The Age of Napoleon by Alistair Horne

Author:Alistair Horne [Horne, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588363640
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-04-26T17:00:00+00:00

As is so frequently the story with autocratic regimes, with the passage of time, corruption set in. At the top, starting from a zero base, all the Bonaparte family amassed considerable fortunes—either from loot obtained abroad or by other means. Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese was able to acquire one of the most sumptuous houses in Paris, on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. To the lasting benefit of Britain, the Duke of Wellington bought it after Waterloo. He gained the respect of Parisians when, as the victor, he could have grabbed it for nothing, but insisted on paying the full market price. It remains the British embassy, grandest of all the embassies. Josephine, the penniless Creole, in 1809, the year before Napoleon divorced her, could count hundreds of different dresses; Cambacérès, Napoleon’s chancellor, could afford to strut around the Palais-Royal dressed like a millionaire peacock, an early-day Field Marshal Goering; Talleyrand, also a self-made man, as we have already seen, had no hesitation about playing the markets with insider trading to amass vast wealth. Lower down the scale, Louis Dubois, the much despised city prefect, was reputed to slip a venereal disease “dispensary tax”—in fact, protection money received from prostitutes—into his desk drawer.

The pompous prefect might claim in his inaugural manifesto, “My eye shall penetrate the innermost recesses of the criminal soul . . . ,” yet despite the efforts of the ubiquitous Fouché, supported by all the trappings of a police state, lawlessness continued to persist in Napoleonic Paris. With army deserters and even senior officers involved, and as shortages grew, smuggling became a major industry, run like a military operation. Tunnels a quarter of a mile long were dug under the city customs barrières, discovered emerging beneath a convent. By 1808 the situation had become so bad that, as with the Berlin Wall in the 1960s, a ban was imposed on any building or construction work within a hundred yards of the city perimeter. But still it went on.

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