Russia Against Napoleon

While Alexander had been busy negotiating, his army had been experiencing life in and around the French capital. Vladimir Löwenstern set himself up with an expensive Parisian mistress and a fine carriage, paid for partly by 10,000 rubles won at cards. The Guards officers received a special allowance to enable them to enjoy and grace Paris. Humble officers of the line were not so lucky. Aleksandr Zaitsev, an innocent young ensign of the Kexholm Regiment, was quickly separated from his meagre earnings when he dared to visit the gambling dens and the young ladies of the Palais Royal. As to the soldiers, only the Guards were quartered in Paris and they were subjected to strict discipline and constant parades. The news that they were going home was greeted with joy. First to depart were the irregular cavalry – Cossacks, Bashkirs and Kalmyks: they were not the best peacetime ambassadors for a Russia anxious to conciliate the French civilian population and to be seen as a pillar of European order and civilization. Soon afterwards the regiments of the line began the long march home, many of them enjoying feasts in the Prussian towns through which they passed, as a mark of gratitude from Frederick William III. As always, the Guards were different, most of them being carried home to Petersburg by the Russian fleet which had spent the last eighteen months based in British ports.⁴⁴

Conclusion

Not much more than a year after the Russian army left France they were back again, as a result of the ‘Hundred Days’, in other words Napoleon’s escape from Elba and attempt to overthrow the 1814 settlement. On the eve of Waterloo a Russian army of 150,000 men had just reached the Rhine and Karl von Toll had just arrived in Belgium to coordinate operations with Wellington and Blücher. Part of what had been won in 1814 had needed to be reconquered in 1815 at the cost of many lives, though in this case not Russian ones.

Although this might seem to make the 1814 campaign pointless, in fact this is untrue. If the allies had signed a compromise peace with Napoleon in March 1814 he would have been in a much stronger position to challenge the peace settlement than was actually the case in 1815 after his escape from Elba. He would have had longer to plan his revenge and would have been able to pick his moment. His position within France would also have been stronger. By 1815 the restored monarchy had many supporters and even Napoleon’s chief bulwark, the army, was riven with tensions between those who had compromised with the Bourbons and the hard core of Bonapartist loyalists.

Above all, the international situation would have been more favourable. In the end in 1814 the allies could unite with relative happiness around the restoration of the monarchy. A compromise peace with Napoleon would have been much less acceptable, above all for Alexander. Attempting subsequently to achieve agreement among the allies on a European settlement would have been all the harder. Even without this, the Congress of Vienna looked at one point as if it was going to result in a renewed European war. With Napoleon poised in Paris to exploit allied dissensions and his former allies awaiting his resurgence the dangers of further wars would have been great. In fact by the time Napoleon re-established himself in Paris in 1815 the allies had achieved agreement on the peace settlement and were united in their determination not to let him unravel it. That made his defeat nearly certain. In June 1815 Napoleon had to risk everything by trying to destroy Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies before the main allied armies could intervene. He knew that even if he succeeded in doing this, he still faced probable defeat at the hands of the massive Russian, Austrian and Prussian forces already approaching France’s borders.

The Hundred Days made little difference to the terms of the peace settlement. France more or less retained its 1792 borders. Russia got most but not all of the Duchy of Warsaw. Prussia was compensated with part of Saxony and was given Westphalia and the Rhineland in order to secure their defence against French revanchism. The very loose German Confederation which was created under Austrian and Prussian leadership far from satisfied the hopes of German nationalists or liberals, though these were much fewer on the ground than subsequent nationalist historians claimed. This was even more true in Italy, which after 1815 was made up of a number of illiberal states under a rather benevolent Habsburg hegemony.