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Abstract
This essay re-examines coalition warfare during the Napoleonic era by looking at the three eastern European powers – Austria, Prussia and Russia – how they interacted over time with France as well as each other, and how they managed French preponderance on the Continent. Before 1812, coalition warfare was dominated by eighteenth-century military and diplomatic attitudes: overall foreign political goals were ill-defined and were characterised by deep mistrust. The result was that the eastern powers pursued their own interests with little regard to coalition cohesion. If the coalition held together in 1813 and 1814, on the other hand, it was largely because individual powers' self-interest coincided with the overall objectives of the coalition – an increased determination to defeat Napoleon – along with a never before seen numerical superiority in allied troops. In this, Austria and especially Chancellor Metternich's role in juggling conflicting interests between the allies so that they could present, for the first time, a united front against France was fundamental.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Charles Esdaile and Wayne Reynolds for their comments on drafts of this paper.
Notes
1See ‘Metternich's Sketch of a Political Scheme, January 1806’, in Prince Richard Metternich (ed.), Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1773–1815 (London: Charles Scribner 1880), II, 121–3; Frederick W. Kagan, The End of the Old Order: Napoleon and Europe, 1801–1805 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press 2006), 145–6.
2The British foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, was aware of this difficulty as early as the First Coalition, but awareness did not translate into more effective cooperation between the allies (H.M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System 1740–1815 (Harlow: Pearson-Longman 2006), 287–8). After his defeat at Ulm in 1805, Feldzeugmeister Baron Mack, accused by an Austrian investigating commission of having made too many mistakes in the field, took his cause to the public with a pamphlet in which the author argued that inter-allied disunity, pitted against Napoleon's evident genius, was more to blame for defeat than Mack's own military dispositions (Gunther E. Rothenberg, ‘The Habsburg Army in the Napoleonic Wars’, Military Affairs 37 (1973), 2).
3Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1957), 94.
4It is for this reason that it deals almost exclusively with relations between Austria, Prussia and Russia, as well as relations between the eastern powers and France, largely ignoring the diplomatic role that Britain had to play. That role is covered, among others, by Paul W. Schroeder, ‘“An Unnatural Natural Alliance”: Castlereagh, Metternich, and Aberdeen in 1813’, International History Review 10 (1988), 517–40. Besides, despite bankrolling the Sixth Coalition, Britain was virtually excluded from the councils of the eastern powers until Nov. 1813 (Muriel E. Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen. A Political Biography (London: Longman 1983), 122), and did not play a significant role in the diplomatic negotiations until Langres in Jan. 1814 (Kissinger, A World Restored, 118–9). The eastern powers not only faced many of the same foreign-political problems, but also bore the brunt of the fighting against France. For a brief analysis of the high-political developments of the three eastern powers during this period see, Brendan Simms, ‘The Eastern Empires from the Ancien Regime to the Challenge of the French Wars, 1780–c.1806’, and idem., ‘The Eastern Empires from the Challenge of Napoleon to the Restoration, c.1806–1830’, in Pamela Pilbeam (ed.), Themes in Modern European History (London: Routledge 1995), 65–84, and 85–106.
5Enno E. Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, 2 vols. (Princeton UP 1963), I, 94–5; Marcel Dunan, Napoléon et l'Allemagne: La Système Continentale et les Débuts du Royaume de Bavière, 1806–1810 (Paris: Plon 1943), 232–72. Michael Klang, ‘Bavaria and the War of Liberation, 1813–1814’, French Historical Studies 4 (1965), 27, 33–40, suggests that loyalty towards French inspired reforms among the Bavarian political elite was strong, but that this was not incompatible with an increasing hatred of Napoleon as tyrant.
6Austria, 27 million; Prussia, 8.7 million in 1806, 5 million after 1807; and Russia about 37.5 million (Clive Emsley, The Longman Companion to Napoleonic Europe (London: Longman 1993), 127, 141, 147, 149).
7Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (New Haven: Yale UP 1994), 224.
8Eric Dorn Brose, German History, 1789–1871: From the Holy Roman Empire to the Bismarckian Reich (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books 1997), 51; Gunther E. Rothenberg, The Emperor's Last Victory. Napoleon and the Battle of Wagram (London: Weidenfeld 2005), 55–6.
9Frederick C. Schneid, Soldiers of Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy: Army, State and Society, 1800–1815 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1995), 14, 25.
10Brose, German History, 72.
11Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (London: Longman 1995), 41, 50–65.
12Annie Crépin, Défendre la France: Les Français, la guerre et les service militaire, de la guerre de Sept Ans à Verdun (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes 2005), 157.
13Jacques Houdaille, ‘Pertes de l'Armée de terre sous le Premier Empire, d'après les registres matricules’, Population 27 (1972), 48; idem., ‘Le problème des pertes de la guerre’, Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine 17 (1970), 411–23; Rothenberg, Art of Warfare, 135. The Russian figure is from William C. Fuller, ‘The Imperial Army’, in Dominic Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols. (Cambridge: CUP 2006), II, 537.
14Oskar Regele, Feldmarschall Radetsky (Vienna: Verlagerhold 1957), 111–2.
15Karl Roider, ‘The Habsburg Foreign Ministry and Political Reform, 1801–1805’, Central European History 22 (1989), 161, 176; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (Cambridge: CUP 1994), 238. On the financial crisis facing the regime see, idem, ‘Austria's road to Austerlitz’, in Kinley Brauer and William E. Wright (eds.), Austria in the Age of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota 1990), 12–3.
16Ingrao, Habsburg Monarchy, 238. The Austrian troops, under General of Cavalry Karl Philip Prince Schwarzenberg, were not, it would appear, as inactive as has often been made out. Schwarzenberg lost a third of his men in the campaign. See Digby Smith, The Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book (London: Greenhill Books 1998).
17Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: OUP 1994), 406–7.
18Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 465.
19Alexander M. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries. Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois UP 1997), 144–5; Michael A. Pesenon, ‘Napoleon Bonaparte and Apocalyptic Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century Russia’, The Russian Review 65 (2006), 379, 380–1.
20See, for example, Foreign Minister Czartoryski's grand design in, W.H. Zawadzki, ‘Prince Adam Czartoryski and Napoleonic France, 1801–1805: A Study in Political Attitudes’, Historical Journal 18 (1975), 250–5.
21Zawadzki, ‘Czartoryski and Napoleonic France’, 252.
22Ibid., 256.
23Ibid., 269.
24Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 49; Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801–1825 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press 1969), 167–8, 180–2; Janet Hartley, Alexander I (London: Longman 1994), 74; Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, 323–4, 344–5. Alexander had played a similar double game in 1806–07, encouraging Prussian resistance against France all the while negotiating peace terms behind the Prussian king's back.
25On Prussian neutrality see Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge: CUP 1996); and Philip Dwyer, ‘The Politics of Prussian Neutrality, 1795–1805’, German History 12 (1994), 351–73; idem, ‘Two Definitions of Neutrality: Prussia, the European States-System and the French Invasion of Hanover in 1803’, International History Review 19 (1997), 522–40.
26On the potential impact of Prussia on the outcome of the Third Coalition see, Kagan, The End of the Old Order, 546–7, 654. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 280, on the other hand, believes that Prussia never had any intention of going to war with Napoleon.
27See Philip Dwyer, ‘Prussia during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1786–1815’, in Dwyer (ed.), The Rise of Prussia, 1700–1830 (London: Pearson 2000), 249–50; Simms, Impact of Napoleon, 207–8.
28Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 124; Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen, 128.
29Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 139–40.
30Rothenburg, Art of Warfare, 204. See Kutuzov's remarks to the British liaison officer, Major-General Wilson, in Sir Robert Wilson, Narrative of Events during the Invasion of Russia by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Retreat of the French Army 1812 (London: John Murray 1860), 234.
31See H. A. Schmitt, ‘1812: Stein, Alexander I and the Crusade against Napoleon’, Journal of Modern History 31 (1959), 325–8.
32There were any number of influential men and women in the Tsar's entourage who saw this as an opportunity to expand Russia's borders to the Vistula and who no doubt brought some influence to bear. Martin, Romantics, Reformers, Reactionaries, 141–2. Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 149, argues that Alexander's ‘political preparations from the very outset had anticipated a campaign beyond the Russian frontier’.
33Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann, König in Preuβens groβer Zeit: Friedrich Wilhelm III. Der Melancholiker auf dem Thron (Berlin: Siedler 1992), 362–4, 366; Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 452–3.
34Indeed, orders were issued for Yorck's arrest and court martial, although this did not prevent him from inciting garrisons in East Prussia to revolt, arguing that he was acting with the King's secret approval (Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of the Prussian Reform, 1807–1815 (Princeton UP 1966), 192–5).
35Stamm-Kuhlmann, König in Preuβens groβer Zeit, 365–9, 370–4; Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, 350, Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London: Allen Lane 2006), 362–3.
36Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I. 154–6; Stamm-Kuhlmann, König in Preuβens groβer Zeit, 362–4.
37Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 467.
38Friedrich Luckwaldt, Oesterreich und die Anfänge des Befreiungskrieges von 1813 (Berlin: Ebering 1898), 187–230, 249–307, 388–407; Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 147–86.
39Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 465.
40Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 470. So too did Britain pressure Austria in 1813 to join the alliance, except that it did support local insurrections on Austria's borders (the Tyrol, Italy, Illyria, Switzerland) in the hope of driving Austria into the allied camp.
41Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, 357–8; Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Metternich Studies since 1925’, Journal of Modern History 33 (1961), 242; Kissinger, A World Restored, 88, 89, 91, 98, 101; Luckwaldt, Oesterreich, 61–78, 153–86; Charles Esdaile, Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803–1815 (London: Allen Lane 2007), 497.
42Luckwaldt, Oesterreich, 308–38; and Metternich's somewhat romanticised account of the meeting in Metternich, Memoirs, I, 185–92.
43See the conversation with Metternich in Correspondance de Napoléon I publiée par ordre de l'empereur Napoléon III, 32 vols. (Paris: H. Plon 1858–1870), vol. 25, n. 20175 (23 June 1813).
44Scott, Birth of a Great Power System, 305, 324.
45Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 92–3.
46There were four peace conditions: a partition of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw; the expansion of Prussia; the return of Illyria to Austria; and the restoration of the Hanseatic cities. Russia and Prussia had already agreed on two further conditions: the restoration of Prussia to its pre-1806 borders, and the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine. Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 471–2; Kissinger, A World Restored, 75–6.
47Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 180–90; Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 47. Some historians, like Kissinger, A World Restored, 64, 70, have doubted Metternich's sincerity, arguing that in the months leading to the Austrian declaration of war, he was playing a double game, assuring Russia that he would declare war on France, and Napoleon that he would remain loyal, all the while inching closer to the allied camp.
48Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 201.
50Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Mes souvenirs sur Napoléon (Paris: Plon 1893), 217.
49Cited in Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon, 10.
51Cited in Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969), I, 169. See also Metternich, Memoirs, I, 186.
52Jean Tulard, Napoléon, jeudi 12 octobre 1809: le jour o[ugrave] Napoléon faillit être assassiné (Paris: J.-C. Lattès 1993), 34.
53Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 467–8.
54There is much to Schroeder's assessment that Napoleon refused to make peace ‘because he did not want to, chose not to – and also because he could not; could not make peace because he was no good at it, but also because, by this time, he was probably caught too deeply by his own past to carry it off.’ (Schroeder, The Transformation of Europe, 469).
55Jean Hanoteau (ed.), The Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza (New York: William Morrow 1935), 290; Adam Zamoyski, Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (London: HarperCollins 2007), 5.
56At Frankfurt, Metternich, with the consent of Alexander (who rightly believed that the negotiations would come to nothing), but without the approval of Frederick William, sent a captured French diplomat, Baron St Aignan, to Napoleon with a suggestion of peace on the basis of the ‘natural borders’ of France – the revolutionary borders of Campo Formio (1797) and Lunéville (1801). Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander, 217; Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 490–1; Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I. 223, 250–2, 255–7; Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen, 141–53.
57Thomas Stamm-Kuhlmann (ed.), Karl August von Hardenberg 1750–1822: Tagebücher und autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Munich: H. Boldt 2000), 781.
58Rothenberg, Wagram, 75–6.
59John A. Lynn, ‘Nations in Arms’, in Geoffrey Parker (ed.), The Cambridge History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2005), 207. See the recent works by Volker Wacker, Die alliierte Besetzung Frankreichs in den Jahren 1814 bis 1818 (Hamburg: Kovac 2001); and Karen Hagemann, ‘Francophobia and Patriotism: Anti-French Images and Sentiments in Prussia and Northern Germany during the Anti-Napoleonic Wars’, French History 18 (2004), 404–25.
60Esdaile, Wars of Napoleon, 271. Tim Blanning, ‘The French Revolution and German Modernization’, Central European History 22 (1989), 116, explains the collapse of the Empire through ‘overexertion’ on the part of Napoleon: ‘the demographic base of France was too small to sustain such a large empire, the effort required was correspondingly excessive’. One only needs to compare the population of Britain with that of its Empire to see that the two factors are not necessarily interrelated.
61Esdaile, Wars of Napoleon, 271; Regele, Feldmarschall Radetsky, 121–7.
62Black, European Warfare, 187.
63Paret, ‘Napoleon as Enemy’, 83.
64Rothenberg, ‘The Habsburg Army’, 4; Gordon Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare: The Military Alliance against Napoleon, 1813–14’, in idem, War, Politics and Diplomacy: Selected Essays (London: Weidenfeld 1966), 28; J. P. Riley, Napoleon and the World War of 1813: Lessons in Coalition Warfighting (London: Routledge 2000), 118, 120–1, 441–3.
65Rothenberg, ‘The Habsburg Army’, 4.
66Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare’, 29–30.
67Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 94–5; Llewellyn Cook, ‘Schwarzenberg at Dresden: Leadership and Command’, Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850: Selected Papers (Tallahassee, FL: University of Florida 1994), 644.
68Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare’, 30.
69Cook, ‘Schwarzenberg at Dresden’, 644.
70Especially over the best manner in which to invade France at the end of 1813. See Michael V. Leggiere, The Fall of Napoleon: I: The Allied Invasion of France, 1813–1814 (New York: Cambridge UP 2007), 28–40.
71Gates, Napoleonic Wars, 235.
72Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare’, 43.
73Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 69, 72.
74Cited in Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 75.
75Cited in Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen, 129.
76Baron Friedrich Karl von Müffling, The Memoirs of Baron von Müffling: A Prussian Officer in the Napoleonic Wars (London: Greenhill Books 1997, orig. in German 1851), 92–3, 395; Leggiere, Fall of Napoleon, 39–40.
77Grimsted, Foreign Ministers of Alexander, 205, 208–9; Hartley, Alexander, 123; Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 125–6.
78Chamberlain, Lord Aberdeen, 143.
79Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 250.
80Kissinger, A World Restored, 104.
81Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 332–3.
82Craig, ‘Problems of Coalition Warfare’, 37–8.
83Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 257–8. On the Messianic tones in some of Metternich's correspondence see, Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 98, 117, 122.
84Kissinger, A World Restored, 111–3.
85Kraehe, Metternich's German Policy, I, 264–6.
86Zamoyski, Rites of Peace, 148; Kissinger, A World Restored, 121–7.
87The expression is from Kissinger, A World Restored, 118.
88August Fournier, Der Congress von Châtillon. Die Politik im Kriege von 1814 (Vienna: Tempsky 1900), 298–300.
89Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 501–4; John M. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder. British Foreign Aid in the Wars with France, 1793–1815 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 1969), 315–21; Hartley, Alexander I, 124, who states that Chaumont was designed to bring about the ‘total defeat of France’.
90Schroeder, Transformation of European Politics, 474.