Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, 1812

Eugene Tarlé, John Cournos

• Publisher: Friedland Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789122497
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Guerres napoléoniennes

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) is one of the most illustrated political and military figures of the last two millennia. He has remained in the memory of the world as a legend that the passage of the years has failed to blur. On the contrary, Napoleon Bonaparte widely continues to be considered the personification of human genius.Originally published in this English translation in 1942, leading Russian historian Evgeny Tarle details Napoleon's military campaign to invade Russia in the early nineteenth century."The campaign of 1812 was more frankly imperialistic than any other of Napoleon's wars; it was more directly dictated by the interests of the French upper middle class. The war of 1796-7, the conquest of Egypt in 1798-9, the second Italian campaign, and the recent defeat of the Austrians could still be justified as necessary measures of defence against the interventionists. The Napoleonic press called the Austerlitz campaign 'self-defence' against Russia, Austria, and England. The average Frenchman considered even the subjugation of Prussia in 1806-7 no more than a just penalty inflicted on the Prussian court for the arrogant ultimatum sent by Frederick-William III to the 'peace-loving' Napoleon, constantly harried by troublesome neighbours. Napoleon never ceased to speak of the fourth conquest of Austria in 1809 as a 'defensive' war, provoked by Austrian threats. Only the invasion of Spain and Portugal was passed over in discreet silence."The War of 1812 was a struggle for survival in the full sense of the word—a defensive struggle against the onslaughts of the imperialist vulture."—E. V. Tarle

NAPOLEON’S INVASION OF RUSSIA, 1812

1 — STORM CLOUDS

‘THE storm of 1812 had not yet broken,’ wrote Pushkin. ‘Napoleon had yet to put the great people to the test. He was still threatening, still hesitating.’ The poet was referring to the years immediately preceding one of the most momentous struggles in the history of western civilization.

The campaign of 1812 was more frankly imperialistic than any other of Napoleon’s wars; it was more directly dictated by the interests of the French upper middle class. The war of 1796-7, the conquest of Egypt in 1798-9, the second Italian campaign, and the recent defeat of the Austrians could still be justified as necessary measures of defence against the interventionists. The Napoleonic press called the Austerlitz campaign ‘self-defence’ against Russia, Austria, and England. The average Frenchman considered even the subjugation of Prussia in 1806-7 no more than a just penalty inflicted on the Prussian court for the arrogant ultimatum sent by Frederick-William III to the ‘peace-loving’ Napoleon, constantly harried by troublesome neighbours. Napoleon never ceased to speak of the fourth conquest of Austria in 1809 as a ‘defensive’ war, provoked by Austrian threats. Only the invasion of Spain and Portugal was passed over in discreet silence.

By 1812 no one in France took these fantasies and fabrications seriously, and they had almost disappeared from circulation.

The basic purposes of the new war were to subject Russia to the economic interests of the French upper middle class and to create an eternal threat against her in the shape of a vassal Poland, united with Lithuania and White Russia. If the plan worked out smoothly, there would be the additional prospect of gaining India, with the Russian army serving as an ‘auxiliary force.’

Only by resisting this aggression could Russia preserve her economic and political independence. Only by fighting could she save herself from future dismemberment and the ruin incurred through the Continental blockade. Indeed, the Poles never even pretended that they would content themselves with Lithuania and White Russia; they hoped that in good time the French Caesar would help them to reach the Black Sea. In the circumstances, the War of 1812 was a struggle for survival in the full sense of the word—a defensive struggle against the onslaughts of the imperialist vulture.

This is what gave the war its peculiarly national character and impelled the Russian people to wage it with such heroic fortitude.

What, then, was the historical significance of the War of 1812? Lenin gives a clear answer to this question. In his view, the wars of the French Revolution, waged against interventionists in defence of revolutionary achievements, were, under the Directory and Napoleon, transformed into definitely aggressive wars of conquest; these aggressive, plundering, imperialist wars of Napoleon begot in their turn the movement of national liberation in the Europe he had subjugated; henceforth the wars of the European peoples against Napoleon became wars of national liberation.

The War of 1812 was the most typical of these imperialist wars; Lenin’s term can be applied to it aptly and convincingly. The French upper middle class, especially the industrialists, demanded the complete elimination of England from European markets. Russia was not effectively maintaining the blockade—the only remedy was coercion. Napoleon made this the primary ground for war. The same French bourgeoisie, commercial as well as industrial, wanted to make Alexander I modify the customs tariff of December 1810, which was unfavourable to imports from France. Napoleon made this the second ground. He needed a base where men could receive political and military training for an attack on Russia. To this end, he made every possible effort to establish a powerful but submissive vassal on the Russian frontier, to create a Polish state in one form or another—this was his third ground for quarrel. No one knew exactly what Napoleon planned should the projected expedition against Moscow prove successful. He sometimes spoke of India, sometimes of ‘returning by way of Constantinople,’ i.e. conquering Turkey; he sent agents and spies to Egypt, Syria, and Persia well in advance (1810, 1811, 1812).

Another question: did this imperialist war of conquest promise the liberation of the Russian serfs, even as a by-product of Napoleon’s greater designs?

By no means. There is no need for guesswork on this score. Soon after the invasion—indeed, before the bloody year had come to an end—Napoleon emphatically declared that he had never even considered liberating the Russian peasants. He knew that they were worse off than the serfs in other European countries. He even referred to the Russian peasants as ‘the slaves.’ He made no attempt to win the sympathy of the Russian peasantry by a decree abolishing serfdom; in fact, he feared that his invasion might cause a peasant revolution. He had no wish to create a gulf between himself and the landowning gentry, including the Tsar, because in Russia—so it seemed to him and so he said—he had not found any ‘middle class,’ i.e. that bourgeoisie without which he, the bourgeois Emperor, simply could not conceive the transition of a feudal or semi-feudal country to the new social and economic system. He had deliberately looked everywhere for this middle class on which to base the new political order. He had tried to find a Russian middle class, but, for lack of either time or ability, he had failed. After that, he refused to interfere in internal politics. Of the two remaining social groups, the landowners seemed closer to him in spite of everything, while the prospect of a peasant revolution filled him with terror. He found the Russian peasantry in chains and he departed without the slightest attempt to loosen them. On the contrary: in White Russia and Lithuania he forged new shackles.

None of this was accidental. Napoleon never concealed his ideas and sentiments on the subject, though it was not until after the invasion that he expressed them. At the session of 20 December 1812, in the throne room of the Tuileries, Napoleon said with reference to the recently concluded Russian campaign: ‘The war I am waging against Russia is a political war: I have conducted it without animosity. I wished to preserve her from the misfortunes she had brought on herself. I could have armed the larger part of her population against her by proclaiming the freedom of the serfs. A great number of villages petitioned me to do so. But when I learned of the brutal nature of this large class of the Russian people, I refused to take a measure that would have subjected many families to death, ruin, and the most dreadful sufferings.’ These words require no comment. In no contemporary document, not in a single letter, do we find even the slightest indication that this casual reference to a ‘great number’ of petitions by villages ever existed. This was obviously a politically convenient invention such as Napoleon frequently used without compunction. And Napoleon was well aware that if he had freed the serfs, he could have armed them against the feudal Russian government. He knew it, but feared to use this weapon. Napoleon, emperor by God’s grace, was not the man to liberate the Russian peasants. Shortly before the invasion, Alexander had addressed him in a letter, ‘Sire, my brother.’ No, the ‘brother’ of Alexander I, the son-in-law of Francis of Austria, was not likely to free any peasants.

And what else could he have said at that time? That very day, in the throne room at a reception for the State Council, he praised the Senate for its monarchical attitude, spoke of ‘the benefactions of the monarchy,’ fulminated against ‘popular sovereignty,’ ‘the principle of rebellion,’ and with lofty distaste referred to the Jacobins as ‘bloodthirsty men.’

In a letter to his brother, King Jerome of Westphalia, on 18 January 1813, he gives a new version of his story about the petitioning Russian peasants. ‘A large number of the inhabitants of villages implored me to decree their liberation, and promised to take up arms in my behalf. But in a country with an insignificant middle class—without which it was impossible to direct and hold within proper bounds a movement once it had been communicated to large masses—and when the members of this class, frightened by the destruction of Moscow, fled—I felt that to arm a population of slaves was to doom the country to terrible calamities. I could not conceive of doing such a thing [je n’en eus pas même idée].’

Napoleon invaded Russia not as a liberator but as a conqueror. He did not intend to abolish serfdom, but only, in the event of victory, to send the peasant masses to the Himalayas and to India as an ‘auxiliary army’ (his own term). But he made the same fatal mistake about the Russians as he had about the Spaniards.

***

When did the spectre of a war between the two empires first assume a degree of reality? Diplomats began to think and talk about it early in 1810, and the general public towards the end of the same year.

But long before this, subterranean currents had been undermining the Franco-Russian alliance.

On 2 December 1805, at Austerlitz, Napoleon inflicted a crushing defeat on the Austrian and Russian armies. Even then the French clearly saw the difference between the Russian soldiers and the incomparably weaker and less courageous Austrians. In 1807 the Russian armies dispatched by the Tsar to save Prussia from final defeat fought Napoleon in the bloody but indecisive battle of Eylau (8 February). A second battle followed at Friedland on 14 June, and Napoleon was victor. It was then that Alexander I made peace and concluded an alliance with Napoleon. This occurred shortly after Friedland, at a personal meeting between Napoleon and Alexander in the town of Tilsit. Alexander did not forget these painful lessons. And he was not unaware of the widespread displeasure prevailing in Russia, particularly in the army, over the ‘ignominious peace of Tilsit.’ Humiliation was not the sole factor. Napoleon had forced Alexander to join him in the ‘Continental blockade’: Russia had obligated herself not to buy anything from, or sell anything to, the English, or to allow Englishmen into Russia; she also obligated herself to declare war on England. The blockade caused great suffering to Russian landowners and merchants; Russian trade declined and the state finances dwindled. This Franco-Russian alliance, entered into at Tilsit in 1807, showed its first fissure in the following year, during the September meeting of the two emperors at Erfurt; and the fissure widened in 1809 during Napoleon’s war against Austria. Let us dwell for a moment on these two years: 1807-9.

In the panic following his Friedland rout, Alexander decided not only on peace, but on a decisive, almost revolutionary turn in policy.

It is not our purpose to give a complete picture of Alexander as a man and a sovereign. In the course of his career, he passed through several transformations. As heir to the throne he had been one person; after the murder of his father Paul—another; before Austerlitz—a third; after Austerlitz—a fourth; now after Tilsit, he became a fifth. And how many more changes he was to go through in 1814! How many more in the years of Golitsin and Arakcheyev! It was not just his moods that changed, but his relations to people, his opinions of people, his attitude towards life; indeed his whole character. One of his contemporaries likened Alexander to Buddha, who, according to Hindu legends, undergoes various ‘transformations,’ ‘becomings,’ ‘avatars’ in the course of his life, each time showing a wholly new face.

Here we are interested exclusively in his transformation before the War of 1812 and during the war itself. What kind of man was he then? What were his aspirations? Alexander knew how to keep himself in hand as did no other of Russia’s tsars, and indeed, as few autocrats anywhere.

In 1805 he had suffered an ignominious rout at Austerlitz, and it was absolutely impossible to throw the blame on anyone else. Everyone knew that the Tsar himself, against the will of Kutuzov, led the army to disaster, and that when all was lost he publicly burst into tears and fled from the bloody field. But the enemy was so dangerous and the nobility which surrounded the Tsar so hated and feared this enemy that they largely forgave Alexander for Austerlitz, merely because, in spite of everything, he refused to make peace with Napoleon, and because a year after Austerlitz he again took the field against ‘the enemy of mankind.’ This time the war was longer and even bloodier. There seemed to be some hope of washing away the disgrace of Austerlitz, so hard to bear because, after the victories of Suvorov and Rumyantsev, it was humiliating for Alexander to begin his reign with this crushing defeat. With a little exaggeration, it was possible, especially for the provincial landowners, to regard Pultusk and Eylau as victories. Then came the spring of 1807: Heilsberg and Friedland—a fresh rout, and moreover at the very gates of Russia. Full panic reigned in Russian headquarters. Immediately after the terrible defeat at Friedland, Alexander humbled himself, and sent Lobanov-Rostovsky to implore Napoleon for an armistice.

Soon afterward, the two emperors met on a raft on the Niemen. They embraced, kissed, and in no time concluded a peace and an alliance as well. Yet in the very midst of all these ceremonies and fraternal rejoicings, a certain irritation was discernible. The officers made no great effort to conceal the fact that they were ashamed for themselves and the Tsar, and that in their eyes Tilsit was even more humiliating than Austerlitz.

There was also a feeling of shame because of the humiliation suffered by the King and Queen of Prussia. All Europe was saying that Alexander had betrayed and sold them out. Literally saying, not writing or printing, for in Napoleon’s time little was written in Europe, and less was printed. At a farewell dinner, Queen Louise bitterly reproached Alexander for his treacherous behaviour, then suddenly burst into tears—at that time not much more was needed to impress public opinion. What mattered was not the eclipse of the ‘chivalrous’ Tsar; not the craven violation of the oath he had sworn scarcely two years before, an oath of eternal loyalty and friendship to Frederick-William III and Louise; not even the necessity of embracing and flattering the same Bonaparte who in 1804, when Alexander protested against the execution of the Duke of Enghien, had so rudely and publicly reminded him in a note of the murder of Paul. All these were mere sentimentalities. In politics, tsars must put up with worse ordeals. What really mattered was that the Russian nobility, which in the minds of European governments represented Russian public opinion, was frankly indignant at the peace of Tilsit. Alexander returned from Tilsit wounded in his pride, and with a feeling that an invisible menace hung over him.

The nobility wanted neither the Continental blockade, with the catastrophic losses it caused Russian agriculture and commerce, nor friendship with the hated Napoleon, in whom they continued to see the child of the French bourgeois revolution and a threat to their rule. The nobility was dissatisfied, and from the history of the eighteenth century, Alexander knew what happened to Russian autocrats when they aroused the wrath of the nobility. The Tsar controlled himself, and concealed his irritation and anxiety, indeed all those feelings which later he had an opportunity to reveal. He was by no means lacking in will power. He had character, and could be adamant on occasion. He could be both patient and stubborn. He never had a mature statesman-like mind; for example, it was he, not Arakcheyev, who conceived the monstrous, criminal absurdity of military settlements. And once he had conceived an idea, the Tsar let nothing stand in his way—shunned no baseness or cruelty in carrying it out. To get his way in the matter of these military settlements, he was ready to line the whole road from St. Petersburg to Chudov ‘with gallows.’

He returned from Tilsit with a well-defined plan, which, in his opinion, would not only erase his defeats and the ignominy of two lost wars, but also cover him with greater glory than even the Empress Catherine had had. No one but him seems to have thought the plan feasible; he clung to it all the more stubbornly. He intended to seize large territories from the Turkish Empire: Moldavia, Walachia, perhaps even Constantinople. Napoleon had thrown out this bait in Tilsit where the two emperors spent entire nights in private conversation. Napoleon ‘gave’ Turkey to Alexander, while Alexander ‘gave’ Europe to Napoleon. Of course, Napoleon meant to trick Alexander and give him much less than he was promising. In any event, he never for a moment considered yielding Constantinople.

But Alexander was not so easy to deceive. ‘Alexander is too weak to rule and too strong to be ruled,’ said Speransky, who knew him well. It can also be said that he was not profound or flexible enough to deceive Napoleon, but too crafty and subtle to be taken in by him for long.

Actually, Alexander did anne...