Citizen Emperor (51 page)

Much was made of the transfer of Frederick’s sword to the chapel of the Hôtel des Invalides in May 1807.
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It was then a retirement home for invalid veterans, about 900 of whom had fought during the Seven Years’ War; Napoleon dedicated the sword to them.
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Present too were the members of the Senate, the Tribunate, the Legislative Corps and the Council of State, as well as a number of military officials. After the coronation, and the marriage with the Emperor Francis’s daughter Marie-Louise some years later, it is considered to have been the biggest ceremony in Napoleonic France.
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Napoleon himself was away fighting in the east, but his empty throne was the centrepiece of the decorations and was there to remind everyone that the ceremony was really about him. In effect, what was meant to be a celebration of the soldiers of the Grande Armée, as well as veterans of the Seven Years’ War, was about Napoleon’s innate genius. Like Frederick the Great, Napoleon had succeeded in creating a powerful country – Frederick out of nothing, Napoleon out of a country in chaos.
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The celebrations culminated in a selection of paintings taken from the royal collection in Berlin exhibited at the Musée Napoleon (what is now the Louvre).
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As with the French occupation of northern Italy in the late 1790s, so too the French occupation of northern Germany in 1806 and 1807 was accompanied by a systematic plundering of the private collections of the German princes.
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Between 1806 and 1807, the French absconded with a number of important artworks – 50 statues, 80 busts, 193 bronze objects, 32 drawings and 367 paintings, including some by Rembrandt, Raphael, Titian and Van Dyck, not to mention a number of rare manuscripts and books.

Peace was not going to come right away, although that it did not do so was not entirely Napoleon’s fault. He stayed in Berlin for one month (from 28 October to 24 November), offering Frederick William peace terms that, under the circumstances, were not unreasonable. Prussia was ‘only’ to give up its territories west of the Elbe. Frederick William, unwisely as it turned out, refused. Faced with the option of continuing the struggle or concluding peace, he wanted to continue the struggle, hoping that the Russians would help turn the military situation around. At a council held on 21 November 1806, he decided to fight on. The decision has been described as ‘one of the great turning points in the history of the Prussian monarchy’.
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Frederick William III suffered from what contemporaries referred to as ‘melancholia’. In other words, he was a depressive, a condition probably made worse by the fact that he was steeped in the Prussian Pietist tradition, an evangelical religious movement, a German form of ascetic Protestantism that incited its members to lead vigorously Christian, pious lives.
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It also meant he was more likely to dwell on his own personal failings. Combined with a hesitant nature, this did not make for a good prince in time of war. Nevertheless, faced with limited options, Frederick William did not capitulate; before the arrival of the French, he fled his capital to the easternmost corner of his kingdom, along with the state treasure, saved in the nick of time.
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Frederick William was prepared to hold out, but this was not the case for his army. Napoleon’s forces were in an extremely strong position; they met little resistance as they advanced east across Prussia, one fortress after another surrendering within the space of a few months, often without a struggle, and often when in a position to hold out, if only the will to do so were present. The Prussian army capitulated, ignominiously for some, realistically for others. One explanation for its total disintegration was the collapse of morale, similar to the defeat of the French army in the face of the German invasion in 1940. In part, this may have been due to the quality of the Prussian officer corps.
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A declaration by the king that any commander who surrendered for no good reason would be ‘shot without mercy’ made little impact.
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In the face of the resounding defeat, and the overwhelming impression that the army was in no condition to launch a counter-attack, there seemed little strategic point in holding out.

By the middle of autumn, 96 per cent of the Prussian army had been taken prisoner by the French. More than 140,000 troops and over 2,000 cannon were captured. In some places, Stettin for example, a garrison of 5,000 men, with ample supplies, surrendered to 800 French troops. Erfurt with a garrison of 12,000 troops did not make a stand; the city negotiated its surrender the very same day the French arrived before its gates. Küstrin surrendered only days after the Prussian king had left the town on his voyage eastwards.
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When Marshal Ney turned up in front of Magdeburg, the city’s commander, Franz Kasimir von Kleist, had little choice but to surrender in the face of overwhelming pressure from its inhabitants.
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Others held out longer, partly in the expectation that the Russian alliance would inevitably come good, and partly because it took so long for the French to transport siege material. The siege of Neiss in Silesia is a case in point. General Vandamme encircled the town at the end of February 1807; the siege was broken off for a while in March and was then resumed with the arrival of siege guns in the middle of April. However, the governor of Neiss refused to surrender until an armistice was signed at the end of May 1807, allowing him to hand over the fort in the middle of June, if the Russians did not arrive before then.
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Breslau held out almost three months. Kolberg on the Baltic coast, under the command of Major August Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who would become one of the key figures of the Prussian reform movement, surrendered in July 1807. Kolberg was not the only fortress to hold out for any length of time, but it was transformed into a struggle that would later take on mythic proportions, made much of by the Nazis in the last stages of the Second World War.
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The subjugation of Silesia, it has to be said, took eight months, from October 1806 to July 1807.

After dealing with the Prussian army, Napoleon still had to contend with two Russian armies lumbering their way westwards. One, under Levin August von Bennigsen, consisted of about 64,000 men, and entered Poland at the beginning of November 1806. The other, under Friedrich von Buxhöwden, was made up of about 46,000 men. Napoleon could muster about 80,000 men, although many more had been called up and were on their way.

Before setting off, Napoleon attempted to bring the war to Britain by issuing what was referred to as the Berlin Decree (and later, in November 1807, in the Milan Decree). These decrees extended the trade war throughout Europe by prohibiting the import of any British goods into the Continent, and the confiscation of any vessels (neutral or otherwise) that so much as put into a British port. Since Napoleon could not engage with Britain directly, he was attempting to cripple its economy, something he regarded as a ‘mathematical certainty’, by creating an economic cordon around Europe that excluded Britain, what became known as the Continental System.
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Thousands of customs men would be posted all along the coasts and rivers of Europe in an effort to keep out British goods. It was an impossible task – smuggling became rife – but it marked a turning point in Napoleon’s imperial expansion as he extended it across northern and southern Europe in the pursuit of victory against Britain, but ultimately at the expense of his own Empire.
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The British responded by imposing a counter-blockade of Europe (the Orders in Council in 1807) – the ‘Continental Blockade’ – enforced by the Royal Navy. Napoleon’s economic cordon would eventually become the cornerstone of his system, one that, when it crumbled, would help bring the whole edifice crashing down.

That was some years away yet. Napoleon was necessarily oblivious to what was to come, confident that he could deal with the Russians, and with what was left of the Prussian army. He left Berlin on 25 November, and entered Warsaw on the night of 19 December 1806, somewhat discreetly under the circumstances. The preparations made to receive him in the city – he was meant to drive through a triumphal arch on which was inscribed ‘Long Live Napoleon, the Saviour of Poland. He was Sent to us Straight from Heaven’ – were frustrated by his late arrival.
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Four days later was the start of what is referred to as the Polish campaign. A couple of smaller battles were fought in pursuit of the Russians – at Pultusk the day after Christmas in 1806 and again at Golymin twenty kilometres further north on the same day – but the main Russian army continued to elude the French and to withdraw further east.

Walewska

While the troops were, for the most part, lodged in the countryside, headquarters were in Warsaw, and the French, by all accounts, had a delightful time of it. ‘With the exception of theatres,’ wrote Savary, ‘the city presented all the gaieties of Paris.’
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Warsaw, with a population of around 85,000 people (about 18 per cent were Jewish), was situated on a huge plain on the Vistula, with an imposing castle that was once the residence of the kings of Poland.
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According to the legend, it was here, on New Year’s Day 1807, at an inn near Blonie, that Napoleon first laid eyes on Maria Walewska. She approached Napoleon’s marshal of the palace, Michel Duroc, and asked to be presented to him in the street. She obviously made an impression on the Emperor, exciting him no doubt with the prospect of an easy conquest. Duroc, who often played the palace pimp, was afterwards sent to look for her, but was unsuccessful. So too was the chief of the Warsaw police, a man by the name of Bielinski. It was Prince Joseph Poniatowski, governor of Warsaw, who identified her.

So much for the legend. Everything about their first meeting remains obscure, including where and when it may have taken place. They may have met at Blonie, but then it would have been 18 December 1806; Duroc was not by Napoleon’s side, he had been wounded the preceding day; Napoleon was probably not, as is often asserted, riding in a carriage but on horseback, as the mud was too thick for a carriage. An alternative version is that Murat, or possibly Talleyrand, was sent to find Napoleon a woman for the night, a Polish conquest of sorts.
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We do know that Maria and Napoleon met (again) on the night of 17 January during a ball given by Talleyrand. Napoleon must have been smitten; he sent numerous invitations for her to visit him at the royal palace, which she just as persistently refused, until others, Polish patriots, interceded. As for Walewska, from an old noble family, married off at the age of eighteen to a man fifty years her senior, Athanasius Colonna-Walewski, she was persuaded to seduce Napoleon, or at least approach him, by Polish patriots who hoped that she would then be able to influence him to restore Poland. That, in any event, is the way she preferred to present things in her memoirs.
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However they may have met, the outcome is better known; Napoleon decided to have an affair with Maria. It was not the first time he had dallied with other women, but despite his discretion – apart from a few people in his entourage, the public remained unaware of his liaison with Maria until the publication of the memoirs of his valet, Constant, in 1830 – Josephine must have suspected something. She wrote to him repeatedly asking for permission to join him in Warsaw. Napoleon fobbed her off with excuses – she was needed in Paris, the roads were bad, the weather was terrible, the distances too great – but the more he did so the more suspicious she became, no doubt aware that the end of their relationship was close.
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At one point he even declared how humiliated he was to think that his wife did not trust him. He forbade her to cry any more; ‘it is very ugly’.
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At Josephine’s hints that he was having an affair, Napoleon’s responses were a mixture of feigned surprise – ‘I don’t know what you mean by ladies’; hypocrisy – ‘I love only my little Josephine, good, sulky and capricious’; and condescending reproach – ‘she is ever lovable, apart from the times when she is jealous’.
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The tenderness he felt for Josephine was still there – when on campaign he often reproved her for not writing enough while he wrote two or three times a week – but the passion was definitively gone.
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If Napoleon’s letters to Josephine were reserved, this was not the case for the little notes that he was passing to Maria. ‘I see only you, I admire only you, I want only you.’ Or again, ‘Oh, come! come! All your hopes will be fulfilled,’ he promised.
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‘Whenever I have thought a thing impossible or difficult to obtain, I have desired it all the more.’ It said as much about his attitude towards women as about his desire to get his way in all things. But now, as Emperor, propriety was thrown to the wind.