How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (18 page)

The crisis was, according to the above-mentioned sceptic Alphonse de Lamartine, ‘the Waterloo of our diplomacy’ – a timely reminder to his fellow French parliamentarians that Napoleonic idolatry was at least partly founded upon forgetfulness.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in the Atlantic, the
Belle Poule
, with its precious cargo, was terribly vulnerable to British attack, and young Prince François put the vessel on war alert, which mainly consisted of ordering the small crew to perform combat simulations, as though a few muskets could oppose a British warship.

In the event, the British did not commit the sacrilege of sending Napoleon to the bottom of the ocean, and the
Belle Poule
arrived safe and sound at Cherbourg on 30 November. From there, the coffins were sailed up the Seine to Paris, propelled by a wave of nostalgia. Everywhere there were aged veterans, their heads bowed in respect and remembrance, their old uniforms getting an airing after a quarter of a century in mothballs. The mood of national pomp and ceremony can be judged by the wealth of paintings and drawings depicting every inch of the body’s progress.

In Paris, the coffins were placed on top of an enormous golden chariot pulled by twenty-four horses and accompanied by the flags of each of the
départements
(counties) Napoleon had created. The procession from the Pont de Neuilly on the Seine, through the Arc de Triomphe and across the river to the Invalides, his final resting place, was viewed by around a million spectators, inspiring Victor Hugo to gush:

May the people always keep you in their memory,

This day as beautiful as glory.

Paintings of the occasion don’t show the freezing temperatures – it was around minus 10 degrees Celsius, so the size of the crowd was a real testament to Napoleon’s pulling power. The Duchesse de Dino, a niece of the treacherous anti-Bonapartist diplomat Talleyrand, and no natural fan of Napoleon, wrote that the spectators were all moved by ‘the exclusive memory of his victories that makes him so popular. Paris is declaring its desire for liberty, and with France humiliated by foreigners, it is celebrating the man who shackled this liberty.’ The past was being filtered, and all whiff of defeat eliminated.

At the Invalides, the funeral cortège was greeted by a curious mix of weeping generals, diplomatically respectful royals (including Louis-Philippe) and badly behaved MPs, who chatted loudly, provoking Victor Hugo to remark that ‘junior schoolchildren would have been spanked if they had behaved like these gentlemen in such a solemn place’.

As the coffin was laid to rest in the chapel, rumours were flying around France that it was empty, and that Napoleon was not really dead. He had returned from Saint Helena alive and well – aged seventy, younger than Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo. It would probably have taken a nineteenth-century version of Monty Python’s blue parrot sketch to dampen the sentimentality: ‘This emperor is no more. He has ceased to be. He has expired and gone to meet his maker. This is an ex-emperor.’

But even if Napoleon had in fact shuffled off his mortal coil and gone to meet the choir invisible, his spirit had returned, and it began causing chaos in France almost immediately.

Far from consolidating Louis-Philippe’s role as a unifying figure, the repatriation of Napoleon’s body turned the King into an unexpected villain. Disgruntled voices were saying that the decision to sail the coffin up the Seine had been a political ploy designed to frustrate the general public, and that Louis-Philippe wanted to avoid a procession by road, through towns jammed with cheering Bonapartists, which would have reminded everyone how Napoleon had returned from Elba in 1815 to overthrow the monarchy. Worse, the news of the MPs’ disrespect at the Invalides got out and shattered any illusions that Louis-Philippe’s parliament was anything other than a gang of royalists.

A few months earlier, in August 1840, taking advantage of the upsurge of nostalgia, Louis-Napoléon – Bonaparte’s nephew – had attempted a brief, and rather pathetic, invasion of France with a few soldiers, hoping to spark a mutiny in the army. He had been arrested, and had taken advantage of his trial to address the French people: ‘You have served the cause, and you want to avenge the defeat.’ The cause, of course, being Bonapartism, and the defeat, Waterloo. He was thrown into prison, where he occupied himself writing political pamphlets and sleeping with (female) servants, only to escape in 1846 by borrowing the clothes of a visiting artist.

In 1848, popular discontent with Louis-Philippe finally sparked a revolution, forcing the King to flee to England, disguised as a ‘Mister Smith’.
^fn6
Louis-Napoléon returned to France in triumph, stood for parliament (very much on the shoulders of his giant uncle) and was elected President. Then in 1851, he declared himself Emperor of France, just as the original Napoleon had done. One of his first acts was to create a new medal for the surviving veterans of the
Grande Armée
– the Médaille de Sainte-Hélène – a concrete reminder to the nation of his family’s, and France’s, past heroism.

Bonaparte was well and truly back, both in the physical form of the new Emperor Napoléon III
^fn7
and in the towering ghost who had haunted France from his remote island since 1815, and who was now free to play poltergeist in the palaces he had once grabbed from both the royal family and the revolutionaries.

One question remains about the deceased Napoleon Bonaparte’s return to France in 1840: why do the French refer to the repatriation of his partially decomposed body as
le retour des cendres
? After all, he was not cremated.

The
Larousse
French dictionary defines
cendres
as ‘incombustible elements of a thing, which, after its combustion, remain in a powdery state’, and as ‘volcanic fragments of less than two millimetres projected by an eruption’. Neither of these definitions seems to fit.

Perhaps ‘the return of the ashes’ is just more elegant than ‘the return of the body’, which sounds coldly medical, or ‘the return of the remains’, which evokes putrefaction. But more than this, it seems to be about the difference between the physical Napoleon and his immortal, heroic spririt. Ashes are light, and as close as a body can get to abstraction (short of being blown to smithereens by one of Napoleon’s cannons). Ashes are the essence of a dead person, almost like a powdered soul – and they will never decompose, thereby allowing everyone to remember the deceased in all the vigour of his or her youth.

In this way, the decision by Bonapartists to refer to
cendres
is understandable, even if there were in fact no ashes. These are people who have what one might define as ‘definition issues’. After all, they are the ones who define Waterloo as a ‘defeat won by the British’. And their passion for redefining Napoleon has been growing ever since the so-called
cendres
were enshrined in what is still today the biggest and most-visited tomb in Paris.

^fn1
In fact, Napoleon had thought of calling himself Duroc well before it became an appropriate pun, and used the pseudonym for his escape from Paris to Rochefort at the end of June 1815. It was the name of one of his most faithful generals, Michel Duroc, who had been with him since the siege of Toulon in 1793, who fought at the battles of Austerlitz and Wagram, and who was killed in Germany in 1813.

^fn2
In a peach of a sentence, Napoleon declares that a woman ‘is the property of a man as a fruit tree is the property of a gardener’.

^fn3
Napoleon used the word
faits
, which also means ‘actions’.

^fn4
Translated, this borders on the comic: ‘Our Emperor who art in Saint Helena / Respected be thy name / Thy reign return / Thy will be done / Against the extremists who take away our pensions / Rid us of the accursed Bourbons / Amen.’

^fn5
As a veteran of the Battle of Valmy, Louis-Philippe’s own name was inscribed in the roll of honour.

^fn6
For a full account of Louis-Philippe’s farcical dash for safety, see my book
1000 Years of Annoying the French
.

^fn7
Napoléon II was Napoleon’s young son, whom he named as his successor in 1815, but who was never crowned.

‘Tous voulaient lui parler, le toucher, l’entendre, au moins le voir.’

‘Everyone wanted to talk to him, touch him, hear him, or at least see him.’

– nineteenth-century French historian Georges Barral, describing how the Belgians welcomed Napoleon in June 1815

MODERN BONAPARTISTS HAVE
no intention of letting their idolatry of Napoleon fade away. Every year the Fondation Napoléon offers six grants of 7,500 euros to post-graduate students writing a thesis on Napoleon. The
Fondation Napoléon is an organisation whose mission statement is to ‘support the work of historians, to study Napoleonic history and inform the general public about it, and to help preserve and highlight Napoleonic heritage’, so it is a pretty sure bet that subjects like ‘Damage caused to the French economy by Napoleon’s use of his conscripts as cannon fodder’ or ‘Trying to trace the lost artistic treasures looted by Napoleon’s soldiers throughout his empire’ probably won’t receive a grant. And 7,500 euros may not sound very much, but French universities charge almost no tuition fees, so the grant represents about a year’s rent for a student – a useful sum that also ensures the continued survival of Napoleon’s glory.

Not that the foundation has much to worry about. There have always been plenty of volunteers willing to step forward and fire barrages of Bonapartist propaganda at a sceptical world.

Early anti-Napoleonic historians like Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras failed to puncture the idolatry. Charras wrote in 1857 that the image of the betrayed, misunderstood hero was ‘invented by the prisoner of Saint Helena, this Napoleon who spontaneously and sincerely converted to liberal ideas … who faithfully practised constitutional government … who only fell because of the accumulated errors of his lieutenants’.

One of the prime concerns of Bonapartist historians, starting with veterans of the Napoleonic army, has therefore been to document the most minor details of his life, and paint a portrait of the man behind the tough military façade. They have been spectacularly successful in documenting the countless gestures that point to Napoleon’s profound, almost divine, goodness and love for humanity. In doing so, they are only obeying the Emperor’s call to arms dictated to Las Cases on 1 May 1816: ‘I have inspired every form of praise … pushed back the limits of glory! … Is there any attack against me that a historian could not rebuff?’

A prime example of the historians who have responded to the Emperor’s call is Henry Houssaye, who in 1904 published a book called
Napoléon homme de guerre.
It paints a picture of a hero idolised by his men in a way no other general could aspire to.
‘If Napoleon demanded a lot of his men, he preached by example,’ Houssaye says. ‘Whatever the weather, he never postponed a review of the troops. But the soldiers patiently endured rain heavy enough to fill rifle barrels with water because they saw their Emperor sitting motionless on his horse, without a coat, the rain flowing down his thighs.’ An erotically charged piece of historical writing from a die-hard fan.

Houssaye tells many stories of Napoleon’s human touch. Once, we learn, he went over to a group of soldiers who were drinking water out of a bucket. When all of them had drunk, he took the cup that they had used, and drank from it. An emperor drinking from the same cup as mere footsoldiers? It was like Jesus washing his disciples’ feet,
n’est-ce pas
?

On another occasion, Houssaye tells us, Napoleon ordered a surgeon to continue operating on ordinary soldiers rather than go and save a wounded general: ‘Your duty is to all men, not to one.’ Houssaye admits that Napoleon might have been overdoing his democratic act for an audience, but adds that ‘even so, he was an actor with the whole of Europe for a theatre, twenty nations as his audience, half a million soldiers to applaud him and, to protect his memory, the long succession of centuries’.

Other historians underline the fierce devotion Napoleon inspired in his men because of his obvious love for them. A much-recounted anecdote is the story of how, at 2.30 p.m. on 15 June 1815,
^fn1
after his dash to Belgium, Napoleon arrived at Charleroi dead tired, and fell asleep on a chair in the courtyard of a farm. Marching past, some of his soldiers saw the Emperor and applauded even the act of sleeping. Some part of Napoleon’s sleeping brain seemed to notice that the soldiers were slowing down their advance to look at him and, without opening his eyes, he waved them on. The historian Jean-Claude Damamme sees this as proof that the Emperor’s brain never rested, that he was totally focused on defending France, though a more cynical observer might suggest that Napoleon had simply been trying to wave away the noisy rabble that was disturbing his Corsican siesta.