Free Lafayette by Harlow Giles Unger Page A

accords and massed their troops in Belgium, on the northern French border. On June 12, Napoléon led his 180,000-man army from Paris to engage them. Eight days later, he returned, disheveled, physically exhausted. He had met his Waterloo. OnJune 18, 1820, an allied force of more than 200,000 British, Dutch, German, Saxon, and Prussian troops had outmaneuvered, outgunned, and all but overrun the French armies, which fled in panic back to France. With allied forces pouring into northern France, Napoléon demanded that the Chamber of Deputies vote him emergency dictatorial powers and dissolve. When Lafayette protested, Napoléon’s brother Lucien accused him of disloyalty.
    “That is a slanderous accusation,” Lafayette thundered. “What gives the previous speaker [Lucien Bonaparte] the right to accuse this nation of being disloyal for failing to persevere in following the Emperor? The nation has followed him in the sands of Egypt, and in the steppes of Russia, on fifty fields of battle, in his reverses as in his successes . . . and for having thus followed him we now mourn over the blood of three million Frenchmen!” 9 That evening, Lafayette made a motion “that we all go to the Emperor and say to him that . . . his abdication has become necessary to save the nation.” The Chamber agreed, but Bonaparte rejected their demand. Lafayette responded by threatening, “If the Emperor does not send in his abdication within an hour, I will propose to the Chamber that he be dethroned.” 10
    On June 22, 1815, four days after Waterloo, Napoléon ended his “Hundred Days” by abdicating in favor of his son, Napoléon II. Lafayette arranged passage to America for the fallen Corsican, but when Napoléon reached Rochefort, a British squadron prevented his ship from leaving port. Napoleon appealed for safe passage to the British government, which granted it to him on a British vessel that carried him to the forsaken island of Saint Helena, off the west African coast in the southern Atlantic. He died five years later, on May 5, 1821, three months short of his fifty-second birthday. His older brother, Joseph Bonaparte, was more fortunate: he sailed to America and settled in Bordentown, New Jersey, in a Georgian mansion, whose interior he transformed into a French-Empire showpiece.
    After naming Napoléon II emperor, the Chamber of Deputies elected a five-man directory to assume executive power, bypassing Lafayette as a relic, out of touch with the times. They did, however, appoint him to a peace mission, with the hopeless task of negotiating a halt to the Allied march on Paris. The allies laughed at the French appeal and sent their troops swarming into the capital to hoist the white flag of the Bourbon monarchy above the Tuileries Palace. When Lafayette returned with George to his house on the rue d’Anjou, the entire Lafayette clan was there waiting. Prussian troops had overrun Brie, and high-level Prussian officers had commandeered the château at La Grange as their headquarters.
    In drawing up the peace accords, the allied powers resolved to teach their incorrigibly arrogant French foe to leave its neighbors alone and live within its own borders. As reparations, they extracted not only the costs of the twenty-five-year global upheaval unleashed by the French Revolutionbut also many of the costs of the perennial havoc the French had wreaked on Europe during the millennium since Charlemagne’s Franks had ravaged the continent. To crush any French ambitions for territorial expansion, the allies sent more than one million soldiers to occupy two-thirds of France— sixty-one of the eighty-three departments—for at least five years, and more, if necessary. The allied-imposed Second Restoration returned Louis XVIII to the throne as a puppet king and stripped the boy Napoléon II of his title and all imperial claims. 11
    With only slightly more than ninety thousand privileged men permitted to vote, the first parliamentary elections