Citizen Emperor (73 page)

Although only the foundations had been laid of the monument that was meant to celebrate Austerlitz, Napoleon ordered the construction of a life-size model made of wood, plaster and cloth. Carpenters were working non-stop for over a month to complete the task in time and although there was, to use a modern-day euphemism, some industrial unrest when the carpenters struck for higher wages, that was soon nipped in the bud. The prefect of police, Dubois, threatened them with imprisonment if they did not return to work immediately and work at the conventional rates. Napoleon and his new bride were thus able to drive through the Arc, or at least a wooden facsimile of it.

The marriage was a turning point in the nature of the Empire, a period of transition, a period in which the question of dynastic succession and continuity were reformulated. An institution that had been specifically French now became ever more ‘Germanic’. Greater reliance was laid on Roman and Carolingian traditions, while the court took on an increasingly pan-European flavour.
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Between 1809 and 1815, some 26 per cent of the senior household officials were non-French, while slightly over a third of those presented at court were also not French.
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As we have seen, etiquette became much more stringent from this time on; 634 articles regulating court etiquette were modified and introduced in 1811 drawing on
ancien régime
texts that went as far back as 1710.
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There was too an increasing reliance on the former aristocracy both for diplomatic posts and for appointment as prefects. The number of former nobles in diplomatic missions doubled from around 30 to 60 per cent between 1800 and 1812–13. Similarly, the number of prefects who were of noble birth almost doubled to 41 per cent in that same period.
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There was even some talk of moving the court back to Versailles.
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The Trianon was restored and refurbished for Napoleon’s mother and sisters after 1805, and soft furnishings were ordered in 1811–12 for the château itself, which underwent repair work throughout the Empire. Extraneous events were to interfere before that could happen, but it is clear that the movement towards monarchy and away from the Republic had come full circle.

Men are ‘Insufferable’

The imperial couple left Saint-Cloud on 5 April for Compiègne – the whole court followed them – where they stayed for most of the month of April, and where Napoleon spent the closest thing to a honeymoon that his constitution allowed him.
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By all accounts he was smitten, and behaved like a lovesick puppy, devoted to his new bride,
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never leaving her alone for more than two hours at a time, showering her with expensive gifts almost every day.
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For her part, she was not insensitive to the attention she received and began to reciprocate, calling Napoleon by pet names such as ‘Po-Po’ or ‘Nana’.
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The relationship was not entirely idyllic though, for she soon discovered what it was like to be married to a man who ruled an empire. When they left on a tour of Belgium at the end of April, visiting many of the port towns along the coast – particularly significant for a region that was once attached to the Austrian Empire – Marie-Louise, unaccustomed to travelling with a man as energetic as Napoleon, who often woke at four in the morning in order to be on the road at five, complained as only a spoilt princess could of the little inconveniences she had to put up with.
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He may have been emperor of most of Western Europe but in private he was just a married man, and was therefore involved in the spats and squabbles that occur between couples as they work their way through life together. He was used to ordering people about and to getting his own way; she was an eighteen-year-old girl away from home for the first time who kept candles alight in her room because she was afraid of ghosts.
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She hated the mediocre lodgings they were often put up in, the bad roads, the bad smells, the fatigue of travelling for five weeks. She liked the bedroom unheated at night, he preferred it heated. She liked to travel in the carriage with the window up, he liked to have it down, ‘just to annoy me’, she wrote in her diary. She was hungry and wanted to stop for lunch, he thought that a woman ‘didn’t need to eat’.
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When he got angry and started to yell, she just sulked. Besides, he had some annoying habits, like pinching Marie-Louise’s nose, which must have become very tiring very quickly. Men, she thought, were ‘insufferable’ and if she ever returned to this world she vowed never to marry again.
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Their time in Belgium was not a particularly happy one for either of them.

Court life at the Tuileries was not particularly gay either. Metternich found the Tuileries ‘impossibly pretentious’.
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Several weeks of receptions were marred by a tragic incident that occurred during a ball offered by the Austrian ambassador to Paris at his embassy, and to which more than 700 people were invited (1 July). A fire broke out fuelled by the turpentine that had been used to help paint the ceilings.
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The next morning, several burnt bodies were discovered, including the ambassador’s sister-in-law Princess Schwarzenberg (four months pregnant) and Princess Leyen (one of Josephine’s cousins). Several others died of their burns in the days that followed.
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The street compared it to Louis XVI’s disastrous wedding celebrations when hundreds of people were crushed to death during a fireworks display on the Place Louis XV.
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It was almost as though it were an omen of things to come, for people could not help but draw unfortunate comparisons between the Napoleonic and Bourbon regimes.

The King of Rome

Marie-Louise went into labour at around seven in the evening and was still laid up when, at five o’clock the next morning, 20 March 1811, the Grand Marshal of the Empire came out of her chamber to announce that the pains had ceased and that the Empress had fallen asleep. Many went home to rest, while others simply curled up wherever they could. Napoleon, who had been with Marie-Louise throughout the night, went to take a bath – his way of relaxing – but had hardly stepped into it when Dr Antoine Dubois, the First Obstetrician of the Empire, came to say that the pains had started again, and that there were complications.

The birth of an empress’s baby is an event surrounded by ceremony. If Marie-Antoinette had to give birth in front of the court as well as, according to tradition, two fishwives from Paris, Marie-Louise’s labour was also a public event. The imperial family, the grand dignitaries of the court, the ministers and members of the administrative and clerical elite were gathered in uniform or evening wear for the men, and in what was called
grande toilette
for the women. In all, twenty-two people were present to witness the birth. When Napoleon returned to the bedchamber and was told that there were complications – he was informed by Dubois that the baby was in the breech position – and that in the circumstances it was rare for both mother and child to survive, he did not react as a dynastic ruler but rather as a husband, insisting that everything had to be done to save the mother, somewhat contradicting his earlier assertion that he had merely married a womb.
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Dubois managed to turn the baby, so that it emerged, feet first, at around eight or nine in the morning, and at first appeared to be stillborn. It was laid to one side while everyone crowded around the Empress, whose life seemed to be in danger. It was the first physician at court, Dr Jean-Nicolas Corvisart, who picked up the baby, gave it a few drops of liquor, wrapped it in some warm cloth and began to tap its back. The tapping worked; it came to life seven minutes later. Napoleon took the baby in his arms and burst into the adjoining room to announce, ‘His Majesty, the King of Rome!’
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The title ‘King of Rome’ was traditionally given to the first male child of the Austrian sovereign, as heir to the Holy Roman Empire. Francis effectively ceded this title to Napoleon’s son when, during the marriage celebrations, the Austrian foreign minister, Metternich, stood up during a banquet and proposed a toast to the ‘King of Rome’. He thus expressed the hope that Napoleon would produce a male heir and that the old imperial title would pass to the new dynasty.

When his daughter-in-law, Queen Hortense, came up to congratulate Napoleon, he replied, ‘Ah, I cannot feel happy – the poor woman has suffered so much!’
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He no doubt meant it. As we have seen, he had developed a genuine fondness for Marie-Louise, and she for him, although he never loved her as much as he had once loved Josephine. It was, nevertheless, the beginning of a new experience that made him feel, or so he confided in Metternich, that ‘only now did his life really start’.
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As for Marie-Louise, with her son’s birth, and the tenderness that Napoleon had shown, she began to really love him. ‘My affection for my husband’, she wrote to her father, ‘has increased with the birth of my son. And the devotion and attachment he has shown me throughout this time; I have only to think of it and it brings tears to my eyes.’
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The guns announcing the birth rang out over Paris. As soon as the first shot was fired, people in the streets stopped what they were doing and began to count them. Stendhal was still in bed and was woken by the firing. Twenty-two was the magic number; it meant that a boy had been born (because there were only twenty-one for a girl, and 101 for a boy) and it led, according to the police reports, to spontaneous outbursts of acclamations: ‘Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Impératrice! Vive le roi de Rome!’
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It seems true for once; Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, remarked on people in the rue Saint-Honoré applauding as though a ‘favourite actor’ had appeared.
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Savary, who had been appointed minister of police in June 1810, recounts an anecdote in his police report from that day about two
portefaix
or peasants arguing in the markets. They were going to fight, but when ‘the first cannon shot was heard, they suspended their quarrel to count the shots and on the twenty-second shot, they embraced’.
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Even royalists seem to have been moved by the event, as Mme de Boigne remarked that there was a loud cry of joy throughout the city that went off like an electric spark.
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At half-past ten in the morning, Mme Blanchard left the Champs de Mars in a Montgolfier balloon and threw papers into the air announcing the birth of Napoleon’s heir. The joy elicited by the birth of a son probably had more to do with people’s feeling for Napoleon than with a longing for a stable regime, in which nobody really believed.
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Anonymous,
Accouchement de Marie-Louise, Impératrice des Français
(The confinement of Marie-Louise, Empress of the French), 1811.

That evening there were firework displays and official registers at the Tuileries Palace in which Parisians could congratulate the imperial couple. The
guingettes
– popular drinking places located in the suburbs outside Paris – were full of people of all classes celebrating, and some bosses even gave their workers the day off and a few francs to go and drink.
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Houses were decorated with improvised inscriptions. Church bells rang out throughout France to announce the birth of Napoleon’s son, and in Paris Jews sang prayers of joy on the occasion in the Synagogue.
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Poems and plays were soon being composed to mark the occasion.
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If the police reports have to be treated with circumspection – the usual language is used, namely, ‘never has a demonstration of sentiment been more lively and more general’ – prefects’ reports clearly show that the vast majority of the French people seem to have welcomed the occasion, although particular towns, such as Marseilles and Toulon, increasingly hostile to Napoleon, remained indifferent, and annexed cities, like Hamburg, were cool.
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As in the rest of the Empire, balls, firework displays and popular dances were organized, but while people gladly attended this free entertainment, there is little evidence that it provoked any warm feelings for either Napoleon or his regime. True, a certain number of letters of congratulations were sent to the imperial couple from individuals throughout the Empire,
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and dozens if not hundreds of eulogies were published,
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but the further one got away from Paris the colder the reception was likely to be until one reached Rome, where the response from the general population was at best lukewarm, and from the Church downright hostile.
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That was not surprising, considering the revolutionary-style campaign that Napoleon had been conducting against priests who did not swear an oath of loyalty to him. Dozens of priests simply refused to say any official prayers for the health of Their Majesties, as was required of them.
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