by Alan Schom
The absurdity of the situation became even more evident on November 26, when Cambacérès cheerfully reported to Napoleon’s headquarters that the full-scale renovation of the Tuileries Palace — on which many millions were being spent — was going ahead right on schedule. Napoleon and Josephine’s personal apartments had been completed, as had the large concert hall in the Pavilion de Molière. In addition the staircase leading to the new quarters of the State Council, as well as to the offices around it, were open for use. Workers were expected to begin laying the parquet that week, and the scaffolding for all work would soon be coming down.[656] Meanwhile the cavalry still lacked hay for want of cash.
Napoleon had to produce a victory of truly staggering dimensions if he was to avert the collapse of the Bourse, the Bank of France, and Paris financial markets — indeed of France itself. As late as November 29 Cambacérès reminded him: “The government is financially embarrassed.” There were whispers of incompetence and scandals at the highest levels. Treasury Minister Barbé-Marbois’s brother “has cut his throat with a razor,” Cambacérès despondently reported. “Prince Joseph now merely convokes cabinet meetings in order to complain about these problems, about the difficulties the Bank finds itself in, about the lack of money with which to carry on,” the archchancellor added on the very date that was dramatically to reverse the situation and save Napoleon and his Empire, December 2, 1805.[657]
It was only when the results of the Battle of Austerlitz reached Paris by special courier on December 11 that the financial markets in Paris, Switzerland, and Holland began to rebound — slowly, painfully — barely saving Napoleon and his twelve-month-old Empire. But the story of that military campaign had begun nine weeks earlier. Napoleon ordered:
On the morning of September 25, 1805, Marshal Lannes [V Corps] will cross the Rhine at Kehl and establish himself between Rastadt and Ettlingen. Prince Murat [with the reserve cavalry at Strasbourg] is to follow him with Hautpoul’s heavy cavalry, four divisions of dragoons and one of foot dragoons...Marshal Soult [IV Corps] will cross at Speyer...Marshal Ney [VI Corps] is to cross the Rhine at Durlach...Marshal Davout [III Corps] is to occupy Mannheim,
Marmont’s II Corps was to cross the Rhine at Mainz, while Bernadotte’s I Corps now occupying British Hannover was to converge on southern Germany with them. Finally, Augereau’s VII Corps was to follow on a twenty-nine-day forced march from Brest. “The marshals are authorized to requisition the food and supplies needed for their troops from the countries they occupy...”[658]
The plan was as magnificent as it was desperate. Napoleon literally stripped France of almost every available soldier, except for Marshal Brune’s 30,000 men left to guard the Channel coast. Never before — neither under Louis XVI, Louis XV, nor Louis XIV — had France been left so undefended. Three or four crack British divisions could have marched on Paris with little opposition. But thanks to Napoleon’s total government censorship of the press, not a word got out, nor was a single word of criticism published in any newspaper of the land.
Before setting out from Strasbourg, Napoleon had devised the simple, dramatic, and, by military standards, beautiful campaign now being executed against Austrian emperor Franz II’s three armies (198,000 men) advancing westward and Czar Alexander I’s initial field force (98,000 men). In theory Napoleon had 207,000 men at his disposal now, but in reality fewer than 100,000 under his immediate control. He therefore had to act swiftly to divide and crush the Allies before they could unite and attack him en masse. Napoleon observed operations from his temporary GHQ at Ettlingen, in the Duchy of Baden, during the first week of October, tracing the movement of these corps across his large field map.[659]
In fact Napoleon had decided on this plan of attack only shortly before leaving Paris, as the faithful but hard-pressed Berthier somehow coped with the long stream of complex orders required to set in motion this full-scale campaign. Under the reorganization of the army, Napoleon had carried out many changes, including the replacement of half-brigades with divisions, and the placing of all cavalry under the overall command of one man, Murat, while also centralizing the army’s artillery under General Dommartin.[660]
Each corps of the Grande Armée was following a different route to avoid confusion and bottlenecks and in order to ease the inevitable logistical problems involved in keeping artillery, munitions, and food at a pace with the marching units. Napoleon, intent on his invasion of England to the very end, had in fact ignored the glaring logistical problems involved and was to pay a very heavy price from the outset, when it was discovered that the army lacked sufficient numbers of large wagons, and was forced to requisition an additional 3,500 of them, and some 14,000 dray horses to haul them, causing yet another last-minute nightmare foisted on Berthier. Winter clothing would be slow in arriving, and men would have few muskets available to replace their old Charleville 1777 models when they broke or wore out, as they frequently did. Worse, food would often be desperately short, causing thousands and thousands of stragglers and deserters across hundreds of miles, after the first few weeks in the field. To make matters still worse, many units of the army were still long overdue in receiving back pay. Cold, hungry, unshod, unpaid men — it did not bode well at the beginning of a campaign.
This war, like some that preceded it, such as Egypt, and every one to follow to the end of Napoleon’s career, was utterly unnecessary, provoked by him alone in what was to prove a long, complicated chain of events, domino-style. Had Napoleon simply removed his occupying forces from Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, and renounced all claims to those countries, it could all have been avoided. Not a life need have been lost. But Napoleon was set on conquest, which meant war, and this was just the beginning. This war and its ultimate settlement would initiate new grievances, festering wounds, and unsettled accounts that would lead to war after war. “It is said that a man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself,” one noted historian remarked.[661] In the present instance, Napoleon had deliberately forced Austria (and its ally Russia) to attack him, especially through his latest actions in Italy, while dramatically feigning studied surprise and anger when the Allies were finally forced to retaliate and mobilize as a result.
Nevertheless, despite the crack superbly trained army he had created along the Channel, Napoleon was caught napping, unprepared to meet the avalanche of humanity in military uniform now pouring across Europe to defend various national claims and to put an end to this incessant French aggression. And if Napoleon’s logistics were deplorable, his intelligence was little better. Indeed, he had been so hard put in this regard as to send his aide-de-camp General Bertrand and a marshal of the Empire, Prince Murat, on a lightning — if extensive — and most dangerous intelligence mission across the Rhine, probing hundreds of miles into enemy territory. Only Napoleon could have been so brazen and foolhardy as to dispatch one of the nation’s nine field marshals on such a risky venture, which could and should have been carried out by someone far junior.
In any event Napoleon had to secure his flanks and rear, for what he planned was an attack on the Austrian emperor’s large but widely dispersed armies. Thus on October 1 he forced the duke of Baden to sign a defense pact with him (while promising to spare Heidelberg University from destruction or rampage, as well as future compensation for the duke himself),[662] followed by a similar alliance with the elector of Württemberg four days later. The elector of Bavaria, however, representing a much larger, more powerful state centered around Munich, was not so accommodating, especially when the bargain was complicated by a marriage. Napoleon, through the good offices of Talleyrand at Strasbourg, ordered the Bavarian ruler to deliver his daughter as the bride of the viceroy of Italy, Eugène de Beauharnais, along with a signed defense pact, or pay the consequences. “The most powerful prince of Europe is a man of the highest character, magnificent in his affection, while utterly irreconcilable in a reverse position,” Talleyrand warned the Bavarian leader. “I hardly need spell out the consequences.”[663] T
he elector, who for all his princely blood was a practical businessman, held out until October. Then he, too, buckled under to French military pressure and agreed to provide both a corps of Bavarians for the Grande Armée and a wife for Eugène de Beauharnais. This gain was more than set off, however, on November 3 by the signing of the Treaty of Potsdam, when Czar Alexander persuaded King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia to end his neutral stance and finally join the Third Coalition against France, following Bernadotte’s recent troop violation of Prussian territory at Ansbach, while en route to join Napoleon.
Casting his corps about in almost parallel, descending routes, like an enormous fisherman’s net, Napoleon set in motion his superb enveloping movement around the rear of the opposing army, which was to concentrate at Munster on October 6, cutting off General Kienmaier’s 16,000 men at Neuburg from the rest of Archduke Ferdinand’s army straddling the Danube and the Iller Rivers. So successful was this strategy that in three days Kienmaier’s troops, now isolated, were fleeing hell-for-leather toward Munich, as Davout’s, Soult’s, Lannes’s, and Murat’s troops neatly sealed off the remainder of Ferdinand’s army under the overall command of General Mack, sending some 40,000 scurrying for the protected battlements of Ulm, lower on the Danube, as another 11,300 fled south. Meanwhile, Ney’s corps of 24,500 to the north of Ulm prevented escape in that direction. By October 13 Murat, Ney, and Lannes, supported by Bessières and Marmont, had herded Mack’s army neatly between their troops and the walls of Ulm. In a separate maneuver far to the southeast, Bernadotte’s corps sealed off Munich, although the evasive Kienmaier nevertheless managed to escape east, avoiding battle. By October 16, thanks to Napoleon’s superb envelopment strategy and Mack’s obligingly incompetent generalship, Mack’s troops were hopelessly locked up behind their Ulm defenses. Mack, who had expected Napoleon’s army to move into Italy rather than Bavaria, was unable to cope with the altered situation. Ney’s VI and Lannes’s V corps cut off Ulm on the west bank of the Danube, while Marmont’s II Corp ringed the city on the east bank, as Soult’s IV Corps now advanced from the south to close that remaining avenue of escape. Encircled and outnumbered, the hapless Mack signed an eight-day armistice with General de Ségur on October 17.
By October 20, realizing that the first contingent of the Russian Army under General Kutuzov could not arrive in time to save him, General Mack surrendered his entire army at Ulm, apart from 10,000 who had managed to escape earlier. Altogether, some 27,000 Austrian troops officially paraded before a satisfied Napoleon, standing before a huge log fire, stacking arms as they passed, and handing over sixty guns and forty regimental standards. Incurring minimal losses without a major battle, Napoleon had taken an entire army and the river bastion of Ulm with its plentiful supplies of food and munitions.
“The war of the third coalition has begun,” a victorious Bonaparte addressed the Grande Armée from imperial headquarters at Augsburg on October 23:
The Austrian army has crossed the Inn, violated treaties, attacked our ally [Bavaria] and driven him from his capital [Munich]...You in turn have been compelled to hasten...to the defence of our frontiers. You have already crossed the Rhine. We shall not again pause until we have assured the independence of the German people, succored our allies, and put to shame the pride of unjust aggressors. We shall not again make peace without firm guarantees...But soldiers, we have difficult marches yet before us, fatigue and hardships of all kinds. Whatever obstacles may confront us, we shall overcome them, and we shall not rest until we have planted our eagles upon the territory of our enemies.[664]
In another order of the day, immediately following the surrender of Mack at Ulm, Napoleon praised Marshals Murat, Ney, Lannes, Soult, and Marmont and the French army. “The result of all these glorious events is that the Austrian army of 100,000 men is destroyed; 50,000 of them are prisoners,” he declared, neither of which was true of course, the advancing masses of Archduke Karl’s army in particular still posing a very real threat to his southern flank.[665]
Indeed, this was hardly the time to celebrate. The real battles lay ahead of the French, and now that the element of surprise had been lost, victory would be more difficult, given Napoleon’s vastly inferior numbers. Half of Archduke Ferdinand’s army had escaped, and, as they attempted to close on the French, the rest of the Austrian army remained as yet untouched by battle, including Archduke John’s 22,000 men and Archduke Karl’s 80,000. Meanwhile Ney and Marmont continued to attempt to head off Karl’s army, aided by Masséna’s Army of Italy (35,000 men) to the southwest. Aggravating matters for Napoleon, however, Kutuzov’s 38,000 Russian troops were now less than one hundred miles away, followed by the rest of the Russian force — for a total of perhaps 226,000 versus Napoleon’s maximum of 152,000 men. And after deducting the garrisons left behind at Ulm and along the road of communications, and the detached divisions with Ney and Marmont, in reality Napoleon found himself with fewer than 100,000 troops available.
It was the Russians who concerned him most at this moment. He ordered Marshals Murat, Soult, Davout, Mortier (and his newly created corps), and Lannes to pursue Kutuzov and the remnants of the immediate Austrian forces, in order to prevent their junction with Czar Alexander’s army. At the same time, should the czar join with the Prussians as well, with their separate force of 200,000 men (as a result of the new defense treaty Alexander was negotiating with Friedrich Wilhelm III at Berlin on October 25), all stemming from a situation that Napoleon had himself created, things could prove nasty. As usual Bonaparte was left to juggle his options. Even if the Prussians did achieve their junction with the Russians, they would be slow to mobilize such a large force. That meant that Napoleon might still be able to get at the Russians before either Archduke Karl’s army or that of Prussia could reach them. Napoleon was willing to take on the three different allies one at a time, but he simply lacked the numbers and commanders to tackle them as a combined force. Given this background, he decided to close on and dispose of Kutuzov and to secure Vienna.
With Augsburg — safely within Bavarian territory — now the main supply depot for the French army, Napoleon instructed Berthier to make Munich the administrative center of operations. Behind the lines Marshal Augereau’s small force was left to garrison newly conquered Ulm, while carrying out harassing operations against the enemy in the Vorarlberg, as Ney and the Bavarian corps were dispatched to Innsbruck in the Tyrol to check Archduke John. It was at this time that Napoleon created a badly needed new corps (VIII) with four divisions taken from other units and placed it under the command of General Mortier. The setting in of an early winter storm, bringing sleet, snow, and plummeting temperatures, did not help matters, however, with the French troops still in the clothes they had worn on quitting the Channel back in August.
Kutuzov’s corps, which was the closest Russian force to Archduke Karl and Vienna, much to Napoleon’s surprise refused to support his Austrian allies in the defense of their capital. He retreated rapidly (with two Austrian corps in tow as well), escaping across the Danube and up the river valley. Murat, Lannes, and Davout were ordered to pursue Kutusov. As for Archduke Karl, after nearly defeating Masséna at Caldiero on October 29, he resumed his march toward Austria and the strong Austrian force at Venice, reinforced en route by his brother John’s smaller army. Together the two archdukes could pose a very serious threat to Napoleon’s right flank, especially if the Russians attacked simultaneously from the left. The pressure on Napoleon was growing.
On November 8 Davout severely crippled Meerveldt’s corps, though Kutuzov refused to come to the aid of this Austrian ally attached to his own army. And yet Murat, instead of joining Davout’s successful strategy in pursuit of Kutuzov, as ordered, unilaterally decided to seize the prize jewel, Vienna. When Napoleon heard at Linz of Murat’s grievous error, which in fact was soon to result in a nightmarish position for him as Kutuzov continued his escape up the Danube to reach the principal Russian army in Moravia, the incredulous French emperor went into one of his famous tira
des, berating Murat “for acting like a blind fool.” The Russians, instead of covering Vienna, had by now retreated over the Danube at Krems, thanks chiefly to Murat.[666] Murat had lost sight of the overall French strategic situation and objective of destroying armies, not occupying undefended cities. By failing to join Davout “to march closely together” per Napoleon’s orders, he had altered a very successful and decisive campaign, leaving it in a questionable state, even endangering the entire outcome, should the Allies now be able to coordinate their actions.
In an attempt to make up for this in some small part, Murat and Lannes, single-handedly and brazenly, walked across the principal bridge of Vienna linking both sides of the broad Danube, and by a courageous if foolhardy ruse (field marshals were not wasted on such missions) successfully seized that bridge from the Austrians before it was destroyed. (This in no way altered the very dangerous situation Murat had helped create, however.) Bernadotte, who was invariably “delayed” somewhere, and now in Melk, certainly also contributed to the tense ambiguities now developing.
Another factor would now be weakening French effectiveness, not only during the remainder of this campaign but in all those to come over the next several years: the jealousy and enmity eroding the coordination required of the French emperor’s senior commanders. Real clashes of temper were involved, a bitterness that no doubt alarmed Napoleon and undermined strategic and tactical success.