'The Secret War Against Napoleon: Britain's Assassination Plot on the French Emperor'

H-War Haynes on Clayton, 'The Secret War against Napoleon: Britain's Assassination Plot on the French Emperor'

Review published on Thursday, September 26, 2019

Tim Clayton. The Secret War against Napoleon: Britain's Assassination Plot on the French Emperor. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. Illustrations. 448 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-64313-057-6.

Reviewed by Christine Haynes (University of North Carolina at Charlotte)Published on H-War (September, 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53933

The role of spying and propaganda in war has received significant attention among academic and popular historians of the twentieth century. Until recently, however, the significance of such “dark business” (the original title of this book in Great Britain) has been overlooked in histories of the first “total” wars during the revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Building on work by Elizabeth Sparrow, Simon Burrows, and Stuart Semmel, among others, this new book by the author of more traditional histories of Trafalgar and Waterloo reconstructs the “secret war” orchestrated by the British government against Napoleon Bonaparte.[1] Developing out of research he conducted for an exhibit on Napoleon and the British at the British Museum in 2015, Tim Clayton asserts that the new kind of “total” warfare practiced by the French necessitated “an unprecedented ruthlessness whose full extent remains relatively unexplored and remarkably little known” (p. 9). In contrast to recent work on Britain in the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which details its administrative, financial, and industrial mobilization, this book emphasizes the political intrigue behind the scenes of the British war effort.[2]

Although it traces the pre- and post-history of the British “secret war” against Napoleon, the book focuses on the period between two government-sponsored assassination attempts against him: the machine infernale exploded by Pierre Robinault de Saint-Régent in the rue Saint-Nicaise on Christmas Eve in 1800 and the “Grand Conspiracy” involving French generals Jean-Charles Pichegru and Jean-Victor Moreau as well as numerous royalist and Chouan agents operating around Boulogne to restore the Bourbon monarchy in early 1804. During these three years, in spite of the Peace of Amiens, the British government financed an extensive propaganda campaign against Napoleon, thereby creating the “Black Legend” about him. Fueled by fear of invasion and revolution at home, the ministries of William Pitt and Henry Addington enlisted an army of French and British journalists, publishers, spies, and counterrevolutionaries under the direction of spymaster William Windham to undermine the government of the first consul. Recounting “a very modern story of secret committees, slush funds, assassination and black propaganda” in addition to safe houses and even invisible ink, Clayton asserts that it was British intransigence, not French aggression, that was responsible for the renewal of war after 1803 (p. 14). The British-sponsored virulent press campaign and foiled royalist plot of that year provoked Napoleon to order the assassination of the royal prince Duc d’Enghien as well as the execution of a number of the arrested plotters. This “dark business” also encouraged Napoleon to take the title of emperor, which in turn exacerbated tensions between France and Great Britain—and the rest of Europe. Ultimately, Clayton argues, the British campaign against the French

“tyrant” prolonged the wars for another decade, “with the ironic consequence that Britain itself stepped back many, many paces and was a much less liberal and attractive country in 1815 than it had been in 1789” (p. 347).

Clayton’s narrative of this story begins well, with a gripping account of the failed machine infernale plot to assassinate Napoleon on his way to the opera on Christmas Eve in 1800. In this first mass terrorist act, as Clayton terms it, the explosion could be heard across Paris. At least seven people were killed and twenty were seriously injured; the neighborhood was so badly damaged that within two years it was demolished. The book also illuminates the networks of agents and double agents—including women—operating on both sides of the English Channel during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the help of a number of portraits and a good map of their landing points and safe houses in northern France. In particular, it provides a detailed account of the organization of the assassination plot of early 1804, including the risky landing of royalist agents at the base of the highest cliffs in Europe, on the “Alabaster Coast” between Dieppe and Le Tréport (pp. 224-25).

Clayton also does an impressive job of exposing the role of the government in orchestrating the propaganda campaign against Napoleon by French émigré writers along with British journalists and publishers. Reminding us that “propaganda” derives from the Counter-Reformationcongregatio de propaganda fide (congregation for propagating the faith), he shows how in the context of the first “total” wars it took material form not just in pamphlets, newspapers, and books (the most important of which was The Revolutionary Plutarch [1804], a parody of Plutarch’s Lives [circa AD 96-98] that skewered French revolutionary heroes, including Napoleon) but also in songs, plays, prints, and even material objects, such as pottery (p. 11). Particularly interesting is his discussion of how this anti- revolutionary propaganda recycled tropes regarding the English Civil War, including the generals Oliver Cromwell and George Monck (used to symbolize Napoleon) and a pamphlet titledKilling No Murder (originally published in 1657 to justify the execution of Charles I and reprinted numerous times in the 1790s and early 1800s). In his discussion of this propaganda, which he deems more effective than previous scholars, such as Burrows or Semmel, Clayton is careful to trace the evolution of representations of Napoleon, from anti-Catholic hero and modern Alexander during his rise as a revolutionary general, through “savior of the world” during the Peace of Amiens, to brutal warrior (for example, at Jaffa) and Corsican “usurper.” Increasingly denigrated as “Little Boney,” Napoleon—like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette before him—was also attacked via sexual libel, which suggested alternately that he was infertile, homosexual, or insatiable. Together, these various strands of propaganda against Napoleon fueled the British war effort against France. As Clayton concludes, “Tory journalists had depicted Napoleon as the heir of atheist Jacobinism; Whigs saw him as the dictator who had betrayed the liberal aspirations of the revolution. The two strands fused in propaganda that was directed against Napoleon personally, inconsistent and all-embracing in its accusations, but effective in uniting Britons” (pp. 168-69).

Ultimately, though, this book falls short of its promise to uncover a “secret war” against Napoleon. While the narrative begins strong, it gets bogged down in its reconstruction of the events of 1801-4, especially the political intrigue surrounding the Peace of Amiens and the second plot to land royalist agents near Boulogne. Although it seems to be intended for a popular non-British audience, the book assumes significant knowledge of British political factions and leaders in this period. In general, despite a helpful “Cast of Characters” at the beginning, there are far too many names for the reader to keep track of. More significantly for the overall argument, a lack of evidence in government

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Haynes on Clayton, 'The Secret War against Napoleon: Britain's Assassination Plot on the French Emperor'. H-War. 09-26-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/4832567/haynes-clayton-secret-war-against-napoleon-britains-assassination Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-War records forces too much speculation on the part of the author, for instance, about the financing of royalist agents. For example, Clayton is unable to say whether one of the most important caricaturists of Napoleon, James Gillray, received money from the British government. And, regarding rumors that a key British-sponsored conspirator, a former French revolutionary named Méhée de la Touche, was a double agent, he is forced to conclude, “It is as difficult now as it was then to get to the truth” (p. 242). Moreover, to demonstrate the significance of the propaganda campaign against Napoleon in fueling the war, more evidence is needed of its effect on public opinion in Great Britain. To what extent did the British public endorse the “Black Legend” of Napoleon, and what role did this legend really play in mobilization for war against France after 1803? More research is needed to substantiate the author’s claim that the British “secret war” against Napoleon was critical to the renewal and extension of the official war.

Nonetheless, Clayton’s work does point to two relatively unexplored avenues of research on the role of Great Britain in the Napoleonic Wars: spying and propaganda. Going beyond previous work that has analyzed these techniques in terms of international intrigue or British politics, his synthesis of the two topics shows that they were instrumental to modern warfare as it developed in the age of Napoleon. In our current context of war on terror, it is a timely reminder that the use of espionage, conspiracy, and “fake news” in the interest of regime change is nothing new.

Notes

[1]. Elizabeth Sparrow, Secret Service: British Agents in France, 1792-1815 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999); Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792-1814 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2000); Simon Burrows, “Britain and the Black Legend,” in Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797-1815, ed. Mark Philp (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 141-57; and Stuart Semmel, Napoleon and the British (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

[2]. See, for example, Roger Knight,Britain against Napoleon: The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815 (New York: Penguin Books, 2013); and Jenny Uglow,In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Citation: Christine Haynes. Review of Clayton, Tim,The Secret War against Napoleon: Britain's Assassination Plot on the French Emperor. H-War, H-Net Reviews. September, 2019.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53933

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.