Introduction

Do not lament my fate; if I have decided to go on living, it is to serve your glory. I wish to write the history of the great things we have done together!1

With these emotional words, Napoleon said farewell to the veterans of his Imperial Guard at Fontainebleau on 20 April 1814, and took the road into exile on Elba. He kept the promise he made that day. He devoted the last five years of his life to composing his memoirs, and laying the foundations of the Napoleonic legend. Where Napoleon led, innumerable writers and historians have followed. Not aU of them have ‘served his glory’; many have criticized him fiercely. Yet he remains today one of the most intensely studied figures in world history. WeU over 200,000 books have been written about him since his death.2

The emphasis in these works has changed with the passage of time. Initially, it was Napoleon’s extraordinary personality and career that fascinated historians. There have been great biographies of him, such as those of Lefebvre, Tulard, Holland Rose, and Fournier, and many more no doubt will be written.3 His military exploits, such a central part of his legend, have always generated an industry of their own. Y et increasingly the focus of research has widened to include the major changes his rule brought both to France and to his empire beyond her borders. In 1982, Jean Tulard published a pioneering study of Napoleon’s empire, and this has been followed within the last decade by Thierry Lentz’s four-volume Nouvelle histoire du premier empire. Jacques-Olivier Boudon has assessed the impact of Napoleonic religious policy across Europe and Alan Forrest the burden of conscription, while Michael Broers has analysed Napoleon’s cultural imperialism and Charles Esdaile has placed his wars in an exceptionally broad international perspective.4

Yet despite all that has been written, certain crucial aspects of Napoleon’s story are stiU neglected—especially his faU. Much of this is a question of perspective. Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 at Waterloo was so dramatic that to the public it has become the crucial moment of his destruction. In Britain, the fact that he was beaten by a British general, Wellington, has given it a special importance. Victory over Napoleon has become a staple of patriotic history and an important element of national pride.

In fact, this perspective is false. Napoleon at Waterloo was not a recognized head of state, but an adventurer condemned as an outlaw by the other European powers. He had already been forced to abdicate once. It was this first overthrow, the previous year, that was decisive, and deprived him both of his throne and his legitimacy. His return to France in 1815 was a last desperate attempt to reverse this verdict, and its failure was inevitable.

The events that led to Napoleon’s first abdication remain far less familiar to British readers than Waterloo, no doubt because Wellington and his army played only a secondary role. In the great battles of 1813 and 1814— Bautzen, Dresden, Leipzig, Laon, and the capture of Paris, Napoleon was opposed instead by Russians, Austrians, and Prussians. Although British subsidies were essential to her continental allies, no British troops fought in these battles, except for one rocket battery at Leipzig. It was here that Napoleon’s fate was decided, but with the exception of Dominic Lieven’s excellent book on the Russian war effort, there are few significant works in English on the subject.5

As weU as offering an unfamiliar story, the conflict of 1813—14 also raises a central question. At several moments during these years, Napoleon’s opponents offered him compromise peace terms, yet he consistently failed to explore them. Was this because they were patently insincere, and not worth pursuing? Or were they in fact genuine, and Napoleon’s rejection of them merely arrogance and obstinacy? Whatever answer is given has major implications for one’s view of the Napoleonic wars. If Napoleon’s enemies had no intention of making peace with him, then the conflict was an irreconcilable clash, which could end only with complete victory for one side and utter defeat for the other. If, however, the offers were honestly meant, then a settlement between France and her adversaries was possible, and the ultimate responsibility for their failure rests on a single man.

This book seeks to resolve this question. It does so with the help of important new archival sources. Ironically, several ofthese remain untapped precisely because so much has been published about Napoleon. In the century after his death, the memoirs and many other papers of those who had known him appeared in print, leading to the assumption that the archives they were taken from contained nothing more of interest. This is emphatically not the case. The two best examples here are the papers of Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s foreign minister in 1813—14, and Metternich, his Austrian counterpart and the leading diplomat of the coalition formed against France. Caulaincourt’s memoirs were published in 1933, but these did not include a mass of autobiographical notes, including an entire section of several hundred pages on the 1813 campaign, and some important correspondence, now in the Archives Nationales in Paris. Eight volumes of Metternich’s papers appeared in the 1880s, but this was only a smaU selection from his vast archive now in the Czech National Archives in Prague, the Acta Clementina, which has only recently been properly catalogued. Some of the most significant new material in this book comes from these two sources.

The Caulaincourt and Metternich papers are both in public archives. Some sources—it is impossible to estimate how many—remain in private hands. I have been fortunate enough to gain access to one of these, the papers of Count Carl Clam-Martinic, aide-de-camp of Field-Marshal Schwarzenberg, allied commander-in-chief in 1813 and 1814, and later Austrian war minister. These contain important, and controversial, observations about the 1813 campaign, and a remarkable description of Napoleon himself, whom Clam accompanied on his journey to Elba.

Military and diplomatic events played the key role in Napoleon’s fall, but I have also tried to reflect the hopes and fears of the ordinary people he ruled. Like many other highly authoritarian leaders, Napoleon was obsessed by public opinion. ‘Nothing could be more changeable’, he once remarked of it, ‘but it never lies.’6 Testimony to this conviction is the remarkable series of monthly reports on ‘public morale’ he ordered from the prefects of every French department from October 1812. These are also now in the Archives Nationales, and have not yet been systematically studied. Even allowing for self-censorship and the desire to please the Emperor, they paint an extremely revealing picture of what French people at the grass roots thought about the war whose burden they bore. They also shed light on an important political and psychological question. Napoleon always claimed that the French would overthrow him themselves if he concluded a less than glorious peace, and consistently used this argument to refuse a compromise settlement. Through these monthly reports, I have tried to establish

Whether Napoleon’s perception was based on reality, or was instead the product of delusion.

Attempting to understand a personality as complex and brilliant as Napoleon’s has occupied many historians throughout their working lives. Often they have done so through biography, whereas this book covers only a short period of Napoleon’s life. Yet the moment of a great man’s fall offers a special insight into his character, his motives, and the reasons for his failure. That is what drew me to these three years.