The newly elected chambers took their oath of allegiance to the Emperor with minimal difficulty two days later, even though the elections the previous month had resulted in a number of constitutionalists, liberals, crypto-royalists and Jacobins being elected. With the lower house immediately sidetracked into an ill-tempered debate about whether members should be allowed to read speeches from notes hidden in their hats, the legislature was unlikely to cause Napoleon much immediate cause for concern, despite the fact that his long-term opponent, the former senator the Comte Lanjuinais, had been elected its president and Lafayette was now a deputy. There was a huge firework display in the Place de la Concorde the following evening, which featured Napoleon arriving in a ship from Elba. As a spectator recorded: ‘The mob cried “Vive l’Empereur and the fireworks!” and the reign of the Constitutional Monarchy began.’51 Of course it wasn’t a constitutional monarchy as in Britain, since the ministers were all appointed by Napoleon, who was his own prime minister, but neither was it the unfettered dictatorship of the pre-1814 period, and it seemed possible that it might evolve liberally.
Napoleon knew that his success or failure would ultimately be determined solely on the battlefield. On June 7 he ordered Bertrand to get his telescopes, uniforms, horses and carriages made ready ‘so that I can leave two hours after having given the order’, adding: ‘As I will be camping often, it is important that I have my iron beds and tents.’52 That same day he told Drouot: ‘I was pained to see that the men in the two battalions that left this morning had only one pair of boots each.’53 Two days later, on June 9, 1815, the Allies signed the Treaty of Vienna. Under Article I they reaffirmed their intention of forcing Napoleon from the throne, and under Article III they agreed that they would not lay down their arms until this was achieved.54
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As early as March 27 Napoleon had told Davout that ‘the Army of the North will be the principal army’, as the closest Allied forces were in Flanders and he certainly did not intend to wait for Schwarzenberg’s return to France.55 At 4 a.m. on Monday, June 12 Napoleon left the Élysée to join the Army of the North at Avesnes, where he dined with Ney the next day. By noon on the 15th he was at Charleroi in Belgium, ready to engage the Prussian army under Blücher near Fleurus. He hoped to defeat Blücher before falling on an Anglo-Dutch-Belgian-German force under Wellington, 36 per cent of whose troops were British while 49 per cent spoke German as their first language.
Napoleon later said that ‘he had relied mainly . . . upon the idea, that a victory over the English army in Belgium . . . would have been sufficient to have produced a change of administration in England, and have afforded him a chance of concluding an immediate general truce.’56 Capturing Brussels, part of the French Empire until 1814, would also have been good for morale. To fight was a risk, but not so great a risk as waiting until the vast Austrian and Russian armies were ready to strike at Paris once again. Across Europe, 280,000 French soldiers faced around 800,000 Allies, although the Austrian contingent would not be in theatre for several weeks, and the Russians not for months. ‘If they enter France,’ Napoleon told the army from Avesnes on June 14, ‘therein they will find their tomb . . . For all the French who have the courage, the time has come to vanquish or perish!’57
The opening stages of the campaign saw him reviving the best of the strategic abilities he had shown the previous year. The French were even more scattered than the Allies at first, across an area 175 miles wide by 100 deep, but Napoleon used this fact to feint towards the west and then concentrate in the centre in classic bataillon carré style. The manoeuvring of the 125,000-strong Army of the North between June 6 and the 15th allowed it to cross the rivers at Marchienne, Charleroi and Châtelet without any Allied reaction of note. Wellington, who had arrived post-haste from Vienna on April 5, had been forced to string his force out along a 62-mile-wide front, trying simultaneously to guard the routes to Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent. He frustratedly acknowledged as much when he said on the evening of June 15, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God.’58
Napoleon’s speed and tactical ability allowed him once again to strike at the hinge between the armies opposing him, as he had been doing for nearly twenty years. His manoeuvres were all the more impressive as half of his army was made up of raw recruits. Although veterans had been released from Spanish, Russian and Austrian prisoner-of-war camps, after the initial rush of enthusiasm only 15,000 volunteers had joined the colours, so conscription provided the balance. Morale among the troops was shaky, especially after the former Chouan leader, General Bourmont, and his staff defected to the Allies on the morning of the 15th.59 Some of the men understandably asked why generals who had pledged oaths to the Bourbons, such as Soult, Ney, Kellermann and Bourmont, had been allowed back at all. Low morale led to poor discipline, with the Imperial Guard plundering freely in Belgium and laughing at the gendarmes sent to stop them.60 Equipment was also wanting: the 14th Légère had no shakos, the 11th Cuirassiers no breastplates. (‘Breastplates aren’t necessary to make war,’ Napoleon blithely told Davout on June 3.) The Prussians reported that some battalions of the Imperial Guard, reconstituted on March 13 when Napoleon was in Lyons, looked more like a militia, wearing an assortment of forage caps and bicornes instead of their fearsome bearskins. The Middle Guard, disbanded by the Bourbons, had been recalled only the previous month.
On June 16, Napoleon divided his army into three. Ney took the left wing with three corps to prevent the juncture of the two enemy forces by capturing the crossroads at Quatre Bras – where the north–south Brussels–Charleroi highway crosses the vital east–west Namur–Nivelles road that was the principal lateral link between Blücher and Wellington – while Grouchy was on the right wing with his corps, and Napoleon stayed in the centre with the Imperial Guard and another corps.61 Later that day, as Ney engaged first the Prince of Orange and then Wellington himself at Quatre Bras, Napoleon and Grouchy attacked Blücher at Ligny. ‘You must go towards that steeple,’ he told Gérard, ‘and drive the Prussians in as far as you can. I will support you. Grouchy has my orders.’62 While these mission-defined orders might sound somewhat casual, a general of Gérard’s enormous experience knew what was expected of him. Napoleon meanwhile ordered an army corps of 20,000 men under General d’Erlon, which an order from Soult had earlier detached from Ney’s command on its way to Quatre Bras, to fall on the exposed Prussian right flank at Ligny.
Had d’Erlon arrived as arranged, Napoleon’s respectable victory at Ligny would have turned into a devastating rout, but instead, just as he was about to engage, he received urgent, imperative orders from Ney that he was needed at Quatre Bras, so he turned around and marched to that battlefield.63 Before he got there and was able to make a contribution, Soult ordered him to turn round and return to Ligny, where his exhausted corps arrived too late to take part in that battle also. This confusion between Ney, Soult and d’Erlon robbed Napoleon of a decisive victory at Ligny, where Blücher lost around 17,000 casualties to Napoleon’s 11,000 and the Prussians were driven from the field by nightfall.64 Ney meanwhile lost over 4,000 men and failed to capture Quatre Bras.
‘It may happen to me to lose battles,’ Napoleon had told the Piedmontese envoys back in 1796, ‘but no one shall ever see me lose minutes either by over-confidence or by sloth.’65 With the Prussians seemingly retreating along their supply lines eastwards towards Liège, he could have fallen upon Wellington’s force at first light on Saturday, June 17. But instead he did not rise until 8 a.m. and then wasted the next five hours reading reports from Paris, visiting the Ligny battlefield, giving directions for the care of the wounded, addressing captured Prussian officers on their country’s foreign policy and talking to his own generals ‘with his accustomed ease’ on various political topics.66 Only at noon did he send Grouchy off with a huge corps of 33,000 men and 96 guns to follow the Prussian army, thereby splitting his force the day before he anticipated a major battle against Wellington, rather than concent
rating it.67 ‘Now then, Grouchy, follow up those Prussians,’ Napoleon said, ‘give them a touch of cold steel in their kidneys, but be sure to keep in communication with me by your left flank.’68 But in sending Grouchy off, he was ignoring one of his own military maxims: ‘No force should be detached on the eve of battle, because affairs may change during the night, either by the retreat of the enemy, or the arrival of large reinforcements which might enable him to resume the offensive, and render your previous dispositions disastrous.’69
Although visiting Ligny gave him an idea of the Prussian order of battle and of which enemy corps had been most damaged, this intelligence could never compensate for letting the Prussian army escape – which it might not have done if he had sent Grouchy off on the 16th, or very early on the 17th. Soult had sent Pajol on a reconnaissance towards Namur, where he had captured some guns and prisoners, leading Napoleon further towards the theory that most of the Prussian army was retreating in disarray on its supply lines.70 Various comments he made that day and subsequently suggest that Napoleon thought he had so shattered the Prussians at Ligny that they could play no further significant part in the campaign. No reconnaissance was therefore sent northwards.
The Prussians had a fifteen-hour head-start on Grouchy, who didn’t know in which direction they had gone. Blücher had been concussed during the battle, and his chief-of-staff, General August von Gneisenau, had ordered a retreat to the north, to stay close to Wellington’s army, rather than east. This counter-intuitive move was to be described by Wellington as the most important decision of the nineteenth century. As he fought and refought the battle in his mind over the next half-decade, Napoleon blamed many factors for his defeat, but he acknowledged that either he should have given the job of staving off the Prussians to the more vigorous Vandamme or Suchet, or he should have left it to Pajol with a single division. ‘I ought to have taken all the other troops with me,’ he ruefully concluded.71
Only later on June 17 did Napoleon move off at a leisurely pace towards Quatre Bras, arriving at 1 p.m. to join Ney. By that time Wellington had learned what had happened at Ligny and was prudently retreating north himself in the pouring rain, with plenty of time to take up position on the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean. This was a few miles south of his headquarters at the village of Waterloo, in an area he had previously reconnoitred and whose myriad defensive advantages as a battlefield – only 3 miles wide with plenty of ‘hidden’ ground and two large stone farmhouses called Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte out in front of a ridge – he had already spotted. ‘It is an approved maxim in war never to do what the enemy wishes you to do’, was another of Napoleon’s sayings, ‘for this reason alone, because he wishes it. A field of battle, therefore, which he has previously studied and reconnoitred should be avoided.’72 Not committing the Guard at Borodino, staying too long in Moscow and Leipzig, splitting his forces in the Leipzig and Waterloo campaigns and, finally, coming to the decisive engagement on ground which his opponent had chosen: all were the result of Napoleon not following his own military maxims.
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Napoleon spent some of June 17 visiting battalions that had distinguished themselves at Ligny, and admonishing those that had not. He recognized Colonel Odoards of the 22nd Line, who used to be in his Guard, and asked him how many men he had on parade (1,830), how many they had lost the day before (220), and what was being done with abandoned Prussian muskets.73 When Odoards told him they were being destroyed, Napoleon said they were needed by the National Guard and offered 3 francs for every one collected. Otherwise the morning of the 17th was characterized by an entirely unaccustomed torpor.
Claims were made decades after the campaign by Jérôme and Larrey that Napoleon’s lethargy was the result of his suffering from haemorrhoids which incapacitated him after Ligny.74 ‘My brother, I hear that you suffer from piles,’ Napoleon had written to Jérôme in May 1807. ‘The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented again.’75 But was he in fact tormented? This might be the reason why he spent hardly any time on horseback during the battle of Waterloo – visiting the Grand Battery once at 3 p.m. and riding along the battlefront at 6 p.m. – and why he twice retired to a farmhouse at Rossomme about 1,500 yards behind the lines for short periods.76 He swore at his page, Gudin, for swinging him on to his saddle too violently at Le Caillou in the morning, later apologizing, saying: ‘When you help a man to mount, it’s best done gently.’77 General Auguste Pétiet, who was on Soult’s staff at Waterloo, recalled that
His pot-belly was unusually pronounced for a man of forty-five. Furthermore, it was noticeable during this campaign that he remained on horseback much less than in the past. When he dismounted, either to study maps or else to send messages and receive reports, members of his staff would set before him a small deal table and a rough chair made of the same wood, and on this he would remain seated for long periods at a time.78
A bladder infection has also been diagnosed by historians, although Napoleon’s valet Marchand denied that his master suffered from one during this period, as has narcolepsy, of which there is no persuasive evidence either. ‘At no point in his life did the Emperor display more energy, more authority, or greater capacity as a leader of men,’ recalled one of his closest aides-de-camp, Flahaut.79 But by 1815 Napoleon was nearly forty-six, overweight, and didn’t have the raw energy of his mid-twenties. By June 18 he also had had only one proper night’s sleep in six days. Flahaut’s explanation for Napoleon’s inaction was simply that ‘After a pitched battle, and marches such as we had made on the previous day, our army could not be expected to start off again at dawn.’80 Yet such considerations had not prevented Napoleon from fighting four battles in five days the previous year.
There is in fact no convincing evidence that any of the decisions Napoleon took on June 18 were the result of his physical state rather than his own misjudgements and the faulty intelligence he received. ‘In war,’ he told one of his captors the following year, ‘the game is always with him who commits the fewest faults.’81 In the Waterloo campaign that was Wellington, who had made a study of Napoleon’s tactics and career, was rigorous in his deployments, and was everywhere on the battlefield. Napoleon, Soult and Ney, by contrast, fought one of the worst-commanded battles of the Napoleonic Wars. The best battlefield soldier Napoleon had fought before Waterloo had been Archduke Charles, and he was simply not prepared for a master-tactician of Wellington’s calibre – one, moreover, who had never lost a battle.
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When Napoleon met d’Erlon at Quatre Bras on the 17th he said either ‘You have dealt a blow to the cause of France, general’, or, as d’Erlon himself preferred to recall it, ‘France has been lost; my dear general, put yourself at the head of the cavalry and push the English rearguard as hard as possible.’82 That evening Napoleon seems to have come close to the fighting between the British cavalry rearguard, slowing the pursuit in the heavy rain, and the French vanguard thrusting them northwards towards the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean, though he didn’t take part in a cavalry charge, as d’Erlon claimed in his memoirs.83 He did have time to stop for the wounded Captain Elphinstone of the 7th Hussars, however, to whom he gave a drink of wine from his own hipflask and for whom he got the attention of a doctor.84 Napoleon was perfectly capable of kindness to individual Britons while detesting their government.
At around 7 p.m., Napoleon called off the attack on the Anglo-Allied rearguard, as d’Erlon had been urging him to, and said: ‘Have the troops make soup and get their arms in good order. We will see what midday brings.’85 That night he visited the outposts, telling his men to rest well, for ‘If the English army remains here tomorrow, it is mine.’86 He chose Le Caillou farmhouse as his headquarters that night, sleeping on his camp bed on the ground floor while Soult slept on straw on the floor above. (He hadn’t wanted to go the extra 3 miles back to the town of Genappes as he knew he would be receiv
ing reports.) Corbineau, La Bédoyère, Flahaut and his other aides-de-camp spent the night riding between the various corps in the rain, recording movements and positions.
‘Mamluk Ali’, Napoleon’s French bodyguard, recalled him lying on a bundle of straw till his room was made ready. ‘When he had taken possession . . . he had his boots taken off, and we had trouble in doing it, as they had been wet all day, and after undressing he went to bed. That night he slept little, being disturbed every minute by people coming and going; one came to report, another to receive orders, etc.’87 At least he was dry. ‘Our greatcoats and trousers were caked with several pounds of mud,’ Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit of the 1st Grenadiers à Pied recalled. ‘A great many of the soldiers had lost their shoes and reached their bivouac barefoot.’88 Never had Napoleon’s obsession with shoes been more vindicated.
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