by Philip Dwyer
In Vienna, her father showed her a letter from Napoleon addressed to her uncle, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, pleading with him to forward letters to his wife. It was the request of a desperate man. Francis then instructed her not to reply to Napoleon’s letters. As she told Méneval, she had the choice of bending to her father’s will or rebelling against him and her whole family, with what would have been serious consequences.73 The last letter to him was dated the beginning of January 1815.74 It is possible that by this stage, with a new lover by her side, she was learning to forget her husband. The change in attitude was spotted by those in Vienna; a secret police report noted that she was still ‘attached’ to Napoleon, but that she was no longer the same.75
Letizia arrived on Elba on 2 August 1814, having embarked from Leghorn amid the jeers of the mob.76 She was sixty-four years of age, but looked twenty years younger, and had decided to join her son from Rome where she had taken refuge after the collapse of the Empire.77 Her son was not there to greet her; expecting her to arrive the previous day he had gone to the country. She was a fairly unpretentious woman, but she was nevertheless, like her son, a bit of a stickler for form and refused to go ashore until a guard of honour had been arranged and enough people had been gathered together to give a semblance of a cheering crowd.78 She settled into the Vantini house, a spacious residence originally destined for Pauline below the Villa Mulini. Napoleon was delighted by her arrival and spent a number of hours with her, visibly happy on his return to the Mulini. Letizia as we know had a formidable character, something that did not fail to impress itself upon those who came into contact with her. Although ‘very pleasant and unaffected’,79 more ‘eminent people were intimidated in front of her than in front of the Emperor’.80 Napoleon also treated her with deference, visited her every day, something that he had never been able to do when in Paris, dined once a week at her residence, spent evenings playing cards with her and accorded her a role befitting her former title. When he cheated at cards, which was often, his mother was the only person to pull him up with a brusque, ‘Napoleon, you are cheating!’81
The Decision
When he was not keeping himself busy with one building project or another or frittering away his energies on trivial matters, Napoleon had time to mull over the events of the past year. In his inimitable fashion, he proved incapable of anything like self-reflection or self-critique. Instead, he tended to dwell on his own ‘feats’ during the last campaign, to argue that France had not suffered all that much because the bulk of lives expended were foreign, and to abuse Marmont whose defection he believed had obliged him to give up the struggle.82 Napoleon was encouraged, it is generally argued, by the stories from France that were filtering back to him about how unpopular Bourbon rule was proving, but one wonders just how much encouragement he needed. Yes, it is obvious that the army was not overly impressed with its new Bourbon masters. Not only had many veterans found themselves out of work or on half-pay – which the government then proceeded to reduce by imposing a number of taxes – and many experienced officers who had campaigned and fought for France had been replaced by men whose only qualification was to have connections at court, but soldiers returning from captivity in Germany, Britain and Russia (the lucky few) now circulated horror stories about their time in captivity. Most of these returning veterans were still loyal to Napoleon; their reinsertion into French society was, therefore, bound to create problems.83 They fed into the core of loyal supporters who would never accept the return of the Bourbons, creating enormous tensions between royalists and Bonapartists.84
Other reasons are put forward to help us understand Napoleon’s state of mind around this time. The knowledge that Marie-Louise and his son were not going to join him was a factor. So too was Louis’ refusal to pay him the pension he had been promised by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (along with every other member of the Bonaparte family). To be fair to Louis, the new king simply did not feel obliged to conform to a treaty he had no part in elaborating, not to mention the fact that the financial circumstances in which he found France were dire; Napoleon had saddled the Bourbons with an enormous debt. But then Louis was essentially a spiteful man who would have resented having to pay Napoleon at all. Nevertheless, deliberately withholding the funds was a calculated move, not particularly astute as it turned out but calculated nonetheless. Louis and his government wanted Napoleon gone and they mistakenly believed that by withholding funds they would oblige him to reduce his staff and his guard, so that he would be more easily moved at a later date.85
Of course, this also suited Napoleon, up to a point. Ever willing to play the victim, he made political mileage out of Louis’ niggardly behaviour. The more he could point to his own precarious situation, the more people, or so at least he thought, would be inclined to pity him and despise the Bourbons. But the lack of money put him in a difficult situation on several levels. His treasurer, Baron Guillaume Joseph Peyrusse, rescued about 2.5 million francs in gold, and he managed to get another 900,000 out of Marie-Louise, but that appears to have been the extent of Napoleon’s personal fortune.86 If Louis flouted the clauses of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, despite protests from the allies, and let him live in relative poverty, then there was little to stop the king from violating other treaty stipulations, and possibly treating Napoleon as a kind of outlaw.87 That possibility became even more real after 18 December 1814 when Louis decided to confiscate Napoleon’s personal property in France, depriving him of another source of income.
By the beginning of November, it was apparent to Neil Campbell that Napoleon’s ‘pecuniary difficulties press[ed] upon him’, and that if they did so much longer, ‘so as to prevent his vanity from being satisfied by the ridiculous establishment of a Court which he has hitherto supported in Elba, and if his doubts are not removed, I think he is capable of crossing over to Piombino with his troops, or of any other eccentricity’.88 Campbell sent another warning in December along the same lines.89 By that time too, reports were coming in from the spy that had been placed on Elba by the Chevalier Mariotti (on Talleyrand’s payroll). The spy, known mysteriously as the Oil Merchant, was probably Alessandro Forli, an Italian from Lucca who had formerly been a soldier in the Army of Italy. He was now selling olive oil to the imperial household, gathering information in the process, writing reports back to Mariotti which were, on the whole, models of reserve. By the middle of December 1814, Forli was also writing that Napoleon was seriously considering returning to France.90
The withholding of Napoleon’s pension and the confiscation of his property in France were minor irritations. The rumours flying around about how the allies wanted to assassinate Napoleon, or remove him from Elba, were more concerning.91 A certain Comte de Chauvigny de Blot wrote to Louis’ brother and heir presumptive, the Comte d’Artois, from Toulon in June 1814 offering to have Napoleon assassinated by Corsican officers on the island.92 It is impossible to know with any certainty how serious were these assassination threats, but the rumours certainly threw the Bonaparte household into a flap.93 In early September, Napoleon was described as ‘very uneasy, very agitated not daring to sleep in the same room for two nights running’.94 He apparently became so concerned that from the end of 1814, guests were no longer invited to table, and on the rare occasions he left his lodgings, he only went about with an armed escort.95 As a consequence, the security measures surrounding Napoleon were reinforced. Around 700 Imperial Guard, allowed Napoleon by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, had left Fontainebleau six days before the Emperor (although they did not arrive on the island until 26 May). This was enough for his personal security, but not enough to fend off a sustained attack from the mainland. There had indeed been a few half-hearted, badly organized attempts on his life, some on the part of the minister for the interior, Pierre Louis de Blacas, although to be fair to Louis XVIII he was probably unaware of his minister’s intrigues. André Pons de l’Hérault, who managed the iron mines on the island, but who became devoted to Napoleon despite the fact that he was a former
Jacobin, wrote of a kind of psychosis that took over the island as rumours, assassination plots and real assassination attempts merged to become indistinguishable.96
Much more to the point, however, Napoleon feared above all that Louis would convince the British and Austrians to throw him off Elba. There were rumours floating around at the beginning of November 1814 that he was going to be sent to St Helena.97 Certainly, in Vienna in October 1814, the allies were considering the Azores, St Lucia and St Helena, ‘in all the official mouths’.98 It was Talleyrand who suggested that Napoleon could be moved to an island in the Azores.99 The Azores belonged to Portugal and were 500 leagues from land, but Castlereagh seemed to think that the British might be able to buy one of the islands and that the Portuguese would be amenable. They were not, so that by November it was more or less decided: Bonaparte was going to be sent to St Helena.100
Napoleon was aware that Talleyrand and Louis were conspiring against him, but what he did not yet know was that so too was Metternich. He had entered into a secret correspondence with Louis, through Blacas, in a bid to oust Napoleon and Murat from Italy.101 In turn, Louis, through his representative at Vienna, Talleyrand, was pushing to oust not only Murat from Naples, but Napoleon from Elba. The two objectives were linked in the mind of Talleyrand.102 Realistically, once the Congress of Vienna was concluded, Napoleon would in all probability not be allowed to stay on Elba. By this stage, the European press was openly discussing the possibility of removing him to another location.103 At most, he might be offered another place of exile, but there was no guarantee that he would not be worse off.
At one point, towards the end of December 1814, Napoleon confronted Campbell with the rumours, declaring that he would never allow himself to be removed and that he would resist with force.104 It was the last meeting between the two men. Castlereagh would have preferred to move Napoleon (and Murat) with their agreement, perhaps softening the blow with a financial and territorial sweetener, but he never really attempted to discuss or even persuade his European counterparts. The only person who took the Treaty of Fontainebleau seriously was the Tsar, and even he was beginning to lose interest in Napoleon.
Other factors played a role. The situation in France has often been portrayed as dire for the Bourbons and it is true that there were large sections of the population who did not look upon the return of the monarchy with any pleasure. It was not so much that the Bourbons were out of touch with the people – true for some in Louis XVIII’s entourage – as that the monarchy had implemented a number of measures that alienated certain elements of the French population: republicans were upset by the return of the white Bourbon flag, the military by the number of redundancies that were made, and the ‘granting of a Charter’ – the Bourbons could not bear to call it a constitution – flew in the face of more than twenty-five years of political evolution. These measures, combined with the apparent return of the influence of the Church (demi-soldes, soldiers on half-pay, were obliged to attend mass on Sunday to receive their money), the return of ancien régime etiquette at court (which was nevertheless less elaborate than that formerly used by Napoleon) and the replacement of the tricolour with the fleur de lys all made for a public relations nightmare that haunted sections of the population who believed the Bourbons were determined to overthrow the gains of the Revolution. There were, moreover, a few high-profile incidents that highlighted the regime’s reactionary character. Louis XVIII ennobled the father of Georges Cadoudal, who had been killed in the plot to assassinate Napoleon.105 Former Chouans were decorated with the Croix de Saint-Louis. Returned émigrés upset people with their behaviour, especially when they attempted to retrieve their lands through either coercion or persuasion. Within a year of Louis’ coming to power, French political temperament and attitudes towards Napoleon had dramatically changed.
But this is not what brought about Napoleon’s return or Louis’ demise. Rumours of Napoleon’s deportation from Elba were fundamental in deciding him to leave the island, probably as early as December 1814.106 The newspapers, the conversations he had with visitors and the reports he was receiving from his own spies all confirmed that the allies were resolved to move him from Elba. In Napoleon’s mind, the best defence was attack; it was better to tempt fate in France than to wait passively for the allies to remove him. Up to this point he had been under the illusion that his marriage with Marie-Louise would always play in his favour and that Austria would consequently not permit his deportation.107 It must have been the realization that Marie-Louise was never going to join him that tipped the balance.
On 5 February 1815, Napoleon sent a confidential letter to Pons de l’Hérault. The letter asked Pons to report on how to organize an expeditionary flotilla – that is, how to ship the Guard to France. Napoleon saw Pons the next day, and asked him directly, ‘Shall I listen to the wishes of the army and the nation, who hate and mistrust the Bourbons?’108 This summary of his intentions is a political statement and does not reflect in the slightest what was going on in his mind. There is some speculation that he believed his escape had to be timed with the ending of the Congress of Vienna, and that rumours of Alexander’s departure for Russia had already reached Elba.109 The rumours proved to be false, but speculation about how much better it would have been if Napoleon had indeed waited until the end of the Congress, an idea that he himself maintained later,110 so that the allies were no longer gathered together in the one place, is really a moot point. At most, it would have delayed Napoleon’s inevitable downfall by a few months. Pons was, apparently, the only person in whom Napoleon confided.111 Not even Bertrand or Drouot were yet aware of what he had in mind.
Napoleon was looking on France from without. What is clear, even if he understood what was going on with French public opinion, is that he did not take into account the international context. Nor did he take into account the veritable outpouring of hatred and venom against him now that people were able to express themselves in books, pamphlets and caricatures unleashed upon the reading public as though a dam had burst. Many of these that appeared immediately after the fall of Napoleon portray him as a tyrant and despot who had been justly overthrown;112 in others he was used as a sort of moral spectacle whose physical and moral decay was meant to edify. In Charles Malo’s Napoléoniana, for example, we find a collection of fictive anecdotes that are meant to point to Napoleon’s moral bankruptcy. ‘Heaven granted Buonaparte great military skill, but no personal bravery; prodigious activity, but to no end; an indomitable will, but without discernment. Not the most incredible favours of fortune, nor the most terrible lessons of misfortune, nor the advice of enlightened men who wanted to show him true glory, nor the devotion of all his warriors, nothing could soften the character of the Corsican soldier, rectify its false spirit, or raise its corrupted soul.’113 Le Néron corse, which portrays him as a criminal, declared that the time of charlatans was over and that the people could no longer be duped.114 The overriding themes in these works are, first, that Napoleon was not French but a foreigner, and second, that he was driven by an unbounded ambition.115 The Précis historique sur Napoléon Bonaparte, for example, is filled with ancedotes that are meant to illustrate his lack of humanity and his excessive ambition.116 These kinds of books were enormous publishing successes, going through several editions in a short space of time. Their goal was to ‘demythify’ his political and military genius, and to set the reader on the right path.
‘The Die is Cast’
If Napoleon read any of these pamphlets, they do not appear to have weighed heavily in his decision to return. Timing was everything. Campbell was going to be away in Italy, so it was important to carry out the final preparations, which would take about ten days, during that time. It was a question of loading enough supplies for about 1,000 men, as well as getting forty horses and four cannon on board. Napoleon had at his disposal the brig Inconstant, a xebec called the Etoile and several smaller vessels – in all, seven ships. When the troops received the order to get ready to leave on the afte
rnoon of 26 February, many guessed what their destination was to be.117 Old soldiers that they were – ‘a soldier is not made to be a mason or a gardener’ – they were delighted to be going back into action.118 The sun was setting when the Old Guard left their barracks and marched towards the port through the narrow streets, encumbered now with inhabitants who had come to see them off.
Even then the scheme could have been uncovered if Captain Adye of the British brig the Partridge had been a little more observant. He arrived in Portoferraio during the night of 23 February, and weighed anchor not far from the Inconstant. Napoleon had ordered his ship to be painted like a British brig to help avoid detection once in open waters. If Captain Adye had seen this, it would naturally have aroused suspicion. Napoleon, therefore, ordered the ship to set sail. The next day, Adye came ashore with half a dozen English tourists, made sure that Napoleon was still on the island and sailed away later that afternoon, oblivious to what was going on around him.
Not all agreed with Napoleon’s decision. When the Emperor told Drouot on 25 February that he was leaving – ‘the whole of France regrets me and wants me back’ – Drouot was ‘struck with astonishment’. He nevertheless went along with the plans because, as he later stated at his court martial after Waterloo, he had sworn an oath of loyalty to Napoleon.119 That evening, Napoleon let his mother and sister, as well as his servants, in on the secret without however telling them where he was headed. His mother was troubled by the news, but was quickly reassured by her son.120 The rest of the time he spent drafting proclamations to the French people. He left the Villa Mulini around seven or eight o’clock that night. Crowds gathered around his carriage, accompanying him to the same port where he had disembarked ten months previously.121 Everyone, it seemed, had turned out to see him go. When he finally reached the port, and he turned to address the crowd, there was a prolonged ‘Shhh!’ A few words were spoken, no doubt from the heart, before he embarked on a boat that was also followed by an array of vessels, some rented by the town’s gentry so that they could approach the imperial brig.122 On board the Inconstant, Napoleon is supposed to have said, ‘The die is cast.’123 Indeed, he was like a gambler who had lost everything but his shirt, but who had to have one last throw of the dice. It is what the French call the maladie du pouvoir. It is as though Napoleon undertook the journey just to show by his very presence that it was easy to overthrow the old Europe. ‘There is no precedent in history for what I am about to do,’ Napoleon told Colonel Mallet of the Guard, ‘but I can count on popular astonishment, the state of public opinion, the resentment against the Allies, the affection of my soldiers, and the attachment to the Empire which lingers everywhere in France.’124