How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (23 page)

The green jacket and tight white trousers (the uniform of a
chasseur
, a light cavalryman); the grey greatcoat and white waistcoat that he showed to royalist troops in March 1815, defying them to shoot at their instantly recognisable Emperor; and of course the black bicorn hat. With these simple elements, Napoleon created the mould for all military dictators since – design yourself a personal uniform so that the people will think of you as an active soldier, no matter how flabby and battle-shy you really get (not that Napoleon became either before he was deposed).

Napoleon wanted to distance himself from the silk-and-satin rulers who had preceded him, as well as impose a forceful new image of military power, with himself as the charismatic protector of the nation. In reality, he often fought battles wearing a green velvet cap or bareheaded (as he was at Waterloo), but he created his iconic image as early as 1801, when the painter Jean-Baptiste Isabey first sketched him in green jacket and black hat, with his hand inside his waistcoat – not because of stomach pain or to hide a paunch but because this was seen at the time as a noble orator’s stance.

During his fifteen-year on-and-off reign as consul and Emperor, Napoleon had about fifty of the bicorn hats made out of felt or beaver skin by a Parisian hatter in the Palais Royal, and from 1801 onwards all his official portraits depicted him wearing it – the only exceptions being the pictures painted for his two coronations. In 1806, for example, two years after his enthronement as Emperor, he commissioned a portrait from Europe’s most fashionable painter, Ingres, for which he posed in a Roman emperor’s crown of golden laurel leaves, wearing a jewelled broadsword and sporting a manly (and physiologically inaccurate) cleft chin – all in all, every bit as godlike as France’s most elitist kings. But this, and the even more pompous painting of his second coronation, are rare departures from the brand image that his soldiers loved and (while their glory lasted) his people idolised.

This sense of design extended throughout his regime, which was characterised by its mass of new uniforms and its ever-present golden eagles. Napoleon even seems to have invented the ministerial red box – all generals and ranking administrators in Bonapartist France had their own official document case, which was often red, and inscribed with their title.

The Napoleonic look found favour outside France, too: after all, ever since the Battle of Waterloo, Britain’s Household Cavalry and Guards regiments have worn the French breastplates, busbies and eagles that they picked up from the battlefield. One could interpret this as a kind of scalping, decorating yourself with symbols of your defeated opponents. But surely it is more of a testimony to the attractive design – we have never seen British or American troops sporting swastikas or jackboots (except perhaps when a British soldier-prince goes to a fancy dress party).

And talking of Nazis, it has to be said again: in matters of design Napoleon seems – inadvertently of course – to have inspired Hitler. All those eagles, the personalised uniforms of the Third Reich’s leaders, the highly choreographed processions of adoring soldiers, the charismatic portraits. Even Hitler’s floppy black fringe – it’s all Napoleon. And it’s the only historical tribute the modern Bonapartist would prefer to do without.

Aside from grand monuments like Invalides and the Arc de Triomphe, Napoleon and his short reign have left a mark on everyday life in modern France in a way that no other period of history has done.

There is, for instance, an Avenue Charles de Gaulle and a Place 8 Mai 1945 in many a French town, but the sheer multitude of Napoleonic streets in Paris is dizzying. The city is ringed by the
boulevards des maréchaux
, just inside the modern
périphérique
, as if Napoleon’s men were now defending Paris against attack from the notoriously unruly
banlieusards
. Out of his twenty-six marshals, nineteen of them have a boulevard named after them, the most notable exceptions being Grouchy, who went AWOL at Waterloo, and the traitors Marmont (who defected to the royalists in 1814) and Bernadotte (who, bizarrely, left Napoleon’s army to become King of Sweden in 1810, and later signed an alliance with Russia agaist France). Even Ney, whose rashness and indecision scuppered Napoleon’s battle plan at Waterloo, gets a boulevard.
^fn1

Throughout Paris there are countless other testimonies to Napoleon – the rue Bonaparte, leading from Saint Germain des Prés to the River Seine; streets like Friedland, Iéna (Jena), Pyramides, Wagram, Marengo and Rivoli named after his victories, a couple of which get bridges too (Iéna and Austerlitz), and one a railway station: Austerlitz is the anti-Russian and anti-Austrian equivalent of London’s Francophobic Waterloo.

There is nothing forcing the French to maintain these nostalgic names. After the Revolution, for example, most royal street names were expunged, but no such fate has befallen Napoleon.

The only exception was the rue Napoléon itself, a grand street in central Paris that he commissioned in his own honour in 1806, to replace a demolished convent – proof that in Napoleon’s world view, emperors took preference over divinities. The street led to the Place Vendôme, where Napoleon erected a column in honour of the
Grande Armée
, made from 1,200 bronze cannons captured at Austerlitz. As soon as Napoleon abdicated in 1814, the street was renamed rue de la Paix – Peace Street – the obvious implication being that Napoleon’s name was synonymous with war.

His column in the Place Vendôme survived the invasion by British, Austrian and Russian troops, but was pulled down in 1871 by the Communards (Parisians who resisted the Prussian siege of 1870–1 and then staged a short-lived revolution), who called it a ‘symbol of brute force and false glory, an affirmation of militarism, a negation of international law, a permanent insult by victors to the defeated’ – probably the strongest-ever condemnation of Napoleon’s rule by the French themselves. However, the Commune lasted only a few months, and as soon as it fell, the column went up again, even though the new government was theoretically a republican regime. Even today, 42 metres above one of Paris’s most luxurious squares, Napoleon in his Roman toga looks down on his old capital, apparently keeping his eye out for dubious goings-on at the Ritz Hotel.

The column even survived World War Two, when the hotel was squatted by the Luftwaffe and adopted as the epicentre of Nazi nightlife. The occupiers clearly didn’t object to being lorded over by Napoleon. Here was one Frenchman whom even these descendants of the warlike Prussians could respect.

Napoleon’s legacy in everyday France is not confined to road names and military mementoes. Far from it.

It was during his reign that European streets first got their present numbering system, with even numbers on one side, odd on the other. It was also his engineers who designated that pavements should be slightly convex, with gutters collecting the run-off (although efficient sewers were still decades in the future and much of the run-off would have made disgusting stains on the Emperor’s shiny boots).

Napoleon, who as we saw above was the French god of centralisation, also decided that Paris should have one big central market at Les Halles, and that the city needed large abattoirs on the outskirts, so that butchers would stop cutting animals’ throats in their shops and courtyards and offending sensitive Parisians.

Napoleon also decreed that Parisians needed to be centralised after death, and created the large cemeteries of Père Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre.

Modern tourists have plenty of reasons to be grateful to Napoleon, too, even if they don’t want to visit his tomb, or be entombed themselves alongside Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison in Père Lachaise. Because the Louvre owes much of its collection to
l’Empereur
and his empire-building instincts.

A national art collection had been started in 1793, largely consisting of works that had been ‘liberated’ from the Church or the royal family during the Revolution. Napoleon began to contribute to the collection as soon as he was named chief of the French army based in Italy in 1796. All French generals were under orders to ‘send to France all the artistic and scientific monuments that they consider worthy of entering our museums and libraries’, and Napoleon fulfilled his mission with the same thoroughness he applied to any task, pillaging Europe’s art collections – including that of the Vatican – of its finest pictures, sculptures and manuscripts. In 1800, on seizing power, he moved the collection to the Louvre, ironically evicting a large group of artists who had been squatting there since the Revolution. He also decided that the country’s art collection needed to be centralised, and dispossessed many provincial museums of their prize exhibits.

Inevitably, after he lost power in 1815, the occupiers returned the compliment and tried to relieve France of its stolen property. By November of that year, five months after Waterloo, 5,203 works of art, including 2,065 paintings, among them several dozen Rembrandts, seventy-five Rubens, fifteen Raphaels, as well as Da Vincis,
^fn2
Van Dycks and Titians, and hundreds of ancient Roman and Greek statues, had been sent back to their previous owners.

The Pope commissioned an artist, Antonio Canova, to retrieve works that had been looted from the Vatican, no doubt on the grounds that Canova knew Napoleon’s collections well – he had previously made a sculpture of Napoleon as a giant Greek athlete, naked except for a fig leaf, which was later bought by Wellington and displayed in his London town house, in the same way that a big-game hunter might have shown off the skin of a tiger he had shot.
^fn3
Seeing these foreigners loot the Louvre’s (largely looted) collection, the museum’s director, Dominique Vivant Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon to Egypt to requisition ancient artefacts, complained to King Louis XVIII that ‘We conquered Europe to construct this trophy; Europe has now joined forces to destroy it.’

Fortunately for modern visitors to Paris, Monsieur Denon was over-dramatising somewhat. Because even while Wellington was (so French historians allege) personally climbing ladders to unhook paintings from the walls of the museum, the Parisians were hiding large quantities of stolen art from the prying eyes of the invaders. At the same time, in typical Parisian fashion, the Louvre informed provincial museums that they wouldn’t be getting their exhibits back. Which is why today, visitors to Paris can still enjoy the cream of France’s art collection – as well as a large number of pieces that were never returned to other countries – all under one roof.
Vive la centralisation napoléonienne
.

After 1815, Napoleon’s family was banned
en masse
from France. This enraged one of his greatest fans, the writer Victor Hugo, who turned his most withering irony on Louis XVIII’s administration. What had the Bonapartes done wrong? Hugo asked, and ironised: ‘Here are their crimes – religion restored, the Civil Code written, France expanded beyond its natural borders, Marengo, Iéna, Wagram, Austerlitz; it is the greatest legacy of power and glory that any great man ever gave to a great nation.’

Napoleon himself, never one to undervalue his contribution to France’s well-being, told his biographer Las Cases much the same thing. He had bequeathed to the nation, he said, ‘the glory and splendour … of truly national institutions’. Only a true French technocrat could ever think that a country’s bureaucracies were glorious and splendid, and far from being the belligerent little Corsican that many British people imagine, Napoleon was in fact a passionate administrator obsessed with every detail of political and public life, from the titles of his ministers to the colour of his soldiers’ trousers.

Even his fiercest critics would have to admit that modern France is a Napoleonic nation.

French law today is still founded upon the Code Napoléon of 1804 (later renamed the Code Civil), which set out all the rights and responsibilities of a French citizen. It was followed by the Code du Commerce of 1807 (designed to promote ‘free commerce that favours all classes and excites all imaginations’) and the Code Pénal of 1810, which among other things created the very French
juge d’instruction
, the examining magistrate who even today conducts criminal investigations, interrogating suspects and witnesses, overriding the police whenever he or she feels like it, and often taking years to decide whether a case should come to court.

However, these laws weren’t merely the whims of a dictator. Napoleon summoned four legal specialists from different regions of France, aiming to combine the best elements of all the country’s 360 regional legal systems. Each of the specialists’ proposals was examined by teams of advisers, and then voted on by an assembly. For a man renowned as a tyrant, it was as democratic as anything France had ever seen, including during the Revolution.

The laws themselves generally favoured individual freedom. Any ordinary citizen could own property, a ruling that ended the semi-feudal system still reigning in the French countryside. The only excuse for withdrawing this inalienable right to property was
l’utilité publique
, which today explains how French railways and motorways get built so fast – a Frenchman’s home is no longer his
château
if the state decides to demolish it ‘for the public good’.

The Code Napoléon also established the very French concept of the
co-propriété
, a group of individuals who own apartments in the same building. The system is still very much alive today, which is why anyone who owns an apartment in France is summoned every year by registered letter to attend a
co-propriété
meeting, chaired by an elected president, at which everyone spends hours debating what colour to paint front doors within the building (they all have to be the same colour), who is responsible for repairing which walls, and how much money to set aside for the following year’s expenses, as if preparing for a Napoleonic campaign. Two people even have to be conscripted Napoleon-style to serve as the president and secretary of the
co-propriété.