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  Where the Romanovs refused to mingle their blood with the Corsican adventurer’s, the Habsburgs were perfectly willing, though it took them a little time to grow accustomed to the idea. For the Habsburgs, marriage was their geopolitics. They had, over the centuries, put together one of the largest empires in Europe, which had no common ethnic basis, entirely by marriage. They might not be very proficient at winning battles, but they were immensely shrewd and experienced in directing their sons toward land-rich heiresses and pairing off their daughters with powerful princes. Bonaparte might be a usurper, but he controlled half of Europe and terrified the rest. That was good enough for the family firm, and a bargain was struck.

  Marie-Louise was not only the daughter of the Habsburg emperor; she was the great-niece of the murdered Marie-Antoinette. She had been brought up to regard the events of the 1790s in France as the most horrific catastrophe in the whole of European history. Perhaps they portended the coming of the Antichrist, and perhaps Bonaparte himself was indeed the Antichrist—that was her schoolroom teaching. Now she was told to marry the Ogre. Her ideological world was abruptly turned upside down. But the Habsburgs’ training was strict. Their princesses expected to be married off to powerful men who might be objectionable in appearance, habits, morals, religion, or nationality. At least Bonaparte was comparatively young, professed the same faith, and exuded an excitement that could be felt all over Europe. So Marie-Louise went to her sacrificial fate in Paris with mixed feelings. Bonaparte took to her, or seemed to. She was big, blond, and sumptuous. She was also slow. Impatient as ever, he would hustle her along, slapping her broad rump and saying, “Get a move on!”

  The marriage was celebrated on a prodigious scale. Good taste, or more likely Bonaparte’s superstitious instincts, forbade a repetition of the sacrilegious, and in retrospect unlucky, coronation ceremony in Notre Dame. The 1810 wedding to Marie-Louise was a pronouncedly more secular affair and was held in the Louvre, the actual marriage rite being conducted in a gallery fitted up as a private chapel. Style, fashion, iconography had moved on in the last half-dozen years. In 1804 a colossal portrait-statue of Charlemagne had dominated the temporary porch of Notre Dame erected for the ceremony. Now, the décor was put into the skillful hands of Pierre-Paul Proud’hon, perhaps the greatest draftsman of the female nude France has ever produced, chosen because of his outstanding skills as a classicist. The theme was Roman, indeed Caesarian—the bounds of Bonaparte’s empire had expanded from the Carolingian to projects that embraced all Europe and the Mediterranean. Huge triumphal arches were set up, façades transformed. The basic material, as usual in Revolutionary and Napoleonic fêtes, was cardboard. It was cheap, light, easy to set up and take down, and could be painted or covered in decorative materials with great effect. In retrospect, of course, it symbolized the ephemeral nature of the entire regime, but at the time it impressed as French chic and cleverness.

  Bonaparte supervised all the details, down to the dress of his bride. One of the many things he thought he knew all about was women’s fashions, and he often pronounced on the subject, in public, complimenting or disparaging ladies for their attire when they appeared at his state functions. For a woman to be assessed sartorially by the emperor was one of the many terrors of his court. He saw Marie-Louise as the product of a dowdy, provincial society—the term Biedermeier, as the verdict on all that was most frumpish in Viennese art, at this time had not yet come into use, but the sneering, especially among the French, had already begun—and he took it upon himself to dress her in the height of Parisian fashion, as he interpreted it, of course. But without the fashion-conscious Josephine at his side anymore, the results were not always felicitous. After the divorce, Josephine retired to her estate at Malmaison, dying in 1814.

  The occasion itself had its uncomfortable, not to say brutal, moments. Although only 100 or so were invited to the actual wedding breakfast, some 8,000 notables—the entire Bonapartist nomwenklatura, one might say—had been summoned to the Louvre to line the galleries through which the wedding procession passed. In the Grande Galerie, the climax of the parade, the bride had to pass beneath stolen masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Rubens, and other masters, looted from Antwerp and Potsdam, Rome and Florence, Milan, Brussels, Munich, and, not least, Vienna, some of them having been prized items in her father’s palaces. In a sense, she had been looted, too, or so many of those present must have felt.

  The breakfast was an uneasy occasion. Bonaparte had noticed that the actual wedding ceremony, conducted not by the pope this time but by the Corsican uncle, Cardinal Fesch, had been boycotted by thirteen cardinals, who believed that the earlier marriage to Josephine had never been satisfactorily annulled and that therefore the new one was bigamous. He spent much of the meal fuming and thinking out a way of humiliating the disrespectful prelates—he eventually had them chased out of their official apartments and hustled literally into the street, red robes flapping.

  The meal had its peculiarities in any case. Bonaparte was unsure whether to arrange the placement on the basis of precedence, or by alternate sexes, or according to the style of the ancien régime. In the end he hit upon the awkward arrangement of seating the men down one side of the table and the women on the other. Someone had put it into his head that he and his bride, as chief guests, ought to be honored by a nef apiece. These marvelous constructs of silver-gilt and jewelry, in the form of a ship, were the crowning feature of late-medieval and Renaissance table decorations. The two made for this occasion by the leading silversmith Henri August were of fitting splendor. But Bonaparte, like most people unfamiliar with the niceties of ancient ceremonial, thought they were merely decorative. Actually, they had a specific use: to hold the knives, forks, and spoons of the particular guest they honored, and his or her individual pots of condiment and spices, so no sharing with other guests was needed. Marie-Louise’s father would have known this, but she was perhaps too young, and Bonaparte had no idea what they were for. So he had the nefs put on little tables by the side, for glory, and their whole point was lost.

  What occurred on the wedding night is not recorded. But there is a story that Bonaparte, well aware that his ability to beget a son by this virgin bride was now at stake, and aware, too, that he was twice her age, put on one of his best sexual performances. But it was too quick, of course. The bride, thus bedded with the Ogre, was totally silent before the act and during it, and for some time afterward was lost in thought. Then she suddenly said, to the emperor’s consternation: “Do it again!” At all events, then or later, a son was conceived, the future king of Rome. Proud’hon was again at hand to design the cradle: a sumptuous confection, chiefly in gold and enamel, and in the strictest Empire style, perhaps the most expensive berceau ever made in France. But it was of course an object of state, not of taste, as indeed were most of the artifacts created for the emperor’s service.

  Marie-Louise was said to have developed a strong personal attachment to the emperor, but it did not survive his absences and failure. In 1814 she set off from Vienna to join her husband in Elba, or so he ardently hoped. But whether by accident or design, her escorting gentleman was handsome and attentive, and she never got there. The Congress of Vienna made her reigning duchess of Parma, and she remarried twice, ending her days in 1847 in her father’s old capital. The countess Walewska, on the whole, was more loyal to Bonaparte’s memory. She visited him in Elba, perhaps believing that he was not finished yet and that her son might still be made king of Poland should Bonaparte’s fortunes revive. But it was not to be, and she died, a disappointed woman, in 1817, aged only twenty-eight.

  In any case, the birth of the king of Rome came too late for Bonaparte to adopt a long-term imperial policy. That would have involved him in a conscious and consistent effort to govern in the interests of the people he ruled. Of course, that is what he said he did anyway, and perhaps he half-believed it. He saw himself as the Enlightenment embodied, bringing rationality and justice to peoples hitherto ruled in the interests
of privileged castes. But, despite the cheers that usually greeted him when he erupted into territories ruled by feudalism and autocracy, and some initial efforts to curry favor, Bonaparte was always forced in the end, and usually sooner rather than later, by financial and military necessity, to impose burdens that made his rule even more unpopular than the old regimes. His requirements for money and manpower were insatiable. The empire had to provide them, and hatred was the inevitable result. Moreover, if he overthrew one privileged caste, he replaced it with another, the French administration, civil and military. Most of Europe thus grew to hate him, collectively and individually, until these opponents swelled into a mighty multitude, excluding only those who benefited directly from his power.

  One people who had a peculiar detestation of Bonaparte were the Swiss. His first act in Switzerland was to plunder the treasury in Berne: he took every gold and silver coin it contained to finance his expedition to Egypt. About £10 million in cash disappeared, plus £8 million in good paper, mainly English bills. When the French plenipotentiary, General Brune, left Switzerland for Italy, the bottom of his carriage collapsed under the weight of the stolen gold he had hidden in its luggage compartment. When the people resisted, they were shot. One French commander, General Schauenberg, slaughtered 500 men, women, and children in the Nidwalden; whole villages were wiped out. It was this rape of peaceful, liberty-loving Switzerland that decisively turned Wordsworth against Bonaparte. Wordsworth saw the Swiss as his realized ideal peasantry, loving their native land and close to it, yeomen who owned their own patches and worked them industriously, natural democrats whose ancient ways of governing themselves locally had been brutally smashed by a grasping and corrupt tyrant.

  This was the pattern throughout occupied Europe. To the ordinary people, as opposed to the intellectuals of the towns, the coming of Bonaparte’s armies often meant the loss of their crops, stores, horses, and livestock, the torching of their farms and barns, the rape of wives and daughters, the billeting of rapacious soldiery, and the stabling of horses in their beloved local church. Bonaparte’s orders to commanders were: You have the force, live off the land. When in 1808 he put Marshal Joachim Murat in charge of conquered Spain, and the marshal complained to him of want of supplies, Bonaparte replied harshly that he was tired of a general who “at the head of 50,000 men, asks for things instead of taking them.” The letter, said Murat, “stunned me like a tile falling on my head.”

  The Italians had mixed feelings about Bonaparte from the outset. On the one hand they welcomed this scourge of the occupying Austrians, this liberator. That made him popular in Lombardy. In the Papal States, the worst-governed part of Italy, he was seen as the man who, while protecting the church from revolutionary persecution, cut it down to size politically. Again, in Naples, Bonapartism was seen, initially, as preferable to the Bourbons. Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, Murat, who had married the emperor’s sister Caroline, was initially welcomed as substitute king. Few regretted, at the time, the suppression of knightly rule in Malta or the old self-perpetuating oligarchy that had ruled Venice.

  Indeed, most of them saw him as an Italian. Bonaparte himself boasted: “My origin has made all Italians regard me as a compatriot!” He said that when his sister Pauline proposed to marry a prince of the ancient Roman house of Borghese, the Italians said: “It will do, it’s among ourselves, it’s one of our own families.” When Bonaparte ordered the pope to come to Paris to crown him as emperor, the Italian party among the cardinals overruled the Austrian party and encouraged him to accept. The argument went: “After all, we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.”

  But this soon became a bad joke. The two Bonaparte princesses were themselves popular, Caroline for her charity to Naples’s countless poor, Pauline for her entertaining naughtiness. Prettiest of all the women in the family, she was proud and shameless and loved to display her body. Once a week, she held la cérémonie des pieds, in which her exquisite little feet were washed and powdered by her maids, in front of a goggling circle of male aristocrats, and even the odd cardinal. She also forced Canova, Europe’s leading sculptor, who was prudish, to portray her naked to the waist (he refused to do her totally naked, as she wished), lying on a bed. Inside the bed was a mechanism that moved the body around, so that it could be seen from all angles, and this was a candlelight after-dinner treat for Roman high society.

  But French rule was corrupt and rapacious. The French stole any valuables not nailed down and many that were. The “barbarians” took hundreds of Italy’s finest works of art, arguing that the Italians did not look after, know about, or care for them. Thanks to the efforts of Canova in 1815, aided by Castlereagh and Wellington, many of these masterpieces, including the famous four antique horses of Venice, were returned to Italy, British troops holding back the whipped-up Paris mobs that tried to prevent repatriation. But more than a thousand precious objects dispersed in French provincial collections (a fact that undermined Bonaparte’s claim that he brought the art of Europe to the Louvre so that the entire world could see it concentrated there) were never sent back and are still there. But money as well as art was stolen. Trieste, according to one eyewitness, was left bare. Other towns were effectively sacked. The various new states or republics that Bonaparte created in Italy were badly thought out and functioned even more inefficiently and exactingly than those they replaced. France taxed Italy mercilessly, and those who did not pay were treated as “brigands” and hanged. If villages or towns refused to hand them over, the mayor was hanged. Italy became a place where thousands of Frenchmen, usually from the families of marshals and generals, or others with influence, could get easy jobs as administrators, with large salaries and much to be made on the side. And wherever France ruled, there was cultural imperialism, or racism as we would say. Italian was treated as a barbarous patois. Thus, in Ron cole, in the duchy of Parma, the baby Verdi was registered as Joseph-Fortunin-François by a grinning French official. When the débâcle came, most Italians found they preferred the Austrians, the papalists, even the Bourbons, to the hated French. Murat, who outstayed his welcome, was executed.

  Most Britons never liked the look of Bonaparte from the start. William Pitt found by experience that his word could never be trusted, and Castlereagh and Canning in turn learned to treat him as an incorrigible liar. Even his faithful secretary Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, one of his most favorable character witnesses, wrote: “It pained me to write official statements at his dictation, each one of which was an imposture.” When he protested, Bonaparte answered: “My dear sir, you are an idiot, you understand nothing.” But Bourrienne, and others, understood only too well. Bonaparte was a man who, when he was in his cradle, had been given by the Good Fairy gifts beyond the imagination of most men. But she had denied him things that most people, however humble, take for granted—the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, or right and wrong.

  The British sensed this early on, especially Pitt and Castlereagh, both of whom prided themselves on never lying to the House of Commons. Lord Liverpool, who as a young man had actually witnessed the fall of the Bastille, and had never forgotten the horror of it, saw Bonaparte as the man who had turned a mob into an army to terrorize Europe. Ordinary British people, with their inherited hatred of standing armies and their passionate love of the navy, saw Bonaparte as an enormous standing army personified, and the navy as their heaven-sent protection from him. Everything Bonaparte did was wrong—or, if apparently benevolent, suspicious. Nelson himself summed up this intuitive rejection of Bonapartism. Picking up a pair of tongs, he said: “It matters not which way I place these tongs. But if Bonaparte says they must be placed this way, then we must place them the other.”

  The English intellectuals, if that is not too fancy a term, were divided. With few exceptions, the artists were hostile, and rejected totally Bonaparte’s notion that the arts of the world be concentrated in Paris in the Louvre—the fact that he
renamed the building the Musée Napoléon was seen as insufferable impudence coming from a soldier. Many writers had been initially captivated by the Revolution. Wordsworth, who wrote “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven,” wanted to found a “pantisocracy” with Southey and Coleridge in America, to embody the new ideals. But all three turned against it, the brute facts of the Terror being more persuasive, perhaps, than the powerful arguments of Edmund Burke. But Burke carved the case against Revolutionary France (and by implication Bonaparte, its residual heir) in flaming tablets of stone. His hugely successful and much-read essay Reflections on the Revolution in France played a key role in keeping the thinking part of the nation steady during the long years of gloom-laden warfare that followed.

  Wordsworth was particularly bitter about Bonaparte’s cruelty to the peasants in the lands he invaded. Southey wrote his brilliant, bestselling Life of Nelson, which the entire nation read and which remained the standard work for a century. Coleridge learned a great deal about geopolitics (for which he had an instinct) while secretary to the governor of Malta during the buildup to the Trafalgar campaign in the Mediterranean, and he became a close friend of the British military expert Captain Charles William Pasley, whose book on British global strategy was so much relished by Jane Austen. Coleridge held Bonaparte in peculiar detestation. He wrote dozens of leading articles for the Morning Chronicle denouncing Bonaparte’s policies and actions, which he argued were a threat to everything Britain stood for, from personal freedom to the independence of nations. Bonaparte was “the evil genius of the planet.” He even thought there was a case for assassinating him. He saw him in colossal terms, not as a supernatural Antichrist so much as a superhuman monster, “the enemy of the human race,” who was “waging war against mankind.”