1916 John MacBride,
50, Irish patriot, executed by British firing squad for his participation
in the Easter Rising. He had fought in the Irish brigade with the Boers
against the British in 1899.
1913 Henri Moret, French artist born on 12 December
1856. — MORE
ON MORET AT ART “4” MAY with
links to images.
1907 Eugène-Alexis Girardet, French painter born on 31
May 1853. — more
with links to images.
1886 Seven strikers, killed by militia (the Bay View Massacre).
Striking steelworkers, marching toward a mill in the Bay View section of
Milwaukee, are intercepted by a squad of militia, who shoot point blank
into the strikers, killing seven.
1883 Eva Gonzalès, Mme Henri Guérard, during
childbirth, French Impressionist
painter born on 19 April 1849, model and student of Édouard
Manet. — MORE
ON GONZALÈS AT ART “4” MAY
with links to images.
1862 Nearly
500 French and 100 Mexican soldiers at the battle of Puebla
^top^
Cinco de Mayo: During the French-Mexican War, a badly
supplied and outnumbered Mexican army under General Ignacio Zaragoza
defeated a French army attempting to capture Puebla de Los Angeles,
a small town in east central Mexico. Victory at the Battle of Puebla
did not stop the French for long, but it represented a great moral
victory for the Mexican government, and symbolized the country's will
to defend its sovereignty against threat by a powerful foreign nation.
In 1861, after establishing his liberal
Mexican government, Benito Juarez became president of a country in
financial ruin, and he was forced to default on his debts to European
governments. In response, France, Britain, and Spain sent naval forces
to Veracruz to demand reimbursement. Britain and Spain negotiated
with Mexico and withdrew, but France under Napoléon III decided
to use the opportunity to carve a dependent empire out of Mexican
territory.
Late in 1861, a well-armed
French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large French force and driving
President Juarez and his government into retreat. Certain that French
victory would come swiftly in Mexico, 6000 French troops under General
Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles.
From his new headquarters in the north, Juarez rounded up a rag-tag
force of loyal men and sent them to Puebla.
Led by Texas-born General Zaragoza, the 2000 Mexicans fortified the
town and prepared for the French assault. On the fifth of May, 1862,
Lorencez drew his army, well-provisioned and supported by heavy artillery,
before the city of Puebla and began his assault from the north. The
battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French
finally retreated they had lost nearly 500 soldiers to the less than
100 Mexicans killed.
Although
not a major strategic victory in the overall war against the French,
Zaragoza's victory at Puebla tightened Mexican resistance, and six
years later, France withdrew. The same year, Austrian Archduke Ferdinand
Maximilian, installed as emperor of Mexico by Napoléon in 1864,
was captured and executed by Juarez's forces. Puebla de Los Angeles,
the site of Zaragoza's historic victory, was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza
in honor of the general.
Today,
Mexicans celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Puebla as Cinco
de Mayo, a national holiday in Mexico. |
1859 Johann
Peter Guztav Lejeune Dirichlet, German mathematician born on
13 February 1805 in the ephemereal empire of the tyrant who died in abject
exile 38 years, to the day, before him. In 1826 Dirichlet proved that in
any arithmetic progression with first term coprime to the difference there
are infinitely many primes. He made many other important contributions
to mathematics.
^
1821 Napoléon Bonaparte,
former French ruler who once ruled an empire that stretched
across Europe, dies as a British prisoner on the island of Saint Helena
in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
He was born in Corsica (sold in 1768 by the Genoese to France which
occupied it in 1769 defeating independentist Paoli) on 15 August 1769
as Napoleone Buonaparte, the fourth, and second surviving, child of
Carlo Buonaparte [29 Mar 1746 – 24 Feb 1785], a lawyer, and
his wife, Letizia Ramolino [24 Aug 1750 – 02 Feb 1836]. His
father's family, of ancient Tuscan nobility, had emigrated to Corsica
in the 16th century.
Carlo Buonaparte
had married the beautiful and strong-willed Letizia when she was only
14 years old; they eventually had eight children to bring up in very
difficult times. The French occupation of their native country was
resisted by a number of Corsicans led by Pasquale Paoli [26 Apr 1725
– 05 Feb 1807]. Carlo Buonaparte joined Paoli's party, but when
Paoli had to flee a few weeks before Napoléone's birth, Buonaparte
came to terms with the French. Winning the protection of the governor
of Corsica, he was appointed assessor for the judicial district of
Ajaccio in 1771. In 1778 he obtained the admission of his two eldest
sons, Giuseppe Buonaparte [07 Jan 1768 – 28 Jul 1844] and Napoléone,
to the Collège d'Autun. Napoléon from the age of nine was educated
in France as Frenchmen were. But he shared neither the traditions
nor the prejudices of his new country: remaining a Corsican in temperament.
First and foremost, through both his education and his reading, he
was a man of the 18th century.
Napoléon was educated at three schools: briefly at Autun, for
five years at the military college of Brienne, and finally for one
year at the military academy in Paris. It was during Napoléon's
year in Paris that his improvident father died of a stomach cancer,
leaving his family in straitened circumstances. Napoléon, although
not the eldest son, assumed the position of head of the family before
he was 16. In September 1785 he graduated from the military academy,
ranking 42nd in a class of 58. He was made second lieutenant of artillery
in the regiment of La Fère, a kind of training school for young artillery
officers. Garrisoned at Valence, Napoléon continued his education,
reading much, in particular works on strategy and tactics. He also
wrote Lettres sur la Corse, in which he reveals his feeling
for his native island. He went back to Corsica in September 1786 and
did not rejoin his regiment until June 1788. By that time the agitation
that was to culminate in the French Revolution had already begun.
A reader of Voltaire and of Rousseau, Napoléon believed that
a political change was imperative, but as a career officer he seems
not to have seen any need for radical social reforms.
When
in 1789 the National Assembly, which had convened to establish a constitutional
monarchy, allowed Paoli to return to Corsica, Napoléon asked
for leave and in September joined Paoli's group. But Paoli had no
sympathy for the young man, whose father had deserted his cause and
whom he considered to be a foreigner. Disappointed, Napoléon
returned to France; and in April 1791 he was appointed first lieutenant
to the 4th regiment of artillery, garrisoned at Valence. He at once
joined the Jacobin club, a debating society initially favouring a
constitutional monarchy, and soon became its president, making speeches
against nobles, monks, and bishops. In September 1791 he got leave
to go back to Corsica again for three months. Elected lieutenant colonel
in the national guard, he soon fell out with Paoli, its commander
in chief. When he failed to return to France, he was listed as a deserter
in January 1792. But in April France declared war against Austria
and his offense was forgiven.
Apparently
through patronage, Napoléon was promoted to the rank of captain
but did not rejoin his regiment. Instead he returned to Corsica in
October 1792, where Paoli was exercising dictatorial powers and preparing
to separate Corsica from France. Napoléon, however, joined
the Corsican Jacobins, who opposed Paoli's policy. When civil war
broke out in Corsica in April 1793, Paoli had the Buonaparte family
condemned to “perpetual execration and infamy,” whereupon they all
fled to France.
Napoléon
Bonaparte, as he may henceforth be called (though the family did not
drop the spelling Buonaparte until after 1796), rejoined his regiment
at Nice in June 1793. In his Souper de Beaucaire, written
at this time, he argued vigorously for united action by all republicans
rallied round the Jacobins, who were becoming progressively more radical,
and the National Convention, the revolutionary assembly that in the
preceding fall had abolished the monarchy. At the end of August 1793,
the National Convention's troops had taken Marseille but were halted
before Toulon, where the royalists had called in British forces. With
the commander of the National Convention's artillery wounded, Bonaparte
got the post through the commissioner to the army, Antoine Saliceti,
who was a Corsican deputy and a friend of Napoléon's family.
Bonaparte was promoted to major in September and adjutant general
in October. He received a bayonet wound on 16 December, but on the
next day the British troops, harassed by his artillery, evacuated
Toulon. On 22 December Bonaparte, aged 24, was promoted to brigadier
general in recognition of his decisive part in the capture of the
town.
Augustin de Robespierre,
the commissioner to the army, wrote to his brother Maximilien, by
then virtual head of the government and one of the leading figures
of the Reign of Terror, praising the “transcendent merit” of the young
republican officer. In February 1794 Bonaparte was appointed commandant
of the artillery in the French Army of Italy. Robespierre fell from
power in Paris on 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794). When the news reached
Nice, Bonaparte, regarded as a protégé of Robespierre, was arrested
on a charge of conspiracy and treason. He was freed in September but
was not restored to his command. Thefollowing March he refused an
offer to command the artillery in the Army of the West, which was
fighting the counter-revolution in the Vendée. The post seemed to
hold no future for him, and he went to Paris to justify himself. Life
was difficult on half pay, especially as he was carrying on an affair
with Désirée Clary, daughter of a rich Marseille businessman and sister
of Julie, the bride of his elder brother, Joseph. Despite his efforts
in Paris, Napoléon was unable to obtain a satisfactory command
because he was feared for his intense ambition and for his relations
with the “Montagnards,” the more radical members of the National Convention.
He then considered offering his services to the sultan of Turkey.
Bonaparte was still in Paris in May
1795 when the National Convention, on the eve of its dispersal, submitted
the new constitution of the year III of the First Republic to a referendum,
together with decrees according to which two-thirds of the members
of the National Convention were to be reelected to the new legislative
assemblies. The royalists, hoping that they would soon be able to
restore the monarchy, instigated a revolt in Paris to prevent these
measures from being put into effect. Vicomte Paul de Barras, who had
been entrusted with dictatorial powers by the National Convention,
was unwilling to rely on the commander of the troops of the interior;
instead, knowing of Bonaparte's services at Toulon, he appointed him
second in command. Thus, it was Napoléon who shot down the
columns of rebels marching against the National Convention (13 Vendémiaire
an IV; 05 October 1795), thereby saving the National Convention and
the republic.
Bonaparte became
commander of the army of the interior and, consequently, was henceforth
aware of every political development in France. He also became the
respected adviser on military matters to the new government, the Directory.
Lastly, he came to know an attractive Creole, Joséphine Tascher de
La Pagerie [23 Jun 1763 – 29
May 1814], the widow of general. Alexandre de Beauharnais [28
May 1760 – 23 Jun 1794 guillotined during the Reign of Terror],
a woman of many love affairs, and the mother of two children, Eugène
de Beauharnais and Hortense de Beauharnais, who married Louis Bonaparte
and became the queen of Holland and the mother of Napoleon III [20
Apr 1808 – 09 Jan 1873].
From every point of view, a new life was opening for Bonaparte. Having
proved his loyalty to the Directory by dissolving a communist group
led by François Babeuf [23 Nov 1760 – 27
May 1797] and an Italian, Filippo Buonarroti [11 Nov 1761 –
17 Sep 1837], whom Bonaparte had known in Corsica, Bonaparte was appointed
commander in chief of the Army of Italy in March 1796. He had been
trying to obtain that post for several weeks so that he could personally
conduct part of the
plan of campaign adopted by the Directory on his advice. He married
Joséphine on 09 March 1796 and left for the army two days later. Arriving
at his headquarters in Nice, Bonaparte found that his army, which
on paper consistedof 43'000 men, numbered scarcely 30'000 ill-fed,
ill-paid, and ill-equipped men. On 28 (27?) March 1796, he made his
first proclamation to his troops:
Soldats
vous êtes nus, mal nourris ; le Gouvernement vous doit beaucoup, il
ne peut rien vous donner. Votre patience, le courage que vous montrez
au milieu de ces rochers, sont admirables ; mais ils ne vous procurent
aucune gloire, aucun éclat ne rejaillit sur vous. Je veux vous conduire
dans les plaines les plus fertiles du monde. De riches provinces,
de grandes villes seront en votre pouvoir ; vous y trouverez honneur,
gloire et richesses. Soldats d'Italie, manqueriez-vous de courage
ou de constance?
He took
the offensive on 12 April 1796 and successively defeated and separated
the Austrian and the Sardinian armies and then marched on Turin. King
Victor Amadeus III [26 Jun 1726 – 16 Oct 1796] of Sardinia asked
for an armistice; and, at the peace treaty in Paris on 15 May 1796,
Nice and Savoy, occupied by the French since 1792, were annexed to
France. Bonaparte continued the war against the Austrians and occupied
Milan but was held up at Mantua. While his army was besieging this
great fortress, he signed armistices with the duke of Parma, the duke
of Modena, and finally with Pope Pius VI [25 Dec 1717 – 29 Aug
1799].
At the same time, he took
an interest in the political organization of Italy. A plan for its
“republicanization” by a group of Italian “patriots” led by Buonarroti
had to be shelved when Buonarroti was arrested for complicity in Babeuf's
conspiracy against the Directory. Thereafter, Bonaparte, without discarding
the Italian patriots altogether, restricted their freedom of action.
He set up a republican regime in Lombardy but kept a close watch on
its leaders, and in October 1796 he created the Cisalpine Republic
by merging Modena and Reggio nell'Emilia with the papal states of
Bologna and Ferrara occupied by the French Army. Finally he sent an
expedition to recover Corsica, which the British had evacuated.
Austrian armies advanced four times
from the Alps to relieve Mantua but were defeated each time by Bonaparte.
After the last Austrian defeat, at Rivoli on 14 January 1797 by general
André Masséna [06 May
1758 – 04 Apr 1758], Mantua capitulated. Next, Bonaparte
marched on Vienna. He was about 100 kilometers from that capital when
the Austrians sued for an armistice. By the preliminaries of peace,
Austria cededthe southern Netherlands to France and recognized the
Lombard republic but received in exchange some territory belonging
to the old Republic of Venice, which was partitioned between Austria,
France, and Lombardy. Bonaparte then consolidated and reorganized
the north Italian republics and encouraged Jacobin (radical republican)
propaganda in Venetia. Some Italian patriots hoped that these developments
would soon lead to the formation of a single and indivisible “Italian
Republic” modeled on the French.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte grew uneasy at the successes of the royalists
in the French elections in the spring of 1797 and advised the Directory
to oppose them, if necessary, by force. In Julyit attempted a coup
d'état against the royalists and failed; thereupon Bonaparte sent
Gen. Pierre Augereau to Paris, along with several officers and men.
Augereau's successful coup d'état of 18 Fructidor (04 September 1797)
eliminated the royalists' friends from the government and legislative
councils and also enhanced Bonaparte's prestige. Thus, Bonaparte could
conclude the Treaty of Campo Formio with Austria as he thought best.
The Directory was displeased, however, because the Treaty had ceded
Venice to the Austrians and did not secure the left bank of the Rhine
for France. On the other hand, it raised Bonaparte's popularity to
its peak, for he had gained victory for France after five years of
waron the Continent.
Only the war
at sea, against the British, continued. The directors, who wanted
to launch an invasion of the British Isles, appointed Bonaparte to
command the army assembled for this purpose along the English Channel.
After a rapid inspection in February 1798, he announced that the operation
could not be undertaken until France had command of the sea. Instead,
hesuggested that France strike at the sources of Great Britain's wealth
by occupying Egypt and threatening the route to India. This proposal,
seconded by Talleyrand, the foreign minister, was accepted by the
directors, who were glad to get rid of their ambitious young general.
The expedition, thanks to some fortunate
coincidences, was at first a great success: Malta, the great fortress
of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, was occupied
on 10 June 1798, Alexandria taken by storm on 01 July 1798, and all
the delta of the Nile rapidly overrun. On 01 August 1798, however,
the French squadron at anchor in Abu Qir Bay was completely destroyed
by the fleet of Adm. Horatio Nelson [29 Sep 1758 – 21 Oct 1805]
in the Battle of the Nile, so that Napoléon found himself confined
to the land that he had conquered. He proceeded to introduce Western
political institutions, administration, and technical skills in Egypt;
but Turkey, nominally suzerain over Egypt, declared war on France
in September. To prevent a Turkish invasion of Egypt and also perhaps
to attempt a return to France by way of Anatolia, Bonaparte marched
into Syria in February 1799. His progress northward was halted at
Acre, where the British withstood a siege, and in May Bonaparte began
a disastrous retreat to Egypt.
The Battle of the Nile showed Europe that Bonaparte was not invincible,
and Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Turkey formed a new coalition
against France. The French armies in Italywere defeated in the spring
of 1799 and had to abandon the greater part of the peninsula. These
defeats led to disturbances in France itself. The coup d'etat of 30
Prairial (18 June 1799) expelled the men of moderate views from the
Directory and brought into it men who were considered Jacobins. Yet
the situation remained confused, and one of the new directors, Emmanuel
Sieyès, was convinced that only military dictatorship could prevent
a restoration of the monarchy: “I am looking for a sabre,” he said.
Bonaparte did not take long to make up his mind. He would leave his
army and return to France—in order to save the republic, of course,
but also to take advantage of the new circumstances and to seize power.
The Directory had, in fact, ordered his return, but he had not received
the order, so that it was actually in disregard of his instructions
that he left Egypt with a few companions on 22 August 1799. Their
two frigates surprisingly escaped interception by the British, and
Bonaparte arrived in Paris on 14 October 1799.
By this time French victories in Switzerland and Holland had averted
the danger of invasion,and the counter-revolutionary risings within
France had more or less failed. A coup d'état could therefore
no longer be justified by any need to save the republic. Sieyès, however,
had not given up his project, and now he had his “sabre.” From the
end of October he and Bonaparte were in league together planning the
coup, and on 18–19 Brumaire, An VIII (09-10 November 1799), it was
carried out: the directors were forced to resign, the members of the
legislative councils were dispersed, and a new government, the Consulate,
was set up. The three consuls were Bonaparte and two of the directors
who had resigned, Sieyès [03 May 1748
– 20 Jun 1836] and Pierre-Roger Ducos [1747-1816]. But it was
Bonaparte who was henceforth the master of France.
Bonaparte,
now 30 years old, was thin and short and wore his hair cut close,
le petit tondu as he was called. Not much was known about his personality,
but people had confidence in a man who had always been victorious
(the Nile and Acre were forgotten) and who had managed to negotiate
the brilliant Treaty of Campo Formio. He was expected to bring back
peace, to end disorder, and to consolidate the political and social
“conquests” of the Revolution. He was indeed exceptionally intelligent,
prompt to make decisions, and indefatigably hardworking, but also
insatiably ambitious. He seemed to be the man of the Revolution because
it was due to the Revolution that he had climbed at so early an age
to the highest place in the state. He was not to forget it: but more
than a man of the Revolution, he was a man of the 18th century, the
most enlightened of the enlightened despots, a true son of Voltaire.
He did not believe in the sovereignty of the people, in the popular
will, or in parliamentary debate. Yet he put his confidence more in
reasoning than in reason and may be said to have preferred “men of
talent”—mathematicians, jurists, and statesmen, for instance, however
cynical or mercenary they might be—to “technicians” in the true sense
of the word. He believed that an enlightened and firm will could do
anything if it had the support of bayonets; he despised and feared
the masses; and, as for public opinion, he considered that he could
mold and direct it as he pleased. He has been called the most “civilian”
of generals, but essentially he never ceased to be a soldier.
Bonaparte imposed a military dictatorship
on France, but its true character was at first disguised by the Constitution
of An VIII (4 Nivôse; 25 December 1799), drawn up by Sieyès. This
constitution did not guarantee the “rights of man” or make any mention
of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” but it did reassure the partisans
of the Revolution by proclaiming the irrevocability of the sale of
national property and by upholding the legislation against the émigrés.
It gave immense powers to the first consul, leaving only a nominal
role to his two colleagues. The first consul, Bonaparte, was to appoint
ministers, generals, civil servants, magistrates, and the members
of the Council of State and even was to have an overwhelming influence
in the choice of members for the three legislative assemblies, though
their members were theoretically to be chosen by universal suffrage.
Submitted to a plebiscite, the constitution won by an overwhelming
majority in February 1800.
The
Consulate's work of administrative reform, undertaken at Bonaparte's
instigation, was to be more lasting than the constitution and so more
important for France. At the head of thegovernment was the Council
of State, created by the first consul and often effectively presided
over by him; it was to play an important part both as the source of
the new legislation and as an administrative tribunal. At the head
of the administration of the départements were the prefects, who carried
on the tradition of the intendants of the ancien régime, supervising
the application of the laws and acting as the instruments of centralization.
The judicial system was profoundly changed: whereas from the beginning
of the Revolution judges had been elected, henceforth they were to
be nominated by the government, their independence assured by their
irremovability from office. The police organization was greatly strengthened.
The financial administration was considerably improved: instead of
the municipalities, special officials were entrusted with the collectingof
direct taxes; the franc was stabilized; and the Banque de France,
owned partly by shareholders and partly by the state, was created.
Education was transformed into a major public service; secondary education
was given a semi-military organization, and the university faculties
were re-established. Primary education, however, was still neglected.
Bonaparte shared Voltaire's belief
that the people needed a religion. Personally, he was indifferent
to religion: in Egypt he had said that he wanted to become a Muslim.
Yet he considered that religious peace had to be restored to France.
As early as 1796, when he was concluding the armistice in Italy with
Pope Pius VI, he had tried to persuade the Pope to retract his briefs
against the French priests who had accepted the Civil Constitution
of the Clergy, which in practice nationalized the church. Pius VII,
who succeeded Pius VI in March 1800, was more accommodating than his
predecessor, and ten months after negotiations were opened with him
a concordat was signed reconciling the church and the Revolution.
The Pope recognized the French Republic and called for the resignation
of all former bishops; new prelates were to be designated by the First
Consul and instituted by the Pope; and the sale of the property of
the clergy was officially recognized by Rome. The concordat, in fact,
admitted freedom of worship and the lay character of the state.
The codification of the civil law,
first undertaken in 1790, was at last completed under the Consulate.
Le Code civil des Français promulgated on 21 March 1804, and later
known as the Code
Napoléon, gave permanent form to the great gains of the Revolution:
individual liberty, freedom of work, freedom of conscience, the lay
character of the state, and equality before the law; but, at the same
time, it protected landed property, gave greater liberty to employers,
and showed little concern for employees. It maintained divorce but
granted only limited legal rights to women.
The army received the most careful attention. The First Consul retained
in outline the system instituted by the Revolution: recruitment by
forced conscription but with the possibility of replacement by substitutes;
the mixing of the conscripts with old soldiers; and the eligibility
of all for promotion to the highest ranks. Nevertheless, the creation
of the Academy of Saint-Cyr to produce infantry officers made it easier
for the sons of bourgeois families to pursue a military career. Moreover,
the École Polytechnique, founded by the National Convention, was militarized
in order to provide officers for the artillery and engineers. Yet
Bonaparte was not concerned about introducing new technical inventions
into his army. He put his trust in the “legs of his soldiers”: his
basic strategic idea was a fast-moving army.
The
First Consul spent the winter and spring of 1799–1800 reorganizing
the army and preparing for an attack on Austria alone, Russia having
withdrawn from the anti-French coalition. With his usual quick assessment
of the situation, he saw the strategic importance of the Swiss Confederation,
from which he would be free to outflank the Austrian armies either
in Germany or in Italy as he might see fit. His past successes made
him choose Italy. Taking his army across the Great St. Bernard Pass
before the snow had melted, he appeared unexpectedly behind the Austrian
army besieging Genoa. The Battle of Marengo on 14 June 1800 gave the
French command of the Po Valley as far as the Adige; and in December
another French army defeated the Austrians in Germany. Austria was
forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville of February 1801, whereby France's
right to the natural frontiers that Julius Caesar [13 Jul 100 –
15 Mar 44bc] had given to Gaul, namely, the Rhine, the Alps, and the
Pyrenees, was recognized.
Great
Britain alone remained at war with France, but it soon tired of the
struggle. Preliminaries of peace, concluded in London in October 1801,
put an end to hostilities, and peace was signed at Amiens on 27 March
1802.
General peace was re-established
in Europe. The first Consul's prestige increased still more; and his
friends—at his suggestion—proposed that a “token of national gratitude”
should be offered to him. In May 1802 it was decided that the French
people should vote in referendum on the following question: “Shall
Napoléon Bonaparte be consul for life?” In August an overwhelming
vote granted him the prolongation of his consulate as well as the
right to designate his successor.
Bonaparte's conception of international peace differed from that of
the British, for whom the Treaty of Amiens represented an absolute
limit beyond which they were under no circumstances prepared to go.
The British even hoped to take back some of the concessions they had
been forced to make. For Bonaparte, on the other hand, the Treaty
of Amiens markedthe starting point for a new French ascendancy. He
was, first of all, intent on reserving half of Europe as a market
for France without lowering customs duties—to the indignation of British
merchants. To revive France's expansion overseas, he also intended
to recover San Domingo (now Hispaniola, which had rebelled), to occupy
Louisiana (ceded to France by Spain in 1800), perhaps to reconquer
Egypt, and at any rate to extend French influence in the Mediterranean
and in the Indian Ocean. Finally, on the Continent of Europe, he advanced
beyond France's natural frontiers: incorporating Piedmont into France;
imposing a more democratic, decentralized government on the Swiss
Confederation; and in Germany compensating the princes dispossessed
of territory on the Rhine under the Treaty of Lunéville with shares
of the secularized ecclesiastical states.
Great Britain was alarmed by this expansion of France in peacetime
and found it scarcely tolerable that one state should command the
coastline of the Continent from Genoa to Antwerp. The immediate occasion
of Franco-British rupture, however, was the problem of Malta. According
to the Treaty of Amiens, the British, who had taken the island on
the collapse of the French occupation, should have restored it to
the Knights Hospitallers; but theBritish, on the pretext that the
French had not yet evacuated certain Neapolitan ports, refused to
leave the island. Franco-British relations became strained, and in
May 1803 the British declared war.
The peace settlement had brought about the life consulate; the return
of war was to stimulate the formation of the empire. The British government,
which would have been glad to see Bonaparte deposed or removed by
assassination, renewed its subsidies to the French royalists, who
resumed their agitation and plotting. When a British-financed assassination
plot was uncovered in 1804, Bonaparte decided to react vigorously
enough to deter his opponents from any more such attempts. The police
believed that the real head of the conspiracy was the Duc d'Enghien
[02 Aug 1772 – 21 Mar 1804], a scion of the royal house of Bourbon,
who was residing in Germany, a few kilometers across the frontier.
Accordingly, with the agreement of Talleyrand [27 Feb 1754 –
17 May 1838] and the police chief
Joseph Fouché [21 May 1758 –
25 Dec 1820], the Duc was kidnapped on neutral soil and brought to
Vincennes, where he was tried and shot. This action provoked a resurgence
of opposition among the old aristocracy but enhanced the influence
of Fouché.
In the hope of consolidating
his own position, Fouché now suggested to Bonaparte that the best
way to discourage conspiracy would be to transform the life consulate
into a hereditary empire, which, because of the fact that there would
be an heir, would remove all hope of changing the regime by assassination.
Bonaparte readily accepted the suggestion, and on
28 May 1804, the empire was proclaimed.
Though there was little change in the organization of the government
of France, Napoléon as emperor revived a number of institutions
similar to those of the ancien régime. In the first place, he wanted
to be consecrated by the pope himself, so that his coronation should
be even more impressive than that of the kings of France. Pius VII
agreed to come to Paris, and the ceremony, which seemed equally outrageous
to royalists and to the old soldiers of the Revolution, took place
in Notre-Dame on 02 December 1804. At the last moment, the Emperor
took the crown from the Pope and set it on his own head himself.
The imperial regime also instituted
its symbols and titles. Princely titles were brought back for the
members of Napoléon's family in 1804, and an imperial nobility
was created in 1808. As opposition was still lively, Napoléon
intensified his propaganda and imposed an increasingly strict censorship
on the press. A dictatorial regime allowed him to carry on his wars
for years without worrying about French public opinion. Having been
president of the Italian Republic (as the Cisalpine Republic was renamed)
since January 1802, Napoléon in March 1805 was proclaimed king
of Italy and crowned in Milan in May.
From 1803 to 1805 Napoléon had only the British to fight; and
again France could hope for victory only by landing an army in the
British Isles, whereas the British could defeat Napoléon only
by forming a continental coalition against him. Napoléon began
to prepare an invasion again, this time with greater conviction and
on a larger scale. He gathered nearly 2000 ships between Brest and
Antwerp and concentrated his Grande Armée in the camp at Boulogne
(1803). Even so, the problem was the same as in 1798: to cross the
Channel, the French had to have control of the sea.
Still far inferior to the British Navy, the French fleet needed the
help of the Spanish; and even then the two fleets together could not
hope to defeat more than one of the British squadrons. Spain was induced
to declare war on Great Britain in December 1804, and it was decided
that French and Spanish squadrons massed in the Antilles should lure
a British squadron into these waters and defeat it, thus making the
balance roughly equal between the Franco-Spanish navy and the British.
A battle in the entrance to the Channel could then befought with some
chance of success.
The plan failed.
The French squadron from the Mediterranean, under Adm. Pierre de Villeneuve
[31 Dec 1763 – 22 Apr 1806], found itself alone at the appointed
meeting place in the Antilles. Pursued by Nelson and not daring to
attack him, it turned back toward Europe and took refuge in Cádiz
in July 1805; there the British blockaded it. Accused of cowardice
by the angry Napoléon, Villeneuve resolved to run the blockade,
with the support of a Spanish squadron; but on 21 October 1805, he
was attacked by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. Nelson was killed in the
battle, but the Franco-Spanish fleet was totally destroyed. The British
had won a decisive victory, which eliminated the danger of invasion
and gave them freedom of movement at sea. They had also succeeded
in organizing a new anti-French coalition consisting of Austria, Russia,
Sweden, and Naples. On 24 July 1805, three months before Trafalgar,
Napoléon had ordered the Grande Armée from Boulogne to the
Danube (thus ruling out an invasion of England even if the French
had won at Trafalgar). In the week preceding Trafalgar, the GrandeArmée
won an outstanding victory over the Austrians at Ulm, and on 13 November
1805 Napoléonentered Vienna. On 02 December 1805, in his greatest
victory he defeated the combined Austrian and Russian armies in the
Battle of Austerlitz. By the Treaty of Pressburg, Austria renounced
all influence in Italy and ceded Venetia and Dalmatia to Napoléon,
as well as extensive territory in Germany to his protégés Bavaria,
Württemberg, and Baden. The French then proceeded to dethrone the
Bourbons in the kingdom of Naples, which was bestowed on Napoléon's
brother Joseph. In July 1806 the Confederation of the Rhine was founded—soon
to embrace all western Germany in a union under French protection.
In September 1806 Prussia entered the
war against France, and on 14 October 1806 the Prussian armies were
defeated at Jena and at Auerstädt. The Russians put up a better resistance
at Eylau in February 1807 but were routed at Friedland in June. In
Warsaw Napoléon fell in love with Countess Marie Walewska,
a Polish patriot who hoped that Napoléon would resurrect her
country. Napoléon had a son by her.
The Russian emperor Alexander I [23 Dec 1777 – 01 Dec 1825]
could have continued the struggle, but he was tired of the alliance
with the British. He met Napoléon at Tilsit, in northern Prussia
near the Russian frontier. There, on a raft anchored in the middle
of the Niemen River, they signed treaties that created the Grand Duchy
of Warsaw from the Polish provinces detached from Prussia and, in
effect, divided control of Europe between the emperors, Napoléon
taking the west and Alexander the east. Alexander even made a vague
promise of a land attack against the British possessions in India.
As Napoléon could no longer think
of invading England, he tried to induce capitulation by stifling the
British economy. By closing all of Europe to British merchandise,
he hoped to bring about a revolt of the British unemployed that could
force the government to sue for peace. He forbade all trade with the
British Isles, ordered the confiscation of all goods coming from English
factories or from the British colonies, and condemned as fair prize
not only every Britishship but also every ship that had touched the
coasts of England or its colonies.
For the blockade to succeed, it had to be enforced rigorously throughout
Europe. But from the beginning, England's old ally Portugal showed
itself reluctant to comply, for the blockade wouldmean its commercial
ruin. Napoléon decided to break down Portuguese opposition
by force. Charles IV of Spain let the French troops cross his kingdom,
and they occupied Lisbon; but the prolonged presence of Napoléon's
soldiers in the north of Spain led to insurrection. When Charles IV
[11 Nov 1748 – 20 Jan 1819] abdicated in favor of his son Ferdinand
VII [14 Oct 1784 – 29 Sep 1833], Napoléon, seeing the
opportunity to rid Europe of its last Bourbon rulers, summoned the
Spanish royal family to Bayonne in April 1808 and obtained the abdication
of both Charles and Ferdinand; they were interned in Talleyrand's
château. After the bloody suppression of an uprising in Madrid, insurrection
spread across the whole country, for the Spaniards would not accept
Joseph Bonaparte, king of Naples, as their new king.
The subsequent defeat of Napoléon's forces in Spain and Portugal
were sensational blows to his prestige. Soon the Iberian Peninsula,
up in arms, became a bridgehead on the Continent for the British.
Under the energetic Arthur Wellesley (later 1st duke of Wellington)
[01 May 1769 – 14 Sep 1852], in command from 1809, the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese
forces were to achieve decisive successes.
At the Congress of Erfurt (September – October 1808), a conference
with Alexander I, Napoléon assembled a great concourse of princes
to impress the Russian emperor in an attempt to extract promises of
help. Whether impressed or not, Alexander would make no definite commitment.
Alexander's refusal, furthermore, was partly prompted by Talleyrand,
who had become dismayed by Napoléon's policies and was already
negotiating with the Russian emperor behind his master's back.
By early 1809, however, with most of
the Grande Armée thrown into Spain, Napoléon seemed on the
point of overcoming the revolt. Then, in April, Austria launched an
attack in Bavaria in the hope of rousing all Germany against the French.
Napoléon once again defeated the Habsburgs (06 July 1809) and
by the Treaty of Schönbrunn (14 October 1809) obtained the Illyrian
Provinces, thus rounding out the continental system.
In 1810 Napoléon's fortunes were at their zenith, despite some
failures in Spain and Portugal. He considered himself the heir of
Charlemagne [02 Apr 742 – 28 Jan 814]. He repudiated Joséphine,
who had not given him a child, so that he could marry Marie-Louise
[12 Dec 1791 – 17 Dec 1847], daughter of the Austrian emperor
Francis I. The birth of a son, the king of Rome Napoléon-François-Charles-Joseph
Bonaparte [20 Mar 1811 – 22 Jul 1842] seemed to assure the future
of his empire, now at its greatest extent, including not only the
Illyrian Provinces but also Etruria (Tuscany), some of the Papal States,
Holland, and the German states bordering the North Sea. The empire
was surrounded by a ring of vassal states ruled over by the Emperor's
relatives: the Kingdom of Westphalia by his youngest brother Jérôme
Bonaparte [15 Nov 1784 – 24 Jun 1860]; the Kingdom of Spain
by his brother Joseph Bonaparte; the Kingdom of Italy with Eugène
de Beauharnais [03 Sep 1781 – 21 Feb 1824], Joséphine's son,
as viceroy; the Kingdom of Naples by maréchal Joachim Murat
[25 Mar 1767 – 13 Oct 1815], husband of Napoléon's youngest
sister, Caroline Bonaparte [25 Mar 1782 – 18
May 1839]; and the Principality of Lucca and Piombino by Félix
Bacciochi, another brother-in-law. Finally, other territories were
closely bound to the empire by treaties: the Swiss Confederation (of
which Napoléon was the mediator), the Confederation of the
Rhine, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Even Austria seemed bound to
France by Napoléon's marriage to Marie-Louise.
The political map of Europe, which had been so complicated before
1796, was now greatly simplified. Yet the frontiers did not coincide
either with geographical features or with “nationalities.” Whatever
he may later have said, Napoléon, while he was in power, was
not interested in realizing either German or Italian unity. Yet by
reducing the number of states, by pushing the frontiers about, by
amalgamating populations, and by propagating institutionslike those
that the Revolution and nationalism had created in France, he prepared
the ground for German and Italian unification. National feeling in
Europe, stirred by French ideas and by contact with Frenchmen, in
turn gave rise to the first resistance against French domination.
From 1809 onward Spanish guerrillas, supported by British troops,
were harassing the French, and the national Cortes, convened at Cádiz
by the insurrectionaries, in 1812 promulgated a constitution inspired
by the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789 and by British institutions.
Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian
emperor had shown himself less and less inclined to deal with Napoléon
as a trusted partner. In the spring of 1812, therefore, Napoléon
massed his forces in Poland to intimidate Alexander. After some last
attempts at agreement, in late June his Grande Armée, about 600'000
men, including contingents extorted from Prussia and from Austria,
began to cross the Niemen River. The Russians retreated, adopting
a “scorched earth” policy. Napoléon's army did not reach the
approaches to Moscow until the beginning of September. The Russian
commander in chief, Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov [16 Sep 1745 –
28 Apr 1813], engaged it at Borodino on 07 September 1812. The fight
was savage, bloody, and indecisive, but a week later Napoléon
entered Moscow, which the Russians had abandoned. On that same day,
a huge fire broke out, destroying the greater part of the town. Moreover,
Alexander unexpectedly refused to treat with Napoléon. Withdrawal
was necessary, and the premature onset of winter made it disastrous.
After the difficult crossing of the Berezina River in November, fewer
than 10'000 men fit for combat remained with Napoléon's main
force.
This catastrophe heartened
all the peoples of Europe to defy Napoléon. In Germany the
news unleashed an outbreak of anti-French demonstrations. The Prussian
contingents deserted the Grande Armée in December and turned against
the French. The Austrians also withdrew their troops and adopted an
increasingly hostile attitude, and in Italy the people began to turn
their backs on Napoléon.
Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were becoming
more frequent. In Paris a malcontent general nearly succeeded in carrying
out a coup d'etat after announcing, on 23 October 1812, that Napoléon
had died in Russia. This incident was a major factor in Napoléon's
decision to hasten back to France ahead of the Grande Armée. Arriving
in Paris on 18 December 1812, he proceeded to stiffen the dictatorship,
to raise money by various expedients, and to levy new troops.
Thus, in 1813 the forces arrayed against
France were no longer armies of mercenaries but were those of nations
fighting for their freedom as the French had fought for theirs in
1792 and 1793; and the French themselves, for all their courage, had
lost their former enthusiasm. The Emperor's ideal of conquest was
no longer that of the nation.
In
May 1813 Napoléon won some successes against the Russians and
Prussians at the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, but his decimated
army needed reinforcements. The armed mediation of Austria induced
Napoléon to agree to an armistice, during which a congress
was held at Prague. There, Austria proposed very favourable conditions:
the French Empire was to return to its natural limits; the Grand Duchy
of Warsaw and the Confederation of the Rhine were to be dissolved;
and Prussia was to return to its frontiers of 1805. Napoléon
made the mistake of hesitating too long. The congress closed on 10
August 1813 before his reply arrived, and Austria declared war.
The French were even worse off than
in the spring. The allies were gaining new troops every day, as one
German contingent after another left Napoléon to go over to
the other side. The greatest debacle since Napoléon came to
power was the Battle of Leipzig, or “Battle of the Nations” (16-19
October 1813), in which the Grande Armée was torn to shreds. That
defeat degenerated fast into collapse. The French armies in Spain,
forced to retreat, had been defeated in June; and by October the British
were attacking their defenses north of the Pyrenees. In Italy the
Austrians took the offensive, crossed the Adige River, and occupied
Romagna. Murat, now openly a traitor to the Emperor who had made him
king of Naples, entered into negotiations with the Viennese court.
The Dutch and the Belgians demonstrated against Napoléon.
In January 1814 France was being attacked
on all its frontiers. The allies cleverly announced that they were
fighting not against the French people but against Napoléon
alone, since in November 1813 he had rejected the terms offered by
the Austrian foreign minister Metternich, which would have preserved
the natural frontiers of France. The extraordinary strategic feats
achieved by the Emperor during the first three months of 1814 with
the army of young conscripts were not enough; he could neither defeat
the allies, with their overwhelming numerical superiority, nor arouse
the majority of French people from their resentful torpor. The Legislative
Assembly and the Senate, formerly so docile, were now asking for peace
and for civiland political liberties.
By the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, Austria, Russia, Prussia,
and Great Britain bound themselves together for 20 years, undertook
not to negotiate separately, and promised to continue the struggle
until Napoléon was overthrown. When the allied armies arrived
before Paris on 30 March 1814, Napoléon had moved east to attack
their rear guard. The Parisian authorities, no longer overawed by
the Emperor, lost no time in treating with the allies. As president
of the provisional government, Talleyrand proclaimed the deposition
of the Emperor and, without consulting the French people, began to
negotiate with Louis XVIII [17 Nov 1755 – 16 Sep 1824], the
brother of the executed Louis XVI [23 Aug 1754 – 21 Jan 1793].
Napoléon had only reached Fontainebleau when he heard that
Paris had capitulated. Persuaded that further resistance was useless,
he finally abdicated on 06 April 1814.
By the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the allies granted him the island
of Elba as a sovereign principality with an annual income of 2'000'000
francs to be provided by France and a guard of 400 volunteers; also,
he retained the title of emperor. After unsuccessfully trying to poison
himself, Napoléon spoke his farewell to his “Old Guard,” and
after a hazardous journey, during which he narrowly escaped assassination,
he arrived at Elba on 04 May 1814.
“I
want from now on to live like a justice of the peace,” Napoléon
declared on his little island. But a man of such energy and imagination
could hardly be expected to resign himself to defeat at the age of
45. In France, moreover, the Bourbon Restoration was soon exposed
to criticism. Though in 1814 the majority of the French people were
tired of the Emperor, they had expressed no wish for the return of
the Bourbons. They were strongly attached to the essential achievements
of the Revolution, and Louis XVIII had come back “in the baggage train
of the foreigners” with the last surviving émigrés who had “learnt
nothing and forgotten nothing” and whose influence seemed to threaten
most of the Revolution's achievements. The apathy of April 1814 quickly
gave way to mistrust. Old hatreds were revived, resistance organized,
and conspiracies formed. From Elba, Napoléon kept a close watch
on the Continent. He knew that some of the diplomats at Vienna, where
a congress was deciding the fate of Europe, considered Elba, between
Corsica and Italy, too close to France and to Italy and wanted to
banish him to a distant island in the Atlantic. Also, he accused Austria
of preventing Marie Louise and his son from coming to join him (in
fact, she had taken a lover and had no intention of going to live
with her husband). Finally, the French government refused to pay Napoléon's
allowance so that he was in danger of being reduced to penury. All
these considerations drove Napoléon to action. Decisive as
ever, he returned to France like a thunderbolt. On March 1, 1815,
he landed at Cannes with a detachment of his guard. As he crossed
the Alps, the republican peasants rallied round him, and near Grenoble
he won over the soldiers dispatched to arrest him. On March 20 he
was in Paris. Napoléon was brought back to power as the embodiment
of the spirit of the Revolution rather than as the emperor who had
fallen a year before. To rally the mass of Frenchmen to his cause
he should have allied himself with the Jacobins; but this he dared
not do. Unable to escape from the bourgeoisie whose predominance he
himself had assured and who feared above all else a revival of the
socialist experiments of 1793 and 1794, he could only set up a political
regime scarcely distinguishable from that of Louis XVIII. Enthusiasm
ebbed fast, and the Napoléonic adventure seemed a dead end.
To oppose the allied troops massing on the frontiers, Napoléon
mustered an army with which he marched into Belgium and defeated the
Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815. Two days later, at Waterloo,
he met the British under Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular
War. A savage battle followed. Napoléon was in sight of victory
when the Prussians under Gebhard Blücher arrived to reinforce the
British, and soon, despite the heroism of the Old Guard, Napoléon
was overthrown. Back in Paris, Parliament forced Napoléon to
abdicate; he did so, in favour of his son, on June 22, 1815. On July
3 he was at Rochefort, intending to take ship for the United States,
but a British squadron prevented any French vessel from leaving the
port. Napoléon then decided to appeal to the British government
for protection. His request granted, he boarded the “Bellerophon”
on July 15. The allies were agreed on one point: Napoléon was
not to go back to Elba. Nor did they like the idea of his going off
to America. It would have suited them if he had fallen a victim to
the “White Terror” of the returned counter-revolutionaries or if Louis
XVIII hadhad him summarily tried and executed. Great Britain had no
choice but to send him to detention in a far-off island. The British
government announced that the island of Saint Helena in the southern
Atlantic had been chosen for his residence; because of its remote
position Napoléon would enjoy much greater freedom than would
be possible elsewhere. Napoléon protested eloquently: “I appeal
to history!” Exile on Saint Helena On October 15, 1815, Napoléon
disembarked in Saint Helena with those followers who were voluntarily
accompanying him into exile: Gen. Henri-Gratien Bertrand, grand marshal
of the palace, and his wife; the comte Charles de Montholon, aide-de-camp,
and his wife; Gen. GaspardGourgaud; Emmanuel Las Cases, the former
chamberlain; and several servants. After a short stay at the house
of a wealthy English merchant, they moved to Longwood, originally
built for the lieutenant governor. Napoléon settled down to
a life of routine. He got up late, breakfasting about 10 AM, but seldomwent
out. He was free to go anywhere on the island so long as he was accompanied
by an English officer, but he soon refused to comply with this condition
and so shut himself up in the grounds of Longwood. He wrote and talked
much. At first Las Cases acted as his secretary, compiling what was
later to be the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (first published in 1823).
From 7 to 8 PM Napoléon had dinner, after which a part of the
evening was spent in reading aloud—Napoléon liked to hear the
classics. Then they played cards. About midnight Napoléon went
to bed. Some of his time was devoted to learning English, and he eventually
began reading English newspapers; but he also had a large number of
French books sent from Europe, which he read attentively and annotated.
Saint Helena has a healthful climate, and Napoléon's food was
good, carefully prepared, and plentiful. His inactivity undoubtedly
contributed to the deterioration of his health. The man who for 20
years had played so great a role in the world and who had marched
north, south, east,and west across Europe could hardly be expected
to endure the monotony of existence on a little island, aggravated
by a self-imposed life of a recluse. He had also more intimate reasons
for unhappiness: Marie-Louise sent no word to him, and he may have
learned of her liaison with the Austrian officer appointed to watch
over her, Graf Adam von Neipperg (whom she eventually married in secret
without waiting for Napoléon's death); nor did he have any
news of his son, the former king of Rome, who was now living in Vienna
with the title of duke of Reichstadt. Finally, though the severity
of Sir Hudson Lowe has been much exaggerated, it is certain that this
“jailer,” who arrived as governor of Saint Helena in April 1816, did
nothing to make Napoléon's life easier. Napoléon from
the start disliked him as the former commander of the Corsican rangers,
a band of volunteers largely composed of enemies of the Bonaparte
family. Always anxious to carry out his instructions exactly, Lowe
came into conflict with Las Cases. He saw Las Cases as Napoléon's
confidant and had him arrested and expelled. Thenceforward, relations
between the governor and Napoléon were limited strictly to
those stipulated by the regulations.
Napoléon showed the first signs of illness at the end of 1817;
stomach cancer it has long been believed. The Irish doctor Barry O'Meara,
having asked in vain for a change in the conditions under which Napoléon
lived, was dismissed; so also was his successor John Stokoe, who was
likewise thought to be well-disposed toward Napoléon. The undistinguished
Corsican doctor who took their place, Francesco Antommarchi, prescribed
a treatment that could do nothing to cure his patient. It is uncertain,
however, whether Napoléon's “disease” was curable
at all, even by 20th-century methods. In 1840, his body was returned
to Paris, where it was interred in the Hotel des Invalides. Tests
showing high level of arsenic in his hair are adduced to boster the
theory that Napoléon was slowly poisened starting in 1816 by the Count
of Montholon, acting on behalf of the French and British regimes who
wanted to make sure that Napoléon would not make another come-back.
From the beginning of 1821, the illness
became rapidly worse. From March, Napoléon was confined to
bed. In April he dictated his last will:
I
wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that
French people which I have loved so much. . . . I die before my time,
killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.
On 05 May he spoke a few coherent phrases:
“My God . . . The French nation . . . my son . . . head of the army.
. . . ” He died at 17:49 on that day, not yet 52 years old. The stone
covering his tomb bore no name, only the words “Ci-Gît”.
Napoléon's
fall had set loose a torrent of hostile books designed to sully his
reputation. One of the least violent of these was the pamphlet De
Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes
légitimes (1814) by François de Chateaubriand [04 Sep 1768 –
04 Jul 1848], a well-known writer of royalist sympathies. But this
anti-Napoléonic literature soon died down, while the task of
defending Napoléon was taken up. Lord Byron had published his
“Ode to Napoléon Buonaparte” as early as 1814; the German poet
Heinrich Heine wrote his ballad “Die Grenadiere”; and in 1817 the
French novelist “Stendhal” [23 Jan 1783 – 23 Mar
1842] began his biography Vie de Napoléon. At the same time,
the Emperor's most faithful supporters were working toward his rehabilitation,
talking about him, and distributing reminders of him, including engravings.
They idealized his life (“What a novel my life is!” he himself had
said) and began to create the Napoléonic legend.
As soon as the Emperor was dead, the legend grew rapidly. Memoirs,
notes, and narratives by those who had followed him into exile contributed
substantially to it. In 1822 Dr. O'Meara, in London, had his Napoléon
in Exile, or a Voice from Saint Helena published; in 1823 the
publication of the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France
sous Napoléon, écrits à Sainte-Hélène sous sa dictée by Montholon
and Gourgaud, began; Las Cases, in his famous Mémorial, presented
the Emperor as a republican opposed to war who had fought only when
Europe forced him to fight in defense of freedom; and in 1825 Antommarchi
published his Derniers moments de Napoléon. Thereafter the
number of works in Napoléon's honor increased continually;
among them were Victor Hugo's “Ode à la Colonne,” the 28 volumes of
the Victoires et conquêtes des Français, and Life of Napoléon
Buonaparte, Emperor of the French by Sir Walter Scott. Neither
police action nor prosecutions could prevent books, pictures, andobjects
evoking the imperial saga from multiplying in France.
After the July Revolution of 1830, which created the bourgeois monarchy
under Louis-Philippe, thousands of tricolour flags appeared in windows,
and the government had not only to tolerate the growth of the legend
but even to promote it. In 1833 the statue of Napoléon was
put back on the top of the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris; and
in 1840 the King's son François, prince de Joinville, was sent in
a warship to fetch the Emperor's remains from Saint Helena to the
banks of the Seine in accordance with his last wishes. A magnificent
funeral was held in Paris in December 1840, and Napoléon's
body was conveyed through the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l'Étoile
to entombment under the dome of the Invalides.
Napoléon's nephew Louis-Napoléon [20 Apr 1808 –
09 Jan 1873] exploited the legend in order to seize power in France.
Though his attempts at Strasbourg in 1836 and at Boulogne in 1840
were failures, it was chiefly because of the growth of the legend
that he won election to the presidency of the Second Republic with
an overwhelming majority in 1848 and was able to carry out the coup
d'état of December 1851 and make himself emperor in 1852.
The disastrous end of the Second Empire
in 1870 damaged the Napoléonic legend and gave rise to a new
anti-Napoléonic literature, best represented by Origines
de la France contemporaine (1876–1894) by Hippolyte Taine [21
Apr 1828 – 05 Mar 1893]. World Wars I and II, however, together
with the experience of the 20th-century dictatorships, made it possible
to judge Napoléon more fairly. Any comparison with Stalin [21
Dec 1879 – 05 Mar 1953] or Hitler [20 Apr 1889 – 30 Apr
1945] , for instance, can only be to Napoléon's advantage.
He was tolerant, he released the Jews from the ghettoes, and he showed
respect for human life. Brought up on the rationalist Encyclopédie
and on the writings of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment, he remained
above all a man of the 18th century, the last of the “enlightened
despots.” One of the gravest accusations made against Napoléon
is that he was the “Corsican ogre” who sacrificed millions of men
to his ambition. Precise calculations show that the Napoléonic
Wars of 1800–1815 cost France itself about 500'000 men; i.e., about
one-sixtieth of the population. The loss of these young men, furthermore,
seems to have had a notably adverse effect on the birth rate.
The social structure of France changed
little under the First Empire. It remained roughly what the Revolution
had made it: a great mass of peasants comprising three-quarters of
the population—about half of them working owners of their farms or
sharecroppers and the other half with too little land for their own
subsistence and hiring themselves out as labourers. Industry, stimulated
by the war and the blockade of English goods, made remarkable progress
in northern and eastern France, whence exports could be sent to central
Europe; but it declined in the south and west because of the closing
of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The great migrations from rural
areas toward industry in the towns began only after 1815. The nobility
would probably have declined more swiftly if Napoléon had not
restored it; but it could never recover its former privileges.
Above all, Napoléon left durable
institutions, the “granite masses” on which modern France has been
built up: the administrative system of the prefects, the Code Napoléon,
the judicial system, the Banque de France and the country's financial
organization, the universities, and the military academies. Napoléon
changed the history of France and of the world.
Napoléon, one of the greatest military strategists in history,
rapidly rose in the ranks of the French Revolutionary Army during
the late 1790s. By 1799, France was at war with most of Europe, and
Napoléon returned home from a campaign in Egypt to take over
the reigns of French government and to save his nation.
After becoming first consul in February of 1800, he reorganized his
armies and defeated Austria. In 1802, he established the Napoléonic
Code, a new system of French law, and in 1804, was crowned emperor
of France in Notre Dame Cathedral. By 1807, he controlled an empire
that stretched from the River Elbe in the north down through Italy
in the south, and from the Pyrenees to the Dalmatian coast.
Beginning in 1812, Napoléon
began to encounter the first significant defeats of his military career,
suffering through a disastrous invasion of Russia, losing Spain to
the Duke of Wellington in the Peninsula War, and enduring total defeat
against an allied force by 1814.
Exiled to the island of Elba, he escaped to France in early 1815,
and raised a new Grand Army that enjoyed temporary success before
its crushing defeat at Waterloo against an allied force under Wellington.
Napoléon was subsequently exiled
to the island of Saint Helena off the coast of Africa. Six years later
he died, of stomach cancer it has long been believed, and in 1840,
his body was returned to Paris, where it was interred in the
Hotel des Invalides. However tests showing high level of arsenic in
his hair are adduced to boster the theory that Napoléon was
slowly poisened starting in 1816 by the Count of Montholon, acting
on behalf of the French and British regimes who wanted to make sure
that Napoléon would not make another come-back. |
1811 Antoine de Marcenay de Ghuy, French artist born in
1724.
1809 Joseph-Laurent Malaine (or Malines, Mallache),
French artist born on 21 February 1745.
^
1794 (16 floréal
an II) Condamnés à mort par la Révolution:
COTTEREAU Perrine, et COTTEREAU Renée,
domiciliées à St Ouen (Mayenne), comme espionnes des brigands de la
Vendée, par la commission militaire séante à Laval
LUGAU
Jean, volontaire au St 2ème bataillon du Tarn, domicilié
à Paul-de-Lamialte (Tarn), comme embaucheur, par le tribunal militaire
du 1er arrondissement de l'armée des Pyrénées-Orientales.
MARAIN
Augustin, voiturier, domicilié à Lyon (Rhône), comme distributeur
de faux assignats, par le tribunal criminel du département de l'Ain.
VERLING Marguerite, veuve Commet, domicilié à Vamerange
(Moselle), comme distributrice de faux assignats, par le tribunal
criminel dudit département.
Par
le tribunal
révolutionnaire de Paris:
COLIN François,
âgé de 54 ans, natif de Metz, ex substitut du procureur du roi au
ci-devant parlement de Metz, ex présidant du tribunal criminel et
administrateur du département, domicilié à Ars-sur-Moselle.
LAVOISIER Antoine Laurent, ex fermier général, ex
noble âgé de 50 ans, né et domicilié à Paris, membre de la ci-devant
académie des sciences, régisseur des poudres et salpêtre, commissaire
à la trésorerie, comme complice de la conspiration des fermiers généraux
contre le peuple français en mettant dans le tabac, de l'eau et des
ingrédients nuisibles à la santé. Chimiste
français né à Paris le 26 août 1743, guillotiné à Paris le 8 mai 1794.
L'un des créateurs de la chimie moderne. On lui doit la nomenclature
chimique, la connaissance de la composition de l'eau et de l'air,
la découverte du rôle de l'oxygène dans les combustions et dans la
respiration animale, l'énoncé de la loi de conservation de la premières
mesures calorimétriques, Député suppléant, il fit partie de la commission
chargée d'établir le système métrique. Lavoisier fut exécuté avec
les fermiers généraux, en 1794, dont il faisait partie. A ceux qui
intervinrent en sa faveur, le tribunal répondit: “La Révolution
n'a pas besoin de savants.”
LOISELLIER Claude
Françoise, ouvrière en modes, âgée de 44 ans, née et domiciliée
à Paris, comme convaincue d'avoir placardé un écrit portant ces mots:
“Peuple, vous qui êtres unis, grand corps de citoyens, armez-vous
donc de force et de courage pour sauver la vie à ces innocents victimes
que l'on fait périr tous les jours, et faites finir la guillotine.”
SAUVAGE Jean, armurier et canonnier de la section
du Panthéon Français, âgé de 34 ans, natif de Boulang, domicilié à
Paris, , comme contre-révolutionnaire, ayant dit, en mettant la main
sur un bonnet blanc : “Voilà le bonnet que j'aime; pour le bonnet
rouge, je n'en veux pas;” qu'il irait en Angleterre pour se soustraire
à la révolution, que dans les armées on les faisait égorger, et qu'il
aimerait mieux être quillotiné que de repartir.
ENNOUF
Félicité Mélanie, âgée de 21 ans, fille, marchande de modes,
née et domiciliée à Paris, pour avoir composé des écrits et tenu des
propos contre-révolutionnaires.
VIROLLE Marie Magdeleine,
coiffeuse, âgée de 25 ans, née à Angoulême, domiciliée à Paris, comme
auteur d'écrits, dans lesquels, les membres de la Convention et des
autorités constituées étaient traités de gueux.
LABUSSIERE
Jacques Jean, ex noble et capitaine au ci-devant régiment
d'Auvergne, âgé de 54 ans, né à Angalien (Nièvre), domicilié à Nevers,
même département, comme complice d'un complot qui a existé le 9 août
1792, de la part du dernier tyran roi et autre.
DREUX
Jeanne, femme Lichy, âgée de 62 ans, native de Sauvigny,
département de l'Allier, ex noble, domiciliée à Cosne, département
de la Nièvre, comme contre-révolutionnaire.
DUCHESNE
Jacques, âgé de 60 ans, ci-devant domestique, facteur, militaire,
natif de Verdun, domicilié à Chaillot (Seine), comme contre-révolutionnaire.
DUVERNE M. Joséphine Thomassine Pacôme, âgée de 36
ans, né à Mingot, fille ex noble, domiciliée à Cosne (Nièvre), comme
contre-révolutionnaire. |
1793 CHARRIER Jacques,
laboureur et officier municipal domicilié à Salertaine (Vendée), condamné
à mort comme brigand de la Vendée, par la commission militaire séante aux
Sables.
1793 JICQUIAU Claude, cultivateur, domicilié à Ferel (Morbihan),
condamné à mort, par le tribunal criminel dudit département, comme contre-révolutionnaire.
1793 LAVAL Jacques, ex noble, domicilié à Meri (Orne),
condamné à mort, comme émigré, par le tribunal criminel du département de
l'Orne.
1705 Leopold I, 64, Emperor of Holy Roman Empire.
1601 Jacob-Willemsz Delff I, Dutch artist born in 1550.
|
^
On
a 05 May:
1789
Back in Brussels, Marx [< photo] wrote
