Metternich played for time. He intensified secret negotiations with the rulers of the southern states, which gratefully accepted Austria’s protective embrace. He was confident that he could outmanoeuvre Stein through faits accomplis. Above all, he placed his faith in his ability to manipulate Alexander.
‘I argued for at least 3 hrs with your fine Emperor, I told him off as I do my son when he has done wrong,’ he wrote to Wilhelmina from Weimar on 25 October. ‘The result of my strictures will be that for the next week he will not do anything silly, but then he will start again and I shall have to tell him off again. That has been my role for the past 2 months.’ The sense of power this gave him was exhilarating. ‘I dashed over to Meiningen to arrange a few minor points in the destiny of the world with the Emp. Alexander and then dashed back here to do the same with my master,’ he reported to her six days later.33
The feeling that he was fulfilling some grand destiny led him to ponder that of Napoleon. ‘What kind of state must that man be in,’ Metternich mused in a letter to Wilhelmina, ‘he who once stood at the summit of power, and now sees the levers of such an immense construction shatter in his hands!’34
Napoleon struggled back towards the Rhine after his defeat at Leipzig ‘in a state of despondency difficult to describe but easy to comprehend’, in the words of the Paris Préfet baron Étienne Pasquier. Of the more than 300,000 men under his command three months earlier, only 40 to 50,000 were still with him, and they were for the most part ‘no more than a crowd marching without order and incapable of carrying out any vigorous operation’. They nevertheless managed to defeat their erstwhile Bavarian allies under General Wrede, who tried to cut off their retreat at Hanau.1
The network of Napoleonic control over Germany that had been built up since 1806 unravelled. Napoleon’s brother Jérôme fled from his kingdom of Westphalia as the other rulers of the Rheinbund joined the allies. ‘I found him accompanied by his ministers of foreign affairs and war, and still surrounded by all the tattered trappings of royalty,’ wrote Beugnot, Napoleon’s minister in the grand duchy of Berg, who saw him pass through Düsseldorf. ‘The house he was occupying was full of lifeguards, whose theatrical uniforms heavy with gold were wonderfully inapposite to the situation; there were chamberlains on the stairs since there were no ante-chambers, and the whole thing resembled nothing so much as a troupe of players on tour rehearsing a tragedy.’2
Private scores were settled as the French regime imploded, and unruly troops bent on rapine added to the misery. The situation was rendered all the more tragic as a typhus epidemic swept through the Rhineland, turning the military hospitals into morgues, striking down exhausted and underfed stragglers and taking with it even healthy men such as the venerable comte de Narbonne, who had survived the retreat from Moscow with such stoicism.
The collapse of Napoleon’s power-structure in Germany meant that all the French troops still holding out in fortresses such as Danzig, Magdeburg, Modlin and Zamość were now utterly beyond his reach. They did not even represent a serious inconvenience to the allies, as they were easily contained by small forces of militia. And the retreat of Napoleonic power in Germany was replicated in Italy.
As soon as the armistice had expired in August, Austrian troops had invaded the Illyrian provinces, forcing the weak French garrisons to evacuate. Prince Eugène could do little to halt their advance, and fell back on Milan. In November he was approached on behalf of the allies by his father-in-law King Maximilian of Bavaria, who urged him to safeguard his future by changing sides, but he refused. His wife, Maximilian’s daughter, supported him in his resolve. ‘Courage, my friend,’ she wrote, ‘we do not merit our fate, yet our love and our clear conscience will be enough to sustain us, and in a simple cottage we will find the happiness that so many others seek fruitlessly on thrones. I say again to you, let us abandon everything, but never the path of virtue, and God will take care of us and of our poor children.’3
Virtue was not much in evidence further south, at Naples, whose King Joachim, Napoleon’s brother-in-law Murat, was engaged in secret negotiations with the Austrians in the hope of keeping his throne. Napoleon had ordered his former chief of police Fouché to Naples with instructions to keep an eye on Murat and prevent him from defecting. But while Fouché had little time for Murat, he was even less interested in shoring up the Napoleonic empire, whose fall he was eagerly anticipating for reasons of his own. So he merely observed the game being played out before him, not so much by Murat as by his pushy and scheming wife, Napoleon’s beautiful sister Caroline, who had no intention of giving up the pleasures of royalty at the age of thirty.
Murat disposed of an army of not more than 20 to 25,000 men, magnificently uniformed but undisciplined, barely trained and poorly officered. Metternich, who may have been influenced by fond memories of the short but passionate affair he had enjoyed in Paris a couple of years before with Caroline, seems to have believed that Murat’s forces were stronger, and to have been impressed by his overblown military reputation. He therefore thought it prudent to detach Murat from Napoleon by offering him Austria’s recognition of his status and promising to obtain Britain’s as well. Castlereagh did not approve, but accepted that Metternich must be given freedom of action in this instance, on the understanding that Britain’s ally Ferdinand IV of Naples, now holed up in the Sicilian half of his kingdom, would be compensated with land elsewhere in Italy.4
Napoleon was back at Saint-Cloud on 10 November. The following day he held a council of state during which he complained that he had been betrayed by everyone, venting particular rage against King Maximilian and vowing vengeance. ‘Munich shall be burned!’ he ranted repeatedly. He gave orders for the raising of 300,000 soldiers, who were to be found by conscripting ever younger men and taking extra quotas from age groups which had not been heavily levied in the past. But as the area under his control shrank, so did his manpower pool, not to mention the number of uniform and munitions factories. The price of hiring a replacement soldier doubled to 4,000 francs. In Ghent, even a hundred seminarists preparing for the priesthood were packed off to fill the ranks of the artillery. Resistance to conscription increased commensurately. In November 1813 a young man who had been called up shot himself publicly in the main square of Cologne. As it became easier to escape from France and the administration in the country came under strain, the number evading conscription by fleeing or going into hiding rose drastically, and according to some estimates reached 100,000.5
On 9 December Napoleon presided over the opening of the Legislative Chambers and lectured them on the need for more men, more money and more determination. He set an example by acting as though nothing were amiss, and court life continued as usual. The receptions were as glittering and crowded as ever.
His remarkable show of confidence failed to inspire any in those around him. ‘The master was there as always, but the faces around him, the looks and the words were no longer the same,’ recorded one official who attended the imperial lever at the Tuileries. ‘There was something sad and tired about the very demeanour of the soldiers, and even of the courtiers.’ The mood in Paris was one of despondency. ‘People were anxious about everything, foreseeing only misfortune on all sides,’ wrote Pasquier. ‘People no longer had faith in anything, all illusions had been shattered.’6
As he contemplated the invasion of France itself, Napoleon did what he could to improve her