$Unique_ID{bob00053}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte And Life Of Josephine
Chapter XX}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Tarbell, Ida M.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{napoleon
allies
france
peace
emperor
paris
army
french
campaign
day}
$Date{1906}
$Log{}
Title:       Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte And Life Of Josephine
Book:        Life Of Napoleon Bonaparte
Author:      Tarbell, Ida M.
Date:        1906

Chapter XX

Campaign Of 1813 - Campaign Of 1814 - Abdication

     The campaign opened May 2, 1813, southwest of Leipsic, with the battle of
Lutzen.  It was Napoleon's victory, though he could not follow it up, as he
had no cavalry.  The moral effect of Lutzen was excellent in the French army.
Among the allies there was a return to the old dread of the "monster." By May
8th the French occupied Dresden; from there they crossed the Elbe, and on the
21st fought the battle of Bautzen, another incomplete victory for Napoleon.
The next day, in an engagement with the Russian rear guard, Marshal Duroc, one
of Napoleon's warmest and oldest friends, was killed.  It was the second
marshal lost since the campaign began, Bessieres having been killed at Lutzen.

     The French obtained Breslau on June 1st, and three days later an
armistice was signed, lasting until August 10th.  It was hoped that peace
might be concluded during this armistice.  At that moment Austria held the key
to the situation.  The allies saw that they were defeated if they could not
persuade her to join them.  Napoleon, his old confidence restored by a series
of victories, hoped to keep his Austrian father-in- law quiet until he had
crushed the Prussians and driven the Russians across the Nieman.  Austria saw
her power, and determined to use it to regain territory lost in 1805 and 1809,
and Metternich came to Dresden to see Napoleon.  Austria would keep peace with
France, he said if Napoleon would restore Illyria and the Polish provinces,
would send the Pope back to Rome, give up the protectorate of the
Confederation of the Rhine, restore Naples and Spain.  Napoleon's amazement
and indignation were boundless.

     "How much has England given you for playing this role against me,
Metternich?" he asked.

     A semblance of a congress was held at Prague soon after, but it was only
a mockery.  Such was the exasperation and suffering of Central Europe, that
peace could only be reached by large sacrifices on Napoleon's part.  These he
refused to make.  There is no doubt but that France and his allies begged him
to compromise; that his wisest counsellors advised him him to do so.  But he
repulsed with irritation all such suggestions. "You bore me continually about
the necessity of peace," he wrote Savary. "I know the situation of my empire
better than you do; no one is more interested in concluding peace than myself,
but I shall not make a dishonorable peace, or one that would see us at war
again in six months. . . . These things do not concern you."

     By the middle of August the campaign began.  The French had in the field
some three hundred and sixty thousand men.  This force was surrounded by a
circle of armies, Swedish, Russian, Prussian, and Austrian, in all some eight
hundred thousand men.  The leaders of this hostile force included, besides the
natural enemies of France, Bernadotte, crown prince of Sweden, who had fought
with Napoleon in Italy, and General Moreau, the hero of Hohenlinden.  Moreau
was on Alexander's staff.  He had reached the army the night that the
armistice expired, having sailed from the United States on the 21st of June,
at the invitation of the Russian emperor, to aid in the campaign against
France.  He had been greeted by the allies with every mark of distinction.
Another deserter on the allies' staff was the eminent military critic Jomini.
In the ranks were stragglers from all the French corps, and the Saxons were
threatening to leave the French in a body, and go over to the allies.

     The second campaign of 1813 opened brilliantly for Napoleon, for at
Dresden he took twenty thousand prisoners, and captured sixty cannon.  The
victory turned the anxiety of Paris to hopefulness, and their faith in
Napoleon's star was further revived by the report that Moreau had fallen, both
legs carried off by a French bullet.  Moreau himself felt that fate was
friendly to the emperor.  "That rascal Bonaparte is always lucky," he wrote
his wife, just after the amputation of his legs.

     But there was something stronger than luck at work; the allies were
animated by a spirit of nationality, indomitable in its force, and they were
following a plan which was sure to crush Napoleon in the long run. It was one
laid out by Moreau; a general battle was not to be risked, but the corps of
the French were to be engaged one by one, until the parts of the army were
disabled.  In turn Vandamme, Oudinot, MacDonald, Ney, were defeated, and in
October the remnants of the French fell back to Leipsic. Here the horde that
surrounded them was suddenly enlarged.  The Bavarians had gone over to the
allies.

     A three days' battle at Leipsic exhausted the French, and they were
obliged to make a disastrous retreat to the Rhine, which they crossed November
1st.  Ten days later the emperor was in Paris.

     The situation of France at the end of 1813 was deplorable.  The allies
lay on the right bank of the Rhine.  The battle of Vittoria had given the
Spanish boundary to Wellington, and the English and Spanish armies were on the
frontier.  The allies which remained with the French were not to be trusted.
"All Europe was marching with us a year ago," Napoleon said; "to-day all
Europe is marching against us." There was despair among his generals, alarm in
Paris.  Besides, there seemed no human means of gathering up a new army.
Where were the men to come from? France was bled to death.  She could give no
more.  Her veins were empty.

     "This is the truth, the exact truth, and such is the secret and the
explanation of all that has since occurred," says Pasquier.  "With these
successive levies of conscriptions, past, present, and to come; with the
Guards of Honor; with the brevet of sub-lieutenant forced on the young men
appertaining to the best families, after they had escaped the conscript, or
had supplied substitutes in conformity with the provisions of the law, there
did not remain a single family which was not in anxiety or in mourning."

     Yet hedged in as he was by enemies, threatened by anarchy, supported by a
fainting people, Napoleon dallied over the peace the allies offered. The terms
were not dishonorable.  France was to retire, as the other nations, within her
natural boundaries, which they designated as the Rhine, the Alps, and the
Pyrenees.  But the emperor could not believe that Europe, whom he had defeated
so often, had power to confine him within such limits.  He could not believe
that such a peace would be stable, and he began preparations for resistance.
Fresh levies of troops were made. The Spanish frontier he attempted to secure
by making peace with Ferdinand, recognizing him as King of Spain.  He tried to
settle his trouble with the Pope.

     While he struggled to simplify the situation, to arouse national spirit,
and to gather reenforcements, hostile forces multiplied and closed in upon
him.  The allies crossed the Rhine.  The corps legislatif took advantage of
his necessity to demand the restoration of certain rights which he had taken
from them.  In his anger at their audacity, the emperor alienated public
sympathy by dissolving the body.  "I stood in need of something to console
me," he told them, "and you have sought to dishonor me.  I was expecting that
you would unite in mind and deed to drive out the foreigner; you have bid him
come.  Indeed, had I lost two battles, it would not have done France any
greater evil." To crown his evil day, Murat, Caroline's husband, now King of
Naples, abandoned him.  This betrayal was the more bitter because his sister
herself was the cause of it.  Fearful of losing her little glory as Queen of
Naples, Caroline watched the course of events until she was certain that her
brother was lost, and then urged Murat to conclude a peace with England and
Austria.

     This accumulation of reverses, coming upon him as he tried to prepare for
battle, drove Napoleon to approach the allies with proposals of peace. It was
too late.  The idea had taken root that France, with Napoleon at her head,
would never remain in her natural limits; that the only hope for Europe was to
crush him completely.  This hatred of Napoleon had become almost fanatical,
and made any terms of peace with him impossible.

     By the end of January, 1814, the emperor was ready to renew the struggle.
The day before he left Paris, he led the empress and the King of Rome to the
court of the Tuileries, and presented them to the National Guard.  He was
leaving them what he held dearest in the world, he told them.  The enemy were
closing around; they might reach Paris; they might even destroy the city.
While he fought without to shield France from this calamity, he prayed them to
protect the priceless trust left within.  The nobility and sincerity of the
feeling that stirred the emperor were unquestionable; tears flowed down the
cheeks of the men to whom he spoke, and for a moment every heart was animated
by the old emotion, and they took with eagerness the oath he asked.

     The next day he left Paris.  The army he commanded did not number more
than sixty thousand men.  He led it against a force which, counting only those
who had crossed the Rhine, numbered nearly six hundred thousand.

     In the campaign of two months which followed, Napoleon several times
defeated the allies.  In spite of the terrible disadvantages under which he
fought, he nearly drove them from the country.  In every way the campaign was
worthy of his genius.  But the odds against him were too tremendous.  The
saddest phase of his situation was that he was not seconded.  The people, the
generals, the legislative bodies, everybody not under his personal influence
seemed paralyzed.  Augereau, who was at Lyons, did absolutely nothing, and the
following letter to him shows with what energy and indignation Napoleon tried
to arouse his stupefied followers.

                                             "Nogent, 21st February, 1814.

         " . . . What!  six hours after having received the first troops
     coming from Spain you were not in the field!  Six hours' repose was
     sufficient.  I won the action of Nangis with a brigade of dragoons coming
     from Spain, which, since it left Bayonne, had not unbridled its horses.
     The six battalions of the division of Nismes want clothes, equipment, and
     drilling, say you.  What poor reasons you give me there, Augereau!  I have
     destroyed eighty thousand enemies with conscripts having nothing but
     knapsacks!  The National Guards, say you, are pitiable.  I have four
     thousand here, in round hats, without knapsacks, in wooden shoes, but with
     good muskets, and I get a great deal out of them.  There is no money, you
     continue; and where do you hope to draw money from?  You want wagons; take
     them wherever you can.  You have no magazines; this is too ridiculous.  I
     order you, twelve hours after the reception of this letter, to take the
     field.  If you are still Augereau of Castiglione, keep the command; but if
     your sixty years weigh upon you, hand over the command to your senior
     general.  The country is in danger, and can be saved by boldness and good
     will alone. . . .

                                                                 "Napoleon."

     The terror and apathy of Paris exasperated him beyond measure.  To his
great disgust, the court and some of the counsellors had taken to public
prayers for his safety.  "I see that instead of sustaining the empress," he
wrote Cambaceres, "you discourage her.  Why do you lose your head like that?
What are these misereres and these prayers forty hours long at the chapel?
Have people in Paris gone mad?"

     The most serious concern of Napoleon in this campaign was that the
empress and the King of Rome should not be captured.  He realized that the
allies might reach Paris at any time, and repeatedly he instructed Joseph, who
had been appointed lieutenant-general in his absence, what to do if the city
was threatened.

          "Never allow the empress or the King of Rome to fall into the hands
     of the enemy . . . .  As far as I am concerned, I would rather see my son
     slain than brought up at Vienna as an Austrian prince; and I have a
     sufficiently good opinion of the empress to feel persuaded that she thinks
     in the same way, as far as it is possible for a woman and a mother to do
     so.  I never saw Andromaque represented without pitying Astyanax surviving
     his family, and without regarding it as a piece of good fortune that he
     did not survive his father."

     Throughout the two months there were negotiations for peace.  They varied
according to the success or failure of the emperor or the allies. Napoleon had
reached a point where he would gladly have accepted the terms offered at the
close of 1813.  But those were withdrawn.  France must come down to her limits
in 1789.  "What!" cried Napoleon, "leave France smaller than I found her?
Never."

     The frightful combination of forces closed about him steadily, with the
deadly precision of the chamber of torture, whose adjustable walls
imperceptibly, but surely, draw together, day by day, until the victim is
crushed.  On the 30th of March Paris capitulated.  The day before, the Regent
Marie Louise with the King of Rome and her suite had left the city for Blois.
The allied sovereigns entered Paris on the 1st of April.  As they passed
through the streets, they saw multiplying, as they advanced, the white
cockades which the grandes dames of the Faubourg St. Germain had been making
in anticipation of the entrance of the foreigner, and the only cries which
greeted them as they passed up the boulevards were, "Long live the Bourbons!
Long live the sovereigns!  Long live the Emperor Alexander."

     The allies were in Paris, but Napoleon was not crushed.  Encamped at
Fontainebleau, his army about him, the soldiers everywhere faithful to him, he
had still a large chance of victory, and the allies looked with uneasiness to
see what move he would make.  It was due largely to the wit of Talleyrand that
the standing ground which remained to the emperor was undermined.  That wily
diplomat, whose place it was to have gone with the empress to Blois, had
succeeded in getting himself shut into Paris, and, on the entry of the allies,
had joined Alexander, whom he had persuaded to announce that the allied powers
would not treat with Napoleon nor with any member of his family.  This was
eliminating the most difficult factor from the problem.  By his fine tact
Talleyrand brought over the legislative bodies to this view.

     From the populace Alexander and Talleyrand feared nothing; it was too
exhausted to ask anything but peace.  Their most serious difficulty was the
army.  All over the country the cry of the common soldiers was, "Let us go to
the emperor." "The army," declared Alexander, "is always the army; as long as
it is not with you, gentlemen, you can boast of nothing. The army represents
the French nation; if it is not won over, what can you accomplish that will
endure?"

     Every influence of persuasion, of bribery, of intimidation, was used with
the soldiers and generals.  They were told in phrases which could not but
flatter them: "You are the most noble of the children of the country, and you
cannot belong to the man who has laid it waste....  You are no longer the
soldiers of Napoleon; the Senate and all France release you from your oaths."

     The older officers on Napoleon's staff at Fontainebleau were unsettled by
adroit communications sent from Paris.  They were made to believe that they
were fighting against the will of the nation and of their comrades.  When this
disaffection had become serious, one of Napoleon's oldest and most trusted
associates, Marmont, suddenly deserted. He led the vanguard of the army.  This
treachery took away the last hope of the imperial cause, and on April 11,
1814, Napoleon signed the act of abdication at Fontainebleau.  The act read:

          "The allied powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon
     Bonaparte is the only obstacle to the reestablishment of peace in Europe,
     the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his oath, declares that he renounces,
     for himself and his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy, and that there
     is no personal sacrifice, even that of his life, which he is not ready to
     make in the interest of France."

     For only a moment did the gigantic will waver under the shock of defeat,
of treachery, and of abandonment.  Uncertain of the fate of his wife and
child, himself and his family denounced by the allies, his army scattered, he
braved everything until Marmont deserted him, and he saw one after another of
his trusted officers join his enemies; then for a moment he gave up the fight
and tried to end his life.  The poison he took had lost its full force, and he
recovered from its effects.  Even death would have none of him, he groaned.

     But this discouragement was brief.  No sooner was it decided that his
future home should be the island of Elba, and that its affairs should be under
his control, than he began to prepare for the journey to his little kingdom
with the same energy and zest which had characterized him as emperor.  On the
20th of April he left the palace of Fontainebleau.