NAPOLEON THE LIBERATOR[16]
[Footnote 16: References: Sorel, A.: Le traite de Paris du 20
novembre, 1815. I. Les cent jours. Lacretelle: Histoire de
France depuis la restauration. Nettement: Histoire de la
litterature francaise sous la restauration. Constant:
Memoires sur les cent jours en forme de lettres. Lucien
Bonaparte: La verite sur les cent jours.]
Napoleon Ready to Reappear -- Reasons for his Determination --
The Return to France -- The Northward March -- Grenoble Opens its
Gates -- The Lyons Proclamations -- The Emperor in the Tuileries
-- The Emperor of the French -- The Additional Act -- Effects of
the Return in France and Elsewhere -- The Congress of Vienna
Denounces Napoleon.
It has lately been recalled that as early as July, 1814, the Emperor
of Elba remarked to an English visitor that Louis XVIII, being
surrounded by those who had betrayed the Empire, would in turn
probably be himself betrayed by them. For the ensuing four months,
however, the exile gave no sign of any deep purpose; to those who
wished to leave him, he gave a hearty good-by. In December, however,
he remarked to one of his old soldiers, pointedly, as the man thought:
"Well, grenadier, you are bored; ... take the weather as it comes."
Slipping a gold piece into the veteran's hand, he then turned away,
humming to a simple air the words, "This will not last forever."
Thereafter he dissuaded all who sought to depart, saying: "Be patient.
We'll pass these few winter days as best we may; then we'll try to
spend the spring in another fashion." This vague language may
possibly have referred to the Italian scheme, but on February tenth he
received a clear account of what had happened at Vienna, and on the
evening of the twelfth Fleury de Chaboulon, a confidential friend of
Maret, arrived in the disguise of a sailor, and revealed in the
fullest and most authentic way the state of France. When he heard of
the plan to reestablish the regency, Napoleon burst out hotly: "A
regency! What for? Am I, then, dead?" Two days later, after long
conferences, the emissary was despatched to do what he could at
Naples, and the Emperor began his preparations.
This was soon known on the mainland, and three days later a personage
whose identity has never been revealed arrived in the guise of a
Marseilles merchant, declaring that, except the rich and the
emigrants, every human being in France longed for the Emperor's
return. If he would but set up his hat on the shores of Provence, it
would draw all men toward it. When Napoleon turned pseudo-historian he
declared in one place that the breaches of the Fontainebleau treaty
and his fears of deportation had nothing to do with his return from
Elba; in another he states the reverse. Since the legend he was then
studiously constructing required the unbroken devotion of the French
to the standard-bearer of the Revolution for the sake of consistency,
he probably recalled only the feelings awakened by Fleury's report
that opportunity was ripe, and that, too, earlier than had been
expected. But there were other motives at the time, for Peyrusse,
keeper of Napoleon's purse during the Elban sojourn, heard his master
asseverate that it would be more dangerous to remain in Porto Ferrajo
than to return to France. In any case, so far as France and the world
at large were concerned, the contemptuous indifference of Louis and
his ministers to their obligations under the treaty powerfully
justified Napoleon's course. Even Alexander and Castlereagh had early
made an indignant protest to Talleyrand; but the latter, already deep
in conspiracy, turned them off with a flippant rejoinder.
With great adroitness and secrecy Napoleon collected and fitted out
his little flotilla, which consisted of the _Inconstant_, a stout brig
assigned to him at Fontainebleau, and seven smaller craft. During the
preparations the French and English war-vessels patrolling the
neighboring waters came and went, but their captains suspected
nothing. Campbell's departure created a false rumor among the
islanders that England was favoring some expedition on which the
Emperor was about to embark, thus allaying all suspicion. When, on the
twenty-sixth, a little army of eleven hundred men found itself afloat,
with eighty horses and a number of cannon, no one seemed to realize
what had happened; except Drouot, who pleaded against Napoleon's
rashness, all were enthusiastic. To avoid suspicion, each captain
steered his own course, and the various craft dotting the sea at
irregular intervals looked no way unlike the other boats which plied
those waters. Several men-of-war were sighted, but they kept their
course. As one danger after another was averted, the great
adventurer's spirits rose until he was exuberant with joy, and talked
of Austerlitz. It was March first when land was finally sighted from
the _Inconstant_; as if by magic, the other vessels hove in sight
immediately, and by four the men were all ashore on the strand of the
Gulf of Jouan. Cambronne, a colonel of the imperial guards, was sent
to requisition horses at Cannes, with the strict injunction that not a
drop of blood be shed. As the great actor had theatrically said on
board his brig, he was "about to produce a great novelty," and he
counted upon dazzling the beholders into an enthusiasm they had
ceased to feel for the old plays. Among others brought to Napoleon's
bivouac that night was the Prince of Monaco, who had been found by
Cambronne at St. Pierre traveling in a four-horse carriage, and had
been taken as a prisoner into Napoleon's presence. "Where are you
going?" was, according to tradition, the greeting of Napoleon. "I am
returning to my domains," came the reply. "Indeed! and I too," was the
merry retort.
Recalling the mortal agony he had endured on the highway through Aix
but a short year before, and its causes, and having been informed how
bitter was the anti-royalist feeling in the Dauphine, Napoleon set his
little army in march direct toward Grenoble. At Cannes there was
general indifference; at Grasse it was found that the division general
in command had fled, and there were a few timid shouts of "Long live
the Emperor!" Thence to Digne on the Grenoble highway was a mountain
track over a ridge twelve thousand feet above the sea. In twenty hours
the slender column marched thirty-five miles. The "growlers" joked
about the "little corporal" who trudged at their side, the Alpine
hamlets provided abundant rations, and the government officials
furnished blank passports which enabled Napoleon to send emissaries
both to Grenoble and to Marseilles, where Massena was in command. The
little garrison of Digne was Bonapartist in feeling, but it was not
yet ready to join Napoleon, and withdrew; that at Sisteron was kept
from meddling by a body of troops which had been despatched as a corps
of observation from Marseilles, while the populace shouted heartily
for the Emperor. At Gap the officials strove to organize resistance,
but they desisted before the menaces of the people. By this time the
peasantry were coming in by hundreds. So far Napoleon's enterprise
had received but four recruits: two soldiers from Antibes, a tanner
from Grasse, and a gendarme. Now he was so confident that he dismissed
the peasantry, assuring them that the soldiers in front would join his
standards.
On March seventh the head of the column of imperial adventurers
reached La Mure, a short day's march from Grenoble. They were received
with enthusiasm, and a bucket of the poor native wine was brought for
the refreshment of the men. When all had been served Napoleon reached
out for the cheap little glass, and swallowed his ration like the
rest. There was wild delight among both his men and the onlookers as
the "army" set out for Laffray, the next hamlet, where was a small
detachment sent from Grenoble to destroy a bridge over the Drac. With
inscrutable faces they stood across the highway, lances set and
muskets charged, under orders to fire on Napoleon the moment he should
appear. At length the critical moment arrived. "There he is! Fire!"
cried a royalist officer. The soldiers clutched their arms, their
faces blanched, their knees shook, and they--disobeyed! Napoleon,
walking slowly, advanced within pistol-shot. He wore the old familiar
gray surtout, the well-known cocked hat, and a tricolor cockade.
"Soldiers of the Fifth," he said in a strong, calm voice, "behold me!"
Then advancing a few paces farther, he threw open his coat and
displaying the familiar uniform, he called: "If there be one soldier
among you who wishes to kill his Emperor, he can. I come to offer
myself to your assaults." In an instant the opposing ranks melted into
a mob of sobbing, cheering men, kissing Napoleon's shoes, struggling
to touch the skirts of his shabby garments. The surrounding throng
crowded near in sympathy. "Soldiers," cried the magician, "I come
with a handful of brave men because I count on you and the people. The
throne of the Bourbons is illegitimate because it was not erected by
the nation. Your fathers are threatened by a restoration of titles, of
privilege, and of feudal rights; is it not so?" "Yes, yes," shouted
the multitude. At that instant appeared a rider arrayed in the uniform
of the national guard, but wearing a huge tricolor cockade. Alighting
at Napoleon's feet, he said: "Sire, I am Jean Dumoulin the
glove-maker; I bring to your majesty a hundred thousand francs and my
arm." At that instant likewise an imperial proclamation denouncing
traitors, and promising that under the old standards victory would
return like the storm-wind, was passing from hand to hand in the
garrison of Grenoble. Labedoyere, the colonel, of the Seventh of the
line, first announced his purpose to support his Emperor, and the
royalist officers saw the imperialist feeling spread with dismay. They
arranged to evacuate the place next morning. At seven in the evening
Napoleon summoned the town; the commandant, unable to resist the
pressure of both soldiers and populace, fled with a few adherents, and
at ten the gates were opened. The reception of the returning exile was
hearty and impressive. It was with an army of seven thousand men that,
after a rest of thirty-six hours, he started for Lyons.
"As far as Grenoble I was an adventurer; at Grenoble I was a prince,"
wrote Napoleon at St. Helena. If this were true, at Lyons he was an
Emperor in fact as well as in name, that great city receiving him with
plaudits as energetic as were the execrations with which they
dismissed Artois and Macdonald. Recalling the lessons of his youth,
some learned in Corsica, some in the Rhone valley, the returning
Emperor carefully felt the pulse of public opinion as he journeyed. He
found the longing for peace to be universal, and even before entering
Lyons he began to promise peace with honor. But this he quickly found
was not enough: it must be peace with liberty as well. The sole task
before him, therefore, he declared to be that of protecting the
interests and principles of the Revolution against the returning
emigrants. France, restored to her glory, was to live in harmony with
other European powers as long as they minded their own affairs.
Napoleon, the liberator of France! To terrify foreign invaders and
intestine foes a great united nation was to speak in trumpet notes.
From Lyons, therefore, second city of the Empire, was summoned a
popular assembly to revise the constitution. To convey the impression
that Austria was in secret accord with the Emperor's course, three
delegates from the eastern capital were summoned to assist at a
significant ceremony which was to occur almost immediately, the
coronation of the Empress and the King of Rome. Still further, a
decree was issued which banished the returned emigrants and swept away
the pretensions of the arrogant nobles. Talleyrand, Marmont, Augereau,
and Dalberg were attainted, and the noble guard of the King was
abolished. Under these influences Bonapartist feeling grew so intense
and spread so widely that the army of Soult, which had been assembled
in the southeast to oppose Murat, turned imperialist almost to a man.
Massena, who seems to have followed the lead of Fouche, waited to see
what was coming, and remained neutral. Ney fell in with the general
movement, and joined Napoleon at Auxerre. "Embrace me, my dear
general," were the Emperor's words of greeting. "I am glad to see you;
and I want neither explanations nor justifications."
All resistance disappeared before Napoleon's advance as he passed
Autun and descended the Yonne valley toward Paris. Everywhere there
were dissensions among the populace, but the enthusiasm of the
soldiers and their sympathizers triumphed. The troops despatched by
the King's government to overpower the "usurper" sooner or later went
over to the "usurper's" standards. One morning a placard was found on
the railing around the Vendome column: "Napoleon to Louis XVIII. My
good brother, it is useless to send me any more troops; I have
enough." Paris was in a storm of suppressed excitement. The measures
of resistance were half-hearted; the King made lavish concessions and
the chambers passed excellent laws without attracting any attention or
sympathy; volunteers were raised, but there was no energy in their
organization. When Napoleon reached Fontainebleau on the eighteenth,
the reserves stationed in and near Paris on the south came over to him
in a body. On the nineteenth Louis issued a despairing address to the
army, and fled to Lille; on the morning of the twentieth the capital
found itself without any vestige of government. The streets were
thronged with people, but there was no disorder until a band of
royalists attacked a half-pay officer wearing the imperial cockade. At
once the city guard formed and intervened to quell the disturbance.
Thereupon the imperialists endeavored to seize the Tuileries; they,
too, were checked, and a double force, royalist and imperial, was set
to defend that important spot. Over other public buildings the
imperial colors waved alone and undisturbed. During the afternoon the
crowds dispersed and the imperial officials quietly resumed their
places. At nine in the evening a post-chaise rolled up to the
Tuileries gate, Napoleon alighted, and the observers thought his smile
was like that of one walking in a dream. At once he was caught in the
brawny arms of his admirers, and handed upward from step to step, from
landing to landing. So fierce was the affection of his friends that
his life seemed to be in danger from their embraces, and it was with
relief that he entered his cabinet and closed the door, to find
himself among a few of his old stanch and tried servants, with
Caulaincourt at their head. This reception had been in sharp contrast
to the apathy displayed on the streets, where the people were few in
number, unenthusiastic, and indifferent. "They let me come," said
Napoleon to Mollien, "as they let the other go." Finding himself
unable to endure the loneliness of the Tuileries, and depressed by the
associations of the familiar scenes, he withdrew in a few days to the
comparative seclusion of the Elysee, then a suburban mansion dubbed by
courtesy a palace.
Some portion of Napoleon's leisure in Elba had been devoted, as was
mentioned in another connection, to sketching the outline of a
treatise intended to prove that his dynasty was quite as legitimate as
any other which had ruled over France. His illusions of European
empire were dismissed either permanently or temporarily, and for the
moment he was the apostle of nationality and popular sovereignty in
France. Before laying his head on his pillow in the Tuileries he
displayed this fact to the world in the constitution of his cabinet,
which would in our day be designated as a cabinet of concentration,
representative of various shades of opinion. Maret, Davout,
Cambaceres, Gaudin, Mollien, Decres, Caulaincourt, Fouche, and Carnot
accepted the various portfolios; most surprising of all, Benjamin
Constant, the constitutional republican, became president of a
reconstructed council of state. In connection with the announcement of
these names, the nation was informed that the constitution was to be
revised, and that the censorship of the press was abolished. In
reference to the latter, Napoleon remarked that, since everything
possible had been said about him during the past year, he could
himself be no worse off than he was, but the editors could still find
much to say about his enemies. To Constant he frankly explained what
he meant by revision. The common people had welcomed his return
because he was one of themselves, and at a signal he could have the
nobles murdered. But he wanted no peasants' war, and, as the taste had
returned for unrestricted discussion, public trials, emancipated
elections, responsible ministers, and all the paraphernalia of
constitutional government, the public must be gratified. For all this
he was ready, and with it for peace. But peace he could win only by
victory, for, although in his conduct, in the Lyons decrees, and in
casual talk, he hinted at negotiations with foreign powers, those
negotiations were purely imaginary.
With a clear comprehension of the situation, the ministers went to
work. On April twenty-third was promulgated the Additional Act,
whereby the franchise was extended, the state church abolished,
liberty of worship guaranteed, and every wretched remnant of privilege
or divine right expunged. The two chambers were retained, many
imperial dignitaries being assigned to the House of Peers, the
Bonaparte brothers, Lucien, Joseph, and Jerome, among the number. It
was, as Chateaubriand sarcastically said, a revised and improved
edition of Louis's constitution. The preamble, however, was new; it
set forth that Napoleon, having been long engaged in constructing a
great European federal system suited to the spirit of the time and
favorable to the spirit of civilization, had now abandoned it, and
would henceforth devote himself to a single aim, the perfect security
of public liberty. This specious representation, half true and half
false, awakened no enthusiasm in France; it was accepted, along with
the Additional Act, by a plebiscite, but by only a million three
hundred thousand votes--less than half the number cast for the
Consulate and the Empire. This was largely due to a curious apathy,
induced by a still more curious but firm conviction that at last
France had secured peace with honor. Reference has been made to a
military conspiracy fomented by Fouche in the North; before the
hostile public feeling thus engendered in that quarter Louis fled to
Ghent within five days after Napoleon reached Paris, and, though the
royal princes were able to carry on civil war in the South a little
longer, it was generally felt that the nation now had a ruler of its
own choosing, and that if they attended strictly to their own affairs
they would be left in peace. For considerable time there was little
news from abroad, and so swift was the rush of internal affairs that
no heed was given to what there was.
This was suddenly changed in April, when it was brought home to the
nation that the specter of war had again been raised, and that the
dynasties were finally a unit in their determination to extirpate the
Napoleonic regime as a measure of self-defense. Every man with any
means saw himself beggared, and every mother felt her son slipping
from her arms to swim once more that sea of blood in which for a
generation the hope of the nation had been submerged. The depression
was general and terrible, for the prospect was appalling. England,
entangled with dynastic alliances in order to preserve her prosperity
and dignity, had lost most of her serious and trusted leaders, and the
few who survived were so panic-stricken as to have little
perspicacity. The King's illness having at last removed him from
public life, he had been succeeded by the most profligate and
frivolous of all the line of English kings, the Prince Regent, who was
later George IV. Percival and Liverpool were not merely conservative
from principle; they were negative from the love of negatives. Already
they had laid the basis, in their mismanagement of domestic affairs,
for the social turbulence which within a short time was to compel the
most sweeping reforms. Castlereagh had not even an inkling of what the
treaty of Chaumont might mean to Great Britain in the end. To destroy
Napoleon he was perfectly content that his own free country should
support a system of dynastic politics destructive of every principle
of liberty.
The Congress of Vienna represented, not a confederation of states, but
a league of dynasties posing as nations and banded for mutual
self-preservation. To them the permanent restoration of Napoleon could
mean only one thing, the recognition of a nation's right to choose its
own rulers, and that would be the end of absolutism in Europe. To
Great Britain it would mean the destruction of her prosperity, or at
least a serious diminution of both power and prestige. The late
coalition, therefore, was re-cemented without difficulty, but on a
basis entirely new. The account of Napoleon's escape reached Vienna on
March sixth. Within the week Maria Louisa, now entirely under
Neipperg's influence, wrote declaring herself a stranger to all
Napoleon's schemes, and a few days later the French attendants of the
little King of Rome were dismissed; the child's last words to Meneval
were a message of affection to his father.[17] At that time
negotiations among the powers were progressing famously, each having
secured its main object; on March thirteenth the Congress, under
Castlereagh's instigation, publicly denounced Napoleon as the "enemy
and disturber of the world's peace," and proclaimed him an outlaw. The
Whigs stigmatized the paper in parliament as provocative of
assassination and a disgrace to the English character, but, of all
the important journals, the "Morning Chronicle" alone was courageous
enough to sustain them, asserting that it was a matter of complete
indifference to England whether a Bourbon or a Bonaparte reigned in
France. These manly protests were unheeded, and by the twenty-fifth
all Europe, except Naples, was united against France alone.
[Footnote 17: See Welschinger: Le roi de Rome, ch. vii.]