1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow. Adam Zamoyski
it with strictness.
Adding insult to injury, Napoleon decided to recoup some of the cost to France of the system at the expense of others. He took a leaf from the smugglers’ book and licensed a number of merchants to import goods from Britain (for which they paid a hefty price to his treasury), and these goods were then exported overland, many of them to Russia. Such procedures left Alexander with little option but to defy the system openly. On 31 December 1810 he issued an ukaz opening Russian ports to American ships and at the same time imposing hefty tariffs on (French) manufactured goods imported overland into Russia. British goods were soon pouring into Germany from Russia. The Continental System was in tatters. Yet Napoleon refused to accept this. ‘The Continental System is uppermost in his mind, he is more taken up with it than ever,’ noted his secretary Baron Fain early in 1811; ‘too much so perhaps!’15
In his determination to control all points of import, Napoleon annexed the Hanseatic ports. In January 1811 he did the same with the Duchy of Oldenburg, whose ruler was the father of Alexander’s brother-in-law. He did offer him another German province as compensation, but this was refused. Alexander was outraged, and felt personally insulted – his supposed ally was now dethroning members of his family, thereby reinforcing the view, widely held in Russia, that Tilsit was not an alliance but a subjection. He felt he had to act, if only to safeguard his position at home. ‘Blood must flow again,’ he told his sister Catherine.16
On 6 January 1811 he wrote once more to Czartoryski, asking him to try persuading the Poles to accept him as their liberator and restorer. His Minister of War General Barclay de Tolly was already drawing up plans for a strike into the Grand Duchy followed by an advance into Prussia to link up with the Prussian forces.* In a second letter to Czartoryski, Alexander detailed the troops he had already massed on the border to support the operation: 106,500 in the front line supported by a second line of 134,000 men, and a third army of 44,000 men supplemented by 80,000 recruits who had already finished their training. These forces could, in case of need, be supplemented with a few divisions from the army operating against the Turks in Moldavia. ‘There can be no doubt that Napoleon is trying to provoke Russia into a break with him, hoping that I will make the mistake of being the aggressor,’ he explained. ‘It would indeed be a mistake in the present circumstances, and I am determined not to make it – but everything would look different if the Poles were to rally to me. Reinforced with the 50,000 men whom I could count on from them, by the 50,000 Prussians who could then join me without risk, and by the moral revolution which would unfailingly result in Europe, I would be in a position to reach the Oder without striking a blow.’17
Alexander’s troop movements could hardly be kept secret, and by the summer of 1811 the forthcoming war was being widely discussed all over Russia. His agitation in Poland, as well as the soundings his diplomats were taking in Vienna and Berlin, were no secret either. This has prompted some to conclude that he was in fact bluffing. But whether he meant to attack at this stage or not, he had taken a step which could not fail to lead to armed confrontation.18
Napoleon had to take the threat seriously. He had already been alerted by Poniatowski to Russian troop concentrations along the border of the Grand Duchy in the autumn of 1810, and he was desperately aware of the weakness of his forces in the area. He immediately instructed commanders on the spot to draw in exposed units and supply dumps against a surprise attack, and designated a fallback position along the Vistula while he set about strengthening his forces in Poland and Germany. He began bombarding Marshal Davout, in command of the French troops in northern Germany, with letters telling him to fortify strongpoints and put his men on a war footing. On 3 January 1811 he began regrouping his forces with the aim of strengthening the front line. ‘I considered that war had been declared,’ he later affirmed. Most people in France too considered it only a matter of time. ‘There is much talk of war here; sooner or later it must come to that, and now the time seems propitious,’ an officer of the Chevau-Légers of the Imperial Guard wrote from the depot at Chantilly to his sister on 9 April 1811.19
At the same time, Napoleon did everything he could to avert a conflict. In February he instructed Caulaincourt to demand an interview with Alexander and his Foreign Minister Rumiantsev, and to assure them that he wanted the alliance to continue, and that he would never make war on Russia unless she were to ally herself with Britain. In April he repeated this in his instructions to General Marquis Jacques Law de Lauriston, the new ambassador he was sending to St Petersburg to replace Caulaincourt, who had finally been recalled. Napoleon also took every opportunity to tell Kurakin and any other senior Russian figure who passed through Paris that he wanted peace and friendship with their country. ‘I have no wish to make war on Russia,’ he declared to Prince Shuvalov during an interview at Saint Cloud in May 1811. ‘It would be a crime on my part, for I would be making war without a purpose, and I have not yet, thanks to God, lost my head, I am not mad.’ To Colonel Aleksandr Ivanovich Chernyshev, a trusted aide-de-camp whom the Tsar had sent to Paris a couple of times with letters for Napoleon, he repeatedly stated that he had no intention of fatiguing himself or his soldiers on behalf of Poland, and ‘he formally declared and swore by everything he held holiest in the world that the re-establishment of that kingdom was the very least of his concerns’.20
But Alexander could not lay aside the Polish problem so easily. When he realised that he could not count on the Poles to undo Napoleon, he reverted to the idea of cementing his relationship with him over the body of the Polish question. Rumiantsev proposed to Caulaincourt just before the latter left Russia that they put the Duchy of Oldenburg and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw into a sack, shake it about, and see what dropped out. What he was suggesting was that Napoleon indemnify his uncle by marriage for the loss of Oldenburg with a piece of the Grand Duchy. Napoleon responded with anger to this proposal, and refused to consider it, although he did at one stage contemplate giving the throne of a restored Kingdom of Poland to Alexander’s brother Constantine as a solution.21
When Caulaincourt’s travelling chaise rolled into Paris on the morning of 5 June 1811, it drove straight on to Saint Cloud, where Napoleon was staying. Within minutes of it having trundled into the courtyard, Caulaincourt was ushered into Napoleon’s presence, in which he spent the next seven hours. His account of the interview, noted down that very evening, provides an illuminating insight into Napoleon’s thinking at this crucial stage.22
Caulaincourt told Napoleon that in his view Alexander desired peace but could not be expected to subject his people to the rigours of the Continental System, and needed reassurance on the subject of Poland. He also warned Napoleon that Alexander was no longer the malleable youth of Tilsit, and that he would not let himself be intimidated. Alexander had told him that if it came to war, he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital, as the Emperor Francis and King Frederick William had done. Napoleon brushed this aside, saying that Alexander was ‘false and weak’, and suggested that Caulaincourt had been taken in by him.
He himself was suspicious of the Tsar’s intentions, believing that he would pounce on the Grand Duchy of Warsaw the moment his back was turned. He repeatedly affirmed that he was no Louis XV – referring to France’s feeble response to the Russian partition of her Polish ally in the eighteenth century. The conversation went round in circles, with Napoleon eagerly asking Caulaincourt’s opinion yet rejecting it when it was given. He was, in fact, probably right to think that Caulaincourt had been lulled into believing in Alexander’s pacific intentions, yet he could not dismiss his arguments outright.
One thing that did seem to make a profound impression on Napoleon was one of the Tsar’s statements as reported by Caulaincourt. ‘If fate decides against me on the field of battle,’ Alexander had said, ‘I would