When Napoleon asserted that the French people would reject peace without victory, he was thinking above all of the people of Paris. In 1792, he had witnessed their ferocity in the face of defeat, and assumed that they would react the same way in 1814. Were Napoleon’s fears justified, or merely based on his grisly memories of the Revolution?
Whereas in the provinces public opinion was monitored by the prefects, in the capital this was the job of the police, and Pasquier, the prefect of the Paris police, wrote Napoleon daily reports. These survive, and are a mine of information about Parisian opinion in the last months of Napoleon’s regime.1 The picture that emerges bore little relation to the Emperor’s preconceptions.
Unlike those of the provincial prefects, Pasquier’s bulletins do not deal with public opinion under a separate heading. Instead, references to it are scattered through the main sections: on the theatres, notable events (usually murders or suicides), surveillance of barracks, and the operations of the Bourse, the Paris stock exchange. The reasons for this are unclear, but the likeliest is that Pasquier was strongly in favour of peace, and known to be so.2 Including in his bulletins all available evidence that the Parisians felt the same way was an obvious means of steering Napoleon in this direction. Yet Pasquier could not do this too openly, otherwise the Emperor, always suspicious of being manipulated, might take serious offence.
This helps explain the reports’ most striking feature—most of the material on public opinion comes in the sections on the Bourse. On one level, this had a clear logic. In the crisis conditions of spring 1814, the Bourse was packed. ‘In these circumstances’, Pasquier concluded, ‘the stock market becomes a barometer—if admittedly often an inaccurate one—of opinion.’3 On another level, presenting public opinion in the guise of reporting on the Bourse allowed Pasquier to make his points effectively, but not too obtrusively. It was worthy ofhis skill and subtlety to smuggle everything his
Master did not wish to hear into some inoffensive paragraphs on stocks and shares.
All the bulletins portray the Bourse as desperate for an end to the war. Most obviously, the share index rose at any news that peace was likely to be signed, and feU when this prospect receded. On 8 January, Pasquier reported that ‘the faU in share prices would have been steeper, according to observers, if there was not still some hope of peace.’ In contrast, two days later he noted: ‘the rise in consolidated stocks is attributable to new transactions and to sustained rumours of peace.’ More concretely, on 20 January he wrote that ‘today’s rise can be credited to an article in the Moniteur saying that [Cau-laincourt] has received his passports to attend [a peace conference] in Basel.’4
The Bourse was probably the best-informed public place in Paris. In fact, as the crisis continued and business declined, it seems to have functioned more as a clearing-house for news than as a forum for commercial transactions. On 9 March, for example, it was ‘so crowded that it was difficult to move; the numbers of the curious grow daily and business is almost at a standstill.’ On the 12th, apparently, commerce virtually stopped: ‘people were principally occupied chasing the latest news.’ Inevitably in such a febrile crowd, there was much unsubstantiated rumour as weU as hard fact. When on 3 February some countrywomen arrived in Paris from Vincennes, claiming to have encountered on the road thirty armed men with long beards speaking bad French, traditional fears ofbrigands revived. In fact, the thirty bandits turned out to be eight bedraggled deserters from the army. What this did illustrate was the level of alarm and anxiety in the capital, whose effects, if one report is to be believed, could be fatal in themselves. On the morning of 8 March, a story went round the Bourse that ‘among the people fleeing Montereau for Paris, several had died of fear in the stagecoach.’5
From 2 February, the Bourse’s attention was fixed on the negotiations at ChatiUon. Initially, the news received was sparse. No word, for example, seems to have leaked out about the allied demand for France’s former limits. However, the session of the congress on the 17th, coupled with the French victories of the previous week, caused hopes to rise sharply. That day, a report circulated that Marie-Louise had just received a letter from Napoleon announcing that the allies had made him ‘improved offers of peace’, and share prices rose as a result. Two days later, optimism reached a peak. ‘It is said’, Pasquier reported, ‘that the signature of peace preliminaries depends on just one article that would make Antwerp a free city.’6 Given Napoleon’s
Determination to keep Antwerp French at all costs, this smacks of wish-fulfilment. It is further evidence of the role of rumour in reflecting the public’s most urgent desires.
When the preliminary peace did not materialize, hopes were revived by the armistice talks at Lusigny. Significantly, they were swiftly linked to Berthier; on 22 February, the talk was that he had left Paris the previous night to draw up the demarcation lines. Over the next few days, speculation mounted that both an armistice and peace preliminaries were being agreed. On the 26th, it was believed that an armistice had actually come into force. In another example of desire becoming reality, it was also said that at ChatiUon, Stadion, with his Francophobe reputation, had been replaced as the Austrian representative by the more moderate Prince Liechtenstein, and that the preliminaries would be signed by 10 March. ‘All thoughts are turned towards peace,’ concluded Pasquier’s spies.7
When the armistice too proved an illusion, confidence slumped, and this time it did not recover. On 3 March, Pasquier noted that ‘today’s fall in share prices is attributable to the lack of official news and above all to the dwindling hope of peace now talk of negotiations has ceased.’ There was no sense of panic, only a weary resignation. By mid-March the bulletins described ‘an atmosphere not of bitterness, but of increasing sadness’. By the 24th, it was generally accepted that the congress of ChatiUon had broken up, and that the war would continue to the end. The police spies loyally reported unbreakable confidence in Napoleon’s military genius, but the general mood of fatalism belied this.8
The Bourse strongly favoured peace, since it was founded on commerce, and peace and commerce are generally linked. Did it represent Parisian opinion as a whole? The evidence is very patchy. The only other place in Paris that Pasquier monitored as closely as the Bourse was the eastern quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. The comparison, however, is revealing. Ifthe Bourse was bourgeois and capitalist, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine was solidly working-class, and had a long radical tradition. During the Revolution it had been the sans-culottes greatest stronghold, from where the crowd had marched on the Tuileries on 10 August 1792. In the event of a ‘dishonourable’ peace, if a popular backlash could be expected anywhere it was here.9
In fact, nothing of the sort transpired. By 1814, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine too was weary of war and its attendant hardships—conscription, taxation, and high food prices. On the night of 20—21 January, many of the
Conscription notices posted in the district were torn down. Six weeks later, discontent and protest were being openly expressed. ‘The misery of the suburbs, and particularly of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, is becoming painfully obvious’, warned Pasquier’s bulletin of 3 March. ‘The people are strongly expressing their bitterness, and ardently hoping for peace as the only remedy for their ills.’10 Ironically, by prolonging the war Napoleon was bringing closer the one outcome he feared most—upheaval on the Paris streets.
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