Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  At about 8 p.m. some of Eugène’s Army of Italy got into the town of Deutsch-Wagram, although four of his generals were wounded and 2,000 Italians broke and fled. At 9 p.m. Bernadotte attacked Aderklaa with 9,000 Saxon infantry and 14 guns. The fighting was chaotic, but he continued until 11 p.m., losing half his force; he was voluble in his denunciations of Napoleon afterwards for having ordered the assault.49 Davout wisely called a halt to the attacks, and by 11 p.m. the fighting had died down. The Austrians had got the better of the first day. During the night, they launched eighteen fire-rafts down the Danube to take down the pontoon bridges, but they were stopped by the stakes the French had driven into the riverbed.

  • • •

  As Davout was preparing a dawn attack on Thursday the 6th, his aide-de-camp Colonel Lejeune ran into thousands of Austrians forming up for the attack but he couldn’t get back in time to warn the marshal.50 Fortunately, Davout was ready to meet the assault on Grosshofen when it came at 4 a.m., not least because Archduke Charles’s orders for absolute silence prior to the attack had not got through to the regimental bandsmen. Napoleon, disturbed at breakfast by the din on his right flank and fearing that Archduke Johann had arrived from the east, sent some heavy cavalry reserves to help Davout. Over the next two hours the Austrians took and then lost Grosshofen.

  Bernadotte fell back from Aderklaa without orders to do so, allowing the Austrians to take the village for no losses, as an artillery duel commenced between the two grand batteries. At 7.30 a.m., having consulted Masséna, Napoleon had to order the recapture of Aderklaa by Saint-Cyr’s French and Hessian division, which was successful after fierce fighting and a musketry duel conducted at only eighty paces. During the day, Aderklaa – so nonchalantly evacuated by Bernadotte – saw 44,000 Austrians engage 35,000 French and Germans. ‘Is that the scientific manoeuvre by which you were going to make the Archduke lay down his arms?’ Napoleon asked Bernadotte sarcastically, after which he removed him from command with the words: ‘A bungler like you is no good to me.’51 By 9.45 a.m. General Molitor from Masséna’s corps retook Aderklaa, but many men had died as a result of Bernadotte’s unforced error.

  At 10 a.m., using a watchtower on the heights above Markgrafneusiedl as his aiming-point, Davout sent 10,000 cavalry across the open plain to the right, sweeping aside the Austrian cavalry and providing room for Friant’s and Morand’s infantry divisions to advance, forcing the Austrians to extend the line in order to prevent their flank being turned.* If Archduke Johann had arrived at this point it could have been disastrous for Napoleon, but he had allowed his men a lunch stop on the way and told his brother he couldn’t arrive before 5 p.m., so Charles now had to commit his reserves. When Johann’s scouts finally arrived they advised him that the battle was lost and there was no point in his coming out onto the field at all, so he didn’t. Anyone other than the Emperor’s brother would have faced a court martial for this decision.

  Markgrafsneusiedl was now the key to the Austrian position. An escarpment turns north-east there and the slopes are gentle. The village is just below. Fierce house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting took place between the stone houses, the windmill, the monastery and old moated church, but unco-ordinated Austrian counter-attacks failed to retake what was soon a burning village. Astonishingly, Napoleon – who had spent sixty of the previous seventy-two hours in the saddle – took one of his ten-minute naps at about this point of the battle, a measure of his sangfroid as much as of his exhaustion. When he woke and saw that Markgrafneusiedl was still in Davout’s hands, he pronounced the battle won.52 Napoleon’s ability to sleep on a battlefield with 700 cannon firing is all the more remarkable considering that on or near the Raasdorf knoll that served as his headquarters no fewer than twenty-six staff officers were killed or wounded that day. Both the men commanding the two regiments composing the Guard Chasseurs à Cheval lost a leg: Major Pierre Daumesnil, who was riddled with wounds and was admired by the whole army, lost his left leg, while his friend Major Hercules Corbineau, brother of Napoleon’s aide-de-camp who had died at Eylau, lost his right. (When Corbineau went to Napoleon years later to discuss the deposit he needed to put down before he could become a tax inspector in the Seine department, the Emperor is credited with saying that he would take his leg in lieu of any need for a down-payment.) After a howitzer shell caused Napoleon’s horse to shy, Oudinot exclaimed, ‘Sire, they are firing on the headquarters.’ ‘Monsieur,’ the Emperor replied, ‘in war all accidents are possible.’53 And when a staff officer had his helmet knocked off by a cannonball, Napoleon joked: ‘It’s a good job you’re not any taller!’54

  When shortly before 11 a.m. Archduke Charles sent 14,000 men marching along the Danube towards the Lobau bridgehead, hoping to cut off Napoleon’s line of retreat and get behind the French lines, Masséna’s corps undertook one of the most ambitious manoeuvres of the campaign, marching 5 miles right across the battlefield, directly in front of two Austrian corps.55 Napoleon then ordered Bessières to launch a cavalry attack at the junction between Kollowrath’s corps and the Austrian grenadier reserves. He watched as 4,000 heavy cavalrymen rode past him crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, to which he replied, ‘Ne sabrez pas: pointez, pointez’ (Don’t slash, use the points of your swords, use the points).56 Bessières’ horse was shot from under him and Bessières himself was hit by a cannonball and taken from the field. Napoleon urged those who knew not to draw attention to what had happened as he feared it would affect morale. Once Bessières recovered he teased him that that his absence cost him 20,000 prisoners.57 His charge was the last decisive use of cavalry on a Napoleonic battlefield, just as the battle as a whole was the start of the dominance of artillery. Cavalry would no longer be the pivotal arm in warfare, though it was to take many decades before this was fully appreciated.

  The French lost huge numbers of horses at Wagram, but Bessières’ charge bought time for the deployment of Lauriston’s massive Grand Battery of 112 guns. These included sixty 12-pounders of the Imperial Guard artillery – his ‘cherished daughters’ – in the centre of the battlefield. He pounded the Austrian positions with 15,000 rounds, which bounced often on the flat hard ground and set the cornfields alight, burning many of the wounded to death. The battlefield resounded with a gigantic percussive din.

  When the Austrians fell back, the Grand Battery pushed forward. Napoleon asked for twenty volunteers from each company of the Old Guard infantry to run forward to help manoeuvre and service these guns, and he got them. At about 1 p.m., as Davout advanced along the Russbach, Napoleon ordered Macdonald to make an attack that would pin down the Austrian reserve formations and stop them from moving against Davout. Macdonald had hoped to be raised to the marshalate when it was first created in 1804, but his republican politics – he still wore his old uniform with its tricolour sash – and his friendship with Moreau had precluded that. As Eugène’s immensely competent second-in-command, he had done very well in Italy, and at Wagram he performed superbly. His 8,000 men now formed a gigantic, hollow, open-backed square 900 yards wide and 600 yards deep, which he marched towards the Austrian line, with cavalry covering its open back. It was the last time such a formation was used in the Napoleonic Wars because it was so hard to control; the front battalions could fire but not those behind them, and it naturally drew much artillery fire. Nonetheless, there was far too much Austrian cavalry near by not to have the men in square. The formation also made it look as though Macdonald had far more men than he really did.

  Although it took heavy casualties, Macdonald’s square – supported by the light cavalry of the Army of Italy on the right and heavy cavalry on the left, and with covering fire from the Grand Battery – bought the time necessary for Masséna and Davout to outflank the Austrian right and left respectively. Seeing that Macdonald needed further support, Napoleon released Wrede’s 5,500-strong Bavarian Division and some of the Young Guard. (Lightly wounded in this attack, Wrede melodramatically cried out, ‘Tell the Emperor I die for h
im!’ only to receive the robust reply from Macdonald: ‘You’ll live; tell him yourself.’58)

  At 2 p.m. Archduke Charles decided on a phased withdrawal. The Grenadiers and Reserve Cavalry covered each other as the villages of Stadlau, Kagran, Leopoldsdau and Strebersdorf continued to be contested. There was no sign of panic. It was at this late stage of the battle that the brilliant French cavalry general Antoine de Lasalle – who had distinguished himself at Austerlitz, Eylau and Stettin, saved Davout’s life in Egypt, broken seven swords in the 1800 campaign and saved Murat’s life at Heilsberg – was shot dead at the head of his men. ‘Any trooper who is not dead by thirty is a coward,’ he had once said of the hussars, ‘and I don’t anticipate exceeding that length of time.’59 He was thirty-three.

  Some of the French units had spent forty hours in almost continuous action, and most were simply too exhausted to pursue the enemy. As he shared some soup, bread and chicken with a voltigeur at around 7 p.m., Napoleon recognized that he could not follow up his victory on the field. Although the name of Wagram is to be found in marble alongside Austerlitz and Arcole at the foot of Napoleon’s tomb at Les Invalides, in fact it was something of a pyrrhic victory. No fewer than 30,000 men of the Grande Armée were killed or wounded at Wagram and 4,000 captured, and it lost many of its horses, eleven guns, three eagles and nine colours. The Austrian losses, at 23,000 killed and wounded and 18,000 captured, were substantial, but they lost only nine guns and one colour owing to their disciplined withdrawal back towards Znaïm. ‘The whole French army got drunk the night after the battle of Wagram,’ Captain Blaze recalled. ‘The vintage was good, the quantity abundant, the soldiers drank immoderately.’60 After two such days, they deserved it.

  • • •

  ‘No rancour,’ Napoleon said to Macdonald afterwards, in recognition of their past political differences; ‘from today we’ll be friends, and I will send you, as proof, your marshal’s baton that you won so gloriously yesterday.’61 It was one of only two battlefield batons Napoleon ever bestowed, the other being Poniatowski’s during the battle of Leipzig. Despite his disapproval of Oudinot’s high losses on the first day, and his criticisms of Marmont’s tardiness in crossing the Danube, they too received batons a week later. Marmont was only thirty-four, bringing the average age of the active-duty marshalate down to forty-three. These three post-Wagram creations were described by the soldiers at the time as ‘One for friendship, one for France, and one for the army’, as Marmont had been with Napoleon since Toulon, Macdonald was a fine soldier and Oudinot was beloved by his men.62

  ‘My enemies are defeated, thrashed, in full rout,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine at 2 a.m. on the night after the battle; ‘they were very numerous; I have crushed them. My health is good today.’63 Three hours later he told her that he had captured one hundred guns – an absurd exaggeration – and complained of sunburn. A further, inconclusive battle was fought by Marmont against Archduke Charles at Znaïm on July 10–11, and Napoleon accepted the Archduke’s offer of an armistice the next day. He wasn’t to see a battlefield again for another three years.

  Francis I refused the armistice agreed between Napoleon and Archduke Charles six days after Wagram. Some 40,000 British troops had just landed on Walcheren Island in Holland, carried in 35 ships-of-the-line and 200 other vessels, and he wished to see how Britain’s attack developed before he sued for peace. The expedition was a disaster: it was immediately struck down by a malarial-dysentery infection that disabled half the men and killed over 10 per cent of them (as against only 106 lost in battle). ‘Fever and inundation will render an account of the English,’ Napoleon wrote to his war minister Henri Clarke with remarkable foresight as early as August 9. ‘As long as they remain on the island of Walcheren there is nothing to fear . . . Allow them to lash their buttocks in the marshes and pursue the shadow of a prey.’64 With 11,000 sick soldiers, the expedition limped home just before Christmas. Fouché had acted quickly, raising a large army to protect Antwerp should the British land there too, but Napoleon was only mildly impressed: ‘You might take it into your head to raise an army against me!’ he shot back.65 Even before that, in September, Francis acknowledged that the Walcheren expedition could not save him, and Austria began negotiations to end the War of the Fifth Coalition.

  22

  Zenith

  ‘Everyone knows that the ties of family count for very little in political calculations, and are nullified after twenty years. Philip V waged war against his grandfather.’

  Napoleon to Tsar Alexander, July 1808

  ‘Ought princesses to fall in love? They are political chattels.’

  Napoleon on St Helena

  ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the other powers,’ Napoleon baldly stated, ‘with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is best placed for that purpose.’1 When he came to power, France’s population (then the largest in Europe), agricultural production, scientific advances, opera, furniture, painting, design, theatre and literature, together with the ubiquity of its language and the size and beauty of Paris, all combined to make it the leading as well as the predominant nation in Europe.

  In his belief in rational progress and in the possibility of benificent dictatorship, Napoleon was the last of the Enlightened absolutists who had emerged so frequently in Europe since the late seventeenth century; his own reverence for its most famous exemplar, Frederick the Great, underscored this identification. He believed, as many Frenchmen did, that modern ideas of governance could be spread across Europe through the agency of the Grande Armée.2 ‘You have nothing but special laws,’ he told an Italian delegation at Lyons in 1805, ‘henceforth you must have general laws. Your people have only local habits; it is necessary that they should take on national habits.’3 For many German and Italian public officials, Napoleon’s Empire, in the words of the British historian H. A. L. Fisher, ‘shattered the obdurate crust of habit and substituted wide ideals of efficient combination for narrow, slovenly, lethargic provincialism’.4 By 1810 he was moving towards a progressive unitary Empire with uniform laws based on the Napoleonic Code, enlightened secularism and religious toleration, equality before the law, and uniform weights, measures and currency.5 Yet the French administrative model was almost never simply imposed on conquered territories so much as adapted subtly according to prevailing local circumstances. If the Code was likely to create resistance and impede ‘contributions’ and recruitment, then its implementation was delayed.6 In Bavaria and Baden, for example, administrators totally overhauled all the state structures in the Napoleonic manner, whereas in less Francophile Mecklenburg and Saxony next to no reforms were made.7

  Napoleon’s political support from inside the annexed territories came from many constituencies: urban elites who didn’t want to return to the rule of their local Legitimists, administrative reformers who valued efficiency, religious minorities such as Protestants and Jews whose rights were protected by law, liberals who believed in concepts such as secular education and the liberating power of divorce, Poles and other nationalities who hoped for national self-determination, businessmen (at least until the Continental System started to bite), admirers of the simplicity of the Code Napoléon, opponents of the way the guilds had worked to restrain trade, middle-class reformers, in France those who wanted legal protection for their purchases of hitherto ecclesiastical or princely confiscated property, and – especially in Germany – peasants who no longer had to pay feudal dues.8 Yet although Napoleon wanted all traces of feudal entitlements, entailments and privileges abolished, some parts of the Empire, such as Westphalia, Poland, Spain, Illyria (the western Balkans) and Calabria, were so backward that they remained feudal in all but name.9 If his system was to work smoothly, what it most needed was time.

  Of course some Legitimist governments had attempted to modernize before Napoleon, but they had tended to encounter resistance from Church hierarchies, privileged orders, en
trenched guilds, obstructive judiciaries, penny-pinching parlements, reactionary nobilities and a suspicious peasantry.10 Because the Napoleonic state had so much more capacity than any of its predecessors Napoleon could slice through these Gordian knots and deliver what has been described as a ‘systematic reorganisation of the administrative, bureaucratic and financial institutions’ of the wider Empire.11 The result was a hierarchical and uniform administration controlled from Paris in which, in the words of an admiring contemporary, ‘the executive chain descends without interruption from the minister to the administered and transmits the law and the government’s orders to the furthest ramification of the social order’.12 It was the fulfilment of the dream of the eighteenth-century enlightened despots.

  To large numbers of people across Europe Napoleon seemed to represent the ideas of progress, meritocracy and a rational future. When Count Maximilian von Montgelas, effectively the prime minister of Bavaria, secularized the monasteries, introduced compulsory education and vaccination, instituted examinations for the civil service, abolished internal tolls and extended civil rights to Jews and Protestants in Bavaria between 1806 and 1817, he did so because it conformed to what he called the Zeitgeist (spirit of the age).13 Why should an Italian, Dutch, Belgian or German lawyer, doctor, architect or businessman prefer to be ruled by some inbred princeling than by Napoleon, a member of the Institut de France who believed in opening careers to the talents? Of course practically they often had little choice but to serve the French in the short term, but for many the advent of French military victory gave them an opportunity to adopt modern practices from a revolutionary system shorn of the guillotine and the Terror. Nor were they required to like Napoleon or the French to appreciate that their ways were more efficient. In Italy, for example, the system of tax collection instituted by Napoleon lasted for a century after his fall, and the Rhineland kept the Code Napoléon as its system of law until 1900.14 It is a myth, however, that Napoleon was a believer in pan-Europeanism; in 1812 he propagated the idea that he was the defender of European Christian civilization, holding back the barbarian Asiatic hordes of Russia, and made much of the idea of European unity when constructing his legacy, but his Empire was always primarily a French construct, not a European one.