Saturday, November 21, 2009 Previous editions
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
BOOKS that genuinely break new ground don’t come along very often, and even then they tend to be academic rather than reader-friendly.
Dominic Lieven’s Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807-1814 is both readable and a landmark historical work.
As Lieven points out, no western professor has written a book on Russia’s contribution to Napoleon’s defeat. Because of the difficulty in accessing Russian sources before the fall of the Soviet Union, most work has focused on British, French, and German sources, and on Russia only until the end of the French invasion of 1812.
Napoleon led 450,000 men into Russia, but only a few made it back. The French blamed the cold but, as Lieven shows, exhaustion and disease were much greater factors.
Bonaparte, a genius on the battlefield but who never really planned ahead, was out-thought. The defeat shattered the myth of French military superiority.
Tsar Alexander had always planned for a defensive war against the French so they could destroy themselves. As the Russians retreated, destroying food supplies as they went, Napoleon pressed on in a determined bid to force a decisive battle. He sought not to conquer Russia, but to destroy its army and remove it as a player on the European stage. The decisive battle never came, despite several smaller battles. After wintering in Moscow, but starving and having lost most of their horses to battle and starvation, the French had to retreat, harried all the way.
Using almost entirely Russian sources, which hasn’t been done before, Lieven puts 1812 in context. He shows Russia’s place as a world power and its tensions with Britian and France up to 1807, the practical but transient Russo-French alliance from 1807-1812 and the Russian-led war of 1813-14 that made it to Paris and ousted Napoleon.
But Lieven’s aim is not simply to explain 1812.
He wants to understand how Russia fought Napoleon and why it won. He tries to redress national myths, showing, for example, that success in 1812 was down to a multi-ethnic army (with many German generals) rather than a triumph of ethnic Russians, as depicted by Leo Tolstoy. The humble horse emerges as a hero, a resource Russia had in abundance but which France could not replace. They were needed for everything from cavalry to hauling artillery.
The 1813-14 war is often overlooked even by Russian scholars, but Lieven does an excellent job of showing that Bonaparte’s removal was not guaranteed after 1812. He gives a detailed account of the Russian army’s struggle to rebuild and the fragile alliance that drove Napoleon from Prussia and into Germany. There, at Leipzig, he suffered a devastating defeat that forced him back into France.
Lieven shows how an empire near bankruptcy achieved success with an army often equipped with obsolete weapons and hampered by in-fighting and ineptitude among its generals. Keeping 500,000 men supplied so far from home was itself an achievement.
Although called Russia Against Napoleon, it could easily be called Alexander Against Napoleon: the war was as much the tsar’s project to bring a lasting peace to Europe as to safeguard Russian interests.
His officers didn’t understand his cause; they were content to drive the French off Russian soil. Joining the army on the field while also ensuring alliances were upheld with Prussia, Austria, and Sweden, Alexander held the European powers together long enough to invade France and force Napoleon out.
An absolute monarch in an empire built on serfdom, Alexander took advantage of the serf system to fill the ranks. The book is at its most interesting when it uses the memoirs of lower-ranking officers and conscripts. They add a human element to the grand narrative of battles, generals and diplomacy.
The accounts of soldiers like Pamfil Nazarov, a peasant conscripted in 1813, give an excellent picture of what the common man made of the war. He felt no patriotism, just sorrow at leaving his family for obligatory 25-year service. That Nazarov recurs through the narrative of the 1813-14 campaign adds depth to the text.
The book’s publication in October will mark a major addition to scholarship on the Napoleonic wars. One criticism, though, is that it covers so much the reader can get lost in a forest of names and regiments.
Occasionally Lieven takes liberties with the reader’s knowledge, referring to army formations without explaining until much later how many men were, say, in a Russian battalion (750, and about 13,000 in a division). Until then it is hard to get a picture of the troop numbers involved.
Lieven is passionate about his subject (he named his dog after the Russian general Barclay de Tolly), but sometimes it’s like a tour with a guide who knows everything but tries to pack too much in. That said, a less able guide would have made a mess of this, and this is no mess.
Understandably, as it focuses on the Russian perspective, we get little regarding British involvement.
Although Britain, because of tensions with (and later financial agreements with) Russia, features intermittently, it only becomes prominent when discussing the talks around the fall of France.
The British are more evident in a recent text on Bonaparte, Hubert O’Connor’s The Emperor and the Irishman. The book focuses on Napoleon’s banishment to St Helena.
Dr Barry O’Meara, a Dubliner and a surgeon in the British navy, became Bonaparte’s physician and O’Connor reproduces extracts from his diaries.
They are a window into Napoleon’s daily life as his health failed and O’Meara came under pressure from the British authorities to report on Bonaparte from 1816-18.
However, a very brief concluding section about the level of arsenic in Napoleon’s system, which has given rise to claims he was poisoned, feels tacked on and insubstantial.
Overall, an interesting perspective on Napoleon’s last days but best suited for readers already interested in the era.
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