Napoleon

by Andrew Roberts

  By February 13 Napoleon had received the deeply ominous news that Austria was mobilizing a field army of at least 100,000 men. Shortly afterwards, Metternich offered to ‘mediate’ a European peace settlement – hardly the stance expected of an ally. A long talk with Molé in the billiards room of the Tuileries after dinner that evening laid bare Napoleon’s thinking on several issues. He spoke highly of Marie Louise, saying he saw something of her ancestress, Anne of Austria, in her. ‘She knows quite well that so-and-so voted for the death of Louis XVI, and also knows everyone’s birth and record,’ he said, yet she never showed bias towards the old nobility or against the regicides. He then spoke of the Jacobins who were ‘fairly numerous in Paris and particularly formidable’, but ‘As long as I am alive that scum will not move, because they found out all about me on 13th Vendémiaire and know that I’m always ready to stamp on them if I have any trouble.’22 He knew his foreign and domestic enemies would be ‘much more venturesome since the Russian disaster. I must have one more campaign and get the better of these wretched Russians: we must drive them back to their frontiers and make them give up the idea of leaving them again.’23 He went on to complain about his marshals: ‘There’s not one who can command the others and none of them knows anything but how to obey me.’24

  Napoleon told Molé that he had hopes for Eugène, despite the fact that he was ‘only a mediocrity’. He complained that Murat cried ‘fat tears on the paper’ when he wrote to his children and said he had suffered from ‘despondency’ during the retreat from Moscow, whereas:

  In my own case it’s taken me years to cultivate self-control to prevent my emotions from betraying themselves. Only a short time ago I was the conqueror of the world, commanding the largest and finest army of modern times. That’s all gone now! To think I kept all my composure, I might even say preserved my unvarying high spirits . . . Yet don’t think that my heart is less sensitive than those of other men. I’m a very kind man but since my earliest youth I have devoted myself to silencing that chord within me that never yields a sound now. If anyone told me when I was about to begin a battle that my mistress whom I loved to distraction was breathing her last, it would leave me cold. Yet my grief would be just as great as if I’d given way to it . . . and after the battle I should mourn my mistress if I had the time. Without all this self-control, do you think I could have done all I’ve done?25

  So rigid a control of one’s emotions might seem distasteful to the modern temperament, but at the time it was considered a classical virtue. It undoubtedly helped Napoleon deal with his extraordinary reversals of fortune.

  This self-control was in evidence when he spoke to the opening of the Legislative Body and Senate on February 14. A spectator recalled that he mounted the steps of the throne to cheers from the deputies, ‘though their faces betrayed infinitely more anxiety than his’.26 In his first full presentation to his deputies since his return from what he called the Russian ‘desert’, he explained the defeat by saying, ‘The excessive and premature harshness of the winter caused my army to suffer an awful calamity.’ He then announced an end to his ‘difficulties’ with the Pope, said that the Bonaparte dynasty would for ever reign in Spain and proclaimed that the French Empire had a positive trade balance of 126 million francs, ‘even with the seas closed’.27 (Three days later Montalivet published statistics that backed up everything the Emperor had claimed, as dictatorships so often do.) ‘Since the rupture which followed the treaty of Amiens, I have proposed peace [with Britain] on four occasions,’ he said, in this instance truthfully, after which he added: ‘I will never make any peace but one that is honourable and suitable to the grandeur of my empire.’28 The phrase ‘perfidious Albion’ had been employed occasionally ever since the Crusades (and had appeared in an ‘Ode on the Death of Lannes’) but it was in 1813, on Napoleon’s orders, that it came into general use.29

  The 1812 campaign had been disastrous for French finances. Until 1811 the franc had maintained its value against sterling, indeed it had slightly gained on it. The 1810 budget had seen a small surplus of 9.3 million francs, and bond yields were at a manageable 6 per cent. But after the infamous 29th bulletin, bonds – reflecting the lack of confidence in Napoleon’s future – shot up from 6 per cent to 10 per cent, and the budget deficit for 1812 of 37.5 million francs could be serviced only through new taxes and new sales of state property, which fetched a fraction of earlier sell-offs because their title was so insecure. When the public sale of 370 million francs’ worth of state-owned land raised only 50 million francs, sales taxes had to be increased by 11.5 per cent and land taxes by 22.6 per cent.30 Napoleon meanwhile made some personal economies, telling his chief steward that he wanted ‘fewer cooks, fewer plates, dishes, etc. On the battlefield, tables, even mine, shall be served with soup, a boiled dish, a roast, vegetables, no pudding.’31 Officers were no longer going to be able to choose between wine and beer, but would drink whatever they were given. On an interior ministry proposal to spend 10 per cent of a prefect’s salary on his funeral if he died in office, Napoleon scrawled: ‘Refused. Why look for occasions to spend more?’32 The Army of Catalonia would no longer be sent wine, brandy, oats and salted meats when there was plenty locally. ‘All the deals that are being made by General Dumas are madness,’ Napoleon wrote of the intendant-general’s plans for provisioning the Oder fortresses. ‘He apparently believes that money is nothing more than mud.’33 All state building projects had been suspended before the Russian campaign, and were never resumed. The years 1813 and 1814, when there was no sign that an end to mass mobilization and high military spending was in sight, produced still higher deficits.

  • • •

  Although in early January 1813 Frederick William III offered to have General Yorck court-martialled for concluding the non-aggression pact with the Russians at Tauroggen, he was merely biding time. Prussia had undergone a modernizing revolution since Tilsit, which meant that Napoleon now faced a very different enemy from the one he had crushed at Jena nearly seven years before. The country had reformed, with defeat as the spur and the Napoleonic administrative–military model as its template. Barons vom Stein and von Hardenberg and generals von Gneisenau and von Scharnhorst demanded a ‘revolution in the good sense’ which, by destroying ‘obsolete prejudices’, would revive Prussia’s ‘dormant strengths’. There had been major financial and administrative reforms, including the abolition of many internal tariffs, restrictive monopolies and practices, the hereditary bondage of the peasantry and restrictions on occupation, movement and land ownership. A free market in labour was created, taxation was harmonized, ministers were made directly responsible and the property, marriage and travel restrictions on Jews were lifted.34

  In the military sphere Prussia purged the high command (out of the 183 generals en poste in 1806, only eight still remained by 1812), opened the officer corps to non-nobles, introduced competitive examination in the cadet schools, abolished flogging, and mobilized her adult male population in the Landwehr (militia) and Landsturm (reserve). By 1813 she had put more than 10 per cent of her total population into uniform, more than any other Power, and over the next two years of almost constant fighting she lost the fewest through desertion.35 With a hugely improved general staff, Prussia was able to boast fine commanders in the coming campaigns, such as generals von Bülow, von Blücher, von Tauentzien and von Boyen.36 Napoleon was forced to admit that the Prussians had come on a great deal since the early campaigns; as he rather crudely put it: ‘These animals have learnt something.’37 It was hardly a consolation that they had learned much of it from him, just as Archduke Charles’s military reforms since Austerlitz had copied many Napoleonic practices and several of Barclay de Tolly’s reforms in Russia since Friedland had also echoed them. The wholesale adoption by all European armies of the corps system by 1812, making the Allies’ armies far more flexible in manoeuvre, was a tribute to the French, but also a threat to them.

  On February 28, 1813 Frederick Wil
liam signed the Treaty of Kalisch with Alexander, whereby the Tsar promised to restore Prussia to her pre-Tilsit borders and provide 150,000 troops if Prussia would send 80,000 to fight Napoleon. No sooner had the treaty been signed than the British began shipping arms, equipment and uniforms into the Baltic ports for use by both armies. Eugène was forced to abandon Berlin while leaving behind garrisons in Magdeburg, Torgau and Wittenberg. Because it was already besieging the French in Stettin, Küstrin, Spandau, Glogau, Thorn and Danzig, the Russian field army was down to 46,000 infantry and 10,000 Cossacks, although they were about to be joined by 61,000 Prussians. The Allied plan was to move on Dresden in order to detach Saxony from Napoleon, while sending Cossack units pouring across the north German plain to try to stir up rebellion in the Hanseatic Towns and the Rhine Confederation.

  ‘At the least insult from a Prussian town or village burn it down,’ Napoleon commanded Eugène on March 3, ‘even Berlin.’38 Fortunately burning the Prussian capital was no longer possible, since the Russians entered it that same day. ‘Nothing is less military than the course you have pursued,’ Napoleon raged to Eugène on hearing the news. ‘An experienced general would have established a camp in front of Küstrin.’39 He further complained that as he wasn’t getting daily reports from Eugène’s chief-of-staff, ‘I only learn what’s happening from the English press.’ He was even angrier with Jérôme, who complained about the high taxes that Westphalians had to pay to provision fortresses like Magdeburg. ‘These means are authorized by a state of war; they have constantly been employed since the world was the world,’ Napoleon raged in a characteristically blistering response. ‘You will see how much the 300,000 men cost that I have in Spain, all the troops which I have raised this year, and the 100,000 cavalry I am equipping . . . You always argue . . . All your arguments are nonsense . . . Of what use is your intelligence since you take such a wrong view? Why gratify your vanity by vexing those who defend you?’40 Before sending off a force to defend Magdeburg on March 4, Napoleon went through a familiar checklist with its commander: ‘Make absolutely certain that each man has a pair of shoes on his feet and two pairs in his knapsack; that his pay is up to date, and, if it isn’t, have the arrears paid. Make sure that each soldier has forty cartridges in his ammunition pouch.’41

  Writing to Montalivet, Napoleon said he was about to go to Bremen, Münster, Osnabrück and Hamburg, but in his new spirit of thrift his lodgings and guards of honour in those cities ‘must cost the country nothing’.42 It was a ruse, however, to deceive the enemy about his movement. It was just as well he didn’t go to Hamburg, however, as on March 18 Cossacks arrived and sparked a Hanseatic revolt just as the Allies hoped. Mecklenburg was the first state to defect from the Confederation of the Rhine. By late March the situation was so bad that Napoleon told Lauriston, now the commander of the Observation Corps of the Elbe, that he no longer dared to write to Eugène about his plans for the defence of Magdeburg and Spandau as he didn’t have a cipher code and ‘the Cossacks might intercept my letter.’43 To make things even worse, Sweden then agreed to contribute 30,000 men to the Sixth Coalition if Britain would subsidize her with £1 million, and in early April General Pierre Durutte’s small garrison was forced to evacuate Dresden.

  It was at this time that Napoleon spoke to Molé about the prospect of France returning to her ‘old’, pre-war borders of 1791. ‘I owe everything to my glory,’ he said.

  If I sacrifice it I cease to be. It is from my glory that I hold all my rights . . . If I brought this nation, which is so anxious for peace and tired of war, a peace on terms which would make me blush personally, it would lose all confidence in me; you would see my prestige destroyed and my ascendancy lost.44

  He compared the Russian disaster to a storm which shakes a tree to its roots but ‘leaves it still more firmly fixed in the soil from which it has failed to tear it’. Dubious arboreal analogies aside, he wanted to discuss the French nation: ‘It fears me more than it likes me and would at first regard the news of my death as a relief. But, believe me, that is much better than if it had liked me without fearing me.’45 (The contrast between being loved and feared of course echoes Machiavelli’s The Prince, a book with which he was very familiar.) Napoleon went on to say that he would beat the Russians as ‘they have no infantry’ and that the borders of the Empire would be fixed on the Oder as ‘The defection of Prussia will enable me to seek compensation.’ He also thought Austria would not declare war, because ‘The best act of my political career was my marriage.’46 In those last three points at least he was clearly trying to boost Molé’s morale without any real consideration of the facts of the situation.

  It was a measure of Napoleon’s resilience and resourcefulness – and of the confidence that he still commanded – that having returned from Russia with only 10,000 effectives from his central invading force, he was able within four months to field an army of 151,000 men for the Elbe campaign, with many more to come.47 He left Saint-Cloud at 4 a.m. on April 15 to take the field, with the kings of Denmark, Württemberg, Bavaria and Saxony and the grand dukes of Baden and Würzburg as allies, albeit some of them reluctant ones. ‘Write to Papa François once a week,’ he told Marie Louise three days later, ‘send him military particulars and tell him of my affection for his person.’48 With Wellington on the offensive in Spain, Murat negotiating with Austria over Naples, Bernadotte about to land with a Swedish army, fears of rebellion in western Germany and an Austria that was rearming quickly and at best only offering ‘mediation’, Napoleon knew he needed an early and decisive victory in the field. ‘I will travel to Mainz,’ he had told Jérôme in March, ‘and if the Russians advance, I will make plans accordingly; but we very much need to win before May.’49 The Allies grouping around Leipzig – commanded by Wittgenstein after Kutuzov’s death from illness in April – had massed 100,000 men; 30,000 of them were well-horsed cavalry, and they were being heavily reinforced. As a result of the equinocide in Russia the previous year, the rapidly reconstituted Grande Armée, by contrast, had only 8,540 cavalry.

  Napoleon reached Erfurt on April 25 and assumed command of the army. He was shocked to find how inexperienced some of his officers were. Taking captains from the 123rd and 134th Line to make them chefs de bataillon in the 37th Légère, he complained to his war minister General Henri Clarke: ‘It’s absurd to have captains who have never fought a war . . . You take young people just out of college who have not even been to Saint-Cyr [Military Academy], with the result that they know nothing, and you put them in new regiments!’50 Yet this was the material Clarke had to work with after the loss of over half a million men in Russia.

  Within three days of his arrival Napoleon had led the Grand Armée of 121,000 men back across the Elbe and into Saxony. His aim was to recover north Germany and relieve Danzig and the other besieged cities, to release 50,000 veterans, and hopefully sweep back to the line of the Vistula. Adopting the bataillon carré formation, he aimed for the enemy army at Leipzig with Lauriston’s corps in the van followed by Macdonald’s and Reynier’s corps on the left flank, Ney’s and General Henri Bertrand’s on the right and Marmont’s as the rearguard. On his left Eugène had a further 58,000 men. Poniatowski rejoined the army in May, but Napoleon sent Davout off to be governor of Hamburg, a dangerous underuse of his best marshal.

  • • •

  On May 1, while out reconnoitring enemy positions, Bessières was killed when a cannonball ricocheted off a wall and hit him full in the chest. ‘The death of this exalted man affected him much,’ Bausset recorded. Bessières had served in every campaign of Napoleon’s career since 1796. ‘My trust in you’, Napoleon had once written to him, ‘is as great as my appreciation of your military talents, your courage and your love of order and discipline.’51 (To calm her, he asked Cambacérès to ‘Make the Empress understand that the Duc d’Istrie [Bessières] was a long way away from me when he was killed.’52) He now wrote to Bessières’ widow saying: ‘The loss for you and your children is
no doubt immense, but mine is even more so. The Duc d’Istrie died the most beautiful death and suffered not. He leaves behind a flawless reputation: this is the finest inheritance he could bestow upon his children.’53 She might justifiably have taken issue with him as to whose loss was the greater, but his letter was heartfelt nonetheless, and accompanied by a generous pension.

  Napoleon now faced a force totalling 96,000 men.54 On Sunday May 2, when he was watching Lauriston’s advance, he heard that Wittgenstein had launched a surprise attack on Ney near the village of Lützen at ten o’clock that morning. Listening intently to the cannonading, he ordered Ney to hold his position while he twisted the army round, sending Bertrand to attack the enemy’s left and Macdonald its right in a textbook corps manoeuvre, with Lauriston forming the new reserve.55 ‘We have no cavalry,’ Napoleon said; ‘that’s all right. It will be an Egyptian battle; everywhere the French infantry will have to suffice, and I don’t fear abandoning myself to the innate worth of our young conscripts.’56 Many of these conscripts had received their muskets for the first time when they reached Erfurt only days before the battle, and some only the day before the battle itself.57 Yet the ‘Marie Louises’ performed well at Lützen.