Seven Ages of Paris (32 page)

Waiting at Notre-Dame were sixty bishops with their clergy, the Senate, the Legislative Body, the Conseil d’Etat, and ministers of the various European powers. Closest to the Emperor were generals mostly from plebeian backgrounds, some of whom had been Jacobins and regicides only the previous decade, now all bearing resounding titles: Grand Chamberlains, Grand Marshals, Grand Masters of the Hounds. In the west end of the cathedral, and opposite the altar, on a platform twenty-four steps high sat an immense throne. Here Napoleon, not the Pope, placed the imperial crown on his own head, as Josephine knelt before him. There were moments of dissonance, which threatened to introduce farce into a scene of high majesty. Between the altar and the throne, an altercation broke out between Josephine and the jealous sisters-in-law carrying her train, which momentarily arrested her procession. Chagrined by receiving only two tickets for the coronation, David, the court painter, sought his revenge by painting himself into the ponderous formal tableau. On the return journey to the Tuileries, there was an unfortunate omen when the weighty crown toppled off the coach.

At this point, when he had taken to himself a concentration of power comparable only to that of the Roman Caesars, of Charlemagne and of the Holy Roman emperors, Napoleon was still only thirty-five. Le petit caporal or le Tondu, as the army fondly called him, was beginning to show just a few signs of filling out; his cheeks were plumper, the waistband of his breeches tauter, his skin sallower. Already he had been cocu by Josephine (and vice versa). Soon it would be time to do once again what he did best: to demonstrate to the world the military supremacy of France.

ELEVEN

*

“The Most Beautiful City

That Could Ever Exist”

If the Heavens had granted me another twenty years and some leisure, you would have looked in vain for the Old Paris …

NAPOLEON ON SAINT HELENA

RETURN FROM AUSTERLITZ

The Peace of Amiens had reached the end of its short life in May 1803 when England, alarmed by Napoleon’s naval activity, resumed her blockade of France. Napoleon was determined to invade England and assembled 177,000 men and more than 2,000 craft in the Channel ports, only to be frustrated repeatedly by adverse winds. When the new Third Coalition—in which Britain was joined by Russia, Austria, Sweden and Naples—menaced him from the east, the French Emperor acted decisively, even precipitately. On 1 October 1805, finally abandoning all thoughts of invading perfide Albion, Napoleon reversed direction and headed eastwards for the greatest military triumph of his career. It was one of his rare campaigns without a female consort. Never would he be more admired and worshipped by his soldiers than during this brief and dazzling operation. Nevertheless, he left an ill-humoured and extremely anxious Paris. In the Senate there had been little more than token enthusiasm when he explained the causes of the new war, laying the blame squarely on the Allies. Since the ending of the Peace of Amiens and of its accompanying boom, the French economy had nosedived. A poor harvest had made bread prices soar, and the national finances were soon in a mess once again, with the budget showing an immense deficit and taxes rising. All of this provoked something akin to panic on the Bourse. Thus it was absolutely imperative for Napoleon to win a swift and conclusive victory; otherwise the country would be in serious danger of bankruptcy. A call-up of 80,000 troops had done little to enhance his popularity in the capital. Leaving the Tuileries on his long march, the Emperor had been vexed by the unwonted lack of warmth towards him shown by the citizenry.

Yet, within the month, after marching through Germany at a prodigious speed, Napoleon at the head of the Grande Armée had trapped a whole Austrian army at Ulm and received its surrender. By 14 November he was entering Vienna in triumph. Two weeks later, brought to bay—so it seemed—far away in the heart of what is now the Czech Republic, he then turned and defeated the vastly superior combined forces of Austria and Russia. The Battle of Austerlitz, one of the most perfectly conceived and executed in the history of warfare—though an immensely risky affair—would always remain the jewel of all military jewels in Napoleon’s crown.

But this was not how Paris saw it when the news came through on 26 November. The city was still in an ill humour. With such a hands-on ruler, anxiety was often rife during his absences on campaign, and Paris was never more nervous. Up to 1803, Napoleon had appeared to Frenchmen as a peacemaker, but thenceforth it was as the conqueror and founder of a new empire—a change of role that, as of 1805, was by no means to every Parisian’s liking. Vienna was the first Allied capital ever to be occupied during all the wars of the previous decade, yet news of Napoleon’s triumphal entry was greeted in Paris with a momentary froideur. What was Napoleon getting himself into? Unmistakably the hand of the police could be seen fomenting the “spontaneous” joy in the streets, and “inviting” householders to display all their lights. The rejoicing did not last long; and it would be dimmed by the news of the loss of Admiral Villeneuve’s fleet at Trafalgar. But much more menacing in its immediacy was the awareness that the Banque Récamier had stopped payments. And what a terrifying predicament—the Grande Armée with the Emperor himself so many hundreds of kilometres from home, surrounded by powerful enemies in the heart of Europe!

Next, hardly pausing for breath, Napoleon was striking northward into Saxony, to defeat the combined forces of Prussia (which had belatedly joined the Allies against France in the Fourth Coalition), in another smashing, decisive victory at Jena. Then he was marching in triumph through a prostrate Berlin. Following this, in pursuit of the Russians, he was plunging eastwards into Poland, to Warsaw (where he was smitten by the beautiful Marie Walewska), and then finally—1,600 kilometres from Paris—he fought the last two battles of the campaign, Eylau and Friedland, less tidy and far costlier victories than Austerlitz and Jena, but victories all the same. In July 1807, from a raft anchored midstream in the River Niemen, Napoleon received the defeated Tsar Alexander I of Russia in an elegant pavilion of striped canvas. On the 7th of that month, the Peace of Tilsit was concluded. It was Napoleon’s finest achievement, and one of the greatest in the annals of France. “One of the culminating points of modern history,” declared Napoleon’s starry-eyed schoolfriend Bourrienne: “the waters of the Niemen reflected the image of Napoleon at the height of his glory.” Pitt’s Third Coalition had been rent asunder; Pitt, the arch-enemy, himself was dead, and, surveying from the raft in the Niemen the ruins of the rival empires, Napoleon could truly proclaim himself to be Master of All Europe. Everything was possible. But history is fickle. The next time Napoleon ventured on to the Niemen, just five years later, he would be en route to his first great defeat, and the beginning of his eclipse.

After the historic victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon was back in Paris at ten o’clock on the night of Sunday, 26 January 1806; within an hour he was issuing orders on how to resolve the bank crisis. He had been out of town for just 124 days, in which time he had smashed all his enemies—a true Blitzkrieg before its time. In the ensuing year, sixty-one days’ absence would suffice to bring Prussia to her knees; while, by the time of the destruction of the Allies’ Fourth Coalition and the conclusion of the Peace of Tilsit in July 1807, he would have been absent over the two years for a total of 306 days—the longest he would ever be away from the capital.

To commemorate the Grande Armée’s military triumph at Austerlitz, and also as part of his “bread and circuses” strategy of distracting uneasy Parisian minds with evidence of la Gloire, Napoleon projected a huge exposition of manufactures associating the arts of peace with the triumphs of war. (In the event, there was no such exhibition until 1819.) To keep the city’s growing body of unemployed quiet, Napoleon set them to work digging a new canal—the Ourcq. Outside the Tuileries the Arc du Carrousel, a triumphal arch in the Roman style, was to be erected; in Louis XIV’s Place Vendôme, a lofty column would be wrapped with the bronze of enemy cannon captured at Austerlitz. For the Grande Armée’s heroes, a colossal banquet was offered by the city—to which Napoleon, with his extraordinary attention to detail, proposed adding “a few bullfights in the Spanish manner,” a diversion which he thought would please the warriors. A vast camp was prepared at Meudon, designed to quarter the whole Grande Armée, only for Napoleon to decide that the Imperial Guard alone should be allowed to figure in the Parisian celebrations. But by this time Napoleon was at war with Prussia, so the Grande Armée headed east again, instead of marching through Paris.

When news of the next remarkable victory, at Jena, reached the capital, Parisians again reacted “without over-excitement, like a well-behaved child.” Frochot, the Prefect of the Seine, was actually exhorted to do whatever he could to “facilitate the explosion of [public] enthusiasm,” possibly by encouraging “dance resorts ordinarily frequented by the people on a Sunday, the bastringues, that is, to make them more attractive, better attended, gayer, more animated.” A deputation was sent by the Senate to Berlin, more to persuade Napoleon to make peace than to offer congratulations for Jena.

What continued to be much more immediately preoccupying to Parisians, during this period of astonishing events in faraway countries, was news in the autumn of 1805 of the collapse of the Banque Récamier, which had suspended withdrawals, thereby provoking a sequence of bankruptcies and bringing whole industries to a standstill. Anarchy imported by the zealots of the Revolution had caused capital to flee the city, and had destroyed the basis of commercial prosperity in Paris. This was being slowly rebuilt under the Consulate, but when the peace ended in 1803, and with it the tourist boom, Paris had experienced a tremendous inflation of prices, especially in luxuries; a woman’s coiffure for a single evening, for instance, cost three times the tariff of a few years before. The Banque Récamier had been a rock-like institution—the elderly Jacques Récamier a pillar of respectability, his wife, Juliette, renowned for her salon and her sofa, a paragon of virtue (until she met Chateaubriand). Yet when Récamier pleaded for a modest government loan to bail out the bank, Napoleon was unmoved, writing from Austerlitz within days of his triumph there, “Is it at a time like this that I must be obliged to make advances to men who got themselves involved in bad businesses?” and, more brutally, “I am not the lover of Madame Récamier, not I, and I am not going to come to the help of négociants who keep up a house costing 600,000 francs a year.”

The Récamiers would survive—indeed recoup their fortune—but for a while it looked as if the whole of France was facing bankruptcy. As a result of the breakdown of commerce with England, businesses collapsed right and left, and Parisians tightened their belts. Unhelpfully, Napoleon told them to break their habit of colonial foodstuffs: “Let your women take Swiss tea, it is just as good as the tea of the caravane, and chicory coffee is as healthy as Arabian coffee … !” And he warned the writer
Mme.
de Staël and her coterie, “Beware that I don’t spot them wearing dresses of English material!” It was almost certainly only by the success of Napoleon’s triumphs on distant battlefields like Austerlitz and Jena that serious disorder was averted in Paris.

THE PEACE OF TILSIT

The winter of 1806–7 continued just as difficult and dreary, with the English blockade affecting not only Paris but cities as far away as Lyons. In Paris, hardship was complicated by the prolonged absence on campaign of the court, aggravated by the knowledge that the Grande Armée was bogged down in the mud of Poland. Josephine, suffering pangs of jealousy when rumours reached her of Marie Walewska, thought of joining Napoleon in Warsaw, but he would have none of it. She had to stay in Paris. “I want you to be gay and bring a little life into the capital,” he told her. But the spring of 1807 brought a renewal of confidence in Paris. The economy seemed to be turning the corner; and in Tilsit the Napoleonic apparatus went into top gear to ensure that the Emperor’s victorious return to his capital would this time remain fixed in Parisian memories. There was in any case now little doubt about the genuineness of the warmth now being displayed by Parisians.

On 27 July 1807, cannon thundering out from the Invalides announced that the Emperor had returned from the eastern front. Heralds clad in medieval costume and illuminated by torchlight proclaimed the treaty he had just concluded. The whole of Paris and Saint-Cloud, where he spent his first nights, were lit up with spontaneous illuminations. (Typically, one of Napoleon’s first actions on reaching Saint-Cloud was to summon his architect to pursue his grandiose plans for a Temple de la Gloire at the Madeleine.) Official deputations flooded in from all over France and Europe. Military bands and spectators jammed the broad avenues, as the magnificent Imperial Guard made its triumphal entry. There were endless parades, balls and fêtes. In November, Paris laid on the celebrations for the Imperial Guard which had been called off the previous year. At the head of a glittering cavalcade, Marshal Bessières, hero of Austerlitz, magnificent on his charger, led the Guard into Paris via the Porte de la Villette and onward through the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, still hidden in scaffolding. That night a vast banquet was offered to all the soldiers of the Guard the length of the Champs-Elysées. The following day another grandiose fête was thrown by the Senate at the Luxembourg; alas—possibly an augury of the gods—icy rain and snow turned the occasion into a rout.

Perhaps the most brilliant of all Paris’s celebrations of Tilsit was that marking the Emperor’s birthday on 15 August. An extraordinary gaiety pervaded the streets, never to be seen again in Napoleon’s day. Houses were hung with metres of calico inscribed with flowery and obsequious eulogies, and even vendors of thermometers turned poets for the occasion:

I know not what genius will venture

To sing a hero guided by victory.

For my part, I could not make a thermometer