1812. Adam Zamoyski

been married for just one year, and the arranged match had quickly turned into an almost cloyingly loving relationship. One of thirteen children of the Austrian Emperor Francis II, Marie-Louise had been her father’s favourite, his ‘adorable poupée’. She had been brought up to hate Napoleon and to refer to him as ‘the Corsican’, ‘the usurper’, ‘Attila’ or ‘the Antichrist’. But, when diplomacy demanded it, she bowed to her father’s will. And once she had tasted the pleasures of the marital bed there was no restraining her enthusiasm for the Emperor. Napoleon, who had been thrilled at the idea of having in his bed ‘a daughter of the Caesars’, as he referred to her – and one half his age – quickly became moonstruck, and their marriage turned into a middle-class idyll.

      That evening, as the capital celebrated, the child was baptised according to the age-old rites of the French royal family. The next day Napoleon held a grand audience, seated on the imperial throne, to receive formal congratulations. The entire court then accompanied him to see the infant, who lay in a superb silver-gilt cradle presented by the city of Paris. It had been designed by the artist Pierre Prudhon and represented a figure of Glory holding a triumphal crown and a young eagle ascending towards the bright star which symbolised Napoleon. The chancellors of the Légion d’Honneur and of the Iron Cross laid the insignia of both orders on cushions beside the sleeping child. The painter François Gérard set to work on a portrait.

      Over the next days homage of every kind poured in, and cities throughout the country joined Paris in celebrating as the news reached them, each in turn sending a delegation to deliver its congratulations. The same process was repeated as the news rippled out to the more far-flung parts of the Empire and to other countries. Such expressions were to be expected in the circumstances. But there was a great deal more to the celebrations and congratulations than just loyal humbug – to most Frenchmen the birth of a boy heralded a period of peace and stability, and much more besides.

      France had been at war virtually without interruption for nineteen years. She had been attacked, in 1792, by a coalition of Prussia and Austria. Over the next years these were joined by Britain, Spain, Russia and other lesser powers, all of them bent on defeating revolutionary France and restoring the Bourbon dynasty. It was not a fight over territory. It was an ideological struggle over the future order of Europe. Atrocities aside, revolutionary France had brought into public life all the ideals of the Enlightenment, and her very existence was seen by the monarchical powers as a threat to theirs. She had made ample use of this weapon in order to defend herself, by exporting revolution and subverting provinces belonging to her enemies. She had gradually turned from victim to aggressor, but she was nevertheless fighting for survival. Revolutionary France could not secure a lasting peace, as virtually every other power in Europe would not reconcile itself to the survival of the republican regime, and felt a necessity to destroy it.

      General Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in Paris in November 1799 should have broken this vicious circle of fear and aggression. He reined in the demagogues, closed the Pandora’s box opened by the revolution and tidied up the mess. Being a child of the Enlightenment as well as a despot, he mobilised the energies of France and harnessed them to the task of building a well-ordered, prosperous and powerful state, the ‘état policé’ of which the philosophes of the Enlightenment had dreamed. He was following in the footsteps of rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia and Joseph II of Austria, who had introduced social and economic reforms while strengthening the framework of the state, and who were universally admired for this. But to their successors, Bonaparte was but a grotesque upstart, a malignant outgrowth of the evil revolution.

      By 1801, following a series of resounding victories, Bonaparte was able to force peace on all the powers of the European continent. France’s security was guaranteed by expanded frontiers and the creation of a series of theoretically autonomous republics in northern Italy, Switzerland and Holland which were in fact French provinces. In March 1802 Bonaparte even concluded the Peace of Amiens with Britain. But this was not likely to last.

      To Britain, France’s hegemony in Europe was intolerable. To France, Britain’s superiority at sea was a constant threat. French designs on Malta, Egypt and India were a hazy but nevertheless haunting nightmare to Britain, while Britain’s ability to use allies on the European mainland to make war by proxy was a source of continuing anxiety to France. Hostilities between the two resumed in May 1803.

      During the following year Bonaparte himself revived opposition to his rule throughout Europe. In March 1804 he ordered the young Bourbon Duc d’Enghien to be seized at Ettenheim in the state of Baden just outside the borders of France and brought to Paris. He was convinced that the Duke was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him and restore the monarchy, and had him executed after a summary judgement. This violation of every accepted law and principle horrified Europe. It confirmed the opinion of those who saw Bonaparte as the devil incarnate, and reinforced the notion of a fight to the death between the sanctified order as embodied in the ancien régime and the forces of evil in the form of revolutionary France.

      France was in fact no longer exporting revolution. She had become little more than a vehicle for the ambitions of Bonaparte, who a couple of months later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon I. What exactly these ambitions consisted of has perplexed and divided historians over two centuries, for Napoleon was never consistent in anything. His utterances can at best be taken to illustrate some of his thoughts and feelings, while his actions were often erratic and contradictory. He was intelligent and pragmatic, yet he allowed himself to indulge the most far-fetched fantasies; he was the ultimate opportunist, yet he could get caught up in his own dogma; he was a great cynic, yet he pursued romantic dreams. There was no grand idea or master project.

      Napoleon was in large measure driven by nothing more complicated than the lust for power and domination over others. Attendant on this was an often childish set of reactions at being thwarted in any way. Having no sense of justice and no respect for the wishes of others, he took any objection to his actions as gratuitous rebellion, and responded with disproportionate vehemence. Instead of ignoring a minor setback or turning an obstacle, he would unleash bluster and force, which often involved him in unnecessarily costly head-on collisions.

      He was also driven by a curious sense of destiny, a self-invented notion of a kind often affected by young men brought up on Romantic literature (his favourite reading had been the poems of Ossian and The Sorrows of Young Werther), which he came to believe in himself. ‘Is there a man blind enough not to see,’ he had declared during his Egyptian campaign in 1798, ‘that destiny directs all my operations?’⁶ Napoleon was also a great admirer of the plays of Corneille, and there is reason to believe he saw himself as acting out some great tragedy in their mould.

      This sense of living out a destiny was to lead him repeatedly into acting against his better judgement in pursuit of nebulous dreams. His triumphs in Italy, followed by his spectacular victories at Austerlitz and Jena, only confirmed him in this fantasy, which communicated itself to his troops. ‘The intoxication of our joyful and proud exaltation was at its height,’ wrote one young officer after Napoleon’s triumph over Prussia. ‘One of our army corps proclaimed itself "the Tenth Legion of the New Caesar"!, another demanded that Napoleon should henceforth be known as "The Emperor of the West!"’⁷

      But Napoleon was also the ruler of France. As such, he was inevitably driven by the same political, cultural and psychological motors which had dictated the policies of French rulers of the past such as François I and Louis XIV, who had striven for French hegemony over Europe in order to achieve lasting security.

      France had always sought to impose a balance in central Europe that would prevent a major mobilisation of German forces against her, and she had achieved this by the Treaty of Westphalia back in 1648, in which she and Austria, jointly with a number of other powers, had put in place a whole series of checks and balances. This system had been undone in the second half of the eighteenth century by the rise of Prussian power and the emergence of Russia as a player in European affairs, manifested most critically in huge shifts of power in Germany, the partition and disappearance of Poland, and the race for control of the Balkans. In view of this, it was quite natural that Napoleon should seek to reassert French interests, and in doing so he was pursuing