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Since the Congress of Erfurt, the Russian emperor had shown himself less and less inclined to deal with Napoleon as a trusted partner. In the spring of 1812, therefore, Napoleon massed his forces in Poland to intimidate Alexander. After some last attempts at agreement, in late June his Grande Armée—about 600,000 men, including contingents extorted from Prussia and from Austria—began to cross the Niemen River. The Russians retreated, adopting a “scorched earth” policy. Napoleon's army did not reach the approaches to Moscow until the beginning of September. The Russian commander in chief, Mikhail I. Kutuzov, engaged it at Borodino on September 7. The fight was savage, bloody, and indecisive, but a week later Napoleon entered Moscow, which the Russians had abandoned. On that same day, a huge fire broke out, destroying the greater part of the town. Moreover, Alexander unexpectedly refused to treat with Napoleon. Withdrawal was necessary, and the premature onset of winter made it disastrous. After the difficult crossing of the Berezina River in November, fewer than 10,000 men fit for combat remained with Napoleon's main force.
This catastrophe heartened all the peoples of Europe to defy Napoleon. In Germany the news unleashed an outbreak of anti-French demonstrations. The Prussian contingents deserted the Grande Armée in December and turned against the French. The Austrians also withdrew their troops and adopted an increasingly hostile attitude, and in Italy the people began to turn their backs on Napoleon.
Even in France, signs of discontent with the regime were becoming more frequent. In Paris a malcontent general nearly succeeded in carrying out a coup d'etat after announcing, on October 23, 1812, that Napoleon had died in Russia. This incident was a major factor in Napoleon's decision to hasten back to France ahead of the Grande Armée. Arriving in Paris on December 18, he proceeded to stiffen the dictatorship, to raise money by various expedients, and to levy new troops.
Thus, in 1813 the forces arrayed against France were no longer armies of mercenaries but were those of nations fighting for their freedom as the French had fought for theirs in 1792 and 1793; and the French themselves, for all their courage, had lost their former enthusiasm. The Emperor's ideal of conquest was no longer that of the nation.
In May 1813 Napoleon won some successes against the Russians and Prussians at the battles of Lützen and Bautzen, but his decimated army needed reinforcements. The armed mediation of Austria induced Napoleon to agree to an armistice, during which a congress was held at Prague. There, Austria proposed very favourable conditions: the French Empire was to return to its natural limits; the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and the Confederation of the Rhine were to be dissolved; and Prussia was to return to its frontiers of 1805. Napoleon made the mistake of hesitating too long. The congress closed on August 10 before his reply arrived, and Austria declared war.
The French were even worse off than in the spring. The allies were gaining new troops every day, as one German contingent after another left Napoleon to go over to the other side. The greatest debacle since Napoleon came to power was the Battle of Leipzig, or “Battle of the Nations” (October 16–19, 1813), in which the Grande Armée was torn to shreds. That defeat degenerated fast into collapse. The French armies in Spain, forced to retreat, had been defeated in June; and by October the British were attacking their defenses north of the Pyrenees. In Italy the Austrians took the offensive, crossed the Adige River, and occupied Romagna. Murat, now openly a traitor to the Emperor who had made him king of Naples, entered into negotiations with the Viennese court. The Dutch and the Belgians demonstrated against Napoleon.
Downfall and abdication
In January 1814 France was being attacked on all its frontiers. The allies cleverly announced that they were fighting not against the French people but against Napoleon alone, since in November 1813 he had rejected the terms offered by the Austrian foreign minister Metternich, which would have preserved the natural frontiers of France. The extraordinary strategic feats achieved by the Emperor during the first three months of 1814 with the army of young conscripts were not enough; he could neither defeat the allies, with their overwhelming numerical superiority, nor arouse the majority of French people from their resentful torpor. The Legislative Assembly and the Senate, formerly so docile, were now asking for peace and for civil and political liberties.
By the Treaty of Chaumont of March 1814, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain bound themselves together for 20 years, undertook not to negotiate separately, and promised to continue the struggle until Napoleon was overthrown. When the allied armies arrived before Paris on March 30, Napoleon had moved east to attack their rear guard. The Parisian authorities, no longer overawed by the Emperor, lost no time in treating with the allies. As president of the provisional government, Talleyrand proclaimed the deposition of the Emperor and, without consulting the French people, began to negotiate with Louis XVIII, the brother of the executed Louis XVI. Napoleon had only reached Fontainebleau when he heard that Paris had capitulated. Persuaded that further resistance was useless, he finally abdicated on April 6.
By the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the allies granted him the island of Elba as a sovereign principality with an annual income of 2,000,000 francs to be provided by France and a guard of 400 volunteers; also, he retained the title of emperor. After unsuccessfully trying to poison himself, Napoleon spoke his farewell to his “Old Guard,” and after a hazardous journey, during which he narrowly escaped assassination, he arrived at Elba on May 4.
Elba and the Hundred Days
“I want from now on to live like a justice of the peace,” Napoleon declared on his little island. But a man of such energy and imagination could hardly be expected to resign himself to defeat at the age of 45.
In France, moreover, the Bourbon Restoration was soon exposed to criticism. Though in 1814 the majority of the French people were tired of the Emperor, they had expressed no wish for the return of the Bourbons. They were strongly attached to the essential achievements of the Revolution, and Louis XVIII had come back “in the baggage train of the foreigners” with the last surviving émigrés who had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” and whose influence seemed to threaten most of the Revolution's achievements. The apathy of April 1814 quickly gave way to mistrust. Old hatreds were revived, resistance organized, and conspiracies formed.
From Elba, Napoleon kept a close watch on the Continent. He knew that some of the diplomats at Vienna, where a congress was deciding the fate of Europe, considered Elba, between Corsica and Italy, too close to France and to Italy and wanted to banish him to a distant island in the Atlantic. Also, he accused Austria of preventing Marie Louise and his son from coming to join him (in fact, she had taken a lover and had no intention of going to live with her husband). Finally, the French government refused to pay Napoleon's allowance so that he was in danger of being reduced to penury.
All these considerations drove Napoleon to action. Decisive as ever, he returned to France like a thunderbolt. On March 1, 1815, he landed at Cannes with a detachment of his guard. As he crossed the Alps, the republican peasants rallied round him, and near Grenoble he won over the soldiers dispatched to arrest him. On March 20 he was in Paris.
Napoleon was brought back to power as the embodiment of the spirit of the Revolution rather than as the emperor who had fallen a year before. To rally the mass of Frenchmen to his cause he should have allied himself with the Jacobins; but this he dared not do. Unable to escape from the bourgeoisie whose predominance he himself had assured and who feared above all else a revival of the socialist experiments of 1793 and 1794, he could only set up a political regime scarcely distinguishable from that of Louis XVIII. Enthusiasm ebbed fast, and the Napoleonic adventure seemed a dead end.
To oppose the allied troops massing on the frontiers, Napoleon mustered an army with which he marched into Belgium and defeated the Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815. Two days later, at Waterloo, he met the British under Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular War. A savage battle followed. Napoleon was in sight of victory when the Prussians under Gebhard Blücher arrived to reinforce the British, and soon, despite the heroism of the Old Guard, Napoleon was overthrown.
Back in Paris, Parliament forced Napoleon to abdicate; he did so, in favour of his son, on June 22, 1815. On July 3 he was at Rochefort, intending to take ship for the United States, but a British squadron prevented any French vessel from leaving the port. Napoleon then decided to appeal to the British government for protection. His request granted, he boarded the “Bellerophon” on July 15. The allies were agreed on one point: Napoleon was not to go back to Elba. Nor did they like the idea of his going off to America. It would have suited them if he had fallen a victim to the “White Terror” of the returned counter-revolutionaries or if Louis XVIII had had him summarily tried and executed. Great Britain had no choice but to send him to detention in a far-off island. The British government announced that the island of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic had been chosen for his residence; because of its remote position Napoleon would enjoy much greater freedom than would be possible elsewhere. Napoleon protested eloquently: “I appeal to history!”
Exile on Saint Helena
On October 15, 1815, Napoleon disembarked in Saint Helena with those followers who were voluntarily accompanying him into exile: Gen. Henri-Gratien Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace, and his wife; the comte Charles de Montholon, aide-de-camp, and his wife; Gen. Gaspard Gourgaud; Emmanuel Las Cases, the former chamberlain; and several servants. After a short stay at the house of a wealthy English merchant, they moved to Longwood, originally built for the lieutenant governor.
Napoleon settled down to a life of routine. He got up late, breakfasting about 10 AM, but seldom went out. He was free to go anywhere on the island so long as he was accompanied by an English officer, but he soon refused to comply with this condition and so shut himself up in the grounds of Longwood. He wrote and talked much. At first Las Cases acted as his secretary, compiling what was later to be the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (first published in 1823). From 7 to 8 PM Napoleon had dinner, after which a part of the evening was spent in reading aloud—Napoleon liked to hear the classics. Then they played cards. About midnight Napoleon went to bed. Some of his time was devoted to learning English, and he eventually began reading English newspapers; but he also had a large number of French books sent from Europe, which he read attentively and annotated.
Saint Helena has a healthful climate, and Napoleon's food was good, carefully prepared, and plentiful. His inactivity undoubtedly contributed to the deterioration of his health. The man who for 20 years had played so great a role in the world and who had marched north, south, east, and west across Europe could hardly be expected to endure the monotony of existence on a little island, aggravated by a self-imposed life of a recluse. He had also more intimate reasons for unhappiness: Marie-Louise sent no word to him, and he may have learned of her liaison with the Austrian officer appointed to watch over her, Graf Adam von Neipperg (whom she eventually married in secret without waiting for Napoleon's death); nor did he have any news of his son, the former king of Rome, who was now living in Vienna with the title of duke of Reichstadt. Finally, though the severity of Sir Hudson Lowe has been much exaggerated, it is certain that this “jailer,” who arrived as governor of Saint Helena in April 1816, did nothing to make Napoleon's life easier. Napoleon from the start disliked him as the former commander of the Corsican rangers, a band of volunteers largely composed of enemies of the Bonaparte family. Always anxious to carry out his instructions exactly, Lowe came into conflict with Las Cases. He saw Las Cases as Napoleon's confidant and had him arrested and expelled. Thenceforward, relations between the governor and Napoleon were limited strictly to those stipulated by the regulations.
Napoleon showed the first signs of illness at the end of 1817; he seems to have had an ulcer or a cancer of the stomach. The Irish doctor Barry O'Meara, having asked in vain for a change in the conditions under which Napoleon lived, was dismissed; so also was his successor John Stokoe, who was likewise thought to be well-disposed toward Napoleon. The undistinguished Corsican doctor who took their place, Francesco Antommarchi, prescribed a treatment that could do nothing to cure his patient. It is uncertain, however, whether Napoleon's disease was curable at all, even by 20th-century methods.
From the beginning of 1821, the illness became rapidly worse. From March, Napoleon was confined to bed. In April he dictated his last will:
I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French people which I have loved so much. . . . I die before my time, killed by the English oligarchy and its hired assassins.
On May 5 he spoke a few coherent phrases: “My God . . . The French nation . . . my son . . . head of the army. . . . ” He died at 5:49 PM on that day, not yet 52 years old. His body was dressed in his favourite uniform, that of the Chasseurs de la Garde, covered by the gray overcoat that he had worn at Marengo. The funeral was conducted simply, but with due propriety, in the Rupert Valley, where Napoleon had sometimes walked, beside a stream in which two willows were reflected. The stone covering his tomb bore no name, only the words “Ci-Gît” (“Here Lies”).
The Napoleonic legend
Napoleon's fall had set loose a torrent of hostile books designed to sully his reputation. One of the least violent of these was the pamphlet De Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes légitimes (1814; On Buonaparte and the Bourbons, and the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes, for the Safety of France and of Europe) by François de Chateaubriand, a well-known writer of royalist sympathies. But this anti-Napoleonic literature soon died down, while the task of defending Napoleon was taken up. Lord Byron had published his “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte” as early as 1814; the German poet Heinrich Heine wrote his ballad “Die Grenadiere”; and in 1817 the French novelist Stendhal began his biography Vie de Napoléon. At the same time, the Emperor's most faithful supporters were working toward his rehabilitation, talking about him, and distributing reminders of him, including engravings. They idealized his life (“What a novel my life is!” he himself had said) and began to create the Napoleonic legend.
As soon as the Emperor was dead, the legend grew rapidly. Memoirs, notes, and narratives by those who had followed him into exile contributed substantially to it. In 1822 Dr. O'Meara, in London, had his Napoleon in Exile, or a Voice from Saint Helena published; in 1823 the publication of the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France sous Napoléon, écrits à Sainte-Hélène sous sa dictée (Memoirs of the History of France during the Reign of Napoleon, Dictated by the Emperor at St. Helena) by Montholon and Gourgaud, began; Las Cases, in his famous Mémorial, presented the Emperor as a republican opposed to war who had fought only when Europe forced him to fight in defense of freedom; and in 1825 Antommarchi published his Derniers moments de Napoléon. Thereafter the number of works in Napoleon's honour increased continually; among them were Victor Hugo's “Ode à la Colonne,” the 28 volumes of the Victoires et conquêtes des Français, and Sir Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. Neither police action nor prosecutions could prevent books, pictures, and objects evoking the imperial saga from multiplying in France.
After the July Revolution of 1830, which created the bourgeois monarchy under Louis-Philippe, thousands of tricolour flags appeared in windows, and the government had not only to tolerate the growth of the legend but even to promote it. In 1833 the statue of Napoleon was put back on the top of the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris; and in 1840 the King's son François, prince de Joinville, was sent in a warship to fetch the Emperor's remains from Saint Helena to the banks of the Seine in accordance with his last wishes. A magnificent funeral was held in Paris in December 1840, and Napoleon's body was conveyed through the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l'Étoile to entombment under the dome of the Invalides.
Napoleon's nephew Louis-Napoleon exploited the legend in order to seize power in France. Though his attempts at Strasbourg in 1836 and at Boulogne in 1840 were failures, it was chiefly because of the growth of the legend that he won election to the presidency of the Second Republic with an overwhelming majority in 1848 and was able to carry out the coup d'etat of December 1851 and make himself emperor in 1852.
The disastrous end of the Second Empire in 1870 damaged the Napoleonic legend and gave rise to a new anti-Napoleonic literature, best represented by Hippolyte Taine's Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–94). World Wars I and II, however, together with the experience of the 20th-century dictatorships, made it possible to judge Napoleon more fairly. Any comparison with Stalin or Hitler, for instance, can only be to Napoleon's advantage. He was tolerant, he released the Jews from the ghettoes, and he showed respect for human life. Brought up on the rationalist Encyclopédie and on the writings of the Philosophes of the Enlightenment, he remained above all a man of the 18th century, the last of the “enlightened despots.” One of the gravest accusations made against Napoleon is that he was the “Corsican ogre” who sacrificed millions of men to his ambition. Precise calculations show that the Napoleonic Wars of 1800–15 cost France itself about 500,000 men; i.e., about one-sixtieth of the population. The loss of these young men, furthermore, seems to have had a notably adverse effect on the birth rate.
The social structure of France changed little under the First Empire. It remained roughly what the Revolution had made it: a great mass of peasants comprising three-quarters of the population—about half of them working owners of their farms or sharecroppers and the other half with too little land for their own subsistence and hiring themselves out as labourers. Industry, stimulated by the war and the blockade of English goods, made remarkable progress in northern and eastern France, whence exports could be sent to central Europe; but it declined in the south and west because of the closing of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The great migrations from rural areas toward industry in the towns began only after 1815. The nobility would probably have declined more swiftly if Napoleon had not restored it; but it could never recover its former privileges.
Above all, Napoleon left durable institutions, the “granite masses” on which modern France has been built up: the administrative system of the prefects, the Code Napoléon, the judicial system, the Banque de France and the country's financial organization, the universities, and the military academies. Napoleon changed the history of France and of the world.
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