15

Napoleon’s Europe
1804–1815

Master of Europe

The French Revolution lasted barely five years, but it shook Europe to the core. It witnessed in turn representative government, mob rule, terror, collapse and eventual dictatorship – as Burke had predicted. The evolution of any state so swiftly into chaos was sobering. As the oriental saying went, better a hundred years of tyranny than a week of anarchy. But its lesson was unclear. Regimes in Austria, Prussia and Russia saw events in Paris as a warning against democracy in any shape or form. Others, such as Britain’s Whigs, took the opposite view, that the events proved the necessity of reform. On one irony all might agree, that the cradle of revolution had morphed into Europe’s most potent autocracy.

By crowning himself Charlemagne’s heir, Napoleon left no doubt as to his intentions, and they were not confined to the battlefield. Clothed in the raiment of imperial power, he was charismatic, decisive and with astonishing energy. In 1800 he had set up a commission, sometimes with himself in the chair, to draft France’s new legal framework, the Code Napoléon. It was promulgated in 1804 as a legal template for government and society, not just in France but across its new empire. Borrowing from the 1789/90 revolutionary decrees, the code was mostly advanced and liberal. It reiterated equality before the law, religious tolerance, the right to private property and family security. Marriage and divorce were to be civil matters, not religious. France’s public realm would henceforth be secular. ‘I wish to throw granite blocks on the soil of France,’ declared Napoleon.

The republican nation state had been developing since the late Middle Ages. Now formalized as a specific constitutional entity, it was to be Napoleon’s most lasting legacy. In France it enshrined the Revolution’s obsession with control and the suppression of provincial diversity. Local government, already reordered by the Revolution, was supplanted by departmental prefects, centrally accountable. A national university was established, together with a network of secondary lycées. Every teacher was told what to teach, a dirigisme that applies to this day, and that was first ridiculed and then imitated in Britain.

Trafalgar and Austerlitz

The government in London was unconcerned by the revival of French expansionism in Europe. Napoleon, on the other hand, regarded an independent Britain as a blot on his European escutcheon. In 1803 he revived his ambition to invade the islands with main force, convinced that, once he reached London, Britons would rise against the hated Hanoverians and welcome him. The activities of London’s Francophobe press – such as his popular depiction as a midget dictator by the cartoonist James Gillray – in no way deterred him.

A French army of 200,000 soldiers was duly assembled at Boulogne, with an armada of 2,343 transports. But the French navy could not assure them a safe crossing. British ships were blockading France’s northern fleet in Brest. Another squadron under Nelson was blockading Toulon in the south. None the less Pitt took the threat seriously. Across England’s east and south coasts a chain of Martello towers was hurriedly built. Local militias were recruited against invasion, though it is hard to see what they, or their medieval-style towers, could have done against Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

In the summer of 1805, the Toulon fleet under Admiral Villeneuve managed to escape Nelson’s blockade and reach Gibraltar and the Atlantic. Its plan was to combine with French ships in the West Indies and sail to assist Napoleon in the Channel. Blighted by poor communications, Villeneuve eventually found himself in Cadiz, where he was blockaded by Nelson and attacked off Cape Trafalgar as he sailed forth. In the ensuing battle, Nelson deployed his twenty-seven ships in two lines directed at a right angle to the thirty-three French and Spanish ships deployed facing him. The French disposition was disastrous. Nelson destroyed twenty-two enemy vessels without losing one of his own. The victory was lent poignancy by Nelson’s death to a sniper’s bullet at the moment of triumph.

Napoleon had already abandoned his invasion plan by the time of Trafalgar, but Britain was now safe from further threats from France. The captured Villeneuve was allowed to attend Nelson’s state funeral in London, which later acquired a new square and column in honour of the battle and its victor. England, said Pitt, ‘has saved herself by her exertions, and will I trust save Europe by her example’. The implication was that Britain had done its bit against Napoleon.

For others in the anti-French coalition, Trafalgar was small comfort. Napoleon had already taken his army from Boulogne and, one day before Trafalgar, defeated an Austrian army at the Battle of Ulm in southern Germany. He proceeded to occupy Vienna, conquering the capital of the Holy Roman Empire that had never before fallen to an enemy force. In December 1805 he won an even greater victory over a Russian-Austrian combined force at Austerlitz, leaving a terrible carnage of 26,000 dead and the Russians fleeing home. Napoleon’s fieldcraft at Ulm and Austerlitz was taught in (old-fashioned) military academies into the twentieth century.

Ulm, Austerlitz and the overrunning of Germany meant that the Holy Roman Empire was effectively dead. Napoleon told Talleyrand he ‘no longer recognized the empire’s existence’. It was ‘an old whore who has been violated by everyone for a long time’. Napoleon ordered Germany to cohere into thirty-six states (not including Prussia), forming a loose Confederation of the Rhine under his authority. The states sent polite apologies to the Austrian (and Holy Roman) emperor, Francis II (1792–1806), pleading force majeure. They had no option. Napoleon’s intention for the confederation, which embraced some fifteen million people, was chiefly to supply him with money and manpower for his ongoing wars.

The remaining Holy Roman Empire was now indeed a pathetic spectacle. It was shorn of Germany and northern Italy. It had shrunk to Austria, Bohemia, parts of Hungary and Venice. Francis was persuaded by his advisers urgently to ‘disband’ it, lest Napoleon seize the title for himself. Officials drew up papers, vassal states were relieved of feudal ties, accountants worried over pensions and property deeds. There was an argument over what should happen to the crown jewels. Then, on 6 August 1806, a herald in full regalia rode to Vienna’s Jesuit church, climbed the tower and summoned the citizens with a silver trumpet. He declared that the Holy Roman Empire was no more. The crowd wept.

The empire had lasted a millennium and brought, at least to the people of Germany, eight centuries (mostly) of peace, prosperity and cultural glory. For all its lack of potency, it had outlasted every European association since Rome. As its biographer Peter Wilson writes, its weakness was its strength. To its members, ‘the wider imperial structure guaranteed their local privileges and autonomy. Their sense of belonging was multi-layered, from household, parish, community, territory, region to empire.’ It was a measure of its success to have produced some of Europe’s greatest architects, artists and composers. The only European writer widely regarded as a rival to Shakespeare, Goethe (1749–1832), was a humble court official in tiny Weimar. This coat of many colours now passed to Napoleon. His new confederacy laid the foundation of what would one day succeed not only the Holy Roman Empire but also his own France, a new German state.

Prussia and Russia

Where now for Napoleon? Talleyrand later said he could never detect any strategy, any objective, in his master’s mind beyond an awareness of ‘what had just happened, and what he thought of doing next’. In October 1806 it was Prussia’s turn to feel the might of Napoleon’s army. Its king, Frederick William III (1797–1840), had declined to support the alliance at Austerlitz, and had thereby contributed to its demise. To make amends he now sent his army, without allies, to confront Napoleon at the Battle of Jena, where it suffered a humiliating defeat. Napoleon’s troops swept east and entered Berlin in triumph.

Ahead lay Russia. In February 1807 Napoleon marched east from Berlin and met and defeated a Russian army in two bloody battles at Eylau and Friedland. Tsar Alexander I (1801–25) was forced to sue for peace at the Treaty of Tilsit. During these negotiations, Napoleon is said to have toyed with the idea of France and Russia dividing Europe, east and west, between them. Together he imagined they could drive the Turks out of the Balkans, hand Constantinople to Moscow and march across Asia to British India. Despite this enticing invitation to emulate his ancient namesake, Alexander was unpersuaded. He knew that Napoleon was not good at keeping his word, let alone sharing.

Instead, Napoleon punished Prussia by reducing its land area and population of over eight million by more than half. He restored to Poland the lands lost in Catherine’s 1795 partition. He also helped himself to a Polish mistress, Marie Walewska, induced to join him by Polish aristocrats desperate to cement their buffer status against Russia. Napoleon then reverted to his obsession with Britain by seeking to undermine its trade. In 1806 he had established a ‘continental system’ of European customs controls, aimed at excluding British goods from continental markets. In an intriguing premonition of the twentieth-century European Union, he announced, ‘There is not enough sameness among the nations of Europe.’ There should be a single dominant power ‘with enough authority to force [the nations] to live in harmony with one another’. That power should, of course, be France.

Napoleon’s blockade was a fiasco. British ships dominated the trade routes of northern Europe, including in the Baltic. Almost all Russia’s exports, from furs and linen to tallow and iron, left in British ships that crowded the harbours of St Petersburg. There was no way Russia could or would cut off this business. In addition, in 1807 Britain’s proactive foreign minister, George Canning, seized and destroyed most of the Danish fleet in Copenhagen harbour, denying Napoleon its use for a blockade. The same year, the British Parliament passed a law formally abolishing the country’s Atlantic slave trade. That trade had in theory been abolished in the French Revolution, but was partly reinstated by Napoleon to appease local interests in France’s Caribbean empire.

The Peninsular War

In response to Copenhagen, Napoleon decided to punish Britain’s only firm continental ally, Portugal, and deny British ships the use of Lisbon. In 1807 he dispatched an army into Spain, ordering its monarch, Charles IV, to join an attack on Portugal. The result was calamitous for all concerned. Spain was a conservative country that had avoided Europe’s revolutionary upheavals. There were no barricades in Madrid to assert the Rights of Man. The nation was ruled by a bizarre ménage of Charles, his queen, her lover Manuel de Godoy, and Godoy’s wife and mistress. They were unreliable allies for France, or anyone, but they caused Napoleon no trouble. He could well have left them alone.

The French invasion divided Spanish loyalties. It precipitated Charles’s abdication and replacement by his probably illegitimate and certainly incompetent son Ferdinand, ghoulishly depicted by Francisco Goya. Napoleon lost patience and in 1808, after a sequence of inspired feuds and coups, he sent the Spanish royal family into exile, replacing it with his brother, Joseph Bonaparte. The Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil.

Uncharacteristically, Britain overreacted. In 1808, after the failure of Sir John Moore’s intervention at the head of one army, Britain sent to Portugal an army under the hero of the Indian wars, Arthur Wellesley. He led a joint Portuguese and British force against the French and Spanish. The resulting Peninsular War was to be the most gruelling of Napoleonic conflicts, five years of campaigning across the dusty plains of central Spain, with heavy losses on both sides. Its most innovative feature was the use of Spanish irregular units, known as guerrilleros (later guerrillas), informal skirmishes, on Wellington’s side. The chief benefit was to sap Napoleon’s resources at a time when he needed everything for his new venture to the east.

Moscow and endgame

Napoleon was wrestling with demons, not least his own. He had spent over a decade supposedly ‘liberating’ nations across Europe. For the German-speaking lands, freedom meant little but taxation, conscription and state intervention. Napoleon could win battles and crush regimes, but he could not rule, let alone instil loyalty. His empire had mutated from a revolution to a family business, a parody of Maximilian’s ‘conquest by marriage’. Bonapartes wore crowns in France, Spain, Holland, Westphalia, Italy, Tuscany and Naples. La gloire applied not to France but to its emperor.

Slowly the defeated governments of Europe regathered their strength. Austria found in the aristocratic diplomat Klemens von Metternich a foreign minister of brilliance and cunning. He came to power too late to stop Austria recklessly taking the field again against Napoleon, in 1809 at the Battle of Wagram, only to be mercilessly crushed. The best Metternich could do was send his emperor’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Marie Louise, to be Napoleon’s new wife, Josephine having been divorced for not bearing children. Though the girl was horrified at the prospect, she became devoted to Napoleon and bore him a son.

The emperor’s megalomania was now all-consuming. In 1810 he moved his army into Prussia and gazed eastwards. Russia was openly breaching Napoleon’s attempted blockade of British trade and now Alexander told him to leave Prussia in peace and cease his machinations in Poland. Diplomatic manoeuvres intensified, with Austria’s Metternich offering Napoleon, if he withdrew, a Franco-Austrian alliance against any future Russian advance into Europe. Napoleon reputedly replied that he would ‘wade through the blood of millions’ to assert his dominance over Europe. Austria reverted to a policy of what Metternich called ‘armed neutrality’.

In the spring of 1812 Napoleon assembled an army of some 650,000 men, fewer than half of them French and mostly conscripted from Germany. With little casus belli beyond forcing Russia to stop trading with Britain, he crossed the Russian border and embarked on one of the great marches of history. He avoided the capital, St Petersburg, as he sought the heart of Russia and Alexander’s army, which was steadily retreating towards Moscow before him. In August he reached Smolensk, 230 miles from Moscow, where his generals pressed him to halt, mindful of the forthcoming Russian winter.

Napoleon was now showing signs of delusion, and he insisted on pursuing the Russians eastwards. With each mile covered, the long French supply train weakened, and soldiers had to live by foraging an increasingly denuded land. Eventually the Russian general, Kutuzov, halted seventy miles from Moscow at Borodino. Battle was joined. The result was dreadful slaughter, of some 45,000 Russians and 30,000 French, but it was indecisive. Napoleon described it as ‘the most terrible of all my battles … the French worthy of victory, but the Russians of invincibility’.

Kutuzov now evacuated Moscow of virtually all its 250,000 citizens. ‘Napoleon is a torrent we cannot stem,’ he said, ‘but Moscow is a sponge that will suck him dry.’ When Napoleon entered the city he found it empty and much of it in flames, with eventually three-quarters of its buildings destroyed. There was no news of any Russian surrender, and a month later, at the end of October, the French in turn withdrew, taking with them a hollow triumph on the long, freezing road home.

Tolstoy’s account of the Moscow campaign in War and Peace charts the pointlessness and arrogance of Europe’s incessant wars. It describes the militaristic culture of elites to whom finding someone and somewhere to fight was a hangover of some drive deep in their cultural DNA, even if it meant the deaths of thousands. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow had no such romance. Its enemies were Russia’s oldest friends, General Distance and General Winter. The Grande Armée starved and it froze. By the time it reached East Prussia in December, barely 40,000 of the original 650,000 soldiers were in a condition to fight. Some 60,000 were walking wounded and they had lost virtually all their horses. The outcome was not a Russian victory, except that to Russia survival always meant victory. Thus could Tchaikovsky celebrate 1812 with bells and cannons in his rousing overture.

As soon as Napoleon left Russian soil, he raced to Paris to stem rumours of insurrection and raise new troops, which he did with remarkable ease. By then it was clear that his Spanish strategy was in disarray. Wellesley, now the Marquess of Wellington, had liberated Madrid in 1812 and would soon defeat Napoleon’s marshal, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, at the Battle of Vitoria, driving the French back over the Pyrenees.

For Napoleon, both Russia and Spain were avoidable disasters resulting from imperial overreach. His most persistent critic, the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, fought against him at Jena and Borodino, and became a leading theorist of war. He sought to synthesize its ‘primordial violence, hatred, and enmity’ into its serious purpose, to act as ‘a continuation of political intercourse, by other means’. Above all, he warned, war should never become an end in itself.

For Napoleon, war had become just that. It preceded policy rather than followed from it. As success turned to failure, the emperor had no strategy on which to fall back. He had refused Metternich’s offer of an alliance against Russia, which might have saved his empire. Russian and Prussian armies were now pursuing his forces across Europe. Coalitions that had spent a decade forming and re-forming against him now found coherence. Over the spring and summer of 1813, Russia, Sweden, Prussia and Austria agreed to a ‘sixth coalition’, with Britain as usual offering money as well as manpower in considerable quantities.

The culmination was a ‘battle of the nations’ outside Leipzig on 16–19 October, involving over half a million soldiers under the Prussian General Blücher, and considered the biggest battle in Europe prior to the twentieth century. Most of the coalition’s crowned heads attended in person, except England’s now-ailing George III. Napoleon suffered the defection of many of his German allies, including Bavaria, and was at last outmanoeuvred in the field. He lost virtually his entire army. It was said to have taken a year for the local peasants to clear the field of corpses. France retreated to its homeland.

By April 1814 the Russian and Prussian armies were at the gates of Paris, whereupon Napoleon’s marshals told him the war was over. Talleyrand, who had departed Napoleon’s service, exasperated, in 1807, returned to the ascendant, advising the senate to demand the emperor’s abdication. He should go into exile on the island of Elba, off the west coast of Italy. It agreed. The Bourbon Louis XVIII now took the French throne, with Talleyrand as his leading counsellor.

The indefatigable Talleyrand behaved as if he were suddenly arbiter of Europe rather than the supplicant of a defeated nation. He invited Alexander to lodge at his Paris house, and held talks with Britain’s foreign minister, Castlereagh. He assured one and all that he represented not Napoleon but France and the French people. The French Revolution should be regarded as over. Napoleon’s marshal Ney would later be executed for treason, and 60,000 Napoleonic officials were dismissed from their posts. In May 1814 the warring parties met and agreed the Treaty of Paris, which acknowledged the Bourbon restoration and put France back behind its pre-revolutionary borders. It also agreed to reconvene for a more comprehensive settlement in Vienna. It was to be the greatest assemblage of power in Europe’s history.