To Hortense, who saw him shortly after his return, he seemed ‘tired, preoccupied but not crestfallen’. Mollien was astonished when he called at the Tuileries: a few days before Napoleon left for Russia, Mollien’s wife had fallen dangerously ill, and Napoleon’s first words to him on his return were to enquire of her health. Another who was struck by the emperor’s serenity was Frederick William’s envoy Prince Hatzfeld. ‘In general, I can assure Your Majesty on my honour that on no other occasion when I have been with the Emperor have I found him so gay, so affable and so pronounced in his opinions and his hopes than on this,’ he reported.7
Napoleon meant to show that nothing had changed, so he rode out inspecting public building works with Fontaine, and insisted that the carnival go ahead as usual, even though tens of thousands were mourning their dead or anxiously waiting for news of loved ones who had gone missing. The balls were not calculated to spread merriment, as so many of the dancers had no arms, wooden legs, or lacked noses, ears and fingers lost to frostbite. His feeling did show on occasion, and as he took leave of him in March, the prefect Joseph Fiévée noted ‘a dark sadness’ in his eyes.8
While the immediate reason for leaving his army and returning to Paris was to muster fresh forces with which to march out in the spring and relieve those he had left behind, what really preoccupied Napoleon on his return was something entirely different.9
On the night of 23 October, as he was beginning his retreat from Moscow, General Claude-François Malet and a handful of others had made an audacious attempt to seize power by calling on key officials, announcing that the emperor was dead and brandishing faked documents authorising them to take over. They had managed to fool a number of people, including the prefect of Paris Nicolas Frochot, and arrested the minister of police Savary before they were stopped. They were promptly tried, and twelve were shot, before Napoleon even came to hear of the attempted coup, which made some wonder whether the speed had not been dictated by the wish to prevent further investigations, a suspicion fuelled by the enmity between the two ministers conducting them, Clarke and Savary. Malet had already conspired to mount a coup in 1808, but had been caught and sent to a madhouse. When asked by the general presiding over the court martial whether he had any accomplices, he had replied, ‘The whole of France and you yourself, if I had been successful.’ The police had stumbled on another conspiracy in the Midi, which involved a number of republicans, among them Barras, and there was undoubtedly much discontent with Napoleon’s rule. But that was not what shocked and disturbed him.10
On hearing the news of his death in Russia, those who believed it had not reacted in the appropriate manner, which, he pointed out to the Council of State and the Senate when they came to greet him, would have been to proclaim the accession of his son. ‘Our fathers rallied to the cry: “The king is dead, long live the king!”’ he reminded them, adding that ‘these few words encompass the principal advantages of monarchy’. The fact that they had not been uttered on the night of 23 October spelled out to him that for all its trappings, the monarchy he had created lacked credibility. It was a severe blow to his self-esteem as well as to his political edifice, calling into question the very basis of his right to rule.11
From Dresden on his way back to Paris, Napoleon had written to his father-in-law asking him to double the contingent of Austrian troops defending the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and to send a reliable ambassador to Paris. Francis sent General Ferdinand Bubna, whom Napoleon knew and liked. At their first meeting, on the evening of 31 December 1812, Bubna made an offer on the part of Austria to mediate in peace negotiations between France and Russia. Napoleon debated with Cambacérès, Talleyrand, Caulaincourt as well as Maret on whether it would be better to accept this offer or to try and strike a deal directly with Russia, over the heads and possibly at the expense of Austria and Prussia. He listened to their opinions without committing to either course.12
He wanted peace, probably more than any of his enemies. He was forty-three years old. ‘I am growing heavy and too fat not to like rest, not to need it, not to regard the displacements and activity demanded by war as a great fatigue,’ he confessed to Caulaincourt. He knew that Austria, Prussia and all his other German allies also longed for peace, and that they feared the involvement of Russia in German affairs even more than they disliked his dominance. From certain statements it is clear that he had come to appreciate that the terms of Tilsit were too hard on Russia, and that he might be prepared to make concessions, particularly if a general settlement including Britain could be agreed. But he had an innate reluctance to negotiate from anything other than a position of strength. He also believed, as he explained to Mollien, that if he were to sign a peace he himself had not dictated, nobody would believe in his sincerity. Perhaps more important, he felt a need to restore his credentials as a ruler, called into question by the Malet affair, and as he believed these were based on military glory, the only way to do so was to re-establish his reputation as a general.13
The Senate agreed to raise 350,000 fresh troops, 150,000 of them to be conscripted in advance from those normally eligible in 1814, another 100,000 from those who had been eligible in previous years but had not been called up, and a further 100,000 from the ranks of the National Guard. In the event, probably no more than two-thirds of that number would join the colours, many of them of doubtful quality. They could not all be provided with uniforms and arms, and despite enormous effort, no more than 29,000 horses could be found, which would not provide for the needs of cavalry, artillery and transport. The improved situation in Spain allowed Napoleon to withdraw four Guard regiments, the mounted gendarmerie and some Polish cavalry from the Peninsula.14
‘Everything is in motion,’ he wrote to Berthier on 9 January 1813. ‘There is nothing lacking, neither men, nor money, nor good will.’ He appears to have elicited more sympathy than blame for what had happened in Russia, and he received many marks of support. Not all were of much use: Louis, who had just published a crass novel entitled Marie, ou les peines de l’amour, wrote to his brother from his retreat in Gratz offering to return to Holland and galvanise the Dutch. Lucien, who had settled in England to write a new version of the Odyssey, had approached the foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh with a proposal to broker an alliance between Britain and Joseph in Spain. Jérôme had whiled away his time since leaving Napoleon in Russia with his three mistresses, and in November unveiled a nine-foot-tall statue of himself on the Place Royale of Kassel.15
The perceived danger threatening France helped the mobilisation. There was much discontent and grumbling about the call-up, but, as even a declared enemy of Napoleon had to admit, once conscripted the young men marched out shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ The conscripts, known as ‘les Marie-Louise’ (as she had signed the call-up decree in Napoleon’s absence), were kitted out in a simplified uniform, with trousers rather than breeches, and no waistcoat. There were not enough officers to lead them, but Napoleon hoped to find these among the surviving officers and NCOs of the Grande Armée, who were recuperating in Poland and Germany.16
He worked tirelessly, not only forming up the new army, but also shoring up his authority and tidying up affairs neglected during the retreat from Moscow. More than a thousand letters of his survive from the first four months of 1813, most of them long and detailed. Quite a few of them relate to the situation in Spain, where although the military position had stabilised, Joseph and Soult were at loggerheads. A more pressing issue was that of finance: juggle the figures as he might, he could not find enough money for his needs, and military expenditure was now absorbing around 65 per cent of state revenue. He put on a brave face, but the situation was not good, and on his return from a performance at the Théâtre-Français on the evening of 9 January 1813 he received more unwelcome news.17
On 30 December 1812 General Yorck von Wartemburg, commander of the Prussian corps in the Grande Armée, detached it from the French units and effectively signed his own alliance with Russia. Following fast on this new
s came the assurance that Frederick William had denounced the move and dismissed Yorck, but that was a meaningless gesture, since he and his men had already joined the Russian army.
Frederick William was in an unenviable position. The French garrison in the fortress of Spandau paraded through Berlin, reminding him that there were more French than Prussian troops in the country. The probability was that Napoleon would be back in the spring with a fresh army with which he would crush the Russians. In the circumstances, both he and his chancellor, Baron August von Hardenberg, agreed that alliance with Napoleon was the lesser of two evils. He sent Prince Hatzfeld to Paris with the proposal of a closer alliance against Russia, to be sealed by the marriage of the Prussian crown prince to a princess of the house of Bonaparte. But Napoleon did not mean to tie himself to Prussia.18
He believed that his father-in-law the Emperor Francis would stand by him: Napoleon was so besotted by Marie-Louise and his son that he assumed Francis must share those feelings for his favourite daughter and grandson. ‘Our alliance with France is so necessary that if you were to break it off today, we would propose to re-establish it tomorrow on the very same conditions,’ Metternich had told Napoleon’s ambassador in Vienna, explaining that only France could counterbalance the threat presented by Russia.19
Kutuzov and most senior Russian officers were against carrying the war into Germany, and most of the Russians around the tsar felt that Russia should do no more than help herself to East Prussia and much of Poland, providing herself with some territorial gain and a defensible western border. But Alexander had undergone a spiritual awakening, and had come to see himself as an instrument of the Almighty destined to free Europe from the spirit of Godlessness, of which Napoleon was the epitome. He pressed on, occupying East Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, bringing in his wake a bevy of German nationalists bent on raising the whole of Germany against Napoleon.20
In the absence of any encouragement from Napoleon, and as most of his army was by then operating in defiance of him, Frederick William was obliged to accept Alexander’s offer of an alliance, and on 16 March declared war on France. The two monarchs accompanied this with a proclamation calling on Germans everywhere to rise up and help them overthrow the Confederation of the Rhine, and warning its German rulers that if they did not join in this venture they would lose their thrones.21
Nobody was more alarmed by this than Metternich. While he and Francis were eager to exclude French influence from Germany, they did not wish to see it replaced by a Russian hegemony, and the proclamation threatened to arouse revolutionary and nationalist passions that could undermine the Habsburg state. Although Metternich had lamented the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire, he could appreciate the usefulness of the Confederation of the Rhine. And he did not agree that Napoleon must be got rid of at any cost.22
He hoped the Russian campaign had sobered him enough to make him realise his best option was to make peace – a peace Metternich would broker, with attendant advantages to Austria. First, he had to extricate Austria from her alliance with France. Only then could he cast Austria in the role of honest broker (and forestall the possibility of Russia and France reaching a deal over his head). To strengthen his position, he ordered the mobilisation of Austria’s armed forces.23
Metternich had been in secret communication with the Russian court throughout the past year, and although obliged to send an Austrian corps into Russia as part of Napoleon’s invasion force, he had instructed its commander, Schwarzenberg, to avoid fighting. When the Russians began to advance, Schwarzenberg pulled back into Poland, and in January 1813 began evacuating the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which he was supposed to defend in common with Poniatowski’s Polish army. Schwarzenberg signed a secret convention with the Russians and withdrew from their path, forcing Poniatowski to fall back, opening Poland and the road west to the Russians.
Metternich also wanted to involve Britain, and in February 1813 he sent an envoy to London to sound out the British cabinet on whether it would agree to participate in negotiations under Austrian mediation. Since Marie-Louise’s marriage to Napoleon, the view in London was that Austria was a close ally of France, and Metternich’s move was viewed as some kind of intrigue. What neither Metternich nor Napoleon appreciated was that Alexander was on a mission; negotiations were far from his mind, and his troops were on the move.24
Before he could march out to face them, Napoleon needed to prepare the ground at home. At the opening of a new session of the Legislative Assembly, he astonished its members with an extraordinary speech asserting that he had ‘triumphed over every obstacle’ during his Russian campaign. He assured them that he desired peace, and would do everything to further it, but would never make a dishonourable one. He painted a reassuring picture of the state of affairs: the Bonaparte dynasty was secure in Spain, and there was nothing alarming about the situation in Germany. ‘I am satisfied with the conduct of all my allies,’ he stated. ‘I will not abandon any of them; I shall defend the integrity of their possessions. The Russians will be forced back into their horrible climate.’ For good measure, he nominated a dozen new members solidly loyal to him to keep an eye on the others.25
Having at last accepted that his treatment of the Pope was alienating people all over Europe and undermining his standing in France, on 19 January he went to Fontainebleau, where the pontiff had been confined. After a preliminary meeting at which good intentions were professed on both sides, he returned on 25 February with a protocol which amounted to a partial climbdown, the details of which were to be determined at a later date. The Pope was ill and in no condition to resist, so he agreed to it. Napoleon promptly announced that a new concordat had been signed. The Pope abrogated the agreement three days later, and issued a formal retraction on 24 March, but Napoleon ignored it, and since the retraction was not published his version stuck.
He then turned his attention to the coming campaign. Following his failure to rally the remnants of the Grande Armée at Vilna and then at Königsberg in East Prussia, on 16 January Murat had left his post and gone back to Naples. He had already opened secret negotiations with Austria as, sensing the possibility of further French defeats, he was determined to ensure the survival of his own throne; when Davout tried to stop him, reminding him that he had only acquired it ‘by the grace of Napoleon and French blood’, Murat retorted that he was king by the Grace of God.26
Eugène, who had taken his place, managed to stabilise a front along the Vistula, but was gradually obliged to pull it back to the Oder and then the Elbe, leaving behind French garrisons in fortresses such as Danzig, Modlin and Magdeburg. They would be of use to Napoleon, who planned to take French forces back across the Niemen into Russia. On 11 March he sketched a bold plan for a sweep through Berlin and Danzig into Poland. From Krakow, Poniatowski supported by the Austrians would strike northward and cut the Russian army’s lines of communication.27
These plans were disrupted but Napoleon’s confidence was not shaken when, on 27 March, the Prussian ambassador in Paris announced Prussia’s declaration of war. Napoleon’s reaction was to instruct his ambassador in Vienna, Narbonne, to offer Austria the Prussian province of Silesia (which the Prussians had captured from Austria in 1745) as a prize if she stood by France. Metternich could do without Silesia, and did not mean to go to war again at the side of France. In order to persuade Napoleon to negotiate, he sent Schwarzenberg to Paris with instructions to make clear that while Austria would support France in pursuit of a fair peace, she did not feel bound to do so unconditionally, and that Napoleon’s marriage to Marie-Louise counted for nothing. Napoleon ignored these warnings as he prepared to restore his position by military means before entering into any negotiations.28
How sure of himself he felt is open to question; unnerved by the implications of the Malet coup, he had set the Council of State the task of devising a mechanism that would ensure the survival of his dynasty if anything were to happen to him. Accordingly, a senatus-consulte of 5 February 1813 gave Marie-Lo
uise the status of regent for the King of Rome, with a Regency Council made up of the principal grand officers of the empire.
Schwarzenberg, who had a long interview with Napoleon at Saint-Cloud on 13 April, found him less belligerent than in the past, and genuinely eager to avoid war. ‘His language was less peremptory and, like his whole demeanour, less self-assured; he gave the impression of a man who fears losing the prestige which surrounded him, and his eyes seemed to be asking me whether I still saw in him the same man as before.’ Thirty-six hours later Napoleon left for the army, which he joined at Erfurt on 25 April. He was hoping to defeat the Russians and Prussians before tackling negotiations with Austria, and instructed Marie-Louise to keep her father from making a move prematurely. ‘Write to Papa François once a week,’ he wrote to her from Mainz, ‘inform him of the military situation and assure him of my fondness for him.’29
Alexander and Frederick William had already taken the offensive. With the Prussian army under General Gebhard Blücher in the van, they invaded Saxony, denouncing its king as a tool of Napoleon and a traitor to their cause. As Alexander was intending to hold on to Prussia’s former Polish provinces, he had promised to compensate Frederick William with territorial ‘equivalents’ at the expense of Saxony. Both therefore hoped that Frederick Augustus would not declare for the allies.
Frederick Augustus was one of the few European monarchs endowed with a sense of honour, and was genuinely attached to Napoleon. He was both unwilling to cast off his alliance with him and afraid of doing so. He sidestepped the issue by taking refuge in Austria, which promised to protect him and his kingdom. Not long after he left his capital, Dresden was occupied by Alexander and Frederick William, who marched in at the head of their troops, some 100,000 Russians and Prussians commanded by the Russian General Wittgenstein and the Prussian Blücher. They then moved out to face the French forces concentrating around Erfurt.
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