Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (55 page)

As the chambers debated whether to demand Napoleon’s abdication, Napoleon’s own advisers were encouraging him to send in the army and seize emergency power. Napoleon’s brother Lucien strongly urged this response. Napoleon thought it over in a hot bath, and then later that day in a walk through the palace gardens, while a small crowd outside the gates still shouted,
“Vive l’Empereur!”

On June 22, the French legislature demanded that Napoleon step down from the throne voluntarily or he would be removed. He had one hour to decide. Napoleon’s advisers did not agree on the response, though several still wanted him to march the army over to the legislature. Napoleon, this time, refused. “I have not returned to drench Paris in blood,” he said. At three o’clock that afternoon, Napoleon abdicated for a second time.

Chapter 33

S
HIFTING
S
AND

Finita la commedia.

—G
ENTZ, WRITING IN HIS DIARY THE LAST NIGHT OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE

N
ews of the victory at Waterloo traveled across Europe by courier, carriage, and pigeon. Souvenir hunters almost immediately descended onto the grim site. One was Lord Byron, who openly mourned the French emperor’s defeat—“damned sorry for it,” he was. Another curious visitor was Sir Walter Scott, who described what he saw:

The ground is still torn with the shot and shells, and covered with cartridges, old hats, and shoes, and various relics of the fray which the peasants have not thought worth removing.

There was everything from flowers for the slain to enterprising peasants claiming to have been with Napoleon and now offering guided tours. Swords, decorations, and other mementos were hawked at a nearby market. Sir Walter Scott bought two cuirasses.

As the leading powers behind the victory at Waterloo, the British and the Prussians were, no surprise, the first to reach Paris, and they would also play the most decisive role in determining the adjustments that would be made to Vienna’s Final Act. Napoleon’s escape from Elba had forced a revision of the terms of peace, at least for France, though the Allies were by no means agreed on what those changes would be. Napoleon’s return to power had lasted roughly a hundred days; the peace negotiations afterward would drag on for 133.

Paris during these four months would sometimes seem like a sedate reunion of the Vienna Congress. Most of the cast was back. Cafés, theaters, and the opera flourished, along with a new popular ballet about Waterloo. There were dinners at restaurants such as Beauvilliers, Robert’s, or Massinot’s, and gambling in the gilded halls of Frascati’s and Salon des Étrangers. One English captain in Paris that summer advised all players looking to make a fortune at the fashionable roulette tables to imagine that the entrance to these gambling chambers bore the inscription atop the gates of Dante’s hell: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

With some 150,000 soldiers in town, the elegant capital looked like a military camp. White tents of the British army lined the Champs-Élysées, stretching all the way to Napoleon’s still-unfinished Arc de Triomphe. Other contingents camped out in the grasses in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral, or in the Bois de Boulogne.

This army was needed for many functions, not least the supervision of the return of King Louis XVIII. Despite the widespread resistance, Britain had gotten its way, and the Bourbon king was restored a second time to the throne. This was done quickly, before any rival candidates had time to organize support and lobby effectively. Louis XVIII was returning with the Allied army, or, as critics said, “behind the scarlet uniforms freshly dyed in the crimson blood of Frenchmen.”

King Louis may have had a crown, a throne, and a guard again, but he did not yet rule. The capital was in a volatile state. French and Allied soldiers dueled and clashed, as did returning royalists and Bonapartists who refused to abandon their idol.

Castlereagh had returned from London for the diplomatic discussions, joining the Duke of Wellington to work closely again, as they had briefly in Vienna and more generally the previous several years. Both men would push for moderation, not wishing to saddle France with a vindictive peace that would only make matters worse for Louis XVIII and the future stability of the Continent.

The Prussians, on the other hand, disagreed. France was a “criminal country,” as Blücher put it, and should be punished accordingly. Some Prussian generals, swept up in a victory that had come so suddenly and completely, demanded a partition of France, claiming for themselves Alsace, Lorraine, Saarland, Savoy, Luxembourg, Franche-Comté, Flanders, and Burgundy, along with a reparations bill of 1.2 billion francs. Such excessive demands once again worried Hardenberg. “I find myself,” he sighed, “in the midst of Praetorian bands.”

On the way to the capital, the Prussian army had laid waste to the countryside, eager to avenge “the cruelties, the extortion, insults, and hard usage their own capital has suffered.” Reports of Prussian looting appalled the Allies: “The work of devastation I have no language to describe,” one said. They had stormed a château, and “not one article of furniture, from the costly pier-glass down to the common coffee-cup…was not smashed to atoms.” A mad dog in France was, for a long time, called a Blücher.

When the Prussian troops reached Paris, they showed no signs of mellowing. Blücher wanted to blow up the bridge Pont d’Iéna in central Paris, because the name commemorated one of Napoleon’s major victories over the Prussians in 1806. The field marshal had, in fact, mined the base and was about to order its detonation, when Talleyrand, in protest, threatened to come and sit on the bridge. Fine, Blücher said, remembering the French minister’s opposition in Vienna. He would hold off the detonation until Talleyrand had time to arrive.

The Duke of Wellington, however, intervened, calmed Blücher down, and, just to make sure, posted a British sentry on the bridge. Talleyrand, in the end, also helped diffuse the crisis, proposing to rename it Pont de l’École Militaire, and the bridge was saved (and later renamed Pont d’Iéna).

But Talleyrand was not exactly comforted by what he had seen so far. Arrogance, greed, abuse of power—hopefully, the behavior of the Great Powers was not an indication of how unsuccessful the congress had been. As Talleyrand knew, if the peacemakers had not established a just peace, Europe could count on “revolutions for the rest of our life.”

A
S THE
A
LLIES
settled into Paris for the negotiations, the question immediately arose about what to do with Napoleon. For the Prussians, the answer was simple: Send him to a firing squad. No doubt, had the Prussians captured Napoleon after Waterloo, he would have met such a demise. No doubt, too, they had not abandoned their hunt. Blücher’s orders were to capture Napoleon “dead or alive.”

There was still a chance that the former French emperor would rally his remaining supporters among the army and the people. The last remnants of the Waterloo army, under Marshal Grouchy, were reportedly on their way back from Belgium, and there was another force heading for the capital, after squashing a royalist rebellion in the west. The total strength was unknown, though some feared that it could be as high as 150,000 to 200,000 men. This was exaggerated, of course, but Napoleon could very well field a large enough army to make a final, bloody stand.

None of Napoleon’s enemies wanted to take any chances. A few days after the emperor’s abdication, the new leader of the provisional government, Joseph Fouché, had ordered Napoleon to leave the capital. Many historians believe that Fouché hoped that the Prussians would capture and dispose of him. At any rate, the former emperor duly headed out to Malmaison, the three-story château on the banks of the Seine where he had lived with his first wife, Joséphine, and spent some of his happiest days in his rise to power. Josephine died shortly after he had left for Elba. “Poor Joséphine,” he said, reminded of his early career, “I feel as if I ought to meet her at every turn.”

The Prussians, meanwhile, were closing in, and, by late June, they were reportedly in the vicinity of Malmaison. As the French government claimed it could no longer guarantee his safety, Napoleon was ordered out of France. He did, however, have one final request. Napoleon wanted to resume his position as general, rally the army, and defeat the invaders, who were then spread out thin and vulnerable to attack. He promised not to interfere anymore with politics. The offer was declined.

So Napoleon secretly left for the port of Rochefort on the west coast of France, hoping to find transport to the United States or, failing that, Mexico or South America. Two French frigates were waiting on him, he was told, and by the time he arrived, so were two British warships that had no intention of allowing Napoleon to escape.

Surrounded by his last loyal friends, many of them from Elba, Napoleon debated what to do. Should he attempt to race past the English warships? But even if he broke out initially, it would be difficult to outrun the Royal Navy and evade capture. Perhaps he could slip away undetected on board an American merchant ship like the one his brother Joseph had chartered, or under the flag of a neutral power. What about first leaving shore on a small, inconspicuous whale or fishing boat, and then, once at sea, switching over to a larger, friendly vessel? Many other possibilities were suggested, including smuggling Napoleon on board a ship in a barrel.

None of this, Napoleon concluded, was befitting the dignity of a man who once ruled the largest empire that Europe had ever known. Napoleon would instead appeal directly to British honor. Referring to the ancient Athenian general who beseeched King Artaxerxes after the Persian Wars, Napoleon wrote to the Prince Regent that he came, like Themistocles, to trust his fate to the hands of his most committed enemy. On the morning of July 15, Napoleon boarded the HMS
Bellerophon
and surrendered.

For months, politicians and the people alike had debated what to do with Napoleon, and now, all of a sudden, Britain had him. Many clamored for vengeance. Editors of the London
Times
had wanted Napoleon hanged; the Prussians preferred a firing squad. Some thought that the “Corsican ogre” should be locked up in the Tower of London or the Fort St. George, or even shuffled off with other criminals to Botany Bay. Yet another suggestion was simply turning him over to the French government for trial, though many rightly feared that the new government would be far too shaky to pull that off.

By the end of July, Britain had made its decision—and it was Britain’s decision, as the Allies had recently agreed to hand over the entire responsibility to it. Napoleon would not be executed or imprisoned on the British Isles. Nor would he be given asylum, as he clearly had hoped; that was far too risky. The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, had concluded that Napoleon, already an object of curiosity, might soon be popular and dangerous, a source of unrest and rallying point for the Continent’s disillusioned. No one wanted to fight another Waterloo.

Napoleon was furious when the British undersecretary of state announced his fate on July 31: He was to be banished to St. Helena in the South Atlantic. He had been tricked, he protested. He accused (probably unjustly) Captain Frederick Maitland of the HMS
Bellerophon
of promising him asylum in Britain, and denounced the treachery, but there was nothing he could do. The former emperor was transferred to the HMS
Northumberland,
a seventy-four-gun ship that would carry him into exile. It would be a ten-week voyage to the tiny volcanic island some 1,800 miles east of Brazil and 1,200 miles west of Angola. Its nearest neighbor, 700 miles away, was not even a dot on the map.

W
HILE
B
ONAPARTE WAS
being removed, and the Bourbon dynasty restored, the Allies debated the future of France. It would take the rest of the summer and most of the autumn. One of the most high-profile controversies raged over the artwork stolen during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Frustrated with the slow process of negotiation, however, the Prussians were not waiting on the diplomats to decide on the matter. Only days after arriving in the capital, some troops stormed into the Louvre and started removing the works of art that Napoleon had stolen, or that they claimed had been stolen. Were all those Raphaels and Titians being yanked down from the walls really from Prussian collections? What about the portraits of Napoleon and the Bonaparte family that Marshal Blücher personally requested?