Citizen Emperor (99 page)

The allies pursued Napoleon but failed to catch up with and destroy him. A force of 43,000 men under the Bavarian General Karl von Wrede (the man responsible for taking Bavaria over to Napoleon’s enemies) tried to cut Napoleon off in the last days of October at Hanau, not far from Frankfurt, but he was quickly and easily brushed aside.
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The retreat was, for all that, horrendous. Hudson Lowe, the man who would soon be appointed Napoleon’s jailer, served as a liaison officer with the Prussians and was part of the pursuing Army of Silesia. ‘For an extent of nearly fifty English miles [eighty kilometres]’, he wrote, ‘from Eisenach to Fulda the carcasses of dead and dying horses, dead bodies of men who had been shot or perished through hunger, sickness or fatigue, lying on the roads or cast into the ditches, prisoners brought in by Cossacks or light troops, blown-up or destroyed ammunition and baggage wagons in such numbers as absolutely to obstruct the road, sufficiently attested the sufferings of the enemy, whilst pillaged and burning towns and villages marked at the same time the ferocity with which he had conducted himself.’
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Similarly, Lady Burghersh, who was the wife of a British military commissioner in the Austrian army, was witness to the devastation wrought by the French in retreat. One month after they had passed she reported, ‘Every bridge blown up, every village burnt or pulled down, fields completely devastated, orchards all turned up, and we traced their bivouaques all along by every horror you can conceive. None of the country people will bury them or their horses, so there they remain lying all over the fields and roads, with millions of crows feasting – we passed quantities, bones of all kinds, hats, shoes, epaulettes, a surprising quantity of rags and linen – every kind of horror.’
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Napoleon tried to hide the defeat by sending twenty enemy flags captured at Leipzig to Paris, as was customary when a victory had been won. The gesture was surrounded in great pomp and ceremony. But this was hardly likely to do either the regime or Napoleon’s reputation any good. Leipzig was for Napoleon what Blenheim was for Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession, or what Stalingrad was for the German army on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, a turning point beyond which there could be no victory. No amount of propaganda could hide how widely Leipzig was seen as a personal defeat for Napoleon. It had a huge psychological impact not only on the people of France but also on the statesmen of Europe. When the Prussian reformer Baron vom Stein heard the news of Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig, he wrote to his wife, ‘The shame in which he [Napoleon] covered us has been washed away by torrents of French blood.’
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Hyperbole aside, the sentiment was common enough. Aberdeen wrote to Castlereagh to take the credit for the outcome of the battle on behalf of Englishmen everywhere and declared, ‘The deliverance of Europe appears to be at hand.’
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The faithful stayed in the ranks, but they were never enough to make up the loss in numbers. On learning of the defeat at Leipzig, an artillery officer in the Guard by the name of Marin, stationed in France, was heard to say, ‘I am leaving for the army; I am going to get myself killed for the Emperor.’
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Captain Burnot, who was in Neuss near Düsseldorf, wrote to his father on 11 November 1813: ‘Under the circumstances, and despite what I have suffered during this campaign, nothing could persude me to retire; with all my troubles, and even with a leg missing I can assure you that I will not leave the service. All Frenchmen should do the same. We have to take revenge on those Bavarian and Saxon dogs that are the cause of all our problems and the loss of so many brave men.’
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It was almost prophetic. Burnot was wounded and had a leg amputated while fighting in France. He died of his wounds on 20 March 1814.

Men like Burnot were increasingly in the minority. Nothing better demonstrates the desperate situation in which Napoleon found himself than the response to a massive call-up he instigated after Leipzig. Between October 1813 and January 1814, he attempted to put more than 930,000 men under arms.
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Anybody who was reasonably fit and could bear arms – the National Guard, policemen, forest rangers, customs officers, boys under eighteen – was enlisted. The response, however, was less than enthusiastic. As a result of a number of problems, including the short duration of the campaign, the disarray into which the imperial administration seems to have fallen, the lack of supplies and the desertion rates, only one-third of that number answered the call, and of them only about 120,000 actually saw combat.
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War-weariness is often the reason given for the lack of response in the face of invasion, but we simply do not know how many men actually received the call to arms.
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Desertion rates were high, between one-third and one-half, and even higher in the German departments.
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The relative failure of conscription on this occasion seems indicative of the lack of support for both Napoleon and the Empire.
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There appears to have been a relative indifference to the fate of both. This was not 1792, when the French government was able to garner massive popular support in defence of the Revolution. Another way of looking at things is to say that the Empire was not efficient or ruthless enough to enforce conscription quotas. That does not mean that enthusiasm for Napoleon had hitherto been entirely superficial, but as with every charismatic leader the moment he fails to live up to the reputation he himself has created, support begins to wane.

Given the superiority in allied numbers, Napoleon had performed remarkably well at Leipzig, almost winning the battle on the first day. It is easy enough to argue that it would have been better to withdraw then, before allied reinforcements arrived, but those kinds of judgements can only be reached in hindsight. Napoleon was dispirited, depressed by the turn of events, but it took some time before he could admit to himself that the battle for Germany was over. When he reached Erfurt on 23 October, he still had about 70,000 troops under arms, with another 30,000 stragglers following behind. He could probably muster about 150,000 in all, although he may have lost as many as 100,000 men during and in the days after the battle; considerable numbers of troops belonging to the Confederation deserted between Leipzig and Erfurt.
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In addition, 325 cannon, 900 ammunition wagons and large quantities of military stores were left behind.
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Napoleon planned to use Erfurt to refit his men, but these plans came to a crashing halt with the news that Württemberg had defected to the allies. In effect, the battle of Leipzig persuaded those German powers whose loyalty might have been wavering to declare finally for the allies, and caused the rest of the Empire virtually to collapse overnight. In Holland, for example, waves of political agitation shook the country as a direct result of the news of the destruction of Napoleon’s army, culminating in a massive riot in Amsterdam (15 November 1813) that saw the governor and former Third Consul Charles-François Lebrun flee and France lose its hold on the country. Authority fell away ‘like dead flesh from a skeleton’.
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In those circumstances, Napoleon had little choice but to retreat behind the Rhine with the allies hard on his heels.

The coalition faced problems of its own. It had risked falling apart on a number of occasions, but never more so than after victory at Leipzig. Between Leipzig and the Treaty of Chaumont in March 1814, for a period of a little over four months, the allies were divided about their objectives and how to achieve them, sometimes to the point where the whole coalition almost dissolved. They differed over the question of the treatment of the occupied German territories – Alexander refused to stipulate what his territorial claims might be, thus creating friction with Metternich and Austria – and whether or not to push across the Rhine into France.
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Invasion was a policy favoured by most of the leading allied politicians at this stage: Alexander, Czartoryski and Grand Duchess Catherine on the Russian side, despite opposition from many of the Tsar’s ministers and generals;
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Gneisenau and Blücher among the Prussians; Schwarzenberg among the Austrians. However, Francis I as well as Frederick William III and a number of Austrian and Prussian generals were unwilling at this stage to carry the campaign into France, still wary of Napoleon’s military prowess and of the potential for the French people to rise against an invading force.
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The Prussians in particular had ‘little heart for the pursuit’.
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For these men, there was little to be gained from a prolonged struggle now that Napoleon had been ousted from central Europe. Frederick William appears to have been the staunchest opponent of continuing the war. In the aftermath of Leipzig, allied forces were depleted. The Prussian 1st Regiment of the Foot Guards, for example, had lost a third of its strength since August 1813.
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A veteran of the battle of Valmy in 1792, having experienced defeat and occupation from 1806 to very recently, the Prussian king could not see the logic of crossing the Rhine and marching on Paris. He much preferred a peace settlement.
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Bernadotte too opposed the crossing, not wanting to engage French troops on French soil, or to commit his men so far from home.
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Besides, he was pursuing his own interests, more intent on a campaign against Denmark than against Napoleon.
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That the coalition did not fall apart is testament to Metternich’s perseverance and foresight.

Entwined with the question of whether the allies should push on across the Rhine was that of the future of Napoleon, which presented a complex problem. At the beginning of 1814, the allies, with the possible exception of Alexander, had no intention of overthrowing him.
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The British did not have his overthrow as a central tenet of their policy; Castlereagh believed that the allies should not ‘excite or originate’ a change of government.
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Austria had given the question of France’s political future little or no thought. The allies were not about to impose a new regime on France, believing that the French had the right to determine their own government. If the French remained loyal to Napoleon, then it would be difficult for the allies to bring about peace in Europe. What alternative then to Napoleon? There were rumours of Alexander pushing for Bernadotte to assume the throne, possibly influenced by Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant, although no one seems to have taken the idea very seriously.
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When Alexander and Bernadotte met after Leipzig, according to Bernadotte, Alexander urged him to aim for the French throne, but he declined. In any event, Frederick William, Castlereagh and Metternich rejected the suggestion for fear that Bernadotte would become Alexander’s puppet. As for a Bourbon restoration, Alexander had little respect for the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII) whom he knew from his time in exile in Russia,
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and did not believe that he would be able to respect the gains of the Revolution, including representative institutions. He looked for alternatives to the Bourbons, but few were viable.

Self-Destruction

The War of Liberation was over; the Napoleonic Empire in Germany had ceased to exist. The battle for France was about to begin. Troops jokingly remarked that they had been all the way to Moscow to fetch the Russians to bring them back to France.
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On 2 November 1813, Napoleon arrived at Mainz where he set up headquarters. Along the way, he would have seen thousands of stragglers and sometimes small groups of organized men, making their way towards the bridge that could get them across the Rhine and into France at Mainz. Those men no longer looked upon him the way they used to. It was, after all, the second disaster to have befallen him in a year. He was deprived of that infallibility, as a result of which men felt ‘more on the same level with him’.
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Napoleon, on the other hand, was obliged to maintain the same regal façade, even if he came across as ‘gloomy and silent’ in private; he admitted that the situation was ‘unfortunate’, but always tried to talk things up.
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The reality was starker than he was prepared to admit. By the time he reached the Rhine, he had sustained combined losses, through the campaigns of 1812 and 1813, of about 700,000 men.
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Not all of these were dead or wounded. Many had deserted or gone over to the enemy. On top of the losses in Russia, combined with the drain on manpower that had been Spain, it is evident that any chance now of holding off a combined coalition army was getting bleaker by the day. Only about 40,000–60,000 men remained in any condition to fight, but, worse, troops that could have been used, perhaps as many as 190,000 men, were pointlessly holed up in fortresses across northern Germany. They had little chance of breaking out of the net that was closing around them. Some in Napoleon’s inner circle tried to convince him to make peace, but he would have none of it.
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The fact that most of the member states of the Confederation of the Rhine deserted him that month, with the exception of Saxony, the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt and the principalities of Leyen and Isenburg, seemed to make no difference.