The Guard of Elba

When Napoleon departed France to become Sovereign of Elba he was allowed to be accompanied by a small detachment of the Guard to serve as the army of the tiny state. Napoleon had written a call for volunteers from Fontainebleu after his abdication and was swamped with volunteers – officers begged to serve a common grenadiers in order to accompany their beloved leader while fights were said to have broken out between those soldiers chosen and those that weren’t. A Grenadier battalion, a squadron of the Polish lancers (only half of whom had horses), an artillery company, a detachment of sailors and a small section of Mamelukes totalling around 750 men landed with the former Emperor and settled on the picturesque, if slightly sleepy, island. Duty was easy and generally rather dull with the main concern being pirate raids originating from North Africa, though the British and French warships patrolling around the island would have probably deterred any prospective corsairs. The Grenadiers paraded and drilled each day besides the ‘palace’ under the Emperor’s supervision, usually drawing an appreciative audience from the locals, and manned guard posts at the various Imperial properties on the island. The other troops had similar duties – the Lancers would provide an escort for Napoleon’s daily travels, the sailors manned the small Elban navy and the artillerymen set-up the coastal defences – but the island was not as lively as Paris, no matter how good the local wine was or how many shooting contests and celebrations were organised, and morale suffered. Napoleon applied the same organisational energy that had once overseen an army of hundreds of thousands to his tiny force, setting up depots and overseeing the finances; he also personally oversaw the daily drill parades and inspections, maintaining morale by building up close personal relationships with his dedicated troops – at one point he joked with a Grenadier who complained the stew tasted funny because “the water of the Seine makes the best stock”; another time he gently admonished a pair of Grenadiers for pilfering grapes from his orchard, telling them to at least wait until they were ripe. Growing bored, he attempted to build up an auxiliary battalion using the regular forces assigned to the island (the 35th Light regiment and the Italian Colonial battalion) but discipline was hard to maintain and the companies struggled to reach strength. Even though some of the dedicated guardsmen had requested discharges to return to France, most were on edge with the constant stream of rumours arriving on ships France telling of a country ready to rise up as soon as the Emperor returned. All were just waiting on the word to board the boats.

The Royal Corps of France

The Guard remaining in France had a far bigger problems than boredom on a bucolic island. Still milling about in Paris as the Bourbons landed in France, the Old Guard formed an honour guard on the streets of Paris as the Royal cavalcade entered the city. Bitter, angry and despairing at their new leaders the Grenadiers attempted to hide the Eagle cap plates of their bearskins and refused to cry “vive le Roi!” until being dressed down by their officers. The writer Chateaubriand noted the absolute rage in their eyes and their vicious scowls as the Bourbons passed by, observing that the presentation of arms was furiously correct – perhaps too furiously correct. The thorny problem of what to do with the Guard was given to new Minister of War – Dupont, infamous throughout the army for his surrender to the Spanish at Bailen. The old Marshals led by Soult had implored the King and his ultra-reactionary brother to take the Guard as their own, merely changing their titles in order to ensure their loyalty; instead the pre-Revolutionary companies of Gardes du Corps and the Maison Royale were resurrected – expensive, gaudy, impeccably aristocratic and ultimately militarily useless. Fully disbanding the Guard was considered undesirable as it would spread thousands of unhappy men around France to stir up trouble or to ferment mutiny amongst the line units if sent there; besides, splitting up the finest troops in Europe would be grossly wasteful. Instead the Guard would be retained as a special corps within the army, though the exact composition was to be decided – certainly the Old Guard infantry and cavalry, but what of the supporting arms and the Young Guard? By 1814 the Guard was massive, almost an army within the army with over 100,000 men on paper at least – this was unsustainable with the rest of the army in tatters and badly understrength. The Young Guard infantry regiments and cavalry squadrons would be broken up and absorbed into the line regiments, with any Old Guard officers and NCO’s allowed to rejoin the senior regiments. The supporting arms were inspected to sound out their loyalty to the new regime to determine whether they could be attached to the new Royal Guard. The artillery was virulently and openly Bonapartist which soon ended those thoughts, not helped by one senior officer’s old boast to “blow the brains out the first Bourbon to set foot in France” – most were discharged and the remainder were to be split amongst the line. The sappers and sailors soon followed though Dupont, perhaps out of solidarity with a unit captured at Bailen, implored the commander of the Sailors to lodge a formal protest to no avail; the train and artisan units were broken up at the same time. The Polish lancers were sent back to Poland and the Grenadiers and Red Lancers were combed through for any Dutchmen who might have happened to survive Russia and the subsequent campaigns.

The remaining Old Guard units would remain a separate elite corps with 2 regiments each of 3 battalions for the Corps Royale des Grenadiers de France and Corps Royale des Chasseurs a Pied de France (absorbing the former Middle Guard regiments), each also had a 4th battalion of cadre strength formed from supernumerary officers and NCOs. The four remaining cavalry regiments each formed their own Corps Royale de France – the Horse Grenadiers, Dragoons, Chasseurs a Cheval and Lancers, though the Grenadiers were renamed as Cuirassiers probably to avoid confusion with Grenadier a Cheval company of the Royal Guard. The Gendarmes were retained to patrol the Royal parks and hunting grounds. Oudinot was given overall command of the infantry corps and Ney the cavalry with most of the old officers being retained at the regimental level. Some, such as Louis Friant commanding the Grenadiers attempted to reconcile with new authorities and implored the men to play nice; others, such as Lefebvre-Desnoettes of the Chasseurs-a-Cheval barely contained their desire to the return of the Emperor – a birthday celebration organised by his wife was regarded as openly seditious and the local sub-prefect wisely decided to decline an invitation. Slights, both real and imagined, weighed heavily on the remaining guardsmen who felt their position deeply – their pay was cut, the material for their uniforms was to be downgraded to inferior cloth and the requirement to attend mass regularly rankled. The former Grenadiers-a-Cheval frostily rejected attempts to place them in armour and helmets seeing this as impugning their bravery and instead retained their traditional bearskin caps. Regular inspections by various members of the Royal family only made matters worse, thanks to a remarkable talent for putting their feet wrong: the Duke of Angouleme had a habit of wearing the uniforms of a general of British or Russian armies, his wife told a group of officers from the Lancers that they “certainly look fine, but this is not enough; they also need to be good!” - sound advice, but probably not coming from a Royal Duchess to a group who had survived years of constant war; the Duke of Berry inspected the Foot Chasseurs and attempted to imitate Napoleon’s mannerisms, pinching cheeks and offering snorts of snuff, provoking only laughter from the assembled troops. Eventually the various Corps were separated and sent to various garrisons around the North-East of France to get them away from Paris. Here they too waited, the grumblers living up to their nickname as they awaited word that their beloved Emperor had returned.