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My consent to the marriage would secure to the empire some years of political peace, which I can devote to the healing of its wounds. All my powers being devoted to the welfare of my people, I cannot, therefore, hesitate in my decision. Send a courier to Paris, and say that I accept the offer for the hand of my daughter, but with the express reservation that on neither side shall any condition be attached to it: there are sacrifices which must not be contaminated with anything approaching a bargain.5

There is little need to discuss the issue of the Austrian marriage any further. After hastily being married by proxy to Napoleon in Vienna on

11 March, Marie-Louise was brought to France amidst great splendour and celebration. Reaching the chateau specially prepared for her reception at Compiègne, she was welcomed quite literally with open arms by Napoleon, and formally married to him in Paris in a series of lavish ceremonies held on April. On a personal level, the marriage was a success: the couple quickly became completely infatuated with one another and it was not long before they had a healthy son who was christened Napoleon François Charles Joseph and immediately named King of Rome. Politically and diplomatically, however, the issue is of almost no significance. Inside France the decision to wed an Austrian archduchess is supposed to have damaged Napoleon’s prestige by breaking some of the last links that bound him to the Revolution. At the same time, Josephine, who was gifted with a public manner far more winning than that of her replacement, remained extremely popular in the army. There may, then, have been some grumbling - even real anger - but radicalism was scarcely a major force within the empire, and there is little reason to believe that the eventual downfall of the empire had much of an ideological explanation: what mattered far more was war-weariness and opposition to conscription, and in this context the marriage to Marie-Louise was of little account beside, say, the war in Spain.

Nor was the wedding of any real account on the international stage. Napoleon clearly hoped it would buy him acceptance amongst the monarchies of Europe, while the fact that many details of events in France mimicked the reception of Marie-Antoinette - Marie-Louise’s great-aunt - by Louis XVI in 1770 is yet one more example of Napoleon’s desire to assume the mantle of the Bourbons. And, needless to say, the marriage ceremony itself was one more opportunity to parade the power and grandeur of the Napoleonic empire: the new empress was accompanied to the altar by four queens, a vicereine and three grand duchesses, all of them drawn from the extended Bonaparte family. But whether any of this had the slightest impact in the courts and foreign ministries of Europe is doubtful. To take the more particular cases of Austria and Russia, meanwhile, all that the new marriage alliance did was to confirm existing trends: Russia’s relations with Napoleon were deteriorating well before February 1810, just as Austria had already embarked on the path of collaboration. Yet if Marie-Louise did not come as the harbinger of change, but rather, at best, its accelerant, it might be noted, though, that the precedents were not encouraging. Prior to the French Revolution, Austria had been France’s chief foreign partner, but she had given her little support and had ultimately proved a broken reed. Moreover, the power to which Napoleon had linked himself was not even the relatively proud Austria of 1789, but rather the defeated, bankrupt and much reduced Austria of . Compared to the partnership that might have been obtained from Russia, Vienna could offer little, even if it was true, as Talleyrand claimed, that the advent of Marie-Louise guaranteed that Vienna wished ‘to associate itself with the fortunes of the imperial dynasty that rules today in France, and that it has recognized the folly and iniquity of the contrary system which it has upheld for the last ten years, and that, having taken this resolution, Vienna would persist in it, leaving the