by Paul Johnson
Bonaparte played the detonating role in this process. After Austerlitz and Jena, and the tame surrender of the Prussian army, he had treated the Germans with contempt. He had set up French garrisons and puppet rulers, personally occupied their royal palaces when he felt like it, and made German kings, electors, and reigning dukes parade before him like lackeys. He conscripted their armies to provide expendable manpower for his schemes. His propagandists held sway in German universities, presenting French culture, with its strong classicizing flavor and its Roman gilt, as the only acceptable form of artistic expression. His puppets imposed a Gallic censorship on their press and books.
The political and military reaction was slow in coming, but it was all the more powerful, when the Russian catastrophe brought it into the open, for being accompanied by a deep-rooted and overwhelmingly muscular cultural reaction. The explosion in German thought and literature at the end of the eighteenth century was a determining event in European history. Coleridge was one of the first to become aware of its importance, and brought the good news to England. He thought that the imposition of alien French culture would turn German creativity inward, with disastrous consequences, and that was one reason why he hated Bonaparte so much, saw him as an enemy of the creative human spirit. Madame de Staël also examined the new German phenomenon and was overwhelmed by its richness and profundity. She wrote a brilliant book about it, which Bonaparte would not allow to be published in France, but which was printed nonetheless and widely circulated, and so brought the good news to Paris.
The young Bonaparte had been seen as a romantic figure. But that was a superficial judgment on a slim young man who had done remarkable things. The mature Bonaparte, stout and imperious, with his much-vaunted cult of reason in all things, and his dogmatic taste for le goût roman and le style empire, exported everywhere his soldiers took their bayonets, was increasingly seen by the intelligentsia as an old-fashioned relic of a dusty classicism whose day was done, and as an implacable opponent of the dawning romanticism his tyranny had evoked. That was why Victor Hugo, a teenage prodigy, hated him. The new spirit, which enthralled the young, came from the North—that was why it first took root in England and Germany. It was medieval and Gothic; it was both Christian and pagan as opposed to rational, rooted in folklore and legend, in spirituality and the supernatural, in the laws of the Angles and Saxons rather than the Code Napoléon, in the dark, impenetrable forests with their wolves and bears, rather than the sunny South.
The German intellectuals, writers, and artists, imbued with this spirit, were the first to turn against Bonaparte. It was significant that the German artistic colony in Rome, second in size only to the French, became fiercely francophobe in the years 1805-15. German painters adopted an anti-Napoleonic iconography. For a decade, Bonaparte himself had poured millions into launching an iconography of his own. To give one instance, Bonaparte sought to efface the massacre at Jaffa by holding a competition among French artists to portray him in a more heroic light. The eventual result was Gros’s riveting painting Bonaparte among the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa, showing the young general dauntlessly defying the risk of contagion by comforting his stricken soldiers and civilians. It was an immense success and became one of the lasting icon-narratives of the regime.
Now the Germans moved in precisely the opposite direction, by projecting Gothic, anticlassical, and anti-Bonapartist images on the popular consciousness. One of the most vehement of the Gothic painters was Caspar David Friedrich, who hated Bonaparte and whose symbolic crosses, arising out of the snow or mist, were ideograms of Germany’s mystic and Christian awakening from Gallic rationalism. The German romantic artists both joined and illustrated the bands of Jäger, volunteer detachments of forest rangers who were recruited to attack the French army, like organized guerrillas. They wore green uniforms, and one of them was Colonel Friedrich von Brincken, who was killed in the struggle. He wears the green uniform in Friedrich’s most famous painting, the Rückenfigur or Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which commemorates his memory, showing him rising above the choking miasma of Bonapartist oppression.
We come here to an important historiographical point. It has been common among Bonaparte’s biographers to attribute his eventual failures to age, lack of concentration, deterioration in his health, increasing weight, and tiredness, and to a progressive decline in his mental faculties. There is some truth in this. It is also true that the French army was in slow but irreversible decline, so many experienced junior officers and NCOs, who should have been training the new intakes, having been lost in Russia. More than 200,000 fine horses had been left there, too, and they could not be replaced either. From this point on, Bonaparte always complained that he did not have enough cavalry or that it was of poor quality.
These are material reasons for Bonaparte’s declension. But there was a metaphysical reason, too, embracing the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. He had once been “a man whose time had come.” In the second half of the 1790s, Bonaparte was an embodiment, all over Europe, of the protest against the old legitimists, their inefficiency, privileges, obscurantism, and misuse of resources, above all the talents and genius of youth. Thus he prospered and conquered. By 1813, however, he was out of date. His time had gone. His compatriot and critic Chateaubriand, who embodied the new romanticism, had produced a book, Le Génie du christianisme, that had a huge effect on French and European opinion and that captured the new spirit of the times. A religious revival was under way, and that was something Bonaparte, a secular man if ever there was one, neither understood nor wanted. Wherever one turned in 1813—to the bestselling novels and poems of Sir Walter Scott, read all over the Continent; to the later symphonies of Beethoven, still raging at Bonaparte’s betrayal of his ideal; and to the etchings of Goya, relished by everyone who had suffered under Bonaparte’s troops—the zeitgeist was against the French emperor. He did not understand that all had changed. He continued to splutter out, in an unending stream, schemes for the improvement of humanity. But he was a superannuated man, and events were about to deposit him, alongside the doge of Venice, the grand master of Malta, and the Holy Roman Emperor, on history’s smoldering rubbish dump.
Meanwhile, the law of unintended effect continued to operate. The war for Germany, which opened with two victories for Bonaparte in April, continued for six months, punctuated by pauses and one truce. Gradually Bonaparte built up his numerical strength in Germany or nearby to 450,000 men in his main army, with a further 220,000 within call. But he was permanently short of cavalry to turn a tactical advantage over his opponents into a rout, and much of his infantry was un dertrained and incapable of performing complicated field maneuvers. By contrast, the Prussian army benefited from fundamental reforms instigated by the violently anti-Bonapartist staff general Gerhard Scharnhorst. Bonaparte killed this brilliant organizer at Lützen. But he was quickly replaced by the equally forceful Augustus Wilhelm Gneisenau, who as chief of staff helped to make Marshal Blücher into a highly successful battle commander and turned the Prussian army into the most formidable military machine in Europe, a title it held, on and off, until 1945.
One can say, indeed, that 1813 marked the point at which the military paramountcy of Europe, which France had held since the 1640s, began to shift toward Germany. In retrospect, it is obvious that Bonaparte should have made peace immediately after his two victories in April and May. He would probably have got better terms than Metternich offered. As it was, in the Sixth Coalition, which formed during the year, he faced a more formidable array of forces than ever before. He had always said that, leaving Britain aside, he could beat two of the big three (Prussia, Russia, and Austria) at any one time. If he faced three, the outcome was more doubtful. Now, when Austria declared war on him in August, he faced not only the big three but Sweden, while his former ally Bavaria changed sides and his most abject puppet, Saxony, was occupied by his enemies. Moreover he was now fighting, in effect, a united Germany, which was being swept by a wave of violent natio
nalism that made the Scharnhorst-Gneisenau reforms far more effective, and inspired even the Austrians to fight as they had never fought before. In numbers, Bonaparte appeared at times to have the advantage. But in quality, for the first time, the advantage lay with his opponents. As Wellington later observed, Bonaparte lacked the temperament to fight a defensive battle, let alone a defensive campaign. Had he been able to do so, he might well have fought the Sixth Coalition to a peace of exhaustion, without a single one of its soldiers setting foot on French soil proper. As it was, he was still determined to follow his instincts and bring the entire war to colossal battle, ignoring the fact that his own losses could not be replaced, while the Allies were increasing their numerical strength all the time.
The outcome was the Battle of Leipzig, fought over three days, 16-19 October 1813. The number of troops involved was greater than in any of the pitched battles of the entire period 1792-1815. (Borodino was the next largest.) Bonaparte had 180,000 men around the city and was awaiting 20,000 more. The Austrians, Prussians, Russians, Swedes, and other entities had in the area about 350,000 troops, with more on the way. It was called “the battle of the nations,” a somber phrase, signifying what Bonaparte was doing to Europe, precipitating a new form of warfare that involved not just professional armies but entire peoples—total war. More than half those engaged were conscripts. There was no element of dazzling maneuver or tactical surprise in this battle of attrition, and the environs of the city became killing fields in which the total casualties were not far short of 100,000. Bonaparte was forced to withdraw, leaving behind an additional 30,000 prisoners, plus—a new note, this—5,000 who fled to the opposing camp while the battle was still raging. He left behind, too, 100,000 men in French garrisons scattered all over Germany, and all were forced into unconditional surrender.
Thus the empire dissolved in military ruin, and Bonaparte now had to fight, for the first time, on French soil. It was then that French public opinion turned decisively against him. The French had applauded Bonaparte’s conquests, not least the way in which he got them to pay for his empire by financial exactions and to man it by providing many of the troops. But those days were over, and the full cost of any continued fighting had to be carried by France herself, both in men and in money. In 1812 and 1813 Bonaparte had lost, in killed, wounded, prisoners, and simply disappeared, about one million men. About half were Frenchmen. Yet all had been in vain, as Germans and Russians were now pouring across the frontiers into France, often led by marauding squadrons of Cossacks. All looted, raped, and murdered, as the French had once looted, raped, and murdered in their homelands. Thus faced with the horrors of war, as the Germans, Italians, Russians, and Spanish—and others—had faced them, the French did not like what they saw, and quailed. Wellington had now broken out of Spain, skirted around the Pyrenees, and was well into France. Soult, his opponent, had more or less given up the struggle. Bordeaux capitulated without a shot. The French and their puppets in Switzerland put up no resistance to the Austrians. The British and their allies occupied Holland and pushed into Belgium. Germany was totally lost. Major French frontier fortresses surrendered or were abandoned. Royalists began to appear everywhere in France, and Talleyrand and those who thought like him were maneuvering to get the best terms they could.
Bonaparte’s behavior, in the interval between Leipzig in October 1813 and his actual abdication in April 1814, makes little sense. He rejected Allied offers first of the 1799 frontiers, then of the 1792 old frontiers, both of which might have given him a real chance of surviving as a ruler. He then, in January, took the head of his army again. But it was not an army that gave him even an outside chance of beating the Allies in a major battle, the only way in which he could save himself. It never numbered more than 70,000 men at its height, and the Allied armies converging on Paris were in excess of half a million, with more to come if necessary. Bonaparte had successfully played the numbers game in war and raised the stakes, and now the odds turned against him with a vengeance. All he could do was to carry out his old strategy in miniature—lightning strikes against isolated sections of the Allied forces. This he did with considerable skill, and his 1814 campaign in the winter and early spring is often held up as a model of how to use inferior forces with effect. The so-called Six-Day campaign of 9-14 February inflicted 20,000 casualties on the Prussians and was followed by several more victorious skirmishes. But they were of no more strategic significance than the Nazi victory in the Ardennes at the end of 1944. They merely taught Blücher and the other commanders to be more cautious and allow their steady buildup of forces, and occupation of French territory, to take effect. Bonaparte won his last victory, over a detached Prussian division, on 13 March. Two weeks later, he gave up the campaign as hopeless and made for Paris. By now his commanders were surrendering and defecting, and by the end of the month it was impossible to defend the capital. The empress Marie-Louise; her son, the king of Rome; and Joseph, nominally in charge of the imperial government, left in a hurry. About 150,000 Allied troops entered the capital, and Talleyrand, as vice-chamberlain of the empire, formally proclaimed the dissolution of the empire, preparing the way for a royal restoration. Bonaparte made a last attempt to assemble an army at Fontainebleau, but his remaining marshals refused to follow him, and on 6 April he formally abdicated the thrones of France and Italy. He was offered a petty kingdom in Elba, and took it, sailing for the island aboard a British warship on 28 April. It was a sad and messy end to a great enterprise, and many felt, like Byron, that Bonaparte should have gone down fighting. He had raised French nationalism to a gigantic height, but in the process he had awakened other nationalist forces that, collectively, overwhelmed him and his country. The apprenti sorcier should have gone down with his failed magic. But Bonaparte still had illusions to entertain and his appetite for battle was undiminished. So a long, dying sigh was in store, for him and his admirers.
CHAPTER SIX
Elba and Waterloo
BONAPARTE ARRIVED in Elba on 4 May 1814, courtesy of the Royal Navy frigate HMS Undaunted. The Allies rejected his demand that the abdication was in favor of his son, the king of Rome. Instead, Louis XVIII, brother of the guillotined king, was restored to the throne of the Bourbons and arrived in Paris the same day Bonaparte arrived in Elba. The whole thing had been arranged by Talleyrand, now on excellent terms with Metternich; Karl Robert Nesselrode, the Russian minister; and the three sovereigns, especially the czar, who chose to stay in Talleyrand’s house when he reached Paris. Bonaparte saw Talleyrand’s actions as treason, but the old fox could reply that he put the interests of France before any other loyalty, unlike Bonaparte, who identified France’s interests with his own. Certainly, Talleyrand’s tact and cunning performed an immeasurable service to his country by ensuring that France immediately became one of the big five, along with Britain, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, in restoring order to Europe after the collapse of Bonapartism.
As a sop to his pride, Bonaparte was appointed de facto administrator of Elba, under Allied supervision. His official title was “Emperor and Ruler of Elba.” That was a joke, of course: one detects Talleyrand’s sly sense of humor. Bonaparte did not see the point. One of the things he did aboard the frigate was to design a new flag for his little territory. His declension from Europe to Elba was indeed his maxim of the sublime to the ridiculous turned into reality. From ruling half the continent and eighty million, he was now prince of an island 7 miles from the coast of Italy, 19 miles long, 7 wide, 140 square miles in area, and with a population said to be 100,000, but which at the end of the nineteenth century was accurately counted as a little over 25,000. It had been acquired in the sixteenth century by Cosimo I of Florence. He had built its capital, which he called Cosmopolis but had become known as Portoferraio, and Bonaparte did not have the heart to restore its splendid name, or the chutzpah to call it Napoleonopolis. But he had his main palace there, and his villa outside, and various other properties on the island. These included a former hermitage, high in the
mountains, which went up to 3,440 feet. There, in due course, he entertained his Polish mistress, Maria Walewska, who came on a visit, bringing their little blond boy, Alexandre. She was more faithful to him than Marie-Louise, who not only declined to come to him but soon (by the stratagems of Metternich) acquired a lover, her aide-de-camp, General Count von Neip perg (rather like the prince regent’s estranged wife, Caroline, and her majordomo). Bonaparte made no comment on this. But when, soon after his arrival in Elba, he got the news of Josephine’s death, he commented: “Now she is happy.” He was delighted to welcome his mother, Letizia, now in her mid-sixties, whose attitude to the débâcle was “I told you so!” She had always treated his splendor as fairy gold and remarked: “Yes, if only it lasts.” His sister Pauline came, too, and ran his household, gave masked dances, and did the usual Italian things. But he kept her short of money, by habit but also because, for the first time in fifteen years, he no longer had millions to spend.
He had 600 men of his Guard with him, and 400 other troops, including Polish lancers. He had a small court and a skeleton administration. Since ancient times Elba had had iron mines and fisheries, and these produced for its government something over a quarter of a million francs a year. The treaty arrangements, signed at his old palace of Fontainebleau, laid it down that the French government was to pay Bonaparte two million francs a year, to which was later added provision for his mother and Pauline. He had his own fortune—not seven million as some said, more like four million—but he wanted to keep that as an “iron reserve.” His expenses for the army, administration, and court came to 1.5 million a year. There would have been no problem if the French government had fulfilled its obligations, but it silently refused to send one franc. So almost from the start Bonaparte began to worry about money. He had bitter enemies all over Europe, especially royalists, and he feared they would come to murder him. His army of 1,000 was the least he required to prevent such an attack. He began to sell property and make economies, fearing that the only alternative was reduction in his force. The meanness of the returned Bourbons was not only wrong but (as Talleyrand might have said) a mistake. If Bonaparte had been plentifully pensioned off, the likelihood is that he would have died in Elba, playing with his miniature army. Fear was his strongest motive in seeking a comeback.
