1811 could have been a good, or at least a promising year for the French Empire. Peace on the Continent (since 1802) had never been closer, and even in Spain the situation seemed to be stabilising. Britain was suffering badly from the Continental Blockade; indeed, the annexations of 1810 had tightened the screw. After the integration of a great part of Hanover to Westphalia (14 January, 1810), the addition of the Papal States, the Hanseatic cities and Holland to France (17 February and 9 July, 1810), and the creation of military governments in the north of Spain (8 February, 1810) – the annexation of Catalonia would be decided upon in the autumn of 1811 and officialised in January 1812-, Napoleon continued his restructuring of Europe (this time with delicate touches here and there), and by and large, the continent was not unhappy with French dominance. The alliances with the Confederation of the Rhine, with the Duchy of Warsaw and with “Papa Franz's” Austria seemed solid. The Bonaparte family reigned over half of the continent: Joseph in Spain, Jerome in Westphalia, the Murat-Caroline husband-and-wife team in Naples, and Eugène in Italy.(1) A son of Louis, Napoléon-Louis, was the titular Grand-Duc de Berg, with uncle Napoleon as regent.(2) Within the Empire proper, the Grand Duchess Elisa ran Tuscany,(3) and Camillo Borghese, husband of Pauline, managed the French departments beyond the Alps. Who could contest the Emperor of the West's right to proclaim before the Corps législatif: “A new order rules the universe”?(4)
At home, opposition seemed to have melted away, and the few priests who were stirring up trouble were quickly dispatched to Corsica where, though the weather was naturally nicer, the surveillance was tight. This firmer stance by the regime, marked by the arrival of the ruthless Savary as Minister of Police, did not trouble the people; indeed they were almost behaving as if the country were at peace. The arrest of a few trouble-makers and the close surveillance or detention at Vincennes of certain cardinals was not going to make public opinion abandon the Emperor. And to cement the whole, the marriage alliance with Austria brought forth the finest fruit in the form of the birth of the King of Rome, on 20 March, 1811.
In 1810, however, the Emperor had given the impression that he was resting on his laurels. He had been slow to appreciate certain difficulties, in particular reacting sluggishly to the economic downturn, showing lack of concern for the agitation in Germany, underestimating the difficulties in Spain, and remaining blind to the rising impatience and later downright hostility of Russia. Even physically, he appeared a changed man. At this time, one person found him “jaundiced, obese, bloated”, adding: “I was expecting a God; I saw only a fat man”.(5) Later, Jacques Bainville was to say that Napoleon was “drunk on fatherhood, dreaming of an empire that could never be too large for his son”.(6)
In that spring of 1811, the Emperor now knew that dark clouds were gathering. Thunder rumbled, the premise of the violent storm that was to break in June 1812 with the invasion of Russia and start of the beginning of the end.
The 3,144 letters in this volume XI of the Correspondance générale (7) of Napoleon give a startling snapshot of the paradoxes in these nine months – from 1 April to 31 December, 1811 – during which scales wobbled and then tipped sharply down towards the politico-economic disruption of the Napoleonic Empire and war.(8)
At home, the letters tell of the final festivities related to the King of Rome and his solemn baptism at Nôtre-Dame, organised down to the last detail by the Grand-Maréchal du Palais, Duroc.(9) We read of the Emperor and his visits to the provinces: Cherbourg in May and then the Belgian and Dutch departments over the summer. Here the Emperor is still recognisable, hyperactive, passing from one subject to another, no detail too humble, imaginative and imperious. It was still the time of the grand projects, for Antwerp, Cherbourg, the Zealand islands, but also Paris and Versailles. He wanted the city-hub of the Empire to become “unique, beyond compare with any other capital”.(10) As for Louis XIV's château, it was to be returned to its former glory. Indeed Napoleon taxed the Interior Minister on this point in several of the 67 letters addressed to him, cheek by jowl with remarks on matters of public order, food supplies and reprimands to be given to this or that government department. There was not to be enough time for the completion of all the Parisian projects;(11) and lack of money was to sound the death knell for the one at Versailles.
Two major events however darkened the horizon in France: new developments in the religious crisis, beginning with the annexation of the Papal States and followed by the arrest of Pius VII, and the initial effects of the economic downturn which, gradually, extinguished the “prosperity and growth” of the first years of the Empire.(12)
The grave nature of the religious crisis appears only in side-shots in this volume of the Correspondance générale.(13) The crisis itself took place for the most part during the Emperor's stay in Paris, and it was probably his priority to deal with it during councils and in conversation with the Minister for Religion and the other main players in the matter. That being said, Bigot de Préameneu received forty or so letters, and ecclesiastical matters are the subject of several dozen letters to Savary, Fesch and Montalivet. We see here the Emperor adopting different strategies, namely:
– The fixing of imperial authority in the ex-Papal states now French departments. The resistance of local clergy was to cease, and for that to happen, Savary had to take “firm measures to put an end to this ridiculous situation”.(14)
– The bypass of the recalcitrant Pope's “investiture bottleneck” by reactivating the Gallican practice of getting diocesan chapters to appoint un-invested Bishops as “Vicars Capitular”. These men could thus administer their districts without needing any Papal approval whatsoever. It was an issue however that would not go away, because Pius VII, as he said, was ready to sacrifice himself in order to bequeath to his successors an unbroken heritage.(15)
– An attempt to negotiate with Pius VII, given that Napoleon could not force the Pontiff to accept the Gallican rules; after a meeting of an Ecclesiastical council, in January 1811, a delegation went to Savona where Pius was being held under house arrest. However, the Pope remained unmoved, to Napoleon's huge annoyance.(16)
– Having the unilateral decisions of the Imperial government ratified by a “National Council” opening on 17 June, 1811. Another failure. Napoleon fumed, made threats and then took action: the recalcitrant cardinals saw their detention prolonged, and relations with Uncle Fesch reached a new low.(17)
The conflict with the Holy See was not even close to being over, and there were to be yet further developments.(18) In particular, this issue would provide more troops for opponents of the Empire.
Another disturbing element on the home front was that the Empire was suffering the results of an economic downturn, one that had begun at the beginning of the previous year and got steadily worse. The abundance of letters to the Treasury and Finance ministers, Mollien and Gaudin, (98 and 40 letters respectively) denotes the Emperor's vigilance but also his largely financial view of the question. There were several causes for the downturn: a drop in military orders as a result of the end of the continental wars (except in Spain); the tightening of the Blockade which added complexities to trading almost on a daily basis; monetary tension as a result of the excess of loans offered by banking houses; a shortage of liquidity as a direct result of an attempt to solve the loan problem; the collapse of the real estate market; sequential bankruptcies; and the laying-off of tens of thousands of workers. Confidence took a hit, trade slowed, and certain prices and salaries began to drop.
The downturn reached a new low in 1811, but it was far from over. And to add insult to injury, though the harvest in 1810 had been acceptable, that of 1811 was frankly rotten. The price of a hectolitre of wheat had averaged 15.17 Francs in 1809. It rose to 20.26 Francs in 1810, 26.33 Francs in 1811, and reached 33 Francs in 1812.(19) With this rise in the price of living, the downturn also became a social issue. For the first time in fifteen years, the people suffered food shortages. This time the State was forced to intervene, naturally with public orders and police measures, but also with a slackening of certain rules for the Blockade.(20) The consequences of these crises one on top of the other would be felt right up to the end of the Empire, bringing with them political consequences. Support for the regime began to falter tangibly, both in the world of business and amongst workers, craftsmen and rural folk.
And, naturally, as we saw in the ten preceding volumes, it is military affairs which take up the lion's share of the corpus of this volume XI. Two statistics say it all: Clarke, War Minister, alone received 1,149 letters (36 % of the total), and Lacuée, War Administration Minister, got 247 (8 % of the total). Nor should we forget here the abundant correspondence with Davout, commander of the Army in Germany, Berthier, supervising (from Paris) Spanish operations, Dumas, Director General of Conscription, generals, and ordnance officers sent to the four corners of the Empire, etc.. In the end, 60% of the texts published in the present volume concern the army.
Nothing escaped the Emperor at work; not even the tiniest details, whether of uniforms, arms, saddles, sabres, or lances. He corrected the ideas of others, developed his own, encouraged, ordered, reprimanding when necessary, offering praise from time to time. He even once again became an artillery general, studying new types of mortars, calculating trajectories, and giving – often from far away – precise orders on the position of cannon facing estuaries, on islands, or on ships positioned in defence of the coast. In short, the whiff of powder seemed to have brought him to life.
Spain, the only active war front on the continent, was about to get worse, after a period of definite improvement. Wellington was campaigning there against more than 300,000 French soldiers, ranged in several different armies, whose generals were quarrelling. As for Joseph, he was thought to have “gone native” to such an extent as to be deemed not worth talking to. His brother wrote only one letter to him during the nine months at issue here. It was essentially Berthier's job to run the war in the Iberian Peninsula. How much of the 238 (occasionally extremely detailed) letters Napoleon sent to him did the Major General during this period send to the generals or to Joseph? Surely the King had to be informed of what was going on in his kingdom?
This year of ‘nearly-peace' was also dedicated to dreams of the sea and the provisional reactivation of the project for a military landing in England. It also primarily marks the beginning of the most phenomenal martial enterprise of Napoleon's reign, namely, the invasion of Russia. From 19 April, 1811, the die was cast: the huge machine of the organisation of the Grande Armée was put into gear and nothing was to halt it.(21) In December, Clarke was informed that the creation of the 4th battalions of each regiment had but one aim: war; starting in March 1812.(22)
Gathering warclouds, indeed.
The story of this increase in tension is well known. Though it was exacerbated by specific ‘sore points' (the annexation of Oldenburg, the Czar's refusal of the Russian marriage, the non-respect of the Blockade, the Ukase on French produce, etc.), the fundamental cause was the incompatibility of the French and Russian Emperors' European projects, in Germany, in Poland, in the Mediterranean, and in the Balkans, where what is more Russia and Turkey had been fighting for the previous two years.(23) Alexander finally decided to switch roles, moving from “insidious enemy to declared adversary”.(24) But he was to meet his match. It is true that Napoleon – who was not always the bad guy – had allowed Alexander to steal a march on him the previous year, with the troop movements on the Duchy of Warsaw frontier, but thereafter, the French Emperor stepped up his game. And his response was fully commensurate with his power. First of all, he detailed Davout to prepare immense forces which he hoped to unleash on the “barbarians of the North”: as governor general of the Hanseatic Provinces, commander in chief of the Armée d'Allemagne, renamed in October “Observation Corps on the Elbe”, Davout received no less than 229 letters, to which should be added orders to the Governor General of Illyria, Bertrand, and to the viceroy of Italy, Eugène, to levy troops and to send them to the north-east. Orders were also sent to the Commander of the Garde, Mortier, to the finance ministers and, of course, to the War Administration headed by Lacuée, who was required to provide all the necessary equipment. Leafing through this mass of documents, one is left with no doubt that preparation for the “guerre suprême”, as Napoleon would later term it, was well in motion at the beginning of 1812.
Caulaincourt was forced to leave St Petersburg. He was replaced by General Lauriston. On the occasion of the change in ambassadors, Napoleon had delivered to the Czar a long letter in which he dwelt on the difficulties within the Tilsit alliance, reiterating his complaints with respect to Russian policy, threatening slightly but nevertheless begging his correspondent “ to see in his missive only conciliation, fitting for the elimination of all distrust on either side and for the unification of our two nations, in every respect, in the intimacy of an alliance which for four years now had been a happy one”.(25) The reply of the autocrat would be similarly ambivalent. Then, on 17 April, 1811, Maret replaced Champagny as Minister of Foreign Relations. The choice of this devoted servant was a change of policy rather than one of personnel. The 120 letters which the new minister received up to December are those preparing for the pursuance of diplomacy by other means. The compliments addressed to other European sovereigns should be put under the same heading,(26) as indeed all the words written on the subject of how necessary it was for the “Warsovians” (Napoleon never officially used the word “Poland”) to have an army worthy of the name.
However, Napoleon still had the energy to pursue chimaeras: namely, the taking control of the oceans and seas. The Minister for the Navy and Colonies, Decrès, received 320 letters, in which his master dealt with, and meddled in, absolutely everything, demanding information on the culprits of the slightest naval failure, praising to the skies the smallest of successes, planning to take back the lost colonies and in several years building an invincible armada. The continent was too small; Napoleon sometimes wanted to operate on a world scale. And as he imagined himself, counter to all the evidence, soon capable of taking the upper hand, he brought back the project for a military landing in England. The Boulogne camp came back to life, new leaders were sent, and if the orders from Paris are to be believed, they were to prepare a bold amphibious operation. Here, it is hard to tell from the tone of the letters whether Napoleon really believed what he was writing. But one thing is certain, the Navy minister and offices were made to work hard and pointlessly (did they know?) to satisfy the most incredible demands. What did they think, for example, of the staggering calculation made by the Emperor in December: “basing myself on the different bits of information I have received, I have calculated that in France I have 16 million trees which are five feet in circumference, that is, 480 million cubic feet, in other words, enough to make 4,800 vessels. With a single order, I could […] have a sufficient quantity of wood cut down in the whole of my Empire to be able to build four thousand eight hundred vessels, and that, without the slightest damage to my forests”?(27) It is what you could call building a fleet on paper.
And as if absolutely anything was possible, and with the colonies lost and mastery of the seas still British, Napoleon remembered that the best solution to the Britain problem was in the end to take the fight directly to that country. The project for the military landing was fixed for post-September 1813.(28) Since the arrangements at Boulogne had never been dismantled, and since the invasion fleet built during the Consulate was still available, Marshal Ney was appointed to head a sort of advanced guard which, on site in Boulogne, would prepare for the great offensive.(29) And if a landing could not be found near Dover, the Emperor thought that an expedition to Ireland could take England from behind. The Navy offices (whose finances would be increased to the level of almost 20% of national expenses) were actually to work on the preparations for this operation. Let us not think here that the Emperor had lost his mind. By frightening the British, he would make them spend ever-increasing sums on keeping the Royal Navy on red alert.
For, as 1811 came to a close, Napoleon already knew that his next campaign would be terrestrial not maritime. It was to take place east of the continent, against Russia.
Tr. P.H. November 2015