Authors: Adam Zamoyski
The Russians had also been keen to detach the Spaniards serving in the Grande Armée from the Napoleonic cause, and they offered generous terms to any who would surrender. They formed a regiment out of the prisoners, under Don Raphael de Llanza, who had been captured at the Berezina. Although this regiment never fought against Napoleon as had been intended, it did go back to Spain, where, as the Imperial-Alejandro, it took part in the 1820 Riego rising against the very Bourbons Napoleon had dethroned.
Not the least curious outcome of the enmities aroused in 1812 was that the son of Captain Octave de Ségur of the 8th Hussars, who, pierced by two cossack lances and taken prisoner in a skirmish outside Vilna on 28 June, was the first notable French casualty of the campaign, married in 1819 Sophie, the youngest daughter of
Count Fyodor Rostopchin, Governor-incendiary of Moscow. As the Comtesse de Ségur, she went on to write a series of books for children on which generations of French boys and girls were brought up well into the twentieth century.
T
he catastrophic outcome of the Russian campaign sealed Napoleon’s fate. Not only did it cost him hundreds of thousands of his best soldiers; it punctured the general conviction that he was invincible and tarnished the aura of superiority surrounding his person. ‘It seems to me that the spell has been broken as far as Napoleon is concerned, and that he is no longer redoubtable as he was in the past,’ the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna wrote with satisfaction to a friend in the first days of 1813. ‘He is no longer an
idol
, but has descended to the rank of
men
, and as such he can be fought by men.’
1
She was right. As the master of Europe was seen to stumble and fall, every person who held a grudge against him, every nation which resented his dominion, every group with a dream of change took heart. As the extent of the disaster became known in the first months of 1813, it became apparent that the future of Europe was open to an extent it had not been since the 1790s.
Few saw this as clearly as the German patriots who had been smarting under the humiliation of French dominion. ‘The first rays of Germany’s freedom burst from the east; they were red as blood, but they shed the light of promise,’ the painter Wilhelm von Kügelgen wrote. General Yorck’s defection had been a signal, and young men all over northern Germany prepared to rise up to throw off the French
yoke. Stein had set about organising a volunteer militia in Prussia. King Frederick William dithered, unsure of what to do, but was overtaken by events; in the minds of young Germans the war of liberation, the
Freiheitskrieg
, had begun. On 19 February the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte ended a lecture he was giving at the University of Berlin with the words: ‘This course will be suspended until the close of the campaign, when we will resume it in a free fatherland or reconquer our liberty by death.’
2
On 28 February an alliance was concluded between Russia and Prussia, and two weeks later the latter declared war on France.
Napoleon had managed to raise a new army in an astonishingly short time, and took the field at the end of April 1813 with over 200,000 men. He was robbed of the chance to settle scores with Kutuzov, who had fallen ill on the march and died at Bunzlau in Silesia on 25 March. He defeated a combined Russo-Prussian force under Blücher and Yorck at Lützen on 2 May and another under Wittgenstein at Bautzen on 20 May, but the shortage of experienced officers and men in his ranks told, while the lack of cavalry meant that he could not follow up his successes.
Sweden joined the coalition with an army under Bernadotte. Britain contributed money, while her army in Spain under Wellington forced Joseph out of Madrid in May and defeated him at Vittoria on 21 June. And as Napoleon’s enemies grew in strength, his allies in Germany began to waver.
Austria had never been an enthusiastic ally of Napoleon, but she did not relish the prospect of a strong Russo-Prussian presence in central Europe, and therefore felt the necessity to save France from annihilation. She offered to mediate and managed to arrange an armistice, which was signed on 4 June. Napoleon was given the opportunity of peace on the basis of a return to France’s ‘natural’ frontiers, with no say in the arrangements to be made in the rest of Europe. His situation was desperate. But he felt that if he accepted this he would be placing himself and France at the mercy of the coalition, and he rejected it. Feeling unable to help Napoleon further and fearful
for his own future, the Emperor Francis abandoned him and joined the coalition. On 12 August Austria too declared war on France.
Napoleon defeated the Austrians and Russians under Schwarzenberg outside Dresden on 26 August, but Oudinot was defeated by Bernadotte at Blankenfelde and Grossbeeren, and Vandamme by General von Kleist at Külm. On 16 October Napoleon was attacked by the combined allied armies at Leipzig. The ‘battle of the nations’, as it was called on account of the number and size of the armies involved, lasted three days, on the second of which Napoleon’s last ally, the King of Saxony, was obliged to change sides. By this stage the French were outnumbered by two to one. Napoleon held his own for as long as he could, giving Barclay de Tolly and Bennigsen, both of whom had been called back to command armies, a very difficult time. But in the end he was forced to withdraw. A nervous engineer blew the bridge across the river Elster prematurely, cutting off Napoleon’s rearguard of 20,000 men. Lauriston was taken prisoner with them. Poniatowski perished while trying to swim across. Despite another victory over a force of Austrians and Prussians under Wrede at Hanau, Napoleon’s position in Germany was no longer tenable.
He struggled back across the Rhine with no more than about 40,000 men at the beginning of November 1813, and although he fought a brilliant campaign against the invading armies throughout that winter and spring, he could do no more than delay the end. Paris capitulated on 31 March 1814, and Napoleon was forced to abdicate on 6 April. He was exiled to the island of Elba off the Italian coast. A year later, on 1 March 1815, he landed in France and took power once again amid scenes of patriotic jubilation, but on 18 June he was defeated at Waterloo by a combined British and Prussian army under Wellington and Blücher. He was then exiled to the island of St Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, where he would die on 5 May 1821.
As he rode into Paris in triumph on 31 March 1814, Tsar Alexander was cheered by enthusiastic crowds. The French were relieved the war was over. They were also charmed by his person and his manner,
which radiated benevolence and spirituality. He seemed uninterested in triumph or retribution, and magnanimously pardoned all the Poles who had fought against him in Napoleon’s ranks. He talked of expiation and regeneration, held prayer-meetings and curious semi-religious parades, and represented himself to some as a ‘Second Abraham’ who would bring a new kind of peace to the world.
He was not alone in this exaltation. In Germany, where poets compared Napoleon’s Russian débâcle to the fate of the Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, many believed Alexander to be an instrument of God’s will. In London, the Tsar was greeted by Quakers and members of the British Bible Society as though he were some kind of spiritual sage or even avatar. It is not unusual after a long war for people to dream of new beginnings.
None let themselves go to such dreams with greater abandon than the young Russian officers who had taken part in the campaigns of 1812–1814. ‘Many centuries have passed, and many will follow in the future, but not one of them contained or will contain two such full and wondrous years,’ wrote Nikolai Borisovich Galitzine, a junior staff-officer. Young men such as he felt they had lived through a national epic that vindicated their country’s right to universal respect. ‘With head lifted proudly, one can at last say “I am a Russian!”’, wrote the partisan commander Denis Davidov.
3
It was not just pride in the new power and prestige of their country that animated them. ‘After the successful conclusion of the patriotic war and our victorious march from the ruins of Moscow to Paris, Russia breathed a sigh of freedom, and came alive with the spirit of renewal and rebirth,’ reflected Prince Piotr Viazemsky many years later. Another participant believed that the events had ‘awoken the Russian people to life’ and defined them politically. Fyodor Glinka saw the whole episode as a kind of ‘holy progress’ towards a better state of being.
4
It was partly a question of heightened self-awareness: these young officers had experienced a great deal in a very short time, facing death daily, enduring great sufferings, plumbing the depths of despair and riding the crest of triumph. They had discovered a
new sense of solidarity with each other and with their men, and dreamt of a fairer and better life for all as they chatted around their campfires.
But as they gave free rein to their better instincts, their more down-to-earth peers back home had busied themselves repairing the damage caused by Napoleon’s incursion into the Russian empire. As soon as the French had left Moscow back in October 1812, Rostopchin set up a special commission to investigate all those who had remained in the city under the French occupation. It identified twenty-two, most of them of foreign extraction, who had failed to remain true to their oath of loyalty to the Tsar. They were duly exiled, sent to Siberia or imprisoned. A further thirty-seven were deemed to have been of service to the French but not punished. Others were handed over to civil courts, and some were flogged. Similar investigations were carried out in other provinces. All those who had stayed put under the French occupation were interrogated, along with those who had served the enemy. Very few were penalised, as an amnesty was declared in 1814 before sentences had been passed.
5
Such leniency reflects a degree of relief.
The greatest cause for relief was that the serfs had not taken the opportunity provided by the French invasion to rise up against their masters in any numbers. ‘I see that this is what most touches the feelings of all the Russians with whom I have conversed on the subject,’ noted John Quincy Adams in his diary on 1 December 1812. ‘This was the point on which their fears were the greatest, and that upon which they are most delighted to see the danger past.’
6
But many feared the danger was far from over.
While giving fulsome praise to the patriotism of the serfs, people voiced fears of what these peasant heroes might do next, particularly as many had acquired muskets and learnt to use them. The authorities issued proclamations calling on the peasants to hand in weapons, even offering five roubles per musket, but the results were disappointing and the arms had to be confiscated by force. Just how seriously the threat was taken can be gauged by the fact that Aleksandr
Benckendorff, who had commanded a ‘flying’ detachment under Wintzingerode to the north of the Moscow – Smolensk road, received orders to disarm his peasant auxiliaries and to have those who had been most active shot.
7
‘The common people have become accustomed to war and witnessed butchery,’ Rostopchin wrote to Alexander after a long talk on the subject with Balashov in the autumn of 1812. ‘Our soldiers pillaged them before the enemy did, and now that Bonaparte has apparently slipped out of our clutches, it would not be a bad idea, as we prepare to do battle with him, to think of the measures to be taken for the struggle within the empire against your enemies and those of the fatherland.’
8
These were not groundless fears.
On 9 December, as the debris of the Grande Armée straggled into Vilna, the recently recruited 3rd Militia Regiment of the province of Tula, stationed in the little town of Insar, mutinied. They arrested their officers, beat them up and dragged them about the town before locking them up in the gaol. They began erecting gallows on which to hang them, but were distracted by the lure of booty, and went on the rampage. An officer who managed to escape into the countryside found that the peasants wanted to lynch him and the local landowners. The mutiny spread to other garrisons in Tula before being put down by regular troops supported by artillery. After investigation it emerged that the men had believed they would win their freedom by serving in the militia, and reacted with fury on being told that this was not so. Three hundred were condemned to run the gauntlet, which ended in the death of thirty-four.
9
The French invasion had indeed altered the attitudes of the peasants affected by it, whether as victims, as partisans, as militiamen or as regular soldiers. They had all suffered or fought alongside their masters in the cause of the common fatherland, and it seemed only right that there should be some acknowledgment of this.
It was the men called up in the course of 1812 who felt most aggrieved. The manifesto under which they had been drafted clearly stated that they were being called upon to defend the fatherland in its
moment of need, and that once the enemy had been chased out, they would be free to return home to their families. Instead, they were marched across Europe, fought in two campaigns, and only returned to Russia after three years. On their march to Paris they saw that peasants in every country they crossed enjoyed not only a standard of living but also a degree of freedom beyond their wildest dreams. They felt the least they deserved was some alleviation of their lot. ‘We shed our blood, and now they want us to go back and sweat for the masters!’ they grumbled. ‘We saved the fatherland from the tyrant, and now the lords want to tyrannise us!’
10
When the time came for the army to begin its long march back from Paris, many of the soldiers did the sensible thing. ‘At the first night’s stop, twelve of our best soldiers deserted, even more on the second, so that in three days’ march the company lost fifty men,’ wrote Captain A.K. Karpov.
11
His experience was by no means exceptional, and special measures had to be taken to prevent the army from melting away as it marched home.