1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
At the end of the two weeks, he asked for another ten days. Then another week. At the beginning of February 1810 he was still stalling, saying that his mother objected on the grounds that Anna was too young. Napoleon, who felt insulted by the lack of enthusiasm he sensed in Alexander and was beginning to suspect that he would never agree to the match, decided to pre-empt the humiliation of a refusal by turning to Austria instead.
He had sounded out the Austrian court on the subject in a vague way in the previous year, so he could now act with speed. After reading the despatches from Caulaincourt describing Alexander’s negative response on the morning of 6 February, he summoned Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg, the Austrian ambassador in Paris, and pinned him down for a binding decision straight away. Schwarzenberg seized what he believed was a historic chance, and, overstepping his powers, gave him the reply he wanted. The courier bearing Napoleon’s letter to Alexander notifying him of the change of plan crossed with one from the Tsar bearing a letter in which he in effect refused Napoleon’s offer, explaining that his mother felt there could be no question of marrying off Anna for at least two years.
When he heard the news of Napoleon’s betrothal to Marie-Louise, Alexander assumed that he had been carrying on parallel negotiations with Austria all along, and was stung by the apparent duplicity. It is almost certain that Napoleon would have preferred to marry the Grand Duchess Anna, as it would have had tremendous resonance as a symbolic marriage of East and West reuniting the two halves of the Roman Empire. But as his marriage to Marie-Louise went ahead, absorbing the attention of Europe with its pomp and éclat, Alexander was made to look ridiculous in front of his own people. He had stood up for the entente with Napoleon in the face of almost universal opposition at home, only to end up in the role of jilted party. And the marital junketing going on in Paris appeared to hide a deeper threat.
At the marriage feast the Austrian Chancellor Count Metternich, who was representing his imperial master, stood up and raised his glass ‘To the King of Rome!’, thereby expressing the hope that Napoleon would produce an heir, and ceding the old imperial title to the house of Bonaparte. From St Petersburg it looked very much as though France and Austria were entering into an alliance even closer than the special relationship forged at Tilsit. An unpleasant sign of the way public opinion was swinging was that a Russian loan which Alexander was trying to float on the Paris exchange in order to raise much-needed funds suddenly found no subscribers. And the new situation had other implications.1
When Alexander was approached on the subject of the marriage of his sister, he had let it be known that he would make his agreement conditional on a convention ruling out forever the restoration of a Kingdom of Poland. Napoleon had responded positively, quite happy to trade Poland for Anna. But now Alexander had lost his main bargaining counter in this matter of crucial importance.
Napoleon’s creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 had, in effect, introduced the first material conflict of interest between France and Russia. The new political unit inevitably raised the possibility of a restoration of the Kingdom of Poland. Such a restoration would entail the loss by Russia of some if not all of her acquisitions at the expense of Poland in the partitions – an area of 463,000 square kilometres with a population of some seven million.
The creation of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw had also raised the spectre of another threat to Russia through the introduction of the Code Napoléon. This transformed social relationships and would lead to the full emancipation of the peasants. The landowners of Russia, 95 per cent of whose population were serfs, could not look on such a neighbour with equanimity.
The Poles, whether they were citizens of the Grand Duchy or not, certainly saw it as the nucleus of a restored Kingdom of Poland, and there was much dreaming and plotting in provinces still under Russian or Austrian rule. When Austria went to war with France in 1809, one of her armies had seized Warsaw but had then been obliged to fall back, pursued by the Poles, who proceeded to march into Galicia, a part of Poland annexed by Austria.
In the peace settlement, Napoleon had allowed the Poles to incorporate a small part of the liberated territory into the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. This alarmed the Austrians, who feared they might in time have to give up the rest, and annoyed the Poles, who felt they should have been allowed to take back the whole area they had liberated. They were, moreover, outraged by the fact that Napoleon had also ceded a piece of it to Russia as a sweetener.
But the Russians were not mollified. Caulaincourt reported that everyone in St Petersburg, from the Tsar down, was adamant that no part of Galicia should be added to the Grand Duchy, as this would set a dangerous precedent. ‘All the news coming from Moscow and the provinces confirms that this agitation is universal: it is necessary to take up arms and die, they are saying, rather than suffer the reunification of Galicia with the Grand Duchy,’ he wrote. And the issue transcended loyalty to the Tsar, whom many did not trust.* ‘There is not the slightest restraint in the allegations being made against the Emperor Alexander; there is open talk of assassinating him,’ reported Caulaincourt. ‘I have not seen minds so agitated since my arrival in Petersburg.’2
Napoleon never had any intention of restoring Poland – all his statements to the contrary date from later, when he was trying to keep the Poles on his side or to pluck straws of self-justification from the wind. He therefore proposed to Alexander that they sign a joint convention binding themselves not to encourage the Poles in their dreams. As a sign of his discouragement of Polish aspirations, he sent the best units of the army of the Grand Duchy, the Legion of the Vistula, to fight in Spain.
But Alexander produced a draft convention which would excise the words ‘Poland’ and ‘Poles’ from all official correspondence, ban the wearing of Polish decorations and forbid the use of Polish emblems in the Grand Duchy. He wanted Napoleon to pledge that he would never allow the restoration of Poland, and that he would take up arms against the Poles if they attempted it. Napoleon replied that while he could declare his opposition to such a revival, he would not and could not undertake to hinder it. The wording suggested by Russia was nonsensical, as it bound France to pledges she would be in no position to carry out. He pointed out that he could have re-established Poland if he had wished to in 1807, and added the whole of Galicia to the Grand Duchy in 1809, but had not done so because he had no intention of doing so. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of Poles had fought loyally alongside the French for over a decade, inspired by their hopes of a free motherland and by France’s sympathy to their cause. To sign the text suggested by Russia would ‘compromise the honour and dignity of France’, as Napoleon put it to Champagny.3
Alexander continued to insist on his draft rather than the more general one proposed by Napoleon. Hoping to put pressure on the Emperor to acquiesce, he dropped hints that he might not find it so easy to keep up the blockade against Britain without wholehearted support from him. But his increasingly urgent insistence with regard to the convention, as well as the suspicions he voiced, revealed how little he trusted Napoleon, who began to wonder what lay behind it all. ‘One cannot conceive what aim Russia might have in mind in refusing a version which accords her everything she wants in favour of one which is dogmatic, irregular, contrary to common prudence, and which, ultimately, the Emperor cannot subscribe to without dishonouring himself,’ he wrote to Champagny on 24 April 1810.4
On 30 June, when Champagny brought a communication from St Petersburg with a list of complaints and a renewed demand that he sign the Russian draft of the convention, Napoleon lost his temper. He summoned the Russian ambassador, Prince Kurakin. ‘What does Russia mean by such language?’ he demanded. ‘Does she want war? Why these continual complaints? Why these insulting suspicions? If I had wished to restore Poland, I would have said so and would not have withdrawn my troops from Germany. Is Russia trying to prepare me for her defection? I will be at war with her the day she makes peace with England.’ He then dictated a letter to Caulaincourt in St Petersburg telling him that if Russia was going to start blackmailing him and using the Polish question as an excuse to seek a rapprochement