Chapter 87
LOUIS XVIII
There can hardly have been a more complete contrast in history than that between the now deposed, hyperactive, quick-witted Corsican upstart and the Bourbon Louis XVIII, the new King imposed largely by the British. It was truly, in Napoleon’s phrase, a change from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Comte de Provence was a hugely fat, waddling, prematurely aged man with a fish-like mouth and penetrating gaze surmounted by his sole distinguishing feature, prominent black eyebrows. Pompous, cold and courteous, endowed with little physical courage, considerable indolence, a prodigious love of food and books, and deeply self-centred, he had just two dominant virtues. While of middling intellect, he was politically moderate, pragmatic and shrewd; he was also reasonably humane in an age known for vindictiveness and cruelty. He was in fact a thoroughly civilized, mediocre, egotistical, eighteenth-century-style monarch, like many others of the same period.
Yet the course of this most ordinary man’s life had been anything but ordinary. As a younger son he lived in the shadow of his good-looking, blond, blue-eyed, intelligent and prickly autocratic elder brother who became Louis XVI, as well as his own energetic scheming, reactionary and ambitious younger brother, the Comte d’Artois. A scion of the Bourbons, the greatest ruling family in Europe, which had run France since the tenth century, with brother branches on the thrones of Spain, Naples and Parma, he spent the first decades of his life virtually powerless.
He married a hideous Italian princess, Marie-Josephine, with a horse face, a large nose, and thick beetle eyebrows. They enjoyed the peaceful splendour of life in Versailles. Philip Mansel, in his superb and definitive biography, wrote:
His increasing size emphasised and helped ensure that he was one of the few Bourbons who did not spend half his life on a horse. At first, however, he had quite enjoyed hunting and shooting: he would be accompanied by sixty-three horses, twenty grooms, two Ecuyers, a Gentilhomme d’Honneur, a Capitaine des Gardes and his Premier Ecuyer when he went hunting, and by thirty-two horses and eighteen household officials and servants when he went shooting – impressive testimony to the degree to which his daily life was sheltered and surrounded by his household. And in the 1780s he was still going shooting once or twice a month in the summer.
Like most royal siblings, he cordially detested his older brother. When the events of 1789 occurred, he had been merely a passive spectator. In June 1791 he slipped away into exile with a friend, pretending to be a British merchant, using phrases like ‘Come with me’ and ‘I am ready’, and speaking to the coachman in French with an English accent. After drifting aimlessly around Europe as an exile, Louis supported the aborted royalist invasion of France in the autumn of 1792.
With the guillotining of Louis XVI and the death in appalling circumstances of his infant son soon afterwards, this portly indolent, easygoing man became the Pretender to the French throne. However most royalists preferred his scheming, hardline younger brother, the Comte d’Artois. On Napoleon’s ascent to power, Louis wrote amicably to the new leader suggesting that he support a royal restoration, only to be brutally fobbed off: ‘You would have to walk over a hundred thousand corpses. Sacrifice your interests to the peace and happiness of France’ – words which ring a little ironically in view of later events. In 1807 Louis took refuge in England, to the dismay of its government which wanted an accommodation with the French republican regime and refused to allow him to reside in London.
Instead he was patronized by the recently deposed Whig grandee, the outgoing prime minister, William, Lord Grenville, and lavishly entertained at Stowe, ducal seat of the marquess of Buckingham, Grenville’s brother. Louis’s son and heir almost fell in love with his lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lady Mary Grenville. In England Louis became still fatter, moving ‘like the heavings of a ship’, as Charles Grenville commented, and contracted gout, so that he had to be wheeled about his country house. Not until 1811 was he officially received by the court, in the shape of the almost as fat, but quicker-witted and more unscrupulous Prince Regent.
On 12 March 1814 news arrived to a tearfully joyful Louis that Bordeaux had risen against Napoleon and had been liberated by Wellington. On 7 April the French senate proclaimed him King of France. On 24 April Louis set foot in France for the first time after two decades in exile, arriving to a tumultuous welcome in Calais. Five days later at Compiègne the surviving coterie of Napoleon’s senior marshals Ney, Berthier, Marmont, Jourdan, Mortier, Oudinot and Victor – arrived to pay him homage and put the army at his disposal. The effective leader of France, Talleyrand, was there too, along with the Vicomte de Chateaubriand. They pledged to ‘provide the pillars of your throne’. Louis greeted them generously: ‘It is on you, Messieurs les Maréchaux, that I want always to rely; come near and surround me. You have always been good Frenchmen; I hope that France will have no more need of your swords. If ever, which God forbid, we were forced to draw them, I would march with you, if that was necessary.’
All this was an astonishing turnaround. The restoration of the guillotined King of France’s corpulent younger brother seemed to wipe out the entire French national experience from 1789 to 1814 and return the country to the status quo ante. All the turbulence, murderousness and disruption of the Revolution, all the sacrifice, glory and imperial power had, it seemed, been in vain: the clock had been turned back to what it was before, as if France had awoken from a nightmare to rediscover its former Versailles-type splendour.
In a sense it was Napoleon himself who had paved the way, for his own attempts to create a dynasty had resulted in a France that was if anything more royal, centralized and absolutist than ever before. As Lafayette, in retirement, wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson in August: ‘Bonaparte or the Bourbons, such have been, and such still are, the only possible alternatives, in a land where the idea of a republican executive is regarded as synonymous with the excesses committed under that name.’
Older revolutionaries like the regicide Fouché were now dukes. The Abbé Sieyès, whose incendiary pamphlets had triggered off the Revolution and who had brought Napoleon to power, was a count. Carnot, creator of the republican military machine taken over by Napoleon, was also a count.
Nor had the Revolution or Napoleon wrought so great a transformation in the French social fabric as they liked to believe. With a population of nearly 30 million, France was still an overwhelmingly agricultural land. Of the 670 richest people in France around that time only a fifth did not derive their fortunes from the land. (Around 75 per cent were nobility either from before, or ennobled by, Napoleon.) France may actually have deindustrialized during the period when industrialization was transforming Britain, thanks to the chaos caused by the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars.
Marseilles and Bordeaux were in decline, and Paris’s population had fallen by 50,000 to some 600,000. Fewer than 20 per cent lived in towns of more than 2,000 people. The Revolution had redistributed land to a much lesser extent than is believed. Between 1789 and 1804 it is estimated that the nobility’s share of the land had fallen from 21 to 15 per cent, while church lands had been entirely expropriated. The middle classes’ share rose from 16 to 28 per cent, and the peasantry’s from 30 to 42 per cent. As Mansel observed:
Land-ownership and government office or military position were indeed perhaps even more important after than before the Revolution, since they had become the most reliable sources of wealth. The great seaports of eighteenth-century France were now declining for lack of trade, for France was almost permanently at war. After his release from prison in 1794, the great eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert had no need to go to Rome to paint ruins. There were enough in and round Paris. A report addressed to Louis’s agent in Vienna in 1804 noted that commerce was languishing, bankruptcies were frequent and only agriculture was flourishing. The Revolution, far from being ‘capitalist’ or ‘bourgeois’, had delayed France’s industrial development by fifty years.
The monarchy had been restored to th
e throne, not by the French people, but by occupying powers; and they were themselves divided.
The main concern of both the British and the Austrians had been to prevent the other predatory power that they considered most dangerous in Europe, Russia, from taking France into its orbit for traditional dynastic reasons. The Tsar detested the French Bourbons, but had been forced to acquiesce in Louis’s accession. During the last days of Napoleon’s regime, Alexander had continually toyed with the idea of setting up Napoleon’s son, the infant King of Rome, as regent. Talleyrand remarked: ‘The Emperor Alexander is capable of the unexpected; one is not the son of Paul for nothing.’ The Prussians sided with their allies, the Russians. A continent of two separate blocks seemed indeed possible.
Talleyrand wanted to dissuade the Tsar with all the diplomatic dexterity at his fingertips. One contemporary remarked:
There was this advantage with him, that no question surprised him, and that the most unexpected ones pleased him the best . . . The whole policy of the Provisional Government was the laisser-aller and the laisser-faire of Monsieur de Talleyrand; his genius hovered above all the intrigues and lurked behind all the business . . . I overcame my awe of this famous statesman; his reputation was more imposing than his personality – he was easy to get on with; phantoms disappear when one is close to them. It was in the simplest conversation that Monsieur de Talleyrand let fall the remarks to which he attached the greatest importance, they always had an object; he sowed them carelessly, like the seed that nature scatters, and, as in nature, the majority perished without produce.
Talleyrand persuaded Alexander that any such regency would be but a figleaf for continuing Napoleonic rule and would swiftly result in the Emperor’s restoration. But fortune had indeed proved capricious; for Alexander, Napoleon’s bitterest enemy of 1812, was now a covert sympathizer of the exiled Emperor, with Austria and Britain, who had questioned the wisdom of invading France, the main supporters of the Bourbon restoration, largely because they favoured a weak government in France; Britain was confident that it could control Louis.
Louis from the first disliked having been recalled by the old senate, composed of revolutionaries and Napoleonic sycophants, who had issued a liberal constitution similar to that of 1791 with a two-chamber parliament, a ministry responsible to it and a King who derived his authority from ‘the people’. He lost no time in insisting that, on the contrary, the new constitutional regime derived its authority from the monarchy, not the other way around.
Yet he was a paternalist, not an absolutist, unlike the vicious Ferdinand VII of spain, who on his restoration after the Peninsular War promptly abolished parliament. Louis granted equality of religion, including that of the Jews, whom Napoleon had persecuted in 1808. Political prisoners were released and censorship eased, although not abolished. Louis’s governments consisted of moderates like Talleyrand.
However, he revived the unpopular splendours of Versailles. And within months discontent was spreading across France like wildfire. The government from the first showed itself to be disunited and venal, with the bureaucracy expanding rapidly. Worse, it was treated with contempt by the hardline royalists, known as the ultras, who sought to revenge themselves against the revolutionaries, and to return to the old pattern of landholdings and absolutist rule. Many people in France, especially the new landowners, were terrified at the prospect of the ultras coming to power.
Louis also became unpopular for his friendship with his country’s traditional enemy, Britain, whose tourists swarmed to paris. The Prince Regent himself was invited over and Wellington, France’s most hated enemy general, became British ambassador, who many suspected gave Louis his orders. The Duke’s nomination, was, in truth, one of Castlereagh’s most disastrous mistakes, a direct provocation that suggested to the French that they were under British military occupation.
The Duke was far from unenlightened. He charmed many French noblemen with his observation of their customs and his courtly manner, and played a role in getting the French to abolish the slave trade. He was also thoroughly French, embarking on a string of love affairs with a score of pretty women, two at least of whom had been lovers of Napoleon – Guiseppina Grassini, the opera singer, and Marguerite Josephine Weimar, the actress, who remarked: ‘Le Duc était de beaucoup le plus fort’ He also may have bedded Marshal Ney’s pretty young wife. Harriet Wilson, the famous British courtesan, was also seen in passionate embrace with the Duke in the Bois de Boulogne. The Duke had long become bored sexually by the decent, fussy, short-sighted Kitty with her plain dress, who remained in Britain for several months.
At the sumptuous new British embassy in the Faubourg St Honoré, Wellington entertained lavishly, marvelling at the King’s ability to eat an entire serving dish of strawberries. He met old adversaries, including Ney and Soult. Masséna remarked: ‘My Lord, you owe me dinner for you positively made me starve.’ ‘You should give it to me, Marshal, for you prevented me from sleeping,’ was Wellington’s dry retort. He was devastated by news of the death of Ned Pakenham, his adoring young brother-in-law, during the brief war with America.
He sent another young protégé, Colonel Harvey, with urgent despatches to Beresford, now running the British army in Lisbon. Harvey made the ride across immensely dangerous territory in record time, drawing the admiration of the British press.
He performed the journey of nearly 1,400 miles, from Paris to Lisbon on horseback in fourteen days, a feat rarely accomplished by an equestrian, and one which may be truly considered of an extraordinary character, considering the season of the year, the nature of the country to be passed, and the dangers to which he was exposed. That those dangers were of no ordinary character may be gathered from the fact that in passing through Spain, Colonel Harvey was stopped by banditti (who after the war infested every portion of the country), who robbed him of everything but his despatches, and a few pieces of silver which he managed to save from them by pleading that he ‘had fought for their country’. His knowledge of the language, and of the people of the various countries through which he passed on this journey, must have stood Colonel Harvey in good stead. A single anecdote may be narrated as an illustration of the mode in which he turned such knowledge to account. On arriving at Salamanca very late at night, the colonel and his guide found the gates of the city closed to travellers. The guide called, as usual, on the Virgin. The colonel, knowing the Spaniards, as he was accustomed to observe, enquired for the breach that was made last year in the Town Walls. ‘I can take you to it,’ said the guide. ‘Then there will be no difficulty in getting into the town,’ said the colonel, ‘for I am quite certain they have not thought of repairing it, or of placing any one to guard it, so let us go in.’ And go in they did, for on arriving at the breach they found it precisely in the condition the colonel had predicted, unrepaired and entirely unprotected.
Nearly a century and a half later Harvey’s great grandson Oliver was to return as British ambassador in the splendid establishment of Rue de Fauborg St Honoré after the Second World War.
Wellington also visited London, where he was rapturously received in society as well as by the crowds. ‘It is a fine thing to be a great man, is it not?’ he remarked grandly to Lady Shelley, who became a close companion of his, as the crowds parted respectfully to let them through after an opera. Wellington was not a modest man.
A large part of the destroyed Napoleonic army grew increasingly sullen: many were demobbed and unemployed, roaming the country. Most believed they had not been defeated but betrayed by Talleyrand and other civilian intriguers. Nationalism, always a hugely potent force in France, reared its head again: the country was seething under foreign occupation.
Talleyrand was denounced for selling his country’s interests at the Congress of Vienna when the exact opposite was true: with scarcely any cards at his disposal he actually secured a peace which expanded France’s territorial size from what it had been in 1789 and required it to pay no reparations to the allies for devastating a continen
t for two generations. He explained his task:
The role of France was singularly difficult. It was very tempting and very easy for the Governments which had so long been hostile to keep her excluded from the major questions affecting Europe. By the Treaty of Paris France had escaped destruction, but she had not regained the position that she ought to occupy in the general political system. Trained eyes could easily detect in several of the principal plenipotentiaries the secret desire to reduce France to a secondary role. It was necessary above all that the French representative should understand, and should make it understood, that France wanted nothing more than she possessed, that she had sincerely repudiated the heritage of conquest, that she considered herself strong enough within her ancient frontiers, that she had no thought of extending them, and, finally, that she now took pride in her moderation.
Talleyrand sought the friendship of Austria and Britain to impede the ambitions of Russia and Prussia. He had the effrontery to chide the Tsar: ‘Liberal principles are in accordance with the spirit of the age, they cannot be avoided; and, if Your Majesty will take my word for it, I can promise you that we shall have monarchy combined with liberty; that you will see men of real merit welcomed and given office . . . I admit, Sir, that you have met many discontented people in Paris, but what is Paris after all? The provinces, they are the real France – and it is there that the return of the House of Bourbon is blessed and that your happy victory is proclaimed.’
To Metternich he said: ‘There are people here who ought to be allies in the sense that they ought to think in the same way and desire the same things. How have you the courage to put Russia like a belt around your principal and most important possessions, Hungary and Bohemia? How can you allow all the patrimony of an old and good neighbour [the King of Saxony] to be given to your natural enemy [Prussia]?’
The War of Wars Page 92