The Memoirs of François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand sometime Ambassador to England. volume 3 (of 6) Mémoires d'outre-tombe volume 3

The Hundred Days in Paris--Effect of the passage of the Legitimacy in France--Bonaparte's astonishment--He is obliged to capitulate to ideas which he thought smothered--His new system--Three enormous gamblers remain--Illusions of the Liberals--Clubs and Federates--Juggling away of the Republic: the Additional Act--Convocation of the Chamber of Representatives--A useless Champ de Mai--Cares and bitterness of Bonaparte--Resolution in Vienna--Movement in Paris--What we were doing at Ghent--M. de Blacas--The Battle of Waterloo--Confusion at Ghent--What the Battle of Waterloo was--Return of the Emperor--Reappearance of La Fayette--Renewed abdication of Bonaparte--Stormy scenes in the House of Peers--Threatening portents for the Second Restoration--The departure from Ghent--Arrival at Mons--I miss the first opportunity of fortune in my political career--M. de Talleyrand at Mons--His scene with the King--I stupidly interest myself on M. de Talleyrand's behalf--Mons to Gonesse--With M. le Comte Beugnot I oppose Fouché's nomination as minister: my reasons--The Duke of Wellington gains the day--Arnouville--Saint-Denis--Last conversation with the King.

I show you the wrong side of events which history does not display: history exhibits only the right side. Memoirs have the advantage of presenting both surfaces of the texture: in this respect they depict the whole complexion of humanity better, by exposing, as in the tragedies of Shakespeare, low and exalted scenes. There is everywhere a cottage beside a palace, a man who weeps beside a man who laughs, a ragman carrying his basket beside a king losing his throne: what was the fall of Darius[308] to the slave present at the Battle of Arbela?

Ghent, then, was only a tiring-room behind the slips of the spectacle opened in Paris. Some famous personages still remained in Europe. I had, in 1800, commenced my career with Alexander and Napoleon; why had I not followed those leading actors, my contemporaries, on the great stage? Why only at Ghent? Because Heaven casts you where it wills. From the "little Hundred Days" at Ghent let us pass to the "great Hundred Days" in Paris.

I have told you the reasons which ought to have stopped Bonaparte in Elba and the urgent reasons, or rather the necessity drawn from his nature, which compelled him to issue from exile. But the march from Cannes to Paris exhausted all that remained of the old man. In Paris, the talisman was shattered.

The few moments for which the reign of lawfulness had reappeared had sufficed to render impossible the re-establishment of arbitrariness. Despotism muzzles the masses and enfranchises individuals, within a certain limit; anarchy lets loose the masses and enslaves individual independence. Hence, despotism resembles liberty, when it follows after anarchy; it remains what it really is when it replaces liberty: Bonaparte, a liberator after the Constitution of the Directory, was an oppressor after the Charter. He felt this so well that he thought himself obliged to go further than Louis XVIII. and to return to the sources of national sovereignty. He, who had trodden the people under foot as its master, was reduced to create himself anew a tribune of the people, to court the favour of the suburbs, to parody the revolutionary infancy, to lisp an old language of liberty which forced his lips into a grimace, while each syllable angered his sword.

His destiny as a power was, in fact, so well accomplished that the genius of Napoleon was no longer recognised during the Hundred Days. That genius was the genius of success and order, not that of defeat and liberty: now he could do nothing through victory, which had betrayed him, nothing for order, since it existed without him. In his astonishment he said:

"To what a condition have the Bourbons reduced France for me, in a few months! It will take me years to restore her."

It was not the work of the Legitimacy which the conqueror saw, but the work of the Charter; he had left France dumb and prostrate, he found her erect and speaking: in the ingenuousness of his absolute mind, he took liberty for disorder.

And yet Bonaparte was obliged to capitulate with the ideas which he was unable to conquer at first sight. In the absence of any real popularity, workmen hired at forty sous a head came, at the end of their day's work, to howl, "Long live the Emperor!" in the Carrousel. That was called "going to the crying." Proclamations at first announced marvels of forgetting and forgiving; individuals were declared free, the nation free, the press free; nothing was wanted but the peace, independence and happiness of the people; the whole imperial system was changed; the golden age was about to return. In order to conform practice with theory, France was divided into seven great police sections; the seven lieutenants were invested with the same powers which were enjoyed under the Consulate and the Empire by the directors-general: it is well-known what those protectors of individual liberty were at Lyons, Bordeaux, Milan, Florence, Lisbon, Hamburg, Amsterdam. Over these lieutenants, in a hierarchy "more and more favourable to liberty," Bonaparte placed commissaries-extraordinary, after the fashion of the representatives of the people under the Convention.

[Sidenote: The hundred days.]

The police, directed by Fouché, informed the world, by means of solemn proclamations, that it would thenceforward serve only to spread philosophy, that it would act only in accordance with virtuous principles.

Bonaparte re-established, by decree, the National Guard of the Kingdom, the mere name of which used formerly to make his head swim. He found himself compelled to annul the divorce pronounced under the Empire between despotism and demagogy and to favour their renewed alliance: from this hymen was to spring, on the Champ de Mai, a liberty wearing the red cap and the turban on its head, the mameluke's sabre in its belt and the revolutionary axe in its hand, a liberty surrounded by the shades of those thousands of victims sacrificed on the scaffolds or in the burning campaigns of Spain and the icy deserts of Russia. Before success, the mamelukes were Jacobins; after success, the Jacobins were to become mamelukes: Sparta was for the moment of danger, Constantinople for that of triumph.

Bonaparte would, indeed, have liked to recover possession for himself alone, but that was impossible for him; he found men prepared to dispute it with him: first, the earnest Republicans, delivered from the chains of despotism and the laws of the Monarchy, desired to retain an independence which is, perhaps, but a noble error; next, the madmen of the old faction of the Mountain: these latter, humiliated at having been nothing more under the Empire than the police-spies of a despot, seemed resolved to resume on their own account that liberty of doing everything of which, during fifteen years, they had yielded the privilege to a master.

But not the Republicans, nor the Revolutionaries, nor the satellites of Bonaparte were strong enough to establish their separate power, or mutually to subjugate each other. Threatened from without by an invasion, pursued from within by public opinion, they understood that, if they became divided, they were lost: in order to escape the danger, they adjourned their quarrel; some brought their systems and illusions to the common defense, others their terror and perversity. None was in earnest in this compact; each, once the crisis passed, resolved to turn it to his profit; all sought beforehand to make sure of the results of victory. In that awful trente-et-un three enormous gamblers kept the bank by turns: liberty, anarchy and despotism, all three cheating and striving to win a game which was lost for all.

Full of that thought, they did not proceed rigorously against a forlorn hope which was urging on revolutionary measures: federates had been formed in the faubourgs and federations were being organized under stem oaths in Brittany, Anjou, Lyonnais and Burgundy; the Marseillaise and the Carmagnole were heard sung; a club, established in Paris, corresponded with other clubs in the provinces; the resurrection of the Journal des Patriotes was announced. But on that side what confidence were the resuscitated of 1793 able to inspire? Was it not known how they explained liberty, equality, the rights of man? Were they more moral, more wise, more sincere, after their enormities than before? Was it because they had tainted themselves with all the vices that they had become capable of all the virtues? One cannot abdicate crime as easily as a crown: the brow once girt with the hideous circlet retains ineffaceable marks from its contact.

The idea of reducing an ambitious man of genius from the rank of Emperor to that of Generalissimo or President of the Republic was a chimera: the red cap which they had fixed on the head of his busts during the Hundred Days would only have foreboded to Bonaparte the resumption of the diadem, were it given to the athletes who race through the world to run the same course twice.

Still, some Liberals of the better sort promised themselves the victory: mistaken men, like Benjamin Constant, dolts, like M. Simonde-Sismondi[309], spoke of placing the Prince of Canino[310] at the Ministry of the Interior, Lieutenant-general Comte Carnot at the War Office, the Comte Merlin[311] at the Ministry of Justice. In appearance despondent, Bonaparte made no opposition to democratic movements which, in the last result, supplied his army with conscripts. He allowed himself to be attacked in pamphlets; caricatures repeated "Elba" to him as parrots cried "Péronne" to Louis XI[312]. They preached liberty and equality to the man escaped from prison, addressing him in the second person singular; he listened to these remonstrances with an air of compunction. Suddenly, bursting the shackles in which they had pretended to bind him, he proclaimed, by his own authority, not a plebeian Constitution, but an aristocratic Constitution, an "Additional Act" to the Constitutions of the Empire[313].