Napoleon

by Adam Zamoyski

  They left Fontainebleau on 2 April and stopped at Brienne the following day, staying the night at the château with the ageing Madame Loménie de Brienne and visiting the ruins of Napoleon’s old school and other former haunts. On 14 March, Easter Day, they made an imperial stop at Lyon, where they attended mass celebrated by Fesch in the cathedral. By 24 March they were in Turin, and on 1 May reached Alessandria, from where Napoleon rode over to contemplate the field of Marengo. Four days later he reviewed 30,000 troops under Lannes on the battlefield, in the coat and bullet-holed hat he had worn during the battle.

  The next day he met his youngest brother. Jérôme had reached the shores of Europe at Lisbon, but the French consul there refused to allow his wife ashore, and while he travelled on to plead with his brother she sailed to London. In July she would give birth in Camberwell to a son, Jérôme Napoléon, who would never be recognised by the emperor. ‘There are no wrongs that genuine repentance will not efface,’ Napoleon told his brother when they met at Alessandria on 6 May. Elizabeth Patterson was granted a pension on condition she went back to America, and Jérôme was given command of a frigate, with the mission to sail to Algiers and retrieve French and Italian subjects imprisoned there.5

  On 8 May 1805 Napoleon entered Milan. Although his entry was described by one French soldier as triumphal, with people weeping for joy in the streets, he was not satisfied. There followed nearly three weeks of receptions and festivities, culminating on 26 May, when he crowned himself with the iron crown of Lombardy once worn by Charlemagne, declaring, ‘God has given it to me, woe to him that reaches for it!’ The ceremony was greeted with enthusiasm by many who dreamed of a united Italy. It also made a lasting impression, with woeful consequences for much of South America, on a twenty-one-year-old Spanish creole who happened to be there, named Simón José Antonio Bolívar.6

  The coronation could only be viewed in Vienna as a provocation. With the aid of British subsidies, Austria had been arming over the past year, and had concentrated considerable forces in the Tyrol. They would be difficult to contain if other states on the peninsula were to join Austria. Napoleon had written to Queen Maria-Carolina, the power behind the throne of Ferdinand IV of Naples, warning her not to allow herself to be drawn into a coalition against him; she was the sister of the late Marie-Antoinette, and hated the French. He rightly suspected that a plan already existed to land British and Russian troops in Naples.7

  After the coronation he set off on a tour of the kingdom of Italy, inspecting fortifications and troops, meeting local authorities and nobles, going to the theatre and the opera, in a display of confidence and mastery. On 1 July he reached Genoa, which had been under French control for some time and was being administered, along with Liguria, Lucca and Piombino, by Saliceti, and now requested to be incorporated into the French Empire. The act was accompanied by elaborate celebrations, with Napoleon and Josephine towed out into the bay on a floating temple surrounded by gardens from which they watched a firework display. He went aboard the flotilla which Jérôme had commanded, greeting the 231 liberated slaves as they came ashore to universal applause.8

  A week later Napoleon was back at Saint-Cloud. He was expecting a new Russian envoy, Count Nikolai Novosiltsev, through whom he hoped to negotiate a separate treaty with Russia, but Novosiltsev had stopped in Berlin and sent back his French passports, on the grounds that Napoleon’s encroachments in Italy had made negotiations pointless. The tsar had originally meant to avoid foreign entanglements and concentrate on reforming the Russian state. He secretly admired Napoleon, but had been shocked by the execution of Enghien – and mortified by Napoleon’s retort to his protest. Supported by his anti-French foreign minister Prince Czartoryski, he now put himself forward as a champion of ethical politics, with a far-reaching vision for the remodelling of the political arrangement of Europe.9

  Napoleon affected to ignore the military preparations being made against him, and on 2 August he went to Boulogne. At the end of June he had given orders for the invasion force to be ready for embarkation by 20 July. He expressed frustration that his plan of drawing British ships off to the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean before sailing back to the Channel was proving difficult to implement. He was hoping to concentrate up to sixty-five ships of the line to protect the invasion craft. Impatient and accustomed as he was to overcoming any difficulty, he could not accept the delays imposed by the weather, blaming the admirals. They did indeed lack the dash he expected of them; hardly surprising, given the poor quality of the ships and the inexperience of the crews, which were no match for a Royal Navy in which Pitt had invested heavily during the late 1780s and early 1790s, and which had reached a peak of performance. The only French admiral with any initiative, Louis-René de Latouche Tréville, had died the previous summer. Napoleon urged Decrès to seek out younger men to command his fleets, but the real problem was, as he had already noted, lack of discipline among the crews, which could not be imposed in the British way, given his distaste for corporal punishment and the fact that, as he put it, ‘for a Frenchman it is a principle that a blow received must be returned’.10

  He kept up the appearance of intending to go ahead with the invasion, even though eight months earlier, on 17 January 1805, he had told the Council of State that the concentration at Boulogne was a pretext to build up an army to strike against any of France’s enemies at a moment’s notice. On 3 August he instructed Talleyrand to warn Francis that he only meant to attack England, but might feel obliged to turn about and fight Austria if she supported Britain. Ten days later he instructed Talleyrand to send what amounted to an ultimatum to Francis, repeating that his invasion of England did not constitute a threat to Austria, but that if Francis persisted in rearming there would be war, and he would be spending Christmas in Vienna.11

  Throughout August Napoleon kept up a stream of instructions for the invasion of England, and on 23 August he wrote to Talleyrand saying that if his fleet arrived in the Channel in the next few days he would be ‘master of England’. But on the same day he ordered supplies and rations to be stockpiled at Strasbourg and Mainz; two days later he sent Murat ahead along the Rhine to scout routes into southern Germany and gather maps of the area. ‘The decisive moment has arrived,’ he informed Berthier. A few weeks before, on 13 August, he had renamed the Army of England La Grande Armée. It was not only the name that had changed.12

  The army Napoleon had inherited was a mixture of regulars from the royal army and untrained volunteers and conscripts. Each unit had coalesced in wartime conditions around its most competent officers, and each of the armies around their commanding general. Given the soldiers’ aptitude for desertion, it was impossible to impose discipline in traditional ways. Incompetent and disloyal officers had been purged and generals moved about, undercutting loyalties forged on campaign; demi-brigades had been re-formed as regiments; the men were paid, clothed and fed, and a sense of pride was instilled through parades. It nevertheless remained an unaccountable assemblage of men with idiosyncratic loyalties.

  In May 1804 Napoleon had nominated fourteen marshals of the empire. While those singled out were all military men, this was in fact a civil rank, placing its bearer on a par with the ‘grands officiers’ of the empire and giving them a position at court, with the privilege of being addressed as ‘mon cousin’ by the emperor. The fourteen included close comrades such as Berthier and Murat, some awkward ones Napoleon needed to neutralise, such as Augereau and Bernadotte, as well as a number of capable generals whose loyalty he needed to capture. One such was Nicolas Soult, five months Napoleon’s senior, the son of a small-town notary who had distinguished himself fighting under Moreau and later Masséna, a braggart and an opportunist who needed to be controlled. Another was the cooper’s son from north-eastern France Michel Ney, seven months Napoleon’s senior, who had also risen through the ranks under Moreau, brave but limited, and therefore in need of cousinly guidance; Josephine had taken the first step in 1802 by arranging his marriage to one of her protégé
es. A very different man was Louis-Nicolas Davout, the scion of a Burgundian family that could trace descent from Crusaders, who, being almost a year younger than Napoleon, had just missed him at the École Militaire and had served as a cavalry officer in the royal army. He had been introduced to Napoleon in 1798 by Desaix, who valued him highly, and although he too had served under Moreau he was not a man for factions; self-assured and professional, a strict disciplinarian and unflinchingly brave, he was devoted to the service of France. But whatever their origins, attitudes and sympathies, on receiving their marshal’s baton such men became Napoleon’s lieutenants, bound to him by far more than mere bonds of loyalty. They would allow him to operate in larger numbers on a wider theatre, and they would hold his army together.

  The concentration of the greater part of the army at Boulogne for over a year transformed it. The idea of taking the war to the hated English aroused enthusiasm, and the rate of desertion dropped off. The cohabitation and frequent contact, both in drilling and exercises (although there was surprisingly little of either) and in off-duty activities, developed a wider esprit de corps and, in the words of one soldier, ‘established relationships of trust between the regiments’. It had forged an army for Napoleon.13

  By 3 September he was back at Malmaison. A couple of days later he learned that Austria had invaded Bavaria, an ally of France. Over the next three weeks he attended to matters that needed to be despatched before he went on campaign, including an edict abolishing the revolutionary calendar and reinstating the Gregorian. On 24 September, having instructed the Senate to put in hand the raising of 80,000 more men, and leaving Joseph and Cambacérès in charge, he left for Strasbourg to join the Grande Armée, which had been on the march since the end of August.

  While the 90,000 Austrians in Carniola and the Tyrol under Archdukes Charles and John moved into Italy, on 8 September General Karl Mack with a corps of 50,000 Austrians under the titular command of Archduke Ferdinand had marched into Bavaria and taken up position in the west of the country to await a Russian army under General Kutuzov which was to join him in invading France. The Grande Armée had left the Channel coast in seven corps, commanded by Bernadotte, Marmont, Davout, Soult, Lannes, Ney and Augereau, with a cavalry force of 22,000 under Murat, a total of some 180,000 men. They moved with astonishing speed, living off the land, allowing men to fall behind and catch up as best they could.

  Napoleon left Strasbourg on 2 October in fine weather, cheered as he passed troops on the march, some of whom would present him with petitions. He would stop his horse or carriage alongside resting units and address the men; thanks to his extraordinary memory he could always name one or other of them and allude to their or their unit’s battle records. On 4 October he was at Stuttgart with the elector of Württemberg, with whom he attended a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and from whom he had to borrow fresh horses as his were all spent. Three days later he was directing the crossing of the Danube at Donauwörth, far to the east of Mack’s positions, which enabled him to sweep round and attack him from behind. From Augsburg on 12 October he wrote to Josephine that things had gone so well that the campaign would be one of his shortest and most brilliant yet: ‘I am feeling well, although the weather is dreadful and it’s raining so much I have to change clothes twice a day.’ He was always in the thick of the action, and when Murat and Berthier took his horse’s reins to pull him away from an exposed position in which bullets were whistling around their heads, saying it was not the place for him, he snapped at them, ‘My place is everywhere, leave me alone. Murat, go and do your duty.’14

  ‘For the past eight days, rain all day and cold wet feet have taken their toll, but today I have been able to stay in and rest,’ he wrote to Josephine from the abbey of Elchingen on 19 October, adding, ‘I have carried out my plan: I have destroyed the Austrian army just by marching.’ Archduke Ferdinand had managed to get away with a small force, but Mack had been checked by Ney at Elchingen and was left with no option other than to seek refuge in the town of Ulm, where he was bottled up with some 30,000 men while his cavalry fled back to join the Russians in Bohemia. On 19 October Mack had been obliged to capitulate, bringing the number of Austrian prisoners taken by the French in the space of two weeks to 50,000.15

  It was an extraordinary feat. Sébastien Comeau de Charry, a fellow artillery officer who had emigrated and ended up serving in the Bavarian army, now allied to the French, could barely believe what he witnessed. He had watched what looked like a rabble pour into Germany, shedding men and horses but streaming on, suddenly turn into a fighting force. On the Austrian side there were beautiful uniforms and fine horses, on the French ‘not one unit in order, just a compact mass of foot-soldiers’ pouring down the road. ‘It is only a superior man, a sovereign, who can bring unity and harmony to such a crowd,’ he reflected. A young French officer in Ney’s corps thought he had dreamed it all when he reflected that he had been at Boulogne on 1 September and was taking Mack’s surrender in Bavaria on 20 October.16

  Comeau de Charry had last met Napoleon at a mess table in Auxonne in 1791, when he had refused to sit next to him on account of his republican views, and was now astonished to see him adopt ‘the tone and manner of an old, loved, esteemed comrade’. Attached to his staff, he was able to observe not only the emperor’s extraordinary grasp of the situation, but also the unorthodox behaviour of the French army. Where another general would have wished and another army demanded a few days’ rest and resupply after a victory such as Ulm, Napoleon pressed on along the Danube towards Vienna and his troops surged on, stopping in groups to cook up something to eat, then resuming their march, dropping behind their units, getting mixed up with others, going off on ‘la maraude’ in search of food and other necessities, but always ready at a moment’s notice to form up columns, lines or squares, without having to be directed by their officers. Colonel Pouget, commanding the 26th Light Infantry, noted that on the march soldiers of various units would get together in groups to scavenge, mess and find comfortable overnight quarters, only rejoining their respective units in camp, but in an emergency they would integrate with the closest unit and fight as though they belonged to it.17

  On 24 October Napoleon entered Munich, and invited the elector of Bavaria to repossess his capital. On 13 November, after Murat, Lannes and Bertrand had managed to fool the unfortunate Austrian colonel guarding it to let them cross a bridge over the Danube, assuring him that an armistice had been signed, Napoleon entered Vienna. He took up quarters outside the city in the imperial palace of Schönbrunn. He was in an evil mood, to judge by a letter to Joseph written the next day in which he raged against Bernadotte, who had failed to act on his orders and missed a valuable opportunity. He was also displeased with Augereau, who had been slow, and with Masséna, who had failed to pin down the Austrians in Italy. His mood would not have improved three days later, when he received news that instead of sailing into the Mediterranean and harrying British ships supporting Naples, Admiral Villeneuve had left Cádiz with the combined French and Spanish fleets only to be disastrously defeated off Cape Trafalgar by Admiral Nelson. He took his displeasure out on Murat, who had allowed a Russian unit to give him the slip.18

  After Ulm, Napoleon had suggested peace negotiations to Francis, pointing out that Austria was bearing the brunt of the war and suffering on behalf of her British and Russian allies. Although he had lost an army, Francis remained sanguine, as Napoleon’s position was precarious. In Italy, Masséna and Eugène had defeated the archdukes, but they could not pursue them as they had to turn about and face a Neapolitan attack supported by British and Russian troops. Forced out of Italy, the archdukes were now hovering on Napoleon’s southern flank. Having been obliged to detach a force to head them off and leave men behind to cover his lines of communication, he was himself down to little over 70,000 men. A combined Russian and Austrian force of nearly 90,000 had gathered at Olmütz (Olomuc) to the north of Vienna, and there was a risk that Prussia might join the coalition and at
tack him from behind.19

  King Frederick William had been wavering between the option of joining France and acquiring Hanover as a reward, and that of joining the anti-French coalition. News of Trafalgar lifted the spirits of every enemy of France, and increased Napoleon’s vulnerability. Tsar Alexander had visited Berlin on 25 October and, aided by the fiercely anti-French Queen Luise, managed to persuade the king to sign an accord promising to take the field against the French by 15 December at the latest. The pact was sealed by a night-time visit by the tsar and the royal couple to the tomb of Frederick the Great, where by the light of flaming torches they vowed to fight together and Alexander kissed the sarcophagus of the renowned warrior.

  Napoleon’s anxieties were compounded by the situation at home, where the fall-off in trade following the end of the peace of Amiens, a bad harvest and a budget deficit caused by military expenditure had precipitated a financial crisis and a run on the Bank of France, which Joseph was barely managing to contain. The first successes of the campaign, reported in fulsome Bulletins which were plastered on street corners and read out in theatres, had elicited enthusiasm and created a sense of national solidarity. But by the end of October there were scuffles outside the bank as people struggled to withdraw specie. By the beginning of November troops were being deployed to keep order outside the bank. Joseph and Cambacérès sent Napoleon daily pleas for good news to feed to the jumpy population. ‘It is highly desirable that Your Majesty should send me news every day,’ Joseph wrote on 7 November. ‘You cannot imagine how easily anxiety rises when the Moniteur does not give any news of Your Majesty and the grande-armée; in the absence of real news, anxiety forges false news.’ Although the official reports played down its significance (Napoleon would dismiss it with talk of gales dispersing and wrecking some of the fleet), news of Trafalgar further undermined confidence. By 9 November, Joseph warned that ‘we must either support the Bank or let it fail immediately’. Napoleon tried to ease the tension by sending back more mendacious Bulletins, but as he and his army marched further and further away, anxiety mounted, and by late November there was mild panic in Paris.20