Franco-Russian relations (1805-1812)

Russia had been instrumental in forming the Third Coalition in 1805 (including Austria, Britain, Sweden, and Naples) and had contributed substantial military resources to the campaign that ended disastrously for the forces of Tsar Alexander I (1777-1825) and his Austrian allies at Austerlitz, in Moravia, on 2 December 1805. Austria soon abandoned the coalition, while Alexander withdrew his army through Bohemia - Rusian army was badly shaken but not destroyed.

When Prussia challenged France in the autumn of 1806, Russia prepared to help Prussia, but military intervention did not become effective until early 1807, by which time Prussia had been thoroughly beaten, and the costly struggle at Eylau on 7 February and, finally, the decisive defeat at Friedland on 14 June, persuaded Alexander to seek terms with Napoleon, in conjunction with the Prussian king. The peace of Tilsit the following month sparked a diplomatic revolution, converting France and Russia from adversaries into allies, with Europe split between them and a chastened Frederick William in control of a much weakened Prussia. By secret clauses in the treaty France promised to assist Russia in 'liberating' most of European Turkey, while in return Russia agreed to open hostilities with Britain and Turkey if Britain refused the Tsar's mediation.

Both sides promised to pressure Sweden, Denmark and Portugal into conforming to the Continental System - Napoleon's ambitious scheme to close the whole European coastline to British commerce in an attempt to strangle the British economy. Russia cooperated, albeit unenthusiastically, and duly declared war on Britain in November (and invaded Swedish territory in 1808), though war with Britain amounted to little more than the cessation of trade with her. Napoleon and Alexander renewed their agreement at a conference at Erfurt in September 1808, while French armies were busy in Spain trying to subdue that nation as part of the same scheme to eradicate British trade with the Continent.

Alexander I of Russia.The Tsar's formidable forces opposed the French in 1805 and 1807, before Napoleon finally decided to invade Alexander's vast empire. Despite the occupation of Moscow, Alexander not only refused to negotiate, but pursued the French out of Russia and across Germany in a relentless campaign to reach Paris and overthrow the Bonaparte dynasty. Russia's major contribution to victory and Alexander's considerable influence on affairs at the Congress of Vienna established Russia as the most powerful nation on the Continent until the Crimean War

That close Franco-Russian relations never fully developed may be divined by Alexander's decision to stand aloof during the 1809 campaign, his armies merely observing on the Austrian frontiers. With victory achieved over Austria for the fourth time since 1792 (1797, 1800 and 1805), Napoleon's new friendship, such as it was,with the Habsburg monarchy caused considerable concern at St Petersburg, and in any event by 1810 Russia was growing tired of the economic hardship caused by her inability to carry on trade with Britain. Pro-British factions in the court of St Petersburg were now once again in the ascendant and there were signs that Napoleon was not fulfilling his side of the Tilsit agreement. He had raised the Electorate of Saxony to the status of a kingdom and had created the Kingdom of Westphalia for his brother Jerome out of Prussian territory, but the Emperor had done nothing to hasten the partition of Turkey, and Russia continued to wage her war against the Ottomans, begun in 1806, without any French aid. Moreover, the territory of the Duke of Oldenburg, a relation of Alexander's, was annexed to France without prior consultation. Russian anxieties grew still deeper when, in 1810, Napoleon not only annexed Holland in order better to enforce the Continental System, but also extended his control along the coastline stretching to the Baltic Sea. Both these actions were clear violations of Tilsit.
For his part, the Tsar had also broken his commitments. He truly closed his ports to British merchant vessels, yet British and colonial goods still came ashore via ships flying neutral flags and protected by Royal Navy escorts. The fact remained that, by 1810, the exclusion of British trade had badly hurt the Russian economy; by employing this expedient, the Tsar could improve his financial situation by collecting import duties on that goods. By the end of the year he had also increased the duty on French imports coming by land - yet another source of criticism. Alexander also grew increasingly resentful of the French satellite, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw - a Polish state reconstituted from Prussian and Austrian annexations of the partitions of the 1790s - and suspected the French of involvement in the Swedes' nomination of the former Napoleonic marshal, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763-1844), to their throne, as crown prince. Thus, through a combination of many factors based on mutual distrust and self-interest, the Franco-Russian alliance established in 1807 had effectively come to an end by 1811.
By this time Napoleon, grown tired of Russian rejection to support the ban on British trade, planned his ill-fated invasion, and on 24 February 1812 he enlisted Prussia's nominal support in the form of 20,000 men, improved by 60,000 Austrians supplied in conformity with a treaty concluded on 12 March. Together with his own Grande Armée of genuinely loyal troops - half of whom summoned from outside France herself - the Emperor had 600,000 men ready by the spring. The Tsar, for his part, was not idle. Apart from gathering large forces of his own, on 5 April Alexander established an offensive and defensive alliance with Sweden – finding Bernadotte in fact hostile to Napoleon – and on 28 May he ended his 6 year war with Turkey, thus releasing much needed troops for the theater of war to the north.
At the end of March, through secret proposal to Frederick William, he learned that Prussia's support for the invasion was nothing more than a demonstration, with an auxiliary corps of 20,000 men under Major-General Yorck von Wartenburg (1759-1830), while the Austrians indicated on 25 April that their army, under Prince von Schwarzenberg (1771-1820), would not take part in serious fighting. In July Russia and Britain signed a peace treaty, ending the quasi-war that Tilsit had created. For the first time since April 1805, during the formation of the Third Coalition, these two peripheral, yet powerful, nations entered into a formal alliance by which Britain promised subsidiary aid and weapons, while Russia prepared to counter the French invasion with Russia’s massive resources in manpower.
Napoleon's invasion began on 22 June, he fought a costly struggle at Borodino on 7 September and entered Moscow the same month. Weeks passed as he waited for Alexander to come to terms. Receiving no communication and with most of the city already destroyed by fire, Napoleon began the long winter retreat, with its now well-known and fatal consequences.

Previous Articles

• The fall of the French empire 1813- 1815
• French Occupation of Germany (1807-1812)

References

• Fremont-Barnes, G. (2002). Essential Histories : The Napoleonic Wars (4). Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

The fall of the French empire 1813- 1815

By 1810 Napoleon had established an empire in Europe that surpassed that of Charlemagne a millennium before. Nevertheless in a couple of years it would collapse. The following articles will trace the events that led to its fall throughout the climactic years 1813-1815, in which, among a number of other battles, were fought 2 of the foremost decisive in history i.e. Waterloo and Leipzig. Leipzig, the largest battle in history till 1914, called as the 'Battle of the Nations' because of its sheer size and also the number of nationalities took part. Half a million men struggled during a clash of arms that was to determine whether Napoleon would still maintain his empire in central Europe. What might, except for the extraordinary error on the part of one sergeant of engineers, have been a drawn battle became a disaster that forced Napoleon and his crushed army to abandon Germany and withdraw across the Rhine, thus bringing the war again to French soil for the first time in more than twenty years. The campaign of 1814 which followed taxed Napoleon to the limit, and yet, with paltry forces - some mere boys – he displayed a number of his former strategic and tactical genius and cause a number of defeats on the Allies before surrender to force of numbers and the betrayal of his marshals.

Napoleon and his desperate men lead the army throughout mud and snow during the campaign of 1814 in France. In spite of the huge losses sustained by the Grande Armée the previous year Napoleon steadfastly clung to his conviction that he might ultimately achieve victory, a belief underlined by Napoleon’s apparently callous indifference to losses.’ I grew up upon the field of battle,' Napoleon declared a few months before, 'and a man such as I care little for the lives of a million men.'

The seeds of destruction were sown throughout the Russian campaign in 1812, after that, despite having lost over 500,000 men, Napoleon prepared for a new campaign in the coming spring. The Russians, encouraged by Napoleon's retreat, were prepared to carry the war that will be called as the War of the Sixth Coalition, into Germany, with Prussia as a junior partner in a new alliance.
That this alliance had been preceded by 5 others provides a good indication of the Great Powers' failure to curb French expansion since the beginning of the wars twenty years earlier. However for Prussia and for a number of other German states, this new struggle was to have an ideological element that had been missing from her 1806-1807 war: the campaign of 1813 was to become known by its patriotic title: the 'War of German Liberation'. The moral forces which had once given impetus to the armies of revolutionary France were currently coming back to haunt them, though with some adaptations. The Prussians had no desire for a republic, however their nationalism had been awakened, and therefore the war was to be for the liberation of 'Germany', more than fifty years before an actual nation state with this name emerged.
At this stage, the coalition failed to contain all the Great Powers, however unity was crucial for success. Some nations, like Sweden and Austria, wished to wait and observe how the tide of fortune moved, however eventually they and most of the former members of the Confederation of the Rhine, including Saxony and Bavaria, would side with the Allies in numbers which Napoleon might never hope to match. Britain, too, would play a significant financial and diplomatic role in the war, ensuring Allied unity and providing millions of pounds in subsidies to nations that could supply the manpower needed. Britain had committed tens of thousands of men to the ongoing struggle in Spain, and continued to man the fleets that blockaded French ports and starved Napoleon's empire of seaborne trade.
Yet Napoleon wasn't to be overwhelmed by circumstances that lesser commanders might have considered hopeless. Quickly raising new armies composed of young, inexperienced conscripts and invalided veterans, however seriously deficient in competent non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and trained officers, and with a serious shortage of cavalry, Napoleon resolved to preserve his empire in Germany, despite the rapidly spawning forces of nationalism. The Emperor's organizational genius resurrected a new army with which he achieved hard-fought victories at Bautzen and Lützen before, in late summer, Austria finally threw in her lot with the Allies, thereby making the most formidable military alliance Europe had ever seen and the combination of Great Powers that was absolutely vital if Europe was to free itself of Napoleon's control.
Further epic struggles were to follow during the autumn campaign, including the battles of Leipzig and Dresden. When operations shifted to French soil in 1814, the beleaguered Emperor found himself outnumbered by over than three to one, nevertheless in a series of brilliant actions he managed to hold the Allies at bay, displaying a military genius reminiscent of Napoleon’s earlier years. But, with Paris threatened, Napoleon’s army overwhelmed by very greater numbers, and Napoleon’s marshals refusing to fight on, Napoleon was ultimately forced to give up, only to return the following year to fight his last, and history's greatest, battle.
Waterloo was more than a battle with far-reaching political effects: it was a human drama possibly unparalleled in military history, and it is no accident that far more has been written about this 8 hours period of time than any other in history. The defense of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, the charge of the Scots Greys, Wellington's committed infantry defying the assault of the cuirassiers, the struggle for Plancenoit, and the repulse of the Imperial Guard – all became compelling and distinct episodes in a battle on which hinged nothing less than the future of European security. When it was all over, the Allies could at last implement their historic and extensive plans for the reconstruction of Europe. Though these plans didn’t guarantee peace for Europe, they offered a significant degree of stability for the next forty years. Indeed, the Vienna Settlement, in marked contrast to those before it and since - especially that achieved at Versailles in 1919 - stands as the most effective and long-lasting political settlement up to 1945.
For both senior commanders and for the ordinary ranks of Napoleon's army, campaigning had always been accompanied by a degree of hardship, mostly after nearly twenty years of constant war. However the immediate wake of the Russian campaign was to render the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 particularly hard, with march, counter-march, bivouac, hunger, thirst, rain, mud, cold, and privation. It would also be a time when commanders would be tested to the limit and the flaws in Napoleon's command structure would become clearly apparent.
In the past, field commanders had rarely been allowed to organize their operations except with the express orders of Napoleon and little was done to encourage them to develop independent thought or initiative. Without sufficient understanding of the Emperor's grand strategy or their own roles in it, Napoleon's subordinates could do little but follow orders unquestioningly at a time when armies had grown so much larger than in previous campaigns that Napoleon simply could not supervise everything, and needed commanders competent of independent decision-making. By 1813 some of these had been killed in action (Lannes, Desaix, Lasalle), others would die in the coming campaign (Poniatowski and Bessières), and still more were just tired of fighting or were busy in Spain. Some were excellent as leaders of men in combat, but were not themselves strategists and were hesitant to take independent decisions lest they fail.
With marshals continuously shifted from command of one corps to another and corps changing in composition as situation seemed to need, no practical command structure could be created. Appropriate control of increasingly poorer-quality soldiers became all the more difficult. Under such circumstances, with Napoleon unable to be everywhere and monitor everything, errors were inevitable, and at no time in his military career were these errors so obvious as in 1813-1815.

In spite of the failure in Russia, the empire remained impressive in size, consisting of an over-sized France that extended to the Rhine and across the Pyrenees, and including the Low Countries, parts of northern Italy and the Dalmatian coast. Direct Bonapartist rule extended to the Kingdoms of Italy (Napoleon himself), Naples (his brother-in-law Murat), Westphalia (his brother Jerome), and Spain (his brother Joseph). Switzerland and the Duchy of Warsaw were French satellites, alongside the various states of the Confederation of the Rhine and France possessed other allies of varying loyalty, including Denmark-Norway Prussia, and Austria, the last of which gave up its imperial princess, Marie-Louise, as Napoleon's bride in 1810. By the beginning of 1813 all this was under grave threat, with Russia, Britain, Spain, and Portugal hostile, and Prussia shortly to join them.

Next Articles

• French Occupation of Germany (1807-1812)

References

• Fremont-Barnes, G. (2002). Essential Histories : The Napoleonic Wars (4). Oxford: Osprey Publishing.

French Occupation of Germany (1807-1812)

Prussia's involvement in the campaigns of 1813-15 cloud be traced back to the autumn of 1806, when, having remained faraway from the Third Coalition, Prussia foolishly confronted Napoleon with solely Saxony at their side and with the Russian armies too far to the east to help before winter. Prussia had smarted at Napoleon's creation of the Confederation of the Rhine in the heart of Germany, and the French refusal to cede Hanover (formerly a British possession) as promised, convinced King Frederick William III (1770 1840) that the time had come to put into the field his armies, widely acknowledged to be the best in Europe. The twin decisive victories at Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October destroyed the illusion of Prussia's superiority and within weeks practically all of Prussia's forces were rounded up or besieged in fortresses and obliged to capitulate.

Seeing the vaunted Prussian ranks broken at Jena and Auerstädt was quite stunning for contemporaries, however to witness the systematic hunting down of the remnants of the army and also the pitifully weak resistance given by fortresses throughout the kingdom in the following weeks was more than Prussia could accept. Years of French occupation were to follow. The Treaty of Tilsit, concluded in July 1807, imposed subordination and in its wake Napoleon took deliberate and concerted measures to diminish not only Prussia's pride and prestige, but also Prussia's military and economic power. Prussia's status as a great power was effectively vanished when Napoleon raised the status of smaller German states like Saxony, to which he allotted all Prussian territory in Prussia's former Polish province, while imposing a number of harsh restrictions on Prussia, including a massive compensation of several hundred million francs. The much respected Queen Louise (1776-1810), icon of Prussia's former grandeur and pride, had to endure numerous personal insults under French occupation, including Napoleon's description of her as 'the only real man in Prussia', and the queen's subjects attributed her premature death to such indignities. French troops occupied Prussia's fortresses on the Oder and Prussia's ports on the Baltic, while the Continental System destroyed Prussia's seaborne commerce. Large parts of Prussia's territory were let go to the French puppet government of Westphalia and Prussia's army was restricted to 42,000 men for 10 years. By all these measures and others, Prussia was left severely - but not fatally - weakened, and with Prussia's pride badly wounded Prussia would remain a potentially dangerous time-bomb in the years after Tilsit.

Meeting at Tilsit, July 1807. While France and Russia settled their differences and established an alliance which recognized Napoleonic mastery of western and central Europe, Prussia was left truncated and humiliated: a new French satellite, the Kingdom of Westphalia, absorbed all Prussian territory west of the Elbe; Prussia was stripped of her Polish possessions to create another satellite, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; Danzig was created a free city; Prussia was forced to join the Continental System; and, finally, French troops were to remain on her soil until enormous war indemnities were paid in full.

The result was a movement of reform and growing patriotism, some of it exposed for all to see, though much of it kept secret so as to prevent French detection and suppression. Young Prussians established the anti-French Tugendbunde ('League of Virtue'), and other societies which encouraged not simply a narrow form of Prussian patriotism, but a kind of pan-German unity that demanded freedom from foreign domination in general, but especially French. At official levels reforms were carried out by men like Baron Stein (1757-1831), who worked in a civilian capacity, Gerhard von Scharnhorst (1755-1813) and Augustus von Gneisenau (1760-1831), who introduced radical and new changes in the army. Though aware of many of these activities, Napoleon did not fear Prussian attempts at social, economic and military reform, because he believed Frederick William to be too hesitant to oppose French might. In any event, Prussia had neither the financial nor the military resources to wage a war of national resistance.
For five years the Prussians suffered under Napoleonic occupation, their desire for vengeance and passionate hatred of the French growing more intense as the years passed. These sentiments, whether overtly simply pro-German or anti-French, had been promoted and fostered by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Johann Fichte (1762-1814). Before long, Prussians began to channel their dissatisfaction into thoughts of patriotism, embracing notions hitherto connected with the French Revolution, especially the concepts of 'nation' and, in a peculiarly German form, 'fatherland'. Unlike the French, however, the Prussians did not regard such revolutionary principles as entirely contradict with monarchy.

Queen Louise of Prussia. Revered by her subjects as the soul of national virtue, Louise openly advocated war with France in 1806 and regularly referred to Napoleon as 'the Monster'. On taking up the challenge, the Emperor announced in his Bulletin to the army' A beautiful queen wants to see a battle. So, let us be gallant and march at once .. .The two did not come face to face until the historic meeting at Tilsit in July 1807, by which time Prussia had been comprehensively beaten and occupied,

Wholesale military reforms were introduced along with social reforms, which in turn encouraged a growing sense of German nationalism between 1807 and 1813. In Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, delivered in the winter of 1807-08 but which provided a model for many others to follow, Fichte defied the French occupiers with a less than subtle appeal for resistance to Napoleonic rule:

It is only by means of the common characteristic of being German that we can avert the downfall of our nation, which is threatened by its fusion with foreign peoples, and win back again an individuality that is self-supporting and quite incapable of any dependence on others ...we alone must help ourselves if help is to come to us ...By means of the new[system of ] education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body ... The German, if only he makes use of all his advantages, can always be superior to the foreigner ...he alone is capable of real and rational love for his nation.

These ideas had an effect on civilians, not only among young intellectuals but also the nation as a whole, and also profoundly affected the officer corps, including men like Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), who would later accomplished even greater prominence with his magnum opus, Vom Kriege ('On War'). Not only did Prussian soldiers adopt the battle cry 'Das Vaterland!' in place of 'Der König!', but they were retrained to employ entirely new tactics and methods introduced by specially organized commissions that scrapped the obsolete system employed by the armies of Frederick the Great (1713-86). These were replaced with drills, organization, tactics, and technology, based on careful studies of Napoleonic innovation. The reformers stop corporal punishment, just like in the French Revolution, as unworthy of men fighting for the 'nation' or 'fatherland', so that a soldier might follow his officers out of respect rather than fear. Just as in French revolutionary reforms, merit overcame aristocratic privilege as the principal criterion by which eager young men committed to national service acquired a commission and subsequent promotion.

Augustus Wilhelm, Count von Gneisenau. A general in the Prussian Army, Gneisenau worked with Scharnhorst in implementing wide-ranging military reforms between 1807 and 1813, including new principles for officer training, the establishment of a general staff, and the introduction of a system of reservists, by which large

numbers of men could be trained, released back into civilian life and then called up on short notice to swell the ranks of the army He performed well as Bluchers Chief of Staff from 1813 to 1815

The Prussian Army had been strictly limited to 42,000 men by Napoleonic dictat. Prussian military reformers now employed an ingenious method of circumventing this restriction, enabling them to train more soldiers without exceeding the official size of the army. A system of shrinkage (Krümpersystem) was introduced by which men called to the colors received intensive training, and joined the ranks for a limited time before being released back to civilian life. These recruits would later be recalled for further periods of training to maintain a reasonable level of fitness and acquaintance with military life, but once demobilized they became a sort of hidden reserve, which by the beginning of 1813 amounted to 80,000 men - in addition to the standing army. Therefore, as the spring campaign season opened, Prussia was reasonably ready - with Russia taking a leading role - to challenge Napoleonic authority, for spiritual and military preparations had been under way for five years. It was clear, moreover, that the winter retreat had inflicted a devastating blow to French arms, and the sight of the shattered remains of the Grande Armée shuffling on to Prussian territory encouraged those who were already inclined to resist the occupation.

Emperor Francis I of Austria. Under Francis Austria was a consistent opponent of both Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, fielding armies in numerous unsuccessful campaigns (1792-97, 1800, 1805, 1809) which reduced the vast Habsburg territories in Italy, Poland, and along the Adriatic coastline. After first seeking to appease Napoleon by offering his daughter; Marie- Louise, in marriage, Francis ultimately threw in his lot with the Allies in August 1813, and accompanied his army until the fall of Paris.

Resistance emerged elsewhere in Germany during this period. While Austria again opposed France in 1809, Napoleon subdued Austria once more, taking Vienna in May, suffering a temporary check at Aspern- Essling, and finally emerging victorious at Wagram on 5 July. By the Treaty of Schönbrunn (14 October), Emperor Francis I (1768-1835) ceded land to the Confederation of the Rhine, to Saxony, and to the Kingdom of Italy. Russia, by then in possession of Swedish Finland, received part of Austria's Polish territories in Galicia. Francis, playing for time in which to recover and reorganize both his army and his shattered finances, offered Napoleon - now divorced from the Empress Josephine (1763-1814) - the hand in marriage of his daughter, the Archduchess Marie-Louise (1791-1847), and the two produced a son, Napoleon II (1811-32), born on 20 April 1811, and known as the 'King of Rome'.
Hereafter, signs of growing German resistance became particularly marked. Not only had Austria risen up, but many individual Germans began to question the legitimacy of French domination of central European affairs. Already in 1806 the French had executed a bookseller from Nuremberg named Johann Palm (1768-1806) for printing and distributing anti-French literature. In 1809 a young Thuringian, bent on assassinating Napoleon and in so doing accelerating the French withdrawal from Germany, was executed. And in the following year Andreas Hofer (1767-1810), who had raised the standard of revolt in the Tyrol just prior to the campaign of 1809, was also executed. The French had also demanded that the Prussian government arrest and hand over their foreign minister, Stein, for alleged conspiracies against France, and only Stein's refuge in Russia prevented a lengthy prison term and possibly death. Such heavy-handed policies against German patriots, accused of treason while merely questioning the French presence in their midst, began to effect a profound change in German attitudes.

Previous Articles

•  The fall of the French empire 1813- 1815

Next Articles

• Franco-Russian relations (1805-1812)

References

Fremont-Barnes, G. (2002). Essential Histories : The Napoleonic Wars (4). Oxford: Osprey Publishing.