It’s an atmospheric painting, and is meant to show the moment on 31 July when Napoleon learned that, contrary to his expectation, he would not be settling in England and writing his memoirs between visits from admiring Anglaises – he was being sent into exile on Saint Helena, a British rock in the middle of the South Atlantic vividly described by one of Napoleon’s entourage, General Bertrand, as ‘an island shat by the devil’.
There had been rumours about Saint Helena in the British press, and Napoleon had definitely heard them, but confirmation of the news must have come as a hammer blow. Until that moment, the journey from Rochefort back to England had been more like a pleasure cruise. Midshipman Home described the ship’s arrival in Torbay. Some of the officers were given permission to go ashore and ‘I was taken prisoner by some twenty young ladies, marched off to a fine house in the little town, regaled with tea and clouted [sic] cream, and bored with five thousand questions about Napoleon, the ridiculousness of which I have often laughed at since: What was he like? Was he really a man? Were his hands and clothes all over blood when he came on board? Was it true that he had killed three horses in riding from Waterloo to the Bellerophon? Were we not all frightened of him? Was his voice like thunder?’
Shore leave spent fighting off Napoleon’s groupies (and probably surrendering to at least one) – it was a young sailor’s dream. At Plymouth two days later, Home wrote that things got even more hysterical, as about 1,000 boats swarmed around the Bellerophon, hoping to get closer to the world-famous Frenchman: ‘He must have conceived that he was as much admired by the English as by his own beloved French. The Sound was literally covered with boats; the weather was delightful; the ladies looked as gay as butterflies; bands of music in several of the boats played favourite French airs, to attract, if possible, the Emperor’s attention, that they might get a sight of him, which, when effected, they went off, blessing themselves that they had been so fortunate … He showed no disinclination to gratify the eager spectators, by frequently appearing at the gangway, examining the crowd with his pocket-glass; and frequently, as a pretty face gazed at him with bewitching curiosity, he showed his fine white teeth, lifted the little three-cocked hat nearly off his broad and commanding forehead, for he never wholly uncovered, bowed, and smiled with evident satisfaction.’
Then the order arrived from London, condemning Napoleon to distant exile, and everything changed. No longer was he ‘Monsieur the Emperor’. He was a dangerous prisoner of war. Customs men came aboard and even seized a few dozen bottles of French wine that Napoleon had given to the captain’s wife, Mrs Maitland.
Midshipman Home was furious about the mistreatment: ‘I never think of the proceedings which I then witnessed without feeling my blood boil up with indignation, and my face blush crimson for my degraded country.’
Understandably, Napoleon suddenly felt less sociable, and disappeared below deck. When he was transferred to the HMS Northumberland – supposedly a newer, more reliable ship than the Bellerophonfn2 – for transport to Saint Helena, the deposed Emperor was a changed man: ‘His clothes were ill put on, his beard unshaved, and his countenance pale and haggard. There was a want of firmness in his gait, his brow was overcast, and his whole visage bespoke the deepest melancholy; and it needed but a glance to convince the most careless observer that Napoleon considered himself a doomed man … The ship’s deck looked like a place of execution, and we only wanted the headsman, his block, and his axe to complete the scene.’
Midshipman Home, a lifelong Napoleon fan, concludes his account of the episode with a prescient accolade that is a favourite among Bonapartists: ‘The more the character of Napoleon gains its true place in the page of history, the more dastardly will appear our conduct.’ As we will see in Chapter 8, the young officer’s prediction was completely accurate.
VI
However, it would be a mistake to think that Napoleon let himself go to Saint Helena without a fight. He was furious, and dictated a statement of protest: ‘I came aboard Bellerophon of my own free will. I am not a prisoner, I am a guest of England … I appeal to History, which will say that an enemy who waged war on the English people for twenty years came freely, in his hour of misfortune, to seek asylum under its laws. What more striking proof of his esteem and trust could he give?’
This wasn’t a letter to the Prince Regent or the British government. It was simply a statement of his opinion, an historical record. Napoleon was already thinking of himself as a sort of living monument. And he was right to do so. History has judged the British for this ‘betrayal’ – or a certain strain of French historians has done, anyway. The modern Bonapartist writer Jean-Claude Damamme expresses ‘a profound distaste for England, which brought dishonour upon itself that nothing will ever wash away’.
Again, the Bonapartists manage to extract a victory from this new British slap in the face. If the English felt obliged to send Napoleon to the other end of the earth, it was because they were terrified of him, n’est-ce pas?
British sources prove it: Lady Charlotte Fitzgerald, the wife of a British MP, for example, saw Napoleon transferred from the Bellerophon to the Northumberland, and wrote that ‘Others may suppose his career finished but I am sure he does not – he appears most to resemble a bust of marble or bronze as cold and as fixed. He seems quite inaccessible to human tenderness or human distress.’ Lady Charlotte recalled that she ‘came away with my heart Considerably Steeled against him, & with many fears lest the Lion again escape from his Cage’. (Though she also noted that ‘he is wonderful!’.)
Another Englishwoman described the crowds who came to see Napoleon in Plymouth, and concluded, ‘His person is so prepossessing that it is dangerous to the loyalty of the people.’
Wellington himself seems to have agreed with this point of view. According to his friend and confidante Lady Frances Shelley, the Iron Duke was relieved that the British government had refused to let Napoleon land in England. ‘It was only by coercion … that they prevented George the Fourth from receiving Bonaparte,’ Wellington reportedly said. ‘There can be little doubt that if Bonaparte had got to London, the Whig Opposition were ready to use him as their trump card, to overturn the Government!’
Et voilà, Napoleon’s admirers can cheer: Wellington himself was still scared, even after Waterloo. Napoleon’s charisma was so powerful that, even unarmed and almost unaccompanied, he could not be permitted to set foot on English soil. His very presence would have undermined the British government and caused rebellion, both at home and in France. Who knows, Napoleon might even have succeeded in convincing a new Whig government to lend him British soldiers (including Wellington) so that he could recapture his throne.
That might be idle Bonapartist fantasy (though no fantasy seems too great when it comes to Napoleon’s most fervent admirers), but one thing is for certain: over the 200 years since Napoleon set off for Saint Helena, his stature has never stopped growing. It has been, as Victor Hugo said, a case of ‘losing the field but keeping control of history’.
Because no matter who ended up claiming control of a few hectares of blood-soaked Belgian farmland, Napoleon’s many fans will claim – with some justification – that only one man has come to stand triumphant over the battlefield of history, overshadowing everyone else who was involved in the fighting on 18 June 1815.
* * *
fn1 See my book 1000 Years of Annoying the French to find out how France used this victory at Rocquencourt to win yet another battle over the Anglo-Saxon enemy almost 150 years later.
fn2 After this mission, HMS Bellerophon was converted into a prison ship, and in case its future occupants misinterpreted their status, as Napoleon had done, it was renamed the Captivity.
PART TWO
6
ABSENCE MAKES THE (FRENCH) HEART GROW FONDER
‘Napoléon a accru le patrimoine d’héroïsme de la France.’
‘Napoleon increased France’s national stock of heroism.’
– from the review of a book about Wa
terloo in the magazine Lectures pour Tous (1898)
‘Une défaite est l’expiation d’une gloire passée et souvent le garant d’une victoire pour l’avenir.’
‘A defeat is an atonement for past glory, and often the guarantee of future victory.’
– Ernest Renan, nineteenth-century French philosopher
I
WHEN NAPOLEON ARRIVED on Saint Helena on 15 October 1815, he was justifiably depressed. Elba had been within sight of mainland Italy, almost within swimming distance of his native Corsica, and peopled by adoring natives and hundreds of faithful Gardes. Saint Helena was 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, further away from France than Napoleon had ever been. Even the snowy wastes of Russia were on the doorstep compared to this lonely rock.
And this time Napoleon was no island sovereign, with a friendly governor to keep a casual eye on him. He was a prisoner watched over by 125 British guards, and hemmed in by a ring of hostile British ships with orders to fire on any unauthorised vessel approaching the island. Instead of the army that had accompanied Napoleon to Elba, he was attended by only two dozen people – three generals and their families, a secretary, and a skeleton staff of servants. Not only that, the coffee, bread and wine were disgusting, and random Englishmen could enter his room at any time and speak to him without asking permission. A firing squad, the deposed Emperor complained, ‘would have been a blessing by comparison’.
To cap it all, he was given a mean-spirited jailer who, it quickly became clear, had been entrusted with the job of making Napoleon’s existence a living hell.
A man of the same age as Napoleon (he was born two weeks before his famous prisoner), Sir Hudson Lowe was an old soldier whose path had very nearly crossed that of his French captive several times during the Napoleonic Wars. Lowe had been sent to Toulon just before it was liberated by the young Napoleon in 1793. He had then been posted on the island of Corsica (when it was briefly under British control) and even billeted at the Buonaparte family home. Later on, he had commanded a force of pro-British Corsican exiles in the Mediterranean, a fact that irritated Napoleon considerably – he called them ‘vagabond Corsican deserters’. And after serving during the 1814 campaign to oust Napoleon from power, Lowe had been chosen to take the glad tidings of his abdication to London. In French eyes, Lowe was therefore just about the most troublesome anti-Bonaparte campaigner the British government could have chosen.
Not only that, Lowe was notoriously small-minded. Aleksandr Balmain, the Russian representative on Saint Helena, said of Lowe that ‘he is awkward, and impossibly unreasonable. He kills those around him with pin pricks. He has a weak, confused mind that takes fright at the slightest thing.’ The complete opposite, in other words, of a courageous French general with visions of world domination.
Lowe took over the job of guarding Napoleon in April 1816, and immediately proved that he had none of Wellington’s magnanimity towards his former adversary. He made sure that Napoleon’s isolation in the wind-battered Longwood House, an hour’s ride from the capital Jamestown, was almost complete.
Lowe was infuriatingly petty in a way that is usually the domain of French bureaucrats. He once refused to let Napoleon have a new pair of shoes until the old pair had been handed over. He also forbade the British garrison from addressing Napoleon as anything grander than ‘General’. This incensed Napoleon, who declared that he wanted to change his name to Baron Duroc (‘Baron of the Rock’). A neat play on words, but Lowe took it seriously and expressly forbade it.fn1
This wasn’t the only mischief that Lowe inspired in his captive. When he ordered guards to spy openly on Napoleon, insisting that the prisoner be sighted at least once a day, Napoleon took to hiding indoors to frustrate his captors. Once, when he heard that Lowe was on his way to visit, Napoleon leapt into the bath so as to be unavailable – and later informed Lowe that he had done so. It was open rebellion.
Lowe insulted Napoleon by ordering that Saint Helena’s French contingent should cover some of the expenses of their exile, though he changed his mind when Napoleon put up some of his personal silver for sale, and the demand from the outside world was so enormous that Lowe feared it would create an undesirable market in Napoleonic souvenirs.
In short, the English governor was so disrespectful to the Empereur that Bonapartist historians despise him even more than Blücher. There is a book called Hudson Lowe face au jugement des Anglais (that is, ‘condemned by the English’), published in 2001, that gleefully lists Lowe’s misfortunes after his time on Saint Helena. It claims that Lowe’s name was dragged through the mud in 1827 by Sir Walter Scott in his biography of Napoleon (see Chapter 7), though in fact Scott mostly defends Lowe’s patience in the face of his prisoner’s provocations. Scott does criticise Lowe for occasionally being over-zealous in interpreting his government’s instructions, and for telling Napoleon to reduce the costs of his captivity; but after detailing every quibble and argument between prisoner and jailer, he concludes that ‘reason and temper on either side would have led to a very different proceeding on both’. No matter, though – Scott’s detailed examination of the charges against Lowe counts, in Bonapartist eyes, as condemnation. The jugement des Anglais, we are told, was a guilty verdict. After being sent into exile himself as governor of Ceylon, Lowe decided to return to Britain to defend himself, lost his job, and died in poverty. A fitting end – so the Bonapartists tell us – to Napoleon’s tormentor.
According to Napoleon’s admirers, his only consolation during his exile – apart from the sexual favours he obtained from the wives of his entourage – was that it gave him the chance to sit down and rewrite the story of his reign. This battle for possession of the high ground in history would be his last, and ultimately most successful, campaign.
II
Not that Napoleon rewrote events himself – his every thought was dictated to one of his most ardent fans on Saint Helena, his chamberlain and companion, Emmanuel de Las Cases.
Las Cases had accompanied Napoleon from Paris to Rochefort, and was the man who first contacted Captain Maitland of the Bellerophon with a view to a surrender. It has been alleged that Las Cases was too naive in his dealings with Maitland, and allowed Napoleon to fall into British hands when he would have done better to advise his employer to flee to America.
It has also been suggested that Las Cases made sure he left Saint Helena as soon as he had recorded enough material for a book. He was expelled by Hudson Lowe in 1816 – purportedly for trying to smuggle out a letter complaining about the Emperor’s mistreatment – and took with him 925 pages of Napoleonic reminiscences.
Despite allegations about Las Cases’ loyalty to Napoleon, when his book, Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, was published in eight volumes in 1823, it became a bible for Bonapartists, and laid the foundations for the image of Napoleon as a combination of martyr and historical monument. Part diary, part history book, the ‘memoirs’ were much embellished by Las Cases, and interspersed with the author’s own admiring comments, but most of all they represented a huge canvas upon which Napoleon was allowed to paint the heroic tableau of his life.
All soldiers’ reminiscences are wise after the event, but in Las Cases’ volumes, a worldwide audience, already fascinated by the myth of the fallen French war hero, was given a veritable feast of Napoleonic hindsight. His misunderstood desire for a Europe-wide democracy, his unacknowledged campaign for world peace, the unfairness of the weather conditions on the night of 17–18 June 1815, and of course his genius on various battlefields – Napoleon’s whole career is there, in chapter after chapter of ramblings that jump from one subject to the next, from religion to rat control, from accounting to freedom of speech, and the ‘folly’ of equality for women.fn2
In the book, Napoleon explains, for example, why he was known as the petit caporal. It was a nickname given to him by the ‘old moustaches’ when he took command of the Armée d’Italie (that is, the army that was to invade Italy, not the Italian army) at the tender age of twenty-five.
After his first victory at Lodi in northern Italy in 1796, the old soldiers showed their approval by ‘promoting’ him from private to corporal. Nothing to do with his diminutive size, bien sûr.
He denies having seized power in 1799 with a coup d’état: ‘I didn’t usurp the crown. I picked it up from the gutter. The people put it on my head.’
He claims that his only true goal as ruler of France was ‘the reign of reason’ – that is, to educate the people. ‘What a younger generation I will leave! They are my creation. Their achievements will be my revenge.’
He recalls his great battles, of course, dishing out praise and condemnation to the officers who served him well or otherwise, and marvelling at his own judgement on the battlefield. ‘Success in war,’ he opines, ‘hangs so much on insight and seizing the moment’ – which he did, over and over again.
He also predicts that his future detractors will be wasting their time, or ‘biting into granite’ as he puts it: ‘My memory consists of facts,fn3 and mere words will not be able to destroy them.’
In this, of course, Napoleon was absolutely right, and his own war of words, the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, has since proved to be a resounding victory in allowing Bonapartists to disregard Waterloo as a minor blot on the otherwise spotless record of a national hero.
III