by Will Durant
He knew that British goods—or goods from British colonies—were being admitted into Russia under papers forged by Russian traders or officials, certifying that the material was American and therefore admissible; Alexander allowed it; and part of it passed through Russia into Prussia and other countries.45 Napoleon, through the Russian minister in Paris, sent an angry protest to the Czar. Alexander, by a decree of December 31, 1810, sanctioned the entry of British colonial goods, lowered the tariff on them, and raised the tariff on goods from France. In February, 1811, Napoleon sent him a plaintive letter: “Your Majesty no longer has any friendship for me; in the eyes of England and Europe our alliance no longer exists.”46 Alexander made no answer, but mobilized 240,000 troops at various points on his western front.47 According to Caulaincourt he had, as early as May, 1811, resigned himself to war: “It is possible, and even probable, that Napoleon will defeat us, but that will not bring him peace…. We have vast spaces into which to retreat…. We shall leave it to our climate, to our winter, to wage our war. … I shall withdraw to Kamchatka rather than cede any of my possessions.”48
He agreed now with the English diplomats in St. Petersburg, and with Stein and other Prussian refugees at his court, who had long since been telling him that Napoleon’s purpose was to subdue all Europe to his rule. To unify the nation Alexander abandoned the reforms, and proposals for reform, that were alienating from him the most influential families; even the common people, he felt, were not ready for them. On March 29, 1812, he dismissed Speranksy not only from office, but from the court, from St. Petersburg, and gave ear more and more to the conservative Count Aleksei Arakcheev. In April he signed a treaty with Sweden, agreeing to favor the Swedish claim to Norway. He sent secret orders to his representatives in the south to make peace with Turkey, even at the cost of surrendering all Russian claims to Moldavia and Wallachia; all Russian armies must be available for defense against Napoleon. Turkey signed peace on May 28.
Alexander knew that he was risking everything, but he had been turning more and more to religion as a support in these days of strain and decision. He prayed, and daily read the Bible. He found comfort and strength in feeling that his cause was just, and would receive divine aid. He saw Napoleon now as the principle and embodiment of evil, as a power-mad anarch marching insatiably from power to more power. Only he, Alexander, backed by a God-intoxicated people and a God-given immensity of space, could stop this ravaging devil, save the independence and ancient order of Europe, and bring the nations back from Voltaire to Christ.
On April 21, 1812, he left St. Petersburg, accompanied by the leaders of his government and escorted by the prayers of his people, and traveled south to Vilna, capital of Russian Lithuania. He arrived there on April 26; and there, with one of his armies, he waited for Napoleon.
BOOK V
FINALE
1811–15
CHAPTER XXXV
To Moscow
1811–12
I. THE CONTINENTAL BLOCKADE
THE direct cause of the Franco-Russian War of 1812 was Russia’s refusal to continue its observance of the Continental Blockade declared by Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806. This decree was Napoleon’s plan for closing all the ports and coasts of the European Continent against the entry of British goods. Its purpose was to force Great Britain to end the blockade which it had declared (May 16, 1806) of all French-controlled ports from Brest to the Elbe; to end British interference with France’s maritime trade; to secure the restoration of French colonies captured by Great Britain; and to end the British financing of Continental states in their wars against France.
How was the Continental Blockade working? By 1810 it had brought England to a severe economic depression. In the first two years (1806–08) after Napoleon’s Berlin Decree, Britain’s exports fell from £40,800,000 to £35,200,000; imports of raw cotton fell by ninety-five percent. As one result the domestic price of corn rose from sixty-six to ninety-four shillings per quarter (one fourth of a hundredweight) in little more than one year (1807–08). Meanwhile slackened foreign trade depressed wages, spread unemployment, and set off violent strikes. Britain needed Swedish iron for her industry and Russian lumber for her ships; war with Sweden and Russia’s alliance with France (1807) closed those sources. Britain struggled to counter such setbacks by protecting her remaining trade outlets; her exports to Portugal, Spain, and Turkey rose four hundred percent between 1805 and 1811; hence Napoleon’s costly invasion of the Peninsula.
Matters worsened in Britain as the blockade continued; her exports to northern Europe declined twenty percent in 1810–11. Her adverse trade balance caused a rise in gold payments to Europe, and brought the international value of the pound to so low a point that Grenville and Grey, leaders of the Opposition, called for peace at any price.1 In 1811, one year before Napoleon’s war with Russia, his Continental Blockade reached its maximum effect in Great Britain.
Relatively to England the rival blockades substantially advantaged France. Her port cities—Le Havre, Nantes, Bordeaux, Marseilles—were in such decay that the last two began to call for a return of the Bourbons,2 but internal commerce benefited from the exclusion of British competition, the influx of gold, the abundance of capital, and the subsidies provided by a businessman’s government which enriched its Treasury with the gains of war. French business profited still more from these factors, and from improved access to Continental markets under Napoleon’s control. Mechanical weaving quadrupled from 1806 to 1810, accelerating the Industrial Revolution in France. Full employment and political stability within the extended frontiers gave industry such stimulus that if France had won the Napoleonic Wars she might have caught up with England in production and world trade.
The blockade was favorable to industry and domestic trade, injurious to foreign commerce, in the “Continental System” of states subject to Napoleon. The Hanseatic cities—Amsterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck—naturally suffered from the double blockade; but Switzerland, northern Italy, and the Rhineland communities prospered from the unhindered extension of Napoleonic institutions. Farther east, where industry was less developed, the blockade, preventing the sale of the region’s produce to Britain, was a burden that generated rising discontent. This, of course, was especially so in Russia.
The basic weakness of the Continental Blockade was that it ran counter to the human demand for freedom to explore every avenue of gain. The ports and coastal towns of Europe abounded in men who were willing to risk their lives in smuggling into the Continent British goods made doubly attractive by prohibition. Conversely Continental manufacturers who had enjoyed foreign outlets complained that they had to sacrifice British markets. In Holland the resentment of the great merchant families so moved King Louis Bonaparte that he wrote to Czar Alexander a letter “surpassing in bitterness against Napoleon the most merciless pamphlets.”3
Against the rising opposition Napoleon used 200,000 customs houses, thousands of agents recognizable or disguised, and countless troops to detect violations of the blockade, to arrest and punish and confiscate. In 1812 the court of customs in Hamburg pronounced in eighteen days 127 sentences, some to death; these, however, were rarely, if ever, carried out. Confiscated goods were sold for the French Treasury, some were burned in public bonfires that alienated nearly all onlookers.
Partly to moderate hostility, to raise income, or to ease shortages, Napoleon, as long ago related, began in 1809 to sell licenses, usually for a thousand francs, to import British goods judged necessary to French industry or morale, or to export to Britain goods paid for in coffee, sugar, or gold. Britain had already issued similar licenses—44,346 of them between 1807 and 1812—to override British embargoes.4 By comparison Napoleon issued only 494 licenses by November 25, 1811;5 but Alexander pointed out that while Napoleon demanded strict exclusion of British goods from Russia, he connived at their admission into France.
All in all, the Continental Blockade, despite its widespread unpopularity and the difficulties and
blunders in its enforcement, seemed, in 1810, to be succeeding. England was on the verge of bankruptcy, even of a revolution demanding peace; the states allied with France were grumbling but submissive; and France, despite the human and financial drain of the Peninsular War, was prospering as perhaps never before. The Frenchman had little freedom, but he had francs, and his aliquot portion of the glory of victorious France and its incomparable Emperor.
II. FRANCE IN DEPRESSION: 1811
Then suddenly, as if some evil force was coordinating catastrophes, the whole many-faceted economy seemed to fall to pieces, and to founder in a whirlpool of bank failures, market disruptions, factory closings, unemployment, strikes, poverty, riots, and the threat of starvation—just as the miracle-working Emperor was planning to raise money and troops and morale for a life-and-death struggle with a Russia distant, unknown, and immense.
The causes of a recent depression are hard to specify; how shall we analyze the causes of that 1811 depression in France, which was apparently more severe than any that the oldest among us can remember? A learned historian6 ascribes it to two main sources: (1) the failure of the French textile industry to secure needed raw material and capital; and (2) the failure of a banking firm in Lübeck. French spinning mills had relied upon the importation of raw cotton for their looms; the protectionist policy of the French government had placed a high tariff on such imports; the supply fell and its price rose; the French mills could not afford to pay this price for all the material needed to keep all their looms busy; they could not pay the rising rate of interest charged by French banks for capital loans; the mill owners felt forced to discharge more and more of their employees. The failure of the Lübeck bank, soon followed by similar bankruptcies in Hamburg and Amsterdam, affected Parisian firms; bank failures in France rose from seventeen in October, 1810, to forty-one in November, to sixty-one in January, 1811. The scarcity and high cost of bank loans forced one business firm after another to reduce its working staff, even to suspend operations; soon the streets of French cities were crowded with jobless workers seeking to sell their possessions, or begging for bread; some committed suicide.7 Bands of unemployed, in the Nord department, raided farms and seized the grain; in the towns they attacked markets and warehouses; on roads and rivers they stopped and pillaged transports of food; the chaos of 1793 seemed to have returned.
Napoleon decreed severe punishments for crimes against public order, sent soldiers to check violent strikes, and organized free distributions of food. A decree of August 28 sent 500,000 hundredweights of wheat and 30,000 sacks of flour to critical centers of distress. Meanwhile he interrupted the Continental Blockade to allow the import of alien corn; he raised tariffs on foreign products competing with French industries; he arranged government loans to enable firms to resume employment and production. In May, 1812, following revolutionary precedents, he decreed a “maximum” price for wheat; it failed, for farmers kept their product from the market until they received the price they demanded. Private charity helped the government to avoid a national upheaval. Count Rumford, American-British scientist then living in France, arranged “soupes de Rumfort,” made chiefly of beans and peas, which not only provided vegetable proteins but appeased the cry for bread.
This economic crisis, coming amid preparations for his invasion of Russia, was a test of nerves for Napoleon, and it may have shared in weakening his confidence and resolution. But his good fortune did not yet desert him. The harvest of 1812 promised and proved to be abundant; bread became cheaper; the unemployed could at least eat. Banks reopened or were replaced by new ones; loans were made; capital, that unseen and indispensable producer, resumed its role in the factories; wages could be paid for work on goods that might take half a year to reach a purchaser; the markets were again supplied. Now Napoleon could dedicate himself to a war to enforce a blockade that had already been doomed by the behavior of nations and the nature of man.
III. PREFACE TO WAR: 1811–12
The imperial adversaries prepared for the combat with diplomatic moves, military accumulations, and mass movements of men. Each tried to persuade the other that he was a devotee of peace. Napoleon chose as his ambassador Armand de Caulaincourt, a man of more than merely genealogical nobility. Arrived in St. Petersburg (November, 1807), Caulaincourt was impressed by the development of Alexander from the diffident young ruler whom he had seen there in 1801; the Czar had become a paragon of good looks, graceful manners, and friendly speech. Alexander professed himself a lover of Napoleon, still dedicated to the agreements made at Tilsit—given some slight adjustments which the brilliant Emperor of the French would find reasonable.
Poland divided them. Napoleon had established the grand duchy of Warsaw (1807) under a French protectorate; Alexander countered by wooing Polish nobles with an offer to restore all pre-partition Poland as a kingdom internally autonomous but recognizing the czar of Russia as its king and master of its external relations. Letters containing this offer fell into Napoleon’s hands, and infuriated him.8 He recalled Caulaincourt (February, 1811), and replaced him, as French ambassador to Russia, with Jacques Law, the future Marquis de Lauriston.
In this month Alexander urged Austria to join him in an attack upon Napoleon’s forces in Poland, offering her, as incidental profit, half of Moldavia and all of Wallachia;9 Austria refused. Napoleon at St. Helena shed some light on his Polish policy: “I would never have waged war with Russia simply to serve the interests of the Polish nobility”; and as for freeing the serfs, “I could never forget that when I spoke to the Polish serfs about liberty, they answered, ‘Certainly we should like to have it very much; but who will feed, clothe, and house us?’”10—i.e., they would have floundered helplessly in any sudden change.
Caulaincourt, loaded with gifts from the Czar, reached Paris on June 5, 1811. He tried at great length to convince Napoleon of Alexander’s pacific intentions, and warned him that a French invasion of Russia would be doomed to defeat by climate and space. Napoleon concluded that Caulaincourt, violating correct diplomatic procedure, had fallen in love with the Czar.11 Abandoning hope of a peaceful solution, and suspecting Russian attempts at seducing Prussia and Austria,12 Napoleon massed troops in or near Prussia, and frightened Frederick William III into signing an alliance with France (March 5, 1812); this committed Prussia to provide twenty thousand troops for the French invasion of Russia, and to feed the French army when it passed through Prussia; the cost of the food was to be subtracted from the indemnity still owed by Prussia to France.13 On March 14 Austria entered into a similar forced alliance with France. In April Napoleon proposed to the Sultan an alliance by which Turkey would expand her conflict with Russia into a holy war, and cooperate with France in a simultaneous march upon Moscow; in case of success the Porte was to regain the Danubian principalities, and secure full control of the Crimea and the Black Sea. Remembering that Napoleon had fought the Turks in Egypt and Syria, and had, at Tilsit, offered Alexander a free hand against Turkey, the Sultan rejected the proposal, and signed peace with Russia (May 28, 1812). On April 5 Alexander signed a pact of mutual aid with Sweden; on April 18 he offered peace and alliance with Great Britain. On May 29 he declared all Russian ports open to ships of all nations. In effect this was to withdraw from the Continental Blockade, and to declare war upon France.
Along with this diplomatic duel went one of the most massive military preparations in history. Here Alexander’s task was narrower and simpler than Napoleon’s; he had only one country to mobilize in force and sentiment. The sentiment almost took care of itself: Mother Russia rose spontaneously against the hordes of barbarians that were being organized against her by a savage infidel. The patriotic fervor that had condemned the Peace of Tilsit was transformed into religious support of the Czar. Wherever he went simple men and women crowded around him, kissing his horse or his boots. So strengthened, he enlarged his armies, ordered them to prepare for war, and stationed 200,000 men along the Dvina and the Dnieper, the great rivers that divided Russian Russia fr
om the Lithuanian and Polish provinces taken in the partitions.14
Napoleon’s mobilization was more complex. He faced the initial difficulty that 300,000 French troops, and a dozen French generals, were tied down in Spain, and that even more might be needed to keep Wellington from marching through the Peninsula and over the Pyrenees into France. He had hoped to return to Spain and repeat his victories of 1809; now he had to choose between losing Spain, Portugal, and the blockade and losing the Russian alliance and the blockade. “I knew better than anyone that Spain was a gnawing cancer that had to be healed before we could enter upon such a terrible war, in which the first battle would be fought fifteen hundred miles from my frontier.”15
He had begun his military preparations in 1810 by quietly strengthening the French garrison in Danzig, and adding, as imperceptibly as he could, to the French contingents policing Prussia. In January, 1811, he called to the colors the year’s conscripts, and distributed them along the German coast from the Elbe to the Oder, to guard against a Russian flank attack by sea. In the spring he ordered the princes of the Rhineland Confederation to prepare their pledged quotas of troops for active service. In August he began a painstaking study of the Russian terrain, and fixed upon June as the best month for an invasion.16 In December he prepared a network of spies to work in or around Russia.17
By February, 1812, both sides had completed their mobilization. The French conscription had revealed a sharp decline in the popularity of the army: of 300,000 men called to the colors 80,000 failed to appear, and thousands of these were hunted down as outlaws.18 Many of the recruits deserted, or made unwilling soldiers, and proved dangerously unreliable in a crisis. In former campaigns the newcomers would have received proud example and avuncular encouragement from the veterans of the Imperial Guard; but now most members of that brotherhood of battle were dead, or in Spain, or too old to be heroes except in reminiscences. Nor had the recruits the inspiration of a united and enthusiastic nation behind them. Napoleon appealed to them, and to his subjects, to see the enterprise as a holy war of Western civilization against the swelling wave of Slavic barbarism;19 but the skeptical French had heard such stories before, and in any case Russia was too far away to frighten them. He tried to arouse his generals, but almost to a man, out of his hearing, they were against the new war as an invitation to tragedy. Many of them had grown rich by his largesse, and wished he had let them enjoy it in peace.