Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  That day, 20 March, largely because of the rainy weather, but also because of the crowds of people who lined the road between Fontainebleau and Villejuif,101 Napoleon made slow progress. It was six o’clock before he reached Essonnes, forty-odd kilometres from the centre of Paris. He arrived before the Tuileries around nine in the evening. By all accounts the crowd awaiting his ‘magical arrival’ was huge, possibly as many as 20,000, mostly made up of what might loosely be called the popular classes, the very petite bourgeoisie or the working classes.102 When Napoleon was at last seen, ‘the cry rose to such a pitch that you would have thought the ceilings were coming down’.103 Writing many years later, Captain Léon Routier described how the thought of Napoleon arriving still made his heart palpitate with pleasure. According to some, the Emperor’s carriage could barely move for the crowd; it was surrounded by officers ‘mad with joy’. ‘It was like witnessing the resurrection of Christ,’ wrote Thiébault, who prided himself on being able to touch Napoleon or to kiss his clothes.104

  Accounts of what followed vary. Alexandre de La Borde, an officer in the National Guard, claimed that Napoleon was hoisted on to the shoulders of supporters and carried into the Tuileries.105 Napoleon is supposed to have confessed to someone close by, ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’106 Caulaincourt was able to shout out to Lavalette to put himself in front of Napoleon so that he could force a path. Lavalette did so, walking backwards for a while, eyes brimming over, exclaiming, ‘What! It’s you! It’s you! It’s finally you!’,107 as if he had just seen a ghost. In many respects he had. It was a ‘fantastical apparition’ that later took on a supernatural or holy character.108

  The Passionate and the Afflicted

  And that is how it was treated by Napoleon’s loyal followers, who were often overcome by the turn of events. The letters of devotion that started to come into Paris from around the country attest to the depth of feelings, some prepared to go so far as to die for him.109 But there were private declarations of love as well. One officer wrote to his girlfriend, ‘I am overwhelmed with happiness. I am mad with love and joy. I have found my Emperor again . . . What more do I need to be happy? . . . I can breathe at last. At the first news of this fortunate event, I pulled off the [fleur de] lys, replaced the white cockade with a red one and raised the eagle which has so often led us to victory.’110 Jean Bordenave, a teacher, wrote to the ministry of war asking to be employed in the army: ‘I found in my heart an emptiness similar to that which a lover has for the object of his passion; all that he sees, all that he hears renews his pain . . . such was my situation for one whole year . . . But now I feel like a lover who has recovered his desire; I offer my body as a bulwark to support His Majesty, and Vive l’Empereur and those who serve him.’111 Etienne-Maurice Deschamps, who had survived the debacle that was the Russian campaign, described the feeling among his friends at news of Napoleon’s return: ‘Like children to whom it has been announced that their father, from whom they believed they were forever separated, has returned, they [Napoleon’s supporters] could not contain their joy; it was made obvious in a thousand ways. The heart bore all the costs of that scene of general happiness, and if history is able to say that Trajan was loved by the human race, one can add that Napoleon was the idol of the French soldier.’112

  Nevertheless, Napoleon’s return was not without a moral dilemma for those who had sworn an oath of loyalty to Louis XVIII. Commandant de Lauthonnye had been presented by Napoleon with a Legion of Honour. He admitted that when he received the medal, ‘I was dizzy with happiness, I cried so much that I could not thank him other than by shouting: “Long live the Emperor.”’ On Napoleon’s return, his family had to make him promise to remain faithful to Louis XVIII. And yet, if Napoleon had personally asked him to follow him, Lauthonnye probably would not have been able to resist the call.113 Captain Pierre Robinaux reported for duty but explained that he was ‘sincerely afflicted’ by not being able to keep his oath to Louis.114 Others bided their time to see how things would play out.115 Most officers, however, went over to Napoleon.116 Indeed, many public servants who had served him, and who had yet sworn an oath of loyalty to Louis, reneged on their oaths and re-enlisted under the Emperor. However, some of Napoleon’s best generals decided not to throw their lot in with him. Others, like Hippolyte d’Espinchal, came out against him and fought imperial troops on French soil. He reasoned, ‘I had served with enthusiasm, zeal and devotion until the last moment, my admiration for him was like the memory of a religious cult, but his abdication had brought his destiny to an end: to abandon him before that time would have been cowardice and to return to him after having sworn an oath of loyalty to the king . . . would have been a breach of all the duties prescribed by honour.’117

  Although many young men, naive in their assessment of their chances of victory, looked upon Napoleon as the ‘avenger’ who would rectify the wrongs of the Bourbon regime, the responses among the people varied according to class and region.118 They were a good deal more muted in royalist strongholds and among the educated classes than in some working-class areas. Napoleon meant war – royalist propaganda worked on that theme – and support for him as a replacement for an unpopular Louis XVIII started to wane as soon as that became clear.119 If the Tuileries was surrounded by a large group of enthusiasts, mostly workers and veterans, if some of the military were ecstatic about his return, if Napoleon was accompanied by hundreds of peasants, some armed, and if the townspeople warmly greeted him on the way to Paris, these scenes were limited to particular regions. In the rest of France, there appears to have been an extraordinary degree of indifference. Even Napoleon seems to have realized this when he stated, ‘They have allowed me to come, just as they have let the others [the Bourbons] go.’120

  Napoleon Impotent

  There is a difference between holding office and exercising real power. Between the time Napoleon entered Paris on 20 March to the time he fled ninety-eight days later, he was to learn of the chasm that existed between the two. In 1814, his control over the machinery of government was total. He now no longer had that control. Moreover, he left the details of the administration to two close collaborators – Carnot and Fouché. Carnot did not want or was not able to carry out a thorough purge of the administration that would see men loyal to the new regime put in place, while Fouché was playing his own little games, subverting Napoleon, maintaining contact with Louis XVIII in exile in Ghent, with Talleyrand in Vienna and with Wellington in Brussels. Fouché never really believed that Napoleon would prevail, and was only too eager to disrupt the good functioning of government.121 Even with capable men in place in the provinces, most of the bureaucratic elites were playing a wait-and-see game, failing to pursue directives from Paris with vigour. Some municipalities pandered to both Napoleon and the Bourbons, hedging their bets, as it were.122 The attitude seems to have been: ‘If Napoleon wins, everything will be fine without measures having to be undertaken, and if he is defeated everything that we could have done will not have helped.’123

  As a consequence, the administration of the country was disjointed, chaotic in places, virtually suspended or on hold in others. Where they could, royalists attempted to maintain their hold on local government; battalions of royalist volunteers, called verdets, were formed in the south, ready to rise in revolt when commanded to do so.124 Royalists in Paris manifested their discontent in discreet ways, in much the same way that Bonapartists had done before the Emperor’s return. Female royalists, for example, wore blue flowers (a royal colour and the sign of constancy), shawls were printed with royalist slogans, and royalist pamphlets and songs flooded the city.125 Napoleon’s hold on power was so tenuous – one royalist speaks of the ‘decrepitude of power’ – that it was enough for a rumour of his arrest to lead to demonstrations of joy in the Haute-Loire.126 Others urged what today would be called civil disobedience, encouraging people not to pay taxes and to disobey the regime.127

  All bureaucrats had to swear an oath of loyalty to Napoleon. Many did,
some willingly, some reluctantly. This was the case with one of Napoleon’s most loyal servitors before 1814, the Comte de Molé.128 He refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the restored monarchy and was kept out of public office as a result. However, he was no more inclined to resume public office when Napoleon summoned him to the Tuileries and offered him a choice of portfolios, justice or foreign affairs. He turned them down, pleading ill-health, and reluctantly took on a position with less responsibility – Director of the Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Roads). The whole time he was there, however, he astutely refused to attend important meetings, signed nothing of significance and even sent a letter to Louis XVIII declaring his loyalty. He was so often absent – supposedly sick, travelling to various spas – it is a wonder Napoleon tolerated him at all.

  Etienne-Denis Pasquier is another example. A former prefect of police under Napoleon, and Director of the Ponts et Chaussées under the Bourbons, Pasquier refused to adhere to the new government.129 Friends intervened on his behalf so that he was not arrested. Napoleon tried to purge the administration, nominating his own men, but many refused to take up their positions, so that, for example, some departments remained without prefects, while others again went through four or five in the space of a few months.130 There was a similar story in the bureaucracy. Administrators were encouraged to denounce their colleagues who had ‘betrayed’ Napoleon, but they simply refused to do so.131 When the Emperor dismissed all the small-town mayors and held new elections to replace them, 80 per cent of those who had been put in place by the royal government were re-elected. If that was not exactly a slap in the face – there were all sorts of reasons why the mayors were returned – it was certainly a setback for Napoleon, who suffered because of it; he was not in complete control of the administration and hence not in complete control of the country.132

  Among the people of France, the reaction to Napoleon’s return was varied and incredibly complex.133 It is difficult to get an accurate depiction of public opinion, but it is clear the country was divided along ideological lines. In cities such as Metz, Nevers, Grenoble, Lyons and Paris support for Napoleon seems to have been strong.134 His followers went to considerable lengths to support the regime and the army. At Grenoble, French pupils at the lycée donated 400 francs, pupils from Nancy 500 francs.135 Old soldiers offered up their pensions; government officials donated their salaries; women sold their jewels; administrative bodies and cultural organizations throughout France donated tens of thousands of francs. Solidarity was one sentiment, revenge was another. Resentment of the Bourbons in some towns and regions in the south, east and south-east of France led to an urban and rural reaction that often resulted in violence and the murder of royalists.

  Support for Napoleon was also expressed in the formation of people’s militias called the fédérations, different from the National Guard.136 It was a spontaneous, popular movement that began in Brittany in the middle of April and spread quickly to the rest of the country. The fédérations brought together up to 100,000 men in various regional centres but especially in Paris where 20,000–25,000 men took part in this movement, predominantly motivated by two sentiments: a rejection of the House of Bourbon, and a patriotism born of the impending allied invasion.137 In some parts of France, those who volunteered were overwhelmingly middle class. In Paris, however, they were largely working class and were based on the faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Marceau. Napoleon felt obliged to promise that he would arm them, but he did not warm to the idea. He was thinking of the sans-culottes, who had committed some of the worst excesses during the dark days of the Revolution. But he was caught in a bind. He could not very well suppress the popular enthusiasm that found expression in the fédérations, even as he donned anew the mantle of national reconciliation. In the end, they were never armed, even when Paris was about to be besieged by the allies – as we shall see.138

  In other regions, however, the initial enthusiasm for Napoleon’s return quickly waned, as though the people had collectively woken the morning after a drinking binge, regretting what they had done. In the north of France, Marseilles and the Vendée, support for the Bourbons remained constant.139 In Poitiers, a bust of Napoleon was smashed. In Toulouse, Rouen, La Rochelle, Bayonne and Versailles, royalist proclamations were put up on the wall of the town overnight. In the town of Agde, in the south of France, violence broke out when a new municipal council was proclaimed. The Vendée rose up against Napoleon and in favour of the monarchy on 15 May, largely as a result of the renewed demands for men for war. In the other major urban centres – Bordeaux, Marseilles, Nîmes – royalists dug in their heels and had to be defeated militarily before control of those regional centres could be gained.140 The pacification was at best fragile when it did occur. Some regions held out longer than others. The Vendée, for example, tied up 8,000 troops and cavalry, as well as part of the Young Guard. In all, more than 20,000 troops were occupied throughout the country putting down the internal flames of rebellion,141 all of whom could have been put to better use at Waterloo.

  * In 1794, Claude Chappe (brother of Ignace) invented a semaphore system that he called the ‘telegraph’. Lines were established between Brest, Lille, Lyons and Paris, composed of a series of relay towers between ten and fifteen kilometres apart.

  26

  A Parody of Empire

  ‘Venality Dressed in Ideological Garb’

  Once installed in the Tuileries, Napoleon knew he could not simply take up where he had left off. Before Elba, he had been in undisputed command. After the first abdication, the French were given a charter that granted them a constitutional monarchy; anything less than that now would be unacceptable.1 Napoleon, therefore, had to present the French people with the façade of himself as a liberal, and one way of doing that was to give them a new, more liberal constitution.

  The man Napoleon chose to write a new constitution was Benjamin Constant. For most of his career as a writer, Constant had opposed the Napoleonic system, publishing in 1813 De l’esprit de conquête (The spirit of conquest), in which he attacked what he considered to be the cornerstone of imperial ideology – Napoleon’s love of war and conquest. He insisted that Napoleon had come closer to achieving total control over his subjects than any other previous ruler. The Emperor had, in effect, usurped the Revolution and the principle of popular sovereignty. As late as March 1815, after hearing news of Napoleon’s return, he published a vicious personal attack on him in the Journal des Débats, describing him as ‘more terrible and more odious’ than Attila and Genghis Khan.2 He also pompously declared, ‘I am not the man to crawl, a miserable traitor, from one seat of power to another. I am not the man to hide infamy by sophisms, or to mutter profane words with which to purchase a life of which I should feel ashamed.’

  In fact, he was. When Constant met Napoleon on 14 April after being summoned to the Tuileries, he wrote in his diary that he thought him ‘an astonishing man’. Napoleon had persuaded him to help prepare a new constitution, a fact that is a remarkable testament to his ability to charm even the staunchest opponent (or to Constant’s overwhelming egotism and desire for political office). A few days later, Constant was appointed to the Council of State, and over the coming weeks and months became a confidant of the Emperor. During this time he wrote what was to become known as the Additional Act, an amendment to the imperial Constitution which introduced a number of changes: the recognition that sovereignty resided in the nation; greater independence for the judiciary; limited political representation; and freedom of the press. There were to be elections to a lower house, the Chamber of Representatives, but voting rights were limited to men who owned property and who were at least twenty-five years old. Napoleon appointed members to a new Chamber of Peers, much to the disgust of liberals and revolutionaries, who argued that this was a return to the ancien régime. Some of Constant’s enemies claimed that the amendments were ‘venality dressed in ideological garb’.3 To those in his entourage Napoleon is supposed to have boasted that he would have done with t
his ‘vain chatter’ within six weeks.4 Freedom of the press was a case in point.5 Although royalists were able to vent their rage against Napoleon, especially in the form of pamphlets, censorship was introduced and the police raided royalist presses, both clandestine and legal, for being ‘incendiary’.

  There was, moreover, an inherent contradiction between what Napoleon set out to do – that is, introduce a liberal constitution that would win over bourgeois and enlightened opinion – and what the circumstances of the moment required, namely, a firm leader who could bring about a decisive military victory. Rather than consult with those most directly concerned, or have an elected national assembly draw up a new constitution (something that would have taken too long), Napoleon made sure he retained complete control over the whole process. As always, he wanted to be the master, but since no one believed that he would adhere to the Additional Act for long, when it was released to the public on 23 April it was greeted with scepticism.6 The existence of a hereditary peerage, for example, contradicted the principles of equality demanded by the Revolution. Constant wrote in his journal that ‘Never was blame so bitter, never was censure so unanimous.’7 A cartoon in a liberal newspaper aptly illustrated their concerns. It shows Napoleon undergoing a medical examination by Cambacérès. When Napoleon asks, ‘Dear cousin, what do you think of my state?’, Cambacérès replies: ‘Sire, this cannot last. Your Majesty has a very poor Constitution.’

  The Constitution was, in short, badly received in France, unable to please any of the political factions. Even though it was more radical than the Bourbon Charter, liberals disliked being handed a constitution they had no part in shaping; republicans bemoaned the fact that it was not more ‘revolutionary’ and that it negated the principle of universal suffrage.8 Bonapartists hardly saw the necessity of an Additional Act and believed Napoleon should govern as a dictator and that he should have dispensed altogether with elected assemblies.9 Royalists, needless to say, rejected the whole exercise because it excluded any possibility of a return of the Bourbons. Indeed, there was a stream of critical pamphlets, some by those who had initially greeted Napoleon’s return, but most by royalists who continued to see him as the ‘usurper’.10 The real problem was that Napoleon did not really believe in the new Constitution, and did not want the elite (certainly not the French public) discussing its terms. There was an evident contradiction in his private and public rhetoric that belied his true intentions. In reality, he did not care for a constitution that limited his powers in any way. In this, the accusation often levelled at émigrés is apposite for Napoleon; during his absence, he had neither learnt nor forgotten anything.