Napoleon the Great

by Andrew Roberts

  Napoleon then did one of those dumbfounding things of which he was so often capable. He wrote to his former intelligence chief Fouché and instructed him to come to Dresden in secret, as quickly as possible, in order to run Prussia once it was captured. ‘No one must know of this in Paris,’ he told him. ‘It must seem as if you are about to leave to go on campaign … Only the Empress-Regent knows of your departure. I’m very glad to have the opportunity to call upon you for new duties and to have new proof of your attachment.’65 Fouché felt no attachment to Napoleon since his abrupt sacking following his secret peace talks with Britain, as the events of the following year were to illustrate. The military situation meant that he never took over Prussia, but as with Talleyrand, Napoleon had either lost his antennae for who opposed and who supported him, or was so confident in his powers that he didn’t care. The circle of loyal advisors he could count on was shrinking.

  The news that Austria was arming, and seemed ever more bellicose, worried Napoleon. He wrote to Marie Louise constantly to ask her to intercede with her father, saying on May 14 for example: ‘People are trying to mislead Papa François. Metternik [sic] is a mere intriguer.’66 He wrote to Francis himself three days later, calling him ‘Brother and dearly beloved father-in-law’. ‘No one desires peace more ardently than me,’ he began. ‘I agree to the opening of negotiations for a general peace and the summoning of a Congress’, but ‘Like all warm-blooded Frenchmen, I would rather die sword in hand than yield, if an attempt be made to force conditions on me.’67 At the same time, he sent Caulaincourt to the Tsar asking for peace, telling him: ‘My intention is to build him a golden bridge … you must try to tie up a direct negotiation on this basis.’ Even now he believed he could rekindle their friendship. ‘Once we have come to speak to each other,’ he said, ‘we will always finish by finding an agreement.’68 But when Caulaincourt arrived at Allied headquarters, the Tsar would see him only in the presence of the King of Prussia and the Austrian and British ambassadors.

  Napoleon left Dresden at 2 p.m. on May 18 to attack the Allied main army at the fortified town of Bautzen on the River Spree. One would hardly have surmised this from the letter he wrote Marie Louise the next day: ‘The valley of Montmorency is very beautiful in this season, yet I fancy the time when it’s pleasantest is the beginning of June when the cherries are ripe.’69 That day he ordered Eugène in Italy to ‘Busy yourself with the organization of your six regiments right away. To begin with, you will dress them in jackets, trousers and shakos …’ In another letter he elaborated on how Eugène’s six-year-old daughter, Josephine of Leuchtenberg, would receive the revenues of the Duchy of Galliera, which Napoleon had especially created for her in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.70

  The Allied armies, some 97,000 strong, had fallen back to the low hills overlooking Bautzen, a naturally strong position quickly improved with field fortifications. All reports indicated that they would stand their ground there, which is exactly what Napoleon wanted them to do. He had 64,000 men in Bertrand’s, Marmont’s and Macdonald’s corps facing the enemy directly, supported by Oudinot’s corps and the Imperial Guard: 90,000 in all. The Allies had built eleven strong redoubts in the hills as well as some in the town, and had three fortified villages in their second line of defence. But their northern flank was dangerously open, and that was where Napoleon intended to send Ney’s and Lauriston’s corps. In all he would engage some 167,000 men by the end of the battle. When his officers told him that some of the Prussian regiments they would be facing had fought under Frederick the Great, he made the obvious point: ‘That’s true, but Frederick isn’t around any more.’71

  The battle of Bautzen opened on Thursday, May 20, 1813 with Oudinot vigorously attacking the Allied left. Napoleon waited for Ney’s enlarged wing of the Grande Armée of some 57,000 men to march up and into position before decisively turning the open Allied right flank and driving it into the Erzgebirge mountains. The plan worked well on the first day, as the Tsar mistakenly committed most of the Allied reserves to the left, just as Napoleon hoped. The next day, Napoleon was confident that Ney and Lauriston would join the battle and complete the victory. Oudinot again vigorously assaulted the Allied left; Macdonald and Marmont joined the attack in the centre and then Napoleon committed the Imperial Guard when he thought the moment right. But Ney arrived late after a confusing order led him to halt for an hour, allowing the Allies to spot the danger and march away to safety. The level of ferocity of the fighting is reflected in the casualties: 21,200 Frenchmen were killed or wounded whereas the Allies, enjoying the benefit of strong defences, lost half that. Once again the lack of cavalry meant Napoleon was unable to exploit his tactical victory in any meaningful way.

  ‘I had a battle today,’ Napoleon told Marie Louise. ‘I took possession of Bautzen. I dispersed the Russian and Prussian armies … It was a fine battle. I am rather unwell, I got soaked two or three times during the day. I kiss you and ask you to kiss my son for me. My health is good. I lost no one of any importance. I put my losses at 3,000 men, killed or wounded.’72 The proximity of the phrase ‘My health is good’ so soon after ‘I am rather unwell’ implies that the sign-off was by then just a reflex.

  Only hours after writing that he hadn’t lost anyone of any importance, his closest friend, Géraud Duroc, the Duc de Frioul, was disembowelled by a cannonball in front of him on a hill overlooking Nieder-Markersdorf at the battle of Reichenbach on May 22. ‘Duroc, there is another life,’ Napoleon was represented in the Moniteur as having told him. ‘There you will await my coming.’ Duroc is supposed to have answered: ‘Yes, Sire, when you have fulfilled all the hopes of our Fatherland’, and so on, before saying: ‘Ah, Sire, leave me; the sight of me is painful to you!’73 A year later Napoleon spoke about what had really happened, admitting that ‘when his bowels were falling out before my eyes, he repeatedly cried to me to have him put out of his misery. I told him: “I feel pity for you, my friend, but there is no remedy but to suffer till the end.” ’74

  The loss of such a friend, who could read Napoleon’s moods and could distinguish between his real and feigned anger, was at once personally traumatic and politically devastating, especially in that spring of 1813 when Napoleon badly needed wise and disinterested counsel. ‘I was very sad all day yesterday over the death of the Duke of Frioul,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise the next day. ‘He was a friend of twenty years’ standing. Never did I have any occasion to complain of him, he was never anything but a comfort to me. He is an irreparable loss, the greatest I could suffer in the Army.’75 (He remembered Duroc’s daughter in his will.) ‘The death of the Duc de Frioul pained me,’ he wrote a few weeks later to his son’s governess, Madame de Montesquiou. ‘This was the only time in twenty years that he did not guess what would please me.’76 The list of friends and close comrades Napoleon had lost in battle was by now long and doleful: Muiron at Arcole, Brueys at the Nile, Caffarelli at Acre, Desaix at Marengo, Claude Corbineau at Eylau, Lannes at Aspern-Essling, Lasalle at Wagram, Bessières the day before Lützen and now his closest friend Duroc at Reichenbach. Nor was it to end there.

  The victories at Lützen and Bautzen gave Napoleon control of Saxony and most of Silesia, but his losses were high enough to force him to accept a temporary ceasefire on June 4. The Armistice of Pleischwitz was originally intended to last until July 20. ‘Two considerations have caused me to make this decision,’ Napoleon told Clarke, ‘my lack of cavalry, which prevents me from striking strong blows, and the hostile attitude of Austria.’77 It was not in Napoleon’s nature to agree to armistices, which went totally against his concept of war as a fast-moving surge of aggression in which he always kept the initiative. (Indeed the codename that the Bourbons’ intelligence service gave him was ‘The Torrent’.) He later acknowledged that the Allies used the time bought by Pleischwitz more profitably than he did, almost doubling their forces and strengthening their defences in Brandenburg and Silesia. Britain also used the time to organize the Treaty of Reichenbach, which
funded Russia and Prussia with a massive £7 million, the largest subsidy of the war.78 Yet Caulaincourt, who took over Duroc’s roles as advisor and grand marshal of the palace, was in favour of the armistice, as was Berthier; only Soult thought it a mistake.

  At the time Napoleon desperately needed to train, reorganize and reinforce his army, especially his cavalry, fortify the Elbe crossings, and replenish ammunition and food stocks. ‘A soldier’s health must take precedence over economic calculations or any other consideration,’ he told Daru when trying to buy 2 million pounds of rice. ‘Rice is the best way to protect oneself from diarrhoea and dysentery.’79 He worked throughout the truce at his normal frenetic pace – on June 13 he caught sunstroke having been in the saddle all afternoon. The other reason he needed time was to persuade Austria not to declare war on him. During the armistice, Metternich sent Count Stadion to the Allies and Count Bubna to Napoleon to discuss a French withdrawal from Germany, Poland and the Adriatic. Metternich had demanded an international congress at Prague to discuss peace, but Napoleon feared that was merely a pretext for Austria joining the Allies. A French evacuation of Holland, Spain and Italy was also to be tabled there.

  Napoleon was outraged that he should have to give up Illyria to Austria without a fight. ‘If I can, I will wait until September to attack with heavy strikes,’ he wrote. ‘I therefore want to be in a position to beat my enemies, as far as is possible, so that when she sees me capable of doing so, Austria will … face up to her deceptive and ridiculous pretensions.’80 Yet he also had to acknowledge to Fain: ‘If the Allies don’t want peace in good faith, then this armistice could be very deadly to us.’81 He wasn’t always glum, however; when he was told that Marie Louise had received the homosexual Cambacérès while in bed, he told her: ‘I beg that under no circumstance will you receive, no matter who, when in bed. That is permitted only to persons over thirty years of age.’82

  Some of Napoleon’s marshals wanted to retreat to the Rhine if the armistice collapsed, but he himself pointed out that this would mean abandoning for ever the garrisons in the fortresses on the Oder, Vistula and Elbe, as well as his Danish, Polish, Saxon and Westphalian allies. ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘Where’s your prudence? Ten lost battles could hardly reduce me to the position you want to place me in right away!’ When his marshals reminded him of the long lines of communication to Dresden he said: ‘Certainly, you don’t have to risk your lines of operation lightly; I know it; it’s the rule of common-sense and the ABC of the job … But when great interests are unravelled, there are moments in which one must sacrifice to the victory and not fear to burn one’s boats! … If the art of war was only the art of not risking anything, glory would be prey to mediocrities. We need a full triumph!’83

  Napoleon intended to use Dresden’s geography to his advantage. ‘Dresden is the pivot from which I want to manoeuvre in order to face all the attacks,’ he told Fain.

  From Berlin to Prague, the enemy is developing on a circumference of which I occupy the centre; the shortest communications get longer for him on the contours that they have to follow; and for me some marches suffice to take me wherever my presence and my reserves need to be. But in the places where I will not be, my lieutenants must know to wait for me without committing anything to chance … Will the Allies be able to keep up such a spread of operations for long? And myself, shouldn’t I reasonably hope to surprise them sooner or later in any false movement?84

  The reasoning was sound, though it relied completely on the clarity of his own judgement and manoeuvring on internal lines.

  To those in the French high command who argued that the Russians might try to put light cavalry beyond the Elbe and even the Rhine, Napoleon retorted: ‘I’m expecting it, I’ve provided for it. Independently of the strong garrisons of Mainz, Wesel, Erfurt and Würzburg, Augereau is gathering a Corps of Observation on the Main.’ ‘Only one victory,’ he added, ‘will force the Allies to make peace.’85 Napoleon’s victories early in his career had quickly led to peace by negotiation; his central mistake now was to assume that peace would still be found in that way. He now faced an enemy with as firm a resolve as his own, and a newfound determination to force him to yield. ‘You bore me continually about the necessity of peace,’ he wrote on June 13 to Savary, who had told him again how much Parisians yearned for it. ‘No one is more interested in concluding peace than me, but I will not make a dishonourable peace or one that would see us at war again in six months. Don’t reply to this; these matters do not concern you, don’t get mixed up in them.’86

  On June 19 Talma, his former mistress from ten years previously Marguerite Weimer (whose stage name was Mademoiselle George) and fifteen other actors arrived in Dresden. There’s no indication that Napoleon had specifically asked for Mademoiselle George to come, but he appeared to be grateful for the distraction of theatre. ‘A remarkable change took place in Napoleon’s taste,’ remarked his chamberlain, Bausset, ‘who until this time had always preferred tragedy.’87 Now he chose only comedies to be performed and plays that drew closely observed ‘delineations of manner and characters’. Perhaps he had seen quite enough genuine tragedy by then.

  The following week Napoleon wrote to Marie Louise: ‘Metternich arrived in Dresden this afternoon. We shall see what he has to say and what Papa François wants. He is still adding to his army in Bohemia; I’m strengthening mine in Italy.’88

  What precisely happened during the eight-hour – some accounts say nine-and-a-half-hour – meeting in the Chinese Room of the Marcolini Palace in Dresden on June 26, 1813 is still a matter of speculation, since only Napoleon and Metternich were present and they gave contradictory accounts. Yet taking the most unreliable narrative, Metternich’s memoirs written decades later, and comparing it with the other available sources – Metternich’s own short official report to Francis of that same day, a letter Metternich wrote to his wife Eleonore two days later, Napoleon’s contemporaneous report to Caulaincourt, Maret’s report to Fain published in 1824 and some remarks Napoleon made to the Comte de Montholon six weeks before he died – it is possible to arrive at a fair understanding of what transpired in the climactic encounter that would do so much to determine the fate of Europe.89

  Napoleon began the meeting shortly after 11 a.m. hoping to browbeat Metternich, the most imperturbable statesman in Europe, into dropping Austria’s plans for mediation. He thought he could persuade him to return to the French camp. Metternich, by contrast, was determined to arrive at a negotiated peace agreement covering all the outstanding territorial issues over Germany, Holland, Italy and Belgium. The vast discrepancy in their respective positions partly explains the length of the meeting. As the diplomat who had negotiated Napoleon’s marriage, in Vienna Metternich was considered pro-French. He had (at least publicly) shown dismay when the Grande Armée was shattered in Russia. Was he vague as to the precise terms of the peace, as Napoleon later charged? Or was he deliberately employing delaying tactics to allow his country to rearm? Was he demanding more than he thought Napoleon could ever give in the hope of making him look unreasonable? Or did he really want peace but thought it could be assured only on the basis of massive French withdrawals across Europe? Given Metternich’s mercurial inconsistency, he was probably driven by an ever-changing mélange of several of these motives and others. He certainly thought that Dresden was the moment when he, rather than Napoleon, could decide the fate of the continent. ‘I am making all of Europe revolve around the axis that I alone determined months ago,’ he boasted to his wife, ‘at a time when all around me thought my ideas were insignificant follies or hollow fantasies.’90

  There are several contradictions in the various reports of the meeting. Napoleon admitted he threw his hat on the ground at one stage: Metternich told his wife that Napoleon threw it ‘four times … into the corner of the room, swearing like the Devil’.91 Fain said that Napoleon agreed to participate in the Congress of Prague at the end of the meeting; Metternich said it was four days later, as he was stepping into h
is carriage to leave Dresden. Metternich claimed to have warned Napoleon, ‘Sire, you are lost!’, and Napoleon accused him of being in the pay of the English.92 This last remark was a stupid one; on his deathbed Napoleon admitted it had been a disastrous faux pas, turning Metternich into ‘an irreconcilable enemy’.93 Although Napoleon tried to make amends almost immediately, pretending it had been a joke, and although the two men seem to have ended the meeting on civil terms, Metternich emerged convinced – or so he claimed – that Napoleon was incorrigibly committed to war.

  ‘Experience is lost on you,’ Metternich has Napoleon tell him. ‘Three times I have replaced the Emperor Francis on his throne. I have promised always to live in peace with him; I have married his daughter. At the time I said to myself you are perpetrating a folly; but it was done, and today I repent of it!’94 Napoleon digressed on the strength and strategy of the Austrian forces and boasted that he knew their dispositions down to ‘the very drummers in your army’. Going into his study, they spent over an hour going over his daily list from Narbonne’s spies, regiment by regiment, to prove how good his intelligence network was.

  When Metternich brought up the ‘youthful’ nature of the French army, Napoleon is alleged to have snapped, ‘You are no soldier, and you do not know what goes on in the mind of a soldier. I was brought up in the field, and a man such as I am does not concern himself much about the lives of a million men.’95 In his memoirs Metternich wrote, ‘I do not dare to make use of the much worse expressions employed by Napoleon.’ Napoleon has been heavily criticized for this line about the million lives, which has been taken as prima facie evidence that he cared nothing for his soldiers, yet the context was critical – he was desperately trying to convince Metternich that he was perfectly willing to return to war unless he received decent peace terms. It was bluster, not the heartless cynicism it has been represented as being. If indeed he ever said it at all.