Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign Book

This relatively thin (just shy of 300 pages) account of Napoleon's disastrous Russian Campaign is not a grand study of the operational, tactical, and strategic shortcomings that led to the decimation of the Grande Armée. For that there are many other books from von Clauswitz's Russian Campaign of 1812 (he fought in the service of Russians) to a plethora of more modern analyses. Instead, this is a memoir written from the perspective of Napoleon's aide-de-camp. Count Philippe-Paul de Ségur published his account entitled Histoire de Napoléon et de la grande armée pendant l'année 1812 nine years after Napoleon met his Waterloo. Republished a number of times, the definitive English language version was masterfully translated by J. David Townsend in 1958. (I note that the excellent publishers New York Review of Books released an edition some 10 years ago, though my copy is the sturdy, stiff-paper cover Time-Life Books edition of 1965.)

As a regular occupant of Napoleon's tent and staff meetings, de Ségur was in a unique position to comment on the Emperor's disposition as the campaign worsened. The picture painted is not always flattering. Here we see Napoleon indecisive, pensive, pacing, brooding, doubting, worried, depressed and in pain. (He had a number of moderately debilitating physical ailments in Russia from nagging colds, urinary tract problems, and insomnia, though de Ségur doesn't go into much detail about these.) The decisive, bold master commander of Austerlitz is but a shadow of before. This is revealed as much in the battles themselves as it is in de Ségur's trenchant observations before - or after - the battles. Napoleon is driven by the internal demons of pride and hubris, "Like all men who have been fortunate for a very long time, he expected what he desired."

Continually outmaneuvered by the elusive Russians (debate 'rages' still after some 200 years as to whether there was ever a grand "Scythian Plan" deployed or whether Russian operational prudence in response to Gallic obtuseness was merely at play), Napoleon chases the specter of success from battle to battle: "retreat was of little importance to Napoleon who thought only of victory." With the Russians exiting Smolensk, Napoleon ignores his generals and plans for the grand battle that doesn't happen, because he "believed what he most desired." After Smolensk burns and the Russians have again vanished, de Ségur gives us a despondent Napoleon who chased "the mirage of victory, which lured him on, which he seemed so often on the point of grasping, [yet] had once more eluded him."

Next up Borodino but before the grand and bloody battle, the weather too turns against the Emperor: "...a fine cold rain began to fall, and a high wind heralded the coming of autumn. This was one more enemy to be reckoned with." Borodino, Napoleon felt, was finally THE ONE BIG BATTLE that was needed to break the Russians. The French had been chasing and fighting since June 24th. Depending upon the source between 450,000 and 600,000 men had begun the march into Russia. At Borodino Napoleon had no more than 190,000 tired, hungry and now shivering cold men left: "He [Napoleon] felt that the army needed a rest…and there was no rest in store for his troops save in death or victory." De Ségur finds the Emperor "with his head in hands reflecting on the vanity of glory." This is not the young Napoleon of old and to some historians his hesitancy and perseveration, though gaining him a tactical victory, cost him the strategic edge, never to be regained.

On to Moscow only to be frustrated there by a first vacant, then torched city, Napoleon exhibits bi-polar behavior with deep depression and wild manic schemes to march on St. Petersburg. His generals are appalled at the latter suggestion, though this no wonder given that they have a "sovereign whose genius outdistanced their imaginations." The Emperor clearly realizes that his position is becoming untenable, even indefensible, but retreat cannot be an option: "When one makes a mistake one must stick to it -- that makes it right!" And so, writes de Ségur, "Stubbornness his finest quality elsewhere, becomes his worst defect here." He stays too long in the ruins of the great city, waiting for peace offerings from the Russian emperor, Alexander I, that never come, "alternately urged forward and held back, he remained with the ashes of his conquest, with little to hope for, yet still wishing."

The retreat, when it comes, is one long prolonged death agony. De Ségur spares little horrific detail as appalling conditions and marauding, elusive Cossacks wreak havoc on the starving and freezing men of the once Grand Army. The last large battle, of the Berezina River, is described in lurid, livid terms and lives on in modern France as the term "Bérézina" has become synonymous for "disaster."

Whilst the portrait that de Ségur paints of Napoleon is critical it is ultimately both believable and all-too-human. The former so much the so because of the latter. Some have been critical of this version of Napoleon - de Ségur was challenged to a duel and was wounded by another former soldier of the campaign - but I find it not dissimilar from other accounts I have read of the Emperor post-Wagram.

Napoleon made it further than either Charles XII of Sweden (Battle of Poltava, 1709) or Hitler in '41-'42, but as it was for those two empires (the Kingdom of Sweden and the German Reich), so it was for the French: the invasion of Russia was the beginning of the end. De Ségur says it best on the last page: "I have erected a melancholy beacon with a lurid beam; and if my weak hand has not been equal to the painful task, I have at least attempted to give this warning, that those who came after us may see the peril and avoid it." Unfortunately, pride and hubris still ride before circumspection and humility.