Napoleon in 1813
From a painting by Aimable-Louis-Claude Pagnest.
The disaffected, though few, were powerful and active, suborning the prefects and civic authorities by every device, issuing proclamations which promised anything and everything, and procuring plans of fortified places for the allies. Talleyrand began to utter oracular innuendos about the vindictiveness of the allies, the desertion of Murat, the sack of Paris, and various half-truths more dangerous even than lies. The air was so full of rumors that, although there was no widespread revolutionary movement, there were now and then serious panics; the town of Chaumont surrendered to a solitary Würtemberg horseman. But when the populace of the country at large began to wonder who the coming Bourbon might be, and what he would take back from the present possessors of royal and ecclesiastical estates, they were staggered. People in the cities heard with some satisfaction the strains of the "Marseillaise," which by order of imperial agents were once again ground out around the streets by the hand-organs. Napoleon walked the avenues of Paris without escort, and was wildly cheered; the Empress and her little son were produced on public occasions with dramatic success, and popular wit dubbed the boy conscripts by the name of "Marie Louises." The little men showed a grim determination and eventually a sublime courage, but they never could acquire the veteran steadfastness which wins battles. Journals, theaters, music-halls, and public balls were all managed in the interest of imperial patriotism; imperial tyranny dealt ruthlessly with suspicious characters. Yet the imperialists had their doubts, and many, like Savary, threw an anchor to windward by storing treasure at distant points, and sending their families to safe retreats. On the whole, the balance of public opinion at the opening of 1814 was overwhelmingly imperialist both in the cities and in the country. Men ardently desired peace, but they wanted it with honor and under the Empire.
That the Empire desired peace seemed to be proved by steps for the release of its two most important prisoners, the King of Spain and the Pope. Wellington thought that if the former had been despatched directly into his kingdom on December eighth, the day on which the conditions between himself and the Emperor were signed, England would have found the further conduct of the war impossible. Talleyrand, already deep in royalist plots, must have been of the same opinion, for he did not advise haste, but craftily suggested to his prisoner that the provisional government of Spain might refuse to accept him as king unless the treaty of release had been previously ratified by the Cortes. Accordingly it was referred to them, and, since the liberals desired the assent to their new constitution of a king not under duress, by their influence it was rejected. It was not until March, 1814, that Ferdinand was unconditionally released, and this delay proved fatal to Napoleon's interests in Spain. The liberals could no longer fight for free institutions, because it was then clear that the dynastic conservatism of Europe was to win a temporary victory. In about six months King Ferdinand undid the progressive work of six years, and Spain relapsed into absolutism and ecclesiasticism, with all their attendant evils. Nevertheless, France interpreted the conduct of the Emperor as indicating an earnest desire for peace, and this feeling had been strengthened by the absolutely unconditional release of the Pope on January twenty-second. This apparently gracious concession was effective among the masses, who did not know, as the Emperor did, that the allies were already on French soil.
The very next day Napoleon performed his last official act, which was one of great courage both physical and moral. The national guard in Paris had been reorganized, but its leaders had never been thoroughly loyal, many of them being royalists, some radical republicans, and the disaffection of both classes had been heightened by recent events. But the officers were nevertheless summoned to the Tuileries; the risk was doubled by the fact that they came armed. Drawn up in the vast chamber known as that of the marshals, they stood expectant; the great doors were thrown open, and there entered the Emperor, accompanied only by his consort and their child in the arms of his governess, Mme. de Montesquiou. Napoleon announced simply that he was about to put himself at the head of his army, hoping, by the aid of God and the valor of his troops, to drive the enemy beyond the frontiers. There was silence. Then, taking in one hand that of the Empress, and leading forward his child by the other, he continued, "I intrust the Empress and the King of Rome to the courage of the national guard." Still silence. After a moment, with suppressed emotion, he concluded, "My wife and my son." No generous-hearted Frenchman could withstand such an appeal; breaking ranks by a spontaneous impulse, the listeners started forward in a mass, and shook the very walls with their cry, "Long live the Emperor!" Many shed tears, and felt, as they withdrew in respectful silence, a new sense of devotion welling up in their hearts. On the eve of his departure, the Emperor received a numerously signed address from the very men whose loyalty he had hitherto had just reason to suspect.
It was four in the morning of January twenty-fifth when Napoleon left for Châlons. From that moment he was no longer Emperor. During the long winter nights just past he had wrought with an intensity and a feverish activity which he had never surpassed, sparing neither himself nor others, displaying no consideration for prejudice or honest opposition, calling on every Frenchman to sacrifice everything for France, to which, as he vehemently asserted, he himself was more necessary than she to him. If he had come honestly to believe what millions of others believed, it was little wonder; he had thenceforth but one aim—to prove that he was, as of yore, the first general of France, the only one able to save the country in an hour when all her glories were falling in wreck about her. His strategic plans, immense and intricate as was his task, were complete and excellent. The first was intended to prevent invasion by way of Liège, the most direct line and that which Prussia preferred. The second, which was partly defensive, was the one eventually used against the clumsy form of advance actually chosen by the invaders. Of the two, the former was the more brilliant, but the second was almost as clever. By it the Rhine bank was divided into three parts for purposes of defense. Macdonald was stationed at Cologne to protect the lower course; Marmont was to guard the central stretch, and they two divided between them the remnants of the army which had been swept out of Germany; Victor was stationed on the upper course to command the garrisons of the great frontier fortifications and strengthen himself by the new levies; Bertrand remained as a sort of rear post on the right bank of the river at Kastel, opposite Mainz. All told, these generals had at first only fifty thousand men.
The allies no sooner obtained possession of central Europe than they outdid its recent master in every species of exaction. The countries which had formed the Confederacy of the Rhine were compelled almost to double the number of the contingents they had raised for France, and to organize every fencible man into either the first or second line of reserves, called by the old feudal terms of ban and arrière-ban. At the same time the allies demanded and obtained new subsidies both of money and arms from Great Britain. In the three armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, as they stood on the Rhine, there were ready by January first about two hundred and eighty-five thousand men. By the end of February the army-lists of France, excluding the national guards, displayed a total of six hundred and fifty thousand men; the coalition, including England, had registered nearly a million. Deducting forty per cent. as ample to cover all shortcomings, we may say that France, with three hundred and ninety thousand in the ranks, men and boys, faced Europe with six hundred thousand full-grown men. These figures include the French armies of Catalonia, of the Pyrenees, of Italy, and of the Netherlands, together with the garrisons in all the strong places then held by France on both sides of the Rhine; they also include the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian reserves, with the national armies of Holland, Spain, and Italy.
Aside from the centrifugal forces inherent in the coalition, there was one which threatened its disintegration: the erratic character of the great Gascon who represented Sweden. Bernadotte's first care, after the battle of Leipsic, was to move north and secure the long-coveted prize of Norway. Ever mindful of the hint about a French crown, which Alexander had thrown out as still another bait at Abo, he gave as his parting admonition the transparent advice that the coming campaign should be confined to a frontier invasion of France, and at Hamburg he actually offered Davout, as the price of surrender, a safe return for himself and his army to their native land! This was too much; Alexander was furious, and the schemer was peremptorily ordered to leave a sufficient investing force before the city and return with the rest of his army to the lower Rhine. There he was suffered to remain in idleness, the task assigned to him being that of watching the Netherlands; two of his best corps were withdrawn from him and assigned to Blücher.
Nor was Napoleon free from his thorn in the flesh. In a bulletin published by him after the retreat from Moscow was a passage which implied some censure of Murat for his lack of stability. This both the King of Naples and his spouse bitterly resented, the latter roundly abusing her brother in their correspondence. This was an excellent pretext for desertion when the general crash appeared imminent, and at Erfurt the dashing and gallant, but weak and testy, monarch decamped. Hastening south, he entered at once into alliance with Austria, and then, putting himself at the head of eighty thousand Neapolitans, set out for Rome, waging a terrific warfare of proclamations. Eugène, too,—and this was an elemental disaster,—was virtually checkmated by the defection of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, which opened the Tyrol to the allies. All Italy was consequently lost. Augereau, whose feeble loyalty to Napoleon was already at the vanishing-point, had been appointed to take forty thousand conscripts, collect any straggling soldiers he could find in southeastern France, and keep open the door out of Italy for some or all of Eugène's veterans, with whose assistance it was hoped the marshal could form an army for the defense of the Vosges Mountains. But Eugène, having fought the indecisive battle of Roverbello, and finding himself in a sorry plight from both the military and political points of view, could send no reinforcements until April, when finally he concluded an armistice releasing his army. Augereau therefore found himself opposite Bubna at Geneva with an ineffective force, and with very little heart to wield what he had. This ended Napoleon's grand scheme for uniting the forces of Italy, Naples, Switzerland, and France.