The Campaigns of Napoleon

by David G Chandler

  Furthermore, one of Napoleon’s most trusted servants, the wily Talleyrand, had unexpectedly resigned the portfolio of Minister of Foreign Affairs shortly after the signature of the Tilsit agreements. He had never made any secret of his distrust of a Franco-Russian entente, but now he was so alarmed by the dangers he could see awaiting Napoleon and so frustrated by his master’s refusal to heed his warnings that he determined to shed all responsibility for France’s unscrupulous diplomacy. Despite all his vices Talleyrand was at heart a man of peace devoted to France’s true long-term interests, and he noted with growing apprehension the development of Napoleon’s megalomania and its accompanying capacity for self-delusion. Talleyrand realized that the forces of German nationalism were still far from extinguished, and that Napoleon’s growing struggle with Rome was hardly a happy augury for a settled future with the Catholic countries of Europe; he was also aware of his Emperor’s growing impatience with Portugal and his mounting desire to meddle in Spanish politics. All these factors were harbingers of trouble, and Talleyrand preferred to restrict himself to the duties of Grand-Chancellor of the Empire, a position of vast influence but with rather fewer disturbing diplomatic responsibilities. A nonentity named M. de Champagny took over the Foreign Ministry.

  For some considerable time, Napoleon had been casting an impatient eye on the uncertain affairs of the Iberian Peninsula. At first, it was not the corrupt and incompetent Spanish Government that attracted his wrath; despite Godoy’s blatant treachery in the autumn of 1806, Spain was still technically in alliance with France, and had even made some attempt to comply with the requirements of the Continental System. Moreover, 15,000 of her best troops were serving as hostages for Spain’s future good behavior in the Grande Armée. Consequently, Napoleon could afford to bide his time where his large but inefficient Bourbon neighbor was concerned. But distant Portugal posed more immediate problems that could not be ignored. In mid1807, therefore, it was England’s oldest continental ally that attracted the full power of Napoleon’s baleful displeasure. Not only had the Regent, Prince John, shown the temerity to refuse adherence to the Continental System, but it was no secret that Great Britain was finding valuable new markets in Portugal’s colony of Brazil while the Tagus was sheltering naval shipping which the Emperor coveted. Furthermore, the Royal Navy had often made use of the facilities of Lisbon to sustain operations in the Mediterranean and maintain the blockades of Toulon and Marseilles. The seizure of Portugal, therefore, had much to recommend it, and Napoleon probably foresaw that its occupation might well serve as a useful preliminary move for any future war with Spain.

  Accordingly, the Portuguese Government was subjected to mounting diplomatic pressure from the time of Tilsit onward. On July 19, Napoleon instructed his foreign minister to “inform the Portuguese Ambassador that the ports of his country must be closed to England by September I; in default of this I shall declare war against Portugal and confiscate English merchandise…. The same day send a dispatch to my ambassador at Madrid to the effect that he must see the Prince of Peace and conclude a convention for the closure of Portuguese ports. In default of this, the ambassadors of France and Spain will leave Lisbon, and both powers will declare war against Portugal; on September I a French army will march to Bayonne ready to join up with a Spanish army for the conquest of Portugal.”5

  On August 2, an Imperial Decree brought into existence the first corps of the Gironde Army of Observation under the command of Napoleon’s favorite, General Junot. A week later an embargo was placed on all Portuguese shipping in French ports, and more troops were sent on their way toward the Pyrenees. On September 23, Napoleon deliberately delivered a powerful tirade against the Braganzas at a reception attended by the Portuguese minister, the gist of which was subsequently reported to Vienna by Prince Metternich. “If Portugal does not do as I wish the House of Braganza will not be reigning in Europe in two months’ time. I will no longer tolerate a single English envoy in Europe; I will declare war on any power that has one two months from now. I have 300,000 Russians at my back, and with this powerful ally I can do anything. The English declare that they will no longer respect neutrals at sea; I will no longer recognize them on land.”6 By early October almost 20,000 French troops had reached Bayonne.

  Napoleon was brandishing the big stick with a vengeance, and there is small wonder that the weak-willed and luxury-loving Regent of Portugal visibly hesitated. At first he promised the British ambassador that in the event of Portugal being forced to close her Atlantic ports, his government would send the Portuguese fleet out of harm’s way to Brazil, permit the English to trade there, and finally lease the island of Madeira to the British Crown for the duration of the war. However, by early November, the Regent had decided to change his tune, following the news of the fiasco that had befallen the English expeditionary force of General Whitelocke at Buenos Aires, and announced his readiness to accede to three of the four points in the latest French ultimatum; namely, Portugal would close her ports to English shipping forthwith, declare war on England, and seize the persons of all English residents in Portugal. Prince John, however, refused to confiscate and hand over all British property.

  This was only a minor face-saving reservation, but it provided Napoleon with the excuse he required for the invasion of Portugal. Everything was ready, and Portugal had virtually been partitioned before hostilities commenced. Junot had moved his army into Spain on September 17 with the full blessing of Godoy, and on October 27, the two governments concluded the Treaty of Fontainebleau. In return for the cooperation of the Spanish forces and permission for further French troops under General Dupont to occupy certain key towns in northern Spain along Junot’ s lines of communication, Napoleon promised Godoy the southern portion of Portugal as a principality. France would retain control of Lisbon itself, and the northern part of the country was to be awarded to the Etrurian ruling house as compensation for the loss of their Tuscan possessions* in North Italy (recently given to the covetous Elisa Bonaparte). On November 13, the Paris Moniteur sardonically declared that the House of Braganza had ceased to reign, “a new proof of how inevitable is the ruin of all who attach themselves to England.”

  Accordingly, General Junot was instructed to carry out his original orders. These were to march at full speed through Spain and Portugal to seize Lisbon and capture the members of the ruling house and their ministers without delay. Junot was further charged with the task of securing the squadrons of Portuguese naval vessels at anchor in the Tagus; above all there was to be no repetition of the Copenhagen incident. He was also instructed to make a military survey of the countryside through which he passed—in both Spain and Portugal—a fact of considerable future significance. “Send me descriptions of the provinces through which you pass,” the Emperor had written on October 17, “of the roads and the nature of the terrain; send me sketches. Let the engineers perform this work—which is important. Let me know the distances between villages, the nature of the countryside and its resources…. I have this moment learned that Portugal has declared war on England; this is not enough; continue your march; I have reason to believe that there is an arrangement with England to give her troops time to travel from Copenhagen. You must be in Lisbon by December I—whether as friend or foe.”7

  Junot moved with commendable speed and energy. His footsore columns reached Salamanca on November 12, were through Alcantara a week later, and then set out to cross the desolate mountains of Portugal by long daily marches. According to Bourienne, “The invasion of Portugal presented no difficulty. It was an armed parade and not a war….”8 However, if little open opposition was encountered, the rank and file soon found it extremely difficult to find enough food or shelter. “We found not a single peasant in his hut,” grumbled Nicolas-Joseph Desjardin of the 58th Regiment; “They had all fled, abandoning house and possessions. We often found ourselves without provisions and forced to wade through water up to our necks; under the worst imaginable weather conditions we had to bivouac in the fie
lds and woods. Many men met their deaths through sheer misery—or at the hands of the peasantry. We received our rations only when we reached Lisbon.”9

  Nevertheless, Junot managed to carry out Napoleon’s instructions concerning his date of arrival at the Portuguese capital to the letter, and on November 30 he led 2,000 exhausted troops (all that were left in the ranks of his original 25,000) over the last miles to Lisbon, having covered 300 miles in 14 days. This was sustained marching in the best traditions of the Grande Armée, but to Junot’s bitter disappointment he found that the Royal Navy had narrowly forestalled them. Only two days earlier, Prince John and his court had heeded the pleas of the British ambassador and set sail for Brazil in their fleet, escorted by Sir William Sidney Smith’s squadron. Although the “birds had flown,” the weary French troops found some consolation in pillaging the rich palaces, monasteries and churches of the capital. Fourteen cartloads of silver and gold were found abandoned on the jetties, clear evidence of the hasty nature of the evacuation, but Napoleon was furious that the Braganzas and their valuable fleet had eluded his grasp, and on December 28 vented his spleen by ordering a levy of 100 million francs from Portugal. The Emperor still firmly believed that “war should pay for war,” but when all was said and clone, France was now in unquestioned possession of Portugal, and the deadening hand of the Continental System had extended its grasp over another large area of Europe.

  Not much time would elapse before Napoleon turned his full attention upon the confused affairs of his Spanish “ally,” but when he did so it was as much in pursuance of his Anglophobic policies as from any desire to replace chaos with order. “Perfidious Albion” remained very much in his thoughts, and he was continually devising new means of bringing her to book. The Emperor’s first reaction to news of the Copenhagen coup earlier in the year had been to order an immediate survey of the ports along the French and Dutch Channel coasts in preparation for a renewed invasion attempt. However, his staff reported that many of the barges left rotting in the harbors since 1805 were demonstrably unseaworthy, while several of the ports had become silted up and were virtually unusable. Furthermore, the Royal Navy was unquestionably in control of La Manche. Consequently, Napoleon was compelled to shelve the idea of a cross-Channel attack once more, though he took considerable pains to preserve the appearance of an invasion threat in order to harass his insular enemies. He found himself driven back to reliance on the Continental System, although he was never fully convinced that this form of economic pressure alone could bring England to her knees. As an additional means of bringing direct pressure to bear on Great Britain, he therefore turned to a grandiose scheme of overseas conquest designed to destroy her overseas interests in the Levant and far-off Asia.

  As we have seen, the East had always exerted a potent influence over Napoleon’s dreams and ambitions. In 1795 he had almost taken service with the Sultan of Turkey; years later at the very height of his fortunes, he still liked to recall the exploits of his abortive expedition to Egypt and Syria in 1798-99; on the very eve of the battle of Austerlitz, the lure of the Orient formed the main topic of conversation around the headquarters campfire. And now, in the first months of 1808, Napoleon produced a plan of fantastic scope and dubious practicability. This called for a three-fold strategic offensive designed to destroy British interests in the furthest parts of the globe. One of these attacks was to be carried out with the assistance of Tsar Alexander. “An army of 50,000 men, Russians, French and perhaps Austrians, marching into Asia by way of Constantinople, would no sooner reach the Euphrates than England would tremble and go down upon her knees. I am ready in Dalmatia; Your Majesty is ready on the Danube. A month after our coming to terms an army could be on the Bosphorous. The blow would re-echo through India and England would be subdued…. Everything could be signed and decided before March 15.”10 The letter ends with a blatant piece of hypocrisy: “We must become greater in spite of ourselves,” Napoleon smugly asserted.

  Simultaneously, the second drive would be securing control of the Mediterranean. Joseph, King of Naples, was expected to invade Sicily and deprive the Royal Navy of the use of its ports. At the same time, a French army was to march through Spain to besiege and take Gibraltar before crossing over the Straits to quell the Barbary kingdoms and thus deprive the British men-of-war of their last remaining ports of call and centers of supply. As Napoleon envisaged it, this would compel the British fleet to abandon the Mediterranean theater and raise the inconvenient blockades of Cadiz, the Tagus, Toulon and Cartagena. It would also ruin the lucrative trade with the Levant.

  When this was achieved, the third part of the plan would become operative. A Franco-Spanish fleet would set sail and carry the war to the British possessions of the Cape of Good Hope and into the East Indies, while a second, under Admiral Ganteaume, sailed eastward from Toulon to relieve the French garrison at Corfu and assist Joseph with his attack on Sicily if this was still necessary. On paper, at least, this staggering plan would have destroyed or threatened British interests in the Mediterranean, Africa, the Levant and the East at one and the same time, and it gives some measure of the breadth of Napoleon’s strategic vision, or some would say of his megalomania. However, this brainchild was destined to be stillborn. A few preliminary moves were made by Joseph. French troops regained Reggio and Scylla from Sicilian forces in the south of Italy; shipping was gathered at Naples and two French squadrons managed to elude the British blockade and slip out to sea—one relieving Corfu—but that was all. For Napoleon discovered that the vital degrees of Russian and Spanish cooperation were not forthcoming. Alexander was adamant that the price of his aid should be Russian possession of coveted Constantinople, and it was an axiom of French foreign policy that the Tsar should never be afforded free access to Mediterranean waters. Secondly, Napoleon so mishandled his relations with the Spanish royal family and populace, so fatally underestimated the power of England to intervene effectively in the Iberian Peninsula, that he incurred a major war in Spain which effectively ruined his wider plans for 1808, and eventually played a decisive part in bringing down his whole Empire in ruins around him. Thus neither the march through Central Asia nor the siege of Gibraltar ever materialized; the Royal Navy’s blockade continued unabated, and in due course its ships safely convoyed to Spain a British army that would eventually prove more than capable of defying the ablest of Napoleon’s marshals. The sole long-term result of the Emperor’s grandiose scheme, therefore, was the tying down of eventually 200,000 of his best men in the Spanish Peninsula and a constant annual drain of 40,000 valuable lives in an extended seven-year war of attrition.

  Napoleon coveted control of Tuscany in order to link the French spheres of influence in North Italy with the Kingdom of Naples. Subsequently, the Papal States were occupied with scant difficulty to complete the process.

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  AN ENGINEERED CRISIS

  Napoleon’s ill-considered decision to intervene in Spanish affairs was based on several motives, but ultimately all of them sprang from the streak of opportunism in his character. “To choose the right moment is the great art of men,” he once wrote to Joseph; “What can be done in 1810 cannot be carried out in 1807.”11 In 1808, however, it was his instinct as a soldier that overruled his prudence as a statesman and led him into an unanticipated large-scale struggle. He badly misjudged both the moment for action and the caliber of his intended victims. Why was this so?

  In the first instance, he was obsessed with the need to strengthen and perfect the Continental System. Spain was technically a party to this instrument of economic warfare, but it was an open secret that many Iberian ports were still far from closed to British traders, so venal and inefficient was the governmental machinery. To this motive for military intervention was added a French hunger for what was left of the Spanish fleet and for control of the South American markets of her colonies, some of which were already being penetrated by British interests. For some inexplicable reason Napoleon also appears to have overestimated the
latent riches of the decrepit and practically bankrupt Spanish Empire, and he considered that their acquisition would greatly assist his war effort.

  Secondly, from the purely military point of view, it seemed that nothing could be easier than a French occupation of Spain. Its Government had obligingly permitted Napoleon’s soldiers to garrison almost all the key cities and communication centers of northern Spain prior to Junot’s invasion of Portugal, and they were still there. Three weak corps had by degrees been slipped into northern Spain under Dupont, Moncey and Duhesme. Consequently, the task seemed already half completed. The Bourbon armies were regarded as a joke; their inefficiency and corruption were considered second only to their sister-armies in Naples. Consequently, Napoleon had reason to suspect that Spanish incompetence might well compromise the execution of his schemes against Gibraltar and the Barbary Coast; if success was to be guaranteed, a firm measure of control over the unreliable Spanish Government was not only desirable, but vital.

  Thirdly, the political circumstances of the country appeared to be playing straight into his hands, and this provided Napoleon, the opportunist, with an even stronger incentive for intervention. He was well aware that the Spanish Government was hopelessly corrupt and irremediably divided. King Charles IV of the Spanish House of Bourbon was an inbred and incompetent figurehead, completely devoid of any statesmanlike qualities and without a trace of national pride. His son and heir, Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, was no better, and was in any case at constant loggerheads with his father. The real power in the land was the feared and hated adventurer, Manuel Godoy, who sported the grandiose and wholly inappropriate title of “Prince of Peace.” Originally a private soldier in the Royal Guard, he had worked his way to power through the bedchamber of Charles’ licentious and pleasure-loving consort, and through her influence had become first a grandee and ultimately the supreme manager of the state. Under Godoy’s baleful guidance, the endemic corruption of Spanish public life became highly organized and more venal than ever. Courtiers, nobility and populace alike loathed Godoy, but his hold on the King and Queen appeared unshakeable. “He was an object of execration to all who were not his creatures,” recorded Bourienne, “and even those whose fate depended upon him viewed him with the most profound contempt…. There is no doubt that Godoy was one of the principal causes of all the misfortunes that have overwhelmed Spain.”12