Europe: A History (153 page)

Map 21. Revolutionary Paris

General Petit, heading the colour party, ordered the presentation of arms. The drums beat ‘Aux Champs’. Napoleon descended the staircase and plunged into the midst of the assembled troops. The Emperor’s exact words were not recorded, but General Petit was well placed to remember:

Officiers, sous-officiers, soldiers of my Old Guard! I am bidding you farewell. For twenty years, I have been pleased with you. I have found you always on the path of glory.

The Allied Powers have armed the whole of Europe against me. Part of the Army has betrayed its duties and France itself… With you and with other brave men, who have remained faithful, I could have carried on the war for another three years. But that would have made France miserable, and would be contrary to my declared aims. So, be faithful to the new sovereign which France has chosen. Do not abandon this dear
Patrie
, so long unhappy.

Do not regret my fate. I shall always be content if I know that you are content also. I could have died… But, no. I chose the honourable way. I shall write of everything that we have done.
⁴⁵

At this point General Petit raised his sword and shouted ‘Vive l’Empereur’, to a thunderous echo.

I cannot embrace you all, so I shall embrace your general.
Approchez, General Petit
…

Having enveloped the general, he then said, ‘Bring me the Eagle’. He kissed the hem of the standard three times with the words, ‘Dear Eagle, may these kisses reverberate in the heart of all the brave.’ Finally: ‘Adieu, mes enfants.’ ‘Those grizzled warriors, who many a time had watched unmoved while their own blood ran, could not hold back their tears.’
⁴⁶
Napoleon strode to the carriage, took his seat briskly, and was driven off.

The Château of Fontainebleau, 37 miles to the south-east of Paris, was Napoleon’s favourite residence. Built by Francis I round the tower of a medieval hunting-lodge, it dated from 1528 and represented one of the earliest breaths of the Renaissance in France. Surrounded by the oaks and pines of its dense forest, it offered true escape and relaxation. Less forbidding than Versailles, it was free of the shades of anyone else’s glory. Its buildings were arranged round a series of courtyards—la Cour Ovale, la Cour des Princes, la Cour de la Fontaine, la Cour des Offices, le Jardín de Diane. La Cour du Cheval Blanc, which has been known since the events of April 1814 as ‘La Cour des Adieux’, was realized under Louis XIII. The interior, which contained artistic treasures such as Rosso’s frescos in the
Galerie Francois I
^er
, was designed with a touch of splendour, but not on a gigantic scale. The decorations and fittings, mainly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had been supplemented by Napoleon’s own collection of Empire furniture. The chateau had been used as a gilded cage for Pope Pius VII, but had also seen the happiest days of Napoleon and Josephine. ‘The Forêt de Fontainebleau is my English garden’, he once said; ‘I want no other.’
⁴⁷
To leave it was no small wrench.

The Imperial Guard embodied the essence of two military terms—
corps d’élite
and
esprit de corps
. Formed in November 1798 as the Consular Guard, it was steadily expanded until it became an army within the army. In 1805 it numbered some 5,000 men from all four arms—infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers. In 1809 it was split into the Old Guard, an élite of veterans within the élite, and the Young Guard, drawing on recruits and transferees. By 1813, at its height, it possessed nearly 60 different regiments, almost 50,000 men.

The Guard accepted only the finest applicants. They had to be 1.78 m (5 ft 10 in) tall, 25 years old, literate, and had to have fought in three campaigns: They were given resplendent uniforms, generous pay, special training, and top commanders with direct access to the Emperor. They had the right to be addressed as ‘Monsieur’ by all other soldiers. Every week when possible, their
Tondu
—the ‘shorn one’—would inspect his
moustaches
and his
grognards
, his ‘invincibles’ and ‘immortals’. In due course the core of veterans, ‘the oldest of the Old’, had served 17, 20, or even 22 years. Joking with the Emperor was accepted form. One trooper once called out to ask why he had not yet received the Legion d’Honneur. ‘Why so?’ ‘Because I gave you a melon in the Egyptian desert!’ ‘A melon,
non, non
...’ ‘Yes, a melon, and eleven campaigns and seven wounds—at Areola, Lodi, Castiglioni, the Pyramids, Acre, Austerlitz, Friedland…’. Before he had finished, he was a chevalier of the Empire with a payment of 1,200 francs. The Guard included many exotic foreigners. Two of the four regiments of ‘grognards’ were Dutchmen. There were whole ‘Velite’ formations of Italians. The cavalry included a regiment of scimitar-wielding Mamelukes, the German ‘Landers de Berg’, the Tartar Horse from Lithuania, and the three regiments of Polish Lancers, the ‘truest of the true’.

For many years Napoleon had been notoriously reluctant to sacrifice his guardsmen in battle, except for lightning strikes at critical points. At Borodino he had held them back with the words: ‘I will not have the Guard destroyed 300 leagues from Paris!’ But then, in the later campaigns, as the supply of trained men dwindled amidst the floods of raw recruits, he spared them nothing. In the brilliant fighting retreat of 1814, they had marched and bled every step of the way.
⁴⁸

Napoleon had reached Fontainebleau three weeks before, still confident of defeating the allied armies. From his defensive position in Champagne, he had planned to turn in his tracks and to strike deep into the enemy’s lines of communication. But marauding Cossacks had captured one of his couriers, and had discovered his
intention of ‘drawing the enemy from Paris’.
⁴⁹
In the last week of March, therefore, he found that the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians, instead of advancing to fight him, had made a sudden concerted lunge against the weakly defended capital. The Russians advanced on Romainville. The Prussians set up batteries on Montmartre. The Austrians advanced up the Seine to Charenton. Two-hundred-thousand allied troops surrounded the capital’s defensive lines. The defenders under Marshal Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, stood their ground. The gallant Duroc, who had lost a leg in Russia, refused to surrender: ‘I’ll give up my positions when you give me back my leg.’ But the politicians had little stomach for a siege. The citizens feared to share the fate of Moscow. Talleyrand had put out feelers to the Tsar. Napoleon’s brother Joseph left the city with the Empress on the 30th.

Racing back from St Dizier in his flying barouche, Napoleon covered the 120 miles in a single day. As on his lightning sleigh ride from Moscow two years before, he was accompanied by his Foreign Minister, the loyal Caulaincourt. At 11 p.m. on the 31st, he was changing horses at the
Cour de France
inn at Juvisy-sur-Orge, only eight miles from Notre Dame, when he met a French officer and heard that Paris had capitulated. The news was premature. The Emperor set off on foot in the direction of Paris; but then, meeting more men in retreat, he saw that he was too late to intervene. He withdrew to Fontainebleau to regroup, arriving exhausted at 6 a.m. Three days later, on 3 April, Palm Sunday, he reviewed the Guard at Fontainebleau. 10,000 infantrymen and 4,600 sabres heard him say, ‘In a few days I shall march on Paris. Am I right?’ They roared in approval. ‘Á Paris! Vive l’Empereur.’

However, the reeling Emperor was soon forced to abandon all active plans. The first blow was to learn that the Imperial Senate had approved a provisional government without him, and was proposing to restore the Bourbons. Then he learned that Marmont’s corps had defected, thereby rendering further resistance almost impossible. The French language received a new verb—
raguser
, to betray. The third blow was to hear from his marshals that they advised abdication in favour of his infant son. Marshal Macdonald had told him that to draw the sword against fellow-Frenchmen was unthinkable. Marshal Ney announced: ‘The Army will not march. The Army will obey its chiefs.’
⁵⁰
The ‘bravest of the brave’ had lost the will to fight. Finally, the Emperor found that the Allies would no longer accept the terms of his first abdication, effected on 4 April. For a terrible week he writhed under the growing realization that exile alone would suffice. The
dégringoladey
the ‘disintegration’, was complete.

The bitterest cup was handed him by his wife, Marie-Louise. Ignoring his tender and courageous letters, the Empress repaid all his earlier neglect and disloyalties with interest. She responded with indecision, and then with callous disregard. The initial assumption was that she would join him either at Fontainebleau, or perhaps at some stage on their road to a shared exile. Then it was agreed that she should travel to meet her father, the Emperor Francis, to plead her husband’s cause. It emerged that she had no such intentions. She was going to Vienna, but to break with her husband for ever.

The Army had to be released from its oath of allegiance. The formula chosen by Marshal Augerau was specially wounding. ‘Soldiers,’ he declared, ‘you are released from your oaths by the abdication of a man who, after sacrificing millions of victims to his cruel ambition, did not have the courage to die the death of a soldier.’
⁵¹
The tricolour was replaced by the white cockade.

The one fixed point in all these shifting sands lay with the Imperial Guard. On the night after the first abdication, they massed in the streets of Fontainebleau, torches in hand, to cries of‘Vive l’Empereur.’ He had to order them to barracks. He also received a heart-warming letter from Count Wincenty Krasiński, the senior general of the Polish contingent. ‘The marshals are deserting. The politicians betray you … But your Poles remain …’
⁵²
But even the Polish regiments were divided. One-third of the
chevau-légers-lanciers
stayed on. But another third, mainly Frenchmen, broke up. The remaining 1,384 set off for Poland, led by the hero of Somosierra. Resplendent and perfumed on his black Arab charger, Kozietulski took leave of the emperor for the last time:

Sire, We lay at Your Imperial Majesty’s feet the arms which no man could take from us by force … We have served as Poles the most amazing man of the century… Accept, Sire, the homage of our eternal loyalty… to an unfortunate prince.
⁵³

The politicking in Paris was led by Talleyrand, Chairman of the Senate, who emerged as the President of the Provisional Government. Talleyrand was behind the anonymous signals that had urged the Allied armies to attack; and he was now entertaining the Tsar in his own house. Royalist
émigrés
were streaming back, and the stock of the Bourbons was rising daily. The Comte de Provence (Louis XVIII), now 59 years old, was returning home. He had spent twenty-three years in exile, at Coblenz, Verona, Blankenberg, Calmar, Mittau in Courland, Warsaw, and the last five years in England. He was packing his bags at Hartwell in Buckinghamshire in the same week that Napoleon was packing at Fontainebleau. He was determined to underline his hereditary right by rejecting a constitution prepared by the Senate, but also to grant a liberal constitutional charter of his own making. Dubbed punningly
Louis des Huîtres
, ‘the oyster-eater’, from his gourmet reputation, he was a man of conciliation who had no intention of replacing the entire imperial establishment. Napoleon’s marshals and ministers awaited the restoration with equanimity. The Russians were camped in the Champs Elysées. The Emperor Francis was at Rambouillet, Frederick-William of Prussia at The Tuileries. The Parisians went out to see the exotic sights—veteran Prussian grenadiers in pigtails, colourful Croats and Hungarians, Circassians in chain-mail, mounted Bashkir bowmen.

As France wrestled with its ex-Emperor, the rest of Europe adjusted to the consequences of his fall. News in 1814 travelled slowly. Neither Wellington nor Soult were aware that Napoleon had already abdicated when they fought the last battle of the Peninsular campaign near Toulouse on 10 April. The imperial garrison on Corfu did not know about it until a British frigate called on them to surrender in June. Elsewhere, the main pieces of the Napoleonic Empire had already fallen
apart. In the East, the Duchy of Warsaw had been occupied by the Russians for over a year. The Prussian and Austrian monarchies were resurgent. The Confederation of the Rhine had dissolved. In Switzerland, the old constitution had been revived. In Spain, Ferdinand VII had just been restored. In the Netherlands, William of Orange had just returned. In Scandinavia, Norway had just rebelled against its transfer from Denmark to Sweden. In Italy, the Napoleonic states had been overrun by the Austrians. Pope Pius was on his way back to Rome, where he would revive the Index and the Inquisition.

Britain, immune from the Continental fighting, was basking in the glow of the victorious Regency. Nash was rebuilding the Brighton Pavilion in fantastic pseudo-oriental style. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, said of Napoleon, ‘He will soon be forgotten.’ Sir Walter Scott published the first of the Waverley novels. George Stephenson was perfecting the first effective steam locomotive at Killingworth Colliery near Newcastle. The English language later received from Mrs Margaret Sanger the term ‘birth control’. The Marylebone Cricket Club opened its first season at Lord’s. Popular discontent from the post-war recession was brewing. The war with the United States had died down, but had not yet been terminated.

In the arts, 1814 was a year when the Classical still vied with the rising Romantic. This was the year of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
Phantasiestücke
, his fantastic ‘Tales’. In painting, Goya, Ingres, and Turner were all active. In music, the young Schubert wrote
The Erlking
, Beethoven completed his only opera,
Fidelio
. J. G. Fichte died; Mikhail Lermontov was born.

France’s political crisis came to a head during Holy Week. Allied Commissioners arrived at Fontainebleau on 6 April to administer the revised act of abdication, which Napoleon duly signed.