Napoleon and his court

by C. S. Forester

It was incidents of this nature which caused the feeling of distrust which gradually arose in the minds of the French people. Broken treaties and international bad faith did not move them so much, partly because they were never in possession of the true facts, partly because a series of brilliant victories wiped off the smudges from the slate, and partly because international morality was at its usual low ebb; but tales of official murder and of unsavoury scandals in high places constitute the ideal food for gossip, and rumours spread and were distorted in the way rumours are, until a large section of the public had lost its faith in the Emperor. As long as Napoleon was successful in the field this defection was unimportant, but as soon as his power began to ebb it became decidedly noticeable, and, as much as anything else, helped to reconcile the mass of the people to the return of the Bourbons.

It has been well said that the man who never makes any mistakes never makes anything else, and allied to this statement is Wellington’s famous dictum (which applies equally well to all kinds of endeavour) that the best general is not the one who makes fewest mistakes, but the one who takes most advantage of the mistakes of his opponent. On examining Napoleon’s career one finds mistakes innumerable—and the successes are more numerous still. In military matters the explanation lies in the extreme and elaborate care Napoleon devoted to his strategic arrangements. His movements were so planned that no tactical check could derange them. His bataillon carré of a hundred thousand men, with Lannes the incomparable at the head of the advanced guard, could take care of itself whatever happened. The advanced guard caught the enemy and pinned him to his ground, providing that fixed point which Napoleon always desired as a pivot, and then the massed army could be wheeled with ease against whatever part of the enemy’s line Napoleon selected. If victory was the result, then the pursuit was relentless; if perhaps a check was experienced, then the previous strategy had been such that the damage done was minimized. It was this system which saved him at Eylau and which was so marvellously successful at Friedland.

The occasions when danger threatened or when disaster occurred were those when Napoleon did not act on these lines. The campaign of 1796, indeed, shows no trace of the “Napoleonic system.” The principles which Napoleon followed were only those of the other generals of the period, but they were acted upon with such vigour and with such a clarity of vision that they were successful against all the odds which the Aulic Council brought to bear. At Marengo, on the other hand, the conditions were different and more exacting. This victory had to be as gratifying as possible to the French nation—it had to be gained by extraordinary means; it had to be as unlooked-for as a thunderbolt, as startling as it was successful, and it must bring prodigious results. Also (for Napoleon’s own sake) it had to be gained as quickly as possible, so that he could return to Paris to overcome his enemies.

The Austrians had overrun Italy, were besieging Genoa, and had advanced to the Var. No mere frontal attack upon them would fulfil all the onerous conditions imposed upon the First Consul. A series of successes painfully gained, resulting in the slow driving of the Austrians from one river line to another, might be safe, but it would not be dramatic nor unexpected, and, worst of all, it would not be rapid. Napoleon took an enormous risk, and led his Army of Reserve over the Alps. He had satisfied the need for drama; now he had to justify himself by a speedy victory. Defeat, with an impassable defile in his rear, meant nothing less than disaster; but delay, with his enemies gradually rallying at Paris, meant similar disaster. The strain became unbearable, and Napoleon scattered his army far and wide in his endeavour to come to grips with the Austrians. The risk he ran was appalling, and was almost fatal, for the fraction of the army which he still retained under his own hand was suddenly attacked by the combined Austrians, and driven back. Napoleon flung himself into the battle; somehow he kept his battered battalions together until three undeserved strokes of luck occurred simultaneously. Desaix arrived with his stray division; Zach unduly extended the Austrian line; and Kellermann was afforded an opportunity for a decisive charge. In ten minutes the whole situation was changed. Marengo was won; it was the Austrians who were defeated without an avenue of retreat; and Napoleon was free to enjoy the intoxication of supreme power—and to meditate on the destiny which had saved him from indescribable disgrace.

The errors into which Napoleon fell during the campaign of 1805 were mainly the result of his overestimation of his adversaries’ talents. No one could possibly have imagined that Mack would have been such a spiritless fool as to stay in Ulm and allow himself to be surrounded by an army three times his strength. Napoleon certainly did not expect him to, and made his dispositions on the supposition that Mack would endeavour to fight his way through to Bohemia or Tyrol. But Mack remained paralysed; the one gap left open was closed to him by Ney’s dashing victory at Elchingen, and all that remained to be done was for Napoleon to receive the timid surrender of thirty thousand men and for Murat to hunt down whatever fragments were still at large. Five weeks later the Russians were destroyed at Austerlitz. There is no manœuvre of Napoleon’s during these five weeks at which anyone can reasonably cavil; the faint criticism that Napoleon ought not to have advanced as far as he did into Moravia is easily falsified by the fact that by this means he was able to find room for his retreat on Austerlitz which gave so much heart to the Russians and which induced them to make their ruinous attack on his right wing.

The mistakes which Napoleon made during the Jena campaign have already been fully discussed. He made several gross miscalculations, and his only justification is his final success. As the war went on, however, and the French advanced into Poland, we find Napoleon at his very best strategically. At Eylau he blundered in sending forward Augereau’s corps in their mad rush at the powerful Russian line, but once again he was able to extricate himself from his difficulties, and Friedland settled the matter.

It is now that we come to the most disastrous adventure of all—the Spanish affair. The remark has been made that until 1808 Napoleon had only fought kings, and never a people. He plunged into the involved politics of Spain expecting as easy a victory as Masséna’s conquest of Naples in 1806, or Junot’s conquest of Portugal in 1807. He was sadly mistaken. And yet one can find traces indicating that he was taking all possible precautions. His instructions to his representatives at Madrid certainly suggest that he was trying to frighten the Spanish royal family out of the country, and that only when this scheme had been upset by the abdication of Charles at Aranjuez (which could not possibly have been foreseen) did he call the suicidal conference of Bayonne. The Portuguese royal family had fled from Junot; the Neapolitan Bourbons had fled from Masséna; it might have been expected that the Spanish Bourbons would have fled from Murat, especially as they had rich American dependencies in which to settle. The Spaniards would not have fought half so hard for a craven King in America as they did for one who was pictured to them as suffering a martyr’s torments in a French prison. So far Napoleon’s methods are perhaps justified in every way except morally. But from this time onward he made mistake after mistake. He entrusted the conquest of Spain to officers and troops of poor quality—generals like Savary, Dupont and Duhesme, with mere provisional regiments formed from the sweepings of the depôts. The capitulation of Baylen and the loss of Madrid were the natural consequence. In wrath Napoleon called upon the Grand Army. He plunged into Spain, routed the wretched Spanish levies, pressed on to conquer all Spain and—was forced to wheel back to counter Moore’s swift thrust at his rear.

Napoleon never returned to the Peninsula. It was not central enough; he could not from there keep an eye on the rest of Europe. He endeavoured instead to direct affairs from Paris, with the result that what little order remained dissolved into chaos. His despatches arrived six weeks late, and co-ordination was impossible. The best course left open to him was to entrust the supreme command in Spain to the most capable of his subordinates, someone who could make his plans on the spot and see that they were carried out. But there Napoleon stopped short. Give to another Frenchman the command of three hundred thousand men and all the resources of a vast kingdom? Unthinkable! So matters drifted from bad to worse while the Marshals quarrelled among themselves, while Joseph and Jourdan tried to make their authority felt, and while Napoleon blindly stirred up still further trouble among them.

Worse than this; Napoleon entirely misread the character of the Spanish war. Despite his own experiences there, he did not realize the enormous difficulties with which the French armies had to contend. He set three hundred thousand men a task which would have kept half a million fully occupied, and he further hampered them by the niggardly nature of their allowances of money and material. He under-estimated the fighting power of the guerillas, of the Portuguese levies, and (worst of all) of the English army. He over-estimated the power of his name among the unlettered Spanish peasants. He left entirely out of account the impossibility of communication and of supply. In a word, there was no error open to him into which he did not fall.

The Spanish trouble had hardly assumed serious dimensions when in 1809 Austria made one more bid for freedom and commenced hostilities against him. As busy as he could possibly be with Spanish affairs, with troubles in Paris, and with ruling the rest of Europe, Napoleon delayed before going in person to the seat of war. He miscalculated the time necessary to Austria to mobilize, and he entrusted the temporary command to Berthier—two grave errors. Only Davout’s skill and his own unconquerable energy staved off a serious disaster and snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat. The French pressed on to Vienna. This time there was no Auersperg to be cozened out of his command of the Danube bridge; the crossings were all broken down, and Napoleon was compelled to force a passage in face of a hostile army of equal strength—the most delicate operation known to military science. Napoleon’s first attempt was rash to the verge of madness. It was simply a blind thrust at the heart of the opposing army; the bridges provided were insufficient, and broke down through enemy action at the crisis of the battle; the staff work and the arrangements generally appear to have been defective. Thirty-six hours of fierce fighting saw the French hurled back again; Masséna’s tenacity and Lannes’ daring saved the army from destruction, but the cost of defeat amounted to twenty thousand men—among them was Lannes, the hero of Montebello, of Saalfeld, of Friedland, of Saragossa; one of the few who dared to say what they thought to the Emperor, and one of the few who enjoyed his trust and friendship.