In 1801, First Consul for Life Napoleon Bonaparte sent an army of 35,000 men to take control of the city of New Orleans, the key to the vast territory returned to France in 1800 by secret treaty with Spain. Along the way, the expeditionary force was supposed to make a quick detour and put down Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave revolt on Hispaniola, thus securing French influence in the Caribbean and, incidentally, a source of refined sugar to feed France’s insatiable sweet tooth. As with many of Napoleon’s overseas campaigns, the enterprise didn’t work out as planned. Virtually the entire force was wiped out before it reached Louisiana; whoever wasn’t killed by the rebels died of yellow fever instead. Thwarted in his ambitions, Napoleon offered to sell France’s entire North American territory to the United States at the fire sale price of fifteen million dollars—three cents an acre—a strategic bargain that sealed the fortune of the new nation.
The reader will learn little of this in Alistair Horne’s amiable short history The Age of Napoleon. Instead, the sale of Louisiana appears as a toss-away gesture to prevent America from falling into the enemy camp while Napoleon turned his attention to invading England (1803-1805). It seems that Talleyrand, Napoleon’s foreign minister at the time, had passed the worst of the French Revolution in Philadelphia (of all places); while there, with his usual acuity, Talleyrand recognized that, notwithstanding eight years of war, the population remained British at heart, with sympathies likely to follow in any conflict between England and France. According to Horne, it was this “sensible advice” from Talleyrand that led Napoleon to use Louisiana as a diplomatic sweetener to secure the friendship of Jefferson’s administration. Others have thought that Napoleon counted on the British navy taking New Orleans during any future hostilities, so Talleyrand’s far more “sensible advice” was to fatten France’s war chest by giving up title to territory that Napoleon expected to lose anyway.
The sort of thing the reader will learn in this delightfully gossipy book is that Josephine was a ravishing beauty despite her blackened stubs of teeth, ruined by a childhood of chewing Martiniquais sugar cane, and that her pug bit the future emperor on the leg during the crucial moment of their wedding night. The reader will also learn how many dresses Josephine had in her closet when her wardrobe was inventoried in 1809, about the time Napoleon divorced her to marry Marie-Louise of Austria (unfortunately, the reader will learn that twice within about five pages, but it’s still worth knowing): she had 666 winter dresses, 230 summer ones—and, “toujours la Creole,” only “two pairs of knickers.” In fact, the reader will hear about Josephine’s Creole background a few too many times for absolute comfort, as in repeated references to “the voracious sexual appetite of the hot-blooded Creole.”
As befits a book that treats the entire Napoleonic Era in fewer than 200 pages, Horne assumes a working knowledge—or at least a cheerful ignorance—of the various battles, alliances, campaigns, and revised alliances of the Napoleonic era. And, if the reader really cared about such matters, I suppose there are books aplenty about Rivoli, Marengo, Ulm, and Austerlitz, or, for that matter, about Napoleon’s disastrous Peninsular Campaign against the combined Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese armies led by Arthur Wellesley (later the first Duke of Wellington) and Napoleon’s even more disastrous invasion of and retreat from Russia. This is also a book for people—like me—who want to know that Wellington and Napoleon both bedded an actress named Mademoiselle George, and that she famously, if indiscreetly, proclaimed the Iron Duke “le plus fort.” She said this, of course, after Waterloo (the reader also learns that one twice). This is also a volume for people who want to know that one of the ways Frenchmen avoided service in the Grande Armée was to knock out their front teeth, essential for tearing the paper off musket cartridges in the heat of battle. (And Horne’s treatment of Napoleon is the latest in the Modern Library Chronicles, a series of short popular accounts of subjects ranging from Islam to the joint-stock company; it is intended to be the historian’s version of a beach book, a niche it fits splendidly. Sensibly, given his brief, Horne has chosen to focus on the social and cultural changes during the period of Napoleon’s peak influence, from 1795, when he received his first post with political clout, to 1820, when his presence was still felt in a shaky Bourbon restoration. Although the bedroom trivia is really the draw—did you know that, while working in a Philadelphia bookstore during the Terror, Talleyrand’s patron, Saint-Mery, introduced contraceptives to America?—Horne actually manages to cram in some respectable history and analysis into his account as well.
In particular, because Horne is the author of at least one book on the architectural history of Paris, he is especially strong on Napoleon’s vast public works in the capital. Napoleon intended to make Paris “the most beautiful city in the world,” notwithstanding the occasional fantasy about escaping from the city’s annoying inhabitants by founding an entirely new capital in Lyons—”a habitation worthy of my rank andfortune”—renamed “Napoleonville.” From moving the city’s cemetery to the suburban estate of the confessor of Louis XIV, Pére de La Chaise, to building a sixty-mile-long canal to provide fresh water to the city, from carving new streets and plazas out of the medieval city to reconstructing the quais and bridges along the Seine to protect against flooding, Napoleon put his stamp on the city. Even as his regime was reeling from the failed Russian campaign, the War of the Fourth Coalition, famine, and economic disarray, Paris remained one vast construction site. As Horne recounts, when the king of Württemberg was asked, during an 1810 visit, what he thought of Paris, he replied, “Fine, for a town
Horne also perceptively discusses the manner in which Napoleon both changed and built upon French culture, in ways that persist to the present—and not only in his incessant pursuit of “la Gloire.” Horne argues that Napoleon centralized French government and cultural life—even down to fashion, theater, and food—to an extent unrealized even by that great centralizer Louis XIV, leaving the provinces to remain dismal backwaters. Napoleon’s school reforms alone ensured that in every French lycée, at any given hour, French students were studying exactly the same subject in exactly the same way. Although the army was a meritocracy, Horne notes also its reliance on the graduates of a few specialized schools ultimately recreated a system of elites that favored the old aristocracy and bourgeoisie. But, in the short run, with the shrewd creation of public favors such as the Légion d’Honneur, Napoleon fashioned a classless civic elite built solely on loyalty to his person.
Napoleon also reorganized the French government so that he had personal control of its minutest details even while in the field. Thus, during the campaigns of 1805-1807, during which Napoleon was out of Paris for 306 days, he never missed a beat. A steady stream of letters emanated from his headquarters supervising everything from the illumination of Paris to the scripts of new plays and his brother’s piles (apply leeches: another worthwhile fact to add to one’s store of knowledge). Nowhere was Napoleon’s centralizing hand more clearly evident than in the creation of the uniform Code Napoleon, his most enduring achievement, even in his own eyes, and which, by destroying primogeniture, put the final nail in the coffin of the ancien régime.
As André Maurois observed, Napoleon “believed in equality and did not believe in liberty.” Horne makes a convincing case that Napoleon was not a revolutionary, but an enlightenment opportunist with a technocratic and authoritarian bent. Although he rose to power under the Directory, Napoleon was never comfortable with the Parisian masses. Instead, he kept them in check with a carrot and stick: spectacles, parades, public fétes, and dreams of glory in the Grande Armée on the one hand—dreams that probably cost France over one million casualties out of a total population of 33 million—and tight press control, censorship of the theater (which was a vital force in molding public opinion), and a very efficient secret police on the other.
Napoleon’s fundamental distrust of Parisian loyalties was well justified in light of the repeated volte-faces of allegiance that accompanied the collapse of his regime: the Russian entry into the city in 1814, the subsequent Bourbon restoration, the Napoleonic return in the Hundred Days, the final defeat at Waterloo, and the reoccupation of Paris by the English and Prussians—each was cheered by the French public in its turn. As Napoleon disdainfully said, “They are cowards who change their sovereign as they change their shirt.” Or, in true French fashion, as the Marquise de Coigny remarked of the hordes of British strolling the Bois de Boulogne after Waterloo, “It is so like a féte that it’s a pity it’s a conquest.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. For these wonderful nuggets alone, the book is worth the read.
