[Quick set-up (from Wikipedia): In April 1813 Napoleon gave [Marmont] the command of a corps, which he led at the battles of Lützen, Bautzen and Dresden. He then fought throughout the great defensive campaign of 1814 until the last battle before Paris. Marmont's forces fought a fighting retreat back to the commanding position of Essonne, inflicting high casualties on the enemy. Marmont then took upon himself a political role, seeking to halt what he now saw as a pointless prolonging of a war which France would now assuredly lose. Marmont contacted the Allies and reached a secret agreement with them. As the Allies closed on Montmartre, Marmont—together with marshals Mortier and Moncey—marched to a position where they were quickly surrounded by Allied troops and then surrendered their forces, as had been agreed. Link]
[…] on April 4 Marmont marched his corps straight into the Allied camp to capitulate, along with all their arms and ammunition. This led the Tsar to demand Napoleon’s unconditional abdication. Alexander had taken his huge army right across Europe and nothing less would now do.
For the rest of his life, Napoleon went over the circumstances of Marmont’s treachery again and again. Marmont was, he said, with slight but pardonable exaggeration, ‘a man whom he had brought up from the age of sixteen.’
For his part, Marmont said Napoleon was ‘satanically proud’, as well as given to ‘negligence, insouciance, laziness, capricious trust and an uncertainty as well as an unending irresolution’. Napoleon was certainly proud, definitely not lazy, and if he was capriciously trusting, the Duc de Ragusa [Marmont] had been a prime beneficiary.
’The ungrateful wretch,’ Napoleon said, ‘he will be more unhappy than me.’
The word ragusard was adopted to mean traitor, and Marmont’s old company in the Guard was nicknamed ‘Judas company’. Even three decades later, when he was an old man living in exile in Venice, children used to follow him about, pointing and shouting, ‘There goes the man who betrayed Napoleon!’
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Defiance." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 711-12. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Lentz, L’Effondrement p. 572
Hobhouse, Recollections I p. 183, ed.
North, Napoleon on Elba p. 65.
Cronin, Napoleon p. 554.
Raguse, Mémoires VI p. 274.
Houssaye, Campaign of 1814 p. 499.
Further Reading:
Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont / duc de Raguse (Duke of Ragusa)
Napoleone di Buonaparte / Napoleon Bonaparte / Napoleon I
Александр Павлович (Alexander I of Russia) / Alexander the Blessed
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