Chapter 28

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.