How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  This theory is confirmed (again, in French eyes) by King George III’s sudden unprovoked blockade of France’s ports in May 1803. Despite this English aggression, the French contend that Napoleon continued to push for peace, and quote an eloquent letter to George III on 2 January 1805, in which Napoleon says that ‘my first sentiment is a wish for peace’ and that ‘reason is powerful enough for us to find a way to reconcile all our differences’.

  However, a closer look at the missive – part peace offering, part (self-)love letter – reveals that it is more a case of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’. Napoleon informs the hereditary English King that he (Napoleon) was ‘called to the throne of France by providence and by the vote of the Senate, the people and the army’ – which surely outweighs a mere accident of birth. Napoleon then declares that ‘my heart wishes for peace, but war has never diminished my glory’. He reminds King George and his government that ‘I have proved to the world, I think, that I fear none of the uncertainties of war’ and that a conflict between Britain and France would be ‘pointless, and [a British] victory cannot be assumed’. As for expansionism, Napoleon innocently asks the King of England whether he doesn’t think he has enough colonies already – ‘more than you can hope to keep’. It is a threat more thinly veiled than one of Josephine’s famously transparent dresses.

  Napoleon ends his letter by asserting generously that ‘the world is big enough for both of our nations to live in’. But King George and his Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger obviously didn’t agree, because they never even bothered to reply.

  Not that the French Emperor was completely without friends in Britain at the time. James Fox, the leader of the opposition, was a virulent anti-royalist who had supported the French Revolution, and his pacifist group in the British parliament numbered about twenty-five MPs. War with France, Fox said, ‘is entirely the fault of our Ministers and not of Bonaparte’. Though, typically for a politician, this support was largely based on self-interest: Fox was hoping that William Pitt’s anti-French lobbying would fail, so that Pitt himself would have to resign. In truth, Fox wasn’t that big a Bonaparte fan. He visited Napoleon in 1803 and apparently spent most of their meeting haranguing the Frenchman about freedom of speech and censorship of the press.

  Meanwhile, Napoleon had received a warning from the Russian ambassador to London that Britain’s aim would ‘always be to destroy France and then reign despotically over the whole universe’. (Actually, apart from the ‘despotically’, most Brits of the time would have agreed wholeheartedly.)

  Faced with this belligerence, so the French argument goes, the peace-loving Napoleon had no option but a return to war against France’s traditional enemy, Britain. As he expressed it in his memoirs: ‘I had more reason than most to make peace, and if I didn’t do so, it is obviously because I wasn’t able to.’

  But for a man who seems to be saying ‘bof, OK, let’s fight, if you really want to’, in 1805 Bonaparte threw himself into war with a startling amount of enthusiasm.

  II

  In fact, Napoleon loved a good battle. He had been trained as a soldier since childhood, having been sent from his native Corsica to a military academy in mainland France at the age of nine. There, legend has it, he commanded his classmates in a successful snowball fight.fn2 At fifteen, he entered Paris’s elite Ecole Militaire where, no doubt because of his skill with snowballs, he specialised in artillery warfare. In short, here was a man who had been learning how to fight professionally all his life, and who had chosen to specialise in the branch of war that involves the loudest explosions and the most collateral damage. A Buddhist he was not.

  Napoleon first came to prominence in the French army in 1793 by commanding an attack on a British fleet stationed in Toulon, in the south of France, a city that had rebelled against the Revolution. Erecting artillery batteries and accurately bombarding vulnerable sections of the city wall and the British ships, he had effectively retaken Toulon, and been made a general at the tender age of twenty-four. In 1795, he was then instrumental in suppressing a royalist revolt in Paris, blasting the armed crowds surrounding the parliament building with point-blank cannon fire for some forty-five minutes. Then in 1799 he seized power by invading the French parliament with a group of bayonet-waving soldiers. In short, Napoleon’s favourite political tools were hot lead and cold steel.

  He also felt most at home when on military campaigns. Out in the field with his troops he was in his element, engrossed in logistical problems, which fascinated him. One of his life’s greatest works was a total reorganisation and modernisation of the French army, dividing it into self-sufficient units of around 25,000 men, each with its own marshal or general in command of a body of infantry supported by cavalry and, of course, a large contingent of artillery. These units were designed to be fast-moving (it was not uncommon for inexperienced footsoldiers to die of exhaustion during long marches), and during a major campaign they were under orders to stay within 30 kilometres or so (a day’s march) of each other, so that Napoleon could bring them into action quickly when an enemy was engaged. The reorganisation went deep, right down to the small sections of half a dozen men who formed teams within their larger battalion. Napoleon was obsessive about detail, and the army was where he expressed this obsession with all his fiery-yet-bureaucratic Franco-Corsican temperament.

  At the heart of the action, commanding his hundreds of thousands of loyal men, shaping the destiny of nations with his carefully aimed cannon fire, Napoleon felt completely at home, not least because his campaign bivouac was more luxurious than the VIP tent at the Glastonbury festival. Here, his gift for planning was at its most ingenious.

  An exhibition staged in 2014 in Corsica, ‘Le Bivouac de Napoléon’, included a picturesque blue-and-white marquee that wouldn’t look out of place as the tea tent at a modern royal garden party, and a camp bed equipped with a thick mattress and enveloped in a green silk tasselled curtain. His folding leather chair was a more comfortable version of the kind we see Steven Spielberg sitting in for marathon directing sessions, while the panther-patterned carpet looked like something out of a 1980s pop video.

  France’s most famous furniture designers, potters, cutlery-makers and metal-workers were commissioned to create monogrammed crockery, a full range of easily folding chairs, desks, tables and footstools, dismountable candlesticks, a mobile brazier and even a folding bidet (which sounds rather dangerous) – all of it made of ‘noble’ materials like silver, gold-plated bronze, crystal, fine porcelain, silk and walnut. This nomad’s palace would travel with Napoleon in a small convoy of carriages so that he could live on the road in luxury for months on end. He was the nineteenth-century equivalent of a rock star on tour.

  And like those rock stars, he was determined to export the music of his cannons to as many territories as possible. Between 1804 (when he declared himself Emperor of France, as opposed to a mere ‘consul’) and 1811, Napoleon battled his way across Europe, annexing Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland and most of modern-day Germany.

  Incidentally, by taking over several German princedoms and imposing his brother Jérôme as King of Westphalia in 1807, Napoleon accidentally did the world a great favour. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, had just finished studying law and were about to embark on a legal career, but when the French occupiers imposed Napoleon’s new ‘Code’ (of which more in Chapter 8) the brothers found it much too rigid compared with ancient German traditions, and decided to devote their lives to collecting folk tales instead. Westphalian law’s loss was the world’s (and especially Walt Disney’s) gain.

  Wanting to spread his influence beyond the borders of his empire, Napoleon also imposed an embargo against trading with Britain on countries that he hadn’t occupied, like Russia and the whole of Scandinavia.fn3 As France’s former Prime Minister Dominique Villepin expresses it in one of his history books, Napoleon had ‘a dream of France that was bigger than the French’. Put less patrioti
cally, Napoleon wanted all of Europe to bow before him as its emperor, and very nearly succeeded in getting them all on their knees.

  III

  There was one rival who, despite all Napoleon’s protests of peace, he really wanted to beat. That was, of course, Britain, whom he (quite rightly) blamed for all the European mischief-making against him. The British proudly and openly invested in beating Napoleon, distributing money and munitions to anyone who was willing to oppose the French. It has been estimated that Britain spent £1.5 billion on fighting Napoleon – an unimaginable fortune in the early 1800s – half of which was borrowed. Britain’s anti-Napoleonic debt was so huge that it was only paid off in 1906.

  The Brits naturally alleged that this was all for the good of world peace. George Canning, Foreign Secretary between 1807 and 1809, once said that ‘Whenever the true balance of the world comes to be adjusted, it is only through us alone that they can look for secure and effectual tranquillity.’ (Britain was never known for its humility, least of all in the nineteenth century.) Until then, Mr Canning said, Britain could justifiably cause trouble wherever it wanted: ‘Until there can be a final settlement that shall last, everything should remain as unsettled as possible.’ This was a principle that applied especially to France, the traditional enemy.

  True to his principles of cannonball diplomacy, Napoleon therefore spent much of 1803, 1804 and 1805 planning a mass invasion of the south coast of England via hot-air balloon, giant barges and even a tunnel. Sadly for him, the scheme sank without trace when Nelson smashed the French fleet at Trafalgar in October 1805 – a victory that cemented Britannia’s rule over the waves and ensured that the Grande Armée’s trip across the Channel would get very choppy indeed.

  Napoleon duly changed tack, and decided that the way to hurt Britain was to aim for its soft, sweet underbelly – India, the source of its tea, spices and cheap cotton goods, the pride of its empire. George III had already lost America (with French help), and the loss of India would therefore be a doubly painful blow.

  There was something of an Alexander the Great fantasy in Napoleon’s plan to march through Turkey and right across north-western Asia. And Napoleon knew that he would need Russia’s blessing and logistical help, so in March 1808, the French Emperor wrote to Czar Alexander I outlining his ambitious scheme. ‘Everything can be signed before March 15,’ Napoleon enthused. ‘By May 1 our troops will be in Asia … The English, threatened in India, expelled from the Middle East, will be crushed beneath the weight of events.’

  Predictably, the conquest of Asia didn’t go ahead that quickly, and a meeting between Napoleon and the Czar was arranged for September in Erfurt, Germany, which Napoleon had recently seized from the Prussians. He hoped to use the so-called ‘Entrevue d’Erfurt’ (the word entrevue making it sound slightly like a job interview) to dazzle the Russian Czar with his power and vision, and invited along all the crowned heads of France’s puppet European states. Napoleon also took the entire national theatre company, the Comédie Française, with him to perform the greatest works of French literature (most of which were recycled Greek and Roman tragedies, presumably intended to depress Czar Alexander into acquiescence). He even made a tentative offer to cement the alliance by marrying Czar Alexander’s sister Catherine.

  Napoleon was therefore disappointed to come home from the two-week-long series of talks and theatre evenings with nothing more than a tame Franco-Russian treaty asking Britain to recognise France’s claim to Spain and Russia’s recent occupation of Finland and Sweden. No Russian wife, and no Russian promise to support an attack on India.

  Napoleon couldn’t understand why Alexander had been ‘difficult’ during the talks. What had gone wrong?

  Well, predictably, it was a Frenchman who had scuppered Napoleon’s grand plan – Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (Talleyrand for short). He was France’s own Minister of Foreign Affairs, and had become disenchanted with Napoleon’s habit of dealing with foreign affairs himself – with cannons rather than witticisms, for which Talleyrand was famed.

  At Erfurt, Talleyrand held secret talks with Czar Alexander, and apparently lectured the Russian on the folly of allying with Napoleon. ‘What are you doing here?’ he is said to have asked Alexander. ‘It is up to you to save Europe, and you will only do that if you stand up to Napoleon. The people of France are civilised, their sovereign is not. The sovereign of Russia is civilised, his people are not. It is therefore up to the sovereign of Russia to ally with the people of France.’

  When Napoleon found out about all this, he convened a meeting of his advisers at which he publicly called Talleyrand ‘de la merde dans des bas de soie’, or ‘shit in silk stockings’. Why he didn’t have him executed or at least exiled is a mystery. Other anti-Bonaparte plotters went to the scaffold on the strength of a whim or a rumour. But Talleyrand miraculously survived five French regimes while heads were falling all around him, and would later play a key role in sealing Napoleon’s fate after Waterloo.

  For the moment, though, the treacherous Talleyrand had merely demolished Napoleon’s great scheme to invade India and humiliate Britain, and had thereby virtually assured the war with Russia that would decimate his Emperor’s beloved Grande Armée. It was a good start.

  Talleyrand’s machinations were also typical of the French back-stabbing that, according to Bonapartists, would eventually lead to Napoleon’s demise. As we shall see, the higher Napoleon climbed, the greater the danger that a traitor or a coward would bring him crashing down. Partly this was because his most faithful companions were courageous generals who would fall in battle, forcing him to appoint less reliable aides (an excuse frequently used to defend Napoleon against charges of being a bad judge of character). But most of all, Bonapartist historians are keen to stress that Napoleon was a man with a unique greatness that was bound to arouse envy among his contemporaries, even his fellow Frenchmen; that his vision was so all-encompassing that it was impossible for mere mortals to comprehend; and, most importantly, that anything that went wrong was almost certainly someone else’s fault. Nothing must be blamed on the great Empereur.

  IV

  Sadly for Napoleon, his defeats have left an indelible trace on the French language. One of these linguistic black marks is the saying (still used today) ‘c’est la Bérézina’, meaning that a situation is total chaos, and that everything is about to go horribly wrong. In the kitchen before a big French family dinner, if the veal comes out of the oven overcooked, the potatoes aren’t ready, the wine is too warm, and a cherubic child is found decorating the walls with the chocolate mousse, ‘c’est la Bérézina’.

  It’s a saying inspired by a great national tragedy that took place between 25 and 27 November 1812 at the River Berezina, when the frost-bitten, starved remnants of Napoleon’s Grande Armée made a frantic attempt to squeeze across two hastily improvised bridges and escape from Russia. Out of 80,000 or so men who had managed to tramp 640 kilometres westwards across the frozen steppes from Moscow, only 35,000 made it.

  And yet, predictably, Napoleon’s French fans hail it as a victory. The historian Jean Tulard, who started writing books about Napoleon in the 1960s and hasn’t stopped yet, calls Berezina ‘a French victory in difficult conditions … Napoleon and a large part of his troops escaped’. The whole thing was, if you like, a sort of Dunkirk.

  But surely any comparisons with 1940 are absurd. Admittedly, Dunkirk was a retreat, also ‘in difficult conditions’, but it was a tactical withdrawal that boosted national morale and prevented an invasion of England by the Nazis. Berezina was a dash for safety by the half-dead survivors of the largest army Europe had ever seen, and ultimately led to Napoleon’s first abdication. It was like saving a few family photos from a blazing house. Though to the most fervent Bonapartists, only one photo was important.

  And it had all started out so promisingly. In June 1812, with an empire stretching from south-west Spain up to northeastern Poland, from Holland down to the toe of Italy, Napoleon decided that he was
not going to take any nonsense from the ‘difficult’ Czar who had begun to defy his Blocus Continental. Buying coffee, tea, sugar and cotton (products of the perfidious British Empire), and cheap knives, scissors and machines (the result of Britain’s dizzying technological progress), was a Russian slap in the face to French superiority. Wasn’t Napoleon’s empire capable of supplying everything that Europe needed? Well, no, it clearly wasn’t, and the Russians were rubbing his nose in the fact.

  Napoleon therefore launched the grandest military operation Europe had ever seen. Figures vary widely, but most historians agree that more than half a million soldiers began to cross the Polish border into Russia on 24 June 1812. About three-quarters of them were French, the rest coming from right across Napoleon’s empire – there were Italians, Belarusians, Austrians, Swiss, Lithuanians, Poles, Danes, Spaniards, Bavarians, Prussians, and even an Irish brigade. Napoleon himself told his memoirist Emmanuel de Las Cases that he had 400,000 men with 240,000 in reserve. Opposing them were around 400,000 Russians, including a large proportion of hastily conscripted, underpaid serfs, bolstered by 80,000 of the scariest soldiers on the continent, the Cossacks.

  As the Grande Armée set off towards Moscow, the sun glinting brightly on their breastplates and bayonets, Napoleon must have felt sure that victory would soon be his. He knew that the main Russian army was not far off – it was just a matter of catching up and destroying it. In his Napoléon: l’Immortel de Sainte-Hélène, the final part of a four-volume biography, the French historian Max Gallo imagines the Emperor bursting with a mixture of pride and impatience as he gazed out over the scene through his looking glass. ‘The hills and valleys were full of men, horses and wagons. The weapons were shining beneath the incandescent sky … What an army! He [Napoleon] slapped his boots with his riding whip, strode back and forth humming “Malbrough [sic] s’en va-t-en guerre”.fn4 Who could resist such power in motion?’ This huge French army was accompanied by 30,000 carts carrying two million bottles of brandy and 28 million bottles of wine, mobile boulangeries and several tons of wheat, blacksmiths’ equipment, ammunition, medicine, and of course officers’ picnic sets. There was also a whole column of cattle – a regiment of steak tartare on the hoof. Napoleon himself travelled in a sort of horse-drawn camper van, with a desk and enough room for strategy meetings.