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May 18 - June 2, 2022
On 24 February the case of the Order of Malta was considered. The Sovereign Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem, based in the holy city in the twelfth century, had been obliged to move its headquarters to the island of Rhodes after the fall of the crusader state. It had been forced out of there by the Turks, and fell back once more, to the island of Malta, donated to the Order in 1530 by the King of Spain,
In 1798 the knights surrendered to General Bonaparte on his way to Egypt, but in 1800 the island was captured by the British. It was clear to all that, legitimacy notwithstanding, Britain was not going to give up such a pre-eminent naval base as Malta to anyone.
The Swedish plenipotentiary Löwenhielm suggested Spain give the Order the island of Minorca. The indignant Labrador retorted that the Order had proved itself so cowardly that it did not deserve to be given anything. But, he continued, Spain might consider such a gift if Britain were to return Malta itself to its original owner, Spain. He went on to suggest that if Britain was so keen on keeping the island, it should compensate the Order with a plot in Ireland.
Parma and its two dependent duchies had been promised to Marie-Louise by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, and as she was the daughter of the Emperor Francis that meant they would remain within the Austrian sphere of influence. But there was a question mark over what would happen after her death, as most of the allies were adamant that Napoleon’s son should never ascend a throne, however insignificant.
The interests of Britain and France converged at almost every point in Italy, yet Castlereagh and Liverpool so mistrusted Talleyrand that they conducted their own talks on the subject of Italy with Louis XVIII and his First Minister, the comte de Blacas. They encouraged the latter’s jealousy of Talleyrand and achieved nothing but a confusion of the issues, which Castlereagh aggravated by also cutting Talleyrand out of his discussions with Metternich on the subject.
It then turned its attention to the matter of how to combine the many individual agreements reached into one coherent final act; after what seemed like an interminable discussion a Drafting Committee was nominated, under the direction of La Besnardière, Anstett and Gentz.
At the ungodly hour of 6 o’clock on that same morning, 7 March 1815, Metternich was shaken awake by his valet Giroux. A courier had arrived at the door with a despatch marked ‘urgent’, so Giroux had decided to wake his master, in spite of having been told to let him sleep late. Metternich took one look at the envelope, which was marked: ‘From the I[mperial] & R[oyal] Consulate General in Genoa’. He laid it on his bedside table and turned over to go back to sleep. But, having been disturbed, he slept fitfully, and at 7.30 he reached over and opened the envelope. It contained the briefest of
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it was still not clear where Napoleon was headed, or what he intended to do. Even counting the volunteers who had joined him on Elba, he only had about a thousand men with him, so he did not represent much of a military threat as such. He might be bound for Naples, where he would find Murat with an army ready and waiting for him, or for France, where his reception was more doubtful.
The implications were indeed alarming. If Napoleon were to land at Naples, as most people surmised, he might, with the use of Murat’s army, be able to raise the whole of Italy and threaten Austria. Austria’s freedom of action against him would be severely limited by considerations of the position Russia and Prussia might take. Although tension had eased in recent weeks, there was still a military alliance in existence binding Austria, France, Britain, Holland, Bavaria and Hanover against Russia and Prussia. On 5 March, two days before he received news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, Louis
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News that Napoleon had landed not in Italy but on the south coast of France reached Vienna late on 10 March.
Napoleon’s landing in France rather than Italy took the pressure off Austria, but opened up other possibilities. His reappearance in France would put the Bourbon regime to the test, and with it the wisdom of those who had installed it. Alexander, who had been against the restoration from the start, might be tempted to revisit his old projects. The only groups who had shown not just pleasure, but outright joy at the news of Napoleon’s escape were disappointed German patriots and the Prussian military.
In southern Germany and Westphalia there was even some cheering of Napoleon when news broke of his escape.
There was a fear that there would be risings in support of Napoleon in Switzerland, particularly in Aargau and Vaud, and that states neighbouring France, such as Bavaria, might find it expedient to break ranks.
There was also the unpleasant probability that if Napoleon did manage to seize Paris, he might find, in the archives of the French Foreign Ministry, a copy of the secret Anglo-Franco-Austrian treaty against Russia and Prussia, which he would certainly not fail to make public. While he expressed the belief that Alexander would not react violently if this came to pass, Castlereagh warned Wellington of this possibility.
Public opinion was quick to blame the British, who in the common perception were deemed to be Napoleon’s guardians.
Some thought that they had actually facilitated his flight, either so as to be able to recapture him and then deal harshly with him, or in order to frighten the other powers.
But Britain had no role in the exile of Napoleon beyond that of having provided the ship in which to take him to Elba, and was only seen as his gaoler because she was universally viewed as the policeman of the seas. If anyone was to blame it was Alexander, who had, acting entirely on his own initiative, designated Elba as the place of Napoleon’s exile and allowed him to take a contingent of troops. The French blamed Alexander’s ‘sentimental’ politics for placing Napoleon on Elba, but also censured Metternich’s reluctance to chase Murat out of Naples.
They, and particularly Talleyrand, had every reason to be anxious. Both as a former servant of Napoleon and the chief engineer of the Bourbon restoration, he was deeply implicated. And his position at Vienna as the plenipotentiary of France depended on whether the King he represented could maintain himself on the throne.
To a fellow Frenchman who asked him what he would do, Talleyrand shrugged his shoulders and answered, ‘I don’t know, I shall wait and see.’
Talleyrand was the first to appreciate that if Napoleon were to topple the Bourbons and represent himself as the de facto ruler of France, and then accept the terms of the Treaty of Paris, the other signatories of that treaty would, legally speaking, have no grounds for not recognising him, and certainly no justification for hostilities against him. The only way of avoiding this was to disqualify Napoleon himself, and that is what Talleyrand promptly set out to do.
He persuaded the ministers of the other powers that they must issue a joint declaration, and produced a draft. This argued that by leaving the island of Elba Napoleon had broken his only legal right to exist, and that he was therefore an outlaw and fair game for anyone to kill. When they met to discuss this on 13 March, some of the other plenipotentiaries protested against such extreme language, on legal grounds. Metternich objected because he did not want the door closed entirely on some form of negotiated settlement with Napoleon if that were to prove possible or necessary. After some
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Elba was granted a flag (white with a diagonal crimson band decorated with Napoleon’s armorial three bees),
The government of Louis XVIII considered that, like Murat, Napoleon must go, and the sooner the better. And whether assassination or invasion were the chosen option, it would be made a great deal easier if lack of funds obliged him to disband his guards. Alternatively, it might provoke him into making a rash move that would bring the whole of Europe out against him, the assumption being that this time he would be given no quarter when finally cornered. The Bourbon ministry calculated, correctly, that this was the surest way to engineer the monster’s final downfall, but miscalculated
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Napoleon knew that he was taking an enormous gamble by breaking out of Elba. But he had every reason to believe that if an assassin did not get him first he would awake one morning to find the island blockaded by the Royal Navy and invaded by Austrian troops from the Italian mainland. He realised that he was too dangerous for his enemies to leave where he was. He believed he had no choice. He sensed that time was running out. He reckoned that he had a good chance of succeeding, and he was right. It was timing, the factor in the equation over which he had no control, that would prove his
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On 1 March the Inconstant sailed into the Golfe Juan, and Napoleon stepped onto French soil.
Bourbon rule in France had not been a success.
In many ways, Louis XVIII was the ideal successor to Napoleon. He was in no sense a competitor. His legitimacy, which had nothing to do with military prowess or other talents, guaranteed a stability both external and internal that the other could never provide.
But Louis was predictably out of touch with the nation he had been called to reign over, and he made a series of grave errors of judgement at the outset. His insistence on counting 1814 as the nineteenth year of his reign amounted to a rejection of all that had happened in the course of those years.
So did his refusal to adopt the tricolour flag. His act of ‘granting’ a charter, having previously refused to countenance the constitution drawn up by Talleyrand and approved by the chamber that had voted his restoration, was a calculated insult to the concept of the sovereignty of the people, which even Louis XVI had been forced to acknowledge.
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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As recently as 4 December 1814 Louis XVIII had dismissed rumours of plots against him as alarmist and assured Talleyrand that ‘My sleep is as tranquil as in my youth.’ He was not alone in his complacency.
On the morning of 20 March Napoleon drove into the Cour du Cheval Blanc of the château of Fontainebleau, where he had bidden a tearful farewell to his troops exactly eleven months before. He left Fontainebleau at 2 o’clock that afternoon for Paris.
Louis XVIII had left the palace in the early hours of that very morning. ‘I hope that France will no longer have need of your swords,’ he had declared to Napoleon’s marshals when they rallied to him less than a year before, expressing the hope that they would become the pillars of his throne, ‘but, by God! Gentlemen, if the need to draw them should arise once more, I will, gout-ridden as I am, march at your side!’ But in the event he had cowered in the Tuileries, sending off one force after another, handing out cash to the troops in an attempt to buy their loyalty.
Fearing to remain in France a moment longer, Louis crossed into Belgium at the nearest point instead of making for Calais. He wanted to take ship at Ostend, but Monsieur persuaded him to pause at Ghent.
Napoleon’s resumption of power had been seamless. The morning after his return to the Tuileries, the entire imperial court, headed by the former Queens of Spain and Holland and the wives of the marshals, gathered in the throne room to greet him.
Unlike the Bourbons, Napoleon had learnt a great deal from the events of the past two years, and he was not about to repeat their mistakes. He did not attempt to resume his absolutist rule, and instead sought strength and political legitimacy in the Revolutionary tradition.
Napoleon hoped to install a constitutional system that would marry the best traditions of the Revolution to a liberal monarchy. One of the first things he did was to summon the political thinker Benjamin Constant in order to enlist his support. Constant did not like Napoleon. He nevertheless believed that in his present mood he represented the best chance of providing France with a favourable form of government. Another whom Napoleon needed to have at his side was the man who would have taken Talleyrand’s role in March 1814 if he had been in Paris at the time – Joseph Fouché, duc d’Otrante.
who went on to join virtually every faction in the course of the French Revolution, always one step ahead, ruthlessly repressing and putting to death former colleagues and friends as he went. He helped the rise to power of General Bonaparte, whose chief of police he became, and was rewarded by the Emperor Napoleon with the duchy of Otranto in Italy. He remained chief of police until 1810, when he was replaced by Savary following the discovery of his dealings with the exiled Bourbons.
In 1813 Napoleon had sent him to take over as Governor of Illyria and thence to Naples, mainly in order to keep him out of Paris at such a critical time. Fouché was aware of this, and watched helplessly from afar as the empire crumbled. He raced to Paris as soon as he could, but he was too late, and Talleyrand had assumed control of the situation.
But he did not believe the Bourbon regime would last, and he plotted with General Drouet d’Erlon to raise the garrison of Lille for Napoleon in the event of a comeback by the Emperor. His ultimate wish was to provide France with a regime which would be capable of preserving some of the legacy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods,
When Fouché heard of Napoleon’s landing at Antibes he activated the d’Erlon conspiracy, but this misfired. At the same time he was asked by Louis XVIII to enter the government. He stalled for as long as he could, and was saved from having to commit himself to the crumbling Bourbon cause by Napoleon’s entry into Paris.
Napoleon did not trust him, but, just like Louis XVIII, he needed him. He made him chief of police again, as only he could keep republican elements under control.
Napoleon did all he could to represent his return to power as an internal French matter, and therefore of no concern to other European powers.
As his Foreign Minister he appointed the universally respected Caulaincourt, who wrote to Metternich with assurances of France’s peaceful intentions. Napoleon proclaimed his acceptance of the terms of the Treaty of Paris, and wrote to Alexander assuring him that he would abide by it.
In an attempt to endear himself to Britain, he abolished the s...
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Fouché also supplemented Caulaincourt as a kind of unofficial Foreign Minister.
Within hours of hearing the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, and long before they had any idea of where he was headed, the plenipotentiaries of the Five began mustering their forces against him.
As the allies argued over command it became apparent that they must create a basis for what was in effect a new coalition. On 16 March Castlereagh suggested to Wellington that the Treaty of Chaumont was the only basis on which they could safely proceed, and Wellington began working towards that end. But imposing unity on the allies was not easy.
At this stage the allies still assumed that Louis XVIII would manage to contain the problem on his own. It seemed inconceivable that a man with barely a thousand soldiers could take over a kingdom with an army of 150,000 men at its disposal. But the man was Napoleon,
On Tuesday, 28 March, news reached Vienna that Napoleon was in Paris. That meant that they were, in some respects, back where they had been in 1813. Among the first reactions of some of the statesmen was the fear that all they had worked for for so long and achieved at the cost of so many hours of discussion and argument might be lost. From London, Castlereagh wrote to Wellington suggesting that they sign a treaty as soon as possible enshrining at least that which had been agreed so far, so as to place it ‘out of the reach of doubt’.
