Citizen Emperor (110 page)

Of course, this also suited Napoleon, up to a point. Ever willing to play the victim, he made political mileage out of Louis’ niggardly behaviour. The more he could point to his own precarious situation, the more people, or so at least he thought, would be inclined to pity him and despise the Bourbons. But the lack of money put him in a difficult situation on several levels. His treasurer, Baron Guillaume Joseph Peyrusse, rescued about 2.5 million francs in gold, and he managed to get another 900,000 out of Marie-Louise, but that appears to have been the extent of Napoleon’s personal fortune.
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If Louis flouted the clauses of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, despite protests from the allies, and let him live in relative poverty, then there was little to stop the king from violating other treaty stipulations, and possibly treating Napoleon as a kind of outlaw.
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That possibility became even more real after 18 December 1814 when Louis decided to confiscate Napoleon’s personal property in France, depriving him of another source of income.

By the beginning of November, it was apparent to Neil Campbell that Napoleon’s ‘pecuniary difficulties press[ed] upon him’, and that if they did so much longer, ‘so as to prevent his vanity from being satisfied by the ridiculous establishment of a Court which he has hitherto supported in Elba, and if his doubts are not removed, I think he is capable of crossing over to Piombino with his troops, or of any other eccentricity’.
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Campbell sent another warning in December along the same lines.
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By that time too, reports were coming in from the spy that had been placed on Elba by the Chevalier Mariotti (on Talleyrand’s payroll). The spy, known mysteriously as the Oil Merchant, was probably Alessandro Forli, an Italian from Lucca who had formerly been a soldier in the Army of Italy. He was now selling olive oil to the imperial household, gathering information in the process, writing reports back to Mariotti which were, on the whole, models of reserve. By the middle of December 1814, Forli was also writing that Napoleon was seriously considering returning to France.
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The withholding of Napoleon’s pension and the confiscation of his property in France were minor irritations. The rumours flying around about how the allies wanted to assassinate Napoleon, or remove him from Elba, were more concerning.
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A certain Comte de Chauvigny de Blot wrote to Louis’ brother and heir presumptive, the Comte d’Artois, from Toulon in June 1814 offering to have Napoleon assassinated by Corsican officers on the island.
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It is impossible to know with any certainty how serious were these assassination threats, but the rumours certainly threw the Bonaparte household into a flap.
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In early September, Napoleon was described as ‘very uneasy, very agitated not daring to sleep in the same room for two nights running’.
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He apparently became so concerned that from the end of 1814, guests were no longer invited to table, and on the rare occasions he left his lodgings, he only went about with an armed escort.
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As a consequence, the security measures surrounding Napoleon were reinforced. Around 700 Imperial Guard, allowed Napoleon by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, had left Fontainebleau six days before the Emperor (although they did not arrive on the island until 26 May). This was enough for his personal security, but not enough to fend off a sustained attack from the mainland. There had indeed been a few half-hearted, badly organized attempts on his life, some on the part of the minister for the interior, Pierre Louis de Blacas, although to be fair to Louis XVIII he was probably unaware of his minister’s intrigues. André Pons de l’Hérault, who managed the iron mines on the island, but who became devoted to Napoleon despite the fact that he was a former Jacobin, wrote of a kind of psychosis that took over the island as rumours, assassination plots and real assassination attempts merged to become indistinguishable.
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Much more to the point, however, Napoleon feared above all that Louis would convince the British and Austrians to throw him off Elba. There were rumours floating around at the beginning of November 1814 that he was going to be sent to St Helena.
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Certainly, in Vienna in October 1814, the allies were considering the Azores, St Lucia and St Helena, ‘in all the official mouths’.
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It was Talleyrand who suggested that Napoleon could be moved to an island in the Azores.
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The Azores belonged to Portugal and were 500 leagues from land, but Castlereagh seemed to think that the British might be able to buy one of the islands and that the Portuguese would be amenable. They were not, so that by November it was more or less decided: Bonaparte was going to be sent to St Helena.
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Napoleon was aware that Talleyrand and Louis were conspiring against him, but what he did not yet know was that so too was Metternich. He had entered into a secret correspondence with Louis, through Blacas, in a bid to oust Napoleon and Murat from Italy.
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In turn, Louis, through his representative at Vienna, Talleyrand, was pushing to oust not only Murat from Naples, but Napoleon from Elba. The two objectives were linked in the mind of Talleyrand.
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Realistically, once the Congress of Vienna was concluded, Napoleon would in all probability not be allowed to stay on Elba. By this stage, the European press was openly discussing the possibility of removing him to another location.
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At most, he might be offered another place of exile, but there was no guarantee that he would not be worse off.

At one point, towards the end of December 1814, Napoleon confronted Campbell with the rumours, declaring that he would never allow himself to be removed and that he would resist with force.
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It was the last meeting between the two men. Castlereagh would have preferred to move Napoleon (and Murat) with their agreement, perhaps softening the blow with a financial and territorial sweetener, but he never really attempted to discuss or even persuade his European counterparts. The only person who took the Treaty of Fontainebleau seriously was the Tsar, and even he was beginning to lose interest in Napoleon.

Other factors played a role. The situation in France has often been portrayed as dire for the Bourbons and it is true that there were large sections of the population who did not look upon the return of the monarchy with any pleasure. It was not so much that the Bourbons were out of touch with the people – true for some in Louis XVIII’s entourage – as that the monarchy had implemented a number of measures that alienated certain elements of the French population: republicans were upset by the return of the white Bourbon flag, the military by the number of redundancies that were made, and the ‘granting of a Charter’ – the Bourbons could not bear to call it a constitution – flew in the face of more than twenty-five years of political evolution. These measures, combined with the apparent return of the influence of the Church (
demi-soldes
, soldiers on half-pay, were obliged to attend mass on Sunday to receive their money), the return of
ancien régime
etiquette at court (which was nevertheless less elaborate than that formerly used by Napoleon) and the replacement of the tricolour with the fleur de lys all made for a public relations nightmare that haunted sections of the population who believed the Bourbons were determined to overthrow the gains of the Revolution. There were, moreover, a few high-profile incidents that highlighted the regime’s reactionary character. Louis XVIII ennobled the father of Georges Cadoudal, who had been killed in the plot to assassinate Napoleon.
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Former Chouans were decorated with the Croix de Saint-Louis. Returned émigrés upset people with their behaviour, especially when they attempted to retrieve their lands through either coercion or persuasion. Within a year of Louis’ coming to power, French political temperament and attitudes towards Napoleon had dramatically changed.

But this is not what brought about Napoleon’s return or Louis’ demise. Rumours of Napoleon’s deportation from Elba were fundamental in deciding him to leave the island, probably as early as December 1814.
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The newspapers, the conversations he had with visitors and the reports he was receiving from his own spies all confirmed that the allies were resolved to move him from Elba. In Napoleon’s mind, the best defence was attack; it was better to tempt fate in France than to wait passively for the allies to remove him. Up to this point he had been under the illusion that his marriage with Marie-Louise would always play in his favour and that Austria would consequently not permit his deportation.
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It must have been the realization that Marie-Louise was never going to join him that tipped the balance.

On 5 February 1815, Napoleon sent a confidential letter to Pons de l’Hérault. The letter asked Pons to report on how to organize an expeditionary flotilla – that is, how to ship the Guard to France. Napoleon saw Pons the next day, and asked him directly, ‘Shall I listen to the wishes of the army and the nation, who hate and mistrust the Bourbons?’
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This summary of his intentions is a political statement and does not reflect in the slightest what was going on in his mind. There is some speculation that he believed his escape had to be timed with the ending of the Congress of Vienna, and that rumours of Alexander’s departure for Russia had already reached Elba.
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The rumours proved to be false, but speculation about how much better it would have been if Napoleon had indeed waited until the end of the Congress, an idea that he himself maintained later,
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so that the allies were no longer gathered together in the one place, is really a moot point. At most, it would have delayed Napoleon’s inevitable downfall by a few months. Pons was, apparently, the only person in whom Napoleon confided.
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Not even Bertrand or Drouot were yet aware of what he had in mind.

Napoleon was looking on France from without. What is clear, even if he understood what was going on with French public opinion, is that he did not take into account the international context. Nor did he take into account the veritable outpouring of hatred and venom against him now that people were able to express themselves in books, pamphlets and caricatures unleashed upon the reading public as though a dam had burst. Many of these that appeared immediately after the fall of Napoleon portray him as a tyrant and despot who had been justly overthrown;
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in others he was used as a sort of moral spectacle whose physical and moral decay was meant to edify. In Charles Malo’s
Napoléoniana
, for example, we find a collection of fictive anecdotes that are meant to point to Napoleon’s moral bankruptcy. ‘Heaven granted Buonaparte great military skill, but no personal bravery; prodigious activity, but to no end; an indomitable will, but without discernment. Not the most incredible favours of fortune, nor the most terrible lessons of misfortune, nor the advice of enlightened men who wanted to show him true glory, nor the devotion of all his warriors, nothing could soften the character of the Corsican soldier, rectify its false spirit, or raise its corrupted soul.’
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Le Néron corse
, which portrays him as a criminal, declared that the time of charlatans was over and that the people could no longer be duped.
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The overriding themes in these works are, first, that Napoleon was not French but a foreigner, and second, that he was driven by an unbounded ambition.
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The
Précis historique sur Napoléon Bonaparte
, for example, is filled with ancedotes that are meant to illustrate his lack of humanity and his excessive ambition.
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These kinds of books were enormous publishing successes, going through several editions in a short space of time. Their goal was to ‘demythify’ his political and military genius, and to set the reader on the right path.

‘The Die is Cast’

If Napoleon read any of these pamphlets, they do not appear to have weighed heavily in his decision to return. Timing was everything. Campbell was going to be away in Italy, so it was important to carry out the final preparations, which would take about ten days, during that time. It was a question of loading enough supplies for about 1,000 men, as well as getting forty horses and four cannon on board. Napoleon had at his disposal the brig
Inconstant
, a xebec called the
Etoile
and several smaller vessels – in all, seven ships. When the troops received the order to get ready to leave on the afternoon of 26 February, many guessed what their destination was to be.
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Old soldiers that they were – ‘a soldier is not made to be a mason or a gardener’ – they were delighted to be going back into action.
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The sun was setting when the Old Guard left their barracks and marched towards the port through the narrow streets, encumbered now with inhabitants who had come to see them off.