Antiques.(former king Joseph Bonaparte in United States; visit of American Relution hero Lafayette; democratic ideals in United States)

What is the throne?--a bit of wood gilded and covered with velvet. I am the state--I alone am here the representative of the people. Even if I had done wrong you should not have reproached me in public--people wash their dirty linen at home. France has more need of me than I of France.

Napoleon I, To the Senate, 1814

In the weeks after his final defeat, when neither he nor the British who had prevailed at the battle of Waterloo could make up their minds what to do next, Napoleon discussed with one of his aides the idea of escaping to the United States. In June 1815 the emperor's brother Lucien wrote their sister Pauline that Napoleon "will depart for the United States...where all of us will join him." Fortunately for James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, Napoleon was dissuaded from carrying out this plan. He was still only forty-six years old and he concluded that as a general and a monarch he could not abandon his "brave officers who are so devoted to me." Rather than attempt to escape, Napoleon surrendered to the victors, who sent him as far away as possible, to Saint Helena, a small island and British colony in the South Atlantic.

But Napoleon did bestow on the United States an opportunity for hospitality to his family by allowing his elder brother, Joseph, to take up exile there. Joseph Bonoparte created a pleasant estate of eighteen hundred acres in New Jersey which was called Point Breeze (see pp. 130-139). In the 1820s there grew up around him clusters of Bonapartist expatriates, reduced in dignity as well as purse. The resurgent mercantile bourgeoisie in France wanted them out of the way while awaiting the improvement of their political fortunes.

The stir created by these exiles was eclipsed in 1824 by the return to the United ...