Authors: Adam Zamoyski
The young Pushkin, still at school in St Petersburg, wrote an ode to Alexander on his return from Paris, full of joy and yearning for the future. He was expressing the enthusiasm of a generation which hoped that the Tsar would transform their country. For them, the events of the past two years had been a spiritual awakening, and they believed that Russia must realise their promise by breaking down those hierarchies which divided the nation. While they generally rejected foreign values, and French ones in particular, the would-be reformers nevertheless envisaged a process of regeneration that would turn Russia into a progressive liberal state.
The humiliating invasion and the desecration of their country by the French had produced a visceral reaction throughout Russian society, which reached back into its own history and traditions for solace and strength. Ethnic fashions, music and dances invaded the palaces of the aristocracy. Count Ostermann-Tolstoy went as far as tearing out the French décor of the main bedroom in his St Petersburg
palace and replacing it with rough-hewn logs in imitation of a Russian peasant’s cottage. But such manifestations did not necessarily presage any change in attitude to the peasants themselves.
While the image of the patriotic common soldier was glorified in paintings and prints, and while he was the hero of many a poem and short story, and at least one popular play in which a peasant became an officer, reality remained harshly unaffected. Serfs had to be put in their place and sent back to work. When it was discovered that a lancer who had won the Cross of St George for bravery was a Jew, he was denied the right to wear it.
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The majority of Russian society saw the events of 1812–1814 not as a spur to regeneration but as divine vindication of the existing constitution of the Russian state, which alone had been deemed worthy by the Almighty of carrying out His will in the struggle against the evil of revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Abandoning his youthful liberalism, the Tsar himself espoused this view. There would be no more reforms, and the system became in some ways even more stultifying than before. When Denis Davidov attempted to publish a memoir of his heroic deeds, the text was savaged by the censors, and the book was not published for years. It gradually dawned on the heroes of 1812 that, having done their duty, they were now supposed to carry on as before, as though nothing had happened.
In their frustration, they were drawn together. General Orlov, an admirer of the German
Tugendbund
, founded an ‘Order of Russian Knights’, which grew into the ‘Union of Salvation’ and finally the ‘Union of Welfare’. The stated aim of these associations was self-betterment and the regeneration of society, their inspiration a mixture of St Paul and Rousseau, and they did not ostensibly threaten the Russian state. As this was also a period of flowering in Russian literature, a number of purely literary clubs and societies sprang up at about the same time, and there was a certain amount of movement and communication between the two.
In 1822 Tsar Alexander issued a decree banning all such societies, and this was followed by purges in the universities, where subversion
was supposedly lurking. The Union of Welfare was driven underground and grew more political, and its members, most of them officers who had fought for their country in 1812, began plotting ways of saving it from autocracy.
They seized their chance in December 1825, when the sudden death of Alexander created a moment of uncertainty, to stage a military coup. But brave as they had been on the battlefield, they had neither the decisiveness nor the ruthlessness necessary to carry through such a venture, and their revolt collapsed under a hail of canister-shot from troops loyal to the new Tsar, Alexander’s younger brother Nicholas I.
Among those condemned to a variety of sentences, some of them unwarrantedly harsh, were sixty-five officers who had been at Borodino, and another fifty who had fought in defence of their fatherland in 1812. With them went the hopes of any reform, but they became potent symbols for subsequent generations of Russians, for whom their heroism in 1812 and their self-sacrifice in 1825 stood for all that was best and most worth fighting for.
The effects of Alexander’s ‘liberation’ of Europe were no less disappointing to those who had longed for it. While quoting Holy Scripture, he haggled over territory and influence with the best of them, and tried to use the peace settlement as a vehicle to establish an ideological orthodoxy over the European mainland. His Holy Alliance sanctified a system which was designed to invigilate the political life of every state in Europe and intervene militarily if something that displeased him took place anywhere, be it Naples, Belgium or Spain. Contemplating the European scene in 1819, Stendhal came to the conclusion that Russia had achieved such dominion over the continent that only the United States of America could save it.
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Such a system could not work for long, and fell apart even before Alexander’s death in 1825. But the dominant position Russia had assumed meant that she could prevent any change in the political
status quo
in central Europe which did not meet with her approval. It
also strengthened the forces of conservatism in other major states of the area, such as the Austrian Empire and Prussia.
Prussia was perhaps the greatest beneficiary of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia. Alexander’s use of her as a tool for the liberation of Germany meant that by 1814 her army was one of the best in Europe. He could not reward her by returning all the Polish lands Napoleon had taken from her at Tilsit, since he had claimed most of them for Russia, so he helped her acquire provinces in other parts of Germany and the Rhineland instead. This meant that it was Prussia, not Austria, which would become the dominant German state.
If Russian liberals had been disappointed at the betrayal of their hopes by Alexander and Russian society in general, the German dreamers who had envisaged a great new Germany taking a spiritual lead in Europe were appalled at the way in which their aspirations were quashed. Prussia merely modernised her despotic constitution and, in common with Russia, stamped on even the most innocent indulgences of liberal students and patriotic poets. When a great Germany did arise, in 1870, it was not the chivalric one imagined by Stein and the Romantic poets who had fought in the
Freiheitskrieg
, but the militaristic and autocratic one of Bismarck and the Kaisers.
Far from rolling back those he had called the ‘northern barbarians’, Napoleon had brought them into the heart of Europe. His own defeat and France’s resultant eclipse as a Great Power had paved the way for the dominance of both Russia and Prussia. They used that dominance to protect a
status quo
that impeded social, national and religious emancipation, economic enterprise and political development in central Europe, thereby generating militant nationalisms and creating tensions that led to revolution and upheaval in the first two decades of the twentieth century and fed the ideologies which accounted for tens of millions of lives in the third, fourth and fifth decades.
The French reacted to their fall from power in a variety of ways. Some went into denial and dreamt of how things could have been. One, Louis Geoffroy, actually rewrote history in order to comfort himself
and his peers, and published his version of events in 1841. According to this, Napoleon did not pause in Moscow in 1812 but marched north. He came up against an army of Russians, Swedes and 25,000 British under the command of Alexander and Bernadotte, and defeated them outside Novgorod on 8 October. A week later he made a triumphal entry into St Petersburg. He forced Alexander to bring the Russian empire into the fold of the Catholic Church, which earned him the forgiveness and wholehearted support of the Pope. He sacked Bernadotte and made Poniatowski King of a restored Poland. He then went to Spain, where, at Segovia on 13 July 1813 he defeated and captured Wellington. The Pope persuaded the Spaniards to accept Joseph Bonaparte as their King, and peace descended on the Iberian peninsula. In April 1814 Napoleon invaded England, landing in East Anglia and defeating the British army under the Duke of York outside Cambridge. He then marched on London, where he stormed into the House of Commons and informed the astonished MPs that Britain was abolished before ordering his troops to clear the chamber. Once this had been done he locked the doors, took the keys and, riding onto Westminster Bridge, cast them into the Thames. While George III was allowed to reign in Glasgow as a vassal King of Scotland and Ireland, England was divided up into twenty-two
départements
and incorporated into the French empire. Napoleon rebuilt Paris as a new Rome to which all flocked. Even Madame de Staël returned, to take up a place in the Académie Française and receive the title of Duchess from Napoleon. He also lavished his attention on Rome, which he embellished, draining the marshes and diverting the Tiber as well as rebuilding St Peter’s for his uncle, Cardinal Fesch, who had become Pope. In 1817 Russia, Prussia and Sweden rose up against French rule, but they were crushed; Napoleon wiped Prussia off the map and split Russia into three separate states. As an afterthought, he conquered Constantinople. In 1820 he annexed north Africa and in the following year Egypt. After a great victory outside Jerusalem, he marched east to Baghdad and sent Prince Eugène to Mecca, which he destroyed. Napoleon then abolished Islam. The rest
of Asia, China, Japan and the remainder of Africa were easily conquered over the next few years, and, after a great congress at Panama, all the rulers of the Americas, North and South, humbly begged to be allowed to submit to Napoleon’s rule. All the world’s Jews met in congress in Warsaw and decided to become Catholics. By the time he died, on 23 February 1832, Napoleon ruled the whole world, which spoke French and worshipped Christ.
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Preposterous as this fantasy might be, the fact remains that neither Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815 nor his death in 1821 succeeded in consigning him to history. Many in France looked back with understandable nostalgia to the days when he made Europe tremble, while old soldiers of other nationalities never forgot what they had experienced when serving under his command. For many he remained a sacred memory, and people would gather on the anniversary of his birth, his coronation or his death. From time to time rumours swept France that he had landed somewhere in Europe and was marching on Paris at the head of a great army. These persisted long after his death, news of which many refused to believe.
The Romantic movement added a further dimension to the fascination Napoleon exerted. Poets such as Alfred de Vigny and Alfred de Musset represented him as a titanic figure, above the common run of man, one who belonged to the heavens rather than to earth, while even writers who hated him, like Châteaubriand and Victor Hugo, saw him as a ‘poet in action’, superhuman and heroic. It was not only the French who were in thrall. To Goethe, Napoleon was the ‘daimon’, representing the darker – but more inspired – element in the dualism of human nature, the ultimate doer of deeds. To Heinrich Heine he was Prometheus, who had stolen the fire of heaven. Byron dwelt at length on his fate, and Walter Savage Landor wove a messianic myth around him. To the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, Napoleon was a kind of demi-god and 1812 a failed incarnation whose memory was to be cherished. Even the Russians were not immune, and it was not uncommon for the heroes of 1812 to have statuettes or prints of Napoleon in their studies. To them he
epitomised energy, willpower, action. He was a colossus, an elemental being, exerting the same fascination as an erupting volcano or a raging storm.
In exile on St Helena, Napoleon mused that if only he had been killed in battle at Borodino or on his entry into Moscow, he would have gone down in history as the greatest conqueror and hero of all time.
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But he was wrong. In classical Greek theatre a hero can only exist in the genre of tragedy, which makes people appear more than they are and lends stature to figures who are not necessarily virtuous or attractive. The more tragic the action, the more terrible the trials to which he is subjected, the greater the hero appears. The same was true for the Romantics, who were fascinated by the concept of man living out a tragic destiny. To be interesting, a man had to be both colossus and victim.
Walter Scott hurried to Waterloo in order to see the field on which the giant had been toppled, and when he first met Stendhal, at the opera in Italy, Byron talked only of the retreat from Moscow, quizzing the French novelist for every detail of the Emperor’s comportment. It was the catastrophe Napoleon had met with that turned him into a hero in their eyes. It mattered not that he himself had been the author of this catastrophe, or that he was responsible for the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
Some, like Dostoevsky, were fascinated by the very callousness and monstrosity of the man. ‘The real
Master
, the man to whom all is permitted, can storm Toulon, stage a massacre in Paris,
forget about
an army in Egypt,
throw away
half a million men in the Moscow expedition and then get away with a witty phrase in Vilna,’ marvels Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
. ‘Yet altars are erected to him after his death, for to such a man
all
is permitted. No, such people are clearly not made of flesh, but of bronze!’
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One did not have to be a tortured intellectual to sense an element of the numinous in Napoleon. At the first stop after Kovno on his flight from Smorgonie in December 1812, the Emperor took the opportunity to have a wash and a change of linen. When his Mameluke, Roustam,
handed the discarded shirt and stockings to the innkeeper to dispose of, they were seized by the locals present, cut up and distributed, to be preserved as holy relics. And relics of the terrible retreat, gathered on the banks of the Berezina and at other scenes of disaster, were surrounded by far greater piety than objects from the fields of Marengo, Austerlitz or Jena.
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