To Dare More Boldly by Hulsman John C

Author:Hulsman, John C.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Bonaparte’s Predictable Fall as a Leader of a Revolutionary Power

It was his vain attempt to try to enforce the Continental System that led Bonaparte to his two greatest military calamities: the Peninsular War in Iberia, and the epic assault on Moscow. But in reality, it was the militaristic, self-perpetuating expansionism of Napoleon’s France that led to the setbacks in Spain and Russia. The Continental System was just Bonaparte’s policy tool for implementing the strategy of a revolutionary power. Both the Spanish and Russian disasters arose out of Napoleon fighting wars of choice, conflicts that a status quo power would have entirely avoided.

Enraged at Portugal’s brazen violations of the Continental System—Lisbon had long had well-established and lucrative trading ties with Britain—Napoleon ordered its invasion. Along with its Spanish allies, Portugal was quickly brought to heel in 1807. However, befitting its status as a revolutionary power, France simply could not bank its strategic winnings and leave well enough alone.

In 1808, the throne of Spain was unoccupied. Seeing his chance, Napoleon seized Madrid for his older brother, Joseph, whom he had crowned as the new king in the summer of that year. This high-handed blunder enraged Spain’s deeply religious and conservative Catholic populace, particularly in rural areas. Thus commenced a six-year struggle that morphed into a vicious guerrilla war sapping French strength and would ultimately tie down 300,000 French troops in a never-ending struggle to pacify the Spanish countryside.

Britain immediately capitalized on France’s strategic mistake, in 1808 sending troops under the Duke of Wellington to bolster the Spanish and the Portuguese, as well as vital supplies and economic backing. By 1814, with Wellington having masterfully made his name fighting in Spain, Napoleon was forced by the crisis in Russia to withdraw French troops from the Iberian Peninsula; the British, Portuguese, and Spanish at last managing to dislodge the French, pushing them out of Iberia. Napoleon’s over-fixation on the military tool of power—in his case, to the exclusion of basic economics—had led directly to France’s ruin in Spain.

But even worse was yet to come. A major strain on the always tenuous Franco-Russian alliance between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I was this self-same violation of the Continental System by Moscow. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, and hearing reports of ongoing Russian treachery with England, Napoleon fatefully invaded Russia on June 24, 1812.

Due to the Russian army’s scorched-earth tactics, Napoleon’s troops found it increasingly difficult to forage for food for themselves, and crucially for their horses, which began dying in the thousands. Even when the Russians finally gave Napoleon the fixed battle he so longed for, at Borodino on September 7, 1812, his usual decisive victory eluded him. As the emperor himself put it at the time at Borodino, “The French showed themselves to be worthy of victory, but the Russians showed themselves worthy of being invincible.”10 Napoleon was, as so often, on the mark. For the tactical success at Borodino did not yield the strategic success that Napoleon desperately needed—the dispiriting of the czar and his docile return to the negotiating table.

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