GUEST POST BY PHILIP MANSEL: NAPOLÉON’S MYTH UNCOVERED
As we celebrated the great battle of Waterloo – disregarding who won or who lost it –, a special figure came to mind: Napoléon Bonaparte. But who actually was this singular character? A revolutionary? A modernist? Or rather a hidden monarch? Dr. Philip Mansel, who unravels the Emperor’s myth in his new book The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon, gave us a recap.
Napoléon: Relaunching Monarchy in the Heart of the French Republic, by Dr. Philip Mansel
Napoleon I was not a revolutionary, nor ‘the world soul on horseback’ as the German philosopher Hegel wrote, but a monarch, obsessed with rank, splendour and his own dynasty. The revolution appeared to have been a search for liberty, equality and fraternity. It had also been an interlude caused by the failures of Louis XVI and his ministers, the outbreak of war and the radicalism of the assemblies. Bonaparte fulfilled the prophecy of the writer Rivarol: ‘either the king will have an army or the army will have a king’.
Napoleon wanted more palaces and more etiquette, and was more autocratic, than the Bourbons. He had over 100 chamberlains, and a total of around 3,000 men in his household, whereas Louis XVI had had only four First Gentlemen of the Chamber, and around 2,000 in his household. Most of his courtiers were nobles like his Grand Chamberlain and Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, son of a lady in waiting of Marie Antoinette. He was later disgraced, and denounced by the Emperor, in one of his many public rages, as ‘a lump of shit in a silk stocking’. By 1804 Napoleon had created a monarchy, a dynasty, and a court. If his main palaces, the Tuileries beside the Louvre, and Saint Cloud to the west of Paris, had not been destroyed during the Franco-Prussian war and the Commune in 1870-1, his court would be as famous as Louis XIV’s.
Napoleon was more insecure than his victories and his court made him appear. There were always Frenchmen planning his downfall. By 1814, thanks to war, conscription and a deteriorating economy he was extremely unpopular. He had become a tyrant who told courtiers whom they should marry and to which schools to send their children. He censored Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael. In January 1814, when speakers in the Chamber of Representatives demanded peace, he was infuriated. At a reception in the Tuileries palace, he declared: ‘Everything resides in the throne. I alone represent the people.’ He believed that France needed him more than he needed France.
On 12 March the port of Bordeaux opened its gates to a Bourbon prince the Duc d’Angouleme and British troops. On 31 March, after Paris surrendered, Parisians cheered the victorious allied army as it entered their city under Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William III of Prussia. The disgraced Grand Chamberlain Talleyrand organised the deposition of Napoleon by the Senate and the proclamation of the brother of Louis XVI, as King Louis XVIII. There were also popular risings against Napoleon in Marseille and Milan. The claims of Napoleon’s son the King of Rome were forgotten.
In June 1815, during the Hundred Days, he alienated opinion by preferring to wear the embroidered ‘Petit Costume de l’Empereur’, rather than the uniform of the Paris National Guard. He insisted on sending messages to the Chamber of Representatives through his chamberlains, rather than through a responsible minister. After Waterloo, it voted his deposition.
Napoleon left France smaller and weaker – by the loss of one million men – than he found it. Not one Napoleonic monarchy, constitution or frontier survived his downfall. Even his army was dissolved after Waterloo. A new one, the basis of the French army of the nineteenth century, was formed by Louis XVIII. The Napoleonic legend was exactly that – legend, not reality.
Napoleon did, however, leave a dynasty, with a sense of rank and entitlement. In exile after 1815 they continued to behave as if they were still on the throne. Henry Fox wrote of Princess Pauline in 1823: ‘her manner and her reception could not have been more royal if Napoleon was still on the throne he had once made illustrious by possessing.’ In 1828, he found that Jerome-Napoleon, former King of Westphalia, kept ‘certainly the best mounted and most princely looking establishment’ in Rome, and ‘will not go out where he is not received as a king’. As they had at the Tuileries, in Rome the Bonapartes quarrelled over who had the right to sit in an armchair at ‘family dinners’; in the end Madame Mere stopped giving them.
Philip Mansel
For more information about The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon please click here to go to the publisher's website.