Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of Legitimacy

Katherine Astbury, Mark Philp, Katherine Astbury, Mark Philp

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319702070
• eBook ISBN: 9783319702087
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines the politics of legitimacy as they played out across Europe in response to Napoleon's dramatic return to power in France after his exile to Elba in 1814. Napoleon had to re-establish his claim to power with initially minimal military resources. Moreover, as the rest of Europe united against him, he had to marshal popular support for his new regime, while simultaneously demanding men and money to back what became an increasingly inevitable military campaign. The initial return – known as 'the flight of the eagle' – gradually turned into a dogged attempt to bolster support using a range of mechanisms, including constitutional amendments, elections, and public ceremonies. At the same time, his opponents had to marshal their resources to challenge his return, relying on populations already war-weary and resentful of the costs they had had to bear. The contributors to this volume explore how, for both sides, cultural politics became central in supporting or challenging the legitimacy of these political orders in the path to Waterloo.

Part INapoleon’s Legitimacy in France

© The Author(s) 2018

Katherine Astbury and Mark Philp (eds.)Napoleon's Hundred Days and the Politics of LegitimacyWar, Culture and Society, 1750-1850https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70208-7_2

Begin Abstract

The Hundred Days and the Birth of Popular Bonapartism in Paris

Michael Sibalis¹

(1)

Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Michael Sibalis

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

On the evening of 21 June 1815, Napoleon, back in Paris from Waterloo , was walking in the gardens of the Élysée Palace with the liberal writer and politician Benjamin Constant when they heard shouts from a “crowd of men, mostly of the indigent and laborious class,” gathered in the Rue de Marigny to acclaim the Emperor, who was under pressure from the Chamber of Deputies to abdicate: “You see that, he told [Constant], those are not the people whom I showered with honours and wealth. What do they owe me? I found them poor, I left them poor.” ¹ Here was one of history’s ironies. There is no real evidence that Napoleon ever enjoyed enthusiastic popularity—as distinct from broad acceptance—among the common people of Paris (or France) throughout most of his reign. ² On the contrary, war, conscription , economic crisis, and increasing taxes had considerably worn down support for the regime by the time it fell in 1814. Quite unexpectedly, however, the authoritarian ruler, whose police had harried and repressed the remnants of the Parisian sans-culotte movement, emerged in the Hundred Days under a new guise and with fervent support from the city’s common people. Historian Frédéric Bluche has labeled the phenomenon “Jacobin Neo-Bonapartism.” ³ In the words of a royalist pamphleteer, “[Napoleon] had thus rejoined the Jacobin Club, he had thereby agreed to swap his imperial crown for the frightful red liberty cap and his imperial title for that of general of patriots.” ⁴

The explanation for this development lies in the First Restoration , the ten months between Louis XVIII’s entry into Paris (3 May 1814) and Napoleon’s return (20 March 1815). The restored Bourbons were unpopular with the Parisian masses from the start. As early as 6 April 1814 (the day Napoleon abdicated), René de Chateaubriand ’s sister described “the rabble” (la canaille) as “insolent and very brazen”; no one (she said) dared wear the white cockade in certain (unidentified) Paris faubourgs (peripheral districts inhabited predominantly by artisans and workers), where posters announcing her brother’s pamphlet backing the monarchy were smeared with excrement. ⁵ However, the police (initially at least) expected that peace, prosperity, and full employment would eventually win over Paris’ workers. ⁶ Furthermore, as the Director-General of Police suggested in October 1814, Napoleon had turned the city’s “working classes” into passive spectators of political events. They purportedly cared only about earning a living, and this “egoism” and “servile obedience,” forced on them by fifteen years of dictatorship “are for the [present] government the strongest guarantee of its tranquillity, which is complete in the capital.” ⁷ Police reports on public opinion during the First Restoration are on the whole vague and reassuring, like this one from August 1814: “These faubourgs [St. Antoine and St. Marcel] are under constant surveillance; there is nothing seen there that can give the least concern.” ⁸ However, many of these reports also record numerous incidents—relatively minor, to be sure, but telling when taken together—that suggest a different picture. ⁹

Indeed, by the late autumn of 1814 police agents were appalled by what they were overhearing: “In those places where the common people gather, such as wine shops in particular, workers and the lower class, when speaking of the Government, express themselves with a freedom and an indecency that prove that the people are being … stirred up and strongly stirred up.” ¹⁰ Dissatisfaction was particularly acute among veterans and demobilized soldiers, who grumbled about the poor treatment they felt they were receiving from the new government. Former soldiers recalled with pride “the days when they marched from victory to victory” and they were openly loyal to the dethroned Emperor. ¹¹ For instance, two assistant pastry chefs (garçons patissiers) recently returned from the army were heard (in August 1814) “to utter the most insolent words against His Majesty, and to praise Bon*** to the skies; they long for his return, in which they believe.” ¹² However, such discontent went far beyond one-time soldiers. On one day, for example (29 September 1814), the police arrested both a drunken carter as he walked along the Seine shouting “Long live Napoléon!” and a cotton worker who refused to doff his cap when the King passed by in the Tuileries Gardens. ¹³ It was not unusual for drunken workers to sing songs praising Napoleon, and the revolutionary song La Marseillaise could be heard “on all sides.” ¹⁴ According to one report, port workers “are in general men of the lowest class, among whom there are many admirers of Bonaparte.” ¹⁵ Louis XVIII on his throne implicitly challenged the French revolutionary tradition in a way that Napoleon’s monarchy had not. The police arrested a shoemaker named Maillefer for saying that “we should do to the fat pig [Louis XVIII] what we did to his brother [Louis XVI] and make him look through the lunette [of the guillotine] to see if Napoleon is coming back.” ¹⁶ Placards on the walls of the capital insulted the King, lauded Napoleon, and demanded work and bread. ¹⁷

As this suggests, economic woes added to the discontent. In a petition dated 30 May 1814, ten Parisian workers in the building trades predicted that “if the workers … were employed, all these murmurs of misery would cease, gaiety would reign, and the wise and beneficent government would be blessed.” ¹⁸ Instead, police reports indicate a general decrease of wages through the summer of 1814. ¹⁹ The earnings of cotton workers in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine fell by half, “which causes them to contrast the past to the present,” ²⁰ while journeymen carpenters repeated rumours that their employers had bribed the King to permit lower wages and longer working hours. ²¹ Wage-earners blamed the new regime for their economic distress. ²² An engraver named Langlé and his wife kept a bust of Napoleon in his workshop; “these two individuals complain that since the arrival of His Majesty, the workers have had their wages reduced by half.” ²³ The Minister of the Interior himself believed that it was “impolitic” of the monarchy not to continue the public works program “to which the last government had accustomed the people of the capital.” ²⁴

Another destabilizing factor was rampant anti-clericalism . By the Napoleonic period, Christianity had lost its hold on Parisian workers, especially men. ²⁵ The First Restoration got off to a bad start by banning Sunday work on 7 June 1814, a measure resented by workers, who thus lost a day’s wages and in any case often preferred to take off Mondays (faire le lundi) if they could afford it, as well as shopkeepers, who disliked the loss of business hours. ²⁶ There were also disturbances in June when, for the first time since the Revolution, the government authorized Corpus Christi processions in the streets and the National Guard forced people to kneel as the host passed by. ²⁷ By July, if the police can be believed, workers in the Faubourgs Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marcel “speak endlessly of Bonaparte who, they say, did not support the priests.” ²⁸ Two months later, police informants reported overhearing workers gathered on the Quai de Gesvres complaining that priests were seeking to regain their former prerogatives from the King. ²⁹ In January 1815, when the curé of Saint-Roch refused to conduct burial services for the actress Mademoiselle Raucourt, a mob estimated at eight- or nine-thousand-strong forcibly brought her coffin into his church. The curé was subsequently insulted in the streets when visiting his counterpart at Sainte-Marguerite in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, while people mocked a group of priests skating on the frozen Ourcq Reservoir and pelted them with snowballs and rocks. The police were at a loss to explain this reaction among the common people , most of whom (they noted) could not have been familiar with the celebrated actress. Although downplaying the incident’s political significance (“it’s neither a Bonapartist operation nor an anti-royalist undertaking”), they nonetheless commented: “It’s the strangest explosion of the multitude’s hatred of the clergy … . There were veritable curses and swear-words ringing out everywhere.” ³⁰

Almost inevitably, support for Napoleon merged with the revolutionary tradition in the minds of many workers. A boot-maker named Pasque used to declaim against Napoleon when drunk; now he spoke out in his favour. ³¹ Rocher, a shoemaker’s assistant, “who formerly ranted against Bon***’s government and did everything possible to get out of conscription ” now “openly manifests his opposition to the King and announces the imminent return of Bon*** who will overthrow the Bourbons.” ³² Fréché, a notoriously republi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• Part I. Napoleon’s Legitimacy in France
• Part II. Legitimacy Beyond France
• Part III. Contesting Napoleon’s Legitimacy
• Back Matter