“Horses, artillery, and muskets were all in desperately short supply. Hours of his frenetic, almost manic energies were poured into correcting this with pitifully little success.”

In April of 1814, Napoleon Bonaparte was finished. A coalition of powers had driven the Grande Armée from Europe and invaded France itself. Foreign troops were even in control of Paris. Under the terms of his surrender, laid out in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, Napoleon agreed to give up his throne and go into exile on the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba. On February 26, 1815, after only 10-months, Napoleon escaped and returned to France where he was soon swept back into power. Great Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia promptly branded him an outlaw and declared war. The conflict that followed, which would be remembered as Napoleon’s Hundred Days, famously culminated on June 18, 1815 with the Battle of Waterloo. Despite later being described by Britain’s Duke of Wellington as “the nearest-run thing you ever saw,” Napoleon’s eventual defeat was largely a foregone conclusion. Still reeling after more than 20 years of total war, France was in no shape to take on the 22-nation Seventh Coalition — and neither was its weary and aging leader. In the new book Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821, Oxford scholar Michael Broers explores the last chapter of the emperor’s life—from his defeat in Russia and the drama of Waterloo to his final exile. Below, the author lays out the state of the French army (and its commander-in-chief) on the eve of the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars.

By Michael Broers

AS EARLY AS March 27, Napoleon made it clear to his war minister Louis-Nicolas Davout that the main army would be in the north. He knew the allies were not assembled anywhere except Belgium. Napoleon was not yet ready, himself, and said later he would rather have waited until autumn to fight, but the allies were growing stronger by the week. If a decisive engagement was what he wanted—and he always did—there was no choice but to strike at Britain’s Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher.

Napoleon never committed his exact plans to paper and kept his troop buildup well hidden. He quietly concentrated five corps—89,000 infantry, 22,000 cavalry, 11,000 gunners, 336 guns, and the Guard—in a zone of only 30 kilometers. This was a strike force. Yet, however scattered, the allies still outnumbered him considerably, however substandard some of the Dutch and

German troops might be. He did not feel strong enough to herd Wellington and Blücher together and destroy them with a single blow. His plan hinged on defeating them individually, a confession of weakness, that revealed many others.

The Army of the North was composed almost entirely of veterans — good troops whose rank-and-file retained the same ferocious loyalty to Napoleon they displayed on his return to France. But this army was a façade. It contained almost of all the combat-ready troops Napoleon possessed. The Rhine and Alpine fronts, those in the path of the approaching Russian onslaught, were held by raw recruits and poorly armed, untrained national guards. In the event of an allied advance, the national guards were to abandon Alsace immediately and fall back into the Vosges. The frontiers were not the only places Napoleon was prepared to yield. In late May, he felt that only one of Marseille’s two forts could be defended against royalists in the city, and ordered the garrison’s gunpowder and cartridges taken to Lyon. Nothing had been done by June, and Marseille was still not safe from “the popular movement.”

“There are 4,000 well-armed national guards and many royalist companies . . . The national guard must be disarmed, and a new one formed composed of patriots and the people,” he wrote.

Napoleon ordered mass arrests; many nobles were to be expelled from the city; a “very severe police” was needed. Five hundred gendarmes were sent from Corsica to garrison the forts. Marshal Guillaume Brune took command of the city. Once a protégé of Georges Danton and a member of the radical Cordeliers Club during the Terror, he was a man of impeccable republican credentials, and in 1807, he fell afoul of Napoleon for taking a surrender “in the name of the French army,” not that of “His Imperial and Royal Majesty.”

He had not been employed since. Now, he was just what Napoleon needed. The army retreated from the city, the second largest in France, into the forts. He wrote despairingly to police minister Joseph Fouché that it was no better in Bordeaux or Montauban. Even Toulon was at risk. All their national guards had to be purged and replaced by “friends of the Revolution.” This alone would “change the face of the Midi.”

Nor did Lille, so close to the war zone, appear safe. Its national guard was “badly disposed” and had to be disarmed. It was easier said than done. Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, Napoleon’s interior minister, had summoned these units into being, armed them, and created a monster.

Napoleon’s command was but a thin screen, a Japanese paper door, between France and conquest. He knew it. He ordered massive defenses built on the heights of northern Paris. The picturesque modern neighborhood of Montmartre bristled with earthworks and stakes; 30 artillery batteries—240 guns in all—were commanded for the city; 120,000 men were allocated to Davout to hold it, even if they were all second rate.

“It would be shameful to strip too many troops from the capital, for its population, on which I must count, needs security,” Napoleon wrote. “They cannot be forced (to serve) because this is a question of . . . public morale and, if they are unhappy, they don’t want to do anything. I’m told that in Paris, (the authorities) are being too rigorous about that.”

Napoleon still feared and respected his volatile capital. He put one of his marshals, Louis-Gabriel Suchet, in charge of Lyon, where the huge task of raising earthworks on its high ground.

Napoleon knew the likelihood of defeat in the field, and mapped out his retreat well before the campaign. Neither great city was to be trusted. Despite his fiery Jacobin noises, the lack of muskets gave Napoleon a good reason not to distribute them “to the workers of Paris and Lyon, from whom they cannot be got back,” he wrote.

The practical problems of 1814 had not changed. Horses, artillery, and muskets were all in desperately short supply. Hours of his frenetic, almost manic energies were poured into correcting this with pitifully little success. The war industries, which had struggled when at full tilt in 1814, had been largely dismantled under Louis XVIII.

“We need at least 100,000 muskets at Vincennes [the depot for Paris] and 100,000 on the Loire [for the reserve army],” Napoleon wrote. “I want the production at Tulle tripled. I also want it tripled at Versailles.”

He hoped to produce 235,000 weapons. In truth, production never surpassed 20,000 per month, plus the same number of repaired muskets. More than half of national guardsmen had no muskets; almost all ammunition went to the field army. Often, national guards were armed with hunting rifles.

“What is not good for the artillery will do well for the peasants,” Napoleon told Davout.

The relentless search for horses yielded an increase of 70 per cent between March and June: 27,864 cavalry mounts rose to 44,000; 7,765 artillery horses became 16,500 through a mixture of purchase and requisition. Numbers can deceive; it was nowhere near enough.

“The western departments furnish almost nothing,” Bonaparte wrote. “Those of the Champagne . . . can furnish no more, because of the losses born in the last enemy invasion.” Napoleon was convinced he could hope for only 5,000 horses from this levy, not the 8,000 he originally demanded.

On June 1, Napoleon told Davout the artillery had to have priority over the cavalry: “Four batteries which arrive too late can cost me a battle.”

On the eve of the campaign, 500 Polish light horsemen, an elite unit, found themselves without mounts. Napoleon saw the mess he made too late.

“I attach great importance to having the 500 Poles mounted as soon as possible,” he told Davout, but confessed they had only 300 saddles.

As the army took the field, its supplies were shambolic. The depots on the route north had only four days’ rations of bread and shortages continued on the march, creating the dispersal and delay that went with foraging. The army had not been paid, perhaps Napoleon’s most pressing reason for a quick victory.

Napoleon made all this worse. In Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, Suchet, and more than anyone, Davout, Napoleon still had his best field commanders, but he deployed them badly. The use made of Davout and Suchet was born of his deep pessimism about the campaign. A Midi swelling with resurgent royalism, a Vendée still in arms, a capricious capital, an obstreperous parliament that had found its voice: All this and more led him to keep Davout in Paris to “watch his back.”

The pathetic vulnerability of eastern France, menaced by what Napoleon called “never ending defiles” that so tortured the former marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier probably influenced putting Suchet, himself a Lyonnais, in charge there.

Suchet’s Army of the Alps numbered about 38,000 conscripts and national guards; the 8,000 men of his Observation Corps in the Jura had no arms at all in June. There he languished.  Napoleon’s plans needed men capable of independent command. There were none better than the victor of Auerstadt or the conqueror of Tarragona, but Napoleon’s vulnerability at home denied him their genius.

On Saint Helena, Napoleon wailed to his aide-de-camp Gaspard Gourgaud: “If I had had Lannes or Bessières at the head of the Guard, this ill would not have befallen!”

He cried out for the dead, but there were those among the living he could easily have summoned, had he chosen to.

Jean-de-Dieu Soult was a different case. No one trusted him, yet none doubted his ability in the field. This was not what Napoleon chose to do with him. He made him his chief of staff. Marshal Ney had hated Soult with a passion since the Portuguese campaign of 1809, when the two drew swords on each other. They almost came to blows again as recently as February, while in Louis’ service.

Ney was as much loved in the army as Soult was loathed, and with so many marshals dead, loyal to Louis, or seconded to other duties, he was also the senior field commander in the Army of the North. This did not make Soult an ideal choice as the chief liaison with the corps commanders. There were alternatives. Napoleon’s brother Joseph pressed the case for Jourdan, who had fulfilled that role in Spain in Berthier’s absence, whereas Soult’s tenure of the same post had been a disaster.

Napoleon did not value Joseph’s views on war.

“He believed himself a great soldier . . . superior to Suchet, Masséna, or Lannes,” he told Bertrand.

Jourdan was probably undone by his referee, rather than his record. Suchet was also discussed, but Napoleon wanted him where he was. He had his eye on Soult for the role for some time.

“He is a skillful man . . . with a good understanding of the details of warfare, and would make a perfect chief of staff,” he remarked in 1811.

Napoleon could see what he wanted to see in someone, and so it was with Soult. Napoleon knew well Soult’s shifty character, but Davout and he agreed that Soult was capable. Problems soon began, however.

Soult assumed he had authority over the entire army, and was answerable only to Napoleon, but Napoleon had made him chief of staff only for the Army of the North. Conflict and confusion ensued when Davout, as minister or war, claimed that because the army was not yet in the field, he, not Soult, gave the orders. Napoleon tried to rectify it on May 16, declaring that Soult’s authority was restricted to the Army of the North, and Davout controlled all other units. When Soult ignored this and continued issuing general orders, Davout threatened to resign. This was only sorted out when Napoleon joined the army in the field.

Napoleon had only three marshals with him on campaign: the deskbound Soult, Ney, and Grouchy, whose experience was almost entirely as a cavalry commander, and was a newly minted marshal, for his trivial victory over d’Angouléme a few weeks before. Murat’s offer of his services was spurned.

Napoleon still had experienced divisional commanders—Gérard, Vandamme, Reille, generals Lobau and d’Erlon—but they had seldom led corps, so clear instructions from the chief of staff were more important than ever. In these circumstances, the absence of Soult, Davout, and Suchet from the battlefield is almost incalculable. None of this boded well. Napoleon learned of Berthier’s end only days before he took the field. One observer remembered: “No one was better at hiding or simulating his emotions. But he seemed to have lost all power to dissimulate . . . [H]is face was contorted . . . and his gestures expressed more sadness as his smallest movements had something convulsive about them.”

Carnot recalled: “He said that if Berthier returned, he would not have been able to stop himself taking him in his arms.”

General Monnier said he never heard Napoleon speak ill of him, and that he praised him as one of his best generals because he simply knew what to do.

“I would really like to have seen Berthier in the uniform of a captain in Louis XVIII’s guard,” Napoleon told his minister with a sly grin, but it was clear to all he dreaded going to war without him.

Few people worked more closely with Napoleon in these frenetic weeks that Carnot and Mollien, and they detected worrying signs in him. Mollien saw fundamental changes:

“His glance at work, once so confident and quick . . . became more circumspect. His plans appeared less sharp, his orders less absolute and less energetic. In council . . . he prolonged discussions to make it look as if the decision was the work of everyone . . . His meditations had become laborious and irritating . . . A kind of weariness, that he had never known, would overcome him after several hours of work.”

Carnot pointed to Napoleon’s equal determination to master detail, and his ability to work with the same minister for hours at a time. To do otherwise was not in Napoleon’s character: “He believed that if he let go of the reins only a little, all power would slip from him.”

The old knack for delegation was gone. Both men noted that Napoleon never appeared flustered. In this he remained master of himself, no matter how pressing the matter, “habitually calm, thoughtful, and conserving without affectation a serious dignity,” wrote Mollien. Yet, these two men who were in intense, daily contact with Napoleon discerned deeper, disturbing currents. Mollien saw a fatalism in Napoleon, stemming from, he thought, his sheer exhaustion:

“There were few traces of that audacity of the first years, of that self-confidence that had never known an insurmountable obstacle: but in those other times, destiny had shown itself as submissive to him as men. In the Hundred Days, he was the first to say that destiny had changed for him, and that in it, he had lost an ally he could never replace.”

Carnot, if he is to be believed, stumbled upon a Napoleon with “qualities of the heart” he had never suspected when they worked together in the early days of the Consulate or when he gave him the Army of Italy 19 years before. He found Napoleon weeping over the portrait of his son one day, and was so convulsed with sadness, Carnot had to lead him to his desk, something that deeply moved Carnot, but was, in truth, worrying in a man under such pressure. From his return to Paris until his departure on campaign, Napoleon never let up on himself, working demonic hours even by his own standards, but Mollien saw this savage routine taking a new kind of toll on him:

“He had no other distraction, no other source of rest, than private interviews; he sought them out, and what is even more odd, he preferred to summon people who, having served him previously, left him little surprised by the fantasizes which his prodigious imagination had stunned others.”

Even that benchmark for absolutist workaholics, Philip II of Spain, did not rise until 8 a.m., nor open his paper until 11, stopped at 9 p.m., and made time for two short walks. Above all, he had diversions.

Shorn of his wife and son, probably too ill to hunt, even had there been time, Napoleon had nothing to ease his growing impatience all around him saw.

“He sensed he had played his last hand,” Mollien reflected soon afterward. As he led his army into the jaws of hell, there was also the question of its commander’s state of mind and body. Such was the commander’s condition when he quietly took his leave of Paris on June 12 to join the army.

Michael Broers is the author of Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 from which this article is excerpted. A Professor of Western European History at Oxford University, he is the author of The Napoleonic Empire in Italy, winner of the Grand Prix Napoleon Prize, and Napoleon: Soldier of Destiny and Napoleon: The Spirit of the Age, both available from Pegasus Books. He lives in Oxford, England.