Napoleon had lost some 524,000 men, around 100,000 to 120,000 of whom had been captured. Many of those captured died over the coming years, and virtually none returned to France before Waterloo, although about 20,000 non-French volunteered to fight in the new Russian army that would soon be raised against Napoleon. Macdonald’s corps of 32,300 on the northern flank may have emerged largely unscathed, but half of them were Prussians who would soon be ranged against France, and Schwarzenberg’s 34,000 Austrians were now not to be trusted either. A further 15,000 survivors of the Berezina crossing had been lost on the retreat between there and Vilnius.* Ney was the last man to re-cross the Niemen on December 14, by which point he had barely four hundred infantry and six hundred cavalry with him, along with a grand total of nine cannon.147 (Although none died, four marshals were wounded during the campaign.) Stragglers returned in small numbers over the next few weeks, though a number of them were quietly murdered by Prussian villagers as they made their way westwards. The entire central force of the Grande Armée was now fewer than 25,000 men, of whom only about 10,000 were capable of combat.148 Even if one considers the French contingent of Macdonald’s corps and the 60,000 reinforcements coming from France, the army that Napoleon would have in Poland and Germany at the turn of the year was pitifully small, and greatly lacking in artillery and cavalry.149 Many units were at just 5 per cent of their strength: Davout’s corps of 66,000 was down to 2,200; of the 47,864 original effectives of Oudinot’s corps, only 4,653 remained; the Imperial Guard of 51,000 was left with a little over 2,000; of the 27,397 Italians who crossed the Alps, fewer than a thousand returned (and of the 350 members of the Italian Royal Guard, all but eight perished). Of the Dutch Grenadier Guard, only thirty-six survived out of five hundred.150 And out of the four hundred brave Dutch pontonniers who saved the army at the Berezina, only fifty ever saw Holland again.
In late December 1812, Tsar Alexander dined with the Lithuanian novelist and noblewoman Sophie de Tisenhaus in Vilnius, which had been evacuated earlier that month by Murat. He spoke of Napoleon’s ‘light-grey eyes, which gaze at you so piercingly that you cannot withstand them’, and later: ‘What a career he has ruined! Having gained so much glory, he could bestow peace on Europe, and he has not done so. The spell is broken.’151 She noted that he repeated the last phrase several times.
26
Resilience
‘Posterity would never have seen the measure of your spirit if it had not seen it in misfortune.’
Molé to Napoleon, March 1813
‘He could sympathize with family troubles; he was indifferent to political calamities.’
Metternich on Napoleon, July 1813
‘On seeing what he created twenty days after his arrival in Paris,’ Marshal Saint-Cyr wrote in his memoirs, ‘we must agree that his brusque departure from Poland was wise.’1 Napoleon embarked upon a maelstrom of activity, recognizing that it could not be long before the Russians coalesced with the Prussians, and possibly with his father-in-law Emperor Francis of Austria too, first to expel France from Poland and Germany and then to try to overthrow him. In attempting to repair the Russian disaster Napoleon showed, in the view of Count Molé, who was shortly to be appointed minister of justice, ‘a furious activity which perhaps surpassed everything he had revealed hitherto’.2 Hortense, who hurried to the Tuileries, found her former stepfather preoccupied but resolute. ‘He seemed to me wearied, worried, but not disheartened,’ she wrote. ‘I had often seen him lose his temper about some trifle such as a door opened when it should have been shut or vice versa, a room too brightly or too dimly lighted. But in times of difficulty or misfortune he was completely master of his nerves.’ She sought to give him some comfort, saying ‘Surely, our enemies have suffered huge losses too?’ To which he replied, ‘No doubt, but that does not console me.’3
In less than seventeen weeks between returning to Paris in mid-December 1812 and setting off on campaign the following April, Napoleon incorporated the 84,000 infantry and 9,000 gunners of the National Guard into the regular army; called up 100,000 conscripts from the 1809–12 year groups and 150,000 from 1813 and 1814; formed thirty new infantry regiments consisting of dozens of new demi-brigades; ordered 150,000 muskets from arms factories; combed through the depots and garrisons for extra men; moved 16,000 marines from the navy to the army as well as veteran naval gunners to the artillery; demanded that the Empire’s 12,000 cantons each provide one man and one horse; ransacked the line army in Spain to rebuild the Imperial Guard; bought and requisitioned horses wherever they could be obtained; ordered the allies to rebuild their armies; and created Corps of Observation on the Elbe, on the Rhine and in Italy.4 The recruits called up were of course described in the Moniteur as ‘magnificent men’ but some were as young as fifteen and Molé noted at a review at the Carrousel that ‘their extreme youth and poor physique roused a deep pity among the crowds around them’.5 These young recruits were nicknamed ‘Marie Louises’, partly because the Empress had signed the orders for their conscription in Napoleon’s absence, and partly because of their innocent smooth-cheeked youth. The grognards referred to the newly recruited cavalrymen as ‘chickens mounted on colts’. Since the new French recruits had no time to train they were far less manoeuvrable in battle; one of the reasons for the unimaginative frontal assaults of the next two years was the need to keep undertrained masses moving together.
If Napoleon’s imperial rule had been tyrannical, one would have expected those parts of Europe that had endured it for the longest to be the first to rise up once he had been comprehensively humiliated, yet that was not what happened. East Prussia and Silesia, which hadn’t been occupied by the French, revolted in 1813, but the parts of Prussia that had been occupied since 1806, such as Berlin and Brandenburg, did not.6 Similarly Holland, Switzerland, Italy and much of the rest of Germany either didn’t rise against him at all or waited for their governments to declare against him, or sat passively until the Allied armies arrived. In France itself, apart from some bread riots in Brittany and minor trouble in the Vendée and Midi, no risings materialized – in 1813, 1814 or indeed 1815. Although much of France was heartily sick of war, and there was substantial local opposition to conscription, especially during harvest-time, the French did not want to oust their Emperor while he was fighting France’s enemies. Only those openly denouncing Napoleon were liable to arrest, and even this mild crackdown was carried out in a classically French eighteenth-century manner. When the royalist Charles de Rivière ‘proclaimed his hopes a little too spitefully and prematurely’, he was sent to La Force prison, but was later released when a friend won his freedom in a game of billiards against Savary.7 Some ambitious army officers even wanted the war to continue. ‘One thing disturbed us,’ wrote Captain Blaze of the Imperial Guard. ‘If, we said, Napoleon should stop short in so glorious a career, if he should unfortunately take it into his head to make peace, farewell to all our hopes. Luckily, our fears were not realized, for he cut out more work for us than we were able to perform.’8
Although they rarely draw much attention, Russian losses in 1812 were also enormous. Around 150,000 Russian soldiers had been killed and 300,000 wounded or frostbitten over the course of the campaign, and very many more civilians. Russia’s field army was down to 100,000 weary men and much of the area from Poland to Moscow had been devastated, depriving the Russian treasury of hundreds of millions of rubles in taxes, though Alexander remained utterly committed to destroying Napoleon. In early 1813 four Russian divisions crossed the Vistula and invaded Pomerania, forcing the French to evacuate Lübeck and Stralsund, though they left garrisons in Danzig, Stettin and other Prussian fortresses. On January 7 Sweden, which had hitherto been neutral under the terms of the 1812 Treaty of Åbo but was now under Bernadotte’s influence, declared war against France. Bernadotte told Napoleon that he was not acting against France but for Sweden, and that Napoleon’s seizure of Swedish Pomerania was the cause of the rupture – adding, however disingenuously, that he would always be
ar for his old commander the sentiments of a former comrade in arms.9 Apart from his natural inclination as a Frenchman not to shed French blood, Bernadotte recognized that doing so would mean for ever giving up his hopes, which had been stoked by Alexander, of one day becoming king of France.
‘My army has suffered losses,’ Napoleon told the Senate on December 20, ‘due to the premature rigour of the season.’10 Using Yorck’s defection to whip up patriotic indignation, he set as his target to raise 150,000 men and ordered prefects to stage meetings in support of his recruiting drive. ‘Everything is in motion here,’ he told Berthier on January 9.11 It needed to be. The Russian army advanced 250 miles between Christmas Day 1812 and January 14 when they reached Marienwerder in Prussia, despite having to recapture Königsberg and other French strongholds in the depths of a northern winter.12 Eugène had no choice but to withdraw back to Berlin.
Napoleon was surprisingly open about the depth of his setback in Russia. ‘He is the first to speak about the misfortunes and he even brings them up,’ wrote Fain.13 Yet if the Emperor was willing to acknowledge his misfortune, he did not always do so truthfully. ‘There was not an affair in which the Russians captured either a gun or an eagle; they took no other prisoners but skirmishers,’ he told Jérôme on January 18. ‘My Guard was never engaged, and did not lose a single man in action, and it could not therefore have lost any eagles as the Russians declare.’14 The Guard lost no eagles because it had burned them at Bobr, but it suffered badly at the battle of Krasnoi, as Napoleon well knew. As for the Russians not capturing a single gun, something he also told Frederick VI of Denmark, Tsar Alexander conceived a scheme to build a massive column out of the 1,131 French cannon captured in the 1812 campaign. It never came to fruition, but scores of Napoleonic cannon can still be seen in the Kremlin today.15
In an effort to minimize domestic discontent, Napoleon concluded a new Concordat with the Pope at Fontainebleau in late January. ‘Perhaps we will achieve the much desired aim of ending the differences between State and Church,’ he had written on December 29. It seemed ambitious, but within a month a wide-ranging and comprehensive document had been signed covering most areas of disagreement.16 ‘His Holiness will exercise the Pontificate in both France and Italy,’ it began, ‘the Holy See’s ambassadors abroad will have the same privileges as diplomats … the domains of the Holy Father which are not alienated will not be subject to tax, those alienated will be compensated up to 2 million francs of income … the Pope will give canonical institution to the Emperor’s archdioceses within six months’ – that is, he would recognize Napoleon’s appointments as archbishops. Napoleon was also given permission to appoint ten new bishops.17 It was a good outcome for Napoleon, which the Pope immediately regretted and tried to renege upon. ‘Would you believe,’ Napoleon told Marshal Kellermann, ‘that the Pope, after having signed this Concordat freely and of his own accord, wrote to me eight days afterwards … and earnestly entreated me to consider the whole affair null and void? I replied that as he was infallible he could not be mistaken, and that his conscience was too quickly alarmed.’18
On February 7 Napoleon held a great parade at the Tuileries and a meeting of the Conseil d’État afterwards to set up a regency for periods when he would be away on campaign. The Malet conspiracy had rattled him and he wanted to protect himself against any renewed effort to take advantage of his absence. He was also keen to ensure that in the event of his death his son would be accepted even in infancy as his successor. (He had come a long way since his youthful fulminations against monarchs.) Under the nineteen-clause sénatus-consulte drawn up by Cambacérès, in the event of Napoleon’s death power would reside with Marie Louise, who would be advised by a Regency Council until the King of Rome came of age. Napoleon wanted Cambacérès to be the effective ruler of France, but with Marie Louise to ‘give the Government the authority of her name’.19 The meeting to establish the regency was attended by Cambacérès, Regnier, Gaudin, Maret, Molé, Lacépède, d’Angely, Moncey, Ney, the interior minister the Comte de Montalivet and the once-again forgiven Talleyrand. Napoleon, in Molé’s words, ‘though apparently calm and confident as to the campaign he was about to open, mentioned the vicissitudes of war and the fickleness of fortune in words which gave the lie to his imperturbable expression’.20 Ordering Cambacérès only to ‘show to the Empress what it is good for her to know’, Napoleon told him not to send her the daily police reports as ‘It’s pointless to speak to her of things which could worry her or sully her mind.’21
By February 13 Napoleon had received the deeply ominous news that Austria was mobilizing a field army of at least 100,000 men. Shortly afterwards, Metternich offered to ‘mediate’ a European peace settlement – hardly the stance expected of an ally. A long talk with Molé in the billiards room of the Tuileries after dinner that evening laid bare Napoleon’s thinking on several issues. He spoke highly of Marie Louise, saying he saw something of her ancestress, Anne of Austria, in her. ‘She knows quite well that so-and-so voted for the death of Louis XVI, and also knows everyone’s birth and record,’ he said, yet she never showed bias towards the old nobility or against the regicides. He then spoke of the Jacobins who were ‘fairly numerous in Paris and particularly formidable’, but ‘As long as I am alive that scum will not move, because they found out all about me on 13th Vendémiaire and know that I’m always ready to stamp on them if I have any trouble.’22 He knew his foreign and domestic enemies would be ‘much more venturesome since the Russian disaster. I must have one more campaign and get the better of these wretched Russians: we must drive them back to their frontiers and make them give up the idea of leaving them again.’23 He went on to complain about his marshals: ‘There’s not one who can command the others and none of them knows anything but how to obey me.’24
Napoleon told Molé that he had hopes for Eugène, despite the fact that he was ‘only a mediocrity’. He complained that Murat cried ‘fat tears on the paper’ when he wrote to his children and said he had suffered from ‘despondency’ during the retreat from Moscow, whereas:
In my own case it’s taken me years to cultivate self-control to prevent my emotions from betraying themselves. Only a short time ago I was the conqueror of the world, commanding the largest and finest army of modern times. That’s all gone now! To think I kept all my composure, I might even say preserved my unvarying high spirits … Yet don’t think that my heart is less sensitive than those of other men. I’m a very kind man but since my earliest youth I have devoted myself to silencing that chord within me that never yields a sound now. If anyone told me when I was about to begin a battle that my mistress whom I loved to distraction was breathing her last, it would leave me cold. Yet my grief would be just as great as if I’d given way to it … and after the battle I should mourn my mistress if I had the time. Without all this self-control, do you think I could have done all I’ve done?25
So rigid a control of one’s emotions might seem distasteful to the modern temperament, but at the time it was considered a classical virtue. It undoubtedly helped Napoleon deal with his extraordinary reversals of fortune.
This self-control was in evidence when he spoke to the opening of the Legislative Body and Senate on February 14. A spectator recalled that he mounted the steps of the throne to cheers from the deputies, ‘though their faces betrayed infinitely more anxiety than his’.26 In his first full presentation to his deputies since his return from what he called the Russian ‘desert’, he explained the defeat by saying, ‘The excessive and premature harshness of the winter caused my army to suffer an awful calamity.’ He then announced an end to his ‘difficulties’ with the Pope, said that the Bonaparte dynasty would for ever reign in Spain and proclaimed that the French Empire had a positive trade balance of 126 million francs, ‘even with the seas closed’.27 (Three days later Montalivet published statistics that backed up everything the Emperor had claimed, as dictatorships so often do.) ‘Since the rupture which followed the treaty of Amiens, I have proposed peace [wit
h Britain] on four occasions,’ he said, in this instance truthfully, after which he added: ‘I will never make any peace but one that is honourable and suitable to the grandeur of my empire.’28 The phrase ‘perfidious Albion’ had been employed occasionally ever since the Crusades (and had appeared in an ‘Ode on the Death of Lannes’) but it was in 1813, on Napoleon’s orders, that it came into general use.29
The 1812 campaign had been disastrous for French finances. Until 1811 the franc had maintained its value against sterling, indeed it had slightly gained on it. The 1810 budget had seen a small surplus of 9.3 million francs, and bond yields were at a manageable 6 per cent. But after the infamous 29th bulletin, bonds – reflecting the lack of confidence in Napoleon’s future – shot up from 6 per cent to 10 per cent, and the budget deficit for 1812 of 37.5 million francs could be serviced only through new taxes and new sales of state property, which fetched a fraction of earlier sell-offs because their title was so insecure. When the public sale of 370 million francs’ worth of state-owned land raised only 50 million francs, sales taxes had to be increased by 11.5 per cent and land taxes by 22.6 per cent.30 Napoleon meanwhile made some personal economies, telling his chief steward that he wanted ‘fewer cooks, fewer plates, dishes, etc. On the battlefield, tables, even mine, shall be served with soup, a boiled dish, a roast, vegetables, no pudding.’31 Officers were no longer going to be able to choose between wine and beer, but would drink whatever they were given. On an interior ministry proposal to spend 10 per cent of a prefect’s salary on his funeral if he died in office, Napoleon scrawled: ‘Refused. Why look for occasions to spend more?’32 The Army of Catalonia would no longer be sent wine, brandy, oats and salted meats when there was plenty locally. ‘All the deals that are being made by General Dumas are madness,’ Napoleon wrote of the intendant-general’s plans for provisioning the Oder fortresses. ‘He apparently believes that money is nothing more than mud.’33 All state building projects had been suspended before the Russian campaign, and were never resumed. The years 1813 and 1814, when there was no sign that an end to mass mobilization and high military spending was in sight, produced still higher deficits.
Napoleon the Great Page 78