Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  The terms Metternich demanded for peace went far beyond the restitution of Illyria to Austria. He seems to have asked Napoleon for the independence of half of Italy and the whole of Spain, a return to Prussia of almost all the lands taken from her at Tilsit, including Danzig, the return of the Pope to Rome, the revocation of Napoleon’s protectorate of the German Confederation, the evacuation of French troops from Poland and Prussia, the independence of the Hanseatic ports and the abolition of the Duchy of Warsaw. At one point Napoleon shouted from the map room adjoining his study, so loudly that the entourage heard, that he did not mind giving up Illyria but the rest of the demands were impossible.96

  Napoleon had told his court several times that the French people would overthrow him if he signed a ‘dishonourable’ peace sending France back to her pre-war borders, which is effectively what Metternich was demanding. His police reports were currently indicating that the French people wanted peace far more than la Gloire, but he knew that national glory was indeed one of the vital four pillars – along with national property rights, low taxation and centralized authority – that bolstered his rule. Metternich might have been sincere in his desire for peace (though the words ‘Metternich’ and ‘sincerity’ tend to sit uncomfortably together at the best of times) but he clearly asked far too much as a price for it.

  ‘I had a long and wearisome talk with Metternich,’ Napoleon told Marie Louise the next day. ‘I hope peace will be negotiated in a few days’ time. I want peace, but it must be an honourable one.’97 That same day, Austria secretly signed a second Treaty of Reichenbach, with Prussia and Russia, in which she promised to go to war with France if Napoleon rejected peace terms at Prague. This, of course, had the effect of increasing the terms that Prussia and the by then irreconcilable Russia would demand.

  Napoleon met Metternich again on June 30, this time for a four-hour conference at which they extended the armistice to August 10 and Napoleon accepted Austrian mediation at the Prague Congress, set to start on July 29. ‘Metternich,’ Napoleon told his wife afterwards, ‘strikes me as an intriguer and as directing Papa François very badly.’98 Although Napoleon denounced it as ‘unnatural’ for Emperor Francis to make war on his son-in-law, he himself had demanded that Charles IV of Spain make war against his son-in-law, the King of Portugal, in 1800, so he was not on very sure ground.

  Napoleon’s position at the coming Congress was severely weakened when the news arrived on July 2 of Wellington’s crushing victory over Joseph and his chief-of-staff Marshal Jourdan at the battle of Vitoria in northern Spain on June 21, which cost Joseph 8,000 men and virtually the entire Spanish royal art collection. (It can today be seen at Apsley House in London. Jourdan’s red velvet marshal’s baton studded with golden bees is today on display outside the Waterloo Gallery at Windsor Castle.) Napoleon said the defeat at Vitoria was ‘because Joseph slept too long’, which is absurd.99 At the time, he wrote to Marie Louise to say that Joseph ‘is no soldier, and knows nothing about anything’, though that begs the question why he gave his brother overall command of an army of 47,300 men against the greatest British soldier since Marlborough.100 The trust and affection between the brothers had almost completely broken down over the disasters in Spain, for which each blamed the other. Five days later Napoleon told Marie Louise that if Joseph took up residence at his lovely Château de Mortefontaine in the Oise, with its islets, orangery, aviary, two parks and some of the finest landscaped gardens in Europe, then ‘it must be incognito and you must ignore him; I will not have him interfere with government or set up intrigues in Paris.’ He ordered Soult to take command of Joseph’s shattered army, with the very competent generals Honoré Reille, Bertrand Clauzel, Jean-Baptiste d’Erlon and Honoré Gazan as his principal lieutenants, hoping to protect Pamplona and San Sebastián.

  On July 12 the Russian, Prussian and Swedish general staffs met at Trachenberg to co-ordinate strategy in the event that the Prague Congress should fail. It was one of those rare occasions when leaders showed they had learned the lessons of history. Appreciating that Napoleon had often outflanked enemy armies and then punished the centre, they accepted the Austrian General Joseph Radetzky’s strategy to divide their forces into three armies that would advance into Saxony, not offering battle to Napoleon himself, but instead withdrawing before him and concentrating on the inferior forces of his lieutenants. If one of the Allied armies was attacked by Napoleon, the other two would attack his flank or rear. The idea was to force Napoleon to choose between three options: going on the defensive, leaving open his lines of communication or dividing his forces.101 The Trachenberg strategy was explicitly tailored to counteract Napoleon’s military genius and it would be used to tremendous effect.

  The Congress of Prague finally met on July 29. Caulaincourt and Narbonne represented France. ‘Russia is entitled to an advantageous peace,’ Napoleon told Fain at this time:

  she would have bought it by the devastation of her provinces, by the loss of her capital and by two years of war. Austria, on the contrary, doesn’t deserve anything. In the current situation, I have no objection to a peace that might be glorious to Russia; but I feel a true repugnance to seeing Austria, as a price for the crime she committed by violating our alliance, collect the fruits and honours of the pacification of Europe.102

  He did not wish to reward Francis and Metternich for what he saw as their scheming perfidy. After receiving intelligence reports from his spies, he warned his marshals on August 4 that ‘Nothing is happening at the Congress of Prague. They will arrive at no result, and the Allies intend to denounce the armistice on the 10th.’103

  On August 7 Metternich demanded that the Duchy of Warsaw be repartitioned, that Hamburg (which Davout had captured before the armistice) be liberated, that Danzig and Lübeck become free cities, that Prussia be reconstructed with a border on the Elbe and that Illyria, including Trieste, be ceded to Austria.104 Despite the fact that it would have meant forswearing the last seven years, leaving allies in the lurch and rendering the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives in vain, almost every other statesman of the day would have agreed to these terms. But the Emperor of France, the heir to Caesar and Alexander, simply could not bring himself to accept what he saw as a humiliating peace.

  27

  Leipzig

  ‘Fear and uncertainty accelerate the fall of empires: they are a thousand times more fatal than the dangers and losses of an ill-fated war.’

  Napoleon, statement in the Moniteur, December 1804

  ‘When two armies are in order of battle, and one has to retire over a bridge while the other has the circumference of the circle open, all the advantages are in favour of the latter.’

  Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 25

  ‘There’s not an ounce of doubt that the enemy will call off the armistice on the 10th and that hostilities will recommence on the 16th or 17th,’ Napoleon warned Davout from Dresden on August 8, 1813. He predicted that Austria would then send 120,000 men against him, 30,000 against Bavaria and 50,000 against Eugène in Italy.1 Nonetheless, he concluded: ‘Whatever increase in forces this gives to the Allies, I feel able to face up to them.’ His birthday celebrations were therefore brought forward five days, to August 10; they were to be the last formally held while he ruled France. The Saxon cavalry colonel Baron Ernst von Odeleben recalled in his memoirs the two-hour review of 40,000 soldiers, a Te Deum sung at Dresden cathedral accompanied by the roar of artillery salutes, the Imperial Guard banqueting with the Saxon Royal Guard under the linden trees by the Elbe, bands playing martial airs, every soldier receiving double pay and double meat rations, and the King of Saxony giving thousands of bottles of wine to the troops. As for Napoleon, ‘the vivats resounded as he passed along the ranks at a full gallop, attended by his brilliant suite.’ Few would have predicted that the French and Saxon artillerymen who ‘caroused together’ would within weeks be firing on each other. At 8 p.m. Napoleon visited the King of Saxony’s palace for a birthday banquet, after which their soldi
ers jointly cheered and discharged fireworks from either side of the bridge. ‘An azure sky gave a charming effect to the multitude of rockets,’ remembered Odeleben, ‘which crossed each other in their flight over the dark roofs of the city, illuminating the air far and wide … After a pause the cipher of Napoleon appeared in the air, above the palace.’2 Later on, as the crowds dispersed, the ‘doleful cries’ of a fisherman could be heard from the shore; he had approached too close to the rockets and had been mortally wounded. ‘Was this an omen,’ Odeleben wondered, ‘of the dreadful career of the hero of the fête?’

  By mid-August 1813 Napoleon had assembled 45,000 cavalry, spread over four corps and twelve divisions.3 It was far more than he had had at the start of the armistice, but still not enough to counter the forces massing against him. The Allies denounced the armistice at noon on the 11th, within twenty-four hours of Napoleon’s estimate, and stated that hostilities would resume at midnight on the 17th.* Austria declared war on France on the 12th. The deftness with which Metternich had drawn Austria out of her alliance, then into neutrality, then into supposedly objective mediation, and then, the day after the end of the armistice, into the Sixth Coalition has been described as ‘a masterpiece of diplomacy’.4 Napoleon saw only duplicity. ‘The Congress of Prague never seriously took place,’ he told the King of Württemberg. ‘It was a means for Austria to choose to declare herself.’5 He wrote to Ney and Marmont saying he would take up a position between Görlitz and Bautzen and see what the Austrians and Russians would do. ‘It seems to me that no good will come of the current campaign unless there is first a big battle,’ he concluded in what was by now a familiar refrain.6

  The strategic situation was serious but not disastrous. As he had stated, Napoleon had the advantage of internal lines within Saxony, although he was surrounded by large enemy armies on three sides. Schwarzenberg’s Army of Bohemia now consisted of 230,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians, who were coming up from northern Bohemia; Blücher was leading the Army of Silesia, comprising 85,000 Prussians and Russians, westwards from Upper Silesia, and Bernadotte headed a Northern Army of 110,000 Prussians, Russians and Swedes moving southwards from Brandenburg: 425,000 men in total, with more on the way. Facing them, Napoleon had 351,000 men spread between Hamburg and the upper Oder.7 Although he had a further 93,000 men garrisoning German and Polish towns and 56,000 training in French army depots, they were not readily available. He would need to keep his army concentrated centrally and defeat each enemy force separately, as he had done so often in the past. Yet instead he made the serious error of splitting his army – contradicting two of his own most important military maxims: ‘Keep your forces concentrated’ and ‘Do not squander them in little packets.’8

  Napoleon took 250,000 men to fight Schwarzenberg, while sending Oudinot (against the marshal’s protestations) northwards to try to capture Berlin with 66,000 men, and General Jean-Baptiste Girard to defend Magdeburg 80 miles to the west of Oudinot with 9,000 men. He also ordered Davout to leave 10,000 men behind to defend Hamburg and to support Oudinot with a further 25,000. As in the attack on Moscow, Napoleon rejected the strategy that had served him so well in the past – that of concentrating solely on the enemy’s main force and annihilating it – and instead allowed secondary political objects to intervene, such as his desire to take Berlin and punish Prussia. Nor did he place Davout under Oudinot’s command or vice versa, with the result that there was no unity of command in the northern theatre.

  Even had Oudinot succeeded in capturing Berlin it would not have guaranteed victory in 1813 any more than it had in 1806; had Schwarzenberg been comprehensively defeated by the combined French forces, Bernadotte could not have defended Berlin in any case. Although Napoleon knew the campaign was going to be decided in Saxony or northern Bohemia, he failed to give Oudinot more than a skeleton force to protect the Elbe from Bernadotte and defend his rear.9 Leaving Davout to counter non-existent threats from north-west Germany was also a shocking waste of the marshal who had best proved his ability in independent command.

  On August 15, his forty-fourth birthday, Napoleon left Dresden for Silesia, where he hoped to strike Blücher, who had captured Breslau. On the way he was joined at Bautzen by Murat, who was rewarded for his unexpected re-adherence to Napoleon’s cause with his old position in overall charge of the cavalry. That day Napoleon told Oudinot that Girard’s division at Magdeburg was 8,000 to 9,000 strong, which was true. The very next day he assured Macdonald it numbered 12,000.10

  ‘It is he who wanted war,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise in reference to her father, ‘through ambition and unbounded greed. Events will decide the matter.’11 From then on he referred to Emperor Francis only as ‘ton père’ or ‘Papa François’, as when writing on August 17, ‘Deceived by Metternich, your father has sided with my enemies.’12 As regent of France and a good wife, Marie Louise was loyal to her husband and adopted country, rather than to her father and her fatherland.

  Putting their Trachenberg strategy into effect as agreed, the Allies fell back in front of Napoleon’s force while seeking out those of his principal lieutenants. Blücher was thus ready to take on Ney between the Bober river and the Katzbach on August 16, but he pulled back when Napoleon moved up with large elements of his main field army. Oudinot, whose advance on Berlin was slowed by torrential rain that all but halted his artillery, was pounced upon by Bülow’s Prussians and Count Stedingk’s Swedish corps in three separate actions from August 21 to 23 at Gross-Beeren, and defeated. He withdrew to Wittenberg rather than, as Napoleon would have preferred, Luckau. ‘It’s truly difficult to have fewer brains than the Duke of Reggio,’ Napoleon said to Berthier, after which he despatched Ney to take over Oudinot’s command.13

  By August 20 Napoleon was in Bohemia, hoping to impede Schwarzenberg’s movement towards Prague. ‘I drove out General Neipperg,’ he reported to Marie Louise that day. ‘The Russians and Prussians have entered Bohemia.’14 (Only a year later, the dashing one-eyed Austrian General Adam von Neipperg would exact a horribly personal revenge.) Hearing of a major attack on Dresden by the Army of Bohemia, Napoleon turned his army around on the 22nd and dashed back there, leaving Macdonald to watch Blücher. As he did so he wrote to Saint-Cyr: ‘If the enemy has effectively carried out a big movement towards Dresden, I consider this to be very happy news, and that will even force me within a few days to have a great battle, which will decide things for good.’15 The same day he also wrote to his grand chamberlain, the Comte de Montesquiou, expressing his dissatisfaction with his birthday festivities in Paris. ‘I was much displeased to learn that matters were so badly managed on the 15th of August that the Empress was detained for a considerable time listening to bad music,’ he wrote, ‘and that consequently the public were kept waiting two hours for the fireworks.’16

  The battle of Dresden was fought on August 26–27, 1813. Napoleon’s intelligence service had accurately warned of the huge Allied forces converging on the city. By the 19th, Barclay de Tolly’s Russians had joined Schwarzenberg to form a vast army 237,770 strong – comprising 172,000 infantry, 43,500 cavalry, 7,200 Cossacks and 15,000 artillery, with a colossal 698 guns. This enlarged Army of Bohemia marched into Saxony on August 21 in five columns. Wittgenstein’s column of 28,000 men headed for Dresden. Since Napoleon controlled all the bridges over the Elbe, however, the French were able to march on both sides of the river.

  At Dresden itself the Old City defences, effectively a semicircle anchored at each end on the Elbe, were held by three divisions of Saint-Cyr’s corps, roughly 19,000 infantry and 5,300 cavalry. The city’s garrison of eight battalions manned the walls. Napoleon arrived at the gallop at 10 a.m. on the 26th and approved Saint-Cyr’s deployments. Despite suffering from stomach pains that induced vomiting before the battle, he fired off his instructions. Guns were placed in each of the five large redoubts outside the Old City walls and eight inside the New City. The Old City’s streets and gates were barricaded, all trees within 600 yards of the walls were cut
down and a battery of thirty guns was placed on the right bank of the river to fire into Wittgenstein’s flank.17 Fortunately for those making these preparations, the slowness of General von Klenau’s Austrian column meant that the general attack had to take place the next day.

  Although Tsar Alexander, General Jean Moreau (who had left his English exile to witness the great assault on Napoleon) and General Henri de Jomini (Ney’s Swiss chief-of-staff who had defected to the Russians during the armistice) all thought Napoleon’s position too strong to attack, King Frederick William of Prussia argued that it would damage army morale not to, and insisted that the Allies gave battle. Although both sides were ready to fight from 9.30 a.m. nothing happened until mid-afternoon, when Napoleon ordered Saint-Cyr to retake a factory just outside the city walls. This minor advance was mistaken by the Allied commanders as the signal for the battle to begin, which it therefore did essentially by accident.

  Wittgenstein was in action by 4 p.m., advancing under heavy artillery fire as the Young Guard met the Russian attack. Five Jäger (elite light infantry) regiments and one of hussars attacked the Gross-garten, a formal baroque garden outside the city walls, with infantry and artillery support. The French defended the Gross-garten stubbornly, and managed to bring up a battery through the Prinz Anton Gardens to hit the enemy in the flank. Two Russian attack columns were meanwhile caught by murderous artillery fire from beyond the Elbe. By the end of the day each side held about half of the Gross-garten. (A fine view of the battlefield can be seen today from the 300-foot dome of the Frauenkirche.) Marshal Ney led a charge at Redoubt No. 5 composed of Young Guard units and men of Saint-Cyr’s corps, which forced the Austrians to feed in reserves, but even these couldn’t prevent an entire Hessian battalion from being surrounded and forced to surrender. When the first day’s fighting ended at nightfall, the Allies had lost 4,000 killed and wounded, twice as many as the French.