by Philip Dwyer
At the beginning of 1810, Napoleon appears to have been prepared to take into consideration Russian sensitivities about the one thing that upset Alexander (and the Russians) the most, Poland. It was the major bone of contention between the two countries.22 Napoleon did nothing to help his own cause. At the Tsar’s behest, he authorized Caulaincourt to enter into negotiations with the Russian foreign minister, Nikolai Petrovich Rumiantsev, so that all four powers concerned – France, Russia, Prussia and Austria – could come to some sort of binding agreement over Poland. A draft agreement was drawn up in January 1810, but Napoleon rejected it on the grounds that he could not undertake to prevent an event that might happen as a result of conditions beyond his control. This kind of sophistry was not only not appreciated in St Petersburg, but caused consternation. Caulaincourt did his best to try to persuade Napoleon to change his mind, arguing that his stance was doing tremendous damage to the relationship, but to no avail.23 Alexander, who was insisting on these terms – that is, that Napoleon guarantee that there would be no resurrection of the Kingdom of Poland – went so far as to suggest that if Napoleon did not acquiesce he might find it hard to continue the blockade against Britain. Napoleon was understandably outraged, and declared in a letter to Caulaincourt in July 1810 that if Alexander was going to start blackmailing him, and using the Polish question as an excuse for a rapprochement with Britain – for this is what it seemed like in Paris – then there would be war.24 From that time on, relations between the two countries went into a nosedive, and both sides starting preparing for war.
Napoleon was playing a number of cards at the same time: he wanted to maintain the myth that the Polish kingdom would one day be resurrected, but at the same time he was exploring alternative foreign policy directions.25 One was a closer alliance with Austria, while the other was to help place Bernadotte on the Swedish throne, a country Russia considered to be within its sphere of influence. The offer of the Swedish throne to a relatively marginal French marshal is one of the stranger stories to come out of the Napoleonic wars.26 Relations with Bernadotte had always been strained, a relationship made worse by Bernadotte’s opposition to Bonaparte’s power, and by his poor performance in the field, notably at Wagram. In 1810, he was about to be sent to Rome as its new governor when he was ‘elected’ heir to the Swedish King Charles XIII, who was childless and in poor health. The proposal was made on the initiative of a member of the Swedish Diet, Baron Karl Otto Mörner, who acted entirely on his own initiative. In fact, the Swedes were so dumbfounded that Mörner was arrested. It took some time for their government to warm to the idea, but they eventually came around to it. When Bernadotte told Napoleon of the offer, he agreed on condition that Bernadotte sign a document saying that he would never take up arms against France. Bernadotte refused, arguing that he could not accept ‘foreign vassalage’. In the end, Napoleon relented and did not oppose Bernadotte’s election as crown prince, thinking that either the king, Charles XIII, would be around for a while longer yet, or that Sweden was an insignificant player. He may have been glad to be rid of a troublesome marshal. Nor did Napoleon think at all about how this would be seen in St Petersburg. The creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the recent marriage alliance with Austria and now the election of a French marshal as the Crown Prince of Sweden all gave Russia the impression that it was being encircled.
Relations between the two countries got worse as the year progressed. The sticking point for Napoleon was the Continental System. The Baltic became the principal region through which the system was most breached, and through which English goods were distributed to the rest of mainland Europe.27 As many as 5,000 merchant ships entered and left the Baltic in 1810. Around the end of October and the beginning of November 1810, Napoleon concluded that the anti-English aspects of the Tilsit agreement were dead.28 His response, the only one he was capable of, was to make the Baltic more watertight by annexing a number of territories, such as Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen and, in December 1810, the Duchy of Oldenburg, a territory of some size in north-west Germany. The latter in particular was a thoughtless move. The integrity of the duchy had been guaranteed by the Treaty of Tilsit, but what made matters worse was that Peter, the Duke of Oldenburg, was Alexander I’s uncle, while one of Peter’s sons, George, was, as we have seen, married to Alexander’s sister, the Grand Duchess Ekaterina.29 The Russian connection was close then, which is no doubt why Napoleon hesitated before acting, and why Alexander reacted the way he did.
Alexander moved troops towards the Polish border, and sent a letter to all the crowned heads of Europe protesting that the annexation was an illegal act.30 The troop movements were little more than sabre rattling, but were accompanied by a refusal on the part of the Tsar to see Caulaincourt for more than two weeks. More serious was a ukase, or edict, issued on 31 December 1810 that allowed neutral merchant ships to enter Russian ports and, moreover, forbade French goods from entering Russian soil (except wine and silk; Alexander was still anxious not to upset the Russian ruling classes). It was a virtual declaration of economic war on France. The Russian minister for foreign affairs, Rumiantsev, attempted to patch things up by suggesting that the Duke of Oldenburg could be compensated by territory equal in size in the Duchy of Warsaw, something that would have quelled Russian fears about Napoleon’s intentions in Poland,31 but the negotiations led nowhere and Napoleon’s repeated suggestions that Alexander send an envoy to Paris to talk over the difficulties between the two countries were spurned. Napoleon simply could not understand what impact his actions were having on attitudes inside Russia.
Napoleon had known for years that public opinion in Russia was decidedly against the French alliance; his emissaries in Petersburg kept him well informed of Russian discontent. The Russian nobility had considered him a despot ever since the assassination of the Duc d’Enghien in 1804 and were on the whole hostile towards the French. The French Empire was perceived, by some at least, to be little more than ‘a sort of slavery under which the rest of Europe groaned’. Russia, on the other hand, was the only power that could act as a ‘barrier to this devastating torrent, for which nothing is sacred’.32 As early as 1811, then, some in Alexander’s entourage were recommending war. The Tsar had been thinking about it even earlier than that. When Frederick William III’s aide-de-camp, Major Friedrich Heinrich Ernst Count von Wrangel, was sent to Petersburg in July 1810 to announce the death of Queen Luise (she died of an unidentified illness that month), Alexander was so upset that he is reported to have said, ‘I swear to you to avenge her death, and her murderer [a reference to Napoleon] is to pay for it.’ He then told Wrangel in the strictest confidence that he was arming and that he would be ready to attack Napoleon by 1814.33 Alexander was thinking, at the end of 1810 and the beginning of 1811, of an offensive on Polish territory.34
It has to be said that Russian attitudes towards the French – and this also applies to Alexander – were profoundly ambivalent. If they hated what the French Revolution represented – the overthrow of the existing social order – some nobles both admired Napoleon for his brilliance and hated him as ‘an enemy of mankind’, thinking that war against him was a sacred duty.35 In previous campaigns, though, the regime had refused to mobilize the nobility’s often blustering patriotism and quashed public discussion for fear it might turn against the regime. Moreover, hatred of revolutionary France, resentment of the interruption of commerce with Britain and the ascendancy of the Anglophile party at the court of St Petersburg did not necessarily translate into a desire for war.36 On the contrary, the fear that Napoleon might incite the Russian peasants to rise up against their noble lords convinced many that it was probably best to avoid war at all costs.
‘Two Blustering Braggarts’
Both Napoleon and Alexander publicly professed that they did not want war, and yet both sides were drawn into a situation that made war inevitable. At the beginning of 1811, Napoleon told Davout that ‘I do not want war with Russia, but I want to take an offensive position.’37 During an
interview at Saint-Cloud in May 1811, he told Alexander’s aide-de-camp, General Count Pavel Andreyevich Shuvalov, who had been sent to Paris with a dispatch, ‘I am always ready to do what I can to maintain peace, but I will never let my honour be attacked, and who in Europe would believe the part Emperor Alexander has taken over the duchy of Oldenburg, it is a pretext.’ And again in the same interview: ‘I have no wish to make war on Russia. It would be a crime on my part, for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thank God, lost my head. I am not mad.’38 In the same vein, he asserted to another of Alexander’s aides-de-camp, Colonel Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, sent a number of times to Paris with personal letters, that he had no intention of re-establishing the Kingdom of Poland.39 Similarly, Alexander was telling everyone that he would not be the first to draw the sword, and that he had no wish to be saddled with the responsibility of the bloodshed that would inevitably follow war between the two countries.40 Both Napoleon and Alexander appear to have been genuine enough, but then it was the same old story – neither was prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to reach a compromise. And when Napoleon at last came to the realization of what was actually needed to avoid war, it was already too late. He aptly summed up the situation in a letter to Alexander in April 1811. ‘The effect of my military preparations will make Your Majesty increase his own; when news of his actions reaches me here, it will force me to raise more troops: and all this over nothing!’41 On St Helena, he later admitted that they were like ‘two blustering braggarts’ who had no desire to fight each other but who sought to frighten each other.42 Contemporaries, even those hostile to Napoleon, were in no doubt who was responsible for the coming catastrophe. According to Metternich, it was Russia’s ‘unpardonable manner’.43
Caulaincourt was recalled from Petersburg in May 1811. When he arrived in Paris on 5 June, he was immediately ushered into the presence of Napoleon (then at Saint-Cloud), and they spent the next five hours in conversation. Caulaincourt wrote down an account of the interview, and if it is to be treated as at all reliable, it seems clear that Napoleon’s ideas on the subject were relatively set, that he discounted any opinions on the matter that contradicted his own, and that he was convinced he was the victim – Russia was trying to humiliate him – rather than the aggressor.44 Caulaincourt advised against going to war with Russia, urging Napoleon to abandon Poland for the sake of the Russian alliance. His advice would not have made much difference at this late stage.45 Most people in Napoleon’s entourage advised against going to war with Russia, including Captain Leclerc, in charge of preparing a demographic and statistical analysis of Russia and who warned that any French army that penetrated into the Russian interior risked being annihilated like that of Charles XII of Sweden in 1709.46
Napoleon, however, had his supporters at court, so that there were two factions, both scoffing at and denouncing the other. At the Hôtel de Galliffet, for example, the new minister for foreign affairs, Hugues-Bernard Maret, now Duc de Bassano (he took over from Champagny in April 1811), worked towards garnering support for the invasion among the Paris elite. His wife organized puppet shows that publicly mocked both Talleyrand and Caulaincourt for their peaceful views.47 And they were by no means alone. Most of the military believed in the inevitability of victory; they had only to think of Russia’s performance at Austerlitz and Friedland to be convinced of the outcome of war.48 Napoleon himself was likewise convinced that Russia would succumb to his military might and told Alexander’s aide-de-camp, Count Shuvalov, as much: ‘I can assemble my troops faster . . . you will find before you the double of your forces. I know war, I have been doing it for a long time, I know how one wins and how one loses battles.’49 Of course he did, but he was underestimating the enemy before him.
By the summer of 1811, then, it seems likely, despite professions to the contrary, that Napoleon had well and truly decided on war.50 Comte Jacques Claude Beugnot, the man charged with organizing the new Kingdom of Westphalia on behalf of Jérôme, related how during this period Napoleon was tormented by Spain and that he wanted to ‘deliver a great blow’ against Russia in order to end the conflict with Britain.51 The Empire, he suggested, even though it stretched from Rome in the south to Hamburg in the north, was still too small for him. Napoleon was persuaded, according to this account, that with Russia on its knees, Spain would fall and the fate of Britain would be settled once and for all. In short, the crisis was fabricated in order to resolve other problems.
In the lead-up to the campaign, the diplomatic preparations, which should have been extensive and which could have benefited France considerably, were utterly woeful. Napoleon’s attempts were an exercise less in persuasion than in coercion. A case in point is his relations with the pope; they broke down completely. One of the most vexed questions between Napoleon and the Catholic Church was the investiture of bishops. By 1811, a number of sees had fallen vacant and every name Napoleon put forward as a possible replacement was simply rejected by the pope. Without going into all the details, by the beginning of 1812, Napoleon had informed the pope that since no agreement had been reached he considered the Concordat null and void.52 In an attempt to get the pope to abdicate (an unreasonable expectation at best), he had him brought to Fontainebleau in the greatest secrecy.53 The pope’s voyage began in the middle of the night of 9 June 1812. Accompanied by a colonel of the Gendarmes by the name of Lagorsse, he was even obliged to wear a black robe over his pontifical clothes to hide his identity. He arrived at Fontainebleau on 19 June in a weakened state.54 Napoleon had overstepped the mark. While it is an exaggeration to say that this error, as much as any other, contributed to his downfall,55 it did leave a very poor impression of the man and his regime, especially among the Catholics of Europe.
In more practical, military terms, Napoleon ordered troops to be called up, often imposing unreasonable demands in the process. For example, he notified Frederick William III that he expected full co-operation, and that if he did not get it Prussia would cease to exist. Not much argument there; Prussia became a virtual client state with the signing of a new Franco-Prussian alliance in February 1812. For some strange reason, especially considering the past strained relations between the two men, Napoleon simply assumed that Bernadotte would remain loyal to France. He threw any possibility of that away when, at the beginning of January 1812, he ordered Davout to occupy Swedish Pomerania.56 What exactly he was hoping to achieve remains a mystery. If he thought he was somehow going to force Bernadotte’s hand he was grossly mistaken.57 Public opinion in Sweden was understandably outraged. Admittedly, Austria was on board but this was largely due to Metternich’s initiative and had less to do with Napoleon. Metternich saw that war was coming and believed that it was in the best interests of Austria to ally with France. He did not believe Russia was capable of withstanding the French onslaught; rather, he thought that it would be destroyed.58 Three weeks after the Prussians had entered into an alliance with France, therefore, Austria entered into a similar arrangement but with more advantageous conditions.59 Austria willingly supplied twice as many men as Napoleon had demanded, and Metternich was able to stipulate that they should not be used in Spain or against the English. Moreover, in the event that Russia was defeated, Austria was to receive territorial compensation for its trouble.
This did not prevent Austria from maintaining secret contacts with the court of Petersburg. Even though official relations were broken off, and the Russian representative, Gustav Ernst von Stackelberg, left Vienna, he did not leave Austria. Rather he laid low in Graz, the whole time corresponding with Metternich.60 The secrecy was in part motivated by a desire to keep a close watch on Russia, and to make sure that Alexander and Napoleon did not conclude a separate peace at the expense of Austria. Francis informed Alexander that, even though he had signed a treaty with France, Austrian troops would do their best to avoid combat with Russian troops in the coming war.61
There was also, at the same time as these rather poor diplomatic preparations, a belated
attempt to prepare the French public for what was coming. In this Napoleon had an enormous difficulty. Admittedly, rumours of a war with Russia had been rife since 1811, so the general expectation was already there, but no one seems to have been terribly convinced of its necessity.62 This, combined with what was happening in Spain, as well as adverse economic conditions in France, ensured that Napoleon’s popularity was starting seriously to wane.63 Between 1805 and 1810, Napoleon had lost 9,000 men killed and wounded at Austerlitz; 12,000 at Jena-Auerstädt; 12,000 at Eylau; 12,000 at Friedland; 10,000 at Bailén; 6,000 at Eckmühl; 15,000–19,000 at Aspern; and 39,000 at Wagram.64 As the wars dragged on the losses got higher, not counting Spain, which was draining the Empire of manpower – over 350,000 men had been sent there by 1811, of whom only 27,000 were withdrawn for the invasion of Russia. The losses came on top of an economic crisis, unemployment and rising grain prices that doubled between 1810 and 1812. There was rioting in Caen in March 1812, when a mill was sacked and burnt down by people demonstrating, unemployed with nothing to eat. Napoleon was so worried by this development that 4,000 troops from the Imperial Guard were sent to the region to quell any further unrest.65
