Citizen Emperor (68 page)

The Battle of the Cannon

Austria was in a relatively good position to continue the fighting and emerge victorious. Its troops had taken Warsaw, Dresden and Bayreuth, and the Tyrol was in revolt. What was lacking, perhaps above all else, was political determination. Charles, despite his near victory, still wanted to negotiate with Napoleon, while Stadion was insistent that the struggle continue. These two opposing views split the administration and the army into two camps, one supporting war, the other supporting peace, and in some respects prevented the Austrian army from taking the offensive. What Charles did instead was wait for Napoleon to attack.

Napoleon had to regroup and prepare for the next offensive. This time, he prepared well and did so over the next six weeks.
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Units were brought closer to Vienna so that almost 160,000 troops were positioned in and around the city by the end of June, military stores were built up, and the artillery was given a badly needed boost with the incorporation of Austrian as well as extra French cannon so that there were around 500 guns available by the time hostilities resumed. Five good bridges were built across the Danube while Lobau was turned into a fortified area with 129 guns. Skirmishes and artillery barrages had taken place in the days leading up to the morning of 4 July, when about one hundred French artillery pieces opened up, covering the crossing of the Danube, further south than the previous month. This time, there were no incidents, and the bridges built by the sappers were more solid. Moreover, barques and boats were also used to assist thousands of troops to cross over.

The next day, the two armies faced each other, formidable in size, for what was later dubbed the battle of Wagram, and once again it was avidly watched from the roofs, bell towers and church steeples of Vienna.
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Napoleon commanded 190,000 men and disposed of 500 artillery pieces, while this time Charles had considerably fewer – 140,000 men and about 450 artillery pieces, all spread out along a twenty-two-kilometre front.
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Charles was hoping for another 30,000 men to arrive under his brother Archduke John, who had been engaged in Italy, but he was still too far away. John’s arrival would probably not have made all that much difference to the outcome of the battle in any event; Napoleon was aware that he was moving towards the battlefield and had placed four divisions in reserve to meet him.

The first day (5 July) went well for Napoleon; he managed to get all his men across the Danube without incident, attack the Austrian formations and secure a central position. A number of crises during the day were staved off, on both sides. At one point, the French appeared to be on the point of breaking through the centre when Archduke Charles appeared with reinforcements to shore up his faltering lines. Later, panic set in among the Italian troops under Macdonald’s command; they turned tail and fled in a way that had never been seen before among Napoleon’s troops, and were stopped only by the bayonets of the Imperial Guard.
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By that stage, late in the day, the impetus the French had initially gained began to fade with the light. No ground or real strategic advantage had been obtained by either side at the end of the first day’s fighting, although things had not gone too badly for Napoleon. He was still in a position to deliver a decisive blow the next day. That night he slept sheltered by a pile of drums, dozing in between interviews with officers who came up for orders.

The troops did not sleep many hours that night. Fighting was resumed the next day (6 July) as soon as light broke, around four in the morning. The Austrian Emperor was able to watch the battle unfold from the Bisamberg heights; by his side was Metternich who had come from Paris at the end of May. It was far less like an eighteenth-century battle and much more like a modern-day battle in which artillery played a pivotal role. At one stage, Napoleon assembled, with great difficulty, about 100 cannon to pound the Austrian centre, before launching an attack of 15,000 men to break through. They were stopped; Napoleon was obliged to throw in his reserves. By three o’clock that afternoon, the battle had been won – Napoleon took a few moments’ nap on the ground – even though fighting continued till nightfall. The Austrians, much to their credit, retreated in good order – Charles’s reputation, at least as commander, remained intact – while the French cavalry was too exhausted to pursue them.

Wagram was dubbed the ‘battle of the cannon’. The French estimated that they had expended around 100,000 rounds over two days, while the Austrians fired a similar number. Napoleon may have won the field, but he lost almost as many men as the Austrians – probably around 39,000 killed, wounded or taken prisoner, one-quarter of effectives on the field of battle (regardless of the grossly under-reported casualty figures in the bulletins).
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Estimates are as high as 66,000 men killed and wounded.
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The casualties included forty generals and more than 1,800 junior officers. The Austrian figures were comparable. Charles reported that around 37,000 troops had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, about one-quarter of effectives (although it is possible the real figure was higher).
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The battle was, consequently, far from decisive and did not strike a mortal blow at the enemy. The Austrians had performed well and had extricated themselves in good order as soon as Charles realized that the battle was likely to be lost. His troops exhausted, Napoleon was obliged to give them a night’s sleep before pursuing the enemy.

Marmont and Masséna caught up with them a few days later (10 July) at Znaim, and although the Austrians engaged and held off the French, a completely demoralized Charles asked for an armistice. Hugues-Bernard Maret, now foreign minister, and Duroc were against any suspension of hostilities; they wanted to push ahead and destroy the enemy. It was Napoleon, with some help from Berthier, who reined in his generals. He no doubt realized that his men were exhausted and that the troops of 1809 were not those of 1805. The troops were not the only ones exhausted. This campaign began to show the flaws in Napoleon’s own condition. By the end of it, after being on the road for more than three months, he was physically and quite possibly mentally drained. The armistice was signed at two in the morning of 12 July. Napoleon returned to Schönbrunn the next day.

It was the end of Charles’s career. On 18 July, his brother Francis removed him from his post as commander-in-chief of the Austrian army. The only man who up until now had proved a match for Napoleon, and who was still considered one of the most able Austrian generals, was never to lead men into battle again.
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The campaign and the loss of men that resulted should have given Napoleon pause for thought. It did not. Wagram was one of the largest land battles that had ever been fought up till then, involving 300,000 troops along a twenty-kilometre front, and is often considered a turning point not only in the Napoleonic wars but in modern warfare in general. It says a great deal about the rapidly changing nature of warfare under Napoleon. In Italy in 1796 the major battles pitched around 50,000 men against each other in engagements that at most lasted a day. Now, the major battles involved hundreds of thousands of men and thousands of cannon fighting for two or three days.
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Wagram also foreshadowed a change in the way battles were fought: cavalry was rendered less effective, the artillery took centre-stage, and campaigns were less about knockout blows than a war of attrition.

Until this point in time, Napoleon’s military flair had been extraordinary, but he had made a good deal more out of his victories, politically, through propaganda, than the reality warranted. Egypt, as we know, was a half-success, although one would not know it from reading contemporary accounts of it; Marengo was a battle almost lost, through lack of foresight on Bonaparte’s part if you will, or bad luck, won only by the timely intervention of others; Austerlitz was a brilliant victory but had become so steeped in legend, playing into his own myth of manifest destiny, that it became easy for Napoleon to believe he had planned everything, foreseen everything, well beforehand; Jena was a battle won, but it was Davout who defeated the bulk of the Prussian army at Auerstädt; Eylau had been a bloodbath and was really a draw.

This was the first time Napoleon had encountered an enemy who had his measure. Charles had learnt from his past encounters with the French. Napoleon had won the campaign but at a cost, and this was telling because it was the only time he did not attempt to exploit his victories for political purposes. There were few attempts to exploit the battle as a great victory.
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The artistic focus, as we have seen, was on the death of Lannes, and Napoleon in mourning. There were only ever popular representations of the battle, attempts by enterprising individuals to cash in on the event.
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When Napoleon returned to Paris, there were no celebrations, and the attempt by a fawning Institute to bestow on him the title ‘Augustus’ and ‘Germanicus’ fell flat. Napoleon replied that there was nothing ‘to envy in what we know of the Roman emperors’.
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More than anything, the campaign in Austria brought Napoleon to the realization that he could no longer count on Alexander. He had personally asked the Tsar to intervene on a number of occasions, but the Russians took an eternity to reach the theatre of operations, and when they arrived, entering Galicia on 3 June 1809, they did everything in their power to avoid confronting the Austrians.
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In fact, Alexander had already secretly informed Austria that he would not attack them. His behaviour was indicative of how onerous he found the French alliance, but it also made a profound impression on Napoleon, to the point where, ‘wounded’, he no longer believed in his Russian ally.
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Relations between the two nevertheless had to appear normal even if behind the scenes mistrust and suspicion were the rule. Napoleon wondered what concessions he might make in order to get him back onside, grudgingly giving Russia part of Austrian Galicia as a ‘reward’ for its part in the campaign.

Schönbrunn

In the negotiations with Austria that followed, Napoleon did not entirely have the upper hand. The Austrians were still capable, it was thought, of putting another 250,000 men in the field (even if that proved not to be the case; the Austrian army was depleted and morale was low, to say the least). Before Wagram, Napoleon had toyed with the idea of breaking up the Austrian Empire by promoting a Hungarian national revolution: Francis would be forced to abdicate and the Empire would then be divided between the archdukes into three kingdoms – Austria, Hungary and Bohemia.
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The other option was to force Francis to abdicate in favour of his brother, the Grand Duke Ferdinand. Davout for one was pushing him towards partition; thousands of proclamations in French, German and Hungarian were distributed, calling on the Magyars to revolt and promising them an independent state.
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But Napoleon never vigorously pursued these ideas. Instead, through the ineffectual Champagny, he presented Austria with an ultimatum: either Francis would have to abdicate if Austria were to maintain its territorial integrity; or Austria would have to lose territory if Francis were to remain.
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Napoleon wanted a victor’s treaty that would impress upon Europe the extent of the victory of Wagram, and for that to happen Austria was going to have to sacrifice as many subjects again as at Pressburg, the treaty that had concluded the campaign of 1805. Since Francis did not abdicate, Austria had to give up control over its territories in the Confederation of the Rhine, Galicia (returned to the Duchy of Warsaw) and the Adriatic ports of Trieste and Fiume (the Illyrian Provinces), making Austria landlocked and bringing it into line with Napoleon’s attempt to exclude Britain from the Continent. In the process, it lost 3.5 million souls. Moreover, it had to pay an indemnity of 200 million francs (Vienna was forced to confiscate all silver in private hands in an attempt to meet the indemnity),
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and reduce its army to 150,000 men.

The reaction of the Austrian people to the peace – the Treaty of Schönbrunn – was similar in some respects to that of the German people in 1919. There was relief the war was over, but also a feeling that somehow the Austrian people had been not so much defeated as betrayed by the diplomats at the negotiating table.
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Contemporaries condemned the conditions – Stadion commented that the treaty may have avoided Austria’s complete destruction, but it would nonetheless effect a slow strangulation.
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Similarly, most historians describe this as a harsh treaty, one going so far as to call it ‘vicious’, but it certainly was not in comparison to Prussia’s treatment a few years earlier – there was no army of occupation as in Prussia that bled the country dry – and it was certainly not as severe as Napoleon’s Bavarian ally would have liked it to have been.
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