Napoleon
Page 56
Almost all the fighting in the next part of the campaign took place inside East Prussia, formerly Polish territory, in what is today the 5,830 square mile Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Much of it is a flat, boggy plain with many rivers, lakes and forests. In winter temperatures drop to −30°C and there is daylight only between 7.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. The roads were often only tracks unmarked on maps; even the main road from Warsaw to Posen was unpaved and lacked side ditches. Heavy rain turned the entire countryside into seas of mud, with cannon moving at 11/4 mph. Napoleon joked that he had discovered a fifth element to add to water, fire, air and earth: mud! He sent his survey department forward to map and sketch the countryside, note the name of each village, its population and even soil type, all recorded beside the officer’s signature so that he could summon him to learn more details later.
• • •
Even as he prepared to confront the Russians again, Napoleon’s thoughts turned to Britain, which he saw as an equally serious threat to France’s long-term interest. On Friday, November 21, 1806, he signed into law the Berlin Decrees. These were designed to force Great Britain to the negotiating table, but instead were to lead – once he tried to impose them by force on Portugal, Spain and Russia – to his own downfall. The ‘Continental System’ created by the Berlin Decrees (and their successors the Milan and Fontainebleau Decrees of 1807 and 1810) was what Napoleon called ‘a retaliation’ against the British Order-in-Council of May 16, 1806, which had imposed a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the Elbe.26 ‘That England does not admit at all the law of nations followed universally by all civilized people,’ the Berlin Decrees began, means her adversaries have ‘a natural right to oppose the enemy with the same arms he uses.’ Therefore the articles, drafted and redrafted by Talleyrand, who supported the policy, were uncompromising:
The British Isles are in a state of blockade.
All trade and all correspondence with the British Isles is forbidden.
Every British subject, of whatever state or condition he may be . . . will be made a prisoner of war.
All warehouses, all merchandise, all property, of whatever nature it might be, belonging to a subject of England will be declared a valid prize . . .
No ship coming directly from England or the English colonies, or having been there since the publication of the present decree, will be received in any port.27
Since one-third of Britain’s direct exports and three-quarters of her re-exports went to continental Europe, Napoleon intended the decrees to put huge political pressure on the British government to restart the peace negotiations broken off in August.28 Writing to Louis on December 3, he explained: ‘I will conquer the sea through the power of the land.’29 Later he explained: ‘It’s the only means of striking a blow to England and obliging her to make peace.’30 It was true; since the destruction of the French fleet at Trafalgar there was no direct way to damage Britain other than commercially.
Although Napoleon believed that the Berlin Decrees would be popular with French businessmen, who he hoped would pick up the trade that previously went to Britain, he was soon disabused by the reports from his own chambers of commerce. As early as December that of Bordeaux reported a dangerous downturn of business. International trade simply wasn’t the zero-sum game that, with his crude Colbertism, Napoleon assumed it to be. By March 1807 he had to authorize special industrial loans from the reserve funds to offset the crises that were resulting.31
Although the most ardent articles in the influential British Whiggish journal the Edinburgh Review (apart from those attacking Wordsworth’s poetry) called for peace in order to allow trade to resume, the British government managed to ride out domestic criticism. By contrast, the Continental System damaged precisely those people who had done well from Napoleon’s regime and had hitherto been his strongest supporters: the middle classes, tradesmen, merchants and better-off peasantry, the acquirers of biens nationaux property he had always sought to help. ‘Shopkeepers of all countries were complaining about the state of affairs,’ recalled the treasury minister Mollien, but Napoleon was in no mood to listen, let alone compromise.32
On January 7, 1807 Britain retaliated with further Orders-in-Council, ‘subjecting to seizure all neutral vessels trading from one hostile port in Europe to another . . . interdicting the coastal trade of the enemy to neutrals’.33 Then, in November, still more Orders stated that France and all its tributary states were under a state of blockade and that all neutral vessels intending to go to or from France had to sail to Britain first, pay duties there and obtain clearance. All American trade with France was therefore blocked unless the United States’ ships bought a licence in a British port for a substantial fee. Along with the British practice of ‘impressing’ (i.e. kidnapping) thousands of Americans for service in the Royal Navy, the November 1807 Orders-in-Council were the primary cause of the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States.
One major problem with the Continental System was that it could not be imposed universally. In 1807, for example, because Hamburg and the Hanseatic towns such as Lübeck, Lüneberg, Rostock, Stralsund and Bremen couldn’t manufacture the 200,000 pairs of shoes, 50,000 greatcoats, 37,000 vests and so on that the Grande Armée required, their governors were forced to buy them from British manufacturers under special licences allowing them through the blockade. Many of Napoleon’s soldiers in the coming battles of the Polish campaign wore uniforms made in Halifax and Leeds, and British ministers boasted in the House of Commons that Napoleon couldn’t even provide the insignia stitched onto his officers’ uniforms except by resort to British manufacturers.34
In some parts of the Empire, the Continental System caused genuine distress as it unbalanced, dislocated and occasionally wrecked entire industries. There were serious disturbances in the Grand Duchy of Berg, and two demi-brigades had to be sent to Mainz to confiscate all English and colonial goods. Comestibles destined for larders across Europe were publicly burned, and the parts of Germany closest to France suffered more than Britain.35 Napoleon’s protectionist decrees led to huge bonfires of confiscated British produce on the beaches of Dieppe and Honfleur.
Another problem was that there was widespread undermining of the System, even by the imperial family. Louis turned a blind eye to smuggling in Holland, Murat failed to impose the System fully when he became king of Naples, and Josephine herself bought smuggled goods on the black market.36 Even the ultra-loyal Rapp allowed contraband into Danzig when he became governor in 1807, and refused to burn merchandise.37 ‘No prohibited merchandise whatever may enter without my order,’ an infuriated Napoleon told his finance minister, Gaudin, ‘and I should be expressly derelict to permit any abuse which touches my House so closely. Where there is a law, everybody should obey it.’38 He dismissed Bourrienne in 1810 – who as governor of Hamburg had been taking bribes from merchants to relax the System’s prohibitive measures – and dethroned Louis the same year to set an example, but abuses continued virtually unabated.
Although Napoleon was not so naive as to believe that smuggling could be stamped out altogether, he went to great lengths to suppress it, posting three hundred customs officers along the Elbe in 1806, for example. Yet the British made even greater efforts to facilitate smuggling, setting up a huge operation on the Baltic island of Heligoland.39 By 1811 there were 840 vessels plying their often night-time trade between Malta and southern Mediterranean ports. Once landed, coffee and sugar were smuggled across borders despite the penalty of ten years’ penal servitude and branding, and after 1808 the death penalty on occasion for repeat offenders.40 (Britain had imposed the death penalty for smuggling in 1736, which was regularly enforced.)
The blockaded French navy could not hope to police the European coastline, and Lisbon, Trieste, Athens, Scandinavia, the Balearics, Gibraltar, Livorno, the Ionian Islands and St Petersburg all provided points at which, at different times and in differing amounts, British goods coul
d enter the continent overtly or covertly. When French customs officials did capture contraband a proportion of it was often returnable for a bribe, and in due course it became possible to take out insurance against seizures at Lloyd’s of London. Meanwhile, French imperial customs revenues collapsed from 51 million francs in 1806 to 11.5 million in 1809, when Napoleon allowed the export of grain to the British at high price when their harvest was weak – some 74 per cent of all British imported wheat came from France that year – in order to deplete British bullion reserves.41* The Continental System failed to work because merchants continued to accept British bills-of-exchange, so London continued to see net capital inflows.42 Much to Napoleon’s frustration, the British currency depreciated against European currencies by 15 per cent between 1808 and 1810, making British exports cheaper. The Continental System also forced British merchants to become more flexible and to diversify, investing in Asia, Africa, the Near East and Latin America much more than before, so exports that had been running at an average of £25.4 million per annum between 1800 and 1809 rose to £35 million between 1810 and 1819. By contrast, imports fell significantly, so Britain’s balance of trade was positive, which it hadn’t been since 1780.43
Napoleon hoped, by preventing continental consumers from buying British produce, to stimulate European production, especially French, and to encourage producers to explore alternatives. When it was discovered in 1810 that sugar beet and indigo could be produced in France, he told his secretary that it was like discovering America a second time.44 An experimental school was set up in Saint-Denis to teach sugar-making and in March 1808 Napoleon asked Berthollet to research whether ‘it is possible to make good sugar from turnips’.45 He could not persuade people to drink Swiss tea, however, let alone chicory rather than coffee, and his plans to manufacture cotton out of thistles in 1810 also came to nothing.46
Had Britain merely been ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, the economic downturn in the fiscal years 1810 and 1811 that has been attributed to the Continental System might well have stirred up political problems for the government, but the Cabinet was largely made up of upper-class former colleagues of William Pitt – indeed the Duke of Portland’s government of 1807–9 abjured the labels ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ altogether and simply called itself ‘the friends of Mr Pitt’ – who put their support for the war against Napoleon above all commercial considerations. Spencer Perceval, who followed Portland as prime minister in October 1809, was quite unhinged on the subject. He told his brother-in-law Thomas Walpole that Napoleon could be identified in the Book of Revelation as ‘the woman who rides upon the beast, who is drunk with the blood of the saints, the mother of harlots’.47 When Napoleon was stopped at Acre in 1799, Perceval wrote an anonymous pamphlet, catchily entitled Observations Intended to Point out the Application of a Prophecy in the Eleventh Chapter of the Book of David to the French Power, which sought to argue that the Bible had foretold the fall of Napoleon. (Perceval’s detailed calculations from the scriptures also convinced him that the world was going to end in the year 1926.)48 With Britain’s politicians possessed by beliefs so resistant to reason, it is hard to see how Napoleon could ever have persuaded Britain to make peace after the death of Fox. When in 1812 Perceval was assassinated by someone even more deranged than him, his place as prime minister was taken by another disciple of Pitt, Lord Liverpool (formerly the foreign secretary Lord Hawkesbury), who was just as committed to the destruction of Napoleon and who would serve until 1827.
• • •
At 3 a.m. on November 25, 1806 Napoleon left Berlin for a tour of the Polish front, inviting Josephine, who was in Mainz, to come east to stay with him,49 a suggestion he was later to regret. He entered the Polish city of Posen on the night of the 27th to a tremendous reception from the inhabitants, whose hopes for nationhood he had excited but avoided making any commitment to gratify. ‘I ought not to have crossed the Vistula,’ he later said in one of his many acknowledgements of blunders. ‘It was the taking of Magdeburg that induced me to enter Poland. I did wrong. It led to terrible wars. But the idea of the re-establishment of Poland was a noble one.’50 To the town fathers begging for the restitution of their kingdom he chose his words carefully: ‘Speeches and empty wishes are not enough . . . What force has overthrown only force can restore . . . what has been destroyed for lack of unity only unity can re-establish.’51 It sounded positive and martial, but fell well short of a promise to re-establish Poland as a nation-state.
The next day Count Levin von Bennigsen, the Hanoverian-born commander of the Russian army, retreated from Warsaw and stopped 40 miles to the north near Pultusk. Murat entered Warsaw that evening, installing himself as governor. Napoleon was not about to be coerced by the Poles’ enthusiastic welcome into alienating for ever the three countries which had partitioned and extinguished Poland for their own immense territorial gain in 1795. ‘I am old in my knowledge of men,’ he told Murat on December 2. ‘My greatness does not rest on the help of a few thousand Poles . . . It is not for me to take the first step.’ As for General Prince Józef Poniatowski, the pro-French nephew of Poland’s last king, Napoleon said: ‘He is more frivolous and lightweight than most Poles, and that is saying a good deal.’52 Napoleon wanted Murat to convey to the Poles ‘that I am not begging for a throne for a member of my family; I have no shortage of thrones to give them.’53
• • •
The Grande Armée hated life on the Vistula, and saw only ‘want and bad weather’ ahead.54 One of the army’s jokes was that the entire Polish language could be reduced to five words – ‘Chleba? Nie ma. Woda? Zaraz!’, ‘Bread? There is none. Water? Immediately!’ – so when an infantryman in a column near Nasielsk shouted out to Napoleon: ‘Papa, Chleba?’, he immediately called back ‘Nie ma’, whereupon the whole column roared with laughter.55 During a storm before the army went into its winter quarters (cantonments), another soldier shouted: ‘Have you bumped your head, leading us without bread on roads like this?’ To which Napoleon replied: ‘Four more days of patience, and I won’t ask you for anything more. Then you’ll be cantoned.’ The soldier shouted back: ‘Well, it’s not too much, but remember it, because after that we’ll canton ourselves!’56 The grognards had genuine grievances – on occasion they were reduced to drinking horses’ blood from saucepans while on the march – but Savary recalled of this period of the campaign how: ‘He loved the soldiers who took the liberty of talking to him, and always laughed with them.’57
To a letter from Josephine saying that she wasn’t jealous of him spending his evenings with Polish women, Napoleon replied on December 5:
I have long since perceived that choleric people always maintain they are not choleric; those who are afraid declare repeatedly that they are not afraid; you, then, are convicted of jealousy; I’m enchanted! Anyway, you’re wrong to think that in the wastes of Poland I think of beautiful women. There was a ball last night given by the provincial aristocracy, with quite pretty and rich women, but badly dressed, even though they tried to emulate Parisian fashion.58
The following week he pulled off a significant coup when the Elector Frederick Augustus of Saxony, whose forces had fought alongside the Prussians at Jena and Auerstädt, left his alliance with Frederick William III and joined the Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon arrived in Warsaw to an ecstatic welcome on December 19. He immediately set up a provisional government of Polish nobles, albeit with little more than consultative powers. He assumed that the Russians would not retreat much further and were ready to fight, so he ordered all his corps over the Vistula. Hoping to make for the gap between the German-born Russian generals Bennigsen and Büxhowden, he told the corps commanders to expect a major offensive soon. When Davout’s corps reached the village of Czarnowo on the Bug river on December 23, Napoleon reconnoitred the area and launched a night attack, which was successful in putting to flight 15,000 overextended Russians under Count Alexander Ostermann-Tolstoy,* at the end of which the waterways north of Warsaw were in
French hands.59
On Christmas Day 1806, Napoleon tried to destroy Bennigsen’s army while it was retreating to the north-east by sending Lannes to Pultusk to cut off his line of retreat, while Davout, Soult and Murat marched north, Augereau went north-east from the Wkra river and Ney and Bernadotte south-east from the Vistula. The weather ruined his chances, cutting movement down to 7 miles a day. ‘The ground over which we passed was a clayey soil,’ recalled Rapp, ‘intersected with marshes: the roads were excessively bad: cavalry, infantry and artillery stuck in the bogs, and it cost them the utmost difficulty to extricate themselves.’60 When battle was joined at Pultusk the next day, ‘Many of our officers stuck in the mud and remained there during the whole of the battle. They served as marks for the enemy to shoot at.’
Bennigsen fought a successful rearguard action during a snowstorm at Pultusk with 35,000 men against Lannes’ 26,000-strong corps, and withdrew the next day.61 On the same day at Golymin, Prince Andrei Galitzin fought until dark before neatly extricating his force from one of Napoleon’s traps (Murat, Augereau and Davout were to descend on him from three sides) – when they met at Tilsit in July Napoleon congratulated Galitzin on his escape.62 Napoleon visited the Golymin battlefield the next day, and the soldier-painter Lejeune recorded how ‘the Emperor and Prince Berthier stopped a few minutes to hear us sing airs from the latest operas of Paris’.63