How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (2 page)

Which brings us to the question of why exactly all these people are in denial about Waterloo, the battle that – like it or not – ended Napoleon’s political and military career. Is it a classic emotional blockage, patriotism gone mad, or is there something even more subtly French at play?

Well, yes to all those rhetorical questions; but the central reason seems to be that, ever since 1815, it has been vital for the French national psyche to see Napoleon as a winner. If he is a loser, so is France. And if there is one thing the French as a nation hate, it is losing – especially to
les Anglais
.

This is why even those French people who acknowledge (at least partial) defeat at Waterloo are determined to extract some form of triumph from the debacle: they will say that the outnumbered French troops were defending the nobler cause, that their glorious defiance made them the tragic heroes of the day, and so on. There is no end to the evasive action they will take.

To illustrate all this historical escapology, I have concentrated mainly on French sources – Waterloo veterans, nineteenth-century French novelists and poets who experienced Napoleon’s regime, French historians writing from 1815 right up to today, and of course Napoleon himself, who had time while in exile to relive (and rewrite) every second of the battle.

Exploring their original words and impressions has given me a vivid insight into what the French have been saying about their beloved
Empereur
for the last two centuries, and what they’re still doing to defend his iconic image.

English-language commentators seem to spend a lot of time reworking the old argument that Waterloo was purely and simply a hard-won Anglo-Prussian victory that got rid of Napoleon and changed the course of European history.

But Napoleon’s admirers, past and present, show that the Battle of Waterloo and its 200-year-long aftermath have been a lot more complicated – and a lot more French – than that.

Stephen Clarke, Paris, February 2015

‘La paix est le vœu de mon cœur, mais la guerre n’a jamais été contraire à ma gloire.’

‘My heart wishes for peace, but war has never diminished my glory.’

– Napoleon Bonaparte, in a letter to England’s
King George III in 1805

FIRST, THE CONTEXT.
Why exactly did Napoleon Bonaparte confront the Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s Generalfeldmarschall Gebhard Blücher at a crossroads in Belgium on that rainy day of 18 June 1815 – aside from the fact that Belgium was conveniently central for all three?

The main reason is, of course, that Britain and France had been at war virtually non-stop since 1337. The Napoleonic Wars were more or less a continuation of the medieval Hundred Years War, and in 1815, things had come to an ugly head. As the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet, author of a nineteen-volume
Histoire de France
, put it: ‘The war of wars, the combat of combats, is England against France; all the rest are mere episodes.’
^fn1

French Bonapartists insist that Napoleon didn’t want war with Britain. Napoleon himself said so. He was a peace-loving man, much more interested in modernising his own country than firing cannons at his neighbours. All he wanted to do was write new laws, create new schools, and turn beetroot into sugar (all of which he actually did, as we shall see in a later chapter).

The Prussian ambassador to France – not a man instinctively favourable towards the French – confirmed this as early as 1802. Marquis Girolamo Lucchesini (he was an Italian in the service of Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia) reported to Berlin that Napoleon was talking convincingly of ‘canals to complete or dig, roads to repair or build, ports to clean out, cities to embellish, religious institutions to found, and educational resources to pay for’. According to the Prussian-Italian diplomat, Napoleon wanted to ‘devote money to agriculture, industry, business and arts that would otherwise be absorbed and exhausted by war’. In the circumstances, it was impossible, surely, to imagine a single French franc getting spent on cannons, muskets and cavalry helmets?

A more cynical diplomat might have asked this peace-loving version of Napoleon why, after seizing power in France with a military coup in 1799, he had continued the war against Britain and its allies the Austrians, Italians and Russians, or why he had invaded Italy in 1800, confirmed the annexation of Belgium, and maintained a puppet pro-French regime in Holland.

Napoleon would have replied – with some justification – that he had just been finishing off what was started during the French Revolution, before he even came along. He had simply fought a few battles, discouraged the country’s enemies from invading, consolidated his position as leader of France, and built a platform from which he could oversee his grand peacetime plan for the nation. Put like that, it sounds convincing, and the Prussian ambassador clearly believed it.

So too does modern French historian Jean-Claude Damamme, one of Napoleon’s most fervent defenders. He blames Britain (or ‘England’ as he calls it, like any Frenchman with an anti-British axe to grind) for the Napoleonic Wars. France, he says, was too dangerous a competitor, ‘a threat to the ascendancy that England has always considered a divine right’. With France united behind their glamorous young leader, Monsieur Damamme asserts, it became obvious to the Brits that their only hope of European domination was to eliminate him.

Damamme even accuses the English of being behind the so-called ‘attentat de la rue Saint-Nicaise’ (the rue Saint-Nicaise attack) when, on Christmas Eve, 1800, a wine barrel packed with explosives was ignited as Napoleon’s carriage drove past, demolishing forty-six houses, killing twenty-two people and injuring around a hundred, but leaving Napoleon miraculously unscathed.

The Emperor had been on his way to the theatre with his wife Josephine to see Haydn’s
Creation
, and had fallen asleep in the carriage. The explosion not only woke Napoleon up, it also aroused a fierce desire for vengeance. He had a group of ‘conspirators’ executed despite evidence proving that they were innocent, before begrudgingly accepting that the true guilty parties were royalists who wanted to restore the monarchy. Jean-Claude Damamme, though, blames the British, whom he accuses of stirring up virtually all the anti-Napoleonic unrest on the continent over the next fifteen years, and paying the Belgians, Dutch and Prussians to turn against the French (an accusation that was largely justified, as we will see).

Faced with this endless British troublemaking, Napoleon was, in Bonapartist French eyes, like a kung fu master, meditating peacefully on his prayer mat about progress and democracy while a gang of irritating English boys threw acorns at him, finally forcing him to get up and give them a slap.

This theory is confirmed (again, in French eyes) by King George III’s sudden unprovoked blockade of France’s ports in May 1803. Despite this English aggression, the French contend that Napoleon continued to push for peace, and quote an eloquent letter to George III on 2 January 1805, in which Napoleon says that ‘my first sentiment is a wish for peace’ and that ‘reason is powerful enough for us to find a way to reconcile all our differences’.

However, a closer look at the missive – part peace offering, part (self-)love letter – reveals that it is more a case of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’. Napoleon informs the hereditary English King that he (Napoleon) was ‘called to the throne of France by providence and by the vote of the Senate, the people and the army’ – which surely outweighs a mere accident of birth. Napoleon then declares that ‘my heart wishes for peace, but war has never diminished my glory’. He reminds King George and his government that ‘I have proved to the world, I think, that I fear none of the uncertainties of war’ and that a conflict between Britain and France would be ‘pointless, and [a British] victory cannot be assumed’. As for expansionism, Napoleon innocently asks the King of England whether he doesn’t think he has enough colonies already – ‘more than you can hope to keep’. It is a threat more thinly veiled than one of Josephine’s famously transparent dresses.

Napoleon ends his letter by asserting generously that ‘the world is big enough for both of our nations to live in’. But King George and his Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger obviously didn’t agree, because they never even bothered to reply.

Not that the French Emperor was completely without friends in Britain at the time. James Fox, the leader of the opposition, was a virulent anti-royalist who had supported the French Revolution, and his pacifist group in the British parliament numbered about twenty-five MPs. War with France, Fox said, ‘is entirely the fault of our Ministers and not of Bonaparte’. Though, typically for a politician, this support was largely based on self-interest: Fox was hoping that William Pitt’s anti-French lobbying would fail, so that Pitt himself would have to resign. In truth, Fox wasn’t that big a Bonaparte fan. He visited Napoleon in 1803 and apparently spent most of their meeting haranguing the Frenchman about freedom of speech and censorship of the press.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had received a warning from the Russian ambassador to London that Britain’s aim would ‘always be to destroy France and then reign despotically over the whole universe’. (Actually, apart from the ‘despotically’, most Brits of the time would have agreed wholeheartedly.)

Faced with this belligerence, so the French argument goes, the peace-loving Napoleon had no option but a return to war against France’s traditional enemy, Britain. As he expressed it in his memoirs: ‘I had more reason than most to make peace, and if I didn’t do so, it is obviously because I wasn’t able to.’

But for a man who seems to be saying ‘bof, OK, let’s fight, if you really want to’, in 1805 Bonaparte threw himself into war with a startling amount of enthusiasm.

In fact, Napoleon loved a good battle. He had been trained as a soldier since childhood, having been sent from his native Corsica to a military academy in mainland France at the age of nine. There, legend has it, he commanded his classmates in a successful snowball fight.
^fn2
At fifteen, he entered Paris’s elite Ecole Militaire where, no doubt because of his skill with snowballs, he specialised in artillery warfare. In short, here was a man who had been learning how to fight professionally all his life, and who had chosen to specialise in the branch of war that involves the loudest explosions and the most collateral damage. A Buddhist he was not.

Napoleon first came to prominence in the French army in 1793 by commanding an attack on a British fleet stationed in Toulon, in the south of France, a city that had rebelled against the Revolution. Erecting artillery batteries and accurately bombarding vulnerable sections of the city wall and the British ships, he had effectively retaken Toulon, and been made a general at the tender age of twenty-four. In 1795, he was then instrumental in suppressing a royalist revolt in Paris, blasting the armed crowds surrounding the parliament building with point-blank cannon fire for some forty-five minutes. Then in 1799 he seized power by invading the French parliament with a group of bayonet-waving soldiers. In short, Napoleon’s favourite political tools were hot lead and cold steel.

He also felt most at home when on military campaigns. Out in the field with his troops he was in his element, engrossed in logistical problems, which fascinated him. One of his life’s greatest works was a total reorganisation and modernisation of the French army, dividing it into self-sufficient units of around 25,000 men, each with its own marshal or general in command of a body of infantry supported by cavalry and, of course, a large contingent of artillery. These units were designed to be fast-moving (it was not uncommon for inexperienced footsoldiers to die of exhaustion during long marches), and during a major campaign they were under orders to stay within 30 kilometres or so (a day’s march) of each other, so that Napoleon could bring them into action quickly when an enemy was engaged. The reorganisation went deep, right down to the small sections of half a dozen men who formed teams within their larger battalion. Napoleon was obsessive about detail, and the army was where he expressed this obsession with all his fiery-yet-bureaucratic Franco-Corsican temperament.

At the heart of the action, commanding his hundreds of thousands of loyal men, shaping the destiny of nations with his carefully aimed cannon fire, Napoleon felt completely at home, not least because his campaign bivouac was more luxurious than the VIP tent at the Glastonbury festival. Here, his gift for planning was at its most ingenious.

An exhibition staged in 2014 in Corsica, ‘Le Bivouac de Napoléon’, included a picturesque blue-and-white marquee that wouldn’t look out of place as the tea tent at a modern royal garden party, and a camp bed equipped with a thick mattress and enveloped in a green silk tasselled curtain. His folding leather chair was a more comfortable version of the kind we see Steven Spielberg sitting in for marathon directing sessions, while the panther-patterned carpet looked like something out of a 1980s pop video.