Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/235

1815.] NAPOLEON 223 Disquiet graphy. Never was a great state in a position so untenable in and monstrous as France after he quitted the helm. In France. ^ wen ty years of thrilling events, in the emotions first of tragedy and then of epic poetry, the French had forgotten the Bourbon court, when suddenly the old Comte de Provence (under the name of Louis XVIII.) and the Comte d Artois, Cond6 and the Due d Angouleme, and the Orpheline du Temple reappeared and took possession of the country before even a royalist party had formed itself in France. Politically, indeed, they brought liberty, for they created a parliament where all assemblies had been mute and servile for fourteen years ; but they un settled all domestic affairs, the position of public men, the prospects of the army, the title of estates, in a manner so sudden and intolerable, and that at a moment when the country had suffered conquest from without, that some new convulsion seemed manifestly imminent. Disgraced, be wildered, and alarmed at the same time, the French could think with regret even of the reign of Napoleon. The wholesale massacre of the last two years might have been expected to seem like a bad dream as soon as the spell was snapped, but it began to seem regrettable in comparison with the present humiliation. Another event happened which was like a new revolution. The prisoners and the troops shut up in German fortresses returned to France under the treaty, perhaps not less than 300,000 men. What could be more evident than that if all these soldiers could take the field again, and under Napoleon, France might yet escape the humiliation of a Government imposed by foreigners, and perhaps also recover her lost frontiers. The congress of Vienna entered upon business in Septem ber, and from this time a new chapter of politics opened. France ceased to be the general bugbear, and new alliances began to be formed in order to check the aggressive spirit of Russia. The European Coalition, once dissolved, might not be so easily reconstituted. Internal politics also had altered. A wild party of ultras had sprung up among the royalists; the church was beginning to give disquiet to the holders of national property ; the army was enraged by seeing emigres who had fought against France appointed in great numbers to the command of regiments. It was not the first time that Napoleon had gone into a sort of exile. As he had disappeared in the East, and returned to make Brumaire, so he might come from Elba to rescue France. The situation was not less intolerable than in 1799. As then, so now, had he not returned, a revolution would, nevertheless, have taken place. Fouche was weaving a military plot, which would have carried to power perhaps the duke of Orleans, perhaps the king of Rome. The He entered upon the last of his thousand adventures on Hundred February 20, 1815, when he set sail from Porto Ferraio Days. w ith Generals Bertrand and Drouot and 1100 soldiers. On March 1st he reached the French coast between Cannes and Antibes. Twenty days after he entered the Tuileries in triumph. He had judged the feeling of the army correctly, and also the effect which would be produced by his prodigious fame. These causes were more than enough to overthrow a Government so totally without root as that of the Bourbons. From the coast he took the way across the mountains of Provence by Sisteron and Gap to Grenoble. The soldiers sent from this town to stop him were dis armed when he uncovered his breast and asked, Which of them would fire on his emperor? He was then joined by the royalist La Be doyere. Macdonald at Lyons stood firm, but was deserted by his soldiers. Ney, who commanded in the east, at first declared himself violently against his old chief, but the military feeling afterwards gained him, and he joined Napoleon at Auxerre. The king left the Tuileries on the 19th, retiring northward, and on the next day Napoleon entered Paris. At Brumaire he had put down Jacobinism, and given the nation order and repose. Now he was summoned, in the name of liberty, to protect the acquisitions of the Revolution and to defend the national honour against the triumphant foreigner. The Hundred Days are the period of popular or democratic imperialism. Those who sided with him told him frankly that he must turn over a new leaf, and he professed himself ready to do so. It would be rash to say that this was impossible. He was but forty-five ; his return from Elba was an astonish ing proof that he still possessed that elasticity of spirit, that power of grasping the future, which he had often shown so remarkably. Here then, as at a second Brumaire, might begin a third Napoleonic period. The mad crusade against England and the world-empire which sprang out of it were now to be forgotten ; he was to stand out as a hero of national independence and of modern ideas together, a representative of the free modern people against the Holy Alliance. This last and most surprising of his transforma tions was already most prosperously begun. But at this point fortune deserted him once for all. Napoleon Liberator remained a poetical idea, transforming his past life into legend, and endowing French politics with a new illusion; ! the attempt to realize it came to an end in a hundred days (March 13 to June 22). The ultimate cause of this failure seems to have been a change in Napoleon himself. It had long been remarked that the emperor Napoleon was wholly different from the general Bonaparte of the Italian campaigns. Bonaparte had been lean, shy, laconic, all fire and spirit, the very type of republican virtue imagined by Rousseau ; the emperor was fat and talkative, and had his fits, according to Marmont, of indolent ease. Once or twice there had been attacks of illness, by which he had been temporarily incapacitated ; but this had been hushed up. On the whole he had never yet been wanting to himself. In the campaign of 1814 his activity had been prodigious, and the march to Paris in twenty days, with which he had opened 1815, had been a great display of vigour. But he could not maintain him self at this level. A physical decay had begun in him, affecting through his body, not indeed his mind, but his will and his power of application. " I do not know him again," said Carnot. " He talks instead of acting, he the man of rapid decisions ; he asks opinions, he the imperious dictator, who seemed insulted by advice ; his mind wanders, though he used to have the power of attending to every thing when and as he would ; he is sleepy, and he used to be able to sleep and wake at pleasure." This last symptom was the most striking ; in some of the most critical and terrible moments of the Waterloo campaign he seems to have been scarcely able to keep himself awake. The constitutional history of the Hundred Days may be despatched summarily, since it led to nothing. On March 13 an imperial decree was issued from Lyons dissolving the two chambers established by the Bourbons, and convoking an extraordinary assembly in Field of May for the purpose "of correcting and modifying our constitutions and of assisting at the coronation of the empress, our dear and well-beloved spouse, and of our dear and well-beloved son." But the prospect soon changed, and, as it was necessary that the empire, like the monarchy, should have its charter, it seemed impossible to wait till May. Napoleon had recourse to Benjamin Constant, that is, he marked his change of policy by sending for the leader of the opposi tion. The "Acte Additionnel aux Constitutions de 1 Empire," dated April 22, was drawn by Constant, examined by a committee, and then adopted by the council of state. The most remarkable feature of it is the preamble,