1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

The Holy Roman Empire, founded by Charlemagne a thousand years before, included almost all the lands inhabited by German-speaking people, but it did not bring them together or represent them. The absurd division of the territory into hundreds of political units inhibited cultural and economic, as well as political life. German eighteenth-century thought was cosmopolitan rather than nationalist, but most educated Germans nonetheless longed for a more coherent homeland.

Between 1801 and 1806, following his victories over Austria and Prussia, Napoleon thoroughly transformed the political, social and economic climate throughout the German lands. He secularised ecclesiastical states and abolished the status of imperial cities, swept away anachronistic institutions and residues of gothic rights, in effect dismantling the Empire and emancipating large sections of the population in the process. In 1806, after his defeat of the Emperor Francis at Ulm and Austerlitz, he forced him to abdicate and to dissolve the Holy Roman Empire itself. In a process known as ‘mediatisation’, hundreds of tiny sovereignties were swept away as imperial counts and knights lost their lands, which were fused into thirty-six states of varying size, bound together in the Confederation of the Rhine. With them went all the nonsensical borders and petty restrictions that had made life so difficult. In their place came institutions moulded on the French pattern.

The ending of feudal practices gave agriculture a boost, the abolition of guild and other restrictions encouraged industry and trade, the removal of tolls and frontiers liberated trade. The confiscation of Church property was followed by the building of schools and the development of universities. Not surprisingly, all this made Napoleon popular with the middle classes, with small traders, peasants, artisans and Jews, as well as with progressive intellectuals, students and writers. Johan Wilhelm Gleim, a poet more used to singing the glories of Frederick the Great, wrote an ode to Napoleon, Friedrich Hölderlin also immortalised him in verse, and Beethoven dedicated his ‘Eroica’ symphony to him.

Although many were put off by his decision to take the imperial crown and some even felt betrayed by the act, German intellectuals continued to be fascinated by Napoleon, whom they saw as a figure in the mould of Alexander the Great. Some hoped he would revive the old German empire like a latter-day Charlemagne. To others, he appeared as some kind of avatar. The young Heinrich Heine imagined Christ riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday as he watched Napoleon making his entry into his native Düsseldorf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously identified him as ‘the world-spirit on horseback’.

But that moment, just after the victories of Jena and Auerstädt, in which Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army and shook the Prussian state to its core, was to be something of a turning point. The Prussians were shocked and insulted by the French victories, but they also saw them as proof of the superiority of France and her political culture. When Napoleon rode into Berlin he was greeted by crowds which, according to one French officer, were as enthusiastic as those that had welcomed him in Paris on his triumphant return from Austerlitz the previous year. ‘An undefinable feeling, a mixture of pain, admiration and curiosity agitated the crowds which pressed forward as he passed,’ in the words of one eyewitness.

(#litres_trial_promo) Napoleon won the hearts of the Berliners as well as their admiration over the next weeks.

But he treated Prussia and her King worse than he had treated any conquered country before. At Tilsit he publicly humiliated Frederick William by refusing to negotiate with him, and by treating Queen Louise, who had come in person to plead her country’s cause, with insulting gallantry. He did not bother to negotiate, merely summoning the Prussian Minister Count Goltz to let him know his intentions. He told the Minister that he had thought of giving the throne of Prussia to his own brother Jérôme, but out of regard for Tsar Alexander, who had begged him to spare Frederick William, he had graciously decided to leave him in possession of it. But he diminished his realm by taking away most of the territory seized by Prussia from Poland, so that the number of his subjects, which had grown to 9,744,000, was reduced to 4,938,000. Napoleon would brook no discussion, and Frederick William had to submit.

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Having done so, he wrote to the Emperor on 3 August 1807 entreating him to accept Prussia as an ally of France, addressing him as ‘the greatest man of our century’. Napoleon ignored the request. The reason he did not wish to encumber himself with such an ally was that he intended to despoil the country. In the treaty he had foisted on Prussia, he had undertaken to evacuate his troops, but only after all the indemnities agreed upon had been paid. But the level of the indemnities was never agreed, and while vast amounts of money did pour out of the Prussian treasury into French coffers, some 150,000 French troops continued to live off the land, happily helping themselves to everything they required. French military authorities virtually supervised the administration, while the economy plummeted. The Prussian army had been reduced to 42,000 men, with the result that hundreds of thousands of disbanded soldiers and even officers wandered the land begging for their subsistence.

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Napoleon did consider abolishing Prussia altogether. The kingdom had only emerged as a major power sixty years before (as a result of a French defeat), but it was efficient and expansive, and might one day rally the rest of Germany, which was something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But while he continued to exploit and humiliate it in every way, he did not get around to dismantling it. In effect, Napoleon’s treatment of Prussia is paradigmatic of his whole mishandling of the German issue, for which his successors were still paying in 1940.

If Frederick William had every reason to feel aggrieved, most of the other rulers in Germany, grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, had much to thank Napoleon for. For one thing, they were relieved to be rid of the heavy-handed Habsburg overlordship. Although they were now subjected to Napoleon through a series of alliances, they had grown in power within their own realms. Several had even been promoted, and most had gained in territory, becoming proper sovereigns with their own armies.

Landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstädt had seen the size of his fief swell, and became a grand duke; the tiny Landgravate of Baden had also become a grand duchy, and its ruler Frederick Charles willingly married his grandson to Napoleon’s stepdaughter Stephanie de Beauharnais. The Elector of Saxony had seen his realm expand and turn into a kingdom. Bavaria too was enlarged and turned into a kingdom, and in 1809 King Maximillian I acquired more territory, making his realm larger than Prussia. Württemberg, which had been a mere duchy, was extended with every Napoleonic victory and its elector Frederick was promoted to the rank of king in 1806. He was only too happy to see his daughter marry Napoleon’s brother Jérôme.

Jérôme himself ruled over the Kingdom of Westphalia, created by Napoleon at the heart of Charlemagne’s Germany with its capital at Cassel, extended again in 1810 to include Hanover, Bremen and part of the North Sea coast. ‘What the people of Germany desire impatiently is that individuals who are not noble but have talents should have an equal right to your consideration and to employment, that all kinds of servitude and all intermediary links between the sovereign and the lowest class of the people should be entirely abolished,’ Napoleon wrote to Jérôme as he took up the throne of Westphalia. ‘The benefits of the Code Napoléon, transparency of procedures and the jury system will be the distinguishing characteristics of your monarchy. And if I have to be quite open with you, I count more on their effect for the extension and consolidation of your monarchy than on the greatest victories. Your people must enjoy a liberty and equality and a well-being unknown to the other peoples of Germany,’ he continued, making it clear that the security of his throne and that of France were better served by this great benefit she was able to bestow than by any number of armies or fortresses.

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Some of the other rulers did follow the French example and adopted the Code Napoléon. King Maximillian of Bavaria even brought in a constitution. Most of them, however, only introduced those French laws which gave them greater power over their subjects, sweeping away in the process venerable institutions and hard-won privileges. But whether they were enlightened liberals or authoritarian despots like the King of Württemberg, their subjects were immeasurably better off in every way than they had been before they had heard of Bonaparte.

Causes for discontent nevertheless began to pile up. The most vociferous opponents of the new arrangements were, unsurprisingly, the horde of imperial counts and knights who had lost their estates and privileges. More liberal elements were disappointed that the changes wrought by Napoleon had not gone far enough. The old free cities and some of the bishoprics, which had been havens of German patriotism, had been awarded to one or other of the rulers Napoleon had favoured. Along with their independence they lost some of their freedoms. Many were disappointed that the old aristocratic oligarchy had not been replaced by republics, and some would have liked to see the creation of one great German state.

The high-handedness of the arrangements, with Napoleon callously shunting provinces from one state to another, could not fail to offend Germans at every level. French became the official language in some areas. French officials were placed in key posts, and the higher ranks in the armies of the various sovereigns were reserved for Frenchmen. The large-scale official looting was also highly offensive. French military impositions and the Continental System, which actually had the effect of stimulating the coalmining and steel industries in Germany, became a cause for everyday grumbling by the very classes that naturally supported the changes brought in by Napoleon.

Cultural factors also played a part. Cosmopolitan and outward-looking as the Germans were, they were generally, whether they were Catholics or Protestants, very pious, and they found the godlessness of revolutionary and Napoleonic France shocking. In Lutheran circles, the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur was even referred to as ‘the sign of the Beast’. Napoleon was more popular amongst Catholic Germans, until June 1809, when he dispossessed the Pope and imprisoned him in Savona, drawing upon his head the Pontiff’s excommunication. The Germans also nurtured an age-old sense of their ‘otherness’, a vision of themselves as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ in contrast to the French, whom they viewed as essentially flighty and artificial, if not actually false and corrupt.

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It was not long before these feelings began to have practical consequences. Her catastrophic defeat in 1806 had prompted Prussia to embark on a far-ranging programme of reform and modernisation. Those in charge of carrying it out realised that a real revolution was required, both in the army, where the soldier was transformed from a conscript motivated entirely by ferocious eighteenth-century discipline into a professional inspired by love of his country, and in society as a whole, where an edict passed in 1807 swept away the remnants of feudalism and emancipated the peasantry.

This was to be a revolution from above, carried out, in the words of Frederick William’s Minister Count Karl August von Hardenberg, ‘through the wisdom of those in authority’ rather than by popular impulse. It was also to be a spiritual revolution. One of its chief architects, Baron vom Stein, a mediatised knight, wanted ‘to reawaken collective spirit, civic sense, devotion to the country, the feeling of national honour and independence, so that a vivifying and creative spirit would replace the petty formalism of a mechanical apparatus’.

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The process was largely carried out by German nationalists from other parts of the country. Baron vom Stein was from Nassau, Count Hardenberg was from Hanover, as was General Gerhard Johann Scharnhorst; Gebhart Blücher was from Mecklemburg, August Gneisenau was a Saxon. They were inspired by the example of revolutionary France in their determination to infuse a national spirit into every part of the army and administration. But their reforms aimed not so much at emancipating people as at turning them into efficient and enthusiastic servants of the state. Many of them believed that only a strong Prussia would be able to liberate and unite the German lands, and then go on to challenge French cultural and political primacy. A powerful tool in this was to be education, and Wilhelm von Humboldt was put in charge of a programme of reform of the system that culminated in the opening of a university in Berlin in 1810.

At a popular level, the urge to seek regeneration through purification manifested itself through the formation of the Tugendbund, or League of Virtue, by a group of young officers in Berlin. Its aims were non-political in principle, consisting of self-perfection through education and moral elevation, but since this included the fostering of national consciousness and the encouragement of love of the fatherland, they were deeply so in practice. The membership never exceeded a few hundred, and all they did was sit around talking of insurrection, guerrilla war and revenge. But it is in the very nature of secret societies to appear more powerful and threatening than they actually are, and the Tugendbund had profound symbolic significance.

It also acted as an inspiration and a focus to disaffected elements in other parts of Germany. The German nation’s impotence in the face of the arrogance of the French was underlined as the cost of the Continental System made itself felt. Wounded pride turned into grim determination in the minds of many German patriots, and it received its first encouragement with the news of Bailén in the summer of 1808. ‘The events in Spain have had a great effect and show what can be done by a nation which has force and courage,’ Stein wrote to a friend.

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Napoleon was well aware of the new spirit at work in Germany. He was not particularly concerned by it, but he did, during his stay in Erfürt and Weimar at the time of the meeting with Alexander in 1808, make a desultory effort to garner some popularity, inviting professors from the university of Jena to lunch with him. He decorated Goethe with the Légion d’Honneur. He had the poet Christoph Martin Wieland brought to Weimar, and spent upwards of two hours discussing German literature with him during a ball, while a circle of astonished guests looked on. He then walked over to Goethe and engaged him in conversation. The event was commented on in the court bulletin, which explained that ‘the hero of the age thereby gave proof of his attachment to the nation of which he is the protector, and that he esteems its language and literature, which are its national binding force’. But the next day he visited the battlefield of Jena, on which he had made the Germans build a small temple to commemorate his triumph over them.

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In 1802, the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel had gone to Paris with the intention of founding an international institute of learning in this new Rome. Now he was looking more to Germany. Goethe, who wore his Légion d’Honneur with pride and used to refer to Napoleon as ‘my Emperor’, was also beginning to complain of the shameful state of submission into which Germany had been forced. The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the writer Ernst Moritz Arndt and the theologian Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher were among those who called for a national German revival and a rejection of the French hegemony. Many of those who had seen Napoleon as a liberator now saw in him nothing but an oppressor.

There had been a predictable surge of national feeling in Austria following her defeat by Napoleon in 1806, with papers and pamphlets calling for a united German front against the French. Austria’s natural desire to avenge the humiliating defeat and regain some of her losses had been powerfully reinforced by the many disgruntled mediatised counts and knights, the deposed north Italian and particularly Piedmontese nobles and the many German patriots from the Confederation of the Rhine who had taken refuge and in many cases service there. In January 1808 the Emperor Francis married for a third time. His bride, Maria Ludovica of Habsburg, was the daughter of the Captain-General of Lombardy, who had been thrown out by Napoleon, and this was not the least of her reasons for loathing the French.

The new government under Count Philip Stadion appointed by Francis in 1808 began preparing for a confrontation with France, instituting, amongst other things, a national militia, the Landwehr. This war of revenge, Stadion made clear, was to be a national, German one, aimed at expelling France and her influence from central Europe altogether. While Maria Ludovica and a poet and fitness enthusiast called Caroline Pichler reinvented a supposedly traditional German form of dress, the Tracht, the historian Johannes von Müller, the publicist Friedrich von Gentz and others underpinned the anti-French arguments with facts. They made much of what they saw as the struggle of the Spanish people against foreign domination, holding it up as an example for the Germans to follow. Authors of every kind were invited to police headquarters, where they would be asked to use their pens in the national cause, and publishers of periodicals were instructed to print patriotic poems and articles, on pain of having their publications closed down. Unbidden, the poet and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist published ‘Die Hermannschlacht’, a poetic appeal to Germans and Austrians alike to rise up against the French and to punish all pro-Napoleonic ‘traitors’.

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In April 1809, judging Napoleon to be bogged down in Spain, Austria invaded Bavaria and launched a war for the ‘liberation’ of Germany. ‘We fight to assert the independence of the Austrian monarchy, to restore to Germany the independence and national honour that belong to her,’ declared Stadion in his manifesto. The commander-in-chief Archduke Charles issued a proclamation penned by Friedrich Schlegel which dwelt on the pan-German character of the war, representing it as an opportunity for the redemption and regeneration of the nation.

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Their call did not go unanswered. A Prussian officer, Frederick Charles de Katt, attempted to seize Magdeburg with a gang of partisans, but failed and was forced to take refuge in Austrian Bohemia. Colonel Dornberg, a Hessian serving in King Jérôme’s royal guard who had been plotting with Stein, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, intended to seize Jérôme and call the population to arms. In the event, he only managed to raise six to eight hundred men and was easily defeated. This was bad news for Major Schill, a Prussian officer who had distinguished himself in 1806–1807 by his determined defence of Kolberg. On 28 April 1809 he marched out of Berlin with his regiment, telling his men that he was going to invade Westphalia and evict the French from Germany. He was expecting to link up with Dornberg, who should by then have seized Jérôme, but he soon found himself facing superior forces and was obliged to retreat to the Baltic coast, where he hung on, vainly hoping for British seaborne support, until he was killed in a skirmish on 31 May.

An altogether more serious response came in the Tyrol, where resentment of the French ran much deeper. The area had traditionally been governed by the Habsburgs with much respect for local tradition and idiosyncrasies, but Bavaria, to which it was transferred by Napoleon in 1806, operated a more centralised administration. The locals were offended by higher rates of taxation and by enforced conscription. The parish clergy did not approve of the secularisation taking place in Bavaria, adding to the discontent. In January 1809 Andreas Hofer and a handful of other Tyrolese went to Vienna to prepare an insurrection to coincide with Austria’s invasion of Bavaria. On 9 April beacons were duly lit and the Tyrol rebelled. A Bavarian corps of two thousand men was forced to capitulate, and Austrian forces occupied Innsbrück. But they were soon ejected from it by the French under Marshal Lefèbvre.

On 21–22 May Napoleon fought the twin battles of Aspern-Essling against the Austrians under Archduke Charles. Although technically a French victory, they reverberated through Europe as a defeat. Napoleon suffered a personal loss in the death of Marshal Lannes, and had to bring Lefèbvre back to join the main army. This allowed the revolt in the Tyrol to erupt with renewed vigour, under the slogan ‘God and the Emperor’, which had enemies of Napoleon all over Europe rubbing their hands at what they thought was a new Spain.

At this point, the Duke of Brunswick-Oels appeared on the scene. His father had been ignominiously defeated at Auerstädt in 1806, and he had vowed eternal hatred to the French. He had gone to Vienna, where he obtained a subsidy in order to raise a 20,000-strong ‘Legion of Vengeance’ with which he intended to liberate northern Germany. He now sallied forth, defeated the Saxons at Zittau, seized Dresden on 11 June and Leipzig ten days after that. On 21 July he marched on, through Brunswick and Hanover, but he met with little enthusiasm, and was eventually forced to take refuge on a British man-of-war in the Baltic.

In the meantime, Napoleon had won the conclusive battle of Wagram, and Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Vienna, which reduced it to a state of powerlessness. Her image as a potential liberator of Germany was shattered, and she settled down meekly within the Napoleonic system. Francis was only too happy to pay tribute by giving his favourite daughter to the Corsican ogre, and the marriage was hailed as a happy event by his people.

Austria’s failure stemmed in large measure from her inability to engage the support of Russia, and above all to draw Prussia into the war against the French. The pan-German plotters had been active in this respect, and Vienna had been in close touch with Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst and the other Prussian reformers, who were doing everything to bounce Frederick William into declaring war. But the pusillanimous Prussian King was afraid. He was afraid of the French, and he was afraid of starting a ‘national’ war that might end up by costing him his own throne. It was only when, with Schill marching into Westphalia and popular opinion at a high pitch of excitement, he thought he might lose his throne if did not act that he considered going to war.

One of the stipulations of the Treaty of Vienna was that Francis had to banish all French émigrés, Piedmontese, and Germans from other states who had settled or taken service in Austria. A number, including Karl von Grolmann, a Prussian officer who had come to fight for Austria, now headed for Spain, where they could carry on their crusade against Napoleonic France. Many more took the St Petersburg road, already trodden by some of those German patriots who had gone to Prussia in the hope that she might become the champion of Germany. With both Prussia and Austria discredited, Alexander was beginning to look like the only alternative. He was still an ally of Napoleon, and had acted as such by sending an army to threaten Austria during the recent war. But he had done only the minimum demanded of him. Assisted by large doses of wishful thinking, many of those opposed to Napoleon and French hegemony had begun to see in Alexander a tutelary angel of their own particular cause.

One of the first to fall for Alexander, when she had met him in 1805, was Frederick William’s Queen, Louise, who saw him as ‘a Schiller hero come down to earth’. ‘In you, perfection is incarnate,’ she wrote to him; ‘one must know you to know perfection.’ The feeling did not go unrequited, which was probably what had saved Prussia from extinction at Tilsit. But there was little more that Alexander could do for her and her dismal husband. In January 1809 he invited them to St Petersburg, where he honoured and fêted them, thereby sending out a strong signal to all Napoleon’s enemies in Europe. The mutual esteem between Alexander and Louise grew. When he heard of her death in Prussia in July 1810, he saw her as a victim of Napoleon’s barbaric oppression and reacted with requisite chivalry. ‘I swear to you that I shall avenge her death and shall make certain that her murderer pays for his crime,’ he is alleged to have said to the Prussian Minister in St Petersburg.

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Alexander was also viewed as a potential saviour by other humiliated or dispossessed monarchs and nobles, including the kings of France, Sardinia, the Two Sicilies, Spain, the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, a gaggle of dispossessed Germans, as well as hordes of French, Piedmontese, Spanish and other émigrés.

This did not prevent elements more or less violently opposed to the ancien régime from looking to him as well. Many of the Germans who placed their hopes in Alexander were republican or at least liberal nationalists in conflict with the Prussian monarchy. The same went for Tugendbunders and even the Freemasons, who were regarded by Frederick William as dangerous subversives. Among the Spaniards and Italians who placed their hopes in the Tsar were liberals who would in time be clamped in irons by their own monarchs.

Other unlikely members of the club were French liberal opponents of Napoleon, such as Benjamin Constant and Madame de Staël, who, while subscribing to most of the achievements of the French Revolution, hated him for his despotic tendencies and for the cultural arrogance with which he treated Europe. Her bestselling novel Corinne, published in 1807, was a thinly veiled criticism of French doings in Italy, while her treatise on German literature, De l’Allemagne, was so implicitly critical that the first printing was confiscated on Napoleon’s orders.

His behaviour and his policies were rapidly losing Napoleon the dominion over hearts and minds he had enjoyed in earlier years, while a great internationale of alienated people all over Europe was gathering, bound together only by their detestation of him. Even Wellington was beginning to see and to portray his war against Napoleon in Spain as a part of some kind of moral crusade.

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None of this was of any immediate consequence, and Napoleon’s position in Europe was still paramount. He controlled his vast imperium through a web of loyalty, beginning with his crowned brothers. He had created all over Europe a new international aristocracy beholden to him, endowed with fiefs which had fallen vacant through the mediatisation of the Holy Roman Empire or through conquest, and by 1812 the imperial almanac listed four princes, thirty dukes, nearly four hundred counts and over a thousand barons, not including the titles Napoleon had given to members of his own family.