17
‘Prussia was hatched from a cannonball.’
Attributed to Napoleon
‘When I receive the monthly reports on the state of my armies and my navy, which fill twenty thick volumes . . . I take greater pleasure reading them than a young lady does in reading a novel.’
Napoleon to Joseph, August 1806
On the morning after Austerlitz, having changed his shirt for the first time in eight days, Napoleon rode around the battlefield. On the shore of Lake Satschan he saw a Lithuanian sergeant who had been shot in the thigh, lying on a block of floating ice. ‘His blood stained the ice bright red,’ recalled Marbot, ‘a horrible sight.’1 The soldier called out to Napoleon, who sent two officers to swim over. Afterwards he rewarded them with rum, asking them how they had enjoyed their bath.2 (The sergeant later joined the Guard lancers.)
The next day, Napoleon granted Emperor Francis’s request for an interview, and at 2 p.m. the two men met for the first time by a fire at the foot of the Spaleny Mlyn windmill, 10 miles south-west of Austerlitz on the road to Hungary. They embraced cordially and spoke for 90 minutes. ‘He wanted to conclude peace immediately,’ Napoleon told Talleyrand afterwards, ‘he appealed to my finer feelings.’3 On getting back on his horse, Napoleon told his staff: ‘Gentlemen, we return to Paris; peace is made.’4 He then galloped back to Austerlitz village to visit the wounded Rapp. ‘A strange sight for the philosopher to reflect on!’ recalled one of those present. ‘An Emperor of Germany come to humble himself by suing for peace to the son of a small Corsican family, not long ago a sub-lieutenant of artillery, whose talents, good fortune and the courage of the French soldier had raised to the summit of power and made the arbiter of the destinies of Europe.’5 Napoleon refused to commit his thoughts about Francis to paper when writing to Talleyrand – ‘I’ll tell you orally what I think of him.’ Years later he would say that Francis was ‘so moral that he never made love to anyone but his wife’ (of whom he had four).6 He was less charitable in his assessment of Tsar Alexander of Russia, who had not sued for peace. In a letter to Josephine he wrote ‘He has shown neither talent nor bravery.’7
Talleyrand advised Napoleon to take the opportunity to turn Austria into an ally and ‘a sufficient and necessary rampart against the barbarians’, meaning the Russians.8 Napoleon rejected this, believing that while Italy remained French, Austria would always be bellicose and resentful. As a friend of General Thiébault’s said of him that year: ‘He can subdue, but he cannot reconcile.’9
• • •
Soon after the battle, Napoleon decreed that the widow of every soldier killed at Austerlitz would receive an annual pension of 200 francs for life, with the widows of generals receiving 6,000 francs. He also undertook to find employment for the sons of every fallen soldier, and allowed them to add ‘Napoleon’ to their baptismal names. He could afford this, and much else besides, thanks to the return of financial confidence that swept the country as government bonds leaped from 45 to 66 per cent of their face value on the news of the victory.10 He nonetheless didn’t forgive the bankers who had shown insufficient confidence in him during the early part of the campaign. State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère noted ‘the bitterness with which he invariably expressed himself when speaking of the bankers’ and what he called ‘the bankers’ faction’.11
On December 15 Count von Haugwitz was presented with the Franco-Prussian Treaty of Schönbrunn, which promised that Hanover, the ancestral territory of the British monarchs, would go to Prussia in exchange for the much smaller Anspach, Neuchâtel and Cleves. It was such an attractive offer that Haugwitz signed it immediately on his own authority. Prussia therefore ended her commitments to Britain under the Treaty of Potsdam, which she had made only the month before, and Napoleon drove an effective wedge between her and her former ally. Schönbrunn also committed Prussia to close her ports to British shipping. ‘France is all-powerful and Napoleon is the man of the century,’ Haugwitz wrote in the summer of 1806, having forced the resignation of his rival Karl von Hardenberg as Prussia’s foreign minister in March. ‘What have we to fear if united with him?’12 Yet Hardenberg was kept on in secret government service by King Frederick William and his fiercely anti-Napoleonic wife, the beautiful and independent-minded Queen Louise, daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg, not least in order to keep diplomatic channels open to Russia.
Napoleon was irritated by the way that French papers such as the Journal de Paris were writing loosely about the blessings of peace. ‘It is not peace that is important but the conditions of peace,’ he told Joseph, ‘and it’s too complicated for the comprehension of a Paris citizen. I am not accustomed to shape my policy after the discourses of Paris loungers.’13 Unusually superstitious, he told Talleyrand that he wanted to wait until the new year before signing the treaty with Austria, ‘for I have a few prejudices, and I should like peace to date from the renewal of the Gregorian calendar, which presages, I hope, as much happiness for my reign as the old one’.14 Not receiving the letter in time, Talleyrand signed the Treaty of Pressburg in the ancient capital of Hungary on December 27, 1805, so ending the War of the Third Coalition.
The treaty confirmed Napoleon’s sister Elisa in the principalities of Lucca and Piombino; transferred what Austria had previously received from Venice (mainly Istria and Dalmatia) to the Kingdom of Italy; passed the Tyrol, Franconia and Vorarlberg to Bavaria, which was recognized as a new kingdom; and incorporated five Danubian cities, a county, a landgravate and a prefecture into Württemberg, which also became a kingdom. Baden became a grand duchy with yet more Austrian territory. Francis was forced to recognize Napoleon as king of Italy, pay 40 million francs in reparations, and promise that there would be ‘peace and friendship’ between him and Napoleon ‘for ever’.15 The Austrian Emperor had lost over 2.5 million subjects and one-sixth of his revenues overnight, as well as lands that the Habsburgs had held for centuries, making the likelihood of eternal friendship very unlikely.16 Meanwhile, Napoleon recognized the ‘independence’ of Switzerland and Holland, guaranteed the integrity of the rest of the Austrian Empire and promised to separate the crowns of France and Italy after his death – none of which meant or cost him anything.17
When Vivant Denon presented Napoleon with a series of gold medals commemorating Austerlitz, one of which showed the French eagle holding the British lion in its talons, Napoleon threw it ‘with violence to the end of the chamber’, saying: ‘Vile flatterer! How dare you say the French eagle stifles the English lion? I cannot launch upon the sea a single petty fishing boat but she’s captured by the English. In reality it’s the lion that stifles the French eagle. Cast the medal into the foundry, and never bring me another!’18 He told Denon to melt down the other Austerlitz medals, too, and come up with a far less grandiose design, which Denon did (it had Francis and Frederick William’s heads on the reverse). There was a modicum of modesty still left in Napoleon in 1805; he also turned down Kellermann’s proposal for a permanent monument to his glory and had David destroy an over-flattering gilt model of him.
The Treaty of Pressburg made no mention of Naples, which had joined the Third Coalition despite Napoleon’s very clear warnings to Queen Maria Carolina in January, and despite the treaty of neutrality it had signed thereafter. The Bourbons had welcomed a Russo-British landing of 19,000 troops in Naples on November 20, though the troops had left again on receipt of the news of Austerlitz. Maria Carolina was quoted as calling Napoleon ‘That ferocious beast . . . that Corsican bastard, that parvenu, that dog!’19 So on December 27 Napoleon simply announced: ‘The dynasty of Naples has ceased to reign; its existence is incompatible with the peace of Europe and the honour of my crown.’ Maria Carolina’s disingenuous declarations that the Allied landings had been a surprise were rebuffed. ‘I will finally punish that whore,’ Napoleon supposedly told Talleyrand, demonstrating a capacity for invective quite as colourful as the queen’s.20
Although Masséna – marching down from Milan – quickly conquered most of Naples, hanging the bandit leader Michele Pezza (known as Brother Devil) in November 1806, the Bourbons escaped to Sicily and a dirty war developed in the mountains of Calabria, where peasant guerrillas fought against the French for years in a conflict characterized by vicious reprisals, especially after Napoleon appointed General Charles Manhès military governor there in 1810. The guerrilla war sapped French energy, manpower and morale, while devastating Calabria and its population. Although the British helped on occasion – landing a small force which won the battle of Maida in July 1806 – their main contribution was in guarding the Straits of Messina. ‘Had Sicily been closer and had I been with the vanguard,’ Napoleon told Joseph that month, ‘I would do it; my experience of war would mean that with 9,000 men I would defeat 30,000 English troops.’21 Here was another indication of his disastrous underestimation of the British, whom he was not personally to face across a battlefield until Waterloo.
• • •
In order to cement France’s alliance with Bavaria, Napoleon asked its newly minted monarch, King Maximilian I (who had ruled Bavaria under the title Elector Maximilian-Joseph IV of the Palatinate since 1799), that Princess Augusta, his eldest daughter, should marry Eugène, despite the fact that she was engaged to Prince Karl Ludwig of Baden and Eugène was in love with someone else. He sent Eugène a cup with her picture on it, assuring him that she was ‘much better’ looking in real life.22 They married on January 14, 1806, and it turned out to be a far more successful marriage than some of the others that Napoleon insisted upon in order to lend his court respectability, such as the disastrous marriages he imposed on Rapp and Talleyrand. ‘Make sure you do not give us a girl,’ Napoleon only half joked to Augusta when she became pregnant, suggesting she ‘drink a little bit of undiluted wine every day’ as a way of avoiding that unfortunate outcome.23 When, in March 1807, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, whom Napoleon ordered to be called Josephine, he wrote to Eugène to congratulate him: ‘All that now remains for you to do is to make sure that next year you have a boy.’24 (They had another girl.)
Napoleon had other plans for the nineteen-year-old Karl Ludwig of Baden, and on April 8, 1806 he was married to Josephine’s cousin, Stéphanie de Beauharnais, although they lived separately until he became Grand Duke in June 1811, whereupon they had five children over the course of seven years. And when he finally divorced his pretty American wife, Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore, Jérôme wedded Princess Catarina of Württemberg in August 1807. Napoleon had therefore married members of his family into the ruling houses of all three of the key buffer states between the Rhine and the Danube in the course of only nineteen months, a move intended to legitimize his dynasty as well as to create strategically important political and military alliances.
• • •
A report from the Grande Armée’s receiver-general in January 1806 showed just how profitable the victory at Austerlitz had been for France.25 Some 18 million francs had been collected from Swabia as well as the 40 million francs demanded from Austria by the Pressburg treaty. British merchandise was seized and sold across all the newly conquered territories. In all, revenue amounted to about 75 million francs, which, after deducting costs and French debts to the German states, left France nearly 50 million francs in profit.26 Although Napoleon constantly told his brothers that paying the army was the primary duty of government, troops were typically paid at the end of campaigns, as a disincentive to desertion and because those killed and captured needn’t be paid at all.27‘War must pay for war,’ Napoleon was to write to both Joseph and Soult on July 14, 1810. He used three methods in a bid to achieve this end: straightforward seizure of cash and property from enemies (known as ‘ordinary contributions’); payments from enemy treasuries agreed in peace treaties (‘extraordinary contributions’), and the billeting and maintenance of French troops at foreign or allies’ expense. France would train, equip and clothe her armies, after that they were expected to be largely self-financing.28
Ordinary and extraordinary contributions produced 35 million francs in the War of the Third Coalition, 253 million francs in the War of the Fourth Coalition, 90 million francs of requisitions in kind from Prussia in 1807, 79 million francs from Austria in 1809, a huge 350 million francs from Spain between 1808 and 1813, 308 million francs from Italy, 10 million francs in goods seized from Holland in 1810 and a special ‘contribution’ from Hamburg of 10 million francs the same year.29 The savings made by the use of allied military contingents (253 million francs) and by despatching French troops to be billeted on satellite states (129 million francs), as well as a total of 807 million francs in ‘ordinary contributions’ and 607 million francs in ‘extraordinary contributions’ over more than a decade brought in a total of nearly 1.8 billion francs. Yet still it wasn’t enough, because between the breakdown of Amiens and 1814 no less than 3 billion francs was required to finance Napoleon’s campaigns.30 To make up the difference, he needed to raise over 1.2 billion francs, of which 80 million came from taxation (including in 1806, now secure on his throne, deeply unpopular Ancien Régime droits réunis taxes on tobacco, alcohol and salt), 137 million in customs duties and 232 million in sales of national and communal property (biens nationaux), as well as by taking loans from the Bank of France. Officers of the state (including Napoleon himself) donated a further 59 million francs.31 ‘We must take care not to overload our donkey,’ Napoleon told his Conseil.
So the war did not pay for the war, but only for 60 per cent of it, with the remaining 40 per cent being picked up by the French people in various other ways. Yet these did not include the imposition of direct taxes on Napoleon’s strongest supporters – French tradesmen, merchants, professionals and the peasantry – except for the discretionary taxes on drinkers and smokers. Nor did it involve any direct taxes on middle- and upper-class incomes, even though Britain levied income tax at 10 per cent on all incomes over £200 per annum, an unheard-of imposition at the time. By the time of Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, French public debt was down to only 60 million francs when income from taxes and other levies were bringing in between 430 million francs and 500 million francs per annum.32 It was an impressive feat to finance fifteen years of warfare without imposing any income taxes, especially considering that the Ancien Régime had been destroyed in part as a result of its far smaller outlays helping the American Revolution. ‘When I have overthrown England, I will take off 200 million francs of taxes,’ Napoleon promised the Conseil in May 1806.33 It was never to happen, but that is no reason to doubt he would have done it.
• • •
In January 1806 Napoleon made his first really significant error of statesmanship, when he offered his brother Joseph the throne of Naples, saying: ‘It will become, like Italy, Switzerland, Holland and the three kingdoms of Germany, my federal states, or, truly, the French Empire.’34 Joseph was crowned king on March 30, and Louis became king of Holland in June. This reversion to the pre-revolutionary system of governance struck at the meritocratic system for which Napoleon had initially stood, installed largely inadequate brothers in key positions and stoked up problems for the future. In December 1805 Napoleon was writing to Joseph of Jérôme: ‘My very positive intention is to let him go to prison for debt if his allowance isn’t enough . . . It’s inconceivable what this young man costs me for causing nothing but inconvenience, and being useless to my system.’35 Yet within two years he had made the utterly unchanged Jérôme king of Westphalia. There were plenty of local pro-French reformers whom he could have installed in power – Melzi in Italy, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck in Holland, Karl Dalberg in Germany, Prince Poniatowski in Poland, for example, even Crown Prince Ferdinand in Spain – who would have done a far better job than most Frenchmen, let alone squabbling, vain, disloyal and often incompetent members of the Bonaparte family.
Although Napoleon wrote scores of rude and exasperated letters admonishing Joseph over his manner of ruling – ‘You must be a king and talk like a king’ – nonetheless his love for his elder brother was profound and genuine.36 When Joseph complained that he was no longer the brother he once knew, Napoleon wrote to him from his hunting chateau at Rambouillet in August 1806, telling him he was upset that he felt that way, for – adopting Joseph’s grammar of writing about Napoleon in the third person – ‘It’s normal that he should not have, at forty, the same feelings towards you he had when he was twelve. But he has more real and much stronger feelings for you. His friendship bears the hallmarks of his soul.’37
Holland had astonished the world in its heyday, defying Imperial Spain, moving its Stadtholder, William of Orange, to become king of England, founding a global empire, buying Manhattan, inventing capitalism and glorying in the golden age of Grotius, Spinoza, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Yet by the late eighteenth century, Britain had taken over most of Holland’s colonies, often without a fight, her shipping and overseas trading systems were all but destroyed, her cities were declining in population (in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe), and in manufacturing only gin production was doing well.38 By appointing Louis king (which the Dutch didn’t oppose) Napoleon administered the coup de grâce to Holland’s sovereignty. In many ways Louis was a good monarch, continuing the unification of the country from federated provinces, a process that had already started under her blind veteran Grand Pensionary Schimmelpenninck, who was beginning to reverse the long national decline. Local government reforms stripped the departments and local elites of influence in 1807; the ancient guilds were abolished in 1808; the justice system was rationalized in 1809. Louis moved his court from The Hague, via Utrecht, to Amsterdam, where the city council vacated its town hall so that it could become the royal palace.39
‘From the moment I set foot on Dutch soil I became Dutch,’ Louis told the legislature, which explained in a sentence the problem Napoleon was to have with him over the next four increasingly unhappy years.40 Napoleon inundated Louis with immensely rude letters throughout his reign, complaining that he was too ‘good-natured’ to be the kind of tough, uncompromising monarch that he needed. A typical letter would read:
If you continue to govern by whingeing, if you allow yourself to be bullied you will . . . be even less use to me than the Grand Duke of Baden is . . . You tire me needlessly . . . Your ideas are narrow and you have little interest in the common cause . . . Don’t come and plead poverty anymore; I know the Dutch well . . . Only women cry and complain; men take action . . . If you are not more energetic, you will end up in a situation that will make you regret your weakness . . . More energy, more energy!41
The only surprise is that Louis stayed on his throne for as long as he did. He received little support from his wife Hortense, who although she carried out her regal duties conscientiously, and was relatively popular with the Dutch, cordially hated Louis and was soon to start conducting an affair with Talleyrand’s illegitimate son, the dashing Comte Charles de Flahaut, by whom she had a son in 1811, the Duc de Morny.
Napoleon was to spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about his brothers, and would even joke of one, ‘It’s really unfortunate he’s not illegitimate’, but he kept them on long after their failures were clear.42 One immediate problem was that the Pope refused to recognize Joseph as king of Naples, which together with his designation of Jérôme’s wedding as against canon law began an entirely unnecessary quarrel between Napoleon and Pius VII that was to lead to the seizure of papal lands in June 1809 and Napoleon’s excommunication. Napoleon felt he could trust his siblings more than others outside his family – although that was not borne out by events – and he wished to ape the dynastic aggrandizement of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hanoverians. ‘My brothers have done me a great deal of harm,’ Napoleon admitted years later in a characteristic bout of honest self-evaluation, but by then it was far too late.43
More defensibly, Napoleon began doling out titles and lands to the leaders of his Empire in 1806. Murat became the ruling Grand Duke of Berg (roughly the Ruhr valley) in April, Talleyrand became Prince of Benevento in Italy (a former papal principality south-east of Naples), Bernadotte was made Prince of Ponte Corvo (an entirely artificial principality created out of another former papal possession in south Lazio near Naples), Fouché was given the hereditary dukedom of Otranto, and Berthier became Prince of Neuchâtel on the condition that he got married.44 Napoleon wrote to Murat asking him to organize Berg so well as to ‘make the neighbouring states envious and want to be part of the same dominion’.45 After his coronation he had created Grand Dignitaries of the Empire for Eugène (arch-chancellor) Murat (grand admiral, despite being a cavalryman), Lebrun (arch-treasurer), Cambacérès (grand chancellor), Talleyrand (grand chamberlain) and Fesch (grand almoner), while Duroc became grand marshal of the palace. Several of these jobs came with very large budgets; the grand chamberlain received nearly 2 million francs in 1806, the master of the horse (Caulaincourt) 3.1 million francs and the grand almoner 206,000 francs, among many others.46 Although there was undoubtedly a Ruritanian feel to some of these titles, and they were duly sniggered at by Bourbon snobs and propagandists, they all came with lands and incomes that were real enough.*
Marshals and ministers weren’t the only ones to be rewarded in 1806; on March 24 he gave his seventeen-year-old mistress, the ‘dark-eyed brunette beauty’ Éléonore Denuelle de la Plaigne, 10,000 francs from the imperial treasury.47 Her husband was in prison for fraud when Caroline Murat, whose lectrice (reader) she was, introduced her to Napoleon in yet another bid to undermine Josephine. The de la Plaignes divorced that April. Keen to establish that he wasn’t impotent, Napoleon impregnated Éléonore, who on December 13 gave birth to his illegitimate child, Comte Léon (who was rather unsubtly given the last four letters of his father’s name). The experiment reassured Napoleon that he could found a dynasty if he were to divorce Josephine. It also solved Éléonore’s financial problems, especially once Napoleon found her an army lieutenant to marry and gave her a large dowry.
• • •
On January 23, 1806, the forty-six-year-old William Pitt the Younger died of a peptic ulcer of the stomach, a disease that would today be cured with a short course of acid-inhibiting pills. In William Grenville’s so-called Ministry of All the Talents, which followed from February 1806 to March 1807, Charles James Fox, who had long been sympathetic to the French Revolution and to Napoleon, became Britain’s foreign secretary. Napoleon had made peace overtures to Tsar Alexander when he sent Prince Repnin back to St Petersburg after Austerlitz; now he entertained them from Fox, who on February 20 wrote from Downing Street ‘in my capacity as an honest man’ to warn Talleyrand of an assassination attempt that was to be made against Napoleon from plotters in the 16tharrondissement at Passy, and even going so far as to name them.48 He added that George III ‘would share the same emotions’ about this ‘detestable assignment’. This act of decency initiated full-scale peace negotiations lasting throughout the summer, largely conducted by lords Yarmouth and Lauderdale on the British side and by Champagny and Clarke on the French, which even reached the stage of bases for a proposed treaty.
Negotiations were conducted in secret as neither side wanted to admit to their having taken place if they failed, but there are no fewer than 148 separate documents in the French foreign ministry archives relating to the period between February and September 1806.49 These protracted negotiations – which covered Malta, Hanover, the Hanse Towns, Albania, the Balearic Islands, Sicily, the Cape of Good Hope, Surinam and Pondicherry – had effectively stalled by August 9 when Fox fell ill, but it was the fifty-seven-year-old foreign secretary’s death on September 13 that doomed them completely.50 ‘I know full well that England is but a corner of the world of which Paris is the centre,’ Napoleon wrote to Talleyrand as the talks broke down, ‘and that it would be to England’s advantage to have a foothold there, even in times of war.’51 He therefore preferred to have no relations at all with Britain than ones that were not leading to peace, and once Grenville’s government was replaced in March 1807 by that of the 3rd Duke of Portland, who re-dedicated himself to Pitt’s bellicose policy against France, any hope of that was inconceivable.
• • •
Much of the first nine months of 1806 was spent by Napoleon in his Conseil, covering a characteristically wide range of matters. March saw him complaining about his 300,000-franc upholsterer’s bill for his throne and six armchairs, which he was refusing to pay, as well as insisting that priests charge no more than 6 francs for conducting the funerals of the poor: ‘We ought not to deprive the poor merely because they are poor of that which consoles their poverty,’ Napoleon said. ‘Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvellous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurors. The priests are better than the Cagliostros, the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.’52*
Napoleon came up with a way of taxing the butter and egg markets in March 1806, by announcing that all the proceeds would go to the hospitals of Paris, which the municipal authorities would then defund by a corresponding amount.53 He approved a duty on newspapers, saying that when it came to the press ‘the celebrated maxim of laissez-faire is a dangerous one if taken too literally, and must be moderately and cautiously applied’.54 A few days later, stating that the words ‘wholesale’, ‘retail’, ‘pint’ and ‘pot’ could with perfect propriety be inserted into the new Excise Act, he told the Conseil that the bill was, after all, ‘anything but an epic poem’.55 On March 11 he told the Conseil that his bedtime reading was ‘the old chronicles of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth centuries’, which taught him that the ancient Gauls weren’t barbarians, and that ‘governments had devolved too much power over education to the clergy’.56
Civil administration didn’t occupy Napoleon’s mind completely that month; he also had time to complain to General Jean Dejean, the director of war administration, that the 3rd Légère still hadn’t received the thousand uniforms and bandoliers that they’d been promised eight days before.57 The Conseil also discussed the colour of the Grande Armée’s uniforms, because indigo dye was expensive and came via Britain. ‘It would be no small economy to dress the troops in white,’ Napoleon said, ‘though it may be said, truly enough, that they have succeeded pretty well in blue. I don’t think, however, that their strength lies in the colour of their coats, as that of Samson did in the length of his hair.’58 Other considerations against having white uniforms were how filthy they would get and how much they would show blood.
Although Napoleon worked phenomenally hard, he believed ‘Work should be a way to relax.’59 He thought that if one got up early enough, as he told Eugène on April 14, ‘One can get a lot of work done in little time. I lead the same life you do; but I have an old wife who doesn’t need me around to have fun, and I’m also busier; however I allow myself more time for relaxation and amusement than you . . . I have spent the last two days with Marshal Bessières; we played like 15-year-old children.’ As he had written fourteen letters that day, six of them to Eugène himself, Napoleon probably hadn’t played precisely like a fifteen-year-old, but the fact that he thought he was relaxing was probably therapeutic in itself.
Some of the letters Napoleon sent to Eugène in April were absurdly nannying: ‘It’s important that the Italian nobility learns to ride,’ he ordered.60 More practical was the advice he gave Joseph about how to avoid being assassinated in Naples. ‘Your valets, your cooks, the guards that sleep in your apartment, the people who wake you up in the night to bring you despatches, have to be French,’ he wrote.
Nobody must ever come in during the night, except for your aide-de-camp who must sleep in a room preceding yours. Your door must be locked from the inside and you should unlock it only if you have recognized your aide-de-camp’s voice: he should only knock on your door after having locked the one of the room he sleeps in to make sure nobody has followed him and that he is alone. These precautions are important; they’re not a nuisance and as a result they generate confidence, apart from the fact that they can save your life.61
On May 30, 1806 Napoleon passed a ‘Decree on Jews and Usury’ that accused the Jews of ‘unjust greed’ and lacking ‘the sentiments of civic morality’, gave a year’s relief from debt repayment in Alsace and called a Grand Sanhedrin in order to reduce ‘the shameful expedient’ of lending money (something his own Bank of France did on a daily basis, of course).62 This was the first sign of hostility towards a people to whom Napoleon had hitherto shown amity and respect; henceforth he seems to have been uncharacteristically unsure of himself when it came to policy towards the Jews. Although he didn’t meet many Jews during his childhood or at school, and none of his friends were Jewish, during the Italian campaign he had opened up the ghettos of Venice, Verona, Padua, Livorno, Ancona and Rome, and ended the practice of forcing Jews to wear the Star of David.63 He had stopped Jews being sold as slaves in Malta and allowed them to build a synagogue there, as well as sanctioning their religious and social structures in his Holy Land campaign. He had even written a proclamation for a Jewish homeland in Palestine on April 20, 1799, which was rendered redundant after his defeat at Acre (but was nonetheless published in the Moniteur).64 He extended civil equality for the Jews beyond the borders of France in all his campaigns.* Yet on his return to Paris after Austerlitz, Napoleon was petitioned by Salzburg businessmen and bankers to restrict Jewish lending to Alsatian farmers. Alsatian Jews made up nearly half of France’s Jewish population of 55,000, and they were blamed for ‘excessive’ usury in that curious inversion whereby people who borrow money under free contracts in an open market blame those who lend it to them.65 The Conseil investigated the issue further, and was severely split over it. Napoleon told his councillors that he did not want to ‘sully my glory in the eyes of posterity’ by allowing the anti-Semitic Alsatian laws to stand, so they were repealed clause by clause over the following months.66
When the Grand Sanhedrin met it put many of Napoleon’s worries to rest, and exposed his ignorance of Judaism, which he seemed to believe promoted polygamy. The Jewish elders answered the questions he posed brilliantly, pointing out that exogamous marriage was as unpopular with Jews as it was with Christians, that interest rates reflected the risks of non-repayment, and that French Jews were patriotic supporters of his Empire.67 Napoleon thereafter proclaimed Judaism one of France’s three official religions, saying ‘I want all people living in France to be equal citizens and benefit from our laws.’68 One reason for his toleration of the Jews, at least relative to the restrictions that prevailed in Austria, Prussia, Russia and especially the Papal States, might have been self-interest. As he later said, ‘I thought that this would bring to France many riches because the Jews are numerous and they could come in large numbers to our country where they would enjoy more privileges than any other nation.’69
Yet, despite all this, when Napoleon thought the interests of the Jews conflicted with those of his natural constituency of French landlords, tradesmen and the better-off peasantry, he supported the latter with little regard for natural justice. On March 17, 1808 he passed ‘The Infamous Decree’ which imposed further restrictions on the Jews, making debts harder to collect, conscription harder to avoid and the purchase of new trading licences compulsory.70 Although Napoleon lifted many of these within a few months in many departments, they lasted until 1811 in Alsace.71 In Germany Jews became full citizens under Napoleon’s edict forming Westphalia in 1807, with special taxes on them abolished. Similarly, in 1811 the five hundred Jewish families of the Frankfurt ghetto were made full citizens, as were all Jews except moneylenders in Baden. In Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen the entry of Napoleon’s troops brought civil rights for the Jews, however much the local rulers and populace hated it.72
There were only about 170,000 Jews in Napoleon’s extended Empire, one-third within the old frontiers of France, but there was also a good deal of anti-Semitism, as exhibited in particular by Fesch, Molé, Regnier and Marshal Kellermann. Anti-Semitism was rife in the army, where there was only one Jewish general, Henri Rottembourg, and where the flocks of carrion crows that often followed the baggage-trains were nicknamed ‘the Jews’.73 Napoleon himself has been quoted making anti-Semitic remarks, telling one of his secretaries that the biblical Jews were ‘a vile people, cowardly and cruel’.74 In the January 1806 Conseil meeting to consider the Usury Decree he called Jews ‘a debased, degraded nation . . . a state within a state . . . not citizens’, ‘a plague of caterpillars and grasshoppers [who] ravage all France!’, adding ‘I cannot regard as Frenchmen those Jews who suck the blood of true Frenchmen.’ He also spoke of ‘rapacious and pitiless moneylenders’, despite the fact that the Conseil’s auditeurs confirmed that the Alsatian debts and mortgages were ‘engagements voluntarily entered into’, and that the law of contract had ‘sanctity’. Repulsive though such remarks are to all civilized people today, these were pretty standard views for an upper-middle-class French army officer in the early nineteenth century. It seems that, although Napoleon was personally prejudiced against Jews to much the same degree as the rest of his class and background, he saw advantages for France in making them less unwelcome there than they were elsewhere in Europe. With these qualifications, he probably deserves his present reputation in Jewry as a righteous Gentile.
His continuing lack of sympathy with the essence of the religion of most of his subjects, together with the failure for once of his normally well-tuned ear for propaganda, led on August 15 – his birthday and the Festival of the Assumption – to the introduction into the French religious calendar of a new saint’s day: St Napoleon’s. This was a step too far, even for the normally quiescent Gallican Church. The idea flopped among Catholics, who understandably found it blasphemous. Napoleon had asked Cardinal Caprara to canonize a new saint for his birthday, and the cardinal had found a Roman martyr called Neopolis who was alleged to have been martyred for refusing to pledge allegiance to the Emperor Maximilian, but who was in fact a complete invention by the Vatican.75
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The Holy Roman Empire had a logic to it in the Middle Ages, when it brought together hundreds of tiny German and central European states in a loose agglomeration for mutual trade and security, but after the legal foundations of the modern nation-state had been laid by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and once the Imperial Rescript had rationalized Germany in 1803 (and especially once Austerlitz had neutralized Austrian power across much of Germany), it was entirely stripped of its raison d’être. On July 12, 1806 Napoleon made it yet more irrelevant when he proclaimed himself Protector of a new German entity, the Confederation of the Rhine (Rheinbund), comprising the sixteen client states allied to France, and from which Austria and Prussia were notably excluded. By the end of 1806 the kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony and Württemberg, the principalities of Regensburg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Hohenzollern-Hechingen, Isenburg-Birstein, Leyen, Liechtenstein and Salm, the grand duchies of Baden, Berg, Hesse-Darmstadt and Würzburg and the duchies of Arenberg, Nassau, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Gotha, Saxe-Hildburghausen, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Weimar had all joined the Confederation. In 1807 the Kingdom of Westphalia also joined, along with nine principalities and three duchies. Karl Dalberg, archbishop of Mainz, former arch-chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire and a great admirer of Napoleon’s, was appointed Prince Primate of the Confederation.
The foundation of the Rhine Confederation had profound implications for Europe. The most immediate was that its members’ simultaneous withdrawal from the Holy Roman Empire meant that the Empire, established by Charlemagne’s coronation in AD 800, was formally abolished by Francis on August 6, 1806. (Goethe noted that day that the people staying in the same inn as him were far more interested in the quarrel between their coachman and the innkeeper than in its demise.) With the Holy Roman Empire no more, Francis II became merely Francis I of Austria, which he had already proclaimed an empire in August 1804, making him the only Doppelkaiser (double emperor) in history.76
Under the terms of the founding of the Rhine Confederation, Napoleon now had an extra 63,000 German troops at his disposal, a number that was soon increased; indeed the term ‘French army’ becomes something of a misnomer from 1806 until the Confederation’s collapse in 1813. Another consequence was that Frederick William III of Prussia had to give up any further hope of playing a significant leadership role beyond the borders of his own state, unless he was prepared to take part in a fourth coalition against France. Meanwhile, the Confederation fostered a nascent sense of German nationalism, and dreams that one day Germany could be an independent state ruled by Germans. There is no more powerful example of history’s law of unintended consequences than that Napoleon should have contributed to the creation of the country that was, half a century after his death, to destroy the French Empire of his own nephew, Napoleon III.
‘Your Majesty has been placed in the singular position of being simultaneously allied with both Russia and France,’ Karl von Hardenberg, the former Prussian foreign minister, wrote to Frederick William in June 1806. ‘This situation cannot last.’77 Frederick William’s decision to go to war with France, taken in early July but not put into effect until October, stemmed from his fear that time wasn’t on Prussia’s side. Although Prussia had been the first state to recognize Napoleon as emperor, had expelled the Bourbons from her territory and had signed the Treaty of Schönbrunn the previous December, by October 1806 she was at war.78 Frederick William dreamed of regional hegemony free of both France and Austria, and harboured growing fears of French encroachment in northern Germany.79 In late June and early July 1806 Hardenberg’s successor, von Haugwitz, who had earlier lauded the French alliance, wrote three memoranda that concluded that Napoleon was looking for a casus belli against Prussia, and was trying to detach Hesse from the Prussian orbit. He recommended that Prussia build up an anti-French alliance comprising Saxony, Hesse and Russia, and forgo the annexation of Hanover in order to secure British war subsidies. His stance was supported by the influential General Ernst von Rüchel, who nonetheless admitted to the king that war with France within a year of Austerlitz would be a Hazardspiel (dangerous game).80
Meanwhile in Paris, the Tsar’s envoy Peter Yakovlevich Ubri agreed to the wording of an ‘eternal peace and friendship’ treaty with France on 20 July, which required only the Tsar’s ratification in St Petersburg to undercut any Prussian hopes of a fourth coalition. Yet the Tsar was infuriated by reports that General Sébastiani, the French ambassador in Constantinople, was encouraging Turkey to attack Russia, so he waited before choosing between France and Prussia. The extent to which Sébastiani was acting on Napoleon or Talleyrand’s orders is unknown, but in the absence of a peace treaty after Austerlitz it made sense for France to follow that diplomatic path in Constantinople.* Napoleon didn’t want a war with either Prussia or Russia, however, let alone both simultaneously. On August 2 he ordered Talleyrand to tell the French ambassador in Berlin, Antoine Laforest, ‘that I desire, at no matter what price, to remain on good terms with Prussia, and, if necessary, allow Laforest to remain under the conviction that I really will not make peace with England on account of Hanover’.81 The same day he ordered Murat in Berg in the Ruhr valley not to take any action that might be construed as hostile towards Prussia. ‘Your role is to be conciliatory, very conciliatory with the Prussians, and not to do anything to upset them,’ he wrote. ‘Faced with a power like Prussia, one can’t take it slowly enough.’82 A scratched-out sentence on the original notes for that letter to Murat reads: ‘Everything you do will only end one way, with the pillaging of your states.’
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Early August 1806 saw Napoleon meet the new Austrian ambassador to Paris, Count Clemens von Metternich, for the first time. The Emperor wore a hat indoors at Saint-Cloud, which Metternich noted was ‘improper in any case, for the audience was not a public one, [and] struck me as a misplaced pretension, showing the parvenu’.83 Since Metternich was to become one of Napoleon’s implacable foes, his generally positive first impressions – headwear excepted – are of interest:
What at first struck me most was the remarkable perspicuity and grand simplicity of his mind and its processes. Conversation with him always had a charm for me, difficult to define. Seizing the essential point of subjects, stripping them of useless accessories, developing his thought and never ceasing to elaborate it till he had made it perfectly clear and conclusive, always finding the fitting word for the thing, or inventing one where the image of language had not created it, his conversation was ever full of interest. Yet he did not fail to listen to the remarks and objections addressed to him. He accepted them, questioned or opposed them, without losing the tone or overstepping the bounds of a business conversation; and I have never felt the least difficulty in saying to him what I believed to be the truth, even when it was not likely to please him.84
At this stage of their relationship at least, Metternich did not see Napoleon as the raging egotist that he portrayed him as in his memoirs.
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On August 25, Prussians were outraged at the trial of the Württemberg-born publisher-bookseller Johann Palm, who sold nationalist German and anti-Napoleonic publications and who was living in neutral Nuremberg when he was arrested. Palm refused to divulge the name of the author of one of his pamphlets, Germany’s Profound Degradation – thought to be the German nationalist Philipp Yelin – so he was shot in Braunau the next day.* ‘It’s no ordinary crime to spread libels in places occupied by the French armies in order to excite the inhabitants against them,’ Napoleon told Berthier, but Palm quickly attained the status of martyr.85
On the same day that Palm was indicted, Frederick William – influenced by Queen Louise and a war party in Berlin that included two of his brothers, a nephew of Frederick the Great and von Hardenberg – sent Napoleon an ultimatum ordering him to withdraw all French troops west of the Rhine by October 8. Stupidly he had not concluded preparations with Russia, Britain or Austria before doing this.86 Young Prussian officers then went so far as to sharpen their sabres on the front steps of the French embassy in Berlin.87
By the beginning of September Napoleon recognized that as Tsar Alexander had not ratified Ubri’s treaty, Russia was likely to be fighting alongside Prussia in any coming war. On the 5th, he ordered Soult, Ney and Augereau to concentrate on the Prussian frontier, estimating that if he got his army beyond Kronach in eight days it would take only ten days to march to Berlin, and he might be able to knock Prussia out before Russia could come to her aid. He called up 50,000 conscripts, mobilized 30,000 men of the Reserve and sent spies to reconnoitre the roads from Bamberg to the Prussian capital.
If he were to move 200,000 men in six corps plus the Reserve Cavalry and Imperial Guard hundreds of miles into enemy territory, Napoleon would need accurate intelligence of its terrain, especially its rivers, resources, ovens, mills and magazines. The topographical engineers who made his maps were ordered to include every piece of information imaginable, especially ‘the length, width and nature of the roads . . . streams must be traced and measured carefully with bridges, fords and the depth and width of the water . . . The number of houses and inhabitants of towns and villages should be indicated . . . the heights of hills and mountains should be given.’88
At the same time, the enemy should be fed misinformation. ‘You must send on sixty horses from my stables tomorrow,’ Napoleon told Caulaincourt on September 10. ‘Do this with as much mystery as possible. Try and make people believe that I am going to hunt at Compiègne.’ He added that he wanted his campaign tent ‘to be sturdy and not theatrical [tente d’opéra]. You will add some thick rugs.’89 The same day he ordered Louis to form up 30,000 men at Utrecht ‘on the pretext of preparing for war with England’. At 11 p.m. on September 18, while the Imperial Guard was moved in post-chaises from Paris to Mainz, Napoleon dictated to his war minister Henri Clarke his ‘General Dispositions for the Reunion of the Grande Armée’, the founding document of the campaign. It stated precisely which troops needed to be in which positions under which marshals by which dates between October 2 and 4. On September 20 alone he wrote thirty-six letters, his record for 1806.*
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Napoleon left Saint-Cloud with Josephine at 4.30 a.m. on September 25; he wasn’t to return to Paris for ten months.90 Four days later, when he was at Mainz, a report arrived from Berthier which, when added to the reports of two spies, completely changed his view of the strategic situation. Instead of the Prussians taking up advanced positions, as Berthier had feared, it was now clear that they were still around Eisenach, Meiningen and Hildburghausen, which would allow the French to cross the mountains and the Saale river and deploy without being intercepted. He therefore entirely altered his plan of operations, which, since Murat and Berthier were also issuing instructions, led to some confusion for a short time. ‘It is my intention to concentrate all my forces on my right,’ Napoleon told Louis, ‘leaving the space between the Rhine and Bamberg entirely open, so as to be able to unite about 200,000 men on the same field of battle.’91 A tremendous amount of marching would be needed; Augereau’s 7th Corps marched 25, then 20 and then 24 miles on three consecutive days, and two demi-brigades attained an extraordinary average of 24 miles a day for nine consecutive days, the last three over mountainous country.92
Davout soon occupied Kronach, which Napoleon was astonished the Prussians had not defended. ‘These gentlemen care little about positions,’ he told Rapp, ‘they are reserving themselves for grand strokes; we will give them what they want.’93 Napoleon’s overall plan, to capture Berlin while carefully protecting his lines of communication, was in place by the time he left Josephine in Mainz and reached Würzburg by October 2. The army was ready to attack by the 7th. A week later Josephine wrote to Berthier from Mainz, asking him to take ‘especially good care of the Emperor, making sure he doesn’t expose himself [to danger] too much. You are one of his oldest friends and it is that attachment I depend upon.’94
Napoleon was at Bamberg by the 7th, waiting to see what the enemy intended, expecting either a retreat towards Magdeburg or an advance via Fulda. The Prussian declaration of war arrived the same day, along with a twenty-page manifesto so predictable that Napoleon didn’t even read through to the end, sneering that it was just cribbed from British newspapers. ‘He threw it away contemptuously,’ recalled Rapp, and said of Frederick William, ‘Does he think himself in Champagne?’ – a reference to the Prussian victories of 1792. ‘Really, I pity Prussia. I feel for William. He is not aware what rhapsodies he is made to write. This is too ridiculous.’95 Napoleon’s private reply, sent on October 12 as his army advanced into Thuringia read:
Your Majesty will be defeated, you will compromise your repose and the existence of your subjects without the shadow of a pretext. Prussia is today intact, and can treat with me in a manner suitable to her dignity; in a month’s time she will be in a very different position. You are still in a position to save your subjects from the ravages and misfortunes of war. It has barely started, you could stop it, and Europe would be grateful to you.96
This letter has been denounced as ‘a breath-taking blend of arrogance, aggression, sarcasm and false solicitude’.97 It can also be read as giving Frederick William one (very) last opportunity for a dignified exit, and extremely accurately estimating Prussia’s chances in the coming war (indeed the prediction of disaster ‘within a month’ was an underestimate, since the battles of Jena and Auerstädt took place within two weeks). The true arrogance and aggression came from the Prussian princes, generals and ministers who had sent the ultimatum.
Although Prussia had a potentially very large army of 225,000 troops, 90,000 of them were tied up garrisoning fortresses. No immediate help could be expected from Russia or Britain, and although some of her commanders had fought under Frederick the Great, none had seen a battlefield in a decade. Her commander-in-chief, the Duke of Brunswick, was a septuagenarian and her other senior commander, General Joachim von Möllendorf, an octogenarian. Moreover, Brunswick and the general in charge of the left wing of the Prussian army, Prince Friedrich von Hohenlohe, had rival strategies and hated each other, so councils of war could take up to three ill-tempered days to reach a conclusion. Napoleon didn’t hold a single council of war throughout the entire campaign.98
Some of the Prussians’ more bizarre movements in the campaign, born of committee-generalship, were hard to comprehend even from their own perspective. On the night of October 9, Napoleon concluded from reports that the enemy was moving eastward from Erfurt to concentrate at Gera. In fact they were not doing that, although perhaps they should have been as it would have covered Berlin and Dresden better than their actual manoeuvre of crossing the Saale river.99 Napoleon made a mistaken assumption, but once he had discovered it the next day he moved with extraordinary rapidity to correct the error and take advantage of the new situation.
The French advance into Prussian-occupied Saxony was screened by only six light cavalry regiments under Murat. Behind them came Bernadotte’s corps in the lead, Lannes and Augereau on the left, Soult and Ney on the right, the Imperial Guard in the centre and Davout and the main body of the cavalry in reserve. At the battle of Saalfeld on October 10, Lannes defeated the Prussian and Saxon vanguard under Prince Louis Ferdinand, Frederick William’s nephew, who was killed leading a desperate charge against the French centre, cut down by Quartermaster Guindet of the 10th Hussars. This defeat, in which 1,700 Prussians were killed, wounded or captured at the cost of 172 French, had a bad effect on Prussian morale. The Grande Armée then formed up, its soldiers with their backs to Berlin and the Oder, cutting the Prussians off from their lines of communication, supply and withdrawal.100 By the following morning it was deployed on the Saxon plain, ready for the next phase of the campaign. Moving quickly, Lasalle captured Hohenlohe’s supply train in Gera at 8 p.m., forcing the Prussians to march away via Jena. When Napoleon heard this from Murat at 1 a.m. on October 12 he thought hard for two hours, and then started sending out a blizzard of orders that had the effect of wheeling the whole army westwards towards the Prussian army behind the River Saale.101
Murat’s cavalry and spies confirmed on October 12 that the main Prussian army was now at Erfurt, whereupon Murat fanned out his cavalry to the north, and Davout seized the river crossing at Naumburg, ending any hopes Brunswick might have had of adopting a forward defence. The Prussians therefore began another major retreat to the north-east, demoralized and psychologically on the back foot even before any major engagement had taken place. On the 13th Lannes threw his vanguard into the town of Jena, expelled the Prussian outposts there and immediately sent troops to seize the Landgrafenberg plateau above the town, guided by a Prussophobe Saxon parish priest.
By now Napoleon had correctly deduced that the Prussians were retreating on Magdeburg, and that Lannes was therefore isolated and in danger of being hit by a powerful counter-attack from some 30,000 Prussians he had reported in the vicinity. He ordered the whole Grande Armée to concentrate on Jena the next day. Davout and Bernadotte were ordered to move via Naumburg and Dornburg to turn the enemy left at Jena. Davout couldn’t have known that the main Prussian army was in fact heading towards him, and perhaps over-confidently didn’t warn Berthier of the large numbers of enemy troops he was already encountering. Bernadotte and the Reserve Cavalry moved more slowly towards Jena, out of fatigue.
On the afternoon of October 13, as Napoleon rode through Jena, he was spotted by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his study window. Hegel, who was writing the last pages of The Phenomenology of Spirit, told a friend that he had seen ‘the Emperor, this Weltseele [world-soul] ride out of town . . . Truly it is a remarkable sensation to see such an individual on horseback, raising his arm over the world and ruling it.’102 In his Phenomenology Hegel posited the existence of the ‘beautiful soul’, a force that acts autonomously in disregard of convention and others’ interests, which, it has been pointed out, was ‘not a bad characterisation’ of Napoleon himself.103
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Napoleon arrived on the Landgrafenberg above Jena at around 4 p.m. on the 13th, and, seeing the enemy encampments further along the plateau, ordered the whole of Lannes’ corps and the Imperial Guard up onto it, a risky undertaking as they were only 1,200 yards from enemy guns.* Walking the Landgrafenberg today, it becomes immediately clear that so long as it didn’t come under sustained artillery fire, the flat open heath of the plateau was a fine place from which the two corps could deploy. That night Napoleon brought Lannes’ artillery up onto the plateau to join Augereau’s corps and the Imperial Guard. Ney was close by, and Soult and the Reserve Cavalry were on their way. Hoping that Davout would turn the Prussian left the next day, Napoleon and Berthier sent him a carelessly worded message that ‘If Bernadotte is with you, you can march together’ towards the town of Dornburg.104
The battle of Jena started in thick fog at 6.30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 14, 1806. Napoleon had already been up since 1 a.m. reconnoitring the advance posts with one of Lannes’ divisional commanders, General Louis Suchet. There they were fired upon by a French sentry-post on the left flank, which stopped only when Roustam and Duroc shouted that they were French.105 Back in his tent, Napoleon started issuing a stream of orders from 3 a.m. His plan was for Lannes to use both his divisions (the second commanded by General Honoré Gazan) to attack Hohenlohe’s vanguard under General Bogislav von Tauentzien, in order to gain space for the rest of the army to manoeuvre onto the plain. Augereau was to form up on the Jena–Weimar road (also known as the Cospeda ravine), and move up on Lannes’ left while Ney came in on his right. Soult would guard the right flank, and the Imperial Guard and cavalry would be held in reserve to exploit weaknesses as they developed in the enemy’s line.
Napoleon harangued Lannes’ corps in person at 6 a.m., before sending them off towards Tauentzien. The military historian Colonel Baron Henri de Jomini, whose 1804 book on strategy had caught Napoleon’s attention and whom he appointed as official historian on his staff, was impressed how he understood ‘that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because where you should find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it’. So when he addressed Lannes’ men he praised the Prussian cavalry, but ‘promised that it could do nothing against the bayonets of his Egyptians!’, by which he meant Lannes’ veterans who had fought in the battle of the Pyramids.106
Suchet advanced on the village of Closewitz in columns ready to deploy into line once they had reached the plateau, but in the fog they veered off to the left and struck the enemy between Closewitz and the village of Lützeroda. As the fog slowly lifted, stubborn fighting developed for nearly two hours, disordering the French and using up a great deal of ammunition as masses of enemy cavalry formed up on the Dornberg, the highest point on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Lannes, a consummate drill-master, passed his second line through to the front and fought to clear the plateau, beating off a counter-attack from Lützeroda and turning to face the village of Vierzehnheiligen in the process. Beyond Vierzehnheiligen, the ground on the battlefield suddenly becomes very flat, ideal for cavalry. Both Vierzehnheiligen and the Dornberg were captured and then lost in the course of the fighting, as Hohenlohe sent in units piecemeal against the French, rather than co-ordinating a massive counter-attack. Napoleon joined Lannes at this stage of the battle, massing a twenty-five-gun battery once the fog had cleared by about 7.30 a.m., and directing the 40th Line to attack Vierzehnheiligen.
With the arrival of Soult, Saint-Hilaire drove the Prussians from Closewitz, and once his artillery and cavalry had caught up he began to move on to the village of Rödigen. He was held up by fierce Prussian resistance, but by 10.15 a.m. was able to resume his advance through Hermstedt to turn the enemy’s left flank. Because Augereau had packed an entire division into the Cospeda ravine he didn’t emerge onto the plateau until 9.30 a.m., but once there he engaged the enemy east of Isserstedt. Meanwhile, Ney had reached the plateau with about 4,000 men and had seen a gap opening up on Lannes’ left. So on his own initiative he moved behind Lannes and came into the line on his left, just as Lannes was being driven out of Vierzehnheiligen. Ney’s attack recovered the village and got the French onto the south end of the Dornberg. The sheer weight of Prussian artillery fire checked their advance, but Ney’s infantry clung to the burning village. A cavalry attack forced Ney to shelter in an infantry square. At that point Napoleon made another appeal to Lannes, whose corps stormed the Dornberg and joined Ney at 10.30 a.m., just as Hohenlohe sent 5,000 infantry, with some 3,500 cavalry and 500 gunners in support, in perfect parade-ground order, to trade thunderous volleys with the defenders of Vierzehnheiligen. Crucially, Hohenlohe’s troops did not storm the village.
By 11 a.m. Augereau had taken Isserstedt and linked up with Ney, and at noon Soult had arrived on the right flank. With Ney’s two divisions on Lannes’ left, and the cavalry under generals Dominique Klein, Jean-Joseph d’Hautpoul and Étienne Nansouty arriving, Napoleon judged the moment right for a major assault. On his order, the French army surged forward in thick skirmish lines followed by battalion columns. The Prussians fell back doggedly for an hour, but their losses rose and in the face of Murat’s repeated cavalry charges Tauentzien’s regiments finally broke and ran. By 2.30 p.m. Hohenlohe’s army was fleeing the battlefield in total disorder, with only a few battalion squares retreating under the command of their officers. Murat, riding-whip in hand, followed by dragoons, cuirassiers and the light cavalry of all three corps, engaged in a relentless pursuit over 6 miles, slaughtering many and capturing several thousand Saxons on the way. He stopped only when he reached Weimar at 6 p.m. The deep pursuit of the Prussian forces after Jena was a textbook operation – literally so, as it is still taught in military academies today – of how to maximize victories.
It was only once victory had been won that Napoleon realized he had not been fighting the main enemy army under the Duke of Brunswick at all, but just its rearguard under Hohenlohe. For Davout, 13 miles away at Auerstädt, that same day defeated Frederick William and Brunswick, the former escaping only after many hours in the saddle, and the latter dying of his wounds shortly after the battle. With 30,000 men and 46 guns, Davout had performed a double envelopment on the 52,000 Prussians with their 163 guns, losing 7,000 French soldiers killed and wounded in that bloody engagement, but inflicting almost twice as many casualties on the Prussians.107 It was one of the most remarkable victories of the Napoleonic Wars, and, as at Austerlitz, Davout had radically altered the odds in Napoleon’s favour. When Napoleon was told by Colonel Falcon, Davout’s aide-de-camp, that he had not defeated the main Prussian army but only Hohenlohe’s detachment, he didn’t believe it, telling Falcon: ‘Your marshal must be seeing double.’108Napoleon was effusive once he had realized the truth, however. ‘Tell the marshal that he, his generals and his troops have acquired everlasting claims on my gratitude,’ he told Falcon, giving Davout’s corps the honour of leading the triumphal entry into Berlin on October 25.109 Even so, Auerstädt was never sewn onto flags as a battle honour, because that would have contrasted Napoleon’s fine victory over Hohenlohe with Davout’s stunning one over Brunswick.
Bernadotte, by contrast, had not managed to arrive on either battlefield, something for which Napoleon and Davout never truly forgave him. ‘I ought to have had Bernadotte shot,’ Napoleon said on St Helena, and at the time he seems to have briefly considered court-martialling him.110 Napoleon wrote him a sharp letter on October 23 – ‘Your Corps was not on the battlefield, and that could have been fatal for me.’ Bernadotte had taken Berthier’s orders at face value and marched his men to Dornburg. He didn’t cross paths with Napoleon between October 9 and December 8, by which point the Emperor had written to praise him for capturing Lübeck from Blücher, so the stories of a fiery personal interview are myths.111 It was rare for Berthier to give garbled orders, but Bernadotte’s absence from both battlefields was indicative of what could happen if he did. Nonetheless, Bernadotte knew that he was once more the butt of Napoleon’s ire, and his own longstanding private dislike and envy of Napoleon only made the situation worse.
‘My love, I’ve executed some fine manoeuvres against the Prussians,’ Napoleon boasted to Josephine from Jena at three o’clock on the morning after the battle. ‘I won a great victory yesterday. The enemy numbered 150,000; I have taken 20,000 prisoners, 100 artillery pieces, and flags. I saw the King of Prussia and got near to him, but failed to capture him, so also to the Queen. I have been in bivouac for two days. I am wonderfully well.’112 The numbers were exaggerated as usual, and Frederick William had been at Auerstädt rather than Jena so he couldn’t have seen him or the queen, but Napoleon had indeed captured eighty-three guns and Davout fifty-three, and after his near-flawlessly executed battle there was no doubt that Napoleon was ‘wonderfully well’.