The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  First, Napoleon had to be stripped of the protection that came with his title as a legitimate European sovereign. “I will do all in my power to keep people here from going to sleep,” Talleyrand promised Louis, “and to induce the Congress to depose Bonaparte from a rank which, by an inconceivable weakness, he has been suffered to preserve, and to render him at length incapable of preparing fresh disasters in Europe.” If Napoleon did try any action in France, it would be “the act of a brigand, and it is thus that he ought to be treated, and every measure lawful against brigands ought to be employed against him.”

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  • • •

  NEIPPERG TOLD MARIE LOUISE about the escape that same afternoon while they were out riding. Back at Schönbrunn she discovered some of the members of her largely French retinue clapping their hands in excitement. She tried to act as if nothing had happened. “There was dinner, billiards, and music as usual,” wrote Méneval. Marie Louise told Neipperg she worried about how Napoleon’s actions would influence her claims to Parma as well as her son’s inheritance. She wanted to make it clear she had nothing to do with the escape. Later that evening people heard her crying in her room.

  With Neipperg’s help she drafted a formal letter to her father, writing in French, the language of diplomacy, so that the message could be circulated to the congress delegates:

  At this moment when . . . further misfortunes menace me I cannot hope for a surer asylum . . . than the one I claim for myself and my son from your paternal affection. In your arms, my very dear father, I take refuge with the person who is most dear to me in this world. . . . We will not seek any other instruction than yours. With your habitual gentleness, you may order all our comings and goings.

  That night in one of the Hofburg’s ballrooms an amateur production of a Kotzebue play was performed by a cast that included Metternich’s daughter, Marie, Talleyrand’s niece, Dorothée, and Alexander’s current mistress, Princess Auersperg. The major figures of the congress, all in the audience, kept their opera glasses trained at the stage as though it was the only thing on their minds, wanting to avoid a panic but also out of respect for their friends and relations onstage. But speculation about Napoleon’s landing soon spread among the audience and then to the performers backstage and the show was ruined. “Though there was every attempt to conceal apprehension under the mask of unconcern,” wrote one of the British delegates in attendance, “it was not difficult to perceive that fear was predominant in all the Imperial and Royal personages there assembled.” Reality had become far more interesting than anything that could be put up onstage. “The events are so extraordinary, so unexpected, so magical,” wrote Geneva’s ambassador to the congress in his journal. “When one sees all that is happening, it is as though the One Thousand and One Nights is coming true, and everything happens by the waves of a wand of some invisible magician.”

  The conference delegates were already blaming the British for Napoleon’s escape, and some accused them of outright collusion. At dinner one night in Vienna, Castlereagh’s hard-drinking half brother, Charles Stewart, burst out, “Are we Napoleon’s keepers? We’re not at war with him.” People were carrying on “as if they had put a dangerous man in prison, refused him bread and then left the door open,” and then complained when he escaped, wrote one of the Danish delegates. Nowhere in the Treaty of Fontainebleau was Napoleon actually forbidden from leaving Elba.

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  • • •

  WHEN THE DELEGATES in Vienna finally learned that Napoleon had landed not in Italy but at Golfe-Juan, “the news spread with the speed of an electric spark,” as one French diplomat remembered. “The waltz was interrupted, and while the orchestra continued in vain with the melody it had started, we looked at each other in shock and started with our interrogations. . . . He’s in France!”

  The Viennese papers stopped printing their daily updates on the city’s social life and diplomatic developments. “All festivities ceased in Vienna from this time and gave way to silent activity,” wrote Méneval. “The sitting of the Congress was involved in impenetrable mystery.” Communications with France were prohibited. The infant King of Rome, or Prince Franz, as he was then being called, was separated from his French handlers. His governess, Madame de Montesquiou, who had watched over him since birth, was dismissed on suspicion of a Bonapartist plot to kidnap the boy, now potentially heir to the French throne, and replaced by a Polish woman recommended by Neipperg.

  The signatories of the Treaty of Paris would release a declaration drafted by Talleyrand, which branded their common adversary an outlaw, “beyond the pale of civil society,” who had hijacked his country to serve his own goals. To rhetorically place Napoleon “beyond the pale” sent the message that anyone could kill him on their own initiative without fear of reprisal. The sovereigns of Europe’s main powers felt justified in pursuing this course, reasoning that by landing in France with armed men Napoleon had openly declared himself as the enemy of peace and had reneged on all the terms of his surrender, meaning that he forfeited any claim to an imperial title and was no longer entitled to be under the protection of any treaty or law. From then on, in their view, he was no longer Napoleon, Emperor of Elba, but a common outlaw named Bonaparte.

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  LAFFREY

  NAPOLEON AND HIS SOLDIERS continued their brutal march along the Alpine route toward Grenoble, where thousands of French soldiers were garrisoned, with plans to capture the arsenal there. By capitalizing on the element of surprise and moving so quickly through the countryside, Napoleon had opened the campaign with the same daring and speed that had marked his greatest military victories. His troops had covered more than two hundred miles in the six days since their campfire on the beach at Golfe-Juan. Despite some halfhearted protests by local officials, they were for the most part welcomed by villagers as they passed.

  On March 7 the column reached the edge of the village of Laffrey, on a high plateau about seventy-five miles south of Grenoble, where they would have their first encounter with a potentially hostile force. Here were eight hundred infantrymen of the 5th Regiment, all of whom had sworn oaths that they would be willing to give their lives protecting the Bourbon reign.

  Napoleon ordered his musicians to play the “Marseillaise,” and then walked, unarmed, toward the opposing troops. Cambronne, Drouot, and Bertrand trailed closely behind. A cold wind whipped off the Grand lac de Laffrey.

  A soldier tried to halt Napoleon’s progress. “If you don’t withdraw,” he shouted across the field, “you’ll be arrested.” The members of the royalist battalion put their muskets at aim and the Elban corps did the same.

  Napoleon told his troops to lower their weapons and continued walking. He stopped about twenty feet from the first row of infantrymen, whose muskets were still pointed at his head and chest. In his heavy Corsican lilt he shouted, “Soldiers! I am your emperor. Do you not recognize me?”

  Silence.

  He moved forward again, now a dozen feet from the battalion, and opened his greatcoat to expose his stocky trunk, offering it as a target.

  “If there is any one among you who wants to kill his emperor, here I am!”

  No one moved.

  A voice cried out from the royalist battalion: “Fire!” But no one shot and again there was silence.

  Then came a single shout from one of the soldiers of the 5th, which quickly grew to a roar: “Long Live the Emperor! Long Live the Emperor! Long Live the Emperor!”

  Men from both sides of the field threw down their guns and surrounded Napoleon. Some of them cried; some of them laughed. They embraced one another. They shouted their vivas, again and again.

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  TO CONTEMPLATE ALL OBJECTS AT A CERTAIN ANGLE

  A FEW HOURS AFTER Napoleon’s encounter at Laffrey, the Partridge anchored at Antibes, not far from the Fleur de Lys. In his journal, Campbell blamed the time spent communicating with the French ship f
or denying him and Adye “the glorious chance, which was so nearly at our command, of destroying [Napoleon].”

  The town’s commanding officer presented Campbell with the dubious story that he’d been away at Île Sainte-Marguerite when Napoleon landed, enjoying a picnic with some guests near the island’s recently dismantled fort, when he saw a tall ship flying the tricolor, an outlawed symbol, as he knew well, along with some smaller craft landing at Golfe-Juan, but had taken them for Algerian corsairs who must have captured some smaller fishing boats and were flying the tricolor as a ruse. Only after two dispatches reached him did he understand what was going on, causing him to scramble up some rocks and through heavy bushes—he showed Campbell the marks on his arms—to avoid being seen by Napoleon’s troops, but had only reached Antibes after they had left.

  Campbell found it “most extraordinary” that Napoleon’s landing and a full day of encampment had failed to attract more notice or any action from the authorities at Antibes. He stayed in the area to try to learn as much as he could about the past few days and in speaking to witnesses fixated on the smallest details while trying to recreate the scene, noting that “during the afternoon the band continued to play,” that Napoleon “wore a gray great coat,” that “at night he lay down on a mattress with a coverlet turned over his head,” and that Bertrand “always kept off his hat when he approached him, as did all others.”

  For the next weeks Campbell buzzed between Nice, Genoa, and Livorno trying to figure out where Napoleon was headed. In a strange bookend to the theft of his belongings during his battlefield convalescence almost exactly a year earlier, some highwaymen robbed him along the Ligurian coast early on March 20, just as Napoleon was entering Paris. He abandoned his pursuit the next day and headed for London to face Castlereagh and the prince regent. His ensuing journal entries record little other than places and dates as he pushed through Milan, Luxembourg, Brussels, and Ostend.

  He reached London on All Fools’ Day and was summoned the next morning for separate interviews with Castlereagh and with the prince regent. His journal leaves no record of what was said at the meetings.

  People were already beginning to learn the details of his strange assignment. His younger brother, Patrick Campbell, a major general, told anyone who would listen that Neil had been frantically warning the government of Napoleon’s scheme for months. A damning piece in the Times quoted “a private letter from Livorno,” whose writer remarked that it was

  inconceivable why so dangerous a man was not better watched. Colonel Campbell, who was to watch over him, was almost always here or at Florence. He contented himself with sending a corvette once a week to reconnoiter the harbor of Portoferraio.

  A few weeks later, the future parliamentarian John Cam Hobhouse attended a posh dinner in Paris whose star guest was Colonel Jerzmanowski, a commander of the Polish lancers during the exile. While regaling his dining companions with tales of Elba and the landing at Golfe-Juan, Jerzmanowski described Campbell as “too much of a politician and too little of a soldier.” But Hobhouse knew Campbell and thought the opposite: that he was a decent soldier who had been forced into a political role to which he was badly suited. “What a change a little place of court can make in a man,” wrote Hobhouse. “No one was less diplomatic than Campbell when I knew him in Germany.”

  Though Campbell’s full journal wouldn’t be published for another five decades, Hobhouse somehow managed, shortly after Napoleon’s landing, to get hold of a “half official memoir” drawn from Campbell’s papers. After reading it, Hobhouse wrote that he pitied Campbell, just a few years older than he was, for having experienced what must have been a life-changing disillusionment. By regarding the Emperor of Elba from as close a distance as he had, Campbell must have discovered a sad truth about Napoleon. He was neither history’s greatest genius, nor its most terrifying monster, but simply human, “a very commonplace-minded man.”

  As Hobhouse put it:

  Campbell, when I knew him, was a most worthy, sensible man, but it is just possible that being accustomed to . . . the dignities of this world, he was astounded perhaps at first, and then disgusted, at finding so much of human frailty, of the weaknesses of common life, in a general and a sovereign. The colonel might have been but little surprised to have seen him shoot a grenadier a day. There would besides have been more of dignity in guarding such a Nero. But to find that his prisoner had none of the trappings of legitimate tyranny, that he could not discover one trait in his manner or conversation which affected him or gave him a superiority over himself; that he talked freely and playfully on the passages of his former life and sometimes of his future destination and even projects; that he took no pains to conceal any weakness or error; that he was, in short, altogether such a being as himself; this was intolerable, and would be so to any eye accustomed to contemplate all objects at a certain angle, and to mistake elevation of position for height of stature.

  EPILOGUE

  NAPOLEON, MARIE LOUISE, CAMPBELL, AND ELBA

  Here was an experiment, under the most favorable conditions, of the powers of intellect without conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed and so weaponed; never leader found such aids and followers. And what was the result of this vast talent and power, of these immense armies, burned cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no result. All passed away like the smoke of his artillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole contest for freedom was to be begun again. The attempt was in principle suicidal. France served him with life and limb and estate, as long as it could identify its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the reward,— they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,— they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “Napoleon: The Man of the World” (1850)

  To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

  —SIMONE WEIL, The Need for Roots (1949)

  NAPOLEON WAS PRAGMATIC about the relative ease with which he retook the Tuileries on March 20—his son’s fourth birthday—recognizing it mainly as the result of his dexterity and its stupefying effects, just as he intended. When a French financier came to congratulate him on his first night at the palace, he answered, “They let me come, just like they let them go,” referring to the Bourbons. Though people were dazzled by the temerity of his lightning march on Paris they were never rationally persuaded that his return would be for the greater good, and Napoleon never gained widespread support during his brief return to power, now known as the Hundred Days. The shock factor, lingering support from veterans of his wars, and a great deal of bluster were enough to keep him propped up, but only for a short while.

  He wrote to Marie Louise several times during his march. He wanted her and the King of Rome with him in the capital, perhaps out of affection, or perhaps because if there was to be a restored empire he needed to show people his dynasty was intact. He planned a coronation ceremony that would include his wife and child. His letters to Marie Louise were intercepted and never reached her directly, but she did learn of their contents. She said she would rather enter a convent than be reunited with Napoleon, and indeed she never saw him again. Caulaincourt returned the red portfolio of her letters that Napoleon had asked be set aside for his son ten months earlier. One morning in May, one of Napoleon’s ministers found him at the Tuileries crying, looking at a portrait of his son.

  After Waterloo, Napoleon again tried abdicating in favor of his son, without success. He dreamed of escaping to America, but the British naval blockade made that impossible. Louis XVIII returned to retake the throne on July 8, and a week later Napoleon surrendered to the British aboard the Bell
erophon. Again he became Britain’s problem, again he thought he might be exiled to England, and again the British were hamstrung, not feeling justified in executing him and fearful of the repercussions if they did.

  A letter from the British prime minister, Lord Liverpool, to Castlereagh showed that they had learned something from their first mistake:

  We are all decidedly of the opinion that it would not answer to confine him in this country. . . . You know enough of the feelings of people in this country not to doubt he would become an 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.

  They would send him to Saint Helena instead, where there was “a fine citadel,” as Liverpool wrote, and “only one place in the circuit of the island where ships can anchor, and we have the power of excluding neutral vessels altogether, if we should think it necessary. At such a distance and in such a place, all intrigue would be impossible, and being so far from the European world he would very soon be forgotten.”

  Liverpool was only half right. Few events captured nineteenth-century imaginations as did the Hundred Days. Though the results of Napoleon’s return were disastrous, its sheer boldness likely did more to shape his popular legend than any other aspect of his career. Until his return from Elba, Napoleon “had portrayed himself as primarily a strong charismatic ruler and as a military conqueror,” writes the historian Sudhir Hazareesingh. “The events of the Hundred Days would initiate the process through which Napoleon’s image would be reinvented. Very soon the creator of a new Empire would come to be seen as an upholder of the Revolutionary principle of equality; the expansive ruler of the world as a patriotic defender of his country; the martialist conqueror as a law-giver; and, perhaps most extraordinarily of all, the autocratic and despotic ruler as the potent symbol of liberty. The manner in which Napoleon’s rule ended, in short, proved decisive in the launching of his legend.”