The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (48 page)

While armies easily foraged in the rich farmlands of northwest Europe, countries on the rough edges of the continent were too rugged or primitive to support the huge armies Napoleon needed for victory. In Spain and Russia, Napoleon found his armies scouring the countryside and failing to turn up enough provisions to support the long, grim campaign necessary to crush the locals.

Russian Campaign

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was the most ghastly single campaign of the Napoleonic Wars, possibly of the entire nineteenth century. When Russia refused to stop trading with Britain, Napoleon gathered 611,900 soldiers and 25,000 civilian support personnel from all across occupied Europe into the Grand Army. He personally led 250,000 in June of 1812 along the main axis of advance toward Moscow, while smaller armies under his marshals followed in reserve or covered his flanks.
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Napoleon’s army was too large for the Russians to even consider trying to stop it, but the retreating Russians devastated the countryside ahead of the French, leaving nothing to feed them. Disease thinned the French ranks, as did the need to leave French garrisons to protect the route home, so the Grand Army was reduced by almost half when the Russians finally stood against Napoleon in September at Borodino. Napoleon bludgeoned them out of the way in a messy battle that left Moscow free for the taking.

However, soon after the French moved into Moscow to wait out the winter, wildfires swept across the empty city. Knowing he could never survive the Russian winter in the ruins, Napoleon began his retreat in October, but now the earlier scorched-earth tactics of the retreating Russians took their toll a second time. As the retreating French staggered homeward on reduced rations, the snows arrived early. Horses were eaten and cannon abandoned. “Our lips stuck together,” a survivor wrote. “Our nostrils froze. We seemed to be marching in a world of ice.”
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Cossacks swept along the wake of the retreating French, killing stragglers with imagination and delight. Only some 70,000 ragged survivors of Napoleon’s army crossed the last river to safety in December, leaving a half million dead, captured, or deserted behind them.

The French Empire was now mortally wounded, and the wolves awoke and circled in for the kill. Previously pacified nations like Austria and Prussia raised new armies, and having learned from the French, they rallied their nations with passionate appeals to patriotism. Napoleon hurried back to France and rounded up all of the young men who had come of age since he had left for Russia. He stripped the empire of garrison troops and recalled retired veterans. With an army that, on paper, was back to pre-Russian levels, Napoleon plunged into the heart of Germany to stop the allies from dismantling his empire.

The battle they fought at Leipzig for four days in October 1813 is the first battle in reliably recorded history with more than a half-million combatants, and one of the only battles that Napoleon fought on the defensive or in a city. Napoleon’s untested and outnumbered army got the worst of it, and his Saxon allies switched sides in the middle of the battle. Napoleon started to pull back behind the Elbe River; however, the bridges were blown up before he finished, and tens of thousands of Frenchmen were stranded on the wrong side of the river.

Despite the defeat, he was still Napoleon, and he made his enemies fight every step of the way back to France. The allied armies gradually pushed him across France and took Paris in March of 1814. Finally admitting defeat and abdicating in April, Napoleon was exiled to the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba, where he would be free to rule over his tiny court and parade his tiny army. Then the monarchs of Europe sent their representatives to the Congress of Vienna to create a new status quo that would guard against resurgent liberalism.

Like the end of a horror movie, where the villain is beaten and left for dead, only to stealthily reemerge wet, bloody, and angry from the bottomless pit or churning waterfall and suddenly attack one last time after the hero has put his weapon aside or the heroine has undressed for bed, that’s what Napoleon did. He crashed through the window and tried to strangle a screaming teenager in her nightie—metaphorically speaking.

After sneaking back into France in February 1815, Napoleon rallied his supporters and led the French army into Belgium, hoping to knock out the approaching allied armies one at a time before they coalesced into an unbeatable horde. He knocked the British back at Quatre Bras, then the Prussians at Ligny, and then turned back against the British before they could recover from the first blow. At Waterloo, Wellington’s Britons stood their ground against the full fury of the French attack all day, until the Prussians arrived to chase away the exhausted French. The battle wrecked Napoleon’s army beyond repair, and there was no other choice but to retreat and come to terms with the victors.

Napoleon’s original plan was to escape to America, but British control of the seas put a stop to that. Most of his enemies wanted him dead, but Great Britain had never been overrun by Napoleon, so the British proved a bit more flexible on the last point than, say, the Russians. Napoleon was taken aboard a British warship and safely stashed in a heavily guarded cottage in one of the world’s most remote inhabitable places—the tropical Atlantic island of Saint Helena. He would remain a private citizen under house arrest for the final six years of his life.

Worldwide Legacy

Lacking control of the seas, Napoleon couldn’t impose his will outside of Europe, but for someone who never got any further than the Mediterranean basin, he caused disruptions on a global scale. The Western Hemisphere was almost totally transformed by the career of a man who never even set foot there.

The French occupation of Spain left the Spanish colonies in America adrift. Forced to look after themselves while Spain was in turmoil, they resisted when the restored Spanish monarchy tried to reassert control. It took a decade of bloody colonial wars, but eventually these Latin American communities would establish their independence.

In the United States foreign policy split along party lines, with the Jeffersonians fully in favor of killing kings and supporting America’s old ally France against the hated British, while the Federalists were swayed more by America’s traditional ethnic and economic ties to Britain and a general middle-class fear of revolution. The debate turned so angry that the Speaker of the House was stabbed over it after Congress approved a favorable treaty with Great Britain.

While the Federalists were in power, America fought an undeclared naval war against France, but in 1800, the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency restored America’s friendship with France and hostility to Britain. When Napoleon needed to raise cash, he sold his North American holdings to Jefferson, doubling the size of the United States and putting the Pacific coast of the continent within reach. Ten years later, in 1812, while Napoleon trudged across Russia, America went to war with Britain over its blockade of Napoleonic Europe. The American attempt to conquer Canada was beaten back, but British assaults against Baltimore and New Orleans likewise failed, so the war was officially a draw. At least America got a national anthem out of it.

Even the farthest tips of Africa and Asia got knocked around by the wars in Europe. After France annexed the Netherlands, the British seized the Dutch colony at Cape Town, which would eventually evolve into the troublesome nation of South Africa. The British also took the strategic Malacca Strait from the Dutch, where they would soon build the city of Singapore.

Compared to the other events on my list, the Napoleonic Wars stand out for two reasons. They are one of the few giant megadeaths that ended when the perpetrator was actually caught and locked away, and among the few that killed more soldiers than civilians. In fact, if we count only the deaths of soldiers and ignore civilians, the Napoleonic-Revolutionary Wars would collectively count as the third bloodiest conflict in history, behind the two world wars.

WORLD CONQUERORS

W
E CAN’T JUST HAND THE COVETED TITLE OF “WORLD CONQUEROR” TO
anyone who marches up and asks for it. We need standards. Obviously, no one has ever succeeded in conquering the entire world, but a few have tried. Here are the men and women—okay, men—who have gone out of their way to attack every country within reach and beaten most of them. These are the deadliest conquerors of history:

Hitler:
42 million dead in Europe

Chinggis Khan:
40 million dead across Asia

Timur:
17 million dead in Asia

Napoleon:
4 million dead in Europe

Frederick the Great:
2 million dead in two wars over Silesia and hegemony in Europe

Louis XIV:
1.5 million dead from his wars
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Shaka Zulu:
1.5 million dead in southern Africa

Gaius Julius Caesar:
claimed to have killed 1,192,000 foreign enemies in battle
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Alexander the Great:
450,000 killed in the Middle East

Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning a couple of the least successful world conquerors in history. These warlords attacked all of their neighbors and were badly beaten every time:

Saddam Hussein:
around 740,000 dead from his wars, not including the 300,000 Iraqis he killed by internal tyranny

First he invaded Iran, hoping to take advantage of the Iranian revolution to conquer a few oil-rich provinces. After a promising start, the tide turned and Saddam was forced to defend his own oil provinces. (Seven hundred thousand were killed in that war.) Then he invaded Kuwait, but was kicked out by an international coalition. (Twenty-five thousand were killed in that war.) Finally, the United States invaded and removed him entirely. (Thirteen thousand were killed in the invasion itself.)

Solano Lopez:
480,000 dead from the War of the Triple Alliance, in which Paraguay fought all of its neighbors.

HATIAN SLAVE REVOLT

Death toll:
400,000 (350,000 Haitians, 50,000 European troops)
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Rank:
81

Type:
slave revolt

Broad dividing line:
slaves vs. masters

Time frame:
1791–1803

Location:
Saint-Domingue (now Haiti)

State participants:
France, Britain, Spain

Who usually gets the most blame:
A surprising number of people blame the slaves.

Economic factors:
slaves, sugar

T
WO CLEARLY DEFINED CLASSES INHABITED THE FRENCH COLONY OF SAINT-DOMINGUE
in the Caribbean Sea—a tiny white minority of citizens who had full civil rights and a huge black majority of slaves who had none. A vague third class of free mulattos every bit as numerous as the whites held a more awkward position. They were allowed to own property and form families, but they had no voice in law or politics.

All of the liberal revolutions following the Enlightenment had to face the contradiction of slavery being legal in a free nation. Some abolished it; some compromised; the French went back and forth on it, depending on who was in charge at the moment. After the French Revolution, Paris decided to slip a little more democracy into Haiti by granting full voting rights to any free man in Saint-Domingue with property, even among the biracial. Naturally the whites in the colony wouldn’t accept a law that cut their political clout in half, so protests led to riots, and sporadic fighting broke out over it in 1790.

Then suddenly, in August 1791, that seemed unimportant when the slaves in the northern part of the island rose up, slaughtering 2,000 of their white masters with farm tools and burning over twelve hundred coffee and two hundred sugar plantations. The surviving whites retaliated, killing 10,000 slaves. Soon everyone was killing everyone else.
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Meanwhile, Paris rescinded its original franchise law. The free mulattos under Jean-Jacques Dessalines joined the slaves and pushed the whites into three defensive enclaves. The rebels usually slaughtered any whites who didn’t escape in time, regardless of age or sex.

In 1793, commissioners arrived from France to sort things out. These were radicals, more inclined to side with the slaves than their masters, so they began to fulfill the mulattoes’ wish list. Meanwhile, the white population began evacuating to other, less volatile islands and the United States.
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The chaos left Saint-Domingue vulnerable to the other colonial powers, so Spanish and British troops arrived in September 1793 to partition the French colony. With the British navy in control of the sea, France couldn’t send troops to stop it, but as a parting shot the French government declared all of the slaves free in the hopes that they would fight the British and Spanish for them. It actually worked. With the Spanish forces had come an army of former French slaves under Toussaint Louverture. When the French government completely abolished slavery in the colonies in 1794, Toussaint tossed in with them. This made the island French again.
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A brief break in the global hostilities between France and Britain gave Napoleon the chance to ship an army over to crush the Haitian rebels, who were now slaves again. (Napoleon had restored slavery.) He sent his brother-in-law, Charles Leclerc, with 20,000 men to retake the island in February 1802. After a few defeats, Dessalines and several of the lesser warlords recognized French authority, but Toussaint stubbornly continued his fight. Finally Leclerc gave up and recognized Toussaint as the lawful ruler of Haiti. In June 1802, Leclerc invited Toussaint to a celebratory dinner, where he was congratulated, ambushed, arrested, and shipped back to France in chains. The French stashed Toussaint in a dungeon in the Jura Mountains of France, where he died of cold and neglect within a year.
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Back in Haiti, disease accomplished what the rebels could not. Eventually half of the French invasion force—including Leclerc—died of yellow fever. Even though Napoleon continued to ship reinforcements, those who survived the tropical fevers were in no condition to contest control of the colony. As the Haitians came to realize the growing weakness of the remaining French, the rebellion intensified. Dessalines resumed his fight against the French.

When war between France and Britain resumed in May 1803 and interrupted French shipping, Napoleon finally caved. Abandoning their ambitions, the French army and eighteen hundred civilian refugees left the island under a truce in November 1803, with the agreement that eight hundred sick and wounded who were too weak to move could be left behind and sent back to France after they recovered. Instead, a few days later, the Haitians loaded the hospital patients on boats, took them out to sea, and dumped them overboard.
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The main legacy of the Haitian slave revolt, aside from establishing America’s second independent nation, was to terrify slave owners up and down the Western Hemisphere into refusing to even consider freeing their slaves. Look at what happened in Saint-Domingue, they said. Do you want that to happen here? In the United States right after the American Revolution, emancipation societies had been equally as common in slave and free states, but after Haiti, no true southerner would allow the merest discussion of it, which sharpened the sectional divide.