Downfall And Abdication of Napolean-1

All of France's borders were under attack in January 1814. Since Napoleon had rejected the terms proposed by the Austrian foreign minister Klemens, Fürst (prince) von Metternich in November 1813 that would have preserved France's natural borders, the allies cunningly declared that they were fighting against Napoleon alone and not the French people. The emperor's tremendous strategic achievements during the first three months of 1814 with the army of youthful conscripts were insufficient, he was unable to overcome the allies, who had a vast numerical advantage, or to shake the mass of the French people out of their bitter stupor. 

 

The Senate and the Legislative Assembly, who had before been so submissive, were now pleading for political and civil rights as well as for peace. By signing the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Great Britain committed to fighting with one another until Napoleon was toppled for a period of 20 years. On March 30, the allied forces reached Paris, but Napoleon had already marched east to assault their rear guard. No longer intimidated by the emperor, the Parisian authorities wasted no time in negotiating with the allies. 

 

In his capacity as head of the interim administration, Talleyrand declared the emperor to be abdicated and, without first addressing the French populace, started talks with Louis XVIII, the brother of the assassinated Louis XVI. He ultimately abdicated on April 6 after realizing that continuing to resist would be pointless.

 

By way of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the allies gave him 400 volunteer guards, the island of Elba as a sovereign principality, and a two million franc yearly income to be given by France. He kept his emperor title as well. Napoleon bid his "Old Guard" farewell after trying unsuccessfully to poison himself, and on May 4, following a perilous journey during which he narrowly evaded assassination, he landed at Elba. 

 

Napoleon said on his tiny island, "I wish to live now like a justice of the peace." A man with such drive and ingenuity, however, could hardly be expected to concede defeat at the age of 45. In France, in addition, the Bourbon Restoration was quickly the target of criticism. Despite the fact that the majority of French citizens were sick of the emperor in 1814, they did not express any desire for the Bourbons to return. They had a strong attachment to the fundamental victories of the Revolution, and Louis XVIII had returned "in the baggage train of the foreigners" with the last remaining émigrés, whose influence seemed to threaten the majority of the Revolution's victories and who had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing." 

 

Apathy in April 1814 was swiftly replaced by distrust. Old animosities were rekindled, resistance was organized, and plots were hatched. Napoleon closely monitored the Continent from Elba. Elba, between Corsica and Italy, was too close to France and Italy, according to certain officials in Vienna, where a congress was debating the future of Europe, and they sought to exile him to an isolated island in the Atlantic. He further claimed that Austria had stopped Marie-Louise and his son from travelling to join him (in fact, she had taken a lover and had no intention of going to live with her husband). Additionally, Napoleon's allowance was not paid by the French government, putting him in danger of being hungry.

 

Napoleon was motivated to act by all of these factors. He made a thunderous return to France, as decisive as ever. He arrived in Cannes on March 1st, 1815, along with a portion of his guard. The republican peasants rallied around him as he crossed the Alps, and he defeated the soldiers sent to apprehend him near Grenoble. He was in Paris on March 20. Instead of being restored to power as the emperor who had been overthrown a year earlier, Napoleon was brought back as the personification of the spirit of the Revolution. He should have joined himself with the Jacobins to win over the majority of Frenchmen to his cause, but he was afraid to do so. 

 

He was unable to get away from the bourgeoisie, whose power he had ensured, who feared a return of the radical experiments of 1793 and 1794 more than anything else, and who could only establish a political system that was hardly dissimilar from Louis XVIII's. The Napoleonic expedition appeared to be coming to an end as enthusiasm quickly waned. Napoleon gathered an army with which he marched into Belgium and routed the Prussians at Ligny on June 16, 1815, in order to counter the allied forces amassing on the boundaries. 

 

He encountered Wellington's British forces, who had won the Peninsular War, two days later at Waterloo. A brutal battle ensued. Despite the valour of the Old Guard, Napoleon was soon beaten when the Prussians led by Gebhard Blücher arrived to reinforce the British. Napoleon was on the verge of victory. The assembly in Paris forced Napoleon to resign, which he did on June 22, 1815, in favor of his son. He arrived in Rochefort on July 3 with plans to depart for the United States, but a British fleet blocked any French ships from leaving the harbor. Napoleon then made the decision to request protection from the British government. 

 

On July 15, after having his request approved, he boarded the Bellerophon. Napoleon was forbidden by the allies from returning to Elba. They also didn't like the thought of him leaving for America. They would have preferred if he had succumbed to the "White Terror" of the exiled counterrevolutionaries or had been brutally convicted and executed by Louis XVIII. He was forced to be sent to a remote island for incarceration by Great Britain. Napoleon would have considerably more freedom there than it would be conceivable anywhere else, according to the British administration, which announced that the island of St. Helena in the southern Atlantic had been selected as his home. Napoleon vehemently objected, saying, "I appeal to history!" 

 

General Henri-Gratien Bertrand, the palace's grand marshal, and his wife, as well as the comte Charles de Montholon and his wife, an aide-de-camp, General Gaspard Gourgaud, the former chamberlain Emmanuel Las Cases, and several servants, all disembarked with Napoleon in St. Helena on October 15, 1815. After a brief stay at a wealthy English merchant's home, they relocated to Longwood, which was first constructed for the lieutenant governor. Napoleon began to live a normal existence. He slept in and had breakfast at 10:00 AM, but he rarely left the house. He was allowed to travel wherever on the island as long as he was accompanied by an English officer, but he soon objected to this requirement and isolated himself in Longwood's grounds. 

 

He spoke and wrote a lot. Initially serving as his secretary, Las Cases put together the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (first published in 1823). Napoleon ate dinner between 7:00 to 8:00 PM. He then spent some of the evening reading aloud since he enjoyed the classics. They then began to play cards. Napoleon went to sleep around midnight. He spent some time learning English and finally started reading English newspapers, but he also had a lot of French books delivered to him from Europe that he carefully studied and commented. St. The weather in Helena was favorable, and Napoleon's food was delicious, expertly cooked, and in large quantities. Without a doubt, his idleness caused his health to deteriorate. It was unlikely that a man who had occupied such a significant position in the world for 20 years and who had marched across Europe in all directions could put up with the monotony of life on a small island, made worse by his self-imposed reclusive lifestyle. 

 

Additionally, he was unhappy for more personal reasons: Marie-Louise hadn't communicated with him, and he might have discovered of her affair with Adam, the Austrian officer assigned to look over her, Graf (count) von Neipperg (whom she finally wed in secret before waiting for Napoleon's demise). Additionally, he was unaware of any developments regarding his son, the ex-king of Rome who was now residing in Vienna with the title of duke of Reichstadt. Although Sir Hudson Lowe's severity has been greatly exaggerated, it is undeniable that this "jailer," who took office as governor of St. Helena in April 1816, did not make Napoleon's life any easier. He was the former leader of the Corsican rangers, a group of volunteers made up of rivals of the Bonaparte family, and this made Napoleon loathe him right away.

 

Lowe ran afoul of Las Cases because he was always so eager to carry out his orders precisely. Considering Las Cases to be a close friend of Napoleon's, he had him detained and exiled. From that point on, the governor's and Napoleon's interactions were strictly governed by the rules. At the end of 1817, Napoleon began to exhibit symptoms of his sickness, it appears that he had either a stomach ulcer or stomach cancer. Barry O'Meara, an Irish physician who had unsuccessfully sought to modify the circumstances in which Napoleon lived, as well as John Stokoe, his successor, both had favorable opinions of Napoleon, were fired. Francesco Antommarchi, the unremarkable Corsican physician who replaced them, gave his patient a medication that was ineffective for curing their condition. 

 

However, it is unclear whether Napoleon's illness was ever treatable, let alone with modern technology. The reason of his death has been a subject of ongoing debate, but many academics do not view the evidence as definitive. Some claim that Napoleon was poisoned. Beginning in 1821, the sickness quickly got worse. Napoleon was confined to a bed starting in March. He narrated his last will in April, saying:

 

I want my ashes to be interred among the French people, whom I adored, on the banks of the Seine. I am assassinated by the English oligarchy and its hired killers, dying before my time.

His first coherent words were "My God," "the French nation," "my son," and "head of the army" on May 5. On that day, at 5:49 PM, he passed away. He was only 51 years old. His grey overcoat from Marengo was covering his body, which was clad in his favorite uniform—that of the Chasseurs de la Garde. In the Rupert Valley, along a brook where two willows were reflected, where Napoleon had occasionally strolled, the funeral was held quietly but properly. His tombstone's lone inscription was the phrase "Ci-Gît" (which means "Here Lies").

 

A flood of antagonistic novels intended to damage Napoleon's reputation were released after his downfall. De Buonaparte, des Bourbons, et de la nécessité de se rallier à nos princes légitimes, pour le bonheur de la France et celui de l'Europe (1814; On Buonaparte and the Bourbons, and the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes, for the Safety of France and of Europe) was written by the well-known royalist sympathiser vicomte de Chateaubriand and was But as work on defending Napoleon began, this anti-Napoleonic literature rapidly faded away. The German poet Heinrich Heine composed his ballad "Die Grenadiere" in 1814, Lord Byron released his "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte," and in 1817, French author Stendhal started writing his history Vie de Napoléon (Life of Napoleon). 

 

The emperor's most devoted friends were also promoting his recovery, speaking about him, and dispersing mementos of him, such as engravings. They glorified his life (Napoleon had exclaimed, "What a novel my life is!") and started to fabricate the Napoleonic legend. After the emperor passed away, the legend quickly spread. It was mostly based on the memoirs, diaries, and stories of people who had followed him into exile. 

 

Or, A Voice from Saint Helena was published by O'Meara in London in 1822. Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de France sous Napoléon, written at Sainte-Hélène under his dictée was published in 1823. the famous Mémorial by Las Cases depicted the emperor as a republican opposed to war who had only engaged in battle when Europe forced him to do so in defense of freedom, in 1825, Antommarchi published his Derniers moments de Napoléon, and during the Reign of Napoleon, Dictated by the Emperor at St. Helena) by Montholon and Gourgaud; (The Last Days of Emperor Napoleon) After that, the number of works written in Napoleon's honor grew steadily. Among them were Sir Walter Scott's biography of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of France, Victor Hugo's "Ode to the Column," the 28 volumes of Charles-Louis-Fleury Panckoucke's Victoires et conquêtes des Français, and the 28 volumes of Victories and Conquests of the French. 

 

The proliferation of publications, images, and items that reference the imperial tale in France was unabated by either police action or legal action. Numerous Tricolor flags began to emerge in windows following the July Revolution of 1830, which established the "Bourgeois Monarchy" under Louis-Philippe. As a result, the government was forced to not only tolerate but also advance the legend. Napoleon's statue was restored to the top of the column in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 1833. In line with the emperor's dying desires, his remains were brought from St. Helena to the banks of the Seine in 1840 by the king's son, François, prince de Joinville, in a warship. 

 

Napoleon's remains was carried through the Arc de Triomphe in the Place de l'Étoile to entombment beneath the dome of the Invalides during a grand burial performed in Paris in December 1840. Louis-Napoléon, Napoleon's nephew, used the mythology as a political tool to take control of France. Despite the fact that his attempts in Strasbourg in 1836 and Boulogne in 1840 were unsuccessful, it was largely due to the growth of the legend that he was able to carry out the coup d'état in December 1851 and become emperor in 1852 and win the election to the presidency of the Second Republic with an overwhelming majority in 1848. Napoleon's legend was weakened by the Second Empire's terrible conclusion in 1870, which also gave rise to new anti-Napoleonic literature, most exemplified by Hippolyte Taine's Origines de la France contemporaine (1876–94, The Origins of Contemporary France). But the experience of the 20th-century dictatorships and World Wars I and II allowed for a more objective evaluation of Napoleon. 

 

Any comparison to Hitler or Stalin, for example, can only be advantageous to Napoleon. He respected human life, was tolerant, and freed the Jews from the ghettos. He remained primarily an 18th-century man, the last of the "enlightened despots," having been raised on the rationalist Encyclopédie and the literature of the Enlightenment philosophers. Napoleon was accused of being the "Corsican ogre," who sacrificed millions of men for his ambition, which is one of the most serious charges against him. According to exact estimations, France itself suffered 500,000 casualties during the Napoleonic Wars between 1800 and 15 (about one-sixth of the population), and a further 500,000 people were either imprisoned or missing. 

 

However, the population growth was not significantly impacted by the loss of these young men. Little altered in France's social structure under the First Empire. It remained largely as the Revolution had changed it, a large majority of peasants making about three-fourths of the population, with around half of them working farm owners or sharecroppers and the other half having insufficient land for their own needs and hiring themselves out as laborers. The war and the blockade of English goods propelled industry in northern and eastern France, where exports could be transferred to center Europe, but it slowed down in the south and west due to the Mediterranean and Atlantic sea lanes closing. 

 

Only after 1815 did the large-scale migrations from rural to industrial centers start. If Napoleon hadn't restored it, the nobility would have likely deteriorated more quickly, but it would never regain its old rights. The Napoleonic Code, the judicial system, the Banque de France and the nation's financial organization, the centralized university, and the military academies are just a few of the enduring institutions Napoleon left behind that have served as the "granite masses" on which modern France has been built. Both French and global history were altered by Napoleon.