‘Writing to a minister so enlightened as you are, Prince,’ Napoleon began a flattering letter to Metternich on January 16 in which he asked for an armistice with Austria.18 ‘You have shown me so much personal confidence, and I myself have such great confidence in the straightforwardness of your views, and in the noble sentiments which you have always expressed.’ He asked for the letter to remain secret. Of course it didn’t; Metternich shared it with the other Allies, but throughout the spring of 1814 Napoleon’s plenipotentiaries – principally Caulaincourt – kept up discussions with the Allies over the possibility of a peace treaty, whose terms fluctuated day by day with the fortunes of the armies. On January 21, in an attempt to win over popular opinion, the Pope was released from Fontainebleau and allowed to set off for the Vatican.
Murat’s treachery was sealed on January 11 when he signed an agreement with Austria to lead 30,000 men against Eugène in Italy in return for Ancona, Romagna and the security of his throne for himself and his heirs. ‘He isn’t very intelligent,’ Napoleon told Savary when Murat captured Rome just over a week later, ‘but he’d have to be blind to imagine that he can stay there once I’ve gone, or when . . . I’ve triumphed over all this.’19 He was right; within two years Murat would be shot by a Neapolitan firing squad. ‘The conduct of the King of Naples is infamous and there is no name for that of the queen’, was Napoleon’s response to his sister’s and brother-in-law’s behaviour. ‘I hope to live long enough to be able to revenge myself and France for such an insult and such fearful ingratitude.’20 By contrast, Pauline sent her brother some of her jewellery to help pay his troops. Joseph, who continued to call himself king of Spain even after Napoleon had allowed Ferdinand VII back to his country on March 24, stayed in Paris to guide the Regency Council.
‘To the courage of the National Guard I entrust the Empress and the King of Rome,’ Napoleon told its officers at an emotional ceremony in the Hall of the Marshals at the Tuileries on January 23. ‘I depart with confidence, am going to meet the enemy, and I leave with you all that I hold most dear; the Empress and my son.’21 The officers present cried ‘Vive l’Impératrice!’ and ‘Vive le Roi de Rome!’, and Pasquier ‘saw tears running down many faces’.22 Napoleon understood the propaganda value of his infant son, and ordered an engraving to be made of him praying, with the inscription: ‘I pray to God to save my father and France.’ He adored the boy, who could induce strange reflections in him; once when the infant fell and slightly hurt himself, causing a great commotion, ‘the Emperor became very pensive and then said: “I’ve seen one cannonball take out a single line of twenty men.”’23 For all his proclaimed ‘confidence’ in victory, Napoleon burned his private papers on the night of the 24th, before leaving Paris for the front at six o’clock the next morning. He was never to see his wife or son again.
• • •
The Champagne region lies to the east of Paris and is crossed by the Seine, the Marne and the Aisne, river valleys that were the natural corridors for the Allied advance on the capital. The fighting there was to take place during the harshest winter in western Europe in 160 years; even the Russians were astonished at how cold it was. Hypothermia, frostbite, pneumonia, exhaustion and hunger were ever present. Typhus was again a particular concern, especially after a major outbreak at the Mainz camp. ‘My troops! My troops! Do they really imagine I still have an army?’ Napoleon told his prefect of police, Pasquier, at this time. ‘Don’t they realise that practically all the men I brought back from Germany have perished of that terrible disease which, on top of all my other disasters, proved to be the last straw? An army indeed! I shall be lucky if, three weeks from now, I manage to get together 30,000 to 40,000 men.’24 Nine of the campaign’s twelve battles were fought in an area of just 120 miles by 40 – half the size of Wales – on land that was flat and covered in snow, which was ideal country for cavalry, had he had any. Facing him were the two main Allied armies, Blücher’s Army of Silesia and Schwarzenberg’s Army of Bohemia, about 350,000 men. In all, the Allies fielded nearly a million troops.*
Whereas in 1812 Napoleon’s army had grown so large that he had been forced to rely on his marshals taking largely independent commands, once it had contracted to 70,000 he was able to control it in the direct and personal way he had in Italy. Berthier and seven other marshals were with him – Ney, Lefebvre, Victor, Marmont, Macdonald, Oudinot and Mortier – and he was able to use them much as he had when some of them had been mere generals or divisional commanders over a decade before; each of them had only 3,000 to 5,000 troops under his command. (Of the others, Bernadotte and Murat were now fighting against him, Saint-Cyr had been captured, Jourdan, Augereau and Masséna were governing military districts, Soult and Suchet were in the south, and Davout was still holding out in Hamburg.)
Taking command of only 36,000 men and 136 guns at Vitry-le-François on January 26, Napoleon ordered Berthier to distribute 300,000 bottles of champagne and brandy to the troops there, saying, ‘It’s better that we should have it than the enemy.’ Seeing that while Blücher had pushed well forward, Schwarzenberg had veered slightly away from him, he attacked the Army of Silesia at Brienne in the afternoon of the 29th.25 ‘I could not recognize Brienne,’ Napoleon said later. ‘Everything seemed changed; even distances seemed shorter.’26 The only place he recognized was a tree under which he had read Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. Napoleon’s guide during the battle was the local curate, one of his old schoolmasters, who rode Roustam’s horse, which was later killed by a cannonball immediately behind Napoleon.27 It was the surprise storming of the chateau at Brienne, during which Blücher and his staff were nearly captured, and its retention despite vigorous Russian counter-attacks, that helped give Napoleon his victory. ‘As the battle did not begin until an hour before nightfall, we fought all night,’ Napoleon reported to his war minister, Clarke. ‘If I had had older troops I should have done better . . . but with the troops I have we must consider ourselves lucky with what happened.’28 He had come to respect his opponent and said of Blücher, ‘If he was beaten, the moment afterwards he showed himself ready as ever for the fight.’29 On Napoleon’s return to his headquarters at Mézières, a Cossack band came close enough for one of them to thrust a lance at him, only to be shot dead by Gourgaud. ‘It was very dark,’ recalled Fain, ‘and amidst the confusion of the night encampment, the parties could only recognize each other by the light of the bivouac fires.’30 Napoleon rewarded Gourgaud with the sword he had worn at Montenotte, Lodi and Rivoli.
When he took stock of the situation after the battle he found he had lost 3,000 casualties, and Oudinot was wounded yet again. Retreating from Brienne to Bar-sur-Aube, the Prussians were joined by some of Schwarzenberg’s Austrian contingents in the plain between the two towns. Napoleon couldn’t refuse battle as the bridge over the Aube at Lesmont, the principal line of retreat, had been destroyed earlier in the campaign in order to stop Blücher’s advance on Troyes. He had stayed a day too long, and although his force had been reinforced by Marmont’s corps to number 45,000 men it was attacked across open ground by 80,000 Allies at La Rothière, 3 miles from Brienne, on February 1. The French defended the village until dark but Napoleon lost nearly 5,000 men which he could ill afford, although the Allies lost more. He also lost seventy-three guns, and was forced to retreat, sleeping in Brienne Château and ordering a retreat to Troyes over the barely rebuilt Lesmont bridge. The next day Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise telling her not to watch L’Oriflamme at the Opéra: ‘So long as the territory of the Empire is overrun by enemies, you should go to no performances.’31
After La Rothière, believing Napoleon to be retreating to Paris, the Allies separated again, Schwarzenberg heading due west to the valleys of the Aube and Seine while Blücher marched to the Marne and Petit-Morin valleys on a parallel line, 30 miles to the north. Their armies were really too large to march together logistically, and the gap between them allowed Napoleon to operate deftly between the two forces. It was to th
ese next four battles that Wellington was referring when he said of Napoleon’s 1814 campaign, it ‘has given me a greater idea of his genius than any other. Had he continued that system a little longer, it is my opinion that he would have saved Paris.’32
‘The enemy troops behave horribly everywhere,’ Napoleon wrote to Caulaincourt from a deserted Brienne. ‘All the inhabitants seek refuge in the woods; no more peasants are found in the villages. The enemy eat up everything, take all the horses, cattle, clothes and all the rags of the peasants; they beat everyone, men and women, and commit rape.’33 Of course Caulaincourt, who had been on the Russian campaign, knew perfectly well how invading armies, including the French, behaved. Was this letter written for the record? The next sentence gives a clue to its intent: ‘The picture which I have just seen with my own eyes should make you understand easily how much I desire to extricate my people as soon as possible from this state of misery and suffering, which is truly terrible.’34 Napoleon was presenting a humanitarian rationale to Caulaincourt for accepting decent terms if they were offered at the peace negotiations that had begun on February 5 at Châtillon-sur-Seine.*
The Congress of Châtillon sat until March 5. Knowing that they had the upper hand through sheer weight of numbers, the Allies dropped the proposal for France to return to her ‘natural’ frontiers, as they had suggested at Frankfurt, and, led by the British plenipotentiary Lord Aberdeen, demanded that France return to her 1791 frontiers instead, which didn’t include any part of Belgium. At his coronation Napoleon had sworn ‘to maintain the integrity of the territory of the Republic’ and he meant to keep to it. ‘How can you expect me to sign this treaty, and thereby violate my solemn oath!’ he asked Berthier and Maret, who were urging him to end the war even on these punishing terms.
Unexampled misfortunes have torn from me the promise of renouncing the conquests that I have myself made, but shall I renounce those that were made before me! Shall I violate the trust that was so confidently reposed in me? After the blood that has been shed, and the victories that have been gained, shall I leave France smaller than I found her? Never! Can I do so without deserving to be branded a traitor and a coward?35
He later admitted that he felt he couldn’t give up Belgium because ‘the French people would not allow [me] to remain on the throne except as a conqueror’. France, he said, was like ‘air compressed within too small a compass, the explosion of which was like thunder’.36 Against the advice of Berthier, Maret and Caulaincourt, therefore, Napoleon counted on Allied disunity and French patriotism – despite little evidence of either – and fought on. As his soldiers were now living off the backs of their own countrymen, he bemoaned the fact that ‘The troops, instead of being their country’s defenders, are becoming its scourge.’37
The treasury’s bullion was loaded onto carts in the courtyard of the Tuileries on February 6 and secretly taken out of Paris. Denon requested permission for the Louvre’s pictures to be removed, which Napoleon did not grant on grounds of morale. Napoleon tried to keep Marie Louise’s spirits up, writing at 4 a.m. that day: ‘I’m sorry to hear you are worrying; cheer up and be gay. My health is perfect, my affairs, while none too easy, are not in bad shape; they have improved this last week, and I hope, with the help of God, to bring them to a successful issue.’38 The next day he wrote to Joseph, ‘I fervently hope that the departure of the Empress will not take place,’ otherwise ‘the consternation and despair of the populace might have disastrous and tragic results.’39 Later that same day he told him: ‘Paris is not in such straits as the alarmists believe. The evil genius of Talleyrand and those who sought to drug the nation into apathy have hindered me from summoning it to arms – and see to what pass they have brought us!’40 He had finally recognized the truth about Talleyrand – who with Fouché was planning a coup in Paris and openly discussing surrender terms with the Allies.* Napoleon could not bring himself to accept that the apathy of the nation in the face of invasion was a reflection of its loss of appetite for war. Writing to Cambacérès about the new mania for forty-hour ‘misery’ church services praying for salvation from the Allies, he asked, ‘Have the Parisians gone mad?’ To Joseph he commented, ‘If these monkey tricks are continued we’ll all be afraid of death. Long ago it was said that priests and doctors render death painful.’41
All the leaders who were planning to oust him – Talleyrand, Lainé, Lanjuinais, Fouché and others – had opposed or betrayed him in the past, yet he hadn’t imprisoned them, let alone executed them. In this, Napoleon resembled his hero Julius Caesar, who was assassinated by people to whom he had shown clemency and decided not to mark down for the judicial murders that Sulla had employed before him, and Octavian would afterwards.
• • •
As the political situation darkened at Châtillon, Napoleon began to think about his own death, writing to Joseph about the prospect of Paris falling. ‘When it comes I will no longer exist, consequently it is not for myself that I speak,’ he said on February 8. ‘I repeat to you that Paris shall never be occupied during my life.’42 Joseph replied, not very helpfully, ‘If you desire peace, make it at any price. If you cannot do so, it is left to you to die with fortitude, like the last emperor of Constantinople.’43 (Constantine XI had died in battle there in 1453 when the city was overwhelmed by the Ottomans.) Napoleon more practically replied, ‘That is not the question. I am just working out a way of beating Blücher. He is advancing along the road from Montmirail. I shall beat him tomorrow.’44 He did indeed, and then again and again in a series of high-tempo victories that, despite being very close to each other geographically and chronologically, were quite separate battles.
Posting Victor at Nogent-sur-Seine and Oudinot at Bray, Napoleon marched north to Sézanne with Ney and Mortier, and was joined on the way by Marmont. The Army of Silesia was still moving parallel to the Army of Bohemia but at a much faster pace. As it pulled too far ahead it presented not just its flank but almost its rear to Napoleon, who was poised between the two Allied armies. Spotting that the Russians had no cavalry with them and were isolated, Napoleon struck at their open flank and fell upon the centre of Blücher’s over-extended army at Champaubert on February 10, destroying the best part of General Zakhar Dmitrievich Olsufiev’s corps and capturing an entire brigade, for the loss of only six hundred killed, wounded and missing. He dined with Olsufiev at Champaubert’s inn that evening, writing to Marie Louise, to whom he sent Olsufiev’s sword, ‘Have a salute fired at Les Invalides and the news published at every place of entertainment . . . I expect to reach Montmirail at midnight.’45 The chorus of the Opéra, where Jean-Baptiste Lully’s Armide was being performed, sang ‘La Victoire est à Nous’.
On the 11th General von Sacken broke from the Trachenberg strategy and attacked Napoleon directly at Marchais on the Brie plateau overlooking the Petit-Morin valley.* Ney defended Marchais while Mortier and Friant counter-attacked the Russians at L’Épine-aux-Bois and Guyot’s cavalry came around their rear, routing the Russians and Prussians. It was a classic example of Napoleon’s tactic of defeating the main enemy force (under Sacken) while successfully holding off the enemy’s secondary force (under the command of Yorck). Napoleon slept that night in a farmhouse at Grénaux, where, Fain recalled, ‘the dead bodies having been removed, the headquarters were established’.46 Writing to his wife at 8 p.m., Napoleon ordered a salute of sixty guns fired in Paris, claiming that he had taken ‘the whole of their artillery, captured 7,000 prisoners, more than 40 guns, not a man of this routed army escaped’.47 (He had actually captured 1,000 prisoners and 17 guns.)
The fact that many of Sacken’s and Yorck’s soldiers had escaped was evident the next day, when Napoleon attacked them at Château-Thierry, despite his being outnumbered two to three. Spotting that a Russian brigade was isolated on the extreme right of the Allied line, Napoleon ordered his few cavalry to ride them down, which they did, capturing a further fourteen guns.48 Macdonald’s failure to capture the bridge at Chât
eau-Thierry allowed the Allies to escape to the north side of the Marne, however. ‘I’ve been in the saddle all day, ma bonne Louise,’ Napoleon told the Empress from the chateau, along with another tissue of propaganda data, ending ‘My health is very good.’49 For all these victories over the Army of Silesia, nothing could make it possible for Oudinot’s corps of 25,000 men and Victor’s of 14,000 to hold the five bridges over the Seine and prevent Schwarzenberg’s 150,000-strong Army of Bohemia from crossing.50
On February 14 Napoleon scored yet another victory over Blücher, at Vauchamps. Leaving Mortier at Château-Thierry at 3 a.m., he doubled back to support Marmont, whom Blücher was forcing to retreat from Étoges to Montmirail. A sudden assault of 7,000 Guard cavalry forced Blücher and Kleist to retreat to Janvilliers, where Grouchy attacked their flank and Drouot’s fifty guns wrought further havoc. This secured the Marne from the Silesian army, which was beaten and dispersed, though not ‘annihilated’ as the official bulletin claimed. Napoleon could now hasten to confront the Army of Bohemia, which had forced Oudinot and Victor back from the bridges over the Seine and was driving deep into France, capturing Nemours, Fontainebleau, Moret and Nangis.* Further south, in a sure sign of national demoralization, French towns and cities were starting to surrender even to small Allied units. Langres and Dijon fell without a fight, Épinal surrendered to fifty Cossacks, Mâcon to fifty hussars, Reims to a half-company, Nancy to Blücher’s outriding scouts, and a single horseman took the surrender of Chaumont.51 Napoleon’s hopes for a national uprising against the invader, with guerrilla actions to rival those of Spain and Russia, were not going to be realized.
Pausing only to send 8,000 Prussian and Russian prisoners-of-war to be marched down the Parisian boulevards to substantiate his (accurate) claim of four victories in five days at Champaubert, Montmirail, Château-Thierry and Vauchamps, Napoleon left his headquarters at Montmirail at 10 a.m. on February 15 to join Victor’s and Oudinot’s corps at Guignes, 25 miles south-east of Paris. By the evening of the 16th he had placed his army across the main road to the capital. He found Schwarzenberg’s force strung out over 50 miles and hoped to defeat it piecemeal, writing to Caulaincourt: ‘I am ready to cease hostilities and to allow the enemy to return home tranquilly, if they will sign the preliminary bases of the propositions of Frankfurt.’52 As Lord Aberdeen was still refusing to allow Napoleon to retain control over Antwerp, however, the fighting had to continue.
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