by Tim Clayton
Within a month, Napoleon’s negligible band of a thousand renegades had conquered France, ejected the Bourbons and reinstated the social changes of the Revolution, to the delight of the common people, including the majority of ordinary soldiers. As a result, the most feared military genius in Europe was back in charge of Europe’s most potent army, then some 210,000 strong.10 Only Napoleon could have pulled off such a feat. This was a man capable of extraordinary achievements, endowed with extraordinary luck. A sardonic caricature, published in April, showed Ney with his head to Napoleon’s arse, saying, ‘I swear it smells of violets.’11
2
The Devil is Unchained
On 7 March 1815 there was to be a stag hunt at Eisenstadt, the palace of Prince Esterhazy near Vienna. The British Ambassador kept a pack of hounds there, and the Duke of Wellington intended to run them now the snow had thawed. The hunt gathered in Esterhazy’s English-style landscape garden, where the waterworks were powered by an imported British steam engine, and where ‘the turn-out was thoroughly English; the hounds English, and horses English; master, huntsmen, and whippers-in, all decked out in English costume.’
The wealthy British were conspicuous at the Congress of Vienna, where representatives of the allied powers – Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia being the most important – had met to thrash out the shape of post-Napoleonic Europe, and the Duke of Wellington, Britain’s undefeated general, was universally respected. His aide, young William Pitt-Lennox, was vastly fond of hunting and intent on the preparations, until he noted with disappointment that the Duke had not turned up, and gradually realised that everyone was looking very serious. He asked Napoleon’s stepson Eugène Beauharnais what the matter was. Eugène, former viceroy of Italy, was attending the conference with his father-in-law, the king of Bavaria, having retired to Munich after Bonaparte’s abdication. ‘Have you not heard?’ replied Eugène, ‘Napoleon has escaped from his prison on the Isle of Elba.’ Abandoning his cherished hunt, Pitt-Lennox rode the forty miles back to Vienna, thinking that Wellington might wish to leave instantly.1
There were not just diplomats at Vienna; this was a vast social gathering of European aristocracy. Entranced by a constant whirl of waltzes, concerts and plays, spectacular shows at the Imperial Riding School, sledge trips to the palaces outside Vienna, and once the snow had finally melted, hunting with the ambassador’s hounds, the courtiers played while diplomats and soldiers wrangled.
Within weeks the wrangling became acrimonious. During his years of prosperity the tyrant that everybody feared had redrawn the map of Europe, throwing out feudal lords at will and creating kingdoms for members of his own family. Having forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the island of Elba, the other princes of Europe were now gathered to carve up his huge empire, to return the world to how it had been before the revolution, to reward some and punish others. By Christmas the conflicting territorial ambitions of the allied Great Powers had brought them to the brink of war.
Napoleon’s biggest change had been the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the archaic structure based in Germany and comprising innumerable small feudal princedoms, free cities and prince-bishoprics. In 1806 Napoleon had forced Francis II of Austria to resign as Holy Roman Emperor and had created a confederation of new states along the Rhine as a buffer between France, Austria and Prussia, Austria’s rival power in Germany, but in 1815 the dispossessed princes wanted their lands back. A sense of common nationhood was awakening among the German-speaking peoples, but it clashed with the interests of the princes and, meanwhile, the Great Powers were intent on expansion.
The thorniest issue at the Congress was a Russo-Prussian proposal that Poland should become a Russian possession while Saxony should go to Prussia. The Duchy of Warsaw and Saxony had been Napoleon’s most loyal ally and, along with many Rhinelanders, had still been fighting for him at Leipzig, the great battle of the Nations, in 1813. At this enormous four-day battle involving half a million men, Napoleon had finally lost his grip on Germany. Lord Castlereagh supported Austrian and French objections to the proposal, surprising Prussians who thought he had been on their side. Things came to a head when the Tsar announced to Castlereagh, ‘I shall be King of Poland, and the King of Prussia shall be King of Saxony,’ and pointed out that the Russians had an army of 480,000 men occupying Poland and Saxony. The Prussians could not believe that Britain could be so deferential to the French and on 1 January Prussia threatened war and began to mobilise its army. Two days later Britain, Austria and France signed the Secret Treaty of Vienna, a covert alliance against Prussia and Russia. The pair eventually backed down, and the allies patched up an agreement whereby Saxony was split, its king ceding roughly half his territory to Prussia. Nevertheless, the Prussian generals at Vienna received an impression of British perfidy in which the Duke of Wellington, who was ambassador to France and had replaced Castlereagh at Vienna when the foreign secretary returned to England, was deeply implicated.2
It took the shocking news of Napoleon’s escape to reunite the alliance. On 13 March, after learning that he had landed in France, the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw. On 17 March Prussia, Russia, Austria and Britain each pledged to raise armies of 150,000 men to oppose Napoleon.
The Great Powers appreciated that their decisions as to which king should rule which region would not always be received with enthusiasm in the regions concerned and they worried now that in these places many might remember Bonaparte more fondly. Such nostalgia was feared most immediately in Belgium. Before the French Revolution, the southern Netherlands, modern Belgium, had belonged to Austria, while the northern Netherlands, modern Holland, had been the Dutch Republic. The southern Netherlands had been annexed to France in 1795, while the Dutch were first the Republic of Batavia, then the Kingdom of Holland ruled by Louis Bonaparte, and finally from 1810 to 1813 part of France. For commercial and strategic reasons Britain was interested in the fate of the Netherlands, especially the important Belgian port of Antwerp, through which a large proportion of British exports to Europe flowed. At the Congress Austria accepted a British plan to install the Orange family, traditional Stadtholders of Holland, as rulers of a new state powerful enough to resist France. The Prince Regent had planned a marriage between his daughter and the young Prince of Orange, but she didn’t like him and broke off the engagement, while the allies were still bickering about just what lands the Netherlands should include.
During Bonaparte’s march on Paris the Congress agreed to unite Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and on 16 March Willem I was proclaimed first king of the Netherlands. Willem of Orange had been acting ruler of Belgium since the end of the previous July but Protestant Dutch hegemony was resented. After he decreed that Dutch should replace French as the official language of Belgium, the Dutch national anthem, Oranje Boven, was whistled in the theatres. Tom Morris, an articulate Cockney sergeant, realised that Willem needed conspicuous British backing in the form of a British and Hanoverian army of occupation. Morris’s 73rd Regiment had been sent to Holland in 1813 to support the Dutch rebellion against Bonaparte but was now in Belgium, he supposed, ‘to ensure the tranquillity of the people, until the annexation of Belgium to Holland should be carried into effect’. The proclamation announcing the unification of Belgium and Holland was ‘very unpopular; so much so, that where we were, they could not prevail on any of the inhabitants to assist in the reading of it; and that duty had to be performed under a guard of British bayonets’.3
The Belgians had flourished under Bonaparte and the Francophone portion had welcomed incorporation into France. A very large number of Belgians had served in the French army and some remained in it, although during 1814 Louis XVIII had ejected most soldiers who were no longer French nationals. A priority case had been 9000 Belgian members of the bloated Imperial Guard, who crossed the border back into Belgium still in uniform. Willem I was prepared to make use of these experienced soldiers for his new army, but his allies were distinctly uneasy when he entrusted the mi
litary administration of the southern Netherlands to a general from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. There were acute fears that a lightning strike by Napoleon against the Netherlands would be followed by the immediate defection of Belgium, with its 9000 former Imperial Guards of dubious loyalty.
The new king’s twenty-two-year-old son, the Prince of Orange, took command of 14,000 British, 9000 Hanoverian and 10,000 Dutch and Belgian troops. In 1795, when he was two, William and his family had fled from the French and anti-Orange ‘Patriots’ to England. He was given a military education in Prussia, was sent to the University of Oxford, and then joined Wellington as an aide-de-camp in the Peninsula from 1811 to 1813, rising, without ever commanding troops, to the rank of lieutenant-general. He was courageous, vain and excitable: on hearing that Napoleon had reached Lyons he proposed invading France to save Louis XVIII who was at Lille, but was dissuaded by his military secretary Sir John Colborne, one of Wellington’s best soldiers, who had been appointed to keep a mature eye on the prince.4 As one British officer noted:
it appears that the Prince has made himself unpopular in our army, and that the present situation has a little turned his head, nor have flatterers been wanting to make him believe that he is as great a general as some of the ancient princes of his house; which, judging from the present state of the army under his command, and from the mode in which everything is carried on by him, does not appear to be the case.5
Orange was out of his depth, and although Colborne considered him essentially sound, other British officers came to regard him as a liability, and were later to blame him for many things that went wrong on the battlefield.
On 22 March a rumour in Brussels that Napoleon was in northern France with 50,000 men caused the British Guards to head for the frontier and the banks to close. Most of the British civilian population – an estimated 1500 people – fled to Antwerp; Louis XVIII reached Ostend en route for London, but was persuaded to remain in Belgium. Meanwhile, the Congress of Vienna decided to entrust command of the army in the Netherlands to the Duke of Wellington and on 29 March he left for Brussels.6 The Prussian army in the Rhineland, reduced over the winter to a strength of only about 30,000, recalled troops that had just been demobilised. Everyone in Belgium was jumpy. Edmund Wheatley, an English officer serving at Tournai, noted in his journal on 2 April, ‘While dressing to go out to a party, the girl came in pale and aghast telling me the cannon was planted “sur la grande place” with lighted matches, and that Boney was at Lille.’ The northern French town was just a few miles across the border.7
3
Glory, Liberty and Peace
The man the rulers of Europe all feared was a prodigy and an enigma. ‘He has indeed no Model but in Antiquity,’ wrote the republican Earl of Wycombe in 1797, during the first wave of enthusiasm for the saviour of the Revolution. Two years later a Swiss journalist who had just been exiled for criticising Bonaparte was nevertheless confused what to make of him: ‘Never were human valour and contemptibleness, capacity and false-greatness, understanding and shifts of ignorance, insolent immodesty and brilliant qualities, so mixed as in this man.’ Fifteen years were to reveal much more of his character, but portrayed so differently by friends and enemies as to baffle interpretation. Even after his fall Bonaparte was still loved and hated, admired and despised in almost equal measure. ‘If it be doubtful whether any history (exclusive of such as is avowedly fabulous) ever attributed to its hero such a series of wonderful achievements compressed into so small a space of time, it is certain that to no one were ever assigned so many different characters,’ wrote a wry commentator in 1819; but even British enemies admitted that ‘he was and will remain the greatest man of his time.’1
To British comic artists Napoleon was ‘Boney’, a conceited, furious, upstart tyrant, a diminutive hero with enormous hat and sword. In reality Napoleon stood five foot six or seven inches tall – average height for the period – but the British public became convinced that he was tiny (in part also because his height had been reported in France, where the inch was longer, as five foot two). ‘Boney’ remained a lean figure with a thin, sallow face and aquiline nose, as Bonaparte had been in 1797 when the first portraits of him reached Britain, even though by 1815 the real Emperor was stout and paunchy.
On the continent caricaturists drew him with the darker knowledge of experience. They parodied the characteristic bicorne hat and blue or green uniforms of his own propaganda, and produced a figure to be feared, bombastic but sinister. For many more people in Europe than in Britain Bonaparte represented hope betrayed. Enthusiasm for the young, handsome, brilliant republican hero who had preserved the social changes of the French Revolution turned gradually to fear and hatred. A generation had grown up with constant warfare and Napoleon came to represent universal slaughter and devastation: in his wars about a million Frenchmen had died, together with rather more of their enemies. The most striking of many caricatures issued in Germany at the end of 1813 showed the Emperor with his face composed of corpses. Sometimes he was the Antichrist: by a standard numerological system the letters of his name added up to 666, the Number of the Beast (but only if one spelled his name ‘Napolean’). Often he was the Devil.
Inevitably, propaganda oversimplified Napoleon. He was an immensely complex figure, one of the greatest men of any age. Handsome in his youth, Napoleon was charismatic, charming and highly intelligent. People became wary of his eyes, and also of his voice with which he could cast a spell to bend men to his will: the mayor of Brussels believed he had bewitched the young men of the city.2 Even in Britain he had sympathisers and William Gibney, assistant surgeon to the 15th Hussars, was one. Gibney, an Irishman, qualified as a doctor at Edinburgh and Trinity College Dublin, took the view that the French should be allowed the ruler of their choice:
Why the French, if they preferred Napoleon to a Bourbon, should not be allowed to retain their choice I never could see. Napoleon was cold-blooded, selfish, and ambitious, but he had the glorification and love of France in his heart, and showed by his government and laws that he knew how to rule and not improbably was often driven into war by combinations made against him. Napoleon was a heaven-born general, and knew it; he was, too, a far-seeing and resolute ruler, very much the sort required to govern the French people; and had he been left alone might have acted otherwise than he did. Anyhow, he could have and would have licked all Europe, had we Britons not come to their aid; and with our money and obstinate resolve finally disposed of this clever but somewhat unscrupulous leader.3
Nobody denied that Bonaparte was a brilliant general, perhaps the greatest of all time. Through much of Europe he had swept away the ancien régime and in Italy, Germany and elsewhere enlightened liberals had flocked to his banner, for he was a man of the meritocratic future, not the feudal past.
Born to an influential family in Corsica, Napoleon had the modern, scientific education of a French artilleryman. During the French Revolution he had joined the Jacobin party, first attracting notice when he commanded the artillery that recaptured the port of Toulon from royalists and the British navy in 1793. After gaining the favourable attention of the Convention in 1795 by dispersing royalist rebels with a ‘whiff of grapeshot’, Napoleon first commanded an army in Italy in 1796 at the age of twenty-seven. France was in chaos and defeat seemed imminent but Bonaparte reversed the fortunes of war, winning many admirers for freeing Italy. Further campaigns there and in Egypt and Syria brought victories at Arcola, Rivoli and the Pyramids that established a reputation as an invincible commander. In October 1799, after the coup d’état de Brumaire, he became one of three consuls ruling France and before long he was First Consul. A victory at Marengo in 1800 made him the hero who brought peace to Europe, after which Napoleon threw himself into a series of legal, educational, social and infrastructural reforms that proved of lasting value to the nation.
Peace did not last long, for the British government didn’t trust Bonaparte and Bonaparte didn’t trust them. At this stage Napoleon had many a
dmirers in Britain, but the royal family was fundamentally opposed to his republican government. Moreover, Bonaparte represented not just revolution but France: Britain had long been competing with France in what French historians describe as a second Hundred Years War for command of global trade. Napoleon was a thoroughly dangerous leader of the archenemy – Louis XIV in a different guise.
From May 1803 he was at war with Britain, with his army, trained to perfection, lining the Channel coast. In 1804 he crowned himself Emperor of France and in 1805 King of Italy. The army created for invasion of Britain was Napoleon’s finest, a war machine worthy of the imperial Roman legions. Carrying eagle standards like the Romans they emulated, and renamed the Grande Armée, his soldiers marched to destroy the forces of the Third Coalition to be formed against France, this time between Britain, Austria, Russia, Sweden and Naples. In 1805 Napoleon mesmerised the Austrians at Ulm and then crushed them and their Russian allies at Austerlitz. When a Fourth Coalition was formed by Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Sweden and Great Britain, he humiliated the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt in 1806, invaded Prussia and won the war at Friedland in 1807, converting an admiring Tsar into an ally of France. Directly or indirectly Napoleon now ruled most of continental Europe.
