by Philip Dwyer
Marie-Louise set off with her entourage in the evening of 29 March, in about twelve berlines plus a number of baggage wagons that contained the imperial treasury, watched by the people of Paris in the ‘most profound silence’.53 What followed, to paraphrase Marshal Oudinot’s wife, was the government, the Empire.54 They headed for Chartres via Rambouillet, but finally settled on Blois, where they arrived on 2 April. The departure of the court caused a slight panic among some in the Parisian upper classes. The roads to Rouen, Chartres and Dreux were blocked with traffic as the wealthy attempted to get out of the capital and find refuge in quieter country towns.55 The city itself was relatively calm, if not deserted. Few shops were open, although the Café Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens continued to serve ices and punch while French wounded and allied prisoners filed past in front of an indifferent clientele.56 Those fleeing were joined by Joseph and Jérôme, who had left Paris even before Marmont had officially capitulated, and later by Louis, Letizia and Fesch. Louis was, according to Marie-Louise, ‘in such a state of panic . . . and so demented that it was embarrassing’.57 Hortense received the order to follow Marie-Louise, but before doing so she wrote to her mother to say that she too should flee to Normandy. Josephine wrote to her daughter about how unhappy she was being separated from her children, to the point where she did not care about her own fate. ‘I am only worried about you,’ she added.58 She left Malmaison on 29 March with three carriages and travelled about twenty leagues over two days. She reached Navarre in Normandy the next day and was joined by her daughter on the 31st. The trip was ‘sad and painful’, wrote her chambermaid.
The same morning the capitulation was signed, the 31st, the allies marched into Paris. Not since the days of Joan of Arc had the city fallen to a foreign invader (it would occur twice more, in 1870 and again in 1940). The allied troops marched through Montmartre into the centre of the city and eventually down the Champs-Elysées. It was a stark reminder to the people of Paris that the allies were indeed the stronger of the two forces and that, contrary to Napoleonic propaganda over the past few weeks, they had won the day. It is often said that Frederick William and Alexander (Francis was not there) were greeted by huge enthusiastic crowds, some bearing the white cockades and waving the white flag of the Bourbons, but it was not that clear-cut.59 The people of the Faubourg Saint-Martin, working class, were sullen (and were later known to harass and even attack small groups of military).60 As the allies passed through the triumphal arch at Saint-Denis, however, cheers started to be heard. By the time they got to the Tuileries, there was a veritable festival.61
That same evening, a conference was held at Talleyrand’s house in the rue Saint-Florentin between a number of French politicians and the allied leaders, Alexander, Frederick William and Schwarzenberg (filling in for Francis). They decided to draft a proclamation to the French people announcing that the allies would no longer treat with Napoleon (or any member of his family), that they would respect the integrity of France as it had existed in 1792 and that they would recognize any constitution the French decided to give themselves.62 The declaration, signed by Alexander and pasted on the walls of Paris, also called on the Senate to elect a provisional government, which it did under Talleyrand’s guidance on 1 April. The very next day, the Senate deposed Napoleon and his family.
In the scheme of things, whether Joseph gave up the capital to the allies or held out is neither here nor there; Napoleon’s defeat was inevitable. Talleyrand and the Senate played key roles in this. By giving places in the new government to both administrators and the military (especially top-ranking generals and marshals), they made defection all that much easier. If the allies had threatened them with dismissal, there would have been stiff opposition; the French elite would have had nothing to lose. One could paraphrase Louis XIV at the moment of his death in 1715, when he is said to have declared, ‘I am going, but the state will always remain.’ For Napoleon, however, it was more a case of ‘I am going, and so is the imperial regime.’
‘Nap the Mighty is – Gone to the Pot!!!’
Napoleon had completely misread the situation, convinced that the allies would never let him out of their sight or allow him to cut off their lines of communication in the rear. He had worked under the impression that a major battle was looming in the days after 24 March.63 As a consequence, he had lost days in futile marching, exhausting his troops in the process, looking for an enemy that was not there – they were in Paris.
On the night of 27 March news of the allies’ march towards Paris started to get back to him. Given the desperate situation in which he now found himself, he decided to push on ahead in the hope of being able to support his commanders in Paris, ordering his army to Troyes, where he arrived in the night of 29 March. Troyes is nevertheless 150 kilometres from Paris, and most of the Guard and the cavalry were still a day behind. Outside Troyes, at the Château de Pouilly, he learnt of the assault on Paris, along with vague rumours of a surrender. He decided to hurry ahead, taking off at a gallop with an escort (the Guard and the rest of the army were to quicken their pace). When his horse gave out beneath him, he climbed into a wicker dogcart (at Villeneuve-l’Archevêque, on the River Vanne), lent to him by a local butcher. At Sens, later in the day, he was able to borrow an open carriage and was at Fontainebleau by five that evening.
It was near there, late on the evening of 30 March, that he learnt from General Belliard, leading a group of battle-weary men, that Paris had capitulated. He was at a post-house near Fromenteau-Juvisy (between Essonnes and Villejuif, today the Observatory of Juvisy), and seems to have become disoriented for a short while. He called for his carriage and then, before it could arrive, started down the road towards Paris on foot, ‘everyone following sadly after him’.64 After a while, seeing that his carriage had still not come up, he turned around and went back the way he had come, as though to meet the carriage along the way. Belliard tried to reason with him, although Napoleon seems to have been possessed by the idea of marching on, working himself into a rage as he questioned the hapless Belliard about what had happened in Paris, venting his anger against the minister of war, that incapable Clarke, ‘nothing but a head bookkeeper turned vain’, and that pig of a brother Joseph. He then turned around again and quickened his pace towards Paris until he came across a column of the Young Guard that had withdrawn from Paris. In the end, he had to face reality, and saw that he really was too far away to make a difference. He kept on walking along the road at a brisk pace for a while, accompanied by Berthier and Caulaincourt, in silence, letting out a deep sigh now and then, intermittently exclaiming, ‘Four hours too late, what a mischance!’ They walked for over two hours before regaining the post-house, where he went inside, propped his head in his hands and stayed that way for a long time, seemingly lost in thought, sighing heavily and often, exclaiming now and then things like ‘Joseph has ruined everything!’, or ‘All is lost.’
The next day he headed for Fontainebleau where he was to stay for the next three weeks working on plans to renew the fighting, and where some 40,000–60,000 troops had gathered urging him to march on Paris. His response to his powerlessness was to rage at everyone, to cry treason, to concoct schemes to join one army or another in order to fight on. He constantly harped on about how he had been betrayed, ‘fourteen times a day’, by Talleyrand, by Marmont, by Joseph.65 On 3 April, after reviewing in the courtyard of Fontainebleau units of the Guard, who shouted, ‘To Paris! To Paris!’, he came away convinced that he could still march on his former capital. General Boulart and General François Antoine Lallemand passed around a petition asking the Emperor to march on Paris. The common soldier, it seems, was all in favour.66 Napoleon spent the afternoon with Berthier working on plans to do so, seemingly unaware of or at least not paying attention to those in his entourage who took their leave, one by one, invoking one pretext or another. What Berthier was thinking is impossible to know. Perhaps he too, wrapped up in Napoleon’s own delusions, believed that the Emperor could pull it off,
or he simply obeyed out of loyalty, out of habit.
The senior military commanders in Napoleon’s entourage – Ney, Macdonald, Lefebvre, Oudinot – had other ideas. They met together and then informed him on 4 April that they would no longer continue to fight. Lefebvre told Napoleon that his conscript troops were in no condition to do so, and in any event they wanted peace. It was they who persuaded him to abdicate in favour of his son. Reports vary as to the intensity of the discussions: violent according to some, calm according to others.67 They were thinking of themselves, yes, but it was also a realistic assessment of the military situation and showed that they felt a certain responsibility towards the general wellbeing of the people. That day, the 4th, Napoleon issued a declaration stating that, in accordance with the oath he had sworn and for the good of the patrie, he was prepared to vacate the throne in favour of his son and the regency, and that he was even prepared to leave France.68 The declaration was taken to Paris by a delegation that comprised Caulaincourt, Ney and Macdonald. In Paris, Alexander demanded an unconditional abdication. The delegation returned to Fontainebleau, and in a moment of defiance Napoleon appealed to his comrades in arms and said, ‘Let’s march tomorrow and beat them.’ It was only in the face of their stony silence that he agreed to draft an act of abdication.69 After some hesitation, he somewhat petulantly scribbled his name on the act.
It is evident from his contradictory behaviour and language during this period that he did not really know what to do or what he wanted. It is possible he was hoping or expecting the allies to reject the idea of a regency and thus, in his mind at least, oblige his generals to fight on. This is why he held a meeting the next morning to work on plans to march on Paris, again, if the abdication was rejected. It is also possible that Napoleon was, as he had been throughout the campaign for France, playing for time, and using this as a respite while he gathered his forces for another battle. ‘The desire to exalt France’s renown and prosperity always came into conflict with his best intentions and most peaceful resolve, and he was forever hoping to escape from the necessity of submitting to a peace that ran counter to his lifelong dreams.’70 In any event, the idea of a regency was illusory, especially after the capitulation of Marmont left Napoleon’s military situation untenable. There were too many people working against it; the fact that Napoleon seems to have been blissfully unaware of just how many people wanted him definitively dethroned is an indication of how out of touch with the political reality he was.
As a result of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which the abdication and the agreement regulating his fate was called, Napoleon was formally granted sovereignty over the island of Elba, off the Tuscan coast, with a pension of six million francs, and he was allowed to keep the title of emperor, despite the fact that Louis XVIII was restored to the French throne. Alexander, it has to be pointed out, made the offer of Elba to Napoleon without consulting his allies (as was his wont). He may have done so to demonstrate to the rest of Europe how generous he was in victory.71 Talleyrand, in the name of the French provisional government, supported the offer because he was more concerned at this stage with getting Napoleon away from his troops at Fontainebleau and avoiding a possible civil war.72 The other allied powers, holed up at Dijon, were left out in the cold during these negotiations. So when Metternich, Hardenberg and Castlereagh arrived in Paris on 10 April to find that Alexander had given Elba to Napoleon, they were furious.73 There was much that could go wrong: Elba’s proximity to the Italian shores, the (perceived) popularity of Napoleon in Italy, the popularity of Eugène in Italy and the unpredictability of Murat all made Elba a curious choice. Francis and Metternich objected; Elba was now within Austrian territory. Castlereagh also thought the choice of Elba a poor one and at first refused to sign, but eventually had to waive any objections because Alexander had given his word. When the British cabinet found out about Elba, it was less than impressed. Sir Charles Stewart, envoy extraordinary to the Prussian court, wrote to Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies under Lord Liverpool, to say that ‘Very considerable apprehension has arisen . . . as to the mischief and ultimate danger that may accrue.’74 Some among the English public were calling for blood, arguing that Napoleon should have been either killed in action or put on trial for the murder of the Duc d’Enghien, among others.75 Other English pamphleteers were urging life imprisonment for the Emperor.76 No one, in short, was happy with the decision, including Napoleon who at one stage was thinking of asylum in England. Later, in a last face-saving exercise, he would make out that Elba had been his own choice, as though it were somehow a victory carried off by Caulaincourt, with the complicity of Alexander.77 It was the impression he was trying to create before even setting foot on the island, trying to offset any ideas that he was a prisoner.78
When Napoleon’s abdication was made public, the reactions were mixed. In the army, among the rank and file, it was one of incredulity. When Marmont’s troops realized that their marshal’s lack of activity had left Paris open to the enemy and forced Napoleon’s abdication, they were furious. A colonel by the name of Ordener refused to carry out his orders and yelled, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, a cry that, if he is to be believed, was repeated by the rest of the troops for three hours. This is no doubt an exaggeration, but it did take some time for the generals in Marmont’s army to persuade their men not to go to Fontainebleau. It is evident that those in the army still loyal to Napoleon had difficulty resigning themselves to the fact that he had abdicated. At Briare, officers learnt of his abdication in the newspapers, which they tore up in public saying they had been duped.79 In Versailles, on the morning of 6 April, officers ran through the ranks shouting they had been ‘betrayed’.80 When Jean-Baptiste Barrès and his fellow officers heard the news in Germany, nearly everyone ‘shed tears of rage and pain’.81
It was a different matter among the highest-ranking officers, and those with royalist sympathies. General Kellermann was one of Napoleon’s severest critics.82 ‘A blind man who had recovered his sight would not feel a sweeter sensation,’ wrote the artillery colonel Antoine-Augustin-Flavien Pion des Loches. ‘I touched myself to make sure it was really me, having survived the battlefields, the snows of Russia.’83 Even some in Napoleon’s entourage, like General Sorbier, were happy to see his fall. ‘And this is where that b[ugger] has led us after twenty years of revolution and no one will take a pot shot at him.’84 These sentiments were shared by a great number of general officers, if Pion des Loches is to be believed. Fontaine remarked that ‘those closest to him, those obligated to him, his trusted servants, almost all of them abandoned him as pillagers and as ingrates’. ‘I should have expected it,’ Napoleon is supposed to have said.85 It perhaps says as much about him as it does about the men he surrounded himself with.
Among the people, there seems to have been a general sense of relief that the war was at an end and that peace was finally upon them. In the south of France, the French had welcomed the arrival of the British under Wellington. At Toulouse, where the last battle of the war had been fought, the British were offered a banquet by the town.86 Royalists of course celebrated the return of the monarchy. Volney, the same man who had once been kicked in the stomach by Napoleon, wrote to a friend to say that it was ‘a dream for us to find liberty again, I should say civilization, at the hands of foreigners who had been carefully portrayed as ogres’.87 Once the allies arrived in Paris, and within a very short time, it was as though Napoleon had never lived. He was spoken of as if he had existed in the fourteenth century.88
When news of Napoleon’s abdication and the end of the war was heard, it was greeted with joy and celebrations throughout Europe. No more so than in Britain where the public celebrated what to all appearances was Napoleon’s final defeat. At Yarmouth, 8,000 people feasted at a table more than a kilometre long.89 Thomas Carlyle, writing to his friend Robert Mitchell, declared that Napoleon had ‘gone to the pot’.90 Only a few months previously, wrote Carlyle, he had been trampling on ‘thrones and sceptres, and king
s and priests and principalities and powers, and carried ruin and havoc and blood and fire, from Gibraltar to Archangel’.
‘Napoleon is Always Napoleon’
When Caulaincourt and Macdonald returned from Paris on 2 April to Fontainebleau, they found the place almost empty. A few faithful remained to serve the Emperor, as did some in the imperial household and a few domestics, but many had deserted him. General Pelet remarked that the place was so mournful it seemed as though Napoleon had already been buried. Napoleon’s greatest fear during these days was that he would be killed by an angry mob. ‘His misgivings on that score’, wrote Caulaincourt, ‘outran anything that I could imagine.’91 Napoleon rambled about other great men in history who had taken their lives rather than live in humiliating circumstances, but in this as in all things during this period he appears to have been equivocal. In one breath he could talk about suicide and in the next about how he was ‘condemned’ to live. ‘They say a living gudgeon is better than a dead Emperor.’92 Given his state of mind, those close to him feared that he might attempt to take his own life.
In the night of 12–13 April, a few hours after going to bed, after a fitful sleep, he got up, placed some poison in a glass of water – a mixture of opium, white hellebore and belladonna that he had been carrying around for the past two years – and drank from it. By now, though, the mixture had lost its potency, or was too weak to take effect, and did nothing more than make him sick. He went back to bed, but when his valet saw that he was restless and showing signs of nausea, he fetched Caulaincourt, who sat by him listening to his gloomy views of the world and his fear that he would never reach Elba alive.