Citizen Emperor (93 page)

He wanted to take the offensive in the coming spring, convincing himself that he had learnt the lessons of the Russian fiasco. Letter after letter went out organizing the army for what he knew would end in a campaign in Germany the following year.
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He wrote to Francis I, explaining the military situation, and asking for another 30,000 men.
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There was some justification for Napoleon’s optimism, even after what had happened in Russia and even after the allies had advanced deep into Germany by the beginning of 1813. At the end of 1812, he was still in a powerful position; he still controlled all of western Europe up to the Oder. Tens of thousands of troops called up as early as September 1812 to replace the losses in Russia were marching to the front by the beginning of 1813.
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By March 1813, Eugène in Berlin was in command of over 110,000 men and 185 guns. Another 140,000 men with 320 guns were gathering between the Rhine and the Elbe.
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In all, more than one million men were called up; the class of 1813 but also the classes between 1809 and 1812 were recalled to arms, obliging notables who had managed to keep their sons out of the army by buying replacements to do so again.

Napoleon was not about to take the decision to go to war again alone. A Council meeting was held at the beginning of January 1813, at which people expressed their views. Talleyrand, Caulaincourt, Cambacérès and Decrès all advised peace, moderation and the mediation of Austria.
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In fact, this type of council was for show. Napoleon had no intention of negotiating peace terms, for to him it would be seen as an avowal of weakness that would make Russia and Austria more demanding. Besides, he had already decided to continue the war. Any hope or expectation by some of his generals that the retreat would prove a useful lesson and cool his warlike ardour was misplaced.
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He was arming for peace, he told the Austrian ambassador to Paris, Prince Schwarzenberg, and he expected Austria to raise some 200,000 men to threaten the Russians.
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The winter of 1812–13 thus passed with Napoleon in Paris trying to reorganize his Empire. There was, to quote Caulaincourt, ‘mourning in every family but hope in every heart’.
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The war with Russia had generally been regarded as unnecessary, and the war in Spain had created a good deal of discontent.
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At the beginning of the Empire there had been an ideological consensus in favour of conquest and expansion – France was, after all, extending an ‘empire of liberty’ throughout Europe – when military victory was considered to be the necessary prerequisite for peace. Now, this was no longer accepted. Political consensus, built upon quite fragile foundations, began to waver with the First Polish War, and certainly with the invasion of Spain. It became definitely hostile over Russia. The image of Napoleon and the regime had been indelibly tarnished by the continuing wars.

Hostility varied from region to region, depending on the extent to which war had touched people’s lives.
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Fouché believed that the people and what were called the ‘intermediary classes’, that is the bourgeoisie, were no longer favourable towards Napoleon even though they were not yet openly hostile.
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In December 1812, as a result of the Russian defeat, the minister of the interior, the Comte de Montalivet, requested confidential letters from prefects about the mood of the people in the departments. These letters were summarized in reports for the Emperor. For the most part they were reassuring and probably influenced Napoleon in setting his course, especially since it was clear that he would be able to solve the conscription problem.
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But the letters also made it clear that the French desperately longed for peace. Public declarations of support may have been made by municipal councillors and prefects, but they were largely conforming to imperial expectations.
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One of Napoleon’s failings is that he could think only in terms of triumph and defeat. The fear of defeat made further triumphs always necessary. Moreover, the feelings of grandeur that grew with every triumph rendered it increasingly intolerable that anybody, or any nation, should not recognize his greatness.

The French people wanted nothing more than to enjoy the benefits of a stable peace, and had wanted it now for years.
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The public was tired of war even before Austerlitz and was unable to arouse any enthusiasm for most of Napoleon’s victories. Police reports throughout 1807 made it plain that the populace was sick of war, especially in those regions, like Brittany, that had never entirely accepted either the Republic or the Empire.
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As the Empire progressed the news of victories fell on a population increasingly indifferent and increasingly war-weary. There was probably no better indication of the extent of disaffection with the regime than the response to conscription. If there had been a gradual diminution in the number of draft dodgers between 1800 and 1810, down from 28 per cent to 13 per cent, the number shot up after 1810 to more than 45 per cent in some departments. That is, almost half of those called up, especially in certain departments in Belgium, in the west and the south-west of France and in Italy, refused to answer the call.
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Five call-ups, as well as the extraordinary call-ups that had been made to meet the shortfall in men, meant that in 1813 Napoleon conscripted more men than in the previous six years.
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The numbers of foreign troops continued to increase so that they went from 14 per cent of the Grande Armée
in 1808 to 24 per cent in 1813.
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All males between the ages of twenty and twenty-five were in principle eligible, although only a proportion were ever called up, usually around a third (in 1813–14 the figure climbed to two-thirds, on paper at least).
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In September 1813, for example, the prefect from the Ariège complained that so many young men were being taken that there would be no one left to procreate.
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It was no doubt an exaggeration, but it was an indication that the call-up for the year 1813 was considered the most onerous and was going to contribute to the legend of Napoleon as the ‘Corsican Ogre’. The Emperor was reduced to trawling all previous classes that had been called up going back as far as 1803 – that is, including men who were now thirty.

The Germans Strike Back

At the sight of so many bedraggled, wounded and unarmed men straggling through Germany at the beginning of 1813, people quickly reached the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the French Empire was on the verge of collapse.
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Rumours of the Russian seizure of Königsberg, not to mention of the death of Napoleon at Moscow, had reached north Germany by the middle of January.
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By that stage, some young men, as was the case in Minden, sixty kilometres east of Osnabrück, expressed their opposition to the Empire by running through the streets at night crying ‘Vive l’Empereur Alexandre!’
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By the middle of February, many north Germans were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Russian Cossacks.
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The more that rumours about the Russians became prevalent, the more tensions increased between the local populations and their French overlords. On 23 February, the tension came to a head in Hamburg where the arrest of some smugglers outside the city gates was the occasion for rioting throughout the city.
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In Lübeck, French police reported ‘a decided effrontery, in the inhabitants’ words and deeds, and especially in their relations with the French’.
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In Leiden, a crowd of peasants forced open the gates of the city, possibly with the intention of hoisting the Orange flag – representing the House of Orange, which ruled Holland until 1795 – but the riot was quickly put down by regular troops.
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In Oldenburg, the revolts were especially violent after frustrations simmering under the surface finally erupted.
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The symbols of French imperialism were attacked, the hated customs houses and post office were sacked, and French officials were forced to flee. In some instances – in Hamburg, for example – French troops opened fire on the crowds, killing and wounding dozens.
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In the departments of the Rhine that had been annexed to France, and in the Grand Duchy of Berg, the first revolts broke out in January 1813; it took French troops two months to suppress them.
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Two things are worth noting about these revolts. First, they were the direct consequence of the economic cost of occupation. The Empire had brought heavy burdens of war requisitions and conscription even during the campaign in Russia. In many instances, this had been going on for years. Second, the revolts involved the working and lower-middle classes. The elites, or at least property-owning families, almost invariably sided with the French, out of fear of the lower classes and lawlessness. In other words, the riots were the expression of people’s frustration with economic deprivation; there was little or nothing political about them. The obligation to supply Napoleon’s armies with men and matériel had been an overwhelming burden the consequences of which would be felt for decades. We have seen how the Grande Armée laid waste to Prussia, but to give two other examples, the town of Nuremberg, with a population of 25,000 people, was obliged to feed and house 350,000 men from August 1813 to June 1814. The town of Erlangen, with a population of 8,000, had to feed and house 34,000 men in 1814.
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The French were hated because they destroyed livelihoods and reduced countless working- and lower-middle-class lives to poverty.
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When the French were able to retaliate, however, the local elites always co-operated with them. Reprisals were typically harsh. Special military courts were established in Hamburg. Dozens were arrested, tried and executed on the same day.

If Alexander was determined to pursue Napoleon,
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this was certainly not the case for either Austria or Prussia. At first, it would appear that Prussia had every intention of staying in the alliance with France. At the end of December 1812, Frederick William wrote to Napoleon to assure him of his ‘constant attachment’.
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He then sent an envoy to Paris in January 1813 to try to come to some agreement with Napoleon in return for his continued loyalty. His demands were quite reasonable under the circumstances: the payment of ninety million francs already owed to Prussia for supplies taken by France, and a few territorial concessions in return for which he would enter into an active alliance against Russia. The alliance was to be sealed with a marriage between a Prussian prince and a Bonaparte. Despite two further alliance proposals made in February 1813, Napoleon’s only answer was to continue with requisitions in a manner that was bound to alienate Prussia even further.
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Moreover, he ordered Eugène to burn any village ‘at the least insult’, even Berlin if it ‘behaved badly’.
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It may have been a conscious attempt on the part of Napoleon to push Prussia into the arms of Russia, so that he would have an excuse to wage war against the Hohenzollerns, defeat them and finally eliminate the monarchy altogether.
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He no doubt believed that any future campaign against a Russo-Prussian alliance would be a replay of 1806–7, but given the pyrrhic victory of Eylau this was hubris.

In typical Prussian style, though, at the same time as the Prussians were negotiating with Napoleon, the chancellor, Karl August von Hardenberg, attempted to get Metternich to side with Prussia and Russia against France, and when that did not work to create a central European neutral block that would oblige Napoleon and Alexander to come to terms.
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Thus, after Napoleon’s refusal to negotiate, and against the king’s better judgement, Frederick William III issued a proclamation known as
An mein Volk
(To my people) on 17 March 1813, calling on north Germans to rise in a war against Napoleon. It was a patriotic Christian appeal which presented the war against France as both a ‘holy war’ and a ‘people’s war’.
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In nineteenth-century Prussian-German history much was made of this proclamation and the so-called
Erhebung
or uprising against France. As uprisings go, however, it was not much of one, and as proclamations go, Frederick William was playing catch-up. A similar proclamation had been issued by the Prussian assembly of the estates one month previously, on 13 February,
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after Alexander had crossed the Niemen in pursuit of the remains of the Grande Armée, and more than two months after the Prussian contingent under the command of General Hans David Ludwig von Yorck withdrew and signed a convention with the Russians at Tauroggen (30 December 1812). Yorck’s action was at first disowned by Frederick William, fearful of French reprisals.
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There was a sizeable presence of French troops in the region of Berlin, and some concern that the king might be kidnapped. Frederick William, though, was being overtaken by events: he had already lost control of two-thirds of his army, as well as the provinces of East and West Prussia. Revolution was something he feared even more than Napoleon or the Russians.
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He had only reluctantly decided to come out publicly against France.