Citizen Emperor (25 page)

Whitworth’s version of events in his reports caused a little storm in London.
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He chose to underline Bonaparte’s ‘agitation’, and his own imperturbability. There is one other available British eyewitness account, that by the Reverend John Sanford, who happened to be present in Josephine’s drawing room, which emphatically denies that Bonaparte raised his voice.
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‘The impropriety consisted in the unfitness of the place for such a subject.’ The Russian plenipotentiary, Arkady Morkov, another Francophobe, wrote of Bonaparte addressing the assembly in a ‘loud voice:
Malta or war, and a curse on those who violate treaties!
’
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It is possible (although there is nothing to support this view) that Whitworth and Morkov consulted each other in the days that followed, and perhaps even worked each other up into a bit of a lather.

Much has been made of this incident, as though it were a turning point in the history of relations between the two countries, but really the scene is indicative of a general malaise between France and the great powers rather than of a deterioration in diplomatic relations. We know that Bonaparte was in the habit of losing his temper, but on this occasion his outburst was not egregious. His behaviour can in part be explained by naivety. In matters of foreign policy and even diplomatic etiquette, he was an inexperienced amateur, credulous enough to think that he could act and speak on the international scene in the same way that he spoke to his soldiers, and that he could do so without consequence. However, his behaviour has also to be seen within a broader context. The French were masters of the Continent, they considered themselves to be the epitome of European civilization,
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and most French generals, not to mention the political elite, agreed with the policies Bonaparte had adopted. The attitude of the British was insufferable and inflexible; they were meddling in Continental affairs and they had failed to fulfil their treaty obligations.

Neither side was about to give ground, so that by the time Whitworth had arrived in Paris, war between the two countries was inevitable.
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It was simply a question of timing. The reasons why can be rattled off, although it is much more difficult to understand why the British acted at that particular moment.
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The French would appear to be responsible for the rupture. The British objected to France intervening in a civil war that was raging in Switzerland in October 1801, imposing a new constitution and a new treaty, the Act of Mediation that enabled France to control the Alpine passes
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; to keeping Holland occupied by French troops;
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to annexing Piedmont in September 1802; but most of all to continuing French designs on Egypt.
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None of the concerns raised by the British breached the Treaty of Amiens. The French intervention in Switzerland, for example, was consistent with French meddling in that country going back more than sixty years.
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French behaviour was aggressive and worrying, and generated suspicion about whether Bonaparte could be trusted. But the British did breach the Treaty of Amiens by failing to give up Malta, and they did so on the pretext of French policy in Piedmont and Switzerland.
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The real reason was that they needed Malta, key to the naval domination of the western Mediterranean, to prevent what they feared most, a second French attempt to conquer Egypt and the consequent threat to India.

One can add to the mix the virulent anti-French/anti-Bonaparte campaign in the English press that consisted of a series of articles and caricatures attacking both Bonaparte and his family, which by all accounts irritated and possibly even hurt him.
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He had his secretary, Bourrienne, read out the British papers during his morning ablutions.
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The
Morning Post
, for example, described him as a ‘Mediterranean mulatto’.
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It is true that Addington asked newspapers, unofficially, not to publish defamatory articles against Bonaparte, but this could hardly have the desired impact.
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A leading émigré journalist, Jean-Gabriel Peltier, was prosecuted for criminal libel as a sop to Bonaparte, but that was the extent of it.
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The foreign secretary Lord Hawkesbury tried to reassure the First Consul that the British government would deport royalists involved in distributing anti-Bonaparte propaganda, but this was never done.
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Instead, the government paid lip-service to freedom of speech, and protested its impotence regarding the expulsion of émigré journalists, claiming that it lacked the authority to do so. In contrast, pro-French journalists were expelled from Britain using the Alien Act without so much as the pretence of a trial.
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The French consequently perceived London’s position as hypocritical. Bonaparte responded by waging a campaign to silence the hostile press in England by trying to bribe émigré journalists – with some notable successes – and by putting diplomatic pressure on governments to pursue journalists hostile to the Consulate. If the British government did little to placate Bonaparte, it is because it did not want to, exacerbating an already tense situation and creating a climate in which compromise was impossible.
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Neither side had peace at heart. The French–British disagreement had its root in deep-seated cultural antipathies exacerbated by years of war and an unwillingness to come to an understanding.
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When Whitworth delivered an oral ultimatum to Talleyrand on 26 April – evacuate Holland within a month and agree to a temporary British occupation of Malta (for a period of ten years) – Talleyrand asked for it to be submitted in writing. Whitworth declined, saying that he was unauthorized to do so; Talleyrand did not even bother passing on the ultimatum to Bonaparte (Whitworth repeated the ultimatum to Joseph later that same day).
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Talleyrand quite possibly did not take Whitworth’s threats very seriously, since he was getting upbeat reports from his ambassador General Antoine-François Andréossy in London, suggesting that the talks to prevent a rupture were progressing.
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As for Whitworth, not submitting the ultimatum in writing seems a strange thing to do at such a critical juncture. Either the ultimatum was bluff, therefore, something that he used to prod the French into compromise, or he had determined to precipitate a rupture. The latter seems more likely since two days later he asked for passports for himself and his family to be delivered on 2 May.

It was obvious to all that war was going to resume sooner rather than later. On 1 May 1803, after a
lever
at the Palace, Bonaparte addressed a number of senators and councillors of state alluding to the likelihood of war. ‘England will finish by weeping tears of blood,’ he is supposed to have exclaimed; ‘the war, it has begun.’
¹⁰⁷
It may have been bluster, but he appears to have been genuinely upset by the manner in which Britain had delivered the ultimatum. In Paris, the certainty of war had been on everyone’s lips for the past weeks and months.
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The British, too, had been preparing for war, at least since March 1803, when most of the navy had been manned and supplied.

Britain officially declared war on 18 May 1803. Two days before the declaration, the British seized 1,200 French and Dutch merchant ships and more than £200 million-worth of merchandise. Bonaparte responded on 22 May by ordering the arrest of all British subjects and the seizure of all British ships and merchandise in France and the Italian Republic (the name of the Cisalpine Republic was changed in January 1802).
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The increased political tensions and the likelihood of war had already decided many tourists to leave and they had been doing so in a steady stream since March, some returning home, others moving on to neighbouring countries. ‘Flight was the order of the day,’ according to one English tourist, Bertie Greatheed, ‘and the most judicious prepared immediately for their departure.’
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Surprisingly, Bertie was not one of them; when he went to get his passport on 23 May, he was informed that he was a prisoner of war. As a result of Bonaparte’s decree, unusual in that there was no precedent for the internment of foreign nationals on the outbreak of war, just about every British man, woman and child who could be got hold of was arrested and held, in some instances until the end of the conflict. They were at first kept in Paris and then progressively dispersed to a number of provincial towns, the most important of which was Verdun, where they were held in the local fortress. The French claimed that 7,500 were arrested, but this seems to be a grossly inflated figure and it is more likely that 700–800 were detained.
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How many of these people escaped in the course of the conflict is difficult to know.

The peace had lasted fourteen months. The war was going to last another twelve years.

‘Six Centuries of Outrage to Avenge’
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The arrest of British nationals was accompanied by a campaign in the French press against Britain that was reminiscent of language directed against the Revolution’s enemies at the height of the Terror; it called for the extermination of perfidious Albion.
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Before the peace, Britain had been portrayed as the new Carthage, a tyrant on the high seas, with an immense and insatiable ambition, countered by a French government that fought only ‘for peace and the Happiness of the world’.
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In September 1803, Bonaparte enlisted the help of Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, renowned for having called for the extermination of all rebels in the Vendée in 1793, and asked him to direct his talents at the English.
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He did so with a newspaper whose sole purpose was to underline the perfidy of the English government, the despotism of its commerce and the problems the country faced.
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‘There is no piracy, no brigandage, no crime, no cowardice in Europe of which it [the British government] is not the instigator, the agent or the accomplice.’
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The person most responsible for everything from piracy to espionage, to assassinations and counterfeiting was that ‘degenerate child’ Pitt.
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The newspaper was hardly a roaring success, but it was playing a tune most French people were familiar with. Some of the more extreme examples of Anglophobia could be found in the popular pamphlets of the day.
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This propaganda campaign was one of the reasons why the French, although by no means welcoming it, believed war justified, especially when, as we shall see, a plot to kill Bonaparte was tied to the British government. Bonaparte capably portrayed himself during this period as the victim, and not as the aggressor, as someone whom Britain despised and hired assassins to murder. If he had to draw his sword once more to defend the
patrie
it was because perfidious Albion, the term most commonly associated with Britain,
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obliged him to do so. It was a theme that the regime played on throughout the Empire. It was able to do so successfully because of the longstanding and traditional hatred between the two countries.

George III, as well as most of the military and political elite, remained supremely confident that the French would fail in their attempt to cross the Channel.
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The English public, on the other hand, was a good deal more anxious.
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The
Morning Post
reported in the first week of October that the invasion was to take place ‘immediately’, after strong gales had dispersed the British fleet.
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In some regions, rumours about an impending invasion caused a panic that has been dubbed the Great Terror. The Reverend Thomas Twining left Colchester, because he was ‘afraid to stay in it’.
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To meet this threat there was, apart from the Royal Navy, a militia of around 110,000 men – whose fighting quality was dubious, but who might have been used in guerrilla actions – and about 129,000 regular army troops.
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Admiral Nelson suggested that Charles-François Dumouriez, a French general who had defected to the Austrians in 1793, be brought to London to draw up plans on how to meet an invasion.
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It led to schemes for a scorched-earth policy and the creation of a vast network of coastal defences.
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Seventy-four Martello towers were constructed along the coast.
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A telegraph system – consisting of wooden cabins with frames containing shutters – was set up to communicate between the coast and the roof of the Admiralty in London.
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But some hare-brained schemes were also born of the moment, which, in hindsight, appear to have been an overreaction. They included the construction of the Royal Military Canal behind the Romney Marshes in the south-east of England – nineteen metres wide, and almost three metres deep – which was somehow meant to impede the advancing French, and the construction of dams built to flood the Lea Valley outside London.
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Much of this was offset by satire.
The Times
published a piece loosely based on the Hamlet soliloquy in which Bonaparte is heard to repeat the lines, ‘T’invade or not t’invade – that is the question.’
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