The Illustrious Dead Read Online Free

had been placed on the throne by the emperor, allowed British merchant ships into their harbors to trade freely.
    French manufacturers simply couldn’t supply the finished goods that England did. Russia was hit especially hard: its thriving export market in raw materials such as tallow, pitch, wood, corn, iron, and leather collapsed under Napoleon’s regime. England responded with its own blockade, a much more effective one, as it was enforced by the Royal Navy. Rich barons in Paris had to smuggle in tobacco and coffee, and even aristocratic families hung a single lump of sugar from their ceilings on a string and allowed their members only a single dunk of the sweetener into their coffee. In Hamburg, all but three of the city’s four hundred sugar factories closed as a result of the embargo, and one of Napoleon’s administrators there had to turn to England to get warm uniforms for the emperor’s troops, without which they would have “perished with the cold.” England had woven itself into the fabric of international life, and even Bonaparte couldn’t unravel its ties.
    In December 1810, the young Tsar Alexander, under pressure from his merchants and after watching the value of the paper ruble fall 50 percent, opened Russian ports to ships from neutral countries (which were sure to be filled with British goods) and slapped steep tariffs on French luxury products. The Continental System was effectively dead in Moscow. The blockade was almost universally hated, but it was Napoleon’s only real weapon against En gland. If he let Russia openly flout the embargo, it would become an “absurdity,” in the emperor’s opinion. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. “Sooner or later we must encounter and defeat the Russians,” Napoleon had written as early as 1806, and now the case for him became even more pressing.
    For his part, the tsar eventually saw Napoleon clearly, not as a monster or a soul mate (a notion he had briefly entertained) but as a conqueror who demanded obedience, pure and simple. Concessions on Poland and the embargo were Napoleon’s main demands now, and Alexander knew he couldn’t relent on the first issue. “The world is clearly not big enough for us,” he wrote in the buildup to the war, “to come to an understanding over that country.”
    The emperor was intensely frustrated by Alexander’s stubbornness. From speaking of the young man as an underrated ruler, Napoleon began to revert to the old chestnuts of anti-Russian invective: Alexander was inscrutable, a Tatar, a barbarian. He repeated to his advisers ridiculous stories and accounts of conspiracies hatched by the Russian imperial court to overthrow or undermine him. Perhaps as in every war, the enemy used many of the same tropes in describing Napoleon, especially that of a barbarian.
    But disillusionment with Alexander didn’t necessitate war with Russia. The tsar was flouting the embargo on English goods, but so were Napoleon’s own brothers. Poland was still securely in the French sphere, and Alexander had been sufficiently cowed by two defeats not to attempt anything in the near future. Still, Napoleon (like Alexander) had domestic concerns that would be alleviated by a new war: the nobles were pressing the emperor for reform, and a crop failure in 1811 had exacerbated tensions and depressed the economy. Fresh victories would turn the public’s mind away from the increasing authoritarianism of his rule.
    There are a hundred theories as to why Napoleon began to contemplate war with Russia, from Freud’s speculation that he was driven by guilt over his recent divorce from the empress Josephine to mental complications from his declining health. Napoleon said that the speculation that swirled around him even during the lead-up was frivolous. “I care nothing for St-Cloud or the Tuileries,” he said of two of his magnificent residences. “It would matter little to me if they were burned down. I count my houses as nothing, women as