by Philip Dwyer
The faithful stayed in the ranks, but they were never enough to make up the loss in numbers. On learning of the defeat at Leipzig, an artillery officer in the Guard by the name of Marin, stationed in France, was heard to say, ‘I am leaving for the army; I am going to get myself killed for the Emperor.’47 Captain Burnot, who was in Neuss near Düsseldorf, wrote to his father on 11 November 1813: ‘Under the circumstances, and despite what I have suffered during this campaign, nothing could persude me to retire; with all my troubles, and even with a leg missing I can assure you that I will not leave the service. All Frenchmen should do the same. We have to take revenge on those Bavarian and Saxon dogs that are the cause of all our problems and the loss of so many brave men.’48 It was almost prophetic. Burnot was wounded and had a leg amputated while fighting in France. He died of his wounds on 20 March 1814.
Men like Burnot were increasingly in the minority. Nothing better demonstrates the desperate situation in which Napoleon found himself than the response to a massive call-up he instigated after Leipzig. Between October 1813 and January 1814, he attempted to put more than 930,000 men under arms.49 Anybody who was reasonably fit and could bear arms – the National Guard, policemen, forest rangers, customs officers, boys under eighteen – was enlisted. The response, however, was less than enthusiastic. As a result of a number of problems, including the short duration of the campaign, the disarray into which the imperial administration seems to have fallen, the lack of supplies and the desertion rates, only one-third of that number answered the call, and of them only about 120,000 actually saw combat.50 War-weariness is often the reason given for the lack of response in the face of invasion, but we simply do not know how many men actually received the call to arms.51 Desertion rates were high, between one-third and one-half, and even higher in the German departments.52 The relative failure of conscription on this occasion seems indicative of the lack of support for both Napoleon and the Empire.53 There appears to have been a relative indifference to the fate of both. This was not 1792, when the French government was able to garner massive popular support in defence of the Revolution. Another way of looking at things is to say that the Empire was not efficient or ruthless enough to enforce conscription quotas. That does not mean that enthusiasm for Napoleon had hitherto been entirely superficial, but as with every charismatic leader the moment he fails to live up to the reputation he himself has created, support begins to wane.
Given the superiority in allied numbers, Napoleon had performed remarkably well at Leipzig, almost winning the battle on the first day. It is easy enough to argue that it would have been better to withdraw then, before allied reinforcements arrived, but those kinds of judgements can only be reached in hindsight. Napoleon was dispirited, depressed by the turn of events, but it took some time before he could admit to himself that the battle for Germany was over. When he reached Erfurt on 23 October, he still had about 70,000 troops under arms, with another 30,000 stragglers following behind. He could probably muster about 150,000 in all, although he may have lost as many as 100,000 men during and in the days after the battle; considerable numbers of troops belonging to the Confederation deserted between Leipzig and Erfurt.54 In addition, 325 cannon, 900 ammunition wagons and large quantities of military stores were left behind.55 Napoleon planned to use Erfurt to refit his men, but these plans came to a crashing halt with the news that Württemberg had defected to the allies. In effect, the battle of Leipzig persuaded those German powers whose loyalty might have been wavering to declare finally for the allies, and caused the rest of the Empire virtually to collapse overnight. In Holland, for example, waves of political agitation shook the country as a direct result of the news of the destruction of Napoleon’s army, culminating in a massive riot in Amsterdam (15 November 1813) that saw the governor and former Third Consul Charles-François Lebrun flee and France lose its hold on the country. Authority fell away ‘like dead flesh from a skeleton’.56
In those circumstances, Napoleon had little choice but to retreat behind the Rhine with the allies hard on his heels.
The coalition faced problems of its own. It had risked falling apart on a number of occasions, but never more so than after victory at Leipzig. Between Leipzig and the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, for a period of a little over four months, the allies were divided about their objectives and how to achieve them, sometimes to the point where the whole coalition almost dissolved. They differed over the question of the treatment of the occupied German territories – Alexander refused to stipulate what his territorial claims might be, thus creating friction with Metternich and Austria – and whether or not to push across the Rhine into France.57 Invasion was a policy favoured by most of the leading allied politicians at this stage: Alexander, Czartoryski and Grand Duchess Catherine on the Russian side, despite opposition from many of the Tsar’s ministers and generals;58 Gneisenau and Blücher among the Prussians; Schwarzenberg among the Austrians. However, Francis I as well as Frederick William III and a number of Austrian and Prussian generals were unwilling at this stage to carry the campaign into France, still wary of Napoleon’s military prowess and of the potential for the French people to rise against an invading force.59 The Prussians in particular had ‘little heart for the pursuit’.60 For these men, there was little to be gained from a prolonged struggle now that Napoleon had been ousted from central Europe. Frederick William appears to have been the staunchest opponent of continuing the war. In the aftermath of Leipzig, allied forces were depleted. The Prussian 1st Regiment of the Foot Guards, for example, had lost a third of its strength since August 1813.61 A veteran of the battle of Valmy in 1792, having experienced defeat and occupation from 1806 to very recently, the Prussian king could not see the logic of crossing the Rhine and marching on Paris. He much preferred a peace settlement.62 Bernadotte too opposed the crossing, not wanting to engage French troops on French soil, or to commit his men so far from home.63 Besides, he was pursuing his own interests, more intent on a campaign against Denmark than against Napoleon.64 That the coalition did not fall apart is testament to Metternich’s perseverance and foresight.
Entwined with the question of whether the allies should push on across the Rhine was that of the future of Napoleon, which presented a complex problem. At the beginning of 1814, the allies, with the possible exception of Alexander, had no intention of overthrowing him.65 The British did not have his overthrow as a central tenet of their policy; Castlereagh believed that the allies should not ‘excite or originate’ a change of government.66 Austria had given the question of France’s political future little or no thought. The allies were not about to impose a new regime on France, believing that the French had the right to determine their own government. If the French remained loyal to Napoleon, then it would be difficult for the allies to bring about peace in Europe. What alternative then to Napoleon? There were rumours of Alexander pushing for Bernadotte to assume the throne, possibly influenced by Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, although no one seems to have taken the idea very seriously.67 When Alexander and Bernadotte met after Leipzig, according to Bernadotte, Alexander urged him to aim for the French throne, but he declined. In any event, Frederick William, Castlereagh and Metternich rejected the suggestion for fear that Bernadotte would become Alexander’s puppet. As for a Bourbon restoration, Alexander had little respect for the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII) whom he knew from his time in exile in Russia,68 and did not believe that he would be able to respect the gains of the Revolution, including representative institutions. He looked for alternatives to the Bourbons, but few were viable.
Self-Destruction
The War of Liberation was over; the Napoleonic Empire in Germany had ceased to exist. The battle for France was about to begin. Troops jokingly remarked that they had been all the way to Moscow to fetch the Russians to bring them back to France.69
On 2 November 1813, Napoleon arrived at Mainz where he set up headquarters. Along the way, he would have seen thousands of stragglers and sometimes sma
ll groups of organized men, making their way towards the bridge that could get them across the Rhine and into France at Mainz. Those men no longer looked upon him the way they used to. It was, after all, the second disaster to have befallen him in a year. He was deprived of that infallibility, as a result of which men felt ‘more on the same level with him’.70 Napoleon, on the other hand, was obliged to maintain the same regal façade, even if he came across as ‘gloomy and silent’ in private; he admitted that the situation was ‘unfortunate’, but always tried to talk things up.71 The reality was starker than he was prepared to admit. By the time he reached the Rhine, he had sustained combined losses, through the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, of about 700,000 men.72 Not all of these were dead or wounded. Many had deserted or gone over to the enemy. On top of the losses in Russia, combined with the drain on manpower that had been Spain, it is evident that any chance now of holding off a combined coalition army was getting bleaker by the day. Only about 40,000–60,000 men remained in any condition to fight, but, worse, troops that could have been used, perhaps as many as 190,000 men, were pointlessly holed up in fortresses across northern Germany. They had little chance of breaking out of the net that was closing around them. Some in Napoleon’s inner circle tried to convince him to make peace, but he would have none of it.73 The fact that most of the member states of the Confederation of the Rhine deserted him that month, with the exception of Saxony, the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt and the principalities of Leyen and Isenburg, seemed to make no difference.
To make matters worse, a typhoid epidemic was raging through Germany, brought in large part by the remnants of the Grande Armée returning from Moscow.74 The hospitals of Gumbinnen, Insterburg, Königsberg, Marienburg and Thorn were full of the sick and wounded. Between August and October 1813, more than 90,000 sick and wounded soldiers passed through Leipzig. In Leipzig in the final months of 1813, around 700–800 people fell ill every week. In all, around 13,500 people came down with typhus (that was about a third of the population), of whom 2,700 died.75 At Mainz, between November 1813 and May 1814, some 10 per cent of the city’s population succumbed, around 500 people per day, along with around 30,000 troops.76 ‘The streets of Mainz were framed by two rows of men dying of cold, hunger and the terrible typhus, which had just violently broken out and which promptly ravaged the ranks. One can truthfully say that the city was paved with the dead and the dying.’77 One of Napoleon’s chamberlains confirms the impression, later recalling having to walk through the streets to the palace every day, and seeing nothing but corpses.78 From Mainz, the epidemic spread to the rest of the Rhine departments. In the Moselle, between October 1813 and the following January, 9,000 people died.79 About 300 soldiers died each day so that in the last two months of 1813 about 15,000 soldiers (and as many civilians again) eventually succumbed.80 As with the outbreak of the plague in Egypt and Syria, here too it was naively thought that fear was a factor in the contagion.81 Many troops, exhausted by malnutrition and the hardships of the campaign they had just endured, succumbed in their weakened state.
Napoleon stayed in Mainz until 7 November 1813, while the army rested and was reorganized. He seems to have clung to the hope that the allies would not undertake a winter campaign – not as far fetched an idea as it might seem – and that if he were given six months’ respite he would be able to create another army to defend ‘the sacred soil’, as he referred to France.82 That may have been true, but it also gave the allies a chance to rest and regroup. And he was mistaken about his enemies’ intentions. A winter campaign is exactly what the allies chose to embark on, throwing his plans for a spring offensive into disarray.
Even under these conditions, Napoleon did not negotiate a settlement. In November 1813, Metternich, with the knowledge of Britain and the consent of Russia, sent a captured French diplomat, Caulaincourt’s brother-in-law the Baron de Saint-Aignan, with a suggestion of peace on the basis of the ‘natural borders’ of France – the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, the revolutionary borders of Campo Formio and Lunéville.83 That meant giving up Spain, Holland, Germany and Italy, although he could keep Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine and Savoy. These were known as the Frankfurt Proposals. Metternich insisted that military operations should continue against Napoleon so that he could not use the cover of negotiations to gain time to reorganize the army, but he also made it clear, by a letter sent to Caulaincourt (10 November), that now was the time to make peace with the allies. Once again, it is highly improbable that Metternich, like Alexander, thought anything would come of these proposals, which is in part why they were offered in the first place.84 They understood Napoleon well enough to know it was impossible to negotiate with him, under any circumstances.
Metternich’s reply (25 November) to Napoleon was adamant – peace talks would not begin until Napoleon accepted the Frankfurt Proposals.85 Metternich indeed seems to have been playing a double game, as he had throughout 1813 and would continue to do throughout 1814, saying one thing to Napoleon, much of which was meant for public consumption, and something else entirely in his private correspondence. Regardless of Metternich’s and the allies’ intentions, Napoleon obliged them to continue the struggle. It was only then that the allied monarchs issued a common declaration, on 1 December 1813, that they would not lay down their arms until the balance of power on the Continent had been restored. Note, however, they did not swear to fight on until Napoleon was overthrown. At this stage, they still planned to make a place for Napoleon’s France in their concept of Europe. Metternich then drafted a proclamation to the French people which declared that the alliance was directed not against France but against French preponderance, read Napoleon.86 The allies were attempting to separate Napoleon from the nation.87
How do we interpret Napoleon’s actions during this period? It is true that Napoleon could not be expected to take too seriously what was, after all, no more than an oral approach on the part of Saint-Aignan with a private letter to Caulaincourt.88 Besides, the Frankfurt Proposals could not be entirely accepted at face value. Offering them was a move worked out between the Austrians and the Russians. Prussia was not involved in the deal and it did not want to agree to give up the left bank permanently – although of course pressure could have been brought to bear to make Prussia concede – but nor was Britain, and its position on the Rhine was intractable.89 Nevertheless, even more so than at Dresden, it would have been in Napoleon’s interests to negotiate a settlement, and yet he did not. What was it that prevented him from doing so?
When Hegel later reflected on Napoleon’s rise and fall he decided that the same reasons that had brought Bonaparte to power had led to his demise. ‘The entire mass of mediocrity . . .presses on like lead . . . until it has succeeded in bringing down what is high to the same level as itself or even below.’90 That view of history is a little abstract; we need look no further than Napoleon’s character for an explanation. In June 1814, for example, he opened up to Metternich: ‘I would die before I ceded one inch of territory. Your sovereigns born on the throne can be beaten twenty times and still return to their capitals. I cannot do that because I am an upstart soldier. My domination will not be able to survive from the day I cease . . . to be feared.’91 This was about ‘legitimacy’ – that is, about whether Napoleon possessed the ‘necessary qualities’ to call himself emperor. It was a constant source of anxiety for him, a theme he reverted to whenever he felt the need to justify his actions.
That Napoleon believed his power was based on his military triumphs is important in understanding why he always claimed that he could not make peace after defeat. For him, every war was about his very existence as a monarch.92 Nonetheless, despite underlying currents of royalism and Jacobinism, despite the assassination attempts against him and despite occasional rumblings at court, his power was never seriously threatened from within. The domestic difficulties that had endangered political stability under the Directory and other revolutionary regimes had been largely (if not entirely) resolved by Napoleon during the Cons
ulate. His suggestion that somehow his legitimacy, his authority or even his power would be undermined if not destroyed by a reversal of fortune and a contraction of the Empire’s territorial limits does not convince. It is only if one understands that military victories and their corollary, defeat, were intimately tied to his prestige and honour that we can begin to understand his thinking. He did not believe, could not bring himself to believe, that he would continue to reign if he gave up territories that had been conquered by the French armies before he came to power.93 ‘What do they want me to do?’ he asked of Metternich. ‘Do they want me to degrade myself ? Never! I shall know how to die; but I shall not yield one handbreadth of soil.’94 Exaggeration in the heat of the moment, perhaps, but there was certainly the question of how the regime would look if it were to give up huge tracts that had been conquered and integrated into the Empire. Napoleon believed he would not be able to live it down. Yes, the Bonapartes were not the Hohenzollerns or Habsburgs, but if the Emperor of Austria or the King of Prussia could yield swathes of land and still remain in power, then there is no reason to think Napoleon could not have survived. Metternich reasoned with him in this way, but the ‘warning of the oracle’ does not doom avert.95