-copied from here.
"No doubt they reckoned on an ally strong and cruel: winter. And in truth it wore down men and beasts, numbed, famished, frostbit, crippled, killed them. Wolves, coyotes, vultures trailed the legions of the Empire."
-Poul Anderson, The Winter Of The World, XXI, p. 188.
Victor Hugo and Poul Anderson agree.
("Two enemies! The Czar, the North. The North is worse.")
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have read that General Winter, and his adjutant General Mud, were what really defeated Charles XII and Napoleon in their wars with Russia. Exaggerated, but with some truth!
Sean
Actually General Plague defeated Napoleon -- but the winter helped. What killed most of the Grand Army wasn't hunger or cold directly, but typhus -- lice born "jail fever".
But it spreads fastest when men don't take off their clothes, don't wash, and are crowded together; which is why it was a disease of jails, ships, and armies.
Disease always killed more men than battle in that era -- the Western Front in WW1 was the first big war that didn't -- but typhus could annihilate armies once it got going.
20% of the population of Serbia died of typhus i n WW1, and that was after the insect vector was known and a vaccine was produced.
In Napoleon's shoes what I'd have done while invading Russia was to proclaim freedom to the serfs -- "the land is yours, kill the boyars and take it".
That would have neutralized the appeal to "Holy Mother Russia", pretty much.
This was advocated at the time; rumor had it that Napoleon's Polish mistress, Marie Walweska (who was of course a member of a family of serf-owning nobles) pillow-talked him out of it.
That's probably an exaggeration; but she'd have been a conduit from a large group of nobles (most of the aristocracy of White Russia and the western Ukraine were Polish) who were willing to support Napoleon against the Czar... but would most emphatically not be willing to sign on for a social revolution.
Napoleon had set up a puppet Polish state, which proved very loyal to him and raised high-quality troops; the Partitions of Poland were quite recent and restoring a Polish state, even one that was Napoleon's catspaw, was very popular.
And it would have been very difficult to administer the occupied territories without a nobility to handle the work of collecting taxes, recruits and so forth on the ground.
But on the whole, and looking beyond the concern with the western borderlands of Russia, it would have been the way to put a powder-keg under the Czar's throne. There had been huge peasant revolts in Russia only a generation before, that shook the foundations of the monarchy.
The historical information in the combox gets better and better.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I forgot how diseases like typhus was a really big killer of armies before WW I. And most of Napoleon's Grand Army would not be able, esp. as Winter came, to take measures needed to fend off such diseases.
I had not known there were people around Napoleon who argued that a good way of winning the war would be foment a social revolution, that the French should urge the serfs to rebel. Yes, that would very likely have nullified Alexander I's appeal for all Russians to rally in defense of Holy Mother Russia.
I did know of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, headed by the King of Saxony, which Napoleon set up as a client state, and probably the only one of his puppets which was really successful. All the others, in varying degrees, being resentful of French domination.
Sean
Sean: the people around Napoleon included a lot of ex-Jacobins, and Napoleon sold himself in France as the one who would consolidate the gains of the Revolution for non-nobles while imposing order and ending the Terror and the purges.
French domination in areas directly annexed to Napoleon's Empire -- which included large chunks of central and eastern Europe -- experienced quite radical social change.
Napoleon's law codes decreed legal equality for all (male) adults and ended hereditary privilege and legal exemptions.
It was quite conceivable for Napoleon to appeal to the serfs in Russia; the French aristocracy had done rather badly in France (understatement) and there were plenty of people in his entourage who hated aristos.
But the situation east of the Elbe was very different. In many respects civilization there was a thin (largely aristocratic, or urban) layer over a mass of brutalized and brutal peasants mentally living in a different epoch. The peasant mass frightened outside observers.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Wait! I thought territories directly annexed to the French Empire during Napoleon's rule were MOSTLY directly contiguous to France. Such as what's now the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, the German Rhineland, Andorra, and Northern Italy. The Ionian Islands in the Adriatic Sea being the only territories further away from France that I know were annexed.
That said, I can see how merely an "occupation" of central and eastern European territories could lead to upheavals.
Yes, I knew Napoleon's entourage included ex-Jacobins who were not all whom very happy with how he put a stop to the Terror and the bloody purges. To say nothing of how Napoleon's usurpation of the throne and proclaiming himself Emperor in 1804 also disgruntled them.
As for the thin veneer of civilization over a brutal and brutalized peasant mass in Eastern Europe and Russia, I can see why Napoleon could have hesitated at deliberately fomenting a social revolution. For reason as varied as actually humane (such an upheaval would be unspeakably bloody and violent, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Any leader with SOME decency in him would think long and hard before doing so. Another reason, as you said, was practical. Any French conquests in Eastern Europe would need the Polish and Russian aristocrats simply to run the administration.
Sean
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