Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  On July 27–28, 1809 Joseph, Jourdan and Victor were soundly defeated at the hands of Wellington and the Spanish Captain-General Cuesta at the battle of Talavera. Napoleon was particularly incensed by the way Jourdan misled him in his report, claiming that Wellington had lost 10,000 men – that is, one-third of his army – and possession of the battlefield. When Napoleon discovered that the number was really 4,600 and that the French had been ‘repulsed all day long’, he described Jourdan’s lies as ‘a straightforward crime’, and was furious that they might well have influenced his strategy in Spain. ‘He may say what he likes in the Madrid newspapers,’ he wrote, thus acknowledging the endemic untruthfulness of press accounts, ‘but he has no right to disguise the truth from the Government.’20 Napoleon tended to believe the accounts in the British papers over those of his own generals, telling Clarke: ‘You must also tell General Sénarmont that he has not sent a correct account of his artillery; that the English captured more guns than he admits.’21 (It wasn’t six as Sénarmont reported, but seventeen.) ‘As long as they will attack good troops like the English, in good positions without making sure they can be carried,’ he continued, ‘my men will be led to death to no purpose.’22

  Napoleon celebrated his fortieth birthday on August 15, 1809 by making Masséna, Davout and Berthier princes, each title coming with a large dotation. That night, after a grand parade, a review of the Guard at Enzersdorf and a gala dinner, he and Berthier slipped incognito into Vienna, an enemy capital under occupation where he might have been recognized, to watch the firework display in his honour.23 He nonetheless worked as hard as ever during the day, writing from Schönbrunn to Cambacérès about a message to the Senate, his ambassador to Moscow, General Caulaincourt, about rumoured British attempts to buy muskets in Russia, the war minister General Clarke about Spain, and ordering the intendant-general of the Army of Germany, Pierre Daru, to give 300 francs to every child whose father had died at Austerlitz. Further letters that day went to Murat about setting up duchies in Sicily once their enemies were ‘purged’ from there and to Berthier about building boats that could transport 6,600 men across the Danube.24

  By September Francis was obliged to start negotiations. ‘Your master and I are like two bulls,’ Napoleon told the Austrian negotiator, Colonel Count Ferdinand Bubna, ‘who wish to mate with Germany and Italy.’25 To Murat’s aide-de-camp (and Hortense’s lover) Colonel Charles de Flahaut, he went on to say: ‘I need Germany and I need Italy; for Italy means Spain, and Spain is a prolongation of France.’26 This virtually guaranteed the eternal enmity of Austria, which had been the predominant power in both Italy and Germany for generations before the French Revolution. ‘I am not afraid of him,’ Napoleon said privately of Francis, ‘I despise him too much. He is not a knave; on the contrary, he is a simple soul like Louis XVI, but he is always under the influence of the last person to whom he has spoken. One can never trust him.’27 As for the coming negotiations: ‘What matters it to them if they give up a few provinces; they are so dishonest that they will seize them again whenever they get the chance?’ The experiences of 1796–7, 1800–01, 1805 and 1809 certainly suggested that that was true. ‘Here’s the second time I’ve been to the battlefield of Austerlitz,’ Napoleon said, dining with his generals at Brno on September 17. ‘Will I have to come here a third time?’ ‘Sire,’ they replied, ‘according to what we’re seeing every day, nobody would dare bet against it.’28

  The Treaty of Schönbrunn was signed on October 14 by Champagny and Liechtenstein and ratified the next day by Napoleon and soon afterwards by Francis. Given that Francis had launched the war after several warnings, he could hardly complain of its harsh terms. Confining her armed forces to 150,000 men, and almost cutting her off from the sea by annexing the Illyrian provinces (she retained Fiume), Napoleon effectively reduced Austria to a second-rate power. She ceded Istria and Carinthia to France, and Salzburg, Berchtesgaden and parts of Upper Austria to Bavaria; was made to join the Continental System, and had to recognize all of Napoleon’s changes in Iberia and Italy. Austrian Galicia was split, the western four-fifths going to the Duchy of Warsaw and one-fifth (mainly eastern Galicia) to Russia. Despite the fact that 400,000 people had been added to the Russian Empire, this nevertheless raised new fears in St Petersburg that Napoleon intended to recreate the Kingdom of Poland.29 In total, Austria had to give up 3½ million of her population and to pay large indemnities. Francis also had to promise ‘peace and friendship … in perpetuity’, a similar phrase to the one he had assented to only four years earlier, which he did with the same degree of sincerity.30

  On the day the treaty was signed, Napoleon ordered Eugène to help the Bavarians crush a pro-Austrian rebellion that had broken out in the Tyrol in April.31 On October 17 Eugène took 56,000 Bavarian and French troops into the region to crush the resistance movement led by the charismatic former-innkeeper Andreas Hofer, who was betrayed and captured in the village of St Martin in the South Tyrol in late January. (The soldiers who seized him tore at his beard till his cheeks bled, wanting souvenirs of their formidable enemy.)32 Eugène pleaded for clemency, but on February 11, 1810 Napoleon replied that with the negotiations over his approaching marriage in full swing he didn’t want matters complicated by an official Austrian request for Hofer to be spared, so a military tribunal needed to be convened and he would have to be shot within twenty-four hours.33

  The Treaty of Schönbrunn has been criticized as a Carthaginian peace, which ultimately worked against Napoleon’s interests because it forced the Austrians to go to war against him yet again, but that happened only after he had been catastrophically defeated by Russia in 1812. At the time it seemed that a new kind of Franco-Austrian relationship was necessary to prevent these constant wars of revenge. Metternich, who was appointed foreign minister on October 8, had already concluded that Austria’s only alternative after her fourth successive defeat in twelve years was to join France as her junior partner. He spoke of ‘adapting to the triumphant French system’.34 This could be achieved at a stroke, of course, if Napoleon were to divorce Josephine and marry Francis’s daughter, the Archduchess Marie Louise, who would be eighteen that December. Tentative preliminary soundings were taken. By 1809, Napoleon hadn’t given up the idea of marrying a Romanov princess, but neither an Austrian nor a Russian bride was possible while he was still married to Josephine.

  Two developments, one two years previously and one very recent, may have concentrated Napoleon’s mind on the prospect of the succession and have renewed his desire for a child of his own to continue his dynasty.35 In the early hours of May 5, 1807, Louis and Hortense’s four-year-old son Napoléon-Louis-Charles, the Crown Prince of Holland, whom Napoleon might have been considering as his ultimate heir, had died at The Hague of a croup-like illness. Hortense fell into a deep depression that could not have been much helped by letters such as Napoleon’s of June 16 that read, ‘I am touched by your suffering, but I wish that you were more courageous. To live is to suffer, and a human being who is worthy of honour must always struggle for mastery of self.’ He ended three sentences later, writing of Friedland: ‘I had a great victory on 14 June. I am well, and I love you very much.’36 The child’s death ended any lingering attachment Hortense might have had to Louis, and she later had a child by the Comte de Flahaut.37 ‘I could wish to be near you, to make you moderate and sensible in your grief,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine of her grandson’s death. ‘You have had the good fortune not to lose any children, but such loss is one of the conditions and pains attached to our human misery. Might I only learn that you have been reasonable and are well! Would you add to my sorrow?’38 Although Napoleon himself might not have immediately spotted the way in which the infant’s death would increase the pressure on his own marriage, the far more emotionally intelligent, now forty-five-year-old Josephine did. Part of the reason why she could not be ‘sensible in her grief’ was that she was grieving not just for her daughter and grandson but for her own marriage, realizing that Napoleon m
ight now wish to produce his own heir. Napoleon knew himself to be capable of this, because he had already had an illegitimate son, Count Léon, by his former mistress Éléonore de la Plaigne, and in the late summer of 1809 Marie Walewska also became pregnant by him.

  Then, at 9 a.m. on Thursday, October 12, as Napoleon was about to interview some released French prisoners-of-war not far from the horseshoe-shaped double staircase at the back of Schönbrunn Palace, Friedrich Staps, the eighteen-year-old son of a Lutheran pastor from Erfurt, attempted to assassinate him while pretending to hand him a petition. He would have succeeded had Rapp not seized him a few paces away, whereupon Rapp, Berthier and two gendarmes found a large carving knife on him. ‘I was struck with the expression of his eyes when he looked at me,’ Rapp recalled, ‘his decided manner roused my suspicions.’39 Napoleon interviewed Staps soon afterwards, in the company of Bernadotte, Berthier, Savary and Duroc, with the Alsatian-born Rapp interpreting. The Emperor hoped that the young student was insane and thus might be pardoned, but Corvisart pronounced him healthy and rational, albeit a political fanatic. When asked by Napoleon what he would do if he were freed, he replied, ‘I would try to kill you again.’ He was shot at 7 a.m. on the 17th, crying ‘Long live Germany!’ to the firing squad, and ‘Death to the tyrant!’40 It had been impressed upon Napoleon in a very direct, personal manner that a new and uncompromising spirit of German nationalism was now alive in the lands that only three years before had been slumbering in the centuries-old embrace of the Holy Roman Empire.* ‘I’ve always had a dread of madmen,’ Napoleon told his secretary, recalling an evening when he’d been accosted at the theatre by an escapee from the Bicêtre lunatic asylum. ‘I am in love with the Empress!’ the man had cried. ‘You seem to have chosen an extraordinary confidant,’ Napoleon replied.41†

  Napoleon’s ruthlessness came out starkly in his next move. The close, comfortable, companionable marriage that he and Josephine had built up since his return from Egypt – in which she complained about his affairs but stayed faithful to him – was now a block to his political and dynastic ambitions and what he conceived to be the best interests of France, and so it had to end. His close proximity to men killed on many battlefields, lucky survival of the machine infernale, injury at Ratisbon, and the recently failed assassination attempt, now helped to concentrate his advisors’ minds. He left Schönbrunn on October 16 and arrived back at Fontainebleau at 9 a.m. on the 26th. (Pauline and one of her ladies-in-waiting, the plump and pretty twenty-five-year-old Piedmontese reader Baroness Christine de Mathis, came to visit that evening and Napoleon embarked on an affair with Christine almost immediately, which was to last until the night before his wedding. He would later say of her, ‘she accepted presents’.42) He ordered that the connecting door between his and Josephine’s bedrooms be walled up; there was nothing metaphysical or ambiguous about this message of rejection. ‘All tenderness on the Emperor’s part, all consideration for my mother had vanished,’ wrote Hortense of this painful time, ‘he became unjust and vexatious in his attitude … I wished that the divorce had already been pronounced.’43 The family left for the Tuileries on November 15 and by the 27th Bausset, who watched closely as the marriage entered its pathological final stage, had noticed ‘a great alteration in the features of the Empress, and a silent constraint in Napoleon’.44

  Had his Empire been an ancient, established one it might have survived the accession of a brother or nephew, but Napoleon’s Empire was not yet five years old, and he came to the conclusion that for the Bonaparte dynasty to survive he needed a son. After thirteen years of trying, the forty-six-year-old Josephine clearly wasn’t going to produce one. Napoleon knew all about the bloody power struggles that had followed the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, who died without obvious heirs. His current heir was Joseph, whose wife Julie Clary had not borne him any sons, and who was manifestly failing in Spain. As early as July 1806 the Duc de Lévis, an émigré who had returned after 18 Brumaire, had warned the Emperor, ‘Atlas carried the world, but after him came chaos.’45

  On November 30 Napoleon told Josephine he wanted to annul their marriage. ‘You have children,’ he said, ‘I have none. You must feel the necessity that lies upon me of strengthening my dynasty.’46 She wept, said she couldn’t live without him, implored him to reconsider. ‘I have seen her weep for hours together,’ Rapp recalled of this period; ‘she spoke of her attachment for Bonaparte, for so she used to call him in our presence. She regretted the close of her splendid career: this was very natural.’47 She wore a large white hat at dinner that night to hide the fact that she had been crying but Bausset found her ‘the image of grief and of despair’.48 Dining alone together, neither Napoleon nor Josephine ate much and the only words that passed were Napoleon asking Bausset about the weather. At one point during dinner, Napoleon recalled, ‘she gave a scream and fainted’, and had to be carried away by her lady-in-waiting.49 On another occasion, or perhaps the same one but differently remembered, Bausset heard ‘violent cries from the Empress Josephine issue from the Emperor’s chamber’, and Bausset entered to find her lying on the carpet ‘uttering piercing cries and complaints’ saying she would ‘never survive’ a divorce. Napoleon asked Bausset and a secretary to take her to her bedroom up the private staircase, which they managed to do although Bausset nearly tripped over his dress-sword as he was doing so.

  Eugène’s arrival on December 5 helped calm his mother, and the Bonapartes and Beauharnais were soon able to get down to discussing specifics. In order to qualify for the Church ceremony that Napoleon needed for his next wedding, his religious marriage to Josephine on the eve of his coronation had to be declared invalid, even though it had been performed by a prince of the Church, Cardinal Fesch. So Napoleon argued that it had been clandestine, with insufficient witnesses, and that he had been acting under Josephine’s compulsion.50 Josephine agreed to go along with this absurdity, but no fewer than thirteen out of France’s twenty-seven cardinals refused to attend Napoleon’s next wedding. (When Napoleon banned them from wearing their scarlet robes of office, the dissenters became known as ‘the black cardinals’.) In nullifying the marriage, the government law officers took as their precedents the divorces of Louis XII and Henri IV.51

  At the meeting on December 7 at which Josephine had to declare before the grand officers of the Empire that she consented to the divorce, her niece’s husband, the minister Antoine Lavalette, recorded: ‘She displayed so much courage and firmness of mind that all the spectators were deeply moved. The next day she left the Tuileries, never to return more.’52 When she got into her carriage with her lady-in-waiting, ‘not one single person remained to show her a grateful face’. Such is the cruelty of courts. She was hardly exiled from Paris, however, as she kept the Élysée Palace as part of her settlement. Napoleon gave her Malmaison and the fourteenth-century Château Navarre in Normandy, which had cost him 900,000 francs, and she maintained her rank of empress, all honours and prerogatives, while her debts of 2 million francs were paid off and she enjoyed 3 million francs per annum in income for life.53 As Frederick the Great said of Maria Theresa at the time of the first partition of Poland: ‘She wept, but she took.’

  The financial aspects worked well for both of them: Josephine was given a vast income, and it is a fortunate man who has his divorce settlement paid by the state. Ironically, although it was to get an imperial heir that Napoleon divorced Josephine, it would turn out to be her grandson, rather than any offspring of Napoleon, who would become the next emperor of France and her direct descendants who today sit on the thrones of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg. His sit on none.

  Even before breaking the news to Josephine, Napoleon had written to Caulaincourt, the French ambassador to Russia, on November 22, to ask him privately to sound out the Tsar over the prospect of his marrying his sister, the Grand Duchess Anna Pavlovna: ‘I do not make a formal request, I solicit an expression of your opinion.’54 So began a dual courtship with the Russians a
nd the Austrians. Napoleon made it clear in mid-December that his preference was for Anna and he didn’t care about the religious considerations involved – to a man who had flirted with Islam and embraced excommunication, the fact that she was Russian Orthodox was not an insurmountable problem. There was an alternative princess available in Saxony, but she would not have brought the geopolitical benefits of a marriage to Tsar Alexander’s sister or Emperor Francis’s daughter. The age gap – Anna wouldn’t be fifteen until January – would probably have meant that she would have stayed in St Petersburg for a few years before moving to Paris.

  On December 16 Napoleon’s marriage to Josephine was dissolved by a four-sentence sénatus-consulte, and immediately afterwards he ordered Caulaincourt to propose to Anna on his behalf, asking for a response in two days. The Russians took thirty-eight. ‘I tell you frankly,’ Alexander told Caulaincourt, ‘my sister could not do better.’55 He wasn’t being frank: the Tsar did not want a mésalliance between the Romanovs and a Corsican upstart any more than did his mother. Equally, he couldn’t afford to offend Napoleon while France was so much in the ascendant and Russia had no allies. He wanted at very least a signed agreement with France on the future of Poland as the price for his assent, and to that end Caulaincourt and the Russian foreign minister Rumiantsev drafted a convention on December 28, the first article of which was a ‘Reciprocal engagement never to permit the re-establishment of Poland’, and the second suppressed the word ‘Poland’ and ‘Poles’ in all public acts, while Article 5 forbade any further territorial extension of the Duchy of Warsaw.56 When the Tsar implied he could remove his mother’s objection to the marriage, Caulaincourt signed. The Tsar of All the Russias was therefore perfectly willing to sacrifice his teenage sister to the man his family saw as a forty-year-old Corsican parvenu in order to keep Poland partitioned. What Napoleon’s brave Polish lancers would have made of all this is impossible to say. On January 10 Caulaincourt received orders from Napoleon to obtain a definite reply to the proposal within ten days of receipt, at a time when couriers took nearly three weeks to get from Paris to St Petersburg.57