NAPOLEON'S INVASION OF RUSSIA - PART TWO
NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA IN 1812. PART TWO
For those officers who survived the revolutionary zeal of the Terror, however, prospects were excellent. In the pre-revolutionary army Napoleon could have expected to serve for fifteen years as a lieutenant, and, if he was both lucky and very able, reach the rank of major before retirement on half pay after thirty years. As it was he became a captain after only seven years and would shortly be promoted further. It was the siege of Toulon that first brought Napoleon’s abilities to the attention of the revolutionary high command. In 1793 with Austrian and Prussian counter revolutionary armies closing in, France declared war on Great Britain (and on just about everyone else). Coincidentally there were royalist risings in Marseilles, Lyon and the Vendée on the west coast and, in August 1793, in the Mediterranean port of Toulon. The British were swift to capitalise on this and a squadron of the Royal Navy, commanded by Admiral Hood, duly entered Toulon and landed troops.
The newly instituted Committee of Public Safety were in panic mode: unless this vital naval base was recaptured, and that soon, the risings could spread and the revolution would be strangled in its infancy. Battalions of soldiery, regular and volunteer, were cobbled together and sent south. The British were occupying the landward defences and if there was to be any chance of a quick result siege artillery would be needed, but there was little to be had. The shortage was not because the guns did not exist – they did, in quantity and, thanks to Gribeauval, in excellent condition – but the chaos consequent upon the on-going attempts to amalgamate the revolutionary volunteers, the various militias and the remnants of the regular army into one cohesive body, coupled with the lack of trained officers and logisticians, most of whom were dead or in exile, had produced administrative constipation. When Captain Bonaparte was sent off to join the siege he was provided only with a mixed handful of guns of various types.
On reporting to the siege lines outside Toulon the young captain soon found himself commanding the artillery with a promotion to major when the previous commander was wounded. By harrying, hustling, prodding and persuading, threatening and cajoling Napoleon managed to extract guns from arsenals all over the south of France. By conscripting retired artillery officers living in the area and putting somewhat unwilling infantrymen through conversion courses to turn them into gunners, he made a major contribution to the recapture of Toulon when the British fleet re-embarked the troops and sailed away in December 1793. Napoleon had demonstrated his military competence and he soon found himself promoted to general de brigade (brigadier) at the age of twenty-four. For the early part of 1794 he commanded the artillery of the Army of Italy campaigning against the Austrians in that peninsula of Austrian client states.
Then politics intervened. In what became known as the coup-d’état of Thermidor 1794 (July/August of the revolutionary calendar, abolished by Napoleon in 1806) Robespierre, who had sent so many to the scaffold, followed them along with many of his adherents. A purge of those connected with the Committee began and now Napoleon’s political reliability was tested. In October 1795 a crowd of several thousand composed of royalists, disgruntled national guardsmen, political agitators and the usual members of the Parisian unwashed who went along for the fun and the possibility of plunder, began to march on the Tuileries where the Convention was in session. Paul Barras, a member of the Convention and entrusted with its defence, sent for Brigadier Bonaparte who had no compunction in lining up his guns commanding the approaches to the Tuileries. The baying mob approached and when the guns opened fire with several volleys of canister at a range of a hundred yards or so – the ‘whiff of grapeshot’ – 200 were killed and probably three times as many wounded. The survivors dispersed in haste and the power of the mob to influence the progress of the revolution was broken for good.
1796 was the beginning of Napoleon’s rise to real power. In that year he was appointed to command of the Army of Italy and married Josephine Beauharnais, a widow whose husband had gone to the guillotine for failing to defend Mainz with sufficient vigour against the Austrians and Prussians in 1793, and only escaping the same fate herself by the fall of the Committee and the end of the Terror. Napoleon spent 1796 and most of 1797 in Italy. In many ways this was the most skilful campaign of his entire career. Without the huge numbers of men and materiel which he could dispose of later, with few officers he could trust and with an army that was little more than an outnumbered, barely trained and undisciplined militia, in a daring and brilliantly conducted series of manoeuvre battles making particular use of the new Gribeauval guns, he forced the Austrians to the negotiating table. Now he was the talk of Paris and the darling of the newspapers. Refusing command of an army raised for the invasion of England, on the very sound grounds that the strength of the Royal Navy made such a proposition impossible, he took command of the Army of Egypt instead, with the aim of occupying the overland route to India and threatening British power there and in the Mediterranean. Initially he was successful. The Battle of the Pyramids saw Napoleon crush an Ottoman army and take Cairo, but the sinking of the French Fleet in Aboukir Bay by Nelson cut him off from France. A miserable retreat from Syria back to Cairo across the desert began to take its toll on a now plague-ridden army. Napoleon, still well informed as to matters political in Paris, left his army to eventual defeat (by a British army in 1801), disease and imprisonment and hurried back to France, narrowly avoiding being intercepted by the Royal Navy on the way. Never called to account for his desertion and arriving in Paris at the same time as the news of his earlier Egyptian victories, and before those of his defeats, he was greeted by cheering crowds, albeit by a distinctly cool Directorate.
Now another coup, that of Brumaire (November 1799), removed the directorate and replaced it with the Consulate, of three consuls: Napoleon, ever the opportunist, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès and Charles-François Lebrun. Most people in France had never heard of the other two, and very soon Napoleon would be First Consul, then First Consul for life. In the meantime he conducted another campaign in Italy, negotiated the short-lived Peace of Amiens and was finally crowned, or crowned himself, as Emperor of the French in 1804.
Napoleon was now supreme ruler of France and head of its armed forces. What he had to do next was to end the war, preferably by winning it. France had been at war since 1793 and from initially being a war of defence, where the Powers – those countries that mattered, themselves monarchies – had attempted to crush the revolution, it had now mutated into a war of aggrandisement with la mission civilatrice being exported by force of arms. Throughout all this the one consistent factor had been England. It was England’s implacable opposition to French ambitions, England’s money and the Royal Navy that had been the impetus and the finance behind the three anti-French coalitions that had so far been created (there would be four more). If only England could be removed from the line-up, then the rest of his enemies could be persuaded or forced to make peace. But how could it be done? England could not be invaded, and if that was not sufficiently clear before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 it most certainly was after it. England was, however, a trading nation that made its money – and newly industrialised England was the richest country in the world – by importing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods. Additionally, she imported much of the food that she ate, perhaps as much as twenty per cent. If no one would trade with England, ran the Napoleonic logic, then she would run out of money and starve. Hence the ‘Continental System’ when by the Decree of Berlin in 1806 all those countries allied to, occupied by or under the influence of France would refuse to sell England anything or buy anything from her.
And so by the Treaty of Tilsit Russia allied herself to France and declared war against Great Britain, promising to join the Continental System. The British understood the Russian position and limited military action to confiscating Russian vessels in Portuguese harbours and any encountered on the high seas. The trouble was that even by 1807 it was apparent that the Continental System didn’t work. Some British manufacturing industries did suffer a slow-down, and unemployment rose but while the governments of most countries under French influence agreed, or affected to agree, to implement the system, trade with Europe diminished only slightly. Smuggling received an enormous boost, and the Royal Navy ensured that raw materials and food could still be obtained from the Caribbean sugar islands, North America and India. Of the three countries that objected to the Napoleonic fiat, Sweden was defeated by France in the campaign of 1805 -1807; Spain, a member of the First Coalition but since 1795 a reluctant ally of France, voiced half-hearted objections and then gave way, and only Portugal refused to comply. Portugal was England’s oldest ally, by the Treaty of Windsor of 1386, and she had always seen England as her protector against Spanish designs. Her refusal to cease trading with England or to expel British envoys precipitated a Franco-Spanish invasion in 1807, thus beginning what later became known to the British and the Portuguese as the Peninsula War, where a tiny Anglo-Portuguese army, supported by Spanish guerrillas, tied down three times as many French troops in what Napoleon called The Spanish Ulcer.
TO BE CONTINUED