Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  By 11 a.m. Augereau had taken Isserstedt and linked up with Ney, and at noon Soult had arrived on the right flank. With Ney’s two divisions on Lannes’ left, and the cavalry under generals Dominique Klein, Jean-Joseph d’Hautpoul and Étienne Nansouty arriving, Napoleon judged the moment right for a major assault. On his order, the French army surged forward in thick skirmish lines followed by battalion columns. The Prussians fell back doggedly for an hour, but their losses rose and in the face of Murat’s repeated cavalry charges Tauentzien’s regiments finally broke and ran. By 2.30 p.m. Hohenlohe’s army was fleeing the battlefield in total disorder, with only a few battalion squares retreating under the command of their officers. Murat, riding-whip in hand, followed by dragoons, cuirassiers and the light cavalry of all three corps, engaged in a relentless pursuit over 6 miles, slaughtering many and capturing several thousand Saxons on the way. He stopped only when he reached Weimar at 6 p.m. The deep pursuit of the Prussian forces after Jena was a textbook operation – literally so, as it is still taught in military academies today – of how to maximize victories.

  It was only once victory had been won that Napoleon realized he had not been fighting the main enemy army under the Duke of Brunswick at all, but just its rearguard under Hohenlohe. For Davout, 13 miles away at Auerstädt, that same day defeated Frederick William and Brunswick, the former escaping only after many hours in the saddle, and the latter dying of his wounds shortly after the battle. With 30,000 men and 46 guns, Davout had performed a double envelopment on the 52,000 Prussians with their 163 guns, losing 7,000 French soldiers killed and wounded in that bloody engagement, but inflicting almost twice as many casualties on the Prussians.107 It was one of the most remarkable victories of the Napoleonic Wars, and, as at Austerlitz, Davout had radically altered the odds in Napoleon’s favour. When Napoleon was told by Colonel Falcon, Davout’s aide-de-camp, that he had not defeated the main Prussian army but only Hohenlohe’s detachment, he didn’t believe it, telling Falcon: ‘Your marshal must be seeing double.’108 Napoleon was effusive once he had realized the truth, however. ‘Tell the marshal that he, his generals and his troops have acquired everlasting claims on my gratitude,’ he told Falcon, giving Davout’s corps the honour of leading the triumphal entry into Berlin on October 25.109 Even so, Auerstädt was never sewn onto flags as a battle honour, because that would have contrasted Napoleon’s fine victory over Hohenlohe with Davout’s stunning one over Brunswick.

  Bernadotte, by contrast, had not managed to arrive on either battlefield, something for which Napoleon and Davout never truly forgave him. ‘I ought to have had Bernadotte shot,’ Napoleon said on St Helena, and at the time he seems to have briefly considered court-martialling him.110 Napoleon wrote him a sharp letter on October 23 – ‘Your Corps was not on the battlefield, and that could have been fatal for me.’ Bernadotte had taken Berthier’s orders at face value and marched his men to Dornburg. He didn’t cross paths with Napoleon between October 9 and December 8, by which point the Emperor had written to praise him for capturing Lübeck from Blücher, so the stories of a fiery personal interview are myths.111 It was rare for Berthier to give garbled orders, but Bernadotte’s absence from both battlefields was indicative of what could happen if he did. Nonetheless, Bernadotte knew that he was once more the butt of Napoleon’s ire, and his own longstanding private dislike and envy of Napoleon only made the situation worse.

  ‘My love, I’ve executed some fine manoeuvres against the Prussians,’ Napoleon boasted to Josephine from Jena at three o’clock on the morning after the battle. ‘I won a great victory yesterday. The enemy numbered 150,000; I have taken 20,000 prisoners, 100 artillery pieces, and flags. I saw the King of Prussia and got near to him, but failed to capture him, so also to the Queen. I have been in bivouac for two days. I am wonderfully well.’112 The numbers were exaggerated as usual, and Frederick William had been at Auerstädt rather than Jena so he couldn’t have seen him or the queen, but Napoleon had indeed captured eighty-three guns and Davout fifty-three, and after his near-flawlessly executed battle there was no doubt that Napoleon was ‘wonderfully well’.

  18

  Blockades

  ‘The Emperor Napoleon was often known to take off his cross of the Légion d’Honneur and place it with his own hands on the bosom of a brave man. Louis XIV would have first inquired if this brave man was noble. Napoleon asked if the noble was brave.’

  Captain Elzéar Blaze of the Imperial Guard

  ‘The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second. Hardship, poverty and want are the best school for a soldier.’

  Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 58

  ‘I’ve never seen men so completely beaten,’ Napoleon said of the Prussians after Jena.1 Yet Frederick William didn’t surrender. Instead he withdrew north-eastwards to continue fighting, knowing that the Russian army was on its way. Although negotiations were opened after the battle between the Marquis Girolamo di Lucchesini, the Prussian ambassador to Paris, and Duroc, nothing came of them. Napoleon rightly suspected Lucchesini to have been a prime supporter of the war.2 ‘I think it would be difficult to give a greater proof of the imbecility of this pantaloon,’ he wrote to Talleyrand.3

  Meanwhile the Grande Armée continued its relentless drive through Prussia, never allowing the Prussians a chance to stop and regroup. Spandau capitulated to Suchet on October 25, Stettin to Lasalle on the 29th and the heavily fortified Magdeburg to Ney on November 11, which secured the whole western half of Prussia. On November 7 General Gerhard von Blücher, who had fought bravely at Auerstädt, was forced to surrender his whole force at Lübeck when he completely ran out of ammunition.

  The fall of Berlin came so quickly that shopkeepers didn’t have time to take down the numerous satirical caricatures of Napoleon from their windows.4 As in Venice, the Emperor had the city’s Quadriga and winged Victory chariot removed from the Brandenburg Gate and taken back to Paris, while prisoners from the Prussian Guard were marched past the same French embassy on whose steps they had so hubristically sharpened their swords the previous month.5 Napoleon visited the battlefield of Rossbach, the scene of France’s humiliation by Frederick the Great in 1757, and ordered the column erected there to be sent to Paris too.6 ‘I am wonderfully well,’ he repeated to Josephine from Wittenberg on October 23, ‘fatigue agrees with me.’7 His habit of signing off so very many letters to Josephine with the words ‘I’m well’ (Je me porte bien), turned out later to become a dangerous one.8

  Sheltering in a hunting lodge in a surprise storm that day, a young widow told him of being married to the chef de bataillon of the 2nd Légère who had died at the battle of Aboukir, leaving her with their son. On being shown proof of the child’s legitimacy, Napoleon gave her a pension of 1,200 francs per annum, to revert to the boy on her death.9 The next day at Potsdam he was shown Frederick the Great’s sword, belt, sash and all his decorations at his palace of Sanssouci, which he sent to Les Invalides, as further ‘revenge for the disasters of Rossbach’.10 (He kept the king’s alarm clock by his bed for the rest of his life, but didn’t take Frederick’s flute, which can still be seen at Sanssouci.) ‘I would rather have these than twenty million,’ said Napoleon of his booty, and, gazing on Frederick’s tomb with his staff, he modestly added: ‘Hats off, gentlemen. If this man were alive I would not be standing here now.’11

  While at Potsdam, Napoleon nearly took an altogether more serious revenge when it was discovered that Prince Franz Ludwig von Hatzfeld, who was on a Prussian delegation from Berlin, had been writing in code to Hohenlohe reporting on the size and state of the French army there. Even though Berthier, Duroc, Caulaincourt and Rapp tried to appease Napoleon’s anger, the Emperor wanted to arraign Hatzfeld as a spy in front of a military tribunal and have him shot. Shades of d’Enghien must have weighed heavily with Caulaincourt, and Berthier actually left the room when Napoleon ‘lost all patience’ with his advisors.12 Recognizing that he had overreacted, Napoleon ar
ranged a touching scene whereby Hatzfeld’s pregnant wife threw herself in tears at his feet begging for her husband’s life. The Emperor then magnanimously tossed the intercepted coded letter into the fire, destroying the evidence.13

  On the same day that Davout entered Berlin and Suchet took Spandau, Napoleon was writing to Fouché about the expense of the stage scenery for Pierre Gardel’s ballet The Return of Ulysses, and asking for a detailed report ‘to make sure there is nothing bad in it; you understand in what sense’ (Penelope had suitors when Ulysses was abroad).14 Yet somewhat hypocritically Napoleon was perfectly willing to make exactly the same insinuations against Queen Louise that he feared being made about himself, stating in a bulletin: ‘There was found in the apartment that the Queen occupied at Potsdam the portrait of the Emperor of Russia which that prince had presented to her.’15

  The accusations that Frederick William had succumbed to petticoat government were unrelenting. ‘The notes, reports and State papers were scented with musk,’ read the campaign’s 19th bulletin from the Charlottenburg Palace on October 27, ‘and were found mixed with scarves and other objects on the dressing table of the Queen.’16 In case anyone missed the point, it stated how these ‘historical documents … demonstrate, if it needs demonstration, how unfortunate princes are when they allow women to have influence on political affairs’. Even the devoted Bausset thought that Napoleon wrote ‘with anger and without courtesy’ about Queen Louise, and when Josephine complained of the queen’s treatment in his bulletins, Napoleon admitted: ‘It’s true that beyond all I hate manipulative women. I am used to good, gentle and compassionate women … but that is maybe because they remind me of you.’17

  ‘Soldiers,’ Napoleon proclaimed from Potsdam on October 26, ‘the Russians boast of coming to us. We will march to meet them, and thus spare them half the journey. They shall find another Austerlitz in the heart of Prussia.’18 This was not what the army wished to hear. Now that the Prussian capital had fallen they wanted to return home.

  Napoleon entered Berlin on the 27th in a grand procession at the head of 20,000 grenadiers and cuirassiers in their full-dress uniform. ‘The Emperor moved proudly along in his plain dress with his small hat and his one-sou cockade,’ recalled Captain Coignet. ‘His staff was in full uniform and it was a curious sight to see the worst dressed man the master of such a splendid army.’19 In 1840, writing to the future Empress Eugénie, Stendhal recalled how Napoleon ‘rode twenty paces ahead of his soldiers; the silent crowd was but two paces from his horse; he could have been shot down by a rifle from any window’.20 He settled in Frederick William’s vast rococo Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin, which became his headquarters. Napoleon’s treasury expenses record some 23,300 francs being given to a lady at this time who is described merely as ‘a Berliner’.21 On October 30, Napoleon offered peace on the basis of Prussia renouncing all its territories west of the Elbe, which Frederick William was prepared to do, but when he then added that the kingdom must also serve as his operational base for the coming struggle with Russia, the king ignored the advice of the majority of his council and continued the war, retreating to Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad) up on the Baltic coast.22

  France provided Napoleon with around 80,000 French conscripts a year, and many of the 1806 intake were now on their way to Prussia. These together with the 80,000 men he already had in the field – not including the garrisons in captured Prussian cities – and various detachments from the Confederation of the Rhine, meant that by November 1806 Napoleon could cross the Vistula into what had recently been Poland, and he could do so in force before winter closed down the campaign. Poland had been a European nation since 966, a kingdom since 1205 and part of a commonwealth with Lithuania after the Union of Lublin of 1569. It had been steadily erased from the map when it was partitioned in 1772, 1793 and 1795 between Russia, Prussia and Austria, but although it no longer existed as a country there was nothing the three partitioning powers could do to damage Poles’ sense of nationhood. This Napoleon continually encouraged, allowing the Poles to believe that one day he would restore their nation. Perhaps he would have done so eventually, but he had no plans for it in the short-term. Since 1797, when the French revolutionary army created ‘Polish Legions’, some 25,000 to 30,000 Poles had served in the two Italian campaigns, Germany and Saint-Domingue. Napoleon’s apparent sympathy with their cause encouraged many more Poles than that to rally to him, and some of Napoleon’s finest troops were Polish – including the first lancer units in the Grande Armée, who proved so effective that by 1812 he had converted nine regiments of dragoons into lancer regiments.

  Horses were collected from all over France and Germany for the coming campaign, and the Army of Italy was stripped of cavalry in favour of the Grande Armée. Napoleon requisitioned uniforms, food, saddles, shoes, and so on from Prussia, but the state of Polish roads meant there were constant supply shortages. His abiding concern with how his soldiers were shod led him to write twenty-three letters about boots and shoes in November and December alone, including one to General François Bourcier, commandant of the cavalry depot in Potsdam, ordering that Prussian cavalrymen be made to give up their boots in exchange for French shoes, explaining: ‘They won’t be needing their boots again, and needs must …’23

  On November 2 Napoleon ordered Davout to push east to Posen with Beaumont’s dragoons, followed by Augereau.24 Once there they set up a base and built bakeries before the corps under Lannes, Soult, Bessières, Ney and Bernadotte followed, with approximately 66,000 infantry and 14,400 cavalry in total. Napoleon took the territory between the Oder and the Vistula primarily to deny it to the Russians, but he also hoped to prevent the Prussians from staging a resurgence and to persuade the Austrians to remain neutral. He himself remained in Berlin. On the 4th he learned that 68,000 Russian soldiers were marching west from Grodno with the aim of joining the 20,000 Prussians under the command of General Anton von Lestocq.* ‘If I let the Russians advance I should lose the support and the resources of Poland,’ he said. ‘They might decide Austria, which only hesitated because they were so far off; they would carry with them the whole Prussian nation.’25 Murat, Davout, Lannes and Augereau therefore marched on towards the Vistula to establish bridgeheads before repairing to their winter cantonments on the western side of the river. Marching eastwards a thousand miles from Paris into a freezing winter through some of Europe’s worst-provisioned, poorest countryside against two enemy nations, with a third possibly hostile one to the south, was always going to be a considerable risk, though no worse a one than the Austerlitz campaign had been.

  Almost all the fighting in the next part of the campaign took place inside East Prussia, formerly Polish territory, in what is today the 5,830 square mile Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Much of it is a flat, boggy plain with many rivers, lakes and forests. In winter temperatures drop to −30°C and there is daylight only between 7.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. The roads were often only tracks unmarked on maps; even the main road from Warsaw to Posen was unpaved and lacked side ditches. Heavy rain turned the entire countryside into seas of mud, with cannon moving at 1¼ mph. Napoleon joked that he had discovered a fifth element to add to water, fire, air and earth: mud! He sent his survey department forward to map and sketch the countryside, note the name of each village, its population and even soil type, all recorded beside the officer’s signature so that he could summon him to learn more details later.

  Even as he prepared to confront the Russians again, Napoleon’s thoughts turned to Britain, which he saw as an equally serious threat to France’s long-term interests. On Friday, November 21, 1806, he signed into law the Berlin Decrees. These were designed to force Great Britain to the negotiating table, but instead were to lead – once he tried to impose them by force on Portugal, Spain and Russia – to his own downfall. The ‘Continental System’ created by the Berlin Decrees (and their successors the Milan and Fontainebleau Decrees of 1807 and 1810) was what Napoleon called ‘a retaliation’ against the British Order-i
n-Council of May 16, 1806, which had imposed a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe.26 ‘That England does not admit at all the law of nations followed universally by all civilized people,’ the Berlin Decrees began, means her adversaries have ‘a natural right to oppose the enemy with the same arms he uses.’ Therefore the articles, drafted and redrafted by Talleyrand, who supported the policy, were uncompromising:

  The British Isles are in a state of blockade.

  All trade and all correspondence with the British Isles is forbidden.

  Every British subject, of whatever state or condition he may be … will be made a prisoner of war.