Gullible he might well have shown himself to be in this instance, but it was unwise to ignore even the most far-fetched intelligence, as people at both extremes of the political spectrum were prepared to embark on ventures of barely believable rashness; almost anything could sound plausible in the prevailing climate, with the phantom of Napoleon hovering in the popular imagination and the fear of ‘Jacobinism’ gripping people’s minds.
Marooned as he was in the middle of the Atlantic on the island of St Helena, Napoleon continued to haunt the nightmares of his conquerors. Their fears combined with the vague longings of others to generate an extraordinary incidence of rumour. In the prevailing climate, official announcements were greeted with suspicion, which encouraged second-guessing and speculation, and this developed a life of its own, giving rise to new conjectures that turned into certainties with surprising rapidity. News also travelled at very irregular speeds. Reports of a riot in one place might take ten days to reach a neighbouring town but only three to reach Paris, from which it might come back to the second town first, giving rise to the impression that there was a revolution in Paris rather than nearby.
Many rumours were the consequence of discontent over the price of bread or of deep-rooted if inchoate anxieties, foremost among which were that the government might be planning to raise taxes, impose conscription, bring back the servitudes of the ancien régime, return the biens nationaux, and abolish the freedoms won during the Revolution. Whenever such anxieties were aroused, the poor would long for a guardian angel, a protective deity, and would fix on the one figure whose power they believed in – Napoleon. Wishful thinking would do the rest, and give rise to rumours that he was about to return, or had done so.
In the summer of 1814, shortly after he had reached Elba, rumours began to circulate that Napoleon had landed in France at the head of a Turkish army. At the end of 1815, before he had set foot on St Helena, talk of his imminent return alternated with reports that he had already landed, and even sightings of him. Rumours of this sort reached a peak in 1816 and 1817, when the effects of the Tambora eruption raised the price of bread to new heights. They continued over the next years, and would not cease with Napoleon’s death in 1821, news of which would be widely disbelieved.17
The rumours had occurred most frequently in March 1815, the month he escaped from Elba. That miraculous return and the birth of his son the King of Rome, on 20 March 1811, were the two events on which his followers based their hopes for the future, and violets, which flower in March, became associated with those hopes. The cities of Lyon and Grenoble also featured as the focus for many rumours, as they had welcomed him enthusiastically in 1815. Each March between 1816 and 1825 there were reports of his return, some of them specific as to where he had landed, where he had been sighted and the number of troops he had with him. These troops were variously Turkish, Moorish, Polish, German, Persian, Chinese, ‘barbarians’ or ‘two million Indians marching across the Ganges’. In one instance, Napoleon had landed first in the United States and recruited an army of Americans; in another, he was rescued from St Helena by ‘the Emperor of Morocco’. The more sensational the image, the more easily it captured the imagination.18
These rumours had a destabilising effect in rural communities and led to a reluctance to show loyalty or even pay taxes to a regime which might be swept away at any moment. In late 1816 a rumour spread that the former Empress Marie-Louise was forming an army in Austria to liberate France, as a result of which thirty soldiers deserted and set off to enlist. In March 1817 a reported sighting of Napoleon spread paranoia through Lyon, with some barricading their doors and windows, and others fleeing the city. Parish priests who assured their flocks that the ogre would never escape from St Helena only made people wonder whether perhaps he already had. There were also impersonators of Napoleon or his marshals, who travelled around the country swindling people of food and money as they dispensed more or less fantastic pieces of information. In the Lyon area, highway robbers attacked in the name of Napoleon, leading to news spreading that he was advancing on Paris. Just as damaging were rumours that he had been murdered by the allies, which caused explosions of anger and rioting.19
In their reports, police agents, landowners, prefects, mayors and other officials often inflated the degree of support for Napoleon in their localities, either voicing their own worst fears or because they did not wish to appear lacking in zeal, thus magnifying the threat and causing alarm in Paris. This could lead to overreaction, which merely had the effect of making people believe that Napoleon really had landed. Such was the case in March 1816, when 6,000 National Guards were deployed in Lyon on the strength of baseless gossip. In 1821, a rumour that Napoleon had disembarked travelled so fast that a couple of days later a hundred communes sent in reports which mentioned sightings in almost as many places. Instead of suggesting the evident fallacy of the original rumour, this threw the authorities in Paris into a panic, the police came out in force everywhere, and the declaration of a state of emergency added credence to it.20
After Waterloo, the Bourbon authorities had seized all pro-Napoleonic literature they could lay their hands on, and the Chamber passed a law criminalising any endorsement of the emperor and his doings. Another extended criminal law to include incitement, direct or indirect, to change the line of succession to the throne of France. Symbols of Napoleonic rule were removed and representations of events or subjects connected with the Empire were banned. In 1816 two artisans from Beauvais were arrested for announcing the intention of naming their sons Paul-Joseph-Bonaparte and Louis-Henri-Napoléon. A doctor in Albi was arrested for naming his daughter Marie-Louise-Néapoldine, another for naming his Marie-Louise-Napoléonide. People were not infrequently arrested for wearing a violet in their buttonhole.21
In spite of this, millions of prints, statuettes and busts of Napoleon, as well as images illustrating the glorious episodes of his life, were clandestinely produced and disseminated all over the country by travelling salesmen. After his death, coins appeared on the market bearing the inscription ‘Napoleon II’. The police were powerless to stop this illicit industry and trade, despite frequent arrests and severe penalties for possession.
A high priority for the French police was to keep a close watch on members of Napoleon’s family, most of which had wound up in Italy. His mother had settled in Rome, along with his uncle Cardinal Fesch, his brothers Lucien and Louis, and his sister Pauline, whose beautiful villa was suspected of being a hub for all manner of dangerous conspiracy. Decazes despatched an agent to coordinate surveillance over them, and persuaded the Austrian and other police forces operating in the peninsula to tail him, in order to lend him credibility with other subversives. The only fruits of this surveillance are thick files of reports of numbing futility in the archives of Paris.22
Napoleon’s brother Joseph had managed to escape to Switzerland after Waterloo, whence he made his way discreetly to an Atlantic port and sailed to the United States, which he reached in September 1815. Unaware of this, but finding that the trail they had picked up had gone cold, the French police began to suspect the worst – if he was not to