Napoleon

by Paul Johnson

  Joseph Fouché (1759-1820) was of coarser and baser material than Talleyrand but had the same capacity to survive. A spoiled priest, he became a Jacobin deputy, a Terrorist under Robespierre, survived the Thermidor coup, served the Directory as its Paris policeman, supported the Brumaire coup, and was rewarded with the job of chief of police to the Bonaparte regime, holding it until 1810. Fouché was not remotely loyal to anyone or anything, but he had a large staff, a big budget, and countless informants, and his service de renseignement, which covered all Europe as well as France but was particularly active in Paris, was of irreplaceable value to Bonaparte and helped to keep him ahead of the game and in power. He was never so secure after Fouché’s removal in 1810. Fouché had decided the game was almost up and was systematizing his royalist contacts. This made him invaluable to France during the first débâcle of 1814, when he helped to restore Louis XVIII while remaining in contact with Bonaparte in Elba. Head of police again during the Hundred Days, he survived Waterloo and was once more in royal employment, when the outrage of the returned émigrés obliged the king to exile him. He died in Trieste in 1820, victim of such a ferocious bout of arthritis that it proved impossible to straighten his body and he was buried sitting up in his coffin. Fouché, who operated the world’s first secret police force, and who was the prototype of Himmler or Beria, was an important element in Bonaparte’s legacy of evil, for some of his methods were widely imitated in Austria and Prussia, where they became permanent, and even in harmless Sweden, where they were carried out there by Bonaparte’s marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

  The third member of the trio was Vivant Denon (1747- 1825), who became a key figure in Bonaparte’s deliberate attempt to take the curse off his invidious reputation as a mere soldier and adventurer, and acquire a second persona as a cultural benefactor. Made head of all France’s museums, at a time when the public collection was just coming into vogue, and art was beginning to be seen as something to be enjoyed by the middle class, indeed everyone, as opposed to an aristocratic elite, Denon could be seen as a progressive and an innovator. He can also be seen as a fig leaf on Bonaparte’s naked dictatorship, a cultural factotum whereby the centralizing tyranny of the regime was translated into soothing artistic terms—the acceptable face of Bonapartism. He was a propagandist for culture, in the old clerical sense of the word, and his activities can be compared to the role played by Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer under Hitler, or by André Mal raux under President de Gaulle.

  Bonaparte was by birth a quasi-Italian, but by national adoption he became a French cultural racist. He saw the appeal of French culture as a fifth column within the camps of his enemies, a force by means of which he could appeal over the heads of hostile courts to the intelligentsia, the young, the progressive, the bohemian, and the ardent throughout Europe. Hence Denon was at the center of a cultural web that reached all over the empire. Paris was embellished by the construction of the rue de Rivoli, its first modern thoroughfare. Bonaparte did not have time to carry through his transformation of the medieval capital into a city of boulevards—that was left to his eventual successor Napoleon III. But vast sums of money were spent on sprucing up the city, now designated the world capital of civilization. The baggage trains of loot from the victorious armies, as they converged on Paris, loaded with antiquities as well as Old Masters, were labeled: “Greece ceded them, Rome lost them, their destiny has changed twice but it will not change again.”

  France’s cultural manufacturies, led by the magnificent royal porcelain factory at Sèvres, were revived and went into furious activity. Bonaparte characteristically appointed a scientist and inventor, Alexandre Brogniart, to run Sèvres, and many technical innovations were introduced. But the chief function of Sèvres, as of all other institutions, was to underpin the regime. There were many thousands of representations of Bonaparte himself, as general, First Consul, emperor; as busts, full lengths, or equestrian statues, nude or draped, with or without a crown, in porcelain or bronze, and in various sizes. There were countless busts, too, of both his wives and members of his family. Denon was instructed to oversee the creation of an exquisite porcelain hand of Pauline, made from a plaster cast, and of one of her pretty feet. Sèvres produced a magnificent Service des Maréchaux in 1810, in hand-painted porcelain, featuring Bonaparte himself and thirteen of his marshals, as well as sumptuous vases commemorating Bonaparte’s victory at Austerlitz and his crossing of the Great Saint Bernard.

  Denon and Bonaparte, indeed, restored and confirmed France’s reputation as the leading producer of luxury goods of every kind, from tapestry and furniture to women’s clothes. Countless millions were spent on the refurbishment, from top to bottom, of France’s great state palaces and houses, ministries and institutions—at any rate those Bonaparte thought worthy. The new rich of the regime, led by the millionaire marshals, followed suit, and the products of France’s fashionable workshops were exported everywhere the French held sway. The style became known as Empire and was vaguely Roman, ornate, and heavily gilded. It was, indeed, an adumbration of the Gilded Age, when money was come by in vast quantities, none too scrupulously, and freely spent on grandeur. France was not yet even beginning to be industrialized, but its urban economy of skilled craftsmen flourished mightily under this patronage. That was an important part of Bonaparte’s policy of keeping France as contented as he could, short of abandoning his ambition to rule all Europe. It was cultural imperialism and domestic stability as well. Significantly, the Ministry of the Interior had the following divisions: agriculture, commerce, subsistence, population, trade balance, factories, mines, foundries, religion, education, and an arts section involving theater, architecture, music, and literature. Its omnicompetence, so typical of Bonaparte’s conviction that he, or the state, had the answer to everything, was the prototype of totalitarianism in its twentieth-century manifestations. Hence the reported saying of the emperor when told that France needed more good writers: “That is a matter for the Minister of the Interior.”

  The Denon touch was seen in the princely sums paid to favored painters of the regime and its triumphs, such as Jacques-Louis David and Baron Gros. Handsome commissions were ordered to non-French artists of stature, too. Thus Canova did a marble statue of the emperor almost naked and more than ten feet high (he was used to these incongruous commissions, which included one of Washington dressed as a Roman senator). Scientific awards were made to non-French citizens, too, including the Englishman Sir Humphry Davy. (But such cash prizes were not always actually paid.) Under Denon’s guidance, the French viceroy opened Milan’s first public museum in 1805, Murat set up a museum in Naples the following year, and in 1809 King Joseph of Spain organized what became the Prado. There was a lot of rebuilding. In Venice, a palace fit for the emperor himself was started out of sections of the Procuratie Nuove and Vecchie, and much damage done, though happily the work was halted and reversed when Bonaparte fell. In Rome, in which Bonaparte had taken a particular interest since he made his infant son its king, he created the Piazza del Popolo. There were monumental schemes elsewhere in Europe, which remained for the most part visionary, like the grander projects of Mussolini and Albert Speer.

  There was too much gilt in Denon’s cultural presentation of the empire, and too much cardboard in his public shows. But on the whole it was the most successful aspect of Bonaparte’s dictatorship, and one that served him well posthumously. For if Bonaparte had been merely a victorious soldier and conqueror, it would have been impossible in a country like France to have staged the public rehabilitation of the Napoleonic image that began in 1830 and continues to this day. Thanks to Denon, Bonaparte was able to play the cultural card with some success, and it still takes tricks.

  Bonaparte’s other strong suit was his reputation as a law-maker, which allowed him to claim to be the Justinian of the modern world. The ancien régime had retained feudal and regional anomalies despite all the centralizing and modernizing efforts of Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert, and the reforming liberals du
ring the last days of Louis XV and throughout the reign of Louis XVI. The Revolution took up the cause, enacting nearly 15,000 statutes, then making half a dozen attempts to embody them in a homogenous code. Bonaparte, having absolute authority and a habit of taking rapid decisions, pushed the project forward. Despite his panegyricists, he attended in person only thirty-six out of the eighty-seven sessions of the Council of State needed to complete the draft code by the end of 1801. Its 2,281 articles were finally published in March 1804, when it was named the Code Civil and, from 1807 to 1814, the Code Napoléon. It abolished what remained of the feudal system and established, in theory anyway, the principle of equality before the law. It was imposed in those parts of Europe where the French writ ran, or rather where the French army occupied the barracks. The more rational and popular parts of it became permanent. Thus it had a huge impact on large parts of Europe, and it still has. Bonaparte did not create it. On the other hand it could not have come into being without him. Much of its apparent novelty was not new—after all, the English Parliament had abolished the feudal system in the early 1640s. Insofar as Bonaparte’s opinions were reflected in it, the code was conservative, or rather paternalist. It reversed the progress in women’s rights that had been made under the Revolution (Bonaparte loathed women’s interfering in politics, and his view of their role was close to the Kirche, Küche, Kinder notion of Hitler). It enabled the French state to reimpose slavery in the West Indies, at a time when Britain had just abolished the slave trade by law. It contained many open or hidden pitfalls for libertarians and weighted the balance heavily in favor of public authority as opposed to the individual. It led to the dark French saying about power: “Only le Pouvoir can correct the abuses of le Pouvoir.” But, with all its faults, it was his monument.

  The code gave the regime a kind of unity it did not otherwise possess. The Revolution had abolished the traditional regional frontiers of France, which went back to the early Middle Ages or even Roman times, and imposed départements and préfets. Bonaparte strengthened the new system, using force and fear, but the old France was not so easily exorcised. Even half a century after his death, perhaps a majority of French citizens did not speak what we would call French. Bonaparte’s dictatorship differed from its twentieth-century successors fundamentally, in that it was not based on a party. He had no party. Indeed, his regime rested on maintaining the balance among Jacobins, royalists, and other parties. But if he had no party, he had an army. That was at bottom—indeed on the surface, too—the source of his power, and the army, though possessing the monopoly of force (even over Fouché and his police), was not ubiquitous and pervasive in the way that a modern party is. Moreover, for its effectiveness as an instrument of rule, as distinct from war, it was naturally dependent on the men to whom Bonaparte gave authority over it: the male members of his family and his corps of marshals.

  Neither group was suited to this role. Some were better than others. As monarch of the precariously artificial kingdom of Wesphalia, which Bonaparte knocked up out of Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, and bits of Hanover and Saxony, his youngest brother, Jérôme, made a conscious effort to discharge an impossible job. The territory had a fixed income of thirty-four million francs, roughly. Ten million had to go to pay the French garrison (and in addition Jérôme had to raise an army), seven million went direct to the emperor, and a “debt” of fifty million a year went to the French state. So Jérôme had to live off capital by selling state property. There was no long-term future in this, and the kingdom would have disintegrated even if the Allies had not broken it up in 1813.

  Eugène de Beauharnais, Bonaparte’s stepson, who in 1805 was made viceroy of Italy (made up of French-occupied territories), likewise tried his best to govern well. Some of the Italians liked him, though they hated the French as a whole. He made a happy marriage, under his own steam as it were, to the daughter of the king of Bavaria, and there was an outside chance that he would survive the Bonapartist disaster of 1812-14 and keep his kingdom. Instead, the Congress of Vienna gave him a pension and made him prince of Eichstadt.

  One of the most implausible of the new states was the Batavian Republic, which encompassed the old Dutch territories of the House of Orange, created by the Directory in 1795. Bonaparte turned it into the kingdom of Holland and made his brother Lucien its sovereign in 1806. These puppet kings had a miserable choice: to obey Bonaparte and risk total unpopularity among their subjects, or to disobey him and risk removal. Lucien chose the second course and was forced to abdicate in 1810, the territory then being absorbed into France. Brother Joseph, the eldest but most obedient of the siblings, took the other course, both as king of Naples and then, from 1808, as king of Spain. As a result, he was discounted as a cipher and proved an abject failure in both kingdoms. In Naples, he was succeeded by Joachim Murat, the son of a poor Gascon innkeeper, raised to a monarch by virtue of his marriage to Bonaparte’s sister Caroline. Murat loved sensational uniforms and titles. He was, among other things, grand admiral of France, grand duke of Berg and Cleves, a prince of the empire, and a founding member of the marshalate, spreading across his broad chest a scintillating display of clanking medals and stars. He had some of the swagger Neapolitans love. But as Bonaparte’s best cavalry commander, he was away a good deal in Russia and elsewhere, and much of the ruling was left to Caroline, who, though selfish and treacherous, was better at it. Left to herself, she might have survived the débâcle, but Murat, who had fled in March 1815, foolishly returned and was executed. She lived out her days in Florence as countess of Lipona, an anagram of Napoli.

  Of the top tier of the Bonapartist state, the only potentate who survived the débâcle with his possessions intact was Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763-1844). He rose fast to the marshalate by virtue of his marriage to Désirée Clary, a former Bonaparte mistress, which made him “family.” In 1810 the obsequious Swedish states general elected Bernadotte heir to the childless Charles XII, hoping thereby to win Bonaparte’s amity. The marshal, who had never won Bonaparte’s approval as a commander (he was slow and cautious), thereupon switched sides and led Sweden back into the Allied camp. He proved a more effective king than general and kept his throne until his death in 1844, in his eighties.

  Of course, Sweden was a real kingdom and a natural ethnic entity. So in a sense was the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, an ephemeral affair that Bonaparte created in 1807 and that survived as a French puppet until occupied by Russian troops after the retreat from Moscow. Spain and Holland, too, were mere usurpations, which naturally returned to the local lines when French bayonets withdrew. The other “kingdoms” of Italy and Germany were gimcrack creations, merely cartographical entities, put together by Bonaparte in one of his map sessions, and liable to constant changes of laws, frontiers, rulers, and constitutions. They played their historical part by removing ancient entities such as the Holy Roman Empire and crumbling states like Venice, and so accelerated the development of German and Italian nationalism and unity. But few, even at the time, can have believed they would survive. All of the puppet states and kingdoms were mere devices whereby Bonaparte could raise money and troops to keep his war going. At the same time, France itself expanded, in a cartographical sense, until it doubled its size and population, encompassing 130 départements in which 44 million lived. But this enlarged France merely increased the problems of governing it.

  Bonaparte learned the hard way that military rule, or rule by military men, works only (if at all) in emergencies for brief periods. In a sense, then, the whole Napoleonic Empire was an emergency entity, built to blaze but not to last. The senior generals formed its integument, and in 1804 Bonaparte raised eighteen of them to the rank of marshal. The marshalate formed a college of military power and glory, to which would be added, from time to time, other distinguished generals, seven in all. The marshalate was not a threat to Bonaparte, for it had no corporate power or function and never met except socially. It was a convenient way of keeping his soldiers happy with the regime, especially since it was accompa
nied by titles and cash. Bonaparte was a patriarch, true to his Corsican origins, and treated his favored men-at-arms as a family of valor, to reinforce his family of blood. Some, like Murat, were raised to princedoms. Most became dukes. Thus Andoche Junot was made duke of Abrantes; Géraud Duroc, a mere general but charged with running the imperial household, was duke of Frioul; Auguste Marmont was duke of Ragusa; and so on. Most were given suitable estates, in some cases large ones, augmented by foreign properties. Bonaparte might also give a favored commander a house in Paris. He gave them incomes of 100,000, even 200,000 francs a year and presents of similar sums when they got married, and he was generous to their children. Bonaparte created an atmosphere of sumptuous luxury in his palaces and state institutions and encouraged the marshals to do the same, but was himself a man of parsimonious habits. He lived vicariously through his marshals (and other indulged servants and friends), keeping an account of his gifts in a notebook.