Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Tilsit’s constraints on trade had meant that the Russian treasury had been running unsustainably large deficits, of 126 million rubles in 1808, 157 million in 1809 and 77 million in 1810. Her national debt increased thirteen-fold, with dire consequences for the value of her currency. In 1808 the volume of Russia’s Baltic exports had dropped to one-third of their 1806 level.10 On December 19, the same day that Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic Towns and Oldenburg, Tsar Alexander retaliated by publishing a ukaz (decree) which stated that from the end of the year Russian trade would be opened to neutral countries (such as America, though not including Britain) and that certain French Empire luxury goods would be banned, while others – such as wine – would be subjected to heavy import duties.11 Cambacérès believed that the ukaz had ‘destroyed our commercial relationship with Russia and … revealed the true intentions of Alexander’.12 It did state that all goods manufactured in England would be burned, but added that so too would certain silks and cloths manufactured in France and the Rhine Confederation. On hearing the news, Napoleon said: ‘I would sooner receive a blow on the cheek than see the produce of the industry and labour of my subjects burnt.’13 It wasn’t long before British ships flew the Stars and Stripes so that they could evade the ukaz regulations, with the covert complicity of Russian customs officials.14

  The year 1811 saw the start of a continental economic crisis that lasted two years and that also engulfed Britain, which was beset by bad harvests, mass unemployment, wage cuts, Luddism and food shortages.15 Mulhouse in eastern France saw two-thirds of its workforce of 60,000 unemployed, and over 20,000 were unemployed in Lyons.16 Napoleon needed to stimulate growth, but his Colbertian economic views, which rejected the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena, sent him back to attempting to enforce ever more strictly the Continental System, even if it might eventually mean fighting Russia again. Napoleon feared that if Russia were allowed to leave the System other countries might follow, but in 1811 none was likely to try.

  By 1812 Napoleon believed that the Continental System was working, and cited the bankruptcies of various London banks and commercial enterprises to support this. As his private secretary Baron Fain put it: ‘A little more effort and the blockade would have subdued British pride.’17 Napoleon assumed that Britain couldn’t simultaneously afford, in Fain’s list, ‘the occupation of India, the war against America, the establishments in the Mediterranean, defending Ireland and its own coasts, the garrisoning of the huge navy, and at the same time the stubborn war … against us in the Peninsula’.18 In fact such was the credit-worthiness of the British government and the underlying strength of the British economy that all those commitments could just about be sustained simultaneously, but Napoleon was certain that to break British commerce it was necessary for the Continental System to encompass all Europe. Having brought Prussia and Austria into the System in 1807 and 1809 he was not about to allow the Russians to break it, even though Russian trade was never an important factor in the British economy – certainly not as important a factor as British trade was for Russia’s. By then some 19 per cent of Britain’s exports went to the Iberian peninsula, another reason why Napoleon should have gone back there rather than putting pressure on Russia.19

  Napoleon was not wrong in assuming that Britain was suffering very seriously as a result of his Continental System throughout 1811 and the first half of 1812, which have been described as ‘years of grave danger for the British state’.20 Trade declined rapidly, government 3 per cent consols fell from 70 in 1810 to 56 in 1812, the bad harvests of 1811 and 1812 led to food shortages and inflation, and war expenditure increased budget deficits from £16 million in 1810 to £27 million in 1812. Some 17 per cent of Liverpool’s population was unemployed during the winter of 1811/12, and the militia had to be deployed against potential rioters and Luddites across the Midlands and North of England, with ringleaders sentenced to transportation to Australia, or even in some cases death.21 The worst moment for the British economy in fact came with the outbreak in June 1812 of the war against America over trade and impressment issues.22 Yet Spencer Perceval stuck rigidly to his programme of funding the Peninsular War, while meeting all Britain’s other commitments as listed by Fain. The immense pressure on Britain only lifted in late 1812 and early 1813 as a result of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia; had he not undertaken it, there is no way of knowing how long Britain could have held out against the Continental System.

  The ukaz directly contravened the Tilsit and Erfurt agreements and was a clear casus belli, threatening Napoleon’s imperial system at a time when he was capable of raising an army of over 600,000 men. Yet even if Napoleon had defeated Russia in 1812, it is doubtful that he could have enforced the Continental System. Would he have then annexed the rest of the south Baltic coastline, and installed French customs officials at St Petersburg? He probably assumed that a defeated Alexander would administer the System for him again, as he had between 1807 and 1810, but it is doubtful that this crucial aspect of his plan was properly thought through. There are certainly no letters in his vast correspondence that even refer to how he intended to enforce his ban on British trade after the war.

  On Christmas Day 1810, Alexander wrote to Prince Adam Czartoryski about ‘the restoration of Poland’, baldly stating: ‘It is not improbable that Russia will be the Power to bring about that event … This has always been my favourite idea; circumstances have twice compelled me to postpone its realisation, but it has nonetheless remained in my mind. There has never been a more propitious moment for realising it than the present.’23 He asked Czartoryski to canvass opinion among Poles as to whether they would accept nationhood ‘from whatever quarter it might come, and would they join any Power, without distinction, that would espouse their interests sincerely and with attachment?’ Asking for absolute secrecy, he wanted to know ‘Who is the officer who has the greatest influence upon opinion in the army?’, freely admitting that his offer of ‘a regeneration of Poland … is based not on a hope of counterbalancing the genius of Napoleon, but solely on the diminution of his forces through the secession of the Duchy of Warsaw, and the general exasperation of the whole of Germany against him’. He attached a table showing that the Russians, Poles, Prussians and Danes together could amount to 230,000 men, against Napoleon’s forces in Germany of 155,000. (Since Alexander included a figure of only 60,000 French, and the Danes were loyal allies of France, the table made little sense.) Alexander concluded by warning Czartoryski that ‘Such a moment presents itself only once; any other combination will only bring about a war to the death between Russia and France, with your country as the battlefield. The support on which the Poles can rely is limited to the person of Napoleon, who cannot live for ever.’24 Czartoryski replied sensibly, questioning the Tsar’s figures and pointing out that ‘the French and Poles are brothers in arms … the Russians are her bitter enemies’, and that there were 20,000 Poles fighting in Spain, who would be open to ‘the vengeance of Napoleon’ if they suddenly swapped sides.25

  This correspondence had the effect of turning Alexander against an offensive war from the spring of 1811, although Napoleon was still worried about a surprise attack well into the spring of 1812. Had he known that Alexander was seeking secret military conventions with Austria and Prussia at this time he would have been even more concerned. In September 1810, Alexander had approved Barclay’s increases in army recruitment and introduction of deep-seated military and social reforms.26 Russia adopted the corps and divisional system; the War College was abolished and all military authority was brought into the war ministry; orders were given for military production factories to stay open on Church holidays; a law entitled The Regulation for the Administration of a Large Active Army was passed, providing for – among many other things – the better collection and distribution of food; the powers of army commanders were codified and regulated; and a more efficient staff structure was introduced.27 Alexander himself took charge of an extensive fortification programme of Russia�
��s western frontier, which, because her most recent wars had been fought in the north against Sweden and in the south against Turkey, was relatively under-protected. These fortifications, and the relocation of troops from Siberia, Finland and the Danube to the Polish border, were considered a provocation by Napoleon, who, according to Méneval, came to the conclusion by early 1811 that Russia intended ‘to make common cause with England’.28 In the first week of January 1811, Alexander wrote to his sister Catherine: ‘It seems like blood must flow again, but at least I have done all that is humanly possible to avoid it.’29 His actions and correspondence over the previous year clearly belied him.

  A huge military concentration was beginning, on both sides. On January 10, 1811 Napoleon reorganized the Grande Armée into four corps. The first two, under Davout and Oudinot, were stationed on the Elbe, a third under Ney occupied Mainz, Düsseldorf and Danzig – the last of which, by January 1812, was turned into a major garrison city containing enough stores to sustain 400,000 men and 50,000 horses. By April 1811 a million rations had been amassed in Stettin and Küstrin (present-day Szczecin and Kostrzyn) alone.30 Napoleon managed everything, from the significant – ‘If I were to have war with Russia,’ he told Clarke on February 3, ‘I reckon that I should require two hundred thousand muskets and bayonets for the Polish insurgents’ – down to a complaint a few days later that twenty-nine out of one hundred conscripts on a march to Rome had deserted at Breglio.31

  Napoleon didn’t actively want war with Russia, any more than he had wanted it with Austria in 1805 or 1809, but he was not about to avoid it through concessions that he feared might compromise his empire. Writing to Alexander in late February 1812, in a letter he gave the Tsar’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Alexander Chernyshev, who was attached to the Russian embassy in Paris, he enumerated in friendly, temperate language all his various grievances, saying that he had never intended to revive the Kingdom of Poland, and insisting that their differences over issues such as Oldenburg and the ukaz could be resolved without conflict.32 Chernyshev, who unbeknown to Napoleon was Russia’s extremely successful spymaster in Paris, took eighteen days to get the letter to Alexander and another twenty-one days to have the necessary discussions and return.33 By the time Chernyshev got back to Paris, Poniatowski had heard of Czartoryski’s soundings among the Polish nobility and Napoleon had put his forces in Germany and Poland on full alert for a Russian attack expected between mid-March and early May.

  ‘I cannot disguise from myself that Your Majesty no longer has any friendship for me,’ Napoleon had written to Alexander.

  You raise all kinds of difficulties on the subject of Oldenburg, when I do not refuse an equivalent for that country, which has always been a hotbed of English smugglers … Allow me to say frankly to Your Majesty that you forget the benefits you have derived from this alliance, and yet what has happened since Tilsit? By the treaty of Tilsit you should have restored Moldavia and Wallachia to Turkey; yet, instead of restoring those provinces, you have united them to your empire. Moldavia and Wallachia form one-third of Turkey-in-Europe; it is an immense addition which in resting the vast empire of Your Majesty on the Danube, deprives Turkey of all force.34

  Napoleon went on to argue that if he had wanted to re-establish Poland, he could have done it after the battle of Friedland, but he deliberately hadn’t done so.

  Having ordered a fresh military levy of serfs on March 1, Alexander replied: ‘Neither my feeling nor my politics have changed, and I only desire the maintenance and consolidation of our alliance. Am I not rather allowed to suppose that it is your Majesty who has changed towards me?’35 He mentioned Oldenburg, and ended, somewhat hyperbolically: ‘If war must begin, I will know to fight and sell my life dearly.’36

  On March 19, 1811, almost a year after her first encounter with Napoleon, Marie Louise felt birth-pangs, and as Bausset recalled, ‘all the court, all the great functionaries of the State assembled at the Tuileries, and waited with the greatest impatience’.37 None more so than Napoleon, who, Lavalette remembered, was ‘much agitated, and went continually from the salons to the bedchamber and back again’.38 He took Corvisart’s advice to hire the obstetrician Antoine Dubois, whom he paid the vast sum of 100,000 francs, but advised, ‘Pretend you’re not delivering the Empress but a bourgeois from the rue Saint-Denis.’39

  Napoléon-François-Joseph-Charles was born at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, March 20, 1811. It was a difficult, even traumatic birth. ‘I’m not naturally soft-hearted,’ admitted Napoleon years later, ‘yet I was much moved when I saw how she suffered.’ It required instruments which meant that the baby emerged with ‘a little scratching about the head’ and needing ‘much rubbing’ on delivery.40 ‘The redness of his face showed how painful and laborious his entry into the world must have been,’ wrote Bausset. Despite everything he had done for an heir, Napoleon instructed the doctors that if it came to a choice the Empress’s life must be saved rather than the baby’s.41 The infant was proclaimed ‘King of Rome’, a title of the Holy Roman Empire, and was nicknamed ‘L’Aiglon’ (the Eaglet) by Bonapartist propagandists.

  The baby’s second name was a tribute to his grandfather, the Emperor of Austria, and the fourth was further indication that Napoleon had loved his father, even if he hadn’t much admired him. Because it had been announced that the birth of a daughter would be signalled by a salute of twenty-one guns and that of a son by a hundred and one, there was huge celebration in Paris on the twenty-second boom of the cannon, which was so widespread that the prefecture of police had to stop all traffic in the city centre even days later.42 ‘My son is big and healthy,’ Napoleon wrote to Josephine, with whom he had stayed affectionately in touch. ‘I hope that he will grow up well. He has my chest, my mouth, and my eyes. I trust that he will fulfil his destiny.’43 Napoleon was a doting father. ‘The Emperor would give the child a little claret by dipping his finger in the glass and making him suck it,’ recalled Laure d’Abrantès. ‘Sometimes he would daub the young prince’s face with gravy. The child would laugh heartily.’44 Many royals were stern and unloving towards their children at that time – the Spanish Bourbons and British Hanoverians almost made a practice of hating their children – but Napoleon adored his son. He was inordinately proud of the boy’s bloodline, pointing out that through his mother’s brother-in-law he was related to the Romanovs, through his mother to the Habsburgs, through his uncle’s wife to the Hanoverians and through his mother’s great-aunt to the Bourbons. ‘My family is allied to the families of all the sovereigns of Europe,’ he said.45 The fact that all four families currently longed for his overthrow in no way lessened his satisfaction.

  In early April 1811 Napoleon sent a letter to the King of Württemberg, asking him to join the kings of Saxony, Bavaria and Westphalia in providing men to protect Danzig from the Royal Navy. In it he mused with a certain poetic resignation on the tendency of talk of war to lead ineluctably to a confrontation, and suggested that the Tsar might be forced into war whether he wanted one or not.

  If Alexander desires war, public opinion is in uniformity with his intentions; if he does not wish for war … he will be carried away by it next year and thus war will take place in spite of him, in spite of me, in spite of the interests of France and those of Russia. I have seen this happen so often that my experience of the past unveils the future. All this is an operatic scene, the shifting of which is in the hands of the English … If I do not wish for war, and if I am far from desiring to be the Don Quixote of Poland, I have the right to insist upon Russia remaining faithful to the alliance.46

  He also feared the effect of Russia and Turkey coming to terms, something he ought to have calculated far earlier, and taken steps to prevent.

  Another consideration should have figured much more prominently in his calculations: Spain. In early May 1811 Masséna was defeated by Wellington at the battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, after which the French were forced out of Portugal altogether, never to return. Napoleon replaced Masséna with Marmont – who did even wors
e against Wellington – and never employed ‘the darling child of victory’ in any significant capacity again. Yet Masséna had never been adequately supplied or reinforced, so his failure had been largely Napoleon’s fault. However, the situation in Spain in mid-1811 was not desperate; the guerrilla war still raged, but the Spanish regular army posed no serious danger. Wellington was far from Madrid on the Spanish–Portuguese border and most of the Spanish fortresses (except Cadiz) were in French hands. If Napoleon had not ordered a concentration on Valencia or had provided more reinforcements, or had taken command himself, the situation would have improved enormously, and perhaps even been reversed.47

  Because of disease, desertion, guerrilla and British action, the Russian campaign and virtually no reinforcements, Napoleon had only 290,000 troops in the Iberian peninsula in 1812, and by mid-1813 the figure had fallen to a mere 224,000. As the annual intake of 80,000 French recruits was only just enough to cover the 50,000 per annum attrition rate in Spain and the need for garrison forces in central Europe, Napoleon simply did not have enough Frenchmen to conduct a major campaign in Russia.48 Had he cauterized the ‘Spanish ulcer’ by restoring Ferdinand and withdrawing to the Pyrenees in 1810 or 1811 he would have saved himself much trauma later on.

  On April 17, 1811 Champagny, who opposed the coming war, was replaced as foreign minister by Hugues-Bernard Maret, later Duc de Bassano, a bureaucrat who has been described as docile, even servile, and who certainly wouldn’t cause any difficulties.49 Napoleon’s Russian plans were more or less vocally criticized by Cambacérès, Daru, Duroc, Lacuée and Lauriston, as well as by Caulaincourt and Champagny.50 Perhaps they did not all warn quite so presciently or loudly as they later claimed, but nonetheless they all counselled to some degree against a confrontation with Russia. Part of the problem was that many of those to whom in earlier years Napoleon might have had to listen were now unavailable: Moreau and Lucien were in exile in America and Britain respectively; Talleyrand, Masséna and Fouché were in disgrace; Desaix and Lannes were dead. Furthermore, Napoleon had been proved right against the advice of others too often in the past for him to feel that the nay-sayers were right, even when there were a number of them. Almost all the French diplomatic service opposed the war, but Napoleon didn’t heed them either.51 He had no intention of going deep into the Russian interior, so a war did not seem at the time like any great gamble. Besides, he had succeeded through audacity before.