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4 Maritime Exodus America was in every respect our true refuge . . . —Napoleon, St. Helena, 1816 I have taken passage on a ship that is leaving for America, where I shall dig my grave . . . —General Savary, Smyrna, August 1816 Jacques Lajonie’s stay in Switzerland was brief. After years under Napoleon’s rule, the new Confederation had just returned to the control of the old elite,from whom the fleeing French could expect no help: the right to stay was denied to many, and others were taken back to the border and handed over to waiting French gendarmes .1 Accused of murder,Lajonie had to fear the zeal of the Swiss constabulary and consider Switzerland a place of transit, not a permanent refuge. He thought it better to cross the seas: “In the United States there is liberty.”2 Beyond an ocean far more difficult to traverse than the Alpine barrier, it was the ideal destination, reached chiefly from the ports of Antwerp and Le Havre, Marseille and Leghorn, Nantes and Bordeaux. After returning home, Lajonie could easily go down the Dordogne to the Gironde estuary, gateway to the New World, open in the eighteenth century to tens of thousands of people from the Aquitaine region of southwest­ ern France, driven out by poverty and religion, or dreaming of a better life where they would—why not?—be fabulously rich “Ameriquains.”3 People were then thinking of Louisiana and the islands, with Saint-­ Domingue, “the pearl of the Antilles,” as the destination of the vast majority. But in the 1790s, the slave revolt, the maritime war with England, and then with the United States slowed the movement of men and merchandise . Bordeaux’s function as the port of welcome and redistribution for the Aquitaine population declined until peace was restored. Then transatlantic shipping resumed its regular rhythm and the United States of America became the recipient of a new wave of immigration, following that of the refugees from Saint-­ Domingue, its finest colony, which France had lost for good. 58 • Chapter 4 Two Brothers on the Atlantic Freedom and fortune were all the more cherished by the emigrants because they had been won with difficulty, at a time when sailing was still a heroic act for sailors and passengers, even those accustomed to risks, like military men. Artillerymen, infantrymen, and cavalrymen were most often strangers to the world of the sea, since France, from the Revolution to the Empire, had not been known for naval exploits, foundering at Aboukir and Trafalgar. After Waterloo, the British squadrons relaxed their hold on French shipping, except for one traveler whose escape was unthinkable. Before he conceived the idea of an Ameri­ can exile after his sec­ ond abdication, Napoleon had already received encouragement in this direction . . . from Fouché, wanting to get rid of him. The Emperor ought to flee Elba, which slanderers intent on his ruin would quickly label a dangerous base of operations for stirring up a revolt. For his own safety he should put half of the earth, that is, the Atlantic, between himself and his enemies, and begin life anew in the United States, among new people who could admire him without fearing him:“You will prove [to them] that if you had been born in their midst, you would have felt, thought, and voted as they do, that you would have preferred their liberties to all the dominations of the earth.”4 Fouché would have liked to see Napoleon leave the Mediterranean and permanently renounce his ambitions so as not to compromise his own. Napoleon on Elba was for Europe Vesuvius next to Naples, he prophesied to the Count of Artois . Finding the comparison persuasive, Artois sent his protégé, Hyde de Neuville , back from a long Ameri­ can exile, to investigate the possibilities of the Emperor ’s escape and then to speak highly to him of America: “In this virgin land of liberty, the name of the great conqueror would have impressed Europe; the setting matched his stature and renouncing his ambition would be a heroic end.”5­ Fouché was thus not alone in wanting the Emperor far from France, and Count Anglès, trained by Fouché, went so far as to extend the need for an oceanic quarantine zone to the entire family in a police report of July 1, 1814. The presence of the Bona­ partes on the Continent constituted a threat to the Bourbons and to peace:“It would truly be desirable to get the [allied...

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