In Burke and the Pimpernel Affair, Burke visits the Empress Josephine at her home at Malmaison. Until I started researching the story, I had no idea that Malmaison still existed and is a short bus ride from the centre of Paris. Back then, I couldn’t go to see it because of covid. Fortunately, there is an excellent virtual tour available online but I really wanted to see the place for myself and last month I was finally able to visit.
It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored to show what it was like when Josephine lived there.
This was her bedroom and the bed where she died in May 1814. It’s rather splendid.
She actually had another, more liveable, bedroom for regular use but this one (designed in 1812 and restored by Napoleon III) was her “formal” bedroom. I wish I had seen it before I wrote the book because I’ve created an imaginary bedroom on the ground floor and this one would have been much more fun.
Visiting Malmaison gives you a strong idea of what Josephine was like. I enjoyed the billiards room.
Billiards rooms always seem a very masculine place (often explicitly so in English stately homes) but the billiards room at Malmaison was just across the hall from the dining room and apparently Josphine enjoyed a game of billiards after dinner.
Although Malmaison was her personal property, Napoleon spent a lot of time there and clearly had a hand in a lot of the décor. There is a recurring tent motif, with walls covered in fabric. The Emperor wanted to feel that he was out campaigning even when he was quietly at home with his wife. This was particularly obvious in the council chamber where he would often meet with his ministers.
Napoleon was a voracious reader — he even had a travelling library in the coach he took on campaign — and leading off the council chamber was a large library with a hidden staircase that led directly to his first floor apartment.
There are an awful lot paintings of Josephine on display in Malmaison. I notice her feet peeking out from under some of her dresses. I think she might have been especially proud of her feet which, judging from some shoes on display, were particularly small and narrow.
She was fond of shoes, buying an immense number. She spent out on dresses, too, though probably not very many like this one.
Josephine is buried with her children in a church nearby.
It’s such a shame that Ridley Scott’s terrible film of Napoleon’s life did not make more of Josephine. At one point, Napoleon appointed her Regent of France and she seems to have been a remarkable woman. It was a great pleasure to visit her home.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
If you want to explore more of the places Burke visited in the book, have a look at last week’s blog post: In Paris with James Burke.
I really enjoyed writing Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. It’s a straightforward spy story with more than a nod to Baroness Orczy’s hero, freeing French prisoners from Paris gaols.
Much of the story revolves round the Conciergerie which was the main prison during the Terror and which still housed prisoners under Napoleon. I’d often seen the building from outside without knowing what it was and I looked forward to visiting it while I was working on the book. Then came covid and visits to Paris were postponed indefinitely. Even when the city was open to tourists again, buildings like the Conciergerie remained closed and my research all had to be done online. Now I have finally made it over to France to see the places I had written about. It was great fun!
This is the Conciergerie.
It used to combine court buildings and a prison. The courts are still there but most of the cells have been lost in the extensive remodelling the place went through in the 19th century. Some remain as museum pieces.
The palace complex (the Conciergerie was originally a royal palace) includes the chapel of Sainte Chapelle. At the time Burke was there, it was used as a library. Now it has been restored as an astonishingly beautiful church.
The main entrance to the building was up a grand flight of steps which a wounded Burke flees down after the escape has not entirely gone to plan. Here it is.
Sadly, there was no car waiting to whisk him away.
It was lovely to visit the real site of Burke’s fictitious adventures. I went to Malmaison as well, but that will have to wait till next week.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
Will it be historically accurate? Even judging from the trailers (and Ridley Scott’s own comments) the answer to that is a very loud NO!
I’ve already written about Scott’s interesting reinvention of the Battle of the Pyramids. Even the few seconds shown in the trailer are horribly inaccurate. But I don’t really care. The film looks amazing. And, for those who want to know what the battle was really like, there’s always the description in Burke and the Bedouin. In the interests of historical education, I’m selling the book for just 99p/99 cents from 23 to 29 November. I’m spending £22 on my ticket to the movie: 99p to get it right seems a small price to pay.
Many Napoleonic wars enthusiasts dismiss Napoleon as a tyrannical megalomaniac who was good for nothing but war and who achieved little that benefitted France. This ignores the introduction of the prefecture system which enabled effective government across the whole country, his reform of the civil legal code which has a significant impact on legal principles across Europe even today, and his enthusiastic support of technical improvements across a range of scientific endeavours.
I’m writing this now because I have been reading Valerie Poore’s excellent blog about barge life in the Netherlands. She’s recently been writing about the history of some of the canals on the French-Belgian border and Napoleon’s name comes up time and time again. It was Napoleon who pushed for the Canal de Saint Quentin to be finished, a project that connected Paris by water to the coalfields of Belgium. It was originally conceived in the 1730s but abandoned due to other political priorities. Napoleon resurrected the scheme in 1801 and, with his drive and support, it was opened in 1810.
The Canal de Saint Quentin was just part of Napoleon’s vision for expanding the canal networks that linked France with its neighbours. In 1806 he gave orders to build the Canal de la Sensée (originally Censée) to link the Scarpe River and the Escaut River (English: Scheldt). Work didn’t start, though, until 1819, long after his defeat at Waterloo. It was open to navigation in 1820 and is still a working canal today.
This reminded me that when Napoleon invaded Egypt, in part to provide an overland route for his armies to march to India, he considered the idea of building a canal to link the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Suez. He had his surveyor, Jacques-Marie Le Pere carry out a survey on the feasibility of excavating a canal north from Suez. Unfortunately, attacks from Bedouin combined with extremes of temperature and vicious dust storms meant that his findings were false. He concluded that the Red Sea was almost 33 feet higher than the Mediterranean and that any attempt to link the two would lead to massive flooding. Only later was his error detected. The sea levels were in fact almost the same and just over 50 years later the Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was to start construction of the modern canal. The historian Paul Strathern claims, though, that “the modern inauguration of this project, and the French involvement in it, certainly originated with Napoleon.”
It wasn’t just canals that Napoleon was enthusiastic about. Like all great generals going back to the time of the ancient Persians, he recognised the importance of roads in moving troops around his growing empire. Military roads were built connecting France to Germany, Italy, Spain and so on. In Croatia, the road known as ‘Napoleon’s Road’ or the ‘French Road’ was built primarily thanks to Napoleon’s military commander and duke of Dubrovnik, August Marmont. The 61km road extends from the south-east of Orebić to the north-west of the peninsula. Communication axes were an absolute political priority for Napoleon. Natural boundaries, such as the Alps between France and Italy, were traversed using post stations that allowed mail transit from one side to the other.
Within France, roads linked Paris to the regions, consolidating the capital’s grip on the provinces.
Napoleon’s enthusiasm for construction projects didn’t stop at roads and canals. He identified the lack of a proper sewage system as one of Paris’s main problems and, under his rule, the first vaulted sewer network was built. It was only 30 km long, but it marked a major step forward in the disposal of Paris’s waste and he regarded it as the most important thing he did for the city. The sewers followed the pattern of the streets above and were labelled with street names so you could and still can navigate the city as straightforwardly underground as above. Here’s part of it, which I photographed on a fascinating underground adventure.
So besides bringing years of war, economic turmoil and political repression to virtually all of continental Europe, what did Napoleon do for us? The answer is: more than you think.
Paul Strathern (2008) Napoleon in Egypt Vintage Books: London
Europeana Napoleon and urbanism in the 19th century: Protecting oneself https://www.europeana.eu/en/exhibitions/napoleon-and-urbanism-in-the-19th-century/protecting-oneself-destruction-and-reconstruction-of-the-city
Last week was the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile back in 1798. Nowadays we associate Nelson so firmly with Trafalgar that his other victories can be overlooked. Back in the early 19th century, though, the Nile featured prominently on memorials like this one at Greenwich.
Memorial Arch to Nelson at Greenwich HospitalDetail of cherub on arch
As with many battles, the name isn’t geographically accurate. The battle of the Nile didn’t actually take place at the Nile but at Abū Qīr Bay near Alexandria. Napoleon had invaded Egypt, his troops travelling in an enormous French fleet. After the troops had been successfully landed, his warships remained on the Egyptian coast ready to protect his lines of supply. They moored near the shore in the shelter of the bay.
Conventionally, naval battles were fought broadside to broadside, one ship against another. The French fleet was immensely strong. L’Orient, the French flagship mounted 118 guns. The French anchorage meant that the ships’ broadsides were facing out to sea, allowing an enormous concentration of fire to be brought to bear on any force attacking from the Mediterranean.
The British fleet that discovered the French lying at anchor was, on paper, vastly inferior. However, the British realised that the French had anchored slightly too far out into the open sea, allowing a channel between their line and the shore. The British split their force, some ships sailing between the French and the shore while others sailed between the shore and the open sea. With an onshore wind, the French were unable to manoeuvre away from their anchorage and the British sailed slowly down the line, each French ship being engaged one after the other by at least two British ships firing simultaneously from both sides.
The tactic was overwhelmingly successful. Of the 13 French ships of the line, nine were captured and two destroyed. No British ships were lost.
The most dramatic moment of the battle was the loss of L’Orient which caught fire and exploded when the flames spread to the powder magazine. The Captain’s young son had been ordered by his father to stand at his position until his father told him to move. His father having died, the son is said to have remained on deck and died. His death is commemorated in the poem, Casabianca:
The boy stood on the burning deck Whence all but he had fled.
Battle of the Nile, August 1st 1798 at 10 pm, by Thomas Luny
After the battle, the British had complete naval dominance in the Mediterranean. With his lines of supply cut off, Napoleon’s plans to use Egypt as a jumping off point for further invasions were in disarray. Napoleon fled back to France the following year and the French army lingered on in Egypt until surrendering to the British in 1801.
Burke and the Bedouin
The Battle of the Nile is the climax of Burke and the Bedouin. William Brown is on board, the Orion, one of the British ships, and witnesses L’Orient’s sinking.
“It’s the Orient… The Orient is ablaze… The Orient is sinking.”
An officer appeared. “All hands on deck!”
Confused, William joined the procession of seamen clambering onto the deck. The night was still warm, but after the atmosphere of the gun deck, it was bliss to breathe fresh air.
Out here, the view was dominated by the blaze from the Orient. Sales and rigging were well alight and the spars were dropping onto the deck. Flames could be seen running along the joints between her timbers, where they had been sealed with tar. Here and there, the fire had spread to the timbers themselves. Against the light, the crew could be seen desperately throwing water onto the fire, but many had clearly already given up hope and were shimmying down ropes to escape into the sea.
“Stop gawping! Start dousing the deck.”
Buckets of water appeared, passed hand-to-hand up ship from the bilges or hauled to the deck from the sea below. While most of the men from the gun deck poured the water over the timbers at their feet, the crew who had been manning the sails aloft hauled buckets from the deck and soaked the canvas and ropes.
William could not understand the reason for this frantic activity, but it became all too clear after they had been at work for only a few minutes.
William had his back to the Orient when it happened. The night was lit up with a brilliant flash of light and, while his brain was still trying to comprehend what he had seen, the noise of the explosion rolled across the ship. William felt himself pushed forward by the force of the blast.
“Get down!”
William fell to the deck, along with the rest of the crew.
Debris from the wreck flew across the ship. Pieces of hot metal scoured tracks in Saumarez’s immaculate deck. Pieces of the Orient‘s hull – two yards long and three feet thick – were hurled at the Orion as if they weighed no more than pieces of paper. There was other debris too – things William did not want to look at too closely. Most of the bodies were in pieces too small to be recognised as human, but William saw what was clearly an arm, the fist still clenched, although whatever it had been holding was lost somewhere in the Mediterranean.
Like all the Burke books, Burke and the Bedouin is first and foremost a spy story. But I wanted to describe one of Nelson’s greatest victories for a generation that has no longer grown up with the tale. There are French spies and a beautiful woman and midnight gallops across the desert, but the story ends with the historical reality of the Battle of the Nile and the end of Napoleon’s dreams of conquest in the east.
Header picture
The picture at the top of the page is ‘The Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798‘ by Nicholas Pocock.
