How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (26 page)

When talking about Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, Bonapartist historians often fail to mention that he only just made it alive to the south coast of France because of the hostility of his own people. Even Walter Scott’s account of French people ‘insulting his passage’ doesn’t paint the full picture. As Napoleon’s convoy of carriages passed through Orgon, in Provence, there was a minor riot, and he had to disguise himself as a messenger to save his skin. He also insisted on taking a British warship across to Elba, because the French navy was under the command of his rival, the treacherous Talleyrand, and Napoleon suspected that he might ‘fall overboard’ during the crossing. The French sailors designated to escort the Emperor were sent away at the last minute, and Napoleon entrusted himself to the hated – but apparently more honourable – British enemy.

Today, even some of the French historians who admire Napoleon, like Jean Tulard, author of
Le Dictionnaire Napoléon
,
acknowledge the dictatorial tendencies that created such hostility while the Emperor was still in power. Tulard quotes the story of Cincinnatus, the dictator of Rome who, as soon as a crisis was resolved, went back to farming his fields. This Napoleon never did (despite a short period of exile spent planting chestnut trees on Elba) – he hung on to his throne too long, and therefore took away the lustre of his great achievements.

By 1815, almost everyone in France except Napoleon was exhausted by his war effort. Since the Revolution, about 1.4 million Frenchmen had died in battle.
^fn1
In total, around 30 per cent of French males born between 1790 and 1795 were killed or wounded in uniform.

This is why anti-Bonapartists insist that Napoleon – not France – lost Waterloo. If he had won the battle, they say, the allies would have continued attacking, whereas his defeat ushered in a period of fifty-five years of relative peace in Europe – which only ended when Napoleon’s nephew provoked Prussia in 1870. France then got rid of the last Bonaparte emperor, and enjoyed forty-three more years of European peace until World War One. All in all, they would say, Waterloo was the first step in ‘curing’ the Bonaparte problem that would otherwise have dogged France throughout the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless – a Bonapartist would argue – even statements like that place Napoleon at the heart of French history, as the catalyst for everything that succeeded his reign.

It has not always been easy to voice anti-Bonapartist views in France. A telling example is Pierre Larousse’s fifteen-volume encyclopedia,
Le
Grand Dictionnaire Universel
, completed in 1876. It contains two separate definitions of Napoleon: under ‘Bonaparte’, in volume two which was first published in 1867, he is ‘the greatest, most glorious, most striking name in history … a name that is easy to remember, simple, unified, military, with hard, short, dry consonants, a name that was unknown before him, but which was to engrave itself in the memory of all who heard it’. It reads like an advert for a French perfume.

However, at the entry for ‘Napoléon 1er’, in a volume published in 1874, there is an editor’s note explaining that seven years earlier the dictionary had been forced to praise Napoleon ‘for fear of compromising our publication’. The former Emperor is then defined as ‘a man who was the cruellest enemy of freedom … a political and military dictator, an imitator of the Caesars’.

The explanation for this apparent schizophrenia is that the early volumes were published while Napoléon III, Bonaparte’s nephew, was in power, the later ones just after his fall.

But the most interesting thing about all this is that in 2014, in a special Napoleonic edition of the French magazine
L’Histoire
, an article about the
Grand Dictionnaire
’s differing definitions failed to mention the time gap between the two volumes of the dictionary. It described the contrasting opinions as a sign that France has never been able to make up its mind about Napoleon.
^fn2
In fact, though, the French have always divided themselves into two factions –
pour
and
contre
Napoleon. The thing is that bitterly negative opinions, like the definition of him as ‘the cruellest enemy of freedom’, have become much rarer since he and his nephew were ousted from power and their tyrannical tendencies stopped causing resentment. Now that the French can say what they like about Napoleon, it is simply the Bonapartists who are much more vocal.

Even though in 1815 France had ousted Napoleon for the second time in two years, with many French people calling for his head and the returning royalist aristocracy hungry for revenge against almost everything that had happened in France for the previous twenty-five years, post-Napoleonic France remained a surprisingly Napoleonic place – the key difference being that Napoleon himself was no longer there to force the French to obey
all
his rules and keep
all
his institutions.

Naturally, there were also sweeping political changes. During his first short reign from 1814 to early 1815, Louis XVIII had signed (albeit with the allies holding the pen) his so-called ‘Charte constitutionelle’,
which ushered in some major anti-Bonapartist reforms. These were reintroduced after Waterloo. The Charte guaranteed the freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and opened up careers such as the law and medicine to poor but talented citizens. It also confirmed the property deeds of everyone who had bought land and property from dispossessed aristocrats and the royal family.

Astonishingly, Louis XVIII allowed the newly created Napoleonic aristocracy to keep its noble titles – though it is doubtful whether the average French citizen found having two aristocracies better than one. After all, a double layer of
crème de la crème
makes even the sweetest dessert taste sickly.

Louis XVIII stopped short of handing total power back to the aristos, however. Even he knew that they were incapable of ruling the country. The Charte therefore installed the new elite that still governs France – the technocrats, who were largely a product of the Napoleonic system, and who were now freed of subservience to either an emperor or a king.

At the same time as the restored monarchy was introducing a measure of British-style parliamentary democracy to France, there was also strong pressure from Britain to adopt its economic model. As we saw in Chapter 4, however, this met with a decisive French ‘Merde!’. Turning its back on the free market, in 1815 France adopted its own strategy, a combination of Napoleonic patriotism and new freedom: Louis Becquey, who was given the grand new title of Directeur Général de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Arts et Manufactures, defined the strategy as ‘liberté au-dedans, protectionnisme au-dehors’ – ‘freedom within, protectionism outside’. It is a technique that the French still use today, one that makes the European Union (and especially the Brits) howl with outrage every time France blocks the sale of a big French company to a foreign multinational, or uses government subsidies to prop up its ailing industries, often in defiance of EU law.

So, after Waterloo, as Britain steamed ahead with the Industrial Revolution, flooding the world with its cheap cotton and metal products, and the spices, tea and sugar from its colonies, rather as China is doing now with its plastics, France did not try to follow suit (not that it had the money or the energy to do so).

Instead, it haughtily disapproved. The French politician Adolphe Blanqui – a royalist – visited England in 1823 and compared the factories of Wolverhampton to the fires of Mount Etna. He understood, he wrote in a book about his travels, how this small island had toppled Napoleon’s ‘great empire’ (even a royalist could be nostalgic about France’s recent glories): it was thanks to these factories that ‘had forged the thunder sent against my homeland’, meaning the hundreds of thousands of muskets and millions of bullets and cannonballs that had ripped France’s armies to shreds. This English industrial might had become a plague, Blanqui declared, blanketing everything with black dust and ‘forcing the English to cover the sea with their ships’ so that they could export all their products.

It is a view that survives in France today: many French people still harbour Blanqui’s distaste for unashamed capitalism, as well as a suspicion that bosses are evil slave-drivers, building themselves mansions in the country while the workers choke on poisonous fumes. Despite the huge international success of French entrepreneurs like the Renault brothers, Armand Peugeot and Paul Ricard, generating colossal profits has come to be thought of by many ordinary French people as a crass, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ character fault. Anyone in France who makes too much filthy lucre is seen as not really French.

The French can argue that it was actually an advantage to have been left behind (initially at least) by the Industrial Revolution. After 1815, France was forced to become self-sufficient, and it huddled down over its needles, its cheese-making machines and wine presses, making the most of the new post-Napoleonic peace by concentrating on its typically French crafts. And before long, rich British businesspeople were rushing to Paris to shop at the city’s small, exclusive boutiques, buying lace, gloves, hats and silk garments, as well as fanning out into the countryside to buy wine and fine food direct from the farmers.

Free of Napoleon’s trade barriers, the French were quickly able to enslave the British by selling them all the sophisticated things English factories were incapable of making. France’s luxury industry – its greatest export today – was born out of the unique post-Waterloo economic conditions. Triumph in the battle for chic belongs to France.

Bonapartists often talk about the French people feeling ‘orphaned’ or left unprotected in 1815. A Napoleonic veteran, the former General Baron Thiebault, put it nicely in his memoirs, saying that ‘With Napoleon gone, France was like a ship without sails or a compass, a plaything for the storm.’ But in fact, the economic transition seems to have been much smoother. It was less a case of France losing its
pater familias
than emerging from childhood. Papa had retired from the family business – admittedly, not altogether willingly – and left the next generation free to run things as they wanted, in a more open, efficient way, undisturbed by war. As Victor Hugo put it in
Les Misérables
, ‘the disappearance of the great man was necessary to usher in the great century’.

The fall of Napoleon also ushered in a new period of cultural freedom in France, rather in the way that the end of Cromwell’s puritan regime did in England.

Even if Napoleon had inspired foreign artists like Beethoven, Byron and Hegel while he was in power, at home he had overseen a period of cultural austerity. As a general, Napoleon had spent a lot of his campaign time looting foreign museums of their treasures, but as Emperor he had been fonder of the beauty of a well-expressed regulation. His only real artistic creativity was directed towards portraits of himself in heroic mode, grandiose self-aggrandising monuments, uniforms and propaganda. Under Napoleon, theatres were unable to decide their own programmes, and the anti-elitist satire that had grown out of the Revolution was well and truly stifled. Art had to be officially sanctioned.

On 29 November 1803, Napoleon wrote a letter to his Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, saying: ‘I desire you to commission … a song about the invasion of England … I know that several relevant plays have been put on; a selection should be made, so that they can be performed in Parisian theatres, and especially in the camps at Boulogne and Bruges, and wherever the army is stationed.’ It is easy to imagine his soldiers’ joy when showtime was announced, and instead of actresses reciting lewd poems, they got hymns and plays about attacking Kent.

To get an idea of Napoleon’s view of culture, one only has to look at the regime he devised for the management of France’s national theatre, the Comédie Française. In 1812, while in Moscow, he took time out from chasing the Czar to dictate a decree that turned French actors into a sort of army.

The Comédie Française, he ordered, would be ‘placed under the surveillance and direction of the Superintendent of our theatre’. (By ‘our’, of course, Napoleon was referring to himself.) ‘An Imperial Commissioner, named by us, will be responsible for transmitting the Superintendent’s orders to the actors.’ Actors had to sign up for twenty years, and obey strict rules of behaviour – they could be excused from performing if they were declared officially sick, but if seen out walking in the street or going to see a show while on the sick list, they would be fined.

There was little room for art or inspiration in all this – tragic actors were forbidden to play comedy, and roles were attributed according to seniority rather than talent. Only plays approved unanimously by nine committee members (named by the state) could be performed. Napoleon’s list of rules ends chillingly: ‘Our Ministers of the interior, of police, of finance and the Superintendent of our theatre are all given responsibility for the execution of the present decree.’

After Napoleon’s exit from the world stage, the Comédie Française embraced the change of political regime, and began to choose for itself the plays it could produce. This seems to have been enough to satisfy the actors, because they didn’t alter anything else in Napoleon’s rules, which still govern the Comédie Française today. Performers sign up as
pensionnaires
(apprentices) for a year, before being elected
sociétaires
(members), and their nomination has to be confirmed by the Ministry of Culture. Yet again, Bonapartists can claim a lasting victory for Napoleon’s administrative skills.

And the new freedom did not mean that the Comédie suddenly started to honour France’s new friends, the English, by programming a Shakespeare season. The bard was still considered much too anarchic for classical French tastes, and in 1822, a year after Napoleon’s death, when a brave Frenchman tried to produce a performance of
Othello
, it was met with a barrage of eggs, fruit and cries of ‘down with Shakespeare, he is the lieutenant of Wellington’ – proving that the audience had not read the programme notes about the author not being a soldier.
^fn3
To make matters worse, by this time many French people had begun to pronounce Wellington’s name as ‘Vilain-jeton’, as Napoleon’s soldiers had done. Literally, this means ‘ugly fake coin’, probably an allusion to a French term for ‘hypocrite’ –
faux jeton
.