The Bourbons’ most self-defeating policies were towards the army. The tricolour, under which French soldiers had won victories across Europe for over two decades, was replaced by the white flag and fleur-de-lys, while the Légion d’Honneur was downgraded in favour of the old royal orders (one of which the grognards promptly nicknamed ‘the bug’).84 Senior army posts were awarded to émigrés who had fought against France, and a new Household Guard superseded the Imperial Guard, while the Middle Guard, which Napoleon had instituted in 1806 and which boasted many proud battle honours, was abolished altogether.85 Large numbers of officers were retired by the despised Dupont and 30,000 more put on half-pay, while aggressive searches continued for draft evaders.86* ‘My first hope came when I saw in the gazettes that at the banquet at the Hôtel de Ville there were the wives of the nobility only,’ Napoleon later recalled, ‘and none of those of the officers of the army.’87 In gross defiance of orders, many in the army openly celebrated Napoleon’s birthday on August 15, 1814, with cannon-fire salutes and cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as sentries presented arms only to officers wearing the Légion d’Honneur.
Of course it was not only the Bourbons’ mistakes which helped decide Napoleon to risk everything to try to regain his throne. Emperor Francis’s refusal to allow his wife and son to rejoin him was another, and the fact that his expenses were running at two and a half times his income. There was also sheer ennui; he complained to Campbell of being ‘shut up in this cell of a house, separated from the world, with no interesting occupation, no savants with me, nor any variety in my society’.88† Another consideration was paragraphs in the newspapers and rumours from the Congress of Vienna that the Allies were planning forcibly to remove him from Elba. Joseph de Maistre, the French ambassador to St Petersburg, had nerve-wrackingly suggested the Australian penal colony of Botany Bay as a possible destination. The exceptionally remote British island of St Helena in the mid-Atlantic had also been mentioned.89
On January 13, 1815, Napoleon spent two hours with John Macnamara and was delighted to hear that France was ‘agitated’.90 He admitted that he had stayed in Moscow too long and said ‘I made a mistake about England in trying to conquer it.’ He was adamant that his role in international affairs was over. ‘History has a triumvirate of great men,’ Macnamara stated, ‘Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon.’ At this, Napoleon looked steadfastly at him without speaking, and Macnamara said ‘he thought he saw the Emperor’s eyes moisten.’ It is what he had wanted people to say ever since he was a schoolboy. Eventually Napoleon replied: ‘You would be right if a ball had killed me at the battle of Moscow but my late reverses will efface all the glory of my early years.’91 He added that Wellington was ‘a brave man’ but that he should not have been made ambassador. Napoleon laughed frequently during the conversation, as he did when told that the Prince Regent had welcomed his divorce from Josephine, as it had set a precedent for him to divorce the wife he hated, Caroline of Brunswick. Macnamara asked if he feared assassination. ‘Not by the English; they are not assassins,’ he said, but he conceded that he did have to be cautious with regard to the nearby Corsicans.92 As he left, Macnamara told Bertrand that the Emperor ‘must be a very good-humoured man and never in a passion’. Bertrand replied with a smile: ‘I know him a little better than you.’93
By the beginning of February Campbell noted that Napoleon had ‘suspended his improvements as regards roads and the finishing of his country residence’, all on grounds of expense, and had also attempted to sell Portoferraio’s town hall.94 He again warned Castlereagh that ‘If the payments promised to him at the time of abdication were withheld, and the want of money pressed upon him, I considered him capable of any desperate step.’95 Tsar Alexander later lambasted Talleyrand for not paying the funds due to Napoleon: ‘Why should we expect him to keep his word with us when we did not do so with him?’96
When Napoleon’s former secretary Fleury de Chaboulon visited him in February 1815 he brought a message from Maret that France was ripe for his return. Napoleon asked about the attitude of the army. When forced to cry ‘Vive le Roi!’, Fleury told him, the soldiers would often add in a whisper ‘de Rome’. ‘And so they still love me?’ Napoleon asked. ‘Yes, Sire, and may I even venture to say, more than ever.’ This accorded with what Napoleon was hearing from a large number of French sources and from his network of agents in France, including people like Joseph Emmery, a surgeon from Grenoble who helped plan his coming expedition and to whom he left 100,000 francs in his will. Fleury said the army blamed Marmont for the Allied victory, which prompted Napoleon to claim: ‘They are right; had it not been for the infamous defection of the Duke of Ragusa, the Allies would have been lost. I was master of their rear, and of all their resources; not a man would have escaped. They would have had their [own] 29th Bulletin.’97
On February 16 Campbell left Elba in HMS Partridge ‘upon a short excursion to the continent for my health’. He needed to visit either his ear doctor in Florence or his mistress, Countess Miniacci, or possibly both.98 This gave Napoleon his chance, and the next day he ordered L’Inconstant to be refitted, stocked for a short voyage and painted the same colours as Royal Navy vessels.99 On Campbell’s arrival in Florence, Castlereagh’s deputy at the British foreign office, Edward Cooke, told him: ‘When you return to Elba, you may tell Bonaparte that he is quite forgotten in Europe: no one thinks of him now.’100 At much the same time, Madame Mère was telling her son: ‘Yes, you must go; it is your destiny to do so. You were not made to die on this desert island.’101 Pauline, ever the most generous-hearted of his siblings, gave him a very valuable necklace that could be sold to help pay for the coming adventure. When Napoleon’s valet Marchand tried to console her by saying that she would soon be reunited with her brother, she presciently corrected him, saying that she would never see him again.102 A year later, when asked whether it was true that Drouot had tried to dissuade him from leaving Elba, Napoleon answered that it was not. In any case, he retorted curtly, ‘I do not allow myself to be governed by advice.’103 The night before Napoleon left he had been reading a life of Emperor Charles V of Austria, which he left open on the table. His elderly housekeeper kept it untouched, along with ‘written papers torn into small bits’ that were strewn about. When British visitors questioned her soon afterwards, she gave them ‘unaffected expressions of attachment, and artless report of his uniform good humour’.104
Napoleon left Elba on L’Inconstant on the night of Sunday, February 26, 1815. Once the 300-ton, 16-gun ship had weighed anchor, the 607 Old Guard grenadiers aboard were told they were headed for France. ‘Paris or death!’ they cried. He took generals Bertrand, Drouot and Cambronne, M. Pons the inspector of mines, a doctor called Chevalier Fourreau, and a pharmacist, M. Gatte. They were attempting to invade a great European country with eight small vessels, the next three largest of which were only 80, 40 and 25 tons, carrying 118 Polish lancers (without their horses), fewer than 300 men of a Corsican battalion, 50 gendarmes, and around 80 civilians (including Napoleon’s servants) – a total force of 1,142 men and 2 light cannon.105 A moderate breeze carried them to France, and they narrowly missed two French frigates on the way. Napoleon spent a lot of time on deck, chatting to officers, soldiers and sailors. The commander of the lancers, Colonel Jan Jermanowski, recorded:
Lying down, sitting, standing, and strolling around him, familiarly, they asked him unceasing questions, to which he answered unreservedly and without one sign of anger or impatience, for they were not a little indiscreet, they required his opinions on many living characters, kings, marshals and ministers, and discussed notorious passages of his own campaigns, and even of his domestic policy.106
During this he spoke openly of ‘his present attempt, of its difficulties, of his means, and of his hopes’.
L’Inconstant sailed into Golfe-Juan on the southern French coast on Wednesday, March 1, unloading Napoleon’s force by 5 p.m. ‘I have long weighed and most maturely considered the project,’ Napoleon harangued h
is men just before they went ashore, ‘the glory, the advantages we shall gain if we succeed I need not enlarge upon. If we fail, to military men, who have from their youth faced death in so many shapes, the fate which awaits us is not terrific: we know, and we despise, for we have a thousand times faced the worst which a reverse can bring.’107 The following year he reminisced about the landing: ‘Very soon a great crowd of people came around us, surprised by our appearance and astonished by our small force. Among them was a mayor, who, seeing how few we were, said to me: “We were just beginning to be quiet and happy; now you are going to stir us all up again.” ’108 It was a sign of how little Napoleon was seen as a despot that people could speak to him in that way.
Knowing that Provence and the lower Rhône valley were vehemently royalist, and that for the moment he needed above all else to avoid any Bourbon armies, Napoleon resolved to take the Alpine route to the arsenal of Grenoble. His instinct was proved right when the twenty men under Captain Lamouret whom he sent off to Antibes were arrested and interned by the local garrison. He hadn’t the troops to attack Toulon, and was conscious of the need to move faster than the news of his arrival, at least until he could augment his force. ‘That is why I hurried on to Grenoble,’ he later told his secretary General Gourgaud. ‘There were troops there, muskets, and cannon; it was a centre.’109 All he had was the capacity for speed – horses were soon bought for the lancers – and a genius for propaganda. On landing he issued two proclamations, to the French people and the army, which had been copied out on board ship by hand by as many of the men as were literate.
The army proclamation entirely blamed the 1814 defeat on the treason of Marmont and Augereau: ‘Two men from our ranks have betrayed our laurels, their country, their prince, their benefactor.’110 He turned his back on bellicosity, declaring: ‘We must forget that we were masters of nations, but we must not suffer anyone meddling in our business.’ In the proclamation to the people, Napoleon said that after the fall of Paris, ‘My heart was torn apart, but my spirit remained resolute … I exiled myself on a rock in the middle of the sea.’111 It was only because Louis XVIII had sought to reintroduce feudal rights and rule through people who had for twenty-five years been ‘enemies of the people’ that he was acting, he claimed, despite the fact that the Bourbons had certainly not yet got around to reviving feudalism. ‘Frenchmen,’ he continued, ‘in my exile I heard your complaints and wishes; you were claiming that government of your choice, which alone is legitimate. You were blaming me for my long sleep, you were reproaching me for sacrificing to my repose the great interests of the State.’ So, ‘amid all sorts of dangers, I arrived among you to regain my rights, which are yours.’112 It was tremendous hyperbole, of course, but Napoleon knew how to appeal to soldiers who wanted to return to glory and full pay, better-off peasants who feared the return of feudal dues, millions of owners of the biens nationaux who wanted protection from the returning émigrés and churchmen who wanted their pre-1789 property back, workers hit by the flood of English manufactured goods and imperial civil servants who had lost their jobs to royalists.113 The Bourbons had failed so comprehensively in less than a year that even after the defeats of 1812 and 1813 Napoleon was able to put together a fairly wide-ranging domestic coalition.
On the day he landed Napoleon bivouacked on the dunes at Cannes not far from the present-day Croisette, opposite an old chapel that is today the church of Notre-Dame. At two o’clock the next morning he joined Cambronne’s advance guard, which included unmounted lancers and the two cannon. Instead of going to Aix, the Provençal capital, he took the road through Le Cannet which climbs 15 miles up to Grasse, which – since there were only five working muskets in his town – the mayor surrendered. After resting till noon, Napoleon abandoned his carriages and cannon, mounted his supplies on mules, and took the mountain road northwards. There was snow and ice on the higher parts, where some mules slipped and fell, and at points the road narrowed to single file. He walked on foot among his grenadiers, who affectionately teased him with nicknames such as ‘Notre petit tondu’ (Our little cropped one) and ‘Jean de l’Epée’ (Jack of the Sword).114
The ‘Route Napoléon’ was instituted by the French government in 1934 to encourage tourism, and impressive stone eagles were placed along it, of which a handful still survive today. Every town and village Napoleon went through has a sign proudly announcing the fact, and it is possible to see many of the places where he slept on what became a legendary journey north. Starting in the Alpes-Maritimes department, he marched through Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Hautes-Alpes, and reached Grenoble in the Isère by the night of March 7, travelling 190 miles in only six days. He went on foot and on horseback across high plateaux and plains, over bare rocks and verdant pasture, past Swiss-style villages, over 6,000-foot snow-capped mountains with vertiginous drops and down winding Corniche-style roads. Today the Route Napoléon is considered one of the great cycling and motorcycling roads of the world.
After Saint-Vallier, Napoleon passed through the villages of Escragnolles, where he called another halt, Séranon, where he slept at the Château de Brondel, the country house of the Marquis de Gourdon, and Le Logis-du-Pin, where he was served broth. Reaching Castellane by noon on March 3 he lunched at the sous-préfecture (today in the Place Marcel Sauvaire), where Cambronne demanded 5,000 rations of meat, bread and wine from the mayor, a few days’ provisions for his still tiny force of less than a thousand. (Campbell thought Cambronne ‘a desperate, uneducated ruffian’, so he was just the right man for such an adventure.115) Napoleon spent that night in the hamlet of Barrême, where he slept in the house of Judge Tartanson on the main road. The next day he reached Digne-les-Bains and rested at the Petit-Palais hotel, where he was joined by some veterans of his Grande Armée. The people of Digne begged the pro-Bourbon commander of the Basses-Alpes department, General Nicolas Loverdo, not to turn their town into a battleground, and finding himself short of loyal troops he didn’t. Napoleon then pushed on and spent the night in the Château de Malijai, which today is the town hall.*
The next morning, Sunday, March 5, Napoleon halted at the village of Volonne, by local legend drinking at a fountain dating back to Henri IV. He faced his first real test at the massively imposing castle of Sisteron, where the guns of the great citadel there could easily have destroyed the sole bridge across the Durance. Instead he lunched with the mayor and notables in the Bras d’Or hotel and went on his way shortly afterwards. From the top of the citadel’s bell-tower it is possible to see up and down the River Durance for 40 miles; Napoleon would have had nowhere else to cross. Either due to an oversight, economies or because its commander wanted an excuse not to destroy the bridge, the castle had no gunpowder, and from then on whenever Cambronne arrived ahead of Napoleon to cajole, negotiate, bribe and, if necessary, threaten the mayors of each town, no bridge was destroyed.
Napoleon later recalled that when he reached Gap ‘Some of the peasants took five-franc pieces stamped with my likeness out of their pockets, and cried, “It is he!” ’116* ‘My return dispels all your anxieties,’ he wrote in a proclamation from Gap to the inhabitants of the Upper and Lower Alps, ‘it ensures the conservation of all property.’ In other letters he specifically played on the fears of what might happen under the Bourbons (but hadn’t yet) when he stated that he opposed those ‘who wish to bring back feudal rights, who wish to destroy equality between different classes, cancel sales of biens nationaux’.117 He left Gap at 2 p.m. on March 6. From there the ground rises steeply, up to the Col Bayard at 3,750 feet. That night Napoleon slept in the gendarmerie in the main street of Corps.
Easily the most dramatic moment of the journey came the following day a few hundred yards south of the town of Laffrey, where Napoleon encountered a battalion of the 5th Line in a narrow area between two wooded hills on what is today called La Prairie de la Rencontre. According to Bonapartist legend, Napoleon, standing before them well within musket range, with only his far smaller number of Imperial Guardsmen prote
cting him, threw back his iconic grey overcoat and pointed to his breast, asking if they wanted to fire on their Emperor. In testament to the continuing power of his charisma, the troops threw down their muskets and mobbed him.118 Napoleon had previously been informed by two officers of the pro-Bonapartist attitudes of the demi-brigade, but a single shot from a royalist officer could have brought about a very different outcome. Savary, who wasn’t present, told a slightly less heroic version, in which Napoleon’s conversational style and habit of question-asking saved the day.
The Emperor approached; the battalion kept a profound silence. The officer who was in command ordered them to aim their muskets: he was obeyed; if he had ordered Fire we cannot say what would have happened. The Emperor didn’t give him time: he talked to the soldiers and asked them as usual: ‘Well! How are you doing in the 5th?’ The soldiers answered ‘Very well, Sire.’ Then the Emperor said: ‘I’ve come back to see you; do some of you want to kill me?’ The soldiers shouted ‘Oh! That, no!’ Then the Emperor reviewed them as usual and thus took possession of the 5th Regiment. The head of the battalion looked unhappy.119
When Napoleon himself told the story he said he had adopted a jovial, old-comrade attitude towards the troops: ‘I went forward and held out my hand to a soldier, saying, “What, you old rascal, were you about to fire on your Emperor?” “Look here,” he answered, showing me that his musket was not loaded.’120 He also put the success down to having his veterans with him: ‘It was the bearskin helmets of my Guards which did the business. They called to memory my glorious days.’121 Whether Napoleon had been declamatory or conversational at that tense moment, he showed great nerve. Laffrey also represented a watershed, because for the first time regular soldiers, rather than peasants or National Guardsmen, had come over to his side.
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