How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (6 page)

But for the moment at least, Napoleon didn’t need to bother about the opinion of the common
bourgeois
– he knew that they weren’t going to put together an army of umbrella-waving ladies and pen-wielding solicitors to oppose his return. And he knew this because he had stopped a carriage carrying mail from Paris, and had the letters read by his aides. Even 200 years ago, the war of information was a vital part of a politician’s life.

When Napoleon arrived in Paris on 20 March 1815, schoolchildren greeted the news by cheering and beating out a celebration drumroll on their desktops. Perhaps they knew that they were safe from conscription, though it probably wasn’t a good idea to be too proficient at drumming – Napoleon’s armies sent young drummer boys into the front lines, to be shot at just like the adults.

The politicians weren’t quite as welcoming as the schoolchildren, and Napoleon discovered that the perfidious English had made their mark during the brief occupation of Paris. France’s parliament was now dominated by English-style liberals who told Napoleon that the population would back him only if he agreed to a new constitution. They demanded that he maintain the British-style two-house parliamentary system set up by Louis XVIII, with a Chambre des Pairs (a house of hereditary peers) and a Chambre des Députés (consisting of MPs elected for five years). He also had to confirm the freedom of the press, and accept criticism of his regime. The old-style emperor-god was a thing of the past.

Unwillingly, Napoleon accepted the concessions demanded of him, though he refused to call this a new constitution, and dubbed the changes the Acte Additionnel, as though it were merely an afterthought to his former regime.

He also had to shrug off the humiliation of disastrous elections, which saw huge abstention rates (especially among the silent
bourgeois
majority), and a wave of liberal, anti-Bonapartist MPs and mayors elected or re-elected (80 per cent of the local officials put in place by Louis XVIII’s regime were confirmed in office). Napoleon might have started to wonder why he hadn’t remained on Elba as the island’s uncontested sovereign. As it was, he contented himself with dismissing parliamentary debates as ‘vain chatter’.

There was one consolation, though – he did get his way with his re-investiture. On 1 June, on the Champ de Mars in front of his old Ecole Militaire, Napoleon held a stupendously self-congratulatory ceremony before 400,000 spectators, including 50,000 soldiers. For the occasion he designed himself a new imperial costume – a red tunic, a cape lined with ermine, white trousers and stockings, and a Roman emperor’s crown. His soldiers, though, weren’t happy: they wanted to be reunited with their beloved general, not a dandy in fancy dress.

Not that Napoleon was over-keen to get back into military uniform. He knew that the most he could hope for now was to reign unopposed over France. Rekindling the war against the allies would be suicidal. He made a speech admitting as much: ‘I have given up my idea of a great Empire that I had only just begun to build. My aim was to organise a federal European system that matched the spirit of the century and favoured the advancement of our civilisation.
^fn12
My goal now is simply to increase France’s prosperity by strengthening public freedom.’ Sadly for Napoleon, his old nemesis Talleyrand was not willing to let this happen. Ever the tireless anti-Bonaparte campaigner, when news came through that Napoleon had landed in France, Talleyrand was in Vienna meeting with Metternich, Czar Alexander and Wellington. He immediately began to whip up outrage among the allies, declaring that Napoleon was ‘the disturber of world peace’. In no time at all, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Britain had promised to launch their armies against Napoleon, guaranteeing at least 150,000 soldiers each.

Napoleon sent a peace envoy to Metternich, and a placatory letter to England’s Prince Regent, but both were ignored. On 7 June he made a speech in Paris, informing his people that ‘It is possible that the first duty of a prince will soon call me to lead the children of the nation in a fight for our homeland. The army and I will do our duty.’

Dominique de Villepin, France’s Prime Minister from 2005 to 2007, supports Napoleon in this resolve to fight. ‘Governing,’ he writes in his book
Les Cent Jours
(referring to Napoleon’s 100-day return to power in 1815),
^fn13
‘does not mean endlessly negotiating in the hope of finding a compromise. It means deciding. Governing implies cool-headedness, initiative and responsibility.’ It is the usual Bonapartist refrain: Napoleon, they say, desired only peace, but when he recognised the inevitability of war, like the hero he was, he could not shy away from it.

The facts are more banal. Surrounded by enemies both at home and abroad, Napoleon had no choice but to accept the impossible odds if he wanted to hang on to power. The long journey from his first victory against the British fleet in Toulon in 1793 had come to its climax. Almost twenty years of glory, followed by two and a half in which he had lost two whole armies and his throne. He had known total power, self-inflicted disaster, exile, a glorious return, and now he had to fight one last great battle to decide his ultimate fate.

Napoleon, and Europe itself, was ready for Waterloo.

The improbable thing is that Napoleon thought he could win – although even that is less improbable than the way his admirers still allege that he actually did.

^fn1
All quotations from French sources are my own. Though I have tried to be scrupulously objective when translating,
naturellement
.

^fn2
That is no joke – the snowball story really is told in French biographies, as is the tale about young Napoleon ‘annexing’ other pupils’ vegetable patches in the school gardens. His whole life is treated by his French admirers as the stuff of heroic legend.

^fn3
Napoleon called his embargo the Blocus Continental, which probably goes some way to explaining the traditional feeling among Brits of being separate from ‘the continent’. British ‘splendid isolation’ comes in part from Napoleon’s desire to isolate it.

^fn4
‘Marlborough goes off to war’. Ironically, Napoleon is depicted humming an old French song, sung to the tune of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, about the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns against Louis XIV. Or perhaps it was not ironic – it might have been a way of implying that Napoleon was a greater general than the famous Englishman.

^fn5
The French won at Borodino, and prefer the battle to be called Moskowa – Napoleon gave his Marshal Ney the title ‘Prince de la Moskowa’ for his gallantry there. But for once, the rule that the victor names the battle doesn’t apply, and everyone outside France refers to the Battle of Borodino. Proof, perhaps, of the extent of Napoleon’s overall defeat in Russia.

^fn6
Incidentally, the governor of Moscow who emptied the city of food and burned it down was a man called Fiodor Rostoptchine. Rich Muscovites were so furious with him that he was forced into exile, eventually ending up in France in 1817 (which by then was under a new, anti-Bonapartist regime). There, Fiodor’s daughter Sofia married the nephew of a general who had been with Napoleon at Moscow, and she became one of France’s most famous children’s writers under the name La Comtesse de Ségur.

^fn7
The French also refer to the coalition of allies opposing Napoleon as
les coalisés
, which makes them sound rather like a bloodclot.

^fn8
Montereau, 80 kilometres south-east of Paris, is hoping to raise its profile by opening a Parc Napoléon in 2020. See the Epilogue, page 247, for more details.

^fn9
Perhaps the landowners on Elba hadn’t read the exact wording of Napoleon’s exile agreement, which stipulated that he received ‘for the rest of his life, the sovereignty and ownership’ of the whole island.

^fn10
Alexander used the French slang word
nul
, which means totally rubbish in all respects.

^fn11
This is a famous quotation that ensures Ney a decidedly chilly reception whenever Bonapartist historians are describing his actions at Waterloo, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

^fn12
A federal European system geared to the advancement of French civilisation – 200 years later, via the EU, France is still trying to make Napoleon’s wish come true.

^fn13
Incidentally, Villepin was so inspired by Napoleon in his own political career that when he was appointed Prime Minister, he gave himself ‘a hundred days to restore confidence’ in President Jacques Chirac’s right-wing regime. Sadly, Villepin’s first measure, a law that gave employers the right to fire workers under the age of twenty-five, provoked a national strike and rioting, and dashed his hopes of running for the presidency.

‘Napoléon est le héros parfait … Il n’eut pas une pensée qui ne fît une action, et toutes ses actions furent grandes …’

‘Napoleon is the perfect hero … He never had a thought that he did not put into action, and all his actions were great …’

– nineteenth-century French writer Anatole France

WATERLOO IS PROBABLY
the most-analysed battle in history. Every musket shot and cannonball of 18 June 1815 has been debated, ballistically tested, computer-generated and re-enacted – especially by Bonapartists trying to extract positive conclusions from the debacle.

Countless veterans of the actual battle emerged from the mud and gore to tell their stories, which are often self-aggrandising and almost always partly inaccurate, because each one is of necessity just a personal snapshot of the events of the day. Over the past two centuries, these have been slotted together like the odd-shaped pieces of a thousand different jigsaw puzzles.

The accounts of what went on at Waterloo include those of Wellington and Napoleon, both of whom wrote their official reports while the wounded were still trying to crawl off the battlefield. Predictably, both men’s reports are biased – Wellington’s by old-fashioned English understatement and Napoleon’s by the need to stress that he did not have to give up his emperor’s cloak just yet, because his army could regroup and carry on the fight.

In most British versions of the battle, there is an understandable undercurrent of triumphalism. Meanwhile many French accounts, including those by veterans, tend towards a more puzzling conclusion. Someone lost the battle, they seem to admit, but one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t Napoleon.

His defenders explain away the disaster by blaming it on everyone and everything except
l’Empereur
himself. They point an accusing pen at God, the weather, destiny, history, traitors, deserters, the generals, the contours of the battlefield, the type of mud, the dense smoke, the food, piles, a urinary problem, syphilis, and – of course – British cheating.

So who or what exactly was to blame for it all going so wrong for Napoleon?

Among Napoleon’s many sayings on the subject of fighting was: ‘In war, as in love, to get the job done, you have to get up close.’ But tender-hearted he was not. For him, war was all about merciless, focused attack.

He had reinvented warfare using what Dominique de Villepin calls his three weapons – cannon, bayonets and horses. He would launch a diversionary assault on his opponent’s left or right flank while his artillery would batter what he considered the weakest point of the opposing lines, and skirmishers would snipe at key officers and gunners. Then, depending on the terrain, the cavalry or infantry would charge, the opposing lines would break into a rout, and finally the cavalry would mop up with their sabres and lances, playing dandelion cutters with the fleeing soldiers to ensure that no one would be around to fight the following day.

This was the theory, and it often worked in practice, which was why the Russians had been so careful to avoid face-to-face confrontation in 1812.

Napoleon’s charges were as terrifying as his artillery onslaughts. The heavy cavalry would trot forward slowly, an impenetrable mass of snorting horses and growling Frenchmen. The infantry would begin its advance with linked arms and march straight into musket or cannon fire, each fallen man instantly replaced by another. Then, nearing the lines, they would point their bayonets straight at the enemy’s hearts and close in for the kill. The idea was to give the opposing army plenty of time to panic in the face of the wave of doom bearing down on them, and run.

Napoleon’s footsoldiers called these charges a
déjeuner à la fourchette
– a ‘fork lunch’ – and one of his army’s many slogans was ‘the Old Guard only fights with the bayonet’. French historians describe Napoleon’s battles with all the glee of
Dad’s Army
’s Corporal Jones’ catchphrase ‘They don’t like it up ’em’. It’s no coincidence that the most common words in French Napoleonic histories are
Empereur
,
gloire
(glory),
patrie
(homeland) and
baïonette
. Bonapartist historians delight in the butchery inflicted on France’s enemies by Napoleon’s fearless troops.