Napoleon
Page 83
On June 19 Talma, his former mistress from ten years previously Marguerite Weimer (whose stage name was Mademoiselle George) and fifteen other actors arrived in Dresden. There’s no indication that Napoleon had specifically asked for Mademoiselle George to come, but he appeared to be grateful for the distraction of theatre. ‘A remarkable change took place in Napoleon’s taste,’ remarked his chamberlain, Bausset, ‘who until this time had always preferred tragedy.’87 Now he chose only comedies to be performed and plays that drew closely observed ‘delineations of manner and characters’. Perhaps he had seen quite enough genuine tragedy by then.
• • •
The following week Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise: ‘Metternich arrived in Dresden this afternoon. We shall see what he has to say and what Papa François wants. He is still adding to his army in Bohemia; I’m strengthening mine in Italy.’88
What precisely happened during the eight-hour – some accounts say nine-and-a-half-hour – meeting in the Chinese Room of the Marcolini Palace in Dresden on June 26, 1813 is still a matter of speculation, since only Napoleon and Metternich were present and they gave contradictory accounts. Yet taking the most unreliable narrative, Metternich’s memoirs written decades later, and comparing it with the other available sources – Metternich’s own short official report to Francis of that same day, a letter Metternich wrote to his wife Eleonore two days later, Napoleon’s contemporaneous report to Caulaincourt, Maret’s report to Fain published in 1824 and some remarks Napoleon made to the Comte de Montholon six weeks before he died – it is possible to arrive at a fair understanding of what transpired in the climactic encounter that would do so much to determine the fate of Europe.89
Napoleon began the meeting shortly after 11 a.m. hoping to browbeat Metternich, the most imperturbable statesman in Europe, into dropping Austria’s plans for mediation. He thought he could persuade him to return to the French camp. Metternich, by contrast, was determined to arrive at a negotiated peace agreement covering all the outstanding territorial issues over Germany, Holland, Italy and Belgium. The vast discrepancy in their respective positions partly explains the length of the meeting. As the diplomat who had negotiated Napoleon’s marriage, in Vienna Metternich was considered pro-French. He had (at least publicly) shown dismay when the Grande Armée was shattered in Russia. Was he vague as to the precise terms of the peace, as Napoleon later charged? Or was he deliberately employing delaying tactics to allow his country to rearm? Was he demanding more than he thought Napoleon could ever give in the hope of making him look unreasonable? Or did he really want peace but thought it could be assured only on the basis of massive French withdrawals across Europe? Given Metternich’s mercurial inconsistency, he was probably driven by an ever-changing mélange of several of these motives and others. He certainly thought that Dresden was the moment when he, rather than Napoleon, could decide the fate of the continent. ‘I am making all of Europe revolve around the axis that I alone determined months ago,’ he boasted to his wife, ‘at a time when all around me thought my ideas were insignificant follies or hollow fantasies.’90
There are several contradictions in the various reports of the meeting. Napoleon admitted he threw his hat on the ground at one stage: Metternich told his wife that Napoleon threw it ‘four times . . . into the corner of the room, swearing like the Devil’.91 Fain said that Napoleon agreed to participate in the Congress of Prague at the end of the meeting; Metternich said it was four days later, as he was stepping into his carriage to leave Dresden. Metternich claimed to have warned Napoleon, ‘Sire, you are lost!’, and Napoleon accused him of being in the pay of the English.92 This last remark was a stupid one; on his deathbed Napoleon admitted it had been a disastrous faux pas, turning Metternich into ‘an irreconcilable enemy’.93 Although Napoleon tried to make amends almost immediately, pretending it had been a joke, and although the two men seem to have ended the meeting on civil terms, Metternich emerged convinced – or so he claimed – that Napoleon was incorrigibly committed to war.
‘Experience is lost on you,’ Metternich has Napoleon tell him. ‘Three times I have replaced the Emperor Francis on his throne. I have promised always to live in peace with him; I have married his daughter. At the time I said to myself you are perpetrating a folly; but it was done, and today I repent of it!’94 Napoleon digressed on the strength and strategy of the Austrian forces and boasted that he knew their dispositions down to ‘the very drummers in your army’. Going into his study, they spent over an hour going over his daily list from Narbonne’s spies, regiment by regiment, to prove how good his intelligence network was.
When Metternich brought up the ‘youthful’ nature of the French army, Napoleon is alleged to have snapped, ‘You are no soldier, and you do not know what goes on in the mind of a soldier. I was brought up in the field, and a man such as I am does not concern himself much about the lives of a million men.’95 In his memoirs Metternich wrote, ‘I do not dare to make use of the much worse expressions employed by Napoleon.’ Napoleon has been heavily criticized for this line about the million lives, which has been taken as prima facie evidence that he cared nothing for his soldiers, yet the context was critical – he was desperately trying to convince Metternich that he was perfectly willing to return to war unless he received decent peace terms. It was bluster, not the heartless cynicism it has been represented as being. If indeed he ever said it at all.
The terms Metternich demanded for peace went far beyond the restitution of Illyria to Austria. He seems to have asked Napoleon for the independence of half of Italy and the whole of Spain, a return to Prussia of almost all the lands taken from her at Tilsit, including Danzig, the return of the Pope to Rome, the revocation of Napoleon’s protectorate of the German Confederation, the evacuation of French troops from Poland and Prussia, the independence of the Hanseatic ports and the abolition of the Duchy of Warsaw. At one point Napoleon shouted from the map room adjoining his study, so loudly that the entourage heard, that he did not mind giving up Illyria but the rest of the demands were impossible.96
Napoleon had told his court several times that the French people would overthrow him if he signed a ‘dishonourable’ peace sending France back to her pre-war borders, which is effectively what Metternich was demanding. His police reports were currently indicating that the French people wanted peace far more than la Gloire, but he knew that national glory was indeed one of the vital four pillars – along with national property rights, low taxation and centralized authority – that bolstered his rule. Metternich might have been sincere in his desire for peace (though the words ‘Metternich’ and ‘sincerity’ tend to sit uncomfortably together at the best of times) but he clearly asked far too much as a price for it.
‘I had a long and wearisome talk with Metternich,’ Napoleon told Marie Louise the next day. ‘I hope peace will be negotiated in a few days’ time. I want peace, but it must be an honourable one.’97 That same day, Austria secretly signed a second Treaty of Reichenbach, with Prussia and Russia, in which she promised to go to war with France if Napoleon rejected peace terms at Prague. This, of course, had the effect of increasing the terms that Prussia and the by then irreconcilable Russia would demand.
Napoleon met Metternich again on June 30, this time for a four-hour conference at which they extended the armistice to August 10 and Napoleon accepted Austrian mediation at the Prague Congress, set to start on July 29. ‘Metternich,’ Napoleon told his wife afterwards, ‘strikes me as an intriguer and as directing Papa François very badly.’98 Although Napoleon denounced it as ‘unnatural’ for Emperor Francis to make war on his son-in-law, he himself had demanded that Charles IV of Spain make war against his son-in-law, the King of Portugal, in 1800, so he was not on very sure ground.
Napoleon’s position at the coming Congress was severely weakened when the news arrived on July 2 of Wellington’s crushing victory over Joseph and his chief-of-staff Marshal Jourdan at the battle of Vitoria in northern Spain on June
21, which cost Joseph 8,000 men and virtually the entire Spanish royal art collection. (It can today be seen at Apsley House in London. Jourdan’s red velvet marshal’s baton studded with golden bees is today on display outside the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor Castle.) Napoleon said the defeat at Vitoria was ‘because Joseph slept too long’, which is absurd.99 At the time, he wrote to Marie Louise to say that Joseph ‘is no soldier, and knows nothing about anything’, though that begs the question why he gave his brother overall command of an army of 47,300 men against the greatest British soldier since Marlborough.100 The trust and affection between the brothers had almost completely broken down over the disasters in Spain, for which each blamed the other. Five days later Napoleon told Marie Louise that if Joseph took up residence at his lovely Château de Mortefontaine in the Oise, with its islets, orangery, aviary, two parks and some of the finest landscaped gardens in Europe, then ‘it must be incognito and you must ignore him; I will not have him interfere with government or set up intrigues in Paris.’ He ordered Soult to take command of Joseph’s shattered army, with the very competent generals Honoré Reille, Bertrand Clauzel, Jean-Baptiste d’Erlon and Honoré Gazan as his principal lieutenants, hoping to protect Pamplona and San Sebastián.
On July 12 the Russian, Prussian and Swedish general staffs met at Trachenberg to co-ordinate strategy in the event that the Prague Congress should fail. It was one of those rare occasions when leaders showed they had learned the lessons of history. Appreciating that Napoleon had often outflanked enemy armies and then punished the centre, they accepted the Austrian General Joseph Radetzky’s strategy to divide their forces into three armies that would advance into Saxony, not offering battle to Napoleon himself, but instead withdrawing before him and concentrating on the inferior forces of his lieutenants. If one of the Allied armies was attacked by Napoleon, the other two would attack his flank or rear. The idea was to force Napoleon to choose between three options: going on the defensive, leaving open his lines of communication or dividing his forces.101 The Trachenberg strategy was explicitly tailored to counteract Napoleon’s military genius and it would be used to tremendous effect.
• • •
The Congress of Prague finally met on July 29. Caulaincourt and Narbonne represented France. ‘Russia is entitled to an advantageous peace,’ Napoleon told Fain at this time:
she would have bought it by the devastation of her provinces, by the loss of her capital and by two years of war. Austria, on the contrary, doesn’t deserve anything. In the current situation, I have no objection to a peace that might be glorious to Russia; but I feel a true repugnance to seeing Austria, as a price for the crime she committed by violating our alliance, collect the fruits and honours of the pacification of Europe.102
He did not wish to reward Francis and Metternich for what he saw as their scheming perfidy. After receiving intelligence reports from his spies, he warned his marshals on August 4 that ‘Nothing is happening at the Congress of Prague. They will arrive at no result, and the Allies intend to denounce the armistice on the 10th.’103
On August 7 Metternich demanded that the Grand Duchy of Warsaw be repartitioned, that Hamburg (which Davout had captured before the armistice) be liberated, that Danzig and Lübeck become free cities, that Prussia be reconstructed with a border on the Elbe and that Illyria, including Trieste, be ceded to Austria.104 Despite the fact that it would have meant forswearing the last seven years, leaving allies in the lurch and rendering the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives in vain, almost every other statesman of the day would have agreed to these terms. But the Emperor of France, the heir to Caesar and Alexander, simply could not bring himself to accept what he saw as a humiliating peace.
27
Leipzig
‘Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.’
Napoleon, statement in the Moniteur, December 1804
‘When two armies are in order of battle, and one has to retire over a bridge while the other has the circumference of the circle open, all the advantages are in favour of the latter.’
Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 25
‘There’s not an ounce of doubt that the enemy will call off the armistice on the 10th and that hostilities will recommence on the 16th or 17th,’ Napoleon warned Davout from Dresden on August 8, 1813. He predicted that Austria would then send 120,000 men against him, 30,000 against Bavaria and 50,000 against Eugène in Italy.1 Nonetheless, he concluded: ‘Whatever increase in forces this gives to the Allies, I feel able to face up to them.’ His birthday celebrations were therefore brought forward five days, to August 10; they were to be the last formally held while he ruled France. The Saxon cavalry colonel Baron Ernst von Odeleben recalled in his memoirs the two-hour review of 40,000 soldiers, a Te Deum sung at Dresden cathedral accompanied by the roar of artillery salutes, the Imperial Guard banqueting with the Saxon Royal Guard under the linden trees by the Elbe, bands playing martial airs, every soldier receiving double pay and double meat rations, and the King of Saxony giving thousands of bottles of wine to the troops. As for Napoleon, ‘the vivats resounded as he passed along the ranks at a full gallop, attended by his brilliant suite.’ Few would have predicted that the French and Saxon artillerymen who ‘caroused together’ would within weeks be firing on each other. At 8 p.m. Napoleon visited the King of Saxony’s palace for a birthday banquet, after which their soldiers jointly cheered and discharged fireworks from either side of the bridge. ‘An azure sky gave a charming effect to the multitude of rockets,’ remembered Odeleben, ‘which crossed each other in their flight over the dark roofs of the city, illuminating the air far and wide . . . After a pause the cipher of Napoleon appeared in the air, above the palace.’2 Later on, as the crowds dispersed, the ‘doleful cries’ of a fisherman could be heard from the shore; he had approached too close to the rockets and had been mortally wounded. ‘Was this an omen,’ Odeleben wondered, ‘of the dreadful career of the hero of the fête?’
By mid-August 1813 Napoleon had assembled 45,000 cavalry, spread over four corps and twelve divisions.3 It was far more than he had had at the start of the armistice, but still not enough to counter the forces massing against him. The Allies denounced the armistice at noon on the 11th, within twenty-four hours of Napoleon’s estimate, and stated that hostilities would resume at midnight on the 17th.* Austria declared war on France on the 12th. The deftness with which Metternich had drawn Austria out of her alliance, then into neutrality, then into supposedly objective mediation, and then, the day after the end of the armistice, into the Sixth Coalition has been described as ‘a masterpiece of diplomacy’.4 Napoleon saw only duplicity. ‘The Congress of Prague never seriously took place,’ he told the King of Württemberg. ‘It was a means for Austria to choose to declare herself.’5 He wrote to Ney and Marmont saying he would take up a position between Görlitz and Bautzen and see what the Austrians and Russians would do. ‘It seems to me that no good will come of the current campaign unless there is first a big battle,’ he concluded in what was by now a familiar refrain.6
The strategic situation was serious but not disastrous. As he had stated, Napoleon had the advantage of internal lines within Saxony, although he was surrounded by large enemy armies on three sides. Schwarzenberg’s Army of Bohemia now consisted of 230,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians, who were coming up from northern Bohemia; Blücher was leading the Army of Silesia, comprising 85,000 Prussians and Russians, westwards from Upper Silesia, and Bernadotte headed a Northern Army of 110,000 Prussians, Russians and Swedes moving southwards from Brandenburg: 425,000 men in total, with more on the way. Facing them, Napoleon had 351,000 men spread between Hamburg and the upper Oder.7 Although he had a further 93,000 men garrisoning German and Polish towns and 56,000 training in French army depots, they were not readily available. He would need to keep his army concentrated centrally and defeat each enemy force separately,
as he had done so often in the past. Yet instead he made the serious error of splitting his army – contradicting two of his own most important military maxims: ‘Keep your forces concentrated’ and ‘Do not squander them in little packets.’8
Napoleon took 250,000 men to fight Schwarzenberg, while sending Oudinot (against the marshal’s protestations) northwards to try to capture Berlin with 66,000 men, and General Jean-Baptiste Girard to defend Magdeburg 80 miles to the west of Oudinot with 9,000 men. He also ordered Davout to leave 10,000 men behind to defend Hamburg and to support Oudinot with a further 25,000. As in the attack on Moscow, Napoleon rejected the strategy that had served him so well in the past – that of concentrating solely on the enemy’s main force and annihilating it – and instead allowed secondary political objects to intervene, such as his desire to take Berlin and punish Prussia. Nor did he place Davout under Oudinot’s command or vice versa, with the result that there was no unity of command in the northern theatre.