Meanwhile, in the background diplomatic dealings were underway: Napoleon’s initiative was to Alexander, while Prussia’s was toward the new emperor of the French.
•••
For Napoleon—as he expressed clearly in a letter to the emperor of Austria on November 8—the tsar was blinded by his advisors’ preference for Britain so he had to be convinced of France’s peaceful intentions. Thus, Napoleon sent to Olmütz his aide-de-camp Savary to meet the Russian emperor and at the same time discreetly gather information about the state and size of the coalition forces. On November 27 Savary gave the tsar a letter from Napoleon in which the French emperor displayed his courtesy and amiability. But Savary was received coldly at Russian headquarters.
Awaiting the tsar’s response, Savary chatted both amiably and skillfully with the officers who were heedlessly trusting, if not irresponsible. Relating the episode, a bulletin of the Grande Armée (dated December 3, 1805) did not fail to denounce the naïveté and incompetence of Alexander’s staff:
It was easy for [Savary] to understand, after the conversation that he had for three days with thirty-some whippersnappers who under various titles surrounded the emperor of Russia that presumption, imprudence, and thoughtlessness reigned in the military decision-making, as they had reigned in the political.8
On November 27 the emissary left the headquarters with a letter handwritten by Alexander. Addressed to “the head of the French government” (a minimal formula that implicitly refused the title of emperor), the tsar’s letter was cold in tone and devoid of any desire for rapprochement:
I have received with gratitude the letter of which General Savary was the bearer and I hasten to express all my thanks for it. I have no other desire than to see peace in Europe reestablished with loyalty and on equitable bases. I wish at the same time to have the occasion to be able to be personally agreeable to you. Please receive this assurance, as well as my highest regards.9
The same day, Alexander at the head of his troops, having in effect removed General Kutuzov from supreme command, gave the order to seek combat against the French. The next day, near Wischau, a first engagement between the French and the allied Austrians and Russians (in superior numbers) turned to the advantage of the latter. For the young tsar leading his troops with spirit and courage on the field of battle, the success seemed a good omen for the campaign operations.
In parallel with the diplomatic dealings between France and Russia, discussions were ongoing between Prussia and France. On November 28 in Brünn, the Prussian emissary, Haugwitz, a former minister of foreign affairs, met Napoleon and gave him a letter from the Prussian king written in Potsdam at the end of October. But now there was no question of an ultimatum: Haugwitz, less bellicose than Hardenberg, really aspired to make a deal with France to avoid war. Prussia was indeed the weak link in the coalition.
The next day, Savary was once again in Olmütz to convince Alexander to accept a meeting with Napoleon. But the tsar, perhaps carried away by his first military success, preferred to send Prince Dolgoruki to the French camp. A long-standing Anglophile and a partisan of pursuing the war, the young prince arrogantly addressed Napoleon, who was indignant in a letter to the elector of Württemberg about the behavior of the Russian emissary:
I had a conversation with this whippersnapper in which he spoke to me as one would speak to a boyard who was being sent to Siberia. […] This young man was excessively arrogant and he must have taken my extreme moderation as a mark of great terror.10
Yet, the French emperor tried to temporize, astonished at the tsar’s bellicose attitude, but the meeting deteriorated. Napoleon’s annoyance reached its height when Dolgoruki, having stressed that Russia was expecting no territorial advantage from its engagement in the conflict and was intervening only to defend the independence of European states against French ambitions, added provocatively that peace could only be envisaged if Napoleon renounced the kingdom of Italy, the left bank of the Rhine, and Belgium and evacuated Vienna. Such demands amounted to a refusal to negotiate, and henceforth Napoleon was convinced that war with Russia was inevitable. On November 30, shortly before Austerlitz, he confided to Talleyrand and reaffirmed his sympathy (somewhat condescending) for the young tsar:
Tomorrow there will probably be a very serious battle with the Russians; I have done much to avoid it, for it is blood spilled uselessly. I had correspondence with the emperor of Russia and all I am left with is that he is a brave and worthy man led astray by those around him, who are sold to the English—to the point that they want to force me to give Genoa to the King of Sardinia and to renounce Belgium!11
And his letter to the elector of Württemberg (December 5) was along the same lines, affirming that the tsar was of a good nature and filled with great qualities, but “was surrounded by twenty-some rascals who are leading him to misery.”12
Dolgoruki had just returned from his mission and given Alexander an optimistic report. He thought the French troops feared a military engagement because the superior coalition numbers (90,000 faced with 70,000 French soldiers) were crushing: “Our success is beyond doubt,” he wrote in his report. “It suffices to go forward and our enemies will retreat like they retreated at Wischau.”13 Unfortunately for Alexander I, nobody could be less clairvoyant.
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Over several weeks before Austerlitz,14 there reigned in the Russian headquarters a strange atmosphere that combined excitement, an appetite for glory, and total recklessness. Surrounded by young swaggerers who were totally inexperienced, who all dreamed of beating Napoleon, Alexander was eager for battle and despised the old generals. Langeron’s harsh judgment was explicit:
He had little regard for them, received them rarely, spoke to them little and reserved all his favors for five or six young favorites who were his adjutants, (Lieven, Volkonsky, Gagarin, Dolgoruki). He gave himself over to a familiarity with them that was humiliating for the old generals, who saw their bearing and manners ridiculed by all these children whose influence extended to everything.15
Farther on, he wrote about General Kutuzov: “The young men who surrounded the emperor made fun of Kutuzov and called him ‘General Lambin’—he was without power and respect.”16 For them, as for Alexander, old General Kutuzov, known for his taste for pretty women and his propensity to drink, blind in one eye, corpulent, and slow to mount a horse, was past his prime. His extreme caution—he refused to lead offensive actions against Napoleon—was an admission of cowardice. Only Adam Czartoryski in the entourage of Alexander, did not support the warlike enthusiasm of the young officers, and the fact that the emperor had taken the head of the coalition troops appeared to him to be dangerous, but the Polish prince, whose relations with Alexander were strained since he had gone to Berlin, was also being marginalized. So Alexander did not heed either the firm injunctions from Czartoryski, who advised him to yield command to a military man, or from Kutuzov’s reserves, who wanted to delay engagement and wait for reinforcements. In Alexander’s favor, it should be stressed that Kutuzov did not express his reservations strongly; the old courtier, of boundless devotion to the young tsar, bent to all his desires.
On the night of December 1, the Austrian general Weyrother convened a war council in which he presented his arrangement for the battle to come. Speaking in German, his exposition was translated to the Russian officers, who got lost in the names of villages and landmarks;17 Kutuzov was sighing and appeared to doze. Only Langeron dared challenge a plan that he considered complicated and hazardous. Convinced that Napoleon was weakened, Weyrother aimed to attack the French troops from the plateau of Pratzen; he would descend toward the plain where most of the French army was located, outflank it from the right, and enclose it in Brünn. But Napoleon had anticipated this maneuver and would use the enemy plan to deliver the decisive battle he was seeking. He willingly withdrew his right flank and retrenched in a village behind the frozen marshes.
At 7:30 a.m. on the second of December, the coalition forces amassed on th
e Pratzen began to descend on their left to attack the French right flank and take the whole army from the side. Doing so, they presented their own flank during the maneuver, and then at 8:30 the French center led by Soult attacked the Pratzen, which was already in confusion due to the movement. As the fog dissipated, the sun revealed the French attack, and Kutuzov understood the danger. Around 9:00, to remedy the abandonment of the heights of the Pratzen, he gave the order to his army (including the imperial Guard) to regain the top of the plateau. But the tsar had arrived on the spot along with the emperor of Austria, their generals, aides-de-camp, and advisors; he criticized this decision, demanding that the troops assault the French, addressing General Kutuzov in the familiar form: “Mikhail Ilarionich, why aren’t you advancing? We are not on maneuvers in Tsaritsyno where the parade does not commence until all the regiments are there.” Kutuzov defended himself but complied: “Sire, if I do not start, it is precisely because we are not on the field of Tsaritsyno. But if you order it . . .”18
The order proved catastrophic: the engagement was immediately disastrous for the Russian troops. They were submerged in a French assault that soon took the Pratzen plateau. The French installed their artillery and from there fired cannons down on their adversaries, whose lines below were dislocated. At 11:00 the signal for retreat was given but would only be executed two hours later, transforming the defeat into a rout. Many soldiers would die frozen in the Satchan pond in crevasses opened up by the French bombardment:
The water, penetrating through crevasses soon surged over the ice and we saw thousands of Russians,19 as well as their horses, cannons, and chariots, slowly sink into the chasm! It was a horribly majestic spectacle that I will never forget! In an instant the surface of the pond was covered with every thrashing thing that could not swim: men and horses struggled amidst the ice and water.20
Kutuzov was lightly wounded. The tsar, jostled by his fleeing troops and desperate at the scope of the defeat and trembling with fever, broke down in tears at the foot of a tree. He owed his survival only to the vigilance of his equerry Ené and his courier Prokhnitski, as well as the intervention of his doctor, James Wylie, who took it upon himself to administer a few drops of opium in wine to knock him out and allow him to escape for several hours from the nightmare of Austerlitz. But when he awoke, the tsar of Russia now had to face the disastrous consequences of the defeat.
Aftermath of Austerlitz to the Friedland Defeat
The defeat at Austerlitz, in which the tsar took a direct share because he assumed command of military operations, took a very heavy toll. First, on the human level: the allies lost 35,000 killed or missing (25–28,000 Russians and 6,000 Austrians),21 as opposed to only 9,000 for the Grande Armée. On the diplomatic level the emperor of Austria made an armistice with Napoleon on December 4, by which Russian troops had to leave Austrian territory immediately, and later that month Austria signed the Treaty of Presburg, which marked the end of the Third Coalition. Despite the advice of Talleyrand, who was unsuccessfully trying to moderate “Napoleon’s destructive plans,”22 the French emperor (no doubt carried away by his successes) imposed very harsh conditions on Austria, which was thrown out of northern Italy and forced to concede Venetia, Istria, and Dalmatia and to accept the creation of the principality of Lucca and Piombino, which then fell into the Bonaparte family’s pockets. On German land Austria had to cede its possessions in Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg. Austria came out of the conflict very weakened. Demographically, it lost 4 million of the 24 million inhabitants that made up the country in 1805; financially, it was subject to heavy war reparations of 50 million florins; and symbolically, Franz I had to give up his title of emperor of the German Holy Empire, which disappeared the following August. As Talleyrand had foreseen from the start, these harsh conditions incited in Austria a desire for revenge and in the long term could not guarantee a lasting peace. But in the short term Austria was wiped out of the war.
On December 5 Alexander met his former ally at Holitsch, then set off for St. Petersburg, having sent a message to the king of Prussia stating that he was ready to support Prussia with all his forces. But Frederick-Wilhelm III had little confidence in the promises of Alexander or in his ability to keep them, and so he preferred to negotiate with Napoleon. In the king’s name, in Schönbrunn, Haugwitz signed a treaty of alliance (both defensive and offensive) with France on December 15, which granted Hanover to Prussia, while the Prussian enclaves of Ansbach, Cleves, and Neufchatel went to France. From this date—although the king had not yet ratified the treaty—the Third Coalition was dissolved.
On December 8 Alexander arrived in St. Petersburg at four in the morning, going directly to the Kazan Cathedral and then reviewing his troops in front of the Winter Palace. People and courtiers were joyful, for the tsar had come back alive from the theater of operations, and everybody saluted his return, convinced that responsibility for the disaster fell on the Austrians, who were suspected of treachery. In the evening Alexander gave a large party in the palace, at which he decorated Kutuzov with the Order of St. Vladimir, naming him governor of Kiev, an honorary but distant post that removed the old general from Alexander’s sight; his presence alone was a living reproach. But the truth about the campaign was soon known, as Novosiltsev wrote in a letter to Stroganov in January 1806:
You know that when we separated, you left us very concerned about how we would appear in St. Petersburg. The worry and shame of appearing there increased as we approached the capital. Imagine our astonishment when we learned that the emperor was received with an enthusiasm that cannot be described, that he entered amid unprecedented acclamations, that the whole good town was in heaven over the distinguished way our army had behaved in the recent affair; that it was composed only of heroes […] that our army was said to ask for nothing more than to begin again right after the battle, but that the Austrians did not want to, and that to prevent us, they made an armistice without our knowledge; and finally these Austrians were the real traitors who sold out to France, and that we only lost the battle because they had communicated the plans to the French and their whole army suddenly went over to the French. There had to be victims and guilty ones: so Count Razumovski [ambassador in Vienna] who had not sounded out public opinion enough in committing the court of Vienna to declare itself against the French! He merited nothing less than to be ignominiously fired; […]. You may easily imagine that all the tales like this could not be believed for very long; people from the army kept arriving and setting the public straight. Everybody soon knew how things actually happened, what the real cause of our defeat was, and how we behaved afterward. So after our arrival, the emperor fell in public opinion in an alarming way. Nobody spoke any more of treason, but now all the misfortune was attributed to him alone.23
In fact, once the truth was known, Alexander I faced severe criticism from his advisors, his ministers, and his own family. Prince Czartoryski was particularly vehement, reproaching him first for having contributed to the disaster by his useless presence on the battlefield:
Instead of continually going to the advance posts, or later exposing yourself in front of the columns, where the presence of Your Majesty, far from helping, if I may speak the truth, only upset and hindered the generals, it would have been better to remain more distant from the army, to let it march forward without accompanying all of its movements, but rather use all your care, Sire, all your time and all your faculties to occupy yourself without sparing any means of making the whole thing proceed, not blocking any administrative branch of your empire, reorganize Austria, […]. But how was it possible to attend to so many difficult and important objects, since days were taken up with other occupations of little utility, and which also exhausted your time and energy? But by accustoming the soldiers to your presence without any useful goal, Your Majesty has weakened the charm that was attached to it. Your Majesty’s presence had no advantage at Austerlitz; it was precisely at the place you were located that the rout was immediate and complete. Your Ma
jesty had his share of that chaos and ought to have hastily got away from something to which you should never have been exposed. At Holitz your departure, Sire, which was only a consequence of your arrival, if I dare say so, was little calculated to the circumstances of the moment and increased the sense of a panicky retreat and general demoralization.24
Then, on a more political level Czartoryski was critical of Alexander’s orientation as still partisan to an alliance with Prussia. In March 1806 Alexander wrote to Frederick-Wilhelm III that union between Prussia and Russia appeared all the more indispensable. However, Prussia, after having played a double game and trying to negotiate secretly with both Napoleon and with England over recognition of its rights over Hanover, had just concluded a peace treaty with France! Consequently, Czartoryski expressed in the same letter his profound disagreement, enjoining Alexander to stop taking account of Prussian interests at the expense of Russia’s. To give strength to his arguments, he sent the emperor a “Memorandum on Relations between Russia and Prussia,”25 written around January 1806, in which he tried to revise Russia’s diplomatic orientation. In another note in April, he pleaded once more for an ambitious Polish policy that would result in reconstituting a kingdom of Poland under the aegis of the tsar. But Alexander continued to privilege the Prussian alliance, as much out of sympathy for the sovereign as out of conviction (because he saw Prussia as the cornerstone of his strategy against Napoleon); thus he could not call for the annexation of Prussian Poland. So he answered Czartoryski with a flat rejection: “You want a discussion, I am ready to grant one, but I cannot prevent myself telling you that it won’t serve any purpose, since our starting points are so diametrically opposed.”26 The old intellectual and political complicity of the two friends had disappeared.
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