Citizen Emperor

by Philip Dwyer

  No one really knows what time the battle began – some say 10 a.m., others 11.30 – but it soon centred on the large farmhouse called Hougoumont, on the French left flank, defended by British Guards, and attacked relentlessly by the French for most of the afternoon.57 Hougoumont and another farmhouse, La Haye Sainte, in the centre of the battlefield were key; they lay only a few hundred metres from Wellington’s line, meaning that if not taken they would interrupt any advance by the French. There is no need to go into the details of the pounding taken by both sides. Late in the afternoon, the Prussians appeared on Napoleon’s right flank. They were held off for some time while Napoleon launched the Guard at Wellington’s line, roughly halfway between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, at about 7.30 in the evening. The Guard faltered, and retreated. It was the moment Wellington decided to launch a general advance across the line with the consequences that we now know.

  Ney and Grouchy bear some of the burden of defeat: Ney for not pressing home his advantage after the battle of Ligny, for squandering his cavalry on useless attacks against British squares, and for pointless and costly attacks against Hougoumont which could easily have been reduced by an astute use of artillery; and Grouchy for letting Blücher slip away, also after Ligny, and for not riding to the sound of the cannon once the battle was engaged.58 Grouchy actually heard the sound of the Grand Battery opening fire at the beginning of the battle, even though he was about twenty kilometres away to the east, and got into an argument with his commanding generals about whether they should ride to the sound of the guns.59 Grouchy insisted on pressing after Blücher but never caught up with him, allowing Blücher to join Wellington later in the day.

  In subsequent years, Napoleon sought to blame others for the defeat, exaggerating the number of men he faced, pointing to the deficiencies of his generals, and arguing that fate had abandoned him.60 Ultimately, however, he must assume the responsibility. His efforts remained disappointing. The fact that Berthier, his brilliant former chief of staff, was not around meant that the army was not as numerous, not as well equipped and not as well organized as it could have been, with the consequence that it appears to have performed sluggishly throughout the campaign. So did Napoleon. He may have been looking for what he called a ‘coup d’éclat’,61 but his behaviour during the days and weeks leading up to the fateful battle was listless. It is possible that he grossly underestimated the quality of the enemy before him. Wellington’s account of the battle in a letter to Lord Beresford is telling: ‘Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what the boxers call gluttons. Napoleon did not manoeuvre at all. He just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style. The only difference was, that he mixed cavalry with his infantry, and supported both with an enormous quantity of artillery . . . I had the infantry for some time in squares, and we had the French cavalry walking about us as if they had been our own.’62

  Chaos

  One of the turning points in the battle was the flight towards the end of the day of the Imperial Guard, which set in motion a general panic in the French ranks. This was not the Imperial Guard of old, decimated in Russia. Of the 50,000 members of the Guard who had entered Russia in 1812, a little over 1,500 returned, 200 of whom were permanently incapacitated. The Young Guard was wiped out entirely.63 The Guard formed in 1813–14 was made up of experienced soldiers, meeting the minimum requirement of ten years’ service and three campaigns, but possibly not as experienced as the Old Guard had once been.

  There is an anecdote often told of the Guard’s last stand. When asked to surrender Cambronne is famously reputed to have said one of two things: a brief but ballsy ‘Merde’, or the more prosaic ‘Je meurs et je ne me rends pas’ (‘Shit’, or ‘I will die but I will not surrender’).64 It lends a romanticism to the end of the battle that conflicts with the harsh reality of a rout. The Guard that had lost the battle was transformed by this heroic, suicidal gesture. The phrase came to represent throughout the nineteenth century the suffering of Bonapartists faced with the fall of their idol.65 After the battle, Napoleon tried to plunge into the heart of Cambronne’s corps and expose himself to enemy fire, but was prevented from doing so by Soult. He was seen riding towards Charleroi with a little group of generals. They reached Quatre-Bras (near Genappe) by one that morning. There they stopped for a while and made a fire; Napoleon was spotted by an officer crying. Colonel Trefcon, who had experienced the retreats in Syria, in Russia and at Leipzig, wrote that he had never seen such a ‘horrible disorder’.66 The officers were unable to overcome the chaos; many of the troops were utterly demoralized, some preferred suicide rather than suffer at the hands of the enemy. Fear gripped the retreating army; small groups of men broke off from the main army and pillaged their way through the towns and villages in their path. Cries of ‘Prussians! Prussians!’, even when they were nowhere to be seen, were enough to throw men into a panic, tossing their muskets and sacks away, abandoning their colours and making a run for it.67

  The astonishing thing about Waterloo is not so much that Napoleon lost the battle as his reaction to it. In all, 55,000–60,000 men were killed and wounded during that day in the space of a few square kilometres, along with 10,000 horses. But Napoleon still retained control over about 117,000 men in the north, yet he did not attempt to rally his troops, nor continue the fight and bring the battle to the enemy at another point. Blücher and Wellington did not co-ordinate their advance on France so it is more than possible that, had Napoleon rallied his troops, he could have inflicted defeats on both armies separately in order to be in a stronger position to negotiate. Many of the British troops believed Waterloo was only the first in what would be a series of battles,68 and in some respects this was true. Other battles ensued in the days and weeks that followed.69 Between 27 June and 3 July, three of the four Prussian army corps marching into France fought battles in the regions of Picardy and the Île de France.70 At Rocquencourt, a Prussian brigade was almost completely annihilated. Battles were also fought at Sèvres and Meudon. But none of them involved Napoleon. To be fair, Napoleon was caught between a rock and a hard place. If, as had happened the previous year, he stayed with the army, he was likely to be betrayed in Paris. This time, he reasoned, he would sort out Paris first and return to the army in a few days.

  The battle may have been the ‘nearest run thing’, as many contemporaries will attest,71 but the fact remains that even if Napoleon had carried the day, it would not have made the slightest difference to his fate. He might have won another battle or two, but he could not possibly have won the campaign. One need only keep in mind the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 when he triumphed in a number of battles but was unable to win the war. This time, not only did he face the combined forces of the coalition but, as we have seen, his position at home was less than assured with little or no support from the elites. A prolonged and sustained campaign would soon have met with opposition if not revolt at home. A striking sign of Napleon’s lack of support is that the price of shares in the Paris stock exchange went up on news of Waterloo.72

  After the battle, Wellington immediately dispatched Major Henry Percy to London with some of the captured French flags and a letter – the now famous Waterloo Dispatch – announcing his victory. This gesture, this act, rewrote the history of the battle by forgetting to mention the role of the Prussians in the victory and by enhancing the Duke’s own. It was the start of a romanticized account of the battle that would find its way on to the page of many a British poet and the canvas of many a British painter. When the letter reached London on evening of 21 June, it came as a shock; everybody had expected the renewed war to be protracted, so that news of victory produced a genuine sense of exhilaration among the people.73

  Shortly after the battle, Walter Scott hurried to visit the field on which Napoleon had been defeated.74 He was one among thousands of British tourists who now flocked to the Continent, many stopping to see the battlefield on their way to Paris.75 The excursion to Waterloo was to remain a popular
tourist site well into the 1820s and 1830s, and may have attracted up to 5,000 visitors each year.76 Veterans also made the journey as a sort of pilgrimage. Tourists and veterans were not the only people; enterprising businessmen visited too, not for the relics they might be able to take home, and not out of a sense of history, but for the bones left lying on the ground. In November 1822, the London Observer ran a piece estimating that, over the previous year, more than a million bushels (about 36,000 cubic metres) of both human and animal bone had been collected from every battlefield in Europe and shipped back to the port of Hull. From there they were sent to factories in Yorkshire where the bones were ground down and sold as fertilizer.77

  ‘I Have Received a Mortal Blow’

  Napoleon reached Philippeville, a fortified town eighty kilometres south of Brussels, on the morning of 19 June. He stopped long enough to take a room at the Hôtel du Lion d’Or, where he wrote two letters. One was to the Chamber of Representatives, giving a misleading account of the battle and its outcome.78 The other was to Joseph, almost as misleading, but optimistically, unrealistically defiant.79 He began it with an ominous ‘All is not lost,’ and went on to calculate that he could muster up to 400,000 troops to continue the fight. ‘The British’, he wrote, ‘are making slow headway. The Prussians are afraid of the peasantry and dare not advance too far.’ Joseph received this letter in the afternoon of 20 June. He read it out to a hastily assembled gathering of ministers, but asked them to keep the news secret for the time being.

  Napoleon’s letter was part wishful thinking, part propaganda, a desire to hide the truth from the French people. The journey to Paris was not much more than a day’s ride, but once there, and faced with the political reality, there was no further question of Napoleon’s rejoining the army. Rumours of the defeat followed the army in retreat so that between 19 and 20 June it became general knowledge in Paris.80 Crowds gathered outside the Chamber of Representatives at the Palais Bourbon trying to pick up news. It is where Emile Labretonnière, a pupil at the Imperial Lycée (today the Lycée Louis-le-Grand), heard of the defeat on 21 June. It is difficult if not impossible to know just what the French people, supporters or otherwise of the regime, thought. There is little in the press of the day and even less in the archives. Official confirmation more or less came with an account of the battle published in the Moniteur universel, which admitted defeat after a fanciful report of what had happened that involved a fictional Middle Guard (moyenne garde).81

  It took Napoleon three days to reach Paris from Waterloo. He arrived, exhausted, on 21 June between six and eight o’clock in the morning. Caulaincourt was there to greet him at the Elysée with the words, ‘It would have been preferable for you not to have left the army. The army is your force, your security.’82 Napoleon reportedly replied, ‘The blow I have received is mortal.’ He then babbled about calling a special meeting of both Chambers to ask them to give him the power, that is, another army, to ‘save the country’. Caulaincourt confronted Napoleon with the reality, telling him that ‘deputies seem more hostile to you than ever before . . . the Chamber [of Representatives] will not respond as you hope’. The Comte de Lavalette confirmed that the majority of the Chamber was inclined to demand his abdication. Napoleon’s response is said to have been an epileptic laugh that worried those present.

  Napoleon met with his ministers as he was taking his bath, receiving his treasurer, Peyrusse, and Davout, minister of war. Peyrusse entered service in 1805 as an employee of the treasury, and had followed Napoleon to Elba. He was devoted to the Emperor but now had to tell him that there was nothing in the treasury, while Davout admitted that few troops were at his disposal. He was possibly playing down the number of effectives available, estimated since then at between 50,000 and 120,000 men, but it might have been a reflection of the poor state of morale, not only among many of the troops but also among their commanders.83

  During the morning, Napoleon appears to have recovered somewhat from the peripety and started talking about martial law, a temporary dictatorship, moving the government to Tours and fighting it out under the walls of Paris. The ministers, as well as Lucien and Joseph, listened to this ramble with lowered eyes in an embarrassed silence.84 He then asked for their opinions. The old revolutionary Lazare Carnot, who feared above all another Restoration, fell back on what had once worked but now would no longer, urging Napoleon to declare the patrie in danger, just as he had done in 1793.85 If Paris fell, the army would take up positions behind the Loire. Davout initially thought in terms of a military dictatorship – Brumaire bis – and thought that the Chambers should be dissolved (although he later argued against the use of brute force, when he realized that the moment to act had passed).86 Caulaincourt (along with Cambacérès and Maret) believed on the contrary that the loyalty of the Chambers was paramount; otherwise the occupation of the capital and the end of the Empire would invariably follow. Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, who had been with Napoleon in one capacity or another since the first Italian campaign, spoke frankly, declaring that the Chambers wanted Napoleon’s abdication and that if he did not offer it, they would demand it.87

  Napoleon was stunned by this admission, but received support for a military dictatorship from both Carnot and Lucien, who declared that if the Chambers were not inclined to join the Emperor, then he would have to save France by himself. At that point, Napoleon went on to describe how he would defend the north from invasion. It was entirely unrealistic. After the meeting had finished, Napoleon kept Carnot and Regnault behind and dictated a message to the deputies. In essence, it said that he had been on the verge of winning a great victory at Waterloo when ‘a panic was caused by mischief-makers’, but that he was going to take the necessary measures to ensure public safety.88 The defeat had become a setback.

  This kind of message, made of half-truths and exaggerations, might have worked in the past, but no longer. The deputies had already spoken to officers who had taken part in the battle and who had described it as a catastrophe. Besides, it was too late. An hour or so earlier the deputies, fearful that Napoleon was on the verge of carrying out another coup, had acted. Lafayette proposed declaring the Chamber of Representatives in permanent session and adding that any attempt to dissolve it should be considered high treason. While Lafayette may not exactly have ‘saved’ France, as he later pompously declared in his memoirs,89 he certainly left Napoleon with far fewer options. The Chamber greeted these suggestions with loud cheering and applause; its members were in fighting mood and had already been considering the idea of Napoleon’s dismissal, an idea put about by Fouché and his supporters. The proposal was adopted unanimously. Not only did Napoleon thus lose control of the Chamber, but if he refused to obey it, the deputies threatened, they would declare him an outlaw.90 A short time later, they summoned Napoleon’s ministers to the Chamber to answer their questions. By four o’clock that afternoon, the Elysée was surrounded by elements of the National Guard.91 Napoleon was effectively a prisoner in his own capital.

  Napoleon’s rage over this development soon gave way to hesitation and resignation. It was all well and good to declare that he should have dissolved the Chamber of Representatives before leaving on campaign, but it was too late now. This was not Brumaire; there was no military solution to this problem. Faced with the lack of political support, Napoleon abandoned the fight. Rather than act boldly and decisively he dithered, letting the power he had taken on his return from Elba fall from his grasp. He did not challenge the Chamber, nor attempt to overthrow it, but tried to negotiate a political outcome, not for the country, but for himself.

  ‘I Want Nothing for Myself’

  About five o’clock that evening, Napoleon decided to go for a walk in the grounds of the Elysée Palace with Lucien, amid the echoes of the cries of a pro-Bonapartist crowd at the gates of the palace, possibly as many as 6,000, demanding weapons.92 Lucien used this demonstration of loyalty to persuade Napoleon that he should take the law into his own hands and act.93 It was Napoleon
who rejected the idea. ‘I will attempt everything for France. I want nothing for myself.’ At this, Lucien’s eyes filled with tears and he literally fell on his knees, ‘admiring from the bottom of my heart this father of the patrie’. Lucien on his knees before his brother would have been a sight to see, but his account is poppycock, an attempt to create many years after the event the myth of Napoleon’s self-sacrificing nature. In reality, Lucien came away from the meeting fuming. ‘He is hesitating, he is temporizing,’ he complained to a small group of men who included Carnot, Fouché, Caulaincourt and Davout. ‘The smoke of Mont Saint-Jean [Waterloo] has gone to his head. He is a lost man.’94

  He was indeed. Lucien was sent off that evening to the Chamber of Representatives to talk about ‘the interests of France’, to try to come to terms with them, in part by making menacing noises about a repetition of Brumaire. He entered the Chamber wearing the uniform of the National Guard. It shocked the deputies and seemed to confirm rumours that a coup was imminent.95 Lucien was, in short, a terrible choice, and his intervention was to little effect.96 Egged on by Fouché, the deputies openly discussed the possibility of Napoleon’s abdication.97 They did not yet, however, demand it – the motion was set aside – either because they remained wary of Napoleon98 or because they were afraid of the army’s reaction. Instead, they appointed a commission to invite Napoleon to abdicate.99 If he refused, the Chamber would pronounce his deposition.