Treaty of Fontainebleau (1814)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Treaty of Fontainebleau, signed on the 11th of April 1814, ended the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor of the French and sent him into exile on the island of Elba. In just a few weeks, a coalition of European powers had dismantled one of the most formidable military empires the continent had ever seen. What did it take to bring Napoleon to the negotiating table? And what exactly did the allies demand in return for peace? The answers reach from the Palace of Fontainebleau to the French Senate, from a stolen document case at Sotheby's decades later, and to a principality carved out of a small Mediterranean island.

• 2. The Coalition's March

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  Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and several German states had spent the years 1812 to 1814 pushing Napoleon out of Germany and then into France itself. By early 1814, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Portugal were invading across the Pyrenees from the south. Russia, Austria, and their allies crossed the Rhine from the east. When Coalition forces captured Paris, the path to Napoleon's removal was open.

  On the 31st of March 1814, the Coalition issued a formal declaration to the French nation. The text, signed by Russian Emperor Alexander I at three in the afternoon, told the French people that the allies respected the integrity of "old France as it existed under its legitimate kings." It promised that France would be allowed to draft its own constitution, provided the French accepted that Napoleon had to go. The following day, Alexander I addressed the French Sénat conservateur in person and repeated those terms. As a gesture of goodwill, he announced that 150,000 French prisoners of war who had been held by Russia since the French invasion of Russia two years earlier would be released immediately.

  On the 2nd of April, the Senate agreed to the Coalition's terms and passed the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, formally dethroning Napoleon and his family. A decree dated the 5th of April declared that Napoleon was cast down from the throne, that the right of succession in his family was abolished, and that the French people and army were absolved from their oath of fidelity to him.

• 3. Napoleon's Gamble

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  On the 3rd of April 1814, word reached Napoleon at the Palace of Fontainebleau that the Senate had dethroned him. The Coalition had been clear in its public position: its quarrel was with Napoleon personally, not with France. Napoleon decided to call their bluff. He offered a conditional abdication, proposing to step down in favour of his son, with Empress Marie-Louise serving as regent.

  Three plenipotentiaries carried this conditional abdication to the Coalition sovereigns. Napoleon's text stated that he was "ready to descend from the throne, to quit France, and even life itself, for the good of the country," but insisted this was inseparable from the rights of his son and the regency of the Empress. While those envoys were still travelling, Napoleon learned that Marshal Auguste Marmont had placed his corps in a hopeless military position and that their surrender was inevitable. Napoleon's last credible military card had just been played.

  The Coalition sovereigns rejected the conditional abdication outright. Emperor Alexander was direct about the reasoning: Napoleon alive and nominally in retirement was still Napoleon. Alexander said he feared that Napoleon, given his "devouring activity" and ambition, would eventually put himself at the head of any regency and restart the war. The refusal forced Napoleon to make a far cleaner break. His unconditional abdication renounced, for himself and all his heirs, the thrones of France and Italy.

• 4. What the Treaty Contained

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  The formal agreement ran to 21 articles. Napoleon and Marie-Louise were each allowed to keep their titles of emperor and empress, even as Napoleon was stripped of all actual power. Every member of Napoleon's family and all potential successors were barred from attaining power in France.

  Elba was established as a separate principality under Napoleon's rule. Foreign powers guaranteed recognition of Elba's sovereignty and its flag, but the treaty restricted outright annexation to France alone. Marie-Louise received the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza and the Duchy of Guastalla; any direct male descendant of hers would carry the title of Prince of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla.

  Empress Josephine's annual income was set at 1,000,000 francs. Napoleon was required to surrender all of his French estates to the French crown and to hand over all crown jewels. He was permitted to bring 400 men with him to Elba as a personal guard. The signatories on Napoleon's side were Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza; Marshal MacDonald, Duke of Tarentum; and Marshal Ney, Duke of Elchingen. The allied signatories were Prince Metternich, Count Nesselrode, and Baron Hardenberg. Napoleon ratified the agreement on the 13th of April.

• 5. Britain's Absence

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  Britain was conspicuously absent from the list of signatories. Castlereagh explained the British position plainly: in British eyes, Napoleon was a usurper, and the French people had been in a state of rebellion. Signing the treaty would have required Britain to acknowledge Napoleon's legitimacy as emperor of the French.

  Britain also objected to the geography of the arrangement. Exiling Napoleon to an island over which he held formal sovereignty, placed only a short distance from France and Italy, both of which carried strong Jacobin factions, struck Castlereagh as a recipe for future conflict rather than lasting peace. Britain's concerns would prove prescient. Napoleon left Elba less than a year after arriving and returned to France for what became known as the Hundred Days.

• 6. Theft and Recovery

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  Nearly two centuries after the treaty was signed, it became the centre of a criminal case in France. In 2005, a French court charged two Americans with stealing a copy of the Treaty of Fontainebleau from the French National Archives. The theft was traced to a period stretching from 1974 to 1988. John William Rooney, a former history professor who was 74 at the time of the charges, and Marshall Lawrence Pierce, then 44, had removed the document along with other materials, including letters from King Louis XVIII.

  The case came to light in 1996, when a curator at the French National Archives discovered that Pierce had placed the document up for sale at Sotheby's. Rooney and Pierce pleaded guilty in the United States. Rooney was fined $1,000 and Pierce was fined $10,000. Neither man was extradited to France to stand trial there. The copy of the treaty and the other documents were returned to France by the United States in 2002, three years before the French court issued its charges.