Napoleon Bonaparte

by Alan Schom

  I strongly suspect that at this moment they are working closely together to achieve a common goal. They now offer a real chance of success because they conform with the aspirations of an exhausted nation, after the excesses demanded of them for so long, a nation fearful of further demands requiring the destruction of their lives and fortunes, all for but one purpose: satisfying the personal ambitions of their master.

  A month later the Austrian ambassador confirmed that “Talleyrand and his friend Fouché are always together, most determined to seize the opportunity, should it arise, but apparently lacking the necessary courage to create it themselves.[750]

  The astute Metternich had got it right. They were literally parading their conspiratorial wares, their availability for an attempt to overthrow Napoleon, waiting for an offer of help from the right party to set events in motion. They had attempted to contact Murat, but at least one crucial secret missive had been intercepted. Had they actually been in the throes of a definite plot, however, they certainly would have acted quickly, stealthily, removing Bonaparte while he was still out of the country. Instead they had just flaunted themselves provokingly in public. All this Napoleon had just reread in the reports and letters gathered by his minions. He had worked himself up into a fury.

  “You are a thief, a coward, and disloyal,” Emperor Napoleon almost screamed at Talleyrand:

  You don’t believe in God. All your life you have failed to fulfill your responsibilities. You have deceived and betrayed everyone. Nothing is sacred to you. You would sell out your own father if you found it profitable. I have heaped benefits, veritable fortunes on you, and yet there is nothing you are incapable of carrying out against me. For the past ten months you have been betraying me, because, for whatever reason of your own, in the final analysis you feel that my affairs in Spain are not going well, thereby entitling you to tell whomever you please that you have always been against my seizure of that kingdom...Well, what are your alternative plans? What would you do instead? Let’s hear it!

  His temper clearly out of control, clenching his little fists, his darting eyes for once concentrating on the unflinching foreign minister, Napoleon went on before Talleyrand could reply: “Why, I could break you like a glass! I have the power to do so. But I scorn you too much for that. Why didn’t I have you hanged in public on the gates of the Carrousel! But there is still time for that. You are just common shit in silk stockings.” Trying to arouse a still unruffled, imperturbable Talleyrand, he shouted, “You did not tell me that the Duke de San Carlos [his prisoner at Valençay] was your wife’s lover?” Napoleon had finally hit a raw nerve. At last aroused, his mask falling momentarily, Talleyrand nonetheless responded calmly: “Quite, Sire. I did not think that such matters as that could possibly enhance either the glory of Your Majesty or of myself.” Taken unaware by this quip, Napoleon flushed, nonplussed. “This violent scene,” as the usually discreet Méneval referred to it, continued. But Talleyrand remained calm. “The very immobility of the unflappable gentleman, the utter lack of any sign of emotion, had incensed Napoleon all the more, to the point of forgetting his imperial dignity, by approaching Talleyrand and threatening to strike him.” After next briefly lashing out at Fouché, “the paroxysm of his wrath having reached a crescendo,” as Méneval put it, “then collapsed by the effort of its own excesses, and Napoleon, finding it futile to continue, left off with the warning: ‘Just you remember that in the event of a fresh attempted coup against me, regardless of the role you do or do not play in it, you will be among the first to be destroyed.’” Ten minutes later, as his carriage passed before the very Carrousel where Napoleon had threatened to have him hanged, Talleyrand at last commented, “What a pity that such a great man was so badly brought up!”

  Just to twist the knife a little more, the following day, during the usual weekend reception in the Throne Room, as Napoleon was greeting his ministers and state counselors, whom did he find before him as if nothing had transpired but Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord! Furious at the rebuked minister’s temerity, Napoleon greeted those to either side but deliberately avoided looking at him. When Talleyrand audaciously repeated the same thing one week later, Napoleon dismissed him as his grand chamberlain (replacing him with Count Anatole de Montesquiou) and ordered him not to appear at court again. Fouché, curiously enough, remained in the government for the time being, despite a report that he had burned a good many papers in his office during the preceding week. His days too, however, were clearly numbered. Napoleon had fired the shifty police minister once; he could do so again. As for Murat, hardly a longtime favorite of his brother-in-law, there was no documentary evidence of his complicity, at least not in his own hand, and of course he was “family.”

  By February 1809 Napoleon was hermetically sealed off from the rest of society by his self-imposed isolation at the Elysée and by the fact that he had no real friends with whom he could discuss matters apart from Duroc. Official matters could still be dealt with in the sessions of the State Council, but even chats with poor Monge were rare occasions now as Monge’s mind wandered more and more, he aging quickly ever since his illness and near death at Acre. To be sure, Cambacérès was always there, always faithful, always amusing, and ever dependable to run the government in his absence, but he was not one of Napoleon’s confidants. As for Josephine, he rarely spent five minutes with her, deliberately cutting her off as he prepared to make the official decision to divorce her and remarry. She withdrew to the realm of her ladies-in-waiting at the Tuileries, and at her beloved Malmaison, finally inured to the idea of severing marital ties with Napoleon and losing her official role in imperial society.

  Even after putting that dreadful scene with Talleyrand and Fouché behind him, for Napoleon back at the Elysée Palace the tension was growing over the dangerous military situation developing in central Europe. Despite the alarums to the contrary back in December, it was only on February 8, 1809, that the Auric Council in Vienna under Count Stadion, in concert with Austrian emperor Franz I, reached the decision to authorize a full-scale campaign against France, to avenge the humiliating wholesale theft of Austrian territory, peoples, and wealth in the previous wars, culminating with Austerlitz and the Peace of Pressburg, back in 1805-6. “The freedom of Europe has sought refuge beneath your banners,” Commander in chief Archduke Karl now addressed the Austrian army. “Soldiers, your victories will break her chains. Your German brothers who are now in the ranks of the enemy await their deliverance.” On April 9 Austrian forces under the emperor’s brother, Archduke Karl, thus once again crossed the River Inn into the territory of King Max Josef of Bavaria, and hence of the Confederation of the Rhine, this time without a declaration of war.

  On April 12 Napoleon learned by military “telegraph,” shutter-flag tower signals sent from Strasbourg, that Archduke Karl had entered Bavaria. The next day Napoleon and his powerful cavalry escort left the Elysée. Passing Strasbourg, Munich, Ludwigsburg, and Dillingen, they reached the temporary GHQ set up by Berthier at Donauwörth on April 18. The only recent good news Bonaparte had received from the peninsula prior to his departure was of Marshal Lannes’s success in taking the devastated city of Zaragoza on February 21, after one of the bloodiest and most destructive sieges in modern history.[751] Thus Lannes was now free to join him.

  On paper at least the French military situation in northern and central Europe looked good. In September 1808, on Napoleon’s orders, the war and interior ministers initiated the mobilization process for 80,000 more new conscripts (of the classes of 1806, 1807, 1808, and 1809). In December he had demanded another 80,000 recruits from the class of 1810. In January Napoleon issued call-up orders for yet an additional 110,000 conscripts. First eighteen-year-olds, then seventeen-year-olds, now sixteen-year-olds — an entire generation was being swept away. Meanwhile casualties in the peninsula would average 45-50,000 per year, year in, year out thereafter, and unceasing columns of younger and younger replacements were required to maintain the French army in Spain al
one. Clearly Napoleon had badly calculated there, or as General Marbot summed it up in later years, “Napoleon too far scorned the nations of the peninsula and believed that he need merely show some French troops in order to obtain what he wanted. This was a great mistake,” for which the youth of France were now paying in full measure.

  The new events in central Europe, particularly the growing Habsburg discontent with the onerous previous peace treaties and the stripping of Austrian territory and citizens, added to the hard fact that French armies of occupation surrounded the Austrians on three sides, and that the Empire had been forced to pay an enormous war indemnities claim by Napoleon, had humiliated and embittered the Austrians beyond the point of reconciliation. On February 23, 1809, Napoleon created the Army Corps of Observation of the Rhine. The situation was tense as Napoleon ordered Ambassador (General) Andréossy to leave Vienna. War, it seemed, was inevitable. French troops remained in northern and northeastern Europe, of course. Davout’s III Corps included some 80,000 men, while the Confederation of the Rhine member states provided more than 88,000 troops, and Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais theoretically had nearly 150,000 men available in all categories, although front-line troops comprised a small percentage of that figure. But no sooner had Napoleon marched tens of thousands of troops all the way from central Europe down to Spain in 1808, than by 1809 he was marching more than 100,000 of these same troops all the way back up to central Europe again. Among their number were some of the principal commanders in that theater, notably Marshals Lannes, Masséna, and Bessières (again at the head of the Imperial Guard). In addition Napoleon was enlarging he prestigious Imperial Guard by adding a new, less select unit, the Young Guard, taken from the raw conscripts (not from volunteers, as of yore). He was also preparing a new Reserve Corps of seventeen regiments.

  Napoleon thus reckoned that by May 29, 1809, he would be in a position to announce the creation of what he now called the Grand Army of Germany, expected to have an approximate effective strength of 174,000-177,000 men with which to confront the Austrians. To this number he could add 134,000 new recruits, Poles, Saxons, and some of Eugène’s troops. If several of the old commanders were still in place (some for the last time), most of the infantry units were composed of green recruits, many of them scrawny sixteen-year-olds. Clearly this was not to be the Grand Army of Austerlitz and Friedland. Even the artillery was much reduced, with only 311 guns available, dispersed among all units.

  The outlook of the French people, too, had altered, Rumblings were growing in all directions, as parents bemoaned the disappearance of 270,000 young men in less than a year’s time, this in a population of around 27 million. The conquered nations of Europe — which is to say the whole of Europe except Russia — suffering French armies of occupation were becoming more vehement in their protests, even diplomats openly expressing their discontent. “It is no longer the French people who are waging war,” Metternich wrote in December 1808, “it is Napoleon alone who is set on it...Even his army no longer wants this conflict.”

  Napoleon, who had hoped ultimately to count on a force of up to 177,000 men (including noncombatants, engineers, and the like), united four basic corps to fight a fresh Danube campaign that would probably concentrate in the vicinity of Ratisbon (Regensburg), hoping to catch the Austrians off guard as they gathered large forces to the south, expecting Napoleon to cross the mountains and alps into Italy. His aim was to destroy the major part of the Austrian army in one big battle before the rest of the Austrian forces could be brought up from Italy. The Auric Council, dictating Austrian war plans, had, however, decided (at Karl’s urging) to concentrate their forces along the Danube instead, and drive westward into Bavaria, to crush the Army of the Confederation of the Rhine before Napoleon himself could arrive from France to take command.

  In addition to his immediate army in Austria of perhaps 161,400, to the north Karl had Bellegarde’s smaller force of 48,000 men. Well to the south of Bavaria, in the vast area beginning with Lake Constance in the Vorarlberg and extending through the mountainous Tyrol all the way south to the Adige River and the northeast above Rovereto, anti-French revolt was prevalent in an area held by a mere 10,000 French troops. The French were very vulnerable. The one other large remaining Austrian force was commanded by the less competent archducal brother, Johann, with 76,200 men divided between Italy, at the northern end of the Adriatic between Venice and Trieste, and Dalmatia. Facing the latter was Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais’s immediate force of anywhere from 50,000 to 68,000 men, and Marshal Marmont’s isolated corps in Dalmatia.

  Ideally Napoleon’s intention was to strike hard and fast at Archduke Karl’s army before he could be reinforced by General Bellegarde and Archduke Johann. If all went well, after one major victory Bonaparte would drive along the Danube to take a defenseless Vienna once again, as in 1805. But this time around he was to have one or two surprises in store for him.

  In fact Napoleon’s mighty, monolithic Grand Army of Germany was neither as mighty nor as monolithic as the resplendent name indicated, nor was the situation secure even within the confines of Napoleon’s Empire. To the northeast the rumbling in Prussia had intensified since Napoleon had ordered the arrest of Friedrich Wilhelm’s state minister, Baron von Stein, for speaking out against him. His patriotic correspondence and speeches calling for the removal of the French had led to Bonaparte’s unilateral order to have the man seized and thrown into irons. Apprised of this plan, Stein fled safely across the frontier into Austria before the French could arrest him. He had no intention of becoming another Enghien, another Rumbold, another Palm. At the same time this attack against one of their own ministers irritated the Prussians all the more, hardening their resolve.

  In Hamburg, Kassel, and throughout “King Jérôme’s” newly created state of Westphalia, there were many grave problems, even well-developed plans for open uprisings. Napoleon had as usual demanded tens of millions in war contributions and separate sums for the maintenance of the army there. Jérôme himself already owed the French treasury more than 20 million francs for state expenses, not to mention millions to friends, local financiers, moneylenders, and businessmen to pay for his own tinsel court, with its outlandish new uniforms, new medals, and even a new currency, the gold “Jérôme” (which infuriated brother Napoleon, with his own coin of the realm in use everywhere else in the Empire). Jérôme’s continual, staggering expenses for his endless balls, parties, extravagances, jewelry, clothing, and castles were so far out of control as to bewilder even Napoleon. Then he fired the supervisors and state officers Napoleon had assigned to him and the administration of his court, and even declared a little war of his own against Napoleon’s customs officials, whom he defied by openly importing and trading in the prohibited English manufactured goods.

  This was the unsettling situation in Westphalia when, in April 1809, Napoleon appointed Jérôme commander of the new X Corps, ordering him “to keep an eye on everything happening in Dresden, Hannover, and Hamburg.” Though in theory a field command, this was one corps Napoleon wanted to keep far from the battlefield. The twenty-five-year-old Westphalian Jérôme naturally saw things differently, addressing his men: “Soldats! I shall always be there to lead you!” which no doubt was enough to frighten any Frenchman — or Westphalian. In any event one Colonel Dornberg, commanding the chasseurs of Jérôme’s Royal Guard, had by now had quite enough of the French occupation of his country and of this spoiled and marauding Jérôme Bonaparte, and planned a coup d’état that included invading Jérôme’s palace and sweeping the strutting young man from the stage. This was to be followed immediately by a major uprising of the region. (General Thiébault had had to put down an even earlier uprising when military governor of Kassel.) Other insurrections were planned throughout the rest of Westphalia. Learning of the plot just in time, Jérôme brought in French battalions to put it down, even as his stouthearted “wife” fled across the Rhine all the way to Strasbourg. The virus was everywhere in the air. One determined Major
Schill, for instance, quickly raised several hundred regular soldiers to aid in his attack on the Confederation of the Rhine. By the end of May, Schill, despite setbacks, had taken Rostock and Wismar with six thousand men and was stopped only when he was killed at Stralsund. Those two uprisings, and as well as another by Colonel Katt, had stirred the flames. The duke of Brunswick for one was still openly calling for the overthrow of the French. Napoleon repeated the same orders he had given in Hesse and Westphalia in 1807: “My intention is that the main village where the insurrection began shall be burnt, and that thirty of the ringleaders be shot. An impressive example is needed to contain the hatred of the peasantry for our soldiers.” He then increased the figure of hostages to be shot to sixty and finally to two hundred. He did the same, far more extensively, in the Kingdom of Naples, and in Spain and Portugal.

  In the case of Westphalia, Napoleon naturally blamed the whole thing on Jérôme. “Your kingdom has no police, no finances, and no organization. One does not found monarchies by living in the lap of luxury, by not lifting a finger. I quite expected that revolt to happen to you, and I hope it will teach you a lesson.” It did not, however. Instead it instilled in Jérôme a bitterness toward Napoleon that the emperor would one day have to pay for, at a moment when he badly needed his brother’s help.

  Nor was the situation more reassuring under King Louis Bonaparte in Holland, where Napoleon also found his orders rebuffed and rejected with a maddening regularity, not to mention his attempt to keep his own “advisers” in control there. In fact Louis’s recalcitrance marked a double setback for Napoleon, for unlike Jérôme, Louis, a competent, well-qualified officer, could have substantially aided Napoleon.