Citizen Emperor (114 page)

The ‘flight of the eagle’, as Napoleon’s return is called, is one of the foundational stories of the Napoleonic legend.
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Even the Emperor’s enemies understood that his return was a ‘superb’ gesture, a ‘grandiose spectacle’,
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admired all the more because they also realized the adventure could not possibly succeed. The passage from Grenoble to Paris has been compared to a royal entry, during which time an accord was reached between the Emperor and the people of France who greeted him along the way.
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At Gap, people prevented the prefect and the commanding general from placing the city in a state of siege.
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At Grenoble, the cartwrights of the Faubourg Saint-Joseph broke down the gate at the Porte de Bonne to let Napoleon and his men in.
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At Lyons, the silk workers tore down the barricades on the bridges across the Rhône that had been erected in order to prevent Napoleon from passing. Crowds of people gathered along the bridges and on the quays in such numbers, according to Napoleon’s valet, that they risked being crushed, so desperate were they to get a glimpse of the Emperor.
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At Villefranche, a crowd of 50,000–60,000 people had gathered outside the town hall to see and cheer him, despite the cold weather. Similar crowds gathered at Mâcon, Tournus and Châlons. At Autun, the tanning workers laid siege to the Hôtel de Ville and entered the cathedral with the tricolour flag three days before Napoleon reached the town. There were risings in Nevers, Dijon, Dole, Beaune, Auxonne and many villages throughout Burgundy and the Franche-Comté. In short, Bonapartist urban insurrections preceded Napoleon’s arrival and almost always took the same form – the occupation of a central building like the town hall, the prefecture or the church, the suppression of monarchical symbols, the raising of the tricolour flag and often a procession that involved placing Napoleon’s bust in a prominent public position. Agricol Perdiguier noted that the first thing that happened in his village after news of Napoleon’s return was the hoisting of the tricolour flag on the church steeple.
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The
demi-soldes
were often behind these movements,
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but Napoleon’s acolytes were also sent ahead to prepare the way. It is impossible to know of course what motivated people to turn out to see Napoleon, curiosity or fervour. No doubt a core of people in those crowds could be described as Bonapartists, people who desired the return of their hero. It is quite possible that many turned out realizing this was an historic moment they should be a witness to. It does not mean to say they hated the Bourbons, or that they wanted to see Napoleon back in power. It is, however, an indication of the extent of his fame. While some may have welcomed his return, the majority of the French treated the event with either indifference or hostility. Certain regions eventually rose in revolt against Napoleon – the Vendée, the south-west and Provence – while the elite were circumspect to say the least.

Interestingly, few prefects, mayors or municipal councillors came out to support or greet Napoleon when he arrived in towns along the way. The only time he appears to have been officially welcomed was at Auxerre, where republican sentiment in the city was stronger than in other parts of France.
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Auxerre was the last important city before the dash to Paris so Napoleon spent the day of 16 March, a Saturday, putting some order into his affairs, and writing to Marie-Louise asking her to join him. ‘I shall be in Paris by the time you receive this letter. Come and join me with my son,’ he pleaded. ‘I hope to embrace you before the month is out.’
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All the next day, a Sunday, Napoleon was on the road, anxious to get to Paris as quickly as he could. He lunched at Joigny, and was at Sens by five in the afternoon. He left Pont-sur-Yonne at midnight, just as Louis was leaving the Tuileries. He pushed on to Fontainebleau, riding throughout the night, so that he arrived there at ten in the morning. He went straight to his apartments, where a fire had already been lit, and lay half dressed on his bed, exhausted after twenty hours on the road. He awoke after a few hours’ sleep to find a number of letters and dispatches, the most important of which was from Lavalette, who had taken over the Post Office in Paris, and who wrote to inform him that Louis had fled and he should make for the Tuileries as soon as possible. That letter decided him to push on to Paris.

That day, 20 March, largely because of the rainy weather, but also because of the crowds of people who lined the road between Fontainebleau and Villejuif,
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Napoleon made slow progress. It was six o’clock before he reached Essonnes, forty-odd kilometres from the centre of Paris. He arrived before the Tuileries around nine in the evening. By all accounts the crowd awaiting his ‘magical arrival’ was huge, possibly as many as 20,000, mostly made up of what might loosely be called the popular classes, the very petite bourgeoisie or the working classes.
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When Napoleon was at last seen, ‘the cry rose to such a pitch that you would have thought the ceilings were coming down’.
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Writing many years later, Captain Léon Routier described how the thought of Napoleon arriving still made his heart palpitate with pleasure. According to some, the Emperor’s carriage could barely move for the crowd; it was surrounded by officers ‘mad with joy’. ‘It was like witnessing the resurrection of Christ,’ wrote Thiébault, who prided himself on being able to touch Napoleon or to kiss his clothes.
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Accounts of what followed vary. Alexandre de La Borde, an officer in the National Guard, claimed that Napoleon was hoisted on to the shoulders of supporters and carried into the Tuileries.
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Napoleon is supposed to have confessed to someone close by, ‘This is the happiest day of my life.’
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Caulaincourt was able to shout out to Lavalette to put himself in front of Napoleon so that he could force a path. Lavalette did so, walking backwards for a while, eyes brimming over, exclaiming, ‘What! It’s you! It’s you! It’s finally you!’,
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as if he had just seen a ghost. In many respects he had. It was a ‘fantastical apparition’ that later took on a supernatural or holy character.
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The Passionate and the Afflicted

And that is how it was treated by Napoleon’s loyal followers, who were often overcome by the turn of events. The letters of devotion that started to come into Paris from around the country attest to the depth of feelings, some prepared to go so far as to die for him.
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But there were private declarations of love as well. One officer wrote to his girlfriend, ‘I am overwhelmed with happiness. I am mad with love and joy. I have found my Emperor again . . . What more do I need to be happy? . . . I can breathe at last. At the first news of this fortunate event, I pulled off the [fleur de] lys, replaced the white cockade with a red one and raised the eagle which has so often led us to victory.’
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Jean Bordenave, a teacher, wrote to the ministry of war asking to be employed in the army: ‘I found in my heart an emptiness similar to that which a lover has for the object of his passion; all that he sees, all that he hears renews his pain . . . such was my situation for one whole year . . . But now I feel like a lover who has recovered his desire; I offer my body as a bulwark to support His Majesty, and Vive l’Empereur and those who serve him.’
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Etienne-Maurice Deschamps, who had survived the debacle that was the Russian campaign, described the feeling among his friends at news of Napoleon’s return: ‘Like children to whom it has been announced that their father, from whom they believed they were forever separated, has returned, they [Napoleon’s supporters] could not contain their joy; it was made obvious in a thousand ways. The heart bore all the costs of that scene of general happiness, and if history is able to say that Trajan was loved by the human race, one can add that Napoleon was the idol of the French soldier.’
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Nevertheless, Napoleon’s return was not without a moral dilemma for those who had sworn an oath of loyalty to Louis XVIII. Commandant de Lauthonnye had been presented by Napoleon with a Legion of Honour. He admitted that when he received the medal, ‘I was dizzy with happiness, I cried so much that I could not thank him other than by shouting: “Long live the Emperor.”’ On Napoleon’s return, his family had to make him promise to remain faithful to Louis XVIII. And yet, if Napoleon had personally asked him to follow him, Lauthonnye probably would not have been able to resist the call.
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Captain Pierre Robinaux reported for duty but explained that he was ‘sincerely afflicted’ by not being able to keep his oath to Louis.
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Others bided their time to see how things would play out.
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Most officers, however, went over to Napoleon.
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Indeed, many public servants who had served him, and who had yet sworn an oath of loyalty to Louis, reneged on their oaths and re-enlisted under the Emperor. However, some of Napoleon’s best generals decided not to throw their lot in with him. Others, like Hippolyte d’Espinchal, came out against him and fought imperial troops on French soil. He reasoned, ‘I had served with enthusiasm, zeal and devotion until the last moment, my admiration for him was like the memory of a religious cult, but his abdication had brought his destiny to an end: to abandon him before that time would have been cowardice and to return to him after having sworn an oath of loyalty to the king . . . would have been a breach of all the duties prescribed by honour.’
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Although many young men, naive in their assessment of their chances of victory, looked upon Napoleon as the ‘avenger’ who would rectify the wrongs of the Bourbon regime, the responses among the people varied according to class and region.
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They were a good deal more muted in royalist strongholds and among the educated classes than in some working-class areas. Napoleon meant war – royalist propaganda worked on that theme – and support for him as a replacement for an unpopular Louis XVIII started to wane as soon as that became clear.
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If the Tuileries was surrounded by a large group of enthusiasts, mostly workers and veterans, if some of the military were ecstatic about his return, if Napoleon was accompanied by hundreds of peasants, some armed, and if the townspeople warmly greeted him on the way to Paris, these scenes were limited to particular regions. In the rest of France, there appears to have been an extraordinary degree of indifference. Even Napoleon seems to have realized this when he stated, ‘They have allowed me to come, just as they have let the others [the Bourbons] go.’
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Napoleon Impotent

There is a difference between holding office and exercising real power. Between the time Napoleon entered Paris on 20 March to the time he fled ninety-eight days later, he was to learn of the chasm that existed between the two. In 1814, his control over the machinery of government was total. He now no longer had that control. Moreover, he left the details of the administration to two close collaborators – Carnot and Fouché. Carnot did not want or was not able to carry out a thorough purge of the administration that would see men loyal to the new regime put in place, while Fouché was playing his own little games, subverting Napoleon, maintaining contact with Louis XVIII in exile in Ghent, with Talleyrand in Vienna and with Wellington in Brussels. Fouché never really believed that Napoleon would prevail, and was only too eager to disrupt the good functioning of government.
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Even with capable men in place in the provinces, most of the bureaucratic elites were playing a wait-and-see game, failing to pursue directives from Paris with vigour. Some municipalities pandered to both Napoleon and the Bourbons, hedging their bets, as it were.
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The attitude seems to have been: ‘If Napoleon wins, everything will be fine without measures having to be undertaken, and if he is defeated everything that we could have done will not have helped.’
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As a consequence, the administration of the country was disjointed, chaotic in places, virtually suspended or on hold in others. Where they could, royalists attempted to maintain their hold on local government; battalions of royalist volunteers, called
verdets
, were formed in the south, ready to rise in revolt when commanded to do so.
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Royalists in Paris manifested their discontent in discreet ways, in much the same way that Bonapartists had done before the Emperor’s return. Female royalists, for example, wore blue flowers (a royal colour and the sign of constancy), shawls were printed with royalist slogans, and royalist pamphlets and songs flooded the city.
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Napoleon’s hold on power was so tenuous – one royalist speaks of the ‘decrepitude of power’ – that it was enough for a rumour of his arrest to lead to demonstrations of joy in the Haute-Loire.
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Others urged what today would be called civil disobedience, encouraging people not to pay taxes and to disobey the regime.
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