The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  So, about midnight of March 1–2, the eleven hundred set out on the road to Cannes. Some sixty of them had been able to buy horses, but, to keep pace and friendship with the rest, they walked beside their baggage-laden mounts. Napoleon usually rode in a carriage. In the center of the procession some guardsmen watched over Napoleon’s gold. Tough Corsicans brought up the rear.17

  At Grasse they left their cannon as too big a problem for icebound mountain roads. Napoleon’s veterans, used to winning wars with their legs, set a good pace for the rest. On March 5 they reached Gap, having walked (most of them) 150 miles in four days. At La Mure, twenty miles south of Grenoble, they encountered their first serious challenge.

  The commander of the Fifth Division of the Army, stationed at Grenoble, had received orders from Paris to arrest Napoleon, and had sent a battalion of five hundred men to stop the approaching rebels. As the opposed columns neared each other Napoleon ordered his defenders to ground their arms. He stepped out in front and walked toward the oncoming troops. Nearing them, he stopped and addressed them: “Soldiers of the Fifth, I am your Emperor; do you recognize me?” He opened his military greatcoat, and said, “If there is among you a soldier who would like to kill his Emperor, here I am [me voilà] “Almost to a man the battalion lowered its arms, and cried out, “Vive l’Empereur!” It disbanded, and the happy soldiers gathered around Napoleon, seeking to touch him. He spoke to them affectionately, returned to his group, and told them, “Everything is settled; in ten days we shall be in the Tuileries.”18

  That evening they approached Grenoble. Hundreds of peasants and proletaires flocked to welcome him; and when they found one of the city gates closed they broke it down to let the little army in. Bidding his exhausted men find a good rest till the next noon, he himself went to the Inn of the Trois Dauphins. The mayor, the municipal officers, even the military commanders came to greet him. On the next morning he received a larger delegation, which asked him to pledge himself to constitutional government. He knew that Grenoble had been in the forefront of the Revolution, and that it had never lost its thirst for freedom. He addressed them in terms that repudiated his past absolutism and promised reform. He acknowledged that he had assumed excessive power, and that he had allowed his wars, originally defensive, to become wars of conquest, nearly exhausting France. He pledged himself to give France a representative government loyal to the principles of 1789 and 1792. Now, he told them, his dearest hope was to prepare his son to be the worthy and liberal leader of an enlightened France.19

  That afternoon (March 8) he bade his followers resume their march; he would remain a day more at Grenoble to issue directives to those towns that were accepting his lead; but he promised to rejoin his band in time to help them to peaceful victories. On March 10 he caught up with them, and led them on to Lyons.

  By this time the news of Napoleon’s escapade had reached Louis XVIII. He was not at first alarmed, feeling confident that the culprit would soon be stopped. But as the march continued, and approached a Grenoble known for its hostility to the Bourbons, Louis issued on March 7 a proclamation exhorting every citizen to help take this troublesome criminal and bring him to a military court for trial and execution; and the same punishment was decreed for all who aided him. The King summoned Ney from retirement, and asked him to lead a force against Napoleon. Ney agreed, but the story that he vowed to bring Napoleon back in an iron cage is probably a fable.20 Ney hurried south, took command of a battalion at Besançon, and called upon Generals de Bourmont and Lecourbe to join him with their forces at Lons-le-Saunier (northwest of Geneva). To the six thousand troops so assembled he made a fiery speech to stir their courage. “It is well,” he said, “that the man from Elba has attempted his foolish enterprise, for it will be the last act of the Napoléonade”21 There was little response from his men.

  On that day, March 10, Lyons was acclaiming Napoleon. The manufacturers there had generally prospered under the Continental Blockade, which had opened all Europe except England to Lyons products, and they had no love for the émigrés who had returned to the city and were behaving as if there had never been a Revolution. In this resentment their employees agreed, for reasons of their own; many of them were ardent Jacobins, part of an underground current that now rose to the surface to welcome Napoleon in the hope that he would lead them back to 1789. The peasants of the hinterland trembled for their unblessed lands, and looked to Napoleon to quiet the priestly campaign for the restoration of the nationalized and redistributed ecclesiastical domains. And the soldiers of the garrison were eager to replace the red cockade on their bayonets.

  So Lyons opened its gates, the royalists fled, the bourgeoisie smiled, the workers and soldiers cheered, as Napoleon led his regiment into the city. The municipal officials, the judges, even some military leaders came to offer their allegiance; he replied by promising a constitutional government and a policy of peace. The entire garrison, except its noble officers, joined his swelling army when he resumed the march on Paris. He had now twelve thousand troops to fight for him, but he still hoped to win without a shot. He wrote to Marie Louise, promising to be in Paris on March 20, the third anniversary of their son’s birth, and telling her how happy she would make him if she could join him in Paris soon. He wrote to Ney a note as cordial as if there had never been a cloud on their friendship; he invited him to a meeting at Châlons, and promised to receive him as after the battle of Borodino—as “Prince of the Moskva.”

  On March 14, still at Lons-le-Saunier, Ney called his troops together and read to them the proclamation that was to cost him his life: “Soldiers, the cause of the Bourbon is lost forever. The legitimate dynasty that France has adopted is about to reascend the throne. It is the Emperor Napoleon, our sovereign, who is henceforth to reign over our glorious country.” The soldiers shook the ground with their repeated cries of “Vive l’Empereur! Vive le maréchal Ney!”22 He offered to lead them to join Napoleon’s forces; they agreed; and Napoleon found them at Auxerre on March 17. On the 18th Napoleon received Ney, and their old friendship was renewed. No one dared, thereafter, to impede the march to Paris.

  On the evening of the 17th, Louis XVIII, in royal apparel, appeared before the combined chambers in the Palais-Bourbon, and announced his determination to resist Napoleon. “I have labored,” he said, “for the happiness of my people. Could I, sixty years old, better end my days than in dying in its defense?” He ordered the mobilization of all loyal forces. Some answered, but they were chiefly his household troops; the regular Army was slow to respond, and no able leader appeared to lead or inspire them. The royalists began to emigrate again.

  Mme. de Staël’s salon buzzed with rumors, and she too thought of flight. On March 19 the Journal des débats published an article by her intermittent lover Benjamin Constant reaffirming his support for Louis XVIII and constitutional government. That evening he went into hiding.

  Louis himself, always reluctant to move, delayed departure till word came, on March 19, that Napoleon had reached Fontainebleau, and might be expected in Paris the next day. At 11 P.M. Louis and his family rode out from the Tuileries and headed for Lille. That city was strongly royalist, but doubtless the King thought, now and then, of a brother who had set out on a similar trip in 1791, and had been brought back a prisoner of the people.

  On March 20 some enthusiastic Bonapartists, learning that the Tuileries was free of the King and his household troops, entered it in a gay impromptu, and prepared the royal chambers to receive Napoleon. All that day his swelling army marched toward its goal. Napoleon himself remained in Fontainebleau till 2 P.M., dictating messages and instructions, and presumably wandering fondly about the palace that had seen so much history, including an abdication now to be canceled and avenged. He reached Paris about 9 P.M., accompanied by Bertrand and Caulaincourt. They drove almost unnoticed until they reached the Tuileries. There a crowd of relatives and friends greeted him with wild ecstasy, lifting him bodily up the stairs. He submitted to one embrace after another, until
he stood before them exhausted and bewildered, but happy to the point of tears. Hortense came; he reproached her for having accepted favors from Alexander; she defended herself; he melted, took her in his arms, and said, “I am a good father; you know it…. And you have been present at poor Josephine’s death. Amid our many misfortunes her death pained my heart.”23

  So ended the incredible journey: 720 miles from Cannes to Paris in twenty days, accomplished by most of his companions on foot; and the vow kept that no shot should be fired in this reconquest of France. Now for the task of restoring internal peace and unity, forming a new government, and preparing to face 500,000 troops gathering from Russia, Prussia, Austria, and England to send him back to his little island or a more distant one, or to a firing squad.

  Every end is a beginning; and on this March 20, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte began his Hundred Days.

  V. REBUILDING

  The task of restoring a government, an army, and a national will was made trebly difficult by the illegality of his position, the unity of his foreign enemies, and the disunion of his people.

  He had again, as in 1799, seized by force—or the threat of force—a legally established government. True enough, he was taking back by force an authority which had been taken from him by force of arms; but he had formally surrendered his power by his abdication, and the Senate had offered the throne to Louis XVIII, who had accepted it as his legal right, and had not now relinquished it. In the eyes of the Allies—and of a considerable portion of the French people—he was a usurper.

  His foreign enemies were now more firmly united against him than in their massive campaigns of 1813–14. The many nations represented at the Congress of Vienna had been unanimous in branding him an outlaw. Not only had Russia, Prussia, Austria, and England pledged, each of them, 150,000 troops to the new campaign to remove him from the scene; Sweden, the new German Confederation, and even little Switzerland had promised to contribute to the wall of flesh and money that was rising to move upon him.

  He sent them humble offers to negotiate a bloodless settlement; they made no answer. He appealed to his father-in-law, Emperor Francis II of Austria, to intercede for him with the other Allies—no answer came. He wrote to his wife to solicit her aid in softening her father; apparently the message never reached her. On March 25 the united Allies proclaimed that they were not making war against France, but would never make peace with Napoleon Bonaparte, lest he should again lead France—willing or not—into another war disturbing the foundations of European order.

  France was by no means united against the united Allies. Thousands of royalists remained there to plead the case, and organize the defense, of the absent King. On March 22 hundreds of them welcomed him into Lille on his flight from Paris, and they grieved when he moved on to Ghent, where he would again be protected by British power. In the south of France the royalists were strong enough to keep control of Bordeaux and Marseilles. In the west the deeply Catholic Vendée had again risen in arms against Napoleon, whom they considered an atheistic persecutor of their Pope, a crypto-Jacobin ally of regicides,24 and an obstinate protector of property stolen from the Church. In May, 1815, he sent twenty thousand troops to quell this passionate insurrection. Often, later, he mourned that these added troops might have won Waterloo.25

  Against his internal foes he could range some elements of public support not all agreeable to his views and character. Most agreeable was the Army, which (except in Bordeaux and the Vendée) was devoted to him as the organizer and rewarder of victory. The lower ranks of the nation—peasants, proletaires, and city populace—were ready to follow his lead, but they hoped he could avoid war, and they no longer gave him the worship that had made him reckless and proud. There were still many Jacobins in the cities, willing to forget his hostility to them if he would declare himself loyal to the Revolution. He accepted their support, but would not pledge himself to their war against merchants and priests.

  He admired the middle class as the foundation of that social-moral order which, since the September Massacres, had become the center of his political philosophy; but it did not offer him its support or its sons. It valued freedom of enterprise and trade and the press, but not of the ballot or of public speech; it feared the radicals, and wished to limit the franchise to property owners. It had elected the Chamber of Deputies, and was resolved to protect the rights of that body to check the power and policies of the king or emperor. And that rising section of the bourgeoisie—the intelligentsia of journalists, authors, scientists, philosophers—was making it quite clear that it would fight with all its weapons against any attempt of Napoleon to reestablish imperial power.

  The challenged hero was himself divided, in purpose and will. He still worked hard, noting everything, giving orders, sometimes dictating 150 letters in a day.26 But his very alertness weakened him, for it told him how little he could rely upon his new generals, or the chambers, or the nation, or even upon himself. The diseases that six years later would kill him were already weakening him; hemorrhoids irritated and humiliated him. He could not work as long as in the halcyon days of Marengo and Austerlitz. He had lost something of his old clearness of mind and steadiness of purpose, his old buoyant confidence in victory. He had begun to doubt his “star.”27

  On the very evening of his reaching Paris he chose a new ministry, for he needed its aid at once. He rejoiced to learn that Lazare Carnot (the “organizer of victory” during the Revolution) was ready to serve him against his enemies; he found him—aged sixty-two—too old for battle, but made him minister of the interior, as one whom all could trust. Hardly for such a reason he chose, as minister of police, Joseph Fouché, now fifty-six, suspected and feared by all, managing a private network of spies, and maintaining secret relations with almost every faction; probably the hurried ruler gave him his old office to keep him under scrutiny; and no one questioned Fouché’s ability. In most of the complications that followed he kept the clearest vision and the most flexible morality. “The Emperor in my eyes,” he was to write in his Memoirs, “was nothing but a worn-out actor, whose performance could not be reenacted.”28 Even while serving Napoleon he predicted, toward the end of March, “He can’t last longer than three months.”29

  The next step was to organize an army. Louis XVIII had felt no need for any except for internal order; consequently he had ended conscription, and had reduced his military to 160,000 men. Napoleon restored conscription in June, but these lucky youths were not yet mobilized when Waterloo ended the war. He called upon the National Guard to prepare itself for full—including foreign—service; many refused; 150,000 obeyed. Adding these and some volunteers to the existing Army, he could muster, in June, 300,000 men. He stationed most of them in the northern departments, and bade them await further orders. Meanwhile he repeated his exploits of 1813 and 1814 in raising and allocating provisions and matériel for the new Army. Secretly he imported guns from his favorite enemy, England.30 He could not use all his former marshals, for some had committed themselves to Louis XVIII; but he still had Ney, Davout, Soult, Grouchy, Vandamme. He studied maps of roads and terrain, and reports of enemy movements, and planned every major aspect of the coming campaign. In such planning he was at his best and happiest.

  He was least comfortable in his third task—to win public support despite his seizure of the government. Nearly all elements except the royalists demanded his commitment to a constitution that would protect freedom of speech and press, and make him responsible to an elected parliament. This went sorely against his grain, for he had long been accustomed to absolute rule, and felt that an able and well-intentioned dictator like himself was better for a country than a parlement of palaver and a count of noses whether of voters or of deputies. Nevertheless, in a gesture of conciliation, he sent for Benjamin Constant (April 6) to draw up a constitution that would appease the liberals without manacling the monarchy. He knew that Constant had written violently against him, but he recognized in him a finished stylist and a flexible mind. Constant c
ame, uncertain of his fate, and was relieved to find that all that the Emperor asked of him was to extemporize a constitution that would satisfy both Napoleon and Mme. de Staël. He labored for a week, daily exposing his product to his employer. On April 14 he presented the result to the Council of State.

  It proposed a constitutional monarchy in which the hereditary head of the state would have ample executive powers, but would be responsible to a Chamber of Peers nominated by the ruler, and a legislative Chamber of (six hundred) Representatives elected by the people through intermediate assemblies. Specific clauses abolished state censorship and guaranteed freedom of worship and the press. In this quite traditional way the Emperor and his scribe felt that they had united the charms of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy.

  After all this had been accepted by Napoleon, he insisted that the new constitution be presented to the people not as a repudiation of his past rule but as an “Acte Additionnel” certifying liberties that (Napoleon argued) had already existed under the Empire. Constant and his liberal advisers protested and yielded. On April 23 the Acte Additionnel was submitted to a plebiscite of all registered voters. The royalists refused to vote; many others abstained. The vote was 1,552,450 for, 4,800 against. Napoleon ordered that on May 26 the people should assemble on the Champ-de-Mars, in a massive and formal ceremony called the Champ de Mai, to celebrate the adoption of the constitution, the beginning of a new era, and the blessing and departure of the troops. The assembly, postponed to June 1, showed Napoleon in a royal mood: he came dressed in his robes as emperor, in his coronation coach drawn by four horses, and preceded by his brothers as princes of the Empire. The assemblage was not pleased by this aroma of a dead past. What had happened to the new constitution?

  The nation received it with some skepticism and much indifference; apparently many doubted its sincerity or permanence. Napoleon himself gave contradictory testimony on this point. According to Las Cases, the Emperor felt that doubt of his sincerity was unjustified: