12 defeats of Napoleon Bonaparte. Finishing the campaign of 1812, the Russians kicked out the remnants of Napoleon's Grand Army not only from Russia, but from the bastard Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Gathering new forces, up to 17-year-old concripts of future conscription, the French emperor entered into a new battle with his main rival on the continent - Russia.
Where will we win? In Silesia, in Bohemia? In Saxony
It is difficult to say whether the Russians would have survived the May battles of 1813 at Lutzen and Bautzen under the command of Kutuzov, if he were still alive. Wittgenstein, who immediately took the post of commander-in-chief, still a very young favorite of Alexander I, the savior of St. Petersburg, had very motley forces under his command, and he can hardly be considered the culprit of the first defeats of the Allies in the new campaign against Napoleon.
The accession of the Prussians, led by Blucher, who was dragged into heroes by the leaders of Tugenbund Gneisenau and Scharngorst, did not yet indicate the decisive preponderance of the Allies over the French. Blucher only managed to inflict a severe defeat on the French vanguard during the retreat from Bautzen. But the Plesvitsky truce that followed soon, to which Napoleon went mainly because of the internal problems of France, became, in fact, salvation for the new anti-French coalition.
The main mistake of Napoleon was the bet that Austria would remain his ally, especially considering that the grandson of Emperor Franz was the heir to the French throne. Meanwhile, Franz long ago actually gave his foreign minister Metternich carte blanche to break with Napoleonic France. The negotiations that were held at the Prague Congress, and then in Neumarkt, in fact, initially could not bring results in favor of France, but the transition of Austria to the side of the Allies still came as a big surprise to Napoleon.
At the beginning of August 1813, Field Marshal Prince K-F. Schwarzenberg, who commanded only a 40-thousandth corps in the war with Russia, suddenly descends from the mountains of Bohemia into the valleys of Saxony at the head of an almost 200-thousandth Bohemian army, half staffed by Russians. The heavy defeat inflicted on the allies by the French emperor at the battle of Dresden forced the Russians and Austrians to retreat back through the narrow defile of the Ore Mountains on their way to the hereditary lands of the Habsburg crown.
For several weeks, Napoleon hatched grandiose plans to encircle his main enemy, counting, among other things, on a deep maneuver through the Pirna fortress. However, a direct invasion of Bohemia after the defeated army of Schwarzenberg could well result in the loss of Prussia and Saxony, not to mention the northeast of Germany - Pomerania and Mecklenburg. After all, there, with the exception of a few fortresses, along with the Prussian landwehr, the Swedes already ruled almost everywhere (see The first dash to the west from the Neman to the Elbe)
As a result, Napoleon did not succeed in reaping the fruits of the victory. The allied armies learned well the lessons taught them once, and despite the fragmentation, they learned to act in concert. First, a strong retaliatory blow for Dresden was dealt to the French by the Russians, who routed and almost completely captured General Vandamme's outflanking French column at Kulm. And soon the entire army of Napoleon could be under threat of loss of communications and even complete encirclement.
One after another, Napoleon's marshals suffered heavy setbacks - first MacDonald under Katzbach, and then one after another Oudinot and Ney in the battles of Gross-Beeren and Dennewitz. The offensive into Bohemia was postponed, Napoleon, rather hoped to lure the allied troops out of there for a decisive battle.
Irretrievable losses
In the hardest campaign of 1813, Napoleon's marshals not only suffered defeats, they died themselves. Later, after the “Battle of the Nations” was lost, covering the retreat of the main forces, the brilliant Józef Poniatowski, who had just received the marshal's baton from Napoleon, would not be able to get out of the waters of Elster.
He was the nephew of the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Napoleon later stated that “the real king of Poland was Poniatowski, he possessed all titles and all talents for this …” The French emperor said more than once that “he was a noble and brave man, a man of honor. If I had succeeded in the Russian campaign, I would have made him the king of the Poles."
However, Napoleon for some reason preferred to confine himself to the fact that he appointed him Minister of War in the Grand Duchy of Warsaw organized by him. However, he still did not have the courage to return independence to the Poles, although not even half a century has passed since the collapse of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Apparently, among the reasons for this, in the first place is the irresistible desire of the Corsican parvenu Napoleone Buonaparate to enter the large family of European monarchs.
And even before Poniatowski, Marshal Bessières fell. The son of a Languedoc surgeon from Preisac, who worked as a barber, Jean-Baptiste, chose a military career with the outbreak of revolutionary wars. His characteristic Jacobin hairstyle - long hair that quickly turned gray, was recognized from afar, even under the general's cocked hat. Under the leadership of Bessière, who was among the first to receive the marshal's baton, there was a Guards cavalry for many years, and he never recognized the primacy of Murat as a cavalryman.
A convinced republican, despite everything - titles and marshal's baton, and personal friendship with the emperor, to whom he never hesitated to tell the truth, Bessières was a real favorite of the army. Once, during the battle of Wagram, when a horse was killed under it, and the marshal himself was shell-shocked, he was considered dead. The army was already mourning its beloved leader, and when Bessières was able to return to service, the iron-sided rushed into the attack with renewed vigor.
Marshal Bessière was struck by a Prussian cannonball on May 1, 1813 in a skirmish near Weissenfels on the eve of the battle of Lützen. Soon after that, Napoleon lost another friend, also a marshal, but of the court - Gerard Duroc, Duke of Friul. The death of Bessière was a prelude to Napoleon's first victory, and the death of Duroc happened immediately after Napoleon's second success in the campaign - under Bautzen.
Contemporaries recalled how the emperor lamented: I cannot give one more of my friends for every victory. Duroc, like Bessières, died from a direct hit from an enemy core. This happened a day after the battle of Bautzen near the town of Markersdorf, when the entire Napoleonic retinue watched the rearguard battle of the retreating Russian-Prussian army in full force.
On the monument, which was erected at the site of the death of Duroc, by order of Napoleon it was written:
"Here General Duroc died in the arms of his emperor and his friend."
The campaign of 1813 in general turned out to be extremely bloody, and there were also numerous losses in the Allied generals. One of the fallen was a Frenchman, who was called a personal enemy and the most real of Napoleon's rivals - the revolutionary General Jean-Victor Moreau. When Napoleon assumed the imperial crown, he first exiled the ardent Republican Moreau to the North American States, on an apparently far-fetched suspicion of involvement in a royalist conspiracy.
A former French general who was to lead the allied armies, Moreau received a mortal wound in the first minutes of the battle at Dresden. At that moment, the Russian Emperor Alexander was next to him. It is believed that the cannon that killed the general was personally loaded by Napoleon; it was on this legend that Valentin Pikul built the plot of the famous novel "To Each His Own". French General Moreau was buried in St. Petersburg, in the Church of St. Catherine on Nevsky Prospect.
Not to Dresden, but to Leipzig
After his marshals were unable to cope with Blucher and Bernadotte, Napoleon made every effort to push the allied armies - the Silesian and Northern armies as far as possible from the field of the decisive battle at Leipzig. There, in the first half of October, the 220,000-strong Bohemian army began to move slowly, but rather compactly.
Alexander I, who, despite the first setbacks in the campaign, was still determined to reach Paris, placed his headquarters with the Bohemian army. He invited there not only the Prussian king and the Austrian emperor, but also many courtiers, and not only from Russia. Many historians, not without reason, consider this to be almost the main reason for the passivity with which the main forces of the Allies, headed by Prince Schwarzenberg, acted.
However, in the four-day battle near Leipzig, rightly called the "Battle of the Nations", Napoleon himself did not give the Bohemian army any chance of inaction. Continuously maneuvering, the French commander still managed to make sure that the Silesian and Northern armies did not have time to approach the battlefield in time. The classics - Marx and Engels, in their famous article about Blucher, written for the New American Encyclopedia, named their fellow countryman almost the main creator of the victory at Leipzig.
Indeed, Blucher, nicknamed "Marshal Forverts" (Forward), not only led his Silesian army to the walls of Leipzig, but also constantly pushed Bernadotte there. He, as you know, did not dare to accept the offer of Alexander I to head all the allied armies, but limited himself to the Northern, a quarter staffed by the Swedes - his future subjects. In order to bring the Northern Army to Leipzig, 70-year-old Blucher, with his colossal combat experience and authority, even agreed to go under the direct command of the former Napoleonic marshal.
However, the Russian emperor personally did much more so that the Russian-Prussian-Swedish army of the crown prince would be in the fields near Leipzig. And diplomacy, thanks to which at the most acute moment one of the main allies, Saxony, broke away from Napoleon. However, the so-called "betrayal" of the Saxons was largely due to the fact that their former commander was just a Napoleonic Marshal, and now the Swedish Crown Prince Bernadotte had already gone over to the side of the anti-French coalition.
Napoleon, meanwhile, without waiting for the Bohemian army to descend from the mountain passes, by October 10 concentrated the main forces at Duben, demonstrating his readiness to give battle to the combined forces of the Northern and Silesian armies. There was very little time left before the main forces of the allies went directly to his rear, and the emperor made an attempt to force the armies of Blucher and Bernadotte, who were clearly evading the battle, to leave behind the Elbe.
With a flank march to Wittenberg, he created a real threat to the communications of the Northern Army, which forced Bernadotte to retreat. If Bernadotte's army, and after it Blucher, had gone beyond the Elbe, the Allies at Leipzig would have had almost 150 thousand fewer soldiers. The case, most likely, would have ended for the Bohemian army with another Dresden, and, as a result, with a defeat in the campaign.
It was at this moment that the Swedish crown prince insisted that Alexander put Blucher under his command. Blucher obeyed seemingly unquestioningly, but managed not only to convince Bernadotte to confine himself to a retreat to Petersberg, very far from the right bank of the Elbe, but also to convince Alexander to accelerate the advance of all forces of Schwarzenberg's Bohemian army to Leipzig.
On the approaches to the city, the Russian and Austrian corps advanced even with some advance. Blucher actually joined his army to the troops of Bernadotte, for which he made a roundabout maneuver to Halle, and was forced to fight the Marmont corps at Möckern. Bernadotte's army did not perform any maneuvers; it marched from Petersberg as slowly as Schwarzenberg's troops.
Contemporaries argue that the Swedish crown prince on the morning of October 16 (4th according to the old style), when the cannonade was already heard from the direction of Leipzig, stopped the movement of the Northern Army at the village of Selbits, not far from Petersberg. Bernadotte did not pay attention to the persuasions of the Allied commissars who were at his apartment, and only in the evening did he move part of the troops to Landsberg, one passage from the battlefield.
"Battle of the Nations" was not the last
In the meantime, it was hastily advanced to the field of the decisive battle, although it was clearly not in time for another Allied army - the Polish army under the command of General Bennigsen, which was joined by the Austrian corps of Coloredo. The other two allied armies, the Silesian and the Northern, were also late, which gave Napoleon another chance. And on the first day of the "Battle of the Nations" the French commander made every effort to use this chance.
Five infantry and four cavalry corps, backed by a guard, were ready to unleash all their might on the columns of Prince Schwarzenberg's army, the center of which was four Russian infantry and two allied corps under the command of Infantry General Barclay de Tolly. At this time, Schwarzenberg insists on his plan for a double bypass of the French positions, which only leads to an unnecessary division of forces.
However, the Russians were the first to strike. Alexander did not hide his fears that Napoleon was only pretending to attack the Bohemian army, but in fact was concentrating his forces to strike at Blucher's Silesian army. She, with a force of just over 50 thousand people, noticeably broke away from Bernadotte and could simply be crushed by the French.
On the morning of October 16, Russian infantry columns went on the attack and even had little success, and even took the place of Wachau in the center of the French positions, although later they had to leave it under cross-fire. This forced Napoleon to regroup his forces, abandoning the idea of striking the right flank of the Bohemian army, cutting it off from Blucher. At this time, Napoleon had already received reports that Blucher had defeated Marmont, and went to Leipzig from a completely different side.
The emperor did not pay attention to the movements of Blucher, and decided to crush the Bohemian army with a coordinated blow to the center of the allied positions. At the same time, the bypass of Barclay's right flank was not canceled as an auxiliary blow. At about three o'clock in the afternoon, almost 10 thousandth waves of Murat's French cavalry, supported by the fire of hundreds of guns and several attacks by infantry, including the Guards, eventually broke through the Russian positions.
The hussars and shevoljeres even managed to break through to the hill on which the allied monarchs and Schwarzenberg were located, but were stopped by the Russian guard and the allied cavalry rushing to the rescue. The transfer of 112 cannons of the horse artillery of General Sukhozanet to the place of breakthrough at once turned out to be very timely.
As a result, the famous attack at Wachau did not become victorious for the French, and did not force the Bohemian army to retreat, although at the allied headquarters, to which the French cavalry almost broke through, they were already ready to give such an order. Fortunately, Prince Schwarzenberg also abandons the idea of a deep bypass of the Napoleonic army between the Elster and Place rivers, and sends significant forces to help Barclay.
There is a legend that Alexander was persuaded to stand to death by his advisers. The first among them is the personal enemy of Napoleon, the Corsican Pozzo di Borgo, who had not yet received the count's title in Russia, but who succeeded in negotiations with Bernadotte on going over to the side of the Allies. The second is the future president of independent Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias, who is credited with the authorship of the famous maxim addressed to Alexander I, who was named by him "Agamemnon of this great battle and the king of kings."
Kapodistrias himself later recalled more than once how Alexander at Leipzig calmly disposed of in the most critical moments of the battle, joked when grenades fell near him, commanding an army of three hundred thousand and surprising the professional military with his strategic considerations.
The second day of the titanic confrontation near Leipzig - October 17, when Napoleon even offered a new truce to the allies can be considered a turning point in the "Battle of the Nations". After that, not only Alexander, but all his entourage discarded any thoughts of stopping the battle. Napoleon, who managed to withstand the Bohemian army on the eve, no longer attacked, while Blucher's army began to threaten him from the north.
The next day, Napoleon was forced to reduce his extended positions, retreating closer to the walls of Leipzig. More than 300 thousand allied troops were concentrated against his 150 thousandth army, with which there was an unprecedented amount of artillery - 1400 cannons and howitzers. In fact, already on October 18, it was only about covering the retreat of the French army, although the French fought so fiercely that it seemed as if Napoleon was seriously counting on victory.
On this day, the Polish army entered the battle, and Bernadotte's troops also appeared on the battlefield, which, despite the direct ban of the crown prince, took part in the assault on Pounsdorf. On the same day, at the very climax of the battle, the entire Saxon division, which fought in the ranks of Napoleon's troops, went over to the side of the Allies.
There were not so many Saxons near Leipzig - just over three thousand with 19 guns, but soon their example was followed by the Württemberg and Baden units from the Napoleonic troops. About how the refusal of the Germans to fight for the emperor of the French reflected on the course of the battle, Dmitry Merezhkovsky wrote more vividly than others: "A terrible emptiness began to flicker in the center of the French army, as if a heart had been ripped out of it."
By nightfall, the French managed to retreat to the walls of Leipzig. On the day of October 19, it was planned to storm the city by allied troops, but the Saxon king Frederick Augustus managed to send an officer with a proposal to surrender the city without a fight. The only condition of the monarch, whose soldiers had already left Napoleon, was a 4-hour guarantee for the French troops to leave the city.
Messages about the agreement reached by no means reached everyone; Russian and Prussian soldiers stormed the outskirts of Leipzig, capturing the southern gates of the city. At this time, the French in droves poured through the Randstadt Gate, in front of which a bridge was unexpectedly blown up by mistake. The retreat quickly turned into a stampede, the losses of the Napoleonic army were enormous, and Marshal Ponyatovsky was among the drowned in the Elster River.
The campaign of 1813 ended with the retreat of the French across the Rhine. The Bavarians, who also went over to the side of the Allies, tried in vain to block the path of retreat to Napoleon at Hanau. Ahead was the campaign of 1814 - already on French soil.
