The new regime’s treatment of the military was particularly wrongheaded as well as unjust. The appointment as Minister of War of the despised General Dupont, who had capitulated to the British at Bailén in 1808, was one of many public insults to the army. Marshal Davout, the most distinguished and respectable of Napoleon’s lieutenants, was exiled from Paris. The inevitable redundancies resulting from the reduction of the size of the army were bound to be unpopular. That the Imperial Guard and those who had distinguished themselves over the past decades were specifically targeted only made
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