In less than 20 years, a little Corsican—a nobody in the
army of his adopted country, France—had come to cast such a mighty shadow over
Europe that kingdoms fell, worldly-wide counselors quailed at a baleful glance
from him, and foreign ministers tried vainly to cobble together shifting
alliances that could defeat him on at least one battlefield.
Yet in a fit of pique, while still engaged with
enemies in Western Europe, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte led his feared Grande Armee
of more than half a million strong on pontoon boats across the Niemen River from
Poland into Lithuania, on their way to Russia, from June 24 to 26. The invasion of Russia--planned for the last year and a half, begun with soldiers in
magnificent apparel loudly singing French patriotic songs--would unravel by the
fall, depleting his forces and leading to his eventual loss of power.
It has not escaped historians’ notice that the two
masters of the European land mass over the last 2½ centuries, Napoleon and
Adolf Hitler, both began to fall to earth with foolhardy invasions of Russia.
The similarities between the two were, in fact, so extensive and pronounced
that they became the subject of an entire book, Desmond Seward’s Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography (1990).
Certainly, the same question—What was he thinking?—arises from both Napoleon’s 1812 campaign and
Hitler’s in 1941. Both invasions occurred when the strongmen, though they had
continually outguessed opponents on the field, still had not overcome opponents
in the West (Napoleon’s: a force of British soldiers and Spanish guerrillas,
led by the Duke of Wellington; Hitler’s: Great Britain, in North Africa). Both strongmen were determined to strike at
Russian rulers they deemed either vulnerable or downright treacherous. Both
ignored pointed warnings that they would face a brutal Russian winter. And both
thrust deeply into Russia before slowing down and suffering stinging losses
from which they would never recover.
Yet the story of Napoleon’s Russian misadventure is
astonishing in and of itself, even without the comparison to Hitler. His
motives, and those of his opponent, Czar Alexander I, were more complex than
the Nazi dictator’s, and the losses were, proportionately speaking, as
staggering as those endured by Germans under their ruler in WWII.
To start with: Napoleon was peeved at Alexander’s
vacillating attitude toward the Continental System, a blockade in which all trade with Great Britain was forbidden.
After a defeat at the hands of Napoleon in the Battle of Friedland, Alexander
concluded the Treaty of Tilsit with
him, agreeing to leave most of Europe to the French leader while he maintained
a free hand in dealing with Finland, Sweden and the Ottoman Empire. Once foes,
the two took to proclaiming their brotherhood to each other, united by disdain
for Great Britain.
It didn’t last long. Alexander, discovering that the
freeze on British trade was having an adverse effect on the economy of his own
country, too, looked the other way when Russian merchants began to break the
blockade, angering Napoleon.
What may have annoyed the French emperor even more,
however, was the Romanov dynasty’s refusal to facilitate his offer of marriage
to Alexander’s youngest sister, Grand Duchess Anna. Like Britain’s Henry VIII,
Napoleon’s fear that a lack of an heir would produce discord in France after
his death led him to contemplate divorce from the Empress Josephine.
Additionally, marriage between two royal houses would enable him to consolidate
power in Europe—something he was in a great hurry to do, following one battle
after another.
But Alexander’s father, Czar Paul, had given his
wife, Dowager Empress Maria, right of approval over prospective grooms for her
daughters—and Maria could not abide the thought that her youngest daughter
would marry someone she regarded as a scoundrel. Additionally, a rumor appears
to have reached her—spread by Napoleon’s soon-to-be-ex, Josephine—that the
general, all-conquering on the battlefield, was rather less triumphant in the
boudoir. (Incidentally, the saying that spread after this choice bit of gossip—“Not
Tonight, Josephine!”—became the initial, ultimately rejected title for one of
cinema’s great comedies: Billy Wilder’s Some
Like It Hot.) The Dowager Empress—and, hence, Alexander—refused to consent
to a union so disadvantageous.
Imagine you’re Napoleon. Not only has your
diplomatic maneuver been stymied, but also your very manhood has been
questioned. (And unfairly maligned, at that:
After his marriage to Josephine was dissolved, he sired a child.) How would you react?
Napoleon, guessing the outcome, went off and married
Maria Louisa of Austria. But he was still furious over the slight from the
Romanovs. And Alexander, already concerned about this reaction to the
matrimonial mess, grew worried as he saw the man he had once marveled at
massing more and more troops in Poland, just beyond his sphere of influence.
Faced with Napoleon’s blustering about the
Continental System as well as these latest military maneuvers, Alexander
carefully went over with one of his diplomats what he wanted to convey to the
French emperor: France might have
better-trained troops and more skilled generals, but Napoleon could never hope
to conquer Russia. In fact, the farther he penetrated inland, the more likely
his defeat at the hands of a vicious winter.
Napoleon ignored the warning and thrust his army
into Russia. It seemed like a juggernaut, but that was a bit deceptive—only
two-fifths were French. The other soldiers, as well-trained as they were, were
not as highly motivated to fight for their country.
Alexander’s Minister of War, Barclay de Tolly, adopted a “Fabian” strategy (named for the
ancient Roman general Quintus Maximus Verrucosus Fabius) of avoiding pitched
battles and frontal assaults in favor of a war of attrition. In the American
Revolution, George Washington’s patient implementation of this strategy bore
positive results at Yorktown.
The strategy was meant to minimize the Russian
Army’s huge liabilities, which, as summarized in Curtis Cate’s fine history of
the campaign, The War of the Two Emperors, included the following:
*archaic army regulations dating back to Czar Peter
the Great in 1716;
*widespread gambling, drunkenness, and dissipation
among the officers;
*foot soldiers, taken from the vast population of
serfs, recruited by their masters for 25 years—and, consequently, with low
morale;
*inadequate food that left soldiers so weak they
could not withstand disease or low marches;
*field artillery forces commanded not by skilled,
trained officers, but by favorites of the hierarchy.
Again, Napoleon was warned about the nature of the
strategy facing him. Again, he chose to plunge ahead, sure he could carry all
before him.
Speed was required to make Napoleon’s strategy of
enveloping the Russian army work, but that was precisely what he could not
achieve in the coming campaign. His
opponent would simply pull back, denying him the decisive battle he wanted. His
men became exhausted from the increasingly dire conditions of the march (clouds
of dust that, after downpours of rain, could turn roads into mudfields; dying
horses; mosquitoes; dysentery; etc).
Napoleon regularly pushed his men to their physical
limits (e.g., their heavy wool uniforms made them wilt in the early summer
heat). But the supreme strategist of the era had made a great error, and
continued to do so, as he pursued an enemy that would never really give him the
fight he wanted.
Most important, he lost time. A campaign that began
in summer heat was continually delayed. After the Russian Army left Moscow with
the city in flames, he waited for weeks for a surrender that never came,
leaving him less time to pull out of the nation before the Russian winter.
The names of the battles in the subsequent
campaign—Smolensk, Borodino, Maloyaroslavets, Berezina—would enter Russian
legend, most memorably in Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel, War and Peace. The truth, though, was that the campaign was marked
by terrible mistakes and hideous casualties on the part of generals on both
sides. (The commander that Alexander eventually appointed to lead his armies in
the field, General Mikhail Kutusov, pursued the withdrawing Napoleon in a
leisurely manner that enabled the French emperor to escape utter destruction.)
Once Napoleon straggled home to France, John Quincy
Adams, serving as America’s ambassador to Russia, remarked of the campaign that
there was “nothing like it in history since the days of Xerxes.”
The toll on Napoleon’s army was astonishing. By
mid-January, the once-Grande Armee—now
placed under the command of General Joachim Murat—numbered a mere 40,000
organized troops and another 20,000 stragglers—physical, and often mental,
shells of their old selves. In another year, Napoleon would be forced from his throne following another defeat. Even an escape from a prison at Elba could not regain the domination of the continent he once had, as the Duke of Wellington and his allies defeated him, at last, at Waterloo in 1815.
(The image depicts Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, in a painting by Adolph Northen.)
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