Citizen Emperor (118 page)

After the battle, Wellington immediately dispatched Major Henry Percy to London with some of the captured French flags and a letter – the now famous Waterloo Dispatch – announcing his victory. This gesture, this act, rewrote the history of the battle by forgetting to mention the role of the Prussians in the victory and by enhancing the Duke’s own. It was the start of a romanticized account of the battle that would find its way on to the page of many a British poet and the canvas of many a British painter. When the letter reached London on evening of 21 June, it came as a shock; everybody had expected the renewed war to be protracted, so that news of victory produced a genuine sense of exhilaration among the people.
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Shortly after the battle, Walter Scott hurried to visit the field on which Napoleon had been defeated.
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He was one among thousands of British tourists who now flocked to the Continent, many stopping to see the battlefield on their way to Paris.
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The excursion to Waterloo was to remain a popular tourist site well into the 1820s and 1830s, and may have attracted up to 5,000 visitors each year.
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Veterans also made the journey as a sort of pilgrimage. Tourists and veterans were not the only people; enterprising businessmen visited too, not for the relics they might be able to take home, and not out of a sense of history, but for the bones left lying on the ground. In November 1822, the London
Observer
ran a piece estimating that, over the previous year, more than a million bushels (about 36,000 cubic metres) of both human and animal bone had been collected from every battlefield in Europe and shipped back to the port of Hull. From there they were sent to factories in Yorkshire where the bones were ground down and sold as fertilizer.
⁷⁷

‘I Have Received a Mortal Blow’

Napoleon reached Philippeville, a fortified town eighty kilometres south of Brussels, on the morning of 19 June. He stopped long enough to take a room at the Hôtel du Lion d’Or, where he wrote two letters. One was to the Chamber of Representatives, giving a misleading account of the battle and its outcome.
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The other was to Joseph, almost as misleading, but optimistically, unrealistically defiant.
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He began it with an ominous ‘All is not lost,’ and went on to calculate that he could muster up to 400,000 troops to continue the fight. ‘The British’, he wrote, ‘are making slow headway. The Prussians are afraid of the peasantry and dare not advance too far.’ Joseph received this letter in the afternoon of 20 June. He read it out to a hastily assembled gathering of ministers, but asked them to keep the news secret for the time being.

Napoleon’s letter was part wishful thinking, part propaganda, a desire to hide the truth from the French people. The journey to Paris was not much more than a day’s ride, but once there, and faced with the political reality, there was no further question of Napoleon’s rejoining the army. Rumours of the defeat followed the army in retreat so that between 19 and 20 June it became general knowledge in Paris.
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Crowds gathered outside the Chamber of Representatives at the Palais Bourbon trying to pick up news. It is where Emile Labretonnière, a pupil at the Imperial Lycée (today the Lycée Louis-le-Grand), heard of the defeat on 21 June. It is difficult if not impossible to know just what the French people, supporters or otherwise of the regime, thought. There is little in the press of the day and even less in the archives. Official confirmation more or less came with an account of the battle published in the
Moniteur universel
, which admitted defeat after a fanciful report of what had happened that involved a fictional Middle Guard (
moyenne garde
).
⁸¹

It took Napoleon three days to reach Paris from Waterloo. He arrived, exhausted, on 21 June between six and eight o’clock in the morning. Caulaincourt was there to greet him at the Elysée with the words, ‘It would have been preferable for you not to have left the army. The army is your force, your security.’
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Napoleon reportedly replied, ‘The blow I have received is mortal.’ He then babbled about calling a special meeting of both Chambers to ask them to give him the power, that is, another army, to ‘save the country’. Caulaincourt confronted Napoleon with the reality, telling him that ‘deputies seem more hostile to you than ever before . . . the Chamber [of Representatives] will not respond as you hope’. The Comte de Lavalette confirmed that the majority of the Chamber was inclined to demand his abdication. Napoleon’s response is said to have been an epileptic laugh that worried those present.

Napoleon met with his ministers as he was taking his bath, receiving his treasurer, Peyrusse, and Davout, minister of war. Peyrusse entered service in 1805 as an employee of the treasury, and had followed Napoleon to Elba. He was devoted to the Emperor but now had to tell him that there was nothing in the treasury, while Davout admitted that few troops were at his disposal. He was possibly playing down the number of effectives available, estimated since then at between 50,000 and 120,000 men, but it might have been a reflection of the poor state of morale, not only among many of the troops but also among their commanders.
⁸³

During the morning, Napoleon appears to have recovered somewhat from the peripety and started talking about martial law, a temporary dictatorship, moving the government to Tours and fighting it out under the walls of Paris. The ministers, as well as Lucien and Joseph, listened to this ramble with lowered eyes in an embarrassed silence.
⁸⁴
He then asked for their opinions. The old revolutionary Lazare Carnot, who feared above all another Restoration, fell back on what had once worked but now would no longer, urging Napoleon to declare the
patrie
in danger, just as he had done in 1793.
⁸⁵
If Paris fell, the army would take up positions behind the Loire. Davout initially thought in terms of a military dictatorship – Brumaire
bis
– and thought that the Chambers should be dissolved (although he later argued against the use of brute force, when he realized that the moment to act had passed).
⁸⁶
Caulaincourt (along with Cambacérès and Maret) believed on the contrary that the loyalty of the Chambers was paramount; otherwise the occupation of the capital and the end of the Empire would invariably follow. Michel Regnaud de Saint-Jean d’Angély, who had been with Napoleon in one capacity or another since the first Italian campaign, spoke frankly, declaring that the Chambers wanted Napoleon’s abdication and that if he did not offer it, they would demand it.
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Napoleon was stunned by this admission, but received support for a military dictatorship from both Carnot and Lucien, who declared that if the Chambers were not inclined to join the Emperor, then he would have to save France by himself. At that point, Napoleon went on to describe how he would defend the north from invasion. It was entirely unrealistic. After the meeting had finished, Napoleon kept Carnot and Regnault behind and dictated a message to the deputies. In essence, it said that he had been on the verge of winning a great victory at Waterloo when ‘a panic was caused by mischief-makers’, but that he was going to take the necessary measures to ensure public safety.
⁸⁸
The defeat had become a setback.

This kind of message, made of half-truths and exaggerations, might have worked in the past, but no longer. The deputies had already spoken to officers who had taken part in the battle and who had described it as a catastrophe. Besides, it was too late. An hour or so earlier the deputies, fearful that Napoleon was on the verge of carrying out another coup, had acted. Lafayette proposed declaring the Chamber of Representatives in permanent session and adding that any attempt to dissolve it should be considered high treason. While Lafayette may not exactly have ‘saved’ France, as he later pompously declared in his memoirs,
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he certainly left Napoleon with far fewer options. The Chamber greeted these suggestions with loud cheering and applause; its members were in fighting mood and had already been considering the idea of Napoleon’s dismissal, an idea put about by Fouché and his supporters. The proposal was adopted unanimously. Not only did Napoleon thus lose control of the Chamber, but if he refused to obey it, the deputies threatened, they would declare him an outlaw.
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A short time later, they summoned Napoleon’s ministers to the Chamber to answer their questions. By four o’clock that afternoon, the Elysée was surrounded by elements of the National Guard.
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Napoleon was effectively a prisoner in his own capital.

Napoleon’s rage over this development soon gave way to hesitation and resignation. It was all well and good to declare that he should have dissolved the Chamber of Representatives before leaving on campaign, but it was too late now. This was not Brumaire; there was no military solution to this problem. Faced with the lack of political support, Napoleon abandoned the fight. Rather than act boldly and decisively he dithered, letting the power he had taken on his return from Elba fall from his grasp. He did not challenge the Chamber, nor attempt to overthrow it, but tried to negotiate a political outcome, not for the country, but for himself.

‘I Want Nothing for Myself’

About five o’clock that evening, Napoleon decided to go for a walk in the grounds of the Elysée Palace with Lucien, amid the echoes of the cries of a pro-Bonapartist crowd at the gates of the palace, possibly as many as 6,000, demanding weapons.
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Lucien used this demonstration of loyalty to persuade Napoleon that he should take the law into his own hands and act.
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It was Napoleon who rejected the idea. ‘I will attempt everything for France. I want nothing for myself.’ At this, Lucien’s eyes filled with tears and he literally fell on his knees, ‘admiring from the bottom of my heart this father of the
patrie
’. Lucien on his knees before his brother would have been a sight to see, but his account is poppycock, an attempt to create many years after the event the myth of Napoleon’s self-sacrificing nature. In reality, Lucien came away from the meeting fuming. ‘He is hesitating, he is temporizing,’ he complained to a small group of men who included Carnot, Fouché, Caulaincourt and Davout. ‘The smoke of Mont Saint-Jean [Waterloo] has gone to his head. He is a lost man.’
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He was indeed. Lucien was sent off that evening to the Chamber of Representatives to talk about ‘the interests of France’, to try to come to terms with them, in part by making menacing noises about a repetition of Brumaire. He entered the Chamber wearing the uniform of the National Guard. It shocked the deputies and seemed to confirm rumours that a coup was imminent.
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Lucien was, in short, a terrible choice, and his intervention was to little effect.
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Egged on by Fouché, the deputies openly discussed the possibility of Napoleon’s abdication.
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They did not yet, however, demand it – the motion was set aside – either because they remained wary of Napoleon
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or because they were afraid of the army’s reaction. Instead, they appointed a commission to
invite
Napoleon to abdicate.
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If he refused, the Chamber would pronounce his deposition.

Later that evening, back at the Elysée, the Bonaparte family, or at least those who were in Paris, started to come together to consult about Napoleon’s future. Hortense was the first to arrive, followed by Letizia; Joseph and Lucien joined them in the garden, along with Caulaincourt and Maret. Hortense had already urged Napoleon to write to Alexander or Francis to demand they offer him asylum.
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He refused; he still felt resentful towards Francis for keeping him from his wife and child, and Alexander, he argued, was but a man. He would rather appeal to a people, like the English. Once more, Lucien tried to persuade Napoleon to dissolve the Chamber of Representatives, and insisted that within twenty-four hours its authority must be ended.
¹⁰¹
Maret and Caulaincourt argued, on the contrary, that he should accede to its demands or risk being deposed; he would lose any chance of his son succeeding him.

Lucien and Joseph left the Elysée around eleven o’clock to attend a meeting of the commission appointed by the Chamber of Representatives at the Tuileries, presided over by Cambacérès.
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They did not return until the first light of day; the commission decided that it would negotiate with the enemy, and that the ministers would attempt to obtain Napoleon’s abdication. Later, on St Helena, Napoleon portrayed himself as standing alone that night against the world.
¹⁰³
Two courses were left open to him: to try to save the country (never mind that he was the cause of the dilemma it now faced); or to abdicate, what he referred to as surrendering to the ‘general pressure’. All were against him; he was alone; he had to give in. Napoleon thus depicted himself as a tragic figure, betrayed by all those around him, and nobly sacrificing himself after Waterloo for the good of the nation. That kind of self-serving rhetoric is to be expected of a man who had risked all on the throw of a dice. He could have had the most hostile members of the Chamber arrested that night, but he did not, arguing that he had no troops he could rely on. For his enemies and supporters alike, it simply demonstrated his irresolution, a defeatist attitude born of the realization that the powers pitted against France were overwhelming.