Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Caulaincourt – who had been replaced by Lauriston as ambassador to St Petersburg in mid-May and brought back to Paris so that Napoleon could call on his inside knowledge of Russia during the coming crisis – spent five hours one day in June 1811 trying to persuade the Emperor not to go to war. He told him of Alexander’s admiration for the Spanish guerrillas’ refusal to make peace despite losing their capital, of Alexander’s remarks about the severity of the Russian winter, and of his boast ‘I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it.’52 He said that Alexander and Russia had fundamentally changed since Tilsit, but Napoleon replied, ‘One good battle will see the end of all your friend Alexander’s fine resolutions – and of his sandcastles as well!’53 Napoleon crowed similarly to Maret on June 21: ‘Russia appears to be frightened since I picked up the gauntlet, but nothing is yet decided. The object of Russia seems to be to obtain, as an indemnity for the Duchy of Oldenburg, the cession of two districts of Poland, which I will not consent to, by honour and because they would altogether destroy the Duchy [of Warsaw].’54

  By ‘honour’ Napoleon meant his prestige, but he obviously didn’t realize that he would be risking honour, prestige and his throne itself over two Polish districts and the so far non-existent integrity of the Duchy of Warsaw. Still expecting a campaign of the Austerlitz–Friedland–Wagram kind, Napoleon believed that a sharp, focused re-run of his 1807 campaign – albeit on a larger scale – would not entail great risk. Yet three emergency levies in 1812 raised no fewer than 400,000 new recruits for Russia, out of 1.1 million new recruits in the period 1805–13. Napoleon failed to take into account the fact that he would be fighting a very different Russian army from earlier ones, though one with the same doggedness that had aroused his admiration at Pultusk and Golymin. Over half of the Russian officer corps were seasoned veterans and one-third had fought in six or more battles. Russia had changed, but Napoleon had not noticed. So while not actively seeking war, Napoleon was more than willing to ‘pick up the gauntlet’ that was thrown down by Alexander’s ukaz.

  Another good reason not to embark on another war came in July 1811 when it became clear that the harvest had failed across northern France in Normandy, and in much of the Midi, leading to what Napoleon privately described as famine.55 Subsidizing the baking industry to prevent civil unrest turned into what the minister concerned, Pasquier, called ‘an immense burden for the government’. By September 15 a 4-pound loaf had nearly doubled in price to 14 sous and Napoleon was ‘most reluctant’ to see that figure exceeded.56 He chaired a Food Committee which met frequently, investigating price controls while, in Pasquier’s words, ‘Anxiety began to give way to terror’ in the countryside. With violence breaking out in corn-markets, gangs of starving beggars roaming the Norman countryside and flour-mills being pillaged and even destroyed, Napoleon at one point ordered the gates of Paris closed to prevent the export of bread. He also distributed 4.3 million dried-pea and barley soups.57 Troops were sent into Caen and other towns to quell bread riots, and rioters (including women) were executed. In the end a combination of price controls of grain and bread, charitable efforts by the notables of departments as co-ordinated by prefects, soup-kitchens, the sequestration of food stocks and harsh punishments for rioters helped alleviate the problem.58

  Although Lauriston and Rumiantsev continued negotiating over compensation for the Oldenburg annexation and the amelioration of the ukaz during the summer of 1811, preparations for war continued on both sides of the Polish border. On August 15 Napoleon confronted Ambassador Kurakin at his birthday reception at the Tuileries. He had a long history of addressing ambassadors in very forthright language – including Cardinal Consalvi over the Concordat, Whitworth over Amiens, Metternich on the eve of the 1809 war, and so on – but full and frank discussions are partly what ambassadors are for. In a half-hour rebuke, the Emperor now told Kurakin that Russia’s support for Oldenburg, her Polish and (supposedly) English intrigues, her breaking of the Continental System and her military preparations meant that war seemed likely, yet she would be left alone and friendless like Austria had been in 1809. All this could be avoided if there were a new Franco-Russian alliance. Kurakin said he had no powers to negotiate such a thing. ‘No powers?’ Napoleon exclaimed. ‘Then you must write at once to the Tsar and request them.’59

  The next day Napoleon and Maret went through the laborious process of looking into all the issues of the Oldenburg compensation, recognition of Poland, Turkish partition plans and the Continental System, reviewing all the papers on those subjects going back to Tilsit. These convinced him that the Russians had not been negotiating in good faith, and that evening he told the Conseil d’État that although a campaign against Russia in 1811 was impossible for climatic reasons, once Prussian and Austrian co-operation was assured, Russia would be punished in 1812.60 Russia’s hopes for military conventions with Prussia and Austria were dashed by those countries for fear of Napoleon’s reprisals, although both gave Alexander secret oral assurances that their support to the French would be minimal, rather as the Russian attack on Austria in 1809 had been. Metternich’s word for it was ‘nominal’.

  The seriousness of Napoleon’s intentions can be ascertained by his renewed focus on the condition of the army’s shoes. A report in the Archives Nationales from Davout to Napoleon on November 29 stated: ‘In the 1805 campaign many men stayed behind for lack of shoes; now he is accumulating six pairs for each soldier.’61 Soon afterwards, Napoleon ordered his director of war administration, Lacuée, to supply provisions for 400,000 men for a fifty-day campaign, requiring 20 million rations of bread and rice, 6,000 wagons to carry enough flour for 200,000 people for two months, and 2 million bushels of oats to feed horses for fifty days.62 The weekly reports in the war ministry archives are testament to the huge operation taking place in early 1812. On February 14, 1812, to take an example almost at random, French troops were heading eastwards to over twenty German cities from all over the western part of the Empire.63 Further indication of Napoleon’s thinking can be seen in his order in December 1811 to his librarian, Barbier, to collect all the books he could find on Lithuania and Russia. These included several accounts, including Voltaire’s, of Charles XII of Sweden’s catastrophic invasion of Russia in 1709 and the annihilation of his army at the battle of Poltava, but also a five-hundred-page description of Russia’s resources and geography and two recent works on the Russian army.64*

  In early January 1812 the Tsar, who still had six months to avert war if he cared to, wrote to his sister Catherine: ‘All this devilish political business is going from bad to worse, and that infernal creature who is the curse of the human race becomes every day more abominable.’65 Alexander was receiving reports from Chernyshev’s spy codenamed ‘Michel’, who worked in the transport department of the war administration ministry in Paris until his arrest and execution with three accomplices in late February 1812. These reports revealed to Alexander the vast extent of France’s war preparations and troop movements, and even Napoleon’s order of battle.66

  On January 20, in another short-sighted act, France annexed Swedish Pomerania in order to enforce the Continental System along the Baltic coast. Cambacérès recalled that Napoleon had shown ‘little tact’ with Bernadotte, who after all had become a royal prince and deserved a new degree of respect. The annexation threw Sweden into the hands of the Russians, with whom she had been at war as recently as September 1809.67 Instead of establishing a useful ally in the north, capable of drawing Russian troops away from his own, Napoleon had ensured that Bernadotte would sign a treaty of friendship with Russia, which he did at Åbo on April 10, 1812.

  In February Austria agreed to furnish Napoleon with 30,000 men under Prince von Schwarzenberg for the invasion, but as Metternich told the British Foreign Office, ‘It is necessary that not only the French Government but the greater part of Europe should be deceived as to my principles and intentions.’68 At the time, Metternich had no discernible principles, and h
is intention was simply to see how the invasion of Russia would go. A week later Prussia promised 20,000 men, whereupon fully a quarter of the Prussian officer corps resigned their commissions in protest, many of them, such as the strategist Carl von Clausewitz, actually joining the Russians.69 Napoleon used to say, ‘It’s better to have an open enemy than a doubtful ally,’ but he did not act according to that belief in 1812.70 With Davout reporting on the huge size of the Russian army, he believed he needed as many foreign contingents as possible, and he needed them to be well armed.71 ‘I have ordered the light horse to be armed with carbines,’ he had written to Davout on January 6. ‘I would also like the Polish to have them; I learned that they only have six per company, which is ridiculous, given they have to deal with the Cossacks, who are armed from head to foot.’72

  On February 24 Napoleon wrote to Alexander saying that he had ‘decided to talk with Colonel Chernyshev about the unfortunate events that have occurred over the last fifteen months. It only depends on Your Majesty to end it all.’73 The Tsar rebuffed this further open-ended effort at peace. On the same day Eugène started marching 27,400 men of the Army of Italy to Poland. According to Fain, Napoleon briefly considered dismembering Prussia at this time, and so ‘secure, from the first cannon-shot, an indemnity against all the unfavourable risks of a Russian campaign’.74 With the Russians having gathered more than 200,000 men between St Petersburg and the Duchy of Warsaw, however, he had to face what he considered to be a serious Russian threat and could not afford to cause chaos in his rear.*

  Although Napoleon hoped for another swift victory, he gave his enemies far more time to organize in 1811–12 than in any of his earlier campaigns. From the moment that the first mobilization orders went out to Rhine Confederation contingents in early 1811, the Russians had well over a year to prepare, time that they used extremely well. In all his other campaigns Napoleon’s opponents had been lucky if they had a matter of weeks to get ready for his onslaught. Although the plan to concentrate forces upon Drissa that General von Phull drew up in the spring of 1812 wasn’t adopted, the Russian high command was constantly thinking through alternative strategies, and certainly out-thinking Napoleon’s by then transparent strategy of a quick decisive battle fought on the border.

  Although Napoleon called it the ‘Second Polish Campaign’, he privately told his staff, ‘We don’t have to listen to inconsiderate zeal for the Polish cause. France before anything else: those are my politics. The Poles aren’t the subject of this fight; they mustn’t be an obstacle to peace, but they might be a tool of war for us, and, on the eve of such a great crisis I will not leave them without advice or guidance.’75 He appointed the Abbé de Pradt as French ambassador to Warsaw. ‘The campaign began without any provisioning, which was Napoleon’s method,’ Pradt later wrote in his (violently anti-Napoleon) memoirs. ‘Some admiring imbeciles believe it was the secret of his success.’76 Though untrue – there was plenty of provisioning at the start of the campaign – it was a fair criticism later on, partly due to the negligence and incompetence of Pradt himself as Poland was the major supply depot for the campaign. Napoleon’s other possible appointee for Pradt’s post had been Talleyrand. That either man was even considered was a sign of how his usual good judgement of people had begun to slip badly and his lacuna over Talleyrand continued.

  It took Napoleon dangerously long to realize that Alexander was about to pull off significant diplomatic coups in both the north and south, allowing him to concentrate his forces against the coming invasion. As late as March 30, 1812 he told Berthier, ‘I assume the Russians will avoid making any movement, they cannot be unaware that Prussia, Austria and probably Sweden are with me; that with hostilities starting again with Turkey, the Turks will make new efforts, that the Sultan himself is going to join the army, and that all this makes it unlikely they will defy me easily.’77 In fact Napoleon had lost the north flank through his inability to treat Bernadotte and Sweden with respect and indulgence, and in late May 1812 he also lost the south flank, despite sending General Andreossy to Constantinople to tell Sultan Mahmud II ‘If one hundred thousand Turks, their Sultan at their head, went through the Danube, I promise in exchange not only Moldavia and Wallachia, but also the Crimea.’78 Alexander matched Napoleon’s offer over the Danubian provinces and signed the Treaty of Bucharest with Turkey on May 29, which meant that the Russian Army of the Danube could begin to threaten Napoleon’s southern flank.

  ‘The Turks will pay dearly for this mistake!’ Napoleon said on hearing news of the treaty. ‘It is so stupid that I couldn’t foresee it.’79 But the stupidity in this instance was in fact his – he had counted too complacently on Ottoman support. In turning back Napoleon at Acre in 1799, and by allowing Russia to redeploy her Balkan forces against him in 1812, the supposed ‘sick man of Europe’ was in fact instrumental in two of Napoleon’s major reverses. ‘If I’m ever accused of having provoked this war,’ Napoleon told Fain in August, ‘please consider, to absolve me, how little my cause was linked with the Turks, and how harassed I was by Sweden!’80

  By March 15 all the Grande Armée’s corps had reached the Elbe. That same day Napoleon ordered Louis Otto, the French ambassador in Vienna, to buy 2 million bottles of Hungarian wine at 10 sous each, to be delivered to Warsaw.81 To strengthen the invasion force, Belgian National Guard units replaced French troops in garrisons along the Atlantic coast, Princess Pauline Borghese’s bodyguard were called up, cannon were stripped from the navy and the hospitals scoured for malingerers. Reserve units were disbanded and reassembled to maximize the numbers that could go to Russia; the 10th Cohort of the Paris National Guard, for example, was soon almost entirely comprised of men with flat feet.82

  On April 8, a week after the Grande Armée had reached the Oder, Alexander issued an ultimatum ordering Napoleon immediately to evacuate his troops from Prussia, Swedish Pomerania and the Duchy of Warsaw and to reduce the Danzig garrison. This was to be a preliminary to a new settlement of the frontiers of Europe, under which Russia would be allowed to trade with neutrals but would negotiate compensation for Oldenburg and reduce Russian duties on French goods.83 These terms would clearly be unacceptable to Napoleon, and in any case sounded more like a propaganda bulletin than genuine bases for negotiation. On April 21 Alexander left St Petersburg for his army base at Vilnius. On the 17th Napoleon had made a peace offer to the British foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, saying that he would withdraw from the Iberian peninsula if the British did too, and that Sicily could stay Bourbon if Murat was recognized as king of Naples and Joseph as king of Spain. ‘If this fourth attempt should be unsuccessful,’ he concluded of his various peace offers since the breakdown of Amiens, ‘as those that have preceded it, France will at least have the consolation of thinking that the blood that could flow again will fall entirely on England.’84 It was cheekily opportunistic – especially the absurd provision regarding Joseph and Murat – and Castlereagh, as befitting a true disciple of Pitt, treated it with predictable contempt.

  On April 25 Napoleon sent his aide-de-camp General Comte Louis de Narbonne-Lara (who was probably the illegitimate son of Louis XV) with more realistic counter-proposals to the Tsar’s ultimatum that didn’t involve evacuations from allies’ territory. ‘These will prove to Your Majesty my desire to avoid war and my steadfastness in the sentiments of Tilsit and Erfurt,’ Napoleon wrote. ‘However, Your Majesty will allow me to assure you that, if fate makes war between us inevitable, it would not change the sentiments that Your Majesty has inspired in me and which are safe from any alteration and vicissitude.’85 Historians have tended to view cynically Napoleon’s repeated attempts to stay personally friendly with a head of state of a country he was about to ravage, yet it was part of his belief in the almost ethereal brotherhood of emperors that this should be possible. Their time at Tilsit together had clearly meant much more to him than it had to Alexander. Speaking to Pasquier in May before he left for the front, Napoleon described the coming campaign against Russia as ‘The g
reatest and most difficult enterprise I’ve ever attempted. But what has been begun must be carried through.’86

  At 6 a.m. on Saturday, May 9, Napoleon left Saint-Cloud with Marie Louise and the baby King of Rome to make his way to the front. The day before he had imposed wheat taxes and swingeing food-price controls. ‘In this way he hoped to ensure that they would remain contented during his absence,’ Pasquier concluded, but it was only a short-term solution.87 As always he moved fast: the imperial family passed the Rhine on the 13th, the Elbe on the 29th and the Vistula on June 6, travelling 530 miles in seven days and averaging over 75 miles a day in a horse-drawn carriage over unmetalled, rutted roads. There was nonetheless time for meetings in Dresden with the kings of Württemberg, Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria, the first of whom had refused to send a contingent to Spain in 1810, but would against Russia; the last was still angry that Napoleon had never reimbursed him for the expenses of the war of 1805, but nonetheless sent a contingent too. Marie Louise saw her father there for the first time since her wedding; and Napoleon for the first time since they had met at the windmill near Austerlitz. Francis also met his grandson. The King of Rome was attended by his governess Madame de Montesquieu, whose official title, ‘Governess to the Imperial Children’, indicates that Napoleon and Marie Louise hoped for more. Indeed, Napoleon later said he would have liked another son for the Kingdom of Italy and a third to be safe.