by Alan Schom
But in other respects the celebration differed from that of his coronation five and a half years earlier. Large numbers of prisoners were not freed from the prisons this time — Ouvrard and his partners, Séguin and Desprès, still behind bars and stone walls of debtors’ prison, Ste.-Pélagie, falsely accused by Napoleon of owing the state twelve million francs. Nor after the initial announcement on the twentieth were there large crowds or much deeply felt cheering by the public. Their numbers had been diminished over the years by the permanent state of warfare, hundreds of thousands buried but not forgotten in foreign lands from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Napoleon could well rejoice over the birth of a son, while hundreds of thousands were mourning the deaths of theirs. Nor were the popular medals with the effigies of the emperor and empress distributed among the public this time, not even lead or tin replicas; the few medallions of gold, silver, or bronze struck by the mint were limited solely for the princes, princesses, and members of the court. Nor did anything like the vast number of congratulations seen in December 1804 flood the Tuileries this time. Official documents were received, of course, from the capitals of occupied Europe and from some Masonic lodges, but nothing from the French people. There were few cheerful songs in the streets, or even the theater. To be sure, the official delegations made their appearances, the ambassadors extraordinary were dispatched — Prince von Hatzfeld from Berlin, Chernichev from St. Petersburg, Prince Karl from Vienna, from the kings of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg, from El Rey José, delegations from the Senate, the Corps Législatif, and the nation’s university and magistracy. But strangely enough — and no doubt it struck everyone at the time — representative delegations from Napoleon’s ultimate base of power, his army, were deliberately excluded from the ceremonies, apart from the Paris military governor’s staff officers. Even the delegation dispatched by the Imperial Guard was not admitted. And then of course there was that slight problem with his family, for when Napoleon named sister Caroline Murat as one of his son’s godmothers, requiring her presence at the child’s baptism at Nôtre-Dame, the pouting Caroline declined to participate. She had been brooding ever since the interloper, Marie-Louise, had arrived in France and was devastated when she learned of the new empress’s pregnancy. The birth of their son sent Caroline into temper tantrums, for Joachim would never be named as Napoleon’s successor now. Nevertheless Napoleon repeatedly extended the invitation to come to the Paris ceremony, finally losing his patience and removing her name altogether as godmother. No one ever crossed Napoleon Bonaparte and got away with it.
What was happening in France? What was happening to Napoleon? Everyone had noted the changes in him since his exhausted return from the Wagram campaign at the end of 1809. He had gained weight; he had withdrawn from society; and most strangely he had repeatedly procrastinated leaving for the battlefields of Spain, where his 280,000 men were awaiting him. Was Napoleon tired of war? But even as Napoleon was deliriously celebrating the birth of his first legitimate heir, proclaiming loudly, “Now begins the finest period of my reign,” the growing rumble of marching boots and the rat-a-tat-tat of distant drums were already faintly heard far to the east, beyond the Oder, the Vistula, and the Niemen, in a new theater of war at once so vast and limitless as to reduce the voracious Iberian battlefield to insignificance in comparison.
Chapter Thirty-Three – Russia
‘As a Roman emperor once said: the body of a dead enemy always smells good.’
With his invasion and annexation of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and the Duchy of Oldenburg, in December 1810 and February 1812, Napoleon had at once ensured a war to the death with Russia, and eventually with the rest of occupied Europe. With the French closing of the very last commercial outlets with England, indeed with the outside world, Czar Alexander realized he had no choice. Although in full sympathy with Alexander, Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria declined to join Russia openly in opposing French armies of occupation in 1812, if only through fear of further rapacious French reprisals.
Czar Alexander had finally retaliated against the French with his famous decree of December 31, 1810, placing high import duties on all French goods, chiefly luxury items, while reopening Russian ports to British trade. “Is that what Russia calls an alliance and a state of peaceful relations?” Napoleon asked Champagny. When Napoleon then ordered Marshal Davout, on one of his rare visits to Paris, suddenly back to Germany, the Russian ambassador advised St. Petersburg immediately: “Marshal Davout’s abrupt departure has produced quite a sensation here. It is considered the automatic harbinger of war. Two hundred cannon have already been shipped across the Rhine to Wesel.”
Although Alexander dissimulated to Ambassador Caulaincourt, protesting his devotion to Napoleon, all the while he was preparing for the inevitable break. Napoleon for his part did not mince words. “Your Majesty’s last ukase [of December 31] both in essence and form was specifically directed against France,” Napoleon wrote St. Petersburg on February 28, 1811, “and therefore in the view of Europe and England, our alliance no longer exists.” As for Poland, it was French territory, Napoleon warned, and “I therefore have the right to insist that no one interefere in what I do beyond the Elbe,” even as he received reports of fresh Russian fortifications being raised along the River Dvina.
I am amazed by this new evidence and by the realization that Your Majesty is quite disposed — once circumstances permit — to come to an arrangement with England. As far as I am concerned, that is equivalent to igniting a state of war between our two empires. Your Majesty’s abandoning of our alliance and burning of the Tilsit Conventions would inevitably lead to war within the next few months.
Although Alexander continued to dissimulate his protestations of friendship to French Ambassador Caulaincourt, it was simply to buy time. Secretly the czar was confiding to the other occupied European powers straining under the harsh French yoke, “I am sick and tired of Napoleon’s continued meddling in our affairs. I have 200,000 good troops ready, and another 300,000 men in my militia, with which to challenge him, and we shall then see.”
“Order that this operation [for increased arms manufacture] be executed with the greatest secrecy,” Bonaparte informed War Minister Clarke on February 18, 1811, instructing him to prepare for war with Russia, and to have guns ready by May. “They must be able to be shipped within twenty-four hours’ notice” to the army munitions depots at Mainz. “There is no doubt about it now,” commented Comte Charles de Damas on March 22, 1811, “that Napoleon wants to wage war on Russia.” “I am not so stupid as to think that it is Oldenburg [the property of the husband of the czar’s favorite sister, Catherine] that troubles you,” Napoleon warned Russian Minister Prince Kurakin on August 15, 1811. “I see that Poland is the real question. You believe I have designs on Poland. However I begin to think that you wish to seize it for yourselves. No! If your army were encamped on the very heights of Montmartre itself, I would not cede an inch of the Warsaw territory, not a village, not a windmill...Am I to be forced into abandoning the [Continental] System I have set up [because of you?]...I will not yield an inch of Poland. Nothing that has been annexed to France shall be taken from her.” The following day, August 16, Napoleon was convening a ministerial conference in which he outlined his intended campaign against Russia.
“We are in a state of highest alert,” Czar Alexander wrote his sister Catherine on November 10, 1811. “The situation is so delicate, so tense, that hostilities might break out at any moment now.” A month later he concluded, “It seems that blood must flow yet again.” “You know that I have eight hundred thousand men, and that every year another two hundred-fifty thousand conscripts more are placed at my disposal,” Napoleon bullied Prince Kurakin in Paris. As far as Alexander was concerned, “The moment a French army passes the River Oder, for I can no longer hold the Elbe, I believe I have the right to consider war to have been declared against me, and Divine Providence alone will decide the outcome.”
Alexander was attending a ball at the estate
of Gen. Baron Levin Bennigsen on June 24, 1812, when a special courier arrived with a dispatch informing the czar that the French army had just crossed the Niemen, the Russian frontier. Despite the blatant invasion of sovereign Russian territory, Alexander decided to make one last effort to save the peace. He wrote to Napoleon:
Monsieur mon frère, I learned yesterday that, in spite of the loyalty I have demonstrated in maintaining my engagements with Your Majesty, his troops have crossed the Russian frontier. If Your Majesty has no wish to spill the blood of his people over a misunderstanding of this nature, and if he agrees to withdraw his troops from Russian territory, I shall choose to overlook the matter, thereby allowing an accommodation to remain in effect between us...It lies within Your Majesty’s hands alone to spare mankind the calamities of another war.
“I have undertaken great preparations, and my forces are three times greater than yours,” an uncompromising Napoleon wrote back from his new GHQ at Vilna, Lithuania. “At this time, with the whole of Europe behind me, how do you expect to be able to stop me?”
The orders had already gone out to Napoleon’s family and the imperial command to prepare for war. Jérôme was named commander of the VIII Westphalian Corps. But Louis, living in his Austrian exile writing poetry, would not take part, while brother Joseph assured Julie and Napoleon of his intention of holding the fort in Spain. Brother Lucien of course was happily ensconced in his comfortable English estate, protected by English guns. Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, still in temporary administrative control of the Kingdom of Italy, received his marching orders from Major General Berthier on April 30, 1812, to join the Army of Italy, as the new IV Corps of the Grande Armée in Poland. “It is sad for me to see you go to war again, but I hope that God will protect the good son of a good and tender mother,” Josephine now wrote. Her sentiments were shared by hundreds of thousands of mothers all across Europe.
The situation regarding the final member of the Bonaparte clan, brother-in-law Joachim Murat, king of Naples, however, was far more delicate. Joachim and Caroline Bonaparte, who had separated after numerous acrimonious quarrels, especially concerning her latest open liaison, this time with Prince von Metternich, now agreed to a reconciliation, for public consumption at any rate, as Murat desperately needed Caroline to intercede with Napoleon. Napoleon was openly threatening to annex Naples, just as he was threatening Joseph in Spain and had already done in the case of Holland. The situation had been aggravated on June 14, 1811, when Murat, who had been firing high French officials personally placed in Naples by Napoleon, decreed that all French generals and officials serving in his new kingdom had to drop their French citizenship and instead become naturalized Neapolitan citizens under his own rule. That was the last straw. Napoleon immediately reinstated most of the key officials peremptorily removed by Murat, topped by an embarrassing slap in the face: a superseding decree from Paris. The Kingdom of Naples, Napoleon reminded King Joachim,
comprises the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies [Naples] an integral part of Our Empire, thereby considering any prince ruling that state automatically to be a French citizen...and that that particular prince [Murat] has only been placed, and maintained upon, that throne thanks to efforts of our people [Napoleon’s French Army], and thus we have decreed and do hereby decree: ARTICLE I. All French citizens are [automatically] citizens of the Two Sicilies. ARTICLE II. The Decree of 14 June [1811] by the king of this country [Murat] is not applicable.
Rumors spread like wildfire throughout Paris and Naples that the arrogant Murat had finally gone too far and would shortly be removed, as Napoleon announced the official dissolution of the Army of Naples, replacing it with a French-run Armée d’Observation.
A panic-stricken Murat made up with Caroline, who reluctantly left Metternich’s bed to trudge over to the Tuileries to intercede with Napoleon on Joachim’s behalf. She had no intention of losing her kingdom in the process. Napoleon reluctantly gave in, on the condition that Murat apologize and formally declare himself a vassal of Napoleon, and hence his willingness to join him in the forthcoming war with Russia. Murat capitulated, whining and as innocent and subservient as Soult had been in Spain when that marshal had declared his interest in seizing a kingdom for himself in Portugal. “And what, Sire, have ‘they’ done to so alarm you about my feelings to you?” Murat cheekily replied.
How could I not tremble at the very thought, when in fact all my thoughts and efforts have had but one sole purpose, that of never acting contrary to your vast projects, indeed, quite the reverse, to second you entirely?...Your Majesty dishonors his brother-in-law, his lieutenant, by removing him as commander of his own troops, by accusing him before the whole of France as being anti-French...To my dying breath I shall be, and have always been, your faithful friend. There is nothing more I can add. I am so distressed by all this.
Murat would now behave himself, and Napoleon could employ his badly needed sword in Russia, and on May 12, 1812, King Joachim duly set out as commander of the four cavalry corps of the Grande Armée, and Caroline could return to the comfort of Metternich’s perfumed featherbed.
In May 1811 Napoleon had recalled Ambassador and Grand Equerry Armand de Caulaincourt from St. Petersburg. Caulaincourt was a fool, he said, hoodwinked by Alexander, whom he fawned over. He believed all the czar’s professions of peaceful intentions toward France. That Napoleon had in turn misled both the czar and Caulaincourt through his belligerent annexations of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and the Hanseatic states was quite another matter, of course. Not so for an embarrassed Caulaincourt, however, who requested to be replaced as French ambassador to St. Petersburg. Technically basing his request on grounds of failing health due to the harsh Russian climate, he in fact had been caught between the czar’s anger over the recent French annexations, and by Napoleon’s own displeasure with the czar’s breaking with the Continental System and reopening of the Baltic to English trade. Napoleon, who never permitted anyone to resign from his personal service, ignored Caulaincourt’s request and instead immediately “recalled” him.
Then, on his return to Paris on June 5, Caulaincourt had been summoned to St.-Cloud to receive an imperial dressing-down over his failure to have properly represented France’s vested interests there, vis-à-vis the deteriorating relations between the two great empires. Caulaincourt, a most reasonable man, tried in vain to reason with Napoleon. “Given these circumstances, my duty is to plead with Your Majesty [to understand the situation],” he began. “I am neither approving nor criticizing. I am merely recounting all the events that have transpired. Your Majesty will then judge for himself if all his criticisms of my actions were well founded after all.” But instead Napoleon harangued him, Caulaincourt commenting, “As regards the unjust harshness of a sovereign who can never admit he is in the wrong, I refused to accept any personal complaint against me,” something Bonaparte was quite unaccustomed to since the days of Talleyrand. “The Emperor was angrier than ever at me.” For all his ranting and raving, however, he did not dismiss Caulaincourt, though his presence was not always tolerated at court. Napoleon secretly respected a man who stood his ground and was not intimidated by him, and a courageous Caulaincourt held firm to the very end.
By the summer of 1811, Napoleon’s actions had again altered dramatically. He shed his recent lethargy and left behind the easygoing interlude that had begun following his marriage to Marie-Louise the previous year and lasted until the birth of his son in March, as a locust leaves behind its old shell on the bark of an elm. Suddenly there was new action, new tension, acrimonious political discussions with his ministers and the State Council, and above all a fresh flow of orders to War Minister Clarke. The sleeping giant was awake again.
Napoleon was restless, some thought even unhinged or at least unnaturally frantic. The languid days of domestic bliss and early fatherhood were over. He was constantly on the move now. The empress could not keep up with this stranger, nor could his ministers, or his enormous staff, or the commander of the Imperial Guard
responsible for providing the military escorts for his frequently unplanned movements. On July 10 Napoleon moved from St.-Cloud to the Trianon Palace, then back to St.-Cloud. On August 6 he suddenly announced his departure for Rambouillet, and on the fourteenth he rushed back to the Tuileries, then to St.-Cloud, then back to the Trianon. Just as abruptly he set out for the Palace of Compiègne, followed in September by a sudden journey to Boulogne. Massive stores of provisions and elaborate palace personnel had to be ready at all these establishments, for Napoleon flew into a rage when on a whim he left one palace for another only to find nothing in readiness for him and his suite.
After inspecting the massive batteries and fortifications at Boulogne, Bonaparte suddenly ordered a tour of the north, arriving at Ostend at three o’clock in the morning, where he transferred to a ship and sailed up the coast to Flushing, then off to Middelburg, then to Terneuzen, next up the Scheldt to the primary French naval shipyards and fortifications at Antwerp where he was joined by a bewildered Marie-Louise at one o’clock in the morning of September 30. (Life in the Schönbrunn had never been like this.) In rapid succession over the next few days he visited Willemstad, Hellevoetsluis, Hogplat, Dordrecht, Gorkum, and Utrecht. On the seventh and eighth he carried out a full military review at La Bruyere. From there to Amersfoort, Amsterdam, the Helder, then touring the new series of forts at Texel before continuing to Alkmaar, Haarlem, Muiden, Naarden, and on to Katwijk, Leiden, Scheveningen, and The Hague, concluding his lightning tour with Bonn, Liège, and Compiègne and reaching St.-Cloud again on November 11. Not since Napoleon had suddenly announced his intention of building a couple of thousand boats and hundreds of fortresses preparatory to invading England had anyone seen him in such a frenzy. Clearly it was to be war again, as never before.