The author of the linked piece, Jerry D. Morelock, is offering a vastly oversimplified narrative of the complicated politics behind the Hundred Days. Napoleon's return violated previous agreements he had made with both the Allies and France over the terms of his abdication. Neither side was particularly committed to the Elba option; the Allies did not provide Napoleon his promised subsidies and the Austrian government prevented Marie Louise from joining her husband. Louis XVIII was not party to Treaty of Fontainebleau which established which established the terms of France's extensive subsidies towards both Elba and the Bonaparte clan, and cut off some of this money. Moreover, there was already talk in Allied circles of reneging the Elba arrangement, which had been the result of an initiative of Tsar Alexander I done without consultation with his allies, and exiling Napoleon to a more distant land. Within France, there were some royalist pamphlets talking of executing Napoleon or hardening his exile.

But much of this Allied talk of reneging the Elba arrangement was just that, talk. For France to completely abrogate Fontainebleau, it would need to convince both Austria and Britain to sanction it, and these two powers preferred having a caged Napoleon as a silent threat to the Bourbons (and this threat was also part of why Alexander I sanctioned Elba in the first place; he felt that magnanimous treatment would earn Napoleon's gratitude and he could be unleashed on Austrian Italy if it came to war between Russia and Austria). The Bourbon's parsimony fed into the anti-Bonapartist sentiments at court, but these also dovetailed with the dire fiscal situation of the French government. But the cutting off of subsidies and Austria's decision to keep Marie Louise away from Elba likely crystallized Napoleon's decision to return in December 1814.

Napoleon was naturally well-informed about the various problems Louis XVIII had with the Restoration. The Bourbons had been out of touch with French society for some time and factions within the Royalist camp did favor recriminations for the French Revolution. There were also some attempts to square the return to the ancien régime with the developments in France between 1789-1814. The Bourbons had a Charter, Louis XVIII could not bear to call it a constitution, and the political culture of the Restoration was certainly not an effort to simply turn back the clock. But initiatives like removing the Tricolore, honoring various Bourbon martyrs of Revolution, and reducing much of the army to half pay alienated segments of French society. Two groups stood out among these malcontents, former Revolutionaries and the army. The former had been estranged from Napoleon since his imperial and autocratic turn, but saw little future for them in the Bourbon political order. The military also was one of the key "masses of granite" Napoleon had affixed his empire to, and many military men looked askance at Bourbon attempts to pare down the officer lists and remove their hard-won honors.

The drama of Napoleon's triumphal return obscures how weak his domestic position was during the Hundred Days. Although the army rallied to him, minus a good portion of the Marshallate, there were very few sectors of French society that joined his cause. While few joined the Bourbons, many Frenchmen did not flock to Napoleon either. Therefore it became imperative for Napoleon to incorporate new political meanings to his return. His proclamations in his march to Paris only alluded to the revolutionary tradition and past political glories. Yet Napoleon soon realized that he would have to adapt a liberal guise to win over those former Revolutionaries who were on the fence over his return. Benjamin Constant, a prominent French liberal who had been sidelined during the Empire, helped draft a new constitution that replaced the Charter. Constant's constitution was a compromised constitution that pleased few, including Napoleon who chafed at its restrictions on his power, but it was more radical than the Charter and bought Napoleon a veneer of Revolutionary credibility as a Liberal Emperor. These trappings of the French Revolution, which had been vague when Napoleon landed in southern France, took on new relevancy once he was safely ensconced in Paris. Cynics did find Napoleon's liberal turn convenient, but a number of French liberals like Lafayette did see Napoleon's weakness as an opportunity to rekindle the Revolutionary spirit by taking advantage of a politically weakened Napoleon.

Napoleon's liberal turn also had an international component to it as well. Napoleon knew that Metternich was upset over Louis XVIII's conservative government and had toyed with replacing Louis with his more liberal brother. This, coupled with Napoleon's familial relationship with the Habsburgs via Marie Louise, meant Napoleon placed hopes that Austria would sanction his return to power. But as was typical of Napoleon's post-1809 Austrian policy, Napoleon overplayed his hand. The dramatic nature of his return, in which it was Napoleon who directly abrogated Fontainebleau, along with the resuscitation of Revolutionary rhetoric drove the Allies together despite their fractiousness. Napoleon's offers of peace came with the uncertainties that he would violate any agreement once he had cemented his position within France. There were a number of unsettled issues such as the position of France's natural frontiers, her colonies, or Italy and the Low Countries that could easily trigger another war.

Although it is idle counterfactual speculation, it is unlikely that Napoleon's liberal turn would have lasted had he triumphed in 1815. Neither French liberals nor Napoleon were terribly satisfied with the constitution. The document provided for no taxation or conscription without the consent of parliament, which would have been a grave check on Napoleon's authority. Napoleon preferred constitutions that were "short and vague" and his prior experience with constitutions established a pattern that he would violate or bend them for the needs of state. For their part, French liberals and Revolutionaries tended to view the lack of universal suffrage and a number of them resented being given one by fiat. The plebiscite for acceptance of the constitution showed a reasonable, albeit lukewarm, support for it, but there were signs of future problems in the new governmental order well before Waterloo. The May 1814 elections to the lower house Chamber of Representatives returned very Bonapartist candidates. The electorate, limited to around 100000 electors from the local elite of the départments, returned only some 60 Bonapartist deputies. The remaining 569 deputies were dominated by liberals (ca. 500) and the Chamber chose as its President Comte Jean-Denis Lanjuinais, who had led the Senate's deposing of Napoleon in 1814. This was not a political order that promised a return to stability for France, but more internal conflict.

Waterloo rendered this problematic political arrangement irrelevant. Although Napoleon may have had some justification in violating the terms of his abdication, it was Napoleon that took the first concrete step in abandoning Fontainebleau. The Napoleonic legend certainly burnished the idea that he was the champion of the French Revolution and its ideals in 1815, but the rhetoric emanating from his camp after his landing at Golfe-Juan show he adapted this republican guise somewhat late in his march. Napoleon's uses of fait accompli as a means of governance such as presenting the constitution for a plebiscite show his arbitrary and authoritarian habits of rule were still quite ingrained. The seeds of future domestic conflict were already laid before he marched off to fight the Allies. Returning to France in 1815 was a gamble, and like many gambles, it did not pay off.

Sources

Dwyer, Philip G. Citizen Emperor: Napoleon in Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Price, Munro. Napoleon: The End of Glory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Woloch, Isser. Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.