Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  “I have the honour to acquaint you,” Lord Clancarty informed London, “that his Grace the Duke of Wellington set out this morning from Vienna, to take command of the army in the Low Countries.”

  Meanwhile Napoleon, still living in his fantasy world and remaining blissfully ignorant of the hornets’ nest he had stirred up (or, for that matter, what Marie-Louise had been doing in his absence), wrote to his wife on March 19 before setting out for Paris from Auxerre: “My good Louise, The people are running to me in droves. Entire regiments are quitting and joining me...I shall be in Paris by the time you receive this letter...Come and rejoin me with my son. I hope to embrace you before the month is out.”

  “I wish to be less the sovereign of France and more the first of her citizens,” Napoleon had declared at Lyons. “I am a product of the Revolution...[and] have come to free the French people from the enslavement in which the priests and nobles wanted to entrap them...I shall hang the lot of them!” If this blatant rabble-rousing politicking did hoodwink tens of thousands of troops, not so the civilians. “If we are not careful, we shall see the same bloody scenes of 92 all over again,” one prefect warned. “I am fearful of the upheaval threatening us, ready as it is to vomit forth terror and proscription over France yet again,” an uneasy comte de Molé confided frankly to Napoleon. “It was sheer folly,” Madame de Stael was to comment within a few weeks. “The moment we accepted Bonaparte, a return to dictatorship was inevitable.”

  Such were some of the sentiments expressed as Napoleon’s glorious cavalcade passed unchallenged through the suburbs, reaching Paris in the cold of night and crossing the Seine on the Pont Louis XV, the bridge’s lamps casting a dull glow over the damp tricolor flags just erected there. Reaching the Tuileries, they passed under the arches of the Pavilion de Flore, clattering into the courtyard where units of National Guardsmen snapped to attention and a large crowd of officers, civilians, and dignitaries rushed over to the coach. “Seeing that he could advance no farther, the Emperor descended in the midst of the immense crowd, which quickly engulfed him,” eyewitness Saint-Denis reported. But once inside and looking about these welcoming courtiers, what no doubt he noticed most were those of the faithful who were absent, including Berthier, Clarke, Jaucourt, and Talleyrand, all now attached to Louis XVIII’s court at Ghent, but in particular, his marshals — Brune, St.-Cyr, Jourdan, Macdonald, Marmont, Soult, Augereau, Moncey, Mortier, Oudinot, and Suchet — the others too weak and ailing to be of use. And then there were the phantoms of another age who would never return: Duroc, Bessières, Poniatowski, Junot, and of course Lannes.

  Nevertheless there were many familiar faces, not all of them of the first order, to be sure, including former Secretary of State Maret; Admiral Decrès, despite his sense of doom; Gaudin, the former finance minister; Treasury Minister Mollien; and the inimitable but much-aged Cambacérès, who would agree to accept the one very sensitive portfolio in his new government that no one else would touch, that of justice. There was also Marshal Davout, the best commander he had ever had, but who would only grudgingly accept the War Ministry now, and of course, Caulaincourt, Lavalette, and a few others. But the vast majority were either over the border or on their estates in silent protest, demanding only to be left alone by Napoleon Bonaparte.

  With Bertrand at his side, still serving as his grand marshal, after accepting the congratulations of the assemblage, Napoleon withdrew to begin organizing his new government. In addition to Maret, Decrès, Gaudin, Mollien, Cambacérès, and an extremely unhappy Davout, he gave Lavalette his old portfolio as postal minister and again named Caulaincourt to head the Foreign Office, despite the latter’s request for an army command. Nor did anyone want the other sensitive portfolio, as interior minister. With his profession of a return to the principles of the Revolution, Napoleon needed someone with a sense of command and decision, a man who knew the workings of the government and whose name would silence any criticism from the left. The next day he was to summon a most wary Lazare Carnot, the very man who had denounced Napoleon’s position as life consul and emperor, preferring the seclusion of his country house to that of participation in a dictatorship. Leaving the Tuileries afterward, the tough Carnot simply sighed, “At a time like this, one could refuse him nothing.” If Carnot’s nomination took everyone utterly by surprise, that of Napoleon’s final appointment left them staggered: none other than the infamous Joseph Fouché, returning to the Police Ministry after years in the wilderness. “Thus the government was completed,” ex-Chancellor Pasquier, no longer a participant and soon to be harried by Napoleon’s police, concluded, “but not without very considerable difficulty.”[779]

  “I am a product of the Revolution,” Napoleon repeated, and that was to be his theme as he promptly ordered all royalists to leave the French capital, Fouché issuing warrants for the arrest of Talleyrand, Montesquiou, La Rochefoucauld, Lynch, Bellard, Beurnonville, Jaucourt, and of course Mar-mont and the highly dangerous Bourrienne, ordering the seizure of their estates and wealth — although Bourrienne had never had anything to seize. Next Napoleon reintroduced slavery, while theoretically abolishing the press censorship he himself had earlier established. But when the royalists immediately unleashed a torrent of abusive anti-Bonapartist articles and propaganda, Napoleon grew uneasy, and the faithful General Hugo, whom Napoleon had so faithlessly fired years earlier over the Egyptian fiasco, protested, malgré tout: “Is it possible to so horribly outrage the great man!” And yet even within his own ranks, indeed even among his ministers, there was not only a singular lack of enthusiasm for the new enterprise but open doubt. “He is going to be up against the whole of Europe,” Foreign Minister Caulaincourt confided to the former chancellor, Pasquier. “The Emperor is not in an enviable position,” Michel St.-Jean d’Angély echoed.

  Despite the doubt and criticism he encountered, Napoleon was determined to play his last card, his claim of wishing to introduce the new “Liberal Empire.” The onetime dictator had changed his proverbial spots: There would now be representative government and peace. “I should rather perish than fall into his hands,” Benjamin Constant declared to his mistress, Juliette Récamier, after having openly attacked Napoleon in the columns of the Journal de Paris. “I shall not change and become a wretched turncoat, going about with hat in hand, from one regime to another...Along with Marmont, Chateaubriand, and Laîné, I am now certainly one of the most compromised men in France.” But when Bonaparte now summoned this selfsame gentleman to the Tuileries, he came away beaming. “What an amazing man he is!” he exclaimed to Récamier. “I am to bring him an outline for a new constitution!” She and Chateaubriand were both aghast.

  On April 19 Constant duly returned to the Tuileries with the draft of the new “Additional Act” to the Imperial Constitution. It called for the abolition of all press censorship, as well as any state religious affiliation. All conscription thereafter would have to be authorized by the chambers. Government ministers were to be given wider powers. The document did make a surprising number of concessions to Bonaparte, who would be allowed the right to continue to appoint all members of the hereditary Chamber of Peers, and the nation’s judges, while also retaining the right unilaterally to prorogue and dissolve the chambers and to propose new legislation.

  After completing his reading of the entire text of sixty-seven articles, an anxious Constant looked up to see Napoleon’s reaction. Much to his surprise Bonaparte accepted the entire thing, Constant’s “Benjamine,” as it was soon dubbed by the royalists. Napoleon would now submit it to a new Constitution Committee for study. With a vigorous new step, Constant rushed off to Madame Récamier’s boudoir to relate the good news.

  But immediately following Constant’s departure, a furious Napoleon exploded to his secretary, Baron Fain: “They are pushing me in a direction I do not like. They are weakening me, tying my hands.” The French people, he said, were asking what had become of “the Emperor’s famous firm hand, which France needs now in order to master Europe again. The
y can talk to me all they want about their concepts of ‘goodness,’ ‘abstract justice,’ and ‘the natural laws,’ but the first real law is ‘necessity,’ while the most essential form of ‘justice’ is ‘national safety.’”

  “That man has learned nothing,” Fouché commented, “and has returned as much of a despot, as keen on conquest, as insane as ever.”

  Napoleon knew he needed a device by which to regain the support of the masses, and his new “republicanism” was just the thing. Naturally he confided nothing of this to the fundamentalist republican Carnot at the Interior Ministry, while publicly calling for a new national plebiscite to approve Constant’s Additional Act. The results would be announced at an enormous rally, the “Champ de Mai” ceremony in Paris on May 26 (a date later changed to June 1). Postal Minister Lavalette, an intimate of the Bonaparte inner circle who knew Napoleon very well indeed, for one was not taken in by this little charade. “Do not rely on this liberal constitution, which he appears willing enough to give us today. Once at the head of a victorious army again, he will have soon forgotten it.” A. N. de Salvandy fully agreed: “He has learned nothing, he has forgotten nothing.”

  Next Napoleon went to work on the window dressing, calling for the convening of the electoral colleges to elect the new deputies to the Chamber of Representatives, while he ordered brother Joseph — who, like Lucien and Jérôme (but unlike Prince Eugène de Beauharnais), had most reluctantly returned to Paris — to draw up a list of 120 candidates for the proposed new Chamber of Peers, from whom Napoleon would select 80. Between April 26 and 30, Bonaparte personally launched the national plebiscite, as his prefects went to every town and village of the realm to “count” the votes.

  If Napoleon had somehow convinced himself that all would fall nicely into place again, with the country fully behind him, Caulaincourt, who had lectured him on the way back from Moscow to Paris in 1812, asked: “What direction is he heading in now? He does not even know himself...He is entirely out of his depth. And why is he so blind to the fact that the only real feeling he inspires in the people is fear itself?” Indeed there was much fear in the land, resulting in political instability, revolt, repression, and growing turmoil. Even Interior Minister Carnot was taken aback by the treasonous reports he was receiving from the nation’s prefects, who governed with full powers in the country’s provinces, Carnot finally forced to dismiss sixty-one of a total of eighty-seven of their number. Then, with ever-growing reports of revolt and discontent, he fired every mayor in the country, replacing them with his own men.

  “The government’s action here is entirely null and void,” read the report of one southern prefect. “Everything is collapsing and falling into a state of anarchy.” At Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles, Bayonne, Versailles, and Amiens, official government decrees and proclamations were torn down, often replaced by royalist counterpropaganda. At Boulogne the white Bourbon flag was hoisted defiantly. “Down with the eagles! String up Napoleon! Up the royalists! Death to the Bonapartistes!” were heard and duly reported by prefects throughout the land. Even the headmasters of the few schools in the country, lycées that Napoleon had earlier created, reported open defiance of anything celebrating Napoleon, students adamantly refusing to cry out “Vive l’Empereur!” at school assemblies, knowing of course that they would soon be called up for national service once war resumed. Nor was it surprising that the numerous newly returned clergy, humiliated by Bonaparte for nearly fifteen years, now preached against him in just about every church of the land, and there was nothing the prefects could do about that. TWO MILLION FRANCS REWARD FOR ANYONE FINDING THE PEACE LOST ON 20 MARCH, read one poster boldly plastered on the very walls of the Tuileries Palace. Not only were the prefects, mayors, and schoolboys defying Paris, but in the capital itself the newly elected president of the Chamber of Representatives, the undaunted Laîné, openly called for his constituents not to heed Napoleon’s new decrees or pay their imperial taxes.

  But perhaps the greatest change to be found since Napoleon’s return, and for him the most dramatic, was public attacks on the army, the very base of his power. Following Laîné’s speech, two hundred rioting young army conscripts in Bordeaux were put down only at bayonet point. There and elsewhere officers were insulted in the streets and began to appear publicly more often in civilian disguise. In one case some citizens called up for temporary National Guard service opened fire on some regular army officers. Marshal Brune, the military governor in Provence, received death threats in the mail (he would later be murdered). At Lisieux one regimental colonel who refused to discard his uniform was seized by civilians and publicly horsewhipped. Some of his prefects, Carnot admitted, lacked “energy and firmness.” But it was these very prefects and mayors who were ultimately responsible for issuing the call-up orders to the recruits for the new army Napoleon was forming. “All the reports received express the same apathy and ill-will on the part of the mayors,” the war minister confirmed.

  Despite the early April reports by some prefects — “Fears of civil war in the West have now completely disappeared”; “Everywhere the people are happy” — massive unrest was in fact building. At the heart of the royalist rebellion about to break out were Louis, the marquis de La Roche-jacquelein, and his brother, Auguste, with their headquarters at the family château at St.-Aubin de Bauginé. There their lieutenants — some of whom Napoleon had known as a student at the Ecole Militaire — came for their instructions, including d’Autichamp, Sapinaud, St.-Hubert, de Suzannet, Robert, the Charettes, La Salmonière, d’Andigné, and others. The entire region from Brittany to the Vendée was a virtual hotbed of rebellion, and this time well armed, with the support of the majority of the civil population behind them.

  General Caffarelli was one of the first to report the gravity of the situation, sending a dispatch rider to War Minister Davout on April 16: “The revolt here will explode out of control if the remaining troops are withdrawn. Then instead we will need an entire army in Brittany.” In fact, due to Napoleon’s conviction that he remained the people’s overwhelming choice, he had ordered almost all troops to be withdrawn from the provinces to form a part of his new army. He continued to turn a cold shoulder to such hysteria. Rebel attacks until this point — led by La Roche-jacquelein, d’Autichamp, and Suzannet, for instance — had been small and scattered, the leaders deliberately holding off major operations throughout the western provinces until they could coordinate it with the expected Allied invasion in June. Meanwhile the British continued to land along the coast of Brittany almost with impunity, due to Napoleon’s having put most ships in mothballs back in 1814.

  Some of the royalist commanders would not wait for the big day, however, and began to launch serious attacks. “It’s civil war just like ’93 all over again!” a distraught General Charpentier reported. “The entire Department of Morbihan is in rebellion. “Rennes is being threatened. I am surrounded by ten thousand insurgents!” General Bigarré, no hysteric, warned from Brittany. “The country is in danger, discontent is general and continuing to spread in the provinces, as it is in Paris,” Carnot himself personally alerted Napoleon. “Civil war is about to break out in several parts of the country.”

  It was not until the end of May, however, that Napoleon finally conceded that he had misjudged the situation in the West. He then ordered General Lamarque to form a special new army, including regiments of the “Young Guard,” twenty-five battalions of infantry, eight squadrons of cavalry, and three artillery batteries — more than twenty thousand additional men — to march quickly to the aid of the various besieged garrisons, even as rebellion was spreading to Bordeaux and Provence. Ultimately Napoleon would be forced to leave 105,151 troops behind, occupying France.[780] By the end of May he not only had all of Europe against him but most of France as well.

  Napoleon’s almost-full-time preoccupation now was neither political reform nor the expanding civil war but the creation of his new army with which to confront the Allies. That he was successful in mobilizing
and arming such a force so quickly, literally within less than three months, was thanks to the astonishing efforts of two men supremely suited to do just that: the forty-five-year-old Marshal Louis Davout, the duke of Auerstädt and prince of Eckmühl, and the sixty-two-year-old mathematician and republican turned imperial count, Lazare Carnot.

  Born in 1772, the scion of minor Burgundian aristocracy, Louis Nicolas Davout entered the Ecole Militaire just as Napoleon was receiving his commission. Second Lieutenant Davout began his military career in 1788. He proved as brilliant a soldier as he had a scholar and rose quickly in the new revolutionary army. He was already a brigadier general in March 1798, when Gen. Louis Desaix introduced him to Major General Bonaparte, whose Egyptian expedition he then joined. In Egypt he proved to be the most effective field commander, inflicting the heaviest overall casualties on the Mamelukes.

  Participating in most of Napoleon’s subsequent campaigns, he continued to distinguish himself time and again, the one senior commander who always executed his orders, and was on the initial list to receive a marshal’s baton in 1804. He single-handedly defeated the Prussians at Auerstädt and performed superbly again at the Battle of Eckmühl (though a jealous Napoleon withheld the peerages due for those victories for several years).