How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did Read online

  At the same time as the restored monarchy was introducing a measure of British-style parliamentary democracy to France, there was also strong pressure from Britain to adopt its economic model. As we saw in Chapter 4, however, this met with a decisive French ‘Merde!’. Turning its back on the free market, in 1815 France adopted its own strategy, a combination of Napoleonic patriotism and new freedom: Louis Becquey, who was given the grand new title of Directeur Général de l’Agriculture, du Commerce et des Arts et Manufactures, defined the strategy as ‘liberté au-dedans, protectionnisme au-dehors’ – ‘freedom within, protectionism outside’. It is a technique that the French still use today, one that makes the European Union (and especially the Brits) howl with outrage every time France blocks the sale of a big French company to a foreign multinational, or uses government subsidies to prop up its ailing industries, often in defiance of EU law.

  So, after Waterloo, as Britain steamed ahead with the Industrial Revolution, flooding the world with its cheap cotton and metal products, and the spices, tea and sugar from its colonies, rather as China is doing now with its plastics, France did not try to follow suit (not that it had the money or the energy to do so).

  Instead, it haughtily disapproved. The French politician Adolphe Blanqui – a royalist – visited England in 1823 and compared the factories of Wolverhampton to the fires of Mount Etna. He understood, he wrote in a book about his travels, how this small island had toppled Napoleon’s ‘great empire’ (even a royalist could be nostalgic about France’s recent glories): it was thanks to these factories that ‘had forged the thunder sent against my homeland’, meaning the hundreds of thousands of muskets and millions of bullets and cannonballs that had ripped France’s armies to shreds. This English industrial might had become a plague, Blanqui declared, blanketing everything with black dust and ‘forcing the English to cover the sea with their ships’ so that they could export all their products.

  It is a view that survives in France today: many French people still harbour Blanqui’s distaste for unashamed capitalism, as well as a suspicion that bosses are evil slave-drivers, building themselves mansions in the country while the workers choke on poisonous fumes. Despite the huge international success of French entrepreneurs like the Renault brothers, Armand Peugeot and Paul Ricard, generating colossal profits has come to be thought of by many ordinary French people as a crass, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ character fault. Anyone in France who makes too much filthy lucre is seen as not really French.

  The French can argue that it was actually an advantage to have been left behind (initially at least) by the Industrial Revolution. After 1815, France was forced to become self-sufficient, and it huddled down over its needles, its cheese-making machines and wine presses, making the most of the new post-Napoleonic peace by concentrating on its typically French crafts. And before long, rich British businesspeople were rushing to Paris to shop at the city’s small, exclusive boutiques, buying lace, gloves, hats and silk garments, as well as fanning out into the countryside to buy wine and fine food direct from the farmers.

  Free of Napoleon’s trade barriers, the French were quickly able to enslave the British by selling them all the sophisticated things English factories were incapable of making. France’s luxury industry – its greatest export today – was born out of the unique post-Waterloo economic conditions. Triumph in the battle for chic belongs to France.

  Bonapartists often talk about the French people feeling ‘orphaned’ or left unprotected in 1815. A Napoleonic veteran, the former General Baron Thiebault, put it nicely in his memoirs, saying that ‘With Napoleon gone, France was like a ship without sails or a compass, a plaything for the storm.’ But in fact, the economic transition seems to have been much smoother. It was less a case of France losing its pater familias than emerging from childhood. Papa had retired from the family business – admittedly, not altogether willingly – and left the next generation free to run things as they wanted, in a more open, efficient way, undisturbed by war. As Victor Hugo put it in Les Misérables, ‘the disappearance of the great man was necessary to usher in the great century’.

  IV

  The fall of Napoleon also ushered in a new period of cultural freedom in France, rather in the way that the end of Cromwell’s puritan regime did in England.

  Even if Napoleon had inspired foreign artists like Beethoven, Byron and Hegel while he was in power, at home he had overseen a period of cultural austerity. As a general, Napoleon had spent a lot of his campaign time looting foreign museums of their treasures, but as Emperor he had been fonder of the beauty of a well-expressed regulation. His only real artistic creativity was directed towards portraits of himself in heroic mode, grandiose self-aggrandising monuments, uniforms and propaganda. Under Napoleon, theatres were unable to decide their own programmes, and the anti-elitist satire that had grown out of the Revolution was well and truly stifled. Art had to be officially sanctioned.

  On 29 November 1803, Napoleon wrote a letter to his Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, saying: ‘I desire you to commission … a song about the invasion of England … I know that several relevant plays have been put on; a selection should be made, so that they can be performed in Parisian theatres, and especially in the camps at Boulogne and Bruges, and wherever the army is stationed.’ It is easy to imagine his soldiers’ joy when showtime was announced, and instead of actresses reciting lewd poems, they got hymns and plays about attacking Kent.

  To get an idea of Napoleon’s view of culture, one only has to look at the regime he devised for the management of France’s national theatre, the Comédie Française. In 1812, while in Moscow, he took time out from chasing the Czar to dictate a decree that turned French actors into a sort of army.

  The Comédie Française, he ordered, would be ‘placed under the surveillance and direction of the Superintendent of our theatre’. (By ‘our’, of course, Napoleon was referring to himself.) ‘An Imperial Commissioner, named by us, will be responsible for transmitting the Superintendent’s orders to the actors.’ Actors had to sign up for twenty years, and obey strict rules of behaviour – they could be excused from performing if they were declared officially sick, but if seen out walking in the street or going to see a show while on the sick list, they would be fined.

  There was little room for art or inspiration in all this – tragic actors were forbidden to play comedy, and roles were attributed according to seniority rather than talent. Only plays approved unanimously by nine committee members (named by the state) could be performed. Napoleon’s list of rules ends chillingly: ‘Our Ministers of the interior, of police, of finance and the Superintendent of our theatre are all given responsibility for the execution of the present decree.’

  After Napoleon’s exit from the world stage, the Comédie Française embraced the change of political regime, and began to choose for itself the plays it could produce. This seems to have been enough to satisfy the actors, because they didn’t alter anything else in Napoleon’s rules, which still govern the Comédie Française today. Performers sign up as pensionnaires (apprentices) for a year, before being elected sociétaires (members), and their nomination has to be confirmed by the Ministry of Culture. Yet again, Bonapartists can claim a lasting victory for Napoleon’s administrative skills.

  And the new freedom did not mean that the Comédie suddenly started to honour France’s new friends, the English, by programming a Shakespeare season. The bard was still considered much too anarchic for classical French tastes, and in 1822, a year after Napoleon’s death, when a brave Frenchman tried to produce a performance of Othello, it was met with a barrage of eggs, fruit and cries of ‘down with Shakespeare, he is the lieutenant of Wellington’ – proving that the audience had not read the programme notes about the author not being a soldier.fn3 To make matters worse, by this time many French people had begun to pronounce Wellington’s name as ‘Vilain-jeton’, as Napoleon’s soldiers had done. Literally, this means ‘ugly fake coin’, probably an allusion to a French term for
‘hypocrite’ – faux jeton.

  But by bombarding the stage and insulting an English general, at least the French were taking advantage of their political liberty. And the rest of French culture also began to express itself more freely after Waterloo.

  Freedom of the press spawned freedom of the written word in general, and the book trade began to expand. In 1813, 3,749 books had been published in France; by 1825 the figure was 7,605. Writers like Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo were free to talk about everyday life, poverty and the realities of war. Though as we saw in Chapter 7, Bonapartists can claim some credit for this literary renaissance, too, because much of the subject matter was inspired by nostalgia for France’s former ‘glory’ under Napoleon.

  The new spirit of expressiveness spread to music, too. Romanticism finally ousted classicism in France, prompting Liszt and Chopin to come and perform. Rossini became director of Paris’s Théâtre Italien, and light-hearted entertainment thrived, so that by the 1840s the German-born composer Jacques Offenbach was in Paris writing the catchy melodies that would give birth to Vaudeville. The French frivolity that would later inspire the Belle Epoque was born in the heady peacetime post-Waterloo.fn4

  It could also be argued that France’s most memorable contribution to world culture in the nineteenth century came about because of the fall of Napoleon. While he was in power, official painting was limited to glorifying the Emperor, his regime and its military heroes. The more a portrait looked like something looted from ancient Greece, the better. Things didn’t change very quickly, and even in the 1850s, Paris’s artistic establishment was staid enough to reject paintings by Edouard Manet that were considered not heroic enough. But soon, inspired by painters like Camille Corot and Gustave Courbet, a new generation of artists were freeing up their palettes, slapping on the colour, and painting portraits of simple peasants, waitresses and workers instead of emperors and generals. Impressionism was blossoming.

  And where were the new artists doing this (with apologies for the French-style rhetorical question)? Mainly on the fringes of Paris, which, unlike London, was not expanding massively under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution. Even as late as the 1860s Montmartre was still a village, with peasants, fields and vineyards, less than 3 kilometres from the centre of Paris. Painters trained in the art schools and studios of the capital only had to wander a short way up the hill to find rustic inspiration and cheap accommodation, free of the smog that would have blackened their brushes if they had tried the same thing in London. Just a few kilometres further out, in the unchanging French countryside, they could paint peaceful sunlit picnics, bourgeois pretending to be peasants, and women wearing floaty dresses and looking quintessentially French. And when the Impressionists turned to urban life, they painted a few cityscapes and puffing trains, but most of all they immortalised Parisiennes sporting the chic hand-made dresses, hats and parasols that were being turned out in the city’s workshops.

  All in all, it can be argued that France’s place in art history was founded on the economic tranquillity that reigned in the country after Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon. Again, the French are the winners.

  V

  The conclusion, then, is clear. The Brits and the Germans might think that they won the great battle on 18 June 1815, but if you take a step back and examine history through French eyes – Bonapartist or not – things look very different.

  Like Cambronne’s last square of defiant Gardes, the French are surrounded by hostile (mainly British) historians reminding them that Waterloo was lost, and that the day ended with everyone in a French uniform – including the most famous uniform of them all – running for their lives. But either they will contradict you, or they don’t care.

  Even if you can get a French person to admit that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo – which will probably involve your conceding that he won more battles than he lost, that he had bad luck with the weather, and that his piles were playing up on that fateful June day – you will be forced to agree that Napoleon is a far more famous and recognisable icon today than either Wellington or Blücher. Who has won the battle for history? the French person will ask; and, being French, he or she will also provide the answer: c’est Napoléon.

  Furthermore, this French person will argue that even if Napoleon was defeated on 18 June 1815, France as a nation emerged a winner, because it was allowed to keep everything that was useful about Bonapartism, and build on those foundations to become a well-organised bureaucratic republic, the birthplace of Impressionism and the world capital of the luxury industry – not to mention making a fortune out of Napoleonic tourism and selling Napoleonic memorabilia.

  And if you haven’t given up arguing yet, and continue to contradict your French debating partner, he or she will simply pull one decisive trick out of Napoleon’s million-euro black hat: all discussion will be ended with the triumphant word that France first learned how to use to its full effect at Waterloo – merde.

  In short, there was one critical thing that Wellington and Blücher didn’t know when they took on the French at Waterloo, one unavoidable fact that we today are forced to acknowledge: when you’re up against Napoleon, you just can’t win.

  * * *

  fn1 Compared to ‘only’ 300,000 British men killed during the Napoleonic Wars. But then the French would argue that this was because Britain was paying foreign mercenaries to do its fighting – which was true. Around a million soldiers from the other allied countries also died.

  fn2 When I wrote to the magazine pointing out this omission, I was of course ignored. A mere Anglais does not contradict a French history magazine, especially to point out uncomfortable truths.

  fn3 Unless the French crowd misunderstood Othello’s line in Act Two, ‘The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue’, and thought it was a call for audience participation.

  fn4 For more details about fun and frivolity in Parisian theatre, see my book Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France.

  EPILOGUE

  AS I FINISH writing this book, France is in a mood of crushing pessimism. Most of this is caused by day-to-day economic gloom and the fear of terrorist attacks, but a fair proportion is more deeply rooted in a painful combination of wounded pride and vicious self-criticism. With its declining influence in world affairs, the replacement of French by English as a global language, as well as its current economic problems, France seems to be more aware than ever that it has frittered away all the gloire that Napoleon earned for it 200 years ago.

  This negativity is exactly the kind of mood that Napoleon could have cured – with a quick war to annex Luxembourg, perhaps – and one that is alleviated today by regular bouts of Napoleonic nostalgia.

  One of these therapy sessions we have already heard about – the November 2014 auction in the ‘imperial town’ of Fontainebleau of Napoleonic memorabilia at which one of the Emperor’s hats was sold for 1.8 million euros. During the sale, France’s core psychological problems were highlighted by two key slips of the tongue.

  First, while talking about a historian who had researched the provenance of Napoleon’s possessions in the sale, one of the auctioneers committed a hugely revealing Freudian slip. Instead of ‘un historien’, he called the man ‘un hystérien’, thereby inventing a piercingly accurate description of Napoleon’s most nostalgic admirers.

  A second, and even more telling, mistake came when the main auctioneer was reciting Edmond Rostand’s lines of poetry about Napoleon’s hat. As I pointed out in Chapter 8, he completely fluffed the last two lines. But most revealingly of all, he omitted one vital word. Rostand wrote that the sound to be heard inside Napoleon’s shell-like hat was that of ‘une grande nation’ on the march – but the auctioneer forgot to say ‘grande’. Subconsciously, while surrounded by the relics of Napoleon’s legendary career, he was admitting that modern France just isn’t ‘great’ any more.

  This is why French people today seem to feel that they need Napoleon. Or at least a Napoleon. The politicians try to e
mulate him, but they all fall absurdly short (which is not a height-related pun). When France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, travelled to London in October 2014, he was ostensibly coming to convince both the City of London and French tax exiles that his Socialist regime was not hostile to business; but it soon became clear that his was a different mission, and one that probably set Napoleon’s cendres spinning in his sarcophagus.

  Monsieur Valls told his audience of businesspeople (in French of course), ‘Every day I read your press, I hear and I see what is being said about France. Too often in some of your newspapers I see bias, prejudices and attacks.’ Yes, in reality he had come to London to complain about le French-bashing, a piece of English vocabulary that is so hurtful to the French national psyche that they have actually adopted it into their language.

  In short, in 2014 a French Prime Minister crossed the Channel to complain to les Anglais that they were saying nasty things about France. Two centuries earlier, Napoleon and all his troops, right up to the highest-ranked marshals, had stood impassively on the battlefield as British cannonballs were fired at their heads, and now a French politician was whinging about a few insults? At the very least he could have unleashed a decent retort of ‘Merde!’ instead of pleading for the barrage of French-bashing to stop. It was a defeat 200 times more humiliating than Waterloo (if, of course, Waterloo was a defeat, etc., etc.).

  In the face of such defeatism among their political leaders, it is no wonder that the French are gearing up for several years of Napoleonic celebration. It seems to be the only way to restore a mood of national pride.

  The biggest of a series of Napoleon-themed projects in the offing is the proposed Parc Napoléon at Montereau, 80 kilometres from Paris, the site of one of Napoleon’s final victories in 1814. This 200-million-euro theme park, due to be completed by 2020, is the brainchild of the town’s MP. It aims to attract 400,000 visitors in the first year, rising to two million in year ten, and will apparently include hotels, a conference centre and of course a battlefield for regular Napoleonic re-enactments (which, given the location, will no doubt all result in French victories). The project has already attracted promises of funding from the French state as well as investment from China and the Emirates, with plenty more money in the pipeline, we are told. Such far-reaching, and expensive, recognition is the Bonapartists’ dream, even if a theme park does seem to place Napoleon at the same cultural level as Mickey Mouse.