Austerlitz

Napoleon Dominates Europe

When the news reached England of Napoleon’s victory over the combined armies of Russia and Austria at Austerlitz on 2 December, 1805, William Pitt, England’s great liberal minded Tory Prime Minister, who was, like Churchill in 1940 against Hitler, the tireless animator of his country in the grim struggle against Napoleon, pointed to a map of Europe on the wall of his room and said: “Roll up that map, we shall not need it these ten years.” Pitt, it was said, died of Austerlitz, though in truth he was a sick man and weakened by his exertions.

The victory seemed to show the hopelessness of resisting Napoleon and the French armies of the Revolution.

Napoleon, it will be remembered, had been created General of the Army of Italy by the Directory which had taken power in France after the Terror and the fall of Robespierre. At the age of twenty-eight, he had won a series of brilliant battles against the Austrians in Italy. Already the French Republic feared England the most of all its enemies, and Napoleon when appointed commander-in-chief decided to strike at the British Empire through the Middle East and India.

In 1798 he landed in Egypt. The expedition was a failure largely because the British controlled the Mediterranean, but it nevertheless added to Napoleon’s glory. The spectacle of a French general entering Jerusalem and reading the Bible to his officers in Nazareth touched the historical imagination of the French people. Here was a mighty conqueror emulating the exploits of the Crusaders of St Louis. Napoleon once spent a long time gazing at the Sphinx. “What did it mean to you?” he was asked. “It is sad, like all greatness,” he replied.

When Napoleon came back to France in 1799 he found that the Russians and Austrians had won back northern Italy. The Direc­tory lacked vigour and was too commonplace a system of govern­ment to satisfy the excited French people. Napoleon was made First Consul by a coup d’etat. He reconquered Italy at once, winning the great battle of Marengo and once more in Germany and Flanders as well French armies were everywhere victorious.

When, in 1801, Napoleon forced the Emperor of Austria to sign the Treaty of Luneville, France’s frontiers reached the Rhine and France was surrounded by Republics which she had created, the Republics of Lombardy and Liguria, the Helvetic (Switzerland) and the Batavian Republic which embraced Flanders and Holland. The great position of France was not only due to Napoleon’s genius but to the effect of the Revolution on the minds of men, and the support France aroused from European progressives.

On 18 May, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of the French by the Pope in Notre Dame, taking the crown from the Pope’s hands and putting it on his own head as Charlemagne had done in a.d. 800. The pompous ceremony took place a little more than eleven years after the last anointed king of France had had his head severed by the guillotine. Six years later, the new emperor was, like the last Bourbon king, to marry a daughter of the Emperor of Austria, a Hapsburg of the oldest ruling house in Europe, and a very similar marriage contract was to be drawn up.

In the course of the next few years, when continental Europe was to He at his mercy, the Emperor Napoleon was to make his brothers kings, and his marshals were to become princes and dukes. To most of the French people the Napoleonic Empire seemed to grow normally out of the Revolution. Imperial titles did not offend. What the Revolution had been fighting was a system of government by an absolute monarch with a Court and a regime which had given immense privileges to nobles and clergy. Napoleon, his family and his marshals had nothing to do with the old order; he had risen to power and won the admiration of the nation as a servant of the Revolution.

Two months before his Coronation, Napoleon had caused the young Duke of Enghien, a Bourbon prince of the blood-royal, to be kidnapped from Germany on the flimsiest of accusations. The duke was summarily shot. It was convenient from every point of view to show the French people that the emperor was a convinced regicide and as anti-royalist as the majority of the nation. The empire was continuing the Revolution and was giving it order, authority and stability. The creation of the Consulate and then of the empire had been put to popular vote by referendum and approved by enormous majorities.

In 1802 England and France signed the Treaty of Amiens which left France with her continental possessions and her client states and England with vast overseas conquests, including South Africa taken from the Dutch. At this moment, Napoleon knew that he was capable of vanquishing over and over again the professional armies of the dynasties. England was the only adversary he had to fear and he had been unable to dispute her command of the seas.

Admiral Duncan had destroyed in 1797 the Dutch fleet on which Napoleon counted; Nelson in 1798 had blown Napoleon’s own fleet out of the water at the battle of the Nile, and put an end to any success of his Middle East expedition; and Nelson again in 1801 had struck at the Danish fleet at anchor before Copenhagen lest it should be used to further French designs.

It is possible that if Napoleon had decided to work for peace in 1802 and to make his dynasty secure, he might have succeeded. But he would have had to sacrifice much to England, including the abandonment of French control over the Low Countries, and he was not the man to make these sacrifices. Perhaps Napoleon lacked the very highest gifts of statesmanship; he underestimated the importance of sea power and also failed to understand the force of national feeling which sooner or later was to follow on his juggling with European territories.

Napoleon, as much as the British, decided that the Treaty was only an armed truce. In 1804, British subsidies once again succeeded in getting the armies of Austria, Russia and Prussia in action against France. Napoleon had gathered at Boulogne and along the Channel coast an army of two hundred thousand men who for nearly two years were to await the signal that the French navy had temporarily obtained control of the Channel and that they could cross. Admiral Villeneuve at one time gave Nelson and the British blockade the slip and French hopes were high; but by the summer of 1805 Villeneuve had slunk back into Cadiz harbour. The invasion was called off.

Napoleon took command of the armies in Germany. On the day that Napoleon won his first victory at Ulm against the Austrians, Admiral Nelson with twenty-seven ships of the line utterly destroyed the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. Britain’s sea-power was in fact to prove the doom of Napoleon. But this was not fully perceived in London. Austerlitz outweighed Trafalgar, which had, in any case, witnessed the sad death of Nelson.

The Emperor of Russia, the chivalrous Alexander I, and William Pitt, both had the greatest hope of crushing Napoleon at Austerlitz once and for all. Napoleon’s armies after the abandonment of the invasion of England had marched east and had surrounded and captured an Austrian army at Ulm On the Bavarian frontier. This easy victory had encouraged Napoleon to enter Vienna, in spite of the fact that there was a large Austrian force in the Tyrol on his right flank and another in Bohemia on his left, and the main Russian and Austrian armies, commanded by the two emperors, to the east of Vienna in Moravia, near Olmutz. The army of the two emperors alone was larger than Napoleon’s force. Unlike the constantly defeated Austrians, the Russians had defeated the French in Italy in 1798 and were full of confidence.

By advancing towards Olmutz, Napoleon seemed to be falling into a trap. The two emperors, whose army was drawn up on some hills of which Austerlitz was the centre, had only to wait for the other Austrian armies or even perhaps the Prussians to march to join them whilst Napoleon, liable to be harassed by a hostile population at the slightest reverse, waited in front of them or tried to attack a strong position held by stronger forces than his own. Napoleon advanced across the plain in front of Austerlitz and then appeared to hesitate. He sent envoys to the Czar on a mission of courtesy. As he had hoped, this mission was returned and the Russian visitors noticed that Napoleon was about to retreat and that there were signs of great confusion in the camp.

On the day following the Russian visit, 1 December, Napoleon exclaimed rapturously, “That army is mine/’ The Russian general Kutosoff, a wise if somewhat somnolent general, did not want to attack Napoleon until the Austrian reinforcements had arrived. He was over-ruled, however, by the Austrian generals and the young Russian entourage of the Emperor Alexander. A large part of the Russian and Austrian troops now began to leave the hill-tops and reinforce the left wing of the allied army and to march on to the flat land. They were, in other words, going to give battle on the plain.

Never had the morale of the French been at a higher point. The long tradition of victories was reinforced by the recent Austrian debacle at Ulm and by the pleasures of the occupation of Vienna. Napoleon inspired absolute confidence. He was still only thirty-six and at the height of his powers. When he went round the battle-lines that night, an old grenadier said to him: “Only promise us that you will keep yourself out of the line of fire.” “I shall be with the reserve”, answered Napoleon, “until you need us.”

December 2nd began with fog and mist, to the delight of the Austrians and Russians who thought they would complete their manoeuvre without the French seeing what they were doing. But suddenly the sun with uncommon brightness came through the mist, the sun of Austerlitz. It was in this blazing sun that Napoleon at once sent a huge cavalry force under Marshal Soult into the gap left between the centre and the left of the Austro-Russian battle-front. This charge completely severed the enemy’s centre from his left. It was then that Napoleon attacked the enemy’s centre above which, on the highest point of the hill, the two emperors were watching the battle.

After a violent struggle which lasted for a couple of hours the French drove the Austrian troops away to the Austro-Russian right whilst the two emperors left the field. The French had also begun to attack the right, but now with French artillery halfway up the hills and firing down on the Russo-Austrian squares the issue was never in doubt.

There was suddenly a general panic flight, the Russians and Austrians fleeing across a number of small frozen lakes. French cannon-balls broke the ice, and in this last part of the battle it is said some twenty thousand men perished from cannon fire and drowning. The two emperors were now in flight with some fragments of their army. Some twenty thousand prisoners were taken in this great battle together with fifty cannon and all the standards of the Imperial Russian Guard.

Austerlitz did not mark the height of Napoleon’s glory. He was to go on winning battles. The next year he won a crushing victory over the Prussians at Jena and defeated the Austrians at Friedland in 1807. But Austerlitz went to Napoleon’s head. He imposed a crushing peace on Austria as on Prussia, thereby showing that he was determined no longer to conciliate Europe but to dominate it. Austria lost all her territory in Germany and Italy; it was to be the end of the Holy Roman Empire. From Venice which he annexed, and from Naples where he installed his brother Joseph as king, Napoleon now plotted to attack Constantinople and once more, with Europe in his hands, strike at England through the east. Napoleon, the brilliant soldier and politician, had now become the all powerful emperor aspiring to world domination, which he would share with Alexander. For the Czar admired Napoleon’s genius, and at Tilsit in 1807 the two emperors swore eternal friendship and alliance. Britain’s answer was to declare war on Russia and to bombard Copenhagen. The British fleet patrolled the coasts, answering the boycott of British trade which Napoleon tried to make all Europe implement by a still more rigorous stoppage of all maritime activity on the part of the continental countries.

After Napoleon’s coronation in 1804, and far more markedly after Austerlitz, the Treaty of Pressburg and Jena, Napoleonic France began to lose that support she had received in Europe from men of all nations who saw in France the custodian of liberty from the tyranny of the past.

Obsessed with the idea of bringing down England by closing the Continent to her, Napoleon embarked, in 1806, the year of his triumph at Jena, on the conquest of Iberia. The Spanish people rose against the invader and at Baylen in 1808, to the surprise of the world, twenty-seven thousand French troops were surprised by Spanish guerrillas and forced to capitulate. Napoleon had to come personally to Spain to restore French prestige, but France’s hold on Spain was never sure. Unlike the Germans, the Spanish were not impressed by Napoleon’s victories on the Continent; indeed they had scarcely heard of them. “What mattered still more was that Portugal and Spain offered a favourable terrain for the British army under the Duke of Wellington to contribute to the downfall of Napoleon.

The success of the British forces and the Spanish guerillas encouraged Austria once more to enter the war and Napoleon was obliged to rush back from Spain. He defeated the Austrians on the Danube in three small but fierce battles and then won the great victory of Wagram. But Napoleon found that the Austrian troops at Wagram were better led and fought much more seriously than in the past. Was this a sign of the times? Why were the Tyrolese daring to revolt? The Dutch refused to submit to orders to boycott British trade and Napoleon had to recall his brother Louis, who had sided with his subjects, and to make Holland into a number of French departments. And then, in 1810, the Czar Alexander, the newly found friend, refused suddenly to close Russian and Scandinavian ports (Scandinavia and Denmark with Russia formed a northern league) and in fact opted out of the Continental blockade of Britain.

Napoleon’s decision to invade Russia in 1812 marked the beginning of his downfall. He entered Moscow at the head of the largest army he had ever mustered, an army in which Poles, Germans, Italians and Netherlanders marched with the French veterans. The Czar refused to discuss peace terms even though the capital was captured. In October, the wooden houses of Moscow began to burn and, by the middle of the month, the great retreat began.

Even though the Grande Armee was a skeleton and, one by one, the German States deserted his cause; even though Austria reentered the war, Napoleon managed to fight a brilliant campaign in Germany.

But at Leipzig in 1813 the last great French army was defeated and Napoleon had to retreat to French territory. Never better did he show what a great leader he was than in the defensive campaign in northern France; but by April, 1814, he was forced back to Paris and his marshals and generals advised him to abdicate. The victorious allies exiled him to Elba but gave him sovereignty of the island. It was the Russian Czar who insisted on this comparatively chivalrous treatment of the vanquished emperor.

In Elba Napoleon, who once boasted that he could spend five hundred thousand gold francs a day and had an annual income of a hundred thousand soldiers, what does a million men matter to me, he once asked, was now reduced to living off the receipts of the iron-ore mines of the tiny island, and accepted the jewels of his rich and generous sister Pauline Borghese. He was then forty five, the same age as the Duke of Wellington.