Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  For the rest of his life, Napoleon went over the circumstances of Marmont’s treachery again and again. Marmont was, he said, with slight but pardonable exaggeration, ‘a man whom he had brought up from the age of sixteen’.97 For his part, Marmont said Napoleon was ‘satanically proud’, as well as given to ‘negligence, insouciance, laziness, capricious trust and an uncertainty as well as an unending irresolution’.98 Napoleon was certainly proud, definitely not lazy, and if he was capriciously trusting, the Duc de Ragusa had been a prime beneficiary. ‘The ungrateful wretch,’ Napoleon said, ‘he will be more unhappy than me.’ The word ragusard was adopted to mean traitor, and Marmont’s old company in the Guard was nicknamed ‘Judas company’. Even three decades later, when he was an old man living in exile in Venice, children used to follow him about, pointing and shouting, ‘There goes the man who betrayed Napoleon!’99

  29

  Elba

  ‘I conclude my work with the year 1815, because everything which came after that belongs to ordinary history.’

  Metternich, Memoirs

  ‘True heroism consists of being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge to the combat.’

  Napoleon on board HMS Northumberland, 1815

  Once it became clear that Ney, Macdonald, Lefebvre and Oudinot had no stomach for a civil war, and the Allies had informed Caulaincourt on April 5 that they would give Napoleon the lifetime sovereignty of the Mediterranean island of Elba off Italy, the Emperor signed a provisional abdication document at Fontainebleau for Caulaincourt to use in his negotiations.1 ‘You wish for repose,’ he told the marshals. ‘Well then, you shall have it.’2 The abdication was only for himself and not for his heirs, and he intended Caulaincourt to keep it secret as he would ratify it only once a treaty – covering Elba and granting financial and personal security for Napoleon and his family – was signed. Yet of course the news quickly leaked out, and the palace emptied as officers and courtiers left to make their peace with the provisional government. ‘One would have thought,’ said State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère of the exodus, ‘that His Majesty was already in his grave.’3 By April 7 the Moniteur didn’t have enough space in its columns to print all the proclamations of loyalty to Louis XVIII that had been made by Jourdan, Augereau, Maison, Lagrange, Nansouty, Oudinot, Kellermann, Lefebvre, Hullin, Milhaud, Ségur, Latour-Maubourg and others.4 Berthier was even appointed to command one of Louis XVIII’s corps of Guards.5 ‘His Majesty was very sad and hardly talking,’ Roustam recorded of these days.6 After his stay at the Jelgava Palace in Latvia, where he had written to Napoleon asking for his throne back in 1800, Louis XVIII had moved to Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, England, in 1807, from where he now prepared to move back to France in order to reclaim his throne, as soon as he received the news that Napoleon had abdicated.

  Yet even denuded of an officer corps and general staff, Napoleon could still have precipitated a civil war had he wished. On April 7 rumours of his abdication prompted the 40,000-strong army at Fontainebleau to leave their billets at night and parade with arms and torches crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, ‘Down with the traitors!’ and ‘To Paris!’7 There were similar scenes at the barracks in Orleans, Briaire, Lyons, Douai, Thionville and Landau, and the white flag of the Bourbons was publicly burned in Clermont-Ferrand and other places. Augereau’s corps was close to mutiny, and garrisons loyal to Napoleon attempted risings in Antwerp, Metz and Mainz. In Lille the troops were in open revolt for three days, actually firing on their officers as late as April 14.8 As Charles de Gaulle was to observe: ‘Those he made suffer most, the soldiers, were the very ones who were most faithful to him.’9 Struck by these protestations of loyalty, the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, warned the secretary for war, Lord Bathurst, of ‘the danger of Napoleon’s remaining at Fontainebleau surrounded by troops who still, in a considerable degree, remain faithful to him’. This warning finally prompted the Allies to sign the Treaty of Fontainebleau, after five days of negotiation, on April 11, 1814.10

  Caulaincourt and Macdonald arrived there from Paris with the treaty the next day, which now only required Napoleon’s signature for its ratification. He invited them to dinner, noting the absence of Ney, who had stayed in the capital to make his peace with the Bourbons.11 The treaty allowed Napoleon to use his imperial title and gave him Elba for life, making generous financial provisions for the whole family, although Josephine’s outrageously generous alimony was cut to 1 million francs per annum. Napoleon himself was to receive 2.5 million francs per annum and Marie Louise was given the Italian duchies of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla.12 Napoleon wrote to her on April 13, saying: ‘You are to have at least one mansion and a beautiful country … when you tire of my Island of Elba and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I am older and you still young.’ He added: ‘My health is good, my courage unimpaired, especially if you will be content with my ill-fortune and if you think you can still be happy in sharing it.’13 He had not yet appreciated that the rationale for a Habsburg marrying a Bonaparte had been that he was Emperor of France; now that he was to be merely Emperor of Elba the desirability of the match collapsed. Getting hold of a book on the island he told Bausset, ‘The air there is healthy and the inhabitants are excellent. I shall not be very badly off, and I hope that Marie Louise will not be very unhappy either.’14 Yet only two hours before General Pierre Cambronne and a cavalry detachment arrived at Orleans on April 12 with orders from Napoleon to take her and the King of Rome the 54 miles to Fontainebleau, an Austrian delegation from Metternich took her and her retinue away to the chateau of Rambouillet, where she was told that her father would join her. At first she insisted that she could only leave with Napoleon’s permission, but she was persuaded to change her mind easily enough, although she wrote to Napoleon that she was being taken against her will. It was not long before she gave up any plans she might have had to rejoin him, and went instead to Vienna. She had no intention of being not very unhappy.

  For all his optimism in his letter to Marie Louise, on the night between the 12th and 13th, after dinner with Caulaincourt and Macdonald, Napoleon attempted to commit suicide.15 He took a mixture of poisons ‘the size and shape of a clove of garlic’ that he had carried in a small silk bag around his neck since he was nearly captured by the Cossacks at Maloyaroslavets.16 He did not try any other means of suicide, not least because Roustam and his chamberlain, Henri, Comte de Turenne, had removed his pistols.17 ‘My life no longer belonged to my country,’ was Napoleon’s own later explanation:

  the events of the last few days had again rendered me master of it – ‘Why should I endure so much suffering?’ I reflected, ‘and who knows that my death might not place the crown on the head of my son?’ France was saved. I hesitated no longer, but leaping from my bed, mixed the poison in a little water, and drank it with a sort of feeling of happiness. But time had taken away its strength; fearful pains drew forth some groans from me; they were heard, and medical assistance arrived.18

  His valet Hubert, who slept in the adjoining room, heard him groaning, and summoned Yvan the doctor, who induced vomiting, possibly by forcing him to swallow ashes from the fireplace.19

  Maret and Caulaincourt were also called during the night. Once it was clear that he wasn’t going to die, Napoleon signed the abdication the next morning ‘without further hesitation’ on a plain pedestal table in the red and gold antechamber now known as the Abdication Room. ‘The Allied powers having declared that the Emperor Napoleon was the only obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe,’ it stated, ‘the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and there is no personal sacrifice, even that of life, that he would not be ready to make in the interest of France.’20

  When Macdonald went to the Emperor’s apartments to collect the ratified treaty at 9 a.m. on April 13, Caulaincourt and Maret were still there. Macdonald found Napoleon ‘seated before the fire
, clothed in a simple dimity [lightweight cotton] dressing-gown, his legs bare, his feet in slippers, his head resting in his hands, and his elbows resting on his knees … his complexion was yellow and greenish.’21 He merely said he had been ‘very ill all night’. Napoleon was fulsome towards the loyal Macdonald, telling him: ‘I did not know you well; I was prejudiced against you. I have done so much for, and loaded with favours, so many others who have abandoned and neglected me; and you, who owe me nothing, have remained faithful to me!’22 He gave him Murad Bey’s sword, they embraced, and Macdonald left to take the ratified treaty to Paris. They never saw each other again.

  After the attempted suicide, Roustam fled Fontainebleau, later saying he feared that he might be mistaken for a Bourbon or Allied assassin if Napoleon succeeded in killing himself.23

  On April 15 it was decided that generals Bertrand, Drouot and Pierre Cambronne would accompany Napoleon to Elba, with a small force of six hundred Imperial Guardsmen, the Allies having promised to protect the island from ‘the Barbary Powers’ – that is the North African states – under a special article of the treaty. (Barbary pirates were rife in that part of the Mediterranean.) The next day four Allied commissioners arrived at Fontainebleau to accompany him there, although only the British commissioner, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, and the Austrian, General Franz von Koller, would actually be living on the island. Napoleon got on well with Campbell, who had been wounded at Fère-Champenoise when a Russian, mistaking him for a French officer, lanced him in the back while another sabred him across the head, even though he had called out lustily, ‘Angliski polkovnik!’ (English colonel). To his delight he was ordered by Castlereagh ‘to attend the late chief of the French Government to the island of Elba’ (a wording that indicates the uncertainty that already prevailed over Napoleon’s exact status).24

  Napoleon read the Parisian newspapers at Fontainebleau. Fain recalled that their abuse ‘made but slight impression upon him, and when the hatred was carried to a point of absurdity it only forced from him a smile of pity’.25 He told Flahaut that he was pleased not to have agreed to the Châtillon peace terms in February: ‘I should have been a sadder man than I am if I had to sign a treaty taking from France one single village which was hers on the day when I swore to maintain her integrity.’26 This refusal to renege on one iota of la Gloire de la France was to be a key factor in his return to power. For the present, Napoleon told his valet Constant: ‘Ah well, my son, prepare your cart; we will go and plant our cabbages.’27 The inconstant Constant had no such intention, however, and after twelve years’ service he absconded on the night of April 19 with 5,000 francs in cash. (Savary had orders to hide 70,000 francs for Napoleon – a good deal more than the Banque de France’s governor’s annual salary.28)

  Meeting Napoleon on the 17th, Campbell, who spoke French well, wrote in his diary:

  I saw before me a short active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell. He was dressed in an old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red top-boots, unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely upon his upper lip and breast. Upon his becoming aware of my presence, he turned quickly towards me, and saluted me with a courteous smile, evidently endeavouring to conceal his anxiety and agitation by an assumed placidity of manner.29

  In the quick-fire series of questions that Campbell came to know well, Napoleon asked about his wounds, military career, Russian and British decorations and, on discovering that Campbell was a Scot, the poet Ossian. They then discussed various Peninsular War sieges, as Napoleon spoke in complimentary terms about British generalship. He inquired ‘anxiously’ about the tragically unnecessary battle of Toulouse, which had been fought between Wellington and Soult with more than 3,000 casualties each side on April 10, and ‘passed high encomiums’ on Wellington, asking after ‘his age, habits, etc’ and observing, ‘He is a man of energy. To carry on war successfully, one must possess the like quality.’30

  ‘Yours is the greatest of nations,’ Napoleon told Campbell. ‘I esteem it more than any other. I have been your greatest enemy – frankly such; but am no longer. I have wished likewise to raise the French nation, but my plans have not succeeded. It’s all destiny.’ (Some of this flattery might have stemmed from his desire to sail to Elba in a British man-of-war rather than in the French corvette, Dryade, that he had been allocated, partly perhaps on account of pirates and partly because he may have feared assassination at the hands of a royalist captain and crew.)31 He concluded the interview cordially with the words: ‘Very well, I am at your disposal. I am your subject. I depend entirely on you.’ He then gave a bow ‘free from any assumption of hauteur’.32 It is easy to see why many Britons found Napoleon a surprisingly sympathetic figure. During the negotiations over the treaty, Napoleon had instructed Caulaincourt to inquire as to whether he might come to Britain for his exile, comparing the society of Elba unfavourably with ‘a single street’ of London.33

  When on April 18 it was discovered that the new minister of war, none other than the same General Dupont who had surrendered his corps at Bailén in Spain in 1808, had ordered that ‘all the stores belonging to France must be removed’ before Napoleon arrived on Elba, the Emperor refused to leave Fontainebleau on the grounds that the island would be left vulnerable to attack.34 He nonetheless sent off his baggage the next day – though not his treasury of 489,000 francs, which would travel with him – and gave away books, manuscripts, swords, pistols, decorations and coins to his remaining supporters at the palace. He was understandably irritated when he heard about the Tsar’s visit to Marie Louise at Rambouillet, complaining that it was ‘Greek-like’ for conquerors to present themselves before sorrowing wives. (Perhaps he was thinking of the family of Darius received by Alexander the Great.) He also railed against the visit the Tsar had paid to Josephine. ‘Bah! He first breakfasted with Ney, and after that, visited her at Malmaison,’ he said. ‘What can he hope to gain from this?’35

  When Berthier’s former aide-de-camp General Charles-Tristan de Montholon visited the palace in mid-April with a (somewhat belated) plan to escape to the upper Loire, he ‘found no one in those vast corridors, formerly too small for the crowd of courtiers, except the Duke of Bassano [Maret], and the aide-de-camp Colonel Victor de Bussy. The whole court, all his personal attendants … had forsaken their unfortunate master, and hastened towards Paris.’36 This wasn’t wholly true; still in attendance to the end were generals Bertrand, Gourgaud and Jean-Martin Petit (the commander of the Old Guard), the courtiers Turenne and Megrigny, his private secretary Fain, his interpreter François Lelorgne d’Ideville, his aides-de-camp General Albert Fouler de Relingue, Chevalier Jouanne, Baron de la Place and Louis Atthalin, and two Poles, General Kosakowski and Colonel Vousowitch. Caulaincourt and Flahaut were absent but still loyal.37 Montholon attached himself to Napoleon’s service, and never left it. Although loyalty and gratitude in political adversity are rare, Napoleon still had the capacity to inspire it, even when he had nothing to offer in return. ‘When I left Fontainebleau for Elba I had no great expectation of ever coming back to France,’ he later recalled. All that these last faithful attendants could expect was the animosity of the Bourbons.38 Nor was the spirit of revenge confined to the Bourbons: Count Giuseppe Prina, Napoleon’s finance minister in Italy, was dragged from the Senate in Milan and lynched over four hours by the mob, after which tax documents were stuffed into the corpse’s mouth.

  One of the greatest scenes of the Napoleonic epic took place when he left Fontainebleau for Elba at noon on Wednesday, April 20, 1814. The huge White Horse courtyard of the palace – now known as the Cour des Adieux – provided a magnificent backdrop, with its huge double staircase a proscenium, and the Old Guard drawn up in ranks a suitably appreciative and lachrymose audience. (As the courier had not yet arrived from Paris with assurances that Dupont’s malicious order had been rescinded, the commissioners were not even certain Napoleon would actually leave,
and were relieved when at 9 a.m. the grand marshal of the palace, General Bertrand, confirmed that he would.) Napoleon first met the Allied commissioners individually in one of the reception rooms upstairs in the palace, speaking angrily to Koller for over half an hour about his continued forced separation from his wife and son. In the course of the conversation ‘tears actually ran down his cheeks’.39 He also asked Koller whether he thought the British government would allow him to live in Britain, allowing the Austrian to make the deserved rejoinder: ‘Yes, Sire, for as you never made war in that country, reconciliation will become the more easy.’40 When Koller later said that the Congress of Prague had provided a ‘very favourable opportunity’ for peace, Napoleon replied, ‘I have been wrong, maybe, in my plans. I have done harm in war. But it is all like a dream.’41

  After shaking hands with the soldiers and few remaining courtiers and ‘hastily descending’ the grand staircase, Napoleon ordered the two ranks of grognards to form a circle around him and addressed them in a firm voice, which nonetheless, in the recollection of the Prussian commissioner, Count Friedrich von Truchsess-Waldburg, occasionally faltered with emotion.42 His words recorded by Campbell and several others bear repetition at some length, both because they represent his oratory at this great crisis of his life and because they indicate the lines of argument he was to employ when he later tried to construct the historical narrative of this period:

  Officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers of the Old Guard, I bid you adieu! For twenty years I have found you ever brave and faithful, marching in the path of glory. All Europe was united against us. The enemy, by stealing three marches upon us, has entered Paris. I was advancing in order to drive them out. They would not have remained there three days. I thank you for the noble spirit you have evinced in that same place under these circumstances. But a portion of the army, not sharing these sentiments, abandoned me and passed over to the camp of the enemy … I could with the three parts of the army which remained faithful, and aided by the sympathy and efforts of the great part of the population, have fallen back upon the Loire, or upon my strongholds, and have sustained the war for several years. But a foreign and civil war would have torn the soil of our beautiful country, and at the cost of all these sacrifices and all these ravages, could we hope to vanquish united Europe, supported by the influence which the city of Paris exercised, and which a faction had succeeded in mastering? Under these circumstances I have only considered the interests of the country and the repose of France. I have made the sacrifice of all my rights, and am ready to make that of my person, for the aim of all my life has been the happiness and glory of France. As for you, soldiers, be always faithful in the path of duty and honour. Serve with fidelity your new sovereign. The sweetest occupation will henceforth be to make known to posterity all that you have done that is great … You are all my children. I cannot embrace you all so I will do so in the person of your general.43