Seven Ages of Paris (37 page)

Fortunately for Napoleon, and with the kind of luck that was now deserting his star, the harvest of 1812 turned out well, and that of the following year was abundant. The price of bread fell and normality returned—just in time to counterbalance, for a while, the sombre news of decisive defeat at Leipzig that was coming in from Germany.

RETREAT FROM MOSCOW

It was impossible for Napoleon to ignore the intensity and duration of the hardship that the disette had imposed on the Parisians. As the fateful 1812 campaign got under way, it was evident that the French nation, drawing on her revolutionary capital, could not for ever go on glorifying war for its own sake. Outside the army itself, always loyal to Napoleon, there was now little enough love for him in the country at large. Increasingly he had to rely on the terror of the omnipresent secret police, headed since 1810 by Fouché’s even more thorough successor, General Savary, the kidnapper of the Duc d’Enghien. Soon after assuming office in Paris, Savary had imposed his stamp by executing two clerks in the Ministry of War for passing information to the Russians. As the Grande Armée headed for Moscow, Paris, recorded Laure, the vivacious wife of General Junot:

presented a curious but melancholy spectacle. Husbands, sons, brothers and lovers were departing to join the army; while wives, mothers, sisters and mistresses either remained at home to weep, or sought amusement in Italy, Switzerland or the various watering-places of France.

Laure herself headed for Aix-les-Bains, where she listened to Talma recite from The Tempest in the middle of a storm, and then began a turbulent affair with the Marquis de Balincourt as her husband, increasingly demented, fought for his life on the Russian front.

So life continued in Paris, while the Grande Armée confronted failure outside Moscow and, in a terrible reverse, was forced to turn for home, struggling for its existence through the ice and snow of the great retreat. At last, on 20 December 1812, Laure Junot recalled, “the cannon on the Invalides announced to the city of Paris that the Emperor had returned from Russia.” Three days later, lovesick and now abandoned by Balincourt, she tried to take an overdose of laudanum. The following January, Junot himself returned. In the place of the dashing young Governor of Paris who had left her a few short months before, “there appeared a coarsened, aged man, walking with difficulty, bent and supported with a stick, dressed carelessly in a shabby greatcoat,” his sanity overthrown by the vicissitudes of war. During the brief time he spent in Paris that dreadful winter, one colonel of the once indestructible Grande Armée found his family and friends:

in general terror-stricken. The famous 29th Bulletin had informed France abruptly that the Grande Armée had been destroyed. The Emperor was invincible no longer. The campaign of 1813 was about to open … people were shocked to see the Emperor entertaining at the Tuileries. It was an insult to public grief and revealed a cruel insensitivity to the victims. I shall always remember one of those dismal balls, at which I felt as if I were dancing on graves.

The mood in Paris darkened as the full horror of the Russian débâcle was brought home by the state of survivors like Junot—a preview of what was to come. In the words of
Mlle.
Avrillon, who looked after the Empress’s jewellery, “we were all the more terrified … because for twenty years so many uninterrupted successes had made us think reverses impossible.” The superstitious could not fail to note that the Russian campaign was the first which had been undertaken by the Emperor since his marriage to Marie Louise. There was a palpable, unspoken sense that Moscow heralded, as Talleyrand expressed it, “the beginning of the end, and … the end itself could not be far distant.”

THE BATTLE OF THE NATIONS

After Napoleon had sacrificed the whole of the Grande Armée in Russia in 1812, abandoning its shattered remnants as he scurried home to a disbelieving and restive Paris, this remarkable warlord had still been able to raise a fresh army to fight a new campaign in eastern Europe the following year. There, pitted against all Europe in the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig, he had suffered his first decisive defeat, in the bloodiest encounter Europe would know until 1914. Now his star—deprived of Josephine, whom the grognards (or grumblers, the veterans of the Grande Armée) deemed integral to it—had clearly turned against him. Nevertheless, he was still able to create new forces and fight one of his most brilliant campaigns, albeit a hopeless one, as the Allies surged across the frontiers of France and closed in on Paris in 1814. And he would repeat the miracle once more, in 1815, on his escape from Elba—until Waterloo finally removed his grip on France.

Up to almost the very last moment, even after the Allies had crossed the Rhine into France, Parisians continued to treat the war as a distant happening that could never immediately affect the capital. After all, Paris had not been entered by a foreign army since the unhappy days of Jeanne d’Arc in the fifteenth century; she had not been invested since Henri IV’s siege in 1590; she had not experienced any warfare since the final flutter of the Fronde in 1652. On 1 February 1814, in the last of its Pièces de circonstances, special heroic performances put on to celebrate contemporary events, the Théâtre National staged a patriotic show to evoke the fight of Charles Martell against the Saracens, and the “Siege of Calais”; it was followed two weeks later by Philippe Auguste à Bouvines, just as 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians were massing on the outskirts of Paris, and the city walls were about to fall. Then came brief moments of panic as reality set in. Out at the barrières there were screams of “The Cossacks are coming! Shut all the shops!” Trees in the Bois de Boulogne were hastily cut down (as they would be again in 1870) to provide barricades against the Allied armies. Hospitals suddenly became overcrowded as wounded from the front straggled in, often finding doors barred against them. Shops emptied as speculators became hoarders, while hungry soldiers begged for bread in the streets. Talleyrand, looking forward to the arrival of his new masters, the restored Bourbons, recorded “grande incertitude.”

In the third week of March, Russian troops entered the east of Paris, on their third assault carrying the fortified redoubt which brave students of the Polytechnique had run up among the tombs of Père Lachaise, the new cemetery the Emperor had established only ten years previously. Abandoning Napoleon, Empress Marie Louise left for Blois, and then for Vienna. On 30 March Paris was subjected to cannonfire. Incredulous that things could come to this, the capital was not prepared for defence. As the Russians captured Montmartre, it was reported that the miller of the Moulin de la Galette had been shot, his body bound to one of the sails of the famous moulin. After he and Mortier had fought hard at Romainville, Marmont, Duc de Ragusa, finally deserted his master and signed an armistice at two o’clock on the morning of the 31st.

The reaction of the Parisians on the street surprised observers, among them Napoleon’s architect Fontaine: “Who could have imagined that the actual event would resemble a festival that did not disturb public peace and order?” Cossacks clattered down the Champs-Elysées, and then encamped there. Their behaviour was far from immaculate—but, after what Moscow had suffered, it was surprising that it was not much worse.

On 6 April Napoleon signed his abdication, and departed for Elba, an exile that would last for less than a year. On a beautiful spring day, 31 March, the victorious Allies had marched into Paris led by the Red Cossacks of the Imperial Guard. It was a picturesque affair, almost on a par with the other triumphant entrées made by the deposed Emperor: heading it was Tsar Alexander, followed by the King of Prussia and then Prince Schwarzenberg, representing the Emperor of Austria. Their respective armies followed, green leaves in their shakos. Military grandees, bearing the white cockades of the Bourbons on their hats, pranced down on horseback to meet them, while various royalist gentry (including a returning Chateaubriand) appeared from nowhere to circulate among the crowds. By now thoroughly disenchanted with Paris and its inhabitants, a censorious Stendhal recorded the “fickle delight” with which the Parisian crowd greeted its conquerors. The almost universal enthusiasm struck some as positively indecent. White handkerchiefs fluttered everywhere. “The blue and red were trampled underfoot and the most rabid were those who had been the most Bonapartist …” recorded
Mme.
Chateaubriand. “We women would cry ‘off with our heads!’ were we to hear our neighbours do so.”

Then, on 4 May, came the restored Bourbon, Louis XVIII, returning to reclaim the nation lost by his decapitated brother and claiming that, “by the grace of God,” he had never ceased to be king. He entered Paris in an open carriage drawn by eight white horses; a Te Deum was sung at Notre-Dame; and the King was solemnly saluted by choirs, a concert and the release of a balloon decorated with white flags. At the other end of the Ile, the statue of the first Bourbon, Henri IV, destroyed in the Revolution, was hastily resurrected in plaster on the Pont Neuf. It was all “so like a party,” remarked
Mme.
de Coigny, “that it is a pity it is a conquest,” a sentiment that sums up the whole incongruous gala. Blücher lost a king’s ransom of 1.5 million francs in one evening gaming in the ever receptive Palais Royal, and it was said that the Allied troops were spending more on pleasure than the reparations France had to pay to their governments. During those May days, Josephine, the former Empress, went riding with the gallant Tsar, caught a cold which turned into pneumonia and died—“going,” in the elegant words of her son Eugène, “as gently and as sweetly to meet death as she had met life.”

By the Treaty of 30 May 1814, the Allied armies left Paris. After over twenty years of war, peace now seemed restored. But it was dreadful old Fouché who saw the truth, predicting for 1815 that “Spring will bring Bonaparte back to us, with the swallows and the violets.”

THE ROAD TO SAINT HELENA

It proved to be a remarkably precise prophecy. All through the year that followed the withdrawal of the victorious Allies, Paris seethed with discontent. The streets swarmed with discharged and penniless veterans, while some 12,000 ex-officers on half-pay took to meeting in the cafés to lament “the good old days” of the Empire. One after the other promises made by the new regime were seen to be broken, while in his tiny kingdom of Elba Napoleon—his own pension unpaid—paced up and down in anger and vengeful frustration and bided his time. Suddenly, it came one day in March 1815 when the Governor, his captor, took leave to visit his mistress on the Italian mainland. Napoleon landed back in the South of France, marching towards Paris, collecting new armies as he went, in the miracle known as the Hundred Days.

When he reached the capital, there took place yet another of those volte-face that occur through French history, which amazed even Napoleon himself. “They let me come back just as easily as they let the others go!” he exclaimed. Paris remained extraordinarily placid. About the worst upheaval took place in the Sorbonne, where no exams were set that winter and spring. At the Tuileries Palace, where seamstresses had been busy unpicking the Napoleonic bees from the carpets, replacing them reverently with hastily stuck-on fleurs-de-lys, the returned Chateaubriand gave the newly enthroned King a brave historian’s advice—to remain and await the arrival of the usurper. Louis was more realistic. “You would have me,” he said, “sit upon the curule chair [as the Roman senators did, awaiting the barbarians]. I don’t feel like it.” The portly old King then clambered heavily into his coach and sped off to Ghent.

Paris, however, was not a cheerful place as Napoleon resumed control. Loud jubilation and songs from the immediate vicinity of the Tuileries contrasted sharply with the total darkness and silence prevailing in the outer districts. A new war threatened immediately as the Allies reassembled their forces. Spring never seemed to come, and it was an ominously grey and cold day as Napoleon reviewed his new armies on the Champ-de-Mars. It must have seemed, to Parisians, like a long hundred days as the Emperor set off with his reconstituted army to meet his fate at Waterloo.

Just as the first tidings of battle reaching Wellington in Brussels were bad, so false rumours arriving in Paris resulted—briefly—in “extravagant rejoicing.” Government stocks rocketed, and “a brilliant society” displayed itself once again in the Tuileries Gardens. Abruptly, however, the mood changed as the truth became apparent in the form of the last of Napoleon’s great armies limping back to Paris, defeated. Instead of chic and busy shoppers, the Place Vendôme was filled with wounded men, groaning on straw at the foot of the soaring monument that depicted the zenith of all Bonaparte’s past victories. Abandoning his army a third and final time, Napoleon hastened back to Paris. There, on 21 June, he called for Marie Walewska and their son, Alexandre, to say his last farewell, before going off into definitive exile. “The mood was lugubrious,” recalled an aide. “It was raining, the Emperor was burning state papers, and I was packing his personal effects.” Young Alexandre (who would become a minister under his father’s nephew, Napoleon III) recorded that the Emperor took him in his arms, and “a tear ran down his face.” The next day, the third anniversary of the launching of the march on Moscow, Napoleon abdicated a second time.

This year there was a sixteen-day siege as the Allies fought their way once more through the graves of Père Lachaise, as the Prussians stormed Issy, and as the National Guard put up a spirited resistance at the Barrière de Clichy in the north of the city. But as they reoccupied Paris, the Allies—after suffering further casualties—were in a far more sombre and less forgiving mood. Blücher’s Prussians left a path of desolation on their route from Waterloo to Paris, a foretaste of what lay ahead in three subsequent German invasions; in Paris only Wellington’s forceful personal intervention prevented Blücher from blowing up the Pont d’Iéna by way of erasing a permanent slight on Prussian arms. This time it was the turn of the triumphant British troops to bivouac in the Place de la Concorde. In the Bois they noted with disgust the wanton damage effected by Prussians in neighbouring encampments. “Our camp was not remarkable for its courtesy towards them,” recorded Captain Gronow of the Grenadiers, with the best insular disdain. On the other hand, Parisiennes expressed shock on discovering that the Highlanders wore no culottes under their kilts.