Unhappily, they were once more mistaken. Though the harvests of 1812 were not bad, the market had been too thoroughly upset to recover its balance for many a long month. Flour made only a timid appearance; the price dropped a point or two, then went up again steeply. This was particularly noticeable when, on November 11, Saint Martin's Day, a date that usually coincided with the lowest prices of the year, corn increased two francs in price — an event unprecedented in market history.
This was the situation when winter began. It threatened to be a very severe one, and this brought interminable queues of poor people to the doors of the bakeries. From one week to another it became necessary to increase the supplies of the Reserves by a thousand sacks, and they could not be found. In the meantime the Emperor had returned from Russia—in what state of mind may be imagined. Was the great military tragedy to be doubled by a year of famine in France?
At this point the luck changed. Just when hope seemed lost, a considerable drop in price was announced on December 28 in the market at Montlhery, and soon spread throughout the country; the miracle that had failed in July was accomplished six months later. Nature was still the kindly sorceress she had always been, but like a coy mistress she had demanded to be implored.
Seen from a distance, this long crisis of 1811-12 has more than one lesson to give us. Its effect on the public mind was mainly due, no doubt, to its occurrence after a period of great prosperity, but it might also have been prevented, or at any rate attenuated, by a different policy.
No help was to be expected from the requisition of flour, or the resurrection of the Maximum, the danger of which had been demonstrated by the Jacobin experiment. On the other hand a restriction of consumption might have been attempted, applying certain measures with which we are now familiar, and which the good sense of the people makes them willing to accept when circumstances demand it.
If the First Empire avoided having recourse to them, it was
because it wanted above all to keep on the right side of public opinion. It had committed every sort of audacity, it had held its own. against Europe; but by a singular contrast this Government, which has remained the type of authoritarian regimes in our history, feared nothing so much as the reactions of the man in the street.
And that is why bread tickets did not see the light in 1812.
CHAPTER XXII. THE GREAT COLLAPSE
The Empire packs up — Entry of the Allies into Paris — Opinion in the Midi — The little war and the great one ~ Vive le Roi - A Bonapartist schoolboy - During the Hundred Days-An Archbishop's vacillations - The invisible hand
HISTORY, as we see it happening day by day, might be summed up as a series of more or lass sensational news items. It was an item of the first magnitude for the Parisians of 1814 when on the morning of March 29 they noticed a long line of vehicles drawn up at the doors of the Tuileries: ten travelling berlines, a number of wagons and an enormous coach covered in grey dust sheets. The Empire was packing up; they were waiting for Marie-Louise's departure.
The berlines were intended for the Regent and her suite; the wagons for the chests of the Treasury. As for the coach, already crammed with saddles, cavalry saddlecloths, boots and harness, it was the Coronation equipage, the one that had carried the first Imperial couple to Notre-Dame and the second along the Champs-Ely sees. A double family relic!
For some hours the lower servants were seen loading bales of valuable objects; then at last Marie-Louise appeared, her features discomposed, with her ladies-in-waiting and Mme de Montesquieu carrying the little King of Rome. Up to the last minute he had fought and screamed, 'I don't want to go away! I don't want to leave my house! As Papa isn't here, I'm the master!' They soothed him as best they could, and towards midday the procession started oflf in the direction of Rambouillet, preceded by a detachment of cavalry and followed by a crowd of domestics on mounts of every size.
The decision taken by Napoleon's wife to leave the Tuileries, the ill-fated Palace that Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had attempted to escape from before her, and from which, in the new century, three kings, a queen and a last empress would escape after her, had been forced upon her by the arrival of the allied armies at the gates of the capital. All next day the fate of Paris hung in the balance, To follow the engagements going on in the neighbourhood of Belleville and La Villette, the strollers in the Jardin des Plantes converged on the Labyrinth, whence they could see the infantry fire in the distance, above the top of the great cedar. 'The little world of swans and banana-trees to which our power had promised eternal peace was disturbed', sighs Chateaubriand. But the centre of the town was much more so!
Here were wounded men dragging themselves along towards the hospitals, poor lamed soldiers of the line, handsome cuirassiers, unrecognizable in their great white capes spattered with mud. There, led by their mistresses, were the little pupils of the Montmartre boarding-schools, disguised as boys for crossing the danger zone. In the suburbs of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, all along the boulevards especially, the people driven in from the country 'marched pell-mell with their cows, their sheep, their scanty baggage*, seeking shelter at the entrances to the courtyards and sharing their last possessions — great loaves of black bread they had baked themselves, almost under the fire of the guns.
One more day was to go by, and over the roadway of these same boulevards, strewn with greenery - by whose hands it were best not to inquire - would pass the army of the victors. A sad episode in the life of Paris, a new sight for a city that, for centuries, had never seen "the smoke of the enemy's camps', and was now obliged to watch them marching past, as if on parade — the imposing Prussian cavalry and the Russian infantry in strange uniforms, aligned in ranks of thirty men abreast.
In the words of an eye-witness, 'It was like a merciless, dark tide of green uniforms and bright plumes, the last waves of which were still submerging the barrier of La Villette while its mounting, ever-swelling flood beat against the chestnut-trees of the Tuileries and the railings of the In-valides/
The crowd's reception was varied. In the suburbs men spoke to one another in low voices, with an occasional shrug of the shoulders. The true populace appeared aghast. But as one approached the Madeleine the public physiognomy changed. 'The enthusiasm of certain women increased with the aristocratic character of the quarter. In the Rue Mont-martre they threw flowers; at the Chinese Baths they alighted from their carriages, they tried to mingle with the squadrons, they shook hands with the Cossacks. Which was as good as saying, as some were already venturing to do, 'Our friends the enemies/
Politics played their part in this debatable enthusiasm. To the applause of the fine ladies, some young men were already sporting white cockades. But as the royalists themselves admitted, these formed only a small minority so far, and the cause of this veering of opinion must be looked for elsewhere.
The country was visibly exhausted. It was sick of the endless wars, the devastating levies of troops mowing down an entire generation, sick of the attempt at universal conquest, which it had thought inspired while it appeared to be successful, but declared to be mad now that it had failed. A state of mind that had nothing heroic about it, but for which the terrible sacrifices of the last two years provided some excuse. There were too many empty places in the home, too many widows' veils in the streets. But above all, nobody believed any longer in Napoleon's star.
Born after the retreat from Russia, this discouragement had increased after Leipzig. From 1813 onwards a thousand little incidents had shown how greatly the Emperor's popularity was on the wane. At the Varietes a play had been given, called La Manie des Campagnes, and in another people had dared to applaud this couplet dedicated to a Don Juan grown old — or to a tired soldier: