Citizen Emperor (78 page)

This did not prevent Austria from maintaining secret contacts with the court of Petersburg. Even though official relations were broken off, and the Russian representative, Gustav Ernst von Stackelberg, left Vienna, he did not leave Austria. Rather he laid low in Graz, the whole time corresponding with Metternich.
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The secrecy was in part motivated by a desire to keep a close watch on Russia, and to make sure that Alexander and Napoleon did not conclude a separate peace at the expense of Austria. Francis informed Alexander that, even though he had signed a treaty with France, Austrian troops would do their best to avoid combat with Russian troops in the coming war.
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There was also, at the same time as these rather poor diplomatic preparations, a belated attempt to prepare the French public for what was coming. In this Napoleon had an enormous difficulty. Admittedly, rumours of a war with Russia had been rife since 1811, so the general expectation was already there, but no one seems to have been terribly convinced of its necessity.
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This, combined with what was happening in Spain, as well as adverse economic conditions in France, ensured that Napoleon’s popularity was starting seriously to wane.
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Between 1805 and 1810, Napoleon had lost 9,000 men killed and wounded at Austerlitz; 12,000 at Jena-Auerstädt; 12,000 at Eylau; 12,000 at Friedland; 10,000 at Bailén; 6,000 at Eckmühl; 15,000–19,000 at Aspern; and 39,000 at Wagram.
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As the wars dragged on the losses got higher, not counting Spain, which was draining the Empire of manpower – over 350,000 men had been sent there by 1811, of whom only 27,000 were withdrawn for the invasion of Russia. The losses came on top of an economic crisis, unemployment and rising grain prices that doubled between 1810 and 1812. There was rioting in Caen in March 1812, when a mill was sacked and burnt down by people demonstrating, unemployed with nothing to eat. Napoleon was so worried by this development that 4,000 troops from the Imperial Guard were sent to the region to quell any further unrest.
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Some effort was, nevertheless, made to portray the war as a crusade, something that had been seen once before, in the run-up to Austerlitz.
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Napoleon had, like most of the French, considered the Russian people barbaric and on the margins of European civilization. The struggle against Russia was, therefore, to an extent, a struggle to the death between two different conceptions of Europe.
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The point was driven home in works on Russia reprinted or translated into French, such as the English travelogue by Edward Daniel Clarke,
Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa
, which had gone through a number of editions since its first appearance in 1810. There one can find descriptions of the Russian, whether noble or peasant, as ‘ignorant, superstitious, cunning, brutal, barbarous, dirty, [and] mean’.
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Before that, Napoleon had commissioned a series of articles, through the ministry of foreign affairs, ensuring that the few newspapers left in the Empire were able to portray Russians in the most unflattering light, highlighting everything from their ‘thick brown skin’ to their eyes ‘without expression’, their weak, lazy, ungrateful character, their ‘absolute submissiveness’ (read ‘slaves’, read ‘need to be freed’). In short, Russians were portrayed as ‘savages’, and as ‘desolators of society’, as ‘barbarian hordes . . . who vandalized the civilized world and exterminated peaceful men’.
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The French Empire contained forty-four million people who enjoyed personal liberty and were among the most civilized in the world. The Russian belonged to a ‘half-civilized’ people, who were going to be delivered by the soldiers of the Grande Armée.
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The propaganda campaign continued even as the Grande Armée occupied Moscow. In October 1812, a book appeared by Charles-Louis Lesur, which included a fabricated ‘Testament of Peter the Great’ designed to demonstrate that Russia was bent on European domination.
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That accusation was now levelled at Alexander I.
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The Army of the Gauls and the Twenty Nations
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On 13 December 1811, Napoleon ordered his librarian, Antoine-Alexandre Barbier, to send him books on Russia and the history of the invasion of Charles XII at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
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It was a sure sign that he was about to launch a new campaign. According to one of his aides-de-camp, the name of the Swedish king was constantly on his lips.
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On the 16th, he ordered the recall of the Imperial Guard from Spain.
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We do not know whether what he read played on his decision, but it is possible. These works portrayed Russia as an ethnically diverse and hence weak conglomerate of peoples, and possibly led to the impression that Russia would be easy to invade and conquer.
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Napoleon had begun to regroup his forces in Prussia, Poland and Germany at the beginning of 1811, in order to strengthen his lines of defence against a possible Russian attack. During this time, the troops received intensive training; officers were kept busy from five in the morning till six in the evening.
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By the beginning of 1812, Napoleon decided to field an army large enough to intimidate Alexander into submission. ‘An army like that of Xerxes, and which will perform spectacularly like that of Alexander.’
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That, at least, was the belief among some of the troops when they realized the extent of the forces being gathered. Most in the military, however, from the highest-ranking officer to the lowliest footsoldier, appear to have been against the war.
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True, there were some, like Fantin des Odoards, who were looking forward to another campaign, but they seem to be in a distinct minority.
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The end result was a conglomeration of nationalities from all over the Empire, including Napoleon’s vassal states and allies. Apart from the French, there were Belgians, Dutch, Italians, Swiss, Austrians, Prussians, Poles, Bavarians, Badenese, Saxons, Württembergers, Westphalians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Croats. There were more Germans than Frenchmen in this army, if one includes those contingents from the annexed regions of the Rhine.
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One French officer remarked that the army resembled the Tower of Babel and that it was impossible to approach a bivouac without hearing a different language.
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Only about one in three soldiers who marched into Russia were French – that is, from what we would today consider to be France – and most of those were inexperienced. For the vast majority, this was their first campaign. This was a far cry from the ‘nation in arms’ that had galvanized the revolutionary armies. Napoleon’s Grande Armée had no single national identity; it had many identities and was composed of people who hated the French and Napoleon, and who had even fought against them in previous wars.
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Prussia, along with Saxony, was obliged to quarter and supply the Grande Armée massed in preparation for the invasion, including delivering all fortresses and ammunition supplies to the French. Frederick William was required to leave Berlin, now placed in charge of a French general, and assume residence at Potsdam.
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Napoleon continued to humiliate Prussia and its king, insisting on a new defensive alliance at the beginning of 1812 by which Prussia was made to furnish a contingent of 20,000 men – this was about half the army that Prussia was allowed – to be placed at Napoleon’s disposal. It meant that Napoleon could in principle deploy them when and where he saw fit. The formal arrangements were worked out in a treaty signed on 5 March. Frederick William and Hardenberg, who was now chancellor, had little choice but to accept these humiliating terms. Napoleon had given the Prussian ambassador, Friedrich von Krusemarck, the choice of having the Grande Armée march on to Prussian soil as either friend or foe. Prussia, in effect, was treated no differently to an enemy state, notwithstanding the alliance. It led to one-quarter of the Prussian officer corps leaving the service in protest.
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The impact of the Grande Armée on Prussia was even more devastating, if some witnesses are to be believed, than it had been during the occupation of 1807–8. A few figures will give an impression of the enormous amounts Prussia was obliged to hand over. It included more than 30,000 tonnes of flour, two million bottles of beer and another two million of brandy, more than 50,000 tonnes of hay and straw, 15,000 horses, 44,000 oxen and 3,600 carts (with carters).
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Napoleon in fact ordered the army to live off the land in the weeks leading up to the invasion so as not to eat into the stockpiles of supplies.
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‘The inhabitants’, wrote one Dutch general stationed around Wismar and Greifswald, ‘were not kind to us; in good conscience, I could not blame them, for we had acted towards them in bad faith worthy of the Carthaginians, and often I was revolted by the orders I had to carry out.’
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One Prussian bureaucrat observed that the entire Polish frontier region had been completely devastated.
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The Grande Armée pillaged the meagre resources available, committing the worst possible depredations in the process.
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‘The soldiers spread through the countryside in search of food, beating peasants, chasing them from their homes, which they looted from top to bottom, taking their cattle, and engaging in . . . the most reprehensible excesses.’
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Worse, a conscript wrote of seeing terrible waste along on the road to Poznan´ (Posen) and Torun´  (Thorn), with sacks of wheat left to rot, barrels of alcohol in the gutter, and supplies left in broken-down wagons. The troops were forbidden to help themselves as they passed by.
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Napoleon should have known better; the army was obviously larger than the inhabitants could realistically be expected to supply, especially since Poland was experiencing serious drought and failed harvests. But he did not seem to care.

The Imperial Progress

The social season was particularly brilliant that winter in Paris, like a ‘candle that flares up brightly just before its final flicker’.
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When it was over and Napoleon left Saint-Cloud on Saturday 9 May with Marie-Louise, a sizeable proportion of the court was at his side, almost as though they were setting out on a pleasure trip,
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amid great displays of public loyalty. In Germany, he stopped along the way to receive homage from various princes – the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, the Prince of Anhalt-Cöthen, the King of Württemberg and the Grand Duke of Baden.

The imperial progress was heading for Dresden, the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, and it was designed to impress. Napoleon had summoned his allies in an attempt to instil in them some enthusiasm for his grandiose but hazardous plan to invade Russia. This act of political theatre was meant, once again, to establish a hierarchical relationship between Napoleon and the German princes, and as a consequence to dissuade them from thinking they could betray him while he was away on campaign.
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Dresden was, in some respects, the mirror image of Erfurt, only this time with Francis II in the role of Alexander. The meeting was meant to overawe the German princes, but it was also intended to present a united front to Alexander, to pressure him into a compromise arrangement,
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and to intimidate all those who might doubt Napoleon’s decisiveness and the loyalty of his allies.

King Frederick Augustus I and Queen Amalie of Saxony met Napoleon on the outskirts of their capital before together making an entry into Dresden by the light of torches as the cannon thundered and church bells pealed.
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Frederick Augustus had been obliged to vacate the best rooms in the Marcolini Palace, now occupied by Napoleon and his suite. In 1812, Dresden was a town of around 30,000 inhabitants spread over both sides of the River Elbe, the old town on one side and the new on the other.
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The Saxon king was almost bankrupted entertaining the visiting dignitaries with extravagant balls, banquets, operas, theatre performances and hunting parties. At nine every morning, Napoleon would hold his
lever
, attended not only by the lesser German princes, but also by the kings of Saxony and Prussia, as well as the Emperor of Austria.
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At first Frederick William of Prussia had no intention of going but was persuaded to do so.
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Napoleon considered him to be little more than a ‘drill sergeant’, a ‘blockhead’, but he was by all accounts prepared to charm the Prussian king at Dresden, to subordinate his true feelings to the interests of the moment, and his need for troops.
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It must have been a tremendous humiliation for all the German princes concerned, but especially for Francis and his young wife, Maria Ludovica, whose father had lost the throne of Modena to the French many years before. She detested Napoleon for it and no doubt felt bitter resentment and frustration at having to attend these ceremonies. From his own
lever
, Napoleon would lead the princes to observe the
toilette
of Marie-Louise.