“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
This week we’re going to explore a little-known footnote of history: Napoleon Bonaparte’s tiniest war. Now, if you’re like me and hate military history, don’t tune out just yet – the battlefield is small, and the only casualty is – well, I won’t spoil it for you. Instead, this is the story of what happens when the world’s greatest ambition is thwarted by the world’s most inescapable obstacle: bureaucracy. This story has it all: double-crossing, surprise comebacks, and petty warfare – no, I mean really petty warfare.
Episode 43: “Napoleon’s Tiniest Campaign”
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Transcript
They thought it was all over:
Bienvenue, and welcome back to The Land of Desire! I’m your host, Diana, and this week we’re going to explore a little-known footnote of history: Napoleon Bonaparte’s tiniest war. Now, if you’re like me and hate military history, don’t tune out just yet – the battlefield is small, and the only casualty is – well, I won’t spoil it for you. Instead, this is the story of what happens when the world’s greatest ambition is thwarted by the world’s most inescapable obstacle: bureaucracy. This story has it all: double-crossing, surprise comebacks, and petty warfare – no, I mean really petty warfare. Presenting: “Napoleon’s Tiniest Campaign”
“You wish for repose. Well then, you shall have it.” With these words, Napoleon Bonaparte stared down his generals, exhausted, faithless, desperate for peace, and signed his abdication. The generals were tired, and they wanted to go home. For two decades, Napoleoalan had led them against the Bourbon kings of France and their supporters, against the Austrians, against the Italians, against the unsuspecting Egyptians, then against the British, then against the rest of the European continent, and then, in a suicidal move to anyone who’s ever played Risk, against the fortress of Russia. It was April 1814, and after having his butt handed to him by the Tsar, Napoleon escaped back to France by the skin of his teeth to find Paris occupied by his enemies while the rest of the country inched closer to civil war. How had it all gone so wrong? As a wunderkind twentysomething, Napoleon led France out of the rubble of the Revolution. Napoleon delivered the first modern nation-state: bureaucracy and vast oversight, but rationality and justice, too. Napoleon took thousands of years of archaic, arbitrary, idiotic laws and drop-kicked them into the dustbin of history. In exchange for liberty, he gave the public equality – the French could hardly do as they liked, but anyone could rise through the ranks of French society through hard work. Between the rise of the upstart Napoleon and the sticky end of Louis XVI, currently taking a vacation from his own head, the kings, queens and aristocracies of Europe were, to put it simply, losing it. Napoleon was coming for you, and in campaign after brilliant campaign, he snatched up lands, ransacked national treasures, and built an enormous empire. No one man had done more to shape the known world. No one man had come so close to the bright star of Alexander the Great, or of Julius Caesar. No one man inspired such violent feelings, of devotion or hatred, in the hearts of so many. And now the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte was over. His wars had come at a terrible price: nearly a million French men. 4 out of 10 men drafted for the wars never returned. Even if Napoleon wished to return to the battlefield, he would have few men left to lead. And so, Napoleon signed a treaty with the Allied powers granting rest to his generals and granting a permanent, if comfortable, exile to himself.
Napoleon spent the first nine years of his life playing with his siblings on the impoverished island of Corsica. Thirty six years later, Napoleon was condemned to a retirement only 30 miles away, on the island of Elba. It was not such a terrible retirement plan: Napoleon could continue to rule, if only over an island the size of a bowl of olives, and would receive vast amounts of money to spend. He could bring his family there, or so he thought – Napoleon kept writing to his second wife, Marie Louise, preparing her for life on the island just as soon as she would leave her family behind and rejoin him. For some reason, impossible to understand, Marie Louise kept failing to arrive. It’s almost as though life with her father, the Emperor of Austria, was preferable to an early retirement in the middle of nowhere. His wife wasn’t coming back, but Louis XVIII was. Confined to a wheelchair by gout, the Bourbon king’s return journey was slow by steady. As the king drew closer, Napoleon’s faithful retinue of servants and supporters retreated, slowly peeling themselves away from their doomed leader. As the day of exile approached, Napoleon resigned himself to fate. One day, he drew his valet Constance to his side. “Ah well, my son, prepare your cart; we will go and plant our cabbages.” But Constance proved anything but, and that night he grabbed a bag full of money and left his master of 12 years behind. A few weeks later, Napoleon set off from Paris to the French coast. The day of his departure, Napoleon received one final insult from the country he loved so dearly: his lobster lunch gave him food poisoning. On April 28th, seasick, poisoned, and sad, Napoleon set sail.
Here’s the thing: after twenty years of Napoleonic rule, France had pretty much figured out what it liked and didn’t like. Fair administrative justice, lower taxes, booming industry, and a general break with the old France? YAY! Aristocrats, high taxes, a powerful, influential Catholic church, markets flooded with cheap British imports? BOO. It should have been pretty easy for Louis XVIII to get the best of both worlds – promise the neighbors you don’t want to take all their stuff, let Napoleon do the hard work of setting up a vast, efficient bureaucracy and then let it keep doing its thing, then take credit for booming years of peace. But Louis had this idea: what if I did everything terrible that Napoleon promised I would do? What if I just clapped my hands over my ears and pretended the French Revolution never happened and I was just an old-fashioned king like before? That would work, right? Right?
Louis basically said, ‘let’s have a do-over’. He shrunk the borders of France back to where they were under his beheaded nephew, wiping out territorial gains that the French army had paid for in blood. He insisted in all of his documents that he was in the 19th year of his reign, as though he’d stepped up to the throne as soon as the guillotine was pushed back out of the street. In reality, Louis had shuffled his way around Europe before roughing it in the posh spots of London, where his weight and his debts grew exponentially. Back on the throne, Louis insisted that his powers derived directly from God, not the people, he restored a bunch of power to the Catholic Church, and moved the ashes of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in a fancy ceremony. Louis slashed pensions to wounded veterans, which, you know, there were a lot of them at the moment. Then, before you can say, “Read a room, buddy” Louis hired himself an old fashioned pousse-fauteuil whose sole job – only job – was to push the king’s chair in and out at dinnertime. Not, as the kids might say, a good look.
Meanwhile, back on Elba, Napoleon set to work channeling his enormous amounts of energy towards its only outlet: ruling his tiny little kingdom. In a span of ten months, Napoleon managed the following: gave money to the poor, planted vineyards, set up a garbage collection service, installed public water fountains, irrigated new tracts of land, improved the existing roads and built new ones, established a library, and delighted local children by playing with his pet monkey, Jénar. Like so many men in retirement, Napoleon grew fat for the first time in his life, but nobody really understands how. He’d developed a taste for the finer things as Emperor, but his life on Elba resembles one of those ads you see for arthritis medication, where retirement looks like one big power-jog through a glorious field of sunshine. “I have never seen a man in any situation of life with so much personal activity and restless perseverance. He appears to take so much pleasure in perpetual movement, and in seeing those who accompany him sink under fatigue.” These words came courtesy of Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, the British commissioner who came along to keep an eye on Napoleon.
Napoleon and Colonel Campbell got along well: Campbell spoke French and made for good company. Campbell didn’t place any restrictions on Napoleon, who was free to come and go as he liked, humming along with his monkey on his shoulder, dictating hundreds of letters about tiny improvements the island needed. Sunshine, good company, and just enough work to keep a man busy – is there any better retirement? Many of Colonel Campbell’s friends and fellow Britons swung by the island to get a look at the ex-Emperor, and they were surprised by how…well…how delightful the man was. One member of parliament remembered later: “His manner put me quite at my ease almost from the first, and seemed to invite my questions, which he answered upon all subjects without the slightest hesitation, and with a quickness of comprehension and clearness of expression beyond what I ever saw in any other man.” This was the emperor they’d spent twenty years hating? This was the man responsible for so much chaos? Napoleon was charming and above all interesting. Military men who’d spent their entire careers fighting against Napoleon’s ambitions now called him a ‘wonderful man’ and admitted ‘I’ve never passed an hour, or indeed an hour and a quarter, more agreeably’ than at Napoleon’s table. They’d ask him about his greatest adventures, and he’d inquire about conditions back home. How are the Bourbons doing? Oh, not well? Hmm, pity. Napoleon would reminisce over his glory days on the battlefield with a lot of old British ex-generals doing the same, and then wave his hands away at any rumors of escape. “For my own part,” he’d reassure them, “I am no longer concerned. My day is done.” As he told Colonel Campbell, “I do not think of anything beyond my little island…I am a dead man.” Then he’d pass the guests a carafe of wine and change the subject back to the cultivation of mulberry trees, or his plans for a new island post office.
The Hundred Days
On February 16th, Colonel Campbell took a short vacation. Officially, he needed to see his ear doctor. Unofficially, he needed to see his Italian mistress. Checking in at the foreign office in Florence, Campbell heard from the British foreign secretary. “When you return to Elba,” he was told, “you may tell Bonaparte that he is quite forgotten in Europe: no one thinks of him now.” Perhaps Napoleon was too forgotten. Guess what Napoleon was up to at that very moment? His favorite ship, stocked with 607 of his favorite soldiers, picked up Napoleon Bonaparte and ferried him back to France. On March 1st, the tiny seaside village of Golfe-Juan was just getting ready to shut down for the day when an enormous ship pulled up and out stepped the most famous man in the world. “We were just beginning to be quiet and happy!” said the miserable looking mayor. “Now you are going to stir us all up again.”
This episode is not about the Hundred Days of Napoleon Bonaparte. No single episode could do it justice – there are entire books devoted to one of the greatest comebacks in history. Landing on French soil with about 1,000 people and 2 cannons, Napoleon Bonaparte made his way from the southern coast to Paris, amassing an army of supporters along the way. In each village, the crowds cheered, forgetting the devastation of Napoleon’s wars and remembering the glory of Napoleon’s victories, anticipating the end of the despised Bourbon kings who had once again ground the poor people of France into the dust. “Frenchmen, in my exile I heard your complaints and wishes; you were claiming that government of your choice, which alone is legitimate. So amid all sorts of dangers, I arrived among you to regain my rights, which are yours.” In ten months, the dimwitted Louis XVIII managed to transform Napoleon Bonaparte from the most despised man in Europe to France’s last, great hope. If absolute monarchs all over Europe had spent the past 20 years since the French Revolution trembling, desperate to justify their continued way of life, boy did they pick the wrong guy to reinspire confidence in the system. Of course, they didn’t pick Louis XVIII, he was the only heir for the job – which was exactly Napoleon’s point. When you rely on a system of monarchy, what do you do when a nincompoop is heir to the throne? Now that the people have seen, have understood, have lived in an alternate system where the most skilled can make their way to the top? Don’t let your pousse-fauteuil help you get too comfortable in that chair, Louis. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
For a moment, it seemed as though Napoleon had managed the impossible. It seemed as though a man had turned back time. Once again, Napoleon Bonaparte was at the head of a great army, facing down impossible odds and inconquerable foes. Once again, he was going to pull a great victory out of the air and astonish the world. Once again he was going to lead France out from under the crushing weight of the aristocracy. Once again, he was the next Alexander the Great. Once again, he was young and brave and unstoppable.
But it was an illusion. On the fields at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte discovered that there was one foe even he could not overcome: time. Napoleon wasn’t a 20something wunderkind, not anymore. He was an old man, he was out of shape, and he was sick, and he was tired. Some historians think Napoleon was suffering from some embarrassing ailments which made riding a horse unbearably painful. Perhaps the pain was distracting him, or perhaps Napoleon’s mind had simply slowed with age. Whatever the cause, Napoleon committed blunder after blunder, making the exact same errors which he famously warned against in his own military maxims, published so many years ago. “Ask yourself several times in the day, what if the enemy were to appear now to my front, or on my right, or on my left?” Napoleon didn’t check. “No force should be detached on the eve of battle.” Napoleon detached his forces. “Never do what the enemy wishes you to do.” Napoleon did exactly what the enemy wished him to do. “A field of battle which the enemy has previously studied should be avoided.” Napoleon set up on a well-known territory. “Infantry, cavalry and artillery are nothing without each other.” Napoleon kept these three isolated from one another. Old Napoleon may have blamed the day on “a combination of extraordinary Fates” – but Young Napoleon would have shaken his head at the sorry display of battlefield strategy. Just like that, The Hundred Days were over, the great dream dissolved, and once again, Napoleon’s fate rested in the hands of his enemies. But this time, the Allied forces of Europe weren’t taking any more chances. Whatever destiny awaited the defeated Napoleon, it wouldn’t be within swimming distance of home.
Back in 1800, when Napoleon was first adjusting to life as First Consul, he did a little housecleaning in his empire. He was busy managing the Haitian Revolution, as well as British aggression, and he didn’t have a lot of cash on hand. Looking through France’s colonial possessions, he saw a bit of land that he could pawn for quick money, and hurried through one of the greatest bargains in real estate history. In 1803, Napoleon authorized the Louisiana Purchase, a fire sale which doubled the size of the United States at the price of less than 3 cents per acre. In the weeks following his defeat at Waterloo, it was clear that Napoleon would never be granted exile on the European continent again – and fair enough, he shrugged. You flee your captors one time and all of a sudden you’re untrustworthy! As Napoleon’s enemies debated where to stick the ex-emperor, Napoleon’s thoughts turned back toward his lost city of New Orleans. Did his destiny lie across the Atlantic?
“Where am I to go? To England? My abode there would be ridiculous or disquieting. America would be more suitable; I could live there with dignity.” In the weeks before his official, formal surrender, Napoleon began preparing for a transatlantic journey, filling up his baggage with books and maps of the United States, and enough home furnishings to start a new life. Always the methodical planner, he began making lists of his favorite horses, linens and books to bring with him across the sea. As the Prussian army marched towards Paris, Napoleon spent his last days of freedom reading a book about New World botany and choosing a fake name to use in the United States, Colonel Muiron. He began sharing his plans with friends and family. One relative wrote, “He’s going to the United States, where we shall all join him. He’s quite calm and courageous.”
On July 15th, 1815, Napoleon surrendered to the British. On board the HMS Bellerophon, Napoleon and his supporters were treated like guests. For a few pleasant weeks, Napoleon enjoyed a peaceful trip to England, flattering the British soldiers on board and regaling them with tales of his international adventures. He was full of praise for his former enemies: “If it had not been for you English,” he joked to the captain, “I should have been Emperor of the East, but whenever there is water to float a ship we are sure to find you in our way.” After dropping anchor off the coast of Plymouth, Napoleon stayed on board while the British discussed his fate. As days stretched into weeks, word got out: Napoleon Bonaparte was sitting on that ship, that one right there, parked on the water! Tiny pleasure boats crammed with curiosity seekers sailed up and down the river to catch a glimpse of the ex-emperor. From his window, Napoleon could look out the window into water teeming with boats, ships, rafts, and anything else that would float. He’d wave to the crowd, and sweep off his hat if he saw any British ladies, all while more and more boats followed the great frigate ship like so many ducklings. At one point, more than one thousand private boats surrounded the Bellerophon. This surreal, watery parade would be the last great crowd Napoleon would ever see.
Meanwhile, the British fought amongst themselves over the emperor’s fate. Napoleon should have realized at once after surrendering to the British that the United States would be out of the question. What Americans now call the War of 1812 had just finished – the British were hardly going to hand over their most skilled enemy into the hands of their other skilled enemy. Napoleon nevertheless trusted in British decency and gallantry, as he had so often admired in the conduct of the Duke of Wellington and the men he commanded. But what Napoleon didn’t realize was that British character didn’t extend all the way to the top. Like Louis XVIII, the Prince Regent of England was a stupid, spoiled, universally despised ruler who wouldn’t recognize gallantry if he met it on the street. Also, to be fair, Napoleon had just, you know, gone back on his word as a gentleman and tried to reconquer Europe, so…The British cabinet knew it would be best for everyone to keep Napoleon far away from London. “It would not answer to confine him in this country. He would become the object of curiosity immediately, and possibly if compassion in the course of a few months.”
Two weeks after surrendering to the British, Napoleon received his sentence: lifelong exile…to the island of St Helena. The blow was staggering. To the initiated, it may sound like, hey, another island. But Elba is just off the coast of Italy, six miles from the mainland. One day in Paris I strolled from the place de la Bastille to la Defense by accident, distracted while reading The Three Musketeers. That walk was longer than the distance separating Napoleon’s first exile from the coast of Europe. The British weren’t about to make the mistake again. As the British cabinet reasoned, “St. Helena is the place best calculated for such a person…At such a place and such a distance, all intrigue would be forgotten and being so far away from the European world, he would soon be forgotten.” St Helena was described at the time as “further away from anywhere than anywhere else in the world.” It is a tiny tropical island about 2,500 miles east of Brazil and 1,200 miles west of Namibia. It’s an island so remote that nobody knew it existed until the Portuguese discovered the uninhabited spit of land in 1502. For most of its history, it was accessible only by hitching a ride on the mail ship, although in 2015 the island opened what has been called “the world’s most useless airport”. Here’s the description of St Helena which ran in The Guardian in 1815: “The voyage from England is usually performed in ten weeks. St. Helena consists of one vast rock, perpendicular on every side, like a castle in the middle of the ocean, whose natural walls are too high to be attempted by scaling ladders; nor is there the smallest beach…Every accessible point has been fortified, and telegraphs and watch towers have been scattered over the island…Among these stupendous scenes, the hitherto restless Napoleon, in the solitude of his exile, will have time to calm the turbulent passions that have so long agitated his breast.”
So instead of heading off for a lifelong Mardi Gras, Napoleon and 26 of his awfully devoted friends and family made the ten week journey to St Helena. The journey itself went fairly well: Napoleon remained charming and funny, gallantly losing all his money at cards, discussing politics with the captain and love and pretty women with the soldiers. Each day, he’d sleep in, eat breakfast if he wasn’t seasick, talk a walk, play chess, eat dinner, take another walk, then play cards all night until bed. In other words, Napoleon was like any other middle aged man on a Caribbean cruise. Even now, there were new adventures to be had: when the ship crossed over the Equator, which is a big rite of passage for sailors then and now, Napoleon insisted on tossing some coins overboard in tribute to Neptune. Neptune obliged by granting the ship safe passage the rest of the way, and on October 14th, Napoleon arrived on the island of St. Helena. Interrupting the endless horizon of an empty sea, the 600 foot tall cliffs of St. Helena jutted out on either side of the port, daring any man to enter, or to escape. If Elba was more like Alcatraz, just close enough to the real world to be maddening, St. Helena was Azkaban. “It is not an attractive place,” Napoleon muttered as he peered through his telescope. “I should have done better to have stayed in Egypt.”
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. In the next episode, Napoleon Bonaparte finally meets his match and launches the silliest war in history. Until then, I’d like to close out this week’s episode by giving a big thank you to a few listeners in particular: Richard S. and Charles R., (and Charles’s wife, I believe): you are my listeners of the month! Thanks to some additional contributions, this month I’ll be able to pay off my most significant bill, which pays for the licensing of the show’s music. Thank you to each and every one of you who contributes on Patreon or PayPal to help keep the show going, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. I’d also like to thank those of you who heard my call for iTunes reviews and helped push the show over the 200 review mark! This week, I have a new challenge: one listener, Sheena, posted on the show’s Facebook page to ask for travel recommendations in France from other listeners. I have my own recommendations up at www.thelandofdesire.com/paris but I’d LOVE to get a big thread going with everyone’s contributions! If you’ve got recommendations for Sheena – or you’re getting ready to plan your own trip soon, swing by the Facebook discussion and say bonjour! I can’t wait to see what everyone has to say. Until next time, au revoir!
Further Reading:
The Invisible Emperor: Napoleon on Elba from Exile to Escape, Mark Braude, Penguin, October 8, 2018 – just coming out!!
Moscow, 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March, Adam Zamoyski, Harper Perennial, 2005.
“When Napoleon Became a British Tourist Attraction”, Greig Watson, BBC News, September 28, 2015.
“The Waterloo Myth: Where Was Napoleon Actually Defeated?”, Uri Friedman, The Atlantic, June 18, 2015.
“It Just Got Easier To Visit the Place Where Napoleon Was Exiled (the Second Time)”, Matt Blitz, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2015
“St. Helena, ‘Cursed Rock’ of Napoleon’s Exile”, Anthony Mancini, New York Times, March 29, 2012
Sources:
Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts, Penguin Books, 2015.
Terrible Exile: The Last Days of Napoleon on St Helena, Brian Unwin, I.B. Tauris, 2013.
“Napoleon’s captivity in relation to Sir Hudson Lowe”, Robert Cooper Seaton, G. Bel and Sons, 1903.
“Napoleon—His Last Illness and Postmortem.” Paul E. Bechet, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 4.4 (1928): 497–502. Print.
“What If Napoleon Had Come to America?”, Linton Weeks, NPR, February 10, 2015
“The forgotten story of how Napoleon wanted to start a new life in America”, Ishaan Tharoor, The Washington Post, June 15, 2015.
“The Opening of ‘The World’s Most Useless Airport’ in Remote Saint Helena”, Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, October 17, 2017