Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  “I believe I can assure Your Excellency that we have nothing to worry about,” Prefect Gamot had informed the interior minister from the provincial capital of the Yonne at Auxerre. But when, on March 15, Gamot “appealed to every man of goodwill” to step forward and form reserve battalions, he, too, met with silence, even as rumors from Paris announced the mass desertion of more officers and troops from the Bourbon Royal Army, culminating in the incredible news of the fall of both Grenoble and Lyons to Napoleon and his army’s approach to Auxerre itself. The result: On the sixteenth, Gamot — who had just assured the interior minister of the loyalty of the people of his department — now addressed these very people: “Inhabitants of the Yonne...Let us unite around this hero whom glory has recalled to us.”

  The king, with strong assurances from his war minister, “Old Nick” Soult, and Marshal Ney, who was gathering a small reserve force at Lons-le-Saunier, may have felt anxious but not desperate. On March 14 Marshal Ney described Napoleon Bonaparte to the prefect as a “mad dog upon whom one must fling oneself in order to avoid his savage bite. If I have the good fortune to arrest him, I intend to bring him back to Paris alive in an iron cage!” Aglaé-Louise Ney reassured her husband: “What utter madness could have seized the emperor? But he will soon be its first victim. Who will support him? Not a soul!”

  Nevertheless, all was not quite what it seemed, for privately a confused Ney was even angrier with the king, who had provided him with only six thousand against Napoleon’s approaching fourteen thousand. Ney had seen for himself what sort of miracles the little Corsican could pull off even when outnumbered. That same day Ney, who could at times become hot-headed and make violent changes of judgment, did it again. He suddenly declared that he had decided to support that “mad dog” Bonaparte. “But don’t worry about a thing. Napoleon is returning with the finest intentions in the world. He wants to forget the past and reconcile all parts of society and save France.” (It should be mentioned in passing that Ney was the brother-in-law of Prefect Gamot at Auxerre, whose lead he was following.)

  At 8:00 A.M. on March 16, Marshal Ney arrived just as his brother-in-law and Napoleon were about to sit down for breakfast. The “mad dog” gave Ney a big hug and exuberant thanks, as the marshal’s forces now swelled Napoleon’s to at least twenty thousand, the equivalent of two divisions.”

  Although the country did not know any of the current members of the Bourbon dynasty, they did know that Louis XVIII represented a great change from Bonaparte. France was accepted by the international European community, and, more important, the nation was finally at peace. Louis XVIII’s predecessor, Louis XVI, had had many faults, but he had not been a warmonger, and furthermore taxes under the Bourbons had been considerably lower. Though the French might poke fun at a monarch obsessed by his clock collection, they could think of far more fatal passions. “Peace is the country’s only desire...By one final effort worthy of you, obtain that peace for yourself and the French people,” the Senate had implored Bonaparte back in December 1813, in vain.” But the Corps Législatif had supported the Senate. “Commerce has been annihilated...industry is on its last legs...What has been the cause of these unutterable woes?” Deputy Laîné had demanded angrily:

  An overbearing government, overtaxation, the deplorable means applied in the collection of taxes, and even more cruel, the excesses of the system used for army recruitment...Conscription has become an odious plague for the entire country...For the past two years the men of this nation have been harvested three times a year. A barbarous and pointless war has been periodically fed by our youth, torn from their education, from agriculture, commerce, and the arts.

  Laîné’s motion to initiate peace talks had then won a sweeping majority vote of approval, 223 for, 51 against. “We want only one thing, peace,” Senator Lapparent agreed. “It is the general cry of everyone, from every corner of the land.” “Do you really want me to tell you the unvarnished truth?” an exasperated Naval Minister Decrès had confided to Napoleon’s protégé and former aide-de-camp Marshal Marmont. “The Emperor is crazy, completely insane, and is going to throw us over, landing us in an incredible catastrophe.” Of course the admiral’s prediction had been borne out by the events of 1814.

  Thus if Louis XVIII had not been cheered wildly by the majority of Frenchmen, at least no one had jeered. Moreover, he brought with him a “Constitutional Charter,” or to be more accurate, seventy-four articles forced upon him by the victorious Allies bent on removing the traditional Bourbon dictatorial control over the country that had so incited the people leading to the Revolution in 1789, which in turn had unleashed its violent armies across Europe, ultimately resulting in Napoleon’s appearance on the scene.

  On June 4, 1814, Louis XVIII had signed the document theoretically creating a constitutional monarchy, with a permanent bicameral legislature, including a Chamber of Peers, or Senate, and a Chamber of Deputies. Slavery, which Napoleon had reintroduced, was again abolished. However, the former electorate of approximately five million of the Empire was now reduced to just ninety thousand, while only ten thousand persons were actually qualified to hold office because of the clause limiting eligibility to those paying high enough taxes. What is more, Roman Catholicism again became the official state religion.

  When it came to the army, however, King Louis was in a bind, for he could find only a few dozen professional officers of aristocratic birth to assume command, thus forcing him to reemploy most of Napoleon’s officer corps. General Dupont, of Bailen memory, was named the first war minister, later to be replaced by Marshal Soult and finally by Napoleon’s own General Clarke. What is more, two of Napoleon’s marshals had been named to command the king’s personal six-thousand-man “Household Guard,” none other than Marmont and Berthier.

  On March 5, learning of Napoleon’s landing near Cannes, King Louis, in coordination with War Minister Soult, decided to launch three armies against the intruders. Two of them would be commanded by King Louis’s nephews. The duc d’Angoulême would form one around Nîmes with ten thousand men with which to pursue Napoleon, and the duc de Berry in the Franche-Comté would form another small one, while Marshal Soult was dispatched to Lyons to form a third corps of thirty thousand. None of these armies was fully established, due in part to mass desertions from the Royal Army, and in part as a result of the utter incompetence of the royal nephews, but in particular because of the even more disastrous inability of Soult, a professional soldier, to follow orders at Lyons, where thirty thousand men could easily have stopped and destroyed Napoleon’s embryonic force. Indeed the only good news reaching Paris now was that two premature pro-Bonaparte military uprisings, by Generals Drouet d’Erlon and Lefebvre-Desnouettes, were quickly put down in the north.

  On learning of the fall of Grenoble and Lyons, the king ordered most of the Paris garrison to Villejuif and Melun, where the duc de Berry was reassigned as commander, with Macdonald serving as his deputy. As for Soult, he was denounced by the king’s closest adviser and companion, the comte de Blacas d’Aulps, charging him with conspiring with Napoleon to overthrow the monarchy. Pouting, Soult resigned and stalked off in a huff. But in fact even Berry’s new army was not taking shape, as desertions accelerated. A now much more anxious King Louis had then also sent Marshal Ney to Lons-le-Saulnier to assemble the army Berry had failed to, the results of which Napoleon saw for himself at Auxerre by the seventeenth.

  But on the stormy afternoon of the sixteenth, the king, still in blissful ignorance of Ney’s betrayal, and despite a downpour, set off in a grand procession to the National Assembly to convene personally for the first (and last) time the new combined chambers. They proceeded in somewhat dampened magnificence attended by the comte d’Artois, the duc de Berry, the duc d’Orléans (the future Louis-Philippe), as well as the principal state and palace officials, in a stream of state carriages, preceded by cavalry units of the Paris National Guard and the king’s famous musketeers in their glorious red-and-black uniforms.

 
At 4:00 P.M. the king’s arrival was announced to the mighty of the land — “Le Roi, Messieurs, le Roi” — attended by trumpeters’ fanfares as the king in all his grotesque enormity was helped to his throne. He then addressed the assemblage. “Gentlemen, in this moment of crisis...I come in your midst to draw close those ties uniting you to me...I have seen my fatherland again, and I have reconciled it with all the foreign powers...I have labored for the happiness of my people...And now at the age of sixty, how could I better end my career than by dying in defense of my country.” They must avert civil war and Napoleon’s “iron yoke,” he reminded them, for “he comes to destroy this constitutional Charter.” The people had to act. “Then let us rally, gentlemen, let us rally around it [the charter]; let it be our sacred standard.” When the king waddled back to his coach, it was still pouring. Politics were still politics.

  The moment he reached the Tuileries, and after receiving everyone’s congratulations, his majesty was informed by a special messenger of Ney’s defection. Summoning Gen. Nicolas Joseph Maison, the governor of the First Military District around Paris, along with General Dessolles, he informed them of the situation and ordered them to replace Soult and Ney at the head of new armies. Could he count on them? the king asked these two former Napoleonic officers warily? Of course, the shocked gentlemen reassured him, but, because they would be risking their necks in the event Napoleon succeeded, they would first need a little insurance, say two hundred thousand francs each, in gold, in advance. At this stage nothing surprised the king anymore, and he consented. Maison left to rally the regular troops in the garrisons around Paris, while Dessolles called out the National Guard, even as War Minister Clarke assured his commanders that all was now well in hand and that all the damage done by Soult had been repaired. The Journal des Débats, however, surpassed even Clarke, informing the French populace that armies under General Marchand and Marshal Masséna had joined forces and had retaken Lyons. (Masséna of course had not even left Marseilles, while Marchand had returned to the Napoleonic fold.) In that same newspaper the pro-Bourbon liberal, Benjamin Constant, described Bonaparte as “this Attila, this Genghis Khan...this man stained with our blood.”[776]

  But with the quadruple failures of Berry, Anglouleme, Soult, and Ney, no one took newspaper reports seriously any longer. As the upper bourgeoisie and the aristocracy hastened to the Hôtel des Postes to apply for their passports, a flow of carriages with encrusted crests on the door panels left the city for the northwest.

  Back at the Tuileries, Treasury Minister Louis was arranging to transfer 25 million francs in silver from the capital, matched by an almost equal sum withdrawn by individuals from their banks. Then just to cap it all, on Saturday March 18, an irate Marshal Macdonald arrived most unexpectedly at the Tuileries, denouncing the interference and follies of the so-called commander at Villejuif and Melun, the Duc de Berry. Even for the phlegmatic king this was too much. He fired Berry on the spot and replaced him with Macdonald. As even the king’s close adviser, the baron de Vitrolles, confessed, “the knell of our agony was ringing across the land.” The king, now in a real panic, remained unable to make the decisions necessary — “a sort of paralysis set in,” the baron admitted.[777]

  By the following day there was pandemonium in the Tuileries, and although no one yet knew it, for he had refused to share this information with even the highest aristocrats of the land, the king had determined to flee the country, covering his tracks by scheduling a review of the Royal Household Guard at the Champ de Mars at noon. Ironically the only two people he did confide in were two Napoleonic officers, Marshals Berthier and Macdonald, not even his own war minister, however.

  The king set off for the review — it was raining again — but because of hostile crowds, he turned around and returned to the Tuileries, not even informing a rain-soaked Marmont, who was left waiting for him with thousands of troops. Later that evening the king’s ministers were finally informed of his planned flight, agreeing to follow him — after each had received one hundred thousand francs in cash. Bidding adieu to his staff and capital, the King set out from the Tuileries just after midnight.[778] It was March 20, the king of Rome’s fourth birthday.

  Fortunately the Allies, meeting at the Congress of Vienna since September 1814, had been a little more efficacious and organized than the Bourbon brothers, though not without some initial division. Convening as a result of the Treaty of Paris (May 30, 1814), the Congress had set out to settle the fate of Europe and its new frontiers, in an attempt to undo the confusion and damage done by Napoleon’s conquests, various dethronements of rulers, and the redrawing of international frontiers, and to name new rulers and governments to replace some of the old. Indeed, one of their first decisions had been to recognize the return of the Bourbons to France and the dissolution of the former Napoleonic Empire. They also had to cope with the conflict between Prussia and Russia over the spoils, Saxony and Poland. Then of course there was the question of a newly independent combined state of Belgium and Holland.

  The key individuals making these fateful decisions at Vienna were Lord Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary; Prince Klemens von Metternich representing Franz I of Austria; Karl August von Hardenberg, Prussia’s King Friedrich Wilhelm III; and Count Nesselrode, Czar Alexander. France, although specifically excluded from participation in this Congress by the Treaty of Paris, was nevertheless represented by King Louis’s new foreign minister, the ubiquitous Talleyrand. As another main purpose of this congress was to arrange French and European affairs in such a way as to preclude any future warlike activity on the part of the turbulent French, the Allies very nearly undid much, including their own coalition, by allowing Talleyrand’s presence.

  Talleyrand, who seemed to personify the most perverse traits of the traditionally perverse French when it came to international affairs, through his great intelligence, finesse, and skill was able to insinuate himself into a place at the negotiating table and then to set ally against ally. An unusually lax Castlereagh was equally responsible, by supporting Talleyrand, who succeeded in manipulating a nearly decisive division among France’s foes by the drafting on January 3, 1815, of a secret Treaty of Alliance among Britain, France, and Austria. In theory a simple mutual defense pact, it was in fact aimed deliberately at the suspiciously vigorous expansionist policies of Czar Alexander, who had already swallowed up both Bessarabia and Finland. Britain protested against Prussia’s desire to annex Saxony. “I confess little kindness for the King of Saxony,” the prime minister confided to Lord Castlereagh, “but I do not wish to see the system of totally annihilating ancient States extended beyond what is necessary.” But at least the decision regarding the Low Countries was made in February 1815, transforming Prince William into King William of the Low Countries, thereby combining Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. France must never again be permitted to possess those countries, Castlereagh insisted.

  Meanwhile Talleyrand played on Allied fears of a possible return of Napoleon. Bonaparte’s “principles,” he claimed, “must be expelled from Europe once and for all...Yes, we have removed him from the battlefields, mais il est au bout de notre lorgnette [but he is still right under our noses],” he warned Prince von Schwarzenberg. “If they had listened to us,” Castlereagh added, “he would have been deported 16,000 leagues from here.” Or, as Talleyrand himself had earlier put it back in February 1814, “The evil never change their ways.”

  The immediate result of Talleyrand’s sinuous manipulations and subtle perversities alienated all the rest of the allies from Russia, without the czar even realizing it. “The Coalition is dissolved, and dissolved forever,” Talleyrand assured Louis XVIII in January 1815. But even the wily Talleyrand could make grievously wrong assessments of situations, and everything was suddenly and irretrievably altered on March 11 as Lord Clancarty, assisting Lord Wellington at Vienna, explained in an urgent message to Castlereagh:

  We were at Court the night of the arrival of Burghersh’s dispatch, containing the news o
f Buonaparte’s flight; and though there was every attempt to conceal apprehension under the masque of unconcern, it was not difficult to perceive that fear was predominant in all — [including] the Imperial and Royal personages there assembled. The overwhelming circumstances...[left nothing but] black and bloody prospects for the whole of Europe and any lasting peace.

  The congress acted swiftly. On March 13 all seven powers (including Russia, Spain, Portugal, and Sweden) signed a declaration outlawing Napoleon:

  In breaking the Convention which established him in the Isle of Elba, Bonaparte is destroying the sole legal title to which his existence is attached. In reappearing in France with projects of troubles and upsettings, he has deprived himself of the protection of the laws, and has manifested in the face of the universe that it cannot have peace or truce with him. In consequence The Powers declare, that Napoleon Bonaparte is placed outside civil and social relations, and that as an enemy and disturber of the peace of the world, he has delivered himself over to public prosecution.

  The Allies, for all their disagreements with Russia, were quick to re-form their coalition — the seventh — and Talleyrand’s scheme for its dissolution was foiled. Before closing the Congress of Vienna, “the Big Four” — Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia — signed the Treaty of Vienna on March 25, 1815, agreeing to quickly rally their armies until Bonaparte “be put absolutely beyond the possibility of exciting troubles.”

  “If we are to undertake the job, we must leave nothing to chance,” Castlereagh wrote Lord Wellington in Vienna. “It must be done upon the largest scale...you must inundate France with force in all directions. If Bonaparte could turn the tide, there is no calculating upon his plan.” As for England, the foreign secretary continued on April 3, “there is no hesitation on the part of the Prince Regent’s Government...in prosecuting the war against Napoleon...and will embark heartily in the contest...for the salvation of Europe.” The Russians fully endorsed this determination, or as Nesselrode put it in an awkward phrase, half English, half French — “C’est pour nous tous, le cas du last shilling, [the] last drop of blood.” They would spend every penny they had and fight to the last man.