by Paul Johnson
The failure to win a quick victory in Spain, or any decisive victory at all, was one of the many reasons that led Bonaparte to embark on a war against Russia. It says a lot for his still-ebullient self-confidence, or maybe for his belief in his destiny, that having failed at one uncongenial end of Europe, he was ready to risk a second front at the other end, which was even less hospitable to his methods. One reason was pride. Bonaparte regarded Czar Alexander as unfinished business. He had come to terms with him at Tilsit and addressed him as “friend,” something he never called the Austrian emperor or the king of Prussia. But their relationship was too akin to equality for Bonaparte’s taste. He would have preferred Alexander, his army destroyed and his crown askew, to have come to him humbly to sue for terms, as the other legitimate potentates had done. Moreover, though the czar had confirmed his alliance with France at Erfurt in 1808, he had (Bonaparte came to realize and resent) insulted and disparaged him by declining to take up an obvious hint that he wanted the czar’s sister in marriage. Evidently, the czar did not regard Bonaparte as fit to become “family.” Despite all his victories and kingdoms, he was still illegitimate in Romanov eyes. So the emperor had to take Marie-Louise as a pis-aller. It had worked out very well, as Bonaparte never ceased to observe, but the injury was still felt. Hell hath no fury like a wooing emperor scorned. Then again, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, which Bonaparte had created out of Prussian Poland in 1807, was an important source of Franco-Russian tension. It was ruled nominally by the king of Saxony, one of Bonaparte’s puppets, but in practice by French soldiers and Polish officials. Bonaparte had dangled in front of the Poles the prospect of an enlarged and restored Polish kingdom, possibly under Jérôme, that would include much Russian territory. This infuriated the Russians. It is a fact of geopolitical life that you cannot be allies of both the Poles and the Russians at the same time.
However, the single biggest source of discord was the Continental System. Though the czar was pledged to implement it, it was probably beyond his power to do so. In any event, it was against Russia’s economic interests. The Baltic trade was of vital importance to her (insofar as anything was vital to the Russian economy), and it had already been severely disrupted by the struggles of Denmark, which was a reluctant French ally, with Norway, Sweden, and Britain—indeed Denmark’s alliance with France eventually forced her to go bankrupt and repudiate her debts. The ruin of the Baltic economy was evident by 1811, and so the czar was deaf to Bonaparte’s complaints that he was not enforcing the system.
By the beginning of 1812, therefore, Bonaparte was bent on war. He lacked good maps of Russia, but he was not wholly unaware of the risks he would be taking. When Murat and four French corps had moved into Poland in the late autumn of 1806, they had suffered heavy losses, not from action but from sickness and undernourishment, as they crossed the barren and often roadless wilderness of the eastern European plain. And whatever the conditions in Poland might be, they would certainly be worse in Russia. But Bonaparte, whose last major victory had been at Wagram in the summer of 1809, was badly in need of something spectacular to reassure the French public he was still a superman, to restore his sliding prestige in Europe, and to compensate for the expensive stalemate in Spain.
Bonaparte intended to make the subjugation of Russia, and its integration into his Continental System, not just a French campaign but a European one. He persuaded himself, or perhaps genuinely believed, that his reforms and code had benefited his allies and satellites, and that the empire ought to be defended and expanded not just by a French army but by a Continental one. So from January 1812 onward he mobilized a historic European army, from Germany and Italy, Poland and Hungary, Austria and Bavaria, the Netherlands and Switzerland. When Alexander refused to enforce the Continental System in full without a slice of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Bonaparte stormed at his ambassador: “Does not your master realize I have 800,000 troops?” He did not have that many, but he could get together 650,000. Nearly all the army commanders, and the key staff officers, were French, and one-third of the men.
By the fourth week in June, the immense host was ready to cross the Neva and so move into Russia proper, preceded by a tremendous barrage of propaganda. Bonaparte thought the numbers would impress. But numbers do not impress Russians—they have too many of them already: countless people (or “souls,” as they call them), villages, rivers, kilometers, high and low temperatures, areas, depths and densities of forests, marshes, plains, wildernesses. Russia always plays the numbers game at the extreme. In practice, the size of Bonaparte’s Grande Armée, deployed in a Russian theater, was its weakness. It strung out at between fifty and a hundred kilometers, an easy target. In his German campaigns, Bonaparte had fashioned a form of deployment on the march in which an entire corps constituted moving squares for offensive or defensive purposes. It was called the bataillon carré. But that was impossible in Russia. Moving rather like a slow arrow, the army took eight days to pass a given spot. The supporting services alone stretched over ten kilometers, with 35,000 wagons, spare horses, cattle for slaughter, officers’ carriages, ambulance trains, camp followers, and vehicles for transporting back the loot. There were 950 guns and a five-kilometer train of ammunition wagons. Bonaparte’s propaganda machine boasted that the supply train included more than thirty million liters of wine and brandy. Whether it did is a mystery: the liquor certainly disappeared quickly enough.
Bonaparte had never directed an army of this unwieldy size. On paper it was a miracle of his logistic skills. On the ground it looked too big and scattered. The emperor’s plan was to move rapidly between the two Russian armies, defeat one or both of them if he could, then press on to Moscow. He calculated that defeat in battle would bring the czar to the negotiating table and, if that failed, the loss of the ancient capital, Moscow, would leave him no alternative but to capitulate. But from first to last the czar did very little, leaving his two armies to blunder about. In his imagination, Bonaparte saw the invasion as an effort by the South to conquer the North, for he identified himself with the Mediterranean South, as opposed to the great plains of northern Europe. And he was disquieted by his scanty historical knowledge, which told him the North had usually conquered the South. But the image was faulty; it was really the West invading the East. The great plains of Russia, in summertime, were baking hot and almost waterless. So the huge army’s first unexpected enemy was heat, along with thirst, bad water, and the diseases it engenders. By the end of the summer, the effective strength of the army had been halved, and it had begun its fatal policy of killing its horses. The march became a trudge. Huge quantities of supplies were dropped off at food depots. But the peasants, as in Spain, could not be bribed or forced into replenishing the rations of the advancing troops. Torture made no difference. They burned their crops and, when possible, picked off the Grand Armée’s stragglers to roast.
Not until the end of the first week in September, after nearly twelve weeks’ marching, did Bonaparte manage to fight the big battle he had planned for. The Russian commander Kutuzov had more than 70,000 infantry, about 25,000 cavalry and Cossacks plus irregulars, and 600 guns. He took up a strongly fortified position at the village of Borodino, on the route to Moscow but still eighty miles southwest of the capital. Bonaparte moved forward from Smolensk with an attacking army of 160,000 and more than 550 guns, but by the time it was in position to fight, it was much smaller. When battle commenced on 5 September it was still broad summer, and Bonaparte, aware that his marshals feared the onset of winter, said to them: “Messieurs, voilà le soleil d’Austerlitz.” He and they remembered how the sun had shone through the winter mists at the great battle when he had routed large Russian forces. But those Russians had been more than a thousand miles from their homes, in a strange foreign place fighting a war whose objects were a complete mystery to them. Now they were defending their homeland. The main action took place on 7 September and lasted from six A.M. to six in the evening. The Russians withdrew the next day at dawn, in good order. Tech
nically it was a Bonaparte victory, but the losses on both sides were enormous: 40,000 Russians and perhaps as many as 50,000 on the French side. Bonaparte, unlike the Russians, could not easily make good his losses, still less his huge expenditure of ammunition for the artillery, which had blazed away virtually all day at the Russian redoubts.
After this costly encounter, the road to Moscow was open, and the Russians evacuated it. Bonaparte moved in on 14 September, and the next day the Russian governor, F. V. Ros topchin, ordered the houses, mostly of wood, to be torched. About three-quarters of the city was destroyed, leaving the Kremlin, which the French looted. There was much hard liquor left behind but little food, so more valuable horses were slaughtered and roasted, amid gruesome scenes of drinking and pillage. Bonaparte, disgusted and increasingly nervous, waited for the czar to capitulate. But the czar, again, did nothing. A personal letter from Bonaparte and two French delegations with treaty instructions were likewise ignored or rebuffed. By mid-October Bonaparte realized that the heavy snow was imminent and that there was no way he could keep the route out of Moscow open through the winter. He felt he had no alternative but to fall back on Smolensk, possibly farther.
Bonaparte marched his men out of Moscow on 19 October. But by now he was down to 95,000 effectives and most of his horses were dead. The Russians were beginning to counterattack, with ever-increasing forces, and on 3 November they destroyed the rear guard under Louis-Nicolas Davout. Bonaparte, much shaken, reached Smolensk on 9 November, to find that most of the food in his depot there had been eaten by starving stragglers, of whom there were about 30,000. When he left the city three days later, he had little more than 40,000 troops under his command. The snow was falling, retreat was becoming a rout, virtually all the loot had to be abandoned, and the army now had to cross several broad rivers whose few bridges had been destroyed. Bonaparte managed to get his army across the Berezina by 29 November, losing 20,000 in the process, but a few days later he had had enough. On 5 December he told his commanders that he was off to Paris as quickly as possible, to secure the regime there. They accepted the decision stoically. Murat was left in command.
It should be said that the retreat from Moscow, though horrific and shameful by the standards Bonaparte had set—more than 20,000 wounded were deliberately left behind, and the prisoners of war taken by the Russians, few of whom ever saw their homes again, numbered in excess of 200,000—was never a complete shambles. The Russian peasants had their revenge in full measure. But the Russian armies were in no fit state themselves to see a gratuitous battle, and on the whole they left the winter cold to do its work. The rear guard of the Grande Armée retired across the Neman in good order on 14 December, Ney, its commander, ensuring very properly that he was the last to leave Russian soil (he and Bonaparte’s stepson, Beauharnais, were the only senior officers who enhanced their reputations during the disaster). Two days later, the emperor’s notorious twenty-ninth bulletin of the campaign appeared in the official Moniteur in Paris. Blaming all on the winter, which had come “unexpectedly early,” the text admitted that “an atrocious catastrophe” had overtaken the Grande Armée.
Meanwhile, Bonaparte himself had been lucky to escape a patrol of guerrillas. He traveled in three horse-drawn sleighs, he occupying one with Louis Caulaincourt, head of the imperial household, a trusted man who had organized the murder of d’Enghien. The others carried his interpreter, his Mamluk bodyguard Rustam, and five servants and aides. They were in the sleigh five days and nearly froze to death in the minus-25-degree temperatures. Bonaparte kept himself warm by taking Caulaincourt’s furs and by incessant talking, rehearsing his excuses. All his tirades ended in a curse against the English: “But for them I would have been a man of peace.” By the time he got to Warsaw and received Polish bigwigs, who were aghast at the disaster, he had his quip ready: “From the sublime to the ridiculous is only one step” (it was Voltaire who had actually coined the saying). He repeated this several times during a three-hour discourse. The sound of his own voice being received in deferential silence by obsequious dignitaries reassured him. He hurried on into Germany by sledge, then by calèche and coach. The party broke the axle of one vehicle, changed into another, stopping only one hour in twenty-four. As they halted briefly in one German town, Bonaparte asked the postmaster its name, was told “Bonn,” and called out: “Give my respects to Monsieur Gött” (Goethe), then rattled on. After a journey in all of thirteen days, they reached the Tuileries Palace in Paris just before midnight on 18 December.
The next day Bonaparte was at his desk, working a fifteen-hour stretch, sending peremptory letters all over his empire. But the signs were ominous. On 25 December, Prussia withdrew from the French alliance. Soon, Prussian troops were fraternizing with the Russian army. One corps actually joined forces to threaten the French withdrawal from Germany. In March 1813, Prussia declared war on Bonaparte. The next ally to desert was the pope, who renounced his concordat with France. The news from Spain was worse and worse. Wellington now had an impressive army of experienced soldiers, he had got the Spanish army under his control, and the two together—plus the guerrillas—were threatening to turn the French out of Spain altogether and invade France itself. The French position in Italy was beginning to crumble, and Bonaparte did not trust Murat (now back in Naples), who he thought, rightly, would change sides to keep his kingdom. Worst of all from Bonaparte’s point of view, his father-in-law, the emperor Francis, was behaving shiftily. He said he was standing by his French alliance, but he was rearming fast. What for? He claimed it was to enable him to mediate effectively between Prussia and France. But he refused to communicate directly with Bonaparte, saying all must go through his foreign minister, Metternich. This tall, blond Austrian womanizer (he had had a liaison with Bonaparte’s sister Caroline) was anti-French and believed in the balance of power in Europe, like Talleyrand. By saying “Talk to Metternich,” Francis was in effect advising “Sue for peace while you can still get reasonable terms.”
But once he was back at work, with the snows of Russia a rapidly fading memory, Bonaparte’s optimism flooded back. The day after he returned to Paris, he had begun assembling a new army, calling up young conscripts and plucking back key men and units from all over the remaining empire. In April 1813, he was in Leipzig, on his horse once more at the tête d’armée (his favorite phrase). He looked fat and paunchy and old, but confident, and he issued his orders with great panache. It became the fashion among the French to say, “Isn’t he looking well!” At Lützen, he inflicted a sharp rebuff on Prussia’s leading general, Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, personally leading an attack by the Young Guard. He drove the Prussians back over the Elbe, and beat them again at Bautzen, forcing them to retreat behind the Oder. Then he returned to Metternich, who met him on 26 June in the palace at Dresden, capital of France’s satellite Saxony. The meeting lasted nine hours, and it was not of the kind Bonaparte relished. He had to listen as well as talk. Flushed with his victories, he found Metternich skeptical and obdurate. To keep Austria neutral, he was told, he would have to surrender not just Illyria, for which he was prepared, but Lombardy and much else. To get peace with Prussia, France would have to withdraw behind the Rhine, and so on. Bonaparte was furious and threw his hat into the corner of the room in his rage. Such terms were tantamount to dissolving the empire and throwing away his life’s work. In fact what Metternich offered was an agreement that, in six months’ time, Bonaparte would have been delighted to accept. But many men had to be turned into corpses before that point was reached. Metternich, shaken by the emperor’s lack of realism, asked him if he really wanted peace—did not the lives of men matter to him? Bonaparte told him that, rather than accept such dishonor able terms, he would gladly sacrifice a million. Metternich replied: “Sire, you are a lost man.” The interview ended.
What Metternich grasped, what Bonaparte did not yet realize, was that a historic change was taking place in the German-speaking world that altered the whole strategic pattern of Europe. Bon
aparte, in his desire to give a reforming cover to his territorial expansionism, had smashed to pieces the old Holy Roman Empire to replace it (as he thought) by a French-dominated Carolingian one. The results were a classic demonstration of Karl Popper’s law of unintended effect. Destroying the Holy Roman Empire seemed, to Bonaparte, no more momentous than ending the Venetian oligarchy or replacing the Knights of Malta. It was just dumping a medieval relic in the dustbin of history. In fact, the Holy Roman Empire filled a role. It was a device for stressing the cultural unity of Germany while making it difficult to bring about its political and military unity. Prussia was the largest German power, but Austria, by virtue of its hereditary occupation of the German imperial throne, was its equal, and the natural protector of the smaller German states. There was thus balance and multiplicity. The more responsible German thinkers wanted to keep things as they were. They argued that the balance between Prussia and Austria, and the existence of other German cultural centers, was of great benefit to Europe in music and painting, education and philosophy, theology and literature. Culture was Germany’s gift to Europe, not power. If, on the other hand, Germany was unified, it would be much more formidable than its neighbors and would inevitably seek to dominate the rest of Europe. That, when their arguments were brushed aside, was exactly what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.