Napoleon
Page 88
On February 17 Napoleon marched on Nangis, where Wittgenstein had three Russian divisions. He attacked with Kellermann on the left and General Michaud on the right, broke the Russian squares and smashed them with Drouot’s guns. To secure the bridges over the Seine he then split his forces at the Nangis road junction. Victor headed for the bridge at Montereau 12 miles to the south and on the way attacked a Bavarian division at Villeneuve, but he failed to press home his advantage after a long march and many days of continual fighting. In one of his few unwarranted substitutions, Napoleon replaced him with General Étienne Gérard. He also humiliated General Guyot in front of his men, and ordered a court martial of General Alexandre Digeon when his battery ran out of ammunition. ‘Napoleon acted with a degree of severity in which he was himself astonished,’ wrote his apologist Baron Fain, ‘but which he conceived to be necessary in the imperious circumstances of the moment.’53 Military orders are naturally terse; Napoleon was often rude to his senior commanders, who were brave and conscientious soldiers, albeit of varying degrees of competence. Yet even now he could contemplate the situation with a degree of humour. ‘Should fortune continue to favour us’, he wrote to Eugène, ‘we shall be able to preserve Italy. Perhaps the King of Naples will then change sides again.’54
Arriving at Montereau at the confluence of the Seine and the Yonne with the Imperial Guard at 3 p.m. on the sunny and cloudless day of February 18, Napoleon set up batteries on the Surville heights above the town, firing canister shot at full range at the Allied infantry crossing the two bridges and preventing the Württemberger engineers from demolishing them. (Looking up from the bridges the heights look like a hillock, but from the place he chose to site his guns on top of them it immediately becomes clear that they dominate the town.) The Austrians were attacked by General Louis Huguet-Chateau, whose force was beaten off, though Chateau himself was killed. Napoleon then sent in a cavalry charge led by General Pajol that crashed down the steep cobbled road, across both bridges and into the town itself.* ‘I am happy with you,’ he said to Pajol afterwards, as heard by Pajol’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Hubert Biot. ‘If all my generals had served me as you did, the enemy wouldn’t be in France. Go take care of your wounds, and when you’ve recovered I will give you ten thousand horses to say hello to the King of Bavaria from me! . . . If the day before yesterday in the morning I had been asked for four million francs to have the Montereau bridges at my disposal, I would have unhesitatingly given them.’55 Biot afterwards joked to Pajol that in that case the Emperor might have parted with 1 million to reward him without too much difficulty.
The next day Napoleon denied to Caulaincourt that the Austrians had reached Meaux, but they had. Sacken’s cannon were now distinctly audible in Paris itself, although the Russian commander pulled back on the news that Napoleon was intending to attack Blücher again.56 That day Napoleon wrote angrily to his police minister, the usually reliable Savary, for permitting poems to be published in the Paris papers saying how great a soldier he was because he was constantly defeating forces thrice his number. ‘You must have lost your heads in Paris to say such things when I am constantly giving out that I have 300,000 men,’ wrote Napoleon, who had in fact commanded only 30,000 at Montereau; ‘it is one of the first principles of war to exaggerate your forces. But how can poets, who endeavour to flatter me, and to flatter the national self-love, be made to understand this?’57 To Montalivet, who had written of France’s desire for peace, Napoleon retorted, ‘You and [Savary] know no more of France than I know of China.’58
In a desperate attempt to split the Allies, Napoleon wrote to Emperor Francis on February 21 asking for the Frankfurt bases of peace to be re-offered ‘without delay’, saying that the Châtillon terms were ‘the realisation of the dream of Burke, who wished France to disappear from the map of Europe. There are no Frenchmen who would not prefer death to conditions which would render them the slaves of England.’ He then raised the spectre of a Protestant son of George III on the throne of Belgium.59 As with all his earlier attempts, this had no effect.
Concerned that Augereau, whom he had made commander of the Army of the Rhône but whose heart was no longer in the fight, had still not made a significant contribution to the campaign despite having been reinforced with troops from Spain, Napoleon wrote to him in Lyons: ‘If you are still the Augereau of Castiglione, keep the command; but if your sixty years weigh upon you, hand over the command to your senior general.’60 This only had the effect of further alienating the disillusioned old warrior, who failed to march north but instead evacuated Lyons and fell back to Valence. Ney and Oudinot broached the subject of peace in a conversation with Napoleon at Nogent on the 21st, which ended in a severe reprimand and an invitation to lunch. When Wellington crossed the Adour and defeated Soult soundly at Orthez on February 27, however, the strategic situation became even more desperate.61
Although armistice discussions were carried on by the Comte de Flahaut at Lusigny between February 24 and 28, which Napoleon hoped might end with a return to the Frankfurt bases, he insisted that the fighting must carry on. ‘I do not intend to be fettered by these negotiations,’ he told Fain, as he had been during the Armistice of Pleischwitz the previous year. On March 1, 1814 the Allies signed the Treaty of Chaumont with each other, agreeing to make no separate peace with Napoleon, declaring their aim of each contributing an army of 150,000 men to oust him and end French influence over Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands.
As her husband’s Empire was on the brink of catastrophe, Marie Louise revealed herself to be a lightweight young woman quite unsuited to the rigours of a crisis. ‘I have had no news from the Emperor,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘He is so casual in his ways. I can see he is forgetting me.’ From his replies to the trivialities in her letters about court tittle-tattle, scenes with the King of Rome’s governess, matters of etiquette and so on, it seems she was either unaware of or uninterested in the earthquake taking place around her. Perhaps she was simply concentrating on the prattle of the pet parrot given her by her lady-in-waiting the Duchesse de Montebello (Lannes’ widow) in order to drown out the noise of a collapsing empire and the war between her husband and her father. She and her ladies-in-waiting shredded linen to make dressings for the wounded, but what really interested her were sketching, handkerchief-embroidery, music, cards and flowers. She even asked whether she could write to Caroline Murat, to which Napoleon replied: ‘My answer is No: she behaved improperly towards me, who of a mere nobody made a queen.’62 On March 2 Napoleon tried to put her to some useful work organizing the donation to the military hospitals of 1,000 stretchers, straw mattresses, sheets and blankets from Fontainebleau, Compiègne, Rambouillet and other palaces. He added that he was chasing the Prussians, ‘who are much exposed’, and the next day he erroneously reported the wounding of ‘Bulcher’ (sic).63
On March 6 Victor – to whom Napoleon had given a division of the Young Guard after his unfair demotion – captured the heights above the town of Craonne, 55 miles north-east of Paris, even though the plateau was protected by three ravines and the Russians were covering the defile with sixty guns. At the battle there the next day Napoleon attempted unsuccessfully to turn both flanks but finally had to resort to a bloody frontal attack to defeat Blücher’s Russian advance guard. Drouot’s aggressive use of an eighty-eight-gun battery, and Ney’s debouching on to the right wing, finally won Napoleon the field of battle after one of the bloodiest clashes of the campaign. The fighting took place all along the 2-mile-long plateau of the Chemin des Dames, from the Hurtebise farmhouse to the village of Cerny, between 11 a.m., when the farm was cleared, and 2.30 p.m. The very narrow front, hardly more than the width of a single field, contributed significantly to the high losses on both sides. Today’s idyllic, poppy-filled meadow gives no indication of the bitterness of the resistance of the Russians, who were able to retreat unmolested so exhausted were the French. Craonne was a victory, but when news of it reached Paris the Bour
se fell on the assumption that the war would now continue.64
The next day both sides rested and reorganized. On the 9th and 10th Napoleon attacked the main Prussian army at Lâon, the well-fortified capital of the Aisne department 85 miles north-east of Paris. (From the walls of Lâon one can see the entire battlefield laid out below, just as the Prussian and Russian officers did.) In an inversion of Austerlitz, the sun burned off the mist on the plain by 11 a.m., allowing Blücher’s staff to count Napoleon’s army of only 21,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, against 75,000 Allied infantry and 25,000 cavalry, although Napoleon had more guns. So respectful were they of his skill as a tactician, however, that they assumed there must be a ruse, and didn’t counter-attack in full force, though they did engage with larger numbers.
Marmont was only 4 miles away with 9,500 men and 53 guns, but he might not have heard the battle being fought on the plain and so failed to support his Emperor. Because of his later conduct Marmont has been accused of treachery at Lâon, but a strong wind blowing from the west on that battlefield could have drowned out the noise. Yet nothing can excuse him and his staff for not posting sentries properly on the evening of the 9th, as a Prussian corps under Yorck and Kleist mounted a successful surprise night-raid on his camp which completely scattered his force. Napoleon disastrously chose to renew his attack the next day, not realizing until 3 p.m. that he was facing a vastly superior Allied force. He lost 4,000 killed and wounded, with 2,500 men and 45 guns captured.
Though his army had been reduced from 38,500 (including Marmont’s troops) to fewer than 24,000 by the end of March 10, Napoleon showed extraordinary resilience and moved off immediately to attack Reims, hoping to cut through the Allied lines of communication. Yet that same day, the whole concept of lines of communication started to become moot when a letter from Talleyrand arrived at Tsar Alexander’s headquarters, telling him that the siege preparations in Paris had been badly neglected by Joseph, and encouraging the Allies to march straight on to the capital.
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Talleyrand’s final defection was only to be expected – he had been planning for it on and off for the five years since Napoleon had called him a shit in silk stockings – but on March 11 Napoleon was given to understand that own his brother Joseph was making a more intimate betrayal by apparently attempting to seduce his wife. ‘King Joseph says very tiresome things to me,’ Marie Louise told the Duchesse de Montebello.65 Writing from Soissons, Napoleon was clearly concerned. ‘I have received your letter,’ he told the Empress.
Do not be too familiar with the King; keep him at a distance, never allow him to enter your private apartments, receive him ceremoniously as Cambacérès does, and when in the drawing room do not let him play the part of adviser to your behaviour and mode of life . . . When the King attempts to give you advice, which it is not his business to do, as I am not far away from you . . . be cold to him. Be very reserved in your manner to the King; no intimacy and whenever you can do so, talk to him in the presence of the Duchess and by a window.66
Was Joseph trying to play the role of Berville in Clisson et Eugénie? Napoleon suspected so, writing to the Empress the next day:
Will it be my fate to be betrayed by the King? I would not be surprised if such were to be the case, nor would it break down my fortitude; the only thing that could shake it would be if you had any intercourse with him behind my back and if you were no longer to me what you have been. Mistrust the King; he has an evil reputation with women and an ambition which has been habitual with him in Spain . . . I say it again, keep the King away from your trust and yourself . . . All this depresses me rather; I need to be comforted by the members of my family, but as a rule I get nothing but vexation from that quarter. On your part, however, it would be both unexpected and unbearable.67
To Joseph himself Napoleon wrote: ‘If you want to have my throne, you can have it, but I ask of you only one favour, to leave me the heart and the love of the Empress . . . If you want to perturb the Empress- Regent, wait for my death.’68* Was Napoleon becoming paranoid in these letters? Joseph had stopped visiting his mistresses, the Marquesa de Montehermoso and the Comtesse Saint-Jean d’Angély, and within a year Marie Louise would indeed betray Napoleon sexually, with an enemy general.69 Marmont recorded how hubristic and divorced from reality Joseph had by now become, believing that Napoleon had removed him from his command in Spain in 1813 ‘because he was jealous of him’, and insisting that he could have ruled Spain successfully, recognized by the rest of Europe, ‘without the army, without my brother’.70 Such views, if Marmont wasn’t inventing them, were of course totally delusory.
On March 16 Napoleon gave Joseph specific orders: ‘Whatever happens, you must not allow the Empress and the King of Rome to fall into the enemy’s hands . . . Stay with my son and do not forget that I would sooner see him drowned in the Seine than captured by the enemies of France. The tale of Astyanax, captive of the Greeks, has always struck me as the saddest page of history.’71 The infant Astyanax, son of Prince Hector of Troy, according to Euripides and Ovid, was flung off the city walls – although according to Seneca he jumped. ‘Give a little kiss to my son,’ Napoleon wrote less melodramatically the same day to Marie Louise. ‘All you tell me about him leads me to hope that I shall find him much grown; he will soon turn three.’72
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After taking Reims by storm on March 13, Napoleon fought at Arcis-sur-Aube on the 20th and 21st against the Austrians and Russians under Schwarzenberg, the fourth and last defensive battle of his career. He had with him only 23,000 infantry and 7,000 cavalry and he thought he was confronting the Allied rearguard, whereas in fact there were over 75,000 soldiers of the Army of Bohemia in the fields beyond the bridge over the fast-flowing, caramel-coloured river. During the 1814 campaign, Napoleon covered over 1,000 miles and slept in forty-eight different places in sixty-five days. Yet for all this movement, his three defeats – La Rothière, Lâon and Arcis – all came from staying too long in the same place, as he did at Arcis on the 21st. ‘I sought a glorious death disputing foot by foot the soil of the country,’ Napoleon later reminisced of the battle, where a howitzer shell disembowelled a horse he was riding but left him unscathed. ‘I purposely exposed myself; the balls flew around me, my clothes were pierced, but none reached me.’73 He later regularly mentioned Arcis as the place – along with Borodino and Waterloo – where he would have most liked to have died.
On March 21 Napoleon moved on Saint-Dizier, where he again hoped to cut the Allies’ lines of communications. If Paris could only hold out for long enough he could then attack them in the rear. Yet did the Parisians have the stomach for a siege, or would they collapse as the rest of France was doing? That same day Augereau had allowed the Austrians to take Lyons without bloodshed. Napoleon nonetheless hoped that the workers of Paris and the National Guard might barricade the streets and keep the Allies out, telling Caulaincourt on the 24th, ‘Only the sword can decide the present conflict. One way or the other.’74
On the 23rd the Allies captured a courier with a letter from Napoleon which told Marie Louise that he was heading for the Marne ‘in order to push the enemy as far as possible from Paris and to draw closer to my positions’. Also seized was a letter from Savary imploring Napoleon to return to Paris as the regime was crumbling and being openly conspired against.75 Both confirmed the Allied high command in their plan to move on Paris. Sending his light cavalry to Bar-sur-Aube and the Guard towards Brienne, Napoleon harried them as best he could, but although he beat back clouds of Russian cavalry in a series of skirmishes around Saint-Dizier the next day, the main bodies of the Allied armies were now all converging on the badly neglected defences of Paris.76 The capital’s lack of strong fortifications was a fault Napoleon later acknowledged fully; he had planned to put a battery of long-range cannon on top of both the Arc de Triomphe and the Temple of Victory at Montmartre, but neither was ready.77
On March 27 Macdonald brought Napol
eon a copy of an enemy Order of the Day, announcing that Marmont and Mortier had been defeated at the battle of Fère-Champenoise on the 25th. He couldn’t believe it was true and argued that since the order was dated March 29 it must be Allied propaganda. Drouot, whom Napoleon nicknamed ‘the sage of the Grande Armée’ for his wise counsel, pointed out that the printer had inserted a ‘6’ upside-down in error. ‘Quite right,’ Napoleon exclaimed on checking, ‘that changes everything.’78 He now needed to get to Paris at all costs. That evening he gave the order to march away from Saint-Dizier via the road to Troyes, his left flank covered by the Seine, ready to strike towards Blücher on his right.
At a long meeting in Paris on the night of the 28th Joseph, who had completely lost his nerve, had persuaded the Regency Council that it was Napoleon’s wish for the Empress and government to escape from the capital and move to Blois on the Loire, using as evidence a letter that was a month old and had since been twice superseded by different orders. He was supported by Talleyrand (who was already drawing up lists of ministers to serve in his post-Napoleonic provisional government), the regicide Cambacérès (who didn’t want to fall into Bourbon hands), Clarke (whom Louis XVIII soon afterwards made a peer of France) and the Empress herself, who ‘was impatient to get away’.79 Savary, Pasquier and the president of the Legislative Body, the Duc de Massa, thought that the Empress would get much better terms for herself and her son if she remained, and Hortense warned her that ‘In leaving Paris, you lose your crown’, but at 9 a.m. on March 29 the imperial convoy left the capital for Rambouillet with 1,200 men of the Old Guard, reaching Blois by April 2.80 Cambacérès, ‘accompanied by some faithful friends who would not leave him’, took the seals of state to Blois in a grand mahogany box.81