by Alan Schom
For a man of Napoleon’s energy — admittedly greatly reduced since his suicide attempt (he had been wheezing and coughing ever since) and imagination — Elba was a boring backwater. As for the famous “history” he had told Caulaincourt he intended to write, not a word. For entertainment he went out on his horse for long daily rides, and every Sunday the traditional “imperial levée” took place at I Mulini, followed by mass, just as it had been done at the Tuileries. Although his handful of courtiers and their wives turned out in their uniforms and gowns for an occasional “state dinner,” they usually passed the evening playing cards, or preparing a new amateur theatrical production, enhanced by officers’ wives. Even with the arrival of the lively Pauline that winter, life at the palace was lackluster, if not deadly. Everyone was bored and frustrated. Nerves snapped and tempers flared. Nor could Napoleon pay his troops or his personal entourage. The good Bertrand and his wife, Fanny, who had by now joined him, did their best to enliven things. But with his daily circle limited to Bertrand, Drouot, the dreary Cambronne, Major Malet (no relation to the mad general) and Colonel Jerzmanowski (now commanding the Polish Red Lancers), life was pretty tedious, and this dreariness was reflected on Napoleon’s face, worrying Colonel Campbell more and more.
A few foreign visitors were permitted to land briefly. Two of Napoleon’s former mistresses even managed to escape Allied naval vessels for brief sojourns, including the ever faithful Countess Walewska and Emilie de Pellapra, both of whom had borne his sons. But then they were gone, and the masked balls launched by Pauline, artificially light-hearted, left a ringing emptiness, a painful reminder of the better days of yore. Nor did Marie-Louise — now in the arms and bed of Gen. Albrecht Adam von Neipperg, the Austrian hussar assigned to protect her — any longer wish to return to him.
By the end of December 1814, an anxious Colonel Campbell reported to London that Napoleon was withdrawing more and more, avoiding him and just about everyone else.
Meanwhile Talleyrand, who had insisted on the unconditional abdication of Napoleon in his own name and that of all heirs, and who had earlier hired an assassin in Paris to kill Napoleon, was now planning another attempt to kidnap and perhaps kill him, just as he had drawn up the initial master plan for the kidnapping and murder of the duke of Enghien back in 1804. “Napoleon frequently goes over to Pianosa [an islet next to Elba],” French Consul General Mariotti reported from Livorno to Talleyrand. “I have been assured that having no lodgings on that island, he always sleeps aboard one of his ships. It will be easy...to kidnap him.” Colonel Campbell warned Lord Castlereagh of various plots against the sovereign of the island of Elba, including one by Gen. Louis Brulast, the new Bourbon commanding officer of Corsica, which included hiring Arabs from Algiers to sail over in the night and seize him. Others included open murder attempts. “Let them kill me,” a dejected Bonaparte told Campbell, “but I do not want to be deported.” He did not want to end his days in a French dungeon, buried alive forever from any contact with another human being.
By the spring of 1815, as the Congress of Vienna (opened on November 1, 1814) was convening to provide a long-lasting overall European peace settlement to unscramble the political mayhem Napoleon had left for them, the man himself — bored, broke, depressed, anxious, and frustrated — came to the conclusion that he could no longer abide the enforced limitations of his new existence. “Friends” got messages to him. The French people wanted him back, they said; he must liberate them from the Bourbons. With the arrival of former Deputy Prefect Fleury de Chaboulon on February 12, 1815, Napoleon finalized plans to escape his island prison. When Colonel Campbell then obligingly left Portoferraio on February 16 for one of his periodic rendezvous with his mistress on the Italian mainland, the plans went into action.
A seven-vessel flotilla was assembled and rapidly armed, victualed, and prepared for the embarkation of an expeditionary force of 1,026 officers and men, including the Polish lancers, the 551 grenadiers of the Old Guard, and every available Elban willing to join this venture.
After attending mass at 10:00 A.M. on Sunday, February 26, Napoleon once again donned his famous green uniform as colonel of grenadiers. He appeared at the harbor with his new general staff — Generals Bertrand, Cambronne, and Drouot, and General Commissioner Pons — and proclaimed to his men: “Grenadiers, it has been decided. We are going to France, we are going back to Paris!” “Vive la France!” roared hundreds of jubilant homesick voices, “Vive l’Empereur!”
After bidding adieu to Madame Mère and Pauline for the last time, at 9:00 P.M. that evening, with his new white Elban flag with its diagonal red stripe and three bees flying over his flagship, Napoleon boarded the brig the Inconstant, ordering Captain Cautard to hoist the signal to sail, and they weighed anchor and put to sea. Meanwhile off the Tuscan coast, the jolly Colonel Campbell, having been apprised of the events on the island, was aboard a small warship rushing back from Livorno. They passed each other unseen in the night. Despite the sighting of a couple of distant French and British warships, Napoleon’s luck held, his Elban odyssey on course and on schedule, proceeding across calm seas under a clear sky.
And thus it was that at 10:00 A.M. on March 1 they first glimpsed the distant mountains behind Cap d’Antibes, as the captain lowered the Elban flag and replaced it with the tricolor. Rounding the cape, and concealed from the fort at Antibes, with the Ile Ste.-Marguerite to their west, the flotilla entered the protected shallow waters of the secluded Golfe Juan and began landing their few cannon and “army,” as they set out to march along the beach to the narrow peninsula of La Croisette, and Cannes. “I am the sovereign of the Island of Elba,” he proclaimed as he entered that sleepy city, “and have come with six hundred men to attack the King of France and his six hundred thousand soldiers. I shall conquer this kingdom.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine – “Projects of Troubles and Upsettings”
‘I want to return to my throne without having spilled a single drop of blood.’
Had the sixty-seven-year-old mayor of Cannes, Notary François Poulle, been expecting trouble on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 1, 1815, no doubt he would have posted guards on the parapet of the seventy-foot, eleventh-century stone Tour du Suquet on the heights of the Old Quarter and near the Eglise Nôtre-Dame d’Espérance, overlooking the town’s ancient fishing port and twelve thousand peaceful inhabitants. The Phoenicians had passed there, the Romans had given the city its name (after the reeds growing in the lagoon), the Arabs based at nearby La Garde-Freinet had ravaged the area from the eighth through the tenth century, leaving behind only mountainous slopes covered with cork, oak, olive, and chestnut trees to recall their presence.
Such then was the scene when at 3:00 P.M. the good mayor was suddenly summoned most urgently to the Hôtel de Ville, where a domineering man — in fact, General Cambronne — had arrived out of the blue, first demanding “passports” for himself and his friends required to continue on to Marseilles, next returning with a further demand for dozens of horses and a couple of dozen carriages and wagons, and then finally adamantly ordering the bewildered mayor to deliver three thousand rations of beef and bread to their bivouac amid the sand dunes ringing the Bay of the Angels, for as the mayor of Cannes was now informed, Emperor Napoleon had returned to save the realm. With much of the city unwalled and undefended, the mayor had no choice. He summoned all the butchers and bakers, who slaughtered three head of cattle and produced hundreds of loaves of bread.
The town’s three principal roads, leading to Fréjus to the west, Antibes and Nice to the east, and Grasse to the north, were barricaded by uniformed troops, but not securely enough to prevent Mayor Poulle from getting off a desperate message to Count de Bouthillier Chavigny, the royal prefect of the Var, at Draguinan, informing him that “sixty soldiers” and an Elban general had seized the city. This was before Cambronne had returned a final time demanding three thousand rations and informing him of the arrival of Napoleon Bonaparte, while leaving him with the latter’s “Pro
clamation to the Army”: “Napoleon, by the grace of God, Emperor of the French,” had returned to save them, it announced:
I heard you calling me in my exile and crossed every obstacle and peril to be here...Take up those colors that the nation has proscribed, those colors round which we have rallied for twenty-five years, in fending off the enemies of France. Put on the same tricolor cocarde that you wore during our finest days...[and] take up again the eagles that preceded you at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau, and Friedland...Soldiers! Come rally around the banners of your leader![775]
Given the very limited military resources at his disposal, Napoleon had skillfully prepared his invasion plan. Without cavalry, without heavy artillery, and without large numbers of troops, he was in no position even to attack Vauban’s Square Fortress at Antibes, where he had been held prisoner briefly following the downfall of Robespierre. He certainly could not attack the major garrisons farther up the coast at Toulon and Marseilles, where Marshal Masséna now commanded the Eighth Military District in the name of the Bourbon royal house. To be sure, Napoleon had already dispatched one vessel to inform Masséna of his arrival and intentions, and another to Joachim Murat at Naples, asking them both for their support.
Bonaparte knew, however, that he had to march quickly on Paris, for if he got bogged down in conflict here in this traditionally strong pro-Bourbon region, he would be lost. Thus he had landed in one of the very few undefended places that at the same time gave him the most direct access to the route he intended to follow: via Grasse, then climbing into the mountainous back country through Castellane, Digne, Gap, Laffrey, Grenoble, Lyons, and Châlons. This permitted him to put much distance, and tough terrain, between him and any pursuers. Furthermore, he knew the region well, and what little it had to offer large numbers of troops, with its muddy roads weaving up narrow valleys, sometimes heavily forested and always rocky. But it would be hard going for his own men too. High morale was as important as food for his 1,026-man expeditionary force. If all went well, Napoleon’s first real challenge would come as he descended the high mountains overlooking Grenoble, where there was a large garrison of at least 7,000 men, with heavy artillery, munitions, and supplies — all of which he had prepared for his earlier campaigns into Italy and Switzerland while still emperor. He therefore had to win over that garrison. He was not relying entirely on luck, however, having dispatched a messenger to Col. Charles de La Bédoyère, who commanded the Seventh Infantry Regiment at Grenoble, and with whom he had been in secret correspondence since his arrival at Elba. Napoleon was counting on winning over more troops and preventing a clash. “I want to return to my throne without having spilled a single drop of blood,” he lectured his troops sternly before breaking camp at a little after 4:00 A.M. the next day, March 2, knowing that otherwise the French would turn against him.
Reaching Grasse later that same morning, they encountered the outraged royalist mayor of that city, the marquis de Gourdon, who summoned the local National Guard, only thirty men answering the call. Instead Napoleon now gave the orders, demanding more food for his men, wagons, horses, and mules. No sooner had they finished eating than they resumed their march, this time up the steep route into the mountains, to St.-Valliers, Escragnolle, and Seranon, abandoning animals, cannon, and carriages by the time they reached the snow level and severe cold. Making their way along the narrow road used by local mules and peasant carts through the pine forest, at well over three thousand feet, they finally reached Castellane. There they rested as Napoleon requisitioned five thousand rations for the troops — needed through the mountains before them — forty carts, and two hundred mules, only to set out once again, deeper into the desolate mountains, where scarcely a house or shepherd could be found, reaching Bareme on March 3 and Digne by the fourth.
Napoleon’s recognition of the potential dangers back in the Var in fact proved to be too true. Prefect Count Bouthillier had ordered an initial force of fewer than one hundred men to march to the coast via Le Muy on the second. On learning that it was Bonaparte himself, with a much larger force than initially reported by Poullc, he rushed off a messenger to Masséna to inform him “that troops HEADED by Bonaparte would be at Digne today,” and that he, Masséna must act quickly. By 7:00 P.M. Bouthillier had prepared another dispatch, this one for his immediate superior in Paris, Interior Minister Montesquiou, apprising him of the emergency. Nevertheless, “it is quite impossible for those troops [of Bonaparte] to advance very far in a country entirely devoted to H. M. [Louis XVIII] before receiving their just deserts for such a rash act.” He closed by assuring the minister that he was taking “all precautions necessary...to ensure that this aggressor would be repulsed...Vive le Roi!” On March 4 he ordered a fresh detachment into the hills as far as St.-Vallier.
The prudent Masséna, safe and snug in a secure berth at long last, had no intention of wrangling with Napoleon or getting involved in any of this. He would remain neutral. He had received Bonaparte’s initial message sent the first day, but claimed utter surprise on receipt of Poulle’s later message on March 3, stating “that fifty men from the Guard of the ex-Emperor Napoleon...landed in the Golfe Juan yesterday.” To buy time he sent out two or three agents in various directions to gather more precise information, which was always good for a day or two, and after that ordered a regiment into the mountains to Sisteron to pursue the sovereign of Elba. “You can count on my zeal and devotion,” Marshal Masséna informed Louis XVIII’s new war minister, none other than the wily Marshal Soult. “I swore my fidelity to the legitimate King. I shall never deviate from the path of honor,” Masséna, one of the greatest looters in the army, reported. And thus it was that Napoleon safely got away.
But by March 7 he was facing the first real test at Laffrey, where he found himself confronting a battalion of nearly eight hundred men. Gen. Jean-Gabriel Marchand, the commanding officer of Grenoble (awarded the Grand Eagle of the Legion of Honor by Napoleon himself) had no intention of seriously preventing this man who had given him his fortune from marching on Paris. Nor did the local battalion commander sound very convincing: “If you do not withdraw, I shall arrest you.” That is not how determined troops stop dangerous invaders. “Soldiers of the 5th Infantry Regiment, I am your Emperor,” Napoleon shouted, ignoring the impudent officer. “If there is any one among you who wishes to kill his emperor, here I am,” he said defiantly holding his coat open for them to fire at his heart. Although one captain did order the men to fire, nothing happened, and suddenly there was a thundering spontaneous outburst — “Vive l’Empereur!” — as hundreds of men threw down their weapons and broke ranks. They rushed over to Napoleon, knelt before him, and kissed the hem of his winter coat, even his sword.
Shortly thereafter Colonel La Bédoyère arrived at the head of the Seventh Infantry and joined forces with Napoleon’s men. They marched by torchlight through the heavy snow, down the mountain, passing through the open Bonne Gate of the city, which General Marchand and the prefect had just abandoned. Grenoble was his, giving Bonaparte some eight thousand troops and more than enough artillery and munitions to arm a powerful column to Lyons. His gamble had worked thus far, and his route of march was right on schedule. The hurdle of Lyons could prove much more difficult, however.
At 4:00 P.M. on March 9, Napoleon’s newly requisitioned coach, preceded by his Polish lancers in their red-and-gold uniforms, set out with his greatly increased force for the plains of Burgundy and the confluence of the Rhône and Saone Rivers.
On that same day in the Place Bellecour of Lyons, the king’s brother, the comte d’Artois, attended by General Damas and Marshal Macdonald, was addressing General Brayer’s large garrison, reminding them of Bonaparte’s past and of the necessity of preventing him from “again imposing his yoke on a great nation...Put an end to these criminal projects. We are all going to advance together on the enemy! Long live the King!” But instead of a loud “Vive le roi!” there was a resounding silence. A much-rattled Artois, after hastily dismissing the troops and c
onsulting with Macdonald and the two generals, fled the city with the marshal early the next morning, leaving behind only General Brayer, who had decided to throw in his lot with his former commander, Napoleon.
At 10:00 P.M. that same day, March 10, Napoleon and his troops drove unopposed through the gates of the city of Lyons and into the same Place Bellecourt. He was greeted by thousands of vociferous soldiers and civilians — “Vive l’Empereur! Down with the priests! Down with the nobles! Death to the Bourbons! Vive la liberté!”
After spending a comfortable night in the archbishop’s palace (the former residence of Uncle Fesch, the onetime pirate, war commissar, priest, and, latterly, cardinal), “the emperor,” in excellent spirits, emerged with General Brayer at his side to address the troops and townspeople, with a surprise for them all: “I am coming back to protect and defend the interests that our Revolution has given us. I want to give you an inviolable constitution, one prepared by the people and me together.” He concluded with the announcement that he was abolishing the Bourbon aristocracy and replacing the white flag with the revolutionary tricolor.’ The roar of the massive crowd was deafening. In effect he was proclaiming a constitutional monarchy and a return to some of the revolutionary principles, this same Napoleon who had done everything he could as emperor to eradicate every trace of that very Revolution. Politics were politics.
After emptying the till of the Banque de France of six hundred thousand francs, Napoleon, at the head now of some fourteen thousand troops, set off on the road for Paris, determined to arrive on the twentieth, just in time to celebrate his son’s fourth birthday. But he was not in a great hurry as the troops marched north along the Saône, past Mâcon to Châlons, reaching Autun on the fifteenth. He was closing the distance to his objective.
