Seven Ages of Paris (36 page)

Yet, above all the warring actresses of the Empire, it was the great talent of François-Joseph Talma that reigned supreme. The son of a Parisian dentist who declined to follow his father’s calling, Talma in the first decades of the century created the principal roles in all the famous tragedies of the day. He restored the reputation of tragedy in Paris, bringing in many lasting reforms in production and in method—such as less artificiality, less declamation. Skilful at adapting lines of the classics to contemporary events, he became a close intimate of Napoleon. Despite his tirades against “tyrants,” he was to be seen breakfasting regularly at the Tuileries with the Emperor.

Napoleon liked music and revelled in spectacle, but it is not certain how much he genuinely enjoyed opera—especially given the memories of the night so rudely spoiled for him by the bomb back in December 1800. But his interference was about the same as in the theatre. To Fouché he wrote from his campaign headquarters in 1807, “I am very dissatisfied with the handling of the Opéra. Let Director Bonet know that matters of intrigue will not succeed with me … If it doesn’t cease I will give them une bande militaire which will make them march with drums beating.” Immediately on his return to Paris Napoleon summoned the three curators of the Opéra to ask them what was happening.

The rickety state of the Paris Opéra evidently presented distinct physical dangers to dancers. At one performance, a “machine” collapsed, throwing
Mlle.
Aubery six metres from her throne, so that she suffered concussion and a broken leg. Acidly Napoleon would write from Eylau, in March 1807, in the middle of that bloody campaign, “I see that the Mademoiselle Aubery affair occupies the Parisians more than all the losses that my army have suffered!” In 1808, Napoleon instructed his architect Fontaine to draw up “a fine project” for a new home for the Opéra; it was to be “a little like that of Milan.” He laid down the details, but noted somewhat casually that it could be “located anywhere.” Work on the project, however, did not begin until 1813.

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Readers of the novels of Jane Austen have often marvelled at how she could have lived through the Napoleonic era, have written so much, but have mentioned virtually nothing about the cataclysmic war that was taking place. But it becomes perhaps a little less remarkable when one considers how little life in Paris was affected by the war. There were the distractions of the new galleries in the Louvre, the new building works, the promenades, the theatre, the opera—and no serious press to report unpleasant realities from far-flung battlefields. Even the loss of the Grande Armée in the retreat from Moscow in 1812 hardly disturbed the rhythm of life in the capital. Only the actual appearance of Cossacks on the Champs-Elysées in 1814 could do that.

TWELVE

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Downfall of an Empire

Spring will bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.

FOUCHÈ, IN 1814

IMPERIAL NUPTIALS

When life in Paris was interjected with tidings from far-flung battlefronts, after Tilsit in 1807 they were rarely destined to bring great joy. From Madrid, where the “Spanish Ulcer” was beginning its deadly work of sapping French strength, Napoleon returned to Paris in January 1809 to find morale disturbingly low. The economy was in a less healthy condition than when he had embarked on his Spanish adventure. The war represented a heavy financial burden, on top of the ever growing expense of keeping up his imperial splendour. The British blockade in particular was causing problems; once again perfide Albion was frustrating his ambitions at every turn. There was mounting resistance to conscription for the Spanish campaign, the first of Napoleon’s military enterprises that had lacked the pretext of a foreign, royalist coalition united against revolutionary France. Desertion or self-mutilation was preferred by one in ten new recruits. “Spontaneous” public enthusiasm, Fouché warned him, could no longer be depended on. The imperial family had also become markedly less popular, as their prodigious greed increased the overheads of the Empire. Napoleon understood the implications of all this, bluntly remarking to Fouché that “This year is an inopportune time to shock public opinion by repudiating the popular Empress … she is responsible for attaching a part of Paris society to me which would then leave me.” He would have to wait until he could achieve another triumph on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, in the east his once defeated enemies were moving again. On 13 April he departed Paris in haste for Vienna—attempting to leave before dawn, without telling Josephine. However, the about-to-be-abandoned Empress leaped out of bed and flew down to the courtyard in her bedroom slippers. “Crying like a child, she threw herself into his carriage; she was so lightly dressed that his Majesty threw his furlined coat over her shoulders and then issued orders for her luggage to be sent on to her.” There followed another frantic excursion in pursuit of war together. Strasbourg was as far as she would be permitted to go this time. For Josephine it would be their last, poignant journey together. In a thoroughly despondent Paris the stock exchange tumbled. Plainly, the fate of the Empire, and of the Emperor, rested on the outcome of a single battle—more so than at any time since Marengo. But Wagram, in 1809, Napoleon’s last victory, was so hard fought, so marginal, that it brought with it a sense only that “we victors now know that we are mortal.”

When, following Wagram, the Peace of Vienna of that October was announced to a theatre audience, it produced only modest enthusiasm. Consistent bad news was to follow as the Empire reached and passed its apogee. There were, of course, the usual spectacles to distract an uneasy populace. Then, once Josephine—with dignity—had permitted herself to be divorced, in 1810 came the grandiose nuptials of the Emperor and the nineteen-year-old Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria (in shedding the bien-aimée Josephine, reckoned the superstitious, he had shed his lucky star too). Politically, the new match was an act of great cynicism on both sides: in the words of André Maurois, Francis of Austria had “sacrificed his Iphigenia in order to gain time; when the hour should strike, he would not scruple to dethrone the husband and take back the daughter.” For Napoleon, it was a matter of ensuring the continuation of his dynasty. Just five and a half years had passed since the historic ceremony in Notre-Dame, during which time Josephine had proved incapable of providing an heir. Whether driven by urgency or by Mediterranean virility, Napoleon had deflowered his new bride at Compiègne on her way to Paris, in advance of the official ceremony in the Tuileries. That day the route of the imperial cortège through the capital was lined with thousands of spectators. They seem to have been mostly curious, however, because—in contrast to the fallen Josephine—to Parisians Marie Louise’s plump Teutonic face produced “generally an unfavourable impression.” Manifestly ill at ease in the city which had murdered her aunt Marie Antoinette, the new Empress, moreover, never conquered the hearts of the French as had her predecessor.

For the marital grand entrée, a full-scale replica of the still unfinished Arc de Triomphe was created out of painted paper on a wooden framework. But there was an unfortunate omen when carpenters working on it went on strike. The Inspector-General of Police applied a stern hand, giving the carpenters four francs for what they had previously refused to do for eighteen, while six of them were thrown into jail. An even worse augury for the imperial marriage of Austria and France followed that July when a dreadful disaster overtook the Austrian Embassy at the ball celebrating the wedding. As the dancing began, a violent storm blew the curtains on to some candles. Fire took hold, and in moments there was chaos, with the hostess, Princess Schwarzenberg, and many others burned to death. Benjamin Constant’s wife, Charlotte, who was there, recorded the scene for him:

… I swear to you that I still think I’m living in a nightmare—a bare seven minutes covered the whole time from the moment we all started for the doors … the flames reached out into the garden after us … we heard the big mirrors cracking and the chandeliers crashing down … and through it the screams of the wretched beings who were still inside.

Firemen who rushed to the scene turned out to be drunk, provoking from Napoleon his sole comment: “I have discharged the colonel.”

On the night of 20 March 1811, a young Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, then a clerk at army headquarters in Paris, was abed with his girlfriend Angéline Bereyter when they were woken by the sudden, repeated booming of the cannon.

We counted up to nineteen, when mad cheering broke out in the streets. We then realized that we had missed the first three salvos … the cannon went on booming. It was a boy all right … a young prince had been born. All around us people went wild with joy.

It was “a grand and happy event,” interjected Stendhal with unusual pomposity, while totting up, boastfully—in English—rather more personal statistics of his amatory prowess: “I make that one or two every day, she five, sex [sic] and sometimes neuf fois.”

Marie Louise had indeed produced an heir, Napoleon II, the unhappy and short-lived “Aiglon.” His father named him King of Rome, possibly in cynical remembrance of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, which he had liquidated after Austerlitz. To Josephine he duly reported, “My son is plump and well. He has my chest, my mouth and my eyes … I hope he will fulfil his destiny.” It was news that must have been fairly agonizing for a discarded barren ex-Empress. In his journal, Stendhal went on to record his current disillusion: “This capital of the greatest empire of modern times is used up for me, I have become blasé with regard to its pleasures … Obviously I haven’t the light, frivolous character necessary for enjoying Paris to the full.” He had by now come to look on the Parisians as “a surly, fretful, envious people, in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction … Even the pretty girls wore five or six wrinkles across their foreheads, etched in by envy.”

Stendhal’s disillusion perhaps reflected something of the prevailing mood in the city. For all the natural relief that there was now an heir, spontaneous demonstrations of joy at the happy event were somewhat exaggerated by the police reports. In June there was an imposing ceremony for the christening of the King of Rome at Notre-Dame, but the crowds that turned out were described as being more curious than enthusiastic. Napoleon had hoped that the occasion would be the first of a sequence of dynastic celebrations; in the event it was to prove the last party of Empire.

FAMINE

Within days of Napoleon’s rejoicing at the birth of his heir, his two Councils of Commerce and Manufacturing presented to him some unpleasant home truths. Though, with the tightening of the British blockade, Paris had become the undisputed commercial centre of Europe, the problems that had shaken her in 1805—still unresolved—emerged once more with increased force. Despite constantly raising taxes, Napoleon’s treasury had run up a deficit of fifty million francs by the end of 1811. It forced him to issue a decree cancelling the arrears of pay owed to the soldiers who had died for him, thereby in effect cheating even the dead. Led by the Banque de France, the banks had got themselves enmeshed in a chain reaction of competitive discounting which the weaker brethren could not afford.

A first warning came with the fall of the important house of Lübeck, which had repercussions all over Europe. In February 1811 Mollien, the Finance Minister, could report that there were not twelve banks in Paris that remained truly sound. For each of the succeeding months of December 1810 to March 1811 there were more than forty business failures. Part of the trouble was a shortage of credit, and too many middlemen chasing too few goods. There were intermediaries selling goods they never possessed, without paying and without delivering. Speculation was rife; Talleyrand had no compunction about getting involved, and now some of the generals were too.

Much of the speculation concerned contraband run through the blockade, despite the penalties imposed by a despot increasingly enraged at the thwarting of his Continental System, by which—since 1807—he had closed continental ports to Britain. There was a seizure of substantial American cargoes in Antwerp, with painful repercussions in Paris. But still the trade went on with the commerçants of Paris, despite the risks that they exposed themselves to, preferring to continue to offer their clientele contraband English goods. In the spring of 1811, a major consignment of contraband muslins and other fabrics was seized in the Rue Le Peletier, at the elegant heart of Paris. By June 1812, Mollien was daring to observe to Napoleon that “Paris seems to have become the public market chosen by England to direct and consume all its transactions of currency.” The following week, driven over the brink by the double-dealing of his ally, Tsar Alexander, with the English arch-enemy, Napoleon recrossed the Niemen to invade Russia and teach the Tsar a lesson.

For the average Parisian, far worse than the renewed financial crisis was the disette, or famine, of 1811–12, brought about by a combination of native incompetence and the increasing rigour of the Royal Navy’s blockade. Initially the harvest of 1811 promised to be excellent; then repeated thunderstorms caused serious damage, particularly in the Paris region. Administrators were caught out, because—although the harvest of 1811 was not demonstrably smaller than that of 1810—they had allowed surpluses to run down. In Paris, the first signs of the dreaded disette were of boiled potatoes being sold around Les Halles instead of grain, and the sudden increase in the price of rice and vegetables. Shortages were exacerbated by provincials coming in to buy their bread from Paris, because it was of better quality there. Between 1811 and 1813, Napoleon summoned no fewer than fourteen conferences exclusively dealing with food supplies.

By the beginning of 1812 the price of bread was beginning to spiral upwards as the speculators got in on the act. A sack of flour fetching 93 francs in February (already an exceptional price) reached 115 by April. On 8 May, on the eve of his departure for Dresden and Russia, Napoleon signed an important decree releasing stocks of flour to the Parisian millers. The reserves had all but run out.