Louis XVIII cannot therefore have been greatly surprised when, at the beginning of March 1815, less than a year since he ascended the throne, he was informed that Napoleon had landed on the south coast of France. He ordered units in the area to bar the road to Paris and sent his brother, the comte d’Artois, to take command, before despatching a strong force under the former Napoleonic Marshal Ney to defeat and capture his erstwhile master. He summoned the foreign ambassadors to the Tuileries and told them to instruct their courts that he felt ‘no anxiety whatsoever with regard to this event’. ‘I hope that it will not trouble the repose of Europe or my own,’ he added. With similar self-assurance he declared to the Chamber of Deputies and that of Peers that he would die fighting rather than abandon Paris.3
Napoleon had landed on 1 March at Golfe Juan with just over a thousand men. He was obliged to bypass Cannes and Grasse on account of the hostility of the local population, and during the first days of his march he met with little more than morose curiosity on the part of the locals. But the mood changed as he moved north, and at Laffrey on 7 March a regiment of infantry sent to bar his way rallied to him. That night he entered Grenoble in triumph, and on 10 March he was in Lyon, where he was greeted with enthusiasm. Artois, who had set up his headquarters there, had fled at his approach. Troops sent out by Louis XVIII to stop him could not be counted on, and their commanders wavered. Some remained loyal to the king and fell back on Paris, others took their men over to Napoleon. At Avallon General Girard brought two regiments over to his side; at Auxerre Marshal Ney, who had with characteristic bravado promised Louis XVIII that he would bring the usurper back in a cage, rallied to his former master and took his troops with him.
In the early hours of 20 March, with Napoleon approaching fast, Louis XVIII furtively slipped out of the Tuileries and, gradually deserted by most of the Maison du Roi, fled the country. Late that afternoon, Napoleon was carried in triumph up the main staircase of the palace on the shoulders of his generals and former ministers. But he had few illusions. ‘They have let me in just as they let the others out,’ he commented to his treasury minister Nicolas Mollien. There was something distinctly haphazard about the whole business. Yet the events of March 1815 were to have huge significance. The ‘Hundred Days’ that followed did more than briefly disturb the repose of Europe and inconvenience Louis XVIII. The episode fundamentally altered the political situation inside France, and would have serious repercussions for the whole Continent.4
In 1814 the defeated Napoleon could call on not much more than the loyalty of his soldiers, and even many of those were weary. The rest of the population had come to see him as a tyrant and to associate him with oppression, taxation, conscription and deteriorating living standards. As far as they were concerned, there was little to choose between Napoleon and Louis XVIII, and the latter would at least bring peace and a relaxation of conscription.
Unlike the Bourbons, Napoleon had learned his lesson, and the man who landed at Golfe Juan on 1 March was no longer the imperious ruler of 1814. At Lyon, where he paused briefly before advancing on Paris, he issued edicts and hostile declarations concerning priests and aristocrats, threatening to string them up from lamp-posts. When he reached Paris he set out to galvanise the masses by holding a great ceremony of national federation, in emulation of the coming together of the Fête de la Fédération of 14 July 1790, the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. He did everything he could to revive the spirit of 1792, when to the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ the nation had flocked to repel the invading allied armies. The very ease with which he had toppled the Bourbon regime gave radicals of every hue new hope, and all the political issues of the past decades resurfaced.
He succeeded in rousing old revolutionaries and rallied them in defence of what he made out was a common cause. In Toulouse, Marc-Guillaume Vadier, a former Jacobin and friend of Marat and Robespierre, an enthusiastic regicide who had retired from political life in disgust in the mid-1790s, now came forward to lead his community in welcoming Napoleon’s return. At Avignon, Agricole Morea, another rabid Jacobin and henchman of Robespierre, also sprang into action, seeing in the return of Napoleon the only hope of saving at least some of the legacy of the Revolution. Napoleon engaged the respected liberal Benjamin Constant to frame a new constitution, which appeased many enemies and critics. He abolished censorship. In an attempt to appeal to English public opinion he outlawed the slave trade. But the English were not impressed, and nor were the other powers to which he made conciliatory overtures, and whose delegates were still in congress at Vienna, finalising the new arrangement of Europe.5
News of Napoleon’s landing in France put the French delegate at the congress, Talleyrand, in an unenviable position. If Napoleon were to reach Paris, recover his throne and accept all the treaties binding France and the allies, they would have no legitimate grounds to make war on him. That would leave Louis XVIII, and Talleyrand himself, out in the cold. In order to pre-empt such a situation, he persuaded the delegates of all the powers at Vienna to issue a proclamation he had drafted, which declared Napoleon to have placed himself ‘outside the law’ and indeed ‘outside the human race’ by returning to France; he was to be treated as a dangerous criminal, an enemy of mankind. It followed that those who supported him were also outlaws. ‘The declaration is certainly the harshest measure ever taken against an individual,’ Talleyrand commented with satisfaction.6
It was much more than that. It was an entirely new departure in the history of European diplomacy and politics: a political excommunication by a group of powers of not just an individual, but of all he stood for and all those who supported it. It set the scene for a struggle between the self-appointed forces of good against the implied forces of evil, a struggle that would, in time, draw in the whole of Europe, as governments stood by the Vienna settlement as though it had been Holy Scripture and peoples tried to pursue the course of human progress. In the first instance, it drew a battle line across French society which made France very difficult to govern. The Hundred Days had profoundly altered the political landscape in other ways too.
The abdication of Napoleon in the previous year had ingloriously concluded a narrative of which the majority of the people of France had grown tired. Contemporary sources overwhelmingly report an indifference to his fall born of war-weariness and despondency, and even much hostility to his person. His spectacular reconquest of France, followed by the monumental battle and the shattering defeat of Waterloo, was, on the other hand, the stuff of legend. Waterloo instantly became a symbol – of heroism, grandeur, tragedy, and much more besides, a focus for pride as well as sorrow, a sacred memory which the Bourbon king and his regime insulted and defiled by their very existence.
To others, Napoleon’s return had been clear proof that the forces of revolution were still rampant, and that those who had supported him must be extirpated. As soon as news of the allied victory reached Marseille, a mob massacred retired Mamelouks of the Imperial Guard along with their wives and children. Marshal Brune was savagely murdered and mutilated at Avignon, General Ramel in Toulouse. A White Terror swept through the country, with random arrests, house searches, looting of property, beatings and occasionally murder. Owners of biens nationaux were molested and made to pay blood money to get royalist zealots off their backs. In Nîmes, it was the local Protestants, whose disabilities had been lifted by the Revolution and their rights safeguarded by Napoleon, who were the principal targets. All over France senior officers and functionaries were arrested and charged, and some condemned to death in legally dubious manner.7
In Paris, events took a less bloody course, but those who had fled in panic returned in a spirit of vengeance, clamouring for the execution of Napoleon and of dozens