CHAPTER TWENTY -FIVEWith his back to the wall, Napoleon was defiant. Having lost the military
war against the Allies, he proceeded to lose the political war in Paris by
refusing to conciliate the notables. He made an initial gesture towards
them by ordaining that the Senate and Council of State should join the
Chamber of Deputies in a joint session of the Legislature, but spoiled the
effect by appointing one of his own placemen as president of the session.
Bourgeois hostility was redoubled by emergency cuts in salaries, the
collapse of the stockmarket, the acquisition by the Allies of frontier
factories, as at Liege, and new taxes: the Emperor reintroduced the droits
reunis on alcohol, tobacco and salt, doubled the patente and increased the
normal rate of taxation by 30 centimes. To cap all, the French people
were about to experience the horrors of war as French territory was
invaded for the first time since 1792.
By the beginning of 1814 Napoleon no longer had significant support
in France outside the Army. The propertied classes were angry that all
their concessions to the Emperor had been in vain: they had had to see
their sons serve in the wars, see all the money they had spent on
substitutes in the draft in previous years spent for nothing, and now they
faced business ruin. They were also under physical threat from a number
of directions: from the Allied invaders, fr om peasants hungry for a
redistribution of land, from the extraordinary commissioners (rather like
the Revolutionary deputes en mission) Napoleon threatened to unleash
upon them, fr om the volunteer militias formed fr om the unemployed,
and fr om the host of deserters, draft evaders and bandits who roamed the
countryside.
The notables were angry that they were back with the disorder that
had plagued them under the Directory. Was it fo r this they had made an
Emperor? Bonaparte's blunders meant they were now back with the
dilemma they sought to avoid by opting for the imperial 'third way'.
They did not want the restoration of the Bourbons but they feared even
more Jacobinism and the levee en masse. However, the Bourbons came to
seem an increasingly attractive bet after Louis XVIII's decree of