Citizen Emperor (62 page)

And so it was arranged that the Tsar and Talleyrand would meet in the Princess of Thurn and Taxis’s drawing room every day to discuss the meetings between Napoleon and Alexander. It was there that Talleyrand asked Alexander to save Europe by standing up to Napoleon. It was there that Talleyrand schooled Alexander in how to negotiate with Napoleon (Alexander would sometimes take notes while Talleyrand dictated). And it was there that he eventually convinced Alexander, and perhaps Metternich, that France was not Napoleon, and that Austria and Russia should form a bulwark against Napoleon’s insatiable ambition.
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Standing up to Napoleon had its consequences. At one stage Napoleon was so frustrated with Alexander’s obstinacy that, working himself into a melodramatic rage, he threw his hat on to the ground and stamped on it (that is possibly why he got through 160–170 hats in the course of his career).
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In the face of this outburst, Alexander is supposed to have kept his cool, and replied to Napoleon, ‘When you become violent I just become stubborn. With me anger is of no avail. Let us discuss, and be reasonable, or I will go.’ It belied his real intentions. Alexander was not terribly interested in an accommodation of any description with Napoleon. In fact, he was playing for time, hoping not to alienate his powerful ally, and trying to keep his own domestic opposition in check. Even before he had arrived in Erfurt, Alexander wrote to his sister Catherine that ‘Bonaparte thinks that I am nothing but an idiot.
They laugh longest who laugh last!
and I put all my hope in God.’
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In the same vein, Alexander wrote to his mother that it was necessary to ‘enter for some time into his [Napoleon’s] views and to prove to him that he could trust his [Alexander’s] intentions and plans’.
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On 7 October 1808, on the anniversary of Napoleon’s victory at Jena, a hunt was organized on the battlefield itself (about fifty kilometres from Erfurt). The hunt was a pretext. Really, Napoleon wanted to take Alexander on a personal tour, giving him a dramatic account of the battle of Jena from a knoll that overlooked the field. The Tsar played along. He knew how to hide his real sentiments when he had to. Only a few days before, at a performance of Voltaire’s play
Oedipus
, when the line ‘The friendship of a great man is a gift of the gods’ was pronounced, Alexander stood up and, in a flamboyant gesture, took Napoleon’s hand, while the whole audience applauded.
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What was Napoleon thinking then by showing Alexander the site of another victory? Was it a veiled warning, a reminder that any resistance would meet the same fate as the King of Prussia had met? Quite apart from the humiliation that Alexander must have felt at being given a lesson by the man who had so resoundingly trounced him at Austerlitz, it was a tactless thing to do, the action of a man who was profoundly insecure, at least in this relationship. The same night as Voltaire’s play and Alexander’s public profession of friendship, Napoleon’s valet Constant heard his master cry out and went to wake him. He found the Emperor ‘extended across his bed in a convulsive posture, his sheets and his blankets thrown some distance, and his whole person in a frightful state of nervous tension. His opened mouth let escape inarticulate sounds, his chest seemed greatly weighed down, and he had one of his hands pressed, clenched, in the pit of his stomach.’
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Napoleon was obliged to change his nightshirt; it was soaked through with sweat. He had had a nightmare and had dreamt that a bear had opened his chest and was devouring his heart.

One cannot, with any degree of certainty, translate a dream of this nature, but a possible interpretation is that Napoleon must have realized, if only unconsciously, that Russia (and Alexander) represented danger. Something at the back of his mind must have been ringing alarm bells. When Erfurt was over, leaving Alexander on the road to Moscow and returning in his carriage to Erfurt, Napoleon was in a pensive mood.
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Erfurt had been a failure, and he realized it even though he was unaware of Talleyrand working against him behind the scenes. He ended up with a treaty that was different from Tilsit, but was not what he had in mind. Alexander had been considerably less accessible than at Tilsit and had assiduously avoided committing himself to a war with Austria. Napoleon believed that things had gone wrong because the Tsar wanted to treat him as an equal,
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something he would not tolerate. He expected Alexander to behave as a subordinate and that was that. Alexander had no choice but to behave defiantly.

A convention was nevertheless signed between the two countries (12 October 1808), leaving Russia with Moldavia and Wallachia, as well as Finland. In return, Napoleon was supposedly able to count on Russian assistance in the event of war with Austria. In other words, Alexander came away with concrete territorial gains; Napoleon came away with a promise.

‘When Will the Blood Cease to Flow?’

Pierre Corneille’s seventeenth-century masterpiece
Cinna
, a favourite of Napoleon’s, was one of the plays performed at Erfurt by actors from the Théâtre-Français. There is a line in Act III when one of the characters, Emilie, cries out, ‘Treachery is noble when aimed at tyranny’ (
la perfidie est noble envers la tyrannie
). Talleyrand may have felt a certain sense of satisfaction on hearing it. Once he had returned to Paris, he continued to play the spy. Alexander decided to maintain two ambassadors at the Tuileries. One, Prince Kurakin, was an eccentric whose idiosyncrasies caused a great deal of amusement at court. The other, Count Karl von Nesselrode, was a thirty-year-old Westphalian nobleman who had entered Russian service during the revolutionary wars. He was sent to Paris ostensibly as an adviser to the Russian ambassador, Kurakin, but was actually Alexander’s personal liaison with Talleyrand.
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Although Talleyrand no longer had as much access to Napoleon’s person as in the past, he was still reasonably well informed of his intentions and plans and did not hesitate to communicate them to Nesselrode. Talleyrand knew, for example, that war with Russia was approaching but did not expect it until April 1812 (which turned out to be an exact estimate). In the meantime, he offered Alexander some sound advice: to assume a defensive position, to use the time to prepare and to resume relations with Britain.
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Talleyrand was not yet actively working for Napoleon’s overthrow, but rather was encouraging Austria and Russia to form a united block against him by insisting that they should not readily sacrifice their own strategic interests. At every opportunity after Erfurt, Talleyrand would publicly criticize the government in the severest terms, and thereby encourage others to do the same.
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Aimée de Coigny, an ardent royalist and one of Talleyrand’s friends, remarked that ‘all Paris’ was visiting him in secret. The memoirs of the period give the strong impression that Talleyrand was involved in some sort of conspiracy. This was not the case; rather, he acted as a kind of magnet around which oppositional elements gathered.
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As for his motives, it is possible Talleyrand thought that if he managed to present a strong front, public opinion would force the Emperor to moderate his ambitions; Talleyrand, of course, knew that any remarks he made criticizing Napoleon would be reported directly back. At the same time, however, by voicing his opposition he was publicly seen to be an opponent of the government’s policies; if ever there were a change in regime he could always say that he had opposed Napoleon and there would be people aplenty to confirm this.

In many respects, Talleyrand’s stance conforms to the general opposition towards war and the desire for peace prevalent in French society during the latter stages of the Empire.
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This attitude began to find an echo with a minority of individuals – prominent members of the imperial government, the administration and even the army – opposed to further conquests, or who at least believed that their fortunes were being endangered by the lack of political stability on the Continent.
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Self-interest and self-preservation were probably as great a motivation, if not greater, in opposing Napoleon as the desire to see stability in France and Europe. In Talleyrand’s case, however, it should also be seen as typical of
ancien régime
aristocratic behaviour, when it was quite common for nobles to form an alliance with other court nobles or members of the royal family in order to oppose the king’s policies.

The clergy too began to speak out against Napoleon and it is here one can possibly find a more accurate reflection of the malaise that started to take hold of the population as the wars dragged on with no end in sight. The Church had become increasingly disillusioned with Napoleon after 1807, but especially after the arrest of the pope in July 1809 (see below). Not all were anti-Napoleon, but even those who had supported the regime, such as the Bishop of Troyes, Etienne Antoine de Boulogne, were starting to wonder where it would all end. In 1809 the bishop publicly expressed the hope that Napoleon would soon conclude his conquests to ‘sanctify the war’, to work towards ‘closing all the wounds opened by it, to root out all the disorders it has borne, and to dry all the tears that it has caused to shed’.
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It is fair to say that the Bishop of Clermont reflected a general concern among the notables about the war in asking publicly, ‘When will the blood cease to flow?’
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The masterstroke in this oppositional policy was Talleyrand’s reconciliation with his old enemy, Joseph Fouché, the minister of police. The antipathy between the two was almost a given in the French political landscape. They had publicly attacked each other for years in the bitterest of terms. The reconciliation, engineered by Talleyrand’s former secretary and number two at the ministry of foreign affairs, Comte Alexandre d’Hauterive, was revealed in dramatic fashion.
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At a reception in 1809 at the rue de Varenne, Talleyrand’s Paris residence, and after all the guests had arrived, the majordomo announced in a loud voice the minister of police. The councillor of state Etienne-Denis Pasquier recounts how a silence immediately fell upon the assembly and every head turned towards the entrance into the salon. The only sound that could be heard was Talleyrand limping across the room to greet the new arrival. Then, linking arms – the scene elicited the famous quip from Chateaubriand, ‘vice leaning on the arm of crime’ – the two men moved from room to room, theatrically absorbed in a whispered conversation.
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This may have been the first time they had met in full view of everyone – it was therefore a very public demonstration of their intentions – but they had been meeting secretly for some time at Hauterive’s house in Bagneux, on the outskirts of Paris, and at Suresnes at the house of the Princess de Vaudémont, a former mistress of Paul Barras, one-time putative head of the Directory.
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Although we have no idea what was discussed, an accord of sorts seems to have been reached around the question of what to do if Napoleon were killed while away on campaign in Spain.

The question was one that had lingered since the early days of the Consulate when the false news reached Paris that Napoleon had been killed at the battle of Marengo. As we saw, a number of men in the political elite were ready to succeed Bonaparte in the event of his untimely demise.
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Eight years later, the problem of Napoleon’s potential sudden death and the succession were still unresolved. The general opinion among contemporaries was, therefore, that Talleyrand and Fouché were working not for the overthrow of Napoleon, but for the consolidation of his regime through the establishment of a lasting peace and the founding of a dynasty.
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In case of Napoleon’s death, Talleyrand had a secret plan to have either Joseph or Murat recognized as Emperor and French troops withdrawn behind the Rhine.
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It appears that Murat was not only aware of the plotting, but was prepared to take part in it.
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In this vein, both Talleyrand and Fouché had wanted Napoleon to divorce Josephine, and to marry into one of Europe’s legitimate dynasties to produce an heir. At this stage of proceedings men like Talleyrand and Fouché had more to gain from a reformed Napoleonic regime than from Napoleon’s overthrow, which would mean either the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty or a new republican government.

The Consolatory Gaze

War was the fundamental cause of opposition to Napoleon and the fundamental cause of popular discontent. His popularity had taken a beating since the battle of Eylau and efforts had been made to remedy the situation. Two months after the battle, for example, a decision was taken to organize a painting competition with a prize of 16,000 francs.
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It was the first time that a competition had been announced since the rather lacklustre response to the Peace of Amiens and the Concordat. Painters were invited to submit sketches based on specifications that were supplied by Vivant Denon. The winner was to receive the commission for the full painting. The painting was meant to depict the day after the battle, when Napoleon visited the field, with emphasis on his treatment of the wounded. The instructions to the competitors were very explicit, to an extent unusual for a commissioned painting, and much more detailed than the official description of the winning entry that is usually cited. The costumes of the principal figures were carefully described, as was the weather, the position of the secondary figures, and the landscape. Vivant Denon had actually witnessed the battle and made ink sketches of the topography as well as the positions of all the principal figures (he drew everything he saw and had assembled an impressive archive of sketches of every Napoleonic battle).
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Twenty-six sketches were submitted for the competition.
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Jean-Antoine Gros, nagged by Denon, reluctantly submitted an entry, and won.
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