Real Dictators - Napoleon Part 5: Downfall in Russia

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Napoleon’s blockade of Britain begins. Amidst the fall-out, France launches an invasion of Spain. The Duke of Wellington arrives on the scene. After another dispute with Russia, Bonaparte assembles his biggest ever army. It will do the unthinkable and march on Moscow... A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. This is Part 5 of 6. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. It's August the 20th, 1882. We're in Moscow. By the banks of the Moskva River stands a huge pavilion. Inside, 500 guests in their dinner suits and fine dresses sit in eager anticipation. They're gathered to enjoy a performance by the orchestra of the Russian Musical Society.

by the orchestra of the Russian Musical Society. To polite applause in walks the conductor, Ippolit Altani. He is to premiere a work scored especially for the occasion. It's been dashed off in a mere six weeks by one of the greatest composers of the age, Tchaikovsky, best known for his ballet Swan Lake. Altani taps the baton. The audience comes to a hush. As he waves his arms, soft strings begin the piece.

One which will rise over 15 minutes to a bombastic brass crescendo. It's quite the production. A slice of prog virtuosity, ears splittingly loud. Tchaikovsky has somehow worked in an orthodox hymn, church bells, Russian folk songs, even a snippet of the Marseillaise. For sheer pyrotechnic majesty, it was meant to have actual cannon going off on cue outside,

triggered by electric switches. But there have been some technical issues. Kettle drums will have to suffice. The work, Opus 49 in E-flat major, will become one of the most recognisable compositions in the history of music. It will be better known by its informal title, the 1812 Overture. It's a sonic rendering of Napoleon's defeat in Russia and his miserable retreat through the bitter snows.

It's been a full 70 years since Napoleon was sent packing, but the scars from that war run deep. Here in Moscow, next door to this very pavilion, a cathedral is under construction, commissioned to commemorate the great patriotic victory. It is the same across much of Europe, where, over half a century on, Napoleon's downfall is still to be celebrated. From Neuser, this is part five of the Napoleon story. And this is Real Dictators. Back in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte had crowned himself Emperor of France.

He'd followed this with stunning victories over the revolving international coalitions ranged against him. By 1807, Italy is under French control, as are the Low Countries and German states. There are Bonapartes on thrones across Europe. Rivals Prussia and Austria have been smashed. At the height of his power, Napoleon has just entered into a truce with Russia, sealed with the Treaty of Tilsit. Professor Andrew Roberts Professor Andrew Roberts Tsar Alexander I decided that it was time to make a comprehensive European peace with this extraordinary military figure who always seemed to win battles.

And that was Napoleon's opportunity finally to stop on a high, as essentially it was, his absolute high point of his career. But Napoleon, as we know, doesn't have an off switch. And there is still a foe yet to vanquish, the one that always gets away. Great Britain. The temptation of victory is still too great. Unable to launch an invasion across the English Channel, Napoleon has devised a new means of defeating the old enemy.

Economic warfare. Dr. Michael Rapport. He's determined to defeat Britain, which means committing himself to the continental system in Europe, which was an effort to exclude British commerce from the European continent, but also to ensure a closed market for French manufacturing. The result of that though, is you have to inflict it.

You have to impose it on the rest of Europe. You have to impose it on European countries who actually quite like trading with Britain. It's a tall order, especially with Britannia still ruling the waves. For the blockade to work, Napoleon must control every port, every inlet, every cove, along the entire shore of the European mainland. From the Baltic to the Atlantic, and round back up through the Mediterranean. That's 120,000 miles all told.

The difficulties with the continental system and enforcing it was the sheer length of the coastline. The other is that most European people needed British goods. I mean, British cloth, British fabrics, British global trade, and frankly, empire and slavery too. The fruits of all that, you know, were much in demand. Unfortunately for the Emperor of France, when it comes to Europe's coastal states, economic self-interest will always trump Napoleonic diktat.

Pretty soon the blockade is leaking like a sieve. Islands like Heligoland in the North Sea and Malta in the Med become hubs of smuggling operations. Montenegro turns into a handy Balkan backdoor for British contraband, with mule trains trekking into the heart of Europe. In ports like Hamburg, illicit booty is stashed imaginatively. According to the harbourmaster, there seems an unusual amount of coffins going back and forth. According to the harbour master, there seems an unusual amount of coffins going back and forth. Even the Bonaparte brothers Louis and Jérôme are known to racketeer British luxury goods,

which is still much in demand in Paris. Not that Britain's economy doesn't take a hit, it does. Trade with Europe halves, but it adapts, making up for its continental shortfall with supplies from elsewhere. Canadian grain, for example, becomes a substitute for that formerly shipped from the Baltic. Meanwhile, for Napoleon, maintaining the continental system means he's caught in a giant game of whack-a-mole. The little corporal grows frustrated. When Italy's papal states refuse to comply,

he annexes them, even kidnapping the Pope. Professor David Bell. This is actually not a sign of French power. It's in a lot of ways a sign of French weakness. At this point, he can't even rely on satellite kingdoms to do his work for him. He feels the only way he can actually really enforce things is to annex all these areas to France itself. And he says, well, you know, I'm dreaming of a Europe without borders, a Europe with

a single currency, a single language. I mean, this sounds a lot like the European Union in some ways, but it's really written from a position of surprising weakness. He feels that only by doing this can he defeat the British, and he can't actually do it. It's just not within his capacity to integrate all of Europe into a greater France. And the biggest culprit of all? It lies way out west, Portugal. Because of the continental system, Napoleon had to ensure that the whole of Europe stuck to it, and the Portuguese refused to. They had a long alliance with Britain, and they wanted to continue

trading. And so Napoleon was forced in 1807, if he wanted to keep this protectionist system going, to invade Portugal. Sure enough, in October of that year, Napoleon does exactly that. With the help of the compliant Spanish state, he sends round the boys to occupy Lisbon and bring the Portuguese to heel. French troops are given free passage across Spanish territory. They're led by General Junot, dispatched there by Napoleon to get him as far away from Paris as possible.

He's having an affair with the Emperor's own sister, Caroline Bonaparte, wife of General Murat. But Junot is not in the same league as his commander-in-chief. His 20,000 men, a mismatched force of Swiss, Germans and Italians, prove hard to wrangle, and Juno, a swashbuckler and notorious drinker, forgot to pack any maps.

Defeated by disease, confusion and each other, only 1,500 make it to Lisbon. When they get there, they find the Royal Navy has already evacuated the Portuguese royal family, packing them off to Brazil. But Portugal is only half the problem. Spain, it turns out, is not observing the letter of the law either. It too has ports openly doing business with the British. Plus, it's fast becoming a dysfunctional state. Spain is nominally ruled by the lightweight Bourbon king, Charles IV. In effect, it's governed by Charles' favourite, a man called Manuel Godoy,

who also happens to be the Queen's lover. Crown Prince Ferdinand, meanwhile, detests his father, as do much of the Spanish population. In March 1808, the son's supporters storm the royal palace and proclaim the young pretender King Ferdinand VII. Spain implodes. For the sake of stability and to maintain the blockade, there is only one thing for it. Napoleon must conduct a fully-fledged conquest of the whole Iberian Peninsula.

He sends 118,000 men along the coast into the Basque country under the cook-holding General Murat. As per the playbook, with a quick time march and a few easy victories, it'll be a stroll in the park. But Napoleon is too much of a believer in his own hype these days, much of which he's generated himself. Yes, Spain's army is third-rate. Its illiterate peasant society is dominated by the Catholic Church, which still practices the Inquisition. Indeed, when Madrid is duly occupied by Napoleon's men, it all seems by the numbers.

But this is not a war that's going to be fought by the usual rules. going to be fought by the usual rules. On May 2nd, 1808, the capital rises up against the conquistadors. They shoot dead 150 French soldiers. Napoleon will find himself matched not against the standing army, but the whole of the Spanish population. Every man, woman, child and priest will fight the French to the death. There will be a new name added to the military lexicon. The Little War. Guerrilla. A war of terrorism and resistance.

Dr Michael Rowe. And the thing about guerrilla warfare is that, you know, you don't know where your enemy's going to pop up. And they sort of pop up everywhere. In essence, the French can only be sure of controlling that bit of Spain where you've actually got a soldier sort of physically standing. Everything beyond that is potentially hostile. Even fairly well-disciplined armies, under those circumstances, become very frustrated. And they let out that frustration

on the civilian population. Napoleon looks for a solution. Recently he appointed his brother Joseph, King of Naples. This brought the south of the Italian peninsula under French control. This brought the south of the Italian peninsula under French control. But while Joseph may have subdued one undeveloped peasant kingdom, that does not necessarily make him qualified for running another. Amid the chaos in Madrid, Napoleon evacuates its Bourbon royals across the border to Bayonne. There he persuades Ferdinand to renounce his claims of the throne and give it back to his hated father.

But Napoleon has already cut a side deal. King Charles has been bribed to then pass the crown straight on to Napoleon himself, who then proceeds to hand it to his own brother. On June 7, 1808, a reluctant Joseph is unveiled as José I, King of Spain, or as the Spanish will call him, el rey intruso, the intruder king. In the game of musical chairs, and to soften the blow of General Murat's marital woes, the throne of Naples will pass to him.

France's misfortune is Austria's opportunity. Still smarting over defeats at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz, it has its forces massing. In April 1809, the Austrians move into Bavaria. massing. In April 1809, the Austrians move into Bavaria. Fortunately for Napoleon, the Austrians, unlike the Spanish, wage war by the rules. In July, he'll beat them at the Battle of Wagram, northeast of Vienna, putting pay to a short-lived Fifth Coalition. But it's not quite the formality of yore. Where once victories were quick and decisive, they're becoming increasingly epic.

Less about cavalry charges and battlefield daring do, more about artillery barrages and gradual attrition. Bagram lasts three days. There are 74,000 casualties. The diplomatic punishment meted out to Austria is harsh this time. The Treaty of Schönbrunn robs Austria of its Adriatic coast, formerly a gift from Napoleon. They must also give up 20% of their population.

Austria, till recently the centrepiece of the vast Holy Roman Empire, is now a hobbled, landlocked territory. But the Iberian problem won't go away. The war there is sapping the will to live. Napoleon will coin a name for this conflict, one which will rumble on for five painful years, his Spanish ulcer. A critical aspect of the campaign in Spain is that Napoleon doesn't take charge of the troops personally,

not in the first phase. He does step in late in 1808, and with great success, recapturing Madrid and rolling back the enemy in Galicia. But the threat of Austria draws him away. Plus, he has personal issues. After twelve years with Josephine, things are coming to a head. For some time they've lived separate lives.

Napoleon used to be the wronged party, but these days it is he who is playing the field, entertaining a string of mistresses, siring a number of illegitimate kids, including one with his Polish flame, Countess Walewska. The Fontainebleau Palace had been redesigned for Napoleon and Josephine to have individual apartments within a joining doorway, but Napoleon has it bricked up, and then has a fl individual apartments within a joining doorway. But Napoleon has it bricked up and then has a fling with the chambermaid.

At age 46, it's unlikely that Josephine will bear him the child he so craves, the legitimate male heir to the empire. Napoleon deliberates, but ultimately demands the annulment he's long been threatening. His mother and sisters are overjoyed. The move is in violation of his own Napoleonic code.

Marital separation cannot be imposed upon a woman over the age of 40, though an emperor can rewrite his own rules. Josephine begs Napoleon to stay, pleading her acceptance of an open arrangement. But it's all over. The divorce, like the wedding, is a quickie. The marriage is annulled in just two weeks. Napoleon pays Josephine one last visit at Malmaison.

It's recently been extended to include a menagerie of kangaroos, gazelles, flying squirrels and emus, as well as a parrot that can squawk Bonaparte. There they stroll in the rain, talking like old friends. And that's that. She keeps the house and an allowance of three million francs per year. The next in the line of succession is still Napoleon's older brother, Joseph, currently sweating it out in Madrid. And he can be a bit of a schemer.

So Napoleon will do as the monarchs of old, find himself a filly, one of good stock and one of promising breed ability. There are several eligible princesses proposed for this distinguished task. Tsar Alexander of Russia offers his younger sister, Anna. At only 13, Napoleon would have to wait till she comes of age. Plus, he's already enchanted with a picture of Princess Marie-Louise, the 19-year-old daughter of his longtime rival, Emperor Francis of Austria. Despite the princess's tearful objections, her father encourages the move.

The houses of Bonaparte and Habsburg will be in political union, meaning peace and security. So you get this Austro-French alliance. So I guess on the Austrian side, a policy of accommodation, if you're unkind, you'd say appeasement. This is essentially the kind of thing that a medieval dynastic monarch would do and not somebody who had once believed in the principles of liberty, fraternity and equality. On March the 11th, 1810, Marie-Louise dries her eyes and submits to the big day. Napoleon is too busy to get married in person. He sends his chief of staff, Berthier,

to Vienna as his proxy, although he does make up for it later with a sumptuous bash at the Louvre. His new wife's great-aunt was one Marie Antoinette. Napoleon has not just embedded himself with the Habsburgs, he is married into the very Bourbon dynasty that had been overthrown so violently back in 1792. It has come full circle and indeed I think there's some in French circles who argue that in many ways this is kind of like washing out the sin of a French revolution. One year later, the mail-order bride yields a son. He is named Napoleon François-Joseph Chao, a.k.a. Napoleon II, or, as his father prefers, the King of Rome,

his new courtesy title for the heir apparent. At age 42, finally, Napoleon has secured his legacy. He remained very much affectionate towards Josephine until the end of their lives. With Marie-Louise, it was very different. He treated her as a kind of girl, in a sense, and never took her quite as seriously as he took Josephine. Good news is in short supply. That Spanish ulcer is flaring up.

In the summer of 1810, French troops sack Cordoba. In July, laden with stolen goods, they suffer a humiliating defeat to the Spanish army of Andalusia. In the face of a Spanish advance, Joseph, who never wanted the job anyway, abdicates and comes scurrying back to France. The truth is, the war is turning into a phantasmagorical nightmare. The brutality of the likes of the Siege of Zaragoza, the torture, the mutilation, as

captured by the artist Francisco Goya, are simply off the scale. And there is something else. In August 1808, a British expeditionary force landed in Portugal and retook Lisbon. They now have a toehold on the continent. It turns out that the British army aren't quite the soft touch that the French had believed them to be. Britain harnesses the pent-up rage of the Portuguese peasants. It's all hands to the pump fighting the Corsican ogre. The Spanish court in exile declares that murdering a Frenchman is no more a sin than killing

a wild animal. The godless Napoleon, who had the temerity to kidnap the Pope, is the very Antichrist. By May 1811, at the Battle of Fuentes de Oñoro, the British break out of Portugal. A combined Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese force begins rolling back the French all the way to the Pyrenees. The Peninsular War, as it is known, is the campaign that introduces a new actor upon this stage, a British Lieutenant General, a man with as much daring and battlefield nous as Napoleon. He too will become the political leader of his country.

At present, he is plain old Sir Arthur Wellesley. He will soon become the Duke of Wellington. Bernard Cornwell And Wellington is himself a genius at war. Did Napoleon recognise that? I don't know. We know that Wellington held Napoleon in great respect. The only few remarks we have from Napoleon about Wellington tend to be disparaging, but they're disparaging for a purpose, so his generals aren't

frightened of Wellington. In the end, Wellington proves to be the better soldier. Napoleon initially, of course, is very dismissive of Wellington. Somebody had fought in the Indian subcontinent, and I suppose the assumption is that the opponents you fight in India aren't really up to kind of European standards. But Wellington is a brilliant general, not only on a battlefield, but also when it comes to the politics of war. If we want 20th century, compare it to somebody like Eisenhower, who is good at the military side of war,

is good at the logistics, but also realises that there's a kind of political hinterland to war which you need to get right. And that's something which I think Napoleon isn't so good at. You know, Napoleon never really has allies, certainly not trustworthy allies, not people he treats as sort of equal partners. Over 300,000 French soldiers are pinned down in Iberia

during the course of the Peninsular War. Half of them are killed. With the decisive victory at Vitoria in June 1813, Wellington boots the French out of Spain altogether. It's not just in Spain where the continental blockade has broken down. At Tilsit, the Tsar had pledged to play his part. But this was done without serious thought. The Russian economy is now suffering, shrunk to a third of its previous size.

Britain used to be the chief customer for Russian timber, tar and hemp, the foundation blocks of its own Royal Navy, as well as fur and grain. Alexander has not forgotten either the snob from Napoleon to his sister. In October 1810, when talks come to nothing, Russia abandons the blockade altogether. British goods come pouring into Europe again by the Baltic. Napoleon's continental system has collapsed. The furious French leader must now contend with hostile states at either end of the continent. Hearing rumours of Russian mobilisation, and with Prussia, humiliated in 1806, gagging to join in,

Napoleon takes the initiative. For him, it's the decision that will mark the beginning of the end. He will invade Russia. In 1807, when he had the Tsar on the ropes, Napoleon had balked at the idea of pushing on into Russia's vast open spaces. He preferred to stop at the border and to make peace. In spring 1812, however, he has no such qualms. If his generals protest, then they are fools.

To show up those incompetents still floundering in Spain, he will lead the new Grand Armée himself. The army that Napoleon leads into Russia is the largest army, not only that he's ever led, but the largest army that possibly the world, certainly Europe, could ever see. If you include the troops, which have to kind of remain in the base of operations, you're looking at close to 700,000 troops.

In an era where you haven't got railways, you just can't realistically function with forces of that side. You know, the logistics are a nightmare. They're especially a nightmare in somewhere like Eastern Europe and Russia, which is not densely populated. It's not rich and fertile. It hasn't got a brilliant transport infrastructure. So you become much more reliant upon good logistics. And those kind of numbers, you're beginning really to come against the capacity of what is technically feasible. Napoleon is gambling that the sheer momentum the army can generate will make it unstoppable. He tells his wife he'll be back in just two months.

Napoleon was only going to go about 50 to 100 miles inside Russia. It was all going to be over in a couple of months as a way of forcing Russia to return to the continental system and carry on putting this pressure on Britain. It didn't work out that way. At first, he seems to be disproving his naysayers. Before midnight on June 23, 1812, he crosses the Neyman River, the one on which he and the Tsar had staged their bromance.

The French advance meets ineffectual resistance. Soon Napoleon is back exactly where he was in 1807, Tilsit, where the treaty had been signed. The Russians are paranoid about the evolution of an independent Polish state. This is a cause that Napoleon champions. To stick it to the Tsar, he even takes to wearing a Polish uniform. Soon he's in Vilnius, in Russian Lithuania, being greeted as a liberator. But Napoleon's men have been provisioned for no more than a 12-day foray into Russian territory.

The endgame is unclear. Hubris is about to take hold. He will, he declares, now push on 700 miles from the border, all the way to Moscow itself. It is madness, but by this time I think Napoleon believes that he and his army are absolutely unbeatable. But the problem is, it was the same problem that Wellington pointed out when he was asked to take command of the British forces in North America. This was in 1814, and the Brits were not doing too well.

And he just pointed out, you can't win there, because the enemy can always retreat. They've got all the space in the world to retreat. Napoleon comes up against the same thing in Russia. All Russia has to do is fall back and lull the invader on, stretch him to breaking point, and Napoleon takes the bait. With no enemy to fight, it's a continual march into the unknown to look for one. An army of this magnitude is condemned to move at the speed of its slowest unit. It takes five days for them just to cross the Neiman River.

The barren terrain has also forced the invaders to bring their own supplies. Napoleon's Grande Armée is now the kind of lumbering entity he used to have for breakfast. The army is less than half French, too. Conscripts come from all over the empire, men who cannot be coordinated so easily, and who don't have quite the same passion about dying for a French emperor. Especially a fattening middle-aged one, who is constantly waylaid by a series of bowel and bladder complaints. One who rides in the rear in a caravan of fifty wagons, stuffed with creature comforts, and a personal Parisian chef.

The received narrative is that it's the Russian winter that will eventually do for Napoleon, just as it will a century later for Hitler. But the Russian summers are brutal too, as it advances across the mosquito-infested swamps and forests. later for Hitler. But the Russian summers are brutal too. As it advances across the mosquito-infested swamps and forests, the rookie patchwork army is reduced to drinking from puddles.

Dysentery is rife. The road to Moscow becomes an open latrine. And then there is typhus. As summer turns to autumn, a quarter of all Napoleon's troops have perished. There are always flashes of the Russian army in the distance, enough to give the promise of a fight.

But it's just like those desert mirages of old. On September the 7th, the Grande Armée reaches Borodino, to the southwest of Moscow. Here, finally, there is an enemy to square up to. But the Russian army has got the weakened French force right where it wants it. Their general, Mikhail Kutuzov, may be 66. He may be half-blind from having been shot in the head. But he fought Napoleon at Austerlitz, and he knows his moves. In any case, Napoleon, physically ill now, is beyond the point of tactical innovation.

The Grand Armée, with its sheer weight of numbers, is simply deployed in a full-on frontal assault. The Battle of Borodino is a slaughterhouse. 100,000 men are killed, wounded or captured. The bloodiest land battle in Europe until 1914. Napoleon employs his usual spin to claim a victory. But it's a pyrrhic one. The Russians have simply made a strategic withdrawal, a genuine tactical ploy.

It's easy to say with hindsight that he was doomed. First rule of international warfare, never invade Russia, right? But, you know, he didn't want to conquer it. He wasn't Hitler. He didn't want to turn it into living space for the French. He wanted to defeat the Russian army in a pitched battle. He did come pretty close, actually, to doing that at Borodino. His great quality as a field commander is really as a tactician on the battlefield, being able to keep all these

units in his mind at the same time to really figure out better than anybody how to bring them together at the crucial moment to break through the enemy lines. But the forces are simply too big and too spread out. He's also getting older. At the Battle of Borodino, he has these various urinary problems. He's in pain all day long. He's distracted. So all of these things come together. I think in some ways, it was a closer run thing that people often give him credit for. Had he been able to destroy the Russian army really convincingly, then he might have actually been able to impose his will on the Tsar and to have retreated in good order, but he didn't. On September the 14th, from the hills of Salvation,

Napoleon can see the sun glinting on the onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral. The next day, he enters Moscow. Arriving in the Russian capital should be the pinnacle for Napoleon as a warrior, extending his dominion beyond anything Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar or Charlemagne could ever have comprehended. But it rings hollow. There are no crowds, no welcome. All he gets is empty streets. The city's quarter of a million population has vanished. There's no food either, and the water supply has been poisoned with dead animals. As Napoleon rides over the cobbles, there can be no satisfaction, only the sense that something is about to go horribly wrong.

And then the fires start. Muscovites would rather burn their city to the ground than have Napoleon take it. In a coordinated case of mass arson, partisans set Moscow aflame. A policy, quite literally, of scorched earth. The fires rage for days, the sky turns blood red, the heat is overpowering. As the flames die down, the Grande Armée will

camp out in a smoldering Moscow for a full five weeks, scavenging, just trying to survive, waiting for the great victory that will never come. Napoleon, billeted in the Kremlin, sends out a message to Tsar Alexander, his old buddy, hoping at least for talks. But there is no reply. Napoleon spends his nights gazing up at the chandeliers and at Francois Girard's portrait of his infant son, the King of Rome,

which has been dispatched all the way from Paris, and now hangs right here on the Kremlin wall. There is only one thing for it. Head for home. But if Napoleon believes he has exhausted his run of bad luck, he has another thing coming. He rigs the Kremlin with explosives, his parting gift. But as he turns back to enjoy the show, they fail to detonate properly. The damage is minimal. It's a portent of far worse disasters

to come. On October the 19th, as the army leaves the city to begin the long march west, On October the 19th, as the army leaves the city to begin the long march west, there are flurries of snow. Winter has come ridiculously early. By early November, the temperature has plummeted to minus 30 degrees Celsius. This time at the Neiman River, there will be no raft required. The water has frozen solid. There will be nothing to eat between here and France but dead horses.

Just a grim retreat and constant harassment in the rear from mounted Cossacks. The Russian resistance blocks roads with felled trees and causes diversions. Bridges are destroyed. Meanwhile Napoleon and his generals argue

over the best route back. It's a sorry picture. Centuries freeze to death where they stand. Bugles are frozen to lips. Appendages turn black with frostbite. Men huddle inside the carcasses of dead horses for warmth. Each morning, the men who don't wake up, and there are thousands of them, are left where they lay, stripped of every piece of clothing. Napoleon considers suicide. He has always carried a vial of poison with him, a mix of opiates kept in a silk pouch. But then he hears rumours. In his absence, there's been a coup in France.

So just as he did in Egypt, he abandons his army. In December, disguised as a member of a diplomatic team, he heads back to Paris. With a callous disregard for his troops, he stops in Verdun to buy sugared almonds for his wife. Of the 600,000 men he took over the River Neman that June, he was only able to bring 90,000 back over that same river in December. So he, in those six months, lost over half a million men in Russia. And after that, of course, French power was never the same again. Dr Patrice Gueniffey.

First of all, this is the collapse, the destruction of the Grand Army, which means that he will no longer have the military tool to reverse the situation. Then it is the collapse of the Napoleonic system in Europe, because he will not be able to defend his conquests, which will now fall like dominoes one after the other. This is truly the moment when all the Napoleonic elites start to withdraw their support. In short, it is the end. Once Napoleon's empire started getting rolled back, as it did slowly but surely over the course of 1813 to 1814, there are various little uprisings. Italian patriots, Italian liberals

trying to seize power. There are lots of uprisings around Europe. Countries which had been exploited began to break away, often with very good timing. Napoleon is no longer a god, not even to his own people. That coup attempt had been ill thought out. The perpetrator, General Claude-Francois Mallet, will soon be executed. He had spread a rumour that Napoleon had died, but his response on the stand speaks volumes. When asked to identify his accomplices, he simply declares,

the whole of France. Napoleon's judgement is now being questioned, and questioned openly. Royalists are not afraid to show themselves. In a major blow, one of Napoleon's star generals is compelled to switch sides. Jean Bernadotte, at Napoleon's behest, had been seconded to Scandinavia. He had been made a fully-fledged Swedish royal. Now the system of international alliances demands that Bernadotte, as crown prince of Sweden, take up arms against his old boss.

He will not be the last general to do so. This time there will be a new coalition, a sixth one, with all the usual suspects. Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Sweden now, and, pointedly, Austria, hoping to finish off a France in its death throes. Although the marriage to Marie-Louise finally gave him an heir in the King of Rome, it didn't work as a military alliance because in 1813 the Austrians declared war against France and continued fighting until Napoleon was defeated.

Unlike before, there is a coherent plan on the part of the Allies. Defeat of Napoleon will be followed by an occupation of France and the restoration of a constitutional Bourbon monarchy. It's only taken them 22 years to get their act together, but this coalition will be the decisive one. The reason there were so many was because there was nothing stopping the different partners within the coalitions from making separate peace. And often when it was in their interest to do so,

they would do so. Napoleon could pick them off one by one. It's only right at the end, the Sixth Coalition, that the Allies actually agree not to make a separate peace. That the ultimate goal is the defeat of Napoleon. No matter what our different interests may be along the way, we defeat Napoleon, then we can squabble about the spoils. Napoleon is not quite spent.

Once recouped, he raises a new army, calling on every available man and boy, many of whom would never have passed muster for military service. There is a French victory at Dresden in August 1813, but at Leipzig in October, Napoleon must take on all commerce. It's the culmination of what is known locally as the German War of Liberation. Fought over three days, the showdown is dubbed the Battle of the Nations. With half a million men pitched against each other, it will be another battle whose scale won't be replicated until the First World War.

There are estimates of up to 150,000 casualties. And the French will be defeated. Over the next two months, Napoleon will lose a further 400,000 men. Such numbers can only be sustained for so long. And it's not just men. Much of his weaponry was lost on the long road back from Moscow, and that which France uses has been superseded technologically by the coalition, who can now deploy howitzers and rockets. The Russians have fast-loading muskets. The British have started using rifles. The Russians have fast-loading muskets. The British have started using rifles.

Their special ops forces, clad in camouflaged green, can shoot a Frenchman dead at 400 yards. Even the Prussians, till now a bit of a soft touch, have modernised radically. The students have become the masters. So on New Year's Eve, actually, the Prussian forces cross the Rhine and you get the beginning of a campaign of France which will culminate in the occupation of Paris by the Allies in the spring of 1814. France is a big country and it's a populous country and it's more populous relative to the European population than it is today. And France hadn't been successfully invaded for centuries before then. So it's a big military feat.

But the kind of war plan which is being followed is to use your kind of manpower advantage in order to edge your way forward, advance against forces which aren't commanded by Napoleon in person. So if you're confronting Napoleon, you try and hold a kind of position or even possibly fall back and then advance in other areas. I think something else you need to factor in is actually the war weariness of France at this stage. The French have been bled white by Napoleon. Even as he's being rolled back across Europe from 1812 onwards, he has opportunities to make peace with the Allies, with the Coalition, but he doesn't.

And he claims, I need a decisive victory in order to do this. And in fact, the longer it went on, the more the burden of the war fell on the French people. And that's when opposition stirred. stirred. Napoleon's last stand is a heroic return to form. Outnumbered and outgunned, there are flashes of the old military genius. A man forced to compete with stealth and guile. With sublime battlecraft, he ties up the invaders in eastern France for months, holding down armies that are seven times his in size.

He's out of his luxury wagon and back in the thick of it again. In the defence of Arcy, he's nearly killed by a shell. The invasion of France in 1814 is arguably Napoleon's greatest moment. He's defending against the Austrians, Prussians, and Russians to the east of Paris. Wellington himself remarked of that 1814 campaign that Napoleon himself led was absolutely brilliant. He studied it all that winter and came to have a huge respect. And it is an extraordinary campaign. It's Napoleon at his very best. He's ricocheting around eastern France like a pinball and defeating the enemy in detail in place after place. But however many defeats he inflicts on them, there are at least another 10 or 11 armies marching towards him and he's continually retreating.

Napoleon is only delaying the inevitable. The British army have crossed into southwest France and are driving north. Wellington takes Bordeaux and Toulouse. On March 31, 1814, Napoleon is at Fontainebleau Palace burning his personal papers It's here he learns that the Allies have entered Paris marching through the gates of Saint-Denis There are Cossacks, a general tells him watering their horses in the River Seine Tsar Alexander, the Prussian king

and an Austrian general, the Prince of Schwarzenberg are riding in a victory parade down the Champs-Élysées. Napoleon tries to rally his generals, but he has lost even them. Murat, his brother-in-law, has made his own peace with Austria. Switching sides will allow him to retain the crown of Naples. Others are throwing in the towel. With the fall of Paris, the slippery minister Talleyrand stages a coup and forms a provisional government. On April the 2nd, it votes for Napoleon's deposition and gives consent for the monarchy to be reinstated.

All that is required now is for Emperor Napoleon to abdicate. All that is required now is for Emperor Napoleon to abdicate. Four days later, after several rounds of negotiations, with Napoleon raging at his generals into the early hours, he agrees. It is signed into law on April 11th as the Treaty of Fontainebleau. He still employs some trickery. The Allies have declared that their quarrel is not with the French people, but with Napoleon personally. He calls their bluff.

He tries to appoint his young son, Napoleon II, as the new ruler, with his wife as regent. But the Allies will not have it. As it happens, Marie-Louise has already departed for Austria, running back to her father. Napoleon will never see his wife and child again. According to the Peace of Paris, signed on May 30, 1814, the Bourbon Louis XVIII will be restored as the constitutional monarch.

Corpulent and gout-ridden, he is the brother of the late Louis XVI. He has been living in exile in England, in leafy Buckinghamshire. The treaty dictates that France will now revert to her 1792 boundaries, losing all her territorial gains. It's an attempt to reset the clock of Europe. It's as if the Napoleonic era had never happened. In a unique development in international politics, a body will be set up to keep the peace. The Congress of Vienna will

convene in regular session from September. It will take another week for Napoleon's own fate to be mapped out. The old Prussian warhorse, General Blucher, is more than happy to have the upstart Corsican strung up. But Napoleon has taken out an insurance policy. Corsican strung up. But Napoleon has taken out an insurance policy. It was very useful for him, of course, that he had made himself into an emperor, because there was a form of trade unionism of monarchs at that time. Nobody wanted to set the precedent of killing a royal. And so he was in a position where, as emperor, he was going to get treated much better than if he'd just been first consul of France. There is a standard process in such cases. Exile. Napoleon will be dispatched somewhere he can cause no further mischief, an honourable exit.

He will become the ruler of an island of the victors choosing. Several locations are suggested, Corfu, Sardinia, even Corsica. They settle on Elba, off the west coast of Italy, just across the water from his birthplace. There he can live out a comfortable retirement with a small personal guard. He will be, nominally, the island's emperor. Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, objects. Elba is just too close. With a private army at his disposal, what's to stop Napoleon making a return? It's just asking for trouble. But the objection is overruled. On April the 20th at Fontainebleau, just after 9am, following amicable talks with foreign

dignitaries, Napoleon walks down the grand staircase and out into the courtyard. There, his old guard have gathered, choking back the tears. Not that they know it, but Napoleon is ill, wracked by stomach pains. He had, as it turned out, tried to poison himself with his suicide vial, cracked into a glass of wine. But the cold of the Russian winter had diminished the potion's efficacy. Theatrically, he turns for one last gesture, wiping his own eyes on the regimental flag. Goodbye, my children, he cries.

I am leaving. Do not grieve over my fate. I would like to press all of you close to my heart. Let me at least embrace your banner. Let this kiss resonate in the hearts of all my soldiers. Farewell, once again. He's helped into his carriage and heads away to his fate. Though officially it's game over, Napoleon even now is planning a comeback. In under a year, he will escape from Elba and march back up through France, gathering support as he goes. Reinstating himself as Emperor, he will rally his troops for one last battle.

Waterloo. That's next time, in the final part of the Napoleon Story.