Citizen Emperor
Page 72
The departure was a bit of an anti-climax. Despite a good wind blowing all day, it had completely died down by evening, so that the convoy lay motionless in the harbour. The only way to get them out to sea within reach of a possible breeze was to row the ships out. It was midnight before they cleared the lighthouse and when dawn broke the next day they were still only about ten kilometres from the island.125 At one point, as the Inconstant approached the island of Capraia, lookouts could see the French royalist frigate the Melpomène and the Partridge returning from Leghorn.
If Napoleon saw the Partridge, the Partridge did not see Napoleon. Incredibly, Captain Adye mistook the Inconstant for another French brig, the Zéphir, a ship that they expected to see in these waters, and so did not pursue it. Besides, Adye and Campbell both expected Napoleon to head for Naples (where he could join Murat) if he ever attempted an escape, not for France. As for the French frigates patrolling the waters, they seemed little interested in what was going on. There was a belief that Captain Collet, commanding the Melpomène, would either ignore or even help Napoleon if he ran into trouble, and since he too must have seen the Inconstant this appears to have been what happened. As for the Zéphir, it actually came so close to the Inconstant that the two captains had a shouted conversation. Here too one must presume that, unless Captain Andrieux was completely blind, he must have seen that the Inconstant was heavily laden, crowded with men, with other similarly packed ships following. One can only conclude that Andrieux had thus made himself complicit in Napoleon’s escape; he was promoted after Napoleon’s return to Paris. When the Partridge finally got to Elba and Campbell had figured out that Napoleon was heading for France, he lost time searching the islands of Capraia and Gorgona.
It was commonly believed in the south of France and in Piedmont that the English had favoured if not facilitated Napoleon’s return, all the better to destroy him.126 The rumour may have been put around by Napoleon himself in order to create discord among the allies. In fact, he had not been under guard – he had, after all, been granted sovereignty over Elba – and no orders had been issued to the fleet in the Mediterranean to patrol the waters around Elba. Even the English commissioner, Campbell, who initially intended staying on the island, was miffed about Napoleon’s behaviour towards him and so spent much of his time in Italy, enjoying the delights and the company of a young lady he had met, and only deigned to visit the island occasionally. The longer Napoleon was on the island, the more bored Campbell became and the more he disliked the Emperor. Consequently he underestimated him: he did not believe Napoleon to be a man of extraordinary abilities. Quite the contrary, he believed Napoleon’s talents were no greater than those demanded of a sub-prefect.127
If Napoleon was well informed about what was going on in France, Louis XVIII also had his spies on Elba.128 It should have been obvious to him that Napoleon would not have been able to stay long on the island in relative inactivity. The last police report on Napoleon, made on 3 December 1814, suggested just that.129 Indeed, there was no concerted policy towards Napoleon on the part of the allied powers; he had more or less been relegated to the margins of great-power politics as more important issues came to the fore. Although agents, prefects and spies were constantly remarking in reports that they simply did not believe Napoleon would stay on Elba, that his show of resignation was a façade and that he would attempt to return to France, they were all dismissed or ignored. The minister of police, Jacques-Claude Beugnot, sarcastically wrote to Louis XVIII, ‘As if one could land in France with seven or eight hundred men . . . !’130 They were about to get a surprise.
THE SECOND COMING, 1815
25
The Saviour Returns
‘A Criminal and Impotent Delirium’
At daybreak on the morning of 1 March 1815, a small flotilla of ships came within sight of the French coast. The sky was clear, the sea calm, and a gentle breeze filled the sails. In a few hours they would be on ‘sacred soil’. At one point, Napoleon took off the Elban cockade from his hat and replaced it with the tricolour. It took only a moment to accomplish but the reaction was spontaneous, emotional and loud: cheers, clapping, shouting and stamping of feet on the deck.1 Between one and two o’clock in the afternoon, the anchors were lowered at Golfe Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, where the inhabitants would have been surprised to see the arrival of so many ships in a place that would ordinarily be quiet. The event could not but excite a certain amount of interest among the locals, so Drouot came up with the idea of circulating a rumour that the soldiers being brought ashore were either sick or on leave.2 The Emperor went ashore around five that evening, helped by his Guard who held up a gangway so that he could walk from the boat without getting his feet wet. He was the ghost of his younger self. Now forty-five years old, he was corpulent, his complexion was dull and pallid, and he walked with a stiff gait.3 Contemporaries who were to meet him over the next few months were less than impressed with the physique that stood before them. Everyone agreed that he had become ‘very fat and browned’.4
At first, just a few troops were brought ashore. Captain Antoine Jean-Baptiste Lamouret, in charge of about twenty men, was supposed to take possession of a little coastal fort, but finding that it had been demolished decided to make his way to Antibes, about five kilometres away on another bay. The officer in charge of the local regiment, Major Jean-Léopold-Honoré Dauger, outwitted Lamouret and had him and his men arrested.5 Napoleon left them there, although he dispatched General Pierre Jacques Etienne Cambronne of the Guard to make sure that no mail made it out of Antibes; it would not do for the rest of the country to learn that Napoleon had arrived and had suffered a setback almost immediately. During the night, he set up camp in an olive grove, in what is today the rue du Bivouac-Napoléon, near the church Notre Dame du Bon Voyage. A cordon of grenadiers was set up around him to keep the curious away. The first objective was to arrive in Paris without inciting a civil war, or without being accused of lighting its fires. To do that Napoleon had to prevent any guns being fired. He made sure his officers knew this, telling Cambronne that he should ride ahead, and that he was forbidden to ‘fire a single shot. I do not want to shed one drop of French blood in the recovery of my crown.’6
Never one to miss an opportunity to leave his mark on history, Napoleon issued a proclamation, prepared in advance. In fact, there were three proclamations. The first was to the French people in which he declared that the Bourbon government was illegitimate, and that he had been betrayed before Paris (by Marmont). ‘Your complaints and your desires have reached me in my exile,’ he added. ‘I have crossed the seas amid all sorts of perils, and I am here to resume my rights, which are also your own.’7 The second was addressed to the army, to whom he said, ‘We were not defeated.’ It was another way of saying he had been betrayed, and many in the army believed it. He implored the troops to rally around him to liberate France, so that one day they could look back on this event and declare that they too had been part of the army that had delivered Paris.8 The third proclamation was dictated to the Imperial Guard who accompanied him. Those who could made handwritten copies – there was no printing press available – inciting fellow soldiers to ‘trample the white cockade, the badge of shame!’9 These first proclamations mention neither liberty nor a constitution. Instead, Napoleon promised the troops glory and riches, and the people that their enemies would be expelled.10
This was a poor attempt to mirror his return from Egypt fifteen years earlier, and to hide his real motives. Napoleon’s intense feelings of bitterness at having lost power in the first place come through. He was attempting to present the invasion as a return to power at the behest of the French people. We know, of course, that this was not the case, and that as far as Grenoble at least (see below) there was little popular reaction to his return. Napoleon left Elba not to save France, but to save himself from oblivion. In his declarations to the people of France it was important to present a new face. He adopted the posture of the protector of the poor. He was n
ow a soldier of the Revolution come to liberate France from those who wanted to re-establish old privileges, and he claimed that the Austrians knew in advance and approved of his venture.11 Interesting, too, is the transformation of his political message as he got nearer to Paris.12 Napoleon portrayed himself as the reluctant hero who had heard the plaints of his people and now responded by reclaiming the legitimate government.13 In an article in the Moniteur of 23 March, only two days after he had reached Paris, we can read how Napoleon was called to resume his throne at the wishes of the people. The phrase ‘le peuple’ appears to have replaced the word ‘legitimate’, as though the people were the foundations on which his legitimacy were built.14
At Lyons, Napoleon, perhaps sensing the anti-royalist and pro-Jacobin sentiments among the crowds that welcomed him, began to dismantle the Bourbon monarchy by reinstating the tricolour flag, by extending an amnesty to military and civilian officers who had worked for the Bourbons (with some exceptions, such as Talleyrand), by confiscating property belonging to the princes of the House of Bourbon, by dismissing officers who had been integrated into the army since their return, and by expelling émigrés who had returned to France since 1 January 1814; in addition, émigré lands that had been restored were now to return to the state, the Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies were dissolved, and a decree calling for the representatives of the nation to come to Paris (in May) was issued.15 At Lyons, it looked as though the spirit of 1789 and indeed 1793 was alive and well. The populist, radical reaction took a lot of people by surprise, including Napoleon, who then went about using it to his political advantage. Once in Paris, he issued a number of decrees that were supposed to cement his revolutionary credentials: all ‘feudal titles’ were suppressed (in fact they no longer existed); the nobility was abolished (it had been done away with in 1791); and all those who had accepted ministerial office under the Bourbons were to be exiled from Paris. Almost a thousand people would be arrested and arbitrarily detained and nearly 3,000 were placed under house arrest.16 Historians have described these actions of Napoleon as combining the liberal notions of the Revolution, which essentially set out to establish a constitutional monarchy, with the more radical phase of the Revolution of 1793, encapsulated by the Terror, anti-royalism and anti-clericalism.17
This is true, but it is an oversimplification. As a child of the Revolution but also as a man wanting to reassert his imperial authority, Napoleon had little choice but to undo the foundations of the returned Bourbon monarchy, and at the same time to promise a more liberal national assembly. Was this going against the grain,18 or was Napoleon being his most practical, opportunist self ? He certainly played to the crowds when he thought it necessary. At Autun, for example, he was heard to talk about hanging priests and nobles from a lantern (lanterner).19 This found an echo with the silk weavers of Lyons, who chanted, ‘Down with the priests! Death to royalists!’20 Napoleon caught on very quickly. He suddenly rediscovered his revolutionary roots, carried away by his own enthusiasm, imitating what he heard around him, pitting the poor against the rich, the peasantry against the local parish priests. He was now a man of the people, democratic, anti-Bourbon.21 Neo-Jacobins at least liked what they heard; they rallied to him as the legitimate heir of the values of 1789. In the months that followed, anti-Bourbon sentiment was tapped into as Napoleon’s new regime churned out caricatures that mocked Louis XVIII’s physical appearance and reminded onlookers of the role the allies had played in restoring the Bourbons to the throne.22
Anonymous, Glorieux règne de 19 ans – Comme il gouverne depuis 15 ans (The glorious reign of nineteen years – How he has been governing for fifteen years), 1815. In the image on the left we see a corpulent Louis XVIII, who had theoretically reigned since the death of the dauphin in 1795, sitting at a horseshoe table full of food and drink, his responsibilities under his feet marked ‘the Charter’, ‘forgetting the past’ and ‘freedom of the press’, among other things. To the right is Napoleon, working at a table with little food and drink, with a pile of papers whose labels include ‘freedom of religion’ and ‘the abolition of slavery’. He is signing a document releasing from prison the Duc d’Angouleme, the Comte d’Artois’ son.
The revolutionary rhetoric was in complete contrast to the moderate image Napoleon was also cultivating. If it did not inflame old hatreds against priests and nobles, the rhetoric opened old wounds that allowed those who had felt oppressed under the Bourbons to vent their frustration and rage. This was especially the case in the provinces where priests and nobles were harassed and sometimes attacked. The revolutionary song, ‘La Marseillaise’, also revived old animosities. Napoleon had always been very wary of ‘La Marseillaise’; it was almost never sung during the Empire, and was deleted from the official list of songs.23 The troops who rallied to him, however, began to sing it again in the weeks and months leading up to Waterloo.24
Napoleon, nevertheless, refused to rely on the people, especially those of Paris, whom he associated with the worst excesses of the Revolution and referred to as the ‘dregs of the populace’.25 His new regime had to be built on more solid foundations if he were to succeed in rallying the notables.
What followed has become part of the Napoleonic legend. It took Napoleon nineteen days to journey from the south coast of France to Paris, avoiding those towns and regions where he knew he was likely to get a less than warm welcome. The itinerary had in fact been planned in great detail by two obscure supporters of the Emperor: a glove-maker from Grenoble, Jean-Baptiste Dumoulin, and Napoleon’s military surgeon on Elba, Joseph Emery.26
We cannot say with certainty that France welcomed Napoleon’s return. Certainly, before he landed at Golfe Juan, there had been growing anxiety about the Bourbons and their more extreme supporters, who managed to destroy very quickly what goodwill had existed between the people and the Bourbons.27 None of this of course explains the rapid collapse of the Restoration government when faced with the landing of Napoleon and a few troops. The reaction of the army was crucial. Just as it had been necessary to Bonaparte in 1799, so too was the army’s role fundamental in allowing Napoleon to regain power in 1815.28 This time, however, it was not so much the superior officers as the subalterns and the rank and file who were decisive. Despite the Restoration paying the army more attention in the first couple of weeks of March than it had done the whole of the previous year, and despite a campaign in the press to rally the army to the Bourbons, the common soldier turned his back on the king and went over to Napoleon.29 Attempts on the part of high-ranking officers to garner support for Louis with cries of ‘Vive le Roi!’ were met with stony silence.30 The ‘contagious mutiny’ that took place from below was made possible, however, only because the common soldier was pushed along by the people.31
In Vienna, things had not been going well. This is not the place to go into the difficulties the allies faced in coming to some sort of post-Napoleonic settlement, but the situation had deteriorated to such an extent over the Polish and Saxon questions that war appeared inevitable. It got to the point where Alexander was reported to have threatened to ‘unleash’ Napoleon on them.32 One of Francis I’s chamberlains, the Count von Seilern, had the same idea.33 Frederick William and his generals were so unhappy with the way things were progressing that they talked openly of war.34 Their inability to obtain the whole of Saxony did not go down at all well in Berlin. The Prussian Chancellor’s house in Berlin was attacked by a mob, although nothing more than a few windows were broken.35 The Prussians it would appear were spoiling for a fight, and not necessarily against France. Many believed it would inevitably come to that at some time in the future. Two days before Napoleon’s return, Louis XVIII wrote to Talleyrand with instructions about what to do in the event of war.36
And then, on the morning of 7 March, news of the landing of the ‘monster’ in the south of France arrived. Though the remarks of the Polish Countess Potocka about sovereigns and ministers sleeping with their hats on and their swords by their sides can be taken
with a grain of salt, the initial reaction was nevertheless one of stupefaction mixed with fear.37 The King of Bavaria ‘lost his appetite’, Alexander was alarmed and even Metternich was unable to maintain his composure.38 Frederick William insisted Napoleon should have been treated more harshly.39 When Marie-Louise heard the news, she remained entirely composed in public, but then burst out crying when she retired to her apartments.40 The only person not to have been affected appears to have been Talleyrand, who remarked, ‘It is a masterstroke.’41 Later he declared, ‘That man is organically mad.’42 Talleyrand was not the only person to use that expression. Caulaincourt described the ‘enterprise of the emperor’ as ‘mad’.43 Not everyone, however, was displeased by the news. Some of the minor German princes, but especially the Prussian military, were delighted. The German princes saw it as a chance to reopen negotiations, while Prussia saw it as an opportunity to regain more territory in the inevitable war.44