La Belle France by Alistair Horne

Author:Alistair Horne [Horne, Alistair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307426536
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Restoration and Revolt

If you have not lived through 1815, you do not know what hatred is . . .

—André Maurois

REACTIONS TO THE ULTIMATE DEFEAT at Waterloo varied across France, and across social strata. Pierre Fontaine, Napoleon’s official architect and one who had thus spent many hours with him replanning Paris, noted three days after Waterloo how, abandoning his army once more in defeat, “He came back to Paris like a fugitive, thinking only of his person . . . the magic is gone. We can no longer regard him as someone extraordinary ...” 1 Or, in the words of Metternich the previous year, excessively optimistic though they may have seemed at the time: “People speak of him as if he had ruled in the fourteenth century . . . All the eagles have disappeared . . .”

The twenty-five years of Revolution and Empire combined seem to stretch like a great bridge across the history of the world. Beyond it, can one truly say that this was where the “Modern Age” began? A Briton, triumphing in the reflected glory of Waterloo, might well ask, too, how did a defeated Frenchman feel in June 1815? He would have gone through two-and-a-half decades of hell and uncertainty; revolution, endless stress, deprivation and terror. There had followed a few years of hope and optimism, indeed joy, as it seemed that Napoleon was bringing in a New Order that worked, and overthrowing one after another the reactionary old royal Houses of Europe, with their dedication to old-fashioned, out-dated principles and ideas. There had been those ten halcyon years too, from Rivoli to Tilsit, irresistibly heady infusions of la gloire when Napoleon had brought home victory after dazzling victory. Then had come the terrible years of 1812, 1813, 1814—and finally terminal defeat at Waterloo. There was, though, mitigating relief in some royalist quarters that here was peace at last; but to the historic-minded Frenchman, it had to signify the end of the défi anglais, going back to 1214, to the battle of Bouvines when Philippe-Auguste had first drawn a line under English hegemony over France. Now—what had been lost, and what preserved? At least, under the terms offered by the Congress of Vienna, les goddamns were still removed from the heartlands of la patrie—Calais, Aquitaine; the “hexagon” was largely preserved; her overseas empire was lost, otherwise the territory of France was much as Louis XIV had left it.

Occupation costs in 1815 had amounted to ten times what had been exacted the previous year, before the Hundred Days. They reflected the Allies’ anger at having been led by the nose into war by Napoleon once again, and at the fresh casualties they had suffered to achieve final victory. In this light, the terms which Metternich, Castlereagh and Talleyrand, the professional survivor, between them cooked up at the Congress of Vienna seem generous if compared with what Napoleon had dictated to France’s defeated foes at Tilsit. And, compared with the terms that Bismarck’s Prussia would demand from a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.