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By the end of 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte had reached the pinnacle of power. In a series of campaigns over the previous four years, he had defeated the three main European land powers and forced them into unequal alliances with him. Austria’s Emperor Francis was obliged to give his daughter, 18-year-old Marie Louise, in marriage to the French adventurer. Napoleon had broken Prussia’s once impressive war machine, and from its territory he carved a client Polish state. His most formidable antagonist, Russia’s Tsar Alexander I, was strong-armed into joining an economic blockade aimed at choking the trade of the only major surviving power, Britain. It seemed as if Europe lay at Napoleon’s feet.
Yet just five years later, the Napoleonic Empire had collapsed. British-led forces were pushing into southern France, having won the prolonged duel in Portugal and Spain known to history as the Peninsular War. A reformed coalition of Austria, Prussia, and Russia waged an ultimately successful campaign against the French occupation of Germany. Pushed back to his capital, in April 1814 Napoleon abdicated and resigned himself to exile on the Mediterranean island of Elba. Emerging almost a year later to stage one more bid for European power, he suffered final defeat on the field of Waterloo, ending his days on the remote Atlantic fastness of St Helena.
Several interrelated factors explain this astonishing reversal of fortune. Although still capable of stunning victories, Napoleon’s abilities as a commander and the quality of his troops began to decline by the second decade of the new century. This meant that the tactical flair he had exhibited in the years of his rise to power was less often in evidence.
Napoleon was, in large part, the author of his own downfall. Having gained his empire by force, he had to embark on almost continuous warfare to retain and expand it. This led him into unwinnable campaigns in the inhospitable environment of Spain – a theatre in which he played little personal part – and, even more damagingly, in the vast expanses of Russia. Napoleon’s conquests created deep-felt resentment among his foes. They not only yearned to shake off the French imperial yoke but also learned important military lessons from the experience of defeat. Their new-found unity was complemented by the maritime and financial power of a still unbeaten Britain. Just as revolution has been said to devour its own children, Napoleon was consumed by wars of his own making.
Declining powers
As we have seen in the first two parts of this series, Napoleon’s ascendancy was the product of an outstanding talent for generalship, combined with an army at the peak of its performance. Yet, as he entered his forties, the emperor was no longer quite the man he had once been. He had privately reflected in 1805 that ‘I will be good for six years more; after that even I must cry halt’. A few years later, some observers noted that his reactions were slowing and his health was deteriorating. Portraits suggest that his weight had markedly increased. He suffered from urinary tract problems and occasionally experienced seizures that have never been fully explained. Napoleon’s medical condition may have had a marginal effect on his decision-making processes, especially during the 1812 Russian campaign when, unusually for him, he admitted to experiencing ill health.
His army, too, was gradually beginning to decline. The troops who fought at Austerlitz and Jena had included a large proportion of experienced professionals. The ranks were swelled by conscription, giving Napoleon access to a large reservoir of manpower. But with the growing size of armies came acceptance of a high casualty rate. According to one estimate, by 1809 there were some 210,000 dead, wounded, and otherwise incapacitated French troops. This figure was equal to the size of the Grande Armée that had set off from the camp at Boulogne to subjugate central Europe just four years earlier.
To fill the gaps, it was necessary to recruit poorer quality soldiers, so that French infantry tactics began to lose their earlier sophistication and became more wasteful in terms of lives. To compensate for their lack of skill, late empire troops were instructed to batter their way through the enemy lines, while artillery fire was used increasingly to bombard the enemy into submission.
These weaknesses were shown in the campaign that Napoleon waged to suppress a revived Austrian challenge in 1809. After losing the Battle of Aspern-Essling (outside Vienna) in May, he retrieved the situation six weeks later at nearby Wagram, though at a cost of 40,000 casualties on each side. Many of the empire’s new recruits were foreigners drawn from satellite states such as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Tellingly, no more than half of the 600,000 troops assembled by Napoleon for the invasion of Russia were French. This meant reliance on less well-trained troops whose motivation and loyalty were uncertain as well.
Manpower losses became a critical problem following Napoleon’s intervention in two contrasting but equally unpromising theatres of war. From 1808, France was committed to a grinding war of attrition in Portugal and Spain. Then, in 1812, Napoleon overreached himself by invading Russia. Both operations stemmed indirectly from his inability to defeat Britain, whose maritime supremacy had been conclusively demonstrated at Trafalgar in October 1805. Napoleon did not understand sea power and could not realistically rival Britain’s navy. Instead, he resorted to an economic blockade in a bid to bring the island nation to its knees. The outcome was the so-called ‘Continental System’, an attempt to cut mainland Europe off from trade with Britain. Participation in the scheme was expected of the defeated states.
The Continental System inflicted severe damage on Britain in 1810-1811, with markets closed, the country plunged into recession, and serious working-class unrest challenging the country’s stability. But it also caused economic hardship for Napoleon’s unwilling satellites – a situation to which he was entirely indifferent. It was Portugal’s refusal to cooperate with the trade embargo that led Napoleon to embark on the Peninsular War. Tsar Alexander’s decision at the end of 1810 to end his participation provoked a breach which led Napoleon to launch his invasion of Russia.
Unwinnable wars
In the Iberian Peninsula and Russia, Napoleon encountered an environment inimical to his characteristically fast-moving, offensive style of warfare. Agricultural development in both countries was limited, forcing the French to rely on cumbersome supply trains. Spain proved a seemingly limitless drain on Napoleon’s resources. In the first year alone, the Peninsular War cost France 300 million francs. The campaign absorbed vast amounts of manpower, too. By 1812, there were more than 350,000 French soldiers in the peninsula, with some 200,000 of these employed to protect their fragile supply lines against attack.
The harshness of French overlordship encouraged determined resistance, making the land unsafe for the occupiers. Equally provocative was Napoleon’s imprisonment of the Spanish royal family and installation of his brother Joseph on the throne. He was surprised by the hostile popular reaction to the invasion and had no solution to the irregular warfare in which local guerrilla bands engaged. Both sides carried out brutal atrocities, shocking even the hardened British troops under Wellington’s command, who arrived in the summer of 1808 in support of the Portuguese.
A further weakness was that, apart from during a brief period early in the war, Napoleon was not himself present in the peninsula. He left his marshals to manage the campaign, neglecting to appoint an overall theatre commander until July 1813, when it was too late to make a difference. By the autumn, Wellington’s forces had the upper hand and were ready to cross the Pyrenees and push into southern France. This was not just the result of the Iron Duke’s skilful generalship and the discipline and training of his army, nor of the active support supplied by the civilian population, important though these factors were. It was also due to Britain’s ability to resupply its expeditionary force in the peninsula by sea. As Wellington himself acknowledged, ‘it is our maritime superiority [which] gives me the power of maintaining my army while the enemy are unable to do so’.
The ‘Spanish ulcer’ was a long-drawn-out cause of Napoleon’s eventual downfall. More rapid, and arguably more devastating, was the failure of his expedition to Russia. It proved impossible on the country’s poor roads to move supplies rapidly enough to sustain the French army. An astonishing one-quarter of the invasion force was lost through hunger and fatigue on the outward journey. This, combined with the Russians’ use of a ‘scorched earth’ policy to deprive the French of resources, made the invasion unsustainable. This was an ironic outcome for a general who had famously stated that ‘an army marches on its stomach’. His logistical arrangements were suited to the needs of a smaller army, living off the land in an abundant countryside – as, for example, in northern Italy in the 1790s or the Danube valley in the 1805 Ulm-Austerlitz campaign.
Napoleon had, in fact, departed from one of the basic principles of his military thinking. He pushed on to Moscow without destroying the main enemy army in a decisive battle. The Battle of Borodino, in September 1812, was only a qualified victory because he refused to commit his reserve to the fight. Worse, he found Moscow practically deserted and soon engulfed by an enormous fire, mostly probably set by the departing Russians. Napoleon stayed in the city until mid-October in the vain hope that the Tsar would after all seek a negotiated settlement. He had fatally underestimated his opponent’s new-found determination. With winter closing in, Napoleon belatedly ordered his troops to evacuate the city.
Bad weather, poor command and control, and sheer desperation sealed the fate of the retreating French army. More than 40,000 wagons loaded with plunder, rather than supplies, slowed its progress. As snow began to fall, starving men left the ranks in search of food and stragglers were picked off by partisans. Discipline collapsed, with only a heroic rearguard action by Marshal Ney to redeem the disaster. By mid-December, when the last broken units limped back across the River Niemen, Napoleon had lost nine out of every ten soldiers. No less importantly, 200,000 horses also failed to return. These losses would prove impossible to make good as his enemies regrouped.
Forging a new coalition
At a deeper level, Napoleon’s defeat is traceable to the nature of his rule. This stemmed from his own authoritarian personality. Although he contracted alliances with his defeated enemies – as in the 1807 Treaties of Tilsit with Russia and Prussia – these were always unequal relationships, whose sole purpose was to serve the French national interest. As his opponents came to appreciate, Napoleon was committed to a practically limitless programme of conquest. This made it impossible to reach an abiding settlement, based on a fair and reasonable adjustment of interests.
In the short term, Napoleon’s former foes had no choice but to accept his terms. But they never trusted him, and the demands that he placed on them bred a slow-burning desire for revenge. It has been estimated that, in addition to maintaining the bulk of his armies at his opponents’ expense, his conquests supplied up to 15 per cent of France’s annual revenue from 1805. Napoleon’s ever-growing exactions drove the vanquished powers to reorganise and ready themselves to fight back.
The process of internal regeneration was most marked in Prussia, where humiliating defeat at Jena-Auerstädt in October 1806 engendered an embryonic sense of German nationalism. It prompted an extensive modernisation of military practice under a highly effective organiser, Gerhard von Scharnhorst. By the time of his premature death in June 1813, Prussia had a universal system of conscription, and officers were being promoted on merit. The country had the makings of a professional general staff, too, which would later take responsibility for military planning.
To create a coalition capable of defeating the hated oppressor, Austria, Prussia, and Russia had to overcome their own deep-seated differences. Prussia and Russia came together in the Convention of Tauroggen at the end of 1812, but it took Austria – wary of promoting Russian dominance in Europe – until the following summer to join them. Only when it became clear that Britain was victorious in the Iberian Peninsula, and a meeting between Napoleon and Austrian Chancellor Klemens von Metternich at Dresden ended in deadlock, did the Habsburg Empire come on board.
The ensuing campaign in Germany was decided largely by sheer weight of numbers. The decisive point was the epic four-day Battle of Leipzig in October 1813, in which 190,000 French faced 335,000 coalition troops. Despite a strong performance in the early stages of the encounter, Napoleon took heavy losses and was undermined by the defection of his German allies. As the French retreated, the premature blowing of the only bridge leading westward over the River Elster left 50,000 of his troops stranded. Napoleon retreated into France where, facing invasion, he won some victories against individual allied armies, but was undone by the imbalance of forces and the desertion of his marshals.
In April 1814, with no alternative, Napoleon gave up his throne. Although he made a brief comeback in the ‘Hundred Days’ campaign, the European powers would never again allow him to pick them off one by one. At Waterloo in June 1815, a coalition led by Wellington and Prussia’s Marshal Blücher ended the dream of a Napoleonic revival.
Looking back, looking forward
Napoleon’s meteoric career was the last time that a single individual combined the governance of a major state with the personal command of armies in the field. In the years of his ascendancy, the concentration of power in one man’s hands produced broadly successful results. But it did not work over the much greater distances across which French armies were committed in his later years, in theatres stretching from Madrid to Moscow.
Napoleon had always expected his marshals to be obedient instruments of his will, and when they needed to exercise independent initiative, for example in Iberia or in the 1813 German campaign, they proved unequal to the task. The limited communications technology of the early 19th century worked against Napoleon’s highly centralised style of command as well. Even under such an outstanding leader, it is not surprising that the system finally broke down.
The increasing complexity of warfare in the decades after Waterloo, combined with the growing size of armies, meant that the tasks Napoleon handled in person had to be delegated to trained military staffs under the overall supervision of a general. Napoleon’s stunning if short-lived military achievement could not be repeated in the generations that followed his downfall.
Graham Goodlad has taught history and politics for more than 30 years. He is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to MHM.
Further reading:
Napoleon’s Wars: An International History, 1803-1815 (Charles Esdaile, Allen Lane, 2007)
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Strategies for a World War (Jeremy Black, Rowman and Littlefield, 2022)
All images Wikimedia Commons unless stated.
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