12

The Hundred Days

Defeated, sick, and reportedly contemplating suicide, the Napoleon who returned to France in the spring of 1814 was a sadly diminished shadow of the Emperor he had been only a few months earlier. He had wanted to fight on, but superior Allied numbers, high desertion figures, and hunger in the ranks of his army all conspired to deny him the option of a favourable military outcome. In Paris there was a political vacuum as some of those on whom he had depended for support abandoned him – or hesitated to commit themselves to him while they weighed up his prospects of survival. The Emperor was no longer the master of the situation; he wanted to believe that he could conclude a peace on the basis of the terms held out to him at Frankfurt and sought to play on the different ambitions of the Allied powers as he looked to a political solution that would leave France intact and his imperial authority assured. But that was not going to happen. By refusing to make peace when it was on offer, and by allowing France to be invaded, Napoleon had weakened his own negotiating position and abandoned the initiative to the victors.

From Chaumont he made peace overtures to the Allies, sending Caulaincourt to the enemy camp to negotiate on his behalf, but without success. The Emperor’s envoy was not even granted an audience. The other leaders had no reason to trust Napoleon or to believe his promises; they were no longer interested in making concessions but wanted to press on to Paris and drive home their victory. And Napoleon found himself unable – in either his own or his country’s interests – to exploit important tactical differences between his opponents. By the end of March the French army was effectively beaten and the Allies were at the gates of Paris. There was little defence. Napoleon had baulked at building fortifications around his capital and, beyond the incomplete octroi wall and a few trenches and redoubts, the city was undefended when the Allies attacked.¹ Paris was occupied, and although Napoleon, camped at Fontainebleau, considered one last assault on his capital to dislodge them, his plans came to nought. They were undone as much by his supporters and by public apathy as they were by the Allies.

For it was Napoleon’s own marshals, the men he had entrusted with the defence of Paris and the command of his armies, who took the decision to hoist the flag of surrender. They were encouraged in this by Napoleon’s brother Joseph who, as lieutenant-general in Paris and head of the Regency Council, had lost all taste for further bloodshed and saw his main responsibility as preventing the Emperor’s young son from falling into enemy hands. On 29 March he ordered a reluctant Empress to escort the young king away from Paris, taking him first to Rambouillet, then to the comparative safety of Blois. Within days, however, they were on the move again, this time to join Marie-Louise’s family in Vienna, back at the Austrian court. This deprived Napoleon of his last diplomatic card and removed any lingering chance that the Allies would allow the boy to accede to the throne as his father’s successor.² Increasingly, by early April he accepted the possibility that he would lose his throne, and planned to abdicate in favour of his son, establishing the imperial line and providing an honourable exit strategy. But here, too, he was doomed to fail. Ever open to conspiracy theories, Napoleon was quick to smell treason among his marshals and ministers. Marmont, who authorised the surrender of Paris, quickly rallied to the Bourbons, and those marshals who surrounded Napoleon at Fontainebleau – among them close advisers like Lefebvre and Macdonald, Oudinot and Ney – refused to march on the capital, anxious to avoid firing on Parisians. Behind the scenes, politicians lobbied and plotted, most notably the cunning, unscrupulous figure of Talleyrand, who in these vital few days became a powerful advocate of the Bourbon cause. Talleyrand was highly persuasive, urging Tsar Alexander I, Frederick William of Prussia, and the Austrian Emperor Francis I to reject a negotiated peace and demand unconditional surrender.³ Deals were struck about the future without even consulting the Emperor. Napoleon was outraged; he had been out manoeuvred, and, as he continued to protest, betrayed.⁴

The Empire was over, and it was over on Allied terms. Napoleon would neither be granted the peace with honour that he had held out for, nor would he be allowed to hold on to his throne. At this point the most determined of his adversaries was Russia’s Alexander I. The Tsar refused all forms of political compromise and quite unambiguously demanded that Napoleon abdicate and renounce all claim to the French throne. The Emperor was left with no choice but to agree, and on 6 April 1814, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, he signed a letter of abdication, receiving in return the right to retain his imperial title, sovereignty over the tiny island of Elba (which even he dismissed as a ‘royaume d’opérette’),⁵ and an income of two million francs a year, to be paid to him by the French government. There were other small concessions, too: clauses in the treaty gave the Empress the title of Duchess of Parma, and made financial provision for various members of the Bonaparte clan. But all that was mere window-dressing. What mattered was that Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-created Emperor of France, was stripped of his power, and that his claim to dynastic legitimacy was firmly rejected. Europe could breathe more easily, safe in the knowledge that, once banished to Elba, the man they regarded as a usurper and a serial aggressor could do them no further harm. Any settlement concluded in 1814 had to be acceptable to the European powers, and they were not in a forgiving mood. The restoration of Louis XVIII may have been accepted by the French and championed by some of their number – with Talleyrand, as ever, to the fore – but the final decision was not theirs to make. This was a settlement by the Allies for the Allies – something that France was not allowed to forget.

A fortnight later, on 20 April, Napoleon left Fontainebleau for his new kingdom. As ever, his exit lines were carefully prepared, his sense of betrayal intact. He spoke with dignity, even with warmth, of his British opponents, who, he said, had always behaved properly in war and whom he therefore respected. But he remained bitter in his condemnation of the French Provisional Government, which, he believed, was loading him with petty restrictions that were insulting and demeaning. The new Minister of War, for instance, had ordered the withdrawal of guns and stores from Elba, displaying the government’s distrust of their prisoner and leaving him without the means to defend himself – not, he insisted, against his fellow Frenchmen, but against the raiders and Barbary pirates who were still the scourge of the Mediterranean. Napoleon was scathing in his dismissal of the new government, accusing them of cowardly collaboration with the enemy and questioning their legitimacy. He seemed keen to draw a clear distinction between his British captors and representatives of the Bourbons, with whom he refused to have any dealings. His treaty, he said, was not with the French monarchy but with the Allied governments, and he looked to those governments to fulfil their obligations to him.⁶ In the same spirit, once he had reached Fréjus, where both a British frigate and a French corvette waited to escort him to Elba, he avoided all communication with the French. On being told that the French captain had instructions from his government to embark him and take him to Elba, Napoleon took pains to insist that he travel on the British vessel.⁷

Despite his repeated claims to represent the patriotic instincts of his people, there is little to suggest that they shared his outrage. In Paris as in London, cartoonists mocked Napoleon’s little kingdom, with its toy defences and its travesty of an imperial court. An English caricature showing the deposed leader being welcomed by the savage inhabitants of the island was entitled ‘Napoleon dreading his doleful doom, or his grand entry on the isle of Elba.⁸ Another popular image, first printed in London, then widely circulated in France, mocked ‘the jay stripped of his borrowed feathers’, and depicted Napoleon being plucked of his peacock feathers by two crowned eagles.⁹ French caricaturists were equally dismissive, depicting Napoleon as a murderous tyrant, half covered in a tiger skin, with a handsaw replacing the hand of justice and papers scattered on the ground to remind the onlooker of his savagery: one read ‘conscription’, the others ‘Spain’, ‘Moscow’, and ‘Jaffa’ – reminders all of the cost in blood of his regime.¹⁰ Across Europe relief and glee mingled easily. Even in France itself there were few outside the army who did not share that relief, happy at least that the Emperor’s fall from grace meant a respite from war and from the dreadful tax in blood they had paid for it. Some did not hesitate to blame Napoleon personally or to accuse him of being unmoved by the loss of so many young lives. A proclamation by the department of the Seine on 2 April was unambiguous in its condemnation of the Emperor, reminding the inhabitants of Paris that he alone was responsible for the miseries they had endured. ‘You owe all the woes which have befallen you to one man and one man alone,’ it intoned, a man who ‘year after year has decimated your families by his continuous conscription.’¹¹ There were many in France who, in the immediate aftermath of the defeat and invasion, thought of Napoleon as the cause of their troubles and were prepared to welcome any ruler who promised them a respite from war.

On 3 May Louis XVIII made his official entry into Paris, his coach drawn by eight white horses and his arrival greeted with church bells and a salvo of artillery fire. To judge by contemporary accounts, the city reacted with caution rather than exuberance; people lined the streets or looked down from their balconies, but did so quietly, driven more by fear and curiosity than by joy. There were royalists among them, of course, cheering for the Bourbons and the white flag and shouting their hatred for the tyrant they had toppled. But they were a minority. Most people were less concerned by the change of regime than by the prospect of peace, and the dominant emotion was relief that the war was over, that civilian life could resume, and that future generations of young men would be free of the obligations of conscription.¹²

There was no clamour for a return to Bourbon rule. But the draining effects of over twenty years of war were taking their toll, with high prices, shortages, and the loss of sons, servants and horses, all in the name of patriotism and the Empire. Bemused, often unenthusiastic, Parisians looked on as momentous changes took place in their midst and peace was restored. The treaty was signed at the end of May and the Allied armies then began their withdrawal. On 4 June, in the presence of the new king, the charter was read before the two Chambers, and though it provided the constitutional framework by which Louis was to rule the country, the symbolism of monarchy would prove powerful, especially for a nation and a generation that had known only revolution and empire. ‘The period of revolution and wars was over’, wrote Henry Houssaye during the most republican years of the Third Republic, and it seemed as if nothing had changed; Louis XVI might still be on the throne. ‘Hereditary monarchy and the authority of divine right were re-established; the legitimate king was in the Tuileries, on the throne of his ancestors, in “the nineteenth year of his reign.”’ But that did not mean that these changes were consented to, or approved by the population; many in France were bewildered and confused, while others, especially in the army, refused to accept the consequences of defeat. If Louis promised an amnesty to his opponents, he did not extend that to regicides. Those who had voted Louis XVI’s death were to be banished from his realm. And the restored monarch soon started to snub former revolutionaries, however willing they might be to serve him.¹³ The country was not reunited; as Houssaye perceptively added, the Bourbons may have been restored to the throne, but ‘all that remained was to govern.’¹⁴

The difficulties of the new regime were greatly increased by Napoleon’s refusal to accept his own defeat, by the dreams and the resentments he took with him to Elba. His proud words of farewell to the officers and men of the Old Guard in the courtyard at Fontainebleau, as he left on his journey to Elba, contained more than a suggestion of the perils to come. ‘Adieu, mes enfants,’ he addressed them with an almost paternal affection, ‘would that I could press you all to my heart.’ Instead, as his men lined up before him, he solemnly kissed their standard. Between the soldiers and their commander there was a genuine bond, built on the many painful campaigns they had shared and the moments of glory they had revelled in together. At Fontainebleau, Napoleon’s gesture was not innocent. Rather, he was sealing that bond for the future, revealing very publicly the love and esteem in which he held those who served him. The report of the ceremony offered no commentary but let the poignancy of the moment shine through. ‘The silence was broken,’ it noted, ‘only by the sobs of the soldiers.’¹⁵ Many who were there, like many others who had seen service under him, continued to revere him and to look back on their years in the Grande Armée with affection and nostalgia as a period of adventure and comradeship, when they had been plucked from their cottages and workshops and helped to make history. With peace restored and the Bourbons deeply suspicious of their political motives, they felt poorly rewarded for their years in uniform, pensioned off or placed on half-pay, the years of dreaming brought to a sudden and savage end. Among them were romantics who dreamed that Napoleon would return to lead them again, and they held on to their sacred relics of war – the medals, the tricolour cockades, the eagles – in the hope that they might see further service.¹⁶ For them, Napoleon would always be their leader, the commander who had shared their sufferings and had inspired them to greatness; a soldier’s soldier who had risen through the ranks of the army and had brought them glory, honour and national pride.

The conditions of his exile were in no sense Spartan, though after his long years at the heart of a Europe-wide empire, Elba must have felt curiously remote, even for a man brought up in Corsica. He was accompanied from France by three collaborators who had volunteered to share his exile, Cambronne, Drouot and Bertrand, and once on Elba his entourage included two secretaries, a butler, a doctor and a considerable domestic staff. There were also the officers of the small military force he maintained for ceremonial occasions and for the island’s defence. He lived comfortably, if simply, in the Palazzina dei Mulini in Portoferraio, where he spent long hours outside in the garden overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. There was no prohibition on receiving visitors; indeed, he maintained regular communication with the outside world, mostly through the sea-link to Naples where Murat was still (temporarily) in power. For political reasons, the government refused to allow the Empress Marie-Louise, or their son, the King of Rome, to visit him on Elba, but the Bonaparte family rallied round. He entertained his favourite sister Pauline, while his mother, Letizia, showed solidarity with her son by electing to live with him in his new kingdom. Of the other women in his life, Maria Walewska also came to visit, with their four-year-old son, Alexander, the pair being smuggled secretly on to Elba, where Napoleon preferred to receive them in private, in a simple cottage in the mountains at the far end of the island, far removed from public gaze. Josephine, to Napoleon’s profound sorrow, never made the journey. She died at Malmaison on 29 May, within weeks of his arrival on Elba.¹⁷

During the ten months he spent in Portoferraio Napoleon retained much of his astonishing energy, which he now transferred to the land and to improving the quality of life of the islanders. He had, as ever, no shortage of plans or projects, from new crops to irrigation schemes and plans to improve the profitability of iron-mining, all of which brought him the lasting respect and affection of the islanders.¹⁸ And he dreamed up building projects of his own. The unofficial British representative on Elba, Neil Campbell, remarked in one of his regular despatches to London that Napoleon was ‘engaged in perpetual exercise, and busy with projects of building, which, however, are not put into execution’.¹⁹ But with the passage of time Campbell began to notice a significant change in the Emperor’s concentration. On 20 September he wrote that ‘Napoleon seems to have lost all habits of study and sedentary application. He has four places of residence in different parts of the island, and the improvements and changes of these form his sole occupation. But as they lose their interest to his unsettled mind, and the novelty wears off, he occasionally falls into a state of inactivity never known before, and has of late retired to his bedroom for repose during several hours of the day.’ Campbell rushed to add that the Emperor’s health was still excellent, and that he was often in good spirits. He did not raise questions of boredom or depression. ‘I begin to think’, he concludes, ‘he is quite resigned to his retreat, and that he is tolerably happy, excepting when the recollections of his former power are freshened by sentiments of vanity or revenge, or his passions become influenced by want of money, and his wife and child being kept from him.’²⁰ It was an intelligent guess based on his observations, but, as events soon proved, a very mistaken one.

Napoleon, it turned out, was both bored and frustrated with what life could offer on a small Mediterranean island. He was not content, as he had told Campbell he was in the course of a private conversation, to ‘lead the life of an ordinary justice of the peace’; and he certainly wanted more from the world than ‘my family, my little house, my cows and mules’.²¹ But then he never had restricted himself to such a domestic arena. As a ruler, albeit of a tiny state, he had set about providing for its defence, against both an Allied attack – never a likely occurrence – and the more probable incursions of pirates from the Barbary coast. To this end he raised an army of just under two thousand men, which included more than six hundred former members of his Imperial Guard who elected to follow him out from France; among these were a small number of Poles and Mamelukes who remained loyal to his person. And given that Elba was an island, and that any attack must come from the sea, he also built a small navy with at its heart the French frigateInconstant which had accompanied him from Fréjus. Elba’s navy had around a hundred sailors and was used mainly to sail to the mainland on missions for Napoleon and his family. But we should not underestimate the importance of this tiny force to Napoleon’s ambition. The Emperor himself still cut a military figure. He took a deep personal interest in his troops, reviewing them on the main square of Portoferraio, reminding them of their loyalty to France and of their duty to the people of Elba. In all, the army and navyconsumed three-quarters of his annual budget.²² They would also form the kernel of his support when the moment came to invade the French mainland.

That moment came in early March 1815. Napoleon had kept in touch with events in France throughout the winter and had learnt from his correspondents a great deal to give him hope. The initial goodwill of the French people towards Louis XVIII seemed to have faded. The King had never succeeded in harnessing popular enthusiasm, and the first months of his reign had done little to increase his support. Many resented the dynastic symbolism of the restored monarchy, the insistence on the white Bourbon flag, and the return of the Catholic clergy to the inner councils of state. Taxes had risen in a period of economic austerity, grain prices had increased sharply, and the presence of an army of occupation and the imposition of a large indemnity dispelled any vestige of glory and national pride. Napoleon’s sources told him that the regime had become unpopular with the people – those who still shared the values of the Republic and gloried in the name of the nation. Many of Napoleon’s fellow countrymen had started to look back on his reign with a tinge of nostalgia, remembering a time of good harvests and affordable bread. It was, he convinced himself, the moment to offer the French people an alternative, the moment to take action. What followed was a bizarre adventure story. Napoleon chose a moment when Campbell was absent from the island and there were no British naval vessels in the vicinity, and left Elba for ever. He took with him a handful of ships, some forty horses, and a small number of troops – just six hundred and fifty men of the Guard, plus a hundred Polish lancers and a handful of Corsican and Elban volunteers.²³ With this puny force he crossed the Mediterranean to the south coast of France, landing safely on the coast near Antibes, from where he began his march northwards towards Paris and the resumption of power.

The idea seemed ridiculous, the pitfalls innumerable. But Napoleon, above all, was a gambler who believed in his abilities and in his power to charm and persuade. He was helped, of course, by the slowness of communication in the French provinces, so that no one in Paris knew anything about his return till 5 March, four full days after his landing. The journey was long and arduous, through the foothills of the Alps along what is today dubbed the Route Napoléon by the tourist authorities, to Grenoble, then Lyon, and on through Burgundy to the capital. Along the southern part of the route his little army passed through divided and embittered communities, the sorts of places where royalists lurked and villagers were embroiled in White Terror and revenge killings. Yet the journey proved almost unreasonably easy. During the first days the party encountered no opposition, no soldiers, no challenge to their progress. As he moved north, and as word spread of his approach, local people began to join him: villagers, peasants, men dazzled and overawed by his reputation or attracted by the promise of liberty he appeared to hold out. Popular crowds greeted him rapturously in the bigger cities where he passed, first Grenoble, then Lyon. When soldiers did appear, sent by the new government to stop him, his charismatic charm did not fail him. At Vizille, Lyon and Auxerre the units that had been sent against him were won over to his side.

Near Grenoble, in one of the most famous incidents of the whole adventure, he was approached by several French regiments with orders to arrest him. Opening his greatcoat to expose his chest, he called on them to recognise him and challenged them to carry outtheir orders: ‘If there is one among you who would kill his general, his Emperor, he may; here I stand’.²⁴ No one moved. The same emotional appeal worked for generals and men of the line; at Grenoble civilians mingled with his troops and he was assailed with enthusiastic cries of Vive l’Empereur!²⁵ When Marshal Ney, having taken an oath of loyalty to Louis XVIII, was sent to arrest him, his resolve failed as soon as he met Napoleon face to face. With every day the little army that had left Antibes posed a greater threat to the Bourbon regime. With every day, the vol de l’aigle gained a further hold on the popular imagination. Every step Napoleon took seemed to add further lustre to his romantic legend.

On 20 March, little more than a fortnight after disembarking on the south coast, Napoleon was back in Paris, where he at once occupied the Tuileries, his former palace, hurriedly abandoned by a fugitive Louis XVIII. But he no longer presented himself in all the finery of the Empire, or played on the pomp of his imperial office. Rather, in a quite remarkable act of political theatre, he spoke directly to the populace, presenting himself as a man of the people, wronged by foreign tyrants and British treason, and appealing directly to the tradition of the French Revolution. He showed that, unlike Louis, who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing during his years of exile, he had learned a great deal and was willing to make important concessions in order to woo opinion. Over the years of the Empire, the rights and liberties of Frenchmen had been whittled away as the power of the state was reinforced, conscription extended, and policing reinforced. Yet, during the Hundred Days Napoleon did not tire of expending effort on gaining support from former republicans who feared discrimination at the hands of the monarchy. He drew attention to the new government’s attempts to appease the Church and welcome back priests from emigration. He pointed to the danger of their seizing back church lands that had been sold off during the Revolution. He offered liberal reforms and wider voting rights, and sought to win the support of the bourgeoisie by confirming the abolition of feudalism, banishing those émigrés who had returned to France during the Restoration, and expropriating their landed estates.²⁶ He restored the Legion of Honour, the award which more than any other imposed military values at the very heart of civil society; this appealed to the spirit of the army, placing solidarity and the defence of the public good above selfish materialism.²⁷ And he unashamedly tapped into what he believed to be a potent seam of popular opinion: fear of a return to the Old Regime, using a language of anti-privilege that the Jacobins could hardly have bettered. ‘I have come,’ he insisted, ‘to save Frenchmen from the slavery in which priests and nobles wished to plunge them,’ adding ominously that ‘I will string them up from the lampposts.’²⁸

If that was little more than empty rhetoric and an attempt to capture something of the flavour of republican sentiment, his constitutional reforms did represent something of a break with the authoritarian tone of the later Empire and a return to the more consensual politics of the Consulate. Not that the acte constitutionnel of 1815, which contained his principal reforms, can be seen as a model of democratic practice. In essence, it amended the constitutions of the Consulate and Empire to take account of the Bourbon Charter of 1814 and to reaffirm the principles of individual liberty and of equality before the law: freedom of religion and the free expression of opinion were guaranteed, property was declared inviolable, and, in a significant shift of policy since 1812, the Emperor promised that no part of French territory would in future be placed under siege unless France was invaded.²⁹ Legislative power was to be shared by the Emperor and two chambers, one composed of hereditary peers nominated by Napoleon, the other of deputies elected indirectly, through a two-tier electoral process. The act was to be ratified by the people in a plebiscite, though opinion differs on just how significant this consultation was. For some, the low turn-out and the apathy among young voters suggest that the constitution failed to ignite the public, and they point out that Bonaparte’s supporters were only half as numerous in the Hundred Days as they had been during the Consulate.³⁰ Others minimise the significance of the fact that only 1.3 million Frenchmen bothered to record their vote. There was little local encouragement to do so, no intervention by prefects or sub-prefects, with the consequence that around a third of the registers sent out to mayors to record the votes of their constituents were returned entirely blank.³¹ Any popular enthusiasm for the regime was more about the person of the Emperor than about constitutional rights.

There is no reason to believe that Napoleon was enthusiastic about this new, more liberal empire, which had been largely forced upon him by his collaborators, those men to whom he turned in 1815 to establish civil government, many of whom were committed to peace and lukewarm about his prospects of uniting the country. Some were longstanding imperial allies, like Fouché, who returned to the Ministry of Police, or Cambacérès, who was charged with the Ministry of Justice. Caulaincourt was made Foreign Minister, Maret Secretary of State and Davout Minister of War, with Decrès Minister for the Navy. Two of the Emperor’s staunch supporters, Boulay de la Meurthe and Regnaud de St-Jean d’Angély, became heads of section in the Council of State. Other pillars of the new regime were more surprising choices. They included men who had previously quarrelled with Napoleon over his authoritarian appetites, or his contempt for the institutions of the Republic. Lazare Carnot, for instance, was a staunch republican who had refused to serve the Empire after 1804 but had rallied to Napoleon in 1814 when France was invaded; he agreed to stay on as Napoleon’s Minister of the Interior, convinced that he was now committed to a more liberal empire, and that this represented the only remaining hope of rescuing something from the revolutionary legacy.³² Perhaps most surprising of all was the man to whom the Emperor gave responsibility for drafting the new constitution, the noted liberal thinker Benjamin Constant. Constant, having proclaimed his opposition to the Emperor’s taste for dictatorship, now made it his priority to restrain his excesses through parliamentary controls. What emerged through the acte additionnel was something akin to constitutional monarchy.³³

If Napoleon managed to persuade a percentage of French domestic opinion that he had changed his spots and wished to represent the interests of his people, he enjoyed no such success beyond his national boundaries. Across Europe the leaders of the Great Powers were in no mood to compromise, continuing to view him as a usurper and a threat to the peace of the entire continent. And though in the various lands Napoleon had annexed or conquered there were groups of powerful and eloquent defenders of his regime, they were drawn from the educated elite – the lawyers and judges and professional administrators – seldom from the population at large. The masses, and especially the rural masses, continued to view the Napoleonic state as an artificial imposition, what Michael Broers has called ‘the practical expression of an alien elite culture’.³⁴ The Allies saw no reason to hesitate or play for time; to their eyes Napoleon was an outlaw, and the constitutional arrangements he offered France a total irrelevance. Indeed, as soon as news reached them of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, the European monarchs understood that there was no alternative to war, a war which they would declare in order to force a second abdication. As early as 7 March 1815, Metternich summed up the Allies’ mood, writing that Napoleon ‘appears anxious to run great risks. That is his business. Our business is to give to the world that repose which he has troubled all these years’.

Francis I committed himself to using military force if necessary to dislodge Napoleon once more from his throne. ‘Go at once and find the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia,’ he instructed. ‘Tell them that I am prepared to order my armies once again to take to the road to France. I have no doubt that the two Sovereigns will join me in my march.’ The Austrian Emperor was, of course, right. The Allied powers worked together to produce a concerted policy, and on 13 March issued a joint declaration in the name of Austria, France, Britain, Prussia, Russia, Spain, Portugal and Sweden. Once again drawing a clear distinction between Napoleon and the French people, they undertook to provide ‘the King of France and the French nation’ with all the help they required to restore what they termed ‘public tranquillity’. At the same time they noted that ‘Napoleon Bonaparte had placed himself outside the pale of civil and social relations,’ and that he stood condemned as ‘the disturber of world repose’.³⁵

The course was again set for war. On 25 March the four major Allied powers, Austria, Britain, Prussia and Russia, undertook, by the Treaty of Vienna, to rally their armies against Napoleon so as to disable him and prevent him from causing further trouble.Castlereagh hammered the point home in a dispatch to Wellington, insisting that troops be deployed on ‘the largest scale’, with Allied forces ‘inundating France from all sides’.³⁶ Even some of Napoleon’s closest allies viewed this prospect with ill-concealed unease, the more so as it necessitated yet another round of conscription, draining the country of still younger men and boys and arousing public discontent across the length and breadth of France. After watching the decimation of two armies during the retreat from Moscow and at Leipzig, and with the greater part of those who returned in 1814 now retired or decommissioned, the renewal of hostilities meant the creation of yet another new army with which to confront the Allies. France was exhausted, her local communities crying out for peace; yet by mid-June Napoleon had assembled a force of one hundred and twenty thousand men, with which he crossed the frontier into the Netherlands, driving a wedge between British and Dutch forces under Wellington and the Prussians of Blücher.³⁷ His final campaign against his enemies, now ranged against him in a seventh coalition, had begun.

Napoleon was deaf to those of his ministers who counselled caution, who shrank from squandering yet more blood on the battlefield in a cause which they deemed already lost. And he had spilt plenty – one of the charges that would always be mounted against him by those seeking to diminish his stature as a military commander. His ability to draw on a mass conscript army meant that he had large numbers of soldiers, often raw and ill-trained, at his disposal, and he often gave the impression that he cared little about losses, that men could always be replaced and that their lives came cheap. Indeed, he famously boasted that he had grown up on battlefields and ‘cared little about the lives of a million men’.³⁸ Some have estimated these losses much higher; the nineteenth-century historian Hippolyte Taine suggested that Napoleon’s wars killed one million seven hundred thousand men born within the limits of pre-revolutionary France, besides a further two million Europeans, both allies and foes.³⁹ Though these figures are probably exaggerated, the scale of losses, whether from wounds sustained in battle or from fevers and disease, was unprecedented. To a degree this reflected the manner of fighting: the growing use of artillery, the resort to ever more mobile guns, and the increased firepower of these guns in battle. Jean-Paul Bertaud has told the story movingly, in raw statistics. If the French artillerymen fired twenty thousand cannon balls during the battle of Valmy, at Leipzig they fired a hundred thousand. Artillery aimed to kill, to mow down their opponents in a largely anonymous slaughter. And with every campaign the carnage grew worse. If losses were around six per cent at Fleurus in 1792, they had risen to fifteen per cent at Austerlitz in 1806 and thirty-one per cent at Eylau the following year. At the upcoming Battle of Waterloo, casualties would hit a staggering forty-five per cent.⁴⁰ Not without reason was Napoleon accused by his enemies of being a cruel and heartless butcher, prepared to condemn thousands to die in pursuit of glory.

Once again Napoleon faced the problem of manpower. With the Allies able to muster a million men, he was yet again forced to raise an army virtually from scratch. It proved a Herculean task, though by the end of the spring extraordinary progress had already been made. In March, all non-commissioned officers were recalled to the colours, and by the end of April he could put four armies and three observation corps in the field. Money was quickly raised, and tens of thousands of horses prepared for battle.⁴¹ But time was short, too short to allow him to assemble the army of eight hundred thousand of which he talked. Already a Prussian army under Blücher and an Anglo-Dutch army under Wellington were taking up position in the Netherlands, leaving Napoleon little choice but to launch a quick pre-emptive strike against them. This he achieved with remarkable precision. He imposed a total news blackout, and spread false intelligence to unnerve his opponents. On 2 June he ordered the one hundred and twenty-four thousand men who made up the Armée du Nord to a position just south of the Belgian border, seemingly without provoking any response from the Allies. His tactic was working like a dream. Ten days later he left Paris to take personal command of the army, without his opponents realising what was happening around them. As late as 13 June Wellington was still reassuring London that it was unlikely Napoleon would leave Paris – just two days before he launched an incisive attack to separate the Allied armies and prevent them from forming a united front.⁴²

Hostilities were joined quite dramatically on 16 June, when the French army attacked both the Prussians and the Anglo-Dutch army to the south of Brussels. At Ligny, Napoleon engaged the Prussians and scored what turned out to be his last victory in the field, though it was less decisive than he would have liked since it left the Prussian army able to re-form and fight on. It was a bloody encounter, pitting around eighty-three thousand Prussians against sixty-three thousand Frenchmen, and few prisoners were taken on either side. Napoleon read the battle well, but credit for the victory did not lie with him alone: of his generals, Gérard was far-sighted and tactically shrewd, but the victory can also be ascribed to the quality of those under his command, especially his junior officers and non-commissioned officers.⁴³ The significance of Ligny was diminished, however, by events elsewhere in the field. An army of twenty thousand men under Drouet d’Erlon, instructed to keep the English in their sights, was harassed and delayed. At the same time, Ney failed to take the key crossroads of Quatre-Bras from the Anglo-Dutch army, which allowed Wellington to pull back towards Brussels.⁴⁴ The French had sought to destroy the two armies individually so as to avoid having to face their combined onslaught, but neither battle was decisive and the Allies were able to regroup. The blood shed at Ligny and Quatre-Bras by the Prussian and British armies had served its purpose: it had bought the Allies time. Wellington and Blücher were far from defeated, and two days later they would engage Napoleon again, much more decisively, at Waterloo.

The Battle of Waterloo was an evenly matched affair, and one in which Napoleon again demonstrated his qualities as a commander and a strategist. He understood only too well that this was a life-or-death struggle, an engagement he had to win if he was to survive, and his principal aim after Quatre-Bras was to force the British to engage him before they had the chance to join forces with Blücher’s Prussians. The French opened the attack with a frontal assault, led by Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, against the right flank of the British army near the fortified farm of Hougoumont. At the same time Napoleon ordered an infantry attack on the main body of British troops at La Haie Sainte. Both manoeuvres were carried off with a certain élan, but both failed to dislodge the enemy, necessitating a third assault. This was a cavalry charge led by the brave if headstrong Ney, which was also repulsed by the British squares. The British lines had held firm. Worse, from the Emperor’s point of view, was the fact that Grouchy, whom he had sent withthirty thousand men to find and pin down Blücher, had not succeeded in locating the Prussian army; and though he was within earshot of the battle, he had stuck limpet-like to his instructions instead of turning back to add fresh troops to the French attack. Should Grouchy be held to blame – as Napoleon did not hesitate to do from his exile on Saint Helena – or was the Emperor’s own strategy at fault? Whatever the cause, it proved a fatal blunder, and when Blücher himself turned up on the battlefield, his Prussian forces emerging through the smoke and mist to add weight to Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch army, the game was surely up. It was not in any sense a rout; indeed, Wellington would famously describe it as ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.⁴⁵The French emerged with honour. The Imperial Guard fought a memorable battle, the cavalry attacked the enemy with flair, and they inflicted terrible casualties on their opponents. For Waterloo was truly a murderous battle, with some two hundred thousand men concentrated in a confined area barely two and a half miles square. The most reliable casualty figures list the losses in Wellington’s army at three and a half thousand dead, three thousand three hundred missing and some ten thousand two hundred wounded – with the Prussians suffering a further twelve hundred dead, all in a single day.⁴⁶ But for all Napoleon’s tactical skill, the battle was lost, and with it his imperial ambitions.

His first instinct on the morning after the battle, however, was to fight on, to engage the British and Prussian armies yet again, and turn defeat into victory. He insisted that it had been a glorious defeat from which his troops emerged with credit and honour, and that is how it would enter French collective memory. To Victor Hugo, Waterloo was a morne plaine forever shrouded in mist and gunsmoke; Charles Péguy summarised the regrets of his generation when he wrote of Waterloo that it was one of those rare defeats which ‘more than any victory, and more positively than any victory, fix themselves in the memory of men, in the common memory of humanity’.⁴⁷ Though Napoleon remained in denial, it signalled the end of his Empire and the end of a dream. For whereas he seemed eager to fight on, demanding that Joseph raise a further hundred thousand men, the two Chambers were overtly hostile, understanding only too clearly that peace would be unattainable as long as France continued to harbour military ambitions. The deputies also knew that the Allies would have no truck with Napoleon, and that the best they could now hope for was peace on Europe’s terms. In the Chamber of Deputies the unthinkable was being said, that the Emperor’s abdication was an essential precondition of peace, and Napoleon returned to Paris to face a wall of hostility. To save his Empire would require drastic measures: he would have to dissolve the two Chambers, assume dictatorial powers and turn to the army, steps that would risk plunging the country into civil war.

A few of his advisers, notably his brother Lucien, advised this course of action but, perhaps mindful of what had happened after the Eighteenth of Brumaire, Napoleon had no appetite for a war against France. On 22 June, informed by the Chambers that he must abdicate or be deposed, he addressed ‘the French people’ for the last time: ‘In opening war to support national independence,’ he declared, ‘I counted on a union of all efforts and all wills. Circumstances seem to me to have changed. I offer myself in sacrifice to the hatred of the enemies of France.’ Expressing the somewhat forlorn hope that the Allies aimed only at destroying the person of the Emperor, he named his young son as his successor. ‘My political life is over,’ he told them, ‘and I proclaim my son, under the title of Napoleon II, Emperor of the French.’⁴⁸ But the time for dynastic ambition was long past. It was a prospect that neither the Chambers nor the Allies were prepared to contemplate.