NAPOLEON'S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812. PART ONE
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812. PART ONE
A united Europe with a common currency, a common language and a common legal system, with Britain, whose citizens had never considered themselves Europeans, refusing to join and concentrating ever more on global issues. No, not the United Kingdom of a post-Brexit-twenty-first century, but a possible early nineteenth scenario, but where the common language would have been French, the common currency the franc and the common legal system the Code Napoleon. All this might have happened had Napoleon Bonaparte resisted the temptation to invade Russia in 1812 and, by avoiding a defeat from which he could not recover, thus retaining his domination of Europe and the, albeit sullen, adherence of Prussia, Austria and the German states. A massive army, not frittered away in the snows of Russia, would have been well sufficient to prevent any possibility of an invasion by England, the only power now still in arms against him. Even if Russia had condemned the Treaty of Tilsit and declared neutrality, Napoleonic France would have survived, and Britain would, eventually, have had to accept that, while herself turning to Imperial rather than European, ambitions. It was not to be, and the decision to invade Russia was the tipping point of nineteenth-century European history.
In 1807 Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French since 1804, was at the height of his powers. He had defeated the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, when Tsar Alexander had to flee the field, and after which Austria left the British-led Fourth Coalition and signed a peace treaty with France. Napoleon began negotiations to marry Marie Louise, the daughter of the Austrian emperor. At the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt on 14 October 1805 Napoleon had defeated the Prussians and they too were knocked out of the Coalition. The Russians were defeated again at Friedland on 14 June 1807 which finally brought Russia to the table, and the two emperors met near the town of Tilsit where negotiations were carried out on a raft moored in the River Niemen. Alexander said to Napoleon, ‘the one thing we have in common is that we both hate the English!’
Tsar Alexander I was the grandson of Catherine the Great, who had ruled Russia for thirty-four years from 26 June 1762 to 17 November 1796. She had not a drop of Russian blood in her. Born Princess Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg in Prussia she was married at age sixteen to the future Tsar Peter III Romanov. Coming to Russia from stern-faced, dour, Lutheran Pomerania, she fell in love with Russia and particularly with the Russian Orthodox church, with its incense, its bells, its music, its vestments and its wonderful icons. She learned Russian, converted to the Russian Orthodox religion and changed her name to Ekaterina: Catherine. The pair had one son, Paul, born in 1754. Catherine’s husband, Peter, was a grandson of Peter the Great in the female line. He was a thoroughly unpleasant character, given to torturing animals for fun and other nasty pastimes. He changed the uniforms of the Guards regiments, which had been designed by Peter the Great, into those of the Prussian style, which pleased the army not at all. He neglected the church and paid little attention to the aristocracy. When his predecessor, his aunt the Empress Elizabeth, died in 1761 he became tsar, but before he could be formally crowned there was a coup on 28 June 1762, led by the Guards regiments in St Petersburg and assisted by the British ambassador, and with Catherine at least tolerant of, if not complicit in, it. Paul was removed and murdered, although it was announced that he had died of haemorrhoidal colic.
During the seventeen years that Catherine had been in Russia she had made sure to cultivate the army, and she was now installed as the undisputed ruler. By the Law of Succession laid down by Peter the Great succession to the throne was not necessarily by primogeniture. Rather it was for the tsar to nominate his or her successor, the major criterion being that he or she must be ‘worthy’, that is capable of ruling, a stipulation that was intended to exclude the mad, the bad or the infant. Catherine was not convinced that her son Paul was fit to be tsar and she groomed Paul’s son, Alexander as her successor. When she died of a stroke in 1796 at the age of sixty-seven, her son Paul was forty-two and her grandson Alexander nineteen. After her death her will, nominating her successor, could not be found. While the evidence is sketchy, it is probable that it was destroyed by Paul’s supporters, and he now became Tsar Paul I. Paul now started to undo all his mother’s reforms. He brought back corporal punishment and compulsory military service for the nobility, both abolished by Catherine, and he freed all those jailed for rebelling against his mother. Paul did not last long for on 11 March 1801 another coup, in which his son Alexander was certainly involved, removed and murdered him. Paul was the third Romanov tsar to be deposed and murdered and the same fate would befall three others before the dynasty would come to an end in 1918. Alexander now became the tsar at the age of twenty-four.
Napoleone di Buonaparte, later Napoleon Bonaparte in the French style, was born in Corsica in 1769, the son of an impoverished lawyer. While the words ‘impoverished’ and ‘lawyer’ do not normally coincide, the family had lost most of their riches in supporting the cause of Corsican independence from the Republic of Genoa. Short of funds they may have been but they had powerful friends. The French governor of Corsica was Napoleon’s godfather, which ensured that young Napoleon received a good education in a school in Paris and a place at a military academy, from where he was commissioned into the Bourbon artillery in 1785 aged sixteen. By the time that street riots and general defiance of authority broke out into open rebellion with the storming by the mob of the Bastille St Antoine, the Parisian state prison, in 1789, and the release of a handful of prisoners and the murder of the commandant, Napoleon had completed the specialist training undergone by all newly joined officers. He had spent some weeks first as a gunner and then as an NCO, in order to learn thoroughly the gun drills. He had participated in crowd control in Lyon, accompanied his regiment on a move to Douai, commanded the Demonstration Company at the school of artillery responsible for carrying out various experiments including the very hairy one of trying to find a way to fire shells from canon, and had enjoyed what seems by today’s standards to be an inordinate amount of leave. He had also increasingly acquired an admiration for France, if not for her system of government.
Napoleon was a child of the revolution; it was the revolution that made him and although some claimed and still claim that he betrayed the revolution, there can be little doubt that had it not been for the climactic events of the 1790s, the world would long ago have forgotten that he ever existed. On leave in Corsica Napoleon swiftly found himself caught up in revolutionary fervour. Unsure of the loyalty of the standing army, the National Assembly in Paris authorised the raising of volunteer battalions, its officers to be elected. By 1792, as an officer of the regular army, albeit only a very junior one, Napoleon found himself as both a regular captain and a volunteer lieutenant colonel second-in-command of a Corsican volunteer battalion. His tenure in Corsica was not a success – or perhaps it was too much of a success – for his adherence to the revolution came into conflict with his Corsican nationalism and he chose the revolution and France, leaving Corsica with his family altogether when the great Corsican patriot Pasquale Paoli shifted from espousing integration with France to demanding outright independence .
In 1792 the National Assembly declared the monarchy abolished, and ‘The Terror’, administered by the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ from April 1793, began. From now on anyone of noble birth, or with money, or owning land or property, or associated in any way with the royal government was liable to be hauled before a revolutionary tribunal and condemned to death after a hasty trial, which often needed no more evidence than a statement that the accused was an aristocrat, before summary execution on the recently-invented guillotine. Many old scores were settled and in 1793 the king went to his death, bravely by all accounts. He was followed nine months later by his unfortunate Austrian queen, Marie-Antoinette. There was now a wholesale culling whereby seventy-five percent of the officers of the Bourbon army were either executed, imprisoned or had fled into exile. Of the 300 generals, only five remained, and they and others promoted to general rank were encouraged by the threat of execution if defeated. In 1793 General de Division Costine failed to press the Austrians hard enough in Flanders and was recalled and guillotined. His replacement, General Houchard, defeated the Duke of York at Dunkirk and the Prince of Orange at Menen but failed to drive the Austrians out, so he too was guillotined. Generals were further constrained from using their initiative by the presence at their headquarters of representatives of the Committee of Public Safety, political hacks with no military experience who were there to ensure that the generals remained loyal to the ideals of the revolution and who had the power to overrule any decision by the army commander.
TO BE CONTINUED