1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

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When Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden, Napoleon realised that he might prove less than cooperative, but assumed he would behave as a Frenchman and as a Swede. Sweden had traditionally been a close ally of France, and her natural enemies had always been Russia and Prussia. Only the previous year Russia had invaded and forced her to give up Finland after a protracted war. The Swedes’ friendly feelings towards France were put under a certain amount of strain by the Continental System, but their long coastline permitted them to breach it and trade with Britain, while their Pomeranian colony on the northern coast of Germany meant that they could sell on to the German market with profit.

The Russians could only view the combination of the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon’s marriage to the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and the recent developments in Sweden as aggressive encirclement, and Bernadotte’s election was greeted with uproar.

All these feelings were given added poignancy by the economic hardships caused by the Continental System, which had turned into a regular tariff auction. Britain had responded to Napoleon’s Berlin decree of 1806 banning her ships from all ports under his control by declaring that any ship trading with a port from which her ships were excluded was fair game for confiscation by the Royal Navy. French, Spanish, Dutch and German traders tried to get around this by using neutral American vessels to carry goods, but Britain decreed that no vessel could be considered neutral if it were carrying goods between hostile ports. In order to get around this, American ships would pick up their cargoes, take them to an American port, unload them, reload them and take them to a European port. Britain refused to accept this as legal. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by decreeing that any ship which had put in at a British port or paid British duty was automatically liable to seizure. On 1 March 1809 the United States closed its ports to all British and French shipping, but Napoleon managed to reach an agreement with the Americans to the detriment of Britain, which would ultimately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the United States in 1812.

Russia had little industry, and was dependent on imports for a huge variety of everyday items. These now had to be smuggled in via Sweden or through smaller ports on Russia’s Baltic coastline. Her exports – timber, grain, hemp and so on – were bulky and difficult to smuggle. The Russian rouble fell in value against most European currencies by some 25 per cent, which made foreign goods exorbitantly expensive. Between 1807 and 1811, the price of coffee more than doubled, sugar became more than three times as expensive, and a bottle of champagne went from 3.75 to twelve roubles. Russian noblemen had to pay through the nose not only for champagne, but for everything they did not produce at home, and they could not find a market for the produce of their own estates.

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This cocktail of hurt pride and financial hardship produced ever more violent criticism of Alexander’s policy and of his State Secretary, Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky, who was virtual prime minister. Speransky was the son of a priest, a very able man of lowly social background, ascetic and devoid of any social or financial ambition. A radical at heart, he believed autocracy to be incompatible with the rule of law, and would have liked to carry out far-reaching reform of the structure of the state. But he accepted the limitations imposed by his position and concentrated on modernising the administration. Soon after his appointment in 1807 he had promulgated reform of the legal system, which was never implemented, of government finances and of the administration.

The nobility, who sensed an enemy in him, did everything to undermine his position. There were soon rumours circulating to the effect that Speransky was a Freemason and revolutionary secretly in league with Napoleon, and that he meant to bring the whole social system crashing down.

The Tsar of Russia was theoretically an all-powerful autocrat, but his relationship with his people was a complex and ambivalent one. There was a mystical, sacred foundation to his power, since he was both his subjects’ religious hierarch and the representative of God on earth. This imposed strong bonds of obedience to him on them. But if a Tsar was felt to have betrayed his divinely ordained purpose, he became something worse than just a wicked Tsar – he became a devil who must be destroyed. At the secular level, his position was just as ambiguous. The very fact that all power was concentrated in him meant that he had no instruments with which to impose his will. He was thus in a curious way dependent on the goodwill of the nobility, which staffed the army and all the organs of state, and therefore on public opinion. And public opinion was by now strongly against Alexander and his policies on virtually every point. He was seen by many as the author of Russia’s shame, and he realised that the only way he could wipe away that shame was through war. The conquest of Finland had helped slightly, but it was not enough.

On 26 December 1809, while he was assuring Napoleon that he would do everything to make the marriage to his sister Anna possible and begging him to bury the Polish question forever, Alexander summoned Prince Adam Czartoryski, a close friend and a prominent Polish patriot who had ten years before elaborated a plan for the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland under Russia’s protection. The Tsar told him that he would now like to put this plan into action, by ‘liberating’ the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and uniting it with the Polish provinces currently under Russian rule, and asked Czartoryski to sound out the Poles on the subject. The Prince did not need to do much research. He knew that the plan could only have worked in 1805 or in 1809, during Napoleon’s war with Austria. He nevertheless went to Warsaw and saw the man who would be the key figure in such a plan – Prince Józef Poniatowski, commander-in-chief of the Grand Duchy’s army and nephew of the last King of Poland. Predictably, Poniatowski rejected the Russian proposal.

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Czartoryski reported back to Alexander personally in April 1810. He pointed out that many Poles had got wind of Alexander’s negotiations with Napoleon to prevent the restoration of Poland, and that this hardly inspired confidence. But the Tsar clung to his view that the Poles could be won over. ‘We are now in April, so we could begin in nine months’ time,’ he concluded.

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Caulaincourt noticed during the winter of 1809–1810 that Alexander was less and less amenable to French policies, and by the spring of 1810 he was finding the friendship he had built up with the Tsar increasingly at odds with his ambassadorial role. He began to hint to Napoleon that he would like to be recalled. But Napoleon paid no heed to his warnings or his wishes.

He had persuaded himself that Britain was suffering economically, and that a few more months would probably bring her to the negotiating table. He therefore adopted a more aggressive attitude to the application of the Continental System. His correspondence bristles with detailed instructions to the rulers and administrators of the coastal areas under his control on which ships and goods to impound and which to allow through. He suggests alternative sources of the supplies cut off and explains the principle behind his policy, exhorting all to enforce it with strictness.

Adding insult to injury, Napoleon decided to recoup some of the cost to France of the system at the expense of others. He took a leaf from the smugglers’ book and licensed a number of merchants to import goods from Britain (for which they paid a hefty price to his treasury), and these goods were then exported overland, many of them to Russia. Such procedures left Alexander with little option but to defy the system openly. On 31 December 1810 he issued an ukaz opening Russian ports to American ships and at the same time imposing hefty tariffs on (French) manufactured goods imported overland into Russia. British goods were soon pouring into Germany from Russia. The Continental System was in tatters. Yet Napoleon refused to accept this. ‘The Continental System is uppermost in his mind, he is more taken up with it than ever,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain early in 1811; ‘too much so perhaps!’

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In his determination to control all points of import, Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic ports. In January 1811 he did the same with the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose ruler was the father of Alexander’s brother-in-law. He did offer him another German province as compensation, but this was refused. Alexander was outraged, and felt personally insulted – his supposed ally was now dethroning members of his family, thereby reinforcing the view, widely held in Russia, that Tilsit was not an alliance but a subjection. He felt he had to act, if only to safeguard his position at home. ‘Blood must flow again,’ he told his sister Catherine.

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On 6 January 1811 he wrote once more to Czartoryski, asking him to try persuading the Poles to accept him as their liberator and restorer. His Minister of War General Barclay de Tolly was already drawing up plans for a strike into the Grand Duchy followed by an advance into Prussia to link up with the Prussian forces.

(#ulink_9391b5e3-0bb4-56af-9215-94a464ae00a0) In a second letter to Czartoryski, Alexander detailed the troops he had already massed on the border to support the operation: 106,500 in the front line supported by a second line of 134,000 men, and a third army of 44,000 men supplemented by 80,000 recruits who had already finished their training. These forces could, in case of need, be supplemented with a few divisions from the army operating against the Turks in Moldavia. ‘There can be no doubt that Napoleon is trying to provoke Russia into a break with him, hoping that I will make the mistake of being the aggressor,’ he explained. ‘It would indeed be a mistake in the present circumstances, and I am determined not to make it – but everything would look different if the Poles were to rally to me. Reinforced with the 50,000 men whom I could count on from them, by the 50,000 Prussians who could then join me without risk, and by the moral revolution which would unfailingly result in Europe, I would be in a position to reach the Oder without striking a blow.’

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Alexander’s troop movements could hardly be kept secret, and by the summer of 1811 the forthcoming war was being widely discussed all over Russia. His agitation in Poland, as well as the soundings his diplomats were taking in Vienna and Berlin, were no secret either. This has prompted some to conclude that he was in fact bluffing. But whether he meant to attack at this stage or not, he had taken a step which could not fail to lead to armed confrontation.

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Napoleon had to take the threat seriously. He had already been alerted by Poniatowski to Russian troop concentrations along the border of the Grand Duchy in the autumn of 1810, and he was desperately aware of the weakness of his forces in the area. He immediately instructed commanders on the spot to draw in exposed units and supply dumps against a surprise attack, and designated a fallback position along the Vistula while he set about strengthening his forces in Poland and Germany. He began bombarding Marshal Davout, in command of the French troops in northern Germany, with letters telling him to fortify strongpoints and put his men on a war footing. On 3 January 1811 he began regrouping his forces with the aim of strengthening the front line. ‘I considered that war had been declared,’ he later affirmed. Most people in France too considered it only a matter of time. ‘There is much talk of war here; sooner or later it must come to that, and now the time seems propitious,’ an officer of the Chevau-Légers of the Imperial Guard wrote from the depot at Chantilly to his sister on 9 April 1811.

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At the same time, Napoleon did everything he could to avert a conflict. In February he instructed Caulaincourt to demand an interview with Alexander and his Foreign Minister Rumiantsev, and to assure them that he wanted the alliance to continue, and that he would never make war on Russia unless she were to ally herself with Britain. In April he repeated this in his instructions to General Marquis Jacques Law de Lauriston, the new ambassador he was sending to St Petersburg to replace Caulaincourt, who had finally been recalled. Napoleon also took every opportunity to tell Kurakin and any other senior Russian figure who passed through Paris that he wanted peace and friendship with their country. ‘I have no wish to make war on Russia,’ he declared to Prince Shuvalov during an interview at Saint Cloud in May 1811. ‘It would be a crime on my part, for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thanks to God, lost my head, I am not mad.’ To Colonel Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, a trusted aide-de-camp whom the Tsar had sent to Paris a couple of times with letters for Napoleon, he repeatedly stated that he had no intention of fatiguing himself or his soldiers on behalf of Poland, and ‘he formally declared and swore by everything he held holiest in the world that the re-establishment of that kingdom was the very least of his concerns’.

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But Alexander could not lay aside the Polish problem so easily. When he realised that he could not count on the Poles to undo Napoleon, he reverted to the idea of cementing his relationship with him over the body of the Polish question. Rumiantsev proposed to Caulaincourt just before the latter left Russia that they put the Duchy of Oldenburg and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw into a sack, shake it about, and see what dropped out. What he was suggesting was that Napoleon indemnify his uncle by marriage for the loss of Oldenburg with a piece of the Grand Duchy. Napoleon responded with anger to this proposal, and refused to consider it, although he did at one stage contemplate giving the throne of a restored Kingdom of Poland to Alexander’s brother Constantine as a solution.

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When Caulaincourt’s travelling chaise rolled into Paris on the morning of 5 June 1811, it drove straight on to Saint Cloud, where Napoleon was staying. Within minutes of it having trundled into the courtyard, Caulaincourt was ushered into Napoleon’s presence, in which he spent the next seven hours. His account of the interview, noted down that very evening, provides an illuminating insight into Napoleon’s thinking at this crucial stage.

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Caulaincourt told Napoleon that in his view Alexander desired peace but could not be expected to subject his people to the rigours of the Continental System, and needed reassurance on the subject of Poland. He also warned Napoleon that Alexander was no longer the malleable youth of Tilsit, and that he would not let himself be intimidated. Alexander had told him that if it came to war, he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital, as the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William had done. Napoleon brushed this aside, saying that Alexander was ‘false and weak’, and suggested that Caulaincourt had been taken in by him.

He himself was suspicious of the Tsar’s intentions, believing that he would pounce on the Grand Duchy of Warsaw the moment his back was turned. He repeatedly affirmed that he was no Louis XV – referring to France’s feeble response to the Russian partition of her Polish ally in the eighteenth century. The conversation went round in circles, with Napoleon eagerly asking Caulaincourt’s opinion yet rejecting it when it was given. He was, in fact, probably right to think that Caulaincourt had been lulled into believing in Alexander’s pacific intentions, yet he could not dismiss his arguments outright.

One thing that did seem to make a profound impression on Napoleon was one of the Tsar’s statements as reported by Caulaincourt. ‘If fate decides against me on the field of battle,’ Alexander had said, ‘I would rather retreat as far as Kamchatka than give away provinces and sign in my capital any treaty which would only be a truce. The Frenchman is brave, but long privations and a bad climate tire him and discourage him. Our climate, our winter will fight for us. Prodigious victories are only achieved where the Emperor is, and he cannot be everywhere or spend years away from Paris.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Alexander had said that he was well aware of Napoleon’s ability to win battles, and would therefore avoid fighting the French where they were under his command. He had also referred to the guerrilla in Spain, and said that the whole Russian nation would resist an invader. But on reflection Napoleon dismissed all this as bravado. He believed Alexander was too weak a character to carry out such a plan, and that Russian society would not accept such sacrifices. He reasoned that the nobles would not want to see their lands ravaged for the sake of Alexander’s honour, while the serfs would as likely revolt against their nobles and their Tsar as fight to the last man for a system of slavery.

When asked his opinion on what should be done, Caulaincourt came up with two alternatives. Napoleon should either give a significant part, if not the whole, of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to Alexander, thereby cementing the alliance, or he should go to war with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Poland. He pointed out that Austria could easily be compensated, and maintained that the cause of Poland was so universally recognised as a just one that even Britain would ultimately approve.

(#litres_trial_promo) Asked which course of action he would adopt given the choice, Caulaincourt replied that he would give the Grand Duchy to Alexander, thereby guaranteeing a stable peace. Napoleon countered that he could not have peace without honour, and the abandonment of the Poles would dishonour him. At the same time, such appeasement of Alexander would inevitably lead to further Russian expansion into the heart of Europe.

Alexander’s military ardour had in fact cooled by then. Memories of Austerlitz must have played their part, for, as Czartoryski noted, he was still ‘very afraid’ of Napoleon. His mind was troubled by the uncertainties of his position at home, his heart was bruised by the public rejection of his policies and, at a more personal level, by the successive deaths, in 1808 and 1810, of two baby daughters. But perhaps the main consideration holding him back was that he did not want to be seen as the aggressor. In July 1811 he wrote to his sister that the best course to follow was to let time and circumstances destroy Napoleon. ‘It seems to me more reasonable to hope that this evil will be remedied by time and by its own sheer scale, for it is such that I cannot rid myself of the conviction that this state of affairs cannot last, that the suffering of all classes, both in Germany and in France, is so great that patience must necessarily run out.’

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But it was Napoleon’s patience that had run out. He viewed the Russian abandonment of the Continental System as a betrayal, he saw her troop build-up as a threat and a provocation, and he was convinced that she was using the Polish question and the subject of trade as excuses to break out of the alliance. This seemed to be confirmed by the increased diplomatic activity of the Russians in Vienna, where they were quite openly trying to turn Austria away from France.

Napoleon needed to go and take charge of operations in Spain personally in order to throw out the British and pacify the peninsula, but he could not contemplate such a move with a Russian army hovering on the borders of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and exciting German hopes of revenge. He was convinced that, just as the Austrians had done in 1809, Alexander would stab him in the back the moment he turned it.

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His exasperation erupted on 15 August 1811, his forty-second birthday. At midday he strutted into the throne room at the Tuileries, which was filled with the entire court and all the senior officers in Paris, all perspiring in full ceremonial and parade uniforms on what was an exceptionally hot day. He took his place on the throne to receive the good wishes of the dignitaries and the diplomatic corps. This part of the ceremony over, Napoleon stepped down from the throne and began to circulate among the guests.

When he reached the Russian ambassador Prince Kurakin, he mentioned Russian reports of a recent victory over the Turks at Ruschuk on the Danube, and queried why, if they had indeed won, the Russians had evacuated the town. Kurakin explained that the Tsar had been obliged to withdraw some troops from the Turkish front for financial reasons, and had therefore decided not to hold the town. At this Napoleon exploded, saying that the Russians had not won, they had been beaten by the Turks, and they had been beaten because they had withdrawn troops from the Turkish front not for any financial reasons, but because they were massing their armies on the frontiers of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and that all the so-called outrage over Oldenburg was but an excuse for their intention to invade the Grand Duchy in an open act of hostility to him, Napoleon. The unfortunate Kurakin kept opening his mouth to reply, but could not get a word in edgeways and looked like a fish gasping for air, while perspiration poured down his face in the intense heat. Napoleon accused Russia of harbouring hostile intentions, and when Kurakin assured him of the contrary, he turned on the ambassador and asked whether he had powers to negotiate, for if he had, they could conclude a new treaty there and then. The answer was negative, so Napoleon merely walked away, leaving the ambassador in a state of shock.

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Napoleon was back at Saint Cloud late that evening, and on the following morning he locked himself up with the punctilious and hard-working Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano, who had succeeded Champagny as Foreign Minister. Together they trawled through all the documentation concerning the Russian alliance since Tilsit. According to their analysis, the problems had started in 1809, when the Russians had hung back in the war against Austria instead of marching in loyally and capturing Galicia. Had they done so, they could have been allowed to keep it. As they did not, it was captured by the Poles, who could not be denied some of it. This caused panic in Russia and led the Tsar to demand slices of the Grand Duchy. France could never accede to such a request. Not just for the sake of her honour, but also because if Russia were to receive one piece of the Grand Duchy she would in time expect to get another, and would soon entrench her position on the Vistula if not the Oder. For similar reasons, France could not countenance any further Russian advance against Turkey.

In the memorandum summing up the situation, they stated France’s position as follows: France wanted Russia’s friendship and needed her as an ally in her struggle against Britain, which was the one remaining obstacle to a general peace. She did not want to fight Russia, as there was nothing that she wanted to take from her. Also, she had more pressing business in Spain, which required Napoleon’s personal attention. But France could not go down the road of buying Russia’s friendship through endless cession of Polish or Ottoman lands. France must therefore prepare for war in order to be in a position to dictate a peace. Lauriston was told that he had to make it clear that ‘we want peace, but we are prepared for war’.

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Napoleon’s sense of exasperation at not being able to bring Alexander back into a close alliance is obvious in a personal letter he had written him on 6 April. ‘The effect of my military preparations will make Your Majesty increase his own; and when news of his actions reaches me here, it will force me to raise more troops: and all this over nothing!’ he wrote. They had been drawn into a spiral of mistrust and power politics that made it very difficult to arrive at a negotiated settlement. Napoleon later admitted that they had got themselves ‘into the position of two blustering braggarts who, having no wish to fight each other, seek to frighten each other’.