against the moral force of the pope, a prisoner at Fontainebleau; and this he did not realize. The alliance arranged at Tilsit was seriously shaken by the Austrian marriage, the threat of a Polish restoration, and the unfriendly policy of Napoleon at Constantinople. The very persons whom he had placed in power were counteracting his plans: after four years’ experience Napoleon found himself obliged to treat his Corsican dynasties like those of the ancien régime, and all his relations were betraying him. Caroline conspired against her brother and against her husband; the hypochondriacal Louis, now Dutch in his sympathies, found the supervision of the blockade taken from him, and also the defence of the Scheldt, which he had refused to ensure; Jerome, idling in his harem, lost that of the North Sea shores; and Joseph, who was attempting the moral conquest of Spain, was continually insulted at Madrid. The very nature of things was against the new dynasties, as it had been against the old.
After national insurrections and family recriminations came treachery from Napoleon’s ministers. Talleyrand betrayed his designs to Metternich, and had to be dismissed; Fouché corresponded with Austria in 1809 and 1810, entered into an understanding with Louis, and also with England; Treachery. while Bourrienne was convicted of peculation. By a natural consequence of the spirit of conquest he had aroused, all these parvenus, having tasted victory, dreamed of sovereign power: Bernadotte, who had helped him to the Consulate, played Napoleon false to win the crown of Sweden; Soult, like Murat, coveted the Spanish throne after that of Portugal, thus anticipating the treason of 1813 and the defection of 1814; many persons hoped for “an accident” which might resemble the tragic end of Alexander and of Caesar. The country itself, besides, though flattered by conquests, was tired of self-sacrifice. It had become satiated; “the cry of the mothers rose threateningly” against “the Ogre” and his intolerable imposition of wholesale conscription. The soldiers themselves, discontented after Austerlitz, cried out for peace after Eylau. Finally, amidst profound silence from the press and the Assemblies, a protest was raised against imperial despotism by the literary world, against the excommunicated sovereign by Catholicism, and against the author of the continental blockade by the discontented bourgeoisie, ruined by the crisis of 1811.
Napoleon himself was no longer the General Bonaparte of his
campaign in Italy. He was already showing signs of physical
decay; the Roman medallion profile had coarsened,
the obese body was often lymphatic. Mental degeneration,
too, betrayed itself in an unwonted irresolution.
Degeneration
of Napoleon.
At Eylau, at Wagram, and later at Waterloo, his method
of acting by enormous masses of infantry and cavalry, in a mad
passion for conquest, and his misuse of his military resources,
were all signs of his moral and technical decadence; and this
at the precise moment when, instead of the armies and governments
of the old system, which had hitherto reigned supreme,
the nations themselves were rising against France, and the events
of 1792 were being avenged upon her. The three campaigns of
two years brought the final catastrophe.
Napoleon had hardly succeeded in putting down the revolt
in Germany when the tsar himself headed a European insurrection
against the ruinous tyranny of the continental
blockade. To put a stop to this, to ensure his own
access to the Mediterranean and exclude his chief
Russian campaign.
rival, Napoleon made a desperate effort in 1812 against a country
as invincible as Spain. Despite his victorious advance, the
taking of Smolensk, the victory on the Moskwa, and the entry
into Moscow, he was vanquished by Russian patriotism and
religious fervour, by the country and the climate, and by
Alexander’s refusal to make terms. After this came the lamentable
retreat, while all Europe was concentrating against him.
Pushed back, as he had been in Spain, from bastion to bastion,
after the action on the Beresina, Napoleon had to fall back
upon the frontiers of 1809, and then—having refused the peace
offered him by Austria at the congress of Prague, from a dread of
losing Italy, where each of his victories had marked a stage in
the accomplishment of his dream—on those of 1805, despite
Lützen and Bautzen, and on those of 1802 after his defeat at
Leipzig, where Bernadotte turned upon him, Moreau figured
Campaigns of
1813–14.
among the Allies, and the Saxons and Bavarians
forsook him. Following his retreat from Russia came
his retreat from Germany. After the loss of Spain,
reconquered by Wellington, the rising in Holland preliminary
to the invasion and the manifesto of Frankfort which
proclaimed it, he had to fall back upon the frontiers of 1795;
and then later was driven yet farther back upon those of 1792,
despite the wonderful campaign of 1814 against the invaders, in
which the old Bonaparte of 1796 seemed to have returned.
Paris capitulated on the 30th of March, and the “Delenda
Carthago,” pronounced against England, was spoken of Napoleon.
The great empire of East and West fell in ruins with the emperor’s
abdication at Fontainebleau.
The military struggle ended, the political struggle began.
How was France to be governed? The Allies had decided on
the eviction of Napoleon at the Congress of Châtillon;
and the precarious nature of the Bonapartist monarchy
in France itself was made manifest by the exploit of
Downfall of
the Empire.
General Malet, which had almost succeeded during the
Russian campaign, and by Lainé’s demand for free exercise of
political rights, when Napoleon made a last appeal to the Legislative
Assembly for support. The defection of the military and
civil aristocracy, which brought about Napoleon’s abdication,
the refusal of a regency, and the failure of Bernadotte, who
wished to resuscitate the Consulate, enabled Talleyrand, vice-president
of the senate and desirous of power, to persuade the
Allies to accept the Bourbon solution of the difficulty. The
declaration of St Ouen (May 2, 1814) indicated that the new
monarchy was only accepted upon conditions. After Napoleon’s
abdication, and exile to the island of Elba, came the Revolution’s
abdication of her conquests: the first treaty of Paris (May 30th)
confirmed France’s renunciation of Belgium and the left bank of
the Rhine, and her return within her pre-revolutionary frontiers,
save for some slight rectifications.
After the scourge of war, the horrors of conscription, and the despotism which had discounted glory, every one seemed to rejoice in the return of the Bourbons, which atoned for humiliations by restoring liberty. But questions of form, which aroused questions of sentiment, speedily Faults of the Bourbons. led to grave dissensions. The hurried armistice of the 23rd of April, by which the comte d’Artois delivered over disarmed France to her conquerors; Louis XVIII.’s excessive gratitude to the prince regent of England; the return of the émigrés; the declaration of St Ouen, dated from the nineteenth year of the new reign; the charter of June 4th, “concédée et octroyée,” maintaining the effete doctrine of legitimacy in a country permeated with the idea of national sovereignty; the slights put upon the army; the obligatory processions ordered by Comte Beugnot, prefect of police; all this provoked a conflict not only between two theories of government but between two groups of men and of interests. An avowedly imperialist party was soon again formed, a centre of heated opposition to the royalist party; and neither Baron Louis’ excellent finance, nor the peace, nor the charter of June 4th—which despite the irritation of the émigrés preserved the civil gains of the Revolution—prevented the man who was its incarnation from seizing an opportunity to bring about another military coup d’état. Having landed in the Bay of Jouan on the 1st of March, on the 20th Napoleon re-entered the Tuileries in triumph, while Louis XVIII. fled to Ghent. By the Acte additionnel of the 22nd of April he induced Carnot and Fouché—the The Hundred Days. March–June 1815. last of the Jacobins—and the heads of the Liberal opposition, Benjamin Constant and La Fayette, to side with him against the hostile Powers of Europe, occupied in dividing the spoils at Vienna. He proclaimed his intention of founding a new democratic empire; and French policy was thus given another illusion, which was to be exploited with fatal success by Napoleon’s namesake. But the cannon of Waterloo ended this adventure (June 18, 1815), and, thanks to Fouché’s treachery, the triumphal progress of
