Citizen Emperor (11 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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 state 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
.
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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.
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The next day, at five in the morning, a twenty-one-gun salute announced the official ceremonies.
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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.
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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!’
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As he was riding from the Concorde to the Invalides, someone broke through the crowds to kiss his saddle cover.
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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.
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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.
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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’
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– it is largely because it became the object of an intense propaganda campaign, both written and iconographic.
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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!”’
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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).
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Bourrienne had been in constant contact with Joseph-Jean Lagarde, the general secretary of the consuls, sending him almost daily bulletins dictated by Bonaparte.
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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 had 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’.
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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’.
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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.