1812

For most young officers, military service had meant little more than attending parades (the non-commissioned officers did all the training, so all they had to do was lead their men) and court festivities. The rest of the time was given over to gaming, drinking and womanising. They underwent hardly any training or military instruction. ‘We had no sense of morality, an entirely false conception of honour, very little true education and, in almost every case, a surfeit of foolish high spirits which I can only call depraved,’ wrote Prince Sergei Volkonsky, a junior officer of the Chevaliergardes.7

They marched away to war in 1805 as though they were off to a hunting party. Some, like Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, dreamed of emulating Napoleon. They were routed at Austerlitz. They were defeated at Pultusk and two other minor battles in the following year; in 1807 they lost the bloody battle of Eylau, and were finally vanquished at Friedland.

Most of the Russian officers took these defeats very badly. The campaign had been a sobering experience, and they had begun to grow up. Even the most depraved of the aristocratic layabouts felt a spark of patriotism flare inside them, and the valour of their soldiers had awakened a novel respect for these serfs in uniform. They felt humiliated at the apparent facility with which the French could inflict defeat on them however hard they fought, and their resentment of them was heavily tinged with an inferiority complex which shines through their writings on the subject. Lieutenant Denis Davidov and his brother officers were outraged when the Comte Louis de Périgord, the bearer of a letter from Marshal Berthier to General Bennigsen, did not remove his fur kolpak when ushered into the Russian general’s presence. They saw it as an insult to Russia’s honour, and developed a dogged determination to go on fighting until they finally won a battle against France. They regarded the peace of Tilsit as something akin to a betrayal.8

The wounded pride of these officers was reflected by a sense of humiliation felt by sections of the nobility back home. Once nations have embarked on the pursuit of great-power status they begin to develop a curious perspective on what represents a threat to their very existence. And the Russians were fast catching up with the French in this respect. ‘Our land was free, but the air had grown heavier, we walked about freely but could not breathe,’ complained Nikolai Grech after Tilsit. ‘Hatred of the French grew apace.’ But there was more to it than mere hatred. There were the beginnings of a sense of mission. Ordinary backwoods xenophobia came together with anti-Masonic paranoia and the first stirrings of Romanticism to create a conviction that Russia was somehow different from other European countries, more spiritually alive, and that she should reject the mainstream (i.e. French) culture of Europe and go her own way.9

There was a flurry of pamphlets, passionately argued, semireligious, deeply anti-French, advocating a return to Russian values, and in 1808 Sergei Glinka founded a new periodical, Russkii Viestnik, which was to be ‘purely Russian’, and would oppose the treacherous philosophy of the West with the manners and virtues of old Russia, an imagined culture of idyllic innocence. Defenders of the Russian language joined the fray, and a discussion club, Biesieda, was founded by a group including the poet Gavril Romanovich Derzhavin to combat foreign influences in literature. Patriots denounced the employment of French tutors and chambermaids as ‘gallomania’, and the retired Admiral Aleksandr Semionovich Shishkov called for children to be brought up in traditional Russian ways. Alexander’s sister Catherine, whose German husband George of Oldenburg had been given the post of Governor of Tver, Yaroslavl and Novgorod, somehow contrived to become the belle idéale of the most fervent champions of Russian culture. They included the former Chancellor Count Fyodor Rostopchin and the historian Nikolai Karamzin, who used to refer to her as ‘the demi-goddess of Tver’.10

In these circumstances, the creation by Napoleon of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was as a red rag to a bull. Russia had actually gained a piece of Polish territory in the operation, but territory was not the only consideration. Orthodox Russian traditionalists tended to regard the Catholic and unmistakably Western Poles as the rotten apples in the Slav basket. Now the Polish inhabitants of Russia’s western provinces, some of whom had only become subjects of the Tsar a dozen years back, could potentially form a terrible fifth column of Western corruption inside the Russian empire.

This kind of thinking gave rise to a paranoid conviction, voiced by Sergei Glinka and others, that France under the satanic leadership of Napoleon was bent on the subjugation of Russia, and that Tilsit and indeed any peace concluded with her was but a truce putting off the terrible day. The sense of paranoia was only intensified when, at the end of May 1810, the Swedes elected Napoleon’s Marshal and kinsman, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte, Prince of Ponte-Corvo, to the position of Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Sweden.

With its colony in Pomerania, Sweden still ruled over more than half of the entire coastline of the Baltic Sea. She had lost Finland to Russia in 1809 and a constitutional crisis resulted in the half-mad Gustav IV being toppled in favour of Charles XIII. The new King was senile and childless, and in their search for a successor the Swedes turned to Napoleon for advice. He declined to involve himself in their internal affairs, and in the end they chose a man they believed he might have nominated, and whom they considered to be agreeable to him. Their mistake was to have momentous consequences.

Bernadotte was an old colleague of Napoleon. When the two were no more than aspiring officers he had succeeded, and possibly supplanted, the future Emperor in the affections of the lovely Désirée Clary, whom he had subsequently married. Désirée’s sister Julie had married Napoleon’s brother Joseph, which might have made for a happy family. But it did not. Bernadotte was jealous of his colleague’s meteoric rise. While he happily accepted the rank of Marshal of France and the princely title Napoleon had bestowed on him, he cloaked his resentment in righteous disapproval of Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial purple and his pursuit of conquest. Napoleon for his part had a low opinion of Bernadotte and once said that he would have had him shot on at least three occasions had it not been for the bond of kinship.11

When Bernadotte became Crown Prince of Sweden, Napoleon realised that he might prove less than cooperative, but assumed he would behave as a Frenchman and as a Swede. Sweden had traditionally been a close ally of France, and her natural enemies had always been Russia and Prussia. Only the previous year Russia had invaded and forced her to give up Finland after a protracted war. The Swedes’ friendly feelings towards France were put under a certain amount of strain by the Continental System, but their long coastline permitted them to breach it and trade with Britain, while their Pomeranian colony on the northern coast of Germany meant that they could sell on to the German market with profit.

The Russians could only view the combination of the creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, Napoleon’s marriage to the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and the recent developments in Sweden as aggressive encirclement, and Bernadotte’s election was greeted with uproar.

All these feelings were given added poignancy by the economic hardships caused by the Continental System, which had turned into a regular tariff auction. Britain had responded to Napoleon’s Berlin decree of 1806 banning her ships from all ports under his control by declaring that any ship trading with a port from which her ships were excluded was fair game for confiscation by the Royal Navy. French, Spanish, Dutch and German traders tried to get around this by using neutral American vessels to carry goods, but Britain decreed that no vessel could be considered neutral if it were carrying goods between hostile ports. In order to get around this, American ships would pick up their cargoes, take them to an American port, unload them, reload them and take them to a European port. Britain refused to accept this as legal. Napoleon retaliated in December 1807 by decreeing that any ship which had put in at a British port or paid British duty was automatically liable to seizure. On 1 March 1809 the United States closed its ports to all British and French shipping, but Napoleon managed to reach an agreement with the Americans to the detriment of Britain, which would ultimately lead to the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and the United States in 1812.

Russia had little industry, and was dependent on imports for a huge variety of everyday items. These now had to be smuggled in via Sweden or through smaller ports on Russia’s Baltic coastline. Her exports – timber, grain, hemp and so on – were bulky and difficult to smuggle. The Russian rouble fell in value against most European currencies by some 25 per cent, which made foreign goods exorbitantly expensive. Between 1807 and 1811, the price of coffee more than doubled, sugar became more than three times as expensive, and a bottle of champagne went from 3.75 to twelve roubles. Russian noblemen had to pay through the nose not only for champagne, but for everything they did not produce at home, and they could not find a market for the produce of their own estates.12

This cocktail of hurt pride and financial hardship produced ever more violent criticism of Alexander’s policy and of his State Secretary, Mikhail Mikhailovich Speransky, who was virtual prime minister. Speransky was the son of a priest, a very able man of lowly social background, ascetic and devoid of any social or financial ambition. A radical at heart, he believed autocracy to be incompatible with the rule of law, and would have liked to carry out far-reaching reform of the structure of the state. But he accepted the limitations imposed by his position and concentrated on modernising the administration. Soon after his appointment in 1807 he had promulgated reform of the legal system, which was never implemented, of government finances and of the administration.

The nobility, who sensed an enemy in him, did everything to undermine his position. There were soon rumours circulating to the effect that Speransky was a Freemason and revolutionary secretly in league with Napoleon, and that he meant to bring the whole social system crashing down.

The Tsar of Russia was theoretically an all-powerful autocrat, but his relationship with his people was a complex and ambivalent one. There was a mystical, sacred foundation to his power, since he was both his subjects’ religious hierarch and the representative of God on earth. This imposed strong bonds of obedience to him on them. But if a Tsar was felt to have betrayed his divinely ordained purpose, he became something worse than just a wicked Tsar – he became a devil who must be destroyed. At the secular level, his position was just as ambiguous. The very fact that all power was concentrated in him meant that he had no instruments with which to impose his will. He was thus in a curious way dependent on the goodwill of the nobility, which staffed the army and all the organs of state, and therefore on public opinion. And public opinion was by now strongly against Alexander and his policies on virtually every point. He was seen by many as the author of Russia’s shame, and he realised that the only way he could wipe away that shame was through war. The conquest of Finland had helped slightly, but it was not enough.

On 26 December 1809, while he was assuring Napoleon that he would do everything to make the marriage to his sister Anna possible and begging him to bury the Polish question forever, Alexander summoned Prince Adam Czartoryski, a close friend and a prominent Polish patriot who had ten years before elaborated a plan for the restoration of the Kingdom of Poland under Russia’s protection. The Tsar told him that he would now like to put this plan into action, by ‘liberating’ the Grand Duchy of Warsaw and uniting it with the Polish provinces currently under Russian rule, and asked Czartoryski to sound out the Poles on the subject. The Prince did not need to do much research. He knew that the plan could only have worked in 1805 or in 1809, during Napoleon’s war with Austria. He nevertheless went to Warsaw and saw the man who would be the key figure in such a plan – Prince Józef Poniatowski, commander-in-chief of the Grand Duchy’s army and nephew of the last King of Poland. Predictably, Poniatowski rejected the Russian proposal.13

Czartoryski reported back to Alexander personally in April 1810. He pointed out that many Poles had got wind of Alexander’s negotiations with Napoleon to prevent the restoration of Poland, and that this hardly inspired confidence. But the Tsar clung to his view that the Poles could be won over. ‘We are now in April, so we could begin in nine months’ time,’ he concluded.14

Caulaincourt noticed during the winter of 1809–1810 that Alexander was less and less amenable to French policies, and by the spring of 1810 he was finding the friendship he had built up with the Tsar increasingly at odds with his ambassadorial role. He began to hint to Napoleon that he would like to be recalled. But Napoleon paid no heed to his warnings or his wishes.

He had persuaded himself that Britain was suffering economically, and that a few more months would probably bring her to the negotiating table. He therefore adopted a more aggressive attitude to the application of the Continental System. His correspondence bristles with detailed instructions to the rulers and administrators of the coastal areas under his control on which ships and goods to impound and which to allow through. He suggests alternative sources of the supplies cut off and explains the principle behind his policy, exhorting all to enforce it with strictness.

Adding insult to injury, Napoleon decided to recoup some of the cost to France of the system at the expense of others. He took a leaf from the smugglers’ book and licensed a number of merchants to import goods from Britain (for which they paid a hefty price to his treasury), and these goods were then exported overland, many of them to Russia. Such procedures left Alexander with little option but to defy the system openly. On 31 December 1810 he issued an ukaz opening Russian ports to American ships and at the same time imposing hefty tariffs on (French) manufactured goods imported overland into Russia. British goods were soon pouring into Germany from Russia. The Continental System was in tatters. Yet Napoleon refused to accept this. ‘The Continental System is uppermost in his mind, he is more taken up with it than ever,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain early in 1811; ‘too much so perhaps!’15

In his determination to control all points of import, Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic ports. In January 1811 he did the same with the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose ruler was the father of Alexander’s brother-in-law. He did offer him another German province as compensation, but this was refused. Alexander was outraged, and felt personally insulted – his supposed ally was now dethroning members of his family, thereby reinforcing the view, widely held in Russia, that Tilsit was not an alliance but a subjection. He felt he had to act, if only to safeguard his position at home. ‘Blood must flow again,’ he told his sister Catherine.16

On 6 January 1811 he wrote once more to Czartoryski, asking him to try persuading the Poles to accept him as their liberator and restorer. His Minister of War General Barclay de Tolly was already drawing up plans for a strike into the Grand Duchy followed by an advance into Prussia to link up with the Prussian forces.* In a second letter to Czartoryski, Alexander detailed the troops he had already massed on the border to support the operation: 106,500 in the front line supported by a second line of 134,000 men, and a third army of 44,000 men supplemented by 80,000 recruits who had already finished their training. These forces could, in case of need, be supplemented with a few divisions from the army operating against the Turks in Moldavia. ‘There can be no doubt that Napoleon is trying to provoke Russia into a break with him, hoping that I will make the mistake of being the aggressor,’ he explained. ‘It would indeed be a mistake in the present circumstances, and I am determined not to make it – but everything would look different if the Poles were to rally to me. Reinforced with the 50,000 men whom I could count on from them, by the 50,000 Prussians who could then join me without risk, and by the moral revolution which would unfailingly result in Europe, I would be in a position to reach the Oder without striking a blow.’17

Alexander’s troop movements could hardly be kept secret, and by the summer of 1811 the forthcoming war was being widely discussed all over Russia. His agitation in Poland, as well as the soundings his diplomats were taking in Vienna and Berlin, were no secret either. This has prompted some to conclude that he was in fact bluffing. But whether he meant to attack at this stage or not, he had taken a step which could not fail to lead to armed confrontation.18

Napoleon had to take the threat seriously. He had already been alerted by Poniatowski to Russian troop concentrations along the border of the Grand Duchy in the autumn of 1810, and he was desperately aware of the weakness of his forces in the area. He immediately instructed commanders on the spot to draw in exposed units and supply dumps against a surprise attack, and designated a fallback position along the Vistula while he set about strengthening his forces in Poland and Germany. He began bombarding Marshal Davout, in command of the French troops in northern Germany, with letters telling him to fortify strongpoints and put his men on a war footing. On 3 January 1811 he began regrouping his forces with the aim of strengthening the front line. ‘I considered that war had been declared,’ he later affirmed. Most people in France too considered it only a matter of time. ‘There is much talk of war here; sooner or later it must come to that, and now the time seems propitious,’ an officer of the Chevau-Légers of the Imperial Guard wrote from the depot at Chantilly to his sister on 9 April 1811.19

At the same time, Napoleon did everything he could to avert a conflict. In February he instructed Caulaincourt to demand an interview with Alexander and his Foreign Minister Rumiantsev, and to assure them that he wanted the alliance to continue, and that he would never make war on Russia unless she were to ally herself with Britain. In April he repeated this in his instructions to General Marquis Jacques Law de Lauriston, the new ambassador he was sending to St Petersburg to replace Caulaincourt, who had finally been recalled. Napoleon also took every opportunity to tell Kurakin and any other senior Russian figure who passed through Paris that he wanted peace and friendship with their country. ‘I have no wish to make war on Russia,’ he declared to Prince Shuvalov during an interview at Saint Cloud in May 1811. ‘It would be a crime on my part, for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thanks to God, lost my head, I am not mad.’ To Colonel Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, a trusted aide-de-camp whom the Tsar had sent to Paris a couple of times with letters for Napoleon, he repeatedly stated that he had no intention of fatiguing himself or his soldiers on behalf of Poland, and ‘he formally declared and swore by everything he held holiest in the world that the re-establishment of that kingdom was the very least of his concerns’.20

But Alexander could not lay aside the Polish problem so easily. When he realised that he could not count on the Poles to undo Napoleon, he reverted to the idea of cementing his relationship with him over the body of the Polish question. Rumiantsev proposed to Caulaincourt just before the latter left Russia that they put the Duchy of Oldenburg and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw into a sack, shake it about, and see what dropped out. What he was suggesting was that Napoleon indemnify his uncle by marriage for the loss of Oldenburg with a piece of the Grand Duchy. Napoleon responded with anger to this proposal, and refused to consider it, although he did at one stage contemplate giving the throne of a restored Kingdom of Poland to Alexander’s brother Constantine as a solution.21

When Caulaincourt’s travelling chaise rolled into Paris on the morning of 5 June 1811, it drove straight on to Saint Cloud, where Napoleon was staying. Within minutes of it having trundled into the courtyard, Caulaincourt was ushered into Napoleon’s presence, in which he spent the next seven hours. His account of the interview, noted down that very evening, provides an illuminating insight into Napoleon’s thinking at this crucial stage.22

Caulaincourt told Napoleon that in his view Alexander desired peace but could not be expected to subject his people to the rigours of the Continental System, and needed reassurance on the subject of Poland. He also warned Napoleon that Alexander was no longer the malleable youth of Tilsit, and that he would not let himself be intimidated. Alexander had told him that if it came to war, he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital, as the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William had done. Napoleon brushed this aside, saying that Alexander was ‘false and weak’, and suggested that Caulaincourt had been taken in by him.

He himself was suspicious of the Tsar’s intentions, believing that he would pounce on the Grand Duchy of Warsaw the moment his back was turned. He repeatedly affirmed that he was no Louis XV – referring to France’s feeble response to the Russian partition of her Polish ally in the eighteenth century. The conversation went round in circles, with Napoleon eagerly asking Caulaincourt’s opinion yet rejecting it when it was given. He was, in fact, probably right to think that Caulaincourt had been lulled into believing in Alexander’s pacific intentions, yet he could not dismiss his arguments outright.

One thing that did seem to make a profound impression on Napoleon was one of the Tsar’s statements as reported by Caulaincourt. ‘If fate decides against me on the field of battle,’ Alexander had said, ‘I would rather retreat as far as Kamchatka than give away provinces and sign in my capital any treaty which would only be a truce. The Frenchman is brave, but long privations and a bad climate tire him and discourage him. Our climate, our winter will fight for us. Prodigious victories are only achieved where the Emperor is, and he cannot be everywhere or spend years away from Paris.’23 Alexander had said that he was well aware of Napoleon’s ability to win battles, and would therefore avoid fighting the French where they were under his command. He had also referred to the guerrilla in Spain, and said that the whole Russian nation would resist an invader. But on reflection Napoleon dismissed all this as bravado. He believed Alexander was too weak a character to carry out such a plan, and that Russian society would not accept such sacrifices. He reasoned that the nobles would not want to see their lands ravaged for the sake of Alexander’s honour, while the serfs would as likely revolt against their nobles and their Tsar as fight to the last man for a system of slavery.

When asked his opinion on what should be done, Caulaincourt came up with two alternatives. Napoleon should either give a significant part, if not the whole, of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw to Alexander, thereby cementing the alliance, or he should go to war with the aim of restoring the Kingdom of Poland. He pointed out that Austria could easily be compensated, and maintained that the cause of Poland was so universally recognised as a just one that even Britain would ultimately approve.24 Asked which course of action he would adopt given the choice, Caulaincourt replied that he would give the Grand Duchy to Alexander, thereby guaranteeing a stable peace. Napoleon countered that he could not have peace without honour, and the abandonment of the Poles would dishonour him. At the same time, such appeasement of Alexander would inevitably lead to further Russian expansion into the heart of Europe.