More defensibly, Napoleon began doling out titles and lands to the leaders of his Empire in 1806. Murat became the ruling Grand Duke of Berg (roughly the Ruhr valley) in April, Talleyrand became Prince of Benevento in Italy (a former papal principality south-east of Naples), Bernadotte was made Prince of Ponte Corvo (an entirely artificial principality created out of another former papal possession in south Lazio near Naples), Fouché was given the hereditary dukedom of Otranto, and Berthier became Prince of Neuchâtel on the condition that he got married.44 Napoleon wrote to Murat asking him to organize Berg so well as to ‘make the neighbouring states envious and want to be part of the same dominion’.45 After his coronation he had created Grand Dignitaries of the Empire for Eugène (arch-chancellor) Murat (grand admiral, despite being a cavalryman), Lebrun (arch-treasurer), Cambacérès (grand chancellor), Talleyrand (grand chamberlain) and Fesch (grand almoner), while Duroc became grand marshal of the palace. Several of these jobs came with very large budgets; the grand chamberlain received nearly 2 million francs in 1806, the master of the horse (Caulaincourt) 3.1 million francs and the grand almoner 206,000 francs, among many others.46 Although there was undoubtedly a Ruritanian feel to some of these titles, and they were duly sniggered at by Bourbon snobs and propagandists, they all came with lands and incomes that were real enough.*
Marshals and ministers weren’t the only ones to be rewarded in 1806; on March 24 he gave his seventeen-year-old mistress, the ‘dark-eyed brunette beauty’ Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, 10,000 francs from the imperial treasury.47 Her husband was in prison for fraud when Caroline Murat, whose lectrice (reader) she was, introduced her to Napoleon in yet another bid to undermine Josephine. The de la Plaignes divorced that April. Keen to establish that he wasn’t impotent, Napoleon impregnated Éléonore, who on December 13 gave birth to his illegitimate child, Comte Léon (who was rather unsubtly given the last four letters of his father’s name). The experiment reassured Napoleon that he could found a dynasty if he were to divorce Josephine. It also solved Éléonore’s financial problems, especially once Napoleon found her an army lieutenant to marry and gave her a large dowry.
On January 23, 1806, the forty-six-year-old William Pitt the Younger died of a peptic ulcer of the stomach, a disease that would today be cured with a short course of acid-inhibiting pills. In William Grenville’s so-called Ministry of All the Talents, which followed from February 1806 to March 1807, Charles James Fox, who had long been sympathetic to the French Revolution and to Napoleon, became Britain’s foreign secretary. Napoleon had made peace overtures to Tsar Alexander when he sent Prince Repnin back to St Petersburg after Austerlitz; now he entertained them from Fox, who on February 20 wrote from Downing Street ‘in my capacity as an honest man’ to warn Talleyrand of an assassination attempt that was to be made against Napoleon from plotters in the 16th arrondissement at Passy, and even going so far as to name them.48 He added that George III ‘would share the same emotions’ about this ‘detestable assignment’. This act of decency initiated full-scale peace negotiations lasting throughout the summer, largely conducted by lords Yarmouth and Lauderdale on the British side and by Champagny and Clarke on the French, which even reached the stage of bases for a proposed treaty.
Negotiations were conducted in secret as neither side wanted to admit to their having taken place if they failed, but there are no fewer than 148 separate documents in the French foreign ministry archives relating to the period between February and September 1806.49 These protracted negotiations – which covered Malta, Hanover, the Hanse Towns, Albania, the Balearic Islands, Sicily, the Cape of Good Hope, Surinam and Pondicherry – had effectively stalled by August 9 when Fox fell ill, but it was the fifty-seven-year-old foreign secretary’s death on September 13 that doomed them completely.50 ‘I know full well that England is but a corner of the world of which Paris is the centre,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand as the talks broke down, ‘and that it would be to England’s advantage to have a foothold there, even in times of war.’51 He therefore preferred to have no relations at all with Britain than ones that were not leading to peace, and once Grenville’s government was replaced in March 1807 by that of the 3rd Duke of Portland, who re-dedicated himself to Pitt’s bellicose policy against France, any hope of that was inconceivable.
Much of the first nine months of 1806 was spent by Napoleon in his Conseil, covering a characteristically wide range of matters. March saw him complaining about his 300,000-franc upholsterer’s bill for his throne and six armchairs, which he was refusing to pay, as well as insisting that priests charge no more than 6 francs for conducting the funerals of the poor: ‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty,’ Napoleon said. ‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’52*
Napoleon came up with a way of taxing the butter and egg markets in March 1806, by announcing that all the proceeds would go to the hospitals of Paris, which the municipal authorities would then defund by a corresponding amount.53 He approved a duty on newspapers, saying that when it came to the press ‘the celebrated maxim of laissez-faire is a dangerous one if taken too literally, and must be moderately and cautiously applied’.54 A few days later, stating that the words ‘wholesale’, ‘retail’, ‘pint’ and ‘pot’ could with perfect propriety be inserted into the new Excise Act, he told the Conseil that the bill was, after all, ‘anything but an epic poem’.55 On March 11 he told the Conseil that his bedtime reading was ‘the old chronicles of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries’, which taught him that the ancient Gauls weren’t barbarians, and that ‘governments had devolved too much power over education to the clergy’.56
Civil administration didn’t occupy Napoleon’s mind completely that month; he also had time to complain to General Jean Dejean, the director of war administration, that the 3rd Légère still hadn’t received the thousand uniforms and bandoliers that they’d been promised eight days before.57 The Conseil also discussed the colour of the Grande Armée’s uniforms, because indigo dye was expensive and came via Britain. ‘It would be no small economy to dress the troops in white,’ Napoleon said, ‘though it may be said, truly enough, that they have succeeded pretty well in blue. I don’t think, however, that their strength lies in the colour of their coats, as that of Samson did in the length of his hair.’58 Other considerations against having white uniforms were how filthy they would get and how much they would show blood.
Although Napoleon worked phenomenally hard, he believed ‘Work should be a way to relax.’59 He thought that if one got up early enough, as he told Eugène on April 14, ‘One can get a lot of work done in little time. I lead the same life you do; but I have an old wife who doesn’t need me around to have fun, and I’m also busier; however I allow myself more time for relaxation and amusement than you … I have spent the last two days with Marshal Bessières; we played like 15-year-old children.’ As he had written fourteen letters that day, six of them to Eugène himself, Napoleon probably hadn’t played precisely like a fifteen-year-old, but the fact that he thought he was relaxing was probably therapeutic in itself.
Some of the letters Napoleon sent to Eugène in April were absurdly nannying: ‘It’s important that the Italian nobility learns to ride,’ he ordered.60 More practical was the advice he gave Joseph about how to avoid being assassinated in Naples. ‘Your valets, your cooks, the guards that sleep in your apartment, the people who wake you up in the night to bring you despatches, have to be French,’ he wrote.
Nobody must ever come in during the night, except for your aide-de-camp who must sleep in a room preceding yours. Your door must be locked from the inside and you should unlock it only if you have recognized your aide-de-camp’s voice: he should only knock on your door after having locked the one of the room he sleeps in to make sure nobody has followed
him and that he is alone. These precautions are important; they’re not a nuisance and as a result they generate confidence, apart from the fact that they can save your life.61
On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).62 This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.63 He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).64 He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.* Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.65 The Conseil investigated the issue further, and was severely split over it. Napoleon told his councillors that he did not want to ‘sully my glory in the eyes of posterity’ by allowing the anti-Semitic Alsatian laws to stand, so they were repealed clause by clause over the following months.66
When the Grand Sanhedrin met it put many of Napoleon’s worries to rest, and exposed his ignorance of Judaism, which he seemed to believe promoted polygamy. The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.67 Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’68 One reason for his toleration of the Jews, at least relative to the restrictions that prevailed in Austria, Prussia, Russia and especially the Papal States, might have been self-interest. As he later said, ‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’69
Yet, despite all this, when Napoleon thought the interests of the Jews conflicted with those of his natural constituency of French landlords, tradesmen and the better-off peasantry, he supported the latter with little regard for natural justice. On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.70 Although Napoleon lifted many of these within a few months in many departments, they lasted until 1811 in Alsace.71 In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.72
There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France, but there was also a good deal of anti-Semitism, as exhibited in particular by Fesch, Molé, Regnier and Marshal Kellermann. Anti-Semitism was rife in the army, where there was only one Jewish general, Henri Rottembourg, and where the flocks of carrion crows that often followed the baggage-trains were nicknamed ‘the Jews’.73 Napoleon himself has been quoted making anti-Semitic remarks, telling one of his secretaries that the biblical Jews were ‘a vile people, cowardly and cruel’.74 In the January 1806 Conseil meeting to consider the Usury Decree he called Jews ‘a debased, degraded nation … a state within a state … not citizens’, ‘a plague of caterpillars and grasshoppers [who] ravage all France!’, adding ‘I cannot regard as Frenchmen those Jews who suck the blood of true Frenchmen.’ He also spoke of ‘rapacious and pitiless moneylenders’, despite the fact that the Conseil’s auditeurs confirmed that the Alsatian debts and mortgages were ‘engagements voluntarily entered into’, and that the law of contract had ‘sanctity’. Repulsive though such remarks are to all civilized people today, these were pretty standard views for an upper-middle-class French army officer in the early nineteenth century. It seems that, although Napoleon was personally prejudiced against Jews to much the same degree as the rest of his class and background, he saw advantages for France in making them less unwelcome there than they were elsewhere in Europe. Napoleon therefore hardly deserves his present reputation in Jewry as a righteous Gentile.
His continuing lack of sympathy with the essence of the religion of most of his subjects, together with the failure for once of his normally well-tuned ear for propaganda, led on August 15 – his birthday and the Festival of the Assumption – to the introduction into the French religious calendar of a new saint’s day: St Napoleon’s. This was a step too far, even for the normally quiescent Gallican Church. The idea flopped among Catholics, who understandably found it blasphemous. Napoleon had asked Cardinal Caprara to canonize a new saint for his birthday, and the cardinal had found a Roman martyr called Neopolis who was alleged to have been martyred for refusing to pledge allegiance to the Emperor Maximilian, but who was in fact a complete invention by the Vatican.75
The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but after the legal foundations of the modern nation-state had been laid by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and once the Imperial Rescript had rationalized Germany in 1803 (and especially once Austerlitz had neutralized Austrian power across much of Germany), it was entirely stripped of its raison d’être. On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded. By the end of 1806 the kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg, the principalities of Regensburg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Hohenzollern-Hechingen, Isenburg-Birstein, Leyen, Liechtenstein and Salm, the grand duchies of Baden, Berg, Hesse-Darmstadt and Würzburg and the duchies of Arenberg, Nassau, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Gotha, Saxe-Hildburghausen, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Weimar had all joined the Confederation. In 1807 the Kingdom of Westphalia also joined, along with nine principalities and three duchies. Karl Dalberg, archbishop of Mainz, former arch-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire and a great admirer of Napoleon’s, was appointed Prince Primate of the Confederation.
The foundation of the Rhine Confederation had profound implications for Europe. The most immediate was that its members’ simultaneous withdrawal from the Holy Roman Empire meant that the Empire, established by Charlemagne’s coronation in AD 800, was formally abolished by Francis on August 6, 1806. (Goethe noted that day that the people staying in the same inn as him were far more interested in the quarrel between their coachman and the innkeeper than in its demise.) With the Holy Roman Empire no more, Francis II became merely Francis I of Austria, which he had already proclaimed an empire in August 1804, making him the only Doppelkaiser (double em
peror) in history.76
Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813. Another consequence was that Frederick William III of Prussia had to give up any further hope of playing a significant leadership role beyond the borders of his own state, unless he was prepared to take part in a fourth coalition against France. Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.
‘Your Majesty has been placed in the singular position of being simultaneously allied with both Russia and France,’ Karl von Hardenberg, the former Prussian foreign minister, wrote to Frederick William in June 1806. ‘This situation cannot last.’77 Frederick William’s decision to go to war with France, taken in early July but not put into effect until October, stemmed from his fear that time wasn’t on Prussia’s side. Although Prussia had been the first state to recognize Napoleon as emperor, had expelled the Bourbons from her territory and had signed the Treaty of Schönbrunn the previous December, by October 1806 she was at war.78 Frederick William dreamed of regional hegemony free of both France and Austria, and harboured growing fears of French encroachment in northern Germany.79 In late June and early July 1806 Hardenberg’s successor, von Haugwitz, who had earlier lauded the French alliance, wrote three memoranda that concluded that Napoleon was looking for a casus belli against Prussia, and was trying to detach Hesse from the Prussian orbit. He recommended that Prussia build up an anti-French alliance comprising Saxony, Hesse and Russia, and forgo the annexation of Hanover in order to secure British war subsidies. His stance was supported by the influential General Ernst von Rüchel, who nonetheless admitted to the king that war with France within a year of Austerlitz would be a Hazardspiel (dangerous game).80
Napoleon the Great Page 51