1812
Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

ADAM ZAMOYSKI

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Adam Zamoyski 2004

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Maps

Europe in 1811

Russia’s expansion in the west, 1772–1812

The Russian Armies of the West

French and Russian dispositions in June 1812

The French advance

The advance to Vitebsk

The Rudnia offensive and Napoleon’s Smolensk manoeuvre

The battle for Smolensk

Lubino – Valutina Gora

The Russian positions at Borodino

Borodino. The morning attacks

Borodino. The final assault

Kutuzov’s retreat from Moscow

Maloyaroslavets

The retreat

The view from Smolensk

Krasny, 15–16 November

Krasny, 16 November

Krasny, 17–19 November

The closing trap, 21 November

The Berezina manoeuvre

The Berezina crossing

The strategic situation at the beginning of December

Statistical chart showing the outward march and retreat of all the forces which crossed the Niemen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Maps

Select Glossary of Place-Names in the Former Polish Lands of the Russian Empire

Introductory Note

1 Caesar

2 Alexander

3 The Soul of Europe

4 The Drift to War

5 La Grande Armée

6 Confrontation

7 The Rubicon

8 Vilna

9 Courteous War

10 The Heart of Russia

11 Total War

12 Kutuzov

13 The Battle for Moscow

14 Hollow Triumph

15 Stalemate

16 The Distractions of Moscow

17 The March to Nowhere

18 Retreat

19 The Mirage of Smolensk

20 The End of the Army of Moscow

21 The Berezina

22 Empire of Death

23 The End of the Road

24 His Majesty’s Health

25 The Legend

Plates

Notes

Sources

Index

About the Author

Reviews

Praise

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Select Glossary of Place-Names in the Former Polish Lands of the Russian Empire

Babinovitse: Babinowicze (Polish), present-day Babinavicy (Belarus)

Berezina: Berezyna (Polish), present-day Bjarezina (Belarus)

Beshenkoviche: Bieszenkowicze (Polish), present-day

Bešankovicy (Belarus)

Bobr: Bóbr (Polish), present-day Bobr (Belarus)

Borisov: Borysów (Polish), present-day Barysau (Belarus)

Brest: Brzesc (Polish), present-day Brést (Belarus)

Dnieper: Dniepr (Polish), present-day Dnjapro (Belarus)

Drissa: Dryssa (Polish), present-day Verhnjadzvinsk (Belarus)

Dubrovna: Dubrowna (Polish), present-day Dubrovno (Belarus)

Dunaburg: Dzwinsk (Polish), present-day Daugavpils (Latvia)

Glubokoie: Głebokie (Polish), present-day Glybokae (Belarus)

Grodno: Grodno (Polish), Grodna (Belarus)

Kobryn: Kobryn (Polish), present-day Kobryn (Belarus)

Kovno: Kowno (Polish), present-day Kaunas (Lithuania)

Ladi: Lady (Polish), present-day Liadi (Belarus)

Loshnitsa: Łosznica (Polish), present-day Lošnica (Belarus)

Miedniki: Miedniki (Polish), present-day Medininkai (Lithuania)

Minsk: Minsk (Polish), present-day Minsk (Belarus)

Mogilev: Mohylów (Polish), present-day Magilev (Belarus)

Molodechno: Mołodeczno (Polish), present-day Maladzecna (Belarus)

Mstislav: Mscislaw (Polish), present-day Mscislav (Belarus)

Niemen (river): Niemen (Polish), present-day Nemunas (Lithuania)

Nieshviezh: Nieswiez (Polish), present-day Njasviž (Belarus)

Orsha: Orsza (Polish), present-day Orša (Belarus)

Oshmiana: Oszmiana (Polish), present-day Ašmjany (Belarus)

Ostrovno: Ostrowno (Polish), present-day Astrovna (Belarus)

Pleshchenitse: Pleszczenice (Polish), present-day Plescanicy (Belarus)

Polotsk: Polock (Polish), present-day Polack (Belarus)

Ponary: Ponary (Polish), Panarai (Lithuania)

Shvienchiany: Swieciany (Polish), present-day Svencionys (Lithuania)

Smorgonie: Smorgonie (Polish), present-day Smarhon’ (Belarus)

Studzienka: Studzienka (Polish), present-day Studenka (Belarus)

Tolochin: Toloczyn (Polish), present-day Talacyn (Belarus)

Troki: Troki (Polish), Trakai (Lithuania)

Vesselovo: Weselowo (Polish), Veselovo (Belarus)

Vilia: Wilja (Polish), present-day Neris (Lithuania)

Vilna: Wilno (Polish), present-day Vilnius (Lithuania)

Vitebsk: Witebsk (Polish), present-day Vicebsk (Belarus)

Volkovisk: Wołkowyski (Polish), present-day Vavkavysk (Belarus)

Zakrent: Zakret (Polish)

Ziembin: Ziembin (Polish), present-day Zembin (Belarus)

Introductory Note

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 was one of the most dramatic episodes in European history, an event of epic proportions, etched deeply in the popular imagination. I only had to mention the subject of this book for people to come to life, stirred by recollections of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, by the scale of the tragedy, by some anecdote that had lodged itself in their memory, or just a mental image of snowbound Napoleonic tragedy. But the flash of recognition was almost invariably followed by an admission of total ignorance of what had actually happened and why. The reasons for this curious discrepancy are fascinating in themselves.

No other campaign in history has been subjected to such overtly political uses. From the very beginning, studies of the subject have been driven by a compulsion to interpret and justify that admits of no objectivity, while their sheer volume – over five thousand books and twice as many articles published in Russia alone in the hundred years after 1812 – has helped only to cloud the issue.¹

This was to be expected, considering what was involved. There were great reputations at stake: those of Napoleon, of Tsar Alexander, of Field Marshal Kutuzov, to name only the obvious ones. There was also a need to make sense of the whole business, for this war, unprecedented in the history of Europe in both scale and horror, was not easy to assess in military terms. The action was often confused. Both sides claimed victory in every engagement. And if the French had lost the campaign, the Russians could hardly be said to have won it. At the same time, people on both sides had behaved with a savagery that neither nation wished to contemplate.

In France, early attempts at a balanced study were complicated by political factors: the regime which replaced Napoleon’s soon after the events required anything to do with him to be represented in the most negative terms. Censorship also played a part in Russian assessments, for more complex reasons. The events of 1812 and their aftermath raised questions about the very nature of the Russian state and its people, and, as the historian Orlando Figes nicely puts it, ‘the nine-teenth-century quest for Russian nationhood began in the ranks of 1812’.²

This quest was innately subversive of the Tsarist system, and led in the first place to the Decembrist Rising of 1825. It was pursued, along divergent paths, by those who sought a more modern Russia integrated into the mainstream of Western civilisation, and by the slavophiles, who rejected the West and all it stood for, seeking instead a truly ‘Russian’ way. The events of 1812 were used by both sides to back up their arguments, rapidly attaining mythological status and becoming increasingly distorted as a result. This dualism was only complicated with the advent of Marxism.

The first French historians to write about 1812 were either hostile to Napoleon or motivated by a desire to ingratiate themselves with the post-Napoleonic regime, and therefore laid all blame at the feet of the demon Bonaparte. But most French writers on the events of the campaign, whether they were participants or later academic historians, have followed a more measured, and broadly similar, path. While often displaying a degree of embarrassment over such an apparently imperialist venture and the misery France inflicted on the Russian people, not to mention her own and her allies’ soldiers, they have tried to redeem Napoleon’s reputation and the honour of French arms by a generous representation of the doughtiness of the Russian soldier and of the implacable nature of the Russian climate. They have also clutched at the straw of comfort held out by the Romantic imagination of the 1820s and 1830s, which turned the picture of sordid disaster into a vision of greatness in adversity.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, distance as well as a growing cordiality between the two nations made it possible for French historians to approach the subject more objectively. The centenary, coming as it did just before the Great War and at a time when the two nations were allies, saw cooperation between the historical commissions of the French and Russian staffs, and led to the publication of much primary source-material. But French historians continue to show a certain reluctance to deal with the war, and have come up with no satisfactory general study of it.

The first Russian account of the events, by a colonel on the general staff, was produced with such alacrity that it was published, in English, as far afield as Boston within a year. It was undoubtedly a piece of propaganda, intended to pave the way for Russia’s future role in the affairs of Europe, but it did reflect the perceptions of large sections of Russian society. It depicted Alexander as the catalyst who rallied a gallant patriotic nobility and a loyal peasantry eager to defend Faith, Tsar and Fatherland.

Dmitri Petrovich Buturlin, himself a participant, who wrote the first detailed account of the war, added a couple of new elements. One was the idea of Russia as the innocent victim of aggression. The other was the image of Kutuzov as the quintessential Russian hero, simple but wise. A.I. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky, whose four-volume history came out in 1839, depicted Alexander as a moral beacon awakening the spiritual as well as the physical forces of the Russian people in defence of their fatherland. It was he who first called it the ‘Otechestvennaia Voina’, the ‘Patriotic War’. Underlying much of their writing was the view that it was the Almighty, acting through the Tsar and the Russian people, who had confounded the evil one. This being so, French assertions that they had been defeated by the Russian winter rather than the Russians themselves were dismissed as irrelevant.

It was against the backdrop of this fundamentally spiritual interpretation that in the summer of 1863 Tolstoy began work on his novel War and Peace, in which he was to add his own highly personal gloss on the events.

Tolstoy had originally been enthusiastic about the programme of liberal reforms launched by Tsar Alexander II when he came to the throne in 1855. He had even tried to pre-empt them by offering the serfs on his estate a deal that would free them from their obligations and give them the land they worked. But the serfs were suspicious and rejected his offer. Instead of turning Tolstoy against the peasants, this helped to put him off liberalism in general. He embraced the slavophile view that the liberals would destroy Russia by imposing foreign ideas and institutions alien to the Russian character. He also reacted against the wave of self-abasement among intellectuals who had turned the recent defeat in the Crimean War into a paradigm for Russian backwardness. In his depiction of the events of 1812, Tolstoy traces a metaphor of the penetration of Russia by foreign influences: Napoleon is the harbinger of an ‘alien’ order, which some of Alexander’s ‘contaminated’ entourage favour. But it is rejected by the Russian nation. Yet this is no glorification of the Russian common people – the hero of Tolstoy’s novel is a deferential peasantry led by the minor nobility who, unlike the Frenchified aristocrats, have remained true to Russian values. But Tolstoy’s work is not all fantasy, and he did his homework.

The first sentence of War and Peace expresses outrage at French doings in Genoa and Lucca in 1799, while on the next page one of the protagonists affirms that Russia will be ‘the saviour of Europe’. With this opening, Tolstoy firmly dismissed the notion of the French invasion of 1812 as an act of gratuitous aggression: to him it was clear that it was merely part of a prolonged struggle between France and Russia for hegemony over Europe. Yet it was to be some time before a Russian historian would mention this.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the publication of a great many diaries, recollections and letters of participants in the events; of staff documents giving troop numbers and dispositions; and of official documents, orders and letters. It also brought forth a number of very useful studies of specific aspects of the campaign, of individual battles, and of social reactions to the events.

The next generation of Russian historians to deal with the subject in any depth were influenced by the works of Marx and Engels and took a more pragmatic view. It is true that Aleksandr Nikolaevich Popov, writing in 1912, idealised Kutuzov and ‘Russian society’, but his more down-to-earth contemporary Vladimir Ivanovich Kharkievich admitted that Kutuzov had faults, and rejected the image of Russia as innocent victim. Konstantin Adamovich Voensky took a similar line, and related Russian military failures in 1812 to the shortcomings of the country’s constitution and social structure. A number of other historians produced studies of specific aspects, in which they turned up evidence of a less glorious response by Russian society than had been represented hitherto, and confirmed that logistics and climate had been largely responsible for the outcome.

Perhaps the most forceful of this generation of historians, and the one who reacted most vigorously against the old pieties, was Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovsky. According to him, the Tsarist state was bent on extending Russian hegemony beyond its borders in order to guarantee the survival of an essentially feudal system at home. He went so far as to say that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was ‘an act of necessary self-defence’ on his part. He was deeply critical of Kutuzov and other Russian generals. He stressed the role of the weather in the defeat of the French, and belittled the role of ‘Russian society’, questioning the myth of the patriotic peasants. Those who did resist the invader did so, according to him, in defence of their chickens and geese, not their fatherland.³

This view was endorsed by Lenin, and held sway during the first two decades of Soviet rule. The war was not referred to as the ‘Patriotic War’ during this period, as it concerned only the respective economic interests of the Russian imperialists and the French bourgeoisie. The Russian army had made a mess of defending the country precisely because it was commanded by nobles, and the government’s fear of arming the peasants prevented the development of a guerrilla war against the French.

At Stalin’s prompting, a ruling of the Central Committee on 16 May 1934 recommended a fresh approach to the study of history, aimed at engaging the masses. How that would affect the representation of the events of 1812 was not immediately clear. Writing in 1936, the historian Evgenii Viktorovich Tarle affirmed that the Russian people had played no part in the war, dismissing evidence of peasant guerrilla activity as no more than the opportunistic murder of French stragglers. The following year he published an account of the war in which he said almost exactly the opposite, representing it as the triumph of the patriotic Russian people. After a certain amount of hair-splitting argument couched in the language of Marxist dialectics, it was once again dubbed the ‘Patriotic War’, but only in inverted commas. Tarle also admitted that the weather might have had something to do with the French débâcle, but was later accused of retailing the ideas of what one writer termed ‘the Trotskyite-Bukharinite counter-revolutionary enemies of the people’ and ‘the lying inventions of foreign authors’ – even the account by the great military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, himself a participant in the campaign on the Russian side, was dismissed as ‘lies’.

Tarle adopted a traditional spiritual view of the events, representing the French victory at Borodino as ‘a moral victory’ for the Russians and the war itself as the crucible of all that was best in Russian history over the next decades. He also built up the image of Kutuzov, as a kind of metaphysical emanation of the Russian people, their true leader in every sense.⁴ But it was his colleague P.A. Zhilin who made the obvious connection between Kutuzov and Stalin as saviours of the fatherland.

Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941 and the titanic struggle that followed added substance to this connection, and the events of 1812 provided a wonderful source of propaganda material. The ‘Patriotic War of 1812’, as it would henceforth be known, could be viewed as a dress rehearsal for what became the ‘Great Patriotic War’. Tarle’s book was translated and published widely in the West, in order to help make the point that a peace-loving Russia had been attacked for no reason at all – deftly burying the embarrassing fact that, just as in 1812, Russia had been a complicitous ally of the other side up to the very outbreak of hostilities – but that her people and the great leaders that sprung from their bosom were invincible.

For a brief period following Stalin’s death in 1953 an element of objectivity entered Russian historiography, and a number of solid studies on the economic, political and diplomatic background, the military preparations and other aspects saw the light of day. But the advent of Brezhnev put the lid on this. Historians such as L.G. Beskrovny plugged the old patriotic nostrums and shamelessly repeated obvious falsehoods. French numbers were regularly inflated and those of the Russian forces scaled down. The persona of Kutuzov took on a life of its own. The luxury-loving prince was transformed into a kind of peasant leader who was in some mysterious way ‘in conflict’ with the Tsar and the system. Every blunder he made was represented as a piece of cunning, the actual effect of which was not defined, and every failure to act as a brilliant strategic ploy.

This kind of interpretation went unchallenged until the late 1980s, when a new generation of historians, such as A.A. Abalikhin, V.G. Sirotkin, S.V. Shvedov, Oleg Sokolov and N.A. Troitsky brought a freshness and honesty to the subject never known before. But it will probably be some time before a satisfying synthesis emerges from this.

The handful of Western historians who have written on the subject have made modest use of available Russian primary sources, relying instead on the works of their Russian colleagues. Not surprisingly, they have accepted the facts and figures they found in these. More surprisingly, most have also accepted some of the interpretations and ingested, albeit unconsciously, a dose of their emotional and political flavour.

Virtually all the extant documentary material concerning the political and military events covered by this book has been published and available for decades. It would be interesting, and possibly worthwhile, to investigate further areas such as the question of how the episode impacted on the structures of the Russian state, its economy and attitudes to authority. It might also be profitable to go back to the manuscript originals of some of the printed sources, particularly where these have been translated from French into Russian. But it is highly improbable that new documents of any significance will come to light, or that further detailed research in any ancillary field will throw up fresh evidence on the causes of the war, its conduct, the numbers involved, the extent of the losses or any of the other vital aspects.

The ground has therefore been thoroughly prepared, and now that the nationalist passions and the political imperatives have ebbed away, the task of writing about the events of 1812 should present a less daunting prospect. But it remains a formidable one. For this was not just any war. It was the climax in a protracted struggle between Napoleon and Alexander, between France and Russia, and between the ideological inheritance of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution on the one hand, and a reactionary combination of Christianity, monarchism and traditionalism on the other. It involved the whole of Europe, and its repercussions were therefore widespread as well as long-lasting. Its scale was unprecedented, and raised a number of issues hitherto unknown in military history. It was also the first modern war, in that the entire Russian people were forced by their own government to participate actively, and popular feeling became an element of military strategy. It is impossible to isolate any of these elements from the others, as the conflict does not make sense without at least an awareness of the depth and breadth of the issues involved.

To do justice to such a subject would take many years, and a book at least twice the length of this one, which is not intended to be in any way a definitive work. It is not a full record of the military operations, which involved dozens of engagements and ranged over a vast area. Nor does it aspire to be any more than an outline of the diplomatic relationship between France and Russia. My principal aim in writing this book has been to tell an extraordinary story, of which everyone has heard but very few have any real knowledge. I have attempted to place it in its wider context and to touch on its deeper significance. Above all, I have tried to convey what these events meant for those concerned, at every level – for this is par excellence a human story, of hubris and nemesis, of triumph and catastrophe, of glory and squalor, of joy and suffering.

I have therefore drawn heavily on the first-hand accounts of participants, of which there are a remarkable number. There is much variation between them, in terms of both accuracy and literary quality: some are original letters or diaries; others are memoirs written from diaries; memoirs written from memory, some of them composed within a year or two, others decades later; accounts based on personal experience and documentation; and regular histories written by participants, some of whom were in key positions, others only witnesses. I have taken these factors into account in making use of them, and I have avoided basing myself too heavily on, for instance, the much-quoted Ségur, who was not a central figure but who wrote as though he had been, and subjected his writing to exalted literary pretensions; I also avoid his main critic, Gourgaud, who was himself not as well placed to know what was going on as he suggests, and who subjects his account to uncritical worship of Napoleon.

I have been driven by the same desire to reproduce the human experience in my choice of illustrations, and in this I have been aided by another unique aspect of this war. This was the only campaign before the age of photography to have been graphically recorded by a number of participants, some of whom were distinguished artists. Not until the American Civil War, half a century later, would the realities of war be conveyed through such vivid insights. In view of this, I decided to dispense with the array of pompous and largely meaningless battle scenes that usually adorn this kind of book, and to concentrate on providing something more akin to a photographic record of life on campaign. Apart from the small number of portraits of the main protagonists, almost every image was drawn or painted by a participant, either on the spot or from memory, and the few exceptions to this were executed under the direction of participants.

Where I feel a quotation or a statement of fact needs it, I have given references to other first-hand accounts which support it. But in order to keep down the quantity of reference numbers on the page, I have often lumped together several quotations or a series of linked facts contained in a single paragraph under the same one. The translations are all mine, except in cases where the book was only available to me in another’s translation, and in the case of the translations from German, in which I was helped by others.

There are several methods of transliterating Russian words and names, none of which is, to my mind, completely satisfactory. This is mainly because they attempt consistency where none is possible, and also because every new scheme necessarily outlaws words based on previous methods that have already become familiar. I have therefore followed my own instinct and what I believe to be common sense. I realise that specialists may find this irritating.

I have transliterated Russian names as they are pronounced, preferring Yermolov to Ermolov, or as they have been known in the West for decades, sticking to Tolstoy rather than Tol’stoi, Galitzine rather than Golitsuin. I have stuck to the -sky ending for Russian names as opposed to the -skii, for the same reasons. But I have observed the universally accepted new spelling in the bibliography, since that is how the names appear in (most) library catalogues. In the cases of non-Russians serving in the Russian army, I use the original spelling, as I see no reason to turn a Wittgenstein into Vitgenshtain, a Czaplic into a Chaplits, or a Clausewitz into a Klausevits, except in the cases of Baggovut (Swedish Baggehuffwudt) and Miloradovich (Serbian Miloradovic), for purely pragmatic reasons.

Perhaps the most difficult question is that of place names. The action of the campaign unfolds over territories which had recently passed from one sovereignty to another, and sometimes back again, and which are now in entirely new countries. I have used German names for what was then East Prussia. I have used Russian names for Russia beyond Smolensk (except for St Petersburg and Moscow). I have used Polish forms and spellings for places in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and transliterated Polish names on the territory which had been Polish in the decades before 1812. I have done this because the French used these forms in their accounts (albeit with curious spellings). The Russian forms of these names hardly differ from the Polish, while the present-day Lithuanian or Belarussian ones would be confusing (I have enclosed a brief glossary of these names with their present-day forms, for purposes of identification). I have made an exception of the capital of Lithuania: the French mostly spelt it Wilna, the Russians called it Vilna, and the Polish Wilno would seem out of place, particularly if transliterated into Vilno – so I have opted for Vilna. For similar reasons, I have preferred the Russian Glubokoie to the Polish Głebokie, which would be transliterated as Gwembokie.

All dates are given in the new style, according to the Gregorian calendar.

I should like to thank Professors Isabel de Madariaga, Janet Hartley, Lindsey Hughes, Dominic Lieven and Alexander Martin for their advice and assistance. My thanks must also go to Mirja Kraemer and Andrea Ostermeier for reading a number of German texts for me, and to Galina Babkova for the speed and efficiency with which she ferreted out, copied and despatched to me whatever I required from libraries in Russia. I am grateful to Dr Dobrosława Platt, Laurence Kelly, Artemis Beevor and Jean de Fouquières for their help in tracking down illustrations. Shervie Price was, once again, a long-suffering reader and an invaluable critic of my typescript, and Robert Lacey was an exceptionally meticulous and sensitive editor. Trevor Mason deserves a medal for his patience with me over the maps and the diagram.

I should also like to thank Ambassador Stefan Meller for his assistance during my trip to the theatre of operations, and Mikolaj Radziwill for being such a good driver on the roads of Russia, Lithuania and Belarus, and companion in Vilnius, Orša and Smolensk, on the battlefield of Borodino and the banks of the Berezina.

Above all I want to thank my wife Emma, for everything.

1
Caesar

As the first cannon shot thundered out from the guns drawn up before the Invalides on the morning of 20 March 1811, an extraordinary silence fell over Paris. Wagons and carriages came to a standstill, pedestrians halted, people appeared at their windows, schoolboys looked up from their books. Everyone began to count as the discharges succeeded each other at a measured pace. In the stables of the École Militaire, the cavalry of the Guard were grooming their horses. ‘Suddenly, the sound of a gun from the Invalides stopped every arm, suspended every movement; brushes and curry-combs hung in the air,’ according to one young Chasseur. ‘In the midst of this multitude of men and horses, you could have heard a mouse stir.’¹

As news had spread on the previous evening that the Empress had gone into labour, many patrons had given their workmen the next day off, and these swarmed expectantly in the streets around the Tuileries palace. The Paris Bourse had ceased dealing that morning, and the only financial transactions taking place were bets on the sex of the child. But the excitement was just as great among those who had nothing riding on it.

‘It would be difficult to imagine with what anxiety the first cannon shots were counted,’ recalled one witness: everyone knew that twenty-one would announce the birth of a girl, and one hundred that of a boy. ‘A profound silence reigned until the twenty-first, but when the twenty-second roared forth, there was an explosion of congratulation and cheering which rang out simultaneously in every part of Paris.’² People went wild, embracing total strangers and shouting ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Others danced in the streets as the remaining seventy-eight shots thundered out in a rolling barrage.

‘Paris had never, even on the greatest holidays, offered a picture of more general joyfulness,’ noted another witness; ‘there was celebration everywhere.’³ A balloon went up, bearing into the sky the celebrated aeronaut Madame Blanchard with thousands of printed notices of the happy tidings, which she scattered across the countryside. Messengers galloped off in all directions with the news. That evening there were fireworks and the capital was illuminated, with candles in the windows of even humble mansard rooms. Theatres staged special performances, printmakers began churning out soppy images of the imperial infant borne on celestial clouds with crowns and laurels hovering over him, and poets set to work on commemorative odes. ‘But what one will never be able to convey adequately,’ wrote the young Comte de Ségur, ‘is the wild intoxication of that surge of public rejoicing as the twenty-second cannon shot announced to France that there had been born a direct heir to Napoleon and to the Empire!’⁴

The twenty-year-old Empress Marie-Louise had felt the first pains at around seven o’clock on the previous evening. Dr Antoine Dubois, Premier Accoucheur of the Empire, was on hand. He was soon joined by Dr Corvisart, the First Physician, Dr Bourdier, the Physician-in-Ordinary to the Empress, and Napoleon’s surgeon Dr Yvan. The Emperor, his mother and sisters, and the various ladies of the Empress’s household brought to twenty-two the number of those attending her, either in her bedroom or in the next chamber.

Beyond that, the salons of the Tuileries were filled with some two hundred officials and dignitaries, who had been summoned at the first signs of the Empress going into labour and stood about awkwardly in full court dress. Every now and then, one of the ladies-in-waiting on duty would come out and give them a progress report. As the evening wore on, small tables were brought in and they were served a light supper of chicken with rice washed down with Chambertin. But the banter was subdued: things were clearly not proceeding smoothly in the Empress’s bedroom. At about five in the morning the Grand Marshal of the Empire came out and informed them that the pains had ceased and the Empress had fallen asleep. He told them they could go home, but must remain on call. Some went, but many of the exhausted courtiers stretched out on benches or rolled up carpets into makeshift mattresses and lay down on them in all their finery to snatch some sleep.

Napoleon had been with Marie-Louise throughout, talking to her and comforting her with all the solicitude of a nervous father-to-be. When she fell asleep Dubois told him he could go and take some rest. Napoleon could do without sleep. His preferred means of relaxation was to lie in a very hot bath, which he believed in as a cure for most of his ailments, be it a cold or constipation, from which he suffered regularly. And that is what he did now.

He had not been luxuriating in the hot water for long when Dubois came running up the concealed stairs that led from his apartment to the Empress’s bedroom. The labour pains had started again, and the doctor was anxious, as the baby was presenting itself awkwardly. Napoleon asked him if there was any danger. Dubois nodded, expressing dismay that such a complication had occurred with the Empress. ‘Forget that she is Empress, and treat her as you would the wife of any shopkeeper in the rue Saint Denis,’ Napoleon interrupted him, adding: ‘And whatever happens, save the mother!’ He got out of his bath, dressed hastily and went down to join the doctors at his wife’s bedside.

The Empress screamed when she saw Dubois take out his forceps, but Napoleon calmed her, holding her hand and stroking her while the Comtesse de Montesquiou and Dr Corvisart held her still. The baby emerged feet first, and Dubois had a job getting the head clear. After much pulling and easing, at around six in the morning he delivered it. The baby appeared lifeless, and Dubois laid it aside as he and the others attended to the mother, who seemed to be in danger. But Corvisart picked up the child and began to rub him briskly. After about seven minutes of this he came to life, and the doctor handed him to the Comtesse de Montesquiou, with the comment that it was a boy. Napoleon, who could see that Marie-Louise was by now out of danger, took the baby in his arms and, bursting into the adjoining room where all the senior officers of the Empire were gathered, expecting the worst, exclaimed: ‘Behold the King of Rome! Two hundred cannon shots!’

But when his sister-in-law, Queen Hortense, came up to congratulate him a moment later, he replied: ‘I cannot feel the happiness – the poor woman has suffered so much!’⁵ He meant it. They had been married for just one year, and the arranged match had quickly turned into an almost cloyingly loving relationship. One of thirteen children of the Austrian Emperor Francis II, Marie-Louise had been her father’s favourite, his ‘adorable poupée’. She had been brought up to hate Napoleon and to refer to him as ‘the Corsican’, ‘the usurper’, ‘Attila’ or ‘the Antichrist’. But, when diplomacy demanded it, she bowed to her father’s will. And once she had tasted the pleasures of the marital bed there was no restraining her enthusiasm for the Emperor. Napoleon, who had been thrilled at the idea of having in his bed ‘a daughter of the Caesars’, as he referred to her – and one half his age – quickly became moonstruck, and their marriage turned into a middle-class idyll.

That evening, as the capital celebrated, the child was baptised according to the age-old rites of the French royal family. The next day Napoleon held a grand audience, seated on the imperial throne, to receive formal congratulations. The entire court then accompanied him to see the infant, who lay in a superb silver-gilt cradle presented by the city of Paris. It had been designed by the artist Pierre Prudhon and represented a figure of Glory holding a triumphal crown and a young eagle ascending towards the bright star which symbolised Napoleon. The chancellors of the Légion d’Honneur and of the Iron Cross laid the insignia of both orders on cushions beside the sleeping child. The painter François Gérard set to work on a portrait.

Over the next days homage of every kind poured in, and cities throughout the country joined Paris in celebrating as the news reached them, each in turn sending a delegation to deliver its congratulations. The same process was repeated as the news rippled out to the more far-flung parts of the Empire and to other countries. Such expressions were to be expected in the circumstances. But there was a great deal more to the celebrations and congratulations than just loyal humbug – to most Frenchmen the birth of a boy heralded a period of peace and stability, and much more besides.

France had been at war virtually without interruption for nineteen years. She had been attacked, in 1792, by a coalition of Prussia and Austria. Over the next years these were joined by Britain, Spain, Russia and other lesser powers, all of them bent on defeating revolutionary France and restoring the Bourbon dynasty. It was not a fight over territory. It was an ideological struggle over the future order of Europe. Atrocities aside, revolutionary France had brought into public life all the ideals of the Enlightenment, and her very existence was seen by the monarchical powers as a threat to theirs. She had made ample use of this weapon in order to defend herself, by exporting revolution and subverting provinces belonging to her enemies. She had gradually turned from victim to aggressor, but she was nevertheless fighting for survival. Revolutionary France could not secure a lasting peace, as virtually every other power in Europe would not reconcile itself to the survival of the republican regime, and felt a necessity to destroy it.

General Napoleon Bonaparte’s seizure of power in Paris in November 1799 should have broken this vicious circle of fear and aggression. He reined in the demagogues, closed the Pandora’s box opened by the revolution and tidied up the mess. Being a child of the Enlightenment as well as a despot, he mobilised the energies of France and harnessed them to the task of building a well-ordered, prosperous and powerful state, the ‘état policé’ of which the philosophes of the Enlightenment had dreamed. He was following in the footsteps of rulers such as Frederick the Great of Prussia, Catherine the Great of Russia and Joseph II of Austria, who had introduced social and economic reforms while strengthening the framework of the state, and who were universally admired for this. But to their successors, Bonaparte was but a grotesque upstart, a malignant outgrowth of the evil revolution.

By 1801, following a series of resounding victories, Bonaparte was able to force peace on all the powers of the European continent. France’s security was guaranteed by expanded frontiers and the creation of a series of theoretically autonomous republics in northern Italy, Switzerland and Holland which were in fact French provinces. In March 1802 Bonaparte even concluded the Peace of Amiens with Britain. But this was not likely to last.

To Britain, France’s hegemony in Europe was intolerable. To France, Britain’s superiority at sea was a constant threat. French designs on Malta, Egypt and India were a hazy but nevertheless haunting nightmare to Britain, while Britain’s ability to use allies on the European mainland to make war by proxy was a source of continuing anxiety to France. Hostilities between the two resumed in May 1803.

During the following year Bonaparte himself revived opposition to his rule throughout Europe. In March 1804 he ordered the young Bourbon Duc d’Enghien to be seized at Ettenheim in the state of Baden just outside the borders of France and brought to Paris. He was convinced that the Duke was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him and restore the monarchy, and had him executed after a summary judgement. This violation of every accepted law and principle horrified Europe. It confirmed the opinion of those who saw Bonaparte as the devil incarnate, and reinforced the notion of a fight to the death between the sanctified order as embodied in the ancien régime and the forces of evil in the form of revolutionary France.

France was in fact no longer exporting revolution. She had become little more than a vehicle for the ambitions of Bonaparte, who a couple of months later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon I. What exactly these ambitions consisted of has perplexed and divided historians over two centuries, for Napoleon was never consistent in anything. His utterances can at best be taken to illustrate some of his thoughts and feelings, while his actions were often erratic and contradictory. He was intelligent and pragmatic, yet he allowed himself to indulge the most far-fetched fantasies; he was the ultimate opportunist, yet he could get caught up in his own dogma; he was a great cynic, yet he pursued romantic dreams. There was no grand idea or master project.

Napoleon was in large measure driven by nothing more complicated than the lust for power and domination over others. Attendant on this was an often childish set of reactions at being thwarted in any way. Having no sense of justice and no respect for the wishes of others, he took any objection to his actions as gratuitous rebellion, and responded with disproportionate vehemence. Instead of ignoring a minor setback or turning an obstacle, he would unleash bluster and force, which often involved him in unnecessarily costly head-on collisions.

He was also driven by a curious sense of destiny, a self-invented notion of a kind often affected by young men brought up on Romantic literature (his favourite reading had been the poems of Ossian and The Sorrows of Young Werther), which he came to believe in himself. ‘Is there a man blind enough not to see,’ he had declared during his Egyptian campaign in 1798, ‘that destiny directs all my operations?’⁶ Napoleon was also a great admirer of the plays of Corneille, and there is reason to believe he saw himself as acting out some great tragedy in their mould.

This sense of living out a destiny was to lead him repeatedly into acting against his better judgement in pursuit of nebulous dreams. His triumphs in Italy, followed by his spectacular victories at Austerlitz and Jena, only confirmed him in this fantasy, which communicated itself to his troops. ‘The intoxication of our joyful and proud exaltation was at its height,’ wrote one young officer after Napoleon’s triumph over Prussia. ‘One of our army corps proclaimed itself "the Tenth Legion of the New Caesar"!, another demanded that Napoleon should henceforth be known as "The Emperor of the West!"’⁷

But Napoleon was also the ruler of France. As such, he was inevitably driven by the same political, cultural and psychological motors which had dictated the policies of French rulers of the past such as François I and Louis XIV, who had striven for French hegemony over Europe in order to achieve lasting security.

France had always sought to impose a balance in central Europe that would prevent a major mobilisation of German forces against her, and she had achieved this by the Treaty of Westphalia back in 1648, in which she and Austria, jointly with a number of other powers, had put in place a whole series of checks and balances. This system had been undone in the second half of the eighteenth century by the rise of Prussian power and the emergence of Russia as a player in European affairs, manifested most critically in huge shifts of power in Germany, the partition and disappearance of Poland, and the race for control of the Balkans. In view of this, it was quite natural that Napoleon should seek to reassert French interests, and in doing so he was pursuing a traditional vision of a ‘French’ Europe as much as his own personal ambition. It was a vision that appeared to have history on its side.

In the eighteenth century France had become the cynosure of Europe in terms of culture and political thought. Her paramountcy in these spheres was consolidated by the revolution, whose fundamental message and ideas were admired and accepted by élites all over the Continent. The French political and military classes saw themselves as ‘la Grande Nation’, the first nation in Europe to have emancipated itself, and considered themselves to be armed with a mission to carry the benefits of what they had achieved to other peoples. This was the age of neo-Classicism, and they began to see France as the next Rome, the fount from which this new ideological civilisation radiated, the capital of the modern world.

Napoleon was not immune to the enthusiasms of his age. As befitted the most powerful individual since the days of the Caesars, he issued decrees ordering the cleaning of the Tiber and the Forum Romanum, and the preservation of its monuments. Shortly after the birth of the King of Rome, he set in motion plans for an imperial palace on the Capitol. But he also intended to build one for the Pope in Paris, arguing that this was where he should move, just as St Peter had moved to Rome from the Holy Land.⁸

As early as the mid-1790s, the French revolutionary armies began to bring home to Paris not only valuables and works of art, but also libraries, scientific instruments and entire archives. This epic bout of looting was not the product of mere greed. The idea was that everything most useful to the development of civilisation should be concentrated at the heart of the Empire, and not allowed to benefit only a few in outlying provinces. ‘The French Empire shall become the metropolis of all other sovereignties,’ Napoleon once said to a friend. ‘I want to force every king in Europe to build a large palace for his use in Paris. When an Emperor of the French is crowned, these kings shall come to Paris, and they shall adorn that imposing ceremony with their presence and salute it with their homage.’ It was not so much a question of France ‘über alles’. ‘European society needs a regeneration,’ Napoleon asserted in conversation in 1805. ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the other powers, with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is the best placed for that purpose.’ He was, like many a tyrant, utopian in his ambitions. ‘We must have a European legal system, a European appeal court, a common currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws,’ Napoleon once said to Joseph Fouché. ‘I must make of all the peoples of Europe one people, and of Paris the capital of the world.’⁹

France’s claim to the mantle of Imperial Rome seemed to gain validation when, in 1810, Napoleon married Marie-Louise, daughter of the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. His father-in-law, now Emperor of Austria under the name of Francis I, appeared to acquiesce in this transference of power. When Napoleon produced an heir, Francis ceded to the child the title of King of Rome, which had traditionally been that of the son of the Holy Roman Emperor.

France’s position on the Continent was by then one of unprecedented power; her political culture and the new system were imposed over vast areas of Europe. But to the average Frenchman this was of less interest than the benefits the past decade had brought him at home. All the most positive gains of the revolution had been salvaged, but order, prosperity and stability had been guaranteed, and a general amnesia if not amnesty had allowed those divided by the struggles of the revolution to put the more unpleasant aspects of the past behind them. Whether this new order would survive depended not only on Napoleon’s ability to defend it, but on his ability to guarantee its continuance by cancelling out the possibility of a Bourbon restoration. A return of the Bourbons would mean not only a return to the ancien régime; it would also raise the prospect of much score-settling.

In this respect, the birth of the King of Rome was crucial. Most of Napoleon’s subjects believed that their ruler, who had recently turned forty, would henceforth be inclined to spend more time with his family than with his armies, that Napoleon the Great would in time be succeeded by Napoleon II, and that the rest of Europe would accept that the Bourbons had been consigned to history. That was why they rejoiced. ‘People sincerely anticipated a period of profound peace; the idea of war and occupations of that sort were no longer entertained as being realistic,’ wrote Napoleon’s chief of police, General Savary, adding that the child appeared to all as the guarantor of political stability.¹⁰

Napoleon himself rejoiced for much the same reasons. ‘Now begins the finest epoch of my reign,’ he exclaimed. He had always been keenly aware that a man who seizes the throne can never rest easy on it, and that he could only achieve security of tenure by means of the dynastic principle. ‘With the birth of my son, there is a future in my destiny,’ he told one of his diplomatic agents. ‘I am now founding a legitimacy. Empires are created by the sword and are conserved by heredity.’¹¹

But he was not yet ready to lay down his arms. He had managed to destroy the unity of purpose which had fed the coalitions against France for so long. Austria, Russia and Prussia were now as ready to fight each other as to fight France, the original repugnance to treat with ‘the Corsican upstart’ had largely evaporated, his imperial title was recognised across the Continent, and the Bourbon pretender Louis XVIII was beginning to look like an anachronism. Yet Napoleon was keenly aware of his continuing vulnerability, for nothing had been finally settled.

Over the past decade he had turned France into an empire which included the whole of Belgium, Holland and the North Sea coast up to Hamburg, the Rhineland, the whole of Switzerland, Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria and Catalonia, and ruled directly over some forty-five million people. The French Empire was surrounded by a number of dependent states – the Kingdom of Westphalia, the kingdoms of Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg and other states grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the kingdoms of Italy, Naples and Spain, ruled by Napoleon’s siblings, relatives or devoted allies. The only part of his vast imperium where there was open unrest was in Spain, where armed opposition to his brother King Joseph was being supported by a British army. This was not in itself a major problem, and could be dealt with by a concerted operation under his own direction.

The real problem facing Napoleon was how to achieve some kind of finality and to fit all his conquests into a system that would guarantee his and his successors’ position. While others regarded him as a megalomaniac bent on conquering all, he saw his wars as defensive, aimed at guaranteeing France’s security as well as his own. ‘To leave my throne to my heirs,’ he told one of his chamberlains, ‘I will have had to be master of all the capitals of Europe!’ In the written instructions to one of his diplomatic envoys, he explained that although France

was at the height of her power, ‘if she cannot fix the political constitution of Europe now, she may tomorrow lose all the advantages of her position and fail in her enterprises’.¹²

But a final settlement that would secure his gains for the future eluded him, partly because he kept expanding its scope, meaning it to be comprehensive, and partly because war was his element; he could not see his way to achieving his ends by other means. That was why all his treaties to date were no more than truces, and all his arrangements remained fluid pending the elusive ultimate peace settlement. The Empire was a work in progress.

At the time of the birth of his son, Napoleon was forty-two years old. He was five feet two inches tall, which was small even at the time, but he had a well-proportioned figure. ‘His complexion had never had much colour; his cheeks were of a matt white, giving him a full, pale face, but not of the kind of pallor that denotes a sick person,’ wrote his secretary Baron Fain. ‘His brown hair was cut short all over and lay flat over his head. His head was round, his forehead was large and high; his eyes were grey-blue, with a gentle look in them. He had a handsome nose, a graceful mouth and beautiful teeth.’ But he had recently begun to put on weight. His body filled out, his neck, which was short anyway, thickened, and he developed a paunch. Those close to him noted that his eyes grew less piercing. He spoke more slowly and took longer to make decisions. His phenomenal powers of concentration diminished, and those used to his fits of fury were surprised to find him growing more pensive and hesitant. Something was eating away at the vital force of this Promethean creature. It has been convincingly suggested that his pituitary gland failed as he reached the age of forty, causing dystrophia adiposogenitalis, a condition that leads to weight gain and loss of energy.¹³

It is impossible to say whether Napoleon himself was aware of any decline. His enemies had certainly noted that his victories were no longer as resounding as they had been, and he must have realised this as well. Even if this was not quite the twilight of his life, the end of his active career could not be that far off, so the final battles would have to be fought soon and a permanent settlement put in place in the near future.

The principal obstacle to such a settlement was Britain, with which France had become locked in a self-perpetuating duel. With her control of the seas, Britain could cripple French trade and support resistance anywhere on the European mainland, as she was currently doing in Spain. After the annihilation of his fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 Napoleon could not hope to confront the British navy in battle. He had therefore decided to ruin her economically, by closing the whole Continent to her trade.

The idea was not new. It was one of the fundamental French beliefs that Britain’s wealth came not from herself but from her colonies, which supplied commodities she could sell on to Europe at vast profit. Every conflict between Britain and France over the past century had included a tariff war, and the revolutionary government and the Directory inherited this tradition. As there was widespread commercial jealousy of Britain, this was a popular policy. Napoleon carried on this tradition, setting ever higher tariffs and eventually banning all British trade from the Continent.

In theory, the French policy was bound to bring about economic hardship in Britain that would undermine support for her war effort. The Whigs, currently in opposition, had sympathised with the revolution in France and opposed the waging of war against her, and many admired Napoleon himself. Although they were in a minority, their calls for peace with France might well have carried the day if British trade had really begun to suffer. But in the long run, France probably suffered more than Britain. And Napoleon’s Continental System, as he called it, was in effect unenforceable. Smuggling and corruption holed it even in French ports, while some of France’s dependent states and allies were hardly enforcing it at all.

Worse, it imposed real hardships on the populations of subject and allied states. Nowhere more so than in the very area France most needed to control. Germany was feeling the cost very keenly, and political discontent was mounting. Although most of the sovereigns who ruled there were strongly attached to the French cause, the mood of their people might make them think twice if an alternative became possible. Such a situation might arise if French power were challenged, but there were only two powers capable of mounting such a challenge – Britain, which could not gain a serious foothold on mainland Europe, and Russia, which was an ally of France.

But Russia was not a happy ally, and nobody realised better than Napoleon that if she were to break out and challenge his authority, Britain could never be brought to the negotiating table, and the whole of Germany would be destabilised. Russia was therefore the key, and she would have to be brought back on side before any final settlement could be achieved. What he could not appreciate was that it was already far too late for that, and that even as French society was looking forward to a golden age of peace, Russia was coming to see war with France as unavoidable, desirable even, while her ruler was entertaining dreams of his own for the regeneration of Europe.

2
Alexander

When Catherine the Great came to the throne, exactly half a century before 1812, Russia had been of little significance outside the immediate area of eastern Europe. Peter the Great had done much to modernise his kingdom, and he put it on the map by building a fancy new capital at St Petersburg. In 1721 he even awarded himself the title of Emperor. But he was succeeded by a series of largely ineffectual monarchs, most of them ushered in through disreputable palace revolutions. They were feared by their subjects but generally despised by the other rulers of Europe, none of whom recognised the imperial title Peter had assumed.

Catherine changed all that. She worked hard at organising the state, involved herself in the affairs of Europe, and initiated an aggressive foreign policy which over the next fifty years was to add the whole of Finland, what are now Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, most of Poland, the Crimea, some of what is now Romania, the Kuban, Georgia, Kabardia, Azerbaidjan, parts of Siberia, Chukchi and Kamchatka to her dominions, as well as part of Alaska and a military settlement just north of San Francisco. This not only increased the size and population of Russia, it also brought her frontiers six hundred kilometres further into Europe and her rulers into European affairs. By 1799 Russian armies were operating in Switzerland and Italy. In a memorandum to Catherine’s successor Paul I, the Russian Chancellor Fyodor Vasilievich Rostopchin wrote: ‘Russia, as much by her position as by her inexhaustible resources, is and must be the first power in the world.’¹ It was a constant aim of Russian policy to extend that power over the Balkans, Ottoman Turkey and into the Mediterranean.

Many in Europe were alarmed at this seemingly inexorable onward march of Russian power. There was talk of ravening Asiatic hordes and some fear, particularly after the first partition of Poland in 1772, that Russia might engulf the whole of Europe as the barbarians had done with ancient Rome. ‘Poland was but a breakfast … where will they dine?’ Edmund Burke wondered, echoing the fears of many.² Diplomats were struck by the single-mindedness and ruthlessness of Russia’s foreign policy: she did not play by the same rules as others. What few appreciated was the extent to which Russia saw herself as a special case.

When Ivan IV, popularly known as the Terrible, was crowned in the Uspensky cathedral in the Kremlin in 1547, he took the title of Tsar (Caesar) and laid claim to the legacy of Byzantium. ‘Ivan was claiming not only sovereignty, independence from other powers,’ in the words of Geoffrey Hosking, ‘but the actual superiority of his realm, as the universal Christian monarchy, to all others on earth.’³ He used the regalia of Byzantium and had himself depicted alongside Roman emperors. His successors and their political servants remained faithful to this legacy and the mission it imposed. It was not for nothing that Catherine had named her two eldest grandsons Alexander and Constantine.

France had traditionally kept a string of allies in the east – Sweden, Poland and Ottoman Turkey – whose purpose it was to contain the then dominant threat of Habsburg power in central Europe. When Russia began to impinge, she depended on this ‘barrière de l’est’ to guard against the new threat developing in the east. But by the end of the eighteenth century, Sweden had declined as a power, Poland had ceased to exist, and Turkey had been pushed out of the Crimea and Moldavia, and was in a state of political decay. France would have to look elsewhere for allies.

In 1801 General Bonaparte, who was then First Consul, decided to make an ally of Russia herself. When, during negotiations on the exchange of prisoners, the British and Austrians refused to accept seven thousand of their Russian allies taken prisoner by the French in Switzerland in exchange for French prisoners they were holding, Bonaparte offered them free to Tsar Paul. He even volunteered to clothe and arm them. Paul, who had previously held everything to do with revolutionary France in abhorrence, was as disarmed by this chivalrous gesture as he was annoyed by the mean-mindedness of his Austrian and British allies. Bonaparte, who knew how much the Russians lusted for a harbour in the Mediterranean, followed this up by offering Paul the island of Malta (which was about to be captured by the British anyway). He would at this stage even have contemplated awarding Constantinople to Russia in order to enlist her support against Britain. He was well on the way to achieving this when, on the night of 23–24 March a group of generals and court officials forced their way into Paul’s bedroom in the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg and murdered him.⁴

Paul had been mentally and emotionally unstable, if not actually mad, and there was an open sense of relief in Russia at his death. Whenever his son and successor Alexander showed himself in public in the first weeks of his reign, he was mobbed by people kissing his hands and clothes, and Pushkin later wrote of ‘the magnificent dawn of Alexander’s days’. But while he stands out among the monarchs of his day by his generous nature, his lack of vindictiveness and his hatred of injustice and cruelty, Alexander was also marked by severe psychological problems.

Though not unintelligent, he suffered from an inability to think through the consequences of his words and actions. This need not have mattered much had it not been for the education his grandmother, Catherine the Great, had devised for him. She was a despot who admitted no liberal ideas in or near her dominions. Yet alongside mathematicians and priests, she engaged the services of the Swiss republican philosophe Frédéric César de La Harpe as tutor for her grandson. The child was subjected to a regime of moral education which consisted of the study of improving stories drawn from the scriptures, history and mythology, as well as a whole canon of secular Enlightenment morality. His limited mind could hardly have been expected to square the religious precepts with the profane, or to accommodate within the despotic reality the radical concepts preached by La Harpe. ‘This little boy is a knot of contradictions,’ Catherine commented, somewhat disingenuously, after a few years of this diet.⁵

Alexander’s principal failings – vanity, weakness and laziness – also need not have mattered much, had it not been for the brand of moral education to which he was subjected, and which expanded his perceived duties well beyond his capacities. He had to keep notebooks, ‘archives of shame’, in which he jotted down every failing, every piece of bad behaviour, every loss of temper or lack of diligence in study. ‘I am an idler, given over to irresponsibility, incapable of true thought, speech and action,’ the twelve-year-old notes on 19 July 1789. ‘Egoism is one of my shortcomings, and vanity its main cause; it is easy to see to what they might lead me if I give them a chance to develop,’ on 27 August.⁶ This continuous self-flagellation only aggravated an innate sense of inadequacy.

When he came to the throne at the age of twenty-three, Alexander was a young man of great charm, burning with desire to improve the world. But as he struggled to live up to what he thought was expected of him, he was undermined by a terrible moral canker. His father’s murderers had naturally made him a party to their plans, since it was in order to put him on the throne that they had decided to act. He would claim that he made them swear they would not kill Paul, but he was nevertheless an accomplice in the crime of parricide. He could hardly penalise them, so they continued to hold high office at court and rank in the army. Alexander was racked with guilt for the rest of his life for the part, however passive, he had played in the murder.

He was indeed a mass of contradictions. He claimed to despise the principles of hereditary monarchy, and recoiled before the necessity of assuming power. ‘My plan is to settle with my wife on the banks of the Rhine, where I shall live peacefully as a private person finding happiness in the company of friends and in the study of nature,’ he confided to one of his friends at the age of nineteen. But he soon fell out of love with his wife and with the notion of a tranquil, private life. He also used to hold forth on the liberal constitutions he was going to introduce. But once he had gained power, he grew jealous of letting anyone else have any say in how things should be done, and notoriously took offence whenever privileges and rights he had granted were actually invoked.⁷

Alexander wanted to bring an element of professionalism into the governance of the Russian empire through the introduction of institutional structures. He reorganised the civil service, making entrance into the higher grades dependent on a university degree or a written exam (which did not endear him to the nobility). He set up ministries and a State Council, which were supposed to help run the country. What he would have liked to introduce was something along the lines of the system Bonaparte was creating in France – authoritarian government mobilising the whole nation in an efficient way along rational and liberal lines. But this would have required emancipating the serfs and breaking down the entire social structure of Russia, and he lacked the nerve to implement it.

Absorbed as he was by internal reforms, Alexander paid little attention to foreign policy. He was horrified by Bonaparte’s abduction and judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien, and joined every other ruler in Europe in robust condemnation of the act. It offended every fibre in his chivalrous nature, and he felt the outrage personally: the Duke of Baden, on whose territory Enghien had been seized, was his father-in-law. He therefore couched his condemnation in grandiloquent terms. But he was made to regret it. The French response was to remind the world that Paul’s assassins had not only never been punished, but actually held high office at his son’s court, thereby putting in question Alexander’s right to point the finger at anyone, in view of the part he had played in the murder of his own father. Alexander was stung, and hated Bonaparte for it. When Bonaparte took the title of Emperor a few months later, Alexander’s hatred turned to indignant rage, and the bearer of Peter the Great’s invented title denounced that taken by the upstart Corsican.

Alexander believed that Europe had reached a crisis, moral as well as political, and wrote to the British Prime Minister William Pitt suggesting a reorganisation of the Continent into a league of liberal states founded on the sacred rights of humanity. Pitt was not interested in the scheme, but he pandered to Alexander, and, allowing him to dream of greater things, in 1805 managed to enrol him into the third coalition against Napoleon: Austria and Russia were to attack France, and Britain would pay for it.

Russia had no reason for going to war with France, as none of her interests were threatened, and France was Russia’s cultural beacon. Russian society was divided on the matter. While those who regarded Napoleon as an evil being who had to be crushed were probably in the majority, there were plenty who thought otherwise. The former Chancellor Count Rostopchin was vociferous in his criticism, propounding the view that Russia was being used by Britain; his future successor, Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, regarded France as Russia’s natural ally. Napoleon had many admirers in Russia, particularly among the young – some of whom would be drinking his health even after the war had begun.⁸

But Alexander had come to see the whole question as part of a wider moral issue. He had assumed the role of knightly defender of a Christian monarchical tradition against the onslaught of the new barbarism as represented by Napoleon. An element of emulation also came into it, for he longed to distinguish himself on the battlefield. He had inherited his father’s love of parades and the minutiae of military life – he was always checking details of uniforms and drill – and believed that a Tsar’s place was at the head of his troops. He therefore insisted on setting off to war in person, although he gave overall command of his armies to the only experienced general to hand, the fifty-eight-year-old Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov.

Kutuzov had first seen action against Polish insurgents, and subsequently distinguished himself in several campaigns against Turkey. In 1773 in the Crimea he had received a bullet in the head which severed the muscles behind his right eye, causing it to sag in a grotesque way; eventually he lost sight in it. Kutuzov had been military governor of St Petersburg at the time of the murder of Tsar Paul, so he knew a thing or two about that. This was not the least of the reasons for which Alexander feared and resented him, and as a result he dismissed him and exiled him to his country estate. There, Kutuzov relieved his boredom and his rheumatic pains with drink and whatever sexual solace the rural retreat could provide his notorious appetite. And it was there, in the summer of 1805, that he suddenly received the order to take command of the army and join forces with the Austrians.

The army was not ready, so Kutuzov set off with an advance guard to reinforce the Austrian General Mack. Napoleon acted with speed and surrounded Mack, forcing him to surrender at Ulm while Kutuzov was still on the march. Massively outnumbered, Kutuzov was obliged to fall back and join up with the Russian main army, led by Alexander, and the remainder of the Austrian forces under the Emperor Francis.

Napoleon had never seen any good reason for France and Russia to fight, and was convinced that Alexander had been manipulated by Britain into joining the coalition. He therefore sent General Savary to the Tsar with the suggestion that they get together and sort out any differences amicably. But Alexander haughtily declined, famously addressing his reply to ‘the Head of the French Government’, as he could not stomach acknowledging Napoleon’s imperial title.

Kutuzov wanted to retreat further, but Alexander was determined to fight, and obliged him to give battle at Austerlitz on 2 December. Like a subaltern playing at being commander, Alexander overruled Kutuzov’s suggestions and made him adopt a plan devised by one of the Austrian generals. On the day, he bossed and chivvied Kutuzov for the slowness of his deployment, and then watched in horror as the allied army was routed. Forced to flee from the battlefield, Alexander was mortified. ‘He was himself even more thoroughly defeated at Austerlitz than his army,’ according to the French diplomat Joseph de Maistre.⁹ The Tsar now resented Kutuzov all the more, and dismissed him from his command, giving him the minor post of Governor of Kiev.

Austria sued for peace, but the war went on, as Prussia joined the coalition. The thirty-five-year-old King Frederick William III had sat on the fence, until his beautiful and spirited wife Louise had finally induced him to come out against Napoleon. But in a whirlwind campaign in October 1806 his renowned army was routed at Jena and Auerstädt, and he had to flee his capital of Berlin. Napoleon entered the city and pursued Frederick William, who took refuge in East Prussia at the side of the Russian army, now under the command of General Lev Bennigsen.

Alexander showed remarkable determination in adversity. He raised more troops, and in 1807 called up a peasant militia. But he had to take precautions to ensure that these serfs would remain loyal to a system that kept them enslaved. News of the revolutionary happenings in France over the past fifteen years was slow to spread among the uneducated peasants of central and eastern Europe. But that very slowness meant that it often mingled with local legend and even religious millenarian longings as it went, with the result that the figure of Napoleon was sometimes confused with a number of mythic folk heroes, lending him the attributes not only of a liberator, but of a messiah as well. The Russian authorities were well aware of this, and prepared accordingly as the French armies drew close to the boundaries of the empire.

While calling on a high official in 1806 the writer Sergei Glinka had been intrigued to see a civil servant clutching a copy of the Apocalypse. There was a long tradition in Russia of associating the enemy with the Antichrist in order to raise the fighting spirit of the soldiers, and now the authorities had hit on the idea of substituting Napoleon for the rulers of the abyss, Abaddon and Apollyon. In November 1806 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church issued a thundering denunciation of Napoleon, accusing him of taking on the role and the name of Messiah and conspiring with Jews and other evil people against the Christian faith. The clergy also made much of the fact that when in Egypt Napoleon had declared his regard for Islam – it must be remembered that the Russians had been in a semi-permanent state of war with Muslim Tatars and Turks, which they saw as a kind of crusade. Thus the average soldier and peasant was given the impression that Napoleon was in league with all the devils of hell.¹⁰

But the crusade against him was cut short. In January 1807 Bennigsen lost 25,000 men in a fierce engagement at Eylau, and he was routed by Napoleon at Friedland in June. Alexander faced a stark choice. He could either fall back and try to regroup, which would involve letting the enemy into his own empire, or he could come to terms with Napoleon. His army was unpaid, unfed and badly officered, and the territory he would be falling back through, which had only been taken from Poland ten years before, was full of potential partisans.

On 24 June 1807 Alexander sent General Lobanov-Rostovsky to Napoleon’s headquarters at Tilsit on the river Niemen with a personal message saying that he would be delighted to make not just peace but an alliance with him. ‘An entirely new system must replace the one which has existed up to now, and I flatter myself that we will easily reach an understanding with the Emperor Napoleon, provided that we meet without intermediaries,’ he wrote.¹¹

Negotiations began the next day. A tented pavilion was constructed for the purpose on a raft moored in the middle of the Niemen. Alexander turned up in his most fetching uniform, determined to charm Napoleon and get himself out of the desperate straits he was in. For his part, Napoleon wanted to seduce Alexander in order to break up the coalition once and for all, and in the process gain a useful pawn in his struggle against Britain.

Alexander may have had great charm, but Napoleon was the better manipulator of men. He flattered Alexander shamelessly, treating him as an equal. He also spared no occasion of driving a wedge between him and his Prussian ally. Frederick William III had not been allowed on to the raft, and on the day negotiations opened he could be seen watching from the Russian bank, even at one stage edging his horse forward until it had water up to its chest, as though trying to eavesdrop. On the next day Napoleon relented and allowed Alexander to present Frederick William to him, but he was curt and did not invite him to the dinner he was giving for the Tsar that evening. He repeatedly told Alexander that he was only leaving the wretched King on his throne in deference to his, Alexander’s, wishes. However much he might have been pained or shocked by such insults to a brother monarch, Alexander could not fail to be flattered at the difference in the status accorded to the two by Napoleon.

While the foreign ministers of both states negotiated the actual treaties, Napoleon and Alexander assisted at parades, went out for walks, drives and rides; they sat up together after dinner, talking far into the night. Napoleon would let drop the odd phrase about how Russia’s frontier really ought to be on the Vistula, about a possible mutual carve-up of Turkey, about the two of them resolving all the problems of Europe together. He pandered to Alexander’s dreams of reforming the world. He would unfold maps of Europe and Asia, and together they would speculate on ideal solutions to the world’s ills through some monumental territorial rearrangement. Napoleon told of how he had modernised France, giving Alexander the impression that he too could achieve great things, that all the self-flagellation he had been obliged to perform before his tutor would finally be vindicated by some magnificent act.¹²

Alexander had grown up hating Napoleon and all he stood for, as did his family and court. On the day of the first meeting on the raft, his sister Catherine wrote to him vehemently denouncing Napoleon as a liar and a monster, urging him to have no truck whatever with him. But there is no doubt that the flattery of the conqueror of Europe, however monstrous he might be, had worked its magic. For Alexander, unsure of himself, aware of his inadequacies, brought up to think of himself as a failure, to be treated as an equal by a man who had achieved so much, whose very name made Europe tremble, was strong liquor. The subaltern sat at the table of the most successful general in history. ‘Just imagine my spending days with Bonaparte, talking for hours quite alone with him!’ he wrote back to Catherine. ‘I ask you, does not all this seem like a dream?’¹³

And while Napoleon had set out with the most cynical attitude, he too seems to have fallen for Alexander’s boyish charm and enjoyed being with him in an elder-brotherly way. They were also to some extent carried away by the epic nature of the proceedings. Their meeting on the raft, in full view of two great armies drawn up in parade uniforms on either bank; the banquets at which the two most powerful men in Europe drank each other’s health and embraced, pledging to build a better world; the grenadiers of both armies mingling to drink the health of the emperors of the Orient and the Occident; the touching scenes as Napoleon, having asked the Russians to name their bravest ranker, pinned the order of the Légion d’Honneur on his breast, a gesture reciprocated by Alexander with the Cross of St George – were all so much playacting. But it was grand spectacle, and actors are notorious for being taken in by their own histrionics.¹⁴

In the treaties signed on 7 July at the conclusion of these three weeks of posturing, Russia ceded the Ionian Islands to France, but received a small part of Poland in return. She agreed to pull her troops out of the Danubian Principalities, while France negotiated a settlement with Turkey on her behalf. Most importantly, she allied herself with France in the war with Britain, promising to close her ports to all British trade unless Britain made a speedy peace with France by the end of the year.

The obvious loser at Tilsit was Prussia. Frederick William was only just allowed to keep his throne, in deference to the wishes of Alexander. He had to give up most of the territory Prussia had taken from Poland in the past decades, to pay France a huge indemnity for having made war on her, to reduce his army to a symbolic force, and to accommodate French garrisons all over his kingdom. With the Polish lands taken from Prussia, Napoleon formed the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a new French satellite.

Considering he had been obliged to sue for peace, Tilsit was a triumph for Alexander: he had managed to avoid being treated as a defeated party. But a closer look at the treaty revealed it to be not a peace settlement, but the initiation of a new war and the foundation of a partnership, one which bound Russia more than it bound France. All the exciting nocturnal talk remained vapour hanging in the air, while Russia had committed herself to make economic war on Britain. And while the stationing of French troops on her territory was a humiliation and an expense for Prussia, it was clear to all but the most naïve that they were there to keep Russia in check and to shore up the newly-founded Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This in itself was an open challenge to Russia. It was tiny, but it was a potential kernel for the resurrection of the Polish state which had been wiped off the map only a decade before, and a chunk of which currently formed the whole western belt of the Russian empire.

Whatever else he had managed to save, Alexander did not have to wait long to find out that he had not, as far as his subjects were concerned, saved his face or Russia’s honour. His sister Catherine called the treaty a humiliating climbdown, and his mother refused his embrace when he returned to St Petersburg. The court, already disapproving of his desertion of the popular Empress Elizabeth for his mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, sensed a betrayal. The traditionalist aristocracy opposed any negotiation with the despised ‘upstart’ and saw the treaty as a sell-out. Many felt Alexander had been made a fool of by Napoleon. The playwright Vladislav Aleksandrovich Ozerov wrote Dmitry Donskoi, a play whose historical heroics, applauded frantically by full houses, made Alexander look ineffectual.

Although the Russian army had been beaten by Napoleon, the younger officers felt a new confidence and entertained dreams of fighting on to ultimate victory, and consequently felt betrayed. The soldiers could not understand why their Tsar was suddenly embracing as an ally the man they had been told was the Antichrist. A vigorous whispering campaign against Alexander’s conduct of policy was initiated by General Wilson, a British adviser formerly attached to the Russian army. Rumours of plots to depose or assassinate the Tsar were rife. ‘Take care, sire! You will end up like your father!’ one of his courtiers warned him. As there had been so many palace revolts in the past century, many people assumed that the dissatisfied courtiers would reach for this ‘Asiatic remedy’, as one diplomat called it. ‘I saw this prince enter the cathedral preceded by the assassins of his grandfather, surrounded by those of his father, and followed, no doubt, by his own,’ wrote a French émigré after attending Alexander’s coronation. Such fears were probably exaggerated, but the possibility could not be discounted.¹⁵

Matters only got worse when, Britain having failed to make peace with France, Russia had to honour her undertaking and declare war on her. This went against the grain, and revealed the true implications and consequences of the Tilsit settlement. ‘Russia’s alliance with Your Majesty, and particularly the war with England, has upset the natural manner of thinking in this country,’ Napoleon’s ambassador reported from St Petersburg in December. ‘It is, one could say, a complete change of religion.’¹⁶ Alexander had difficulty in finding ministers whom he could trust to implement his policy. The only one wholeheartedly in favour of the French alliance was Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, who now became Foreign Minister.

It is difficult to know what Alexander really thought of Napoleon and of the arrangement reached at Tilsit, as he was learning to be more secretive and devious. But outwardly he had to pretend that he stood by the treaty and his friendship with the Emperor of the French. Feeling rejected by society, Alexander withdrew into himself, and, as he steeled himself against public opinion, he bandaged his hurt pride and swathed his vulnerable convictions in such spiritual scraps as had been left behind by his strange upbringing.

Ironically, the treaty signed at Tilsit also bore the germ of Napoleon’s undoing. On the face of it, he had achieved a great deal. He had broken up the coalition and set up the Grand Duchy of Warsaw as a French marcher outpost, an ambiguous piece on the diplomatic chessboard, to be used aggressively against one or all of his potential enemies, or traded for something. It was a powderkeg laid under one of the bastions of Russia’s position in central Europe, as well as a threat to Austria. The treaty had neutered Prussia, and left a strong French military presence in the area ready to intervene at the slightest sign of trouble. Above all, it was an affront to Britain, whose shipping was excluded from even more ports, and who could now find no allies on the European mainland. Napoleon felt the moment draw near when Britain would be obliged to negotiate with him. Shortly after signing the treaty he turned his attention to excluding Britain from the Iberian peninsula, and in November 1807 French troops entered Lisbon.

The crucial element in the Tilsit treaty was that it was meant to embody an alliance, a real entente, between the two emperors. Yet Napoleon did not know how to treat allies: he was used to vassals. And this alliance was a particularly unnatural one. It dispelled Russia’s primal dream of continued expansion at the expense of Turkey; it placed a question mark over her possession of Poland; and it forced her to penalise herself by making economic war on Britain. Those Russians who did not care about the stain on their country’s honour would feel the pinch in their purses. Russia had been pushed into a loveless and unequal marriage with France, and soon adopted the sullen resentment of the unhappy wife. Sooner or later, she would be unfaithful, and Napoleon would have to go to war again in order to bring her back to heel. And it is much easier to defeat and even dispossess countries than to force them to do one’s bidding.

Napoleon had made Russia the cornerstone of his strategy. ‘The affairs of the whole world will be decided there … the general peace is to be found in Petersburg,’ he said to the special envoy he sent there after Tilsit.¹⁷ For this crucial mission he chose one of his most trusted officers, General Armand de Caulaincourt, Master of the Horse. Caulaincourt was only thirty-four years old, but he had come a long way. The scion of an old noble family of Picardy, he had been brought up partly at the court of Versailles, which made him a little more acceptable to supporters of the ancien régime. He knew Russia, as he had already been sent to St Petersburg once by Napoleon, to negotiate with Paul. His brief was to keep the special relationship between Napoleon and Alexander, the ‘mood of Tilsit’, alive by every possible means.

As Napoleon’s ambassador extraordinary, Caulaincourt appeared in public at Alexander’s side, sat at his table and enjoyed a position which singled him out from the rest of the diplomatic corps in the Russian capital. He spent lavishly on balls and dinners, and while Russian society avoided him at first, he soon seduced even the most obdurate. In an effort to replicate this situation in the French capital, Napoleon bought his brother-in-law Murat’s Paris residence – furniture, silver, bedlinen and all – for an astronomical sum so that Alexander’s ambassador, Count Tolstoy, should be comfortable on his arrival.¹⁸ But Tolstoy remained cool, hardly able to conceal his disdain and dislike of Napoleon. His successor, Prince Aleksandr Borisovich Kurakin, a caricature of the boundlessly wealthy and profligate Russian grandee, nicknamed ‘le prince diamant’, was hardly more amenable.

Feeling the atmosphere grow cool, Napoleon decided to dangle another bauble before Alexander. In a long letter on 2 February 1808 he laid before him a grandiose plan for a joint attack on the British in India, holding out a prospect of empire in the east. It was an old idea. As early as 1797 General Bonaparte had declared that the surest way to destroy Britain was by throwing her out of India, and when he sailed for Egypt in May 1798 he took with him atlases of Bengal and Hindustan. He wrote to Tippoo Sahib, the Sultan of Mysore, who was then fighting the British, promising to come to his aid.

‘I was full of dreams, and I saw the means by which I could carry out all that I had dreamed,’ he confided two years later. ‘I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, with a turban on my head and in my hand the new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs. In my undertakings I would have combined the experiences of the two worlds, exploiting for my own profit the theatre of all history, attacking the power of England in India, and, by means of that conquest, renewing contact with the old Europe. The time I spent in Egypt was the most beautiful of my life, for it was the most ideal.’ He felt that the East offered a grander stage on which to act out his destiny. ‘There has been nothing left to achieve in Europe over these last two centuries,’ he declared a couple of years later. ‘It is only in the East that one can work on a grand scale.’ Napoleon would far rather have emulated Alexander the Great than Charlemagne.¹⁹

In 1801 he had sold the idea of a joint march on India to Paul, who had actually begun moving troops towards the Caucasus as a preliminary, and he had touched on it again at Tilsit. Circumstances were now inviting. The ruler of Persia, Shah Fath Ali, whose recent capture of Kabul and Kandahar brought her armies closer to the British outposts in India, greatly admired Napoleon and wanted French arms and officers to modernise his army. He had sent an ambassador, who reached Napoleon’s headquarters early in 1807, and in May a treaty of alliance was duly signed. General Gardane was sent to Persia as ambassador with a seventy-man military mission and instructions to survey the routes to India and map out convenient halting points. He came up with a route through Baghdad, Herat, Kabul and Peshawar.²⁰

‘If an army of 50,000 men, Russian, French, and perhaps even partly Austrian were to set off from Constantinople into Asia it would need to get no further than the Euphrates to make England tremble and fall at the feet of the continent,’ Napoleon wrote to Alexander on 2 February 1808. Caulaincourt noticed the Tsar’s expression change and grow animated as he read the letter. ‘This is the language of Tilsit,’ Alexander exclaimed. He thrilled at the grandeur of the concept and seemed keen to participate.²¹ But there would be no talk of the East at their next meeting, a few months later, as in the short term Napoleon needed his ally for another purpose.

A revolt had broken out against French rule in Madrid on 2 May 1808, and although this had been crushed with severity, insurrection had spread through the whole of Spain. A blow was dealt to French military prestige on 21 July when a force of some 20,000 men under General Dupont was cut off by a Spanish army and obliged to capitulate at Bailén. Exactly a month later, General Junot was defeated by the British at Vimiero in Portugal. Napoleon concluded that he must go to Spain and conduct operations in person. But he suspected that the moment he was fully engaged on the other side of the Pyrenees Austria would take the opportunity to make war on him. He therefore needed to make sure that his Russian ally was going to cover his back.

The two emperors agreed to meet at Erfürt in Thuringia. They arrived in the city on 27 September 1808 and spent the next two weeks in each other’s company. Alexander was treated to the spectacle of Napoleon as the master of Europe, surrounded by the kings of Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria and Saxony, the Duke of Weimar and a dozen other sovereign princes, all doing obeisance. He sat through bombastic performances of classics by Corneille, Racine and Voltaire performed by the best actors of Paris, brought along specially for the purpose. Among them were some of the most celebrated beauties, whom Napoleon apparently tried to introduce into Alexander’s bed. Napoleon had his troops parade before the Tsar, spent hours talking to him about administrative reforms, new buildings, the arts, and all the things he knew interested him. He took him off to visit the battlefield of Jena, and on the knoll from which he had commanded the action he gave a dramatic account of the battle. After this they sat down to a bivouac dinner, as though they were on campaign. Outwardly, Alexander appeared to be duly impressed. When the line ‘The friendship of a great man is a gift of the gods’ rang out during the performance of Voltaire’s Oedipe one evening, Alexander rose from his seat and ostentatiously took Napoleon’s hand, while the whole audience applauded.²² But it was all sham.

When Alexander had announced his intention of going to Erfürt, most of his entourage begged him not to go, knowing only too well his weakness and fearing that he would be forced into some new agreement. There was also a latent fear that he might never come back: only a few months earlier, Napoleon had invited the Spanish King Charles IV and his son to a meeting at Bayonne, and had promptly deposed and imprisoned them. The underlying fears are best expressed in a long letter the Tsar’s mother wrote to him just as he was setting off. In measured tones that nevertheless betray a sense of despair, she implored him not to go, saying that his attendance on Napoleon would insult the dignity of every Russian and lose him their confidence. ‘Alexander, the throne is but poorly secured when it is not based on that strong sentiment,’ she wrote. ‘Do not wound your people in all that they hold most sacred and dear in your august person; recognise their love in their present anxiety and do not go voluntarily to bow your forehead adorned with the most beautiful diadem before the idol of fortune, an idol accursed of present and future humanity; step back from the edge of the precipice!’ Again and again she came back to her real fear. ‘Alexander, in the name of God avoid your downfall; the esteem of a people is easily lost but not so easily regained; you will lose it through this meeting, and you will lose your empire and destroy your family …’

Alexander’s reply was calm, well reasoned and Machiavellian in its clear-sightedness. He poured cold water on the enthusiasm aroused by Bailén and Vimiero, pointing out that they were of no significance, and that Napoleon was strong enough to conquer Spain and beat Russia, even if Austria were to come to her aid. The only course of action was to work at mobilising the power of Russia and wait patiently for the moment when that power, along with that of Austria, could be brought to bear in a decisive way. ‘But it is only in the most profound silence that we must work towards this aim, not by boasting of our armaments and preparations in public, or in loudly denouncing him whom we wish to defy,’ he explained. He pointed out that France would always prefer alliance with Russia to a state of conflict, and this meant that Napoleon would not harm him and would not move against Russia if she did not provoke him. He was afraid Austria might be tempted into going to war too soon, thereby sealing her own downfall and putting back for years the moment at which they could stand up to Napoleon effectively. He believed that by going to Erfürt and appearing to be ready to support France against her, he might make Austria think twice before launching an attack that was doomed to failure. ‘If the meeting were to have no other result than that of preventing such a deplorable calamity, it would compensate with interest for all the unpleasantness involved in it,’ he concluded. To his sister Catherine, he replied more succinctly. ‘Napoleon thinks that I’m just a fool,’ he wrote, ‘but he who laughs last laughs longest.’²³

Napoleon could have had no inkling of these thoughts, but he was unpleasantly struck by the change that had taken place in Alexander. He found him more self-possessed and annoyingly steadfast, and their interviews were nothing like those of Tilsit – so much so that one day Napoleon grew so heated in the discussion that he tore his hat from his head, threw it on the floor and stamped on it.²⁴

Alexander had come to Erfürt looking for some advantage or concession with which he could justify his apparent subjection to Napoleon to sceptics at home. But Napoleon was not in a giving mood. He deflected Alexander’s plans for expansion in the direction of Constantinople, as he had come to the conclusion that any division of the Ottoman Empire would benefit Russia far more than France. He allowed Alexander to hang on to Moldavia and Wallachia, and to take Finland from Sweden. He agreed to withdraw French troops from the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and to start evacuating his garrisons in Prussia. But that was the sum total of his concessions. Alexander did not openly challenge the basis of the alliance, and agreed to act out the role of faithful ally with respect to the Austrian threat. ‘The two emperors parted relatively satisfied with their arrangements, but, at bottom, dissatisfied with each other,’ in the words of Caulaincourt.²⁵

Having, as he thought, secured a degree of support from Alexander, Napoleon turned his attention to Spain, where he went in November. On 4 December he was in Madrid, and from there he set about pacifying the country. Just as he had anticipated, Austria seized the opportunity of his back being turned, and in April 1809 invaded the territory of his Bavarian and Saxon allies.

Napoleon recrossed the Pyrenees and marched to their defence. On 21 May he confronted the Austrian army at Essling. The battle was little short of a defeat for Napoleon, dimming the aura of invincibility that hung about him and giving heart to all his enemies. On 6 July he won the decisive battle of Wagram and dictated a treaty with Austria. But he was far from satisfied. Alexander, on whose assistance he had called as soon as he heard of the Austrian attack, had been slow to respond, and his army had taken an eternity to reach the theatre of operations. When it did so, it began executing a series of military minuets aimed at avoiding the Austrian forces until all was over. It was so successful that it suffered just one casualty during the entire campaign.

Napoleon had taken Alexander for granted, and was now paying the price. He would henceforth have to make more of an effort to bring his ally back on side, and he began to consider what concessions he might make to him. But he had no idea of how far Alexander had strayed from his influence. He certainly did not know that his own Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, had been involved in secret talks with the Tsar at Erfürt. ‘It is up to you to save Europe and you will only achieve this by standing up to Napoleon,’ Talleyrand claimed to have told Alexander. What Talleyrand probably did not know was that the Tsar had already come to see himself as being locked in a personal contest with Napoleon. Instead of acquiring a useful ally, Napoleon had helped to create a formidable rival, one who was already working at supplanting rather than merely defeating him. ‘There is no room for the two of us in Europe,’ Alexander had written to his sister Catherine before setting off for Erfürt; ‘sooner or later, one of us will have to bow out.’²⁶

3
The Soul of Europe

That Alexander could be beginning to think of himself as a counterweight or even an alternative to Napoleon on the international stage is eloquent testimony to what a mess the Emperor of the French had made of his dealings with the other nations of Europe, and with the Germans in particular.

France’s had long been the dominant intellectual and cultural influence on the Continent, and by the end of the eighteenth century progressives and liberals of every nation fed on the fruits of her Enlightenment. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, followed by the abolition of privilege, the declaration of the Rights of Man, the introduction of representative government and other such measures elicited wild enthusiasm among the educated classes in every corner of Europe. Even moderate liberals saw revolutionary France as the catalyst that would bring about the transformation of the old world into a more equitable, and therefore more civilised and peaceful one.

The horrors of the revolution put many off, and others were offended by France’s high-handed behaviour with regard to areas, such as Holland and Switzerland, caught up in her military struggle against the coalitions lined up against her. But the French were convinced that they were engaged on a mission of progress, bringing happiness to other nations. So, in a more pragmatic way, was Napoleon, who used to say that ‘What is good for the French is good for everyone.’ Liberals everywhere clung to the view that a process of transformation and human regeneration was under way, and that casualties were only to be expected. Those suffering foreign or aristocratic oppression continued to look longingly at the example set by France. With some justification.

The political boundaries criss-crossing much of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the constitutional arrangements within them were largely the legacy of medieval attempts at creating a pan-European empire. Germany was broken up into more than three hundred different political units, ruled over by electors, archbishops, abbots, dukes, landgraves, margraves, city councils, counts and imperial knights. What is now Belgium belonged to the Habsburgs and was ruled from Vienna; Italy was divided up into eleven states, most of them ruled by Austrian Habsburgs or French and Spanish Bourbons; the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation included Czechs, Magyars and half a dozen other nationalities; and Poland was cut up into three and ruled from Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg.

Every time a French army passed through one of these areas, it disturbed a venerable clutter of archaic law and regulation, of privilege and prerogative, of rights and duties, releasing or awakening a variety of pent-up or dormant aspirations in the process. And every time France annexed a territory she reorganised it along the lines of French Enlightenment thought. Rulers were dethroned, ecclesiastical institutions were abrogated, ghettos were opened, guild rights, caste privileges and other restrictions were abolished, and serfs and slaves were freed. Although this was often accompanied by cynical exploitation of the territory in the French cause and shameless looting, the net effect was nevertheless a positive one in the liberal view. As a result, significant sections, and in some cases the majority, of the politically aware populations of such countries as Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Poland and even Spain ranged themselves in the camp of France against those seeking to restore the ancien régime, even if they resented French rule and decried the depredations of French troops. Nowhere more so than in Germany.

The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Charlemagne a thousand years before, included almost all the lands inhabited by German-speaking people, but it did not bring them together or represent them. The absurd division of the territory into hundreds of political units inhibited cultural and economic, as well as political life. German eighteenth-century thought was cosmopolitan rather than nationalist, but most educated Germans nonetheless longed for a more coherent homeland.

Between 1801 and 1806, following his victories over Austria and Prussia, Napoleon thoroughly transformed the political, social and economic climate throughout the German lands. He secularised ecclesiastical states and abolished the status of imperial cities, swept away anachronistic institutions and residues of gothic rights, in effect dismantling the Empire and emancipating large sections of the population in the process. In 1806, after his defeat of the Emperor Francis at Ulm and Austerlitz, he forced him to abdicate and to dissolve the Holy Roman Empire itself. In a process known as ‘mediatisation’, hundreds of tiny sovereignties were swept away as imperial counts and knights lost their lands, which were fused into thirty-six states of varying size, bound together in the Confederation of the Rhine. With them went all the nonsensical borders and petty restrictions that had made life so difficult. In their place came institutions moulded on the French pattern.

The ending of feudal practices gave agriculture a boost, the abolition of guild and other restrictions encouraged industry and trade, the removal of tolls and frontiers liberated trade. The confiscation of Church property was followed by the building of schools and the development of universities. Not surprisingly, all this made Napoleon popular with the middle classes, with small traders, peasants, artisans and Jews, as well as with progressive intellectuals, students and writers. Johan Wilhelm Gleim, a poet more used to singing the glories of Frederick the Great, wrote an ode to Napoleon, Friedrich Hölderlin also immortalised him in verse, and Beethoven dedicated his ‘Eroica’ symphony to him.

Although many were put off by his decision to take the imperial crown and some even felt betrayed by the act, German intellectuals continued to be fascinated by Napoleon, whom they saw as a figure in the mould of Alexander the Great. Some hoped he would revive the old German empire like a latter-day Charlemagne. To others, he appeared as some kind of avatar. The young Heinrich Heine imagined Christ riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as he watched Napoleon making his entry into his native Düsseldorf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously identified him as ‘the world-spirit on horseback’.

But that moment, just after the victories of Jena and Auerstädt, in which Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army and shook the Prussian state to its core, was to be something of a turning point. The Prussians were shocked and insulted by the French victories, but they also saw them as proof of the superiority of France and her political culture. When Napoleon rode into Berlin he was greeted by crowds which, according to one French officer, were as enthusiastic as those that had welcomed him in Paris on his triumphant return from Austerlitz the previous year. ‘An undefinable feeling, a mixture of pain, admiration and curiosity agitated the crowds which pressed forward as he passed,’ in the words of one eyewitness.¹ Napoleon won the hearts of the Berliners as well as their admiration over the next weeks.

But he treated Prussia and her King worse than he had treated any conquered country before. At Tilsit he publicly humiliated Frederick William by refusing to negotiate with him, and by treating Queen Louise, who had come in person to plead her country’s cause, with insulting gallantry. He did not bother to negotiate, merely summoning the Prussian Minister Count Goltz to let him know his intentions. He told the Minister that he had thought of giving the throne of Prussia to his own brother Jérôme, but out of regard for Tsar Alexander, who had begged him to spare Frederick William, he had graciously decided to leave him in possession of it. But he diminished his realm by taking away most of the territory seized by Prussia from Poland, so that the number of his subjects, which had grown to 9,744,000, was reduced to 4,938,000. Napoleon would brook no discussion, and Frederick William had to submit.²

Having done so, he wrote to the Emperor on 3 August 1807 entreating him to accept Prussia as an ally of France, addressing him as ‘the greatest man of our century’. Napoleon ignored the request. The reason he did not wish to encumber himself with such an ally was that he intended to despoil the country. In the treaty he had foisted on Prussia, he had undertaken to evacuate his troops, but only after all the indemnities agreed upon had been paid. But the level of the indemnities was never agreed, and while vast amounts of money did pour out of the Prussian treasury into French coffers, some 150,000 French troops continued to live off the land, happily helping themselves to everything they required. French military authorities virtually supervised the administration, while the economy plummeted. The Prussian army had been reduced to 42,000 men, with the result that hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers and even officers wandered the land begging for their subsistence.³

Napoleon did consider abolishing Prussia altogether. The kingdom had only emerged as a major power sixty years before (as a result of a French defeat), but it was efficient and expansive, and might one day rally the rest of Germany, which was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But while he continued to exploit and humiliate it in every way, he did not get around to dismantling it. In effect, Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia is paradigmatic of his whole mishandling of the German issue, for which his successors were still paying in 1940.

If Frederick William had every reason to feel aggrieved, most of the other rulers in Germany, grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, had much to thank Napoleon for. For one thing, they were relieved to be rid of the heavy-handed Habsburg overlordship. Although they were now subjected to Napoleon through a series of alliances, they had grown in power within their own realms. Several had even been promoted, and most had gained in territory, becoming proper sovereigns with their own armies.

Landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstädt had seen the size of his fief swell, and became a grand duke; the tiny Landgravate of Baden had also become a grand duchy, and its ruler Frederick Charles willingly married his grandson to Napoleon’s stepdaughter Stephanie de Beauharnais. The Elector of Saxony had seen his realm expand and turn into a kingdom. Bavaria too was enlarged and turned into a kingdom, and in 1809 King Maximillian I acquired more territory, making his realm larger than Prussia. Württemberg, which had been a mere duchy, was extended with every Napoleonic victory and its elector Frederick was promoted to the rank of king in 1806. He was only too happy to see his daughter marry Napoleon’s brother Jérôme.

Jérôme himself ruled over the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon at the heart of Charlemagne’s Germany with its capital at Cassel, extended again in 1810 to include Hanover, Bremen and part of the North Sea coast. ‘What the people of Germany desire impatiently is that individuals who are not noble but have talents should have an equal right to your consideration and to employment, that all kinds of servitude and all intermediary links between the sovereign and the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished,’ Napoleon wrote to Jérôme as he took up the throne of Westphalia. ‘The benefits of the Code Napoléon, transparency of procedures and the jury system will be the distinguishing characteristics of your monarchy. And if I have to be quite open with you, I count more on their effect for the extension and consolidation of your monarchy than on the greatest victories. Your people must enjoy a liberty and equality and a well-being unknown to the other peoples of Germany,’ he continued, making it clear that the security of his throne and that of France were better served by this great benefit she was able to bestow than by any number of armies or fortresses.⁴

Some of the other rulers did follow the French example and adopted the Code Napoléon. King Maximillian of Bavaria even brought in a constitution. Most of them, however, only introduced those French laws which gave them greater power over their subjects, sweeping away in the process venerable institutions and hard-won privileges. But whether they were enlightened liberals or authoritarian despots like the King of Württemberg, their subjects were immeasurably better off in every way than they had been before they had heard of Bonaparte.

Causes for discontent nevertheless began to pile up. The most vociferous opponents of the new arrangements were, unsurprisingly, the horde of imperial counts and knights who had lost their estates and privileges. More liberal elements were disappointed that the changes wrought by Napoleon had not gone far enough. The old free cities and some of the bishoprics, which had been havens of German patriotism, had been awarded to one or other of the rulers Napoleon had favoured. Along with their independence they lost some of their freedoms. Many were disappointed that the old aristocratic oligarchy had not been replaced by republics, and some would have liked to see the creation of one great German state.

The high-handedness of the arrangements, with Napoleon callously shunting provinces from one state to another, could not fail to offend Germans at every level. French became the official language in some areas. French officials were placed in key posts, and the higher ranks in the armies of the various sovereigns were reserved for Frenchmen. The large-scale official looting was also highly offensive. French military impositions and the Continental System, which actually had the effect of stimulating the coalmining and steel industries in Germany, became a cause for everyday grumbling by the very classes that naturally supported the changes brought in by Napoleon.

Cultural factors also played a part. Cosmopolitan and outward-looking as the Germans were, they were generally, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, very pious, and they found the godlessness of revolutionary and Napoleonic France shocking. In Lutheran circles, the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur was even referred to as ‘the sign of the Beast’. Napoleon was more popular amongst Catholic Germans, until June 1809, when he dispossessed the Pope and imprisoned him in Savona, drawing upon his head the Pontiff’s excommunication. The Germans also nurtured an age-old sense of their ‘otherness’, a vision of themselves as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ in contrast to the French, whom they viewed as essentially flighty and artificial, if not actually false and corrupt.⁵

It was not long before these feelings began to have practical consequences. Her catastrophic defeat in 1806 had prompted Prussia to embark on a far-ranging programme of reform and modernisation. Those in charge of carrying it out realised that a real revolution was required, both in the army, where the soldier was transformed from a conscript motivated entirely by ferocious eighteenth-century discipline into a professional inspired by love of his country, and in society as a whole, where an edict passed in 1807 swept away the remnants of feudalism and emancipated the peasantry.

This was to be a revolution from above, carried out, in the words of Frederick William’s Minister Count Karl August von Hardenberg, ‘through the wisdom of those in authority’ rather than by popular impulse. It was also to be a spiritual revolution. One of its chief architects, Baron vom Stein, a mediatised knight, wanted ‘to reawaken collective spirit, civic sense, devotion to the country, the feeling of national honour and independence, so that a vivifying and creative spirit would replace the petty formalism of a mechanical apparatus’.⁶

The process was largely carried out by German nationalists from other parts of the country. Baron vom Stein was from Nassau, Count Hardenberg was from Hanover, as was General Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst; Gebhart Blücher was from Mecklemburg, August Gneisenau was a Saxon. They were inspired by the example of revolutionary France in their determination to infuse a national spirit into every part of the army and administration. But their reforms aimed not so much at emancipating people as at turning them into efficient and enthusiastic servants of the state. Many of them believed that only a strong Prussia would be able to liberate and unite the German lands, and then go on to challenge French cultural and political primacy. A powerful tool in this was to be education, and Wilhelm von Humboldt was put in charge of a programme of reform of the system that culminated in the opening of a university in Berlin in 1810.

At a popular level, the urge to seek regeneration through purification manifested itself through the formation of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, by a group of young officers in Berlin. Its aims were non-political in principle, consisting of self-perfection through education and moral elevation, but since this included the fostering of national consciousness and the encouragement of love of the fatherland, they were deeply so in practice. The membership never exceeded a few hundred, and all they did was sit around talking of insurrection, guerrilla war and revenge. But it is in the very nature of secret societies to appear more powerful and threatening than they actually are, and the Tugendbund had profound symbolic significance.

It also acted as an inspiration and a focus to disaffected elements in other parts of Germany. The German nation’s impotence in the face of the arrogance of the French was underlined as the cost of the Continental System made itself felt. Wounded pride turned into grim determination in the minds of many German patriots, and it received its first encouragement with the news of Bailén in the summer of 1808. ‘The events in Spain have had a great effect and show what can be done by a nation which has force and courage,’ Stein wrote to a friend.⁷

Napoleon was well aware of the new spirit at work in Germany. He was not particularly concerned by it, but he did, during his stay in Erfürt and Weimar at the time of the meeting with Alexander in 1808, make a desultory effort to garner some popularity, inviting professors from the university of Jena to lunch with him. He decorated Goethe with the Légion d’Honneur. He had the poet Christoph Martin Wieland brought to Weimar, and spent upwards of two hours discussing German literature with him during a ball, while a circle of astonished guests looked on. He then walked over to Goethe and engaged him in conversation. The event was commented on in the court bulletin, which explained that ‘the hero of the age thereby gave proof of his attachment to the nation of which he is the protector, and that he esteems its language and literature, which are its national binding force’. But the next day he visited the battlefield of Jena, on which he had made the Germans build a small temple to commemorate his triumph over them.⁸

In 1802, the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel had gone to Paris with the intention of founding an international institute of learning in this new Rome. Now he was looking more to Germany. Goethe, who wore his Légion d’Honneur with pride and used to refer to Napoleon as ‘my Emperor’, was also beginning to complain of the shameful state of submission into which Germany had been forced. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt and the theologian Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher were among those who called for a national German revival and a rejection of the French hegemony. Many of those who had seen Napoleon as a liberator now saw in him nothing but an oppressor.

There had been a predictable surge of national feeling in Austria following her defeat by Napoleon in 1806, with papers and pamphlets calling for a united German front against the French. Austria’s natural desire to avenge the humiliating defeat and regain some of her losses had been powerfully reinforced by the many disgruntled mediatised counts and knights, the deposed north Italian and particularly Piedmontese nobles and the many German patriots from the Confederation of the Rhine who had taken refuge and in many cases service there. In January 1808 the Emperor Francis married for a third time. His bride, Maria Ludovica of Habsburg, was the daughter of the Captain-General of Lombardy, who had been thrown out by Napoleon, and this was not the least of her reasons for loathing the French.

The new government under Count Philip Stadion appointed by Francis in 1808 began preparing for a confrontation with France, instituting, amongst other things, a national militia, the Landwehr. This war of revenge, Stadion made clear, was to be a national, German one, aimed at expelling France and her influence from central Europe altogether. While Maria Ludovica and a poet and fitness enthusiast called Caroline Pichler reinvented a supposedly traditional German form of dress, the Tracht, the historian Johannes von Müller, the publicist Friedrich von Gentz and others underpinned the anti-French arguments with facts. They made much of what they saw as the struggle of the Spanish people against foreign domination, holding it up as an example for the Germans to follow. Authors of every kind were invited to police headquarters, where they would be asked to use their pens in the national cause, and publishers of periodicals were instructed to print patriotic poems and articles, on pain of having their publications closed down. Unbidden, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist published ‘Die Hermannschlacht’, a poetic appeal to Germans and Austrians alike to rise up against the French and to punish all pro-Napoleonic ‘traitors’.⁹

In April 1809, judging Napoleon to be bogged down in Spain, Austria invaded Bavaria and launched a war for the ‘liberation’ of Germany. ‘We fight to assert the independence of the Austrian monarchy, to restore to Germany the independence and national honour that belong to her,’ declared Stadion in his manifesto. The commander-in-chief Archduke Charles issued a proclamation penned by Friedrich Schlegel which dwelt on the pan-German character of the war, representing it as an opportunity for the redemption and regeneration of the nation.¹⁰

Their call did not go unanswered. A Prussian officer, Frederick Charles de Katt, attempted to seize Magdeburg with a gang of partisans, but failed and was forced to take refuge in Austrian Bohemia. Colonel Dornberg, a Hessian serving in King Jérôme’s royal guard who had been plotting with Stein, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, intended to seize Jérôme and call the population to arms. In the event, he only managed to raise six to eight hundred men and was easily defeated. This was bad news for Major Schill, a Prussian officer who had distinguished himself in 1806–1807 by his determined defence of Kolberg. On 28 April 1809 he marched out of Berlin with his regiment, telling his men that he was going to invade Westphalia and evict the French from Germany. He was expecting to link up with Dornberg, who should by then have seized Jérôme, but he soon found himself facing superior forces and was obliged to retreat to the Baltic coast, where he hung on, vainly hoping for British seaborne support, until he was killed in a skirmish on 31 May.

An altogether more serious response came in the Tyrol, where resentment of the French ran much deeper. The area had traditionally been governed by the Habsburgs with much respect for local tradition and idiosyncrasies, but Bavaria, to which it was transferred by Napoleon in 1806, operated a more centralised administration. The locals were offended by higher rates of taxation and by enforced conscription. The parish clergy did not approve of the secularisation taking place in Bavaria, adding to the discontent. In January 1809 Andreas Hofer and a handful of other Tyrolese went to Vienna to prepare an insurrection to coincide with Austria’s invasion of Bavaria. On 9 April beacons were duly lit and the Tyrol rebelled. A Bavarian corps of two thousand men was forced to capitulate, and Austrian forces occupied Innsbrück. But they were soon ejected from it by the French under Marshal Lefèbvre.

On 21–22 May Napoleon fought the twin battles of Aspern-Essling against the Austrians under Archduke Charles. Although technically a French victory, they reverberated through Europe as a defeat. Napoleon suffered a personal loss in the death of Marshal Lannes, and had to bring Lefèbvre back to join the main army. This allowed the revolt in the Tyrol to erupt with renewed vigour, under the slogan ‘God and the Emperor’, which had enemies of Napoleon all over Europe rubbing their hands at what they thought was a new Spain.

At this point, the Duke of Brunswick-Oels appeared on the scene. His father had been ignominiously defeated at Auerstädt in 1806, and he had vowed eternal hatred to the French. He had gone to Vienna, where he obtained a subsidy in order to raise a 20,000-strong ‘Legion of Vengeance’ with which he intended to liberate northern Germany. He now sallied forth, defeated the Saxons at Zittau, seized Dresden on 11 June and Leipzig ten days after that. On 21 July he marched on, through Brunswick and Hanover, but he met with little enthusiasm, and was eventually forced to take refuge on a British man-of-war in the Baltic.

In the meantime, Napoleon had won the conclusive battle of Wagram, and Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Vienna, which reduced it to a state of powerlessness. Her image as a potential liberator of Germany was shattered, and she settled down meekly within the Napoleonic system. Francis was only too happy to pay tribute by giving his favourite daughter to the Corsican ogre, and the marriage was hailed as a happy event by his people.

Austria’s failure stemmed in large measure from her inability to engage the support of Russia, and above all to draw Prussia into the war against the French. The pan-German plotters had been active in this respect, and Vienna had been in close touch with Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and the other Prussian reformers, who were doing everything to bounce Frederick William into declaring war. But the pusillanimous Prussian King was afraid. He was afraid of the French, and he was afraid of starting a ‘national’ war that might end up by costing him his own throne. It was only when, with Schill marching into Westphalia and popular opinion at a high pitch of excitement, he thought he might lose his throne if did not act that he considered going to war.

One of the stipulations of the Treaty of Vienna was that Francis had to banish all French émigrés, Piedmontese, and Germans from other states who had settled or taken service in Austria. A number, including Karl von Grolmann, a Prussian officer who had come to fight for Austria, now headed for Spain, where they could carry on their crusade against Napoleonic France. Many more took the St Petersburg road, already trodden by some of those German patriots who had gone to Prussia in the hope that she might become the champion of Germany. With both Prussia and Austria discredited, Alexander was beginning to look like the only alternative. He was still an ally of Napoleon, and had acted as such by sending an army to threaten Austria during the recent war. But he had done only the minimum demanded of him. Assisted by large doses of wishful thinking, many of those opposed to Napoleon and French hegemony had begun to see in Alexander a tutelary angel of their own particular cause.

One of the first to fall for Alexander, when she had met him in 1805, was Frederick William’s Queen, Louise, who saw him as ‘a Schiller hero come down to earth’. ‘In you, perfection is incarnate,’ she wrote to him; ‘one must know you to know perfection.’ The feeling did not go unrequited, which was probably what had saved Prussia from extinction at Tilsit. But there was little more that Alexander could do for her and her dismal husband. In January 1809 he invited them to St Petersburg, where he honoured and fêted them, thereby sending out a strong signal to all Napoleon’s enemies in Europe. The mutual esteem between Alexander and Louise grew. When he heard of her death in Prussia in July 1810, he saw her as a victim of Napoleon’s barbaric oppression and reacted with requisite chivalry. ‘I swear to you that I shall avenge her death and shall make certain that her murderer pays for his crime,’ he is alleged to have said to the Prussian Minister in St Petersburg.¹¹

Alexander was also viewed as a potential saviour by other humiliated or dispossessed monarchs and nobles, including the kings of France, Sardinia, the Two Sicilies, Spain, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, a gaggle of dispossessed Germans, as well as hordes of French, Piedmontese, Spanish and other émigrés.

This did not prevent elements more or less violently opposed to the ancien régime from looking to him as well. Many of the Germans who placed their hopes in Alexander were republican or at least liberal nationalists in conflict with the Prussian monarchy. The same went for Tugendbunders and even the Freemasons, who were regarded by Frederick William as dangerous subversives. Among the Spaniards and Italians who placed their hopes in the Tsar were liberals who would in time be clamped in irons by their own monarchs.

Other unlikely members of the club were French liberal opponents of Napoleon, such as Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, who, while subscribing to most of the achievements of the French Revolution, hated him for his despotic tendencies and for the cultural arrogance with which he treated Europe. Her bestselling novel Corinne, published in 1807, was a thinly veiled criticism of French doings in Italy, while her treatise on German literature, De l’Allemagne, was so implicitly critical that the first printing was confiscated on Napoleon’s orders.

His behaviour and his policies were rapidly losing Napoleon the dominion over hearts and minds he had enjoyed in earlier years, while a great internationale of alienated people all over Europe was gathering, bound together only by their detestation of him. Even Wellington was beginning to see and to portray his war against Napoleon in Spain as a part of some kind of moral crusade.¹²

None of this was of any immediate consequence, and Napoleon’s position in Europe was still paramount. He controlled his vast imperium through a web of loyalty, beginning with his crowned brothers. He had created all over Europe a new international aristocracy beholden to him, endowed with fiefs which had fallen vacant through the mediatisation of the Holy Roman Empire or through conquest, and by 1812 the imperial almanac listed four princes, thirty dukes, nearly four hundred counts and over a thousand barons, not including the titles Napoleon had given to members of his own family.

It is also worth noting that he had many natural allies bound to him by self-interest of one sort or another. Frederick William and Hardenberg feared the social upheaval that might result from any national revival more than they resented Napoleon. Others in Germany and Europe as a whole feared the relentless onward march of Russian expansion and believed that a weakening of French influence would entail Russian hegemony, and distrusted Alexander’s motives.¹³

Napoleon’s spies nevertheless kept a close watch on potential subversives all over Germany and on the support they were receiving from Russia. By the summer of 1810 he was growing irritated by the numbers of Russians visiting European courts and capitals trying to incite people against France. In Vienna, the former ambassador Count Razumovsky, the salonière Princess Bagration and Napoleon’s old Corsican enemy Pozzo di Borgo, now in Russian uniform, made up a real propaganda network between them. Others were rallying anti-Napoleonic sentiment in the watering places of Germany. He asked Alexander to recall them all to Russia, but received scant satisfaction.

In November 1810 Talleyrand’s successor as Foreign Minister, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, reported to Napoleon that ‘a vast revolution’ was brewing in Germany, fuelled by national hatred of France. This gathered in strength as tension between France and Russia mounted, and as the Continental System began to bite. Although he tended to make light of the threat, Napoleon was beginning to take more serious note of it, and declared his intention of ‘uprooting the German national spirit’. And the only way he would be able to ‘uproot’ this burgeoning growth was by cutting off its chief source of nourishment, which came from Russia.¹⁴

4
The Drift to War

At Erfürt, Napoleon had in an offhand way asked Caulaincourt what he thought Alexander might think of a dynastic union between the two empires. He did not seem to attach much importance to the matter, but came back to it a couple of times. This did not surprise Caulaincourt. Ever since Napoleon had assumed the imperial crown, the question of an heir had presented itself, and as the Empress Josephine was no longer of childbearing age, there had been much talk of a divorce. After Tilsit, gossip had it that he might marry one of the Tsar’s sisters to cement the new entente.

Alexander had two unmarried sisters, the Grand Duchess Catherine, who was charming, witty and highly regarded, and the Grand Duchess Anna, who was only fourteen years old. Before his assassination, their father had issued a special ukaz giving his consort, now the Dowager Empress, absolute power to decide whom their daughters married. She loathed Napoleon, and in 1808, no doubt alarmed by the gossip, quickly found a husband for Catherine. Shortly after Alexander’s return from Erfürt, the Grand Duchess was married to Prince George of Holstein-Oldenburg.

This did not bother Napoleon, who had anyway been thinking of the younger sister. He was in no hurry, and he wanted to keep his options open. It also suited Alexander, permitting him to express a degree of enthusiasm for the idea of the marriage, knowing that he need not commit himself for some years.

But as the cracks in the alliance began to show, Napoleon decided to paper them over with a dynastic union. At the end of November 1809 he instructed Caulaincourt to approach Alexander with a request for his sister’s hand. Alexander’s response was positive, but he took the matter no further. When Caulaincourt pressed him for a definite answer, he asked for two weeks to consider the matter and to gain his mother’s approval. At the end of the two weeks, he asked for another ten days. Then another week. At the beginning of February 1810 he was still stalling, saying that his mother objected on the grounds that Anna was too young. Napoleon, who felt insulted by the lack of enthusiasm he sensed in Alexander and was beginning to suspect that he would never agree to the match, decided to pre-empt the humiliation of a refusal by turning to Austria instead.

He had sounded out the Austrian court on the subject in a vague way in the previous year, so he could now act with speed. After reading the despatches from Caulaincourt describing Alexander’s negative response on the morning of 6 February, he summoned Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, and pinned him down for a binding decision straight away. Schwarzenberg seized what he believed was a historic chance, and, overstepping his powers, gave him the reply he wanted. The courier bearing Napoleon’s letter to Alexander notifying him of the change of plan crossed with one from the Tsar bearing a letter in which he in effect refused Napoleon’s offer, explaining that his mother felt there could be no question of marrying off Anna for at least two years.

When he heard the news of Napoleon’s betrothal to Marie-Louise, Alexander assumed that he had been carrying on parallel negotiations with Austria all along, and was stung by the apparent duplicity. It is almost certain that Napoleon would have preferred to marry the Grand Duchess Anna, as it would have had tremendous resonance as a symbolic marriage of East and West reuniting the two halves of the Roman Empire. But as his marriage to Marie-Louise went ahead, absorbing the attention of Europe with its pomp and éclat, Alexander was made to look ridiculous in front of his own people. He had stood up for the entente with Napoleon in the face of almost universal opposition at home, only to end up in the role of jilted party. And the marital junketing going on in Paris appeared to hide a deeper threat.

At the marriage feast the Austrian Chancellor Count Metternich, who was representing his imperial master, stood up and raised his glass ‘To the King of Rome!’, thereby expressing the hope that Napoleon would produce an heir, and ceding the old imperial title to the house of Bonaparte. From St Petersburg it looked very much as though France and Austria were entering into an alliance even closer than the special relationship forged at Tilsit. An unpleasant sign of the way public opinion was swinging was that a Russian loan which Alexander was trying to float on the Paris exchange in order to raise much-needed funds suddenly found no subscribers. And the new situation had other implications.¹

When Alexander was approached on the subject of the marriage of his sister, he had let it be known that he would make his agreement conditional on a convention ruling out forever the restoration of a Kingdom of Poland. Napoleon had responded positively, quite happy to trade Poland for Anna. But now Alexander had lost his main bargaining counter in this matter of crucial importance.

Napoleon’s creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 had, in effect, introduced the first material conflict of interest between France and Russia. The new political unit inevitably raised the possibility of a restoration of the Kingdom of Poland. Such a restoration would entail the loss by Russia of some if not all of her acquisitions at the expense of Poland in the partitions – an area of 463,000 square kilometres with a population of some seven million.

The creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw had also raised the spectre of another threat to Russia through the introduction of the Code Napoléon. This transformed social relationships and would lead to the full emancipation of the peasants. The landowners of Russia, 95 per cent of whose population were serfs, could not look on such a neighbour with equanimity.

The Poles, whether they were citizens of the Grand Duchy or not, certainly saw it as the nucleus of a restored Kingdom of Poland, and there was much dreaming and plotting in provinces still under Russian or Austrian rule. When Austria went to war with France in 1809, one of her armies had seized Warsaw but had then been obliged to fall back, pursued by the Poles, who proceeded to march into Galicia, a part of Poland annexed by Austria.

In the peace settlement, Napoleon had allowed the Poles to incorporate a small part of the liberated territory into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This alarmed the Austrians, who feared they might in time have to give up the rest, and annoyed the Poles, who felt they should have been allowed to take back the whole area they had liberated. They were, moreover, outraged by the fact that Napoleon had also ceded a piece of it to Russia as a sweetener.

But the Russians were not mollified. Caulaincourt reported that everyone in St Petersburg, from the Tsar down, was adamant that no part of Galicia should be added to the Grand Duchy, as this would set a dangerous precedent. ‘All the news coming from Moscow and the provinces confirms that this agitation is universal: it is necessary to take up arms and die, they are saying, rather than suffer the reunification of Galicia with the Grand Duchy,’ he wrote. And the issue transcended loyalty to the Tsar, whom many did not trust.* ‘There is not the slightest restraint in the allegations being made against the Emperor Alexander; there is open talk of assassinating him,’ reported Caulaincourt. ‘I have not seen minds so agitated since my arrival in Petersburg.’²

Napoleon never had any intention of restoring Poland – all his statements to the contrary date from later, when he was trying to keep the Poles on his side or to pluck straws of self-justification from the wind. He therefore proposed to Alexander that they sign a joint convention binding themselves not to encourage the Poles in their dreams. As a sign of his discouragement of Polish aspirations, he sent the best units of the army of the Grand Duchy, the Legion of the Vistula, to fight in Spain.

But Alexander produced a draft convention which would excise the words ‘Poland’ and ‘Poles’ from all official correspondence, ban the wearing of Polish decorations and forbid the use of Polish emblems in the Grand Duchy. He wanted Napoleon to pledge that he would never allow the restoration of Poland, and that he would take up arms against the Poles if they attempted it. Napoleon replied that while he could declare his opposition to such a revival, he would not and could not undertake to hinder it. The wording suggested by Russia was nonsensical, as it bound France to pledges she would be in no position to carry out. He pointed out that he could have re-established Poland if he had wished to in 1807, and added the whole of Galicia to the Grand Duchy in 1809, but had not done so because he had no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Poles had fought loyally alongside the French for over a decade, inspired by their hopes of a free motherland and by France’s sympathy to their cause. To sign the text suggested by Russia would ‘compromise the honour and dignity of France’, as Napoleon put it to Champagny.³

Alexander continued to insist on his draft rather than the more general one proposed by Napoleon. Hoping to put pressure on the Emperor to acquiesce, he dropped hints that he might not find it so easy to keep up the blockade against Britain without wholehearted support from him. But his increasingly urgent insistence with regard to the convention, as well as the suspicions he voiced, revealed how little he trusted Napoleon, who began to wonder what lay behind it all. ‘One cannot conceive what aim Russia might have in mind in refusing a version which accords her everything she wants in favour of one which is dogmatic, irregular, contrary to common prudence, and which, ultimately, the Emperor cannot subscribe to without dishonouring himself,’ he wrote to Champagny on 24 April 1810.⁴

On 30 June, when Champagny brought a communication from St Petersburg with a list of complaints and a renewed demand that he sign the Russian draft of the convention, Napoleon lost his temper. He summoned the Russian ambassador, Prince Kurakin. ‘What does Russia mean by such language?’ he demanded. ‘Does she want war? Why these continual complaints? Why these insulting suspicions? If I had wished to restore Poland, I would have said so and would not have withdrawn my troops from Germany. Is Russia trying to prepare me for her defection? I will be at war with her the day she makes peace with England.’ He then dictated a letter to Caulaincourt in St Petersburg telling him that if Russia was going to start blackmailing him and using the Polish question as an excuse to seek a rapprochement with Britain, there would be war.⁵

It was the first time Napoleon had mentioned war, and it was a remark thrown out in the heat of the moment. The last thing he wanted was war with Russia. Russia, on the other hand, was increasingly looking forward to one. Russian society had been hostile to the French alliance from the start, and attitudes had only hardened over the years. The reasons were cultural and psychological rather than strategic.

Russia was a young society, and its upper echelons consisted of a rich social and ethnic mix. At court, in the administration and in the army old boyar families jostled with a new aristocracy whose origins lay in the political instability and culture of favouritism of the past century, which had produced grand aristocratic families such as the Razumovskys and the Orlovs, only a couple of generations from the servants’ quarters or the barrack room. To this, conquest and annexations had added Germanic Baltic barons, Polish nobles, Georgian and Balkan princes, while the need for talent in the rapidly expanding state had sucked in immigrants from many lands. It was a mobile society, highly dynamic, but also beset by cultural insecurity.

Over the past hundred years educated Russians had drawn heavily on French culture. To them more than to any other European society, France was the fount of civilisation. The nobility were brought up by French tutors on French literature, and spoke French amongst themselves.* Few of them had any more Russian than was needed to give orders to servants. French books were as widely read in Moscow and St Petersburg as in Paris. Fluency in French was mandatory for anyone wishing to make a career in the army or the administration. The only senior officer in the Russian army in 1812 not to speak French fluently was General Miloradovich, who was of Serbian extraction, and Alexander prided himself on the fact that his French was better than Napoleon’s.⁶

Underpinning this francocentrism was a huge colony of teachers, artists, musicians, tailors, dressmakers, cabinetmakers, jewellers, dancing masters, hairdressers, cooks and servants, some of whose parents or grandparents had settled in Russia and established dynasties. From the beginning of the revolution in France they were joined by thousands of French émigrés, some from the highest aristocracy, many of whom took service in the Russian army.†

Knowledge of French meant much more than just a linguistic skill. It implied familiarity with the literature of the past hundred years and with the ideas of the Enlightenment, as well as with all the pseudo-spiritual and occult fads of the day. Freemasonry had spread through the upper reaches of Russian society, and its more spiritual offshoots, such as Martinism,‡ were embraced with enthusiasm. Alexander himself had close relations with many Masons, and even founded a lodge consisting of himself, Rodion Kochelev, a follower of Saint-Martin and Swedenborg, and Aleksandr Nikolaevich Galitzine (whom he had also appointed Procurator of the Holy Synod). This seemingly paradoxical situation was symptomatic of a wider malaise, for the dependence on French culture sat uneasily with a visceral attachment to traditional Orthodox values. And while French culture ruled and society spoke French, dressed French and aped the French in everything, there had always been a concurrent resentment of France herself. The revolution had magnified this resentment, and the events of 1805–1807 had turned it into something of a national movement.

For most young officers, military service had meant little more than attending parades (the non-commissioned officers did all the training, so all they had to do was lead their men) and court festivities. The rest of the time was given over to gaming, drinking and womanising. They underwent hardly any training or military instruction. ‘We had no sense of morality, an entirely false conception of honour, very little true education and, in almost every case, a surfeit of foolish high spirits which I can only call depraved,’ wrote Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a junior officer of the Chevaliergardes.⁷

They marched away to war in 1805 as though they were off to a hunting party. Some, like Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, dreamed of emulating Napoleon. They were routed at Austerlitz. They were defeated at Pultusk and two other minor battles in the following year; in 1807 they lost the bloody battle of Eylau, and were finally vanquished at Friedland.

Most of the Russian officers took these defeats very badly. The campaign had been a sobering experience, and they had begun to grow up. Even the most depraved of the aristocratic layabouts felt a spark of patriotism flare inside them, and the valour of their soldiers had awakened a novel respect for these serfs in uniform. They felt humiliated at the apparent facility with which the French could inflict defeat on them however hard they fought, and their resentment of them was heavily tinged with an inferiority complex which shines through their writings on the subject. Lieutenant Denis Davidov and his brother officers were outraged when the Comte Louis de Périgord, the bearer of a letter from Marshal Berthier to General Bennigsen, did not remove his fur kolpak when ushered into the Russian general’s presence. They saw it as an insult to Russia’s honour, and developed a dogged determination to go on fighting until they finally won a battle against France. They regarded the peace of Tilsit as something akin to a betrayal.⁸

The wounded pride of these officers was reflected by a sense of humiliation felt by sections of the nobility back home. Once nations have embarked on the pursuit of great-power status they begin to develop a curious perspective on what represents a threat to their very existence. And the Russians were fast catching up with the French in this respect. ‘Our land was free, but the air had grown heavier, we walked about freely but could not breathe,’ complained Nikolai Grech after Tilsit. ‘Hatred of the French grew apace.’ But there was more to it than mere hatred. There were the beginnings of a sense of mission. Ordinary backwoods xenophobia came together with anti-Masonic paranoia and the first stirrings of Romanticism to create a conviction that Russia was somehow different from other European countries, more spiritually alive, and that she should reject the mainstream (i.e. French) culture of Europe and go her own way.⁹

There was a flurry of pamphlets, passionately argued, semireligious, deeply anti-French, advocating a return to Russian values, and in 1808 Sergei Glinka founded a new periodical, Russkii Viestnik, which was to be ‘purely Russian’, and would oppose the treacherous philosophy of the West with the manners and virtues of old Russia, an imagined culture of idyllic innocence. Defenders of the Russian language joined the fray, and a discussion club, Biesieda, was founded by a group including the poet Gavril Romanovich Derzhavin to combat foreign influences in literature. Patriots denounced the employment of French tutors and chambermaids as ‘gallomania’, and the retired Admiral Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov called for children to be brought up in traditional Russian ways. Alexander’s sister Catherine, whose German husband George of Oldenburg had been given the post of Governor of Tver, Yaroslavl and Novgorod, somehow contrived to become the belle idéale of the most fervent champions of Russian culture. They included the former Chancellor Count Fyodor Rostopchin and the historian Nikolai Karamzin, who used to refer to her as ‘the demi-goddess of Tver’.¹⁰

In these circumstances, the creation by Napoleon of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was as a red rag to a bull. Russia had actually gained a piece of Polish territory in the operation, but territory was not the only consideration. Orthodox Russian traditionalists tended to regard the Catholic and unmistakably Western Poles as the rotten apples in the Slav basket. Now the Polish inhabitants of Russia’s western provinces, some of whom had only become subjects of the Tsar a dozen years back, could potentially form a terrible fifth column of Western corruption inside the Russian empire.

This kind of thinking gave rise to a paranoid conviction, voiced by Sergei Glinka and others, that France under the satanic leadership of Napoleon was bent on the subjugation of Russia, and that Tilsit and indeed any peace concluded with her was but a truce putting off the terrible day. The sense of paranoia was only intensified when, at the end of May 1810, the Swedes elected Napoleon’s Marshal and kinsman, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, Prince of Ponte-Corvo, to the position of Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Sweden.

With its colony in Pomerania, Sweden still ruled over more than half of the entire coastline of the Baltic Sea. She had lost Finland to Russia in 1809 and a constitutional crisis resulted in the half-mad Gustav IV being toppled in favour of Charles XIII. The new King was senile and childless, and in their search for a successor the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice. He declined to involve himself in their internal affairs, and in the end they chose a man they believed he might have nominated, and whom they considered to be agreeable to him. Their mistake was to have momentous consequences.

Bernadotte was an old colleague of Napoleon. When the two were no more than aspiring officers he had succeeded, and possibly supplanted, the future Emperor in the affections of the lovely Désirée Clary, whom he had subsequently married. Désirée’s sister Julie had married Napoleon’s brother Joseph, which might have made for a happy family. But it did not. Bernadotte was jealous of his colleague’s meteoric rise. While he happily accepted the rank of Marshal of France and the princely title Napoleon had bestowed on him, he cloaked his resentment in righteous disapproval of Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial purple and his pursuit of conquest. Napoleon for his part had a low opinion of Bernadotte and once said that he would have had him shot on at least three occasions had it not been for the bond of kinship.¹¹

When Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden, Napoleon realised that he might prove less than cooperative, but assumed he would behave as a Frenchman and as a Swede. Sweden had traditionally been a close ally of France, and her natural enemies had always been Russia and Prussia. Only the previous year Russia had invaded and forced her to give up Finland after a protracted war. The Swedes’ friendly feelings towards France were put under a certain amount of strain by the Continental System, but their long coastline permitted them to breach it and trade with Britain, while their Pomeranian colony on the northern coast of Germany meant that they could sell on to the German market with profit.

The Russians could only view the combination of the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon’s marriage to the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and the recent developments in Sweden as aggressive encirclement, and Bernadotte’s election was greeted with uproar.

All these feelings were given added poignancy by the economic hardships caused by the Continental System, which had turned into a regular tariff auction. Britain had responded to Napoleon’s Berlin decree of 1806 banning her ships from all ports under his control by declaring that any ship trading with a port from which her ships were excluded was fair game for confiscation by the Royal Navy. French, Spanish, Dutch and German traders tried to get around this by using neutral American vessels to carry goods, but Britain decreed that no vessel could be considered neutral if it were carrying goods between hostile ports. In order to get around this, American ships would pick up their cargoes, take them to an American port, unload them, reload them and take them to a European port. Britain refused to accept this as legal. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by decreeing that any ship which had put in at a British port or paid British duty was automatically liable to seizure. On 1 March 1809 the United States closed its ports to all British and French shipping, but Napoleon managed to reach an agreement with the Americans to the detriment of Britain, which would ultimately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the United States in 1812.

Russia had little industry, and was dependent on imports for a huge variety of everyday items. These now had to be smuggled in via Sweden or through smaller ports on Russia’s Baltic coastline. Her exports – timber, grain, hemp and so on – were bulky and difficult to smuggle. The Russian rouble fell in value against most European currencies by some 25 per cent, which made foreign goods exorbitantly expensive. Between 1807 and 1811, the price of coffee more than doubled, sugar became more than three times as expensive, and a bottle of champagne went from 3.75 to twelve roubles. Russian noblemen had to pay through the nose not only for champagne, but for everything they did not produce at home, and they could not find a market for the produce of their own estates.¹²

This cocktail of hurt pride and financial hardship produced ever more violent criticism of Alexander’s policy and of his State Secretary, Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky, who was virtual prime minister. Speransky was the son of a priest, a very able man of lowly social background, ascetic and devoid of any social or financial ambition. A radical at heart, he believed autocracy to be incompatible with the rule of law, and would have liked to carry out far-reaching reform of the structure of the state. But he accepted the limitations imposed by his position and concentrated on modernising the administration. Soon after his appointment in 1807 he had promulgated reform of the legal system, which was never implemented, of government finances and of the administration.

The nobility, who sensed an enemy in him, did everything to undermine his position. There were soon rumours circulating to the effect that Speransky was a Freemason and revolutionary secretly in league with Napoleon, and that he meant to bring the whole social system crashing down.

The Tsar of Russia was theoretically an all-powerful autocrat, but his relationship with his people was a complex and ambivalent one. There was a mystical, sacred foundation to his power, since he was both his subjects’ religious hierarch and the representative of God on earth. This imposed strong bonds of obedience to him on them. But if a Tsar was felt to have betrayed his divinely ordained purpose, he became something worse than just a wicked Tsar – he became a devil who must be destroyed. At the secular level, his position was just as ambiguous. The very fact that all power was concentrated in him meant that he had no instruments with which to impose his will. He was thus in a curious way dependent on the goodwill of the nobility, which staffed the army and all the organs of state, and therefore on public opinion. And public opinion was by now strongly against Alexander and his policies on virtually every point. He was seen by many as the author of Russia’s shame, and he realised that the only way he could wipe away that shame was through war. The conquest of Finland had helped slightly, but it was not enough.

On 26 December 1809, while he was assuring Napoleon that he would do everything to make the marriage to his sister Anna possible and begging him to bury the Polish question forever, Alexander summoned Prince Adam Czartoryski, a close friend and a prominent Polish patriot who had ten years before elaborated a plan for the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland under Russia’s protection. The Tsar told him that he would now like to put this plan into action, by ‘liberating’ the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and uniting it with the Polish provinces currently under Russian rule, and asked Czartoryski to sound out the Poles on the subject. The Prince did not need to do much research. He knew that the plan could only have worked in 1805 or in 1809, during Napoleon’s war with Austria. He nevertheless went to Warsaw and saw the man who would be the key figure in such a plan – Prince Józef Poniatowski, commander-in-chief of the Grand Duchy’s army and nephew of the last King of Poland. Predictably, Poniatowski rejected the Russian proposal.¹³

Czartoryski reported back to Alexander personally in April 1810. He pointed out that many Poles had got wind of Alexander’s negotiations with Napoleon to prevent the restoration of Poland, and that this hardly inspired confidence. But the Tsar clung to his view that the Poles could be won over. ‘We are now in April, so we could begin in nine months’ time,’ he concluded.¹⁴

Caulaincourt noticed during the winter of 1809–1810 that Alexander was less and less amenable to French policies, and by the spring of 1810 he was finding the friendship he had built up with the Tsar increasingly at odds with his ambassadorial role. He began to hint to Napoleon that he would like to be recalled. But Napoleon paid no heed to his warnings or his wishes.

He had persuaded himself that Britain was suffering economically, and that a few more months would probably bring her to the negotiating table. He therefore adopted a more aggressive attitude to the application of the Continental System. His correspondence bristles with detailed instructions to the rulers and administrators of the coastal areas under his control on which ships and goods to impound and which to allow through. He suggests alternative sources of the supplies cut off and explains the principle behind his policy, exhorting all to enforce it with strictness.

Adding insult to injury, Napoleon decided to recoup some of the cost to France of the system at the expense of others. He took a leaf from the smugglers’ book and licensed a number of merchants to import goods from Britain (for which they paid a hefty price to his treasury), and these goods were then exported overland, many of them to Russia. Such procedures left Alexander with little option but to defy the system openly. On 31 December 1810 he issued an ukaz opening Russian ports to American ships and at the same time imposing hefty tariffs on (French) manufactured goods imported overland into Russia. British goods were soon pouring into Germany from Russia. The Continental System was in tatters. Yet Napoleon refused to accept this. ‘The Continental System is uppermost in his mind, he is more taken up with it than ever,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain early in 1811; ‘too much so perhaps!’¹⁵

In his determination to control all points of import, Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic ports. In January 1811 he did the same with the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose ruler was the father of Alexander’s brother-in-law. He did offer him another German province as compensation, but this was refused. Alexander was outraged, and felt personally insulted – his supposed ally was now dethroning members of his family, thereby reinforcing the view, widely held in Russia, that Tilsit was not an alliance but a subjection. He felt he had to act, if only to safeguard his position at home. ‘Blood must flow again,’ he told his sister Catherine.¹⁶

On 6 January 1811 he wrote once more to Czartoryski, asking him to try persuading the Poles to accept him as their liberator and restorer. His Minister of War General Barclay de Tolly was already drawing up plans for a strike into the Grand Duchy followed by an advance into Prussia to link up with the Prussian forces.* In a second letter to Czartoryski, Alexander detailed the troops he had already massed on the border to support the operation: 106,500 in the front line supported by a second line of 134,000 men, and a third army of 44,000 men supplemented by 80,000 recruits who had already finished their training. These forces could, in case of need, be supplemented with a few divisions from the army operating against the Turks in Moldavia. ‘There can be no doubt that Napoleon is trying to provoke Russia into a break with him, hoping that I will make the mistake of being the aggressor,’ he explained. ‘It would indeed be a mistake in the present circumstances, and I am determined not to make it – but everything would look different if the Poles were to rally to me. Reinforced with the 50,000 men whom I could count on from them, by the 50,000 Prussians who could then join me without risk, and by the moral revolution which would unfailingly result in Europe, I would be in a position to reach the Oder without striking a blow.’¹⁷

Alexander’s troop movements could hardly be kept secret, and by the summer of 1811 the forthcoming war was being widely discussed all over Russia. His agitation in Poland, as well as the soundings his diplomats were taking in Vienna and Berlin, were no secret either. This has prompted some to conclude that he was in fact bluffing. But whether he meant to attack at this stage or not, he had taken a step which could not fail to lead to armed confrontation.¹⁸

Napoleon had to take the threat seriously. He had already been alerted by Poniatowski to Russian troop concentrations along the border of the Grand Duchy in the autumn of 1810, and he was desperately aware of the weakness of his forces in the area. He immediately instructed commanders on the spot to draw in exposed units and supply dumps against a surprise attack, and designated a fallback position along the Vistula while he set about strengthening his forces in Poland and Germany. He began bombarding Marshal Davout, in command of the French troops in northern Germany, with letters telling him to fortify strongpoints and put his men on a war footing. On 3 January 1811 he began regrouping his forces with the aim of strengthening the front line. ‘I considered that war had been declared,’ he later affirmed. Most people in France too considered it only a matter of time. ‘There is much talk of war here; sooner or later it must come to that, and now the time seems propitious,’ an officer of the Chevau-Légers of the Imperial Guard wrote from the depot at Chantilly to his sister on 9 April 1811.¹⁹

At the same time, Napoleon did everything he could to avert a conflict. In February he instructed Caulaincourt to demand an interview with Alexander and his Foreign Minister Rumiantsev, and to assure them that he wanted the alliance to continue, and that he would never make war on Russia unless she were to ally herself with Britain. In April he repeated this in his instructions to General Marquis Jacques Law de Lauriston, the new ambassador he was sending to St Petersburg to replace Caulaincourt, who had finally been recalled. Napoleon also took every opportunity to tell Kurakin and any other senior Russian figure who passed through Paris that he wanted peace and friendship with their country. ‘I have no wish to make war on Russia,’ he declared to Prince Shuvalov during an interview at Saint Cloud in May 1811. ‘It would be a crime on my part, for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thanks to God, lost my head, I am not mad.’ To Colonel Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, a trusted aide-de-camp whom the Tsar had sent to Paris a couple of times with letters for Napoleon, he repeatedly stated that he had no intention of fatiguing himself or his soldiers on behalf of Poland, and ‘he formally declared and swore by everything he held holiest in the world that the re-establishment of that kingdom was the very least of his concerns’.²⁰

But Alexander could not lay aside the Polish problem so easily. When he realised that he could not count on the Poles to undo Napoleon, he reverted to the idea of cementing his relationship with him over the body of the Polish question. Rumiantsev proposed to Caulaincourt just before the latter left Russia that they put the Duchy of Oldenburg and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw into a sack, shake it about, and see what dropped out. What he was suggesting was that Napoleon indemnify his uncle by marriage for the loss of Oldenburg with a piece of the Grand Duchy. Napoleon responded with anger to this proposal, and refused to consider it, although he did at one stage contemplate giving the throne of a restored Kingdom of Poland to Alexander’s brother Constantine as a solution.²¹

When Caulaincourt’s travelling chaise rolled into Paris on the morning of 5 June 1811, it drove straight on to Saint Cloud, where Napoleon was staying. Within minutes of it having trundled into the courtyard, Caulaincourt was ushered into Napoleon’s presence, in which he spent the next seven hours. His account of the interview, noted down that very evening, provides an illuminating insight into Napoleon’s thinking at this crucial stage.²²

Caulaincourt told Napoleon that in his view Alexander desired peace but could not be expected to subject his people to the rigours of the Continental System, and needed reassurance on the subject of Poland. He also warned Napoleon that Alexander was no longer the malleable youth of Tilsit, and that he would not let himself be intimidated. Alexander had told him that if it came to war, he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital, as the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William had done. Napoleon brushed this aside, saying that Alexander was ‘false and weak’, and suggested that Caulaincourt had been taken in by him.

He himself was suspicious of the Tsar’s intentions, believing that he would pounce on the Grand Duchy of Warsaw the moment his back was turned. He repeatedly affirmed that he was no Louis XV – referring to France’s feeble response to the Russian partition of her Polish ally in the eighteenth century. The conversation went round in circles, with Napoleon eagerly asking Caulaincourt’s opinion yet rejecting it when it was given. He was, in fact, probably right to think that Caulaincourt had been lulled into believing in Alexander’s pacific intentions, yet he could not dismiss his arguments outright.

One thing that did seem to make a profound impression on Napoleon was one of the Tsar’s statements as reported by Caulaincourt. ‘If fate decides against me on the field of battle,’ Alexander had said, ‘I would rather retreat as far as Kamchatka than give away provinces and sign in my capital any treaty which would only be a truce. The Frenchman is brave, but long privations and a bad climate tire him and discourage him. Our climate, our winter will fight for us. Prodigious victories are only achieved where the Emperor is, and he cannot be everywhere or spend years away from Paris.’²³ Alexander had said that he was well aware of Napoleon’s ability to win battles, and would therefore avoid fighting the French where they were under his command. He had also referred to the guerrilla in Spain, and said that the whole Russian nation would resist an invader. But on reflection Napoleon dismissed all this as bravado. He believed Alexander was too weak a character to carry out such a plan, and that Russian society would not accept such sacrifices. He reasoned that the nobles would not want to see their lands ravaged for the sake of Alexander’s honour, while the serfs would as likely revolt against their nobles and their Tsar as fight to the last man for a system of slavery.

When asked his opinion on what should be done, Caulaincourt came up with two alternatives. Napoleon should either give a significant part, if not the whole, of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to Alexander, thereby cementing the alliance, or he should go to war with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Poland. He pointed out that Austria could easily be compensated, and maintained that the cause of Poland was so universally recognised as a just one that even Britain would ultimately approve.²⁴ Asked which course of action he would adopt given the choice, Caulaincourt replied that he would give the Grand Duchy to Alexander, thereby guaranteeing a stable peace. Napoleon countered that he could not have peace without honour, and the abandonment of the Poles would dishonour him. At the same time, such appeasement of Alexander would inevitably lead to further Russian expansion into the heart of Europe.

Alexander’s military ardour had in fact cooled by then. Memories of Austerlitz must have played their part, for, as Czartoryski noted, he was still ‘very afraid’ of Napoleon. His mind was troubled by the uncertainties of his position at home, his heart was bruised by the public rejection of his policies and, at a more personal level, by the successive deaths, in 1808 and 1810, of two baby daughters. But perhaps the main consideration holding him back was that he did not want to be seen as the aggressor. In July 1811 he wrote to his sister that the best course to follow was to let time and circumstances destroy Napoleon. ‘It seems to me more reasonable to hope that this evil will be remedied by time and by its own sheer scale, for it is such that I cannot rid myself of the conviction that this state of affairs cannot last, that the suffering of all classes, both in Germany and in France, is so great that patience must necessarily run out.’²⁵

But it was Napoleon’s patience that had run out. He viewed the Russian abandonment of the Continental System as a betrayal, he saw her troop build-up as a threat and a provocation, and he was convinced that she was using the Polish question and the subject of trade as excuses to break out of the alliance. This seemed to be confirmed by the increased diplomatic activity of the Russians in Vienna, where they were quite openly trying to turn Austria away from France.

Napoleon needed to go and take charge of operations in Spain personally in order to throw out the British and pacify the peninsula, but he could not contemplate such a move with a Russian army hovering on the borders of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and exciting German hopes of revenge. He was convinced that, just as the Austrians had done in 1809, Alexander would stab him in the back the moment he turned it.²⁶

His exasperation erupted on 15 August 1811, his forty-second birthday. At midday he strutted into the throne room at the Tuileries, which was filled with the entire court and all the senior officers in Paris, all perspiring in full ceremonial and parade uniforms on what was an exceptionally hot day. He took his place on the throne to receive the good wishes of the dignitaries and the diplomatic corps. This part of the ceremony over, Napoleon stepped down from the throne and began to circulate among the guests.

When he reached the Russian ambassador Prince Kurakin, he mentioned Russian reports of a recent victory over the Turks at Ruschuk on the Danube, and queried why, if they had indeed won, the Russians had evacuated the town. Kurakin explained that the Tsar had been obliged to withdraw some troops from the Turkish front for financial reasons, and had therefore decided not to hold the town. At this Napoleon exploded, saying that the Russians had not won, they had been beaten by the Turks, and they had been beaten because they had withdrawn troops from the Turkish front not for any financial reasons, but because they were massing their armies on the frontiers of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and that all the so-called outrage over Oldenburg was but an excuse for their intention to invade the Grand Duchy in an open act of hostility to him, Napoleon. The unfortunate Kurakin kept opening his mouth to reply, but could not get a word in edgeways and looked like a fish gasping for air, while perspiration poured down his face in the intense heat. Napoleon accused Russia of harbouring hostile intentions, and when Kurakin assured him of the contrary, he turned on the ambassador and asked whether he had powers to negotiate, for if he had, they could conclude a new treaty there and then. The answer was negative, so Napoleon merely walked away, leaving the ambassador in a state of shock.²⁷

Napoleon was back at Saint Cloud late that evening, and on the following morning he locked himself up with the punctilious and hard-working Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano, who had succeeded Champagny as Foreign Minister. Together they trawled through all the documentation concerning the Russian alliance since Tilsit. According to their analysis, the problems had started in 1809, when the Russians had hung back in the war against Austria instead of marching in loyally and capturing Galicia. Had they done so, they could have been allowed to keep it. As they did not, it was captured by the Poles, who could not be denied some of it. This caused panic in Russia and led the Tsar to demand slices of the Grand Duchy. France could never accede to such a request. Not just for the sake of her honour, but also because if Russia were to receive one piece of the Grand Duchy she would in time expect to get another, and would soon entrench her position on the Vistula if not the Oder. For similar reasons, France could not countenance any further Russian advance against Turkey.

In the memorandum summing up the situation, they stated France’s position as follows: France wanted Russia’s friendship and needed her as an ally in her struggle against Britain, which was the one remaining obstacle to a general peace. She did not want to fight Russia, as there was nothing that she wanted to take from her. Also, she had more pressing business in Spain, which required Napoleon’s personal attention. But France could not go down the road of buying Russia’s friendship through endless cession of Polish or Ottoman lands. France must therefore prepare for war in order to be in a position to dictate a peace. Lauriston was told that he had to make it clear that ‘we want peace, but we are prepared for war’.²⁸

Napoleon’s sense of exasperation at not being able to bring Alexander back into a close alliance is obvious in a personal letter he had written him on 6 April. ‘The effect of my military preparations will make Your Majesty increase his own; and when news of his actions reaches me here, it will force me to raise more troops: and all this over nothing!’ he wrote. They had been drawn into a spiral of mistrust and power politics that made it very difficult to arrive at a negotiated settlement. Napoleon later admitted that they had got themselves ‘into the position of two blustering braggarts who, having no wish to fight each other, seek to frighten each other’.²⁹

* While many assumed that Napoleon’s creation of the Grand Duchy owed much to his infatuation at the time with his mistress Maria Walewska, now many in Russia suspected Alexander’s mistress Maria Antonovna Naryshkina, also a Pole, of exercising a similar influence.

* It is true that some teachers at Russian universities did use German or Latin.

† According to some sources, almost certainly apocryphal, even Captain Bonaparte applied for a post in the Russian army in 1795.

‡ Martinists were followers of the illuminist philosopher and mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, whose obscure writings had a surprisingly wide influence.

* In February a similar plan was submitted by General Bennigsen, while Generals Bagration, Württemberg, d’Allonville and Saint Priest also contributed theirs.

5
La Grande Armée

On the evening of 25 March 1811, as he was scouring the night sky from his makeshift observatory in Viviers, Honoré Flaugergues discovered a comet in the now defunct constellation of Argo Navis. He saw it again the following day and began to track its progress. The comet was low in the south and was moving northward and brightening. On 11 April it was spotted by Jean Louis Pons in Marseille, and on 12 May by William J. Burchell in Cape Town. The comet soon became visible to the naked eye, and by the late autumn it lit up the night sky from Lisbon to Moscow. People gazed up at it, some with interest, many more with a sense of foreboding.¹

This seemed to increase the further east one went in Europe. ‘As they contemplated the brilliant comet of 1811,’ recalled a parish priest there, ‘the people of Lithuania prepared themselves for some extraordinary event.’ Another inhabitant of the province never forgot how everyone got up from dinner and went out to gaze on the comet and then talk of ‘famine, fire, war and bloodshed’. In Russia, many linked the comet to a plague of fires which swept the land that summer and autumn, and a blind terror gripped them as they looked on it. ‘I remember fixing a long look on it on an autumn moonless night, and I was struck with childlike fear,’ wrote the son of a Russian landowner. ‘Its long, bright tail, which seemed to wave with the movement of the wind and to leap from time to time, filled me with such horror, that in the days that followed I did not look up at the sky at night, until the comet had disappeared.’

In St Petersburg, Tsar Alexander himself became fascinated by the phenomenon, and discussed it with John Quincy Adams, then American ambassador at his court. He claimed to be interested only in the scientific aspects of the comet, and made fun of all those superstitious souls who saw in it a harbinger of catastrophe and war.²

But he was either being disingenuous or he was deluding himself, for the machinery of war had already clanged into gear, and its wheels were by now turning with such momentum that it would have taken a complete climbdown on the part of Napoleon or himself to stop them. Observing events from Vienna, Metternich was in no doubt that ‘the supreme struggle’ between the ancien régime and what he termed Napoleon’s revolutionary designs was now imminent. ‘Whether he triumphs or succumbs, in either case the situation in Europe will never be the same again,’ he wrote to his imperial master on 28 December 1811. ‘This terrible moment has unfortunately been brought on us by the unpardonable conduct of Russia.’³

‘I am far from having lost hope of a peaceful settlement,’ Napoleon wrote to his brother Jérôme on 27 January 1812. ‘But as they have adopted towards me the unfortunate procedure of negotiating at the head of a strong and numerous army, my honour demands that I too negotiate at the head of a strong and numerous army. I do not wish to open the hostilities, but I wish to put myself in a position to repulse them.’⁴ He therefore needed to field an army vast enough to intimidate Alexander or, failing that, to force him into submission with a rapid and shattering blow. There was an element of haste involved, as he had to count with the possibility of a Russian first strike at any moment. Fortunately, he was not starting from scratch.

Following the treaty of Tilsit, a body of French troops remained in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw while the local forces were being organised, along with garrisons in key fortresses in Prussia such as Danzig, Glogau, Stettin and Küstrin. After the 1809 war with Austria, Napoleon left further garrisons at Düsseldorf, Hanau, Fulda, Hanover, Magdeburg, Bayreuth, Salzburg and Ratisbon. In May 1810 he strengthened all the forces on German soil and organised them into the Armée d’Allemagne, under Marshal Davout. In the autumn of 1810, following the Russian troop build-up along the border of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon reinforced this further. He also began moving units stationed in France closer to Germany, concentrating his artillery parks at Strasbourg, Metz, Wesel and La Fère, and withdrawing selected units from Spain.

In the spring of 1811, fearing a Russian invasion of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon ordered the Poles to mobilise 50,000 men. He had already ordered his stepson Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, to place the Army of Italy on a war footing. Now he instructed his brother Jérôme and other allied monarchs to mobilise the armies of Westphalia, Württemberg, Bavaria, Baden and the lesser German states. He meant to put together a force of half a million men with which to confront Russia. He began calling up men in France on a massive scale, and gendarmes combed the countryside for the tens of thousands of deserters who regularly sneaked away from the colours and went to ground. They would be rounded up and fed back into the army, along with the new recruits.

The French army was organised in divisions, which were usually made up of four regiments. A regiment of foot normally consisted of about 3800 men, with a hundred officers. It had up to five battalions, one of which was always at the depot, and these battalions consisted of six companies each, of which one would be a company of grenadiers, one of voltigeurs (skirmishers) and four of fusiliers. A company was supposed to number 140 men, including two drummer boys, and was commanded by one captain, one lieutenant, one sub-lieutenant, a sergeant major and a dozen other sergeants and corporals. To accommodate the new influx, Napoleon added a fifth and then a sixth battalion to existing regiments. The recruits were spread through the old battalions as well as the new ones, which were fortified with a sprinkling of veterans.

Napoleon attended personally to every detail. His correspondence in these matters reveals a staggering degree of familiarity with every brigade, regiment and battalion, where they were stationed, where they were due to move to, who commanded them, how many reinforcements they needed, where these could be drawn from, and how soon they could be made available. No detail was too insignificant for him. He attended to lettering on standards and badges, to the quality and calibre of arms and equipment, to numbers of horses and types of supply wagon required. To deal with the many rivers he would need to negotiate, he formed a bridging train equipped with pontoon boats and other necessaries at Danzig.

Curiously enough, the one thing he paid no attention to, now or at any stage in his military career, was the army’s basic weaponry. The artillery still used the Gribeauval gun and gun carriage, designed fifty years before, while the footsoldier’s weapon was a muzzle-loading flintlock musket of a design that had remained virtually unchanged for a hundred years. It was an extremely primitive instrument. To load it, a soldier would take a cartridge, consisting of a paper cylinder containing a measure of powder and a lead ball. He would bite off the end of the cartridge, keeping the ball in his mouth, sprinkle a little of the powder in the priming pan, and close the flap; he would then pour the remainder of the powder down the barrel, spit the ball in after it, screw up the paper into a wad, and ram the whole lot down to the bottom of the barrel with his ramrod. A trained soldier could reload and be ready to fire in one and a half minutes.

The musket was notoriously inaccurate even at short range and had a number of faults which could be dangerous. The black powder in the cartridges fouled the inside of the barrel, so that after a dozen or so shots it became increasingly difficult to ram anything down it, while the progress of the bullet being fired was also slowed. The powder in the pan might ignite, producing the usual plume of smoke, but the charge in the barrel might not go off – the proverbial ‘flash in the pan’. In the din of battle, the soldier might not register that his charge had not gone off, and set about loading up with another cartridge. If the first one then went off, the barrel was likely to explode in his face. But that was considered just another of the hazards of war. Footsoldiers were expendable, and there were always plenty more where they came from.

The relentless build-up of forces continued through the autumn and winter of 1811 and into the spring of 1812. The twenty-year-old son of a wine-grower in Burgundy presented himself at seven o’clock on the morning of 3 January 1812 at the Préfecture in Lyon, and a couple of days later he was in the barracks of the 17th Light Infantry at Strasbourg. ‘The very morning after our arrival, we were uniformed and armed, and, without giving us time to breathe, the corporals set about inculcating in us the principles of our new trade,’ he remembered. ‘They were in a hurry …’⁵

Raising the troops was only part of the task: the men had to be fed, clothed and armed. On campaign, the French soldier was supposed to receive a daily ration of: 550 grams of biscuit, either thirty grams of rice or sixty grams of dried vegetables, 240 grams of meat or two hundred grams of salt beef and lard, some salt, a quarter of a litre of wine, a sixth of a litre of brandy and, in hot weather, a shot of vinegar. By January 1812 Napoleon had amassed fifty-day supplies of biscuit, flour, salted meat and dried vegetables for 400,000 men and forage for 50,000 horses at Danzig. This was on top of the million rations stored at Stettin and Küstrin.⁶

The enterprise also required the provision of hundreds of thousands of items of clothing, of boots of various kinds, and of small arms. It entailed the purchase of tens of thousands of horses for the cavalry, which had to be trained to carry a heavily armed rider and respond to his intentions as he wielded his sword, lance or carbine. They also had to be habituated to the roar of cannon and the clash of arms, by being led and then ridden, again and again, towards lines of men shouting, banging cooking pots and letting off guns in their direction, and to be rewarded each time with a carrot.

Napoleon prepared massive supplies of ammunition, setting up depots at Magdeburg, Danzig, Küstrin, Glogau and Stettin. By May 1812 he would have amassed 761,801 rounds of ammunition for his field artillery – over a thousand rounds per gun for some calibres of the more than eight hundred cannon he was putting into the field. This did not include the siege train of heavy guns which he had built up there so as to be able to reduce enemy fortresses. Such figures do not compare at all badly with the preparations made by a highly industrialised imperial Germany a hundred years later.

As he was expecting Russia to launch her attack at any moment, his first preoccupation was to secure the line of the Vistula and strengthen the garrisons of the fortresses at Modlin, Torun and Zamosc. This would allow his main forces to concentrate in the first couple of months of 1812. He hoped to have over 400,000 men in the area of northern Germany and Poland by the middle of March, which would allow him to deal with any Russian strike, even if it were accompanied by outbreaks of German national insurrection.⁷

The situation in Germany had been growing increasingly tense for some time, and patriots watched the preparations for war on both sides with mounting excitement. The Russian embassy in Vienna was orchestrating agitation throughout Germany. Colonel Chernyshev was recruiting disaffected Prussian officers and working on a plan to found a German Legion in Russia which, in the event of war, would enlist all prisoners of German nationality taken from Napoleon. He was also investigating the possibility of creating a fifth column of sympathisers all over Germany who would be ready to rise up when a Russian army marched in.⁸

Reports from French military commanders and diplomatic agents in Germany were full of stories of plots by secret societies, and warned Napoleon that the hardships imposed by the Continental System were driving people to desperation. In the autumn of 1811 Prussia appeared to be on the brink of revolt, with the King and his pro-French cabinet barely able to control the nationalists. The Prussian army was surreptitiously mobilising its reserves. In Westphalia, Jérôme was growing nervous. ‘The ferment has reached the highest degree, and the wildest hopes are fostered and cherished with enthusiasm,’ he reported to Napoleon on 5 December 1811. ‘People are quoting the example of Spain, and if it comes to war, all the lands lying between the Rhine and the Oder will be embraced by a vast and active insurrection.’ Napoleon did not believe the Germans had the stomach for popular insurrection and thought the secret societies ridiculous. But he instructed Davout to be ready to march on Berlin at a moment’s notice in order to disarm the Prussian army.⁹

The army Napoleon was assembling would be the largest the world had ever seen.* It included soldiers from almost every nation of Europe. Its main body was made up of Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Italians and Swiss from the areas incorporated into the Empire. This was supplemented by contingents from every vassal or allied state. The presence of such a wide variety of nationalities inevitably raised questions of cohesion, quite apart from motivation or loyalty. But with the exception of the Polish and the Austrian corps, all the contingents were commanded by French generals. And most were imbued with French military culture, and fortified by the reputation of French arms. ‘The belief that they were invincible made them invincible, just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralysed the enemy’s spirits and efforts,’ in the words of Karl von Funck, a German officer attached to the French imperial staff.¹⁰

‘Three-quarters of the nations which were about to take part in the struggle had interests diametrically opposed to those which had decided the opening of hostilities,’ wrote Lieutenant Count von Wedel, a German serving in the 9th Polish Lancers. ‘There were many who in their heart of hearts wished the Russians success, and yet at the moment of danger, all fought as though they had been defending their own homes.’¹¹ The urge to emulate was strong, and there was the magic presence of Napoleon.

‘Anyone who was not alive in the time of Napoleon cannot imagine the extent of the moral ascendancy he exerted over the minds of his contemporaries,’ wrote a Russian officer, adding that every soldier, whatever side he was on, instinctively conjured a sense of limitless power at the very mention of his name. Wedel agreed. ‘Whatever their personal feelings towards the Emperor may have been, there was nobody who did not see in him the greatest and most able of all generals, and who did not experience a feeling of confidence in his talents and the value of his judgement … The aura of his greatness subjugated me as well, and, giving way to enthusiasm and admiration, I, like the others, shouted "Vive l’Empereur!"’¹²

The largest non-French contingent were the Poles, who numbered some 95,000. Many of them had been fighting under French colours since the late 1790s and were enthusiastic allies. In 1807 Napoleon created an élite regiment of Polish Chevau-Légers in the Imperial Guard as a token of how much he valued his Polish troops. In the same year the Grand Duchy of Warsaw began recruiting its own army, and raised the Legion of the Vistula, an auxiliary corps which was to fight for the French. These troops had distinguished themselves in various theatres, and had no difficulty in operating alongside the French. The only problem was that Napoleon’s insistence on the Grand Duchy raising more troops than such a small state could support, either in human or economic terms, meant that the barrel had been scraped. Men who were physically unfit had been drafted, uniforms had been skimped on, training was inadequate, and nobody was paid after June 1812. But at least their loyalty to the cause and devotion to Napoleon were never in question.¹³

The next largest contingent were the Italians, grouped in the Army of Italy, commanded by Prince Eugène, and the Neapolitan army of Joachim Murat. The Army of Italy was a fine force of 45,000 – 25,000 Italians organised on French lines, highly disciplined, with a strong esprit de corps, particularly in units such as the Royal Guard, and 20,000 Frenchmen, many of them from Savoy and Provence, stationed in Italy. It was also one of the more motivated contingents, inspired by national pride. As he looked at all the nationalities making up the Grande Armée, one young Italian officer’s mind drifted to the days of ancient Rome, whose legions were equally made up of disparate elements, and he felt a great sense of pride at being part of it.¹⁴

The same could not be said for the Neapolitan contingent. This was a largely worthless force, poorly trained and undermined by the existence of numerous rival secret societies. Whenever the troops were moved out of barracks they deserted in large numbers and formed bands of brigands who would terrorise the surrounding countryside.

Most of the German troops in the Grande Armée were of high quality. The 24,000 Bavarians were Napoleon’s most reliable allies, having fought under his banner several times. The smaller Badenese forces, organised along French lines, had taken part in the campaign of 1805 against Austria and Russia, so they fitted relatively well into the composite army. The 20,000-strong Saxon contingent was disciplined and also marched quite comfortably in the ranks of the Grande Armée, to which it brought some of the best cavalry.¹⁵

The 17,000 men of the Westphalian contingent did not, according to Captain Johann von Borcke from Cassel, contain many Napoleonic enthusiasts. The Principal Minister of Westphalia reported that the men were loyal, but hated the idea of being sent far away more than they feared being killed. ‘An active resistance on their part seems impossible to me,’ he wrote to Maret in January 1812, ‘but the weight of their inertia could, in the first stages, cause trouble, mainly through large-scale desertion.’¹⁶

On the whole, the German contingents were loyal to Napoleon. Many of the troops were fired by the idea of rolling the Russians back out of Europe, and felt a strong urge to prove the valour of German arms. Even if they had no love for the French, they tended to be more antagonistic to Germans from other parts of the country, with most of the troops from the Confederation of the Rhine showing a marked dislike of the Prussians. Finally there was military honour. ‘I know that the war we are fighting is contrary to the interests of Prussia,’ Colonel Ziethen of the Prussian Hussars said to a Polish officer, ‘but I will, if necessary, let myself be hacked to pieces at your side, for military honour commands it.’¹⁷

The Prussians were brought into the Grande Armée under the terms of the treaty signed between Napoleon and Frederick William on 24 February 1812, and made up an auxiliary corps of 20,000 men. There was also an Austrian contingent, under Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, made up of 35,000 men. Most of them had last seen action against the French and the Poles, and while soldiers fight when and whom they are ordered to, they were not enthusiastic allies. Because of the political stance of their ruler and their commander, they were to play an insignificant part in the campaign.

Amongst the lesser contingents the four Swiss regiments should be singled out as being of very high quality and well tempered by a couple of years’ service in Spain and Portugal. There were two battalions of Spanish volunteers from the Joseph-Napoléon Regiment, in distinctive white uniforms with green facings, which had spent the past year under Davout in Germany. They were commanded by Colonel Doreille, a Provençal who did not speak French. There were also many Spaniards, some three thousand of them, in the ranks of the second and third regiments of General d’Alorna’s Portuguese Legion, which numbered around five thousand men in total, uniformed in brown with red facings and English-style shakos. ‘The men, who are highly motivated, make up a fine unit, on which I believe we can count,’ General Clarke, Napoleon’s Minister of War reported. And finally there were two regiments of Croats, numbering just over 3500 men.¹⁸

The worth of all these troops was hugely enhanced by the presence of Napoleon. Not only because he lent them the value of his reputation as a military genius, but also because he had the gift of drawing the best out of them. He was masterly in his treatment of soldiers, whom he captivated with his bonhomie and his sometimes brusque lack of ceremony. He always knew which regiments had fought where, and when he reviewed them, he would walk up to older rankers and ask them if they remembered the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, or wherever it was that particular unit had distinguished itself. They would swell with pride, feeling that he had recognised them, and they could feel the envy of the younger men all around them. With the younger soldiers Napoleon adopted a solicitous manner. He would enquire if they were eating enough, whether their equipment was up to scratch, sometimes asking to see the contents of their haversacks and engaging them in conversation. He was well known for tasting the soldiers’ stew and bread whenever he passed a camp kitchen, so they felt his interest was genuine.

During a review shortly before the campaign, Napoleon stopped in front of Lieutenant Calosso, a Piedmontese serving in the 24th Chasseurs à Cheval, and said a few words to him. ‘Before that, I admired Napoleon as the whole army admired him,’ he wrote. ‘From that day on, I devoted my life to him with a fanaticism which time has not weakened. I had only one regret, which was that I only had one life to place at his service.’ Such a level of devotion was by no means rare, and transcended nationality. But Napoleon could not be everywhere, and the larger the army, the more diluted his presence would be.¹⁹

Napoleon’s determination to assemble such a vast force was bound to have a negative effect on its quality. Louis François Lejeune, a senior officer on Berthier’s staff, was detailed to inspect the troops already on the Oder and the Vistula in March 1812, and was bombarded with complaints from the commanders of the units he visited that half of the recruits they were receiving were useless.

He mentioned this to General Dejean, who was organising the cavalry in the area. Dejean told him that up to a third of the horses he had been sent were too weak to carry their burden, while nearly half of the men were too puny to wield a sabre. ‘I was not happy with the way the cavalry was being organised,’ echoed Colonel de Saint-Chamans, commanding the 7th Chasseurs à Cheval. ‘Young recruits who had been sent from depots in France before they had learnt to ride a horse or any of the duties of a horseman on the march or on campaign, were mounted on arrival in Hanover on very fine horses which they were not capable of managing.’ The result was that by the time they reached Berlin, the majority of the horses were suffering from lameness or saddle sores induced by the riders’ bad posture or their failure to take care in saddling up. More than one officer noted that recruits were not taught about checking whether their saddle was rubbing or how to detect the early signs of saddle sores.²⁰

Sergeant Auguste Thirion of the 2nd Cuirassiers had a rosier view. ‘Such fine cavalry has never been seen, never had regiments reached such high complements, and never had horsemen been so well mounted,’ he wrote, adding that their leisurely march through Germany had actually hardened the horses and men. But the cuirassiers were the élite of the French cavalry. And good horses could be a problem in themselves, according to Captain Antoine Augustin Pion des Loches of the Foot Artillery of the Guard. ‘Our teams were of the best, and the equipment left nothing to be desired, but everyone was agreed that the horses were too tall and too strongly built, and unsuited to supporting hardship and lack of abundant nourishment,’ he wrote on leaving the depot at La Fère on 2 March 1812.²¹

Napoleon was not particularly bothered by such a state of affairs. ‘When I put 40,000 men on horseback I know very well that I cannot hope for that number of good horsemen, but I am playing on the morale of the enemy, who learns through his spies, by rumour or through the newspapers that I have 40,000 cavalry,’ he told Dejean when the latter reported his findings. ‘Passing from mouth to mouth, this number and the supposed quality of my regiments, whose reputation is well known, are both rather exaggerated than diminished; and the day I launch my campaign I am preceded by a psychological force which supplements the actual force that I have been able to furnish for myself.’²²

The real strength of the French army was that all the men, even the lower ranks, were free citizens with a strongly patriotic education in the new public schools behind them. They could think as well as fight, and if they showed initiative as well as bravery they could gain promotion and rise very high. But Napoleon’s habit of rewarding mere bravery with promotion eventually led to units being commanded by men who lacked the necessary competence. ‘Among the generals of rapid promotion,’ wrote Karl von Funck, ‘there were only a few who had the gift of leadership; many lacked even the most elementary military knowledge … In the madness of daring they had learnt how to fling their intrepid forces against the foe, but they had no notion of judging a position, of even the first principles of operations, of withdrawing in good order if the first onset should fail …’ There was also a multitude of young officers drawn from the Parisian jeunesse dorée who had obtained promotion through string-pulling, who had mostly joined cavalry regiments because they liked the uniforms or the staff because they wanted to be close to Napoleon. Many were clearly not up to the job.²³

Much of the revolutionary ardour that had fired the French armies of the 1790s and early 1800s had been quenched by 1812. ‘As the uniforms grew more embroidered and gathered decorations the hearts they covered grew less generous,’ as one observer put it. Napoleon himself sensed a lack of enthusiasm for the forthcoming campaign. ‘People have always followed him with excitement; he is surprised that they are not prepared to end their careers with the same dash with which they embarked on them,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain.²⁴ But it was he who had turned his commanders into what they were.

‘From the moment that Napoleon came to power, military mores changed rapidly, the union of hearts disappeared along with poverty and the taste for material well-being and the comforts of life crept into our camps, which filled up with unnecessary mouths and with numerous carriages,’ in the words of General Berthézène. ‘Forgetting the fortunate experiences of his immortal campaigns in Italy, of the immense superiority gained by habituation to privation and contempt for superfluity, the Emperor believed it to be to his advantage to encourage this corruption.’²⁵ He gave his marshals and his generals titles, lands and pensions on the civil list. He demanded of them that they keep palaces in Paris in which they were to entertain at the appropriate level. As members of his court, they must maintain a glittering entourage, as he increasingly did himself. This high living softened them up, and they became less and less willing to give up their warm beds and fine palaces in fashionable parts of Paris, not to mention their wives and mistresses, for the rigours of the bivouac and the uncertainties of war. This was particularly true of the marshals.

‘They were most of them between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five when, after a stormy youth, a man begins to look for a settled domesticity,’ wrote von Funck. ‘They could hardly expect to win a higher degree of fame, but might well jeopardise the reputations they had made.’ A good example was Napoleon’s chief of staff Marshal Berthier, Prince de Neuchâtel, a plump man of settled tastes in his mid-fifties with a magnificent apanage and an adored and adoring mistress in Paris.²⁶

At the same time the lavish rewards given to those who distinguished themselves in battle were an irresistible incentive to soldiers and officers right up to the rank of general, who all saw in war the possibility of making their fortune. A simple soldier might obtain promotion, which would give him a higher salary and status, or the Légion d’Honneur, which meant pension rights. A general might obtain the coveted marshal’s baton, which signified fame and fortune, and a ducal title to boot.

There was also the opportunity of making some money on the side through the more or less legitimate acquisition of precious items. Looting as such was not countenanced, but in the course of campaigns in distant lands it was possible to purchase things at knockdown prices and bring them home without paying any duties. Valuables found on the field of battle or in the enemy camp were fair game, as was anything that might be left masterless through the fortunes of war. As this great campaign to end all campaigns was being prepared, a good many felt that it would be their last opportunity to get rich.

There were also a great many for whom war furnished the prospect of adventure, the opportunity to distinguish themselves or a last chance to share in the glory. ‘At last I was going to find myself at some of those battles which are destined to change the course of history; I was going to fight under the eyes of so many of the illustrious warriors who filled the world with their renown, Murat, Ney, Davout, Prince Eugène, and so many others, and under the eyes of the greatest of them all, under the eyes of Napoleon!’ remembered a Creole from Saint-Domingue. ‘There I would have my chance to distinguish myself, there I would be able to obtain decorations and promotion of which I would be proud and which I could hold up to the world! Before a year was out I would be chef de bataillon; I would be colonel by the end of the campaign, and after that …’²⁷

Most of Napoleon’s entourage, beginning with Caulaincourt and including close friends and collaborators such as General Duroc, repeatedly beseeched him not to go down the road of war. Many of them warned that Russia could not be defeated in conventional ways. Napoleon had read the accounts of Charles XII’s disastrous foray into Russia almost exactly a hundred years before, beginning with the famous one by Voltaire, who wrote that ‘there is no ruler who, in reading the life of Charles XII, should not be cured of the folly of conquest’. Napoleon dismissed such arguments with annoyance. ‘His capitals are as accessible as any others, and when I have the capitals, I hold everything,’ he snapped at one of his diplomats who had been pointing out the perils of going to war with Alexander. But he had a habit of making statements he did not believe in, as though he were trying to convince himself by convincing others. And the special nature of the forthcoming campaign was not lost on him. ‘If people think that I am going to make war in the old way, they are very much mistaken,’ he is alleged to have declared.²⁸

He certainly prepared himself for the forthcoming campaign as he had prepared for no other. For one thing, realising that he would be operating in detached corps at some distance from each other, he decided to make an example of General Dupont, whose capitulation at Bailén had been such a humiliation. Before setting off for Russia, Napoleon had him retried and given a harsher sentence.²⁹

He had officers who spoke German and Polish or Russian attached to every unit, while others were made to take Russian lessons so they could interrogate prisoners and gather intelligence, and he set up a network of intelligence agents fanning out from Poland into Russia’s western provinces. He ordered his librarian to supply him with books on the Russian army, and on the topography of Lithuania and Russia, which he studied, paying particular attention to roads, rivers, bogs and forests. As early as April 1811 he commissioned the Dépot de la Guerre to engrave a series of large-scale maps of western Russia.³⁰

Not the least daunting aspect of this campaign was that the enemy frontier, on the river Niemen, lay about 1500 kilometres from Paris. Thus a length of time and a huge effort were required to move up men and supplies before the campaign could begin. And the Russian capital cities of St Petersburg and Moscow lay another 650 and 950 kilometres respectively beyond that. An army marching from Paris to Moscow without fighting would take up to six months to cover the distance. To make matters worse, the last three hundred of the 1500 kilometres up to the Niemen lay through poor, infertile areas of Prussia and Poland, while the first five hundred of the next 950 kilometres were in even less abundant country. It was, moreover, criss-crossed by rivers, mottled with bogs and forests, and contained large areas of wilderness.

Napoleon’s tactic had always been to move fast, concentrate large numbers of men at the right point before the enemy knew what was happening, knock out their army with a decisive blow and force them to make peace on his terms. But he would have to work hard to achieve it in this theatre of operations.

His armies had in the past been able to move fast because they travelled light, a tradition originally forged of necessity. The French revolutionary armies of the 1790s had been hurriedly improvised and had not possessed a proper commissariat. Since they regarded enemy territory as belonging to tyrants and enemies of the revolution, they lived by looting. With time, they began to buy what they needed, but as they paid with largely worthless paper assignats, it amounted to the same thing. Napoleon disapproved of looting, and brought in administrators who would provide for the army’s needs in a more methodical way. They bought what was needed, paying in real money or receipts that were generally honoured, when peace had been signed, by the government of the defeated country. But the fact remained that French armies lived off the fat of the land they moved through. And as they moved fast, they did not stay long enough to exhaust its resources.

Whenever the administrative machine broke down or failed to provide the necessities, the French reverted to the old system of ‘la maraude’. Every so often a company or similar unit would send out eight or ten men under a corporal into the areas alongside the line of march. These little bands would fan out through local villages and farms, paying for what they took, and rejoin their company a few days later, their carts laden with grain, eggs, chickens, vegetables and other victuals, driving before them a small herd of cattle. From time to time the main force would halt in order to allow the foraging parties to catch up.

As the French armies were conscripted, a company usually contained a baker, a cobbler, a tailor’s apprentice, a cooper, a blacksmith and a wheelwright, so not only could they bake their own bread, but also, given an occasional purchase of cloth, leather, iron and other raw materials, they could mend their uniforms, boots, equipment and wagons.

For everything else, there was the cantinière or suttler-woman, something of an institution, unique to the French army. ‘These ladies usually started out by following a soldier who had inspired tender feelings in them,’ explained Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘You would see them first walking along with a cask of eau-de-vie slung round their neck. A week later, they would be comfortably seated on a horse someone had found, draped, to the right, to the left, in front, behind, with casks, saveloys, cheeses and sausages in precarious equilibrium. A month would not pass that a cart harnessed with a couple of horses and filled with provisions of every kind would not be testifying to the growing prosperity of their enterprise.’³¹

In camp, the tent of the cantinière became the company café, where officers would come to sit around and play cards or gossip. It was also a bank, lending money and giving credit. On campaign, the cantiniére went to untold lengths to stock up on all the little necessities which could transform a soldier’s life by guaranteeing survival or just relief. She always had a little something for a soldier who had money or whom she trusted to pay her when he got some. She usually had a protector, sometimes a husband but mostly just a temporary mate who was able to provide her with security and help in return for being supplied with victuals, and sometimes a change of protector would entail a financial transaction between the two men involved.

These ladies saw themselves as part of the army, and despised anyone not in uniform. They viewed the dangers of war as part and parcel of their trade. If they fell prey to enemy marauders and lost everything, they would shrug it off as hard luck and start again. Some would even take kegs of brandy onto the battlefield and give free slugs to the men, and not a few were wounded in this act.

When a regiment moved out on campaign, it was followed by the cantinière and her small gang of purveyors, the servants of the officers, a dozen washerwomen and a horse thief or two. As it went, it picked up petty criminals for whom things had got too hot in the locality, young men looking for adventure, stray dogs and the odd whore. ‘While the regiment marched along the road in good order, or wherever it was sent, this mounted rabble – or to give it its proper name, this robber band – swarmed round it to left and to right, in front and behind, and used the regiment as a base,’ wrote Lieutenant von Wedel. ‘They all carried large and small haversacks and bottles in which to hide their plunder, and they were armed with swords, pistols, even carbines if they could lay hands on such a weapon. These bands often roamed far and boldly on the flank, and if they ever got back again, brought supplies for the troops. The work was dangerous and many lost their lives – in agony if they fell into the clutches of the infuriated peasants … This swarm of plunderers also formed a sort of flank patrol for the army, because if ever they bumped into enemy detachments they came flying back with great haste and loud shouts.’³²

Such tactics liberated French commanders from the necessity of hauling heavy stores along with them, which gave them the edge of speed over their more traditionally organised enemies. They worked well in the rich, densely populated, fertile and commercially developed areas of northern Italy and southern Germany, where small distances, good roads, frequent towns and an abundance of every kind of resource meant that a comparatively large army could indeed move fast and provision itself as it went. It even worked in the less populous and more arid expanses of Spain. It could not work in Russia, where the distances were huge, the roads primitive, towns few and far between, the countryside thinly populated and poor in resources. Nobody saw this more clearly than Napoleon. ‘One can expect nothing of the country, and we shall have to carry everything with us,’ he warned Davout.³³

The commissariat he had founded, under the command of General Matthieu Dumas, was methodically stockpiling arms, munitions, uniforms, shoes, saddles, as well as food rations on a vast scale. But the problem of how to move these supplies about represented a logistical nightmare. ‘The Polish war does not resemble the war in Austria at all; without means of transport, everything becomes worthless,’ Napoleon wrote to Prince Eugène in December.³⁴

The French army’s supply system, such as it was, was in the hands of a transport corps, a military formation called le train, founded in 1807. In the course of 1811 and 1812 Napoleon gradually expanded the size of the train to twenty-six battalions, with 9336 wagons drawn by some 32,500 horses, with six thousand spare horses. He put in hand the construction of heavy ox-drawn wagons which could be used to haul flour to the front line, where the oxen would be consumed along with the flour. He realised that these heavy wagons, capable of carrying one and a half tons, would have difficulty in negotiating all but the best roads. He therefore equipped eight of the battalions with lighter wagons, but he was reluctant to increase the number of these, as that would only increase the number of horses needed: four horses could draw a heavy wagon laden with one and a half tons, but two horses could not manage a lighter wagon laden with three-quarters of a ton. And horses needed to be fed.

This detail was to be the crucial element in the forthcoming campaign. It even decided the timing of its start: as there could be no question of hauling fodder for the horses as well as supplies for the men along with the army, the horses would have to be fed on the new harvest of hay and oats (cavalrymen were issued with sickles for this purpose), and none of these crops would be ripe for harvesting before the end of June at the very earliest. This meant that while he had to begin moving up his troops in the inclement marching conditions of the winter and early spring, Napoleon could not open his campaign until the middle of the summer, which left him with very little time in which to achieve his victory.

On 1 January 1812 François Dumonceau, a Belgian officer in the Lancers of Berg, was on parade in the courtyard of the Tuileries. ‘The Imperial Guard, the Young and the Old, appeared more numerous and imposing than ever,’ he recalled. The band of the Polish Chevau-Légers played, led by a kettle drummer magnificently mounted, caparisoned, uniformed and plumed. There were also two Illyrian infantry regiments, ‘whose fine and robust bearing drew admiring looks’. They had just marched up from the Balkans so that they could see their Emperor before they joined the Grande Armée in Germany, and they were hosted and shown around Paris by the Grenadiers of the Old Guard. A few days later Dumonceau and his men set off from their regimental depot in Versailles, marching through Brussels, Maastricht, Osnabrück, Hanover, Brunswick, Magdeburg and Stettin to Danzig.³⁵

Soon the whole of Germany was covered in troops marching eastwards and northwards. There were files of cavalry: cuirassiers in helmets and breastplates, chasseurs in green uniforms and bearskin kolpaks, lancers in blue and crimson with four-cornered Polish caps, dragoons in helmets and uniforms of every hue. There were long convoys of artillery, in lighter blue with black shakos. And above all, endless columns of infantry.

The French footsoldier wore a standard cutaway blue coat, white breeches or trousers, white or black gaiters and a shako or a bearskin bonnet. It was not a uniform designed for convenience, let alone comfort. ‘I have never understood why under Napoleon, when we were constantly at war, the soldier should have been forced to wear the ghastly breeches, which, by pressing in on the hams at the back of the knee, prevented him from walking easily,’ wrote Lieutenant Blaze de Bury. ‘On top of that, the knee, which was covered by a long buttoned-up gaiter, was further strangled by another garter which pressed on the garter of the breeches. Underneath, the long undergarment, held in place with a cord, further restricted the movement of the knee. It was, all in all, a conspiracy by three thicknesses of cloth, two rows of buttons one on top of the other, and three garters to paralyse the efforts of the bravest of marchers.’ He wore shoes with unfashionably square toes – to prevent theft or the resale of military shoes to civilians. These shoes were supposed to last for a thousand kilometres of march, but usually fell apart far sooner.³⁶

Every footsoldier carried a heavy musket 1.54 metres long without its bayonet – taller than Napoleon. On a bandolier slung across his shoulder he carried his giberne, a stiff leather case containing two packets of cartridges, a phial of oil, a screwdriver and other gun-cleaning implements. On his back he carried a pack made of stiffened cowhide, in which he carried a couple of shirts, collars, kerchiefs, canvas gaiters, cotton stockings, a spare pair of shoes, a sewing kit, clothes brush, pipeclay and bootwax, as well as a supply of hard tack, flour and bread. His rolled-up overcoat and other items of kit were strapped to the top of the backpack.

Most of the ornamental features of the uniform were absent on the march. Shakos and bearskins disappeared into oilcloth covers and strapped to the backpack or hung off it, plumes were put away in waxed canvas containers which were strapped to the swordbelt or bandolier. In their place the men donned the bonnet de police, a flat forage cap with a tasselled bob hanging down the side. Breeches and gaiters were replaced by baggy canvas trousers, and the Old Guard wore long blue tunics instead of their white-faced uniforms.

The men marched at the pas ordinaire, of seventy-six steps a minute, or the pas accéléré, of a hundred steps a minute. A usual day’s march was between fifteen and thirty-five kilometres, but in a forced march they could cover anything up to fifty-five kilometres. Every unit, every horse, every man had a route prescribed for them, was instructed where to stop for the night and provided with food and accommodation. On arrival at a given stop, the unit’s farrier or some other non-commissioned officer would go to the local military commander or commissaire des guerres and collect a visa from him. He would then take this to the town hall, where he would be given a full list of billets for the men, and chits for forage and victuals. These chits were then taken to the appointed provisioning merchants, and the unit would collect its supplies for that evening and the next day. The system worked like clockwork in France and Germany, with the required supplies ready and waiting for the tired men when they reached their prescribed halt.³⁷

There were nevertheless jams of horses, cannon and wagons of every description, of straggling men and single platoons as well as large units snaking along over several miles of road, of officers in private carriages hurrying to join their units, and couriers trying to gallop in both directions, particularly at the crossings over the Rhine, at Wesel, Cologne, Bonn, Coblenz and Mainz.

Those still in Paris tried to make the most of what was a particularly glittering carnival, and the Comte de Lignières, Lieutenant in the Chasseurs of the Guard, found his order to march out when he returned to barracks at four in the morning after a ball. The notaries of Paris were kept busy writing wills, and some followed the departing troops, along with wives and lovers who wanted to see their dear ones for a few days longer.³⁸

The Army of Italy came over the Brenner pass and down into the valley of the Danube, where it met up with the contingent from Bavaria. ‘Our march was like a brilliant and agreeable military promenade,’ noted Cesare de Laugier, a native of Elba. Lieutenant von Meerheimb found leavetaking from his native Saxony gloomy and tearful, but the mood changed as soon as they were on the march. ‘From the very first stage, every face reflected universal gaiety, and good humour reigned along the whole length of the snaking column,’ he wrote. They were warmly greeted as they trudged through southern Germany, and had many an amorous adventure along the way.³⁹

‘The ancients had a great advantage over us in that their armies were not tailed by a second army of penpushers,’ Napoleon frequently complained in conversation.⁴⁰ He was not referring to the vastly expanded commissariat he had organised for this campaign.

From the moment he became ruler of France, he had begun to take elements of government as well as a military staff off to war with him. And when he became Emperor, he began to take a skeleton court. For this campaign, whose scope and duration were both so imponderable, he decided to take his whole life-support system, the means to exercise government, and everything that was necessary to make a grand show wherever he went and whatever he might decide to do – be it enthroning a King of Poland or having himself crowned Emperor of India. Napoleon’s equipage, under the command of the Master of the Horse Caulaincourt, consisted of some four hundred horses and forty mules carrying or drawing tents, camp beds, office, wardrobe, pharmacy, silver plate, kitchen, cellar and forges as well as an assortment of secretaries, officials, servants, cooks and grooms; and 130 saddle horses for the Emperor and his aides-de-camp. His baggage included a great many tents that would never be pitched and equipment that would never be unpacked. There was also a force of a hundred postillions attached to him. These would be posted along the road of the advance to supervise the rapid movement of mail between Paris and Napoleon’s headquarters by passing over the locked boxes containing his state correspondence from one courier or estafette to another.⁴¹

The exigencies of administrating the army, its support services and the Emperor’s entourage had exponentially inflated the numbers. Thousands of commissaires and lesser administrators, each with his servants, followed in the wake of the army. ‘The military administration was full of people who had never seen war and who said out loud that they had come on this campaign in order to make their fortune,’ complained Colonel de Saint-Chamans. Colonel Henri-Joseph Paixhans ranted against these people, ‘penetrated with the importance of their little persons’, who together with their minions made up ‘a cloaca of ineptitude, baseness and rapacity’.⁴²

Every officer had at least one carriage, in which he kept spare uniforms, arms, maps, books and personal effects, driven by his own coachman and attended by at least one servant. General Compans, commanding the 5th Division in Davout’s 1st Corps, was by no means a sybarite; if anything, he was one of the plainer-living officers. Yet his establishment at the outset of the campaign consisted of his maitre d’hôtel Louis; his valet de chambre Duval; his coachman Vaud; two valets, Simon and Louis; his gendarme Trouillet; three other servants, Pierre, Valentin and Janvier; five carriage horses, half a dozen saddle horses and some thirty draught horses; one carriage and several wagons.⁴³

The unknown object of the campaign, the uncertainty as to where it might take them and the likelihood of great distances to be covered made many an officer stock up against all eventualities, and more than one had new uniforms made for himself and new liveries for his servants. Faced with the possibility of a long absence from home, many, particularly among the Italians, appear to have defied Napoleon’s strict instructions and brought their wives along.⁴⁴

As they marched across Germany and Poland, they had no clear vision of the aims of the campaign, and this dampened the ardour of some. ‘The future was vague, and its fortunes very distant; there was no inkling, nothing to exercise the imagination, nothing to awaken the enthusiasm,’ wrote Colonel Boulart of the artillery of the Guard. This did not stop them from speculating wildly. Jakob Walter of Stuttgart thought they were being marched up to some Baltic port, from which they would be shipped to Spain. But most looked eastwards. ‘We thought that, together with the Russians, we would cross the deserts of that great empire in order to go and attack England in her possessions in India,’ wrote General Pouget. One soldier wrote home saying they were marching to England, overland through Russia.⁴⁵

‘Some said that Napoleon had made a secret alliance with Alexander, and that a combined Franco-Russian army was going to march against Turkey and take hold of its possessions in Europe and Asia; others said that the war would take us to the Great Indies, to chase out the English,’ remembered one volunteer.* ‘All of this concerned me very little: whether we were going to go to the right, to the left or straight ahead was a matter of indifference to me, as long as I could enter into the real world,’ wrote another. ‘My friends, my childhood companions were almost all in the army; they were already storing up glory. Was I, useless burden on this earth, to remain with my hands crossed to shamefully await their return? I was eighteen years old.’ Another, a fusilier in the 6th Regiment of the Guard, wrote to his parents telling them he was off to the ‘the Great Indies’ or possibly ‘Egippe’. ‘As for me, I don’t care either way; I would like us to go the ends of the earth.’ He spoke for many.⁴⁶

* The term ‘grande armée’ in French military parlance designated the main operational force in any given campaign, but in the popular imagination the two words are above all associated with the great force that marched on Moscow.

* Curiously enough, Alexander’s secret information services had also reported to him that Napoleon’s plan was to knock out Russia with a quick blow, force peace on her and then, using 100,000 Russian auxiliaries, march on Constantinople, thence to Egypt, and then to Bengal.⁴⁷

6
Confrontation

As hundreds of thousands of men drawn from every corner of Europe tramped across Germany ready to fight and die for him, dreaming of an epic march to India or just of getting back home as quickly as possible, the Emperor of the French was setting the scene for the catastrophe that would engulf all but a handful of them.

Napoleon was about to pit himself against a huge empire while still engaged in a wasting war in Spain, with Germany in a state of ferment and Britain hovering on the sidelines ready to take advantage of any opportunity that might arise. It is customary before going to war to firm up as many allies as possible, and for one such as this it was an absolute necessity. As luck would have it, he had a number of them lining up to support him. Sweden was a natural ally, with a long history of francophilia and an interest in recovering Finland and her enclaves on the Baltic from Russia; Turkey, another traditional ally of France, was actually engaged in a bloody war with Russia; Austria, whose emperor was Napoleon’s father-in-law, had many interests in common with the French; Prussia was begging to be allowed into an alliance with France; and the Poles were only waiting to be given the signal to rise up all over western Russia.

In the circumstances, Napoleon’s behaviour is astonishing. On 27 January 1812, under the pretext that the Continental System was not being enforced rigorously enough there, he sent his armies into Swedish Pomerania and took possession of it. He followed this up with a demand to Sweden for an alliance against Russia and a contingent of troops. When this was rejected by Bernadotte, he said he would allow the Swedes to recapture Finland, and offered some trading concessions. When this too was rejected, Napoleon offered to return Pomerania and threw in Mecklemburg as well as a large subsidy. But it was too late. His high-handed seizure of Pomerania had been taken as an insult in Sweden, and within two weeks of the news reaching Stockholm, Bernadotte’s special envoy was in St Petersburg asking for a treaty with Russia, which was duly signed on 5 April.

As for France’s other traditional ally, Turkey, Napoleon did nothing, assuming that she would go on fighting Russia unbidden. It is true that relations between France and Turkey had been strained by the treaty of Tilsit, which appeared to ally France with Turkey’s enemy. It is also true that Napoleon had a low opinion of the three sultans who had followed each other in rapid and bloody succession. But at this stage any gesture of support for Turkey would have yielded real advantages: Alexander had just instructed his commander on the Turkish front, General Kutuzov, to start talks and make peace at almost any cost, as he needed all his troops to face the French.

Napoleon’s treatment of Austria was hardly less offhand. The treaty he signed with her on 14 March stipulated that following a French victory Moldavia and Wallachia would be returned to Turkey, and that if Poland were to be restored, Austria could keep Galicia, or, if she preferred, receive compensation in Illyria. While the treaty suggested a common policy in central Europe and the Balkans, it kept everything vague, as Napoleon did not wish to tie his hands. For the same reason, he only asked for a small Austrian auxiliary force under Prince Schwarzenberg, which was to cover his right flank.

Frederick William of Prussia had begged Napoleon for an alliance which would restore some dignity to his country’s enforced subjection to France. But Napoleon responded with a treaty, signed on 4 March, by which he graciously allowed Prussia to supply a small contingent of troops for the forthcoming campaign, on the most abject terms. This not only incensed the Prussian nationalists further, it also undermined the pro-French party in Berlin, paving the way for an explosion of anti-French feeling. It also meant that French troops had to be diverted to keeping an eye on the country, as Napoleon insisted that they march through Berlin every day and maintain strong garrisons in fortresses such as Spandau and Danzig.¹

Finally, he refused to give the Poles an unequivocal signal, thereby strengthening the party in that country which mistrusted his intentions and believed that their best chance of survival lay with Alexander. The fact that Napoleon did not see fit to give such a signal speaks volumes both about his self-confidence and his unwillingness to damage Russia any more than was necessary. He wanted to frighten her, but he did not want to destroy her as a power. He wanted to co-opt her as an ally against Britain. There was no other reason for France to go to war with Russia: there was nothing Russia had that France could possibly have wanted. The only other conceivable motive for confronting Russia was to force her out of her newly dominant position in European affairs and neutralise her ability to threaten France.

In the first days of March, in a long conversation with one of his aides, Napoleon announced that he was determined to ‘throw back for two hundred years that inexorable threat of invasion from the north’. He expounded a historical vision according to which the fertile and civilised south of Europe would always be threatened by uncivilised ravenous hordes from the north. ‘I am therefore propelled into this hazardous war by political reality,’ he affirmed. ‘Only the affability of Alexander, the admiration he professed for me, which I believe was real, and his eagerness to embrace all my schemes, were able to make me disregard for a while this unalterable fact … Remember Suvorov and his Tartars in Italy: the only answer is to throw them back beyond Moscow; and when will Europe be in a position to do this, if not now, and by me?’²

He did not believe any of it. He had already shown that he was even prepared to add to Russia’s power if that meant she would help him vanquish Britain. And, as ever when he thought of Russia and Britain, Napoleon’s mind filled with a notion that lived uneasily beside the vision of himself as a latter-day Roman emperor throwing back the barbarian hordes, namely the Alexandrine dream of a joint march to India.³

To General Vandamme he gave a more perfunctory reason for going to war. ‘One way or another, I want to finish the thing,’ he said, ‘as we are both getting old, my dear Vandamme, and I don’t want to find myself in old age in a position in which people can kick me in the backside, so I am determined to bring things to a finish one way or the other.’⁴ In effect, he had assembled the greatest army the world had ever seen, with no defined purpose. And, by definition, aimless wars cannot be won.

One cannot help wondering whether Napoleon did not realise this. In the weeks before setting off, he made more than his usual share of cryptically fatalistic comments. ‘And anyway, how can I help it if a surfeit of power draws me towards dictatorship of the world?’ he said to one of his ministers who urged him to draw back from the war. ‘I feel myself propelled towards some unknown goal,’ he told another.⁵ This fatalism would also explain the absence of the speed and determination which were his usual hallmarks. While the vast military machine was taking shape in northern and eastern Germany in March, the diplomatic niceties continued.

For all the talk of barbarian hordes being thrown out of Europe, the unfortunate Russian ambassador in Paris, Prince Kurakin, was finding it difficult to get away. He had never enjoyed his job, and had found it increasingly difficult to carry it out as tension mounted between Napoleon and Alexander. Things had not been made any easier when, in February, a spying scandal had broken over Paris involving Alexander’s special envoy Colonel Chernyshev. He had for some time been paying a clerk at the French War Ministry to supply him with information on troop numbers and movements. The French police had got wind of this and informed Napoleon. On 25 February, just as Chernyshev was about to set off for St Petersburg with a personal letter from him to Alexander, the Emperor accorded him a long interview, in which he treated him with cordiality and respect. The following day the police broke into the apartments the departed Chernyshev had just vacated and brought the whole matter into the open.

Kurakin had to listen to torrents of outraged self-righteousness on the subject. As he watched troops leaving Paris bound for Germany, he found himself in a ridiculous position. He felt he should ask for his passports and leave, but every time he mentioned this to Maret or to Napoleon they evinced shocked surprise, affirming that there was no reason at all for him to go, and intimating that his departure would be interpreted as a declaration of war.⁶

On 24 April Kurakin called on Maret with a letter from Alexander stating that Russia would not negotiate until France withdrew all her troops behind the Rhine. This was rich, considering that only two weeks earlier Alexander himself had set off to join his armies on the frontier of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. On 27 April Kurakin had an audience with Napoleon at the Tuileries to discuss this. The interview was not as stormy as might have been expected, and Napoleon handed him a letter for Alexander. It expressed regret that the Tsar should be ordering Napoleon where to station his troops while he himself stood at the head of an army on the frontiers of the Grand Duchy. ‘Your Majesty will however allow me to assure him that, were fate to conspire to make war between us inevitable, this would in no way alter the sentiments which Your Majesty has inspired in me, and which are beyond any vicissitude or possibility of change,’ he ended.⁷

But he could not delay any longer. He had to go and take command of his armies. Before doing so, he made arrangements for the defence and the administration of France. Although he had, as a long shot, made a peace offer to Britain, suggesting a withdrawal of all French and British troops from the Iberian peninsula, with Joseph remaining King of Spain and the Braganzas being allowed back into Portugal, he expected nothing to come of it. He therefore strengthened the coastal defences in order to discourage any British attempt at invasion, and organised a national guard of 100,000 men who could be called out to deal with any emergency.

He had considered leaving Prince Eugéne in Paris as regent, but decided against it. In the event he left the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire Jean-Jacques Cambacérès in charge. The Arch-Chancellor would preside over the Council of State, which was a non-political executive composed of efficient and loyal experts.

At their last interview, on the eve of Napoleon’s departure, Étienne Pasquier, Prefect of Police, voiced his fears that if the forces of opposition building up in various quarters were to try to seize power with the Emperor so far from Paris, there would be nobody on the spot with enough authority to put down the insurrection. ‘Napoleon seemed to be struck by these brief reflections,’ recalled the Prefect. ‘When I had finished, he remained silent, walking to and fro between the window and the fireplace, his arms crossed behind his back, like a man deep in thought. I was walking behind him, when, turning brusquely towards me, he uttered the following words: “Yes, there is certainly some truth in what you say; this is but one more problem to be added to all those that I must confront in this, the greatest, the most difficult, that I have ever undertaken; but one must accomplish what has been undertaken. Goodbye, Monsieur le Préfet.”’⁸

Napoleon knew how to hide any anxiety he may have felt. ‘Never has a departure for the army looked more like a pleasure trip,’ noted Baron Fain as the Emperor left Saint Cloud on Saturday, 9 May with Marie-Louise and a sizeable proportion of his court.⁹ It soon turned into more of an imperial progress.

At Mainz, Napoleon reviewed some troops and received the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstädt and the Prince of Anhalt Coethen, who had come to pay their respects. At Würzburg, where he stopped on the night of 13–14 May, he found the King of Württemberg and the Grand Duke of Baden waiting for him like two faithful vassals.

On 16 May he was met by the King and Queen of Saxony, who had driven out to meet him, and together they made a triumphal entry into Dresden that evening by torchlight as the cannon thundered salutes and the church bells pealed. His lever the next morning was graced by the ruling princes of Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Coburg and Dessau. This was followed by a solemn Mass (it was Sunday), attended by the entire court and diplomatic corps. Napoleon went out of his way to greet the representative of Russia. The Queen of Westphalia and the Grand Duke of Würzburg arrived in Dresden later that day, and the Emperor Francis of Austria and his Empress the following day. A couple of days later Frederick William arrived in Dresden accompanied by his son the Crown Prince.

Napoleon had taken up residence in the royal palace, which Frederick Augustus had obligingly vacated, guarded by Saxon rather than French sentries. It was he who was the host, and he dictated etiquette, treating both the King of Saxony and the Emperor of Austria as his guests. At nine every morning he would hold his lever, which was the greatest display of power Europe had seen for centuries. It was attended by the Austrian Emperor and all the German kings and princes, ‘whose deference for Napoleon went far beyond anything one could imagine’, in the words of Boniface de Castellane, a twenty-four-year-old aide-de-camp.¹⁰ He would then lead them in to assist at the toilette of Marie-Louise. They would watch her pick her way through an astonishing assemblage of jewels and parures, trying on and discarding one after the other, and occasionally offering one to her barely older stepmother the Empress Maria Ludovica, who simmered with shame and fury. She loathed Napoleon for the upstart he was – and for having thrown her father off his throne of Modena many years before. Her distaste was magnified by the embarrassment and resentment she felt in the midst of this splendour, as the poor condition of the Austrian finances allowed her only a few jewels, which looked paltry next to those of Marie-Louise.

In the evening they would dine at Napoleon’s table, off the silver-gilt dinner service Marie-Louise had been given as a wedding present by the city of Paris, and which she had thoughtfully brought along. The company would assemble and enter the drawing room in reverse order of seniority, each announced by a crier, beginning with mere excellencies, going on to the various ducal and royal highnesses, and culminating with their imperial highnesses the Emperor and Empress of Austria. A while later, the doors would swing open and Napoleon would stride in, with just one word of announcement: ‘The Emperor!’ He was also the only one present who kept his hat on.

To some of the older people present, and particularly to the Emperor Francis, there must have been an element of the surreal about the proceedings. It was less than twenty years since his sister Marie-Antoinette had been shamefully dragged to the scaffold and guillotined to please the Parisian mob, yet here was this product of the French Revolution not only ordering them all about, but insinuating himself into the family, becoming his own son-in-law. At dinner one evening, the conversation having touched on the tragic fate of Louis XVI, Napoleon expressed sympathy, but also blamed his ‘poor uncle’ for not having shown more firmness.¹¹

His stay in Dresden was enlivened with balls, banquets, theatre performances and hunting parties. They were by no means just gratuitous show, but part of a carefully choreographed display of power. ‘Napoleon was indeed God at Dresden, the king amongst kings,’ was how one observer saw the proceedings. ‘It was, in all probability, the highest point of his glory: he could have held on to it, but to surpass it seemed impossible.’ Napoleon was flexing his muscles before the whole world, and he meant everyone to sit up and take note. On the one hand he wanted to remind all his German and Austrian allies of their subjection to him. More importantly, he was still hoping that Alexander’s nerve would break; that when he saw himself isolated and faced with such an array of power he might agree to negotiate.

To many, this still seemed the most likely outcome. ‘Do you know that many people still do not believe there will be war?’ Prince Eugène wrote to his pregnant wife from Plock on the Vistula on 18 May. ‘They say it won’t take place, as there is nothing to be gained from it by either party, and that it will all end in talk.’ Napoleon’s secretary Claude-François Meneval noted ‘an extreme repugnance’ to war on his master’s part.¹²

Napoleon had convinced himself that Alexander was being manipulated by his entourage, and that if only he could talk to him directly or through some trusted third party, he would manage to strike a deal. He therefore sent a special envoy to the Tsar. For this delicate and, as he thought, crucial mission, he chose one of his aides-de-camp, the Comte Louis de Narbonne.

Narbonne was a fifty-seven-year-old general, who had, in turn, been Minister of War in the early stages of the revolution, an émigré and Napoleon’s ambassador in Vienna. He was a man of vast education, with literary tastes and a special interest in the diplomacy of the Renaissance, on which he was something of an expert. He was generally believed to be the natural son of Louis XV, and exuded all the elegance and grace associated with the ancien régime. If anyone could inspire trust in Alexander, it must surely be him.

But Napoleon was deluding himself. Even had he wished to, Alexander could not afford to negotiate with him. ‘The defeat of Austerlitz, the defeat of Friedland, the Tilsit peace, the arrogance of the French ambassadors in Petersburg, the passive behaviour of the Emperor Alexander I with regard to Napoleon’s policies – these were deep wounds in the heart of every Russian,’ recalled Prince Sergei Volkonsky. ‘Revenge and revenge were the only feelings burning inside each and every one.’ He may have exaggerated the strength and the universality of these feelings, but they were gaining ground, encouraged by popular literature, which scoured Russia’s past for patriot heroes. ‘The upsurge of national spirit manifested itself in word and deed at every opportunity,’ wrote Volkonsky. ‘At every level of society there was only one topic of conversation, in the gilded drawing rooms of the higher circles, in the contrasting simplicity of barracks, in quiet conversations between friends, at festive dinners and evenings – one, and only one thing was expressed: the desire for war, the hope for victory, for the recovery of the nation’s dignity and the renown of Russia’s name.’¹³

Reading the letters and memoirs of Russian nobles of the time, one is struck by the fact that nobody seems to have a good word to say of anyone in positions of authority, be it in the civil administration or the army. They reverberate with invective against ‘foreigners’ running the country, and laments over ‘corruption’, Freemasonry, ‘Jacobins’, and any other bogey that came to mind. Much of this discontent settled on the figure of Speransky, who was heartily detested by Grand Duchess Catherine and her court, and by most of the nobility, who hated him for blocking their careers by introducing qualifying exams for senior posts in the civil service and who feared his alleged intention of emancipating the serfs. ‘Standing beside him I always felt I could smell the sulphurous breath and in his eyes the glimpse the bluish flames of the underworld,’ noted one contemporary.¹⁴

In February 1812 an intrigue was spun by Gustav Mauritz Armfeld, a Swede who was one of Alexander’s military advisers, with the participation of the Minister of Police Aleksandr Dmitrievich Balashov, to show up Speransky as being in secret contact with the French (which indeed he was, with Talleyrand, on Alexander’s orders). At the same time a rumour was spread to the effect that the police had uncovered a plot by Speransky to arm the peasants and call them out against their masters.

Alexander had Speransky put under surveillance by the police, but also had his Minister of Police followed and watched – this kind of paranoia was not a Soviet innovation. It is impossible to tell whether Alexander believed that Speransky had betrayed him or not, but it was certainly clear even to him that his State Secretary’s unpopularity was not only tainting him, but even exposing him to danger.

On the evening of 29 March 1812 Speransky was summoned to an audience with the Tsar in the Winter Palace. There were no witnesses to the two-hour interview, but those waiting in the antechamber could see that something was wrong when the Minister emerged from the Tsar’s study. Moments later the door opened again and Alexander himself appeared, with tears pouring down his cheeks, and embraced Speransky, bidding him a theatrical farewell. Speransky drove home, where he found Balashov waiting for him. He was bundled into a police kibitka and driven off through the night to exile in Nizhni Novgorod.¹⁵

His post as State Secretary was given to Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov, a retired admiral and a particular hater of everything pertaining to France and her culture. He had denounced the Tilsit treaty and made frequent attacks on Speransky, and had of late achieved a certain notoriety through his Dissertations on the Love of One’s Fatherland. He was astonished, and somewhat overwhelmed, to be hauled out of obscurity. But nobles up and down the empire rejoiced.

The fall of the hated Minister was an unequivocal signal to them that Alexander had understood he needed them during the uncertain times ahead. He was acutely aware that an invasion of Russia might well trigger a new Time of Troubles similar to that two hundred years before. It was probably for this reason that he agreed to give the post of Governor General of Moscow, which had fallen vacant in March, to his sister Catherine’s protégé Count Fyodor Rostopchin. This erstwhile Foreign Minister to Tsar Paul was a lively, clever man, forthright in his opinions, but he was also something of a fantasist, and possibly mentally unbalanced. Alexander did not consider him up to the job, and had tried to resist his sister’s request. ‘He’s no soldier, and the Governor of Moscow must bear epaulettes on his shoulders,’ he argued. ‘That is a matter for his tailor,’ she riposted. Alexander gave way. It was, after all, a largely honorary post.¹⁶

He had removed the most obvious points of friction between himself and his people, and pacified the most vociferous centres of opposition. Now it was up to God. At 2 p.m. on 9 April, after attending a solemn service in the monumental new cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, Alexander left St Petersburg for the army, accompanied part of the way by a crowd of wellwishers who ran alongside his carriage cheering and weeping. He had decided that his place was with his troops.

The Russian army was unlike any other in Europe, and could not have been more different from the French, particularly where the common soldier was concerned. He was drafted for a period of twenty-five years, which effectively meant for life. He was unlikely to serve that term, as no more than 10 per cent survived the dreadful conditions and the frequent beatings – including the practice of making them run the gauntlet of two rows of their comrades beating them as they went – let alone disease or death in battle.

When he was drafted, his family and often the entire village would turn out to see him off, treating the event as a funeral. His family and friends excised him from their lives, never expecting to see him again. As the children of men drafted into the army could not be looked after by working single mothers, they were sent to military orphanages to be brought up and trained to become non-commissioned officers when they grew up. But conditions in these institutions were so poor that only about two-thirds of them survived into adulthood.¹⁷ If the conscript were to return after a quarter of a century (with no leave and no letters) he would be a stranger. And he would no longer be a serf, so there was no place for him in the rural economy any more. Those who did last out the twenty-five years would therefore either try to go on serving, or go off to towns looking for work.

When they entered their regiments the conscripts effectively joined a brotherhood, removed from the normal stream of Russian life and bound together by misery. Virtually the only respect in which they had an advantage over their French counterparts was that their uniforms, predominantly green in colour, were more practical and less constricting, as well as better made. In peacetime, their platoon functioned as a trading corporation, an artel, leasing their labour to local civilians, with the profits theoretically being shared out between them, though more often going into the pockets of their officers.

Desertion was difficult within the boundaries of the Russian empire, as an unattached peasant would stick out wherever he went. But when Russian armies were stationed along the western border it became frequent, and many would cross it and take service in the Polish or other forces. When they operated abroad, particularly when they were about to return home, desertion became common, and its scale testified to the misery of military life. In 1807, as they began their march back into Russia after Tilsit, Prince Sergei Volkonsky noted that his regiment, the élite Chevaliergardes, lost about a hundred men in four days, despite doubled sentries posted all around the camp perimeter.¹⁸ The men nevertheless behaved with the greatest patriotism and loyalty in the face of the enemy.

Much of the training in the Russian army was directed at good performance on the parade ground rather than on the battlefield. The men were drilled mercilessly and marched about in formation until they learnt to operate as a mass, and taught to rely on the bayonet rather than musketry. In battle, obedience was considered to be a key factor. A special instruction addressed to infantry officers stipulated that on the eve of an engagement they must give their men a talk, reminding them of their duty and that they would be severely punished for any signs of cowardice. Even trying to dodge a cannonball while the unit was standing to was to be punished by caning. If a soldier or non-commissioned officer showed cowardice in the field, he should be executed on the spot. The same went for one who created confusion, by, for instance, shouting ‘We’re cut off!’, as he was to be considered a traitor.¹⁹ All these factors conspired to generate solidarity, resilience and the ability to put up with almost any conditions. But they did not breed intelligence or initiative.

The chasm dividing officers from the other ranks was unbridgeable, and there was no possibility of promotion. The officers were drawn exclusively from the nobility. They were supposed to serve their apprenticeship in the ranks, but usually did this in cadet formations or officer schools, and kept contact with their troops down to a minimum. This was not a problem, since many could not sustain a conversation in Russian. But they did personally cane them for minor faults.

The pay of junior officers in the Russian army was lower than anywhere else in Europe. And as promotion to senior ranks was almost entirely dependent on influence at court, junior officers from the minor nobility were sentenced to a life of poverty and obscurity. As a result, such a career only attracted those of meagre talents. The operations of 1805–1807 had shown up grave faults in the command structure of the Russian army, lack of cooperation between units and arms, and other weaknesses, mainly to do with the low calibre and poor training of the officers. But all attempts at addressing these problems were vitiated by the rapid expansion of the armed forces over the next few years, which created a shortage of officers, with the result that in 1808 the length of training was actually cut.

Alexander did everything he could to prepare the army for its next showdown with Napoleon. He created a Ministry of the Armed Forces with the aim of making the army more effective, and lavished money on it. Military spending rose from twenty-six million roubles out of a total budget of eighty-two million at Alexander’s accession to seventy million out of a budget of 114 million by 1814. He raised the draft, which took four men out of five hundred souls in 1805, to five out of five hundred, yielding 100 to 120,000 men each year, which meant that he conscripted more than 500,000 men between 1806 and 1811. In the course of that year 60,000 retired but capable soldiers were brought back into service. The total number under arms in Russia’s land forces increased from 487,000 in 1807 to 590,000 in 1812, and in March of that year an extra draft of two men per five hundred souls yielded another 65 to 70,000 men. By September 1812 the total number of men under arms in the land forces would reach 904,000.²⁰

In 1803 Alexander had charged General Arakcheev with modernising the artillery. His reforms did not yield fruit in time for the war of 1805, but by the end of the decade it was probably the most professional in Europe. Arakcheev got rid of small-calibre guns, and equipped it with six- and twelve-pounder field guns, and ten- and twenty-pounder ‘licornes’, a kind of howitzer. He fitted these guns with the most sophisticated and accurate sights, and made sure that the gunners knew how to use them to best advantage.

The latest reform to see the light of day, in January 1812, was an ordinance for the command of large armies in the field. This laid out clearly who was responsible at every level of command, and gave the commander-in-chief almost unlimited powers in time of war. It also prescribed the channels through which all information should flow up from the furthest outpost to the commander-in-chief and how orders should be transmitted down from him to the company commander. Unfortunately, it was to be almost universally disregarded in the forthcoming campaign, with lamentable results.

The Russian forces in Lithuania were divided into two armies. The First, the stronger of the two, under General Barclay de Tolly, was deployed along the river Niemen in a slight arc almost a hundred kilometres long in advance of Vilna, a position from which it could either move out to attack or mount a defence. The Second Army, under General Bagration, was concentrated like a strike force, ready either to support the advance of the First Army by outflanking any enemy defence, or to ram the exposed flank of any force that attacked the First Army before Vilna. A Third Army, under General Tormasov, guarded the frontier to the south of the Pripet marshes. Exact figures for the strength of these forces are impossible to establish: the conflicting calculations of Russian historians put the total land forces as low as 356,000 and as high as 716,000, with as few as 180,000 and as many as 251,000 effectives in the front line. Most recent studies have been more consistent, but there is some confusion as a result of Russian historians’ habit of breaking down effectives into ‘front-line’ figures and totals, which include all the support services. The myth of the Russians being vastly outnumbered during this campaign has stemmed from the juxtaposition of Russian ‘front-line’ figures with French totals. The strength of the First Army was 127,800 frontline and 159,800 in total, that of the Second 52,000 and 62,000 respectively, and of the Third 45,800 and 58,200, making up a force of 225,000 front-line and 280,000 in total positioned along the frontier, supported by just over nine hundred guns.

This force was backed up by two reserve corps, Ertel’s of 55,000/ 65,000, and Meller Zakomelsky’s of 31,000/47,000, bringing the total of the Russian forces facing Napoleon to 392,000. Behind them a second wave of units was being formed. As soon as Alexander’s diplomatic demarches had secured peace with Sweden and Turkey, another 28,500/37,200 troops from Finland and 54,500/70,000 from Moldavia would be brought into play. The armies at the front were well supplied and supported for an offensive by a series of magazines at Vilna, Shvienchiany, Grodno and elsewhere, and a second line stretching behind that from Riga in the north to Kaluga in the south.²¹

It is difficult to gauge what Alexander intended by coming to Vilna, as he gave no indication that he meant to take command. His armies had been massing in the region for the past eighteen months, and were poised along the frontier in readiness to attack. The Tsar’s arrival at advance headquarters would, in the circumstances, suggest that the decision had been taken to launch the attack, since there could be no conceivable point in His Imperial Majesty coming all that way just to review them. In the event, Alexander’s presence helped to confuse what was already a highly confused situation.

The man ostensibly in command was the fifty-one-year-old Minister of War, General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly. He was an intelligent, sensible and competent man of strong character and independent judgement, who had shown his mettle in the field against Swedes, Poles, Turks and Frenchmen, being seriously wounded at Eylau. He was undoubtedly very brave and steady under fire. Alexander liked him and had promoted him over the heads of others, arousing their jealousy. He was reserved and stoical rather than affable, which did nothing to increase his popularity among his peers. As he could not count on their cordial cooperation, he was wont to look to everything himself. And although he had done more than any other to ease the lot of the common soldier, he was not the kind of commander who inspires devotion in the rank and file.²²

While Barclay had been appointed commander of the First Army, he had not been nominated commander-in-chief. This may have been because Alexander felt this to be unnecessary since he was also Minister of War, or it may have been because he intended to command himself, or did not want to offend others vying for the post.

Ostensibly, Alexander took no part in military affairs beyond inspecting fortifications and attending parades. But he did interfere in day-to-day business. And his presence at headquarters ineluctably diminished Barclay’s already fragile authority, as it gave huge scope for insubordination – and there was no lack of those who hated Barclay and resented the idea of serving under him.

Foremost amongst these was General Prince Piotr Ivanovich Bagration, commanding the Second Army. Bagration was a dashing battlefield general, recklessly brave, with a volcanic temper, a warm heart, and all the fiery bravado necessary to make him worshipped by his officers and men. Although younger than Barclay, he had been a general for longer and therefore felt he had a right to overall command. In the absence of any document stipulating that he must take his orders from Barclay, Bagration took the view that his command was an independent one. Alexander’s arrival at headquarters provided him with an excuse to send all his reports to the Tsar, as supreme commander, bypassing Barclay entirely.

Bagration’s position was a strong one. He was extremely popular with his fellow generals and had a great following at court. And, having been for a time Grand Duchess Catherine’s lover, he also had a slight ascendancy over Alexander, who did not like him but could not be seen to put him down.

Matters were made no easier by the Tsar’s younger brother Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, who commanded the Imperial Guard, an unbalanced blusterer whose only real pleasure in life derived from making troops parade before him. For him, the parade was a kind of ballet – perfect precision in the choreography and meticulous attention to dress were assured by the generous distribution of savage punishments for being a few inches out of line or missing a button. Between parades, Constantine could be counted on to support anyone who criticised Barclay or failed to carry out one of his orders.

This state of affairs opened the door for a comeback by General Levin Bennigsen. A Hanoverian by birth, this old professional soldier had taken service in Russia more than fifty years before. A competent commander, if a little fussy and ponderous, he had risen slowly but surely, and assured his survival in Alexander’s good graces by being one of those who had murdered his father. He had ended his military career on a less than satisfactory note, leading the Russian army to defeat at Friedland. He was now sixty-seven years old. He had retired, and was living on his estate of Zakrent, which happened to be a few kilometres outside Vilna. Ever since Friedland he had longed for a chance to redeem his reputation, and felt it was he, not Barclay, who should be given overall command. Upon his arrival in Vilna, Alexander summoned Bennigsen and asked him to return to service in an unspecified capacity in his personal entourage.

This was already alarmingly large. Alexander was surrounded by a swarm of unofficial advisers, including his brother-in-law Prince George of Oldenburg, his uncle Prince Alexander of Württemberg, the Swedish adventurer Gustav Mauritz Armfeld, the French émigré Jean Protais Anstett, and a host of others. This was partly the result of Alexander’s longer-term views and ambitions. ‘Napoleon means to complete the enslavement of Europe, and to do so he has to strike Russia down,’ he wrote to Baron vom Stein, inviting him to come and help plan the crusade for its liberation. ‘Every friend of virtue, every human being who is animated by the sentiment of independence and love of humanity is interested in the success of this struggle.’²³

Since Alexander also needed to carry on exercising political power, he had instructed his most important ministers to follow him to headquarters. He was soon joined in Vilna by Admiral Shishkov, who was slightly baffled to find himself, the effective Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior, stuck out at military headquarters. General Arakcheev, head of the Council of State’s Military Committee and Secretary to the Emperor for Military Affairs, was also in attendance. Chancellor Rumiantsev suffered a mild stroke on his way to Vilna, but this did not stop him joining the Tsar, though Alexander henceforth conducted his diplomatic business through his Secretary for Foreign Affairs Karl von Nesselrode.

The presence of so many different hierarchies of power had undesirable repercussions in the army at every level, and exacerbated a problem, created by the dearth of native officer material, which was to bring forth torrents of bad blood and bedevil the conduct of the campaign: the presence of large numbers of foreigners.

There were literally hundreds of French officers serving in the Russian army, most of them émigré aristocrats who had fled the revolution. They occupied a variety of posts, including some of the highest, with the Marquis de Traversay Admiral-in-Chief of the Russian Fleet, the Comte de Langeron and the Marquis Charles Lambert in command of army corps and General de Saint-Priest as chief of staff to the Second Army. There were also Italians, Swiss, Swedes, Poles and others: Barclay came of a family of Baltic barons who traced their ancestry to the Barclays of Towie in Scotland; Bagration’s origins were Georgian. But those who caused the greatest problem were the Germans, and particularly the Prussians.

Hundreds of officers who had been cashiered as a result of the reduction of the Prussian army after Jena had taken service in Russia. More joined them over the next years, with a second great wave after Napoleon’s defeat of Austria in 1809. And a final batch had just arrived, disgusted by the servile alliance Prussia had signed with France in February. Among these officers were the Prussian military reformers Major von Boyen and Colonel von Gneisenau, the future military theorist Major von Clausewitz, the staff officer Colonel Karl von Toll, and Baron Ludwig von Wolzogen, a native of Saxe-Meiningen and former aide-de-camp to the King of Württemberg.

All the Russian officers spoke French amongst themselves, and that was the language in which orders were normally given, but many of the Prussians lapsed into German when communicating with each other. As Barclay also spoke good German, they would address him in that language, creating an impression of a foreign club within the army, particularly at headquarters, since most of the Germans were employed as staff officers.

Alexander’s presence in Vilna had a paralysing effect on the vital question of Russia’s overall strategy. While he refrained from favouring any particular option, he lent a willing ear to anyone who expressed a view, and then asked others what they thought of it, thus seemingly opening to discussion something that should have been decided in small committee at the outset. There were a number of options to be considered.

There was the old plan, formulated by Barclay, Bennigsen, Bagration and others in the previous year, of a strike into Poland followed by an advance into Prussia to liberate it from French domination. Bagration repeatedly begged Alexander to implement this plan even at this late stage. ‘What have we to fear?’ he wrote to his sovereign on 20 June. ‘You are with us, and Russia is behind us!’²⁴ According to some sources, Barclay still favoured this plan, although he was less sanguine about the chances of success than some of his colleagues. He was presumably also aware of his master’s reluctance to be seen as the aggressor, and therefore prepared a second plan, of defending the frontier along the river Niemen. He stretched his forces along the frontier, ostensibly so they could contain and beat back any French attempt at crossing the river.²⁵

Barclay had come up with another plan back in 1807, when he was lying in hospital recovering from a wound received at Eylau. The Russians had just been defeated by the French at Friedland, and he saw their only hope of avoiding total annihilation in a retreat deep into Russia. If the French were to follow them, they should avoid giving battle, but concentrate on consolidating their forces by marching back towards their bases. The further the French came after them, the more men they would have to leave behind, and the longer their lines of communication and supply would grow. In the end, the Russians would find themselves superior in numbers and resources and would be able to defeat the French.²⁶

It was not a particularly original idea: the strategic asset provided by the vast country was something of a cliché, and Russian officers often brandished it as a threat in conversations with foreigners – Alexander himself had done so.²⁷ But Barclay had only considered it in 1807 as a last resort, a counsel of despair, at a moment when Russia did not really have an army left. Napoleon’s willingness to treat with Alexander at Tilsit had saved the day, and no more was said of the plan.

While there was much interest in Russian and Prussian military circles in the concept of a long-drawn-out defensive war, inspired partly by Wellington’s tactics in Spain, it was not one based on retreat. In a long memorandum written for Alexander at the end of July 1811, Barclay suggested moving out to attack the French, but not in a conventional battle – he advised loose manoeuvring by large numbers of light troops, which could harry and demoralise, dragging out the campaign and avoiding decisive engagements. This was to be carried out on enemy territory. Withdrawal into Russia was not something that could be seriously considered when there was a numerous and well-equipped army standing in defence of her borders, and neither Barclay nor Alexander, nor any of the Russian generals for a moment contemplated such a strategy.²⁸ It would have been politically inadmissible and militarily absurd. The troops were positioned for attack, not for retreat. Their stores and depots were as close behind them as they could be so that they could support an attack, and would be condemned to destruction or capture by the French if a retreat were ordered. And drawing an enemy into Russia raised all manner of terrifying possibilities, including peasant revolt – it was only four decades since a rebellion by the peasant leader Emelian Pugachov had brought the empire to the brink of collapse. The memory was fresh in people’s minds, kept so by regular minor eruptions of discontent.

There was only one man at Russian headquarters who entertained a plan based on retreat, and it was nothing like the poetic vision of drawing the enemy in to be devoured by the expanses and forces of Russia. He was Karl Ludwig von Phüll. He had left the Prussian service after Auerstädt and joined the Russian army, in which he had been given the rank of Lieutenant General.

Phüll’s plan was based on a tactic adopted by his hero Frederick the Great in 1761 when confronted by overwhelming forces. Frederick had fallen back into an entrenched camp and worn down the two enemy armies which besieged him there. Phüll suggested that in the event of a French invasion, the Russian First Army should fall back to a previously prepared position, drawing the French in behind them. The Second Army could then come up in the rear of the French and inflict great damage on them. For this purpose he, or rather his protégé Wolzogen, selected a site at Drissa, covering both the Moscow and the St Petersburg roads. Work had started in the last months of 1811 on the construction of massive earthworks that were to make the position impregnable.

The Drissa idea appealed to Alexander because it reminded him of Wellington’s fallback to the lines of Torres Vedras in 1811. But he did not come down firmly in favour of this or any other plan, and he simultaneously entertained various other options. One was to launch a rising in the Balkans and Hungary in order to cause a diversion. The idea was the brainchild of Admiral Pavel Vasilievich Chichagov, an eccentric but competent sailor and erstwhile admirer of Napoleon, currently serving under Kutuzov on the Turkish front. He suggested that having made peace with Turkey, Russia should use her army on that front to invade Bulgaria, whose population was Orthodox and therefore russophile, from there launch an attack on Napoleon’s provinces along the Dalmatian coast, and thence into the heart of Napoleonic Europe via Italy and Switzerland. Alexander was entranced by the sheer scale of the scheme, and toyed with it for some time before Rumiantsev pointed out that it was unrealistic and diplomatically counter-productive, as it would rouse both Turkey and Austria against Russia and force them into Napoleon’s camp.

Then there was the Polish card, which Alexander was still trying to find ways of playing. While in Vilna he devoted much effort to seducing the local Polish aristocracy, bestowing orders and honorific titles and making the odd allusion to the possibility of restoring Poland. He had a couple of trusted agents sounding out opinion, and wrote to Czartoryski asking whether now would not be a propitious moment to declare his intention of doing so. He was encouraged in this by Bernadotte, who wrote urging him to strike into Poland and to offer its crown to Poniatowski. Alexander sent Colonel Toll on a secret mission to Poniatowski to offer him high office (possibly even the crown) in a future Kingdom of Poland if he agreed to detach his corps from the French army and take it over to the Russian side. Poniatowski was astonished at this request, which would have been impossible to carry out, even had he wished to.

In his quest for ways of subverting the Poles, Alexander also instructed the notorious Catholic pugilist and Sardinian ambassador in St Petersburg, Joseph de Maistre, to employ the Jesuits (who had been disbanded by the Pope but had perversely been kept alive in Russia) to subvert Poland, using the argument that Alexander was the defender of the Papacy, while Napoleon was its enemy.²⁹

Alexander’s sister Catherine was urging him to leave the army. ‘If one of [the generals] commits a fault, he will be blamed and punished; if you make a mistake, everything falls on your shoulders, and the destruction of confidence in him on whom everything depends and who, being the only arbiter of the destiny of the Empire, must be the support to which everything bends, is a greater evil than the loss of a few provinces,’ she wrote.³⁰

What she did not point out was that he had already done a great deal of damage by going to Vilna, and was compounding it by his irresolute behaviour. His refusal to commit himself to any of the options laid before him or to openly place his confidence in any one of his generals meant that nobody knew what to prepare for. His brother Grand Duke Constantine drilled his soldiers mercilessly, but nobody was preparing to meet the approaching Grande Armée. No serious attempts were being made to plot the enemy’s movements, and the units had not even been issued with adequate maps of the areas they were to operate in.³¹

‘In the meantime we held balls and parties, and our prolonged sojourn in Vilna resembled a pleasure trip rather than preparations for war,’ in the words of Colonel Benckendorff. Shishkov was astonished by the carefree atmosphere and the lack of any sense of imminent menace he found on his arrival in Vilna. ‘Our everyday life was so carefree that there was not even any news about the enemy, as though they had been several thousands of versts* away,’ he wrote. The troops had settled into their billets and savoured whatever pleasures the country life of Lithuania could provide. ‘The senior officers feared Napoleon, seeing him as a fearful conqueror, a new Attila,’ wrote Lieutenant Radozhitsky of the light artillery, ‘but we younger ones romped with the god of love, sighing and moaning from his wounds.’³²

People far away from the front could not understand why the Russian army, whose officers wrote home letters full of bravado, did not attack and drive the French out of Prussia and Poland. There was grumbling about the lack of action, reinforced by widespread fear of a French advance into Russia, not least because it might provoke social unrest.

In May the erroneous news reached St Petersburg that Badajoz and Madrid had fallen to the British and that a Spanish army had crossed the Pyrenees into southern France. Why, people asked themselves up and down the country, was Alexander not marching out to deal the final blow against Napoleon? He and his entourage appeared to be whiling away the time at balls and parties, and it was reported in the capital that the officers were indulging in ‘orgies’.³³

Russian estimates of the size of the Grande Armée were very low. Barclay and Phüll put the strength of the French forces at 200–250,000; Bagration at 200,000; Toll at 225,000; Bennigsen at 169,000; and Bernadotte at 150,000. The highest estimate drawn up by anyone on the Russian side was 350,000, and that included all reserves and rear formations.³⁴ This meant that an attack on it would have been seen as perfectly feasible, and Alexander undoubtedly longed to launch one. His excitement about the Chichagov plan and his attempt to bribe Poniatowski can only be viewed in the context of an offensive. And there are other indications that he wanted to take command of it.³⁵

But he was heavily influenced by Phüll’s views, and Phüll was against any attack, believing as he did that the Russian army was not up to it.³⁶ Above all, Alexander wanted to be seen as the innocent victim rather than the aggressor, and his religious instincts told him to play the part of passive tool of the divine will.

In recent years he had made more and more references to the will of God in his letters and utterances, and he had been increasingly guided by the wish to make himself a worthy and righteous instrument of that will. ‘I have at least the consolation of having done everything that is compatible with honour to avoid this struggle,’ he had written to Catherine in February. ‘Now it is only a question of preparing for it with courage and faith in God; this faith is stronger than ever in me, and I submit with resignation to His will.’³⁷

Nesselrode was still advising Alexander to negotiate rather than provoke a war, but Alexander seems to have ruled out negotiations entirely as an option, and he was in no mood to talk when Narbonne arrived in Vilna on 18 May.³⁸ He received him and read the letter he had brought, but told him that as Napoleon had ranged the whole of Europe against Russia it was evident his intentions were hostile, and that there was therefore no point in negotiating. He reiterated that he would only consider doing so if Napoleon withdrew his troops beyond the Rhine.

‘What does the Emperor want?’ he asked Narbonne rhetorically. ‘To subject me to his interests, to force me to measures which ruin my people, and, because I refuse, he intends to make war on me, in the belief that after two or three battles and the occupation of a few provinces, perhaps even a capital, I will be obliged to ask for a peace whose conditions he will dictate. He is deluding himself!’ Then, taking a large map of his dominions, he spread it on the table and continued: ‘My dear Count, I am convinced that Napoleon is the greatest general in Europe, that his armies are the most battle-hardened, his lieutenants the bravest and the most experienced; but space is a barrier. If, after a few defeats, I retreat, sweeping along the population, if I leave it to time, to the wilderness, to the climate to defend me, I may yet have the last word over the most formidable army of modern times.’³⁹

Although most people at Russian headquarters assumed that the only purpose of Narbonne’s mission was to spy out their dispositions and rouse local patriots to stage an uprising, Alexander invited him to attend a parade on the following day, and to dine with him afterwards. But the next day Narbonne was informed by one of Alexander’s aides-de-camp that a carriage generously provisioned for the journey back to Dresden would be waiting at his door that evening.⁴⁰

* One verst = 1060 metres, approximately five-eighths of a mile.

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