On 1 December the combined Russia and Austrian armies marched forward to occupy the abandoned Pratzen Heights, seemingly the key to the battle, from which they could gaze down contemptuously on the French forces below. There they held a council of war, during which Kutuzov slept ostentatiously, saying that his advice had been ignored. They decided to attack through the weakened French southern flank and attempt to cut Napoleon off from his supply line along the road to Vienna, thus encircling his army. They had taken the bait.
Napoleon was unusually animated at dinner that evening. An eyewitness described the scene at 9 p.m.
[The Emperor] decided to go the round of the bivouacs on foot and incognito; he was nearly at once recognized. It would be impossible to describe the enthusiasm of the soldiers when they saw him. In an instant blazing torches of straw were raised on a thousand poles, and 80,000 men were standing and acclaiming their Emperor, some for the anniversary of his coronation, others saying that the army would present the Emperor with a bouquet on the following day. An old grenadier came up to him and said: ‘Sire, keep out of the firing, I promise you in the name of the grenadiers, that you need not fight otherwise than as a spectator, for we will bring you the standards.’ When the Emperor returned to his own bivouac, a straw shanty without a roof that the grenadiers had built for him, he said: ‘This is the most glorious night of my life; but I regret that so many of these brave fellows will be lost. They really are my children.’
He also had luck on his side: a thick fog enveloped the lakeside in the early hours of the morning, which helped further to conceal Davout’s and Bernadotte’s arrival, as well as Soult’s cavalry behind the main lines: the shallow valleys of the terrain helped further to hide the French. To the allies it seemed the French were heavily outnumbered, in inferior positions and demoralized, almost on the verge of retreat.
The allies decided on a two-pronged attack: Bagration was to strike in the north against Lannes’s Fifth Corps; and Buxhovden, commanding a second Russian army, was to lead the main attack with 45,000 men against Soult’s apparently weakened forces in the south; the Russians and Austrians, thus lulled by a sense of false security, took the immense risk of moving off the Pratzen Heights in a southerly direction.
At around 4 a.m., the attack began, with the Russians and Austrians being checked in the north, but making steady progress against the French in the south across difficult terrain which was also bounded by the marsh and the shallow lakes, potential death traps in the freezing conditions. After some four hours of fighting, the coalition troops in the south suddenly came up against 7,000 fresh soldiers commanded by Davout and were blocked.
At this moment Napoleon ordered Murat’s cavalry to attack the Russian cavalry which had been left occupying the Pratzen Heights: a colossal cavalry engagement involving some 10,000 men ensued. Napoleon waited until just after nine, when the sun had more or less cleared the mists, to order Soult’s two divisions in waiting to move. In a disciplined and steady march the infantry ascended the gentle incline of the heights against the by now much reduced allied army at its weakest point – the centre.
Kutuzov, seeing what was happening, ordered reinforcements to the weakened centre, but it was too late: the allies were being pushed back. Bernadotte’s concealed corps was also now ordered into the fray. The Russians turned desperately to counter-attack. The Russian Imperial Guard, headed by the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, bravely dashed into the centre, but the Austrians, retiring in confusion, got in their way and they were forced back at around one o’clock.
By now the French commanded the heights and were in a position to turn the tables, threatening to cut off the bulk of the Russian army to the south, which was caught between the heights and the ponds. French artillery was brought to bear on the trapped army, blowing holes in the shallow ice below. Both Napoleon and Alexander later suggested that thousands of Russians fell through the ice to a freezing death in the waters of the ponds – the one to rub in the extent of his triumph, the other seeking to blame natural causes for his defeat. Yet when the ponds were drained a few days later only two or three bodies were found, along with 150 dead horses and thirty cannon. Most of the Russian soldiers fled across the narrow strip of land between the ponds: the ice was too thin to bear them.
As the retreat turned into a rout, only Bagration’s forces in the north retired in good order. By the end of the day, however, the French were too exhausted to give chase. It was nevertheless an overwhelming victory. Some 11,000 Russians and 4,000 Austrians had been killed and 12,000 taken prisoner along with 180 guns. Only 1,300 French soldiers had been killed and some 7,000 wounded, along with the loss of around 600 prisoners.
It had been a textbook victory, secured by Napoleon’s skill in deceiving the enemy, in positioning his troops, in making perfect use of the features of the battlefield and in ordering the various corps into battle with split-second timing. Essentially, through concealing most of his troops and feinting a retreat from the strategic centre ground on the obverse side of a hill, he had lured the enemy into a trap – a trick which was later to be used time and again by his most dangerous enemy, the Duke of Wellington.
The remarkable mobility of his troops had also overcome the static and predictable linear attack of his opponents. And once again he had shown his ability to mass overwhelming force where it could be used to devastating effect: he had cut the enemy line in two by the simple device of slicing straight through their weakened centre. Finally the battle was a rare masterpiece of precision, command and control – his orders were executed rapidly and faultlessly, his generals operating with just the right degree of co-ordination and independence as in some flawlessly executed field manoeuvre rather than in battle.
Never were Napoleon’s military skills more in evidence than at Austerlitz. Of all his battles, it was the most flawless, the most perfect, the most inspired – as Napoleon probably himself thought, although he had a habit of trying to inflate his achievements on much less impressive occasions. The Russians retreated at speed to Poland while the Austrian Emperor sued immediately for peace. In the Battle of the Three Emperors, the greatest engagement that had ever yet been fought in Europe, two had been comprehensively routed.
Napoleon spent the cold night out in the open among his dead, and then the following one in comfort. In his words: ‘The battle of Austerlitz is the most splendid of all I have fought. I have fought thirty battles of the same sort, but none in which the victory was so decisive, and so little in doubt. The infantry of the guard was not sent into action – the men were weeping with rage. Tonight I am lying in a bed, in the beautiful castle of Count Kaunitz, and I have changed my shirt, which I hadn’t done for a week past. I shall get two or three hours’ sleep.’
Archduke Charles arrived at the head of his Italian armies to insist on the need for peace and to dismiss his enemies at court as ‘obscure quacks gathered round the monarchy’s deathbed’. Both Colloredo and Coblenz were dismissed. Napoleon spent Christmas at the Schonbrunn and also met the Archduke, his most formidable Austrian adversary.
At the Treaty of Pressburg, signed on 26 December, Francis and the Austrians were utterly humiliated. Venice, as well as Dalmatia and Istria, was ceded to the Kingdom of Italy. Sweden and the Tyrol were granted to Napoleon’s allies, the electors of Wurttemberg and Bavaria. Austria was forced to pay 40 million francs to the French.
Napoleon had also secured a buffer zone of German states. Murat was given charge of the Grand Duchy of Berg and Berthier that of Neuchâtel. The King of Prussia hastened to make peace and broke off relations with Britain, being rewarded with the electorate of Hanover.
The French Emperor now engaged in dynastic policies on a megalomaniacal scale, aping royal lines that had taken centuries to build, awarding whole countries as baubles to his singularly untalented and ill-equipped family. For this former Jacobin, supporter of Robespierre and ‘meritocrat’, it was grotesque.
To his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais, admitted
ly the only talented member of the clan, he awarded Bavaria by marrying him off to the beautiful Augusta, daughter of the King. To his dim, timorous, head-in-the clouds elder brother Joseph he gave the Kingdom of Naples. There was a small detail to fill in: first it had to be captured. Joseph and Masséna marched on the kingdom with 40,000 men, forcing the crass King Ferdinand IV and Maria Carolina to flee to Sicily once again. The ‘Batavian Republic’ was abolished and the new Kingdom of Holland was awarded to his younger brother Louis, a nervous, but essentially well-meaning man without an ounce of administrative ability but who was sensitive to the needs of his subjects – as Napoleon discovered to his cost.
Thus the extraordinary vulgarity of Napoleon’s nature fused in a kind of mania: the distribution of the spoils of Corsican brigandage on a pan-European scale to members of his own family.
If Napoleon had followed his triumph at Austerlitz with an attempt to put in place a lasting settlement in Europe based on French domination, and had also shown moderation in his treatments of his defeated foes, the Austrians and their allies, he might have laid the foundations for lasting peace and indeed his own survival, for Britain had no wish to prolong a war in which it was isolated. Instead he trampled on his defeated foes in an unprecedented display of triumphalism, which was guaranteed to nourish hatred and feelings of revenge at the earliest opportunity. Admittedly Napoleon’s recently acquired subject peoples were uncertain what to make of their new masters at first: they preached freedom and equality and might be an improvement upon their stiff-backed Austrian predecessors. But such hopes were soon dashed.
Napoleon’s triumphalism was soon apparent in his own country. He ordered the patchwork of mediaeval Paris to be slashed across with great avenues to celebrate his triumph – admittedly by a great city planner, Haussmann. The Arc de Triomphe was built, 150 feet high and nearly as wide, at the head of the Champs Élysées, sweeping down to the Tuileries, where the Arc d’Austerlitz (now known as the Arc de Carrouse) was also built, with a column nearby in the Place Vendôme surmounted by Napoleon dressed as Caesar.
For the moment Napoleon’s more dangerous rivals in the army were entirely subdued. The opposition, faced by the ferocious surveillance of Fouché’s spy system, went to ground. Napoleon seemed unchallenged – master both of France and the continent. Yet the French power elites, although subdued, still existed. Talleyrand, in particular, so often depicted as a scheming opportunist at this moment of Napoleon’s apotheosis, showed strength and firmness by telling his master what he did not want to hear. He urged the Emperor to reach a generous peace with Austria so as to secure it as an ally, not a sullen and resentful defeated enemy:
The Austrian monarchy is a combination of ill-assorted states, differing from one another in language, manners, religion, and constitution, and having only one thing in common – the identity of their ruler. Such a power is necessarily weak, but she is an adequate bulwark against the barbarians – and a necessary one. Today, crushed and humiliated, she needs that her conqueror should extend a generous hand to her and should, by making her an ally, restore to her that confidence in herself, of which so many defeats and disasters might deprive her for ever. I implore Your Majesty to read again the memorandum which I had the honour to submit to you from Strasburg. Today more than ever I dare to consider it as the best and wisest policy.
The wily foreign minister, who had been given the Principality of Benevento in the Kingdom of Naples as his share in the spoils, was right; for Archduke Charles, the most intelligent and resolute Austrian leader, favoured a strategy of eastern expansion for his country at the expense of Turkey, leaving Europe as Napoleon’s domain. This would have been a not unreasonable compromise, but the Emperor Francis was disposed to oppose Napoleon and feared that the French Emperor was scheming to have him replaced on the throne by one of his more pliable brothers.
In the summer of 1806 Napoleon set up his Confederation of the Rhine, which effectively turned the states of Germany into French satellites, whose security and foreign policy he now ran. Francis formally dissolved the Holy Roman Empire for fear that Napoleon would adopt that title too. In fact it had been merely an expression of Austria’s continuing influence in the region, which was already under challenge from the Prussians; with France’s victories, it had become obsolete.
Napoleon now enjoyed a unique position. Like Julius Caesar he did ‘bestride this world like a colossus’. France ruled the Low Countries, virtually all of Italy and effectively dominated most of Germany. To the south Spain was in sullen alliance with France, while only tiny Portugal was hostile, thanks to its old alliance with Britain; to the east Austria had been stripped of many of its possessions and neutralized, although not entirely subdued; Prussia was timorous and fearful under a weak and vacillating king, and the arrogant young Alexander’s Russia had been badly burnt in its first sally towards western Europe.
Napoleon’s conquests were not quite Roman in scale – they did not extend round the shores of the Mediterranean to Spain or Britain – but they exceeded Charlemagne’s and were the largest European empire in some 1,300 years. If the thirty-six-year-old Emperor sincerely wanted peace – and the French nation, exhausted by years of revolution, upheaval, war, economic crisis and conscription seemed to thirst for it – it was his for the asking. Moreover Napoleon himself had for the first time proved himself as a general of the first rank, both at Ulm and at Austerlitz. He could no longer be dismissed by his military peers as merely a winner of small victories in Italy, or as a ‘colonial’ general in Egypt.
Chapter 51
THE GRENVILLE INTERLUDE
When Pitt died at the end of January 1806, William, Lord Grenville, Pitt’s brilliant cousin, formed the Ministry of All Talents, so named for its dazzling array of senior political figures from all parties and its engaging liberalism. It featured such luminaries as Charles James Fox, foreign secretary until his death in September 1806, a dissolute figure in his youth who became a politician of notable calibre and Pitt’s perennial opponent; Lord Howick, who later as Earl Grey steered Britain to peaceful political reform in 1832; and, as secretary for war, William Windham, an enthusiast for a British role in South America.
Exhausted by war and with Pitt dead, the British now made a fresh attempt to make peace with France based upon an entirely new concept – not in fact dissimilar to that advocated by the Archduke Charles in Austria. France could dominate the west and centre of the European continent, leaving Austria, Prussia and Russia to contend and expand in the east, while Britain would be left with its maritime empire, possibly carving out a massive new province of this from the crumbling of the Spanish empire in South America. There had been an extensive history to this plan – and it was under Pitt’s successor that it seemed ready at last to take flight.
Britain had long played host to an extraordinary figure, Francisco de Miranda, the former French revolutionary general and self-styled Liberator of Latin America. In May 1790, Miranda, a mixture of skilled professional soldier, dreamer, poseur, man of letters, traveller and sexual obsessive, had first met William Pitt. Miranda prepared himself feverishly, drawing up an ambitious and wholly unrealistic plan for liberation. He gave a careful estimate of the colonies’ resources, and of Spanish strength there. There were 21 million people, he claimed, in ‘the Spanish Indies’, half of them Spaniards, criollos, whites and of mixed blood, the rest Indians and blacks. The colonies produced annually about 55 million pesos in gold, silver, sugar, cacao, hides, tobacco, indigo and cochineal, and imported roughly 22 million pesos’ worth of goods from Spain, and a similar amount on contraband. Spain had around 36,000 troops in the colonies, of whom some 20,000 were locally raised militia, the rest regular soldiers; and a navy of 123 ships and 44,000 sailors.
Miranda subtly underlined South America’s potential by suggesting – with remarkable foresight – that a canal could be cut through the isthmus of Panamá to facilitate trade to the Far East for Britain and America. He argued that although Spanish America, m
ore populous than Spain, should be able to stage its own revolt, its communities were cut off from one another by distance and poor communications. With control of the seas, the Spanish could send reinforcements wherever they liked – a crucial insight. Britain, he insisted, as a maritime power, could cut the Spanish lines of communication. He argued that Britain was a natural ally for South America, and ended on an elevated and flattering note: ‘In view of the similarity that exists in the character of these two nations, and the effects that must naturally flow from liberty and the fact that a good government can instruct the general mass of men, progressively doing away with the religious prejudices that cloud its people’s minds . . . these being otherwise honest, hospitable, and generous – we must expect soon to see a respectable and illustrious nation emerging worthy of being the ally of the wisest and most famed power on earth.’
His grandiose blueprint was for a kind of united states of Spanish America, stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic, excluding Brazil and Guiana, but including the land east of the Mississippi and south of the source of the river, below Parallel 45. The constitution of this great new state would be a hybrid of the monarchical and republican systems: a descendant of the Incas would sit on the throne – this to give the monarchy an authentically pre-Columbus flavour – but he would be accountable, British-style, to a two-chamber congress, with an upper house elected for life and a lower one by regular popular (if restricted) vote. A two-thirds majority would be needed to amend the constitution, as well as a three-quarters majority of a council composed of the Inca Emperor sitting with the highest judges of the land. The clergy would retain many of their privileges, but the Inquisition would be done away with. The Spanish monopoly of trade would be ended and the new state would be open to commercial treaties with Britain and other countries. (On seeing this blueprint later, President Adams of the United States is said to have remarked that he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The son of the Bostonian James Lloyd, however, wrote to Adams describing Miranda as ‘the most extraordinary and marvellously energetic man I have ever met’.)
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