IN 1811, thanks to his ruthless policy of aggression, Napoleon was towering above the common rulers of Europe, terrible as the Miltonic Fiend. He had never lost a campaign, very seldom had he lost a battle. He still kept his grip on struggling Spain. There were signs that, thanks to the Continental Blockade, England was suffering economically and was becoming very weary. Had the Emperor merely kept the peace upon the mainland and maintained a resolute front toward England, he might presently have forced the latter into a compromise treaty which would really have been a victory for France. Wisdom in any case dictated that he take on no new enemies. As just stated, his autocracy was becoming very unpopular at home; the Continental Blockade was proving even more severe economically upon France than upon England; the blood tax of conscription was setting every mother of a growing son against the Emperor: and even some of his stanchest lieutenants were growing weary of war. They had been well fed with rewards, and wished quiet and leisure wherein to digest their honors and pensions. In short, there had been a surfeit of "glory" for all France, save only for its never-resting master.
The most serious situation of all was really in the imperial armies. There were still an abundance of competent officers, but the rank and file, the veterans of the old Republican victories, of the First Italian campaign, of Austerlitz, and of Jena, had left their bones on a score of battle-fields. The young conscripts were not their equals. Napoleon was, indeed, using his vassal allies wherever possible – Italians, Bavarians, Hollanders, Westphalians; even Prussians marched now in great numbers under his standards. These troops were not unfaithful so long as things went well with him, but they would make no great sacrifices for the French cause, and a few defeats would be sure to shake their loyalty. Napoleon simply could not continue flinging the youth of Western Europe, like tinder into the furnace of his incessant wars, and expect his supply of man-power to remain unexhausted. Neither could he expect France and her dependencies to undergo unnecessary agonies merely to gratify his restless ambition. Probably it is true that his position at home would have become an uneasy one, had he frankly said "Enough!" when urged to new conquests, and had settled down as the peaceful regenerator of France. The demand for civil liberties would have been instantaneous the moment the pressure of war conditions had been removed, and although one can imagine Napoleon doing many things, it is hard to imagine him for any length of time as the strictly constitutional sovereign of a limited monarchy, conscious of his people's rights and respectful toward opposition.
After Tilsit the Emperor had for some time worked in real harmony with Czar Alexander I; but the friendship had presently cooled. Napoleon thwarted the Russian schemes for the conquest of Turkey – already he had marked Constantinople as his prospective prey. He had also angered the Czar by dethroning the German Duke of Oldenburg, to whom Alexander was related. The Russians again saw their commerce being ruined by Napoleon's insistence upon their enforcement of the Continental System. In 1812 the two great Empires of Eastern and Western Europe exchanged defiances, and Napoleon led forth again the "Grand Army" – its van headed toward Moscow.
There is little doubt that the Emperor was showing himself the spoiled child of fortune. His campaigns were not being planned with the same concentration upon all-important details. He was trusting too much to spontaneous strokes of genius. He was too willing to assume that because his intuitions had been right in the past they would therefore always be right in the future. It is probably not true that he was suffering from a disease that weakened his faculties, but he possibly had lost much of that physical alertness which made men marvel during the first campaign in Italy. But all these things were only to be appreciated after the great event. What Europe knew in June, 1812, was that with over 553,000 men – very many of them Italians, Poles, and Germans as well as Frenchmen – he was marching into the heart of Russia.
What followed taught the nations that the Corsican was a man, and not a perfectly functioning and pitilessly intelligent mechanism. The story of the Russian campaign is one of the most familiar in all history. In June Napoleon had crossed the Niemen with the "Grand Army" and was headed for the heart of Muscovy. On September 7 he had won the battle of Borodino, the most sanguinary struggle in all his wars. Seven days later he marched into Moscow, and made his headquarters upon the deserted Kremlin. But his main army had already shrunken to 95,000 men. Not all the rest had perished, of course, but his numbers had been terribly drawn upon by the need of keeping open a perilously long line of communication. From September 15 to 19, Moscow was burning, it is needless to question now whether by accident or by deliberate Russian design. Napoleon's position was obviously uncomfortable. He expected the Czar to sue for peace, but Alexander sued not. The imminence of the Russian winter was ignored, until by October 19 the situation was so critical that the Emperor evacuated Moscow, and gave the unfamiliar orders to retreat.
Early in November the terrible Northern cold settled down. One disaster followed another as the starving, freezing "Grand Army" trailed its way toward Poland. At the crossing of the Berezina, the French were nearly cut off, and were only saved by the valor of Ney and Oudinot. From that time the retreat of the invaders degenerated into what was little better than a rout. Had the Czar's Cossacks been ordered to push their attacks more resolutely, probably the entire host of their enemies would have been taken or perished; but toward the end the victory seemed so complete that they let Napoleon and his last remnants escape. At last, near the Prussian frontier, the Emperor "decided to leave the army for Paris, where his presence was urgently demanded." A great calamity could not be concealed or denied, but by the famous "Bulletin No. 29" the main blame was cast upon the severity of the winter. About 20,000 men straggled over the frontier in an organization somewhat resembling an army. Of the remainder of the invading host many were prisoners in Russia, others had made their escape in small detachments; but a conservative estimate is that to France and her allies the lives of $300,000 able-bodied young men had been lost. When before had there been a like military disaster? It was a great misfortune for his foes, however, that the Cossacks had not pressed Napoleon harder. He had lost nearly all his rank and file, but the remnant of the French that escaped included a very large proportion of his best officers; men whose professional abilities made them worth their weight in gold. Given time and raw material he could thus hope to rebuild new armies. Time he could scarcely have; for the instant the news of the great defeat was spread, Prussia made haste to throw off her chains and to rally not merely her own people, but many other North Germans to arms, also to make prompt alliance with the victorious and advancing Russians. England would again furnish subsidies to maintain a great coalition against her arch-enemy. Austria still talked "neutrality," but was not to be relied upon by Napoleon – she was merely waiting her chance. The Emperor returned to Paris, however, in anything but a crestfallen mood. For the first time the dice had fallen against him, but he had still plenty of stakes to lay against Fate. Once more by a remorseless conscription, levies of almost every able- bodied man and boy in France were hurried to the colors. The Emperor accomplished prodigies in securing the arming and uniforming of these new forces. The conscripts were brave and although their parents cursed the relentless policy that dragged their sons away, the young troops acquitted themselves loyally like Frenchmen in the ensuing battles. But no good-will could make them into hard-bodied, experienced veterans. Napoleon entered his last campaign in Germany with infinitely poorer human material sustaining him than in any previous adventure with Destiny. He committed also the serious blunder of trying to hold too many of the North-German fortresses – Danzig, Stettin, Küstrin, Hamburg, etc. – placing in them some of his best troops. These garrisons were presently blockaded by groups of Prussian local militia, and thereby immobilized and rendered useless in the open campaign. With their numbers added to his field army Napoleon had a chance of victory; without them, it turned out that he had none.
So the campaign of 1813 began with one arm of the Corsican tied behind his back. He was weaker than before and his foes, as he ruefully confessed, had learned much of his own military art. In May he defeated the allied Prussians and Russians at Lützen (near Leipzig), then again at Bautzen. But these were anything but decisive victories. Then in June he committed another grievous blunder. He granted an armistice (June 4 to August 10, 1813) nominally to let Austria mediate and patch up a peace; actually to allow both sides to secure reinforcements. Austrian "mediation," however, was very insincere, and the Emperor had fewer reinforcements to bring up than his enemies. Napoleon's marshals were becoming very anxious that the war should cease. If the Empire went down, where would be their own fine principalities and emoluments? But their moderating counsels weighed little with their master. Up to the last he protested that the French would never endure him if he once made public confession of defeat by consenting (as his foes now demanded) to relinquish a large share of his former conquests: and he kept a dogged confidence that by some lightning military stroke he could still recover everything.
The crisis came at Dresden, June 26, when Metternich, the astute Austrian prime minister, had his famous interview with the Emperor, vainly urging a spirit of reasonableness. Napoleon was in an entirely arrogant mood. He had learned nothing from adversity. "So you want war," were his words: "well, you shall have it. I have beaten the Russians at Bautzen: now you wish your turn to come! Be it so, the rendezvous shall be in Vienna." Vainly Metternich reminded him that his army was depleted; that his troops were not men, but boys; to which the great egoist tossed back: "You do not know what goes on in the mind of a soldier: a man such as I does not take much heed of the lives of a million men" – and he threw aside his hat. Metternich did not pick it up. Thus the interview ended stormily. When the Austrian minister went out, the French generals in the anteroom crowded up eagerly, hoping for a report of real peace negotiations. "Were you satisfied with the Emperor?" anxiously asked Berthier. "Yes," came back from Metternich. "He has explained everything to me: it is all over with the man."
Manifestly for the safety of the world, this colossal vampire, who despite a thousand admirable qualities was literally sucking away the best blood of France no less than of all Europe, must be flung from power. In August, 1813, the war was renewed, after Napoleon had proved utterly unconciliatory. Austria joined his other foes. For the first time since 1795, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and England were all at war with France, and all fighting heartily in alliance: the struggle was now for life and death. The old cunning had not deserted Napoleon. He held out for more than two months in Central Germany, defending the line of the Elbe. He repulsed the first attacks, and even won a great battle at Dresden (August 26); but the numbers against him were too great. Sweden was joining the coalition, and on October 16, 17, and 18, the Allies at last bayed the terrible lion at Leipzig. Here in a three days' battle ("The Battle of the Nations" the Germans called it) 150,000 French stood against 300,000 Russians, Austrians, Prussians, and Swedes. The young conscripts fought bravely, but they were being asked to achieve the impossible. On the 19th Napoleon was obliged to order a general retreat toward France. The losses in the battle and in the subsequent hasty flight across Germany were terrible. With barely 70,000 men, none too well organized, the Corsican found himself again behind the Rhine.
The situation was now, from a military standpoint, all but hopeless. The veteran field army was gone; the new conscript field army was almost gone. The garrisons were being starved out one by one, in the now distant and isolated German fortresses. The good-will of France had been alienated by the Continental Blockade and the blood tax. The English were sweeping Napoleon's generals out of Spain and crossing the Pyrenees. The South-German vassal states were all making their peace with the victors. Nevertheless the Allies would probably have left Napoleon his throne and a territory much larger than that of Louis XVI in 1792, had he promptly and sincerely treated for peace. He would not do so. Even when the Allies were crossing the Rhine in great force, he fought against the inevitable. He sent delegates, indeed, to a Peace Conference at Châtillon (on the Seine), but allowed his representatives only to play for time. And so he went on to the end.
Napoleon's campaign of 1814 was in some respects his best – considered merely from a military standpoint. He had barely 50,000 mobile troops left. The French nation would not rise against the invader. The old fires of 1792-93 had burned out. There was, of course, some anger at the cruelties inflicted by the conquering Allies, but, compared with 1914, the invaders of 1814 seem to have been fairly humane and loath to stimulate French patriotism by a policy of schrecklichkeit. With all these handicaps, with odds three and four to one against him, the Corsican fought brilliantly; hurling himself now against one, now another of the columns advancing on Paris, and repeatedly he won temporary victories which brought the whole Austro- Prusso-Russian advance to a stand. But in the end the attempt was impossible. The army became weary of its hopeless struggle. The masses of the invader were too great. On March 31, in the absence of Napoleon – after the Allies had stormed their way to the very gates of Paris – Marshal Marmont, commandant of the capital, capitulated and the victors marched in triumph into the city from which, after Valmy, Brunswick had turned back twenty-two years before.
Napoleon could still muster 50,000 men around him at Fontainebleau. Many of the privates and lower officers seem to have been willing to keep up the struggle, such was their devotion to the leader who would have sacrificed them with scarcely a sigh. But the marshals and upper officers recognized that the game was up; to fight longer meant their personal ruin, and they desired neither poverty nor exile. In Paris, the Allies were forming a provisional government presided over by an ex-minister of Napoleon's, the supple, immoral, and infinitely clever Talleyrand, who now cheerfully deserted his master, proclaimed that the Emperor had forfeited his throne, and who hastily prepared for the restoration of the Bourbons. Under the pressure of his old comrades, on April 4, Napoleon signed a formal act of abdication. The Allies, with a magnanimity they doubtless regretted a year later, consented to assign him the small island of Elba in the Mediterranean as a "sovereign principality," and permitted him to keep the poor consolation of the formal title of "Emperor."
Napoleon was very unpopular at this time in France. The nation longed for peace, and his ambition had seemed alone to stand in the way of checking the public ruin. When he traveled through Languedoc and Provence he was cursed to his face and stones were flung at his carriage, while mobs howled after the "Hateful tyrant, punished at last!" and at Orange and Avignon there were even fears of a lynching. The fallen despot, much cowed possibly for the moment, was taken to Elba, and there he was to wait ten uneasy months – while many things happened in France.
Louis XVIII, the eldest of the brothers of Louis XVI, had been placed on the throne by the Allies, not because they had any great love for him personally, but because they were resolved to have an end to "Bonaparte" and his family, and they objected heartily to a Republic. To recall the old dynasty then was really the only thing possible. The conquerors assigned to France slightly larger boundaries than she had in 1790, before the beginning of the great wars, and they imposed no indemnity upon her. They also compelled Louis XVIII to give his subjects a kind of a constitution and to guarantee that the great social and personal liberties won in 1789 should not be abolished. This was worldly wisdom – the Allies feared to drive the French people to desperation. Then the main interest of the world shifted from Paris to the Congress of Vienna. At the Austrian capital, under Metternich's artful presidency, the diplomats met in the famous peace congress to quarrel, threaten one another, but presently to agree on the territorial and other arrangements which, it was fondly hoped, would last for many generations; and which were, indeed, to cast their shadow over Europe till 1914.
Meantime France, chastened, economically smitten, invaded, cut short, bereft of the flower of her youth, was flung back very unhappily upon herself. The character of the new King, and the Restoration, and its political institutions will be stated later, it is enough to say here that the new Government was soon extremely unpopular with influential classes. When the peace was made, all the captive officers and veterans of course came back from Russia and Germany. They were outraged at finding a new and unwelcome King in Paris, and the Bourbon white flag with its lilies flying in the place of the beloved tricolor of Lodi and Marengo. Instead of public thanks and triumphs, they received black looks and distrust from the new masters of the Tuileries, and no better material rewards than being put on the retired list on half-pay. The professional army, in short, speedily became intensely dissatisfied at the whole situation, and the bulk of the people were soon displeased enough with many acts of the new dynasty to lose much of their recent hatred for the Corsican – all of which facts competent agents promptly brought to Napoleon in Elba.
On March 1, 1815, the Emperor landed at Cannes with fifteen hundred troops he had been allowed to take with him into exile. On March 20 he entered Paris, while King Louis XVIII had made a hasty exit to Ghent.
"I shall reach Paris without firing a shot," Napoleon had said, as his small vessel approached the French coast. Near Grenoble a battalion of the now "royal army" had been drawn up to halt his advance. The Corsican had come forward in the face of the leveled muskets. "Soldiers," said the well-known voice, "if there is one among you who wishes to kill his Emperor he can do so. – Here I am.""Long live the Emperor!" burst from the ranks, and the whole force went over to the returning leader. Marshal Ney, who had turned against Napoleon in 1814 with peculiar bitterness, marched out with six thousand troops from Besançon to "bring him back in an iron cage." His troops began to desert. Ney's loyalty for the Bourbons oozed out, and he called his officers around him and again proclaimed the Emperor. It was amid vast rejoicings by the army and all the jubilant half-pay officers that the returned exile swept into the Tuileries. For an instant it seemed as if the whole effect of the disasters of Moscow and Leipzig had been undone.
But Napoleon did not conceal from himself the fact that while the army was delighted to have him return, the rest of the nation was more or less indifferent to his prospects, although without the least enthusiasm for Louis XVIII. "My dear fellow," said the Emperor to an intimate, "people have let me come just as they have let the Bourbons go." Probably, other things being equal, the bulk of Frenchmen greatly preferred Napoleon to the restored Royalists, but other things were not equal. Frenchmen were terribly anxious for peace, and the Emperor announced (perhaps with sincerity) that he intended to try to keep the peace and not to make any attempt to restore the swollen boundaries of France in 1812. But no sooner had the news of his landing in France reached Vienna, than the allied diplomats dropped their serious squabblings and united in a general decree of outlawry. Russia, Austria, Prussia, and England joined in declaring that "Bonaparte" had broken the compact which established him at Elba, and "placed himself outside the bounds of civil and social relation" and was to be punished as "an enemy and disturber of the peace of the world."
So the Emperor stood again with all the other great Powers embattled against him, and not a single ally. His only chance lay in the enthusiastic support of the entire French nation. He endeavored to conciliate public opinion by announcing liberalizing changes, technically known as "The Additional Act," in the former "Constitution of the Empire." These changes on analysis, however, did nothing to weaken the Emperor's autocratic disposal of the entire State. Intelligent Frenchmen were angered at being obliged thus to continue under the absolutist régime; and all Frenchmen, outside the army, were aghast at the prospect of the renewal of desperate war. It is not surprising then that almost the whole of Napoleon's famous "Hundred Days" were spent in hurried preparations and in intense anxiety.
Attempts to get the great Powers to keep the peace having completely failed, the Corsican once more threw dice for the supreme stakes in war. He had, indeed, an admirable army – so far as it went: 180,000 veteran troops devoted to him; men who had been shut up in German fortresses in 1813 or had submitted unwillingly in 1814. His foes were concentrating infinitely greater numbers, but he had the bare chance of crushing their armies piecemeal before they could effect a junction. To this end he flung his main forces into Belgium in June, 1815, to strike the Prussian Blücher and the English Wellington before the Austrians and Russians could bring up their myriads.
The master of legions had not lost his old-time cunning. On June 15-16 he fell on the Prussian army of Blücher at Ligny and he roundly defeated it. The first misfortune came when the Emperor was led to believe that Blücher was much more badly beaten than was actually the case, and that the victors were free to turn elsewhere. As a matter of fact the Prussians, though worsted, were able soon to halt their retreat, while Grouchy, the French general ordered to pursue, lost touch with them. On June 18 Napoleon then smote against the Duke of Wellington with his mixed English, Dutch, and North-German force at Waterloo. The French had about 70,000 men, Wellington rather less. What Napoleon did not know, however, was that Blücher was drawing nigh with 30,000 men to reinforce Wellington. The battle that followed almost resulted in a French victory, thanks to the splendid charges of the imperial cavalry; but the Emperor, who had never really fought against the English before, was astonished at the stubborn resistance of the hostile squares. Outnumbered, and the non-British part of his troops of very mediocre quality, Wellington hung grimly on, praying for "Night or Blücher!" And at length, when the fight was practically at a deadlock, Blücher came. A last charge by the imperial "Old Guard" was driven home heroically, but broke down with sanguinary losses. Then the whole English line advanced, and realizing the hopelessness of their situation, the bulk of the French army scattered in rout.
One or two squares of the Guard made off the field in the semblance of order, but there was no chance to stay the panic. Never was there an overthrow more complete than Waterloo. Seven times the fugitives paused to make their bivouac. Seven times they were driven on by the pursuing cavalry. "Cowards! Have you forgotten how to die?" Ney is said to have called to his men. The taunt was unjust. The French army had done for the Corsican more, perhaps, than any other army had ever done for a leader. His restless ambition had created a situation in Europe by which there could be no peace for the world nor for France if he were to keep the throne. Even had he won Waterloo, the Russian and Austrian hosts were drawing nigh. The only result would have been a new vista of great wars. The French leader himself did not court a soldier's death. Dazed by the rout, he fled with the foremost fugitives. When he reached Paris on June 20 he found his case was hopeless. No one would fight for him. A provisional government, headed by his old minister Fouché, provided a kind of order until the Allies arrived to restore the Bourbons.
Once more Napoleon abdicated "in favor of his son." He fled to Rochefort on the seacoast hoping to get ship for America, but the English cruisers were blockading him, and the case being hopeless he went on board a British man-of-war and cast himself on the magnanimity of his oldest and most constant foes. What was then done with him has been often criticized for its severity, but it must be realized that this fugitive and prisoner had caused nigh twenty years of capital warfare and the death therein of some millions of human beings. After the escape from Elba the statesmen of the day felt it to be criminal negligence to risk allowing this firebrand to enkindle the world again. As all men know, he was sent by the British on the shipof-the-line Bellerophon to the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic; and there he remained an unhappy and quarrelseeking prisoner until his death by cancer in 1821. When the news of his passing spread, many Frenchmen mourned, but all over the world there was a general relief that the arch-destroyer could threaten the nations' happiness no more.
After reviewing the deeds of Napoleon Bonaparte, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that had Heaven given him a modicum of unmixed humanity and patriotism and of real unselfishness, he could have approached the very limits of human achievement. As it was, despite the service he rendered mankind in destroying the decrepit institutions all over Europe, and in creating various admirable civil institutions for France, the latter part of his career was calamitous to the world, and most calamitous of all to the great nation of which he boasted himself to be Emperor.
The Corsican could fascinate the planet by his brilliance, but it was the brilliance of Satan arrayed as an angel of light.