by Alan Schom
By February 21 Jérôme was becoming desperate and informed Paris that if Catherine were not invited to France he would send her to Stuttgart with its large French garrison. The ostensible urgency concerned the impending war and invasion, hence the need for the queen’s flight from Kassel. Napoleon was always suspicious of any request or action by any member of his family. Nevertheless finally, if reluctantly, he did give tentative approval, but on one condition only: “Immediately following the entry of Emperor Alexander and General Kutuzov into either Berlin or Dresden, you will arrange for the departure of the queen via Wesel, thence on to Paris, but not before that!” He was adamant. Jérôme, who saw none of the implied nuances, was delighted, as was silly Catherine. She could hardly wait to leave. She would be staying at Uncle Fesch’s enormous mansion in Paris. Jérôme, a little too precipitously, then announced in the Westphalian Monitor that “the Oueen was leaving for Paris at the invitation of His Imperial Majesty.” The very next day, March 9, Jérôme informed Napoleon that the enemy had entered Berlin “in force” and thus he was seeing off his good lady. Bidding adieu to his wife on the tenth, Jérôme ordered the coachman and accompanying military escort to avoid the more direct Frankfurt-am-Main route, now “encumbered by an army of one hundred thousand men,” sending her instead via Bonn, Aachen, and Brussels.
Upon receiving this news by special royal courier, Napoleon was incredulous. The Russian army already in Berlin, about to invade Westphalia! Impossible!
In reality the king of Westphalia simply wanted his wife not only out of his bed, but out of his castle, out of his kingdom, and out of his life, for he had found a lovely if ruthless replacement. The stunning Countess von Löwenstein-Wertheim was immediately installed as mistress in residence at the royal palace in Kassel. Everyone knew about it but Napoleon. When Jérôme had abandoned the battlefield in Poland in 1812, it had been to rush back to the charms and wiles of this lovely countess now “in her early thirties,” who had arrived here from Württemberg in 1808, along with an impoverished and redundant husband, not to mention three unwanted children.
By the autumn of 1812, the determined countess had already secured her position at the court of Westphalia. Determined as any Lady Macbeth to prepare a solid power base for herself, she had already “persuaded” the feckless Jérôme to remove several of his closest officers in favor of soldier-friends of her own choice, not to mention establishing an intricate network of spies riddling the royal palace. Jérôme was apparently happily unaware that his every word and action, even his private correspondence, was being reported back to the scheming Löwenstein. Needless to say Queen Catherine’s mail, even to her father, was not spared the countess’s rigorous scrutiny, and when the queen discovered this and complained, the matter was dismissed out of hand.
Catherine had grown more and more fearful of this intruder’s power, especially when she realized in the autumn of 1812 that her husband wanted to marry the hussy.
There were two more things Jérôme’s mistress desired before striking the final blow. First she wanted to be made a princess, which she did by inveigling Jérôme to persuade the king of Bavaria to raise the title of her father-in-law from “Count” to “Prince” von Löwenstein, which the obliging Max Joseph officially did, thereby automatically elevating the countess to princess. (That she had long ago abandoned her estranged husband, the good von Löwenstein, appeared immaterial, even to the king of Bavaria.) The next step was to get rid of Catherine, which she succeeded in doing with the scare of “the Russians are coming.” Deadlier than any enemy troops, the enemy had in fact already arrived.
Now it was simply a case of buying off the church with another annulment. Napoleon had it in his power to do anything, and after all the unfortunate pope was still a state prisoner at Fontainebleau. Given a few more months, perhaps a year, and she would be able to elevate her title once again, this time to queen.
Alas, here our Lady Macbeth made two slight miscalculations. Under no circumstances would the pope have obliged Jérôme with a divorce or annulment (Pius VII still considered him married to Elizabeth, his American wife), and in any case the pope was no longer on speaking terms with Napoleon or any other Bonaparte. The scheming Löwenstein’s second error was greater, for she did not know that in fact not only were the Russians indeed coming but so were the Prussians. Furthermore, the resplendent castle she so coveted in Kassel would soon be reduced to a heap of ashes and rubble (not by the marauding Cossacks but by overzealous royal servants feeding an overheated oven). Jérôme’s tinsel Kingdom of Westphalia would be swept off the map before the year was out. As for the ousted Catherine, she soon found herself first at Compiègne and then in Paris, an annoyed brother-in-law Napoleon footing all her bills thereafter.
“Sire, your army no longer exists,” Chief-of-Staff Berthier had informed Napoleon on his return to Paris in December 1812. And as Méneval acknowledged, “He [Napoleon] had to conquer continuously, absolutely, and in every direction, and his first real defeat on the battlefield would overnight transform his ‘allies,’ hitherto bound to him at gunpoint, into relentless enemies.”
On January 22, 1813, Karl August von Hardenberg, the Prussian chancellor who had been dismissed years before on Napoleon’s personal orders but since reinstated, gave a glittering dinner party in his Berlin mansion for the entire diplomatic corps and the senior French generals in the city, announcing casually that King Friedrich Wilhelm was about to leave Potsdam to assemble the new Prussian force required by the French. He was indeed raising a new army, but one with which to fight the French occupying force in his kingdom.
Deep-seated hatred of the French now appeared overtly in every direction. The hitherto dry, stuffy Professor Steffens, entering the amphitheater for his usual boring lecture at the University of Breslau, instead set aside his lecture notes and indignantly harangued his astonished audience on their patriotic duty to overthrow the French despots. He marched out of the entrance of the university with some two hundred students to volunteer for militia service at the local garrison. Similar scenes were repeated in Berlin and elsewhere.
On January 13 Alexander gave full authorization for his newly prepared war plans, while naming the outlawed (by Napoleon) Baron Stein to administer the districts of Prussia proper as they were recaptured by Russian troops. Beginning with Königsberg, he was to summon the Provincial Assemblies of East and West Prussia and with their approval prepare to arm and launch a new Landwehr, or militia. Full-throated voices, long choked off by the French, resounded loudly their determination, echoing from the banks of the Pregel to those of the Rhine itself.
Meanwhile the Prussian king had not only been successfully calling up new army units, but also conferring secretly at Breslau with Chancellor von Hardenberg and Gen. Gerhard von Scharnhorst, drafting an emergency defence pact that would be presented to Czar Alexander on February 28 at nearby Kalisch. Scharnhorst, who had directed the Royal Prussian Military Academy, also had his own personal account to settle with Napoleon Bonaparte. A veteran of both Auerstädt and Eylau, he had then been taken prisoner by the French at Lübeck. Since 1807 he had reorganized the Prussian army, boosting the morale of its officer corps to such a point that military leaders were now champing at the bit to attack the French.
The Treaty of Kalisch was fully approved by the czar and formed the basis of the new grand alliance, the coalition of powers that were gathering everywhere. The instrument called for “the total destruction of the enemy forces,” proclaiming “the great epoch of independence for all the States which shall be ready to seize it and free themselves from the yoke which France has imposed upon them for so many years.” The Kalisch Accords further called for full and immediate cooperation between Russian and Prussian armies, swearing both countries not to sign any separate peace treaties with the French. They had to work together if they were to succeed this time. Russia agreed to restore Prussia “to the same degree of power,” population, and land that that kingdom had held before the war of 1806, thoug
h the two countries differed on which portions of Poland would go to whom. On March 15 Alexander, Friedrich Wilhelm, Hardenberg, and Scharnhorst duly met again at Breslau to launch their new campaign, although in reality the troops of both armies were already on the march and had recaptured Berlin itself. Their goal was to bring in Austria as well, but — wary of Napoleon’s power — Vienna balked at the idea (while secretly in agreement with both the feelings and objectives of the new Allied Coalition).
On March 17 a wider Russo-Prussian Convention was signed at Breslau with very precise objectives, including the liberation of Germany from France, the destruction of the Confederation of the Rhine (as a French organization), and the summoning of all German princes to join them (or else suffer the loss of their territory). Friedrich Wilhelm closed this pivotal congress by creating the order of merit to be known as the Iron Cross, to be awarded to German patriots in the new campaign. The aging poet-philosopher Goethe cast the only shadow with his famous dictum: “Shake your chains as you will, the man [Napoleon] is too strong for you.” Neither Goethe nor his skepticism was present at Breslau that momentous day, however, as orders were issued to the general staffs to prepare full-scale attacks against the French.
Austria’s hands were still officially tied at this time, through its earlier military pact with Napoleon. Nevertheless it was slowly coming around to the realization that it would soon have to change sides and, indeed, had already taken one initial step that had very much upset Napoleon — concluding a separate armistice with the Russians back in January 1813. As a result Emperor Franz I now offered to act as mediator of a peace accord between France and its opponents. Napoleon immediately countered this by dispatching Ambassador Narbonne to Vienna to hamstring those negotiations, an act not appreciated by the Austrians, even as Alexander and Friedrich Wilhelm were advancing with their troops and reaching Dresden. The Austrians would eventually join the Allies, but only when they were sure that this time they could not lose. One of the key factors soon to render this possible was Great Britain’s joining the Russo-Prussian Kalisch Accords officially signed at Reichenbach, Silesia, on June 14-15. The British were to pay £666,666 per month as a special subsidy to Prussia, another £1 million total to Russia, while guaranteeing a separate £5 million war chest with both Russia and Prussia. Independently of this, on March 3, the British government had signed another defense pact at Stockholm with Crown Prince Bernadotte, ensuring a Swedish declaration of war against Napoleon and the landing of up to thirty thousand men in Swedish Pomerania, in exchange for another British subsidy. A new coalition was formed.
Napoleon of course had made it perfectly clear to Ambassador Narbonne that he was not interested in peace or concessions. It was to be continued war. Hortense’s estimation, given earlier to Schwarzenberg in perfectly good faith, assuring him of Napoleon’s peaceful intentions, had proved 100 percent incorrect. Apparently having forgotten the five hundred thousand men of the Grande Armée left behind in Russia less than a year before, he was now bent on a war of annihilation.
Bonaparte did not seem to grasp the reality of the rapid disintegration of his imperial holdings throughout Europe. Warsaw had fallen to the Russians back in February, Rapp was isolated at Danzig with up to thirty thousand men, and on March 4 Prince Eugène and the French army were forced to evacuate Berlin. Hamburg was the next to fall, Gen. Carra St.-Cyr forced to retreat on March 12, as the Freikorps moved in. The next day Prussia declared war on France, catching Napoleon completely off guard. He who was so accustomed to deciding when a campaign would begin was not ready. Hold the Oder, he instructed his commanders, if at all possible, while Davout was ordered to head for Hamburg to undo the damage done there. But the bad news continued. General Reynier’s southern army had been forced to evacuate the Saxon capital of Dresden, which was occupied by Field Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army on March 27. Napoleon, who had planned on driving to the Vistula, was instead fighting just to hold the Elbe.
That Bonaparte remained in Paris as long as he did, given the grave situation, is puzzling. The usually decisive — indeed impetuous — commander did not set out from the French capital until April 15, after Warsaw, Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden all were lost. This Saxon campaign, as it was to be known, was to prove one of the longest and most costly ever fought. Time, along with all the other factors, wras favoring the new Allied Coalition against him. Although determined to hold the Elbe, he could no longer count on his once mighty Confederation of the Rhine, already in the throes of rebellion. His revised plan was to let the Allies “penetrate toward Bayreuth” while Napoleon at the head of his main army headed for Dresden, now in Prussian hands.
Lacking anything like accurate intelligence on Allied numbers and positions, Napoleon spent a week at Mainz gleaning what he could, further revising his plan of operations and issuing final orders.
On April 25 Napoleon moved on to Erfurt, preparatory to gathering his armies near Merseburg and Naumburg along the Saale River, just west of Leipzig. Combined, Napoleon’s Army of the Elbe and the Army of the Main totaled about 179,000 men, but with a very small cavalry and thus far only 372 guns (he had lost his entire cavalry in Russia, not to mention more than one thousand artillery pieces). The French still held two bridgeheads over the Elbe at Magdeburg and Wittenberg, however, and they had to be held at all costs.
Bonaparte had placed his northern army of 58,000 men under the command of Prince Eugène, with Latour-Maubourg’s cavalry and part of the new Guard, with orders to deploy along the Elbe as far north as Magdeburg. Meanwhile Davout’s independent command of 20,000 men and Sébastiani’s cavalry of 14,000 men were to secure the far northwest to the Baltic. At this time Napoleon had actually with him only about 121,000 men (including Oudinot’s, Bertrand’s, Marmont’s, and Ney’s corps, and most of the Guard, perhaps 15,000 or so, commanded by Bessières, Mortier, and Soult).
The Allies were not as well coordinated and surprisingly still fielded only about 106,000 men, even as late as April. The Russian army was temporarily the largest, while the dying Kutuzov was replaced as commander in chief by Wittgenstein (who had defeated the French time and again the year before). Their four corps were deployed along the Elbe opposite Magdeburg down as far as Halle. To the south of them stood Blücher’s Prussian army, near Leipzig.
By May 1, 1813, Napoleon’s main force reached a point just south of Lützen, opposite Wittgenstein’s Russians (whose numbers had increased), giving them five corps, though their precise whereabouts still remained unknown at French GHQ. Marching on the road to Leipzig on May 1, Napoleon was startled to hear heavy guns and intensive small-arms fire from between Lützen and — when he checked his map — the sleepy village of Kaja.
It had all been such a surrealistic nightmare ever since the flight from Moscow, their narrow escape over the Berezina, the humiliation of having to flee in disguise as Caulaincourt’s secretary, with packs of wolves literally snarling around them as their terrified horses pulled them mile after mile across the frozen wastes of Poland, to the Elbe, the Rhine, and the Seine, Napoleon’s body so shrunken beneath those strange clothes that neither his concierge nor his own wife had recognized him at first. His thoughts were only to avenge himself with another army, one as large as the one he had just obliterated from the face of the earth. And what a nightmare it had been assembling this totally new army.
In September 1812, through another special senatus consultum, Napoleon had called for 137,000 conscripts from the class of 1813, and another 78,000 National Guards were assigned to active military duty with the army. On January 11, 1813, he had called for an additional 100,000 men from the class of 1812, who, through various loopholes, had earlier evaded service. In February, Napoleon ordered the conscription of 150,000 young men from the Class of 1814. He transferred 16,000 naval gunners to the army, then stripped most of the ships of the line of their crews and added them to the army as well. Still not satisfied, on April 3 Napoleon drafted a further 80,000 men from the classes of 1807-12, plus 90,000
more from the class of 1814. A special 10,000-man Gardes d’Honneur was drafted from the wealthy and well-connected young men who had escaped military service by influence or the purchase of a substitute or two. Napoleon was desperate: He would take anyone, even old rejects — except brother Jérôme.
When the king of Westphalia had volunteered his services for the forthcoming campaign, Napoleon had instructed Berthier:
Inform the king that he will never be given another command in the French Army if: (1) he will not first acknowledge his disgraceful conduct last year by leaving the army without permission...and (2) if in being reintegrated he does not agree to take orders from every marshal of my army...and if he will not further agree to holding the rank of general de division and no higher...For he must realize that war is a profession, which one must learn and prepare for, and that as the king has never even been in a major battle, he therefore is not fit to command.
Jérôme did not reply.
After calling up every conscript he could think of, even some old, crippled soldiers who had already served their long years, and putting the navy in mothballs (because of the lack of crews, also conscripted), he was left with trying to find cavalry and especially mounts, finally reduced to drafting the nation’s mounted gendarmerie.
Then there was the problem of actually rounding up French conscripts themselves, so violently had public reaction turned against Napoleon’s continuous, fatal wars. By 1813 there were at least forty thousand deserters or men who had escaped the recruiters’ bayonets, roaming the French countryside in gangs, terrorizing one and all, as they desperately attempted to flee the glorious call to arms, to avoid the fate of the hundreds of thousands of corpses frozen beneath those immaculate white fields of snow in Poland and Russia.