Authors: Adam Zamoyski
On the face of it, the invasion had provoked a surge of patriotism and devotion to the Tsar in all classes. The nobility were, as Alexander had witnessed in Smolensk and Moscow, apparently eager to sacrifice their lives and their wealth to the cause. When Kutuzov began to organise the St Petersburg militia, he received the following letter, which gives an idea of this:
Having had the pleasure of serving under the command of your excellency in the previous Turkish war, in the Bug rifle corps, I took part in many battles including the storming of Izmail, in three victorious encounters beyond the Danube and at Machin at the defeat of the Vizir, where we were always victorious with you. After that I took part in all the encounters against the French in Italy and was wounded very gravely in the leg, when my thighbone was shattered by a bullet, which remained lodged in it, and as I could not walk I was retired from service with the rank of Major General with the right to wear uniform but no pension. For ten years and six months I suffered from this bullet, seeking relief everywhere, but nobody could remove it; at last here, in St Petersburg, Jacob Vasilievich Wille decided to deliver me, and after an operation counselled by him removed the bullet, the wound healed and the bone grew back, and now I have the full use of my leg and complete freedom, as proof of which I have a certificate from him, which I enclose. Having the most passionate desire to serve my fatherland
under the command of your excellency in the militia, I beg most humbly to be admitted into its ranks.
5
Young boys ran away from home to join the army, twenty-two pupils at the Kaluga school for nobles volunteered, and from the fringes of the empire Bashkirs, Kalmuiks, Crimean Tatars and Georgian princes declared their willingness to fight. Groups of fashionable young gentlemen clubbed together to form units of volunteers at their own cost, taking the opportunity to design flashy uniforms with death’s-head symbols and to call themselves ‘the immortals’ or some such dramatic name. Some showed their patriotic ardour in drastic ways: Sergei Nikolaevich Glinka burnt his entire collection of richly bound French books.
6
But not all were prepared to make such sacrifices. While some picked their best serfs for the militia and personally led them into the ranks, others refused to serve themselves or would only do so on local order-keeping forces. Most did everything they could to hold on to their workforce. Many small landowners sent tearful letters to the authorities in an attempt to evade the obligation. Others dragged their feet, hoping the war would be over before they were forced to part with their serfs. Others still selected the old, the crippled, the shirkers, drunks, miscreants and the village idiots. As a result, the province of Kaluga, which should have yielded 20,843 men, furnished no more than 15,370, and hardly more than a third of the men raised as a whole by the levy were suitable for active service. With patriotic proclamations appealing for defenders of the fatherland to come forward, some serfs, assuming that if they fought they might be rewarded with personal freedom, actually volunteered, but they were pursued and arrested as fugitives and dealt with harshly by their masters. According to Rostopchin, two aristocrats who had loudly pledged to raise and equip a regiment each during Alexander’s visit to Moscow, never contributed a man or a penny between them.
7
Notwithstanding numerous proclamations issued by the
authorities enjoining them to destroy anything that could be of use to the invader and to abandon occupied areas, many landowners stayed put. There were plenty of instances of them providing forage and victuals to the French, taking payment in cash or notes. A foraging party led by Captain Abraham Rosselet of the 1st Swiss Regiment was not only plentifully supplied by the Russian landowner they visited, but put up for the night and in the morning assisted in evading a unit of cossacks which was preparing to ambush them.
8
When Alexander asked Sergei Volkonsky about the attitude of the nobility in the country at large, he replied: ‘Sire! I am ashamed to belong to it.’ But the nobility were not the only ones lacking in patriotic spirit. Grand Duke Constantine himself forced the army to buy remounts from him at inflated prices, and of the 126 horses he sold, only twenty-six were fit for service while the rest had to be destroyed. Arakcheev was taking a cut from suppliers. The civil servants responsible for equipping and supplying the army stole and sold on goods bought for it, inflated prices and took bribes to issue receipts for deliveries that never took place, with the result that the troops never received much of what had been procured for them. Those responsible for caring for wounded officers evacuated out of the war zone deflected to their own pockets the sums destined for the feeding and care of their charges. And according to some sources, members of the clergy showed little courage and abandoned their posts as the French approached.
9
The merchant class appears to have been more generous, although much of this could be put down to the fact that the war against France was also a war against the Continental System, which was so ruinous to them. And there were many instances of profiteering among them too. They joined with the commissary officials in fixing prices, and some certainly profited from supplying the army. Following Alexander’s appeal for volunteers and offerings in Moscow, the city’s armourers raised the prices of sabres from six to between thirty and forty roubles; of a pair of pistols from seven or eight roubles to thirty-five or fifty; and of a musket from eleven or fifteen to eighty.
10
When asked about the attitude of the common people, Volkonsky answered: ‘Sire! You should be proud of it: every peasant is a hero, devoted to the fatherland and your person.’ But this is hardly borne out by the evidence. The peasants had no interest in the war, but were understandably keen to preserve themselves and as much of their livestock as possible, usually by taking it off to the woods. The retreating Russian army encouraged this trend, telling the peasants of the horrors that awaited them if they stayed behind. ‘These rumours are producing a sensation among the peasants, who with the greatest
sang-froid
in the world set their huts on fire so as not to abandon them to the enemy,’ recorded one Russian officer. But many were not happy to see the retreating Russian army torching their villages, and some put out the fires as soon as the soldiers had moved off. The peasants had also been told, from the pulpit, that this invader was an infidel, and many referred to the French as ‘
Bisurman
’, a traditional term for a Muslim.
11
Hence the fearful and hostile attitude encountered by the French.
Once the fear was dispelled, relations could be perfectly amicable. Michal Jackowski, an officer in Poniatowski’s horse artillery, rode into a village accompanied only by one trooper, and was promptly surrounded by some fifty armed peasants. But when he gave them the traditional Christian greeting habitual in Poland and Russia, they lowered their weapons and said that if he was a Christian they had nothing against him. He found that this never failed, and that he always obtained supplies by prefacing his request with the statement that he would only buy what they could spare.
A similar attitude is recorded by other Poles, who were better placed than the other nationalities of the Grande Armée to communicate with the locals. Every French division had a Polish officer seconded to it for this purpose, and there are accounts of peaceful and fruitful foraging expeditions. General Berthézène denied that there was any widespread animosity at this stage. ‘On the contrary,’ he wrote, ‘I saw our servants go off singly and without escorts, foraging around Moscow; I saw peasants warning them of the approach of
cossacks or of ambushes; I saw others show us where their masters had hidden their supplies and share them with our soldiers.’ A number of French and allied officers corroborate this with accounts of amicable foraging expeditions.
12
One Westphalian soldier recorded that when his unit came to evacuate Mozhaisk after a five-week stay, the man they had pressed into service to work for them bade them farewell with tears in his eyes, making the sign of the cross over them. Lieutenant Peppler, whose Hessians were cantoned outside Mozhaisk, found that by treating the locals politely they had nothing to fear. ‘We had won the trust and even the friendship of those good people to such a degree that we felt as safe among them as though we had been in a friendly country,’ he wrote. And when Bartolomeo Bertolini escaped from captivity, he found friendly peasants giving him food as he made his way across country to Moscow.
13
Even allowing for some exaggeration, such accounts are revealing, and they are corroborated by evidence from the Russian side, where the attitude of the lower orders aroused the deepest fears. ‘We still do not know which way the Russian people will turn,’ Rostopchin warned Sergei Glinka.
14
Soon after the invasion began, there were instances of serfs refusing to carry out their duties and even staging minor revolts, and there was much ransacking of manors abandoned by fleeing nobles. In a letter to a friend, one landowner described how, after a French foraging party had come and taken what they needed from his estate, the serfs rushed in and looted all that remained. Once the local authority had evaporated the peasants began to behave like ‘bandits’, even assaulting priests and torturing them in order to extort supposed Church riches. Peasants also helped French marauders to attack and loot manor houses. Some complained of their condition to the French, and seemed to expect Napoleon to do something about it. Many of those landowners who stayed put, often wives of officers who were away with the army, surrounded themselves with armed servants and asked the French for protection. There were cases of landowners being
roughly handled and even killed, but most of the disorders were opportunistic rather than politically inspired.
15
Pavel Ivanovich Engelhardt, a landowner on the fringes of the area occupied by the French in the province of Smolensk, led his peasants in an attack on some French marauders. Emboldened by the action, they began to question his rights over them and refused to work. He called on a detachment of cossacks hovering in the area to come and restore discipline. The serfs then denounced him to the French authorities in Smolensk, and he was imprisoned. But as the French could find nothing specific to charge him with, they released him. He once more called in the cossacks, and his serfs were whipped into submission. But the moment the cossacks had gone they buried in his park the bodies of a couple of French soldiers they had killed and then denounced him again. This time he was shot by the French.
16
There were also cases of peasants showing extreme devotion to their masters. Aleksandr Benckendorff recounted how his detachment fell upon a party of French marauders looting the estate of one of the Galitzine family and chased them off. The peasants, who had assembled, asked the Russian officer in charge for permission to drown one of their number, a woman. When asked why they wanted to do this, they replied that she had revealed to the French the place where the Princess’s jewels had been hidden. The officer suggested that she might only have done this under duress, and they answered that she had assuredly been flogged to within an inch of her life, but that nevertheless she must be punished.
17
The Russian army’s failures, followed by the loss of Smolensk and then Moscow, inevitably lowered respect for the authorities and for the Tsar, so that it was not uncommon to hear peasants making ribald jokes about the incompetence not only of Barclay and the ‘Germans’, but of Alexander himself. In the general mood of mistrust and paranoia even Russian officers in uniform found themselves arrested by the populace and in at least one case nearly lynched as ‘spies’.
18
The nationalist Filip Vigel commented, approvingly, that the lower orders had shed their deference and become much more outspoken,
while others noted, with alarm, the frequency with which the name of the rebel Pugachov was uttered by them. ‘The influence of the local authorities, particularly of the police, grew weak, and the common people grew restive,’ according to the merchant M.I. Marakuev. ‘It was necessary to treat them with skill and flattery. The decisive tone of authority and mastership was out of place and could be dangerous.’ Even the authorities recognised this, and proclamations were couched in populist terms and a cajoling rather than commanding style.
19
‘The ideas of freedom that have spread through the land, the widespread devastation, the total destitution of some and the selfishness of others, the disgraceful attitude of landowners, the abject example they have set to their peasants – will this not lead to great upheaval and disorder?’ noted Lieutenant Aleksandr Chicherin in his diary as he observed the situation around the retreating army.
20
In a letter to a friend, Maria Antonovna Volkova expressed the conviction that Rostopchin had saved Moscow from social upheaval, even though she had lost her house in the fire. ‘Only a man like Rostopchin knew how to deal with minds in such a state of ferment and prevent terrible and irreversible things happening,’ she wrote. ‘Moscow has always had an influence on the whole country, and you can be sure that if there had been the slightest disorder between groups of her inhabitants, the upsurge would have been universal. We all know with what perfidious intentions Napoleon invaded. It was necessary to counteract them, to turn minds against the scoundrel and thereby contain the common people, who are always thoughtless.’ She was talking about revolution.
21
A great deal of effort had been put into influencing the attitudes of the people. Alexander’s proclamations and religious sermons were accompanied by a steady trickle of propaganda and rumour. News of the burning of Moscow, universally attributed to the French, of the profanation of churches and of alleged atrocities committed on the population was circulated widely. ‘It is impossible to imagine the horrors the French are said to be committing,’ noted Lieutenant Uxküll. ‘One hears that they’re burning and desecrating churches,
that the weaker sex – or rather any individuals who fall into their frantic hands – are sacrificed to their brutality and the satisfaction of their infernal lusts. Children, greybeards – it’s all the same to them – all perish beneath their blows.’
22
Rumours were disseminated among the peasants to the effect that Napoleon would convert them all to Catholicism by force and brand them on the heart. Much was also made of the fact that Napoleon was in league with Russia’s historic enemy, the Poles, who were supposedly intent on recapturing parts of Holy Russia.