The manuscript on the floor of the cabinet bears the date “1811.” Engraved by Weber, after Steuben.
With Russia, the “other half” of the machine, the ally upon whom the great plan of Tilsit and Erfurt depended, there was such a bad state of feeling that, in 1811, it became certain that war would result. Causes had been accumulating upon each side since the Erfurt meeting.
The continental system weighed heavily on the interests of Russia. The people constantly rebelled against it and evaded it in every way. The business depressions from which they suffered they charged to Napoleon, and a strong party arose in the empire which used every method of showing the czar that the “unnatural alliance,” as they called the agreement between Alexander and Napoleon, was unpopular. The czar could not refuse to listen to this party. More, he feared that Napoleon was getting ready to restore Poland. He was offended by the haste with which his ally had dismissed the idea of marriage with his sister and had taken up Marie Louise. He complained of the changes of boundaries in Germany. Napoleon, on his part, saw with irritation that English goods were admitted into Russia. He resented the failure of Alexander to join heartily in the wide-sweeping application he had made of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, and to persecute neutral flags of all nations, even of those so far away from the Continent as the United States. He remembered that Russia had not supported him loyally in 1809. He was suspicious, too, of the good understanding which seemed to be growing between Sweden, Russia, and England.
Engraved by W. Bromley, after Sir Thomas Lawrence.
During many months the two emperors remained in a half-hostile condition, but the strain finally became too great. War was inevitable, and Napoleon set about preparing for the struggle. During the latter months of 1811 and the first of 1812 his attention was given almost entirely to the military and diplomatic preparations necessary before beginning the Russian campaign. By the 1st of May, 1812, he was ready to join his army, which he had centred at Dresden. Accompanied by Marie Louise he arrived at Dresden on the 16th of May, 1812, where he was greeted by the Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, and other sovereigns with whom he had formed alliances.
The force Napoleon had brought to the field showed graphically the extension and the character of the France of 1812. The “army of twenty nations,” the Russians called the host which was preparing to meet them, and the expression was just, for in the ranks there were Spaniards, Neapolitans, Piedmontese, Slavs, Kroats, Bavarians, Dutchmen, Poles, Romans, and a dozen other nationalities, side by side with Frenchmen. Indeed, nearly one-half the force was said to be foreign. The Grand Army, as the active body was called, numbered, to quote the popular figures, six hundred and seventy-eight thousand men. It is sure that this is an exaggerated number, though certainly over half a million men entered Russia. With reserves, the whole force numbered one million one hundred thousand. The necessity for so large a body of reserves is explained by the length of the line of communication Napoleon had to keep. From the Nieman to Paris the way must be open, supply stations guarded, fortified towns equipped. It took nearly as many men to insure the rear of the Grand Army as it did to make up the army itself.
Painting by Lawrence. Collection of the Duc de Bassano. This portrait of Napoleon II. is an exquisite work of art, a bright and fresh color-harmony. Lawrence must have executed this portrait while travelling in Europe, whither he was sent by his sovereign George IV., and paid twenty-five thousand francs a year, to paint for the great Windsor gallery the portraits of all the heroes “du grand hasard de Waterloo.”—A. D.
With this imposing force at his command, Napoleon believed that he could compel Alexander to support the continental blockade, for come what might that system must succeed. For it the reigning house had been driven from Portugal, the Pope despoiled and imprisoned, Louis gone into exile, Bernadotte driven into a new alliance. For it the Grand Army was led into Russia. It had become, as its inventor proclaimed, the fundamental law of the empire.
Until he crossed the Nieman, Napoleon preserved the hope of being able to avoid war. Numerous letters to the Russian emperor, almost pathetic in their overtures, exist. But Alexander never replied. He simply allowed his enemy to advance. The Grand Army was doomed to make the Russian campaign.
By Girodet. From the collection of Monsieur Cheramy of Paris.
CHAPTER XIX
THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN—THE BURNING OF MOSCOW—A NEW ARMY
If one draws a triangle, its base stretching along the Nieman from Tilsit to Grodno, its apex on the Elbe, he will have a rough outline of the “army of twenty nations” as it lay in June, 1812. Napoleon, some two hundred and twenty-five thousand men around him, was at Kowno, hesitating to advance, reluctant to believe that Alexander would not make peace.
When he finally moved, it was not with the precision and swiftness which had characterized his former campaigns. When he began to fight, it was against new odds. He found that his enemies had been studying the Spanish campaigns, and that they had adopted the tactics which had so nearly ruined his armies in the Peninsula: they refused to give him a general battle retreating constantly before him; they harassed his separate corps with indecisive contests; they wasted the country as they went. The people aided their soldiers as the Spaniards had done. “Tell us only the moment, and we will set fire to our buildings,” said the peasants.
MARSHAL NEY (“LE MARECHAL NEY, DUC D’ELCHINGEN, PRINCE DE LA MOSKOWA, PAIR DE FRANCE”).
Engraved by Tardieu, after Gérard.
By the 12th of August, Napoleon was at Smolensk, the key of Moscow. At a cost of twelve thousand men killed and wounded, he took the town, only to find, instead of the well-victualled shelter he hoped, a smoking ruin. The French army had suffered frightfully from sickness, from scarcity of supplies, and from useless fighting on the march from the Nieman to Smolensk. They had not had the stimulus of a great victory; they began to feel that this steady retreat of the enemy was only a fatal trap into which they were falling. Every consideration forbade them to march into Russia so late in the year, yet on they went towards Moscow, over ruined fields and through empty villages. This terrible pursuit lasted until September 7th, when the Russians, to content their soldiers, who were complaining loudly because they were not allowed to engage the French, gave battle at Borodino, the battle of the Moskova, as the French call it.
At two o’clock in the morning of this engagement, Napoleon issued one of his stirring bulletins:
“Soldiers! Here is the battle which you have so long desired! Henceforth the victory depends upon you; it is necessary for us. It will give you abundance, good winter quarters, and a speedy return to your country! Behave as you did at Austerlitz, at Friedland, at Vitebsk, at Smolensk, and the most remote posterity will quote with pride your conduct on this day; let it say of you: he was at the great battle under the walls of Moscow.”
The French gained the battle at Borodino, at a cost of some thirty thousand men, but they did not destroy the Russian army. Although the Russians lost fifty thousand men, they retreated in good order. Under the circumstances, a victory which allowed the enemy to retire in order was of little use. It was Napoleon’s fault, the critics said; he was inactive. But it was not sluggishness which troubled Napoleon at Borodino. He had a new enemy—a headache. On the day of the battle he suffered so that he was obliged to retire to a ravine to escape the icy wind. In this sheltered spot he paced up and down all day, giving his orders from the reports brought him.
By Raffet.
Moscow was entered on the 15th of September. Here the French found at last food and shelter, but only for a few hours. That night Moscow burst into flames, set on fire by the authorities, by whom it had been abandoned. It was three days before the fire was arrested. It would cost Russia two hundred years of time, two hundred millions of money, to repair the loss which she had sustained, Napoleon wrote to France.
Suffering, disorganization, pillage, followed the disaster. But Napoleon would not retreat. He hoped to make peace. Moscow was still smoking when he wrote a long description of the conflagration to Alexander. The closing paragraph ran:
“I wage war against your Majesty without animosity; a note from you before or after the last battle would have stopped my march, and I should even have liked to sacrifice the advantage of entering Moscow. If your Majesty retains some remains of your former sentiments, you will take this letter in good part. At all events, you will thank me for giving you an account of what is passing at Moscow.”
“I will never sign a peace as long as a single foe remains on Russian ground,” the Emperor Alexander had said when he heard that Napoleon had crossed the Nieman. He kept his word in spite of all Napoleon’s overtures. The French position grew worse from day to day. No food, no fresh supplies, the cold increasing, the army disheartened, the number of Russians around Moscow growing larger. Nothing but a retreat could save the remnant of the French. It began on October 19th, one hundred and fifteen thousand men leaving Moscow. They were followed by forty thousand vehicles loaded with the sick and with what supplies they could get hold of. The route was over the fields devastated a month before. The Cossacks harassed them night and day, and the cruel Russian cold dropped from the skies, cutting them down like a storm of scythes. Before Smolensk was reached, thousands of the retreating army were dead.
NAPOLEON AFTER THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN.
Napoleon had ordered that provisions and clothing should be collected at Smolensk. When he reached the city he found that his directions had not been obeyed. The army, exasperated beyond endurance by this disappointment, fell into complete and frightful disorganization, and the rest of the retreat was like the falling back of a conquered mob.
There is no space here for the details of this terrible march and of the frightful passage of the Beresina. The terror of the cold and starvation wrung cries from Napoleon himself.
“Provisions, provisions, provisions,” he wrote on November 29th from the right bank of the Beresina. “Without them there is no knowing to what horrors this undisciplined mass will proceed.”
And again: “The army is at its last extremity. It is impossible for it to do anything, even if it were a question of defending Paris.”
The army finally reached the Nieman. The last man over was Marshal Ney. “Who are you?” he was asked. “The rear guard of the Grand Army,” was the sombre reply of the noble old soldier.
Some forty thousand men crossed the river, but of these there were many who could do nothing but crawl to the hospitals, asking for “the rooms where people die.” It was true, as Desprez said, the Grand Army was dead.
It was on this horrible retreat that Napoleon received word that a curious thing had happened in Paris. A general and an abbé, both political prisoners, had escaped, and actually had succeeded in the preliminaries of a coup d’état overturning the empire, and substituting a provisional government.
They had carried out their scheme simply by announcing that Napoleon was dead, and by reading a forged proclamation from the senate to the effect that the imperial government was at an end and a new one begun. The authorities to whom these conspirators had gone had with but little hesitation accepted their orders. They had secured twelve hundred soldiers, had locked up the prefect of police, and had taken possession of the Hôtel de Ville.
The foolhardy enterprise went, it is true, only a little way, but far enough to show Paris that the day of easy revolution had not passed, and that an announcement of the death of Napoleon did not bring at once a cry of “Long live the King of Rome!” The news of the Malet conspiracy was an astonishing revelation to Napoleon himself of the instability of French public sentiment. He saw that the support on which he had depended most to insure his institutions, that is, an heir to his throne, was set aside at the word of a worthless agitator. The impression made on his generals by the news was one of consternation and despair. The emperor read in their faces that they believed his good fortune was waning. He decided to go to Paris as soon as possible.
On December 5th he left the army, and after a perilous journey of twelve days reached the French capital. It took as great courage to face France now as it had taken audacity to attempt the invasion of Russia. The grandest army the nation had ever sent out was lying behind him dead. His throne had tottered for an instant in sight of all France. Hereafter he could not believe himself invincible. Already his enemies were suggesting that since his good genius had failed him once, it might again.
No one realized the gravity of the position as Napoleon himself, but he met his household, his ministers, the Council of State, the Senate, with an imperial self-confidence and a sang froid which are awe-inspiring under the circumstances. The horror of the situation of the army was not known in Paris on his arrival, but reports came in daily until the truth was clear to everybody. But Napoleon never lost countenance. The explanations necessary for him to give to the Senate, to his allies, and to his friends, had all the serenity and the plausibility of a victor—a victor who had suffered, to be sure, but not through his own rashness or mismanagement. The following quotation from a letter to the King of Denmark illustrates well his public attitude towards the invasion and the retreat from Moscow:
“The enemy were always beaten, and captured neither an eagle nor a gun from my army. On the 7th of November the cold became intense; all the roads were found impracticable; thirty thousand horses perished between the 7th and the 16th. A portion of our baggage and artillery wagons was broken and abandoned; our soldiers, little accustomed to such weather, could not endure the cold. They wandered from the ranks in quest of shelter for the night, and, having no cavalry to protect them, several thousands fell into the hands of the enemy’s light troops. General Sanson, chief of the topographic corps, was captured by some Cossacks while he was engaged in sketching a position. Other isolated officers shared the same fate. My losses are severe, but the enemy cannot attribute to themselves the honor of having inflicted them. My army has suffered greatly, and suffers still, but this calamity will cease with the cold.”
To every one he declared that it was the Russians, not he, who had suffered. It was their great city, not his, which was burnt; their fields, not his, which were devastated. They did not take an eagle, did not win a battle. It was the cold, the Cossacks, which had done the mischief to the Grand Army; and that mischief? Why, it would be soon repaired. “I shall be back on the Nieman in the spring.”
But the very man who in public and private calmed and reassured the nation, was sometimes himself so overwhelmed at the thought of the disaster which he had just witnessed, that he let escape a cry which showed that it was only his indomitable will which was carrying him through; that his heart was bleeding. In the midst of a glowing account to the legislative body of his success during the invasion, he suddenly stopped. “In a few nights everything changed. I have suffered great losses. They would have broken my heart if I had been accessible to any other feelings than the interest, the glory, and the future of my people.”
Raffet shows us a Napoleon worn out by the disastrous excess even of his victories, marching under a sad, rainy sky, at the head of his little army, which, although hopeful, decreased daily in numbers after repeated fights—all of them victorious. The legend chosen by the artist sums up the state of mind of these old grognards—always discontented, and yet always ready, in spite of wearing fatigue and increasing discouragements, to run even to death on a sign from their emperor. Meissonier meditated long and earnestly before this beautiful picture, inspired by the campaign of France, previous to painting his immortal canvas, “1814.”—A. D.
In the teeth of the terrible news coming daily to Paris, Napoleon began preparations for another campaign. To every one he talked of victory as certain. Those who argued against the enterprise he silenced temporarily. “You should say,” he wrote Eugène, “and yourself believe, that in the next campaign I shall drive the Russians back across the Nieman.” With the first news of the passage of the Beresina chilling them, the Senate voted an army of three hundred and fifty thousand men; the allies were called upon; even the marine was obliged to turn men over to the land force.
But something besides men was necessary. An army means muskets and powder and sabres, clothes and boots and headgear, wagons and cannon and caisson; and all these it was necessary to manufacture afresh. The task was gigantic; but before the middle of April it was completed, and the emperor was ready to join his army.
The force against which Napoleon went in 1813 was the most formidable, in many respects, he had ever encountered. Its strength was greater. It included Russia, England, Spain, Prussia, and Sweden, and the allies believed Austria would soon join them. An element of this force more powerful than its numbers was its spirit. The allied armies fought Napoleon in 1813 as they would fight an enemy of freedom. Central Europe had come to feel that further French interference was intolerable. The war had become a crusade. The extent of this feeling is illustrated by an incident in the Prussian army. In the war of 1812 Prussia was an ally of the French, but at the end of the year General Yorck, who commanded a Prussian division, went over to the enemy. It was a dishonorable action from a military point of view, but his explanation that he deserted as “a patriot acting for the welfare of his country” touched Prussia; and though the king disavowed the act, the people applauded it.
Throughout the German states the feeling against Napoleon was bitter. A veritable crusade had been undertaken against him by such men as Stein, and most of the youth of the country were united in the Tagendbund, or League of Virtue, which had sworn to take arms for German freedom.
When Alexander followed the French across the Nieman, announcing that he came bringing “deliverance to Europe,” and calling on the people to unite against the “common enemy,” he found them quick to understand and respond.
Thus, in 1813 Napoleon did not go against kings and armies, but against peoples. No one understood this better than he did himself, and he counselled his allies that it was not against the foreign enemy alone that they had to protect themselves. “There is one more dangerous to be feared—the spirit of revolt and anarchy.”
CHAPTER XX
CAMPAIGN OF 1813—CAMPAIGN OF 1814—ABDICATION
The campaign opened May 2, 1813, southwest of Leipsic, with the battle of Lützen. It was Napoleon’s victory, though he could not follow it up, as he had no cavalry. The moral effect of Lützen was excellent in the French army. Among the allies there was a return to the old dread of the “monster.” By May 8th the French occupied Dresden; from there they crossed the Elbe, and on the 21st fought the battle of Bautzen, another incomplete victory for Napoleon. The next day, in an engagement with the Russian rear guard, Marshal Duroc, one of Napoleon’s warmest and oldest friends, was killed. It was the second marshal lost since the campaign began, Bessières having been killed at Lützen.
The French obtained Breslau on June 1st, and three days later an armistice was signed, lasting until August 10th. It was hoped that peace might be concluded during this armistice. At that moment Austria held the key to the situation. The allies saw that they were defeated if they could not persuade her to join them. Napoleon, his old confidence restored by a series of victories, hoped to keep his Austrian father-in-law quiet until he had crushed the Prussians and driven the Russians across the Nieman. Austria saw her power, and determined to use it to regain territory lost in 1805 and 1809, and Metternich came to Dresden to see Napoleon. Austria would keep peace with France, he said if Napoleon would restore Illyria and the Polish provinces, would send the Pope back to Rome, give up the protectorate of the Confederation of the Rhine, restore Naples and Spain. Napoleon’s amazement and indignation were boundless.
Engraved by Benedetti, after Daffinger.
“How much has England given you for playing this rôle against me, Metternich?” he asked.
A semblance of a congress was held at Prague soon after, but it was only a mockery. Such was the exasperation and suffering of Central Europe, that peace could only be reached by large sacrifices on Napoleon’s part. These he refused to make. There is no doubt but that France and his allies begged him to compromise; that his wisest counsellors advised him to do so. But he repulsed with irritation all such suggestions. “You bore me continually about the necessity of peace,” he wrote Savary. “I know the situation of my empire better than you do; no one is more interested in concluding peace than myself, but I shall not make a dishonorable peace, or one that would see us at war again in six months.... These things do not concern you.”
By the middle of August the campaign began. The French had in the field some three hundred and sixty thousand men. This force was surrounded by a circle of armies, Swedish, Russian, Prussian, and Austrian, in all some eight hundred thousand men. The leaders of this hostile force included, besides the natural enemies of France, Bernadotte, crown prince of Sweden, who had fought with Napoleon in Italy, and General Moreau, the hero of Hohenlinden. Moreau was on Alexander’s staff. He had reached the army the night that the armistice expired, having sailed from the United States on the 21st of June, at the invitation of the Russian emperor, to aid in the campaign against France. He had been greeted by the allies with every mark of distinction. Another deserter on the allies’ staff was the eminent military critic Jomini. In the ranks were stragglers from all the French corps, and the Saxons were threatening to leave the French in a body, and go over to the allies.
The second campaign of 1813 opened brilliantly for Napoleon, for at Dresden he took twenty thousand prisoners, and captured sixty cannon. The victory turned the anxiety of Paris to hopefulness, and their faith in Napoleon’s star was further revived by the report that Moreau had fallen, both legs carried off by a French bullet. Moreau himself felt that fate was friendly to the emperor. “That rascal Bonaparte is always lucky,” he wrote his wife, just after the amputation of his legs.
But there was something stronger than luck at work; the allies were animated by a spirit of nationality, indomitable in its force, and they were following a plan which was sure to crush Napoleon in the long run. It was one laid out by Moreau; a general battle was not to be risked, but the corps of the French were to be engaged one by one, until the parts of the army were disabled. In turn Vandamme, Oudinot, MacDonald, Ney, were defeated, and in October the remnants of the French fell back to Leipsic. Here the horde that surrounded them was suddenly enlarged. The Bavarians had gone over to the allies.
A three days’ battle at Leipsic exhausted the French, and they were obliged to make a disastrous retreat to the Rhine, which they crossed November 1st. Ten days later the emperor was in Paris.
The situation of France at the end of 1813 was deplorable. The allies lay on the right bank of the Rhine. The battle of Vittoria had given the Spanish boundary to Wellington, and the English and Spanish armies were on the frontier. The allies which remained with the French were not to be trusted. “All Europe was marching with us a year ago,” Napoleon said; “to-day all Europe is marching against us.” There was despair among his generals, alarm in Paris. Besides, there seemed no human means of gathering up a new army. Where were the men to come from? France was bled to death. She could give no more. Her veins were empty.
“This is the truth, the exact truth, and such is the secret and the explanation of all that has since occurred,” says Pasquier. “With these successive levies of conscriptions, past, present, and to come; with the Guards of Honor; with the brevet of sub-lieutenant forced on the young men appertaining to the best families, after they had escaped the conscript, or had supplied substitutes in conformity with the provisions of the law, there did not remain a single family which was not in anxiety or in mourning.”
Yet hedged in as he was by enemies, threatened by anarchy, supported by a fainting people, Napoleon dallied over the peace the allies offered. The terms were not dishonorable. France was to retire, as the other nations, within her natural boundaries, which they designated as the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. But the emperor could not believe that Europe, whom he had defeated so often, had power to confine him within such limits. He could not believe that such a peace would be stable, and he began preparations for resistance. Fresh levies of troops were made. The Spanish frontier he attempted to secure by making peace with Ferdinand, recognizing him as King of Spain. He tried to settle his trouble with the Pope.
While he struggled to simplify the situation, to arouse national spirit, and to gather reënforcements, hostile forces multiplied and closed in upon him. The allies crossed the Rhine. The corps législatif took advantage of his necessity to demand the restoration of certain rights which he had taken from them. In his anger at their audacity, the emperor alienated public sympathy by dissolving the body. “I stood in need of something to console me,” he told them, “and you have sought to dishonor me. I was expecting that you would unite in mind and deed to drive out the foreigner; you have bid him come. Indeed, had I lost two battles, it would not have done France any greater evil.” To crown his evil day, Murat, Caroline’s husband, now King of Naples, abandoned him. This betrayal was the more bitter because his sister herself was the cause of it. Fearful of losing her little glory as Queen of Naples, Caroline watched the course of events until she was certain that her brother was lost, and then urged Murat to conclude a peace with England and Austria.
This accumulation of reverses, coming upon him as he tried to prepare for battle, drove Napoleon to approach the allies with proposals of peace. It was too late. The idea had taken root that France, with Napoleon at her head, would never remain in her natural limits; that the only hope for Europe was to crush him completely. This hatred of Napoleon had become almost fanatical, and made any terms of peace with him impossible.
By the end of January, 1814, the emperor was ready to renew the struggle. The day before he left Paris, he led the empress and the King of Rome to the court of the Tuileries, and presented them to the National Guard. He was leaving them what he held dearest in the world, he told them. The enemy were closing around; they might reach Paris; they might even destroy the city. While he fought without to shield France from this calamity, he prayed them to protect the priceless trust left within. The nobility and sincerity of the feeling that stirred the emperor were unquestionable; tears flowed down the cheeks of the men to whom he spoke, and for a moment every heart was animated by the old emotion, and they took with eagerness the oath he asked.
The next day he left Paris. The army he commanded did not number more than sixty thousand men. He led it against a force which, counting only those who had crossed the Rhine, numbered nearly six hundred thousand.
In the campaign of two months which followed, Napoleon several times defeated the allies. In spite of the terrible disadvantages under which he fought, he nearly drove them from the country. In every way the campaign was worthy of his genius. But the odds against him were too tremendous. The saddest phase of his situation was that he was not seconded. The people, the generals, the legislative bodies, everybody not under his personal influence seemed paralyzed. Augereau, who was at Lyons, did absolutely nothing, and the following letter to him shows with what energy and indignation Napoleon tried to arouse his stupefied followers.