Citizen Emperor (43 page)

The plan was reasonable enough. It required Vice-Admiral Honoré-Joseph Ganteaume, the man who had brought Bonaparte back from Egypt and who was now blockaded in Brest, to break out and head for Martinique. At the same time, Villeneuve was to break out of Toulon, meet up with the Spanish fleet at Cadiz and then rendezvous with Ganteaume in the Caribbean. Once there, they were to conquer some English islands and reinforce the garrisons on Saint-Domingue, Guadaloupe and Martinique. They were then to return to Europe and help free the Spanish and French vessels in the port of El Ferrol, thus giving them a combined strength of thirty-four or thirty-five ships. This is more or less what Villeneuve did (but not Ganteaume, who refused to move from Brest). Villeneuve broke out of Toulon at the end of March and sailed for the Caribbean; favourable winds and the absence of British frigates allowed him to do so. His squadron of nineteen ships reached Martinique on 16 May. For almost two weeks, after dropping anchor in the harbour of Fort de France, Villeneuve did nothing until, on 30 May, new orders from Napoleon arrived instructing him to capture nearby British possessions. This he set out to do in a rather lacklustre manner,
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but soon learnt that Nelson had arrived in Barbados. Rather than confront him, he decided to return to Europe.

As Villeneuve approached the European mainland on 22 July, he encountered a British squadron off the coast of Cape Finisterre (Cabo Fisterra) in Galicia.
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There was a brief encounter in fog in which the English, under Admiral Sir Robert Calder, seem to have got the better of the French, but neither Calder nor Villeneuve, ‘timid and irresolute’, persisted and the engagement was broken off. According to one story, when one of the captains of a French vessel, Rear-Admiral Magon de Médine, saw the signal to break off, he went into such a rage that he stormed up and down his ship shouting abuse, and threw his spyglass and wig at Villeneuve as he passed by.
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Napoleon at first accepted Villeneuve’s self-serving reports of the encounter, which portrayed himself in a glowing and the Spanish in a poor light, even though they, and not the French, had borne the brunt of the fighting.
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Part of the problem with the French navy’s lacklustre performance was that Villeneuve appears to have been depressed, and may even have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
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He eventually took refuge in the Bay of Biscay in the north-west of Spain (2 August). Eight days later, he weighed anchor, but rather than head north to Boulogne where the army was waiting, he headed south for Cadiz.
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By that stage, an invasion was out of the question (about which more below) and new orders were sent to Villeneuve to head for the Mediterranean and to disembark the troops at Naples.
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Villeneuve did not receive those instructions until 28 September, and it was not until 18 and 19 October that he finally set sail from Cadiz.
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He was intercepted by Nelson off Cape Trafalgar in what has been described as the ‘greatest sea-fight of the century’.
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The losses were catastrophic for the French naval effort against Britain. Of the thirty-three ships of the line in the combined Franco-Spanish fleet, twenty-two were destroyed or captured. Admiral Villeneuve, no match for the genius of a Nelson, was taken prisoner and escorted to England. He was released in April 1806, but without a command and in disgrace; a few days after his release he committed suicide in a hotel in Rennes, aptly named the Hôtel de la Patrie. His body was found naked from the waist up; he is supposed to have plunged a knife into his breast, near his heart, six times.
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The sixth struck home. Even in death, he was hesitant and inept. The note he left behind gives an indication of the man’s state of mind: ‘Alone, reviled by the Emperor, rejected by a minister who was my friend, having an immense responsibility for a disaster I am blamed for and for which inevitably I am brought here, I must be the object of horror for everyone, and must die.’
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At the time, Trafalgar was referred to as the battle of Cadiz. When Napoleon received news of the defeat he went into a rage against Villeneuve, although he may very well have been relieved to have someone to blame for the failed invasion.
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There is some evidence that he was beginning to doubt whether the scheme would succeed, and that he was getting ready to call off the invasion even before he moved against Austria.
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This is possibly why he never attempted an invasion again, even after gaining a hold over the Continent. For the English, on the other hand, Trafalgar, in spite of the death of Nelson, represented the triumph of the chosen Protestant nation against a country that had ‘offended God’, the instrument of His avenging hand.
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Seven Torrents Descend on Germany

Let us go back a little to before the battle of Trafalgar. It was not until July 1805 that Napoleon suspected that a newly formed coalition was moving against him. He then realized that two Russian armies were massing on the Polish border, while Austrian troops were concentrating on the Bavarian border, in Venetia and in the Tyrol.

This is why Napoleon dictated a letter to his arch-chancellor in August which states his position in blunt terms: ‘The fact is that this power [Austria] is arming itself; I wish to disarm it; if it does not, I will go there with 200,000 men to pay it a good visit that it will remember for a long time.’
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From that time on, Napoleon instructed the French ambassador in Vienna, Alexandre-François de La Rochefoucauld, to demand explanations about Austrian troop movements. By the middle of August, the French, through Talleyrand, had virtually delivered an ultimatum.
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If Vienna were intimidated by these threats and backed down, then Napoleon would have assured his rear while going ahead with plans to invade England. If the threats came to naught, then he had at least laid the diplomatic groundwork for an attack against Austria at a later stage.

On 22 August, Napoleon urged Villeneuve to leave Brest – Villeneuve had said that he might be sailing for Brest or Cadiz, but between 10 and 21 August no one knew where he was – without losing a moment: ‘England is ours. We are all ready, everything is embarked. Appear within twenty-four hours and it’s all over.’
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The very next day, however, he decided that if Villeneuve were not able to make the rendezvous, he would postpone the invasion for a year.
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It is from that moment that one can date the decision to abandon the Channel crossing, even if Napoleon had been thinking about the possibility of a Continental war for some months. The idea of turning around the Army of England, rebaptized the Grand Army (Grande Armée) on 13 August, and launching an attack on Austria, as well as possibly Prussia and Russia, had been considered as early as the end of 1804, and into the summer of 1805.
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There is some indication, however, that Napoleon remained convinced there was no threat to him from either Russia or Austria, at least until about July 1805, months after those two countries had started planning for war.
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There was an evident reluctance on Napoleon’s part to believe that the eastern European monarchs had hostile intentions towards him. Thus when news of an increase in Austrian garrison strengths on the Italian border reached him, he issued a strongly worded letter to Francis and moved troops to the region, but seemed easily appeased by the explanation he received from the Austrian Emperor that they were not aimed at France.
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Napoleon’s willingness to accept Francis’s word at face value was not simply a matter of good faith. He believed, wrongly, that Austria, and for that matter Russia, would not be swayed by British offers of a new coalition.
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The Austrians and Russians, on the other hand, had been planning an offensive against France since February, although they did not start to mobilize troops, for fear of arousing Napoleon’s suspicions, until September–October.
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Napoleon’s spies, in that respect, had let him down; he was blithely unaware of just how advanced their plans were or indeed of the true intentions of Francis and Alexander. When Murat attempted to warn Napoleon that a treaty had been concluded – he appears to have got wind of it from his own intelligence sources – Napoleon reprimanded him, insisting that the rumours were false and fabricated.
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Napoleon even attempted to bend reality to his own will by instructing Fouché to fabricate letters from Petersburg to show just how well the French and Russians got on.
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He finally acted in August by sending a letter to Francis through their respective foreign ministers.
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It was a belated attempt to argue Austria out of an alliance with Russia but it was also warning of what would happen if a Continental war obliged him to turn his forces from the Channel coast to Italy and Germany. A few days later, however, he received a letter from the court of Vienna – a response to his demands to disarm – that was hardly likely to reassure him.
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A power that breaks a treaty, and refuses all claims concerning it, the letter declared, was just as guilty of committing an aggression as if it had attacked another unjustly. It was in part a pointed lesson on how to behave as a great power and as head of state, and in part justification for Austria’s mobilizing of its troops. It had been obliged to do so, gradually, in response to the French mobilization, and because of a lack of conciliatory approaches. Napoleon, not surprisingly, did not see things the same way. In his mind, France was being forced into a war by Austrian aggression; at least that was the official line.
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Napoleon’s decision to turn on his adversaries has been clouded in myth and is often referred to as the ‘Boulogne dictation’ (
dictée de Boulogne
). According to this legend, Napoleon dictated in one draft the plan of the forthcoming campaign to one of his councillors of state, Comte Pierre Antoine Daru. The exaggeration has been pointed out many times before,
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but it is worth underlining that Napoleon would have had to consult with many people – other generals, intendants and administrators – and would have had to think through numerous options, before deciding on the final draft, which is what the dictation appears to be. The main idea was simple: prevent the Russians from joining up with the Austrians in Germany. Moreover, although Napoleon had ordered his troops to gather on the Rhine, he did not decide on a plan of attack until the end of September, when he realized what the Austrian dispositions were likely to be.
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Underlying the simplicity of his objectives, however, was a complexity in operational planning that was to revolutionize warfare for the next century and more.
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The army, divided into seven corps or seven ‘torrents’ as Napoleon referred to them,
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set out on 29 August 1805. The time these men had spent in camp at Boulogne in part explains why he was so successful in the campaigns fought between 1805 and 1809.
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The army and its officers had been constantly exercised between 1803 and 1805 in every aspect of drill and tactics. This was a new army – only about 12 per cent of the troops were veterans of the revolutionary wars – that literally drilled seven days a week in their battalions or divisions, and held army corps manoeuvres twice a month when they practised live musket and cannon fire.
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Or at least most of them did. There are memoirs from this period that paint a less flattering portrait of the army in training and that describe it as far less disciplined than has been made out.
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Nevertheless, the training and discipline were drilled into most, so that they were superbly fit, which is why they were able to march from early morning till nightfall, covering about 390 kilometres, an average of fifty-five kilometres a day, in seven days.
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This is not to say that the forced marches did not take their toll. The march to the Rhine was fraught with difficulties, not the least being the precarious supply situation. Once again, the French believed that a combination of foraging and relying on supply depots would solve any provisioning problems. The only trouble was there were virtually no supply depots, despite orders being sent out to prepare them in advance.
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As a consequence of both the rapidity of the march and the lack of supplies, commanding officers had neither the time nor the means to feed their men, so the troops were authorized to pillage for food. Villages would be completely stripped bare.
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Bad weather and a constant lack of food meant that not only did the army go hungry but it was often in disarray.
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Although it is impossible to give any exact figures for the numbers of men who fell by the wayside, deserted or simply died of exhaustion, it seems that of the 210,000 men who started out from Boulogne, less than half were present at Austerlitz.
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