11

From the Peninsula to Leipzig

In 1807, as we have seen, Napoleon was at the very zenith of his power. In a face-to-face negotiation with Tsar Alexander I on the Niemen, he had effectively divided Europe into French and Russian zones of influence to the exclusion of defeated powers such as Austria and Prussia – as well, of course, as Great Britain. The glorious surroundings, the trappings of imperial authority, the intimacy of the moment – allies and even advisers were excluded from the meeting of the two emperors – all served to emphasise that this was a very personal triumph, one that might yet allow him to be perceived by the French people as a man of peace. Yet the accords drawn up at Tilsit held the seeds of future conflicts. Those rulers who had not been involved in the negotiations were unlikely to accept with good grace a treaty imposed on them by France and Russia; their feelings of resentment would smoulder until they had an opportunity for revenge. The King of Prussia, in particular, had reason to feel aggrieved, since his lands were cavalierly carved up in the interests of the two empires to his east and west. Prussia lost a third of its territory and nearly half its population, with its share of Poland remodelled into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and placed under the hereditary rule of the King of Saxony.¹Prussia would bide her time, restructure her armed forces, and seek new alliances; in this part of Central Europe Tilsit was an invitation to further warfare, and it is surely unsurprising that the Grand Duchy did not survive Napoleon’s fall. Many of the German princes whose loyalty Napoleon had bought with favours and honours became increasingly restive as the Emperor rode roughshod over their interests, while their subjects were attracted to the new forces of German nationalism.

Tilsit would prove a short-lived triumph for Napoleon, exposing him to the resentments and jealousies of others. It left him with responsibility for a Europe-wide empire, to be sure, but also vulnerable to the perils that wide-flung territories and distant frontier zones imposed. Stable government depended increasingly on gaining the cooperation of local rulers and local elites. In particular, Napoleon was overly dependent on the support of Alexander I to maintain his territories to the east, to the extent that Russia became, in Luigi Mascilli Migliorini’s phrase, ‘the keystone to the stability of the Empire’s eastern frontier’.² The foreign policy successes of the early years came with dangers of their own.

It was not only a question of defending these far-flung borders, difficult as that might at times appear. The sheer geographical extent of the Empire took the Napoleonic system into new political zones, which had hidden perils of their own. French territories were not all contiguous with France itself; at its height, the Empire also controlled provinces along the Adriatic, in Istria, Croatia and Dalmatia, which bordered on Russia and the Ottoman Empire. In the Balkans and the Near East, Napoleon had dreamt as late as 1806 of creating alliances with both Turkey and Persia, a triple alliance that would help France to ward off Russia and attack British India. But by the following year his priorities had changed because the speed of his victory against the Tsar obviated any further need for aid from Persia or Turkey; while relations between the two Near Eastern powers, never good, had disintegrated into open warfare. Napoleon had to choose between them: he decided that the stability of the Ottoman Empire was threatened by internal decadence, and so he opted to abandon the Ottomans for the sake of a Persian alliance.³

This, too, would have serious diplomatic consequences, alarming both the British and the Russians and alerting foreign governments to his further ambitions beyond Europe. It was also a reminder that, however great France’s military power, the Emperor could not force others to share his interests or bully them into unnatural friendships. Besides, inside the envelope of the Napoleonic Wars there would be areas of conflict that had little to do with France, but which reflected local goals and regional animosities. The Europe-wide wars provided a context in which ambitions could be realised and old scores settled. A military coup in Sweden in 1809, for instance, overthrew Gustav IV and provided Russia with an excuse to intervene; Finland then battled to secure liberation from two centuries of Swedish rule, and a popular insurrection broke out in the Tyrol against Austria. None of this had much to do with Napoleon’s Empire, at least not directly. Nor, ostensibly, did the first murmurings of a Spanish-American revolution in Venezuela in 1810, though the insurrectionary mood was fired by news of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. The revolutionary leaders in Latin America, like Francisco de Miranda, were profoundly influenced by France’s revolution and looked for inspiration to its iconography.⁴Conflict in one area created aspirations elsewhere in the world, thus transferring the Napoleonic Wars on to a world stage.

Elsewhere in Europe, the demands of Napoleonic administration served to whip up opposition and stimulate a desire for national autonomy. Throughout Germany it sowed the seeds of a new German nationalism that would be a powerful force in the Wars of Liberation in 1813, while Russia and Austria continued to cast covetous eyes on Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Napoleon himself showed no desire to end the war, or to accept that the balance of power established at Tilsit was in any sense definitive. Rather, he argued that further wars of expansion were needed, that further punishment must be meted out to those, like Britain, that had not been conquered, if the stability of the Empire was to be guaranteed and the formation of new coalitions averted. He may, of course, have been right here, in the sense that the dynastic rulers of Europe were unlikely to accept as legitimate the patchwork of client states with which the Emperor had surrounded himself, most often with one of his relatives at its head. It was not only the King of Prussia who was harbouring resentments or biding his time. Austria, too, humiliated by Napoleon in battle and humiliated again diplomatically by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, had good reason to seek revenge. And internally, across much of Europe, there was the danger of restiveness as people suffered the full weight of taxes and requisitions, the burden of conscription, and the intrusion of imperial administration and policing. For a while, until around 1808, it must have appeared that the Napoleonic system was working well, introducing efficient government and attracting local notables to its service; and from Belgium to Venice and across much of German Central Europe, landowners, merchants, lawyers and even the great noble families seemed ready to attach themselves to the imperial standard. But already there were serious fissures below the surface, and in the years that followed Napoleonic Europe would be engulfed once more in war and crisis.

At the root of the crisis was Napoleon’s determination to attack Britain’s trading and economic power, which he believed, with some reason, to hold the secret of her military success. The destruction of her commercial wealth and the impact this would have on the City of London would, he argued, force the British government to sue for peace and thereby remove his most implacable opponent. He would claim that this policy was forced upon him by Britain’s dominance at sea after Trafalgar, and the aggressive use that she was making of her naval superiority. In London, the Portland administration showed no desire to treat with the Empire and, even more than its predecessors, seemed set on a fight to the death. The French response was to implement the Continental Blockade, with the aim of cutting off the coasts of Europe from British shipping.⁵ Britain’s response was immediate, and it was openly aggressive – an attack on Denmark in 1807 in which the British fleet bombarded Copenhagen, causing thousands of civilian deaths, and seized the Danish navy before it could fall into Napoleon’s hands. For Britain had good reason to fear the effect of Napoleon’s blockade, at least until such time as she had found new markets for her goods, and she put intense pressure on her allies to break it. Knocking out the Danish navy was necessary, the British felt, if they were to maintain command of the seas and control the coastline of Europe.⁶

Napoleon did not doubt that he would bring Britain to her knees. As a strategy, the Continental System he had initiated was by no means an unpromising idea, nor was it certain in 1806 that the British could undermine it. However, as mentioned earlier, it was harder to enforce than Napoleon had envisaged and was proving deeply unpopular, even in parts of France. Across the Empire the Continental System was resented, and blamed for creating shortages and forcing up prices; it was also seen, quite justly, as a French policy to promote French interests, often at others’ expense. ⁷ In the short term, the great European ports were savagely affected, losing their domestic commerce and becoming increasingly dependent on neutral shipping. In the longer term, merchants devised their own strategies to subvert the policy, and many managed to carry on in trade.⁸ But the policy, as a device designed to undermine Britain, clearly failed. Meanwhile, in ports like Hamburg, the misery it caused and the sense that they were being exploited for the benefit of France left a burning sense of resentment which helped to militarise opinion and persuade a commercial civil society to take up arms against the Empire.⁹

It was Napoleon’s determination to enforce the Continental System that led most immediately to the extension of the war, to force other rulers to implement the Berlin and the later Milan Decrees and to close their ports to the British. This brought heightened tensions in much of Italy and led to the occupation of the Papal States. More importantly it explains Napoleon’s fateful decision to invade Spain. Spain was not a hostile power; indeed, the Spanish monarchy had been counted among the Empire’s military allies, albeit a rather lukewarm and inefficient ally at times. But the Spanish court was a hotbed of cabals and factions, some strongly anti-French, and the King’s chief minister, Manuel Godoy, was plotting to tear up the French alliance and cross the Pyrenees. This treachery alone was enough to persuade Napoleon that the time had come to take firm action, but just as important was the threat that Iberia presented to the Continental System, Lisbon in particular offering a major entry point for British goods on the continent. In October 1807 French forces had crossed the Spanish border and invaded Portugal, the first of three invasions within four years, and in May 1808, at Bayonne, Napoleon bullied the King of Spain, Charles IV, into signing over his rights to the throne and forced his son Ferdinand to abdicate. He then brusquely transferred his own brother, Joseph, from Naples to replace Charles as King of Spain.

At Bayonne, Spain was transformed into yet another imperial satellite, or so it appeared; in the event, the arrival of the French, with their customary demands for heavy taxes and military levies, triggered widespread popular resistance in support of the Bourbons, including a bitter insurrection in Madrid that would be immortalised by the Spanish artist Goya. Provincial risings followed in many parts of the country, pinning back French forces, and by the end of 1808 the British army had liberated Portugal. It was now clear that the French were engaged in a different kind of war from those they had encountered on the plains of Central Europe. Many Spaniards remained deeply loyal to their royal family, now exiled in Brazil, and saw Joseph as a usurper and the puppet of a foreign power. Their acquiescence could not be taken for granted as it could in many of the German electorates, where Napoleon sealed deals with their rulers and ensured that their subjects’ loyalty remained undivided. This would be a war against civilians and partisans as well as regular soldiers, a guerrilla war, in which it was difficult to distinguish soldiers from villagers, fought against an enemy that melted away into forests and mountain passes. It was something new in the imperial era: a people’s war that Napoleon found he could not win, a war that dragged on miserably and drained French manpower and resources.¹⁰

Of course, France did not go into Spain unprepared, and the army that Napoleon sent across the Pyrenees was a powerful military unit of around one hundred and twenty thousand men, certainly the best trained and equipped in Spain at the time, even if it was composed mainly of raw conscripts and second-line troops transferred from war in Italy. In the early stages of the war the army advanced across the north of the country meeting only limited resistance, but Spanish opinion rallied against the French, with the opposition centred in provincial governments and local juntas. Militarily, the Spanish army itself was in poor shape, badly neglected during the years of Godoy’s government, and the major military operations against the French were led by the British under Wellesley, for whom the Peninsula was the principal theatre of operations. Soon, around twenty-three thousand British troops were assembled in Portugal, the base from which the British defended the Portuguese and launched attacks on French positions, with both Spanish and Portuguese troops playing a secondary role alongside them.

Until 1809 it looked as though the French invasion would succeed. They had put down the majority of the insurrections they had encountered in the northern areas of the country and, with the exception of a surprise defeat at Bailén in 1808, they had systematically defeated the Spanish army in open battle. But then the political climate in Europe changed dramatically. In response to the Tyrolean rebellion Austria re-entered the war and looked to form a new coalition against France. Napoleon hurriedly returned to Paris, leaving the day-to-day conduct of the Peninsular War to his marshals while he concentrated on hostilities in the east. And, increasingly, it was not the Spanish army that the French found themselves pitted against, but the guerrillas on the one hand, and the British army on the other. The British, from their base in Portugal, proved more than a match for them on the battlefield, where Wellesley – soon to be created Viscount Wellington – would prove a skilled tactician. But for the average French soldier thrown into the cauldron of the Spanish war it was the unfamiliarity, and often the sheer savagery, of guerrilla warfare that left the deepest mark. Officers’ memoirs and soldiers’ letters agree in expressing a hatred of the Spanish front that was unequalled in their previous experience of warfare. As one French officer recalled, no one could be trusted: ‘Treason was a constant risk, day and night, whether at the other side of the road or at the head of one’s bed. Everyone was to be feared, even those seemingly hospitable people who took you in to their homes.’¹¹

Increasingly, France found herself at war with what must have seemed like the entire population. Joseph failed to win popular support for his government, and the French army became embroiled in an increasingly brutal, ruthless and repressive campaign against Spanish irregulars, the guerrillas who have gone down in nineteenth-century Spanish history as nationalists and freedom fighters. Their motives were almost certainly more mixed, many of them choosing service in the guerrilla less from political idealism than as a means to combat poverty or escape conscription into the official army; and some of those who led the guerrilla bands were little better than robbers and bandits.¹²

Their reputation among the French troops was characterised by tales of torture and cruelty: they ambushed French columns in impenetrable mountain areas, cutting off stragglers and subjecting them to sadistic torture before mutilating and killing them. In parts of southern Spain, notably Andalusia, civilians joined in these acts of cruelty, and there were horrific tales of soldiers being buried alive in sand and left to die in the sun, reports of mutilation and, worse, decapitation, and of men having their genitals cut off and stuffed into their mouths – watched by the entire village – in a final, repugnant act of sexual humiliation.¹³ It is impossible to guess how much these tales were exaggerated or a single incident multiplied many times in the retelling. But like any act of terrorism, it had the effect of destroying French discipline and inviting retaliation; and the French were not slow to oblige, hanging partisans from olive trees and inflicting collective punishment on entire villages suspected of aiding the guerrilla fighters. Like the civil war in the west of France in the 1790s, which was also fought against peasants, the war in Spain sparked hatreds that would be difficult to quench. For a trained professional army, accustomed to fight in battle formation, it was a miserable and often frightening experience and led many of the French soldiers to regard their Spanish opponents as barbaric and uncivilised. This was an opinion that some of Wellington’s troops, their supposed allies against the French, confessed to sharing. Exacerbating the poor relations between the invading army and the local population, the French often equated Spanish backwardness with the excessive piety of a people who had emerged from the eighteenth century untouched by the Enlightenment. They further fuelled the animosity of local people by pillaging and desecrating churches in the regions the army passed through, where, as one historian has remarked, ‘French troops behaved as if they were charged with the de-Christianisation of the province’.¹⁴

If the French were harassed by the guerrillas, they were not, however, defeated by them; the Peninsular War would be won by the British army, aided by the Portuguese and some Spanish divisions, in regular fighting. Three times the French invaded Portugal to try and dislodge the British army, and three times, in 1808, 1809 and 1811, they were driven back. The British army was helped in no small measure by the Portuguese policy of destroying their crops and farmsteads and retreating behind the walls of Lisbon to thwart the French attack. But in Spain itself Wellington’s only significant incursion – an attempt to take Madrid in 1809 – had ended in failure, and the British had retreated to Lisbon, leaving the defence of Spain to the severely mauled Spanish forces. In the years that followed, the French marshals entrusted with the Spanish campaign scored significant military successes, conquering Andalusia and Extremadura in the face of fierce resistance. But the British understood how seriously other war fronts were distracting Napoleon from Spain and how rapidly they were consuming French military resources. It was now decided to increase troop deployment in the Peninsula and to push on into Spain, beginning in the south and with the liberation of Madrid. The tactic worked brilliantly. With the French now fighting major campaigns in Germany and Russia, Wellington had, by 1813, driven their armies out of every Spanish province except Catalonia. By the following year the Peninsula was lost, and Ferdinand VII, who had been held captive in France for most of the war, was able to reclaim his throne.

Napoleon’s strategic approach had come badly unstuck in Spain. He had not secured the acquiescence of the population to Joseph’s kingship, and this left the country a prey to insurrection. And his troops had been unusually vulnerable to attack from the guerrillas. The tactic of seizing territory by means of a rapid manoeuvre, with the aim of engaging and destroying the enemy’s army – a tactic that he had used so deftly elsewhere – failed him here. His forces were held off by guerrilla attacks in the inhospitable mountain country of the interior, or delayed by the need to send out foraging parties if men and horses were to be fed. And with little cooperation from the local people, rations and fodder were often scarce, or had to be wrenched from the peasants’ grasp by threats and violence. In hostile terrain of the sort the French encountered beyond the Pyrenees, the wisdom of a logistical policy that had remained intact since the Revolution, that of exporting the supply problem and living off the land, was less assured, and the army’s march was continually slowed by the need to stock up from local granaries.¹⁵ There were other problems, too. With Napoleon’s attention diverted by other theatres of war, he spent little time in Spain, leaving campaign decisions to his marshals, who certainly showed little of the political understanding that was necessary to win over public opinion. They, too, were shunted around to serve the interests of the wider war, and the abler marshals, like Soult and Marmont, were removed from Spain to serve in what Napoleon regarded as the more sensitive war zones of Central Europe. Those who remained were of only moderate ability, and it is hard not to conclude that Napoleon systematically underestimated the threat he faced in Spain, giving insufficient credit to Wellington as a commander and showing contempt for the guerrillas. He would pay dearly for it, as the Spanish Ulcer pinned down nearly two hundred thousand French and Allied troops, thus restricting his ability to move against Russia and Central Europe.¹⁶

Perhaps Napoleon also failed to understand the resentment that his rapid victories over the great European powers had created, or the extent of their anxiety about his future ambitions. After 1806 both Prussia and Austria, which had both been humiliated in war by the French Emperor, planned major reforms of their military structures, attempting to learn from Napoleon’s tactics and prepare themselves for a future war of revenge. Austria in particular saw a new war as inevitable and encouraged expressions of German nationalism; in 1808 the Archduke Charles established the Landwehr throughout Austria and Bohemia, with compulsory military service for all men between eighteen and forty-five. In Russia, too, Alexander I was biding his time, temporarily focusing on military objectives closer to home, in Finland and Turkey, yet fully aware that Russia would need to fight another war against the Empire.

Britain was equally convinced of the need to defeat Napoleon, but Canning saw little advantage to be gained from spreading Britain’s military resources, preferring to concentrate on the struggle in the Peninsula where he believed that the French were most vulnerable. Besides the Peninsular campaign, Britain deployed her traditional weapon against French hegemony – the Royal Navy – responding to the Continental System by imposing a blockade of the French coastline. This strategy was reasonably effective as it seriously cut the volume of French commercial shipping, though, after 1808, developments elsewhere weakened its impact, from the growth and diversification of British trade to an explosion of smuggling along the Channel coast.¹⁷ Britain had, however, no need for concern, as her stronger and more diversified economy and the support of international finance provided her with a decisive advantage. Britain could simply run up debt, thanks to the money markets and the people feeling secure in the belief that their credit was safe. International merchants, industrialists, landowners, planters, banks and speculators all rushed to buy into London. Napoleon enjoyed no such confidence.¹⁸

In Central Europe and in Italy conflict continued, fired by revolts and popular insurrections against the Empire, while Napoleon’s contemptuous treatment of the Pope – who was seized and imprisoned by French forces in 1809 – outraged Catholic opinion across Europe. There was talk of a new military alliance against France, but in April 1809 Austria broke ranks and, buoyed by public opinion and a new surge of nationalism, resumed the war against Napoleon on her own; of the other powers only Britain signed up to the so-called Fifth Coalition. The Austrian Emperor, Francis II, and the majority of the archdukes believed that, with the French bogged down in Spain, they should seize the moment to re-establish Austrian dominion in southern Germany and Italy. Austria’s army was in better shape than it had been four years earlier, while Napoleon seemed ill-prepared because of his heavy involvement in Spain. He had at his disposal some ninety thousand men of the Army of the Rhine, to which he added around a hundred thousand allied troops, mainly Germans, Dutch and Poles. To plug the gaps, he then called up a further one hundred and forty thousand conscripts, so that by March 1809 he had effectively assembled a new army in Germany, some three hundred thousand strong.¹⁹ He did so in record time, forsaking his customary meticulous preparation; the consequence was a messy campaign that saw Napoleon defeated by the Austrians in a bloody encounter at Aspern-Essling, in which Lannes and a number of generals were killed. Napoleon rallied, defeating the Austrians at Wagram and forcing them to sue for peace at Schönbrunn. But the victory bore none of the mystique of his earlier campaigns. There were enormous casualties on both sides, and the French were too exhausted to destroy the enemy. The Emperor’s military reputation was left tarnished by a campaign chiefly remembered in Germany for the failed insurrection of the Tyrolean patriot Andreas Hofer.

Napoleon’s ambition, however, was not satisfied, and his attention soon turned to Russia. He was disappointed in the fruits of his Russian alliance and was angered by Alexander’s reluctance to implement the Continental System and exclude British trade. When the two emperors had met at Erfurt in 1808, Alexander had looked to the French for concessions over Constantinople, but got none.²⁰ Napoleon was also irritated by the cool reception to the proposal that he might marry a Russian princess after he divorced Josephine. He had, however, other, more political, reasons to distrust his Russian ally: Alexander had not stood by when he saw the French stretched on other fronts, but took advantage of Napoleon’s distraction in Spain to pursue his own traditional foreign policy objectives in Eastern Europe.

Within what Russia saw as her sphere of influence she was defiantly expansionist, going to war with Sweden in the north and with Turkey in the south. From the Swedes, Russia took Finland and Aaland, in the process unleashing a constitutional crisis in Sweden that would overthrow the reigning monarch and make the former Napoleonic marshal, Bernadotte, the Swedish Crown Prince. This Alexander saw as an opportunity rather than a threat. He sought Bernadotte’s friendship and tried to force a schism between him and his former Emperor; and Bernadotte, flattered by the Tsar’s attentions, outraged by Napoleon’s seizure of Swedish Pomerania, and attracted by Alexander’s offer of a free hand against Denmark, agreed to commit Sweden to the Russian cause.²¹ But this was not the only reason for Napoleon’s rupture with Alexander. Even more provocative was Alexander’s decision in 1810 to break formally with the Continental System, and he was soon demanding that Napoleon recognise Russia’s right to trade with neutrals, which undermined the economic strategy of the Empire.²² There were also persistent rumours of an imminent Russian attack on the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a loyal French ally in the region. Russia was posing a threat to the very sinews of the Empire.

For all these reasons, relations between the two emperors cooled rapidly, and both understood that they would have to fight another war. By 1811 Napoleon was drawing up plans to assemble a Grande Armée de la Russie, calling upon his allies across Europe to make contributions of men and materials. His intentions were clear. Alexander and his chief minister, Speranski, were also building up their military strength, initiating army reforms and, crucially, making peace with Turkey in 1812, which released more forces for national defence. Timing was everything. In 1811 the Russians had feared being overrun by Napoleon. A year later, with his army enlarged and reformed by Barclay de Tolly and his strategy in place, Alexander was more confident that he was now in a position to take full advantage of Russia’s vast territorial expanse to repel any French invasion. What he may have underestimated was Napoleon’s capacity to shrug off his losses in the Peninsula and create a massive new army six hundred thousand strong, including a huge cavalry force of eighty thousand.

It was in one sense a remarkable achievement: an army drawn from across occupied Europe, its men forcibly conscripted, the horses compulsorily purchased for army service. In France itself, if the levies were met, it was in the face of glum fatalism and occasional sparks of resistance. But barely half of the soldiers were Frenchmen. The fourth corps was one-third Italian, while the fifth (under Poniatowski) consisted entirely of Poles. Others were drawn from Bavaria, Saxony, Westphalia, Austria and Prussia, and those corps that were predominantly French were augmented by foreign auxiliaries from Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Poland or the Confederation of the Rhine. Even the Imperial Guard had brigades of Portuguese and Hessian cavalry.²³ Yet by the summer of 1812, with Austria and Prussia offering support, this huge army was already marching eastwards and the first units had crossed the Niemen.²⁴ The Russian campaign, which must surely be seen as Napoleon’s most audacious military gamble, was under way.

If it was audacious, it was also foolhardy. Napoleon’s timing in launching a mighty campaign against the huge expanse of the Russian empire could scarcely have been worse. A large contingent of his forces was still cut off in Spain; and in Central Europe there were increasing signs that his German empire was becoming restive. This was a war that would be fought on enemy terrain – the open steppes of Russia – where the French had little feel for the topography and low tolerance for the extreme cold of the Russian winter. These conditions handed a huge advantage to those with local knowledge. Napoleon seems to have recognised all this and yet still felt driven to fight the Russians rather than make the political concessions that peace-keeping would require. One of the Emperor’s closest aides, Armand de Caulaincourt, would recall in his memoirs the warnings he had given to Napoleon at the time. ‘I described the country to him, the climate, the advantage the enemy would have in allowing him to advance and wear himself out by marching without the chance to fight. I also recalled to him the privations and discontent of the troops during his last campaign in Poland.’ But, Caulaincourt reports sadly, ‘to all my argument his reply was that I had turned Russian, and that I understood nothing of great affairs.’ Napoleon did not reconsider; he insisted that he had no choice, and that it was Alexander who wanted war.²⁵ Though this was a self-servingly partisan view, he was not, of course, entirely wrong. Russia was not dedicated to maintaining peace; Alexander, too, had predatory instincts, and his army had been preparing for war since 1810.²⁶

The story of the Moscow Campaign is among the best-known battle histories of all time, thanks in large part to the fictional account presented in Tolstoy’s epic novel of the period, War and Peace. Here Napoleon is shown to hesitate fatally and the French army to blunder and delay till it was thwarted by a combination of the Russian winter and the stout heroism of the Russian people. What Tolstoy downplays is the skill of the Russian commanders and the tactics they adopted to frustrate the invader – tactics well suited to their strengths, to the landscape, and to the logistical shortcomings of the enemy. Napoleon, as always, chose to live off the land, foraging for food in the countries he passed through, with the result that much of Central Europe had been denuded of grain and fodder crops during the passage of the French army, while horses and cattle had been seized to mount the troops and provide food on the hoof. Rather than engage the troops in battle, Russian commanders withdrew before them, retreating hundreds of miles into the interior, thus drawing the French into the empty, barren steppes while destroying food supplies as they went. Napoleon sought a decisive victory in Russia, but his tactical goals were vague and his strategy amounted to little more than hunting down the Russians to defeat them. And the Russians eluded him. Their armies under Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly continually frustrated Napoleon, avoiding engagement on any other than their own terms, while pulling him further and further into the interior. The Russian generals had made their calculations carefully; they accepted that if they were drawn into open battles to defend their territory they had little chance of success against Napoleon’s seasoned troops. Barclay de Tolly had been forbidden by the Tsar to adopt an offensive strategy; his task was to defend Russian territory, and this he did, drawing back, harassing Napoleon’s positions, and goading the Emperor relentlessly, almost taunting the French to pursue him towards Moscow.²⁷

In the first weeks the fighting consisted of little more than irregular skirmishes in a silent countryside of smoking barns and burned-out villages, as the pace of the French advance slackened and the army grew weaker from the effects of heat and fatigue. Then, behind carefully prepared defences, the Russians at last gave battle, first at Smolensk in August, then at Borodino in September. Neither battle was conclusive; certainly neither was a great tactical Napoleonic triumph. The carnage was frightful, the losses shocking on both sides. Each time the Russians withdrew after the battle, and each time Napoleon was lured further into the Russian heartland. Seven days after Borodino, he entered Moscow – but this was a Moscow that had been torched by the Muscovites and now lay in ruins, sacrificed by the Russians in a bid to halt the French advance. As can be seen in a letter to Marie-Louise, Napoleon shared the horror of his men on seeing Moscow burn before his eyes: ‘I had no conception of this city. It had five hundred palaces as beautiful as the Elysée, furnished in French style with incredible luxury, several imperial palaces, barracks, and magnificent hospitals. Everything has disappeared, consumed by fire over the last four days.’²⁸ An integral part of European civilisation had been lost.

But for the French army the worst was far from over. Faced with an empty city, and unable to access fresh supplies, Napoleon now faced the prospect of a long retreat, harried by the Russian army, and with winter closing in. Napoleon fatefully delayed his departure from Moscow until mid-October, and almost at once hit difficulties. He had intended to return by a more clement southerly route, but at Maloyaroslavets, south of Moscow, he was cut off by Kutuzov and forced back north, retracing the same route that he had followed on his advance eastwards – the same burned villages, the same scarred landscape, where any food there may once have been had been already pillaged and consumed, the same harrying from Cossack soldiers. In late October came the first frosts of winter, and by the time the army reached Smolensk in November the thermometer had dipped to minus twenty or thirty degrees centigrade.

France’s troops were weak, sick and hungry. Men died by the roadside, some pleading with their colleagues to end their misery lest they fall into Russian hands; those taken prisoner risked being stripped of their clothes and possessions by the Cossacks and sold to Russian villagers, a fate which they equated with slavery and a slow, cruel death. Many more froze to death in their sleep. They ate what little they could find to keep themselves alive; life became a lottery, survival dependent on desperate makeshift measures. Increasingly, they were reduced to eating their own horses when the animals died of starvation, or simply slaughtered them for food. A French officer wrote from Smolensk: ‘The army has been without bread on its march, but it did have large numbers of horses which had died from exhaustion, and I can assure you that a slab of horse-meat, sliced and cooked in a pan with a little fat or butter makes a very reasonable meal.’²⁹ In these desperate weeks it was probably the only ‘reasonable meal’ they could hope for. The retreat had turned into a human disaster, as disorganised as it was poorly planned. Some sixty thousand men died on the march, and the supplies which Napoleon had ordered for Smolensk proved woefully inadequate. Food intended to feed the army for two weeks was consumed by desperate soldiers in just three days. Any thought the Emperor may have had of wintering in the city had to be quickly abandoned.³⁰

It was little comfort that the Russians, too, had suffered mass desertions and seen men and horses die in their thousands. Kutuzov and Wittgenstein, the general charged with the defence of Saint Petersburg, made no effort to engage the French, contenting themselves with harrying tactics as the ragged, dishevelled army plodded westwards in search of safety. The final hurdle was the Berezina river, which they had to cross to find that safety, and here Napoleon showed some of his old decisive flair, ordering his sappers to build pontoons – temporary bridges that would allow the men to make their way across the bloated river. Despite constant harrying and sniping, most of the remaining troops survived the ordeal, though they still faced the misery of frostbite and near-starvation on their long march home.

Napoleon himself left his troops under Murat’s command and hastily returned to Paris. But there was no way he could disguise the scale of the catastrophe. In the course of the Moscow Campaign he had lost the largest army of the entire war, possibly the largest in European history. The losses were stupefying. Though there are no definitive figures, no records of many of those who perished, it has been estimated that some five hundred and seventy thousand men and two hundred thousand horses did not return. The famed Imperial Guard, once fifty thousand strong, had been reduced to a meagre rump of fifteen hundred men.³¹ And Napoleon’s prestige as a military strategist and battlefield tactician, which more than anything guaranteed the loyalty of his troops, was now seriously damaged, although their continuing affection for him would suggest that there was more to his personal chemistry than military success. What the Moscow Campaign demonstrated was that the remarkable military abilities he had shown as a younger man were fading; he was less supple, more corpulent, and more fatigued by long days in the saddle. His health, too, was beginning to desert him; he complained of problems with his digestion, and it has been suggested that he was suffering from the early stages of duodenal cancer. He could no longer maintain his gruelling work ethic and increasingly depended on his marshals to make key military decisions, despite the fact that they were of variable ability and did not always enjoy his full confidence. The marshals of 1813 did not always display the same qualities as those of the early years. Napoleon had never learned to delegate, and had tended to promote those most loyal to him. His failure to develop the talents of his officers or to reshape the higher command system of the army was a source of weakness that would be increasingly evident in his final campaigns.³²

Russia had serious international consequences too. The scale of Napoleon’s defeat put his earlier conquests in jeopardy when the other European powers realised the full extent of French military weakness. In Spain, the withdrawal of French troops to serve in the east provided the British with an opportunity to mount a major offensive that left the whole of southern Spain, along with border fortresses at Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, in Allied hands. Wellington also won a major battle against the French at Salamanca, which again served to puncture the reputation for invincibility of the imperial armies and gave new hope to both the British and the guerrillas. In 1813 he attacked the northern fortresses of Pamplona and San Sebastian before repelling the French, now under Soult’s command, at the Battle of the Pyrenees. By November Wellington had advanced to the frontier, pushing Soult back on to French soil, and the remaining months of the campaign saw the British lay siege to Bayonne before attacking Bordeaux and Toulouse. The very last action of the war, in April 1814, was a bloody engagement between the British and the garrison at Bayonne.³³ It was a final humiliation for the French. In the far south-west of France the once mighty imperial army had shown that it was now incapable of defending France’s own territory.

If the Russian campaign paved the way for a British victory in Spain, in Central Europe it produced a diplomatic revolution that shattered Napoleon’s alliance system and heralded the end of the Empire itself. The Emperor had piled too much misery and humiliation on the other crowned heads of Europe to escape their vengeance when they believed their moment had arrived. Towards the end of his life, from exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon would look back with regret on the debacle in Russia, but ascribing it to the Russian winter and to misfortune rather than to his own overweening ambition or tactical misjudgements. It was the moment, he decided, when ‘fortune ceased to smile on me’. But there was more than self-justification here; he was expressing genuine regret. He recognised the damage that had been done to his army and military capacity, but also to his reputation. ‘I should have died at Moscow,’ he lamented, with more than a touch of self-pity. ‘Then I would probably have had the reputation of the greatest conqueror of all time.’³⁴ It was the reputation he craved, but which would elude him.

Even during the Russian Campaign, the first tentative steps towards a Sixth Coalition against France were being taken, beginning with an alliance between Britain and Russia in response to Napoleon’s march eastwards. In 1813, this rapidly extended to encompass Prussia, Austria, and other German powers now awakened to the scale of Napoleon’s defeat by the sight of his famished and bedraggled troops retreating across Poland and northern Germany. They were also increasingly pressured by popular feeling at home, which no longer saw France as a fount of justice and citizenship, but as a colonial power intent – seemingly without end – on taxing them, conscripting their sons and requisitioning their goods and livestock. Before the end of the Russian campaign Napoleon’s Prussian allies were abandoning him. Prussian units were deserting in large numbers and fleeing the imperial cause, while some leading Prussian officers, among them the great military strategist Clausewitz, were so appalled by the threat Napoleon posed to their country’s independence that they travelled to Russia to advise the Tsar and steel his resolve to carry on the struggle.³⁵ Some soldiers, cut off in Russia during Napoleon’s retreat, offered their services to the Tsar. In doing so there is no doubt that they were exceeding their orders since, for the Prussians, their alliance with Napoleon served a serious purpose: that of guaranteeing their security. Now, however, with the Grande Armée in tatters and Napoleon’s invincibility punctured, many in Central Europe thought the moment ripe to renege on that alliance and unite against him. As well as Russia and Prussia, who had signed their military alliance as early as February 1813, Britain promised financial contributions to the war effort, and Sweden pledged her support for the Allies. In August, Austria declared war after Metternich convinced himself that Napoleon had no further interest in peace. Frederick William in Prussia did not hesitate to summon up the language of German nationalism to rally opinion against the French, while the Tsar seemed intent on freeing all Europe from Napoleon’s control. A new phase of the Wars, known in German history as the Wars of Liberation, had begun.

Napoleon had had warnings of the strength of European opinion and the dangers of a new German war. His brother Jerome had already advised him in 1811 that a new war in Europe would unleash popular insurrections ‘in all the provinces between the Rhine and the Oder’; while Caulaincourt, a consistent critic of the Russian campaign, continued to discourage further military aggression.³⁶ But Napoleon paid no attention to their pleas, showing within days of his return to Paris that he was intent on raising a new army to replace the men lost in Russia, whatever the cost for a country that was becoming increasingly drained of manpower. He was eager to resume the conflict, eager to gain revenge on those he believed had betrayed him. That was not quite the story he reserved for posterity, however. Had peace been concluded at Moscow, he told Las Cases in 1816, it would have been the last of his military campaigns, a peace that finally would have guaranteed national security. ‘A new horizon, new projects would be undertaken, all devoted to the wellbeing and prosperity of everyone.’³⁷ This can only be dismissed as fantasy. A series of imperial edicts incorporated national guardsmen into the regular army and called up recruits from the 1814 conscription roll, while the French provinces were required to provide twenty thousand men, trained and equipped, for the new campaign. Astonishingly, France responded, despite the enormous cost in men and taxes.

Within months Napoleon again headed an army of more than two hundred thousand men, though it did not bear comparison with the superbly trained forces he had led in previous campaigns. The infantry was raw and lacked battle experience, and even more damagingly the cavalry was critically short of horses of the necessary quality. Most of the one hundred and seventy-five thousand horses that had left for Russia never returned, and the army had no choice but to requisition such horses as it could find, or call on French civilians to volunteer their riding horses for military use. The French countryside could not supply more; besides, many of France’s strongest cavalry horses had traditionally come from northern Germany, whose resources Napoleon could no longer exploit, though even here there was a serious shortage of horses for supply and artillery transport.³⁸ The new campaign was a rushed affair, launched without the careful logistical build-up it required, which was a reflection of Napoleon’s impatience. His adversaries were stronger, too, buttressed by military reforms, supported by at least a modicum of popular opinion, and subsidised by the British treasury to the tune of over ten million pounds. But this was more a victory for the old European aristocracies than for the new forces of nationalism. Napoleon had started out by launching his army into Saxony, scoring early successes over the Russians and Prussians at Lützen and Bautzen in May 1813, and forcing the allies to seek a brief armistice. But his refusal to accept the mediation of the Austrians at Dresden in late June brought Austria into the war, and thereafter the French were heavily outnumbered and increasingly outfought. Despite beating an allied army at Dresden, the French suffered a series of minor defeats in August and September that forced Napoleon to concentrate his forces around Leipzig.

Here, in October, was fought the decisive battle of the war in Central Europe, the Battle of the Nations, where the French took on the combined armies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, their numbers supplemented by several of Napoleon’s former German allies who, sensing which way the wind was blowing and threatened by popular insurrections at home, now threw in their lot with his enemies. Leipzig was a bloodbath, with huge losses on both sides; French deaths were estimated at fifteen thousand, while a further thirty thousand were wounded. It was a decisive defeat for Napoleon, which forced him to retreat to Mainz, then on to French territory. Even the inner empire was now collapsing as he was forced to throw reservists and boys of seventeen – the conscripts of 1815 – into the fray. The northern Italian states had already fallen to the Austrians; now it was the turn of the lands on the west bank of the Rhine, Holland, and then Belgium. By the beginning of 1814 Blücher’s army had crossed the Rhine, leaving the final stages of the war to be fought on home turf, in eastern and northern France.³⁹

The Campagne de France would drag on for three increasingly desperate months before Marmont decided, on 31 March, that further resistance was futile and, seemingly on his own initiative, sued for the armistice that ended the war. The Allies now enjoyed clear military superiority over France, and the French army suffered from both a breakdown in its command structure and a sapping loss of morale. Desertion levels soared. Within a month the marshals were forced to abandon the Rhine and retreat to the Marne, evacuating territory in the hope that they could play for time and regroup.⁴⁰

Predictably, Napoleon did not give up without a fight, winning a number of minor engagements against both the Austrians and the Prussians before cutting off the advance guard of a joint Prussian and Swedish army on the plateau of Craonne in early March. Significant reverses followed, however: first at Laon at the hands of the Prussians and Swedes, then at Arcis-sur-Aube, where he was forced to withdraw by the Austrians and Russians; thereafter, the Allies decided to march directly on Paris and put an end to French resistance. Surprisingly, perhaps, given the disruption he had brought to the European political order, they were still willing to negotiate with Napoleon, offering to maintain him on his throne and leave France with her 1792 borders. This fact alone allowed the Emperor to emerge from his defeat with some dignity. So did the manner of these last weeks of fighting. In Spain and Italy, Croatia and Russia, wherever the French had encountered guerrilla activity, they had denounced it as brigandage and the work of criminals. Yet when France was invaded civilians rose in arms to help their troops, and brigandage was magically transformed into the patriotic courage of partisans, fighting to defend their communities against the invader. Theirs was a hopeless cause, but many men, simple peasants in the main, chose to die for it. That the French did not lie down before the invading armies became something of a badge of honour in the last days of the war. It restored a little lustre to the cause, and helped to stoke the Napoleonic legend of a brave and glorious defeat.⁴¹