by Paul Johnson
The marshals were a curious collection of old soldiers, romantics, daredevils and plain devils, time-servers and cynics. Almost without exception, they were brave men. The Gas-cons—Joachim Murat, Michel Ney, Jean Lannes, Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult—were exceptionally so. Bonaparte called Ney “the bravest of the brave,” and anyone who cares to see why should seek out his statue near the rue de l’Observateur in Paris, on which are listed the endless battles where he served with honor. Some had fought under the ancien régime, like the cavalryman Nicolas-Charles Oudinot, who carried the marks of twenty-two wounds he received under his new masters. About half the men had come up through the ranks. François-Joseph Lefebvre had been a sergeant in Louis XVI’s guard and went on to lead the imperial guard infantry in Russia. Asked to justify Bonaparte’s generosity to his marshals, the much-wounded veteran replied: “We will go down into my garden. I shall fire at you sixty times and, if you are still alive at the end, everything I have shall be yours.” Some, like André Masséna, were incorrigibly corrupt, looters notorious even by the standards of Bonaparte’s army. Masséna, indeed, was so outrageous that on one or two occasions he had actually to be punished by loss of command. But he was too invaluable to be kept in retirement, and he went on to become a marshal, duke of Rivoli, and a prince. Some were simple soldiers. Some, like Soult, were crafty survivors, who long outlived their master and flashed their stars at the courts of the last Bourbons and Louis-Philippe.
What few possessed—and therein lay their weakness—was independence of mind. They were, almost without exception, subordinates. Under the command of a decisive military genius like Bonaparte, they could perform prodigies. They rushed to obey his orders, to please him, to earn his praise and rewards. Sometimes, given an independent command, they acted well, especially if his orders were explicit and the task reasonably simple. But on their own, they tended to be nervous, looking over their shoulders, unresourceful in facing new problems he had not taught them how to solve. This exasperated the emperor, especially in Spain, where they all failed. But it was his own fault. He did not like to delegate, and therefore the men he promoted under his command tended to be those who carried out his orders with precision, rather than men with their own minds. The weakness was central to the failure of the empire, for Bonaparte used his marshals and generals not only to command distant armies, which he could not supervise in detail, but to govern provinces and kingdoms, run embassies, put down rebellions, and deal with all the crises that, from time to time, swept across territories of nearly eighty million souls.
There was something solitary and monolithic about Bonaparte. He was not the capstone of a solid pyramid of power. A huge unbridgeable chasm yawned between his person and the next man down the chain of command. And this fact, quite apart from the hidden menace of his personality, inspired fear. The state, the empire, was glued together by a ubiquitous terror. It was not that Bonaparte murdered many people. He imprisoned at will, and exiled. His police were everywhere and were very persistent. He controlled the printing presses, the theaters. His representative institutions were shams. But he had no concentration camps. His judicial murder of the duc d’Enghien—of which Talleyrand cynically remarked: “It was more than a crime, it was a mistake”—was remembered and brought up against Bonaparte again and again precisely because it was so unusual. But then it, too, helped to inspire fear, especially among Europe’s princes and crowned heads, who felt that, if their armies failed them, they, too, might be dragged before the drumheads and sentenced to be shot.
The best account of the fear Bonaparte inspired was provided by Madame de Staël, whose book Ten Years’ Exile is an indispensable guide to the Napoleonic period and a deep insight into the work of the man (not his mind, for that was unfathomable). De Staël was not a woman easily cowed. She was the strident daughter of Jacques Necker, the millionaire banker who had tried so hard to put into order the chaotic finances of the ancien régime. Rich and independent, articulate and outspoken, she had the unique distinction of being linked in possible marriage not only to Bonaparte himself but to his mortal enemy William Pitt. Neither intended any such thing; they rather fancied having careers of their own. So Germaine de Staël was no faintheart. Quite early in the Bonaparte dictatorship, she asked his aide Pierre Augereau if General Bonaparte intended to make himself king of Italy and was told: “Non, assurément, c’est un jeune homme trop bien elévé pour cela.” De Staël found the remark curious:
Far from reassuring me, further acquaintances with Bonaparte made him seem even more frightening. I had the disturbing feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself. He neither hates nor loves. . . . The force of his will resides in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity. . . . Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment would ever divert him from his ends. . . . I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race.
It is true that, at bottom, Bonaparte despised the French, or perhaps it would be more exact to say the Parisians, the heart of the “political nation.” He thought of them, on the basis of his experience during the various phases of the Revolution, as essentially frivolous. And since Paris set the trend for the nation, the rest of France followed suit in Paris’s whims. He told a friend of Madame de Staël: “Something new must be done every three months, to captivate the imagination of the French nation—with them, whoever stands still is ruined.” Thus, according to Wellington (who swore that the story was true), he sought to distract attention from his catastrophe in Russia by ordering the high-kicking dancers at the Opéra to stop wearing drawers—but the girls flatly refused. He thought the French clever and cunning but lightweight. They could not be trusted with democracy, or even with a parliament like the British one. The flattery he daily received confirmed this impression. De Staël relates that one of the state counselors, a member of the institute and a very great personage at Bonaparte’s court, asked her: “Haven’t you noticed what beautiful fingernails the First Consul has?” Another grandee asserted: “Bonaparte’s hand is perfectly made,” whereupon a young sprig of the old nobility interjected: “For Heaven’s sake, let’s not talk politics.”
If Bonaparte despised the French, how much more complete was the contempt of this cultural racist for the rest of his empire. He turned their kings and reigning dukes out of their own palaces and slept in their royal beds. He dragooned their soldiers into his armies, where they became military helots. His system of taxation was deliberately punitive, for it kept them weak, as he believed, and it was the only way the empire could be saved from bankruptcy, which always threatened. Bonaparte believed that his foreign subjects would never rise against him, for he was the victim of his own propaganda. What he did not grasp, because he did not listen to his critics, was that in trying to conquer all Europe, he was stirring up precisely the popular nationalism that had made Revolutionary France so formidable in the first place, but that was now spreading throughout the Continent.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Graveyards of Europe
THE DOWNFALL of Bonaparte had its origins in the unwillingness of the British to accept his conquests and legitimize them by a general peace treaty. After Trafalgar they were confident they could survive and somehow or other—they knew not exactly how—checkmate his schemes. The Industrial Revolution, based on steam and cotton, was proceeding vigorously, gold was flowing into the country, and the British were confident they could both pay for an enormous navy and also subsidize any or all of the powers willing to stand up to the tyrant. Meanwhile, their navy kept station off the main ports of the empire, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, keeping France’s navies rotting in harbor, and preventing the arriv
al or departure of any merchantmen carrying goods the British ruled contraband.
This blockade had an effect on Bonaparte disproportionate to its economic importance, considerable though that was. He thought it was unfair, even morally outrageous. Unaccustomed though he might be to discuss war-making in terms of ethics, he nevertheless felt it inadmissible to use the blockade weapon. Not understanding sea warfare, and underestimating the physical and financial strain of maintaining total blockade on vast stretches of coastline, he thought the British were using this unlawful weapon on the cheap. As he later put it angrily: “With two small wooden machines, you distress an entire line of coast, and place a country in a situation of a body covered with oil, and thus deprived of its natural perspiration.”
The issue was one of those occasions when Bonaparte allowed his anger to overrule his reason in determining the central strategy of the war. The idea of hitting back at British seapower and crippling its commerce by a universal blockade of British goods had been discussed under the Directory and the Consulate, but it was not until the end of 1806 that Bonaparte, flushed with his sensational triumphs over Austria, Russia, and Prussia in 1805-6, decided on action. On 21 November 1806 he laid down in Berlin a series of decrees aimed at excluding British goods and services wherever French arms held sway or influence. These were formalized in the first and second Milan Decrees (November-December 1807) and became known as the Continental System.
Bonaparte often passed laws or issued proclamations that proved ineffective, and nothing more was heard of them. But he took the Continental System with unusual earnestness and spent prodigious amounts of his time and energy trying to make it work. In vain. The system was counterproductive. It produced a vast amount of smuggling from which the British benefited, knowing full well that without strict maritime controls large-scale smuggling could not be prevented—and in this case the controlling maritime power, maintaining a perpetual inshore watch, was on the side of contraband. Moreover, inland efforts by Bonaparte’s army and police to control the traffic were expensive in manpower and highly unpopular. This was true even in France, not least because the smugglers who brought in cheap British cotton goods and exotic products from the Americas and the East took back with them French wine, brandy, and silks for smuggling into Britain. But at least in France, some, perhaps most, people saw the point of the system. Outside France it seemed, to those who suffered the worst side of French imperialism, designed as much to boost French exports as to ruin Britain’s. This impression was reinforced after Bonaparte issued the Trianon Decrees in 1810, which admitted some British goods under a complex tariff system discriminating shamelessly in favor of French producers. The result was that governments not directly controlled by the French, although part of the system, made little or no effort to enforce it. This was something Bonaparte’s pride could not tolerate, and it tipped him into two disastrous wars, the first with Spain, the second with Russia.
Bonaparte had never fought in either of these two remote theaters, at both ends of Europe. Spain was a weak power that had come under French influence from 1796, lending its navy, allowing French troops to trample across the country to attack Britain’s ally Portugal, and subscribing to the Continental System. Bonaparte despised the Spanish ruling elite, its armed forces, and everything else in a wretched country that had once been great and was now decadent and cowardly. He equally formed a low opinion of Russia, whose army he had scattered without much difficulty in the Austerlitz campaign. Lacking experience of Spain and Russia, Bonaparte was let down by what, as a rule, was his strongest gift or instinct, his geographical imagination. A man who could conjure up entire campaigns, down to the smallest topographical detail, by poring over maps embarked not once but twice on a desperate adventure cartographically blind. The maps, such as they were, did not convey, or did not convey to Bonaparte, the hazards and seriousness of these enterprises. Bonaparte was used to Europe proper, with its productive agriculture, teeming trade routes, good roads, prosperous cities, rivers bridged every few miles, and (on the whole) temperate climate. He knew how to squeeze it to produce what he wanted—he used it to supply his armies day by day with everything he required: food for his men and horses, money for the payroll, supplies of all kinds—and he knew, also, how to strike quickly at its centers of power, to compel surrender.
By contrast, Spain was, in certain important physical respects—climate, topography, vegetation and flora, desiccation, and soil content—part not of Europe but of northwest Africa. And in similar ways, Russia was part of northern and western Asia. Both had untamed, often unbridged rivers, poor or nonexistent roads, subsistence economies that could not support unsupplied armies, and extremes of climate that made both summers and winters perilous for troops without barracks. Neither country had a political core that, once occupied, placed the rest at the invader’s feet. They were both eaters of armies.
Bonaparte believed that in Spain, a backward country in his eyes, he could build up a progressive pro-French party, as he had once done in Italy and Germany. But that did not work. Instead, the defeats and miseries engendered by the French alliance, which exacerbated the decay of Spain’s Latin American empire, its chief source of wealth, led to vicious internal disputes and the threat of civil war. Both factions appealed to Bonaparte to mediate. He took this as justification for ordering an open invasion, which took place in March 1808. He had no difficulty in taking Madrid, but when he then deposed the Bourbons and set up a puppet regime under his brother Joseph, switched from the throne of Naples at a moment’s notice to take the crown once held by Charles V and Philip II, Spain’s pride and dignity were outraged. In May there was something akin to a national uprising, which began in Madrid and spread rapidly after Joseph was crowned in June. A Cortes, or parliament, was elected under a national junta or government, and local juntas sprang up in most parts of the country. Joseph was king of Spain only in those parts where the French had a strong military presence, and if Spain was to be effectively subdued, a large occupying army would be permanently required.
Bonaparte had never confronted a situation like this. Austria, as he saw it, played the game: once it had been beaten in the field and its capital occupied, it sued for peace. The Prussians had done likewise after Friedland. Large garrisons, in almost impregnable and well-provisioned fortresses, had tamely surrendered when a mere troop of French cavalry had made its appearance. But in Spain the more troops the emperor poured in, the more resistance stiffened. There were 30,000 in Madrid, under Murat, appointed military governor. There was an army of 25,000 under Junot in Portugal, and another 20,000 along the Tagus, 15,000 in Catalonia, and 30,000 in reserve in Castile—120,000 in all. The Spanish army was beaten again and again, with no perceptible change in the overall situation. Soon there was no food for the French army and no supplies. All had to be sent from France, and Bonaparte refused to send it. So began the long, harrowing process of gouging food out of hoarding peasants, hanging and torturing them, and raping their wives, followed by the inevitable reprisals on isolated groups of French soldiers caught unawares, who were emasculated and burned alive. Spaniards who held office under the French were assassinated. Entire villages were torched in retaliation. Spain became a theater where all the worst horrors of war, so startlingly drawn and etched by Goya, were enacted.
Bonaparte took a personal hand in the last months of 1808. He brought with him more of his best generals, Soult and Ney, Lefebvre and Victor, and yet more troops. Joseph had felt obliged to evacuate Madrid. Bonaparte, with 45,000 men, had no difficulty in retaking it early in December. He immediately issued a succession of decrees and reforms, which fell on stony ground. He had an overall plan, which produced some minor victories and forced the withdrawal at Corunna of a 30,000-strong British force under General Sir John Moore, which had come to aid the junta. By January 1809 Bonaparte had been there three months and had had enough of Spain. He announced that he had solved the problem and returned to more congenial business in his empire.
But nothing had been solved. Though Moore was killed, his force was intact. Commanding the seas, the British found it relatively easy to embark a hard-pressed army and land it elsewhere on the coast. Moore was succeeded by Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Wellington). He had made his name in India and was therefore dismissed by his colleagues and the French as a “Sepoy general.” In fact he was admirably suited to his task. He fought a war of attrition, designed to exhaust the enemy. He bolstered the Spanish forces and conserved his own. He had no hesitation in abandoning towns and territory when advisable and retiring behind prepared lines. He was a defensive general. But, when the odds were in his favor, he was quite capable of carrying out a well-prepared attack. Unlike Bonaparte, he had no grandiose strategy, no talent for blitzkrieg. He was a monument of patience, content with accumulating small gains. He recognized that the war for the peninsula was going to be a long haul, and he was right: it lasted for six years and was the most protracted campaign of the entire period.
In October 1809 Bonaparte sent 80,000 more troops to Spain, bringing the grand total to more than a quarter of a million. He put Masséna in overall command. Throughout the winter of 1809, for the whole of 1810, and into 1811, Masséna’s strategy, an echo of Bonaparte’s, was to bring Wellington’s force to battle and destroy it. But Wellington feinted, dodged, and retired, and occasionally inflicted a sharp rebuff on the French. His troops were well fed and supplied, and Masséna’s often near starving. Bonaparte was committing the elementary error that young cadets are taught at training school to avoid: “Never reinforce failure.” The occupation of Spain was a failure. It either had to be replaced by an entirely different concept or abandoned. Instead, Bonaparte continued to send in reinforcements, small and large but never of a scale likely to make a dramatic difference. It became, for him, like Vietnam for the Americans or Afghanistan for Soviet Russia. And gradually Wellington’s army grew larger and better trained, and his Spanish auxiliaries a little more dependable, especially when stiffened by British troops on their flank. So the climate of fear Bonaparte radiated was dispelled. Wellington began to advance and win battles—first minor ones, then major ones. Bonaparte blamed his marshals. Virtually all of them were tried out in Spain, and all failed. But, though Bonaparte criticized, he did not produce a new master plan. Nor did he again go to Spain himself.