Napoleonic Wars

V

Blockade, Entanglement, and Defeat, 1807-1812

As a result of Tilsit, if one disregards a weak and isolated Sweden that was soon to be broken by Russian invasion, Napoleon had once again secured a general peace on the Continent. The emperor, however, proved incapable of turning this situation to account. Rather than simply waiting for the Continental Blockade to crush Britain (and there is considerable evidence that, but for subsequent events, it would have done so, the period 1807 to 1808 being a time of great hardship), in the autumn of 1807 a variety of factors impelled him to intervene in Portugal and Spain, the second of these states eventually being given his brother, Joseph, to be its new king. This, however, was a disaster, for both countries. They became the scene of major revolts that proved impossible to suppress, the Iberian insurgents receiving the support of larger and larger numbers of British troops in a conflict that became known as the Peninsular War. In the end Napoleon might still have triumphed even in the Peninsula, while an attempt on the part of Austria to reverse the defeat of 1805 was smashed at Wagram in July 1809, but the effect of his adoption of the Continental Blockade was to force him to annexe more and more territory in Germany and Italy, this being the only means by which the policy could be made effective. The result of this being to alienate Alexander I, Napoleon resolved on the invasion of Russia. The effect of this move, which was initiated in June 1812, was completely to destabilize the French position in Spain, but, had victory been obtained in Russia this need not have mattered, for it is clear that the emperor could then have swept back across the Pyrenees and forced the Allies to retreat.

Victory, however, was not obtained in Russia. On paper the chances of success seemed very high when war broke out on June 24. In all, Napoleon had some 600,000 men, against whom the Russians could initially field only 175,000, while even these troops were in a very difficult situation. Yet, hampered by poor roads, inadequate reconnaissance, commanders who were out of their depth, and its sheer size, the grande armée moved with none of its customary celerity. Meanwhile, increasingly corpulent and rather unwell, Napoleon himself was no longer the dynamic leader of earlier years. In consequence, the Russians succeeded in falling back on Moscow, leaving the grande armée to lumber slowly along in their wake. Meanwhile, so many men died of exhaustion or disease or had to be dropped off to protect the road to the frontier, that when the Russians finally gave battle at Borodino some 70 miles west of Moscow on September 5, the emperor was left with too few men to obtain a decisive victory. After a terrible struggle that was very badly handled by Napoleon, Moscow was eventually occupied, but, secure in the knowledge that his army was still in one piece, Alexander refused to negotiate, the emperor eventually being left with no option but to retreat. Leaving Moscow on November 19, the grande armée soon found itself plunged into the horrors of the Russian winter. Thousands of men died of cold or starvation, while still others were picked off by Cossack raids or killed fighting off the new armies that the Russians had sent to cut their line of retreat. In all, some 120,000 of the 140,000 troops involved perished in the disaster.

VI

The Overthrow of Napoleon, 1813-1814

In the end, no more than 20,000 men escaped across the frontier into East Prussia, which, left with too few troops to halt the oncoming Russians, the French were forced to evacuate, along with the satellite state known as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw that Napoleon had established in Poland in 1807. Meanwhile, Austria abandoned the alliance that she had made with France as the only means of surviving after Wagram, while Prussia after some hesitation elected to join the Russians (rather than stopping at the frontier, Alexander had decided that his armies should push on westwards). With some difficulty Napoleon succeeded in scraping together a new grande armée, and with these troops gained sufficient success to force Alexander and Frederick William to accept an armistice in June 1813.

We now come to the turning point of the campaign. Thus far still neutral, Austria was desperate to maintain a balance between France and Russia, conceiving that an outright victory for either could not but spell disaster for the Habsburgs, and greatly fearing the nationalistic effervescence that the campaign had started to provoke in Germany. In these circumstances the only hope was a compromise peace, and the Austrian chancellor, Metternich, therefore proffered his services as a mediator. Ratified in the convention of Reichenbach of June 27, 1813, the result of his discussions with the Allies was that, unless Napoleon agreed to give up all of Germany, Poland, and present-day Slovenia and Croatia, which he had taken from Austria in 1809, Vienna would enter the war on July 20. Confronted with these terms (which were most favourable, for he would have retained not only his throne but Belgium, Holland, the left bank of the Rhine and much of Italy), however, Napoleon brushed aside Metternich's attempts to present them in a favourable light and even soften them still further, and swore to fight on, the implication being that he was gambling on total victory.

This, however, was foolish in the extreme. Confronted by the odds that he now faced, even Napoleon would have been hard put to survive. Counting the troops of his remaining allies, he could muster some 335,000 men in the main theatre of operations in Saxony. However, once the Austrians had duly joined the Allies, facing him were a minimum of 515,000 troops. Dividing his forces so that he could strike out in several directions at once, he succeeded for a short period in staving off disaster, but in the middle of October he was all but surrounded at Leipzig. Driven to accept battle for reasons of prestige alone, the outnumbered French were crushed, Napoleonic control of central and northern Europe then proceeding to evaporate overnight.

With the grande armée fleeing for the Rhine, and with those German states that had not already come over to the Allies either collapsing or changing sides, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland being over-run, and Allied forces invading northern Italy and pushing across the Pyrenees from a liberated Spain and Portugal, it might have been thought that Napoleon would have decided to admit defeat. Yet, offered terms that would have granted him first France's natural frontiers and then the frontiers of 1792, he again elected to fight on. This time, however, it really was all over. Asked for yet more troops, France, which had already been bled dry and forced to endure a prolonged economic slump, refused to back the emperor. With local government falling apart and populace and notables alike in a state of near revolt, on April 6 Napoleon was forced by his own generals to abdicate and was sent into exile. Just over a year later there followed the “glorious irrelevance” of the Hundred Days, in which Napoleon escaped from Elba, secured power with the aid of the deeply disaffected army, and went down to defeat at Waterloo, but to all intents and purposes the Napoleonic Wars were over.

In September 1814, meanwhile, the business of remaking Europe had begun at a major congress of Europe's statesmen in Vienna. This almost produced further conflict, Austria and Prussia colliding violently over the question of Saxony, but in the end a peace settlement was reached whose chief feature was the creation of a series of safeguards against future French aggression, considerable Prussian expansion in Germany, the establishment of Austrian control in northern Italy, and the renewed obliteration of Polish independence.

VII

The Impact of the Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars had a considerable impact on 19th-century Europe. In political terms, their chief contribution was to give birth to an age of nationalism. In Austria and Germany the period from 1805 to 1814 had witnessed the emergence of a pan-German nationalist movement that saw unification and popular mobilization as the obvious answers to French aggression: Napoleon, it was argued, must be driven out by a great people's revolt, and France prevented from any further invasion of German territory by the creation of a new nation state. In the course of the wars themselves, this school of thought had far less impact than has often been imagined: revolt in Germany was at best sporadic, while the so-called “War of Liberation” of 1813 to 1814 was far more a matter of kings and princes than it was of peoples. After the return of peace, however, it was a different matter. In Germany, Austria, and Italy (where the wars had seen the emergence of a movement similar to that of Germany), nationalists were dissatisfied with the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, while in Belgium practical problems related to enforced union with Holland created further agitation. If it was not the only factor in doing so—it did not help, for example, that the wars gave military heroism a certain aura of romance, or that in Spain they gave rise to repeated civil wars and a tradition of military intervention in politics—all this helped make the period 1815 to 1848 an “age of revolutions”. That said, however, it was also on the whole an era of comparative stability in international relations: fearing war's political dynamic, the powers strove to avoid it and at first tried to manage their dealings with one another through a system of congress diplomacy.

In economic and social terms, the picture is more mixed. Demographically, the heavy losses of the wars—estimates range between 5,000,000 and 7,000,000—did little or nothing to check the steady rise in population. However, there seems little doubt that the general effect of the conflict was somewhat to retard the industrialization of Continental Europe. While Britain soared ahead thanks to her control of the seas, French protectionism and the shortage of raw materials that resulted from the Continental Blockade inflicted considerable damage on the industries of such areas as the Ruhr, while even French industry lost out thanks to its inability to keep in touch with the latest technological developments in Britain. Yet even here the picture is mixed, for the blockade of such ports as Bordeaux, Nantes, Antwerp, and Hamburg encouraged a shift from commerce to industry, for example, while the wars also stimulated the industrialization of certain areas that had hitherto been untouched by this development, a good example being Saxony.

The greatest contribution of the Napoleonic Wars to the history of Europe, however, lies in the development of the state. By 1814 war had come to involve an exercise of power that can only be described as prodigious by the standards of the 18th century. To fight the sort of wars that threatened in the future, all states would need to maintain powerful war machines of a sort that could simply not be fed, clothed, armed and administered by the resources of the ancien régime. For this reason, if for no other, there could be no return to 1789, most of Europe therefore seeing the retention of Napoleonic patterns of taxation, administration, policing, and military organization. In short, the modern state had arrived.