Napoleon collected his marshals around him at Smorgoni, on the The Bulletin. 5th of December, 1812, and dictated a bulletin which developed the horrors of the retreat, and explained to them his reasons for returning to Paris. “I quit you,” he said, “but go to seek three hundred thousand men.” He then proceeded to lay the blame on the King of Westphalia, and his trusted and tried friend the Duc d’Abrantes; alleged that English torches had turned Moscow into a heap of ashes; and added (with greater truthfulness) that the cold had done the rest of the mischief. He entrusted the command to Murat, and bidding them farewell set out, accompanied only by Generals Coulaincourt, Duroc, and Mouton, the Mameluke Rustan, a captain of the Polish lancers, and an escort of Neapolitan horsemen. This event is referred to in a caricature, published by S. W. Fores on the 1st of January, 1813, entitled, Boney returning from Russia covered with Glory, leaving his army in comfortable winter quarters. Napoleon and Coulaincourt are seated in a sleigh driven by another general in jack boots, with a tremendous cocked hat on his head, a huge sword by his side, and a formidable whip in his hand. Coulaincourt inquires, “Will your Majesty write the bulletin?” “No,” replies Napoleon; “you write it. Tell them we left the army all well, quite gay; in excellent quarters; plenty of provisions; that we travelled in great style; received everywhere with congratulations; and that I had almost completed the repose of Europe” (a favourite expression of his). By way of contrast to these grandiloquent phrases, the eye is attracted to the surroundings. The ground is thickly coated with snow; in the foreground, two famished wretches cut and devour raw flesh from a dead horse. On all sides lie dead and dying men and animals, while in the distance we behold the flying and demoralized troops chased by a cloud of Cossacks. The English caricaturists follow the emperor into the sanctity of his private life; they depict in their own homely but forcible fashion the astonishment of the empress at his unexpected return, and the disgust of young “Boney the Second,” who not only expresses surprise that his imperial sire had forgotten his promise to “bring him some Russians to cut up,” but suggests that they seem to have “cut him up” instead. These incidents are described in a satire entitled, Nap’s Glorious Return; or, the Conclusion of the Russian campaign, published by Tegg, in June, 1813.
The crushing defeat of Vitoria, the crowning disaster of Leipzig—sustained the same year, the subsequent abdication of Bonaparte, the return from Elba, the brief incident of the “hundred days,” the catastrophe of Waterloo, and the subsequent consignment of the great emperor to St. Helena, form of course the subjects of a host of graphic satires. Foremost amongst them (for Gillray’s intellect was gone), must be mentioned the caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson and of George Cruikshank. The first being fully described in Mr. Grego’s work, we are not called on to mention them here, while the last will be fully set out when we come to treat of the caricature work of George Cruikshank.
The French royalist satirists of course expressed their views on French Royalist Satires. the situation. A French royalist caricature, published after Waterloo, represents Napoleon as a dancing bear forced to caper by England, his keeper, who makes an unsparing use of the lash, whilst Russia and Prussia play pipe and drum by way of music. A good answer, however, to this is found in a French caricature (published in the Napoleon interest), like most of the French satires of that period without date, entitled, L’après dinée des Anglais, par un Français prisonnier-de-guerre, which satirizes the after-dinner drinking propensities of the English of the period. The caricature, although neither flattering nor altogether decent, is probably not an exaggerated picture of English after-dinner conviviality while the century was young.
 | |
Gillray.] [“Royal Affability,” Feb. 10th. “Well, friend, where a’ you going, hay? What’s yourname, hay? Where do you live, hay?—hay?” | |
 |  |
Gillray.] [Connoisseur examining a Cooper A CONNOISSEUR IN ART. | Gillray.] [“A Lesson in Apple Dumplings.” “Hay? hay? apple dumplings?—how get the apples in?—how?Are they made without seams?” [Face p. 24. |
By far the most biting, the most sarcastic, the most effective, and the most popular of the anti-Bonaparte caricatures are those by James Gillray, which commence before the close of the last century, and end in 1811, the year when the lurid genius of this greatest and most original of satirists was quenched in the darkness of mental imbecility. James Gillray, however, like his able friend and contemporary, Thomas Rowlandson, does not fall within our definition of a “nineteenth century” satirist; and I am precluded from describing them. I have before me the admirable anti-Bonaparte satires of both artists; and inseparably linked as they are with the men who began work after 1800, the almost irresistible tendency is to describe some of them in elucidation of the events to which I have occasion to refer. To do so, however, although fascinating and easy, would be not only to wander from my purpose, but to invade the province of the late Thomas Wright and of Mr. Grego, which I am not called upon to do; to refer to them, however, for the purpose of this chapter, I have found not only necessary, but unavoidable.
Caricature, like literary satire (as we all know from the days of Injustice of the Caricaturists. the “Dunciad” downwards), has little concern with justice; but we who look back after the lapse of the greater part of the century, and have moreover studied the history and the surroundings of Napoleon Bonaparte, may afford at least to do him justice. Gillray is a fair exponent of the intense hatred with which Bonaparte was regarded in this country, when not only the little “Corsican,” but those about him, were held up to a ridicule which, oftentimes vulgar, partook not unfrequently of absolute brutality. Who would imagine, for instance, that the fat blousy female quaffing deep draughts of Maraschino from a goblet, in his famous satire of the Handwriting on the Wall, was intended for the refined and delicate Josephine? Occasionally, however, James Gillray descended to a lower depth, as in his Ci Devant Occupations (of 20th February, 1805), in which we see this delicate woman, with the frail but lovely Spaniard, Theresa de Cabarrus (Madame Tallien), figuring in a manner to which the most infamous women of Drury Lane would have hesitated to descend. Josephine de la Pagerie, as we all know, was anything but blameless; which indeed of les Déesses de la Revolution could pass unscathed through the fiery furnace of the Terror?[14] But this miscalled satire of James Gillray, which he dubs “a fact,” is nothing They mistake the character of Bonaparte. less than a poisonous libel. As for le petit Caporal himself, everyone now knows, that while he viewed the carnage of the battlefield with the indifference of a conqueror, he shrank in horror from the murderers of the Swiss; from Danton and his satellites, the Septembrist massacrists; from the mock trials and cold-blooded atrocities of the Terrorists. Standing apart from these last by right of his unexampled genius, with Danton, Marat, Robespíerre, Couthon, Carrier, Napoleon Bonaparte has nothing whatever in common. Looking back upon the ruins of his empire, the mistakes he had made, the faults he had committed, Napoleon, with reference at least to his own personal elevation, might say with truth: “Nothing has been more simple than my elevation. It was not the result of intrigue or crime. It was owing to the peculiar circumstance of the times, and because I fought successfully against the enemies of my country. What is most extraordinary is, that I rose from being a private person to the astonishing height of power I possessed, without having committed a single crime to obtain it. If I were on my death-bed I could make the same declaration.”[15]
To these facts, of course, James Gillray (if indeed he knew them) closed his eyes. In his sketch of the 12th of May, 1800, he shows us the young lieutenant at the head of tattered legions directing the destruction of the royal palaces. Blinded by the prejudice of his times, he seems apparently ignorant of the fact that Napoleon although a spectator of the attack on the Tuileries, had no power; that if he had, he would (as he himself expressed it at the time) have swept the sanguinary canaille into the gutters with his grape shot. Again, in his satires, he connects him repeatedly with the guillotine, to all appearance unconscious of the fact that between Napoleon and the guillotine no possible sympathy existed.
| James Gillray.] [June 28th, 1791. THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY PETRIFIED, AND THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY REVIVIFIED. 1. Barber—“De King is escape! de King is escape!” 2. Cook.—“Aha! be gar, de King is retaken!! Aha! Monsieur Lewis is retaken, aha!!” [The French Revolution.] [Face p. 26. |
******