by Alan Schom
A grim and sometimes brutal commander, the brilliant Davout was one of the very few general officers who proved impeccably honest. In addition he was a superb administrator, resulting in Napoleon’s naming him military governor of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Following the Russian débâcle, he continued in that capacity at Hamburg over the Hanseatic cities, and ultimately was the last French commander to hold out against the Allies.
In consequence Davout’s nomination as war minister in 1815 had caused many a raised eyebrow and was criticized in military circles then and ever after. Napoleon badly needed Davout at the head of one of his wings in June 1815 and was to suffer grievously for having made yet another wrong decision. On the other hand, because of General Clarke’s and Marshal Berthier’s defections to the royalist cause, Napoleon appeared to have no other senior general as capable and as reliable as Davout, nor one with his detailed knowledge of the workings of the French army. Carnot no doubt would have done an equally good job if he had not been out of the army and office since the Consulate. It would have taken too long to bring him up to date, and Napoleon had not a day to spare.
As for Carnot himself: The son of a prosperous Burgundian notary, born at Nolay in 1753, he was educated first at the College d’Autun and next at the seminary in that same city. After two years’ study of artillery and engineering in Paris, Carnot completed his preparation at the famous Mézières engineering school, from which he graduated in January 1773 with the rank of lieutenant. But because he could not establish noble birth, he was not permitted to rise above the rank of captain, which helped turn him against the Bourbons. As a member of the National Convention he voted for the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In fact he became a fanatical supporter of the Revolution and served as one of the members of the hated Committee of Public Safety in 1793, where he was responsible principally for reorganizing the army, thereby making possible significant victories in the field, for which he was ever after known to the nation as “the Organizer of Victory.”
Trained as an engineering officer, Carnot became a specialist in the designing of fortifications, over which he often clashed with General Bonaparte, who thought his own views superior. Carnot also was a brilliant mathematician and an active member of the Institute’s Academy of Science.
Forced to flee arrest and deportation in 1797, Carnot returned to France only following Napoleon’s coup d’état in November 1799, the first consul appointing him inspector general of military reviews and then war minister, in which post he quickly established a reputation as a most effective (and honest) administrator. But for Bonaparte, Carnot remained a problem, and his jealousy of the independent, mule-headed Carnot’s views and mathematical abilities, added to his fundamentalist revolutionary principles, led to a parting of the ways, especially after Carnot rebuked him for his dictatorial and hereditary leadership. “I shall vote against the reestablishment of monarchy in any form,” he had told the first consul to his face. Carnot retired to the provinces, and although he was a member of the Tribunate from 1802 until it was dissolved in 1807, he never again served Bonaparte directly in any capacity. Unlike just about every other high official, Carnot was devoted to his wife, and they spent their last years together, she dying, however, before Napoleon’s return to France. “Monsieur Carnot, I really got to know you far too late,” Bonaparte later admitted at Saint Helena.
If Lazare Carnot was thus very much out of touch with the army and its administration by the spring of 1815, he could organize the nation’s material resources and draft the men needed for the army. Thus Carnot, Davout, and Napoleon formed a bizarre, if powerfully effective, triumvirate in mobilizing the country for war.
Bonaparte made an attempt through Foreign Minister Caulaincourt to contact the various capitals of Europe, hoping somehow to delay the Allied armies from marching against France, but it was quite in vain. Nevertheless it had almost worked, when on taking over foreign affairs Caulaincourt discovered the secret treaty signed by Britain, France, and Prussia back in January. Taking advantage of this explosive document, he immediately revealed it to the Russians, who — though greatly upset about this anti-Russian plot — nonetheless remained even more furious with this Napoleon, who had destroyed their cities, burned their land, and slaughtered their people. The czar thus agreed to continue to support the Seventh Coalition in its determination to attack and destroy Bonaparte and the French army.
Money was always a problem, and now Napoleon found only 50 million francs in the treasury. His budget back in 1812, for instance, had reached 876.0.000 francs, but 226,389,000 francs of that had come from forced annual war contributions extorted from the occupied states all over Europe. That money had stopped, of course, in 1813.[781]
Napoleon took ruthless action. He had already put the entire French fleet into mothballs, leaving only five ships of the line (out of nearly one hundred), transferring their officers and men to the army and the navy’s budget to the army’s budget. As he informed an incredulous Admiral Decrès, “So long as this crisis lasts, it really does not matter whether or not we have a navy.”
Where was he to get the many hundreds of millions he needed to raise overnight? Amazingly, the much abused Ouvrard offered a loan of 40 million, and Finance Minister Gaudin promised another 150 million franc loan for the government. Gaudin thought another 240 million could be raised through revenue gradually due the government over the next several months. Treasury Minister Mollien next offered to produce 440 million in “extraordinary revenue” by selling the remainder of state and communal property, state forests, and cut timber, and through the reintroduction of his special war tax, the “centimes de guerre.” But when that minister attempted to obtain “patriotic offers,” as Napoleon had most successfully done for the creation of the invasion flotilla back in 1803-5, it proved a colossal flop. So desperate was Bonaparte that the lycee students of Grenoble were ordered to send Paris 400 francs; those of Nancy, 500; the Collège de France another 1,500; and Monge’s Ecole Polytechnique yet another 4,000. One aging war veteran offered his year’s pension of 1,081 francs, and the police prefect of Paris came up with 20,000 (its source undisclosed). And thus the process worked, Napoleon forced to steal schoolboys’ allowances in order to buy bayonets.
Carnot and Davout also got the arsenals working overtime, to provide three hundred thousand muskets “in the shortest time possible.” The muskets were finally produced, and some army recruits did arrive, but they could not be outfitted. “I have 100,000 men at the induction centers whom I cannot even use because of the lack of funds with which to clothe and equip them,” Bonaparte complained to Mollien, ordering him “to work day and night” to get the job done.
Mobilizing the necessary troops proved an even bigger task. On March 26 Napoleon had ordered the creation of eight new army corps, and by June he envisaged a regular standing army of 300,000 men. An additional 120,000 men could be found by drafting “former soldiers” (mostly deserters from 1814). But the 120,000 recruits — chiefly teenagers — from the 1815 conscription lists fizzled, and the figure revised downward to 85,000 men. He needed 40,000 men for the newly promoted Marshal Grouchy’s cavalry — Grouchy a second-rate replacement for Murat, whom Napoleon understandably refused even to sec. Carnot promised a levée en masse that would raise 2.5 million men, including 234,000 National Guardsmen initially. But by June only 90,000 had materialized, and only 52,500 former soldiers could actually be rounded up. Of the 445,800 men promised by Napoleon’s minister, only 142,500 ultimately appeared by June. With these added to men already serving, Napoleon had a grand total of 284,000 men under arms, but with 105,000 of these needed to put down French national uprisings, he was in fact left with a mere 179,000 with which to face several hundred thousand Allied troops, and of course some would have to be left to defend the frontiers.
With news of more and more Allied army units assembling under Wellington, and of the approaching Austrian forces to the south and east, and of course the Prussians, followed by the
Russians, Caulaincourt’s anxieties seemed to sum up the situation: “What will be the outcome of this terrible war into which he is leading us?” he asked his old friend Pasquier. “The most valiant generals are themselves afraid, and upon seeing the approach of hostilities the nation will take fright and turn against him [Napoleon].”[782]
But Napoleon would show them yet. He could do it, and the “Champ de Mai” ceremony now about to take place on June 1 was intended to stir every male citizen to his patriotic duty. Moreover, the Bonaparte family was back at his side, at least part of it, including Joseph and Julie, Madame Mère, Hortense, a pouting Jérôme, a wary Lucien after an absence of eleven years, and Uncle Fesch, who had been brought to France by a French warship on May 26. Murat and Caroline, however, were not allowed by Napoleon to come to Paris, following King Joachim’s little stunt back in Italy. (At Rimini on March 30, 1815, Murat had suddenly proclaimed Italian independence, reserving the entire peninsula for himself. After being routed from Occhiobello by the Austrians that April, ending in his final defeat at Tolentino in May, the Murats had fled the country. Once in France, they were informed they had to stay out of harm’s way, Napoleon indicating the region between Lyons and the Alps as their abode. Disregarding his instructions, they chose the Riviera.)[783] The most glaring absence, causing considerable comment, however, was that of Empress Marie-Louise and the king of Rome.
Police Minister Fouché estimated the crowd assembled on the vast acres of the Champ de Mars before the Ecole Militaire at a couple of hundred thousand, while hundreds more filled boats and barges in the Seine, across from the sharply rising right bank, where Napoleon had earlier planned to build a palace for his son. The ministers, five hundred electoral college delegates, peers, representatives, members of the Institute, distinguished professors, mayors, and commanding officers were all gathered together once again in their splendid array of uniforms and colors. At 11:00 A.M. sharp a thundering explosion stopped all talk as one hundred cannon along the Seine near the Tuileries and another five hundred at the Ecole Militaire, the Invalides, atop Montmartre, and at distant Vincennes left eardrums numb and the very land beneath their feet rolling. For a few moments all those civilians present were given their first inkling of what it might possibly be like on a battlefield, but now only to announce the departure of the emperor from the Tuileries, preceded by his Polish Red Lancers and the Imperial Guard.
The overcast skies soon gave way to a sunny, in fact broiling, day, as the procession of state coaches, including Napoleon’s refurbished 1804 coronation carriage, reached the special Scandinavian-style stands built by the imperial architect, Pierre Fontaine. The purpose of this extraordinary gathering was in theory to announce the results of the constitutional plebiscite, but in reality to show the world that Napoleon was back at the helm and that nothing had changed. But of course everything had changed very much, for these very Parisians had also witnessed the vast armies of the triumphant Coalition recently parading in this very field and then had briefly glimpsed the results of peace, freedom, and the end of mass conscription. What is more, although Joseph, Lucien, and Jérôme were now back at Napoleon’s side, they looked tense and peeved, as did the five marshals who had agreed to serve on the forthcoming campaign — Davout, Grouchy, Mortier, Ney, and Soult. Seven additional marshals had reluctantly consented to make a brief appearance for old time’s sake before retreating quickly to their estates and seclusion — Jourdan, Kellermann, Lefebvre, Masséna, Moncey, Oudinot, and Sérurier — and they now deliberately separated from the rest. As for the absent sixty-one-year-old Marshal Berthier, that very afternoon he was climbing the tower of his castle in Bamberg, Germany, about to leap to his death.
Perhaps the greatest symbol of the change, however, was Napoleon himself, who looked ten years older since his attempted suicide just over a year ago, his pronounced paunch nearly bursting the resewn buttons on his coronation costume, first worn more than a decade earlier. He was wheezing, and saliva occasionally was seen on his lips, and the face of this forty-five-year-old retread emperor was rounder than last remembered, as he sweated under the heavy robes.
At last the ceremony began, late as usual, with only an occasional “Vive l’Empereur/” despite the patriotic music filling the air. Welcoming Napoleon, the spokesman for the electoral delegates announced that “a new contract has been formed between the nation and Your Majesty,” a new “tablet of laws.” Then he criticized the impending invasion threatened by the Allies — “But what do all these Allied kings want with us...drawn up for a war that so astounds Europe and afflicts humanity?” — and continued with his speech, which had been carefully vetted and rewritten by Cambacérès and Jean-Antoine Chaptal, leading to the purpose of this discourse — “If they force us to fight, then let one great cry resound in every heart. Let us march on the enemy!” There it was, the ultimate reason for the assembly: a pep rally for the war. “Every Frenchman is a soldier,” he concluded. “Victory will follow our eagles!”[784]
The results of the great national plebiscite on the Additional Act to the Imperial Constitution were announced: 1,532,357 votes for, only 4,802 votes against, out of more than 5 million electors. 99.993 percent of the votes cast, for Napoleon. The usual remarkable results...
Napoleon then addressed those present: “As Emperor, Consul, Soldier, I owe everything to the people. In prosperity, adversity, on the battlefield, before the council, on the throne, in exile, France has been the sole and constant object of my thoughts and actions.” He had “sacrificed” himself, he said, in exchange for “a long era of peace.” But the unjust Allies would not permit the French to live in peace, the foreign kings saying that they wanted only Napoleon out of the way, when in fact “it is this country they really want, and not just me, otherwise I would gladly give myself up to them.” But so long as “the French people continue to manifest the many examples of their love for me, the rage of the enemies will be rendered harmless.”
There was fairly loud applause, mainly from the thousands of troops, with cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” but clearly the crowd remained anxious and withdrawn. The speech had lacked the old stirring spark. He then took the oath, before the archbishop of Bourges, “to observe the constitutions of the Empire,” all the new state officials following suit. The Te Deum was chanted and the imperial eagles of the National Guard, navy, and army units passed in review, thousands strong.
Following that, Napoleon then crossed the field to a large platform in the middle of the troop formation and addressed the men: “I hereby confide the eagle to the national colors. Do you swear to perish if need be in the defense of the nation? Do you swear to die rather than allow them [foreign troops] to come and dictate their laws to us?” “Nous le jurons [We swear it]!” came the response like a deafening thunderclap, followed by salvos of “Vive l’Empereur! Vive l’Empereur!” It was electrifying. Napoleon had finally roused them. “It is impossible to describe its magnitude,” English eyewitness John Cam Hobhouse, remarked, duly impressed by the spectacle.
Throughout the remaining few days Napoleon was preoccupied with war preparations, and having reinstated Marshal Soult in May, appointed him Berthier’s replacement as chief of staff. On Sunday, June 11, Napoleon’s last full day in Paris, he received a delegation from the combined chambers at the Tuileries, these chambers that Gen. Gilbert de Lafayette had dubbed “the Napoleon Club.” “I shall be leaving tonight to join and lead my armies,” he informed them in the magnificent Hall of the Marshals. “In all my undertakings my step will be firm and straight. Help me now save the country.”
After ordering Marshal Ney to meet him at his field headquarters at Avesnes on the fourteenth, Napoleon convened his final Council of Ministers in the throne room to instruct them that they, in the presence of “notre frère le prince Joseph,” and seconded by “Prince Lucien,” would be responsible for governing in his absence.
Back in his apartments that evening brother Joseph handed Napoleon eight hundred thousand francs’ wort
h of diamonds, just in case (Pauline had earlier given him one of her necklaces worth three hundred thousand francs). Then after sending final notes — along with a large cache of arms — to two of his former mistresses who had borne him sons, Mesdames Pellapra and Walewska, preceded by his Red Lancers and a four-hundred-man Imperial Guard escort, Napoleon’s famous green-and-yellow berlin clattered out of the courtyard of the Tuileries, taking the road north for Sois-sons — and his last campaign.
Chapter Forty – “To Conquer or Perish”
‘Once it has been decided to fight, one should do so to the very endy to conquer or perish.’
As Napoleon was moving north to assume command of his army, the Allies were very slowly putting their own plans into effect for a second invasion of France. Wellington with a theoretical force of 92,300 men was to drive south via Mons as Blücher’s 130,200 Prussians simultaneously attacked from the east through Charleroi and Maubeuge, while 168,000 Russian troops crossed the frontier east of the Moselle and Metz, marching for Nancy; and finally 225,000 Austrians under Schwarzenberg would be attacking between the Russians and the Rhine, with the remainder of their force invading France from Switzerland (37,000 men) and Italy (60,000 men).
By mid-June, however, the Prussians were just leaving the regions around Koblenz and Liège, while Schwarzenberg’s principal force was still extended on the eastern banks of the Rhine from Mannheim down to the Swiss frontier facing General Rapp’s meager 23,000 men on the opposite shore around Strasbourg. Opposing the Swiss force, Napoleon had only Lecourbe’s 8,400 troops, while farther to the south the Austrian army under Frimont was advancing against Suchet’s and Brune’s combined force of just under 30,000 men. Counting every man from Toulon to the frontier, Napoleon had 179,000 men facing a total of about 719,000 allies, a force 74 percent greater than his own, a disparity he was probably not aware of.