Napoleon boldly returns to France
The military leader lands on French soil to retake power
By the last week in February 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte had been in exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba for more than nine months. Europe was at peace, and the campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars were a fading memory. Yet in Vienna, where the major powers were redrawing the bloodstained map of Europe, tempers were fraying. In France, too, under the Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII, there were already hints of unrest at the restoration of the old order. But surely nothing could go seriously wrong – could it?
And then, on 1 March, something extraordinary happened on the south coast of France. Napoleon – who had escaped from Elba on the brig Inconstant – landed in the seaside village of Golfe-Juan, between Cannes and Antibes, with a thousand men. *e issueF a Fefiant proclamation asserting his right to rule.
“Frenchmen!” he declared. “In my exile I have heard your complaints and your desires: you were claiming that government of your choice, which alone is legitimate. You were complaining of my long sleep, you reproacheF me with sacrificing to my own repose the great interests of the fatherland… I have crossed the seas in the midst of perils of every sort; I arrive among you in order to reclaim my rights, which are yours.”
+t seemeF the stuʘ of a novel the stuʘ of fantasy. But it was real. The Bourbons sent troops south, but Napoleon seemed unstoppable. First Antibes fell, then Cannes. On
|/arch in the village of .aʘrey the army at last caught up with him.
“Soldiers, do you recognise me?” Napoleon cried. “If there is one among you who wishes to kill your emperor, here I am!”
After a long silence, one musket clattered to the ground, then another, then another. First one soldier was shouting: “Vive l’Empereur!” – then they were all shouting it.
Napoleon smiled. “It’s over,” he said. “In eight days, we shall be in Paris.”
Like all good revolutions, the Hungarian uprising of 1848 began in a coʘeehouse. The place’s name was Pilvax, and it looked exactly as a Pest cafe should: pillars, arches, newspapers, men smoking in the corners. And it was here, on 15 March, that Sándor Pet fi and his fellow radicals gathered, wearing red-white-andgreen ribbons on their lapels, to mark their support for Hungarian freedom.
For Pet fi, a 25-year-old poet, Hungary had chafed for too long under the rule of the remote Habsburg emperor. The radical had co-written a list of 12 demands, including a devolved Hungarian government, a free press, a national bank and a national army. In a nod to the French Revolution 60 years earlier, the document ended with the powerful words: “Equality, liberty, brotherhood!”
As the young revolutionaries left the cafe, they carried copies of these Twelve Points. Ranging across the city, they forceF printers to run oʘ more copies so they could read them to the crowds. Soon hundreds of people were joining them, then thousands. At last they reached the newly built National Museum, and here Pet fi seized his moment.
Before a giant crowd, he began to recite his most recent poem, National Song: “On your feet, Magyar, the homeland calls! The time is here, now or never!
Shall we De slaves or free!
This is the question, choose your answer! By the God of the Hungarians
We vow,
We vow, that we will be slaves No longer!”
Needless to say, the crowd loved it.
A little later, the huge throng surged across the Danube via a pontoon bridge to Buda, then a separate city. Here they gathered outsiFe the *aDsDurg governor’s oʛce demanding that he acquiesce to the demands. The governor was no fool; he said yes. More good news followed two days later, as the emperor agreed that Hungary could have its own government.
So far, not a single drop of blood had been spilled. It didn’t last.