Finally, in the winter of 1811–12 the crafty new Russian commander-in-chief, Mikhail Kutuzov, cut off the main Ottoman army as it attempted to manoeuvre against him, and forced it to surrender. In so doing he made one of his greatest contributions to the 1812 campaign before it had begun. With his main armies lost, his treasury empty and intrigue rife in Constantinople, the sultan agreed to peace, which was signed in June 1812. The peace came too late to allow the Army of the Danube to be deployed northwards to face Napoleon’s invasion, but soon enough for the troops to reach Belorussia by the autumn and pose a huge threat to Napoleon’s communications and his retreating army.
At the other, northern end of the Russian line the obvious danger was that, with French power resurgent, Sweden would revert to its traditional role as a French client. When Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was elected as heir to the Swedish throne in August 1810 this danger appeared to be confirmed. Since he was Joseph Bonaparte’s brother-in-law as well as Napoleon’s marshal, on the surface Bernadotte appeared likely to prove a reliable French client. In fact, he had stored up a good deal of resentment against Napoleon and moved quickly to reassure Alexander I about his peaceful intentions regarding Russia. It helped greatly that Aleksandr Chernyshev had established a close relationship with Bernadotte before any question of the Swedish throne came up and was able to act as a trusted intermediary between him and Alexander both in Paris immediately after his election and in an important special mission which he undertook to Stockholm in the winter of 1810. Even before Bernadotte’s final selection as Swedish crown prince, Chernyshev was able to reassure Petersburg that he had got to know the marshal well, that Bernadotte was well disposed towards Russia and that he was certainly no admirer of Napoleon.48
Although personal factors mattered, cool calculation guided Bernadotte’s actions as the de facto ruler of Sweden. He realized that if he joined Napoleon and helped to defeat Russia this would bring about Europe and Sweden’s ‘blind submission to the orders of the Tuileries’. Swedish independence would be better assured by Russian victory and he did not despair of Alexander’s chances, given ‘the immense resources of this sovereign and the means he has to offer a well-calculated resistance’. Moreover, even if Sweden did succeed in recapturing Finland from Russia this would not be the end of the story. Russia would not go away, she would always be stronger than Sweden, and she would also always seek to regain Finland in order to increase the security of Petersburg. Much better therefore to seek compensation for Finland’s loss by taking Norway from Denmark.
The British stance must also have been a key factor in Bernadotte’s thinking. If Napoleon attacked Russia, Britain and Russia would become allies. Since Sweden’s crucial foreign trade was totally at Britain’s mercy, to join Napoleon in attacking Russia could spell ruin. By contrast, neither London nor Petersburg would mind too much if Sweden despoiled Napoleon’s faithful ally, the Danish crown, of its Norwegian territories. On these considerations the Russo-Swedish alliance was signed in April 1812. It stored up some problems for the future by promising Bernadotte a Russian auxiliary corps to help him defeat the Danes, and by giving this task priority over a joint landing in Napoleon’s rear in Germany. In the spring of 1812, however, what concerned the Russians was that they did not need to guard Finland or Petersburg from a Swedish invasion.49
Any overview of the years between Tilsit and Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is likely to come to the conclusion that the collapse of the Russo-French alliance and the descent into war were not surprising. Napoleon was aiming at empire in Europe or at the least for a degree of dominance which did not allow for the existence of independent great powers not subject to French orders. In these years the Russian Empire was much too powerful and its elites far too proud to accept French dominion without putting up a stiff fight. Eighteen-twelve was the result.
To an extent, the main difficulty in making sense of these years is that Napoleon ‘blundered towards empire’. In other words he did not always sort out priorities or match ends to means, and often used tactics of bullying and intimidation which harmed his own cause. In the famous expression of the American historian Paul Schroeder, Napoleon could never see a jugular without going for it. In addition, his views on economics were often crude and his grasp of naval matters limited. Though true, this is not however the whole truth.50
The Napoleonic empire was above all the result of the sudden increase in French power brought about by the Revolution of 1789. This increased power took everyone by surprise. French expansion was partly driven by the army’s desire for plunder and the French government’s wish that other countries should pay this army’s costs. Napoleon’s personality was also a major factor. But French grand strategy has to be judged within the context of the policies of the other great powers and, above all, of the century-old struggle with Britain. After 1793 British naval superiority more or less confined French imperialism to the European continent. The enormous gains made by the British outside Europe since 1793, not to mention their ever-growing economic power, meant that, unless Napoleon created some form of French empire within Europe, the struggle with Britain was lost. It is true that Napoleon undermined his own cause by never working out a coherent and viable plan for the creation and maintenance of this empire. On the other hand, the whole Napoleonic episode was so brief that this is not altogether surprising.51
Napoleon’s greatest rivals, the British and Russian empires, were not peace-loving democracies anxious to stay at home and cultivate their gardens. They were themselves expansionist and predatory empires. Many of the criticisms aimed at Napoleon’s empire could, for example, be applied to British expansion in India in this period. They would, for example, include the repatriation of Indian wealth back to Britain by the subcontinent’s British rulers and the impact on Indian manufacturing of incorporation into the British Empire on terms set by London. In 1793–1815, too, the main engine for British territorial expansion in India was a formidable but very expensive European-style army, which needed to conquer new lands to justify its existence and pay its costs, and which was itself fuelled by plunder. Particularly under Richard Wellesley, British territorial expansion was pursued with a single-mindedness worthy of Napoleon, and justified in part by reference to the need to preserve Britain’s position in India against the French threat.52
The basic point was that it was far harder to create an empire in Europe than overseas. Ideology was a factor here. Within Europe, the French Revolution had glorified concepts of nationhood and popular sovereignty which in principle were the antithesis of empire. The experience of Napoleon’s wars – economic as much as military – did nothing to legitimize the idea of empire in Europe to Europeans. Meanwhile, however, on the whole European opinion was becoming more inclined than before to accept the idea of Europe’s civilizing mission and inherent cultural superiority over the rest of the world. The French, with some justice, saw themselves as the leaders of European civilization and they regarded the continent’s eastern periphery in particular as semi-civilized. Even they, however, would hardly have applied to Europeans a British senior official’s view of ‘the perverseness and depravity of the natives of India in general’. Nor would many Europeans have believed them had they done so.53