Kitabı oku: «Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna»

1 The Lion at Bay

The clock of the Tuileries had begun striking the last quarter before midnight when a mud-spattered carriage of the ungainly kind known as a chaise de poste, drawn at the gallop by four tired horses, swung onto the parade ground in front of the palace. Ignorant of court etiquette, the coachman drove under the central span of the triumphal arch of the Carrousel, reserved exclusively for the Emperor, before the drowsy sentries had time to bar his way. ‘That is a good omen,’ exclaimed one of the two men sitting inside the carriage, a plump man in a voluminous pelisse with a fur bonnet hiding much of his face.

The vehicle came to a stop at the main doorway, under the clock, and its occupants clambered down. The first, who was the taller of the two, had unbuttoned his greatcoat, revealing a chest covered in gold braid, so the sentries let him and his companion through unchallenged, assuming them to be senior officers bearing urgent despatches.

The two men walked briskly down to the end of the vaulted passage and knocked at a large door. After a while, the concierge appeared in his nightshirt, holding a lantern. The taller of the two men identified himself as the Imperial Master of the Horse, but the concierge and his sleepy wife, who had joined him, took some convincing that the man standing before them was indeed General de Caulaincourt. The uniform was right, but the man’s hair was long and unkempt, his face was weatherbeaten and covered with a two-weeks’ growth of stubble, and he looked more like a stage bandit than a senior dignitary of the imperial court.

The concierge’s wife opened the door, saying that the Empress had just retired for the night, while her husband went off to summon the duty footmen so they could show in the newcomers. Yawning and rubbing her eyes, she shifted her attention to the other man. Although the flickering lantern lit up only a small part of his face, between the high collar of the pelisse and the fur bonnet pressed over his brow, she thought she recognised the Emperor. That seemed impossible. Only two days before, Paris had been stunned by the twenty-ninth Bulletin de la Grande Armée, which announced that he was struggling through the snows of Russia with his beleaguered army.

The two men were led down a gallery, open to the gardens on the right, and turned left into the Empress’s apartments. They came in just as her ladies-in-waiting were emerging from her private apartment, having attended her to bed. The ladies started with fright at the sight of the bearded man in his dirty greatcoat, but when he announced that he was the bearer of news from the Emperor they recognised Caulaincourt, and one of them went back into the Empress’s apartment to announce the Master of the Horse.

Unable to control his impatience, the shorter of the two men brushed past his companion and made for the door to the Empress’s apartment. His pelisse had fallen open, revealing the uniform of the Grenadiers of the Old Guard, and as he marched confidently across the room there was no mistaking the Emperor Napoleon. ‘Good night, Caulaincourt,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘You also need rest.’¹

It was something of an understatement. The General had not slept in a bed for over eight weeks, and had hardly lain down in the past two; he had travelled over 3,000 kilometres in unspeakable conditions, often under fire, all the way from Moscow. Before that he had taken part in the gruelling advance into Russia, which wasted the finest army in Europe, and seen his adored younger brother killed at the battle of Borodino. He had watched Moscow burn. He had borne the hardships and witnessed the horrors of the disastrous retreat, which had brought the death toll to over half a million French and allied soldiers.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to bear for the thirty-nine-year-old General Armand de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza, an accomplished soldier and diplomat, was that he had been obliged to watch all his worst prophecies come true. As Napoleon’s ambassador to Russia from 1807 to 1811 he had done everything in his power to keep the two empires from conflict. He had repeatedly begged Napoleon not to make war on Russia, warning him that it was impossible to win against such an opponent. He had continued to make his case as they travelled across Europe to join the army massing against Russia. Once the campaign had begun he had attempted time and again to persuade Napoleon to cut his losses – while remaining utterly loyal, Caulaincourt was never afraid to speak his mind. All to no avail.

On 5 December 1812, as the remnants of his army struggled along the last leg of the retreat, Napoleon had decided to leave it and race back to Paris. He handed over command to his brother-in-law Joachim Murat, King of Naples, with firm instructions to rally the Grande Armée at Vilna (Vilnius) in Lithuania, which was well stocked with supplies and reinforcements, and to hold that at all costs.

He had set off with Caulaincourt in his travelling coupé, which was followed by two other carriages bearing three generals and a couple of valets. They were escorted by a squadron of Chasseurs and another of Polish Chevau-Légers of the Old Guard, and briefly by some Neapolitan cavalry. At one point the convoy narrowly missed being intercepted by marauding Russian cossacks. Napoleon had a pair of loaded pistols placed in his coupé and instructed his companions to kill him if he failed to do so himself in the event of capture.²

Caulaincourt remained constantly at his side, even when they left their escort and companions behind, changing from carriage to improvised sleigh to carriage and to sleigh once again, breaking axles and running half a dozen vehicles into the ground as they flew from Vilna to Warsaw, Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar, Erfurt, Mainz and eventually to Paris, which they reached in the last minutes of 18 December.

But before he could go home to bed, Caulaincourt had to perform one last duty. He went to the house of the Arch-Chancellor of the Empire, Jean Jacques de Cambacérès, and, after waking him up with the astonishing news of the Emperor’s return, instructed him to make the necessary arrangements for the regular imperial lever to take place in the morning. Napoleon wanted an immediate resumption of everyday normality.

When on campaign, Napoleon would publish Bulletins de la Grande Armée at regular intervals to keep his subjects informed of his actions and to present a heroic picture of his doings. In the twenty-ninth Bulletin, published on 16 December, they had for the first time read less than glorious news. It informed them that he had been obliged to abandon Moscow and that his army had suffered terrible losses as a result of the winter weather. Reading between the lines, they could detect a major disaster. But the Bulletin ended with the words: ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’ His intention was that, two days after hearing the worst, the citizens of France should be able to recover their confidence, with the knowledge that their master was back and in control.

Napoleon’s principal reason for abandoning his army and returning to Paris was to muster fresh forces with which to march out and reinforce it in the spring. But there were other motives. One was that he preferred to have his less than reliable Austrian and German allies in front of him rather than at his back. Another, more weighty, was the urgent need he felt to reassert his authority at home. He had been away from his capital for over seven months, and during that time had conducted the affairs of state from his headquarters. This had worked remarkably well, and he had continued to invigilate and order everything from foreign policy to the repertoire of the Paris theatres.

But on the night of 23 October, while he was beginning his retreat from Moscow, an obscure General by the name of Malet and a handful of other officers had attempted to seize power in Paris, claiming that the Emperor was dead. They came very close to success, and although Malet and his accomplices were tried and shot before Napoleon even came to hear of the attempted coup, it had disturbed him profoundly when he did. It revealed to him the frailty of the foundations of his throne, and gave him much food for thought.

On the morning of 19 December the cannon of the Invalides delivered a salute that announced to the astonished citizens of Paris that the Emperor was back in the capital. They were still stunned by the news of his failure in Russia, and eager for further details and some kind of explanation. The sense of anticipation was particularly keen among the officials and courtiers who hurried to the lever. But they were disappointed. The Emperor was stern and uncommunicative, and quickly disappeared into his study, to which he summoned his principal ministers.

He was in no mood to give explanations, but rather to demand them, as the representatives of the legislative and administrative bodies discovered when they called on him the following day to pay their respects. He brought up the matter of the Malet conspiracy to show them up as weak, cowardly and ineffectual. What had touched a particularly raw nerve was that the news of his death in Russia, announced by Malet, had led those who believed it to consider a change of regime, instead of making them proclaim the succession of his son, the King of Rome. ‘Our forefathers rallied to the cry: “The King is dead, long live the King!”’ he reminded them, adding that ‘These few words encompass the principal advantages of monarchy.’ That they had not been uttered on the night of 23 October revealed to him that for all its trappings, the monarchy he had created lacked consistency, and he was still just a general who had seized power, a parvenu with no title to rule beyond his ability to hold on to it. He felt this setback personally, and the sense of insecurity it induced would have a profound effect on how he behaved over the next two years, making him more aggressive and less amenable, and leading inexorably to his downfall.³

Before he embarked on his fatal Russian campaign, in the summer of 1812, Napoleon had been the undisputed master of Europe, wielding greater power than any Roman Emperor. The French Empire and its direct dependencies included the whole of Belgium, Holland and the North Sea coast up to Hamburg, the Rhineland, the whole of Switzerland, Piedmont and Liguria, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria (present-day Slovenia and Croatia) and Catalonia as well as France. All the minor states of Germany, including the kingdoms of Saxony, Westphalia, Bavaria and Württemberg, had been incorporated into the Confederation of the Rhine, the Rheinbund, which was an entirely subservient ally of France, as were the grand duchy of Warsaw, the kingdom of Italy, the kingdom of Naples and Spain. Several of these were ruled by Napoleon’s siblings or relatives, or connected to him through dynastic marriages. Denmark and Russia were locked into more or less permanent alliance with France, Austria and Prussia were unlikely allies, and in Continental Europe only Sweden remained outside the Napoleonic system.

While there were many who resented this French stranglehold, others either welcomed or at least accepted it. The only open challenge Napoleon faced was from Britain, but while she was supreme on the seas, her only foothold on the Continent was in Spain, where General Wellington’s army was operating alongside Spanish regular and guerrilla forces opposed to the rule of Napoleon’s brother Joseph. But Britain was also engaged in a difficult and costly war with the United States of America, which restricted her military potential.

The disasters of the Russian campaign had changed all this, but not as profoundly as one might think. Although he was now at war with Russia and had lost an army trying to cow her into submission, Napoleon’s overall position had not altered. His system and his alliances were still in place, and the situation in Spain had actually improved, with the setbacks of the summer reversed and the British and Spanish forces under Wellington repulsed.

The only possible threat to his system at this stage could come from Germany, whose many rulers, beginning with Frederick William of Prussia, found his alliance increasingly onerous, and whose people burned with resentment of their French allies. But Prussia had been reduced to a minor power and bled economically by France over the past few years, while the other monarchs were too weak and too mistrustful of each other to present a credible challenge, and Austria was in no position to make war after her crushing defeat in 1809. Any who still dreamt of throwing off the French hegemony had to take into account the remains of the Grande Armée in Poland and a string of French garrisons in fortresses across Germany.

Napoleon’s self-confidence had not been seriously shaken by the events of 1812. He had blundered politically and militarily, and he had lost a fine army. But he knew – and so, despite the Russian propaganda, did most of the experienced commanders of Europe – that he had been victorious in battle throughout. ‘My losses are substantial, but the enemy can take no credit for them,’ as he put it in a letter to the King of Denmark. And he could always raise a new army.⁴

France was still the most powerful state on the Continent. Russia had no comparable reserves of power or wealth, and had suffered greatly from the devastations of war in the previous year. With the benefit of hindsight Napoleon’s reputation and the basis of his power had been damaged beyond repair, but at the time it was clear to all that his position remained unassailable as long as he kept his nerve and consolidated his resources. And that is what he set about doing.

At Warsaw, on his way back to Paris, he had stopped just long enough to assure the Polish ministers that the situation was under control and that he would be back in the spring with a new army. At Dresden a few days later, he reassured his ally the King of Saxony and urged him to raise more troops. From there he also wrote to his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, saying that everything was under control and asking him to double the contingent of Austrian troops operating alongside the Grande Armée to 60,000. He also asked him to send an ambassador to Paris, so that they might communicate more easily.⁵

On his return to Paris he set to work at rebuilding his forces. Before leaving he had given orders for the call-up of the age group which should have been liable to conscription in 1814, and this had yielded 140,000 young men who were already being put through their paces in depots. He also had at his disposal 100,000 men of the National Guard which he had set up as a home defence force before leaving for Russia. Mindful of the political situation in France, he now created a new force, the Gardes d’Honneur, made up from the young scions of aristocratic families and those opposed to his rule, drawn from the depths of the most royalist provinces. The improved situation in Spain allowed him to withdraw four Guard regiments, the mounted gendarmerie and some Polish cavalry from the peninsula. And he instructed his other allies in Germany to raise more troops to support him.

Europe at the end of 1812

Central Europe at the beginning of 1813

According to his calculations he still had 150,000 men holding the eastern wall of his imperium, with at least 60,000 under Murat at Vilna, 25,000 under Macdonald to the north, 30,000 Austrian allies to the south under Schwarzenberg, Poniatowski’s Polish corps and the remainder of the Saxon contingent under Reynier covering Warsaw, and over 25,000 men in reserve depots or fortresses from Danzig (Gdansk) on the Baltic down to Zamosc. He was therefore confident that he would be able to take the field in Germany with some 350,000 men in the spring.⁶

But less than a week after his return to Paris, on Christmas Eve, bad news came in from Lithuania. As the remnants of the Grande Armée straggled into what they thought was the safe haven of Vilna, the men’s endurance had given way to the need for rest. Murat had failed to organise an adequate defence, and the advancing Russians were able to overrun the city with ease. The confusion and panic had prevented an orderly evacuation even by those units still capable of action, and a couple of days later not many more than 10,000 men crossed the river Niemen out of Russia. Napoleon was devastated by the news. He bitterly regretted having left Murat in charge, and dreaded the propaganda value of the event. But within a day or two he put it behind him, assuring Caulaincourt that it was an unimportant setback.⁷