THE ARRAY OF NATIONS[40]
[Footnote 40: References as before, to which add Lehmann:
Scharnhorst, Vol. II.]
Estrangement of France and Russia -- Premonitions of War --
Alexander's Secret Policy -- The Various Factors in the Situation
-- Bernadotte -- The Eve of a General Conflagration -- England
and Prussia -- Austria and Prussia -- Alliance between Sweden and
Russia -- England and the United States -- The Confederation of
the Rhine -- The State of France.
[Sidenote: 1811-12]
Meanwhile Metternich, confident that in the partition of Turkey better
terms could be obtained for Austria from Napoleon than from Alexander,
was doing his utmost to embitter the relations of France and Russia. A
strong Russian party in Vienna was in close touch with the numerous
Poles in Warsaw who looked to Alexander for the restoration of their
country's integrity. In both places there was much talk of the
restoration of Poland, in Warsaw especially, and the phrase was
constantly in the newspapers. Alexander's ambassador in Paris made
urgent representations concerning "a persistent rumor that the Emperor
intends to restore Poland." Napoleon retorted in fury, and threatened
war, but immediately wrote a soothing assurance that he was still true
to the engagements of Tilsit, and as to the treaty itself he would
agree to changes, but would never brand his own memory with dishonor.
On July first, while the lines were in the copyist's hands, there
occurred the incident which many thought at the time changed the
course of history. During a magnificent festival given by the Austrian
ambassador, the decorations in an open court took fire, and the
conflagration spread, enveloping the entire embassy. All the important
guests escaped unhurt except Kourakine, the Russian ambassador, who
was so injured that he could no longer perform his official duties. It
appeared to throw a strong light on Napoleon's character as a man that
almost immediately his humor seemed to change; his personal
obligations to the much-abused but well-bred envoy could not now be
wiped out by a gentle reply to the master; hence, apparently, he
curtly dismissed the Russian charge d'affaires, and ended the
negotiation. It was when this news reached St. Petersburg that
Alexander a second time offered Norway to Sweden.
The real cause of Napoleon's abrupt manner was the news communicated
by Metternich that the Russian army had advanced successfully to the
Danube. On July seventeenth Francis despatched an envoy requesting his
new son-in-law to join him in a protest against the aggressions of the
Czar; in other words, to throw the agreements of Tilsit and Erfurt to
the winds. Napoleon returned an unhesitating and honorable refusal,
but said significantly to Metternich: "If Russia quarrels with us she
will lose Finland, Moldavia, and Wallachia," adding that if the Czar,
contrary to his engagement of 1808, should seize anything south of the
Danube, then he himself would intervene on Austria's behalf. But all
Europe seemed convinced that war was inevitable. In all the
watering-places the talk was of nothing else. The Russian party in
Vienna grew bolder; Pozzo di Borgo, Napoleon's life-long foe, who had
been temporarily under a cloud in Russia, appeared in Vienna in his
Russian uniform, courted and oracular. A French interpreter on his way
to Persia was stopped by him, and bribed to enter the Russian service.
In a terse personal note written by his own hand, Napoleon called
Alexander's attention to the facts, but without awaiting the reply he
went further. Kourakine, partly recovered, was leaving Paris for home.
Through him the Emperor poured into his ally's ear a long exposure of
the situation, saying in substance that war was to be avoided, that he
had not the slightest intention of restoring Poland, and that if the
Czar would write what was desired as a guarantee in the form of a
newspaper article, the words should be inserted unchanged in the
"Moniteur." At the same time orders were sent commanding Caulaincourt
to end all negotiation, and the Poles were peremptorily enjoined to
silence. Simultaneously schemes for a new naval campaign were
gradually being perfected, so that they might be realized the
following year.
Something of Alexander's secret diplomacy must have leaked out, but he
appeared unmoved. He was steadily preparing for war, strengthening his
fortresses, and locating fortified camps in the district between the
Dwina and the Dnieper. But his chief concern was with Poland. Relying
on the Jesuit influence at Warsaw for support against the jailer of
the Pope, he again took up his old scheme of restoring the country as
an appanage of the Russian crown, and wrote to Czartoryski. The plan
was dazzling: a national army, a national administration, and a
liberal constitution. But that nobleman, after a long residence in his
native land, had learned how strong was the conviction of his
countrymen that Napoleon would give them a more complete autonomy than
the Czar, and sent back what must have been a discouraging reply,
although it has never been found. Alexander on its receipt determined
that the coming war should be defensive on his part, and immediately
opened communications with England and Sweden concerning the
Continental System. Finally, in the closing days of the year, he
issued a ukase excluding wines, silks, and similar luxuries from
France, but facilitating the entry of the colonial wares in which
England dealt. This was an act of open hostility to his old ally, a
declaration of commercial war. Prussia immediately made semi-official
advances to the Czar, but they were repelled.
It is not easy to estimate Napoleon's responsibility for what had
happened and was about to happen. He was persistently domineering,
contemptuous of national feeling and dynastic politics, over-confident
in the unswerving devotion of France, inflexible in his policy of
territorial aggrandizement, ruthless in applying his peculiar
conceptions of finance and political economy, and pitiless in his own
self-seeking. On the other hand, Alexander, having received Prussia's
autonomy as his part, had proved an untrustworthy ally from the
outset. Having seized Finland, he would not pay the price, but first
evaded the Continental System, then rejected it, and finally declared
commercial war on France; in the latest conflict between France and
Austria he had actually wooed the latter's favor. Procrastinating in
the marriage affair, he was furious when the suppliant turned
elsewhere, and at once displayed an insulting mistrust concerning
Poland; finally, he declared diplomatic war by his overtures to
England and his secret machinations in Vienna; there was but a final
step in the evolution of complete hostility, the declaration of
military war. Austria, too, had done her utmost to bring on a
conflict, hoping to find her account in the dissensions of the two
empires. Her policy demanded her territorial aggrandizement at the
expense of Turkey; in a war between France and Russia she was sure to
find her account, and there was nothing in Metternich's dealings
with Napoleon which tended to preserve the peace of Europe.
Sweden, under Bernadotte, was manifestly anxious to find a cause of
offense, being defiant in temper, and ready to do anything for the
purpose of strengthening the hands of Alexander and escaping from
French protection. So feeble was the titular King of Sweden that the
adoptive crown prince speedily became the real ruler, and his personal
desires were soon the public policy. It was a strange transformation
which took place in the man. He had been generous and kindly in the
difficult positions he held as a French general. Avowedly a
revolutionary democrat of the most radical stripe, he was nevertheless
a true Gascon and failed to display his great abilities wherever his
heart was not engaged. He had, moreover, basked in the sunshine of
imperial favor, and in an age of atheism had remained in the fold of
the Roman Church. Having himself schemed against Napoleon under the
promptings of personal ambition, he often gave aid and comfort to the
Emperor's enemies. When adopted into the royal family of Sweden it
cost him little effort to profess Lutheranism; his republican
sympathies were quenched, and he developed into a beneficent despot
anxious to put Sweden in line with Russia. He never was able to win
the affections of his people, and when before the close of his life
they demanded a liberal constitution, this democratic sovereign,
brought up under the illumination of French revolutionary doctrines,
held back until the paper had to be wrung from him. The phases of
Napoleon's life are scarcely more startling than those of this rather
commonplace actor on a stage which was provincial when compared with
the cosmopolitan scene of the Emperor's life-drama.
In the spring of 1811 all Europe knew that war was inevitable. "It
will occur," wrote Napoleon on April second of that year, "in spite of
me, in spite of the Emperor Alexander, in spite of the interests of
France and those of Russia. I have already so often seen this that it
is my experience of the past which unveils to me the future.... It is
all a scene in an opera, and the English control the machinery." A
week later he notified Alexander that he was aware of the movement of
Russian troops toward Poland, and declared that he himself was
likewise preparing. Lauriston was sent to replace the too pacific
Caulaincourt at St. Petersburg, and Champagny was removed from the
Foreign Office to make way for the fiery Maret. There was much to be
done before the actual outbreak of hostilities. England's history is
the story of her struggles for nationality, for religious, civil, and
political liberty, and for mercantile ascendancy. Her inborn longings
for the highest civilization were not inconsistent with her grim
determination to resist a system that stood on the Continent for
progress, but which she had come to believe meant national ruin for
her. Prussia, with a new vigor born of self-denial, education, and
passionate patriotism; Sweden, restless and uneasy under the yoke of
Napoleonic supremacy; Denmark, friendly, but independent in her
quasi-autonomy; the United States, chafing under the restrictions of
her commerce; Turkey, sick to death, but then as now pivotal in all
European politics--the relation of all these powers to the coming
conflict was still a question, and during a year much might be done in
a diplomatic way to determine it. The whole civilized world was to be
in array, although the life-and-death struggle was to be between two
insatiate despotisms, one Western and modern, the other Oriental and
theocratic. Napoleon grasped the tendency of his own career but dimly.
Goethe said of him, "He lives entirely in the ideal, but can never
consciously grasp it." Unconsciously, too, Alexander the Great had
fought for the extension of Greek culture; Caesar, to destroy the
stifling institutions of a worn-out system; Charles the Great, to
realize the "city of God" on earth; Napoleon, for nationality,
individual liberty, popular sovereignty. What was personal and petty
in the work of these Titans, being ephemeral, disappeared in the death
of each; what was human and large has endured and will endure. The
creative ideas of the revolutionary era with which Napoleon's name is
so closely connected are no longer called in question; his own career
was now verging to its decline, but in his fall the fundamental
conceptions of the epoch were firmly established.
In January, 1812, Wellington, as has been mentioned, stormed Ciudad
Rodrigo; on April sixth Badajoz fell. On April eighteenth Napoleon
offered terms of peace, Spain to be kept intact under Joseph, Portugal
to be restored to the house of Braganza, Sicily to remain under
Ferdinand, and Naples under Murat. Considering all the circumstances,
the offer was worthy of consideration; but the English cabinet refused
it. The possibility of peace with Great Britain being thus
extinguished, Napoleon considered what course he should pursue toward
the other great Protestant land, which also felt itself to be
struggling for life. Some well-informed persons asserted that at first
the Emperor contemplated destroying the Hohenzollern power utterly. If
so, he quickly dismissed the idea as involving unnecessary risk. With
the reforms of Stein and Hardenberg successfully accomplished, with
her educational system completed and her army reorganized, with her
people electrified at last into true patriotism, Prussia was again a
redoubtable power. Her influence permeated all Germany, and the
secret associations which ramified everywhere labored for German
unity, their members already dreaming of the Jura, Vosges, and
Ardennes as the western frontier of their fatherland. At first
Frederick William made overtures to the Czar, offering an army of a
hundred thousand men. Alexander, desiring a purely defensive war, was
cold; but late in 1811 he agreed, in case of an attack on Prussia, to
advance as far as the Vistula, "if possible."
Meantime Austria had at first contemplated neutrality, but she
abandoned the policy when convinced that, whichever side should be
victorious, Prussia would be dismembered. Francis saw Alexander's
continued successes on the Danube with growing anxiety, and, learning
that Napoleon would put four hundred thousand men into the field, made
up his mind that France must win. Accordingly, in March, 1812, a
treaty was executed which put thirty thousand Austrian troops under
Napoleon's personal command, and stipulated for Austria's enlargement
by Galicia, Illyria, and even Silesia, in certain contingencies.
During these negotiations Frederick William had learned how stupendous
Napoleon's preparations were, and, with some hesitancy, he finally
sent Scharnhorst to sound Austria. The result was determinative, and
on February twenty-fourth, 1812, a treaty between France and Prussia
was signed, which gave Prussia nothing, but exacted from her twenty
thousand men for active service, with forty-two thousand for garrison
duty, and afforded the French armies free course through her
territories, with the right to charge up such requisitions as were
made against the war indemnity. To this pass Alexander's narrowness
had brought the proud, regenerated nation; its temper can be imagined.
French diplomacy, triumphant elsewhere, was utterly unsuccessful
with Sweden. Alexander offered Norway as the price of alliance, with
hints of the crown of France for Bernadotte somewhere in the dim
future. Napoleon temptingly offered Finland for forty thousand Swedish
soldiers. But the new crown prince was seemingly coy, and dallied with
both. This temporizing was brought to a sudden end in January, 1812,
when Davout occupied Swedish Pomerania. On April twelfth the alliance
between Sweden and Russia was sealed. It carried with it an armistice
between Russia and Great Britain. This was essential to the Czar, for
he would be compelled to withdraw his troops from the Danube for
service in the North, and to that end must make some arrangement with
Turkey. He offered the most favorable terms; Napoleon, on the other
hand, demanded a hundred thousand men if he were to restore to the
Sublime Porte all it had lost. England threatened to bombard
Constantinople if there should be too much hesitancy, and on May
twenty-eighth, 1812, the Sultan closed a bargain with Russia which
gave him the Pruth as a frontier.
In spite of Turkey's submission, Great Britain was not to be left
passive. The neutrality of the United States had, on the whole, been
successfully maintained, but their commerce suffered. On May first,
1810, Congress enacted that trade with Great Britain should be
forbidden if France revoked her decrees, and vice versa. Madison and
the Republicans believed that this would relieve the strain under
which farmers as well as merchants were now suffering. This enabled
Napoleon, in those days of slow communication, to make a pretense of
relaxing the Berlin and Milan decrees, while continuing to seize
American ships as before. England was not for a moment deceived, and
enforced the orders in council with added indignities. This conduct so
exasperated the American people that they demanded war with the
oppressor, and on June nineteenth the war of 1812 began. Napoleon's
diplomatic juggling had been entirely successful.
A year earlier the princes of the Rhenish Confederation had received
their orders. Their peoples were unresponsive, but the zeal of the
rulers overcame all opposition. The King of Saxony was grateful in a
lively sense of favors to come, and his grand duchy of Warsaw became
an armed camp, the Poles themselves expecting their national
resurrection. The prince primate's realm was erected into a grand
duchy for Eugene, whose viceroyalty was destined for the little King
of Rome, and under the stimulus of a fresh nationality the people gave
more than was demanded. Wuertemberg and Baden learned that Napoleon
"preferred enemies to uncertain friends," and both found means to
supply their respective quotas. Jerome, true to the fraternal
instincts of the Bonapartes, hesitated; but his queen was a woman of
sound sense, and both were alive to the uncertainties of tenure in
royal office, so that, receiving a peremptory summons, Westphalia fell
into line. Bavaria and Switzerland furnished their contingents as a
matter of course. Among the Germans, some hated Napoleon for his
dealings with the papacy, some as the destroyer of their petty
nationalities; some devout Protestants even thought him the
antichrist. But the great majority were in a state of expectancy, many
realizing that even the dynastic politics of Europe had been vitalized
by his advent; others, liberals like Goethe, Wieland, and Dalberg,
hoped for the complete extinction of feudalism and dynasticism before
his march.
This had already been accomplished in France, and for that reason the
peasantry and the townsfolk upheld the Empire. In Paris the upper
classes had never forgotten the Terror, and were ready for monarchy
in any form if only it brought a settled order and peace. There were
still a few radicals and many royalists, but the masses cared only for
two things, glory and security. They enjoyed the temporary repose
under a rule which protected the family, property, and in a certain
sense even religion. Family life at the Tuileries was a model, the
Emperor finding his greatest pleasure in domestic amusements, playing
billiards, riding, driving, and even romping, with his young wife,
while his tenderness for the babe was phenomenal. Still he was no
puritan, and the lapsed classes could indulge themselves in vice if
only they paid; from their purses fabulous sums were turned into the
Emperor's secret funds. Under the Continental System industry was at a
standstill, and every household felt the privation of abstaining from
the free use of sugar and other colonial wares. There was, however,
general confidence in speedy relief, and there were worse things than
waiting. The peasantry were weary of seeing their soldier sons return
from hard campaigning with neither glory nor booty, and began to
resent the conscription law, which tore the rising generation from
home while yet boys. Desertions became so frequent that a terrible law
was passed, making, first the family, then the commune, and lastly the
district, responsible for the missing men. It was enforced mercilessly
by bodies of riders known as "flying columns." Finally, every
able-bodied male was enrolled for military service in three
classes--ban, second ban, and rear ban, the last including all between
forty and sixty. Nevertheless, and in spite of all other hardships,
there was much enthusiasm at the prospect of a speedy change for the
better. In March, 1812, Napoleon could count not far from four hundred
and seventy-five thousand men ready for the field. Berthier was
retained as chief of staff. In the guard were forty-seven thousand
picked men, the old guard under Lefebvre, the young guard under
Bessieres. Davout's corps numbered seventy-two thousand, all French;
Oudinot's thirty-seven thousand, French and Swiss; Ney's thirty-nine
thousand, French and Wuertembergers; Prince Eugene's forty-five
thousand, French and Italians; Poniatowski's thirty-six thousand, all
Poles; Gouvion Saint-Cyr's twenty-five thousand, all Bavarians;
Regnier's seventeen thousand, all Saxons; Vandamme's eighteen
thousand, Hessians and Westphalians; Macdonald's thirty-two thousand,
Prussians and Poles. Murat commanded the cavalry reserve of four corps
under Nansouty, Montbrun, Grouchy, and Latour-Maubourg respectively,
and numbering in all forty thousand. In addition to this majestic
array there were thirty thousand Austrians under Schwarzenberg, and
the ninth corps of thirty-three thousand French and Germans under
Victor was to follow. "I have never made greater preparations," the
Emperor wrote to Davout.