Russia Against Napoleon

by Dominic Lieven

  For the first crucial days in Paris Alexander led and spoke for the coalition. During his time in Paris he made some mistakes. Though his effort to press the cause of moderation and the senatorial constitution on Louis XVIII was understandable, it was actually unnecessary and contributed to initially poor relations between Russia and the restored French monarchy. A more serious blunder was to allow Napoleon the sovereignty of Elba, which caused allied and Russian fears at the time, later justified. Undoubtedly this was in part the product of Alexander’s desire to be, and to be seen to be, generous to a defeated foe. It was not easy in the circumstances of the time to find any safe solution to the problem posed by Napoleon, however, as Castlereagh recognized in a letter to the British secretary for war which is not included in his collected correspondence. Castlereagh wrote that the French Provisional Government had supported Alexander’s offer because they were scared of civil war and desperate to get the emperor away from his army at Fontainebleau. Elba had its dangers but there were no obvious better alternatives. Although Castlereagh did not mention this, any constraint on Napoleon’s freedom was impossible because it was ruled out by the agreement with Marmont when he brought his corps over to the allies. The British foreign secretary did, however, write that Elba was a better alternative than Napoleon’s apparent desire to live in England, which the British Government certainly would not welcome.42

  On the whole, however, Alexander’s performance in Paris was a great success. He had charmed the French, kept in line with his allies, and established a regime in Paris which had the best chance of retaining legitimacy while accepting a lasting peace. Alexander had been much criticized for arguing that once the allies reached Paris they would be able to find and encourage French opponents to Napoleon, but events had proved him right. If he retained doubts about the Bourbons, these were shared by many Frenchmen and by Alexander’s allies. As Schwarzenberg wrote to his wife at the time, the removal of Napoleon was a boon to mankind but he had little faith in the restored monarchy. For him as for Alexander, and in a manner very familiar in politics, the Bourbons were simply the least bad alternative at the allies’ disposal. With the monarchy restored and peace with France signed, Alexander left Paris on 3 June 1814.43

  While Alexander had been busy negotiating, his army had been experiencing life in and around the French capital. Vladimir Löwenstern set himself up with an expensive Parisian mistress and a fine carriage, paid for partly by 10,000 rubles won at cards. The Guards officers received a special allowance to enable them to enjoy and grace Paris. Humble officers of the line were not so lucky. Aleksandr Zaitsev, an innocent young ensign of the Kexholm Regiment, was quickly separated from his meagre earnings when he dared to visit the gambling dens and the young ladies of the Palais Royal. As to the soldiers, only the Guards were quartered in Paris and they were subjected to strict discipline and constant parades. The news that they were going home was greeted with joy. First to depart were the irregular cavalry – Cossacks, Bashkirs and Kalmyks: they were not the best peacetime ambassadors for a Russia anxious to conciliate the French civilian population and to be seen as a pillar of European order and civilization. Soon afterwards the regiments of the line began the long march home, many of them enjoying feasts in the Prussian towns through which they passed, as a mark of gratitude from Frederick William III. As always, the Guards were different, most of them being carried home to Petersburg by the Russian fleet which had spent the last eighteen months based in British ports.44

  Conclusion

  Not much more than a year after the Russian army left France they were back again, as a result of the ‘Hundred Days’, in other words Napoleon’s escape from Elba and attempt to overthrow the 1814 settlement. On the eve of Waterloo a Russian army of 150,000 men had just reached the Rhine and Karl von Toll had just arrived in Belgium to coordinate operations with Wellington and Blücher. Part of what had been won in 1814 had needed to be reconquered in 1815 at the cost of many lives, though in this case not Russian ones.

  Although this might seem to make the 1814 campaign pointless, in fact this is untrue. If the allies had signed a compromise peace with Napoleon in March 1814 he would have been in a much stronger position to challenge the peace settlement than was actually the case in 1815 after his escape from Elba. He would have had longer to plan his revenge and would have been able to pick his moment. His position within France would also have been stronger. By 1815 the restored monarchy had many supporters and even Napoleon’s chief bulwark, the army, was riven with tensions between those who had compromised with the Bourbons and the hard core of Bonapartist loyalists.

  Above all, the international situation would have been more favourable. In the end in 1814 the allies could unite with relative happiness around the restoration of the monarchy. A compromise peace with Napoleon would have been much less acceptable, above all for Alexander. Attempting subsequently to achieve agreement among the allies on a European settlement would have been all the harder. Even without this, the Congress of Vienna looked at one point as if it was going to result in a renewed European war. With Napoleon poised in Paris to exploit allied dissensions and his former allies awaiting his resurgence the dangers of further wars would have been great. In fact by the time Napoleon re-established himself in Paris in 1815 the allies had achieved agreement on the peace settlement and were united in their determination not to let him unravel it. That made his defeat nearly certain. In June 1815 Napoleon had to risk everything by trying to destroy Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies before the main allied armies could intervene. He knew that even if he succeeded in doing this, he still faced probable defeat at the hands of the massive Russian, Austrian and Prussian forces already approaching France’s borders.

  The Hundred Days made little difference to the terms of the peace settlement. France more or less retained its 1792 borders. Russia got most but not all of the Duchy of Warsaw. Prussia was compensated with part of Saxony and was given Westphalia and the Rhineland in order to secure their defence against French revanchism. The very loose German Confederation which was created under Austrian and Prussian leadership far from satisfied the hopes of German nationalists or liberals, though these were much fewer on the ground than subsequent nationalist historians claimed. This was even more true in Italy, which after 1815 was made up of a number of illiberal states under a rather benevolent Habsburg hegemony.

  For the Russians, the key elements in the settlement were Poland and Germany. As regards the former, many of Nesselrode’s dire predictions proved correct. Alexander did consider seriously the idea of a federalized Russia with representative institutions, into which the constitutional Polish kingdom might fit more easily than into the present autocratic empire. Understandably, however, given Russian realities at the time, he retreated from this idea. Soon enough the contradictions between the monarch’s role as autocratic tsar and constitutional king of Poland became glaring. The 1830 Polish rebellion ended the experiment of constitutional rule in Poland. Meanwhile the revolt of Russian officers in the so-called Decembrist movement of 1825 owed much to injured Russian national pride at the Poles being given freedoms denied to the Russian elites. In the century which followed 1815 the Poles contributed much to the Russian Empire’s economy. In political terms, however, both the Polish and Jewish populations of the former Duchy of Warsaw caused the Russian government many problems. Nor was it even clear that the annexation of the Duchy had strengthened Russia’s strategic position. On the contrary, by 1900 it could be seen as a potential trap for the Russian army. By then the German settlement of 1815 also looked a mistake from the perspective of Russian interests. A France bordering on the Rhine would have eased many Russian concerns about the challenge of Germany’s growing power.

  Of course, it is unfair to judge the efforts of statesmen using retrospective knowledge. Some of the difficulties caused by annexing the Duchy of Warsaw could have been – and indeed were – anticipated. But from the Russian perspective there were actually no easy answers to
the Polish problem, to an even greater extent than was true of the British in Ireland. Nor could anyone predict that the weak Prussia of 1814 would be transformed by the Industrial Revolution and German unification into a menace to itself and Europe. Nevertheless a knowledge of subsequent European history does give emphasis to the question of whether the enormous sacrifices of the Russian people in 1812–14 had been worthwhile.

  This is not just a matter of how much the Russian population suffered during the war. As is always true, victory legitimized and consolidated the existing regime, which in Russia was rooted in autocracy and serfdom. The sense that Russia was victorious and secure removed an incentive for radical domestic reform. The conservative regime of Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 until 1855, was partly rooted in an assumption of Russian power and security. This assumption was only undermined by defeat in the Crimean War of 1854–6, which unleashed a swath of modernizing reforms under Nicholas’s son, the Emperor Alexander II. In 1815, however, Russia did not have the means – which meant above all the educated cadres – to carry out radical reforms of the type undertaken two generations later. It is naive to believe that defeat by Napoleon would have unleashed a programme of successful liberalization in Russia. Even less well founded is the belief that Nicholas’s conservatism was the basic cause of Russia’s growing backwardness in 1815–60 vis-à-vis north-western Europe. The Industrial Revolution had dynamics well beyond the control of the Russian government of that era. It required levels of education and population density which Russia lacked, and the bringing together of coal and iron deposits, which in Russia’s case was only possible with the introduction of the railway.

  In any case, the question whether the sacrifices made in 1812–14 were worthwhile implies that the Russians had a choice. Then as always, ordinary Russians of course had little choice. The whole logic of the political system was designed to deny this. In 1807–14, however, the Russian government in reality also had few options. By the second half of 1810 the brilliantly run Russian intelligence operations in Paris gave Alexander every reason to expect attack. The very extensive military intelligence provided in 1811 confirmed this. No doubt if Alexander had caved in to all Napoleon’s demands war might have been avoided for a time. By 1810, however, it was clear that the price of adhering to Napoleon’s Continental System would be the undermining of the financial base of Russia’s position as a great power. Russia’s growing weakness would make it easy for Napoleon to restore a greater Poland, which was within both his power and his interests. Returning part of its Adriatic coastline to Austria could easily reconcile the Habsburgs to this new European order. Compensating the King of Saxony by destroying Prussia would have satisfied two French interests simultaneously. If full-scale French empire in Europe was impossible, French hegemony was not – at least for a time. No Russian government would have allowed this to happen without fighting. In the barely credible event that a Russian monarch had tried to do this, he would have been overthrown. Perhaps subsequent European history would have been happier had French hegemony lasted. But no one can expect Alexander’s government to have foreseen or accepted this.

  As some of Alexander’s advisers had predicted, one result of Napoleon’s destruction was a great increase in British power. For a century after Waterloo Britain enjoyed global pre-eminence at a historically small price in blood and treasure. Russian pride and interests sometimes suffered from this, most obviously in the Crimean War. In the long run, too, British power meant the global hegemony of liberal-democratic principles fatal to any version of Russian empire. But this is to look way into the future: in 1815 Wellington and Castlereagh disliked democracy at least as much as Alexander I did. Under no circumstances could Russian policy in the Napoleonic era have stopped Britain’s Industrial Revolution, or its effects on British power. Moreover, in the century after 1815 Russia grew greatly in wealth and population, benefiting hugely from integration into the global capitalist economy whose main bulwark was Britain. In the nineteenth as in the twentieth century Russia had much less to fear from Britain than from land-powers intent on dominating the European continent.

  There is no great puzzle as to why Russia fought Napoleon. How it fought him and why it won are much bigger and more interesting questions. To answer these questions requires one to demolish well-established myths. It is not surprising that these myths dominate Western thinking about Russia’s role in Napoleon’s defeat. No Western scholar or soldier has ever studied these years from a Russian perspective on the basis of the Russian evidence. Interpreting any country’s war effort through the eyes of its enemies and coalition partners is bound to be problematic, still more so in an era when European nationalism was just beginning its march.

  Much more interesting and difficult is the task of challenging Russian national myths. Naturally, by no means are all these myths untrue. The Russian army and people showed great heroism and suffered hugely in 1812. The truly bizarre and unique element in Russian mythology about the defeat of Napoleon is, however, that it radically underestimates the Russian achievement. The most basic reason for this is that the Russia which defeated Napoleon was an aristocratic, dynastic and multi-ethnic empire. Mining the events of the Napoleonic era just for Russian ethno-national myths and doing so in naive fashion inevitably leaves out much about the war effort.

  At one level it is absurd to call Leo Tolstoy the main villain in this misunderstanding. A novelist is not a historian. Tolstoy writes about individuals’ mentalities, values and experiences during and before 1812. But War and Peace has had more influence on popular perceptions of Napoleon’s defeat by Russia than all the history books ever written. By denying any rational direction of events in 1812 by human actors and implying that military professionalism was a German disease Tolstoy feeds rather easily into Western interpretations of 1812 which blame the snow or chance for French defeat. By ending his novel in Vilna in December 1812 he also contributes greatly to the fact that both Russians and foreigners largely forget the huge Russian achievement in 1813–14 even in getting their army across Europe to Paris, let alone defeating Napoleon en route. One problem with this is that marginalizing or misunderstanding as crucial an actor as Russia results in serious errors in interpreting why and how Napoleon’s empire fell. But it is also the case that to understand what happened in 1812 it is crucial to realize that Alexander and Barclay de Tolly always planned for a long war, which they expected to begin with a campaign on Russian soil that would exhaust Napoleon but that would end in a Russian advance into Europe and the mobilization of a new coalition of anti-Napoleonic forces.

  One key reason why Russia defeated Napoleon was that its leaders out-thought him. In 1812 Napoleon failed to understand Russian society and politics, or to exploit Russia’s internal weaknesses. In the end he ruined his cause by delaying in Moscow in the naive hope that salvation would come from Alexander, the Russian elites or even a Cossack revolt. By contrast, Alexander well understood the strengths and weaknesses of his enemy and used this insight to full effect. Before the invasion he realized exactly what kind of war Napoleon wanted and needed. The Russians planned and executed the opposite kind of war – a drawn-out defensive campaign and a ‘people’s war’ which would play to their strengths and Napoleon’s weaknesses. In the first year of the war Russian strategy succeeded beyond their expectations. Napoleon’s entire army was virtually destroyed. This owed much to luck and to Napoleon’s mistakes. Events certainly did not precisely follow Alexander’s plans. Had they done so, Napoleon would have been stopped and worn down on the river Dvina. But in war events very seldom do go precisely according to plan, particularly in a defensive campaign which necessarily surrenders the initiative to the enemy. Nevertheless the basic Russian concept of ‘deep retreat’ was sound and worked. It would not have done so without luck and enemy mistakes, but the resolution and moral courage of Mikhail Barclay de Tolly was also crucial, as above all were the fortitude, discipline and skill of the Russian rearguards and their commanders.

&n
bsp; It should be no surprise to anyone that the Russian army fought with more skill in 1813–14 than in 1812. Even more than in most activities there is a vast difference between training for war and its reality. Experience is a crucial teacher. Whether one looks at low-level tactics – such as the use of jaegers – or at the competence of staffs, there is no doubt that the army of March 1814 was much more formidable than had been the case two years before. In comparison to the disaster of 1806–7 when Bennigsen’s army starved in East Prussia, the performance of Georg Kankrin in feeding and supplying the Russian troops as they crossed almost the whole of Europe was also outstanding. No one who has read accounts of how the army fought at Kulm, Leipzig or Craonne – to take but three examples – could subscribe to old myths about how the soldiers lacked the patriotic motivation they had felt in 1812. This is not to deny that officers and men may have fought with special desperation at Borodino after weeks of retreat and in the Russian heartland. As in most armies, however, the key to performance on the battlefield was usually loyalty to comrades and to one’s unit. In the Russian case this included messmates in the artel but also the regiment, which for so many of these soldiers was their lifetime home.

  The Russian regiment was very much part of an Old Regime rather than a modern, national army. This merely underlines the fact that it was the European Old Regime which defeated Napoleon. It had absorbed some aspects of modernity such as the Prussian Landwehr and it had allied itself to British economic power, which was much more truly modern than was Napoleon’s absolutist empire. Nevertheless the main cause of Napoleon’s defeat was that the three great dynasties fought side by side for the first time since 1792 and that the Russian army was on the scene from the start, rather than having to pick up the pieces after Napoleon had defeated the Austrians or Prussians. It did help enormously that Napoleon’s army had been destroyed in 1812 and that he fought in 1813 with younger and less skilled troops. But during the spring 1813 campaign the Russian army too was still hugely weakened by its efforts in the previous year and the Prussian army was mostly raw and struggling to train, arm and equip itself. The same was true of both the Prussians and the Austrians at the start of the autumn 1813 campaign. In fact, right down to the battle of Leipzig, the 1813 campaign was a very close-run business and could easily have gone in Napoleon’s favour. This contributes to the story’s drama.