Napoleon Exiled to Elba: The Empire's Brief End

Napoleon Bonaparte signed away an empire with a stroke of ink. The Treaty of Fontainebleau, finalized on April 11, 1814, stripped the man who had dominated European politics for nearly two decades of everything except a tiny Mediterranean island and an annual pension of two million francs. Six days earlier, marshals Ney, Lefebvre, and Macdonald had confronted their emperor at Fontainebleau Palace, refusing to march on Paris. The allied armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain had already occupied the French capital, and the Senate had declared Napoleon deposed. The treaty granted Napoleon sovereignty over Elba, an island of 12,000 inhabitants off the Tuscan coast. He was permitted to retain his imperial title, keep a personal guard of 400 soldiers, and receive his pension from the French treasury. His wife Marie Louise received the Duchy of Parma. The terms were remarkably generous for a man who had plunged Europe into wars that killed millions. Napoleon arrived on Elba in May 1814 and threw himself into governing with characteristic energy, reorganizing the island's iron mines, road system, and small military force. But he watched from across the water as the restored Bourbon monarchy under Louis XVIII alienated the French public with reactionary policies and as the Congress of Vienna carved up his former empire. Within eleven months, Napoleon escaped Elba with roughly a thousand men, landed on the French coast near Antibes, and marched to Paris in what became the Hundred Days. The treaty that was supposed to end his career merely interrupted it. His final defeat would come at Waterloo in June 1815, after which the allies chose a far less comfortable exile: the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he died in 1821.