Napoleon’s LAST STAND
From prison break to war with Wellington, inside the exiled emperor’s 100-day return to power
Napoleon Bonaparte was a man whose vaulting ambition saw him conquer Europe – but it would also be his downfall. In just over 100 days, the ‘Nightmare of Europe’ would escape from prison with a small band of brothers and reconquer France, prompting all the great powers of Europe to unite together to bring him down once and for all.
Lasting from 1804 to 1814, Napoleon built an empire that covered vast swathes of the continent and by 1810 it was easier to list the regions he didn’t dominate – Portugal, Sicily, Sardinia, and the British, Russian and Ottoman Empires. This was not bad for the ‘Petit Corporal’ from Corsica, who only secured a commission in the French artillery in 1787.
Napoleon enjoyed a series of accelerated promotions as a result of the French Revolution. By early 1796, he was the commander of all the French forces manning the Italian frontier. Gifted with extraordinary tactical genius, he won a string of great victories that knocked both Austria and Piedmont out of the War of the First Coalition. Similar success in Cairo fighting the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798, during a doomed attempt to conquer Egypt, cemented his reputation as one of Revolutionary France’s greatest heroes.
However, while Napoleon was enjoying these personal victories, France as a whole was struggling.
“With his back to the wall, Napoleon fought bravely but the odds against him were just too high”
While he was off gallivanting in Egypt, Austria and Russia had rejoined the War of the Second Coalition and had retaken Italy. It was clear that France needed a much stronger government than the one that had emerged from the bloody chaos of the Revolution.
Seeking to fill the void, Napoleon, an extremely determined young man who had been dreaming of taking power for some time, set himself up as a de facto dictator in November 1799. Over the next year, he remodelled France and forced all of its opponents to make peace. Though hostilities with Britain would resume in 1803, the next year he was rewarded by the tame political system he had created with the title of Emperor of the French.
Over the next few years, the French armies secured unprecedented success and the result was that France remained complicit. With their social position both respected and protected by the state, the propertied classes had no reason to oppose Napoleon, while the populace as a whole were mollified by a measure of economic prosperity. Additionally, though levels of conscription were still relatively heavy, they were not unreasonable. By 1807, the French Empire was greatly expanded. This included areas annexed to France and ruled directly from Paris, and satellite states that were often ruled by one of the emperor’s many relatives, such as Spain under his brother Joseph.
However, victory turned Napoleon’s head and he increasingly began to overreach himself. As his desire for power and glory increased, so did his demands for men and money. Meanwhile, all the powers of Europe were driven into a position in which they had no option but to fight him. The wars dragged on interminably with little sign of any sort of lasting peace. The elites and populace alike became increasingly unhappy with their emperor – and all the more so when a series of mistakes on the part of Napoleon precipitated a general economic crisis, which had terrible effects on living standards for ordinary people.
Beaten first in Russia in 1812 and then in Germany in 1813, the French were facing invasion by 1814. With his back to the wall, Napoleon fought bravely but the odds against him were just too high, while the system of conscription broke down in the face of a wholesale refusal to obey the regime or to implement its policies. Within weeks, it was all over. Napoleon was finally forced to surrender to his enemies on 6 April 1814.
In theory, this should have been the end of the story. Napoleon was exiled to the tiny
Mediterranean island of Elba and given a position as its king, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored to France in the person of Louis XVIII. Meanwhile, the powers of Europe met in a great congress at Vienna in which they attempted not to turn the clock back to 1789, but to build a new system of international relations instead. On the one hand, it would ensure that France couldn’t embark on any more acts of aggression and, on the other, it would make sure that Europe didn’t slide back into the endless dynastic conflicts that had plagued the 18th century.
Watching from afar, the fallen Napoleon was not treated especially harshly in the wake of his defeat. With him went roughly 600 soldiers drawn from the Imperial Guard, and he was given complete freedom of movement as he was left almost entirely unsupervised on the peaceful and picturesque Italian island.
For Napoleon, however, confinement to so small a sphere was torture. The French government also afforded him a legitimate grievance by failing to pay the pension that had been granted to him. Many stories reached him of massive public discontent with the new regime so at the end of February 1815, he decided to return to France and restore himself to glory.
His prison break was somewhat anticlimactic as there was not a single guard to stop him. Though there was normally a British agent – Sir Neil Campbell – assigned to watch over Napoleon, he had left Elba to travel to Florence on 16 February, allegedly to visit his mistress. Ten days later, Napoleon set sail on board a small brig called L’inconstant along with his imperial guard.
There followed the so-called ‘flight of the eagle’. According to legend, the erstwhile emperor returned to a hero’s welcome in France but the truth may actually have been a little less romantic. When he landed on the French coast on 1 March, he was initially denied entrance to the town of Antibes and could supposedly only find two people to volunteer for his cause.
However, in a somewhat famous episode where Napoleon dared a unit blocking the road to fire upon him, the garrison of Grenoble actually decided to join him on 5 March. The city of Lyons – a place that the emperor had always favoured when in power – also welcomed his arrival with great excitement just five days later.
“Confinement to so small a sphere was torture”
Most astonishingly of all, despite having promised Louis XVIII to bring Napoleon back to Paris in an iron cage, Marshal Ney pledged his allegiance to Napoleon along with his 6,000 men when they finally met at Auxerre on 18 March. Taken against his better judgement, it was a decision that was to eventually cost Ney his life.
Having received reports of Napoleon’s growing support, Louis XVIII fled Paris on 20 March. Napoleon arrived just a few hours later, taking up residence at the Tuileries Palace. After being greeted by a large crowd of officers, they all celebrated well into the night.
Napoleon’s ability to win over the army was to be expected. Some of the soldiers had been driven to fury by the restored monarchy’s treatment of the military. Many officers who had once fought bravely for Napoleon had been placed on half-pay by the Bourbons in favour of aristocrats who had fled abroad in the wake of the Revolution – and they had fought for France’s enemies to boot. However, regaining power over everyone else would prove to be trickier.
Popular responses to Napoleon’s grandiose return were muted. While some areas that had done well out of Napoleon felt a measure of enthusiasm as they had particular reason to resent the Bourbons or had suffered the full brunt of the invasions of 1814, news of his return elsewhere was greeted with a mixture of fear, horror and armed resistance.
In an attempt to win over public opinion, Napoleon claimed to be a champion of the Revolution against reaction and he proposed a new liberal constitution but his every effort fell on deaf ears and was often badly bungled. For example, the so-called ceremony of the Champ de Mai, held on 1 June 1815, was supposed to be a great celebration of the new constitution.
It was bad enough that this was clearly an attempt to restore the institutions of the empire in a more liberal guise. To add insult to injury, the very name ‘Champ de Mai’ was unfortunate as it originally referred to assemblies of nobles called by Charlemagne and other Medieval monarchs when they wished to pacify subjects who might otherwise have become rebellious.
It’s hard to tell what Napoleon thought he could achieve by returning to France. Take power in Paris though he might, there was really no realistic chance of the European powers actually leaving him in peace. They had all made effort after effort to come to terms with him prior to 1814 only to find that his demands were just too outrageous or that their friendships with the emperor brought little or nothing in the way of benefits for them. Napoleon was quickly declared an international
“Napoleon claimed to be a champion of the Revolution against reaction and he proposed a new liberal constitution”
outlaw and as a result, preparations were afoot for a massive invasion of France within a matter of days. Against such odds, there was little chance of Napoleon achieving victory.
It was quite clear that however unpopular
Louis XVIII had been, the French people were in no mood to see the return of a ruler who was associated with both economic disaster and war without end. With conscription out of the question, Napoleon was forced to rely on the services of the much-reduced army that had been in his service when he escaped from Elba.
The only men who were mobilised for military service were the militia, the National Guard and the many thousands of soldiers who had been sent home in 1814 on the understanding that they could be called up once again if they were needed in the event of war. Even so, this should have given the emperor an army of approximately 500,000 men but in the event, fewer than one-third of those who should have put in an appearance seemed to turn up. Thus, Napoleon was left with a force of only half that number.
In this situation, his only option was to strike a rapid blow against the nearest enemy in the hope that a great victory would be obtained that would frighten his foes into making peace. In truth, this was a slim hope. On 15 June 1815, he invaded Belgium with the idea of catching the forces there unawares, as these troops were the most vulnerable to attack.
In the firing line were two separate armies, namely the duke of Wellington’s Army of the Netherlands – a polyglot collection of troops from Britain, Holland and various minor German states – and Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussian Army of the Lower Rhine. Neither force was of particularly good quality and individually they were both smaller than Napoleon’s 125,000-strong Army of the North. In consequence, the emperor planned to defeat them separately by getting between them and hitting each one before they could unite and overwhelm him by the sheer weight of their combined numbers.
As an operational plan this was very good but it was badly executed. Units took wrong turnings, failed to move at the appointed time or became jammed in the narrow country lanes leading to the frontier. Fortunately for the French, the situation was not at its best in the Allied camp either. For ease of subsisting the troops, the armies of Wellington and Blücher were spread over a wide expanse of southern Belgium and the two commanders were not expecting an attack so soon. That night, Wellington was at a ball hosted by the duchess of Richmond where he and many other key officers enjoyed the free-flowing wine.
Hampered by poor staff-work, however, the French could not take advantage of their opponents’ disarray. Initial success against the Prussians in particular was squandered, and Wellington and Blücher managed to reach safety a few kilometres south of Brussels – close enough to support one another with ease. Napoleon’s master plan had failed.
The climax of the campaign came on the morning of Sunday 18 June. Having followed Wellington with the bulk of his forces, Napoleon needed to crush him before the Prussians arrived to help him but heavy rainfall the day before meant that much of his army had not yet arrived. It was nearly midday before his forces finally got into action and even when they did, they found that Wellington had chosen a very strong position in the form of a long ridge studded with a number of stoutly built farms. Every attempt at attack was soundly defeated.
All this time, exactly as he had promised, Blücher’s army had been marching to the sound of the guns and at around 4.30pm, large numbers of Prussian soldiers started pouring onto the field on the emperor’s right flank. From then on, increasing numbers of French troops had to be diverted to hold off Blücher. Success against Wellington became even harder to attain. One last attack by the Imperial Guard having been beaten off, the onset of evening saw the Prussian pressure simply become too great. The defensive line that had been established to hold them back was not just breached, but swept away.
This was the end – within a matter of minutes, the whole French army had collapsed. The only troops who put up any sort of fight were a few battalions of the Imperial Guard that had remained in reserve. Indeed, such was the disorder that it was only with the greatest difficulty that Napoleon evaded capture at the hands of the
“a man whose ambition and lust for glory had made the entire continent run with blood”
vengeful Prussians. He skulked away to begin to contemplate his next move.
Such was the battle of Waterloo. Deposed by the government he had left behind in Paris, Napoleon eventually surrendered to the British on 15 July, who promptly sent him into perpetual exile on the distant island of Saint Helena. He spent the rest of his life blaming Marshal Emmanuel Grouchy, who had blundered on the battlefield, for his defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon refused to realise that Grouchy, who had ended the day fighting the Prussian rearguard at Wavre, could not have reached him in time to make any real difference even had he tried to do so. Behind him, meanwhile, the emperor left a battlefield strewn with tens of thousands of casualties. Even in the two World Wars, such a scene of horror was rarely equalled but some might argue that it was a price worth paying for ridding Europe of a man whose ambition and lust for glory had made the entire continent run with blood.
In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Napoleon found himself imprisoned in far worse conditions than he had ever endured on Elba – his house, for example, was damp and overrun with rats. Even France suffered much harsher treatment than it had been subjected to in 1814, having both to pay a large indemnity and to endure three years of military occupation.
What is more, Louis XVIII was restored to the throne and was succeeded by his far less politically savvy brother, Charles X, in 1824.
Even so, it was not until 1830 that the House of Bourbon was removed from the French throne for good. Perhaps this was proof of just how exaggerated the rumours of popular discontent were, the very same ones that had persuaded Napoleon to embark on his prison break – an adventure that was never far short of crazy.