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he appointed his stepson, Eugene Beauharnais (son of Empress Josephine by her first marriage) as his Viceroy. Brother Joseph was already King of Naples and Sicily and brother Jerome was King of Westphalia; little brother Louis now became King of Holland. Spain, still under its weak Bourbon rulers, was little more than a French puppet. Even the far-off Scandinavian countries came under Napoleon's influence.

Not content with his geographic and political changes, Napoleon organized the European continent into an economic system designed to enrich France at the expense of its satellites. Only Britain and Portugal, Britain's oldest ally, remained outside the "Continental System." Their example provided a gleam of hope to the other Europeans, a hope which could be dangerous to Napoleon's security. He decided to eliminate Britain and Portugal.

In October 1807 Napoleon concluded a secret treaty with Charles IV, his Spanish puppet, to partition Portugal between them. The plotters misjudged the temper of the Spanish people. In March 1808 a band of Spanish patriots ousted the weakling king and his scheming minister, Prince Godoy. They placed Prince Ferdinand on his father's throne. Napoleon sent an army across the Pyrenees and rapidly overran Spain. He held both Charles IV and Prince Ferdinand as hostages and transferred his brother Joseph to the throne of Spain. The vacant throne of Naples went to Marshal Murat, husband of sister Pauline Bonaparte and a brilliant cavalryman. Nothing like keeping all the good jobs in the Bonaparte family.

Napoleon thought he had gained a great and easy victory in Spain. He underestimated the courage of the Spaniards and the difficulties of campaigning in the semiarid, mountainous Iberian Peninsula. The Spaniards again revolted and in July 1807 forced a French Army of 20,000 to surrender. This was unprecedented in Napoleon's career. King Joseph Bonaparte (irreverently called Pepe Botella or "Joe Bottle" by his unwilling Spanish subjects) could be maintained on his throne only by French bayonets. A month later a small British expeditionary force landed at Lisbon in Portugal to support its endangered ally.

Despite the best efforts of Napoleon's hitherto victorious generals during the ensuing 8 years the "Spanish ulcer" drained French manpower away in guerrilla skirmishes and pitched battles. It is estimated that the Peninsular War cost Napoleon more than 600,000 soldiers. During 1807-08 the British made little

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progress under unskilled generals, although the brilliant Sir John Moore made a successful hit-and-run raid into Spanish territory. However, he was killed in action just as his troops were embarking for rest and reequipment in Britain. In 1809 Sir Arthur Wellesley took command in the Peninsula. During the next 5 years the French were soundly whipped in several bitterly-fought battles and slowly forced out of the Iberian Peninsula. Wellesley was rewarded with wealth and fame, the title of Duke of Wellington, and assorted Spanish and Portuguese titles.

C. S. Forester's novel, Rifleman Dodd, describes one of the early campaigns of Wellington's redcoats in the Peninsula. It is a fine story about a trained and courageous footsoldier. Mathew Dodd is a semiliterate private of the 95th Regiment (The Rifle Brigade), an elite unit armed with the Baker rifle (instead of the usual "Brown Bess" musket of the British line regiments). He is brave, loyal, tenacious, and well trained in light-infantry and skirmishing tactics. Cut off from his regiment during the British retreat to Wellington's famed "Line of Torres Vedras," Dodd is forced to forage behind the French lines for several months. Working with chance-met bands of Portuguese guerrillas, Dodd causes several casualties to the French invaders in a series of hit-and-run attacks which shake the enemy morale.

Napoleon enjoyed 2 years of comparative peace (1809-11), except for the "Spanish ulcer" which he tried to ignore. He was 40 years old, at the peak of his mental and physical powers and at the pinnacle of his political and military prestige. However, unquestioned authority at home and abroad caused his personality to degenerate. He became cynical, jealous, irritable, given to violent outbursts of temper and often made serious misjudgments of men and events. He was as dictatorial within his family circle as outside it. Josephine was unable to give him the heir he desired as a man and needed to consolidate his dynasty, so he divorced her in 1809. Despite Austrian enmity, he wed Archduchess Marie Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis I, in 1810. She bore him a son in March 1811-the ill-fated "King of Rome." In 1810-11 there seemed to be no cloud on Napoleon's horizon. His armies occupied (albeit somewhat precariously) all of Europe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Vistula River (see map "Napoleonic Europe in 1810").

However, the end was inevitable and approaching rapidly. Prussia was regenerated by a new spirit of nationalism which arose from the ashes of defeat and humiliation in 1807. Baron

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von Stein, a brilliant and liberal statesman, reorganized the civil government and reformed the army. He abolished serfdom and gave the freed peasant the privilege of buying land. All occupations opened to every class; the nobles could engage in business and industry, governmental and military posts came within the reach of the bourgeois and peasant classes. A new pride in German culture developed.

Britain, led by the brilliant young Prime Minister, William

Pitt, remained adamantly opposed to the "Corsican ogre" and made unceasing efforts to create a combination which could overthrow him. Even Tsar Alexander I moved from friendship to hostility toward France. The Russian was suspicious of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw (France's puppet state in Poland), resentful of Napoleon's continued postponement of the partition of Turkey, and offended at the rejection of his own sister as Napoleon's bride. By 1811 an open breach existed between Napoleon and Alexander and both prepared for the inevitable showdown.

Alexander ended his war with Turkey and made an alliance with Sweden. Napoleon levied troops from Austria and Prussia to supplement his own forces. He raised an army of approximately 600,000 men-the largest ever seen in Europe-but only about 200,000 were Frenchmen. The rest were men of Napoleon's captive nations: Prussians, Westphalians, Swabians, Dutch, Swiss, Austrians, Poles, Croats, Italians, and Balts. Far too many of Napoleon's tall French grenadiers, light infantrymen, gunners, and horsemen were lying in nameless graves in Spain and Portugal, penned up in Iberian towns by guerrillas, or locked in battle with Wellington's British and Portuguese veterans. The ardent young generals, his youthful companions-in-arms, were either dead or grown fat and lazy with the spoils of Europe. Neither Napoleon nor his army had the spirit of the early days of their glory.

Napoleon assembled his huge army in East Prussia and Poland. He did not bother to declare war on Alexander or to tell the French people that they were at war with Russia. He invaded Russian territory in June 1812, crossing the Niemen River and occupying Vilna. He planned to drive a wedge between two slowly-massing Russian armies, one under Prince Barclay de Tolly and the other under Prince Bagration. He would destroy each one separately, winter at Smolensk, and force Alexander to sue for peace. If the Tsar refused, Napoleon would then advance on Moscow during the summer of 1813. Unfortunately for Napoleon, the Russians refused to stand and fight. They withdrew, trading space for time by a scorched-earth policy and harrassing the French with partisan tactics. Napoleon's increasing ill health and his waning powers as a military commander forced him to fight the campaign on Russian terms. The results are well known. The Russian retreat allowed Napoleon to reach Smolensk in August, well ahead of his timetable, and he decided to push on to Moscow. He finally came to grips with a Russian army at Boro

dino on September 7, 1812; the battle resulted in 70,000 casualties on both sides, but Napoleon's losses were irreplaceable. Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, but the Russians burned the city and he could not winter there. He began his long retreat on October 18, by which time his army numbered approximately 100,000 men. He had fewer than 20,000 left when he crossed the Niemen River, his original jumpoff point. He deserted his army (as he had in Egypt) and sped to Paris. The evacuation of Russia brought no relief to his unfortunate army. The Russians followed it into Germany, where they were joined by the Prussians and Austrians.

Napoleon scraped the bottom of the Imperial manpower barrel to raise the last 250,000 troops, mainly raw recruits, for the 1813 campaign against the assembled might of Prussia, Russia, Austria, and Sweden. The war ended with the Great Battle of Nations near Leipzig, Saxony, in October 1813. Napoleon lost all but 40,000 men of his last army. He retreated to France, hoping to rally his fellow countrymen for a last ditch defense of the motherland. His empire collapsed around him. Wellington drove the French out of the Iberian Peninsula; the Dutch revolted and expelled the French officials. The Allied Armies crossed the Rhine with 200,000 men in December 1813. With a flash of his old military genius, Napoleon defeated the Allies in six sharp battles, forcing them back across the Rhine. It was the last flicker of the old flame. His armies were beaten and forced back on Paris. The Allies entered his capital city on March 31, 1814, and Napoleon abdicated unconditionally on April 11, 1814. He was exiled to Elba. The Bourbons were restored to their ancient throne. Except for his "Hundred Days" of 1815, beginning with his escape from Elba on March 1 and ending with his defeat at Waterloo on June 18, Napoleon ceased to trouble Europe. The Era of Napoleon was succeeded by the Reconstruction of Europe and the establishment of the Holy Alliance to insure that the legitimate rulers of Europe would not be troubled by any future upstart.

Tolstoy devotes the final one-third of War and Peace to the campaign of 1812. His battle descriptions are brilliant. Much of his historical background is taken from Napoleon's Russian Campaign by Philippe Paul, Comte de Segur, one of Napoleon's aidesde-camp. J. David Townsend, who edited and translated the most recent edition of Segur's history finds the similarity between the works of Segur and Tolstoy too great to be accidental. He points out that chapters 29 and 34 of part X of War and Peace are built up out of scraps of information given in chapter 3 of Segur's

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