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Bonapartists in the Borderlands
French Exiles and Refugees on the Gulf Coast, 1815-1835
By Rafe Blaufarb The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2005 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8261-2
CHAPTER 1
The New Atlantic France
The news spread quickly across New York City that August morning in 1815: the distinguished Frenchman who had just disembarked from the Commerce after a month long Atlantic crossing was Lazare Carnot. The military engineer who, as a member of the Committee of Public Safety, had saved revolutionary France from the monarchical armies of Europe was a hero to republicans the world over. But as admiring Americans flocked to the boardinghouse where the illustrious arrival had taken rooms, it became clear that a mistake had been made. The traveler was not Carnot, but rather a figure who, while less impressive for his own accomplishments, was more relevant to the political realities of the day: Joseph Bonaparte, elder brother of Napoleon and former king of Spain from 1807 to 1814 when that country had been occupied by French arms.
Joseph was not the only member of his family to consider fleeing to America after Waterloo. Within days of Napoleon's defeat, four of the five Bonaparte brothers met outside Paris and decided to seek refuge in the United States, one of the few republics in the world. Lucien, Napoleon's independent-minded younger brother, initially set out for the Channel port of Boulogne, but abruptly doubled back and headed south toward Italy. Arrested and imprisoned in Turin, he was released only at the request of the pope who allowed him to live comfortably (albeit under Vatican surveillance) in Rome. Jerome, former king of Westphalia, first made for an Atlantic port but, on being recognized, returned to Paris where he hid in the house of a Corsican shoemaker. Once discovered, he was allowed to escape to Switzerland by a Bourbon government eager to avoid the tumult of a public trial. From there he continued to Wurtemburg to join his wife, Catherine, daughter of the local duke, but was imprisoned by his father-in-law in a crude attempt to pressure the couple into a divorce. Napoleon himself reached the port of Rochefort where, after much hesitation, he rejected his retainers' pleas that he sneak past the British blockade and sail for America. Instead, he decided to throw himself on the mercy of England and its much-vaunted legal protections. This proved a mistake for, once he was on board the English warship Bellerophon, the cabinet of Saint-James decided to incarcerate him on the remote island of Saint Helena. He died there in 1821.
Of all the Bonapartes, only Joseph made it to America. With evident relief the former king set aside his public political role to embrace the simpler life of a country gentleman. Facilitating his transformation was the large fortune he had brought with him into exile, as well as the good offices of Stephen Girard, the merchant and banker reputed to be the wealthiest man in the United States. With Girard's help, Joseph transferred his assets into real estate and government bonds and constructed a magnificent country seat for himself near Bordentown, New Jersey. Here Joseph lived a "markedly reserved life" — so reserved, in fact, that all the French consul in New York City could report in early 1816 was that he occasionally "gives small dinner parties." Known to some as the Count de Survilliers (after one of his estates in France), to others as "that peaceable gentleman," and to others still as simply "Mr. Bonaparte," Joseph deserved the title bestowed on him by a recent biographer, "the gentle Bonaparte."
Although he was the only Bonaparte to make it to the United States, other French refugees — Bonapartists and revolutionaries, military officers hounded from the army for their political views or discouraged by the prospect of stagnation in peacetime, young men with a taste for adventure born a few years too late, and poor emigrants in search of economic opportunity — soon joined Joseph in America. Upon their arrival, these voluntary and involuntary exiles encountered a large community of fellow expatriates, composed overwhelmingly of refugees from the slave revolt of the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, that had preceded them and established themselves in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and other cities. The two groups gravitated toward one another, forming what the French ambassador to the United States Jean-Guillaume Hyde de Neuville (a noble who had himself escaped the Revolution by fleeing to America) dubbed the "New Atlantic France."
Bourbon Restoration and Reaction
The first Bonapartist emigrants to follow Joseph to America were political exiles. During the First Restoration (April 1814–February 1815), the Bourbons had extended a remarkable degree of clemency to the Bonapartist establishment, allowing most administrative and military officials to keep their positions. Their generosity was repaid with betrayal when Napoleon returned to France from his Elban exile, and the Bonapartists greeted him with open arms. Thus, after Waterloo and Napoleon's final abdication, the Bourbons were understandably less forgiving. They were particularly implacable toward those who had directly aided Napoleon's return or had accepted positions in his hundred-day regime. An ordinance of proscription issued on 24 July 1815 targeted some of Napoleon's most devoted military and political servants. Drafted by Joseph Fouché, the slippery Napoleonic minister of police who had jumped the Bonapartist ship just in time to receive a position in the Bourbon government, the lengthy initial list was pared down as powerful royalist figures sought to remove the names of their compromised protégés. In the end, the definitive ordinance named only fifty-seven individuals. A law passed six months later, on 12 January 1816, by the first elected legislative assembly of the restored monarchy completed the legal framework of Bourbon retribution. It swelled the ranks of exiles by banishing the regicides (deputies to the National Convention who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI in 1793), those individuals who had already been sentenced to internal exile by the first ordinance of proscription, and all members of the Bonaparte family. These official exiles, essentially military men and politicians, would furnish the most famous names associated with the Vine and Olive colony.
Whether these measures were too strict or too lax is (and was at the time) a matter of debate. What is clear is that the repression would have been harsher had the government — led by the relatively moderate prime minister Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, Duke de Richelieu — not tempered the vengeful zeal of the legislature, which wanted to add entire categories of people to the proscription lists. One advocate of retribution, the Count de la Bourdonnaye, urged his fellow legislators to "use irons, executioners, and torture" against the revolutionaries and Bonapartists. "Death, and only death," he thundered, "can frighten their accomplices and put an end to their plots. ... We must be ready to spill a few drops of blood in order to avoid having it run in torrents."
La Bourdonnaye's fear that the people of France would take matters into their own hands if they did not see the government meting out justice were not groundless. In the months preceding the convocation of the legislature in early October 1815, large parts of the country — especially in the south — had been gripped by a wave of violent popular reaction known as the White Terror. The trouble began in Marseille when the sudden withdrawal of the Bonapartist commander on the night of 24 June 1815 sparked two days of royalist score-settling in which about 250 people were killed or wounded and 200 arbitrarily imprisoned. From there, local royalists marched on nearby Toulon, which they similarly "liberated": more than 800 people were imprisoned and at least as many fled the city. In the département of the Gard, home to one of the greatest concentrations of Calvinists in France, the collapse of Napoleon's hundred-day regime reawakened longstanding Catholic hostility toward their Protestant neighbors, hostility that was expressed in months of lynching, arbitrary imprisonment, destruction of property, and mass flight. Equally violent (although nonsectarian) disturbances shook the other major cities of the South: Lyon, Avignon, and Toulouse. In the last-named city, a crowd publicly murdered the king's local military commander, a moderate but sincere royalist, for attempting to restrain the ultraroyalist militia. By revealing the popular violence of the White Terror as a threat to not only former revolutionaries and Bonapartists but also the government's authority, this episode helped pave the way for a more systematic approach to punishing the supposed crimes of the revolutionary past.
To rein in popular violence, the legislature passed a series of laws — allowing arrest without trial, prohibiting seditious speech, and reestablishing the quasi-military provost courts — that were collectively intended to form the armature of a second (this time legal) White Terror. Between July 1815 and June 1816, approximately six thousand people were convicted of political crimes. Even more far-reaching were the purges that took place at all levels of the central and local administration. Mindful of the disastrous consequences of having left intact the imperial bureaucracy after Napoleon's first abdication in 1814, the Bourbons were in no mood to repeat the experience. Although no exact figures are available, it has been estimated that between fifty thousand and eighty thousand government employees were removed from their positions. These men — together with those whose names were included in the proscription lists, those who feared popular vengeance, and others repelled by the prospect of life under monarchy — swelled the ranks of potential emigrants and exiles.
Of the many state institutions subjected to royalist scrutiny during the first years of the Restoration, none received greater attention than the army. It was widely believed in royalist circles that Napoleon's return to power in 1815 was the result of a military conspiracy. Indeed, certain generals — including three who would later join the Vine and Olive colony (the brothers Henri and Charles Lallemand and Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes) — had concocted plans to lead their troops in rebellion if Napoleon attempted to recover his throne. Upon learning of his return, they set these plans in motion. But the plot failed miserably. In the end, it was not the conspiracy but rather the devotion the former emperor still inspired in the troops sent to arrest him that brought him to power once again.
After Waterloo restored his throne, Louis XVIII took immediate steps to ensure the loyalty of the army. The war ministry wasted no time in ordering a purge of its leadership. In October 1815 a military commission was convened to examine the political tendencies of the entire officer corps and, with help from reliable local officials, classify each one according to his political sentiment. While of unprecedented scope and rigor, the purge of politically suspect officers was just one facet of the Restoration's new military policy. The other measures adopted — including the canceling of advancement and decorations bestowed during the Hundred Days, the drastic downsizing of the army, and the replacement of veteran imperial officers with royalist favorites — probably did even more damage to the army's morale. Approximately twenty thousand officers were removed from active service and placed on half-pay between September 1815 and December 1816. The literary image of the demisoldes (half-pay officers) as a restless crowd of grumblers, barely disguised Bonapartists, and outright plotters greatly exaggerates the degree of their opposition to the Bourbon regime (most were perfectly willing to become royalists in order to get their jobs back); nonetheless they provided a solid cadre of malcontents. Another group augmented the pool of potential plotters and adventurers: young men whose boyhood dreams of playing an active part in the Napoleonic legend were dashed with Waterloo. These were the men described by one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, as "that generation born with the century and suckled on the dispatches of the Emperor, who saw a naked blade ever present before their eyes — but became ready to grasp it only at the very moment when France returned it to the scabbard of the Bourbons."
For men like these — soldiers of the empire whose careers had been prematurely ended by the Restoration and young men disappointed in their dreams of martial glory — the prospect of service in foreign lands held great attraction. For despite the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (and their American offshoot, the War of 1812), the world of 1815 was by no means a peaceful place. Opportunities abounded for French soldiers in places like Persia and Egypt, countries eager to recast their armies along Western lines. Others preferred to pursue their profession in the cause of revolution. In 1820, for example, many lent their services to the new constitutionalist government of Spain. When Bourbon France invaded three years later to restore the absolutism of Ferdinand VII, its troops were opposed by other Frenchmen, organized in units with telling names like the "Liberal Foreign Legion" and the "Lancers of Napoleon II." The Greek insurrection, too, would attract its share of French veterans and adventurers. But by far the greatest opportunities after 1815 were to be found in the Western Hemisphere, in the maelstrom of the civil war between Spain and her colonies. French exiles and adventurers discerned especially promising possibilities in a distinctive theater of this multifaceted struggle, in the contested borderlands of North America, where local independence movements intersected with the territorial disputes of the United States and Spain to produce a "great game" no less intricate than its Central Asian equivalent.
The Coriolani of France
The first refugees to join Joseph in America were members of the Napoleonic political and military elite designated by the proscription ordinance of 24 July 1815. With few exceptions, they were insiders whose proximity to the regime and efforts to reestablish it after Napoleon's first abdication in 1814 marked them for retribution. Of the fifty-seven on the list, eleven would take part in the Vine and Olive venture. They included one marshal (Emmanuel de Grouchy), six generals (the Lallemand brothers, Lefebvre-Desnouettes, Bertrand Clausel, Dominique-Joseph-René Vandamme, and Antoine Rigau), two government officials (Pierre-François Réal and Jacques Garnier des Saintes), and two minor Bonapartists (the journalist Louis-Marie Dirat and Col. J. Jerome Cluis). After the passage of the law of 12 January 1816, they were joined by several former deputies to the National Convention, including two who would take part in Vine and Olive: Joseph Lakanal and Jean-Augustin Pénières-Delors.
Of all who were proscribed, the military men were the most desperate to leave France. The ordinance of 24 July 1815 had ordered their trial before military courts on the charge of having "betrayed the King," "attacked France and the government with arms in hand," and "seized power." Given the capital charges they faced and the nature of the tribunals designated to try them, the officers were afraid that if they delayed leaving France their lives would end before a firing squad. Anxious to avoid potentially embarrassing trials and executions of celebrated Napoleonic war heroes, the royal government did all it could to speed them on their way. The example of Marshal Ney, whose stubborn refusal to flee forced the reluctant Bourbons to put him to death, not only confirmed the worst fears of the proscribed officers but also induced others to leave France before any new measures of repression were enacted.
Another sentiment fueled the hostility of the officers to the Bourbon regime. With hardly an exception, they owed their elevated professional and social status to the meritocratic changes made by the Revolution and confirmed by Napoleon. Before 1789 all but fourth-generation nobles were essentially excluded from the officer corps. Aspirants who could not provide the required parchment proofs had to begin their military careers in the ranks. The Revolution changed all that. By abolishing the genealogical requirements that had previously kept the officer corps an aristocratic preserve, the National Assembly opened military careers to talent. This fundamental transformation — together with the opportunities for advancement generated by the emigration of thousands of noble officers, national military mobilization, and nearly twenty-five years of unrelenting warfare — allowed many young men of non-noble lineage to rise to the top of the military profession. With the consolidation of Napoleon's regime, their newly won professional standing received social reinforcement in the form of titles, offices, and land. Owing everything they had to the Revolution and Napoleon, they had everything to lose by the return of the Bourbons and their vengeful noble supporters, some of whom wanted to turn back the clock to the days of aristocratic predominance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bonapartists in the Borderlands by Rafe Blaufarb. Copyright © 2005 University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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