Napoleon: A Political Life by Englund Steven

Author:Englund, Steven [Englund, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2010-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

XI

The Empire—and Its Fissures (1807-1810)

I love power … as a musician loves his violin, for the tones I can bring forth, for the chords and harmonies.

—Napoleon I, Emperor of the French

IMPERATOR AND IMPERIUM

1

—John Holland Rose

To very few men in the world’s history has it been granted to dream grandiose dreams and all but realize them, to use by turns the telescope and the microscope of political survey, to plan vast combinations of force, and yet to supervise with infinite care the adjustment of every adjunct.

France received its emperor back in late July 1807 and bestowed on him the cognomen “great”—an accolade not awarded since Louis XIV became Ludovicus Magnus. Huge festivities honored variously his birthday, the Grande Armée, and la gloire in general. The Civil Code saw itself redubbed with the moniker it has kept: Code Napoleon; while the mega-museum that Vivant Denon was bringing into being in the Louvre became the Musée Napoléon. The ironical banter of even the skeptical Parisian bourgeoisie fell into adulation before this degree of world glory; “servitude was acceptable when thus gold-encrusted.”2

The human being who bore all these honors was heavier now, as he approached forty. The angular noble Roman that was General Vendémiaire had developed more rounded features, but his movements and moods were still so rapid and changing—“the eyes so alive and penetrating, alternately soft, then severe, terrible, then caressing”—that it made his face impossible of a searching portrayal, even by the best artists (the more so, as Napoleon refused to sit still for a portrait). A film documentary would be needed, but we possess only the film of memory among witnesses who disagree. The Emperor’s valet, Constant, felt: “Later on he grew much stouter, but without losing any of the beauty of his features; on the contrary, he was handsomer under the Empire than under the Consulate; his skin had become very white, and his expression animated.”3 Others noted the flaccidity of taut musculature, and the breath of indolence where animation had once been. As the older, cynical Napoleon perhaps lurked in the idealistic, young Bonaparte, so the bronze statue of the Legend was starting to emerge from the physique of the Emperor—in the darkening skin covering the well-chiseled nose, where he sniffed tobacco, in the set chin and the sculptural profile he now preferred to full-face representations.

Although nothing had gone terribly wrong in the ten months he was away, the Emperor yet returned to Paris with both barrels blazing, eager “to be his own prime minister again.”4 En route home, he fired Talleyrand as foreign minister, replacing him with an obedient functionary, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny. The old aristocrat had fallen out of step with his sovereign’s unrelenting bellicosity, which he found incomprehensible and self-defeating. He expressed his attitude in a letter to the Emperor after the battle of Friedland, in which he said he earnestly hoped that this would be the “last” victory.5 The former bishop contained his disappointment—all the easier to do in that he kept his title of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.