon began negotiations with the leaders of the United Irishmen in Paris in August, hoping that 20,000 Irish rebels would support the French army if he landed in Ireland.18 He wanted them to join the corps of 117 guide-interpreters he would need in England. He designed a uniform for them of ‘dragoon-green coats with red lining, scarlet facings, white buttons’, right down to the colour of their spurs, and decided that they would have two drummers.19 This mania for micro-management extended to ordering that a marble bust of the seventeenth-century naval hero Jean Bart be placed in the town hall of his birthplace, Dunkirk, to encourage pride in French maritime exploits.
As always, Napoleon required more than warfare and politics for his mental nourishment. On October 1 he thanked the American physicist Sir Benjamin Thomson, who was living in Paris, for his dissertation on heat conservation, and commented:
The rough surface of unpolished bodies is mountainous compared to the extreme attenuation of calorific molecules; their total surface area is much greater than that of the same body when polished, and from the area of the surface used for measuring the number of issues or accesses of calories, it follows that this number must be greater, and therefore, temperature changes should be faster for an unpolished body than for a body that is polished. These are the ideas that I formulated, and that were confirmed by your paper. It is through many experiments made with precision, in order to arrive at the truth … that we advance gradually and arrive at simple theories, useful to all states of life.20
That last sentence alone confirms Napoleon as a product of the Enlightenment.
His sexual life too was very active at this time. It seems likely that Napoleon had a mistress in the Boulogne region, as he wrote to an unidentified ‘Madame F’ while stationed there in early November, promising that the next time they met, ‘I will again be the gate-keeper, if you like; but this time I will absolutely not let the care of accompanying you on the voyage to the island of Kythira fall to any others.’ Kythira was the home of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and none of the other recipients of his letters at the time were designated by an initial alone. He was also sleeping with Chaptal’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Bourgoin, an actress at the Comédie-Française, to Chaptal’s intense chagrin.
Did Josephine know? In November 1804 he replied to what he called a ‘sad’ letter from her: ‘The good, the tender Josephine cannot be erased from my heart except by Josephine herself, by her becoming despondent, tetchy, troublesome. My life is made up of many sorrows; a sweet agreeable home, free from all strain, can alone make me endure them.’21 In January, however, he was writing ‘a thousand kind things to the little cousin’, as well as telling her that Eugène was ‘wooing all the women in Boulogne and is none the better for it’.22
All the leading French admirals – Ganteaume, Eustache Bruix, Laurent Truguet, Pierre de Villeneuve, as well as Decrès – opposed the English expedition as far as they reasonably could, chastened by the two Channel squadrons of over thirty British ships-of-the-line on permanent station. The most capable officer for its overall command, Louis Latouche Tréville, had been ill since returning from Saint-Domingue, and died in August 1804; his replacement, Bruix, died of tuberculosis in March 1805. Napoleon and his senior advisors recognized that it would be impossible to send large numbers of men over on a single tide, and a surprise crossing in fog was also deemed too dangerous. Louis XIV had prepared for an invasion of Britain in 1692, plans had been made by Louis XVI in 1779 and Napoleon himself had looked into the possibilities in 1797–8. The best strategy that could be devised on any of these occasions was the ruse of luring the Royal Navy away from the English south coast for long enough to cross the Channel. Yet the idea that the Admiralty Board in London could be induced to leave the narrows of the Channel under-guarded for even one tide was always utterly fanciful.
Napoleon wrote to Ganteaume on November 23, 1803 about the flotilla of 300 armed longboats (chaloupes cannonières), 500 gunboats (bateaux cannoniers) and 500 barges he hoped soon to have ready. ‘Do you think it will take us to the shores of Albion? It can carry 100,000 men. Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’23 The next day he asked Chaptal to have several songs written ‘for the invasion of England’, one to the tune of ‘Le Chant du Départ’.24 In mid-December he directed that brigadiers could take four servants to England but colonels would have to make do with two.* ‘Everything is beautiful here and comforting to see,’ he wrote to Joseph. ‘I really like this beautiful, good Normandy. It’s the real France.’25 A year later, on November 12, 1804, he wrote to Augereau from Boulogne, ‘I have been here for the last ten days, and I have reason to hope that I shall arrive at the goal for which Europe awaits. We have six centuries of insults to avenge.’26 Four days later he told Cambacérès that he could distinguish ‘t
he houses and the movement’ on the English coast from the cliffs at Ambleteuse, after which he described the Channel as ‘a ditch which will be crossed when we have the audacity to try’.27
On January 24, 1804 Napoleon ordered the double-agent Mehée de la Touche to leak to Francis Drake, the British envoy at Munich, the information that ‘the preparations at Boulogne are false demonstrations which, however costly, are less than would appear at first glance; that the launches are so constructed that they can be turned into merchant vessels, etc, etc; that the First Consul is too crafty and considers his position too firmly established today to attempt a doubtful operation where a mass of troops would be compromised’.28 That month Napoleon even tried to draw the Pope into supporting the operation, writing to him of the ‘intolerable … oppression’ of Irish Catholics. There was no response from Rome.29
Napoleon spoke openly and frequently about his invasion plans while in exile on Elba a decade later, saying that all he had needed were superior numbers in the Channel for three or four days to protect the flotilla. ‘As he should march immediately to London, he should prefer landing on the coast of Kent,’ he later recalled of himself, ‘but this must depend upon wind and weather.’30 He claimed that he would place himself in the admirals’ and pilots’ hands over where to land his 100,000 men, with artillery and cavalry following on soon afterwards. He believed he could have ‘arrived in London in three days’, just at the moment that Nelson would have returned from the West Indies from chasing another French fleet, too late to save his country.31
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