Napoleon
Page 89
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On Wednesday, March 30, 1814, as Napoleon moved from Troyes via Sens towards Paris as fast as his soldiers could march, 30,000 Prussians, 6,500 Württembergers, 5,000 Austrians and 16,000 Russians under Schwarzenberg engaged 41,000 men under Marmont and Mortier in Montmartre and other Parisian suburbs. Despite putting out a proclamation on March 29 saying ‘Let us arm to protect the city, its monuments, its wealth, our wives and children, all that is dear to us’, Joseph left the city once the fighting started the next day.82 Marmont and Mortier were hardly facing impossible odds, yet they considered the situation irretrievable and succumbed to Schwarzenberg’s threats to destroy Paris. At seven o’clock the next morning, they opened talks with a view to surrendering the city.83 Although Mortier marched his corps out of the city to the south-west, Marmont kept his corps of 11,000 men stationary over the coming days. As the enemy closed in, the elderly Marshal Sérurier, governor of Les Invalides, supervised the burning and hiding of trophies, including 1,417 captured standards and the sword and sash of Frederick the Great.
The Emperor reached Le Coeur de France, a staging post-house at Juvisy only 14 miles from Paris, sometime after 10 p.m. on March 30. General Belliard arrived there soon after to inform him of Paris’s capitulation after only one day’s indecisive fighting. Napoleon called Berthier over and plied Belliard with questions, saying ‘Had I arrived sooner, all would have been saved.’84 Exhausted, he sat for over a quarter of an hour with his head in his hands.85* He considered simply marching on to Paris regardless of the situation there, but was persuaded not to by his generals.86 Instead he became the first French monarch to lose the capital since the English occupation of 1420–36. He sent Caulaincourt to Paris to sue for peace and went to Fontainebleau, where he arrived at 6 a.m. on the 31st. An auto-da-fé of flags and eagles was conducted in the forest there (although some escaped the bonfire and can be seen in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris today).87
When the Allied armies entered Paris by the Saint-Denis gate on April 1, with white ribbons on their arms and green sprigs in their shakos, they were greeted by the populace with the exuberance that victorious armies always tend to receive. Lavalette was particularly disgusted by the sight of ‘Women dressed as for a fete, and almost frantic with joy, waving their handkerchiefs crying: “Vive l’Empereur Alexander!”’88 Alexander’s troops bivouacked on the Champs-Élysées and Champ de Mars. There was no evidence that Parisians were willing to burn down their city sooner than cede it to their enemies, as the Russians had burned Moscow only eighteen months previously. The fickleness of the rest of the Empire might be judged from a Milanese deputation then on a visit to Paris to congratulate the man they had intended to call ‘Napoleon the Great’ for triumphing over all his enemies. On approaching the capital and hearing that it was being besieged they nonetheless decided to press on, and when they arrived promptly offered their congratulations to the Allies ‘on the fall of the tyrant’.89
Fifteen years after supporting Napoleon’s coup d’état at Brumaire, Talleyrand launched his own coup on March 30, 1814 and set up a provisional government in Paris that immediately began peace negotiations with the Allies.90 Although Tsar Alexander had considered alternatives to restoring the Bourbons, including Bernadotte, the Orleanists or perhaps even a regency for the King of Rome, he and the other Allied leaders were persuaded by Talleyrand to accept Louis XVIII. Another regicide, Fouché, was brought into the provisional government, and on April 2 the Senate passed a sénatus-consulte deposing the Emperor and inviting ‘Louis Xavier de Bourbon’ to assume the throne. The provisional government also released all French soldiers from their oath of allegiance to Napoleon. When this was circulated among the troops it was noted that although the senior officers took it seriously, most of the other ranks treated it with contempt.91 (One can be too pious about the solemnity of these oaths of loyalty, of course; Napoleon had sworn them to both Louis XVI and the Republic.)
At Fontainebleau, Napoleon considered his dwindling options. His own preference was still to march on Paris, but Maret, Savary, Caulaincourt, Berthier, Macdonald, Lefebvre, Oudinot, Ney and Moncey were uniformly opposed, though Ney never spoke to the Emperor in the bald, rude terms later ascribed to him;92 some of them favoured joining the Empress at Blois. It was paradoxical that although the marshals hadn’t forced abdication on Napoleon after he had been comprehensively beaten in Russia in 1812, nor after Leipzig in 1813, they did favour it when he was still winning victories in 1814, albeit with an army that was heavily outnumbered. They pointedly reminded him of his repeated statements only to do what was in the best interest of France.93 Napoleon suspected that they wanted him to abdicate in order to protect and enjoy the chateaux and riches he had given them, and gave voice to this opinion in bitter moments.
Although he had asked some of them – Macdonald, Oudinot and especially Victor – to do the impossible in 1814, and had berated them when they could achieve only the extraordinary, the real explanation for their behaviour wasn’t selfish, but rather that none could see how the campaign could possibly be won from the strategic position they were in, even if it were continued from the French interior. Since Napoleon’s abdication was the only way the war could end, it was logical for them to call for it, albeit respectfully. However much Napoleon reviewed the Old Guard and other units, who on April 3 shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ at the idea of marching on Paris, the marshals knew that the numbers simply no longer added up – insofar as they ever had during this campaign.94 Macdonald stated in his memoirs that he didn’t want to see the capital go the way of Moscow.95 Ney and Macdonald had wanted Napoleon to abdicate immediately so that a regency might be salvaged from the wreckage, and Napoleon sent them and Caulaincourt to Paris to see if this was still possible. However, on April 4 Marmont marched his corps straight into the Allied camp to capitulate, along with all their arms and ammunition. This led the Tsar to demand Napoleon’s unconditional abdication.96 Alexander had taken his huge army right across Europe and nothing less would now do.
For the rest of his life, Napoleon went over the circumstances of Marmont’s treachery again and again. Marmont was, he said, with slight but pardonable exaggeration, ‘a man whom he had brought up from the age of sixteen’.97 For his part, Marmont said Napoleon was ‘satanically proud’, as well as given to ‘negligence, insouciance, laziness, capricious trust and an uncertainty as well as an unending irresolution’.98 Napoleon was certainly proud, definitely not lazy, and if he was capriciously trusting, the Duc de Ragusa had been a prime beneficiary. ‘The ungrateful wretch,’ Napoleon said, ‘he will be more unhappy than me.’ The word ragusard was adopted to mean traitor, and Marmont’s old company in the Guard was nicknamed ‘Judas company’. Even three decades later, when he was an old man living in exile in Venice, children used to follow him about, pointing and shouting, ‘There goes the man who betrayed Napoleon!’99
29
Elba
‘I conclude my work with the year 1815, because everything which came after that belongs to ordinary history.’
Metternich, Memoirs
‘True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.’
Napoleon on board HMS Northumberland, 1815
Once it became clear that Ney, Macdonald, Lefebvre and Oudinot had no stomach for a civil war, and the Allies had informed Caulaincourt on April 5 that they would give Napoleon the lifetime sovereignty of the Mediterranean island of Elba off Italy, the Emperor signed a provisional abdication document at Fontainebleau for Caulaincourt to use in his negotiations.1 ‘You wish for repose,’ he told the marshals. ‘Well then, you shall have it.’2 The abdication was only for himself and not for his heirs, and he intended Caulaincourt to keep it secret as he would ratify it only once a treaty – covering Elba and granting financial and personal security for Napoleon and his family – was signed. Yet of course the news quickly leaked out, and the palace
emptied as officers and courtiers left to make their peace with the provisional government. ‘One would have thought,’ said State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère of the exodus, ‘that His Majesty was already in his grave.’3 By April 7 the Moniteur didn’t have enough space in its columns to print all the proclamations of loyalty to Louis XVIII that had been made by Jourdan, Augereau, Maison, Lagrange, Nansouty, Oudinot, Kellermann, Lefebvre, Hullin, Milhaud, Ségur, Latour-Maubourg and others.4 Berthier was even appointed to command one of Louis XVIII’s corps of Guards.5 ‘His Majesty was very sad and hardly talking,’ Roustam recorded of these days.6 After his stay at the Jelgava Palace in Latvia, where he had written to Napoleon asking for his throne back in 1800, Louis XVIII had moved to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1807, from where he now prepared to move back to France in order to reclaim his throne, as soon as he received the news that Napoleon had abdicated.
Yet even denuded of an officer corps and general staff, Napoleon could still have precipitated a civil war had he wished. On April 7 rumours of his abdication prompted the 40,000-strong army at Fontainebleau to leave their billets at night and parade with arms and torches crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, ‘Down with the traitors!’ and ‘To Paris!’7 There were similar scenes at the barracks in Orleans, Briaire, Lyons, Douai, Thionville and Landau, and the white flag of the Bourbons was publicly burned in Clermont-Ferrand and other places. Augereau’s corps was close to mutiny, and garrisons loyal to Napoleon attempted risings in Antwerp, Metz and Mainz. In Lille the troops were in open revolt for three days, actually firing on their officers as late as April 14.8 As Charles de Gaulle was to observe: ‘Those he made suffer most, the soldiers, were the very ones who were most faithful to him.’9 Struck by these protestations of loyalty, the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, warned the secretary for war, Lord Bathurst, of ‘the danger of Napoleon’s remaining at Fontainebleau surrounded by troops who still, in a considerable degree, remain faithful to him’. This warning finally prompted the Allies to sign the Treaty of Fontainebleau, after five days of negotiation, on April 11, 1814.10
Caulaincourt and Macdonald arrived there from Paris with the treaty the next day, which now only required Napoleon’s signature for its ratification. He invited them to dinner, noting the absence of Ney, who had stayed in the capital to make his peace with the Bourbons.11 The treaty allowed Napoleon to use his imperial title and gave him Elba for life, making generous financial provisions for the whole family, although Josephine’s outrageously generous alimony was cut to 1 million francs per annum. Napoleon himself was to receive 2.5 million francs per annum and Marie Louise was given the Italian duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla.12 Napoleon wrote to her on April 13, saying: ‘You are to have at least one mansion and a beautiful country . . . when you tire of my Island of Elba and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I am older and you still young.’ He added: ‘My health is good, my courage unimpaired, especially if you will be content with my ill-fortune and if you think you can still be happy in sharing it.’13 He had not yet appreciated that the rationale for a Habsburg marrying a Bonaparte had been that he was Emperor of France; now that he was to be merely Emperor of Elba the desirability of the match collapsed. Getting hold of a book on the island he told Bausset, ‘The air there is healthy and the inhabitants are excellent. I shall not be very badly off, and I hope that Marie Louise will not be very unhappy either.’14 Yet only two hours before General Pierre Cambronne and a cavalry detachment arrived at Orleans on April 12 with orders from Napoleon to take her and the King of Rome the 54 miles to Fontainebleau, an Austrian delegation from Metternich took her and her retinue away to the chateau of Rambouillet, where she was told that her father would join her. At first she insisted that she could only leave with Napoleon’s permission, but she was persuaded to change her mind easily enough, although she wrote to Napoleon that she was being taken against her will. It was not long before she gave up any plans she might have had to rejoin him, and went instead to Vienna. She had no intention of being not very unhappy.
For all his optimism in his letter to Marie Louise, on the night between the 12th and 13th, after dinner with Caulaincourt and Macdonald, Napoleon attempted to commit suicide.15 He took a mixture of poisons ‘the size and shape of a clove of garlic’ that he had carried in a small silk bag around his neck since he was nearly captured by the Cossacks at Maloyaroslavets.16 He did not try any other means of suicide, not least because Roustam and his chamberlain, Henri, Comte de Turenne, had removed his pistols.17 ‘My life no longer belonged to my country,’ was Napoleon’s own later explanation:
the events of the last few days had again rendered me master of it – ‘Why should I endure so much suffering?’ I reflected, ‘and who knows that my death might not place the crown on the head of my son?’ France was saved. I hesitated no longer, but leaping from my bed, mixed the poison in a little water, and drank it with a sort of feeling of happiness. But time had taken away its strength; fearful pains drew forth some groans from me; they were heard, and medical assistance arrived.18
His valet Hubert, who slept in the adjoining room, heard him groaning, and summoned Yvan the doctor, who induced vomiting, possibly by forcing him to swallow ashes from the fireplace.19
Maret and Caulaincourt were also called during the night. Once it was clear that he wasn’t going to die, Napoleon signed the abdication the next morning ‘without further hesitation’ on a plain pedestal table in the red and gold antechamber now known as the Abdication Room. ‘The Allied powers having declared that the Emperor Napoleon was the only obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe,’ it stated, ‘the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and there is no personal sacrifice, even that of life, that he would not be ready to make in the interest of France.’20
When Macdonald went to the Emperor’s apartments to collect the ratified treaty at 9 a.m. on April 13, Caulaincourt and Maret were still there. Macdonald found Napoleon ‘seated before the fire, clothed in a simple dimity [lightweight cotton] dressing-gown, his legs bare, his feet in slippers, his head resting in his hands, and his elbows resting on his knees . . . his complexion was yellow and greenish.’21 He merely said he had been ‘very ill all night’. Napoleon was fulsome towards the loyal Macdonald, telling him: ‘I did not know you well; I was prejudiced against you. I have done so much for, and loaded with favours, so many others who have abandoned and neglected me; and you, who owe me nothing, have remained faithful to me!’22 He gave him Murad Bey’s sword, they embraced, and Macdonald left to take the ratified treaty to Paris. They never saw each other again.
After the attempted suicide, Roustam fled Fontainebleau, later saying he feared that he might be mistaken for a Bourbon or Allied assassin if Napoleon succeeded in killing himself.23
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On April 15 it was decided that generals Bertrand, Drouot and Pierre Cambronne would accompany Napoleon to Elba, with a small force of six hundred Imperial Guardsmen, the Allies having promised to protect the island from ‘the Barbary Powers’ – that is the North African states – under a special article of the treaty. (Barbary pirates were rife in that part of the Mediterranean.) The next day four Allied commissioners arrived at Fontainebleau to accompany him there, although only the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and the Austrian, General Franz von Koller, would actually be living on the island. Napoleon got on well with Campbell, who had been wounded at Fère-Champenoise when a Russian, mistaking him for a French officer, lanced him in the back while another sabred him across the head, even though he had called out lustily, ‘Angliski polkovnik!’ (English colonel). To his delight he was ordered by Castlereagh ‘to attend the late chief of the French Government to the island of Elba’ (a wording that indicates the uncertainty that already prevailed over Napoleon’s exact status).24
Napoleon read the Parisian newspapers at Font
ainebleau. Fain recalled that their abuse ‘made but slight impression upon him, and when the hatred was carried to a point of absurdity it only forced from him a smile of pity’.25 He told Flahaut that he was pleased not to have agreed to the Châtillon peace terms in February: ‘I should have been a sadder man than I am if I had to sign a treaty taking from France one single village which was hers on the day when I swore to maintain her integrity.’26 This refusal to renege on one iota of la Gloire de la France was to be a key factor in his return to power. For the present, Napoleon told his valet Constant: ‘Ah well, my son, prepare your cart; we will go and plant our cabbages.’27 The inconstant Constant had no such intention, however, and after twelve years’ service he absconded on the night of April 19 with 5,000 francs in cash. (Savary had orders to hide 70,000 francs for Napoleon – a good deal more than the Banque de France’s governor’s annual salary.28)
Meeting Napoleon on the 17th, Campbell, who spoke French well, wrote in his diary:
I saw before me a short active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell. He was dressed in an old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red top-boots, unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely upon his upper lip and breast. Upon his becoming aware of my presence, he turned quickly towards me, and saluted me with a courteous smile, evidently endeavouring to conceal his anxiety and agitation by an assumed placidity of manner.29