Campaign in north-east France (1814)

• 1. Introduction

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  In late March 1814, a letter meant for Empress Marie-Louise fell into the wrong hands. Cossack riders serving under Marshal Blücher intercepted it on the 22nd of March, and in that moment, Napoleon Bonaparte's last gambit unravelled. The letter revealed his plan to swing east, rally garrisons, and cut the Coalition armies off from their supply lines. Instead of catching his enemies off guard, Napoleon had handed them the one thing he could not afford to give: clarity.

  The 1814 campaign in north-east France was Napoleon's final campaign of the War of the Sixth Coalition. The armies arrayed against him numbered in the hundreds of thousands, drawn from Austria, Prussia, Russia, and other German states. France had been invaded before, but never quite like this. Yet in the weeks that followed their crossing of the Rhine, Napoleon would win battles that stunned his opponents and raised a question that hung over every campfire and council chamber: could a general of his brilliance actually hold off an entire continent?

  The answer, as it turned out, depended less on what happened on the battlefield than on what happened in the corridors of Paris, around negotiating tables in Pougy, and in the chambers of the French Senate on the 2nd of April. The campaign asks how a man who won almost every fight he entered could still lose a war, and what it costs a city, an empire, and an idea when the answer arrives.

• 2. A Weakened France

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  Prussia and Austria had not always been Napoleon's enemies in these final years. Both states had been forcibly drawn into alliance with France during the disastrous Russian campaign, only to break free when that campaign consumed the Grande Armée. The formation of the Sixth Coalition followed from the wreckage, and a decisive defeat at Leipzig in 1813 pushed Napoleon back across the Rhine.

  By the time the Coalition crossed into France in late December 1813, Napoleon faced a severe mismatch in manpower. He could gather only around 200,000 men in all. More than 100,000 of those were already committed against Wellington's forces on the Spanish frontier, and another 20,000 guarded the Alpine passes. That left fewer than 80,000 troops available for the eastern and north-eastern frontier, where three Coalition armies were advancing.

  The soldiers filling those French ranks were extraordinarily young. A senatus consultum of the 9th of October 1813 had called up the conscript classes of 1814 and 1815, producing recruits so inexperienced that they earned the nickname marie-louises, after the young Empress herself. Against them, the Army of Bohemia under Prince Schwarzenberg counted 200,000-210,000 men, the Army of Silesia under Blücher numbered 50,000-75,000, and the Army of the North under Wintzingerode and Bülow fielded roughly 120,000. The arithmetic alone made the odds staggering.

  One advantage remained to Napoleon. He was operating inside France, a country where his army could forage for food and rely on secure lines of communication. That logistical edge, modest as it was, would shape how he fought the campaign that followed.

• 3. The Six Days' Campaign

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  Blücher reached Nancy on the 25th of January and pushed rapidly up the valley of the Moselle. By the afternoon of the 28th of January his troops were in contact with the Austrian advance guard near La Rothière. Napoleon caught up with him the following day, launching a surprise attack that came close to capturing Blücher himself at the Battle of Brienne on the 29th of January.

  Blücher fell back to a strong position covering the exits from the Bar-sur-Aube defile, where the Austrian advance guard joined him. On the 2nd of February Napoleon attacked at La Rothière, but the weather proved a worse opponent than the Coalition. Snow swept across the field in waves, his artillery, the core of his tactical system, sank uselessly into heavy ground, and columns lost their direction in the drifts. At nightfall Napoleon withdrew to Troyes.

  Blücher, restless and aggressive, obtained permission from Frederick William III of Prussia on the 4th of February to transfer his line of operations to the valley of the Marne. He advanced along those roads with his columns spread wide, believing a screen of Pahlen's Cossacks protected his flank. Those Cossacks had actually been withdrawn forty-eight hours earlier without his knowledge. Napoleon moved fast.

  In four days Napoleon struck four times. He shattered Lieutenant General Olssufiev's Russian IX Corps at Champaubert on the 10th of February, then turned on the vanguard and defeated Osten-Sacken and Yorck at Montmirail on the 11th. He hit them again the following day at Chateau-Thierry. On the 14th of February, he caught up with Blücher himself near Etoges and routed him at Vauchamps, pursuing him all the way towards Vertus. These four battles in six days became the campaign's most celebrated sequence, forcing the entire Army of Silesia into retreat and briefly making the Coalition's numerical advantage feel almost irrelevant.

• 4. Schwarzenberg's Slow Advance

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  While Napoleon was dismantling Blücher's army piece by piece, Schwarzenberg's vast Army of Bohemia was inching forward with the caution that critics would call extraordinary lethargy. No pursuit of Napoleon followed the French retreat from La Rothière, a delay that gave Napoleon the time he needed to turn north and deal with Blücher.

  Once Blücher was neutralised, Napoleon swung back south and hit Schwarzenberg's flank in rapid succession. At Mormant on the 17th of February, at Montereau on the 18th, and at Mery-sur-Seine on the 21st, he inflicted heavy punishment on the Austrians. Under that pressure Schwarzenberg pulled his army back precipitately to Bar-sur-Aube, surrendering much of the ground his enormous force had taken weeks to cover.

  At Arcis-sur-Aube in March, the two forces met again under very different conditions. When Napoleon intercepted Schwarzenberg's advance guard on the 20th of March, the forces were roughly matched: about 21,000 Austrians to 20,000 French. Overnight, both sides received reinforcements. By the second day, French strength had grown to around 28,000. Austrian strength reached 80,000. Napoleon was compelled to withdraw eastward, and the road west to Paris lay open.

  Schwarzenberg's caution had bought Napoleon time and cost the Austrians battles, but the sheer size of the Coalition force meant that even a slow advance would eventually arrive. The fall of Soissons earlier in the campaign had already allowed Blücher's retreating army to escape across the Marne and link up with the Army of the North, raising the forces at Blücher's disposal to over 100,000 men at Laon.

• 5. The Intercepted Letter

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  After six weeks of fighting, the Coalition armies had gained almost no ground. Napoleon's victories in detail had stalled their advance repeatedly, and the Coalition generals were still hoping to concentrate their forces and bring him to a decisive battle on their own terms. Napoleon understood that this was a race he could not win by continuing the same strategy.

  He settled on a bold alternative: move east to Saint-Dizier, gather the garrisons from fortified towns along the way, and rouse the countryside against the invaders. If enough force could be assembled behind the Coalition, their lines of communication would become untenable and they would be forced to turn back from Paris. Napoleon had actually begun executing this plan when the letter to Marie-Louise was intercepted by Cossacks on the 22nd of March.

  At a council of war held at Pougy on the 23rd of March, the Coalition commanders initially voted to follow Napoleon east. Then, on the 24th, Tsar Alexander I and King Frederick William III reconsidered. They had seen the letter. They knew their opponent was not strong enough to pose a real threat to their rear. One additional factor may have concentrated minds: a concern that the Duke of Wellington, advancing from Toulouse in the south, might reach Paris before they did. The decision was made to march directly on the capital.

  Marmont and Mortier assembled what troops they could and took position on the heights of Montmartre. On the 31st of March, finding further resistance hopeless, the French commanders surrendered Paris. At that moment Napoleon was hurrying across the rear of the Austrian army toward Fontainebleau, still trying to reach his troops.

• 6. Abdication and Exile

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  On the 2nd of April, the French Senate passed the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, deposing Napoleon, and followed it on the 5th of April with a decree justifying the action. Napoleon had reached Fontainebleau, but he had arrived too late to change anything. When he proposed that the army march on Paris, his marshals refused, unanimously overruling him on the grounds that the city should be spared further destruction.

  On the 4th of April Napoleon abdicated in favour of his son, with Marie-Louise named as regent. The Coalition rejected this arrangement entirely. Two days later, on the 6th of April, he announced his unconditional abdication and signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau.

  The terms that followed reshaped the map of Europe in fundamental ways. The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 30th of May 1814 by representatives of the restored French monarchy and the Coalition powers, formally ended the War of the Sixth Coalition. France's borders were returned to what they had been in 1792. The monarchy under Louis XVIII was restored. Napoleon was sent to the island of Elba.

  Elba did not hold him for long. Napoleon escaped the following year, initiating the Hundred Days that ended at Waterloo with his defeat by the Seventh Coalition. The intercepted letter of the 22nd of March had set in motion a sequence of events that a campaign full of brilliant victories had been unable to prevent, and the Congress of Vienna would settle the terms of a Europe Napoleon had spent twenty years trying to reshape.