Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (41 page)

O
N HIS WAY
from Elba, Napoleon had enjoyed good fortune in eluding several ships patrolling the waters. The
Inconstant
passed the French frigates
Melpomène
and
Fleur-de-Lys
without incident, and then, rounding Corsica, Napoleon passed yet another enemy warship, the
Zéphir,
without any difficulties. Even the British vessel carrying Campbell back to Elba, the
Partridge,
was sighted on the horizon. No one had stopped him. Conspiracy theories would proliferate for years. Had the winds blown differently, others have speculated, Napoleon might easily have been seized or sunk.

By the first of March, when Napoleon’s brig had approached Golfe-Juan, people at first thought it was a small band of pirates about to make a raid. Learning the true identity of the crew, however, did not seem to please them any more. Some scoffed at the ragtag gang that had just been “vomited up from the sea.”

But Napoleon had safely disembarked, and managed to pass through the streets without harm. To the thrill of his supporters, at first mainly soldiers and peasants, the initial surprise and cold reception was beginning to thaw. Gradually, there were more cheers and shouts of
“Vive l’Empereur!”

At this beautiful medieval town, Napoleon faced another major decision. Examining his map sprawled out on a table in the middle of an olive garden, Napoleon calculated his chances either way. He could continue through southern France, a hotbed of royal support, or chance a dangerous mountain path through the French Alps into Grenoble. It was steep and narrow, hardly fit for his cumbersome baggage trains and cannon pieces, and it was covered with ice. Still, that one was deemed the least risky route.

Southern France had suffered tremendously during his empire. Ports like Marseille had been crippled under Napoleon’s unsuccessful attempt to boycott English goods, and their shipping business decimated. Taxes had been crushing, and extended to all sorts of items, including alcohol and tobacco. Farmers there, and elsewhere, complained of being forced to furnish the army with supplies, their fields stripped down to the “last kernel of corn and the last forkful of fodder.” And, of course, like so many others, they resented the conscriptions into the army and the heavy loss of life in his wars, all of which seemed a high price to pay for Napoleon’s so-called glory.

While preparing for the mountain passageway, and abandoning his cannons, which he figured he would not need, anyway, Napoleon finished his own proclamations, one to the French people and another to his soldiers. Both sounded like rallying speeches straight out of those stirring addresses of his early campaigns: “Frenchmen, in my exile, I heard your plaints and prayers; I have crossed the sea amid perils of every kind; I [have] come to you to assert my rights, which are ours.”

To the soldiers, he reminded them that they had been not defeated, but rather betrayed by a few marshals who sold out the country, the army, and its glory. He had been summoned back to France by the will of the people, and his symbol, the eagle, would soon “fly steeple to steeple all over the country to Notre Dame.”

The emperor’s progress was, in fact, astounding. His soldiers marched some fifteen to twenty miles, and often many more, each day under exhausting and very difficult conditions. It was necessary to move quickly, before the Bourbons had a chance to realize what had happened.

King Louis XVIII and the French government were, of course, taking measures to resist Bonaparte. The minister of war, Marshal Nicolas Jean Soult, the former Bonapartist, had some 60,000 troops in the south waiting for deployment, and supposedly another 120,000 on reserve at Melun, south of Paris, that could cover the main roads to the capital. Another marshal working for the king, André Masséna, was marching troops after the invaders. Orders were also made to blow up strategic bridges, such as Ponhaut, and block the way to Grenoble.

On March 7, at Laffrey, some fifteen miles outside Grenoble, Napoleon had the famous confrontation with the Fifth Infantry Regiment. The commander had orders to stop “Bonaparte’s brigands,” and he was determined to obey. Napoleon’s army approached, led by his Polish Lancers and the Old Guard to the rallying anthem of “La Marseillaise.” Napoleon himself rode to the front of his troops, dismounted, and advanced straight ahead in the line of fire of the king’s soldiers. “There he is, fire,” the royalist commander ordered. Napoleon then shouted, “Soldiers of the fifth, I am your Emperor.”

“If there is any one among you who would kill his Emperor,” Napoleon continued as he opened his greatcoat, “here I am.” The tense silence was broken with shouts,
“Vive l’Empereur!”
The soldiers deserted and joined him.

Later that day, only hours after Vienna learned of his escape, Napoleon had already reached Grenoble, some two hundred miles north of his landing. “The inhabitants of Grenoble [were] proud to have the conqueror of Europe within their walls.” Five army regiments had come over to his side, and he also gained a large cache of artillery, guns, gunpowder, and other military supplies. No major bridge had been destroyed to slow the advance.

Few orders were, in fact, carried out. Bonapartists in the king’s army often refused to obey them, or sabotaged their execution, if they did not desert outright to Napoleon. Other Frenchmen, divided in their loyalties, hedged their bets and waited on the outcome.

Louis XVIII had committed so many mistakes since his restoration that he had effectively obliterated the memories of the worst excesses of the Napoleonic regime. When Napoleon arrived in a town, many rushed to greet him as a liberator. His sympathizers swarmed the popular cafés, looking for supporters and returning encouraged by what they saw. Townsmen stopped their daily activities and talked quietly in their own private enclaves, and street vendors even paused from their tireless railing to observe the astonishing events.

Back in Vienna, the news from France was bad and getting worse. Napoleon was marching with great momentum, and the king’s soldiers were rapidly flocking to his side. Fewer symbols of the king, such as lilies and white handkerchiefs, were seen. In fact, when they appeared, the flowers were often trampled, the flags torn to shreds, and the Bourbon coats of arms smashed. Only ten days after his landing, France’s second city, Lyon, had fallen. Louis XVIII was having to come to grips with betrayal, desertion, and incompetence on a grand scale.

Vienna’s stock exchange had plummeted on this news, and the momentous events surrounding Napoleon’s march north were clearly raising the specters of war all over again. The Swiss banker Eynard gave the odds of Napoleon’s success, first at 1,000 to 1, and then, a few days later, at 10 to 1. Two additional days, and the bet was even. How on earth could this have happened? Had Napoleon, some asked, made a pact with the devil?

While many of Vienna’s diplomats worked with zeal to oppose Napoleon, there were others visibly delighted by Napoleon’s success, particularly the many disenchanted, disillusioned, and disenfranchised delegations that deeply resented the way the congress had acted.

The Prussians, for example, seemed happier than they had been for a long time. Extreme opinion not only wanted war, but also hoped to wipe France off the map, carving it up into small states such as Burgundy, Champagne, Auvergne, Brittany, Aquitaine, and others. Territories in the east, like Alsace and Lorraine, would promptly return to a German home. French property would be granted outright to the Allies, or, at the least, used to offset the costs of the new war. Prussian generals looked forward to accomplishing with the sword what the diplomats had failed to secure with the pen.

F
OR
T
ALLEYRAND,
N
APOLEON’S
success caused a lot of concerns. The last thing he had wanted was another Allied invasion of France, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching across the country, some undoubtedly preying upon the people again like “ferocious beasts.” In this scenario, Talleyrand knew that the suffering would be great, and the chances were slim that France would enjoy such a lenient peace a second time.

Faced with this challenge, Talleyrand had hatched a plan that he hoped would ensure that Vienna’s plenipotentiaries made an important distinction between France and Napoleon, and kept the two entities separate. He would draw up a declaration that would specifically name Napoleon, not France, as the enemy. Perhaps, then, all the inevitable anger unleashed in war would be confined to that single person and his supporters and not be projected onto the entire country.

Talleyrand had written a draft, and prepared to present it at a meeting on March 13. The stakes were high. Before his carriage left Kaunitz Palace, he advised his fellow diplomats:

Watch for my return from the palace windows. If I succeed, you will see me in the carriage window holding up the treaty on which hangs the fate of France and Europe.

As Talleyrand worded it, Napoleon was denounced as a “wild beast” and all of Europe was called upon to rid the world of this “bandit.” As he put it, “every measure permissible against brigands should be permissible against him.”

Historians have often depicted the outlawing measure as inevitable, but it hardly seemed that way at the time. When Metternich read the draft at the meeting, he was skeptical. Should such words as “wild beast” and “bandit” really be used for Emperor Francis’s son-in-law? Wellington also found the terminology inappropriate. Although he had no love for Napoleon, he did not wish to be seen as encouraging outright murder.

Debate raged throughout the night on this declaration that Talleyrand urged on the congress, and it reached a climax—a loud climax—around midnight, when, according to Humboldt, twenty voices were all shouting at once. In the end, Metternich offered a more moderate formulation, and this one was adopted.

In this declaration, drafted by the indefatigable Gentz, Napoleon Bonaparte was in fact declared an outlaw and denounced for his reckless violation of his previous agreement. Napoleon had also, the document continued, “deprived himself of the protection of the law and demonstrated before the world that there can be neither peace nor a truce with him.”

However much it was moderated, this solemn document would still cause a scandal. In Vienna, only eight powers were allowed to sign the declaration—the same members of the Committee of Eight. The rest were excluded completely. The king of Denmark and the king of Bavaria, among many others, had not been invited to the meetings, or even consulted on the matter.

Outside Vienna, two passages in the declaration particularly came under fire, one claiming that Napoleon had lost “his sole lawful right to exist,” and the other:

The Powers declare that Napoleon Buonaparte has placed himself outside all human relations and that, as the enemy and disturber of the peace of the world, he has delivered himself up to public justice.
(vindicte publique)

Some newspapers, when reporting the story of the declaration, translated the phrase
vindicte publique
as “public vengeance,” and not, as Metternich had insisted with his better grasp of French, only as “public justice” or “prosecution.” As for the words about Napoleon forfeiting his “sole lawful right to exist,” this only referred to legal status, though that was too subtle a distinction for some newspapers’ editors. The damage was done. Mistranslations were in print, and critics now had another accusation to hurl at the Vienna Congress: the peacemakers were trying “to deliver Buonaparte over to the dagger of the assassin.”

It was Wellington and the British delegation, of course, who would be most criticized for this declaration; after all, they came from a land with a Parliament, an active opposition party, and a relatively free press. One opposition leader, Samuel Whitbread, spoke for many when he criticized this vindictive and “abhorrent” declaration, which branded Napoleon an outlaw and encouraged his murder, when it was the Bourbons who had failed to fulfill their obligations to him. Wellington would be criticized almost daily. Talleyrand, on the other hand, would not have to worry that much. His critics had long accused him of worse.

Indeed, Talleyrand was pleased to put his graceful signature at the bottom of the document. He had obtained his main objective. Declaring Napoleon an outlaw would focus the animosity on him, not the French people, and, moreover, it would serve to “deprive traitors of confidence and to give courage to the loyal.” In his letter to King Louis, Talleyrand praised the wording of the document: “It is very strong; there has never been a document of so much power and importance signed by all the sovereigns of Europe.”