THE INVASION OF FRANCE[5]
[Footnote 5: Correspondance, Vol. XVII. Memoires du roi
Joseph. Beauchamp: Histoire des campagnes de 1814 et 1815.
Danitz: Geschichte d. Feldzugs v. 1814. Danilewsky: Der
Feldzug in Frankreich. Houssaye: 1814.]
Amazing Schemes of Napoleon for New Levies -- Attitude of the
People toward the Empire -- The Disaffected Elements --
Napoleon's Armament -- Activity of the Imperialists -- Release of
Ferdinand and the Pope -- Napoleon's Farewell to Paris -- His
Strategic Plan -- France against Europe -- The Conduct of
Bernadotte -- Murat's Defection -- Conflicting Interests of the
Allies -- Positions of the Opponents at the Outbreak of
Hostilities.
[Sidenote: 1813-14]
What happened in France between the first days of November, 1813, when
Napoleon reached St. Cloud, and the close of the year, is so
incredible that it scarcely seems to belong in the pages of sober
history. Of five hundred and seventy-five thousand Frenchmen, strictly
excluding Germans and Poles, who had been sent to war during 1812 and
1813, about three hundred thousand were prisoners or shut up in
distant garrisons, and a hundred and seventy-five thousand were dead
or missing; therefore a hundred thousand or thereabouts remained under
arms and ready for active service. By various decrees of the Emperor
and the senate, nine hundred and thirty-six thousand more were called
to arms: a hundred and sixty thousand from the classes between 1804
and 1814, whether they had once served or not; a hundred and sixty
thousand from the class of 1815; a hundred and seventy-six thousand
five hundred were to be enrolled in the regular national guard, and a
hundred and forty thousand in a home guard; finally, in a
comprehensive sweep from all the classes between 1804 and 1814
inclusive, every possible man was to be drawn. This, it was estimated,
would produce three hundred thousand more.
It is easy to exaggerate the significance of these enormous figures,
for to the layman they would seem to mean that every male capable of
bearing arms was to be taken. But this was far from being the case;
contrary to the general impression, the population of France had been
and was steadily increasing. In spite of all the butcheries of foreign
and civil wars, the number of inhabitants was growing at the rate of
half a million yearly, and the country could probably have furnished
three times the number called out. Moreover, less than a third of the
nine hundred and thirty-six thousand were ever organized, and not more
than an eighth of them fought. This disproportion between plan and
fulfilment was due partly to official incapacity or worse, partly to a
popular resistance which was not due to disaffection. It speaks
volumes for the state of the country that even the hated flying
columns, with their thorough procedure, could not find the men,
especially the fathers, husbands, and only sons, who were the solitary
supports of many families. The fields were tilled by the spades of
women and children, for there were neither horses to draw nor men to
hold the plows. Government pawn-shops were gorged, and the government
storehouses were bursting with manufactured wares for which there was
no market; government securities were worth less than half their face,
the currency had disappeared, and usury was rampant. Yet it seems
certain that four fifths of the people associated none of these
miseries with Napoleonic empire. The generation which had grown to
maturity under Napoleon saw only one side of his activities: the
majestic public works he had inaugurated, the glories of France and
the splendors of empire during the intervals of peace, the exhaustion
and abasement of her foes in a long series of splendid campaigns--all
this they associated with the imperial rule, and desired what they
supposed was a simple thing, the Empire and peace.
The other fifth was, however, thoroughly aroused. When the legislature
convened on December nineteenth, and the diplomatic correspondence was
so cleverly arranged and presented as to make the allies appear
implacable, an address to the throne was passed, amid thunderous
applause and by a large majority, which virtually called for a return
to constitutional government as the price of additional war supplies.
In sober moments even the most ardent liberals were ashamed, feeling
that this was not an opportune moment for disorganizing such
administration as there was by calls for the reform of the
constitution. Only one question was imperative, the awful
responsibility they had for the national identity. The general public
was so outraged by the spectacle that the deputies reconsidered their
action, and by a vote of two hundred and fifty-four to two hundred and
twenty-three struck out the obnoxious clause. But this did not appease
Napoleon, who made no attempt to conceal his rage, and prorogued the
chamber in scorn. His support was ample in the almost universal
conviction that at such a moment there was no time for parleying about
abstract questions of political rights; but every cavilling deputy had
some friends at home, and in a crisis where the very existence of
France was jeopardized there were agitations by the reactionary
radicals. The royalists kept silent then, and for months later,
contenting themselves with biting innuendos or witty double meanings;
drinking, for instance, to "the Emperor's last victory," when the
newspapers announced "the last victory of the Emperor."
The first conscription from the classes of 1808-1814 was thoroughly
successful, the second attempt to glean from them was an utter
failure; the effort to forestall the draft of 1815 met with
resistance, and was abandoned. It was impossible to organize the home
guards and reserves, for they rebelled or escaped, and local danger
had to be averted by local volunteers who were designated as
"sedentary" because they could not be ordered away. By the end of
January not more than twenty thousand men had been secured for general
service from all classes other than the first--at least that was
approximately the number in the various camps of instruction. In order
to arm and equip the recruits, Napoleon had recourse to his private
treasure, drawing fifty-five million francs from the vaults of the
Tuileries for that purpose. The remaining ten were transferred at
intervals to Blois. But all his treasure could not buy what did not
exist. The best military stores were in the heart of Europe; the
French arsenals could afford only antiquated and almost useless
supplies. The recruits were armed, some with shot-guns and knives,
some with old muskets, the use of which they did not know; they were
for the most part without uniforms, and wore bonnets, blouses, and
sabots. There were not half enough horses for the scanty artillery and
cavalry. Worse than all, there was no time for instruction in the
manual and tactics. On one occasion a boy conscript was found standing
inactive under a fierce musketry fire; with artless intrepidity he
remarked that he believed he could aim as well as anybody if he only
knew how to load his gun!
[Illustration: NAPOLEON IN 1813
From a painting by Aimable-Louis-Claude Pagnest.]
The disaffected, though few, were powerful and active, suborning the
prefects and civic authorities by every device, issuing proclamations
which promised anything and everything, and procuring plans of
fortified places for the allies. Talleyrand began to utter oracular
innuendos about the vindictiveness of the allies, the desertion of
Murat, the sack of Paris, and various half-truths more dangerous even
than lies. The air was so full of rumors that, although there was no
widespread revolutionary movement, there were now and then serious
panics; the town of Chaumont surrendered to a solitary Wuertemberg
horseman. But when the populace of the country at large began to
wonder who the coming Bourbon might be, and what he would take back
from the present possessors of royal and ecclesiastical estates, they
were staggered. People in the cities heard with some satisfaction the
strains of the "Marseillaise," which by order of imperial agents were
once again ground out around the streets by the hand-organs. Napoleon
walked the avenues of Paris without escort, and was wildly cheered;
the Empress and her little son were produced on public occasions with
dramatic success, and popular wit dubbed the boy conscripts by the
name of "Marie Louises." The little men showed a grim determination
and eventually a sublime courage, but they never could acquire the
veteran steadfastness which wins battles. Journals, theaters,
music-halls, and public balls were all managed in the interest of
imperial patriotism; imperial tyranny dealt ruthlessly with suspicious
characters. Yet the imperialists had their doubts, and many, like
Savary, threw an anchor to windward by storing treasure at distant
points, and sending their families to safe retreats. On the whole, the
balance of public opinion at the opening of 1814 was overwhelmingly
imperialist both in the cities and in the country. Men ardently
desired peace, but they wanted it with honor and under the Empire.
That the Empire desired peace seemed to be proved by steps for the
release of its two most important prisoners, the King of Spain and the
Pope. Wellington thought that if the former had been despatched
directly into his kingdom on December eighth, the day on which the
conditions between himself and the Emperor were signed, England would
have found the further conduct of the war impossible. Talleyrand,
already deep in royalist plots, must have been of the same opinion,
for he did not advise haste, but craftily suggested to his prisoner
that the provisional government of Spain might refuse to accept him as
king unless the treaty of release had been previously ratified by the
Cortes. Accordingly it was referred to them, and, since the liberals
desired the assent to their new constitution of a king not under
duress, by their influence it was rejected. It was not until March,
1814, that Ferdinand was unconditionally released, and this delay
proved fatal to Napoleon's interests in Spain. The liberals could no
longer fight for free institutions, because it was then clear that the
dynastic conservatism of Europe was to win a temporary victory. In
about six months King Ferdinand undid the progressive work of six
years, and Spain relapsed into absolutism and ecclesiasticism, with
all their attendant evils. Nevertheless, France interpreted the
conduct of the Emperor as indicating an earnest desire for peace, and
this feeling had been strengthened by the absolutely unconditional
release of the Pope on January twenty-second. This apparently gracious
concession was effective among the masses, who did not know, as the
Emperor did, that the allies were already on French soil.
The very next day Napoleon performed his last official act, which was
one of great courage both physical and moral. The national guard in
Paris had been reorganized, but its leaders had never been thoroughly
loyal, many of them being royalists, some radical republicans, and the
disaffection of both classes had been heightened by recent events. But
the officers were nevertheless summoned to the Tuileries; the risk was
doubled by the fact that they came armed. Drawn up in the vast chamber
known as that of the marshals, they stood expectant; the great doors
were thrown open, and there entered the Emperor, accompanied only by
his consort and their child in the arms of his governess, Mme. de
Montesquiou. Napoleon announced simply that he was about to put
himself at the head of his army, hoping, by the aid of God and the
valor of his troops, to drive the enemy beyond the frontiers. There
was silence. Then, taking in one hand that of the Empress, and leading
forward his child by the other, he continued, "I intrust the Empress
and the King of Rome to the courage of the national guard." Still
silence. After a moment, with suppressed emotion, he concluded, "My
wife and my son." No generous-hearted Frenchman could withstand such
an appeal; breaking ranks by a spontaneous impulse, the listeners
started forward in a mass, and shook the very walls with their cry,
"Long live the Emperor!" Many shed tears, and felt, as they withdrew
in respectful silence, a new sense of devotion welling up in their
hearts. On the eve of his departure, the Emperor received a numerously
signed address from the very men whose loyalty he had hitherto had
just reason to suspect.
It was four in the morning of January twenty-fifth when Napoleon left
for Chalons. From that moment he was no longer Emperor. During the
long winter nights just past he had wrought with an intensity and a
feverish activity which he had never surpassed, sparing neither
himself nor others, displaying no consideration for prejudice or
honest opposition, calling on every Frenchman to sacrifice everything
for France, to which, as he vehemently asserted, he himself was more
necessary than she to him. If he had come honestly to believe what
millions of others believed, it was little wonder; he had thenceforth
but one aim--to prove that he was, as of yore, the first general of
France, the only one able to save the country in an hour when all her
glories were falling in wreck about her. His strategic plans, immense
and intricate as was his task, were complete and excellent. The first
was intended to prevent invasion by way of Liege, the most direct line
and that which Prussia preferred. The second, which was partly
defensive, was the one eventually used against the clumsy form of
advance actually chosen by the invaders. Of the two, the former was
the more brilliant, but the second was almost as clever. By it the
Rhine bank was divided into three parts for purposes of defense.
Macdonald was stationed at Cologne to protect the lower course;
Marmont was to guard the central stretch, and they two divided between
them the remnants of the army which had been swept out of Germany;
Victor was stationed on the upper course to command the garrisons of
the great frontier fortifications and strengthen himself by the new
levies; Bertrand remained as a sort of rear post on the right bank of
the river at Kastel, opposite Mainz. All told, these generals had at
first only fifty thousand men.
The allies no sooner obtained possession of central Europe than they
outdid its recent master in every species of exaction. The countries
which had formed the Confederacy of the Rhine were compelled almost to
double the number of the contingents they had raised for France, and
to organize every fencible man into either the first or second line of
reserves, called by the old feudal terms of ban and arriere-ban. At
the same time the allies demanded and obtained new subsidies both of
money and arms from Great Britain. In the three armies of Austria,
Prussia, and Russia, as they stood on the Rhine, there were ready by
January first about two hundred and eighty-five thousand men. By the
end of February the army-lists of France, excluding the national
guards, displayed a total of six hundred and fifty thousand men; the
coalition, including England, had registered nearly a million.
Deducting forty per cent. as ample to cover all shortcomings, we may
say that France, with three hundred and ninety thousand in the ranks,
men and boys, faced Europe with six hundred thousand full-grown men.
These figures include the French armies of Catalonia, of the Pyrenees,
of Italy, and of the Netherlands, together with the garrisons in all
the strong places then held by France on both sides of the Rhine; they
also include the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian reserves, with the
national armies of Holland, Spain, and Italy.
Aside from the centrifugal forces inherent in the coalition, there was
one which threatened its disintegration: the erratic character of the
great Gascon who represented Sweden. Bernadotte's first care, after
the battle of Leipsic, was to move north and secure the long-coveted
prize of Norway. Ever mindful of the hint about a French crown, which
Alexander had thrown out as still another bait at Abo, he gave as his
parting admonition the transparent advice that the coming campaign
should be confined to a frontier invasion of France, and at Hamburg he
actually offered Davout, as the price of surrender, a safe return for
himself and his army to their native land! This was too much;
Alexander was furious, and the schemer was peremptorily ordered to
leave a sufficient investing force before the city and return with the
rest of his army to the lower Rhine. There he was suffered to remain
in idleness, the task assigned to him being that of watching the
Netherlands; two of his best corps were withdrawn from him and
assigned to Bluecher.
Nor was Napoleon free from his thorn in the flesh. In a bulletin
published by him after the retreat from Moscow was a passage which
implied some censure of Murat for his lack of stability. This both the
King of Naples and his spouse bitterly resented, the latter roundly
abusing her brother in their correspondence. This was an excellent
pretext for desertion when the general crash appeared imminent, and at
Erfurt the dashing and gallant, but weak and testy, monarch decamped.
Hastening south, he entered at once into alliance with Austria, and
then, putting himself at the head of eighty thousand Neapolitans, set
out for Rome, waging a terrific warfare of proclamations. Eugene,
too,--and this was an elemental disaster,--was virtually checkmated by
the defection of his father-in-law, the King of Bavaria, which opened
the Tyrol to the allies. All Italy was consequently lost. Augereau,
whose feeble loyalty to Napoleon was already at the vanishing-point,
had been appointed to take forty thousand conscripts, collect any
straggling soldiers he could find in southeastern France, and keep
open the door out of Italy for some or all of Eugene's veterans, with
whose assistance it was hoped the marshal could form an army for the
defense of the Vosges Mountains. But Eugene, having fought the
indecisive battle of Roverbello, and finding himself in a sorry plight
from both the military and political points of view, could send no
reinforcements until April, when finally he concluded an armistice
releasing his army. Augereau therefore found himself opposite Bubna at
Geneva with an ineffective force, and with very little heart to wield
what he had. This ended Napoleon's grand scheme for uniting the forces
of Italy, Naples, Switzerland, and France.
Prussia was now the ablest as well as the bitterest of Napoleon's
foes, Stein, Bluecher, Gneisenau, and their friends aiming at nothing
short of annihilating the Napoleonic power. This was, no doubt, due in
part to a thirst for revenge; but in the main it was due to the
longing for such a leadership in Germany as would spread abroad the
new doctrines of liberal and constitutional monarchy, in order to
restrain Austria's ever-increasing influence. The councils of the
allies presented an amusing spectacle. The Prussians urged an
immediate advance by the best line for invasion, that, namely, from
Liege and Brussels; but the Austrians, except Radetzky, drew back,
fearing Prussia almost equally with France. The Czar held the balance,
but his scales were very sensitive, inclining often toward Prussia,
but settling in the end to a compromise suggested by Schwarzenberg and
Metternich. Having imitated Napoleon in his practice of war
requisitions, the allies now determined to imitate him in contempt for
international law, and to violate Swiss neutrality. The plan which
they adopted was to throw their main army into France by way of Basel,
and thus turn the line of frowning fortresses behind the Rhine, as
well as the Vosges Mountains. Bluecher was to cross the middle Rhine,
and Buelow, with thirty thousand men, was to cooeperate with the English
troops under Graham in the Netherlands. The whole scheme was
unmilitary, but it exactly suited Metternich, who, having on January
thirteenth first learned of Bernadotte's understanding with the Czar
about the crown of France, was very uneasy. Both he and Schwarzenberg
desired to end the war on the frontier, if possible; Prussia's power
and Alexander's ambitions for European preponderance were far more
dangerous to Austria than a Napoleonic empire confined to France.
Bluecher, leaving twenty-eight thousand men before Mainz, crossed the
Saar on January ninth with forty-seven thousand; Schwarzenberg, with
the main army arrayed in four columns, two hundred and nine thousand
strong, crossed the Rhine at or near Basel and moved toward Langres.
The thin, straggling French columns began to retreat concentrically
toward Chalons on the Marne. At the opening of the second stage in the
campaign Bluecher had invested the Mosel fortresses, and was advancing,
with less than thirty thousand men, toward Arcis on the Aube;
Schwarzenberg was in and about Langres; and the French were
concentrated on a line from Vitry-le-Francois to St. Dizier. Napoleon
reached Chalons on the twenty-sixth, having left Joseph to represent
him in Paris. The wily strategist, feeble as was his strength, had
momentarily secured the advantage over his unwieldy foe, having wedged
himself between the invading armies, and being quite strong enough,
with the forty thousand soldiers in his ranks, to cope with Bluecher.