Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Masséna’s wholly justified complaints by late July – that his troops hadn’t been paid for six months, that thousands of rations had to be abandoned for lack of wagons, that one-third of the artillery had to be left behind in Spain for lack of mules, that the promised reinforcements hadn’t arrived, and so on – fell on Berthier’s unsympathetic ears. Nonetheless, in less than a month Masséna had pursued Wellington to within 20 miles of Lisbon, where he came up against the formidable defensive Lines of Torres Vedras and was forced to halt. With heavy guns and large-scale reinforcement, Masséna might have found the weakest place of the Lines to storm, but he did not have them. Napoleon assumed that Masséna’s much larger force would easily overcome Wellington’s 25,000 men, entirely failing to take into account the additional 25,000 Portuguese serving with Wellington. Having never seen the Lines himself he underestimated their defensive capacity, until it was explained to him on November 24 by General Maximilien Foy.

  To visit the Lines today, especially in those places where they are being expertly restored to their 1810 condition, one appreciates the almost insurmountable problem that Masséna faced. Seven thousand Portuguese labourers had constructed no fewer than three lines across the 29-mile Lisbon peninsula, including 165 fortified redoubts, defended by 628 guns.96 The Royal Navy established a telegraph system for rapid communication along each of them and the flanks were covered by gunboats anchored in the River Tagus and the sea.

  Napoleon might deride Wellington as a mere ‘sepoy general’ in the Moniteur, but in private he was impressed with Wellington’s ruthless scorched-earth policy on the retreat to Torres Vedras, telling Chaptal: ‘In Europe only Wellington and I are capable of carrying out these measures. But there is this difference between him and me, which is that France … would blame me, while England will approve of him.’97 It was true; Wellington has not generally been criticized for the scorched-earth tactics he employed in Portugal, while Napoleon has been castigated for using much the same methods in the Holy Land, Prussia and later Russia. By January 1811, reinforced only by Drouet and 6,000 men, Masséna’s army at Santarém outside the Lines was starving, deserting and marauding. Masséna stayed until the retreat could not be put off any longer, and on the night of March 5, erecting scarecrows stuffed with straw to resemble sentries, he left Santarém. ‘He is used up,’ Napoleon said of Masséna, ‘he isn’t fit to command four men and a corporal!’98

  In May 1810 the heir to the sixty-one-year-old King Charles XIII of Sweden died.* The Swedes alighted upon the idea of offering the future throne to Bernadotte, who had been kind to Swedish prisoners-of-war during the Eylau campaign. They clearly didn’t mind that their future monarch was a former rabid republican who had had ‘Death to Kings’ tattooed on his chest, and assumed that after their defeat by Russia and the loss of Finland, having a French marshal on their throne – especially one related to Napoleon by marriage – would bring them a useful alliance.

  Yet, as we have seen, Napoleon and Bernadotte were not at all on good terms, as the Swedes assumed they were. ‘The vanity of that man is excessive,’ Napoleon had written to Fouché from Vienna the previous September. ‘I’ve ordered the War Minister to recall him. His talent is very mediocre. I’ve no kind of faith in him. He lends a willing ear to all the intriguers who inundate this great capital … He almost made me lose the battle of Jena; he behaved feebly at Wagram; he wasn’t at Eylau, although he might have been, and he didn’t do all he might have done at Austerlitz.’99 It was all true, and he might have added plenty more slights going back beyond Brumaire – Bernadotte had married Désirée, after all. Yet when the Swedes, who could have been invaluable in any future war against Russia, asked Napoleon’s permission to offer Bernadotte the (eventual) crown, he agreed, albeit hesitantly enough to irritate Bernadotte, who was still smarting over the sarcastic words directed at him during the battle of Wagram.

  Tsar Alexander chose to regard Bernadotte’s move to Sweden, like the spurning of Anna Pavlovna, as an insult and a provocation. Only in the army was the apparent meritocracy of the elevation admired. ‘The example of Bernadotte turned all heads,’ recalled Captain Blaze; ‘we all fancied that we had a sceptre in the sheath of our sword. A soldier had become a king; each of us thought we might do the same.’100

  On June 3, 1810, Napoleon dismissed Fouché for conducting unauthorized secret peace negotiations with Britain. ‘I’m aware of all the services which you have rendered me,’ he wrote, ‘and I believe in your attachment and your zeal; however it is impossible for me to allow you to keep your portfolio. The post of minister of police requires an absolute and entire confidence, and that can no longer exist because you have compromised my tranquillity and that of the State.’101 Employing the banker Gabriel Ouvrard (who used invisible ink in his correspondence with Fouché), the British banker Sir Francis Baring and other intermediaries, Fouché had indulged in detailed peace negotiations with the British foreign secretary, Lord Wellesley, Wellington’s elder brother, without Napoleon’s knowledge.102

  Napoleon was understandably furious when he discovered that Wellesley had been led to believe that Fouché was acting on his behalf, which would have meant ‘a total change in all my political relations’, as well as ‘a stain upon my character’. Napoleon was hoping to force Britain to sue for peace through the pressure of the Continental System, but this unauthorized démarche could only have sent a mixed message to London. Fouché’s intrigues, Napoleon complained, meant that ‘I am obliged to keep up a constant supervision, which fatigues me.’103 He sent Fouché to Rome as governor, and appointed his rival Savary as police minister.104 Ouvrard was sent to the debtors’ prison of Saint-Pélagie, where he stayed for three years playing charades and whist in conditions of some luxury.105

  By July 1810 Napoleon appreciated that the Continental System was not working as he had hoped, but rather than scrap it altogether he decided to modify it, introducing ‘Le Nouveau Système’, which permitted the selling of special licences that allowed certain individuals and companies to trade with Britain in a number of named products. The sale of these was open to abuse – Bourrienne skimmed off a vast fortune selling them in Hamburg, for example – and rife with accusations of favouritism. Non-French manufacturers within the Empire were rightly convinced that the granting of licences tended to be skewed towards the French, and they deeply resented it. Between 1810 and 1813, Bordeaux received 181 general licences and 607 one-off permits to trade with America, for example, against Hamburg’s 68 and 5 respectively.106 Even the treasury minister Mollien suspected that Napoleon ‘wanted to take a part of the monopoly of [trade with] England through a system of licences, at the expense of the Continent’.107 By April 1812 Napoleon was writing to Berthier to say that ‘as there is no customs service in Corsica, there are no objections to sugar and coffee going in, without permitting it however, but by turning a blind eye’.108

  Bureaucracy plagued the licensing system as further decrees were promulgated over the years. In the area between Antwerp on the Channel and Lorient on the Bay of Biscay for example, one-sixth of all exports had to be of wine, with the rest composed of brandies, seeds (except grass) and non-prohibited French merchandise. The area of the Charente Inférieure could export grains, but half of exports there too had to be wines and brandies. Ships from ports between Ostia and Agde could go to nine named ports in the Levant and Spain, but no others. Further circulars in July 1810 authorized prefects to refuse licences to non-French vessels.109 Different types of licences costing different amounts authorized different companies from different departments to trade in different prescribed commodities with different foreign ports. The rules were constantly changing, seemingly capriciously, with endless clauses and sub-clauses covering every likely combination and permutation. Napoleon oversaw all this with his customary attention to minutiae. ‘Who authorized the admission of the Conciliateur which arrived on Genoa on July 11th with a cargo of ebony?’ he asked the excise chief in Paris on August 14.

  The R
ussians considered Le Nouveau Système to be an outrage against them, since they were still banned from trading with Britain, whereas French manufacturers seemed to be evading the blockade. A sign of how far Alexander had come from the friendliness he had shown Napoleon at Tilsit, and even the good nature of Erfurt, may be judged from the visit in July 1810 of Frederick William’s aide-de-camp, Baron Friedrich von Wrangel, who announced the death of Queen Louise from damaged lungs and a heart polyp. ‘I swear to you to avenge her death,’ a clearly upset Alexander told Wrangel, absurdly blaming Napoleon’s behaviour towards the queen at Tilsit for her demise, ‘and her murderer is to pay for it.’110 He added that he was rearming fast, not in order to help Napoleon invade India, as one unfounded rumour went, or even to prosecute the wars he was currently fighting against both Turkey and Persia, but to fight France. ‘By 1814,’ he said, ‘I can, according to my most exact calculations, enter the lists with a well-equipped army of 400,000. With 200,000 I will cross the Oder, while another 200,000 will cross the Vistula.’111 He added that he expected Austria and Prussia to rise up at that point, and follow his lead.

  While Napoleon expected family obligations to keep Austria in France’s political orbit, they didn’t prevent him from dethroning his own brother Louis on July 3, 1810, for putting his Dutch subjects’ interests over those of the French Empire, especially with regard to conscription and the Continental System. ‘In spite of all his faults I cannot forget that I brought him up as a son,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise.112 ‘When I was a lieutenant of artillery,’ he told Savary, ‘I raised him on my pay; I was sharing what bread I had with him, and this is what he does to me!’113 Holland was annexed and run as a series of imperial departments, while Louis went into exile in various Austrian spa towns, where he had hot baths in grape-skins and wrote anti-Napoleonic tracts under his cadet title, the Comte de Saint-Leu.

  Napoleon was not naive about his worsening relations with Alexander. In early August he wrote to the King of Saxony, asking him secretly to strengthen his armaments and in particular to reinforce the Polish fortress of Modlin against a possible Russian attack. ‘My relations are very good,’ he said of Alexander, ‘but one must be prepared.’114 With Russia seemingly coming to terms with Turkey, Napoleon told Caulaincourt to warn Alexander that although he was content for Russia to take Moldavia and Wallachia and the left bank of the Danube, ‘Russia would violate her agreements with me should she keep anything on the right bank, and if she interfered with the Serbians’, because ‘a single place kept by Russia on the right bank of the Danube would destroy the independence of Turkey, and would entirely change the state of affairs.’115 Napoleon asked for intelligence on Russian troop movements, and by mid-October he was starting to strengthen his forces in Danzig and northern Germany, while the Russians fortified the Dvina and Berezina rivers. The number of flashpoints between the two superpowers was multiplying dangerously.

  The year 1810 had been a mixed one for Napoleon; although his Empire had reached the zenith of its power and territorial extent, he had made mistakes that boded ill for its future. Most of these errors had been unforced, and many of his problems, we can now see, were self-inflicted. He need not have quarrelled publicly with the Pope, certainly not to the point of arresting him. Impatience to make a dynastic alliance had offended Alexander and made him suspicious over Poland, even though Napoleon had no intention of restoring that kingdom. The Austrian marriage was never going to be enough to assuage the harsh peace of Schönbrunn. Masséna should have been supported properly, or not sent to Portugal at all; better still, Napoleon should have gone there himself to fight Wellington. It was an error of judgement to let an untrustworthy, resentful Bernadotte go to so strategically important a place as Sweden, and another to have left Fouché’s prima facie act of treason go essentially unpunished. Similarly, Napoleon should have seen the Continental System’s new licensing regime for the hypocrisy that it was in the eyes of the Empire, his allies and especially the Russians. Although Alexander was rearming and planning a war of revenge, the Grande Armée in its present state would be more than capable of taking care of a border war against Russia in Germany, especially with Austria tied into the marriage alliance. None of his opponents could threaten the existence of the largest European empire since Ancient Rome, larger even that Charlemagne’s. Only Napoleon himself could do that.

  Part Three

  DENOUEMENT

  23

  Russia

  ‘A Frenchman is brave but long privations and bad climate would wear him down and discourage him. Our climate, our winter, will fight on our side.’

  Tsar Alexander to Caulaincourt, early 1811

  ‘One must never ask of Fortune more than she can grant.’

  Napoleon on St Helena

  Napoleon toured his Empire for many weeks of the year, and always at breakneck speed. In the autumn of 1811, he visited forty cities in twenty-two days, despite losing two and half days stuck on board the warship Charlemagne at Flushing due to a gale and another day at Givet when the Meuse flooded its banks. He was much more interested in gleaning information than in listening to laudatory speeches from local worthies. On one occasion when a mayor had taken great pains to commit a speech to memory, Napoleon had ‘scarcely given him time to present the keys before the coachman was impetuously ordered to drive on, and the mayor left to harangue the air’. The mayor was perhaps consoled by seeing an account of the presentation of the keys and his entire speech reproduced in the next day’s Moniteur. ‘ “No harangue, gentlemen!” is frequently the discouraging apostrophe with which Bonaparte cuts short these trembling deputations,’ recalled the civil servant Theodor von Faber.1 The questions Napoleon asked mayors were testimony to his omnivorous appetite for information. One might have expected inquiries about population, deaths, revenues, forestry, tolls, municipal rates, conscription and civil and criminal lawsuits, and Napoleon certainly asked them, but he also wanted to know ‘How many sentences passed by you are annulled by the Court of Cassation?’ and ‘Have you found means to provide suitable lodgings for rectors?’2

  ‘There is proof’, Napoleon wrote to Tsar Alexander on November 4, 1810, ‘that the colonial produce at the last Leipzig Fair was brought from Russia in seven hundred wagons … and that 1,200 merchant vessels, under Swedish, Portuguese, Spanish and American colours, which the English escorted with twenty warships, have partly landed their cargoes in Russia.’3 The letter went on to ask him to confiscate ‘all the goods introduced by the English’. In December Napoleon ordered Champagny to give Alexander Kurakin, the Russian ambassador to Paris, and simultaneously Caulaincourt to give the Tsar, a direct warning that should Russia open her ports to ships carrying English merchandise in direct contravention of the Tilsit treaty, then war would become inevitable.4

  It was largely in order to combat smuggling across the German north-west littoral that Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic Towns such as Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck on December 19 1810. After Rome, Hanover and Holland, it was Napoleon’s fourth annexation in the past twelve months, and like them it arose directly as a result of his obsession with his protectionist economic war against Britain. Yet taking over the direct rule of these major cities made no geographical or commercial sense without also acquiring the 2,000-square-mile Duchy of Oldenburg on the left bank of the Weser, whose regent-ruler, Duke Peter, was the father-in-law of Alexander’s sister, the Grand Duchess Catherine Pavlovna. Despite repeated warnings from Napoleon it continued to trade relatively openly with Britain, to the point that it has been likened to an enormous warehouse for smuggled goods.5 Although the duchy’s independence had been guaranteed by Tilsit, Napoleon decided to close this loophole and annexed Oldenburg on the same day as the Hanseatic Towns. A month later he offered Duke Peter the small principality of Erfurt in compensation for the duchy, which was six times larger, and this left Alexander even more affronted.6

  Franco-Russian tensions had long pre-dated Napoleon; Louis XVI had supported the Ottomans against Russi
an expansionism, and had made common cause with Gustav III of Sweden in the Baltic.7 Successive tsars and empresses had looked westwards since Peter the Great visited every major European court (except Versailles) on his travels at the end of the seventeenth century, and St Petersburg was a testament to this westward outlook. Alexander had brought Russia up to the Danube with the annexations of Moldavia and Wallachia, and looked covetously towards Turkey’s Balkan possessions. The Russians under Alexander’s grandmother, Catherine the Great – herself a German princess who had long seen France as a potential antagonist – had partitioned Poland three times between 1772 and 1795, and Alexander’s father, Paul I, had become Grand Master of the Knights of Malta and sent the great General Suvorov into Lombardy and Switzerland. Russia’s ambitions to be a major European power were therefore very long-standing, and were always likely to cause tensions with whichever was the hegemonic European power of the day. For much of the eighteenth century, and certainly by Napoleon’s time, that was France.

  Even before Napoleon’s annexation of Oldenburg, Alexander had been making plans for another war against France.8 His war minister Barclay de Tolly, his military advisor General Ernst von Phull, a French émigré Comte d’Allonville and a former adjutant to the Tsar, Count Ludwig von Wolzogen, were all sending him detailed schemes from October 1810 onwards that covered every offensive and defensive contingency. In early December, Barclay planned for a defensive battle on both sides of the Pripet Marshes, in modern-day southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, after a quick pre-emptive Russian attack had destroyed Napoleon’s bases in Poland.9 From being (Napoleon hoped) an enthusiastic friend at Tilsit, and a more reluctant ally at Erfurt, Alexander was now looking more and more like a future enemy.