Bavaria participated in one final war during the Napoleonic era — the campaign of the Hundred Days in 1815 occasioned by Napoleon’s escape from his exile on the island of Elba. The Allied leaders from 1813-14 were still gathered in Vienna, dickering over the settlement of innumerable questions of territory and compensation, when word of Napoleon’s landing in France reached them in early March 1815. Quickly putting aside their many disputes, the powers of Europe, great and small, immediately began to prepare for war against the returned French Emperor. Schwarzenberg, again designated as the overall commander, hoped to invade France in June or July, but Napoleon hit first, striking into Belgium in an attempt to defeat Blücher’s Prussians and the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Allied force before his other foes could start their operations. The ensuing Waterloo campaign brought Napoleon’s defeat on 18 June and his abdication four days later. The Napoleonic Wars were over.
Bavaria contributed an army of some 60,000 men to the Allied cause in 1815. Organised into four divisions under Wrede, it was an impressive contingent, but Minister Montgelas, concerned for the kingdom’s shaky financial situation, found it more than a little extravagant. In his opinion, the size of the force,
sprang from the ambition of Prince Wrede, burdened us with the support of an over-large army, which was commensurate with neither the population nor the resources of the realm... But his desire to command, to shine thereby, and to enhance his image through a strong army; this consideration pushed every other into the background.1
Although this large force duly entered France on 18 June, its combat experience was limited to a few insignificant encounters with French outposts and garrisons from the 23rd to the 25th. Wrede pressed on for Paris more or less on his own initiative, but the victors of Waterloo reached the French capital far ahead of the Bavarians. In any event, Napoleon had already given up his claim to the throne, and Wrede’s men were detailed off to occupation duties by the middle of July. The Allies levied a heavy war indemnity on the prostrate foe and maintained an occupation force, including approximately 10,000 Bavarians, in France until 1818 when the new regime in Paris finally managed to hand over the last sou.
Although still technically in uniform, Franz did not participate in what he called ‘the military promenade to France in the year 1815’.2 He was already on leave status, studying economics as he prepared for a new career as a civil official. In 1818, when the last of the Bavarian occupation troops returned from duty across the Rhine, Franz graduated from university and left the army. Throughout his life, however, he cherished the memory of his military service and retained an enduring pride in his achievements with ‘the 7th Infantry Regiment, in whose ranks I spent the happiest years of my youth’.3
Franz was not alone in his nostalgia for his years in uniform under Napoleon. Despite the horror of experiences such as the retreat from Russia, despite the nationalist sentiment that swept much of Germany in the early to mid-nineteenth century, Napoleonic veterans’ groups flourished in Germany in the decades following the French Emperor’s second abdication. Proudly wearing their crosses of the Legion of Honour, publishing songs and poems to ‘the hero Napoleon’, they preserved a memory and contributed to the Napoleonic legend,
But nothing matches the thrill
when our bright eyes
envisage the Emperor
who led us to fame and victory,
who glorified France’s throne,
and was a true father to us!4
In his voluminous writings5 we have no indication that Franz belonged to any such organisation, indeed it seems unlikely he would have been drawn to one, but his impression of Napoleon as ‘the greatest man of our times’ was shared by many German survivors of the Grande Armée. For Franz, as for other German veterans, this experience of service in the Napoleonic Wars, particularly those halcyon days under the Emperor himself, became the most intense, most vivid years of their lives, defining experiences of danger, camaraderie and glory that outshone the more secure but less exhilarating era they inhabited after 1815.
1 Quoted injunkelmann, p. 341.
2 From Franz’s account of the First Battle of Polotsk in Auvera. p. 485. See also Chapter 5.
3 Ibid.
4 Words from the song written for the Founding Festival of the Veterans’ Association of Former Napoleonic Soldiers in Krefeld, August 1848; reprinted in Carl Schehl, Vom Rhein zur Moskwa 1812, Krefeld: Obermann, 1957. See Sauzey (pp. 350-1) for similar quotations from a book called Liederbuch für die Veteranen der Grossen Napoleonarmee von 1803 bis 1814, published in 1837.
5 Other than the extracts quoted in Appendix 2, Franz’s many post-1815 letters to his children are not included in this volume.