Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

He needed to persuade the allies that he was with them in spirit, yet at the same time manoeuvre them away from pursuing the war and towards negotiating a peace. For this purpose he selected his predecessor Stadion, who had served a term as ambassador in St Petersburg, who was known to be anti-French and pro-war, and who would therefore enjoy the confidence of the allies. As he was also known to be a rival of Metternich, the latter could disassociate himself from him if the French were to hear of his presence at Russian headquarters.

Stadion’s brief was to propose that the allies sign an armistice with Napoleon and enter into negotiations with him. Shortly after his departure, Metternich had a long interview with Narbonne, whom he tried to convince that Austria wanted to help Napoleon make a favourable peace, with minimal concessions. Narbonne correctly suspected that Metternich was hoping to get Napoleon to agree to negotiations in principle, so as to be able to start upping the terms, thereby forcing him either to accept these or to break off the negotiations, which would allow Austria to declare their alliance null. Sensing that he was getting nowhere with Narbonne, Metternich resolved to address Napoleon through Bubna.

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Napoleon had entered Dresden hot on the heels of Alexander and Frederick William. He set about fortifying the city, which he intended to be the base from which he would strike at the allied armies converging on the Elbe. Wishing to be free of court ceremonial and to dispense with etiquette, he had taken up quarters not in the royal palace but in the summer residence of the former minister Marcolini, set in extensive gardens in the northern suburb of Friedrichstadt. Here he could behave as though he were on campaign, working and resting to a rhythm set by the twin exigencies of war and diplomacy. A daily courier from Paris brought news of everything that was going on not merely in the capital but throughout his realm. Agents all over Germany reported on events and morale. Like a great spider at the centre of his web, he watched and waited.

Bubna had his first interview with Napoleon on 16 May. He put forward Metternich’s suggested basis for peace: that Napoleon give up the grand duchy of Warsaw, relinquish control over German territory east of the Rhine, and return Illyria to Austria. The interview quickly turned into a harangue as Napoleon accused Austria of duplicity, of arming and of negotiating with France’s enemies while pretending to remain loyal to her. He pointed out to Bubna that Schwarzenberg’s withdrawal from Poland had been a betrayal of their alliance. He reminded him that during their last interview in Paris, Schwarzenberg had solemnly assured him that the 30,000-strong Austrian auxiliary corps was still at his disposal, but that when the campaign had opened Metternich had withdrawn it.

Napoleon laughed at the basis for negotiation put forward by Bubna, declaring that while it was an affront to him it was certainly too minimal to satisfy his enemies (he was not mistaken, as on the very same day, at allied headquarters at Würschen, Nesselrode was busily adding more conditions, extending the basis to include France’s cession of Holland and Spain). Napoleon expressed regret at having married Francis’s daughter, and swore that he would not give up a single village.

He was trying to frighten the Austrians into toeing the line. But he was far from confident, and he suspected that a trap was being set for him. After the interview, which lasted four hours, he asked Caulaincourt to question Bubna further in an attempt to penetrate Metternich’s real intentions. He realised that if he refused to go along with the proposed negotiations he would be isolating himself, so at a final interview with the Austrian general he declared that he would agree to an armistice and that he was prepared to make peace in principle, on terms to be discussed in due course.

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How little Napoleon trusted his Austrian ally by this stage is revealed by the fact that hardly had Bubna left Dresden than he despatched Caulaincourt to the Russian front lines with the request for an immediate ceasefire and for one-to-one talks between France and Russia. If he were going to be forced to give up the grand duchy of Warsaw, he might as well use it to bribe Russia into ditching Prussia and Austria.

This was the nightmare that had been haunting Metternich all along: the possibility of Napoleon and Alexander reaching agreement, necessarily at Austria’s as well as Prussia’s expense. Metternich knew nothing of Caulaincourt’s mission yet, as communications were slow. But the armies were not far apart, war or peace could be made from one day to the next, and all sides lived in suspense. People in Vienna would open their windows at the slightest rumble and listen anxiously for the sound of French guns. These did not remain silent for long.

On 20 May Napoleon struck again. He outflanked the new allied defensive positions behind the river Spree around Bautzen, forcing them to abandon the field and beat a hasty retreat. Although his shortage of cavalry once again prevented him from turning this into a rout and the retreat was relatively orderly, morale on the allied side plummeted as the Russians and Prussians trudged back into Silesia.

The Russian army, some of whose units were down to a quarter of their nominal strength, was in a critical condition, and from the highest to the lowest, the men wanted to return home. The newly-arrived British ambassador Sir Charles Stewart described their mood as ‘of a desponding nature’ and reported that ‘they eagerly looked to their own frontiers’. The rank-and-file, most of whom had been drafted under emergency measures in 1812 to resist the foreign invader, had been promised they could go home once the fatherland had been liberated. Only junior officers, avid for glory and promotion, wanted to take the war into Germany. As far as the rest were concerned, Poland was enough of a prize.

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That was precisely what Caulaincourt had been instructed to offer the Tsar. But he had reached the allied outposts on 18 May, two days before the battle, and had been told that Alexander would not receive him. It might have been otherwise if he had arrived four days later. By then the Russians were staring disaster in the face; one more push, or even a vigorous pursuit by the French, and, to quote Stewart, ‘the military power of Russia might have been crushed for a generation’, a judgement confirmed by the Russian General Langeron.

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If Napoleon had continued his advance, the Russians would have been forced to fall back into Poland while the Prussian forces would have had to retreat northwards. The allied army would have split into two forces, easy to defeat separately. Although the French lines of communication would have been extended by such an advance, this would have been more than made up for by the reinforcements Napoleon would have found on the spot in the shape of the garrisons he had left in a string of fortresses from Danzig to Zamość. More to the point, morale in the Russian army would probably have been tipped over the edge and the first flare of a pan-German revolt would have been doused. As it was, the numbers of volunteers coming forward to fight for the liberation of Germany had been disappointing outside East Prussia and Brandenburg.

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But Napoleon was worried by the state of his own forces. ‘The magnificent spirit that had always inspired our battalions was destroyed,’ wrote the commander of the 2nd Tirailleurs of the Guard. ‘Ambition had replaced emulation. The army was now commanded by officers who may have been brave to the point of temerity, but who lacked experience and instruction. The soldiers only looked for opportunities to leave their units, to get into hospitals, to keep out of danger.’ The marches and counter-marches of the past weeks had not only exhausted the troops, they also gave the impression that their commander was not as sure of his actions as before. Shortage of cavalry restricted reconnaissance and pursuit alike. Paucity of not only cavalry horses but also draught animals meant that the quarter-mastership could not deliver adequate victuals or supplies. To add to the misery, the spring of 1813 was unusually cold and wet. Desertion was rife, particularly in the contingents contributed by Napoleon’s German allies, in which whole units would go over to the enemy at night. ‘What a war!’ Marshal Augereau complained. ‘It will do for all of us!’

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At a more personal level, Napoleon had been deeply saddened by the death, during the opening shots of the Battle of Lützen, of Marshal Bessières, one of his most loyal and capable commanders. He had been profoundly shaken three weeks later when Marshal Duroc, his sincere friend as well as one of his most trusted collaborators, was hit by a cannonball at Bautzen. Napoleon was at his bedside when Duroc breathed his last.

Instead of pursuing the allies, Napoleon decided to call a halt and wait for reinforcements, so he sent a messenger to allied headquarters with the offer of an armistice of seven weeks. The offer was readily accepted and the armistice concluded at Plesswitz on 4 June.

Napoleon had made a fatal strategic error. The armistice ‘saved us and condemned him’, as one Russian general put it. Not only did Napoleon save the allies from almost certain defeat, he threw away the initiative, which he would never regain.

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5 Intimate Congress (#ulink_b6300375-0aa4-52a6-85b0-04f720f0fce7)

Metternich had received a report of Caulaincourt’s mission to Russian headquarters not long before he heard of the allied defeat at Bautzen. The first opened up the terrifying possibility that Napoleon and Alexander might strike a deal over his head, while the second raised the equally alarming one that the allied armies would withdraw into Poland and Prussia respectively, leaving Austria militarily defenceless and at Napoleon’s mercy.

The time was fast approaching when Metternich would have to commit Austria to one side or the other, and he was not ready. Schwarzenberg was massing all available Austrian forces at Prague, but would not be ready to take the field before the second week in August at the earliest. Only diplomacy could buy Metternich that time, and when a courier from Dresden brought news of Bautzen at 4 p.m. on the afternoon on 29 May, he sprang into action.

He drove over to the palace of Laxenburg to see the Emperor Francis. He persuaded him to leave Vienna and take up residence at some point midway between Alexander’s headquarters and Napoleon’s, in order to underline his intention of assuming an autonomous role. The only suitable residence in the area was Wallenstein’s former stronghold, the gloomy old castle at Gitschin (Jicin). The move was prepared with the utmost secrecy, but the French ambassador Narbonne got wind of it through his spies at the imperial stables and rushed to Metternich for an explanation. Metternich fobbed him off with evasive answers. The anxious Narbonne immediately set off for Dresden to warn Napoleon, but Metternich had pre-empted him. He had already sent off two couriers, one to Bubna in Dresden instructing him to renew the offer to Napoleon of Austria’s good offices as mediator in reaching a peace settlement, the other to allied headquarters announcing that Francis had left Vienna in order to be closer to his army.

This in itself was hardly likely to convince Alexander of Austria’s good faith. He needled Stadion and Lebzeltern about her true intentions, and pointed to signs of her treachery. He was furious when he heard that Austria had allowed Poniatowski’s Polish corps, which had been isolated in Kraków, to march through Austrian territory in order to rejoin Napoleon’s main forces in Saxony. His suspicions were further aroused when news reached him of Bubna’s mission to Dresden.

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On 1 June, as they were making their way to Gitschin, Francis and Metternich encountered Nesselrode coming the other way. He had been sent by an exasperated Alexander with instructions to pin the Emperor of Austria down to committing himself, on which point he stressed ‘that I need a categorical decision, in writing’. The last thing Francis was prepared to do at this stage was to commit himself in writing, but he did give Nesselrode a strong verbal assurance of his intent to join the allies if a satisfactory peace settlement could not be wrenched from Napoleon.

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In the circumstances, the armistice of Plesswitz, which came into effect on 4 June, the day after Francis and Metternich reached Gitschin, was a godsend. ‘The first great step has been taken, my dearest friend,’ Metternich wrote to his wife on 6 June, making out that the signature of the armistice was somehow the consequence of his own deft diplomacy. In a letter to his daughter written two days later, he complained of the strain of being the prime mover, on whom the eighty million inhabitants of the Continent depended for their salvation. Full of his sense of mission, he set about manipulating events.

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His first move was to provide himself with a stage on which he would be able to direct the actors as he wished. One of his reasons for choosing Gitschin was that it lay not far from Ratiborzitz (Ratiboric), the estate of Wilhelmina de Biron, Princess of Sagan. She was one of the four daughters of the late Duke of Courland. Originally an autonomous prince under the suzerainty of Poland, he had foreseen the extinction of that kingdom and of his principality with it, and had purchased substantial estates as insurance for the future. One of these was the principality of Sagan (Zagan) in Silesia, which he had left Wilhelmina on his death in 1800. He had also left her the estate of Ratiborzitz, with a simple but luxurious country house set in the grounds of the ancient castle. As this was conveniently close to Gitschin and to the allied headquarters at Reichenbach (Dzierzoniów), which had already attracted her mother the Duchess of Courland, Metternich suggested that she take up residence there. She could not resist the call to be near the epicentre of events; and, like so many ladies in Europe at the time, she worshipped Alexander, so she agreed.

She was joined there by Gentz, whom Metternich wished to have near at hand, since he had planned to arrange a number of meetings at Ratiborzitz that even Napoleon’s spies would not get wind of. ‘I live here as in heaven,’ Gentz wrote to a friend. He loved the relaxed atmosphere that reigned in the elegant house, and was beginning to fall under the spell of its beautiful châtelaine.

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Metternich had met her a few years before and had even begun a mild flirtation with her in 1810, but this had been interrupted by the appearance of the dashing young Prince Alfred von Windischgraetz, an officer in the Austrian army, with whom she fell in love. She still was, but this did not stop her growing close to Metternich during the spring of 1813, when he was feeling politically isolated and under pressure. He would discuss his ideas and policies with her as though she were a colleague. She would now act as his stage manager as he put together one of the great acts of his career.

Alexander was in no mood for play-acting. Although he had been obliged to accept Napoleon’s offer of the armistice, he was still bent on war. It was not in his nature to back down in the face of adversity. At Bautzen, where he had insisted on exercising command at one point, he had, when informed that his right flank had been turned, declared that ‘In war the obstinate will always triumph,’ and had nearly been cut off as a result. ‘I noticed that the idea of breaking off the war without having achieved the grand results he had allowed himself to dream of tormented him like a gnawing parasite,’ Gentz reported to Metternich after a meeting with the Tsar.

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The allies had established their headquarters in the little town of Reichenbach, to the south of Breslau, but Alexander himself had taken up quarters a few miles away in a derelict country house at Peterswaldau (Pieszyce). He was attended only by Admiral Shishkov and his chief of police, Aleksandr Balashov, as well as a few aides-decamp. But he ignored their presence, spending hours alone in the overgrown gardens and orchards of the house or walking over to the nearby colony of Herrnhut Moravian Brethren at Gnadenfrei (Piława Górna), with whom he communed.

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Partly out of a growing reluctance to relinquish control and partly out of a sense that, since he was the instrument of God, he did not need advice, Alexander delegated less and less. His Foreign Minister, Chancellor Rumiantsev, had suffered a slight stroke and was in no condition to carry out his duties, but rather than replace him Alexander left him in his post back in St Petersburg and took control of foreign affairs himself. Instead of being elevated to ministerial rank, Rumiantsev’s natural successor Nesselrode merely became a sort of secretary to the Tsar.

He was perfectly suited for such a role. Born in Lisbon, the son of a minor Westphalian noble in Russian service, Nesselrode had come to Russia in 1796, aged sixteen, and served as a midshipman in the Baltic fleet. He moved on to a commission in the horseguards, and after a spell as aide-de-camp and chamberlain to Tsar Paul, he transferred to the diplomatic service. As a junior diplomat at the embassy in Paris, he established and became the link in a secret communication between Alexander and the then French Foreign Minister Talleyrand. Small and ordinary-looking, he challenged no one. He was a competent bureaucrat, loyal, hard-working and always ready to oblige his superiors. Gentz, with whom he also kept up a clandestine correspondence through war and peace, thought him ‘a man of upright character, good judgement, born for work and solid things’. Metternich once said that ‘If he were a fish, he would be carried away with the current.’ He would probably not have minded, as he saw himself primarily as the Tsar’s instrument. ‘I am called when I am needed,’ he explained to his wife. ‘I am completely passive.’

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With ministers such as Nesselrode around him, Alexander never needed to fear being contradicted. He also had a number of people in his entourage who had their own programmes and who would support him robustly whenever he needed reassurance. One such was Stein, who could be counted on to argue against all the Russians who were for retrenching on their conquests in Poland. Another was Carl’Andrea Pozzo di Borgo.

Corsican by birth, he was a contemporary and erstwhile close friend of Napoleon, with whom he had made common cause during the early stages of the French Revolution. He had gradually drifted away from and eventually turned against his famous compatriot, becoming an implacable enemy whose hatred was kept warm by burning jealousy. After spending some time in London and Vienna, Pozzo had taken service in Russia, where Alexander had rewarded him with the rank of General and the title of Count. He was more cunning than intelligent, and could certainly be counted on to support Alexander in any venture, however risky, aimed at the destruction of Napoleon.

Strong in the conviction that God meant him to save Europe, buoyed up by the vigorous support of the likes of Stein and Pozzo, Alexander was unlikely to be deflected from his aim. Particularly as every day reinforcements marched into camp from the depths of Russia and newly formed Prussian regiments took their place in the allied ranks.

The situation in the Prussian camp was quite the reverse of that in Alexander’s entourage. When news of the armistice became known at allied headquarters ‘the Prussian officers were so indignant that they tore off their pelisses and trampled them underfoot’, according to Stewart. Their exasperation was shared by Hardenberg, and particularly by Humboldt.

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Wilhelm von Humboldt was an ardent patriot, and had put his faith in Prussia as the only agency through which the German lands could be freed. A prominent literary figure and a close friend of Schiller, he had neglected his career as a writer to become a Prussian minister and, in 1810, Prussia’s ambassador in Vienna. He was now forty-six years old and somewhat overshadowed by the reputation of his younger brother, the renowned naturalist and traveller Alexander von Humboldt. He was highly intelligent and dedicated, yet many found him difficult to like. He was censorious and at times priggish, which did not prevent him from liberally indulging a seedy taste for preferably fat lower-class girls whom he could treat as objects while writing curiously high-minded letters to his wife Caroline, his ‘dearest Li’.