Napoleon
Page 7
This was the kind of violent outburst that Hitler was later to make his speciality, to terrify those he addressed and to spread fear among onlookers. But whereas Hitler’s rages were deliberate and rehearsed, Bonaparte sometimes lost his temper, and usually regretted it, as on this occasion. But it made little difference anyway. Britain and Bonaparte were again at war from May 1803, and it was during this period that a French invasion of Britain became a serious possibility. Flat-bottomed boats were collected in French Channel ports, soldiers encamped. The British took the threat with gravity and made intense preparations, including building a fortress in the Midlands in which it was planned to place the king and his government in the event of a French landing and occupation of London. But no detailed plans for transshipment of troops and an opposed landing have survived, and it is possible none were made. Bonaparte hated the idea of sea warfare and shuddered at the idea of participating in it. Yet for anyone else to lead the invasion would have invoked odious comparisons with Caesar’s invasion of Britain. Bonaparte talked specifically of what he would do in London, mentioning a seizure of the Bank of England and the appropriation of its fabulous gold reserves. But by comparison with the eagerness with which he seized on opportunities for land offensives on the largest scale, and the rapidity with which he executed them, his slow and hesitant approach to invading Britain is significant—his heart was never in it. And Nelson’s spectacular victory at Trafalgar on 21 October 1805 put an end to any possibility of invasion.
By that time Pitt had returned to office in 1804 and immediately set about putting together the Third Coalition, centering around a Russian-Austrian alliance, the arrangement being completed on 9 August 1805. The British provided more than £12 million in subsidies and agreed with Sweden to land troops in northern Germany, and this led Prussia to join the coalition in the autumn. The central idea was an Austrian invasion of France supported by 250,000 Russian troops. But Bonaparte swiftly abandoned his English invasion plans and moved large quantities of troops (of what was now renamed the Grande Armée) into Italy and Germany. The speed with which he acted contrasted sharply with the sluggishness of Austrian and, still more, Russian movements. One Austrian army in Bavaria was surrounded at Ulm and surrendered on 20 October. Bonaparte himself took charge of the French troops now operating in Austria against the main armies of Russia and Austria, which had finally joined forces under the personal command of their two emperors. By a series of ruses, including skillful concealment of the strength of his army, Bonaparte succeeded in enticing the emperors to give him battle at Austerlitz on 2 December.
This famous battle, generally regarded as Bonaparte’s most brilliant victory, took place in atrocious winter conditions of cold, fog, frozen but treacherous ponds, snow, and ice, over rugged country that ranged from rocks to marsh. The combined Austrian and Russian strength was about 90,000 men, with 280 guns. Bonaparte had 73,000 men and 139 guns, but his ruses persuaded the Allied command that he had no more than 40,000. Believing they outnumbered Bonaparte by more than two to one, they were happy to see him take up a defensive position. He thus had the ground of his choosing, and it was well chosen. But although, contrary to his usual practice, he invited initial attack, he was prepared and able to launch both cavalry and infantry attacks of his own, and this was his response after the initial Russian and Austrian forward movements revealed an absence of determination and a confusion of plan.
The battle began at eight A.M., when it was still dark, and it was virtually over by early afternoon, with the Allied forces separated and retreating in different directions. Bonaparte triumphed for three reasons. First, he had complete unity of command. The senior Allied commander, M. I. Kutuzov, had in practice no chance to adopt and carry out a unified tactical plan, and authority was hopelessly divided between sovereigns and individual commanders, some of whom acted on their own initiative. Second, in the poor conditions, orders frequently miscarried or were misunderstood or disobeyed. Both sides were affected by this, but the French much less so, since Bonaparte knew exactly what he was doing and his only problem was getting his commanders to obey his orders quickly and in full. Although in the battle he destroyed both the armies facing him as fighting units, he proclaimed loudly after the event that if his generals had been more prompt, the Austrian-Russian forces would have been annihilated. As it was, the Allies lost 27,000, including prisoners, against French losses of 9,000, most of them wounded. Third, French units operated more efficiently. Their cavalry repeatedly attacked and dispersed superior numbers of Allied cavalry, and the artillery were persistently resourceful: informed that the Russians were trying to escape over frozen ponds, they quickly prepared red-hot shot and fired them into the ice, breaking it and causing 2,000 Russians to be drowned. The infantry of the lines were so effective that Bonaparte did not have to call on the Guard at all.
Austerlitz ended the Third Coalition, the Austrian emperor, who had had enough of active campaigning, suing for terms the very next day. The Peace of Pressburg was agreed to at the end of the month. Pitt (who, on hearing the news of Austerlitz, had despairingly cried: “Roll up the map of Europe—we shall not be needing it this many a long year!”) died early in 1806. But subsequent British peace feelers came to nothing, and the Fourth Coalition emerged after Prussia declared war in August 1806. Bonaparte was reluctant to go to war because he sensed weariness of the endless conflict in France, but once he gathered his 150,000-strong army and marched it into Germany, using forest cover to mask its strength, he behaved with characteristic decisiveness and resolution against an enemy that had no real war plan and whose armies, though totaling more than 200,000 men in all, were disjointed and uncoordinated. In a series of engagements, at Saalfeld (19 October), Jena and Auerstadt (14 October), and Lübeck (3 November), he broke up all Prussia’s main armies, inflicted 25,000 casualties, took 14,000 prisoners and 2,000 guns, and occupied the Prussian capital, Berlin. With Russian support and British subsidies, Prussia carried on the war through the winter, losing a ferocious encounter with the Grande Armée at Eylau on 8 February 1807 but inflicting heavy losses. The spring brought a respite, while both sides rebuilt their forces. Bonaparte, who had occupied Warsaw, raised a Polish army and called up a new intake of French conscripts a year early, thus raising his total forces to 600,000 men. In June he advanced toward the Prussian king in Königsberg, brought his army to battle at Friedland (14 June), and won a decisive victory, forcing both Prussia and Russia to sign a peace treaty at Tilsit (7 July). This once more left Britain as Bonaparte’s sole opponent.
The struggle then switched to Spain, which had been a reluctant French ally, had lost its fleet at Trafalgar—Admiral Nelson’s decisive victory over the combined French and Spanish navies on 21 October 1805—and was becoming increasingly nationalist and anti-French. In March 1808, Bonaparte decided on direct invasion and occupation, but a popular rising in Madrid in May began a struggle, in which a British army joined, and which proved increasingly costly for the French. Thus encouraged, Austria, which had stayed out of the Fourth Coalition but had been rearming, decided to go to war against France on 8 February 1809. This is called the war of the Fifth Coalition, though Russia (nominally a French ally) and Prussia did not join it. Large-scale maneuvering in the spring culminated on 22 May in the Battle of Aspern, which was costly and indecisive for the French and is often counted as Bonaparte’s first major defeat. However, he reestablished his reputation with a major victory at Wagram on 6 July. On 12 July the Austrian forces signed an armistice, translated into the Treaty of Schönbrun in October 1809. This ended the Fifth Coalition.
So far all the coalitions had failed. Bonaparte’s strategy of lightning wars, aimed at bringing his opponents one by one to a large-scale battle, destroying their army, and occupying their capital, then imposing a punitive peace, was a highly successful formula. It directed Bonaparte’s great qualities—speed of action, decisiveness, risk taking, and wonderful leadership, together with iron will and courage—with absolute precision
to the attaining of his objects. Of course, it could not have succeeded without the corresponding weaknesses of his enemies—lethargy, indecisiveness, and weak, divided leadership, together with a lack of will to see the struggle through, and often blatant cowardice. Their conduct was brilliantly summed up by a British journalist, Leigh Hunt, editor of the Examiner, a radical journal that, though fundamentally patriotic and pro-British, was by no means unsympathetic to the French Revolutionary spirit. In his Autobiography, he wrote of Austria, Prussia, and Russia (and the lesser Allies) that it was precisely their pygmy behavior that made Bonaparte seem such a giant.
It is a melancholy period for the potentates of the earth when they fancy themselves obliged to resort to the shabbi est measures of the feeble; siding against a friend with the enemy; joining in accusations against him at the latter’s dictation; believed by nobody on either side; returning to the friend, and retreating from him, according to the fortunes of war; secretly hoping that the friend will excuse them by reason of the pauper’s plea, necessity; and at no time able to give better apologies for their conduct than those “mysterious ordinations of Providence” which are the last refuge of the destitute in morals. . . . Yet this is what the allies of England were in the habit of doing through the whole contest of England with France. When England succeeded in getting up a coalition against Napoleon, they denounced him for his ambition, and set out to fight him. When the coalition was broken by his armies, they turned round at his bidding, denounced England, and joined him in fighting against their ally. And this was the round of their history: a coalition and tergiversation alternately; now a speech and a fight against Bonaparte, who beat them; then a speech and a fight against England, who bought them off; then again a speech and a fight against Bonaparte, who beat them again; and then as before a speech and a fight against England, who again bought them off. Meanwhile they took everything they could get, whether from enemy or friend, seizing with no less greediness whatever bits of territory Bonaparte threw to them for their meanness, then pocketing the millions of Pitt, for which we are paying to this day.
Thus from 1799 to the end of 1809, Bonaparte seemed invincible and strode the landmass of Europe like a colossus. But his position and future were still insecure—he needed a further large-scale triumph. Once his military resources became overstretched, as they did from 1809 onward, and his capacity to deliver set-battle victories ended, as it did from 1810, the coalitions that his overreaching ambition and pride raised against him became far more formidable. The Sixth Coalition was brought into being by Bonaparte’s invasion of Russia in 1812, and it worked with increasing resources and success until the defeated emperor abdicated in April 1814, followed by the victorious allied Treaty of Paris. This sent Bonaparte to Elba as a petty ruler, while the Bourbon king, younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, was restored to the old throne as King Louis XVIII. The great powers then gathered in Vienna to devise a lasting settlement of European frontiers, and they were still in congress when Bonaparte escaped from Elba and returned to France. Their reaction to his audacity was swift and purposeful and produced what is sometimes called the Seventh Coalition, an amalgam of all the powers that had ever opposed Bonapartism, and that led directly to Bonaparte’s total overthrow at Waterloo.
But that is to anticipate events. What is clear from the story of the seven coalitions is that Bonaparte remained, from start to finish, a military man. As such, he enjoyed extraordinary success. Where he failed was as a politician, and still more as an international statesman. His failure was so complete that it eventually involved his military ruin, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Flawed and Fragile Empire
IF THE RECORD shows that Bonaparte was a great general, it equally demonstrates beyond argument that he could not rule on a long-term basis. No one has ever been faster than he was at overturning existing governments, setting up new administrations, and imposing constitutions to fit them. None lasted more than a few years, some only a few months. His empire waxed and waned, but it was throughout in a state of flux. It always bore the hallmarks of his impatience and his lack of tenacity in sustaining the long haul. It is unhistorical to engage in psychological examinations of Bonaparte’s character with a view to explaining his successes or failures in the running of nations. But his lack of heirs, and the stability and confidence they provide for a man who had won thrones by his own efforts, clearly contributed to the provisional nature of his imperial administration. If Bonaparte had been married earlier, to a fertile woman, and produced children to succeed and assist him, who could be trained to rule, he would have looked at the empire as a long-term investment to be treated and coaxed and cherished accordingly.
But here we come into unfathomable depths. Bonaparte’s emotional and sexual life remains a mystery, despite all that has been written about it. That he was captivated by Josephine, both before and for some time after their marriage, seems clear. She was an older woman, rather fragile in health, and from a higher social class, and she was taken aback by his ardor and determination, and perhaps by his manners. She needed persuading, and he was not a persuader but a man of action, in personal as in public matters. She complained that, in bed, he was too quick and selfish. Later, she was swept along in the chariot of his success, as first lady of the Republic, then as empress, leading the life of palaces and the court. She spent a fortune on clothes, probably her chief interest in life. The couple were apart a great deal and, when together, were not close. The pair have been the victims of one of the most famous bedroom jokes of all time: “Not tonight, Josephine.” There is no contemporary authority for it. What can it mean? It reflects, no doubt, what the French said. Josephine had had a number of affairs before she met Bonaparte. She seems to have taken lovers again during his long absences.
Bonaparte also had sexual encounters on campaign. As always with him, things were done in a hurry. When he felt the urge for sex, he would simply tell an aide: “Bring me a woman.” They knew his tastes. These women were stripped and ushered into his quarters naked, Bonaparte having no wish to become another Holofernes, the biblical general executed by the ardent Israelite patriot Judith. Or rather, this was the belief of Bonaparte’s nephew Napoleon III, who instituted the same practice when he, in turn, became emperor and needed a woman.
Both Bonaparte and Josephine were capable of jealousy. They had rows and shouting matches. Josephine could take risks because her position as spouse was protected by Bonaparte’s superstition: he believed she was part of his destiny. Then why no child? She believed, on the advice of her doctor, that the deficiency lay in Bonaparte. After all, she had produced a son before. He believed that she would die before him, and that he could then remarry and produce offspring. He had women even when they were together in one of his palaces, as she was aware when she was denied entrance to his private quarters in the evening. (Perhaps this is the origin of the notorious joke.) But on neither side did the liaisons go deep. Bonaparte would joke about his own, sometimes to Josephine herself, criticizing the object of his interest, especially deficiencies in lovemaking. This was coarse, but Josephine doubtless took it as evidence that his affections were not deeply engaged. He evidently detested her own infi delities, but kept his deepest feelings to himself.
There was one important exception to Bonaparte’s casual liaisons. Traveling triumphantly through Poland in the winter of 1806, he was serenaded by a group of wellborn girls, dressed as peasants, at one of the coach stops. He was struck by the beauty of one of them, and issued orders she was to be found and produced for him. She turned out to be the eighteen-year-old wife of the elderly count Walewski, mother of a little boy. She had no desire to become Bonaparte’s mistress, but intense pressure was put on her by the Polish authorities, by her husband, and by her family to submit. She was told that Poland’s independence would depend on her compliance. According to her own account, when she was finally pushed into Bonaparte’s bedroom and rejected his embraces, he shouted at her: “If you enrage me, I
will destroy Poland like this watch”—throwing his watch on the floor and stamping on it. She then fainted and, while she was unconscious, he raped her. In due course she warmed to him, left her husband, became pregnant, and gave birth to a son. Bonaparte was delighted. The event finally convinced him that he could produce an heir who would perpetuate his dynasty. Thus Josephine’s days as empress were numbered and divorce was only a matter of time. But the countess Maria Walewska was not to be the beneficiary. She was ordered to return to her husband and register the child as his (in due course, Count Alexandre Walewski became foreign minister to Napoleon III). Bonaparte told his brother Lucien: “It would be my personal preference to give my mistress a crown. But reasons of state force me to ally myself with sovereigns.”
Which sovereign now became the question. Bonaparte would have preferred to marry a Russian princess. Of all the legitimate sovereigns of Europe, Czar Alexander I was the only one Bonaparte liked, or said he did. He referred to him as “my friend.” Friendship, which carried a special meaning for Bonaparte (it meant a pooling of interests as well as mutual affection), was the most important link he recognized, next to family. Marriage into Alexander’s line would create a blood pact with the most powerful state in eastern Europe. There was everything to be said for the firmest possible links with Russia, not least the possibility of joint action in Asia to undermine Britain’s Indian empire.
Alexander would not have it, though he avoided an open rejection of the plan. He was an ideologue, who held legitimacy to be sacred. His reasons were as much religious as dynastic. Bonaparte was the beneficiary of a godless revolution that had actively persecuted God’s ministers on earth. True, he had made it up with the Roman church, but for transparent motives of expediency, and was quite capable of resuming the persecution if it once more became profitable. Again, if a Russian princess married Bonaparte, she would be forced to abjure Orthodoxy and embrace Catholicism. That might stir up the czar’s Catholic subjects in Poland, with whose aspirations, in any case, Bonaparte had identified himself. The czar’s refusal to sanctify his friendship with Bonaparte by a Christian family marriage was one of the most momentous mishaps in the dictator’s career. Such an alliance would have made the eventual clash between France and Russia far less likely; might have ruled it out altogether, especially if the two powers began cooperating against Turkey and British India. In that case, Bonaparte might have remained arbiter of much of Europe indefinitely. As it was, however, the czar’s refusal made the eventual invasion of Russia more likely, for Bonaparte deeply resented this rebuff from his “friend,” and his subsequent analysis of the czar’s acts and motives became far more hostile.