The War of Wars (119 page)

Talleyrand emerged from the shadows to lead a provisional government on 1 April and to welcome the Tsar Alexander and the King of Prussia, Frederick William, into the city. For both monarchs it was a
moment to savour: the former had burned his beautiful city of Moscow in a grim attempt to drive the French back just over six months before, while nearly all of the latter’s country had been occupied by the French for some six years.

Talleyrand entertained them at the Opera, where they were received rapturously by the same population that had once cheered the guillotining of monarchs and then welcomed Napoleon’s triumphs: their concern now was to prevent a massive bloodletting in revenge. In Fontainebleau an incredulous Napoleon, still at the head of 60,000 men, declared he would attack the enemy in Paris, to cries of ‘To Paris, To Paris!’ from his men. ‘We will go and prove to them that the French nation is mistress of her own soil; that if we have long been masters among others, we will always be so here, and that we are able to defend our colours, our independence, and the integrity of our country.’

Some ninety miles away in Orléans his faithful, sweet Austrian Empress, whom he had named as Regent of France, issued a proclamation to the French people: ‘Frenchmen, fortunes of war having put the capital in foreign hands, the Emperor, hastening to succour it, is at the head of his armies, so often victorious . . . Remain faithful to your vows, listen to the voice of a princess entrusted to your loyal support who glories in being a Frenchwoman and sharing the destinies of the sovereign you have yourselves chosen . . . The right and person of my son are under your protection.’ It was touching and pathetic.

Ney, his most fearless commander and Berthier, his faithful chief of staff, now had the disagreeable task of telling Napoleon that his army would not march. ‘The army will obey me,’ insisted Napoleon. ‘The army will obey its chief,’ replied Ney.

Napoleon realized that the great adventure that had started with the shabby coup d’état at Brumaire eleven years before – or perhaps with his first military action in helping to recapture Toulon in 1795 – was over. He issued a proclamation on 4 April: ‘The Allied powers having announced that the Emperor Napoleon is the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, mindful of his engagements, declares that he is ready to descend from the throne, to give up France and even life itself for the good of the country,
inseparable from the rights of his son, those of the regency of the Empress, and the maintenance of the laws of the Empire.’

Marie Louise desperately wanted to join him at Fontainebleau, so close to Orléans, but was partly dissuaded and partly kidnapped by a squadron of her father’s troops and forced to join the Austrian Emperor at Rambouillet. Defiantly she wrote to her beloved Napoleon: ‘By now you will know that they made me leave Orléans and that orders have been given to stop me from joining you and even by resort to force if necessary. Be on your guard, my dearest, they are out to fool us. I am worried to death for you, but I shall take a firm line with my father. I shall say that I am absolutely set on joining you, and nobody is going to prevent me from doing that.’

Napoleon penned a note to Marie Louise, saying he loved her ‘more than anything in the world’ and during the night of 13 April he attempted to take poison. Caulaincourt was summoned to find him convulsed in agony. After four hours he began to recover: he had apparently taken a dose he had been given two years before in case of capture by Russian partisans: it had failed to work.

On 16 April an English officer, Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, perhaps the first to meet him since 1803, gave this description of the deposed Emperor at Fontainebleau. ‘I saw before me a short, active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell. He was dressed in an old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red top boots, unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely upon his upper lip and breast.’ The fight was not quite yet over: for Eugène de Beauharnais still held out in Italy, a stepson as faithful to his master as his second wife had been.

De Beauharnais had prepared a spirited rearguard that confirmed the abilities he had shown on the Russian retreat. He had refused allied calls to make him King of Italy, pulling back to the Adige river with 50,000 men as his line of defence against the Austrians, who numbered some 70,000. When Murat, with 50,000 men, declared war on him from the south, he pulled back to a line of defence along the Mincio and the Po rivers. There he fought and won three battles. During the most remarkable, both sides simultaneously attacked in fog, crossing the
Mincio at different points to engage the enemy, and finding themselves in trouble on the reverse side. De Beauharnais had the best of the battle of the Mincio, taking 2,500 prisoners.

Napoleon ordered his stepson to bring his troops to his defence in France. But de Beauharnais refused, pointing out that they were mainly Italians who would desert if asked to fight in France. The British now joined the fight in Italy under Lord William Bentinck who early in March landed with 6,000 British and Sicilian troops at Leghorn. They became the forerunners of Italian independence and unity by calling upon the people to rise up against Eugène and form a free nation.

Bentinck immediately quarrelled with Murat and threatened to march on Naples and overthrow him. Castlereagh ordered him to desist and Bentinck settled for occupying the port of Genoa, while Murat moved north to attack his wife’s step-nephew. De Beauharnais, who had already gone into action against Murat, with mixed results, prepared to do so again, but news arrived of the Treaty of Fontainebleau. This had been signed on 11 April. The allies, at the Tsar’s urging, had decided to send Napoleon to exile on the island of Elba: Corsica and Sardinia were considered too large, Corfu too remote. The other members of the Bonaparte claim were to be given pensions. De Beauharnais’s hopes of becoming Italy’s new King were dashed by the Austrians, who had stirred up riots against him in Italy. He agreed to step down and departed for Munich in Bavaria, then to Paris, to be at his mother Josephine’s bedside when she died in May. Two years later he was given the small Dutchy of Leuchtenberg by the King of Bavaria but presided over it only another seven years, dying peacefully at forty-three after the strain of so much campaigning.

Napoleon meanwhile left for Elba on 20 April in fourteen carriages escorted by sixty Polish cavalry, travelling to Lyons and the Rhone valley, a hotbed of royalist sentiment. At Avignon a mob stopped his coach and tried to lynch him. Napoleon uncharacteristically showed his fear and went on his way disguised as a servant, insisting on travelling aboard a British ship for greater safety. Once on the island he continued obsessively to rule its 12,000 inhabitants as though they were an empire, issuing decrees and reforming the administration. Unfortunately, he had little money and after a few months’ ‘activity
and restless perseverance’, in the words of Campbell, the British commissioner who guaranteed his safety, he began to keep to his small house, where his faithful mother Letizia and sister Pauline joined him to while away the time playing cards. He snubbed Maria Walewska, however, who sought to join him.

Napoleon soon ran out of money – he had taken four million francs to Elba and had been promised two million more by the new French government, which never came. He feared he would soon not be able to afford his bodyguards and might be assassinated or transferred to the Azores. (Fouché said that Napoleon in Elba was to France what Vesuvius was to Naples.) Above all, he learnt with satisfaction of the rapid disillusion that followed the arrival of France’s desperately uncharismatic new King.

There can hardly have been a more complete contrast in history than that between the now deposed, hyperactive, quick-witted Corsican upstart and the Bourbon Louis XVIII, the new King imposed largely by the British. It was truly, in Napoleon’s phrase, a change from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Comte de Provence was a hugely fat, waddling, prematurely aged man with a fish-like mouth and penetrating gaze surmounted by his sole distinguishing feature, prominent black eyebrows. Pompous, cold and courteous, endowed with little physical courage, considerable indolence, a prodigious love of food and books, and deeply self-centred, he had just two dominant virtues. While of middling intellect, he was politically moderate, pragmatic and shrewd; he was also reasonably humane in an age known for vindictiveness and cruelty. He was in fact a thoroughly civilized, mediocre, egotistical, eighteenth-century-style monarch, like many others of the same period.

Yet the course of this most ordinary man’s life had been anything but ordinary. As a younger son he lived in the shadow of his good-looking, blond, blue-eyed, intelligent and prickly autocratic elder brother who became Louis XVI, as well as his own energetic scheming, reactionary and ambitious younger brother, the Comte d’Artois. A scion of the Bourbons, the greatest ruling family in Europe, which had run France since the tenth century, with brother branches on the thrones of Spain, Naples and Parma, he spent the first decades of his life virtually powerless.

He married a hideous Italian princess, Marie-Josephine, with a horse face, a large nose, and thick beetle eyebrows. They enjoyed the
peaceful splendour of life in Versailles. Philip Mansel, in his superb and definitive biography, wrote:

His increasing size emphasised and helped ensure that he was one of the few Bourbons who did not spend half his life on a horse. At first, however, he had quite enjoyed hunting and shooting: he would be accompanied by sixty-three horses, twenty grooms, two
Ecuyers
, a
Gentilhomme d’Honneur
, a
Capitaine des Gardes
and his
Premier Ecuyer
when he went hunting, and by thirty-two horses and eighteen household officials and servants when he went shooting – impressive testimony to the degree to which his daily life was sheltered and surrounded by his household. And in the 1780s he was still going shooting once or twice a month in the summer.

Like most royal siblings, he cordially detested his older brother. When the events of 1789 occurred, he had been merely a passive spectator. In June 1791 he slipped away into exile with a friend, pretending to be a British merchant, using phrases like ‘Come with me’ and ‘I am ready’, and speaking to the coachman in French with an English accent. After drifting aimlessly around Europe as an exile, Louis supported the aborted royalist invasion of France in the autumn of 1792.

With the guillotining of Louis XVI and the death in appalling circumstances of his infant son soon afterwards, this portly indolent, easygoing man became the Pretender to the French throne. However most royalists preferred his scheming, hardline younger brother, the Comte d’Artois. On Napoleon’s ascent to power, Louis wrote amicably to the new leader suggesting that he support a royal restoration, only to be brutally fobbed off: ‘You would have to walk over a hundred thousand corpses. Sacrifice your interests to the peace and happiness of France’ – words which ring a little ironically in view of later events. In 1807 Louis took refuge in England, to the dismay of its government which wanted an accommodation with the French republican regime and refused to allow him to reside in London.

Instead he was patronized by the recently deposed Whig grandee, the outgoing prime minister, William, Lord Grenville, and lavishly entertained at Stowe, ducal seat of the marquess of Buckingham,
Grenville’s brother. Louis’s son and heir almost fell in love with his lovely twenty-one-year-old daughter, Lady Mary Grenville. In England Louis became still fatter, moving ‘like the heavings of a ship’, as Charles Grenville commented, and contracted gout, so that he had to be wheeled about his country house. Not until 1811 was he officially received by the court, in the shape of the almost as fat, but quicker-witted and more unscrupulous Prince Regent.

On 12 March 1814 news arrived to a tearfully joyful Louis that Bordeaux had risen against Napoleon and had been liberated by Wellington. On 7 April the French senate proclaimed him King of France. On 24 April Louis set foot in France for the first time after two decades in exile, arriving to a tumultuous welcome in Calais. Five days later at Compiègne the surviving coterie of Napoleon’s senior marshals Ney, Berthier, Marmont, Jourdan, Mortier, Oudinot and Victor – arrived to pay him homage and put the army at his disposal. The effective leader of France, Talleyrand, was there too, along with the Vicomte de Chateaubriand. They pledged to ‘provide the pillars of your throne’. Louis greeted them generously: ‘It is on you, Messieurs les Maréchaux, that I want always to rely; come near and surround me. You have always been good Frenchmen; I hope that France will have no more need of your swords. If ever, which God forbid, we were forced to draw them, I would march with you, if that was necessary.’

All this was an astonishing turnaround. The restoration of the guillotined King of France’s corpulent younger brother seemed to wipe out the entire French national experience from 1789 to 1814 and return the country to the
status quo ante
. All the turbulence, murderousness and disruption of the Revolution, all the sacrifice, glory and imperial power had, it seemed, been in vain: the clock had been turned back to what it was before, as if France had awoken from a nightmare to rediscover its former Versailles-type splendour.

In a sense it was Napoleon himself who had paved the way, for his own attempts to create a dynasty had resulted in a France that was if anything more royal, centralized and absolutist than ever before. As Lafayette, in retirement, wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson in August: ‘Bonaparte or the Bourbons, such have been, and such still
are, the only possible alternatives, in a land where the idea of a republican executive is regarded as synonymous with the excesses committed under that name.’

Older revolutionaries like the regicide Fouché were now dukes. The Abbé Sieyès, whose incendiary pamphlets had triggered off the Revolution and who had brought Napoleon to power, was a count. Carnot, creator of the republican military machine taken over by Napoleon, was also a count.