Lefebvre Georges. Napoleon

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conﬁ ne France did not include the colonies, England took over Tobago,

St Lucia, Mauritius, Rodrigo and the Seychelles, while Spain was given back

her part of San Domingo. France accepted in advance any decisions the allies

might make on the territories she had seized in the congress that would

meet at Vienna.

This gathering was the most important that Europe had so far held, and

aroused great hopes, ﬁ rst and foremost among the old ‘legitimate’ authori-

ties. The more important among the dispossessed princes resumed their

places. Napoleon had himself set Ferdinand VII free by the Treaty of Valençay

as early as 11 December 1813, and had sent the pope back to his Papal States

in January 1814. The elector of Hesse, the king of Sardinia and the dukes of

Modena and Tuscany all went back to their capitals, and the king of England

resumed possession of Hanover, which now became a kingdom. But would

Napoleon’s former allies restore what he had given them? In Germany more

especially, the Ritterschaft and the ecclesiastical princes were asserting their

rights. There was no less anxiety on the part of the peoples who had fought

for their independence, and not in order to re-establish the ancien régime ,

especially as they had been promised their freedom. The German patriots

claimed unity, though without quite knowing how to deﬁ ne it, and from

the beginning of the year Görres had been conducting a vigorous campaign

in the Rheinischer Merkur against the selﬁ shness of the princes. The Italians were

delighted to have got rid of the French, but were afraid the Austrans might

return. Moreover, the middle classes and peasants set free by the French did

not intend to sink back into a state of dependence. On 22 May 1815, on the

eve of the new campaign against Napoleon, the king of Prussia himself

promised a constitution. But whether it was those who adored the past,

such as Baader, who urged the sovereigns to base the new political order on

the principles of religion, or those who looked to the future, like Saint-

Simon and Augustin Thierry, and who wanted at last to organise a European

society, there was common agreement that what was required of the

congress was peace – a long, if not an everlasting, period of peace.

Castlereagh, Metternich and the Prussians did not look so far ahead. Even

the tsar, though he might listen to the vaticinations of Jung Stilling and

Madame Krüdener which reached him through one of the tsarina’s ladies-

in-waiting, followed his usual habit of using the mysticism to further his

ambitions. He was to say to Talleyrand before long: ‘The habits of Europe

constitute its law.’ The four powers intended the congress to limit itself to

ratifying their decisions, and before the congress England, still claiming the

right to mediate, invited the allies to come and settle them in London.

Alexander interposed in a lordly fashion, annoying the Tories by ﬂ attering

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the Whigs, and offending the regent. The discussion broke up without

reaching agreement, and the September meeting in Vienna was no more

successful. The congress was then adjourned, and although Talleyrand, with

the support of Spain, won a moral victory by ﬁ xing the opening for 1

November, the congress never really came together. Everything took place in

committee, and the important questions were decided by the four. The chief

bone of contention continued to be the duchy of Warsaw, which Russia

wanted to keep, and Saxony, which she intended to make over to Prussia.

There was steady resistance from Metternich, while the English government

showed itself indifferent, merely insisting on avoiding all discussion on the

freedom of the seas and reserving its rights to decide the colonial question.

England appropriated Malta and Heligoland, and took over from the Dutch

the Cape, Singapore and a part of Guiana. She also obtained the condemna-

tion of the slave trade, without however being able to secure its immediate

abolition, owing to the non-cooperation of Spain and Portugal. On

continental matters, she was prepared to leave Castlereagh a free hand.

Castlereagh did not think it possible for his country to stand aside: of all

British statesmen, he was the most European-minded there had ever been.

His ﬁ rst concern was to encircle France by organising the Low Countries,

installing Prussia on the Rhine and settling Austria in Italy; yet he also

thought it advisable not to allow the tsar to acquire hegemony. He thought

it essential to fortify Germany against France and Russia by bringing Austria

and Prussia together. At ﬁ rst, he seemed to be succeeding, and Metternich

agreed to leave Saxony to Prussia if the Prussians would desert Alexander.

But Frederick William, overwhelmed by his friend’s reproaches, disowned

his ministers’ decisions. The situation seemed so serious that Castlereagh

took it upon himself to sign a treaty of alliance with Metternich and

Talleyrand on 3 January 1815. ‘The Coalition has been dissolved,’ wrote

Talleyrand, who took the credit for this success, and has since persuaded a

good many people to believe him. To be sure, he showed great adroitness;

but the principles of territorial impartiality and legitimacy with which he

made such play did not have as much effect as has commonly been believed.

No one dreamed of granting him anything, and if he defended legitimacy,

everyone knew that this was only in order to ﬂ atter Louis XVIII, who wanted

to reinstate his relations in Naples and Parma. The truth is that he complied

with Castlereagh and Metternich in order to get them to throw over Murat.

Moreover, the allies had no intention of breaking up their coalition.

Castlereagh was prepared to make concessions, and quickly persuaded

Alexander to agree. Thorn and Posen were given back to the Prussians, who

had to be satisﬁ ed with a third of Saxony, and obtained only Eupen and

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536

Malmédy on the Dutch side. Failing any better offer, they accepted the Rhine

provinces. Castlereagh thus followed Napoleon’s footsteps in the uniﬁ cation

of Germany. By agreeing with Talleyrand in his refusal to let the king of

Saxony be brought on to the Rhine, he effectively prepared the way for him

to come under Prussian inﬂ uence. Once this matter had been settled, he left

Vienna. Napoleon’s return did not interrupt the work of the committees,

and the ﬁ nal treaty was signed on 9 June.

This settlement has been looked upon as a masterpiece, but in fact it left

the way open for rivalries in the East, which might well lead to further wars.

The Turks had seized the opportunity to reoccupy Serbia between July and

October 1813. Then in November 1814, as a result of a fresh revolt, they

found themselves shut up in their fortresses. The tsar maintained that by

virtue of the Treaty of Bucharest, the Serbs had a right to autonomy, while

the sultan persisted in disputing the tsar’s right to his conquests in the

Caucasus. It was easy to foresee that some time or other the tsar would

demand Constantinople in return for the services he claimed to have

rendered to Europe. This was why Metternich had suggested to Mahmud

that he should get the powers to guarantee his territories. But the Russians

opposed the suggestion, and the English, oblivious of future dangers, also

refused to give their consent.

Furthermore, it was natural that the diplomats of the ancien régime should

be proud of their work, since they had divided the various lands and ‘souls’

according to their cherished principles of equilibrium. For that very reason,

the work of the congress ran counter to the new European tendencies, for it

completely ignored the feelings of nationality which the revolutionary wars

had aroused. In spite of the Whigs’ protestations, on this particular point

Castlereagh was just as blind as Metternich. With the Lombards and Venetians

handed over to Austria, the Belgians unwillingly subjected to the Dutch,

Poland once again partitioned, and even the Germans brought together into

a paralytic confederation torn between Austria and Prussia, it was obvious

that the victims would not be long in reasserting their rights.

The political, administrative and social reaction was also taking its course.

In May 1814 Ferdinand VII had annulled the constitution of 1812 before

entering Madrid, and Ferdinand of Sicily followed his example. The pope

and the Italian princes, and the sovereigns of Central and Northern Germany

all set about destroying the work of Napoleon; while the king of Prussia

suspended the agrarian reforms that were so hateful to the Junkers.

Metternich reckoned that he would certainly also be able to make Southern

Germany return to sound doctrine. In this respect, Castlereagh and the Tories

agreed with him: freedom was a perquisite of the British aristocracy, and the

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continental rabble had no claims to it. They were soon destined to discover

that the spirit of the Revolution, which had been carried abroad by

Napoleon’s troops, had survived their defeat. Even at the present moment,

the aristocrats of Europe were furious to observe that the revolutionary

spirit was being given its share of good things. Several usurpers were allowed

to keep their thrones, which to the aristocrats seemed symbolic. True,

Murat was condemned, because he obstinately insisted on retaining the

Marches, thus alienating Metternich, who handed the matter over secretly

to Castlereagh and Talleyrand in January 1815. But Bernadotte remained in

possession of Sweden, and with English support compelled Christian of

Denmark, who had been elected king by the Norwegians, to cede him the

crown in November 1814. Bonaparte himself reigned over Elba, and his

‘bastard’, as Wellington called him, would one day be duke of Parma. The

reactionary party considered it to be far more serious still that in the Low

Countries, the Rhine provinces, Southern Germany and Switzerland there

should be an apparent obligation to respect the whole or at least part of the

French innovations. In order to oblige William of Orange to have some

regard for the Belgians, Castlereagh had thought it necessary to make him

give them a constitution. The tsar had also promised one to the Poles. In

France, the legitimate king who had been restored with so much difﬁ culty

was very far from re-establishing the old absolutism and all its privileges. He

had resigned himself to preserving the results of the Revolution and the

Empire, and intended to share the work of government with the middle

classes.

The lightning return of Napoleon was to be another proof of the frailty

of this ‘moderate’ restoration regime.

THE FIRST RESTORATION IN FRANCE

AND THE RETURN FROM ELBA

Louis XVIII had reached Calais on 24 April 1814. It was hardly possible for

him to accept the constitution drawn up by the Senate who had called him

to the throne in the name of the nation. In a declaration made at Saint-Ouen

on 2 May he treated it as no more than a preliminary sketch. He was prepared

to keep its essential points, such as civil liberty and equality, the sale of

national property, the retention of the imperial institutions and the princi-

ples of constitutional government; but the sovereignty of the people disap-

peared from the constitution, and in its place the king ‘would grant a

charter’. This was drawn up by a commission sitting from the twenty-

second to the twenty-seventh. The political organisation was borrowed from

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538

the English. The king exercised executive power through responsible minis-

ters. He also had sole power to initiate legislation. Taxes were voted and laws

passed by a Chamber of Peers and a Chamber of Deputies, the ﬁ rst chosen

by the king, with the possibility of hereditary seats, the latter elected by a

suffrage based on property qualiﬁ cations. Anyone paying direct taxes of

three hundred francs or more would have a vote, and at one thousand francs

a man became eligible as a deputy. But for the time being, the Corps Législatif

of the Empire became as it stood the Chamber of Deputies. The new aristoc-

racy also provided the majority of the peers – eighty-four senators and

several marshals. The Charter was read before the chambers on 4 June.

The upper middle classes received the new constitution with some satis-

faction, for on the one hand it was a barrier against a counter-revolution,

and on the other it deprived the common people of all political inﬂ uence.

All the same, it remained to be seen whether Louis XVIII would hand the

government over to the notables, that is, whether he would choose his

ministers according to the wishes of the parliamentary majority, like the

king of England. Well, he intended to do nothing of the sort: he had recon-

stituted the old conseils ‘ d’en haut ’ and ‘ des parties ’, and his ministers were nothing

but superior clerks who dealt with him separately and did not form a like-

minded cabinet with collective responsibility. The middle classes were disap-

pointed. And to make matters worse, Louis XVIII showed no interest in

affairs, and foreign ambassadors – particularly Wellington and Pozzo di

Borgo – aspired to have a hand in the game. The regime had no proper

government, and consequently lost power.

The mass of the nation remained indifferent, for the Bourbons no longer

counted for anything in their eyes, as the allies and émigrés had been aston-

ished to note. After all, Louis had returned without their being consulted,

and they only accepted him because foreigners seemed to be imposing him

on them as a condition of peace and the evacuation of French territory.

Naturally enough, they were not at all grateful to him for this peace – quite

the contrary, in fact: the white ﬂ ag seemed to them to be a symbol of

national humiliation. Nothing in the Charter could rouse their interest, for

they did not care about the seat of political power once it had been decided

not to reintroduce the ancient privileges, the tithe or the feudal dues.

This was precisely what the nobles and the priests could not resign them-

selves to accept. The latter in particular, having proclaimed the Catholic faith

as the religion of the state, did not intend it to be a mere hollow formula.

These two classes looked upon the Charter as a temporary concession, an

opinion that was shared by the comte d’Artois. Louis XVIII, moreover, owed

them certain satisfactions. To the nobles he dealt out places at court, in his

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household guard, in the administration and in the army, while thousands of

ofﬁ cers found themselves discharged on half-pay, at a time when the ﬁ nan-

cial state of the country was being made an excuse for maintaining the

‘combined duties’ which the comte d’Artois had promised to abolish. The

clergy procured a decree requiring the observance of Sunday, the exemption

of Church schools from all dues and all control, and the abolition of the

ofﬁ ce of grand master in the University of Paris. The government could

hardly refuse to make certain symbolical gestures, such as the erection of a

monument to the dead at Quiberon, and the elevation of Cadoudal to the

nobility. There was all the more excuse for showing indulgence to the

nobles’ pleas and the priests’ sermons; and all Frenchmen soon realised

that nothing less than a return to the ancien régime would satisfy these inter-

ests. Resignation was now succeeded by anger, and the regime could

certainly not rely on the loyalty of the soldiers.

Before long, there were conspiracies afoot. Fouché was conﬁ dent that

Europe would not tolerate the return of Napoleon and so was inclined to

look to the duc d’Orléans, or a regency under Marie-Louise with the support

of Austria. Maret, on the other hand, was working for the emperor, and in

February 1815 sent Fleury de Chaboulon to inform him of the state of

affairs. Some generals were preparing a military rebellion, and Lallemand

and Drouet tried to provoke one in the north. They failed, but at the same

moment the news spread that ‘ he ’ had returned.

Napoleon, for his part, had never resigned himself to his fate, and he had

good reasons for complaint. The authorities refused to give him back his

son, and Marie-Louise had already taken Neipperg as her lover. Louis XVIII

declared he would not pay him the allowance that had been promised.

Napoleon probably knew that there was talk at Vienna of banishing him to

St Helena. On 26 February, two days after Chaboulon’s visit, Napoleon

embarked for France, on an adventure which could only bring him new

misfortunes.

On 1 March he reached the Gulf of Juan without let or hindrance. From

there he marched upon Grenoble, where he was awaited by Colonel La

Bédoyère, who surrendered the place to him. On the tenth the workers of

Lyon greeted him in triumph. Ney, who had promised to recapture him,

also went over to his side on the fourteenth at Lons-le-Saulnier and joined

up with him at Auxerre. In face of this blow Louis XVIII, who up till now

had appeared to be conﬁ dent, came to the conclusion that the game was

lost, and in the night of the nineteenth left for Lille, from which he reached

Ghent. The eagle and the tricolour were ﬂ ying once more from belfry after

belfry, and even from the towers of Notre-Dame.

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540

THE HUNDRED DAYS

Napoleon met with no serious resistance. The duc de Bourbon and the

duchesse d’Angoulême tried in vain to draw the troops away from the

emperor. The duc d’Angoulême advanced from Languedoc as far as Drôme;

but he was soon surrounded, and found himself being shipped off to Spain.

Although Napoleon met with few avowed enemies, he found France consid-

erably changed. During the Hundred Days political life gave signs of a revival

that disconcerted Napoleon.

The spirit of the Revolution once more walked openly abroad and revived

its traditions. In the course of his lightning journey, Napoleon had not scru-

pled to make use of it and to launch violent attacks upon the nobles and

priests who wished to restore the ancien régime . ‘I shall string them up to the

lamp-posts,’ he exclaimed at Autun. There was, in fact, a sharp popular reac-

tion against both these classes. Moreover, the Jacobin bourgeoisie revived

the federations, which proved successful in Brittany at the end of April, in

Paris on 14 May, and more especially in the east – in Lorraine, at Strasbourg,

in Burgundy and in Dauphiné. They brought back memories of the

Committee of Public Safety and the army in Year II. There was even singing

of the Marseillaise and the ‘Chant du départ’. The government took alarm

and conscientiously set about measures to ensure that this revival did not

have any practical results. But Napoleon gave it his approval, though without

the least intention of restarting the Revolution. Hereditary and absolute

monarchy had returned for good: all the people had to do was to keep quiet

till they were required to ﬁ ght.

But he did not dare to treat the liberals so cavalierly. From the moment of

his arrival at Lyon he began to hand out lavish promises – no doubt at the

instance of La Bédoyère, though probably without attaching much impor-

tance to them. But in Paris the newspapers, the constitutional bodies and

even the Conseil d’État demanded a constitutional government. ‘That black-

guard has ruined France for me,’ he remarked of Louis XVIII. But the king

had in fact been powerless: he had had to bow in spite of himself to the

power which the notables partly owed to the imperial policy; and Napoleon,

reluctant to base himself on popular support, was obliged to do likewise. In

order not to have to eat his own words, he merely agreed to promulgate a

‘decree to supplement the imperial constitutions’. This supplementary

decree was fairly close to the Charter, and was likewise a compromise. He

signed it himself along with Benjamin Constant, who had as lately as 19

March published a violent article against him in the Débats , but had yielded

to the emperor’s ﬁ rst appeal. The liberal middle classes did not manage to

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retain the property qualiﬁ cation for the suffrage. Napoleon re-established

universal suffrage and the electoral colleges; but he conceded hereditary

peerage to the Senate, though he had refused it in Year XII. The results satis-

ﬁ ed nobody. There were few voters at the plebiscite, and more than half the

electorate failed to vote at the election of the deputies. The granting of

hereditary peerages had frozen the zeal of the patriotic party and robbed

them of all their initiative. As for the liberal middle classes, they did not trust

Napoleon, and soon resumed the offensive against him. After the promulga-

tion of the decree with all due pomp in a Champ de mai which had to be

postponed till 1 June, the deputies undertook to transform themselves into

constituent assemblies and to revise the decree. In short, Napoleon alienated

the Frenchmen who were disposed to support him warmly, without

managing to conciliate the notables.

The liberal opposition proved a source of annoyance to the government.

Fouché, in control of the police, was lenient towards all parties, and was in

addition secretly negotiating with Metternich. At the Ministry of the Interior,

Carnot did not make many ministerial changes. The special commissions

were no more energetic in their actions than in 1814. The censorship –

which had been retained by Louis XVIII – had now been abolished, and the

royalists took advantage of the fact to exploit the economic crisis, the fear of

conscription and the inevitability of war. At the beginning of May the Vendée

rose once again, and the Chouans reappeared in Brittany. The rebels took

Bressuire and Cholet, and Napoleon had to put a western army in charge of

Lamarque. The rebellion was quickly suppressed. The Vendéan leaders were

crushed near Légé on 20 June and made peace on the twenty-ﬁ fth.

Nevertheless, they had pinned down a force of thirty thousand, and had

done good service to the Coalition, for Lamarque’s troops would have made

all the difference between victory and defeat at Waterloo.

Whatever interest the historian may ﬁ nd in these movements of opinion,

Frenchmen themselves were more occupied during these months with the

threats from abroad. During his march on Paris, Napoleon had given an

assurance that he was acting in concert with Austria; but it is difﬁ cult to

believe that he can really have been under such an illusion. When he reas-

sumed the title of emperor, he sent the allies an offer of peace and despatched

envoys to them. But he received no answer. As early as 13 March he was

declared a European outlaw at Vienna, and on the twenty-ﬁ fth the alliance

of Chaumont was conﬁ rmed. In this supreme and ﬁ nal struggle, the kings

and the aristocracy once more posed as the defenders of popular independ-

ence and even the freedom of the French nation, which had been subju-

gated by a tyrant. They were in fact well aware that this was no longer the

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542

question at issue: the vital thing was to crush the Revolution once and for

all by striking down the man who personiﬁ ed it in their eyes. Pozzo di

Borgo had written:

Napoleon is advancing on Paris, holding aloft the torch of revolution. He is

accompanied by the dregs of the populace and by the army . . . The foreign

powers must make haste to nip this evil in the bud, or it will once more

undermine all the foundations of social order, for it represents the lust for

pillage and violence pitted against the rights of property and law.

Europe was about to come down on France like an avalanche. She had from

seven to eight hundred thousand men on foot, considerable reserves and all

the resources of England at her disposal.

The Restoration had an army of 160,000 men, and there were another

one hundred thousand at home, with or without leave. Napoleon called

them all up and mixed them with the 1815 conscripts, who had been

summoned to the ranks on 9 October 1813. He also appealed for volunteers

and for ofﬁ cers of the reserve, preserved the organisation of the National

Guard which he had initiated, and set a part of them to guarding the

fortresses or forming reserve divisions. Unfortunately there was no great

abundance of arms, munitions or horses, and still less money. The worst part

of it was that the national spirit, though better than in 1814, did not show

much enthusiasm. Those who were called up were slow to respond, and by

no means all of them put in an appearance. Napoleon might perhaps have

rekindled some enthusiasm if he had supported the federations. But he

disclaimed the revolutionary ardour and the example of the Committee of

Public Safety, and did not dare to restore either conscription or a mixed

system which would have joined the National Guard in with the army and

thus have made it easily possible to take two hundred thousand men to

Belgium. It must, however, be admitted that he would not have had time to

make better arrangements, for it was imperative to take the offensive and

reconquer the Rhine before the Coalition was organised for action.

In his last army there was thus a breach with the traditions of the

Revolution. It was composed of trained men, who had mostly already fought

a campaign; it was more reliable than the 1813 army, and better provided

with artillery and cavalry, but it was too small. Leaving out of account

the National Guard and the forces assigned to the different frontiers, the

northern army numbered only 126,000 men – that is, six army corps, the

Guards and four cavalry groups. The staff and higher command did not

prove to be of the ﬁ rst order, and on the very eve of Ligny Bourmont went

543

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over to the enemy. In spite of what has been said to the contrary, it would

seem that the emperor’s health, energy and conﬁ dence were no longer what

they had been in former days.

Two of the armies that had evacuated France were still quartered in

Belgium. One of these, composed of English, Hanoverians, Belgians and

Dutch, numbered ninety-six thousand men; and Wellington had come to

take command of it. The other – Blücher’s troops – consisted of 124,000

Prussians. Between them, these two armies were therefore superior in

strength; but they were still in scattered groups and there might well be a

chance of surprising them, or at least defeating them one at a time: this at

any rate was the only card Napoleon had to play. Besides, even an over-

whelming victory would not have decided the issue.

From 6 June onwards Napoleon began to move his troops from Lille to

Metz in order to concentrate them south of the Sambre, and on the ﬁ fteenth

he descended on Charleroi and threw himself between the two enemy

armies. But his orders were rather ineffectively carried out, and Ligny and

Quatre Bras were not taken. He for his part allowed the enemy to retreat and

lost the whole morning of the sixteenth. In actual fact, Blücher and

Gneisenau, having collected eighty-four thousand men, had made up their

minds to risk a battle. Wellington, who had made no move until the twelfth

and was still waiting for an attack from the Mons direction on the ﬁ fteenth,

was quickly moving his divisions eastwards in order to catch the French in

the ﬂ ank. At last, in the early afternoon of the sixteenth, Napoleon realised

that the Prussians were present in force at Ligny. He gave battle, instructing

Ney and Drouet to fall back from Quatre Bras on their right, but he had left

Lobau’s corps at Charleroi, which did not rejoin him till the evening, and he

had only sixty-eight thousand men. Ney was under increasing pressure

from Wellington, and could not disengage himself. Orders were inefﬁ ciently

passed on, with the result that Drouet manoeuvred between the two battle-

ﬁ elds without being of any use in either. Blücher’s army was driven in at the

centre and forced to retreat, though not destroyed. Napoleon was unwell,

and left the ﬁ eld of battle; there was no pursuit of the enemy until at the end

of the morning of the seventeenth, when Grouchy was at last sent to see

what had happened to their retreating forces. In the course of the night he

discovered that far from retiring on Namur, they were marching on Wavre;

and instead of crossing the Dyle and blocking their path he followed them,

so that there was now nothing to prevent Blücher marching to the assistance

of Wellington.

Meanwhile, Wellington had retired northwards, and had taken up a posi-

tion in front of the forest of Soignes, on the Mont Saint-Jean plateau, with