Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  In the quick-fire series of questions that Campbell came to know well, Napoleon asked about his wounds, military career, Russian and British decorations and, on discovering that Campbell was a Scot, the poet Ossian. They then discussed various Peninsular War sieges, as Napoleon spoke in complimentary terms about British generalship. He inquired ‘anxiously’ about the tragically unnecessary battle of Toulouse, which had been fought between Wellington and Soult with more than 3,000 casualties each side on April 10, and ‘passed high encomiums’ on Wellington, asking after ‘his age, habits, etc’ and observing, ‘He is a man of energy. To carry on war successfully, one must possess the like quality.’30

  ‘Yours is the greatest of nations,’ Napoleon told Campbell. ‘I esteem it more than any other. I have been your greatest enemy – frankly such; but am no longer. I have wished likewise to raise the French nation, but my plans have not succeeded. It’s all destiny.’ (Some of this flattery might have stemmed from his desire to sail to Elba in a British man-of-war rather than in the French corvette, Dryade, that he had been allocated, partly perhaps on account of pirates and partly because he may have feared assassination at the hands of a royalist captain and crew.)31 He concluded the interview cordially with the words: ‘Very well, I am at your disposal. I am your subject. I depend entirely on you.’ He then gave a bow ‘free from any assumption of hauteur’.32 It is easy to see why many Britons found Napoleon a surprisingly sympathetic figure. During the negotiations over the treaty, Napoleon had instructed Caulaincourt to inquire as to whether he might come to Britain for his exile, comparing the society of Elba unfavourably with ‘a single street’ of London.33

  When on April 18 it was discovered that the new minister of war, none other than the same General Dupont who had surrendered his corps at Bailén in Spain in 1808, had ordered that ‘all the stores belonging to France must be removed’ before Napoleon arrived on Elba, the Emperor refused to leave Fontainebleau on the grounds that the island would be left vulnerable to attack.34 He nonetheless sent off his baggage the next day – though not his treasury of 489,000 francs, which would travel with him – and gave away books, manuscripts, swords, pistols, decorations and coins to his remaining supporters at the palace. He was understandably irritated when he heard about the Tsar’s visit to Marie Louise at Rambouillet, complaining that it was ‘Greek-like’ for conquerors to present themselves before sorrowing wives. (Perhaps he was thinking of the family of Darius received by Alexander the Great.) He also railed against the visit the Tsar had paid to Josephine. ‘Bah! He first breakfasted with Ney, and after that, visited her at Malmaison,’ he said. ‘What can he hope to gain from this?’35

  When Berthier’s former aide-de-camp General Charles-Tristan de Montholon visited the palace in mid-April with a (somewhat belated) plan to escape to the upper Loire, he ‘found no one in those vast corridors, formerly too small for the crowd of courtiers, except the Duke of Bassano [Maret], and the aide-de-camp Colonel Victor de Bussy. The whole court, all his personal attendants . . . had forsaken their unfortunate master, and hastened towards Paris.’36 This wasn’t wholly true; still in attendance to the end were generals Bertrand, Gourgaud and Jean-Martin Petit (the commander of the Old Guard), the courtiers Turenne and Megrigny, his private secretary Fain, his interpreter François Lelorgne d’Ideville, his aides-de-camp General Albert Fouler de Relingue, Chevalier Jouanne, Baron de la Place and Louis Atthalin, and two Poles, General Kosakowski and Colonel Vousowitch. Caulaincourt and Flahaut were absent but still loyal.37 Montholon attached himself to Napoleon’s service, and never left it. Although loyalty and gratitude in political adversity are rare, Napoleon still had the capacity to inspire it, even when he had nothing to offer in return. ‘When I left Fontainebleau for Elba I had no great expectation of ever coming back to France,’ he later recalled. All that these last faithful attendants could expect was the animosity of the Bourbons.38 Nor was the spirit of revenge confined to the Bourbons: Count Giuseppe Prina, Napoleon’s finance minister in Italy, was dragged from the Senate in Milan and lynched over four hours by the mob, after which tax documents were stuffed into the corpse’s mouth.

  One of the greatest scenes of the Napoleonic epic took place when he left Fontainebleau for Elba at noon on Wednesday, April 20, 1814. The huge White Horse courtyard of the palace – now known as the Cour des Adieux – provided a magnificent backdrop, with its huge double staircase a proscenium, and the Old Guard drawn up in ranks a suitably appreciative and lachrymose audience. (As the courier had not yet arrived from Paris with assurances that Dupont’s malicious order had been rescinded, the commissioners were not even certain Napoleon would actually leave, and were relieved when at 9 a.m. the grand marshal of the palace, General Bertrand, confirmed that he would.) Napoleon first met the Allied commissioners individually in one of the reception rooms upstairs in the palace, speaking angrily to Koller for over half an hour about his continued forced separation from his wife and son. In the course of the conversation ‘tears actually ran down his cheeks’.39 He also asked Koller whether he thought the British government would allow him to live in Britain, allowing the Austrian to make the deserved rejoinder: ‘Yes, Sire, for as you never made war in that country, reconciliation will become the more easy.’40 When Koller later said that the Congress of Prague had provided a ‘very favourable opportunity’ for peace, Napoleon replied, ‘I have been wrong, maybe, in my plans. I have done harm in war. But it is all like a dream.’41

  After shaking hands with the soldiers and few remaining courtiers and ‘hastily descending’ the grand staircase, Napoleon ordered the two ranks of grognards to form a circle around him and addressed them in a firm voice, which nonetheless, in the recollection of the Prussian commissioner, Count Friedrich von Truchsess-Waldburg, occasionally faltered with emotion.42 His words recorded by Campbell and several others bear repetition at some length, both because they represent his oratory at this great crisis of his life and because they indicate the lines of argument he was to employ when he later tried to construct the historical narrative of this period:

  Officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers of the Old Guard, I bid you adieu! For twenty years I have found you ever brave and faithful, marching in the path of glory. All Europe was united against us. The enemy, by stealing three marches upon us, has entered Paris. I was advancing in order to drive them out. They would not have remained there three days. I thank you for the noble spirit you have evinced in that same place under these circumstances. But a portion of the army, not sharing these sentiments, abandoned me and passed over to the camp of the enemy . . . I could with the three parts of the army which remained faithful, and aided by the sympathy and efforts of the great part of the population, have fallen back upon the Loire, or upon my strongholds, and have sustained the war for several years. But a foreign and civil war would have torn the soil of our beautiful country, and at the cost of all these sacrifices and all these ravages, could we hope to vanquish united Europe, supported by the influence which the city of Paris exercised, and which a faction had succeeded in mastering? Under these circumstances I have only considered the interests of the country and the repose of France. I have made the sacrifice of all my rights, and am ready to make that of my person, for the aim of all my life has been the happiness and glory of France. As for you, soldiers, be always faithful in the path of duty and honour. Serve with fidelity your new sovereign. The sweetest occupation will henceforth be to make known to posterity all that you have done that is great . . . You are all my children. I cannot embrace you all so I will do so in the person of your general.43

  He then kissed Petit on both cheeks, and declared, ‘I will embrace these eagles, which have served us as guides in so many glorious days’, whereupon he embraced one of the flags three times, for as long as half a minute, before holding up his left hand and saying: ‘Farewell! Preserve me in your memories! Adieu, my children!’ He then got into his carriage and was taken off at a gallop as the Guard band playe
d a trumpet and drum salute entitled ‘Pour l’Empereur’. Needless to say, officers and men wept – as did even some of the foreign officers present – while others were prostrated with grief, and all the others cried ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  By nightfall the convoy of fourteen carriages with a cavalry escort had reached Briare, nearly 70 miles away, where Napoleon slept in the post-house. ‘Adieu, chère Louise,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘love me, think of your best friend and your son.’44 Over the next six nights, Napoleon slept at Nevers, Roanne, Lyons, Donzère, Saint-Cannat and Luc, arriving at Fréjus on the south coast at 10 a.m. on April 27. The 500-mile journey was not without danger in the traditionally pro-royalist Midi, and on different occasions Napoleon had to wear Koller’s uniform, a Russian cloak and even a white Bourbon cockade in his hat to avoid recognition. At Orange his carriage had several large stones thrown through the window; at Avignon the Napoleonic eagles on the carriages were defaced and a servant was threatened with death if he didn’t shout ‘Vive le Roi!’ (A year later, Marshal Brune was shot there by royalist assassins and his body thrown into the Rhône.) On April 23 he met Augereau near Valence. The old marshal, who had been one of Napoleon’s first divisional commanders in Italy in 1796, had removed all his Napoleonic orders except for the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur. He now ‘abused Napoleon’s ambition and waste of blood for personal vanity’, telling him bluntly that he ought to have died in battle.45

  Campbell had arranged for Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Ussher to pick Napoleon up on the frigate HMS Undaunted at Fréjus. When he arrived there, Napoleon was met by Pauline, who proposed to share his exile. Faithless to her husbands, she nonetheless showed great fidelity to her brother in his downfall. He had wanted to leave France on the morning of the 28th but missed the tide, ate a bad langoustine at lunchtime which induced vomiting, and didn’t sail until 8 p.m. He insisted upon and was given a sovereign’s twenty-one-gun salute when he went aboard, despite the Royal Navy’s convention not to fire salutes after sunset.46 (The Treaty of Fontainebleau had confirmed that he was a reigning monarch and was entitled to the accompanying formalities.) In a poignant echo, he left from precisely the same jetty that he had arrived at when returning from Egypt fifteen years before.47 Although Captain Ussher checked that his sword was loose in its scabbard in case he needed to defend his charge from the crowd, he found instead that Napoleon was cheered as he left, which Ussher found ‘in the highest degree interesting’.48 Throughout the journey, Campbell noted, ‘Napoleon conducted himself with the greatest . . . cordiality towards us all . . . and the officers of his suite observed that they had never seen him more at his ease.’49 Napoleon told Campbell that he believed that the British would force a commercial treaty on the Bourbons, who as a result ‘will be driven out in six months’.50 He asked that they land at Ajaccio, telling Ussher anecdotes of his youth, but Koller begged the captain not to consider it, possibly fearing the havoc Napoleon might wreak if he escaped into the mountains there.51

  At 8 p.m. on May 3, Undaunted anchored at Elba’s main harbour of Portoferraio, and Napoleon disembarked at 2 p.m. the next day. When he stepped ashore he was welcomed by the sub-prefect, local clergy and officials carrying the ceremonial keys of the island, but most importantly by cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and ‘Vive Napoléon!’ from the populace.52 They raised the flag he had designed – white with a bee-studded red band running diagonally across it – over the fort’s battery, and, in an amazing feat of memory, Napoleon recognized a sergeant in the crowd to whom he had given the cross of the Légion on the battlefield of Eylau, who promptly wept.53 After processing to the church for a Te Deum he went to the town hall for a meeting with the island’s principal dignitaries. He stayed in the town hall for the first few days, and then installed himself in the large and comfortable Palazzina dei Mulini overlooking Portoferraio, taking the Villa San Martino, which affords a fine view of the town from its terraces, as a summer residence.* The day after landing he inspected Portoferraio’s fortifications, and the next day its iron mines, which needed to be productive as he would soon be facing a severe cash shortage.

  Napoleon’s financial position was not commensurate with what he considered necessary. In addition to the half a million francs he had brought from France himself, his treasurer Peyrusse delivered an extra 2.58 million and Marie Louise had sent 911,000 francs, giving a total of less than 4 million francs.54 Although the Treaty of Fontainebleau theoretically gave him an annual income of 2.5 million francs, the Bourbons never actually remitted him a centime of it. Revenues from Elba totalled 651,995 francs in 1814 and 967,751 in 1815, yet Napoleon’s civil, military and household expenses amounted to over 1.8 million francs in 1814 and nearly 1.5 million in 1815. He therefore had only enough money to cover another twenty-eight months, although with five valets there were obviously some economies he could make. To make matters worse the Bourbons would sequester the Bonaparte family’s goods and properties in December.55

  When in 1803 Elba had been ceded to France, Napoleon had written of its ‘mild and industrious population, two superb harbours and a rich mine’, but now that he was its monarch he described its 20,000 acres as a ‘royaume d’opérette’ (operetta kingdom).56 Any other sovereign might have relaxed on the charming, temperate, delightful island, especially after the gruelling nature of the previous two years, but such was Napoleon’s nature that he flung himself energetically into every aspect of its life – while always on the lookout for an opportunity to slip past Campbell and return to France should the political situation there favour it. During his nearly ten months on Elba he reorganized his new kingdom’s defences, gave money to the poorest of its 11,400 inhabitants, installed a fountain on the roadside outside Poggio (which still produces cold, clean drinking water today), read voraciously (leaving a library of 1,100 volumes to the municipality of Portoferraio), played with his pet monkey Jénar, walked the coastline along goat-paths while humming Italian arias, grew avenues of mulberry trees (perhaps finally expelling the curse of the pépinière), reformed customs and excise, repaired the barracks, built a hospital, planted vineyards, paved parts of Portoferraio for the first time and irrigated land. He also organized regular rubbish collections, passed a law prohibiting children from sleeping more than five to a bed, set up a court of appeal and an inspectorate to widen roads and build bridges. While it was undeniably Lilliputian compared to his former territories, he wanted Elba to be the best-run royaume d’opérette in Europe.57 His attention to the tiniest details was undimmed, even extending to the kind of bread he wanted fed to his hunting dogs.58

  All this was achieved despite the fact that Napoleon had grown stout. Noting that he was unable to climb a rock on May 20, Campbell wrote that ‘Indefatigable as he is, corpulency prevents him from walking much, and he is obliged to take the arm of some person on rough roads.’59 This didn’t seem to have the same torpor-inducing effect on Napoleon that it does on others, however. ‘I have never seen a man in any situation of life with so much personal activity and restless perseverance,’ Campbell noted. ‘He appears to take so much pleasure in perpetual movement, and in seeing those who accompany him sink under fatigue . . . After being yesterday on foot in the heat of the sun, from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., visiting the frigates and transports . . . he rode on horseback for three hours, as he told me afterwards, “to tire myself out!”’60

  • • •

  At noon on Sunday, May 29, 1814, Josephine died of pneumonia at Malmaison. She was fifty and five days earlier had gone out walking in the cold night air with Tsar Alexander after a ball there. ‘She was the wife who would have gone with me to Elba,’ Napoleon later said, and he decreed two days of mourning. (In 1800 George Washington had got ten.) Madame Bertrand, who told him the news, later said: ‘His face did not change, he only exclaimed: “Ah! She is happy now.”’61 His last recorded letter to Josephine the previous year had ended: ‘Adieu, my love: tell me that you are well. I’m informed that you are getting as fat
as a Norman farmer’s good wife. Napoleon.’62 With this jocular familiarity concluded one of the supposedly great romances of history. She had been living beyond even her enormous income, but had come to terms with her new status as an ex-Empress. Napoleon superstitiously wondered whether it had been Josephine who had brought him luck, noting that his change of fortune had coincided with his divorcing her. By November he was expressing surprise to two visiting British MPs that she could possibly have died in debt, saying, ‘Besides, I used to pay her dressmakers’ account every year.’63

  Madame Mère arrived from Rome to share her son’s exile in early August. Campbell found her ‘very pleasant and unaffected. The old lady is very handsome, of middle size, with a good figure and fresh colour.’64 She dined and played cards with Napoleon on Sunday evenings, and when she complained, ‘You’re cheating, son’, he would reply: ‘You’re rich, mother!’65 Pauline arrived three months later, the only one of his siblings to visit. Napoleon set aside and decorated rooms for Marie Louise and the King of Rome in both his residences, either in a heart-wrenching act of optimism or as a cynical propaganda move, or possibly both. On August 10 Marie Louise wrote to him to say that, although she promised to be with him soon, she had had to return to Vienna in deference to her father’s wishes.66 On August 28, Napoleon wrote the last of his 318 surviving letters to her, from the hermitage of La Madonna di Marciano, on Monte Giove, which featured his typical statistical exactitude: ‘I am here in a hermitage 3,834 feet above sea level, overlooking the Mediterranean on all sides, and in the midst of a forest of chestnut trees. Madame is staying in the village 958 feet lower down. This is a most pleasant spot . . . I long to see you, and also my son.’ He ended: ‘Adieu, ma bonne Louise. Tout à toi. Ton Nap.’67 But by then Marie Louise had found a chevalier to escort her to Vienna, the dashing one-eyed Austrian general Count Adam von Neipperg, who Napoleon had defeated in Bohemia in the 1813 campaign. Neipperg has been described as ‘skilful, energetic, a thorough man of the world, an accomplished courtier, an excellent musician’.68 In his youth he had run off with a married woman, and was himself married when he was charged with looking after Marie Louise. By September they were lovers.69