It seems extraordinary that Napoleon should have given way to such pressures, as the first option was clearly the best: by the beginning of June he had over half a million men under arms around the country including the National Guard, and by keeping them close together in a central position he could have brought shattering force to bear on individual armies venturing into France, as he had done in his Italian campaign. There were also weighty political implications to the first option: if the allied invasion of ancient French territory could be represented in the same terms as that of 1792, it might elicit the same patriotic élan, with similar results. Napoleon never tired of representing himself as the beloved of the people. ‘The people, or if you wish the masses, want only me,’ he boasted to Benjamin Constant. ‘I am not only, as has been said, the emperor of the soldiers, I am the emperor of the peasants, the plebeians of France … That is why despite the past, you can see the people gather to me. There is a bond between us.’ This was largely true, certainly of Paris and of central and north-western France.21
It is also possible that, faced with an entirely pacific Napoleon and the prospect of invading a country at peace, the allies might have paused for thought. Their own troops were tired after years of war, and the desire to have a go at the French had been assuaged in the previous year. And if, as some suggested, the people had been called to arms, visions of 1792 might have haunted them too; they were only too aware of the smouldering embers of revolution in France and Europe.
But so was Napoleon, and his memories of 1792 had never left him. He bowed to reasonable counsel. ‘The sensible middle course is never the right one in a crisis,’ remarked General Rumigny, who believed a national call to arms would have revived a revolutionary fervour that would have saved the day. But the mood in the upper echelons of society was not one to build hopes on. After dining at Savary’s house and later calling at Caulaincourt’s on 15 June, Benjamin Constant noted ‘discouragement and a wish for compromise’ wherever he went. ‘Anxiety, fear and discontent were the predominant sentiments; there was no attachment or affection for the government in evidence,’ noted Miot de Melito, adding that only the poorer quarters of the city were firmly behind Napoleon.22
Whether or not he was just putting on a brave face, as Hortense believed, Napoleon was merrier than usual on the day of his departure to join the army, talking of literature during dinner with Letizia, Hortense and his siblings, and saying as he took his leave of General Bertrand’s wife, ‘Well, Madame Bertrand, let’s hope we don’t live to regret the island of Elba!’ Lavalette was also struck by his apparent optimism. ‘I left him at midnight,’ he recalled. ‘He was suffering from severe chest pains, but as he climbed into his carriage he showed a gaiety that suggested he was confident of success.’ But the strategy he had chosen, to take the war to the enemy, doomed him in the long run, as France would not be able to stand up to the vastly superior allied forces in a prolonged war.23
The campaign opened well. Napoleon had some 120,000 men, with which he intended to defeat Blücher with his 125,000 Prussians and Wellington with an Anglo-Dutch force of 100,000 before they could join up and outnumber him. ‘Our regiments are fine and animated by the best spirit,’ Colonel Fantin des Odoards of the 70th Infantry of the Line, a veteran of many campaigns and a survivor of the retreat from Moscow, noted in his diary on 11 June. ‘The Emperor will lead us, so let us hope that we will take a worthy revenge. Forward then, and may God protect France!’24
Napoleon went for Blücher first, and dealt him a heavy blow at Ligny on 16 June. It would have been a rout if General Drouet d’Erlon had acted as Napoleon intended – not the first instance where the absence of Berthier to oversee and check orders were carried out made itself felt. Soult, who was acting as chief of staff, had neither the aptitude nor the authority required. The battle might also have eliminated the Prussians from the scene had it not been for the courtesy of some French cuirassiers who, returning from a charge which had swept over him, found Blücher himself lying helpless, pinned down by his dead horse, which his aide was unable to shift on his own. With soldierly gallantry they refrained from killing him or taking him prisoner.25
Napoleon detached Marshal Grouchy with over 30,000 men to pursue Blücher and make sure he did not veer west to join Wellington. He himself marched north along the road to Brussels, on which, on the next day, Wellington took up position on a slight rise just south of the village of Waterloo, anchored to two heavily fortified farms at Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Heavy rain had turned the roads to mud and it took a long time for the French forces to come up. They spent a cheerless, cold night, and on the morning of 18 June the ground was so sodden that it was not possible to go into action, so Napoleon waited till noon for it to dry out.
The younger Napoleon would have tied Wellington down frontally and outflanked him, pinning him in a trap of his own making. But he had long since abandoned such manoeuvres in favour of frontal confrontation and heavy fire. With his forces reduced by detaching Grouchy to around 75,000 men and about 250 guns, he did not have much to spare, and little time, as superior Prussian forces might appear on his right flank at any moment. He meant to pin down the British forces in their strong points of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, and to deliver a strong blow at Wellington’s centre. He was unwell and somnolent, and, as at Borodino, did not direct operations actively.
Jérôme, commanding the left wing, wasted time and lives on trying to capture Hougoumont instead of merely neutralising the British forces there. The main attack on the British centre petered out. With some urgency, since Prussian troops were approaching, Napoleon mounted a second assault on Wellington’s positions, to be driven home by a massive cavalry charge. But the attack faltered and the cavalry went into action prematurely, allowing the British infantry to form squares and repel it.
Grouchy had been negligent in his pursuit of Blücher and lost touch with him when the Prussian changed course and moved westward to join Wellington. Instead of marching on the sound of the guns, as some of his generals pleaded with him to do, he carried on, moving away from the battlefield. As a result, Blücher appeared on Napoleon’s right flank and rear in the late afternoon. In a last desperate attempt to break Wellington’s line, Napoleon sent in the Guard, but this was poorly directed and strayed off its prescribed course. Coming under fire from front and flank, it wavered and some units fell back, shaking the morale of the rest of the army, which began a retreat that quickly turned into rout under pressure from swarming Prussian cavalry. As a moonless night fell, the chaos and fear only increased. It was not just a military defeat; it was a morale-shattering humiliation, with standards, guns, supplies and even Napoleon’s famous dormeuse abandoned in the flight.
The roads were so clogged with fleeing troops that he had to make his escape on horseback, riding all night and only stopping the next morning at an inn at Philippeville, where he dictated two letters to Joseph, one for public consumption, the other more honest, and two long Bulletins, one on Ligny, the other on what he called the battle of Mont-Saint-Jean, which made out that it had been hard-fought and was to all intents and purposes won when a moment of panic caused by the retreat of a single unit of the Guard caused a general retreat. It ended with the words: ‘That was the result of the battle of Mont-Saint-Jean, glorious for French arms, yet so fatal.’ He was utterly exhausted, and tears ran down his face, but he tried to sound optimistic. ‘Everything is not lost,’ he wrote to Joseph, since he had received reports that Jérôme and Soult had managed to rally some of the fleeing troops, while Grouchy was retreating in good order to join them, and he urged him to ‘above all, show courage and firmness’.26
He himself was in a state of shock. It had been a bloody encounter – he had lost up to 30,000 men and the allies little short of 25,000. He had also left most of his artillery and a huge number of prisoners on the field and during the flight. The losses were one thing, but the blow to his reputation as a general and to his amour-propre and that of the French army was
what really felled him.
He reached Paris around eight o’clock on the morning of 21 June and drove straight to the Elysée, where he was met by Caulaincourt, who was distressed that he had come back, believing he should have stayed with the army; without it, in Paris, he was politically vulnerable. Napoleon ordered a hot bath and summoned his ministers. The first to arrive, while he was still in it, were his paymaster Peyrusse, from whom he wanted to find out how much money was available, and Davout, whom he questioned about troop numbers. Davout assured him that all was not lost if he acted with determination and took the field as soon as possible with a fresh army. But Napoleon was in a state of shock. ‘What a disaster!’ he had exclaimed to Davout. ‘Oh! My God!’ he cried out with ‘an epileptic laugh’ as he greeted Lavalette.27
At ten o’clock he sat down to a meeting with his ministers. He told them that to defend the country from invasion he needed dictatorial powers, but wished to be invested with them by the Chamber of Representatives and the Senate. He had already been informed by the president of the first and by his brothers Joseph and Lucien that news of the disaster at Waterloo had spread, and the mood in the Chamber was defeatist and strongly against him; Lafayette was calling for him to be deposed. Cambacérès, Caulaincourt and Maret urged him to confront the Chambers and make his case, but he bridled at this. Regnaud expressed the opinion that he should immediately abdicate in favour of his son. Davout, Carnot and Lucien advised him strongly to prorogue the Chambers, seize dictatorial powers and declare ‘la patrie en danger’, the battle cry that had galvanised France in 1792. Fouché said there was no need for that, as, he assured them, the Chambers would be only too happy to support him. Decrès stared in astonishment; he, and Savary, knew that to be nonsense, and could see that Fouché was trying to mislead Napoleon. Before giving him the job, Napoleon had told Fouché that he should have had him hanged long ago, but he seemed blind to what his minister of police was up to.28
Formerly so alive to any threat and so quick to see how to snatch a winning card from an unpromising deal, Napoleon appeared curiously detached and incapable of reaction. He would not concentrate on the matter in hand, going over the available troop numbers and the possibility of calling out the levée en masse one moment, asking for reports on the mood of the country the next, blaming people and events, speculating on possible manoeuvres, and confusing his own predicament with an apparently sincere conviction that he was the only person who could save France. ‘It is not a question of myself,’ he said to Benjamin Constant, ‘it is a question of France’; if he were to retire from the scene, France would be lost.29
By midday, Davout felt he had missed his chance and there was no hope left, but the emperor remained calm. ‘Whatever they do, I shall always be the idol of the people and the army,’ he declared on being told the Chambers were now preparing to force him to abdicate or to depose him. ‘I only need to say a word, and they would all be crushed.’ He was right, but he would not say the word. A crowd of workers and soldiers had gathered outside the Élysée, calling for arms, and Napoleon only had to lead them across to the Palais-Bourbon, where Fouché was working for his demise in the Chamber, and the representatives would have been scampering quicker than on 19 Brumaire.30
When various family members called on him that evening, along with Caulaincourt and Maret, they advised him to abdicate. Only Lucien still begged him to act. ‘Where is your firmness?’ he urged him. ‘Cast aside this irresolution. You know the cost of not daring.’ ‘I have dared only too much,’ replied Napoleon, truthfully for once. ‘Too much or too little,’ snapped back Lucien. ‘Dare one last time.’ But he could not overcome his reluctance to unleash civil unrest. ‘I did not come back from Elba in order to flood Paris with blood,’ he said to Benjamin Constant. He continued to dither, and with every hour that passed his chances of saving anything from the debacle diminished. Savary advised him to leave and make a dash for the United States; Napoleon had already summoned the banker Ouvrard to ask him whether he could make sufficient funds available for him in America against a promissory note issued in France. He may also have tried to commit suicide that night; the evidence is patchy, but he was certainly out of sorts when he got up at nine o’clock on the morning of 22 June.31
He had still not made up his mind how to proceed, but by that time a council of ministers and delegates of the two Chambers which had convened that night under the direction of Cambacérès had decided to send a deputation to allied headquarters, effectively sidelining him. Buoyed by news of the numbers of troops Jérôme and Soult had been able to rally and the good spirits of other units around the country, Napoleon started considering various military options. But at eleven o’clock a deputation from the Chamber demanded his abdication. When it had left, he erupted into a rage and declared he would not abdicate, but Regnaud observed that in doing so he might be able to obtain the succession of his son. His advice was endorsed by all the other ministers present except for Carnot and Lucien, who both strongly urged him to seize power, reminding him of Brumaire. But Napoleon no longer had it in him. He dictated to Lucien a ‘Declaration to the people of France’, in which he stated that he had meant to ensure the nation’s independence, counting on the support of all classes, but since the allies had vowed hatred to his person and pledged that they would not harm France, he was willing to sacrifice himself for his country. ‘My political life is finished, and I proclaim my son Emperor of the French, under the name of Napoleon II,’ he declared, going on to delegate powers to his ministers. Carnot wept, Fouché glowed.32
The declaration was delivered to the Chamber of Representatives shortly after midday, and although it was clear that nobody would accept the succession of his son, it was debated at length; Fouché and others still feared that, pushed too far, Napoleon might yet rouse himself and stage a coup. He influenced the choice of the delegates to negotiate with the allies, which alarmed those closest to him, who began to fear for his life; those chosen would not resist handing him over to the enemy as a mark of good faith. It became clear that he must get away to America as quickly as possible.
Napoleon requested Decrès to provide two frigates at Rochefort, and his librarian began preparing cases of books for him to read on the voyage and to help him in the writing of his memoirs. He went through his private papers, burning many, but, curiously, collecting together his youthful writings, including Clisson et Eugénie and the description of his first sexual encounter, in a box which he entrusted to Fesch. He seemed in no hurry to get away. ‘He speaks of his circumstances with surprising calm,’ noted Benjamin Constant, who also came to see him on 24 June. ‘Why should I not stay here?’ he kept saying. ‘What can the foreigners do to an unarmed man? I shall go to Malmaison, where I shall live in retirement, with a few friends who will certainly only come to see me for myself.’ He nevertheless repeated his request to Decrès that a couple of frigates be made ready to take him to America.33
On 25 June he left for Malmaison, going out by a side entrance to avoid the crowd that had been keeping a vigil in front of the Élysée. He would stay there four days, waiting for news that the ships were ready. Decrès replied that he required authorisation from the Commission of Ministers, effectively the provisional government. Under the influence of Fouché this sent General Becker with a contingent of troops to guard Napoleon at Malmaison, where he had been joined by Letizia, Hortense, Lucien and Joseph, Bertrand, Savary, General Lallemand, his aides Montholon and Planat de la Faye, the councillor Las Cases and Caulaincourt. He received visits from old friends, and saw his son by Éléonore de la Plaigne, whom he said he would bring over to America once he was established there. He admitted to Hortense to have been deeply moved by the child.34
The allied armies had paused, checked by smaller but still battle-worthy French forces. Confused informal negotiations were going on between Fouché and Louis XVIII, who was still in Belgium, and between Talleyrand, who had joined him there, and various of his contacts in Paris. The allies were also discu
ssing among themselves whether to reinstate Louis XVIII or install another ruler. Units in various parts of the country continued to fight. Some officers planned to kidnap Napoleon from Malmaison and rally the army to him in order to fight on – there were still 150,000 men under arms around the country, and others would have joined them.35
On 29 June, when he heard that the allied armies were on the move once more, Napoleon offered his services to the provisional government, promising to retire into exile once victory had been achieved. Fouché dismissed the idea, as it had become clear that one of the preconditions of any negotiation was that Napoleon was to be handed over. Not wishing to provoke any violent moves on his part or that of his entourage, the provisional government sent Decrès to Malmaison to inform Napoleon that two frigates were waiting at Rochefort. That same day, after taking his leave of Hortense and others, and pausing for a while in the room in which Josephine had died, he left Malmaison for Rochefort, escorted by Becker and his men.36
The two frigates were ready, but the port was blockaded by the Royal Navy, so there was no possibility of their sailing without a safe-conduct, which Napoleon was assured would be obtained by the government negotiators, a blatant lie; Fouché had let him reach Rochefort, where he was cut off from any support he might have found in Paris, and once he had boarded one of the frigates he was trapped. As he vainly waited for the safe-conduct, he was allowed to visit the island of Aix, next to which his vessel was anchored, and inspect the works he had commissioned; he was cheered by the troops stationed there, but that could not alter the fact that he was effectively a prisoner.
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