John Quincy Adams: American eyewitness of the Hundred Days

John Quincy Adams was doubtless the foremost professional American career diplomat of his generation, having served as ambassador to the Netherlands, Prussia, St. Petersburg and as the chief negotiator for the Treaty of Ghent (1814). Acculturated in Europe during his childhood and youth, trained in the law at Harvard, and fluent in some five languages, he was an excellent eyewitness of current events and left an extensive diary of his coincidental stay in Paris during most of the Hundred Days, while waiting for his confirmation as Minister to the Court of St. James. Surprisingly, the diary has escaped historical notice. The four standard scholarly biographies devote less than half a dozen pages –between them– to his stay, nor do the leading recent monographs on the Hundred Days mention Adams. This article combines an analysis of the historical significance and tendency of the source, a brief overview of Adams’ activities, and a consideration of Adams’ method of observation and assessment, from his Parisian vantage point, integrating, as he did, various sources of information, such as his vast network of high-placed connections, along with personal observations in public spaces such as the theater and on the streets of the capital. His particular focal points were the Vol de l’Aigle, popular opinion in Paris, Napoleon’s apparent “liberal conversion,” the Allies’ Declaration of the Emperor as an outlaw and its ramifications for international law, and the prospects for a renewed European conflict. In the end, for Adams, the rapid fall of the Bourbons, and Napoleon’s astonishing comeback, mark the Emperor out as a modern stupor mundi, and his account provides further evidence for the contemporary origins of the Napoleonic legend.