Citizen Emperor (17 page)

On 8 November 1801, Paris was awoken by salvoes of artillery; the city had been decked out for celebration. Balls, receptions and fireworks punctuated the official ceremonies. A hot-air balloon with the different flags of the European powers floated over the city. A flotilla of rowing boats with musicians and actors in the national dress of the main European powers floated down the Seine from the Concorde to the Théâtre du Commerce. The peoples of Europe were represented, dancing to the music of Méhul, Gossec and Haydn, announcing a peace built on friendship and understanding. The revolutionaries had dared dream of a universal peace; Bonaparte seemed on the verge of accomplishing that dream.

On 9 November, on the Place de la Concorde, a mock battle was organized in which cannon roared, drums were beaten and trumpets sounded to military tunes, and towns made of cardboard were stormed. At the beginning of this huge theatrical performance, the doors of the Temple of Peace were closed and an actor dressed as Discord and accompanied by ‘infernal divinities’ rode around the square in a chariot drawn by black horses. He was soon chased from the scene so that peace was restored.
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Much later, when Bonaparte visited Amiens in 1803, he was received with an enthusiasm ‘impossible to describe’.
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The horses were unharnessed and the crowds pulled his coach along, triumphal arches were constructed in his honour and everywhere he was greeted and portrayed as the restorer of France.

Before Bonaparte came to power, none of the military victories in Italy made as much of an impact as the announcements of peace at Leoben and Campo Formio. The same can be said of the French public after he came to power. It was peace, just as much as victory (of course they are two sides of the same coin), that enhanced Bonaparte’s prestige. Public sentiment found an outlet in the newspapers acceptable to the regime where any number of odes and panegyrics were to be found.
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To give but one example, a piece in the
Journal des arts
described Bonaparte as ‘A great being, who in the century of the Caesars would have been elevated to the level of the gods’, who could have continued to make war, but who instead hastened to make peace.
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This falls within the ‘rhetoric of praise’ used in the eighteenth century, although it would in other circumstances have applied to a sovereign, not to the head of a republican state.

Pierre Adrien Le Beau,
Traité de Paix signé à Amiens le 24 [25] Mars, An 10
(Treaty of Peace signed at Amiens on 24 [25] March in the Year 10), 1803. Bonaparte, in the centre of the picture, is surrounded by Europe’s monarchs, dressed in their regalia, in contrast to the simple uniform he is wearing. All of them have come to offer homage to him.
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The caption reads, ‘Bonaparte pacificateur de l’Europe unit les puissances qui jurent la paix sur l’autel de la bonne foi’ (Bonaparte, pacifier of Europe, unites the powers, which swear peace on the altar of good faith). Note the King of England who is a little to one side of the other group of monarchs (to the right of Bonaparte). Minerva is to the left, fighting off the dark forces; Abundance to the right.

Bonaparte’s Paris

With peace, Paris became
une grande auberge
for foreigners. A tourist entering the city in 1802 or 1803 would have encountered what was still essentially a medieval town with streets so narrow and dirty that ‘not a ray of sunshine can penetrate the whole year round’.
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It took about four and a half hours to walk around the walls of Paris.
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As for the broader streets, they were covered in jet-black dirt, quite ‘troublesome’ when it rained. The vicinity of the Tuileries Palace was marred by a collection of small slum dwellings, many of which were cleared after the assassination attempt against Bonaparte in the rue Saint-Nicaise. The city was, in effect, growing so quickly – an English tourist guide compared Paris to ‘the root of a monstrous tree, which, watered by a stream, and, planted in a happy climate, has shot forth enormous branches both in height and width’
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– and there was so little room to put the population that people tended to crowd together in areas designated by the geographical origins of the migrants: masons from the Corrèze gathered around the Place de Grève; labourers from Lorraine and the west of France chose the Marais; water carriers came from the Cantal, the Puy-de-Dôme or Aveyron and clustered around the Place Vendôme.
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Then of course there was the smell, of dirt, of human waste, and the hordes of beggars that tourists would have to fend off. The walls were covered in posters of all shapes, sizes and colours advertising everything from plays at the theatre to balls, concerts, restaurants, hotels, tailors, doctors, schools, fencing masters, charlatans selling universal cures and rewards for lost pets.
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Much of the daily commerce took place on the streets, bridges and quays of Paris where hawkers peddled their wares using expressions that only the servants could make sense of. ‘Here is the mackerel which isn’t dead; it’s coming, it’s coming.’ ‘Herrings on ice, new herrings!’ ‘By the boat, by the boat, the oyster seller!’ ‘Baked apples!’ For cold cakes, ‘They’re burning, they’re burning, they’re burning!’ For almond biscuits, ‘Here is the delight of the ladies, here is the delight!’ For oranges, ‘Portugal, Portugal!’ On top of this came the cries, the confused clamour of second-hand clothes dealers, wandering glaziers, sellers of parasols, of old iron, water carriers, all in a perpetual din of barking and yelling. Worst of all were the ink sellers: ‘It’s me, here I am, it’s him, here I am. Like that, madam, no one has ever seen anything like it, mia, mia, mia, mia, mia, mia, never, never, anything like it.’
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When they all came together at a busy intersection, the noise was indescribable. People on the whole were polite, although one English visitor to Paris complained of the ‘somewhat abrupt and familiar manners’ of the lower classes.
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Even the manners of the upper classes were not exactly refined; it was customary for example to spit indoors, something done ‘to excess’.
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Fashionable young men and women were to be found strolling in the gardens of Paris,
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or eating at restaurants, a by-product of the Revolution, such as Véry, no longer the first restaurant in Paris since the arrival of Naudet on the scene, or the Rocher de Cancale and the Trois Frères Provençaux, which became famous for Chicken Marengo, or at the gambling houses and cafés at the Palais Royal.
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There were over 3,000 restaurants to choose from, and more than 4,000 cafés.
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At some, one could get a fixed-price menu for between thirty-six and forty sous, for which one received soup, a
bouilli
, two entrées, an entremets, as much bread as one could eat, a dessert and half a bottle of good wine.
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If dining alone, it was possible to choose from an à la carte menu. Dinner was served between four and seven, supper as late as two in the morning.
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French social life seems to have resumed with a vengeance. The Duchesse d’Abrantès estimated that in the course of the winter of 1801–2, in Paris alone, there were as many as 8,000–10,000 balls and hundreds of dinner parties.
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Even taking into account some exaggeration, it was clear that the winter of that year was ‘brilliant’ compared to those that had preceded it. Salons were encouraged to open their doors again, in the knowledge that a revival of high society was bound to be good for the economy as well as reclaiming Paris’s place as a centre of European elegance, intellect and pleasure.
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The salons were made to serve the state by shoring up the legitimacy of the new regime.
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They were also a means of keeping an eye on what was being said. The opening of the salons was a sign that things were starting to return to normal, that relations between the elites and the new regime were beginning to improve. The regime worked hard to bring them around by its astute use of the politics of reconciliation it had been pursuing since coming to power.
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‘No One Dares Now Talk Politics’

In Britain after Amiens, everything French was back in fashion. English ladies and gentlemen of the upper classes flocked to Paris to catch up with the latest fashions, while businessmen and merchants renewed their contacts. But they all came to catch a glimpse, if they could, of the First Consul in person. In the face of so many tourists wanting to visit the country – possibly as many as 10,000, including two-thirds of the House of Lords
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– there was a fear on the part of some British politicians and writers that the English tourists would somehow succumb to radical ideas and return as proselytizing Jacobins.
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There was no need to worry; the vast majority of these tourists were people of means who travelled with large baggage trains. Lord Mount Cashell, for example, travelled with his wife, her companion, two daughters, three sons, a tutor, a governess and four servants.
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Calais, an ugly town according to one English tourist, was often the first port of call, after a five- to ten-hour journey across the Channel.
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Francis William Blagdon arrived there on 16 October 1801; he claimed to be the first non-official Englishman to have reached the Continent. It was another fifty hours by coach to Paris across 197 English miles of poor roads and dirty inns.
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Once there, tourists had to register with the police, but they then moved about as they pleased, renting furnished apartments or staying in fashionable (or not so fashionable) hotels near the Palais Royal in the rue de Richelieu – there were more than 3,000 in Paris at the beginning of the Consulate
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– where they were sometimes ‘skinned alive’.

The accounts English tourists later wrote of their travels are revealing of what they thought of post-revolutionary France. Henry Redhead Yorke, a Francophile, published one of the most famous travelogues of this period. He had initially, like many educated Britons, been in favour of the Revolution, and had visited in its early days in 1792. Ten years later, his description of the country and its people reflects his own ideas about the Revolution and Bonaparte, whom he referred to even then as the ‘tyrant’. Yorke was at pains to portray the new regime as one with police spies prowling around in every coffee house, where ‘no one dares now talk politics’.
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English tourists came away with the impression that this was indeed a military regime, that Bonaparte needed the military to stay in power, and that the political situation was still deeply unstable.
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Tourists in Paris in the eighteenth century, ably led by one of the first English tourist guides of the city, a
Practical Guide During a Journey from London to Paris
, did what they do today: they headed for the Louvre where, for the first time and mingling with the ‘people’, they were able to see the treasures looted from Italy by Bonaparte’s army. Alternatively they went and pestered the artist David.
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Above all, however, the object of English curiosity was Bonaparte. Visitors were always keen either to get an introduction or to catch a glimpse of the man. Bonaparte, or his reputation, made an impression on many who saw him.
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Lord Aberdeen, William Pitt’s ward, was given the unusual honour of dining with him at Malmaison.
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Joseph Farington caught a glimpse of the First Consul at the monthly review of troops, Place du Carrousel, and described him as ‘of a higher style than any picture or bust of him’ that he had seen.
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Samuel Romilly, who would become solicitor general a few years later, saw Bonaparte in public in conversation with one of the Montgolfier brothers (French balloonists, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier). He was pleasantly surprised. ‘He has a mildness, a serenity in his countenance which is very prepossessing; and none of that sternness which is to be found in his pictures.’
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Others, however, remained steadfastly unmoved. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him nothing more than a ‘little Italian’.
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