1815: The Return of Napoleon

by Paul Britten Austin

Overview

The dramatic story of Napoleon’s escape from Elba and march on Paris—in the words of eyewitnesses and participants.
 
Drawing on hundreds of firsthand accounts by Napoleon’s supporters and opponents, Paul Britten Austin recreates the drama of those tumultuous days of the spring of 1815 and throws light on the mixed French response to the unexpected return of their former emperor.
 
1815: The Return of Napoleon recreates, in the words of those present, Napoleon’s dramatic landing at Antibes in the south of France; the first heady days of his arrival after almost a year of exile; his almost miraculous march across France; his arrival in Paris; and the coup which led to the fall of the Bourbons.
 
Paul Britten Austin, author of an acclaimed trilogy on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, brings historical events to life and gives a dramatic insight into the hopes and fears of the French nation in that spring of 1815.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784380458
Publisher:	Pen & Sword Books Limited
Publication date:	02/20/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	7 MB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

'A CRAZY ENTERPRISE'

If there'd been a sentry on one of the sharply jutting bastions of the Gabelle Fort, just across the harbour from Antibes, at dawn on 1 March 1815, he'd have noticed on the horizon a small flotilla. Mostly lateen-sailed, its largest vessel is a twenty-six-gun brig of war, the Inconstant. And if his officer had steadied his telescope on his shoulder, he'd have seen something even more startling: the Elban ensign, crimson-and-white with imperial bees, being hauled down from its gaff and the tricolour, symbol of republican and imperial France, being broken instead. For the last eleven months – months when Europe, for the first time in twelve years, has been at peace – it's been strictly banned.

But the other day twenty-three-year-old artillery captain Gazon had stripped the Gabelle Fort (also known as Le Fort Carré) of its guns. So there's no sentry and no officer. It's deserted.

'Like most young men at that time,' Gazon prefers

'the pleasures of society to the tobacco and liqueurs of cafés. The foreign colony and garrison officers were living on the best of terms with the townspeople. Our drawing rooms were truly places where people could mingle agreeably and where perfect union reigned. We did a lot of dancing.'

Unlike some 12,000 other demisoldes he's content with his existence. And Brigadier-General Coursin, too, the Antibes military governor, is fond of making 'pleasure trips into the countryside'. Only today he has invited young Gazon to join his other guests on a trip out to the Lerin Islands, opposite Cannes, where Paris has just ordered him to establish a company of veterans in the St Marguerite fort, similarly dismantled. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, for what will follow will be his 'life's most memorable experience' – Gazon has had to decline. He's already promised the day to his good friend Lieutenant Léandre Sardou at the village of Cannet, just inland from Cannes, and early this spring morning has set out, after borrowing his father's mare and faithfully promising his mother to be back by nightfall. Taking boat with his picnic party, Corsin has entrusted Antibes to his second-in-command, the Corsican colonel Cuneo d'Ornano, of the 87th Line.

All day yesterday a heavy sea was running – or at least so it had seemed to Guillaume Peyrusse. A 'young southerner, full of spirit, vivacity and frankness, always cheerful, always obliging, and strongly attached to his duties', Peyrusse is Napoleon's treasurer, who, if anyone asks him why he'd followed him to Elba, laughingly replies: I didn't. I followed my cashbox.'

But just now he's in no laughing mood. All yesterday he'd sat crumpled up on the Inconstant's deck, with his back to the mainmast. Given an imperial kick in the ribs and told to 'join the other pen-pushers' down in the cabin, he'd pleaded a headache and begged to be excused:

'Pooh pooh,' Napoleon had said. 'Seine water will cure all that.'

And when Peyrusse with 'an incredulous shrug of a shoulder' had made so bold as to doubt it, the Emperor had told him they'll be in Paris on 20 March in time to celebrate his son's fourth birthday – that son who just now is a prisoner in Vienna. Down in the cabin, meanwhile, all who can wield a quill are busy making a hundred copies of two proclamations. 'I should have taken a portable printing press,' Napoleon will later say to Gourgaud on St Helena, printed proclamations making so much greater impact. But the imperial printing press has been deemed too cumbersome to bring along. The first of his proclamations is to France. The second to the army:

'Soldiers! We were not defeated. Two men from our ranks betrayed our laurels, their country, their prince, their benefactor! Tear down those colours [the Bourbon fleurs-de-lis] proscribed by the nation and which for twenty-five years have served to rally all France's enemies! Show the tricolour cockade! You wore it during our great days. Come and range yourselves under the standards of your chief ...'

— the two 'traitors' being Marshal Marmont, his oldest friend, who had led his corps over to the Russians after surrendering Paris (admittedly in consultation with Napoleon's own brother Joseph); and Marshal Augereau, who, a republican at heart, had welcomed an end to his master's tyrannical régime and released his troops from their allegiance to him. To the always admiring First Valet Louis Marchand, watching his master dictate these stirring – if not strictly truthful – proclamations it seems

'his whole soul stood painted on his face. When speaking of the fatherland, of France's sufferings, it was electrified. Genius was on the tripos. Deus ecceDeus. I've seen the Emperor on various occasions, but never more handsome.'

The other proclamation, addressed to the French nation and 'dictated with the same rapidity', flings Talleyrand's newfangled label 'legitimacy', under which he'd brought back the Bourbons, in his enemies' faces:

'Raised by your choice to the throne, all that's been done without you is illegitimate. For twenty-five years France has had new interests, new institutions, a new glory, that can only be guaranteed by a national government and a dynasty born in these new circumstances ...' namely his own.

Among the quills busily copying out these stirring effusions is doubtless that of the middle-aged André Pons de l'Hérault. A staunch Jacobin who'd been with the young Bonaparte at the siege of Toulon but afterwards objected to his Empire as 'putting force in the place of law', for years he has been managing the Rio iron mine on Elba, a job he'd owed to Napoleon's dissident brother Lucien. When the exiled Emperor had first landed on the island, Pons had been utterly fascinated by

'this extraordinary man I'd so often blamed and at the same time admired. My heart was fit to burst, my spirits were dejected, my mind distracted, a general trembling took from me the free exercise of my faculties, and I felt I was going to faint.'

But several times since then he's been dismayed by Napoleon's dictatorial ways, not least by his lack of common honesty and consideration for others. Despite at least one head-on dispute, however, Napoleon has learnt to appreciate Pons, and since it had been Pons who'd scraped together his little flotilla it had been to him before anyone else he'd confided his plan to return to France. If he has brought him along it's because he's a personal friend of Marshal Masséna, in command of the 8th military division at Toulon, whose unpredictable reactions can make or break the whole 'crazy project'.

For that's what the forty-one-year-old General Antoine Drouot*, the troops' immediate commander – he too suffering the agonies of seasickness, on a mattress in Napoleon's cabin – thinks it is. Who has ever heard of anyone conquering a large country, the largest in Europe, with a mere 800 men? And Drouot has 'done everything humanly possible to dissuade the Emperor from it'. Dubbed by Napoleon 'the Sage of the Grand Army' on account of his bookish habits, Drouot creates an impression of great probity in all but his former subordinate Pion des Loches. And for Pons, who hadn't hesitated to stand up to Napoleon, he's

'the equal of Plutarch's heroes, the perfection of the moral man. He'd followed the Emperor [to Elba] on condition he didn't pay him any salary – the only one of Napoleon's companions to make this reservation. Inside him were two men: the private man, who was too good; the public man, who was too severe.'

Neither quality, alas, staves off seasickness. To Peyrusse, too, a man who, although torn between ambition and fondness for his creature comforts, has fulfilled his ambition of becoming Napoleon's treasurer, the whole enterprise seems utterly risky. So much so that before leaving Porto-Ferrajo and the 'agreeable relationships' he'd formed there, he'd 'in greatest secrecy' laid up his own little stock of 'flours, wine, potatoes and salt beef'.

'How much does 100,000 francs weigh?' Napoleon had asked him musingly. Then: 'How much a trunkful of books?'

And in fact it's books that at first glance seem to fill the two wooden crates Peyrusse is in charge of – filled in reality with little sacks, each holding two million francs in gold.

So packed with troops are the Inconstant's decks there's hardly even standing room for her sixty to eighty civilian passengers. Less than a year ago at Fontainebleau, after Napoleon's abdication and attempted suicide, these Grenadiers, Chasseurs and gunners of the Old Guard, its crème de la crème de la crème, hand-picked by him, had marched south to join him on Elba. The rest, '100 Polish lancers and 200 Corsican infantrymen of small stature and poorly equipped,' are either on the Saint Esprit, a cargo ship, or else 'on the Emperor's xebec, the speronade Caroline, two vessels from Rio, and a little felucca belonging to an Elban businessman'. Though the guardsmen are the soul of discipline, the Corsican volunteers certainly aren't – Drouot hadn't been at all happy to see a Corsican battalion set up in the first place, their Commandant Guasco being 'the worst officer on Corsica, whose only merit was to bear the name of one of the noble Corsican families.' He's sure they'll only be a nuisance.

Among the brig's many non-military passengers are, of course, Napoleon's two valets. Never has the old saying that no man is a hero to his valet been less true than of the twenty-four-year-old Louis Marchand, a pleasant-mannered young man, in his spare time even something of an artist, who'd been promoted at Fontainebleau after his predecessor Constant Wairy* had absconded, taking with him with 100,000 francs. Admittedly the usually judicious Pons finds Marchand 'very conceited, occasionally playing the confidant'; but from these minor charges his subsequent devotion on St Helena must absolve him. His assistant is the twenty-seven-year-old Louis-Etienne SaintDenis. Originally having been taken on to assist the Armenian mameluke Roustam (who'd also quit at Fontainebleau), he's become known as 'Ali' since he wears the same oriental costume. Shut up in the besieged fortress of Metz, he'd rejoined his master on Elba at the earliest opportunity. Notable for his immaculate handwriting, Ali has a quite remarkable memory for detail. Both valets are veterans of the Russian and Leipzig disasters and worship the ground – or at this moment the deck -beneath their master's feet. Exigent Napoleon may be; but also whenever possible considerate toward both his valets. And it never occurs to either not to accept their master at his own valuation.

Besides the folding iron campaign bed, standard-issue for a French general, with its green curtains and a 'bedcover of embroidered linen, very beautiful work', that can be put together in 'five minutes', Marchand has in his charge three objects of great value: (1) the gold travelling case (la nécessaire)', (2) the privy purse – a casket containing 80,000 gold francs; and (3), not least valuable, a diamond necklace worth 500,000 francs. It had been entrusted to him at the very last moment by Napoleon's sister Pauline, who'd begged him 'with tears in her eyes never to abandon the Emperor and to take good care of him'; mere valet though he is, she'd even allowed him to kiss her hand. And when Marchand, dazzled by her beauty, had countered her heartbroken adieu by respectfully saying it'll more likely turn out to be an au revoir, had replied sadly: 'That's not how I see it' – 'A secret presentment,' he'd thought, that 'seemed to tell her she'd never see him again.'

Otherwise the valets' duties are to wait on His Majesty day and night and, just now, brush his 'one grenadier and one chasseur uniform' and 'a few shirts' – all the clothing he has brought with him.

There have been anxious moments. Yesterday evening Peyrusse had 'shared everybody's joy' when a line-of-battle ship outward bound for Sardinia from Leghorn – a single broadside from half her sixty-four guns could have blown them all out of the water – had sailed unsuspectingly past. Nor had one of the two French frigates forever tacking to and fro between Corsica and Elba, to prevent Napoleon's escape from his absurd little kingdom, suspected anything. And another brig, the Zephyr, had made so threateningly for them that all the troops had been told to lie down on deck and prepare to board her until she'd come within hailing distance of the Inconstant (the rest of the convoy had scattered for the crossing) and her master, recognising her, had merely asked through his loud-hailer where they were bound.

'For Genoa!'

'And how's The Man?'

'Marvellous!'

It had been at dawn the Italian coast had been sighted, then the French. Whereon Napoleon had told Marchand to replace the Elban cockade in his hat with a tricolour one and to pass it up to him through the hatch as he appeared on deck. It had also been at that moment the crimson-and-white Elban flag had been struck, and to the troops' 'delirious' enthusiasm the tricolour run up instead. 'The other vessels had rallied to us. They were told through the loud-hailer to hoist it.' Marchand had handed up the famous hat

'through the hatchway. It was the affair of an instant. The Emperor put it on. Such was the enthusiasm at the sight of this cockade, of the little hat with the colours of Austerlitz gleaming on it, that the Emperor, though he tried to speak, couldn't make a word heard. Indeed it'd be difficult to depict the joy, the enthusiasm, the tender feelings that manifested themselves on the brig.'

Ali too, presumably below deck, hears Pons de l'Hérault reading out the proclamation; and to Marchand, under the open hatch, it seems as if

'the vivats, the hand clappings, the stamping feet made such a noise as if all the brig's batteries were firing at once. It was delirium. Knowing the Guard had exhausted its rations, he ordered his maître d'hôtel to bring up the provisions laid in for his own household and had them shared out among the grenadiers.'

Why is the flotilla leaving Antibes' spacious harbour and rocky promontory to starboard and heading for the Lerin Islands instead? How much does Napoleon know about the state of affairs at Antibes? Is he intending to disembark on the long sandy beach at Cannes? Even if he knows the ancient Sainte Marguerite fort's guns, which normally could prevent it, have also been dismantled, it isn't easy to interpret the flotilla's movements, which must surely by now have given the alarm in Antibes? However this may be, at 9:00 am – doubtless to General Coursin's and his picnic guests' amazement, not to say dismay – the Inconstant, the tricolour flying from her gaff as it also is from all the other boats, comes under the island's lea and lowers her longboat.

Down into it climb an advance party of twenty-three Chasseurs and Grenadiers, commanded by Captain Lamouret, the Guard's senior captain. 'A strictly military man but highly esteemed' (Pons), his orders are to go on ahead, 'visit the coast, make verbal contact, and sound out the terrain', and, if possible, 'seize the citadel at Antibes'. Afterwards Napoleon, who never admits to making mistakes, will make Lamouret responsible for misunderstanding his orders. Is he already doing so? Ali sees how

'instead of making for the goal indicated, he orders his men to row for Antibes. Napoleon, astonished at such a manoeuvre against his will and order, has a gun fired to recall him: "Where are you off to, Captain?'"

By now General Coursin, faced with this 'unprecedented situation to which history offers no parallels', must be worried indeed and wishing he was at his post in Antibes and hoping that Cuneo d'Ornano has his wits about him.

Wading ashore on the short stony beach of the Le Canu promontory, not far from Cannes,Lamouret's party find the coast road lies only a few hundred yards away. Turning right, they've begun to march for Antibes when they run into no less a personage than the commander of the Cannes National Guard. In company with his wife and a borrowed donkey, 'Monsieur D — —' is on his way home after buying some olive groves. The flotilla has already been pointed out to him by a local naval official who, 'following the news that had been spread', had supposed it to be bringing invalids home from Elba. Last January a party of such invalids had come home. This news

'hadn't prevented Monsieur D from attending to his purchases and loading his olives on the donkey. It's in the midst of these domesticities he finds himself, his wife and the donkey arrested. Astonished by such unexpected treatment, he complains loudly and demands sharply to be set at liberty.'

Lamouret assures him it won't be for long. He must just wait for his two parties of soldiers to leave, one for Cannes the other for Antibes. And he tells him confidentially that his men have 'brought back the Emperor of France, where his return is so strongly desired, above all,' he adds, turning to Mme D, 'by the ladies.' 'At this word she almost fainted.' And a few minutes later Lamouret sets the couple at liberty, but 'not the donkey, which this troop kept for its own use.'

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "1815 The Return of Napoleon"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Paul Britten Austin.
Excerpted by permission of Pen and Sword Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations,
List of Maps,
Preface,
Chapter 1 'A Crazy Enterprise',
Chapter 2 A Furious Army,
Chapter 3 A Chapter of Errors,
Chapter 4 Through the Mountains,
Chapter 5 A Thunderclap,
Chapter 6 'If Any of You Wants to Kill His Emperor ...',
Chapter 7 Collapse of a Conspiracy,
Chapter 8 France's Second City,
Chapter 9 Changing Sides at Lons-le-Saulnier,
Chapter 10 Paris Talks, the Old Guard Marches,
Chapter 11 An Icy Reception,
Chapter 12 Hasty Departures,
Chapter 13 'It Seemed he'd Just Come Back from a Journey',
NOTES,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,