Citizen Emperor (111 page)

Even then the scheme could have been uncovered if Captain Adye of the British brig the
Partridge
had been a little more observant. He arrived in Portoferraio during the night of 23 February, and weighed anchor not far from the
Inconstant
. Napoleon had ordered his ship to be painted like a British brig to help avoid detection once in open waters. If Captain Adye had seen this, it would naturally have aroused suspicion. Napoleon, therefore, ordered the ship to set sail. The next day, Adye came ashore with half a dozen English tourists, made sure that Napoleon was still on the island and sailed away later that afternoon, oblivious to what was going on around him.

Not all agreed with Napoleon’s decision. When the Emperor told Drouot on 25 February that he was leaving – ‘the whole of France regrets me and wants me back’ – Drouot was ‘struck with astonishment’. He nevertheless went along with the plans because, as he later stated at his court martial after Waterloo, he had sworn an oath of loyalty to Napoleon.
¹¹⁹
That evening, Napoleon let his mother and sister, as well as his servants, in on the secret without however telling them where he was headed. His mother was troubled by the news, but was quickly reassured by her son.
¹²⁰
The rest of the time he spent drafting proclamations to the French people. He left the Villa Mulini around seven or eight o’clock that night. Crowds gathered around his carriage, accompanying him to the same port where he had disembarked ten months previously.
¹²¹
Everyone, it seemed, had turned out to see him go. When he finally reached the port, and he turned to address the crowd, there was a prolonged ‘Shhh!’ A few words were spoken, no doubt from the heart, before he embarked on a boat that was also followed by an array of vessels, some rented by the town’s gentry so that they could approach the imperial brig.
¹²²
On board the
Inconstant
, Napoleon is supposed to have said, ‘The die is cast.’
¹²³
Indeed, he was like a gambler who had lost everything but his shirt, but who had to have one last throw of the dice. It is what the French call the
maladie du pouvoir
. It is as though Napoleon undertook the journey just to show by his very presence that it was easy to overthrow the old Europe. ‘There is no precedent in history for what I am about to do,’ Napoleon told Colonel Mallet of the Guard, ‘but I can count on popular astonishment, the state of public opinion, the resentment against the Allies, the affection of my soldiers, and the attachment to the Empire which lingers everywhere in France.’
¹²⁴

The departure was a bit of an anti-climax. Despite a good wind blowing all day, it had completely died down by evening, so that the convoy lay motionless in the harbour. The only way to get them out to sea within reach of a possible breeze was to row the ships out. It was midnight before they cleared the lighthouse and when dawn broke the next day they were still only about ten kilometres from the island.
¹²⁵
At one point, as the
Inconstant
approached the island of Capraia, lookouts could see the French royalist frigate the
Melpomène
and the
Partridge
returning from Leghorn.

If Napoleon saw the
Partridge
, the
Partridge
did not see Napoleon. Incredibly, Captain Adye mistook the
Inconstant
for another French brig, the
Zéphir
, a ship that they expected to see in these waters, and so did not pursue it. Besides, Adye and Campbell both expected Napoleon to head for Naples (where he could join Murat) if he ever attempted an escape, not for France. As for the French frigates patrolling the waters, they seemed little interested in what was going on. There was a belief that Captain Collet, commanding the
Melpomène
, would either ignore or even help Napoleon if he ran into trouble, and since he too must have seen the
Inconstant
this appears to have been what happened. As for the
Zéphir
, it actually came so close to the
Inconstant
that the two captains had a shouted conversation. Here too one must presume that, unless Captain Andrieux was completely blind, he must have seen that the
Inconstant
was heavily laden, crowded with men, with other similarly packed ships following. One can only conclude that Andrieux had thus made himself complicit in Napoleon’s escape; he was promoted after Napoleon’s return to Paris. When the
Partridge
finally got to Elba and Campbell had figured out that Napoleon was heading for France, he lost time searching the islands of Capraia and Gorgona.

It was commonly believed in the south of France and in Piedmont that the English had favoured if not facilitated Napoleon’s return, all the better to destroy him.
¹²⁶
The rumour may have been put around by Napoleon himself in order to create discord among the allies. In fact, he had not been under guard – he had, after all, been granted sovereignty over Elba – and no orders had been issued to the fleet in the Mediterranean to patrol the waters around Elba. Even the English commissioner, Campbell, who initially intended staying on the island, was miffed about Napoleon’s behaviour towards him and so spent much of his time in Italy, enjoying the delights and the company of a young lady he had met, and only deigned to visit the island occasionally. The longer Napoleon was on the island, the more bored Campbell became and the more he disliked the Emperor. Consequently he underestimated him: he did not believe Napoleon to be a man of extraordinary abilities. Quite the contrary, he believed Napoleon’s talents were no greater than those demanded of a sub-prefect.
¹²⁷

If Napoleon was well informed about what was going on in France, Louis XVIII also had his spies on Elba.
¹²⁸
It should have been obvious to him that Napoleon would not have been able to stay long on the island in relative inactivity. The last police report on Napoleon, made on 3 December 1814, suggested just that.
¹²⁹
Indeed, there was no concerted policy towards Napoleon on the part of the allied powers; he had more or less been relegated to the margins of great-power politics as more important issues came to the fore. Although agents, prefects and spies were constantly remarking in reports that they simply did not believe Napoleon would stay on Elba, that his show of resignation was a façade and that he would attempt to return to France, they were all dismissed or ignored. The minister of police, Jacques-Claude Beugnot, sarcastically wrote to Louis XVIII, ‘As if one could land in France with seven or eight hundred men . . . !’
¹³⁰
They were about to get a surprise.

THE SECOND COMING, 1815

25

The Saviour Returns

‘A Criminal and Impotent Delirium’

At daybreak on the morning of 1 March 1815, a small flotilla of ships came within sight of the French coast. The sky was clear, the sea calm, and a gentle breeze filled the sails. In a few hours they would be on ‘sacred soil’. At one point, Napoleon took off the Elban cockade from his hat and replaced it with the tricolour. It took only a moment to accomplish but the reaction was spontaneous, emotional and loud: cheers, clapping, shouting and stamping of feet on the deck.
¹
Between one and two o’clock in the afternoon, the anchors were lowered at Golfe Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, where the inhabitants would have been surprised to see the arrival of so many ships in a place that would ordinarily be quiet. The event could not but excite a certain amount of interest among the locals, so Drouot came up with the idea of circulating a rumour that the soldiers being brought ashore were either sick or on leave.
²
The Emperor went ashore around five that evening, helped by his Guard who held up a gangway so that he could walk from the boat without getting his feet wet. He was the ghost of his younger self. Now forty-five years old, he was corpulent, his complexion was dull and pallid, and he walked with a stiff gait.
³
Contemporaries who were to meet him over the next few months were less than impressed with the physique that stood before them. Everyone agreed that he had become ‘very fat and browned’.
⁴

At first, just a few troops were brought ashore. Captain Antoine Jean-Baptiste Lamouret, in charge of about twenty men, was supposed to take possession of a little coastal fort, but finding that it had been demolished decided to make his way to Antibes, about five kilometres away on another bay. The officer in charge of the local regiment, Major Jean-Léopold-Honoré Dauger, outwitted Lamouret and had him and his men arrested.
⁵
Napoleon left them there, although he dispatched General Pierre Jacques Etienne Cambronne of the Guard to make sure that no mail made it out of Antibes; it would not do for the rest of the country to learn that Napoleon had arrived and had suffered a setback almost immediately. During the night, he set up camp in an olive grove, in what is today the rue du Bivouac-Napoléon, near the church Notre Dame du Bon Voyage. A cordon of grenadiers was set up around him to keep the curious away. The first objective was to arrive in Paris without inciting a civil war, or without being accused of lighting its fires. To do that Napoleon had to prevent any guns being fired. He made sure his officers knew this, telling Cambronne that he should ride ahead, and that he was forbidden to ‘fire a single shot. I do not want to shed one drop of French blood in the recovery of my crown.’
⁶

Never one to miss an opportunity to leave his mark on history, Napoleon issued a proclamation, prepared in advance. In fact, there were three proclamations. The first was to the French people in which he declared that the Bourbon government was illegitimate, and that he had been betrayed before Paris (by Marmont). ‘Your complaints and your desires have reached me in my exile,’ he added. ‘I have crossed the seas amid all sorts of perils, and I am here to resume my rights, which are also your own.’
⁷
The second was addressed to the army, to whom he said, ‘We were not defeated.’ It was another way of saying he had been betrayed, and many in the army believed it. He implored the troops to rally around him to liberate France, so that one day they could look back on this event and declare that they too had been part of the army that had delivered Paris.
⁸
The third proclamation was dictated to the Imperial Guard who accompanied him. Those who could made handwritten copies – there was no printing press available – inciting fellow soldiers to ‘trample the white cockade, the badge of shame!’
⁹
These first proclamations mention neither liberty nor a constitution. Instead, Napoleon promised the troops glory and riches, and the people that their enemies would be expelled.
¹⁰

This was a poor attempt to mirror his return from Egypt fifteen years earlier, and to hide his real motives. Napoleon’s intense feelings of bitterness at having lost power in the first place come through. He was attempting to present the invasion as a return to power at the behest of the French people. We know, of course, that this was not the case, and that as far as Grenoble at least (see below) there was little popular reaction to his return. Napoleon left Elba not to save France, but to save himself from oblivion. In his declarations to the people of France it was important to present a new face. He adopted the posture of the protector of the poor. He was now a soldier of the Revolution come to liberate France from those who wanted to re-establish old privileges, and he claimed that the Austrians knew in advance and approved of his venture.
¹¹
Interesting, too, is the transformation of his political message as he got nearer to Paris.
¹²
Napoleon portrayed himself as the reluctant hero who had heard the plaints of his people and now responded by reclaiming the legitimate government.
¹³
In an article in the
Moniteur
of 23 March, only two days after he had reached Paris, we can read how Napoleon was called to resume his throne at the wishes of the people. The phrase ‘le peuple’ appears to have replaced the word ‘legitimate’, as though the people were the foundations on which his legitimacy were built.
¹⁴