Back in Paris, Bonaparte, still only thirty-three, was sitting in his bath when his brothers Joseph, the eldest, and Lucien attacked his decision to sell Louisiana. ‘I know the price of what I abandon,’ he shouted, standing up starkers. ‘I renounce it with the greatest regret.’ Now his chief American preoccupation was the marriage of his youngest brother Jérôme, a feckless naval officer, to an heiress, Betsy Patterson, in Baltimore. Napoleon furiously ordered Jérôme to return, complaining about his avaricious family. The Bonapartes were jealous of Josephine and her Beauharnais children – her charming son Eugène, who served on Napoleon’s staff, and her intelligent, beautiful daughter Hortense – though Napoleon himself preferred them to his own fissiparous brothers. But he tried to reconcile the families by marrying his brother Louis to Hortense. Whatever their faults – and they were legion – he planned to found the greatest dynasty since Charlemagne.
ONE EMPEROR AND FIVE KINGDOMS
On 2 December 1804, at Notre-Dame, in a ceremony at which Pope Pius VII officiated, Bonaparte crowned himself emperor, wearing a long satin gown chased with gold, a scarlet ermine mantel and a golden laurel crown. He whispered to his brother Joseph in Italian, ‘If only Daddy could us now,’ but their mother Letizia, who had survived thirteen pregnancies, was there to see their apotheosis. Joseph had tried to stop Josephine being crowned empress, because Louis and Hortense’s offspring would thereby be imperial grandchildren while his would be grandchildren of a bourgeois. The Bonaparte sisters refused to carry her train, but Napoleon insisted: ‘My wife’s a good woman. She satisfies herself with diamonds, nice dresses and the misfortunes of her ageing … If I make her an empress, it’s act of justice. I am above all a fair man.’ He then crowned a kneeling, weeping Josephine, wearing a white robe and a gilded satin mantel, with diamonds spangled across her coronet, belt, necklace and earrings, and ‘so well made up, she looked twenty-five’.
The emperor, at war with Britain, Russia and Austria, felt that the title would enable him to negotiate with Romanovs and Habsburgs. In August 1802, he had clinched the first consulate for life, and France had already conquered a European empire from Belgium to Italy. In January 1804, a Bourbon assassination conspiracy had focused his attention on monarchy. ‘They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person. I will defend it for
Most politicians struggle to differentiate between their own interests and those of the state, but dictators believe the two are identical. In Napoleon’s case, this delusion justified the deaths of hundreds of thousands in battles to secure his personal rule during a tumultuous decade. But his coronation outraged many. One of them was a young south American admirer, in Paris that day, Simón Bolívar, who fulminated, ‘Henceforth, I viewed him as a hypocritical tyrant.’ In Vienna, the composer Beethoven ripped the title page of his Third Symphony in half. ‘Is he then, also, nothing more than an ordinary man?’ he asked. ‘He’ll exalt himself above all others and become a tyrant.’ Beethoven changed the dedication
