On March 6 Victor – to whom Napoleon had given a division of the Young Guard after his unfair demotion – captured the heights above the town of Craonne, 55 miles north-east of Paris, even though the plateau was protected by three ravines and the Russians were covering the defile with sixty guns. At the battle there the next day Napoleon attempted unsuccessfully to turn both flanks but finally had to resort to a bloody frontal attack to defeat Blücher’s Russian advance guard. Drouot’s aggressive use of an eighty-eight-gun battery, and Ney’s debouching on to the right wing, finally won Napoleon the field of battle after one of the bloodiest clashes of the campaign. The fighting took place all along the 2-mile-long plateau of the Chemin des Dames, from the Hurtebise farmhouse to the village of Cerny, between 11 a.m., when the farm was cleared, and 2.30 p.m. The very narrow front, hardly more than the width of a single field, contributed significantly to the high losses on both sides. Today’s idyllic, poppy-filled meadow gives no indication of the bitterness of the resistance of the Russians, who were able to retreat unmolested so exhausted were the French. Craonne was a victory, but when news of it reached Paris the Bourse fell on the assumption that the war would now continue.64
The next day both sides rested and reorganized. On the 9th and 10th Napoleon attacked the main Prussian army at Lâon, the well-fortified capital of the Aisne department 85 miles north-east of Paris. (From the walls of Lâon one can see the entire battlefield laid out below, just as the Prussian and Russian officers did.) In an inversion of Austerlitz, the sun burned off the mist on the plain by 11 a.m., allowing Blücher’s staff to count Napoleon’s army of only 21,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, against 75,000 Allied infantry and 25,000 cavalry, although Napoleon had more guns. So respectful were they of his skill as a tactician, however, that they assumed there must be a ruse, and didn’t counter-attack in full force, though they did engage with larger numbers.
Marmont was only 4 miles away with 9,500 men and 53 guns, but he might not have heard the battle being fought on the plain and so failed to support his Emperor. Because of his later conduct Marmont has been accused of treachery at Lâon, but a strong wind blowing from the west on that battlefield could have drowned out the noise. Yet nothing can excuse him and his staff for not posting sentries properly on the evening of the 9th, as a Prussian corps under Yorck and Kleist mounted a successful surprise night-raid on his camp which completely scattered his force. Napoleon disastrously chose to renew his attack the next day, not realizing until 3 p.m. that he was facing a vastly superior Allied force. He lost 4,000 killed and wounded, with 2,500 men and 45 guns captured.
Though his army had been reduced from 38,500 (including Marmont’s troops) to fewer than 24,000 by the end of March 10, Napoleon showed extraordinary resilience and moved off immediately to attack Reims, hoping to cut through the Allied lines of communication. Yet that same day, the whole concept of lines of communication started to become moot when a letter from Talleyrand arrived at Tsar Alexander’s headquarters, telling him that the siege preparations in Paris had been badly neglected by Joseph, and encouraging the Allies to march straight on to the capital.
Talleyrand’s final defection was only to be expected – he had been planning for it on and off for the five years since Napoleon had called him a shit in silk stockings – but on March 11 Napoleon was given to understand that own his brother Joseph was making a more intimate betrayal by apparently attempting to seduce his wife. ‘King Joseph says very tiresome things to me,’ Marie Louise told the Duchesse de Montebello.65 Writing from Soissons, Napoleon was clearly concerned. ‘I have received your letter,’ he told the Empress.
Do not be too familiar with the King; keep him at a distance, never allow him to enter your private apartments, receive him ceremoniously as Cambacérès does, and when in the drawing room do not let him play the part of adviser to your behaviour and mode of life … When the King attempts to give you advice, which it is not his business to do, as I am not far away from you … be cold to him. Be very reserved in your manner to the King; no intimacy and whenever you can do so, talk to him in the presence of the Duchess and by a window.66
Was Joseph trying to play the role of Berville in Clisson et Eugénie? Napoleon suspected so, writing to the Empress the next day:
Will it be my fate to be betrayed by the King? I would not be surprised if such were to be the case, nor would it break down my fortitude; the only thing that could shake it would be if you had any intercourse with him behind my back and if you were no longer to me what you have been. Mistrust the King; he has an evil reputation with women and an ambition which has been habitual with him in Spain … I say it again, keep the King away from your trust and yourself … All this depresses me rather; I need to be comforted by the members of my family, but as a rule I get nothing but vexation from that quarter. On your part, however, it would be both unexpected and unbearable.67
To Joseph himself Napoleon wrote: ‘If you want to have my throne, you can have it, but I ask of you only one favour, to leave me the heart and the love of the Empress … If you want to perturb the Empress-Regent, wait for my death.’68* Was Napoleon becoming paranoid in these letters? Joseph had stopped visiting his mistresses, the Marquesa de Montehermoso and the Comtesse Saint-Jean d’Angély, and within a year Marie Louise would indeed betray Napoleon sexually, with an enemy general.69 Marmont recorded how hubristic and divorced from reality Joseph had by now become, believing that Napoleon had removed him from his command in Spain in 1813 ‘because he was jealous of him’, and insisting that he could have ruled Spain successfully, recognized by the rest of Europe, ‘without the army, without my brother’.70 Such views, if Marmont wasn’t inventing them, were of course totally delusory.
On March 16 Napoleon gave Joseph specific orders: ‘Whatever happens, you must not allow the Empress and the King of Rome to fall into the enemy’s hands … Stay with my son and do not forget that I would sooner see him drowned in the Seine than captured by the enemies of France. The tale of Astyanax, captive of the Greeks, has always struck me as the saddest page of history.’71 The infant Astyanax, son of Prince Hector of Troy, according to Euripides and Ovid, was flung off the city walls – although according to Seneca he jumped. ‘Give a little kiss to my son,’ Napoleon wrote less melodramatically the same day to Marie Louise. ‘All you tell me about him leads me to hope that I shall find him much grown; he will soon turn three.’72
After taking Reims by storm on March 13, Napoleon fought at Arcis-sur-Aube on the 20th and 21st against the Austrians and Russians under Schwarzenberg, the fourth and last defensive battle of his career. He had with him only 23,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry and he thought he was confronting the Allied rearguard, whereas in fact there were over 75,000 soldiers of the Army of Bohemia in the fields beyond the bridge over the fast-flowing, caramel-coloured river. During the 1814 campaign, Napoleon covered over 1,000 miles and slept in forty-eight different places in sixty-five days. Yet for all this movement, his three defeats – La Rothière, Lâon and Arcis – all came from staying too long in the same place, as he did at Arcis on the 21st. ‘I sought a glorious death disputing foot by foot the soil of the country,’ Napoleon later reminisced of the battle, where a howitzer shell disembowelled a horse he was riding but left him unscathed. ‘I purposely exposed myself; the balls flew around me, my clothes were pierced, but none reached me.’73 He later regularly mentioned Arcis as the place – along with Borodino and Waterloo – where he would have most liked to have died.
On March 21 Napoleon moved on Saint-Dizier, where he again hoped to cut the Allies’ lines of communications. If Paris could only hold out for long enough he could then attack them in the rear. Yet did the Parisians have the stomach for a siege, or would they collapse as the rest of France was doing? That same day Augereau had allowed the Austrians to take Lyons without bloodshed. Napoleon nonetheless hoped that the workers of Paris and the National Guard might barricade the streets and keep the Allies out, telling Caulaincourt on the 24th, ‘Only the s
word can decide the present conflict. One way or the other.’74
On the 23rd the Allies captured a courier with a letter from Napoleon which told Marie Louise that he was heading for the Marne ‘in order to push the enemy as far as possible from Paris and to draw closer to my positions’. Also seized was a letter from Savary imploring Napoleon to return to Paris as the regime was crumbling and being openly conspired against.75 Both confirmed the Allied high command in their plan to move on Paris. Sending his light cavalry to Bar-sur-Aube and the Guard towards Brienne, Napoleon harried them as best he could, but although he beat back clouds of Russian cavalry in a series of skirmishes around Saint-Dizier the next day, the main bodies of the Allied armies were now all converging on the badly neglected defences of Paris.76 The capital’s lack of strong fortifications was a fault Napoleon later acknowledged fully; he had planned to put a battery of long-range cannon on top of both the Arc de Triomphe and the Temple of Victory at Montmartre, but neither was ready.77
On March 27 Macdonald brought Napoleon a copy of an enemy Order of the Day, announcing that Marmont and Mortier had been defeated at the battle of Fère-Champenoise on the 25th. He couldn’t believe it was true and argued that since the order was dated March 29 it must be Allied propaganda. Drouot, whom Napoleon nicknamed ‘the sage of the Grande Armée’ for his wise counsel, pointed out that the printer had inserted a ‘6’ upside-down in error. ‘Quite right,’ Napoleon exclaimed on checking, ‘that changes everything.’78 He now needed to get to Paris at all costs. That evening he gave the order to march away from Saint-Dizier via the road to Troyes, his left flank covered by the Seine, ready to strike towards Blücher on his right.
At a long meeting in Paris on the night of the 28th Joseph, who had completely lost his nerve, had persuaded the Regency Council that it was Napoleon’s wish for the Empress and government to escape from the capital and move to Blois on the Loire, using as evidence a letter that was a month old and had since been twice superseded by different orders. He was supported by Talleyrand (who was already drawing up lists of ministers to serve in his post-Napoleonic provisional government), the regicide Cambacérès (who didn’t want to fall into Bourbon hands), Clarke (whom Louis XVIII soon afterwards made a peer of France) and the Empress herself, who ‘was impatient to get away’.79 Savary, Pasquier and the president of the Legislative Body, the Duc de Massa, thought that the Empress would get much better terms for herself and her son if she remained, and Hortense warned her that ‘In leaving Paris, you lose your crown’, but at 9 a.m. on March 29 the imperial convoy left the capital for Rambouillet with 1,200 men of the Old Guard, reaching Blois by April 2.80 Cambacérès, ‘accompanied by some faithful friends who would not leave him’, took the seals of state to Blois in a grand mahogany box.81
On Wednesday, March 30, 1814, as Napoleon moved from Troyes via Sens towards Paris as fast as his soldiers could march, 30,000 Prussians, 6,500 Württembergers, 5,000 Austrians and 16,000 Russians under Schwarzenberg engaged 41,000 men under Marmont and Mortier in Montmartre and other Parisian suburbs. Despite putting out a proclamation on March 29 saying ‘Let us arm to protect the city, its monuments, its wealth, our wives and children, all that is dear to us’, Joseph left the city once the fighting started the next day.82 Marmont and Mortier were hardly facing impossible odds, yet they considered the situation irretrievable and succumbed to Schwarzenberg’s threats to destroy Paris. At seven o’clock the next morning, they opened talks with a view to surrendering the city.83 Although Mortier marched his corps out of the city to the south-west, Marmont kept his corps of 11,000 men stationary over the coming days. As the enemy closed in, the elderly Marshal Sérurier, governor of Les Invalides, supervised the burning and hiding of trophies, including 1,417 captured standards and the sword and sash of Frederick the Great.
The Emperor reached Le Coeur de France, a staging post-house at Juvisy only 14 miles from Paris, sometime after 10 p.m. on March 30. General Belliard arrived there soon after to inform him of Paris’s capitulation after only one day’s indecisive fighting. Napoleon called Berthier over and plied Belliard with questions, saying ‘Had I arrived sooner, all would have been saved.’84 Exhausted, he sat for over a quarter of an hour with his head in his hands.85* He considered simply marching on to Paris regardless of the situation there, but was persuaded not to by his generals.86 Instead he became the first French monarch to lose the capital since the English occupation of 1420–36. He sent Caulaincourt to Paris to sue for peace and went to Fontainebleau, where he arrived at 6 a.m. on the 31st. An auto-da-fé of flags and eagles was conducted in the forest there (although some escaped the bonfire and can be seen in the Musée de l’Armée in Paris today).87
When the Allied armies entered Paris by the Saint-Denis gate on April 1, with white ribbons on their arms and green sprigs in their shakos, they were greeted by the populace with the exuberance that victorious armies always tend to receive. Lavalette was particularly disgusted by the sight of ‘Women dressed as for a fete, and almost frantic with joy, waving their handkerchiefs crying: “Vive l’Empereur Alexander!” ’88 Alexander’s troops bivouacked on the Champs-Élysées and Champ de Mars. There was no evidence that Parisians were willing to burn down their city sooner than cede it to their enemies, as the Russians had burned Moscow only eighteen months previously. The fickleness of the rest of the Empire might be judged from a Milanese deputation then on a visit to Paris to congratulate the man they had intended to call ‘Napoleon the Great’ for triumphing over all his enemies. On approaching the capital and hearing that it was being besieged they nonetheless decided to press on, and when they arrived promptly offered their congratulations to the Allies ‘on the fall of the tyrant’.89
Fifteen years after supporting Napoleon’s coup d’état at Brumaire, Talleyrand launched his own coup on March 30, 1814 and set up a provisional government in Paris that immediately began peace negotiations with the Allies.90 Although Tsar Alexander had considered alternatives to restoring the Bourbons, including Bernadotte, the Orleanists or perhaps even a regency for the King of Rome, he and the other Allied leaders were persuaded by Talleyrand to accept Louis XVIII. Another regicide, Fouché, was brought into the provisional government, and on April 2 the Senate passed a sénatus-consulte deposing the Emperor and inviting ‘Louis Xavier de Bourbon’ to assume the throne. The provisional government also released all French soldiers from their oath of allegiance to Napoleon. When this was circulated among the troops it was noted that although the senior officers took it seriously, most of the other ranks treated it with contempt.91 (One can be too pious about the solemnity of these oaths of loyalty, of course; Napoleon had sworn them to both Louis XVI and the Republic.)
At Fontainebleau, Napoleon considered his dwindling options. His own preference was still to march on Paris, but Maret, Savary, Caulaincourt, Berthier, Macdonald, Lefebvre, Oudinot, Ney and Moncey were uniformly opposed, though Ney never spoke to the Emperor in the bald, rude terms later ascribed to him;92 some of them favoured joining the Empress at Blois. It was paradoxical that although the marshals hadn’t forced abdication on Napoleon after he had been comprehensively beaten in Russia in 1812, nor after Leipzig in 1813, they did favour it when he was still winning victories in 1814, albeit with an army that was heavily outnumbered. They pointedly reminded him of his repeated statements only to do what was in the best interest of France.93 Napoleon suspected that they wanted him to abdicate in order to protect and enjoy the chateaux and riches he had given them, and gave voice to this opinion in bitter moments.
Although he had asked some of them – Macdonald, Oudinot and especially Victor – to do the impossible in 1814, and had berated them when they could achieve only the extraordinary, the real explanation for their behaviour wasn’t selfish, but rather that none could see how the campaign could possibly be won from the strategic position they were in, even if it were continued from the French interior. Since Napoleon’s abdication was the only way the war could end, it was logical for them to call for i
t, albeit respectfully. However much Napoleon reviewed the Old Guard and other units, who on April 3 shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ at the idea of marching on Paris, the marshals knew that the numbers simply no longer added up – insofar as they ever had during this campaign.94 Macdonald stated in his memoirs that he didn’t want to see the capital go the way of Moscow.95 Ney and Macdonald had wanted Napoleon to abdicate immediately so that a regency might be salvaged from the wreckage, and Napoleon sent them and Caulaincourt to Paris to see if this was still possible. However, on April 4 Marmont marched his corps straight into the Allied camp to capitulate, along with all their arms and ammunition. This led the Tsar to demand Napoleon’s unconditional abdication.96 Alexander had taken his huge army right across Europe and nothing less would now do.
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