1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

Napoleon recrossed the Pyrenees and marched to their defence. On 21 May he confronted the Austrian army at Essling. The battle was little short of a defeat for Napoleon, dimming the aura of invincibility that hung about him and giving heart to all his enemies. On 6 July he won the decisive battle of Wagram and dictated a treaty with Austria. But he was far from satisfied. Alexander, on whose assistance he had called as soon as he heard of the Austrian attack, had been slow to respond, and his army had taken an eternity to reach the theatre of operations. When it did so, it began executing a series of military minuets aimed at avoiding the Austrian forces until all was over. It was so successful that it suffered just one casualty during the entire campaign.

Napoleon had taken Alexander for granted, and was now paying the price. He would henceforth have to make more of an effort to bring his ally back on side, and he began to consider what concessions he might make to him. But he had no idea of how far Alexander had strayed from his influence. He certainly did not know that his own Foreign Minister, Talleyrand, had been involved in secret talks with the Tsar at Erfürt. ‘It is up to you to save Europe and you will only achieve this by standing up to Napoleon,’ Talleyrand claimed to have told Alexander. What Talleyrand probably did not know was that the Tsar had already come to see himself as being locked in a personal contest with Napoleon. Instead of acquiring a useful ally, Napoleon had helped to create a formidable rival, one who was already working at supplanting rather than merely defeating him. ‘There is no room for the two of us in Europe,’ Alexander had written to his sister Catherine before setting off for Erfürt; ‘sooner or later, one of us will have to bow out.’26

3

The Soul of Europe

That Alexander could be beginning to think of himself as a counterweight or even an alternative to Napoleon on the international stage is eloquent testimony to what a mess the Emperor of the French had made of his dealings with the other nations of Europe, and with the Germans in particular.

France’s had long been the dominant intellectual and cultural influence on the Continent, and by the end of the eighteenth century progressives and liberals of every nation fed on the fruits of her Enlightenment. The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, followed by the abolition of privilege, the declaration of the Rights of Man, the introduction of representative government and other such measures elicited wild enthusiasm among the educated classes in every corner of Europe. Even moderate liberals saw revolutionary France as the catalyst that would bring about the transformation of the old world into a more equitable, and therefore more civilised and peaceful one.

The horrors of the revolution put many off, and others were offended by France’s high-handed behaviour with regard to areas, such as Holland and Switzerland, caught up in her military struggle against the coalitions lined up against her. But the French were convinced that they were engaged on a mission of progress, bringing happiness to other nations. So, in a more pragmatic way, was Napoleon, who used to say that ‘What is good for the French is good for everyone.’ Liberals everywhere clung to the view that a process of transformation and human regeneration was under way, and that casualties were only to be expected. Those suffering foreign or aristocratic oppression continued to look longingly at the example set by France. With some justification.

The political boundaries criss-crossing much of Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the constitutional arrangements within them were largely the legacy of medieval attempts at creating a pan-European empire. Germany was broken up into more than three hundred different political units, ruled over by electors, archbishops, abbots, dukes, landgraves, margraves, city councils, counts and imperial knights. What is now Belgium belonged to the Habsburgs and was ruled from Vienna; Italy was divided up into eleven states, most of them ruled by Austrian Habsburgs or French and Spanish Bourbons; the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation included Czechs, Magyars and half a dozen other nationalities; and Poland was cut up into three and ruled from Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg.

Every time a French army passed through one of these areas, it disturbed a venerable clutter of archaic law and regulation, of privilege and prerogative, of rights and duties, releasing or awakening a variety of pent-up or dormant aspirations in the process. And every time France annexed a territory she reorganised it along the lines of French Enlightenment thought. Rulers were dethroned, ecclesiastical institutions were abrogated, ghettos were opened, guild rights, caste privileges and other restrictions were abolished, and serfs and slaves were freed. Although this was often accompanied by cynical exploitation of the territory in the French cause and shameless looting, the net effect was nevertheless a positive one in the liberal view. As a result, significant sections, and in some cases the majority, of the politically aware populations of such countries as Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Poland and even Spain ranged themselves in the camp of France against those seeking to restore the ancien régime, even if they resented French rule and decried the depredations of French troops. Nowhere more so than in Germany.

The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Charlemagne a thousand years before, included almost all the lands inhabited by German-speaking people, but it did not bring them together or represent them. The absurd division of the territory into hundreds of political units inhibited cultural and economic, as well as political life. German eighteenth-century thought was cosmopolitan rather than nationalist, but most educated Germans nonetheless longed for a more coherent homeland.

Between 1801 and 1806, following his victories over Austria and Prussia, Napoleon thoroughly transformed the political, social and economic climate throughout the German lands. He secularised ecclesiastical states and abolished the status of imperial cities, swept away anachronistic institutions and residues of gothic rights, in effect dismantling the Empire and emancipating large sections of the population in the process. In 1806, after his defeat of the Emperor Francis at Ulm and Austerlitz, he forced him to abdicate and to dissolve the Holy Roman Empire itself. In a process known as ‘mediatisation’, hundreds of tiny sovereignties were swept away as imperial counts and knights lost their lands, which were fused into thirty-six states of varying size, bound together in the Confederation of the Rhine. With them went all the nonsensical borders and petty restrictions that had made life so difficult. In their place came institutions moulded on the French pattern.

The ending of feudal practices gave agriculture a boost, the abolition of guild and other restrictions encouraged industry and trade, the removal of tolls and frontiers liberated trade. The confiscation of Church property was followed by the building of schools and the development of universities. Not surprisingly, all this made Napoleon popular with the middle classes, with small traders, peasants, artisans and Jews, as well as with progressive intellectuals, students and writers. Johan Wilhelm Gleim, a poet more used to singing the glories of Frederick the Great, wrote an ode to Napoleon, Friedrich Hölderlin also immortalised him in verse, and Beethoven dedicated his ‘Eroica’ symphony to him.

Although many were put off by his decision to take the imperial crown and some even felt betrayed by the act, German intellectuals continued to be fascinated by Napoleon, whom they saw as a figure in the mould of Alexander the Great. Some hoped he would revive the old German empire like a latter-day Charlemagne. To others, he appeared as some kind of avatar. The young Heinrich Heine imagined Christ riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as he watched Napoleon making his entry into his native Düsseldorf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously identified him as ‘the world-spirit on horseback’.

But that moment, just after the victories of Jena and Auerstädt, in which Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army and shook the Prussian state to its core, was to be something of a turning point. The Prussians were shocked and insulted by the French victories, but they also saw them as proof of the superiority of France and her political culture. When Napoleon rode into Berlin he was greeted by crowds which, according to one French officer, were as enthusiastic as those that had welcomed him in Paris on his triumphant return from Austerlitz the previous year. ‘An undefinable feeling, a mixture of pain, admiration and curiosity agitated the crowds which pressed forward as he passed,’ in the words of one eyewitness.1 Napoleon won the hearts of the Berliners as well as their admiration over the next weeks.

But he treated Prussia and her King worse than he had treated any conquered country before. At Tilsit he publicly humiliated Frederick William by refusing to negotiate with him, and by treating Queen Louise, who had come in person to plead her country’s cause, with insulting gallantry. He did not bother to negotiate, merely summoning the Prussian Minister Count Goltz to let him know his intentions. He told the Minister that he had thought of giving the throne of Prussia to his own brother Jérôme, but out of regard for Tsar Alexander, who had begged him to spare Frederick William, he had graciously decided to leave him in possession of it. But he diminished his realm by taking away most of the territory seized by Prussia from Poland, so that the number of his subjects, which had grown to 9,744,000, was reduced to 4,938,000. Napoleon would brook no discussion, and Frederick William had to submit.2

Having done so, he wrote to the Emperor on 3 August 1807 entreating him to accept Prussia as an ally of France, addressing him as ‘the greatest man of our century’. Napoleon ignored the request. The reason he did not wish to encumber himself with such an ally was that he intended to despoil the country. In the treaty he had foisted on Prussia, he had undertaken to evacuate his troops, but only after all the indemnities agreed upon had been paid. But the level of the indemnities was never agreed, and while vast amounts of money did pour out of the Prussian treasury into French coffers, some 150,000 French troops continued to live off the land, happily helping themselves to everything they required. French military authorities virtually supervised the administration, while the economy plummeted. The Prussian army had been reduced to 42,000 men, with the result that hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers and even officers wandered the land begging for their subsistence.3

Napoleon did consider abolishing Prussia altogether. The kingdom had only emerged as a major power sixty years before (as a result of a French defeat), but it was efficient and expansive, and might one day rally the rest of Germany, which was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But while he continued to exploit and humiliate it in every way, he did not get around to dismantling it. In effect, Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia is paradigmatic of his whole mishandling of the German issue, for which his successors were still paying in 1940.

If Frederick William had every reason to feel aggrieved, most of the other rulers in Germany, grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, had much to thank Napoleon for. For one thing, they were relieved to be rid of the heavy-handed Habsburg overlordship. Although they were now subjected to Napoleon through a series of alliances, they had grown in power within their own realms. Several had even been promoted, and most had gained in territory, becoming proper sovereigns with their own armies.

Landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstädt had seen the size of his fief swell, and became a grand duke; the tiny Landgravate of Baden had also become a grand duchy, and its ruler Frederick Charles willingly married his grandson to Napoleon’s stepdaughter Stephanie de Beauharnais. The Elector of Saxony had seen his realm expand and turn into a kingdom. Bavaria too was enlarged and turned into a kingdom, and in 1809 King Maximillian I acquired more territory, making his realm larger than Prussia. Württemberg, which had been a mere duchy, was extended with every Napoleonic victory and its elector Frederick was promoted to the rank of king in 1806. He was only too happy to see his daughter marry Napoleon’s brother Jérôme.

Jérôme himself ruled over the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon at the heart of Charlemagne’s Germany with its capital at Cassel, extended again in 1810 to include Hanover, Bremen and part of the North Sea coast. ‘What the people of Germany desire impatiently is that individuals who are not noble but have talents should have an equal right to your consideration and to employment, that all kinds of servitude and all intermediary links between the sovereign and the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished,’ Napoleon wrote to Jérôme as he took up the throne of Westphalia. ‘The benefits of the Code Napoléon, transparency of procedures and the jury system will be the distinguishing characteristics of your monarchy. And if I have to be quite open with you, I count more on their effect for the extension and consolidation of your monarchy than on the greatest victories. Your people must enjoy a liberty and equality and a well-being unknown to the other peoples of Germany,’ he continued, making it clear that the security of his throne and that of France were better served by this great benefit she was able to bestow than by any number of armies or fortresses.4

Some of the other rulers did follow the French example and adopted the Code Napoléon. King Maximillian of Bavaria even brought in a constitution. Most of them, however, only introduced those French laws which gave them greater power over their subjects, sweeping away in the process venerable institutions and hard-won privileges. But whether they were enlightened liberals or authoritarian despots like the King of Württemberg, their subjects were immeasurably better off in every way than they had been before they had heard of Bonaparte.

Causes for discontent nevertheless began to pile up. The most vociferous opponents of the new arrangements were, unsurprisingly, the horde of imperial counts and knights who had lost their estates and privileges. More liberal elements were disappointed that the changes wrought by Napoleon had not gone far enough. The old free cities and some of the bishoprics, which had been havens of German patriotism, had been awarded to one or other of the rulers Napoleon had favoured. Along with their independence they lost some of their freedoms. Many were disappointed that the old aristocratic oligarchy had not been replaced by republics, and some would have liked to see the creation of one great German state.

The high-handedness of the arrangements, with Napoleon callously shunting provinces from one state to another, could not fail to offend Germans at every level. French became the official language in some areas. French officials were placed in key posts, and the higher ranks in the armies of the various sovereigns were reserved for Frenchmen. The large-scale official looting was also highly offensive. French military impositions and the Continental System, which actually had the effect of stimulating the coalmining and steel industries in Germany, became a cause for everyday grumbling by the very classes that naturally supported the changes brought in by Napoleon.

Cultural factors also played a part. Cosmopolitan and outward-looking as the Germans were, they were generally, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, very pious, and they found the godlessness of revolutionary and Napoleonic France shocking. In Lutheran circles, the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur was even referred to as ‘the sign of the Beast’. Napoleon was more popular amongst Catholic Germans, until June 1809, when he dispossessed the Pope and imprisoned him in Savona, drawing upon his head the Pontiff’s excommunication. The Germans also nurtured an age-old sense of their ‘otherness’, a vision of themselves as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ in contrast to the French, whom they viewed as essentially flighty and artificial, if not actually false and corrupt.5

It was not long before these feelings began to have practical consequences. Her catastrophic defeat in 1806 had prompted Prussia to embark on a far-ranging programme of reform and modernisation. Those in charge of carrying it out realised that a real revolution was required, both in the army, where the soldier was transformed from a conscript motivated entirely by ferocious eighteenth-century discipline into a professional inspired by love of his country, and in society as a whole, where an edict passed in 1807 swept away the remnants of feudalism and emancipated the peasantry.

This was to be a revolution from above, carried out, in the words of Frederick William’s Minister Count Karl August von Hardenberg, ‘through the wisdom of those in authority’ rather than by popular impulse. It was also to be a spiritual revolution. One of its chief architects, Baron vom Stein, a mediatised knight, wanted ‘to reawaken collective spirit, civic sense, devotion to the country, the feeling of national honour and independence, so that a vivifying and creative spirit would replace the petty formalism of a mechanical apparatus’.6

The process was largely carried out by German nationalists from other parts of the country. Baron vom Stein was from Nassau, Count Hardenberg was from Hanover, as was General Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst; Gebhart Blücher was from Mecklemburg, August Gneisenau was a Saxon. They were inspired by the example of revolutionary France in their determination to infuse a national spirit into every part of the army and administration. But their reforms aimed not so much at emancipating people as at turning them into efficient and enthusiastic servants of the state. Many of them believed that only a strong Prussia would be able to liberate and unite the German lands, and then go on to challenge French cultural and political primacy. A powerful tool in this was to be education, and Wilhelm von Humboldt was put in charge of a programme of reform of the system that culminated in the opening of a university in Berlin in 1810.

At a popular level, the urge to seek regeneration through purification manifested itself through the formation of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, by a group of young officers in Berlin. Its aims were non-political in principle, consisting of self-perfection through education and moral elevation, but since this included the fostering of national consciousness and the encouragement of love of the fatherland, they were deeply so in practice. The membership never exceeded a few hundred, and all they did was sit around talking of insurrection, guerrilla war and revenge. But it is in the very nature of secret societies to appear more powerful and threatening than they actually are, and the Tugendbund had profound symbolic significance.

It also acted as an inspiration and a focus to disaffected elements in other parts of Germany. The German nation’s impotence in the face of the arrogance of the French was underlined as the cost of the Continental System made itself felt. Wounded pride turned into grim determination in the minds of many German patriots, and it received its first encouragement with the news of Bailén in the summer of 1808. ‘The events in Spain have had a great effect and show what can be done by a nation which has force and courage,’ Stein wrote to a friend.7

Napoleon was well aware of the new spirit at work in Germany. He was not particularly concerned by it, but he did, during his stay in Erfürt and Weimar at the time of the meeting with Alexander in 1808, make a desultory effort to garner some popularity, inviting professors from the university of Jena to lunch with him. He decorated Goethe with the Légion d’Honneur. He had the poet Christoph Martin Wieland brought to Weimar, and spent upwards of two hours discussing German literature with him during a ball, while a circle of astonished guests looked on. He then walked over to Goethe and engaged him in conversation. The event was commented on in the court bulletin, which explained that ‘the hero of the age thereby gave proof of his attachment to the nation of which he is the protector, and that he esteems its language and literature, which are its national binding force’. But the next day he visited the battlefield of Jena, on which he had made the Germans build a small temple to commemorate his triumph over them.8

In 1802, the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel had gone to Paris with the intention of founding an international institute of learning in this new Rome. Now he was looking more to Germany. Goethe, who wore his Légion d’Honneur with pride and used to refer to Napoleon as ‘my Emperor’, was also beginning to complain of the shameful state of submission into which Germany had been forced. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt and the theologian Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher were among those who called for a national German revival and a rejection of the French hegemony. Many of those who had seen Napoleon as a liberator now saw in him nothing but an oppressor.

There had been a predictable surge of national feeling in Austria following her defeat by Napoleon in 1806, with papers and pamphlets calling for a united German front against the French. Austria’s natural desire to avenge the humiliating defeat and regain some of her losses had been powerfully reinforced by the many disgruntled mediatised counts and knights, the deposed north Italian and particularly Piedmontese nobles and the many German patriots from the Confederation of the Rhine who had taken refuge and in many cases service there. In January 1808 the Emperor Francis married for a third time. His bride, Maria Ludovica of Habsburg, was the daughter of the Captain-General of Lombardy, who had been thrown out by Napoleon, and this was not the least of her reasons for loathing the French.

The new government under Count Philip Stadion appointed by Francis in 1808 began preparing for a confrontation with France, instituting, amongst other things, a national militia, the Landwehr. This war of revenge, Stadion made clear, was to be a national, German one, aimed at expelling France and her influence from central Europe altogether. While Maria Ludovica and a poet and fitness enthusiast called Caroline Pichler reinvented a supposedly traditional German form of dress, the Tracht, the historian Johannes von Müller, the publicist Friedrich von Gentz and others underpinned the anti-French arguments with facts. They made much of what they saw as the struggle of the Spanish people against foreign domination, holding it up as an example for the Germans to follow. Authors of every kind were invited to police headquarters, where they would be asked to use their pens in the national cause, and publishers of periodicals were instructed to print patriotic poems and articles, on pain of having their publications closed down. Unbidden, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist published ‘Die Hermannschlacht’, a poetic appeal to Germans and Austrians alike to rise up against the French and to punish all pro-Napoleonic ‘traitors’.9

In April 1809, judging Napoleon to be bogged down in Spain, Austria invaded Bavaria and launched a war for the ‘liberation’ of Germany. ‘We fight to assert the independence of the Austrian monarchy, to restore to Germany the independence and national honour that belong to her,’ declared Stadion in his manifesto. The commander-in-chief Archduke Charles issued a proclamation penned by Friedrich Schlegel which dwelt on the pan-German character of the war, representing it as an opportunity for the redemption and regeneration of the nation.10

Their call did not go unanswered. A Prussian officer, Frederick Charles de Katt, attempted to seize Magdeburg with a gang of partisans, but failed and was forced to take refuge in Austrian Bohemia. Colonel Dornberg, a Hessian serving in King Jérôme’s royal guard who had been plotting with Stein, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, intended to seize Jérôme and call the population to arms. In the event, he only managed to raise six to eight hundred men and was easily defeated. This was bad news for Major Schill, a Prussian officer who had distinguished himself in 1806–1807 by his determined defence of Kolberg. On 28 April 1809 he marched out of Berlin with his regiment, telling his men that he was going to invade Westphalia and evict the French from Germany. He was expecting to link up with Dornberg, who should by then have seized Jérôme, but he soon found himself facing superior forces and was obliged to retreat to the Baltic coast, where he hung on, vainly hoping for British seaborne support, until he was killed in a skirmish on 31 May.