The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  “shit in a silk stocking”: Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand, II, 272. Robin Harris dispels the notion that Napoleon actually said this directly to Talleyrand in a moment of fury, though he allows that it may have been “just possible that Napoleon said it and that all concerned were too ashamed to reproduce it.” Harris, Talleyrand, 204–6, 385. The original source for this remark may be Sainte-Beuve, “Essai,” 30.

  Though he was compensated: Lentz, Nouvelle histoire, I. My key sources on Talleyrand throughout include Cooper, Talleyrand; Dwyer, Talleyrand; Harris, Talleyrand; Lacour-Gayet, Talleyrand; Lawday, Napoleon’s Master; Orieux, Talleyrand; and Waresquiel, Talleyrand. Talleyrand’s memoirs are also an important, if occasionally problematic, source. Roberto Calasso’s quirky treatment of Talleyrand in The Ruin of Kasch was also of use. Talleyrand’s secret work with Alexander evinced the strategy that governed his entire career: to establish as moderate a rule over one’s own people as possible while maintaining equilibrium among rival powers, promoting general prosperity, and to do so subtly and softly, while suspending moral judgments about any single action done in the name of this larger goal. “He rarely gives advice, but can make others talk,” Napoleon once said about him; “I never knew anyone so entirely different to right and wrong.” Talleyrand had also been working with the Austrian foreign minister Count Klemens von Metternich, who had risen to become top consigliere to the Austrian emperor Francis despite being a social outsider, not setting foot in Vienna until the age of twenty-one. Metternich was adept at anticipating who was strongest among his enemies and allies and then brokering and shifting alliances accordingly. “He rarely gives”: Roberts, Napoleon, 145. On Metternich: King, Vienna, 15–18; Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 309. Note that Metternich at this point in time was not yet a prince, hence Count Metternich.

  “only a matter of dates”: During an 1808 peace conference, Talleyrand told Alexander that “the French people are civilized, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilized, but his people are not,” a conversation he later repeated verbatim for Metternich. After his successful overtures to the Russians and Austrians, he’d waited patiently for the opportune moment to make good on these alliances. He boasted that in his life he “had never hurried, but was always on time.” Metternich, Memoirs, II, 298.

  Talleyrand gently helped: Talleyrand had briefly considered a regency, as Napoleon had first proposed in an early draft of his abdication. He would have been the natural candidate for prime minister under such a setup, and it offered a potentially easier solution than a Bourbon restoration, which entailed a symbolic step back into the pre-Revolutionary past. For a moment Tsar Alexander had been in favor of calling on one of Napoleon’s marshals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, to become the new French monarch. Four years earlier, and quite improbably, Bernadotte had been elected crown prince and de facto ruler of Sweden and so had enough of the whiff of monarchy about him to please the tsar. Alexander also considered Napoleon’s stepson, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, for the task, but soon dropped these far-fetched plans, which would have been too hard to sell to the other allies, let alone to the French people. Castlereagh, especially, recognized early on that if they declared their support for any would-be monarch with too much force, it would only help Napoleon’s hand, and that he could rally his soldiers around the perceived threat of a future puppet regime that would be secretly run by a foreign power. It seemed illogical to Castlereagh to insist on one particular “usurper” as the replacement for the existing one. For a time leading up to the abdication, Castlereagh had privately thought that the Duke of Orléans might be a worthier candidate than Louis, whom he deemed “personally incapable.” Things would have been easier if Napoleon were dead, as Talleyrand wrote to a confidant: “If the Emperor were killed his death would guarantee the rights of his son” and a “regency would satisfy everyone.” A British official put it more simply: “The misfortune to us at this moment is that Bonaparte remains in existence.” But to pass the throne to the infant King of Rome while his father was still alive was far too risky. So long as a Bonaparte remained nominal ruler of France the door remained open for Napoleon’s return. Fearing for themselves as much as for the fate of the Bonaparte dynasty, the members of the Regency Council in Paris, including Talleyrand, had arranged for Marie Louise and the King of Rome to escape the city on March 29, following Napoleon’s instructions that they should be removed from the capital at any sign it might fall. They relocated to a chateau in the hillside village of Blois, accompanied by Joseph Bonaparte and other members of the Council, who were to continue governing France from this new headquarters. Talleyrand was supposed to join as well, and while guns were firing on the city from the north and east, he made as if to leave for Blois, packing several chests full of clothes and taking his carriage out to the city’s western gate. There the officer of the National Guard on duty, enlisted earlier to help him play out the charade, barred him from leaving by citing obscure technicalities so that Talleyrand could say he’d tried to follow his empress and remained loyal to the house of Bonaparte. See Castlereagh, Correspondence, IX, 451; Price, Napoleon, 221–23; Zamoyski, Rites, 153, 175–77.

  “having always had”: Price, Napoleon, 224.

  People knew little: “The young generation knew nothing of our princes,” wrote the comtesse de Boigne, who recalled that her younger cousins could never get the Bourbon family tree quite right, and the only person they could identify with certainty was the duchesse d’Angoulême, orphaned by the scaffold. Boigne, Memoirs, 349.

  The allied leaders had never: Lentz, Nouvelle histoire, I; Zamoyski, Rites,152–53.

  A Bourbon restoration: Lieven, Russia, 519. Napoleon had first come to power in a similar fashion, as one of several options from which to choose in the wake of the Terror and its aftermath. As the historian Isser Woloch has argued, the Terror “unleashed a cycle of recrimination, hatred, and endemic local conflict that made future prospects of democratic polity in France very dim. General Bonaparte represented one possible outcome of that dilemma, or a cure worse than the malady, depending on one’s point of view.” Woloch, The New Regime, 431–32.

  To stave off: Regarding the negotiations of the terms of Napoleon’s abdication, see Talleyrand-Périgord, Memoirs, II, 125; Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 316–34.

  He still inspired: No tour of Paris in that era was complete without seeing the site of Louis XVI’s execution, the current Place de la Concorde, where, according to legend, horses and cattle were too spooked by the smell of blood to cross. The name changes of this famous square do much to show the tumult of Parisian politics between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Built between 1755 and 1772, as an octagon with moats on all sides and providing some much-needed public space between the Champs-Elysées and the Louvre, it was originally known as Place Louis XV and its main feature was a statue of that Bourbon king. Revolutionaries tore the statue down and a guillotine was put up in its place. As with so many other places in the city, it was renamed, a symbolic disavowal of the monarchic past, and Place Louis XV became Place de la Révolution. Here huge crowds witnessed the executions of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Charlotte Corday, the young woman who murdered the ferocious journalist Marat. Robespierre, who had made such frequent use of the guillotine, ascended the scaffold in this same square. In 1795, it was renamed as Place de la Concorde, the name reflecting the concord that people hoped to achieve in the wake of such a divisive and violent few years. The Place de la Concorde kept its name for several years, though Paris and France did not find absolute reconciliation. With the Bourbon restoration it briefly returned to its name as Place Louis XV, and finally went back again to Place de la Concorde. See Hussey, Paris, 169.

  “not simply been”: Englund, Napoleon, 420.

  When Caulaincourt proposed: Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 342. Barry O’Meara, the Irish doctor who attended to Napoleon on Saint Helena, made the dubious claim that Bonaparte once told him that Castlerea
gh had actually begged him to live in London, “where he would be received with the greatest of pleasure,” and that he had been the one to turn down the British offer. See O’Meara, Napoleon, II, 50. Castlereagh did write to Liverpool on May 5, 1814, asking, “If [Napoleon’s] taste for an asylum in England should continue, would you allow him to reside in some distant province? It would obviate much alarm on the Continent.” See Webster, Foreign Policy, 250.

  “a very strong letter”: “Napoleon to Marie Louise, April 3, 1814,” Palmstierna, My Dearest Louise, 153.

  The marriage forged: Palmer, Napoleon and Marie Louise, xi; Judson, The Habsburg Empire, was also a useful source.

  “The principal thing”: Metternich, Memoirs, II, 552.

  “I am more his friend”: Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 156–58.

  “Angel” who had finally: Dallas, The Final Act, 23.

  “If he were a woman”: Englund, Napoleon, 293. Though each man could sympathize with the pressures the other faced as sovereign, they differed greatly in their paths to power. Napoleon’s ambition was legendary, while Alexander feared the crown handed to him at twenty-three after his father’s murder and fantasized about sneaking off to live in obscurity on a little farm on the banks of the Rhine. See Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, xxiii.

  After ten days: Branda, La guerre secrète, 20.

  He and Caulaincourt fixed: Caulaincourt, Mémoires, 224–26; Branda, La guerre secrète, 19. Price, working from some of Caulaincourt’s unpublished papers, argues that it was Caulaincourt who suggested Elba and that Alexander accepted, but Price doesn’t offer much detail about how exactly they came to choose this particular location. Corsica had been good enough, eighteen centuries earlier, for Seneca, banished following an alleged affair with Caligula’s youngest sister, Julia Livilla. Napoleon made the dubious claim to Las Cases on Saint Helena that he had decided on the site of his exile, and that he might have had Corsica, but “the humor of the moment led me to decide in favor of Elba.” See Price, Napoleon, 238; Las Cases, Memorial, 348.

  He might also: For theories about the tsar’s motivations, see Lieven, Russia, 518–19, and Branda, La guerre secrète, 30. Lieven writes that Alexander’s “blunder” in allowing Napoleon sovereignty of Elba stemmed in part from his “desire to be, and to be seen to be, generous to a defeated foe.”

  He simply announced: Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy, 10. “The marshals must deliver the act to Napoleon this very night,” Alexander said as soon as he’d decided on Elba.

  The British contingent: Castlereagh’s half brother, Sir Charles Stewart, wrote to Lord Bathurst that “it might be well to consider, before the act is irretrievable, whether a far less dangerous retreat might not be found, and whether Napoleon may not bring the powder to the iron mines which the island of Elba is so famed for.” Castlereagh, Correspondence, IX, 451.

  Castlereagh thought this: Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs, 313. “The most dangerous for us is the chevaleresque tone of Emperor Alexander,” he had written to his prime minister that January. “He has a personal feeling about Paris, distinct from political-military considerations.” Indeed, Alexander told one of his ministers that during a break in the peace negotiations he fell to his knees “and there before the Lord made an effusion of my heart,” to which he was answered with “a hard resolution of will and a kind of blazing clarity of purpose: take Paris!” As quoted in Montefiore.

  But Castlereagh recognized: A year later, pressed to explain how they had bungled Napoleon’s first exile so badly, the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, would blame the need for a quick resolution, which “afforded the only means of avoiding a civil war in France, and of bringing the marshals over [to the Allied cause].” MacKenzie, The Escape from Elba, 25.

  “The whole nation”: Castlereagh, Correspondence, IX, 480.

  He saw no advantage: Lieven, Russia, 519. Castlereagh did attach an “act of accession” to the formal notes concerning the April meeting in Paris that witnessed the discussion of the treaty’s terms. This act confirmed Great Britain’s acceptance of everything having to do with territories and borders but nothing else. The document sought to position Great Britain as an observer to this arrangement, brokered by the other three main allied powers and the French Provisional Government. Castlereagh codified this arrangement in an official declaration on April 27, 1814. See d’Angeberg, Le Congrès, I, 147–48, 155–56; Branda, La guerre secrète, 29; Dallas, The Final Act, 258.

  “They give to others”: Metternich, Memoirs, II, 552. Francis added that “at any rate it must be arranged that Elba, if this matter cannot be prevented, shall come to Tuscany after Napoleon’s death.”

  “the biggest baby”: Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy, 10; Zamoyski, Rites, 184.

  Privately, he feared: Harris, Talleyrand, 224.

  But Talleyrand sensed: Schama, Citizens, 12.

  “I see Talleyrand”: Castlereagh, Correspondence, IX, 454.

  The French held it: In 1809, Elba and the rest of the Tuscan archipelago had been formally attached to the territory overseen by Napoleon’s sister Elisa, who was named Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

  Across the Atlantic: Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 7. See also Dubois, Avengers; James, Black Jacobins.

  Such mysteriousness was what: “King John II of Portugal was only too happy to feed the fantasies of landless nobles by doling out fiefs on yet undiscovered islands,” writes the historian John Gillis. “Don Quixote offered the Island of Baratania to Sancho Panza in return for loyalty.” Gillis, Islands of the Mind, 41.

  There is no evidence: Elba’s population in 1814 stood at 11,380. Tardieu and Denesle, Notice sur l’île d’Elbe.

  Napoleon would retain: A transcription of the treaty can be found in d’Angeberg, Le Congrès, I, 148–51.

  The Russians had almost: For a detailed analysis of the treaty, see Hicks, “Napoleon on Elba,” 53–67. Regarding the British contributions: Edward Cooke, undersecretary of state, in an April 9, 1814, letter to Castlereagh, wrote, “I hope the Allies will not forget that we deserve something for the £700,000,000 we have spent in the contest, and that we cannot pay a soldier, a clerk, or a magistrate, before we have spent £40,000,000 for interest and redemption of debt.” See Castlereagh, Correspondence, IX, 454. The treaty was backdated to April 11. On signing, it was known as the Treaty of Abdication. Talleyrand as representative of the French Provisional Government agreed to the terms in a separate document. Dalberg also signed on behalf of the French Provisional Government. Louis XVIII would also officially agree to the terms, later, on May 30,1814. He hadn’t been consulted on the terms during the negotiations leading to the treaty. In 1988, two American scholars stole one of the ten original copies of the treaty from the French national archives; one of the thieves was a retired history professor who had taught at Marquette and the second was an aspiring writer of historical novels. They were arrested in 2001 at the Tennessee home they shared, after a five-year investigation prompted by their trying to sell it and other pilfered documents to Sotheby’s. It seems the older of the two men had acquired the documents simply by calling them up from the archives and then leaving with them hidden. See McFadden, “Long After Napoleon’s Conquests.”

  “Napoleon in the Isle”: MacKenzie, The Escape from Elba, 110.

  For centuries, Europeans: The key works here are Braudel, The Mediterranean; Corbin, The Lure of the Sea; and Cohen, The Novel and the Sea.

  For the same reasons: It was the symbolism and not the perceived security of island exile that had made the practice so common during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, for instance, at a time when coastal settlements were far easier to sack than hilltop fortresses. See Wilson, The Greatest Empire, 82. Wilson suggests that a Roman emperor “could modulate the expression of his rage by his choice of geographical location for the exile. Relegation or exile to an island sounded worse than being sent to a mainland area. He might choose a far-dist
ant island, for the worst kind of crime, or a nearby one, for a less outrageous infraction. By these standards, Seneca’s punishment [exile to Corsica] was relatively mild.” The same can be said about Napoleon’s banishment to an island a few miles off the coast of Italy, as opposed to, say, Saint Helena. A notable exception to the practice of island exile is the case of Ovid, among the best-known exiles of all, punished for what he called “a poem and a mistake,” who was sent not to an island but to the coastal town of Tomis, present-day Constanta, in Romania.

  Napoleon would be following: On islands and exile, see Gillis, Islands of the Mind; Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands; Edmond and Smith, Islands in History; Gaertner, Writing Exile; Grove, Green Imperialism; Mansel and Riotte, Monarchy and Exile; Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination; and Stabler, The Artistry of Exile. “A precarious, restricted, and threatened life, such was the lot of the islands, their domestic life, at any rate. But their external life, the role they have played in the forefront of history far exceeds what might be expected from such poor territories,” wrote Braudel. Braudel, The Mediterranean, 154. “The events of history often lead to the islands. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they make use of them.” (A bit of Napoleonic intrigue on Elba is what eventually lands poor Edmond Dantès on desolate Montecristo in Dumas’s other great island tale.)

  2: A LODGER IN HIS OWN LIFE

  His face was a mess: Campbell, Napoleon, 96–102; Campbell’s wounds are also detailed in the London Gazette, April 9, 1814.

  “I cried out lustily”: Campbell, Napoleon, 96.

  The worse news: Before traveling to Elba, Campbell would need to secure a medical certificate from Dr. Crichton, who cleared him to go but wrote, “It is but my duty to add that this journey, undertaken before the complete cure of his wounds, and while laboring under the symptoms just mentioned, is accompanied with very considerable danger, and that nothing but the idea that Colonel Campbell is going to a warmer climate, and his extreme anxiety to obey the orders he had received, could have justified his setting out before the complete cicatrisation of his wounds.” Campbell, Napoleon, 102.