Napoleon: a life

33 The Cost of Power

ON THE MORNING of 5 July 1809 a powerful artillery barrage opened what was to be the largest and longest-lasting battle Napoleon had fought. Over the next two days his forces, totalling nearly 190,000 men drawn from all over Europe, supported by more than 500 guns, fought it out with an Austrian army of up to 170,000 with 450 pieces of ordnance in what was more a battle of attrition than his usual decisive manoeuvre.

While the bombardment of their defences at Enzersdorf distracted the Austrians, the French army turned their left wing, forcing them to fall back on the village of Wagram. Archduke Charles managed to repel an attempt by Masséna’s corps to outflank him on his right — helped by the fact that following a bad fall from his horse the day before, Masséna was commanding from a reclining position in his carriage. French attacks by Bernadotte, Eugène, and Davout ground to a standstill in fierce fighting at close quarters which continued late into the evening and only died down at around eleven, when Bernadotte and then the others fell back.

Late that evening Napoleon conferred with Berthier, Davout, Oudinot, and others, preparing a plan for the next day. The nature of war had changed, and so had his style; it was a far cry from the days of his first Italian campaign, when he told Costa de Beauregard that a council of war was a coward’s resource. He went to bed in his tent at one o’clock in the morning and rose at four. At five he was in the saddle, astride a fine grey called Cyrus on which he would cover almost the whole ten-kilometre stretch of the battlefield, often within range of enemy guns, which took a heavy toll on his staff. As one of his aides lifted his hat, which was the form on receiving an order, it was blown away by a cannonball, causing Napoleon to smile and say, ‘It’s lucky you’re not taller.’^[1]

While Archduke Charles made a bold attempt to encircle Masséna, still in his carriage, on the French left, Napoleon ordered Davout to turn his left wing, while he himself launched a massed attack on his centre at Wagram. Ineptly led by Bernadotte, after having triumphed over stiff resistance the Saxon corps, which had led the attack, fell back, and all the advantage gained was lost. After exchanging vigorous words with Bernadotte (whom he later said he ought to have had shot for cowardice, but now just ordered back to Paris), Napoleon reorganised his forces. He combined a massive cavalry attack led by Bessières with a second assault on the Austrian centre, preceded by a heavy barrage, with the French artillery bringing over a hundred guns up to within a few hundred metres of the Austrian lines and pounding them at short range.

When he saw the attack drive home, Napoleon lay down on the grass to sleep for an hour, undisturbed by the thunder of nearly a thousand cannon. The exertions of the past two days were telling on his health, and he had what he called ‘an overflow of bile’ that evening. He was better in the morning. ‘My enemies are undone, beaten and fleeing in complete disorder,’ he wrote to Josephine. ‘They were very numerous, but I crushed them.’^[2]

This was nonsense; the Austrians may have been defeated, but they withdrew in relatively good order, with most of their artillery. Assessments of the losses differ widely, but they were heavy both in men and horses, and greater on the French side. Although the French took as many as 15,000 prisoners, the Austrians lost fewer flags and cannon, and the battle had been neither tactically masterful nor decisive. Yet Napoleon’s bulletin claimed exactly that and described the Austrian retreat as a ‘rout’, which it was not, since the French were too exhausted to pursue the advantage. When they did, two days later, they caught up with the Austrians at Znaïm, where after an inconclusive engagement on 11 July the Austrians proposed an armistice. Dismissing the wishes of his entourage, who were keen to finish them off decisively, Napoleon agreed to it, saying too much blood had been spilt already; he had been shocked by the heavy casualties incurred by both sides in the course of the campaign.^[3]

That was not his only worry as he returned to Schönbrunn on 13 July. Whatever he wrote in his bulletins, he could see for himself that none of the battles he had fought over the past three months were in any sense decisive. Others could see it too. Even though it had earned him his marshal’s baton, Marmont called Wagram ‘a victory without consequence’. ‘The days when swarms of prisoners would fall into our hands, as in Italy, at Ulm, at Austerlitz, at Jena, were past,’ he reflected. In those days, when they encountered the lightning-bold tactics of the still young Napoleon and the dash of the French soldier fledged in the ranks of the Revolution, the Austrian or Prussian commanders and soldiers did not know what had hit them and threw up their hands in a natural reflex. But much had changed since then. It was not just that Napoleon and his generals had grown older, though that was certainly a factor.^[4]

Although Austria was obliged to sue for peace, Germany was by no means subdued. The indecisive nature of the battle of Aspern-Essling had reverberated through Europe in much the same way as news of Bailén the previous year, further denting the myth of Napoleon’s invincibility. It had encouraged the Duke of Brunswick-Oels, whose father had been vanquished at Auerstadt, to march out in June at the head of his ‘Black Legion of Vengeance’ of 2,000 men raised with money from the Austrian government. He had joined up with a force of 5,000 Austrians and marched on Dresden and Leipzig before being seen off by Jérôme’s Westphalians. The rising in the Tyrol had also revived at the news, forcing Napoleon to send Marshal Lefèbvre to pacify the area, but this only inflamed local feeling and fuelled a guerrilla which would take time to put down.

Perceptions of Napoleon had shifted dramatically. From having been widely viewed as a liberator and a friend of the oppressed, he was now coming to be seen as the oppressor. The failure of his attempt to play the national card by calling on the Hungarians to rise up against the Austrians was eloquent evidence of this. They had good reason not to trust him: in order not to ruffle Russian sensibilities, he let down his own party in Poland. Commanded by the nephew of the country’s last king, Prince Joseph Poniatowski, the army of the grand duchy of Warsaw had, after an initial defeat by Archduke Ferdinand, beaten the Austrians back and occupied most of their Polish province of Galicia. Instead of letting the Poles add it to the territory of the grand duchy, Napoleon ceded half of it to Russia, which had barely pretended to support him against Austria. He thereby forfeited the support of a large part of a nation prepared to be his most devoted ally.

The young Buonaparte, who had lived to hate the oppressor of his nation and dreamed only of liberating it, had grown out of his island patriotism and espoused the cause of a France that had embraced the progressive values of the day and offered greater promise to his people. Bearing the standard of that France, he had shattered the chains of feudalism and overthrown tyranny in northern Italy and subsequently bestowed the benefits of rational administration there and in western Germany, earning the gratitude and even love of millions. But a growing cynicism had led him to sacrifice the aspirations of those millions to what he had come to see as higher priorities. The dreams of a German emancipation which he had done much to foster were methodically doused by his arrangements within it, as well as his own and his agents’ behaviour.

A prime example is Westphalia, which could serve as a microcosm of what was wrong with Napoleon’s imperial policy. ‘What the people of Germany ardently desire is that those who are not noble and who have talent should have an equal right to your respect and to employment, that all kinds of servitude and all other bonds separating the sovereign from the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished,’ Napoleon wrote to Jérôme as he took his throne. ‘The benefits of the Code Napoléon, the openness of procedures, the establishment of juries will be among the distinguishing marks of your monarchy. And if I am to be quite open with you, I am counting on such measures more than on the greatest victories to extend and establish your monarchy. Your people must enjoy a liberty, an equality and a well-being unknown to the people of the rest of Germany, and may this liberal government in one way or another lead to the most salutary change in the whole Confederation and the enhancement of your monarchy.’^[5]

The kingdom, which had a population of two million, was made up of territory taken from Prussia and eighteen minor German principalities. With its capital at Kassel, it was organised in departments along French lines and given a constitution drawn up by Cambacérès and Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély based on that of France but incorporating local law. Although at the outset it was run by ministers brought in from Paris, the administration was gradually taken over by locals. But while the kingdom was supposed to be independent, Napoleon could not help treating it as a department of France. He demanded from it a tribute of 49 million francs per annum, and awarded estates there to French generals and officials who sucked another 7 million francs a year out of it.^[6]

The twenty-four-year-old Jérôme was not lacking in intelligence or other qualities, but he was lazy, vain, and dissolute. His career as a naval officer had been a fiasco and his military role as commander of an army corps in Silesia during the campaign against Prussia of 1806–07 was less than brilliant; in Breslau in January 1807 he and his staff had kept themselves warm with eighteen bottles of Champagne and 208 of other wines each day. He was married to the plain and plump Catherine, daughter of the King of Württemberg, and although he was copiously unfaithful to her, he developed real love for his ‘Trinette’.^[7]

He established a court modelled on Napoleon’s, created a new nobility, and instituted an order of chivalry. Palaces were rebuilt and hung with state portraits of the new royal couple, splendid uniforms were designed for royal guards, and even a new unit of currency, the Jérôme, was introduced — to be spent lavishly on court entertainments, jewellery, and the trappings of royalty. He ordered a statue and over fifty busts of himself, and twelve of his wife, from Carrara. He nevertheless managed, with the help of a few competent French officials, to rule not much worse than most monarchs. As Countess Anna Potocka put it, ‘With a little more legitimacy and a little less puerile vanity, he would have passed for a distinguished ruler.’ But as well as making endless demands for more money and troops, many of which were sent to Spain, Napoleon kept interfering in his conduct of affairs, undermining his authority. He also kept rearranging the territory of his kingdom along with his changing plans; provinces were shunted between vassal states or incorporated into the French Empire, which not only disorganised the administration but also sapped any feelings of loyalty that might have developed to the new state and its ruler. Therein lay much of the weakness of Napoleon’s system: he undermined the authority of the siblings he placed on thrones by treating them as his lieutenants, yet out of a combination of fondness, family solidarity, and the inability to put anyone more trustworthy in their place, was unable to control or discipline them.^[8]

There was an inherent contradiction at the heart of the whole Napoleonic imperium: its mission was to enlighten, liberate, and modernise. Feudalism was swept away, along with all disabilities imposed by guilds and corporations, Jews were liberated, and all forms of servitude abolished, yet new hierarchies were created and political constraints imposed on the economy. Since most of the inhabitants of the Continent recognised only monarchy as a principle of government, Napoleon abandoned republican models in favour of imperial and royal ones, with all their trappings of titles, honours, decorations, and courts. In August 1811 he would institute an Ordre de la Réunion, intended to bind prominent people from all parts of the French dominion into a confraternity — which necessarily excluded all the inhabitants of Napoleonic Europe who did not belong to his newly created elite.

What undermined the whole enterprise, particularly in Germany, was that while the benefits of emancipation, equality before the law, and a functioning administration based on a solid constitution, not to mention the spread of education for all, were generally appreciated, those who had bestowed them were increasingly resented for their arrogance and their financial demands. As Jacques Beugnot, who had been sent to Dusseldorf to run the grand duchy of Berg after the generally popular Murat had moved to Naples, noted, he and other French officials in Germany were in the same positions as proconsuls in the Roman Empire. ‘Do not forget that in the states of the King of Westphalia you are the minister of the Emperor,’ the finance minister Gaudin reminded Beugnot as he set off on his mission in 1807. ‘His Majesty is very keen that you should not lose sight of that.’^[9]

The situation was not much better in those states of the Confederation of the Rhine ruled by their own sovereigns. While the people were emancipated and constitutions brought in, the process allowed the rulers to sweep away anachronistic rights and exemptions and gave them far more power than they had enjoyed hitherto. Liberated from their Habsburg overlords, they now had armies, and many had been promoted in status, while their subjects gained little. And with time, the rulers too began to resent the constant demands from Napoleon for money and troops. Something which affected all the areas outside France, whether they were kingdoms governed by one of Napoleon’s siblings or allied states, was Napoleon’s stationing of French troops there. The commanders tended to behave as though they were in conquered territory, helping themselves to what they needed, behaving badly and ignoring or even browbeating local officials. As Rapp once said to Napoleon, ‘Unfortunately, Sire, we do a lot of damage as allies.’^[10]

They did a great deal more damage in the case of Prussia, which was not an ally, and which had been subjected after Tilsit to humiliating conditions. It was obliged to pay a levy of 600 million francs to France in penalties for having started the war, and to support a French army of occupation numbering 150,000 men and 50,000 horses. French military authorities supervised the administration of the country, sucking more money out and reducing much of the population to poverty and even starvation. Houses in towns and villages were abandoned, thousands of beggars wandered the land, and suicides were common. Originally welcomed as a liberator, by 1809 Napoleon was seen as an oppressor. Resentment of all things French grew, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour was referred to as ‘the sign of the Beast’ in some quarters. Young men dreamed of revenge.^[11]

All those who for one reason or another hated French rule or Napoleon looked to Spain, where the outbreak of variously motivated violence provoked by French intervention coalesced around the symbols of God and Ferdinand. Wishful thinking turned the ‘little war’, guerrilla, waged by small regular units and armed bands against the French into an archetype; in the popular imagination all over Europe as far as Russia, the figure of the heroic guerrillero assumed mythical proportions, arousing the enthusiasm of conservative Catholics and revolutionaries alike, who dreamed of emulating him. In Prussia many young men joined the Tugendbund, the ‘League of Virtue’, to prepare themselves and Prussian society for the struggle to liberate Germany from the Napoleonic stranglehold. The extent to which Napoleon’s credibility as a liberator had fallen can be gauged from the failure of Augereau’s attempt to play the anti-Spanish card in Catalonia, usually open to suggestions of separatism.

The situation in Spain had actually shifted in favour of the French. Joseph had re-entered Madrid on 22 January, and ignoring his brother’s advice to act with firmness, he played to Spanish national feelings by attending mass every day, appointing Spaniards to key posts and indulging local customs. He created a functioning administration and gradually built up a body of adherents among Spaniards who wished to modernise their country. He even managed to raise Spanish regiments which demonstrated a modicum of loyalty to him. The area under his control expanded, and the first burst of insurgency subsided. Saragossa had fallen to the French on 20 February, and Soult had taken Oporto on 27 March. Victor defeated a Spanish army at Medellin on the following day, and Suchet managed to pacify Aragon.

But there was no unity of command, as none of the commanders in the field paid any attention to orders issued by Joseph or his commander-in-chief, General Jourdan. Napoleon had encouraged a spirit of emulation among his marshals which had turned into rivalry, and they were not disposed to cooperate, as each tried to wrongfoot the other. The situation was particularly bad between Ney and Soult, whose mutual animosity dated back to their service on the Rhine in the 1790s. General Wellesley outmanoeuvred Soult and Victor, broke out of Portugal, and marched into Spain. He scored a minor success at Talavera at the end of July before being forced to retreat back into Portugal. After a French victory at Almonacid two weeks later, things began to look good for the French. A victory by Soult at Ocaña in November would open up Andalucia, and by the following spring the French were in control of most of the country.

Wellesley showed himself to be the equal of Napoleon in terms of propaganda, sending home a report of Talavera representing it as a great victory which was printed in the British press. This came to Napoleon’s notice in Vienna, and he fumed at the incompetence of his brother and the commanders in the field. An officer sent by Joseph explained that the report in the British press was exaggerated, listing as regimental colours and eagles what were only guidons, and pointed out that all the eagles were still in French hands, but Napoleon would have none of it. He had little faith in his brother’s capabilities. His ambassador in Madrid, Antoine de Laforest, disliked Joseph and retailed what he knew his imperial master would like to hear. Each of the commanders also criticised Joseph, as well as each other, in their reports. Joseph’s attempts to explain the realities of the situation and justify his policy make painful reading. Napoleon dismissed his arguments, ignored his request to be allowed to abdicate, and stopped answering his letters altogether.^[12]

This silence should have been caused by a period of reflection. Cambacérès had written after Essling informing Napoleon, with all the emollient tact that had kept him in office so long, that public opinion in Paris did not reflect his triumphs, and that people did not feel they were worth the cost in blood. He added that there was anxiety at the possibility of his being killed, but made it clear that there was much discontent at the continuing war, the dispiriting news from Spain and a deteriorating economic climate. He received in reply what he described as ‘a rather dry letter’ demanding more specific information. In his next report Cambacérès could not hide that there was also much criticism of his treatment of the Pope.^[13]

It had long been Napoleon’s conviction that France’s security rested on denying other powers influence in Italy and the Mediterranean and that the Papal States represented a strategic security risk for the kingdoms of Naples and Italy. As all subsequent rulers of Italy would accept, logic demanded they be liquidated. Logic was reinforced in Napoleon’s view by the fact that the College of Cardinals was mostly made up of aristocrats sympathetic to every anti-Napoleonic coalition and that Rome had become a refuge for many of his enemies.

He also believed that the clergy should be loyal citizens of the state and politically neutral. Since most of them were his subjects, they should obey him, yet the Pope exercised a rival authority over them, inspiring them to resist some of his arrangements, which he found intolerable. He could not or would not see that there were some measures which the Pope could not sanction on theological grounds, which is why he opposed the introduction of the Code into the Papal States. As Napoleon saw it, the Pope was using spiritual weapons in defence of his temporal interests, which justified disarming him by confiscating these.^[14]

Shortly after reaching Vienna, on 17 May, Napoleon ordered the Papal States’ incorporation into the French Empire. He justified this by arguing that the Pope had only acquired temporal power through the generosity of Napoleon’s ‘august predecessor’ Charlemagne and that he now no longer required it.^[15]

In response, on 10 June the Pope issued a bull excommunicating all the despoilers of the Holy See. Just in case he might be in any doubt, two days later he wrote to Napoleon informing him that he had been excommunicated and anathemised. Napoleon made light of this but sent orders to the commander on the spot, General Miollis, to deal severely with the pontiff, without specifying what he meant. On the night of 6 July Miollis sent General Radet to Rome. Radet entered the Castel Sant’Angelo, seized the Pope, bundled him and Cardinal Pacca into a travelling coach, and drove them off under escort of gendarmes to Genoa and thence to Grenoble, where they were held incommunicado. Napoleon was annoyed when he heard of this, saying the Pope should have been left in peace in Rome, but concluded that ‘what is done is done’; he was not going to back down. On the pages of Le Moniteur he lectured that Christ had preached poverty and rejected temporal power, quoting His saying that His kingdom was not of this world, and the passage about rendering unto Caesar. But the good work of the Concordat had been undone, and royalist sentiment revived in France. His actions also alienated public opinion throughout Catholic southern Germany, which included his allies Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, and Saxony, in Poland and Italy, and inflamed the situation further in Spain.^[16]

Many of Napoleon’s oldest supporters were growing anxious at the turn events were taking, and some of his closest collaborators, even among the military, were beginning to have their doubts. There was criticism of his conduct of the last campaign, and particularly of Wagram, as well as anxiety at the cost in life. Napoleon relied more and more on brute force and artillery — an estimated 96,000 shots were fired by the French at Wagram.^[17]

As he relied on tactics and movement for his successes, Napoleon saw little reason to innovate equipment. While other armies perfected theirs — the Prussians brought in a slicer on their muskets which saved the time taken biting off the top of the cartridge with one’s teeth and increased firepower, the British brought in rifles which increased accuracy — the French stuck with the musket model of 1777. While the British developed rockets and the Russians sophisticated gunsights, the French stuck with the Gribeauval cannon designed in 1765. Although Napoleon founded officers’ schools at Fontainebleau, La Flèche, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, promotion still operated on the revolutionary principle of peer selection, with Napoleon nominating officers after a battle on the recommendation of their comrades, which often yielded poor results. And, as the commander of one light infantry regiment noted, awarding the Legion of Honour was often counterproductive, as it gave the recipient a pension to protect, an incentive to avoid danger.^[18]

While his enemies learned from him, Napoleon failed to learn from them. After the battle of Heilsberg in 1807, Lannes commented that the Russians were beginning to fight better, and Napoleon agreed, allegedly adding that he was teaching them lessons that would one day make them his masters. It was not just a question of weapons and tactics. Many on the French side were astonished as they surveyed the battlefield of Eylau to see Russian dead lying in ranks as they had stood and fought, and at Friedland Russian soldiers were seen to throw themselves in the river and risk drowning rather than surrender. Napoleon paid no attention to this, nor to the other lessons of the campaign of 1806–07.^[19]

He failed to take into account that the tactics he had used in his Italian and south German campaigns, where the theatre was relatively small, densely populated, rich in provender, and easily crossed on relatively good roads, were entirely inappropriate to the open spaces and quagmires that passed for roads in Poland and Russia. More important, he had failed to take stock of another factor which he had not encountered before.

Until then he had commanded troops motivated by national feeling or local loyalties against imperial or royal armies of drafted peasants or professional soldiers who differed little from mercenaries. This had gradually been reversed. By 1807 the Grande Armée contained contingents of Poles, Germans, and Italians, and even the French soldiers were beginning to question what they were doing so far from home, while the Russian army he faced was composed of determined Russian peasants doggedly defending theirs. This reversal became more pronounced over the next two years, in the fighting against a more nationally conscious Austrian army, and above all against the Spanish regulars, not to mention the guerrilleros. Just as he had mutated from liberator into oppressor, so his troops had become agents of imperial power while their adversaries had changed roles from being the upholders of feudalism to that of defenders of the people.

According to one member of the Council of State, Achille de Broglie, at Vienna after Wagram all the generals and marshals longed for peace, ‘cursing their master’ and contemplating the future with ‘great apprehension’. Many were astonishingly outspoken. ‘He’s a coward, a cheat, a liar,’ General Vandamme burst out in front of his comrades. Admiral Decrès did not mince his words either. ‘The Emperor is mad, completely mad, and he’ll send us all, every one of us head over heels and it’ll all end in an appalling catastrophe,’ he said to Marmont. There were plenty more who shared such views.^[20]

Napoleon ignored them, resorting as he increasingly did to cynicism. During the Wagram campaign he turned to General Mathieu Dumas, who had fought for the American as well as the French Revolution, and asked him whether he was ‘one of those idiots who still believed in liberty’. When Dumas affirmed that he was, Napoleon told him he was deceiving himself and that he must be driven by personal ambition like everyone else. ‘Look at Masséna,’ he went on. ‘He has acquired enough glory and honours, but he’s not content: he wants to be a prince like Murat and Bernadotte, he’s ready to go out tomorrow and get himself killed just to be made a prince.’ Masséna did accept the title of prince of Essling, but he and his fellow marshals were appalled when Napoleon floated the idea of instituting a new military order of the Three Golden Fleeces.^[21]

Napoleon spent the next two months at Schönbrunn, where he made himself at home, even erecting a couple of obelisks capped with imperial eagles at the entrance. He held parades which people would drive out of Vienna to watch, as they were both splendid and theatrical. Napoleon would speak to the soldiers, inspect their knapsacks and question them about their experiences. While reviewing a pontoon company he went up to one caisson, asked what was inside, and after having its contents listed in detail, had it opened and personally counted the axes, saws, bolts, nails, and other equipment, even climbing up onto the wheel to inspect the inside, to the delight of soldiers and onlookers. He would make regiments execute various manoeuvres and adopt battle formation, praising or criticising, and personally correcting. When the splendidly uniformed Polish Chevau-Légers of the Guard broke ranks around a pile of building materials blocking the entrance to the parade ground, he flew into a rage and ordered them off, snapping, to the delight of onlookers, ‘That lot are good for nothing except fighting!’^[22]

In the evenings there were theatrical performances, usually Italian opera, which Napoleon found ‘rather mediocre’. There was also more intimate entertainment. Soon after reaching Schönbrunn, before Essling, he had written to Maria Walewska inviting her to join him. While he waited, he distracted himself with what was noted down in the accounts of his cassette as ‘Viennese adventures’. When Walewska arrived, Duroc installed her in a cottage in the village of Mödling a short distance from Schönbrunn, and Napoleon’s valet Constant would come to collect her at night. In mid-August he developed a persistent rash on his neck, so he summoned Corvisart from Paris. The rash had largely cleared up by the time he arrived, and it may be that the reason for the summons was not the rash, but to check whether, as Maria thought, she was pregnant, which Corvisart confirmed. Yet in his letters to Josephine, Napoleon made out that he was bored and looked forward to getting back to Paris, and to her, expressing himself with his usual hints of intimacy.^[23]

During one of the parades at Schönbrunn, on 12 October, a young man approached him and managed to get quite close before Rapp, noticing that he had a hand in his pocket, ordered a gendarme to arrest him. He was found to be clutching a kitchen knife with which he meant to murder Napoleon. When questioned, he said he would only talk to the emperor himself. Intrigued, Napoleon interviewed him. Friedrich Staps, the seventeen-year-old son of a pastor, had decided to assassinate Napoleon for the harm he was doing to Germany. Napoleon could not understand him and concluded that he was mad. He passed him to Corvisart, who examined him and declared him to be quite sane. Napoleon told him that if he apologised he would be forgiven and allowed to go free, but the young man said that would be a mistake, as he would only try again. Napoleon was nonplussed and had him shot.^[24]

On 16 August Cambacérès wrote reporting that Napoleon’s birthday had been celebrated in Paris with ‘prodigious’ attendance. But his letter crossed one from Vienna with a stricture on his behaviour over something he had viewed as no more than a local difficulty, but which had caused alarm in his unquiet master.^[25]

While Britain had only contributed a modest subsidy to Austria’s war effort, it did attempt to take advantage of Napoleon’s absence, and on 7 July, just as the battle of Wagram was drawing to a close, a British force of 1,000 men landed at Cuxhaven at the mouth of the river Weser. It was quickly contained and forced to re-embark by Westphalian troops, but on 30 July a larger force landed on the island of Walcheren in the Scheldt estuary, took the port of Flushing and threatened Antwerp.

As the minister of the interior Émmanuel Crétet was ill and Cambacérès dithered, it fell to Fouché to deal with the threat. He called out the National Guard and delegated the only marshal of France at hand, Bernadotte, to take command of the troops in the area, which he did, arriving at Antwerp on 13 August. Bernadotte had left the battlefield of Wagram in disgrace, and on hearing of the nomination a furious Napoleon despatched Bessières to take over from him. The British, incompetently led and suffering from swamp fever, re-embarked a few days after his arrival and sailed away.

As minister of police, Fouché was aware of the discontent simmering in various quarters and worried by the continuous landings in France of royalist agents from England. There were also occasional raids by the British on coastal forts, possibly rehearsals for an invasion to coincide with a royalist rising. News of the substantial landing on Walcheren may have caused him to overreact in calling out the National Guard. To Napoleon in Vienna it looked as though he was providing himself with the necessary force to take over Paris, and the connection with Bernadotte conjured sinister thoughts, but what seems to have particularly annoyed him was the ineffectual role of Cambacérès in the crisis.^[26]

The Treaty of Vienna was signed on 14 October. The terms were harsh, but not as drastic as Napoleon had originally intended. His first thought had been to force Francis to abdicate in favour of his brother Ferdinand and to break up the empire by creating an independent kingdom of Hungary and using other provinces to cement his failing alliance with Russia. The negotiations, conducted by Metternich and Champagny, resulted in Austria losing access to the sea by the cession of Trieste, Ragusa, Istria, Fiume, and Carniola, which were added to French possessions along the Dalmatian coast to make up the new department of Illyria. Austria also lost Salzburg, which went to Bavaria, and Galicia, which was divided between the grand duchy of Warsaw and Russia. In all, Austria lost about three and a half million subjects. She also had to reduce her army to 150,000 and pay a heavy indemnity. Two days after the signature of the treaty, Napoleon left Schönbrunn for Paris.

He travelled by easy stages, pausing for two days at Nymphenburg to go hunting with a grateful King of Bavaria and flirt with his wife, to whom he had taken a fancy. He also stopped at Stuttgart to visit the King of Württemberg, though his visit there was more Napoleonic — he arrived at seven o’clock in the morning and left at ten the same evening, after having attended a play in the court theatre. On the evening of 26 October he was back at Fontainebleau, where the following morning he gave Fouché a dressing-down. He spent the best part of the next three weeks there, stag-hunting on horseback and shooting, and enjoying a dalliance with a plump little blonde lady-in-waiting to Pauline, Christine Ghilini. She had only recently been married to a Piedmontese nobleman, so she resisted his advances at first, but Pauline wore her down, and although she could be difficult and moody, the affair would go on for a couple of months. Never ungenerous, Napoleon granted her father a title.^[27]

He had for some time been coming round to the view that he must divorce Josephine but hesitated to make the move, perhaps because he had got used to her and feared being alone. She was always sensible when he sought her advice. She understood him and the world they lived in — and from where they had come. He was a man of habit, and he had passed his fortieth birthday. There had been no more talk of divorce during the first half of 1808, although he was already considering marrying a Russian princess. Josephine’s letters reveal that their relations had been particularly close during the time they spent at Bayonne and in the autumn of 1808. It was not until a full year later, on the evening of 30 November 1809, that he openly broached the subject with her at the Tuileries. She burst into tears, then collapsed, writhing in a paroxysm, and appeared to lose consciousness. Napoleon called Bausset, who had been in the next room, and together they carried her down to her bedroom.^[28]

The process of divorcing Josephine was not going to be easy. The Code Napoléon permitted divorce by mutual consent only up to the age of forty-five, which she had passed, while the Statutes of the Imperial House which he had invented himself forbade it outright. The matter was handed over to Cambacérès to sort out, which he accomplished with the legal acrobatics he excelled at. Louis, who had taken the opportunity to seek permission to divorce Hortense, was told he could not as there were no grounds for it.^[29]

Meanwhile, life went on as usual, and the morning after her fainting fit Josephine presided over a reception in honour of the kings of Naples, Württemberg, and Holland who had come to Paris to celebrate the peace with Austria. On 3 December there was a Te Deum at Notre Dame, the following day a reception at the Hôtel de Ville followed by a banquet, a concert, and a ball at the Tuileries. The banquet was a tense affair, with Napoleon in full coronation robes with his plumed hat on his head looking uneasy and impatient, while Josephine sat opposite covered in diamonds looking as though she might faint at any moment. She would not have enjoyed the presence of Letizia, Caroline, and Pauline, who had never looked happier. Whether she received much comfort from her husband is doubtful, as he spent the night of 5 December with another. Once he had decided on the divorce, he had begun to philander more, which Hortense saw as a means of both making himself more interesting to women and of fortifying himself against the forthcoming separation. ‘His mind was made up, but his heart still hesitated,’ she wrote. ‘He was trying to distract it elsewhere.’ He had broken down and wept when he had informed her of his intention to divorce her mother. On 8 December Eugène arrived in Paris and the divorce was discussed with him and Josephine by Napoleon. Three days after that she had to take her place at Napoleon’s side at a party at Berthier’s estate of Grosbois.^[30]

On 15 December, at a special meeting attended by all the family members currently in Paris — Letizia, Louis and Hortense, Jérôme and Catherine, Joseph’s wife Julie, Eugène, Murat and Caroline, and Pauline — in the presence of Cambacérès and the secretary of state for the Imperial House, Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, Napoleon and Josephine each read out prepared texts announcing their wish to divorce, and stating their reasons. The minutes of the meeting taken by Regnaud were signed by those present and passed to the privy council, which that same evening drew up the project of a senatus-consulte. This was presented to the Senate the following day by Regnaud. The meeting was presided over by Cambacérès, and Josephine’s son, Eugène, read out the family’s wish that ‘the founder of this fourth dynasty should grow old surrounded by direct descendants’. There was no debate, and the senatus-consulte was passed by seventy-six votes, with seven against and four abstentions. The same day, Josephine left the Tuileries.^[31]

There then arose the delicate matter of annulling the religious marriage. There could be no question of involving the Pope, who was in solitary confinement at Grenoble. Cambacérès argued that the ceremony conducted by Cardinal Fesch had been ‘clandestine’, since there had been no witnesses present, and was therefore invalid. This could be attested by the diocesan authorities in Paris, and the marriage being invalid, there was no need of an annulment. The diocesan council ruled accordingly, fining Napoleon six francs (to be distributed to the poor) for having contracted an illegal marriage. The ruling was endorsed by a bishop who had no authority, since he had not been approved in office by the Pope.^[32]

Two days after she drove away from the Tuileries, Napoleon dined with Josephine at Trianon. ‘My love, I found you weaker today than you should be,’ he wrote afterward. ‘You have shown courage, and you must find enough to support you and not to let yourself go to a fatal melancholy, and to be content, and above all to keep up your health, which is so precious to me.’ He wrote frequently, expressing his concern and professing his enduring love for her. He visited her at Malmaison on 24 December, and she dined with him at Trianon the following day. She could barely eat and looked as though she were about to faint. Hortense, who was present, saw Napoleon wipe away his tears more than once. When he returned to the Tuileries three days later he found the palace empty without her and wrote saying he felt lonely there.^[33]

He was determined to treat her well. She retained her titles and arms as Imperial Majesty. He gave her the Élysée Palace in Paris, Malmaison, and the château of Navarre near Évreux. She had a settlement on the civil list of 2 million francs per annum, and he threw in another million from his private chest. When it came to his notice that people were keeping away from her he made it plain that such behaviour would incur his displeasure.^[34]