Citizen Emperor (56 page)

Peace was also projected on to Napoleon by some of the religious elite. The Bishop of Cambrai described him as the lieutenant of God who was charged with executing the ‘great work of Heaven’ in order to procure ‘a stable and solid peace for his people’.
¹¹³
The Abbé Lemoyne wrote in the same vein but also declared that ‘the Heavens gave birth to Bonaparte for victory’.
¹¹⁴
They did so not because it was expected of them or out of some sort of reflex that automatically drew an association with their king/emperor and the Bible; they did so because they believed in him, and in his mission.
¹¹⁵
That is why the bishops of France, of their own accord, decided to call Napoleon the new Cyrus, after the biblical figure who delivered the Jews from captivity in Babylon, in the hope that he would restore the Church and defeat France’s enemies.
¹¹⁶

The Limits of Despotism

On Napoleon’s return from Tilsit, a number of contemporaries remarked on the change that seemed to have come over him. Physically, he had grown more portly, his eyes had lost their vivacity; mentally, he seemed more preoccupied and withdrawn.
¹¹⁷
Was he exhausted from the campaign or did he realize that the alliance with Alexander could not last and that war was again inevitable? Had he been marred by the brutality of the campaign and the senseless slaughter of troops? Did he see, after his love affair with Maria Walewska, that his marriage with Josephine could not go on? It is of course impossible to tell – he never expressed any misgivings either in writing or to those in his entourage – but there is little doubt that the campaign in the East had changed him both mentally and physically.

Historians often point to 1807 as a decisive year on the road towards a hardening in Napoleon’s attitudes, and an increase in his ‘despotic’ behaviour.
¹¹⁸
Since the Tribunate had been discreetly purged in 1802, relations between it and the Emperor had been cordial if not downright self-serving. This did not save it, however, from extinction. It had largely outlived its purpose, and been unable to secure the complete co-operation of the Legislative Corps when bills were passed.
¹¹⁹
The story went around that Napoleon simply went one morning to the hall where the Tribunate deliberated, locked the door and put the key in his pocket.
¹²⁰
The judiciary was also purged; more than 160 magistrates lost their jobs, some for incompetence, others because of their political opposition to the Empire, despite the fact that they had been appointed for life.
¹²¹

For all that, legal boundaries to Napoleon’s power were not entirely removed. He still had to contend with the Senate and the Legislative Corps where men spoke out against bills if they did not agree with them. Napoleon, however, was not listening and found it objectionable that a small opposition continued in existence. In many respects, 1807 marks the parting of the ways for some in Napoleon’s entourage who did not agree with the tenor and colour of the Empire. Talleyrand, for example, disillusioned with the direction that foreign policy was taking, offered his resignation in August 1807, and quite possibly expected it to be refused. It was not. He was replaced by Jean-Baptiste de Nompère de Champagny, a relative nonentity, devoted to Napoleon, minister of the interior for a while, but who had no experience in foreign affairs. He was exactly the kind of foreign minister Napoleon desired, someone who would do his bidding without nagging about alternative approaches or the consequences of his actions. Increasingly, the legislative bodies were marginalized so that by 1811 the deputies sat for only five weeks, and not at all after that for another eighteen months.

The hardening of Napoleon’s outlook was also reflected in the regime’s attitude towards public opinion and the press, and towards any form of opposition. Criticisms were taken very personally by Napoleon. Thus, in late 1807, he used an unflattering comparison between himself and Nero made by Chateaubriand as a pretext to close down the newspaper
Mercure de France
.
¹²²
That year, the number of political newspapers in Paris was reduced to four: the
Moniteur
, the
Journal de l’Empire
, the
Gazette de France
and the
Journal de Paris
. Increasingly the government was interested in controlling the content of articles before they appeared in the press.
¹²³
This was another stage on the road to despotism. Almost as soon as Bonaparte was in power, his enemies castigated him as a tyrant, a despot and a usurper.
¹²⁴
Napoleon certainly worked against the revolutionary principle of elected assemblies and the notion of popular sovereignty, of the power residing in the people, by increasing the power of the executive (and hence of the imperial administration).
¹²⁵

But was he for all that a ‘despot’? If one examines Bonaparte’s political beliefs as a revolutionary, it is quite clear he leant towards a strong executive and a strong leader. In 1797, for example, at a time when Robespierre was considered a ‘monster’ by many, Bonaparte praised him as leading the only strong government in France since the origins of the Revolution.
¹²⁶
As ruler, there can be no doubt that Napoleon was authoritarian – he applied the rules of a military camp to running the state – but he was also a populist, and a nationalist. What we see then is the evolution of his reign towards what has been dubbed ‘democratic absolutism’, which consisted of Napoleon moving away from revolutionary concepts like the sovereignty of the people and advancing gradually towards the notion of absolutism by divine right, all the while maintaining a footing in popular sovereignty.
¹²⁷
The years from 1804 to 1807 witnessed the evolution between these two phases. Any association of Napoleon’s regime with the words ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’ is anachronistic. He was not a precursor of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators.
¹²⁸
Rather than look forward, we should look to the past. If Napoleon is to be compared with anyone, a closer approximation would be Louis XIV. Napoleon was an absolutist monarch, the last of the enlightened despots.
¹²⁹

This raises the question of whether Napoleon was himself looking back or forward, in an attempt to create new political structures. He was doing both. He paid lip-service to the French Revolution by maintaining certain revolutionary principles – equality before the law, freedom of religion, the protection of property. Yet, at the same time, and more and more as his regime progressed, he adopted
ancien régime
-style trappings at court. Many of these developments had the approval of the French political elite. Direct democracy as it was known during the Revolution had already been on the wane during the Directory.
¹³⁰
There was also a decline in the direct vote, something of which the elite approved. One of the best ways of obtaining strong and stable government, they argued, was to distance the people from politics by placing severe restrictions on their voting rights.
¹³¹

Napoleon’s attitudes, like those of the elite, were rooted in his own experiences during the Revolution, and as a result he had a profound conviction that elected assemblies were useless.
¹³²
As institutions they had already been abased during the Directory. The rest was a face-saving exercise designed not to worry diehard republicans and democrats, a façade motivated by a concern not to appear to break abruptly with the Revolution. ‘I alone am the representative of the people,’ he liked to say, intimating that he had been chosen by them.
¹³³

13

‘The Devil’s Business’

The Lion and the Lamb

What might have happened, what could have been, had Napoleon been less driven, more complacent, or more determined to pursue peace rather than conquest? What if he had paid heed to the words of Fontanes: ‘Woe to a sovereign who is only great at the head of his army’?
¹
But that would be to argue against Napoleon’s very nature. He possessed a ‘drive to glory’, an innate desire to control and to dominate.
²
Anyone who stood in his way was brushed aside, any who resisted were crushed and eliminated. Over the next few years, three things were to stand in the way of his complete domination of the Continent; Alexander, England and Pius VII. Napoleon’s conflict with the pope, as we shall see, was to evolve into a prolonged and bitter struggle between the secular power of the French state and the spiritual power of the Church.

After the coronation, Pius VII stayed for several months in Paris, in the hope of obtaining something concrete for the effort he had put into the voyage. After all, Cardinal Fesch had held out to him the possibility of a normalization of relations between the Church in Italy and France and the new imperial state. Each time Pius attempted to meet with Napoleon to discuss the issue of returning the papal territories that had been annexed in the course of 1802, he was brushed off.
³
The showdown really came, though, when the Civil Code was introduced into the Kingdom of Italy in January 1806. The Code brought two things that were anathema to the Church: divorce, and the primacy of civil over religious marriage. Pius reacted in the only way he could, by not approving the investiture of four new bishops in the kingdom. He did not refuse outright so as not to infuriate Napoleon; he simply adjourned the investitures.

There were other occasions for increased tensions between the two. In October 1805, Marshal Laurent Gouvion Saint-Cyr occupied the port town of Ancona on the Adriatic, part of the Papal States, supposedly in order to avert the danger of an Anglo-Russian landing. Similarly, Civita Vecchia, not far from Rome, was occupied in May 1806. In both cases, the French did not even bother to inform the papacy of their intentions and simply walked in, in violation of the pope’s neutrality. At the same time as writing a letter to Napoleon in which he virtually threatened to break off relations, the pope also instructed the papal administrators in occupied territory not to co-operate with the French. Rather than see this for what it was, namely, the head of a territorial state unnerved by a seemingly unwarranted French incursion, Napoleon suspected that the papacy was about to change sides, and spat out the proverbial dummy. This was on the eve of Austerlitz, so Napoleon was no doubt anxious about his southern flank. That is why he wrote to the pope asking for assurances that he would remain loyal in the face of the enemies of the Empire.
⁴

Napoleon considered Italy, all of Italy, his by right of conquest, and said so in a letter to the pope. ‘If I leave sovereigns in Italy,’ he continued, ‘it is not so that they favour my enemies and give me issues to worry about.’
⁵
The bottom line is that the Papal States could not remain independent of or neutral towards the Empire. They were expected to integrate into the Continental System, and cease all contact and commerce with England. This was, moreover, the advice that Cardinal Consalvi gave to Pius.
⁶
Napoleon was prepared to pull out all the stops and go over the head of the pope to hold a Council to discuss the religious future of Italy and Germany.
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This blustering and bullying worked, for a while. The pope invited Napoleon to Rome to negotiate an accord, something Napoleon would never have contemplated. In the end, after much toing and froing, Cardinal de Lattier de Bayane was sent to Paris to try to smooth things over.

The cardinal did not succeed. Diplomatic relations were broken off at the end of 1807 with the recall of the papal envoy to Paris, Monsignor della Genga; in diplomatic terms, it was a kind of declaration of war. At the beginning of 1808, Eugène received orders to prepare to march on Rome.
⁸
Napoleon had for a short time envisaged an Italian confederation that would bring together the Kingdom of Italy, Naples and the Papal States. In order to put some pressure on the pope, Napoleon tried to isolate him, sending a number of cardinals back to their dioceses. It was not until 20 April that the pope confirmed his refusal to adhere to Napoleon’s geopolitical plan for Italy. The refusal resulted in Napoleon annexing a number of papal territories (Urbino, Macerata, Ancona and Camerino) to the Kingdom of Italy. The French ambassador in Rome, Jean-Marie Alquier, was warned only three weeks later so as not to fritter away the advantage of surprise (not that there would have been much armed resistance anyway). Alquier was nevertheless to attempt to negotiate one more time, and to make sure that the pope knew what the consequences would be if an agreement were not reached.