by Philip Dwyer
Bonaparte had been a romantic through and through, a romanticism that had in part been bruised by Josephine’s own infidelity. She had thereby unwittingly helped to create a cynic and complete his disillusionment with the world. From about the time of Egypt onwards, Bonaparte’s attitude towards women became more callous.103 When he became head of state, the women he did have serious relations with can be counted on the fingers of one hand – Marie-Antoinette Duchâtel, Carlotta Gazzani, Christine de Mathis, one of Pauline’s ladies-in-waiting, and Marguerite-Joséphine George.104 But there was something peculiar in his romantic conquests, and that was his need to boast about them.105 Not only was he capable of recounting in the most intimate detail all that went on in the bedchamber, he was also perfectly relaxed talking to Josephine about them. For the most part they were conquests; Napoleon did not love women. He denied them his time – he was notoriously as quick in bed as he was at the dinner table – and consequently he denied them any intimacy whatsoever. There were, however, two women who managed again to touch that romantic core. Both were Maries – Maria Walewska and Marie-Louise.
The showdown between Napoleon and Josephine took place at the Tuileries on 30 November 1809, a scene that is now part of the legend.106 Napoleon had returned from Fontainebleau a few days before, and was distracted enough for the prefect of the palace, the Baron de Bausset, to notice. Dinners were held in silence. After one of those dinners with Josephine, and after having dismissed everyone from the room, Napoleon announced that he had decided to divorce her. We do not know what he said but Josephine responded with violent sobs. Bausset, sitting in the salon outside and realizing what was happening, prevented an usher from entering the room and going to her aid. It was Napoleon who opened the door and allowed Bausset to enter, whereupon he found Josephine prostrate on a rug on the floor, emitting what he referred to as ‘heartbreaking cries and lamentations’. It was what contemporaries called ‘an attack of nerves’, the end result of months of anxiety. In any event, it added a melodramatic touch to the end of a relationship that had lasted almost fifteen years. Napoleon asked Bausset, a largish man, to carry her to her apartments while Josephine pretended to faint. Napoleon led the way with a lamp, until they had to descend a narrow staircase leading to Josephine’s bedroom, whereupon the Emperor called over a palace servant to take the lamp; he seized Josephine’s feet while Bausset held her under her arms so that her back was pressed up against his chest and her head resting on his right shoulder. It was at that point that she is supposed to have whispered, ‘You’re holding me too tight.’ Napoleon too played his part as they shed tears together that evening. No doubt there was sorrow and regret on the part of Josephine – she was losing everything after all, although Napoleon would look after her material comfort – and a tinge of regret on his part.
To divorce Josephine, much like other monarchs in other centuries, Napoleon had to obtain the dissolution of the marriage from the pope, and given that he was being held prisoner it was unlikely that he would co-operate.107 Besides, the precedent had not been very encouraging: Napoleon had in the past unsuccessfully attempted to get the pope to annul the marriage of Jérôme to Elizabeth Patterson. Instead, Napoleon turned to the Parisian ecclesiastical hierarchy, which in January 1810 declared his marriage annulled.
The Bonaparte family must have been delighted. They had never hidden their dislike of Josephine, and had been pushing for divorce for some years.108 There were others at court, including Fouché, who had also lobbied in favour of divorce, possibly in the knowledge that public opinion believed the Empire would not outlive Napoleon if there were no direct heir.109 There were, however, those who did not favour divorce. Cardinal Fesch, who took his role seriously, was not convinced by the juridical arguments and insisted that everything had been in order when the pair had married in 1804. It was Cambacérès, a former lawyer, who came to the rescue and found a loophole in the law.110 He argued that since the religious marriage (which was celebrated shortly before the coronation) did not take place in the presence of witnesses it was clandestine and therefore irregular.
The divorce was not made public right away. We know that Josephine was seen at a ball on 4 December at the Hôtel de Ville looking downcast. On 14 or 15 December, she was obliged to appear before the Council of State, in the presence of Napoleon and the grand officers of the Empire, to declare that she consented to divorce. All the family dignitaries were present, including Letizia, the Emperor’s brothers Joseph, Louis and Jérôme and their wives, Caroline and Murat, Eugène, and Pauline. During this ‘family meeting’ Napoleon took a sheet of paper and read from it. It was when he came to the words ‘She has graced my life for fifteen years’ that he allowed some emotion to come through. Then Josephine in turn read from a sheet of paper but was unable to continue as she was crying so much. Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, counsellor of state, and secretary of state to the imperial family, had to finish for her.111 It was a moving occasion, at least for those who liked the Empress.112 Before she left the Tuileries, Napoleon spent a few hours with her in a tête-à-tête and, according to one account, sobbed on bended knee before her.113 However, he was in a situation of his own making. He was not obliged to divorce her. This was not about great-power politics or geostrategic necessity. It was about personal ambition. Josephine was sacrificed not at the altar of international relations, but at the altar of Napoleon’s ego. To shed tears, as he did on this occasion, was to suggest that he was the victim, thereby absolving himself from responsibility for his actions.114 Contemporaries were hardly likely to oblige. The streets of Paris were not pleased by the divorce.115 In the army, many felt Josephine had been hard done by. ‘He shouldn’t have left the old woman; she brought him luck and us too.’116
Two days later, Jospehine left the Tuileries in the pouring rain, never to return. Nothing was sadder, as one contemporary put it, than to see the Tuileries widowed by an empress loved by the people.117 Napoleon spent the next fortnight at the Trianon, a residence in Versailles, dining with her for the last time on 17 December, writing a dozen notes to her before the month was out, attempting to assuage his guilty conscience by a last spurt of affection. Nostalgia perhaps.118
16
Bourgeois Emperor, Universal Emperor
‘I am Marrying a Womb’
Once the divorce had been decided on, there was the question of a suitable bride. This was going to be the scene of intensive lobbying between various political factions at court.1 On 26 January 1810, the limits of the problem were laid out by Napoleon at a private council at the Tuileries. A French noble was out of the question; French monarchs invariably married foreign brides. So too was a minor German princess. Napoleon had his sights set much higher. It came down to choosing between a Russian, an Austrian and a Saxon princess.2 In this he was following the same principle he had laid down for his own relatives: strengthening the dynasty by a policy of alliances through strategic marriage.
Those in favour of a Russian alliance suggested one of the Tsar’s sisters.3 They were for the most part opposed to an Austrian marriage; it reminded them a little too much of Marie-Antoinette, while Austria had traditionally been an implacable enemy of France. Fouché was able to produce a report on the mood of the Parisian populace that warned against any Austrian connection.4 Much stronger, however, was the Austrian lobby, which advocated an alliance with Emperor Francis’s daughter, Marie-Louise, eighteen years of age. For Fontanes, who had been a supporter of the return to monarchical forms in France, a marriage with an Austrian princess, after having executed one only sixteen years previously, was a symbolic act of expiation.5 The lobby supporting the Austrian solution did so with such vigour, however, that Cambacérès suspected Napoleon had organized the whole thing.6
In fact, Napoleon preferred the Russian option. At Erfurt, he had asked Talleyrand to approach Alexander about marrying one of his two unmarried sisters.7 The elder was Grand Duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, who was twenty in 1808, and was considered witty, intelligent an
d charming. The younger was the Grand Duchess Anna, who was only fifteen years old. Alexander’s estranged wife, Elisaveta Alekseevna, wrote of Ekaterina that she had ‘a tone that would not be suitable for a woman of forty’, much less for a woman of twenty.8 There was no doubt a touch of bitterness in that remark: Ekaterina was well liked among the Francophobe faction at court and was considered a possible replacement for the Tsar.9 Indeed, she was considered the mirror image of her grandmother, Catherine II, who had overthrown her husband, Peter III, to reach the throne.10
It was their mother though, the Empress Dowager, Mariia Federovna, the former wife of Paul I, who had absolute control over whom they could marry, and she hated Napoleon. Nevertheless, the Russian court was under the mistaken belief at the end of 1807 that a marriage alliance between Napoleon and the Grand Duchess Ekaterina was probable.11 Shortly after Alexander’s return from Erfurt, perhaps alarmed at Napoleon’s intentions, the Empress Dowager married off Ekaterina to a distant cousin, Prince George of Holstein-Oldenburg.12 This did not seem to bother Napoleon very much, largely because he had set his sights on the younger of the two sisters, Anna. He pushed home the point as relations between the two countries worsened, no doubt in the hope of repairing the cracks.
At the end of November 1809 – that is, before the divorce had been finalized – Napoleon instructed Caulaincourt, the French ambassador in Petersburg, to approach Alexander formally with a request for his sister’s hand in marriage. ‘It will be a proof to me’, he wrote to Caulaincourt, ‘that Alexander is an ally. It [the divorce] would be a real sacrifice for me. I love Josephine. I will never be happier with anyone else, but my family . . . and all the politicians insist on it in the name of France.’13 Yes, well, the sacrifice was possibly all on the Russian side. Alexander stalled for as long as he could – he used his mother as an excuse, saying that she felt Anna was too young, that she had lost two daughters through early childbirths and did not want to see another married before she was eighteen – so that by the beginning of 1810 Napoleon was still waiting for an answer. The Empress Dowager, although she had nothing but contempt for the French, may nevertheless have been playing to public opinion, perhaps for her own ends. She had briefly attempted to govern in the place of her murdered husband before handing over the reins of power to her son, but over the years she had managed to gather around her all those discontented with the regime’s pro-French stance.14
By this time Napoleon realized what Alexander’s lack of enthusiasm meant, and he decided on pre-empting the humiliation that would inevitably come with a refusal by turning to Austria. Three days after receiving a courier from Petersburg, on 6 February 1810, he withdrew his offer of marriage while Eugène officially asked the Austrian ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg, for the hand of Marie-Louise. Napoleon had already sounded out the Austrian court so Schwarzenberg was authorized well in advance to accept such an offer. That same day, Napoleon had a marriage contract drawn up, a duplicate of that which had been prepared for Louis and Marie-Antoinette in 1770. The marriage then was at the political level a public relations coup.15 In diplomatic terms, this was to turn his back on Russia. It was a deliberate choice; Napoleon knew that relations with Russia were less than perfect. In fact, the choice of an Austrian princess made matters worse.
News of the forthcoming marriage was accompanied by a concerted effort in the press to prepare for the arrival of (another) Austrian princess. Poets, musicians, writers, painters were all enlisted.16 Plays with the marriage as a background to the plot were quickly written and performed, although it is impossible to tell whether audiences looked on all this with amusement or cynicism. On the other hand, if Comte Otto, now the French ambassador to Vienna, is to be believed – but, then, what else could he say? – the announcement of marriage was greeted favourably by all classes of Viennese society,17 even if Viennese aristocracy considered the alliance undignified.18 This was not the case in those parts of the Empire, such as the Rhineland, where pro-Austrian sentiment was strong.19 In those regions, news of the marriage made a deep impression, reinforcing the belief that Napoleon and the Empire were here to stay. The regime was being given a degree of legitimacy that it had lacked in royalist eyes till then.20 Even Joseph de Maistre wrote to the King of Sardinia that from this time on Napoleon would have to be treated like any other sovereign.21
When Alexander learnt of the forthcoming marriage he, quite unreasonably under the circumstances, was miffed, believing that Napoleon had been playing a double game – and this despite having sent a letter effectively refusing Napoleon’s request on the grounds that Anna’s mother felt there could be no marriage for at least two more years. Russian public opinion was just as offended.22 Moreover, the Tsar considered the marriage alliance between Austria and France a real danger. It brought the two countries closer together, even if only on paper, appeared to be a potential strategic threat to Russia and made him look a fool to his own people.23 The fact is that Vienna had taken a much more active interest in a marriage alliance with Napoleon and had approached the French with a marriage proposal in 1809 almost as soon as the guns were stilled.24
The alliance represented a shift in thinking for Napoleon, away from Russia towards Austria. Admittedly, the Austria of 1810 was not at its peak – it had been greatly reduced in size since the start of the wars and had been defeated four times by France – but the arguments put forward by Talleyrand in favour of an Austrian alliance were persuasive (though somewhat specious). They consisted largely of a belief that Russia was politically too unstable and that its foreign policy was too closely linked to the person of the Tsar; a change in ruler would invariably lead to a change in policy, as had occurred with the death of Paul I. Austria, on the other hand, was more deeply embedded in a foreign political system that did not rely on the character of one emperor or another.25 Austria was, in fact, no more consistent in its foreign policy choices than any other great power during this period.
Vienna calculated that having a princess of its own at the French court would disarm Napoleon, and make him less mistrustful towards Austria, while Marie-Louise would be working inside to promote Austrian interests.26 Certainly the marriage alliance gave Austria a few years’ peace during which it could heal its wounds after the defeat of 1809, but if Metternich, now Austria’s foreign minister, hoped to exploit the favourable atmosphere to gain diplomatic concessions, he was to be disappointed.27 Napoleon was not mollified and did not want to change the treaty of 1809. In real terms, Austria gained little tangible from the alliance.28 One should not think, however, that the alliance was all to Napoleon’s benefit. The court of Vienna got what it wanted: it prevented France and Russia from drawing closer together, and bolstered the faltering prestige of Francis. Four wars and four defeats had done enormous harm to the Austrian monarchy’s reputation. The alliance with Napoleon, even if it was a complete backflip to what it had practised over the last ten years,29 strengthened the Austrian throne just as much as the Austrian monarchy’s ancient lineage bolstered Napoleon’s legitimacy.30 Francis may not have been overjoyed by the prospect of having Napoleon as a son-in-law,31 but we know that the announcement of the marriage in Vienna was well received. Even the streets of Vienna seemed to welcome the news. Most believed an alliance would force Britain to make peace and bring about stability on the Continent.32 As for the political elite, they were delighted, or at least some of them were, including Metternich, who believed that he had carried out a great diplomatic coup that had allowed Austria to resume its place among the great powers only months after suffering a humiliating defeat.
For Napoleon, the marriage made political sense too. Not only was Austria (still) a power to be contended with on the Continent, militarily and in terms of population, but as an ally it would also lend stability to the centre of Europe. Moreover, French diplomats were able to point out that if Louis XIV and Louis XV had been able to wage war successfully against Britain, it was in part due to the Austrian alliance. Finally, the marriage served to appease Nap
oleon’s main bugbear, legitimacy, by injecting Austrian Bourbon blood into the succession (Marie-Louise was also descended from Charles Quint and Louis XIV).33 This worked, up to a point. The number of ancien régime nobles who rallied to the court after 1810 is impressive, even if their adherence was to be short-lived.34 Talleyrand was hoping for some kind of European reconciliation, as if the marriage alliance was going to expiate the Revolution’s crime of executing a king. Napoleon tried to make political mileage out of the marriage alliance by distributing the modern equivalent of a statement to French diplomats abroad. England, he argued, had always claimed that he was out to destroy Europe’s monarchies.35
Before the Revolution French courts had functioned like vast families in which those admitted were given a privileged place. The European monarchies in particular were tightly bound by blood links, constituting a veritable ‘society of princes’ whose relations were strictly codified.36 The mistake that Napoleon made was in thinking that, through marriage, he would be admitted into this family. He was not. He was the relative that everyone tolerates but whom no one likes. And he was disliked in part because he did not behave like a prince. Indeed, he may not even have been entirely aware of the strict rules codifying princely behaviour. He believed that rigorous court etiquette was enough, that to appear princely would position him among the sovereigns of Europe. It could never, however, replace the bonds of blood that linked other crown princes.37 Etiquette at Napoleon’s court became even more rigid after his marriage to Marie-Louise, as if its rigid application was one more proof of the legitimacy of the regime.