by Philip Dwyer
Hostility varied from region to region, depending on the extent to which war had touched people’s lives.18 Fouché believed that the people and what were called the ‘intermediary classes’, that is the bourgeoisie, were no longer favourable towards Napoleon even though they were not yet openly hostile.19 In December 1812, as a result of the Russian defeat, the minister of the interior, the Comte de Montalivet, requested confidential letters from prefects about the mood of the people in the departments. These letters were summarized in reports for the Emperor. For the most part they were reassuring and probably influenced Napoleon in setting his course, especially since it was clear that he would be able to solve the conscription problem.20 But the letters also made it clear that the French desperately longed for peace. Public declarations of support may have been made by municipal councillors and prefects, but they were largely conforming to imperial expectations.21 One of Napoleon’s failings is that he could think only in terms of triumph and defeat. The fear of defeat made further triumphs always necessary. Moreover, the feelings of grandeur that grew with every triumph rendered it increasingly intolerable that anybody, or any nation, should not recognize his greatness.
The French people wanted nothing more than to enjoy the benefits of a stable peace, and had wanted it now for years.22 The public was tired of war even before Austerlitz and was unable to arouse any enthusiasm for most of Napoleon’s victories. Police reports throughout 1807 made it plain that the populace was sick of war, especially in those regions, like Brittany, that had never entirely accepted either the Republic or the Empire.23 As the Empire progressed the news of victories fell on a population increasingly indifferent and increasingly war-weary. There was probably no better indication of the extent of disaffection with the regime than the response to conscription. If there had been a gradual diminution in the number of draft dodgers between 1800 and 1810, down from 28 per cent to 13 per cent, the number shot up after 1810 to more than 45 per cent in some departments. That is, almost half of those called up, especially in certain departments in Belgium, in the west and the south-west of France and in Italy, refused to answer the call.24 Five call-ups, as well as the extraordinary call-ups that had been made to meet the shortfall in men, meant that in 1813 Napoleon conscripted more men than in the previous six years.25 The numbers of foreign troops continued to increase so that they went from 14 per cent of the Grande Armée in 1808 to 24 per cent in 1813.26 All males between the ages of twenty and twenty-five were in principle eligible, although only a proportion were ever called up, usually around a third (in 1813–14 the figure climbed to two-thirds, on paper at least).27 In September 1813, for example, the prefect from the Ariège complained that so many young men were being taken that there would be no one left to procreate.28 It was no doubt an exaggeration, but it was an indication that the call-up for the year 1813 was considered the most onerous and was going to contribute to the legend of Napoleon as the ‘Corsican Ogre’. The Emperor was reduced to trawling all previous classes that had been called up going back as far as 1803 – that is, including men who were now thirty.
The Germans Strike Back
At the sight of so many bedraggled, wounded and unarmed men straggling through Germany at the beginning of 1813, people quickly reached the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the French Empire was on the verge of collapse.29 Rumours of the Russian seizure of Königsberg, not to mention of the death of Napoleon at Moscow, had reached north Germany by the middle of January.30 By that stage, some young men, as was the case in Minden, sixty kilometres east of Osnabrück, expressed their opposition to the Empire by running through the streets at night crying ‘Vive l’Empereur Alexandre!’31 By the middle of February, many north Germans were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Russian Cossacks.32 The more that rumours about the Russians became prevalent, the more tensions increased between the local populations and their French overlords. On 23 February, the tension came to a head in Hamburg where the arrest of some smugglers outside the city gates was the occasion for rioting throughout the city.33 In Lübeck, French police reported ‘a decided effrontery, in the inhabitants’ words and deeds, and especially in their relations with the French’.34 In Leiden, a crowd of peasants forced open the gates of the city, possibly with the intention of hoisting the Orange flag – representing the House of Orange, which ruled Holland until 1795 – but the riot was quickly put down by regular troops.35 In Oldenburg, the revolts were especially violent after frustrations simmering under the surface finally erupted.36 The symbols of French imperialism were attacked, the hated customs houses and post office were sacked, and French officials were forced to flee. In some instances – in Hamburg, for example – French troops opened fire on the crowds, killing and wounding dozens.37 In the departments of the Rhine that had been annexed to France, and in the Grand Duchy of Berg, the first revolts broke out in January 1813; it took French troops two months to suppress them.38
Two things are worth noting about these revolts. First, they were the direct consequence of the economic cost of occupation. The Empire had brought heavy burdens of war requisitions and conscription even during the campaign in Russia. In many instances, this had been going on for years. Second, the revolts involved the working and lower-middle classes. The elites, or at least property-owning families, almost invariably sided with the French, out of fear of the lower classes and lawlessness. In other words, the riots were the expression of people’s frustration with economic deprivation; there was little or nothing political about them. The obligation to supply Napoleon’s armies with men and matériel had been an overwhelming burden the consequences of which would be felt for decades. We have seen how the Grande Armée laid waste to Prussia, but to give two other examples, the town of Nuremberg, with a population of 25,000 people, was obliged to feed and house 350,000 men from August 1813 to June 1814. The town of Erlangen, with a population of 8,000, had to feed and house 34,000 men in 1814.39 The French were hated because they destroyed livelihoods and reduced countless working- and lower-middle-class lives to poverty.40 When the French were able to retaliate, however, the local elites always co-operated with them. Reprisals were typically harsh. Special military courts were established in Hamburg. Dozens were arrested, tried and executed on the same day.
If Alexander was determined to pursue Napoleon,41 this was certainly not the case for either Austria or Prussia. At first, it would appear that Prussia had every intention of staying in the alliance with France. At the end of December 1812, Frederick William wrote to Napoleon to assure him of his ‘constant attachment’.42 He then sent an envoy to Paris in January 1813 to try to come to some agreement with Napoleon in return for his continued loyalty. His demands were quite reasonable under the circumstances: the payment of ninety million francs already owed to Prussia for supplies taken by France, and a few territorial concessions in return for which he would enter into an active alliance against Russia. The alliance was to be sealed with a marriage between a Prussian prince and a Bonaparte. Despite two further alliance proposals made in February 1813, Napoleon’s only answer was to continue with requisitions in a manner that was bound to alienate Prussia even further.43 Moreover, he ordered Eugène to burn any village ‘at the least insult’, even Berlin if it ‘behaved badly’.44 It may have been a conscious attempt on the part of Napoleon to push Prussia into the arms of Russia, so that he would have an excuse to wage war against the Hohenzollerns, defeat them and finally eliminate the monarchy altogether.45 He no doubt believed that any future campaign against a Russo-Prussian alliance would be a replay of 1806–7, but given the pyrrhic victory of Eylau this was hubris.
In typical Prussian style, though, at the same time as the Prussians were negotiating with Napoleon, the chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, attempted to get Metternich to side with Prussia and Russia against France, and when that did not work to create a central European neutral block that would oblige Napoleon and Alexander to come to terms.46 Thus, after Napoleon’s refusal to negotiate, and against the king’s
better judgement, Frederick William III issued a proclamation known as An mein Volk (To my people) on 17 March 1813, calling on north Germans to rise in a war against Napoleon. It was a patriotic Christian appeal which presented the war against France as both a ‘holy war’ and a ‘people’s war’.47 In nineteenth-century Prussian-German history much was made of this proclamation and the so-called Erhebung or uprising against France. As uprisings go, however, it was not much of one, and as proclamations go, Frederick William was playing catch-up. A similar proclamation had been issued by the Prussian assembly of the estates one month previously, on 13 February,48 after Alexander had crossed the Niemen in pursuit of the remains of the Grande Armée, and more than two months after the Prussian contingent under the command of General Hans David Ludwig von Yorck withdrew and signed a convention with the Russians at Tauroggen (30 December 1812). Yorck’s action was at first disowned by Frederick William, fearful of French reprisals.49 There was a sizeable presence of French troops in the region of Berlin, and some concern that the king might be kidnapped. Frederick William, though, was being overtaken by events: he had already lost control of two-thirds of his army, as well as the provinces of East and West Prussia. Revolution was something he feared even more than Napoleon or the Russians.50 He had only reluctantly decided to come out publicly against France.
The king’s appeal met with a limited popular response: 1,400 men joined the Hanseatic Legion as infantry and another 200 as cavalry in the first days of liberation, often supplying their own equipment, although arms were also eventually supplied by Britain. The numbers increased in the following weeks, so that by April 1813 over 3,600 men had enlisted. Moreover, in what appears to be a German variant of the French National Guard, more than 6,000 men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five joined the Citizens’ Militia (Bürgergarde), equipped by a re-established Senate in Hamburg. It has to be said, however, that even if the Citizens’ Militia represented a break in Hamburg’s political culture, it does not seem to have been taken very seriously by the people of Hamburg; few followed training with the dedication that was expected of them.51 Poorly led, badly trained and badly equipped, they would be no match for regular soldiers once the French returned.
Similar scenes were played out in Berlin, although an appeal to patriotic sentiment was probably unnecessary.52 Prussian conscription was able to tap into proportionately higher numbers of troops than any other great power – 6 per cent of the population was under arms.53 (In comparison, the French were conscripting in 1813 about 2.1 per cent of the population, and that was the highest it ever reached for the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, about the same percentage of men mobilized during the wars of Louis XIV.) The Landwehr units on the other hand were poorly trained and poorly equipped, often lacking in the rudiments of uniforms, shoes and weapons. About 30,000 men volunteered to serve against France, representing about 10 per cent of the overall number of Prussian effectives.54 Compared to the French levée en masse in 1792, this was not a particularly impressive turnout and says a great deal about the structure of Prussian-German society. As for the Free Corps (Freikorps) units commanded by Baron Ludwig Adolf Wilhelm von Lützow, they were authorized immediately after the declaration of war by Frederick William in an attempt to recruit young men outside Prussia. By the middle of 1813, they had managed to attract only 3,891, almost half of whom were Prussian.55
The sentiments expressed by this small but highly articulate group of men came to define latterday German patriotism. The poet Theodor Körner, for example, whose death in August 1813 and whose writings came to symbolize the patriotism of German middle-class youth, spoke about the ‘self-willed heroism of a natural elite, whose sacrifice would inspire God to save the nation’.56 Certainly, ‘patriotism’, defined as a love of one’s (sometimes adopted) country, was beginning to take hold among people in central Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it needs to be remembered that the vast majority of troops fighting in the so-called Wars of Liberation were conscripts, among whom few such sentiments could be found. Patriotism as it later came to be defined by nineteenth-century German historians was not to play a decisive role in the coming wars, even if it was present in an incipient form among some of the volunteers.57 The types of patriotic propaganda that were likely to be most influential were regional rather than national, and the motive inspiring these men was more likely to be revenge or even religion than anything else.58
Women also played an important role in mobilizing civil society in Germany for war, encouraging men to enrol, sometimes chastising them for a lack of patriotic fervour, donating time and money to form associations throughout the German-speaking lands, meeting to knit socks and stockings, make shirts and bandages, sewing flags, donating money and jewellery and sometimes publishing patriotic pamphlets, poems and songs.59 A true measure of ‘patriotism’ was people’s readiness to donate hard cash. In Hamburg, female domestic servants donated over 10,000 marks to help fit out the Hanseatic Legion.60 In the Austrian Empire, women’s associations met to organize war relief and medical care.61 Metternich’s daughter Marie, along with other ‘patriots’, made dressings for the wounded out of old linen sheets (despite the fact that Austria was still meant to be an ally of France).62 But there was not the same desire to go to war in Austria in July 1813 as there had been in 1809. On the contrary, despite the general revulsion against Napoleon’s conquests, and despite the importance of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, Austrians believed his powers to be so extraordinary that any undertaking against him would be pointless.63
This was not the case in Prussia, where there was an intensive propaganda campaign to promote valour and (in a number of pamphlets) ‘manly’ virtues that encouraged a warlike spirit against France among men and women. The rigours of occupation and the consequent hardships associated with economic decline fuelled the desire to be rid of the French. At the centre of this effort was the notion that to die for the fatherland was the greatest honour.64 There were also instances of cross-dressing in which women, wearing men’s uniforms, would fight alongside men. Some of the more notable examples were Eleonore Prochaska and Anna Lühring who fought with the Lützow Freikorps, even after their gender was discovered.65 Lühring was the first woman to receive the Iron Cross (even though she was not Prussian).
The Beast of the Apocalypse
It is worth dwelling on the type of imagery used to demonize Napoleon in a bid to galvanize the peoples of Europe.66 Much of that imagery was religious in nature as were, one could argue, the wars against France.67 There was a good deal of vitriol, both written and oral, directed against Napoleon by the conquered peoples of Europe, which began to find an outlet in the media of the day only after 1812. It was common enough to portray Napoleon as a bloodthirsty tyrant, ‘the enemy of the human race’, well before that time.68 To depict him as ‘tyrant’ is also to underline the illegitimacy, the evilness, of his reign. It was the first stage in portraying him as Antichrist. Satan, Lucifer, the Great Horned Serpent or the Devil was an image that flourished not only in most parts of Europe, but as far afield as the United States and Guatemala, regardless of religious affiliations. It appears to have been part of the millenarian movement at the end of the eighteenth century.69 The description may have had its origins in the innumerable odes, sermons, poems and pamphlets that looked upon the struggle with Napoleon and France as a struggle between good and evil, between the powers of light and darkness.70
Anonymous, Le petit homme rouge berçant son fils (The little red man rocking his son), no date but probably 1813–15. A varation on a theme. Instead of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Jesus, we see a proud devil nursing a baby Napoleon, born in hell. The swaddling is bound with tricolour ribbon, while the devil is holding the Legion of Honour. The caption reads, ‘Here is my beloved son, who has given me so much satisfaction,’ a quotation from St Mark. Variations of this caricature appeared in Germany in 1813 and 1814.
The onslaught of atheist republican governments against the Catholic
Church, in France and abroad, did not do anything to appease the anti-Catholic Francophobia that dominated much of the British pamphlet and broadside literature of the day. On the contrary, there had been a tendency to displace the popular association of the Antichrist with Rome on to republican France.71 It did not take much of a leap, once this pattern had been established, to project the image of the Antichrist on to Napoleon. One prolific British pamphleteer, Lewis Mayer, counted the number of emperors, popes and heads of state ‘alluded to by the horns of St John’s first Beast, Rev. 13’ and came to the conclusion that there had to date been 665 – Napoleon was the 666th.72 The British, in short, sought to identify Napoleon, or at least Napoleonic France, with the Beast of the Book of Revelation. All references to ‘the angel of the bottomless pit, the king of the locusts, the beast with two horns and the head of the Antichristian powers’ were specific biblical allusions to Napoleon. Another millenarian and friend of Samuel Johnson, Hester Lynch Thrale, collected contemporary English anecdotes that led her to conclude the French Revolution had been the harbinger of Napoleon as Antichrist, noting that some women in Wales had told her that his titles added up to 666. Napoleon’s conquest of Rome and his arrest of the pope led some British millenarians to conclude that he was the instrument of a Jewish Restoration that would bring on the Christian millennium.73 Napoleon or ‘Boney’ was also demonized in popular culture so that nursery rhymes were used to scare children into submission (that continued for a good part of the nineteenth century).