How Far From Austerlitz?: Napoleon 1805-1815

by Alistair Horne

Overview

A London Sunday Times Book of the Year
A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

Alistair Horne explores the theme of military success and failure in How Far From Austerlitz? chronicling Napoleon's rise and fall, drawing parallels with other great leaders of the modern era.

The Battle of Austerlitz was Napoleon's greatest victory, the culmination of one of the greatest military campaigns of all time. It was also the last battle the "Father of Modern Warfare" would leave in absolute triumph, for, though he did not know it, Austerlitz marked the beginning of Napoleon's downfall. His triumph was too complete and his conquest too brutal to last. Like Hitler, he came to believe he was invincible, that no force could halt his bloody march across Europe. Like Hitler, he paid dearly for his hubris, climaxing in bitter defeat at Waterloo in 1815. In a matter of years, he had fallen from grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466884649
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/04/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alistair Horne (1925-2017), described by C.P. Snow as "one of the best writers of history in the English-speaking world," is the recipient of the French Legion of Honor, a Wolfson Literary Award, the Hawthornden Prize, and the CBE. His A Savage War of Peace and A Bundle form Britain were both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He has written for The New York Times, Esquire, and The Washington Post. Alistair Horne lived in England and was a trustee of the Imperial War Museum.

Read an Excerpt

How Far from Austerlitz?

Napoleon 1805â"1815

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By Alistair Horne

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1996 Alistair Horne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8464-9

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CHAPTER 1

The Rise of the Adventurer

1795–1801

... it were better not to have lived at all than to leave no trace of one's existence behind.

Napoleon

Throughout the day of 24 June 1807, the hammers of the Grande Armée had clattered frantically to complete a large raft on the River Niemen in faraway East Prussia. The little town of Tilsit – which lies not far from Rastenburg, where Hitler was to locate his 'Wolf's Lair' headquarters, and where he was narrowly to escape assassination in July 1944 – had been ransacked for the richest materials it could provide, to furnish an elegant pavilion of striped canvas aboard the raft. At opposing ends the pavilion was surmounted by the Imperial eagles of Russia and France. Napoleon was determined that no pomp should be missing at this meeting of the two most powerful rulers on earth, which had been proposed earlier that day by Tsar Alexander I, his armies recently humbled on the battlefield of Friedland. For Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer receiving on terms almost of condescension rather than equality the Emperor of All the Russias, this first encounter was to represent the pinnacle of glory in a career of already meteoric achievement.

Completed, the raft was anchored exactly midway between the shores of the river, on which were encamped the rival forces that only ten days previously had been at each other's throats. Simultaneously, with superb military timing, at one o'clock on 25 June, boats carrying the two potentates set off from either bank. With Napoleon came his brother-in-law, the dashing cavalryman Murat; Marshals Bessières and Berthier, the ever-faithful Chief-of-Staff, newly dignified Prince of Neuchâtel; generals Caulaincourt, Grand Equerry, future Foreign Minister and chronicler, and Duroc, Grand Marshal of the Empire. Tsar Alexander was accompanied by, among others, the Grand Duke Constantine with his unpleasing countenance, and General Bennigsen, whose army it was that had just received such a drubbing at Friedland. Perhaps because he disposed of the more efficient oarsmen, Napoleon arrived first at the raft – thus acquiring for himself the air of host on this freshly declared neutral territory. Nevertheless, the first act of the rival emperors on boarding was to embrace each other warmly. The Niemen at that point was no wider than the Seine, consequently the gesture was clearly visible in both camps and wildly applauded. It seemed as if lasting peace was already a reality.

The two emperors then withdrew into the privacy of the pavilion. 'Why are we at war?' they asked each other (so Adolphe Thiers tells us) with Alexander following up: 'I hate the English as much as you do!' To which Napoleon exclaimed, 'In that case peace is made!' Alexander condemned the false promises with which the absent perfidious ones had lured Russia into a disastrous war on their behalf, then abandoning her to fight it single-handed.That first 'summit talk' lasted an hour and a half; after it, Napoleon confided in a letter to his Empress Josephine his delight with the former adversary: 'He is a truly handsome, good and youthful emperor; he has a better mind than is commonly supposed. ...'

For a fortnight the intimate talks, the courtesies and the fêting continued. Napoleon praised Bennigsen and the Grand Duke Constantine, whom he had first encountered at the head of the élite Russian Imperial Guard at Austerlitz; Alexander praised the martial prowess of Murat and Berthier. Alexander was invited to inspect the French Imperial Guard; Napoleon was shown Alexander's fierce Cossack and Kalmuck warriors. They went for long rides together along the banks of the Niemen, while Napoleon unfolded the various new projects his restless mind was already conceiving. Day by day a cordiality, almost an affection, seemed to grow between the two men. On one occasion (according to Baron Ménéval) when Napoleon had pressed the Tsar to remain in his camp for dinner, he offered his guest the use of his own gold toilet-case with which to change. How much further could fraternity be taken! But, behind all this, much hard bargaining was going on. While Napoleon spared no effort in his endeavours to charm the apparently impressionable young Tsar, not quite the same degree of camaraderie between equals was reserved for the latter's unhappy ally, Frederick William, King of Prussia. His armies having been vanquished and his dominions overrun the previous year, in the utmost humiliation that Napoleon had inflicted upon any of his foes, the heir to Frederick the Great was made to wait, like a poor relation, in the rain on the Russian bank, to be admitted to the councils of his fellow rulers only after their cordiality à deux had already been established. 'Sad, dignified and stiff' (according to Thiers) Frederick William was easily bullied by Napoleon. It was left to his attractive queen, Louise, to turn on the charm. 'She is full of coquetterie toward me,' Napoleon wrote to Josephine, but was able to assure her (in this case with conviction): 'do not be jealous, I am an oilcloth off which all that sort of thing runs. It would cost me too dear to play the galant.'

On 7 July, Napoleon signed a formal peace treaty with Alexander at Tilsit. Pointedly, a similar settlement with broken Prussia was not signed and ratified until several days later. In the public treaty between Napoleon and Alexander, much play was made of their newly discovered fraternal feelings for each other and their hopes for active co-operation in the future. More to the point, under the secret articles attached, the Tsar was to abandon any romantic crusading notions about liberating Europe from the revolutionary French; instead, at the expense of Napoleon's ally, Turkey, he was encouraged to pursue expansion along the traditional Russian route – towards the south-east. As a penalty to the Swedes for their rashness in joining the Coalition Wars against Napoleon, Swedish Finland was to be ceded to Russia. But it was, of course, against the still-unvanquished and physically almost untouchable distant arch-enemy, England, that Napoleon's ire was chiefly directed. She was to be excluded totally from Europe, with Russia joining the Continental System if by November Britain had not agreed to Napoleon's terms.

If the terms granted Russia were flatteringly and calculatedly benevolent, those for Prussia were correspondingly harsh. Despite the coquetteries of Queen Louise, Prussia was to be shorn of half her territories. Those west of the Elbe would be transmuted into a new Kingdom of Westphalia for the benefit of Napoleon's brother Jérome. To the east, Prussia's Polish provinces were to be handed over to create a new Grand Duchy of Warsaw (in itself a source of some disappointment to Napoleon's recently acquired mistress, the patriotic Marie Walewska, who, in giving herself, had hoped for nothing less than restored nationhood for her proud but oppressed people). Crushing war indemnities were imposed upon King Frederick William, plus a permanent French military occupation; and, to ensure that Prussia would henceforth never aspire to be more than a second-rate German power, the remainder of the German states had been organized into a puppet Confederation of the Rhine.

On 9 July, Napoleon took leave of his new friend (who was tactfully wearing the Légion d'Honneur for the occasion), bestowing on him one last warm embrace, and watching until Alexander disappeared out of sight on his bank of the Niemen. Earlier Napoleon had written to his Minister of the Interior, Fouché, instructing him: 'See to it that no more abuse of Russia takes place, directly or indirectly. Everything points to our policy being brought into line with that of this Power on a permanent basis.'

News of Tilsit reached London only in the third week in July, during a summer of heat so stifling that haymakers were fainting in the fields of Buckinghamshire. No intimation of the secret clauses had been received from her former allies, but it was abundantly clear that, at Tilsit, the two emperors had effectively divided the continent between them into two spheres of influence in which England was to be permitted no part. From Gibraltar to the Vistula and beyond, Napoleon now ruled either directly or through princes who were his creations (over the previous two years he had given out more crowns than the Holy Roman Emperors had in a thousand), or his dependants. Before Austerlitz Napoleon had been an object of fear, after Tilsit he held Europe spellbound with terror. He was its undisputed master. 'One of the culminating points of modern history,' a starry-eyed supporter declared of Tilsit; '... the waters of the Niemen reflected the image of Napoleon at the height of his glory.' The next time he ventured on to the Niemen, just five years later, he would be en route for his first great defeat, and the beginning of his eclipse.

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How, in so short a space of time, had Napoleon managed to acquire these trappings of mastery which Tilsit now seemed to vest in him? One needs, rapidly, to turn back the clock some twenty years. At Tilsit he was still only thirty-seven, and – because of his youth at the conclusion of his most famous run of victories – one tends to forget that he was born under the reign of Louis XV and started his military career under Louis XVI. If he was a child of the ancien régime, he was also very much a product of that event dubbed by Thomas Carlyle 'the Death-Birth of a World', and was steeped in the French Revolutionary heritage, without which he would surely never have got as far as Tilsit. His father, Carlo Buonaparte, was an impecunious lawyer, originally of minor Italian nobility, who had set up a not notably successful law practice in Ajaccio, Corsica. (The island was taken over by France in 1768, the year before Napoleon's birth.) After producing eight children that survived – five died in infancy – Carlo died of cancer in 1785 when Napoleon was only fifteen. His wife Letizia, later always known as Madame Mère, who had married at fourteen, was a strong-minded woman who would outlive her famous son by fourteen years. Her favourite, cautionary utterance was 'Just so long as it lasts.' Young Napoleon had a rough passage through the school to which he was sent at Brienne in Champagne, where he was distinguished chiefly for his fierce Corsican nationalism and a certain aptitude for mathematics: 'reserved and hardworking ... silent, capricious, proud, extremely egotistical ... much self-esteem ... extremely ambitious,' his reports read. He was then commissioned a second lieutenant in the French Army at the age of sixteen, making his first real mark on military affairs some eight years later, at the Siege of Toulon. The key naval base was then held by an English fleet under the command of Admiral Hood; Napoleon, as a twenty-four-year-old artillery captain, was brought in to advise the not very distinguished commander of the French Revolutionary forces besieging it. With his genius for the swift coup d'oeil which was later to stand him in such good stead, he gave the brilliant appreciation that, if the Le Caire promontory overlooking Toulon harbour could be seized, guns sited there would make the harbour untenable for Hood's ships. The strategy succeeded, and the British were driven out; wounded in the thigh,* Napoleon became a hero in the ranks of the incompetent Revolutionary Army (though still unknown outside it), was promoted to the dizzy rank of général de brigade when he was still only twenty-four, and was made artillery commander to the Army of Italy.

After a brief, fallow period of considerable frustration his next opportunity came when, by chance, he happened to be in Paris on sick leave during the autumn of 1795. A revolt was pending against the Convention and Napoleon was called in by his friend and protector, Paul Barras, to forestall it. He positioned a few guns (brought up at the gallop by a young cavalry captain called Murat) on the key streets leading to the Tuileries Palace. Three years previously he had witnessed the mob storm the same palace, and the weakness of the King on that occasion had made a lasting impression on him. 'If Louis XVI had shown himself on horseback, he would have won the day,' Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph. He was determined not to repeat the same error and showed no hesitation in giving the order to fire. Discharged at point-blank range, the historic 'whiff-of-grapeshot' of the Treizième Vendémiaire left 400 dead and put the mob convincingly to flight. For the first time since 1789 the Paris 'street', which had called the tune throughout the Revolution, had found a new master whom it would not lightly shrug off. Barras, grateful but also nervous at having Napoleon too near the centre of power, now appointed him – at the age of twenty-seven – Commander-in-Chief of the French Army of Italy.

Ever since 1792, France had been at war with the First Coalition of her enemies, who were bent upon reversing the revolutionary tide that seemed to threaten all Europe, and restoring the status quo ante in France. As Thomas Carlyle saw it, the guillotining of Louis XVI had 'divided all friends; and abroad it has united all enemies ...'; on the other hand, in the view of Friedrich Engels and others, had it not been for the stimulating effect of foreign intervention, the Revolution might quietly have choked on its own vomit. It was a question of the chicken or the egg. The fortunes of war had swung back and forth; lack of adequate preparation and incompetence among the new leaders of the revolutionary French forces had been matched by differences of interest and lethargy among the Allies; the stiff forms of eighteenth-century warfare, unaltered since the days of Frederick the Great, had encountered a new revolutionary fervour, though it was lamentably supported with guns and equipment. Marching into France, the Duke of Brunswick and his Prussians were halted and turned about, surprisingly, by the cannonade at Valmy in September 1792, first harbinger of a new form of warfare.

In 1793 the French forces, resurgent under the organizational genius of Lazare Carnot (whom even Napoleon was to rate 'the organizer of victory'), and fired by their first victories to carry the Revolution to all the 'oppressed nations' of Europe, swept into Belgium and threatened Holland. During the bitter winter of 1794–5, one of France's few naval victories was achieved when French cavalry captured the Dutch fleet by riding across the frozen Texel. By June 1794, Jourdan had chased the last Coalition soldier across the French frontier. The British bungled a landing at Quiberon Bay, while – defeated, and invaded in her turn – Prussia abandoned the First Coalition the following year. But, over-extended, under-equipped and unhelped by the dithering and corrupt rule of the Directory, France's new 'Army of the Sambre-and-Meuse' now experienced a series of defeats across the Rhine at the hands of the Austrians.

It was at this point that, called in by Barras, Napoleon was sent to Italy to wrest the initiative from the Austrians. He found the army unpaid, hungry, poorly equipped and on the verge of mutiny. Stendhal cites the example of three officers who owned but one pair of shoes, one pair of breeches and three shirts between them; elsewhere in The Charterhouse of Parma, he relates how, at Napoleon's legendary action on the 'Bridge at Lodi', another French officer had the soles of his shoes 'made out of fragments of soldiers' caps also picked up on the field of battle'. As this ragged army set forth, Napoleon issued one of his most famous orders of the day:

Soldiers, you are naked and ill-fed; though the government owe you much, it can give you nothing ... but ... I will lead you into the most fertile plains in the world. Rich provinces, great cities will be in your power; you will find there honour, glory and riches. ...'

It was an open invitation to looting. But, by his extraordinary capacity to inspire, Napoleon totally transformed the forces under him within a matter of days. One of his officers, Colonel Marmont, later a marshal, said years after the Empire had foundered, 'we marched surrounded by a kind of radiance whose warmth I can still feel as I did fifty years ago'. Over the next eighteen months the young General caused his troops – with minimal resources – to win a series of remarkable victories. These ended with the Battle of Rivoli, as impressive a battle as any the world had yet seen. In Italy, aided and almost abetted by an inept Austrian command, driven on by violent Corsican jealousy at the infidelities of Josephine while he was away at the front, Napoleon took risk after extravagant risk, but his string of successes there laid the foundation for the legend of his invincibility. To Colonel Marmont he remarked, 'Fortune ... is a woman, and the more she does for me, the more I will demand from her. ... In our day no one has conceived anything great; it is for me to give an example. ...' By October 1797, he had defeated seven armies, captured 160,000 prisoners and over 2,000 cannon, and chased the Austrians to within a hundred miles of Vienna. Here, for the first but not the last time, he forced the beaten Austrians to sign a peace with France, thus marking a definitive end to the wars of the First Coalition.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from How Far from Austerlitz? by Alistair Horne. Copyright © 1996 Alistair Horne. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
A St Helena Lullaby,
List of Maps,
List of Illustrations,
Chronology,
Preface,
Map,
1. The Rise of the Adventurer 1795–1801,
2. An Uneasy Peace 1801–1805,
3. Partners in Coalition 1804,
4. The Army of England 1804–1805,
5. Preparing for a New Campaign 1805,
6. La Grande Armée,
7. Ulm and on to Vienna 2 September–28 November 1805,
8. 'Le Beau Soleil d'Austerlitz' 28 November–2 December 1805,
9. 'Soldiers, I Am Pleased With You' 2 December 1805,
10. 'Uncheered by Fortune' 1806,
11. The Raft on the Niemen 1807,
12. Talleyrand Defects 1807–1808,
13. Sir John Moore's Retreat 1808–1809,
14. The Last Victory: Wagram 1809,
15. Love and Marriage 1809–1810,
16. The British Blockade 1810–1812,
17. 'Don't March on Moscow' 1812,
18. The Battle of the Nations 1813,
19. 'La Patrie en Danger!' 1814,
20. The Hundred Days 1814–1815,
Epilogue,
References,
Select Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Alistair Horne,
Copyright,