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Sir Brian Unwin studied at the Universities of Oxford and Yale. After a career in the Civil Service, he became President of the European Investment Bank. He has a long-standing interest in European History and is the author of Terrible Exile:The Last Days of Napoleon on St Helena (I.B.Tauris), which was shortlisted for the Fondation Napoléon History Prize.
‘Paris and London, during the tumultuous years of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, are the background for a linked biography of two remarkable diarists, Fanny Burney and Adèle de Boigne. Brian Unwin skilfully interweaves their stories, drawing on their journals to give a fascinating picture, not only of their private dramas, but of many of the leading figures of the age.’ Linda Kelly, author of Holland House
PR AISE FOR TER R IBLE EXILE : The Last Days of Napoleon on St Helena ‘Unwin evokes, in poignant detail, the idle years of exile, the quarrels, and the intrigues.’ – Michael Binyon, The Times ‘Unwin has written a marvellous account of this extraordinary drama, beautifully illustrated, graphic, well paced, and garnished with first-hand knowledge of St Helena.’ – Brian Holden Reid, TLS ‘For too long we have blindly accepted Napoleon’s own account of the horrors of his exile on St Helena – “the accursed rock”, as he called it – but with Brian Unwin’s well-researched and very well-written investigation into the truth, we now see that his captors have a fascinating tale to tell too.’ – Andrew Roberts
Cover images: Fanny Burney by Edward Francisco Burney © National Portrait Gallery, London; Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne by Jean-Baptiste Isabey © Musées de Chambéry_Photo D. GOURBIN
Fanny Burney and Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne, were two of the most remarkable female writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: one a famous novelist, the other an aristocrat from one of France’s most ancient families. This was the tumultuous era which saw the French Revolution, the Napoleonic years and the July 1830 Revolution in France; and in England the ‘madness’ of George III and the extravagant Regency period. Fanny and Adèle were similarly strong characters – both were fiercely intelligent and closely engaged with the social and political issues of the day – but came from remarkably different backgrounds. Whilst Adèle was born into the French aristocracy – and was raised at Versailles – Fanny came from a rather less auspicious, but highly cultured, family and made her name as one of the best-selling novelists of the day. Both women used memoirs, journals and diaries to document their lives in the upper echelons of society in England and France, commenting with scintillating wit and waspish observation on their encounters with many of the great figures of the day – including Napoleon, Wellington, Talleyrand, Castlereagh, Chateaubriand, Dr Johnson, David Garrick, Madame de Stael and both the French and British Royal families. Although the two women lived for significant periods in each other’s country (mainly in Paris and in London) and inhabited the same social circles, surprisingly they never met in person. Yet they both encountered the same people and commented on the same events. Through the observations of these immensely well-connected and brilliant writers, Brian Unwin provides a fresh and fascinating insight into some of the principal events and persons of one of the most seminal and turbulent periods of modern European history.
www.ibtauris.com
A Tale in Two Cities Fa n n y B u r n e y a n d Adèle, Comtesse de Boigne
Brian Unwin
Published in 2014 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright Š 2014 Brian Unwin The right of Brian Unwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 78076 784 0 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Set in Arno Pro by Tetragon, London Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB
Contents • List of Illustrations vii Preface xi Dictionary of Principal Characters xv Introduction 3 1 Fanny 7 2 Adèle 39 3 Napoleon 71 4 Wellington 91 5 Kings & Queens 111 6 Actors, Artists & Intellectuals 143 7 Views across the Channel 177 8 Blood & Death 195 9 Fanny & Adèle: a Comparison 219 Epilogue 237 Notes 241 Select Bibliography 251 Index 253
Introduction
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his book is a story, largely told in their own words, about the lives and experiences of two remarkable women who lived in the second half of the eighteenth, and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, which was by any standards a remarkable period of European history. In Napoleon’s Master, a biography of the great diplomat and statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, David Lawday called it ‘the most pulse-racing age in Europe’s history’.1 The women in question are Frances Burney, later Mme d’Arblay, to be known here simply as Fanny; and Adèle d’Osmond, later la Comtesse de Boigne, but to be called here just Adèle. Their tale is of two countries, England and France, at war for much of the period; of two great cities, London and Paris, in which both of them lived for long periods; and of many of the events, great and small, and people, famous and less-well-known, that helped to shape that dramatic era. During her lifetime, Fanny was better known as a novelist, but it is to her diaries and journals, started when she was only a child, that we have recourse in this book. Adèle had no pretensions to being an author or historian and only started writing seriously in her fifties out of a sense of duty
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to posterity, but once started, she never stopped, and her memoirs are a brilliant record of the age. It is sad that, so far as we know, Fanny and Adèle never met each other. But their exceptionally long lives were linked by many events and coincidences. Brought up in a thoroughly English household, Fanny married a Frenchman, whom she met when he was one of a group of exiled French aristocrats – mostly well-known to Adèle – who sought refuge from the Revolution in the leafy tranquillity of Juniper Hall in Surrey in early 1793. Among them were the celebrated Mme de Staël and the great Talleyrand himself, tales of whom fill many pages of both our authors’ diaries and memoirs. Adèle in turn married in London – at the same Sardinian embassy chapel at which Fanny and her husband had undergone a Catholic marriage ceremony some years earlier – a rich and much older French general, who had obtained British citizenship. Through these and other circumstances, they came to meet, observe and write about some of the most influential figures of their time, many of whom they each knew, some intimately, both at the same and at different times. They ranged from the great captains, such as Napoleon and Wellington, who had a profound impact on their lives and whom they both saw at close quarters in war and in peace, to the respective English and French monarchies and the leading artists and intellectuals of their day, such as Dr Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Mmes de Staël and Récamier, Jacques-Louis David, and the writer and would-be statesman François-René Chateaubriand. What an eventful period it was. The greatest event of the time was, of course, the French Revolution, and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that followed it. They not only shattered the peace of Europe, causing massive loss of life and acute economic strains (it has been estimated that over 2 million people died as a result of Napoleon’s adventures), but also spread the disturbing rights-of-man gospel like a bush fire across the rest of Europe, awakening political consciousness everywhere. For Adèle personally, the Revolution meant desperate flight from France, just in time, followed by many years in exile – mostly in London – until Napoleon seized power, initially as first consul, and then as emperor, and it was safe to return to Paris to live in uneasy compromise with his regime. For Fanny, the influx of aristocratic refugees from France created her first links with Adèle’s world, and, through her marriage to Alexandre d’Arblay, led to her own subsequent decade of virtual exile as an alien with him in Paris, while their two countries remained at war. This in turn culminated in her flight to Brussels during
Introduction
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the Hundred Days and a time of agonizing fear and uncertainty until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, when she was finally able to return to England with her sick and wounded husband. Fanny’s life after Waterloo was much less eventful than her pre-marriage days when she had served her five years’ hard service at court and, through her father and Mrs Thrale’s Streatham circle, associated with the cream of London’s intellectual and cultural elite, including Dr Johnson, and gained fame as a tyro novelist. She continued to write and edit, though mainly now her own journals and her father’s memoirs, and occasionally renewed her contacts with the royal family. But she was more concerned with domestic affairs, and her later years were saddened by the deaths of those dearest to her, including her husband in 1818 and her only son, Alexander, three years before her own death in 1840. For Adèle, however, the end of Napoleon was the beginning of an active, new political and social life. After three years in London, supporting her ambassador father, she was a regular presence at the restored Bourbon Court; played an important personal part in putting the Bourgeois King, Louis-Philippe, on the throne in 1830; stayed close to him and his queen, her dear friend Marie-Amélie; and remained an influential figure in politics and in her salon, until she withdrew to end her days quietly in the country after the fall of Louis-Philippe in 1848. It is the vividness and immediacy of the pictures they paint, and the perspective they give us on both the countries in which they lived, that make their journals and memoirs so fascinating. Fanny holds up a mirror to the fashionable London intellectual life of the late eighteenth century, to the Hanoverian court under George III and the Prince Regent, and later to imperial Paris under Napoleon, whom we see reviewing his troops on the Tuileries parade ground. Adèle takes us inside Versailles under the Ancien Régime, to London during her exile years, to occupied Paris and London again after Waterloo, and into the streets and over the barricades during the 1830 revolution. Fanny gives us her impressions of Paris as a city – generally unfavourable compared with London – but she is much less interested in political affairs than Adèle who, despite her denials, was a political animal to the core. Adèle’s comments on post-Waterloo England are especially interesting. The cost to both countries of Napoleon’s adventures had been enormous. Despite the many administrative, legal and other reforms that he had introduced, and the booty and tribute he had seized from conquered countries, France was drained
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of manpower and resources. Her economy was increasingly crippled as the blockade of British commerce, the so-called ‘Continental System’, backfired as a result of the stranglehold on French trade by the dominant Royal Navy, which had destroyed the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. England, whose population was only about a third of the 30 million or so of France at the beginning of the wars, and had started the conflict with a standing army of only some 45,000 men to face the imminent threat of invasion, had also suffered severe financial strain as it subsidized successive allied coalitions and was the first to feel obliged to introduce an income tax. But by virtue of the developing industrial revolution, accelerated investment in transport infrastructure and a rate of growth in agricultural productivity estimated to be more then two and a half times greater than that of France, it survived the wars in better economic shape and achieved a general level of prosperity unrivalled by France or other Continental countries until the end of the nineteenth century. It also, by a gradual process of electoral and other reforms, largely managed to escape the extreme political disturbances that characterized France and swept through many other areas of Europe, culminating in the Year of Revolutions in 1848. When Adèle returned with her father to London in 1816 after a long absence, she had lost what she had earlier called her anglomania. But, although she was critical of the polluted quality of the air in London, which loomed over the city like a dirty, dark cloud, she was struck by the general prosperity of the country – the well-maintained roads, the excellent state of housing, the well-dressed children outside their neat cottages in the countryside – and wondered aloud why France had lagged so far behind. In spite of her anger with the continued occupation of Paris by allied troops under their generalissimo, the Duke of Wellington, she also praised the English system of constitutional monarchy and the rule of law. Under the latter she believed the most humble country peasant had the same access to his legal rights as the local squire. Although this was a somewhat idealized view, coming from such an acute and intelligent observer it casts a fascinating light on how a war-weary and still socially and economically divided Britain was seen by a representative of her greatest traditional enemy at that time.