Napoleon: a life

40 Last Chance

NEWS OF THE armistice was greeted with joy throughout the empire; from every department prefects reported that people were desperate for peace. The pursuit of glory no longer held any appeal outside some sections of the army, and most of Napoleon’s marshals and senior officers were begging him to conclude peace at almost any price. ‘You are no longer loved, Sire,’ General Belliard told him frankly, ‘and if you want the whole truth, I would say that you may be cursed.’ He assured Napoleon that if he were to make peace he would be blessed. Napoleon listened but said nothing.^[1]

Even Poniatowski, who had been obliged to evacuate Poland and had joined Napoleon at Dresden with his Polish corps, told him he should make peace now on the best terms available in order to be able to make war from a better position in the future. ‘You may be right,’ Napoleon replied, ‘but I will make war first in order to make a better peace.’ In similar vein, Berthier suggested that Napoleon take advantage of the armistice to pull out his far-flung garrisons and concentrate all his forces on the Rhine. But Napoleon saw the presence of his troops in places such as Hamburg, Stettin, and Danzig, and his own in Dresden, as an indication of his determination to stand by his German allies and any retreat as a sign of weakness that would give heart to his enemies. In letter after letter Cambacérès urged him to make peace, saying that everyone was desperate for an end to the war and that his reputation would not suffer if he were to make concessions. But Napoleon clung to his conviction that the people of France would not respect him if he failed to come up with something which could be dressed up as a victory, and what he called his ‘magie’ would be dispelled, as he explained to Fouché.^[2]

It was a measure of his insecurity that he had drawn Fouché out of retirement and was sending him to take up the post of governor of Illyria — in Paris he might be tempted to engineer a coup against him; in Trieste he was safely out of the way. The post had become vacant as its previous holder, Junot, had begun displaying dramatic symptoms of neurosyphilis dementia and had to be retired.

Metternich arrived in Dresden on 25 June. When he went to the Marcolini Palace the following day, he was struck by the look of despondency on the faces of the senior officers in the emperor’s anterooms. He found Napoleon standing in a long gallery, his sword at his side and his hat under his arm. The emperor opened the conversation with cordial enquiries about Francis’s health, but his countenance soon grew sombre. ‘So it is war you want: very well, you shall have it,’ he challenged Metternich. ‘I annihilated the Prussian army at Lützen; I beat the Russians at Bautzen; and now you want to have your turn. I shall meet you at Vienna. Men are incorrigible; the lessons of experience are lost on them.’ He accused Austria of treachery and said he had made a mistake in marrying Francis’s daughter. When Metternich tried to make him see that this was his last chance to make peace on favourable terms, Napoleon declared that he could not give up an inch of territory without dishonouring himself. ‘Your sovereigns, born on the throne, can afford to let themselves be beaten twenty times and still return to their capitals; I cannot, because I am a parvenu soldier,’ he said. ‘My authority will not survive the day when I will have ceased to be strong, and therefore, to be feared.’

He did not trust Metternich and saw the bases for negotiation suggested by him as a trick, since they would not be acceptable to Russia, let alone Britain, so that in agreeing to them he would be entering an open-ended negotiation. He was right, as although Metternich was sincere in trying to salvage what he could for Napoleon, his prime concern was to disengage Austria from alliance with him and give himself freedom of action. Napoleon tried to browbeat him, accusing him of treachery and of being in the pay of Britain, ridiculing Austria’s military potential and threatening to crush her. He lost his temper more than once, threw his hat into a corner of the room in a rage, only to resume the conversation on polite, even friendly terms. The meeting lasted more than nine hours, and it was dark outside when Metternich left.^[3]

He returned that evening at Napoleon’s invitation to see a play put on by the actors of the Comédie-Française, who had been brought over from Paris. He was astonished to find himself watching the famous Mademoiselle George (with whom he had had an affair in Paris) playing Racine’s Phèdre. ‘I thought I was at St Cloud,’ he wrote to his wife before going to bed, ‘all the same faces, the same court, the same people.’ The weather had turned fine, and there was a festive atmosphere in the baroque city. The armistice had cheered all those who longed for peace, and there were balls and parties for the French officers and Napoleon’s entourage.^[4]

Further meetings having proved fruitless, Metternich was about to leave, on 30 June, when he received a note summoning him for an interview with Napoleon. He ordered his horses to be unharnessed and went to the Marcolini Palace, dressed as he was, expecting to have to listen to the same complaints and threats. To his surprise, Napoleon agreed to a peace congress under Austrian auspices, to be held at Prague in the first days of July. He suggested including Britain, the United States of America, and Spain, but Metternich demurred, seeing this as an unnecessary complication.^[5]

A few days after his departure, Napoleon received unwelcome news from Spain. Wellington had gone over to the offensive at the end of May, and Joseph had been forced to abandon Madrid. The British caught up with him and the retreating French army at Vitoria and routed it on 21 June. It was a humiliating defeat, rendered all the more shameful to French arms by the loss of over a hundred cannon as well as all the army’s and the king’s baggage. Napoleon gave Soult overall command of the Army of Spain and ordered Joseph to go to Mortefontaine and not show himself in Paris.

He did not put much faith in Metternich’s mediation but hoped he might be able to strike a deal with Alexander. ‘Russia has the right to an advantageous peace,’ he told Fain. ‘She will have bought it with the devastation of her lands, with the loss of her capital and with two years of war. Austria, on the contrary, does not deserve anything.’ Yet Alexander was the one monarch least likely to treat with Napoleon on any terms, while Metternich did still favour a peaceful outcome.^[6]

The armistice was extended to 10 August; if terms were not agreed by midnight on that date hostilities would resume, with Austria in the allied camp. But the congress, which convened at Prague, never got beyond procedural questions. ‘At heart, nobody truly wanted peace,’ wrote Nesselrode, adding that the congress was a ‘joke’ which Alexander and Frederick William had opposed from the start, and the tsar sabotaged the proceedings by sending an envoy who would not be acceptable to Napoleon. Caulaincourt and Narbonne struggled to get negotiations going, but they were hamstrung; Caulaincourt had done everything to avoid being nominated to represent Napoleon, whose intransigence would make it impossible for him to negotiate. When he suggested making concessions, Napoleon burst out, ‘You want me to pull down my trousers to get a whipping,’ and stormed out of the room. Caulaincourt was instructed to take the line that Napoleon had never been beaten in Russia and only ‘sustained some losses through the inclement weather’. He was so exasperated that he appears to have told Metternich he wished Napoleon would lose a battle, as only that could bring him to his senses.^[7]

Napoleon was determined to brazen it out and in a show of nonchalance set off on 25 July for Mainz, to spend ten days with Marie-Louise. It was not a joyous occasion. He arrived to find her tired out by her journey and nursing a cold. The weather was bad, with heavy rain. After reviewing the troops in Mainz, he took her with him as he reviewed those camped in the vicinity. He made a show of confidence, putting in hand works for the refurbishment of the imperial residence in the city and declaiming about the apparent success of the negotiations going on in Prague. He also made elaborate plans for her to attend the flooding of the new harbour at Cherbourg, which was to provide a large sheltered basin for the fleet that would threaten Britain. But he was often silent and moody at dinner and on one occasion even snapped at her.

He was back in Dresden on 4 August, only to discover that the negotiations in Prague had not begun. He wrote to Metternich asking him to state his terms and received the answer on 7 August: the grand duchy of Warsaw should be divided between the three allies, Austria should recover Illyria, Hamburg and Lübeck should regain their independence, and France should give up her protectorate over the Confederation of the Rhine and her other German conquests.

Given Napoleon’s position, the terms were acceptable; there was no mention of Holland, Belgium, or Italy, which left plenty of room for manoeuvre when peace talks began in earnest. His acceptance would have prevented Austria from joining the allies in the war against him, which was important, since he continued to entertain thoughts of defeating the Russians and Prussians before then, which would, he believed, allow him to split the allies and play them against each other. But determined not to appear too keen, Napoleon delayed his reply accepting the terms.^[8]

The showman was determined to keep up his act. As his birthday fell after the end of the armistice, he had ordered the festivities to be brought forward by five days to 10 August, and it was celebrated with pomp in every unit, and imperially in Dresden itself, with a parade, a ball, a banquet, and fireworks. ‘One could not imagine anything under the sun more martial; everything exuded confidence, ardour, enthusiasm,’ wrote one of the actors of the Comédie-Française who had been performing in Dresden. ‘My God, what a show!’ It did not impress his generals, many of whom saw disaster looming.^[9]

‘The great moment has arrived at last, my dearest friend,’ Metternich wrote to his wife the same day. That evening, while fireworks lit up the sky above Dresden, the Russian and Prussian negotiators had gathered at his residence in Prague. Watches were consulted with impatience, and when the chimes of midnight rang out over the sleeping city Metternich announced that the armistice was over and Austria was now a member of the alliance. He ordered a beacon to be lit which, by a chain reaction, carried the news to allied headquarters in Silesia. By morning, Russian and Prussian troops were on the march to join the Austrian army outside Prague.^[10]

On 12 August, just as Caulaincourt and Narbonne were preparing to leave Prague, a courier arrived from Dresden with Napoleon’s instructions to accept Metternich’s terms. Caulaincourt called on Metternich without delay but was told it was too late; Austria had issued her declaration of war. Napoleon instructed him to delay his departure in the hope of being able to obtain an interview with Alexander, who was due a couple of days later. On 18 August Maret wrote to Metternich arguing that the congress had not been given a chance and proposing a fresh one to be convoked in some neutral city to include all the powers of Europe, great and small. But Metternich had by then ruled out peace, and Alexander had been against it all along. The tsar had gone so far as to conceal Britain’s agreement to join the negotiations, knowing it would have strengthened Austria’s case for peace and encouraged Napoleon to take the negotiations seriously — he would probably have been prepared to make concessions in such circumstances; a general peace with the participation of Britain, involving as it would not only huge economic relief but also the return of French colonies, could have been dressed up as a victory and allowed Napoleon to claim that he was making peace with honour.^[11]

The only victory he could hope for now was on the battlefield, and that was going to be difficult to achieve. Facing him was the main allied army under Schwarzenberg, consisting of 120,000 Austrians, 70,000 Russians under Barclay de Tolly and 60,000 Prussians under General Kleist, a total of 250,000. Behind it stood Blücher’s army of Silesia, consisting of 58,000 Russians and 38,000 Prussians. In the north Bernadotte commanded an army of 150,000 Swedes, Russians, and Prussians. That added up to well over half a million men and did not include Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish army, which was approaching France’s southwestern frontier. More significantly, the allies had agreed to a plan which consisted in refusing battle to Napoleon and only taking on individual corps commanded by his marshals. The idea was to wear down his forces without risking defeat. His resources were diminishing, while theirs were on the increase; the vast war effort Alexander had put in motion as soon as the French had been expelled from Russia was beginning to produce spectacular results in men, equipment, and, crucially, horses.^[12]

‘I have an army as fine as any and more than 400,000 men; that will suffice to re-establish my affairs in the North,’ Napoleon boasted to Beugnot, but later in their conversation he complained that he was short of cavalry and needed more men, particularly seasoned troops. His forces were in fact greatly inferior to those of the allies. His garrisons in Germany and Poland accounted for 100,000 of his calculation, and they were beyond his reach. His best marshal, Davout, was stuck in Hamburg with a body of seasoned troops, Rapp was besieged in Danzig with over 20,000 veterans, many of them officers and NCOs, while the bulk of the 300,000 or so men at Napoleon’s immediate disposal were mostly conscripts with rudimentary training. Much the same was true of the Army of Italy which Eugène had been forming up to threaten Austria’s southern flank.^[13]

Morale was surprisingly good among the troops as they marched out of Dresden on 16 August, boosted by the arrival of Murat, whom Napoleon had persuaded to come from Naples and take command of the cavalry. Napoleon’s plan was to drive back Blücher and then, leaving Macdonald to cover him, veer south and outflank the main allied army under Schwarzenberg, which was moving on Dresden. The first part of the operation went according to plan, but at Lowenberg on 23 August, as he was taking a hurried lunch standing up, a courier arrived with a message from Gouvion Saint-Cyr, whom he had left to hold Dresden, warning that the main allied army under Schwarzenberg was threatening the city from the south. Napoleon smashed the glass of wine he was holding against the table as he read the despatch. The fall of Dresden would have political repercussions, so he turned about and marched back, detaching a force under General Vandamme to move south into the allies’ rear while he took them on at Dresden.

He arrived outside the city on 26 August, and the next day, in pouring rain with mud up to their knees, his forces began pushing the allied forces back and eventually put them to flight. It was a fine victory; he had inflicted around 15,000 casualties, taken 24,000 prisoners, 15 standards, and a number of guns. But he failed to follow it up as he would have done in the past. He marched back to reinforce Vandamme, who was now in a position to cut off the allied retreat, but unaccountably stopped and turned back. The result was that Vandamme was himself caught in a trap and forced to capitulate at Kulm with around 10,000 men. If Napoleon had come to his assistance he would have destroyed the allied army and probably captured all three allied sovereigns and their ministers.^[14]

Napoleon’s sluggish behaviour has been variously blamed on a bout of food poisoning and on the depressing news he received on 30 August. Oudinot, whom he had ordered to march on Berlin, had been defeated by the Prussians at Grossbeeren. ‘That’s war,’ Napoleon said to Maret that evening after hearing of the disaster of Kulm. ‘Up there in the morning, down there in the evening.’ He was increasingly prone to making fatalistic comments and quoting lines of poetry about destiny; it was as though he were giving himself up to it rather than, as in his youth, trying to forge it. News of the death of Junot, who had leapt out of a window and killed himself on 29 July, would not have helped. In his last letter he had compared his worship of Napoleon to that of ‘the savage for the sun’, but begged him to make peace. In Lannes, Duroc, and now Junot, he was losing men who had served him with devotion since Toulon, nearly twenty years before.^[15]

A curious twist of fate had brought two of his long-standing rivals out against him. Moreau had been persuaded to return from America and had joined the tsar’s headquarters, entertaining dreams of a military and perhaps political comeback. These were shattered by a French shell outside Dresden on 27 August; he died four days later. To the north, as Sweden had joined the coalition, Bernadotte was leading a combined Swedish and Prussian corps, entertaining more clearly stated dreams of succeeding Napoleon as ruler of France. To that end, he avoided coming face to face with French troops and badgered the allies to allow him to attack Denmark instead. The allies did not trust him (Blücher only ever referred to him as ‘the traitor’, and Hardenberg described him as ‘a bastard that circumstances have obliged us to legitimise’) and kept a wary eye on him.^[16]

A couple of days after hearing of the defeats of Kulm and Grossbeeren, Napoleon received news that Macdonald had been repulsed with heavy losses by Blücher on the river Katzbach, and not long after, that Ney had been defeated at Dennewitz on 6 September. He was breaking his own golden rule, never to divide his forces but always to concentrate them at the decisive point. And while ‘the Bravest of the Brave’, as Ney was referred to, was a fine cavalry commander with all the panache one could hope for on the field of battle, he lacked judgement and, like most of the marshals, was not up to operating on his own. It did not help that Berthier was showing signs of age and despondency, which affected his management of operations. Napoleon too hesitated and kept changing his mind, meaning to march on Berlin one moment and into Bohemia the next. With the Austro-Russian army of Schwarzenberg licking its wounds in Bohemia, he decided to take on Blücher, but the Prussian refused to give battle, and Napoleon was obliged to trudge back to Dresden; the allies had drawn him into a game of blindman’s buff as he lunged at one and then another.

Soon after hostilities began, the weather turned wet and cold. The roads were morasses of mud, reducing his mobility as well as the effectives of every unit with each march. Communications were impeded by shortage of cavalry and by the large numbers of cossacks roaming the country; staff officers were reluctant to carry orders and proceeded with caution when carrying out reconnaissance for fear of being captured. The persistent rain often rendered muskets useless, so the troops had to resort to the bayonet. The marches and counter-marches exhausted the men and depleted the ranks. ‘Whenever we left a bivouac in the morning, having spent the night either only partially or not at all sheltered from the rain, the wind and the cold, we almost always left behind exhausted men, undermined by fever, hunger and misery, and that was almost always so many men lost, as in our incessant marches we did not have the possibility of having them moved,’ wrote Sergeant Faucheur. Dresden was filling up with sick and wounded soldiers and the supply situation was dire. ‘Never had my duties been more difficult or my efforts less fruitful,’ recalled the man in charge, General Mathieu Dumas.^[17]

Morale dipped, particularly among senior officers, who could see the situation growing desperate. None felt that more than Napoleon, whose exasperation was evident; he alternated between spells of lethargy and sudden bold decisions which his marshals considered too rash. He also lost his temper, calling into question their competence and their loyalty. When he accused Murat of treason (with good reason), Berthier tried to intervene, only to have Napoleon tell him to mind his own business and snap, ‘Shut up, you old fool!’^[18]

He could no longer hold on to his exposed position at Dresden and on 13 October decided to fall back on Leipzig, where Frederick Augustus had preceded him. Political considerations made him commit a fatal error: fearing that abandoning Dresden would make a poor impression, he left Saint-Cyr there with more than 30,000 men, thus depriving himself of a significant number of troops at a moment when the allies were gaining in strength. Reaching Leipzig two days later, he repelled an attack by Schwarzenberg, and the following day he scored significant success, at one point coming close to capturing the three allied monarchs. But toward the end of the day Blücher, whom he had assumed to be far away, appeared in his rear, and he was forced to call off the attack.

By then the allies had some 220,000 men facing his 150,000 on three sides, outgunning him with over a thousand pieces of artillery. He had lost the initiative and admitted as much by sending an Austrian general captured the previous day with an offer to negotiate — which was rejected out of hand. Their recent successes had buoyed the allies, and the tensions between them had been worked out by the signature on 9 September of the Treaty of Töplitz, which committed them to the common struggle. The only thing that could have saved Napoleon would have been a rapid withdrawal of all his forces in Germany and a concentration on the Rhine, but he continued to put strategy second to what were by now entirely irrelevant political considerations. The allies held off on 17 October as they prepared their concerted attack, but he did not seize the opportunity to make good his escape or even prepare for it; he did not evacuate the wounded or supplies of ammunition, or even have adequate crossings prepared over the rivers.

On 18 October, by which time they outnumbered the French by well over two to one with some 360,000 men and a vast artillery, the allies launched their attack. The French fought with determination, but the sheer numbers facing them told, and matters were not helped when the Saxon contingent in the French army suddenly turned around while advancing on the enemy and began firing on its French comrades who were coming up in support. Other German contingents also defected, sowing confusion and affecting morale. The number of men and guns on the field of battle meant that the slaughter was unprecedented. The corps commanders who could see the pointlessness of the situation were also losing heart. ‘Does that b — know what he’s doing?’ Augereau fumed to Macdonald two days later. ‘Haven’t you noticed that in the recent events and the catastrophe which followed he lost his head? The coward! He abandoned us, he sacrificed us all.…’^[19]

Napoleon really did not appear to know what he was doing. On the evening of 18 October he gave the order to withdraw, and columns of troops began a disorderly retreat through the narrow streets of Leipzig. The allies stormed the city the following morning, sowing confusion. A sergeant left guarding the single bridge over the river Elster with orders not to blow it until the rearguard had crossed panicked and lit the fuses too early, cutting off at least 12,000 men with 80 guns and leading to the death of Poniatowski, who drowned trying to get across the river despite being severely wounded. Napoleon had been asleep in a windmill outside the city and was woken by the explosion. Macdonald, who had managed to get across, reported the event. Napoleon seemed stunned as much as distraught and apparently unaware of the extent to which his lack of foresight had been to blame for a debacle of monumental proportions. The losses of the Grande Armée in the fighting around Leipzig were 70,000 and 150 guns, not counting the 20,000 German allies who had changed sides. Allied losses were 54,000.^[20]

Before leaving Leipzig Napoleon went to the palace and offered Frederick Augustus refuge in France, but the Saxon king declined the offer, saying that he could not leave his subjects at such a time. Frederick Augustus sent officers to each of the allied monarchs but received no response. Alexander snubbed him when he rode into Leipzig, and after some argument the unfortunate Saxon royal couple were bundled into a carriage and sent under armed escort to captivity in Berlin. Murat, however, was allowed to sneak off to Naples, where he had an army of around 25,000 men, magnificently uniformed but inadequately trained and led. Metternich, who may also have been influenced by fond memories of the affair with Caroline he had enjoyed in Paris a couple of years before, seems to have believed that his forces were stronger and to have been impressed by his military reputation. He thought it politic to detach him from Napoleon by offering to leave him on the Neapolitan throne.

Napoleon fell back on Erfurt, where he spent two days, in the same rooms in which he had held talks with Alexander less than five years earlier, ‘in an attitude of deep meditation’, in the words of Macdonald. He briefly thought of making a stand there, but his marshals baulked at this, pointing out that the Bavarians, who had now joined the coalition, were about to cut them off from France. Listless and undecided, he had to be urged to move on by his marshals and made for the Rhine. Aside from the Guard, which was still disciplined, most of his remaining forces were no more than a crowd marching without order; one officer was reminded of the retreat from Moscow. No effort was made to rally the troops, and many were abandoned to die by the roadside.^[21]

At Hanau, their road was barred by 50,000 Bavarians. The Guard managed to defeat their erstwhile allies, but Napoleon barely directed the action, sheltering in a wood and seeming to those around him to have lost his nerve. Ségur, who had arrived from Paris and had not seen him for six months, was shocked by the change that had taken place in him. ‘The impression he made on me was so strong and so painful that I still feel it today,’ he wrote more than a decade later. When Napoleon addressed the remnants of Poniatowski’s Polish corps, releasing them from their oath but begging them to stay with him, promising to fight again one day for their country’s cause, many were so moved to pity that they did.^[22]

He crossed the Rhine on 30 October with no more than 30,000 men and some 40,000 stragglers. He spent two days at Mainz, from where he sent optimistic reports and captured standards to Paris, assuring Marie-Louise that people in Paris were ‘unnecessarily alarmed’: ‘My troops have a decisive superiority over the enemy, who will be beaten sooner than he thinks.’ To Savary, he wrote that the alarmist talk in Paris was ridiculous and made him ‘laugh’. But the situation was nothing short of catastrophic.^[23]

His empire was crumbling. The network of control over Germany built up since 1806 unravelled. As other rulers of the Confederation of the Rhine joined the allies, Jérôme fled Kassel, ‘accompanied by his ministers of foreign affairs and war, and still surrounded by all the tattered trappings of royalty’, in the words of Beugnot, who saw him pass through Düsseldorf, escorted by ‘lifeguards whose theatrical uniforms heavy with gold were wonderfully inapposite to the situation’ and a court which ‘resembled nothing so much as a troupe of actors on tour rehearsing a play’. The 190,000 or so French troops still holding out in fortresses such as Dresden and Hamburg, not to mention points further east, were now beyond Napoleon’s reach and isolated in a hostile sea and would capitulate one by one. Private scores were settled as his regime imploded, unruly Prussian and Russian troops bent on rapine swarmed over the area, and a typhus epidemic spread rapidly as people fled in all directions, turning military hospitals into morgues and striking down exhausted and underfed stragglers.^[24]

The situation further south was little better. Austrian troops had invaded the Illyrian provinces, forcing the weak French garrisons to evacuate them. Eugène could do little to stem their advance and fell back on Milan. In November he was approached on behalf of the allies by his father-in-law, King Maximilian of Bavaria, who urged him to safeguard his future by changing sides, but he refused and remained loyal to Napoleon, firmly supported by his wife.^[25]

As he contemplated the defence of France itself, Napoleon did what he could to improve her defences by closing off potential points of entry. He pressed the Diet of the Helvetic Republic to declare its neutrality (without going so far as to recall the Swiss troops in his own ranks), withdrew all French forces and renounced his role as Mediator.

He also belatedly tried to lance the Spanish ulcer, instructing Joseph to abdicate (which he at first refused to do, waxing indignant about being forced to ‘sacrifice’ sacred rights to ‘his’ throne, and complaining that he was not accorded the honours due to his royal rank), and freed Ferdinand, still a guest of Talleyrand at Valençay. He was to return to Spain, having first married Joseph’s twelve-year-old daughter Zenaïde and signed an alliance with France promising to expel British troops from the Peninsula. By the time Ferdinand set off, in March 1814, he could no longer be of any use to Napoleon, even if he had wished to be. Soult at Bayonne and Suchet further south, with 50,000 and 15,000 men respectively, faced a combined Anglo-Spanish force three times that number.^[26]

Eugène was only just holding out in Italy, with 30,000 troops of questionable quality and allegiance against a more numerous Austro-Bavarian army. Only Augereau’s reserve of about 20,000 stationed in the region of Lyon stood between that and Paris. In the north-east, apart from the troops besieged in fortresses in Holland, Belgium and along the Meuse, Napoleon had only around 70,000 men. They faced at least 300,000 allies who had reached the Rhine and threatened to cross it at any moment.

While he was still at Dresden he had instructed Cambacérès to make the Senate bring forward the call-up of 1815, and on 12 November, after his return to Paris, it voted the conscription of another 300,000 men. Napoleon estimated that he would soon have 900,000 under arms, but his calculations were as fictitious as those concerning available funds. As the area under his control shrank, so did his manpower pool, and resistance to conscription increased; the number evading it by going into hiding rose drastically, and according to some estimates reached 100,000. Few of the class of 1815 ever reached the ranks. Even if they had, they would not have been of much use, as there was nothing to arm them with. Given an annual production of 120,000 muskets, the losses of 500,000 in 1812 and 200,000 in 1813 could not easily be made up. At the end of 1813, the 153rd Regiment of the Line had 142 muskets for 1,100 men, the 115th regiment 289 for 2,300 men. The situation in the cavalry was no better, with the 17th Dragoons having to share 187 sabres and even fewer horses between 349 men.^[27]

Napoleon was back at Saint-Cloud on 10 November. The following day he held a Council of State during which he complained that he had been betrayed by everyone, venting particular rage against King Maximilian of Bavaria and vowing vengeance. ‘Munich shall be burned!’ he ranted repeatedly. He put on a brave face, and only a few days after getting back to Paris he went hunting. Ten days later he rode around with Fontaine inspecting the new post office and corn market and progress on the extravagant project of a palace for the King of Rome at Chaillot. Nobody was fooled. ‘Despite his efforts to hide them, it was evident to all those accompanying him that other thoughts were occupying him more than these grand building projects,’ noted Bausset. He relieved his stress with outbursts against people and also used his feigned rages to show that he was still the roaring lion. He tried to bully the Pope into accepting his ‘new concordat’; when he refused, the old man was bundled off back to detention in Savona. Seeing Talleyrand at the first lever, Napoleon threatened him that if he were brought down, Talleyrand would be the first to die. On 9 December at the opening of the Legislative body he lectured it on the need for more men, more money, and more determination. Court life continued as usual; the receptions were as glittering and crowded as ever, but Joseph and Jérôme were kept away, as Napoleon did not want dethroned monarchs spoiling the show.^[28]

‘The master was there as always, but the faces around him, the looks and the words were no longer the same,’ recorded one official who attended the imperial lever at the Tuileries. ‘There was something sad and tired about the demeanour of the soldiers, and even the courtiers.’ The mood in Paris was despondent. ‘People were anxious about everything, foreseeing only misfortune on all sides,’ wrote Pasquier. ‘The court was gloomy,’ wrote Cambacérès. ‘With the exception of a very small number, all the men with positions anticipated the impending catastrophe and were secretly occupied in trying to avoid it and secure their political existence.’ Many were expecting a change of regime.^[29]

Napoleon only confided in a very few. ‘In the evenings, he would call me to his apartment, as he sat in his dressing gown warming himself by the fire,’ recalled Lavalette. ‘We would chat (I can find no other word for this hour-long talk which preceded his sleep). The first days I found him so prostrate, so despondent, that I was horrified.’ Marmont, who saw him often, noted that he was ‘gloomy and silent’, but would always buoy himself up with hopes that the allies would pause on the Rhine long enough for him to raise a new army; he could envisage no other means of salvation.^[30]

‘Come back to France, Sire, identify yourself with the French and every heart will be yours, and you will be able to do what you wish with them,’ Josephine had written to him on hearing news of Leipzig. But Napoleon could not bring himself to trust the French people. He knew that Bernadotte had contacted his Jacobin friends in the hope of taking power, and he saw the despair to which his entourage had given way as weakness at a moment when the state they had all laboured to build was about to crumble like the Bastille. He was convinced that only he could safeguard the new order he had created, and that only by a show of force.^[31]

He desperately wanted peace, but he had based his right to rule so exclusively on glory and his supposedly miraculous ‘star’ that he felt he would be betraying it by making what he saw as a humiliating peace. ‘In that, he underestimated the generosity of the French and was not able to trust in a quality which was alien to his own character,’ commented Pasquier. ‘He did not even do himself justice, for he possessed, in the memory of his brilliant record, and even in his mistakes and his reversals, an éclat and a grandeur that would always have sustained him.’ He could envisage only one way of reasserting his right to rule, by redeeming himself on the battlefield, and as a result threw away his last chance of keeping the throne of France.^[32]