Europe: A History (152 page)
The terminal campaigns of 1813 and 1814 were decided as much by logistics as by performance in battle. Although Napoleon’s forces were comprehensively overwhelmed at the three-day ‘Battle of the Nations’ near Leipzig in October 1813, he continued to win the great majority of subsequent engagements. But he was facing the collective will of peoples whose sense of nationality he had helped to arouse, as well as the determination of the dynasts to restore their supremacy. The advance of the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians from the east, and of Wellington from the south, could not be stemmed. The toll of young French lives was inexorable. In those last two years Napoleon lost over a million men, even though he had failed to trap his foes into another concerted combat. The moment came when the Emperor was told that the soldiers would fíght no more. In April 1814, with the British, Russians, and Prussians encamped in Paris, Napoleon abdicated. The Revolutionary wars, and the Revolution, were over. Or so it appeared.
MIR
I
N
July 1812, as General Platov withdrew into Byelorussia before the I
Grande Armee
, his Cossacks placed barrels of gunpowder under the castle walls of Mir and blew them to pieces. Jerome Napoleon, King of Westphalia, used the place as his HO for a few days on his way to Moscow. But on 10–11 November, when the Tsar’s army returned, a desperate fight with the retreating French compounded the damage.
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Mir had long been one of the great fortresses of the Polish-Lithuanian borders, one of the most easterly feudal castles in Europe. Once a stronghold of the grand dukes of Lithuania, it passed into private hands in 1434. The massive fortifications were completed c.1500 under Jerzy I lllinicz, Marshal of Lithuania, and his son Jerzy II, a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. Five lofty bastions in red brick were joined by a battlemented wall. They were protected by a horseshoe barbican and surrounded by ditch and moat. From 1569, the central keep was turned by Prince M. K. Radziwitt into a grand Renaissance palace in finished stone. Until 1812, it served with neighbouring Nieéwiez as one of the Radziwills’ two principal seats.
In its long life Mir saw many military actions. It was plundered by the Teutonic Knights in 1395, twice raided by Tartars in the fifteenth century, captured by the Swedes in 1655, burned by Charles XII in 1706, and stormed by the Russians in 1794.
The great days of Mir came with Prince Karol Radziwiii, ‘Panie Kochanku’ (1734–90), who restored the palace after the depredations of the Swedish wars. It was the ‘key’ property in a huge complex of estates worked by thousands of Byelorussian serfs. The Catholic church and the Greek Catholic (Uniate) church adjoined the Jewish synagogue and Tartar mosque. The annual horse-fair was run by a large community of gypsies whose ‘king’ was traditionally crowned by the Prince. In 1761 the palace hosted a stupendous orgy during a session of the Grand Duchy’s Tribunal. In 1785 it saw a grand reception for the last King of Poland. Russian rule began at the Second Partition in 1793. The gypsies promptly migrated
en masse
to Moldavia. The Radziwills left for their properties in Prussia. After 1812, only the ruins remained.
Mir lived on, however, immortalized by the epic poem,
Pan Tadeusz
, of Adam Mickiewicz. The poet had the palace of Mir in mind when he described Lithuania’s ‘Last Supper’. Filled with hope and goodwill at the prospect of liberation by Napoleon, the local nobles gathered for a dazzling banquet. Lords and ladies danced the
polonez
. They were entertained on the cymbals by Jankiel the Jew, ‘who loved his country like a Pole’. At the end they raised their glasses to the old Polish toast,
Kochajmy Sie!
‘Let us love one another!’
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MALET
A
T
3 a.m. on 23 October 1812, a man wearing the full dress uniform of an . imperial general arrived at the Popincourt barracks in Paris and demanded an urgent interview with the Commandant of the National Guard. Introducing himself as General Lamotte, the new Military Governor, he announced that Napoleon had been killed in Moscow, that an emergency session of the Senate had declared a Provisional Republic, and that the National Guard must assemble forthwith in the Place Vendóme. Handing the Commandant a certificate of promotion, he ordered him to take charge of other units and then to secure the release of two state prisoners, Generals Guidal and Ladurie. His instructions were supported by an impressive file of decrees.
For several hours the plan proceeded smoothly. ‘General Lamotte’ did the rounds of the Paris garrison without opposition. So did General Ladurie. General Guidal settled for a good meal in a restaurant. But no fewer than thirteen senior officers took the orders of the non-existent Provisional Republic. The officer commanding the Luxembourg Palace, where the emergency session of the Senate had supposedly taken place, saw nothing amiss.
Things only went wrong when a large part of the National Guard was already drawn up in the Place Vendóme. At a private interview with General Hulin, whom Lamotte was replacing, ‘Lamotte’ was challenged to produce his own orders. Instead, he shot Hulin through the head. Shortly after, meeting another group of officers, he was recognized by a former comrade, who shouted, ‘That’s not Lamotte, it’s Malet’. Overpowered, the chief conspirator was disarmed and unmasked.
Claude-François Malet (1754–1812), a native of the Jura, was a brigadier-general with strong Jacobin convictions. Long removed from active service, he had been held in detention for ill-concealed hostility to Napoleon. He had laid his plans with the help of a fellow detainee, the Abbé Lafon, an ultramontane royalist, who forged the documents. His wife hired the uniforms from a theatrical outfitter. The real Lamotte was a republican general living in exile in the USA.
Malet and Lafon had climbed the wall of their gaol at midnight. Malet went home to dress up, before heading for Popincourt. Lafon disappeared until after the Restoration. At the court martial Malet took sole responsibility, but could not save those who had fallen for his ruse. His last request was to give the order to his own firing-squad.
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The Malet incident revealed the truth about Napoleon’s Empire. Malet had calculated correctly that the Empire’s fate hung on one man’s life. The minute that Napoleon was assumed dead, no one thought of the King of Rome or the Napoleonic succession. As a result, France was very nearly returned to the Republic with only one shot fired. ‘Minor incidents’ can have the potential to make major changes to the course of history.
One might have thought that the result of the Revolutionary wars was plain enough. Yet in the eyes of the historian who studied the subject most exhaustively, the Allies did” not achieve outright victory. ‘The European coalition did triumph in the end over the French armies,’ he wrote; ‘yet one cannot say that France was defeated by the struggle.’
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He was thinking no doubt of the maintenance of France’s territorial integrity, of the continuing force of Revolutionary ideas, and of the surprises still to come.
Everyone accepted that the fate of a whole continent had been at stake. Napoleon loved to talk of’Europe’. When he mentioned it at Tilsit, the Tsar had picked it up. ‘Europe,’ asked Alexander I, ‘what’s that?’ Then he gave his own answer: ‘Europe is us’ (meaning, presumably, the ruling princes). In the spring of 1814, when he was riding towards Paris, he said, ‘I have come to reconcile France with Europe.’ That reconciliation took rather longer than expected.
SPASIT’EL
I
N
1812, to celebrate Russia’s salvation from Napoleon, Alexander I I decreed that Moscow be adorned by a church dedicated to Christ the Saviour. The project was brought to fruition by a committee convened by Nicholas I. Works began on the riverside, close to the Kremlin, in 1837. The design, by Konstanty Ton, an architect of railway stations, envisaged a colossal cruciform basilica surmounted by five domes, a giant bronze cupola, and a soaring pinnacle cross. The interior was gilded with 422 kilograms of pure gold. The belfry housed the largest bells in Russia. The exterior was clad with sheets of Podolian marble and Finnish granite. After forty-five years’ labour, the
Khram Khristusa Spasit’yel’ya
or ‘Saviour’s Temple’ was consecrated in the presence of Tsar Alexander III on 26 May 1883.
On 18 July 1931
Pravda
announced that a committee headed by V. Molotov had decided to build a ‘Palace of the Soviets’ beside the Moscow River. Five months later, the Saviour’s Temple was dynamited. In 1933 Stalin commissioned a design by Yofon and Shchusev which envisaged an edifice 415 metres high, and six times more capacious than the Empire State Building. It was to be surmounted by a figure of Lenin three times taller than the Statue of Liberty, with an index finger 6 metres long.
The Palace was never built. The marble slabs from the demolished temple were used to decorate Moscow subway stations. After thirty years’ delay, Nikita Khrushchev decreed that the hole by the river be turned into an open-air, all-weather swimming pool.
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Inevitably, after the fall of Communism, plans reappeared to redevelop the site once again, and to restore the Saviour’s temple to its former glory.
Wednesday, 20 April 1814, Fontainebleau
. Napoleon Bonaparte, King of Elba, was bidding farewell to the Imperial Guard before leaving France for his new kingdom. In the lobby of the chateau he greeted the members of his remaining entourage, and the gaggle of Allied commissioners. From there he passed to the doorway at the head of the Horseshoe Staircase, whose marble balcony overlooked the spacious Courtyard of the White Horse. Some 5,000 troops of the Old Guard were drawn up. The senior officers stood at the front in a semicircle with the colour party and the orchestra. The carriages for his journey were waiting by the gate. As he appeared on the parapet, cavalry trumpeters sounded the
Fanfare de l’Empéreur:
The standard which was paraded that day has survived in the Musée de l’Armée. It is a square tricolour with vertical stripes of blue, white, and red, embroidered in gold. The front border was adorned with the imperial emblems— two crowns in the top corners, two circles with the monogram ‘N’ on the sides, two eagles in the bottom corners, a sheaf surrounded by bees in the upper centre. The inscription reads:
GARDE IMPèRIALE
—
L’EMPèREUR NAPOLèON AU
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er
RèGIMENT DES GRENADIERS ß PIED.
The reverse is covered with the regiment’s battle honours: Marengo, Ulm, Austerlitz, lena, Eylau, Friedland, Eckmuhl, Essling, Wagram, Smolensk, Moskowa, Vienne, Berlin, Madrid, Moscou. The honours of 1813–14—at Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Leipzig, Hanau, Champaubert, Montmirail, Vauchamps—were still to be added.
Napoleon’s personal entourage had been reduced to under twenty men. It included General Drouot, ‘the Sage of the Grand Army’, who would one day pronounce the Emperor’s funeral oration, General Bertrand, who would bring back the Emperor’s ashes to France, and the Duke of Bassano, his foreign minister. The civilian staff included the aides-de-camp Belliard, Bussy, and Montesquion; and the Barons Fait and Lorgne d’Ideville and the Chevalier Jouanne, members of the secretariat. Among the military staff was Count Kossakowski, commander of the
maison militaire
, Count d’Ornano, commander of dragoons, two colonels of the ordnance, Gourgaud and La Place, Col. Atthalin of the topographic service, and Col. Vauzovits (Wasowicz), the Polish interpreter. The commander of the Old Guard, Marshal Lefebvre-Desnoëttes, Duke of Danzig, waited on horseback at the head of the cavalrymen who would accompany his carriage to Briare. Apart from him, none of the Marshals of the Empire was present, nor a single representative of the imperial family.
