October 15th – Exile and Disgrace

1815

Following his great loss at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte went into hiding.  He did not hide for long, however, as the triumph of his enemies at home and abroad was impossible to deny.  His dominions had fallen, Louis XVIII was restored to the throne, and the call was put out from one end of Europe to the other that the Monster was finished at last.  One of the most tenacious and unconquerable men to ever sit upon a throne, it became his inevitable and horrifying duty to formalise his own defeat.

The process began in July of that year, a month after the battle that destroyed all his hopes and so aggravated his poor health that many of those close to him thought he would die within weeks.  Under the careful protection of a retinue of loyalists, Bonaparte made his way to the docks at Rochefort, on the south-west coast of France, and there presented himself to Captain Frederick Maitland of HMS Belerophon, which happened to be moored there at the time.  After attempts to get Maitland to allow Bonaparte to sail for America failed, the Corsican Tyrant formally surrendered himself to the Englishman.  A letter addressed to England’s Prince Regent was given to Maitland to deliver; its contents are worth reading:

Your Royal Highness,

A victim to the factions which distract my country, and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of their laws; which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies.

Napoleon.

The voyage back to England was largely uneventful, but was naturally marked by the deep significance that Bonaparte’s involvement demanded.  Maitland’s memoirs of this journey, published in 1826, are also worth browsing if you have the time.  It was all that I could do to stop reading them myself, just now, so that I could even make this post at all.

There was some question among the English as to what, precisely, was to be done with Bonaparte.  As his letter indicates, he had thrown himself upon the mercy of England and her laws, and to deny asylum even to the Monster of Europe would have been a betrayal of the ideals that had so long been seen as standing in stalwart opposition to his own.  There was a significant camp among those passing comment on his status as a prisoner who wished to see him executed for his “crimes,” but in the end cooler heads prevailed.  Bonaparte was sentenced to exile, again, and sent to the island of St. Helena, a truly isolated spot in the Atlantic – roughly 2000km from any major coastline.  He arrived on Oct. 15th, 1815, and would stay there until his death on the 5th of May, 1821.

Many would look upon this as only fitting, and in no sense a sad or unfortunate thing.  I cannot agree.  Whatever Bonaparte’s flaws – and they were many – he was nevertheless one of the most remarkable men to ever walk the Earth, and it is something bordering on a tragedy that his charisma, intellect and pure logistical brilliance could have been put to no use whatsoever.  He fretted his remaining years away on an island of no consequence, his life governed by an English commander – the infamous Hudson Lowe – who did not accord him the respect and dignity he deserved, and who implemented frequent measures designed to infringe upon his rights as a prisoner and to break from the genial treatment that had been the hallmark of all other English custodians up to that point.  The greatest European since Charlemagne was defeated, bound in isolation, and forgotten.  What he could have done, in concert with sympathetic English authorities, can only ever be the stuff of sad fantasy.

Incidentally, it was also on this day in 1894 that the Dreyfus Affair began its awful course in France with the arrest of the Jewish artilleryman Alfred Dreyfus on charges of espionage and treason.   Although he would later be exonerated, the affair was an ugly moment in French history, and indeed in that of Europe.  More on that some other time; for now, however, it is enough to pause and remember.