Vive l'empereur..............................

     On March 12 (1815), Adams recorded an astonishing rumor he had heard:  Napoleon was at Lyons with an army of twelve thousand.  A year earlier, Napoleon's generals, hopelessly outnumbered by an alliance of all Europe, had finally turned against the emperor and forced him to abdicate.  Napoleon had accepted exile on the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba.  His brilliant and bloody twenty-year campaign of conquest had finally reached what Adams and so many others viewed as its foreordained end.  But it hadn't - not quite.  Napoleon escaped from Elba on February 26, arriving at Golfe-Juan with barely a thousand men.  The troops sent to capture him instead had flocked to his side.  He and his men began the five-hundred-mile march northward to Paris.  On March19, Adams wrote to Abigail to say that Napoleon was believed to be only six days from the capital.  "The Government," he reported, "has been collecting a force upon which they could depend which will meet him before he can arrive here, and the first actual resistance he meets will I think determine his fate."  For once Adams erred on the side of optimism: perhaps he could not bring himself to believe that this man who had littered Europe with corpses still enjoyed the favor of his own people.
     He wasn't the only one, of course, to underestimate Napoleon's appeal.  Louis XVIII sent Marshall Ney, who had forced the Emperor to abdicate, to deliver the final blow, and Ney, too, defected.  On March 20, Adams watched in wonder as the king and his court fled northward.  The following day, Napoleon's advance guard marched to the royal palace in the Tuileries.  The crowds lined the streets to shout "Vive l'empereur!"  Adams wrote to his father that "the walls of all the public places were covered with the proclamations of Napoleon...pasted over the proclamations scarcely dry of Louis 18 declaring Napoleon Buonaparte a traitor and rebel."  A huge bonfire in the middle of the Palais Royal consumed all the books and pamphlets denouncing Napoleon - no doubt kindled, Adams drily noted, by the same people who had printed them in the first place.  It was much the same scene he had witnessed twenty years earlier when the good republicans of Holland had woken up one fine morning as French revolutionaries in tricorne hats.  Personal experience had taught Adams to distrust fine professions of faith;  few men had the courage of their convictions when they were put to the test.

-James Traub,  John Quincy Adams:  Militant Spirit