Elba and the Hundred Days

“I want from now on to live like a justice of the peace,” Napoleon declared on his little island. But a man of such energy and imagination could hardly be expected to resign himself to defeat at age 45.

In France, moreover, the Bourbon Restoration was soon exposed to criticism. Though in 1814 the majority of the French people were tired of the emperor, they had expressed no wish for the return of the Bourbons. They were strongly attached to the essential achievements of the Revolution, and Louis XVIII had come back “in the baggage train of the foreigners” with the last surviving émigrés who had “learnt nothing and forgotten nothing” and whose influence seemed to threaten most of the Revolution’s achievements. The apathy of April 1814 quickly gave way to mistrust. Old hatreds were revived, resistance organized, and conspiracies formed.

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Was Napoleon Short?

From Elba Napoleon kept a close watch on the Continent. He knew that some of the diplomats at Vienna, where a congress was deciding the fate of Europe, considered Elba, between Corsica and Italy, too close to France and to Italy and wanted to banish him to a distant island in the Atlantic. Also he accused Austria of preventing Marie-Louise and his son from coming to join him (in fact, she had taken a lover and had no intention of going to live with her husband). In addition, the French government refused to pay Napoleon’s allowance, so that he was in danger of being reduced to penury.

All these considerations drove Napoleon to action. Decisive as ever, he returned to France like a thunderbolt. On March 1, 1815, he landed at Cannes with a detachment of his guard. As he crossed the Alps, the republican peasants rallied round him, and near Grenoble he won over the soldiers dispatched to arrest him. On March 20 he was in Paris.

Napoleon was brought back to power as the embodiment of the spirit of the Revolution rather than as the emperor who had fallen a year before. To rally the mass of Frenchmen to his cause, he should have allied himself with the Jacobins, but this he dared not do. Unable to escape from the bourgeoisie whose predominance he himself had assured and who feared above all else a revival of the radical experiments of 1793 and 1794, he could only set up a political regime scarcely distinguishable from that of Louis XVIII. Enthusiasm ebbed fast, and the Napoleonic adventure seemed a dead end.

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To oppose the allied troops massing on the frontiers, Napoleon mustered an army with which he marched into Belgium and defeated the Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815. Two days later, at Waterloo, he met the British under Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular War. A savage battle followed. Napoleon was in sight of victory when the Prussians under Gebhard Blücher arrived to reinforce the British, and soon, despite the heroism of the Old Guard, Napoleon was defeated.

Back in Paris, the parliament forced Napoleon to abdicate; he did so, in favour of his son, on June 22, 1815. On July 3 he was at Rochefort, intending to take ship for the United States, but a British squadron prevented any French vessel from leaving the port. Napoleon then decided to appeal to the British government for protection. His request granted, he boarded the Bellerophon on July 15. The allies were agreed on one point: Napoleon was not to go back to Elba. Nor did they like the idea of his going off to America. It would have suited them if he had fallen a victim to the “White Terror” of the returned counterrevolutionaries or if Louis XVIII had had him summarily tried and executed. Great Britain had no choice but to send him to detention in a far-off island. The British government announced that the island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic had been chosen for his residence; because of its remote position, Napoleon would enjoy much greater freedom than would be possible elsewhere. Napoleon protested eloquently: “I appeal to history!”