casualties suffered by Massena’s army in his fruitless march against Lisbon in 1810–11 were an early sign that ‘the Spanish ulcer’ could not be lanced, even when some 300,000 French troops had been dispatched south of the Pyrenees.89
Besides weakening France, the Spanish business simultaneously relieved the strain upon Britain, strategically as well as commercially. After all, during most of the preceding Anglo-French wars, Spain had fought on France’s side – which not only had posed a landward threat to Gibraltar and a seaward threat (in the form of the Franco-Spanish combined fleets) to British naval mastery, but had also affected export markets in the Peninsula, Latin America, and the Mediterranean generally. A friendly rather than a hostile Spain meant an end to all those pressures. The damage done to British trade by the Continental System was now greatly eased, as the products of Lancashire and the Midlands returned to old markets; by 1810, total British exports had soared to a record £48 million (from £37 million in 1808). Although this relief was but temporary, and was increasingly overshadowed by the closure of the Baltic and by the Anglo-American dispute over impressment and blockade, it was enough. It sustained Napoleon’s great extra-continental foe, and just at the time when the European continent itself was breaking into revolt.
In effect, the Napoleonic system in Europe rested upon a contradiction. Whatever the merits or demerits of the Revolution within France itself, a nation proclaiming liberty, fraternity, and equality was now – at the direction of its emperor – conquering non-French populations, stationing armies upon them, sequestering their goods, distorting their trade, raising enormous indemnities and taxes, and conscripting their youth.90 Resentment was also felt at the controls being increasingly imposed under the Continental System, since it was not only Nantes and Bordeaux but also Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Trieste which were being hurt by the economic warfare Napoleon was waging against Britain. Few would openly rise in arms, like the Spaniards, or decide to pull out of the ruinous Continental System, as the Russians did in December 1810.91 However, once Napoleon’s Grand Army was devastated in the Moscow campaigns and the Armée de l’Espagne was being pushed back to the Pyrenees, the opportunity at last beckoned to throw off the French hegemony. What the Prussians, Russians, Swedes, Austrians, and others then needed was a ready supply of the rifles, boots, and clothing – not to mention the money – which the British were already providing to their Portuguese and Spanish allies. Thus, the security of the British Isles and its relative prosperity on the one hand, and the overstretched and increasingly grasping nature of French rule on the other, at last interacted to begin to bring down Napoleon’s empire.
Such a sweeping analysis of economic and geopolitical factors tends, inevitably, to downplay the more personal aspects of this story, such as Napoleon’s own increasing lethargy and self-delusion. It also may underemphasize the very precarious nature of the military equilibrium until almost the final year of the war – for the French even then possessed the resources to build an enormous navy, had they persisted in that course. The British export economy was to receive its severest test only in 1812; and until the battle of Leipzig (October 1813) there appeared good prospects that Napoleon could smash one of his eastern enemies and thus dissolve the coalition against him.
Nonetheless, the French ‘overstretch’, reflecting Napoleon’s own hubris, was by this time extreme, and any major setback was bound to affect other parts of the system – simply because these parts had to be drained of troops in order to repair the broken front. By 1811, there were some 353,000 French troops in Spain, and yet, as Wellington observed, they had no authority beyond the spot where they stood; defending their lines of communication consumed most of their efforts, and left them vulnerable to the Anglo-Portuguese-Spanish advance. When, in the year following, Napoleon decided to reduce Russia’s independence, a mere 27,000 men could be withdrawn from Spain to join the march upon Moscow. Of the more than 600,000 men in the Grand Army, only 270,000 of that total were Frenchmen, the same number as remained in the Peninsula. Furthermore, since ‘native’ Frenchmen now included the Belgians, Dutch, and many Italians in the annexed territories, troops raised from within the pre-1789 French borders were in a decided minority during the Russian campaign. This may not have mattered in the early, successful stages, but it did become important during the retreat, when men were desperate to escape from the bitter weather and marauding Cossacks and to return to their own homes.92
The Grand Army’s casualties in the Russian campaign were enormous: perhaps as many as 270,000 men were killed and 200,000 captured, and about 1,000 guns and 200,000 horses were lost. The eastern front, more than any other factor, weakened the morale of the French army. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the eastern European and peninsular campaigns interacted from 1813 onward to produce the eventual downfall: for by then the Russian army had little capacity (and many of its generals little enthusiasm) for pursuing the French across Germany; the British were somewhat distracted by their American war; and Napoleon had raised a fresh force of 145,000 men in the early summer of 1813, which enabled him to hold the line in Saxony and to negotiate an armistice. Although Prussia had prudently switched to the Russian side and Metternich was threatening to intervene with an Austrian army of a quarter of a million men, the eastern powers were still divided and uncertain. Thus, the news that Wellington’s troops had smashed Joseph Bonaparte’s army at Vitoria (June 1813) and were driving it back to the Pyrenees was important in encouraging the Austrians to declare war and to combine with the Russian, Swedish, and Prussian forces in order to expel the French from Germany. The subsequent battle of Leipzig in October was fought on a scale unknown to the British army – 195,000 Frenchmen were overwhelmed in four days of fighting by 365,000 allied troops; but the latter were being economically underpinned by vast British subsidies, as well as being provided with 125,000 muskets, 218 artillery pieces, and much other equipment from the island state.93
In turn, the French defeat at Leipzig encouraged Wellington, now north of the Pyrenees, to advance upon Bayonne and Toulouse. As the armies of Prussia and Austria poured across the Rhine and the Cossacks invaded Holland, Napoleon conducted a brilliant tactical defence of northeastern France early in 1814; but his army was drained in strength and contained too many raw recruits. Moreover, the French populace, now that the fighting was on its soil, was (as Wellington had foretold) less than enthusiastic. Stiffened by British urgings to reduce France to its former size and by the pledge of a further £5 million in British subsidies at the Chaumont treaty of 9 March, the allied governments kept up their pressure to the end. By 30 March 1814, even Napoleon’s marshals had had enough, and within another week the emperor had abdicated.
Compared with these epic events, the Anglo-American war of 1812–14 was a strategical sideshow.94 Economically, it might have been far more serious to British interests had it not coincided with the collapse of the Continental System, and had not the New England states, largely dependent upon Anglo-American trade, remained lukewarm (and often neutral) in the conflict. The proclaimed ‘march on Canada’ by American forces soon petered out, and both on land and at sea – despite the raids upon York (Toronto) and Washington, and some impressive single-ship frigate actions – each side demonstrated that it could hurt but not defeat the other. To the British in particular, it showed the importance of the American trades and it revealed the difficulties of maintaining large military and naval establishments overseas at the same time as the armed services were desperately required in the European theatre. As was the case in India, transoceanic possessions and commerce were simultaneously a strengthening of Britain’s power position and a strategical distraction.95
Napoleon’s final campaign of March to June 1815, while certainly not a sideshow, was a strategical footnote to the great war in Europe.96 His sudden return to France from exile interrupted the quarrels of
