Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  The reaction of the Austrian people to the peace – the Treaty of Schönbrunn – was similar in some respects to that of the German people in 1919. There was relief the war was over, but also a feeling that somehow the Austrian people had been not so much defeated as betrayed by the diplomats at the negotiating table.64 Contemporaries condemned the conditions – Stadion commented that the treaty may have avoided Austria’s complete destruction, but it would nonetheless effect a slow strangulation.65 Similarly, most historians describe this as a harsh treaty, one going so far as to call it ‘vicious’, but it certainly was not in comparison to Prussia’s treatment a few years earlier – there was no army of occupation as in Prussia that bled the country dry – and it was certainly not as severe as Napoleon’s Bavarian ally would have liked it to have been.66

  Two days before the conclusion of peace with Austria, on 12 October 1809, Napoleon was reviewing the army at Schönbrunn when an eighteen-year-old by the name of Friedrich Stapps, the son of a Lutheran minister, approached him as though he were about to present a petition.67 When he drew close, however, he tried to pull out a dagger, but was caught by Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, General Jean Rapp. Napoleon interrogated the young man at length, trying to find out what had motivated him. As a gesture of magnanimity, he offered to pardon Stapps in return for an apology, but the youth refused. ‘I want no pardon,’ he is supposed to have said. ‘I only regret having failed in my attempt.’ Napoleon, according to Rapp, had never been so confounded. Stapps’s replies and his determination to both kill Napoleon and die for a cause astonished the Emperor.

  Napoleon had faced assassination attempts before, when French republicans used the example of Brutus as inspiration. Here too we are dealing with a sort of German Brutus. Stapps appears to have been quite clear about what he was doing and what his objective was: to bring about peace on the Continent through the death of the man he most held responsible for war. Inspired by Schill’s rebellion in Westphalia, Stapps’s gesture was deeply patriotic and selfless, if not misguided. It was important, therefore, to paint him as insane; he in turn could not serve as an inspiration to others. He was accused of espionage, declared mad and condemned by a military tribunal on 15 October. He was shot the next day at seven in the morning. His last words were ‘Long Live Liberty! Long Live Germany! Death to the Tyrant!’

  ‘I am Charlemagne’

  While Napoleon was fighting it out on the island of Lobau, tensions between him and Pius VII came to a head. On 10 June 1809, before a population rubbing its eyes in disbelief, French troops raised the tricolour over the Castel Sant’Angelo.68 Pius, looking on behind a curtain from his window in the Quirinal, pronounced ‘Consummatum est’ (It is finished), an echo of the words spoken by Christ on the Cross. It signalled the end of the pope, even if only temporarily, as a secular head of state.

  Relations between Napoleon and the pope had been strained ever since the French had occupied Rome in 1808. Pius responded by refusing to invest any bishops nominated by Napoleon. For his part, Napoleon refused any compromise, largely because he now believed, unlike in the days of the Concordat, that his power was well established and that there was no reason for conciliation.69 He had always had difficulty in according the Church a particular status within his political system, but he now more than ever identified with Charlemagne. As his successor, Napoleon expected the Church to bend to his will and would get angry whenever the ecclesiastical hierarchy showed signs of independence. In a letter to the Vatican in 1806, for example, he declared, ‘I am Charlemagne, for like Charlemagne I join the crown of France with the crown of the Lombards . . . I shall make no outward changes if [the pope] behaves well. Otherwise, I shall reduce him to the status of bishop of Rome.’70 A little later that same year he wrote to Cardinal Fesch to complain about the pope’s behaviour: ‘My eyes are wide open, and I am not deceived unless I want to be . . . I am Charlemagne, the sword of the Church, their Emperor, and . . . I must be treated as such.’71 On another occasion, he railed at members of the French hierarchy of the Church for over an hour for not sorting out relations with the papacy more quickly. According to Talleyrand he kept on repeating the phrase, ‘you want to treat me like Louis the Pious. Do not confuse the son with the father. You see in me Charlemagne . . . I am Charlemagne . . . yes, I am Charlemagne.’72

  Napoleon was determined to bend Rome to his will; the future of his political system depended on it. Spanish bishops had refused to recognize Joseph, and the same thing was happening in Naples with Murat: Italian bishops had been instructed not to recognize him. Throughout Italy, bishops were receiving secret instructions from Rome and were preaching against Napoleon and the Empire from the pulpit. It was a cold war that the pope was leading against Napoleon. It was no doubt the reason why Napoleon decided, while he was in Vienna, to annex the Papal States outright. He did so in the name of his ‘predecessor’ Charlemagne, and in the name of separating the ‘ridiculous temporal power’ of the pope from the spiritual.73

  Napoleon, however, went one step further. He not only annexed the Roman states outright, he made sure the symbols of the pontiff – his ring, his seals, his tiara, the ornaments he wore during ceremonies – were brought to Paris. He seriously began to think about transferring the Holy See to Paris, or at least out of Rome, as he tried to move the direction of spiritual affairs away from Rome to his capital.74 As outrageous as Napoleon’s behaviour might appear, it was nevertheless consistent with revolutionary policy: the revolutionaries too had held the previous pope, Pius VI, captive at Valence (he died in captivity in August 1799); they too had attempted to subordinate the interests of the Church to the state; they too had attempted to bring the Church into line with the reforms that had been carried out in France. In that vein, hundreds of Roman convents were dissolved and thousands of clerics found themselves on the street.75

  The Concordat was in tatters. The rhetoric used to justify the annexation was curious – it was time for the imperial eagles to retake possession of their ancient territories; Charlemagne’s domains would be left in the hands of a worthy heir; Rome belonged to the Emperor.76

  The pope’s only recourse was a papal bull – the Quum memoranda – that detailed what the papacy had had to endure from the French over the previous few years. On 10 June 1809, shortly after the tricolour flag had been raised over the city, Pius excommunicated and anathematized those responsible for the outrage against the Church. Napoleon was not directly named, or even designated as a vitandus (someone who was to be avoided), but it was clear who the bull was aimed at. Napoleon could no longer receive communion, and his soul was condemned to eternal damnation.

  The damage was incalculable.77 It was not the first time that the papacy had used its spiritual powers in the struggle against domineering secular heads of state, although one had to go back a long time to meet the last sovereign excommunicated by the Church, Henry IV of Navarre in the sixteenth century. Napoleon’s excommunication was bound to have a nefarious effect on Catholic views of him throughout Europe and undid much of the goodwill that had been gained through the Concordat. Catholics, according to one Bavarian officer, were now prepared to unite with Protestants against Napoleon.78

  Officially, the Gallican Church never recognized the authority of the pope to excommunicate. Napoleon adopted the same attitude, writing to the minister of religion, Félix-Julien-Jean Bigot de Préameneu, that it was so ridiculous it was not even worth a response.79 In private, however, Napoleon referred to the pope as ‘raving mad’ (fou furieux), and ordered Murat to imprison Cardinal Bartolomeo Pacca, pro-secretary of state, and other supporters of the pope.80 In another letter he wrote, ‘you must arrest, even in the pope’s house, all those who plot against public tranquillity and the safety of my soldiers’.81 A rather ambitious French general by the name of Etienne Radet interpreted this as meaning they were authorized to arrest the pope if necessary, largely because in another letter Napoleon urged them to treat him as if he were just another bishop.

  This i
s what they did on 6 July, at two o’clock in the morning. The French stormed the papal residence, the Quirinal Palace. They had to break down thirteen doors in order to get to Pius. Radet eventually found himself before the pontiff, hatchet in hand, possibly looking a little dishevelled after all the chopping and hacking. The pope was sitting calmly at his desk, waiting with a dozen or so people. Radet had been swept away in the moment until face to face with the pope, and now hesitated over what to do next, suddenly realizing the enormity of the act.82 Pius VII was asked to accompany him to a berline. He blessed the French troops before being escorted away. They headed for Genoa, then Grenoble, where he stayed for a few weeks, and where crowds converged on the gates of the prefecture in which he was being held to obtain his blessing, before he was finally sent back to Savona, a small port town on the Italian Riviera. On the way, at Nice, a crowd of 16,000 people gathered to greet him. He would stay at Savona until May 1812.

  Napoleon’s reaction was one of anger and embarrassment, calling the act a ‘great madness’ (une grande folie).83 He wrote to Cambacérès that the arrest had been carried out without his orders, but then he was inclined to blame subordinates for his mistakes.84 Those orders, as already mentioned, had been ambiguous to say the least. ‘An operation of this magnitude should not have been carried out without my having been warned, and without my deciding the place where it would be conducted’ – which leads one to think that the whole affair suited him. ‘What is done is done. I am not for all that unhappy with your zeal,’ he wrote to General Miollis, in charge of troops in Rome. ‘The pope will never return to Rome.’85 If he had wanted, he could easily have given orders to release the pope. He did not. Instead, to use a modern euphemism, he went into damage control, to limit, as best he could, the news of his excommunication from spreading – an impossibility – or at least to try and diminish the impact such an event was bound to have on the attitude of Catholics throughout the Empire and Europe. Rumours of the pope’s abduction were doing the rounds in Paris as early as 20 July, less than a week after the event. The situation looked as if it was going to revert to the days when the Church and the Revolution were locked in struggle for the control of the people of France. Back then, the people had to choose between the Revolution and their faith. Now, Catholics throughout the Empire were put in the same predicament, obliged to choose between Napoleon and their Church.

  At one stage in September, Napoleon even envisaged bringing the pope to live near Paris.86 A lot of effort was put into persuading him to move from Savona, but Pius simply declared that wherever he went he would be a prisoner.87 (In the end, he was brought by force to Fontainebleau in June 1812.) Little by little, though, from 1809 on, the administration of the Holy See was brought to Paris. Hundreds of carriages laden with archives of one sort or another wound their way from Rome, and were deposited in the Hôtel de Soubise (today the French National Archives). Hundreds more came from the rest of the Empire: Holland, Germany, Spain, even Austria. With them came some of the most important personalities in the Church after the pope, including the secretary of the congregation, and the two apostolic tribunals, the Datery and the Penitentiary.

  ‘Politics Has No Heart’

  Relations between the pope and Napoleon were made worse, if that were possible, by the Emperor’s decision to divorce Josephine. While he was in Vienna in 1809, he ordered the passage between his apartments and Josephine’s at Fontainebleau to be boarded up.88 It was symptomatic of his attitude towards her. He had by now mentally and emotionally cut himself off from her. At one stage he admitted to her that he loved her still, but that ‘politics has no heart’.89 Years later, on St Helena, he would admit that though he still loved her, he had lost all respect for her. She was too much of a liar, too ready to deceive or hide things from him, even concealing how much she owed her debtors. And she constantly owed money. It has been calculated that on clothes alone Josephine spent around 1.1 million francs a year, more than the much-criticized Marie-Antoinette.90 She owned between three and four hundred shawls, over nine hundred dresses and thousands of pairs of gloves. Napoleon tolerated her lavish spending in ways he would not have tolerated in others, as a means perhaps of buying peace of mind.91

  Her extravagance was not the main problem, however: that was Napoleon’s infidelities. Ironically, rather than drawing Napoleon and Josephine closer together, the coronation and the marriage pulled them further apart since court etiquette now required that they sleep in different bedrooms. It made Napoleon’s dalliances easier and they became more frequent. The Empress’s ladies-in-waiting were almost like a seraglio for Napoleon. Part of the problem was that many in his close entourage, including his family, were only too happy to provide willing women. Napoleon’s sister Caroline and her husband, Murat, appear to be have been on the lookout for a woman who could replace Josephine and thought they had found her in Marie-Antoinette Adèle Duchâtel, one of Josephine’s ladies-in-waiting, a black-haired, blue-eyed beauty with a large mouth. Napoleon took up with her only weeks after an affair with a certain Elisabeth de Vaudey. Here too followed a tremendous scene between him and Josephine – plates and vases were thrown and smashed – but he would not back down. He continued to see Mme Duchâtel for a few more years, although he always saw her concurrently with other women, until he realized she was incredibly ambitious, at which point he asked Josephine for advice on how to get rid of her.92 Napoleon had taken a number of women to his bed from 1800, twenty-five that we know of before he remarried, all of them much younger than Josephine.93 Some of them were supplied by his sisters. In December 1806, a son was born to nineteen-year-old Eléonore Denuelle de La Plaigne, reader to Caroline Murat, who had encouraged if not arranged the liaison behind Josephine’s back, an indication of just how much the family hated her. Eléonore called her son Léon (after Napo-leon). Most historians agree that it was from about the time of the birth of his first illegitimate son that the idea of divorce took firm root; it proved that he was fertile and that Josephine was not.94 In 1808 and 1809, he enjoyed a liaison with one of the women in Pauline’s suite, a beautiful Italian by the name of Christine de Mathis; Pauline played the part of the procuress.95 Divorce was given added impetus by the birth of another son, Alexandre, to Maria Walewska, on 4 May 1810.

  Josephine’s inability to procreate and the need to ensure the succession were only the ostensible reasons for divorce. In fact, Napoleon had a fitting heir, Eugène de Beauharnais, whom he had formally adopted in 1806. Far more competent as both ruler and general than any of Napoleon’s brothers, he was the preferred successor. Why then, given the example of Caesar and Augustus, both of whom had adoptive sons, was Napoleon not content with Eugène? Was this really about Napoleon’s ego, as one contemporary suggested, or about geopolitics?96 In public, Napoleon asserted that ‘adopted children are not satisfactory for founding new dynasties’,97 but that is patently not the case. Lots of kings in Napoleon’s own day did not have male heirs and their dynasties survived. When Napoleon married Josephine in front of the pope and crowned her empress in 1804, he must have realized that she was not going to bear him any children; they had already been together for seven years. It is true that the Bonapartes might not have accepted Eugène, as Josephine’s progeny, as heir to the throne, but that was hardly a consideration. It is more likely, therefore, that Napoleon wanted a son, and in keeping with his increasingly conservative turn, a son to a princess of royal blood, so that through the boy’s mother he would legitimately belong to one of the reigning houses of Europe. Divorce and remarriage then were about consolidating his rule through an established reigning house, and, as far as that went, the more prestigious the better.

  Andrea Appiani, Portrait du prince Eugène de Beauharnais, vice roi d’Italie (Portrait of Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, viceroy of Italy), 1810.

  Divorce had crossed Napoleon’s mind before: in 1799 when he returned from Egypt; in 1804 shortly after the proclamation of the Empire, when Josephine caused a scandal over Napoleon’s relations w
ith Marie-Antoinette Duchâtel; and again during his stay at Fontainebleau in the autumn of 1807.98 It is a little ironic then that he considered divorce more seriously about the same time as David’s painting of the coronation appeared at the Salon of 1808. By that stage, rumours of divorce had been circulating for quite some time, no doubt fed by knowledge that Napoleon had put out feelers to Alexander at Erfurt about the possibility of marrying one of his sisters.99 People contemplating David’s painting in the Louvre speculated about Josephine and Napoleon’s desire to obtain an heir. The liberation of the divorce laws during the Revolution led to a widespread acceptance of divorce, even if the total numbers of dissolutions remained quite low.100

  Napoleon still cared for Josephine and was putting off the inevitable in order not to hurt her. Whenever he was unfaithful he seems to have done what many a cheating husband does – take out his guilt and frustration on his wife. In a letter to a confidante, Josephine complained of Napoleon’s bad moods and the scenes he was making; she discovered that the cause of all the unhappiness was a visit to Paris of the singer La Grassini.101 In 1808, at the Château de Marracq where Napoleon stayed when dealing with the Spanish royal house at Bayonne, Josephine arrived with two women, Mlles Gazzani and Guillebault, with the intention of handing them over to her husband.102 It is possible that she thought if Napoleon was going to continue to be unfaithful, then better to choose his lovers herself. He confided later to General Bertrand that the thing he disliked most about Josephine was that she was willing to go to any lengths to keep him attached to her.