Chapter VII: Glory; and Elba

The war, immediately after the Brumaire coup d'etat, was pushed with vigor. Moreau received the commandership-in-chief of the Army of the Rhine, and Bonaparte, on the 16th Floreal of the same year (May 6, 1800), left Paris to put himself at the head of the Army of Italy. On the 25th Prairial (June 14), he achieved the brilliant victory of Marengo, which, completing the work begun under the Directorate, expelled the Austrians from Italy.

Between January 8, 1801, and the 25th of March, 1802, the various powers at war with France were one by one forced to sue for peace. The first treaty was signed by England at Amiens. The peace was to be short-lived, but Bonaparte improved his days of calm to restore a great part of the abuses overthrown by the Revolution, and to lay the foundations for his future hereditary power. Himself a sceptic, but considering religion in the light of an instrument of domination, he treated with the Pope of Rome toward the end of re-establishing Catholicism in all its splendor. He founded the order of the Legion of Honor, a ridiculous and anti-democratic body, and in so much a restoration of social inequality. Shortly thereafter the Revolutionary calendar was replaced by the Gregorian; in short, the First Consul set himself against the current of public opinion, by returning, more and more, to the traditions of the Old Regime.

On May 6, 1802, the Tribunate promulgated the suggestion that the powers of the First Consul be extended for ten years; and two months later upon motion of the Senate, the docile tool of Bonaparte, he was voted the Consulate for life. Pope Pius VII came to Paris to anoint and crown the brow of Napoleon, Emperor of the French by the grace of God.

The consequences of the restoration of hereditary monarchy in France were not long to await. One by one Napoleon forcibly seized all the budding republics of Europe which the breath of the Revolution had fanned into being, and bestowed them as benefices upon his family. Part of Italy, incorporated into France, was given into the vice-regency of Prince Eugene Beauharnais, the Emperor's brother-in-law; and one of the Emperor's sisters received the Duchy of Modena.

The 11th of April, 1803, was marked by a new coalition between England, Austria and Russia. For a moment bent on a descent upon England, Napoleon abandoned the adventurous project. Recalled from Boulogne to face a war on the continent, Bonaparte, whose military genius still attended him, gained on the 2nd of December, 1805, the wonderful victory of Austerlitz. Peace was again imposed upon Austria; on the 26th of the same month she signed the treaty of Presburg by which she surrendered enormous slices of territory.

In 1806 the King of Naples broke his treaties with France. He was summarily dispossessed of his throne to the profit of Joseph Bonaparte, brother to Napoleon. A short time thereafter, the republic of Batavia was presented to Louis Bonaparte, another brother.

Now dreaming of universal empire, and retrograding toward the era of feudal barbarism, Napoleon attached foreign duchy after foreign duchy as fiefs to his throne. His continual inroads into the neighboring territories rekindled the war. A fourth coalition was formed against the Empire. Prussia, neutral in the previous war, this time took an active part; but October 14, 1806, saw her crushing defeat at Jena; on the 26th the French army entered Berlin in triumph.

Russia, defeated at Friedland and at Eylau, begged for peace; it was concluded at Tilsitt, June 21, 1807.

At each of these new and crowning victories Napoleon's vertigo grew. Drunk with constant success, a universal monarchy now became his fixed idea, and still another of his brothers, Jerome Bonaparte, was invested with a kingdom formed out of several states of the Germanic Confederation. The single member of the Bonaparte family who took no part in the rich quarry of thrones distributed by the conqueror was Lucien. Did he seek thus voluntarily to expiate his complicity in the events of Brumaire, or was he victim to the Emperor's ingratitude? Lucien received not a single crown out of the booty.

Napoleon's return to the traditions of the Old Regime, even to those most execrated by the nation, became more and more extravagant. For instance, the right of primogeniture, abolished by the Revolution, was re-established. This iniquity, from the point of view of society and of the family, was forced upon the Emperor by the logic of his mistakes: if he reconstituted the nobility, he could not but ensure its existence by restricting the partition of property.

On March 1st, 1813, the Prussian government, yielding to the public voice of Germany, which was ever more and more hostile to Napoleon, gave the signal for treachery by breaking its alliance with the French Empire and again joining hands with England and Russia. The new coalition was reinforced by Sweden, where Bernadotte, the old general of the Republic, had become King. The victories of Lutzen and Bautzen at first seemed to assure Napoleon's success. Austria proffered its mediation to the belligerent parties, and they concluded, on June 4, 1813, the armistice of Plessewitz. A congress, in session at Prague, offered Napoleon as national limits those won by the armies of the Republic--the Rhine, the Meuse, and the Alps. But Napoleon rejected the proposal with disdain; he feared to lose by it his prestige in the eyes of the world and of France, which he believed he could hold in subjection only by the glamor of his victories.

The war recommenced, but soon, blow upon blow, began the reverses. Macdonald was defeated in Silesia, Ney in Prussia, Vandamme at Culm. The princes of the Germanic Confederation, encouraged by these checks, and yielding to the pressure of their people, abandoned Napoleon on the battle-field of Leipzig. They turned their troops against him. The French army, in full rout, retreated within its frontiers, October 31, 1813; soon the allies threatened them even there. Napoleon rushed to Paris on November 9th, and ordered new levies of troops. Thousands of families, at extortionate prices, had previously bought off their sons from conscription. This last draft took them all. The Corsican ogre devoured the whole generation.

The situation was desperate. The Austrians advanced by way of Italy and through Switzerland; the English, masters of Spain and Portugal, poured over the Pyrenees, under the command of Wellington; the Prussians, led by Bluecher, invaded Frankfort; and the army of the North, with Bernadotte at its head, penetrated France by way of Belgium. In vain the French soldiers performed miracles of valor; in vain were the Prussians annihilated at Montmirail, at Champaubert, and at Chateau-Thierry, and the Austrians overthrown at Montereau. These sterile victories were the final effort of Napoleon's warrior genius.

On the 30th of March, 1814, the foreign armies entered the capital, a shame which France had undergone but once before across the ages, under the monarchy, in the reign of King John. Talleyrand and Fouche, so long the servile tools of their master, were the first to betray him. On April 11, 1814, Napoleon abdicated the Empire after a reign of ten years.

The Senate, whose conduct during the Empire had been marked with abject servility, put the final touches to its ignominy by decreeing with the following justifications the deposition of the man of whom its own members had been the accomplices:

The Senate Conservator,

Considering, That under a constitutional monarchy the monarch
exists only in virtue of the Constitution, or the social contract;

That Napoleon Bonaparte, for some time head of a firm and prudent
government, gave to the nation and his subjects reason to depend
for the future upon his wisdom and justice; but thereupon he
sundered the pact which bound the French people, notably by levying
imposts and establishing taxes not warranted by the law, and
against the expressed tenor of the oath which he swore to before
his ascension to the throne, according to Article 43 of the Act of
Constitution of the 28th Floreal, year XII;

That he committed this assault upon the rights of the people just
when he had without necessity adjourned the legislative body and
had caused to be suppressed as criminal a report of that body in
which it contested his title and his part in the national
representation;

That he undertook a series of wars in violation of Article 50 of
the Constitutional Act of the 22nd Frimaire, year VIII, which
states that declarations of war must be moved, discussed, decreed
and promulgated the same as laws;

That he unconstitutionally rendered several decrees carrying the
penalty of death, namely the decrees of the 5th of March, last;
that he presumed to consider national a war which he entered upon
in the interest alone of his own unbridled ambition;

That he violated the laws and the Constitution by his decrees on
State Prisons;

That he has abolished ministerial responsibility, confounded all
powers, and destroyed the independence of the judiciary;

Considering, That the liberty of the press, established and
consecrated as one of the rights of the nation, has been constantly
subjected to the arbitrary censorship of the police, and that at
the same time he has made use of the press to fill France and all
Europe with contradicted facts, false maxims, doctrines favorable
to despotism, and outrages against foreign governments;

That acts and reports rendered by the Senate have been caused to be
garbled in publication;

Considering, That, in place of reigning with an eye singly to the
interest, the happiness and the glory of the French people and in
accordance with the words of his oath, Napoleon has heaped high the
woes of the fatherland by his refusal to treat upon conditions
which the national interests bade him accept, and which would have
compromised neither French honor nor the interests of the nation;

By the abuse he has made of all the resources of men and of money
that have been confided to him;

By his abandoning of the wounded without medical attention, without
assistance, and without food;

By various measures, the result of which has been the ruin of
cities, the misery and depopulation of the country districts,
famine and contagious diseases;

Considering, That, by all these causes, the Imperial Government,
established by the Senate-Consulate on the 28th Floreal, year XII,
has ceased to exist, and that the manifest will of all the French
calls for an order of things whose first result shall be the
re-establishment of general peace and which may be also an epoch of
solemn reconciliation among all the states of the great European
family,

The Senate declares and decrees as follows:

Article 1.--Napoleon Bonaparte is deposed from the throne, and the
hereditary right set up in his family is abolished. The French
people and the army are released from their oath of fidelity
towards Napoleon Bonaparte, who has ceased to be Emperor.

The heart rises with indignation and disgust at the thought of the shamefulness of these miserable senators. Not alone did not one among them dare to protest, even by his silence, against these acts which they now condemned, but these very acts in their time had had no more vociferous upholders than they themselves.

One last test was reserved for France and Napoleon. The latter was furnished later (in 1815) with the opportunity to expiate and redeem the past. His monarchical pride, his hatred for the Revolution both contrived to render impossible this supreme expiation, and a terrible chastisement fell upon him. In 1814 Bonaparte, although his throne was forfeit, was recognized sovereign of the island of Elba. The coalized Kings assigned him that place as a residence, and thither, attended by several officers and soldiers faithful to him in his misfortune, he repaired.

So great was the need felt by France for peace, repose, and independence, after these ten years of warfare and hard service, that in spite of her profound aversion for the Bourbons, their return was hailed with joy. The kingdom of 1814, a new usurpation of the sole, indivisible, indefeasable and inalienable sovereignty of the people, consecrated again the iniquitous principle of monarchy, against which the republican minority in vain protested.

Louis XVIII, accordingly, made his solemn entry into Paris on the 3rd of May, 1814, in the midst of the princes of his family, escorted by the greater part of the Marshals of the Empire, among whom mingled Emigrants and foreign generals: legitimate punishment to Napoleon!

The Bourbons deeply wounded the sentiment of the nation by a return to the usages of the Old Regime and by outrages against the acts of the Revolution. Decrees restored to the Emigrants the estates and property that had not yet been sold; the loans contracted by Louis XVIII in various countries were placed among the debts of the state. Ordinances prescribed the observation of church days and Sundays; the censorship was retained almost as rigorous as under the Empire. Processions commenced again to circulate about the churches. Thus the royal government in a short space became as odious as the imperial government had been. Several military conspiracies were organized. One faction of the bourgeoisie thought of calling to the throne the Duke of Orleans, while the republican party thought, on its part, to turn the trend of events to its own profit. But, as has well been said, the fate of France lay in the hands of the army, attached to Napoleon by the privileges he had showered upon it, and by the memories of its glory. The people, long grown disused to political life, switched off by Napoleon, and wounded by the Bourbons in its revolutionary instincts, lay inert, all save a few old patriots of the illustrious days of the Revolution. The army alone, then, was the deciding factor in the fate of the Restoration. Such was the state of mind in France from the 3rd of May, 1814, the day of Louis XVIII's entry into Paris, up to the beginning of the month of March, 1815, at which period begins our next chapter.