Hi Everyone, Starting the first of what will be a series of threads here. If you could only ever ask ONE question about Napoleon, what would it be, and why?
(Hopefully someone will try to answer that question for you - you can post more than one question if you want!)
What was the bigger mistake for Napoleon: Invading Spain, invading Russia, or returning to France in 1814?
I'm in two minds about this. Spain (and the Peninsular War which followed) drained the French army of men and resources, but wasn't a 'game changer' until much later in the conflict. Russia had more obvious, and much wider ranging impacts, but would the consequences of Russia have been on the same scale without the Peninsular War?
It has to be the third, since it was entirely of Napoleon's own volition in the certain knowledge that many would die as a result of his decision. While his own initial decisions eventually boxed him into the invasions of Spain and Russia, Napoleon's ultimate decision was not one over which he had free will. Both were essentially the results of economics. The 1803 Subsidy Treaty looked like it would go out of the window as Godoy and the monarchy became more resistant to Napoleon's rapacious demands for cash and manpower, so he had to seize the place to keep the cash to prop up his failing finances, especially after the 1807 war with Russia did not gain any indemnity and garrisoning conquered lands was draining the Treasury. Similarly, in 1811, Napoleon said to Mollien "If I am declaring a new war, it is, of course, for some great political interest, but it is also in the interest of my finances, and precisely because they look weak. Is it not by war that I have always managed to balance them?"
I don't know enough about the political background to talk about opportunism, albeit a shift in Spanish policy would make it a potential backdoor for the British, which was a key reason for the invasion of Portugal. We did crunch the numbers many years ago on one of the forums, but I cannot find it now. However, whilst the 6m Francs annual subsidy may not seem much, economics works at the margins, where 6m would make all the difference. There is a good summary here https://www.cairn.info/revue-napoleonica-la-revue-2008-3-page-2.htm# (interesting to note the German states did not pay up for their 1810 acquisitions). If you add in the Spanish troops in Denmark and what was left of the Spanish Navy, there was a lot at stake in 1807-8. I suspect Napoleon also had ideas about extracting more from the New World, albeit Ouvrard and his chums were factoring the Spanish debt as the gold was not getting through. Interestingly, there were proposals to change the Austrian merchant flag in 1804 as its merchantmen were being attacked by the British, who mistook the flag for a Spanish flag. The UK certainly knew how the Napoleonic war effort was being financed and Ouvrard was banged up by Napoleon for four months in 1809. This is also interesting on the other cashflows to the Napoleonic regime from Spain https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=d6nbkY8kpuAC&pg=PA160&lpg=PA160&dq=1803+subsidy+treaty+spain&source=bl&ots=jWDXS7lglX&sig=ACfU3U1yR8u4NsUtN6rvtTDxXWdF5u2tpQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwilr5Hq0dniAhVOVBUIHW4lDD0Q6AEwEXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=1803%20subsidy%20treaty%20spain&f=false p.160-1. From the number-crunching, the key problem for Napoleon from about 1810 was that more debt was being issued at a time when the yield was over 5%, compared with UK bonds yields never exceeding 3% over the period. Cashflow issues can kill any business long before it is technically insolvent.
This "man of peace" nonsense is a product of Weider and his followers, taken up by Roberts, but it just proves the old adage that you should consider any work on a historical figure not just in terms of what is written about but when the book was written. War is not fashionable now, but you only need to check the full name of the Domaine extraordinnaire to see who thought he had a "right" to wage war. It was the same at the start of Napoleon's regime - he told the French people that he wanted peace in 1799-1800 to stabilise his new regime, when in reality, if you look at the Talleyrand-Thugut correspondence, there was absolutely no intention. This nonsense always reminds me of Mel Brooks in "To Be or Not to Be" (1983) impersonating Hitler singing:
"I don't want war! All I want is peace...peace...peace...! A little piece of Poland, A little piece of France, A little piece of Austria And Hungary, perchance! A little slice of Turkey And all that that entails, And then a bit of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales!"
We can just about prove you knew the Austrian plans for Rivoli, but Austerlitz is more at the prima facie stage - so go on, how much did you know in advance?
I heard once that Napoleon said he didn't care about getting generals who were smart; he just wanted generals who were lucky. Anybody else heard this, and what is the source and exact quotation, in French if possible?
According to the British online newspaper, The Independent, this is a wrongly attributed quote. It actually came from Cardinal Mazarin in the mid-17th century, who said “The question is not whether he is a good general, but is he a lucky general?“. Napoleon seems to have referred to his own luck quite a lot, but this I think is about his intelligence effort - without key spies, his luck had deserved him. Napoleon is quoted by Chandler as saying the hour after 0200 was a special hour - this seems to be when the spies came in.
thanks.
Napoleon's definition of 'lucky' was the commanders ability to exploit accidents.
Why didn't he make lasting peace in 1808, he could have, in case he was hell bent to do it, instead he invaded Spain.
Ohh, I like that one! It's a big one for me. Charles Esdaile has looked at the motives behind the invasion of Spain, but I can't speak for anything else.
Napoleon's three greatest mistakes were invading the Spanish Peninsula, the invasion of Russia, and the Continental System.
The one that did the most damage was the war in Spain. It saddled Napoleon with a continuous second front and did more lasting damage than the invasion of Russia in that it was a constant drain on French and allied manpower.
Interestingly, at the beginning of 1813 some of Napoleon's subordinates urged him to withdraw half of the veterans from Spain and send them to central Europe to face the Prussians and Russians. That could have been decisive and would undoubtedly have kept Austria out of the war.
Unfortunately, Napoleon refused to do it, though he did draw on the French armies in Spain for cadres and replacements, sometimes entire units. That decision compounded the error and might have been the decisive decision of 1813.
I'd agree. Care should be taken not to overplay the impact of the Peninsular War, which some, particularly British, historiography is inclined to do, but it's certainly a mistake to dismiss it as a sideshow. It was a wound steadily bleeding him of vital resources. The scale of the numbers needed to maintain control in the region are shown by the scale of the French defeat when men were pulled out to bolster the 1813 army. That was only one of many reasons for what happened at Vittoria, but it still played it's part.