by Alan Schom
For instance, by the end of November 1808, Napoleon had stripped General Dupont of his rank and ordered him to be brought before a general court-martial. Junot had earlier been defeated and taken prisoner with his entire army in Portugal. Bessières had been removed as commander, as had the ineffectual Moncey, while Lefebvre had been strongly reprimanded for incompetence, not to mention Napoleon’s anger (unjust, as it turned out) with Ney. Napoleon’s magnificent, much-vaunted generals and marshals were proving themselves failures before the whole world. Morale in the French army, and especially in the officer corps, was again plummeting. This was proving to be another Egypt, and yet the second Spanish campaign had barely begun.
Deciding not to attack Moore’s small force approaching Salamanca, on November 28 Napoleon issued orders for the next phase to begin, to retrieve Madrid, this involving some 130,000 troops, with Lefebvre’s corps protecting the right flank, Ney taking the left, and Napoleon proceeding with the center. Facing them was a determined Spanish defense force of 21,000 men in the mountains straddling Napoleon’s route just north of Madrid. Bonaparte attacked them at Somo Sierra Pass and through the western Guadarramas defiles. The Spanish force, greatly outnumbered, did not stand a chance. But Napoleon, ever impatient to proceed, needlessly ordered a Polish squadron of light horse to charge up a steep mountain to silence a major battery of sixteen pieces of artillery, an unequal task resulting in the decimation of the small Polish unit, only twenty-seven men returning out of the eighty-seven sent up the mountain. One hour later the battery was dislodged by more traditional means. By the end of November the Spaniards had been crushed,[747] and by December 2 Napoleon’s army was surrounding the walls of Madrid, which fell to the French on the fourth. As far as Napoleon was concerned, Spain was conquered, Joseph was back on his throne, and once Moore was defeated, Portugal would yet again provide some fine war booty for the Bonapartes.
During his final sojourn in Madrid now, Napoleon established his headquarters in the luxurious Champs Martin Castle, the property of the duke of Infantado’s mother, located less than a mile outside the capital itself, while the French army camped in the surrounding fields. Here the rigors of the journey and fighting could be briefly forgotten, as courtiers gathered and the lovely ladies of Joseph’s new court lightened the scene, including “a beautiful [fifteen-year-old Spanish] actress...so pretty, so seductive,” whom Napoleon ordered to have brought to his bedchamber.[748] But apart from an occasional outing to the theater after Joseph was reinstalled, Madrid offered few attractions for the French emperor.
Napoleon now had to reassess the constantly changing Spanish scene. His losses were already well above the 12,000 he had once lightly mentioned, and they promised to remain high. This was not a country where one could, by a mere glance at a map, plan a campaign and expect to see it executed according to a prearranged timetable. Now with a reluctant Joseph back in the capital, protected by a permanent force of 40,000 French troops under the command of General Savary, the next stage of their operations had to be contemplated. This included Soult’s corps securing the northwest against the small Spanish contingent and equally small British “army” of 25,000 under General Moore, still marching from the Atlantic coast to Salamanca. Napoleon’s V Corps was therefore ordered to the northeast to reinforce the French siege of Zaragoza on the Ebro River in the heart of Aragon, while still farther to the east, on the Mediterranean, Gen. Gouvion St.-Cyr was ordered to conquer the whole of Catalonia with his VII Corps.
But on December 19, while in the midst of reviewing troops in Madrid, Napoleon was interrupted by a special courier informing him of Moore’s unexpected success in taking Salamanca. Moore, it seemed, was determined to cut off and destroy Marshal Soult’s corps, reported to be in the region of Sahagun. The English were always doing the unexpected. Taking no more chances, Bonaparte immediately ordered two powerful corps under Ney and Victor, for a total force of 80,000 men (exclusive of Soult’s corps), on a forced march northward.
Alas, Bonaparte’s ignorance of the Iberian Peninsula again intervened, throwing off his calculations. His troops were soon slowed by the snow-covered Sierra de Gredos and the Sierra de Guadarrama, separating Madrid from the plains beyond, leaving his dissillusioned, hungry, poorly clad men frustrated to the point of rebellion and large-scale desertions. Openly hostile remarks were even made within earshot of Napoleon himself. “The soldiers...[of Victor’s I Corps] showed the most sinister disposition against the Emperor’s person all the way up [the ice-covered mountain],” Colonel de Gonneville later related, “even calling out loudly to one another to shoot him [Napoleon] and have done with it.” But despite the grumbling and growing dissatisfaction with Bonaparte, even within the ranks of the Imperial Guard (which demanded to leave the country), the columns continued to plod ahead to meet Moore’s force.
Sir John’s objective, on the other hand, was to slow the French final conquest of the southern half of Spain, while preventing Portugal from falling under their control. Having captured a copy of Napoleon’s general plan, revealing the strength and location of every French Army corps in the country, Moore, a brave and independent man, realized now what a dangerous spot he and his 25,000 men were in. Nevertheless he persevered until he learned of Napoleon’s approach from the rear, when he finally ordered a strategic retreat to the coast. He had little choice. To be slightly outnumbered in a battle meant little to him, but to be isolated and caught between nearly 100,000 French troops now approaching him simply was not reasonable.
With the odds suddenly overwhelmingly in his favor, Soult took up the pursuit to the Atlantic coast, but as usual proceeded far too cautiously. Moore managed to embark 35,000 men (including the garrisons he had left along the coast) at Vigo on the few English ships there, and then proceeded to the northwestern Spanish port of La Coruña, where he had to wait until January 14, 1809, when the Royal Navy finally appeared and began the slow, laborious, and precarious task of embarking the entire remaining force of 16,500 men under the heavy fire of Soult’s 20,000 troops. Although Moore succeeded in repulsing the French with heavy losses, the English general himself was killed by a cannonball just prior to the fleet’s sailing on January 17.
Twice Marshal Soult had been worsted by the British, but at least he now temporarily held the northwest corner of Spain, including the northern section of Portugal. There was of course no other large organized army left to oppose him.
Napoleon was once again reassessing the situation. Madrid had been secured, albeit at bayonet point amid an openly hostile population, surrounded by an equally hostile people in every province of the land. Some 314,000 French troops had been brought to Iberia, including Junot’s repatriated Portuguese corps. But then Junot, more and more deranged, announced he was leaving his new corps and the governorship of one eastern region of the land, and therewith promptly set off for Paris AWOL!
The reports of increasing mass desertion in just about every regiment and battalion of the army were equally disturbing. Bonaparte acknowledged to War Minister Clarke that of every five hundred men sent him from France, only four hundred ever reached Spain. But even this shocking figure proved to be a generous underestimate. In perhaps the most painful case of all, of 295 young recruits recently dispatched from the Loire, only 45 had reached Spain. Napoleon was not only facing a hostile Spanish population, but a distrustful, hostile France as well, to whom he was no longer the great hero and savior of the nation but a veritable warmonger.
All this marked just the beginning of the bad news with which Napoleon had to cope at this time. In addition to everything else, the late Sir John Moore had in fact achieved his principal objective of greatly upsetting Napoleon’s timetable for the overall conquest of the peninsula by a good year. What is more, it is estimated that Bonaparte had lost perhaps 75,000 men even before the first year of fighting was out, by January 1809. (As usual, he kept the extent of his Iberian casualty figures out of the newspapers.) His losses here already totaled more than all the French dead a
nd wounded in every battle he had fought since seizing power in 1799 — combined.
General Thiébault made a sweeping assessment of the situation of Napoleon’s European conquest at this time, concluding:
Our shameful disasters in Andalusia, and our evacuation of Portugal had altered our military and political position [in Iberia], and the prestige of our former invincibility was now effectively destroyed once and for all. From Messina to St. Petersburg, from Vienna to Texel [Holland], from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, the hatred we now faced — this terrible product resulting from the numerous defeats we had inflicted upon our enemies — now awakened the great desire by the whole of Europe to seek revenge against us.
After placing brother Joseph back on his throne in Madrid, Napoleon returned to Valladolid, where he spent ten days, from January 8 to 18, 1809, studying two more pieces of most disquieting news. During his absence from Paris, Talleyrand and Fouché, seeing clearly what Napoleon apparently could not — the madness of this continuous and expanding state policy of conquest and warfare — had formed an unholy (given their mutual dislike) alliance. Bent on achieving peace and overthrowing the French emperor, even Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat apparently supported the scheme. Then a growing number of intelligence reports brought confirmation of Austrian war preparations, with the apparent objective of avenging all their past defeats and losses on the French. When Josephine now wrote anxiously about such rumors of war with Austria, and perhaps Russia as well, he pooh-poohed the very idea. “Austria will not make war against me,” he assured her on January 9. “If she does, however, I have one hundred fifty thousand men in Austria, and as many again on the Rhine, and an additional four hundred thousand German troops with which to deal with them. Everything is going well.” In fact at this very moment Bonaparte was in the process of hastily preparing to set out for the French capital, to abandon the direct leadership in this Spanish quagmire for the time being, precisely because of the accuracy of all these rumors. Everything was going very wrong.
Given the secret reports he was receiving from prefects in France and French military governors throughout French-occupied Europe, especially in Holland, the Confederated States of the Rhine, occupied Prussia, and of course mobilizing Austria, Napoleon was finally going to have to begin to face the whirlwind that he himself had set in motion, commencing with the Austerlitz campaign. General Thiébault’s assessment had indeed been correct. As a result, while influential high officials in Paris were undermining his position at his very seat of power, Bonaparte would have to face two separate major wars, in two different parts of Europe at the same time. After just four years in existence, his great French Empire would never be the same again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine – Another Danube Campaign
‘Your standing orders are to go wherever there are enemies to be attacked and destroyed.’
To Marshal Davout, April 21, 1809
On December 31, 1808, Napoleon — while traveling between Benevento and Astorga — had received an urgent dispatch apprising him of the new pending Austrian threat. Canceling his plans, he returned to Paris.
Reaching the Tuileries at 8:00 A.M. on January 23, 1809, he immediately arranged to move his offices and personal quarters into the more secluded and leafy grounds of the Elysée Palace, which he had acquired earlier from Murat when the latter was promoted to the Neapolitan throne. The growing tension and the anger swelling round the imperial court since the outset of the disagreeable Spanish venture had forced Napoleon to rely more than ever on himself, as he withdrew more and more. Those few public functions that now resumed were limited to frightfully formal public receptions, uncomfortable for all. Apart from daily contact with his secretary, Méneval, Napoleon’s only really close daily friend and confidant, the only person to be treated almost as an equal and the only one still permitted to tutoyer him was Christophe Duroc, on whom he had become heavily dependent psychologically, and who was responsible for a variety of delicate tasks, including diplomatic negotiations. Even some of his closest soldier-friends of yesterday, such as the ever dependable Marshal Lannes, were no longer permitted to address him with the familiar tu. This self-imposed isolation was apparent to everyone, especially to Josephine, who was left behind at the Tuileries.
Bonaparte’s official business schedule was as frenetic as ever. He received delegations from the assemblies and the diplomatic corps, consulted daily with Cambacérès and one or two ministers, especially Finance Minister Gaudin and War Minister Clarke, and visited the transformations being carried out by Vivant Denon in the Louvre, as well as the major street and building construction in the Rue de Rivoli, just outside the gates of the Tuileries. And although no great music lover — he could never sing or hum in tune — he managed to get to the Opéra at least once, as public relations necessitated his being seen alive and well in the French capital after yet another long absence.
His daily chats with his older generals — now marshals, princes, dukes, and counts — were a thing of the past, tension, jealousies, and feuds in military circles becoming worse than ever. Scarcely any two or three marshals or senior generals were even on speaking terms. It was to prove a crippling situation, and Napoleon simply did not know how to cope with it.
One of the worst of these military squabbles involved Soult’s outright refusal to come to Masséna’s aid when facing Wellington before “the lines of Torres Vedras” (Wellington’s fifty-kilometer stretch of mountain forts protecting Lisbon). Instead of obeying Napoleon’s order to advance briskly to the Portuguese frontier, Soult proceeded to lay siege to Olivenza for nine entire days. And when at last he resumed his march, it was only as far as Badajoz, where he halted his entire army, quite against orders, and began to lay siege to that large city — for fifty-four days! By his “criminal delays” Soult procrastinated just long enough to force Masséna to withdraw from his attack on Portugal. This in turn forced Napoleon to abandon yet another attempted reconquest of that country.[749] Military cooperation at the highest command level was disintegrating everywhere, not helped by the fact that orders to all senior commanders came from the desk of the ruthless, insolent, perverse, frustrated, fingernail-gnawing, permanent chief of staff of the Imperial Army, the universally loathed Major General Berthier.
Thus, although Bonaparte now commanded the largest army in European history, some six hundrd thousand troops, fewer than ever of their commanders were to be found around him in the Elysée Palace, which now offered him the safe isolation and refuge he seemed so badly to need. There “he could walk about in the vast gardens...without being importuned, as well as leave without being noticed,” his secretary recalled. “There he finally found himself freed of the pompous imprisonment to which he was subjected at the Tuileries.” Indeed, during the remaining days of his stay in Paris, he went to the Tuileries only for meetings of the State Council and for Sunday mass (even after his excommunication by the pope), and of course for the weekly court receptions.
Little seemed to be going right, apart from having restored Joseph to his Spanish throne. That some of his most famous commanders — Junot, Soult, and soon Masséna — had been routed by Generals Wellesley and Moore was more than annoying, little Portugal evading him time and again, and it defended by an English “army” at best one-eighth the size of his own. Napoleon would have to come back and personally give the English a military lesson and a public drubbing, he assured Méneval and Duroc.
There was also the little matter of settling accounts with the conspirators in his own government. Accordingly, on January 28 the day of reckoning came, as Talleyrand and Fouché were peremptorily summoned (Murat, the other party alleged to be in on the plot, was in Italy at the time).
On their arrival they found Archchancellor Cambacérès, Archtreasurer Lebrun, and Naval Minister Decrès awaiting them, along with Napoleon, accompanied by Duroc and Méneval. “Those who have been made grand dignitaries or ministers of the Empire cease to be free individuals in their thoughts and expression upon bei
ng named to office,” Napoleon began formally, obviously tense, his voice pinched. “After that they can be nothing more than official organs of the state. For them treason has been committed the moment they permit themselves even to doubt [state policy], which is completed when they openly dissent,” he said, now looking straight at Talleyrand. “Finally the dike burst,” as Méneval put it. “Napoleon, whose indignation and anger grew as he spoke, reached such a pitch that it was inevitable that his scarcely contained fury would burst in a moment.” Having just reread the conspiratorial correspondence (including a letter from Talleyrand to Murat) intercepted by Postal Director Lavalette and Eugène de Beauharnais, and reports received from Napoleon’s own mother, Treasury Minister Mollien, and others — all concerning the extraordinary conspiracy of two hitherto archenemies, Talleyrand and Fouché — Napoleon was livid.
It had been the elegant comte d’Hauteville (a former police official and friend of Talleyrand) who had first secretly brought Talleyrand and Fouché together at his country estate near Bagneux back in October of the previous year, arranging the preliminary reconciliation between the two men. They met again chez the princesse de Vaudémont (an intimate friend of Talleyrand) at Suresnes. Thus far it was all completely confidential.
But then, at the beginning of December, Fouché, who had never before been invited to Talleyrand’s present Paris mansion, the Hotel de Monaco in the Rue de Varenne, not only suddenly appeared there during a reception for several dozen influential personages, but was greeted by a smiling Talleyrand as the two conspirators then walked off slowly, arm in arm. The question on everyone’s lips was: Why this blatant display of their intentions?
All Paris was soon talking about this extraordinary collusion. “Formerly so opposed in their views and interests, they have been brought together by ulterior circumstances,” Metternich, himself no stranger to ulterior circumstances, reported from Paris to Vienna on December 4: