The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  He once told his minister in Rome, ‘Treat with the Pope as if he had 200,000 men.’ But now in 1809 after his excommunication he railed: ‘What can the Pope do? I have 300,000 men under my orders.’

  Napoleon professed disdain for atheism on the grounds that ‘it takes from man all his consolations and hopes’ – which was hardly a ringing endorsement of religion. He also insisted:

  How can morality exist? There is only one means – that of reestablishing religion . . . Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes, and inequality of fortunes cannot exist without religion. When one man is dying of hunger near another who suffers from surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority that can say to him, ‘God wills it so; there must be rich and poor in this world; but hereafter, and for ever, their lot will be different.’

  But he never appeared to be a believer himself: he expressed doubt as to whether Jesus ever existed on two occasions, and on several others compared Him as an equal to Mohammed or Plato. Sometimes he expressed the view that Islam was a simpler and more effective religion than Christianity.

  Following the papal bull of excommunication, Napoleon retaliated by having the Pope arrested and moved to Florence, in case Rome rose up in revolt against his arbitrary action; then he brought him to Nice, before holding him in Savona. The Pontiff was held in miserable and humiliating conditions, but the dignified sixty-seven-year-old scholar did not yield: on the contrary he refused to consecrate Napoleon’s bishops and instructed his followers not to co-operate with the Emperor.

  Napoleon eventually sought a compromise, but the pontiff refused. He was brought to Fontainebleau by an angry Napoleon, where the new French court feared that Napoleon would get so angry that he would reverse the Revolution’s opposition to atheism. Cardinal Fesch, his uncle, who remonstrated with him, was told to look up at the sky: ‘Do you see anything?’ Napoleon asked.

  ‘No,’ said Fesch.

  ‘In that case, learn when to shut up. I myself see my star; it is that which guides me. Don’t pit your feeble and incomplete faculties against my superior organism.’

  The row with the Vatican had a final chapter to go; but Napoleon had no reason to prosecute it except his own desire to squash a lingering pocket of resistance against him: if the church was as powerful as he believed, it was not worth making an enemy of its leader; if it was powerless, he had no reason to proceed against it. But after Wagram he believed he could do anything with immunity, even overawe the Vicar of Christ on earth.

  Napoleon’s attitude towards the lesser rulers of Europe was far more insulting. Of the Emperor Francis he wrote contemptuously: ‘The Emperor of Austria is always of the opinion of the last speaker . . . in five or six years he [will] begin the war again and become once more the tool of England.’

  He scolded his younger brother, the playboy-ruler Jerome:

  I have seen an order of the day signed by you that makes you the laughing stock of Germany, Austria and France. Have you no friend who will tell you the truth? You are a King and a brother of the Emperor – ridiculous title in warfare! You must be a soldier, and again a soldier, and always a soldier! You must bivouac with your outposts, spend night and day in the saddle, march with your advance guard so as to get information, or else remain in your seraglio. You wage war like a satrap. By Heaven! Is it from me you have learned that – from me, who with an army of 200,000 men live with my skirmishers? You have much ambition, some intelligence, a few good qualities – but spoiled by silliness, by great presumption – and have no real knowledge. In God’s name keep enough wits about you to write and speak with propriety.

  He even delivered pompous lectures to Joachim Murat, his brother-in-law and one of the princes of his army as its greatest cavalry commander, who he believed had tried to supplant him. ‘As a rule give nothing to people who have not worked 10 years for you . . . base yourself on the principle that the less the diplomatic corps see you the better.’

  Napoleon’s motive in ruling his dominions through members of his family was not dynastic nepotism pure and simple – it was that these men were pliant and owed everything to him, so that he believed they would do as he ordered, whereas self-made men from outside the clan might not do so, particularly if they were talented. This was a partial misjudgement: independent they might not be, but that did not stop them bitterly resenting their overbearing relation – particularly in the case of Murat, who was merely married to his sister and who loathed him and considered his military talents inferior to his own.

  Napoleon’s vainglory seemed to know no bounds. He wrote:

  The Institute proposes conferring on the Emperor the title of Augustus and of Germanicus. Augustus gained one battle, at Actium. Germanicus won the sympathy of Rome by his misfortunes, but his life shows a decidedly moderate record. There is nothing to provoke emulation in the memory of the Roman Emperors. The only man, and he was not an Emperor, who was distinguished by his character and by his many illustrious achievements was Caesar. If the Emperor could wish a new title it would be that of Caesar. But so many puny princes have dishonoured that title – if such a thing were possible – that it no longer evokes the memory of the great Caesar, but that of a mass of German sovereigns, as feeble as they were ignorant, of whom not one has left a reputation behind him.

  On a more sensible note he observed:

  In a battle even the most skilful soldiers find it difficult to estimate the enemy’s numbers, and as a rule, one is apt instinctively to exaggerate the number. But if one is foolish enough to accept an inflated estimate of the enemy’s forces, then every cavalry colonel on reconnaissance espies an army, and every captain of light infantry battalions. Again I repeat that in war morale and opinion are half the battle. The art of the great captain has always been to make his troops appear very numerous to the enemy, and the enemy very few to his own. So that today, in spite of the long time we have spent in Germany, the enemy do not know my real strength. We are constantly striving to magnify our numbers. Far from confessing that I had only 100,000 men at Wagram, I am constantly suggesting that I had 220,000. In my Italian campaigns, in which I had only a handful of troops, I always exaggerated my numbers. It served my purpose, and has not lessened my glory. My generals and practised soldiers could always perceive, after the event, all the skilfulness of my operations, even that of having exaggerated the numbers of my troops.

  His vanity and conviction of his own omniscience were childlike. Although he possessed the directness of a supremely important political leader and military commander, as well as his own acute intelligence, his absolute lack of modesty was abhorrent and even highly comical to the more subtle, if sometimes crass and stupid, dynastic monarchs he sought to ape.

  Whether it was Napoleon’s splendid surroundings in the Schönbrunn Palace that had gone to his head that summer – he delighted in the cool spring water in the garden – is uncertain: he was certainly playing the part of conqueror and imperial proconsul denied him in Paris, where he was always nervous of plots against him and the derision of his peers and the barbs of polite society. His bombast often reflected insecurity and paranoia, especially towards his fellow marshals. Some twenty plays and operas were performed for him as well as ballets by the great impresario Filippo Taglioni.

  Meanwhile the Countess Marie Walewska had been summoned from Warsaw as his mistress and dallied with him every evening until August, becoming pregnant. He also pursued an affair with a nineteen-year-old Austrian girl who also became pregnant. He was delighted, not because he intended to marry either – although he entertained the idea that his son by Marie Walewska would become King of Poland one day – but because it was proof that he could father an heir. This was much on his mind: he had been wounded at Ratisbon, and was anxious for the future of his dynasty.

  More recently, a young man from Saxony had succeeded in getting close to him at a military parade and attempted to stab him, being deflected at the last moment by one of Napoleon’s aides. The Em
peror was highly disturbed and personally interrogated the boy, the seventeen-year-old Fredrick Staps.

  ‘What did you want of me?’

  ‘To kill you.’

  ‘What have I done to you? Who made you my judge?’

  ‘I wanted to bring the war to an end.’

  ‘Why didn’t you go to the Emperor Francis?’

  ‘He? What for? He doesn’t count. And if he died another would succeed him; but after you the French would disappear from Germany.’

  ‘Do you repent?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Would you do it again?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘What, even if I spared you?’

  Napoleon wrote to Fouché:

  The wretched boy, who seems to be fairly well educated, told me that he wanted to assassinate me to rid Austria of the presence of the French. I could find in him no traces of religious or political fanaticism. He seemed to have no clear idea of who Brutus was. His excitement prevented my finding out more. He will be questioned after he has cooled down and fasted. Possibly it all amounts to nothing. I have sent you the news of this incident to prevent its importance being exaggerated. I hope nothing will be said about it; if there should be talk, make out that the fellow is insane. If there is none, keep the matter a close secret. There was no scene at the parade; I myself had no notion that anything had happened.

  The young man was executed shouting ‘Long live Germany! Death to the tyrant!’

  Perhaps the saddest chapter in Napoleon’s personal life now occurred, again fuelled by the humiliation and megalomania after Wagram. The extraordinary thing was that his near-miss at Wagram did at least seem to dispel – albeit temporarily – his massive complex of personal insecurity. He really did believe he had confounded his foes both at home and abroad, with the exception of the running sore or ulcer of the Iberian Peninsula. At the age of forty, when he publicly considered himself too old to dance, he could afford to relax, to think of becoming primus inter pares among the great families of Europe, of a peaceful, respectable existence presiding wisely over the greatest European empire ever forged. It was time to think of a son and the succession to a French imperial dynasty that would preside over Europe for generations.

  The sacrifice had to be made – and Napoleon was convinced it was his sacrifice primarily – of the woman he truly loved, in the interests of France: Josephine. The marriage between Napoleon and Josephine has often been portrayed as a loveless one of convenience marked by cynicism and infidelity on both sides. Yet it is hard to read Napoleon’s early letters to Josephine without concluding that there was great passion, indeed profound love on his side at first harshly matched by her own indifference. As the relationship progressed his own attitude grew more realistic and bitter, while this hardened woman softened towards him. As two tough survivors, their relationship was extraordinarily complex, but it would be wrong to view their hatreds and quarrels and passions as reflecting an absence of love; quite the reverse.

  Precisely because of an essential similarity in their makeup, their relationship went deeper than the idealized romantic love the Emperor believed he felt for Marie Walewska. Napoleon married Josephine when he was inexperienced sexually, and was certainly passionately in love with her brand of worldly wise, older sensuality, clinging to her in the teeth of fierce opposition from his own family and others, and despite his intense jealousy when bruised by her infidelities. Certainly she married him initially for convenience: she was a widow with her most beautiful years behind her, marrying a somewhat unprepossessing but already highly successful young man.

  It was only on Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign that he appeared to fall out of love with her, when the evidence of her infidelity became overwhelming and his cuckoldry public knowledge. But he must have known before, and his angry reaction then seems as much a show staged for the benefit of his public image as a true reflection of his feelings: he was angry because he had been humiliated by her before others. Although by no means always faithful to her before then – which was typical of most men of his class at that time – his own sexual incontinence now became chronic and public, presumably in an act of revenge.

  His Egyptian dalliances were succeeded by a string of girlfriends (he and his wife now slept in separate apartments) including the beautiful young Louise Rolandeau, the more mature Marguerite George, Josephine Raffin and Mlle Bourgoin, all of them actresses. By the time of his coronation he even had a ‘love nest’ on the rue de Vennes. A more serious liaison was with the twenty-year-old Adele Duchâtel, which Josephine tried to stop, arousing Napoleon’s fury. Another passion was the twenty-year-old Auna Roche de la Coste, followed by the eighteen-year-old Eleonore Denuelle, who was also Murat’s mistress. Napoleon also lusted after Josephine’s famously beautiful niece Stephanie de Beauharnais, whom however he never bedded.

  When he fell in love with Marie Walewska in December 1806 and Josephine learnt of their passion the following April, Napoleon went overboard to assure his wife that he still loved her.

  Maybe this was because he feared her continuing political influence, sometimes with the Jacobins, sometimes with Murat’s supporters; but it is more probably the action of a man genuinely devoted to his oldest love, although wise to her faults and incapable of fidelity himself. She also possessed a psychological power over him, however all-powerful he was politically, and was adept at bending his often childlike emotional nature to her will. By this time Josephine’s infidelities had calmed down a good deal and she would throw jealous rages at her husband, which he occasionally reinforced by violent acts such as breaking the chairs or the furniture.

  In the second part of the relationship it seemed that Napoleon behaved to her with enormous affection, treating her as a sister, never ceasing to write to her, and that she reciprocated by forgiving him for his sexual excesses, even overlooking his mistresses, while behaving with surprising dignity as Empress. She was a tolerant and worldly wise woman who treated the younger and more emotionally immature Napoleon as a naughty boy, putting up with his tantrums, girlfriends and his extraordinarily brutal initial treatment of her (indeed he treated most of his women as sexual playthings).

  Josephine was not a particularly attractive woman in many ways: hard, calculating, manipulative, cynical and often conspiring; but she fuelled a need in this strange man. By the end it is possible to believe that deep in the thickets of her own self-interest there lay a genuine affection for a man who in many ways was another hardbitten conspirator. In 1807 Josephine had a brief liaison with the thirty-year-old Duke Frederick Louis of Mecklenburg, a man half her age, which roused Napoleon to fury. But he adored her nevertheless. ‘I truly loved her, although I didn’t respect her. She was a liar, and an utter spendthrift, but she had a certain something which was irresistible. She was a woman to her very fingertips.’ On learning of her death in 1814 Napoleon’s cri de coeur was too agonized to be dismissed: ‘I have not passed a day without loving you. I have not passed a night without clasping you in my arms . . . No woman was ever loved with more devotion, ardour and tenderness . . . only death could break a union formed by sympathy, love and true feeling.’

  Truly there was an element of the Macbeths in this strange relationship. But at this moment Josephine was about to fall victim to Napoleon’s folie de grandeur. For years Fouché and Talleyrand had been pressing him to divorce Josephine on the grounds that she could not provide him with an heir to the throne. Both had previously considered her politically dangerous, but now a largely spent force.

  His fathering of a child with Marie Walewska proved to him that he was capable of siring an heir and that Josephine, having produced two children by her previous husband, was now barren. Fouché, whose hands were stained with Bourbon blood, wanted an heir to prevent the dynasty’s return. Talleyrand wanted to regularize the line of succession; both agreed that any of Napoleon’s brothers would be a disaster. Napoleon himself longed for the respectability that marriage into one of the old European dynastic royal fami
lies would give him, which was not surprising for one of his background. First, he sought the hand of one of the Tsar’s sisters; Alexander replied that the decision was his mother’s. A fortnight later the sister was engaged to another. It could hardly have been a more blatant snub, but it did not deter Napoleon. Snubbed by the Russians, he began to consider other possible links – in particular a marriage to one of the daughters of his oldest enemy in Europe, the Emperor Francis of Austria.

  On his return to Paris from one of his amorous dalliances with Marie Walewska, he treated Josephine with coldness, walling up the connecting door between their apartments at Fontainebleau and passing his time with his favourite sister Pauline. He asked Josephine’s daughter Hortense and her son, the loyal and able Eugène, to inform their mother that the marriage was at an end, and then did so himself, for political necessity and for ‘the welfare of the nation’. She screamed and fell to the floor ‘weeping and moaning’.

  On 14 December he announced the dissolution of the marriage at a ceremony in the throne room of the Tuileries. He presented her with honours, presents and an income of 3 million francs a year. He wrote with stomach-churning self-pity:

  The ceremony took place in the state apartments of the Tuileries and was very touching; all those present wept.

  The policy of my Empire, the interests, the needs of my people, which have guided all my actions, demand that I should leave after me, to my children – the heirs of my affection for my people – the throne on which Providence has placed me. I have, however, for some years past, lost hope of having children from my marriage with my beloved wife the Empress Josephine: and it is this that has brought me to sacrifice my dearest affections, to consider only the good of the state, and to wish the dissolution of our marriage. At the age of forty I may yet hold the hope of living long enough to bring up in my own way of thinking the children which it may please Providence to grant me. God knows how much my present resolve has cost me, but no sacrifice goes beyond my courage when it can be shown to be for the interests of France . . .