by Susan Jaques
THREE
FUNERAL OF THE EMPIRE
After the defeat at Leipzig, Prussian, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian troops threatened France from the north and east, and Wellington’s forces were approaching from the south over the Pyrenees. On New Year’s 1814, Allied forces crossed the French border and headed for Paris.
Napoleon did not want to give the Allies the public relations coup of freeing the pope. After five years of captivity, Pius VII was released on January 23. The next day, Napoleon embraced twenty-three-year-old Marie Louise and their three-year-old son and left to lead the campaign for France. He would never see them again.
With the Allies closing in on the capital, Marie Louise was persuaded to leave Paris by Henri Clarke, who had received the order from Napoleon. On March 29, she and her toddler son, along with other members of the Bonaparte family, left the Tuileries Palace for Rambouillet, then Blois. As their carriages departed, a crowd gathered in silence, “watching the funeral of the Empire,” wrote Napoleon’s longtime private secretary Claude-François Méneval who would later accompany the empress and king of Rome to Vienna.1 Two days later, the Allies entered Paris.
From Fontainebleau, Napoleon learned that his brother Joseph had fled to Rambouillet. On April 3, the Senate voted to depose Napoleon. With his generals deserting, Napoleon decided to abdicate in favor of his son. But the Senate, headed by Talleyrand, had other plans. The cunning foreign minister succeeded in restoring Louis XVI’s exiled brother to the throne as Louis XVIII.
On April 6, Napoleon penned his abdication at a mahogany table in his drawing room at Fontainebleau. “The allied powers having proclaimed that the emperor Napoleon was the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his children, the throne of France and Italy, and that there is no sacrifice, even of life itself, that he is not willing to make in the interests of France.”2
On the night of April 12, in his bedroom at Fontainebleau, Napoleon swallowed a vial of poison that he had carried around his neck during the Russian campaign. For the generals of antiquity like Hannibal and Mark Antony, suicide was an honorable alternative to capture by the enemy. But over the year and a half, the mix had lost its potency. A doctor managed to save Napoleon’s life. Five days later, he wrote his ex-wife Joséphine: “My fall is great, but . . . I shall substitute the pen for the sword [to write] the history of my reign. . . . Remember him who has never forgotten you and never will. Goodbye, Joséphine.”
At noon on April 20, Napoleon descended Fontainebleau’s monumental horseshoe staircase to the White Horse courtyard where members of the Imperial Guard stood waiting. Napoleon ordered the two ranks of grognards to form a circle around him. Then he delivered his famous last speech, described by Chateaubriand: “Soldiers of my Old Guard, for twenty years I’ve always found you on the path of honor and glory. Do not abandon France—love her always, love her well. I bid you farewell, and I kiss your flags.”3 Napoleon embraced a flag belonging to the first regiment of the infantrymen of the Imperial Guard. After half a minute, he held up his left hand and said, “Farewell! Preserve me in your memories! Adieu, my children!” As Andrew Robert writes, “. . . officers and men wept . . . while others were prostrated with grief, and all the others cried ‘Vive l’Empereur!’”4
The Treaty of Fontainebleau exiled Napoleon to the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba off the coast of Italy with the imperial title Emperor of Elba, four hundred troops, and an annual income of two million francs. Marie Louise was given the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, with her son as heir. En route Napoleon was initially welcomed by locals, but an angry mob confronted his entourage in Provence. On April 29, Napoleon left Fréjus on the British frigate HMS Undaunted, ironically from the same jetty that he had arrived at fifteen years earlier after the Egypt campaign.5 When Napoleon disembarked at Elba on May 3, he was greeted by a welcome committee and cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” and “Vive Napoleon!” The same day, after twenty-three years in exile, the restored Bourbon king Louis XVIII returned to Paris.
In the middle of the crisis, Vivant Denon continued Napoleon’s propaganda campaign. He arranged the production and distribution of a print showing Napoleon’s son praying “for my father and for France.”6 In late July, the museum director organized the Salon at the Musée Napoléon. In February, the Italian “primitives” he had stolen in 1811 arrived in Paris. Now he displayed some eighty-two of these, two-thirds of the 124 pictures on view.7 Though Fra Angelico was celebrated in his day as Italy’s most famous painter, he and his compatriots were largely unknown in early nineteenth-century France. Two hundred thousand visitors descended on the Musée Napoléon’s Salon Carré to see these beautiful pictures for the first time.8 Around the same time, the Musée Napoléon became the Musée Royal.
Louis XVIII refused to pay Napoleon’s pension; by December, he ordered Napoleon’s personal property confiscated. Rather than joining Napoleon in exile, Marie Louise returned to Vienna with their young son. On July 3, Napoleon wrote his wife: “The news you give me about your health and my son gives me great pleasure. I think that you should as much as possible go to Tuscany where there are waters as good and of the same nature as those of Aix in Savoy. . . . My health is good, my feelings for you the same, and my desire to see you and prove it to you very great.”
Six weeks later, his positive tone changed dramatically. “I often write to you, I hope you did the same, yet I have not received any of your letters since a few days of your departure from Vienna, I have received no news of my son, this conduct is beastly.”9
Joséphine appeared more concerned about Napoleon’s welfare than Marie Louise. From Malmaison she wrote her ex-husband: “Why can I not fly to you? I have been on the point of quitting France to follow in your footsteps. . . . Say but the word and I depart. It is no longer by words that my sentiments for you are to be proved, and for actions your consent is necessary. Malmaison has been much respected, and I am surrounded by foreign sovereigns but would rather leave.”10
Among the “foreign sovereigns” who paid their respects to Joséphine was Russia’s Alexander I, impressed by Joséphine’s four statues by Antonio Canova. According to Christopher Johns, her Canova collection was “for too brief a time, the best in existence, and Malmaison became a pilgrimage site for the sculptor’s admirers, including Stendhal and Quatremère.”11
In February 1813, Joséphine had written Canova: “Your two beautiful statues have arrived without any incident in all their splendor. Because the Dancer arrived in time for the public exhibition, it was sent right away, and I’m delighted to tell you that everyone admired the statue. A lot of people came to see it and agreed that it is perfect. I regret that the statue of Paris came too late for the public to see at the Salon but some of the art connoisseurs who saw it really enjoyed it. If I was allowed to judge, I like Paris better, even though I find the Dancer charming. They are now located at opposite ends of my gallery. I never tire of seeing them.
“I think you are doing better than Pygmalion because his masterpieces were made for him, while yours are made for us. My gallery will be complete if I could have the statue of The Three Graces between Paris and the Dancer. I would love to know if you’re working on this composition and which sculpture you are working on right now. Everything that comes from your chisel has the potential to be interesting before it’s even finished. I take advantage with pleasure of this circumstance to communicate the high value with which I regard you.”12
It was Joséphine who suggested the subject for The Three Graces to Canova. The sculptor depicted Venus’s handmaidens sharing a rose. To the left behind them, Canova added a garland of roses to an antique altar, suggesting that the rose-loving Joséphine was Venus, posits Christopher Johns.13
During Alexander’s first visit to Malmaison on April 16, he met Joséphine’s daughter Hortense and her grandchildren. At a subsequent visit, the tsar suggested the family mov
e to Russia, offering them financial assistance and a palace. In an effort to seal the deal, Joséphine presented the tsar with the famous Gonzaga Cameo. Fittingly, the ancient sardonyx was thought at the time to be a double portrait of Olympius and her son Alexander the Great who had shown great generosity to the wife of his enemy, Persian king Darius (it was later identified as Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his wife Arsinoe II). The gem’s impressive provenance included the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua, Sweden’s Queen Christina, and the Vatican. After French troops removed the stunning cameo from the Vatican, Napoleon gave it to Joséphine.14
Joséphine had been allowed to keep the title of empress after the divorce. With a generous allowance, she maintained a luxe lifestyle and her court. On May 24, Joséphine led the tsar and his brothers Nicholas and Michael on a tour of her renowned gardens. It was a rainy day and Joséphine caught a chill that quickly developed into pneumonia. At Hortense’s invitation, Alexander visited the ailing Joséphine four days later. On May 29, days before her fifty-first birthday, Joséphine died in the arms of her son Eugène in her swan-shaped bed. Even at the end, she was “. . . entirely covered with ribbons and rose-colored satin.”15
Two days later, the Treaty of Paris was signed. Some twenty thousand people passed through the vestibule at Malmaison, lit by hundreds of candles. On June 2, Joséphine was buried to the right of the altar inside the sixteenth-century Church of Saint Pierre and Saint Paul in Rueil, near Malmaison. For the tomb, Eugène and his sister Hortense ordered from Pierre Cartellier a marble sculpture of their mother kneeling in her famous pose from Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation.
Antonio Canova was working on an ambitious group marble for Joséphine in early June when he learned of his patron’s death. Two years earlier, Joséphine had commissioned The Three Graces, a popular artistic subject since antiquity. She intended to install the famed female trio at Malmaison between his Paris and Dancer. Canova shipped the marble to Eugène in 1816. From Eugène, Alexander bought all of her Canovas, many French objects, and over one hundred of her best paintings for the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.16
Months later on Elba, Napoleon received word of Joséphine death. He shut himself in his rooms for days.
Madame Mère, long critical of her son, now told him on Elba: “Fulfil your destiny . . . you were not meant to die on this island.”17 In late February 1815, Napoleon heeded her advice, pulling off a daring escape with his guards.
On March 1, Napoleon landed with a small flotilla at the small fishing port of Golfe-Juan near Cannes. Stepping on French soil for the first time in ten months, he addressed the gathered group: “Land of France! Fifteen years ago I adorned you with the title of Fatherland of the Great Nation. I salute you again and in the same circumstances, one of your children, the most deserving of this beautiful title, comes once again to save you from anarchy.”18 Napoleon called on the army to shape the nation’s future. “Victory shall march in double quick time; the eagle bearing the colors of the nation will fly from steeple to steeple until it reaches the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral.” Troops sent to arrest Napoleon wound up joining him instead.
To avoid a royalist crowd in Provence, Napoleon headed north on an icy mountain path, reaching Grenoble on March 7. Stendhal, who was born in Grenoble, described the enthusiastic reception. The gates had been closed, but locals and troops disobeyed royalist orders and tore them down for Napoleon. He also received a hero’s welcome in Lyon where he issued several proclamations—including restoring the tricolor as France’s national flag and dissolving royalist assemblies.19 Another turning point came at Auxerre where Marshal Michel Ney backed the former emperor, describing the Bourbons as unfit to reign, and advising his troops to join Napoleon (that December, Ney would be tried and executed for treason in Paris).
After a stop at Fontainebleau, Napoleon and his entourage entered Paris on the evening of March 20 with three carriages, each drawn by six horses. It was his son’s fourth birthday. At the Tuileries Palace, a friendly crowd of several thousand gathered to see the dramatic return. Many of his former ministers greeted him at the top of the stairs, along with his stepdaughter Hortense. At ten the next morning, Napoleon appeared at the window of the palace; by noon he reviewed the troops on the Place du Carrousel.
Napoleon addressed his troops: “Soldiers! In my exile, I heard your voice; your General . . . is restored to you; come and join him. Tear down those colours which the nation has proscribed, and which for twenty-five years served as a rallying signal to all the enemies of France: mount the cockade tricolor: you bore it in the days of our greatness.”20
By the time Napoleon arrived at Fontainebleau, Louis XVIII had fled to Ghent, Belgium, with the French crown jewels. “Without firing a single shot,” as General Marchand described, Napoleon managed to overthrow the Bourbons once again. On March 20, at the courtyard of Fontainebleau, grenadiers shouted, “Vive l’Empereur!” and tossed their caps into the air. After reviewing his troops, Napoleon set off for Paris.21
Writing about what he called the “flight of the eagle,” Napoleon would later say that he began the escape from Elba as an “adventurer” and became a “Prince.” Napoleon’s return to power “was perhaps the most audacious scheme ever conceived by his fertile mind,” writes Sudhir Hazareesingh.22 But the triumphant comeback did not last.
From Vienna, the Allies reaffirmed their support for Louis XVIII. It was the equivalent of declaring war against Napoleon. On April 10, Napoleon told politician Benjamin Constant: “I wanted to rule the world, and in order to do this I needed unlimited power . . . I wanted to rule the world—who wouldn’t have in my place? The world begged me to govern it; sovereigns and nations vied with one another in throwing themselves under my scepter.”
Two days later, on the morning of April 12, Napoleon arrived at Malmaison with his stepdaughter Hortense. “Nowhere, except on the field of battle, did I ever see Bonaparte happier than in the gardens of Malmaison,” wrote Bourienne. Now he spent hours alone in the magnificent red tented bedroom where Joséphine had died the previous May.
With Prussian soldiers approaching Malmaison, Napoleon considered leaving for the United States. By June, he changed his mind, dictating a plan to the provisional government for defeating the British and Prussians. He proposed that the government give him temporary command of the army to defend Paris. “I promise on my word as a citizen and soldier to leave the country the very day I save the capital,” he wrote. The government refused his offer.
To broaden support, Napoleon made liberal reforms to the constitution. On June 1, he staged the proclamation of the revised constitution on the Champs de Mars. A covered room with benches for fifteen thousand people housed deputations from the regions, the electoral colleges, and representatives of the people. It was open at the center to allow the throne to be seen from the Pont de Iéna. Thirty thousand members of the Imperial Guard and Parisian National Guard lined the route from the Tuileries Palace to the Pont de Iéna and the Champ de Mars; over one hundred thousand people watched.
Napoleon ordered his brothers to wear their lavish petits costumes.23 Napoleon took a seat on a throne against the façade of the École Militaire in an antique-inspired purple outfit. The ensemble did not have the desired effect, according to English observer John Cam Hobhouse. Napoleon appeared “very ungainly and squat” in “his Spanish black bonnet, shaded with plumes, and looped with a large diamond in front. His mantle was of purple velvet edged with broad embroidery of gold on the outside, and lined with white ermine, scarce descending to his ankles, and tied round his throat without any arm-holes.”24
The acceptance of the new constitution was announced, a Te Deum was sung, and a choral Mass celebrated. The eagles were blessed and the emperor took his place on a second, raised throne two hundred paces into the Champ de Mars. The colonels of the regiments gathered with the officers of the Imperial and National Guard, and they swore their oaths to defend their eagles. General Claude-Étienne Guyot, commander of the Horse Grenadiers of the
Guard and an ardent supporter of the emperor, was impressed by the order and calmness in this gathering of people from every part of France and thought that “it must prove to our external enemies and might teach our internal ones that they should despair of again changing the form that the Government wishes to adopt and the chief that France has just chosen once more.”
That same day in Bamberg, Bavaria, Napoleon’s former chief-of-staff Marshal Berthier fell to his death from an upper-story window. The next day French troops began to concentrate on the border and spies were sent to check the locations of Allied troops. The newly elected chambers took their oath of loyalty to the emperor and the following evening there was a huge fireworks display in the Place de la Concorde. The first units of the Guard left Paris on June 5, and Napoleon sent his chief of staff Marshal Soult to the northern border on June 7, the day of the opening of the Corps Législatif. On June 9, the Allies signed the Treaty of Vienna reaffirming their intention of defeating Napoleon.
Rather than wait for an attack at home, Napoleon marched his army of 125,000 across the northeast border. In June, he invaded Belgium, hoping to capture Brussels. His strategy was to separate the British and Dutch forces led by Wellington from the Prussian troops led by Blücher and defeat them separately.25 Though Napoleon did surprise the Allies, the plan backfired. On the evening of June 18, 1815, some twelve miles south of Brussels, combined British, Dutch, and Prussian forces defeated Napoleon’s army at the battle of Waterloo. One quarter of the French army died in the carnage.26
On June 21, an exhausted Napoleon returned to Paris and the Élysée Palace on rue du Faubourg Saint-Honorè (since 1848, the official residence of the President of France). After their promotion to the throne of Naples in 1808, the Murats sold the mansion to the state. Napoleon gave the residence to Joséphine as part of the divorce settlement, and had stayed here in 1809, 1812, and 1813. Now under pressure from France’s legislators, Napoleon signed his abdication in the palace’s Salon d’Argent. The One Hundred Days were officially over.