The Battle of Waterloo: Europe in the Balance

by Rupert Matthews

Frimont’s attack from the south

  Further south, the Austro-Italian army under Frimont had been advancing into southern France from Italy. On 21 June Frimont had his first clash with the French of Marshal Suchet’s Army of the Alps at the Pass of Meillerie. Suchet had started his own advance on 14 June, the same day as Frimont. He had reached Geneva next day, and left behind a small force to conduct a siege while marching on to grab the passes at Meillerie and St Maurice.

  Suchet reached the passes first, but had not yet finished fortifying the positions when the larger army of Frimont arrived. After a short, stiff fight Suchet fell back and by 27 June was back on the river Arve inside France. Frimont’s left-hand column, meanwhile, had met little opposition and got over the Mount Cenis Pass without difficulty. On 28 June the column reached the town of Conflans (now Albertville) where it met a force sent by Suchet to block its advance. After a stiff fight, the Austrians got control of Conflans, but could not advance any further.

  The right-hand column, meanwhile, had crossed the Arve and relieved Geneva. They were stopped on 29 June at the Pass of Les Rousses by strongly defended French redoubts and the campaign paused.

  Lamarque takes on royalists in the Vendée

  Another area in which the fighting was very far from over was the Vendée. Royalist noblemen Suzannet and Autichamp had been on the defensive since Napoleon had arrived in Paris. The Napoleonic commander, General Lamarque, had spent the intervening weeks building up his strength. On 17 June he finally felt strong enough to move with his 7,000 men to face the royalists’ 9,000.

  On 20 June Lamarque attacked the royalists at Rocheservière. After some preliminary cavalry skirmishing, Suzannet led an infantry attack across open heathland. When Suzannet was hit by a bullet and collapsed, mortally wounded, his men fled. Autichamp managed to organize a fighting retreat with a small rearguard and so saved the royalists from total defeat.

  Autichamp retreated back to Cholet, where he adopted a strong defensive position that he thought he could hold for some weeks. On 25 June news arrived that Napoleon had defeated the Prussians at Ligny. That prompted Autichamp to accept a truce under which he retained the town of Cholet but undertook to launch no offensive actions in return for a ceasefire. On 29 June news of Waterloo arrived, prompting Autichamp and Lamarque to meet again. This time the terms of the truce were confirmed almost unaltered and both sides sat down to await developments.

  The developments turned out to be the arrival of some Prussian cavalry, to whom Lamarque surrendered his men before fleeing into exile. He returned to France on being pardoned in 1819 and spent the next decade or so devoted to the cause of agricultural improvements and social reform. Lamarque died in Paris in 1832. His funeral on 5 June attracted a vast crowd, which turned into a general protest against the government of King Louis Philippe. The protest turned into a riot, which in turn became the ‘June Rebellion’ in which more than 800 people died. The funeral and subsequent uprising were immortalized in the Victor Hugo novel Les Misérables, and the subsequent stage and movie versions. Autichamp resumed his pre-war government positions and faded into gentle obscurity.

  Austrians and Russians on the move

  On 4 July Schwarzenberg received an urgent message from Blücher asking him to march on Paris as quickly as possible. Schwarzenberg again chose the Bavarians to lead the advance and on 7 July the advance cavalry scouts of the Bavarians linked up with some Prussian cavalry units at Epernay. Blücher sent word asking the Bavarians to veer to the south, blocking the Marne Valley.

  Hearing of the outbreak of hostilities, Tolly had ordered his columns of Russian troops to speed up across Germany. The lead units reached the Rhine about the 24 June and went across the river to follow the Austrians the following day. The Russian army was thrown forward piecemeal as it arrived and lost its cohesion as an army. Instead the various divisions were assigned to Austrian columns as they came up, so Tolly found that he had little to do except to co-ordinate the movements of his more slowly moving units and seek to sort out the customary confused state of his supply system.

  Frimont and Suchet

  Meanwhile, Frimont resumed his attacks on the passes over the Jura Mountains on 4 July. This time he succeeded by weight of numbers in pushing Suchet back. Suchet fought a skilled retreat, blowing bridges and blasting holes in roads to slow the Austro-Italian supply wagons.

  Once Frimont was out of the mountains, his advance was rapid. On 12 July he reached the great city of Lyons, where Suchet and his army were waiting. Envoys from Suchet rode forwards seeking an armistice. Frimont and Suchet agreed that fighting on their front would come to an immediate end. Suchet agreed to evacuate his forces to the west banks of the Rhône and Saône rivers, handing over the cities of Lyons, Mâcon and Valence to the Austro-Italians. The rival armies would then go into camp and await news from the main theatre of war in the north. Frimont then sent a force north up the Saône to ensure that the French forces had evacuated the east bank as agreed.

  While Frimont had been fighting his way over the mountains, an army of Piedmontese-Sardinian troops commanded by Lieutenant General d’Osasco had been working along the coast. They captured Nice on 9 July, and pushed forward meeting minimal resistance from the French Armée du Var under Marshal Brune. When news of the armistice between Frimont and Suchet arrived, d’Osasco and Brune likewise called a ceasefire.

  With Rapp bottled up in Strasbourg, Schwarzenberg decided he could risk spreading his units out to cover and occupy as much of eastern France as possible. On 20 July forward cavalry units reached Autun, where they met units of Frimont’s army pushing north up the Saône to ensure that Suchet had, as he had promised, pulled his troops back to the west bank of that river.

  Napoleon’s surrender

  Five days before Schwarzenberg’s forces met those of Frimont at Autun the Royal Navy warship HMS Bellerophon had been patrolling of the French Atlantic port of La Rochelle. Captain Frederick Maitland saw his ship being approached by a small French smack. On board was the famous cartographer and author Count de las Cassas. Cassas announced that he was the emissary of Napoleon and asked Maitland to talk.

  Cassas told Maitland that Napoleon had been offered political asylum in the United States of America, and asked that the ship carrying the former emperor be allowed to pass. Maitland had orders to allow no French craft to leave port and was uncertain what to do about this sudden diplomatic conundrum. He told Cassas that he was prepared to take Napoleon on board and sail to Britain to see what the British government decided.

  Cassas left and returned with Napoleon. The former Emperor climbed aboard and approached Maitland. He then lifted his hat, bowed and announced ‘I am come to throw myself on the hospitality of your Prince and your laws.’ Maitland moved out of his own cabin, which was given to Napoleon, while other ship’s officers made space for Napoleon’s retinue.

  As it transpired, the British government was not entirely certain what to do with Napoleon. In the end he was sent to live in exile, under armed guard, on the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic for the rest of his life.

  Aftermath of the war

  News reached Rapp in Strasbourg of Napoleon’s surrender and the end of hostilities in early August, but he still refused to surrender. Although the war was clearly over, for the men bottled up in fortresses the length and breadth of France the future was not entirely clear. For a start, these garrisons were genuinely isolated in a way that modern soldiers would find hard to understand. With no radios or telephones, the garrisons were reliant on their surrounding enemy for news of the outside world. Just because an Austrian general said the war was over did not mean that it was. The message might simply be a trick to get the garrison to surrender.

  Perhaps more pressing was the issue of retribution. Those soldiers who had taken up arms for Napoleon had quite clearly taken up arms against King Louis XVIII. Many soldiers and officers had sworn an oath of loya
lty to Louis in 1814, which made them traitors. It was not entirely certain how forgiving Louis was likely to be of such treachery. Given the track record of the returning noble émigrés in 1814, it did not seem likely that Louis would be prepared to overlook the crime. Imprisonment or execution seemed likely punishments. The soldiers in garrisons knew that they were safe where they were, at least for the time being, and were understandably reluctant to give up their arms until they knew exactly where they stood with regard to King Louis.

  The scene at Waterloo the day after the battle. The speed of Wellington’s pursuit of Napoleon meant that the dead and wounded remained in the open longer than was normal. Families and comrades searched for the missing, hoping to carry them to the field hospitals set up behind the lines.

  They had good reason to be wary. De la Bédoyère had been arrested, courtmartialled and shot in August. Ney was under arrest for treason, and would be executed in December. Murat was also under arrest, and would be shot by firing squad in October. Others would suffer a similar fate.

  It was not until early September that a French general approached the walls of Strasbourg under the flag of the king of France. He brought with him a proclamation which, after he had read it himself, Rapp had read out to the troops. King Louis of France offered to pay all the soldiers their back pay immediately in cash, together with a bonus. On payment of the money, the regiments were to be disbanded and the men allowed to go home without any interference from the Austrians. The war, the king said, was over.

  Rapp told his men to think over the offer, then report to their officers who in turn would report to him. The men decided to accept the offer. They laid down their weapons and marched out of Strasbourg under the eyes of the watching Austrians. As promised, the men were paid and then allowed to wander off as they wished. Rapp himself was not certain if the terms extended to himself. He went to Switzerland and wrote a letter to King Louis asking permission to live at his home in France. Permission was granted and he went home at Colmer in October 1815.

  The German Corps had meanwhile been sitting in front of the fortresses in north-eastern France that they had been tasked with capturing. After Sedan fell on 25 June they had hoped for quick success, but by the end of July only Rheims had been captured. Even then, Engelhardt had agreed to terms under which the French garrison left with its arms and equipment intact, promising only to retreat to the Loire Valley. It was not until 20 September that the final fortress, Montmédy, capitulated. Again the terms were generous, with the French defenders being allowed to leave unmolested.

  The war was finally over.

  The Duke of Wellington

  Arthur Wellesley was born in Dublin in 1769 into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. He joined the British army at the age of 19, being famously dismissed by his own mother with the words, ‘Poor Arthur is fit for nothing but cannon fodder.’ Despite this, his family used their connections to get him appointed aide to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, where his talents and capacity for hard work were noticed. This, together with family connections, ensured his early rapid rise through the ranks to the rank of colonel by 1796. He then went to India, where he won a series of battles and campaigns – most notably, Assaye in 1803. He returned to Britain as a lieutenant general and was fortunate to be available when General John Moore was killed at Corunna, necessitating an urgent replacement to take over command of British forces in the Spanish Peninsula. Wellesley arrived in Portugal in 1808 and with days had defeated the local French forces at Roliça. The following years brought a series of victories, with very few minor setbacks, which ensured Wellesley’s increasing prestige, fame and the bestowal on him of a hat-trick of dukedoms in Portugal, Spain and Britain by 1814. After the Battle of Waterloo, the duke of Wellington (as he now was) went into politics and became a government minister in 1818. By 1828 he was prime minister, during which his most famous act was the Catholic Emancipation Act that gave full rights to Roman Catholics in Ireland. He stood down as prime minister in 1830 and retired from public life in 1846. He died in 1852 and was given a lavish state funeral that took him to his impressive tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.

  Arthur Wellesley, The Duke of Wellington, 1769 -1852

  Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher

  Blücher was born into an ancient but minor family of nobility in the small German state of Mecklenburg-Schewerin in 1742. As a younger son he took the traditional path of a military career, but since Mecklenburg-Schewerin had few opportunities to offer, he joined the Swedish army as an hussar. When Sweden went to war with Prussia, Blücher fought gallantly in Pomerania, but was captured. He found that the officer commanding the force that had captured him was a relative, Wilhelm von Belling. Invited to dinner, Blücher impressed von Belling who at once recruited him to serve as a Prussian staff officer. Blücher later fell out with King Frederick the Great and resigned from the army. He bought a farm and rapidly established himself as a successful businessman. After Frederick the Great’s death, Blücher was offered command of the prestigious Seydlitz Hussars, famed for their red and silver uniforms. During the 1790s he gained fame as a cavalry commander in campaigns against Revolutionary France. After the Prussian defeat by Napoleon at Jena in 1806 he extricated some of the Prussian army before the rest surrendered and commanded a skilful fighting retreat to the Danish border. The Danes refused Blücher and his men sanctuary, so he was forced to surrender, a humiliation he never forgot nor forgave. Blücher became a national hero for his fighting retreat and agitated constantly for a renewed war with France. When war broke out in 1813, Blücher was given command of the Prussian army and fought tirelessly and ruthlessly against the French. Arriving in Paris after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814 he ordered his men to blow up the Jena Bridge over the Seine, but after the first blast failed to demolish the bridge was stopped from further efforts by Wellington. After the Waterloo campaign he was increasingly troubled by the injuries he sustained at Ligny and retired to his country estate. He died in 1819.

  Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, 1742 - 1819

  Jean-de-Dieu Soult

  Born in 1769 the son of a rural lawyer, Soult trained as a lawyer but instead joined the army. He gained rapid promotion both under king and republic to become a brigadier general by 1794. He won a string of minor victories in Germany and in 1802 he was given command of Napoleon’s bodyguard. He did not like Napoleon, but nevertheless was given high command as a marshal of France. He commanded corps in several major campaigns, including Ulm and Austerlitz, before being sent to Spain, where he fought against Wellington several times. Soult succeeded in stopping the Spanish armies from linking up with Wellington and was managing to hold his own when he fell out with Napoleon’s brother Joseph – who had been created king of Spain – and was sacked. Before he left Spain, Soult went through the provinces under his control and stole a vast amount of art treasures. After serving as Napoleon’s chief of staff in the Waterloo campaign he fled into exile, but was allowed to return to France in 1819. King Louis XVIII recognized his military talents and made him again a marshal of France. He went on to be minister of war in 1830 and prime minister in 1832–34. In 1838 he attended the coronation of Queen Victoria in London and at the festivities was suddenly grabbed from behind by a man who whispered menacingly ‘I’ve got you at last.’ It was a smiling duke of Wellington. Soult retired in 1848 and died in 1851.