by Mark Braude
The entire armed and naval forces of Elba numbered around 1,750 men, enough to feasibly guard Portoferraio against attack, so long as they stayed clustered there atop the ridge. The rest of the island would have to be left undefended, save for a small garrison at Porto Longone and a few batteries scattered along the coast. Drouot calculated that defense costs would run up to a million francs for the year, eating up half of Napoleon’s yet-to-be-seen pension from the French government.
Campbell was nonplussed by this ragged army. As he watched them at their drills, he thought the Elbans especially ill equipped for military work. They soldiered without enthusiasm and had the habit of losing, or more likely, Campbell suspected, selling, their guns and uniforms. Few islanders joined the corps after the first round of recruitment. “The organization of the military force does not keep pace with Napoleon’s wishes,” wrote Campbell.
It would have been a difficult army to command. There was no chance to win glory or promotion through bravery on the battlefield, unless someone attacked Elba, no foreign enemy to conquer, meaning no way to add to one’s pay through pillage, and no real sense of collective purpose. While its core consisted of veterans of the Old Guard and Polish lancers who had shared long histories together, the force as a whole was made up of Elbans, Corsicans, and other volunteers from farther abroad. A polyglot army was not in itself unusual. Of the six hundred thousand men Napoleon commanded in the Russian campaign, for instance, likely over half hailed from beyond France. But on Elba any divisions stemming from differences in background were exacerbated by the lack of any common tradition, ideal, or clear goal around which to coalesce aside from Napoleon and the promise of steady pay.
People on the continent were already swapping jokes about the fearsome army of Elba. One Florentine illustrator pictured a parade of tuna enlisting for military service at the edge of a desolate marsh, with Portoferraio looming in the background. Fish-soldiers stand on their tails and hold bayonets with their fins, balanced against their fish-shoulders, while a human Drouot, seated next to a human Napoleon, enlists more tuna by drawing lots. Human officers measure one tuna to see if he meets the minimum height requirement, while another less fortunate fish carries a note in its mouth, begging off service due to epilepsy. The caption reads:
New tuna soldiers draw your number
Bonaparte says in a loud voice,
You will get for me new conquests
Transmitting the lightning bolts of my avenging sword
The Magistrate presents himself at the sea shore
And every tuna bows to him
Now that Napoleon had his Old Guard garrisoned and the Inconstant moored in the bay, Campbell had achieved his mission of seeing him safely installed and defended against attack. He’d received no further word from the Foreign Office since leaving Fontainebleau more than a month earlier. With the British ships from Savona unloaded and set to return to their normal duties, it was a logical point for him to leave the island for good. But he felt compelled to stay. His journal offers no specific reasons why. His entry for the day the ships arrived with the Old Guard tells only of how he told Bertrand “that in case either Napoleon himself or others might ascribe any underhand motive to my remaining here, I was ready to quit the island at once should such be his wish.”
If declaring his readiness to leave had been a gambit, it worked. Bertrand relayed Napoleon’s message that the emperor deemed Campbell “indispensable for his protection and security . . . even after the arrival of his troops and baggage.” Campbell asked Bertrand to put this in writing so he could send it to Castlereagh and the next day was handed a letter formally asking him to stay. It explained that a British officer would be helpful in dealing with all the ships that were sure to make contact with the island, and since it remained to be seen if Barbary pirates would try to attack Elba, having a representative of the Royal Navy on hand was vital to its continued defense. The letter closed, “I can only reiterate to Colonel Campbell how much his person and his presence are agreeable to the Emperor Napoleon.”
Campbell gave a copy of the letter to Ussher, who was preparing to leave, without any orders to ever return. There is no record that they discussed whether Campbell, too, might quit the island the next time a British ship came in. For now Campbell was acting entirely on his own initiative, still unclear if he was Napoleon’s jailor, companion, both, or neither.
{ 13 }
A DEATH, A TREATY, AND A CELEBRATION
IN PARIS, THE HAWKERS were back on the boulevards pitching their wares with cries for hotcakes, potatoes, big wheels of cheese from Champagne, rabbit skins, and milk. Metternich remarked that people in the city were already speaking of Napoleon “as if he had ruled in the fourteenth century. . . . Everything is as peaceful as if there had been no war.” Allied diplomats and soldiers capped days of parading with wild nights at the gaming tables and rides in carriages with courtesans, and people joked that the occupiers were spending more in Parisian brothels, shops, and enfers (“hells,” as the city’s gambling dens were known) than the French would ever have to pay out in war reparations. “This capital is as bad as any other big city for business,” a Bavarian prince reported to his king. “We eat, we drink, dance, see the sights and the women, but affairs do not move forward as one would desire.”
On May 29, Empress Joséphine died suddenly at her Malmaison estate, just short of what would have been her fifty-first birthday. Scandalmongers pinned her passing to the failure of her muslin wrap to protect her from an unseasonable chill during a flirtatious walk with Tsar Alexander in the Malmaison gardens during a ball she hosted to celebrate the peace. A few days earlier she’d sent what would be her last letter to Napoleon:
It is only today that I can calculate the full extent of the misfortune of seeing my union with you severed by law. It’s not for the loss of a throne that I mourn for you . . . for that there is no consolation, but I’m saddened by the grief you must have felt in separating yourself from your ancient companions in glory. . . . Ah! Sire, that I cannot fly to you to give you the assurance that exile can only frighten vulgar minds and that, far from diminishing a sincere attachment, Misfortune lends to it a renewed force.
According to one of her friends, Madame Junot, Joséphine had been sincere about wanting to join Napoleon in exile, and told her she wished her ex-husband would “permit my accompanying him to the island of Elba, if Maria Luisa should keep away.” Junot wrote that she talked Joséphine out of going to Elba by asking what kind of reception she expected from her former in-laws, who had always been so cruel to her and were surely heading off there themselves.
The final words from Napoleon that Joséphine would have read, closing a letter he sent to her in late 1813, were, “Goodbye, my friend, let me know you’re well. They say you’re fattening up like a good Norman farm wife. Napoleon.”
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• • •
THE DAY AFTER JOSÉPHINE’S DEATH, representatives of the allies and the French Provisional Government signed the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the war. The terms were good for the losing party. Rather than trying to enforce any major territorial changes, the allies saw France restored roughly to its borders as they were in 1792, returning it to the limits of its old continental territory before these wars. To show how much they wished to distance themselves from the recent past, the allies chose not to seek major war reparations or the return of looted artworks. The French would not have to endure the humiliation of a permanent occupying army, and while they had to demobilize and yield possession of roughly fifty fortresses, they were not forbidden from rebuilding a military force. With the redrawing of borders and some territorial exchanges, more people and land would be put under French control than there had been in the time of Louis XIV.
Talleyrand was happy to let his king take credit for the treaty that he’d done so much to help draft. “No sooner than did our monarchs appear than we had peace,” proclaime
d the Journal des débats after the treaty was signed. A few days later, a long line of carriages snaked east out of Paris. Headed by Tsar Alexander, the cortege carried the last of the allied soldiers away from the French capital, save for a few Russians still convalescing in the southern suburb of Bicêtre, whose hospital’s most notorious inmate had been the Marquis de Sade. The Russians had left their mark on the city. Their word for “quickly,” bistro, for instance, had become the label for any restaurant serving the fast and simple fare that these occupying soldiers preferred.
Castlereagh also left France, sporting a rich tan acquired during the campaign. He carried a copy of the new treaty whose contents were still unknown to the British public. Guns were fired in his honor as he passed each village on his way to London, accompanied by his wife, Emily (who had shocked the other allied diplomats and their wives with her outré outfits in Paris), and their pet bulldog, Venom.
Though he received a standing ovation when he tabled the treaty in the House of Commons, the actual terms of the peace he’d helped to craft proved divisive. His opponents skewered him for allowing the French to maintain a relatively strong military presence and for failing to secure reparations or push France forcefully toward the absolute abolition of the slave trade. Castlereagh’s supporters countered that Britain needed to avoid meddling in French affairs for the sake of future diplomatic and trade relations, and that the lenient treaty terms helped them make the case that the French people had called for a Bourbon restoration independently of British influence. They should congratulate themselves for their generosity in having helped their former enemies to come out of the Napoleonic wreckage stable enough to bring order to Europe and prosperity to their respective overseas empires. As one London journalist put it, “England is never so powerful as when France is strong. When the Continent trembles, her voice is heard. In her true station, she is Captain of the watch.”
For a few days in June, London’s diplomatic work was put on hold so that the peace could be celebrated with a massive festival, which touched every section of what was then the largest city in the world, having just passed the one million mark in population. The entire route from Dover was lit up for the visiting allied sovereigns who went in procession toward London, trailed by thousands of the war wounded, who were cheered and handed drinks by locals along the way. There were fireworks and the dancing of Scottish reels. On the Strand in central London stood an illuminated model of Napoleon at a table making a house of cards, while Wellington, looking over his shoulder, blows them down.
The allied sovereigns and their ministers agreed that they would gather in Vienna that autumn to hammer out the many issues left unresolved by the treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris and by their own internal negotiations prior to Napoleon’s abdication, from the fates of the territories in present-day Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, to islands from the Caribbean to the East Indies of Southeast Asia, to the future of Poland, at that time partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, and the Duchy of Warsaw created by Napoleon as a client state.
There was also the matter of Napoleon himself, and whether his exile on Elba was tenable. Representatives from all nations that had fought in the wars, on either side, would participate in a set of general meetings, and people were confident that all lingering diplomatic matters could be resolved by an intense burst of hard work, and that this Congress of Vienna would last no longer than a few weeks. That the conference would take place in the Habsburg capital signaled how drastically political power in Europe was shifting from Paris to the three “northern courts” of Vienna, Berlin, and Petersburg, as the French never tired of complaining.
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• • •
PEOPLE ACROSS EUROPE MEANWHILE waited for bulletins from France as the Bourbon government was left to firmly establish its control. The French had shown themselves capable of great antimonarchical violence, and after Napoleon’s fall, anything was possible. This wasn’t a generation accustomed to any feeling of permanence. In the fiery years since 1789, France had seen an absolutist monarchy give way to a constitutional monarchy, followed by a First Republic with its National Convention backed by terror, and then on to the Directory with Napoleon as its “sword,” which after Napoleon’s coup gave way to the Consulate and finally the empire. “This quarter century,” wrote Chateaubriand, “equaled many centuries.” Now with the Bourbons, France would be stepping backward and forward at once.
In the event, the transition of power went fairly peacefully. Though some royalists engaged in scattered outbursts of score-settling, the Bourbons themselves pledged to never persecute anyone for past political actions. The columns of the official Moniteur once reserved for praising Napoleon were now devoted, in the same supercilious language, to praising Louis XVIII and his family. As during the Revolution, people found order in a time of transition by coming up with new names for old things. The Lycée Napoléon was reborn as the Lycée Charlemagne; the rue Impériale became the rue de la Paix; the Journal de l’Empire returned with a variation on its pre-Napoleonic name, as the Journal des débats. Writers once censored under the empire now enjoyed relative freedom to unleash their vitriol against the man no longer referred to as Napoleon, but only as Bonaparte, or even better because it was not French, “Buonaparte.” Some people, rather than giving him even the slightest acknowledgment by uttering his name, preferred to talk of the usurper, the ogre, the tyrant, the Corsican, or simply “that gentleman at Elba.”
{ 14 }
A RIDICULOUS NOISE
THE DAY JOSÉPHINE DIED in Paris was a festive one in Portoferraio. Townspeople gathered at the parish church for a morning prayer in honor of Cristino, their patron saint. Napoleon arrived in a golden coach, passing through twinned lines of soldiers on the short ride down from the Mulini palace. He left the service in equally theatrical style, hailed by members of the Guard who had formed a battalion square outside the church doors. Drummers beat a tattoo while shots from the forts matched the clang of church bells.
That evening by the harbor front more carriages, guards, and firepower greeted Napoleon for his reappearance. Ashamed at not having hosted a grand enough occasion to mark his landing in May, the Elbans had elected to turn their customary San Cristino feast into Napoleon’s official welcome banquet. It was a pleasant night except for a bit of tension when Pons toasted to “Liberty, sun of the universe,” a veiled call for Napoleon to return to his republican roots, which had once been genuine, even if he’d embraced that cause out of political pragmatism as much as ideological fervor. On her husband’s signal, Madame Pons capped the speech by firing some small and until-then-ornamental bronze cannons decorating their garden patch not far from the quayside. There is no record of how Napoleon responded to Pons’s jab.
Napoleon complained that his beloved “Paulette” had missed the party. Since the feast was doubling as his official welcome, he’d thought it could be trebled to include a celebration for his sister as well. By Ussher’s report she should have arrived by then, but, unknown to anyone on Elba, a squall had delayed her sailing. Napoleon had considered postponing the banquet but decided that asking his subjects to reschedule their saint’s day was a step too far, even for an emperor.
Conducting a postmortem on the event with Bertrand, Napoleon admitted that while logic dictated that he should have arrived at the chapel on foot alongside his general staff, he’d felt it necessary to make a “ridiculous noise” of his entrance. As he once said of his French subjects, people didn’t want to see their rulers “walking in the streets,” and the Elbans should be treated no differently. If he failed to show the Elbans the kinds of splendor expected from a sovereign, how should they be expected to continue believing in his sovereignty? He once defined greatness as the ability to make a “big noise. The more noise you make, the farther it will go. Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all this passes—but the noise it makes continues to vibrate through other generations.”
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sp; Pons heard that the locals had judged Napoleon’s show of pomp inappropriate, especially at the solemn morning mass, though in his defense Napoleon had chosen to sit in a pew among the congregants rather than on the throne they had prepared for him. Yet Pons had seen that the Elbans, too, were capable of making their own ridiculous noise. He’d never seen them compete so fiercely with one another as they had at the banquet, where the women vied to display the most opulent silks and brightest jewels and the men made sport out of who could consume the greatest amounts of food and drink, as though Napoleon’s presence had freed them to unleash their own inner emperors. While allowing that the occasional show of wealth could be good for the local tradesmen, Pons counted no more than six island families who could afford such displays. There were plans to mark Napoleon’s birthday in August with a party that would make this one small beer by comparison. Pons worried that to cover the predicted expenses, Elba “would have to have produced not iron but gold.”
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• • •
CAMPBELL MISSED the San Cristino feast, having borrowed the brig Swallow to sail out into open waters in the hope of connecting with a British ship that was reportedly bound from Genoa to Sicily and carrying two senior officials. He thought that if he could make contact, these officials would have the authority to endorse his unanswered request to Castlereagh to extend his stay. But if the British ship did in fact pass on its way to Sicily, then Campbell failed to spot it. Dejected, he returned to Portoferraio on the last day of May.
As he pulled into the harbor he saw a Neapolitan sloop, Letizia, named for Napoleon’s mother. A few hours earlier Pauline Bonaparte had disembarked, along with some members of her household staff. She’d brought her custom-built carriage aboard the sloop, and the islanders followed alongside as it carried her and her brother up the hill. “Ah! Madame,” Pons overheard Napoleon telling his sister, “you might have thought that I was in some desert island with a bunch of half-savages. But look again and tell me if anyone could be better set up than I am!” The next day, on a tour of the island, Pauline told Napoleon of her ideas for improvements. She would have mirrors, clocks, and candelabras sent from Paris and some orange trees sent from Naples. She gave him a diamond necklace with which to buy another property for her sole use when she returned.
