How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did Page 11

  But once the effect of the Belgian eggs wore off, things obviously didn’t look so bright to Napoleon, because his will began to waver. Instead of waiting for Grouchy, he fled to Paris – or rather, as his admirers would have it, he bravely rushed back to rally a defeatist parliament and save the country. The previous year, he had been betrayed by Talleyrand, who had delivered France to the royalists. Now he had to take the situation in hand, and quickly.

  Napoleon knew that Joseph Fouché, the head of his Ministry of Police, was plotting his downfall, largely by manipulating the press (a job Napoleon had usually reserved for himself). Fouché was yet another of Napoleon’s unwise appointments: everyone knew he was as slippery as a jar of French asparagus preserved in olive oil. For a start, he had overt royalist sympathies, and in 1814 he had negotiated a secret peace with England while Napoleon was theoretically still in power. Even so, Napoleon had made him head of the secret police on his return from exile in March 1815, probably reasoning that it was better to have Fouché as an ally than an enemy – the man was a monster. During the Revolution, Fouché had suppressed an uprising in Lyon by having more than 1,600 locals lined up and blown to pieces by cannon fire, arguing that the guillotine would have been too slow. (Even Robespierre expressed his horror at the slaughter, which was a bit like Jean-Paul Sartre accusing someone of being too intellectual.) Fouché had defended himself by saying that ‘the blood of crime fertilises the soil of liberty’, which was the kind of slogan that went down well during the French Revolution.

  In any case, Fouché had been forgiven by Napoleon (perhaps on the grounds that he was a fellow lover of the cannon), and was now busily stabbing his employer in the back. As Napoleon sped towards Paris, Fouché circulated a rumour that he was returning to impose a military dictatorship. The secret policeman also assured parliament that if Napoleon was forced to abdicate, the allies would not insist on another restoration of the monarchy – there would (Fouché lied) be another revolution, opening the way for parliament to grab absolute power.

  When Napoleon arrived back in Paris on 21 June, Fouché gleefully told everyone that the fallen Emperor was a changed man: ‘unrecognisable … he hopes, he despairs, he wants, he doesn’t want. He’s lost his head.’ The last sentence might have been a clever piece of subliminal suggestion, hinting that Napoleon should suffer the same fate as Louis XVI.

  In fact, on reaching the city before dawn, Napoleon made two perfectly reasonable requests: he wanted his ministers and a bath. Not to enjoy a communal soak, but so that he could put in an immediate demand for ‘a temporary dictatorship’. Fouché, it seemed, was right. And Napoleon’s behaviour in the bathtub seemed to confirm Fouché’s other allegation – that he had lost his head – because during the meeting the agitated Emperor waved his arms about, splashing all those present with his dirty bathwater. He tried to explain that he needed complete power ‘in the interests of the nation. I could seize it, but it would be more useful and more national if it was conferred by parliament.’ He wanted to relocate the government 200 kilometres south-west in Tours, prepare Paris for a siege, and begin conscripting a new army.

  While the ministers dried off and presented this request to the MPs, Napoleon confided in his old friend and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Louis de Caulaincourt. It is clear that in his own head he had begun rewriting history already. ‘The battle was won,’ he told Caulaincourt, ‘the army had been prodigious, the enemy was beaten on all fronts. Only the English centre held. Then at the end of the day, the army was seized by a terrible panic. It’s inexplicable!’

  The MPs, though, didn’t want a repeat of recent events. They voted to divest Napoleon of all his powers, and declared that if he tried to dissolve parliament and impose military rule, he would be denounced as a traitor. For which, of course, the penalty was the guillotine or the firing squad.

  Napoleon’s brother Lucien went to try and talk the MPs round, accusing them of having a short memory, but the Marquis de La Fayette, hero of both the French and American Revolutions, crushed him with an impassioned speech: ‘Have you forgotten that we followed him [Napoleon] through the sands of Africa and the deserts of Russia, and that the scattered bones of our children and our brothers bear witness to our fidelity? We have done enough for him. Now our duty is to save the nation.’ Even so, in an admirable spirit of fair play, La Fayette offered to use his old contacts to ensure Napoleon a safe passage to America.

  By now there were increasing calls for Napoleon to be handed over to the allies. The Prussians, and some of his French enemies, wanted him out of the picture permanently.

  II

  For once, Wellington gains brownie points with French Bonapartists, because he spoke out against executing his old enemy. In reply to a Prussian demand ‘that Bonaparte be delivered over to us, with a view to execution … Thus the blood of our soldiers killed and mutilated on the 16th and 18th will be avenged’, Wellington wrote sternly that ‘Such an act would hand down our names to history stained by a crime, and posterity would say of us that we did not deserve to be the conquerors of Napoleon … Such a deed is quite useless and can have no object.’ Wellington also wrote to his political masters, telling them that ‘if the sovereigns [of the allied nations] wish him put to death they should appoint an executioner, which should not be me’.

  This infuriated Blücher’s chief of staff, General Gneisenau, who accused the British of feeling grateful to Napoleon for indirectly increasing their ‘greatness, prosperity and wealth’. But Wellington was a soldier through and through, with a grudging respect for the great French general that Napoleon had been.

  Betrayed by his own parliament and afraid of falling into Prussian hands, on the afternoon of 29 June Napoleon decided to flee towards the port of Rochefort on the British-held south-west coast, hoping for a hospitable welcome. He put on a suit of civilian clothes, climbed into a yellow carriage (an unfortunate symbolic choice of colour, one might think), and gave up the fight.

  He also wrote a letter to the Prince of Wales, the Regent of England during his father George III’s mental illness, begging for asylum: ‘I come, like Themistocles, to ask the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of its laws, which I claim from your Royal Highness, the most powerful, the most unflinching and most generous of my enemies. I thus offer him the greatest page in his history.’

  It is a strange mixture of grovelling sycophancy and self-aggrandisement. Themistocles was an Athenian who in about 470 BC took refuge with the King of the Persians, whom he had previously beaten in battle. He was received as a hero and given command of Persia’s captured Greek cities in Asia Minor. Perhaps Napoleon hoped to be taken on by the Brits as the colonial governor of, say, India or Canada.

  In any case, here he was, without his famous uniform, terrified of being captured by the Prussians, and begging for mercy from his former arch enemies, les Anglais. It was the ultimate humiliation, surely?

  Well no, because according to his French fans, he was about to turn his escape into yet another victory …

  III

  Back in London, the British press was indulging in a frenzy of triumphalism over Waterloo. Public enemy number one had been beaten into submission, and the war was over. On 22 June, The Times declared jingoistically – and prematurely – that ‘Buonaparte’s reputation has been wrecked’ (note the deliberate use of the old Corsican spelling of Napoleon’s name that he had tried to disown). In the same edition, the paper called him a ‘Rebel Chief’, as if he were a brigand rather than a head of state, and boasted that among the spoils of war were ‘a large part of BUONAPARTE’S BAGGAGE’ (their capitals), implying perhaps that the war correspondent would soon be revealing details about the Emperor’s captured underwear.

  On that same day, by coincidence, The Times printed a classified advertisement placed by ‘a French Gentleman’ who was ‘desirous to BOARD and LODGE in a genteel family whose society would enable him to improve in the English language’. Answers were to be sent to a
mysterious ‘XY, c/o Carraway’s Coffee House’. Was this Napoleon, planning his exile?

  Almost certainly not, because even a week after the advert was placed, Napoleon still hadn’t made up his mind what to do. As late as the morning of 29 June, he still thought he could fight on. He had formally abdicated, but just before he got into his yellow carriage to Rochefort, a group of soldiers came and begged him to lead them into battle. They told him that the Prussian avant-garde had advanced too far, that it had moved beyond Paris and was exposed. Napoleon studied charts of the Prussian positions and agreed that he could go and beat them. He put on his uniform, and sent a request to parliament for permission to fight – as a mere general, if not as Emperor. Furious, Fouché dismissed the idea: ‘Est-ce qu’il se moque de nous?’ Which could be translated as ‘Is he taking the pee?’

  Napoleon was deadly serious, though, and was proved right when, on 1 July, one of his most faithful generals, Rémy Exelmans, attacked and defeated the Prussians at Rocquencourt, 20 kilometres south-west of Paris. Exelmans had been frustrated at Waterloo – he was one of the generals who spent the day pleading with Grouchy to march towards the sound of Napoleon’s cannons, and (it is said) even considered blowing Grouchy’s brains out. Now, with about 5,000 men, Exelmans ambushed a force of a thousand or so Prussian cavalry, killing or capturing 500 of them.

  Rocquencourt was in effect the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars – a general armistice was signed on 3 July – which allows the French a certain amount of triumphalism of their own. They might have been defeated at Waterloo and lost the war on points, but who won the final round of this European all-comers championship fight? France.fn1

  IV

  Even the armistice did not dampen Napoleon’s desire to retake charge of his remaining troops. On 7 July, now in Rochefort on the south-west coast, he sent another message to Paris, asking parliament whether they might consider letting him ‘sauver la patrie’ (‘save the nation’). His plan, according to one of his aides, General Charles de Montholon, was to ‘march on Paris at the head of twenty to twenty-five thousand soldiers, with a people’s escort of a hundred thousand fanatical peasants’.

  The reply was predictable but ominous. Napoleon was told by his own government to board a French ship and await further orders. He must have known that once in the hands of pro-royalist forces, the danger was that he would be used as a hostage during negotiations with the allies, and who knew where that would leave him? Up against a wall in Paris, probably, facing a line of Blücher’s muskets.

  In an uncharacteristic turmoil of indecision, Napoleon was still vacillating between taking exile in Britain or, more adventurously, in America. At one point he invited a seventy-year-old politician and mathematician, Gaspard Monge, to embark on a voyage of scientific discovery as his travelling companion. ‘Without an army or an empire, I see nothing but the sciences to occupy my soul,’ Napoleon wrote to Monge. ‘I want to start a new career, to leave a body of work, of discoveries worthy of my name.’ Having given France a set of laws to obey, Napoleon seems to have wanted to do the same thing for the whole physical universe. He offered Monge the honour of accompanying him ‘from Canada to Cape Horn, and during this immense voyage, we will study all the great phenomena of the globe’s physics’. Monge was all for the idea, and the two men even drew up a shortlist of scientific instruments that they would need; but then Napoleon abruptly backed out, deciding that Monge was too old for such transatlantic exertions.

  Finally, after a month during which his mind had been clinging to a stampeding charger that galloped between optimism and resignation, Napoleon now came to a decision. He gave himself up to the British. Some Bonapartists see turning to the hereditary enemy as a sign of weakness, of naivety even – how could he possibly trust Perfide Albion? But Dominique de Villepin interprets it as an honourable decision, and a more intellectually respectable one: Napoleon could have run away to America, but ‘there was a certain nobility about turning to this hereditary enemy’, the ‘model of an aristocratic monarchy that this history-lover, imbued with tradition, probably admired more than the young American democracy’. (As we have seen, democracy wasn’t exactly Napoleon’s thing.)

  At about six a.m. on 15 July, Napoleon duly left the small offshore island île d’Aix, where he had been hiding, and boarded the British warship HMS Bellerophon that was blockading the port of Rochefort. It has been said that the Bellerophon was effectively preventing Napoleon from fleeing to America, but Bonapartist historians sneer at this suggestion. Hadn’t Napoleon already evaded a joint Franco-British blockade around Elba? Did they really think he couldn’t have disguised himself as a fisherman and joined a friendly ship offshore? No, the decision to surrender to the British was a conscious choice, albeit a symbolically charged one, as Bellerophon had fought at Trafalgar, the sea battle that had scuppered Napoleon’s plans to invade England in 1805.

  When he boarded the British ship, in full military regalia, Napoleon announced (in French, of course), ‘I come aboard your ship to place myself under the protection of your prince and your laws.’ To Bonapartists, this was a kind of chivalrous surrender that ought to have bound the British to act honourably, and it makes their later actions all the more treacherous.

  At first, Napoleon’s reception seemed to be cordial. There is a wonderful description of his time on the Bellerophon written by an officer who saw it all first-hand. It is quoted with relish by Bonapartist historians. Writing in 1838, Midshipman George Home recalled the Emperor’s arrival on the ship: ‘And now came the little great man himself, wrapped up in his grey great coat, buttoned to the chin, three-cocked hat, and Hussar boots, without any sword I suppose as emblematical of his changed condition.’

  The young Englishman was shocked to note his own captain’s somewhat aloof behaviour towards his esteemed French visitor: ‘Maitland received him with every mark of respect, as far as look and deportment could indicate; but he was not received with the respect due to a crowned head … The captain, on Napoleon’s addressing him, only moved his hat, as to a general officer, and remained covered while the Emperor spoke to him.’

  The effect on the other sailors, on the other hand, was very different. A superstar had arrived. If it had happened in the twenty-first century, the men would all have been taking selfies. Midshipman Home, who seems to have fallen in love with Napoleon at first sight, remembered that ‘As he passed through the officers assembled on the quarter-deck, he repeatedly bowed slightly to us and smiled. What an ineffable beauty there was in that smile. His teeth were finely set, and as white as ivory, and his mouth had a charm about it that I have never seen in any other human countenance. I marked his fine robust figure as he followed Captain Maitland into the cabin.’

  Napoleon appears to have bonded instantly with these fighting men, and asked to tour the ship. Now that he was no longer a military threat, his wish was granted, and he did the rounds, complimenting the British sailors on the fine state of their vessel, and winning over even the hard-hearted captain. Napoleon paused in front of one of George Home’s fellow midshipmen: ‘A young middy who, boylike, had got before the Emperor and was gazing up in his face, he honoured with a tap on the head and a pinch of the ear, and, smiling, put him aside, which the youngster declared was the highest honour he had ever received in his life viz. to have his ears pinched by the great Napoleon!’

  After this, all British sailors, including some admirals who came to take a look at their star guest, doffed their hats to Napoleon, much to Midshipman Home’s satisfaction: ‘When Admiral Hotham and the officers of the Bellerophon uncovered in the presence of Napoleon, they treated him with the respect due to the man himself, to his innate greatness, which did not lie in the crown of France … but the actual superiority of the man to the rest of his species.’

  The Bonaparte legend was being born, and Napoleon must have felt that his retirement wasn’t going to be so bad after all. He inspected the contingent of marines on board, and asked them to perform some drill.
Flatteringly, he even risked a joke, exclaiming, ‘What I could do with 200,000 men like these!’ Diplomatically ignoring the obvious answer, which was ‘kill as many Englishmen as possible and then invade Britain’, Midshipman Home heartily approved of the remark: ‘And so you well might say, my most redoubtable Emperor, for, give you two hundred thousand such fine fellows as these, and land you once more at Rochefort, and I shall be sworn for it that in three short weeks you have Wellington and the Holy Allies flying before you in every direction, and in ten days more you have the imperial headquarters at Schonbrunn [in Vienna].’

  In short, thanks to his charisma and his sincere fascination for all things military, Napoleon had won over the British crew’s hearts. He had also earned their protection. There would be no French or Prussian delegations coming on board to take Napoleon into custody now. Neither would any other British vessel get the honour of transporting the deposed Empereur to Britain. The crew of the Bellerophon swore that they would resist by force any attempt to take Napoleon off their ship.

  However, as Bonapartist historians are all too happy to point out, this sudden outburst of British brotherly love for Napoleon was too good to be true. The Anglais were about to betray him …

  V

  There is a famous painting of Napoleon on Board the Bellerophon by the Scottish portraitist William Quiller Orchardson. It was first exhibited in 1880, and was such a success with Londoners at that year’s Royal Academy summer exhibition that it inspired Orchardson to follow up with a series of French-themed pictures, including one of the writer Voltaire getting beaten up by the servants of an aristocrat whom he had unwisely insulted.

  Orchardson depicts Napoleon, in trademark hat and greatcoat, gazing gloomily out to sea. His expression is an archetypal French pout. He is sullenly turning his back on a small group of his aides, their hats held respectfully by their sides, who are observing him with a combination of curiosity, concern, sadness and resignation. They seem to be wondering whether he will jump overboard, start weeping, or suddenly order them to seize control of the ship and invade England.