Chapter 35

The Emperor's greatest antagonists are forced to admit that he excelled himself in the winter campaign which he conducted in the first three months of 1814. No previous general had ever shown such talent, or achieved so much with such feeble resources. With a few thousand men, most of whom were inexperienced conscripts, one saw him face the armies of Europe, turning up everywhere with these troops, which he led from one point to another with marvellous rapidity.

Taking advantage of all the resources of the country in order to defend it, he hurried from the Austrians to the Russians, and from the Russians to the Prussians, going from Blucher to Schwarzenberg and from him to Sacken, sometimes beaten by them, but much more often the victor. He hoped, for a time, that he might drive the foreigners, disheartened by frequent defeats, from French soil and back across the Rhine. All that was required was a new effort by the nation; but there was general war-weariness, and there was in all parts, and particularly in Paris, plotting against the Empire.

There are those who have expressed surprise that France did not rise in mass, as in 1792, to repel the invader, or did not follow the Spanish in forming, in each province, a centre of national defence.

The reason is that the enthusiasm which had improvised the armies of 1792 had been exhausted by twenty-five years of war, and the Emperor's over-use of conscription, so that in most of the departments there remained only old men and children. As for the example of Spain, it is not applicable to France, where too much influence has been allowed to Paris, so that nothing can be done unless Paris leads the way, whereas in Spain each Province was a little government and was able to create its own army, even when Madrid was occupied by the French. It was centralisation which led to the loss of France.

It is no part of the task which I have set myself, to relate the great feats performed by the French army during the campaign of 1814, to do so I would have to write volumes, and I do not feel inclined to dwell on the misfortunes of my country. I shall content myself by saying that after disputing, foot by foot, the territory between the Marne, the Aube, the Saone, and the Seine, the Emperor conceived a daring plan which, if it had succeeded, would have saved France. This was to go, with his troops, by way of Saint-Dizier and Vitry towards Alsace and Lorraine, which, by threatening the rear of the enemies, would make them fear being cut off from their depots and finding themselves without any route of retreat. This would decide them to withdraw to the frontier while they still had the opportunity.

However, to ensure the success of this splendid strategic movement, it required the fulfilment of two conditions which failed him; these were: the loyalty of the high officers of state, and some means of preventing the enemy from seizing Paris, if they ignored the movement of the Emperor towards their rear and launched an attack on the city.

Sadly, loyalty to the Emperor was so much diminished in the Senate and the legislative body, that there were leading members of these assemblies, such as Tallyrand, the Duc de Dalberg, Laisne and others, who through secret emissaries informed the allied sovereigns of the dissatisfaction among the upper-class Parisians with Napoleon, and invited them to come and attack the capital.

As for defences, it must be admitted that Napoleon had not given this sufficient thought, and they were limited to the erection of a spiked palisade at the gates on the right bank, without the provision of any positions for guns. As the garrison, formed by a very small number of troops of the line, of invalids, veterans, and students from the polytechnic, was insufficient to even attempt resistance, the Emperor, when he left the capital in January to go and head the troops assembled in Champagne, confided to the National Guard the defence of Paris, where he left the Empress and his son. He had called together at the Tuileries the officers of this bourgeois militia, who had responded with numerous vows and bellicose undertakings to the rousing speech which he addressed to them. The Emperor named the Empress as Regent and appointed as overall commander his brother Joseph, the ex-King of Spain, the pleasantest but most unsoldierlike of men.

Napoleon, under the illusion that he had thus provided for the safety of the capital, thought that he could leave it for some days to its own devices, while he went with those troops which still remained to him to carry out the project of getting behind the enemy. He left for Lorraine about the end of March, but he had been on his way for only a few days, when he learned that the allies, instead of following him as he had hoped, had headed for Paris, driving before then the weak debris of Mortier's and Marmont's corps who, positioned on the heights of Montmartre, attempted to defend the city without any help from the National Guard except an occasional infantryman.

This alarming news opened Napoleon's eyes; he turned his troops to march towards Paris, for where he set out immediately.

On the 30th of March, the Emperor, riding post and with no escort, had just passed Moret when a brisk cannonade was heard; he held on to the hope of arriving before the allies entered the capital, where his presence would certainly have had a remarkable effect on the population, who were demanding arms. (There were one hundred thousand muskets and several million cartridges in the barracks of the Champ de Mars, but General Clarke, the Minister for War, would not allow their distribution.)

On his arrival at Fromenteau, only five leagues from Paris, the Emperor could no longer hear gunfire and he realised that the city was in the hands of the allies, which was confirmed at Villejuif. Marmont had, in fact, signed a capitulation which delivered the capital to the enemy.

As danger approached, the Empress and her son, the King of Rome, had gone to Blois, where they were shortly joined by King Joseph, who abandoned the command which the Emperor had given him. The troops of the line left by the Fontainebleau gate, a route by which the Emperor was expected to arrive.

It is not possible to describe the agitation which seized the city whose inhabitants, divided by so many different interests, had been surprised by an invasion which few of them had foreseen… As for me, who had expected it, and who had seen at close quarters the horrors of war, I was most anxiously thinking of a way to ensure the safety of my wife and our young child, when the elderly Marshal Serurier offered a shelter for all my family at Les Invalides, of which he was the governor. I was comforted by the thought that as everywhere the homes for old soldiers had always been respected by the French, the enemy would act in the same way towards ours. I therefore took my family to the Invalides and left Paris, before the entry of the allies, to report to General Preval at Versailles. I was given command of a small column made up of available cavalrymen from my own regiment and from the 9th and 12th Chasseurs.

Even if the allies had not marched on Paris, this column was due to be assembled at Rambouillet, and it is to there that I went. I found there my horses and my equipment, and I took command of the squadrons which had been allotted to me. The road was full of the carriages of those who were flying from the capital. I was not surprised by that; but I was unable to understand where the great number of troops of all arms came from, which one saw arriving from all directions in detachments, which if they had been combined would have formed a corps of sufficient size to hold up the enemy at Montmartre, and allow time for the army which was hurrying from Champagne and Brie to arrive and save Paris. The Emperor, misled by his Minister for War, had given no instructions regarding the matter, and was probably unaware that he still had so great a capacity for defence at his disposal, a description of which follows, taken from Ministry of War documents.

There were at Vincennes, the military school of the Champ de Mars, and the central artillery depot, some four hundred cannons with ammunition and 50,000 muskets. As for men, there were the troops brought by Marshals Marmont and Mortier, which together with troops gathered from other sources including 20,000 workmen, nearly all of them old soldiers, who had volunteered to help defend the city, amounted to some 80,000.

It would have been possible for Joseph and Clarke to assemble this force in a few hours and to defend the city until the arrival of the Emperor and the army which was following him.

Joseph and Clarke had forty-eight hours warning of the enemy approach, but did nothing, and as a final act of incompetence, at the moment when the enemy troops were attacking Romainville, they sent 4000 men of the Imperial Guard to Blois, to reinforce the escort of the Empress, which was already quite big enough.

When the Emperor learned that Paris had capitulated and that the two small corps of Marmont and Mortier had left, and were retiring towards him, he sent them orders to take up positions at Essonnes, seven leagues from Paris and mid-way between that city and Fontainebleau. He went himself to this last town, where were arriving the heads of the columns coming from Saint-Dizier, an indication that he intended to march on Paris as soon as his army was gathered together.

The enemy generals have later stated that if they had been attacked by the Emperor, they would not have risked a battle, with the Seine behind them and also the great city of Paris, with its million inhabitants, which might rise in revolt at any moment during the fighting and barricade the streets and the bridges, thus cutting off their line of retreat. So they had decided to draw back and camp on the heights of Belleville, Charonne, Montmartre, and the slopes of Chaumont, which dominate the right bank of the Seine and the route to Germany, when new events in Paris kept them in the city.

M. de Tallyrand, a former bishop now married, who had always appeared to be devoted to the Emperor, by whom he had been loaded with riches and made prince of Benevento, Grand Chamberlain, etc., etc., felt his pride injured when he was no longer Napoleon's confidant, and the minister directing his policy. So, after the disasters of the Russian campaign, he had put himself at the head of an underground conspiracy, which included all the malcontents from every party, but mainly the Faubourg Saint-Germain, that is to say the high aristocracy, who, after appearing at first submissive and even serving Napoleon in the time of his prosperity, had become his enemy, and without openly compromising themselves, attacked, by all means, the head of government.

These people, guided by Tallyrand, the most cunning and scheming of them all, had been waiting for an occasion to overthrow Napoleon. They realised that they would never have a more favourable opportunity than that offered by the occupation of the country by a million and a half enemies, and the presence in Paris of all the crowned heads of Europe, most of whom had been grossly humiliated by Napoleon at one time or another. Napoleon, however, though greatly weakened, was not yet entirely beaten, for, apart from the army which he had with him, and with which he had performed prodigies, there was Suchet's army, between the Pyrenees and the Haute-Garonne, there were troops commanded by Marshal Soult, there were two fine divisions at Lyon, and finally, the army in Italy was still formidable, so that in spite of the occupation of Bordeaux by the English, Napoleon might still assemble considerable forces and prolong the war indefinitely, by raising a population, exasperated by the exactions of the enemy.

Tallyrand, for his part, realised that if they gave the Emperor time to bring to Paris the troops who were with him, he might beat the allies in the streets of the capital, or withdraw to some loyal provinces, where he might continue the war, until the allies were exhausted and ready to make peace. In the view of Tallyrand and his friends, it was therefore necessary to change the government. Here there arose a great difficulty, for they wanted to restore the Bourbons to the throne, in the person of Louis XVIII, while other parts of the country wanted to retain Napoleon, or at most to install his son.

The same difference of opinion existed amongst the allied sovereigns. The kings of England and Prussia were on the side of the Bourbons, while the emperor of Russia, who had never liked them, and who feared that the antipathy felt by the French nation towards these princes and the emigres would lead to a fresh revolution, was inclined to favour Napoleon's son.

To cut short these discussions, and decide the question by making the first move, the astute Tallyrand, in an attempt to force the hand of the foreign sovereigns, arranged for a group of about twenty young men from the Faubourg Saint-Germain to appear on horseback in Louis XV square, decked with white cockades, and led by Vicomte Talon, my former comrade in arms, from whom I have these details. They went towards the mansion in the rue Saint-Florentin occupied by the Emperor Alexander, shouting at the top of their voices "Long live King Louis XVIII! Long live the Bourbons! Down with the tyrant!"

The effect produced on the curious gathering of onlookers by these cries, was at first one of astonishment, which was quickly succeeded by threats and menaces from the crowd, which shook even the boldest of the cavalcade. This first royalist demonstration having been unsuccessful, they repeated the performance at various points on the boulevards. At some places they were booed, at others applauded. As the entry procession of the allied sovereigns approached, and as the Parisians need a slogan to animate them, the one produced by Vicomte Talon and his friends rang in the ears of the Emperor Alexander throughout the whole day, which permitted Tallyrand to say to that monarch in the evening, "Your Majesty can judge for himself with what unanimity the nation desires the restoration of the Bourbons!"

From that moment, although his supporters greatly outnumbered those of Louis XVIII, as the events of the following year would show, Napoleon's cause was lost.

End of Volume 2, The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot.
Translated by Oliver C. Colt