Napoleon Bonaparte: A Life

by Alan Schom

  Little did Bonaparte — who as usual thought that he was being most amusing — suspect how that facile unguarded tongue of his, which so amused the French, was creating angry, dangerous foes for him — this at a moment when he thought he was as infallible as he was invincible. “At the very outset, I want Emperor Alexander to be awed by the spectacle of my might,” Napoleon had confided to Talleyrand just before his arrival at Erfurt. “That never fails to render subsequent negotiations much easier.” But word of the grave setbacks in Iberia had already tarnished Napoleon’s image, and in any event the Russian emperor had sharply altered his personal views regarding Napoleon and his French allies. Times had indeed changed, Talleyrand actually warning Alexander in audacious language, “Sire, what are you doing? It’s up to you alone to save Europe, and you will succeed only by standing up to Napoleon now. The French people,” he added, “are civilized, but their sovereign is not; the sovereign of Russia is civilized, but his people are not. Therefore it behooves the sovereign of Russia to be allied with the French people.” As for the present geopolitical situation, “The Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees have been conquered by France; all the rest has been conquered by Napoleon, conquests that France in fact does not support.” It was not in the best national interests of France to retain Germany beyond the Rhine, Italy, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, he pointed out. Talleyrand clearly was one Frenchman the czar could listen to with interest.

  Napoleon had set two principal objectives vis-à-vis Alexander at Erfurt: he wanted a written agreement committing action by Russia against Austria in the event of war, and he wanted the czar’s armies to invade the Ottoman Empire, to seize Constantinople (for France!) and advance eastward to challenge British India and British international commerce. In return Napoleon would promise the czar the Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia and a free hand in seizing Finland and Sweden. Much to Bonaparte’s surprise, for once Alexander stood firm, declining the privilege of capturing Constantinople for Napoleon (he of course badly wanted it for Russia, as a Mediterranean port for his otherwise icebound fleet). And despite fair warning by Foreign Minister Champagny — “It is impossible for a dispute over Constantinople not to lead to war between France and Russia” — Napoleon persisted. As for Austria, Alexander agreed only to a vague sort of defense pact with France (while privately informing Vienna that he would in reality remain neutral in the event of hostilities between Austria and France).

  Blinded as always by his own egotism, Napoleon misunderstood the significance of the Erfurt talks. “All is going well here,” he wrote Josephine. “I am content with Alexander, and he must be with me! If he were a woman, I do believe I could make him my mistress.” And yet, just before leaving Erfurt, Napoleon had awakened his valet, Constant, and bodyguard, Rustan, with his screams from a terrifying nightmare. Bursting into his bedroom, Constant called to him twice, without Napoleon replying, his valet shaking him, as he awoke and sat up. “Oh, mon ami, what an awful dream I had...that a bear was tearing open my chest and about to eat my heart!” “The memory of this dream bothered him for a long time thereafter,” Constant recalled. “He spoke about it very often, and each time sought to interpret its meaning.” Apparently Napoleon saw no connection between his dreams and the czar.

  On October 12, 1808, Foreign Ministers Champagny and Romanzov duly signed the Erfurt Convention, and two days later the Russian and French emperors departed for their respective capitals, never to meet again. Napoleon was confident that he had Alexander in his pocket, while the czar — a most reluctant member of the Continental System — was more convinced than ever that Napoleon had to be stopped.

  With, as he thought, his Austrian flank now covered, throughout the autumn Napoleon made final plans for settling the Spanish score. When they had chased his brother from Madrid, they had humiliated Napoleon himself as he had never been humiliated before, and now they would pay dearly, despite his earlier wise words to Murat regarding the foolishness of such a campaign when the country was in full revolt.

  On September 4 Napoleon had issued a long letter of instructions for War Minister Clarke to draft the largest single number of young men ever called up at one time thus far during his rule of France since November 1799: 140,000 men. Of these 80,000 were to be called up prematurely from the 1809 “allotment,” and 60,000 from the 1810 conscription “class.” There was no legislative body in France powerful enough to question Bonaparte on this extraordinary demand. Prefects throughout the realm distributed the call-up orders, to growing moans and anguish from every department of the country. It was as desperate a move as it was dramatic and unwise. Napoleon had brought peace with England through Amiens and had then abrogated that agreement. He had signed the Pressburg treaty to bring peace with the Austrians. He had fought more battles, concluding with the Treaties of Tilsit to forge a peace with Prussia and Russia, hence bringing peace to the whole continent of Europe. And now he was deliberately, knowingly, developing another full-scale war, in Portugal and Spain, theoretically to break Great Britain but in fact to expand his personal empire. It was hardly the act of a mature, balanced humanitarian. Napoleon was using everything and everyone in (and out of) sight to achieve world conquest. Individuals simply did not count, not even his highest commanders, who were but pawns in this hair-raising game, as his most dedicated aides, commanders, and marshals were now openly admitting. “I have always been the victim of my own attachment to him,” Lannes openly acknowledged. “He only loves you by fits and starts, that is only when he needs to use you.” To be sure, enormous portraits of each of Napoleon’s twenty marshals thus far created hung magnificently in the vast Salle des Maréchaux in the Tuileries,[745] but that was just a petty sop for petty egos, as were the awards of grand eagles and cordons of the Legion of Honor. Nevertheless, even the professional soldiers were now tiring of this incessant lust for warfare. They had wives, children, and mistresses; they had estates and homes of their own; they had their fortunes to tend to and to invest. Enough was enough.

  Back on September 10, 1808, while still at St.-Cloud, Napoleon had officially issued the decree announcing his intention to commit France to a full-scale campaign in the Iberian Peninsula, fully reorganizing and expanding the French Army of Spain, bringing it up to a strength of eight full army corps, two of them now being transferred from central Europe and a new IV Corps created by Marshal Lefebvre, comprising chiefly Poles and Germans. With the arrival of the new recruits, Napoleon would leave behind 205,000 troops in central and eastern Europe, with another 100,000 men throughout Italy and Dalmatia.[746]

  Orders now streamed out of St.-Cloud like a hail of bullets: Germans, Poles, and Frenchmen were to march to Spain, while closer to home units were summoned hastily to Bayonne from Vincennes, Boulogne, Ile de Ré, St.-Omer (even the Channel coastal defenses were being stripped to skeletal garrisons), Lyons, Thionville, Venlo, Maastricht, Longwy, Mainz, and Worms.

  “You make war like a postal inspector, not a general!” Napoleon had castigated brother Joseph following his precipitous flight from Madrid on July 31, 1808. “Clearly they [King Joseph and company] have lost their heads since the capitulation at Bailen,” Napoleon confided to Gen. Mathieu Dumas. “I see that I must go there [to Spain] myself if we are going to get the job done.”

  Seemingly satisfied with the renewal of relations with Czar Alexander and the resulting agreements, Napoleon had set out from Erfurt with his retinue under heavy escort of Imperial Guardsmen on October 14, reaching St.-Cloud four days later. Isolating himself there for the next ten days, he worked around the clock with his usual unrelenting energy, receiving a series of police and ministerial reports on the state of the French capital and of the Empire, putting all government affairs in anticipation of a long absence from the capital. Most of his time, however, was concentrated on a flow of new orders, directives, and “decisions” to War Minister Clarke, the duc de Feltre, and to Marshal Berthier, the prince de Neuchâtel. (Apart from Berthier’s title, which dated back
to 1806, since March 1 Napoleon had created the first enormous batch of French Imperial nobility, which would soon include 7 princes, 21 dukes, 452 counts, 1,500 barons, and 1,474 knights.

  When Clarke and Berthier completed their work an entirely new army would be preparing itself at Bayonne. Then, after finishing his nearly nonstop whirlwind of dictation, Bonaparte embraced Josephine for a final time as he entered his carriage and set out for Spain at midnight on October 29.

  On reaching Marrac Castle at Bayonne on November 3, he was not at all pleased with what he found. He lashed out at the War Minister’s chief deputy, General Dejean, for leaving his new army “naked,” as he put it.

  Monsieur Dejean, you will find herewith a quartermaster’s report. You will see by it how inefficiently I am being served! I still have only 1,500 coats in the depots, and 7,000 cloaks, instead of the 50,000 ordered, only 15,000 pairs of shoes, instead of the 229,000 reported [incorrectly] to have been received! Everything is lacking...My army, about to take the field, is naked and has nothing. There are not even enough uniforms for the conscripts. The reports you sent me are mere fiction, worthless pieces of paper!...You must work on the assumption that all war contracts are mere excuses for theft [by civilian businessmen supplying the army].

  After just two days of further harrying work, inspections, and last-minute dictations, Bonaparte’s carriage, crammed with the usual files, reports, and maps and accompanied by a powerful military escort, not to mention an entirely new army, crossed the Spanish frontier, reaching Vitoria by November 7, when he personally opened his second Spanish campaign, which included attacks by Lefebvre’s and Victor’s corps against General Blake’s 24,000 men in Burgos and the armies of Generals Castaños and Palafox to the east.

  With the new force of approximately 90,000 men to join the rest of the army already in Spain, Napoleon had two overall aims: to reconquer Portugal and oust the British there; and to shatter the opposing Spanish armies in a direct drive through the peninsula to recapture Madrid. According to the figures given him by Clarke on October 10, his Army of Spain would comprise a total of eight full army corps, totaling 314,612 men, of whom 244,125 were combat troops. Mortier’s V and Junot’s VIII Corps, serving as reserves, would arrive shortly to complete the picture. Thus tens of thousands of French troops poured across France, converging first at Bayonne, before being assigned their new sectors of operation. Many thousands of wagons and carts followed slowly with the clothes, arms, munitions, and supplies needed to sustain these hundreds of battalions defiling through the cities of the French Empire. With news only of Napoleon’s far-reaching European peace agreements at Erfurt, and little talk of Spain in the well-controlled French press, hundreds of thousands of French families now offering their young men to the nation no doubt wondered where the war was.

  Facing the French in the peninsula were first of all the forty-seven-year-old Sir John Moore, freshly arrived from England to take command of the British expeditionary force in Portugal, with a maximum of only 50,000 men (half of them Portuguese and Spanish) at his disposal. Alert, intelligent, an able commander in every sense of the word, Moore had campaigned throughout the world, including Den Helder, the Baltic, and Egypt. His troops were noted for always being better trained and equipped than those of most other commanding officers. Once in place that October, Moore was to maneuver with General Baird’s 12,000 troops from England about to land at La Coruña. His greatest problems were total ignorance of the geography of the future campaign, compounded by ancient, woefully inaccurate maps, and a growing inability to maintain communications with, and lack of cooperation from, allied Spanish commanders.

  Moore’s Spanish allies included General La Romana, whose corps, at present with Napoleon’s army in Germany, were shortly to desert the French in Denmark, when the British navy in a spectacular rescue operation whisked most of them away right under the noses of the astonished French and back to Spain. La Romana, on the other hand, was a mediocre general, unlike the most capable Spanish field commander, General Castaños. General Blake, a talented young officer of Irish extraction, had only recently received a jump promotion from colonel to captain general of Galicia. The twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Palafox, captain general of Aragon, was “more the courtier than the nobleman,” but he did prove to be most courageous when the time required it. General Redding, of the Catalan army, was also considered quite capable, as Dupont had already discovered. The aged captain general of Palma, General Vives, was little more than “an Anglophobic booby.” All told the Spaniards commanded only 125,000 troops available for the first line, although with reserves and garrisons they could muster another 75,000 or so, for a total of 200,000 men, few of whom had had military training or real experience in the field. If they could coordinate their communications, tactics, and troop deployments with the British, however, there was hope of foiling Bonaparte’s latest invasion plans.

  Spain was to prove a problem such as Napoleon had never experienced. Although the extreme heat and aridity were nothing new for the few remaining veterans of Egypt, on the other hand in Egypt the French had not had to cope with half a dozen well dispersed major hot spots of organized resistance at the same time, as was already the case in Spain. What is worse, these battles more often than not involved full-scale sieges of ancient walled cities, such as Vitoria, Salamanca, Burgos, Valencia, Madrid, Seville, Cordoba, and Granada, most of them so far apart as to require the use of totally isolated corps, which meant that Napoleon frequently could not combine two or more corps for a single attack. All this was aggravated by growing guerrilla warfare, which was to prove deadly in the long run. Even on the few occasions when a joint, coordinated effort between corps was required, personal animosity between the commanding officers more than once resulted in their failure to cooperate, as for instance later occurred between Ney and Soult (following Soult’s defeat at Oporto by the British), not to mention the continuing hostility between Ney and Lannes, and the general dislike of most commanders of Marshal Berthier. The result was that Napoleon was unable to conclude the occupation of the country and continue on to Gibraltar as planned for the next stage of his conquest, in North Africa. He had instead to fight with the main part of the Grande Armée and most of its famous marshals just in order to recoup his losses in Portugal and in Spain as far as Madrid, to reestablish his brother on the throne he had held for only a matter of days. To complicate matters further, King Joseph announced that he had already had quite enough and begged to return to the relative calm of his Neapolitan kingdom, or, failing that, to the sane, civilized existence of life at Mortefontaine.

  Nor did his problems end in Iberia. The heated words of the German nationalist-philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Baron von Stein, the Prussian state minister, had ignited the frustrated north Germans, and reports arrived of fresh activity in Austrian military circles concerning a possible new mobilization to avenge their nation and retaliate against the French armies of occupation everywhere surrounding them.

  Not even France was free of growing discontent, prefects and military governors reported in growing numbers from every department of the land. Renewed conscription of the nation’s youth, not to mention the decline of French commerce and agricultural production (despite and because of Napoleon’s ingenious Continental System), aggravated by Britain’s unrivaled control of the oceans and overseas markets, all helped to agitate the people. What is more, Napoleon was spending 95 percent of his time on purely military matters — despite great publicity and glaring pronouncements to the contrary — and hence ignoring France and the needs of its civilian population, which, among other things, craved peace.

  Within the army, some of Napoleon’s commanders were getting more and more out of control, failing to obey orders or to follow elementary common sense. Marshal Bessières, for one, and Generals Junot, Dupont, and Lefebvre were particularly at fault at various times. Indeed, Marshal Lefebvre’s latest refusal to obey clear written orders to attack General Blake at Pancorbo actually permitted
Blake and his army to escape intact to the west. Napoleon would therefore have to repeat his maneuvers.

  To what extent Bonaparte was aware of the pattern of events and of the overall worsening situation everywhere is not entirely clear, although he certainly saw some blunders. “His Majesty is severely displeased,” Berthier chastised the unrepentant Lefebvre, the hero of Danzig. It was only on November 11 that “Beau Soleil” Victor had finally pulled himself together and shattered Blake’s force at Espiona. The recalcitrant Bessières, a longtime favorite of Napoleon since Egypt, and commander of his Imperial Guard for years, was fired out of hand as commander of the II Corps, as a result of his repeated failure to obey orders. Alas, he was replaced by Marshal Soult, a man of questionable character, loathed almost universally by officers and men alike, and known generally as “Old Nick,” who was to cause even more headaches for Bonaparte than did Bessières. As for Marshal Ney, “le brave des braves” with whom Napoleon was growing more and more disenchanted, his corps was drastically reduced in strength.

  Advancing on Burgos with 67,000 men on November 10, it was Soult, however, who finally destroyed the army defending the city of Estremadura, thereby permitting the French to occupy that key city of Castile situated on the main logistical route between Bayonne and Madrid. There Napoleon appointed Junot’s crack former chief of staff, Divisional General Thiébault, as its new military governor, while Ney’s troops continued southward clearing the route to the Spanish capital. Although General Blake had escaped, fleeing northward, Marshall Lannes’s 34,000 men then defeated the combined forces of Castaños and Palafox at Tudela on November 23. But if the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula was on schedule, it was not without grave inherent problems.