Napoleon
Page 96
• • •
Waterloo was the second costliest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars after Borodino. Between 25,000 and 31,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and huge numbers captured.121 Wellington lost 17,200 men and Blücher a further 7,000. Of Napoleon’s sixty-four most senior generals who served in 1815, twenty-six were killed or wounded that year. ‘Incomprehensible day,’ Napoleon later said of Waterloo. He admitted that ‘he did not thoroughly understand the battle’, the loss of which he blamed on ‘a combination of extraordinary Fates’.122 Yet the genuinely incomprehensible thing was quite how many unforced errors he and his senior commanders had made. With his torpor the day before the battle, his strategic error over Grouchy, his failure to co-ordinate attacks and his refusal to grasp his last, best opportunity after La Haie Sainte fell, Napoleon’s performance after Ligny recalled those of his more ponderous Austrian enemies in the Italian campaigns nearly twenty years earlier. Not only did Wellington and Blücher deserve to win the battle of Waterloo: Napoleon very much deserved to lose it.
31
St Helena
‘The soul wears out the body.’
Napoleon to Marie Louise
‘He lived in the middle of the plains of Persia, ever missing his country.’
Napoleon on Themistocles
‘All is not lost,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph the day after the battle.
I calculate that, when I reassemble my forces, I shall have 150,000 men. The fédérés and National Guards (such of them as are fit to fight) will provide 100,000 men, and the regimental depots a further 50,000. Thus I shall have 300,000 men ready to bring against the enemy. I shall use carriage-horses to pull the guns; raise 100,000 men by conscription; arm them with muskets taken from royalists and from National Guards unfit for service; organize a levée en masse . . . and overwhelm the enemy. But people must help me, not deafen me with advice . . . The Austrians are slow marchers; the Prussians fear the peasantry and dare not advance too far. There is still time to retrieve the situation.1
Napoleon believed that if he managed to get all the forces under Grouchy (who had escaped the area with his corps intact), Rapp, Brune, Suchet and Lecourbe together, if the great border fortresses could hold out until relieved, and if he could attack the Allies’ extended supply lines, he might obtain respite.2 If nothing else, it was a tribute to his extraordinary determination and continuing energy that he so much as contemplated all this after such a rout as Waterloo. Soult drew up a general order for commanders to gather together stragglers and concentrate on Lâon, Lafère, Marle, Saint-Quentin, Bethel, Vervier, Soissons and Reims, where various unbroken units were garrisoned.3 Jérôme and Morand meanwhile rallied parts of the army at Philippeville and Avesnes.
Napoleon knew that in order to fight on he needed the support of the chambers meeting in the Palais Bourbon, so he hastened back to Paris on horseback, and even by mail-coach, to try to beat the news of the defeat. On the journey, an innkeeper at Rocroi insisted upon being paid 300 francs in cash for the supper provided for the Emperor and his entourage, refusing a requisition chit – as sure a sign as any of Napoleon’s waning authority.4 He arrived at the Élysée at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, summoned his family and ministers, and took his first bath in several days. But although he had gone straight to Paris after Egypt and Moscow, this time his return smacked of desperation. Even John Cam Hobhouse detected ‘a precipitancy that nothing can excuse’ in his hero. Napoleon’s swift return only emboldened his opponents, despite their having sworn solemn oaths of fidelity to him at the Champ de Mai less than three weeks before.5
One hundred and one cannon had been fired in Paris on June 18 to announce the victory at Ligny, which was reported to have been won over Wellington and Blücher, but the lack of any bulletins since had started to worry Parisians. Napoleon considered going to the Palais Bourbon immediately on his return, ‘covered in the dust of the battlefield’, as one of his supporters put it, and appealing to the legislature’s sense of patriotism.6 The hastily summoned Cambacérès, Carnot and Maret supported the idea, and his coach was made ready in the courtyard, but the majority of his ministers thought it too dangerous considering the febrile mood of the parliamentarians.* Instead, the Emperor sent a message to the chambers saying he had come back to Paris ‘to consult with my ministers about measures of national salvation’.7 He later regretted not going there in person, saying: ‘I would have moved them and led them; my eloquence would have enthused them; I would have cut the heads off Lanjuinais and Lafayette and ten others . . . I have to say it: I didn’t have the courage.’8
Nor did he have the support. The power vacuum was quickly filled by Lafayette, who appointed five members of each chamber to take on ministerial functions – effectively a parliamentary coup d’état.9 Regnault de Saint-Jean d’Angély and Lucien tried to dissuade the chambers from this course but Lafayette was eloquent and persuasive in his denunciation of Napoleon. Accused of treachery by Lucien, he said: ‘We have followed your brother to the sands of Africa, to the deserts of Russia: the bones of Frenchmen, scattered in every region, bear witness to our fidelity.’10 During the day, disarmed and dejected troops started arriving in the capital, who ‘reported everywhere, as they passed, that all was lost’.11
The bulletin Napoleon wrote on June 21 argued that Waterloo had been on the verge of being won when ‘malicious malefactors’ (malveillants) started crying out ‘Sauve qui peut’, and so ‘In an instant the whole army was nothing but a mass of confusion.’ He ended: ‘Such was the issue of the battle of Mont Saint-Jean, glorious for the French armies, and yet so fatal.’12 It convinced few, but the use of the word fatal (funeste) three times left Parisians in no doubt about the catastrophe, which was now also fatal for Napoleon’s chance of remaining on the throne. It is possible that Napoleon tried to poison himself again that night. Cadet de Gassicourt, the Emperor’s apothecary, told General Thiébault in 1818 that he had been summoned to the Élysée on June 21 after Napoleon had swallowed poison, as he had the previous year, and then changed his mind – after which the terrified Gassicourt had managed to provoke nausea and then administer fluids.13 Though there is no corroborating testimony, Gassicourt may well have been telling the truth.
At noon the next day, with even the most loyal of his ministers – Lavalette, Savary and Caulaincourt – arguing that it was now unavoidable, Napoleon abdicated for the second time, dictating the document ‘with that rapidity of determination which was characteristic of his peculiar organisation on the field of battle’.14 ‘Frenchmen!’ it began,
In starting the war to uphold national independence, I relied on the gathering of all efforts, all wills, and the support of all national authorities; I had reason to hope for success, and I braved all the declarations of the Powers against me. Circumstances appear to have changed. I offer myself in sacrifice to the hatred of the enemies of France . . . My political life is over, and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon II, emperor of the French. The current ministers will form an interim government council. The interest I am passing to my son leads me to invite the Chambers to organize, without delay, Regency by law. All must unite for public salvation and to remain an independent nation.15
Napoleon still hoped that he would be called upon by the legislature to lead the armies of France against the invading Allies, but if the incoming provisional government didn’t require his services, he told Lavalette, he intended to live as a private citizen in the United States.16 As America had only recently made peace with Britain after three years of war, it is perfectly possible that he would have been allowed to retire there by the US government if he had been able to get there. Lavalette records that once Napoleon had abdicated, ‘he remained calm during the whole day, giving his advice on the position the army was to take, and on the manner [in which] the negotiations with the enemy were to be conducted.’17
The provisional government, of which Fouché became president on Jun
e 24, accepted the abdication gratefully, appointed Macdonald to command France’s armies, put Lafayette in charge of the National Guard, with Oudinot as his second-in-command, and allowed Carnot to keep his old job as minister of the interior. Talleyrand became foreign minister for the fourth time.18 When it was announced in the Journal de l’Empire that ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ had gone to Malmaison, the change in nomenclature struck people forcibly, for if even the foremost Bonapartist paper no longer described him in imperial terms he must indeed have fallen. Yet some ultra-loyalists were still holding out: Colonel Baron Paul-Alexis de Menil of the Army of the Rhine was fighting in the Seltz Forest with his 37th Line Demi-Brigade eight days after the battle of Waterloo, and some towns such as Givet, Charlemont, Longwy, Mézières, Charleville and Montmédy did not capitulate until August and September.
Shortly before he left Paris for the last time, Napoleon said farewell to an agitated and emotional Vivant Denon. Putting his hands on Denon’s shoulders, he said: ‘My dear friend, let’s not get soppy; in a crisis like this one has to behave with sang froid.’19 With his descriptions of Egypt and the Egyptian campaign, designs of bronze commemorative medals, encouragement of the Empire style in art and stewardship of the Louvre, Denon had done more than anyone else besides Napoleon himself to advance the cultural aspects of Bonapartism. He was one of the many non-soldiers of distinction who regretted Napoleon’s downfall.
• • •
A man of lesser self-confidence might have had an escape route planned. Now, between his departure for Malmaison with Hortense, Bertrand and Maret on June 25 and his surrender to the British on July 15, Napoleon did something entirely out of character: he vacillated. As the Allies and Bourbons approached Paris for a second restoration, and the Prussians sent out cavalry patrols further afield, his options started to narrow. While at Malmaison he applied to the provisional government for a passport to go to America, and asked for two frigates to take him there from Rochefort.20 This was absurd: the Royal Navy, which was blockading the port with the seventy-four-gun HMS Bellerophon, would not have respected a passport issued to Napoleon by Fouché’s government or anyone else.21 On June 26 Napoleon received Marie Walewska at Malmaison, where they said goodbye.
On the 29th Napoleon was told by Fouché’s emissaries, Decrès and Boulay de la Meurthe, that the government had released two frigates, the Saale and Méduse, for his use, and that since the Prussians were approaching he needed to leave Malmaison. Pausing only to visit the room in which Josephine had died, and to say goodbye to his mother and Hortense for the last time, he left the house with Bertrand and Savary at 5.30 p.m. (Ferdinand, Napoleon’s premier chef, chose not to go with him as he had not been paid what he had been promised when he went to Elba.) ‘If I had gone to America,’ Napoleon later mused, ‘we might have founded a State there.’22 Yet on July 2, by which time he was at Niort in the Deux-Sèvres department, he was still undecided what to do and his companions were divided about whether he should join up with the army at Orleans or try to smuggle himself aboard an American merchant ship lying eight miles offshore.23
Instead Napoleon installed himself at the maritime prefecture of Rochefort and spent twelve days trying to work out how the Saale, the Méduse and a twenty-gun corvette and a brig could somehow get past Bellerophon. When Captain Philibert of the Méduse refused to take part in any attack, two young naval officers, Lieutenant Genty and Ensign Doret, volunteered to take Napoleon across the Atlantic in a small sailing boat, for which offence they would be scratched from the French Navy List until the fall of the Bourbons in 1830.24
On July 5 Joseph arrived at Rochefort and generously offered to exchange identities with his brother, since they looked alike.25 Instead of grasping his moment, Napoleon again hesitated. When the Bourbons formally returned to power three days later he lost control over the frigates. By then Admiral Sir Henry Hotham had stationed Royal Navy vessels from Les Sables to the Gironde on the lookout for him. Napoleon also turned down several other risky possibilities, such as escaping at night in a Danish ship. By the 9th he was reviewing troops on the Île d’Aix and being cheered by the local populace, but sleeping on the Saale with the Bellerophon anchored near by.
Napoleon sent Savary and a chamberlain, the Marquis de Las Cases, to the Bellerophon on July 10 to negotiate the terms of his surrender with her thirty-eight-year-old captain, Frederick Maitland. He needed to avoid capture by the Bourbons – whose flag would be hoisted in Rochefort on July 12 – and the Prussians, as both would have executed him. He later said that he ‘could not bring himself to submit to receive any favours from the Emperor of Austria, after knowing the manner in which he had taken part against him’.26 Negotiations were renewed on July 14, this time conducted by Las Cases and General Charles Lallemand, commander of the Chasseurs à Cheval at Waterloo. Maitland stated that Napoleon would be well treated in England, where the weather was better than he imagined.27 This was taken by Napoleon as meaning that he would be given asylum as a guest of the British rather than being treated as a prisoner-of-war, but that was an absurd construction to put on the casual words of a naval officer who had no power to make any formal agreement. Indeed, Maitland made it clear that he had no authority to make any promises beyond a safe passage to English waters.28 Napoleon could even then have taken Joseph’s advice and gone overland to a different port further south – there might still be alternatives in the Gironde – but instead he said goodbye to his brother on the 13th. He now preferred dignity and a measure of safety to the risk of another maritime flight such as those he had taken from Corsica, Egypt and Elba.
At around midnight on the 14th, Napoleon wrote a letter to the Prince Regent. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ it began, ‘Exposed to the factions which divide my country and the enmity of the European Powers, I have ended my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people. I put myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant and most generous of my enemies.’29 For once Napoleon’s classical education had failed him, for the great Athenian general Themistocles had actually joined the Persians against his native Greeks, which was not at all what Napoleon was proposing. But he was right about Britain’s constancy. In 1815 alone, Britain subsidized no fewer than thirty European Powers, from the greatest – such as Prussia at £2.1 million, Russia at £2 million and Austria at £1.6 million – to Sicily at £33,333.30 Although Austria had spent 108 months fighting against France, Prussia 58 months and Russia 55 months, Britain was at war with her for a total of 242 months between 1793 and 1815. The Royal Navy blockaded France for two decades, and sank the French battle fleet at Trafalgar; British troops fought for six years in the Iberian peninsula between 1808 and 1814, Wellington not taking a day’s leave throughout the entire period. They also landed expeditionary forces in Egypt in 1801, Calabria (where they won the battle of Maida) in 1806, Copenhagen in 1807, Walcheren (disastrously) in 1809, and Bergen-op-Zoom in Holland (also defeated) in 1814. Even when almost the whole of the rest of Europe (except Portugal and Sicily) came to terms with Napoleon after Tilsit, the British kept the flame of resistance to his hegemony alight.
Calling a meeting of advisors, Napoleon said, ‘I’m not acquainted with the Prince Regent, but from all I have heard of him I cannot help placing reliance on his noble character.’31 Here, too, his information was faulty, as the Prince Regent had one of the most ignoble characters of any British sovereign. ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king,’ opined The Times when he died in 1830. ‘What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? . . . If he ever had a friend – a devoted friend in any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her never reached us.’32 The Prince Regent’s generosity was confined to his tailors, decorators and mistresses. Napoleon had nothing he wanted and so the imperial supplicant never received a reply. He was perhaps
hoping for a gentlemanly imprisonment such as Lucien’s had been in Worcestershire, or perhaps on one of the country estates of the Whig aristocrats he had met on Elba.
Napoleon boarded the Bellerophon at 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 15, 1815 and surrendered to Captain Maitland. He decently allowed his liaison officer with the provisional government, General Beker, not to go with him, and thus to avoid any possible future accusations of having betrayed Napoleon to the British.33 ‘The deepest sadness showed on every face,’ recalled his valet Marchand, ‘and when the British gig arrived to take the Emperor on board, the most heartrending cries were heard’ from officers and sailors alike, who shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ across the water until he reached Bellerophon.34 Some trampled on their hats in despair. As he arrived, Bellerophon’s marines stood to attention and sailors manned the yardarms, but Napoleon didn’t receive a salute because Royal Navy regulations stated it was too early in the day for one. His first words to Maitland, on removing his hat, were: ‘I come on board your ship to place myself under the protection of the laws of England.’35 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were finally over.