History of the War in the Peninsula, under Napoleon - Vol. I

to which is prefixed a view of the political and military state of the four belligerent powers

Général de Division Comte Maximilien Foy, Comtesse Élisabeth Augustine Foy

• Publisher: Wagram Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781782890034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

General Maximilien Foy was a renowned and experienced French general with a long and distinguished career. An artilleryman like his master Napoleon, he fulfilled his duty to France despite disagreeing with Napoleon, and fought across Europe from Switzerland, Germany, Portugal and Spain. He spent a major part of his career fighting in the Peninsular armies at Busaco and with Masséna in Portugal. His military career came to an end after heroic fighting at Waterloo in 1815, after which he became involved in politics and writing.
Foy set about writing a history of the Peninsular War, which had been covered in great detail by British and Spanish writers but not so well by those of France. Although his untimely death in 1825 cut short his endeavour to two books, they are a valuable addition to the literature on the period, filling the gap of a French perspective on the bloody "Spanish Ulcer".
Author — Général de Division Comte Maximilien Foy, 1775-1825.
Editor —Comtesse Élisabeth Augustine (née Daniels) Foy
Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in1827, London, by Treuttel and Würtz
Original Page Count – xv and pages.
Illustrations — 1 Facsimile.

VIEW OF THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY STATE OF THE BELLIGERENT POWERS.

BOOK I.-FRANCE.

State of France in 1799—Napoleon Buonaparte seizes the supreme authority—His progress towards absolute power—Consular government—General peace—Recall of the emigrants—Imperial monarchy—Fondness of Napoleon for Nobility—Institution of a new nobility—Passion of Napoleon for war—Encampment of the army on the sea-coast—Public spirit of the army—Campaign of 1805 in Austria—Campaigns of 1806 and 1807 in Prussia and Poland—Peace of Tilsit—Situation of the French army at the conclusion of 1807—Military conscription—Manners and habits of the army—By whom and in what manner the power was exercised in the army—Promotion and rewards—Subordination and discipline —.Military organization—Infantry—Method of fighting in the time of the Republic—Changes effected during the encampment of the army on the coast—Cavalry—Artillery—Engineers—Staff—Establishment of the corps d’armée—Imperial guard—Administration of the armies—Military legislation—Science of war—Napoleon.

AT the close of the eighteenth century France withstood the attacks of coalesced Europe. The throne had been violently overturned. The privileged castes had been mutilated and dispersed: their spoliation, and the establishment of paper money, by transferring part of the wealth of the classes which consume, to the classes which produce, had meliorated the soil and awakened industry. The agitation, nay, the very excesses of the insurgent population, had tended towards its improvement: they had left behind them a tincture of gravity, and given more nerve to the national character. The political troubles at home and war abroad, concurred to bring talents to light, and to inflame courage. Everything afforded the promise of a more just and more vigorous direction of ideas in the rising generation, and in that which should succeed it, than their predecessors had manifested. Notwithstanding the sanguinary proscriptions, notwithstanding emigration and war, the population had kept progressively increasing, and the French territory was enlarged to the limits fixed by Nature. France contained within itself the active germs of prosperity and power.

It was in the name of liberty and equality that the people had risen. Equality had already triumphed. The influence of the press, which had propagated human knowledge; of commerce, which had augmented and circulated wealth; of war, rendered plebeian by the use of fire-arms: had produced equality in manners, even before the Revolution. The only point now was to introduce it into the laws.

Nations attend to the main chance. Thus, while equality was establishing itself and striking deep root, liberty, which is a passion for generous minds alone, and which becomes not a universal want till after a long and sad experience; liberty was invoked alternately by the vanquished parties, and alternately trampled underfoot by the victorious factions. The struggle which daily grew more vehement between ancient interests and those created by the Revolution was not yet finished; the laws served for weapons of war and instruments of violence.

Such an order of things could not have the character of durability. The Revolution threatened by its prolongation to destroy the very benefits of which it was the source. Anarchy was preparing to devour the state. After several years of splendid victories, the fruits of which were lost through the unskilfulness of the rulers, foreign armies were on the point of invading the French territory. As governments are instituted to maintain the public peace at home, as well as to make the political body respected abroad, and the Executive Directory had shown itself incapable of performing these duties, it could do no otherwise than fall. A more solid establishment was desired, both by the victims of the Revolution who were weary of suffering, and by those who had acquired wealth or elevation, and who wished to enjoy in peace their new existence. Already were some sticklers for liberty, confounding it with the tyranny which had abused its name, on the point of uttering against it the blasphemy of the last Brutus against virtue.

Napoleon Buonaparte appeared, and the supreme authority fell into his hands. He offered sufficient guarantees to the Revolution. It was he, who, in spite of his aversion to the principles and manners of the revolutionists, perceiving that they were the stronger, had put himself at their head on the 13th of Vendemiaire, and dispersed with cannon-balls the armed partisans of the old system. It was he, who on the 18th of Fructidor, had, at the expense of liberty and justice, preserved the existence of the Republic, by throwing the weight of his sword into the balance of parties. The reputation of the warrior, thus placed by choice and by necessity at the head of the new interests, re-assured those who had been alarmed by the progress of foreign arms. From his studious habits, from the profundity of his ideas, from the Ossianic elevation of his language, the friends of liberty took him for one of their number, notwithstanding the prejudices excited by his past conduct. The classes distinguished by education expected more liberality from an illustrious general, than from demagogue tribunes who had risen amid the saturnalia of the latter times. The whole nation wished for the restoration of social order. It was the only want with which it was pre-occupied. Nations never wish for more than one thing at a time. Nothing is so improvident as the public voice; it relates invariably to the present, never to the future. The people demanded order, as they had before demanded equality, without thinking of liberty.

Happy would it have been for France, had her youthful chief understood the spirit of the age and divined that of posterity. Washington, in America, had shown on what condition a man may be the “first in war, the first in peace, and the first in the social affections{2}.” Buonaparte pursued a different track, and furnished an additional proof that brilliant geniuses and naturally predominant spirits are not always the best gifts that Heaven can bestow on nations.

He was born in the island of Corsica, out of the pale of the manners of France and of the age. With an iron constitution, Nature had conferred on him a head mighty in conception, an ardent imagination, and inflexible obstinacy. The belles lettres, which humanize the character, and which are accused of enfeebling the mind, by substituting words for things—the belles lettres had had no charms for him. He had been delighted with the mathematics as methods capable of imparting the faculty of discerning truth, and furnishing positive results. Had he continued to resolve problems, he would have become a Newton or a Lagrange. But mathematical truth was too abstract, too much detached from real life, to afford employment to his will. The insatiability of his mind transported him into the spaces of the moral world. The period at which he lived directed his inquiries to war and politics. Enlightened by the torch of investigation, and supported by his characteristic temperament, he soon outstripped those who blindly crawled on in beaten tracks.

The French Revolution was still a chaos to the ablest men when Napoleon already had a glimpse of its possible results. About the end of 1792, one of his countrymen advised him to try his fortune in Corsica, holding out to him the prospect of succeeding to the fame of the aged Paoli. “Oh!” replied the young man, full of the future, “it is easier to become king of France than king of Corsica!” Ever since that time, in what rank soever Fortune placed him, his ascendancy raised him above it. As chef de bataillon in the artillery, at the siege of Toulon, where he was but the second in that branch of the service, having to contend with Marescot, an engineer who possessed the reputation of being most expert in taking strong places, Buonaparte, supporting his opinions before esteemed generals, and representatives of the people, who spread around them terror and death, appeared with the assurance, the superiority, and almost the tone, of their master. As commander-in-chief of the army of Italy, he kept, from the first, his lieutenants at the same respectful distance as he afterwards did the great men of the earth. The Directory appointed him merely to command the troops and to fight: he received ambassadors from princes and republics, concluded treaties with them, set himself up for a legislator, overthrew and erected States. At the age of thirty his .glory eclipsed that of all his contemporaries.

The thirst of rule, and the necessity of keeping admiration employed, carried him to Egypt. “The East,” said he, as he crossed the desert which separates Africa from Asia, “expects a man.” Would to God that the Genius of France had then appeared to apprize it that this man was cast out by the West! Ancient Europe requires nothing more than the motion necessary to ensure the gradual advance of the human mind, and to guarantee to each the degree of personal independence compatible with the peaceful enjoyment of the gifts of nature and the productions of art.

Napoleon did not at first completely unmask himself: though passionately fond of war, he offered peace to Europe. The refusal of England compelled the First Consul to conquer. At the head of an army of conscripts, he again subdued, by a single manoeuvre, and a single victory, that Italy which had four years before cost his soldiers and him eleven months’ heroic efforts and luminous conceptions. The passage of the Alps carries the mind back to the time of Hannibal; the series of marches which ended in the battle of Marengo, attest the point at which science had arrived. The capitulation of the Austrian general Melas had no parallel in the annals of war.

Equally great in other departments, Buonaparte re-constructed the State and re-composed the government. His predecessors at the helm of affairs were the leaders of the. Revolution; he was its master. A code of civil laws was given to the French, and the glory of it belongs to the head of the State. Not only as the director of the work, but also on account of the flashes of light which his superior mind repeatedly threw into the discussions on that monument of modern reason. The administration assumed a steady and rapid march, from the application of the principle, fertile in happy consequences, of invariably confiding the action to a single individual, and the deliberation to several. Order, which is the symptom of strength and durability, was established in the different branches of the public service; the finances were re-established; the laws were strictly executed; by so much splendour, tempered by so much wisdom, factions were quelled, and the last sparks of civil war were extinguished.

Buonaparte again erected the throne; posterity will say for whose benefit. The heir of the Revolution, and the successor of the republic, the imperial authority was without curb and without limits. The Senate showed the people to what a depth of baseness an assembly may sink, the members of which, otherwise commendable for the individual exercise of virtues or talents, are not united either by a sense of duty to their country, or even by the esprit de corps. The nation lost the little liberty left it by the old system, and all which it had gained under the new. Political rights, private interests, corporate property, education, science, thought, were all seized by the government. Its weight was felt in families as well as in cities. The French now formed but one vast battalion, moved at the command of a single man. The clergy, notwithstanding its propensity to labour for its own aggrandizement, was reduced to the part of a docile instrument in the hands of its master. In that France which shortly before had been so agitated by turbulent assemblies, the citizens no longer possessed the power of meeting. There was no longer left, either in manners or in the laws, any means of resistance to the errors or the abuses of power. It was the political carcase of Constantinople, without the anarchy of the pachas, the secret opposition of the ulemas, or the obstreperous mutiny of the janissaries.

He who would govern men by their vices ought to beware of enlightening them, for the effect of illumination is to infuse into the mind just ideas of the rights and duties of each. In this respect there was in the conduct of Napoleon a contradiction, which is accounted for by his fondness for everything that had éclat. On the one hand, the press was enslaved; the police kept off truth with as much care as if it had to repel the invasion of an enemy; hireling writers undertook sometimes to justify the frenzy of power, at others to divert by literary and theatrical quarrels the attention of a public, eager after novelty; on the other hand Napoleon patronized the sciences, and regretted that he no longer had leisure to cultivate them; he encouraged literature and the arts. During his reign, France was covered with edifices in a style analogous to the grandeur of the epoch. Paris merited its appellation of Capital of the Great Empire. Bridges built over all the rivers, canals dug as soon as planned, roads carried across mountainous precipices, opened new channels for commerce. The impulse given since 1789 to agriculture and manufactures became stronger as it grew more steady. The population kept increasing. There is not to be found in history another example of such prosperity accumulated in a country engaged in continual war. The reason is, because Napoleon was a despot on his own account, but did not delegate his despotism. With him the vexation of subalterns, the insolence of castes, and the intolerable domination of parties, were alike unknown: the law was strong, frequently harsh, but equal for all. The sublimity of his conceptions and the illusions of glory, disguised the deformities of absolute power.

In a few years the tears of contemporaries who have lost their sons or their brothers in battle will be dried up; the evil will be past, the good will remain. In that warlike activity of which we have been the instruments and the victims, will be seen nothing but glory. Military glory is like fire; when near it burns, at a distance it warms. The virtuous hatred excited by despotism will subside before a feeling of admiration for so many useful creations and restorations. It will be admitted, that undisputed power was perhaps necessary to carry them into effect. Fathers will relate to their children, how, in the time of Napoleon, amid the glorious din of arms, France was far from having lost the lustre and prosperity conferred by science, literature, industry, and commerce.

The transition from the forms of the republic to those of the monarchy produced but little impression on the multitude, because it took place progressively, and displaced no interests. But the pomp of royalty rapidly developed in the Emperor a caprice, the germs of which had been already perceived in the conduct of the First Consul. No man surpassed him in pride, and assuredly he was excusable for having more of it than other men. But with that noble pride, which is the consciousness of genius, he united an unfortunate predilection for noble extraction. Will posterity believe it?—the warrior of the Pyramids, the man of glory, the king of kings, loved to repeat that he was by birth a gentleman! In him this was no doubt one of those impressions of childhood, which are perpetuated throughout the whole of life, and to which a person gives way in spite of reason and reflection. Who knew better than Buonaparte, why, for fifteen years past, the lower classes had ascended so high, and the upper descended so low? Who was better able than he to appreciate at their just value, both that frivolous politeness which serves as a varnish to weakness, and that insolence of manners which contrasts with servility of mind? On what other foundation than the Revolution and equality was his throne erected? And yet, instead of placing an entirely new title beyond received prejudices and old habits, the Emperor of the French adopted the bearing of the Kings of France and Navarre. In order to effect the sudden revival of a ceremonial, and usages slowly introduced by the succession of ages, it was found necessary to recur to the depositaries of antiquated traditions. “The antechambers of the imperial court were opened to the nobility, and the nobility rushed into them.”{3} Some brought back to their new master the sentiments of loyalty instilled into them from their youth; others, in greater number, prided themselves only on their fidelity to the system to which their first homage had been paid. It was the fashion to vilify in the saloons of the Faubourg Saint Germain the power to which incense was offered at the Tuileries.

Installed on the throne of the Bourbons, and seated upon it in their manner, Napoleon fancied himself as firm as Louis XIV. He resolved also to have a nobility to form a retinue to his dynasty. Opinion was adverse to an hereditary system, which harmonizes neither with our legislation, nor with the passion of our people for equality. The feudal titles added no relief to the glorious names of the present era, and they drew the shafts of malignity upon gentlemen of recent date, who had not conquered the public esteem by great achievements, or by superior talents. ‘Tis in vain to say that the new nobility was popular because persons were entering it at all times and on all sides.”{4} This democratic tint was destined to be effaced after the first generation. The fathers had been created nobles because they exercised the power; the sons would have usurped the power in virtue of the right of birth. Even if hereditary titles conferred neither functions or prerogatives, there would still have been reason for alarm. The class invested with them, haughty to the citizens, would have wearied the government with its demands and its intrigues. In modern states, the spirit of all nobility, whether new or old, is but the avowed pretension to obtain offices without being capable of filling them, and to live in idleness at the expense of those who work.

Before the battle of Marengo, France would have received peace; after that of Hohenlinden she dictated it. The English Government, seeing the lassitude of the continental nations, consented, in spite of itself, to allow humanity to take breath. By the peace of Amiens the Revolution acquired the right of denizenship in Europe.

The reconciliation of the French with one another and with foreign powers, rested, however, on but a frail and temporary foundation. France had been saved, but by a dictatorship. If this dictatorship was to last beyond the dangers of the country, the remedy might, in the long run, be more baneful than the evil. The liberty of the press, the safeguard of all other liberties, remained suspended. The judicial power continued dependent on the executive power. The tribunate, the only portion of the national representation which was allowed the privilege of speech, had been reduced to silence. Sober minds demanded of the genius of Buonaparte, institutions consistent with the dignity of the human species, and which, like safety-anchors, should stay the vessel of the State amid the fury of tempests.

Buonaparte conceived that he was fulfilling the wishes of the nation in causing himself to be nominated consul for life, in re-establishing religious worship, and in recalling the emigrants. The first of these three acts was but the forerunner of a more extensive plan which soon began to be developed; the second accorded with the opinion of a certain number of the French, and associated religion as a guarantee of the changes recently effected in society; the third compromised the destiny of the Revolution.

Admitting, what we are far from believing, that emigration was a duty to some, and a noble sacrifice on the part of all, still it is true that the emigrants had ranged themselves in opposition to the immense majority of their fellow-citizens, and that they had invoked the arms of foreigners{5}. T...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• THE COUNTESS FOY TO THE FRENCH NATION.
• PREFACE.
• VIEW OF THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY STATE OF THE BELLIGERENT POWERS.
• NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.