How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (27 page)

But by bombarding the stage and insulting an English general, at least the French were taking advantage of their political liberty. And the rest of French culture also began to express itself more freely after Waterloo.

Freedom of the press spawned freedom of the written word in general, and the book trade began to expand. In 1813, 3,749 books had been published in France; by 1825 the figure was 7,605. Writers like Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo were free to talk about everyday life, poverty and the realities of war. Though as we saw in Chapter 7, Bonapartists can claim some credit for this literary renaissance, too, because much of the subject matter was inspired by nostalgia for France’s former ‘glory’ under Napoleon.

The new spirit of expressiveness spread to music, too. Romanticism finally ousted classicism in France, prompting Liszt and Chopin to come and perform. Rossini became director of Paris’s Théâtre Italien, and light-hearted entertainment thrived, so that by the 1840s the German-born composer Jacques Offenbach was in Paris writing the catchy melodies that would give birth to Vaudeville. The French frivolity that would later inspire the Belle Epoque was born in the heady peacetime post-Waterloo.
^fn4

It could also be argued that France’s most memorable contribution to world culture in the nineteenth century came about because of the fall of Napoleon. While he was in power, official painting was limited to glorifying the Emperor, his regime and its military heroes. The more a portrait looked like something looted from ancient Greece, the better. Things didn’t change very quickly, and even in the 1850s, Paris’s artistic establishment was staid enough to reject paintings by Edouard Manet that were considered not heroic enough. But soon, inspired by painters like Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, a new generation of artists were freeing up their palettes, slapping on the colour, and painting portraits of simple peasants, waitresses and workers instead of emperors and generals. Impressionism was blossoming.

And where were the new artists doing this (with apologies for the French-style rhetorical question)? Mainly on the fringes of Paris, which, unlike London, was not expanding massively under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution. Even as late as the 1860s Montmartre was still a village, with peasants, fields and vineyards, less than 3 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Painters trained in the art schools and studios of the capital only had to wander a short way up the hill to find rustic inspiration and cheap accommodation, free of the smog that would have blackened their brushes if they had tried the same thing in London. Just a few kilometres further out, in the unchanging French countryside, they could paint peaceful sunlit picnics,
bourgeois
pretending to be peasants, and women wearing floaty dresses and looking quintessentially French. And when the Impressionists turned to urban life, they painted a few cityscapes and puffing trains, but most of all they immortalised
Parisiennes
sporting the chic hand-made dresses, hats and parasols that were being turned out in the city’s workshops.

All in all, it can be argued that France’s place in art history was founded on the economic tranquillity that reigned in the country after Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon. Again, the French are the winners.

The conclusion, then, is clear. The Brits and the Germans might think that they won the great battle on 18 June 1815, but if you take a step back and examine history through French eyes – Bonapartist or not – things look very different.

Like Cambronne’s last square of defiant
Gardes
, the French are surrounded by hostile (mainly British) historians reminding them that Waterloo was lost, and that the day ended with everyone in a French uniform – including the most famous uniform of them all – running for their lives. But either they will contradict you, or they don’t care.

Even if you can get a French person to admit that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo – which will probably involve your conceding that he won more battles than he lost, that he had bad luck with the weather, and that his piles were playing up on that fateful June day – you will be forced to agree that Napoleon is a far more famous and recognisable icon today than either Wellington or Blücher. Who has won the battle for history? the French person will ask; and, being French, he or she will also provide the answer:
c’est Napoléon
.

Furthermore, this French person will argue that even if Napoleon was defeated on 18 June 1815, France as a nation emerged a winner, because it was allowed to keep everything that was useful about Bonapartism, and build on those foundations to become a well-organised bureaucratic republic, the birthplace of Impressionism and the world capital of the luxury industry – not to mention making a fortune out of Napoleonic tourism and selling Napoleonic memorabilia.

And if you haven’t given up arguing yet, and continue to contradict your French debating partner, he or she will simply pull one decisive trick out of Napoleon’s million-euro black hat: all discussion will be ended with the triumphant word that France first learned how to use to its full effect at Waterloo –
merde
.

In short, there was one critical thing that Wellington and Blücher didn’t know when they took on the French at Waterloo, one unavoidable fact that we today are forced to acknowledge: when you’re up against Napoleon, you just can’t win.

^fn1
Compared to ‘only’ 300,000 British men killed during the Napoleonic Wars. But then the French would argue that this was because Britain was paying foreign mercenaries to do its fighting – which was true. Around a million soldiers from the other allied countries also died.

^fn2
When I wrote to the magazine pointing out this omission, I was of course ignored. A mere
Anglais
does not contradict a French history magazine, especially to point out uncomfortable truths.

^fn3
Unless the French crowd misunderstood Othello’s line in Act Two, ‘The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue’, and thought it was a call for audience participation.

^fn4
For more details about fun and frivolity in Parisian theatre, see my book
Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France
.

AS I FINISH
writing this book, France is in a mood of crushing pessimism. Most of this is caused by day-to-day economic gloom and the fear of terrorist attacks, but a fair proportion is more deeply rooted in a painful combination of wounded pride and vicious self-criticism. With its declining influence in world affairs, the replacement of French by English as a global language, as well as its current economic problems, France seems to be more aware than ever that it has frittered away all the
gloire
that Napoleon earned for it 200 years ago.

This negativity is exactly the kind of mood that Napoleon could have cured – with a quick war to annex Luxembourg, perhaps – and one that is alleviated today by regular bouts of Napoleonic nostalgia.

One of these therapy sessions we have already heard about – the November 2014 auction in the ‘imperial town’ of Fontainebleau of Napoleonic memorabilia at which one of the Emperor’s hats was sold for 1.8 million euros. During the sale, France’s core psychological problems were highlighted by two key slips of the tongue.

First, while talking about a historian who had researched the provenance of Napoleon’s possessions in the sale, one of the auctioneers committed a hugely revealing Freudian slip. Instead of ‘un historien’, he called the man ‘un hystérien’, thereby inventing a piercingly accurate description of Napoleon’s most nostalgic admirers.

A second, and even more telling, mistake came when the main auctioneer was reciting Edmond Rostand’s lines of poetry about Napoleon’s hat. As I pointed out in Chapter 8, he completely fluffed the last two lines. But most revealingly of all, he omitted one vital word. Rostand wrote that the sound to be heard inside Napoleon’s shell-like hat was that of ‘une grande nation’ on the march – but the auctioneer forgot to say ‘grande’. Subconsciously, while surrounded by the relics of Napoleon’s legendary career, he was admitting that modern France just isn’t ‘great’ any more.

This is why French people today seem to feel that they need Napoleon. Or at least
a
Napoleon. The politicians try to emulate him, but they all fall absurdly short (which is not a height-related pun). When France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, travelled to London in October 2014, he was ostensibly coming to convince both the City of London and French tax exiles that his Socialist regime was not hostile to business; but it soon became clear that his was a different mission, and one that probably set Napoleon’s
cendres
spinning in his sarcophagus.

Monsieur Valls told his audience of businesspeople (in French of course), ‘Every day I read your press, I hear and I see what is being said about France. Too often in some of your newspapers I see bias, prejudices and attacks.’ Yes, in reality he had come to London to complain about
le French-bashing
, a piece of English vocabulary that is so hurtful to the French national psyche that they have actually adopted it into their language.

In short, in 2014 a French Prime Minister crossed the Channel to complain to
les Anglais
that they were saying nasty things about France. Two centuries earlier, Napoleon and all his troops, right up to the highest-ranked marshals, had stood impassively on the battlefield as British cannonballs were fired at their heads, and now a French politician was whinging about a few insults? At the very least he could have unleashed a decent retort of ‘Merde!’ instead of pleading for the barrage of French-bashing to stop.
It was a defeat 200 times more humiliating than Waterloo (if, of course, Waterloo was a defeat, etc., etc
.
).

In the face of such defeatism among their political leaders, it is no wonder that the French are gearing up for several years of Napoleonic celebration. It seems to be the only way to restore a mood of national pride.

The biggest of a series of Napoleon-themed projects in the offing is the proposed Parc Napoléon at Montereau, 80 kilometres from Paris, the site of one of Napoleon’s final victories in 1814. This 200-million-euro theme park, due to be completed by 2020, is the brainchild of the town’s MP. It aims to attract 400,000 visitors in the first year, rising to two million in year ten, and will apparently include hotels, a conference centre and of course a battlefield for regular Napoleonic re-enactments (which, given the location, will no doubt all result in French victories). The project has already attracted promises of funding from the French state as well as investment from China and the Emirates, with plenty more money in the pipeline, we are told. Such far-reaching, and expensive, recognition is the Bonapartists’ dream, even if a theme park does seem to place Napoleon at the same cultural level as Mickey Mouse.

Meanwhile, thousands of kilometres away in the South Atlantic, there is a similar plan to turn the island of Saint Helena into a kind of exiled Parc Napoléon. France owns 17 hectares of land on the British island. These French properties cover three locations: The Briars (the garden pavilion where Napoleon spent his first few weeks of exile on the island in 1815), the land around Napoleon’s last residence at Longwood, and his original grave – his body was of course later repatriated to France. Longwood and the grave site were bought for the French nation by Emperor Napoléon III in 1857, while The Briars was gifted to France in 1959 by the English family that had owned it since 1815. The original grave, by the way, was just a square slab of stone on a lawn, but has since been fenced off to prevent Bonapartists prostrating themselves and sobbing loud enough to startle the seagulls.

Recently, Longwood has been renovated by the French at a cost of some 2.3 million euros, 1.5 million of which came from 2,500 private and corporate donors, and the rest from the French state. This sizeable sum did not cover the restoration of the furniture, and over thirty pieces were sent back to France’s national workshops to be refurbished before their return to Longwood.

This costly renovation of Napoleon’s prison island is part of a Bonapartist masterplan, starting with a
grande inauguration
of the new-look Longwood on 15 October 2015 (the bicentenary of Napoleon’s arrival on Saint Helena), followed by a series of visits throughout 2016 by French groups, and a grand tour of the island by the International Napoleonic Society in 2017, with the excitement coming to a climax on the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death on 5 May 2021.

Meanwhile, there has been some harsh French criticism of the Brits for not playing their part in this bonanza of Napoleonic activity on Saint Helena. In 2014
L’Histoire
magazine reproached the islanders for their ‘insufficient hospitality: just 40-odd hotel rooms and six restaurants, all of poor standard’. Usually, of course, Bonapartists criticise
les Anglais
for their rampant commercialism, but when it comes to glorifying Napoleon, commercialism is clearly acceptable.

The French memorial ceremony on Saint Helena in May 2021 is going to be a major event. No doubt French politicians will be flocking to pay their respects in front of the cameras, praying that they can scoop up a few crumbs of Napoleonic
gloire
for themselves. And we can be sure that the island will be echoing to the Bonapartists’ cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
even as they commemorate his death.

By then, a five-star Hotel Napoleon, a Longwood Luncheonette and a Bonaparte Brasserie had better be ready on Saint Helena, or there will be some serious
Anglais
-bashing on the menu. Because this will be the modern Bonapartists’ great moment, the focus of all their energy for at least the past century. They are currently bringing Napoleonic nostalgia to a climax, whipping re-enactors and auction-goers to new heights of hysteria, spreading the Bonaparte gospel as far as Asia, and attracting investors for his theme park from all over the world. Napoleon is as recognisable an icon today as he ever was, and is well on his way to being even bigger than Mickey Mouse. So the threat is very real: if
les Anglais
don’t show enough respect to
l’Empereur
on the bicentenary of his entry into immortality, his worshippers might just annex the whole island and declare it the capital of a new Napoleonic empire …