On the day he landed Napoleon bivouacked on the dunes at Cannes not far from the present-day Croisette, opposite an old chapel that is today the church of Notre-Dame. At two o’clock the next morning he joined Cambronne’s advance guard, which included unmounted lancers and the two cannon. Instead of going to Aix, the Provençal capital, he took the road through Le Cannet which climbs 15 miles up to Grasse, which – since there were only five working muskets in his town – the mayor surrendered. After resting till noon, Napoleon abandoned his carriages and cannon, mounted his supplies on mules, and took the mountain road northwards. There was snow and ice on the higher parts, where some mules slipped and fell, and at points the road narrowed to single file. He walked on foot among his grenadiers, who affectionately teased him with nicknames such as ‘Notre petit tondu’ (Our little cropped one) and ‘Jean de l’Epée’ (Jack of the Sword).114
The ‘Route Napoléon’ was instituted by the French government in 1934 to encourage tourism, and impressive stone eagles were placed along it, of which a handful still survive today. Every town and village Napoleon went through has a sign proudly announcing the fact, and it is possible to see many of the places where he slept on what became a legendary journey north. Starting in the Alpes-Maritimes department, he marched through Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Hautes-Alpes, and reached Grenoble in the Isère by the night of March 7, travelling 190 miles in only six days. He went on foot and on horseback across high plateaux and plains, over bare rocks and verdant pasture, past Swiss-style villages, over 6,000-foot snow-capped mountains with vertiginous drops and down winding Corniche-style roads. Today the Route Napoléon is considered one of the great cycling and motorcycling roads of the world.
After Saint-Vallier, Napoleon passed through the villages of Escragnolles, where he called another halt, Séranon, where he slept at the Château de Brondel, the country house of the Marquis de Gourdon, and Le Logis-du-Pin, where he was served broth. Reaching Castellane by noon on March 3 he lunched at the sous-préfecture (today in the Place Marcel Sauvaire), where Cambronne demanded 5,000 rations of meat, bread and wine from the mayor, a few days’ provisions for his still tiny force of less than a thousand. (Campbell thought Cambronne ‘a desperate, uneducated ruffian’, so he was just the right man for such an adventure.115) Napoleon spent that night in the hamlet of Barrême, where he slept in the house of Judge Tartanson on the main road. The next day he reached Digne-les-Bains and rested at the Petit-Palais hotel, where he was joined by some veterans of his Grande Armée. The people of Digne begged the pro-Bourbon commander of the Basses-Alpes department, General Nicolas Loverdo, not to turn their town into a battleground, and finding himself short of loyal troops he didn’t. Napoleon then pushed on and spent the night in the Château de Malijai, which today is the town hall.*
The next morning, Sunday, March 5, Napoleon halted at the village of Volonne, by local legend drinking at a fountain dating back to Henri IV. He faced his first real test at the massively imposing castle of Sisteron, where the guns of the great citadel there could easily have destroyed the sole bridge across the Durance. Instead he lunched with the mayor and notables in the Bras d’Or hotel and went on his way shortly afterwards. From the top of the citadel’s bell-tower it is possible to see up and down the River Durance for 40 miles; Napoleon would have had nowhere else to cross. Either due to an oversight, economies or because its commander wanted an excuse not to destroy the bridge, the castle had no gunpowder, and from then on whenever Cambronne arrived ahead of Napoleon to cajole, negotiate, bribe and, if necessary, threaten the mayors of each town, no bridge was destroyed.
Napoleon later recalled that when he reached Gap ‘Some of the peasants took five-franc pieces stamped with my likeness out of their pockets, and cried, “It is he!”’116* ‘My return dispels all your anxieties,’ he wrote in a proclamation from Gap to the inhabitants of the Upper and Lower Alps, ‘it ensures the conservation of all property.’ In other letters he specifically played on the fears of what might happen under the Bourbons (but hadn’t yet) when he stated that he opposed those ‘who wish to bring back feudal rights, who wish to destroy equality between different classes, cancel sales of biens nationaux’.117 He left Gap at 2 p.m. on March 6. From there the ground rises steeply, up to the Col Bayard at 3,750 feet. That night Napoleon slept in the gendarmerie in the main street of Corps.
Easily the most dramatic moment of the journey came the following day a few hundred yards south of the town of Laffrey, where Napoleon encountered a battalion of the 5th Line in a narrow area between two wooded hills on what is today called La Prairie de la Rencontre. According to Bonapartist legend, Napoleon, standing before them well within musket range, with only his far smaller number of Imperial Guardsmen protecting him, threw back his iconic grey overcoat and pointed to his breast, asking if they wanted to fire on their Emperor. In testament to the continuing power of his charisma, the troops threw down their muskets and mobbed him.118 Napoleon had previously been informed by two officers of the pro-Bonapartist attitudes of the demi-brigade, but a single shot from a royalist officer could have brought about a very different outcome. Savary, who wasn’t present, told a slightly less heroic version, in which Napoleon’s conversational style and habit of question-asking saved the day.
The Emperor approached; the battalion kept a profound silence. The officer who was in command ordered them to aim their muskets: he was obeyed; if he had ordered Fire we cannot say what would have happened. The Emperor didn’t give him time: he talked to the soldiers and asked them as usual: ‘Well! How are you doing in the 5th?’ The soldiers answered ‘Very well, Sire.’ Then the Emperor said: ‘I’ve come back to see you; do some of you want to kill me?’ The soldiers shouted ‘Oh! That, no!’ Then the Emperor reviewed them as usual and thus took possession of the 5th Regiment. The head of the battalion looked unhappy.119
When Napoleon himself told the story he said he had adopted a jovial, old-comrade attitude towards the troops: ‘I went forward and held out my hand to a soldier, saying, “What, you old rascal, were you about to fire on your Emperor?” “Look here,” he answered, showing me that his musket was not loaded.’120 He also put the success down to having his veterans with him: ‘It was the bearskin helmets of my Guards which did the business. They called to memory my glorious days.’121 Whether Napoleon had been declamatory or conversational at that tense moment, he showed great nerve. Laffrey also represented a watershed, because for the first time regular soldiers, rather than peasants or National Guardsmen, had come over to his side.
After being cheered by crowds at Vizille – where Charles de La Bédoyère brought the 7th Line over to him – taking refreshment at Mère Vigier’s café in Tavernelles and having a by then well-deserved footbath at Eybens, Napoleon entered Grenoble at 11 p.m. on March 7. There the townspeople tore down their own city gates and presented pieces of them to Napoleon as a souvenir of their loyalty. ‘On my march from Cannes to Grenoble I was an adventurer,’ Napoleon later said; ‘in Grenoble I once again became a sovereign.’122 Rejecting an offer to stay at the prefecture, Napoleon displayed his customary genius for public relations by instead staying in room No. 2 of the hotel Les Trois Dauphins in the rue Montorge, which was run by the son of a veteran of his Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was where he had stayed in 1791 when stationed at Valence. (Stendhal stayed in the same room in 1837, out of homage.) Any lack of comfort was made up for in Lyons where he stayed in the archbishop’s palace (today the city library), occupying the same apartments that the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois (later King Charles X) had been forced to leave hastily that same morning. When Napoleon conducted a review of his by now sizeable force in Lyons, he reprimanded a battalion for not manoeuvring well enough. This, he later said, ‘had a great effect; it showed he was confident of his re-establishment’.123 Had he adopted an imploring attitude at that key moment, his men would have spotted it immediately. Instead, even after his defeats and abdication, they were still willi
ng to follow him.
The news of Napoleon’s return reached Paris at noon on March 5 via the Chappe aerial telegraph, but the government kept it secret until the 7th.124 Ney, Macdonald and Saint-Cyr were deputed by Soult, the new war minister, to address the problem, whereupon Ney told Louis XVIII: ‘I will seize Bonaparte, I promise you, and I will bring him to you in an iron cage.’125 Soult’s order to the army stated that only traitors would join Napoleon, and ‘This man is now but an adventurer. His last mad act has revealed him for what he is.’126 And yet, for all this, the only two marshals to fight alongside Napoleon on the battlefield of Waterloo would be Ney and Soult.
On the day Napoleon left Lyons, March 13, the Allies, still in session at the Congress, issued the Vienna Declaration.
By appearing again in France with projects of confusion and disorders, [Napoleon] has deprived himself of the protection of the law and has manifested before the world that there can be neither peace nor truce with him. The Powers consequently declare that Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself beyond the pale of civil and social relations, and that as an enemy and disturber of the world, he has delivered himself up to public vengeance.127
Napoleon continued northwards, spending the following night at Chalon-sur-Saône, the 15th at Autun, the 16th at Avallon and the 17th in the prefecture at Auxerre. He was greeted by large, enthusiastic crowds and joined by further units of soldiers along the way. He sent two officers in disguise to Marshal Ney, who was in command of 3,000 men at Lons-le-Saunier, telling him that if he changed sides, ‘I shall receive you as I did on the morrow of the battle of the Moskowa.’128 Ney had had every intention of fighting against Napoleon when he left Paris, but he had no wish to start a civil war, even if he could persuade his men to open fire. ‘I was in the midst of storms,’ he later said of his decision, ‘and I lost my head.’129 On March 14 Ney defected to Napoleon with generals Lecourbe and Bourmont (who were both very reluctant) and almost all his troops except for a few royalist officers. ‘Only the Emperor Napoleon is entitled to rule over our beautiful country,’ Ney told his men.130 He later said that the Bonapartist sentiment among the men was overwhelming and he couldn’t ‘hold back the sea with my hands’.131
Napoleon met Ney on the morning of the 18th at Auxerre, but as Ney had brought along a document warning him that he needed ‘to study the welfare of the French people and endeavour to repair the evils his ambition had brought upon him’ it was a cold, workmanlike reunion.132 Instead of treating him as he had ‘on the morrow of the battle of the Moskowa’, Napoleon questioned him about the morale of his troops, the state of feeling of the south-eastern departments and his experiences on the march to Dijon, to which Ney gave brief replies before being ordered to march on Paris.
On the 19th Napoleon lunched at Joigny, reached Sens by 5 p.m. and dined and slept at Pont-sur-Yonne. Then at 1 a.m. on Monday, March 20 he left for Fontainebleau, where he arrived in the White Horse courtyard eleven months to the day after leaving it. At 1.30 that morning the gouty Louis XVIII was bodily lifted into his carriage at the Tuileries – no easy task given his weight – and fled Paris. He went first to Lille, where the garrison seemed hostile, so he crossed into Belgium and then waited upon events from Ghent. With his customary veneration for anniversaries, Napoleon had wanted to enter Paris on the 20th – the King of Rome’s fourth birthday – and sure enough, at nine o’clock that evening he entered the Tuileries once again as de facto emperor of the French.
The courtyard of the Tuileries was packed with soldiers and civilians who had come to witness his return. There are several accounts of what happened next, all agreeing on the din of excitement and the general approval that Napoleon elicited upon his arrival. Colonel Léon-Michel Routier, who had fought in Italy, Calabria and Catalonia, was walking and chatting with comrades-in-arms near the pavilion clock at the Tuileries when
suddenly very simple carriages without any escort showed up at the wicket-gate by the river and the Emperor was announced . . . The carriages enter, we all rush around them and we see Napoleon get out. Then everyone’s in delirium; we jump on him in disorder, we surround him, we squeeze him, we almost suffocate him . . . The memory of this unique moment in the history of the world still makes my heart pound with pleasure. Happy who, like me, was the witness of this magical arrival, the result of a road of over two hundred leagues travelled in eighteen days on French soil without spilling one drop of blood.133
Even General Thiébault, who until earlier that day had been in charge of the defence of southern Paris against Napoleon, felt that ‘There was an instantaneous and irresistible outburst . . . you would have thought the ceilings were coming down . . . I seemed to have become a Frenchman once more, and nothing could equal the transports and the shouts with which I tried to show the party I was taking part in the homage rendered to him.’134 Lavalette recalled that Napoleon walked up the staircase of the Tuileries ‘slowly, with his eyes half closed, his arms extended before him, like a blind man, and expressing his joy only by a smile’.135 Such was the press of cheering supporters that it was only with difficulty that the door to his apartment could be closed behind him. When Mollien arrived that night to offer his congratulations, he embraced him and said, ‘Enough, enough, my dear, the time for compliments has passed; they let me come as they let them go.’136
After the dramas of the journey from Golfe-Juan, changing the regime in Paris came easily. That first night it was noticed that the fleur-de-lys covering the carpet in the palace’s audience chamber could be removed, and underneath could still be seen the old Napoleonic bees. ‘Immediately all the ladies set to work,’ recalled a spectator of Queen Julie of Spain, Queen Hortense of Holland and their returning ladies-in-waiting, ‘and in less than half an hour, to the great mirth of the company, the carpet became imperial again.’137
30
Waterloo
‘I sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing.’
Napoleon on the Waterloo campaign
‘A general-in-chief should ask himself several times in the day, what if the enemy were to appear now to my front, or on my right, or on my left?’
Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 8
By the time Napoleon went to bed at three o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, March 21, 1815, he had largely reconstituted his government. The Vienna Declaration made it clear that the Allies would not allow him to retain the throne, so he needed to prepare France for invasion, but he hoped that – unlike in 1814 – ordinary Frenchmen would actively rally to him, having now experienced the Bourbon alternative. To an extent they did; over the next few weeks there were as many recruits as the depots could handle. It was a wrenching moment for Frenchmen to decide where their true loyalties lay. Of the Bonaparte family, Joseph was received with affection by him on the 23rd – Napoleon no longer suspected him of making a move on Marie Louise – Lucien came from his self-imposed exile in Rome and was ‘speedily admitted’ into his presence and forgiven for everything, Jérôme was given the 6th Division to command, Cardinal Fesch returned to France and Hortense became the chatelaine of the Tuileries. Louis and Eugène stayed away, the latter at the behest of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria. Marie Louise remained in Austria, fervently hoping that Napoleon, to whom she had written for the final time on January 1, would be defeated.1 In a letter to a friend of April 6, the infatuated young woman mentioned the exact number of days – eighteen – since she had last seen General Neipperg, and in her last oral message to Napoleon soon afterwards she asked for a separation.2
The unfeigned surprise shown by senior statesmen such as Cambacérès at the news of Napoleon’s return confirms that it was not the result of a widespread conspiracy, as the Bourbons suspected, but of the willpower and opportunism of one man.3 Cambacérès reluctantly went to the justice ministry, complaining ‘All I wa
nt is rest.’4 A few – such as the adamant republican Carnot, who went to the interior ministry – joined Napoleon because they genuinely believed his assurances that he would now be acting as a constitutional monarch who respected the civil rights of Frenchmen.* Other ministers, such as Lavalette, were dyed-in-the-wool Bonapartists. Decrès went back to the naval ministry, Mollien to the treasury, Caulaincourt to the foreign ministry and Daru to war administration. Maret became secretary of state, while Boulay de la Meurthe and Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély returned to their key positions in the Conseil and Molé to his old inspectorate of roads and bridges.5 Savary took over the gendarmerie and even Fouché was allowed back into the police ministry – a sign of how indispensable he was despite his chronic untrustworthiness. Overall, Napoleon had gathered easily enough talent and experience to run an efficient administration if the military situation could somehow be squared. When he saw Rapp, who had been given a divisional command by the Bourbons, he playfully (and perhaps a little painfully) punched him in the solar plexus, saying, ‘What, you rogue, you wanted to kill me?’ before making him commander of the Army of the Rhine. ‘In vain he sought to assume the mask of severity,’ Rapp wrote in his posthumously published autobiography, but ‘kind feelings always gained the ascendancy.’6 One of the few people who wrote a letter asking for re-employment to be refused was Roustam. ‘He’s a coward,’ Napoleon told Marchand. ‘Throw that in the fire and never ask me again about it.’7 It was understandable that he should not want as his principal bodyguard someone who had fled Fontainebleau in the night the previous year. His place was taken by Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis, who since 1811 had been dressed by Napoleon as a Mamluk and called Ali, despite his being a Frenchman born in Versailles.
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