Citizen Emperor (72 page)

Francois Pascal Simon, Baron Gerard,
L’impératrice Marie-Louise
(The Empress Marie-Louise), 1810.

Berthier arrived in Vienna on 8 March 1810, and in a ceremony that took place at the Hofburg Palace, officially asked of Francis, clad in his white uniform, the hand of Marie-Louise. Three days later, a marriage by proxy took place, as was the tradition for unions between reigning houses.
⁴³
Berthier stood in for Napoleon. Archduke Charles represented his father, Francis I, escorting Marie-Louise down the aisle. When Marie-Louise entered France it was to meet a husband she had never laid eyes on. The married couple became acquainted through an exchange of letters. Napoleon knew how to be gallant – ‘we set ourselves the constant task of pleasing you in every way’. Marie-Louise knew how to reciprocate – ‘I consider it an obligation to acquire the qualities that would make me agreeable to your person.’
⁴⁴

She crossed the border near Braunau (the village in which Hitler was to be born seventy-nine years later) on 16 March, following a ceremony that was an exact replica of that which Marie-Antoinette had had to endure in 1770.
⁴⁵
A neo-classical building spanning the border had been thrown up by French engineers, and divided into three connecting rooms, one facing east which was the Austrian room, one in the middle, a sort of neutral no man’s land, and one facing west, the French room. Symbolically, she was meant to enter the Austrian room as an archduchess, and leave the French room as a French princess.
⁴⁶
In the process, she was divested of anything resembling or associated with her Austrian past, including her governess, with whom she had been since she was a little girl, her clothes and her pets.
⁴⁷
After a
toilette
that lasted two hours in which she was bedecked in French perfume, French clothes and a French hairstyle, Caroline met her on the other side, and accompanied her all the way to Compiègne.
⁴⁸
The presence of Caroline was the only false note: she had, after all, replaced another Caroline, a Bourbon queen and daughter of Francis, on the throne of Naples. Fêted along the way, Marie-Louise did not arrive in Compiègne until 27 March.

On 20 March, Napoleon left Paris, arriving in Compiègne that evening. While waiting, he prepared himself, taking dance lessons with Princess Stéphanie and Hortense, having new clothes made, trying to make himself more fashionable and less serious, less severe, something he thought would please a young woman.
⁴⁹
One week later, he was to meet her in the forest between Soissons and Compiègne, where a tent had been set up which was to serve the same purpose as the wooden lodges at Braunau, as a sort of passage between two worlds. According to a strict and elaborate protocol ten pages long invented by the imperial regime, Marie-Louise was to advance towards the Emperor, kneel before him – something Napoleon appears to have insisted on, possibly as a form of domination, though queens of France did not kneel but rather bowed – and utter a set speech, which she was to learn along the way. Napoleon, wearing a costume designed by Pauline, was to help her up and embrace her. The couple could then be on their way.
⁵⁰

So much for etiquette; Napoleon, who made up the rules, broke them at will. He was so impatient to see his new bride that he ignored the weeks of planning and went to meet her, under a sky that was pouring rain, in front of the church in the town of Courcelles, wearing the same grey coat he had worn at Wagram. Mind you, he had whiled away his time at Compiègne with Christine de Mathis.
⁵¹
Napoleon had only seen a portrait of Marie-Louise at that point, one not particularly flattering and which left him with lingering doubts. He had, moreover, been told she was plain if not ugly.
⁵²
He is supposed to have remarked to Murat, ‘Obviously my wife is hideous as not one of these young rips has dared say the contrary . . . After all, it is a womb that I am marrying.’
⁵³
He had to be reassured by Berthier that ‘The more I know the Empress . . . the more I am certain that, although she cannot be considered a pretty woman, she has all that it takes to make Your Majesty happy.’
⁵⁴
She has been described as having an oval face, with hair that was somewhere between light brown and blonde, beautiful blue eyes and clear skin, although intellectually she was far from that which she could become.
⁵⁵
A less gracious portrait would have her as plump, plain and quiet. We have no idea what Napoleon thought of his new Empress the first time he set eyes on her; he may have been pleasantly surprised.

Pauline Auzou, nee Desmarquets,
Arrivée de l’impératrice Marie-Louise à Compiègne le 28 mars 1810 (Marie-Louise recevant les compliments et les fleurs d’un groupe de jeunes filles dans la Galerie du chartrain à Compiègne à 9h du soir)
(Arrival of the Empress Marie-Louise at Compiegne, 28 March 1810 (Marie-Louise receiving compliments and flowers from a group of young women in the Galerie du chartrain at Compiegne at 9 in the evening), 1810.

They arrived at Compiègne around ten in the evening on the 27th, when she was introduced to the gathered Bonaparte and Beauharnais family members. She also found waiting for her, to her great surprise, her dog, her birds and an unfinished tapestry Napoleon had had brought to Compiègne against protocol and without her knowledge. After the couple had dined alone with Caroline, it was time for bed. In order to overcome any scruples his young bride might have had about not yet being formally married, Napoleon remarked to Cardinal Fesch in the presence of the new Empress, ‘Is it not true that we are married?’ ‘Yes, Sire,’ Fesch supposedly replied, ‘after the civil laws.’ Decorum required Napoleon to wait for the religious ceremony to be conducted in Paris before taking Marie-Louise to bed – a proxy marriage was symbolic and not legally binding – but patience was not his strong suit, and her virtue was manhandled that same evening as the Corsican upstart of petty noble origins deflowered a princess from one of the oldest reigning houses in Europe. One author suggests that Napoleon went about it more as rapist than as lover, an overly harsh judgement.
⁵⁶
Marie-Louise seems to have become quickly attached to her husband. ‘I find that he gains a lot when you get to know him more closely: there is something very engaging and very eager about him that it is almost impossible to resist.’
⁵⁷

Ceremonial Paris

The imperial couple arrived in Saint-Cloud on 30 March. What followed were some of the most elaborate political events staged since Napoleon’s coronation. There was a rich and detailed round of ceremonies that included a civil wedding on 1 April (which, since the Revolution, had to take place
before
the religious ceremony); a State Entry into Paris which involved more than forty carriages;
⁵⁸
a religious wedding at the Chapel of the Louvre, celebrated with a good deal more ‘order, dignity and contemplation’ than that of the coronation;
⁵⁹
a state banquet at the Tuileries; a public appearance on the palace balcony; fireworks that evening, plus illumination of the Tuileries gardens; receptions held by the Senate, ministers and senior officials of the Empire; a distribution of gold and silver coins to the crowds in the garden outside. The imperial union was also meant to be celebrated in each locality by the marriage of a young girl ‘of pure heart’ to a returned soldier on leave.
⁶⁰
Napoleon was very much involved with the organization of the festivities. Every monument and bridge in the capital was illuminated; there was a pagan touch to it all when a Greek temple to the goddess Hymen was erected between the two towers of Notre Dame;
⁶¹
festivities were arranged by the Paris municipality including a pantomime –
The Union of Mars and Flora
– on the Champs-Elysées that saw more than 150 people on stage; and there was free distribution of bread and meat. Once again, as with the coronation five and a half years before, it is difficult to know exactly what the people of Paris thought of all this. Witness accounts vary, but most agree that the crowds showed little enthusiasm and that there were few acclamations; they took part in the festivities out of curiosity.
⁶²

There were two incidents that marred the ceremonies. The first was the refusal of thirteen of the twenty-seven Italian cardinals present in Paris to turn up to the wedding, having decided, finally, to protest against Napoleon’s behaviour towards the pope.
⁶³
Their pretext was that the Holy See had not recognized the divorce between Napoleon and Josephine and they did not wish to lend any weight to the marriage by their presence. Thirteen seats remained conspicuously empty therefore around the altar during the ceremony at the Louvre. Napoleon had been forewarned but, typically, did not believe they would have the gall to go through with it. If he entered the Salon Carré all smiles, he came back out furious.
⁶⁴
His first reaction was to have the cardinals taken out and shot.
⁶⁵
Reason saw the light of day. They were, however, arrested, sent into exile to various parts of eastern France where they were placed under house arrest, and they had their cardinalates and pensions taken from them. They were, furthermore, forbidden to wear purple, which is why they were commonly referred to as the ‘black cardinals’.
⁶⁶
This was fairly typical behaviour of course. We have seen in the past how Napoleon would eliminate anybody in any position of power who did not fully co-operate with his plans.

The second incident involved the same kind of petty squabbling that had occurred before the coronation, again with Napoleon’s sisters and sisters-in-law refusing to carry the Empress’s train – tears, simulated fainting, categorical refusals.
⁶⁷
Napoleon, angry, insulted them and in the end had to deliver an imperial ‘I order it.’ The Prince Karl von Clary-Aldringen has left an amusing account of the women involved – the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, the Princess of Borghesa, the Queens of Spain and Westphalia – entering the chapel holding Marie-Louise’s train, the first grimacing, the second holding a bottle of perfume under her nose as if she were about to faint and the third simply letting go of it in mid-course.
⁶⁸
The most stubborn was that ‘goose’ Catherine from Westphalia. The only person to carry it with good grace was Hortense.

One other aspect of these ceremonies is worth dwelling on, if only for what it tells us about the relationship between Napoleon’s Empire and
ancien régime
monarchical rituals, namely, the formal ‘Entry’ into Paris.
⁶⁹
Gone now was any pretence of Napoleon being a ‘republican emperor’ as he adopted wholesale the external trappings of monarchy. He had made formal entries into cities before, in order to take symbolic and in many cases actual possession of them. Formal entries were made, for example, into Milan in 1800, Munich in 1805, Berlin in 1806, Danzig in 1807 and Warsaw in 1809. As a plebiscitary dictator, Napoleon was attuned to public opinion and he understood the importance of being seen by his subjects. That is why he insisted on a formal entry into Paris, and why the procession entered through the Arc de Triomphe; it was meant to be a triumphal entry, one in which he would show off his new conquest – Marie-Louise – and thereby help create an affective bond between the imperial couple and the people.
⁷⁰
In some respects, the entry was the highlight of the ceremony, a sort of public inauguration of the new queen.