How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (22 page)

As you leave your car, you will notice that it is being watched over by a moustachioed, rifle-bearing soldier. This is no vigilante security guard – it is a life-size, life-like statue of a Napoleonic infantryman, who seems to be waiting for his colleagues to finish their burgers or come out of the toilets. In fact, the battlefield of Austerlitz is only a few kilometres away, and the statue is mounting a permanent guard over Napoleon’s reputation in the region. Every year there is a giant re-enactment of the battle, with Napoleon fans hiking for miles across the countryside to play their part in one of the Emperor’s great victories.

Drive closer to the battlefield and Napoleon’s presence can be felt even more strongly. Just off the highway is a large cement works. It consists of three tall gantries beside a long conveyor belt that carries raw materials up into the central cement mixer. It would be unremarkable in the industrial landscape were it not for a few decorative details – the three gantries have been wrapped in canvas and painted to resemble Napoleonic artillerymen, while the conveyor belt and factory now look like a giant cannon, mainly thanks to the addition of two painted wheels and a huge bronze-coloured barrel pointing out at the highway. As Napoleonic souvenirs go, it is a gem.

It’s hard to imagine any other general inspiring such a gigantic personal monument, especially a foreigner who invaded a country some two centuries earlier. But then Napoleon has inspired more monuments, both conventional and quirky, than possibly any other historical figure in Europe.

It’s a similar story in Warsaw, the Polish capital. In the city’s most patriotic location, Warsaw Uprising Square, there stands a bust of Napoleon, in instantly recognisable
petit caporal
hat and waistcoat, above two rampant Napoleonic eagles. It was erected in 2011, on the 190th anniversary of his death, as if the city couldn’t wait another ten years for a more meaningful anniversary.

And it is not the only manifestation of Poland’s love for the man who annexed the country (sorry – liberated it from Russia, Prussia and Austria) in 1807. Every time the Poles sing the full version of their national anthem, they are reminded of their debt to Napoleon. It is a song of resistance dating back to 1797 and the lyrics, written by Jozef Wybkici, include the lines:

We shall be Polish,

Bonaparte has given us the example,

Of how we should prevail.

Wybkici first sang it to soldiers of the Polish Legion of Napoleon’s army, which had been formed with the idea of throwing out their country’s Russian, Prussian and Austrian occupiers. Sadly for these valiant patriots, most of them died fighting for Napoleon in Germany, Italy and Haiti, but the French Emperor has obviously been forgiven, and now stands proud in Warsaw, reminding Poles that they were once part of his empire.

Other countries have more surprising homages to history’s most famous Frenchman. In 2014, for example, Norway celebrated the 200th anniversary of its constitution – which is based on Napoleonic law – by installing a permanent monument in honour of France in front of Oslo’s National Museum of Art. Being Scandinavian, it is less formal than Warsaw’s bust of Napoleon: the Norwegian statue consists of three French public toilets, one painted red, one white and one blue, and inscribed ‘Liberté’, ‘Egalité’ and ‘Fraternité’. Tricolour
toilettes
. But then it is often hard to understand when a Scandinavian is joking.

Even stranger than these toilets, however, is a monument in Belgium, at the site of Waterloo itself, which looks conventional until you realise that it makes you feel as though Napoleon must have won the battle. We have met it already:
Le Panorama de la Bataille de Waterloo
, the 110-metre-long, 12-metre-high picture painted in 1912 by the French artist Louis Dumoulin, who was the official artist to the French navy. The painting was designed to be set inside a round, purpose-built gallery beside the battlefield museum, and depicts the fighting at its fiercest, with cannons blasting, horses charging, and men shouting, shooting and dying. It is a splendidly dramatic picture, and is enhanced by 3D elements like a dummy corpse, discarded weapons and debris-strewn mudbanks, as if it were a huge, gory department store window display.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, the strangest thing about Dumoulin’s work is that it represents a French cavalry charge, and that Wellington, almost hidden in one corner, appears to be on the verge of getting killed. Napoleon, meanwhile, is calmly directing his troops’ assault. If a visitor to the building didn’t know better, they would assume that the British had been overrun at Waterloo by a horde of snorting Frenchmen. It naturally begs the question why a French artist was invited to paint the grandest memorial on the battlefield. It is as though a German had been asked to decorate a D-Day beach with a panoramic view of machine guns wiping out Allied soldiers as they landed. And it is, of course, proof of the strength of Bonapartist legend, as promulgated by Napoleon’s many, and highly influential, admirers.

Right across Europe, Napoleon has left his footprint. Every town in France where he spent any amount of time sells itself to tourists as a
ville impériale
. In Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland and elsewhere, there are monuments on his battlefields, plaques at inns where he spent the night, ‘Napoleon’ restaurants where he stopped for a snack, streets and boulevards where his army marched, museums wherever he forgot a pair of socks, even commemorative public toilets in places where he never set foot.

Today, every European knows who the leader of France was in June 1815. Who could say the same about Prussia, Russia, Austria or even England? Bonapartists might accept (grudgingly) that Napoleon lost Waterloo (well, the second half of the battle, anyway), but they can rightly claim that his memory has triumphed. He has been history’s winner.

The transformation of Napoleon from dead hero to permanent monument began very quickly. In August 1855, when Queen Victoria paid her first state visit to Paris, there was one building she was determined to see. Not the Eiffel Tower, because it wouldn’t be built for another thirty-four years; not Notre-Dame, because it was a Catholic church; no, what interested the Anglo-German Queen was a private pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb. It was dark, there was a terrible thunderstorm brewing, and the torches were spluttering in the wind, but she insisted on going into the gloomy chapel at the Invalides, accompanied by Emperor Napoléon III and several limping old veterans of Napoleon’s battles. Not only this, she took her teenaged son, the future King Edward VII, with her, and forced him to kneel before the coffin to pay his respects. All this for the man whom she called in her diary entry for that day ‘England’s bitterest foe’.

And this was while Napoleon was lying in state in the small Chapelle de Saint-Jérôme, before the completion of the immense mausoleum his nephew Napoléon III was having built below the church. Today, even though Napoleon’s tomb doesn’t attract the kind of crowds that you see clamouring for a glimpse of the
Mona Lisa
or trying to climb the Eiffel Tower, on a sunny day the gold-encrusted roof of the Invalides dominates the Paris skyline like a torch permanently lit in honour of the former Emperor lying inside.

It is certainly the grandest monument to a dead leader in the whole Paris region. The body of the Sun King, Louis XIV, was shared out in small portions – his heart donated to the church of Saint Paul in Paris, his entrails to Notre-Dame, the rest of his body to the basilica of Saint-Denis, a suburb that now has an unfortunate reputation for poverty and riotousness, but where French kings were traditionally entombed. Among more than seventy royal tombs dating back to the fifth century, the basilica houses Henri IV, the first of the Bourbons, as well as the fondly remembered François I.

During the Revolution many of the coffins in Saint-Denis were opened and the bodies thrown into mass graves. Most have been reassembled since, but they now seem to huddle together for protection out in the
banlieue
, far from the safety of central Paris where Napoleon reigns supreme in a mausoleum ten times bigger than anything erected for a French king. Even the Chapelle Expiatoire, the memorial built for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette by Parisians expressing belated guilt for the double guillotining, is much smaller, and the tragic couple are usually ignored by tourists and Parisians alike.

Visiting Napoleon’s tomb, the last word you could possibly imagine is ‘loser’. Like the Arc de Triomphe, it is a celebration of victories, though unlike the Arc, which now plays host to an unknown World War One soldier, more recent events don’t get a look-in.

The tomb is an underground temple constructed around a brown sarcophagus that looks like a gigantic soft-centred chocolate. The sarcophagus is carved from quartzite, set on a granite plinth, and is guarded by twelve sexy (if somewhat butch) angels who wear off-the-shoulder gowns that reveal large amounts of leg and some hefty cleavage. The angels represent Napoleon’s twelve victorious campaigns, though cynical visitors might pick up on the fact that the marble floor is inscribed with only eight victories, including Moscow, which can only be counted as a victory if you ignore the humiliating retreat that followed it.

Around the sarcophagus is a covered walkway decorated with sculpted frescoes. Predictably, one of these contains Napoleon’s military record, which was, after all, impressive. He definitely won a lot more battles than he lost (even if you take in the Bonapartist accounting system that divides successful campaigns into several victories and lumps defeats together in a single mass). But, like the inscription on the floor, the record indulges in some dubious barrel-scraping – should the list of victories really include crossing the Saint Bernard’s Pass or ‘the entry into Madrid’? They sound like stopovers on a coach tour rather than military successes.

Elsewhere, we are confronted by a topless Napoleon (with an enviable six-pack) represented as a Greek god and accompanied by more angels pointing out the extent of his great civil works. An inscription tells us that ‘wherever my reign reached, it left lasting traces of its benevolence’. Curiously, these traces include ‘la route de Bordeaux’, ‘le canal de l’Ourcq’, and ‘les travaux hydrauliques de Dunkerque’. We are also reminded that Napoleon organised a ‘five-yearly exhibition of industrial products’ and that we have him to thank for the ‘renovation of Lyon’s factories’. It all reads less like an emperor’s boasts than a French engineer’s CV.

There is another panel dedicated to Napoleon’s
cour des comptes
(national auditors’ administration), on which we see the guardian angel of accountancy watching over receipts and outgoings, as well as one given over to Napoleon’s introduction of
centralisation administrative
. In short, the tomb seems to be telling us that if heaven needs a technocrat with excellent organisational skills, Napoleon is the man for the job.

It is true that many – if not most – of the people visiting the Invalides are going there principally to see the army museum rather than the tomb, but then Napoleon is the star of that too. And after all, what foreign visitor would dream of visiting France’s army museum for anything other than Napoleon’s
Grande Armée
? There hasn’t been much to shout about since.

The museum doesn’t disappoint – if, that is, the visitor is fascinated by the legend of the Napoleonic soldier. There are rooms full of their glossy weapons – richly engraved swords, muskets made of polished wood and topped by the famously intimidating bayonets – as well as the campaign uniforms of many of Napoleon’s regiments. It is a parade rather than a battlefield.

The museum frankly admits that Napoleon was a war-maker, but doesn’t seem to disapprove. ‘Combining revolutionary ideas and his own glory,’ one inscription reads, ‘Napoleon created a great empire that remodelled the face of Europe.’ (Non-Bonapartists might interpret this ‘remodelling’ as breaking Europe’s nose and smothering its mouth in French lipstick.) ‘The enemies of France were neutralised,’ another caption tells us, an aggressive boast that it is rare to find in a modern military museum. Most countries now play down their former attempts at ‘neutralising’ other nations.

Napoleon’s ultimate defeat is acknowledged in the tiny Waterloo Room, which is maybe 10 feet square. Here, for once, the museum recognises the existence of Napoleon’s opponents, who are represented by three English swords and a frilly black Hussar’s jacket that looks like something out of a Parisian madame’s boudoir, a stark contrast to the manliness of the
Grande Armée’
s uniforms – a subliminal suggestion, perhaps, that these effete Englishmen really didn’t deserve to win at Waterloo (if, indeed, they won at all).

An electronic display describes the course of the battle in five minutes, while the audioguide toes the Bonapartist line, telling us that everything was going more or less to plan when the Prussians arrived and ‘upset the course of the battle’, as if its true course ought to have been a French victory. An inscription on the wall sums up the outcome of Waterloo as ‘an accumulation of bad luck, errors and communication problems’. At least they don’t blame the weather.

The film on this electronic display is very restrained, with little arrows to indicate the movement of the different armies, tiny electronic puffs of smoke to simulate cannon fire, and bangs and neighing horse effects to add a little atmosphere.

The only sign that the battle might have involved anything more violent than neighing and puffs of smoke is a breastplate with a large cannonball-shaped hole in the front. A certain Carabinier Antoine Fauveau was one Napoleonic soldier who never made it back to France.

The Napoleon section of the national army museum is less a commemoration of the men who gave their lives for their Emperor than a celebration of Napoleon’s sense of style and grandeur. Even while he was alive, he turned himself and his entourage into monuments.

Napoleon’s sense of style is, of course, one of the reasons why he remains so firmly fixed in modern minds. He created a personal look that is as unmistakeable as Marilyn Monroe’s blond curls or the skinny silhouette of Michael Jackson.