Citizen Emperor (120 page)

And still Napoleon remained undecided.
¹⁹
The excuses he gave ranged from not wanting to board a foreign vessel to not wanting to follow Baudin’s insistent demands that he escape in great secrecy accompanied by two or three followers at most. That would leave those he left behind – sixty-four people had accompanied him to Rochefort – exposed to the vengeance of the Bourbons. This is possible but unlikely, given Napoleon’s past record of caring little about those in his entourage. It is more likely that he was worried about how he would appear to others. What was he without his entourage, his gaggle of courtiers?

Ever since 1812, Napoleon, once resolute and decisive, had appeared invariably to be racked by indecision and inertia. This has something to do with the fact that he was no longer invincible, with the fact that the self-image shaped in his youth no longer coincided with the reality. The end result was depression. We are talking about a still youngish man – he was not yet forty-six – but he was in poor health, overweight and burnt out. Writing some years after the event, Baron Charles Lallemand blamed the delay on members of Napoleon’s entourage who wanted him to surrender to the British; but, he also argued, the Emperor had lost any interest in his own personal safety and therefore left everything to others, ‘loyal advisers’, who were not particularly clear-sighted about what should happen.
²⁰
Napoleon’s hesitation may very well be explained by his fear of the consequences if he failed to elude the British blockade. If he had been captured, dressed incognito to boot, it would have been a blot on his reputation, a farce which he would not have been able to live down.

On 7 July, General Becker received a dispatch from the provisional government stating that Napoleon had to embark immediately, ‘for the safety and tranquillity of the State are imperilled’ by his delays.
²¹
It was only on 8 July, after repeated representations from Becker and Bonnefoux, that Napoleon agreed to embark for the Île d’Aix at the mouth of the Charente, with his entourage, from the little town of Fouras. There is a tendency on the part of some historians to portray Captain Maitland of the
Bellerophon
as having misled Napoleon or at least having deliberately lulled him into believing that England would welcome him as an exile.
²²
It is quite possible that this did indeed happen, that a certain amount of trickery was used to lure him on board the
Bellerophon
. He was, after all, the biggest prize any naval captain could hope to capture. We know that, by Maitland’s own admission, at one point in the conversations between the captain and Savary, he asked, rhetorically, ‘why not ask asylum in Britain?’
²³
The sloop
Falmouth
appeared with new orders from Admiral Hotham emphasizing that, if captured, Napoleon was to be kept in custody and returned to the nearest English port.
²⁴
Maitland, it should be stressed, was never told what would be Napoleon’s fate once he had reached port, in part because the British government was still unsure what to do with him. He made it clear on a number of occasions that he could not guarantee what his government’s attitude would be once they reached England.
²⁵

Two days were spent on the island of Aix, 12 and 13 July, during which Napoleon again considered his options: the possibility of escaping with Baudin (General Lallemand was sent to confirm that Baudin was still prepared to risk the blockade); or leaving with Joseph, who arrived on the island on 13 July and who offered, generously under the circumstances, to stay on at Aix and play the part of Napoleon while his brother escaped to America. There appear to have been two cliques at work trying to influence Napoleon’s decision: those who were prepared to accept any risk rather than fall into the hands of the English; and those like Bertrand, Savary and Las Cases who, on the contrary, believed that surrender to the English was the best possible course of action.
²⁶
In fact, it would seem that Napoleon had already made up his mind. England appeared to offer him a helping hand, a choice that would enable him to leave France with the dignity by which he held so much store.

At dawn, Napoleon sent Las Cases, this time with Lallemand, back to the
Bellerophon
to negotiate his surrender. The two went away from a discussion with Maitland under the mistaken impression that the Emperor would be free to pursue his voyage to the United States. Even then Lallemand made a last-ditch attempt to persuade Napoleon to escape using Baudin’s offer of the
Bayadère
. Had Napoleon been thinking all this time of Paoli, his one-time idol who had found asylum in England when he fled Corsica and French oppression? Napoleon may very well have been under the mistaken impression that because he was seeking asylum he would be granted it automatically, and that he would enjoy the same rights as any Englishman under the law.
²⁷

Las Cases announced to Maitland that Napoleon would be arriving the next day at four or five in the morning, as a simple citizen, under the name of Colonel Muiron (the young officer who had supposedly sacrificed his life for Bonaparte on the bridge at Arcola), ‘to enjoy the protection of your country’s laws’. While Maitland often reiterated that he had no authority for granting terms of any kind, Napoleon wanted to believe that his enemy was generous and he, playing the role of some sort of fallen Greek hero, expected the rest of the world to behave magnanimously.

Before coming on board the
Bellerophon
, Napoleon wrote a pretentious letter to an even more pompous man, the Prince Regent, declaring that he had come ‘like Themistocles, to throw [himself] upon the hospitality of the British people’, putting himself under the protection of British law, which he claimed from the Prince Regent ‘as the most powerful, most constant and most generous of my enemies’.
²⁸
*
The reference to Themistocles was hardly likely to cut it with the English. When the first secretary to the Admiralty, John Wilson Croker, first heard of the reference, he roared with laughter.
²⁹

Napoleon came on board the
Bellerophon
between six and seven o’clock in the morning (the accounts vary). The act was not without some irony. In Greek mythology, Bellerophon brought upon himself the wrath of the gods by trying to ride the winged horse Pegasus to heaven. Pegasus threw him, and he ended his life as a lonely outcast. The dilemma for Maitland was how to receive Napoleon – as foreign sovereign, or as an enemy general surrendering? In the end he compromised, falling back on custom, which was not to engage in ceremonial honours before eight in the morning or after sunset.
³⁰
Maitland thus decided to order a guard of marines to be drawn up on deck, but stipulated that they were not to present arms. Moreover, although the Emperor was piped aboard, Maitland and the other officers of his crew waited on the quarterdeck, obliging Napoleon to climb up the admittedly short stairway to greet them. He greeted Maitland with the words, necessarily spoken in French, ‘I have come to throw myself on the protection of your Prince and your laws.’ Maitland virtually treated Napoleon as a royal personage – hats were taken off in his presence, he was addressed as ‘Sire’ but only after the Emperor had first spoken to his interlocutor – that is, one could not just start a conversation with Napoleon. The attitude of Admiral Hotham, who arrived in the
Superb
the same day, led Napoleon to believe that the British would continue to treat him as a sovereign on reaching English shores. Most of the voyage to the English coast was spent in his cabin, where he would sometimes read or play cards, or fall asleep on the sofa in his cabin. The curiosity he had shown during the first days, enquiring about the workings of the vessel and those who manned it, had given way to lethargy. He did not appear on deck except for a short period after 5 p.m. and before evening meals at six, during which time he appeared distracted and lost in thought.

Seven days later, early in the morning of 23 July, the ship was abreast of the island of Ushant off the coast of Brittany. Midshipman George Home had come on deck and saw Napoleon just about to ascend the ladder to the poop deck. Because the decks had just been washed down, he rushed to offer Napoleon his arm. Napoleon smiled, pointed upwards and said in broken English, ‘The poop, the poop.’ When they had both climbed up there, he thanked Home, pointed to the island and asked, ‘Ushant? Cape Ushant?’ He then took out a pocket glass and looked ‘eagerly at the land’. It was just after 4 a.m. He stayed on the poop till midday.
³¹
In the course of the morning, several members of his suite joined him, but he paid no ‘attention to what was passing around him’ or even addressed his entourage, who stood behind him all this time. It was an unusual posture to hold for such a long period of time and can really only be explained by the deep but no doubt conflicted feelings he was experiencing. After land had entirely disappeared from view, and without having uttered a word the whole time, Napoleon ‘tottered down the poop-ladder; his head hung heavily forward, so as to render his countenance scarcely visible’. He would never set eyes on France again.

* After defeating the Persians in 483 bc, Themistocles was obliged to flee Greece from the Spartans in 472 or 471 bc. He travelled to Asia Minor, where he entered the service of the Persian king, Artaxerxes I.

Notes

REGENERATION, 1799–1802

1: The Invention of a Saviour