Citizen Emperor (24 page)

By introducing social forms that had been part and parcel of court life during the
ancien régime
, Bonaparte was at one and the same time asserting the regime’s social as well as political legitimacy. In doing so, he obliged the old aristocracy and the new elites to mix and to behave in the same manner. The politics of social fusion was central to the regime’s success. That was only one aspect. Etiquette was as much about how people perceived Bonaparte as about creating an artificial barrier between himself and his entourage, thereby conveying a sense of power.
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This was observed by a contemporary writer and social commentator, Louis-Sébastien Mercier: ‘Etiquette, a prince will say, is a puerile thing about which I would be the first to laugh, but it is the only bulwark that separates me from other men. Remove it, I am nothing more than a gentleman.’
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It was a method Bonaparte had employed in Italy, creating ‘an aura of fear’ (
une auréole de crainte
) around his person that prevented familiarity of any kind.
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Bonaparte’s court, in other words, is also revealing of the man. The fact that it was excessively formal, even by the standards of the day, lends weight to the idea that he strove to erect barriers between his intimate self and his surrounds. Access to Bonaparte, and later more so to Napoleon, was strictly controlled; precedence was introduced so that, depending on a person’s rank and function, he could enter only certain rooms in the Tuileries Palace.
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According to one British witness, the rooms leading to the First Consul’s personal apartments were each reserved. ‘On the days of the grand parade, the first room is destined for officers as low as the rank of captain, and persons admitted with tickets; the second, for field-officers; the third, for generals; and the fourth, for counsellors of state, and the diplomatic corps.’
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It would seem that fear equalled respect in Bonaparte’s mind.

To carry through the introduction of a new etiquette, Bonaparte and his would-be courtiers, most of whom came from the provincial bourgeoisie and were utterly unaccustomed to the ways of pre-revolutionary aristocratic society, had to learn everything anew.
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They were obliged to rely on books, and on those who could remember what it had been like: old valets were interrogated, nobles who had lived at the courts of Louis XV and Louis XVI were consulted. There were of course few former members of the French court to consult; emigration had hit the
noblesse de robe
hardest. Two, however, were found: Mme de Montesson and Mme de Campan. Mme de Campan had been Marie-Antoinette’s
femme de chambre
and had run a finishing school for girls in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (both Caroline and Hortense had gone to school there), so she knew a thing or two about etiquette, as did Mme de Montesson, the wife of Louis Philippe, Duc d’Orléans (the father of Philippe-Egalité, whose son would become king in 1840), who had befriended Josephine during the Revolution.

Josephine was to play an important role in this social legitimizing, holding informal breakfasts at the Tuileries and at Malmaison for between five and fifteen young women at a time, so that they could become acquainted with the customs of good society without feeling intimidated.
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Bonaparte wanted
ancien régime
court traditions to continue because they represented an exercise in the display of power, but he also, like the Bourbon monarchs before him, wanted to create a social centre of power that would become uncontested, and in the process marginalize all others. Naturally, not everyone was happy with the outcome. Certain officers complained that it was now difficult to get to see Bonaparte, and that monarchical forms had replaced military camaraderie.
⁶⁴

A Republic in Uniform

The introduction of etiquette was a gradual process but not an entirely successful one if some of the contemporary accounts are to be believed. The Tuileries was run with military precision, while the rules governing relations between people would eventually become excessively formal, to the point where conversation and friendships were stifled and boredom became the rule.
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People would nevertheless attend because to do so was to be at the centre of power. Etiquette was strictly regulated by Bonaparte, right down to the number of gun salutes or the duration of church-bell ringing during inspection tours. So too was the official hierarchy; it gave precedence to civilians over the military. However, in order to reinforce that precedence, and give all French officials, right down to the local mayor, an exterior symbol of their power, they were now required to wear a uniform – including high-school students.
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Indeed, every member of court from the highest to the lowest was now told what to wear and when to wear it. Bonaparte too wore civilian dress in the weeks and months after Brumaire, but on his return from Marengo he stopped wearing the Consular uniform on a regular basis and started wearing the green and white uniform of a colonel of the Chasseurs à cheval, at least on weekdays.
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At weekends he would wear the blue and white uniform of a colonel of the Grenadiers à pied. It would appear that he rarely donned civilian dress after that – he did so during the signing of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802 and at the Te Deum for the Concordat the following month for example. That was not the case for the rest of the court, the luxury of which soon became the object of much gossip and rumour.
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Bonaparte thus deliberately juxtaposed his simple dress with that of the elaborate dress found at court and among the high-ranking military.
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In this way, he became the link between the people and the court,
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dressing down even as he gave strict orders to everyone else to dress up. He was not the only French monarch to have used this controlling technique: Henry III and Henry IV had consciously and successfully done the same, while Bonaparte’s predecessor, Louis XVI, had also preferred simple dress to elaborate court costume. ‘The right to dress simply’, Bonaparte is supposed to have said, ‘does not belong to everyone.’
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In the realm of diplomacy, too, there was a return to more formalized styles. The revolutionaries had made a conscious effort to break with
ancien
régime
diplomatic norms, tainted by association with the aristocracy.
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Their approach had hardly been successful, and did a good deal to scandalize, shock and alienate the courts of Europe. Soon enough, political expediency triumphed over ideological commitments, and traditional diplomatic conventions were reintroduced during the Directory. Bonaparte, however, went a step further. In 1800, Pierre Bénézech, a former minister of the interior and member of the Council of Five Hundred, now a member of the Council of State, was given the job of receiving foreign ambassadors, and acted as a kind of master of the ceremonies. In November 1801, a key post was given to Bonaparte’s friend Michel Duroc – he was made governor of the Tuileries, with a colossal salary of 24,000 francs per year. From 1802 on, the First Consul started to hold audiences in a manner reminiscent of the former kings of France. It was important at the early stages of his reign, however, not to shock republicans and revolutionaries too much, which is why, as a sop to them, he used as many people as possible who had risen through the ranks during the Revolution.

Etiquette was not simply a personal display of power. Bonaparte was giving himself, as head of state, a certain prestige, but he was also attempting to efface the egalitarianism that had been one of the primary values of the Revolution. In the process, he could banish from his entourage elements he considered undesirable. The flipside to that coin was that he could confide important functions to members of the former nobility in order to facilitate their reintegration into the state. All of this was codified in the
Etiquette du Palais Impérial
, which first appeared in print in 1805, and which was a clearer guide to the power structure of the state than the redundant Constitution. It is an extraordinary document for understanding the nature of the Napoleonic Empire, how court life was regulated and who could have access to the Emperor.
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The
lever
and the
coucher
, ceremonies surrounding the act of getting up in the morning and going to bed in the evening, which had fallen into disuse under Louis XVI, were revived during the Consulate and were now codified.
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Bonaparte greatly simplified the practice: the bedroom receded into the domain of the private and was no longer the central focus of the
lever
or the
coucher
, as it had been; he simply ‘received’ in a salon before going to bed or on getting up. There were two further distinctions: admittance to the court was based on military rank or official position rather than, as at the court of Versailles, social status or lineage; and anyone in an official capacity, as we have seen, was now obliged to wear a uniform. As under the former kings of France, etiquette and uniforms were a means of controlling and dominating those in Napoleon’s entourage.
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Uniform became an important part of court life and was a return in many respects to the
ancien régime
courts where a coat, knee-breeches and silk stockings were obligatory. For a society now built around the idea of meritocracy, but not equality or egalitarianism, this was also a way of making a clear distinction between those with power and influence and those without.
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It was also a sign of the increasing regimentation, if not militarization, of French society. In July 1804, a decree was issued regulating the official costume of the Empire, designed by Jean-Baptiste Isabey.
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The court came to dominate French society and politics in a way that it had never done before, even during the time of Louis XIV.
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Napoleon’s court, with more than 2,700 officials and over 100 chamberlains, was much larger than anything that had preceded it – the Houses of the Emperor and Empress were four times larger than those of the royals during the
ancien régime
– and was the largest in Europe.
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If all the households belonging to his relatives were included, the number probably rose to over 4,000.

‘Weeping Tears of Blood’

In keeping with this new attitude of creating artificial barriers, Bonaparte rarely acted with any warmth at court; he never shook hands, for example. There were, however, a few notable exceptions to the rule, occasions during which Bonaparte lost his sangfroid and displayed emotion, as when he gave foreign diplomats a dressing down. One of those occasions involved the British ambassador to Paris, Charles Whitworth.

The choice of Lord Whitworth as ambassador is an indication of what the British government thought of the French and the Treaty of Amiens. Whitworth was a zealous anti-revolutionary, was directly involved in the plot to assassinate the Tsar Paul I and was a close friend of Lord Grenville, who had opposed peace with France. Whitworth’s dispatches portrayed Bonaparte as a deranged tyrant of the same ilk as Paul I.
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In one letter written in April 1803, he described the actions taken by the First Consul as exhibiting ‘a picture of despotism, violence, and cruelty, at the contemplation of which humanity sickens’.
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As charming as Bonaparte could be at times, he failed to melt Whitworth’s cold exterior. Paris could not help but interpret Whitworth’s uncompromising stance as being determined by the British government.
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In many respects it was.

Things came to a head during a reception of the diplomatic corps in the Tuileries on 13 March 1803.
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Josephine, attended for the first time by maids of honour, was holding an audience in one of the drawing rooms, at which the foreign ambassadors were present.
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Bonaparte was not expected – he had just held another audience in one of his own rooms – but he nevertheless decided to pay a visit. At first, he seems to have been in good spirits, doing the rounds, exchanging banter with the foreign diplomats present, including Whitworth. But then he came back to Whitworth and demanded to know why the conditions of Amiens had not yet been fulfilled. He was referring to the requirement that Britain should withdraw from Malta. Whitworth is supposed to have replied that Egypt had been evacuated and that Malta would be as soon as the other conditions of the treaty were filled. Whitworth then had to face a two-hour monologue at the end of which Bonaparte delivered an ultimatum – give up Malta or go to war.