Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (34 page)

“A
MBITION IS NEVER
content, even at the summit of greatness,” Napoleon declared. The peace with Britain was fragile. He had deployed French troops to Holland, which contravened the treaty with the British. For his part, he was pitched into rage by the expansionist desires of the British and their irreverent newspapers. Day after day, he stared at caricatures of Josephine in a state of undress, jokes that Hortense was his mistress, and pictures of him as a pygmy with a giant nose. Lord Whitworth, the British ambassador, calmly told Napoleon that the British press mocked everyone, but the constitution would not allow them to be silenced—which was not entirely true, since the newspapers were prevented from expressing pro-French opinion.

Napoleon detested Whitworth and was personally annoyed by his impressive height of six feet. When he demanded the British quit Malta, Whitworth replied that his government expected the consul to give up on his aggressive policies of invasion. In March 1803, Napoleon lost his temper and raged at the ambassador in public with insults so terrible that Whitworth declined to repeat them in his letters. “England wants war,” the consul roared at the ambassadors of Russia and Spain. Within two months, Whitworth had left Paris, the tourists fleeing behind him. The British promptly seized all French and Dutch merchant ships near their coasts. On May 18, they declared war on France once more, with the excuse that France had intervened in internal Swiss politics and sent troops to the country. Four days later, Napoleon declared all British men in France between the ages of eighteen and sixty would “immediately be constituted prisoners of war,” an act of capturing civilians that outraged international opinion.
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Simply, Bonaparte wanted to be at war with Britain again. Talleyrand was furious at the breakdown of the short-lived peace with Britain brokered by the Treaty of Amiens, his suspicions confirmed that Napoleon was happy only when he was sending his subjects into battle. As Madame de Staël put it, the “natural restlessness of his character, independently from his need to dominate, is such that he could not be content with a mere thirty million people to govern and make happy.”
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It was a powder keg, and Napoleon ignited it. “In three days, granted favourable circumstances and foggy weather, I could be master of London, the Parliament and the Bank,” he boasted. Peace had not suited
him; he could spend only so many days watching ladies curtsey. By June, he was in his element, bustling around newly created camps for his forces and talking of erupting onto British shores. He had seen the newspapers mocking Lord Nelson for his desperate infatuation with Emma Hamilton, and he thought his old enemy had lost his desire for blood. “I will take you to London,” he boasted to Josephine. “I wish the wife of the modern Caesar to be crowned at Westminster.”

While he was surveying his ships, Josephine wrote him a heartfelt letter.

All my sadness vanished, as I read your touching letter and the expressions of your feelings for me. I am so grateful to you for taking the time to write at such length to your Josephine. You cannot think how much joy you have given to the woman you love … I will always keep your letter which I press to my heart. It will console me for your absence, and guide me when I am near you, for I want to be always in your eyes as you want me to be, your sweet and tender Josephine, my life devoted only to your happiness.

When you are happy or for a moment sad, may it be upon my bosom that you pour out your joy or your grief; may you have no feelings that I do not share. All my desires amount only to pleasing you and making you happy … Adieu, Bonaparte, I will never forget the last sentence of your letter. I have it locked in my heart. How deeply it is engraved there and with what ecstasy my own has answered it! Yes, oh yes, that is my wish too—to please you and to love you—or rather to adore you.
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Josephine dreaded Napoleon venturing overseas. If he died, she would be completely unprotected, as his siblings, ministers, and army generals battled to become the next consul. Fortunately for her, Napoleon changed his mind about invading when intelligence suggested he would need his armies to quell rebellion in his empire and fight back against Austria. Moreover, though he would not admit it, his naval capacity was not equal to Britain’s. The war situation changed to a game of standoff and stalemate.

On June 14, Josephine set off with Napoleon on a monthlong royal tour, traveling through northeastern France and the Low Countries. She was greeted by delighted crowds who had turned out to see her as much as the consul. For a month, she hosted receptions; for the first time, she was wearing the French crown jewels. In Picardy, Napoleon was given a pair of swans, a gift traditionally reserved for kings. He sent them back to Paris and let them swim in a lake at the Tuileries.

The consul gave the appearance of complete power, but he knew he was under threat. In 1804 a Vendéan rebel leader was arrested and confessed to his captors that he and his coconspirators had been plotting to assassinate the first consul and had been waiting only for a prince of royal blood to lead them. The government needed a scapegoat and settled on the thirty-two-year-old Duc d’Enghien, nephew of Louis XVI and a commander in the army of the prince of Condé, which had attempted to assist the Duke of Brunswick’s invasion of France in 1792. Enghien was resident in the neutral grand duchy of Baden. Napoleon sent dragoons to cross the Rhine and seize him at his home. He was imprisoned at the Château de Vincennes near Paris, where servants were already digging his grave near the dungeon.

Josephine was horrified when she heard the news from her ladies. She and her husband were at Malmaison at the time, and she hurried downstairs to find Napoleon serenely playing chess. Her royalist sympathies coming to the fore, she knelt before him and begged him not to execute the man. Her pleas were in vain. “How harshly he repelled my entreaties!” she recalled. “I clung to him! I threw myself at his feet!” He exclaimed angrily, “Meddle with what concerns you! This is not women’s business! Leave me!” He pushed her off with a violence she had not seen from him since the time he had accused her of an affair with Hippolyte on his return from Egypt.
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Later on, she tried again, and he was even gruffer. “Go away, you are only a child, you know nothing about politics.” That evening Josephine was unable to pretend to be merry, and Madame de Rémusat, her lady-in-waiting, was pale. Napoleon demanded to know why she wore no rouge, and she replied that she had not put any on. “That could not happen to my Josephine,” he publicly pronounced. “She knows that there’s nothing more becoming to a woman than rouge—and tears.”
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Later, he began to fondle Josephine
brutally. Distressed but knowing better than to resist him, she allowed him to spend the night in her room.

Napoleon, by that point, hardly cared whether the stolid duc was guilty. He was convinced that there was nothing like an assassination attempt to firm his hold over the people and garner more power.

The consul was merciless. The duc was sentenced to death, with no proper hearing. Under a week after his arrest, on March 21 at two-thirty in the morning, Enghien was taken to the courtyard to be executed. He stood in the dark, his faithful dog beside him. Refusing a handkerchief to cover his eyes, he followed instructions to hold a lantern against his heart to direct the fire. “You are Frenchmen,” he said, “at least you will do me the service not to miss your aim.” The duc’s dignity and courage awed the marksmen. They were told they could help themselves to his clothes and money, but they refused.

The news spread like wildfire across Europe. Napoleon had crossed into a neutral state and executed a man without proper trial. The wanton killing of a royal was not only a terrible reminder of the bloody Revolution and Terror but a slap in the face to the many who still believed the royals had been specially appointed by God to rule. Josephine wept when she heard and struggled to control her feelings. “I am a woman, you know, and I confess I could cry,” she repeated over and over. She consoled herself that her husband was “not naturally cruel, it is his counsellors and flatterers who have induced him to commit so many villainous actions.”
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Napoleon, delighted at what he deemed an absolute success, commanded Talleyrand to throw a ball to celebrate. “The Duc d’Enghien was a conspirator like any other and he had to be treated as such,” he said. “These people wanted to throw France into confusion and to destroy the Revolution by destroying me.” Allying himself with the Revolution was absurd, but he kept it up—“I am the man of the State. I am the French Revolution. I say it, and I will uphold it.”
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His courtiers struggled to celebrate, and foreign visitors stood in their finery, shaking their heads at the horror.
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Just over a week after the death of the duc, Napoleon went to the theater. His habit was to dash to his box before Josephine’s carriage arrived. This time he entered with her—he needed her popularity. As they made their appearance, he was
pale and anxious, while she looked ahead, smiling as if nothing had happened. He was fortunate this time. The people in the theater erupted into shouts and cheers.

For the Parisians, who had read the false newspaper reports that cast Enghien as a conspirator, Napoleon had proved his excellence and strength once more.
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“I have forever silenced both royalists and Jacobins,” he crowed. The Jacobins were delighted, convinced now that he would never put a Bourbon on the throne. The royalists, shocked by his actions, realized they had underestimated him. But it was too late. Three weeks after that awful night when the bullets felled Enghien, the senate assembled and duly declared that the life consul was now the emperor. Josephine was indeed, as the Martinique fortune-teller had suggested, “greater than a queen.”

CHAPTER 15

“Your Imperial Majesty”

Napoleon’s empire was announced on May 18, 1804, to a twenty-one-gun salute. He was the only person at ease, receiving the senators as they stumbled between “Citizen Consul” and “Citizen Emperor.” Josephine visibly trembled when she was called “Your Imperial Majesty.” She was now the empress of France. Surely no mere actress could unseat her now.

Madame de Staël was shocked. “For a man who had risen above every throne, to come down willingly and take his place amongst the kings!” But Napoleon’s supporters, particularly the workingmen who cheered his military victories, thought he could do no wrong. The liberals, who had deluded themselves that he was an heir of the Revolution, were scandalized. But the majority of the French were weary of bloodshed, afraid of the British threat, and desperate for security. Napoleon, a strong ruler who would brook no opposition, seemed their only option.

He had chosen “emperor” as his title. “King” was impossible, but “emperor,” he felt, would remind the French of the grandeur of Charlemagne, the holy Roman emperor. Unlike Charlemagne, he would not be traveling to Rome for the coronation. Pope Pius VII would have to come to Paris. Napoleon’s Council of State, many of them fanatical anti-clerics, were livid. They had been infuriated by Napoleon’s reestablishment of the church, and a religious coronation was, they declared, the last straw. But Napoleon brushed off their complaints. He assured them that a coronation was necessary to ensure the greatness of France,
inspiring the people with pride and putting him on the same footing as every monarch in Europe.

Sixty-two-year-old Pope Pius was reluctant to minister over the coronation, for he had been deeply distressed by Napoleon’s treatment of the Duc d’Enghien. Cardinal Joseph Fesch was sent to persuade him. Fesch pleaded, he flattered, he offered gifts, and he gave a heavy-handed reminder of Napoleon’s military strength. Eventually, Pius gave in and agreed to come. As a thank-you, Napoleon gave Fesch a seat in the French senate, the position of grand almoner of the empire, and the grand cordon of the Légion d’Honneur.