Napoleon
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Pontoon bridges had not been built over the Pleisse, Luppe or Elster rivers, so everyone had to cross by the single bridge over the Pleisse in the city, which was reached at the end of a series of narrow streets. Catastrophically, the bridge was blown up at 11.30 a.m., long before the whole army had got over it, which led to well over 20,000 men being captured unnecessarily and turned the defeat into a rout. Napoleon’s 50th bulletin blamed Colonel Montfort by name for delegating the duty to a ‘corporal, an ignorant fellow but ill comprehending the nature of the duty with which he was charged’.59 People and animals were still on the bridge when the explosion shook the city, raining the body parts of humans and horses into the streets and river.60 Some officers decided to try to swim across to avoid capture. Macdonald made it, but Poniatowski’s horse, which he had ridden into the river, could not climb up the opposite bank and fell back on top of him. Both were swept away by the current.61 The fisherman who hauled Poniatowski’s corpse out of the river did well from selling his diamond-studded epaulettes, rings and snuffboxes to Polish officers who wanted to return them to his family.62 Napoleon’s red-leather briefcase for foreign newspapers, emblazoned Gazettes Étrangères in gold lettering, was captured, along with his carriage, and opened in the presence of Bernadotte.*
‘Between a battle lost and a battle won,’ Napoleon had said on the eve of the battle of Leipzig, ‘the distance is immense and there stand empires.’63 Between the dead and the wounded, Napoleon lost around 47,000 men over the three days. Some 38,000 men were captured, along with 325 guns, 900 wagons and 28 colours and standards (including 3 eagles), making it statistically easily the worst defeat of his career.64 In his bulletin he admitted to 12,000 lost, and several hundred wagons, mainly as a result of the blown bridge. ‘The disorder it has brought to the army changed the situation,’ he wrote; ‘the victorious French army arrives at Erfurt as a defeated army would arrive.’65 After further desertions and defections, he was able to bring only 80,000 men of the Grande Armée back over the Saale out of the more than 200,000 he had had at the start of the battle. ‘Typhus broke out in our disorganized ranks in a terrifying fashion,’ Captain Barrès recalled. ‘Thus one might say that on leaving Leipzig we were accompanied by all the plagues that can devour an army.’66
Napoleon conducted a fighting retreat to the Rhine, sweeping aside the Austrians at Kösen on the 21st, the Prussians at Freiburg that same day, the Russians at Hörselberg on the 27th and, in a two-day battle on the 30th and 31st, the Bavarians at Hanau. He re-crossed the Rhine at Mainz on November 2. ‘Be calm and cheerful and laugh at the alarmists,’ he told his wife the next day.67
Napoleon still had 120,000 men besieged in the fortresses on the Elbe, Oder and Vistula, with Rapp inside Danzig (where his 40,000 effectives were reduced by the end to 10,000), and generals Adrien du Taillis in Torgau, Jean Lemarois in Magdeburg, Jean Lapoype in Wittenberg, Louis Grandeau in Stettin, Louis d’Albe in Küstrin and Jean de Laplane in Glogau, as well as more men in Dresden, Erfurt, Marienburg, Modlin, Zamosc and Wesel. Although Davout held Hamburg and the lower Elbe, most of these eastern fortresses fell one by one in late 1813, often as the result of starvation. A few held out until the end of the 1814 campaign, but none played any useful part besides holding down local militia units in sieges. It was a sign of Napoleon’s invincible optimism to have left so many men so far to the east. By 1814, most of them were prisoners-of-war.
The 1813 campaign had claimed the lives of two marshals, Bessières and Poniatowski, and no fewer than thirty-three generals. It also saw the defection of Murat, who while he was with Napoleon at Erfurt on October 24, secretly agreed to join the Allies in exchange for a guarantee that he would remain king of Naples. Yet Napoleon was not disheartened, or at least not publicly. Arriving in Paris on November 9 he (in Fain’s words) ‘exerted every effort to turn his remaining resources to the best account’.68 He replaced Maret as foreign minister with Caulaincourt (after twice offering the position to the unemployed Talleyrand in order to show his conciliatory intentions), imposed an emergency levy of 300,000 new recruits, of which he got 120,000 despite the now powerful anti-conscription sentiment in the country, and seriously entertained a peace offer from the Allies, brought from Frankfurt by the Baron de Saint-Aignan, his former equerry and Caulaincourt’s brother-in-law.69 Under what were termed the Frankfurt bases of peace, France would return to her so-called ‘natural frontiers’ of the Ligurian Alps, the Pyrenees, the Rhine and the Ardennes – the so-called ‘Bourbon frontiers’ (even though the Bourbons had regularly crossed them in wars of conquest). Napoleon would have to abandon Italy, Germany, Spain and Holland, but not all of Belgium.70 At that point, with only a few garrisons holding out in Spain and unable to defend the Rhine with anything more than bluster, Napoleon told Fain he was prepared to surrender Iberia and Germany, but he resisted giving away Italy, which in wartime ‘could provide a diversion to Austria’, and Holland, which ‘afforded so many resources’.71
On November 14, the same day that the Frankfurt proposals arrived, Napoleon made a speech to Senate leaders at the Tuileries. ‘All Europe was marching with us just a year ago,’ he told them frankly, ‘today all Europe is marching against us. The fact is that the opinion of the world is formed by France or by England . . . Posterity will say that if great and critical circumstances arose they were not too much for France or for me.’72 The next day he instructed Caulaincourt that if the British army arrived at the Château de Marracq near Bayonne ‘it be set fire to, also all the houses which belong to me, so that they may not sleep in my bed’.73
Although he ordered the doubling of the droits réunis on tobacco and postage and doubled the tax on salt in order to raise 180 million francs, he admitted to Mollien that the measures were ‘a digestif that I was saving to the last moment of thirst’. As he was down to 30 million francs in the treasury, that moment had now arrived.74 He ordered that all payments of pensions and salaries be suspended so that the orders made by the war administration ministry could still be honoured.
After the Allies made the Frankfurt terms public on December 1, stating that they would ‘guarantee the French Empire a larger extent of territory than France ever knew under her kings’, Pasquier and Lavalette informed Napoleon that their intelligence services indicated the French people wanted him to accept.75 ‘The moment of the rendezvous has arrived,’ Napoleon told Savary melodramatically; ‘they look at the lion as dead, who will begin taking his delayed vengeance? If France abandons me, I cannot do anything; but they’ll soon regret it.’76 The following day Caulaincourt wrote to Metternich agreeing to the ‘general and summary bases’.77 On December 10, as Wellington crossed the Nive river and Soult withdrew to the Adour, Metternich replied to say that the Allies were waiting for Britain’s reply to Caulaincourt’s offer. The Napoleonic Wars could have ended there and then, but the British were opposed to a peace that left France in possession of any part of the Belgian coast from which Britain could be invaded, specifically Antwerp. Castlereagh’s opposition to Metternich’s terms wrecked the Frankfurt peace attempt, especially once he had arrived in Europe in January 1814 and encouraged the Tsar to oppose peace of any kind with Napoleon.78 He did not believe that a lasting peace would be possible if Napoleon remained on the throne of France.
‘Brilliant victories glorified French arms during this campaign,’ Napoleon told the Legislative Body on December 19, ‘defections without example rendered those victories useless. Everything turned against us. Even France would be in danger were it not for the energy and unity of Frenchmen.’ Only Denmark and Naples remained faithful, he said – though privately he was having doubts about Naples, telling his sister the Grand Duchess Elisa of Tuscany not to send any muskets to their sister Caroline and her husband, Murat, who were back in Italy negotiating with the Austrians once more. He told the Legislative Body that ‘he would raise no objection to the re-establishment of peace’, and ended defiantly: ‘I have never been seduced by prosperity; advers
ity shall find me superior to its blows.’79
Napoleon’s speech to the Senate was equally tough-minded. ‘At the sight of the whole nation in arms, the foreigner will flee or sign peace on the bases which he himself proposed. It is no longer a question of recovering the conquests we have made.’80 Although the Senate stayed loyal, on December 30 the Legislative Body voted by 223 to 51 in favour of a long critique of Napoleon’s actions, which ended with a demand for political and civil rights. ‘A barbarous and endless war swallows up periodically the youth torn from education, agriculture, commerce and the arts,’ it concluded.81 The French had allowed him his first defeat in Russia, but this second catastrophe at Leipzig, coming so soon afterwards, turned many of them against him. If he wished to remain in power, Napoleon had little alternative other than to banish the document’s authors, led by Joseph Lainé, and forbid its publication. The next day he prorogued the Legislative Body.
With fewer than 80,000 men under arms, Napoleon now faced 300,000 Russians, Prussians and Austrians on the Rhine, and 100,000 Spanish, British and Portuguese coming over the Pyrenees.82 ‘The moment when the national existence is threatened is not the one to come to talk to me about constitutions and the rights of the people,’ Napoleon told Savary. ‘We are not going to waste our time in puerile games while the enemy is getting closer.’83 Now that the Allies were crossing the Rhine, national unity was more important than political debate. France was about to be invaded and Napoleon was determined to fight.
28
Defiance
‘When an army is inferior in number, inferior in cavalry and in artillery, it is essential to avoid a general action.’
Napoleon’s Military Maxim No. 10
‘It was Rome that Pompey needed to keep; there that he should have concentrated all his forces.’
Napoleon, Caesar’s Wars
On earlier occasions when France was in danger of invasion – in 1709, 1712, 1792–3 and 1799 – her large army and great border fortresses built in the seventeenth century by the military engineer Sébastien de Vauban had protected her.1 This time it was different. The sheer size of the Allied forces enabled them to outflank her formidable line of north-eastern forts – such as Verdun, Metz, Thionville and Mézières – and besiege them. Moreover, for this they could rely on their second-line troops, such as Landwehr, militias and the soldiers of minor German states. In 1792–3, the Austrian and Prussian armies invading France had numbered only 80,000 men, but were confronted by 220,000 Frenchmen under arms. In January 1814 Napoleon faced a total of 957,000 Allied troops with fewer than 220,000 men in the field – 60,000 of whom under Soult and 37,000 under Suchet were fighting Wellington’s Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese army in the south-west of France and 50,000 under Eugène were defending Italy. Napoleon’s army rarely numbered 70,000 in the coming campaign and was always dangerously weak in artillery and cavalry.2
Many were new conscripts, with little more than a coat and forage cap to distinguish them as soldiers. Yet they stayed with the colours; only 1 per cent of the 50,000 young conscripts who passed through the main depot at Courbevoie deserted during the 1814 campaign.3 Often depicted as an ogre keen to shore up his rule by throwing children into the charnel-house of war, Napoleon in fact wanted no such thing. ‘It is necessary that I get men, not children,’ he wrote to Clarke on October 25, 1813. ‘No one is braver than our youth, but . . . it is necessary to have men to defend France.’ In June 1807 he had told Marshal Kellermann that ‘Eighteen-year-old children are too young to be going to war far away.’4
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Although Napoleon attempted to recreate the patriotism of 1793, even allowing street musicians to play the republican anthem the ‘Marseillaise’, which he had formerly banned, the old revolutionary cry of ‘La Patrie en danger!’ no longer had its electrifying effect.5 Still, he hoped the army and his own abilities might be enough to prevail. ‘Sixty thousand and me,’ he said, ‘together one hundred thousand.’6* However, if the French had been as motivated as Napoleon had hoped, a guerrilla movement would have broken out in France when the Allies invaded, yet none arose. ‘Public opinion is an invisible, mysterious, irresistible power,’ Napoleon mused later. ‘Nothing is more mobile, nothing more vague, nothing stronger. Capricious though it is, nevertheless it is truthful, reasonable, and right much more often than one might think.’7
Napoleon had entrenched the political and social advances of the Revolution largely by keeping the Bourbons out of power for fifteen years, after the ten between the Revolution and Brumaire, so a generation had passed since the fall of the Bastille and the French had grown accustomed to their newfound freedoms and institutions. But for many these benefits had been eclipsed by the price they had to pay in blood and treasure for the series of wars that six successive Legitimist coalitions had declared against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. After twenty-two years of war the French people hankered for peace, and were willing to countenance the humiliation of Cossack campfires in the Bois de Boulogne to gain it. Napoleon soon discovered that he couldn’t even rely on his prefects, only two of whom – Adrien de Lezay-Marnésia at Strasbourg and De Bry at Besançon – obeyed his order to take refuge in the departmental capital and resist the invasion. The others either ‘retired’ – that is, fled to the interior at the first news of a skirmish – or, like Himbert de Flegny in the Vosges, simply surrendered. Some, such as Louis de Girardin of the Seine-Inférieure, hoisted the fleur-de-lys.8 Several prefects managed to rediscover their Bonapartism when Napoleon returned from Elba, only to re-rediscover their royalism after Waterloo.9 Claude de Jessaint, prefect of the Marne, managed to serve every regime without interruption or complaint from 1800 to 1838.
Napoleon was disappointed that so few Frenchmen answered the call to arms in 1814 – some 120,000 out of a nominal call-up several times that – but he hardly had the uniforms and muskets to furnish those who did arrive at the depots. The drafts of recent years had alienated the better-off peasants, his core constituency, and there had been violent anti-conscription riots. Under the Empire a total of 2,432,335 men were called up for conscription in the fifteen decrees, eighteen sénatus-consultes and one order of the Conseil that were issued between March 1804 and November 1813. Almost half of these came in 1813, when army recruiters ignored minimum age and height requirements.10 (Young Guard recruits could now be 5 foot 2 inches where previously they had been required to be 5 foot 4.) Between 1800 and 1813 draft evasion had dropped from 27 per cent to 10 per cent, but by the end of 1813 it was over 30 per cent and there were major anti-draft riots in the Vaucluse and northern departments.11 In Hazebrouck a mob of over 1,200 people nearly killed the local sous-préfet and four death sentences were imposed. In 1804 Napoleon had predicted that the unpopularity of conscription and the droits réunis would one day destroy him. As Pelet recorded, his ‘anticipation came literally to pass, for the words Plus de conscription – plus de droits réunis furnished the motto on the flags of the Restoration in 1814’.12 Taxes were extended from alcohol, tobacco and salt to include gold, silver, stamps and playing cards. The French paid, but resented it.13
After the Russian disaster Napoleon had had four months to rebuild and resupply his army before fighting resumed; now he had only six weeks. With the self-knowledge that was one of the more attractive aspects of his character, he said in early 1814: ‘I am not afraid to admit that I have waged war too much. I wanted to assure for France the mastery of the world.’14 That was not now going to happen, but he hoped that by striking hard blows using interior lines against whichever enemy force seemed to pose the greater threat to Paris, he might force acceptance of the Frankfurt bases for peace and so save his throne. At the same time he was philosophical about failure. ‘What would people say if I were to die?’ he asked his courtiers, and continued with a shrug before they were able to frame anything suitably oleaginous: ‘They would say, “Ouf!”’15
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A spectator at Napol
eon’s New Year’s Day levée in the Tuileries throne room in 1814 recalled: ‘His manner was calm and grave, but on his brow there was a cloud which denoted an approaching storm.’16 He considered the peace terms Britain had demanded at the end of 1813, but rejected the idea. ‘France without Ostend and Antwerp,’ he told Caulaincourt on January 4,
would not be on an equal footing with the other states of Europe. England and all the other powers recognised these limits at Frankfurt. The conquests of France within the Rhine and the Alps cannot be considered as compensation for what Austria, Russia and Prussia have acquired in Poland and Finland, and England in Asia . . . I have accepted the Frankfurt proposals, but it is probable that the Allies have other ideas.17
He might also have added Russian gains in the Balkans and British acquisitions in the West Indies to the list. The arguments he put for continued resistance were that ‘Italy is intact’, that ‘The depredations of the Cossacks will arm the inhabitants and double our forces’ and that he had enough men under arms to fight several battles. ‘Should Fortune betray me, my mind is made up,’ he said with defiant resolution. ‘I do not care for the throne. I shall not disgrace the nation or myself by accepting shameful conditions.’ He could take the betrayals of Bavaria, Baden, Saxony and Württemberg, and those of ministers such as Fouché and Talleyrand – even of Murat and his own sister Caroline – but not that of his greatest supporter up to that point: Fortune herself. Napoleon of course knew perfectly well intellectually that Destiny and Fortune did not control his fate, but the concepts nonetheless exercised a hold on him throughout his life.