Napoleon the Great
Page 90
After being cheered by crowds at Vizille – where Charles de La Bédoyère brought the 7th Line over to him – taking refreshment at Mère Vigier’s café in Tavernelles and having a by then well-deserved footbath at Eybens, Napoleon entered Grenoble at 11 p.m. on March 7. There the townspeople tore down their own city gates and presented pieces of them to Napoleon as a souvenir of their loyalty. ‘On my march from Cannes to Grenoble I was an adventurer,’ Napoleon later said; ‘in Grenoble I once again became a sovereign.’122 Rejecting an offer to stay at the prefecture, Napoleon displayed his customary genius for public relations by instead staying in room No. 2 of the hotel Les Trois Dauphins in the rue Montorge, which was run by the son of a veteran of his Italian and Egyptian campaigns and was where he had stayed in 1791 when stationed at Valence. (Stendhal stayed in the same room in 1837, out of homage.) Any lack of comfort was made up for in Lyons where he stayed in the archbishop’s palace (today the city library), occupying the same apartments that the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois (later King Charles X) had been forced to leave hastily that same morning. When Napoleon conducted a review of his by now sizeable force in Lyons, he reprimanded a battalion for not manoeuvring well enough. This, he later said, ‘had a great effect; it showed he was confident of his re-establishment’.123 Had he adopted an imploring attitude at that key moment, his men would have spotted it immediately. Instead, even after his defeats and abdication, they were still willing to follow him.
The news of Napoleon’s return reached Paris at noon on March 5 via the Chappe aerial telegraph, but the government kept it secret until the 7th.124 Ney, Macdonald and Saint-Cyr were deputed by Soult, the new war minister, to address the problem, whereupon Ney told Louis XVIII: ‘I will seize Bonaparte, I promise you, and I will bring him to you in an iron cage.’125 Soult’s order to the army stated that only traitors would join Napoleon, and ‘This man is now but an adventurer. His last mad act has revealed him for what he is.’126 And yet, for all this, the only two marshals to fight alongside Napoleon on the battlefield of Waterloo would be Ney and Soult.
On the day Napoleon left Lyons, March 13, the Allies, still in session at the Congress, issued the Vienna Declaration.
By appearing again in France with projects of confusion and disorders, [Napoleon] has deprived himself of the protection of the law and has manifested before the world that there can be neither peace nor truce with him. The Powers consequently declare that Napoleon Bonaparte has placed himself beyond the pale of civil and social relations, and that as an enemy and disturber of the world, he has delivered himself up to public vengeance.127
Napoleon continued northwards, spending the following night at Chalon-sur-Saône, the 15th at Autun, the 16th at Avallon and the 17th in the prefecture at Auxerre. He was greeted by large, enthusiastic crowds and joined by further units of soldiers along the way. He sent two officers in disguise to Marshal Ney, who was in command of 3,000 men at Lons-le-Saunier, telling him that if he changed sides, ‘I shall receive you as I did on the morrow of the battle of the Moskowa.’128 Ney had had every intention of fighting against Napoleon when he left Paris, but he had no wish to start a civil war, even if he could persuade his men to open fire. ‘I was in the midst of storms,’ he later said of his decision, ‘and I lost my head.’129 On March 14 Ney defected to Napoleon with generals Lecourbe and Bourmont (who were both very reluctant) and almost all his troops except for a few royalist officers. ‘Only the Emperor Napoleon is entitled to rule over our beautiful country,’ Ney told his men.130 He later said that the Bonapartist sentiment among the men was overwhelming and he couldn’t ‘hold back the sea with my hands’.131
Napoleon met Ney on the morning of the 18th at Auxerre, but as Ney had brought along a document warning him that he needed ‘to study the welfare of the French people and endeavour to repair the evils his ambition had brought upon him’ it was a cold, workmanlike reunion.132 Instead of treating him as he had ‘on the morrow of the battle of the Moskowa’, Napoleon questioned him about the morale of his troops, the state of feeling of the south-eastern departments and his experiences on the march to Dijon, to which Ney gave brief replies before being ordered to march on Paris.
On the 19th Napoleon lunched at Joigny, reached Sens by 5 p.m. and dined and slept at Pont-sur-Yonne. Then at 1 a.m. on Monday, March 20 he left for Fontainebleau, where he arrived in the White Horse courtyard eleven months to the day after leaving it. At 1.30 that morning the gouty Louis XVIII was bodily lifted into his carriage at the Tuileries – no easy task given his weight – and fled Paris. He went first to Lille, where the garrison seemed hostile, so he crossed into Belgium and then waited upon events from Ghent. With his customary veneration for anniversaries, Napoleon had wanted to enter Paris on the 20th – the King of Rome’s fourth birthday – and sure enough, at nine o’clock that evening he entered the Tuileries once again as de facto emperor of the French.
The courtyard of the Tuileries was packed with soldiers and civilians who had come to witness his return. There are several accounts of what happened next, all agreeing on the din of excitement and the general approval that Napoleon elicited upon his arrival. Colonel Léon-Michel Routier, who had fought in Italy, Calabria and Catalonia, was walking and chatting with comrades-in-arms near the pavilion clock at the Tuileries when
suddenly very simple carriages without any escort showed up at the wicket-gate by the river and the Emperor was announced … The carriages enter, we all rush around them and we see Napoleon get out. Then everyone’s in delirium; we jump on him in disorder, we surround him, we squeeze him, we almost suffocate him … The memory of this unique moment in the history of the world still makes my heart pound with pleasure. Happy who, like me, was the witness of this magical arrival, the result of a road of over two hundred leagues travelled in eighteen days on French soil without spilling one drop of blood.133
Even General Thiébault, who until earlier that day had been in charge of the defence of southern Paris against Napoleon, felt that ‘There was an instantaneous and irresistible outburst … you would have thought the ceilings were coming down … I seemed to have become a Frenchman once more, and nothing could equal the transports and the shouts with which I tried to show the party I was taking part in the homage rendered to him.’134 Lavalette recalled that Napoleon walked up the staircase of the Tuileries ‘slowly, with his eyes half closed, his arms extended before him, like a blind man, and expressing his joy only by a smile’.135 Such was the press of cheering supporters that it was only with difficulty that the door to his apartment could be closed behind him. When Mollien arrived that night to offer his congratulations, he embraced him and said, ‘Enough, enough, my dear, the time for compliments has passed; they let me come as they let them go.’136
After the dramas of the journey from Golfe-Juan, changing the regime in Paris came easily. That first night it was noticed that the fleur-de-lys covering the carpet in the palace’s audience chamber could be removed, and underneath could still be seen the old Napoleonic bees. ‘Immediately all the ladies set to work,’ recalled a spectator of Queen Julie of Spain, Queen Hortense of Holland and their returning ladies-in-waiting, ‘and in less than half an hour, to the great mirth of the company, the carpet became imperial again.’137
30
Waterloo
‘I sensed that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success, and if one is not prepared to take risks when the time is ripe, one ends up doing nothing.’
Napoleon on the Waterloo campaign
‘A general-in-chief should ask himself several times in the day, what if the enemy were to appear now to my front, or on my right, or on my left?’
Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 8
By the time Napoleon went to bed at three o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, March 21, 1815, he had largely reconstituted his government. The Vienna Declaration made it clear that the Allies would not allow him to retain the throne, so he needed to prepare France for invasion,
but he hoped that – unlike in 1814 – ordinary Frenchmen would actively rally to him, having now experienced the Bourbon alternative. To an extent they did; over the next few weeks there were as many recruits as the depots could handle. It was a wrenching moment for Frenchmen to decide where their true loyalties lay. Of the Bonaparte family, Joseph was received with affection by him on the 23rd – Napoleon no longer suspected him of making a move on Marie Louise – Lucien came from his self-imposed exile in Rome and was ‘speedily admitted’ into his presence and forgiven for everything, Jérôme was given the 6th Division to command, Cardinal Fesch returned to France and Hortense became the chatelaine of the Tuileries. Louis and Eugène stayed away, the latter at the behest of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria. Marie Louise remained in Austria, fervently hoping that Napoleon, to whom she had written for the final time on January 1, would be defeated.1 In a letter to a friend of April 6, the infatuated young woman mentioned the exact number of days – eighteen – since she had last seen General Neipperg, and in her last oral message to Napoleon soon afterwards she asked for a separation.2
The unfeigned surprise shown by senior statesmen such as Cambacérès at the news of Napoleon’s return confirms that it was not the result of a widespread conspiracy, as the Bourbons suspected, but of the willpower and opportunism of one man.3 Cambacérès reluctantly went to the justice ministry, complaining ‘All I want is rest.’4 A few – such as the adamant republican Carnot, who went to the interior ministry – joined Napoleon because they genuinely believed his assurances that he would now be acting as a constitutional monarch who respected the civil rights of Frenchmen.* Other ministers, such as Lavalette, were dyed-in-the-wool Bonapartists. Decrès went back to the naval ministry, Mollien to the treasury, Caulaincourt to the foreign ministry and Daru to war administration. Maret became secretary of state, while Boulay de la Meurthe and Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély returned to their key positions in the Conseil and Molé to his old inspectorate of roads and bridges.5 Savary took over the gendarmerie and even Fouché was allowed back into the police ministry – a sign of how indispensable he was despite his chronic untrustworthiness. Overall, Napoleon had gathered easily enough talent and experience to run an efficient administration if the military situation could somehow be squared. When he saw Rapp, who had been given a divisional command by the Bourbons, he playfully (and perhaps a little painfully) punched him in the solar plexus, saying, ‘What, you rogue, you wanted to kill me?’ before making him commander of the Army of the Rhine. ‘In vain he sought to assume the mask of severity,’ Rapp wrote in his posthumously published autobiography, but ‘kind feelings always gained the ascendancy.’6 One of the few people who wrote a letter asking for re-employment to be refused was Roustam. ‘He’s a coward,’ Napoleon told Marchand. ‘Throw that in the fire and never ask me again about it.’7 It was understandable that he should not want as his principal bodyguard someone who had fled Fontainebleau in the night the previous year. His place was taken by Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis, who since 1811 had been dressed by Napoleon as a Mamluk and called Ali, despite his being a Frenchman born in Versailles.
On March 21 the Moniteur, which once again changed its editorial policy the moment he returned to power, printed the name NAPOLEON in capital letters no fewer than twenty-six times in the course of four pages, telling the news of his triumphant return.8 Napoleon rose at six o’clock that morning after only three hours’ sleep, and at 1 p.m. held a grand parade in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Commandant Alexandre Coudreux described Napoleon’s arrival to his son:
The Emperor, on horseback, reviewed all the regiments and was welcomed with the enthusiasm that the presence of such a man inspired in the brave men whom for some days the last government had treated as murderers, Mamluks and brigands. For the four hours that the troops remained under arms, the cries of joy were interrupted only for the few minutes that Napoleon spent addressing the officers and non-commissioned officers gathered around him in a circle with a few of those beautiful, if vigorous phrases that belong to him alone, and that have always made us forget all our ills and defy all dangers! [Cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and ‘Vive Napoléon!’ were] repeated thousands of times, [and] must have been heard throughout the whole of Paris. In our euphoria, we all hugged each other without distinguishing between grade nor rank, and more than fifty thousand Parisians, witnessing such a fine scene, applauded these noble and generous demonstrations with all their hearts.9
Napoleon’s work ethic remained unchanged: in the three months between his return to the Tuileries and the battle of Waterloo he wrote over nine hundred letters, the great majority of them concerned with trying to put France back onto a war footing in time for the coming hostilities. On the 23rd he ordered Bertrand to have various items brought to Paris from Elba, including a particular Corsican horse, his yellow carriage and the rest of his underwear.10 Two days later he was already writing to his grand chamberlain, Comte Anatole de Montesquiou-Fezensac, about that year’s theatre budgets.11
The only marshal besides Lefebvre to report for duty at the Tuileries immediately was Davout, even though he had been shamefully underused in the 1813 and 1814 campaigns, tied up in Hamburg rather than unleashed against France’s enemies. After Napoleon’s abdication he had been one of the few marshals who refused to take the oath of loyalty to Louis XVIII. But Napoleon now made a serious error when he appointed Davout war minister, governor of Paris and commander of the capital’s National Guard, thereby denying himself the services of his greatest marshal on the battlefields of Belgium. Some have speculated that the lack of personal rapport between the two of them might have been behind Napoleon’s decision, or that Napoleon thought he needed Davout in Paris in case of a siege – but if the field campaign was not won decisively and swiftly it wouldn’t matter who was in charge in Paris.12 Napoleon did in fact understand this fully, telling Davout on May 12, ‘The greatest misfortune we have to fear is that of being too weak in the north and to experience an early defeat.’13 On the day of the battle of Waterloo, however, Davout was signing bureaucratic documents about peacetime army pay grades.14 Years later, Napoleon regretted not putting either General Clauzel or General Lamarque in the war ministry instead.15 At the time he inundated Davout with his customary letters, such as one on May 29 when, after an eagle-eyed review of five artillery batteries bound for Compiègne, he wrote, ‘I noticed that several gun caissons didn’t have their little pots of grease or all their replacement parts, as required by order.’16
Of the nineteen marshals on the active list (Grouchy was awarded his baton on April 15) only ten – namely Davout, Soult, Brune, Mortier, Ney, Grouchy, Saint-Cyr, Masséna, Lefebvre and Suchet – declared for Napoleon (or eleven if one counts Murat’s quixotic and, as it turned out, suicidal decision to support the man whom he had been the very first to desert). But it wasn’t until April 10 that Masséna in Marseilles put out a proclamation in favour of ‘our chosen sovereign, the great Napoleon’, and afterwards he did nothing.17 Similarly Saint-Cyr stayed on his estate, and Lefebvre, Moncey and Mortier were too ill to be of any service. (Mortier would have commanded the Imperial Guard but for his severe sciatica.)18 Napoleon assumed that Berthier would rejoin him, and joked that the only revenge he would take would be to oblige him to come to the Tuileries wearing the uniform of Louis XVIII’s Guards. But Berthier left France for Bamberg in Bavaria, where he fell to his death from a window on June 15. Whether this was suicide, murder or an accident – there was a history of epilepsy in the family – is still unknown, but it was most probably the first.19 We can only guess at the internal conflict and despair which may have prompted such a course in Napoleon’s chief-of-staff after nearly twenty years of exceptionally close service. Berthier’s absence over the coming weeks was a serious blow.
Although fourteen marshals had fought in the Austerlitz campaign, fifteen in the Jena campaign, seventeen in the Polish campaign, fifteen in the Iberian campaign, twelve in the Wagram campaign, thirteen in the Russian c
ampaign, fourteen in the Leipzig campaign and eleven in the 1814 campaign, only three – Grouchy, Ney and Soult – were present in the Waterloo campaign. From the small pool available to him, Napoleon needed a battle-tested commander for the left wing of the Army of the North to take on Wellington and he summoned Ney, who joined the army as late as June 11. But the war-weary Ney underperformed badly throughout. On St Helena Napoleon opined that Ney ‘was good for a command of ten thousand men, but beyond that he was out of his depth’.20 His place in charge of the left wing should have been taken by Soult, whom Napoleon appointed chief-of-staff, in which job he too badly underperformed. Instead of appointing Suchet or Soult’s lieutenant, General François de Monthion, chief-of-staff he wasted the former by sending him off to the Army of the Alps and kept Monthion, whom he disliked, in a junior role.
Of the other marshals, Marmont and Augereau had betrayed Napoleon in 1814; Victor stayed loyal to the Bourbons; the hitherto politically unreliable Jourdan was made a peer of France, governor of Besançon and commander of the 6th Military Division, while Macdonald and Oudinot stayed passively neutral. Oudinot, who returned to his home at Bar-le-Duc after his troops had declared for Napoleon, is credited with replying to the Emperor’s offer of employment: ‘I will serve no one, Sire, since I will not serve you.’21