Czar Alexander faced heavily weighted pressure from his brother, the Duke Constantine, to agree with Napoleon’s proposed terms on peace. Hence, as Napoleon was still riding the high of his recent victory, he offered quite less strict terms, apparently more lenient than what he had been so used to negotiating with. He simply asked the Russians to join the Continental System, order their forces in Wallachia and Moldavia to retreat, and finally, to freely give the Ionian Islands to France.
The basis for comparison in saying that these are less strict terms were the ruthless deal he presented for Prussia despite Queen Louise’s incessant attempts at persuasion. Napoleon had sweeped out a half of Prussian lands entirely from existence and created a brand new kingdom there called Westphalia. Right after, he had quickly appointed one of his brothers, Jerome, to be the monarch of this new kingdom. Napoleon did not hesitate once in drilling humiliations into Prussia, which then encouraged deep-seated hate and a long-standing grudge.
Czar Alexander continued to feign friendship with Napoleon, which eventually led to a larger conflict because Napoleon had been fallen prey to Alexander’s conditional friendship. Later on, Czar Alexander violated many of the treaty’s provisions. However, Napoleon held on to the Treaty of Tilsit for it was still implemented enough that he was able to get some settlements and come back home to France. After all, he had not been home for the last three hundred days.
The settlements he got from the Tilsit Treaty enabled Napoleon to regroup and reorganize his empire. One of his ultimate goals was to implement the Continental System and have it work against the favors of the British. He redirected his focus towards the Kingdom of Portugal, a kingdom which he found out constantly neglected the preventions he made on trading.
Meanwhile, in 1801, Portugal had implemented a double sided policy right after their fall in the War of the Oranges. When this plan had first commenced, the trade routes to the British had in fact been closed under the direction of John VI. However, when the Franco-Spanish forces defeat them at the Battle of Trafalgar, it sparked a rebellious spirit in John, igniting until he decided to open the diplomatic trading relations with Britain once more.
When Napoleon learned about this treachery and apparent disobedience by the government of Portuguese, he proposed a treaty secretly with Charles IV of Spain and proceeded to order an army to attack Portugal. Twenty four thousand French soldiers commanded by General Junot and with the cooperation of the Spanish forces marched through the Pyrenees and into Portugal to carry out the demands of Napoleon. This became the mustard seed planted and what would soon grow as the Peninsular War, which as a struggle that lasted for six whole years and leeched a notable amount of strength from the French forces. All throughout the cold remaining months of 1808, the French increased relations with the Spanish, taking part even in their internal affairs. Their sole goal was to ignite miscommunication amongst the royal family in Spain. More clandestine operations took place within the country, but were finally uncovered when Napoleon himself declared that he would volunteer to mediating the conflict that arose among opposing political parties in the national scene.
On March, the French came to Madrid while Marshal Murat led a hundred and twenty soldiers to fight against Spain. Just a couple of weeks later, uncontrollable chaos erupt against the occupation in Madrid. During the summer of 1808, Napoleon finally had the power to declare the new King of Spain and gave the post to his other brother, Joseph Bonaparte. This declaration incited intense reactions from the citizens of Spain, and soon, there were revolutionists and rebels who began creating resistance groups throughout the nation. Eventually, the Battle of Balien was fought, and the resistance groups won against the French forces, as they were caught by surprise. As the French troops unexpectedly succumbed to the rebelling forces, Napoleon’s enemies from all across the globe were encouraged and inspired at his loss. This prompted Napoleon himself to deal with the carcass personally.
Napoleon also arranged to meet with Russians to talk about the numerous recurring issues between them before he went to Iberia. Napoleon wished he could maintain his alliance with the Russians for the incoming war to be waged against them by the Spanish forces and other concerns with the tension that brews between his forces and the Austrians during the Congress of Erfurt in October of 1808. Russia and France both reached a compromise in the Erfurt Convention. This prompted Britain to agree to a truce with France and following this was the recognition that the Russian victories over Finland from the hands of the Swedish. This also reassured Russia’s allegiance to the French in any upcoming onslaught from the Austrian forces.
Receiving this guarantee, Napoleon went back to France in order to convalesce his armies, preparing for the future war. In Novmeber of 1808, La Grande Armee quickly marched through the Ebro River under Napoleon’s personal commandeering and simultaneously annihilated the Spanish forces in a series of battles. Napoleon thrust his forces once more into Madrid upon ending the final Spanish resistance armies who were fighting to keep the capital safe at Somosierra. He accomplished this on December with eighty thousand of his soldiers, and directed these forces against the British armies. Finally, in January of 1809, they were driven towards the coast and were compelled to retreat from aiding Spain after their last attempt at helping them in the Battle of Corunna.
The Austrians in Central Europe eventually became the priority for Napoleon, thus prompting him to leave Iberia so he could personally deal with them. However, the Peninsular War persisted while he was gone, and after the 1808 campaign, not once did he come back to Spain at all. Around this time, another duke was rising through military ranks, and it was the leader who will soon be known as the Duke of Wellington. This leader was assigned to commandeer a British army as they were sent to attack the peninsula. The scales of the war were tipped into unexpected directions and every single participant in the battles fought tooth and nail to scramble for the odds to favor them. A notable occurrence during this chaos was the morbid guerrilla warfare that took over a large part of the Spanish rural territories. When they reached this point in the Napoleonic Wars, both sides were blatantly committing the most brutal movements against each other. The fighting exhibited by the Spanish made extreme disruptions in the supply and communication routes for the French. The thirty thousand French men that were left in Iberia were comprised mostly of soldiers who were trained mainly in intelligence operations and garrison duty. France was no longer capable of gathering their forces efficiently. Hence, the war was prolonged until the scales finally tipped and the odds favored the allied forces. In 1812, Russia invaded and made the French armies in Spain decrease when Napoleon needed aide to support his tactical plans in Europe. In the year 1814, after numerous battles have been fought all across Iberia, the allied forces finally managed to drive the French forces away from the peninsula.
The Napoleonic Wars had such an immense impact over the Spanish empire, what with ousting the Spanish Bourbon monarchy in order to install his brother in its seat of power and the general result of Napoleon’s colonization. In the American portion of Spain, a lot of local elites founded machination so that they may rule in the name of the leader that they consider as the legitimate monarch for Spain, Ferdinand VII. The Spanish-American then commenced wars of independence.
In the background, the battle cries of Austrians’ bloodthirsty vengeful soldiers sound, seeking to avenge their defeats from France. At this point in time, the Austrians had no one to count on, not even the Russians, because in 1809, Russia was currently at war with Britain, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire. Prussia’s Frederick William withdrew their support for the Austrians as soon as the conflict broke out. The Austrians were in no way ready to challenge Napoleon’s army once again, especially in the financial aspect. However, the Archduke Charles both proclaimed this warning and confessed that it was not a good idea for the Austrian troops to remain stationary. On the second month of 1809, those who supported war achieved success when the Imperial Government secretly agreed to plan
another attack against Napoleon.
In April of the same year, the frontmen of Austria’s army marched through the Inn River and attacked Bavaria. The first attacks greatly took the French forces off guard, and even Napoleon was not in the place where the invasion was centered. When he finally arrived, he saw that his troops were in a perilous position because of how far out they were separated. Archduke Charles continued attacking La Grande Armee’s left flanks and rammed his forces over to Marshal Davout’s III Corps. Forced by circumstance, Napoleon fished out his emergency strategy, something that will soon be famed and celebrated: the Landshut Maneuver. He reordered his troops and thrust his men into Eckmuhl, which the French easily won. This forced Archduke Charles to order his troops to retreat over Danube and towards Bohemia. In the next month, Vienna fell again, a second in four years. The war continued though because a handful of troops from the Austrian army survived the beginnings of their encounters with South Germany.
Major changes will come in Napoleon’s way again concerning his career and his family. Around this time, the Battle of Aspern-Essling was underway. Basically, this battle was a tug-of-war between the two aforementioned villages, which are the French’s bridgehead. In the conclusion of this war, France still had control over Essling but they lost Aspern. An artillery from Austria managed to convince Napoleon to command his forces to retreat back into Lobau Island, with about twenty three thousand casualaties on each warring side. This defeat became Napoleon’s first ever loss in a crucial battle, thus encouraging hope amongst Napoleon’s enemies because for the first time, he was showing signs of being beaten in war.
Following this drawback, Napoleon regrouped for more than six weeks. He planned and prepared his tactics and strategies before he decided to try crossing the Danube once more. From the end of June up until early July, the French showed incredible strength in attempting to cross the Danube again with more than a hundred and eighty troops marching towards the Austrians. Archduke Charles greeted the French armies with a hundred and fifty of his troops. This resulted to the Battle of Wagram which was waged for two days. This became the largest battle of Napoleon’s career yet. Napoleon ended the battle using a maneuver that focused on destroying the enemy’s central forces and work outward to force them to retreat. The casualties of the Austrian army totaled about forty thousand. Though tired from winning a battle, Napoleon managed to catch up with Archduke Charles at Znaim and made the latter sign a truce on the second week of July.
Meanwhile, the British forces had launched a campaign called Walcheren in the kingdom of Holland with a double purpose of opening up another war front and easing pressure off the Austrians. The British troops arrived at Walcheren during the last days of July when the Austrian armies had already lost. This aforenamed campaign consisted of just a small amount of face-offs in the battlefield but a large amount of casualties because of the illness that would soon be called the Walcheren Fever.
More than four thousand British soldiers went missing while the rest retreated by the end of the year. A delayed political settlement between France and Austria was all that it resulted. Before he considered negotiating with Napoleon, Emperor Francis preferred to see how the British would fare in battle. However, the British made clear that they were only fighting in vain so the Austrians finally said yes to talking about their truce, thus the Treaty of Schonbrunn was birthed.
Coinciding with the changes in his military life, changes in his personal life also emerged. In the year 1810, he arranged the papers so that he may annul his marriage to Josephine, who was not able to give birth to a son for him. He arranged the annulment for the purpose of marrying an 18-year-old Austrian emperor’s daughter named Marie Louise. In the next year, the young woman was finally became his ticket to having an heir. Marie Louise gave birth to a babe who they named after his father. Napoleon II who Napoleon called the “King of Rome” even when he did not actually grow up to rule his father’s empire.
Napoleon and Czar Alexander, whose friendship from their first meeting in Tilsit was preserved, also tried to maintain the Russo-French alliance. However, Russian nobles’ pressure to break the alliance were wearing down Czar Alexander. Tension continued to brew between their nations, which prompted Napoleon to threaten Alexander not to ally with Britain.
Unfortunately, the higher you were up in the sky, the farther down you fall. And alas, did Napoleon fall. His success reached a ceiling that allowed more room for defeat. He suffered defeat after defeat that shot holes into the ship that was the country's military budget. That very ship began to sank hopelessly, In 1812, his troops made a well-thought-out attempt to invade Russia. Napoleon's troops were swept by large numbers, and in the end, only 10,000 out of the 600,000 made it out still fit to serve.
When word got out about this defeat, Napoleon's enemies' bloods from all over and outside France sang and boiled with renewed spirits. Another coup was attempted while Napoleon was leading his troops against Russia, and the British was slowly starting to gain on the territories that Napoleon had left behind.
There was, however, a short pause in battling during a few months of 1812 to 1813 while both Russian and French forces recuperated from their losses. Meanwhile, Napoleon’s aforementioned enemies began allying themselves with each other and forming a coalition. Among them were Prussia, Great Britain, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Russia, and Portugal. Napoleon still had tricks up his sleeve that gained him three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers to his army and took the reins in Germany, lancing through battle after battle against the newly formed Coalition. The final win in this fight was the Battle of Dresden in 1813.
However much he was winning, Napoleon’s enemies seemed to loom larger and larger over him, making him feel frail in comparison to his more glory-filled days. In the Battle of Leipzig, Napoleon’s forces were crushed when they fought an army double its size. Thus far, this became the Napoleonic Wars’ largest battle yet. It had over ninety thousand of total casualties.
In November of 1813, the allied forces proposed another armistice called the Frankfurt proposals. This proposal suggested that Napoleon could retain his post as an emperor of France but it will be stripped to its former state or what could be directly quoted as its “natural frontiers.” When the words could be free of all pretenses, these words just meant that France’s control over Savoy, Belgium, and the west bank of the Rhine River called the Rhineland will be maintained; On the other hand, he would surrender all the power he had over the rest of his remaining empire which was still comprised of the entire nation of the Netherlands and Spain and a large portion of Italy and Germany. Metternich advised him that these were the best terms Napoleon could ever hope for from the allied forces, and more triumphs would only add morbidity to their terms, make their deal worse and worse and less in favor of France. In giving advice to Napoleon, Metternich’s primary concern was to keep France in an equilibrium versus the many threats presented by the Russians as the series of wars died down into hopefully nonexistence.
Heroes have fatal flaws, and these flaws could urge them to make blatant mistakes. In this case, Napoleon’s flaw was his hubris, an overwhelming sense of pride and invincibility that could not be knocked away by checking with reality. He was so sure of himself that he had grown arrogant, expectant that his forces will win the war as he always won the battles back in his glory days. He then deferred the chance to take the allied forces’ kinder offer, until he lost the chance entirely. Only a month had passed and the allied forces took their offer back.
Napoleon felt like he was backed into a corner at this point, what with his the immense pressure now attached to his name and the utter depletion of resources needed to continue fighting. He did his best in trying to re-negotiate a truce with the allied forces, hoping that they would once more offer him the mercy of the Frankfurt proposals. To his dismay, they have already drafted more ruthless terms. One of them was for France to withdraw and shrink itself to its boundaries in 1791. This meant that France will no longer have c
ontrol over Belgium as well. Napoleon could still remain as its emperor.
Hearing the newly proposed terms, Napoleon refused. This did not sit well with the British, and prompted them to want Napoleon to be permanently de-throned instead, and they succeeded. Still, Napoleon rejected their terms.
He retreated into France with an army composed merely of seventy thousand soldiers. His army plus a small cavalry was no longer fit to fight against the allied forces’ troops, which was three times larger than their army. La Grande Armee was surrounded, with the British troops looming over them from the south and other forces from the Coalition at the ready to attack as well. Although not significant enough to flip his army’s fate, Napoleon had managed to win a short series of battles in what was dubbed as the Six Days’ Campaign. Leaders of Paris then waved the white flag to the Coalition in March of 1814.
During the first day of April, Czar Alexander told the Senat conservateur that the allied forces were merely attacking Napoleon and not the country of France itself. Czar Alexander’s friendship with Napoleon mattered not no longer because Alexander had become influenced by Talleyrand. Thus Czar Alexander proposed that Napoleon be evicted from the seat of power, and they will be a lot more eager to propose honorable peace negotiations. The Senat conservateur wasted no time, and the very next day, they had fully drafted and passed the Acte de decheance de l’Empereur or the Emperor’s Demise Act which naturally kicked Napoleon out from his seat of power.
Confusion, Confession and Conviction Page 28