SYNOPSIS: War, Defeat and Nostalgia: France after Waterloo
The rhetoric and symbolism of Napoleon’s France were highly nationalistic. Imperial policy was dominated by a war that enabled the French to impose their administrative and judicial system across much of Europe, revelling in military glory and celebrating such warlike values as honour, chivalry and self-sacrifice. And when the Napoleonic Wars were finally over, the campaigns of the Grande Armée would remain a source of national pride, nurtured by the romantic spirit of the age. But the Wars had not ended well. After 1810 the victories that marked Napoleon’s early campaigns had dried up, and France had emerged defeated, facing an army of occupation and a huge bill in war reparations. More humiliating for those who had served the Empire, regime change followed, with the Bourbon monarchy imposed on France by Allies determined to prevent the emergence of an imperial dynasty. The peace terms signed at Vienna signalled the end not just for the Empire but for all ideas of a Greater France, including the revolutionary vision of the Grande Nation at the head of a federation of republics stretching across Europe. There was no way to hide the scale of this defeat from the French people. France was pushed back to her pre-revolutionary boundaries. The huge losses which the country had sustained appeared to have been in vain.
Not everyone was saddened by the news of Napoleon’s abdication and exile. His Empire, like the Revolution before it, had left France divided and scarred, and royalists did little to conceal their joy when the monarchy was restored. For much of the nineteenth century, indeed, there would be no agreed common polity, no reconciliation between legitimists and constitutionalists, republicans and those still pining for empire. Each had its own understanding of the interests of the nation. But for many who had lived through the imperial years, not least for the men who had served in Napoleon’s armies, defeat was seen as a tragic end to a great adventure in which they still took pride as they returned to an uncertain future in civilian life. For many reinsertion into civil society proved difficult, provoking resentment and regret, and their years in Napoleon’s service could seem like a golden age. Defeat did not destroy their vision of the French nation, or their faith in its army, and the hurt which they felt added a raw intensity to the wave of nostalgia that swept the country in the postwar years. It was an emotion to which the July Monarchy would appeal repeatedly in its search for popular support; and in 1851, just as the Allies had feared, another coup, fuelled by nostalgia for past glories, brought a new Emperor to power with his own imperial ambitions. Defeat, it seemed, had done little to tarnish Napoleon’s memory with the faithful or to dispel the country’s imperial ambitions. It had left a legacy of resentment, a desire for revenge that fuelled nationalist sentiment.
The interlinkage between war, nationalism and defeat is perhaps best incarnated in the memory of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. It was a brutal, bloody battle that caused a disproportionate loss of life and led to a humiliating surrender. Yet in French national memory it quickly assumed a quite different character, as a ‘glorious defeat’ that restored pride to the nation and generated a culture of defeat that would be central to the mythology of the Napoleonic Wars across the long nineteenth century. For the veterans awarded the médaille de Sainte-Hélène in 1857 as for the schoolchildren raised on the textbooks of the Third Republic, Waterloo would forever conjure up images of courage and self-sacrifice : the squares of the Imperial Guard, the apocryphal mot de Cambronne, the battle as it was immortalised by Chateaubriand and Balzac, Victor Hugo and Stendhal. As with Napoleon’s exile and death on St Helena, Waterloo evoked a strong emotional response, an upsurge of nationalism that had the pathos and poignancy of defeat at its heart.
Alan Forrest, Emeritus Professor of History, University of York, UK.
Email: alan.forrest@york.ac.uk