The Invisible Emperor Read online

  The allied leaders had never actually formulated a clear idea of what they would do after Napoleon’s fall, if they did manage to defeat him, just as they had never publicly called for the absolute destruction of the Bonaparte dynasty while fighting France. A Bourbon restoration appeared to many of the principal diplomats to be the least terrible option from which they now had to choose.

  To stave off any chance of a desperate rally, the allies granted Napoleon light terms of surrender. He was allowed to keep his head, for starters, since it was feared that executing him would throw France into civil war. He still inspired feverish devotion in some circles, especially among those who killed and died by trade, and with so many public squares still bearing the stains of a guillotine’s work, no ruler wanted to suggest a beheading as the way to cap a victory. Napoleon also escaped heavier punishment because Europe’s sovereigns still thought of themselves as a band of equals, “cousins,” as he liked to call them, bound despite internecine conflicts by blood, history, and protocol. They alone understood the heavy task of ruling and they alone understood that a defeated emperor must be treated with the deference due his title, even if in this case the ruler in question had invented that title for himself.

  The question now was where to put him. If the point of banishment was to render a threatening person invisible and ineffective by removing him from a place of power, Napoleon presented a strange case in the history of exile. He’d “not simply been at the center of the world,” as one biographer put it, “but [had] been that center.” Before sending Caulaincourt off to negotiate his surrender, Napoleon had told him to push for asylum in Great Britain, where he imagined a kind of country-squire existence as guest of the empire he claimed to respect most after his own. When Caulaincourt proposed the idea to the British foreign secretary, Castlereagh, the latter said he was shocked and embarrassed at even being asked.

  Napoleon meanwhile wrote to Marie Louise, telling her to send “a very strong letter to your father commending yourself and your son to his care. . . . Make it clear . . . that the time has come for him to help us.” Her father was the Austrian emperor, Francis I, who four years earlier had arranged for his then eighteen-year-old daughter to marry the newly divorced Napoleon. At forty-two, Francis had been only two years older than the groom at the time of the wedding, though with his ash white hair, frail frame, and timid bearing he looked much older than his age. The marriage forged an uneasy alliance between Europe’s oldest dynasty and its newest. The Habsburg archduchess Maria Luisa became Marie Louise of the house of Bonaparte, empress of France. But Francis now had nothing to gain by his association with his defeated son-in-law. “The principal thing is to get Napoleon out of France,” he wrote to his foreign minister, Count Klemens von Metternich. “And, please God, as far off as possible.”

  Alexander was meanwhile toying with the idea of a Russian exile. “I am more his friend than he thinks,” he told Caulaincourt when they met in Paris to negotiate the aftermath of Napoleon’s abdication. Even while speaking of himself as a crusading “Angel” who had finally completed his quest to defeat the French “Antichrist,” Alexander still admired his enemy’s military brilliance and statesmanship; if Napoleon had sometimes acted ruthlessly it was only because he understood, as Alexander did, the value of unscheduled brutality. Napoleon had been similarly impressed by the tall and imposing Romanov. “If he were a woman,” he once told his first wife, Joséphine, “I think I would make him my mistress.”

  The tsar eventually recognized that the other sovereigns were unlikely to favor Napoleon living under his protection, a setup that would have paired the two most dangerous men on the globe in relatively close quarters. His negotiations with Caulaincourt for an alternate solution weren’t as tense as might be imagined; the two men had established a camaraderie from Caulaincourt’s years as ambassador to Saint Petersburg. After ten days of talks the tsar devised an only slightly less eccentric solution than a Russian exile.

  How Alexander came to choose Elba as the site of Napoleon’s banishment remains a mystery. He and Caulaincourt fixed on the strategy of an island exile early in their discussions, floating Corfu, Sardinia, and even Corsica as options. There was a certain symmetry in casting this upstart islander back out to sea, a warning from this most hereditary of sovereigns and ruler of Europe’s largest landmass to any other parvenu daring to step out of place. Alexander may have thought Elba a wise choice because it lay only a day’s sail from Piombino, isolating Napoleon from the continent while keeping him close enough to observe. He might also have wanted to grant Napoleon dominion over a small and relatively well-secured bit of land surrounded by water out of genuine concern for his safety, reinforcing Alexander’s religious convictions, which championed forgiveness and generosity. Or it may be that the tsar found the most insignificant territory he could think of and sent his fallen enemy there to humiliate him. Not that he gave his confederates much choice in the matter, one way or the other. He simply announced the decision as a fait accompli one night in Paris, as though testing out his newfound status as the globe’s most powerful sovereign and daring anyone to oppose him.

  The other sovereigns and their ministers were shocked by how boldly Alexander had acted on their collective behalf. The British contingent wondered if Napoleon might not seduce the Elbans into forming the hard core of an army that could come to wreak havoc on the continent. Castlereagh thought this was all just more of Alexander’s acting with too much emotion when it came to Napoleon, unconcerned by the ramifications of his deeply personal and quasi-mystical quest to defeat the French emperor. But Castlereagh recognized that separating Napoleon from his soldiers and warding off civil war trumped all other concerns for the time being. “The whole nation is released from their oaths to Buonaparte, but bound to no one,” he wrote to his prime minister. “This is a dangerous state.” He saw no advantage in challenging the ruler of a nation seventy times larger than Britain and so went along with the tsar’s strange fancy, though he refused to sign any treaty codifying the terms of surrender.

  The Austrians interpreted the tsar’s choice of Elba, which lay close to their Tuscan territories, as a direct insult. “They give to others what belongs to my family . . . and Napoleon remains too near to France and Europe,” Francis wrote to Metternich. The new setup forced Austria to dedicate extra resources to help make sure Napoleon stayed put, which left fewer men to deploy as a check against Russia’s westward maneuvering. Metternich claimed that if he’d only reached Paris a few days earlier he would have stopped Alexander, “the biggest baby on earth,” from acting “like a schoolboy who has escaped from his teacher.” He predicted they would all be back on the battlefield before two years were out, but he knew that the weakened empire he represented lacked the ability to counter Russia.

  Talleyrand, knowing Napoleon better than anyone, had the most reason to feel unnerved by Alexander’s decision. Privately, he feared putting Napoleon so near to Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, still the key force in southern Italy as he clung to his rule in Naples. (After months of furtive negotiations Murat had signed an alliance with Austria that January, strengthening his claim in Naples and making him an enemy of the French.) But Talleyrand sensed that the time had come for impetuous warriors to give way to orderly diplomats, of which he thought himself the shrewdest and most civilized of all, and that the real currents of power would now flow not on the battlefield or the grandstand but around tables and behind closed doors. He stood to gain a great deal by shuffling Napoleon offstage, and quickly. “I see Talleyrand has been naturally taking as much care as possible of himself,” wrote one British official to Castlereagh during the negotiations.

  However odd the idea sounded, there were some practical advantages to an Elban exile. The French held it as a subprefecture under the jurisdiction of the Département de la Méditerranée, meaning that it technically formed part of metropolitan France, as was the case with much of northwest Italy. Napoleon had
sent detachments there in 1802 to make it a base from which to block British trade in the region. And while it had some value from a naval point of view, handing it to Napoleon hardly constituted a huge economic loss. Across the Atlantic, islands were so valuable that a half century earlier the French had thought themselves wise for retaining sugar-rich Guadeloupe instead of swapping it with the British for all of Canada, but Elba, by contrast, had little by the way of natural resources or industry. And any island, even one as close to the European continent as this one, could serve as a kind of blank slate, terra incognita, a place that very few people involved in the matter would have known intimately, if at all, and so an empty space onto which to project all sorts of best-case scenarios. Such mysteriousness was what made islands such ideal rewards for would-be adventurers. Elba could be transformed overnight into Napoleon’s fiefdom without much fuss. There is no evidence of the allies’ giving any thought as to how this recoloring of the map might affect the lives of the roughly twelve thousand islanders.

  Representatives of the allied powers (save for the British) put their names to what became known as the Treaty of Fontainebleau, though it was signed at Talleyrand’s town house in Paris. Napoleon would retain his title of Emperor and would possess Elba as a separate and sovereign principality for the rest of his life, without the right to pass it down to any heirs. The Russians had almost single-handedly shaped the treaty’s terms, though the British had devoted more men, time, and money to fighting Napoleon than anyone else, while the Austrians had arguably suffered the most humiliation at his hands, and the French were expected to foot the bill of two million francs to be paid yearly to their former emperor in return for his surrender, another key term of the treaty. In the end, the signatories were united only in agreeing that they had crafted an imperfect solution. A British general who was following the peace negotiations closely wrote in his journal, “Napoleon in the Isle of Elba has in this case only to be patient. His enemies will be his best champions.”

  Why weren’t Napoleon’s enemies sufficiently terrified by the prospect of having the most fearsome general in recent history a day’s sail from the Italian coast? The answer had much to do with water. For centuries, Europeans had thought of the sea as a boundary between order and chaos, and islands as places distinct from the realm of the everyday, worlds apart and unto themselves. Islands were for refuge and rites of passage, resting places for demigods, hermits, martyrs, knights-errant, pirates, and smugglers, and dream-spaces for seekers of sex, treasure, and utopia. For the same reasons, islands offered readymade holding pens to which to send anyone deemed dangerous to orderly society. Napoleon would be following in a long line of island exiles, real and imagined, from the Roman general Metellus Numidicus studying philosophy on Rhodes, to John wrestling with apocalypse on Patmos, to the mysterious masked convict on Île Sainte-Marguerite whose life Alexandre Dumas would turn into the stuff of fiction.

  The ten-kilometer strip separating Elba from the Tuscan coast may as well have been an ocean by people’s mental maps. The Elbans referred to the landmass across the water as the continente, the continent, rather than as terraferma, the mainland. The allied leaders, then, were following seemingly sound logic: that on this tiny island Napoleon would feel more distant from the centers of European power than if he were sent to the farthest tip of Siberia.

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  A LODGER IN HIS OWN LIFE

  WHILE ARRANGEMENTS WERE BEING made for Napoleon’s travel south, Colonel Neil Campbell lay staring at the ceiling of a small and dingy room in Paris. He had a broken arm, a punctured lung, a bandaged eye, and a ringing in his ears. His face was a mess of purple and red framed in gauze.

  The pain of his wounds was compounded by the embarrassment of how they had been acquired. A few weeks earlier he’d been in the fray at Fère-Champenoise near Vitry. Some Russian cavalrymen heard him calling out to their shared enemy to stop firing and surrender, shouting in French to be understood. Along with his blue surtout and red sash this made him look like a French officer giving orders, reason enough for a Russian hussar to ride up and pierce his lance through Campbell’s back. Though as he fell Campbell opened his coat to show his Russian decorations, his comrades, those “wild sons of the desert,” as he called them, missed seeing them. A second hussar slashed the prone Campbell across his head and went in for the kill, but Campbell saved his own life, thanks to the same facility with foreign talk that had been his undoing. “I cried out lustily, ‘Anglisky Polkovnick’ [sic] (English Colonel),” he recalled in his journal, and “a Russian officer succeeded by the use of better language in preventing the infliction of a third wound.”

  Tsar Alexander was stationed a quarter mile from the battle and sent his personal surgeons, who were Scotsmen like Campbell, to dress his wounds. Campbell had been serving as military attaché to the tsar’s headquarters, fighting alongside a Russian corps through much of Europe, and his eastern allies had named him a Knight of the Imperial Order of Saint Anne for valorous duty the previous summer.

  At the Vitry infirmary someone stole his luggage, which held all his clothes, decorations, and army records. The worse news, from Campbell’s view, was that his doctors advised him to stay in bed for several weeks, which would have kept him from the final push on Paris. After a few days he ignored their counsel and headed for the French capital, determined to be close to the action even if he could not fight. One of the tsar’s surgeons trailed after him so he could continue treatment. By the time they reached Paris the fighting was over.

  Campbell’s first days in the city were quiet and lonely, but things brightened with the delivery of an unexpected letter. “Being still unable to undertake any duty or to mix in society I had no knowledge of the important arrangements in progress regarding the future destiny of Napoleon, except through the channel of the daily newspapers,” he wrote. “I was therefore quite unprepared for a message from Lord Castlereagh, which I received on the 14th.” The foreign secretary invited him “to accompany, in a day or two, the ci-devant Emperor from Fontainebleau to the island of Elba” in the role of commissioner, representing the British contingent of the allied coalition.

  The next morning Campbell met with Castlereagh, who presented him with a second letter, formally outlining his duties, and crafted with all the tact of a seasoned diplomat, looking as much to posterity as to the present situation and opting for the abstract rather than the specific. The letter directed Campbell “to attend the late Chief of the French government” (Castlereagh was still unsure of Napoleon’s proper title) to Elba and to help secure his “asylum” there. He was to tell Napoleon that he’d been “directed to reside in the island till further orders, if he should consider that the presence of a British officer can be of use in protecting the island and his person against insult or attack.”

  The looseness of the language could help Castlereagh make the case that he had assigned someone to Elba only as an ad hoc response to Alexander’s single-handed decision to determine the terms of the exile, rather than as part of some strategy meant to advance British interests in the Mediterranean. The letter’s final instruction, that Campbell exercise “discretion as to the mode of communicating with His Majesty’s Government,” was a way of telling him to consider this a clandestine assignment. Campbell was never actually shown the Treaty of Fontainebleau and only learned of its terms much later through a newspaper item. He was to appear as no more than an impartial observer of Napoleon’s banishment rather than as its chief enforcer, which was what he effectively was. All the better lest the exile go awry, as Castlereagh and many of his colleagues feared it would.

  Campbell must have wondered why he specifically had gotten the call, though he had some obvious merits. He was a Highland gentleman of Duntroon in Argyll and a rising field officer. At thirty-seven he’d already traveled the far reaches of the empire, from the Caribbean to northern Africa, putting his dark good looks to work as attaché to several European courts, where he develop
ed a feel for the pomp and protocol of royalty. He was an able commander and he spoke French, the international language of diplomacy, if too fluently for his own good. He was smart enough, well liked, and upright.

  Castlereagh would have wanted someone clever enough to finesse this strange assignment, but not so devious as to hide anything important from the Home Office. A solitary type was needed for such a secretive solo mission, which had no real end date, an ambiguous set of duties, and little chance for public acclaim. With no sign of a fiancée and no deep ties to any place aside from the family plot in Scotland, Campbell would have presented an especially appealing candidate. And Castlereagh knew loneliness well enough to spot the affliction in others. Born just a few weeks before Napoleon, in Dublin, he was a former Irish volunteer who had gone on to oversee the dissolution of the Irish parliament, a Presbyterian who had remade himself an Anglican. He’d once cheered for the revolutionaries in France and even admired the American rebels for breaking away from their English rulers, but buried those youthful and romantic notions as he rose in the diplomatic corps. Such an enterprising outsider may have had a special affinity for an ambitious Scottish officer trying to make his way in a system ruled from London.

  The following night, April 16, Campbell rode up to Fontainebleau’s imposing iron gates of green and gold. A palace guard led him to Henri Gatien Bertrand, grand marshal of the palace. They chatted about the island they were both soon to call home. Campbell realized that Bertrand knew Elba no better than he did. He spoke about it “in most melancholy terms,” saying only “that it was very small, very barren, part of it extremely unwholesome from the exhalation of the salt-ponds, and that there was very little wood or good water to be had.”

  Campbell had breakfast the next morning alongside some surprisingly friendly French generals and the three other allied commissioners who would escort Napoleon toward Elba: General Waldbourg-Truchsess of Prussia, Baron Koller of Austria, and Count Shuvalov of Russia. He struggled to focus on the meal as he waited to meet the man whose armies he and his countrymen had spent so long trying to destroy. If he thought then about his older brother James, killed while leading an attack on the French, and the son “on whom,” as one Campbell relation wrote, “the hopes of the family had fondly rested,” he didn’t record it in his journal.