Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Volume V. Walter Scott
to instant peace. The allied sovereigns, it was stated, sought but to see a salutary government in France, who would cement the friendly union of all nations. It belonged to the city of Paris to pronounce their opinion, and accelerate the peace of the world.25
Furnished with this important document, which plainly indicated the private wishes of the allies, the Royalists resolved to make an effort on the morning of March 31st. It was at first designed they should assemble five hundred gentlemen in arms; but this plan was prudently laid aside, and they determined to relinquish all appearance of force, and address the citizens only by means of persuasion.
In the meantime, the friends of the imperial government were not idle. The conduct of the lower classes, during the battle on the heights, had assumed an alarming character. For a time they had listened with a sort of stupified terror to the distant thunders of the fight, beheld the wounded and fugitives crowd in at the barriers, and gazed in useless wonder on the hurried march of troops moving out in haste to reinforce the lines. At length, the numerous crowds which assembled in the Boulevards and, particularly in the streets near the Palais Royal, assumed a more active appearance. There began to emerge from the suburbs and lanes those degraded members of the community, whose slavish labour is only relieved by coarse debauchery, invisible for the most part to the more decent classes of society, but whom periods of public calamity or agitation bring into view, to add to the general confusion and terror. They gather in times of public danger, as birds of ill omen and noxious reptiles are said to do at the rising of a tropical hurricane; and their fellow-citizens look with equal disgust and dread upon faces and figures, as strange to them as if they had issued from some distant and savage land. Paris, like every great metropolis, has her share, and more than her share, of this unwholesome population. It was the frantic convocations of this class which had at once instigated and carried into effect the principal horrors of the Revolution, and they seemed now resolved to signalize its conclusion by the destruction of the capital. Most of these banditti were under the influence of Buonaparte's police, and were stimulated by the various arts which his emissaries employed. At one time horsemen galloped through the crowd, exhorting them to take arms, and assuring them that Buonaparte had already attacked the rear of the allies. Again they were told that the King of Prussia was made prisoner, with a column of 10,000 men. At other times, similar emissaries, announcing that the allies had entered the suburbs, and were sparing neither sex nor age, exhorting the citizens, by placards pasted on the walls, to shut their shops, and prepare to defend their houses.
This invitation to make the last earthly sacrifices in behalf of a military despot, to which Zaragossa had submitted in defence of her national independence, was ill received by the inhabitants. A free state has millions of necks, but a despotic government is in the situation desired by the Imperial tyrant – it has but one. When it was obvious that the Emperor Napoleon had lost his ascendency, no shop-keeper in Paris was fool enough to risk, in his cause, his shop, his family, and his life, or to consent to measures for preserving the capital, which were to commence by abandoning to the allied troops, and the scum of their own population, all that was, to him individually, worth fighting for. The placards we have mentioned were pulled down, therefore, as fast as they were pasted up; and there was an evident disposition, on the part of the better class of citizens and the national guards, to discourage all counsels which tended to stimulate resistance to the desperate extremity therein recommended.
Nevertheless, the state of the capital continued very alarming, the lower classes exhibiting alternately the symptoms of panic terror, of fury, and of despair. They demanded arms, of which a few were distributed to them; and there is no doubt, that had Napoleon arrived among them in the struggle, there would have been a dreadful battle, in which Paris, in all probability, would have shared the fate of Moscow. But when the cannonade ceased, when the flight of Joseph, and the capitulation of the city became publicly known, this conflict of jarring passions died away into silence, and the imperturbable and impassive composure of the national guard maintained the absolute tranquillity of the metropolis.
On the morning of the 31st, the Royalists were seen in groups in the Place Louis Quinze, the Garden of the Tuileries, the Boulevards, and other public places. They distributed the proclamations of the allies, and raised the long-forgotten cry of Vive le Roi! At first, none save those engaged in the perilous experiment, durst echo back a signal so dangerous; but by degrees the crowds increased, the leaders got on horseback, and distributed white cockades, lilies, and other emblems of loyalty, displaying banners, at the same time, made out of their own handkerchiefs. The ladies of their party came to their assistance. The Princess of Leon, Vicomtesse of Chateaubriand, Comtesse of Choiseuil, and other women of rank, joined the procession, distributing on all hands the emblems of their party, and tearing their dress to make white cockades, when the regular stock was exhausted. The better class of the bourgeois began to catch the flame, and remembered their old royalist opinions, and by whom they were defeated on the celebrated day of the Sections, when Buonaparte laid the foundation of his fame in the discomfiture of the national guard. Whole pickets began to adopt the white, instead of the three-coloured cockade; yet the voices were far from unanimous, and, on many points, parties of different principles met and skirmished together in the streets. But the tendency to discord was diverted, and the attention of the Parisians, of all classes and opinions, suddenly fixed upon the imposing and terrible spectacle of the army of the allies, which now began to enter the city.
The sovereigns had previously received, at the village of Pantin, the magistrates of Paris, and Alexander had expressed himself in language still more explicit than that of their proclamation. He made war, he said, on Napoleon alone; one who had been his friend, but relinquished that character to become his enemy, and inflict on his empire great evils. He was not, however, come to retaliate those injuries, but to make a secure peace with any government which France might select for herself. "I am at peace," said the Emperor, "with France, and at war with Napoleon alone."
These gracious expressions were received with the more gratitude by the citizens of Paris, that they had been taught to consider the Russian prince as a barbarous and vindictive enemy. The measure of restoring the Bourbons seemed now to be regarded by almost every one, not particularly connected with the dynasty of Napoleon, like a haven on the leeward, unexpectedly open to a tempest-tossed and endangered vessel. There was no loss of honour in adopting it, since the French received back their own royal family – there was no compulsion, since they received them upon their own free choice. They escaped from a great and imminent danger, as if it had been by a bridge of gold.
An immense crowd filled the Boulevards (a large wide open promenade, which, under a variety of distinctive names, forms a circuit round the city,) in order to witness the entrance of the allied sovereigns and their army, whom, in the succession of four-and-twenty hours, this mutable people were disposed to regard as friends rather than enemies – a disposition which increased until it amounted to enthusiasm for the persons of those princes, against whom a bloody battle had been fought yesterday under the walls of Paris, in evidence of which mortal strife, there still remained blackening in the sun the unburied thousands who had fallen on both sides. There was in this a trait of national character. A Frenchman submits with a good grace, and apparent or real complaisance, to that which he cannot help; and it is not the least advantage of his philosophy, that it entitles him afterwards to plead, that his submission flowed entirely from good-will, and not from constraint. Many of those who, on the preceding day, were forced to fly from the heights which defend Paris, thought themselves at liberty next morning to maintain, that the allies had entered the capital only by their consent and permission, because they had joined in the plaudits which accompanied their arrival. To vindicate, therefore, their city from the disgrace of being entered by force, as well as giving way to the real enthusiasm which was suddenly inspired by the exchange of the worst evils which a conquered people have to dread for the promised blessings of an honourable peace and internal concord, the Parisians received the Emperor Alexander and the King of Prussia with such general and unremitting plaudits, as might have accompanied their triumphal entrance into their own capitals. Even at their first entrance within the barriers, we learn from Sir Charles Stewart's official despatch,26 the crowd was already so enormous, as well as the acclamations so great, that it was difficult to move forward; but before the monarchs had reached the porte St. Martin
London Gazette, April 5. – "Early in the morning of the 31st March, before the barriers, were open, the soldiers of the allied army climbed up the pallisades of the barrier Rochechouard to look into Paris. They threw this proclamation over the wall, and through the iron gates." —
London Gazette Extraordinary, April 9.