Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  He then kissed Petit on both cheeks, and declared, ‘I will embrace these eagles, which have served us as guides in so many glorious days’, whereupon he embraced one of the flags three times, for as long as half a minute, before holding up his left hand and saying: ‘Farewell! Preserve me in your memories! Adieu, my children!’ He then got into his carriage and was taken off at a gallop as the Guard band played a trumpet and drum salute entitled ‘Pour l’Empereur’. Needless to say, officers and men wept – as did even some of the foreign officers present – while others were prostrated with grief, and all the others cried ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

  By nightfall the convoy of fourteen carriages with a cavalry escort had reached Briare, nearly 70 miles away, where Napoleon slept in the post-house. ‘Adieu, chère Louise,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘love me, think of your best friend and your son.’44 Over the next six nights, Napoleon slept at Nevers, Roanne, Lyons, Donzère, Saint-Cannat and Luc, arriving at Fréjus on the south coast at 10 a.m. on April 27. The 500-mile journey was not without danger in the traditionally pro-royalist Midi, and on different occasions Napoleon had to wear Koller’s uniform, a Russian cloak and even a white Bourbon cockade in his hat to avoid recognition. At Orange his carriage had several large stones thrown through the window; at Avignon the Napoleonic eagles on the carriages were defaced and a servant was threatened with death if he didn’t shout ‘Vive le Roi!’ (A year later, Marshal Brune was shot there by royalist assassins and his body thrown into the Rhône.) On April 23 he met Augereau near Valence. The old marshal, who had been one of Napoleon’s first divisional commanders in Italy in 1796, had removed all his Napoleonic orders except for the red ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur. He now ‘abused Napoleon’s ambition and waste of blood for personal vanity’, telling him bluntly that he ought to have died in battle.45

  Campbell had arranged for Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Ussher to pick Napoleon up on the frigate HMS Undaunted at Fréjus. When he arrived there, Napoleon was met by Pauline, who proposed to share his exile. Faithless to her husbands, she nonetheless showed great fidelity to her brother in his downfall. He had wanted to leave France on the morning of the 28th but missed the tide, ate a bad langoustine at lunchtime which induced vomiting, and didn’t sail until 8 p.m. He insisted upon and was given a sovereign’s twenty-one-gun salute when he went aboard, despite the Royal Navy’s convention not to fire salutes after sunset.46 (The Treaty of Fontainebleau had confirmed that he was a reigning monarch and was entitled to the accompanying formalities.) In a poignant echo, he left from precisely the same jetty that he had arrived at when returning from Egypt fifteen years before.47 Although Captain Ussher checked that his sword was loose in its scabbard in case he needed to defend his charge from the crowd, he found instead that Napoleon was cheered as he left, which Ussher found ‘in the highest degree interesting’.48 Throughout the journey, Campbell noted, ‘Napoleon conducted himself with the greatest … cordiality towards us all … and the officers of his suite observed that they had never seen him more at his ease.’49 Napoleon told Campbell that he believed that the British would force a commercial treaty on the Bourbons, who as a result ‘will be driven out in six months’.50 He asked that they land at Ajaccio, telling Ussher anecdotes of his youth, but Koller begged the captain not to consider it, possibly fearing the havoc Napoleon might wreak if he escaped into the mountains there.51

  At 8 p.m. on May 3, Undaunted anchored at Elba’s main harbour of Portoferraio, and Napoleon disembarked at 2 p.m. the next day. When he stepped ashore he was welcomed by the sub-prefect, local clergy and officials carrying the ceremonial keys of the island, but most importantly by cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and ‘Vive Napoléon!’ from the populace.52 They raised the flag he had designed – white with a bee-studded red band running diagonally across it – over the fort’s battery, and, in an amazing feat of memory, Napoleon recognized a sergeant in the crowd to whom he had given the cross of the Légion on the battlefield of Eylau, who promptly wept.53 After processing to the church for a Te Deum he went to the town hall for a meeting with the island’s principal dignitaries. He stayed in the town hall for the first few days, and then installed himself in the large and comfortable Palazzina dei Mulini overlooking Portoferraio, taking the Villa San Martino, which affords a fine view of the town from its terraces, as a summer residence.* The day after landing he inspected Portoferraio’s fortifications, and the next day its iron mines, which needed to be productive as he would soon be facing a severe cash shortage.

  Napoleon’s financial position was not commensurate with what he considered necessary. In addition to the half a million francs he had brought from France himself, his treasurer Peyrusse delivered an extra 2.58 million and Marie Louise had sent 911,000 francs, giving a total of less than 4 million francs.54 Although the Treaty of Fontainebleau theoretically gave him an annual income of 2.5 million francs, the Bourbons never actually remitted him a centime of it. Revenues from Elba totalled 651,995 francs in 1814 and 967,751 in 1815, yet Napoleon’s civil, military and household expenses amounted to over 1.8 million francs in 1814 and nearly 1.5 million in 1815. He therefore had only enough money to cover another twenty-eight months, although with five valets there were obviously some economies he could make. To make matters worse the Bourbons would sequester the Bonaparte family’s goods and properties in December.55

  When in 1803 Elba had been ceded to France, Napoleon had written of its ‘mild and industrious population, two superb harbours and a rich mine’, but now that he was its monarch he described its 20,000 acres as a ‘royaume d’opérette’ (operetta kingdom).56 Any other sovereign might have relaxed on the charming, temperate, delightful island, especially after the gruelling nature of the previous two years, but such was Napoleon’s nature that he flung himself energetically into every aspect of its life – while always on the lookout for an opportunity to slip past Campbell and return to France should the political situation there favour it. During his nearly ten months on Elba he reorganized his new kingdom’s defences, gave money to the poorest of its 11,400 inhabitants, installed a fountain on the roadside outside Poggio (which still produces cold, clean drinking water today), read voraciously (leaving a library of 1,100 volumes to the municipality of Portoferraio), played with his pet monkey Jénar, walked the coastline along goat-paths while humming Italian arias, grew avenues of mulberry trees (perhaps finally expelling the curse of the pépinière), reformed customs and excise, repaired the barracks, built a hospital, planted vineyards, paved parts of Portoferraio for the first time and irrigated land. He also organized regular rubbish collections, passed a law prohibiting children from sleeping more than five to a bed, set up a court of appeal and an inspectorate to widen roads and build bridges. While it was undeniably Lilliputian compared to his former territories, he wanted Elba to be the best-run royaume d’opérette in Europe.57 His attention to the tiniest details was undimmed, even extending to the kind of bread he wanted fed to his hunting dogs.58

  All this was achieved despite the fact that Napoleon had grown stout. Noting that he was unable to climb a rock on May 20, Campbell wrote that ‘Indefatigable as he is, corpulency prevents him from walking much, and he is obliged to take the arm of some person on rough roads.’59 This didn’t seem to have the same torpor-inducing effect on Napoleon that it does on others, however. ‘I have never seen a man in any situation of life with so much personal activity and restless perseverance,’ Campbell noted. ‘He appears to take so much pleasure in perpetual movement, and in seeing those who accompany him sink under fatigue … After being yesterday on foot in the heat of the sun, from 5 a.m. to 3 p.m., visiting the frigates and transports … he rode on horseback for three hours, as he told me afterwards, “to tire myself out!” ’60

  At noon on Sunday, May 29, 1814, Josephine died of pneumonia at Malmaison. She was fifty and five days earlier had gone out walking in the cold night air with Tsar Alexander after a ball there. ‘She was the wife who would have gone with me to Elba,’ Napoleon
later said, and he decreed two days of mourning. (In 1800 George Washington had got ten.) Madame Bertrand, who told him the news, later said: ‘His face did not change, he only exclaimed: “Ah! She is happy now.” ’61 His last recorded letter to Josephine the previous year had ended: ‘Adieu, my love: tell me that you are well. I’m informed that you are getting as fat as a Norman farmer’s good wife. Napoleon.’62 With this jocular familiarity concluded one of the supposedly great romances of history. She had been living beyond even her enormous income, but had come to terms with her new status as an ex-Empress. Napoleon superstitiously wondered whether it had been Josephine who had brought him luck, noting that his change of fortune had coincided with his divorcing her. By November he was expressing surprise to two visiting British MPs that she could possibly have died in debt, saying, ‘Besides, I used to pay her dressmakers’ account every year.’63

  Madame Mère arrived from Rome to share her son’s exile in early August. Campbell found her ‘very pleasant and unaffected. The old lady is very handsome, of middle size, with a good figure and fresh colour.’64 She dined and played cards with Napoleon on Sunday evenings, and when she complained, ‘You’re cheating, son’, he would reply: ‘You’re rich, mother!’65 Pauline arrived three months later, the only one of his siblings to visit. Napoleon set aside and decorated rooms for Marie Louise and the King of Rome in both his residences, either in a heart-wrenching act of optimism or as a cynical propaganda move, or possibly both. On August 10 Marie Louise wrote to him to say that, although she promised to be with him soon, she had had to return to Vienna in deference to her father’s wishes.66 On August 28, Napoleon wrote the last of his 318 surviving letters to her, from the hermitage of La Madonna di Marciano, on Monte Giove, which featured his typical statistical exactitude: ‘I am here in a hermitage 3,834 feet above sea level, overlooking the Mediterranean on all sides, and in the midst of a forest of chestnut trees. Madame is staying in the village 958 feet lower down. This is a most pleasant spot … I long to see you, and also my son.’ He ended: ‘Adieu, ma bonne Louise. Tout à toi. Ton Nap.’67 But by then Marie Louise had found a chevalier to escort her to Vienna, the dashing one-eyed Austrian general Count Adam von Neipperg, who Napoleon had defeated in Bohemia in the 1813 campaign. Neipperg has been described as ‘skilful, energetic, a thorough man of the world, an accomplished courtier, an excellent musician’.68 In his youth he had run off with a married woman, and was himself married when he was charged with looking after Marie Louise. By September they were lovers.69

  The hermitage of La Madonna di Marciano (which can today be reached after a 3-mile hike up the mountain) is a romantic and secluded spot with fabulous views over the island’s bays and inlets, from where one can see the outlines of both Corsica and mainland Italy. On September 1, Marie Walewska arrived with Napoleon’s four-year-old natural son Alexandre, and they stayed there for a couple of nights with Napoleon. She had divorced her husband in 1812, and now she had lost the Neapolitan estates that Napoleon had given her when he had broken off their affair before marrying Marie Louise. But loyalty drew her to Napoleon, however briefly. For when General Drouot warned Napoleon that island gossip had uncovered his secret – indeed a local mayor had climbed the hill to pay his formal respects to the woman everyone thought was the Empress – Marie had to leave the island.70

  Napoleon gave the first of a series of interviews to visiting British Whig aristocrats and politicians in mid-November, when he spent four hours with George Venables-Vernon, a Whig MP, and his colleague John Fazakerley. In early December he twice met Viscount Ebrington, for a total of six and a half hours, and on Christmas Eve the future prime minister Lord John Russell. Two other Britons, John Macnamara and Frederick Douglas, the latter the son of the British minister Lord Glenbervie, met him in mid-January. All of these intelligent, well-connected and worldly interlocutors marvelled at the grasp of Napoleon’s mind and his willingness to discuss any subject – including the Egyptian and Russian campaigns, his admiration for the House of Lords and his hopes for a similar aristocracy in France, his plans for securing the colonies through polygamy, the duplicity of Tsar Alexander, the ‘great ability’ of the Duke of Wellington, the Congress of Vienna, the mediocrity of Archduke Charles of Austria, the Italians (‘lazy and effeminate’), the deaths of d’Enghien and Pichegru (neither of which he admitted was his fault), the Jaffa massacre (which he said was), King Frederick William (whom he called ‘a corporal’), the relative merits of his marshals, the distinction between British pride and French vanity, and his escape from circumcision in Egypt.71

  ‘They are brave fellows, those English troops of yours,’ he said during one of the encounters, ‘they are worth more than the others.’72 The Britons reported that he ‘talked with much cheerfulness, good humour and civility of manner’ and defended his record, on one occasion pointing out that although he had not burned Moscow, the British had set fire to Washington that August.73 Napoleon may have been trying to make a good impression in anticipation of an eventual move to London, but his intelligence and candour induced his visitors to lower their guard. ‘For my own part,’ he often said, ‘I am no longer concerned. My day is done.’ He also regularly used the expression ‘I’m dead.’74 Yet he asked lots of questions about the popularity of the Bourbons and the whereabouts of various British and French military units in southern France. He was less subtle in questioning Campbell on these subjects, to the point that the commissioner wrote to Castlereagh in October 1814 to warn him that Napoleon might be contemplating a return.75 Yet the Royal Navy’s watch was not increased beyond the lone frigate HMS Partridge, and Napoleon was even allowed a sixteen-gun brig, L’Inconstant, as the flagship of the Elban navy.

  On September 15, 1814 the Great Powers convened the Congress of Vienna at the instigation of Metternich and Talleyrand, where it was hoped all the major disagreements – over the futures of Poland, Saxony, the Rhine Confederation and Murat in Naples – might be settled. After nearly a quarter of a century of war and revolution the map of Europe had to be redrawn, and each of the Powers had desiderata which needed to be accommodated with those of the others to provide the permanent peace that it was hoped would follow a general settlement.76 The fall of Napoleon had reignited some long-standing territorial differences between the Powers, but unfortunately for him, although it stayed in formal session until June 1815, the outlines of agreement on all the major questions were in place by the time he decided to leave Elba in late February.

  Precisely when Napoleon decided to try to retake his throne is unknown, but he watched closely the seemingly endless series of errors the Bourbons made after Louis XVIII’s return – under Allied escort – to Paris in May 1814. Napoleon increasingly believed that the Bourbons would soon experience what he called ‘a Libyan wind’ – a violent sirocco desert wind that reaches hurricane speeds and was then believed to originate in the Libyan Sahara.77 Although the king had signed a wide-ranging Charter guaranteeing civil liberties on his arrival, his government had failed to alleviate fears that they secretly wished to re-establish the Ancien Régime. Indeed, far from it. Louis’ reign was officially recorded as being in its nineteenth year, as if he had ruled France ever since the death of his nephew Louis XVII in 1795 and everything that had taken place since – the Convention, Directory, Consulate and Empire – had been merely an illegal hiatus. The Bourbons had agreed that France should go back to her 1791 borders, thereby shrinking her from 109 departments to 87.78 There were increases in the Ancien Régime-era droits réunis taxes and food prices, and the Catholic Church returned to some of its pre-revolutionary power and prestige, which irritated liberals as well as republicans.79 Official ceremonies were held at Rennes to honour the ‘martyred’ Chouans, and the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were disinterred from the Madeleine cemetery and reinterred with much pomp in the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Although building work resumed at Versailles and the king appointed a ‘premier pousse-fauteuil’, whose sole job it was to push in his chair as he sat
down at the table, pensions were cut, even to wounded veterans.80 Paintings that Napoleon had brought together at the Louvre were removed from it and returned to the occupying powers.

  As Napoleon had predicted, the pre-revolutionary 1786 trade agreement with Britain was reintroduced, reducing tariffs on some British goods and abolishing them on others, thus triggering a new slump for French manufacturers.81 The British government hardly improved matters by choosing Wellington as its ambassador to France.* ‘Lord Wellington’s appointment must be very galling to the army,’ Napoleon told Ebrington, ‘as must the great attentions being shown him by the king, as if to set his own private feelings up in opposition to those of the country.’82 Napoleon later described what he thought the Bourbons ought to have done. ‘Instead of proclaiming himself Louis XVIII he should have proclaimed himself the founder of a new dynasty, and not have touched on old grievances at all. If he had done that, in all probability I should never have been induced to quit Elba.’83