by Will Durant
Napoleon rode from Smorgonie in the first of three carriages, each mounted on a sleigh and drawn by two horses. One of the vehicles carried friends and aides of the Emperor; another bore an escort of Polish lancers. Napoleon rode with Caulaincourt, who arranged relays of horses, and with General Wonsowicz, who acted as interpreter. To him Napoleon handed two pistols, saying, “In case of real danger kill me rather than let me be taken.”66 Fearing capture or assassination, he disguised himself by exchanging costumes with Caulaincourt. “Passing through Poland,” Caulaincourt recalled, “it was always I who was the distinguished traveler, and the Emperor was simply my secretary.”67
The ride to Paris was continuous, night and day. The longest stop was at Warsaw, where Napoleon surprised the French representative, the Abbé de Pradt, with a now proverbial remark: “From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.”68 He wished to make another visit—to the Countess Walewska; but Caulaincourt dissuaded him,69 perhaps reminding him that his father-in-law was also an emperor. On the ride from Warsaw to Dresden, says Caulaincourt, Napoleon “praised the Empress Marie Louise constantly, telling of his home life with a feeling and simplicity that did one good to hear.”
At Dresden Napoleon and Caulaincourt released their sleigh and their Polish escort, and transferred to the closed carriage of the French ambassador. They reached Paris late on December 18, after thirteen days of almost continuous travel. Napoleon went directly to the Tuileries, made himself known to the palace guards, and sent a message to announce him to his wife; just before midnight he “rushed to the Empress’ bedroom and clasped her in his arms.”70 He dispatched a messenger to Josephine, assuring her that her son was safe; and warmed his heart with the sight of the curlyheaded infant whom he had named the King of Rome.
CHAPTER XXXVI
To Elba
1813–14
I. TO BERLIN
ALL Europe seemed to strain back to its eighteenth-century divisions as Napoleon rushed over its snows and through its cities to fortify his shaken throne; every old boundary became a crack in the baseless edifice of alien power. The Milanese, mourning sons who had been called to serve Napoleon in Russia and had never returned, prepared to unseat the amiable Eugène, absent viceroy of an absent king; the Romans, fond of the patient Pope who was still languishing in Fontainebleau captivity, prayed for his return to his Apostolic See; Neapolitan princes and populace watched for the moment when the ambitious Murat, slipping on his ego, would fall before a Bourbon anointed and legitimate. Austria, dismembered by war and humiliated by a harsh peace, waited anxiously for Metternich to free it, by some diplomatic finesse, from its forced alliance with its traditional enemy. The confederated states along the Rhine dreamed of a prosperity that would not have to be paid for by the surrender of their sons to an alien and uncontrollable genius. Prussia, shorn of half its territory and resources by its ancient enemy now its unwelcome ally, saw its despoiler shattered by a colossal calamity: here at last was the opportunity long prayed for; now it remembered Fichte’s call, and heard the exiled Stein’s appeal, to throw out those French troops that were patrolling them, those French indemnity-collectors that were bleeding them, and to stand free and strong as under Frederick, and become a bastion for German liberty.
Behind these kindred rebellions lay the surprising news that Russia had not only defeated the supposedly invincible Corsican, had not only expelled the French army from her soil, but was pursuing it over the frontier into the grand duchy of Warsaw, and was calling upon the heartland of Europe to join her in a holy war to overthrow the usurper who had made France the agent of his Continental tyranny.
On December 18, 1812—the day on which the beaten Napoleon reached Paris—Alexander left St. Petersburg. On the 23 rd he reached Vilna, and shared with Kutuzov and his army in celebrating victory. That army too had suffered on the march that escorted and gnawed at the departing French; a hundred thousand men had died, fifty thousand had been wounded, fifty thousand had deserted or been lost.1 Alexander publicly praised their general, but privately questioned his leadership. “All he did against the enemy,” he told Sir Robert Wilson (if we may believe Sir Robert), “was what he could not help doing, being driven to it by the force of circumstances. He was victorious in spite of himself…. I will not leave the army anymore, because I do not want to abandon it to the dangers of such a command.”2 Nevertheless, he conferred upon the tired warrior the highest Russian military decoration—the Grand Cross of the Order of St. George.
Convinced, by the fulfillment of his predictions, that he was in some way divinely inspired, and that he might proceed with all the forces of Providence behind him, Alexander overruled the hesitations of his general, took on the supreme command of his united armies, and ordered them to march to the western frontier. Avoiding Kovno, which was opposite to still hostile Poland, he continued along the Niemen to Tauroggen, where General Johann Yorck von Wartenburg, commanding a force of Prussians, allowed the Russians to cross the river into East Prussia (December 30, 1812). Stein, who had accompanied Alexander from St. Petersburg, urged him to proceed in the expectation that the people of Prussia would welcome him. The Czar proclaimed amnesty to all Prussians who had fought against him, and called upon the King and the people of Prussia to join him in his crusade. Frederick William III, torn between the French Eagle and the Russian Bear, refused to approve of Yorck’s action, and withdrew from Berlin to Breslau. Alexander advanced across East Prussia, and was greeted joyfully by the people with shouts of “Long live Alexander! Long live the Cossacks! “3
Approaching the boundary between East Prussia and Poland, the Emperor sent a message to the Polish leaders, promising amnesty, a constitution, and a kingdom with the czar of Russia as king. Apparently by a secret understanding between Russia and Austria, Prince Karl Philipp von Schwarzenberg, commanding Austrian troops in Warsaw, withdrew them to Galicia. The Polish authorities came out to welcome Alexander, and on February 7, 1813, he entered the capital unchallenged. The “grand duchy of Warsaw” came to this early death, and Poland in its entirety became a dependency of Russia. Prussia had hoped to recover that part of Poland which she had possessed in 1795; Alexander hastened to assure Frederick William III that an acceptable equivalent would soon be found for his lost share. Meanwhile he again urged the King and people of Prussia to join him against Napoleon.
The Prussians had long been waiting for such a call. They were a proud people, still remembering Frederick. The spirit of nationalism had been intensified by the quick expansion of France and the successful uprising of Spain. The middle classes were hot in protest against the Continental Blockade and the high taxes levied to pay the French indemnity. The Christians of Prussia were fond of their churches and jealous of their creeds, but all sects distrusted Napoleon as a secret atheist, and united in condemning his treatment of the Pope. The Tugenbund, or Union of Virtue, appealed to all Germans to come together in defense of their common V aterland. The King of Prussia allowed his ministers to rebuild and expand the Prussian Army on the pretext of defending Prussia against Alexander’s invasion. The Russians had taken Marienburg in January; on March 11 they marched unresisted into Berlin. Forced to a decision, the peace-loving king, from Breslau, issued “An mein Volk” (To My People), on March 17, a moving call to rise in arms against Napoleon:
… Brandenburgers, Prussians, Silesians, Pomeranians, Lithuanians! You know what you have borne for the past seven years; you know the sad fate that awaits you if we do not bring this war to an honorable end. Think of the times gone by—of the great Elector, the great Frederick! Remember the blessings for which your forefathers fought under their leadership, and which they paid for with their blood—freedom of conscience, national honor, independence, commerce, industry, learning. Look at the great example of our powerful allies, the Russians; look at the Spaniards, the Portuguese. Witness the heroic Swiss, and the people of the Netherlands….
This is the final, the decisive struggle; upon it depends our independence, our pros
perity, our existence. There are no other alternatives but an honorable peace or an heroic end….
We may confidently await the outcome. God and our own firm purpose will bring victory to our cause, and with it an assured and glorious peace, and the return of happier times.
All classes rose to the King’s call. The clergy—especially the Protestant-proclaimed a holy war against the infidel. Teachers—Fichte and Schleiermacher among them—dismissed their students, saying that the time called not for study but for action. Hegel remained above “the battle,” but Goethe gave his blessing to a regiment that saluted him in passing.4 Poets—Schenkendorf, Uhland, Rückert—put into verse the sentiments of King and people, or put their pens aside for muskets or swords; and some of them, like Theodor Körner, died in action. Ernst Moritz Arndt, returning from exile in Russia, helped to rouse and form the German spirit with his song “Was ist das Deutschen Vaterland?” In that “War of Liberation” a new Germany was born.
However, no nation, when its existence is at stake, can rely upon volunteers. So, on the day of his appeal to his people, Frederick William III ordered the conscription of all men between seventeen and forty years of age, and allowed no substitutes. When the spring of 1813 began, Prussia had 60,000 men trained and ready for service. Of the several armies that had come in from Russia some 50,000 men were fit for action. With these 110,000 troops5 Alexander and Frederick William entered upon the campaign that was to decide the fate of Napoleon and the structure of Europe.
They realized that this would not be enough, and they sought allies who could contribute men and funds. Austria for the time being chose to remain faithful to her alliance with France; she feared that she would be the first to be attacked if she joined the new coalition; and Francis II remembered that he had a daughter on the French throne. Prince Bernadotte had promised Alexander 30,000 men,6 but he had committed most of them to the conquest of Norway. England, as April ended, pledged two million pounds sterling to the new campaign. Prussia opened her ports to British goods, and soon these were coming in good quantity to storehouses on the Elbe.
Kutuzov died in Silesia on April 28, still advising the Russians to go home. Alexander summoned Barclay de Tolly to succeed Kutuzov in direct command of the Russian Army, but kept the supreme command himself. Now he set out to accomplish westward all that Napoleon had hoped to achieve eastward: to invade the enemy’s country, defeat his armies, capture his capital, force him to abdicate, and compel him to peace.
II. TO PRAGUE
Meanwhile Napoleon was fighting for survival in a France no longer fascinated by his victories. Almost every family in the country was now to yield another son or brother. The middle classes had welcomed Napoleon as their protector, but now he was more monarchical than the Bourbons, and he was courting royalists, who were plotting to depose him. Priests distrusted him; generals were praying for peace. He himself was weary of war. Heavy in the paunch, plagued with ailments, conscious of age, slowing in mind, hesitant in will, he could no longer draw from the elixir of victory the zest for combat, or the appetite for government. How could this tired man find in this tired nation the human resources demanded by the mounting onrush of his enemies?
Pride gave him his last power. That faithless Czar, that comely dancer playing general; that frightened weakling tying the great Frederick’s army to a Cossack horde; that turncoat French marshal proposing to lead a Swedish army against his native land—they would never match the gay courage and quick skill of a French soldier, the passionate strength of a nation challenged to defend those hard-won natural boundaries which guarded the finest civilization in Europe. “From now on,” said Napoleon in December, 1812, in a desperate appeal to racial pride, “Europe has only one enemy—the Russian colossus.”7
So he levied taxes, negotiated loans, and drew on his cellar hoard. He issued orders to put the conscript “class” of 1813 into active service, to prescript the class of 1814 for training, to prepare for foreign service the “cohorts” or militia that had been pledged to only domestic needs, to commission contracts for ammunition, clothing, weapons, horses, food. He arranged for teaching the new levies the arts and discipline of drill and march and battle; for stationing the trained battalions at specified encampments; for holding them ready to unite, at command, at a given place and time. By mid-April of 1813 he had organized an army of 225,000 men. He appointed Marie Louise regent, during his absence at the front; gave her his tried and tired secretary, Méneval; and left Paris on April 15 to meet his armies on the Main and the Elbe.
Eugène marched south with the remnants salvaged from the Russian debacle, reinforced with troops called from their stations in Germany. General Bertrand came up from the south. With these trusted men leading his left and right wings, Napoleon moved forward with his Army of the Main, and on May 2, at Lützen, near Leipzig, met an Allied army under the command of the Russian General Wittgenstein and under the eyes of Czar and King. The French now numbered 150,000, the Russians 58,000, the Prussians 45,000. Perhaps to encourage his recruits, the Emperor, savoring once more the thrills of combat, repeatedly risked himself at the front of the action; “this was probably the day in all his career,” wrote Marshal Marmont, “on which he ran the worst direct dangers on the field of battle.”8 The Allies acknowledged defeat, and retired by Meissen and Dresden; but the victorious French had lost 20,000 men—8,000 more than their foes.9 Napoleon was in part consoled by the decision of Frederick Augustus I, king of Saxony-worried neighbor of esurient Prussia—to add his army of 10,000 to the French. On May 9 his capital, Dresden, became Napoleon’s headquarters between campaigns.
Fearing that Austria would join the Allies to try to recapture north Italy, Napoleon sent Eugène to Milan to rebuild his army there and keep an eye on Italian revolutionists. He himself left Dresden on May 18, hoping to achieve a more decisive victory against the Allies, who had regrouped at Bautzen, thirty miles east of Dresden. He dispatched Ney to march in a half circle around them and attack them in the rear, while he himself would lead his main army in a frontal assault. Ney took his time, and joined the battle too late to prevent the Allies, defeated by Napoleon, from retreating into Silesia after losing 15,000 men. Napoleon advanced to the Oder, freed the French garrison at Glogau, and added its men to his army. Roger de Damas, an émigré, wrote in anger: “The French Empire has met the crisis and emerged triumphant.”10
At this moment, when he might have moved along the Oder, freed other garrisons, and added their trained men to his army, Napoleon listened to Metternich offering the mediation of Austria in arranging peace. Berthier for the Emperor’s generals, Caulaincourt for his diplomats, urged him to accept, fearing a long war by a united coalition with endless resources against a divided and depleted France. Napoleon suspected a trick, but hoped that an armistice would give him time to gather another crop of conscripts, and reinforcements for his cavalry; and he feared that a refusal would lead Austria into the Allied camp. An armistice was arranged at Pleisswitz (June 4) for two months, later extended till August 10. Napoleon withdrew his forces to Dresden, issued directions for the replenishment of his battalions, and went to Mainz to spend some time with Marie Louise; perhaps she could persuade her father to maintain the alliance of which she was a pledge. Meanwhile Metternich enlarged and provisioned the Austrian Army, alleging fear of the Allies.
These made good use of the armistice. They welcomed Bernadotte, who now committed his army of 25,000 men to the cause. With him came Moreau, who, convicted of friendly association with the plotters of Napoleon’s death, had been allowed to emigrate to America; now he offered his services to the Allies as one who knew the secrets of Napoleon’s strategy. He stressed one rule: avoid battle when Napoleon is commanding, seek it when he is away. The Allies were more pleased with Lord Cathcart, who, on June 15, gave them a subsidy of four million pounds in return for a pledge to make no peace with Napoleon without England’s consent.11
On June 27 the Allies, accepting Austria’s mediation, agreed tha
t all three parties should send negotiators to Prague to arrange terms of peace. Napoleon sent Narbonne and Caulaincourt, hoping that Alexander’s fondness for the latter, watched by the former, would incline the Czar to accommodations. In any case the terms offered to Napoleon through Caulaincourt and Metternich were what he might have considered reasonable in view of his defeat in Russia and Poland and the revolt of Prussia. He was asked to surrender all territory that he had taken from Prussia, and all claim to the duchy of Warsaw, the Hanseatic city-states, Pomerania, Hanover, Illyria, and the Confederation of the Rhine. He could go back to France with her natural boundaries still preserved, and his throne and dynasty still unchallenged. There was a serious flaw in the proposal: England had reserved the right to make additional demands, and no peace could be signed without her consent.
Napoleon sent to Prague a request for the Allies’ official confirmation of these terms. It reached him only on August 9, with a warning from Metternich that the congress and the armistice would expire at midnight of August 10; and that Napoleon’s acceptance must be received before that time. Napoleon sent a conditional acceptance, which did not reach Prague until Metternich had declared the congress and the armistice ended. On August 11 Austria joined the coalition against France, and the war was resumed.
