PART SIXTEEN
“La Patrie en Danger”
THE CAMPAIGN OF 1814, CULMINATING IN NAPOLEON’S ABDICATION
82
PLAYING FOR TIME
L
ESS THAN THREE WEEKS after the cataclysm of Leipzig, the Emperor Napoleon was back at St. Cloud. With that astonishing resilience he customarily displayed in time of catastrophe, he at once immersed himself in planning the defense of French soil. For the second year running he had witnessed the destruction of half a million French troops and the rapid dwindling of his Empire’s frontiers, but still he appears to have believed that his situation and prospects were not beyond hope. Given a little time to create new armies, he was still confident of his ability to snatch a final victory from his converging and seemingly all-powerful opponents. “At present we are not ready for anything,” he confided to Marmont in mid-November, “but by the first fortnight in January we shall be in a position to achieve a great deal.”1
To anybody but a supreme egotist, France’s military situation in the last months of 1813 must have appeared hopeless. Following their victory at Leipzig, more than 300,000 Allied troops would soon be poised along the Rhine, while the French could muster fewer than 80,000 exhausted and disease-ridden survivors to defend the 300-mile length of their eastern frontiers. Perhaps 100,000 French troops still remained in Germany and Poland, but without exception they were divided into widely separated and closely beleaguered detachments, incapable of taking any active part in France’s impending death struggle. In North Italy, Viceroy Eugàne was narrowly holding his own with 50,000 men along the Adige against the 75,000 Austrians of General Bellegarde, but he already was finding good reason for concern about the ambivalent attitude of Napoleon’s relation, the King of Naples. Amid the Pyrenees, the armies of Marshals Soult and Suchet (sharing 100,000 men between them) were steadily giving ground before the advance of Lord Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish forces (125,000 strong). Napoleon could derive little satisfaction from a study of the true situation on any of these fronts. He also faced the prospect of open dissent in both Holland and Belgium. The French people were also fast reaching exhaustion point after sustaining the ceaseless drain of its dwindling manpower, year after year, and the economic repercussions of two decades of warfare—gravely aggravated by the effects of the Royal Navy’s relentless blockade of France’s ports—were steadily mounting. The Marshalate was war-weary and increasingly mutinous; the dependable Berthier was seriously ill; and the military resources of the German satellites were no longer available to eke out the emaciated French war effort. All in all, Napoleon faced a chilling prospect.
Still, however, the spirit burned; his will to success remained indomitable. The Emperor goaded the jaded ministries of Paris into a flurry of activity. New armies must immediately be created for the defense of la patrie. Every last resource of manpower must be tapped. Edicts were issued calling up no less than 936,000 youthful conscripts and aged reservists during the winter months of 1813-14. Policemen, forest rangers, customs officers were all summoned to the tricolor, together with 150,000 conscripts of the Class of 1815. Large parts of the National Guard were embodied for active service. Every government controlled newspaper made emotional appeals for Frenchmen to rally for the defense of their country as in 1792. Orders were sent to the armies in Italy and Spain, calling for sizeable drafts of experienced soldiers to lead the embryonic citizen armies. Decrees announced a vast expansion of the Young Guard. New taxes would be levied to finance the war effort.
Simultaneously, Napoleon launched a full-scale diplomatic offensive, planning to free his hands of peripheral problems. In the hope of rallying Italian support behind Eugène, the Pope was released from house arrest in France and restored to the throne of St. Peter. To clear the southwest frontiers of France and make the veterans of Soult and Suchet available for action on the Rhine, the French Government offered to restore Ferdinand to the throne of Spain in return for a permanent cessation of hostilities—and a preliminary agreement to this effect was actually initialed by French and Spanish plenipotentiaries on December 11 at Valençay.
Napoleon was well aware, however, that the fruition of these desperate policies could not take place overnight. There had to be a lull, a breathing space, most particularly on the Rhine front where France was weakest and her foes most imposingly strong. In optimistic moments, the Emperor spoke of his hope that the Allies would delay their attack on France’s eastern frontier until the spring of 1814. He based this assessment on three considerations. First, the Allied armies must necessarily be in an exhausted condition after their exertions throughout 1813. Second, it would take them time to incorporate the forces of their new German allies and place their communications in order. Third, Napoleon gambled greatly on internal dissensions within the Alliance disrupting any plans for a winter offensive. By the spring Napoleon was confident that France’s new armies would be, in position along the Rhine, and he even dreamed, of a great offensive by Murat and Eugàne sweeping from Italy over the Alps to threaten Vienna—a repetition of 1796-97.
To some extent Napoleon’s calculations concerning the possibility of a stay in the Allied offensive were soundly based. Powerful factions within the Allied high command were advocating just such a course of action. The Emperor of Austria had at this time no great desire to see the total eclipse of his son-in-law, for the downfall of the French Empire would indubitably favor the interests of the Houses of Hohenzollern and Romanov rather than those of the Hapsburgs. Providing Austria regained her Italian possessions, Francis was prepared to grant France her “natural frontiers”(namely the Rhine, Alps and Pyrenees) even at the cost of Belgium. For purely selfish reasons, Crown Prince Bernadotte of Sweden was also opposed to a full-scale invasion of France; he apparently harbored the hope that the French people might be induced to replace Napoleon with himself, if affairs were properly handled and excessive direct pressure avoided. The representatives of Great Britain were equally concerned with the balance of power in a post-war Europe, and tended to share Austria’s view that Napoleon might be left the “natural frontiers”—less Antwerp and the Scheldt—providing adequate guarantees of future good conduct could be extracted.
The advocates of immediate action placed their faith in the Tsar. Alexander was actually of two minds on the subject. Desperately though he wished to see Russian troops occupy Paris in revenge for Moscow, it occasionally struck him that the soldiers of Holy Russia were being called to make heroic efforts and sustain heavy losses for the benefit of the Germanic powers rather than of Russia herself. On balance, however, he favored action. As for Prussia, King Frederick William III was expected to follow the Tsar’s lead, although personally he wished to avoid any unnecessary prolongation of the war. Among the soldiers, opinion was equally divided. Prince Schwarzenberg—“by nature a statesman and diplomatist rather than a general”—tended to favor his master’s view, but the Prussian leaders, led most vociferously by Blücher, demanded the immediate and vigorous continuation of the campaign until the final overthrow of “the Corsican Ogre.”
In early November, their forces poised along the banks of the Rhine, the Allied leaders went into conclave at Frankfurt-on-Main to settle their policy. So serious were the divisions of expressed opinion that on the 16th it was decided to suspend operations for the immediate future while Napoleon was approached with a conditional offer of the “natural frontiers.” News of this development probably convinced Napoleon that he had won his pause, however much he might distrust the ultimate motives of the Allies. To make the most of his opportunity, he countered by calling for a general Congress, making no definite mention of the proposed terms. As a sop to the Tsar, the Emperor later appointed Caulaincourt as foreign minister and chief plenipotentiary. It is dubious whether either side was completely genuine in its offers and suggestions at this time. The Allies threw the validity of their pacific postures into question when Napoleon provisionally agreed to the “natural frontiers” suggestion, on November 30
; his envoys were then informed that the Allies had withdrawn their original offer, and it was eventually communicated that talks could now only open on the basis of the “frontiers of 1792.” This was out of the question for Napoleon. “I think it is doubtful whether the Allies are in good faith,” he wrote to Caulaincourt in early January, “or that England wants peace; for myself, I certainly desire it, but it must be solid and honorable. France without its natural frontiers, without Ostend or Antwerp, would no longer be able to take its place among the States of Europe.”2
Some time before these lines were penned, the uneasy truce along the eastern frontiers had been shattered. Napoleon’s hopes of a lull extending into March or April were abruptly ended on December 22 when General Wrede crossed the Rhine and laid siege to Hunigen. Even earlier, an Austrian division under General Bubna had begun to occupy undefended Switzerland. By the last days of the year it was clear that the Allied masses were on the move and that der Schlag had come.
The main reasons that decided the Allies to open a major winter campaign were distrust of Napoleon’s long-term intentions (probably justified) and a wish to exploit the current atmosphere of unrest in the Low Countries. Holland had already rebelled against French domination, and it was felt that Belgium needed only positive action by the Allies to follow suit.
The plan was complex. The Army of the North was to split into two. One corps under General Bülow, supported by a British expedition led by General Graham, was to occupy Holland, advance on Antwerp and in due course sweep through Belgium into northern France. The other half, commanded by Crown Prince Bernadotte, Winzingerode and Bennigsen, was to isolate Marshal Davout’s sizeable detachment around Hamburg, keep up pressure against the Danes and continue the siege of Magdeburg. Covered by these secondary operations Blücher’s 100,000 men of the Army of Silesia would advance on the central reaches of the Rhine, secure crossings over a wide front between Coblenz and Mannheim, and hold Napoleon’s attention. Simultaneously, Schwarzenberg (accompanied by a veritable galaxy of Allied monarchs) would march from Basel to Colmar, cross the Upper Rhine, and head for the Langres Plateau. Then the second stage of the campaign would commence. While Blücher continued to pin Napoleon frontally, the 200,000-strong Army of Bohemia would fall upon the French right, subsidiary columns fanning out to the south and southwest to make contact with the Austro-Italian forces advancing on Lyons and Wellington’s army advancing from the Pyrenees. By mid-February at the latest, close on 400,000 Allied troops might well be operating on French soil, the majority of them converging on the ultimate objective—Paris.
On December 29, Blücher began to cross the Rhine at Caub, Lahnstein and Mannheim. On New Year’s Day 1814, Schwarzenberg began to edge cautiously up to Colmar. The defenses of France were about to be put to the supreme test.
As was only to be expected, this early reopening of active hostilities found Napoleon dangerously unprepared. At the end of December there were merely 67,000 French troops readily available to defend the long stretches of frontier running from Strasbourg to the North Sea. In Belgium, General Maison was already experiencing great difficulty in holding down a discontented populace with 15,000 troops. On Maison’s right, the skeleton corps of Marshal Macdonald (13,000), General Morand (13,000), and Marshal Marmont (16,000) were extended over a hopelessly large area. South of Strasbourg, the Upper Rhine and Swiss frontiers were even more sparsely watched by Marshal Victor’s corps of 10,000 men and a handful of garrison troops. Apart from Mortier’s Old Guard, there were few reserves immediately available. Ney was forming two New Guard divisions behind the Vosges, Augereau was under orders to raise a new army at Lyons around a nucleus of experienced troops withdrawn from the Pyrenees, and 30,000 National Guards were collecting at Nogent and Meaux. But these slim resources were still far below establishment.
By the time the first weeks of January were over, it indeed appeared that fortune had finally abandoned Napoleon’s cause. Blow after blow befell his plans with depressing regularity. The new French armies simply failed to materialize; hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen deliberately avoided call-up by fleeing to the forests, and it is estimated that fewer than 120,000 of the original 936,000 called forward ever saw service in the ranks. In any case, great difficulty was found in equipping even the handful that reported for duty. Everything—muskets, uniforms, horses—was in short supply.
It proved almost as difficult to find junior officers and NCOs. “I am told that there are between seven and eight hundred individuals in the Invalides whose disabilities are slight and who would serve again with good grace,” wrote Napoleon to his minister of war on January 10. “If this is correct, they would form an admirable source of underofficers…. I could use them in the six new regiments of the New Guard I am presently forming. I need 540 sergeants and 1,080 corporals.”3 Affairs had come to a sorry pass when the Imperial Guard had to rely on invalids and pensioners for a substantial number of its subordinate leaders. It was even harder to find NCOs for the line formations.
Napoleon was partly relying on drafts from Italy and Spain to augment his slight forces on the Rhine. Again he was largely disappointed. The Spanish Government changed its mind about the Valençay agreement and refused to ratify the terms—the Emperor later admitted that he had committed a bad error in failing to force their hand in December. The immediate effect of this diplomatic rebuff was to pin the bulk of Soult’s and Suchet’s forces to the Pyrennean front. Then the drafts from Italy failed to materialize. The chief reason for this was the defection of Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, on January 11. “The conduct of the King of Naples is infamous,” stormed the Emperor to Fouché on February 13, “and that of the Queen quite unspeakable. I hope to live long enough to avenge for myself and for France such an outrage and such horrible ingratitude.”4 This desertion ultimately strengthened the Allies in North Italy by a further 30,000 Neapolitan troops; this inevitably rendered Eugàne’s position more difficult. Then, on January 14, the King of Denmark also signed an agreement with the Allies releasing still more troops for the invasion of France.
There were almost as many signs of treachery nearer home. In Paris many government officials were “insuring” their positions against the possibility of Napoleon’s downfall. The wily Talleyrand was already in touch with the Bourbons. Few knew what to expect, but all hoped to survive the demise of the First Empire. Under these circumstances of distrust and intrigue, it was impossible for the Emperor to quit Paris immediately.
For the time being, therefore, the defense of the frontiers had to be left to the marshals. All hope that they would be able to stem the onslaught evaporated rapidly. Victor made no attempt to defend Strasbourg, but fell back westward as soon as Schwarzenberg’s cautious advance guard made its appearance. A few days later, Victor similarly decided to abandon Nancy without firing a shot, and this new setback soon gave the Allies a free passage over the Moselle and compelled the whole French line to fall back. Marmont narrowly avoided being trapped by Blücher at Kaiserlautern, and by January 13 was back at Metz with the Prussians and Russians hard on his heels. By the 17th, the forces of Marmont, Ney and Victor were all sheltering behind the Meuse, but this natural obstacle hardly hindered Blücher at all. By the 22nd his army was over the river, and next day Sacken and the advance guard had even seized a bridgehead over the Marne at Joinville. The Army of Silesia had thus advanced 75 miles into France in a matter of nine days.
In growing desperation Napoleon took such steps as were open to him. Mortier and the Old Guard were hastily transferred south toward Langres to stiffen Victor’s southern flank, and on January 4 the Emperor ordered a levée-en-masse to be proclaimed along the eastern frontiers. He was not, however, prepared to adopt the full measures of 1793. Although many Jacobin extremists offered their services as local leaders, Napoleon refused to give them the authority they demanded. “If fall I must,” he exclaimed, “I will not bequeath France to the revolutionaries, from whom I have delivered her.”5 In consequence only “safe” me
n were appointed to the local emergency positions—many of them retired generals who were not suited to the work. Partly because of this weakness in leadership, and partly owing to Allied propaganda to the effect that their quarrel was with Napoleon and not the French people, the local response was at first disappointing and Napoleon’s belief that “the devastations of the Cossacks will arm the inhabitants and double our forces” proved largely illusory. The peasantry remained apathetic while at the front even the sending of Berthier (newly recovered from his illness) on a visit to Victor’s headquarters on the 19th failed to stop the demoralized and confused retreat.
Fortunately for Napoleon’s cause, Schwarzenberg’s advance was far more cautious than Blücher’s. Scared by unfounded rumors that Napoleon was moving in person with 80,000 men to intercept him, the Austrian commander in chief moved forward with extreme caution. Nevertheless, the 17th found the Army of Bohemia at its appointed objective—the Langres Plateau. In the terms of eighteenth-century strategy, this represented a fair achievement, for the area contained the sources of the rivers Aube, Marne and Meuse. Here Schwarzenberg halted until the 23rd, awaiting the result of new diplomatic overtures suggesting the calling of a peace conference at Châtillon-sur-Seine. This delay gave Mortier time to increase his harassment of the Austrians, and when their slow advance again commenced the Duke of Treviso carried out a brilliant fighting withdrawal against overwhelming numbers, contesting every mile of ground to Bar-sur-Aube. However, from the 23rd onward only two days’ marching distance separated the flank forces of the Armies of Bohemia and Silesia.
Clearly Napoleon could linger no longer in his capital if the feared concentration of enemy armies was to be forestalled. On January 12 he had drawn up a “Note on the Actual Situation of France”6—an appreciation of the complete military situation as he then saw it. He prophesied that by the time the Allies succeeded in breaking through the frontier cordon (and he anticipated a considerable delay) he would be in a position to field a force of 120,000 French troops (if green conscripts merited that appellation) to the east of Paris, which would be securely defended by another 30,000 garrison troops. Strategic consumption, he felt sure, would have reduced Schwarzenberg and Blücher to a joint effective strength of barely 80,000 men long before they came within striking distance of the capital. He would thus be in a position to force them to fight on advantageous French terms.
The Campaigns of Napoleon Page 116
