british uses for napoleon

British Uses for NapoleonAuthor(s): Stuart SemmelSource: MLN, Vol. 120, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 2005), pp. 733-746Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3840655 .

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British Uses for Napoleon

Stuart Semmel

In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte's armies defeated Prussian forces at

Jena. William Wordsworth, a staunch British loyalist, expressed what at first sight might have seemed unseemly relief at Prussia's loss. Britain now stood "alone," the poet explained:

The last that dare to struggle with the Foe. 'Tis well! from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be sought.l

It was good, in other words, that Britain would now have to rely upon its own devices. Locked in single combat with Napoleon, Britain faced a test of its national character, a trial of its weaknesses-and this was to be welcomed. Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had said much the same thing three years earlier, when Napoleon seemed on the verge of invading Britain: "As to me, I think, the Invasion must be a Blessing. For if we do not repel it, & cut them to pieces, we are a vile sunken race & it is good, that our Betters should crack us-And if we do act as Men, Christians, Englishmen-down goes the Corsican

Miscreant, & Europe may have peace."2 In 1811, Wordsworth again took strange comfort from the strength

of Britain's enemy. Britain's moral compass, the poet suggested, was maintained only by the magnetic repulsion of its Gallic enemy. "If the time should ever come when this Island shall have no more formi- dable enemies by land than it has at this moment by sea"-Britain's

1 William Wordsworth, "November, 1806," William Wordsworth: The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1981) 1: 725.

2 Letter to Thomas Poole, 3 October 1803, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Leslie Griggs, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956-71) 2:524.

MLN 120 (2005): 733-746 ? 2005 by TheJohns Hopkins University Press



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naval predominance had been established at Trafalgar in 1805-"the extinction of all that it previously contained of good and great would soon follow." Domestic virtue, national character, depended on

having an enemy "capable of resisting us, and keeping us at arm's

length," according to Wordsworth. "If a nation have nothing to

oppose or to fear without, it cannot escape decay and concussion within."3

Wordsworth's notion of Napoleonic France's usefulness for Britain- a usefulness directly proportional to the threat it posed-may seem to

prefigure the notion of some recent historians (notably Linda Colley and Gerald Newman) that British national identity in the Hanoverian

period was constructed by means of a contrast with a French "Other."4 But in fact once Napoleon came to power in 1799, the usefulness of France as an Other became an extremely murky matter. Before the revolution a highly effective opposition between Britain and ancien

regime France had operated in British culture and thought. Political writers contrasted French effeminacy, frivolity, and Catholicism with British manliness, sincerity, and Protestantism-and suggested that

political liberty arose as naturally from the latter trio as a slavish readiness to truckle before authority did from the former. This habitual contrast had to be modified considerably with the coming of the revolution: the supposed French characteristic of aristocratic

frivolity had turned into democratic savagery; servility to power had become anarchic repudiation of hierarchy and tradition; the Catholic

antagonist had turned atheist (and Protestant students of Scripture had followed accordingly, modifying their identification of Antichrist so that the figure in Revelations stood no longer for the papacy but rather for the godless Republic).5 In short, the revolution had

required the British stereotype of the French to be modified radically in its details. Still, a binary categorical opposition between the two nations remained.

: Letter to Captain Pasley, Royal Engineers, 28 March 1811, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selingcourt, 2nd ed., 8 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967-93) 2, pt. 1:480.

4 Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740-1830 (New York: St. Martin's, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992).

'See J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975); W. H. Oliver, Prophets and Millennialists: The Uses of Biblical Prophecy in England from the 1790s to the 1840s (Auckland: Auckland UP, 1978).

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That changed after Napoleon's accession. Napoleon was a hybrid figure, and was regularly figured as such-as a "monster," or a

"proteus"-in British accounts.6 Was he aJacobin or a king (British observers wondered); Italian or Frenchman; Catholic, atheist, or Muslim? Was he some unnatural combination of these elements?

Napoleon unsettled the traditional contrasts, and even the revised

revolutionary ones. He seemed to defy categorization, or to inspire contradictory classifications.

One result was confusion and anxiety for British "loyalists" (as those who trumpeted their devotion to king and country were

known). But British radicals sensed a rhetorical opportunity: to a

surprising degree, they would use the figure of the French emperor as a lens through which to scrutinize the failings of the British

government-and a cudgel with which to beat it. Some radicals were

merely "anti-anti-Napoleonists," critics of the crude brushstrokes with which popular loyalism tarred Bonaparte. But for others, Napoleon served as a counter-king, an alternative model of rule whose example radically challenged British constitutional practice. Unsurprisingly, historians of British political culture have emphasized the hostility to

Bonaparte that dominated public opinion. This article will pay more attention to the pro-Napoleonic sentiment (some lurking, some half-

hearted, some full-fledged) that was surprisingly visible in many corners of late Hanoverian discourse.7

Many one-time friends of the French Revolution who began as radical reformers ended up, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, staunch

6 E.g., "John Bull Turned into a Galley Slave" (1803 broadside, New York Public

Library); "Buonaparte's Confession of the Massacre of Jaffa" (1803 broadside, British Library); William Hunter, A Sketch of the Political State of Europe, at the Beginning of February, 1805 (London, 1805) 191; Charles Maclean, An Excursion in France, and Other Parts of the Continent of Europe (London, 1804) 51.

7 British opinions of Napoleon are considered in much greater depth in my book Napoleon and the British (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), from which this article draws extensively. See also Stuart Semmel, "Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory After Waterloo," Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 9-37. Sympathy for Napoleon is barely visible in the leading (and excellent) studies of wartime radicalism and liberalism, J. Ann Hone's For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982) andJ. E. Cookson's The Friends of Peace: Anti-War Liberalism in England, 1793-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982). An unusual study of some Napoleonic sympathizers, primarily those in the Holland House circle, is E. Tangye Lean, The Napoleonists: A Study in Political Disaffection, 1760-1960 (London: Oxford UP, 1970). See also Simon Bainbridge's valuable Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995).

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loyalists. The former Jacobin Henry Redhead Yorke, who had served time for conspiracy in the 1790s, would become one of the most virulent of ultra-loyalist journalists, publishing pieces endorsing the

slaughter of French prisoners of war; Lewis Goldsmith, who edited an

English-language Paris newspaper for Talleyrand in 1802-03, ended

up producing a British weekly that regularly called for Napoleon's assassination.8 Such stories suggest one important British use for

Napoleon: he functioned, at least for those radicals who had not

already abandoned ship because of the Terror, as a catalyst of

ideological conversion, a bridge across which individuals could make the journey to conservatism. Conventional wisdom in fact suggests that practically all British radicals ended up making this journey: disgust at Napoleon's seizure and consolidation of power-the crown-

ing touch being his self-coronation as emperor-led to disillusion with the revolution that had given him birth, as republicans slunk

away from their former ideals to embrace king and country. But in fact many radicals resisted using this bridge-and some retained not

only their warm feelings for the Revolution but also some sympathy for the man who declared it finished.

The most famous exception to the ostensibly inevitable rightward march was the journalist William Cobbett. Cobbett began his career as a loyalist, but was radicalized in the opening decade of the century. That transformation has been a central problem for students of his life. Oddly, none have made much of his changing attitude toward

Napoleon.' Now, Bonaparte was hardly the plain and simple cause of Cobbett's swim against the current. Many factors drove Cobbett

leftwards, including rage at the corrupt system of financial reward for

government favorites, disgust at the flogging of English soldiers (a punishment which, he noted, Napoleon himself did not inflict upon his troops), and a two-year imprisonment for libel (resulting from this denunciation of flogging).'? The point is not that a growing admira- tion for Napoleon necessarily drove Cobbett's radicalization. It is

significant enough that sympathy for Napoleon was one of the several

ways in which Cobbett's newfound radicalism manifested itself. Cobbett could readily have transformed himself into a radical, even into a

H Mr Redhead Yorke's Weekly Political Review, 10 June 1809, 442. " See George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man's Friend, 2 vols. (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 1982) 2:333-34; Daniel Green, Great Cobbett: The Noblest Agitator (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1983), 373-74.

'0 The article on flogging appeared in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register [ CWPR], 1 July 1809; for later discussion of this article see, e.g., 14July 1810.

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radical critic of the war, without embracing the emperor. That, instead, Cobbett increasingly turned to the Napoleonic example to make his points provides further evidence of the important role that

Bonaparte played in British radical thought even after the peace of Amiens.

Cobbett praised elements of Napoleon's regime in order to spot- light British problems. The Civil Code knew "nothing at all of religious distinctions," Cobbett wrote, nor of tithes (whereas the Anglican Church posed a burden both civil and financial). Napoleon had introduced trial by jury to France-no small matter to a journalist who spent many pages denouncing the inroads that British executive

power was making into the jury system, and whose own conviction could be attributed to some of these innovations.11

It was a gross exaggeration when, in 1809, James Gillray, the great loyalist caricaturist, portrayed Cobbett drinking a "Toast of Damna- tion to the House of Brunswick" while hailing "that Idol of all my Adorations, his Royal & Imperial Majesty, NAPOLEONE!"12 But Gillray's cartoon points us toward another British use of Napoleon: like the word "Jacobin," "Napoleon" was a label that loyalists could pin on the

opposition. Brushing domestic reform with the foreign tar of

Bonaparte was a knee-jerk tactic for many loyalist politicians and writers. Not surprisingly, this practice was resented by radicals and reformers. After Napoleon abdicated in 1814, Cobbett declared that

Bonaparte had served British ministries as a "scare-crow," a "bugbear," a "political and military Devil" who could distract the British people from the true causes of their domestic ills.13 Much the same note was

played by William Hazlitt in his 1828 biography of Bonaparte: "Every body knows," Hazlitt wrote, "that it is only necessary to raise a bugbear before the English imagination in order to govern it at will."14 For these radicals, the most worrisome use of Napoleon was as a scapegoat.

No one more literally demonized France's ruler than the loyalist millenarians who identified Bonaparte as the Beast described in Revelations-or as Antichrist, or Abaddon, or the king of the locusts, or the angel of the bottomless pit (all identifications made in the

11 CWPR, 12 Feb. 1814, 203. For Cobbett's criticisms of recent abuses of the jury system, see, e.g., CWPR, 6 April 1811.

12 "The Life of William Cobbett-written by himself. No. 7 of 8 (29 Sept. 1809). 13 CWPR, 16 April 1814, 488, 492. 14William Hazlitt, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1828-30), vols. 13-15 of The

Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930-34) 2: 187.

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burst of exegetical works published during the Consulate and Em-

pire).l5 But even the millenarian interpretation of Napoleon was not as simple as it appears on first examination. The French revolution

may have effected a fairly painless typological revolution in British

eschatological circles (flexible readers of Scripture deciding that Antichrist and the Beast were not, after all, figures for the church of

Rome, but rather for the atheism that had surfaced across the

Channel). But France no longer seemed a straightforward case after

Napoleon's declaration of kinship with Egyptian Muslims, his Concor- dat with the papacy, his tolerance for Protestants, and his convoking a Grand Sanhedrin of European Jews. Hence the profusion of rival

eschatological readings of the "pious proteus"'6 during his reign- some hewing to the new atheist identification of Antichrist, others

reasserting the traditional anti-Catholic reading. Either way, the

ambiguous Napoleon could be linked to the Beast. Cosmic self-affirmation was one thing that many loyalist exegetes

could agree on. Many believed that God would make the British

people "instrumental in bringing home the remnant of the true Israelites"-that is, restoring the Jews to Palestine.17 But a few writers

thought the role of deliverer was not sufficiently grand for the British nation. Ralph Wedgwood (in a chaotic 1814 pamphlet that wavered between identifying Napoleon as Satan himself or as the servant of a Satanic pope) noted that the Hebrew for covenant was "Brit," "the

original name of our land." This and other circumstances led

Wedgwood to ask that his readers not only view Britain as the Jews' ally but "consider Britain [. ..] the new Jerusalem descended from above." Prophecy spoke, according to Wedgwood, not of Jews but of Britons: the Scriptures revealed that "the British Empire is the peculiar possession of Messiah, and his promised Naval Dominion."'' For writers like

Wedgwood, the light that the prophecies cast on Britain was not reflective but direct: in the Bible's description of theJews, the British should recognize themselves. As another loyalist exegete wrote, all Biblical references to the fate of Israel should be read as predictions

15 Indeed, all these labels could be pinned to Napoleon on a single page: see Lewis Mayer, Bonaparte the Emperor of the French, 3rd ed. (Iondon, 1806) 7.

1 7The Speech of the Right Honourable Iord Minto, at a General Meeting of the County of Roxburgh (Kelso, 1803) 18.

17 Iemarks on Some Parts of Mr. Faber's Dissertation on the Prophecies (London, 1809) 48. 1' R[alph] Wedgwood, The Book of Remembrance: The Outline of an Almanack Constructed

on the Ancient Cycles of Time (London, 1814) iii, xlvii, 12, 62, 46.

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about "the Israelitish Nation, or Protestant British Nation," the new "chosen people of God."'9

Radical exegesis offered a diametrically opposed reading of Napo- leon. The Baptist ministerJames Bicheno, who published ten exegetical pamphlets between 1799 and 1817, identified France, not Britain, as the nation that was helping to prepare the return of the Jews to Palestine.20 Ebenezer Aldred, a Unitarian minister from Derbyshire, went further, arguing that Britain's sins as a nation-not limited to

sodomy and dissipation but extending to "the massacre of millions" in the Indian subcontinent and "the hellish traffic in human beings" to the West Indies-suggested that Britain, not France or Rome, was the whore of Babylon described in Scripture.21 The punishments that British Protestant exegesis had traditionally foretold for the papacy were actually in store for Britain. And a remarkable pamphlet published by the radical William Hamilton Reid-whose other publi- cations, including a glowing later biography of Napoleon, seem

entirely secular-hinted strongly that Napoleon was an "agent of the Messiah." Reid did not believe Napoleon to be plotting the Jews' return to Palestine. His reading of Scripture suggested no physical return was necessary. The NewJerusalem would be France itself, the

empire that had "restor[ed] all men under its dominion to the free exercise of their civil and religious rights, not excepting even the

Jews."'22

Napoleon, we see, could be a problematic Other, a catalyst of

ideological transformation, a useful epithet for loyalists to employ against political opponents, a distraction from reform (according to

9gJames Hatley Frere, A Combined View of the Prophecies of Daniel, Esdras, and St. John (London, 1815) 93n, 114.

20James Bicheno, The Restoration of the Jews the Crisis of All Nations, 2nd ed. (London, 1807) 59-60.

21 "Eben-Ezer" [Ebenezer Aldred], The Little Book (See the Tenth Chapter of Revelations) (London, 1811) 6-7, 39-40.

22 "An Advocate for the House of Israel" [William Hamilton Reid], Sanhedrin Chadasha [New Sanhedrin] and Causes and Consequences of the French Emperor's Conduct towards the Jews (London, 1807) 154, 170-71. Reid's later biography was Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, 2 vols. (London, 1826). On Reid, see lain McCalman, "The Infidel as Prophet: William Reid and Blakean Radicalism," in Historicizing Blake, eds. Steve Clark and David Worrall (New York: St. Martin's, 1994) 24-42; and McCalman, "New Jerusalems: Prophecy, Dissent and Radical Culture in England, 1786-1830," in Knud Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 312-35 (esp. 329-33).

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contemporary reformers); he could also provide compelling evidence of either Britain's messianic nature or its true Antichristian

identity. But one of his most important uses was as a model ruler-a model either to be honored or abhorred. Napoleon allowed reformers and radicals to interrogate the bases and condition of Britain's own monarchy and constitution. And once again, as in so many instances already discussed, Napoleon's example offered a distinctly different intellectual challenge than had the political regimes of the French revolution.

The ultra-loyalist journalist, Lewis Goldsmith, was fond of dismiss-

ing Bonaparte as "the imperial sans-culotte."23 In that phrase, Gold- smith summed up the problem of political classification that Napo- leon posed after his coronation in December 1804. Bonaparte's policies had long since stopped seeming republican. He was now an

Emperor; soon he would take steps to create a pan-European dynasty. How could one still describe him as a Jacobin? Some in Britain still

could, and did (and Goldsmith, who collected thousands of pounds in state subsidy for his services as a propagandist, was foremost among them). But in general, a new rhetorical strategy was needed. It was in these years that a new, political meaning was crafted for the word

"legitimacy." "Legitimacy" does not appear to have been a word used by

seventeenth-century Stuart advocates of divine right. It did not figure in theJacobite writings of the first half of the eighteenth century (the writings of those who wished to return the Stuarts to the throne).24 Only in Napoleon's reign did British conservatives begin to use the term specifically to refer to hereditary kingship. For France now had a king-indeed an emperor-and that was precisely what British

loyalists had been demanding for more than a decade. How could

they maintain their ideological case for war against France when the

regicide republic was no more? They did this by emphasizing that it was not kingship and hierarchy as such that were needed, but rather

'-' See, e.g., Antigallican Monitor, and Anti-Corsican (hronicle, 12 Jan. 1812, 406. 21 Coleridge did claim, "Legitimate is too vague a word to be understood without a

definition: the Jacobites were indefatigable in bandying it against the House of Brunswick." Morning Post, 28 Jan. 1800, in Essays on His 7imes, 1:36. But a survey of materials relating to Jacobitism seems to confirm other late Georgians' opinion that the term had not been used in this sense in previous generations. And an electronic search of the OED's full text, while turning up many seventeenth- and eighteenth- century instances of the words "legitimate" and "legitimacy," reveals none signifying the principle of hereditary right. The term "legitimite" seems to have emerged in French, too, during the years of Napoleon's career.

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a dynasty that was rooted in the past. Napoleon's superficial similarity to a king made it necessary to distinguish him from other rulers by dwelling on the quality he lacked, that of hereditary descent from a line of kings. "Legitimacy" meant chronological depth-something that no number of plebiscites could bestow on the "Corsican upstart" (though something that marrying into the Habsburg dynasty, as

Napoleon would in 1810, might). While instances of the new political sense of "legitimacy" can be

found as early as 1801, a real spike upwards in the usage came towards the very end of the Empire.25 It was then that radicals-concerned that the term was nothing less than the "old doctrine of Divine Right, new-vamped up," in the words of the journalist William Hazlitt-

began to turn their sights on the term.26 They started by insisting on the usage's novelty. The journalist Leigh Hunt warned his readers never to use "this new-fangled word" without putting quotation marks around it, lest they appear to be admitting the equation between

hereditary and lawful rule. (That also went for people speaking the word: "There are inverted commas in tones as well as in types," Hunt noted.)27 "'Fine word, Legitimate!"' Hazlitt declared; "We wonder where our English politicians picked it up. [. . .] It is not written in our annals in the years 1688, in 1715, or 1745."28

Radical critics of "legitimacy" were not simply interested in point- ing out the (ironically) shallow roots of the new loyalist definition.

Loyalist insistence on the significance of hereditary rule gave radicals an opening that they could turn to their advantage in discussions of Britain's own monarchy. Denials of Napoleon's legitimacy uninten-

tionally triggered domestic associations. Loyalist logic overflowed its intended channel, and raised issues that radicals could exploit in

unexpected fashion. For the British crown had not exactly passed from head to head in an orderly and untroubled fashion. In 1688, James II had fled Britain, scared off by an army led by his Dutch son- in-law. James's daughter Mary was not next in line by the strict laws of succession-that position had been taken by the just-born son of

James's Catholic second wife-and yet the crown now passed, by parliamentary act, to her and to her husband, William of Orange. An additional breach in the orderly tableau of heredity came with the

25 True Briton, 8Jan. 1801, 3. The earliest instances the OED cites of this usage come from 1812, and from America.

26"What is the People?" William Hazlitt, Political Essays (London, 1819) 308. 27 Examiner, 10 Sept. 1815, 577. 28 "What is the People?" 308. The opening quotation is from King Lear, I.ii.18.

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Hanoverian succession of 1714 (effected by the 1701 Act of Succes- sion, which denied the throne to non-Anglicans).

In the spring of 1815, after Napoleon's shocking return to French soil, and as British loyalists mobilized opinion in favor of renewed war, radicals insistently harped upon these two historical examples, the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian succession. Both showed that the current British monarch owed his throne to parliamentary legislation-which by extrapolation, in radical accounts, amounted to the popular election of a monarch. Moreover, the Hanoverian dynasty owed its existence to an extra-legal landing of troops in Britain that was comparable to Napoleon's recent surprise landing. In the light of 1688 and 1714, these radicals argued, Britain's Prince

Regent could hardly fight for the cause of hereditary "legitimacy." By joining a renewed crusade against Napoleon-by defending an

unpopular hereditary monarch against a popular ruler-the Regent would chip away at the very principle that had installed his own family on Britain's throne.

Scores of writers and speakers presented similar arguments, in radical newspapers and books, in provincial meetings, and indeed in the House of Commons.29 The goal was to make the legitimacy of the Hanoverian dynasty depend on that of Napoleon. One newspaper mischievously suggested it was treason (given the roots of the Hanoverian tenure) for a Briton to argue for a hereditary definition of political legitimacy.30 Another radical writer argued that if Louis XVIII's flight from France and his reliance on foreign armies did not amount to abdication, then James II had not abdicated either, which left the Hanoverians with "no better title to the sceptre of these realms than usurpation." From here, it was but a short step to the claim, presented in suitable tones of mock-outrage, that British critics of Napoleon were "miscreants" hoping to prove that the Hanoverians were "usurpers.""'

The radical deployment of history against "legitimacy" was a canny tactic. Historical analogies between contemporary French events and the revolution of 1688-that critical moment in modern British constitutional history-allowed radicals to meet the perceived re-

emergence of Stuart theory with a threatening reminder of the

29 See, e.g., letter from "Timothy Trueman," Statesman, 31 March 1815, 4; letter from "Hampden," CWPR, 8 April 1815, 443-44; Sir Francis Burdett's speech of 7 April 1815, Parliamentary Debates 30:436.

3" Statesman, 1 April 1815, 2. 31 Letter from Hortator, CWPR, 12 Aug. 1815, 182, 179.

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Stuarts' fate. It allowed reformers to criticize the policy of the

Regent's government while theatrically brandishing their own loyalty to the House of Hanover (taking a "loyaler-than-thou" position). By arguing that Napoleon's claim to power was no different from that which had entitled William III to the British crown (they conveniently tended to overlook Mary in their analysis, in order to remove heredity as much as they could from the story), the opposition could defend

Napoleon from within a framework that foregrounded the British

constitution, rather than "foreign"Jacobinical principles. By continu-

ally reminding their opponents that the existing political establish- ment rested on a successful revolution, reformers warned loyalists that in embracing the continental advocates of "legitimacy," they were

pulling the rug out from under the very feet of their own monarch. The British king, these commentators argued, should have more in common with a foreign upstart than with any foreign dynast.

But if a good many radicals sought to draw parallels between

Napoleon and the Hanoverian monarchs-in order to use the

actually elected emperor32 to insist on the effectively elective nature of Britain's monarchy-other radicals took a less sanguine view both of Britain's monarchy and of the Glorious Revolution that had laid the groundwork for the Hanoverian succession. The years immedi-

ately following Waterloo saw the rise of a vigorous plebeian radical

culture, many of whose most important voices echoed Thomas Paine's complaint, a generation earlier, that Britain, lacking a written

constitution, lacked a constitution altogether.33 For these radicals, there was no pristine moment in the British past to which reformers

might hearken. The revolution was not glorious, the Carta not

Magna. Studying the history of English government, the journalist William Sherwin wrote in 1818, one met with a set of "precedents which ought to be held in abhorrence." If one traced the English monarchy back to its roots, one would find it had been "established

by the inhuman butchery of thousands of the People [ . .] and that the House of Commons was first convened as an instrument for

plundering the Nation" on behalf of the monarch.34 English government, poisoned at its very source, would not be repaired by appeals to an ancient constitution.

32Actually elected, that is, if one chose (as many radicals did) to emphasize the plebiscites that had confirmed him as Consul and then Emperor-rather than the coups of 1799 and 1815.

33 Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Part One, 1791) (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999) 33. 34 Sherwin's Weekly Political Register, 5 Sept. 1818, 277-78.

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Where did that leave Napoleon? These Paineite radicals, eschewing the Whiggish narrative that grounded future English liberties in past ones, would have dismissed the intellectual merits of the parallel between Bonaparte and William III (who for them was no hero). But the Paineites too made use of Napoleon. Alan Davenport, a contribu- tor to Sherwin's paper, praised the fact that Napoleon had been elected Emperor "by sending books through every parish, and hamlet in the empire in which every one was at liberty to sign their names for, or against." A majority had voted for him. And thus, wrote Davenport, Napoleon became "one of the most 'legitimate' monarchs that ever

reigned."35 Other than the fact that Napoleon had been elected, postwar

Paineite radicals were somewhat ambivalent about his actions as a ruler. Many were dismayed by his having accepted a crown, and

thought this had been his undoing. But a great many Paineites-and a great many radical Whigs as well, for that matter-believed that

Napoleon had, during the Hundred Days, triumphed over his imperial past. Like those in France whom Sudhir Hazareesingh has

described,36 a great many in Britain were convinced that Napoleon had seen the light, had become "a new man,":7 when he declared France a republic, abolished the slave trade, and turned to Benjamin Constant for an Acte additional. As William Burdon-an early admirer of Bonaparte who had soured on him by 1803, but who now returned

eagerly to the Napoleonic fold-put it, the Emperor had "profited by his short period of adversity more than the BOURBONS by their twenty years of exile and calamity.""3 He had won "a victory over himself."39

After Waterloo, of course, this was all history. Empire and republic were both gone. But Napoleon remained, aboard a British ship and then exiled to St. Helena. In this final role as captive, he continued to be useful to the British political opposition. Some still celebrated his

past actions and accomplishments. But others now focused on

protesting the conditions, and the very fact, of his imprisonment. Even those uncertain about his merits as a leader could grieve for him as a victim of British persecution. Sympathy could be extended to

:^ Sherwin's Weekly Political Register, 12 Dec. 1818, 89-90. :6 Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (London: (;ranta, 2004). :7 Letter from William Burdon, Sherwin's Weekly Political Register, 24 April 1815, 3. :3 Letter to the Statesman, 1 May 1815, 3. See also letter from "A. B.", Statesman, 4

April 1815, 3; letter from "Regulus," Statesman, 10 April 1815, 3. :: Statesman, 31 March 1815, 3.

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Napoleon the long-suffering prisoner which might never have been

granted to Napoleon the proud emperor. In captivity, the man whom many had denounced as despotic

became instead a victim demonstrating the would-be despotism of British ministers. Napoleon became, in the eyes of many reformers, a sort of barometer of English liberty, a test of the health of Britain's constitution and its national character. This approach was initiated even before St. Helena, when Bonaparte, having surrendered in July 1815 to the British ship Bellerophon, sailed into British waters. William Cobbett claimed that Napoleon, now that he was under British

jurisdiction, was entitled to enjoy the rights due him under British

law, including habeas corpus and trial byjury. The fact that he was not

going on trial showed the government's recognition that no jury would believe Bonaparte had committed a crime "within the jurisdiction of the court."40

The decision to exile Napoleon seemed all the more pernicious because it had been made without consulting Parliament.41 The

legislature had been prorogued in mid-July, and then its prorogation had been extended. Opposition journalists were outraged at the

extra-judicial nature of the government's policy.42 Working outside of the written and customary law in this fashion, according to Cobbett, betokened "high treason against the national sovereignty."43 Napoleon's expulsion, in sum, had ramifications extending far beyond his own

personal fortunes. Bonaparte happened to be, Cobbett wrote,

the man who will give his name to the age in which he has lived. His renown will swallow up that of all other men. But that is no matter. In the

eye of the law, he is a mere man, who was in the county of Devon, and [ . .] has been transported from that county beyond the seas, without a trial. Now, if one man can be thus transported from the Country of Devon, why not another; why not any man? Why any more trials, previous to transpor- tation?44

Napoleon's banishment set a precedent that should terrify all Britons. The wrong committed against him was "in principle committed against every individual in this country, and may, sooner or later, be practically

40 CWPR, 12 Aug. 1815, 168. 41 See, e.g., Cobbett's complaint in CWPR 12 Aug. 1815, 168. 42 See, e.g., Statesman, 2 Aug. 1815, 2; letter from Capel Lofft, Statesman, 9 Sept. 1815, 3. 3 CWPR, 16 Sept. 1815, 333. Burdon, letter to the Statesman, 19 Aug. 1815, 3;

Statesman, 7 Aug. 1815, 2. 44 CWPg 12 Aug. 1815, 168.

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visited accordingly."45 Quite remarkably, Cobbett and others were

turning Napoleon into a sort of Everyman.46 If Napoleon's rights were

abused, then so too might be those of any British subject. Napoleon the hero, Napoleon the Great Man, would continue to

mesmerize some British observers. But it was Napoleon's humanity that most strikingly colored post-Waterloo treatments of the man.

Bonaparte's Promethean suffering, rather than his triumphs, spoke to the temper of the age. As the historical painter Benjamin Robert

Haydon wrote in 1831, "adversity [. . .] reconcile[d] [Napoleon] again to the world."47 In Haydon's reading, as in Cobbett's, the most

important thing about Napoleon had become what he shared with others. Not convincing, any more, as a cosmic Antichrist or messiah; no longer that useful as a divisive epithet; increasingly less relevant as a counter-king: the force of Napoleon's example now came largely from his weakness and vulnerability. As Haydon concluded: "When the World find a man whose genius they have been forced to

acknowledge, liable to the same infirmities as themselves, it is

extraordinary how fear and hatred change into sympathy and recon-

cilement; they can afford to pity, and pity inplies [sic] equality."48

University of Delaware

: CWPR, 16 Sept. 1815, 335. '"4 Similarly, a frequent correspondent of the radical Statesman newspaper maintained

that if ministers could dispense with trial by jury in this one case, then they were "as absolute masters of the lives and properties of the people of England as everJAMES II. desired to be." Letter from "Timothy Trueman," Statesman, 25 Aug. 1815, 2.

I7 Description of Haydon's Picture of Napoleon Musing at St. Helena (London, 1831) 4.

I)Description of Haydon's Picture, 5.

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