Napoleon Bonaparte

#1March 7, 1815. Napoleon was heading north through southeastern France when a royal regiment blocked the road near Laffrey.

#2The men of the 5th Regiment weren't there to welcome him. They'd been sent to stop the former emperor who had just escaped Elba.

#3Napoleon had brought only about 1,100 men with him. That's nowhere near enough to conquer France the normal way. He couldn't beat one royal army after another, capture city after city, and then lay siege to Paris.

#4So this could have ended right here.

#5All the soldiers had to do was fire.

#6Napoleon walked toward their guns.

#7Later retellings gave the moment a perfect dramatic line, the sort of quote made for legend. The exact wording is much less certain than the story usually makes it sound.

#8But the part that mattered really happened.

#9The soldiers didn't shoot.

#10And then they did something far worse for the king.

#11They started joining Napoleon.

#12He hadn't brought an army big enough to defeat France. Instead, the army of France was beginning to change sides in front of him.

#13How could that happen?

#14For that, you have to go back eleven months.

#15By the spring of 1814, Napoleon's empire was coming apart. Allied armies had pushed into France, and even Napoleon's battlefield victories couldn't turn the whole war around anymore.

#16Then Paris fell.

#17Napoleon still wanted to fight. The men around him increasingly didn't. France had spent years at war, and some of the marshals who had served him across Europe no longer believed another campaign could save the empire.

#18They pushed him toward abdication.

#19So Napoleon didn't lose his throne simply because an enemy army dragged him off it. In the end, some of his own senior military leaders would no longer keep fighting for him.

#20He gave up the crown.

#21Then things got darker.

#22On the night of April 12, Napoleon swallowed poison he'd carried since the Russian campaign, saved for exactly the sort of catastrophe he was now living through.

#23It didn't kill him.

#24He survived hours of agony.

#25A few days later, he said goodbye to the Guards who had stayed with him and left France.

#26He was going to Elba.

#27Napoleon had lost his empire, but he wasn't treated like an ordinary prisoner. He kept the title of emperor. He became sovereign of Elba. He could run a small government and keep a body of loyal troops.

#28So when he arrived, he started governing.

#29He looked at the island's finances, administration, roads, and public works. The man who had once ruled a huge European empire was now running a tiny Mediterranean island.

#30For a while, maybe that could have been the end of the story.

#31But life on Elba was getting harder to imagine as a permanent arrangement.

#32Money France had promised him wasn't arriving. His small court and military force still cost money. And rumors reached him that the powers might eventually move him somewhere much farther away.

#33His family wasn't coming either.

#34His mother and his sister Pauline Bonaparte visited. His wife, Marie Louise, did not. Neither did their young son.

#35Napoleon waited for them.

#36They never came.

#37And while his old imperial family was drifting farther away, reports from France were telling him something else.

#38The new king might not be as secure as he looked.

#39Louis XVIII was back on the French throne. The Bourbon Restoration had brought the old royal dynasty back after years of revolution and empire.

#40But restoring a king didn't erase everything that had happened in between.

#41The army was a particular problem. Plenty of officers and soldiers had built careers under Napoleon. Some were uneasy about their place under the restored monarchy. Some disliked parts of the new order.

#42That doesn't mean France was secretly waiting for Napoleon to return.

#43It wasn't.

#44There were committed royalists. There were people exhausted by Napoleon's wars. There were soldiers who would stay loyal to the king.

#45Napoleon didn't need everybody.

#46He needed one uncertainty:

#47If he came back, could Louis XVIII actually make his own soldiers shoot him?

#48News of discontent kept reaching Elba.

#49Then, in February 1815, Napoleon got an opening.

#50Colonel Neil Campbell, the British commissioner observing Napoleon on Elba, left on February 16.

#51The very next day, activity around Napoleon's brig, the Inconstant, picked up. The ship was being readied. Other vessels were prepared too.

#52But Napoleon kept acting like a man who planned to stay.

#53There were plans for an opera company. Official business was scheduled for March. Construction work continued. Even people close to him weren't told everything.

#54Then February 26 arrived.

#55Napoleon was leaving.

#56He restricted departures from the harbor so news couldn't race ahead of him too quickly. The point was simple: don't give spies an easy chance to reach the mainland first.

#57That evening, the little flotilla sailed.

#58Seven vessels. Around 1,100 men.

#59Louis XVIII had a kingdom, a bureaucracy, and an army.

#60Napoleon had a few ships, a small group of loyal soldiers, and one of the most famous names in Europe.

#61He was gambling that it might be enough.

#62Napoleon landed at Golfe-Juan on March 1.

#63The legend that grew around the Hundred Days can make the next part feel automatic: Napoleon appears, the army remembers him, France rises, the king runs.

#64It wasn't automatic.

#65Napoleon tried to win over troops at Antibes.

#66They refused.

#67The men he sent were detained.

#68So much for the idea that every French soldier would take one look at Napoleon and immediately switch sides.

#69And Napoleon couldn't afford to sit around in the south gathering support. Every extra day gave the royal government more time to concentrate troops and block his path.

#70So he kept moving.

#71He avoided areas where royalist resistance was especially dangerous and headed through the mountains toward Grenoble.

#72He didn't have the numbers for a normal invasion.

#73What he had was speed.

#74And a name everyone recognized.

#75Then, on March 7, he reached Laffrey.

#76The 5th Regiment was waiting for him.

#77Napoleon walked out toward them.

#78Later generations turned the scene into theater, complete with a polished quote and a perfect heroic pose. It doesn't really need any of that.

#79He put himself in front of hostile soldiers.

#80They didn't fire.

#81Then they rallied to him.

#82That changed everything.

#83Until then, Napoleon had been moving through France with the troops he'd brought from Elba. Now he was moving with men who had belonged to Louis XVIII that same morning.

#84And another unit followed.

#85Charles de La Bédoyère, commander of the 7th Regiment, brought his soldiers over to Napoleon.

#86That night, Napoleon entered Grenoble.

#87The new troops mattered. But something else mattered even more.

#88Before Grenoble, people could ask whether this reckless escapee from Elba would survive.

#89After Grenoble, the question started to change.

#90Could the king actually stop him?

#91Louis XVIII still had someone who looked like a powerful answer to Napoleon.

#92Marshal Michel Ney.

#93Few men were more closely associated with Napoleon's wars. But Ney wasn't simply a lifelong loyalist waiting for his emperor to return.

#94In 1814, he'd been among the senior commanders who forced Napoleon to face the fact that the war couldn't go on.

#95After that, he accepted the restored monarchy.

#96And when Napoleon came back in 1815, Ney initially went out in the king's service to oppose him.

#97That should have been good news for Louis XVIII. One of Napoleon's own former marshals was helping stop Napoleon.

#98Except Ney kept moving into a situation that was changing underneath him.

#99Napoleon was still advancing. Royal soldiers were defecting. And the mood of the troops around Ney was becoming harder to ignore.

#100On March 14, Ney changed sides too.

#101He joined Napoleon.

#102At that point, what had happened at Laffrey no longer looked like one emotional regiment losing its nerve.

#103The monarchy had an army on paper.

#104But its ability to make that army fight Napoleon was falling apart.

#105Grenoble opened. Then Lyon. Then came the news that Ney had joined Napoleon.

#106Each success did more than add troops or territory.

#107It changed the question for everyone waiting farther north.

#108At first, an officer might ask:

#109Do I support Napoleon or the king?

#110But once regiment after regiment failed to stop him, another question became harder to avoid:

#111Who's actually going to be ruling France next week?

#112That mattered even to people who weren't devoted Bonapartists.

#113Power isn't just orders and titles. It also depends on people believing that everyone else is going to obey those orders.

#114Louis XVIII was still the legal king. He still had the machinery of the state.

#115But each royal unit that joined Napoleon made the monarchy look a little less secure and Napoleon a little more inevitable.

#116His success was starting to produce more success.

#117By the time he was closing in on Paris, Louis XVIII had a problem no decree could solve: could he trust the forces protecting him?

#118On March 19, he left the capital.

#119The next day, Napoleon walked into the Tuileries Palace.

#120February 26 to March 20.

#121Twenty-two days.

#122No siege of Paris. No great battle that destroyed the king's main army.

#123Napoleon had left Elba with roughly 1,100 men and ended up back in the imperial palace.

#124And there was a strange symmetry to it.

#125In 1814, Napoleon lost his throne because his own military leaders would no longer keep fighting for him.

#126In 1815, he got it back because the king's soldiers wouldn't reliably fight against him.

#127But that trick only worked so far.

#128Back in Paris, Napoleon tried to present himself as a ruler who wanted peace.

#129Europe's great powers had every reason to be suspicious.

#130They'd spent years fighting him. They'd finally removed him. Then they'd allowed him to live on Elba, only to watch him escape and regain the French throne in a matter of weeks.

#131There was another irony here.

#132While Napoleon was on Elba, the powers at the Congress of Vienna had been arguing with each other. The coalition that had defeated him wasn't a happy family. Its members had their own rivalries and territorial disputes.

#133Then Napoleon returned.

#134Suddenly, everyone had a common problem again.

#135Division inside France had helped Napoleon.

#136His return reduced division among his enemies.

#137The powers prepared for war.

#138Napoleon couldn't simply wait for all their armies to assemble around France, so in June he moved first.

#139On June 16, Napoleon defeated Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher's Prussians at the Battle of Ligny.

#140But he didn't destroy them.

#141Two days later came the Battle of Waterloo.

#142Napoleon attacked the army commanded by the Duke of Wellington.

#143And this was nothing like Laffrey.

#144Wellington's soldiers didn't look at Napoleon and see the emperor they'd served a few months earlier.

#145Neither did Blücher's Prussians.

#146There was no old political loyalty for Napoleon to reach into and break apart.

#147He couldn't win by making the other army stop being the other army.

#148He had to beat it.

#149Wellington's force held. Then, later in the day, the Prussians Napoleon had beaten at Ligny began arriving on the battlefield.

#150The French army collapsed.

#151At Laffrey, Napoleon survived because the men facing him didn't pull the trigger.

#152At Waterloo, nobody gave him that gift.

#153Napoleon returned to Paris, but this time the collapse couldn't be reversed.

#154On June 22, 1815, he abdicated again.

#155He tried to pass his claim to his young son.

#156Napoleon II.

#157The same child he'd waited for on Elba.

#158But the boy wasn't in Paris.

#159He wasn't even in France.

#160He was in Vienna, under Austrian control.

#161Calling him emperor couldn't magically create a working French government around a child hundreds of miles away.

#162Napoleon's problem was no longer how to save his throne.

#163It was how to get out.

#164He went to Rochefort and looked at the possibility of sailing to the United States. British naval power made that increasingly unrealistic.

#165In the end, Napoleon placed himself in British hands.

#166And Europe now had a very specific problem to solve.

#167They had already exiled this man once.

#168He'd come back.

#169Elba was close to Europe. Napoleon had ruled it. He'd kept loyal soldiers. He had ships.

#170And when the opportunity came, he'd sailed away.

#171The second exile was built around not repeating that mistake.

#172Saint Helena was a remote island in the South Atlantic.

#173Napoleon wouldn't be its sovereign. He wouldn't have his own small army. His movements and communications would be watched closely.

#174He arrived there in October 1815.

#175He never returned to France.

#176Napoleon died on Saint Helena on May 5, 1821.

#177When he sailed from Elba, he didn't have an army capable of conquering France. He had about 1,100 followers, the political weight of his name, and one weakness in the regime that had replaced him: the king couldn't be sure his own soldiers would fight the former emperor.

#178Napoleon found that weakness and turned it into a throne in twenty-two days.

#179But the armies of Europe didn't have the same weakness.

#180And Europe had learned from Elba too.

#181The first time, they removed Napoleon from the throne.

#182The second time, they removed Napoleon from Europe.

#183In 1815, another fallen ruler tried something that looked strangely similar. Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law and the former king of Naples, also returned with a small force hoping to recover a kingdom he'd lost. Napoleon's gamble carried him all the way back to Paris. Murat's barely got started. Why did two remarkably similar returns end so differently?