Abstract
The kingdom of Westphalia was an entirely artificial creation borne out of the territorial consolidations that accompanied Napoleon’s victories over the major powers of Central Europe. Intended to be an experimental kingdom where the revolutionary values of liberty and especially equality could be transplanted onto German soil, the kingdom was to be ruled by the French emperor’s youngest brother, Jérôme. During the kingdom’s short existence, from 1807 until 1813, many of Jérôme’s policies, especially with regard to taxation and conscription, were unpopular, and his own personal reputation for a luxurious and licentious lifestyle became fodder for German liberationists. As Napoleon’s power fell into jeopardy following his disastrous Russian Campaign of 1812, war poets throughout Central Europe seized the opportunity and began publishing seditious lyrics about their French conquerors. Within the unique context afforded by the kingdom of Westphalia, where a Bonaparte ruled directly, war poets wove together a creative, multi-pronged narrative of exploitation, wherein the king’s heavy taxes were characterized as funding a widespread conscription system, which robbed Westphalia of its young men, in the absence of which Westphalia’s young women were left vulnerable to the French king’s insatiable sexual passions.
From the start, Jérôme Bonaparte faced difficulties within his kingdom of Westphalia. Some of these were of his own making, more could be attributed to his divisive older brother, Napoleon, and even more surfaced from an increasingly patriotic German populace that never entirely warmed to its French sovereign. The fact that Jérôme’s rule was characterized by a series of distinct contradictions also did not help matters. He was a French king on German soil. The name of his realm, chosen by his older brother, harkened back to the venerable treaty of 1648, though the kingdom itself was an entirely artificial creation borne out of the territorial consolidations that accompanied the French emperor’s victories over the major powers of continental Europe. In principle, Westphalia was to be a constitutional state with a representative parliament (Ständeversammlung), but over time Jérôme paid little attention to the former and only called the latter into session on three occasions. Motivated by the guiding principle of égalité, the Jews of Westphalia were fully emancipated and the institution of the nobility was completely dismantled under Jérôme’s watch, but the kingdom’s populace would be burdened by oppressive taxation and conscription systems. In the six short years of his reign, from 1807 until 1813, all of these contradictions and the controversies they unleashed helped undermine the popular loyalty the king desperately desired.
While hatred of Jérôme was undoubtedly overstated by the German nationalist historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 1 there is no doubt that many of his subjects wholly rejected the Bonapartist project in Westphalia. Given the various constraints that accompanied his rule, such as the strict censorship of any unflattering publications, it was not until the Wars of Liberation that key aspects of Westphalian dissatisfaction would be voiced in print. Starting in the autumn of 1813, particularly after Napoleon ordered Jérôme to evacuate Westphalia in late October, a battalion of mostly anonymous pamphleteers began churning out liberationist texts. Some of this literature took the form of political tracts, didactic plays, and litanies of specific, itemized criticisms of French rule. Poetry also played an important role in this propaganda effort.
The genre of poetry possessed certain immediate advantages. It permitted authors to air their complaints without the complicated apparatus of deep explanation. The emphasis here was on criticism, and liberationist poetry’s vitriolic assault on the French was bold and often vulgar. Poetry, especially of this sort, was also memorable. The conventional rhythmic style of early nineteenth-century Germanic verse promised that audiences could learn and remember lyrical content. The fact that many of these poems were humorous – in some instances bordering on the absurd – likely garnered attention. In an era when less than a third of the local population could read, memorable lyrics had the potential of serving the propaganda campaign by being recited to diverse audiences. 2 In this manner, lyric poetry provided an optimal genre of propaganda that, it was hoped by the war poets, would help safeguard Central Europe from the potential of a Napoleonic encore.
Those considerations were very much at play in the poetry that was written in reference to Jérôme’s evacuated kingdom of Westphalia. War poets understandably devoted many a stanza to critiquing the kingdom’s onerous tax code and conscription system, but they also spared no expense in ridiculing the king himself, particularly in regard to his rumored sexual mores. Indeed, the most recurrent motif found within this propaganda is the portrayal of Jérôme’s insidious tendency toward exploitation, especially of Westphalian money, men, and maidens – all three of which war poets fused together in a seamless narrative of mistreatment.
In Westphalia, these war poets emerged relatively late on the scene, especially when compared to their already-engaged counterparts in Austria, Prussia, and other German-speaking realms to the east. In part, this was simply a function of Westphalia’s geographic location. The death knell to Napoleon’s empire had first sounded with his failed Russian Campaign of 1812, and its unraveling proceeded from east to west – the direction of both his retreat and that of the pursuing Russian Cossacks. As importantly, the relatively belated emergence of liberationist lyrics there was also a function of the unique position in which Westphalia had found itself within the empire. Unlike most other German regions that had been conquered and either only marginally occupied or forced into an uneasy alliance with the French, Westphalia was wholly occupied for six years and ruled directly by a Bonaparte, whose ministers, prefects, mayors, and bureaucrats – not to mention a whole cadre of secret police – kept strict watch over the press.
The reality of these circumstances presents two distinct methodological challenges to scholars interested in investigating the war poetry of Westphalia. First, given the timing factor, Westphalian war poets were not in a position to produce as many lyrics as their eastern counterparts, and understandably fewer have survived, which partly explains why they have received comparatively little attention from modern scholars. Second, given the political context, the vast majority of what was produced was penned by authors who chose to remain anonymous. 3 But neither of these challenges poses an insurmountable obstacle, and certainly neither ought to preclude consideration of the lyrics that were produced and continue to exist. Of those, more than half a dozen have been sampled for analysis in this article – enough to serve as a sufficient basis for the claims made here, especially given the remarkable confluence of themes present within them. What is more, while the anonymous nature of the poetry limits our ability to make various claims about, for example, authorial intent or motivation, the language of the lyrics themselves provides a wealth of insight into the concerns of contemporary liberationists, their values, and what they perceived to be their cause.
The Politicization of Culture
The war poetry about Westphalia can be viewed as part of a larger social trend of the time, particularly in reference to the politicization of the early nineteenth-century German lyric, about which there exists a spectrum of scholarly perspectives. Borrowing from social-scientific literature (most notably from Habermas), Peter Stein, for example, has argued that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European political developments inspired a reassessment of German literature’s social function. Friedrich Gottfried Klopstock, Georg Forster, Friedrich Hölderlin, and other high literary figures, initiated the ‘politicization of the German lyric’ with their public commentary on the French Revolution. 4 But during the 1790s, this literary ‘political consciousness expressed itself primarily as a moral protest against state and politics’, Stein argues, ‘without seriously considering the possibility of political action’. 5 Whereas the French Revolution moved German poets to comment on matters previously deemed outside the realm of literary possibility, the subsequent Napoleonic invasions of Central Europe made activism a thinkable project in the literature of ‘moral emancipation’. 6 As German rulers, court officials, and political administrators at all levels of government succumbed to Napoleon, it fell upon literary agents to critique the political situation. 7 In short, they became the harbingers of liberation. According to Stein, this was not simply an act of the moral migrating to the political; the politicization of morality occurred as the boundaries between the private and the public collapsed. Fichte, for example, appropriated Schiller’s ideas on the freedom of the individual in his call for a communal revolt against Napoleon; thus, the moral category of private concerns and personal experiences became a politicized morality imbued with an ethical imperative. In this manner, a ‘moral legitimization of war’ could be found in the poetry of the Wars of Liberation. 8
Whereas Stein’s argument rests upon a social definition of politics, Hasko Zimmer has argued for a different interpretation of this development, and has insisted upon a more rigid distinction between the categories of public and political. He writes: ‘1813 witnessed a connection between German national consciousness and politics, but [the former] remained in essence highly apolitical’. 9 What is more, Zimmer reads poetry from this era as pertaining to culture – not politics. This poetry was innovative not because it was political, but because it infused religious discourse into the cultural realm of literature and lent spiritual authority to the project of Germanic, cultural, self-awareness. The lyrics from the Wars of Liberation evince this, as the fatherland became the ‘holy fatherland’, the Christian God became a ‘German God’, and war became a ‘sacred war’. 10 In the service of his thesis, Zimmer insists that terms such as ‘fatherland’ and ‘German’ did not carry a political connotation, but were invoked by contemporaries as manifestations of a cultural spirit. ‘The patriots of 1813 fought not for a political German nation, but for a fatherland’, he writes. This fatherland ‘would not be understood as political and rational, but as a manifestation of the German national spirit’. 11 He thus reads the lyrics of the Wars of Liberation as a manifestation of ‘a comprehensive process of secularization, in which religious structures were cast as central objects of national feeling and commerce’. 12
The contrasting conclusions of Stein and Zimmer result from different approaches. Stein is interested first and foremost in the literary world, and he argues for the politicization of literature by casting its moral dimension as increasingly social through the infusion of ethical philosophy into literary discourse. Zimmer, in contrast, is interested primarily in religion and argues for the secularization (or, more likely, the acculturation) of religion as it surfaced in literature. But Stein’s thesis on the politicization of literature as pertaining to politics and Zimmer’s thesis on the secularization of religion as pertaining to culture are not completely irreconcilable. Klaus Berghahn summarizes these two perspectives best with his assertion that in Germany ‘moral criticism could be articulated (as a substitute for political action) in the free space of the literary public sphere’. 13
I would like to suggest, however, that moral criticism was itself a political act. Morality (as both private and cultural) served as an authoritative weapon in the service of political critique. During the Wars of Liberation, poets fused morality to politics by subjecting private matters to public criticism. Scholarship on the French Revolution supports this claim by casting light on the intersection of political, cultural, and moral criticism, particularly in the locus of royalty and nobility. The research of both Antoine de Baecque and Lynn Hunt, in particular, has revealed the extent to which, during moments of political and cultural upheaval, the tentative boundaries separating the private from the public collapse in a process of cultural politicization. 14 Across the Rhine, this phenomenon – and particularly its association with the new nationalism of the era – has been investigated most recently by Karen Hagemann who, utilizing the lens of gender analysis, has focused specifically on Prussian and Austrian liberationist propaganda. 15 Cultural politicization that used gender as a weapon was also very much alive in the efforts of Westphalian war poets, but given the circumstances facing Jérôme’s German kingdom, it manifested itself quite differently there.
Taxation as Exploitation
In the kingdom of Westphalia, where a foreign prince had reigned (despite the nominal existence of a parliament), liberationist poetry most often focused on the former ruler and his policies. High among Jérôme’s despised policies was taxation, and criticisms of that taxation were well-founded. Of all Napoleon’s satellite kingdoms, Westphalia had one of the highest tax rates. Locals became subject to a catalogue of land taxes, personal taxes, consumer taxes, patent, salt, and timber taxes, for which they had little patience.
Jérôme’s older brother certainly played an important role in exacerbating the economic hardships facing the nascent kingdom. The emperor’s Continental System and Blockade suffocated many an opportunity for trade and commerce. His own retention of half the Westphalian domains of dispossessed princes further robbed the kingdom of potential resources. His perpetual demands for more revenue, while requiring that Jérôme cover the cost of French troops stationed in Westphalia, and saddling Jérôme with new territory such as Hanover, which cost more money to administer than it generated, all contributed to the gravity of the situation. 16
From the immediate observations of many Westphalians, however, it was just as easy, and certainly as politically expedient, to blame Jérôme for the hardships wrought by imperial directives. Jérôme’s own behaviour rendered this assessment particularly easy. Upon arriving in Cassel, the new kingdom’s designated capital, on 7 December 1807, Jérôme took up residence at Wilhelmshöhe, which he promptly renamed Napoleonshöhe. This was not the only alteration made to the century-old dwelling, whose most recent occupant had been the comparatively parsimonious Elector, Wilhelm I. Almost immediately, the palace was subjected to extensive renovations; at great expense, opulent furnishings were imported from France; lavish gardens were designed. Jérôme’s desire for an elaborate lifestyle of refined tastes and costly galas – he was dubiously rumoured to have bathed in Rhine wine – certainly did not help his reputation, much less the kingdom’s financial solvency.
17
A late 1813 lyric from Cassel entitled Jeromiade – undoubtedly a play on the word ‘Jeremiad’ – noted: Much German gold flowed into the coffer, And much was squandered by the court. The most lucrative position was always Bestowed upon the Gaul. And coach rides were often made to Paris; Much was dispensed to the plundering state; Paid for by the tears of the country.
18
[Viel deutsches Geld floß in den Schatz,
Viel ward vom Hof verschwendet.
Stets ward der lucrativste Platz
Dem Gallier gespendet.
Und nach Paris ward oft kutschirt;
Für Plunderstaat viel depensirt;
Des Landes Thränen zahlten!]
Such sentiments were fuelled by the unsurprising fact that, under the conditions of imperial occupation, Westphalians had not benefitted proportionately from their tax burdens. As Jérôme presided over a spendthrift court, the kingdom could not boast any significant improvements to its infrastructure. As Westphalia’s taxes mounted – for example, land taxes (Grundsteuer) more than quadrupled during Jérôme’s tenure as king – the kingdom was forced to close under fiscal constraint two of its five universities (Helmstedt and Rinteln) in 1809, leaving only Marburg, Halle, and Göttingen, any of which could have been targeted for immediate closure due to the financial problems weighing upon the kingdom.
Just as Westphalia slogged along in perennial arrears, the king, too, lived most of his life in a state of personal debt. Geständnis des Königs an die Casselaner, an anonymous lyric also published in the final months of 1813, presents a farcical autobiographical account of Jérôme, the first stanza of which finds him identifying his motivation for accepting the kingship of Westphalia as his desire to ‘become a richer man’. 19 Here, the king greedily keeps hold of his money, even when the empire is threatened, and when his soldiers flee the battlefield in Poland, he is more concerned over the ‘enormous amount of money’ it costs to maintain an army. ‘I thought then’, Jérôme muses in this poem, ‘[to] allow the soldiers to flee’. 20 There is some historical validity to Jérôme’s alleged feelings, for in the six years of his reign, Jérôme spent more than 200,000,000 francs on military expenditure at the behest of his brother. Considering the annual revenue for Westphalia was estimated by imperial officials to be only 34,000,000 francs, this was indeed a major, debt-producing expense. 21
The war poets’ aggrieved awareness of foreign mistreatment was, in the realm of taxation, doubly reinforced by a keen sense of betrayal, for Westphalia’s Minister of Finance was, and had been for some time, a German. That ministry had originally been directed by the Frenchman, Jacques-Claude Beugnot. But in 1808, Ludwig von Bülow replaced him. Bülow remained in office until 1811, when his subordinate, another German, Karl August von Malchus, took control. Malchus ascended under dubious circumstances, however. In an attempt to gain the favour and trust of the king as a means of advancing his own ambitions, Malchus concocted a fictitious story that his superior, Bülow, had close associations with Prussian patriots and was in treasonous partnership with them – an accusation made plausible only because of Bülow’s blood relations with Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenberg. The allegation was never substantiated, and the whole affair rendered some observers highly suspicious of Malchus. In Jeromiade, faint praise is bestowed upon Malchus with the assertion that: The best department of the government Was that of finance; Its chief knew well how to torment The public with taxes.
22
[Das beste Ministerium
War jenes der Finanzen;
Sein Chef verstand, das Publikum
Mit Steuern zu kuranzen.]
This view was taken even further by August von Kotzebue in his 1813 poem entitled Der Abschied aus Cassel, which consists of a series of fictitious speeches made by members of Jérôme’s court. Kotzebue has Malchus repenting for his crimes: Vox populi! Vox Dei! – Oh woe! Now I must confess. I admit It directly, ‘I am a scoundrel!’ I have ruined you all; And if justice existed here, I would be hanging today in the open air. Let me live, you soldiers! I will gladly tell you everything.
23
[Vox populi! Vox Dei! – Wehe!
Jetzt muss ich beichten. Ich gestehe
Es grad heraus, ‘ich bin ein Schuft!’
Ich hab’ euch alle ruinirt;
Und wird Justiz hier exercirt,
So hang’ ich heut’ in freier Luft.
Lasst mich leben, ihr Soldaten!
Alles will ich gern – verrathen.]
After the fall of Westphalia, Malchus did live, and in fact published what purported to be an exculpatory tract revealing everything about his efforts to address Westphalia’s financial woes. In essence, however, it turned out to be a further denunciation of Ludwig von Bülow’s earlier failure to keep the kingdom financially solvent. 24
Despite denouncing economic misfortune and, indeed, injustice, war poets were careful not to suggest that their objections to Jérôme and his court derived only from material concerns. High taxation presented an opportunity for political critique, but the war poets’ cause required a higher justification. In Kriegeslied der Hannoverschen Landwehr, that calling is imbued with a combination of religious authority and patriotic fervour, in this instance for George III, King of England, who had ruled Hanover prior to Napoleon’s dismembering of that territory, some of which found itself under Westphalian auspices. The Lord is with us, do not tremble, He gives strength to the stalwart hand. We do not fight out of a thieving desire For our weapons are only For George and Fatherland!
25
[Der Herr ist mit uns, zittert nicht,
Er stärkt des Tapfern hand.
Wir kämpfen nicht aus Raubbegier,
Denn unsre Waffen sind nur für
Georg und Vaterland!]
In August Riesch’s Zuruf an das Vaterland, the author also insists that German soldiers fought for a higher purpose. Evoking diction reminiscent of Goethe’s Das Göttliche from late in the previous century, he writes: ‘Twas for the noble Germans, and good, Who there did battle for the Fatherland, Who for Germany’s freedom fought, and bled, Many sink there into his hands.
26
[Zwar der deutschen Edlen, Guten,
Die da streiten für das Vaterland,
Die für Deutschlands Freiheit kämpfen, bluten
Sinken viele hin in seine Hand.]
In the end, money was viewed as insufficient for either justifying war or assuring its victory – a lesson taken from Jérôme’s own history. As one poem noted, despite Jérôme’s excessive military expenditures, ‘he could not defeat the enemy with money’ alone. 27
But embedded in the critique of taxation was a less than subtle criticism of Jérôme himself. It was not enough for the war poets to suggest that the French king robbed Westphalians because he despised Germans. In their patriotic world view, that much was already clear. Rather, they went further to intimate that this abuse was a function of a deeper, immoral character flaw, whereby Germans were exploited in order to satisfy the profligate cravings of a foreign thief, for whom – it was implied – no amount of plunder would suffice. He was greedy yet wasteful with money, and he placed personal fortune at a higher level of importance than either his own good or that of the kingdom. By extension, Jérôme was cast as an illegitimate ruler – one who ignored the welfare of his subjects. His behaviour was unbecoming of a king, and these polemicists proclaimed as much in their poetic assessment of him as both a king and a person.
Militarism as Exploitation
Liberationist poetry’s depiction of Jérôme as a money-crazed spendthrift contented by luxurious court life, enabled war poets to juxtapose the king against the harsh realities of the day. Beyond the economic misfortunes of the kingdom, Westphalia was also a highly militarized state – and one whose conscripted soldiers saw more than their fair share of combat. In 1809 alone, uniformed Westphalians skirmished with a series of insurrectionist combatants, shielded the kingdom from the invading forces of a renegade Prussian officer, engaged with hostile troops of the Fifth Coalition, and helped try to quell guerrillas in the Peninsular Campaign. By 1812, Westphalians were marching to Russia, and, following their disastrous retreat the subsequent year, were receiving orders to oppose the mounting membership of the Sixth Coalition.
All of that had been made possible by the kingdom’s extensive conscription system, itself a product of Napoleon’s insistence that the defeated powers of continental Europe contribute to his increasingly massive military apparatus. 28 Among many German states, the legal basis for this harkened back to the July 1806 Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine, which stipulated that Bavaria should furnish 30,000 soldiers yearly, Württemberg 12,000, Baden 8,000, Berg 5,000, and Darmstadt 4,000. 29 But none within the Confederation played as taxing a role as the kingdom of Westphalia, which produced for Napoleon more troops per capita than any other German state. 30 As stipulated by the Westphalian constitution, the kingdom was required to raise an army of 25,000 indigenous soldiers and maintain the additional presence of 12,500 French soldiers who were to be stationed at Magdeburg on the kingdom’s eastern border with Prussia. 31 Jérôme was quick to implement these requirements, which he accomplished through the establishment of an elaborate conscription system.
Conscription in Westphalia became law on 15 November 1807 – even before Jérôme had entered his kingdom, before the government had been organized, before the bureaucracy had been established – for the idea of conscription was so important that it was mandated by the Westphalian constitution, which stated that ‘conscription shall be a fundamental law for the Kingdom of Westphalia’. 32 This point was reinforced by the kingdom’s official census records, which declared ‘every Westphalian is a born soldier’. 33 A much more elaborate statement about the draft was inserted into Westphalia’s legal code in April of 1808, when a 68-page conscription law was promulgated. ‘Every Westphalian is bound to defend his fatherland with arms, as soon as the king calls upon him’, it began. 34 By the end of 1808, Jérôme already had in his service 14,000 soldiers. An additional 4,000 were in the process of being trained, and 7,000 were in the process of being conscripted. By the early spring of 1809 – only 15 months after Jérôme had assumed the throne – Westphalia had fulfilled its obligation to maintain a standing army of 25,000 of its own soldiers. Over the course of its six-year existence, more than 100,000 individuals – out of a population estimated at 2.5 million – served in the Westphalian military.
Jérôme could rightly boast of great success in raising an army, even ahead of schedule.
35
But war poets would later bemoan this feat as symptomatic of egregious exploitation, here with respect to Westphalia’s young, vital, male population. In their formulation, high taxation had enabled Jérôme to cover the costs associated with maintaining a large standing army. One form of exploitation led to another: Soon one thought of the military – Westphalia had sons. It was a boon to conscription, In spite of many parents’ tears. The people’s uniform was beautiful, The expense was enormous, But the watch parade was proud.
36
[Früh dachte man auf Militair,
Westphalen hatte Söhne.
Es half die Conscription da sehr,
Trotz mancher eltern Thräne.
Schön war der Leutchen uniform,
Der Kostenaufwand zwar enorm,
Doch stolz die Wachtparade.]
The results of that perceived exploitation were disastrous. For example, Westphalia’s stand against the Fifth Coalition resulted in 2,000 casualties; more than 5,000 of its troops perished in the Peninsular Campaign; and only 1,500 Westphalian soldiers out of 22,000 returned from the Russian Campaign, as the overwhelming majority of them died during the evacuation. 37
In contrast to the soldiers’ experiences, Jérôme was portrayed as a coward who could not effectively lead an army; as a king who would flee the battlefield only to retreat to his opulent castle. A variety of factors played into the construction of the cowardice narrative, but war poets were particularly keen to capitalize on the perception of Jérôme’s striking inability to command his troops during the Russian Campaign of 1812. That summer, both Jérôme’s Eighth Corps and Louis Nicholas Davoût’s First Corps were tasked with locating the elusive Russians, whose main forces were in the process of an eastwardly retreat. In early July, Davoût mistakenly believed he had finally trapped the Russians, but Jérôme’s Corps was nowhere to be found. (Actually it was Jérôme who was in quick pursuit of Pyotr Bagration’s main forces.) Choosing to believe Davoût, Napoleon then placed Davoût in command of Jérôme and his forces. 38 In protest, Jérôme resigned his command altogether and abruptly departed for Westphalia.
War poets were quick to capitalize on the perception of Jérôme’s failure to lead. The fact that Napoleon himself had subordinated the king’s command lent credence to narrative. In Geständnis des Königs an die Casselaner, Jérôme is depicted reflecting on this very matter: I was not able to command the troops – Where was I supposed to have learned that? Helped to lose battles there, And then removed myself.
39
[Ich konnt’ nicht kommandiren,
Wo hab’ ich’ s denn gelernt?
Half Schlachten dort verlieren,
Und hab’ mich dann entfernt.]
As another poet remarked, Jérôme had been ‘dishonoured and shamed’ in Russia. 40
There was a further element of bitter irony to this, as locals were well aware. Hessians had long been valued for their own military zeal (despite some embarrassing moments in America). But starting in 1807, their fatherland came to constitute a significant southern portion of the new kingdom of Westphalia, and their former capital, Cassel, would serve that same function for Westphalia. In a castle whose earlier renovations had been financed by the rewards of military might (especially from George III for his use of Hessian troops), 41 now resided a man characterized as a pitiable specimen of military feebleness. This awkward scenario fuelled the fires of personal attack. Indeed, in Jeromiade the king is portrayed as a weak imp retreating to Napoleonshöhe to ‘recover from the strain of war’. 42 This treatment of Jérôme’s character vis-à-vis his military ventures – or misadventures, as the liberationist trope would have it – contrasted neatly with militarism’s association with masculinity that played out elsewhere in the nationalist poetry of the time. 43
Whereas soldiers were portrayed as brave and heroic, Jérôme was depicted as weak and cowardly. His relative youth did not help matters, as it enabled poets to cast him as fickle and ungrounded. Of the Bonaparte brothers ‘little Jérôme was the youngest’,
44
as one poet mocked, and when he accepted the crown of Westphalia, he was a mere 23 years of age. His youthful inexperience stood in stark contrast to that of his mighty brother the emperor, from whom poets liked to point out, he received his crown. As a young man, Jérôme appeared rather detached from the world, especially from the world of politics. He was by character a wanderer, having spent time in the West Indies and the United States before minueting into kingship. And even while in Westphalia, he set his eyes upon what he imagined to be the more stable and financially solid Polish crown, for which he would have gladly traded his Westphalian title. ‘You, Jérôme’, one poet wrote, ‘are nothing but a weak traveller’.
45
The king’s most celebrated journey, his retreat from Westphalia in October of 1813, provided an additional opportunity for ridicule: Soon year 13 [i.e. 1813] was over, And his time as ruler was up, Little Jerome fled like a poodle, Back to where he came from.
46
[Doch bald nun war’s Jahr 13 aus,
Und seine Herrscherzeit war um,
Jerömchen floh wie ein bez … Pudel,
Dorthin woher er kam.]
In capturing the moment of his evacuation from Westphalia, another poet advised, ‘you wander back to your mama now; Adieu!’ 47
What is interesting to note about the attacks levelled against Jérôme is that he tended not to serve as a mere localized symbol for Napoleon. Indeed, war poets often contrasted the two Corsicans in an effort to undermine Jérôme. In Jerömchen, he is identified as ‘the weak brother of the powerful Corsican’. 48 In Geständnis des Königs an die Casselaner, Jérôme is even depicted as accepting this distinction, musing that his brother was ‘born tougher than I’. 49 But why should this be the case?
In one respect, Central European rule had long been conceived as regional. Since its establishment, the Holy Roman Empire had served as an umbrella state-structure to the hundreds of local polities that constituted its landscape – polities, largely sovereign, wherein the true exercise of power resided. The constant challenge of entrenched local power to imperial reign became legitimized in 1555 with the Diet of Augsburg’s formula cuius regio, eius religio. It might have been the case that the Central European tradition of conceiving political rule as regional rule was manifest in the war literature of the early nineteenth century. Based upon such a conception, it would be understandable that so much attention would be paid to the King of Westphalia and not to the Emperor of Europe.
However, being the brother of Europe’s most accomplished military general had its drawbacks, as Jérôme was well aware. And a far more pertinent explanation for Jérôme’s comparative prominence in the war poetry from Westphalia was that it enabled poets to use the reputation of mighty Napoleon as a rhetorical foil against the perceived weaknesses of his youngest brother. The utility of that ready-made foil also fitted neatly within the larger liberationist trope of exploitation. While Westphalian soldiers were fighting and dying for their foreign overlord, Jérôme was hiding in his refurbished castle – paid for, as was the military, by the kingdom’s exorbitant taxes. Even Napoleon himself would not have acted in such a manner.
Sexuality as Exploitation
From the war poets’ perspective, Jérôme’s penchant for court life lent credence to the trope of exploitation both in terms of finance (as high taxes made such life possible) and conscription (since he preferred to be at home, away from the troops he ought to have been commanding). But, most surprisingly, the contours of Jérôme’s court life gave rise to a third indictment of exploitative behaviour. This one pertained to women.
Only a limited historiography exists on the role of gender in the Wars of Liberation, and even less on the place of gender constructions in liberationist lyrics. The scholarship of Karen Hagemann serves as a notable exception. Her research has examined ‘the gender order that accompanied a broad journalistic campaign to mobilize men for the struggle against French domination’, and she contends that lyric poetry served as ‘the most important site for the discursive definition of masculinity’. 50 By paying close attention to the language used in this propaganda, she concludes that ‘the construction of the German national character in gender and socially specific terms was closely tied to the construction of a polarized notion of “sex-specific character”’. 51 Her earlier focus on lyrics published in Prussia has more recently been extended to include those from Austria during the same period. 52
Lyrics about Westphalia largely confirm Hagemann’s assessment of gender’s role in political poetry. Gender was instrumental in defining the character of the cause. Poets who were interested in memorializing liberation in rhyme addressed their work to a participatory audience gendered male. Kriegeslied der Hannoverschen Landwehr begins, for example, with the stirring charge, ‘Arise, arise, Hanover’s sons, arise!’ and calls upon ‘brothers’ to ‘follow the divine call/For George and Fatherland!’ 53 By casting the wars as a holy cause, and by addressing their calls to ‘sons’ and ‘brothers’, poets essentially placed men in the sacred role of protecting the nation by liberating the fatherland.
Beyond that, gender in these war lyrics served a second function. The fatherland housed subjects who were not men, and about whom poets expressed much concern. The liberation of the fatherland was promoted as a defence of family, hearth, and home. Additional stanzas from Kriegeslied der Hannoverschen Landwehr note that ‘We fight for woman and child/Until the brink of death’ and that: If we one day return as victors Back to our Fatherland, The choir of angels, with woman and child Will resound jubilantly from the gates of heaven: For George and Fatherland!
54
[Und kehren wir als Sieger einst
Zurück in’ s Vaterland,
Schallt jubelnd an der Heimath Thor,
Mit Weib und Kind, der Engel Chor:
Georg und Vaterland!]
But what is particularly relevant to note here is that the war poetry about Westphalia stands apart from lyrics about Austria and Prussia because Westphalia found itself in a different position. Unlike Austria and Prussia, which endured under the tutelage of German monarchs who continued to reign over historic, Germanic territory (albeit shrunken as a result of Napoleon’s territorial machinations), Westphalia possessed a French king who reigned over a completely artificial construction. What is clear is that the war poets who wrote about Westphalia took gendered language that existed elsewhere within the liberationist programme and, in this context, used gender not merely as a rallying call for Germans but also as a pointed political weapon against direct French rule over German subjects.
Discussions of gender obviously do not necessarily lead to discussions of sex, but the content of Westphalian political lyrics make this transition particularly easy, especially in light of Jérôme’s personal history. Talleyrand once called him ‘that man who dotes too much on women’.
55
Westphalian observers noticed, too. His innermost character, from the perspective of war poets, was evinced by his dynamic sexual proclivities, themselves characterized as inherently exploitative. His prowess became not only an example of his moral deficiencies, for Jérôme was a married man, but also a source of his political inadequacies. In Jerömchen, for example, the author expresses no hesitation in linking Jérôme’s political failures to his inextinguishable sexual desires: He wanted to be a Henry IV; Oh, how he loved women, and the hunt, But being the people’s goodly father – Ah! That lay beyond his grasp. Dressed up as cute as a courier, Bedecked in the tears of his people, He was not envied by a soul; Only women were moved by his countenance.
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[Er wollte seyn ein Henri quatre.
Wie er liebt Weiber, er, und Jagd,
Zu seyn des Volkes guter Vater,
Ach, das stand nicht in seiner Macht.
Als Laufer niedlich angekleidet
Mit seines Volkes Thränen ausgeschmückt,
Ward er von niemand doch beneidet,
Nur Weiber macht sein Glanz verrückt.]
A similar assessment can be found in Abschied der Casselaner vom König von Westphalen. In it, the poet addresses Napoleon and asserts: Your little brother reaped from the whorehouses often, It threatens his rule with a miserable end: Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!
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[Dein Brüderlein erndtet der Püffe gar viel,
Es droht seiner Herrschaft ein klägliches Ziel,
Adje! Adje! Adje!]
Der Abschied aus Cassel portrays Jérôme, upon being forced to flee Westphalia, as more broken-hearted for having to leave all his women behind than he is upon losing his royal authority. ‘Oh God’, he exclaims, ‘lost are all those beautiful calves!’ 58
To the war poets, Jérôme’s sexual excursions represented more than just an error of judgment. They symbolized in a lurid manner France’s rape and sexual enslavement of Germans. As if German defeat at the hands of the French were not enough, Napoleon’s victories resulted in an unforeseen occupation of Central Europe, which carried with it an additional set of problems. France’s continual demands for military recruits proportionally bled Westphalia, more than any other state, of fathers, sons, and husbands, many of whom died in its service. This disastrous historical reality played itself out in a psychological drama of sexual fantasy seen in the war lyrics of the day. With the decline of a youthful male population in Westphalia, poets expressed fear over Jérôme’s mishandling of their German women who were left to his picking. When he finally fled the kingdom, one poet rejoiced: You are leaving the women here with us in peace, Adieu! You are turning your back on your harem now, Adieu! A German has no love for Turkish ways, So go plant your favourite banner somewhere else: Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!
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[Die Weiberchen lässest Du hier uns in Ruh,
Adje!
Du kehrst deinem Harem den Rücken nun zu.
Adje!
Es liebt nicht der Deutsche die türksche Manier,
Drum pflanze wo anders dein Lieblingpanier;
Adje! Adje! Adje!]
Liberationists, in this manner, fought not merely for the freedom of their hearths and homes, but for the sexual protection – or so they imagined – of their wives and daughters.
This critique of Jérôme’s unbridled sexuality was not entirely unfounded. The king indeed had a certain history with women. Even before he donned the Westphalian crown, he had already achieved a reputation as the most mischievous of the Bonaparte brothers. As early as 1800, Napoleon had sought to discipline Jérôme, only 16 years of age at the time, by enlisting him in the French navy. But while on port call in Nantes in 1803, Jérôme indulged in a tryst with Adélaïde Mélanie Lagarde, the wife of a fellow French officer. Unknown to Jérôme, who soon thereafter sailed for the West Indies, she bore their daughter, Mélanie, in September of that year. Three months later, while on unauthorized leave to the United States, Jérôme eloped with Elizabeth Patterson, the daughter of a wealthy American merchant. Upon learning of the marriage that had taken place in Baltimore, Napoleon demanded its immediate termination. The fact that Elizabeth became pregnant with Jérôme’s son, whom she named after her husband, seemed to matter little to Napoleon who finally had the marriage annulled in May of 1805. 60
The story of Elizabeth Patterson was just one such episode in Jérôme’s playboy life. After Napoleon had the marriage annulled, he provided his younger brother with Elizabeth’s replacement – another foreigner – Katharina von Württemberg, daughter of Friedrich I, whom Jérôme married just four months prior to their arrival in Westphalia. Even as an intimate bond developed between the young king and his new queen, Jérôme also enjoyed the company of other women during his reign over Westphalia. Soon after arriving in his new kingdom, Jérôme called upon a Genoese acquaintance, Blanche Carrega, who had comforted him in the aftermath of the Patterson imbroglio, and whom he now installed as one of Katharina’s maids-of-honour. At the same time, Katharina’s German Grand Mistress, the Countess von Truchsess-Walburg, held the king’s affection, though by 1809, it was the wife of General de Coudras who would claim that honour. As was often the case with Jérôme, affection led to reproduction. Two additional German women, both of whom were married to members of Jérôme’s entourage, bore him multiple children at roughly the same time. While the Countess von Pappenheim gave birth to two daughters – Jenny in 1811 and Diana Pauline in 1813 – the Countess von Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg bore him a son, Charles-Henri in 1811, and a daughter, Mélanie, in 1813. Even in the midst of that, Jérôme still found time for the embraces of the 17-year-old Madame d’Escalonne, who, in preparation for the Russian campaign, accompanied the king to Warsaw, where, much to her chagrin, he quickly turned his attention to the Princess Dominique Radziwill and sent the younger girl back to Cassel.
None of this sexual intrigue was lost on Jérôme’s court, where Jean Baptiste Jollivet was given the delicate task of spying on the king and reporting back to the emperor. In that regard, Jollivet did not disappoint, and he did not shy away from conveying detailed concern over Jérôme’s private affairs. As early as the end of king’s first month in Westphalia, for example, Jollivet reported to Napoleon rumours of the king’s latest sexual escapades – one with an unnamed retainer of the queen, another with an actress from Breslau whom the king had previously met during the Silesian Campaign earlier that year and who had apparently been invited to Cassel at the king’s request – and opined that ‘the mothers of Cassel who have pretty daughters fear to let them go to the balls and the festivals of the court’. 61
Beyond the palace walls, war poets were quick to highlight such sordid behaviour. In Jeromiade, for example, Patterson figures predominately, and the poet introduces her in following manner: With the maidenhead, he had a quick Drink: ‘To bonne amitié’; He sank into the arms of Miss Patterson, the wealthy child. And the marriage, it took place, As is well known, in America; One also quickly saw its fruits.
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[Mit Hymen hatte er geschwind
Bonne amitié getrunken;
Miß Patterson, dem reichen Kind,
War er in Arm gesunken.
Und die mariage, sie geschah
Bekanntlich in Amerika;
Auch sah man bald die Früchte.]
Reference here to the ‘fruits’ certainly pertains to the birth of Patterson’s child, some 18 months after her Christmas Eve wedding to Jérôme in 1803. That reality, however, does not give the poet pause in mocking the couple’s tragic end, wherein Napoleon forced Jérôme to disavow his marriage. He was quite taken with his wife and, for a time, sought to find a way to bring her to Westphalia: Go, cast-off Patterson, Once called the Frau Jerome! The Corsican will certainly Show you the way, if you but knock. The hero, who filched the crown and realm, And like a Turk resides in the country, Will certainly teach you mores.
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[Fahr hin, verstoß’ne Patterson,
Einst frau Jerom’ geheißen!
Der Corsikaner wird dir schon,
Pochst du, die Wege weisen.
Der Held, der Kron’ und Reiche maust
Und wie ein Türk im Lande haußt,
Wird Mores dich auch lehren.]
Accusing Jérôme of behaving like a ‘Turk’ captures both the notion of despotism and the reality of the harem as they existed in the Ottoman world of the time. But the latter soon gives rise to the realization that the king’s companions were, in fact, mostly German ladies.
Here it should be stressed that the women war poets imagined to be in need of protection were not merely helpless victims. Rather, they were often portrayed as participatory agents in their own exploitation. The author of Jeromiade offers a particularly harsh indictment of them. Of the German women at Jérôme’s court, he begins by noting: But ah! This touches upon the sex That one calls beautiful and gentle; At whose feet many lie, And to which one professes undying loyalty! Oh girls, you who have hearts, who have Given your heart and love to a foreigner; Your dignity is desecrated!
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[Ach, leider triffte dies ein Geschlecht,
Das schön und sanft man nennet;
Dem Mancher sich Füßen legt,
Und ew’ge treu’ bekennet!
O, Mädchen, die ihr Herzen habt,
Dem Fremdling Herz und Liebe gabt;
Entweih’t ist eure Würde!]
In the subsequent stanza, he notes the need for ‘paternal measures’ to be taken ‘to tend to the morality’ of what he terms ‘countless authorized concubines of joy’ who ‘made themselves available’ without hesitation. And in the next stanza he goes so far as to call them a ‘sleazily skirted troop/Of Amazons for sale’. 65
On the surface, this critique of excessive sexuality presents a paradox, both in regard to German women and to King Jérôme. For their part, German women of court, as a function of their gender, were portrayed as vulnerable to the king. The only solution was to provide them with ‘paternal’ protection, which this illegitimate king could not provide. That so many of Westphalia’s men were abroad, fighting Jérôme’s battles for him, also meant that German men could not be there to provide such protection either. And for that, Jérôme could be doubly-blamed. For his own part, Jérôme was frequently characterized as unmanly. Recurrent references to his youth and inexperience put into doubt his ability to lead an army, much less a kingdom. Pamphleteers frequently noted Jérôme’s station was the result of his brother’s efforts, and not his own. But against this unmanly nature appear equally recurrent accusations of sexual virility, especially with these so-called German ‘concubines’. The specific virility noted by war poets was, above all else, a misdirected virility, which was a function of moral degeneration. Jérôme’s behaviour violated the ideals of honour and valour, and further undermined his ability to claim legitimate moral, and thus political, authority.
Conclusion
Without a doubt, the Wars of Liberation served as a defining moment in modern German history, and how Germans – from the Danube to the Rhine – experienced resistance to the French was significant not only for the participant generation but also during subsequent decades in which those Wars were remembered and commemorated. 66 Yet beginning almost immediately after Napoleon’s demise, it was the Prussian experience, above all others, that came to dominate the historiographical narrative of liberation. After all, the Prussians could claim that their kingdom had proven more adversarial to the French than most other German states.
But liberationists were not confined exclusively within Prussia’s borders, and the case-study of Westphalia’s war poetry is important for both historical and historiographical reasons. It helps provide a fuller picture of how other Germans of the liberationist variety received and responded to their French conquerors. In one key respect, the reflections of Westphalian liberationists are particularly salient because it was in Westphalia that the realities of French conquest, occupation, and administration were most poignantly felt. Beyond the act of being conquered by the French – a reality shared by other Germans – Westphalians found themselves in a rather unique position. Their new kingdom was an entirely artificial French creation, cobbled together out of smaller German states that ceased to exist after their defeat and portions of others that continued to exist in shrunken form. What is more, as German kings and princes who were forced into alliances with Napoleon continued to reign in most other polities, a Bonaparte was installed to sit upon Westphalia’s throne. There, war poets’ moral criticism of French authority came to constitute a pointed political act, as they applied the trope of exploitation to matters ranging from the financial to the sexual. In regard to the latter, the very singularity of the Westphalian experience presented a scenario in which gender constructions were used not only as a defensive defining of what it meant to be German, but also as an offensive rhetorical weapon aimed at characterizing their French overlords.
This public critique of morality belongs to a genre of politicization wherein private matters of personal behaviour became the fodder of popular lyrical attacks. In certain respects, this literature responded to real-world concerns of local populations, which had become increasingly frustrated with the political and social problems confronting them. War poets identified the source of those problems as the government, which they conceived to reside in both the persona and station of Jérôme Bonaparte. The perceived injustices of Westphalia’s financial crisis were thus not blamed upon the structural inadequacies of Napoleon’s Continental System and Blockade, but upon the financial mishandling and wastefulness of the king. The dire military situation of the Continental Wars, which sent a disproportionately high number of Westphalians to their graves, was not blamed upon a militaristic culture of empire, but upon the military inexperience – indeed cowardice – of Jérôme. A further critique of the person of the king witnessed locals acting out a psychological drama of metaphorical seduction, as poets consistently portrayed Jérôme’s sexual escapades as lurid, uncontrolled, and focused primarily on local wives and daughters.
In the mental universe of war poets, the trope of exploitation could – and did – intersect neatly with the themes of taxation, conscription, and court life. They were also intimately intertwined, as one poet succinctly tied together these disparate elements in reference to Jérôme’s early departure from the Russian Campaign: He came back home, quite astounded, And let his head hang low. But since he did not need to hoard Any more into his war chest, He soothed his feelings And started up his old tune With his concubines.
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[Er kam denn ganz verblüsst nach Haus
Und ließ die Nase hängen.
Doch da er sich in’s Kriegsgebruass
Nicht bruachte mehr zu mengen;
So tröstete sich sein Gemüth,
Und er fing an das alte Lied
Mit seinen Concubinen.]
From his failure to control the financial resources of his kingdom, to his inability to command an army, to his lack of personal control of his sexuality, Jérôme’s masculinity became an object of political critique. The saliency of this lyrical critique, however, resides not only in the fact that contemporaries harboured gendered conceptions of rule and law – and thus, implicitly, of political legitimacy – but also that they were willing to reference those conceptions in the service of liberation from what they portrayed as abounding exploitation. In each instance of critique, Jérôme served as a foil for the ideal German: wasteful and not frugal, feminine and not masculine, ravenous and not reserved. The fact that this type of critique surfaced most pronouncedly in lyric poetry further suggests that pamphleteers considered it to be an effective mode of criticism within a poignant genre of discontent.