Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

After an anxious ten minutes the young Napoleon showed signs of life; he had at first appeared to be dead, and brandy had to be given him and he had to be discreetly smacked before he would cry. But he did so at length, and Napoleon announced to the waiting dignitaries, “It is a King of Rome.” The guns fired a salute to inform the expectant crowds; twenty-one guns were to herald the birth of a daughter; one hundred a son. At the twenty-second gun a storm of cheers arose. More than forty years after, a ceremony almost identical announced the birth of an equally ill-fated son to another Emperor of the French.

Thus the wish of Napoleon’s heart was fulfilled. For the moment he disregarded all the counter-balancing disadvantages and revelled in the possession of an heir. He cared nothing at the time for the fact that the doctors forbade the Empress to have the much desired second son to inherit the crown of Italy; it was nothing to him that Bavaria, Holland, Würtemberg and Saxony at once became restless at seeing their period of thraldom indefinitely prolonged; he hardly cared that Masséna had come miserably back from Portugal, with a ruined army, baulked irretrievably by Wellington at Torres Vedras, so that the “running sore” of the Peninsular campaign was reopened. He flung away his last chance of going in person to end the business, merely to remain by the side of the wife and child of whom he was so proud.

But despite his pride, he still left nothing to chance. Attendance on Marie Louise was maintained as strictly as before; an unauthorized presentation to the Empress by the Duchess of Montebello of some relation of hers called forth a tornado of wrath from the Emperor. The surveillance was redoubled when Napoleon left for the Russian campaign, although he paid her a compliment which had never been paid to Josephine—he appointed her Regent. Poor, silly Marie Louise, three years after being an insignificant princess, found herself Empress of the French, Queen of Italy and Regent of half Europe!

Her august husband nevertheless saw fit to have the Empress-Queen-Regent spied upon by a scullion, who sent him weekly reports, fantastically spelt on blotched and smeared kitchen paper! Nothing else is necessary to prove how utterly lacking in decent instincts was the victor of Austerlitz.

The action was typical of many. Perhaps Napoleon was right; everyone knows how readily autocracy becomes bureaucracy when the autocrat ceases to supervise his subordinates adequately; but not even the Second Empire nor Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century could show so many spies and counter-spies, police and counter-police and counter counter-police as did the First Empire. Secret delation flourished, and the prisons were full of people who had been arbitrarily cast into gaol without even a form of trial. Napoleon wished to know everything that was going on; not the least stray fragment of tittle-tattle came amiss to him. Consequently his regular police developed an organization which spread its tentacles into every avenue of life. Fouché, Minister of Police, could boast of having an agent in every drawing-room and kitchen in the Empire. But then Napoleon feared that Fouché would distort for his own purposes the reports of the agents when making his own report to Napoleon. Since Fouché was Fouché such a thing was not unlikely. So Napoleon had a second and independent police system making similar reports to another minister. Yet even when Fouché was at last got rid of, and packed off as His Excellency the Governor of Rome (and later Dalmatia); even when Savary, “the man who would kill his own father if Napoleon ordered it,” was in charge of the police affairs the dual police system was still adhered to. And besides these, Napoleon had spies of his own, working quite independently, reporting direct to himself, and he placed these not only in the two original police systems, but everywhere where they could keep an eye on those in high places. His royal brothers were surrounded with them; they were to be found in the secretariats of all the ministers; and since payment was largely by results, and they had to justify their existence somehow, it is not surprising that they brought forward trumped-up charges, suborned perjury, and generally acted as typical Continental agents-provocateurs. But all this elaborate system failed to gain the least hint of the Mallet conspiracy, which came so near to pulling down the Empire in the autumn of 1812.

There were opportunities enough for conspiracy, goodness knows. Bourbonists and Republicans, Bonapartists and anarchists, all sought to keep or to acquire power. The Murats, the Beauharnais, the various Bonaparte brothers and even Bernadotte, were all scheming for the succession or the regency, while intertwining among all this was the more legitimate scheming of the various European powers, whose secret agents were equally active throughout the Empire. There is small room for wonder that after a dozen years of this frantic merry-go-round the French people accepted the Bourbon restoration quietly, lest worse befall.

Yet all this does not excuse Napoleon for spying on his wife; for that the only justification lies in the event. How many times has Napoleon been rated for saying that adultery is a matter of opportunity? But his wife apparently did her best to prove him right. In 1814 the Empire was falling, and Napoleon’s abdication was evidently inevitable. One thing alone raised him to an equality with hereditary monarchs, and that was the fact that he had married the daughter of the greatest of them all. They might exile General Bonaparte, but would they dare to exile along with him the Emperor of Austria’s daughter? Besides, in Marie Louise’s keeping was the young Napoleon. To allow him to accompany his mother into exile with his father was simply to court disaster.

At first the prospect seemed dark for the Allies. Marie Louise stood firm, refused to be parted either from her son or from her husband, and generally acted the devoted wife to the life. In this dilemma the Allies appealed to the most cunning and cold-hearted of all their agents—Metternich, who for thirty years was to hold Europe in the hollow of his hand. Metternich was the cynic magnificent, without belief in the constancy of any man or woman born. In that self-seeking age his opinions were largely justified. Metternich plunged adroitly into the affair. He must have known a great deal about the mentality of feeble-minded women, seeing that one of his boasts was that he never had fewer than three mistresses at a time. He selected an agent whom no one at first sight would have believed to be of any use, but who turned out to be extremely valuable. If Neipperg was a knave, he was at least the knave of trumps. He was an elderly one-eyed diplomat, a count and a general in the Austrian army, with a good record behind him. He justified Metternich’s choice remarkably quickly, and while His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty looked on and applauded this prostitution of his daughter, he wormed his way into Marie Louise’s affections, so that by the time Napoleon was deposited in Elba, Marie Louise’s second child (whose engendering Corvisart had so strictly forbidden) was expected in a few months’ time, while her first was under lock and key at Schönbrunn, deprived of all his French friends and attendants, and started on the unhappy life which was to end sixteen years later in consumption, despair and death.

To Napoleon’s credit be it recorded that never by word or deed did he hint at this horrible desertion. All the rest of his life he spoke of Marie Louise with affection and respect, and had he had his way, Marie Louise would have been Regent of the French during the minority of Napoleon II.

Marie Louise lived happily for another thirty years. The Allies rewarded her adultery by giving her the sovereignty of Parma for life, and there she lived with Neipperg, whom she married morganatically as soon as Napoleon was dead. For a long time she bore him one child a year, and the Emperor of Austria, with great consideration, made all of them illegitimate and morganatic alike, princes and princesses of the Empire. No sooner was Neipperg dead than she contracted another morganatic marriage with a person of even lowlier degree. When she was expelled from her duchy by the rising of 1831, she was restored by Austrian bayonets, and she died at length a year before the far more serious rising of 1848. She never saw her first-born child after 1815 until he was on his deathbed in 1832.