On his return to Paris Napoleon was greeted with a sixty-gun salute. When, on 15 August, his birthday, he drove across the city to Notre Dame he was cheered by people who believed they could now expect prolonged peace and prosperity. France had never seemed so great, and people began referring to him as Napoléon le Grand, an epithet last bestowed on Louis XIV. There was by now much more of the Sun King about him than of the ‘necessary dictator’ whom so many had welcomed on his return from Marengo eight years earlier.
He had been away for nine months, but every couple of days he received an estafette with most of the news and information he would have had in Paris, so he was able to hold the reins of government throughout that time, with Cambacérès regularly sending one of the auditeurs of the Council of State off to his headquarters with a batch of papers for him to sign along with the relevant minutes and reports. Everything had functioned smoothly, and while enjoying the carnival in Warsaw or sitting by the fireside at Finckenstein he had been able to continue implementing public works and supervising projects such as the Commercial Code, which was to form part of the Civil Code. He was kept abreast of the meetings of the Grand Sanhedrin, which he had summoned to discuss the status of the Jews in the empire. He inspected accounts and queried the smallest expenses. His presence haunted Paris, if only by the never-ending stream of letters, instructing, admonishing, reproving, and always firm. This, combined with the institutions he had put in place contributed to a remarkable sense of stability. Few states could have survived, let alone functioned efficiently, with their absolute ruler so far away for so long. British naval bombardments of French ports and attempted landings had been seen off. News of Eylau had caused despondency and a recrudescence of anti-government and even royalist feeling in the west, but this had been contained, and although there was still much banditry on the roads, the country functioned normally. Cambacérès and Fouché had ensured that the press, the theatre and literature all followed the official line.
Yet on his return Napoleon felt a need to take matters more firmly in hand. He made a number of ministerial changes and named new senators, and on 19 August he abolished the Tribunate, allowing some members to retire and others to join the Legislative. The closing down of the ‘chattering chamber’ did not cause much surprise or alarm, and many felt the system would function better without it. Whatever people thought of it, the Napoleonic regime delivered stability and prosperity, and that was what most people wanted. Yet he seemed to be gradually losing sight of that crucial fact, and his vision was beginning to diverge from that of the majority of his subjects.
His latest victories had not produced the same effect on public opinion as earlier ones, partly because people no longer believed the Bulletins – the phrase ‘to lie like a Bulletin’ had entered common parlance – but mostly because they could see no point to them. As the Austrian ambassador put it, they felt no excitement at the news of a victory, only relief that it was not a defeat. Napoleon expressed disappointment when he was made aware of this, but did not reflect on the cause, which was that his role as the longed-for victorious hero and saviour of France had been played out; what the people now wanted was a strong ruler who could safeguard what had been achieved. That was not how he saw things.1
His triumph over Russia and Prussia had opened up limitless new vistas to his imagination, in which mirages of eastern conquest now fought with concepts of a grand new arrangement of Europe. The exhilarating experience of Tilsit, and possibly also of knowing that he was not after all sterile, was not calculated to make him settle down to a quiet life. On 3 August Frederick William wrote him a letter, addressing him as ‘the greatest man of the century’ and begging for an alliance, but Napoleon did not answer; he preferred to bleed Prussia dry. Thanks to the huge sums she was forced to disburse, the war had largely paid for itself, and there was more to be squeezed out. Estates seized by the Prussian government when it had taken over its part of Poland were not returned to the government of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw but given to French marshals and dignitaries instead – part of a plan to bind Napoleon’s growing imperium in a great web controlled by himself. He distributed titles of nobility to faithful servants and potential enemies alike, in the conviction that all men could be bought, creating 3,263 princes, dukes, counts, barons and knights by the end of the empire. Fifty-nine per cent of them were soldiers, and most of the rest either state functionaries or notables: 22.5 per cent were from the old nobility, 58 from the middle class, and 19.5 from the working classes.2
Since they owed everything to him, he believed he was their master. Pontécoulant was struck by the change that had taken place in his manner during his absence, noting that ‘there was in his deportment a kind of constraint, a sort of stiffness, which inspired fear rather than respect and seemed to put distance between him and those closest to him’. He also found his conversation less scintillating, and felt that in the Council of State he seemed ‘more intent on imposing than convincing’. The court of the Tuileries reflected this process: ‘it was no longer the tent of the hero crowned by victory, but the ridiculous show of an old-fashioned royal court with all the exaggerations of the past, without the politeness, the urbanity and the good manners’. As Josephine’s lady-in-waiting Claire de Rémusat pointed out, the entire brilliant structure of Napoleon’s power ‘rested on an authority whose foundations were in opposition to the irresistible march of the human spirit’. Not only was he no longer in tune with the spirit which had brought him to power, he seemed to be regressing in time.3
Perhaps the most significant change he made on his return was to remove Talleyrand from the Ministry of Foreign Relations. This was not a mark of disgrace or even displeasure, and he was honoured with the rank of vice-grand elector, which kept him at the heart of the court. It was a question of policy. Talleyrand may have been an opportunist by nature, but he was also a strategist. He had repeatedly and forcefully given Napoleon his opinion that he was moving in the wrong direction, and urged a reorientation of French foreign policy based on a strategic alliance with a strengthened Austria.
Napoleon wanted to direct foreign policy himself, and as Talleyrand’s successor he appointed Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, previously minister of the interior, a conscientious executor of his will without much experience of the outside world. Unwilling or unable to take into account the interests and aspirations of others, Napoleon could not develop a fixed strategy. Most of his actions were henceforth dictated by a determination to bring Britain to book by destroying her economic power, while encouraging industrial development in mainland Europe by eliminating British competition, which was to be achieved by closing Russian, Prussian and Danish ports to her shipping. The Royal Navy would suffer for lack of supplies of Baltic timber, hemp and tar, there would be food shortages for lack of Polish wheat, and British industry would lose some of its most lucrative markets. With Louis reigning in Holland, Jérôme in Westphalia and Murat in the Grand Duchy of Berg, the entire coastline from St Petersburg to France was in theory secure, and Central Europe out of bounds to British commerce. This hurt the British economy, as some 36 per cent of exports had gone there.4
An early setback in Napoleon’s economic war came at the beginning of September 1807. Acting on intelligence that Denmark was being pressured by France to join in alliance against Britain with her large fleet, the British cabinet ordered an attack on Copenhagen which resulted in the capture of the entire Danish fleet. Fouché noted that he had not seen Napoleon react to any news with such fury since hearing of the assassination of Tsar Paul I. But he quickly realised he had to secure the other weak link in his alliance against Britain.5
Ruled since 1700 by Bourbon kings descended from Louis XIV, Spain had been France’s closest political and commercial partner. Along with the Bourbon kingdom of Naples and Sicily, it had formed part of the pacte de famille, a defensive alliance against principally Austrian and British designs. This had been shaken by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and following the execution of Louis XVI his Spanish cousins invaded France. They were soon expelled, and fearing the contagion of revolution, Spain made peace, and by the Treaty of Basel in 1795 became an ally of France once more.
The King of Spain, Charles IV, was an amiable but foolish man more interested in hunting and making things – particularly shoes – than affairs of state. More interested in these was his wife, Maria-Luisa of Parma, commonly referred to as la puta for her supposedly insatiable sexual appetite. She was governed by her favourite, the minor noble Manuel de Godoy, two years older than Napoleon, who had been showered with rank and honours, becoming virtual ruler of the country by 1792. Insofar as he had any principles beyond accumulating as much power and wealth as possible, he was a conservative and ill-disposed to France. He was widely hated. Most of his enemies and those of the status quo pinned their hopes on the heir to the throne, Ferdinand Prince of the Asturias, a dim-witted but treacherous twenty-four-year-old.
Because of its geographical position and colonial empire Spain was of immense importance to France, and Napoleon did not trust Godoy to keep the country from falling under British influence. When he reached Berlin after Jena he found letters from Godoy to the King of Prussia offering to attack France in support of Russia and Prussia. The risk of such an attack would not have worried Napoleon much, even when he was occupied in Central Europe, but the possibility of the British getting a foothold on the Iberian Peninsula did, because it would breach the commercial blockade. As an ally of France, Spain was committed to it, but Portugal was not.
In September 1807 Napoleon wrote to the regent of Portugal, Dom João, telling him to choose between France and Britain. He responded favourably and declared war on Britain, but he was too late. On 27 October an impatient Napoleon had concluded the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Charles IV, by which France and Spain would jointly take over Portugal.
To carry out the operation Napoleon had chosen Junot, telling him his marshal’s baton was waiting for him in Lisbon. Among his reasons for sending him was that during Napoleon’s nine-month absence Junot, who was military governor of Paris, had been having an affair with Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat (who some thought was thus positioning herself for the struggle over the succession were her imperial brother to meet with disaster on campaign). Napoleon did not wish Paris to witness the confrontation between Junot and a returning Murat. He could count on Junot, whose devotion since their first meeting at Toulon some compared to love. What he did not appreciate, or chose to ignore, was that the swashbuckling bravoure, the hard drinking and the happy-go-lucky manner of the handsome, curly-headed Junot, concealed the beginnings of mental problems.
Junot crossed the border into Spain with 20,000 men on 17 October, with no maps and only a hazy idea of where he was going. His force was made up of young French conscripts unused to the rigours of war, supplemented by detachments of Swiss, Italians and Germans. They were inadequately equipped and supplied, and while they were unopposed by the bemused Spanish garrisons they passed on their way, they could not count on their assistance. Men soon began to fall behind and die, so that when he entered Lisbon on 30 November after a forced march of over a thousand kilometres, Junot had only 1,500 left, no cavalry and not one piece of artillery. It was a feat, but it misfired: the British had sailed into Lisbon, embarked the Portuguese royal family and taken them to their colony of Brazil, along with the Portuguese fleet which Napoleon had counted on seizing. Junot did not get his marshal’s baton, only the title of duc d’Abrantès.
The situation in Spain itself was deteriorating rapidly as supporters of Ferdinand had begun plotting to overthrow Godoy, encouraged by the French ambassador in Spain, Josephine’s brother-in-law François de Beauharnais, acting independently of Napoleon. Charles IV arrested his son on charges of treason, but then pardoned him and wrote to Napoleon asking on his behalf for the hand of a princess of the house of Bonaparte, something Ferdinand’s supporters had been urging for some time.
At the end of November 1807 Napoleon began a tour of his Italian dominions, which were of key importance if he was to exclude the British from the Mediterranean and keep Spain allied to France. He had set in motion an ambitious shipbuilding programme which would over the next years produce seventy ships of the line, and while he had not given up hope of recovering some of France’s colonies, his first priority was the Mediterranean, where he ordered the fleets at Brest, Lorient and Rochefort to join that of the Adriatic, based in Venice. He was already making new plans concerning the Middle East and India. Having, by the Treaty of Tilsit, recovered the Ionian islands, he was preparing to turn Corfu into a naval base to rival Malta. In the interests of making Italy secure against British interference, he pressed Joseph to invade Sicily and expel the British who were using it as a base. He dislodged the queen of Etruria, who did not apply the rules excluding British trade rigorously enough. He added her kingdom, which reverted to its name of Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to the French Empire as a fief for his sister Élisa, and gave the ex-queen a piece of Portugal in exchange (it was done quite amicably, and they went to the opera at La Scala together afterwards). Similarly, he annexed the papal province of Le Marche to the kingdom of Italy; that and the other Papal States had several strategic ports, and the Pope could not be relied on to deny use of them to the British or the Russians, as his relations with Napoleon had soured.
Napoleon’s doings in Germany had affected the status of the Church by boundary changes and the introduction of French-style administration, not to mention financial extortion and outright looting of Church property. This was compounded by the extension in January 1806 of the Civil Code to Italy, which impinged on areas governed by the Church. The Code established the primacy of civil over religious marriage, and legalised divorce. The Pope’s protests over this and over the French occupation of Ancona during the Austerlitz campaign angered Napoleon, who assumed he was siding with the allies at a moment when it looked as though they were winning. ‘Your Holiness is sovereign in Rome, but I am its emperor,’ he had reminded him in a brusque letter in February 1806. He insisted that 15 August, the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, be henceforth celebrated as that of St Napoleon, and that the Imperial Catechism be taught in schools. At every opportunity he drove home the message that as temporal ruler of the Papal States, the Pope was vassal of the emperor of the French. He had not forgotten Rousseau’s thesis that Church and state were in fundamental conflict.6
Another point of discord was Napoleon’s nomination of Joseph to the throne of Naples. Traditionally, the kings of Naples had been invested by the Pope, so Napoleon’s action caused offence. When he insisted the Pope recognise the new monarch the Pope refused, prompting Napoleon to send troops in to occupy all the ports in the Papal States, purportedly to prevent communication between the Vatican and the exiled Bourbons, now in Sicily.7
Napoleon kept making demands of the Pope as though he were one of his ministers, requesting, for instance, that he annul the marriage of Jérôme to Elizabeth Patterson. As the couple had never been married in church, the Pope could not oblige, which annoyed Napoleon, who was intending to marry Jérôme to Catherine of Württemberg and wanted to make him look as acceptable as possible to the family of the bride. On his return from Tilsit he sent more troops into the Papal States, and demanded the Pope withdraw his religious objections to his Code and apply it in his states.
As he sped around Italy, reviewing troops, inspecting fortifications and lecturing local authorities, Napoleon managed to fit in operas at La Scala and La Fenice, and to go to the theatre in smaller cities. Joseph came from Naples to confer with him in Venice, and on 13 December Napoleon had a six-hour-long meeting with Lucien at Mantua. He needed his younger brother to rejoin the family enterprise and offered him any kingdom he wanted, but, stuck in the rut of his self-inflicted conventions, he insisted Lucien must first divorce his wife, whom he deemed both too common and, as a divorcee, unsuitable. Lucien retorted that Napoleon had also married an unsuitable woman, adding, ‘and at least mine isn’t old and stinking like yours’. Napoleon undertook to recognise Lucien’s daughters Lolotte and Lilli and make them princesses of France, but not his son, who was born out of wedlock. Lolotte would marry the prince of the Asturias and become queen of Spain. Lucien could carry on living with his wife, but she could only have the status of concubine. To sweeten the pill Napoleon offered to make her Duchess of Parma. But Lucien, who disagreed with the course Napoleon was taking, refused.8
Three days later, in Milan, Napoleon signed yet another decree concerning the blockade. Britain had responded to his Berlin Decrees by ruling that any ship belonging to a neutral nation which had not put into a British port and had its cargo taxed (at 25 per cent) was liable to seizure. Napoleon reacted by ordering the seizure of any vessel that had conformed to the British decrees. This prompted President Thomas Jefferson of the United States to place an embargo on British and French vessels entering American ports.
Napoleon was back at the Tuileries on 1 January 1808. Three days later he visited David’s studio to see the monumental painting of his coronation in progress. On 9 January he inaugurated the new theatre he had ordered Fontaine to construct in the Tuileries, with a performance of Paer’s Griselda, but at the second performance, of Corneille’s Cinna, the room was so cold the ladies in their scanty dresses had to flee at the interval, and he vented his rage on the unfortunate architect. In between hunting, attending performances of tragedies by Racine, presiding over the council of the university and inspecting public works, he fitted in visits to Maria Walewska, whom he had brought to Paris and installed in a discreet house. He also decreed the introduction of full military discipline into the navy, sent Joseph a plan for the invasion of Sicily, and gave orders for the military occupation of the Papal States.
In the course of a meeting with the Austrian ambassador, Metternich, he broached the subject of combined Franco-Austrian operations against Turkey. One can only wonder at how he thought he would represent this to his ally Alexander, given the Russian monarchy’s age-old dream of conquering Constantinople. Napoleon wrote to him on 2 February dangling another prospect before him, presumably meant to distract him: ‘An army of 50,000, Russian, French, perhaps even partly Austrian troops, marching into Asia through Constantinople would need to get no further than the Euphrates to make England quake and fall to its knees before the Continent.’ But while he dreamed of dealing British power a blow in the east, he was going to have to defend himself against it closer to home.9
By the beginning of 1808 it had become obvious that drastic action was required if Spain was not going to disintegrate. Aside from the struggles for power revolving around its dysfunctional royal family, there were broader tensions as well as local animosities simmering all over the country, between peasants and nobles, nobles and clergy, peasants and clergy, traditionalists and reformers, and within the clergy between those who supported the Inquisition and those who wanted it abolished; most historians agree that the manifold passions agitating Spanish society were about to boil over into extreme violence. France could ill afford to have a failing state on its border, particularly one open on three sides to seaborne British attack.10
Along with most Europeans, the French viewed Spain as an archaic state ruled by an imbecile dynasty, populated by a lazy and decadent people marshalled by obscurantist priests – in a word, a society that badly needed the benefits of the Enlightenment. In the course of his recent tour of Italy, Napoleon had formed the impression that on the whole its inhabitants had accepted the new order he had imposed, and many had embraced it with enthusiasm. There seemed little reason to doubt that the same could be done in Spain.
His primary concern was to keep the British out, and he had been gradually sending troops into northern Spain under the pretext of guarding the supply lines of Junot in Portugal. By the beginning of 1808 Generals Dupont and Moncey had some 20,000 men each at Valladolid and Burgos respectively. In order to keep his options open, Napoleon deflected Charles IV’s proposal of a dynastic marriage to Lucien’s daughter on grounds of the disgraceful behaviour of the prince of the Asturias. On 20 February he sent Murat in with another 80,000 men while he considered what to do next.11
Talleyrand argued that France would never be safe unless she could rely on the alliance with Spain, and that the solution imposed by Louis XIV a century earlier was the only sensible one: the throne of Spain should be occupied by a member of the same dynasty as that reigning in France. Cambacérès warned against getting involved in yet another country, but while Napoleon considered the options, events in Spain sucked him in.12
On the night of 18 March 1808, supporters of Ferdinand stormed Godoy’s palace at Aranjuez and imprisoned him, then forced Charles IV to abdicate in favour of his son, whom they proclaimed King Ferdinand VII. They assumed that they had the support of France, and were surprised when Murat, who had occupied much of the country by stealth and installed himself in Madrid, took the unfortunate Charles under his protection. Charles wrote to Napoleon informing him that he had been forced to abdicate and in effect placing himself at his disposal. Napoleon began to think his own presence in Madrid was necessary, and at the end of March he ordered horses, pages and cooks to be sent there. At the same time, he invited Ferdinand to France. It is difficult to deduce his ultimate goal, or whether he had one at this stage.13
On 2 April he left Saint-Cloud, ostensibly on a tour of inspection of the south-west, stopping at Orléans, Bordeaux and other towns to inspect troops and meet local notables. Along the way he encountered three Spanish grandees sent by Ferdinand to announce his accession to the throne, but refused to receive them. On 14 April he reached Bayonne, and three days later took up residence nearby at the grim château of Marracq.
Massively built but small, it barely contained Napoleon and Josephine, who joined him there later with her maison, which huddled uncomfortably in a series of small upstairs rooms. Napoleon’s numerous staff were accommodated in nearby houses and cottages, while his military escort camped on the lawn in front of the house: a battalion of grenadiers of the Guard first, next to them a detachment of Basque gardes d’honneur in red dolmans, black berets, breeches and stockings, and 500 metres away a fancily-uniformed squadron of the newly formed Polish chevau-légers of the Guard.14
The day after taking up residence Napoleon wrote to Ferdinand, reserving his decision on whether to recognise him and inviting him to Bayonne. The same day he wrote to his brother Joseph warning him that in five or six days he might write again asking him to leave Naples and come to Bayonne. When Ferdinand arrived, on 20 April, Napoleon had a short interview with him and discussed matters with members of his entourage. Six days later Napoleon met Godoy, who had also arrived; he told him the Bourbons had lost all credit in Spain, and the people wanted Napoleon as their ruler. ‘If I am not mistaken,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand, ‘this play has reached its fifth act, and we are about to see the dénouement.’ It began with the arrival on 30 April of Charles and Maria-Luisa, who trundled into the town in a convoy of magnificent state coaches of another age, ‘huge gilded boxes with glass in front and behind as well as on the doors’, suspended on wide leather straps attached to outsize gilded wheels. After dining with them that evening, Napoleon could begin to make his own assessment of the Spanish royal family.15
He had taken little time to rule out Ferdinand. ‘The Prince of the Asturias is very stupid, very wicked, very hostile to France,’ he wrote to Talleyrand. As well as being an imbecile, he was untrustworthy – he had expressed regret that when forcing Charles to abdicate his partisans had not followed the example of Tsar Paul’s assassins. He would also be easy for the British to manipulate. On the other hand, a couple of meetings with Charles and his consort sufficed to persuade Napoleon that he too was incapable of ruling effectively. ‘King Charles is a good man,’ he thought, while ‘the queen has her heart and her past written all over her face; no more need be said’. He persuaded Charles to revoke his abdication and appoint Murat as his lieutenant pending a resolution of the crisis.16
This had taken on a new dimension with the outbreak on 2 May of a riot in Madrid. Supposedly a protest against the departure for Bayonne of two more members of the royal family, it turned into an attack on all Frenchmen, principally soldiers, stationed in the capital, between 150 and 200 of whom were murdered. Murat restored order with savage repressions involving the execution of around a thousand rioters. When it reached Bayonne, the news contributed to a scandalous royal row in front of Napoleon, as Charles accused Ferdinand of treachery and Maria-Luisa urged Napoleon to have him executed. An exasperated Napoleon declared he could not recognise anyone as despicable as Ferdinand, and bullied him into renouncing his claim to the throne and acknowledging his father as king. Whether under pressure from Napoleon or not it is not clear, but Charles then renounced his own right to the throne, which he placed at the disposal of Napoleon, on the grounds that only he was in a position to restore order.17
Napoleon returned to Marracq that evening in a state of agitation, and walked around the park with his chaplain, the Abbé de Pradt, discussing the diminishing options. He could see only one: ‘The old dynasty is used up, and I have to rebuild the work of Louis XIV,’ as he put it to General Mathieu Dumas. The next day he wrote to Talleyrand instructing him to prepare the château of Compiègne to receive the ex-king of Spain and his consort. The prince of the Asturias and his brother Don Carlos were to be put up at Talleyrand’s château of Valençay, a punishment for Talleyrand, who was given the additional job of finding him a woman. ‘I believe the most important part of the job to have been done,’ Napoleon wrote, adding that although there might be a few disturbances, the firm lesson given by Murat in Madrid would prevent further trouble. He waited another four days before writing to Joseph instructing him to come and take the throne of Spain, encouraging him with the argument that while Naples was ‘at the ends of the earth’, ‘In Madrid, you are in France.’18
Another four weeks passed before Joseph arrived, and during that time Napoleon visited local garrisons and ports. At Biarritz he bathed in the sea, watched over by mounted chasseurs of the Guard. Presumably in consequence of a lack of reading matter, he gave orders for the creation of a thousand-volume travelling library, in the small duodecimo format with large print fit to be read in a carriage. It was to include sections on religion and the classics, a hundred novels, history, memoirs and the great classics of French drama. He also instructed his librarian to make extracts and précis of the campaigns of Crassus, Trajan and other Roman emperors against the Parthians on the Euphrates, and to have maps and plans of the area drawn up. When the weather grew warm, he and Josephine were plagued with flies and other insects, and slept together under a mosquito net. He was affectionate with her, and did everything to scotch the gossip about a possible divorce.19
Joseph reached Bayonne on 7 June, and the two brothers began setting up the new monarchy. They drew up a constitution which enshrined many Spanish traditions and recognised Catholicism as the religion of state. Napoleon refrained from introducing the Code as he had insisted on doing in Italy. On 22 June, at Valençay, Ferdinand swore an oath of fealty to Joseph, who was proclaimed King José I on 8 July by a hastily convened Cortes consisting of ninety-one members. He was congratulated by the other members of the former dynasty, and began issuing proclamations styling himself ‘Don José, by the Grace of God, King of Castille, Aragon, the Two Sicilies, Jerusalem, Navarre, Grenada, Toledo, Valencia, Galicia’, and a sackful of other titles which had accrued to the Spanish monarchy, including sovereignty over the Canaries, the Eastern and Western Indies, those of Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant and Milan, and many others even more abstruse. Napoleon told him not to be so silly, and packed him off to Madrid the following day.20
Joseph looked forward to his new role with confidence. In his two years on the throne of Naples he had proved himself a competent and generally popular king, displaying tact, behaving as a good Catholic and respecting local traditions. He had reformed the corrupt administration and modernised the army, cleared out gaols filled with people festering for forgotten crimes and suppressed much of the endemic banditry, eventually capturing the most notorious bandit, Fra Diavolo. He admitted that he had been naïve and idealistic in believing that people would respond well to reasonable and benign rule, and occasionally had to resort to firmness. But he did understand something Napoleon did not – that Naples could not be ruled as a colony.21
Despite the apparent similarities, Spanish society and the Spanish political edifice differed fundamentally from those of Naples, and the cauldron of complex and contradictory hatreds had boiled over as a result of recent events inside and outside the country. The French military incursion had provoked resistance, to which the French responded with reprisals which in turn produced savage reactions, releasing a spiral of cruelty which spun out of control as the French razed villages and looted churches, and the inhabitants disembowelled or crucified French soldiers in retaliation.
The French Revolution, which had combined the destruction of the Catholic Church and religious persecution with that of the monarchy and the nobility, had branded all Frenchmen as enemies of Church and throne, while Napoleon’s recent persecution of the Pope had turned him in the Spanish popular imagination into the Antichrist. Priests proclaimed that to kill a Frenchman was not a sin but a step on the path to heaven. Ferdinand on the other hand was miraculously transformed into a sacred symbol. Although he had not a drop of Spanish blood – of his sixteen great-great-grandparents, four were Bavarian, three French, two Polish, two Italian, one Austrian and the rest German (two of them Protestant) – he had become a national hero, el Deseado, the Desired One.
Joseph’s enthusiasm evaporated long before he reached Madrid. ‘The fact is that there is not one Spaniard who is on my side apart from the small number of people who made up the junta and are travelling with me,’ he wrote to his brother only three days after setting off from Bayonne. Even they began leaving him as he travelled on, and less than a week later he had to face the fact that ‘I have not one single supporter here.’ A couple of days later he made his solemn entry into Madrid: bells pealed and cannon saluted, but there was nobody in the streets or at the windows. ‘I was not received by the inhabitants of this city as I was by those of Naples,’ he reported.22
In a succession of letters he assured his brother that they had been deluded, and that to pacify the country was an almost impossible task, given that he was facing an exasperated nation of twelve million people. He changed his approach, as in the circumstances ‘kindness would appear as cowardice’, and only overwhelming force could produce results, though he regarded it as ‘a repulsive task’. He demanded an extra 150,000 troops and overall command of them – beginning with Murat, who had fallen ill with dismay at having been passed over, all the military commanders were ignoring him and acting independently of each other.23
Napoleon made light of his brother’s warnings. He had left Bayonne on 21 July after receiving reports of Bessières’ rout of a Spanish army at Medina del Rioseco, confident in the effectiveness of French arms to deal with the situation. He made a stately progress, inspecting military units and attending receptions with the civil authorities as he went, and reached Bordeaux on 31 July. Joseph’s literary pretensions had always annoyed him, and in his jeremiads he read only cowardice. He wrote back telling him the Spaniards were cowards, and he must show resolution and apply force. But his tone faltered after, on 2 August, he received news which profoundly shocked him.24
A French force of 20,000 men under General Pierre Dupont was marching to relieve the remnants of the French fleet stranded at Cádiz after Trafalgar when it was itself encircled by a larger Spanish army under General Francisco Castaños at Bailén on 22 July. Dupont, whose mostly raw conscripts were suffering from severe shortages of food and supplies, capitulated on the promise that he and his men would be allowed to return to France with their arms and artillery. Once the act of capitulation had been signed, all but Dupont and a handful of senior officers were driven off as prisoners and treated with brutality.
The French setback gave heart to their enemies throughout the country, and on 31 July, after only twelve days in the capital, Joseph was obliged to evacuate it and fall back on Burgos. He wrote to Napoleon that he was not prepared to rule over a people who loathed him, and begged to be allowed to go back to Naples, arguing that Spain had become ungovernable. ‘Your Majesty cannot have any idea, because nobody will have told him, to what extent the name of Your Majesty is reviled here,’ he added for good measure. But Joseph had nowhere to go, as Napoleon had given his Neapolitan kingdom to Murat, who promptly declared himself Joachim-Napoleon, by the Grace of God King of Naples and Sicily. Two weeks later, Joseph wrote from Burgos giving his opinion that Spain could only be ruled ‘by treating the Spaniards as they had treated the subjects of Montezuma’, which would require 200,000 troops and 100,000 scaffolds ‘to support the prince condemned to rule over them’.25
Napoleon agreed, and on 5 August he directed half of the French troops still stationed in Germany to Spain, and sent Marshal Ney to take command. But the situation in the peninsula continued to deteriorate; in Portugal, Junot had attacked a newly landed British force under General Arthur Wellesley at Vimeiro on 21 August, only to be beaten and forced to capitulate. He was more fortunate than Dupont, and the terms of the capitulation were respected, his whole force being shipped back to France by the Royal Navy. With most of the peninsula cleared of French troops, Ferdinand VII was proclaimed king by a junta in Madrid.
Napoleon continued his tour of inspection, visiting the ports at Rochefort and La Rochelle, but he was in a bad mood. When, at Napoléon-Vendée, he discovered that his project supposed to revitalise a rundown village and transform it into an industrial town had barely got off the ground, he erupted. He had taken Bailén as an insult to French arms, and by extension to himself. When Mathieu Dumas reported to him at Saint-Cloud, he fumed at what he termed the cowardice of Dupont and, seizing Dumas’s uniform by the facings, shook him, saying with concentrated rage that the French uniform would have to be washed in blood. He had determined to do that himself, but before he could send all available troops to Spain to drown it in blood, he had to parry a looming threat from another quarter.26