Waterloo Commanders: Napoleon, Wellington & Blucher

French infantry in action guerrillas during the Peninsular War.

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright © Andrew Uffindell 2007.

ISBN 978-1-84415-249-0

Digital Edition ISBN: 978-1-84468-343-7

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Contents

Maps, Illustrations and Key to Maps

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One: Napoleon

1 Formative Years

2 Forging a Reputation

3 Head of State

4 The Years of Victory, 1805–9

5 Decline and Fall, 1810–14

Part Two: Wellington

6 Formative Years

7 India, 1797–1805

8 Interlude, 1805–8

9 The Peninsular War, 1808–11

10 The Peninsular War, 1812–14

Part Three: Blücher

11 Formative Years

12 The Downfall of Prussia, 1806–12

13 The Army of Silesia, 1813–14

Part Four: The Waterloo Campaign, 1815

14 The First Battles

15 The Battle of Waterloo

Part Five: Aftermath, 1815–52

16 Aftermath

Part Six: Assessment

17 Personalities

18 Styles of Leadership

19 Methods of Command and Control

20 Strategy and Tactics

Conclusion

Notes

Further Reading

Maps, Illustrations and Key to Maps

Maps

Napoleon’s Italian campaign, 1796–7

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, 1798–9

The Marengo campaign, May–June 1800

Napoleon’s campaigns in central Europe, 1805–9

Napoleon’s Empire, 1812

Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, 1812

Napoleon’s 1813 campaign

Napoleon’s 1814 campaign

Wellington in India, 1797–1805

Wellington in the Peninsula, 1808–14

Wellington invades France, October–December 1813

The 1806 campaign

The Battle of Auerstädt, 14 October 1806

The Leipzig campaign, Autumn 1813

Blücher in 1814

The Battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny, 16 June 1815

The Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815

The bataillon carré: Napoleon’s 1806 campaign against Prussia

Wellington’s Vitoria campaign, May–June 1813

Plates

Between pages 118 and 119

Napoleon: detail from his statue at Montereau.

Wellington at Waterloo, after Sir Thomas Lawrence.

Blücher, sketched during his visit to England in June 1814.

Napoleon on the bridge at Arcole, 15 November 1796.

The Battle of Rivoli, 14 January 1797.

Austerlitz, 2 December 1805.

Napoleon and his staff.

Napoleon at Wagram, 6 July 1809.

The rout of Napoleon’s army after Waterloo, 18 June 1815.

Napoleon on HMS Bellerophon in July 1815.

Colonel the Hon. Arthur Wellesley in India, September 1800.

Wellington at Waterloo.

Major-General the Hon. Sir Arthur Wellesley in 1804.

Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington.

Blücher.

Gneisenau.

The Battle of Leipzig, 19 October 1813.

Illustrations

Frontispiece: French infantry in action against guerrillas during the Peninsular War

The end at Waterloo: Napoleon and his army flee the battlefield

Napoleon on the morning of Wagram, 6 July 1809

Wellington at Waterloo

Waterloo: Napoleon at his command post

Marshal Davout at Auerstädt, 1806

Key to Maps

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank all my family and friends for their support with this project, especially Rupert Harding of Pen and Sword Books for his advice and guidance; John Richards, who drew the excellent maps; Martin Rodgers; and the ever-helpful staff of the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the German Historical Institute.

Introduction

Waterloo is one of the most important battles in history. It opened a new era, for it ended Napoleon’s extraordinary career and the two decades of conflict that had blighted Europe since the outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1792.

But the decisiveness of Waterloo has distorted the popular view of the three army commanders who fought there. Of all Napoleon’s battles, it is his defeat at Waterloo that is the most famous, rather than such victories as Marengo, Austerlitz, Jena or Friedland. Similarly, the commanders who beat him were remarkable men in their own right and had made a name for themselves even before the battle. The Duke of Wellington helped to establish British imperial power in India and then made his reputation defeating a series of French marshals in the Peninsular War (1808—14). Indeed, some of his Indian and Peninsular achievements required more skill and imagination than his straightforward, attritional defence at Waterloo, as he himself pointed out: ‘It is generally thought that the Battle of Waterloo was one of the greatest battles ever fought; such is not my opinion, but I say nothing upon that point.’

Wellington’s ally, the Prussian commander-in-chief, Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Bliicher, was a seventy-two-year-old who had first seen service in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) and since acquired a wealth of experience fighting the French during the Revolutionary Wars and in the campaign of 1806, before winning fame at the head of the Army of Silesia in the campaigns of 1813-14, which ended with Napoleon’s first abdication. Yet his career has also been overshadowed, at least outside Germany, by his final battle at Waterloo.

It would be difficult to find a more extraordinary combination of commanders than these three men, or more intriguing contrasts in personalities and styles of leadership. This book has been written to explore these contrasts and the lessons to be learned from them. It concentrates on their military careers and offers an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses as soldiers. Their political and private lives have been covered as far as is necessary to understand them as military commanders, and more information on these aspects can be found in the suggestions for further reading at the end of this book. Similarly, the composition, tactics and weapons of their armies will be covered in detail in a companion title, Waterloo Armies, by Philip Haythornthwaite.

These books are intended to supplement Pen and Sword’s Battleground Europe volume, Waterloo: The Battlefield Guide, and to provide both the battlefield visitor and the armchair reader with a fuller understanding of how and why Waterloo was fought and won.

Part One

Napoleon

Chapter 1

Formative Years

Despite his status as a great French national hero, Napoleon was actually the son of Corsican freedom fighters who opposed the French annexation of the island. For the first twenty-three years of his life, he identified with Corsica as his homeland and saw France as an oppressor, even after spending over seven years at schools in France and being commissioned a French officer. He owed much of his character to his childhood on Corsica, including his proudly independent spirit, superstition and a strong sense of clan loyalty.

Youth and Education

Napoleon was born on 15 August 1769 at Ajaccio, the Corsican capital. Although originally from Tuscany, his family, the Buonapartes, had lived on the island for three centuries. His father, Carlo-Maria Buonaparte, had married Maria-Letizia Ramolino, the daughter of an inspector of roads and bridges, in 1764, when he was eighteen and she just fourteen. When King Louis XVI of France annexed Corsica in May 1768, Carlo joined the patriot Pasquale Paoli in resisting the occupation and was seen as a possible successor to him. Letizia was actually pregnant with Napoleon when she and Carlo fled through the mountains following Paoli’s decisive defeat at Ponte Nuovo on 9 May 1769. Paoli went into exile in June, his men were allowed to return home, and Letizia reached Ajaccio in time to give birth. Napoleon was given his unusual name because Carlo followed the example of his grandfather, who had called his sons Joseph, Napoleon and Lucien.

Letizia was a formidable and spirited woman who lived to be eighty-seven and she imbued her family with a strict code of honour and the importance of courage. She bore twelve children, eight of whom survived to adulthood: Joseph (born in 1768); Napoleon (1769); Lucien (1775); Elisa (1777); Louis (1778); Pauline (1780); Caroline (1782); and Jérôme (1784). Some, especially Elisa and Caroline, shared Napoleon’s calculating and egotistical traits, while others, including Joseph, Louis and Jérôme, were more laid-back. Letizia later claimed that while her other children jumped around and scribbled on the walls of the family playroom, Napoleon used to beat a drum, play with a wooden sword and draw soldiers.

Napoleon was bold as well as precociously focused and inquisitive. When he was seven, he mounted a lively horse, to the alarm of his relatives, and rode off to the family farm, where he inspected the mill, found out how much corn it could grind every hour and calculated the daily and weekly output. He was also aggressive and did not hesitate to fight his older brother Joseph.

After Paoli’s defeat, Carlo Buonaparte pragmatically came to terms with the French occupation and enjoyed the rewards of collaboration. Count Louis de Marbeuf, the French Governor of Corsica between 1772 and 1786, became a close family friend and admirer of Napoleon’s mother. The French were keen to establish their rule by developing a Corsican nobility that was attached to the government by self-interest and Carlo was a prime candidate as he both claimed noble descent and was one of Paoli’s former lieutenants. Carlo had intended Napoleon and his eldest son, Joseph, to follow in his footsteps and study law in Pisa, but Marbeuf ensured that Napoleon and other members of the family received a good education on the French mainland.

Napoleon first had to learn French and on Marbeuf’s advice was sent with Joseph to the College of Autun, where he arrived on 1 January 1779. After four months, Napoleon was transferred to the royal military school at Brienne-le-Château, while Joseph, who seemed more suited for a career in the Church, remained at Autun. Carlo’s status as an impoverished noble, and a recommendation from Marbeuf, ensured that Napoleon was educated on a scholarship paid for by the King.

Brienne, and eleven other royal military schools, had been founded by Louis XVI only three years earlier as part of the military reforms of the Minister of War, Count Claude-Louis de Saint-Germain. The intention was to form the character of the cadets by isolating them at school for six years from the age of eight or nine, without leave even during the long autumn vacation. Thus life at Brienne was monastic rather than military and the school was in fact run by a religious order. The cadets wore a uniform, but received a general education, to fit them for further study as priests or lawyers and not necessarily soldiers.

The five and a half years that Napoleon spent at Brienne were crucial to his development. His accent, foreign name and pride in his Corsican heritage resulted in some teasing and isolation from his fellow cadets and he was serious, reserved and self-controlled. The emphasis at Brienne was on physical education, spartan conditions and practical subjects such as geography, drawing, mathematics and the history of France and Ancient Greece and Rome. The quality of the teaching varied and Brienne was criticized by an inspector, but Napoleon benefited in particular from good instruction in mathematics. He also acquired a sound knowledge of geography and liked reading history, although he did not excel at languages, music or fencing. He was grateful for the education he received at the school and later provided pensions, promotions and employment for the staff.

At first, Napoleon seemed destined for the navy, but was selected by an inspector to enter the Ecole militaire, the military school in Paris for gentlemen cadets, and left Brienne in October 1784. In any case, his mother had feared to see him exposed to the dangers of both enemy fire and the sea and he himself came to favour a military career.

At the Ecole militaire, he was once again educated as a scholar at royal expense. Although it was designed to produce gentlemen rather than professional soldiers, the curriculum included fortification, drawing and some military drill. Napoleon successfully passed an examination in September 1785 to become an artillery officer. It was based primarily on knowledge of mathematics and Napoleon studied so hard that he qualified directly as a second lieutenant, without having to pass through the intermediate stage of élève, or cadet, which would have necessitated a second exam. He therefore left the Ecole militaire on 28 October after just one year and was the first Corsican to graduate. He was particularly fortunate to benefit from this education, since the Ecole militaire was suppressed in 1787, soon after he left, as the government had to economize.

Napoleon was now sixteen. He was assigned to the Regiment of Artillery of La Fère and joined it at Valence in the Rhône valley to begin his professional training as a gunner. It was an excellent regiment, but Napoleon had wanted to join it more because of its location: it was based in the south of France, near Corsica, and supplied the artillery for the island’s garrison.

In August 1786, Napoleon helped quell a riot in Lyons by workers seeking an increase in their wages. The following month, after a year’s service, he qualified for six months’ leave and returned to Corsica, which he had not seen for almost eight years. Such long periods of leave were an accepted practice at the time and were hardly unreasonable given that Napoleon had spent over five years of uninterrupted seclusion at Brienne and then a year in the Ecole militaire without being able to roam the city of Paris outside.

Napoleon’s father, Carlo, had died from stomach cancer on 24 February 1785, leaving the family in debt. Napoleon increasingly took the lead in managing its affairs, displacing his sixty-eight-year-old great uncle, Lucien, the Archdeacon of the Cathedral of Ajaccio, who had been acting as head of the family. Napoleon extended his absence from his regiment, partly by claiming sick leave, and went to Paris in September 1787 to press, unsuccessfully, his family’s claims for a government subsidy relating to a nursery of mulberry trees that Carlo had undertaken to plant. From Paris, he returned to Corsica in January 1788 and only in June, after nearly two years of absence, did he rejoin his regiment, which was now at Auxonne.

Napoleon found a mentor in the Commandant of the Auxonne Artillery School, General Baron Jean-Pierre du Teil, one of the foremost gunners of the time, who recognized his potential and lent him books. Napoleon worked hard and wrote in July 1789: ‘I have nothing to do here except work; I only put on my uniform once a week. I sleep very little since my illness; I go to bed at ten and get up at four, and have only one meal a day.’

At Auxonne, and previously at Valence, Napoleon primarily acquired a gunner’s technical education. He studied the theory and practice of artillery, learnt military drill and also gained experience in leadership, for he was attached to a company of bombardiers and helped look after the men. But at the same time, he read avidly on a broad range of topics, including military history, classical authors such as Plutarch, Livy and Tacitus, politics, philosophy and histories of Corsica and he digested what he learnt by writing many papers and essays. He effectively gave himself a university education. At the time, it was not obvious that he would be a commander in war, for his future seemed to lie in Corsica and in a political rather than military role. He therefore studied widely and, although he became familiar with the principles of the art of war, he seems to have fully developed his higher military studies only later, in the early 1790s, particularly after the outbreak of war between Revolutionary France and the European powers.

Napoleon himself was responsible for one of the myths about his education. He later urged would-be commanders to study again and again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Turenne, Eugène and Frederick the Great and to take these great captains as models. But in fact he drew his key concepts less from former commanders and more from the military theorists of the late eighteenth century, especially Generals Pierre de Bourcet and Count Jacques de Guibert. For example, it was the theorists who advocated what became one of Napoleon’s most characteristic methods, the concentration of forces and massed artillery fire against a single point to make a breach in the enemy’s battle line. Napoleon is known to have read a life of Frederick the Great, but it was a superficial account of his campaigns and gave little detail of his tactics. In any case, it was the theorists, rather than the past commanders, who offered the most useful lessons on how future wars should be fought.

Corsican Adventures

The summer of 1789 was a momentous one. Following the Revolutionary upheavals in Paris, the people of Auxonne rioted on 19 July. A month later, Napoleon’s regiment mutinied and was therefore dispersed in different quarters along the Saône river. It was the French Revolution that provided Napoleon with the opportunities to advance himself both in politics and the army and to emerge a decade later as the ruler of France. But in 1789, he still saw Corsica as his country and revealed the depth of his feeling in a letter of 12 June to his childhood hero, the patriot Paoli:

Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited out on our coast, flooding the throne of freedom with rivers of blood – that was the hateful scene first given to my eyes. … Slavery followed upon our submission: subjected to the threefold tyranny of the mercenary, the magistrate, and the tax collector, our countrymen live on despised – despised by those who have the reins of government in their hands. Is that not the most hideous of all the tortures that a man can be put to?

Napoleon saw the Revolution as a chance to reduce the power of the French monarchy over Corsica and supported the Jacobins, the most radical and anti-monarchical political faction. Unlike most of his former comrades at the Ecole militaire, who emigrated rather than break their oath of allegiance, he showed no loyalty to Louis XVI and even advocated his execution.

Napoleon became eligible for another period of absence from his regiment and left Auxonne in September. Along with his brother Joseph, he now pursued an active political career in Corsica and spent almost half the time between September 1789 and June 1793 in three periods of leave on the island.

Napoleon’s methods of obtaining these long absences included mendacious claims of sickness, overstaying his leave and using connections to bypass a refusal by his colonel. He was fortunate that the shortage of officers as the result of large-scale emigration reduced the likelihood of dismissal. In January 1792, he was appointed adjutant-major of one of the four battalions of volunteers formed in Corsica. But all French officers were then ordered to rejoin their regular regiments or be struck off, with exceptions being made only for the first and second-in-command of volunteer battalions. Napoleon therefore secured his election on 1 April 1792 as second-in-command of Ajaccio’s volunteer battalion, partly by forcibly taking one of the election commissioners from the house of an opponent and into his own protective custody.

Ajaccio had been occupied in March by four companies of volunteers as a result of unrest following the suppression of the Capuchin convent. On 8 April, a detachment of the volunteers was attacked and disarmed by a mob and Napoleon, who took some of his officers to the scene, had to retreat after a lieutenant was shot and mortally wounded. Next day, his volunteers opened fire indiscriminately on civilians. The colonel commanding the regular garrison of the citadel at Ajaccio had to intervene to try and restore order, but Napoleon and his battalion commander refused to withdraw and even occupied more buildings. Their men looted, killed livestock, destroyed crops and vineyards outside the city and prevented supplies from entering it. During this stand-off, Napoleon apparently tried to undermine the loyalty of the regular garrison to its commander, but without success. The confrontation was finally ended by a convention on the 12th and subsequently by the arrival of commissioners from the Corsican Directory, or executive committee, who ordered thirty-five of the inhabitants to be arrested and the volunteer battalion to leave Ajaccio. It was an unsavoury episode in Napoleon’s career and indicated at best a loss of control of his men and at worst complicity in the murder of civilians.

Napoleon returned to Paris in May 1792 and had himself reinstated as a captain in the regular army. He was in the city on 20 June, when a mob broke into the Tuileries palace and forced Louis XVI to wear a tricolour cockade. He was also there on 10 August, when the Tuileries was again attacked and the King’s Swiss Guards massacred in its defence. The incident contributed to his fear and loathing of mobs and reinforced his conviction of the need for swift and decisive action in a crisis: he remarked that if the King had appeared on horseback and provided some leadership, he would have repulsed the mob. As it was, France became a republic on 25 September following the overthrow of the monarchy.

During his final period in Corsica (October 1792–June 1793), Napoleon saw action for the first time in February, when he took part in an expedition under Colonel Colonna Cesari Rocca to the small but strategically located island of La Maddalena off the northern coast of Sardinia. But the expedition’s sailors panicked and forced the troops to re-embark without having a chance to attain their objectives. Napoleon, who had set up a battery and fired on the island’s fortifications, had to abandon three guns. It was a disappointing end to a venture intended to help liberate Sardinia from its King and secure it as a valuable source of grain for France.

Political enmities, and a growing rift between Paoli and the French Revolutionary government, forced Napoleon and his family to flee Ajaccio in May and leave Corsica altogether the following month. Thus, his career began with a series of failures. After four years, he had little to show for his Corsican ambitions except valuable experience in leadership and politics. Henceforth, he sought opportunities in France and abandoned his once-fervent Corsican patriotism. From 1796, he would spell his name in the French manner, Napoleon Bonaparte, rather than the Italian, Napoleone Buonaparte.

Toulon, 1793

On 13 June, the Buonapartes landed as refugees at the southern naval base of Toulon. They found France not only at war with most of the European powers and threatened by foreign invasion following the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, but riven with civil conflict. Royalist sympathies were strong in the southern provinces and the Revolutionary government needed to restore its authority.

At first, Napoleon helped prepare the Mediterranean coastal defences to resist British naval attacks. In July, he was sent to Avignon to collect a convoy of material for these defences, but was diverted and joined a force commanded by General Jean-François Carteaux to suppress an insurrection at Marseilles. At this time, Napoleon wrote Le Souper de Beaucaire (‘The Supper at Beaucaire’), a political tract that supported the Jacobins and an end to France’s internal strife and that was intended to raise his profile and win favour with the authorities.

By 25 August, Carteaux had occupied Marseilles. But two days later, Toulon declared itself for Louis XVII, the imprisoned eight-year-old son of the late Louis XVI. Next day, a British fleet under Vice-Admiral Lord Hood entered the harbour and British, Spanish, Sardinian and Neapolitan troops began to occupy the city.

Toulon’s loss was a potential disaster to France’s position as a naval power and her presence in the Mediterranean. Carteaux was sent to recapture it, but his chief artillery officer, Major Dommartin, was wounded in a skirmish on 7 September. Napoleon had returned to his former role with the coastal defences and happened to be passing by on his way back to Nice. He was appointed as Dommartin’s replacement by Antonio Cristoforo Saliceti, who was an influential Representative of the People, or political commissar, as well a fellow Corsican and a family friend.

Napoleon played an important role at the siege of Toulon and energetically organized the artillery and sited batteries. Although General Jean du Teil, the brother of the Commandant of the Auxonne Artillery School, arrived to take charge of the artillery, he was old and sick and assumed only nominal command over Napoleon. But Napoleon did not personally produce the plan that recaptured Toulon, despite later claims to the contrary. It was obvious to both the local commanders and the authorities in Paris that the most effective way of forcing Lord Hood to evacuate the port was by capturing a fortified headland that commanded the inner harbour from the south-west.

Nor was it likely that the defenders of Toulon, outnumbered, overstretched and of mixed quality, would be able to prevent its fall for long, especially after the capable General Jacques Dugommier took command of the besiegers on 16 November.

Napoleon played a subordinate role during the final assault early on 17 December and was dismounted and wounded in the leg by a British soldier with a bayonet or pike. The French Revolutionary forces took the forts on the crucial headland and forced Lord Hood to sail after he had destroyed the arsenal and several of the French ships in the harbour.

Toulon was Napoleon’s first experience of military success. He had demonstrated his bravery, leadership and expertise as a gunner and was promoted to general of brigade on 22 December at the age of twenty-four. Accounts of his life often imply that he was singled out for promotion and that his role at Toulon was pre-eminent. In fact, he was just one of a group of officers who had distinguished themselves and who were promoted one rank. For example, André Massena, who later became one of Napoleon’s most famous marshals, was promoted to general of division. Nonetheless, Napoleon did impress his superiors and influential political figures and General Jean du Teil wrote to the Minister of War: ‘We are at a loss for words to describe adequately to you Buonaparte’s conspicuous services; to say that he showed the greatest insight and knowledge and extraordinary bravery is to give a very inadequate account of the merits of this exceptionally good officer.’