How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (12 page)

‘L’ennemi fut contenu, fut repoussé et recula; il avait épuisé ses forces et l’on n’en avait plus rien à craindre.’

‘The enemy was contained, was pushed back, and retreated; they were exhausted, and we had nothing left to fear.’

– Napoleon, writing about Wellington’s army in his report
immediately after Waterloo

‘Ce ne fut pas lord Wellington qui vainquit; sa défense fut opiniâtre, admirable d’énergie, mais il fut forcé, battu.’

‘It wasn’t Lord Wellington who won; his defence was stubborn, and admirably energetic, but he was pushed back and beaten.’

– Captain Marie Jean Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse, in his
Souvenirs Militaires

IN THE FIRST
edition of one of France’s best-known encyclopedias, the
Nouveau Larousse Illustré
, published in seven volumes between 1897 and 1904, there is a surprisingly poetic entry on Waterloo. The battle is defined as ‘the last conflict of the epic Napoleonic era, fought on 18 June 1815, in the small valley which separates the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean-Waterloo, occupied by Wellington’s English forces, from the hillock of Resomme or Belle-Alliance, where the French army was camped.’ The battle is not defined more simply and encyclopedically, as, for example, ‘the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and his French army by the British and the Prussians’. It is just, for some unexplained reason, the last battle of the Napoleonic era.

The sense of French revisionism about whether Waterloo actually was a defeat is reminiscent of the pitch for the Hollywood idiot movie
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
: ‘History is about to be rewritten … by two guys who can’t spell.’

In the case of Waterloo, history has definitely been rewritten, or overwritten. If you ask a French person about 18 June – ‘le dix-huit juin’ – they almost certainly won’t think that you are referring to 1815 and Waterloo. They will cite De Gaulle’s
Appel du dix-huit juin
, the Général’s famous radio appeal from London in 1940 for Frenchmen to cross the Channel and join him in the struggle to liberate France. Hardly any Frenchmen did so, resulting in the fact that only 177 French troops landed in Normandy on D-Day,
^fn1
but the date of the
Appel du dix-huit juin
has been implanted in the French folk memory (helped along by their history teachers), expunging Waterloo from the calendar.

However, among those French people who more readily associate 18 June with Waterloo, there is a real feeling that it was not a defeat, and that it was in some ways a great victory. To a British reader raised on images of brave redcoats winning eternal glory for themselves and their regiment, this may seem bizarre. But Bonapartist historians have had two centuries to fine-tune their version of the battle, and have come up with some forceful arguments.

They often quote, for example, the fact that France won the battle of the standard captures – French troops snatched at least four British regiments’ flags (some say it was six), and lost only two of their Napoleonic eagles. In those almost medieval times of honour and glory, this was an important statistic.

More significantly, though, many French writers – including Napoleon – claim that the French army won the battle
against Wellington.
We saw earlier how Napoleon liked to divide campaigns into smaller episodes so that he could claim to have won more battles. Here, Bonapartist historians and veterans of Napoleon’s army divide Waterloo itself into two parts – a victory against the British, followed by a defeat once the Prussians arrived. In any case, a partial triumph.

General Foy claimed that on 18 June Wellington was ‘beaten from midday to six o’clock’. Captain Lemonnier-Delafosse called Waterloo an ‘extraordinary battle, the only one in which there were two losers: first the English, then the French’.

Napoleon punctuates his own account of the day’s action, composed on 20 June, with a paragraph claiming that in mid-afternoon ‘the battle was won; we were occupying all the positions that the enemy had occupied at the start of the battle’ (which was, of course, a lie). ‘Marshal Grouchy, having assessed the movement of the Prussian army, was pursuing them, thereby assuring us of a great victory the following day. After eight hours of firing and infantry and cavalry charges, the whole army was able to look with satisfaction upon a battle won and the battlefield in our possession.’ What happened immediately afterwards seems to be of secondary importance.

French historians are also fond of quoting Wellington’s own admission in his report published in
The Times
on 22 June that he would have been lost without the Prussians: ‘I should not do justice to my feelings or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I do not attribute the successful result of this arduous day, to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them.’ It sounds as though the Prussians had helped him put up a marquee for his birthday party, but to the French the meaning is clear – Napoleon had the Englishman pinned to the ropes and rocking back on his heels before a third boxer jumped into the ring.

A French Hussar by the name of Victor Dupuy confirmed this in his
Souvenirs Militaires
: ‘The events of that deplorable day could so easily have been different … The English army was in disarray when the Prussians, who had evaded Marshal Grouchy, arrived on the battlefield and stole the victory that the English had more than lost. Without this … Waterloo Bridge would have been built across the Seine. At the very least, the bridge ought to have a statue of the Prussian general.’

The consensus among Bonapartist historians is simple: the British lost their part of the battle, and didn’t deserve to share the victory.

These historians pour scorn on the British troops, who unlike Napoleon’s fiercely devoted Guards were, as one French historian puts it, ‘in uniform thanks to nothing but poverty or unemployment. In their ranks one frequented all sections of society, including the worst.’ (He seems to be forgetting the huge numbers of men from all over the French empire conscripted into service by Napoleon to replace the hundreds of thousands of troops he lost in Russia.)

Both the French and the British often misquote Wellington as having nothing but upper-class English disdain for his own ordinary soldiers, whom he famously called ‘the scum of the earth’. On the other hand, it is well known that Wellington admired the French army: ‘They were excellent troops; I never on any occasion knew them to behave other than well. Their officers too were as good as possible.’

In fact, though, when Wellington branded his own troops ‘scum’ on 4 November 1813, he was saying something more subtle, albeit equally snobbish: ‘A French army is composed very differently from ours. The conscription calls out a share of every class – no matter whether your son or my son – all must march; but our friends – I may say it in this room – are the very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.’

The French Bonapartist Jean-Claude Damamme goes further and besmirches the character of the British officers, clearly wanting to underline the notion that they were unworthy to be remembered as glorious victors. In Brussels before the battle, he says, kind-hearted Belgian girls gave their hearts to the visiting young bucks (‘these beardless warriors’), but ‘one is forced to note that these idylls were temporary, and the abandoned were legion’. One can only assume that French officers on campaign always married local girls before sleeping with them, and then took them home to meet
maman
.

Damamme also pokes fun at British officers vainly trying to introduce fox-hunting into Belgium, and coming up against furry resistance fighters: ‘the hardy Belgian foxes refused to run from hounds launched in pursuit of their red pelt’.

The only British soldiers who gain any real respect from Bonapartists are the Scots (Auld Alliance
oblige
, of course). They were, one historian says, ‘lively, friendly fellows, whose “skirts” flapped around their muscular calves, titillating the curiosity of the feminine population’.

But if Bonapartist historians find the Brits laughable, the Prussians were just plain, well, Prussian. The French-speaking Belgians called them
la vermine verte
– because of their green uniforms, not their politics. They stole cattle and poultry, they raped and pillaged, and killed anyone who tried to stop them, forcing Belgians to take to the woods. They requisitioned every available cart to transport their booty, and any mayor who failed to hand over his entire town as a billet was beaten up and jailed.

This abuse had been going on, we are told, ever since the Russians and Prussians ‘liberated’ Belgium from Napoleonic rule in 1814, inspired mainly by the psychotic French-hater Blücher. He had been captured by Napoleon’s men at Lübeck in 1806 (he was later exchanged for a French marshal), and was out for revenge.

Blücher is often compared and contrasted with the noble, chivalrous French officers (until, of course, they went AWOL at Waterloo). He was known for sending his men rashly into battle – his nickname was Marshal Vorwärts (which would also have been a good name for France’s Marshal Ney on 18 June) – and he is mocked for failing to grasp the strategy of war. With a startling lack of insight, he had written home to his wife from Belgium that ‘we might stay here another year – Napoleon won’t attack’.

Bonapartists are also keen to point out that at the end of his life, Blücher went totally mad and believed that he had been impregnated by an elephant and that the French had lit a fire under his floor so that he had to walk on tiptoes. They often ignore the fact that Blücher was almost offhand in his bravery. After the Battle of Lützen in 1813, he wrote to his wife: ‘I was shot in the back. I’ll bring the bullet home for you.’

In fact, according to the Bonapartists, not only was Wellington cheating because he had help from this mad old Francophobe and his barbarous Prussian troops, the British army wasn’t even British. There were only 25,000 or so British soldiers in Wellington’s army of 67,000 men. A recent issue of the (normally unbiased) magazine
L’Histoire
even implied that ‘Wellington’s troops were so diverse that there were several accidental but deadly clashes between friendly soldiers, especially when the Prussian reinforcements began to arrive at around 4 p.m.’

The implication is clear – the French army was pure, while the allies were watered down, incompetent and borderline insane.

Even if they concede that France ultimately lost possession of the battlefield, many French commentators still maintain that they won the
moral
victory. The key word here is
gloire
– glory. It is a term that crops up endlessly in French accounts of Waterloo, and Napoleon’s career in general. Napoleon himself said that Waterloo was ‘glorious, even if it was fatal for the French army’.

He is not the only Frenchman who fails to see the inherent contradiction in this idea. In a French dictionary of battles published in 1818, the authors said of Waterloo that ‘both sides showed how far courage can go when one is fighting for national honour; but the French rose far above their enemies; at first victorious, then defeated by the most extraordinary change of fortune, they were greater, and acquired more glory from this setback than if victory had not evaded them’.

Similarly, in the introduction to his book
Histoire de la Campagne de 1815 – Waterloo
, the nineteenth-century historian Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras, who was no fan of Napoleon, wrote that ‘After reading this book, one man [Napoleon] might seem diminished; but on the other hand, the French army will seem grander, and France less bowed.’

In fact, 18 June 1815, we are meant to believe, was a day marked more than anything else by the death-defying bravery of the French soldier. This doesn’t mean the suicidal rashness of Ney, repeatedly charging in the hope of taking a bullet and ending his career with a splash (of his own blood), but the stoic courage of the French soldier fighting for his country and his Emperor even when all the odds were stacked against him.

The French soldiers’ bravery was all the more admirable, Bonapartists insist, because Napoleon’s army at Waterloo had been hurriedly assembled to meet the combined might of the coalition.

Napoleon had not been able to boost numbers with conscripts – King Louis XVIII had abolished conscription, much to the relief of most Frenchmen and their families. And in the past he had been able to round up troops from other countries in his empire, but this too was now impossible. To compensate, Napoleon brought as many French veterans as possible out of retirement. France’s navy had been decommissioned (the Brits wanted Britannia to rule the waves totally unchallenged), so sailors were transferred into the army, as were customs officers and forest wardens. And Napoleon also called for ‘volunteers’, though the notion of volunteering was a typically Napoleonic one – in Corrèze, an apple-growing area where it rains quite a lot, villages that produced too few volunteers had their trees cut down and their roof tiles removed.

In this way, between March and June 1815 Napoleon raised an astonishing new force of 413,000 men whom he stationed all over the country to guard against invaders. He also set about his personal arms race, mobilising public and private weapons factories to manufacture 40,000 rifles a month (this in a pre-production line age of wooden stocks, hand-forged barrels and individually cut flints), with a peak in June 1815 of 1,500 guns per day. The
cartoucherie
(cartridge factory) at the Château de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris produced an amazing twelve million cartridges in two months.

Forts were repaired and armed with cannons, as were Paris’s walls. The Old Guard even came to Paris to motivate the workers on the fortifications by playing rousing military music (though this might also have been a tactic to scare Parisian workers into action).