Geoffrey Wawro
It is a great pleasure to introduce the scholarship in this Festschrift dedicated to Donald D. Horward. From his own Fontainebleau in Tallahassee, Don raised a family of scholars who have left their mark on the dynamic field of the French Revolution and Napoleon. Like the emperor himself, Don identified key areas for further research, distributed the work to his marshals, and – unlike the emperor’s marshals – Don’s have never disappointed. This book contains incisive pieces by his students and admirers that probe into every corner of the Napoleonic world.
Fundamentally, Napoleon excelled by doing unexceptional things with exceptional speed, vigor, inspiration, and efficiency. His preferred stance in politics and war was the “central position” – stealing between two converging enemies, and holding off one while attacking the other. His famed manoeuvre sur les derrières, pinning an enemy’s front while rolling him up from the flank, accounted for his greatest victories. The all-arms corps of 16,000 to 30,000 men, introduced and perfected between Marengo and Austerlitz, was the hook on which Napoleon hung this devastating new form of warfare. He could snare larger forces with a corps, and then wheel his other corps into their flanks and rear. He could parry one army with a corps – of oscillating strength – while annihilating the other with the bulk of his forces. At Waterloo, he famously (if unsuccessfully) sent Grouchy with a corps to drive Blücher away from Wellington.
Rick Schneid shows us Napoleon emerging from obscurity as the great captain in the 1790s. Bonaparte had an uncommon ability to wring maximum advantage from small troop numbers – just 40,000 mobile troops in that 1796 campaign against Piedmont. By 1805, Napoleon had institutionalized this dexterity, one grognard quipping to another during the envelopment of the Austrians at Ulm, that the “emperor makes war in a new way – with our legs.” He wrung every advantage from speed and time, wrong-footing his foes. As Mark Gerges puts it in his chapter on Austerlitz, Napoleon dispersed his corps “like spread fingers,” used them to locate his enemy, and then wrapped them around the enemy in a suffocating embrace. This kind of agility required expert use of roads, supplies, staff work, and combat power. Napoleon oversaw a pre-industrial war machine that had this expertise. He was, as Dennis Showalter reminds us, the very “father of operational war,” as we know it.
And therein lay the problem. Napoleon was a father who directed but did not teach his sons. None of his marshals ever attained his level of ingenuity. And so, as most of the authors in this volume make clear, Napoleonic warfare was most effective when Napoleon himself commanded. This was no problem in the 1790s, when, as Rick Schneid shows, a relatively junior Bonaparte was put in charge of manageable theaters. He proved adept at manipulating his order of battle to achieve maximum impact, shifting brigades between divisions to almost magically attain numerical superiority in a series of battles. This operational and tactical genius – coup d’oeil – became harder to exercise as his power and responsibilities (and number of enemies) mounted.
As the empire grew, much work had to be subcontracted to the marshalate, especially given the emperor’s reliance on detached corps d’armée after the Marengo campaign. Some of the marshals were generally accounted brilliant – Masséna, Davout, Soult, Lannes – some less so. Many of the marshals were the proverbial “good with a corps, bad with an army” type of general. Napoleon’s “strong hand and short leash” system – evolved to inject the emperor’s genius into ballooning French armies – threatened to collapse whenever a marshal escaped the leash, either willfully or due to isolation in a faraway theater of war.
Ney, particularly after he lost his staff chief Jomini, personified this undiscerning type – almost singlehandedly destroying the army at Waterloo in his last-ditch gasconade with the cavalry. Grouchy, another of that type, doomed that army to defeat by pursuing the rear of Blücher’s army to Wavre, while its advanced guards smashed in Napoleon’s withered flank at Waterloo. But long before Waterloo, the allies had already detected this vulnerability and resolved to exploit it via the Trachenberg–Reichenbach Plan of 1813. That plan, composed as a result of Allied (Russians, Prussians, and Swedes) negotiations with the Austrians in July, held that henceforth the Allies would give way before Napoleon-commanded troops – goading the emperor into fruitless pursuits – while swinging into action against the marshals on the emperor’s flanks. This was the formula that culminated in the great victory of Leipzig.
Mike Leggiere makes us feel the full weight of Napoleon’s emerging problems. Like a celebrity whose best career exploits were behind him, Napoleon now had to contend with ambitious new rivals who had taken the time to study his methods. Russia’s desertion of the Continental System, Napoleon’s failed 1812 invasion, the loss of 500,000 of 600,000 troops in Russia, and the defection of key French allies or tributaries, principally Prussia, were blows that all but doomed the French Empire. By the summer of 1813, Napoleon was confronted with the combined, intelligent strength of Europe’s four other great powers. They came from all points of the compass – approaching the Rhine from the east, threading through the Pyrenees in the south, and threatening from the north and west with deployments in the Low Countries.
Dennis Showalter finds that, even under duress, Napoleon was uniquely gifted, able to intervene successfully at any level–policy, strategy, operations, or tactics – without degrading or destroying the whole. Showalter rightly points out that our own post-Vietnam insistence on establishing a hierarchy of importance – policy first, strategy second, then operations and tactics – blinds us to Napoleon’s real genius. His talent and institutions wrung maximum advantage from all four levels of warfare and made them symbiotic and synergistic. Ferocious operations and tactical strokes could rescue an overreaching strategy or a tone-deaf policy.
Showalter sees the Austerlitz and Jena campaigns as outstanding examples of this virtuosity, Jena in particular. It was “a tactical victory that would fulfill his strategy and policy objectives.” Contemporaries, like the stunned governor-general of India in 1808, Lord Minto, could only gape in wonderment: “What would have seemed impossible had become scarcely improbable, since we have seen one state after another in Europe, among them those we deemed most stable and secure, fall like a house of cards before the genius of one man.”
But this versatility was also the seed of Napoleon’s downfall. It tempted him to gamble, and to hazard wild strokes on the assumption that he would always find a way to make them work. As he said in 1809, “our past successes are a certain guarantee of the victory that awaits us.” Of course they weren’t. War, as Clausewitz said, is cards, not chess, and his adversaries were hiding their cards and preparing new gambits to stymie the emperor’s increasingly familiar approach. His two greatest defeats–in Spain and Russia–were owed to this complacency. He became too confident in his intuition and master-strokes, and underestimated a rapidly evolving and improving enemy. “Napoleon’s system,” as Showalter puts it, “had outgrown Napoleon himself.”
Rob Citino’s chapter describes a Prussia that rebuilt from the debacle of Jena–Auerstedt: “The postcatastrophe period was the great era of Prussian reform.” And the same went for the other armies. By Wagram in 1809 – “Napoleon’s last victory” – all of Napoleon’s adversaries were adopting French methods: all-arms divisions, more artillery, faster marches, French tactics, and even national guards like the Austrian and Prussian Landwehr.
Underestimation of the British may have been Napoleon’s greatest blind spot. Huw Davies has Napoleon dismissing the British thusly in 1808, even as they embarked on the Peninsular Campaign: “the English are of little importance; they have never more than a quarter of the troops that they profess to have.” And yet that overlooked Britain’s key strength: seapower and money, the two things they would use to destroy Napoleon. As Kevin McCranie puts it: “the Royal Navy was never far over the horizon.” It picked off French ports and colonies all over the world and could decide great battles, like Trafalgar, or whittle away at Napoleon’s alliances, like the one he constructed in the Baltic after Copenhagen, but which the British navy had essentially dismantled by 1811.
Seapower allowed the British to erode the Continental System, by smuggling to or even openly trading with countries that were technically forbidden to trade with Britain. Britain’s other strength was strategic mobility, its use of naval power to open peripheral fronts such as Walcheren or Portugal, and use them to distract and bleed the Grande Armée. Kenneth Johnson has Napoleon lamenting this in 1809; the British were constantly “disturbing” his financial affairs by opening new fronts and forcing him to react. The English “continue to ruin me,” he wrote then. Even the Walcheren Expedition, generally accounted a British fiasco, wounded the French Empire. “It has cost me 50,000,000,” Napoleon fretted, money he would not recover as multiple threats – ferried by British subsidies – built and coalesced around him.
Alexander Mikaberidze’s chapter on Russia in 1812 captures the strategic floundering of Napoleon. Cooler heads urged him merely to contain the Russian colossus, using the Turks, Poles, Swedes, and Germans as curbstones, but the emperor trusted in his ability to invade Russia, bring the tsar’s army quickly to battle, and dictate devastating terms. He was under no illusions about the campaign, writing lyrically about the Polish mud and the bare Russian steppe, but he trusted his war luck. It ran out in 1812, Mikaberidze noting that “the very magnitude of the war” defeated Bonaparte: the “enormous forces, vast distances, [and] logistical challenges.”
Of course a mind as great as Napoleon’s should have predicted all of this. But Napoleon was a thruster, never content to sit or parley idly. He wanted to impose his will by force of arms. As Leggiere, who stands as Horward’s Caulaincourt with this magnificent volume, affirms in the context of 1813: the Emperor Napoleon became the master of General Bonaparte. Sadly, that must be the brilliant but flawed emperor’s epitaph. Ego always clashed with pragmatism in the mind of history’s greatest commander.