1803—1815
AFTER BARELY A PAUSE, EUROPE PLUNGES BACK INTO WAR, WITH FRANCE’S REVOLUTIONARY IDEALS NOW SUBSUMED BY NAPOLEON BONAPARTE’S CONQUERING AMBITIONS.
After Napoleon Bonaparte was named First Consul of France and then emperor in 1804, what had been the French Revolutionary Wars evolved into a contest pitting Napoleon’s own personal drive to conquer Europe against Europe’s attempts to stop him.
Following the Treaty of Amiens (1802), the French continued to seize territory, including parts of Piedmont, Italy; Switzerland; and the Netherlands, angering the British, who in turn refused to turn over Malta as mandated by the treaty and instead declared war in 1803. Napoleon’s plan to invade England foundered because of the might of the British Royal Navy. France’s fleet was mainly destroyed by Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, off Spain, in 1805. But Europe belonged to Napoleon’s superb Grand Army. Napoleon executed a series of stunning victories, defeating Austrian armies at Ulm, Austerlitz , and Jena after the first of what would be five Napoleonic War Coalitions was formed against him.
As the British navy blockaded France and seized French territory in the West Indies, Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal; set up relatives as puppet kings in Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands; and defeated Coalition army after Coalition army. In 1808, he took a French army to Spain and forced the evacuation of the British army without even having to fight a major battle. The following year, however, he suffered his first defeat of the war, at the hands of the Austrians at Aspern-Essling. He won the next battle (at Wagram, in July) but only at the near-Pyrrhic cost of 34,000 French casualties.
Despite mass conscription—France had a population of 27 million at the time, compared to 11 million for the British, making it easier to recruit—Napoleon’s Grand Army was gradually running out of men to replenish its ranks. Although Napoleon owned all of Western Europe by 1810, he foolishly decided to invade Russia in 1812, with famously disastrous results.
By December of that year Napoleon, faced with unrest at home, was forced to abandon his army, which suffered perhaps 400,000 casualties in the campaign. Despite the fact that he was able to raise a large army to fight the following year, his aura of invincibility was shattered and newly confident Coalition forces closed in for the kill: General Arthur Wellesley, Lord Wellington won stunning victories in Portugal and Spain and entered France, while Napoleon lost the largest battle of the war at Leipzig in October 1813.
A defeated Napoleon abdicated in April 1814 and was sent into exile on the island of Elba, Italy, but, resentful of his enforced captivity, escaped in early 1815, raised an army, and marched on Paris, where he forced the newly installed King Louis XVIII to flee. The Seventh, and last, Coalition of the Napoleonic Wars was formed, and the Duke of Wellington, with a little aid from Marshall Blücher and the Prussians, destroyed Europe’s nemesis once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon was forced once again into exile—this time to the far-flung South Atlantic island of St. Helena—where he died in 1822.
The effect of the Napoleonic Wars was widespread. A reactionary climate ensued, with the Bourbon Dynasty placed back on the throne of France, although, ironically, Napoleon’s carefully scripted appeals to the nationalism of the French people had their effect on the countries that had been enemies of the French. Independence movements began in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere, including South America (after the collapse of Spain as an empire) and Greece. These nationalist movements ultimately succeeded and altered the balance of power in Europe, and the world, by the twentieth century.
For a year or so, beginning in 1810, those around the Emperor Napoleon had found him possessed of an unnatural lassitude. The dramatic, contradictory, impossible-to-predict little man who shook his fists and threatened and yelled when things did not go his way had been replaced by a relatively easygoing and now rather overweight new father of a young son by his marriage to Marie-Louise, Archduchess of Austria, the woman he had divorced his first wife, Josephine, to marry. Napoleon doted on his son. Upon his birth, he picked the boy up and “in a fever of joy” presented him to his courtiers, proclaiming, “Now begins the finest period of my reign.”
By late 1811, though, people were beginning to wonder. Napoleon had not gone back to Spain to take command, despite the fact that the bloody war there had turned against the French. Was the great Napoleon tired of war and—some dared to hope—ready to see peace in Europe?
THE PRINCIPAL SEATS OF WAR IN EUROPE DURING 1788—1815 ARE DEPICTED IN THIS 1920S MAP. NAPOLEON’S INSATIABLE QUEST FOR CONQUEST WOULD TAKE HIM TO RUSSIA IN 1812, INSET ON RIGHT, WHERE RUSSIAN TROOPS, THE UNPREDICTABLE RUSSIAN WEATHER, STARVATION, AND WEARINESS WOULD DECIMATE HIS GRAND ARMEE.
These were fond hopes indeed. Napoleon, always moody, had merely been tired of the protracted Spanish war and was waiting for a new world to conquer. And he found one. In 1812, Napoleon shook off his ennui and became as energized as anyone had ever seen him—traveling to inspect French fortifications, giving orders for new corps to be formed, and demanding that large munitions dumps be built in Poland and Germany. For those who knew Napoleon well, this manic phase meant he was going to war, a war that could only be with Russia.
Russia under Tsar Alexander I had been a reluctant ally of Napoleon’s ever since the two countries had made peace five years earlier at Tilsit in 1807 following Napoleon’s victory over a major Russian army at the Battle of Friedland in June of that year. But friendship with Napoleon was well-nigh impossible for Alexander. Napoleon’s Continental System, which refused to allow barter with Great Britain, hurt Russia’s trade badly. In the meantime, French encroachment in Poland, eastern Germany, and the Balkans threatened Russia’s security.
In 1811, Tsar Alexander refused to comply with the Continental System and began making peace overtures to other neighbors, such as Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. When Napoleon realized this, he knew that war would surely follow. And, typically, he decided to strike first. The manic phase that many of his advisors saw in 1812 was a Napoleon in the almost-ecstatic grip of preparing for the largest invasion the world had ever known since the Mongol hordes traveled the other way in the fourteenth century. Napoleon had assembled 190,000 horses, wagons that could carry 7,000 tons of supplies daily, and an immense force of 614,000 men, compared to perhaps 220,000 Russian soldiers. He told his subordinates, “The aim of all my moves will be to concentrate an army of 400,000 men at a single point,” break through Russian defenses, capture Moscow, and force Alexander in Saint Petersburg to sue for peace.
On June 24, 1812, Napoleon, at the head of a personal command group of 225,000 French soldiers, crossed the River Nieman and headed into Russian Poland. When Alexander I heard of this, he wrote a dispatch to Napoleon that began: “Monsieur mon frère, I learned yesterday that, in spite of the loyalty I have demonstrated in maintaining my engagements with Your Majesty, [your] troops have crossed the Russian border.”
SCENE FROM THE RETREAT FROM RUSSIA, 1835, DEPICTS NAPOLEON’S UNPREPARED TROOPS FALLING VICTIM TO THE FEROCIOUS RUSSIAN WINTER.
Scene from the Retreat from Russia, 1835 (oil on canvas), Boissard de Boisdenier, Joseph Fernand (1813—66) / Musee des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France, Lauros / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
Alexander went on to beg Napoleon to reconsider his invasion. To which Napoleon replied: “I have undertaken great preparations, and my forces are three times greater than yours… How do you expect to be able to stop me?”
The answer to that question was almost immediately clear as Napoleon advanced into the vast plains of Russia. The Russian army did not try to stop him, but in fact retreated before him—as it had done against the Swedes in the Great Northern War, as it would do 140 years later against the Germans in World War II. Although Napoleon should have foreseen this, he did not, and he found himself robbed of the quick battle and victory he desired.
The farther into Russia Napoleon went, the farther the Russians retreated from the prongs of his mighty army groups, and gradually weariness and hunger began to tell on Napoleon’s men. Their supply lines stretched for hundreds of miles and were easily broken up by Cossack cavalry. The Grand Army also began to feel the toll of the unpredictable Russian weather. Torrential rains would fall, creating thigh-deep mud, only to be followed by days of blazing sun that would bake deep ruts into the rudimentary roads being used.
Horses were the first to go, their intestines literally bursting open from eating green corn or thatch pulled from peasants’ roofs. For many soldiers in the Grand Army, the memory of that period was of the stench of tens of thousands of dying horses and clouds of dust arising from the endless plains. Soon, the men themselves began to die, from dysentery, typhus, starvation, or simply exhaustion. When, on July 28, Napoleon finally crossed the Vilna River and entered the city of Vitebsk, hoping to catch the army of the Russian General Mikhail Barclay de Tolly, he found that Barclay had once again withdrawn with his forces. Napoleon raged to his advisors: “Alexander can see perfectly well how incompetent his generals are, and as a result he is losing his country.”
But in fact, Alexander’s generals were winning the war for him. Napoleon began to send peace overtures to the Tsar—written in a tone far removed from his arrogant message at the beginning of the campaign—but Alexander simply did not reply. In the meantime, the Russian retreat continued all throughout August, and now September had arrived.
On September 7, Napoleon finally caught with the army of General Mikhail Kutuzov, who had replaced Barclay, near the little town of Borodino, some seventy-five miles southwest of Moscow. Kutuzov had approximately 106,000 men entrenched in strong positions among the hills and steep bluffs of the area, and Napoleon’s commander, Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout, recommended a flanking action to their left. Once he got past the formidable Russian guns, he told Napoleon that he could swing around and fall upon the enemy’s flanks. But Napoleon—foreshadowing what would happen three years later at Waterloo—ordered a frontal attack. This was the move of an exhausted (and possibly sick) commander, because even though the French still outnumbered the Russians, they had lost thousands of men since invading and were hundreds of miles from home.
Even so, at the Emperor’s command, the attack began, with Napoleon sending 100,000 of his troops straight at the lines held by Marshal Peter Bagration, one of the ablest Russian commanders. “The huge Russian redoubt belched out a veritable hell against our center,” one French onlooker wrote. Many of Napoleon’s faithful soldiers simply disappeared, blown to smithereens. But after hours of fighting, which included a massive bombardment by 300 guns, the Russians, with heavy losses, including the life of General Peter Bagration, were forced to withdraw. However, Napoleon refused to allow his Old Guard reserve of troops to follow up on the victory, and the Russian army lived to fight another day.
It was a French victory, but a Pyrrhic one, with Napoleon’s losses totaling an incredible 40,000 dead and wounded. The Russians lost 50,000, but, close to home, could replenish these losses. Now, even the Emperor’s confidence seemed to be shaken. “These Russians let themselves be killed as if they were not men, but mere machines,” he told an advisor, unable to grasp the patriotism of his opponents.
Still, the way now lay open to Moscow, which Napoleon entered at the head of his army on September 15. He had expected a triumphal procession through a humbled and captive city population; instead, as one historian has written, “there was no life to be seen anywhere, not a face in a window, not a child in a garden, not a horse, carriage, or wagon in the streets.”
The Russians had completely evacuated Moscow, leaving the beautiful city, with its 1,200 steeples, towers, clocks, and cupolas—“more Asiatic than European in appearance,” wrote one French officer—completely deserted. Nonplussed, Napoleon made his way to the Kremlin, where all that could be heard was the chiming of clocks. That night, as the army dug in around Moscow, the fires began, first in the Chinese quarter, but then spreading rapidly throughout the city.
It soon became apparent that the Russians had left behind a hidden team of arsonists, whose job it was to set fire to Moscow. Napoleon, forced to flee the city for three days while the flames raged, simply could not believe that the Russians would destroy their own beautiful capital city to deny it to the French. He wrote a note to Tsar Alexander in Saint Petersburg that shows just how out of touch with reality the Emperor was becoming. “I waged war on Your Majesty without personal animosity,” Napoleon wrote. “The fine, beautiful city of Moscow no longer exists because [your commanders] have burned it. A letter of capitulation from you before or after the battle [of Borodino] could have stopped my march.”
Alexander did not reply. Instead, as the Russian fall set in, he ordered his commanders to close in and encircle French troops in the burned city of Moscow.
Napoleon’s commanders expected him to evacuate Moscow. It was the only move left open to him if he wanted to save his army, but he refused, instead claiming that “I could hardly be better suited than where I am now, in Moscow, to sit out the winter.”
Perhaps Napoleon was fooled by the unusually warm fall weather because October had come by now and the temperatures were practically balmy. But rumors began to spread among the French, not for the first time, that the Emperor had lost his mind. He spent most of his time holed up within the walls of the Kremlin, eating alone, keeping his own counsel. When Napoleon saw his staff officers, he seemed to be obsessed with the Tsar: “Alexander will never have had a better opportunity for a favorable peace than he does here!” he shouted one night, and people who heard him thought he had indeed lost his mind.
IN THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW, A BAND OF MEN UNDER MARSHAL MICHEL NEY BECAME SEPARATED FROM THE MAIN ARMY AND OPEN TO ATTACK. THEY WERE PART OF THE FEW WHO SURVIVED A CONCENTRATED ATTACK FROM THE RUSSIANS.
But Napoleon was a great survivor, and he had a survivor’s instinct. Even while all of his protesting was going on, he was secretly planning to evacuate the Russian capital, although it was in part to deal with the news, which arrived from Paris, that Wellington’s British army was making advances in Spain. At noon on October 19, Napoleon rode out of the gates of Moscow, heading southwest, at the head of a long column of soldiers bearing booty from the city, including statues, paintings, and Persian carpets. He had attacked Russia with 612,000 troops, 450,000 of them active combat soldiers. He now left with 102,000 men. Out of his original 1,300 pieces of artillery, he now had 533. He left about 15,000 wounded behind, as well as a rear guard detachment of 7,000 men who had orders to blow up the Kremlin, a task that was only haphazardly attempted before these men, too, retreated, leaving the grand palace intact.
The retreat back to France has fallen into legend. The first severe frost came late in October, and the first snow fell on November 4. By December, temperatures had dropped to -29°F (-34°C). Forced by Russian armies to use the same route they had taken coming into Moscow, the Grand Army found nothing but scorched earth and corpses in their path. The Russians harried them with partisan actions by Cossack cavalrymen, who isolated and slaughtered straggling units. Men froze and died standing up. Hunting packs of wolves set upon the soldiers, and some French troops, too weak to defend themselves, were torn apart limb from limb. A soldier remembered the state of the troops years later: “Many of them walked, leaning on sticks, their beards and hair a mass of ice…The men who fell imploring help, I fear, were not listened to.”
ARTHUR WELLESLEY, THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, WOULD LEAD AN ALMOST PARALLEL LIFE TO NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. BOTH PROVED THEIR GENIUS EARLY ON; THEY HAD EGOS TO MATCH, WHICH MADE THEM PERFECT ANTAGONISTS.
Napoleon, having heard of an attempted coup d’état in Paris by General Claude-Francois de Malet, abandoned his troops at the village of Smorgoni, in Lithuania. With a 200-man guard, he raced for Paris on sleigh and carriage, at last arriving late one night in December, “passing at full gallop beneath the half-finished Arc de Triomphe,” to arrive at his palace around midnight, much to the consternation of a sleepy guard who answered the Emperor’s imperious knocking while still dressed in his nightshirt.
Although troops continued to stagger and die in the frozen wastes to the east, the campaign to conquer Russia was over. Of 612,000 French soldiers and their allies, 400,000 had died, and 100,000 had been taken prisoner. Even as Napoleon planned to rise again to destroy the Coalition armies and Russia—and he did raise an army of 300,000 men the next year—a decisive turning point had been reached in the Napoleonic Wars. Never again would Napoleon be seen as invincible. From this point on, it was only a matter of time before the Coalition forces, filled with renewed hope, would destroy the Emperor of France, once and for all.
Arthur Wesley—the family would only later change the spelling to Wellesley, a more aristocratic name that also could not be mistaken for John Wesley, a firebrand preacher of the same name—was born to Anglo-Irish nobility in County Meath, Ireland, in 1769. His parents were, as one of his brothers later put it, “frivolous and careless personages” who paid little attention to young Arthur, merely sending him off to good public schools and forgetting about him. But the famous story is that when Wellesley turned eighteen, his mother happened to spot him one night in London, across a crowded theater: “I do believe there is my ugly boy, Arthur,” she exclaimed. “What can I do with him?”
The answer was to buy him a commission in the British army. After Wellesley saw short service in Ireland, he went off to India in 1796. Once in that country, Wellesley—who was indeed a bit of an “ugly boy,” tall and ungainly, with such a hooked nose that his troops would later call him “Beaky”—distinguished himself in the battles against local Indian potentates in the province of Mysore and returned home, in 1803, as a major general and a knight companion of the Order of the Bath.
In 1809, Wellesley was appointed commander in chief of British forces fighting the Peninsular War and first saw action against Napoleon’s armies (although not Napoleon, who had already left Spain to fight the Austrians). There his genius as a commander came to the fore. He was primarily a defensive specialist—one reason why Napoleon despised him—who liked nothing better than to find a well-protected position, anchor his flanks against a river or some high point of land, place his troops on the rear slope of a hill or ridge, and let the enemy give battle, if they might.
These tactics—as well as the judicious use of bold strikes—won Wellesley Portugal and Spain and allowed him to invade France, thus helping bring an end to Napoleon’s reign in 1814. When Napoleon escaped from Elba the following year, it was the now Duke of Wellington who commanded the Allied army that faced him in Belgium, at Waterloo. Here was the defensive specialist facing off against the offensive genius. Here were two commanders who despised each other—Wellington would later say that “Bonaparte’s whole life, civil, political, military, was a fraud”—commanding in a battle that was to determine the fate of Europe.
FRANCISCO DE GOYA’S DEPICTION OF THE BRUTAL WAR IS SHOWN IN HIS PAINTING, EXECUTION OF THE DEFENDERS OF MADRID, 3RD MAY, 1808.
Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 3rd May, 1808, 1814 (oil on canvas), Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746-1828) / Prado, Madrid, Spain, / The Bridgeman Art Library
Although Wellington was to call Waterloo “the nearest run thing,” the tired Napoleon he faced was not the Napoleon of old, and Wellington’s defensive strategies carried the day. While Napoleon died an early death, Wellington went on to become prime minister of Britain, one of the figures who would shape postwar Europe.
Every bit as arrogant as Napoleon, in his own way—he once said, “I began to feel that the finger of Providence was upon me”—he never allowed his ego to interfere with common sense, and thus finally won out against the brilliant, passionate, but ultimately intemperate Napoleon.
Francisco de Goya’s famous painting Execution of the Defenders of Madrid, 3 May, 1808, captures all of the terror, blood, and passion of the Peninsular War: Surrounded by bodies, facing a French firing squad, the Spanish man at the center of the painting, wearing the white shirt of the martyr, stretches his arms wide as if to ask Why? before the bullets tear into his body.
In the space of little more than a decade, the French, once revolutionaries who had thrown off a tyrannical yoke, were now a force of repression. And nowhere was the repression felt more than in the Iberian Peninsula, during what became known as the Peninsular War.
The Peninsular War began in 1807 when Napoleon decided to attack Portugal for refusing to go along with his Continental System, moving thousands of troops into Spain under the pretext of supporting this invasion. Napoleon then duped the “half-wit” Spanish monarch Charles IV into abdicating and put his own brother Joseph on the throne. The Spanish people rose in rebellion in Madrid on May 2, 1808, a rebellion brutally put down by Napoleon’s chief commander, Marshal Joachim Murat. Hundreds of Spanish were rounded up and executed at various locations around the city, a massacre commemorated in de Goya’s famous paintings, including The Riot Against the Mameluke Mercenaries, The Second of May 1808.
Such bloody reprisals created a national resentment against the French, and an uprising in both Spain and Portugal followed, backed by Britain, which landed an expeditionary force in August 1808 led by Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Wellesley, at which point a see-saw battle for Portugal and Spain began. Wellesley drove the French army under Napoleon’s General Jean Junot out of Portugal. Wellesley left, but then Napoleon himself returned to the Peninsula at the head of 200,000 veteran French troops and pushed the British army out of Portugal in early 1809, very nearly destroying it.
Wellesley returned that summer (after Napoleon left to fight elsewhere in Europe) and began the long, hard, slogging campaign to oust the French from the Iberian Peninsula. The campaign was ferocious, with hundreds of thousands of dead and a high toll of civilian casualties. The word “guerilla” was coined for the actions of Spanish irregular fighters against the French, because the Spanish called the Peninsular War Guerra de Guerrillas, or “the war of the little wars.”
The Spanish guerillas, passionate about their country, outraged by atrocities against citizen populations (including nuns, monks, and priests) struck French troops hard in hit-and-run attacks. When Wellesley was finally successful in driving the French out of Portugal and Spain, it was in good measure due to the fact that the Spanish guerillas had sowed terror within the ranks of the French army there. Ironically, it would be the example of the Spanish guerilla fighters in the Peninsula that would later encourage other guerillas to rise up against Spanish rule in South America.
DEVELOPED BY SIR WILLIAM CONGREVE, THE CONGREVE ROCKET WAS THE BEGINNING OF ROCKETRY IN EUROPEAN WARFARE. THE SIGHT OF IT AND THE SHRIEKING SOUND IT MADE AS IT FLEW THROUGH THE SKY WAS ENOUGH TO TERRIFY ANYONE STANDING IN ITS PATH.
Chatham Barracks, a Military Punishment called the ‘Triangle’ and Congreve Rockets, plate 17 from ‘The History of the Nations’ (aquatint), Italian School, (19th century) / Private Collection, The Stapleton Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library
Bombardments during the Napoleonic Wars were terrifying enough, especially if you were a soldier standing on an open field watching the sky in front of you fill with arching black dots that would, in a matter of seconds, turn into cannonballs, any single one of which could disembowel you and ten of your comrades. But the rocket developed by Sir William Congreve and first used against the French during the Napoleonic Wars was a very different type of missile indeed.
Congreve, son of the controller of the British Royal Armory, had been impressed by the way certain Indian princes used rockets (themselves borrowed from the Chinese) in the Mysore Wars fought in India in the late eighteenth century. And so Congreve set out to develop one that could be adapted to European warfare. He came up with what became known as the Congreve Rocket, a sturdy iron tube filled with explosions and capped with a conical nose, the whole thing weighing perhaps 30 pounds (13.5 kg). The tubes were set in metal baseplates, filled with black powder, and attached to wooden guide poles. A fuse was then lit that set off a propellant mixture. The rockets took off in a burst of flame and actually had a range of 2 miles (3 km) or so.
The Congreve rocket was not an accurate weapon, but the shrieking sound it made as it hurtled through the air, especially in conjunction with other types of artillery, was enough to set the hardiest veteran to flight. The British used it quite effectively after it became operational in 1804. Boulogne, France, was bombarded by Congreves in 1806 and suffered a fire that burned acres of the city and caused severe casualties, and Copenhagen and Danzig both suffered serious destruction from hundreds of rockets launched by British artillerists. Purists such as the Duke of Wellington disliked this weapon (“I do not want to set fire to any town,” he once said of the Congreves), but rockets had a powerful effect.
Congreve rockets were used by the British until the 1850s, when more sophisticated rocketry became available, but they had a second life as a distress signal for ships at sea, a life that lasted into the early twentieth century.
