“THIS GRAND AND GLORIOUS UNDERTAKING”: BOULOGNE OR BUST
“I am the nephew of our great Emperor and I have come
to occupy the throne of France.” 1
—PRINCE LOUIS NAPOLÉON
“France is like a flirting woman who sometimes enjoys
seeing a prince risk his life for her.” 2
—BAPTISTE CAPEFIGUE
On a warm Monday, August 3, 1840, in the Pool of London, amid a veritable forest of towering wooden masts obliterating the view of the East India Company docks on the far shore, men were busy loading coal into the bunkers of the City of Edinburgh, while forward of the two great paddle wheels straddling the vessel, nine horses and a pair of elegant carriages bearing French coats of arms were lowered into the stables below. At 301 tons, the vessel had been launched near this very spot at Blackwall by Wigram and Green nearly nineteen years earlier, their very first steamer.
The following morning, Tuesday the fourth, Captain James Crow, of the General Steam Navigation Company, received the first of the passengers who had chartered this vessel for the month of July.3 Their clothes were French, as was their speech. With the last of their trunks and crates aboard and the high tide beginning to ebb, the crew cast off as the helmsman headed the 124-foot wooden steamer downstream. Reaching the Thames estuary at Gravesend, they stopped for the night. There they collected the local pilot; Louis Napoléon Bonaparte; General Tristan de Montholon; Colonels Voisin and Laborde; the young Florentine banker Count Giuseppi Orsi, responsible for securing the £20,000 ($2.2 million in today’s value) required to finance this venture; and the retired major Denis Parquin, who boarded with a partially plucked eagle (to prevent it from flying) he had just bought in the port to serve as their Napoleonic mascot, now chained to the mast.
From Ramsgate on the fifth of August Louis Napoléon ordered Captain Crow to chart a general course for the northern coast of France. Once they were well out in the channel, the prince ordered the trunks and crates opened, and French army uniforms and arms (purchased from Birmingham) were distributed. Among those present were Dr. Henri Conneau, Gilbert Persigny, Count Orsi, the doddering Denis Parquin, his old retainer Charles Thélin, Colonel de Montauban, the recently sacked Major Séverin Le Duff de Mésonan, and General de Montholon, hired to direct the military operations (for which he would be handsomely rewarded).
With all of them decked out in their new uniforms and himself as a French major general—he had been a colonel at Strasbourg—Louis Napoléon convened all fifty-six of them in the main saloon, where he addressed them: “Friends, companions of my destiny, I have drawn up a plan … we are going to France!” [Author’s italics] Wearing French uniforms and approaching the French coast, that could hardly have come as a surprise. “There we will find powerful, devoted friends awaiting us. The sole obstacle is Boulogne, but once it is removed final success is certain. And if I am supported and reinforced there, which is as certain as the sun in the sky we will be in Paris within a matter of days. Then history will say that with just a handful of such brave men as you I shall have achieved this grand and glorious undertaking.”4
Of this fifty-six-man “expedition,” only three—Conneau, Persigny, and Orsi—were considered a part of Louis Napoléon’s inner council, privy to all. Throughout his career, the prince was to be criticized for his lack of judgment in men, of whom among this group “Major General” Tristan de Montholon, his new military commander, was by far the strangest of them all. Just about everything about him was either phony or bizarre, beginning with the title he used of “marquis”—he was only a count, and quite a new one at that. Allegedly wounded and having served with Napoléon from Hohenlinden to Waterloo, it was all lies. Indeed he not only had never served on a single battlefield, but he had refused to do so when so ordered. Not content with that, he had reneged on gambling debts and topped that off by stealing the regimental pay of his own officers. Despite all, he had somehow hoodwinked Napoléon and accompanied him to St. Helena, where he became his final confidant. Promised a major legacy from Napoléon’s will, Montholon on at least two occasions administered arsenic in Napoléon’s wine, greatly weakening him and leading to his death. And it was this charlatan, coward, thief, and murderer whom Louis Napoléon had now unwittingly appointed to head this campaign.5
* * *
The English Channel was calm, the sky clear, and the night warm and uneventful in the early hours of Tuesday, the sixth of August, 1840. Following Louis Napoléon’s instructions, Captain James Crow brought the City of Edinburgh off the coastal village of Wimereux before two o’clock in the morning, dropping anchor a few hundred yards from the shore. They were now just four kilometers north of Boulogne, an easy march even for the older men. Although well known locally for the quality of its mussels and the village itself referred to as a port, there were no port facilities of any kind in Wimereux, neither a basin for the protection of the local fishing smacks nor breakwater. In fact, the coast was quite straight here and the extremely wide, limitless sandy beach a perfect obstacle to any ambitious politician’s plans for challenging nature.6
The City of Edinburgh’s boat was lowered over the side immediately upon anchoring and succeeded in landing the initial contingent after the fourth return trip to the beach, where Lieutenants Aladenize, Bataille, and Forestier from the St. Omer garrison were waiting to guide them to Boulogne. It was still very dark, and everything had to be completed well before daybreak.7
Trouble started immediately when a customs officer, attracted by the commotion the men were making as they scrambled ashore, approached and challenged them. “We belong to the Fortieth Regiment and are en route from Dunkirk to Cherbourg,” they said, explaining that one of the two paddle wheels of their steamer had broken. They were wearing proper French uniforms, with facings of the 40th Infantry Regiment, whereas the local regiment was in fact the 42nd. The customs officer left them to fetch his sergeant, who in turn notified his superior, Lieutenant Bally. By the time Bally arrived, the landing party was assembled in a column ready to march.
After he attempted to question the men, it soon became apparent to Bally that there was no senior officer speaking on behalf of this “expeditionary force.” General Montholon should have acted forcefully and taken over, but instead remained silent, as did “General” Bonaparte. Nevertheless the customs team, a squad of them by now, agreed to act as their guides to Boulogne. Lieutenant Bally could not possibly know, of course, that more than thirty of the fifty-six smart looking troops of the 40th Infantry Regiment had never before even held a rifle in their hands. More than thirty of them were in fact members of Louis Napoléon’s “staff”: household servants, valets, footmen, a butler, a coachman, one messenger boy, three cooks, two gardeners, two gamekeepers (who at least could shoot), and for good measure, one tailor. And of course Orsi was a banker. Thus of the fifty-six men, several in their late forties or fifties, fewer than twenty had any military training whatsoever. It would have been better to have left the thirty civilians behind and marched with the original twenty, for it was the civilians who were going to panic and cause chaos when the shooting began. Louis Napoléon’s comical “expeditionary force” had been doomed even before sailing from the Pool of London.8
Suddenly Colonel de Montauban shouted out impatiently, “Do you know whom you are escorting? It’s Prince Napoléon himself!” He, like several of the others, had been drinking too much cognac during the crossing. Then another man cried out: “Boulogne is ours, and France will soon proclaim the prince Emperor of France!”9
A very suspicious Lieutenant Bally abruptly ordered the column to halt and turn back. The prince’s men refused until General de Montholon, also the worse for drink, stepped forward to offer the young officer a guaranteed pension of 1,200 francs. Bewildered, Bally withdrew his men. Then Parquin, with the eagle in one hand, dropped the other to the hilt of his sword threateningly. “Forward march,” he ordered. The customs men returned to Wimereux, and “General” Bonaparte’s column resumed its march south to Boulogne.10
The merry band headed by Louis Napoléon and Montholon entered the port city of Boulogne at five o’clock that morning, now preceded by Lieutenant Aladenize, who knew the city streets. Persigny immediately ordered a couple of men to plaster the city with the proclamations that had been printed back in London: “Citizens of Boulogne, have faith in our providential mission and follow me.… The Bourbons d’Orléans dynasty has ceased to rule.”11
Their first objective was to seize the barracks of the two companies of the 42nd line regiment protecting the city. They were next to occupy the castle and with it the garrison’s arsenal. Or at least that was the plan. They were stopped in the Place d’Alton by a squad of five soldiers who refused to join Aladenize. The eloquent Parquin once again stepped forward with another garbled, drunken threat: “You will regret that!” No one was coming over to them, and Louis Napoléon’s officers were beginning to get jumpy. Lieutenant Aladenize, angered by the soldiers’ refusal to obey an officer’s orders, grabbed the arm of one of them. “Come here, you! You will be sorry,” he said, but still they refused, and “the expeditionary force” continued on its way, reaching the Grand Rue of the city.12 There encountering a sub-lieutenant, Louis Napoléon addressed him, but frightened and intimidated by this unexpected mass of magnificent gold braid appearing before him, the young man ran off to inform his superior, Captain Col-Puygelier. They resumed their march, Lieutenant Aladenize bringing them before the garrison’s barracks.
Inside the barracks’ parade ground, Aladenize ordered: “To arms! Here is the prince!” which was repeated by a soldier on guard duty. Some of the men of the 42nd fell in and presented arms, shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!” When an older sergeant arrived to see what was happening, Louis Napoléon blurted out, “I shall make you a captain of the grenadiers!” Order and common sense had already been replaced by a carnival of hysterics and absurdities. Louis Napoléon then harangued the troops, offering commissions, medals, and money. Clearly Captain Bonaparte, late of the Swiss army, was no more fit to command a garrison than a squad.
Captain Col-Puygelier arrived and, drawing his sword, demanded to know what was happening and where his company was. Some of Parquin’s men tried to grab him. “Captain, I am Prince Louis Napoléon. Come join us and you will be rewarded with whatever you desire.” “But I don’t know you,” the captain replied. “You are a traitor,” he called out. Then turning around to his company, he said, “Soldiers, this is a trick! Vive le Roi! Fall in behind me.” Bonaparte’s men tried to seize him again when two more officers of the 42nd arrived. Freeing himself, Col-Puygelier managed to notify the garrison commander, Colonel Sansot, and to rally some of his men. Panicking, Napoléon took out his pistol and shot an unarmed grenadier, Geouffroy, in the mouth. They were stunned, and no one more so than Louis Napoléon himself. As for the prudent Persigny, ever the survivor, he kept his head low and well behind the others.
Though Col-Puygelier’s men were still unarmed—they had been issued no live ammunition—they were angered by Louis Napoléon’s cowardly act, and they now chased all fifty-six heavily armed men of his “expeditionary force” from the regimental parade grounds and barracks. The drums were beating to call out the rest of the 42nd as Captain Col-Puygelier distributed ammunition and secured the barracks, while dispatching Lieutenant Maussion with a platoon of twenty men to secure the port. Col-Puygelier then set out with Lieutenant Ragon and his platoon to secure the castle and the arsenal, before this “General” Bonaparte got there.
At about this same time—it was now six o’clock and the sun was rising; the entire city was awake—the mayor of Boulogne, Monsieur Adam, aided by Deputy Prefect Launay-Leprovost, alerted the gendarmerie, the port officer, the director of customs, the commander of the national guard, and the police. With dozens of men shouting and running through the streets, the entire city was by now in an uproar.
Still clearly shaken by his own unplanned madness, Bonaparte ordered his column to continue up toward the higher ramparts and the castle. En route, while passing the offices of the sub-prefecture, the deputy prefect himself stood before the advancing column ordering them to throw down their arms and disperse. As they continued forward, someone lowered one flag standard with the large imperial eagle and rammed it into the chest of the deputy prefect, and Bonaparte resumed his march.
Pound against the solid oak double doors of the château as they might, no one surrendered, and Louis Napoléon, who had once again failed to prepare a backup plan, ordered his column up and beyond the city to the towering Column of the Grande Armée, where Napoléon’s statue had once stood. There they ran up the imperial Napoleonic flag, while “General” Bonaparte just stood there silently, as if in a state of shock, for he quite simply had never even considered defeat, utter failure.
On the other hand, the garrison’s able commanding officer, Colonel Sansot, knew precisely what to do and was now marching with several hundred troops plus the entire national guard directly after Bonaparte’s servants, who began screaming and scattering in all directions. A hysterical Louis Napoléon took out his pistol and apparently tried to blow out his own brains but was restrained by Persigny. One soldier remained at the column, to protect the imperial flag, while several others were quickly rounded up by a handful of gendarmes as they fled across the field. Lieutenant Aladenize and Colonel de Montauban were among the first to be captured. Meanwhile the hapless Major Parquin and the equally inept Major General Tristan de Montholon were next arrested by a police inspector, Bergeret, and the national guard’s commander, Captain Chauveau-Soubitez.
Most of the others, led by a remarkably swift-footed Prince Louis Napoléon, eventually reached the beach at Wimereux. There more troops were lying in wait for them, however, and most of the prince’s men surrendered without a struggle. A few shouted across the water, trying to hail Captain Crow in the City of Edinburgh, hoping in vain for a boat to haul them to safety. At least a dozen tried to escape in the sea under a heavy hail of bullets from the national guardsmen lining the beach. Colonel Voisin, who had found a small boat, was shot twice, gravely injured, while trying to climb aboard before the boat capsized. Captain Hunin was drowned in the surf, Sergeant Faure was shot dead; two other men, servants in uniform, drowned, including a gardener, and another was badly wounded. “The national guardsmen remorselessly peppered these by now frantic unarmed men,” reported the correspondent of the Parisian National. “One of the guardsmen called it ‘a regular duck shoot!’”13 Louis Napoléon, Persigny, Conneau, and Mésonan were among the “ducks” falling under the intensive rain of bullets as they tried to swim out despite their heavy boots, cartridge belts, and woolen military tunics. The prince was hit squarely by one bullet, which lodged in his soaked gold-braided uniform, saving his life. Like Conneau, Persigny, Mésonan, and others, he was fished out of the sea by two boats manned by the national guardsmen.
A shivering, dripping wet Prince Louis Napoléon was helped into the waiting coach of Mayor Adam and Deputy Prefect Launay-Leprovost, ready to whisk him away to Boulogne. He finally got his wish, as they passed through the now open gates of the château he had failed to seize. His only thought was to kill himself. It was the last battle that “General” Bonaparte would ever fight … at least for the next thirty years. Twenty-four hours earlier he had been a free man on English soil.14 Down below in the harbor that Emperor Napoléon had built expressly for the invasion of England, French customs officers were thoroughly searching the City of Edinburgh, where they seized the expedition’s 400,000-gold-franc war chest, which had been provided by Giuseppi Orsi. This port had never brought anything but trouble to the house of Bonaparte.
* * *
“French territory has been violated by a gang of adventurers,” a bulletin from the War Ministry announced to startled Parisians on Friday, August 7, 1840, who “had been thrown back into the sea from which they had just been vomited. Louis Bonaparte and all his followers have been captured, killed or drowned.”15 “Monsieur Louis Bonaparte has placed himself in such an impossible position that no one in France today can honorably feel even the slightest sympathy or pity for him,” declared La Presse. His actions are as “odious” as they are “ridiculous,” the paper continued. He was not even the head of a political party, just the “distorted caricature” of one.16
This attempt at Boulogne has left us with “a sense of indignation mixed with pity,” the Journal des Débats reported. “All these eagles, all these dramatic proclamations, these absurd imperial pretensions of Monsieur Louis Bonaparte … this excess of madness” leaves him now looking like “the dupe of his own vanity that he is.” This whole business has gone far beyond just the ridiculous, “it is crazier than even … the skirmish of 1836 [at Strasbourg]. It surpasses mere comedy,” because this time “blood has flowed”; there were corpses.17
“This obsession of his as pretender [to the Bonaparte throne] really makes one wonder,” the moderate Constitutionnel probed. “Where on earth does this incredible dementia of his come from … this attempt to conquer France with some superannuated sayyid-leftovers from the Empire and a troop of servants disguised as soldiers!”
Louis Napoléon’s sixty-two-year-old father, Louis Bonaparte, was so outraged at the accusations and proceedings being taken against him by Louis Philippe that, resisting his lifelong detestation of the press and the outside political world, he had a letter published in an Italian newspaper in defense of his son. He was, he said, convinced that his son was “the victim of an infamous conspiracy, and seduced by flatterers, false friends and perhaps by insidious advice.” His son, he declared, had fallen into “an appalling trap,” otherwise “it is quite impossible that a man surely not lacking the [financial] means and common sense, should have—with his eyes wide open, willingly thrown himself over such a [political] precipice.”18 Louis Bonaparte, himself a most able general officer in his own right, was simply bewildered by this whole fiasco.
* * *
At midnight on Friday, the seventh of August, Prince Louis Napoléon was taken under heavy escort from the Château of Boulogne to Paris, and from there to the prison fortress of Ham, as Louis Philippe’s government decided how to handle this most delicate situation. That king had other “Bonaparte considerations” to deal with as well, as he had ordered a frigate to sail shortly for St. Helena to collect Napoléon Bonaparte’s ashes for reburial in the French capital, and that alone had required long negotiations with the British government. To have to cancel that now because of this unanticipated Boulogne incident would in itself be most embarrassing. If the reburial service did indeed take place in Paris on schedule in December, would it spark violent demonstrations and perhaps another attempt on the government of Louis Philippe? Or would the cancellation of those very ceremonies incite riots in the capitol, Lyons, Marseilles, and elsewhere throughout the country?
Twenty-five years after Waterloo, the French political scene was still very much plagued by Napoléon and his legacy.
“I make no apologies for what I have done because I have acted out of conviction,” said an unrepentant Louis Napoléon. He had persisted after Strasbourg and had tried again at Boulogne. Clearly he had not heeded Uncle Napoléon’s famous advice: “To know how to choose the right moment in which to act is the special quality that distinguishes great men from all the others.”19
* * *
Louis Napoléon would have to stand trial this time, it was concluded, but by the Chamber of Peers re-forming as a Court of Peers—a decision that went against Louis Philippe’s own advisors, who argued that Louis Napoléon and his men “will have for their judges today the very men who had been on the island of Elba [with Napoléon] yesterday”—they would largely be high officials appointed and promoted by Emperor Napoléon himself.20 They were quite right, but the decision was made, with the Chamber of Peers appointing a committee to carry out a thorough investigation, beginning with the five-hour interrogation of Louis Napoléon, now back once again in the Conciérgerie, on the nineteenth of August. The newly formed Court of Peers then handed down indictments against twenty-one members of the prince’s “force,” charging them with “an attempt against the Security of the State.” Naturally their number included the inner circle of the ringleaders, beginning with Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Conneau, Persigny, Orsi, Montholon, Parquin, Mésonan, Montauban, Voisin, Laborde, Lombard, Aladenize, et al.21
The trial of Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was opened by the highly respected sixty-three-year-old president of the Chamber of Peers and chancellor, Étienne-Denis, Duc de Pasquier (Napoléon’s last prefect of police for Paris), in the impressive Salle des Séances of the Luxembourg Palace on September 28, 1840.
This tale is full of history and ironies. Of the 312 peers of the realm, 160 of them were Napoléon I’s senior army officers and officials who declined to appear or simply abstained, which left only 152 to sit as the jury.22 To the right of the dais, Napoléon’s old throne still stood, untouched. The public prosecutor representing the state was M. Émile Frank-Carré. Prince Louis Napoléon was represented by three of the most brilliant barristers of the day, Maîtres Pierre Antoine Berryer, Thomas Marie, and Ferdinand Barrot (the brother of Napoléon III’s future statesman, Odilon Barrot).
* * *
No sooner had Chancellor Pasquier begun to introduce the proceedings than he was interrupted by Louis Napoléon. Startled, certainly, but Pasquier did not stop him. Wearing a dark frock coat with the highest order of the Legion of Honor, an elegant white waistcoat, black cravat, and of course the obligatory white gloves, a remarkably composed twenty-nine-year-old Louis Napoléon stood before this amphitheater crowded to the bursting point with more than three hundred of the highest dignitaries of the state, and calmly addressed the salle. “For the first time in my life I have been permitted to speak in France and to speak freely before the French people.
“In spite of the guards on either side of me, in spite of all the accusations I have just heard, I find myself here within the walls of the Senate that I had first visited as a child [with Napoléon]. In your midst, you whom I know, gentlemen, I do not believe that I have to justify myself, nor that you could be my judges.
“A solemn occasion is offered me here to explain to my fellow citizens my conduct, my intentions, my projects, what I think and what I desire.… The nation has never revoked the grand act of sovereignty [established by Napoléon’s Imperial Constitution], and as the Emperor himself said, ‘everything done without adhering to it is illegal,’ and that includes this trial.
“And, too, do not think for a moment that I might have wanted to attempt any imperial restoration in France” without the backing of the people of this country through a plebiscite. “As for my undertaking at Boulogne.… I had no other accomplices. I alone am responsible.… I represent before you a principle, a cause and a defeat: one principle, the sovereignty of the people, the cause, that of our Empire; and a defeat, Waterloo. The principle [of sovereignty] you already know; the cause [the First Empire] you yourselves have already served; and the defeat you wish to avenge [were they to declare war on England again]. Therefore clearly there is no disagreement between you and me.
“As the representative of a political cause, I cannot accept a political jurisdiction to judge my wishes and acts.… And if you are the conqueror’s men, I can expect no justice from you, and I do not ask for your generosity [charity].”23
Days of testimony followed, and the trial progressed, the public prosecutor Frank-Carré pointing out before him and all present that he, Louis Napoléon, was utterly incompetent, or as he put it, “The sword of Austerlitz is too heavy for your feeble hands.… And let me just point out to you that France has more right to claim the name of the emperor than you do!”24
Regardless of the surprising dignity and even unexpected eloquence of Louis Napoléon and his gifted barrister, Maître Berryer, in the final analysis, of course, there could be no denial of the fact that on the sixth of August, 1840, Louis Napoléon did, knowingly and with premeditation “invade France” and enter Boulogne at gunpoint with the intention of overthrowing the legal government of the land.
On the sixth of October, after six days of hearings, the Court of Peers rendered their judgment: Prince Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was condemned to “perpetual imprisonment in a fortress situated on the continental territory of the kingdom.”25 By noon the following day Louis Napoléon found himself snugly locked up in the prison-fortress of Ham, where he was shortly to be joined by three others condemned that same day. And a day rich in ironies at that: Prince Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, a plucked eagle in a cage of his own making, the only member of his entire fifty-six-man ragtag “expeditionary force” to have lost his head, to have shot a French soldier.