Kitabı oku: «Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848», sayfa 9

‘God has clearly indicated that He does not wish the order of royal generations to be interrupted,’ argued one of Tsar Alexander’s advisers, Sergei Semionovich Uvarov. But he believed the people had acquired ‘a right to the gratitude of the Sovereigns whom they so valiantly defended’. He suggested that kings and people should make ‘the mutual sacrifice of despotism and popular anarchy’ on ‘the tomb of Buonaparte’. Talleyrand took a similar line when he argued that legitimacy could no longer be based on Divine Right, but on the monarch’s ability to ensure the happiness of his people. ‘The general opinion today, and it would be pointless to try to change it, is that governments exist solely for the people,’ he explained, ‘and the consequence of this view is that legitimate power is that which can best assure their happiness and their peace.’7

History could not be rolled back. ‘Without despising or wishing to denigrate the ancien régime, I regarded as puerile any attempt to reinstate it,’ wrote the duc de Broglie, a twenty-nine-year-old aristocrat who had served as a minor diplomat under Napoleon. ‘In heart and mind I belonged to the new society, I believed fervently in its boundless progress; and while detesting the process of revolution, with all the violence that it gives rise to and the crimes that sully it, I regarded the French Revolution in globo as an inevitable and salutary affliction.’8

To the conservatively minded, this was heresy. The principal reason why the Treaty of Vienna was so flawed was, according to Maistre, that the monarchs and ministers ‘clearly allowed themselves to be penetrated by the philosophical and political ideas of the age’, which he saw as an opportunistic pragmatism. ‘The spirit of revolution is dressed up as the spirit of reason, and under this disguise it is very alluring,’ he warned in August 1815. For people such as him, the threat of a return to 1793 exerted the same compulsive fear as did to all reasonable people in the decades following the Second World War the possibility of a return of fascism: the slightest reference to the episode tended to be pounced on as evidence of ‘Jacobinism’, just as post-war bien-pensants tended to brand anyone with right-wing sympathies a ‘fascist’. The ultra-conservative politician Jean-Baptiste de Villèle referred to all liberals as ‘la Révolution’, a word that epitomised for him a living force, a giant conspiracy on the move.9

‘As long as the absurd and fatal (and also at first sight very plausible) dogma of the sovereignty of the people is more or less publicly recognised,’ warned Maistre in March 1817, ‘I do not think that a sensible man can rest easy.’ Those who shared his views saw the Revolution not so much as a past event, but as the beginning of a new era in the struggle between good and evil. If the Revolution which had had such a devastating impact on people all over the world had indeed been brought about by a conspiracy, the danger was by no means past. The conspiracy could not have merely petered out, and its spirit could not have been extinguished by the military victory over Napoleon. The Revolution had not been the culmination, but an explosion, and, whether or not Mount Tambora had a subliminal effect, the prevailing imagery was volcanic.10

‘The French volcano erupted,’ in the words of Tsar Alexander’s adviser Count Alexander Sturdza. ‘Out came and rose up the spirit of evil. Its path was frayed and widened by religious deviance, excess of luxury, dissolution of morals, abuse of power and perversion of reason.’ The conservative writer Louis de Bonald agreed, and warned that ‘even if the eruption has ceased, the volcano is still alight and rumbling’.11

‘It is not only peace that Europe needs,’ reflected Bonald at the end of 1815, ‘it is first and foremost order that she is in need of …’ But what kind of order? European society had been split along ideological lines to an extent not seen since the Reformation. One man’s order was another man’s prison. If the progressive forces in European society were split between liberals who believed in the gradual evolution of democracy by means of constitutional monarchy and the vociferous minority who called for violent revolution, the forces of conservatism were equally split between the constitutional monarchists and a strident faction which saw only revolution, murder and mayhem everywhere. And while some looked for spiritual solutions, those in power sought comfort in a dubious legitimacy and the security of bayonets. In the circumstances, the pursuit of ‘order’ was to become a self-defeating quest that would transform European societies and help to mould the modern state.12

8
A Hundred Days

What usually happened at the close of a war was that the defeated party ceded territory to the victors and undertook to pay them reparations in one form or another. The deal was often sealed by a marriage which made it difficult for the vanquished ruler to seek to take his revenge. It was not usual practice to overthrow a defeated monarch – at most, he might be forced to abdicate in favour of a less aggressive or capable son – which is what Napoleon proposed in 1814. But Napoleon was a highly unusual monarch. The British did not recognise him as one at all. Others did so only reluctantly, and while he had been crowned by the pope and had married the Emperor of Austria’s daughter, they could not quite bring themselves to accept him. It was not merely a question of his lineage. While some saw him only as its infamous spawn, for others he was the Revolution incarnate. They referred to him as ‘the Usurper’, ‘the Monster’ or ‘the Ogre’. The English prime minister Spencer Perceval likened him to the woman in the Book of Revelations, ‘the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’, who rides upon the Beast and visits destruction on the world. If the revolutionary legacy was to be stamped out and its ghosts exorcised, it followed that Napoleon would have to go.1

They had not yet decided what to do with him when Tsar Alexander, who was first on the scene in Paris in 1814, took the matter into his own hands. In an access of misjudged chivalry, he signed a treaty with Napoleon at Fontainebleau, giving him the Mediterranean island of Elba to rule, with a generous pension to be provided by the future ruler of France. The question of who was to replace him was settled in similarly arbitrary manner, largely by the arguments put forward by the French statesman (and formerly Napoleon’s foreign minister) Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. He insisted that whoever replaced Napoleon must, in contrast to the usurper, enjoy the full sanction of legitimacy. His accession should also mark the end of the epoch that had opened with the outbreak of the Revolution. Talleyrand convinced the victorious monarchs and their ministers that the only person who satisfied these criteria was Louis Stanislas Xavier, younger brother of Louis XVI, the last king of France under the ancien régime, who had been guillotined in 1793.

There could be no question of restoring the ancien régime as such. What had taken place in France between 1789 and 1814 could not simply be written out of history. Talleyrand had himself taken part in the opening stages of the Revolution, and had later been a pillar of the Napoleonic empire. During those twenty-five years France and French society had been transformed beyond recognition, for the better in most cases, and this needed to be taken into account. The allies duly foisted on the new king a constitution, in the shape of the Charte. The legislature was to be a bicameral parliament, the higher chamber made up of peers nominated by the king, the lower of deputies elected on a suffrage based on property ownership: a more liberal and rational version of the English constitutional model. Although it aroused little enthusiasm, the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty was carried out without trouble: the majority of the population of France, exhausted by two decades of war, was politically indifferent – most people could not remember the Republic, let alone the ancien régime, so they saw no reason to resist it. There was nothing about the new king to get heated over.

Born in 1755, the younger brother of the heir to the throne, he had been carefully brought up and well educated, but found no outlet for his ambitions. Deeply religious and conscientious, he stood, or rather sat, on the sidelines, devoting his energies to the study of his favourite subject, the classics. He also gave free rein to his love of food, and, being averse to exercise in any form, grew corpulent. His marriage to a repellent princess of Savoy remained childless, despite valiant efforts on his part, and he distracted himself with a mistress. When the Revolution came, he stood by the king as long as he could, but fled abroad in June 1791. He went to Koblenz, where his younger brother the comte d’Artois and a large number of émigré nobles were forming an army with the intention of marching back into France to reinstate the king. When this hope evaporated, he resigned himself to exile, first at Verona, then Brunswick, Mittau (Jelgava), Warsaw and finally Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, struggling pathetically to maintain the decorum and trappings of royalty on the not always lavish generosity of others, latterly that of the prince regent.

King Louis was immensely fat, but he had good features and many found him handsome. Exuding benevolence, with a dignified bearing, he had the requisite regal presence. He was intelligent and aware that he must make some concession to the times, but he was out of touch with the people he was to rule. The costume he adopted, a combination of eighteenth-century court dress and nineteenth-century military uniform, was designed to marry the two epochs, and instead fell clumsily between them. Too heavy to mount a horse and too gout-ridden to wear leather ones, he invented top-boots made of velvet which, along with the sword he always wore, were meant to stress his adherence to the military traditions of his royal predecessors, but they compared unfavourably with the dashing uniforms of the Napoleonic era.

He took the name of Louis XVIII in deference to the son of Louis XVI, who had survived his father and therefore become titular King of France as Louis XVII before dying in a revolutionary gaol in 1795. Sticking fast to the principle of legitimacy, the new monarch considered himself to have been rightful king from the moment of his nephew’s death, and on arriving in France on 3 May 1814 dated his official pronouncements as being made in the nineteenth year of his reign – which was tantamount to a negation of everything that had happened since 1795. After doing all he could to wriggle out of having to accept the constitution forced on him by the allies, he insisted on ‘granting’ the Charte as a regal gesture. This was an insult to the notion of the sovereignty of the people, which had become the bedrock of French political life. More to the point, it presupposed that as he had granted the Charte, he could take it back if he pleased. Just in case there should be any doubt in the matter, he re-established the notion of Divine Right in official documents and in the oath of allegiance.

What could be forgiven in the king was less tolerable in the large number of émigré nobles who returned in his wake. Most had left France in the early stages of the Revolution, out of ideological conviction and loyalty to the monarchy or fear for their lives. Some had rallied to the princes at Koblenz, and later many had taken service with other monarchs, particularly in Russia. Others had just sat it out. As the Revolution turned into the Napoleonic empire many of the original émigrés returned to France and took service under its new ruler. Those who had held firm looked down on these, and when they in turn came back in 1814, they exhibited a bitter aloofness with regard to everything that had taken place in France over the past quarter of a century.

The revolutionary regime had confiscated the property of émigrés and sold these biens nationaux (national assets) to raise income. Many had since been sold on to new owners, yet the returning émigrés clamoured for their return. The Church, which had also been dispossessed, was in similarly assertive mood, and priests refused to give communion to current owners of former Church property. This kind of thing aroused strong passions in otherwise quiescent rural areas, where politics were of little interest but property rights all-important.

Supported by a large number of nobles who had formed associations with names such as la Congrégation de la Vierge (the Congregation of the Virgin) and les Chevaliers de la Foi (the Knights of the Faith), the Church also tried to recover its spiritual ascendancy. It organised missions to recapture the soul of France, holding mass baptisms in the army and provocatively ostentatious services to commemorate ‘martyrs’ of the Revolution and to ‘expiate’ its ‘crimes’, often at the spot where a liberty tree had been planted in place of a cross or where a guillotine had stood. It was tireless in sniffing out the revolutionary past of government officials and denouncing them, which often ended in them losing their posts and being ostracised. Many who had served the government of the day, often without conviction, during the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire, found themselves penalised and unable to pursue their careers.

Not surprisingly, the army suffered the most in this respect. Napoleon’s Imperial Guard was disbanded and replaced by the Maison du Roi, officered entirely by nobles, mostly émigrés with little or no military experience. As with his own dress, the king had designed for them a uniform which made them a laughing stock. The army was reduced in number, and officers surplus to requirements were put on half-pay. Distinguished generals were replaced by émigrés who had been lieutenants in 1789 and had not borne arms since. The tricolour which had fluttered over victory across Europe was banned in favour of a white flag, the banner of the royalist insurgents of the Vendée. The colour of the uniforms was changed, regiments were disbanded and those that were left lost their identity, and their battle-honours with it. As a final insult, the despised General Dupont, who had capitulated to the Spanish at Bailén in 1808, was appointed minister of war. In wine shops, cafés and guardrooms up and down the country, veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns, those who remained in the ranks and those who had been cashiered or retired on half-pay, the so-called demi-soldes, voiced their contempt for the new regime and talked of bringing back their beloved general.

Napoleon himself soon realised he was not going to be allowed to live out his days as sovereign of the island of Elba. Reports reaching him from Vienna confirmed that the powers assembled there in congress were planning to remove him to somewhere more remote, fearing that while he remained a free man he would be a magnet for discontent and opposition to the restored Bourbon monarchy. He was also aware of a number of plots being hatched to assassinate him. There is some evidence that as well as colluding in such plots, the Bourbon regime was trying to goad him, amongst other means by withholding payment of his allowance, into making a move that would force the allies to deal with him conclusively.2

Louis XVIII cannot therefore have been greatly surprised when, at the beginning of March 1815, less than a year since he ascended the throne, he was informed that Napoleon had landed on the south coast of France. He ordered units in the area to bar the road to Paris and sent his brother, the comte d’Artois, to take command, before despatching a strong force under the former Napoleonic Marshal Ney to defeat and capture his erstwhile master. He summoned the foreign ambassadors to the Tuileries and told them to instruct their courts that he felt ‘no anxiety whatsoever with regard to this event’. ‘I hope that it will not trouble the repose of Europe or my own,’ he added. With similar self-assurance he declared to the Chamber of Deputies and that of Peers that he would die fighting rather than abandon Paris.3

Napoleon had landed on 1 March at Golfe Juan with just over a thousand men. He was obliged to bypass Cannes and Grasse on account of the hostility of the local population, and during the first days of his march he met with little more than morose curiosity on the part of the locals. But the mood changed as he moved north, and at Laffrey on 7 March a regiment of infantry sent to bar his way rallied to him. That night he entered Grenoble in triumph, and on 10 March he was in Lyon, where he was greeted with enthusiasm. Artois, who had set up his headquarters there, had fled at his approach. Troops sent out by Louis XVIII to stop him could not be counted on, and their commanders wavered. Some remained loyal to the king and fell back on Paris, others took their men over to Napoleon. At Avallon General Girard brought two regiments over to his side; at Auxerre Marshal Ney, who had with characteristic bravado promised Louis XVIII that he would bring the usurper back in a cage, rallied to his former master and took his troops with him.

In the early hours of 20 March, with Napoleon approaching fast, Louis XVIII furtively slipped out of the Tuileries and, gradually deserted by most of the Maison du Roi, fled the country. Late that afternoon, Napoleon was carried in triumph up the main staircase of the palace on the shoulders of his generals and former ministers. But he had few illusions. ‘They have let me in just as they let the others out,’ he commented to his treasury minister Nicolas Mollien. There was something distinctly haphazard about the whole business. Yet the events of March 1815 were to have huge significance. The ‘Hundred Days’ that followed did more than briefly disturb the repose of Europe and inconvenience Louis XVIII. The episode fundamentally altered the political situation inside France, and would have serious repercussions for the whole Continent.4

In 1814 the defeated Napoleon could call on not much more than the loyalty of his soldiers, and even many of those were weary. The rest of the population had come to see him as a tyrant and to associate him with oppression, taxation, conscription and deteriorating living standards. As far as they were concerned, there was little to choose between Napoleon and Louis XVIII, and the latter would at least bring peace and a relaxation of conscription.

Unlike the Bourbons, Napoleon had learned his lesson, and the man who landed at Golfe Juan on 1 March was no longer the imperious ruler of 1814. At Lyon, where he paused briefly before advancing on Paris, he issued edicts and hostile declarations concerning priests and aristocrats, threatening to string them up from lamp-posts. When he reached Paris he set out to galvanise the masses by holding a great ceremony of national federation, in emulation of the coming together of the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. He did everything he could to revive the spirit of 1792, when to the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ the nation had flocked to repel the invading allied armies. The very ease with which he had toppled the Bourbon regime gave radicals of every hue new hope, and all the political issues of the past decades resurfaced.

He succeeded in rousing old revolutionaries and rallied them in defence of what he made out was a common cause. In Toulouse, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a former Jacobin and friend of Marat and Robespierre, an enthusiastic regicide who had retired from political life in disgust in the mid-1790s, now came forward to lead his community in welcoming Napoleon’s return. At Avignon, Agricole Morea, another rabid Jacobin and henchman of Robespierre, also sprang into action, seeing in the return of Napoleon the only hope of saving at least some of the legacy of the Revolution. Napoleon engaged the respected liberal Benjamin Constant to frame a new constitution, which appeased many enemies and critics. He abolished censorship. In an attempt to appeal to English public opinion he outlawed the slave trade. But the English were not impressed, and nor were the other powers to which he made conciliatory overtures, and whose delegates were still in congress at Vienna, finalising the new arrangement of Europe.5

News of Napoleon’s landing in France put the French delegate at the congress, Talleyrand, in an unenviable position. If Napoleon were to reach Paris, recover his throne and accept all the treaties binding France and the allies, they would have no legitimate grounds to make war on him. That would leave Louis XVIII, and Talleyrand himself, out in the cold. In order to pre-empt such a situation, he persuaded the delegates of all the powers at Vienna to issue a proclamation he had drafted, which declared Napoleon to have placed himself ‘outside the law’ and indeed ‘outside the human race’ by returning to France; he was to be treated as a dangerous criminal, an enemy of mankind. It followed that those who supported him were also outlaws. ‘The declaration is certainly the harshest measure ever taken against an individual,’ Talleyrand commented with satisfaction.6

It was much more than that. It was an entirely new departure in the history of European diplomacy and politics: a political excommunication by a group of powers of not just an individual, but of all he stood for and all those who supported it. It set the scene for a struggle between the self-appointed forces of good against the implied forces of evil, a struggle that would, in time, draw in the whole of Europe, as governments stood by the Vienna settlement as though it had been Holy Scripture and peoples tried to pursue the course of human progress. In the first instance, it drew a battle line across French society which made France very difficult to govern. The Hundred Days had profoundly altered the political landscape in other ways too.

The abdication of Napoleon in the previous year had ingloriously concluded a narrative of which the majority of the people of France had grown tired. Contemporary sources overwhelmingly report an indifference to his fall born of war-weariness and despondency, and even much hostility to his person. His spectacular reconquest of France, followed by the monumental battle and the shattering defeat of Waterloo, was, on the other hand, the stuff of legend. Waterloo instantly became a symbol – of heroism, grandeur, tragedy, and much more besides, a focus for pride as well as sorrow, a sacred memory which the Bourbon king and his regime insulted and defiled by their very existence.

To others, Napoleon’s return had been clear proof that the forces of revolution were still rampant, and that those who had supported him must be extirpated. As soon as news of the allied victory reached Marseille, a mob massacred retired Mamelouks of the Imperial Guard along with their wives and children. Marshal Brune was savagely murdered and mutilated at Avignon, General Ramel in Toulouse. A White Terror swept through the country, with random arrests, house searches, looting of property, beatings and occasionally murder. Owners of biens nationaux were molested and made to pay blood money to get royalist zealots off their backs. In Nîmes, it was the local Protestants, whose disabilities had been lifted by the Revolution and their rights safeguarded by Napoleon, who were the principal targets. All over France senior officers and functionaries were arrested and charged, and some condemned to death in legally dubious manner.7

In Paris, events took a less bloody course, but those who had fled in panic returned in a spirit of vengeance, clamouring for the execution of Napoleon and of dozens of his marshals and officials. Society ladies joined in the clamour for blood and, in the words of Marshal Marmont, ‘It was the height of fashion to be without mercy.’ Marmont was himself told he should be shot, despite his having remained loyal to the king.8

The more conciliatory Louis XVIII reportedly hoped that Ney would make his escape abroad, and was dismayed when he was apprehended. The marshal was to be tried by a tribunal of the Chamber of Peers, but its most distinguished members refused to sit in judgement over a man widely regarded as a national hero. Those who stepped in turned the trial into a mockery of justice, which only deepened the fault lines running through French society. While members of the highest aristocracy insisted on replacing the prison guards and donning their uniforms in order to stand guard over Ney between his condemnation and his execution, many others began to see him as a martyr.9

Napoleon’s postmaster Lavalette was also condemned to death. While he awaited the guillotine, the king’s entourage did everything they could to prevent his wife addressing a plea for mercy to him. When Marshal Marmont did manage to smuggle her into his presence he dismissed her petition, saying there was nothing he could do. ‘Vive le Roi!’ his entourage roared; Marmont records that the ferocious sound ‘reeked of cannibalism’. With remarkable devotion (considering that Lavalette was by no means young and had a mistress far fresher than her) she devised a plot to spring her husband from gaol dressed in her clothes, while she remained in his cell. With the help of friends, and the British general Sir Robert Wilson, he was then whisked off to England.10

An amnesty was declared, but it did not put a stop to the witch-hunts, and many were either banished or obliged to take shelter abroad. The army was further reduced and combed through for unreliable elements, resulting in the dismissal, disgrace, banishment or imprisonment of thousands. Anyone who had taken a seat in a legislative chamber under Napoleon was automatically disqualified from holding public office.

All the political passions of the past quarter-century had been stirred up. The humiliated army dreamed of revenge, Bonapartists of bringing back Napoleon or his son, revolutionaries of 1789 pined for a limited monarchy, others for the Republic of 1792, Jacobins for more extreme measures, and returned émigrés wanted the restoration of the ancien régime. Some monarchists felt that the lacklustre Louis XVIII, who had, as the saying went, forgotten nothing and learned nothing, should have been passed over in favour of the duc d’Orléans, head of a junior line, an intelligent man who had fought under the revolutionary tricolour in 1792, been a Jacobin and learned a great deal since. More reactionary elements favoured replacing him with a prince from the Spanish line of Bourbons, whose medieval mindset was more to their taste. Another candidate was the Prince of Orange, son of the newly created King of Holland, backed by deluded revolutionary French émigrés in Belgium who apparently believed that they would thereby succeed in adding the territory of Belgium to France.11

If Waterloo had convincingly demonstrated the strength of the forces of repression and the pointlessness of challenging them, Napoleon’s sensationally successful seizure of power suggested that with a will anything was possible. Sensible people took note of the former and resigned themselves to reality; hotheads were inspired by the latter, and were inclined to believe that any ‘coup de main’ might succeed. This meant that no serious group of would-be revolutionaries even considered the feasibility of action, while dreamers and adventurers were prepared to try their hand. If the probability of a well-organised conspiracy was negligible, that of sporadic isolated rebellion was not, particularly in Paris.

The city contained a vast number of manual labourers living on the breadline or beneath it as a result of the early stages of industrialisation, a drift from the countryside and the disbandment of the army. Between 1800 and 1817 the density of the population went up by 30.8 per cent. A volatile new element was the jeunesse des écoles, students of the grandes écoles established by Napoleon, who were filled with the spirit of individualism, philanthropy and rebellion against all authority fostered by the culture of the Romantic movement. The city also attracted restless spirits, including a group of English liberals, the most prominent of whom were Byron’s friend Kinnaird and General Sir Robert Wilson, a flamboyant cavalryman who had fought his way to fame in the colonies, the Peninsula, Russia and Germany, and whose sense of chivalry was outraged at what was going on. Referred to by the Russian ambassador as ‘the English Jacobins’ and ‘the English revolutionaries’, they were, according to him, on a ‘mission’ to ‘excite everywhere civil war’. The French prime minister referred to them as ‘a turbulent sect which is seeking to stir up revolutionary ferment wherever it can find the means’.12

The ambassador was Charles André Pozzo di Borgo, a Corsican by birth and a one-time friend of Napoleon who had participated in the early stages of the Revolution, but then helped the British capture his native island in 1794. He was rescued from it by Nelson when the French reoccupied it two years later, and after spending some time in England had taken service in Russia. Alexander gave him the rank of general and employed him on various missions before posting him to Paris. There, Pozzo di Borgo played a leading role in the permanent conference of the ambassadors of Russia, Prussia, Austria, Britain and the Duke of Wellington, commander-in-chief of their joint army of occupation. This conference had been put in place by the allies to monitor the situation and coordinate their policy on France. It also edited the king’s speeches, new legislation and other important documents, which were submitted to it beforehand by the French cabinet for approval. Pozzo di Borgo was a brilliant conversationalist, with a wit likened to a fireworks display. With his strong Corsican accent, his agility, his flexibility alternating with outbursts of feeling, he was very much a man of the south, and was described by one French statesman as ‘a political Figaro’.13