Napoleon
Page 80
On December 5, at the small town of Smorgoniye where, Bausset recalled, there was a ‘veterinary academy for the instruction of Russian dancing bears’, Napoleon informed Eugène, Berthier, Lefebvre, Mortier, Davout and Bessières that he ‘must return to Paris at the earliest possible moment if I am to overawe Europe and tell her to choose between war and peace’.133 He told them he would be leaving at ten o’clock that night, taking Caulaincourt, Duroc, Lobau, Fain and Constant with him.
He chose Murat to assume command of the army. The flamboyant marshal tried to hold the line of the Vistula after Napoleon left as reserves, new drafts and transferred units flowed towards Poland. Yet his task proved impossible in the face of the Russian advance. The Prussian General Johann Yorck von Wartenburg suddenly declared his troops’ neutrality under the terms of the Convention of Tauroggen, a non-aggression pact he concluded with the Russians on December 30 and negotiated in part by Carl von Clausewitz.134 Murat had to abandon first Poland, and then the line of the Oder. After secret talks with the Austrians, he suddenly left for Naples to try to save his throne, handing command of the Grande Armée over to Eugène. With Lefebvre, Mortier and Victor back in France, Oudinot and Saint-Cyr recovering from wounds and Ney now hors de combat from fatigue and nervous exhaustion, it was Eugène, Davout and Poniatowski who saved what remained of the Grande Armée. Together these three reorganized the corps, resupplied them and created the kernel of a new fighting force. Although the Moniteur stated that Murat was ill, a furious Napoleon told Eugène: ‘It would take very little for me to have him arrested by way of an example . . . He is a brave man on the field of battle, but he is totally devoid of intelligence and moral courage.’135
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‘The French are like women,’ Napoleon told Caulaincourt on the journey home. ‘You mustn’t stay away from them for too long.’136 He was all too aware of the effect that reports of his defeat would have in Vienna and Berlin, and was right to get back to Paris as quickly as possible.137 The remnants of the Grande Armée were only a day or two days’ march from Vilnius and relative safety.138 Although, as with the Egyptian campaign, many denounced his desertion – Labaume said the troops used ‘all the most vigorous epithets our language can supply, for never had men been more basely betrayed’ – Napoleon needed to be in Paris to deal with the political and diplomatic repercussions of the disaster.139 Castellane, who had lost a total of seventeen horses in the campaign, denied that the army felt outrage. ‘I saw nothing of the sort,’ he said. ‘Notwithstanding our disasters, our confidence in him was intact. We feared only that he might be made prisoner on the road.’ He added that the army understood Napoleon’s motives, ‘knowing well that his return alone could stop a revolt in Germany, and that his presence was necessary for the reorganization of an army which could be in a condition to come to our rescue.’140 After the Berezina crossing there were no clashes with the Russians until mid-February 1813. ‘When they know that I am in Paris,’ Napoleon said of the Austrians and Prussians, ‘and see me at the head of the nation and of 1,200,000 troops which I shall organize, they will look twice before they make war.’141
The celebrated diagram of French losses in Russia published in 1869 by Charles-Joseph Minard, Inspector-General of Roads and Bridges 1830–36. Lighter shading indicates the number of men entering Russia, black indicates those leaving. Minard assumed that the forces of Prince Jérôme and of Marshal Davout which were despatched to Minsk and Mogilev, and which re-joined in the vicinity of Orsha and Vitebsk, continued to march with the army. The parallel diagram below shows the temperature in Fahrenheit on the retreat.
Travelling under the alias of Count Gérard de Reyneval, ostensibly as part of Caulaincourt’s retinue, Napoleon covered the 1,300 miles over the winter roads from Smorgoniye to Paris in thirteen days, going via Vilnius, Warsaw, Dresden and Mainz (where he bought some sugar-plums for his son). In Warsaw he told the Abbé de Pradt, apropos the campaign, ‘There is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.’142 He was to repeat the line – which was to become one of his most famous – to Caulaincourt on the journey home. He met the King of Saxony in Leipzig (who exchanged his sleigh for a carriage) and sent his good wishes to Goethe when he passed through Erfurt. As the clock sounded a quarter to midnight on Friday, December 18, he descended from his carriage at the Tuileries.
The following morning he embarked on a full day’s work. He told Cambacérès, Savary, Clarke and Decrès that he had stayed too long in Moscow waiting for a reply to his peace offer. ‘I made a great error,’ he said, ‘but I have the means to repair it.’143 When a courtier who had not been on the campaign assumed ‘a very doleful air’ and remarked ‘We have, indeed, sustained a severe loss!’ Napoleon replied, ‘Yes, Madame Barilli is dead.’144 His reference to the celebrated opera singer mocked his courtier’s obtuse statement of the obvious, but the horrors of the retreat from Moscow had affected Napoleon deeply – no fewer than forty-four of his household servants had died during it.
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Once it reached safety the Grande Armée was meticulous in its bureaucracy. Typical of the records in the war ministry archives is a neatly written 150-page list of the 1,800 men who served in the 88th Line between 1806 and 1813, which records the name and serial number of each, his date and place of birth, both parents’ names, canton and department of both birth and residence, height, shape of face, size of nose and mouth, colour of eyes, hair and eyebrows, distinguishing features, date of either conscription or volunteering, date of arrival at the depot, profession, number of company and battalion, promotion history, details of all actions, wounds and honours, and date of demobilization or death.145 For entire demi-brigades that served in Russia, the list states over page after page ‘presumed captured by the enemy’, ‘prisoner-of-war’, ‘wounded’, ‘died’, ‘died of fever in hospital’, ‘dead in hospital of nervous fever’, ‘fell behind’, ‘deserted’, ‘certified absent’ or ‘unknown’. On some rare occasion the list records that one of the very few survivors went on ‘reform leave’, presumably in the hope he would eventually recover from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder.146
Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured. Many of those captured died over the coming years, and virtually none returned to France before Waterloo, although about 20,000 non-French volunteered to fight in the new Russian army that would soon be raised against Napoleon. Macdonald’s corps of 32,300 on the northern flank may have emerged largely unscathed, but half of them were Prussians who would soon be ranged against France, and Schwarzenberg’s 34,000 Austrians were now not to be trusted either. A further 15,000 survivors of the Berezina crossing had been lost on the retreat between there and Vilnius.* Ney was the last man to re-cross the Niemen on December 14, by which point he had barely four hundred infantry and six hundred cavalry with him, along with a grand total of nine cannon.147 (Although none died, four marshals were wounded during the campaign.) Stragglers returned in small numbers over the next few weeks, though a number of them were quietly murdered by Prussian villagers as they made their way westwards. The entire central force of the Grande Armée was now fewer than 25,000 men, of whom only about 10,000 were capable of combat.148 Even if one considers the French contingent of Macdonald’s corps and the 60,000 reinforcements coming from France, the army that Napoleon would have in Poland and Germany at the turn of the year was pitifully small, and greatly lacking in artillery and cavalry.149 Many units were at just 5 per cent of their strength: Davout’s corps of 66,000 was down to 2,200; of the 47,864 original effectives of Oudinot’s corps, only 4,653 remained; the Imperial Guard of 51,000 was left with a little over 2,000; of the 27,397 Italians who crossed the Alps, fewer than a thousand returned (and of the 350 members of the Italian Royal Guard, all but eight perished). Of the Dutch Grenadier Guard, only thirty-six survived out of five hundred.150 And out of the four hundred brave Dutch pontonniers who saved the army at the Bere
zina, only fifty ever saw Holland again.
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In late December 1812, Tsar Alexander dined with the Lithuanian novelist and noblewoman Sophie de Tisenhaus in Vilnius, which had been evacuated earlier that month by Murat. He spoke of Napoleon’s ‘light-grey eyes, which gaze at you so piercingly that you cannot withstand them’, and later: ‘What a career he has ruined! Having gained so much glory, he could bestow peace on Europe, and he has not done so. The spell is broken.’151 She noted that he repeated the last phrase several times.
26
Resilience
‘Posterity would never have seen the measure of your spirit if it had not seen it in misfortune.’
Molé to Napoleon, March 1813
‘He could sympathize with family troubles; he was indifferent to political calamities.’
Metternich on Napoleon, July 1813
‘On seeing what he created twenty days after his arrival in Paris,’ Marshal Saint-Cyr wrote in his memoirs, ‘we must agree that his brusque departure from Poland was wise.’1 Napoleon embarked upon a maelstrom of activity, recognizing that it could not be long before the Russians coalesced with the Prussians, and possibly with his father-in-law Emperor Francis of Austria too, first to expel France from Poland and Germany and then to try to overthrow him. In attempting to repair the Russian disaster Napoleon showed, in the view of Count Molé, who was shortly to be appointed minister of justice, ‘a furious activity which perhaps surpassed everything he had revealed hitherto’.2 Hortense, who hurried to the Tuileries, found her former stepfather preoccupied but resolute. ‘He seemed to me wearied, worried, but not disheartened,’ she wrote. ‘I had often seen him lose his temper about some trifle such as a door opened when it should have been shut or vice versa, a room too brightly or too dimly lighted. But in times of difficulty or misfortune he was completely master of his nerves.’ She sought to give him some comfort, saying ‘Surely, our enemies have suffered huge losses too?’ To which he replied, ‘No doubt, but that does not console me.’3
In less than seventeen weeks between returning to Paris in mid-December 1812 and setting off on campaign the following April, Napoleon incorporated the 84,000 infantry and 9,000 gunners of the National Guard into the regular army; called up 100,000 conscripts from the 1809–12 year groups and 150,000 from 1813 and 1814; formed thirty new infantry regiments consisting of dozens of new demi-brigades; ordered 150,000 muskets from arms factories; combed through the depots and garrisons for extra men; moved 16,000 marines from the navy to the army as well as veteran naval gunners to the artillery; demanded that the Empire’s 12,000 cantons each provide one man and one horse; ransacked the line army in Spain to rebuild the Imperial Guard; bought and requisitioned horses wherever they could be obtained; ordered the allies to rebuild their armies; and created Corps of Observation on the Elbe, on the Rhine and in Italy.4 The recruits called up were of course described in the Moniteur as ‘magnificent men’ but some were as young as fifteen and Molé noted at a review at the Carrousel that ‘their extreme youth and poor physique roused a deep pity among the crowds around them’.5 These young recruits were nicknamed ‘Marie Louises’, partly because the Empress had signed the orders for their conscription in Napoleon’s absence, and partly because of their innocent smooth-cheeked youth. The grognards referred to the newly recruited cavalrymen as ‘chickens mounted on colts’. Since the new French recruits had no time to train they were far less manoeuvrable in battle; one of the reasons for the unimaginative frontal assaults of the next two years was the need to keep undertrained masses moving together.
If Napoleon’s imperial rule had been tyrannical, one would have expected those parts of Europe that had endured it for the longest to be the first to rise up once he had been comprehensively humiliated, yet that was not what happened. East Prussia and Silesia, which hadn’t been occupied by the French, revolted in 1813, but the parts of Prussia that had been occupied since 1806, such as Berlin and Brandenburg, did not.6 Similarly Holland, Switzerland, Italy and much of the rest of Germany either didn’t rise against him at all or waited for their governments to declare against him, or sat passively until the Allied armies arrived. In France itself, apart from some bread riots in Brittany and minor trouble in the Vendée and Midi, no risings materialized – in 1813, 1814 or indeed 1815. Although much of France was heartily sick of war, and there was substantial local opposition to conscription, especially during harvest-time, the French did not want to oust their Emperor while he was fighting France’s enemies. Only those openly denouncing Napoleon were liable to arrest, and even this mild crackdown was carried out in a classically French eighteenth-century manner. When the royalist Charles de Rivière ‘proclaimed his hopes a little too spitefully and prematurely’, he was sent to La Force prison, but was later released when a friend won his freedom in a game of billiards against Savary.7 Some ambitious army officers even wanted the war to continue. ‘One thing disturbed us,’ wrote Captain Blaze of the Imperial Guard. ‘If, we said, Napoleon should stop short in so glorious a career, if he should unfortunately take it into his head to make peace, farewell to all our hopes. Luckily, our fears were not realized, for he cut out more work for us than we were able to perform.’8
Although they rarely draw much attention, Russian losses in 1812 were also enormous. Around 150,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and 300,000 wounded or frostbitten over the course of the campaign, and very many more civilians. Russia’s field army was down to 100,000 weary men and much of the area from Poland to Moscow had been devastated, depriving the Russian treasury of hundreds of millions of rubles in taxes, though Alexander remained utterly committed to destroying Napoleon. In early 1813 four Russian divisions crossed the Vistula and invaded Pomerania, forcing the French to evacuate Lübeck and Stralsund, though they left garrisons in Danzig, Stettin and other Prussian fortresses. On January 7 Sweden, which had hitherto been neutral under the terms of the 1812 Treaty of Åbo but was now under Bernadotte’s influence, declared war against France. Bernadotte told Napoleon that he was not acting against France but for Sweden, and that Napoleon’s seizure of Swedish Pomerania was the cause of the rupture – adding, however disingenuously, that he would always bear for his old commander the sentiments of a former comrade in arms.9 Apart from his natural inclination as a Frenchman not to shed French blood, Bernadotte recognized that doing so would mean for ever giving up his hopes, which had been stoked by Alexander, of one day becoming king of France.
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‘My army has suffered losses,’ Napoleon told the Senate on December 20, ‘due to the premature rigour of the season.’10 Using Yorck’s defection to whip up patriotic indignation, he set as his target to raise 150,000 men and ordered prefects to stage meetings in support of his recruiting drive. ‘Everything is in motion here,’ he told Berthier on January 9.11 It needed to be. The Russian army advanced 250 miles between Christmas Day 1812 and January 14 when they reached Marienwerder in Prussia, despite having to recapture Königsberg and other French strongholds in the depths of a northern winter.12 Eugène had no choice but to withdraw back to Berlin.
Napoleon was surprisingly open about the depth of his setback in Russia. ‘He is the first to speak about the misfortunes and he even brings them up,’ wrote Fain.13 Yet if the Emperor was willing to acknowledge his misfortune, he did not always do so truthfully. ‘There was not an affair in which the Russians captured either a gun or an eagle; they took no other prisoners but skirmishers,’ he told Jérôme on January 18. ‘My Guard was never engaged, and did not lose a single man in action, and it could not therefore have lost any eagles as the Russians declare.’14 The Guard lost no eagles because it had burned them at Bobr, but it suffered badly at the battle of Krasnoi, as Napoleon well knew. As for the Russians not capturing a single gun, something he also told Frederick VI of Denmark, Tsar Alexander conceived a scheme to build a massive column out of the 1,131 French cannon captured in the 1812 campaign. It never came to fru
ition, but scores of Napoleonic cannon can still be seen in the Kremlin today.15
In an effort to minimize domestic discontent, Napoleon concluded a new Concordat with the Pope at Fontainebleau in late January. ‘Perhaps we will achieve the much desired aim of ending the differences between State and Church,’ he had written on December 29. It seemed ambitious, but within a month a wide-ranging and comprehensive document had been signed covering most areas of disagreement.16 ‘His Holiness will exercise the Pontificate in both France and Italy,’ it began, ‘the Holy See’s ambassadors abroad will have the same privileges as diplomats . . . the domains of the Holy Father which are not alienated will not be subject to tax, those alienated will be compensated up to 2 million francs of income . . . the Pope will give canonical institution to the Emperor’s archdioceses within six months’ – that is, he would recognize Napoleon’s appointments as archbishops. Napoleon was also given permission to appoint ten new bishops.17 It was a good outcome for Napoleon, which the Pope immediately regretted and tried to renege upon. ‘Would you believe,’ Napoleon told Marshal Kellermann, ‘that the Pope, after having signed this Concordat freely and of his own accord, wrote to me eight days afterwards . . . and earnestly entreated me to consider the whole affair null and void? I replied that as he was infallible he could not be mistaken, and that his conscience was too quickly alarmed.’18
On February 7 Napoleon held a great parade at the Tuileries and a meeting of the Conseil d’État afterwards to set up a regency for periods when he would be away on campaign. The Malet conspiracy had rattled him and he wanted to protect himself against any renewed effort to take advantage of his absence. He was also keen to ensure that in the event of his death his son would be accepted even in infancy as his successor. (He had come a long way since his youthful fulminations against monarchs.) Under the nineteen-clause sénatus-consulte drawn up by Cambacérès, in the event of Napoleon’s death power would reside with Marie Louise, who would be advised by a Regency Council until the King of Rome came of age. Napoleon wanted Cambacérès to be the effective ruler of France, but with Marie Louise to ‘give the Government the authority of her name’.19 The meeting to establish the regency was attended by Cambacérès, Regnier, Gaudin, Maret, Molé, Lacépède, d’Angely, Moncey, Ney, the interior minister the Comte de Montalivet and the once-again forgiven Talleyrand. Napoleon, in Molé’s words, ‘though apparently calm and confident as to the campaign he was about to open, mentioned the vicissitudes of war and the fickleness of fortune in words which gave the lie to his imperturbable expression’.20 Ordering Cambacérès only to ‘show to the Empress what it is good for her to know’, Napoleon told him not to send her the daily police reports as ‘It’s pointless to speak to her of things which could worry her or sully her mind.’21