Many Napoleons

IT IS AUTUMN IN PARIS AND IN THE EVENINGS THE pavements are slick with rain. Despite the vaporous drizzle and the darkening gun metal skies, the Parisian women are achingly chic. In the raking light of passing headlamps, a woman walks towards the bus stop I am hunkering under. Her chestnut hair is an artful tumble of curls against her tailored black coat, and her black stiletto heels percuss a languidly confident step, unmind­ful of the rain. The bus appears through the gloom and I face a conundrum. Is one meant to wave down the bus, as the briskly efficient Londoners do, shouting out a brazenly familiar ‘thank you driver’, or would that be unbearably gauche in this city care­lessly drenched in elegance? As for the frankly riotous anarchy of Delhi buses, that is a lifetime away. Paralysed by indecision I do nothing, but the bus squelches to a stop anyway, the gutter sluicing rainwater in gentle waves. Telepathy, I decide.

Later in the evening I walk through the hushed avenues of Les Invalides, near the district I am staying in for a few days. Les Invalides is both a neighbour­hood in the rarefied luxury of the 7th district in Paris, and the name given to a collection of rambling, opulent monuments that celebrate the military history of France. It was first established by King Louis XIV in 1670 as a home for the thousands of disabled war veterans who survived his wars, giving it its original name—Hopital des Invalides. After the French Emperor Napoleon died in exile in St Helena, his remains were brought back to France in 1840 and were buried in the royal chapel of Les Invalides, alongside his brothers Jerome and Joseph. A hundred years later in 1940, the remains of his son Franz, once Napoleon II, who had died rather prosaically of influenza in Austria, were sent back to Les Invalides by no less a menace than Adolf Hitler. Franz’s heart and intestines, macabrely, were kept back as souvenirs in Austria.

There is a watchful silence as I walk the immense boulevard that leads through Les Invalides towards the river Seine. There is a palpable sense of a gathering vigil for the approaching winter. The tourists have left, and the kinetic pulse of the city has slowed down. The trees are holding on to the last of their golden leaves and behind the darkened buildings, the iconic silhouette of the Tour Eiffel glitters with a crown of perkily festive lights. It seems unimaginable to contemplate the history of violence and bloodshed that has surged and ebbed below these very streets where today a jaunty Yorkshire terrier patters by on his evening walk. Entire generations of young people sacrificed to the ambitions of a few men, one of whom dominates the cultural and historical memory of France, and indeed the world—Napoleon.

Napoleon is very much flavour of the month these days, the subject of high-voltage discussions in historical circles as well as variously piqued, amused or incandescent rants in French broadsheets. The reason for the sudden ubiquity of the French Emperor is British director Ridley Scott’s new movie, Napoleon, about the Emperor’s rise to power. In podcasts and YouTube talks, scholars debate the extent of inaccuracies in the movie and the relative egregiousness of its many historical failings. The overall tone is genteel—these are academics after all—but there is an unexpectedly febrile quality to these discussions. Historians have not had so much fun since Mel Gibson simultaneously wore a kilt and painted his face blue to represent 13th-century Scots hero William Wallace in Braveheart, thereby conflating historical epochs which were separated by a thousand years. In return Ridley Scott has advised historians, succinctly, “to get a life”.

As we live in canny commercial times, the launch of Napoleon was preceded by an auction in Paris of some of the Emperor’s personal belongings, the sale prices making global headlines. Napoleon’s hat, especially, sold for a record-breaking 1.9 million euros. Napoleon, like his officers, wore a two-cornered ‘bicorne’ beaver felt hat. So that he would always be instantly recognised on the battlefield, however, Napoleon wore his hat sideways, parallel to his shoulders, while his officers angled their hats forwards. This eccentric headwear, perhaps the single least flattering item of clothing ever created by a French person, be­came something of a hallmark of Napoleon’s.

In the 1980s, French intellectual Pierre Nora began his seminal work to identify specific sites and places in France that were saturated with historical significance in the national consciousness. Sites where the past was remembered, and there­fore validated, through the lens of history. Nora was thus attempting to recreate a history of France through an inventory of places which collective memory had decided were of historical significance. These sites were called the lieux de mem­oires, or places in which memory resided. But each lieu de memoire was necessarily echoed by its obverse, a lieu d’oubli, a place where memory failed.

So, if Les Invalides is a powerfully resonant lieu de memoire for French his­tory of the 18th century and Napoleon in particular, then all the way across the globe and in the glittering Caribbean sea is its exact corollary—a lieu d’oubli, where memory faded. For in that faraway sea is an island which was part of the French empire in the 18th century. St Domingue, later renamed Haiti, was the jewel in the soon-to-be toppled French crown. Today, tragically, Haiti is synonymous with crushing poverty and catastrophic natural disasters but in the 18th century it was called the ‘Pearl of the Antilles’. Haiti was quite sim­ply the most profitable slave colony in the world at the time, generating 80 per cent of France’s commerce through the export of sugar, primarily, but also coffee, indigo, cotton and cocoa. This colossal fortune was generated through the brutality of the slave plantations, off the blood, tears and sweat of half a million slaves of African descent.

As France convulsed through the bloody events of the French Revolution in the 1790s, the heady Republican ideals of liber­ty, equality and fraternity for all men electrified the enslaved in that distant corner of France in Haiti. Leading the charge for freedom in the Caribbean was an unprepossessing 50-year-old Black man with a luminous destiny. Born enslaved in Haiti and then emancipated as an adult, Toussaint Louverture proved to be a fiercely intelligent and impassioned orator, and claimed for himself and all his fellow en­slaved workers the ideals of the French revo­lution. “I was born a slave,” he thundered, “but nature gave me the soul of a free man.” A guerrilla warrior of genius, a charismatic leader who spun around himself a cloak of mystery and invincibility, and a horseman beyond compare, Toussaint Louverture led a slave army in 1791 and brought about what would be the only successful slave revolt in the world. In 1794 the revolutionary government of France abol­ished slavery, and in 1801 Louverture declared himself governor for life of Haiti.

But by 1799 Napoleon had established him­self as First Consul of France, and he baulked at this challenge by a Black governor. There was also the prosaic but powerful need to reclaim the economic pros­perity that Haiti generated for France and so in 1802, Napoleon reinstated slavery in the French colonies and sent an enormous fleet to Haiti to restore law and or­der, and to deal with the menace of Louverture. Louverture was captured through treachery, and deported to France where he was imprisoned in a fort in the Jura mountains—a dismal and colourless place at the very centre of France, far away from the ocean and from the sunlight. He was kept in complete isolation and yet, heartbreakingly, Louverture admired Napoleon and believed in the ideals of the revo­lution. “I am one of your soldiers,” he appealed to Napoleon, asking for his freedom. “The first sol­dier of the Republic of Saint Domingue. I am today miserable, ruined, dishonoured and a victim of the services I rendered to France.” Napoleon, disdain­ful, never replied.

A guerrilla warrior, a charismatic leader and a horseman beyond compare, Toussaint Louverture led a slave army in 1791 and brought about what would be the only successful slave revolt in the world

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Less than a year into his incarceration Louverture was found slumped in his chair next to the fireplace, dead from the cold in his lonely, dank cell. In 1804 Haiti would gain its independence under the leadership of one of Louverture’s trusted lieutenants—Jean Jacques Dessalines. The following year, Haiti abolished the slave trade entirely, becoming the first coun­try in the world to do so. Dessalines would be cel­ebrated in Haiti for his role in its independence, andLouverturewouldbeslowlyforgotten. More perniciousstillisLouverture’scompleteabsence, not only in Ridley Scott’s epic, but in the general school curriculum in France today. As French children learn of the French Revolution and the ideals that proclaimed equality and freedom for all men, there is a disquieting silence about the man who so fiercely embodied these ideals him­self. Whoseinspiredleadershipeventuallyledto the Haitian Revolution and the founding of the first free Black Republic. Buried in the cold and dark earth of the Jura mountains, Louverture’s bones are an unpardonable lieu d’oubli.

IT IS ALMOST TOO LATE BY THE time my daughter and I enter a brasserie in the 7th district. It is 1.45 pm and the harried waiter looks at us askance and disapproving, lips pinched against the many sharp observa­tions he must hold back about such an un- Gallic time for lunch.

There are numerous, companionably clus­tered tables in the brasserie, buttressed by men finishing dessert and drinking red wine, on a weekday. In this atmosphere of hearty male conviviality, it is with some trepidation that we ask if there are any vegetarian options for my daughter. There are not. But she may have a dish of wild champignons, or mushrooms, since autumn is the season for foragers and their harvest of golden and russet-brown rumpled mushrooms. “Mais attention,” says the waiter, holding up a stern finger. “These mushrooms are in fact NOT girolles, as advertised in today’s menu, they are chanterelles,” he declares officiously, assuming that we possess an intimate and nu­anced knowledge of the difference between these species. “But they are still delicious,” he assures us, his stance unbending somewhat, perhaps worried we might clamber over the diners and out of the suffocatingly hot brasse­rie, mortally offended at not being served the desired species of fungi.

But we are not made of such sturdy stuff, my daughter and I. We tiptoe through the world on light feet, filled with self-doubt, endlessly constructing and dismantling the narratives the world offers us. Not for us, then, the vaulting self-confidence of Ridley Scott who, when questioned about the history books he read before filming Napoleon, replied that one book was more than enough. Not only do I find myself now judging straightforward narratives with a leery eye, but I also find I am increasingly drawn to counter-narratives—all the stories and voices that were banished from the mainstream sagas. Tender voices in minor keys, that get overwhelmed by the great crescendo of the vic­tors’ booming chorus. But not all counter-narratives are simply lost, like one would lose a set of keys, in a fit of absent-mindedness. Often this loss requires an act of wilful suppression, and of violent misremembering. And it is in this liminal space of breathy silences and scratchy babel that I learn of another lieu d’oubli associated with Napoleon, where a ‘foreign’ leader in a distant corner of the world was equally inspired by the same desire for freedom that drove Toussaint Louverture.

In the early summer of 1797 as Napoleon was sweeping through Europe, ex­traordinary scenes were being played out amidst the whitewashed palaces and lush vegetation of Seringapatam, Tipu Sultan’s capital in Mysore. A motley crew of French sailors, traders and adventurers gathered in ragged ranks to salute the tricolour flag of the new French Republic. As a guard of honour reverentially carried the blue, white and red flag into the centre of the square, others set fire to the old ‘fleur-de-lys’ Royalist white flag of France, symbolically burning away the old order and loudly acclaiming the new Republic. Cannons and musket were fired to celebrate the occasion and a liberty tree was planted, topped by that other unlikely symbol of the French revolution, the red bonnet, or cap.

Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore, and his father Hyder Ali had been long-time al­lies of the French as they battled the growing aggression of the British East India Company (EIC). The only Indian leader to be kept reliably informed about devel­opments in Europe, Tipu Sultan understood that Britain’s great enemy France might be relied on to offer trained soldiers to an Indian power who was fighting to block the EIC’s voracious appetites. A decade earlier in 1788 Tipu Sultan had even sent an embassy of three Mysorean noblemen to parlay with King Louis XVI.

In 1797, therefore, Tipu Sultan had eagerly greeted the arrival of a Frenchman who proclaimed himself a Republican revolutionary, watching with interest as the rabble of French soldiers unfurled the new French flag in Seringapatam. With the EIC posturing with relentless violence at his borders, Tipu wrote with increasing desperation asking for help from the French governor of Mauritius, and from Napoleon himself. In 1798 Napoleon landed in Egypt, keen to follow in Alexander’s glorious footsteps and to try and blockade Britain’s profitable trade with India. From Egypt, Napoleon wrote airily to the Mysorean Sultan:

“You will have learnt about my arrival on the banks of the Red Sea, at the head of a large and invincible army, desirous of liberating you from the oppressive yolk of the British. I am keen to learn from you, via the Muscat and Mecca route, your political situation. In case you could send an intelligent person who had your full confidence, to the Suez or to Cairo, who speak with me.”

In the end, however, Napoleon was rather more keen to infuriate his loathed British enemies than to help his Mysorean ally. Scholars believe that he always meant for this letter to be intercepted by the British, seeding chaos in their plans. No gallant French warships would land on Mysore’s shores, no revolutionary soldiers would be dispatched to this steadfast ally of France. Instead, the threat of Napoleon would be used as justification by the EIC to attack Tipu, and he would be finally killed, defending his city in 1799. Documents in Seringapatam would be forged by the British to claim a non-existent ‘Jacobite’ link between Tipu and France, and the French tricolour flag that had caused such devasta­tion for the Sultan was captured and presented to King George III. Tipu Sultan and Seringapatam would become lieux d’oublis twice over, long forgotten by the French, and increasingly ignored in India.

On my last day in Paris the neighbour’s enormous cat dances up the stairwell on si­lent pads to survey my actions and I hunker down to look into his alien green eyes. I try to read his expression but he is a conjuring, unknowable and wild. With a slight flick of his tail I am dismissed, and I know it is time to leave. The sound of the ancient wrought-iron lift door clangs shut behind me as I step out into the rain-washed streets. A plane’s contrail is a clean white scar against the cold blue fabric of the sky. That blue fabric is a mi­rage, however, existing to shield our piteous human comprehension from the universe of monstrous, fiery giants that swirl in that in­finite space beyond. A new NASA telescope has been sending images of deep space back to earth, profoundly altering our notions of time and space. Previously blank areas in space have now been shown to be the starlit realm of savage gods- birthing stars and blasting suns. Far beyond the gore and grime of our bloody earthly battles, there are counter-narratives waiting to be discovered in astral song.

And so I comfort myself with the words of Mandarin poet Li Bai, as translated by Vikram Seth, “and there are other earths and skies than these”.

About The Author

Ira Mukhoty

Ira Mukhoty is the author of three books on narrative history and one novel

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