The Hundred Days—Declaration of the Congress at Vienna—Napoleon prepares for War—Capitulation of the Duke d'Angouleme—Insurrection of La Vendée—Murat advances from Naples—Is Defeated—And takes refuge in France—The Champ-de-Mai—Dissatisfaction of the Constitutionalists.
The reports so zealously circulated by the Buonapartists, that some at least of the great European powers were aware, and approved, of the meditated debarkation at Cannes—and the hopes thus nourished among the French people, that the new revolution would not disturb the peace of the world—were very speedily at an end. The instant that the news of Napoleon's daring movement reached Vienna, the Congress published a proclamation in these words:—"By breaking the convention which established him in Elba, Buonaparte destroys the only legal title on which his existence depended. By appearing again in France, with projects of confusion and disorder, he has deprived himself of the protection of the law, and manifested to the universe that there can be neither peace nor truce with him. The powers consequently declare that Napoleon Buonaparte has placed himself without the pale of civil and social relations, and that, as an enemy and disturber of the tranquillity of the world, he has rendered himself liable to public vengeance." These sentiments underwent no change in consequence of the apparently triumphant course of Napoleon's adventure. All Europe prepared once more for war. It was evident that the usurper owed everything to the French soldiery—that body to which the treaty of Paris had at once restored 150,000 veterans, idle, and indisposed for ordinary labour—and that until this ferocious military were effectually humbled there could be no peace for the world.
A formal treaty was forthwith entered into, by which the four great powers bound themselves to maintain each of them at least 150,000 troops in arms, until Buonaparte should either be dethroned, or reduced so low as no longer to endanger the peace of Europe. The other states of the continent were to be invited to join the alliance, furnishing contingents adequate to their respective resources. The King of France was to be requested to sign the treaty also; but with reference to this article an explanatory note was affixed, by the representatives of the Prince Regent of England, denying, on the part of his royal highness, any wish to force a particular government on the people of France: and it was further stipulated that in case Britain should not furnish all the men agreed on, she should compensate by paying at the rate of £30 per annum for every cavalry soldier, and £20 per annum for every foot soldier under the full number. Such was the treaty of Vienna; but the zeal of the contracting parties went far beyond the preparations indicated in its terms. Napoleon was hardly re-seated on his throne ere he learned that he must in all likelihood maintain it against 300,000 Austrians, 225,000 Russians, 236,000 Prussians, an army of 150,000 men furnished by the minor states of Germany, 50,000 contributed by the government of the Netherlands, and 50,000 English, commanded by the Duke of Wellington;—in all one million eleven thousand soldiers.
His preparations to meet this gigantic confederacy began from the moment when he re-established himself in the Tuileries. Carnot became once more minister of war; and what Napoleon and he, when labouring together in the re-organisation of an army, could effect, had been abundantly manifested at the commencement of the consulate. The army cantoned in France, when Buonaparte landed at Cannes, numbered 175,000; the cavalry had been greatly reduced: and the disasters of 1812, 1813, and 1814, were visible in the miserable deficiency of military stores and arms, especially of artillery. By incredible exertions, notwithstanding the pressure of innumerable cares and anxieties of all kinds, and although the temper of the nation prevented him from having recourse to the old method of conscription—the Emperor, ere May was over, had 375,000 men in arms—including an imperial guard of 40,000 chosen veterans, in the most splendid state of equipment and discipline, a large and brilliant force of cavalry, and a train of artillery of proportional extent and excellence.
Napoleon, however, made sundry attempts to open a negotiation with the Allies—nor wanted there statesmen, even in England, to lend their best support to his reclamations. He urged three arguments in defence of his breach of the convention by which he had become sovereign of Elba: 1st, the detention of his wife and son by the court of Austria—an affair with which the king whose dominions he had invaded could have had nothing to do: 2nd, the nonpayment of his pension—a grievance which might have furnished a legitimate ground of complaining to the powers that guaranteed its punctual discharge, and which, if so complained of at the Congress of Vienna, there is no reason to doubt would have been redressed: and 3rd, the voice of the French nation, which he, according to his own statement, had but heard and obeyed. But the state of public feeling in France could not be effectually misrepresented now: and the answer that met him from every quarter was one and the same—namely, that he had ascended the throne of Louis in consequence of the treason of the army, and the intrigues of a faction, in direct opposition to the wishes of almost all the upper classes of society throughout France, and, as regarded the mass of the nation, amidst profound indifference.
Meanwhile the royalists at home had failed in all their endeavours to prevent his authority from being recognised all over France. The Duke d'Angouleme was soon surrounded by the superior numbers of General Gilly, and capitulated—on condition of being permitted to disband his followers, and embark at Cette for Spain—a convention which Napoleon did not hesitate to ratify. The Duchess of Angouleme, daughter of Louis XVI., displayed at Bourdeaux such heroism as drew from Napoleon himself the sarcastic eulogy, "She is the only man of her race;" but in spite of the loyalty of the inhabitants all her efforts were vain. The garrison was strong; they had caught the general flame; and the Princess was at length compelled to take refuge in an English frigate. The Duke of Berri repaired, on the first alarm, to La Vendée: but the regular troops in that faithful province were, thanks to the previous care of King Louis's war-minister, so numerous and so well posted, that this effort failed also, and the Duke escaped to England. Before March had ended, the tricolor flag was displayed on every tower of France.
Having discovered that there was no chance—if indeed he had ever contemplated one—of persuading the Emperor of Austria to restore his wife and son to him, Napoleon, ere he had been many days at the Tuileries, set on foot a scheme for carrying them off from Vienna, by a mixture of stratagem and force. There were French people in the suite of Maria Louisa who easily embarked in this plot; and forged passports, relays of horses, and all other appliances had been so well provided, that but for a single individual, who betrayed the design, there seems to have been a considerable probability of its success. On discovering this affair the Emperor of Austria dismissed the French attendants of his daughter, and caused her to discontinue the use of the arms and liveries of Napoleon, which she had hitherto retained—nay, even the imperial title itself, resuming those of her own family, and original rank as archduchess. This procedure could not be concealed at Paris, and completed the conviction of all men, that there was no hope whatever of avoiding another European war; and almost at the same time a rash expedition of Murat, which, if successful, might have materially influenced the conduct of Austria, reached its end.
Napoleon, when at St. Helena, always persisted in denying any participation in this design of his brother-in-law; but, however this may have been, it is certain that much intercourse subsisted, during his stay at Elba, between the Queen of Naples and the female branches of the family at Porto Ferraio; nor can anyone doubt either that Murat had received some pretty distinct intimation of Napoleon's intended descent in France—or that he ventured on his movement in the confidence that this and the Emperor's would lend to each other much moral support—or that, if Joachim had prospered, Napoleon would have considered what he did as the best service that could have been rendered to himself.
Among the subjects which, prior to Buonaparte's reappearance, occupied the Congress of Vienna, one of the chief was the conduct of Murat during the campaign of 1814. Talleyrand charged him with having, throughout, been a traitor to the cause of the Allies; and exhibited a series of intercepted letters, from him to Napoleon, in proof of this allegation. The Duke of Wellington, on the other hand, considered these documents as proving no more than that Murat had reluctantly lifted his banner against the author of his fortunes. Talleyrand had always hated Murat and despised him—(the father of the King of Naples had originally been steward in the household of the Perigords)—and persisted in urging on the Congress the danger of suffering a sovereign of Buonaparte's family and creation to sit on the throne which belonged of right to the King of the Sicilies. The affair was still under discussion, to the mortal annoyance of the person whose interests were at stake, when Napoleon landed at Cannes. Murat resolved to rival his brother's daring; and, without further pause, marched, at the head of 50,000 men, to Rome, from which the Pope and cardinals fled precipitately at his approach. The Neapolitans then advanced into the North of Italy, scattering proclamations by which Joachim invited all true Italians to rally round him, and assist in the erection of their country into one free and independent state, with him at its head. The Austrian commander in Lombardy forthwith put his troops in motion to meet Murat. The rencontre took place at Occhiobello. The Neapolitans fled in confusion almost at the sight of the enemy; and Murat, unable to rally them, sought personal safety in a fishing vessel, which landed him near Toulon, about the end of May. Napoleon was in vain entreated to receive him at Paris. He refused, asking, with bitter scorn—if the war between France and Naples, which subsisted in 1814, had ever been terminated by treaty? Murat lingered for some time in obscurity near Toulon; and, relanding on the coast of Naples after the King of the Two Sicilies had been re-established on that throne, in the vain hope of exciting an insurrection and recovering what he had lost, was seized, tried, and executed. This vain, but high-spirited, man, met his fate with heroic fortitude; and Napoleon, at St. Helena, often said that the fortune of the world might have been changed, had there been a Murat to head the French cavalry at Waterloo.
The result of this rash expedition enabled Austria to concentrate all her Italian forces also for the meditated re-invasion of France. The Spanish army began to muster towards the passes of the Pyrenees: the Russians, Swedes, and Danes were already advancing from the north: the main armies of Austria, Bavaria, and the Rhenish princes were rapidly consolidating themselves along the Upper Rhine. Blucher was once more in command of the Prussians, in the Netherlands; and Wellington, commanding in chief the British, Hanoverians, and Belgians, had also established his headquarters at Brussels by the end of May. Every hour the clouds were thickening apace, and it became evident, that, if Napoleon remained much longer in Paris, the war would burst simultaneously on every frontier of his empire.
He had no intention to abide at home the onset of his enemies; but the situation of civil affairs was such as to embarrass him, in the prospect of departure, with difficulties which, in former days, were not used to perplex the opening of his campaigns.
Hard indeed was his task from the beginning—to conciliate to himself heartily the political faction who detested, and had assisted in overthrowing the government of the Bourbons, and this without chilling the attachment of the military, who despised these coadjutors, both as theorists and as civilians, and had welcomed Napoleon only as the certain harbinger of war, revenge, and plunder. How little his soldiery were disposed to consider him as owing anything to a civil revolution, appeared almost from the commencement of his march from Cannes. It was observed that these haughty bands moved on in contemptuous silence whenever the populace cheered his approach, and shouted Vive l'Empereur only when there were no pequin[71] voices to mingle in the clamour. Every act of Napoleon after he reached Paris, that was meant to conciliate the common people of the capital, was the theme of angry comment among these martial circles. Such measures as he adopted in deference to the prejudices of the old republican party, were heard of with equal contempt. The pacific language of his first proclamations was considered as a fair stratagem—and no more. To them the man was nothing but as the type of the system: they desired to hear of nothing in France but the great Cæsar, and the legions to whom he owed his greatness, and who had the same right to a new career of battles, as he to his Imperial crown, at once the prize of past, and the pledge of future victories.
With the views of these spirits, eager for blood and plunder, and scornful of all liberty but the licence of the camp, Napoleon was engaged in the endeavour to reconcile the principles and prejudices of men who had assisted in rebuilding his throne, only because they put faith in the assertions of himself and his friends, that he had thoroughly repented of the despotic system on which he had formerly ruled France—that ten months of exile and reflection had convinced him how much better it was to be the first citizen of a free state, than the undisputed tyrant of half the world—in a word, that his only remaining ambition was to atone for the violence of his first reign by the mildness of his second. As a first step to fasten the goodwill of these easy believers, he, immediately on arriving in Paris, proclaimed the freedom of the press; but he soon repented of this concession. In spite of all the watchfulness, and all the briberies of his police, he could never bend to his own service the whole of this power. The pure republicans—even the pure royalists—continued to have their organs; and the daily appeals of either to the reason and the passions of a people so long strange to the exercise of such influence, otherwise than in subservience to the government of the time, whatever that might be, produced such effects, that, almost from the time in which he bestowed the boon, he was occupied with devising pretexts for its recall. He ere long caused, perhaps, more resentment by some efforts to thwart the conduct of the press, than would have resulted from the absolute prolongation of its slavery. Some even of the decrees of Lyons were hard to be reconciled with the professions of one who disclaimed any wish to interfere with the sacred right of the nation to frame its constitution for itself. But in almost every act of his government after he reached Paris, he furnished additional evidence how imperfectly his mind had divested itself of the ancient maxims. Even the edict, emancipating the press from all control, was an assumption on his part of the complete power of legislation. The same might be said of another decree, abolishing negro slavery and the slave trade, which he published shortly after: but this second measure exposed him to other comments. Who could seriously believe that at that moment of tumult, ere France was even in semblance entirely his, and while all Europe was openly arming against him, he had leisure for the affairs of the negroes? This display of philanthropy was set down universally for a stage-trick; and men quickened their eyes, lest such unsubstantial shows in the distant horizon might be designed to withdraw their attention from the foreground.
The great assemblage of Champ-de-Mai had been originally announced for the 10th of May; and its principal business as the formation of a new constitution. The meeting did not take place so early, and the task of proposing a constitutional scheme for its consideration, proved far more difficult than the Emperor had contemplated. He had the assistance, in this labour, of Carnot and Sieyes, whose names would have carried great weight with the republican party—had not both of these old jacobins and regicides accepted, on entering the Emperor's service, high rank in his peerage—a proceeding in direct violation of all the professions of their lives. He was further favoured with the aid of his brother Lucien, who, in spite of all previous misunderstandings, returned on this occasion to Paris; influenced, probably, by the same egregious vanity which made him fancy himself a poet, and hoping, under existing circumstances, to impress Napoleon with such a sense of his value as might secure him henceforth a commanding influence in the government of France. The Abbé Sieyes, and Lucien also, had had some experience ere now of Napoleon in the character of a constitution-maker. He was no longer so powerful as he had been when they formerly toiled together upon such a task: disputes arose; and the Emperor, to cut these short, and give a decisive proof of his regard for freedom of debate, soon broke up the discussion, retired from the Tuileries to the small palace called the Elysée, and there drew up the scheme which pleased himself, and which was forthwith published under the title of "Act Additional to the Constitutions of the Empire."
This title gave great offence, because it seemed to recognise many anterior enactments, wholly irreconcilable with the tenor of the document itself; and the mode of its promulgation furnished even more serious ground of objection. This constitution was, on the face of it, not a compact between the prince and the people, but the record of boons conceded by the former to the latter. In a word, all they that had condemned Louis XVIII. for his royal charter, were compelled to acknowledge that their own imperial champion of freedom was beginning his new career by a precisely similar display of presumption.
The substance of the "additional act" disappointed all those who hankered after the formal exposition of first principles; but it must be allowed that its provisions seem to include whatever is needful for the arrangement of a free representative constitution; hereditary monarchy; a hereditary peerage; a house of representatives, chosen by the people, at least once within every five years; yearly taxes, levied only by the whole legislature; responsible ministers; irremovable judges; and, in all criminal cases whatever, the trial by jury. The act, however, was published; the electoral colleges accepted of it, as they had done of all its predecessors; and it by degrees came out that the business of the Champ-de-Mai was to be—not even the discussion of the imperial scheme, but only to swear submission to its regulations, and witness a solemn distribution of eagles to those haughty bands who acknowledge no law but that of the sword.
This promised assemblage was preceded by one of the rabble of Paris, convoked in front of the Tuileries on the 17th of May, and there feasted and harangued by Napoleon—a condescension which excited lively displeasure among his soldiery. He himself looked and spoke as one thoroughly ashamed of what he had done and was doing. It had been his desire to stimulate among these people something of the old zeal of the revolutionary period, in case Paris should be once more threatened by a foreign enemy; but he had the double mortification to find that the army considered their touch as contamination, and that among themselves the name of Louis was almost as popular as his own. Even the Dames des halles, so conspicuous in the revolutionary tumults, screamed royalist ditties in his ear as they drank his wine; and the only hearty cheers were those of the day-labourers, who had profited by his resumption of some great public works suspended by the King's government.
The Champ-de-Mai itself, which, despite its name, fell on the 1st of June, turned out hardly a more successful exhibition. Napoleon, his brothers, and the great civil functionaries, appeared in theatric dresses, in the midst of an enormous amphitheatre, where the deputies, sent from the departments to swear allegiance to the Emperor and the "additional act," were almost lost in the military among whom the eagles were to be distributed. The enthusiasm was confined to these. The same ominous silence which prevailed at the coronation of 1804 was preserved among the people. The sun shone bright, and the roar of cannon filled every pause of the martial music. It was a brilliant spectacle; but Napoleon retired from it in visible dejection.
Three days after, the two houses met; and while that of the peers, composed of persons who all owed their rank, and most of them much besides, to Napoleon, showed every disposition to regulate their conduct by his pleasure, there appeared from the beginning a marked spirit of independence in a considerable proportion of the representative body. The Emperor's address to both was moderate and manly. He requested their support in the war which circumstances had rendered unavoidable, and professed his desire that they should consider the "additional act" and all other subjects of national interest, and suggest whatever alterations might appear to them improvements. Some debates, by no means gratifying to Napoleon, ensued; but he had no leisure for witnessing much of their proceedings. It was now needful that he should appear once more in his own element.