The Illustrious Dead Read online

  Napoleon’s debut was a perfect illustration of his tactical brilliance as a force multiplier. In the first Italian campaign, he took a demoralized, ill-equipped collection of 100,000 soldiers and led them on a breathtaking series of victories, cutting the Piedmontese-Austrian enemy into its component parts and then chasing, catching, and defeating each segment in turn. He captured 160,000 men, 500 cannon, 39 ships, and wagon-trains worth of booty, including Michelangelos and Titians. Like many geniuses, he seemed to have no apprenticeship. General Napoleon emerged onto the world stage fully formed.

  AS HE REVOLUTIONIZED THE big-picture aspect of war, Napoleon became a master at motivating the individual soldier. “You must speak to his soul in order to electrify him,” he famously said. But his attention went deeper than oratory. He remembered hundreds and hundreds of his troops’ names, tweaked their ears and joked with them during reviews, led them brilliantly, and promoted and rewarded them on the spot for acts of bravery that would have gone unnoticed under another general.

  Stoked by a feeling of personal devotion to their leader, his soldiers did things that no other men in modern European warfare had done, things that modern Navy SEALs would struggle to equal. “The belief that they were invincible made them invincible,” remarked Karl von Funck, a German officer on Napoleon’s staff. “Just as the belief that they were sure to be beaten in the end paralyzed the enemy’s sprits and efforts.” During a stretch of four days during the first Italian campaign, one division under the former cabin boy André Messéna, the son of a tanner risen to general, fought three brutal pitched battles on successive days, marched nearly sixty miles through darkness and snow, and killed or captured thousands of the enemy. Messéna’s division helped Napoleon turn a competent Austrian force of 48,000 men into a terrified mob of 13,000 in a matter of 120 hours. This was not an isolated incident: Napoleon raised the standard of individual performance in the Grande Armée to levels thought unachievable before he arrived.

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  BY 1811 THE EMPEROR was the undisputed master of the Continent, with only the Portuguese, the Spanish rebels, and the old bugbear of England still providing outright resistance to his dominion. By that time, too, the patina of his early rhetoric had been rubbed through and now what Europe saw, by and large, was bright steel: Napoleon’s promise to free those he conquered had gone unfulfilled. He was more and more a traditional conqueror.

  By seeking further territories, Napoleon was reverting to a native form. From the days of the illustrious “Sun King,” Louis XIV, in the late seventeenth century, the French army was considered to be the vanguard of a progressive society conquering backward nations in order to bring them freedom, art, and science. For over a hundred years before the ascent of Napoleon, France had seen itself as the citadel of civilization. As expansionists and Christian visionaries would claim throughout American history, empire building was more than an economic good. It was a duty.

  The makers of the French Revolution called a pause in the acquisition of colonies and satellites, asking for an end to all “wars of conquest.” But Napoleon, driven by a new utopian ardor, rampaging personal ambition, and the need to safeguard his borders, reignited the drive to empire. “The genie of liberty,” Napoleon wrote, “which has rendered the Republic since its birth, the arbiter of all Europe, wishes to see it mistress of faraway seas and foreign lands.” The 1798 invasion of Egypt had been disguised as a scientific mission to rediscover the secrets of the ancient world. But by 1812 the hostile response of many of the recipients of their “liberation” had hardened French attitudes into something far older and more recognizable: what one historian called “egotistical nationalism.” Success had proved to the French that they were better and stronger than their rivals, and that they deserved whatever they could take. By the time they headed for Russia, the banner of intellectual and cultural progress was faded and torn.

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  THE NORMATIVE NINETEENTH-century leader of a European empire would have been more than satisfied with Napoleon’s achievements. His enemies were chastened and his empire at least reasonably secure. Napoleon saw things differently. Five-eighths of the world’s surface—the oceans—was controlled by his enemy, England, whose navy outmatched France’s in every way. His ally, Russia, “the barbarian North,” was slipping outside of his sphere, having recently broken its agreement to stop English ships from entering its harbors and trading with its merchants, a key defection in Napoleon’s intent to strangle England commercially before defeating it militarily.

  Bonaparte didn’t compare himself to his contemporaries, none of whom (except perhaps for the French diplomat Talleyrand) could match his intellect or energy. Instead, he saw himself in a world-historical continuum, with Alexander the Great and the Caesars of Rome as his peers. “I am the successor,” Napoleon said, “not of Louis XVI, but of Charlemagne.” He believed that he had been chosen to remake human society. To do that, first he must grasp and then control the levers of power. Ruthlessly, if necessary.

  To accept peace and turn to the work of civic administration (which he always claimed that he yearned to take up full-time) would be to spurn his own gifts. Napoleon was enough a child of the Revolution to see warfare not only as a practical means to power but as a test of himself as a whole man. He believed that every person should exhaust his possibilities, and his were near-infinite. To turn away before a perfect empire was created, an empire stronger and more enlightened than any that had gone before, was unacceptable.

  England for the moment was out of reach. But Russia, too obstinate and too powerful for its own good, was not.

  ALEXANDER I OF RUSSIA was much closer to a recognizable nineteenth-century monarch than his counterpart in Paris: bright but intellectually lazy; an aesthete who played at military affairs and never really mastered the basics; a vain man not cut out for leadership who could nevertheless on very rare occasions take a position and hold it against everything. Raised in the hothouse climate of the royal palace at Tsarskoye Selo, Alexander had led a cosseted life unsettled only by the murderous strains between his father and grandmother. He was more fluent in English and French than he was in his native language and was completely unfamiliar with the Russia of the steppes or the brutal degradation of the serfs on the estates. Napoleon would say later that he found Alexander to be deeply intelligent but that there was a piece of his character missing. The tsar rarely had the will to carry out intentions to the end, no matter how bitter. Deeply curious, he read prodigiously, but rarely finished a book.

  Alexander led from fear: fear of the military, of his father’s fate, of his mother, and of his people, who were so often a mystery to him.

  Soon after Alexander’s accession in 1801, Napoleon attempted to pry him from his alliance with the Kingdom of Prussia and neutralize Russia as a player in the game for Europe. But Alexander, with his own ambitions for empire, eventually came to regard Napoleon as all the European monarchs did, as a usurper who had enslaved half of Europe and unsettled the rest. He turned down Napoleon’s proposals and joined forces with Austria for a climactic battle on December 2, 1805: Austerlitz.

  Austerlitz was Napoleon’s apogee. There he faced highly rated generals and outthought them at every turn in a battle that unfolded so seamlessly it was as if he had written out the events in longhand the night before. His army proved to be deft and maneuverable, even swelled to the then-unprecedented size of 75,000 men (a figure that would be dwarfed by the Grande Armée in 1812). The emperor fought a new kind of warfare, emphasizing speed, concentrated power, surprise, and improvisation.

  After another crushing victory over Russian forces at Friedland in June 1807, Napoleon and Alexander finally met at Tilsit the following month for a peace conference and the emperor laid siege to him as if he were a romantic conquest. The satanic elf that Alexander had been warned about turned out to be a fascinating charmer, a seducer of great intellectual skill and apparent honesty. Napoleon for his part allowed himself to believe that Alexander was a
kindred soul, at least for his present purposes. “He is a truly handsome, good and youthful emperor,” he wrote, and the two spent nearly two weeks firming up their alliance.

  The main result was the humiliation of Prussia, which was cut down to almost half its size, and an uneasy stalemate over Poland, which Alexander and the political class in Moscow had always considered to belong to the homeland. Napoleon wanted to keep Poland outside of Russian control, as a buffer against any ambitions Alexander might have on his empire. Not only that, he had proposed enlarging the grand duchy with the 1.3 million citizens of western Galicia. This would turn Poland into a significant nation-state and a staging ground for Napoleon’s armies.

  Despite himself, Alexander was swayed by Napoleon and left Tilsit hopeful of a long-lasting alliance. But the return to Moscow dashed cold water in his face. Almost every segment of his power base was against the treaty—from his mother the empress, who hated Bonaparte to her marrow; to the business class, worried about French merchants expanding into their traditional markets in the Baltic; to the military elite, largely French-speaking but traumatized by two wars in which Napoleon had shredded their ranks. “Love for the Tsar has changed to something worse than hatred, to a kind of disgust,” wrote a Russian observer in his diary. There were warnings that Alexander would be assassinated like his despised father. A wave of Russification swept through the upper classes, with traditional arts and language finding a new popularity in the face of what was considered a French humiliation.

  Napoleon’s true target in courting Alexander was, of course, England. He had contemplated an invasion of the British Isles almost as soon as he came to power, but the inherent difficulty of the enterprise, and the looming power of the Royal Navy, had foiled his plans at every turn. What he’d failed to do militarily he tried to do commercially with the Continental System, an economic blockade instituted in 1806 and adopted by Alexander’s Russia after the Tilsit conference. But the blockade was a failure. Smugglers carrying English goods regularly skirted the French authorities and their lackeys and did a booming business in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, often with the corrupt approval of Napoleon’s handpicked rulers. Even his brothers Joseph in Naples, Louis in Holland, and Jérôme in Westphalia, who had been placed on the throne by the emperor, allowed British merchant ships into their harbors to trade freely.

  French manufacturers simply couldn’t supply the finished goods that England did. Russia was hit especially hard: its thriving export market in raw materials such as tallow, pitch, wood, corn, iron, and leather collapsed under Napoleon’s regime. England responded with its own blockade, a much more effective one, as it was enforced by the Royal Navy. Rich barons in Paris had to smuggle in tobacco and coffee, and even aristocratic families hung a single lump of sugar from their ceilings on a string and allowed their members only a single dunk of the sweetener into their coffee. In Hamburg, all but three of the city’s four hundred sugar factories closed as a result of the embargo, and one of Napoleon’s administrators there had to turn to England to get warm uniforms for the emperor’s troops, without which they would have “perished with the cold.” England had woven itself into the fabric of international life, and even Bonaparte couldn’t unravel its ties.

  In December 1810, the young Tsar Alexander, under pressure from his merchants and after watching the value of the paper ruble fall 50 percent, opened Russian ports to ships from neutral countries (which were sure to be filled with British goods) and slapped steep tariffs on French luxury products. The Continental System was effectively dead in Moscow. The blockade was almost universally hated, but it was Napoleon’s only real weapon against En gland. If he let Russia openly flout the embargo, it would become an “absurdity,” in the emperor’s opinion. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Sooner or later we must encounter and defeat the Russians,” Napoleon had written as early as 1806, and now the case for him became even more pressing.

  For his part, the tsar eventually saw Napoleon clearly, not as a monster or a soul mate (a notion he had briefly entertained) but as a conqueror who demanded obedience, pure and simple. Concessions on Poland and the embargo were Napoleon’s main demands now, and Alexander knew he couldn’t relent on the first issue. “The world is clearly not big enough for us,” he wrote in the buildup to the war, “to come to an understanding over that country.”

  The emperor was intensely frustrated by Alexander’s stubbornness. From speaking of the young man as an underrated ruler, Napoleon began to revert to the old chestnuts of anti-Russian invective: Alexander was inscrutable, a Tatar, a barbarian. He repeated to his advisers ridiculous stories and accounts of conspiracies hatched by the Russian imperial court to overthrow or undermine him. Perhaps as in every war, the enemy used many of the same tropes in describing Napoleon, especially that of a barbarian.

  But disillusionment with Alexander didn’t necessitate war with Russia. The tsar was flouting the embargo on English goods, but so were Napoleon’s own brothers. Poland was still securely in the French sphere, and Alexander had been sufficiently cowed by two defeats not to attempt anything in the near future. Still, Napoleon (like Alexander) had domestic concerns that would be alleviated by a new war: the nobles were pressing the emperor for reform, and a crop failure in 1811 had exacerbated tensions and depressed the economy. Fresh victories would turn the public’s mind away from the increasing authoritarianism of his rule.

  There are a hundred theories as to why Napoleon began to contemplate war with Russia, from Freud’s speculation that he was driven by guilt over his recent divorce from the empress Josephine to mental complications from his declining health. Napoleon said that the speculation that swirled around him even during the lead-up was frivolous. “I care nothing for St-Cloud or the Tuileries,” he said of two of his magnificent residences. “It would matter little to me if they were burned down. I count my houses as nothing, women as nothing, my son as not very much. I leave one place, I go to another. I leave St-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to gratify myself, but out of dry calculation.” Dry calculation, of course, in the service of a fantastic ambition.

  LETTERS FLEW BETWEEN Paris and Moscow in 1810 and 1811, the tone getting progressively colder and more threatening. War drew closer and Alexander knew it was going to be costly. “It is going to cause torrents of blood to flow,” he wrote. In addition to the disagreement over the blockade, Alexander fumed at Napoleon’s refusal to divvy up the Ottoman Empire as promised; his installation in 1810 of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as king of Sweden, which Alexander viewed as an aggressive French threat on his border; and France’s swallowing up of the Duchy of Oldenburg in northwest Germany, which was supposed to fall to Alexander’s brother-in-law. These actions inflamed age-old stereotypes of French arrogance and gave an increasingly hostile Alexander little room to maneuver with his nobles or military advisers. He felt that war was coming and that it would decide the fate of his empire.

  France was already at war with Spain and England on the Iberian Peninsula, a vicious, seesaw campaign that gave birth to the concept of the guerrilla war. Spain had included some brilliant successes, but over the course of three years it had shown Napoleon’s weakness as a political strategist: he repeatedly concluded that the revolt had been quashed when it hadn’t, never comprehended the nationalistic fervor of the rebels, and failed, crucially, to set up an adequate supply system for his 350,000 troops. His “live off the land” philosophy had worked in the emperor’s blitzkrieg victories, but when extended over time, it led to an embittered populace, fueling the resistance.

  The quagmire of Spain only made a fast victory in Russia seem more attractive. But this war would be different from all the other Continental campaigns Napoleon had fought: the musket cartridges that, as 1811 ended, were being packed into knapsacks from Brittany to Rome would be superseded by a force being carried to the battlefield by the soldiers themselves, secreted in the folds of their clothes. The killing agent that the scientists would discover two hundred years
later in Vilnius was already present in the Grande Armée’s ranks.

  C H A P T E R 2

  A Portable Metropolis

  THE ARMY THAT THE EMPEROR MOBILIZED TO THREATEN Russia was enormous: all told, 690,000 men were under arms, including reserves, of whom between 550,000 and 600,000 would actually cross the Niemen River into Russian territory. Over the corps of veterans had been layered green recruits, who would hopefully learn enough from their peers to make it to and then over the battlefields. It was a staggering collection of men from a dozen different nations and duchies and kingdoms, speaking a babel of languages, overseen by a legendary administration that could move semaphore signals at 120 miles per hour and staffed by veterans who had fed, clothed, and nursed Napoleon’s armies from Italy to Spain to Egypt.

  As it assembled, the army and its trail of approximately 50,000 wives, whores, sutlers, and attendants represented more people than lived in the entire city of Paris. (To accomplish that today would take over 2.1 million men.) It formed the fifth-largest city in the world, after Tokyo and before Istanbul. The Grande Armée had become a portable metropolis, with its own courts of justice, its own criminals, its own hospitals and patois. The small mercenary armies that had fought in Europe at the service of kings for centuries were gone, replaced by a behemoth.

  Most of the men were, unlike their mercenary predecessors, motivated to serve under Napoleon by more than compulsion or gold. It wasn’t a volunteer army by any means—Napoleon had sent teams to force French conscripts from their town halls and homes—but many of the men wanted to have an adventure, to squeeze some loot out of their enemies, to honor France or their own brief lives, or to write their name in glory on the battlefield. Napoleon guaranteed that one could burst from the ranks and become an officer for a single act of bravery, and that spoke to many of his soldiers.