Napoleon outlawed by the Congress

The congress had been sitting since the autumn and was tearing itself apart over Saxony and Poland; Talleyrand had restored France to the concert of the great powers by playing on the divisions. The news of the landing at Golfe-Juan arrived on 7 March and instantly closed every quarrel.

The question raised was legal as much as military: what to do with a sovereign recognised by a treaty who had just broken it? The answer was drafted within days, with Talleyrand holding the pen.

The declaration of 13 March 1815, signed by the eight powers, stated that by breaking the convention which had established him on Elba, Napoleon Bonaparte had destroyed the only legal title to which his existence was attached. It declared him placed 'outside civil and social relations' and, 'as enemy and disturber of the peace of the world', delivered 'to public vengeance'.

The formula was without precedent in the law of nations. It aimed not at a state but at a man, and set him outside all legal protection: neither sovereign, nor belligerent, nor even an ordinary prisoner of war.

On 25 March the treaty of the Seventh Coalition bound each power to furnish a hundred and fifty thousand men and not to lay down arms before his fall. Napoleon, who multiplied peaceful messages and proclaimed that he wanted only the frontiers of 1814, received no answer: his letters were returned unopened.

Everything was therefore settled before Waterloo. And it was this declaration that would provide, after the surrender on the Bellerophon, the legal basis for deportation to Saint Helena: never having recognised him as a belligerent, London could treat him as a prisoner of state and not as a defeated sovereign.