Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Meanwhile in Paris, the Tsar’s envoy Peter Yakovlevich Ubri agreed to the wording of an ‘eternal peace and friendship’ treaty with France on 20 July, which required only the Tsar’s ratification in St Petersburg to undercut any Prussian hopes of a fourth coalition. Yet the Tsar was infuriated by reports that General Sébastiani, the French ambassador in Constantinople, was encouraging Turkey to attack Russia, so he waited before choosing between France and Prussia. The extent to which Sébastiani was acting on Napoleon or Talleyrand’s orders is unknown, but in the absence of a peace treaty after Austerlitz it made sense for France to follow that diplomatic path in Constantinople.* Napoleon didn’t want a war with either Prussia or Russia, however, let alone both simultaneously. On August 2 he ordered Talleyrand to tell the French ambassador in Berlin, Antoine Laforest, ‘that I desire, at no matter what price, to remain on good terms with Prussia, and, if necessary, allow Laforest to remain under the conviction that I really will not make peace with England on account of Hanover’.81 The same day he ordered Murat in Berg in the Ruhr valley not to take any action that might be construed as hostile towards Prussia. ‘Your role is to be conciliatory, very conciliatory with the Prussians, and not to do anything to upset them,’ he wrote. ‘Faced with a power like Prussia, one can’t take it slowly enough.’82 A scratched-out sentence on the original notes for that letter to Murat reads: ‘Everything you do will only end one way, with the pillaging of your states.’

  Early August 1806 saw Napoleon meet the new Austrian ambassador to Paris, Count Clemens von Metternich, for the first time. The Emperor wore a hat indoors at Saint-Cloud, which Metternich noted was ‘improper in any case, for the audience was not a public one, [and] struck me as a misplaced pretension, showing the parvenu’.83 Since Metternich was to become one of Napoleon’s implacable foes, his generally positive first impressions – headwear excepted – are of interest:

  What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.84

  At this stage of their relationship at least, Metternich did not see Napoleon as the raging egotist that he portrayed him as in his memoirs.

  On August 25, Prussians were outraged at the trial of the Württemberg-born publisher-bookseller Johann Palm, who sold nationalist German and anti-Napoleonic publications and who was living in neutral Nuremberg when he was arrested. Palm refused to divulge the name of the author of one of his pamphlets, Germany’s Profound Degradation – thought to be the German nationalist Philipp Yelin – so he was shot in Braunau the next day.* ‘It’s no ordinary crime to spread libels in places occupied by the French armies in order to excite the inhabitants against them,’ Napoleon told Berthier, but Palm quickly attained the status of martyr.85

  On the same day that Palm was indicted, Frederick William – influenced by Queen Louise and a war party in Berlin that included two of his brothers, a nephew of Frederick the Great and von Hardenberg – sent Napoleon an ultimatum ordering him to withdraw all French troops west of the Rhine by October 8. Stupidly he had not concluded preparations with Russia, Britain or Austria before doing this.86 Young Prussian officers then went so far as to sharpen their sabres on the front steps of the French embassy in Berlin.87

  By the beginning of September Napoleon recognized that as Tsar Alexander had not ratified Ubri’s treaty, Russia was likely to be fighting alongside Prussia in any coming war. On the 5th, he ordered Soult, Ney and Augereau to concentrate on the Prussian frontier, estimating that if he got his army beyond Kronach in eight days it would take only ten days to march to Berlin, and he might be able to knock Prussia out before Russia could come to her aid. He called up 50,000 conscripts, mobilized 30,000 men of the Reserve and sent spies to reconnoitre the roads from Bamberg to the Prussian capital.

  If he were to move 200,000 men in six corps plus the Reserve Cavalry and Imperial Guard hundreds of miles into enemy territory, Napoleon would need accurate intelligence of its terrain, especially its rivers, resources, ovens, mills and magazines. The topographical engineers who made his maps were ordered to include every piece of information imaginable, especially ‘the length, width and nature of the roads … streams must be traced and measured carefully with bridges, fords and the depth and width of the water … The number of houses and inhabitants of towns and villages should be indicated … the heights of hills and mountains should be given.’88

  At the same time, the enemy should be fed misinformation. ‘You must send on sixty horses from my stables tomorrow,’ Napoleon told Caulaincourt on September 10. ‘Do this with as much mystery as possible. Try and make people believe that I am going to hunt at Compiègne.’ He added that he wanted his campaign tent ‘to be sturdy and not theatrical [tente d’opéra]. You will add some thick rugs.’89 The same day he ordered Louis to form up 30,000 men at Utrecht ‘on the pretext of preparing for war with England’. At 11 p.m. on September 18, while the Imperial Guard was moved in post-chaises from Paris to Mainz, Napoleon dictated to his war minister Henri Clarke his ‘General Dispositions for the Reunion of the Grande Armée’, the founding document of the campaign. It stated precisely which troops needed to be in which positions under which marshals by which dates between October 2 and 4. On September 20 alone he wrote thirty-six letters, his record for 1806.*

  Napoleon left Saint-Cloud with Josephine at 4.30 a.m. on September 25; he wasn’t to return to Paris for ten months.90 Four days later, when he was at Mainz, a report arrived from Berthier which, when added to the reports of two spies, completely changed his view of the strategic situation. Instead of the Prussians taking up advanced positions, as Berthier had feared, it was now clear that they were still around Eisenach, Meiningen and Hildburghausen, which would allow the French to cross the mountains and the Saale river and deploy without being intercepted. He therefore entirely altered his plan of operations, which, since Murat and Berthier were also issuing instructions, led to some confusion for a short time. ‘It is my intention to concentrate all my forces on my right,’ Napoleon told Louis, ‘leaving the space between the Rhine and Bamberg entirely open, so as to be able to unite about 200,000 men on the same field of battle.’91 A tremendous amount of marching would be needed; Augereau’s 7th Corps marched 25, then 20 and then 24 miles on three consecutive days, and two demi-brigades attained an extraordinary average of 24 miles a day for nine consecutive days, the last three over mountainous country.92

  Davout soon occupied Kronach, which Napoleon was astonished the Prussians had not defended. ‘These gentlemen care little about positions,’ he told Rapp, ‘they are reserving themselves for grand strokes; we will give them what they want.’93 Napoleon’s overall plan, to capture Berlin while carefully protecting his lines of communication, was in place by the time he left Josephine in Mainz and reached Würzburg by October 2. The army was ready to attack by the 7th. A week later Josephine wrote to Berthier from Mainz, asking him to take ‘especially good care of the Emperor, making sure he doesn’t expose himself [to danger] too much. You are one of his oldest friends and it is that attachment I depend upon.’94

  Napoleon was at Bamberg by the 7th, waiting to see what the enemy intended, expecting either a retreat towards Magdeburg or an advance via Fulda. The Prussian declaration of war arrived the same day, along with a twenty-page manifesto so predictable that Napoleon didn’t ev
en read through to the end, sneering that it was just cribbed from British newspapers. ‘He threw it away contemptuously,’ recalled Rapp, and said of Frederick William, ‘Does he think himself in Champagne?’ – a reference to the Prussian victories of 1792. ‘Really, I pity Prussia. I feel for William. He is not aware what rhapsodies he is made to write. This is too ridiculous.’95 Napoleon’s private reply, sent on October 12 as his army advanced into Thuringia read:

  Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.96

  This letter has been denounced as ‘a breath-taking blend of arrogance, aggression, sarcasm and false solicitude’.97 It can also be read as giving Frederick William one (very) last opportunity for a dignified exit, and extremely accurately estimating Prussia’s chances in the coming war (indeed the prediction of disaster ‘within a month’ was an underestimate, since the battles of Jena and Auerstädt took place within two weeks). The true arrogance and aggression came from the Prussian princes, generals and ministers who had sent the ultimatum.

  Although Prussia had a potentially very large army of 225,000 troops, 90,000 of them were tied up garrisoning fortresses. No immediate help could be expected from Russia or Britain, and although some of her commanders had fought under Frederick the Great, none had seen a battlefield in a decade. Her commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was a septuagenarian and her other senior commander, General Joachim von Möllendorf, an octogenarian. Moreover, Brunswick and the general in charge of the left wing of the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich von Hohenlohe, had rival strategies and hated each other, so councils of war could take up to three ill-tempered days to reach a conclusion. Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.98

  Some of the Prussians’ more bizarre movements in the campaign, born of committee-generalship, were hard to comprehend even from their own perspective. On the night of October 9, Napoleon concluded from reports that the enemy was moving eastward from Erfurt to concentrate at Gera. In fact they were not doing that, although perhaps they should have been as it would have covered Berlin and Dresden better than their actual manoeuvre of crossing the Saale river.99 Napoleon made a mistaken assumption, but once he had discovered it the next day he moved with extraordinary rapidity to correct the error and take advantage of the new situation.

  The French advance into Prussian-occupied Saxony was screened by only six light cavalry regiments under Murat. Behind them came Bernadotte’s corps in the lead, Lannes and Augereau on the left, Soult and Ney on the right, the Imperial Guard in the centre and Davout and the main body of the cavalry in reserve. At the battle of Saalfeld on October 10, Lannes defeated the Prussian and Saxon vanguard under Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick William’s nephew, who was killed leading a desperate charge against the French centre, cut down by Quartermaster Guindet of the 10th Hussars. This defeat, in which 1,700 Prussians were killed, wounded or captured at the cost of 172 French, had a bad effect on Prussian morale. The Grande Armée then formed up, its soldiers with their backs to Berlin and the Oder, cutting the Prussians off from their lines of communication, supply and withdrawal.100 By the following morning it was deployed on the Saxon plain, ready for the next phase of the campaign. Moving quickly, Lasalle captured Hohenlohe’s supply train in Gera at 8 p.m., forcing the Prussians to march away via Jena. When Napoleon heard this from Murat at 1 a.m. on October 12 he thought hard for two hours, and then started sending out a blizzard of orders that had the effect of wheeling the whole army westwards towards the Prussian army behind the River Saale.101

  Murat’s cavalry and spies confirmed on October 12 that the main Prussian army was now at Erfurt, whereupon Murat fanned out his cavalry to the north, and Davout seized the river crossing at Naumburg, ending any hopes Brunswick might have had of adopting a forward defence. The Prussians therefore began another major retreat to the north-east, demoralized and psychologically on the back foot even before any major engagement had taken place. On the 13th Lannes threw his vanguard into the town of Jena, expelled the Prussian outposts there and immediately sent troops to seize the Landgrafenberg plateau above the town, guided by a Prussophobe Saxon parish priest.

  By now Napoleon had correctly deduced that the Prussians were retreating on Magdeburg, and that Lannes was therefore isolated and in danger of being hit by a powerful counter-attack from some 30,000 Prussians he had reported in the vicinity. He ordered the whole Grande Armée to concentrate on Jena the next day. Davout and Bernadotte were ordered to move via Naumburg and Dornburg to turn the enemy left at Jena. Davout couldn’t have known that the main Prussian army was in fact heading towards him, and perhaps over-confidently didn’t warn Berthier of the large numbers of enemy troops he was already encountering. Bernadotte and the Reserve Cavalry moved more slowly towards Jena, out of fatigue.

  On the afternoon of October 13, as Napoleon rode through Jena, he was spotted by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his study window. Hegel, who was writing the last pages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, told a friend that he had seen ‘the Emperor, this Weltseele [world-soul] ride out of town … Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’102 In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.103

  Napoleon arrived on the Landgrafenberg above Jena at around 4 p.m. on the 13th, and, seeing the enemy encampments further along the plateau, ordered the whole of Lannes’ corps and the Imperial Guard up onto it, a risky undertaking as they were only 1,200 yards from enemy guns.* Walking the Landgrafenberg today, it becomes immediately clear that so long as it didn’t come under sustained artillery fire, the flat open heath of the plateau was a fine place from which the two corps could deploy. That night Napoleon brought Lannes’ artillery up onto the plateau to join Augereau’s corps and the Imperial Guard. Ney was close by, and Soult and the Reserve Cavalry were on their way. Hoping that Davout would turn the Prussian left the next day, Napoleon and Berthier sent him a carelessly worded message that ‘If Bernadotte is with you, you can march together’ towards the town of Dornburg.104

  The battle of Jena started in thick fog at 6.30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 14, 1806. Napoleon had already been up since 1 a.m. reconnoitring the advance posts with one of Lannes’ divisional commanders, General Louis Suchet. There they were fired upon by a French sentry-post on the left flank, which stopped only when Roustam and Duroc shouted that they were French.105 Back in his tent, Napoleon started issuing a stream of orders from 3 a.m. His plan was for Lannes to use both his divisions (the second commanded by General Honoré Gazan) to attack Hohenlohe’s vanguard under General Bogislav von Tauentzien, in order to gain space for the rest of the army to manoeuvre onto the plain. Augereau was to form up on the Jena–Weimar road (also known as the Cospeda ravine), and move up on Lannes’ left while Ney came in on his right. Soult would guard the right flank, and the Imperial Guard and cavalry would be held in reserve to exploit weaknesses as they developed in the enemy’s line.

  Napoleon harangued Lannes’ corps in person at 6 a.m., before sending them off towards Tauentzien. The military historian Colonel Baron Henri de Jomini, whose 1804 book on strategy had caught Napoleon’s attention and whom he appointed as official historian on his staff, was impressed how he understood ‘that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because where you should find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it’. So when he addressed Lannes’ men he praised the P
russian cavalry, but promised that ‘it could do nothing against the bayonets of his Egyptians!’, by which he meant Lannes’ veterans who had fought in the battle of the Pyramids.106

  Suchet advanced on the village of Closewitz in columns ready to deploy into line once they had reached the plateau, but in the fog they veered off to the left and struck the enemy between Closewitz and the village of Lützeroda. As the fog slowly lifted, stubborn fighting developed for nearly two hours, disordering the French and using up a great deal of ammunition as masses of enemy cavalry formed up on the Dornberg, the highest point on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Lannes, a consummate drill-master, passed his second line through to the front and fought to clear the plateau, beating off a counter-attack from Lützeroda and turning to face the village of Vierzehnheiligen in the process. Beyond Vierzehnheiligen, the ground on the battlefield suddenly becomes very flat, ideal for cavalry. Both Vierzehnheiligen and the Dornberg were captured and then lost in the course of the fighting, as Hohenlohe sent in units piecemeal against the French, rather than co-ordinating a massive counter-attack. Napoleon joined Lannes at this stage of the battle, massing a twenty-five-gun battery once the fog had cleared by about 7.30 a.m., and directing the 40th Line to attack Vierzehnheiligen.

  With the arrival of Soult, Saint-Hilaire drove the Prussians from Closewitz, and once his artillery and cavalry had caught up he began to move on to the village of Rödigen. He was held up by fierce Prussian resistance, but by 10.15 a.m. was able to resume his advance through Hermstedt to turn the enemy’s left flank. Because Augereau had packed an entire division into the Cospeda ravine he didn’t emerge onto the plateau until 9.30 a.m., but once there he engaged the enemy east of Isserstedt. Meanwhile, Ney had reached the plateau with about 4,000 men and had seen a gap opening up on Lannes’ left. So on his own initiative he moved behind Lannes and came into the line on his left, just as Lannes was being driven out of Vierzehnheiligen. Ney’s attack recovered the village and got the French onto the south end of the Dornberg. The sheer weight of Prussian artillery fire checked their advance, but Ney’s infantry clung to the burning village. A cavalry attack forced Ney to shelter in an infantry square. At that point Napoleon made another appeal to Lannes, whose corps stormed the Dornberg and joined Ney at 10.30 a.m., just as Hohenlohe sent 5,000 infantry, with some 3,500 cavalry and 500 gunners in support, in perfect parade-ground order, to trade thunderous volleys with the defenders of Vierzehnheiligen. Crucially, Hohenlohe’s troops did not storm the village.