How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (14 page)

This
merde
began shaping the national character immediately after the Napoleonic Wars, when France was able to treasure its role as Europe’s defeated power, and even to relish the fact that it was lagging behind in the Industrial Revolution. In 1822, the writer Chateaubriand went to England and turned his intellectual nose up at what he saw there. In the past, England had been ‘covered in livestock’ and generally ‘charming’. Now, he said, ‘its valleys are darkened by the smoke of forges and factories, its lanes turned into iron ruts, and travelling along these lanes, instead of Milton and Shakespeare, one meets mobile furnaces’. Oxford and Cambridge ‘look deserted, their colleges and gothic chapels, half-abandoned, are eyesores’. England had obviously sold its soul to the gods of industry and was losing its identity just so that it could export its cheap goods all over the world. But thanks to Cambronne, the French had an answer.
Merde
to the English – we will stick to hand-making cheese, wine, fine clothes and sausages.
^fn4

Today, this
merde
attitude allows the French to claim that their whole culture is superior to all others. So what if Hollywood makes blockbuster superhero movies that French cinemagoers love to watch instead of homemade French dramas about adultery among the Parisian middle classes?
Merde!
The French state will keep on subsidising films that no one goes to see – at least they’re French.

The same applies to language. Emerging nations prefer to speak English rather than French?
Merde
to them – it’s only because, with Napoleon out of the way, the Anglos were able to colonise the world.

In terms of leaving a lasting mark on the French national psyche, Cambronne certainly won a glorious victory on 18 June 1815.

^fn1
For a more detailed explanation, see my book
1000 Years of Annoying the French
.

^fn2
Incidentally, the saddest testimony to all this slaughter is that the following year, the fields around Waterloo yielded a bumper grain harvest – no doubt thanks to all the well-mulched human fertiliser.

^fn3
It might seem strange for a defector to the royal cause to be calling defection an ‘immense misdeed’ but this only goes to show how complex the French notion of betrayal was at this time – just as it would be again after 1945, when people were trying to explain away their actions during the Nazi Occupation.

^fn4
For more about the French scorn for the Industrial Revolution, see
Chapter 9
.

‘Il fait le choix de la grandeur en s’abandonnant à son vainqueur.’

‘His [Napoleon’s] decision to surrender to his conqueror shows his greatness.’

– Dominique de Villepin, former French Prime Minister

‘Sa chute fut gigantesque, en proportion de sa gloire.’

‘His fall was gigantic, in proportion to his glory.’

– Charles de Gaulle, former President of France

NATURALLY, NAPOLEON DOES
not get a universal thumbs-up from the French for providing their country with its opportunity to play the glorious loser. His most vehement French critic is probably Jean Jaurès, the founding father of France’s Socialist party, who in 1911 published a book with the rather frightening title
The New Army: the Socialist Organization of France
, in which he twisted the knife in the old wound of Waterloo: ‘Napoleon suffered a double defeat: both military and political. Politically and socially, his whole system collapsed.’ Jaurès lambasted the glorification of Waterloo as ‘a mortal peril for … the military institution and for national defence’. Logical, really – no nation wants an army that thinks it’s cool to lose.

Of course Waterloo wasn’t the first time Napoleon had lost on the battlefield. But in the past he had always bounced back. And in 1815, so say his fans, he could have gone on to win the war if he hadn’t been prevented from doing so by his own back-stabbing compatriots.

On the morning of 19 June, Napoleon stopped at an inn, the Lion d’Or at Philippeville, south of Charleroi, Belgium, and devoured bread and butter, eggs and wine – his first meal for twenty-four hours. He was obviously still feeling bullish, because he sent a summons to Grouchy. The errant marshal still had 33,000 men under his control, and had finally got himself back into the Emperor’s good books. After his
promenade militaire
of the previous day, Grouchy had tracked down a Prussian army and given them a sound beating at around eleven o’clock at night – in theory, therefore, France had won the last battle of the day. Now Napoleon wanted these victorious troops to come and rally his own demotivated army of 40,000 survivors and form a rearguard. And as Wellington later admitted, ‘If he [Napoleon] had put himself at the head of that army, we were in a scrape.’

Fortified by his breakfast, Napoleon dictated a letter to his brother Joseph: ‘All is not lost. I think that when I have regrouped all my forces, I will have 150,000 men. The provincial guards and the national guards, who are fit for combat, will provide 100,000 and the regimental depots another 50,000. So I can immediately have 300,000 soldiers ready to oppose the enemy. The English march slowly, and the Prussians are afraid of peasants and won’t dare advance too far. There is still time to save the situation.’

Bonapartist historians are keen to point out that when you add Wellington’s view that Napoleon’s ‘presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men’, there was no reason why Waterloo should have been the end of the Napoleonic era, or even the end of the June campaign. Napoleon could have fought on over the following weeks, and won.

But once the effect of the Belgian eggs wore off, things obviously didn’t look so bright to Napoleon, because his will began to waver. Instead of waiting for Grouchy, he fled to Paris – or rather, as his admirers would have it, he bravely rushed back to rally a defeatist parliament and save the country. The previous year, he had been betrayed by Talleyrand, who had delivered France to the royalists. Now he had to take the situation in hand, and quickly.

Napoleon knew that Joseph Fouché, the head of his Ministry of Police, was plotting his downfall, largely by manipulating the press (a job Napoleon had usually reserved for himself). Fouché was yet another of Napoleon’s unwise appointments: everyone knew he was as slippery as a jar of French asparagus preserved in olive oil. For a start, he had overt royalist sympathies, and in 1814 he had negotiated a secret peace with England while Napoleon was theoretically still in power. Even so, Napoleon had made him head of the secret police on his return from exile in March 1815, probably reasoning that it was better to have Fouché as an ally than an enemy – the man was a monster. During the Revolution, Fouché had suppressed an uprising in Lyon by having more than 1,600 locals lined up and blown to pieces by cannon fire, arguing that the guillotine would have been too slow. (Even Robespierre expressed his horror at the slaughter, which was a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre accusing someone of being too intellectual.) Fouché had defended himself by saying that ‘the blood of crime fertilises the soil of liberty’, which was the kind of slogan that went down well during the French Revolution.

In any case, Fouché had been forgiven by Napoleon (perhaps on the grounds that he was a fellow lover of the cannon), and was now busily stabbing his employer in the back. As Napoleon sped towards Paris, Fouché circulated a rumour that he was returning to impose a military dictatorship. The secret policeman also assured parliament that if Napoleon was forced to abdicate, the allies would not insist on another restoration of the monarchy – there would (Fouché lied) be another revolution, opening the way for parliament to grab absolute power.

When Napoleon arrived back in Paris on 21 June, Fouché gleefully told everyone that the fallen Emperor was a changed man: ‘unrecognisable … he hopes, he despairs, he wants, he doesn’t want. He’s lost his head.’ The last sentence might have been a clever piece of subliminal suggestion, hinting that Napoleon should suffer the same fate as Louis XVI.

In fact, on reaching the city before dawn, Napoleon made two perfectly reasonable requests: he wanted his ministers and a bath. Not to enjoy a communal soak, but so that he could put in an immediate demand for ‘a temporary dictatorship’. Fouché, it seemed, was right. And Napoleon’s behaviour in the bathtub seemed to confirm Fouché’s other allegation – that he had lost his head – because during the meeting the agitated Emperor waved his arms about, splashing all those present with his dirty bathwater. He tried to explain that he needed complete power ‘in the interests of the nation. I could seize it, but it would be more useful and more national if it was conferred by parliament.’ He wanted to relocate the government 200 kilometres south-west in Tours, prepare Paris for a siege, and begin conscripting a new army.

While the ministers dried off and presented this request to the MPs, Napoleon confided in his old friend and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis de Caulaincourt. It is clear that in his own head he had begun rewriting history already. ‘The battle was won,’ he told Caulaincourt, ‘the army had been prodigious, the enemy was beaten on all fronts. Only the English centre held. Then at the end of the day, the army was seized by a terrible panic. It’s inexplicable!’

The MPs, though, didn’t want a repeat of recent events. They voted to divest Napoleon of all his powers, and declared that if he tried to dissolve parliament and impose military rule, he would be denounced as a traitor. For which, of course, the penalty was the guillotine or the firing squad.

Napoleon’s brother Lucien went to try and talk the MPs round, accusing them of having a short memory, but the Marquis de La Fayette, hero of both the French and American Revolutions, crushed him with an impassioned speech: ‘Have you forgotten that we followed him [Napoleon] through the sands of Africa and the deserts of Russia, and that the scattered bones of our children and our brothers bear witness to our fidelity? We have done enough for him. Now our duty is to save the nation.’ Even so, in an admirable spirit of fair play, La Fayette offered to use his old contacts to ensure Napoleon a safe passage to America.

By now there were increasing calls for Napoleon to be handed over to the allies. The Prussians, and some of his French enemies, wanted him out of the picture permanently.

For once, Wellington gains brownie points with French Bonapartists, because he spoke out against executing his old enemy. In reply to a Prussian demand ‘that Bonaparte be delivered over to us, with a view to execution … Thus the blood of our soldiers killed and mutilated on the 16th and 18th will be avenged’, Wellington wrote sternly that ‘Such an act would hand down our names to history stained by a crime, and posterity would say of us that we did not deserve to be the conquerors of Napoleon … Such a deed is quite useless and can have no object.’ Wellington also wrote to his political masters, telling them that ‘if the sovereigns [of the allied nations] wish him put to death they should appoint an executioner, which should not be me’.

This infuriated Blücher’s chief of staff, General Gneisenau, who accused the British of feeling grateful to Napoleon for indirectly increasing their ‘greatness, prosperity and wealth’. But Wellington was a soldier through and through, with a grudging respect for the great French general that Napoleon had been.

Betrayed by his own parliament and afraid of falling into Prussian hands, on the afternoon of 29 June Napoleon decided to flee towards the port of Rochefort on the British-held south-west coast, hoping for a hospitable welcome. He put on a suit of civilian clothes, climbed into a yellow carriage (an unfortunate symbolic choice of colour, one might think), and gave up the fight.

He also wrote a letter to the Prince of Wales, the Regent of England during his father George III’s mental illness, begging for asylum: ‘I come, like Themistocles, to ask the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness, the most powerful, the most unflinching and most generous of my enemies. I thus offer him the greatest page in his history.’

It is a strange mixture of grovelling sycophancy and self-aggrandisement. Themistocles was an Athenian who in about 470
BC
took refuge with the King of the Persians, whom he had previously beaten in battle. He was received as a hero and given command of Persia’s captured Greek cities in Asia Minor. Perhaps Napoleon hoped to be taken on by the Brits as the colonial governor of, say, India or Canada.

In any case, here he was, without his famous uniform, terrified of being captured by the Prussians, and begging for mercy from his former arch enemies,
les Anglais
. It was the ultimate humiliation, surely?

Well no, because according to his French fans, he was about to turn his escape into yet another victory …

Back in London, the British press was indulging in a frenzy of triumphalism over Waterloo. Public enemy number one had been beaten into submission, and the war was over. On 22 June,
The
Times
declared jingoistically – and prematurely – that ‘Buonaparte’s reputation has been wrecked’ (note the deliberate use of the old Corsican spelling of Napoleon’s name that he had tried to disown). In the same edition, the paper called him a ‘Rebel Chief’, as if he were a brigand rather than a head of state, and boasted that among the spoils of war were ‘a large part of BUONAPARTE’S BAGGAGE’ (their capitals), implying perhaps that the war correspondent would soon be revealing details about the Emperor’s captured underwear.