Citizen Emperor Page 7
Two interesting insights can be gleaned from these political intrigues. The first is that the struggle for power in the highest echelons of government had not yet played itself out. For Bonaparte, this was a situation of his own making; by centring all power in his person he had created a state of affairs in which, if ever he were to disappear, a political tussle for power would ensue. There were still enough men around capable of assuming power, or at least men who thought they were capable of doing so. The second is that the question of a successor was being openly discussed less than a year into the new regime.
Roederer, the Brumairian, had raised the question of a successor on a number of occasions, but Bonaparte always avoided giving a definitive answer. On one of those occasions, Roederer received the famous reply, ‘My natural heir is the French people. There is my child.’26 It was meant for public consumption, or at least for those republicans willing to listen, and played to the image of Bonaparte as ‘good son of the Revolution’.27 The problem for the First Consul was that he could not think who could replace him. ‘The French’, he admitted to Roederer, ‘can be governed only by me. I am persuaded that no one other than me, be it Louis XVIII, be it Louis XIV, could govern France at the moment. If I die, it would be a misfortune.’28 This conceit is shocking but hardly surprising. It was to declare publicly that the sovereignty of the people resided in him.29
It was not until the military bulletin of 15 June that Bonaparte announced the outcome of Marengo. He managed to highlight the important events in the battle with theatrical flair: ‘Four times during the battle we retreated, and four times we advanced. More than sixty cannon were taken and retaken at different points and at different times, by both sides. There were twelve cavalry charges, with varying success.’ The bulletin also contained the stirring lines, ‘Children, remember that it is my custom to sleep on the field of battle. – Long live the Republic! Long live the First Consul!’30
The bulletin reached Paris on 22 June. The consuls immediately ordered salvoes of cannon to be fired in celebration; the bulletin was hastily printed and posted all over Paris but especially in the working-class districts. The populace exploded with joy, as though, according to one newspaper report, ‘struck by an electric spark’.31 The centre of celebrations was the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.32 Shopkeepers closed their doors and headed for the Tuileries, where a large crowd had gathered.33 That evening saw the ‘first spontaneous illumination that has taken place in nine years. Work was suspended for the whole day.’34 One contemporary entering Paris that evening through the customs barrier at the Place du Trône (today the Place de la Nation) passed more than 200 fires around which people were dancing and celebrating as he drove through to where the Bastille had once been.35 A Te Deum was improvised in the Church of Saint-Gervais (near the town hall, the Hôtel de Ville), attracting so many people that the congregation spilled out on to the street.36 That was nothing compared to the Te Deum organized in Notre Dame on 24 June, which more than 60,000 people attended.37 Bonaparte had, to paraphrase Fouché, conquered not so much Italy as France.38
The victory was celebrated not only in Paris but throughout France.39 Between Milan and Lyons, the route Bonaparte took to return to Paris was lined with people who turned out to see the victor; Lyons and Dijon reserved a welcome for him as warm as on his return from Egypt.40 The exhilaration can in part be explained not only because Marengo was the victory of the army but because, to many, it was unimaginable that the enemy coalition would now survive for long. After Marengo even Bonaparte thought peace was inevitable.41
The Hero Returns
Bonaparte’s decision to return to Paris shortly after the battle is significant. News of ‘intrigues’ in Paris had reached his ears and, because he thought a plot against him was afoot, he resolved to return to the seat of power. He left Masséna in charge of the army. From Lyons, he wrote to his brother Lucien: ‘I will arrive in Paris without warning. My intention is to have neither triumphal arches nor any other kind of ceremony. I have too good an opinion of myself to have any respect for such trinkets. I know of no other triumph than public satisfaction.’42 Was this an affectation of simplicity, or an instinctive dislike of the theatricality of a grand entrance? It was probably a mixture of both of these things, although whatever reservations he may have had about grand displays did not prevent him, as in Italy, from comparing himself to a force of nature.43 In that vein, he wanted to impress by the speed with which he travelled; he would arrive in Paris when people thought that he was still in Milan. When he stopped in Lyons on the way, his hotel was mobbed by a crowd anxious to catch a glimpse of him.44 At two o’clock in the morning of 2 July he arrived in the Tuileries accompanied by his aide-de-camp Duroc and his secretary Bourrienne.
The next day, Paris witnessed something it had not seen in a long time: workers from the faubourgs descended on the palace to greet the First Consul. ‘An immense crowd filled the terraces and the courtyards of the Tuileries. Never have we seen shine more universally an air of joy, contentment and gratitude on [people’s] faces. This evening, all of Paris is here.’45 The crowds were still in the streets at midnight, even though there was no music and no dancing.46 One of the principal reasons Bonaparte was so easily accepted at the outset of his regime was that he was seen as the general who could bring about peace.47 It was a recurring theme in the regime’s propaganda, at least in the early years.48 The campaign of 1800 was supported because of its potential to bring the war to an end. ‘It is to have peace,’ wrote a journalist in the Décade philosophique, ‘to obtain a just and honourable one, to repress ambition, and especially to guarantee its independence, that it is permissible to support the war.’49
One can only speculate about the extent to which Bonaparte associated military victory and political legitimacy, in both the first and second Italian campaigns, but, as we shall see, the idea would become an obsession with him. He incorrectly associated his popularity with victory and assumed that in order to stay in power he would have to continue to generate military successes. The regime, however, was not contingent on the continuation of good ‘fortune’ on the battlefield. It was dependent on peace in Europe. Talleyrand was one of the first to see this, and also, as we shall see, one of the first to try to dissociate himself from a man unable to overcome his need to win battles.
The Festival of the Concord
The fate of the battle of Marengo was immediately linked to Bonaparte’s personal destiny: the outcome had been favourable because it was preordained that he would rise to greater things. The illusion was immediate and universal. The royalist agent Hyde de Neuville wrote that Marengo was the baptism of Bonaparte’s personal power. It consolidated his reputation as a military leader and consequently his position as a political leader, a sentiment echoed by historians.50 In some respects, Bonaparte anchored the Revolution through this victory, guaranteeing its reforms, and assuring the Revolution’s supporters that peace within France would soon follow. He could reconcile the French around this victory.
Only twelve days after the return of Bonaparte from Italy, the victory was connected to the celebration of 14 July, which since 1790 had been known as the Festival of the Federation.51 Although it coincided with the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the Festival of the Federation was, in its first years, much more about bringing the nation together around the throne, and then around the Republic.52 Bonaparte appropriated the celebrations, dubbing them the Festival of the Concord, and used the occasion to glorify the coup that had brought the regime to power, as well as to commemorate the death of Desaix.53 The celebrations were meant to weaken what little hold radical revolutionaries still had over the Revolution. The Republic was being founded on a new basis – peace, concord, humanity, happiness, the patrie.54
Bonaparte had thought about the programme weeks before.55 When in Milan, he had engaged two Italian singers – Francesco Bianchi and Giuseppina Grassini – to sing a duet celebrating the ‘deliverance’ of the Cisalpine Republic, a sister stat
e in the north of Italy created by Bonaparte in July 1797. He wanted something new which at the same time gave Paris back the spectacles that were part and parcel of the monarchy of the ancien régime.56 There were to be no more revolutionary parades, no more allegorical or mythological processions, although the flamboyant Lucien, who helped plan the proceedings, proposed a chariot race around the Champ de Mars.57 Bonaparte had reservations, but the race nevertheless went ahead.
The festival began on the eve of the public holiday. Theatres were opened to the public for free, but with plays that had been determined in advance by the government, and the Quai Desaix was inaugurated in memory of the general’s death.58 The next day, at five in the morning, a twenty-one-gun salute announced the official ceremonies.59 Festivities filled the whole day, beginning with a ceremony at the Place de la Revolution (Concorde) when the first stone was laid for a column dedicated to the memory of soldiers who had died for the Republic.60 Lucien gave a speech for the occasion, and with an intellectual sleight of hand drew a parallel between the Revolution and the coup by declaring that ‘18 Brumaire has completed the work of 14 July.’61
A conscious effort was made throughout the festivities to draw a parallel between the two events. This was echoed in a number of government-inspired pamphlets, such as the Adresse aux français sur le Quatorze juillet (Address to the French on the Fourteenth of July): ‘It appears to us that the 14 July is separated only by the stormy night of 18 Brumaire, which was, so to speak, the following day.’62 The difference was that since the new government had come to power, ‘France has reconquered all the benefits of 14 July, acquired in Europe more consideration than the monarchy ever had, and increased its territory to the boundaries that nature has allocated it.’63
The contentment with the new regime and with Bonaparte, who was still a curiosity among the Parisian crowds at this early stage of his rule, was palpable. The crowds would run to try and catch a glimpse of the man, yelling ‘Vive Bonaparte!’64 As he was riding from the Concorde to the Invalides, someone broke through the crowds to kiss his saddle cover.65 We are already beginning to see the type of adulation that would later lead to the cult of Napoleon. For some at least this was a public manifestation of the end of the Revolution. ‘If we had still feared’, wrote one journalist, ‘that the Revolution was not over, today there remained no doubt in that regard.’66 While the reaction of the Parisian population varies according to the sources,67 Cambacérès claimed that it was the first popular and spontaneous manifestation of joy in over nine years, that is, since the Festival of the Federation of July 1790. All the other celebrations of 14 July gave the impression of being forced.68
The Festival of the Concord coincided with a funeral ceremony, the first of many, held in the Temple of Mars (the Invalides) to commemorate the death of Desaix. It too was widely reported in the press.69 The flags captured from the enemy in Italy were suspended from the dome, and a statue of Liberty was erected, at the foot of which the three consuls were seated. To their right was a cenotaph in honour of Desaix. The ceremony was much more about Bonaparte (living) than about Desaix (dead), and it was to set the pattern for all the ceremonies that followed. It transformed Desaix into a hero, but it conferred on Bonaparte an almost sacred character.70
Publicly honouring dead generals, not all of whom had fallen on the field of battle, was a relatively new phenomenon. Between 1797 and 1803 generals such as Lazare Hoche, Jean Baptiste Kléber and Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, succumbed either to sickness, to assassination or to death in battle.71 The deaths of these generals were used by the state as part of the heroicization of the public figure, a sort of cult of the revolutionary martyr. Statues were consequently built not only to remind the public of popular heroes who had died for the patrie, but often to link them to either Bonaparte or one of his campaigns. In the case of Desaix and Kléber, for example, their statues were given an Egyptian flavour, stirring memories of the campaign in Egypt, helping thus to promote Bonaparte’s own legend.
Between the victory at Marengo and the Festival of the Republic on 23 September 1800, at least a dozen separate civil celebrations were held in Paris, not counting the religious celebrations, to honour the heroes who had died at Marengo.72 On the last of these, the Festival of the Republic, Bonaparte laid the first stone of a statue in honour of Desaix in the Place des Victoires.73 Here too, as with the funeral ceremony, much was made of the occasion. The consuls were accompanied by their ministers and by an important military escort, speeches were made, music was played, songs were sung.
‘Why am I Not Permitted to Weep?’
The battle of Marengo had been a disaster in many respects and had come close to defeat for Bonaparte, largely as a result of his mistakes. One eyewitness account has him, for a moment, sitting on the levee of a ditch on the main road to Alessandria, holding his horse by the bridle, flicking pebbles with his riding crop, apparently lost in thought and oblivious to what was going on around him.74
Marengo, as we have seen, was really won by Generals Kellermann and Desaix,75 but Bonaparte exploited it to the full. The celebration of ‘Maringo’, as it was first called by the newspapers, was centred on the First Consul; the army was barely mentioned. Marengo helped consolidate his hold on power, placing him at the heart of the state,76 and reinforcing his status as hero of the Republic, perhaps more so than that other key moment in the early part of his reign, the Peace of Amiens (about which more later).77 If Marengo has gone down in history as one of Bonaparte’s victories – indeed, one historian has called it ‘arguably the most important battle of his career’78 – it is largely because it became the object of an intense propaganda campaign, both written and iconographic.79 But, as with the first campaign in Italy, Marengo was quickly reclaimed and interpreted by lesser-known writers and artists. Within days of news reaching Paris, plays were being performed to celebrate the victory, written by enterprising playwrights taking advantage of public sentiment: Bataille de Marengo, ou la Conquête d’Italie (The battle of Marengo, or the conquest of Italy) played at the Cité-Variétés (27 June 1800); La Nouvelle inattendue, ou la Reprise de l’Italie (The unexpected news, or the retaking of Italy) played twice in one hour at the Théâtre des Troubadours on 1 July 1800. Cambacérès arrived in time to see the audience cry out, ‘The play! The play! A second representation of the piece!’ The actors willingly obliged.80
Claude Dejoux’s Monument du Général Desaix tel qu’il a été projeté, composé et exécuté en modèle pour la Place des Victoires en 1806 (Monument to General Desaix as it was designed, composed and performed as a model for the Place des Victoires in 1806), no date. The base of the monument measured 6 metres by 3.25. The statue itself, made of bronze, was more than five metres high. When it was finished and erected in August 1810, Desaix’s nudity was criticized. Hidden by scaffolding less than two months later, under the pretext of a flaw in the pouring of the bronze, the scaffolding remained in place until 1814, when the statue was finally taken down.
Even the military who had lived through the battle reacted with a kind of heroic reflex, recounting anecdotes that could not possibly have happened, glorifying their generals, but especially their commander-in-chief. Thus, chef de bataillon Gruyer wrote in a letter dated 18 June that ‘The All-mighty Bonaparte arrived on the battlefield with his friend Desaix. Then, the brave general Desaix fell dead from a ball next to the First Consul who exclaimed, “Melas will be defeated!”’81 As for Bonaparte, the smoke had hardly cleared when he dictated the bulletin of 15 June to Bourrienne that was issued the following day and distributed throughout France (and later Europe).82 Bourrienne had been in constant contact with Joseph-Jean Lagarde, the general secretary of the consuls, sending him almost daily bulletins dictated by Bonaparte.83 If they were not an entirely new means of sending out information from the battlefield – military bulletins had existed for some decades now – Bonaparte exploited their use like no other. They continued where his dispatches from the first Italian campaign h
ad left off, inundating France (and later Europe) with an often distorted account of what had taken place, perpetuating the image of a supernatural warrior chief. We can thus read of Bonaparte descending the Saint-Bernard, ‘picking himself up from the snow, crossing precipices and sliding over torrents’.84 The bulletin written after Marengo contains a relatively accurate description of the engagement, although even here, in this first draft of the account of the battle, Bonaparte places himself at the centre of the action, as ‘riding the whirlwind and directing the storm’.85 Interestingly, the battle is represented as a victory for the French soldiers’ irresistible élan inspired by the commander’s charisma and not by feelings of patriotism.
Accompanying the glory, however, was also a touch of pathos. Bonaparte had learnt as early as the first campaign in Italy that revealing the soft side of his nature made good press. He therefore unabashedly exploited the death of Desaix for as much political advantage as he could. What his aide-de-camp Muiron had been for the first Italian campaign,86 Desaix became for the second – that is, a loyal lieutenant willing to lay down his life for his commander (and the Republic), although he was celebrated this time round with the help of the machinery of state.87 The bulletin described how Desaix, dying in the arms of his aide-de-camp, Anne-Charles Lebrun, the son of the Third Consul, said, ‘Go and tell the First Consul that I die regretting not to have done enough to live on in the memory of posterity.’88 Of course, these words were never uttered, but they echo the dying words of earlier faithful royal servants to their kings.89 Bonaparte was being portrayed as the figurehead of the nation, the symbol around which the country could unify. It also put the onus of anointing Desaix on Bonaparte. Immortality emanated, so to speak, from the First Consul.90