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Napoleon's Empire in 1811. Satillite states are colored light blue. (From Wikipedia)
Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow
(painted
by Adolphe Northen)
Napoleon's final resting place:
Saint Helena Island. (Wikimedia Commons)
According to paintings of Napoleon, his hair was cut short around the time that he became First Consul, adding to the discarding of long hair that was developing in men's hairstyles. In France, the style of women's clothing was changing too, to lighter dresses that revealed more of the shape of the body - part of what some of the more conservative and religious of people saw as the decadence of the time.
In 1800, in his first year as First Consul, Napoleon led his army over the Alps. And, in June of that year, with light field artillery that could easily be moved about, and the high morale of his troops, and his on-the-spot innovations, he crushed the Austrians at Marengo (125 kilometers east of Milan), which put France back in charge of the Po River valley.
Austria withdrew from its war against France in 1801. And, that year, Napoleon signed a concordant with the Papacy, mending the rift that had begun between the French Revolution and the Catholic Church in 1790. Catholics in France were to be free to practice their religion as they pleased, while the French government was to nominate bishops and pay the clergy.
In 1802, the war-weary British signed a treaty with France - the Treaty of Amiens - which returned to France Trinidad and other Caribbean islands. France remained in control of the Dutch and Belgian Netherlands, most of the Italian peninsula. The Treaty of Amiens left Europe with a balance of power of sorts, which Britain's leaders wished to maintain.
In early 1803, Napoleon still had troops in St. Domingue (Haiti), and he had Louisiana from Spain and was moving to acquire Florida. France also had ties with the Jefferson administration in the United States that were preferential over the British. The British, who still held Canada, felt their position in New World endangered. And they saw indications that Napoleon was planning to dominate the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East and feared for their trade routes in these parts of the world. They disliked signs that France was extending its power into western Germany. And rather than assure the British that they had nothing to fear, Napoleon enhanced British fears by moving to exclude Britain from the continent. Napoleon was also building up his military, adding troops from Piedmont to his war making capability and with Spain building his naval forces. Napoleon was not content with a balance of power, nor did he like the status quo. He did not love war, but he did like the glories of victory - the source of admiration for him from the French people. Napoleon regarded another war with Britain as inevitable, and he was working toward fulfilling that expectation.
The British were not evacuating the island of Malta, as required by the Treaty of Amiens. They wanted to keep Malta and wanted France to withdraw from the United Netherlands and from Switzerland in exchange for Britain's recognition of France's annexation of the Italian island of Elba and its other gains in Italy. France did not agree and, on April 11, 1803, broke relations with Britain. Facing war with Britain, Britain's domination of the Atlantic and having lost hope concerning St. Domingue, France sold Louisiana territory to the United States. And on May 18, Britain declared war on France - the two powers returning to their war of 1792-82, the British expecting it to be a war of attrition that would last many more years.
Napoleon, meanwhile, was streamlining the organization of France. He presided over thirty-six of the eighty-four sessions that produced was called Code Napoleón. Marriages and divorces were to be civil - in other words, outside the purview of the Church. There was to be government restructuring geared to honest administration, protection of property and wealth, and the Rights of Man and Citizen declared in 1789 was to be upheld, including equality before the law and freedom of the press. France was to have both private and public schools, with some of the early years of education in clerical schools, but all schooling was to be controlled by the state.
Under Code Napoleón the tradition of women as dependents was to continue. They could not make contracts or have bank accounts in their own name. Education was important to Napoleon. Women were to be educated mainly in that which was seen as making them good wives: in domestic skills and religious devotion.
Concerned about keeping his armies fed, Napoleon had offered a cash prize to anyone who developed reliable food preservation, and a food canning industry began in France.
A few months into his war with Britain, Napoleon's police discovered in France a British spy network connected with a plot involving émigrés living in Britain. It was a hare-brained plot to replace Napoleon with one of the brothers of Louis XVI, the Count of Artois (not to be confused with his older brother, the future Louis XVIII, the Count of Provence). In the wartime atmosphere and as a defense against French royalty, the Senate, on May 18, 1804, voted in favor of the First Consul becoming Napoleon I, "Emperor of the French." Napoleon's coronation was held on December 2, at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Pope Pius VII had arrived for the coronation, and it was expected that, in keeping with tradition, he would crown Napoleon. But Napoleon did not wish to recognize papal superiority, and at the last moment he took the crown from the Pope and crowned himself.
In 1804, Napoleon won Spain as an ally against the British, the British that year losing patience with Spain for its association with and help for France. Britain ordered a naval squadron to go on the offensive against Spain, and the British seized three Spanish ships carrying treasure from the Americas back to Spain. In December, Spain joined the war against Britain, and Napoleon looked forward to Spain's naval forces helping the French navy.
In May 1805, in Milan, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy, and, in June, France annexed what had been the Republic of Genoa. That year, Russia, concerned about its own imperial ambitions in Europe, allied itself with Britain, and Austria joined the alliance in July, followed by Sweden. And the German states of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, and Baden formally declared themselves with France.
Still looking towards an invasion of England, Napoleon visited the channel coast opposite England, and he said that if he could conquer the channel he could conquer the world. In July he ordered the French fleet to sail up the Atlantic coast to the entrance of the English Channel and to bring with it as many Spanish ships as possible. On August 18 the French fleet reached Spain's Atlantic port of Cadiz. A British fleet, which had been stalking the French fleet, was waiting off Cape Trafalgar. Napoleon ordered the French and Spanish ships and 90,000 men out of Cadiz to do battle with the British. Smashing the British navy would help in his plans to invade England, and the battle, he said, was to end "six centuries of shame and insult."
The captains on the Spanish ships resented being under a French admiral. Their ships were manned mostly by soldiers or beggars that had been gathered from the slums of Cadiz, and those who were to man cannon had never fired a gun from a rolling ship. By the time the ships reached the British navy, many of the crew were sick. And morale was low - on the French ships as well. French ships had been in poor repair, poorly provisioned, and the crews short of men and poorly trained. There were 18 French warships and 15 Spanish - a total of 33 for Napoleon - and 27 British warships. But Britain's crews were experienced, and the British fleet was led by a skillful and imaginative admiral, Horatio Viscount Nelson - feared by sea captains in Napoleon's navy. Nelson's fleet all but annihilated Napoleon's fleet. Not one of Nelson's 27 ships was sunk or captured. Twenty-three of the French-Spanish fleet of 33 sailed away from the battle, damaged and defeated. The British lost 449 killed, including Nelson, and 1,241 wounded. How many of the French and Spanish died is unknown, but the French described the battle as a victory, describing their loss as "trifling" and glorying in Nelson's death.
Despite French propaganda, France's stock market was shaken by the news of the Trafalgar battle, and Napoleon decided that the invasion of England would be postponed. In England, on the other hand, the Battle of Trafalgar brought the British into the streets. Without a strong land army, the British saw their navy as their major line of defense. The Day of Nelson's victory at Trafalgar, October 21, became Trafalgar Day, with the singing of Britannia Rules the Waves (first introduced in 1740). Wartime fears were uniting Britain, and much of the support for the French Revolution was evaporating.
Napoleon, meanwhile, was having real successes on land. In November, Napoleon's cavalry entered Vienna (the capital of Austria) unopposed, while his other forces were pursuing retreating Austrian and Russian armies in Moravia. In early December, Napoleon met the Austrians and Russians at Austerlitz. Russia's emperor, Alexander, was there. So too was the Austrian emperor, Francis II. Napoleon had 68,000 and the combined Russian and Austrian force had 85,000. Tricking the enemy into thinking he was weaker than he actually was and at a propitious moment calling reserves unknown to his enemy, Napoleon again won a battle by his wits. In the twelve hours of battle the Russian-Austrian force lost around 12,000 killed and wounded and 15,000 had been taken by the French as prisoners. The French lost 6,000 men. The Russian emperor fled with his troops back toward Russia, and Francis II decided to make peace. On December 26, Francis signed the Treaty of Pressburg, which gave to France more territory in northern Italy and gave to Napoleon's ally, Bavaria, territory that had belonged to Austria.
To celebrate his victory at Austerlitz, Napoleon launched construction of a monument to be called the Arc de Triomphe, modeled after the Arc de Constantine in Rome - a project not to be completed until 1836.
In February, 1806, the French drove the Bourbon king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, and his queen, Caroline (sister of Marie Antoinette) from southern Italy once again. The royal couple fled to Sicily, where they were protected by the British navy, and Napoleon made his elder brother, Joseph, King of Naples.
The British were disappointed by the 1805 failures of their allies against Napoleon, and, in 1806, Napoleon might have been able to negotiate a settlement with Britain. But talks with the British, in February and March, went nowhere. Napoleon put fifteen of the small German states into a "Confederation of the Rhine" and named himself its protector. The Holy Roman Empire was now abolished, and, in August, Francis of Austria renounced his title of Holy Roman Emperor, becoming merely "Emperor of Austria."
There was the question whether Napoleon's new hold in Germany could be sustained with a popular base. But popularity outside of France did not concern Napoleon much. Military might was his focus. His taking what wealth he could from occupied territories had not made his rule popular in the Netherlands or in Italy. His added power in Germany annoyed the Prussians. The Prussians were proud of the military might that had been created by Frederick the Great, and their new king Frederick William III, with his 200,000-man army, was unafraid and sent Napoleon an ultimatum, demanding the withdrawal of all French troops from east of the Rhine. Napoleon instead sent his army of 122,000 against Prussia's army combined with an army of its ally, Saxony, a total of 114,000 men. - at Jena and at Auerstädt. Napoleon was victorious again. His troops entered Berlin. Frederick William III united what was left of his troops with the Russians, and with Russia's tsar, Alexander, he swore eternal brotherhood.
Napoleon met the combined Prussian and Russian force in the cold of February, 1807, at Eylau, where 45,000 men died. The two sides continued their war, the port city of Danzig surrendering to the French in May. In June, the French and Russians fought at Friedland, with Alexander annoyed over Britain having failed to start a second front in Italy or in Holland to distract the French. The French won and occupied Königsberg.
Tsar Alexander, still annoyed with the British, met with Napoleon on June 25, in full view of their troops. Alexander delighted Napoleon by telling him (it is reported) that he hated the English as much as Napoleon did. Napoleon took a liking to Alexander. In July, Alexander, Frederick William and Napoleon signed the Treaty of Tilsit. Prussia lost almost half its territory. It lost Danzig and it agreed to close its ports to trade with Britain. And a French force was to be stationed in Prussia, where French domination was also to be unpopular.
In the Treaty of Tilsit, Alexander recognized Napoleon's augmented Confederation of the Rhine. He agreed to leave most of Europe to France in exchange for a free hand against Finland, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw from that part of Poland that had been ruled by Prussia. Alexander agreed to join in the boycott against British trade, and he agreed that if Denmark, Sweden or Portugal left their ports open to British shipping that he would join France against them.
Napoleon demanded that Portugal join the trade boycott against the British declare war on Britain. Portugal hesitated, because war with that great naval power would mean cutting itself off from trade with its colonies. Napoleon's ally, Spain, allowed French troops to pass through its territory to Portugal, and the French captured Lisbon on December 1, as Portugal's royal family was fleeing to Brazil.
Meanwhile, afraid of Napoleon, Denmark had allied itself with France. The British feared the addition of Denmark's navy to Napoleon's side and it bombarded Copenhagen, captured the Danish fleet and took 22 Danish ships to England. Napoleon responded by calling the British treacherous and unscrupulous.
Napoleon was confident and believed that he was more powerful than ever before, while in France he had created a police state. He had spies everywhere looking for subversion, and he tried to control as much as he could. He had violated the freedom of the press expressed in Article 11 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, reducing the number of newspapers in Paris to a few sycophants.
What Napoleon should have feared most was his own mistakes, and one of his big mistakes - self-admitted in hindsight in his last years - was in the making. In March, 1808, Napoleon intervened in a quarrel between Spain's king, Charles IV, and the son of Charles, Ferdinand. He took over Spain, making Charles and Ferdinand prisoners in a comfortable setting, but prisoners nevertheless, and in June he moved his brother Joseph from the Kingdom of Naples to the throne in Spain. Spaniards resented the presence of French troops and Napoleon's interventions. An unusually barbarous war began within Spain - with Napoleon as usual caring little about hearts and minds. French troops were living off the land and taking by force what they needed, as Napoleon expected them to. According to reports they were looting and raping with gusto, and profaning churches, and by firing squads and hangings the French executed hundreds of Spaniards thought to be resisting French power.
Napoleon's moves in Spain had repercussions in Latin America. With Charles IV and his son Ferdinand held by the French, the prestige of Spanish authority there declined. Armed uprisings occurred from Mexico to Argentina. And without Spain in control there, the British would be able to do more business in Latin America, helping Britain against Napoleon's economic blockade.
In August, 1808, resistance to the French spread from Spain to Portugal, and in August the British landed a force of 13,000 there, soon reinforced by an equal number of Portuguese. They defeated a French force sent against them, and in October, British troops entered Spain. The French were unable to control Spain's coastline, and the British could make surprise raids against the French and to give added support to Spain's guerrilla forces.
With Napoleon's Grand Army bogged down in Spain, Austria was encouraged to try again to make war against Napoleon. Austria's military and others hoping for war were eager to retaliate at the first opportunity - despite Austria's recent treaty with the French (Pressburg, December 1805). The same was true of the Prussians. Both Prussia and Austria were meeting secretly with the British, but for now it was the Austrians who would try again on the field of battle.
In early April, 1809, an Austrian army pushed into Bavaria, and Napoleon arrived with a counter force. It was less than the force that had defeated the Austrians at Austerlitz. Napoleon was now fighting a two front war, and half of his force against the Austrians were non-French and more like the mercenary dregs of society that had fought for kings before the French Revolution. In May, the Austrians defeated Napoleon, in the Battle of Aspern-Essling. Napoleon pulled back, sat and was vulnerable to being overrun. Napoleon had lost his reputation for invincibility, but the Austrians failed to follow up on their victory. Napoleon was resilient and in July was able to organize an attack and the defeat the Austrians, at the Battle of Wagram. In October, the Austrians signed yet another treaty, promising peace and amity forever. The Austrians ceded the portion of Poland that it had been ruling to the independent Duchy of Poland. They gave up territory to Bavaria and gave control of the eastern shoreline of the Adriatic Sea to France.
In 1810, Napoleon had a new eighteen-year-old wife, Marie-Louise, having annulled his marriage to Josephine, age forty-six, who had failed to give him children. Marie Louise was of the same royal Austrian family as the late Marie-Antoinette, and it appeared to some in France as an abandonment of the French Revolution.
The war continued without battles. The British were trying to cut France's maritime trade and Napoleon was still trying to block British trade from the continent - called the Continental System. But Britain's exports had reached an all-time high in 1809: 50.3 million British pounds compared to 9 million in 1802. [note] Britain's merchant fleet had grown to more than 17,000 ships. Tsar Alexander of Russia had denied Napoleon request to have French soldiers monitor Russia's port cities to prevent smuggling. And elsewhere along the continent's shores smuggling was taking place. Smugglers could get a good price for goods from Britain - prices made high by the illegality. Smuggling was one of the few ways that someone could get rich. Thousands officials were deployed to check the illegal flow of British goods into the continent, but to no avail. And even Napoleon allowed some trading with Britain, to offset damage that the boycott was doing to France's economy. But he cracked down as hard as he could on other nationalities caught trading with the British.
This crackdown including annexations. Napoleon annexed the United Netherlands and the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. He annexed the Republic of Valais, and, in January 1811, he annexed the Kingdom of Westphalia, the Grand Duchy of Berg and the Duchy of Oldenburg, adding to his annexations prior to 1810, including papal states and Triest. These annexations won for Napoleon more enemies. And the annexation of Oldenburg annoyed Tsar Alexander, whose brother-in-law had been an heir to the throne there.
The suspension of trade with Britain was hurting Russian exports and economy, and Tsar Alexander issued a decree taking Russia out of the Napoleon's Continental System. Alexander was annoyed not only by Napoleon's annexation of Oldenburg; he was annoyed by Napoleon's reluctance to approve of his expansion against the Ottomans to Constantinople - Napoleon fearing that this would make Russia too great of a Mediterranean power. Alexander was annoyed also by Napoleon's policy toward the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and his friendship with Polish nationalists. Alexander was unhappy about one of Napoleon's former generals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, having become King of Sweden, Alexander fearing an extension of French power there. And Alexander was surrounded by many who intensely disliked Napoleon.
In early 1811, Napoleon was warned that the tsar was planning a pre-emptive strike against him. At the end of February, he wrote a letter warning the tsar against a rapprochement with the British. Some around Napoleon spoke of the mistake that Charles XII of Sweden had made in the early 1700s by fighting the Russians on their soil. But Napoleon was intent on destroying British hopes of an alliance with Russia. Napoleon worried that if Russia were allowed to flout his boycott of Britain, others would follow its example. By defeating Russia, Napoleon reasoned, he could create an enlarged Poland friendly to France that would be a shield for western Europe against the East. Napoleon, moreover, was a gambler, and like bad gamblers he was ready to assume that luck would be on his side, or assume that he was an exception, rather than weigh the details of actual probabilities. Like a bad gambler, Napoleon wanted action above all else. He preferred action and drama to home-life comforts and addressing domestic issues. He said he cared little if his home at Tuileries burned down. And Napoleon was a dreamer. He was thinking that if Russia were defeated, from there he and his allies could go as far as the Ganges Valley, a farther reach than that of Alexander the Great.
In late December, 1811, Napoleon began organizing his invasion of Russia. In June, 1812, his army was gathered along the Vistula River - while he still had 224,000 men in Spain and troops occupying areas elsewhere in Europe. His invasion force reached 600,000, an army of twelve languages and many nationalities, about one-third French. It included Austrian and Prussian units that were unenthusiastic participants, Austria and Prussia having given them to Napoleon under duress. His army had a supply of rations that was to last fifty days, with horses pulling carts of supplies and artillery, accompanied by herds of cattle. Napoleon allowed officers to bring along luxuries and servants - more to carry and more mouths to feed. And, taking a cue from their officers, common soldiers brought along friends otherwise known as camp followers.
After the march toward Moscow began, Napoleon's troops found the roads were bad. Supply wagons failed to keep up. After the last of the cattle were slaughtered there was nothing around them to feed upon. The Russians were leaving behind them little but scorched earth. Hunger, dysentery, diphtheria and typhus killed 60,000 of Napoleon's troops before a shot was fired against the Russians. Horses with nothing substantial to graze upon died by the thousands. Napoleon was losing from 5,000 to 6,000 men a day through sickness or desertion.
On July 29, Napoleon and his army staggered into Vitebsk, after only a minor skirmish between his troops and a Russian rear guard. Vitebsk was a ghost town. Napoleon was advised that he would soon have no cavalry left. He held a war council, and his three top-ranking subordinates urged a halt to the campaign. Napoleon agreed, saying that they were not going to repeat the folly of Charles XII of Sweden. By the following day he changed his mind. He did not want to admit folly or show weakness. He accused his top subordinates of being too soft and pampered. He was eager to meet the Russians and Tsar Alexander in battle, and he believed that such battle would come either at Smolensk or at Moscow - places he believed that Alexander would not be willing to abandon.
Napoleon and his army reached Smolensk in mid-August. After three-days of hard fighting, his troops entered the city, finding smoking ruin and corpses. The Russian army had pulled back again, retreating north and east. Napoleon reminded an unhappy subordinate of the words of a Roman emperor who said that the corpse of an enemy always smelled good.
Napoleon believed that if the tsar had not fought for Smolensk he would surely fight to hold Moscow. On September 5 he and his army reached the Moscow river, about 120 miles short of Moscow. There, at Borodino, his army faced 640 Russian cannons, against Napoleon's 587. By now, Napoleon was down to 130,000 men - less than a third of those who had crossed the Niemen River with him back on June 23. Napoleon chose a frontal assault against the Russians - a tactic he had always been reluctant to employ - and the worst day of fighting yet known to humankind commenced. It was a one-day battle in which the Russians lost 44,000 dead and wounded and Napoleon lost 35,000. Napoleon's army might have been better trained in marksmanship, but they had been fought to a standstill, and on the night of September 7 the Russian army slipped away, undefeated despite its heavy losses.
Seven days of marching brought Napoleon to the city of Moscow. Fire erupted the day after he entered the city, and it went unchecked for three days. His troops went on a spree of looting - rescuing goods from the fire. Napoleon took up residence in the Kremlin. He waited for Alexander to send a message begging for peace negotiations. Days passed and no such message arrived. Staying in Moscow was winning Napoleon nothing. His supply and communications lines were beginning to be attacked by peasant guerrillas fighting for loot and revenge.
Demoralization was setting in among troops along his supply line, knowing that capture meant a terrible death. Napoleon tried passing the time reading novels but he could not concentrate on them. He ordered the manufacture of winter gear, but his order was not feasible.
After a month of dallying in Moscow - from mid-September to mid-October and thirty days closer to winter - Napoleon ordered a return to the Niemen river. He looked forward to rejoining 37,000 men and supplies that he believe he had in Smolensk.
Napoleon's retreat was burdened from his allowing his troops to carry their loot with them from Moscow - proofs, he said, of their victory. They had horse fodder for less than a week. Rather than take south-western route, which was clear and unopposed, they went over devastated terrain, back across the stinking battlefield at Borodino, where vultures and wolves were still feeding on the thousands of corpses that lay about. His men were abandoning their booty and under increasing attack. Their morale was gone. Men were eating flesh cut from some who had fallen and died. Napoleon reached Smolensk on November 9 and found stocks of food there to be lower than expected. Napoleon was concerned about a coup against him in Paris, and he feared a Russian encirclement. He and a vanguard left Smolensk ahead of a fifty-mile column of starving soldiers and camp followers. Winter had set in. Horses were perishing and being eaten, and people dying from the cold. But the winter was saving him from the Russians.
On December 5, at Smorgoni (around 200 kilometers west of Smolensk and 120 kilometers short of the Niemen River in what is now Poland), Napoleon and some of his top subordinates left the rest of the army and in a coach raced toward Paris.
It is said that only 30,000 of Napoleon's retreating army returned to their homes.
With Napoleon's failure against the Russians in 1812, fervent nationalism swept across Germany, Austria, Italy and other lands dominated by the French. The Spanish were still fighting to drive out the French. Already in May 1811 the French had been driven from Portugal. In February, 1813, Prussia and Russia formed an alliance against Napoleon, and in March they declared war. German princes in Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine were advised to join them against France under pain of being removed from power. Hamburg was occupied by Russian Cossacks. German conscripts in France's armies were deserting en masse. In April, Austria broke relations with France. Napoleon had been raising a new army since his return from Moscow, taking whatever men and boys he could get but not finding the horses he needed for his cavalry. He was in Germany with 200,000 troops in mid-April. On May 1, he beat a Russian-Prussian force at Weissenfeld. The Russians and Prussians had made themselves vulnerable by underestimating Napoleon's strength, but, on May 2, at Lützen, they fought Napoleon again. Napoleon performed well, but he was let down by subordinates, his better generals having been lost in previous wars.
In Spain in June, at Vitoria, an Anglo-Spanish army of 80,000 defeated a French army of 66,000, and much of three of France's armies withdrew from Spain.
During the summer an armistice was agreed to. Napoleon met with Austria's foreign minister, Count Clemens von Metternich, and the discussions did not go well. Napoleon told Metternich that he would give him nothing because Austria had not defeated him and that he would beat Austria again. Metternich described Napoleon's troops as boys and old men and told Napoleon that he was lost. In a rage, Napoleon told Metternich that he knew of nothing of what goes on in a soldier's mind, that he, Napoleon, grew up on the battlefield and cared little for the lives of a million men. Metternich replied that he wished all of Europe could hear what he had just said. Metternich accused him of having sacrificed French soldiers for his own ambitions. Napoleon boasted of having spared French soldiers by sacrificing Poles and Germans, which outraged Metternich - a German.
Napoleon's diplomacy not having gone well, in October he faced four powers in what was to be known as the Battle of the Nations: Russia, Prussia, Austria and Sweden. It was a three-day war in which Napoleon was outnumbered and suffered heavily from his enemy's 1,400 artillery pieces. Napoleon's army had 38,000 casualties and lost 30,000 as prisoners. Napoleon's total losses for the year were around 400,000. It sent Napoleon retreating back toward France, Napoleon crossing westward over the Rhine River on November 2, 1813.
The Allied forces began penetrating France, with 85,000 French soldiers facing 350,000 invaders. By March 31, Russian and Prussian armies were entering Paris. Royalists welcomed them waving the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy. The French senate decreed the end of Napoleon's authority and instituted a provisional government. Napoleon signed his abdication on April 6. The Count of Provence, a younger brother of Louis XVI, returned to Paris as Louis XVIII. He did not want absolute power and accepted that he was to be a constitutional monarch.
Rather than hanging Napoleon for all his aggressions and bloodletting, the Allied powers followed the preference of Tsar Alexander of Russia. Napoleon was sent into exile to the island of Elba, between Corsica and Italy. He was to be the island's ruler, to maintain his title of emperor and to have a benefit of a yearly income of two million francs paid for by the government of France.
Napoleon stayed on his island, Elba, less than eleven months. He had tired of being lord and emperor over a mere little island, and he had not received any of the stipend promised him. Napoleon had been brooding about where he had gone wrong, and had decided that he had judged human nature too highly. He gave little weight to resistance by the Allied nations to his return to France. On February 26, 1815, with about 1026 men, 40 horses and two cannon, aboard a hired frigate, he landed in the south of France, between Cannes and Nice.
A couple of hundred kilometers inland he encountered a battalion of soldiers sent against him. Napoleon stepped forward and said "Let him that has the heart, kill his Emperor!" Soldiers and veterans in France saw Napoleon and his wars as a source of prestige, and Napoleon was able to rally them to his side. Louis XVIII fled Paris. Napoleon took up residence there once again. He put France on war-footing again, and in June he sent troops into Belgium. The Allies responded, and at Waterloo the French met a coalition of British, Dutch, Belgian and Prussian forces, 234,000 men, the majority Prussian. Napoleon had 128,000, and he lost the battle. The Allies took Napoleon prisoner and sent him to an island more remote than Elba. The island was St. Helena, 15 kilometers (about 10 miles) wide and well guarded by the British, more than 15 degrees below the equator and 1,950 kilometers west of the African continent. There Napoleon was to write his memoirs, giving the world a distorted account of his deeds. And there he was to die, at age the age of fifty-two, in 1821.
Additional Online Reading
Recommended Books
Napoleon: a Biography, by Frank McLynn, 1997
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