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for the front: ‘The enthusiasm generated by the emperor when he took the young king in his arms . . . can never be forgotten by its witnesses. Frenetic and prolonged cries of “Vive l’empereur!” moved from the Hall of Marshals to the national guard assembled in the Carrousel . . . These demonstrations of so true a love for his son moved the emperor: he kissed the young prince with a warmth that escaped none in the audience.’96 Instead of listening to the calls for peace with which he was bombarded, Napoleon therefore chose to fight on in the hope of improving his bargaining position, striking hard and fast at a succession of allied commanders as they invaded eastern France. At first it seemed he might succeed. Suffering five major defeats in three weeks, the shaken Allies offered peace on the basis of the frontiers of 1792. But once again Napoleon had been too successful for his own good, electing to fight on in the hope of forcing the resurrection of the Frankfurt proposals. It was his last mistake. Though his improvised armies had performed prodigies of valour, little more could be expected from them, while, recovering their nerve, the Allies now pressed for the frontiers of 1791.

Whether Napoleon could still have achieved anything on the battlefield remains a moot point among historians, but in fact the question is irrelevant. The French state was falling apart. Even the most enthusiastic Jacobins were not fooled by the regime’s attempts to evoke the spirit of 1793, while the bulk of the population was furiously hostile to the demands of the regime for yet more men, and angry at the depredations of the half-starved French army. ‘Everywhere Napoleon was execrated,’ wrote the former member of the Committee of Public Safety, Bertrand Barère. ‘A general wish prevailed that the foreigners might be defeated and driven from France, and yet the victories of the emperor were dreaded because they were likely to encourage him in his despotism.’97 In those areas penetrated by the Austrians, Prussians and Russians, there was much brutality on the part of the invaders, and this produced a few instances of popular resistance, but where the Allies behaved well, as was almost invariably the case in the areas occupied by Wellington, the enemy troops had a friendly welcome. As one of Wellington’s officers remembered, ‘The English army became popular in time. All the supplies were paid in gold by us, while their own army did not respect property. It was said at the time that Marshal Soult remarked, “I may expect to find by-and-by that the inhabitants will take up arms against us.” ’98 In the confusion there were frequent disturbances by the population. ‘The peasants in the district of Gourdon . . . endured the execrable and ruinous yoke of the customs dues with impatience. They flocked together to Gourdon on market-day to the number of 4,000, piled up the books and registers of the custom-house in the middle of the public square and set fire to them after expelling all the officials.’99 The elites were no more enamoured of the regime than the people, and expressions of support for the Bourbons began to multiply dramatically. And, last but not least, Napoleon’s intransigence had driven the Allies closer together, an agreement reached on 1 March committing all of the powers to total victory over the emperor. ‘People realized,’ wrote the Duchess of Reggio, ‘that, by yielding a certain number of his conquests in preceding years, the emperor might have saved France this invasion; that a little later, the line of the Rhine would at least have been left to him; that, even at the time we had reached, if he would only give the Duke of Vicenza (his representative at the congress of Châtillon) the latitude which that zealous functionary demanded, he would still obtain supportable conditions of peace. Peace! The cry was in every heart, for of glory, the everyday food of the country, France had had a sufficient share.’100

As to Napoleon’s state of mind as this veritable twilight of the gods unfolded, we have no better guide than the memoirs of Caulaincourt,