Citizen Emperor (100 page)

To make matters worse, a typhoid epidemic was raging through Germany, brought in large part by the remnants of the Grande Armée returning from Moscow.
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The hospitals of Gumbinnen, Insterburg, Königsberg, Marienburg and Thorn were full of the sick and wounded. Between August and October 1813, more than 90,000 sick and wounded soldiers passed through Leipzig. In Leipzig in the final months of 1813, around 700–800 people fell ill every week. In all, around 13,500 people came down with typhus (that was about a third of the population), of whom 2,700 died.
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At Mainz, between November 1813 and May 1814, some 10 per cent of the city’s population succumbed, around 500 people per day, along with around 30,000 troops.
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‘The streets of Mainz were framed by two rows of men dying of cold, hunger and the terrible typhus, which had just violently broken out and which promptly ravaged the ranks. One can truthfully say that the city was paved with the dead and the dying.’
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One of Napoleon’s chamberlains confirms the impression, later recalling having to walk through the streets to the palace every day, and seeing nothing but corpses.
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From Mainz, the epidemic spread to the rest of the Rhine departments. In the Moselle, between October 1813 and the following January, 9,000 people died.
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About 300 soldiers died each day so that in the last two months of 1813 about 15,000 soldiers (and as many civilians again) eventually succumbed.
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As with the outbreak of the plague in Egypt and Syria, here too it was naively thought that fear was a factor in the contagion.
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Many troops, exhausted by malnutrition and the hardships of the campaign they had just endured, succumbed in their weakened state.

Napoleon stayed in Mainz until 7 November 1813, while the army rested and was reorganized. He seems to have clung to the hope that the allies would not undertake a winter campaign – not as far fetched an idea as it might seem – and that if he were given six months’ respite he would be able to create another army to defend ‘the sacred soil’, as he referred to France.
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That may have been true, but it also gave the allies a chance to rest and regroup. And he was mistaken about his enemies’ intentions. A winter campaign is exactly what the allies chose to embark on, throwing his plans for a spring offensive into disarray.

Even under these conditions, Napoleon did not negotiate a settlement. In November 1813, Metternich, with the knowledge of Britain and the consent of Russia, sent a captured French diplomat, Caulaincourt’s brother-in-law the Baron de Saint-Aignan, with a suggestion of peace on the basis of the ‘natural borders’ of France – the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, the revolutionary borders of Campo Formio and Lunéville.
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That meant giving up Spain, Holland, Germany and Italy, although he could keep Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine and Savoy. These were known as the Frankfurt Proposals. Metternich insisted that military operations should continue against Napoleon so that he could not use the cover of negotiations to gain time to reorganize the army, but he also made it clear, by a letter sent to Caulaincourt (10 November), that now was the time to make peace with the allies. Once again, it is highly improbable that Metternich, like Alexander, thought anything would come of these proposals, which is in part why they were offered in the first place.
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They understood Napoleon well enough to know it was impossible to negotiate with him, under any circumstances.

Metternich’s reply (25 November) to Napoleon was adamant – peace talks would not begin until Napoleon accepted the Frankfurt Proposals.
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Metternich indeed seems to have been playing a double game, as he had throughout 1813 and would continue to do throughout 1814, saying one thing to Napoleon, much of which was meant for public consumption, and something else entirely in his private correspondence. Regardless of Metternich’s and the allies’ intentions, Napoleon obliged them to continue the struggle. It was only then that the allied monarchs issued a common declaration, on 1 December 1813, that they would not lay down their arms until the balance of power on the Continent had been restored. Note, however, they did not swear to fight on until Napoleon was overthrown. At this stage, they still planned to make a place for Napoleon’s France in their concept of Europe. Metternich then drafted a proclamation to the French people which declared that the alliance was directed not against France but against French preponderance, read Napoleon.
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The allies were attempting to separate Napoleon from the nation.
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How do we interpret Napoleon’s actions during this period? It is true that Napoleon could not be expected to take too seriously what was, after all, no more than an oral approach on the part of Saint-Aignan with a private letter to Caulaincourt.
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Besides, the Frankfurt Proposals could not be entirely accepted at face value. Offering them was a move worked out between the Austrians and the Russians. Prussia was not involved in the deal and it did not want to agree to give up the left bank permanently – although of course pressure could have been brought to bear to make Prussia concede – but nor was Britain, and its position on the Rhine was intractable.
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Nevertheless, even more so than at Dresden, it would have been in Napoleon’s interests to negotiate a settlement, and yet he did not. What was it that prevented him from doing so?

When Hegel later reflected on Napoleon’s rise and fall he decided that the same reasons that had brought Bonaparte to power had led to his demise. ‘The entire mass of mediocrity . . .presses on like lead . . . until it has succeeded in bringing down what is high to the same level as itself or even below.’
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That view of history is a little abstract; we need look no further than Napoleon’s character for an explanation. In June 1814, for example, he opened up to Metternich: ‘I would die before I ceded one inch of territory. Your sovereigns born on the throne can be beaten twenty times and still return to their capitals. I cannot do that because I am an upstart soldier. My domination will not be able to survive from the day I cease . . . to be feared.’
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This was about ‘legitimacy’ – that is, about whether Napoleon possessed the ‘necessary qualities’ to call himself emperor. It was a constant source of anxiety for him, a theme he reverted to whenever he felt the need to justify his actions.

That Napoleon believed his power was based on his military triumphs is important in understanding why he always claimed that he could not make peace after defeat. For him, every war was about his very existence as a monarch.
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Nonetheless, despite underlying currents of royalism and Jacobinism, despite the assassination attempts against him and despite occasional rumblings at court, his power was never seriously threatened from within. The domestic difficulties that had endangered political stability under the Directory and other revolutionary regimes had been largely (if not entirely) resolved by Napoleon during the Consulate. His suggestion that somehow his legitimacy, his authority or even his power would be undermined if not destroyed by a reversal of fortune and a contraction of the Empire’s territorial limits does not convince. It is only if one understands that military victories and their corollary, defeat, were intimately tied to his prestige and honour that we can begin to understand his thinking. He did not believe, could not bring himself to believe, that he would continue to reign if he gave up territories that had been conquered by the French armies before he came to power.
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‘What do they want me to do?’ he asked of Metternich. ‘Do they want me to degrade myself ? Never! I shall know how to die; but I shall not yield one handbreadth of soil.’
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Exaggeration in the heat of the moment, perhaps, but there was certainly the question of how the regime would look if it were to give up huge tracts that had been conquered and integrated into the Empire. Napoleon believed he would not be able to live it down. Yes, the Bonapartes were not the Hohenzollerns or Habsburgs, but if the Emperor of Austria or the King of Prussia could yield swathes of land and still remain in power, then there is no reason to think Napoleon could not have survived. Metternich reasoned with him in this way, but the ‘warning of the oracle’ does not doom avert.
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Figures tell a different story: Napoleon lost six of the twelve campaigns fought between 1805 and 1815: Egypt in 1798–9, Russia in 1812, Germany in 1813, Spain (even if he were not directly involved), France in 1814 and Waterloo in 1815. To put it another way, at the beginning of 1813 he had only lost two campaigns – Egypt and Russia. Even then Egypt was perceived to be a personal victory for Napoleon and, while the country was ultimately lost to the British, he could always convincingly blame his subordinates. Spain, on the other hand, was not yet lost, and the battles in Germany and France had not yet been fought. The retreat from Russia was a terrible blow to his prestige, and possibly to his self-belief although there is little evidence of that. So, in 1813 and again in 1814, he may have felt compelled to behave in an uncompromising fashion, believing that if he gave up any territory it would be further perceived as a loss of prestige. But Napoleon had never really been capable of compromise, at any level. The only way he could face change was if it were forced upon him. Think back to Corsica when it became evident to everyone but Bonaparte that there could be no arrangement with the leader of the Corsican independence movement, Pasquale Paoli. Whether Napoleon’s belief had its foundation in political reality is, in any event, beside the point. He was convinced that he had to keep on producing victories in order to justify his existence because he could not overcome his own inner doubts that he was no more than an upstart.

The Barbarian Invasions

When Napoleon returned from Mainz on 10 November, the atmosphere at the court was glum, and the prevailing mood in Paris one of anxiety as the imminent invasion of France loomed larger.
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A few days later, there was an attempt to revive flagging morale when a parade was organized through the streets of Paris, with a military band and the Cavalry of the Guard escorting Austrian and Bavarian flags captured at Hanau. They were taken first to the Tuileries, where they were presented to Marie Louise, and then on to the Invalides. Crowds turned out to see the parade, but the mood was lukewarm at best.
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Over the coming weeks and months, the regime had not only to prepare people for the inevitable invasion, but also to galvanize public opinion and raise new troops. Napoleon also had to justify the continuation of the war, no mean feat in the face of the reverses suffered since 1809 and his consequent loss of prestige. He did this by presenting himself as the defender of civilization. His proclamation after the battle of Lützen, for example, referred to Russia as the ‘home of slavery, barbarism and corruption where man is reduced to the level of the beast’.
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Depictions of Russians as a barbaric people oppressed by a despotic political regime, enslaved by the Orthodox Church, appeared in newspaper articles, books, pamphlets and songs, and fed into stereotypes that had existed for centuries.
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One can find, for example, the
Tableau historique des atrocités commises par les Cosaques en France
(Historical Portrait of the Atrocities Committed by the Cossacks in France), which appeared at the beginning of 1814 and which detailed the supposed outrages carried out by the Cossacks.
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They were described as ‘cannibals’ and as the ‘barbarians of the North’. In one history of the Cossacks, the author asserted that they had ‘always mistreated in the most cruel and ferocious manner the inhabitants of enemy countries’.
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Charles-Louis Lesur published a so-called
History of the Cossacks
that was commissioned by the ministry of foreign affairs as a propaganda piece. In it, one can find a description of the Cossacks around the River Ob, for example, as having ‘a small size and an unpleasant figure: their members tattooed like those of the savages of America . . . their filth disgusting, their idolatry superstitious, announce a race sunk in the worst barbarism’.
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It was a taste of what the French public was to be exposed to once the allies crossed the Rhine. They did so in the small hours of the morning of 1 January 1814 at Kaub, halfway between Mainz and Koblenz. Alexander delayed the crossing so that it would coincide with the anniversary of the Russian army crossing the Niemen, one year previously to the day, the beginning of what he saw as the liberation of Europe. There was no master plan to speak of, and no decision had been made to seize Paris. The initial goal was to take the Langre plateau, some 350 kilometres to the south-west. Political developments would then decide further military operations.