1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

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.