THREE:On the 25th of January Buonaparte conferred the Regency again on Maria Louisa, appointed King Joseph his lieutenant in Paristhe poor man who could not take care of the capital which had been conferred on himand quitted Paris to put himself at the head of his army. This army, in spite of all his exertions, did not exceed eighty thousand men; whilst the Allies were already in France with at least a hundred and fifty thousand, and fresh bodies marching up in succession from the north. He arrived the next day at Chalons, where his army lay, commanded by Marmont, Macdonald, Victor, and Ney. The Austrians, under Schwarzenberg, had entered France on the 21st of December by the Upper Rhine, and directed their march on Lyons. On the 19th of January, a few days before Buonaparte quitted Paris, they had already taken Dijon, and were advancing on Lyons, where, however, they received a repulse. Blucher, at the head of forty thousand men, called the Army of Silesia, about the same time entered France lower down, between Mannheim and Coblenz, at four different points, and pushed forward for Joinville, Vitry, and St. Dizier. Another army of Swedes, Russians, and Germans, under the Crown Prince of Sweden, was directed to assist in clearing Holland and Belgium, as the Crown Prince naturally wished to take no part in the invasion of his native soil. Whilst, therefore,[78] Bernadotte remained to protect Belgium, Sir Thomas Graham, who, with General Bülow, had cleared Holland of the French, except such as occupied the fortress of Bergen-op-Zoom, remained to invest that stronghold, and Bülow and Winzengerode entered France by its northern frontier.After a week's popular tumult in his capital, the King's eyes were opened, and he conceived the idea of putting himself at the head of the popular movement, with a view, no doubt, of directing and controlling it. On the 18th of March he issued an ordinance against convoking a meeting of the Diet which had closed its Session only a fortnight before. In this document he stated that he demanded that Germany should be transformed from a confederation of States to one Federal State, with constitutional representation, a general military system after the Prussian model, a single Federal banner, a common law of settlement for all Germany, and the right of all Germans to change their abode in every part of the Fatherland, with the abolition of all custom-house barriers to commercial intercourse, with uniformity of weights, measures, and coinage, and liberty of the press throughout Germany. Thereby he placed himself at the head of the United Germany movement.