1812: Louisiana attains statehood, and elects former Maryland Senator & diplomat to Louis XVI's France Sebastien Rondelle as its first Governor.
War fever among the Democratic-Republicans leads President Eggers to declare war on Britain with the support of a majority in both Houses of Congress, ostensibly to conquer Canada (‘a mere matter of marching’ one Democratic-Republican Senator reportedly said), suppress the British-backed Indian Confederacy of Tecumseh, and end British impressments of American sailors (which technically had happened with the repeal of the Orders in Council, news of the British announcement just didn’t reach the States quickly enough...that, or it did, and was suppressed by the Democratic-Republican-controlled Secretariat of State). The Federalists are firmly opposed to the war, which they saw as both bad for business and a pointlessly quixotic enterprise that was going to get thousands of Americans simply to satisfy ‘the bloodlust of Southern so-called gentlemen and Western brutes’, but lacked the numbers to oppose it.
The war thus begins on June 18, right in the middle of election season. Unfortunately for them, the United States was definitely not prepared for the war thanks to the Democratic-Republicans’ gutting of the US military to save funds (and/or empower local state militias) since they first gained the White House in 1804, meaning that they would have to rely mostly on inexperienced state militias while rebuilding the regular army almost from scratch. Although there was a large Maroon population present across the Northwest Territory and Ohio to help, the racism exhibited by American commanders and a total lack of coordination between white & Maroon units usually meant that the participation of Maroon formations would only mean adding African-American deaths and captives to the casualty lists. As early as two months after the declaration of war, the Americans sustained heavy defeats at Brownston, Fort Schoolcraft, Detroit (where the Territorial Governor of Michigan, Anthony Steele was captured with over 2,000 of his men and all thirty of the fortress-town’s defensive guns) and the Action of 19 August (where the USS Leo, a frigate – indeed one of the last of its kind left in the US Navy – named after the first ship lost by then-Commodore Poole at Nantucket Shoals in 1776, was defeated by the HMS Guerriere).
As a result of these early defeats, as well as a British blockade of South Carolina and Georgia, the US went into September banking on two campaigns to turn the tide of war in their favor; the Indian Campaign in the northwest, and the Northeastern Campaign in Maine and southern Quebec. The former was off to a decent start with the relief of the Siege of Fort Amsel in Indiana, but it was the latter that got everybody’s attention. In hopes of driving a wedge between Lower Canada/Quebec from the Maritimes and enabling an attack on Halifax and Quebec City both in the future, the US sent 500 regulars backed by 6,000 militia drawn from the various New England states (who had to appear patriotic even despite their opposition to the war, after all) into the Bas-St-Laurent area. On paper, they should have at least had a decent chance at success.
But the reality on the ground? The President had insisted in appointing a Southerner to command this army, and picked one of the worst possible men for the job – hastily-promoted Brigadier General Sydney Smith Wilson, third son of Georgia Senator and ex-Continental Congressman Edmund Wilson (whom the President owed for helping keep Georgia a purely Democratic-Republican state, which explains why he of all people was chosen), an inexperienced officer – he had graduated from Legionville in 1804, but had very much been a ‘desk jockey’ and never actually saw battle until now – whose arrogance and aristocratic condescension toward his Yankee troops, combined with outright hostile racism towards the under-200 Maroon soldiers under his command (whom he immediately relegated to the role of field laborers, though he did grudgingly allow them to continue bearing arms ‘for self-defense’ under pressure from his Yankee subordinates) made sure he was the most hated man in the ‘Army of Maine’ before they even set out in late August. Of course, it didn’t help matters that his right-hand man was Colonel Matthew Saker, son of Senator George Saker and son-in-law of the elderly Governor Charles Dyer of Massachusetts, who felt that as a native Bay Stater he had a greater right to command of the Army of Maine and deeply resented Wilson as a result.
The dueling commanders of the Army of Maine: left to right, Brig. Gen. Sydney S. Wilson & Col. Matthew Saker | |
What followed was a two-month tragicomedy of errors fraught with heavy infighting, vague or contradictory orders, several cases of outright disobedience, ‘friendly fire’ incidents and generally incompetent leadership within the Army of Maine (of course, having the legendary William Howe as the leader of their Anglo-Canadian opponents couldn't have helped the Americans any). After a very brief initial success in capturing Pohenegamook on September 2, the Army of Maine more or less imploded once General Wilson sent Colonel Saker and Majors Thomas Dearborn, Alexander Smith and Lewis Goodman out into the northeast with very vague orders to ‘push until they reach the Saint Lawrence’, which they did while barely keeping in contact (much less coordinating their movements) with each other or Wilson's HQ. After Smith’s detachment was routed and the Major himself killed in a Canadien ambush on September 17, the other three commanders withdrew and began building forts at Auclair (Saker), Biencourt (Goodman) and Lac-des-Aigles (Dearborn). A particularly notorious piece of evidence pointing to Wilson's staggering incompetence (not that his subordinates were much better...well, they were, but not by that much) can be found in his orders to Saker, regarding Canadien insurgents who were harassing his men as they set up their fortifications around Auclair:
Originally Posted by Brigader-General Sydney Smith Wilson to Colonel Matthew Saker
Colonel,
I require you to destroy these troublesome insurgents, who in your and Major Goodman's last reports claimed were murdering your Negro laborers and stealing your supplies, with as much force as you can muster but also in such a fashion that you do not harm a hair on an innocent, thereby seeing to it that not one non-combatant is slain while every single combatant posing as a non-combatant is felled in such a way that people a thousand years from now will believe they were struck down by the Hand of God. Furthermore, I have seen fit to divert your weekly train of rations and ammunition to Major Dearborn's position, and so I require you and your men to also live off the land until we receive the next shipment of supplies from Boston. That said, though I fully expect you to have to liberate poultry and stores of grain from the locals in the near future due to these unfortunate circumstances, I also require you to remain on good terms with the Canadians so that not one man more will resolve to fight for the British tyrant across the sea, a task whose manner of completion I leave completely to your discretion.
When Biencourt fell to Anglo-Canadien assaults before the month’s end anyway due to Wilson refusing to send Goodman any reinforcements (supposedly because he accidentally spilled some wine on his favorite coat on their last day together), thereby caving in the American defensive line, Saker withdrew from Auclair without orders even after defeating the force assigned to drive him out while Dearborn suffered an unfortunate accident involving an exploding cannon immediately after ordering his men to defend Lac-des-Aigles to the bitter end (after which said men also withdrew under his successor, Captain Reginald Weston), forcing an enraged Wilson to follow suit.
The American’ retreat back into Maine was marred by vicious arguments and at least two duels as Wilson accused Saker of disobedience before moving to charges of outright treason, while Saker in turn accused Wilson of criminal incompetence and glory-hounding. When some 800 British regulars and 4,000 Canadian militia pursued the battered Army of Maine over the border, Wilson decided to stand and fight them, picking out Allagash as the site for their decisive battle: there, his scouts had reported 500 British regulars and about the same number of militia moving independent of the rest of the Anglo-Canadian army, surely no match for his remaining force of about 4,000 if they were to attack in full force. In addition to his seemingly superior numbers, the temptation to add 'defeating the undefeated William Howe' to his resume was no doubt too strong for a man like Wilson to resist. Disregarding Saker’s warning that this was most likely a trap, Wilson engaged Howe anyway and assigned the Colonel to lead his reserve of 1,400 (200 regulars, 1,200 militia) ‘just to get [him] out of the way’. When Saker’s warning turned out to be prophetic and the rest of the Anglo-Canadian army fell upon Wilson’s flank with the aged Howe in the lead, instead of advancing to pull his superior’s bacon out of the fire Saker ordered his reserve to retreat, justifying his potentially treasonous action with the argument that Wilson’s position had become unsalvageable and that all he would accomplish by sending in the reserve was getting his own men killed or captured for no real gain.
Needless to say, while Saker made a fighting retreat out of the Aroostook area Wilson was captured along with the majority of the American force left behind at Allagash, and unsurprisingly never forgave him. Saker did turn around to defeat some 300 pursuing Canadian cavalrymen around Fort Amity on October 19, and made it back to a hero’s welcome in Maine. It didn’t last long; he was soon court-martialed for disobedience, misconduct and treason, found guilty of the first two charges, and cashiered from the Army, despite the arguments of the New England governments and his own defense that Wilson had walked into his own demise and that what he had done at Allagash was a necessary evil to salvage what little of the Army of Maine he could. Many New Englanders and a good number of other Northerners felt the court martial was a politically motivated ploy on the part of the Southern-based Democratic-Republicans to deflect any blame that might’ve rightly fallen on their ‘native son’ S. S. Wilson onto the Yankee Saker, and combined with the near-annihilation of the American invasion force assigned to Canada at Queenston Heights on 13 October, in this year’s election the Federalists would recapture Concordia with the support of all the Northeastern states & North Carolina. President X4, having first run on a peace platform, immediately tried to arrange a ceasefire and open negotiations with Britain.
General Isaac Brock directs the decisive Anglo-Canadian charge at Queenston Heights, 1812 | |
On the other side of the world, outraged over Russia’s unwillingness to enforce the Continental System in their own waters Napoleon invaded his unreliable former ally with a ‘Grande Armée’ of 600,000 men drawn from not just French ranks but also those of their allies and puppets all over Europe, initially meant to take out Britain until his defeat at Trafalgar scuppered those plans. Though they departed in June, Napoleon’s army chronically suffered from a lack of supplies (foraging having been rendered a non-option by the Russians’ scorched earth strategy), disease (mostly typhus), desertion and lengthy communication lines. After an early victory at Smolensk, the French went on a long march to Moscow, during which Louis XVII also raced to support his in-laws and attracted large numbers of Russians to his Armée du Roi.
On September 7 1812, Napoleon’s battered Grande Armée came to blows with a massive concentration of Russian troops under Generalissimo Mikhail Kutuzov at Borodino, backed by Louis XVII’s now 22,000-strong Armée du Roi (having been swelled by the addition of Dano-Norwegian, Russian, Swedish and ex-British Vendean formations between Stockholm and Moscow). The day was long and bloody, but near its end the French had thrown the Russians back from their defensive works thanks to Kutuzov’s poor positioning and now had victory in their grasp. At the advice of his desperate commanders and against his own better judgment, Napoleon committed the 18,500-strong Imperial Guard in an effort to land the knockout blow, which he would have – if Louis XVII hadn’t moved his own fresh Armée du Roi, which had been sitting in reserve this entire time, to stop him. Alas, even now the Armée du Roi could not outright prevail against Napoleon’s best of the best; whenever they had the Young and Middle Guards on the ropes (already a difficult task in and of itself) the Old Guard would throw them back, and Louis himself was wounded in the shoulder while directing his cuirassiers – but they did stiffen the rest of the Russian line enough to stop Napoleon’s final attack in its tracks. That night, Napoleon decided to withdraw without taking Moscow, thus beginning his long retreat home through the Russian winter. Ironically, Kutuzov had himself seriously contemplated withdrawing from Moscow as well, but was successfully lobbied to stay and fight the next day by General Barclay de Tolly and Louis XVII.
The last, successful attack of the Russians & French Royalists at Borodino | |
For having scored his first meaningful victories in the Scandinavian winter and on the onset of the Russian one, Louis XVII was now increasingly referred to as the ‘Winter King’ (‘Le Roi d’un Hiver’) by allies and enemies alike. Personality-wise however, he was still known to be a jovial and passionate young man filled with boundless energy – in other words, completely ill-suited to his new epithet – leading him to jokingly coin the nickname ‘the Lukewarm King’ for himself.
In another twist of irony, Napoleon’s sixth child and fourth daughter Alexandrine was born on the same day as Borodino – and Louis XVII’s only son, named Louis Auguste Joseph after the grandfather and uncle he would never meet. The sickly Queen Hélène had produced only miscarriages and stillborn infants prior to this date, and so the Dauphin Louis was immediately acclaimed as ‘Dieudonné’ (‘God-given’) by his overjoyed parents & supporters. Less fortunately, doctors advised the young royal couple that a second pregnancy would likely kill the Queen-in-exile, meaning the Bourbon dynasty’s hopes for the future were now pinned on this ‘Miracle Prince’.
1813: The British and the United States reach the Peace of Concord (usually referred to as the ‘Concordian Concord’ by jokers from the latter in years to come), restoring the status quo ante bellum. The end of impressments was formally made permanent and for their part, the United States repealed the Embargo Act of 1807. Although the United States had feared the danger of at least having to cough up crippling reparations, not only was Britain still too busy fighting Napoleon, but they were not interested in incurring American enmity for generations to come by imposing an overly humiliating peace. All this said, the United States Army under William 'Willie' Bohannon, a son of former Revolutionary War and Whiskey Rebel commander Shawn Bohannon, did land an unexpectedly crushing defeat on the forces of Tecumseh’s Confederacy and his British advisers at Wildcat Creek, Indiana (even killing Tecumseh himself) after the peace treaty was signed but before either of them heard of it; the British obviously weren't pleased, but with Tecumseh already dead and his confederacy shattered they were forced to accept this fait accompli. In light of all this, Northerners would praise X4’s administration for ending ‘this pointless little war’ and restoring lines of trade with the British Empire quickly, while Southerners blasted them for ‘stabbing America in the back’ and pointed to Wildcat Creek as an example of how they totally could’ve won the war if only they were allowed to keep fighting (nevermind that it required the Americans violating the ceasefire arranged by President X4, thereby catching Tecumseh & the Indians completely off guard, to win) for oh, let’s say one to three more years.
The death of Tecumseh, as depicted in the US Capitol Rotunda | |
Across the Atlantic, the French Empire staggers under a multitude of heavy blows from the Sixth Coalition this year. First, Napoleon crawled out of Russia with less than half of the Grande Armée – some 400,000 men had died in Russia, whether in battle or from disease, exposure to the elements and starvation. Needless to say, Austria and Prussia were both ecstatic over the news and immediately threw their lots in with the Coalition once more. Secondly, his brother Joseph was decisively defeated at Vitoria by an Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish army led by Arthur Wellesley, Marquess of Wellington, thereby putting his ambitions to rule as the first Bonaparte King of Spain in the dust for good.
After Marshal Nicolas Oudinot’s attempt to capture Berlin failed in the face of intense Prussian and Dano-Norwegian resistance at Großbeeren, Napoleon made his ‘Hail Mary’ pass at Leipzig, where he stood with some 225,000 men against a Coalition force of over 400,000 – Russians, Austrians, Prussians, Dano-Norwegians and of course that most implacable political nemesis of his, Louis XVII (ironically, like the Grande Armée only half of his now 28,000-strong Armée du Roi were actually Frenchmen, whether hardened old veterans of the Vendee/Austerlitz/Jena or recruited deserters from the Grande Armée). Surrounded from the north and south, the Emperor attempted to break out over the course of three days, only to be frustrated by the sheer numbers arrayed against him and the betrayal of his Saxon & Wurttemburger contingents.
The fighting was bloodiest around the village of Probstheida, where the Prusso-Russian forces of general de Tolly initially gained hard-fought ground from the French before being pushed back by the Imperial Guard, but were rallied by and ended up prevailing with the support of Louis XVII by the end of 18 October. The Armée du Roi had never defeated the Imperial Guard before – at Austerlitz and Jena-Auerstadt they were miserably routed off the field, and at Borodino they would have been crushed again had it not been for the rest of the Russian Army – but here and now, at this small Saxon village, they had undeniably carried the day against one of Europe’s most formidable elite forces. Although the Winter King was unhorsed in the fighting and many feared he had been killed, he leaped to his feet and swept off his helmet to reveal his iconic dark-golden locks before shouting “Votre roi vit encore, les Français! Voulez-vous le voir à combattre l'usurpateur Bonaparte lui tout seul?” (Your King still lives, Frenchmen! Do you wish to see him to fight the usurper Bonaparte all by himself?) to his troops, saving the Armée du Roi from a third rout in the face of Napoleon’s finest. After the fall of Probestheida (soon followed by the loss of Paunsdorf and Schonefeld) and the defection of his German troops, Napoleon’s army began to unravel and rout across the Eister in an undignified mess. The ‘Battle of Nations’ had concluded with over 120,000 casualties, but despite the heavy cost in blood it was still undeniably a decisive victory for the Coalition, and left Napoleon’s once proud army in tatters for good.
'The defense of Probstheida' by Edouard Bara, 1816 | |
Down south, the Ottoman Empire finally committed to the Sixth Coalition after Leipzig and made war against Napoleon’s Balkan puppets with an army that had recently been retrained and modernized as quickly as possible with the help of British advisers; the Janissaries had attempted to resist these modernization efforts, but were suppressed and their barracks destroyed with much bloodshed all without a single sympathetic ear opened to them in the capital, having lost all popular support after their miserable showing at Adrianople some years ago. Charles Leclerc, Grand Prince of Bulgaria, was defeated at Sozopol and Yambol, dying at the latter; his kingdom thus collapsed and was re-absorbed by the Turks. In Serbia, after a defeat at the Battle of Kosovo (under circumstances eerily similar to what befell their ancestors in 1389, no less) Prince Karadorde Petrovic was assassinated in a palace coup led by his Coalition-sponsored rival Milos Obrenovic, who agreed to return Bosnia to the Turks and become a vassal of the Porte in exchange for recognition of his dynasty as the legitimate Princes of Serbia; thanks to the convenient deaths of most of his rivals at Kosovo his rule would be largely uncontested for now, but he and his line would now and forever be damned as traitors to Serbia by future generations of Serbs.
1814: Napoleon is chased back to France proper by the armies of the Sixth Coalition; the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Dano-Nowegians and French Royalists moved in from freshly-liberated (or reoccupied, depending on your perspective) Germany, while the British, Portuguese and Spanish attacked from the south. Despite landing upset victories such as those of the Six Days’ Campaign in northeastern France, Napoleon’s defeat had become a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ at this point. His Empire finally fell to pieces after Marshal Auguste Marmont betrayed him at Montmartre and Paris fell before a Prusso-Russo-Royalist onslaught formally led by Louis XVII (who reportedly boasted “Parisiens! Votre roi légitime retourne!” or ‘Parisians! Your true King returns!’ upon passing through the shattered barricades at Clichy), at which point the Emperor abdicated unconditionally after his offer to abdicate in favor of his now twelve-year-old son Napoleon Francois was rejected out of hand.
Imperial troops attempt to halt the Royalist attack on Clichy's barricades, 1814 | |
Elsewhere, a year of spirited Romanian resistance against the Turks came to an end with the defeat of the joint Moldavian-Wallachian armies at Snagov. Moldavia remained under Russian protection (though of course Bessarabia remained part of Russia) but Wallachia was restored to the Turkish sphere of influence, and Voivode Brancoveanu was deposed in favour of a new Phanariote Greek puppet appointed by the Porte. Finally, the Greeks lost Thessalonica and with it their Macedonian & Thessalian possessions, but a desperate defense at Thermopylae combined with nascent Philhellenism within the Coalition Powers’ elite circles allowed King Eugene de Beauharnais to keep his kingdom (now reduced to Attica, the Peloponnesus, Euboea and the Cyclades) on the condition that he break all ties with Napoleon ‘forever’. Napoleon’s Marshal Joachim Murat, King of Naples since 1808, was also allowed to hold on to his throne under similar terms, to the frustration of the Sicilian House of Bourbon.
The Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on 11 April and ratified by Napoleon two days later, finally ended the War of the Sixth Coalition. Louis XVII was restored to his rightful throne in more than just name, France had to return to its 1789 borders, and Napoleon was granted the tiny island of Elba to rule for the rest of his life as a French vassal; as he was also allowed to keep his imperial dignity, many jokes were made about ‘an Emperor kneeling to a King’ at his expense. Although he insisted on being anointed at Reims in the tradition of pre-Napoleon French monarchs, the Winter King did agree to limit his own royal prerogative by issuing a liberal Charter this year, facilitating the creation of an appointed upper ‘Chamber of Peers’ and an elected lower ‘Chamber of Deputies’ in addition to keeping most of the Napoleonic Code. Louis took a merciful line on those who had fought for Napoleon, discouraging reprisals against known Bonapartists and openly welcoming his surviving Marshals into Bourbon service. The French army was also demobilized, as was the Armée du Roi, though about 10,000 of its veterans (half of them French, the rest organized into Russian/Swiss/Scandinavian/German regiments) stayed on board as the Winter King’s new Royal Guard.
Napoleon bids goodbye to his Imperial Guard at Fontainebleau, 1814 | |
On a side note, upon personally meeting Napoleon off the battlefield for the first time at Fontainebleau, Louis XVII reportedly asked the Comte d’Artois “Oncle, est-ce vraiment le petit homme qui a commencé ces grandes guerres?” (Uncle, is this really the little man who started these great wars?) It was said that Napoleon (who was actually of average height) was so angered that he nearly broke off the negotiations - and the Winter King's nose - right then and there.
1815: The Congress of Vienna, held since November the year prior, seemed on the verge of collapsing due to the rival ambitions of all of the Coalition Powers. Tsar Alexander of Russia desired the absorption of Poland into his empire; Prussia wanted to chew up Saxony and recover its Partition gains in Poland; Austria wanted to keep Galicia and claim Northern Italy as part of its sphere of influence; and Britain backed France, represented by the ever-fickle Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, who wanted to keep the other European powers as weak as possible. Matters nearly exploded into war when Alexander boasted that he had 450,000 Russians sitting on Poland, and that the rest of Europe ‘was welcome to try to remove them, if they can’, followed immediately by British representative Lord Castlereagh approaching Frederick William III of Prussia with an offer to support the annexation of Saxony if he would only support an independent Poland.
However, the intrigues of the Coalition Powers were interrupted when Napoleon capitalized on their apparent distraction with each other to escape his ‘gilded cage’ at Elba and retake power in France. Louis XVII and his Queen Hélène had strived to win the support of the French people by embarking on a tour of their kingdom since last year, where Louis’ willingness to rub shoulders with the commons and wartime reputation as the ‘Winter King’ combined with his Russian wife’s beauty and gentle manners had done much to restore the Bourbon dynasty’s respectability in the eyes of their people; but Napoleon was still remembered as the man who got French boots as far as the outskirts of Moscow, Constantinople and Damascus, and the liberal-minded bourgeois in particular still considered Louis a foreign-imposed reactionary puppet even despite his adherence to La Charte. Thus, after Napoleon slipped through the Alps (to avoid heavily Royalist Provence) he found a generally welcome reception, to the point where he was able to convince two Bourbon regiments to join him at Lyon simply by opening his coat and crying out to them, “Si l'un de vous aura tirer votre empereur, lui tirer dessus maintenant” (‘If any of you will shoot at your Emperor, shoot him now’). Many of Napoleon’s old Marshals also defected back into his service from the Bourbon ranks.
Louis XVII was visiting (of all places) Montmédy, where he had attempted to flee with his family before being intercepted at Varennes so long ago, when the news of Napoleon’s return reached him. He raced back to Paris at once after sending his wife and entourage into the relative safety of the Prussian Rhineland, only to find most of his army had defected to Napoleon and he himself had been locked out of his own capital – his 10,000-strong Royal Guard, led by Vendean veteran-turned-long time Armée du Roi officer and Marshal Marquis Henri de la Rochejacquelain, had withdrawn from the city as Napoleon closed in and the people’s mood turned against them, and met him at Reims to give him the bad news. Marshal Georges Cadoudal, another Chouan & Vendean leader who had fought for the Bourbons from 1792 onward and sat on the Armée du Roi’s staff from 1804 until he was badly injured at Leipzig in 1813, raised a pro-Bourbon rebellion in the Vendee yet again but obviously could not be joined by Louis, while his cousin the Duke of Angoulême raised a second Legitimist revolt in Provence but was crushed by Marshal Grouchy at Valence. With no other viable option left to him, Louis was forced to march to the Dutch border with his Royal Guards, collecting as many loyalists as he could on the way north. His first act upon reaching Ghent was to burn the original copy of La Charte that he carried with him, and his company noted that his demeanor had changed from upbeat and energetic to grim, determined and withdrawn (indeed, far better suited for somebody carrying the moniker of ‘the Winter King’) after these betrayals.
While the Seventh Coalition was formed by the powers present at the Congress of Vienna and Louis XVII awaited reinforcements in Belgium, Napoleon decided to strike first and strike hard. He swept into Belgium with about 70,000 men and most of his loyal Marshals in tow as the ‘Armée du Nord’, having dispatched good-sized detachments under Marshal Lamarque to deal with Cadoudal in the Vendee and to safeguard Paris under Marshal Berthier. Also attached to his army was the thirteen-year-old Prince-Imperial and former King of Italy Napoleon Francois, nicknamed L’Aiglon or ‘The Eaglet’ by the Bonapartists, who was to sit on his father’s command staff as an observer. Opposing them were three scattered Coalition armies; an Anglo-Dutch one commanded by the Duke of Wellington that numbered some 93,000 and was encamped at Brussels, the Prussian host of Gebhard von Blucher that numbered 116,000 and was still marching to join the others, and Louis XVII’s third Armée du Roi of about 30,000 (almost all inexperienced new troops drawn during his retreat north, save for the 10,000 Royal Guards under La Rochejacquelein) marching from Ghent to join the British at Brussels.
Marshal Ney engaged elements of Wellington’s force first at Quatre Bras, but was unable to score a meaningful victory. At Ligny, Napoleon kept Blucher’s forces off-balance but was similarly unable to land a serious defeat on the Prussians, and in the meantime Louis XVII had joined Wellington. Having strategically failed to meaningfully defeat any of his opponents, Napoleon thus resolved to bet everything on a speedy defeat of the much larger Anglo-Dutch-Royalist army, pulling even Grouchy’s forces into the final battle of the war at Waterloo instead of attempting to stop the Prussians’ maneuvers. Thus on June 8, 1815 the last decisive battle of the Napoleonic Wars was fought...
The French kicked things off with an attack on the fortified Chateau d’Hougoumont. Although the attack was intended to sucker Wellington into committing his reserves early, the hard fighting quickly escalated to an all-day battle that forced Napoleon to commit his own reserves instead. Napoleon followed up by ordering Marshal D’Erlon to lead a massive infantry attack to punch in several gaps in the Coalition lines, and indeed seemed so very close to succeeding when Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton (then dressed in civilian clothes, having had no time to change into his uniform before battle was joined) was killed trying to rally his men for a counterattack.
Thomas Picton, here depicted in the uniform he wasn't wearing to Waterloo | |
However, it was at this point that Wellington committed his two brigades of heavy cavalry, one of Household Guards and another of heavy dragoons under the supreme command of the Earl of Uxbridge, backed by one of Louis XVII’s elite cuirassier brigades (the Gendarmes of his Royal Guard, active since Jena-Auerstadt) and one of light cavalry; they proceeded to bowl over D’Erlon’s dispersed cuirassiers and destroyed several French brigades, breaking D’Erlon’s attack entirely. At this crucial junction the inexperienced and overconfident British cavalry could have overreached, but with some effort from their officers and the example set by the Royalist heavy horse (who knew full well what would happen if they allowed themselves to get carried away, some from experience at Austerlitz no less) managed to maintain cohesion, and together with their Royalist allies began to claw their way back to their lines – just in time to avoid the worst of a counterattack consisting of yet more French cuirassiers and lancers. Worse yet for the French, Blucher’s Prussians emerged on his right, forcing Napoleon to spend the last of his reserves (except for the Imperial Guard, of course) under Grouchy, Lobau & Davout in an attempt to hold them back.
Well, this could have been worse | |
Around the time of the Prussians’ arrival, Marshal Ney directed a grand cavalry charge against Wellington’s and Louis XVII’s forces, hoping to succeed where D’Erlon and his infantry failed by sweeping the Coalition forces away through shock & cold steel. That done, the entirety of the French army could then focus on the Prussians. However, even after the French artillery disrupted several of the Coalition squares and allowed Ney’s horsemen to overrun their positions, his efforts were ultimately in vain; the enemy was simply too vast in number, their retaliatory musketry and cannonades too devastating. The French cavalry eventually lost momentum and were driven back by a Coalition counterattack, at the same time that Grouchy and Berthier’s forces were beginning to crack under the weight of Blucher’s assaults no less (Lobau having been wounded badly enough to take him out of the action).
With his chance at victory fast disintegrating before his eyes, Napoleon made the fateful decision to commit the Imperial Guard to battle for the last time. Though they were heavily outnumbered, the Imperial Guard still fought heroically, pushing their way past repeated musket and canister volleys to engage the Coalition forces at La Haye Sainte. Seeing that the British Foot Guards stationed there were now hard-pressed by what remained of the Old and Middle Guard’s might, Louis XVII launched into action with his own Garde du Corps, having previously made clear his hopes of meeting and slaying Napoleon in single combat. These hopes would be in vain, as Napoleon was actually still standing around the inn of La Belle Alliance with two battalions of the Old Guard, but together with the British 52nd Light Infantry Regiment Louis’ Garde du Corps did succeed in hurling the Imperial Guard into full retreat. Making things worse, Grouchy and Berthier’s corps fell apart as the full might of the Prussian army came down upon them, and not even the Young Guard could save the day. Now came the infamous panicked cry of many a Frenchman on the field, as the Armée du Nord began to melt away: "La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!" (‘The Guard retreats. Save yourselves if you can!’)
As the last few cohesive Guard units rallied around Napoleon at La Belle Alliance, the Emperor resolved to try to rally his collapsing forces and make his last stand. His men were able to form a total of four squares before the pursuing Coalition forces crashed against them, and threw the first wave back; but upon the second, the Emperor himself was shot in the chest as he directed the square immediately left of La Belle Alliance. He died almost immediately in the arms of his young son, and his last words were reportedly either “Est-ce que mon histoire se termine?” (Is this how my story ends?) according to the boy, “Vengez-moi!” (Avenge me!) according to the Imperial Guardsmen near him, or just sputtering and coughing blood for a few moments before expiring, according to the British troops closest to his position. Whatever the Emperor’s last words were though, it clearly wasn’t enough to save the day, as the French army continued on its miserable rout. The battered remains of the Old Guard fought as hard as they could to protect the newly-ascended Napoleon II’s withdrawal with his personal guards and to defend their fallen Emperor’s body, defiantly crying out “La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!” (The Guard dies, it does not surrender!) when invited to stand down, and were killed almost to a man by the Coalition forces. Upon viewing the dead Napoleon, Louis XVII reportedly expressed disappointment that he didn't get to kill the Emperor himself.
An idealized depiction of the fallen Napoleon by exiled Bonapartist painter Jacques-Louis David, 1819 | |
Following Waterloo, the Armée du Nord effectively ceased to exist as a fighting force of any note. As virtually nobody was interested in dying for the relative nonentity that was Napoleon II, the French government in Paris surrendered to the Coalition and passed a motion deposing L’Aiglon upon receiving news of the Emperor’s crushing defeat and death a week later. On 3 August 1815, the Treaty of Paris definitively ended the Napoleonic Wars by restoring Louis XVII to the throne a second time, banishing Napoleon’s widow Thérésa Cabarrus Bonaparte and their children to the tiny Portuguese island of Madeira, and installing a 150,000-strong Coalition army in fortresses across France for up to a year, something Louis tolerated only in hopes of being able to hunt down his enemies on his allies’ dime. To his credit however, besides assenting to the Bonaparte family's exile to Madeira instead of lobbying for their arrest and execution to permanently end the threat their line posed to his own ('What manner of King cowers at the shadows of little children?' he reportedly asked Lord Castlereagh on the subject) Louis also argued for the inclusion of an anti-slavery clause and, noting that the elderly Governor L'Ouverture of Haiti had failed to support Napoleon during his Hundred Days, gracefully kept the institution abolished in French domains.
Needless to say, aside from these bits of generosity, after the Hundred Days Louis XVII was not in a forgiving mood. Gone was the dashing young man who fantasized about riding across Europe as a knight in shining armor who would surely reclaim his birthright with God’s help and who believed, perhaps naively, that not only would the French people welcome him after overthrowing & killing his parents but that if he forgave those who once bore arms against him all would be well – this boy died when news of Napoleon’s return reached Montmédy, replaced by a cold and grim statesman who believed that the Enlightenment was a mistake, that only the death of all of his enemies could save him and his family from their own brutal deaths in turn, and that the only reason his father fell in the first place was that he wasn’t ruthless enough. In September Louis issued a new Charte, disbanding the popularly-elected Chamber of Deputies entirely and reducing the Chamber of Peers to a largely advisory body chaired by his uncle the Comte de Provence while concentrating all legislative and executive power in his hands, and mandating the creation of the ‘Bureau des Travaux Spéciales’ (BTS, Bureau of Special Works), equal parts intelligence agency/internal security bureau/secret police, which he staffed with the most skilled and ruthless agents (of both sexes) he could afford from across France and later, all of Europe.
Between late August and December, those Napoleonic Marshals unfortunate enough to have fallen into the Winter King’s hands were all swiftly tried and executed for treason; Augereau (who had tried to rejoin Napoleon earlier but was rebuffed, not that this saved him), Ney, Davout, Berthier, Grouchy, Lobau (captured by the Prussians at Waterloo after being wounded, but turned over to Louis) and Mortier were all thereby shot in rapid succession. Suchet fled to Switzerland and was later invited back into the country with an offer of amnesty, only to be seized and shot for treason as well in October. Jourdan and Lefebvre fled the country, but both ended up becoming the first notable victims of the BTS; Jourdan had his throat slit in Switzerland on New Year’s Eve and Lefebvre killed the first BTS agent to strike at him, only to fall to a second assassin in Italy in 1817. Lamarque had already been killed by Cadoudal's men in the Vendee during the Hundred Days. Due to his considerable popularity Louis XVII grudgingly ‘only’ exiled Soult, but the BTS saw to it that he suffered a tragic accident in the summer of 1816 as well. Only those Marshals who avoided following Napoleon into his Hundred Days – MacDonald, Marmont, Moncey, Oudinot, Masséna and Pérignon – were spared. Reportedly, when the Marquis de La Rochejacquelein advised him to accept these Marshals into his service and make use of their skills instead of trying to purge them all, Louis icily replied 'They will serve me far better in death than they ever could in life'.
The Winter King at age 30-31, shortly before or after Waterloo | |
1816: With the nation at peace, trade lines to all European countries restored since the end of the Napoleonic Wars and businesses booming everywhere, Federalist President X4 handily wins reelection this year. Also, Indiana gains statehood.
Senator Matthew Thompson is elected Governor of Virginia, and will serve a full three-year term before returning to the Senate.
The British and Dutch bombard Algiers in an attempt to force the Dey to stop raiding European shores for slaves and to release all Christians in their custody. The Algerians concede the second point and promise to uphold the first, but break their word as soon as they came to feel it was safe. |