Late on that winter afternoon Napoleon’s infantry attacked Brienne in three columns. Blücher’s headquarters was in the chateau of Brienne, from which he had an excellent view of the advancing enemy. He immediately spotted that the French left-hand column was vulnerable to a cavalry attack and ordered Ilarion Vasilchikov to charge into the enemy flank and rear, which brought the French infantry to a halt. Later that evening, however, on the other allied flank, French infantry burst into Brienne in the darkness past Olsufev’s small corps. Blücher and Sacken only just escaped capture and one of the latter’s key staff officers was killed. Once the initial surprise had passed, the Russian troops rallied and Blücher retreated to link up with the main army on the heights of Trannes just a few kilometres south of Brienne. But Sacken was furious with Olsufev, whom he blamed for the whole episode.40
Napoleon followed Blücher and established his headquarters in the village of La Rothière, just north of the heights at Trannes. For two days the armies watched each other without moving. By midday on 1 February Napoleon believed that the allies were aiming to move around his western flank and ordered his reserves away from La Rothière to watch them. Soon afterwards, however, it became clear that Blücher was on the point of attacking the French line. Napoleon had fewer than 50,000 men to cover a front of 9.5 kilometres, which was too few. His right flank rested on the river Aube at the village of Dienville. The village of La Rothière was in the centre of his line, which stretched out to La Giberie on his left. Blücher commanded Sacken’s and Olsufev’s troops from the Army of Silesia, which stood in his centre opposite La Rothière.
On their left were Gyulai’s Austrian Army Corps, which he ordered to attack Dienville. On the right was the Württemberg Army Corps under their crown prince, whose task it was to assault La Giberie. On their own these troops barely outnumbered the French but the allies had more than double their number available within range of the battlefield.
Gyulai’s attack on the strong French position at Dienville failed. The crown prince of Württemberg also had great difficulties deploying enough troops in the narrow defiles and swampy terrain around La Giberie to push back the French defenders. In the end he was rescued by Wrede’s Bavarian corps which came up behind the enemy left flank and forced Marshal Marmont to retreat. Schwarzenberg had not ordered Wrede to join the battle but the Bavarian commander had marched to the sound of the guns on his own initiative.
By far the fiercest fighting occurred in and around La Rothière, however. Three-quarters of all allied casualties occurred here. Sacken’s infantry assaulted La Rothière in two columns: Johann Lieven attacked from the front down the road and Aleksei Shcherbatov moved forward a few hundred metres to the east. This was the first time that the Army of Silesia had fought under Alexander’s eye and Sacken was determined to impress. The Prussian official history writes that ‘Lieven’s column attacked the village with their bands playing and the soldiers singing’. With a snow storm blowing into their backs, the Russian infantry stormed into the village with their bayonets, without pausing to fire. Major-General Nikitin, the commander of Sacken’s artillery, was unable to drag all of his guns forward to support the attack because of the heavy mud. So he left thirty-six guns behind and double-harnessed the rest. Between them Lieven and Shcherbatov cleared La Rothière after bitter fighting, only then to face a ferocious counterattack in the early evening from Napoleon’s Guards. In this fighting both Marshal Oudinot and Lieven were wounded. In the end, the issue was decided by the Russian reserves, in this case the 2nd Grenadier Division, which came up to support Sacken and drove the enemy out of La Rothière once and for all. The French lost 73 guns and 5,000 men, the allies barely fewer. But the main element in the allied victory was moral. In the first battle of the campaign, Napoleon had been defeated on French soil. His troops’ morale slumped. In the following days many French soldiers deserted and set off for their homes.41
Sacken’s report on the battle concluded with a courtier’s flourish: ‘On this memorable and triumphant day Napoleon ceased to be the enemy of mankind and Alexander can say, I will grant peace to the world.’ Language like this was dangerously premature. Napoleon was not dead yet and the Army of Silesia was to be punished for its overconfidence in just a few days’ time. For Sacken himself, however, the battle had been a triumph. For his victories in 1813 he had been promoted to full general and awarded a string of decorations. Now Alexander granted him the very coveted Order of St Andrew and made him a present of 50,000 rubles. Probably most important for Sacken, however, was the emperor’s remark to him on the day after the battle: ‘You have conquered not only your foreign but also your domestic enemies.’ The old battle with Bennigsen dating back to 1807 which had embittered Sacken and threatened his career was now decided in his favour. His great enemy would end his life as a general and a count. Sacken would race past him, both a field-marshal and a prince.42
The day after the battle the allied leaders held a conference in the chateau of Brienne to decide future strategy. When the time to begin the meeting arrived, apparently Blücher was nowhere to be found and the various dignitaries scattered to track him down. It was Alexander who discovered him, deep in the wine cellars, plucking the best bottles from the racks. The conference decided that the main army and the Army of Silesia must split up, allegedly because it was impossible to feed them if they remained together. Schwarzenberg would advance on Paris from the south along the river Seine. Blücher would approach from the west along the Marne.43 In many ways this was to revert to the model of 1813 and to face the same dangers. Napoleon would be operating on interior lines between the two allied armies. By now he would be well attuned to Schwarzenberg’s caution and slowness, and to Blücher’s boldness and willingness to run risks. In the autumn of 1813 Napoleon had missed his chance to exploit this weakness. Now it had returned in even more clear-cut form. Unlike in the autumn, Napoleon would not have to exhaust himself by marching great distances to strike one or other allied army. Since all military operations were taking place in a small area, he could hope to defeat one enemy army and race back to face the other in a handful of days. Moving in his own country, he could mobilize local knowledge, transport and manpower to use side roads, tap food supplies and be forewarned about enemy actions. He also controlled most of the key river crossings. In addition, in February 1814 Blücher was even more inclined to take risks than before since he shared the widespread view that Napoleon’s demise was imminent. By 7 February he and Alexander were discussing how to quarter the troops when they reached Paris.44
Meanwhile Schwarzenberg was even more cautious than in the previous year. The great numerical superiority of the allies seems to have merely increased his worries about the difficulties of commanding and feeding so vast an army. He was intensely concerned about the security of his long line of communications stretching back to Basle and across the Rhine. He exaggerated the size of Napoleon’s army and, still more, of the force which Marshal Augereau was trying to form in Lyons, believing that Augereau might strike into the allied rear in Switzerland. In these circumstances Schwarzenberg was very opposed to any further move forwards. As he wrote to his wife on 26 January, ‘any advance on Paris is in the highest degree contrary to military science’.45
To do the commander-in-chief justice he was not alone among the allied generals in this view. Knesebeck argued that it would be very difficult to feed the army in the region around Troyes through which they would have to approach Paris. The various allied corps could only move up and down the north–south highways leading to the capital since the side roads were almost impassable at this time of year. Lateral movements and mutual support among the allied corps would therefore be slow at best. Meanwhile Napoleon could feed himself from the fertile areas west of Paris and could use interior lines and better lateral roads which he controlled to concentrate and strike against the lumbering allied columns. If Napoleon’s throne was threatened, no doubt he would fight to the death. What evidence was there that the French na
tion would desert him? Ultimately, to advance on Paris was to gamble on French politics. Might this not prove as deceptive as Napoleon’s gamble in 1812 that occupying Moscow would lead to peace?46
Schwarzenberg’s views and plans were strongly influenced by political considerations. In his view, the advance to Langres had been a means to exert additional leverage on Napoleon and force him to make peace on terms acceptable to the allies. Even now, after all these years, Schwarzenberg had not really grasped Napoleon’s mentality or his way of war. Metternich’s influence on the commander-in-chief was also very important. On a number of occasions in January 1814 he advised Schwarzenberg to delay operations and allow time for peace negotiations. By appointing Caulaincourt as minister of foreign affairs and seemingly accepting the allied peace terms conveyed by Saint-Aignan, Napoleon appeared to be open to compromise. With a peace congress finally about to commence at Châtillon on 3 February, Schwarzenberg, Metternich and Francis II were less inclined than ever to push forward in the days immediately following La Rothière or to let military operations determine policy and define the peace settlement. Because the commander-in-chief was an Austrian, Habsburg political perspectives could quietly derail allied military strategy.47
Meanwhile Alexander did his best to undermine Metternich’s diplomatic strategy at Châtillon. When the congress began its deliberations on 5 February the Russian delegate, Count Razumovsky, announced that he had not yet received his instructions. Russian delaying tactics could not be hidden, however, unlike Metternich’s advice to Schwarzenberg, and quickly annoyed their allies. By now the allies had toughened considerably the peace terms on offer. At Frankfurt they had proposed France’s natural frontiers. At Châtillon they offered the ‘historic’ frontiers of 1792. Metternich pinned Alexander down by presenting the allies with a memorandum which forced them to decide whether or not to make peace with Napoleon if he accepted these terms. It also required them to decide, if they rejected Napoleon, whether they should commit themselves to the Bourbons or decide on some way by which the French might choose an alternative ruler.48
Faced with these questions, Alexander found himself without support. He believed that if Napoleon accepted the allied terms, he would simply regard the peace as a temporary truce and would start a new war at the first suitable opportunity. His military genius and his aura added tens of thousands of invisible soldiers to any army he commanded. So long as he sat on France’s throne, many of his former allies beyond France’s borders would never believe that the peace settlement was permanent. Both the British and the Prussians wanted to sign a peace with Napoleon, however, so long as he accepted France’s 1792 borders and immediately handed over a number of fortresses as a pledge of his commitment. None of the allies shared Alexander’s view that their armies should first take Paris and then gauge French opinion on the nature of the regime with which to sign peace. To them this policy seemed too unreliable. The last thing the allies wanted was to incite popular revolt, or to find themselves involved in a French civil war. But if Napoleon did fall, then in the British, Austrian and Prussian view the only alternative was the return of the Bourbons, in the person of the family’s legitimate head, Louis XVIII.49
Alexander was unenthusiastic about the restoration of the Bourbons. In part this simply reflected his low opinion of Louis XVIII, who had lived in exile in Russia for a number of years and had not impressed the emperor. Alexander was no legitimist. If anything, he had a touch of radical chic. His grandmother, Catherine II, had sought to impress Voltaire and Diderot. Alexander enjoyed winning the plaudits of Germaine de Staél, whose own preferred candidate to rule France was Marshal Bernadotte. Alexander himself briefly toyed with Bernadotte’s candidacy. This infuriated his allies and even led to murmurings that the emperor was trying to put a Russian client on the French throne.50
In fact this was not the point and Alexander contemplated a number of possible candidates, of whom the crown prince of Sweden was but one. The basic issue was Alexander’s belief that a society as sophisticated and modern as France could only be ruled by a regime which respected civil rights and allowed representative institutions. That regime must also accept part of the Revolution’s legacy if it was to survive. The emperor doubted whether the restored Bourbons would do any of these things. As always with Alexander, he was most believable when telling people what they did not want to hear. Even as late as 17 March, he told a royalist emissary, the Baron de Vitrolles, that he had considered not just Bernadotte but also Eugène de Beauharnais and the Duke of Orléans as possible rulers who, unlike Louis XVIII, would not be prisoners of memories and supporters who demanded revenge for the past. The emperor staggered Vitrolles by saying that even a wisely ordered republic might suit France best.51
Above all, Alexander wanted a stable France which would live in peace with itself and with its neighbours. Better than anyone the emperor understood the enormous difficulties of bringing a Russian army across Europe and the unique circumstances which had made this possible. It might never be possible to repeat this effort. As he said to Lord Castlereagh amidst the arguments that raged among the allies in early February, it was precisely for this reason that Russia required a peace settlement which would endure, not a mere armistice. It was on these grounds that he opposed any peace with Napoleon. But it was the same anxiety which led him to look at alternatives to the Bourbons. In fact Alexander underestimated Louis XVIII and came in time to accept with good grace the Bourbons’ restoration. But his fears were not groundless, as the overthrow of the incompetent Charles X subsequently showed.52
After fierce arguments with his allies in the second week of February 1814 Alexander was forced to give way, however. The fact that towards the end of this week news began to arrive of Blücher’s defeat by Napoleon only confirmed the dangers of Russia’s isolation. The emperor had to agree that if a restoration was to occur, then the only possible choice was the head of the royal house, Louis XVIII. More important from Alexander’s perspective, he had to accept that the negotiations at Châtillon would continue and that the allies would ratify a peace with Napoleon if he accepted the 1792 frontiers and surrendered a number of fortresses. On the other hand, the allies did also agree that if Napoleon refused the allied conditions, then they would continue the war until victory was achieved over him. Frederick William III provided some balm to Alexander’s injured feelings by refusing to join Metternich in threatening withdrawal from the war should the Russian monarch refuse to back down. The king insisted that so long as the Russians remained in the field, the royal army would fight alongside them.53
Meanwhile near disaster had befallen Blücher. After the conference in Brienne on 2 February he marched northwards with Sacken’s and Olsufev’s 18,000 Russians. Blücher aimed to unite with the 16,500 men of Yorck’s Army Corps who were advancing just north of the river Marne towards Château Thierry and the nearly 15,000 Prussians and Russians under generals Kleist and Kaptsevich who were approaching Châlons from the east. A French corps under Marshal MacDonald was retreating in front of Yorck, and Blücher ordered Sacken to hurry forward to try to cut it off. Meanwhile he himself stopped with Olsufev’s detachment at Vertus, waiting for Kleist and Kaptsevich to arrive. MacDonald in fact evaded Sacken’s clutches but the attempt to catch him took Sacken’s troops all the way to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre, well to the west of Château Thierry on the south bank of the Marne.
Blücher’s army was now dispersed over a distance of more than 70 kilometres, which made communications difficult and mutual support often impossible.
The details of the military operations which followed were complicated but the essence was simple. Napoleon thrust northwards through Sézanne into the middle of Blücher’s army and defeated one isolated allied detachment after another. Since Blücher was the greatest Prussian hero of the Napoleonic Wars, some Prussian memoirists and historians had an understandable tendency to protect his reputation. They offered a number of partial excuses for his defeat. Correctly, they argued that if Schwa
rzenberg had pressed Napoleon’s rear then the Army of Silesia would have been in no danger. Instead, not merely did the main army crawl forward, its commander-in-chief also withdrew Wittgenstein’s Army Corps to the west, instead of leaving it as a link to Blücher. The field-marshal’s defenders also argued that if Lieutenant-General Olsufev had destroyed the key bridge across the Petit Morin stream the moment danger threatened from the south, Napoleon could never have achieved his march into the middle of Blücher’s army. Undoubtedly too, the allies had poor maps and incorrect information about local roads – as tended to be the case in fighting on foreign soil. Both Blücher and Sacken, for example, believed that the road along which Napoleon marched northwards from Sézanne was impassable for an army. Nevertheless the basic point remains that although in close proximity to the enemy, Blücher scattered his army to such an extent that it could not concentrate for battle and he could not exercise effective command. He made this mistake partly because he believed that Napoleon was on the verge of final defeat and Paris was his for the plucking.54
On 10 February Napoleon advanced from Sézanne and overwhelmed Olsufev’s small corps at Champaubert. The emperor had just been reinforced by thousands of experienced cavalry arrived from Spain. Olsufev had a total of seventeen horsemen. A nimbler commander might have retreated in time to save his men but Olsufev was still smarting from Sacken’s criticism for not having held his ground at Brienne two weeks before. Though his junior generals begged him to fall back on Blücher, Olsufev insisted on sticking to his orders to hold his position and seems to have believed that Blücher was himself advancing from the east into the enemy rear. Napoleon claimed to have taken 6,000 prisoners, which was a remarkable achievement since Olsufev’s ‘corps’ numbered 3,690, of whom almost half escaped with their flags and many of their guns under cover of the winter night and the nearby forests. The key point, however, was that Napoleon and 30,000 men were now standing halfway between Sacken’s 15,000 troops at La Ferte and Blücher’s 14,000 near Vertus, directly on the road which connected the two wings of the Army of Silesia.55
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