The Age of Napoleon Page 2

  1. Skeptic’s Progress

  2. Logic as Metaphysics

  3. Mind

  4. Morality, Law, and the State

  5. History

  6. Death and Return

  Chapter XXXIII. AROUND THE HEARTLAND: 1789–1812

  I. Switzerland

  II. Sweden

  III. Denmark

  IV. Poland

  V. Turkey in Europe

  Chapter XXXIV. RUSSIA: 1796–1812

  I. Milieu

  II. Paul I: 1796–1801

  III. The Education of an Emperor

  IV. The Young Czar: 1801–04

  V. The Jews under Alexander

  VI. Russian Art

  VII. Russian Literature

  VIII. Alexander and Napoleon: 1805–12

  BOOK V: FINALE: 1811–15

  Chapter XXXV. TO MOSCOW: 1811–15

  I. The Continental Blockade

  II. France in Depression: 1811

  III. Preface to War: 1811–12

  IV. The Road to Moscow: June 26-September 14, 1812

  V. The Burning of Moscow: September 15–19, 1812

  VI. The Way Back: October 19-November 28, 1812

  Chapter XXXVI. TO ELBA: 1813–14

  I. To Berlin

  II. To Prague

  III. To the Rhine

  IV. To the Breaking Point

  V. To Paris

  VI. To Peace

  Chapter XXXVII. TO WATERLOO: 1814–15

  I. Louis XVIII

  II. The Congress of Vienna: September, 1814-June, 1815

  III. Elba

  IV. The Incredible Journey: March 1–20, 1815

  V. Rebuilding

  VI. The Last Campaign

  1. June 15, 1815: Belgium

  2. June 16: Ligny

  3. June 17: Rain

  4. Sunday, June 18: Waterloo

  Chapter XXXVIII. TO ST. HELENA

  I. The Second Abdication: June 22, 1815

  II. The Second Restoration: July 7, 1815

  III. Surrender: July 4-August 8, 1815

  Chapter XXXIX. TO THE END

  I. St. Helena

  II. Sir Hudson Lowe

  III. The Great Companions

  IV. The Great Dictator

  V. The Last Battle

  Chapter XL. AFTERWARD: 1815–40

  I. The Family

  II. Homecoming

  III. Perspective

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE

  NOTES

  INDEX

  List of Illustrations

  THE page numbers following the captions refer to discussions in the text of the subject or the artist, or sometimes both.

  Part I. This section follows page 156

  FIG. 1-JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: Unfinished Portrait of Bonaparte

  FIG. 2-ENGRAVING AFTER A DAGUERREOTYPE: The Palace of Versailles

  FIG. 3-ENGRAVING: The Destruction of the Bastille, July 14, 1789

  FIG. 4-ENGRAVING: Louis XVI

  FIG. 5-ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY CHAPPEL: Marie Antoinette

  FIG. 6-MINIATURE ON IVORY BY AVY: Vicomte Paul de Barras

  FIG. 7-SKETCH: Georges Jacques Danton, April 5, 1789

  FIG. 8-JEAN-ANTOINE HOUDON: Mirabeau

  FIG. 9-ENGRAVING BY HENRY COLBURN AFTER AN 1808 PAINTING BY FRANÇOIS GÉRARD: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord

  FIG. 10-BOZE: Jean-Paul Marat

  FIG. 11-ANTOINE-JEAN GROS: Napoleon on the Bridge at Arcole, DETAIL

  FIG. 12-STUDIO OF FRANÇOIS GÉRARD: The Empress Josephine

  FIG. 13-Napoleon’s Study at Malmaison

  FIG. 14-DAVID: Bonaparte Crossing the Alps

  FIG. 15-GÉRARD: Emperor Napoleon I in His Coronation Robes

  FIG. 16-DAVID: The Coronation of Napoleon

  FIG. 17-MME. VIGÉE-LEBRUN: Madame de Staël as Corinne

  FIG. 18-GIRODET: François-René de Chateaubriand

  FIG. 19-GÉRARD: Madame Récamier

  FIG. 20-DAVID: Self-Portrait

  FIG. 21-ENGRAVING: François-Joseph Talma

  FIG. 22-SÉVRES PLAQUE: Baron Georges-Léopold Cuvier

  FIG. 23-ENGRAVING: Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck

  FIG. 24-ENGRAVING BY B. METZEROTH: Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, Paris

  FIG. 25-ENGRAVING: Napoleon I

  FIG. 26-GÉRARD: Empress Marie Louise

  FIG. 27-WOODCUT: Edmund Kean as Hamlet

  FIG. 28-SKETCH BY C. MARTIN: J. M. W. Turner

  FIG. 29-JOHN CONSTABLE: The Hay Wain

  FIG. 30-J. M. W. TURNER: Calais Pier

  FIG. 31-ENGRAVING BY WILLIAM SHARP AFTER A PAINTING BY GEORGE ROMNEY: Thomas Paine

  FIG. 32-SKETCH: Robert Owen

  FIG. 33 -Portrait of Erasmus Darwin

  FIG. 34-ENGRAVING: Sir Humphry Davy

  FIG. 35-LITHOGRAPH AFTER A PAINTING BY JOHN OPIE: Mary Wollstonecraft

  FIG. 36-CARICATURE FROM A DRAWING BY MACHSE: William Godwin, “The Ridiculous Philosopher”

  FIG. 37-ENGRAVING BY JOHN LINNELL: Thomas Malthus

  FIG. 38-J. WATTS: Jeremy Bentham

  FIG. 39-ENGRAVING: Jane Austen

  FIG. 40-WILLIAM ALLAN: Sir Walter Scott

  FIG. 41-P. VANDYKE: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  FIG. 42-F. L. CHANTREY: Robert Southey

  FIG. 43-R. WESTALL: Lord Byron

  FIG. 44-ENGRAVING BY THOMAS LANDSEER AFTER AN 1818 DRAWING BY BENJAMIN R. HAYDON: William Wordsworth

  FIG. 45-WILLIAM BLAKE: Percy Bysshe Shelley

  FIG. 46-BLAKE: The Flight into Egypt

  Part II. This section follows page 528

  FIG. 47-SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

  FIG. 48-GEORGE ROMNEY: William Pitt the Younger

  FIG. 49-LAWRENCE: George IV as Prince Regent

  FIG. 50-ROMNEY: Lady Hamilton as Ariadne

  FIG. 51-L. F. ABBOTT: Nelson after Losing His Arm at Teneriffe

  FIG. 52-HENRY SCHEFFER: Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy

  FIG. 53-Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte

  FIG. 54-DAVID: Pope Pius VII

  FIG. 55-ENGRAVING AFTER A PAINTING BY LAWRENCE: Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich

  FIG. 56-PAINTING AFTER A PORTRAIT BY DROUAIS: Emperor Joseph II

  FIG. 57-ENGRAVING: Queen Louise of Prussia

  FIG. 58-Karl Friedrich Gauss

  FIG. 59 -Statue of Alessandro Volta

  FIG. 60-KARL GOTTHARD LANGHANS: The Brandenburg Gate

  FIG. 61-WOODCUT AFTER A DRAWING BY JOHANNES VEIT: Friedrich von Schlegel

  FIG. 62-ENGRAVING BY F. HUMPHREY: August Wilhelm von Schlegel

  FIG. 63-PORTRAIT AFTER AN 1808 PAINTING BY DAHLING: Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  FIG. 64-DRAWING: Johann Christian Friedrich von Schiller

  FIG. 65-CHARCOAL DRAWING BY GEBBERS: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, age 77

  FIG. 66-WOODCUT: Ludwig van Beethoven

  FIG. 67-JOHN CAWSE: Carl Maria von Weber

  FIG. 68-ENGRAVING BY H. P. HANSEN AFTER A PAINTING BY RIEPENHAUSEN: Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger

  FIG. 69-SKETCH: Esaias Tegnér

  FIG. 70-ENGRAVING BY X. A. VON R. CREMER AFTER A PAINTING BY GEBBERS: Hegel in His Study

  FIG. 71-ENGRAVING: The Winter Palace, St. Petersburg

  FIG. 72-GÉRARD: Czar Alexander I

  FIG. 73-ENGRAVING: Marshal Michel Ney

  FIG. 74-PAINTING AFTER AN EYEWITNESS SKETCH BY J. A. KLEIN: The Retreat from Moscow

  FIG. 75-DRAWING BY ALFRED CROQUIS: Talleyrand, author of “Palmerston, une Comédie de Deux Ans”

  FIG. 76-JEAN-BAPTISTE ISABEY: Louis XVIII

  FIG. 77-GEORGE DAWE: Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blüeher

  FIG. 78-J. JACKSON: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington

  FIG. 79-MARCHAND: View of Longwood

  FIG. 80-LITHOGRAPH BY JOSEF KRIEHUBER AFTER A PAINTING BY MORITZ MICHAEL DAFFINGER: Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstadt

  FIG. 81-Napoleon at St. Helena

  FIG. 82-Napoleon’s Tomb in the Hô
tel des Invalides, Paris

  BOOK I

  THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

  1789–99

  CHAPTER I

  The Background of Revolution

  1774–89

  I. THE FRENCH PEOPLE

  FRANCE was the most populous and prosperous nation in Europe. Russia in 1780 had 24 million inhabitants, Italy 17 million, Spain 10 million, Great Britain 9 million, Prussia 8.6 million, Austria 7.9 million, Ireland 4 million, Belgium 2.2 million, Portugal 2.1 million, Sweden 2 million, Holland 1.9 million, Switzerland 1.4 million, Denmark 800,000, Norway 700,000, France 25 million.1 Paris was the largest city in Europe, with some 650,000 inhabitants, the best-educated and most excitable in Europe.

  The people of France were divided into three orders, or classes (états—states or estates): the clergy, some 130,0002 souls; the nobility, some 400, 000; and the Tiers État, which included everybody else; the Revolution was the attempt of this economically rising but politically disadvantaged Third Estate to achieve political power and social acceptance commensurate with its growing wealth. Each of the classes was divided into subgroups or layers, so that nearly everyone could enjoy the sight of persons below him.

  The richest class was the ecclesiastical hierarchy—cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and abbots; among the poorest were the pastors and curates of the countryside; here the economic factor crossed the lines of doctrine, and in the Revolution the lower clergy joined with the commonalty against their own superiors. Monastic life had lost its lure; the Benedictines, numbering 6,434 in the France of 1770, had been reduced to 4,300 in 1790; nine orders of “religious” had been disbanded by 1780, and in 1773 the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) had been dissolved. Religion in general had declined in the French cities; in many towns the churches were half empty; and among the peasantry pagan customs and old superstitions competed actively with the doctrines and ceremonies of the Church.3 The nuns, however, were still actively devoted to teaching and nursing, and were honored by rich and poor alike. Even in that skeptical and practical age there were thousands of women, children, and men who eased the buffets of life with piety, fed their imaginations with tales of the saints, interrupted the succession of toilsome days with holyday ritual and rest, and found in religious hopes an anodyne to defeat and a refuge from bewilderment and despair.

  The state supported the Church because statesmen generally agreed that the clergy gave them indispensable aid in preserving social order. In their view the natural inequality of human endowment made inevitable an unequal distribution of wealth; it seemed important, for the safety of the possessing classes, that a corps of clerics should be maintained to provide the poor with counsels of peaceful humility and expectation of a compensating Paradise. It meant much to France that the family, buttressed with religion, remained as the basis of national stability through all vicissitudes of the state. Moreover, obedience was encouraged by belief in the divine right of kings—the divine origin of their appointment and power; the clergy inculcated this belief, and the kings felt that this myth was a precious aid to their personal security and orderly rule. So they left to the Catholic clergy almost all forms of public education; and when the growth of Protestantism in France threatened to weaken the authority and usefulness of the national Church, the Huguenots were ruthlessly expelled.

  Grateful for these services, the state allowed the Church to collect tithes and other income from each parish, and to manage the making of wills—which encouraged moribund sinners to buy promissory notes, collectible in heaven, in exchange for earthly property bequeathed to the Church. The government exempted the clergy from taxation, and contented itself with receiving, now and then, a substantial don gratuit, or free grant, from the Church. So variously privileged, the Church in France accumulated large domains, reckoned by some as a fifth of the soil;4 and these it ruled as feudal properties, collecting feudal dues. It turned the contributions of the faithful into gold and silver ornaments which, like the jewels of the crown, were consecrated and inviolable hedges against the inflation that seemed ingrained in history.

  Many parish priests, mulcted of parish income by the tithe, labored in pious poverty, while many bishops lived in stately elegance, and lordly archbishops, far from their sees, fluttered about the court of the king. As the French government neared bankruptcy, while the French Church (according to Talleyrand’s estimate) enjoyed an annual income of 150 million livres,*the tax-burdened Third Estate wondered why the Church should not be compelled to share its wealth with the state. When the literature of unbelief spread, thousands of middle-class citizens and hundreds of aristocrats shed the Christian faith, and were ready to view with philosophic calm the raids of the Revolution upon the sacred, guarded hoard.

  The nobility was vaguely conscious that it had outlived many of the functions that had been its reasons for being. Its proudest element, the nobility of the sword (noblesse d’épée), had served as the military guard, economic director, and judiciary head of the agricultural communities; but much of these services had been superseded by the centralization of power and administration under Richelieu and Louis XIV; many of the seigneurs now lived at the court and neglected their domains; and their rich raiment, fine manners, and general amiability5 seemed, in 1789, insufficient reason for owning a fourth of the soil and exacting feudal dues.

  The more ancient families among them called themselves la noblesse de race, tracing their origin to the Germanic Franks who had conquered and renamed Gaul in the fifth century; in 1789 Camille Desmoulins would turn this boast against them as alien invaders when he called for revolution as a long-delayed racial revenge. Actually some ninety-five percent of the French nobility were increasingly bourgeois and Celtic, having mated their lands and titles to the new wealth and agile brains of the middle class.

  A rising portion of the aristocracy—the noblesse de robe, or nobility of the gown—consisted of some four thousand families whose heads had been appointed to judicial or administrative posts that automatically endowed their holders with nobility. As most such posts had been sold by the king or his ministers to raise revenue for the state, many of the purchasers felt warranted in regaining their outlay by a genial susceptibility to bribes;6“venality in office” was “unusually widespread in France,”7 and was one of a hundred complaints against the dying regime. Some of these titles to office and rank were hereditary, and as their holders multiplied, especially in the parlements, or law courts, of the various districts, their pride and power grew to the point where in 1787 the Parlement of Paris claimed the right to veto the decrees of the king. In terms of time the Revolution began near the top.

  In Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état?—a pamphlet published in January, 1789—the Abbé Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès asked and answered three questions: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been till now? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something,8 or, in Chamfort’s emendation, tout—everything. It was nearly everything. It included the bourgeoisie, or middle class, with its 100,000 families9 and its many layers—bankers, brokers, manufacturers, merchants, managers, lawyers, physicians, scientists, teachers, artists, authors, journalists, the press (the fourth “estate,” or power); and the menu peuple, “little people” (sometimes called “the people”), consisting of the proletariat and tradesmen of the towns, the transport workers on land or sea, and the peasantry.

  The upper middle classes held and managed a rising and spreading force: the power of mobile money and other capital in aggressive, expansive competition with the power of static land or a declining creed. They speculated on the stock exchanges of Paris, London, and Amsterdam, and, in Necker’s estimate, controlled half the money of Europe.10 They financed the French government with loans, and threatened to overthrow it if their loans and charges were not met. They owned or managed the rapidly developing mining and metallurgical industry of northern France, the textile industry of Lyons, Troyes, Abbeville, Lille, and Rouen, the iron and salt works of Lorraine, the soap factories of Marseilles, the tanneries
of Paris. They managed the capitalist industry that was replacing the craft shops and guilds of the past; they welcomed the doctrine of the Physiocrats11 that free enterprise would be more stimulating and productive than the traditional regulation of industry and trade by the state. They financed and organized the transformation of raw materials into finished goods, and transported these from producer to consumer, making a profit at both ends. They benefited from thirty thousand miles of the best roads in Europe, but they denounced the obstructive tolls that were charged on the roads and canals of France, and the different weights and measures jealously maintained by individual provinces. They controlled the commerce that was enriching Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Nantes; they formed great stock companies like the Compagnie des Indes and the Compagnie des Eaux; they widened the market from the town to the world; and through such trade they developed for France an overseas empire second only to England’s. They felt that they, not the nobility, were the creators of France’s growing wealth, and they determined to share equally with nobles and clergy in governmental favors and appointments, in status before the law and at the royal courts, in access to all the privileges and graces of French society. When Manon Roland, refined and accomplished but bourgeoise, was invited to visit a titled lady, and was asked to eat with the servants there instead of sitting at table with the noble guests, she raised a cry of protest that went to the hearts of the middle class.12 Such resentments and aspirations were in their thoughts when they joined in the revolutionary motto, “Liberty, equality, and fraternity”; they did not mean it downward as well as upward, but it served its purpose until it could be revised. Meanwhile the bourgeoisie became the most powerful of the forces that were making for revolution.

  It was they who filled the theaters and applauded Beaumarchais’ satires of the aristocracy. It was they, even more than the nobility, who joined the Freemason lodges to work for freedom of life and thought; they who read Voltaire and relished his erosive wit, and agreed with Gibbon that all religions are equally false for the philosopher and equally useful for the statesman. They secretly admired the materialism of d’Holbach and Helvétius; it might not be quite just to the mysteries of life and mind, but it was a handy weapon against a Church that controlled most of the minds, and half the wealth, of France. They agreed with Diderot that nearly everything in the existing regime was absurd—though they smiled at his longing for Tahiti. They did not take to Rousseau, who smelled of socialism and reeked with certainty; but they, more than any other section of French society, felt and spread the influence of literature and philosophy.