CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY - S I X
O n I I April I 8 I 4 the Allies signed the Treaty o f Fontainebleau, which
was meant to settle the fate of the Bonapartes. Napoleon was granted the
title of Emperor and given sovereignty over the island of Elba, where he
was to receive a stipend of two million francs from the French
Government; the rest of the Bonapartes were given pensions, while
Marie-Louise received the Duchy of Parma with reversion to her son, the
King of Rome. It was a dismal end to a dynasty that once bestrode
Europe.
It was Czar Alexander who originally proposed Elba to Caulaincourt,
at the time when the provisional abdication was being discussed.
Caulaincourt loyally nudged Alexander to keep the offer on the table even
when the abdication became absolute. The other allies thought the
proposal too generous - Metternich considered Elba was too close to Italy
while Castlereagh thought it too close to France. In the end they
reluctantly acquiesced for fear of offending the Czar, who was known to
despise the Bourbons; if he suddenly recanted on a Bourbon restoration
and opted instead for the King of Rome, Europe would face another
CriSIS.
Yet Elba was chosen only after a host of other candidates had been
considered and rejected. Fouche urged the Allies to deport the 'ogre' to
the United States, but this was considered mere extremism. Corsica and
Sardinia were thought dangerously large - Napoleon might be able to
turn them into formidable strongholds - while Corfu was too small,
distant and unacceptable to Napoleon. Most of the proposed sites for the
Emperor's exile were British possessions - Gibraltar, St Helena and even
Botany Bay were mentioned - but Tory backbenchers argued that
Bonaparte would sully these places by his presence. Castlereagh came up
with the ingenious idea of keeping Napoleon under a form of house arrest
on the British fort of St George on the Beauly Firth, where Dr Johnson
and Boswell had dined with the garrison in I 783 . But his Cabinet
colleagues objected that if Napoleon was there, Whig opposition leaders
would serve a writ of habeas corpus, forcing the government either to free
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him or bring him to trial. And trial for what? Waging war to retain the
natural frontiers could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a
cnme.
Elba, then, was the Czar's choice. Some residual regard for the man he
once briefly called his friend may have entered into the choice, but mostly
it was sheer machiavellianism: on Elba Napoleon was a constant thorn in
the side of Austrian Italy, so the Habsburgs could be kept occupied while
Alexander gave himself a free hand in Poland. Neither Metternich nor
Castlereagh liked the idea of Napoleon as sovereign of Elba and partly
discerned the Czar's motives; in the end Castlereagh refused to sign the
treaty, though Metternich reluctantly did.
There were six days between Napoleon's abdication and the arrival of
the draft treaty of Fontainebleau, which he would have to sign. Once
again he was sunk in gloom, immobilized by depression. He seemed
unable to decide whether he wanted Marie-Louise with him or not.
There was something inherently absurd about the events in the week
after his abdication, with him in Fontainebleau and his wife in Blois, just
one hundred miles to the south-west. She very early threw out a broad
hint that she wanted to join him: 'I would be braver and calmer if I were
sharing your fate and consoling you for all your setbacks,' she wrote. But
the reply was a somewhat charmless directive to pay out money from the
Treasury to his grasping family: a million francs each for Madame Mere,
Louis, Jerome, Pauline and Elisa; once they received their money, the
Bonapartes decamped, unconcerned about the Empress. But still there
was no definite word from the Emperor: 'I am sorry to have nothing left
but to have you share my evil fortunes,' he wrote on 8 April.
When they arrived in Blois, Joseph and Jerome tried to persuade
Marie-Louise to surrender to the first Austrian patrol. She resisted the
pressure and, once Joseph had got his share of the Treasury handout, he
departed for Switzerland. On 8 April she made her position explicit: 'I
am awaiting orders from you, and I do beseech you to let me come.'
Napoleon's answer was disappointingly offhand: 'You can come here if
you like . . . or you could stay there.' In the light of this incoherent,
muddled and evasive advice, it seems bizarre that Napoleon was able to
write to Meneval, the Empress's secretary, on 10 April: 'Try to find out
the real intentions of the Empress and to discover whether she prefers to
follow the Emperor . . . or to retire, either to a State which would be
given to her, or to the Court of her father, together with my son . ' The
answer was clear enough in all her daily letters: 'You must send someone
to tell me what to do . . . No one loves you as much as your faithful
Louise. '
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By I I April - the date of the Treaty of Fontainebleau - he seems to
have assumed she would be accompanying him to Elba. 'You are to have
at least one great country house and a beautiful country when you tire of
my island of Elba, and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I am
older and you still young. ' This crossed with a letter in which Marie­
Louise asked his permission for her to interview her father, with a view to
being assigned the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Soon she was on her way to
Rambouillet to meet her father, and sent him a letter through the Polish
officer who was acting as go-between. Napoleon finally bestirred himself
and decided to send a troop of cavalry to bring her back to Fontainebleau.
Somewhat complacently he wrote on I S April: 'You must have met your
father by this time. I wish you to come to Fontainebleau tomorrow, so
that we may set out together for that land of sanctuary and rest, where I
shall be happy - provided you can make up your mind to be so and forget
worldly greatness.'
He was too late. His vacillation had forced Marie-Louise to take
decisive action on her own, but as soon as she crossed Austrian lines she
found she was no longer a free agent. There can be no mistaking the
genuine sorrow with which she announced that seeking her father's help
had been a grave error: 'You will know by now that they have made me
leave Orleans and that orders have been given to prevent me from joining
you, and even to resort to force if necessary. Be on your guard, my
darling, we are being duped . I am in deadly anxiety on your behalf but I
shall take a firm line with my father. I shall tell him that I absolutely insist
on joining you, and that I shall not let myself be talked into doing
anything else.'
The 'firm line' produced no results, nor was it likely to even if Marie­
Louise had had the courage to oppose her father's will, when she had
been brought up to think such conduct unnatural. Soon she was writing
dolefully again to Napoleon: 'He will not allow me to join you now, or see
you, or travel with you to Elba . . . He insisted on two months first in
Austria and then in Parma and that I could see you there. ' She was
escorted to Compiegne, where she met the Czar and the Kaiser. All who
talked to her were astonished that she would hear no ill of her husband,
and even refused to be swayed when Napoleon's old associates detailed
his many affairs and infidelities. Forced back to Austria against her will,
she was still at this stage determined to be reunited with Napoleon on
Elba.
But Napoleon was beginning to suspect that Metternich's malice
would ensure that he never saw his wife and son again - a suspicion
confirmed by the arch and disingenuous letter he received from Emperor
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Francis before he left Fontainebleau. 'I have decided,' Francis wrote, 'to
propose that she should pass some months in the bosom of her family.
Her need of rest and quiet is paramount, and Your Majesty has given her
too many proofs of real attachment for me to doubt that you will share
my wishes on the subject and approve of my decision . Once she has
regained her health, my daughter will proceed to assume the sovereignty
of her country and this will naturally bring her near Your Majesty's place
of abode. I assume it is unnecessary to assure Your Majesty that her son
will be accepted as a member of my family, and that during his residence
in my dominions he will enjoy his mother's constant care.'
By his paralysis of will during the week after his abdication, Napoleon
lost the chance of reunion with his wife. But he seems to have been in the
state of mind during this period when rapid decisions were beyond him
and his will to live at all was faltering. He was in the grip of the
dislocating effects of anomie - too great a change in circumstances in too
short a time. The obvious cliche - how are the mighty fallen - was put
more trenchantly by Hegel, not normally a writer associated with clarity.
It was Hegel who had recorded this impression of Napoleon after Jena: 'I
saw the Emperor - this world-soul - riding out of the city on
reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an
individual, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reach out
over the world and master it . . . It is only from heaven, that is, from the
will of the French Emperor, that matters can be set in motion. ' But on
the fall of Napoleon he wrote gloomily: 'It is a frightful spectacle, to see a
great genius destroy himself. There is nothing more tragic in Greek
literature. The entire mass of mediocrity, with its irresistible leaden
weight . . . has succeeded in bringing down the highest to the same level
as itself. '
Doubtless revolving similar thoughts i n his own mind, the Emperor
thought of suicide, as he had often done in an abstract, Werther-like way.
But did he go further this time? There seem to have been two attempts to
poison himself, one on 7 April and one on the night of 1 2- 1 3 April, but
everything about these incidents is mysterious, including the method
Napoleon used, why it failed, and who witnessed the botched bids for
self-slaughter. It is also impossible to establish what kind of poison was
used. The accounts given by Constant, Meneval and Laure Abrantes can
be dismissed as mere fantasy and rumour-mongering, but the narrative
by Caulaincourt, usually an unimpeachable source, commands our
attention.
Caulaincourt's version is that, ever since his narrow escape from the
Cossacks at Maloyaroslavets in 1 8 1 2, Napoleon carried a small bag
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around his neck, containing a suicide pill - a tiny pouch of black taffeta
containing a mixture of belladonna, white hellebore and opium. When
Caulaincourt brought the draft treaty of Fontainebleau for him to sign on
r z April, he remarked cryptically: 'I shall not need anything; a soldier
does not need much space to die in. ' After dining with Caulaincourt,
when he again behaved as on the sledge to Warsaw in r 8 rz, talking about
himself and his reign as if of a third person, he complained of the base
ingratitude of all who had known him and said that life had become
intolerable.
At 3 in the morning of the 1 3th, Caulaincourt was summoned to the
Emperor's bedside. Napoleon told him he had taken poison and made a
fond and tearful farewell. Caulaincourt implies that he was alone with his
master, but Constant claimed he and a valet named Petard were also in
attendance; this seems more plausible, as someone must have woken
Caulaincourt from his sleep. Then Napoleon began vomiting and
suffered convulsions. Grand Marshal Bertrand and the military physician
Dr Yvan were summoned and told to administer another dose and finish
him off; allegedly Yvan refused, saying that he had taken the Hippocratic
oath and was no murderer. After suffering great pain for four hours,
Napoleon found the pangs easing at 7 a.m. , to the point where he was
able to show himself in public next day. As to why the poison had failed
to take effect, two theories were offered. One was that Yvan, following
orders after Maloyaroslavets, had mixed a double dose of poison that
turned out so powerful that the Emperor's system could not absorb it and
so it was vomited up . The other was that the poison had lost its potency
over nearly two years.
There is something very unsatisfactory about the traditional accounts
of this entire incident. We may reject at the outset the story that Dr Yvan
prepared a double dose of poison, for this is internally inconsistent with
other parts of the tale. Yvan could scarcely claim he had taken the
Hippocratic oath and was no murderer if he had already prepared a
deadly concoction. As to the suicide pill 'losing its potency', one can only
conclude that whoever devised it must have been supremely incompetent,
as there were extant at the time many deadly poisons, arsenic most
notably, from, which death would have been instantaneous. Moreover,
most people, having taken a near-lethal dose of poison, are not up and
about next day.
What, then, is the explanation? The key seems to be the failure of the
first attempt, on 7 April, which Caulaincourt mentions without giving
details - he was not at Fontainebleau on this date. Had Yvan given the
Emperor a placebo in r 8 r z to reassure him? Did a puzzled Emperor,
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having taken the phial without effect on 7 April, try again on the night of
r 2- r 3 only to be visited, quite coincidentally, with a genuine case of food
poisoning? Was an attempt made by person or persons unknown to
murder him by poison? Or is Caulaincourt's account unreliable? Scholars
have from time to time raised doubts about the authenticity of his
memoirs, or parts of them at any rate, and suspicions have arisen that
they might have been doctored by later hands. To a large extent we are in
the realm of circumstantial evidence. Napoleon's state of mind was
certainly such as to predispose him to suicide at this juncture, but he was
to survive worse ordeals and far more dark nights later without turning to
suicide. It is still possible that Caulaincourt's version of events is true but,
if so, a more systematic reinterpretation of Napoleon's character is called
for than historians have been willing to provide.
Certainly Napoleon's emotions at the time were helter-skelter. After
signing the deed of abdication on 6 April, he thought of recanting and
trying to lead a war of national liberation, Spanish-style, or of escaping to
join Eugene, who did not surrender until 1 7 April. After initially bowing
his head under the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he decided not to sign it,
then finally gave in. But he drove a hard bargain, determined not to let
Castlereagh off the hook. He insisted that the British guarantee the treaty,
both to guarantee his own safety on the way to Elba and to guarantee his
person against abduction by Maltese, Sicilian or Barbary pirates once he
was there; as an earnest of British intentions, he asked for a commissioner
who would reside with him in Elba. Castlereagh was forced into the
absurd situation of having to guarantee the independence of a sovereign
whose formal title he refused to recognize.
The man chosen as Commissioner was Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, a
Highlander who had fought at Bautzen. On arrival in Fontainebleau on
r 6 April, Campbell recorded his first impressions of Napoleon : 'I saw
before me a short, active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length
of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell. He was dressed in an
old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red topboots,
unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely
upon his upper lip and breast. ' The arrangement was that Napoleon
would travel to Elba with Campbell and three other Allied Commis­
sioners, together with Bertrand and detachments of the Guard under
General Drouot.
On 20 April a convoy of fourteen carriages escorted by 62 Polish
lancers set off for Elba; 6oo Guardsmen would eventually follow the
Emperor to his island. Before he left Fontainebleau, Napoleon made an
emotional farewell in the courtyard of the Chateau to those Guardsmen
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he would not be seeing again. There is no reason to doubt that he
reduced them to floods of tears by his sentimental oratory. The moment
was one of the great setpieces of Napoleonic iconography, a famous
inspiration to poets and painters of the Romantic movement, and the
speech, possibly reported apocryphally, contained all the well-known
elements of Bonapartist rhetoric:
Soldiers of my Old Guard, I bid you goodbye. For twenty years I have
found you continuously on the path of honour and glory . . . I have
sacrificed all my rights, and am ready to sacrifice my life, for my one
aim has always been the happiness and glory of France . . . If I have
chosen to go on living it is so that I can write about the great things we
have done together and tell posterity of your great deeds . . . Goodbye,
my children! I should like to press you all to my heart; at least I shall
kiss your flag.
The convoy set out southwards, following the road through Nemours,
Montargis, Briare, Nevers and Roanne to Lyons. Then the imperial party
headed down the RhOne Valley. With hindsight, in the knowledge of the
White Terror that swept through Provence after 1 8 1 5, it was ill-advised
to proceed through this fanatically royalist territory. As they trekked
through Vienne and Orange there were hostile demonstrations, hangings
of the Emperor in effigy and finally, in Avignon, physical violence when
the coaches were stopped by a mob and an attempt made to take him out
and lynch him. On his own admission, Napoleon, who had always feared
and loathed the vulgar crowd, lost his nerve. He said to the Austrian
Commissioner, General Koller: 'As you know, my dear General, I
showed myself at my very worst. '
He insisted o n going i n disguise after that, and refused t o eat i n local
inns for fear of being poisoned (strange behaviour, for a man who had
allegedly tried to kill himself by the same means two weeks earlier). His
physical cowardice was noted with disdain by Campbell, who wrote: 'It
was evident during his stay at Fontainebleau and the following journey
that he entertained great apprehension of attacks upon his life, and he
certainly exhibited more timidity than one would have expected from a
man of his calibre. ' After staying overnight with his sister Pauline at Le
Luc, Napoleon's party reached Frejus. Still disguised, this time in a
servant's blue livery with a tiny round hat on his head, he flatly refused to
cross to Elba on a French warship, knowing the particular animus French
naval officers felt for him. Instead, he embarked on 29 April on the
British vessel HMS Undaunted.
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Whenever he encountered ordinary British serving personnel, espe­
cially naval officers, Napoleon always impressed them mightily. Captain
Ussher of the Undaunted was no exception and he always remembered
the Emperor's 'unfailing cordiality and condescension' . On 3 May the
vessel anchored at Porto-Ferraio in Elba, where legend credits Napoleon
with having won over the hostile Elbans in a single hour. This was
necessary for, by an irony of ironies, in mid-April r 8 q the Elbans, still
ignorant of developments in Paris, revolted against Bonapartist rule and
were put down with much bloodshed. Because of plague in Malta, Elba
was quarantined at about the same time, so that it was just a day before
the Emperor's arrival that the r 2,ooo inhabitants of the island learned
that their new ruler was to be Napoleon Bonaparte.
The polyglot population of Elba - Tuscans, Spaniards, Neapolitans were either employed in lead or granite works or in the iron mines of Rio
Marina; apart from fishing, these were the only sources of the island's
wealth. On this unpromising base Napoleon erected the panoply of a
court, with all the expected accoutrements. He established his palace at I
Mulini, a modest house built by the Medicis in the eighteenth century for
the governor's gardener. His court contained a Grand Marshal of the
Palace, a Military Governor, a Treasurer, four chamberlains, two
secretaries, a doctor, a chemist, a butler and a chef with seven assistant
chefs, two valets, two equerries, a Mameluke servant called Ali, two
gentlemen-ushers, eight footmen, a porter, a director of music, two
female singers, a laundress and a washerwoman; 35 men worked in the
stables which housed 27 carriages and his favourite horses.
For the first few months Napoleon enjoyed playing ruler of his
miniature kingdom. He reorganized administration, planted vineyards,
even started to build a theatre. He poured out a stream of decrees
covering all aspects of the island's agriculture: the harvest, irrigation,
forests, olives, mulberries, chestnuts, potatoes - nothing was too trivial to
escape his attention. Campbell reported: 'I have never seen a man in any
situation of life with so much activity and restless perseverance. '
Napoleon had grandiose ambitions for new roads, a new hospital, a
military school. But all these plans came to nothing, for two main reasons.
As rumours spread of tax increases and forced labour through corvee,
initial Elban inclination to give their new sovereign the benefit of the
doubt turned to sullen passive obedience. And, more to the point, there
was no money to implement these schemes as it gradually became
apparent that the Bourbon government had no intention of honouring its
commitment to pay the annual two-million-franc subvention.
Moreover, it soon became clear that Caulaincourt's portrait of Elba as
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an island made prosperous by commerce, and an important stopping
point for ships from the two Sicilies and the East, was wide of the mark.
Gradually Napoleon lost interest in his kingdom and rarely emerged from
his two-storey palace, to the intense discomfiture of the scores of
sightseers, adventurers, mercenaries and spies who thronged the island.
Disappointed, too, with the standard of his court, he soon gave up
holding receptions, preferring to play vingt-et-un and dominoes with his
immediate circle of intimates. He was so bored that he started taking up
practical jokes: once he slipped a fish into Bertrand's pocket, then asked
him for the loan of a handkerchief, so that fish came slopping out on to
the table.
The Emperor was left with much time on his hands to reflect on the
past and mull over the news from France, with which he kept in constant
touch through his secret agents. He was clearly a man fated to be
betrayed by all those he had helped and protected . Even his valet
Constant and the faithful Mameluke Roustam, who used to sleep outside
his door, abandoned him when he went to Elba. Then there were the
great betrayals: by Fouche, by Talleyrand, by Murat and by Bernadotte.
Murat's treachery had been decisive in 1 8 1 4 for, if he had remained loyal,
a large Austrian army would have been pinned down in Italy, and the
Allies would not have had the numbers necessary to invade France until
May. As for Bernadotte, the man's ability to survive scandals that would
have disgraced anyone else and to continue to be taken seriously by the
Allies was nothing short of astonishing. One single statistic is eloquent on
Bernadotte, a Walter Mitty who became a King. Of the lavish subsidies
provided by the British in 1 8 1 2-14, Prussia received £2,088,682, Austria
£ 1 ,639,523 and Russia £2,366,334. These were the three nations whose
forces tore the heart out of the Grande Armee. Yet Sweden, headed by a
king who did little more than find excuses not to take action, received
£2,334,992 in the same period.
A great man is bound to be surrounded by jealous nonentities, just as
the shark swims surrounded by remora fish. To an extent, then, the
Murats, Bernadottes, Fouches and Talleyrands could be understood if
not forgiven. But scarcely to be borne was the treachery of his own
brothers and of his sisters Elisa and Caroline. It is in this context that the
sublimely immoral Pauline finally appears to advantage. Unconcerned in
her featherheaded way about the great crisis faced by the Bonaparte
dynasty in 1 8 1 2- 1 3 , Pauline lolled in the flesh pots of Aix-les-Bains,
fending off the advances of Fran�ois-Joseph Talma, the great French
tragedian of the day, and taking as her latest lover instead an obscure
soldier, Colonel Antoine Duchard. But when Napoleon was exiled to
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Elba she followed him there and never ceased to urge him to return to the
mainland to regain his throne.
Pauline had written to Madame Mere in the spring: 'We must not
leave the Emperor alone. It is now that he is unhappy that we must show
our attachment to him.' So Letizia came too and sat with Pauline playing
cards with her son, while the Emperor cheated shamelessly. Yet another
faithful woman was Marie Walewska, who brought her son to Elba for a
secret visit of a few days. Napoleon's attitude to Marie was always
curious; he was forever blowing hot and cold as if he genuinely could not
decide what his feelings for her really were. Caulaincourt related that in
1 8 1 2, on the sledge to Warsaw, the Emperor toyed with the idea of
diverting to spend a night with Marie at Walewice castle and was
dissuaded only when Caulaincourt pointed out he would almost certainly
be captured by Cossacks. Unfortunately for Marie, the Elba visit
coincided with the down cycle of his feelings for her. Although he met
and spoke to her, he did not take her to his bed. He kept her waiting all
night and did not send for her, then, when she had gone, expressed bitter
regret.
One alleged motive in his turning away Marie Walewska was the desire
not to give Marie-Louise any excuse not to come to him in Elba. It may
have been so, but the evidence shows Napoleon on Elba turning away in
his thoughts from his second wife and back to Josephine. Even before he
left Fontainebleau there are signs that he blamed Marie-Louise (unfairly)
for the debacle that had left him without wife and child, for he wrote to
Josephine: 'They have betrayed me. Yes, all of them except our dear
Eugene, so worthy of you and me . . . Adieu, my dear Josephine. Resign
yourself as I am doing and never forget one who has never forgotten and
will never forget you. P . S . I expect to hear from you when I reach Elba. I
am far from being in good health. '
Josephine's financial position was assured by Talleyrand and the new
government, and she was even visited at Malmaison by Czar Alexander,
who showed her every courtesy. Yet she refused to be an apostate where
her ex-husband was involved. The verbatim comments jotted down by
her attendants in 1 8 1 4 all point in the same direction. Typical is the
following: 'Sometimes I feel so melancholy that I could die of despair; I
cannot be reconciled to Bonaparte's fate. ' In the last week of May she
caught a chill while out driving with the Czar, caught pneumonia and
died on 29 May. Allegedly her last words were: 'Bonaparte . . . Elba . . .
the King of Rome. ' Napoleon first learned of her death from a newspaper
and was so shocked that he stayed in his room for two days. His final
judgement on her was written as if she were still alive: 'I have not passed
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a day without loving you. I have not passed a night without clasping you
in my arms . . . No woman was ever loved with more devotion, ardour
and tenderness . . . only death could break a union formed by sympathy,
love and true feeling.'
Napoleon spent a lot of time on Elba brooding on where he had gone
wrong. He had certainly not been defeated by a people in arms, as
romantic nationalists were starting to claim. Even in the alleged fervour
of German nationalism in 1 8 1 3, the sober truth was that resistance inside
Prussia to conscription was still widespread. No, surely the truth was that
he had rated human nature too highly, had been deceived by Metternich
and Emperor Francis and thus been faced by a coalition of four powers
(Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria) no one nation should contend
against. Sheer weight of numbers had beaten him in the battlefield, but
by this time his Empire had already collapsed from within. The implicit
'social contract' of 1 799 was that foreign policy should never harm the
interests of the notables. This meant, as a minimum, that he had to avoid
conflict with the Catholic Church, maintain living standards and keep
taxation and conscription to a reasonable level. As he now ruefully
realized, he had failed in all three areas.
Alongside the notables, the peasantry, too, had been alienated. His
imperial policies demanded mass conscription, but the peasantry had
never known the draft before 1 793 and hated it with a rare fervour.
Napoleon could have no defence on this issue, for the warning signs were
there for all to see, even in the consular period, with an estimated 25o,ooo
draft dodgers even in the comparatively quiet military period of
1 799- 1 805. One study finds no less than 1 1 9 riots occurring between
Napoleon's coronation and the 1 806 campaign against Prussia on this one
issue alone. Although conscription did not fall on the notables before
1 8 1 3 , even they felt its consequences in the gangs of criminalized
deserters roaming the countryside, looting the substance of the bour­
geoisie and threatening their physical security.
Napoleon also meditated long and hard on the present political
situation in France. Talleyrand and his supporters in the Senate offered
Louis XVIII Bourbon restoration on the understanding that the clock
would be put back to 1 79 1 rather than 1 798. The offer to Louis was
always a pis aller. There was no enthusiasm for Bernadotte as a 'saviour',
no real support for the due d'Orleans and a regency under Marie-Louise
would have allowed Napoleon to direct matters from afar and settle
accounts with his betrayers. The worry for Talleyrand and his minions
was whether Louis XVIII would accept a conditional restoration.
Early signs were not propitious. Louis reached Compiegne on 29 April
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and, in the declaration of St-Cloud on 2 May, repudiated constitutional
monarchy and popular sovereignty. But in a Charter on 4 June he
guaranteed the position of the Constituent Assembly and the freedoms of
the Revolution, thus ensuring there would be no return to absolutism.
Crucially, too, he recognized all the financial arrangements entered into
by the Bonapartist regime, thus giving the notables what they wanted. A
new constitution would give executive power to the King, legislative
power to a chamber of deputies (which he could dissolve) and a chamber
of peers (to which he could nominate an unlimited number).
As for the general European settlement, by the Treaty of Paris on 30
May 1 8 14, only the frontiers of 1 792 were restored, so that Savoy,
Avignon and Montbeliard were the sole residue of all the wars fought
between 1 792-1 8 14. Belgium was annexed to Holland; Venetia and
Lombardy returned to Italy; many fortified towns, notably Hamburg and
Antwerp were restored to their owners and refortified; and the fate of the
rest of Europe was held over for a general congress to be held in Vienna.
Napoleon realized that this was a grievous blow to French pride and
wondered how the French people would react once it sank in that the loss
of all his conquests to the Allies was the price for having the Bourbons
restored. In propaganda terms there was a glaring contrast between
Napoloen Bonaparte, defender of an invaded France, and Louis XVIII,
brought back in a foreigner's wagon and imposed at the point of Allied
bayonets.
By the winter of 1 8 1 4 Napoleon was seriously thinking of raising his
standard again on the mainland. The primary spur towards renewing the
struggle with the Allies was financial. The Bourbons had not paid the two
million francs pledged by Article Three of the Treaty of Fontainebleau
and showed no signs of ever doing so. There was no money to be had on
Elba, which could not export its iron because the Napoleonic wars had
created a glut on the market. Raising fresh taxes on the island was also
not an option. When the people of Capoliveri in the south refused to pay
their normal taxes, the Emperor had to send in his lancers. The taxes
were then paid, but out of the receipts Napoleon had to pay bonuses to
his faithful Poles, so he was back where he started.
The perfidy of the Bourbons was particularly reprehensible since
Napoleon had accepted the 'annuity' of two million francs in return for
the 1 6o million francs of real estate and other property he had left behind
on the mainland. By the end of 1 8 1 4 the four million francs he had taken
with him in cash to Elba was exhausted. He would therefore not be able
to pay the 400 members of his Old Guard or the squadron of Polish
cavalry and would thus be wide open to assassination attempts which
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were constantly threatened. Campbell wrote to Castlereagh: 'If pecuniary
difficulties press on Napoleon much longer, I think he is capable of
crossing over to Piombino with his troops, or of any other eccentricity. '
The Foreign Office i n London made light o f Campbell's fears, but
Castlereagh raised the issue of non-payment with Louis XVIII. The
bloated Bourbon monarch made no direct reply, but suggested Napoleon
should be removed to the Azores.
This talk of the Azores deeply worried the Emperor, and there were
other possible future places of exile mentioned, among them St Helena
and the West Indies. Once the future of Europe was settled by the peace
talks in Vienna, might not Britain, Russia and the German allies lose
interest in him, thus giving the vengeful Bourbons their chance for a final
settling of accounts? Were they not being urged on by Fouche, who said
that Napoleon on Elba was to Europe as Vesuvius to Naples? Given the
extent of murderous hatred towards him by Louis XVIII's brother, the
comte d' Artois, Bonaparte might even count himself lucky if he got as far
as the Azores. An assassin's dagger or a hit man's bullet would be a more
likely fate.
There were other reasons for the Emperor's extreme frustration on
Elba. The extent of Metternich's double-cross over Marie-Louise became
clear when Napoleon heard the full story. In September, still hoping to
rejoin her husband, she set out to take the waters at Aix-les-Bains.
Metternich, reading her mind, sent with her as aide-de-camp a man
sometimes described as his physical double, the one-eyed Count Adam
Albrecht von Neipperg, a man with a reputation as a ladykiller even
greater than Metternich's. Marie-Louise, whose appetite for sex was not
far short of Josephine's or Pauline's, soon succumbed to his subtle
charms. Chateaubriand cynically described Neipperg as 'the man who
dared to lay his eggs in the eagle's nest', but the eagle was by this time
wounded and flightless. Marie-Louise eventually bore Neipperg two
children, the first in r 8 r 5 . Apart from a formal New Year's greeting in
r 8 r 5, Napoleon never heard from her again.
If the need for money and the desire for revenge were powerful
personal motives for a return to the mainland, Napoleon was also greatly
encouraged by all he heard from his spies there. Particularly encouraging
was a visit in February r 8 r 5 from Fleury de Chaboulon, former sub­
prefect of Rheims, who reported his eyewitness impressions and brought
confirmation in a letter from former minister Maret, the Bonapartist
Duke of Bassano. Both spoke of dissension among the Allies and huge
levels of discontent in France.
There were rumours that Austria, France and England were bound by
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secret convention against Russia and Prussia, whose ambitions they
feared. France was supporting Austria against Prussia in its claim to
Dresden, but Austria made a poor requital by failing to agree to a
Bourbon restoration in Naples; she was actuated partly by jealousy of the
House of Bourbon and partly by loyalty to Murat, whose abandonment of
Napoleon in January 1 8 1 4 had in some ways been the crucial military
event in the entire campaign. Most of all, there was considerable personal
animus between Czar Alexander and Louis XVIII. The Czar was furious
when he heard the portly Bourbon tell another ruler known for his
corporation, the Prince Regent, that he owed his restoration to the
British; the Czar took the view, rightly, that it was the Russians who had
done most of the fighting to topple the Corsican ogre. With a strong
visceral dislike of Louis XVIII, Alexander also felt he had been insulted
when Louis served himself first at a state banquet and refused to spend
the night under the same roof. It was reported that Alexander remarked
indignantly: 'One would think that it was actually he who put me on my
throne. '
If there were doubts about how far the Allies would go to support
Louis XVIII, it was very clear the Bourbons could look for little from the
French people themselves. The demobilized soldiers already hated him
and pined for the good old days of the Emperor. Tens of thousands of
undefeated veterans who had been cooped up in the besieged fortresses,
returned home, when these were surrendered, fully convinced that they
had been sold down the river. They joined the throng of disgruntled
Napoleonic officers and further tens of thousands of returning prisoners
of war, who found that there was nothing for them in France as Bourbon
placemen had taken all the good things. The result was an ex-army
thrown on the scrapheap and abandoned, but bitter, brooding and eager
for revenge.
The notables too were becoming concerned by the Bourbons' new
bearing. They resented the dismantling of the Concordat and the
assumption of their sees by the ultramontane bishops, for if Catholicism
was restored to a dominant position in the state, it would not be long
before the issue of confiscated Church property was raised. Indeed, there
were worrying signs that Louis XVIII was about to go back on his word
concerning national property in general. All other classes suffered too,
and not just from an ending of all hope of careers open to talents. The
peasantry were afraid that national property would be taken from them
and feudal tithes reintroduced; urban workers were hit hard by
unemployment as British goods came flooding in and they remembered
with fondness Napoleon's cheap bread policies; while all who had had
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Prussians, Russians and Austrians billeted on them were deeply resentful
at the waste of their substance and the national humiliation.
Napoleon consulted his intimates on whether he should make a landing
on the mainland. General Drouot advised against, but Pauline and
Madame Mere were enthusiastic. Letizia's alleged advice was: 'Go, my
son, fulfil your destiny. You were not made to die on this island. ' On St
Helena Napoleon revealed that he had not really had any option: if he had
stayed on Elba while France was in turmoil and suffering under the
Bourbon yoke, his veterans could rightly have accused him of cowardice.
Given the refusal of Louis XVIII's government to pay him the agreed
annuity, it is hard to see what realistic alternative he had . Chateaubriand
claimed that the events of 1 8 1 5 revealed Napoleon as an egomaniac
without any real feeling for France and its suffering, but this is not really
a plausible interpretation. More feasible is the idea that Austria and
England colluded to set things up so that Napoleon would return; in
order to send him to a distant island, they needed an excuse to convince
the Czar, prime mover in the Elba idea, that none of them could ever rest
easy while Bonaparte was in Europe.
Napoleon chose carefully the moment when he made his bid. On 1 6
February Campbell left Elba for a medical consultation i n Florence on
board the Royal Navy brig Partridge, which normally invested the island.
Next day the Emperor ordered the brig Inconstant to be fitted out for a
voyage. Men, arms and ammuniton were loaded on to six smaller craft.
On 26 February Napoleon bade farewell to Elba. He took with him 650
men of the Guard, just over a hundred Polish lancers and some Corsican
and Elban volunteers. The journey across the Mediterranean was risky,
for with favourable winds the Partridge could have got back from
Leghorn in time to intercept the Inconstant. But Napoleon's usual luck
when at sea held. The only encounter with hostile shipping was with
the French brig, the Zephyr. The two ships hailed each other, but the
Zephyr's captain was lacking in curiosity and was satisfied with the
casually imparted news that the 'great man' was still on Elba.
On 28 February, Napoleon landed at Golfe Juan near Antibes with just
1 ,026 men, forty horses and two cannon. Nothing daunted, he addressed
his comrades in arms: 'I will arrive in Paris without firing a shot. ' In a
further amazing prediction, he declared they would all be in Paris in time
for the King of Rome's birthday on 20 March. To avoid the White
Terror of Provence he proposed to head through the Basses-Alpes to
Grenoble. This involved a grueJling march after Grasse on a winding,
single-file track, made treacherous by ice. The early days were
depressing, for two mules bearing one-tenth of his money plunged over a
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precipice, and so far only four recruits had come in: two soldiers from the
garrison at Antibes, a policeman and a tanner from Grasse.
Leaving Grasse on 2 March, the tiny army proceeded to trek thirty
miles through the snow over a rough mountain track, passing through
Sermon, St Vallier, Barreme and Digne. The Emperor's health, which
had been excellent on Elba, held up well through this ordeal. On 4 March
his advance guard took Sisteron and on 5 March reached Gap. Two days
later came the moment of truth. At Laffrey, 25 miles south of Grenoble
Napoleon's forces met a slightly smaller detachment under Major
Delessart, sent to intercept them by General Jean Marchand, comman­
dant at Grenoble. Ever the gambler, Napoleon decided on a bold stroke.
He might have been able to sweep Delessart's men of the 5th Regiment
from his path, but that would mean bloodshed which he was anxious to
avoid. He knew from his spies that one of his former aides commanded a
regiment at Grenoble, and it was possible that imperial sentiment was
still thriving in the 5th. It was worth the risk.
After telling his band to play the Marseillaise and getting his men to
slope arms ostentatiously, he set off alone on horseback towards
Delessart's infantry. At gunshot range he dismounted and, in his familiar
grey greatcoat, began to walk towards the lines where several hundred
muskets were trained on him. His histrionic talents had always been
superlative, whether before the Pyramids or in the courtyard of
Fontainebleau. Now he gave his greatest performance. He opened up his
coat to expose the white waistcoat beneath, then called out in a loud
voice: 'Here I am. Kill your Emperor, if you wish.' He then added,
falsely: 'The forty-five best heads of the government in Paris have called
me from Elba and my return is supported by the three first powers of
Europe.' He was just a single bullet away from oblivion, but instead of a
fusillade of shots there came back a mighty roar: ' Vive l 'Empereur! ' The
soldiers crowded around him in high emotion, pledging eternal love and
support.
On the crest of this wave Napoleon swept into Grenoble on 8 March
after a 240-mile march through icy mountains that had lasted six days.
The garrison at Grenoble refused to open fire and instead opened the
gates to him. 2,ooo peasants with flaming torches lined the route for his
triumphal entry, yelling 'Long live the Emperor! ' In euphoria Napoleon
acknowledged that he had easily won the opening round of the contest:
'Before Grenoble I was an adventurer; at Grenoble I was a reigning
prince. ' On 9 March the Army that continued the march north was 8,ooo
strong, with 30 guns. Proceeding via Rives and Bourgoin the Army's
vanguard reached Lyons at 10 p.m. on the gth. When Napoleon came in
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on r o March he was received rapturously by throngs of Lyonnais silk
workers. Napoleon learned that I ,ouis XVJJJ's brother, the comte
d' Artois, had come to I ,yons to organize resistance but had found
imperial sentiment so strong that he had decamped back to Paris.
On 13 March Napoleon left Lyons and headed north-west through
Tournus, Chalon, Autun and Avallon to Auxerre. There he was joined
by Marshal Ney, who had earlier boasted to Louis XVIII that he would
bring Bonaparte back to Paris in an iron cage. Ney had taken an oath of
loyalty to the King and did not change his loyalty without heart­
searching, but three factors seem to have weighed with him. One was the
obvious fact that the Bourbons had no popular support, and Ney could
not even be sure of his troops' loyalty if he ordered them into battle
against the Emperor. Secondly, Ney and his wife, who was known to be
an ex-chambermaid, had been snubbed once too often by the royalist
snobs at the Bourbon court. Thirdly, Ney, an unbalanced and emotional
man, had been genuinely moved by the simplicity of the note the
Emperor sent him from Lyons, in which Napoleon took his fidelity for
granted: 'I shall receive you as I did on the morrow of the battle of the
Moskova. '
Ney's defection swayed other waverers. Proceeding from Auxerre via
Joigny, Sens and Pont-sur-Yonne, Napoleon reached Paris at 9 p.m. on
20 March. He was carried up the steps of the Tuileries by a crowd that
seemed almost crazed with excitement. Incredibly, the Emperor had
made good all his boasts. He had reached Paris in time for his son's
birthday and he had done so without shedding a drop of blood. By any
reckoning, the twenty-day march from Antibes to Paris was one of the
high points in his life. As Balzac later wrote incredulously: 'Before him
did ever a man gain an Empire simply by showing his hat?'
In his sensational triumph Napoleon had made just one mistake, but it
was to prove costly. He did not wait until Europe's ministers and
sovereigns had dispersed after their conclave in Vienna before crossing
from Elba. Consequently they were all still together when news of his
return came in. As soon as he got back to Elba, Campbell sent news of
the Emperor's flight to the Austrian consul at Genoa, who in turn sent
the message to Vienna by swift courier. Metternich's valet brought in the
letter and woke him at 7 a.m. on 7 March, but the minister, who had been
working until 3 a.m. , put the envelope on the table and tried to go back to
sleep . Unable to do so, he then opened the letter, sprang out of bed and
was with Emperor Francis by 8 a.m. Fifteen minutes later Metternich
was in conversation with the Czar and at 8.30 with the Kaiser. At ro a.m
the plenipotentiaries to the Conference met, and couriers were dispatched
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to mobilize the Allied armies. In this way war was declared in less than an
hour.
Six days later Congress went to the limits of international law and
beyond by declaring Bonaparte an outlaw. Wellington put his signature to
the communique and was at once attacked by the Whig opposition in
London for seeming to have called for Napoleon's assassination. On 25
March the four principal Allies each agreed to provide 1 50,ooo men in
the first instance to destroy the 'monster'; the British would make up any
shortfall in manpower by appropriate subsidies. The ultimate strategy
was to provide a cordon sanitaire around France from the Alps to the
Channel.
Within France events moved at an even faster pace. Paris learned of
Napoleon's landing on 5 March. Soult, now Minister of War, began by
proclaiming Bonaparte outlaw and organizing an army of defence under
the comte d'Artois. Louis XVIII received the support of the Legislature
and the National Guard and took comfort from the rebuff Antibes had
given Napoleon. The marshals seemed to be holding firm too, for
Massena in Marseilles and Oudinot in Metz proclaimed their royalist
sympathies. Initially the only sign of nervousness was the fall in
government stock from 81 to 75 francs. The turning point was Ney's
defection at Auxerre on 16 March. This opened up the floodgates, so that
almost instantly the entire Army seemed to go over to the Emperor.
Ironically, stung by Allied taunts that he dared not raise an army in his
own country, Louis XVIII had mobilized 6o,ooo men and put them on
the march at the very time Napoleon landed; as a result of this
coincidence, Soult was wrongly accused of collusion and treason. On the
night of 1 9-20 March a panicky Louis XVIII fled from the Tuileries and
took the road to Ghent.
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