by Alan Schom
“We talked for a long time,” Savary recalled, “he making me repeat time and again, not being able to comprehend what had taken place in Andalusia. He lamented having committed so many troops there.”[742] News of the unexpected disasters — the Dos de Mayo, Bailen, Joseph’s flight from Madrid — nonplussed a man unaccustomed to such setbacks. “He permitted his communications to be cut,” Napoleon said of Dupont’s surrender at Bailen, “and his corps to be divided.” Furthermore he had attacked incorrectly and then foolishly capitulated in the name of a large portion of his army that had not even been involved in the battle. And then there was the little matter of his five hundred wagons of loot, despite Napoleon’s strict orders against all looting. “Could I have expected all that from Dupont of all people, a man whom I greatly liked and was in fact grooming to be my next marshal?...Better, far better they had all died with arms in their hands. Their deaths at least would have been glorious.” Napoleon said he would order Dupont to be stripped of his rank and appear before a court-martial. Then, after Savary’s verbal report on Joseph’s panicked evacuation of his mint-new capital, Napoleon concluded, “Well, General, you certainly bring me some fine news there!...Having fallen back across both rivers [the Ebro and the Duero] is tantamount to evacuating Spain itself.” The military genius who had so miscalculated his Egyptian campaign, and then again his attempted amphibious invasion of England, who had lost the naval war at Trafalgar, and who was now holding captive under military occupation Portugal, Holland, Switzerland, Italy, the thirty-nine confederated Rhineland states, Prussia, Austria, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, was in the process of making yet another catastrophic error of judgment, and deep down he knew it. Nevertheless he persisted. This would soon tie down the better part of the entire Grande Armée, eventually resulting not in twelve thousand or even eighty thousand unnecessary French deaths, but in a quarter of a million in the Iberian Peninsula alone, not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese dead and wounded and the untold civilian suffering and destruction.
“In this kind of warfare retrograde movements are never any good. Such movements are dangerous enough in a regular campaign, but when dealing with a national uprising, they should never be employed,” Bonaparte had advised Marshal Bessières back in mid-June, and now he himself was using just such movements. Indeed, by this time everything in his Iberian calculations appeared to be in retrograde. Having planned on no appreciable Spanish resistance to his occupation, he had instead found himself facing not only national uprisings everywhere but the entire Spanish Royal Army, some one hundred thousand of them, as well. Cardinal Desping y Dasseto and the archbishop of Granada had openly denounced the French, a sentiment that seemed to sum up the feelings of the whole population.
Following the surrender at Bailen on July 22, King Joseph, who had entered Madrid only two days before, had, as General Savary had revealed, fled precipitously northward. Meanwhile Marshal Bessières was frantically attempting to keep open the French logistical lifeline between Madrid and Bayonne. It was a nightmare from the outset — shades of the Egyptian campaign all over again — with outnumbered flying columns trying to cope with flashpoints everywhere on the compass, except now in Spain the local population was larger, better armed, and more determined to oppose the intruder. Instead of just a couple of hostile forces as Napoleon had faced in Egypt, numerous armies now appeared in every direction, generally centered around well-fortified ancient cities and bastions. Instead of laying siege to just one citadel of Acre, he was facing a half dozen. If Kléber and Desaix had somehow managed to achieve some success for a while, not so Moncey and Dupont in Spain, the former failing to take his objective of Valencia and falling back, while Dupont of course surrendered in July. As for Bessières, in the face of tough resistance every step of the way, he had to give up his attempt to drive northward through the damp, cold, heavily forested coastal mountains, even failing to secure the important coastal route as far as the major port of Santander. Napoleon already had more than 118,000 men in Spain alone, and was everywhere being repulsed. He had not expected any of this. Madrid was becoming another besieged, hostile Cairo. General Verdier, too, had failed, and had been forced to lift his destructive siege of Zaragoza against General Palafox. Junot’s entire army of around 26,000 men had then surrendered to Wellesley at Vimiero on August 21, its capitulation signed at Cintra the following day, resulting in the expulsion of the entire French force from Portugal. All this within just three weeks of the initial British landing of 9,000 men at Mondego Bay — the great warrior Junot, his scarred body testimony to his many martial exploits and already a legend in the French army, defeated and expelled from Portugal!
Junot, it now turned out, had failed to prepare defenses against an expected British landing and then had commanded most incompetently at the Battle of Vimiero, followed by his even more bizarre flight in mid-battle in a carriage with a beautiful lady. This all had to be hushed up, as most things were in France. There could be no trials, no public denunciations by Napoleon to attract public scrutiny of the whole French fiasco. But everyone associated with Junot — even General Thiébault who had earlier remonstrated strongly with Junot about his failure to prepare Portugal’s defenses — was temporarily sent to Coventry following their return to France as prisoners of war aboard a convoy of forty-five British warships. One humiliation after another. Junot, despite his proven instability of mind and recent incompetence on the battlefield, after being stripped of most of his honorary functions (including his positions as Napoleon’s senior aide-de-camp and military governor of Paris), accompanied by an appropriate cut in his nine-hundred-thousand-franc official income, to everyone’s amazement was given a fresh field command, that of the III Corps, and later of the VIII, only to abandon his men yet again.[743]
About the only good news from Iberia that summer appeared to be the announcement of Marshal Bessières’s victory over Generals Cuesta and Blake at Medina del Rio Seco on July 14, 1808. But the French marshal and his twelve thousand men followed this by committing another major war atrocity, putting to the sword thousands of Spanish troops who had honorably surrendered. The ghost of Jaffa continued to haunt them. This news, too, Bonaparte kept out of the French press.
It was not only the unexpected opposition encountered throughout the land that astonished and then dismayed Napoleon. He had not anticipated the intensity and consistency of the opposition or the gravity of the dramatic, unexpected defeats. For the first time since the fall of Egypt, two large French military forces had surrendered. The magic of the emperor’s name and legions was tarnished. As Louis Madelin put it, the “virginity of French glory” was now a thing of the past.
Joseph’s actions on the arrival of his tattered army at Burgos on August 9 only aggravated matters. Unbelievably, El Rey Josef wrote Napoleon that he intended to issue “a decree declaring my intention to renounce reigning over a people who first had to be subdued by arms.” Therefore Napoleon had “to stop all plans regarding the Kingdom of Naples” to which Joseph wished to return forthwith. It was not too late, he insisted. The quicker the French pulled out of Iberia, the better. “I am convinced that the new arrangements [that is, the French conquest and his naming as king] will encounter more resistance in this country than Your Majesty might realize and that in the final analysis all this will bring happiness to no one.”
It was good, blunt advice, but concepts such as happiness were hardly of any significance to Napoleon. He was neither receptive nor amenable to the idea of Joseph’s return to the Neapolitan throne or to the evacuation of his large army from the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon had already informed the entire diplomatic corps that Spain was his imperial property and that Joseph was its new king. It would be humiliating, he would lose face, should he now suddenly announce that he, his army, and his new puppet king had been thrown out by the Spaniards. Nevertheless Joseph continued to plead in vain to be left on the throne of Naples. In fact Napoleon was so utterly stupefied, even outraged, by J
oseph’s request and assessment of the situation that he could not respond, apart from a purely formal acknowledgment of receipt of said missive.
Nevertheless the official response from Paris was not long in coming, as a fiery Foreign Minister Champagny harangued the Senate in its Luxembourg chambers. Under no circumstances would France let England claim Spain as one of its provinces. “I am resolved to push ahead most actively with this Spanish business,” Napoleon at last informed Joseph. “The future security of my peoples, the prosperity of commerce, and the maritime peace are all dependent upon these important operations.” Napoleon would therefore stay, French troops would stay, Don Josef would stay. Spain would be “pacified” and Portugal reconquered. It was as simple as that. One of Bonaparte’s greatest shortcomings was his arrogant, psychopathic inability to admit an error, especially one dramatically publicized before the world. His Spanish error was to cost him, and France, dearly.
For Napoleon, now back in the French capital, these events could not have occurred at a worse possible time, as he was preparing for an important summit conference with Czar Alexander in Germany, where reports of his latest Iberian setbacks would inevitably undermine his negotiating position. Meanwhile reinforcements would have to be sent to Spain immediately to stabilize the situation and replace the tens of thousands of troops now being returned to France as corpses. Before setting out, in a panic Napoleon authorized troops from France, the Rhineland, and the whole of Europe “to be dispatched to Bayonne without delay.”
By mid-July Napoleon well realized that his hope for a quick conquest was proving to be a pipe dream. A hard new reality was setting in. Masses of troops were being hastily assembled and ordered to march from the Rhine, the Vistula, and the Po, and with them crack veteran commanders, tough men capable of coping with such emergencies, including Ney.
The Emperor, Monsieur le Maréchal, wishes you to come to Bayonne in order to join the King [Joseph, in Burgos]...General Dupont in Andalusia has permitted himself to get entangled in inaccessible mountains...and has capitulated...This truly incredible event appears to have led the King [Joseph] to recall all his troops to the Duero and perhaps [even as far north as] Burgos...You will therefore appreciate the importance the Emperor attaches to your presence there at this time.
Ney was but the first of a series of marshals now being rushed in to salvage the situation in Iberia.
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Another Grave Error
‘I want Emperor Alexander to be awed by the spectacle of my might.’
Despite the unexpected setbacks resulting from his brothers’ (including the stubborn Lucien, Louis, and even Jérôme) refusal to comply with his imperial wishes regarding the Spanish throne, and the unexpected developments in Iberia, Napoleon was determined to implement his plan calling not only for the completion of his conquest of Europe but of much of the rest of the world as well. For this he needed the cooperation of Czar Alexander, who would keep the vanquished Austrians from attempting to mobilize and attack his flanks while he was preoccupied in Iberia. Thus Talleyrand, who had just tendered his resignation as foreign secretary on August 9 because of his strong opposition to Napoleon’s unceasing warfare and conquests, suddenly found himself summoned to St.-Cloud to accompany the emperor on a new, very special diplomatic journey. “We are going to Erfurt,” he was informed. “I want to be able to be free to return to deal with Spain once and for all. Therefore prepare a convention to this effect for me, one that will be mutually acceptable to Czar Alexander as well.”
Never had anything quite like it been seen in the city of Erfurt, as a few dozen newly crowned heads of the states of the Confederation of the Rhine, including Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, and Westphalia — with their glittering ministers, generals, privy councilors, and equerries — greeted the emperors. Napoleon and Alexander met outside the walls of Erfurt, where Napoleon awarded the czar the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor, and Alexander in turn presented Napoleon with the Order of Saint Andre. Then proceeding together, they arrived on horseback at the head of the enormous procession, as the French cavalry escort, including the eight-hundred-man Imperial Guard, made its grand entry into the medieval city square on September 27, 1808, to the background of martial music and a deafening twenty-one-gun salute for each of the emperors. Napoleon, wishing to impress the czar, had had Alexander escorted from Bromberg to Erfurt by elite French troops, dozens of generals, and two French marshals, the dukes of Dalmatia (Soult) and Montebello (Lannes). But when the overzealous officer in charge of the Erfurt battery was about to repeat the imperial salute for the king of Württemberg, who trailed behind the imperial party, a senior officer angrily snapped: “Stop that, you fool! He’s only a king!” With his usual condescending smile and imperious demeanor, Bonaparte dismounted, greeted by the loud acclamation of a fawning crowd of those vanquished earlier by French arms and now on the French payroll. Their imperial majesties then toured their spacious and comfortable accommodations, Napoleon and his vast retinue taking over the government palace in Erfurt, while Alexander and his suite were escorted to “the city’s most beautiful mansion,” and Grand Duke Constantine found his agreeable quarters in the stately residence of a local senator.
Napoleon’s stay in Erfurt proved unexpectedly delightful, he and Alexander seeming to get on well, as if there had been no lapse of time since Tilsit. Napoleon paid assiduous court to the czar, which Alexander insisted on returning, indeed even attending Napoleon’s levee in his chamber in the morning. The two emperors also exchanged gifts, the czar outdoing Napoleon by presenting three sable pelisses. Balls were given, as well as splendid state dinners in neighboring castles; there were long rides together and reviews of each other’s troops and observations of their field maneuvers. Napoleon’s first valet, Constant, however, found the imperial hunts lacking in both sportsmanship and interest, one such event involving the shooting of sixty stags in one afternoon, the deer trapped by beaters using cloth partitions to close off any avenue of escape. The czar, who was very vain and thus refused to wear spectacles in public, could distinguish no living thing beyond a range of twenty feet. This presented a special problem for the organizers of the hunt, who finally walked a large stag (at a distance of twenty feet) before the Russian emperor, who fired at the big blur and brought it down with the first shot. It was a great moment. Bonaparte the sportsman was also delighted with the day’s bag.
Germany’s great man of letters could hardly be forgotten by the French emperor, who so prided himself on cultural attainments. The aging Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gallantly received from Napoleon’s own hand the cross (not the grand eagle) of the Legion of Honor, followed by the French emperor’s disquisition on the shortcomings of Voltaire. Later Goethe managed respectfully to decline Napoleon’s invitation to Paris.
Most evenings at Erfurt were spent at the theater, Alexander and Napoleon watching, among others, Voltaire’s Oedipus, performed by the Comédie Française, which Napoleon had brought with him (a full troupe of thirty-two comédiens, including Talma himself and the luscious Antoinette Bourgoin, “the goddess of joy and pleasure,” as she was intimately known, whose many charms immediately caught the Russian imperial eye). During one performance, on hearing the line “The friendship of a great man is a blessing of the gods,” the czar leaped to his feet and pulled up a dozing Bonaparte and embraced him, much to the delight of the audience below. Understandably Napoleon was to misinterpret this act, as he did Alexander’s seemingly warm attitude throughout most of the Erfurt conference, as a sign of his own control and influence over the Russian emperor. This was not the case, the czar having undergone a great change of heart since Tilsit.
Indeed, thinking Alexander was still his man, a sort of Russian Junot completely under his spell, to do with as he pleased, at times Bonaparte got too cocky, overstepping the bounds of the acceptable, acting not only smug but even impudent, deeply offending the sensitive czar, just as Napoleon frequently did those in his own retinue. This proved to be a grave err
or, with lasting consequences. The mercurial Alexander, who had been so genuinely drawn to Napoleon at Tilsit, had been having serious second thoughts following his cold reception by the Russian aristocracy following the defeats of Friedland and Tilsit. Poland, for example, was, in the czar’s eyes, Russian territory, and Napoleon’s seizure of the “Grand Duchy of Warsaw” therefore a glaring international slap in the face. “Poland is the sole question about which I shall never change,” he had warned the new French envoy, Gen. Armand de Caulaincourt. “In the event of war breaking out, I shall surely have to declare myself king of Poland,” Alexander privately acknowledged. “The world is clearly not big enough for us [France and Russia] to come to an understanding over that country.”[744] Caulaincourt had duly reported the incident, Napoleon facetiously rejecting the idea with a dismissive smile.
Nor could Alexander forget the equally great humiliation suffered by the king and queen of Prussia (still taking refuge at Königsberg) when Napoleon had seized nearly half their country and people. The czar, loyally and emotionally bound to the Prussian royal family, had a long memory. What is more, the czarina, as a German, continued to hammer away at her son’s support of the man whom she referred to in public as “that Corsican parvenu!” and in private as “that bloody tyrant,” an exasperated Alexander finally riposting: “We are not hurrying to declare ourselves against him, for we risk losing everything if we do. Rather, let us affirm our alliance by letting him take us for granted. Let us gain some time in order to prepare ourselves for the day of reckoning. When the day comes, we will all vigorously assist in the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte.” Thus while openly proclaiming his support of Napoleon to Savary and Marshal Lannes — “I like Emperor Napoleon very much” — the festering resentments of the past were accruing. “Bonaparte considers me a fool,” the czar now wrote his sister Catherine from Erfurt. “But he who laughs last, laughs best.”