Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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came at precisely the right moment. War was still going on in Finland, and

was about to be resumed in Turkey, where Russia would be able to enjoy a

free hand. Moreover, Alexander was reverting to his Polish schemes of 1805.

In spite of the disgrace of Czartoryski, who had retired to Palavy, there was

still agitation going on from the Russian party in the grand duchy. In the

spring of 1809 the Warsaw and Galician nobles came to the tsar to offer their

support if he would promise to reestablish the kingdom. On 27 June he

replied that he would never abandon the provinces that had become Russian;

if circumstances allowed, he would gladly re-create a Poland by joining the

grand duchy to Galicia. Clearly, this was to be through his agency and to his

advantage, for soon afterwards he was to forbid Napoleon to carry out the

same measures. Sentiment, too, may have played its part, for in January 1809

the king and queen of Prussia had come to St Petersburg, and that had revived

old memories. While advising the ambassador Schwarzenberg to play for

time, Alexander is said to have added: ‘The moment for vengeance will come

a little later.’ It must therefore be concluded that from then onwards a new

war between Russia and France was only a matter of time. From Valladolid

the emperor sent him one of his ofﬁ cers to suggest that their respective

ambassadors should send Stadion identical notes ordering diplomatic rela-

tions to be broken off unless the reply was satisfactory. Alexander accepted

the notes, but would not agree to breaking off relations, insisting moreover

that this step should be the object of special diplomatic missions, which

postponed it sine die [indeﬁ nitely]. Napoleon was no longer under any illu-

sions. Though he proposed to the tsar that they should join in guaranteeing

the integrity of Austria provided she would disarm, it was only in the vain

hope of gaining time and ﬁ nishing the concentration of his new army before

the archduke should take the offensive.

Returning to Paris, he had to confess that the country’s morale was not

good. He was not seriously troubled by the royalists; but they were not

disarming. On 23 August 1806 the bishop of Vannes had been kidnapped by

Lahaie-Saint-Hilaire, who was not apprehended until 1807. The following

year saw the end of the Normandy exploits of Lechevalier, an accomplice of

the vicomte d’Aché. The royalist agency in Jersey kept sending agents to the

West, and in 1808 Prigent and six others were shot, followed by Armand de

Chateaubriand, a cousin of the vicomte, on 20 February 1809. The Jacobins

were still less of a threat, for they were being relentlessly harried by the

police. At the end of 1807 they arrested Didier, formerly a juror of the

Revolutionary Court; in 1808 a republican plot – the ﬁ rst since 1801 – was

denounced to Dubois, the prefect of police, in which Demailot, formerly an

agent of the Committee of Public Safety, General Malet, the Convention

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members Florent-Guiot and Ricord, and the ex-tribune Jacquemont were

implicated. Fouché succeeded, with Cambacérès’s agreement, in persuading

the emperor that it would be best to hush the matter up.

These various attempts had no further repercussions. What alarmed the

nation was rather the policy of Napoleon himself. His triumphs never reas-

sured anybody, for they always involved a further instalment. ‘This war must

be our last,’ he had been careful to say on entering the struggle against

Russia in 1807. Then he had represented Tilsit as the pledge of peace; yet less

than a year later there was the Spanish affair – and this time it was not

possible to place the responsibility on Charles IV. ‘France is sick with anxiety,’

wrote Fiévée to the emperor. And there was no less uneasiness among the

emperor’s servants. Fontanes, as president of the Corps Législatif, dared to

express their feelings on the eve of the 1808 campaign: ‘You have only to

speak, and your hearers are overcome with nameless fears that are

compounded of love and hope.’ In private, Decrès used much more direct

terms: ‘The emperor is mad, completely mad: he’ll bring ruin upon himself

and upon us all.’ Since he was running so light-heartedly to perdition, some

thought it prudent henceforward to betray him in order to save their own

skins, dressing up their villainy as the interest of their country, which it was

only right to distinguish from the tyrant’s cause. Moreover, if he should be

killed or meet with a disaster, a successor would have to be found; but as

nothing could be done without foreign approval, the safest course was to

offer the powers certain guarantees – and this was Talleyrand’s secret.

One cannot fail to see the signiﬁ cance of the fact that attempts were made

to ﬁ nd a successor to Napoleon during the Spanish expedition and on the

eve of the Austrian attack, as at the time of Marengo. In December 1808

Talleyrand became reconciled with Fouché, and it appears that they came to

an agreement on the subject of Murat. Rumours spread abroad to this effect.

Eugène was said to have intercepted a letter to the king of Naples, and a

secretary of Fouché’s was thought to have let the matter leak out, so that

Madame Mère was able to warn her son. It is certain at any rate that Napoleon

thought he had been betrayed. He made a terrible scene with Talleyrand and

removed him from the ofﬁ ce of grand chamberlain. Fouché was spared –

perhaps in order not to disorganise the police at a dangerous moment,

perhaps because after Tilsit he had taken the initiative in proposing a divorce,

and had even spoken of it to Josephine. After such an outburst, Napoleon’s

tolerant attitude seems as surprising as it was ill advised. Probably he was

afraid that if he struck down one of his old accomplices he would alarm

others and provoke new plots. But he had either said too much, or not

enough. Talleyrand’s disgrace, as Mollien says, roused ‘a kind of anxiety, all

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the more widespread because most people did not know its origins, and so

no one could therefore feel safe’. Yet surrounded as he was by the ci-devant ,

and dreaming of an alliance with a royal family, how could Napoleon have

shot another prince on the score of high treason?

With Napoleon absent at the front, his enemies kept on the alert. It was

quite possible that there might be an English landing on the French coast,

for in April they had damaged the Rochefort squadron in the Île d’Aix road-

stead. In Provence, there was unrest among the royalists and republicans.

Barras was in touch with Generals Guidal and Monnier, with the former

corsair Charabot and with a merchant who advanced funds. There were

suggestions of arranging the escape of Charles IV and Godoy, who were

then interned at Marseille. In July Charabot tried to link up with Collingwood,

who was cruising off the coast. Napoleon’s conﬂ ict with the pope was

rousing a seething unrest in Catholic circles; and in the course of the

summer, the West gave new cause for anxiety, while there were disturbances

in the Saar and the Ourthe districts. Even the army contained some doubtful

elements. We have no information about the Philadelphes

said to have been

under the orders of Colonel Oudet, who was killed at Wagram; but in Soult’s

army in Portugal, an ofﬁ cer named d’Argenton formed a conspiracy and

tried to get Wellington’s support. We must not exaggerate the danger, but a

comparison between the public mood of 1809 and the ovations of August

1807 reveals a striking contrast. The whole Empire was built on victory, and

the reverses in Spain had struck a blow at its prestige which was all the more

powerful because it was the cause of a new war in Germany, which – as the

nation was well aware – was starting at an awkward moment. Facing

Napoleon there was an armed Austria, a Spain that had risen in revolt,

Portugal invaded by the English, and Germany trembling with excitement:

behind him lurked an agonising anxiety and treason; never had he played

for such tremendous stakes.

Yet he proceeded to prepare for the contest with his usual coolness and

calm. He had some ninety thousand men immediately available, the

remnants of the Grande Armée left behind in Germany and labelled the

Army of the Rhine. To this could be added one hundred thousand allied men

– Germans, Dutch and Polish. The 1809 class, who had been called up in

January 1808, were not yet ﬁ t for service. In order to take their place in the

depots, the emperor had called up in September 1808 the 1810 class as

from 1 January 1809. Almost at the same time he raised the contingent

numbers from sixty to eighty thousand, to take effect retrospectively as

* [Secret masonic society with extensive army membership.]

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from 1806, resulting in a total call-up of 140,000 conscripts. Existing regi-

ments had a fourth battalion added to them, and new divisions were consti-

tuted in the Boulogne and Alsace camps, and then sent beyond the Rhine.

Finally, the Guard was brought back with all speed from Spain. In March

1809 Napoleon had three hundred thousand ﬁ ghting men at his disposal in

Germany, of whom he left some one hundred thousand in Italy, sixty thou-

sand of them in Venetia; and Marmont kept a further ﬁ fteen thousand in

Dalmatia. To have created this new army at all was a marvel; but there could

be no illusions about its value. Almost half of it consisted of foreigners who

were a great disappointment in the front line. The French effectives were

more than half recruits, and their formations were incomplete and largely

improvised.

The deﬁ ciencies of the material preparations – as usual, of a rather

perfunctory kind – were particularly apparent to these young troops. Even

the superior command had lost some of its glamour. With Ney and Soult

still in Spain, three army corps had to be entrusted to Lefebvre, Vandamme

and Jérôme, and the Italian army to Eugène. The 1809 army, though much

inferior to that of 1805, contained more than one hundred thousand French

who had fought the 1807 campaign, and they were enough to ensure

victory; but they were a makeshift collection, a foretaste of the army of

1812. For the moment, however, the danger did not lie in its composition,

but in the fact that Napoleon, for all his activity, could not create it quickly

enough to get it assembled in time. At the end of March Bernadotte was still

in Saxony with ﬁ fty thousand Polish and Saxon troops; Jérôme was in central

Germany with the Dutch and Westphalians; Davout’s corps – sixty thousand

picked men – were in Bavaria, north of the Danube; Oudinot, the Bavarians

and other Germans on the Lech; Masséna further in the rear, and the Guard

still on their way from Spain. The bulk of these forces was therefore spread

over a front of 150 kilometres, within a single day’s march of the enemy. The

archduke took up the offensive on 10 April, and Napoleon did not arrive at

Donauwörth till the seventeenth. If the Austrians had made a massed attack

there is no knowing what might have happened.

The allied forces were more judiciously arranged than in 1805. Archduke

John had only ﬁ fty thousand men available for the invasion of Venetia, and

only ten thousand of them were stationed on the Tyrol side, under Chasteler,

and six thousand in Croatia. However, it was necessary to give thirty-ﬁ ve

thousand of the total to Archduke Ferdinand for the protection of Galicia

against the Poles. In Germany, Archduke Charles had two hundred thousand

men at his disposal. His ﬁ rst plan was to debouch from Bohemia in order to

crush Davout and cut the French forces into two halves – a piece of strategy

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that would have been worthy of Napoleon. But he was uneasy at the thought

of leaving Vienna undefended, and he decided to move along the right bank

of the Danube and occupy the Bavarian plateau. In so doing, he lost precious

time and tired out his troops; nevertheless, this revised plan would have

likewise produced decisive results if only it had been carried out speedily

and with all his strength. As it was, he left two corps in front of Davout; and

having crossed the Inn, he advanced slowly towards the Isar, his left

supported by Hiller, in numerous columns whose movements were badly

co-ordinated. Davout was able to fall back southwards, and would have

joined up with the other corps near Ingolstadt if Berthier, through a misin-

terpretation of the emperor’s orders, had not kept him at Ratisbon.

Napoleon had no sooner arrived on the seventeenth than he hastened to

summon him to join up with him, and on the nineteenth the marshal set

out by the right bank of the river, thus passing in front of the enemy and

giving him a last chance of striking a crushing blow. But the archduke failed

to seize the opportunity, and Davout was able to resist the feeble pressure of

the Austrians at Tengen. Meanwhile, Napoleon had mistaken Hiller’s corps

for the main body and was preparing to cut the Inn and force him back on

the Danube. In the centre and under Lannes’s command he massed a force

that attacked the Austrian columns on the left towards Abensberg on 20

April and pushed them back on Landshut, while Masséna was marching on

this town to take them in the rear. But he arrived too late, and on the twenty-

ﬁ rst Hiller, thrust out of Landshut, was able to fall back upon the Inn. The

archduke took advantage of the delay to join up with his forces that had

remained to the north of the Danube – the Ratisbon garrison having mean-

while capitulated; and on the twenty-second he at last decided to launch a

vigorous attack on Davout. But before his right wing had been able to come

into action to cut him off from the river, Davout himself attacked his left

wing at Eckmühl, and soon after, Napoleon, hastening up from Landshut,

took him in the rear. He accordingly retreated, and managed to cross the

Danube without difﬁ culty; but his army had lost about thirty thousand men,

and was cut into two parts, though both of them were still free to move

downstream towards Vienna and effect a meeting, and still comprised more

than one hundred thousand men. On the twentieth the French recaptured

Ratisbon, but Hiller inﬂ icted a reverse on Bessières. The archduke had not

suffered the same fate as Mack.

The emperor did not pursue him into Bohemia, but marched on Vienna.

Not that he was drawn aside by this political objective: it was rather in order

to interpose between the main Austrian army and those in Italy and the

Tyrol. While Davout – now supported by Bernadotte – was keeping an eye

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on the archduke’s movements, Masséna rolled back Hiller’s forces, and

Lannes simultaneously tried to outﬂ ank them through the mountains.

Meanwhile Lefebvre, seizing Salzburg, threw Jellachich back towards the

Drave and could keep a watch on the Tyrol. After a bloody affray at Ebersberg,

near the crossing of the Traun, Hiller managed to get across the Danube to

link up with his chief, and the French entered Vienna on 12 May. But this

time they found the bridges cut, and an enemy force of 115,000 on the left

bank of the river. Napoleon made for the islands which divide the river into

several branches below the city, set up improvised bridges, and on the night

of the twentieth risked a crossing, in spite of an already dangerous ﬂ ood

level. On the twenty-ﬁ rst thirty thousand French were attacked by the whole

Austrian army; yet fortunately for them the attack was not concentrated at

one point, but spread over a half-circle between Aspern and Essling, so that

they were unable to effect a breach. On the twenty-second Napoleon, with

sixty thousand men, took the offensive in order to drive in the enemy centre.

He would moreover have succeeded if the chief bridges had not been swept

away, so holding up the supply of reinforcements. A halt had to be made,

then he had to fall back and stand on the defensive, against a counter-attack,

though short of munitions. But somehow or other they made shift to hold

on, and from the twenty-third to the twenty-ﬁ fth were able to evacuate the

left bank of the river. Twenty thousand French and twenty-three thousand

Austrians had fallen: Lannes and a number of generals had lost their lives.

The archduke had not been able to seize his opportunity, but his opponents

had also failed in their objective. The Battle of Essling caused an even more

profound sensation than Baylen. This time, a blow had been struck at

Napoleon’s personal prestige.

A dangerous situation was again beginning to develop. In the rear of the

army the Tyrol had risen as one man at the news that Chasteler was entering

it by way of the Pustertal on 9 April. Bavaria had spread popular discontent

by abolishing the Landtag and doing away with its independence.

Nevertheless it was above all the economic situation that produced the

feeling of exasperation. Taxes were considerably on the increase; trade was

being ruined by the blockade and the closing of the Italian and Austrian

frontiers; and everyone was being hard hit by the invalidation of Austrian

paper money and the suppression of the convents, which acted as banks and

benevolent institutes. Finally, conscription threatened to spark off a conﬂ a-

gration, and had to be suspended to stop the trouble spreading further.

Besides, Montgelas’s enlightened despotism was Josephist in pattern; and

the Catholic clergy, seeing their ascendancy and privileges threatened,

had taken up the gauntlet. As in the Vendée and in Spain, they wielded

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tremendous inﬂ uence, particularly as the chief insurgent leader, Andreas

Höfer, had for his spiritual adviser the Capuchin monk Haspinger. Hormayr

and Archduke John had had a good chance to prepare the insurrection. It

was essentially peasant in origin, and did not spare the middle classes, who

were pillaged and roughly handled just like the Bavarian ofﬁ cials. There were

only ﬁ ve thousand soldiers to hold down the country, and they were soon

surrounded and forced to capitulate. All the same, Chasteler did not succeed

in organising the insurgents, who went back to their homes after the rising,

and Höfer, although his bravery and piety inspired them with conﬁ dence,

was a limited and rather undecided character. Lefebvre did not have much

difﬁ culty in advancing along the Inn and entering Innsbruck on 19 May.

Chasteler evacuated it, and with the revolt apparently over, it was decided to

leave only Deroy’s division in the Tyrol. Yet when the news of Essling became

known, a fresh insurrection broke out. Napoleon, needing all his forces,

recalled Deroy and left the country to itself. The peasants had no intentions

of leaving it to ﬁ ght a campaign. They made forays into Bavaria and in July

their example was followed by Italy, where an extensive insurrection broke

out in the Adige region and in the Romagna.

If only Archduke John had concentrated all his forces scattered in the

south of the kingdom, he would have found most valuable support. But he

took a very different course. On 10 April he had taken the offensive by way

of the Natisone valley and Caporetto. Eugène’s forces, still scattered over a

wide area, were surprised and fell back to the Mincio, thus surrendering the

whole of Venetia. But when Vienna was threatened the archduke retreated

without any attempt to concentrate the Austrian forces. He himself reached

the Semmering, with Eugène in pursuit, and then withdrew behind the

Raab; Giulay drew away towards Laibach, whence he went upstream again

via Marburg [Maribor] to Graz, hard pressed by Macdonald. Chasteler, who

had come from the Tyrol, did not contrive to join him. In Croatia, Marmont

had fallen back in order to concentrate his forces, but then drove them back

again via Fiume, Laibach and Graz. In the end all the French army corps

rejoined the Grande Armée, whereas Archduke John found his strength

reduced to some twenty thousand men. Davout proceeded to threaten

Pressburg, and Eugène defeated the archduke on the Raab on 14 June. Then

both of them pressed on towards Vienna to take part in the battle, and John

did likewise, crossing to the left bank of the Danube, but arrived some few

hours late.

The most serious consequence the defeat at Essling might have had would

have been to invite intervention by the king of Prussia. Several of his ofﬁ cers

had already taken it upon themselves to compromise the situation. Katte

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made an attempt against Magdeburg and on 28 April Schill made a sortie

from Berlin with his hussars, but was easily overcome by General Marchand.

Central Germany was also astir. On 22 April Dörnberg, an ex-colonel,

marched on Cassel at the head of some hundreds of peasants; and in June

another retired ofﬁ cer tried to produce an insurrection in Marburg, while

there was a rising of the countryside near the Tauber. The Austrians, for their

part, entered Saxony and the king ﬂ ed; and the duke of Brunswick-Oels, at

the head of Hessians transferred by their elector to Bohemia, occupied

Leipzig. Finally, the English were working on Hanover and Holland and on

8 July made an attempt against Cuxhaven. If the Prussians had got under

way, Jérôme would have had considerable difﬁ culty in defending his

kingdom. To start with, Frederick William seemed disposed to take action;

but on second thoughts he conﬁ ned himself to stopping payment of the

indemnity. Though he did in the end send an agent to Vienna, he did not

arrive till 21 July.

As things turned out, then, Napoleon was able to reassemble all his forces,

and did not have much difﬁ culty in exploiting the occupied countries

or bringing up the reinforcements and supplies that were available in

France – twenty thousand foot, ten thousand cavalry, six thousand men for

the Guard and a large amount of artillery so as to make up for the doubtful

reliability of his troops. The island of Lobau was meticulously fortiﬁ ed and

the number of solid bridges extended. In the midst of danger the emperor

himself remained imperturbable. He even went ahead with a measure that

was of all things the most likely to sow disaffection among his own subjects:

on 17 May he decided to annex Rome. On hearing that Pius VII was about

to excommunicate him, the emperor gave orders that he should be taken

prisoner and deported, and on 6 July, the day on which the Battle of Wagram

was fought, the pope was in fact removed by the gendarmerie , and a senatus

consultum of 17 February 1810 subsequently regularised the annexation. It

was thoroughly typical of the man that he should give an order like this at

such a moment of crisis. He continued with untroubled brow to play double

or quits with fortune. And once again he forced destiny to take his side.

At his disposal there were now 187,000 men and 488 guns, against the

enemy’s 136,000 – though their artillery was almost of equal strength. The

crossing of the Danube began on 4 July, a stormy night, downstream from

Essling, and was completed by the following afternoon. By this move the

emperor reckoned to turn the archduke’s ﬂ ank; but when his forces fanned

out over the plain, they failed to ﬁ nd him. The French preparations had not

escaped his notice, and realising that he could not stop this crossing, he had

fallen back a short distance, with his left behind the Russbach and parallel

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to the Danube, and his right perpendicular to it, the top of the angle being

marked by the villages of Aderklaa and Wagram. This position, supported on

the left by fortiﬁ ed heights, possessed distinct advantages, but it was too

extended, and left the archduke with no reserves. Napoleon, disappointed

of his prey, had to improvise a manoeuvre and could not attack the Russbach

front till seven in the evening, and then without success, for the Saxon forces

yielded ground at Aderklaa. He renewed the assault at dawn on the sixth

with all his available strength: Davout turned the position and forced

Rosenberg to retreat. But at Aderklaa, Carra de Saint-Cyr was overwhelmed

and Bernadotte’s troops from Saxony once again disintegrated. Meanwhile

the Austrian right was vigorously hammering at Boudet’s division, which

alone stood in their way, capturing Aspern and Essling and threatening the

French communications with the rear. The emperor was forced to alter his

dispositions in the midst of battle. Masséna moved down towards the river

and stopped the Austrian right by a ﬂ anking manoeuvre, and the gap was

ﬁ lled with a huge battery of one hundred guns, behind which the reserves

advanced in massed column under the command of Macdonald. At two

o’clock, there was a resumption of the general attack on the Russbach. The

enemy left wing was in the end completely overrun and the centre forced

to fall back. The archduke gave the order to retreat, but there was hardly any

pursuit from the exhausted French. He had lost ﬁ fty thousand men to the

enemy’s thirty-four thousand. Tacticians have been full of admiration for the

military genius displayed by Napoleon in the course of that day; but judged

by results, it cannot compare with Austerlitz or Jena. For the enemy

forces – still more than eighty thousand men strong – withdrew through

Moravia in good order, and battle was renewed at Znaim on the eleventh. Yet

the archduke was no Blücher, and he had no hope of a successful issue. He

requested an armistice, and his request was granted on the twelfth.

The ﬁ nal crisis, however, was long-drawn-out. Excitement in Germany

remained intense, and there was an attempt to assassinate the emperor by a

student named Stabs, though order was quickly re-established. The king of

Prussia adopted an attitude of increasing reserve, the Austrians evacuated

Saxony, and Brunswick made a daring transit of Jérôme’s kingdom to reach

the coast where the English were waiting to pick him up. The Tyrol, on the

other hand, though attacked in July by forty thousand men coming up from

Salzburg, the Vorarlberg and the Adige, continued to hold out, exterminating

a division from Saxony and again forcing Lefebvre to retreat. Not till after

peace was signed did Drouet d’Erlon and Eugène succeed in breaking down

their resistance. Höfer had submitted, and then taken up arms again, only to

be betrayed by one of his compatriots and shot on 20 February 1810. Yet the

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English gave still more trouble. Their expedition at last appeared off

Walcheren, and on 13 August captured Flushing. This was the largest contin-

gent they had sent to the Continent – forty thousand men escorted by

thirty-ﬁ ve vessels and twenty-three frigates – but their commander, Lord

Chatham, a great courtier but totally incompetent, kept his men doing

nothing when a straight march on Antwerp would probably have captured

it. As it was, his troops were rapidly laid low by epidemics, and he

re-embarked on 30 September with a loss of 106 killed and four thousand

who had died from disease.

Nevertheless, the expedition had meanwhile spread alarm throughout

the Empire, for which Fouché had been largely responsible. On 29 June

Napoleon had left him for the time being in charge of the Ministry of the

Interior, since Crétet was unwell. Finding himself in charge of the two polit-

ical ministries, he displayed extraordinary activity, suppressing the congréga-

tions [Jesuits], arresting Noailles, who was acting as intermediary between

the pope and the Catholics, putting down disturbances in the West and in

the Rhineland, and supporting government stock by purchases on the stock

exchange without any reference at all to Mollien. On learning that the

English expedition had landed, he proposed to his colleagues that the

National Guards should be mobilised in the ﬁ fteen northern départements

and brushed aside all objections. Bernadotte had quarrelled with Napoleon

because he had gone to the defence of Saxony after Wagram, and had just

returned to France. He now accepted an offer from Fouché, who put him in

charge of the defence of Antwerp. The préfets were then instructed to hold

themselves in readiness for a mass levy of the National Guards in view of the

fear of other coastal attacks, particularly in Provence. In Paris, the National

Guard was reconstituted. Fouché dealt out ranks to the citizens, who eagerly

accepted them, and himself reviewed the force. The military authorities

grew alarmed: were they back again in 1793? Clarke was loud in fury, and

Fiévée wrote to the emperor. There seems to be little doubt that Fouché,

overjoyed at once again ﬁ nding himself in a commanding position, had

allowed himself to be carried away by memories of his days as representa-

tive of the people. Yet there may also have been certain other thoughts at the

back of his mind, for he probably knew of the plot in Provence and was

most likely in touch with the English through Montrond, an agent of

Talleyrand, whom he had sent to Antwerp. One can well imagine what

suspicions must have run through Napoleon’s mind after all the intrigues of

1808. In August he was supporting Fouché’s ﬁ rst measures; but by September,

with the English showing no signs of action, he was beginning to listen to

the critics. He did away with the Paris National Guards, replaced Bernadotte