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2 The “Chief Culprits” Men overwhelmed with your gifts, decorated with your medals, kissed in the morning the royal hand they betrayed in the evening. Rebellious subjects, bad Frenchmen, false knights, scarce had the oaths they had sworn to you died on their lips, when they went, with your lily on their chests, to swear perjury as it were to him who so often declared himself to be a treacherous, disloyal traitor. —Chateaubriand, report to the king, Ghent, 1815 On the day after the battle of Waterloo, Louis XVIII wrote to Wellington expressing his satisfaction with the success of the allies over the French troops. The allies and their English supreme commander had, it is true, made a distinction— in theory—between the French nation and Napoleon, waging war only against the latter. But the royal delight at the imperial chaos, even if it was comprehen­ sible, was apt to exasperate those who saw the victory of Waterloo above all as the defeat of France. In Ghent, the king, never doubting he would return, had fallen under the influence of his brother, the Count of Artois, for whom liberty was the worst of all evils (as it had permitted the return of the monster) and who wanted to see the accomplices of the Hundred Days punished. But this choice of a hard line offended those royalists who favored moderate, constitutional measures, and displeased the allies who had not decided whether or not Louis was going to regain his throne,after showing so little aptitude for keeping it and even less for defending it. So the king took the initiative, crossed the Franco-­ Belgian border, and in late June 1815 confirmed in two successive statements that the losers were in trouble.1 Everywhere, harshness prevailed over the wish to forgive and forget. Repression after Defeat When the peace treaty was signed in Paris in 1814, the victors had shown moderation toward vanquished France, which was, financially and militarily, neither crushed nor humiliated. This time, indulgence was out of the question. Before a new treaty so harsh that it had nothing in common with the first was signed on No­ vem­ ber 20, 1815, a paragraph of the surrender agreement of July 3 suggested the worst for those who had particularly exposed themselves to attack. The offi- The “Chief Culprits” • 29 cers of the ex-­ Guard who had served at Waterloo would be excluded from the new royal army. These men who had fought so many battles could see this as homage, but to the French army it was a warning. The sec­ ond Restoration’s policy with regard to military men was mapped out. In 1815, there were only victors and vanquished . The king dismissed the old army and organized a new one reduced to a shadow of its former self: from divisions down to battalions, corps were broken up and troops dispersed into small, insubstantial units.Those considered surplus were demobilized and swelled the ranks of the unemployed: the census of the summer of 1817 shows nearly sixteen thousand officers on half pay, among them 301 generals .2 But already on July 24, 1815, the king and Fouché, the new minister of police , had signed an edict that targeted important figures in the French army. The Edict of Proscription The king had to hand over to the most fanatical members of his entourage the henchmen of a party against whom hatred knew no bounds, and satisfy the thirst for vengeance of the allies who demanded punishment for the traitors of the Hundred Days, men whose presence was incompatible with law and order. Sentencing the French officers to death followed logically from the thesis that Louis XVIII had never ceased defending, in which he set the treason of the army in opposition to the loyalty of his subjects: the accident of the Hundred Days resulted from a military rebellion without any connection to civil society.This allowed the king to minimize his responsibility and justify a sec­ ond return to the throne. Most of the military leaders, however, could not be accused of lacking devotion or loyalty to the Bourbons. Napoleon himself stated on St. Helena that since no one had “carefully weighed the feelings of the masses and the fervor of the nation ,” they had been unable to do anything to stem the torrent of opinion that had swept them away.3 The English knew this, but wanting to see their continental rivals under a weak king, had adopted the...

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