: Napoleon and his court by Forester C S Cecil Scott - Napoleon I Emperor of the French 1769-1821 Friends and associates; France Court and courtiers History 19th century; Napoleon I Emperor of the French 1769-1821 Relations with courts and courtiers

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Napoleon and His Court

THERE was a time when France extended to the Baltic, the Ebro and the Tiber; when the term "Frenchmen" included Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Germans and even a few stray Danes, Poles and Letts; when Rome was the second city of France, and Amsterdam the third; when the Emperor of the French was also King of Italy and Mediator of Switzerland; when one of his brothers was King of Spain, another, King of Westphalia, and one of his generals King of Naples; when all Germany was ruled by his vassals; when Poland was a French province in all but name; when Austria was the French Emperor's subservient ally; and when one of his less successful generals had just been appointed ruler of Sweden.

Never, since the days of the Roman Empire, had one man held so much power, and never in all history has so much power been as rapidly acquired or as rapidly lost. In ten years Napoleon rose from the obscurity of a disgraced artillery officer to the dignity of the most powerful ruler in the world; in ten more he was a despised fugitive flying for his life from his enemies.

It is difficult for us nowadays to visualize such a state of affairs. To the people of that time life must have appeared like a wild nightmare, as impossibly logical as a lunatic's dream. There seems to have been no doubt anywhere that the frantic hypertrophy could not last, and yet when the end was clearly at hand hardly a soul perceived its approach.

There was only one nation of Europe which escaped the mesmerism of the man in the grey coat, and that was the British. It was only in Britain that they did not speak of him with bated breath as "the Emperor," and remained undaunted by his monstrous power and ruthless energy. To the English he was not His Imperial and Royal Majesty, Napoleon, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, and Mediator of the Helvetian Republic. No, the English thought of him merely as Boney, a fantastic figment of the imagination of the other peoples of the world, who were of course a queer lot with unaccountable fears and superstitions.

But this Boney, this Corsican Ogre, incredible though he was, loomed appallingly large upon the horizon. There were beacons all round the coast in case he landed; his privateers were the scourge of shipping; prices were at famine point and business was parlous on account of his activities; the militia was embodied and there was a ceaseless drain of recruits into the army; every village mourned the loss of a son who had enlisted and whose life had been thrown away in some harebrained expedition into ill-defined foreign parts. And yet on the other hand there were considerations which gave an aspect of unreality to the whole menace. England was constantly victorious at sea, and though Nelson might be mourned the glory of Trafalgar and the Nile cast the possibility of invasion into insignificance. The English people were confident that on land as well they would beat the French at every encounter. Not for nothing were Agincourt and Minden blazoned on English history, and Alexandria and Maida supplied whatever confirmation might be desired. Such disasters as that at Buenos Ayres were forgotten; confidence ran high. When Wellington gained a victory by which all Portugal was cleared of the French at one blow the public annoyance that even greater results had not been achieved, that the whole French army had not been captured, was extreme. There were few English people who did not think that, should Napoleon by some freak of fortune land in England, the veterans of Austerlitz and the almost legendary Imperial Guard would be routed by the militia and the hasty levies of the countryside. There was nothing which could drive the realities of war hard home into the public mind. If prices were high, then as compensation colonies fell into our hands, employment was fairly good, and the business of manufacturing arms and equipment was simply booming. Besides, intercourse with the Continent was not entirely cut off for the smugglers worked busily and successfully, and French lace and French fashions and French brandy circulated freely. It was hard for the average Englishman to realize that the Corsican Ogre was not merely an ogre, especially as the fantastic cartoons of the period and the wild legends which were current were more fitted to grace a child's fairy-tale than to depict the most formidable enemy England had yet encountered.

On the mainland of Europe the picture was utterly reversed. The reality of war was only too obvious. The Emperor was no mere cartoonist's figure drawn with disgusting detail. They had seen him; he had ridden into their capitals on his white horse in the midst of the army which had shattered their proud battalions over and over again. His power was terrible and his vengeance was swift. In half the countries of Europe a chance word might result in the careless speaker being flung next day into an unknown dungeon. His armies swarmed everywhere, and wherever they went they left a trail of desolation behind them. The peasants were starved and the landowners were ruined, to pay the enormous taxes which the indemnities he imposed demanded. The mass of the people, who had once hailed the great conqueror because his arrival meant their delivery from feudalism, now found themselves crushed under a despotism ten times more exacting. The Emperor was very real to them. Many of them now served new rulers who had been imposed upon them by him, and him alone. Wherever he appeared he was attended by a train of subject kings to whom his wish was law. At his word an Italian might find himself a Frenchman, or an Austrian a Bavarian. And this was no mere distinction without a difference. Once upon a time the peasant classes cared little about the politics of their rulers, or even about which ruler they served. The fate of a professional army was a royal, not a national concern. But now every able-bodied man found himself in the ranks. Badeners fought Portuguese on the question as to whether a Frenchman should rule Spain, and a hundred thousand Germans perished in the northern snows because the Emperor of the French wished to exclude English goods from Russian ports. The imposition was monstrous, and in consequence the question of nationality became of supreme importance. If a country made war upon Napoleon every citizen of that country now realized that defeat meant the continuance of a slavery as exasperating as it was degrading. The fact that their eventual victory left them very little freer does not enter into this argument. It is sufficient to say that Napoleon was regarded on the Continent with an interest agonizing in its intensity, and that this interest was nourished in a much more substantial fashion than prevailed in England.

It has been maintained and has infected all nationalities alike. The ability of the French nation to write telling memoirs is nowhere better displayed than in the period of the Empire. A large amount of very fascinating material was produced, by which the history of the period, which had previously been grossly distorted, was corrected and balanced. Details were worked out with an elaboration all too rare. The events in themselves were so exceedingly interesting, and the books about them were so well written, that it can hardly be considered surprising that more and more attention was turned towards the Empire. In addition, the fascinating personality of the Emperor concentrated and specialized the attention. More important than all, since events of huge importance turned merely upon his own whims and predilections, it was necessary to analyse and to examine the nature of the man who had this vast responsibility. It has become fashionable to inquire into every detail of his life, and there has grown up an enormous literature about him. Most of these books contain a fair amount of truth, but they nearly all contain a high proportion of lies. Napoleon himself was a good liar, but by now he is much more lied about than lying.

That coffee legend, for instance. Nine books on Napoleon out of ten say that he was accustomed to drinking ten, twenty, even thirty cups of coffee a day. Napoleon drinking coffee is as familiar a figure to us as Sherlock Holmes injecting morphine, but both figures are equally apocryphal. The best authorities, people who really knew, are unanimous in saying that he never drank more than three cups a day. De Bausset, who was a Prefect of the Palace, and in charge of such arrangements, distinctly says he took only two, and goes out of his way to deny the rumours to the contrary which were already circulating. This is but one example out of many; perhaps we shall meet with others later on.

It is necessary first to sketch Napoleon's career in brief, for the sake of later reference. The merest outline will suffice.

So far, nothing but glory and progress; but from now on, nothing but false steps and failure. First, the overrunning of Spain and the proclamation of Joseph as King of Spain. This brought Napoleon into contact with the enmity of a people instead of that merely of a king. It gave England a chance of effective military intervention, and it shook the world's belief in the invulnerability of the Colossus by the defeats of Vimiero and Baylen. Austria made another effort for freedom in 1809, to submit tamely, after one victory and two defeats, when the game was by no means entirely lost. Hence followed further annexations and maltreatment. Then came blunder after blunder, while the Empire sagged through its sheer dead weight. The divorce of Josephine lost him the sympathy of the fervent Catholics and of the sentimentalists. The marriage with Marie Louise lost him the support of the republicans and of Russia. He quarrelled with his brother Louis, drove him from the country and annexed Holland. He tried to direct the Spanish war from Paris, with bad results. Annexation followed annexation in his attempt to shut the coasts to English trade. The Empire was gorged and surfeited, but Napoleon was inevitably forced to further action. Having irritated each other past bearing, he and Alexander of Russia drifted into war, and the snows of Russia swallowed up what few fragments of the old Grand Army had been spared from the Spanish and Danube campaigns. It was like a blow delivered by a dazed boxer--powerful, but ill-directed and easily avoided, so that the striker overbalances by his own momentum. Napoleon struggled once more to his feet. In 1813 he summoned to the eagles every Frenchman capable of bearing arms. But one by one his friends turned against him. Prussia, Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, each in turn joined the ranks of his enemies. His victories of L?tzen, Bautzen and Dresden were of no avail. At Leipzig his army was shattered; he fought on desperately for a few more months, but at last he had to submit and abdicate.

A further effort after his escape from Elba ended with the disaster of Waterloo, and merely led to the last tragedy of St. Helena.

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