by Philip Dwyer
It was really after Eylau and the intervention in Spain that the clemency theme was emphasized in a desperate attempt to portray Napoleon in a better light to the people of France. There may have been some parallels with the ancient Roman tradition of depicting leaders in certain poses – Napoleon addressing his men, or entering a conquered city – but these paintings were meant to hide their opposite reality, that of the brutality of war.76 At the Salon of 1808, there were a number of pardon scenes, including Pierre-Narcisse Guérin’s Bonaparte fait grâce aux révoltés du Caire (Bonaparte pardoning the rebels in Cairo).77
Jean-Baptiste Debret, Napoléon Ier saluant un convoi de blessés autrichiens et rendant hommage au courage malheureux, octobre 1805 (Napoleon salutes a convoy of wounded Austrians, and renders homage to courageous misfortune, October 1805), 1806.
Commissioned in 1806, the painting depicts a scene that took place shortly after the Revolt of Cairo in October 1798 when Bonaparte made a public display of pardoning the rebels on El-Bekir Square. The whole point of paintings like this was to reinforce the paternal nature of the ruler over the ruled. Napoleon is slightly elevated, looking down at the supplicants who look back with a mixture of expressions ranging from fear, humiliation and resignation to what seems to be anger and defiance. It some respects, it is an allegory of the French as both conquerors and liberators. While French guards surround the group of rebels, one of them in the foreground releases a prisoner from his shackles, highlighting not only French moral superiority but also the promise of liberation to those who obey and submit.
Pierre-Narcisse Guerin, Bonaparte fait grâce aux révoltés du Caire, le 30 octobre 1798 (Bonaparte pardoning the rebels in Cairo, 30 October 1798), 1806–8. Bonaparte offered an amnesty, but only after brutally putting down the revolt. Hundreds were arrested and executed in the days that followed.78
Ironically, since some of the worst French massacres were committed there, Egypt was also the subject of at least four paintings touching on Napoleon’s clemency. In Guillaume François Colson’s Trait de clémence du général Bonaparte (Gesture of clemency from General Bonaparte) of 1812, an Arab mother and her child can be seen adopting a similar position to that of the wounded Lithuanian in Gros’ painting of Eylau, kneeling near Napoleon’s horse, hand outstretched to touch the saddle or the horse: ‘Caesar, you want me to live, well, heal me and I will serve you faithfully as I served Alexander.’79
Guillaume Francois Colson, Trait de clémence du général Bonaparte envers une famille arabe lors de l’entrée de l’armée française à Alexandrie le 3 juillet 1798 (Gesture of clemency from General Bonaparte towards an Arab family during the entry of the French army into Alexandria on 3 July 1798), 1812. Napoleon holds out his hand in an act that calls a halt to the killing. Ten years on, he was still getting mileage out of Egypt.
‘A War of Cannibals’
The concerted effort to transform Napoleon’s image was a reaction to a crisis in public opinion, not only among the people, but also in the army, that would persist and grow as military reverses took the shine off Napoleon’s reputation. Spain significantly contributed to that crisis.
After Erfurt, Napoleon prepared to intervene directly in Spain. In fact, with the exception of the invasion of Russia, he paid more attention to preparing public opinion in France about what was happening in Spain than he did about any other campaign.80 He had decided to intervene personally in August or September, after the military disasters of Bailén (19 July 1808) and Vimeiro (21 August). In the campaign that followed, over three months from November 1808 to January 1809, he was able to redress the situation.
By 6 November 1808, Napoleon was in Vitoria ready to assume command of more than 240,000 men.81 His plan was quite simple: take Madrid so that Joseph could govern with whatever means were at his disposal. There was little between Bayonne and Madrid that would prevent him from doing so. Under his command was not the army of raw recruits that had been mishandled by the Spanish until now. It was battle hardened and led by some of the best generals the French had, although it has to be said that their performance at certain stages of the campaign was going to be sadly wanting. Be that as it may, Napoleon’s presence in Spain made victory possible, but it also highlighted the deficiencies of a system built around one man. When present, Napoleon demanded and received reports on every aspect of the campaign – civil and military – several times a day. In his absence, with no central command, the French invasion was characterized by inefficiency, exacerbated by the petty rivalries between various military and civilian leaders, none of whom wanted to obey others they considered to be of lesser rank.
‘It is a war of cannibals,’ complained Ney. Atrocities were committed on both sides. As the French moved into territory previously occupied but abandoned, they committed some horrendous depredations – villages were burnt to the ground, ‘rebels’, ‘terrorists’ as the French liked to call them, were hung to set an example, churches were ransacked.82 In a deeply Catholic country, that was a certain way to alienate the locals. Napoleon expected any rebels caught to be hung and, it is said, all prisoners to be shot, especially if civilians were caught with weapons in hand. The action was designed to strike fear into the population.83 At least one memoirist asserted that he received the order but was horrified by it.84 He realized that ‘to have the prisoners shot was a useless barbarity, for it served only to excite the hatred the Spanish felt towards us’.85
Under Napoleon’s direction, the French inflicted a number of rapid defeats on the Anglo-Spanish armies. General Soult took Burgos on 10 November; the town was pillaged terribly.86 Even the cemetery was ransacked in the vain hope of finding valuables in the coffins, with decomposing and skeletal bodies being abandoned along the footpath.87 An officer by the name of Castellane saved a woman from being raped by fifty men, but many others were subjected to the same atrocity.88 Napoleon entered the city the next day (and Joseph the day after that), disgusted by the stench of rotting bodies from those killed during the fighting. Napoleon stayed in Burgos all of ten days as the bulk of the army marched through, trying to beat his undisciplined army into shape, drawing up notes for Joseph on the government of Spain.89 General Victor defeated the retreating Anglo-Spanish army at Espinosa de Los Monteros after a battle that lasted twenty hours. Soult took Reinosa, Ney Soria, while Lannes fought and won at Tudela. In every case, the poorly trained Spanish were outnumbered by the French troops. After those encounters, the road to Madrid was wide open. Advance troops approached the northern suburbs of Madrid on 1 December. Napoleon arrived the next day, the anniversary of Austerlitz. He would have preferred to enter the city without a fight, so that Joseph could re-enter the capital on a sound footing. But the junta haughtily rejected Napoleon’s offer, delaring that the ‘people of Madrid were resolved to bury themselves under the ruins of their houses rather than permit the French to enter the city’.90 It was foolish. Napoleon ordered an assault on the capital to begin at dawn on 3 December. It lasted but a few hours and was all over by eleven o’clock that same morning. When Napoleon dispatched another offer to ‘pardon’ the city, the junta sent a delegation to negotiate. They were treated to one of Napoleon’s famous scenes of rage; he let loose a storm of abuse and threatened that if the city had not surrendered by six the following morning, he would put to the sword every man taken arms in hand.91
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Madrid was about the same size as Berlin with a population around 235,000. Despite the religiosity of the Spanish, the city was an Enlightenment city par excellence, probably better designed and equipped than any the French troops had yet seen. The streets were paved, which was not often the case for Paris, and there were pavements along wide avenues planted with trees.92 The grand buildings that were the monarchy’s façade hid a large working-class population that had played a significant role in the uprising.93 Napoleon entered on 4 December. We can discount the official reports according to which he was greeted with ‘an extreme pleasure’.94 He was to remain the
re for a little over two weeks, not in the royal palace, which he wanted to leave vacant for his brother, but on the outskirts of the city in a house at Chamartín, working incessantly to put in place the administrative structures that would consolidate his hold on the country and to bring Spain into line with the rest of the Empire: he abolished feudal rights, internal customs barriers and the Inquisition; a third of all Church lands were confiscated;95 and as was now the norm, the French grabbed whatever they could from the Spanish art collections.96 The confiscation of Church lands simply confirmed Spaniards in their belief that Napoleon was an atheist. At least some of the pillage was carried out by superior officers for their own personal gain, unable to overcome the temptation of taking ‘two or three small paintings’, hoping that they would go unnoticed.97 We will pass over the rapine certain generals and marshals became notorious for, but they included Pierre Dupont, Junot, Marmont, Masséna, Lannes and Soult.98
If the occupation of the city was orderly, the political repression that followed was severe. In flagrant contravention of the agreement Napoleon had signed with the junta only a few days before, he ordered the arrest of a long list of people declared traitors, including the Council of the Inquisition. Any officers who remained in the city were declared prisoners of war. The Duc de Saint-Simon was a French émigré who had chosen to fight against the French army at the siege of Madrid in May 1808, and was thus guilty of treason. Captured, he was condemned to be shot, an expression of Napoleon’s frustration at seeing French émigrés continue to fight against the Empire, despite the politics of reconciliation he had adopted early in his reign.99 Saint-Simon’s daughter, desperate to gain an audience with Napoleon in order to plead for her father’s life, eventually found him in the middle of military manoeuvres where she threw herself at his feet. Napoleon granted clemency in a display of public compassion. It was grandstanding at its most spectacular.
Antoine Charles Horace Vernet, Napoléon Ier devant Madrid, l’Empereur recevant une députation de la ville, 3 décembre 1808 (Napoleon I before Madrid, the Emperor receiving a deputation from the city, 3 December 1808), 1810. Again we are presented with the image of merciful statesman pardoning those who had revolted against him. It contrasts with the brutal reality of Napoleon’s occupation of Madrid. On the left, a deputation from the city of Madrid implores the Emperor to accept their surrender. Gros exhibited a similar painting in 1810.
Napoleon was still in Madrid at the end of December when he received news that the British under Sir John Moore had clashed with elements of Soult’s cavalry at Sahagún, almost 300 kilometres north of Madrid. His forces set out from Madrid on 20 December. Ney led the advance party and on the evening of the 21st reached the Sierra de Guadarrama, a mountain range that lay across the road to Madrid, a natural obstacle that could be crossed fairly easily through the Guadarrama pass. The next day, the weather conditions worsened and the troops accompanying Napoleon found it difficult to follow. Napoleon never let anything as trivial as the weather get in his way. He insisted, despite snowdrifts and high winds, that the pass be negotiated. The Dragoons of the Guard were ordered over first. They got a quarter of the way up the road and then turned back, reporting that it was impossible to go any further. Napoleon nevertheless pushed his troops ahead. Some recalled that the crossing of the Sierra de Guadarrama was far worse than that of Saint-Bernard, and that the wind was so strong that the troops could hardly make any headway.100 A number of men died in the course of the day, either of cold or falling from precipices, so that Napoleon, even though he was there, in the thick of it, was openly threatened. Soldiers from the Lapisse Division goaded each other to shoot him first, accusing each other of cowardice for not doing so. Napoleon heard it all, but seemed to take it in his stride.101 In any event, his persistence paid off; they got across by the end of 23 December, although many would later recall the crossing with horror.
The pursuit proved fruitless. Moore managed to evade the French, although Napoleon’s interpretation of the British retreat was slightly out of touch with the reality. He wrote to Josephine to say that they were ‘fleeing in a terrified fashion’.102 It is true that Moore was hard pressed, and that the condition of his troops did not allow him to turn and fight a battle at any point during the retreat, but they were able to withdraw, in good order, all the way to Coruña, where he was evacuated by the Royal Navy. When Napoleon realized this was going to happen, he reduced the size of his force and handed it over to Soult.
The Courtier’s Mask . . .
Napoleon had decided to leave Spain, without having fought a standing battle. As in Egypt, and as in Russia only two years later, he informed only a few people in his entourage that he was going home. He told Joseph that he would be in Paris for twenty days or so and that he would be back around the end of February. The same day he changed his mind and wrote that it would be the end of October 1809.103
The news he received from France was not the most encouraging. He was getting alarming reports about a ‘conspiracy’ that was forming in Paris (a reference to the Talleyrand–Fouché alliance).104 It was also increasingly obvious that Austria was mobilizing its army against France. There was, therefore, good reason to return, but Napoleon also seems to have been influenced in his decision by an unrealistic assessment of the situation on the ground in Spain. He fully believed his job there was over; he had broken the back of Spanish resistance, and had thrown the Anglo-Spanish army out of Spain through Coruña.105 ‘The Spanish affair is done with,’ he wrote to Jérôme, and that appears to be the extent of his thinking on the matter.106 He left instructions with a number of his commanders to crush what resistance remained, and advised Joseph on the best way to control Madrid – a few good hangings would do the trick.107
After giving the orders to have everything prepared for a dash to Paris, and writing to Joseph to spread the rumour that he would be back within a month,108 Napoleon left Valladolid on 17 January 1809, and travelled the first 120 kilometres in five hours. The news that he was leaving did not impress those left behind; nobody wanted to be in Spain.109 Paul Thiébault, who was travelling from Valladolid to Burgos, was passed by Napoleon and his aide-de-camp, galloping so fast that the rest of his retinue and his guard were a minute or two behind.110 Napoleon reached the capital on 23 January, having travelled over 1,100 kilometres in six days. He had been in Spain all of three months, but had learnt nothing. He did not come away with a better appreciation of the difficulties of occupying the country, and he appears to have been convinced that whatever resistance the French met was temporary. However, his hold over Spain in 1809 was precarious. He did not control Portugal, which would subsequently be used as an entry point by the British to introduce troops, and he had not won the hearts and minds of the Spanish people by implementing reforms. On the contrary, the Spanish resented having their traditions overturned. The instructions Napoleon left on the manner of concluding the campaign reveal how much he treated Spain as though it were another conventional war, and show the extent to which he simply did not understand what was happening on the ground.
Napoleon’s sudden return to Paris did not go down well. There was all sorts of conjecture about his motives: that things were going badly in Spain and that he was abandoning its conquest; that war with Austria was inevitable; that relations with Russia had deteriorated; and that those close to him were plotting.111 There is a grain of truth to all of these suppositions. One of the first people Napoleon saw on his return was Cambacérès. That evening he berated him for not warning him of the rapprochement between Talleyrand and Fouché.112 It was not until five days later, however, on the afternoon of Saturday 28 January, during a meeting of the Council of State that there was a scene.113 The Comte de Montesquiou, recently admitted to the Council and about to be sworn in, was the only person to commit the scene to paper. Napoleon started off in a reasonable enough tone, critical of those who had intrigued behind his back without naming any names. When he saw that Talleyrand remained entirely passive, he increasingly
lost his temper. The dressing down that followed lasted between thirty minutes and two hours.114 Napoleon started by complaining that they had interpreted as unfortunate a campaign that was marked by success and that they had been acting as if the succession were open. Interestingly, the minister of finance, Nicolas-François Mollien, suggests that the opinions Napoleon attributed to Fouché and Talleyrand were those to be found among the general public, and that it was this more than anything else that had made an impression on Napoleon.
During this outburst Napoleon supposedly shouted at Talleyrand the now famous phrase: ‘You are nothing but shit in silk stockings.’ It is a wonderful line, although undoubtedly apocryphal.115 It is clear though that Napoleon thought it, and probably uttered something similar to Caulaincourt years later. Throughout the ordeal, Talleyrand maintained an imperturbable façade, limiting himself when it was all over to the mildest of reactions by remarking to someone standing near by, ‘What a pity that such a great man should be so ill bred.’ Two days later, in evident disgrace, Talleyrand lost his position of grand chamberlain, although even that did not prevent him from attending court as though nothing had happened. For Talleyrand was not disgraced, or not entirely. He kept the title of ‘Vice Grand Elector’, a purely honorific position with no responsibilities. He was never again admitted to a private audience with Napoleon, who never again asked him his opinion, but he was always kept within reach. Fouché, surprisingly, retained his job, for the moment. He was dismissed from office in June 1810, supposedly for having secretly entered into peace negotiations with Britain.