If the popular reaction was at first restrained, the local authorities significantly made little effort to apprehend the newcomer. Massena was immediately informed by semaphore telegraph at Marseilles but took no decisive action. Profiting from the universal hesitation Napoleon pushed inland, selecting for his advance the difficult mountain route to Grenoble—purposely avoiding Marseilles and the department of Provence with its traditional Royalist sympathies.
The first real crisis took place at Laffrey, fifteen miles south of Grenoble, where the small band of adventurers found themselves faced by the 5th Regiment of the Line. Bloodshed was narrowly averted by the coolness of the Emperor, who once again displayed his personal power over soldiers. Advancing alone he bared his breast to the leveled muskets. “Soldiers of the 5th, you can shoot your Emperor if you dare! Do you not recognize me as your Emperor? Am I not your old general?”2 Noticing the growing hesitation, Napoleon won over the waverers by repeatedly adding a piece of blatantly untrue propaganda. “It is not ambition which brings me among you. The forty-five best heads of the Government of Paris have called me from Elba and my return is supported by the three first powers of Europe.” With one accord the soldiers broke ranks and flocked forward, shouting “Vive l’Empereur” The crisis was past and the moment was decisive—for the first units of the army had rallied to Napoleon and he was consequently once more a force on the international scene. Grenoble opened its gates and the citizens gave Napoleon a rapturous welcome, while the local dignitaries feverishly sought their old tricolor sashes and locked away the Bourbon insignia. At St. Helena the Emperor reminisced: “Before Grenoble I was an adventurer; at Grenoble I was a ruling prince.”3
The advance toward Paris continued in an atmosphere of general jubilation. At every stop Napoleon harangued assemblies of local people, adapting the tone of his addresses to suit the tastes of his varied audiences. To countrymen he promised security of land tenure; to townsfolk he guaranteed fiscal reform; to everybody he spoke of peace and prosperity. Napoleon was at all times a brilliant opportunist.
Meanwhile the Bourbon Government vainly issued orders for the Emperor’s arrest and dispatched increasing numbers of troops to intercept his journey. Marshal Ney promised Louis XVIII that he would return to Paris with Napoleon “in an iron cage,” but when his forces met the Emperor near Auxerre on March 14 the old attraction again proved too strong and the men once more deserted en masse, followed by their commander. In Paris some wit posted a large notice in the Place Vendôme: “From Napoleon to Louis XVIII. My good brother—there is no need to send any more troops—I have enough.”4
Small incidents sometimes sway great events. Just as James II of England is reputed to have decided that his cause was hopeless when he overheard one of his sentries whistling “Lillibullero”—the marching song of William of Orange’s rebels—so the Bourbon Government noted with growing concern the signs of popular alienation. In addition to humorous lampoons, grimmer slogans of Jacobin origin appeared overnight on the walls of Paris: “Down with the priests! Down with the nobles! Death to the Royalists! Bourbons to the scaffold!” Exacerbated by the hard conditions of economic inflation, the Paris mob and métayers were once again becoming restive. Serious rioting in the streets of the capital was not calculated to cheer the heirs of St. Louis, already hypnotized by Napoleon’s seemingly inexorable advance, and on March 19 the Royal Court decamped from Paris and fled for the Belgian frontier and renewed exile. Over one hundred days were to pass before they regained their capital.
On March 20 Napoleon entered the Palace of the Tuileries, and was once more in control of the apparatus of government, though he never regained his old absolute power. Revolutionary figures from the dim past—Carnot and Constant—were persuaded to serve in his government, but the Chamber remained aloof and cautious. Napoleon and the State were never again synonymous, and the Emperor could no longer repeat the proud claim of Louis XIV: “L’état, c’est moi.” Vast efforts were made to rally the Parisians behind the new regime, culminating on June 1 in a huge celebration entitled Le champ de mai. The civic part of the ceremony proved a ludicrous fiasco, but the military parade that followed was as impressive as ever.
Napoleon hesitated to order full mobilization, for he was well aware that the vast majority of the people were wholly opposed to a renewal of hostilities. As a gesture to public opinion—and to win time—the Emperor at once put out peace feelers toward the Allied governments, hoping that their growing disillusionment with the House of Bourbon and the festering political divisions within their ranks would play into his hands and persuade at least a few to accept a fait accompli and acknowledge Napoleon as the ruler of France.
Four facsimiles of Napoleon’s signature: (i) 1794; (ii) 1801; (iii) 1806; (iv) 1815. Notice the progressive deterioration.
Any such hopes were soon dashed into oblivion. Seven days before the Emperor reached Paris, the representatives of the Powers met at Vienna to outlaw the Emperor and to pledge over half a million men for the destruction of “the Ogre” once and for all. On March 25 a formal treaty of alliance was signed between England, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and the Seventh Coalition came into being, backed by the promise of £5 million in English gold. Prussia and England at once put a joint force of 150,000 men into the field, and the other governments began their preparations. All negotiations with Napoleon were broken off.
The Emperor never expected to avoid war, but for the sake of the French peace party the gesture had to be made. Once the intentions of the Allies were made manifest and they could be castigated as aggressors by French propaganda, the mask could be dropped with safety. On April 8 mobilization was ordered, but the Emperor still hesitated to reintroduce the hated conscription for a further three weeks. In the meantime a torrent of edicts poured from Paris to make the most of available resources, for speed was vital if the Allied retribution was to be forestalled. Every military commodity was in short supply—horses, harness, ammunition, clothing, weapons—but by tremendous efforts the deficiencies were slowly made good. Every week a million and a half cartridges were manufactured; every day the Paris workshops produced 1,250 uniforms. Arsenals and depots were ransacked for firearms, however ancient, and teams of ordnance experts worked night and day to adapt the old weapons and refurbish them.
The greatest shortage of all was manpower. The army taken over from the Bourbons in March totaled only 200,000 men, and before the end of the year at least five times that number of Allied forces would be arrayed on the frontiers of France. Seventy-five thousand veterans needed little urging to return to the tricolor, and 15,000 more additional volunteers also appeared. But these resources were hopelessly inadequate in themselves; to defend the frontiers it was found necessary to mobilize two hundred battalions of the National Guard and dispatch them to the fortresses with a stiffening of twenty veteran battalions, filling the role of training units. All leave was canceled, and sailors, customs officials and police were again embodied into the line regiments, newly restored to their old titles and numbers. Largely through these measures a force of 280,000 soldiers was produced within eight weeks of Napoleon’s landing, and within six months there was a prospect of a further 150,000 once the Class of 1815 had been reconscripted and put back into uniform.
The strategical situation facing France was indeed threatening. In due course the Allies would mobilize between 800,000 and one million men, and Napoleon could at best hope to muster only half that figure. Furthermore the eastern frontiers of France stretched from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and the enemy had freedom to choose his point of assault. This advantage was fully appreciated by the Allies, who planned to attack with five armies, hoping to compel the French to disperse their small forces. Wellington with 110,000 Allied troops was to attack from Brussels, his left covered by Field Marshal Blücher’s 117,000 Prussians advancing on Namur from their base area around Liège. At the same time, Schwarzenberg’s Austrians, 210,000 strong, would attack the upper reaches of the Rhine from the
Black Forest, and General Frimont with 75,000 more Austrians and Italians would advance onto the Riviera and threaten Lyons. Last to arrive on the scene of operations, Barclay de Tolly’s army of 150,000 Russians were expected to place themselves in the central Rhine area, serving as a strategic reserve or masse de manoeuvre for the other four armies. When all these forces were assembled, a simultaneous drive on Paris and Lyons would grind down the French forces by sheer weight of numbers between converging armies.
On paper this scheme looked extremely impressive, but in late May the only Allied forces actually in the field were those of Wellington and Blücher, and it would be at least July before the Austrians reached the Rhine, while the Russians would be later still. Time was clearly the vital factor to both sides. In a conference with Wellington at Tirlemont on May 3, Blücher pressed for an immediate offensive by the 210,000 men already available in the Netherlands, but he was persuaded to await the arrival of his other allies.
Napoleon had to choose between two courses of action. On the assumption that the enemy could not approach the defenses of Paris in strength before mid-August, the Emperor might employ the further two-month lull to raise and train more forces, and eventually mass the bulk of his army in the vicinity of the capital between the Rivers Seine and Marne—but this time with at least 200,000 men at his disposal as compared with only 90,000 the previous year. If this defensive strategy was adopted, by early August the French army could be disposed as follows to meet the anticipated two-pronged Allied attack: 116,000 troops in the immediate vicinity of Paris and 25,000 more at Lyons, supported by two further field armies—240,000 in the north, 60,000 in the south. As the Allies would be compelled to station at least 200,000 men as garrison and line of communication troops, this would leave 350,000 to march on Paris and perhaps 80,000 to threaten Lyons.
These calculations might be a shade optimistic, but a defensive strategy might have produced at least a temporary parity of numbers—at the cost of the inevitable abandonment of large areas of French territory.
The alternative course of action was an immediate offensive against the Allied forces in the Netherlands. This plan presented both difficulties and advantages. The main problem was clearly one of numbers, for by June Napoleon could expect to have only 125,000 soldiers available for an offensive on the northern frontier, as against possibly 209,000 Allies led by the ablest generals of the Coalition. Nevertheless, the possible effects of a sudden success in this theater appeared dazzling. A crushing victory might at one blow rally French opinion firmly behind the Emperor and shake the Coalition’s will to victory. The defeat of the Anglo-Dutch army would almost certainly be followed by a pro-French revolution in Belgium—providing a useful source of recruits—while the collapse of Wellington’s military reputation might well bring down Lord Liverpool’s Tory ministry in England; any Whig government would be more prone to make peace. Besides these political advantages, the clearing of the northeast frontier would leave the Emperor free to mass his forces against the oncoming Austrians and Russians in the vicinity of the Vosges. In the opinion of Napoleon and his staff this audacious plan was far more in keeping with the French national temperament.
One further consideration settled the matter in favor of an immediate offensive. The political divergencies between England and Prussia were common knowledge, and French intelligence sources soon revealed that this had led to important military repercussions. Instead of sharing a single system of communications, each of the two armies in the Netherlands had set up a separate series, Wellington’s stretching away from Brussels through Ninove and Alost to Ostend and La Manche, Blücher’s away from Liège into Central Germany. A sudden blow against the “hinge” linking the concentration areas of the two armies might well force one or both to retire along their diverging lines of communication. This would cause an increasing interval to develop between the Allied armies and provide Napoleon with the opportunity of catching and defeating each in turn with local superiority of numbers, using the famed mobility of the French army to cover the intervening distances. In the simplest terms this was the essence of the French plan for the campaign in the Netherlands, based on the strategy of “the central position.” While this blow was being mounted, Generals Rapp, Lamarque, Lecourbe, Suchet, Brune, Clausel and Decaen would be entrusted with holding the frontiers and suppressing any pro-Bourbonist internal revolts (one was already taking place in La Vendée).
It is not known when the final decision was taken, but on May 13 the Emperor wrote to Marshal Davout, minister of war, demanding road reports, canal and river breadths, pontoon and wagon availabilities, and the earliest date by which the bridging trains could be concentrated between Avesnes and Laon. Under conditions of the greatest secrecy, the preliminary orders were issued during the early days of June, and the first carefully concealed troop movements toward the Belgian frontier began soon afterward.
To appreciate Napoleon’s plan and the finesse of his initial concentration, the detailed dispositions of the two Allied armies in the first weeks of June repay study. Field Marshal Blücher’s main army consisted of 105,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry and 296 guns divided into four corps. General Ziethen’s Ist Corps was stationed around Fleurus and Charleroi, General Pirch’s 2nd Corps near Namur, the third under Thielmann at Ciney, and lastly General Bülow commanded the 4th Corps close to Liège. In addition to these troops, General Kleist commanded 26,000 Prussians near the Moselle. Blücher had established his headquarters in the fortress of Namur—no less than 48 miles away from the Duke of Wellington in Brussels. For logistical convenience, the latter’s cantonments were even more dispersed throughout a general area bounded by the waters of the Rivers Lys and Dyle. Wellington’s field army was a composite Allied force—of which only one third was British—totaling 79,000 infantry, 14,000 horse and 196 guns. Additionally, 17,000 more troops were deployed in various garrisons with 26 guns. One corps was commanded by the Prince of Orange from his headquarters at Braine-le-Comte, and consisted of two pairs of English and Dutch-Belgian divisions. The second corps under Lieutenant General Lord Hill was stationed in the area around Ath, and comprised three more divisions, two British and one Allied, strengthened by a further Dutch-Belgian brigade. Wellington kept the reserve of 25,000 men under his personal command around Brussels (two British divisions, the Brunswick corps and the Nassau contingent), while Lord Uxbridge picqueted the heavy cavalry and the horse artillery near Grammont and Ninove.
As Napoleon still had many sympathizers in Belgium, the French staff were accurately aware of at least the main locations of these forces, and they estimated that it would take each Allied corps at least twelve hours to assemble and probably three days for both armies to concentrate into a single fighting force. Well ahead of this eventuality Napoleon intended to have crossed the Sambre and to have taken up a position controlling the vital lateral road forming the main communication linking the two armies. L’Armée du Nord was to move in three parts—two wings and a reserve. The traditional central position would then enable the French army to pin or mask each Allied army and destroy them one by one. Each wing would engage the attention of the enemy in its vicinity while the Emperor maneuvered the reserve and any other disengaged troops to fall on each foe in turn. If the Allies were so unwise as to attempt a forward concentration on a line between Gosselies and Frasnes, the Armée du Nord would be in a position to destroy the heads of the advancing columns—but the Emperor considered this eventuality unlikely. At first Napoleon singled out the Prussians as his initial victim on the grounds that they were more active than the British and would undoubtedly be hounded on by Blücher’s “hussar complex” to close up with Wellington if they were left free to maneuver. The immediate objective and the details of the plan were to be changed several times by design or force of circumstances in the days following the launching of the offensive, but the general strategy allowed considerable flexibility.
The success of the plan depended only partly on achieving initial surprise. Speed w
as equally vital. As long as Napoleon caught the Allies in the initial stages of their concentration, he would be able to seize the vital road junctions by a rapid advance. However, virtually complete surprise was achieved on the day; a security ban was imposed on the frontier area on June 7. As operational forces were moved from frontier positions, their places were discreetly filled by National Guardsmen; civilian traffic was carefully controlled, the mails suspended and fishing boats ordered to keep port. The Emperor stressed the importance of these security precautions to Marshal Soult in a dispatch of June 7: “Give the most positive orders for all means of communication to be closed along the fronts of the North, Rhine and Moselle [forces]; not a coach or diligence must be allowed past. Demand the greatest surveillance to prevent even a single letter getting through if that is possible. See the ministers of police and finance and get them to instruct their agents to intercept absolutely all communications.”5
As a result of these stringent measures, no real hint of what was afoot reached Prussian headquarters until the 14th of June; although earlier indications of heavy concentrations near Beaumont were revealed by French campfires to Ziethen’s patrols (soon confirmed by the desertion of General Bourmont to the Allies on the 15th), only local precautionary measures were taken. In the event of a heavy attack over the Sambre, General Ziethen was given orders to fall back from Charleroi and the frontier toward Fleurus, while the other three corps commanders possessed instructions to begin moving forward toward Fleurus to meet the retiring Ist Corps and protect the eastern end of the vital lateral road; however, no orders were issued for the destruction of the bridges over the Sambre. Wellington, for his part, passed most of the 14th in ignorance of the early French moves. A mass of false rumors spread by Napoleon’s agents completely fogged the issue, and not until the afternoon of the 15th did the duke have much idea of what was taking place. By then it was almost too late.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 124