CROSSES, CANDLESTICKS, AND SWORDS: THE CRIMEA
“The Empire stands for peace.” 1
—NAPOLÉON III, 1852
“[We are going to Constantinople] with England to defend the Sultan.” 2
—EMPEROR NAPOLÉON III, BEFORE THE ASSEMBLY, MARCH 2, 1854
It all started in 1535, when Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent accorded France’s king François I the guardianship of the Christian Holy Places in and around Jerusalem. In 1740, those rights were confirmed, and confirmed again in 1774 for both the Latin and Eastern Orthodox Church, but now under the aegis of the tsar. This festering contest for control of the Holy Places between the Latin and Greek churches continued into the nineteenth century, with the Eastern Orthodox Church taking the initiative in 1808 by restoring the Church of the Holy Sepulcher following a disastrous fire. In 1842, the cupola of the Church of the Nativity collapsed, amid Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox monks quarreling over their custodial rights to take charge. By 1847 acrimony reached fever pitch with the good monks of both persuasions taking up arms—in this case heavy silver and gold crosses and candlesticks, resulting in the breaking of heads instead of bread.3 With no apparent sensible resolution of the conflicting claims to the disputed Holy Places in sight, Louis Napoléon dispatched a fleet to show the flag in the Near East, which at once set off alarm bells in Whitehall. The last time France had done that, Napoléon had invaded Egypt! In any event, with a French fleet at hand, on May 5, 1853, Sultan Abdülmecid accepted a more conciliatory stance. Cupolas, crosses, and candlesticks were, to be sure, transparent pretexts deceiving no one as the sword was unsheathed, with Russia’s recent sweeping claims to Ottoman territory very much at the heart of the matter.
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Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) had long been pushing Russian expansion and had earlier seized the Caucasus and beyond, continuing to encroach on a rapidly disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The pending breakup of the Turkish Balkan provinces served as a catalyst to diplomatic disaster in 1827 when the Egypto-Turkish fleet, bringing Egyptian reinforcements for the Peloponnesus, was destroyed by a powerful combined Anglo-French-Russian fleet at Navarino. The Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 offered the Russians a hefty war indemnity and Greece her independence from the Turks. Meanwhile, Egypt’s de facto ruler, Muhammad Ali (Mehmet Ali in Turkish), the Khedive (1805–1848), to whom the sultan had promised Greece and Crete, now instead angrily turned his Mamluk army on the Turkish province of Syria while en route to Constantinople (Istanbul). A desperate Sultan Mahmud II appealed to Europe for help against the advancing army of Muhammad Ali, and Nicholas I alone finally dispatched his Black Sea fleet, landing fourteen thousand marines on the shores of the Golden Horn in 1833. But Turkey and Russia had signed a defense pact in 1833, obliging Sultan Mahmud II to close the Dardanelles “to any foreign vessel of war … under any pretext whatsoever,” whenever requested to do so by the tsar.4 By now both London and Paris were alarmed by the possibility of a Russian Bosphorus eastern Mediterranean “Gibraltar” restricting the Royal Navy and the closure of profitable Anglo-Turkish trade.
Meanwhile, separately, Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian army was advancing into Lebanon and Syria en route for Constantinople. The Royal Navy responded by shelling Lebanon, and Muhammad Ali agreed to withdraw his troops in exchange for the new sultan, Abdülmecid (1839–1861), granting him hereditary rule of Egypt, while keeping it a nominal Ottoman province. In July 1841, the Straits Convention was drawn up in London, officially reopening the Dardanelles and Black Sea to French and English shipping. The Egyptian threat had ended, and Constantinople was no longer held hostage by St. Petersburg.
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Meanwhile the Greek and Latin monks in and around Jerusalem continued their own little skirmishes, aided and abetted once again by Tsar Nicholas I demanding full control of the Holy Places for the Eastern Church. With the French and English fleets off Turkish waters, and two million pounds of British gold on the table—the price demanded by the sultan for his cooperation—on May 5, 1853, the Sublime Porte confirmed that both the Orthodox and Latin churches would receive concessions at the Holy Places. Sultan Abdülmecid, however, did stop at Russian demands for control over all Orthodox Christians, that is, over twelve million Greek Orthodox Christians in the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Tsar Nicholas was not pleased, and tens of thousands of new army recruits marched through the streets of St. Petersburg.
“I fear a storm is brewing in the East,” an anxious Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon warned the forty-nine-year-old Lord Cowley, England’s new ambassador in Paris. And why? Because of “all these disputes about nothing”—local squabbles, far away in a distant land. Maintaining the integrity of the Ottoman Empire “is hardly a great European necessity,” Clarendon argued, and most certainly not for England.5 At the same time he felt that his ambassador accredited to the Sublime Porte, the arrogant sixty-seven-year-old Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, a notorious loose cannon, was behind much of this, deliberately stirring up the Turks against the Russians, even going so far as to summon the British Mediterranean Fleet to the Bosphorus—without even informing London! Although briefly dismissed, Stratford was immediately reinstated, no doubt with the powerful backing of London’s grateful merchants, whose growing annual exports to Ottoman markets exceeded £2,400,000 by 1850.6
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Up until this point the Royal Navy had ruled the proverbial waves of the eastern Mediterranean unhindered ever since Admiral Nelson’s destruction of the French fleet at Abukir Bay in 1798. Since then Egypt’s Isthmus of Suez had become a tendentious transshipment link—combined with the East India Company’s traditional sea route around the Cape, ensuring the flow of England’s rich and flourishing trade with India and the East. With the Turks no longer possessing a strong navy, Russian interference theoretically could result in collateral damage to London’s prosperous shipping and financial empire. The geopolitical situation was suddenly fraught with disturbing possibilities and consequences, especially if Great Britain’s allies of the moment, the French, with their growing commitment to neighboring Algeria, took advantage of the situation to reassert their claims to the rest of North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, and Egypt. And there was already talk in the Paris Bourse and the City of London of plans to build a French Suez Canal. As for Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen and Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon, they were concentrating on the more immediate situation regarding their former Russian allies of 1827.
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The storm Clarendon had so feared finally broke in July 1853 when hawkish rhetoric gave way to war drums, as 80,000 Russian troops descended, crossing the River Pruth in an unprovoked invasion and occupation of the Turkish Danubian provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia (the future Romania). Taking advantage of a weakened and disintegrating Ottoman Empire, which had already lost Greece in 1829 and the province of Egypt to Muhammad Ali in 1841, Russian foreign minister Count Nesselrode once again leveled his sights on the Dardanelles and Constantinople, the Ottoman political capital and spiritual seat of the Sunni Islamic caliphate.
Alarmed, England’s Lord Stratford notified London. The relative stalemate of the last two decades suddenly changed dramatically. If the Admiralty was ever eager to hoist Nelson’s old blue pennant, ready to preserve the Royal Navy’s rights now in 1853, nevertheless Whitehall and Downing Street remained just as adamantly bent on avoiding armed conflict. The Napoleonic wars had not only created a staggering national debt, they had nearly destroyed England’s economy and international trade. Wars always meant more national debt.
The French too found themselves directly involved in this nominal quarrel with Russia. Scarcely ensconced on the family throne, like the English, the very last thing Louis Napoléon desired was to begin his reign with a European war. Nor could he forget the theme of his own recent referendum campaign pledge, “The Empire stands for peace,” reprinted extensively in the French and English press. Above all he was most determined not to risk his assiduously fostered special relationship with the English for the sake of some cantankerous monks or a Muslim sultan upset with Russian transgressions.
Less than a month after his marriage to Eugénie, a most anxious Louis Napoléon thus appealed to London. “My most fervent desire,” he assured Lord Malmesbury, “is to maintain … the closest and most friendly relations with your country.” He was only too willing to entrust a larger share of the Holy Places to the Greek Church in order to avoid conflict. On the other hand, having inherited the Bonapartes’ wariness toward this Russia that had shattered Napoléon’s Grand Army in 1812, Louis Napoléon found himself in the most curiously uncomfortable position of supporting Muslim Constantinople, not Christian St. Petersburg. Political “sympathy” was one thing, war quite another. “I do want peace if it is at all possible,” he instructed Ambassador Alexander Walewski in London, “but whatever I decide on, it must be fully in conjunction with England.” And yet he could hardly forget Talleyrand’s La Fontainian cautionary advice that “France’s alliance with England is as natural as that of man and horse, just so long as one takes care not ending up the horse.”7
The average Frenchman, however, remained anti-English. “You have no idea how the tide of public opinion is setting against us here,” Ambassador Lord Cowley informed Whitehall from Paris, “and it is spreading even to the Emperor’s entourage.”8 This included a peeved and very Catholic Empress Eugénie, who had shown her preference at a recent ball given by the pro-Russian princess Mathilde, by dancing with the Russian ambassador, and not with Lord Cowley. Nevertheless Louis Napoléon was adamant, and moreover, no one could override his decision.
When through the good offices of Vienna a compromise was submitted, offering France’s willingness to share the custodianship of the Holy Places, nine months of intensive negotiations with England, Austria, and Prussia followed.9 Despite Clarendon’s initial resolve not to get involved “in all these disputes about nothing,” the Russian invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia in July 1853 was tipping the scales, and despite Clarendon’s withering strictures to the contrary, Ambassador Stratford de Redcliffe continued to egg on the Ottoman sultan.
On September 25, 1853, Sultan Abdülmecid issued an ultimatum to Tsar Nicholas to evacuate the provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia forthwith. Receiving no reply, on October 23 Turkey declared war on Russia. On the thirtieth of that month, the Russian Black Sea Fleet sailed into Sinop Bay, destroying the entire Ottoman fleet. A reluctant Ambassador Cowley finally gave in. “We should at once make a combined and vigorous attack on Sevastopol [Russia’s home naval port in the Black Sea] and let the right arms of France and England be felt with a vengeance.”
On January 3, 1854, a combined Anglo-French task force duly sailed into the Black Sea to confront the Russian fleet. Although Paris and London had neither signed a mutual military pact nor issued a declaration of war, the unrelenting wheels of war were rumbling forward.10
Bypassing Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys in the newly opened offices in the Quai d’Orsay, on January 29, 1854, Louis Napoléon secretly appealed directly to Tsar Nicholas’s common sense and moderation. “Do not for a moment let your Majesty imagine that there is the least animosity in my heart,” he informed the tsar. In exchange for a Russian evacuation of Moldavia and Wallachia, Louis Napoléon offered the complete withdrawal of the French and English fleets from the Black Sea. “Menaces will not induce me to withdraw [from Moldavia and Wallachia],” Nicholas replied. “My confidence is in God and my rights … I can assure you that Russia will prove herself in 1854 every bit as formidable as she was in 1812.”11
“The emperor of Russia is a tyrant,” Prince Albert fulminated in a letter to Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold, the king of Belgium. “The poor Turk.… is a fine fellow … Down with the Emperor of Russia!” After his first meeting with Louis Napoléon, at a troop review of 100,000 men at Boulogne in September 1854, Albert reported to Belgium’s king Leopold that Louis Napoléon “is ready to fight with us in the glorious cause against Russia. Napoléon [III] forever!”12
“We, England and France, are going there to defend the Sultan,” Louis Napoléon informed the French Assembly, “we are going to defend the freedom of the seas and our own rightful place in the Mediterranean.… We are going to protect the rights of the Christians … and above all we are marching forward with everyone who cherishes the triumph of right, justice and civilization.”13 On the fourteenth of March, the Allies issued one final ultimatum for the tsar to withdraw his army, to no avail, and on the twenty-seventh of March, England and France declared war on Russia, launching the Crimean War.
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The Anglo-French expeditionary force duly landed in the Crimea at Eupatoria, some forty miles from Sebastapol, in September 1854. The French under Marshal Saint-Arnaud and the English under one-armed Waterloo veteran Field Marshal Lord Raglan (leading his much smaller army of 96,000)14 went on to fight at Alma, where the French commander came down with cholera and died days later. Immediately after this battle, one of the French emperor’s divisional generals, first cousin Prince Jérôme “Plon-Plon” Bonaparte, like his father King Jérôme before him, who had deserted his men and Napoléon I en route to Russia in 1812, now in his turn abandoned his men on the field of battle, fleeing back to France and the safety of the Palais Royal, but with a new humiliating sobriquet that would haunt him the rest of his days—“Sans-Plomb,” or “Gutless” Bonaparte.15
It was a grim beginning for what was to prove a very grim campaign under sweltering summer temperatures as dysentery, typhus, typhoid, and a most deadly cholera epidemic ravaged the ranks. On the fifteenth of October, they fought and narrowly won “the indecisive victory” of Balaklava, where the seventh earl, the “mad” general, “Black Bottle” Lord Cardigan—Louis Napoléon’s landlord during his youthful exile in London—led his historic 661-man cavalry in the “Charge of the Light Brigade,” of which only 414 young men, along with some 300 horses, survived.16 This was followed by the Allied victory at Inkerman on November 5, 1854.
And then began the unanticipated eleven-month siege against the Russian marshal Menchikov’s 50,000–70,000 men and their stoutly defended port-fortress of Sebastopol. There, the French, who had failed to bring heavy artillery for this war, were obliged to strip their navy of most of their guns to form thirteen batteries of thirty- and fifty-pound cannon.17 In May 1855, they and the British were reinforced by the first contingents of the 15,000-man Sardinian army sent by King Victor Emmanuel. In the midst of the siege, a temperamental General François Canrobert (1809−1895), another Algerian veteran, who had succeeded Saint-Arnaud, resigned in a huff following a dispute with Raglan, abandoning his army (to be replaced by the brutal General Aimable Pélissier) and returning to France. In the meantime Raglan died of illness, and was replaced by General Sir James Simpson. General Adolphe Niel, an engineer, was called in to put an end to the siege, and Patrice de MacMahon with his colorful Zouaves (Algerian troops) led the bloody assaults against the Malakoff Tower and Sebastopol in September 1855.18
Throughout the fighting in the Crimea, the French maintained a fleet of seventeen ships under the command of Vice Admiral Ferdinand Hamelin, and the Royal Navy fifteen warships under Vice Admiral Sir Richard Saunders Dundas, chiefly involved in the bombardment of Russian coastal facilities, concentrating, of course, on Sebastopol.19
Meanwhile Tsar Nicholas I, who had died March 2, 1855, had been succeeded by his son, Alexander II, as Prince Alexander Menchikov continued to command the Russian army in the Crimea. And even as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were arriving in Paris in mid-August for a royal visit to Emperor Napoléon III and Empress Eugénie, and the Exposition Universelle, or International Exhibition, the bloody siege of Sebastopol continued. One month later, the allies made their triumphal entry into the much battered city, port, and fortress of Sebastopol on September 12, 1855, although the Russians did succeed in taking the Turkish fortress of Kars that November.
If the numerically superior French army of a quarter of a million men bore the brunt of the fighting in the Crimea, far to the north a simultaneous large-scale naval campaign was raging in the Baltic throughout 1854 and 1855. There, an Allied naval force, led by the much wounded but indomitable sixty-nine-year-old Admiral Sir Charles Napier’s twenty-five ships of the Royal Navy,20 and supported by the undermanned French fleet of twelve vessels and three newly launched steam-driven ironclad cuirassés under the handsome, gray-haired Vice Admiral Alexander Parseval-Deschênes, bombarded Russian ports, successfully blockading the entire coast’s naval and army facilities. Kronstadt, a mighty fortress on the island of Kotlin guarding the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and just nineteen miles west of St. Petersburg, however, continued to defy even the persistent guns of the dynamic Napier. Apparently intimidated by Admiral Napier’s formidable reputation and fleet, however, the Russian navy refused to leave the safety of their ports to engage the allies. Unchallenged, the Anglo-French fleet next succeeded in taking Bomarsund, and the British destroyed the arsenal of Sweaborg, near the Russian-occupied capital of Helsinki, in August 1855.
Ultimately the Anglo-French navies were responsible for suppressing most of the maritime trade throughout the eastern Baltic—Russia’s only European outlet to the sea, with the Black Sea now closed—while preventing some 170,000 Russian troops in that theater from reinforcing the Crimea and Sebastopol.21 With the allied occupation of Sebastopol now behind them, on Thursday, December 27, 1855, the neutral Austrians presented the allies’ ultimatum to the new Romanov tsar Alexander in St. Petersburg, demanding his surrender.
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“Several steamers and sailing transports have arrived from the Crimea within the last few days,” the war correspondent of the London Times reported from Marseille on Saturday December 29, 1855. The British steamer Columbian, which had sailed from Constantinople on the eleventh, arrived with 350 sick and wounded French soldiers and 250 invalids who were lodged in the hospitals. “The American clipper White Falcon arrived from Kamiesh, having on board the 3rd Battalion of the French 97th Regiment of the Line, which distinguished itself during the siege of Sebastopol, and the Sardinian steamer Victor Emmanuel arrived yesterday with 220 invalids, some of them very badly wounded.” Dozens of ships returning from the Black Sea now also crowded the harbor of Marseille; these were “chartered by the French government” from the British, Americans, and the Sardinians. In addition to these merchant vessels, a large number of warships and troop transports reached the nearby French naval harbor at Toulon, landing the survivors of the victorious siege of Sebastopol.22
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“At a quarter to twelve [in Paris on Saturday December 29, 1855] a squadron of Guides [of the Imperial Guard] with their band playing issued from the Rue de la Paix [into the Place Vendôme],” The Times reported, as “the Emperor [Napoléon III] made his appearance”23 for this major homecoming ceremony.
With Napoléon III on his “splendid bay,” and his bevy of general officers to either side and behind him, the first three returning veteran regiments of the 274,436 men sent to the Crimea marched into the Place Vendôme, now passing in review before the emperor in the uniform of a major general and the towering bronze column from which the statue of an imperious Emperor Napoléon I looked down. Led by General Canrobert, at the head of what remained of the battered division he had briefly commanded, each regiment was preceded by its commanding officer “raising his sword and saluting,” followed by its own band, “and such of the wounded of each corps as were able to walk,” “these weather-beaten warriors in their worn uniforms, the flags torn to ribands, the eagles of their standards perforated with Russian bullets.” One regiment after another saluted the emperor, their faces reflecting “the dangers they had braved, the privations they had suffered, and the glory they had won”; the troops were greeted “by the most enthusiastic acclamations” as the crowds closed around them.
Watching this sobering spectacle from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice building, the imperial family, including the heavily pregnant Eugénie, Princess Mathilde, her brother, Jérôme, Auguste, Comte de Morny, and his father, the Comte de Flahaut, the other Bonaparte cousins, the Murats, the Bacciochis, and the officers attached to the Empress Eugénie’s official household, observed down below as Louis Napoléon prepared to address the troops assembled before him.
Soldiers of the [Imperial] Guard and soldiers of the Line, I bid you welcome. I am deeply moved in seeing you again, my happiness mixed only with the painful regrets for those who are no longer with us.… Thank God for having spared you.… Although the war has not yet quite ended I have recalled you [to France] now because it is only fitting that the regiments that have suffered the most be relieved by fresh troops. Everyone therefore will share in this glory.…. But remain vigilant and … hold yourselves ready should I be required to call upon you in the future.…24
A thunderous spontaneous outburst of applause and cheers filled the Place Vendôme with cries of “Long live the Emperor!” and “Long live the Empress!” as friends and family swarmed around the victorious veterans of Sebastopol.25
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If this appeared to be a joyous occasion, complete with patriotic music and celebratory fireworks, bringing this unnecessary and unwanted war to a close, Louis Napoléon did not join in the festivities at the Tuileries that evening. Because of her earlier miscarriage, Eugénie retired early to her apartments, while Louis Napoléon retreated alone to his ground-floor corner study overlooking the gardens and the dark waters of the Seine. For the brooding victorious emperor knew what a celebrating French public did not, as he reviewed the latest casualty figures telegraphed in from Toulon. This war could not have been waged without the large French army, and there was a staggering price to pay for this dearly bought “hour of glory”: 95,000 French corpses (two-thirds of these the result of cholera, disease, and colossal mismanagement) buried in the trenches and mud of the Crimea. “But what does France gain by going to war with Russia?” Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys had asked, unconvinced by the excuses he had received. And now Louis Napoléon was simply staggered as he read through the reports once again. Even the British, with their much smaller army, had lost 32,402 (again with a high percentage due to cholera, disease, and poor sanitation) and Sardinia lost 2,000 Italians.26
Meanwhile, one thousand miles away in the sprawling military hospital at Scutari, just outside Constantinople, a thirty-five-year-old Florence Nightingale, with her thirty-eight nurses and two dozen nuns remained, attending those who had not made it back to Paris for today’s victory celebration. Louis Napoléon continued to brood in the dark, for in the end he well knew that he and he alone had been responsible for sending nearly three hundred thousand Frenchmen to war. He alone had had the power to do so. He alone was responsible for the deaths of 95,000 Frenchmen who might otherwise have been alive and well and with their families this night. There was something else he could not forget, and that was the high price to be paid for the support of King Victor Emmanuel’s 15,000 troops serving in the Crimea, the implied price of French military aid one day soon in freeing Italy, in yet another war, with more dead young men. Above all, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte was haunted by his own earlier promise to the French people: “The Empire stands for peace.”