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.