Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
Spencer Perceval likened him to the woman in the Book of Revelations, ‘the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth’, who rides upon the Beast and visits destruction on the world. If the revolutionary legacy was to be stamped out and its ghosts exorcised, it followed that Napoleon would have to go.1
They had not yet decided what to do with him when Tsar Alexander, who was first on the scene in Paris in 1814, took the matter into his own hands. In an access of misjudged chivalry, he signed a treaty with Napoleon at Fontainebleau, giving him the Mediterranean island of Elba to rule, with a generous pension to be provided by the future ruler of France. The question of who was to replace him was settled in similarly arbitrary manner, largely by the arguments put forward by the French statesman (and formerly Napoleon’s foreign minister) Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand. He insisted that whoever replaced Napoleon must, in contrast to the usurper, enjoy the full sanction of legitimacy. His accession should also mark the end of the epoch that had opened with the outbreak of the Revolution. Talleyrand convinced the victorious monarchs and their ministers that the only person who satisfied these criteria was Louis Stanislas Xavier, younger brother of Louis XVI, the last king of France under the ancien régime, who had been guillotined in 1793.
There could be no question of restoring the ancien régime as such. What had taken place in France between 1789 and 1814 could not simply be written out of history. Talleyrand had himself taken part in the opening stages of the Revolution, and had later been a pillar of the Napoleonic empire. During those twenty-five years France and French society had been transformed beyond recognition, for the better in most cases, and this needed to be taken into account. The allies duly foisted on the new king a constitution, in the shape of the Charte. The legislature was to be a bicameral parliament, the higher chamber made up of peers nominated by the king, the lower of deputies elected on a suffrage based on property ownership: a more liberal and rational version of the English constitutional model. Although it aroused little enthusiasm, the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty was carried out without trouble: the majority of the population of France, exhausted by two decades of war, was politically indifferent – most people could not remember the Republic, let alone the ancien régime, so they saw no reason to resist it. There was nothing about the new king to get heated over.
Born in 1755, the younger brother of the heir to the throne, he had been carefully brought up and well educated, but found no outlet for his ambitions. Deeply religious and conscientious, he stood, or rather sat, on the sidelines, devoting his energies to the study of his favourite subject, the classics. He also gave free rein to his love of food, and, being averse to exercise in any form, grew corpulent. His marriage to a repellent princess of Savoy remained childless, despite valiant efforts on his part, and he distracted himself with a mistress. When the Revolution came, he stood by the king as long as he could, but fled abroad in June 1791. He went to Koblenz, where his younger brother the comte d’Artois and a large number of émigré nobles were forming an army with the intention of marching back into France to reinstate the king. When this hope evaporated, he resigned himself to exile, first at Verona, then Brunswick, Mittau (Jelgava), Warsaw and finally Hartwell House in Buckinghamshire, struggling pathetically to maintain the decorum and trappings of royalty on the not always lavish generosity of others, latterly that of the prince regent.
King Louis was immensely fat, but he had good features and many found him handsome. Exuding benevolence, with a dignified bearing, he had the requisite regal presence. He was intelligent and aware that he must make some concession to the times, but he was out of touch with the people he was to rule. The costume he adopted, a combination of eighteenth-century court dress and nineteenth-century military uniform, was designed to marry the two epochs, and instead fell clumsily between them. Too heavy to mount a horse and too gout-ridden to wear leather ones, he invented top-boots made of velvet which, along with the sword he always wore, were meant to stress his adherence to the military traditions of his royal predecessors, but they compared unfavourably with the dashing uniforms of the Napoleonic era.
He took the name of Louis XVIII in deference to the son of Louis XVI, who had survived his father and therefore become titular King of France as Louis XVII before dying in a revolutionary gaol in 1795. Sticking fast to the principle of legitimacy, the new monarch considered himself to have been rightful king from the moment of his nephew’s death, and on arriving in France on 3 May 1814 dated his official pronouncements as being made in the nineteenth year of his reign – which was tantamount to a negation of everything that had happened since 1795. After doing all he could to wriggle out of having to accept the constitution forced on him by the allies, he insisted on ‘granting’ the Charte as a regal gesture. This was an insult to the notion of the sovereignty of the people, which had become the bedrock of French political life. More to the point, it presupposed that as he had granted the Charte, he could take it back if he pleased. Just in case there should be any doubt in the matter, he re-established the notion of Divine Right in official documents and in the oath of allegiance.
What could be forgiven in the king was less tolerable in the large number of émigré nobles who returned in his wake. Most had left France in the early stages of the Revolution, out of ideological conviction and loyalty to the monarchy or fear for their lives. Some had rallied to the princes at Koblenz, and later many had taken service with other monarchs, particularly in Russia. Others had just sat it out. As the Revolution turned into the Napoleonic empire many of the original émigrés returned to France and took service under its new ruler. Those who had held firm looked down on these, and when they in turn came back in 1814, they exhibited a bitter aloofness with regard to everything that had taken place in France over the past quarter of a century.
The revolutionary regime had confiscated the property of émigrés and sold these biens nationaux (national assets) to raise income. Many had since been sold on to new owners, yet the returning émigrés clamoured for their return. The Church, which had also been dispossessed, was in similarly assertive mood, and priests refused to give communion to current owners of former Church property. This kind of thing aroused strong passions in otherwise quiescent rural areas, where politics were of little interest but property rights all-important.
Supported by a large number of nobles who had formed associations with names such as la Congrégation de la Vierge (the Congregation of the Virgin) and les Chevaliers de la Foi (the Knights of the Faith), the Church also tried to recover its spiritual ascendancy. It organised missions to recapture the soul of France, holding mass baptisms in the army and provocatively ostentatious services to commemorate ‘martyrs’ of the Revolution and to ‘expiate’ its ‘crimes’, often at the spot where a liberty tree had been planted in place of a cross or where a guillotine had stood. It was tireless in sniffing out the revolutionary past of government officials and denouncing them, which often ended in them losing their posts and being ostracised. Many who had served the government of the day, often without conviction, during the Revolution, the Directory, the Consulate and the Empire, found themselves penalised and unable to pursue their careers.
Not surprisingly, the army suffered the most in this respect. Napoleon’s Imperial Guard was disbanded and replaced by the Maison du Roi, officered entirely by nobles, mostly émigrés with little or no military experience. As with his own dress, the king had designed for them a uniform which made them a laughing stock. The army was reduced in number, and officers surplus to requirements were put on half-pay. Distinguished generals were replaced by émigrés who had been lieutenants in 1789 and had not borne arms since. The tricolour which had fluttered over victory across Europe was banned in favour of a white flag, the banner of the royalist insurgents of the Vendée. The colour of the uniforms was changed, regiments were disbanded and those that were left lost their identity, and their battle-honours with it. As a final insult, the despised General Dupont, who had capitulated to the Spanish at Bailén in 1808, was appointed minister of war. In wine shops, cafés and guardrooms up and down the country, veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns, those who remained in the ranks and those who had been cashiered or retired on half-pay, the so-called demi-soldes, voiced their contempt for the new regime and talked of bringing back their beloved general.
Napoleon himself soon realised he was not going to be allowed to live out his days as sovereign of the island of Elba. Reports reaching him from Vienna