The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  The moment of treason—of ultimate betrayal—had been reached; the fortunes of the First Empire had attained their nadir.

  News came from Paris that Marmont had openly deserted to the enemy, taking his men with him. This was the final blow. Napoleon played his last card; accepting that he must abdicate, he tried to assure the succession of his young son. “The Allied powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon is the only obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he is ready to descend from the throne, to leave France, and even to lay down his life for the welfare of his country, which is inseparable from the rights of his son, those of the regency of the Empress, and the maintenance of the laws of the Empire. Given at our palace of Fontainebleau, April 4, 1814. N

  APOLEON.”40

  Caulaincourt, Ney and Macdonald set off with this conditional abdication for Paris, Days of bargaining ensued, but the Tsar and the rest of the Allies gradually hardened their terms. The defection of Marmont’s corps, confirmation of Augereau’s abandonment of Lyons and the desperation of Soult’s position at Toulouse, convinced the Allies that they need heed Napoleon no more. Their demand was for full abdication, no more, no less.

  Giving, up the struggle, on April 6 Napoleon drafted an unconditional abdication.

  The Allied powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon is the only obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces, for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and that there is no personal sacrifice, not even of life itself, that he is unwilling to make in the interest of France.41

  For several more days negotiations continued concerning the terms the Allies were prepared to allow the Emperor; the details of these wranglings do not concern us here.

  Afraid lest the Allies might prevent the Empress and their son from rejoining him, Napoleon gave way to despair and attempted to commit suicide on the night of April 12. Ever since his narrow escape from capture by Cossacks at Malojaroslavets in 1812,* he had carried a small black bag containing opium, belladonna and white hellebore on a string round his neck. After taking this potion, the Emperor summoned Caulaincourt to take his dying deposition. “The voice was barely audible; the closing sentence, like those before it, had been interrupted by recurrent hiccups and violent nausea. His skin was parched and chill; all of a sudden it was covered with an icy sweat; I thought he was about to expire in my arms.”42 However, the efficacy of the poison had diminished over the two years, and Napoleon survived. “What a task it is to die in bed,” the Emperor said to us, “when in war the least thing is enough to end one’s life!”43 This suicide attempt was well concealed, and the rumors that escaped were discounted for many years: only the discovery of Caulaincourt’s memoirs in the 1930s proved that the incident occurred.

  Following the abortive attempt to end his troubles, Napoleon became more resigned to his fate. On April 16, the powers ratified the final form of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. They agreed to allow Napoleon to retain his title of Emperor and gave him full sovereignty over the small island of Elba. He was to receive two million francs a year, and was to be allowed to take a guard of 600 soldiers with him. The Empress was to receive the Duchy of Parma with reversion to her son. The other members of the Bonaparte family received pensions.

  By the 20th of the month the time had come for Napoleon’s departure into exile. For the last time the Old Guard paraded for the Emperor’s inspection in the Courtyard of the White Horse. Moving along the silent ranks, he selected his 600 men. General Drouot was ordered to march the remainder to Paris to Louis XVIII. He bade them farewell. This touching moment was recorded by Coignet. “ ‘Bring me my eagle!’ he said in a loud voice—which nonetheless betrayed his emotion. Then, taking it in his arms and pressing it to his heart, he gave it the kiss of farewell…. At sight of this the whole army broke out into sobs.”44 As Caulaincourt described it, “That was a touching farewell; those grizzled warriors who many a time had watched unmoved while their own blood ran down, could not keep back their tears when they saw their Emperor, their general, their father departing from them.”45

  On April 28 the Emperor and his suite embarked on the British brig-of-war HMS Inconstant at St.-Raphaël and set sail for Elba. Two days later, the newly restored government of King Louis XVIII signed the Treaty of Paris with the Allies; France was stripped of all territorial gains acquired since November 1792. The knotty question of what was to be done to redraw the map of Europe as a whole was by common consent postponed for consideration at the Congress of Vienna, called for September.

  Some historians avow that the Campaign of 1814 was Napoleon’s greatest effort. This is surely an exaggeration of the truth. There is no denying that it represents a considerable achievement for Napoleon personally; the whole effort was virtually sustained by his own sense of indomitable purpose and sheer force of character. The maneuvers he executed and the greater number of the battles and actions he fought between January and late March showed many evidences of his genius as both a strategist and tactician. Ultimately, however, he failed—and from the outset of the year this was practically a foregone conclusion despite Allied confusions in the field and hesitations in the council chamber. France was exhausted; two huge armies totaling over one million men between them had been destroyed in the preceding twenty-four months, and the cumulative effects of two decades of almost continual warfare, aggravated since 1807 by the Continental System and the British blockade, had ruined France’s economy as well as her manpower. By 1814 the will to victory, even the will to survive, had largely disappeared. France was played out, and practically all Europe was in arms against her, determined to avenge their injuries. Napoleon might be capable of exerting his old appeal over the survivors of his armies and the new boy-conscripts, but the people of France as a whole remained apathetic to his appeals (save only in Lorraine and the Champagne, where Allied atrocities stirred the peasantry into revolt).

  Napoleon can therefore be charged with being completely unrealistic in his conduct during 1814. He never really accepted that he was undergoing “the twilight of the Gods”; with eternal optimism, he dreamed of regaining all his old prestige and position. On several occasions he rejected offers of reasonable terms when any wholly sane man would have accepted them. By 1814 he had become entirely out of tune with the mood of his subjects and of his time, and even with reality itself. Bolstered by self-delusion, he personally managed to achieve wonders, but he could not be everywhere at once, and one by one his subordinates succumbed to despair, fatalism or self-interest. Toward the end he recognized that he had erred in selecting lieutenants: “He found fault with himself for having made so much use of the marshals in these latter days,” recorded Caulaincourt, “since they had become too rich, too much the grands seigneurs and had grown war-weary. Things, according to him, would have been in a much better state if he had placed good generals of division, with their batons yet to win, in command.”46 Thus, however great his newly refound energy and brilliance, Napoleon was doomed to failure: neither his people nor his commanders were wholly behind him. This basic truth he found it hard to acknowledge: his very brilliance displayed the aberrations of an overwrought brain.

  So ended the Campaign of 1814, and with it the First Empire. It appeared that a new era in her history lay before France. There was, however, one last dramatic act to be played before Europe saw the last of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  See Ch. 71, p. 822.

  PART SEVENTEEN

  The Campaign of the Hundred Days

  NAPOLEON’S RETURN FROM EXILE AND THE EVENTS LEADING TO HIS FINAL ABDICATION

  INTRODUCTION MEETING AT LE CAILLOU

  I

  N MARKED CONTRAST to the pouring rain of the previous evening and night, the morning of Sunday, the 18th of June, 1815, dawned fine and clear. At the farm of Le Caillou, Napoleon and his generals met at nine o’clock to discuss plans for the comin
g battle while the army painfully stretched cramped limbs and wrung the water from sodden capes and blankets. Across the shallow valley which separated the French lines from the position held by Lord Wellington, occasional minute flashes of scarlet revealed the presence of sentries and outposts, and the smoke from a thousand campfires slowly mounted into the still morning air—visible proofs that the Emperor’s chosen victims had not crept away during the obscure and turbulent night. Soon an irregular rattle of musketry was to be heard as the Allied troops fired their muskets to remove the dampness from them and thus reduce the risk of misfires later in the day. The “Iron Duke” was clearly determined to hold his ground. Napoleon was jubilant to find his foe awaiting him. “On les aura” he confidently predicted to his entourage.

  The Emperor appeared confident and even jocular, showing few signs of the illness and fatigue that had periodically afflicted him over the past two days. He was clearly convinced that victory awaited his forces. Certain members of his entourage, however, wore more anxious faces. Memories of bitter defeats at the hands of this same Wellington and his English redcoats in the Peninsula conjured up an air of anxiety around the Emperor’s quarters, for many military reputations had been lost or sullied amid the barren hills of Spain and Portugal. Marshal Soult felt there was need for every caution, and advised the immediate recall of Marshal Grouchy’s corps, at present engaged in the pursuit of the supposedly routed Prussian forces. In his opinion there could not be too many troops to face “Monsieur Villainton.” With a flash of anger the Emperor rounded on his chief of staff: “Because you have been beaten by Wellington you consider him a good general,” he snapped, “but I tell you that Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops. The whole affair will not be more serious than swallowing one’s breakfast.” Early morning statements are notoriously unreliable. “I hope so sincerely,” replied Soult, clearly unconvinced.1 As was ever his practice before an important battle, the Emperor was doubtlessly determined to rally the generals’ confidence and convince them of his army’s invincibility—but his words also reveal a latent contempt for the “nation of shopkeepers” and its so-called soldiers. Inevitably this attitude of mind led to an underestimation of Wellington’s fighting capabilities, and this in turn accounts for some of the extraordinary errors committed by the French during the long-drawn-out battle, which ultimately resulted in catastrophe for the eagles. This particular “breakfast” was to prove singularly indigestible.

  The well-known events of June 18 form only the climax of the short but intense military phase of the Hundred Days. To treat them in isolation from what went before and what ensued would be to give a very fallacious impression of the campaign and battle. The so-called Battle of Waterloo was in fact a composite action made up of no less than four contributory actions: two on June 16, Quatre Bras and Ligny; and two on the 18th—Waterloo and Wavre. A whole is the sum of its parts, and each of the three smaller actions had a most decided influence on what took place between La Belle Alliance and the ridge of Mont-St.-Jean.

  88

  RETURN OF THE EMPEROR

  Although the main events of the campaign were concentrated into four hectic days between June 15 and 18, 1815, it is necessary to return to the preceding year in order to appreciate the situation that exploded so forcefully south of Brussels. Deserted or betrayed by his marshals, with a war-weary France clamoring for peace and Allied armies occupying Paris, Napoleon had been forced to sign an act of unconditional abdication at the palace of Fontainebleau on April 6, 1814. At that time the greater part of the French people undoubtedly welcomed the end of hostilities, which had lasted with hardly a break for more than twenty years with untold cost in terms of human lives and misery. In the outburst of relief that coincided with Napoleon’s departure for exile on the Island of Elba, the Royal Family returned to the throne of their ancestors on what appeared to be a wave of popularity; seemingly the Bourbon lilies had finally triumphed over the Revolutionary tricolor with its uncomfortable associations of red terror and Liberté, Fraternité Egalité. King Louis XVIII—nephew of his unfortunate sixteenth namesake who had paid for his errors of judgment with his head—was a well-intentioned but purblind mediocrity, who could no more extirpate the nationalistic forces liberated in 1789 than he could control his own followers. Behind the wheels of the royal carriage followed a flock of returning émigrés, dispossessed noblemen and clergy who had fled abroad during the Terror, and now demanded the restoration of their privileges and estates, eager to put back the clock to the pre-Revolutionary Elysium.

  While Napoleon employed part of his vast energy reordering the administration of his tiny principality off the Italian coast and drilling its Lilliputian army, and the representatives of the Powers foregathered at Vienna to wine, dine and dance and in between times settle the shape of a disordered post-war Europe, the first “honeymoon” popularity of the restored Bourbons rapidly wore thin. In many respects, the new regime in France was more liberal and enlightened than the one it replaced; the requirements of total war had wrought havoc with civil rights under the Empire, and these were now once more guaranteed by the Bourbon Charter. Attempts to put the ruined French economy in order were also undertaken in all sincerity. But these wise measures did nothing to allay mounting popular suspicion. For twenty-five years the ruling house had been little more than foreign puppets, sheltered by France’s enemies, scheming the downfall of her national forces and de facto ruler—and no amount of royalist propaganda could eradicate the impression that the Bourbons returned as the lackeys of the reactionary powers, committed to destroy the ideals of the Revolution (theoretical though many of these had proved to be). The Bourbons, therefore, had few deep roots in popular esteem, and their good intentions but limited abilities were no replacement for the genius of Napoleon, who, besides causing bloodshed and suffering, had also created the famous Civil and Criminal Codes and given France firm if ruthless government. It was widely anticipated that the Comte d’Artois—the heir-presumptive—would in due course revoke the Bourbon Charter and give the forces of reaction their head.

  No amount of Royal guarantees would allay the suspicions of the most distrustful element of French society—the peasantry. The Revolution had succeeded largely because its leaders had secured the support of the peasants by redistributing the land and abolishing the feudal restrictions that had crippled France’s agrarian economy for centuries. Now, in 1815, the peasantry was faced by the possibility—it was never more than remote—of land reform and the redistribution of part of their property among the returned émigrés, who made up for their relatively small numbers by their vociferous clamors for restitution. The overt suspicion of the largest class of French society—for France was still predominantly an agrarian country—undermined the very foundations of the Bourbon regime, and the peasantry somewhat paradoxically came to regard Napoleon as the hero of the Revolution.

  A second section of the community was equally disgruntled—the ex-soldiers. The victorious powers had insisted that the French forces be reduced to a shadow of their former size, and large-scale demobilization was in any case economically imperative. Pitchforked into civil life, the French rank and file grumbled—as always—but this time with real grievances. One hundred and fifty-five years earlier Cromwell’s New Model Army had similarly been abruptly disbanded by another restored monarchy, and contemporary observers had been greatly impressed by the orderly way in which the original redcoats had reassimilated themselves into civil life. The France of 1815 was not, however, blessed with so easy a transition. No doubt many of the conscripts were only too glad to revert to their former ways of life, but there remained a hard core of veteran soldiers who proved incapable of finding a place in the inflationary economy and shaken society of defeated France. Many starved; all felt disgruntled. The focal points of the old comrades’ discontent were the cafés where the 12,000 or so officers on half pay would congregate to read the Paris news sheets, sip a pernod, and lament the “good old days” of the E
mpire. The passage of time rapidly glossed over the realities of Napoleonic campaigning—the fear, the fatigue, the mud, the hunger and pain—and left only evocative memories of la gloire and treasured remembrances of some passing word from Le Tondu. In this way, the Bourbon policy of military retrenchment ensured that the Napoleonic mystique survived. Somewhat paradoxically, this was nowhere more evident than within the ranks of the units incorporated into the new Royal army. No amount of ordinances and disciplinary awards could check, for instance, the established practice of sentries presenting arms to veterans wearing the white enameled cross of the Légion d’Honneur. In the end this was allowed.

  Napoleon was by no means unaware of the mounting tide of discontent in France. Many of his old generals and servants had taken service with the new regime, but for safety’s sake kept at least a toe in their former master’s camp; one such was inevitably Fouché, Minister of Police; another the wily Talleyrand, diplomat and intriguer par excellence. Early in 1815, Napoleon, intensely bored after ten months of relative inactivity within the restricted confines of the Island of Elba, sensed his opportunity. By allying himself with the discontented elements and posing as the champion of the Revolution, he considered that he might yet reverse the tide of fortune by undertaking one last, grand gamble; he had little to lose—everything to gain.

  On February 26, Napoleon set sail from Elba, accompanied by Generals Bertrand, Drouot and Cambronne, the thousand men of his personal guard and four cannon. On the first day of March, the Emperor once more set foot on French soil near Cannes. His arrival took the authorities by surprise; the news took four days to reach Paris, and nine to be relayed to London, but gradually an apprehensive and astounded Europe learned “the devil is unchained.” The French people—on whose reaction everything depended—remained calm and observant, awaiting a sign before committing themselves one way or the other.