THE ROYAL WEDDING - NAPOLEON AND MARIE-LOUISE

It occurred in February 1810 - a strange match between the most powerful man in the world and a jejeune, flighty Austrian virgin, between a man of 40 and a girl of 18, a union between those best of enemies, France and Austria.  There were many haunting echoes of the past - of Marie-Antoinette and the time before the Revolution and most of them were far from propitious.

                                                     Marie-Antoinette
The ill-fated Austrian Queen had lost her head - Napoleon soon found himself head-over-heels in love. No one was more surprised than he was. It was now not so much the tale of an Austrian Bitch as  the plight of a lost puppy, for what Marie-Louise most expected to miss in Paris was her own per dog. Napoleon delighted her by having the creature waiting for her in her new, adopted country. The Emperor was not as insensitive as many a historian would proclaim. Far from it, as he soon found himself quite under the spell of his young bride.

 

By 1810 Napoleon was far from being the skinny, ill-clad, nonentity he had been when he married Josephine. Portly and with a sudden penchant for dancing and cologne, he did his best to please his young bride. However, many regarded the whole episode with horror. One can imagine how those believers in the divine right of kings, the Royal Families of Europe saw the union. To her father Francis of Austria and his diplomatic Rottweiler Metternich, Marie-Louise was a sacrifice made to appease the Emperor while they and all the other usual Royal suspects of Prussia, Britain and Russia bided their time, waiting for an opportune time to plunge their daggers into the new Caesar.

                                                      Josephine

   But even those most loyal of men - Napoleon's own Guard viewed the change in circumstances with alarm. Josephine had been their good luck symbol, and as Coignet said, the soldiers were not happy with the new order or with Le Tondu (The Shorn One), their nickname for their Emperor. It has to be said, however, that Josephine had treated Napoleon abominably in the early days of their marriage. The original 'good time had by all', she was certainly no virgin and she had no intention of being loyal to her husband. Napoleon was besotted with her, despite the fact she had bad teeth and was already past her prime. She could twist him around her little finger and the anguish and pain he felt when news reached him in Egypt of her infidelities was genuine and heartfelt. It was a French bitch who broke Napoleon's heart.

                                                          Marie-Louise
  But Napoleon always loved her, and he died with her name upon his lips. He did not really want to divorce her, like all the people that meant a lot to him from the early days, he had grown used to having her around, and he was loathe to end their conjugal relationship. However,  after a myriad of assassination attempts upon his life, financed by Britain,  he saw the need of establishing his own dynasty and if he was going to have an heir, it was a step that had to be taken. Now it was Josephine's turn to cry, for she had learnt to love Napoleon in her own sort of way and she certainly loved all the trappings  and splendour of Imperial power. She was always highly in debt and Napoleon always paid those debts.

   The blonde Marie-Louise was in awe of Napoleon and must have been in dread, for all she had heard about her future husband came from the mouths of his inveterate enemies. She was married to him by proxy on March 11th in Vienna. Meanwhile, in France huge amounts were spent making the Chateau of Compiegne ready for her arrival. She then went to France accompanied by Caroline Bonaparte and they both took and intense dislike to each other. Caroline was jealous of all the attention Marie-Louise was getting and irritated by the stream of letters sent by Napoleon to his bride.

   So keen was Napoleon to provide an heir that when they finally met he virtually raped Marie-Louise. However, unlike at Mont Saint-Jean, this was one full frontal attack that more than achieved its purpose. So delighted was she by her first taste of the forbidden fruit that: "She asked me to do it again," Napoleon was to say years later at Saint Helena. Josephine had more than met her her match.

   It is strange to relate that Napoleon was surrounded by highly-charged females throughout his life and they were often more than even he could handle. His sister Pauline made Josephine appear like a nun in comparison. It has been said that if he had taken Pauline with him to Russia in 1812, he could have dispensed with all his soldiers as Pauline could have worn out the whole of the Russian Army.

Neipperg

   As for Marie-Louise, she was faithful to his cause in 1814, even when France was being attacked by Papa Francis, her own father, along with the rest of the Allies. However, when Napoleon abdicated and went to Elba, although at first she hoped to join him there, Francis set her up with a notorious one-eyed lover Neipperg who satisfied her lusts in the here and now. Bang went any idea of rejoining Napoleon.

Even worse for him, his spineless father-in-law, who Napoleon had allowed to keep his throne despite Austria attacking France in 1805 and 1809, made sure that his young son the King of Rome never saw his father again. As Walter Runciman has written, time and again Napoleon let the pathetic rulers of Austria and Prussia keep their thrones despite their warlike tendencies, yet when Napoleon lost, they made sure they got their pounds of flesh and they sought to grind him into the dust. Mere mortals they, they could not abide it when Napoleon appeared to hover above them in the realm of the gods.

Marie-Louise and the King of Rome

No matter what he did, Napoleon would never be a proper royal in the eyes of the in-bred cretins that graced the other thrones of Europe. They would always be superior to him in their own eyes. So Alexander of Russia, who stood back and let his own father be murdered, and who slept with his own sister Catherine who was the only one able to satisfy his lusts and his egomania - was duly welcomed as a hero in England after his part in the toppling of Napoleon. The British papers accused Napoleon of sleeping with his stepdaughter Hortense but Alexander was rocking and rolling with his sister. The former bachelor leader of Britain, William Pitt, had been in love with the port bottle and when he died, pickled like a cabbage, Parliament paid off £40,000 of his liquid debts. And these poltroons and their ilk castigated Napoleon for being the uncouth arriviste and the arbiter of bad taste.

  In 1810 there was a royal wedding......

   

SOLDIERS OF THE GRAND ARMY

What must it have been like to serve with the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army? And at what a time and in such places - Egypt, Spain, and during the coldest winter for a hundred years in Russia in 1812?

 

   As I read Bourgogne's magnificent account of his trials and tribulations during that awful winter, I am with him in spirit, almost 'there' - such is the power of his writing, especially the descriptive passages of his experiences. And what a friend, a pal, a 'mucker' he had in old Picart, the cheeky regimental marksman who pretended to be Jewish when he needed a crust or two. How Bourgogne came across Picart when he was himself close to death is incredible - he tumbled down a ridge and discovered Picart hiding in a covered wagon at the bottom with that most precious of possessions - a saucepan! Many a fellow Guardsman gave up his ghost to those infernal nights and his body to the wolves because he had no container for his ration of horse meat or his few splashes of blood when the poor frozen beasts were bled to feed the skeletal survivors.

 

   Men fought for scraps, prepared to die for a few meagre morsels of food to keep them alive for another unforgiving hour, another dreadful minute. For a while the two friends travelled together on a Cossack nag, Picart at the front and Bourgogne at the back as 'rearguard'. Their lives were saved by a Polish family in Lithuania but then the two human titans were separated. They met briefly again at Vilna / Vilnius when Picart was with Marshal Murat's small party.

  

   But Murat - who Napoleon said craved women like other men crave bread - lacked the balls to stand firm and hold the city in the face of the absolute chaos around him as the remnants of the Grand Army fell apart. Murat did a runner, leaving hundreds of half-dead soldiers to drink themselves into oblivion in the city streets. At the approach of thousands of scarecrows and wraiths, the locals had barricaded their doors and many a man who had dragged himself this far, lay down in the streets and died. 

   One man salvaged what remained of the pride of the French elite - Marshal Ney. A few emaciated men with fingers bent and twisted with the cold, clung to him as he towered over all that ruin and confusion as if impervious both to the freezing winds and to icy despair. Coignet and Bourgogne saw him and marvelled - others, a paltry few, owed him their lives as he shielded them with his aura of inviolability and invincibility. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Quel homme!

  Their spirits remain in a far off land, their bones hidden  beneath foreign soil that will forever be part of France. Their shades frequent the glades where their bodies perished and chuckle along with the Russian streams. What arrogance is there in man, and how easily his mortal flesh perishes. But the honour, la gloire, shines in innumerable places - at Krasny, at the Crossing of the Berezina and at Ney's side. As Napoleon said of him: "He's not a man, he's a lion!" Worth all the gold in the Tuilleries vaults. But the likes of Bourgogne, Picart and Coignet shine too - men of iron. We shall remember them.

2012: TWO CENTURIES SINCE THE INVASION OF RUSSIA

ONCE THERE WERE GIANTS


A human lifetime is very brief and the older we get, the faster the time seems to pass us by. Amidst the blizzard of modern humanity we seem to be little more than an idle snowflake tossed and driven by the winds of Fate. We are vessels of flesh and blood, ghost ships harbouring fantasies and ambitions we are very unlikely to realize. Everyone craves their little moment of fame - an instant when they might stand out from the crowd. But there are no heroes now, nobody to compare with the giants of the past. But once there were real heroes...

l'Empereur

Napoleon strode the world like a Grecian colossus and drew towards him a coterie of followers whose names will resound down the centuries. In his day they were the Achilles' and Hector's of the C19th, men whose actions seem unbelievable to us mere mortals today.

Once such was Marshal Ney, a flame-haired fighter with an incandescent temper to match. He showed his true mettle amidst the freezing snows and ice of Russia when all around him had given up and were preparing themselves for a frigid grave far away from their homes in France. Through sheer grit and tenacity, he held his head high when everyone else was wracked with despair, their glazed eyes fastened upon the unforgiving snow. He was a one man rearguard and men like Bourgogne and Coignet stared at him in awe - no mean soldiers themselves. He put heart into those around him and when limbs were frozen and robbed of volition, they somehow stirred in his noble presence - even those near to death forced themselves to stagger a few move metres in the direction of beloved France.

     Ney in Russia                                  

                                                                                    

Crossing of the Berezina

• In the coldest winter for a hundred years, ten thousands souls sighed and then were heard of no more - followed by another ten thousand, and another...eternal sleep, wrapped in blankets of driven snow.

MORE VARIED ARTICLES AND STORIES

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