Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

General Maitland, commanding the regular forces in the north of the country, did not believe in the likelihood of revolution. Earl Fitzwilliam, now lord lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of the worst-affected areas, maintained that the disturbances were no more than ‘the offspring of distress and want of employment’. Such confrontations as did occur between rioters and troops or militia were usually non-violent, and crowds dispersed peacefully. In Sheffield, women had gone around in a mob, but rather than loot, they forced shopkeepers to sell them flour at a price they thought fair: a strong belief in the ‘rights of free Englishmen’ lay at the root of many of the incidents and shaped their course. In July, the same month that Sidmouth sent out the soldiers, Fitzwilliam reported that the incidents had ceased and the country was quiet. The knitters continued to gather, and there were sporadic outbreaks of machine-breaking, but the crisis was over. In February 1813 the prince regent issued a proclamation calling on ‘all His Majesty’s subjects to exert themselves in preventing the recurrence of these atrocious crimes, and to warn those who may be exposed to the machinations of secret directors of the danger and wickedness of such advice’. By then Fitzwilliam was able to report ‘that the country is fast subsiding into a state of temper which promises that no further outrage will disturb the public tranquillity’, and that it was safe to withdraw the troops.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

The authorities’ tendency to view food riots and Luddite disturbances in political terms is difficult to understand. There was certainly some subversive activity by the detritus of the radical groups of the 1790s and the United Irishmen, those of Despard’s associates who had not been hanged, Spenceans and others. They were joined by returning transportees of 1793 and 1794 whose sentences had expired, many of whom were eager to resume the struggle where they had left off. But the authorities knew who they were, and had spies in every cell, so they would have been aware that there was no connection between them and the Luddites, and that they did not even try to exploit the disturbances. The only reformist activity and political opposition to the government in the past decade had been carried on at Westminster by the likes of Burdett, and in the open by Cartwright and others. The Revolution in France had been shackled by Napoleon, and now Napoleon himself no longer represented a threat to Britain. In October he suffered a crushing defeat at Leipzig that put his own future in question.

The bumper harvest of 1813 and the influx of cheap grain from the liberated Continent ensured that there would be no food riots, and without the spur of hunger the lower orders were generally docile. ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomache,’ Cobbett famously complained. Not only had they failed to be stirred by slogans crossing the Channel from France, they stolidly clung to their own cherished shibboleths. The Royal Jubilee held in 1809 to mark the fiftieth year of the reign of George III had unleashed a quite unexpected effusion of patriotism and attachment to the monarchy in all classes. As the end of the war and the prospect of peace drew near, people of conservative bent all over the United Kingdom could congratulate themselves that the storm had been weathered. In June 1815 the final act of Waterloo would only serve to place a gilded full stop at the end of the story. Yet the fear would not subside.22 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The revolutionary ideas of France have already made but too great a progress in the hearts of men in all countries, and even in the very centre of every capital,’ warned a leading article in The Times a couple of weeks before the momentous battle. ‘It is not Bonaparte that at present forms the danger of Europe: he is unmasked. It is the new opinions; it is the disorganisation of men’s minds; it is the making revolt a calculation of private interest; it is the most deadly of all contagions, the contagion of immorality, of false philanthropy, of a perfidious self-styled philosophy; from all of which the world requires to be protected. This is the true hydra which must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe. The cause of morality is the cause of God; it is the cause of all men, of all nations, of all thrones!’23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Such a cause could not be defeated in the field, and, spectacular as it was, the victory of Waterloo did not alter the attitude of the cabinet, which refused to abandon its fable of a seething mass of revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the British constitution and murdering the king and most of the aristocracy.

7

Peace (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

The wars that came to an end in 1815 had been no ordinary wars. For the best part of a quarter of a century, military operations had swept across Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow, from the Baltic to the toe of Italy: if Sweden, Norway, England, Sardinia and Sicily had been spared invasion, Finland, Wales, Ireland, Malta, Egypt and Palestine had not, and the entire population of the Continent had been affected in material terms. The fighting took in almost all of Europe’s colonies, from Florida in the west to Java in the east, and much of it took place at sea. It lasted six times as long as would the First World War, and four times as long as the Second. Battlefield casualties were not as great, but deaths among soldiers and civilians from wounds, disease, famine and exposure were comparable in relative terms, and certainly unprecedented.

The end of hostilities brought a change for the worse in material terms for the majority of the population of Europe, particularly of the poor. Markets closed by war reopened; others, created by the need for armament and military supplies, collapsed, giving rise to economic dislocation on a vast scale. War had been waged at the economic level, with both sides imposing blockades designed to ruin the other. While Britain did everything to starve France of its colonial trade, Napoleon had excluded British trade from mainland Europe. Items traditionally imported from Britain or the colonies had to be produced at home, and the absence of British competition brought prosperity to parts of Saxony, Austria, Switzerland and Catalonia, to the wool, iron and steel industries of Prussia. Belgium went through an industrial revolution caused by the demand for military goods. Rural areas benefited as the lack of colonial trade gave a boost to the sugar beet industry. The length of the wars lent these provisional developments an element of permanence.

The coming of peace removed trade barriers and flooded hitherto protected areas of Europe with colonial goods and cheap English imports, wreaking havoc with local economies. Yet it did little to alleviate hardship in England. While European markets opened up to English goods such as textiles and steel, it was stocks piled up during the blockade that were exported, and there was therefore no corresponding boost in production or reduction in unemployment. Meanwhile, imports of cheap European corn threatened to ruin British farmers.

The wars had coincided with the introduction of labour-saving machinery and of significant increases in population, and the resulting downward pressure on wages was increased by the influx of disbanded soldiers. The burdens placed on poor households were added to by the return of maimed men unable to work but needing to be fed. Dramatic fluctuations in the currency supply over the period and the introduction of paper money by revolutionary France and then Britain added to the instability and sapped confidence. Every government in Europe taxed whatever it could to pay off wartime borrowing. Britain had spent more in real terms than it would on the First World War, and its national debt was astronomical. Russia’s had multiplied by twenty times between 1801 and 1809, and would more than double again by 1822. Austria was technically bankrupt: over the next three decades an average of 30 per cent of state revenue would be siphoned off to service its debt.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

The social consequences, both of the wars and of the peace, were far-reaching. Young men, and the women who often followed them, were plucked out of their families and communities, away from their restraints and taboos. They were often obliged to serve not the interests of their own ruler, but those of his ally, with the result that Portuguese peasants would find themselves fighting in Russia, and Poles in Spain. Their experiences both emancipated and brutalised them. Those who avoided conscription by running away from home and going into hiding lived by banditry, and would never again be susceptible to control by traditional means such as the influence of the Church or deference to local hierarchies and institutions. The same went for deserters, who were forced into a life of crime in order to survive. When peace came, such people drifted back not to their villages but to large towns, where they could lose themselves and hope to satisfy some of the aspirations encouraged by the slogans of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and the mood of the times.

The urban population was also swelled by economic migration from the countryside, which not only lowered the standard of living of the poorer sections by creating downward pressure on wages and severe overcrowding leading to disease, but also had some unexpected consequences. The move from country to town usually severed or at least weakened not only family ties but also links to traditional forms of religious observance. Established Churches had either been abolished, as in revolutionary France, or seen their property and status dramatically reduced, as well as their social role as providers of education and health care; their influence had shrunk as a result. They had lost control of the poorest sections of the population in large towns, leaving these prone to a variety of new religious movements and political philosophies.

The wars had been preceded by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and were in many ways a continuation of it. They brought in their wake colossal disruption of all social and political relations throughout the Continent and its dependencies overseas: rulers were humbled or toppled, established religion undermined or abolished, hierarchies of every sort weakened or dismantled; individuals, classes, minorities and nations were liberated in one sense or another. This not only aroused dormant disputes and hatreds, it opened to question every aspect of social, political and spiritual practice, introducing an ideological dimension and intensity of a kind that had been absent from most European conflicts since the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Confronted by the revolutionary ardour of the French, the Bourbon kings of Naples had created an ‘Army of the Holy Faith’ to combat it, the Spanish launched a semi-religious guerrilla of great ferocity, Austria roused the passions of the Tyrolese in 1809, Russia used peasant militias to harry the French in 1812, and Prussia mobilised the population of Germany in 1813 for the Freiheitskrieg, or war of liberation.

As though all this were not enough, Nature contributed the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history, more than four times greater than Krakatoa’s in 1883. On 10 April 1815, as Napoleon was mustering the army that would be undone at Waterloo, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the Indonesian archipelago exploded into what contemporaries described as a mass of liquid fire and sent volcanic ash twenty miles into the atmosphere. The eruption was heard more than 1,600 miles away, and the whole area within a radius of some four hundred miles was plunged into pitch darkness for two days. The death toll was somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000. Winds sent the particles of ash around the globe, and Londoners were astonished by brilliantly coloured sunsets at the end of July. But the real effects would only make themselves felt later.

There would be no summer in Europe in 1816. Constant rain and persistent cold would destroy harvests across the Continent, causing famine in parts of Ireland, Wales and northern Italy, where people were reduced to eating grass, berries, boiled vegetable peelings and animal manure. In Germany they made bread from the bark of trees. This would precipitate a mass migration of people to less affected parts of Europe, to Russia and to America. Weather patterns would return to normal in the course of 1819. But nothing else did. ‘The volcano is not burnt out,’ the British home secretary Lord Sidmouth wrote to a friend on 13 August 1815, and he was not referring to Mount Tambora.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

There were many at every level of society and in every region to whom peace was unwelcome, and who would take every opportunity to stir up old passions. Some out of ideological conviction, others out of loyalty to a defeated cause, others out of a desire to reverse a situation which had cost them wealth and or rank, others still because peace had no use for their talents. All over Europe, young men who craved adventure, glory and status faced a bleak and boring future. At the same time, the nature of the wars had transformed armies from the eighteenth-century model of pressed or indentured soldiers and mercenaries into citizens-in-arms and champions of the nation. The army had acquired a distinctive place in every European society, and would become a factor in the internal politics of every state in Europe. In recognition of this, almost every European monarch henceforth appeared in uniform.

Long periods of war, with their hardship and suffering, invariably raise expectations of the longed-for peace, often giving rise to dreams of a fresh start or a better world which might make up for and to some extent justify some of that hardship and suffering. In 1815 this phenomenon was magnified by concurrent spiritual awakenings which had been taking place over the past two decades, in Germany and other parts of central Europe, in England and in North America. Such dreams are almost as invariably dashed. But in this instance, it was not only the millenarian dreamers who were disappointed.

The peace settlement reached at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had been the work of some of the most distinguished statesmen of the day, achieved at the cost of nearly two years of laborious negotiations. The peacemakers had set out with respectable, if not the best, intentions. These had been overtaken by the priority of creating a balance between the major mainland states, Russia, Prussia and Austria, henceforth designated as the great powers, and of making it strategically impossible for France to threaten them again. The final settlement failed to fulfil the expectations and longings of large numbers of people, and it injured cultural and religious sensibilities. It also offended the sense of justice of people at every level of society all over Europe: while many who had prospered from the Revolution and military aggression were dispossessed and criminalised, others were rewarded, and few of the victims obtained satisfaction. Not surprisingly, the peace was widely denounced as unjust and immoral. The complaints of those left out in the cold were, as far as the peacemakers were concerned, irrelevant. But in ignoring them, they were creating causes dedicated to the overthrow of the system they had put in place.

Among the unsatisfied longings torturing various parts of Europe was the aspiration to independent nationhood. Many Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Irishmen, Belgians and above all Germans were unhappy to see their homelands divided or ruled by foreigners, and longed to give them life as independent nations.

Another longing strongly felt in various parts of the Continent, under different guises in every country, was for a return to a simpler and spiritually purer way of life. This had surfaced in the German Enlightenment and the Pietist movement in German religious life, and been taken up in the writings of the Russian journalist Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov, the mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the German poet Novalis, the mining engineer Franz von Baader and Tsar Alexander’s spiritual mentor Baroness von Krüdener. Underlying this trend was the belief not only that the Christian faith should be practised more in spirit than in traditional ritual, but also that love should transcend laws, and that the rights of rulers must be earned through the application of virtue. Some went so far as to see in the French Revolution a punishment for Europe’s abandonment of Christian values, and therefore a salutary lesson which the supposedly Christian monarchs had failed to learn. Such views coincided with a strain in German Romanticism which had identified the Middle Ages as a time of purity and heroism. Writers such as Adam Müller called for a return not to the ancien régime obtaining before 1789, but to an imagined age of chivalry, untainted by the evils of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In his Advice to Young Noblemen, Tsar Alexander’s friend the duc de Richelieu propounded that the Revolution had been in large measure the consequence of the shortcomings of the French nobility, and enjoined their descendants to forget the ‘false grandeur’ of the eighteenth century and to reach back to the ‘age of chivalry’ for models.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Inchoate as such ideas might have been, they drifted through sections of European society demanding attention and action. The frustrated emotions expressed by French poets such as Vigny and Musset, and later Lamartine and Hugo, came to be known as ‘le mal du siècle’. Those of their Russian counterparts Pushkin and Lermontov gave rise to the notion of the ‘lichnii chelovek’, the superfluous man for whom there was no role in the ugly realities of the existing world order.

‘A reputedly invincible revolution has just been vanquished,’ wrote the conservative historian and former émigré soldier François Dominique de Montlosier as he considered the state of France in 1815. But this had solved nothing, since the victors were beset by ‘both the old vices which produced the revolution and the new ones which the revolution produced’ as they tried to rebuild the state. ‘What plan is to be followed? The wisdom of past times is no longer applicable to the present; it is foreign to it: the wisdom of modern times is even less applicable; it is depraved.’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

The problem is well illustrated by what happened when, on recovering his temporal dominion, Pope Leo XII tried to turn the clock back. When the French occupied the Papal States in 1809 they reorganised the administration, lifted the disabilities on various groups, abolished the privileges of others and modernised the infrastructure. The pope sacked all those who had worked in the administration under the French, brought back the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and sent the Jews back to the ghetto. Other casualties included unholy revolutionary novelties such as street lighting and vaccination.

King Victor Emmanuel I of Sardinia took a similar line. He had been forced to flee his mainland capital Turin at the approach of the French in 1798. When he returned, he expelled all French nationals from his realm, even those married to Sardinian subjects, and closed down the botanical gardens created under the French, uprooting and burning plants as though they carried seeds of corruption. He too sacked officials wholesale. Clutching the court almanac of 1798 and muttering ‘Novant’Ott!’ (ninety-eight), he reinstated people in the posts and ranks they had held then, with the result that grandfathers became pages once more. To the joy of breeches- and wig-makers he revived the fashions of the past, and the arch-conservative Sardinian minister in St Petersburg, Joseph de Maistre, had to stop on his way back to Turin in order to have a new wardrobe made (he admitted to a correspondent that ‘at the risk of sounding ridiculous, I am not sure I will know how to walk in our ci-devant dress, having spent more than twenty years in tail-coat or uniform’).5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Victor Emmanuel did, in one case at least, close down a textile factory operating in a former convent and, having traced a dozen former members of its Capuchin community, restore it. But neither he nor the pope returned much religious property confiscated by the state under the French. Nor did they abolish the efficient fiscal systems introduced by them. Victor Emmanuel also retained the French peace-keeping Gendarmerie, under the new name of Carabinieri. Principles crumbled before convenience.

The Congress of Vienna made many casualties of convenience – sovereign rulers, aristocrats, bishops, monasteries and other institutions which had been dispossessed by a revolution or Napoleonic regime saw their property handed over to third parties. Invoking the principle of legitimacy in order to reinstate some offensive aspects of the old order and trampling it for the sake of expediency, the new order set up by the congress alienated large sections of the very nobility and aristocracy that should have been its greatest support. By riding roughshod over the rights of these and other, more humble individuals, the settlement placed the state in opposition to the individual to a greater extent than ever before, and in so doing profoundly contradicted the spirit of the age, which elevated the individual and deified the collective in the shape of the nation. Such sentiments transcended the parochial gripes of wronged minorities, and would unite wildly disparate elements in protest. The philosopher La Harpe went so far as to venture that the peace settlement contained ‘the germs of the disintegration of Europe’. The Italian statesman Camillo di Cavour termed it ‘a political edifice without any moral foundation’. Maistre also denied it legitimacy. ‘Justice, by its very nature, leads to peace,’ he wrote. ‘Injustice, by its very nature, leads to war.’ He would be proved correct, but it would be a very different kind of war from that he imagined.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

The ‘depraved’ wisdom Montlosier referred to was a new liberalism based on considerations of utility and practicality which had left behind the utopianism of the Enlightenment and the idealism of the Revolution, and set aside such grandiloquent concepts as the Rights of Man in favour of a more pragmatic approach intended to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number. It took for granted that much of what had been done in terms of political enfranchisement, social emancipation, secularisation, disestablishment and extension of the protection of the law in France and wherever French influence had penetrated represented a huge step forward on the march of human progress.

‘God has clearly indicated that He does not wish the order of royal generations to be interrupted,’ argued one of Tsar Alexander’s advisers, Sergei Semionovich Uvarov. But he believed the people had acquired ‘a right to the gratitude of the Sovereigns whom they so valiantly defended’. He suggested that kings and people should make ‘the mutual sacrifice of despotism and popular anarchy’ on ‘the tomb of Buonaparte’. Talleyrand took a similar line when he argued that legitimacy could no longer be based on Divine Right, but on the monarch’s ability to ensure the happiness of his people. ‘The general opinion today, and it would be pointless to try to change it, is that governments exist solely for the people,’ he explained, ‘and the consequence of this view is that legitimate power is that which can best assure their happiness and their peace.’7 (#litres_trial_promo)

History could not be rolled back. ‘Without despising or wishing to denigrate the ancien régime, I regarded as puerile any attempt to reinstate it,’ wrote the duc de Broglie, a twenty-nine-year-old aristocrat who had served as a minor diplomat under Napoleon. ‘In heart and mind I belonged to the new society, I believed fervently in its boundless progress; and while detesting the process of revolution, with all the violence that it gives rise to and the crimes that sully it, I regarded the French Revolution in globo as an inevitable and salutary affliction.’8 (#litres_trial_promo)

To the conservatively minded, this was heresy. The principal reason why the Treaty of Vienna was so flawed was, according to Maistre, that the monarchs and ministers ‘clearly allowed themselves to be penetrated by the philosophical and political ideas of the age’, which he saw as an opportunistic pragmatism. ‘The spirit of revolution is dressed up as the spirit of reason, and under this disguise it is very alluring,’ he warned in August 1815. For people such as him, the threat of a return to 1793 exerted the same compulsive fear as did to all reasonable people in the decades following the Second World War the possibility of a return of fascism: the slightest reference to the episode tended to be pounced on as evidence of ‘Jacobinism’, just as post-war bien-pensants tended to brand anyone with right-wing sympathies a ‘fascist’. The ultra-conservative politician Jean-Baptiste de Villèle referred to all liberals as ‘la Révolution’, a word that epitomised for him a living force, a giant conspiracy on the move.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘As long as the absurd and fatal (and also at first sight very plausible) dogma of the sovereignty of the people is more or less publicly recognised,’ warned Maistre in March 1817, ‘I do not think that a sensible man can rest easy.’ Those who shared his views saw the Revolution not so much as a past event, but as the beginning of a new era in the struggle between good and evil. If the Revolution which had had such a devastating impact on people all over the world had indeed been brought about by a conspiracy, the danger was by no means past. The conspiracy could not have merely petered out, and its spirit could not have been extinguished by the military victory over Napoleon. The Revolution had not been the culmination, but an explosion, and, whether or not Mount Tambora had a subliminal effect, the prevailing imagery was volcanic.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘The French volcano erupted,’ in the words of Tsar Alexander’s adviser Count Alexander Sturdza. ‘Out came and rose up the spirit of evil. Its path was frayed and widened by religious deviance, excess of luxury, dissolution of morals, abuse of power and perversion of reason.’ The conservative writer Louis de Bonald agreed, and warned that ‘even if the eruption has ceased, the volcano is still alight and rumbling’.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘It is not only peace that Europe needs,’ reflected Bonald at the end of 1815, ‘it is first and foremost order that she is in need of …’ But what kind of order? European society had been split along ideological lines to an extent not seen since the Reformation. One man’s order was another man’s prison. If the progressive forces in European society were split between liberals who believed in the gradual evolution of democracy by means of constitutional monarchy and the vociferous minority who called for violent revolution, the forces of conservatism were equally split between the constitutional monarchists and a strident faction which saw only revolution, murder and mayhem everywhere. And while some looked for spiritual solutions, those in power sought comfort in a dubious legitimacy and the security of bayonets. In the circumstances, the pursuit of ‘order’ was to become a self-defeating quest that would transform European societies and help to mould the modern state.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

8

A Hundred Days (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

What usually happened at the close of a war was that the defeated party ceded territory to the victors and undertook to pay them reparations in one form or another. The deal was often sealed by a marriage which made it difficult for the vanquished ruler to seek to take his revenge. It was not usual practice to overthrow a defeated monarch – at most, he might be forced to abdicate in favour of a less aggressive or capable son – which is what Napoleon proposed in 1814. But Napoleon was a highly unusual monarch. The British did not recognise him as one at all. Others did so only reluctantly, and while he had been crowned by the pope and had married the Emperor of Austria’s daughter, they could not quite bring themselves to accept him. It was not merely a question of his lineage. While some saw him only as its infamous spawn, for others he was the Revolution incarnate. They referred to him as ‘the Usurper’, ‘the Monster’ or ‘the Ogre’. The English prime minister 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 confirmed that the powers assembled there in congress were planning to remove him to somewhere more remote, fearing that while he remained a free man he would be a magnet for discontent and opposition to the restored Bourbon monarchy. He was also aware of a number of plots being hatched to assassinate him. There is some evidence that as well as colluding in such plots, the Bourbon regime was trying to goad him, amongst other means by withholding payment of his allowance, into making a move that would force the allies to deal with him conclusively.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Louis XVIII cannot therefore have been greatly surprised when, at the beginning of March 1815, less than a year since he ascended the throne, he was informed that Napoleon had landed on the south coast of France. He ordered units in the area to bar the road to Paris and sent his brother, the comte d’Artois, to take command, before despatching a strong force under the former Napoleonic Marshal Ney to defeat and capture his erstwhile master. He summoned the foreign ambassadors to the Tuileries and told them to instruct their courts that he felt ‘no anxiety whatsoever with regard to this event’. ‘I hope that it will not trouble the repose of Europe or my own,’ he added. With similar self-assurance he declared to the Chamber of Deputies and that of Peers that he would die fighting rather than abandon Paris.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

Napoleon had landed on 1 March at Golfe Juan with just over a thousand men. He was obliged to bypass Cannes and Grasse on account of the hostility of the local population, and during the first days of his march he met with little more than morose curiosity on the part of the locals. But the mood changed as he moved north, and at Laffrey on 7 March a regiment of infantry sent to bar his way rallied to him. That night he entered Grenoble in triumph, and on 10 March he was in Lyon, where he was greeted with enthusiasm. Artois, who had set up his headquarters there, had fled at his approach. Troops sent out by Louis XVIII to stop him could not be counted on, and their commanders wavered. Some remained loyal to the king and fell back on Paris, others took their men over to Napoleon. At Avallon General Girard brought two regiments over to his side; at Auxerre Marshal Ney, who had with characteristic bravado promised Louis XVIII that he would bring the usurper back in a cage, rallied to his former master and took his troops with him.

In the early hours of 20 March, with Napoleon approaching fast, Louis XVIII furtively slipped out of the Tuileries and, gradually deserted by most of the Maison du Roi, fled the country. Late that afternoon, Napoleon was carried in triumph up the main staircase of the palace on the shoulders of his generals and former ministers. But he had few illusions. ‘They have let me in just as they let the others out,’ he commented to his treasury minister Nicolas Mollien. There was something distinctly haphazard about the whole business. Yet the events of March 1815 were to have huge significance. The ‘Hundred Days’ that followed did more than briefly disturb the repose of Europe and inconvenience Louis XVIII. The episode fundamentally altered the political situation inside France, and would have serious repercussions for the whole Continent.4 (#litres_trial_promo)