Events of the year 1811--Birth of the King of Rome--Disgrace of
Fouche--Discontents in France--Relations with Russia--Licence
System--Napoleon prepares for War with Russia--The Campaign in the
Peninsula--Massena's Retreat--Battle of Fuentes d'Onor--Lord
Wellington blockades Ciudad Rodrigo--Retreats--Joseph wishes to
Abdicate.
On the 20th of April, 1811, Napoleon's wishes were crowned by the birth
of a son. The birth was a difficult one, and the nerves of the medical
attendant were shaken. "She is but a woman," said the Emperor, who was
present: "treat her as you would a _Bourgeoise_ of the _Rue St. Denis_."
The accoucheur at a subsequent moment withdrew Napoleon from the couch,
and demanded whether, in case one life must be sacrificed, he should
prefer the mother's or the child's. "The mother's," he answered; "it is
her right!" At length the child appeared, but without any sign of life.
After the lapse of some minutes a feeble cry was heard, and Napoleon
entering the ante-chamber in which the high functionaries of the state
were assembled, announced the event in these words: "It is a King of
Rome."
The birth of the heir of Napoleon was received with as many
demonstrations of loyal enthusiasm as had ever attended that of a
Dauphin; yet, from what has been said as to the light in which various
parties of men in France from the beginning viewed the Austrian
alliance, it may be sufficiently inferred that the joy on this occasion
was far from universal. The royalists considered the event as fatal to
the last hopes of the Bourbons; the ambitious generals despaired of any
future dismemberment of the empire: the old republicans, who had endured
Buonaparte's despotic power as the progeny of the revolution, looked
forward with deep disgust to the rule of a dynasty proud of sharing the
blood of the haughtiest of all the royal houses of Europe, and
consequently more likely to make common cause with the little band of
hereditary sovereigns than with the people. Finally, the title, "King of
Rome," put an end to the fond hopes of the Italians, who had been taught
by Napoleon to expect that, after his death, their country should
possess a government separate from France; nor could the same title fail
to excite some bitter feelings in the Austrian court, whose
heir-apparent under the old empire had been styled commonly "The King of
the Romans." For the present, however, both at home and abroad, the
event was naturally looked on as adding much strength to the throne of
Napoleon.
He, thus called on to review with new seriousness the whole condition
and prospects of his empire, appears to have felt very distinctly that
neither could be secure, unless an end were, by some means, put to the
war with England. However he might permit himself to sneer at his great
enemy in his public addresses from the throne, and in his bulletins,
Napoleon had too much strength of mind not to despise those who, in any
of their private communications, had the meanness to affect acquiescence
in such views. When Denon brought him, after the battle of Wagram, the
design of a medal representing an eagle strangling a leopard, Buonaparte
rebuked and dismissed the flatterer. "What," said he, "strangling the
leopard! There is not a spot of the sea on which the eagle dares show
himself. This is base adulation. It would have been nearer the truth to
represent the eagle as choked by the leopard."
He sent a private messenger to London to ascertain from personal
communication with the Marquess Wellesley, then minister for foreign
affairs, on what terms the English government would consent to open a
formal negotiation; but this attempt was baffled by a singular
circumstance. Fouche, having derived new audacity from the results of
his extraordinary conversation with Josephine, on the subject of the
divorce, had ventured to send a dependent of his own to London, for the
purpose of sounding Lord Wellesley on the question of preliminaries; not
doubting that could he give distinct information on this head to his
master, without having in any degree compromised the imperial dignity,
the service would be considered as most valuable. But Lord Wellesley,
beset, at the same time, and on the same very delicate topic, by two
different persons, neither of whom produced any proper credentials, and
who denied all knowledge of each other, conceived, very naturally, that
they were mere adventurers if not spies, and at once broke off his
communications with both. Napoleon, on discovering this intrigue,
summoned Fouche to his presence. "So, sir," said he, "I find you make
peace and war without consulting me." He was dismissed from the ministry
of police, and sent into an honourable banishment, as Governor of Rome.
Fouche's presumption had been great: but long ere now Napoleon was
weary, not of him only, but of Talleyrand, and indeed of all those
ministers who, having reached eminent stations before he himself
acquired the supreme power, preserved, in their manner of transacting
business, and especially of offering advice, any traces of that period
in which Frenchmen flattered themselves they were free. The warnings
which he had received, when about to commence his atrocious proceedings
against Spain, were remembered with the higher resentment, as the course
of events in that country, month after month, and year after year,
confirmed the accuracy of the foresight which he had contemned. This
haughty spirit could not endure the presence of the man who could be
supposed to fancy that even on one point, he had the better of his
master.
The disgrace of Fouche was certainly a very unpopular measure. The
immediate cause of it could not be divulged, and the minister was
considered as having fallen a sacrifice to the honesty of his
remonstrances on the Spanish invasion and the increased rigour of the
Emperor's domestic administration. It was about this time that, in
addition to the castle of Vincennes, nine new state-prisons were
established in France; and the number of persons confined in these
receptacles, on warrants signed by the Emperor and his slavish privy
council, far exceeded those condemned to similar usage in any recent
period of the Bourbon monarchy, under the _lettres de cachet_ of the
sovereign. These were proofs, not to be mistaken, of the growth of
political disaffection. In truth the "continental system," the terrible
waste of life occasioned by the late campaigns in Poland and Austria,
and the constant demands, both on the treasure and the blood of France,
rendered necessary by the apparently interminable war in the
Peninsula--these were evils which could not exist without alienating the
hearts of the people. The police filled the ears of the Emperor with
reports of men's private conversation. Citizens were daily removed from
their families, and buried in remote and inaccessible dungeons, for no
reason but that they had dared to speak what the immense majority of
their neighbours thought. His quarrels with Lucien, who had contracted a
marriage unsuitable, in the Emperor's opinion, to his rank, were so
indecently violent, that that ablest of his brothers at length sought a
refuge in England, where he remained during several years. The total
slavery of the press, its audacious lies, and more audacious silence,
insulted the common sense of all men. Disaffection was secretly, but
rapidly, eating into the heart of his power; and yet, as if blinded to
all consequences by some angry infliction of heaven, the irritable
ambition of Napoleon was already tempting another great foreign enemy
into the field.
When the Emperor of Russia was informed of Buonaparte's approaching
nuptials with the Austrian princess, his first exclamation was, "Then
the next thing will be to drive us back into our forests." In truth the
conferences of Erfurt had but skinned over a wound, which nothing could
have cured but a total alteration of Napoleon's policy. The Russian
nation suffered so much from the "continental system," that the
sovereign soon found himself compelled to relax the decrees drawn up at
Tilsit in the spirit of those of Berlin and Milan. Certain harbours were
opened partially for the admission of colonial produce, and the export
of native productions; and there ensued a series of indignant
reclamations on the part of Napoleon, and haughty evasions on that of
the Czar, which, ere long, satisfied all near observers that Russia
would not be slow to avail herself of any favourable opportunity of once
more appealing to arms. The Spanish insurrection, backed by the
victories of Lord Wellington, must have roused alike the hope and the
pride of a young and ambitious prince, placed at the head of so great a
nation; the inference naturally drawn from Napoleon's marriage into the
house of Austria was, that the whole power of that monarchy would,
henceforth, act in unison with his views--in other words, that were the
Peninsula once thoroughly subdued, the whole of Western Europe would be
at his command, for any service he might please to dictate. It would
have been astonishing if, under such circumstances, the ministers of
Alexander had not desired to bring their disputes with Paris to a close,
before Napoleon should have leisure to consummate the conquest of
Spain.
During the summer of 1811, then, the relations of these two governments
were becoming every day more dubious; and when, towards the close of it,
the Emperor of Austria published a rescript, granting a free passage
through his territories to the troops of his son-in-law, England, ever
watchful of the movements of her great enemy, perceived clearly that she
was about to have an ally.
From the moment in which the Russian government began to reclaim
seriously against certain parts of his conduct, Buonaparte increased by
degrees his military force in the north of Germany and the Grand Duchy
of Warsaw, and advanced considerable bodies of troops nearer and nearer
to the Czar's Polish frontier. These preparations were met by some
similar movements on the other side; yet, during many months, the hope
of terminating the differences by negotiation was not abandoned. The
Russian complaints, at length, assumed a regular shape, and embraced
three distinct heads, viz.:--
First, the extension of the territories of the Duchy of Warsaw, under
the treaty of Schoenbrunn. This alarmed the court of St. Petersburg, by
reviving the notion of Polish independence, and Buonaparte was in vain
urged to give his public guarantee that no national government should be
re-established in the dismembered kingdom:
Second, the annexation of the Duchy of Oldenburg to the French empire,
by that edict of Napoleon which proclaimed his seizure of the whole
sea-coast of Germany, between Holland and the Baltic. Oldenburg, the
hereditary territory of the Emperor Alexander's brother-in-law, had been
expressly guaranteed to that prince by the treaty of Tilsit. Napoleon
was asked to indemnify the ejected duke by the cession of Dantzick, or
some other territory in the neighbourhood of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw;
but this he declined, though he professed his willingness to give some
compensation elsewhere:
Thirdly, the Czar alleged, and most truly, that the state of his country
made it altogether necessary that the regulations of the "continental
system" should be dispensed with in his instance, and declared that he
could no longer submit to see the commerce of an independent empire
trammelled for the purpose of serving the policy of a foreign power.
Buonaparte admitted that it might be necessary to modify the system
complained of, and expressed his belief that it would be found possible
to devise some middle course, by which the commercial interests of
France and Russia might be reconciled. His meaning probably was, that,
if their other differences could be arranged, this part of the dispute
might be settled by admitting the Czar to adopt, to a certain extent, in
the north of Europe, a device which he himself had already had recourse
to on a large scale, for counteracting the baneful effects of his own
favourite system, in his own immediate territories. Napoleon had soon
discovered that, to exclude English goods and colonial produce entirely,
was actually impossible; and seeing that, either with or without his
assent, the decrees of Berlin and Milan would, in one way or other,
continue to be violated, it occurred to him that he might at least
engross the greater part of the profits of the forbidden traffic
himself. This he accomplished by the establishment of a system of
custom-house regulations, under which persons desirous to import English
produce into France might purchase the imperial licence for so doing. A
very considerable relaxation in the pernicious influence of the Berlin
code was the result of this device; and a proportional increase of the
Emperor's revenue attended it. In after-days, however, he always spoke
of this licence-system as one of the few great mistakes of his
administration. Some petty riots among the manufacturing population of
the county of Derby were magnified in his eyes into symptoms of an
approaching revolution in England; the consequence, as he flattered
himself, of the misery inflicted on his great enemy by the "continental
system"; and to the end he continued to think that, had he resisted the
temptation to enrich his own exchequer by the produce of licences, such
must have been the ultimate issue of his original scheme. It was,
however, by admitting Alexander to a share in the pecuniary advantages
of the licence-system, that he seems to have thought the commercial part
of his dispute with Russia might be accommodated.
And, indeed, had there been no cause of quarrel between these powers,
except what appeared on the face of their negotiations, it is hardly to
be doubted that an accommodation might have been effected. The simple
truth was, that the Czar, from the hour of Maria Louisa's marriage, felt
a perfect conviction that the diminution of the Russian power in the
north of Europe would form the next great object of Napoleon's ambition.
His subsequent proceedings, in regard to Holland, Oldenburg, and other
territories, and the distribution of his troops, in Pomerania and
Poland, could not fail to strengthen Alexander in this view of the case;
and if war must come, there could be no question as to the policy of
bringing it on before Austria had entirely recovered from the effects of
the campaign of Wagram, and, above all, while the Peninsula continued to
occupy 200,000 of Buonaparte's troops.
Before we return to the war in Portugal (the details of which belong to
the history of Wellington, rather than of Napoleon), we may here notice
very briefly one or two circumstances connected with the exiled family
of Spain. It affords a melancholy picture of the degradation of the old
king and queen, that these personages voluntarily travelled to Paris for
the purpose of mingling in the crowd of courtiers congratulating their
deceiver and spoiler on the birth of the king of Rome. Their daughter,
the queen of Etruria, appears to have been the least degenerate of the
race; and she accordingly met with the cruellest treatment from the hand
which her parents were thus mean enough to kiss. She had been deprived
of her kingdom at the period of the shameful scenes of Bayonne in 1807,
on pretext that that kingdom would afford the most suitable
indemnification for her brother Ferdinand on his cession to Buonaparte
of his rights in Spain, and with the promise of being provided for
elsewhere. This promise to the sister was no more thought of afterwards
than the original scheme for the indemnification of the brother. Tuscany
became a French department. Ferdinand was sent a prisoner to the castle
of Valencay--a seat of Talleyrand--and she, after remaining for some
time with her parents, took up her residence, as a private person, under
_surveillance_, at Nice. Alarmed by the severity with which the police
watched her, the queen at length made an attempt to escape to England.
Her agents were discovered, tried by a military commission, and shot;
and the unfortunate lady herself confined in a Roman monastery. A plan
for the liberation of Ferdinand was about the same time detected by the
emissaries of the French police: the real agent being arrested, a
pretender, assuming his name and credentials, made his way into
Valencay, but Ferdinand was either too cunning, or too timid to incur
this danger; revealing to his jailers the proposals of the stranger, he
escaped the snare laid for him, and thus cheated Napoleon of a pretext
for removing him also to some Italian cell.
During four months after Wellington's famous retreat terminated in his
occupation of the lines of Torres Vedras, Massena lay encamped before
that position, in vain practising every artifice which consummate skill
could suggest for the purpose of drawing the British army back into the
field. He attempted to turn first the one flank of the position and then
the other; but at either point he found his antagonist's preparations
perfect. Meantime his communication with Spain was becoming every day
more and more difficult, and the enmity of the peasantry was so
inveterate that his troops began to suffer much from the want of
provisions. Massena at length found himself compelled to retreat; and,
if he executed the military movement with masterly ability, he for ever
disgraced his name by the horrible licence which he permitted to his
soldiery. Every crime of which man is capable--every brutality which can
dishonour rational beings--must be recorded in the narrative of that
fearful march. Age, rank, sex, character, were alike contemned; it
seemed as if, maddened with a devilish rage, these ferocious bands were
resolved to ruin the country which they could not possess, and to
exterminate, as far as was in their power, the population which they
could neither conciliate nor subdue.
Lord Wellington followed hard on their footsteps until they were beyond
the Portuguese frontier; within it they had left only one garrison--at
Almeida, and of this town the siege was immediately formed; while the
British general himself invested the strong Spanish city and fortress of
Ciudad Rodrigo. But Massena, on regaining communication with the French
armies in Castile, swelled his numbers so much, that he ventured to
resume the offensive. Lord Wellington could not maintain the siege of
Ciudad Rodrigo in the face of such an army as Massena had now assembled;
but when the marshal indicated his wishes to bring on battle, he
disdained to decline the invitation. The armies met at Fuentes d'Onor,
on the 5th May 1811, and the French were once more defeated. The
garrison of Almeida contrived to escape across the frontier, before the
siege, which had been interrupted, could be renewed. Portugal remained
in a miserable state of exhaustion indeed, but altogether delivered of
her invaders; and Napoleon, as if resolved that each of his marshals in
succession should have the opportunity of measuring himself against
Wellington, now sent Marmont to displace Massena.
Soult meanwhile had advanced on the southern frontier of Portugal from
Estremadura, and obtained possession of Badajos, under circumstances
which Lord Wellington considered as highly disgraceful to the Spanish
garrison of that important place, and the armies which ought to have
been ready to cover it. On the other hand, an English corps, under
General Graham, sallied out of Cadiz, and were victorious in a brilliant
affair on the heights of Barossa, in front of that besieged city.
As concerned the Spanish armies, the superiority of the French had been
abundantly maintained during this campaign; and it might still be said
that King Joseph was in military possession of all but some fragments of
his kingdom. But the influence of the English victories was by no means
limited to the Portuguese, whose territory they had delivered. They
breathed new ardour into the Spanish people: the Guerilla warfare,
trampled down in one spot only to start up in fifty others, raged more
and more widely, as well as fiercely, over the surface of the country:
the French troops lost more lives in this incessant struggle, wherein no
glory could be achieved, than in any similar period spent in a regular
campaign; and Joseph Buonaparte, while the question of peace or war with
Russia was yet undecided, became so weary of his situation, that he
earnestly entreated Napoleon to place the crown of Spain on some other
head.
Such were the circumstances under which the eventful year 1812 began.