Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  At noon the next day, with even the most loyal of his ministers – Lavalette, Savary and Caulaincourt – arguing that it was now unavoidable, Napoleon abdicated for the second time, dictating the document ‘with that rapidity of determination which was characteristic of his peculiar organisation on the field of battle’.14 ‘Frenchmen!’ it began,

  In starting the war to uphold national independence, I relied on the gathering of all efforts, all wills, and the support of all national authorities; I had reason to hope for success, and I braved all the declarations of the Powers against me. Circumstances appear to have changed. I offer myself in sacrifice to the hatred of the enemies of France … My political life is over, and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon II, emperor of the French. The current ministers will form an interim government council. The interest I am passing to my son leads me to invite the Chambers to organize, without delay, Regency by law. All must unite for public salvation and to remain an independent nation.15

  Napoleon still hoped that he would be called upon by the legislature to lead the armies of France against the invading Allies, but if the incoming provisional government didn’t require his services, he told Lavalette, he intended to live as a private citizen in the United States.16 As America had only recently made peace with Britain after three years of war, it is perfectly possible that he would have been allowed to retire there by the US government if he had been able to get there. Lavalette records that once Napoleon had abdicated, ‘he remained calm during the whole day, giving his advice on the position the army was to take, and on the manner [in which] the negotiations with the enemy were to be conducted.’17

  The provisional government, of which Fouché became president on June 24, accepted the abdication gratefully, appointed Macdonald to command France’s armies, put Lafayette in charge of the National Guard, with Oudinot as his second-in-command, and allowed Carnot to keep his old job as minister of the interior. Talleyrand became foreign minister for the fourth time.18 When it was announced in the Journal de l’Empire that ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ had gone to Malmaison, the change in nomenclature struck people forcibly, for if even the foremost Bonapartist paper no longer described him in imperial terms he must indeed have fallen. Yet some ultra-loyalists were still holding out: Colonel Baron Paul-Alexis de Menil of the Army of the Rhine was fighting in the Seltz Forest with his 37th Line Demi-Brigade eight days after the battle of Waterloo, and some towns such as Givet, Charlemont, Longwy, Mézières, Charleville and Montmédy did not capitulate until August and September.

  Shortly before he left Paris for the last time, Napoleon said farewell to an agitated and emotional Vivant Denon. Putting his hands on Denon’s shoulders, he said: ‘My dear friend, let’s not get soppy; in a crisis like this one has to behave with sang froid.’19 With his descriptions of Egypt and the Egyptian campaign, designs of bronze commemorative medals, encouragement of the Empire style in art and stewardship of the Louvre, Denon had done more than anyone else besides Napoleon himself to advance the cultural aspects of Bonapartism. He was one of the many non-soldiers of distinction who regretted Napoleon’s downfall.

  A man of lesser self-confidence might have had an escape route planned. Now, between his departure for Malmaison with Hortense, Bertrand and Maret on June 25 and his surrender to the British on July 15, Napoleon did something entirely out of character: he vacillated. As the Allies and Bourbons approached Paris for a second restoration, and the Prussians sent out cavalry patrols further afield, his options started to narrow. While at Malmaison he applied to the provisional government for a passport to go to America, and asked for two frigates to take him there from Rochefort.20 This was absurd: the Royal Navy, which was blockading the port with the seventy-four-gun HMS Bellerophon, would not have respected a passport issued to Napoleon by Fouché’s government or anyone else.21 On June 26 Napoleon received Marie Walewska at Malmaison, where they said goodbye.

  On the 29th Napoleon was told by Fouché’s emissaries, Decrès and Boulay de la Meurthe, that the government had released two frigates, the Saale and Méduse, for his use, and that since the Prussians were approaching he needed to leave Malmaison. Pausing only to visit the room in which Josephine had died, and to say goodbye to his mother and Hortense for the last time, he left the house with Bertrand and Savary at 5.30 p.m. (Ferdinand, Napoleon’s premier chef, chose not to go with him as he had not been paid what he had been promised when he went to Elba.) ‘If I had gone to America,’ Napoleon later mused, ‘we might have founded a State there.’22 Yet on July 2, by which time he was at Niort in the Deux-Sèvres department, he was still undecided what to do and his companions were divided about whether he should join up with the army at Orleans or try to smuggle himself aboard an American merchant ship lying eight miles offshore.23

  Instead Napoleon installed himself at the maritime prefecture of Rochefort and spent twelve days trying to work out how the Saale, the Méduse and a twenty-gun corvette and a brig could somehow get past Bellerophon. When Captain Philibert of the Méduse refused to take part in any attack, two young naval officers, Lieutenant Genty and Ensign Doret, volunteered to take Napoleon across the Atlantic in a small sailing boat, for which offence they would be scratched from the French Navy List until the fall of the Bourbons in 1830.24

  On July 5 Joseph arrived at Rochefort and generously offered to exchange identities with his brother, since they looked alike.25 Instead of grasping his moment, Napoleon again hesitated. When the Bourbons formally returned to power three days later he lost control over the frigates. By then Admiral Sir Henry Hotham had stationed Royal Navy vessels from Les Sables to the Gironde on the lookout for him. Napoleon also turned down several other risky possibilities, such as escaping at night in a Danish ship. By the 9th he was reviewing troops on the Île d’Aix and being cheered by the local populace, but sleeping on the Saale with the Bellerophon anchored near by.

  Napoleon sent Savary and a chamberlain, the Marquis de Las Cases, to the Bellerophon on July 10 to negotiate the terms of his surrender with her thirty-eight-year-old captain, Frederick Maitland. He needed to avoid capture by the Bourbons – whose flag would be hoisted in Rochefort on July 12 – and the Prussians, as both would have executed him. He later said that he ‘could not bring himself to submit to receive any favours from the Emperor of Austria, after knowing the manner in which he had taken part against him’.26 Negotiations were renewed on July 14, this time conducted by Las Cases and General Charles Lallemand, commander of the Chasseurs à Cheval at Waterloo. Maitland stated that Napoleon would be well treated in England, where the weather was better than he imagined.27 This was taken by Napoleon as meaning that he would be given asylum as a guest of the British rather than being treated as a prisoner-of-war, but that was an absurd construction to put on the casual words of a naval officer who had no power to make any formal agreement. Indeed, Maitland made it clear that he had no authority to make any promises beyond a safe passage to English waters.28 Napoleon could even then have taken Joseph’s advice and gone overland to a different port further south – there might still be alternatives in the Gironde – but instead he said goodbye to his brother on the 13th. He now preferred dignity and a measure of safety to the risk of another maritime flight such as those he had taken from Corsica, Egypt and Elba.

  At around midnight on the 14th, Napoleon wrote a letter to the Prince Regent. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ it began, ‘Exposed to the factions which divide my country and the enmity of the European Powers, I have ended my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to seat myself at the hearth of the British people. I put myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness as the most powerful, the most constant and most generous of my enemies.’29 For once Napoleon’s classical education had failed him, for the great Athenian general Themistocles had actually joined the Persians against his native Greeks, which was not at all what Napoleon was proposing. But he was right about Britain’s constancy. In 1815 alone, Britain subsidized no f
ewer than thirty European Powers, from the greatest – such as Prussia at £2.1 million, Russia at £2 million and Austria at £1.6 million – to Sicily at £33,333.30 Although Austria had spent 108 months fighting against France, Prussia 58 months and Russia 55 months, Britain was at war with her for a total of 242 months between 1793 and 1815. The Royal Navy blockaded France for two decades, and sank the French battle fleet at Trafalgar; British troops fought for six years in the Iberian peninsula between 1808 and 1814, Wellington not taking a day’s leave throughout the entire period. They also landed expeditionary forces in Egypt in 1801, Calabria (where they won the battle of Maida) in 1806, Copenhagen in 1807, Walcheren (disastrously) in 1809, and Bergen-op-Zoom in Holland (also defeated) in 1814. Even when almost the whole of the rest of Europe (except Portugal and Sicily) came to terms with Napoleon after Tilsit, the British kept the flame of resistance to his hegemony alight.

  Calling a meeting of advisors, Napoleon said, ‘I’m not acquainted with the Prince Regent, but from all I have heard of him I cannot help placing reliance on his noble character.’31 Here, too, his information was faulty, as the Prince Regent had one of the most ignoble characters of any British sovereign. ‘There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow-creatures than this deceased king,’ opined The Times when he died in 1830. ‘What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow? … If he ever had a friend – a devoted friend in any rank of life – we protest that the name of him or her never reached us.’32 The Prince Regent’s generosity was confined to his tailors, decorators and mistresses. Napoleon had nothing he wanted and so the imperial supplicant never received a reply. He was perhaps hoping for a gentlemanly imprisonment such as Lucien’s had been in Worcestershire, or perhaps on one of the country estates of the Whig aristocrats he had met on Elba.

  Napoleon boarded the Bellerophon at 8 a.m. on Saturday, July 15, 1815 and surrendered to Captain Maitland. He decently allowed his liaison officer with the provisional government, General Beker, not to go with him, and thus to avoid any possible future accusations of having betrayed Napoleon to the British.33 ‘The deepest sadness showed on every face,’ recalled his valet Marchand, ‘and when the British gig arrived to take the Emperor on board, the most heartrending cries were heard’ from officers and sailors alike, who shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ across the water until he reached Bellerophon.34 Some trampled on their hats in despair. As he arrived, Bellerophon’s marines stood to attention and sailors manned the yardarms, but Napoleon didn’t receive a salute because Royal Navy regulations stated it was too early in the day for one. His first words to Maitland, on removing his hat, were: ‘I come on board your ship to place myself under the protection of the laws of England.’35 The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were finally over.

  Maitland gave Napoleon his own captain’s cabin, and when he appeared on deck again, he showed him around the ship. Napoleon asked whether Maitland thought he had ever had a chance of escape, but the British captain assured him that a seventy-four-gun ship like the Bellerophon was a match for three frigates, and so the odds on escape were ‘much against’.36 As they went around, Napoleon tapped a midshipman on the head and pinched his ear good-naturedly, asking the bosun, Manning, about his duties. He ‘looked quite at ease’, according to another midshipman, George Home, ‘and as completely at home as if he had been going on a pleasure trip on one of his own imperial yachts’.37 He quickly won over everyone on board. One officer wrote that ‘his teeth were finely set, and as white as ivory, and his mouth had a charm about it that I have never seen in any human countenance’. Maitland himself was to admit:

  It may appear surprising that a possibility could exist of a British officer being prejudiced in favour of one who had caused so many calamities to his country, but to such an extent did he possess the power of pleasing that there are few people who could have sat at the same table as him for nearly a month, as I did, without feeling a sensation of pity, allied perhaps to regret, that a man possessed of so many fascinating qualities, and who had held so high a station in life, should be reduced to the situation in which I saw him.38

  During the journey to England, Napoleon ‘showed no depression of spirits’ and was treated with the formal dignities of a head of state. He let Maitland and Admiral Hotham, who went aboard soon after the surrender, see his portable library and 30-inch-wide camp bed, asked lots of questions in broken, almost unintelligible, English, and said that had Charles James Fox lived, ‘it would never have come to this’.39 At dinner on the second night he patted Maitland on the head, saying, ‘If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find you in our way.’40

  The question of how to deal with their prisoner was a tricky one for the British. The Hundred Days following his return from Elba had cost almost 100,000 men killed or wounded on all sides, and no repetition could be risked.41 On July 20 Lord Liverpool wrote to the foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, who was in Vienna, to tell him how the cabinet viewed matters:

  We are all very decidedly of the opinion that it would not answer to confine him in this country. Very nice legal opinions might arise on the subject, which would be particularly embarrassing … He would become the object of curiosity immediately, and possibly of compassion in the course of a few months, and the circumstances of his being here, or indeed anywhere in Europe, would contribute to keep up a certain degree of ferment in France … St Helena is the place in the world best calculated for the confinement of such a person … the situation is particularly healthy. There is only one place … where ships can anchor, and we have the power of excluding neutral ships altogether … At such a place and such a distance, all intrigue would be impossible; and, being so far from the European world, he would soon be forgotten.42

  Napoleon made some over-optimistic remarks in his career, but so did his enemies.

  Napoleon saw France for the last time on July 23, casting ‘many a melancholy look at the coast’ but making few observations.43 After they had anchored at Torbay on the English south coast the next day, he immediately became an irresistible ‘object of curiosity’ for sightseers, some of whom came down from as far as Glasgow for a glimpse of him – indeed the Bellerophon had to put out her boats around the ship to keep them at bay. He went out on deck and showed himself at the gangways and stern windows in order to please the public, saying that Torbay reminded him of Portoferraio. Maitland noted that Napoleon, ‘whenever he observed any well-dressed women, pulled his hat off, and bowed to them’.44

  At Plymouth on the 27th Napoleon enjoyed even greater celebrity status; three days later Maitland estimated that as many as a thousand pleasure boats had collected around the ship, averaging eight people each. Meanwhile Napoleon was ‘often falling asleep on the sofa, having within these two or three years become very lethargic’, a curious comment for a man who had known him for only twelve days.45 This agreeable limbo ended at 10.30 a.m. on July 31, however, when Admiral Lord Keith and Sir Henry Bunbury, the under-secretary of state for war, arrived on Bellerophon to inform Napoleon – whom they addressed as ‘General Bonaparte’ – of his intended fate on St Helena, about which he had been forewarned by reading the British press. They told him that he could take three officers and twelve domestic staff with him, though not Savary or General Lallemand, who both would be imprisoned on Malta for, respectively, the murder of the Duc d’Enghien and betraying the Bourbons.

  Napoleon replied to Keith (either with Gallic splendour or ridiculous histrionics, according to taste) by declaring that ‘his blood should rather stain the planks of the Bellerophon’ than that he should go to St Helena, and that the decision ‘would throw a veil of darkness over the future history of England’.46 He added that the climate would kill him in three months. After Keith and Bunbury had left, Napoleon told Maitand: ‘It is worse than Tamerlaine’s iron cage. I would prefer being delivered up to the Bourbons. Among other insults … they style
me General; they may as well call me Archbishop.’47 Some of the more hot-headed of his staff agreed that dying on St Helena would be ‘very ignoble!’ and ‘Better be killed defending ourselves, or set fire to the powder magazine.’ That same night General Montholon stopped Bertrand’s hysterical and depressed English-born wife Fanny from drowning herself, by pulling her back through a porthole from which she was attempting to jump.48

  Notwithstanding the despatch of another letter to the Prince Regent protesting ‘I am not a prisoner, I am a guest of England’, around noon on August 7 Napoleon was transferred to the eighty-gun HMS Northumberland, commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn (one of the commanders who had burned down Washington the previous year) for the 4,400-mile journey to St Helena.49 He was accompanied by an entourage of twenty-six people willing to go to the other end of the earth with him; several more, such as his sister Pauline and Méneval, applied to go but were turned away by the British authorities. Along with General Henri Bertrand and his clearly reluctant wife and their three children, there was Montholon, his pretty wife Albine and their three-year-old son Tristan, the Marquis Emmanuel de Las Cases (who had fine secretarial skills and spoke good English, though he pretended not to) and his thirteen-year-old son, as well as General Gaspard Gourgaud, the valets Marchand and Noverraz, Napoleon’s valet/bodyguard ‘Mamluk Ali’, his groom and coachman the brothers Achille and Joseph Archambault, a footman called Gentilini, his maître d’hôtel Francheschi Cipriani, the butler and pastry-chef Piéron, the cook Le Page, a Corsican usher-barber Santini and Rousseau the lamplighter, who doubled as a toymaker. There were also four servants of the Montholons and Bertrands.50 When Napoleon’s doctor, Louis Maingault, refused to go, the Bellerophon’s surgeon, the Irishman Barry O’Meara, took his place. All but Napoleon were stripped of their swords, and Cockburn also confiscated 4,000 gold napoleons from them, allowing them little more than pocket money with which to play cards.51 (Nonetheless, eight members of the entourage managed to conceal money-belts hiding a total of a quarter of a million francs, which would be worth £5,000 on St Helena.52)