by Alan Schom
By now Napoleon was so tired of hearing of fresh defeats and defections by French leaders that he would no longer even tolerate the mention of the word “peace” in his presence. “The first person who petitions me to agree to ‘peace’ I will have tried for mutiny!” But it was real panic that was now gripping the nation, as Méneval witnessed for himself:
The presence of enemy troops at the gates of Paris had caused the inhabitants in the countryside to flood the capital, with their furniture, their sacks of grain and vegetables, their cattle, sheep, and chickens, all completely snarling the traffic at the gates leading into the city. Rich families were fleeing from the Loire. In Paris itself, thousands of members of the working classes roamed the streets aimlessly, hopelessly in a daze...Everyone of all classes was fleeing the theater of war,
fanning rumors of atrocities committed by the barbaric invaders, seemingly confirmed by a couple of dozen French villages and towns already heavily bombarded or burned to the ground, thousands of French men, women, and children homeless, refugees streaming aimlessly, mile after mile. Troyes, Arcis-sur-Aube, Montmirail, Vauxchamps, Clacy, Craonne, Laon, and on and on read the list, the French now suffering as the Germans, Austrians, Italians, Poles, and Russians had earlier suffered at French hands. Panic spread, and “thus the absence of the Emperor at this critical moment” paralyzed the French capital all the more.
As late as March 13 there had still been no plan authorized for the defense of Paris, Napoleon rejecting the complicated one Joseph had sent him. “Keep it as simple as possible,” he insisted. By now even Napoleon was alarmed about the morale in Paris. “I receive complaints from all sides about the mayors and the middle classes who are preventing the defense of the capital from being carried out,” he confided to Joseph. Even Méneval was anxious about the number of Napoleon’s courtiers and administrators, who were openly going over to the Allies, Talleyrand and the duc de Dalberg leading the list. They in turn were “aided by the perfidy of foreign diplomatic actions, [and] by our own domestic treason silently eating away at the imperial structure.” Nor could he forget “the discouraging actions by French army commanders who were no longer obeying orders, fearing they would not be supported, or if supported, only in a half-hearted manner.” Nevertheless it was imperative that Joseph complete the city’s defenses, for the Allies were advancing in greater numbers in spite of all Napoleon’s efforts to stop or divert them. By the last week of March, the situation in Paris looked truly bleak, Marie-Louise expecting the worst, as she confessed to Méneval, “It appears that things are going so badly for us that we must certainly expect a visit [by the advancing Allies] in a matter of days. What a frightening prospect!”
The empress was correct. The coordinated Allied offensive on Paris was launched on March 25, Schwarzenberg setting out from Vitry and Blücher from Châlons-sur-Marne, with Yorck and Kleist to the west approaching Lizy, and another Prussian corps encircling the French at Soissons and Compiègne. On that same day both Marmont and Mortier were defeated and sent flying from La Fère-Champenoise, their shattered corps precipitating toward Paris.
When they reached the capital, Joseph placed the remnants of their troops at the foot of Montmartre, where the final defense of the capital would take place. Joseph took up his command post high atop that hill with brother Jérôme at his side, a sight to discourage even the most optimistic of commanders.
For all his bright, confident words, in mid-March Napoleon had dispatched a special courier to Joseph enjoining him “under no circumstances to permit the Empress and the King of Rome to fall into the hands of the enemy...If the enemy should advance on Paris with such superior forces as to render all resistance impossible, then send the Regent, my son, the highest officials, dignitaries, and the ministers, and Baron Bouillerie with the treasure, to the Loire. Do not leave my son’s side,” he concluded with apocalyptic menace, “and just remember that I should prefer to see him at the bottom of the Seine than in the hands of the enemies of France. The fate of Astyanax, suffered as a Greek prisoner, always struck me as the most wretched of all in history.” Then for the first time in many years, he signed his letter, “Your affectionate brother, Napoleon.”
By March 28 the sense of inevitable disaster pervaded every quarter of Paris, although Napoleon had announced his intention of turning around and coming directly back to save the capital. That evening an emergency council was convened at the Tuileries, including the highest officials of the empire, the ministers, and the president of the Senate. There was only one question on the agenda: whether the Empress should leave Paris with her son, or remain here. Although the majority at first insisted on her remaining, when Joseph revealed Napoleon’s own handwritten orders for her to depart, they acquiesced, as they always did. Marie-Louise herself made the ultimate decision to leave the next morning.
The lights burned all night as orders were given to prepare a couple of dozen carriages and the necessary teams of horses for the morrow, while maids and ladies-in-waiting worked until dawn packing. Under Méneval’s supervision, the emperor’s head archivist spent the same night burning important documents and sensitive correspondence in the fireplace, while deep in the cellars of the Tuileries the most valuable jewels and a sizable quantity of gold were being packed and brought up.
By daybreak the carriages were drawn up in the courtyard, Marie-Louise ready by seven. At first everyone talked quickly, nervously, followed by “a painful silence,” embarrassed perhaps by their own relief at being able to escape. Joseph had gone out with Jérôme and Louis once again to study the military situation around the capital and still had not returned when War Minister Clarke sent an officer to the Empress urging her immediate departure. The advance guard of the Prussian army had already been spotted outside the city walls. Still they did not leave, the empress postponing the decision hour after hour. Then her three-year-old-son put up a terrific row, screaming, “I don’t want to leave my house!” kicking all the way into the courtyard.
Just before noon everyone was finally aboard the coaches, and as Joseph still had not returned, Marie-Louise gave one of the most difficult orders of her life, to abandon the capital and proceed to Tours. Ten heavy green berlins, the imperial arms on the doors, followed by dozens of carriages carrying grand dignitaries of the realm, ministers, palace personnel, army officers, servants, and baggage, pulled out of the Carrousel through the Pont-Royal Gate, turning in the direction of the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées, as some eighty or so bystanders watched “this cortège in mournful silence, as one might a passing funeral procession.” And indeed, Méneval commented, “they were in fact watching the funeral of the Empire.”
The night was passed at Rambouillet. They continued on to Chartres the following day, where one of Napoleon’s few remaining aides-de-camp, General Dejean, announced that the emperor was heading a column of troops to defend Paris. But in fact Marshal Marmont, while arguing vehemently with Marshal Mortier, was then in the midst of following Joseph’s order to surrender the French capital to the Austrians on the thirtieth. Marmont and his eleven thousand men were allowed to keep their arms and leave the capital for Essonnes, to the southwest. A few thousand men holding off a couple of hundred thousand troops — it would have meant a bloodbath and the destruction of the city. Everyone accused Marmont, but he made the only intelligent choice possible. Meanwhile Hortense had left with her children to join Josephine at her castle of Navarre in Normandy.
On March 31, on reaching Vendôme, Marie-Louise received another special courier from Napoleon. With only a light cavalry escort he had passed through Juvisy near the village of La Cour de France at 10:30 A.M. on the thirtieth, when he had come upon General Belliard at the head of a column of French soldiers coming from Paris. It was Belliard who informed him of Joseph’s order to capitulate and of the subsequent surrender of Marmont. Paris lost! He was too late after all. This changed everything. After roundly cursing both Joseph and the war minister, Napoleon gathered his wits about him a
nd ordered Foreign Minister Caulaincourt to continue on to the capital “to present himself to the Allied sovereigns [and]...to negotiate a truce or peace treaty,” while sending a messenger to Marie-Louise to change direction and head for Blois. Then turning his carriage, Napoleon set out for Fontainebleau at 3:00 A.M., where he arrived at the crack of dawn.
Marie-Louise and the king of Rome arrived at Blois on April 2, followed shortly thereafter by Joseph, Jérôme, and Louis. Prefect Baron Christiani made spacious quarters available for the empress within the security of the ancient prefecture buildings.
Placards had appeared throughout Paris announcing the empress’s departure. Meanwhile Prince Talleyrand, who for months had been corresponding with the comté de Lille (later Louis XVIII), the eldest brother of the late Louis XVI and hence heir to the throne, preparing the way for the Bourbon Restoration, was now convening a special session of the Senate to authorize a provisional committee (including Talleyrand, General Beurnonville, the duc de Dalberg, Senator Jaucourt, and Abbé Montesquiou) to replace the defunct imperial regime. (It was this same Abbé Montesquiou who soon became famous for his exclamation, “Won’t someone get rid of this little man for us!”) Back at his mansion Talleyrand also persuaded the czar, now his house guest, and the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm to refuse to negotiate with Napoleon “or with any member of his family.” The Corps Législatif, still stung by their rough treatment last December, quickly supported Talleyrand and the Senate’s actions.
Not far away, at his office in the Foreign Ministry, Armand de Caulaincourt learned of the arrival that March 31 of the victorious Allied armies through the Pantin Gate at eleven that morning, preceded by the Russian Imperial Guard, wending their way to the Rue Royale and the Champs-Elysées. There Czar Alexander and Friedrich Wilhelm, followed by the colorful and surprisingly orderly Cossacks, rode past in a solemn procession taking many hours as the tens of thousands of foreign troops filled the boulevards. “The most mournful silence reigned,” Caulaincourt remarked, “anxiety and fear were seen on every face.” But instead of the rapine, looting, and slaughter expected by the Parisians, “there were only orderly columns of well-disciplined troops. The Allies were most exemplary,” he added, every soldier wearing a white armband to distinguish the Allies (in their variety of uniforms and colors) from the French. “Vivent les souverains!” some shouted, “Vivent les Alliés! Vivent nos libérateurs!” mingled with a few “Vive le roi! [Louis XVIII]” and “Vive Napoléon!” “Intrigues and treason” had already made fast inroads among the conquered French, who were ready for anything. Although thousands had already fled the city to the south and west, the roads filled with panic-stricken refugees, the vast majority who remained were gradually filled with a sense of relief.
It was not simply that the troops were restrained, thanks to the presence of their sovereigns, but something far deeper, more fundamental. After nearly fifteen years of Napoleonic warfare, after the massive conscription that had literally obliterated an entire generation, leaving not one family untouched, the fighting had ended. There was to be no more war. And this Caulaincourt openly acknowledged. “I must admit, that there was general unhappiness everywhere [among the French] that Napoleon had pushed events to the point that foreign armies were now marching down the boulevards of Paris,” but at the same time they were relieved, as the full significance of this dramatic change in their lives sank in.
In the negotiations that ensued, “the greatest opposition that I encountered with the monarchs was their adamancy against Napoleon himself and any wish to accord him and his dynasty any rights whatsoever,” Caulaincourt noted, and his task would indeed prove fruitless, so engrained was the bitterness of the whole of Europe against Bonaparte. But even as the Cossacks pitched their tents along the Champs-Elysées, extending back into the Bois de Boulogne, Foreign Minister Caulaincourt stuck to his painful task, negotiating with little leverage with the czar, Foreign Minister Nesselrode, Prince von Schwarzenberg, and the Prussians.
Although the Allies were at first tempted to continue their pursuit of Napoleon and his forces, Caulaincourt, employing all his skill and powers of persuasion, delayed and then stopped them. “Are you going to let one hundred thousand Austrians get killed in order to put the Bourbons on the throne of your emperor’s daughter and grandson?” he argued with Schwarzenberg. Lyons had already fallen, Augereau retreating to Valence, while the Fleur de Lys had been flying over royalist Bordeaux since March 12. Reims had fallen on the thirteenth. Soult, already besieged in Toulouse, would shortly see its surrender to Viscount Wellington on April 10. Daily all public officials were turning against Napoleon, like jackals, denouncing the man who had placed them in office and, in many instances, brought them riches. The tide was turning overnight. There would be no further need of fighting, Caulaincourt assured the Allies.
Meanwhile the French vented their anger on the man who had brought all this evil upon them:
Inhabitants of Paris, your officials would be betraying you and the country if, through vile personal considerations, they compromised their voices and conscience, which cry out to them that you owe all the woes which have befallen you to one man and one man alone. It is he who, year after year, has decimated your families by his continuous conscription...who has closed the very seas to us, who has destroyed our national industry, who has seized the cultivators of our fields, our workers from their factories.
This proclamation on April 2 by the General Council of the Seine did not have to mention the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. The people, the legislators, and the leaders of society all stared in the direction of Fontainebleau.
The man now directing the opposition — preparing both Friedrich Wilhelm and Czar Alexander, and finally the reluctant, easygoing Austrian emperor, Franz I, along with the French Senate itself, not merely to overthrow Napoleon Bonaparte and his once mighty First Empire but to demand unconditional surrender — was none other than Talleyrand. Caulaincourt’s brave diplomatic battle to save Napoleon had failed.
Dismayed, Napoleon instructed Caulaincourt that if he could not save his own crown, then at least he should save the regency for Empress Marie-Louise on behalf of their son. But the Allies would never allow that. A boy with his father’s blood in his veins would be at their throats on reaching manhood. There would be more warfare, more conquests, more conscription, the destruction of hundreds of additional towns, villages, and cities across the face of Europe. The apocalypse would inevitably repeat itself.
On April 2 the Senate, under Talleyrand’s leadership, officially voted the overthrow of Napoleon “and of his entire family.” As Prince von Schwarzenberg plainly told Caulaincourt: “It’s all over now. There is nothing he can do about it...He brought it all upon himself. We warned him...I complained to France, I complained to you. As for the Emperor he desired this wretched state of affairs. He has only himself to blame for it.”
In fact on April 1 the czar had written to Napoleon, informing him there was nothing to negotiate about. Napoleon retaliated by threatening to march on Paris. Marshals Berthier, Ney, Oudinot, Lefebvre, and Macdonald argued with him, but Napoleon refused to see reality. Then Caulaincourt and Maret attempted to persuade him. “The army will obey me,” Napoleon insisted. “No!” snapped an impatient Ney. “From now on it will obey only its commanders, us.” “Our horses can go no farther,” Macdonald pointed out. “We don’t have enough ammunition for even one more skirmish,” and if Napoleon were to attack the Allies, who had proved remarkably lenient thus far, they would take it out on France, on the French people. “The whole of France will be destroyed,” Macdonald persisted, the others in full agreement. Finally after hours of heated argument, Napoleon gave in. They would lay down their arms.
“Born a soldier, I won’t need a throne. I can revert to being just a plain citizen again. My happiness does not depend on grandeur. I wanted to see a great, powerful France; I want that above all else.” Then he added ominously, “I would rather leave the throne, abandon it, than sign
a shameful peace treaty.” He veered in one direction, then another; he had been doing so for days now. In spite of Austria’s betrayal, Marie-Louise’s father “does not wish to dethrone his beloved daughter and grandson...But men are blind, so blind! It is their hatred that is guiding their actions today, and nothing else. In the present frenzy, reason and political requirements are no longer listened to.”
Then he would revert to war as the only solution, keeping Caulaincourt up night after night, till dawn itself, arguing, trying to convince him. “He seemed to think that he could alter the situation and change the outcome yet by marching against the enemy and attacking them before Paris...And I saw for myself that there were still many young officers who wanted to fight one more big battle, to save face and the army’s honor. He wanted to fight the last battle to avenge himself, he told me, against the shameful conduct of the Parisians.” By now Caulaincourt had had enough. “I did not hide from the Emperor the fact that whatever he did, he had to act quickly, there was no time to lose. The Army was exhausted, but if he were to fight it would have to be today, or else fall back on the Loire, surrender and abdicate.”
“We shall be fighting for the honor of France,” Napoleon went off on another tangent, “to prove that the French are not a people to accept the dictates of mere Cossacks.” Then he tore into his ministers and officials, Fouché, Talleyrand, Dalberg, and especially Clarke for his “incompetent defense of the capital.” He was so unstable that Caulaincourt grew very anxious, not knowing what to expect. Then the next day Napoleon ordered his troops into the Cour du Cheval Blanc and addressed them: “Soldiers! The enemy got to Paris three days ahead of us, making them masters of the city. We must chase them away. Swear before me now to conquer or to die, to make the tricolor cocarde respected, that cocarde with which we have lined the roads of Europe with honor and glory for these past twenty years!”
