Chapter 2: Gimme, gimme, gimme (a sunny place after midnight)
An attempt at a psychological portrait of Crown Prince Karl Johan in the Summer of 1813
Article published in Psychohistorical Review, volume 156, Kungliga Akademin i Åbo/Turku, n°2 1976
An attempt at a psychological portrait of Crown Prince Karl Johan in the Summer of 1813
Article published in Psychohistorical Review, volume 156, Kungliga Akademin i Åbo/Turku, n°2 1976
Per Lindqvist is the holder of a Ph. D. in Applied Psychology from the University of Uppsala and a visiting professor in the Royal Academy of Åbo/Turku. He is the official Historiographer of the Realm.
Although Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte’s actions came as a shock to the coalition at the tail-end of August or, for the three monarchs campaigning in Bohemia with Schwarzenberg, in early September, some signs had been appearing for at least a month that the former French marshal and now Crown Prince of Sweden was feeling more and more uncomfortable to wage war against Napoléon and the French Army itself, to whom he owed almost everything.
To be sure, the Trachenberg plan had been mostly his and he had shown no misgivings in drafting it. Although conspiracy theorists have spent much time and spilled buckets of ink trying to prove that the plan was defective from the get-go, there is nothing substantial to support their thesis. Their stridency can maybe be traced to Friedrich Freiherr von Bülow who never accepted that the timing of his decisive defeat at Großbeeren had been anything other than a hurried scheme put together in under a week and whose memoirs were hugely successful among the German aristocratic classes who were desperately looking for some kind of justification for their failure [1]. However, one of the future Karl XIV Johan’s first actions after he had secured Berlin for the French was to inform Emperor Napoléon I of what strategy the Coalition was following. This is not the act of a man who thinks his plan was not designed to work [2].
What really swayed his mind was not the fact that he was, as he has been caricatured by the English cartoonist George Cruikshank, an inherently ‘shifty, three-faced Frenchman at heart, a traitor by nature, a rogue by inclination, a despot by choice’. To understand how Karl Johan came to an agreement with his former Emperor on diplomatic matters and his former comrade Oudinot on the battlefield, we must look to the years the Crown Prince had already spent in his new country.
He had seen the way Swedish crowds could be fickle and turn on someone who wouldn’t deliver on what he promised. Even if he had not seen it in Stockholm, he could all too well remember the days when the Sans-culottes ruled the Parisian streets and when who you were or had been was no protection against the feared guillotine. He also had certainly been told of Axel von Fersen the Younger’s gruesome death after he had been accused of poisoning the previous Swedish Crown Prince.
Furthermore, Karl Johan had not come to Sweden during a stable period for the country. There had been the assassination against the absolute monarch Gustav III in 1792, less than twenty years before, then the coup against his hapless son Gustav IV Adolf in 1809, the hurried writing of a new Constitution and the general incertitude about who exactly was to succeed the ailing and rapidly-aging Karl XIII: a Danish prince if he managed to survive for more than a few months? a French marshal and son of an obscure lawyer all thanks to a hare-brained plot birthed by an idle baron [3]? someone else altogether? To cap it all, Gustav IV Adolf’s ousting had been due to his disastrous Russian war that had seen the loss of Finland. The national trauma this event caused cannot be overstated: Finland had been part of Sweden for centuries. Even if the Finnish subjects were always treated as a bit peculiar and provincial by their Swedish neighbours, kings from the Vasas onwards (except some of the German ones) had always made a point to learn their language, their cultural elites wrote in Swedish and the two parts of the kingdoms regularly exchanged administrators. To lose Finland was to Sweden as losing the départements south of the Loire river would be to France: ripping half a body apart.
Karl Johan had no particular attachment to Finland since he had not turned his mind to Sweden until his adoption by Karl XIII in 1810. He even had some misgivings about it: Finland had proved a fertile ground for casus belli against Russia during the whole of the 18th century. The subsequent wars had cost the Swedish treasury dearly and yielded little apart from untold amount of internal strife, both between the Riksdag and the king and inside the Riksdag itself between the Hats and the Caps. With Napoléon I emerging defeated from Russia and the dregs of the Grande Armée limping out of it, it seemed as if the eastern empire’s star was on the rise and it would be tremendously risky to oppose it. But Karl Johan knew he had to solidify his legitimacy somehow. And so, he turned the other way around and looked to the west. Norway had always been a thorn in Sweden’s side ever since the latter’s hard-won independence. It was one of two routes that Denmark could use to invade the country, the other being Scania. Its extremely long border was a nightmare to defend, even if only a few mountain passes were practicable for an invading army. The Crown Prince, armed with the supreme confidence in his strategic skills he had honed while serving in various theatres of wars across Europe, felt that wresting Norway from Denmark was a golden opportunity. It would restore Sweden’s prestige at little cost, for Denmark was sure to be ground under with its protector Napoléon; it would settle once and for all which Scandinavian country was preeminent; it would strengthen Sweden’s trade links with Great Britain; and finally it would defuse tensions with Russia.
The Crown Prince’s only chance of gaining Norway, however, lay entirely with the Sixth Coalition. Napoléon would never agree to despoil an allied kingdom such as Denmark of a province of that size, even less so for a man who had come into frequent conflict with him. The emperor had also incurred Sweden’s wrath by seizing Pomerania as a staging ground for his ill-conceived 1812 campaign. The Russians could see the opportunity, though, and were keen to be rid of a rival in the Baltic Sea. They even proposed to Karl Johan that he should seize Norway first, before scaling back the offer somewhat when Napoléon’s onslaught came. The British also argued in favour and offered subsidies as was their wont. It remained to be seen if the Prussians could be convinced and, perhaps more importantly, the Austrians.
The Spring Campaign of 1813 proved a mixed bag for the members of the Coalition who had never entertained the possibility that their archenemy could put together another army with such speed. They were not halted in the north, where Karl Johan had overall command, but they were seriously stymied in Saxony and around various French strongholds in eastern Germany or in Poland. Thus, when the armistice of Pläswitz came, they were very keen for the Swedish Crown Prince’s strategic acumen. This alone could have made sure no Great Powers would object to his conquering Norway. But Russians and Prussians alike were at the same time courting the Austrians to come to their side (indeed, the Trachenberg plan was the brainchild of both Bernadotte and of the supposedly neutral Radetzky). And there appeared the stumbling block: Klemens von Metternich was adamant that Sweden should not be compensated in land but rather with a sum of money, preferably paid by Great Britain [4]. He managed to impart this view to both Friedrich Wilhelm III and, in a lesser measure, to Aleksandr I [5]. The latter approached the Crown Prince personally at the end of the Trachenberg Conference (it is not clear whether it was on July 11 or 12) and renewed his offer of making Bernadotte King of France instead of the Bourbons, playing on the friendship they had struck while negotiating in early 1812 [6].
Although more naturally a soldier than a diplomat, the Crown Prince was quite alarmed by this departure from their erstwhile plans. He sought reassurance from the Prussian king and was rudely dismissed. The account of their encounter has been highly fictionalized since then, but the following facts seem confirmed by several key witnesses. Karl Johan came to pay his respects to the king and was made to wait for at least half an hour in an antechamber. When he protested his treatment to a nearby chamberlain, the official curtly answered that Friedrich Wilhelm was examining a military map. By then, the Crown Prince could barely rein in his temper and uttered that: ‘If he had taken that time seven years ago, perhaps he wouldn’t have had to flee to the Russians and abandon us his capital!’ [7] The words unfortunately carried over to Friedrich Wilhelm himself who threw open the doors separating him from Karl Johan and a shouting match ensued. The Prussian king refused to use the Crown Prince’s titles and mockingly called him by his French name Jean-Baptiste. Karl Johan called him the Elector from Brandenburg and King out of Prussia in retaliation [8]. Friedrich Wilhelm then turned to mocking Karl Johan’s faith, who had converted from Catholicism to Lutheranism upon coming to Sweden (and probably heaped some charges of atheism on top, since Karl Johan had taken part in the French Revolution). At this point, Karl Johan threatened to walk out of the Coalition altogether, bring his men back to Sweden and conquer Norway on his own. Since the Swedes were located around Berlin and were helping defending it against the French, the Prussian king realized he had gone too far and half-heartedly apologized. There remained the sticking point of Karl Johan’s command. He remained the nominal chief of the Army of the North, but from that point forward, Frederick William often sent contradictory (and terribly out-of-date) orders to III and IV Corps’ commanders Friedrich von Bülow and Bogislav Tauentzien.
Karl Johan soon suspected this back-channelling and responded with some of his own. When he learned that a Congress had opened at Prague on July 29 – at which Sweden had pointedly not been invited – to discuss peace treaties more or less under the mediation of Austria, he immediately wrote to Armand de Caulaincourt, Napoléon’s main negotiator. In his first letter, whose carefully encoded original can still be admired in Stockholm’s Armémuséum, he warned the French that Metternich had already displayed every intention of joining the coalition after the armistice had expired. After a lengthy complaint about the various humiliations he had had to endure while in Napoléon’s service, he ended his message on a more positive note: ‘I send you these news for I remember I was born a Frenchman and, though I am no longer bound to defend France, I cannot see her glory be defeated by vile betrayals and honeyed words from the Austrians. Make of my letter what you will. I only wrote it so that it may be said that I remained France’s friend even when it was not in my interest to do so.’ [9]
Caulaincourt acted with his usual decisiveness. After carefully sounding out Metternich and realizing that Karl Johan had told him nothing but the truth, he sent word to Napoléon that the Crown Prince seemed alienated from the Coalition and that an intriguing opportunity might be exploited. Karl Johan did not remain idle either. While he kept drilling his men to his very exacting standards, he called for his Foreign Minister Lars von Engeström to join him in Berlin.
The back-and-forth exchange of letters between the French and the Swedes continued for most of the month. They were to remain in secret archives for more than a hundred and fifty years, flustering generations of historians and leaving them reduced to conjectures on what exactly had been promised. On August 4, Napoléon joined his Grande Armée and conferred with Caulaincourt who had been replaced in Prague by Louis de Narbonne-Lara. The armistice expired on August 10, with hostilities to resume on August 17, but Napoléon had hurried his preparations and was feeling ready by then. [10]
Marshal Oudinot had been sent north to threaten Berlin and, if possible, destroy the Army of the North. However, while he was closing on the Prussian capital, an imperial courier reached him and bid him stop his advance the day before he had arrived at Großbeeren. Negotiations had not been finalized between Karl Johan and Napoléon and they both needed to stall for time. Their carefully planned manoeuvre needed absolute coordination and secrecy to be carried out, so much so that Oudinot had not been aware of it when he had set towards Berlin. The marshal had to prevent his subordinate Reynier, in command of the mostly Saxon VII Corps, to throw himself into the fray [11]. Much of the following week was occupied with rounding up Prussian peasants and making them dig carefully hidden trenches to the rear of the French positions while some divisions made demonstrations every day to keep the Prussians’ attention focused elsewhere. When von Bülow went directly to Karl Johan asking him for instructions to attack, the latter answered him in a huff that was probably not entirely faked: ‘Write to your king if you want permission to attack.’
At this point, the Crown Prince was still vacillating. He had learned with enthusiasm that the overbearing plenipotentiary minister baron d’Alquier, whom he had had recalled after the latter had proved too intrusive in 1811, had been sent away from the Court at Copenhagen to be named préfet of the Bouches-de-l’Yssel département [12]. Furthermore, Napoléon promised he would back Karl Johan’s reconquest of Finland and would provide financial assistance to replace the British monies [13]. In another letter, dated from August 20, he offered to surrender any claim to Swedish Pomerania and to adjoin the mouth of the Oder to it, including Stettin. On August 25, Napoléon also added the former Swedish duchy of Estonia and the stronghold of Viborg if Karl Johan would promise not to sign a separate peace with the Russians [14].
The Crown Prince was still hesitating when the last letter arrived on 28 August late in the evening. By the light of a candle, he learned of the Emperor’s apparently decisive victory at Dresden against Schwarzenberg and the three monarchs. Napoléon begged him – always a difficult action for him – to keep in mind his promises. Finally, half an hour past midnight, an unassuming carriage was brought into the Swedish camp that was well segregated from the Prussian encampments by this stage. In it, the Crown Prince had the immense surprise of meeting his wife who had just finished her trip from her sister Julie Bonaparte’s estate in Mortefontaine [15]. Désirée Clary had come to Sweden in December 1810 but the intense cold and the austere court in Stockholm had soon driven her back to her homeland, leaving her husband and her son Oscar behind. Karl Johan was delighted to meet his wife under such strange circumstances and was further mystified by the letter she carried and which decisively tipped the balance. We reproduce here most of it:
“To our esteemed brother Crown Prince Karl Johan.
I have negotiated with you in good faith and promised you rewards for your future kingdom and you both. However, I would not have it said that I forced you over the matter of your wife. I was in love with her and her fiancé once. She might have been Empress of France if other forces had not prevailed upon me. She will be, I hope, a superb Queen of Sweden, as she deserves to be. For the love we both bear her, I beseech you now to listen to her and join me against the Prussians and the Russians who have sought to despoil you of what is rightfully yours. I beg your forgiveness for the slights I have made you endure. I beg your forgiveness for the futile war I had your country wage against England. I beg the forgiveness of your new nation for the intrusion I made on Pomerania and the war I have waged against you. In this, I am not an emperor speaking to a former subject but a repentant friend who comes supplicating the one he has sinned against to forgive him.
Your brother,
Napoléon”
The authenticity of the letter would be very much in doubt if not for the Imperial seal that had kept it closed until the moment Karl Johan read it. Never before in his life and never after had Napoléon been so harsh on himself when writing. He had also dropped the royal ‘we’ that he used in his correspondence and only made a single reference to his title, the better to deny he was acting as an emperor. The fact remained: Napoléon was deciding to trust Karl Johan’s judgement entirely and was abandoning to him every bit of bargaining power he might have had. The Crown Prince is reported to have wept with joy with his wife and vowing eternal friendship with the emperor but that might be simple embellishment after the fact.
What followed has tied up constitutional scholars for two centuries over the legality of the Crown Prince’s actions. An aide-de-camp was sent to rouse Lars von Engeström from his sleep. His eyes still bleary, the Foreign Minister was hurried over to the tent of Karl Johan, where he met the equally confused Court Chancellor, Gustaf af Wetterstedt, who had already for some time been travelling in the field with the Crown Prince. The Swedish officials were astonished to discover that Karl Johan was convening what he called an Extraordinary Council – of two – to use paragraphs 12 and 13 of the 1809 Instrument of Government. Under those provisions, the Crown Prince asserted that he was making use of the royal prerogatives to deal with matters of war after consulting the Council and was switching alliances, effective from the moment he finished speaking, because he found this was what was ‘most profitable for the realm’. There were several outstanding bits of chicanery in that interpretations of his powers: although Karl Johan was Crown Prince and Regent for Karl XIII, he was not king; he had not consulted any minister before indulging in personal diplomacy – indeed, he barely required Engeström and Wetterstedt to agree with his opinion; and most importantly, there was the issue of whether or not his actions fell under the jurisdiction of the twelfth or the thirteenth paragraph of the Instrument of Government. Karl Johan would later maintain that his actions had merely been those of entering into a new alliance, which the twelfth paragraph indeed granted the sovereign the right to do provided the Foreign Minister and Court Chancellor had first been permitted to express an opinion (the paragraph said nothing about these officials needing to agree with the King's decision).
However, Karl Johan's critics would argue that his actions would more aptly be described as waging an aggressive war, the subject matter of the thirteenth paragraph, which the sovereign were only allowed to do after the entire cabinet had been allowed to grant their counsel. The fact that Karl Johan called the nocturnal meeting an Extraordinary Council, language which only appears in the thirteenth paragraph, seems to indicate that no matter what he may have claimed later, he was aware of the constitutional ambiguity of his actions and may have attempted to cloak his decision in the authority of the latter paragraph as well. As it were, neither the Foreign Minister or the Court Chancellor seems to have voiced any opposition, and the Crown Prince's decision was respected but it is debatable whether the headstrong man would have listened to any objection [16].
The remaining hours of the night were spent in feverish agitation and preparation, sending runners to Oudinot’s camp to warn him that Sweden would fight on the side of France and would enter the battle at the point where it would be most difficult for the Prussians and Russians to extricate themselves from it.
By noon, after a furious French onslaught at dawn, the Prussians had advanced and discovered to their dismay that Oudinot had only retreated before them to force them to assault him in his trenches, now over twelve kilometres in length and one meter deep. Von Bülow and Tauentzien as well as their colleague Witzingerode ordered a general advance, still counting on the superior numbers the fresh Swedes would give them. Barely five minutes after that, the Swedish batteries fired their first salvoes of the day and devastated the rear ranks of the three corps. Those were mostly made of Landswehr regiments, fresh recruits whose morale was shaky. Rather than charge the Swedes, they thought their safety lay ahead with the more experienced regiments. The result was a complete rout and the loss of more than ten thousand lives before Oudinot and Karl Johan managed to obtain a general surrender from the panicked mob the Prussian and Russian troops had turned into. Less than fifteen thousand men made it out of the trap and most of them deserted, never to come back to the service. The rest were made prisoners, soon to languish in Danish captivity. Less than seventy-two hours after he had met his wife for the first time in two years, Crown Prince Karl Johan was dining in the Berliner Stadtschloss.
The 1813 campaign had been completely altered by his about-face. Yet more shocks were in store for the members of the Sixth Coalition.
[1] Amputation of the lower leg and having to surrender the capital city you were charged to defend, after one of the most spectacular betrayal on the battlefield in military history, will make some people bitter, I suppose. Furthermore, von Bülow had to escape being made a scapegoat himself.
[2] OTL, it worked. Blücher refused to engage Napoléon in mid-August when he knew he was facing him and only waged battle at the Katzbach when Napoléon had departed, leaving Marshal Macdonald in command. Even the battle of Dresden was not supposed to happen once news of Napoléon’s presence came to the Coalition’s high command. It eventually led to the defeats of Oudinot, MacDonald, Vandamme and Ney, before Napoléon was encircled at Leipzig, beaten, and forced to retreat to France by cutting his way through his former allies, the Bavarians. The strategy was still applied in 1814. To see just how bad things could turn out for the Coalition when Napoléon managed to engage with an army of green recruits, the ‘Marie-Louise’, against numerically superior opponents, see the Six Days’ Campaign where he inflicted four defeats on his opponents.
[3] The OTL proposal really came out of left field. A minor baron, with an even more minor rank in the army, who was part of a Swedish delegation in France came up with it on the spot and went on his lonesome to make the proposal to Bernadotte. The main grounds for it seem to have been a desire for a rapprochement with France after the disastrous loss of Finland to Russia and the fact that Bernadotte had taken good care of Swedish prisoners he had made in an earlier campaign. The French marshal was quite flabbergasted at the proposition but made no particular objection and Napoléon gave his approval. The baron was imprisoned when he came back to Sweden for having so blatantly violated the guidelines of the mission he had been sent on. Luckily for him, Bernadotte got approved by a commission and was adopted by Karl XIII, so he made it out of jail. This is how the son of a lawyer from South-Western France who had risen all the way from simple soldier to Marshal of the Empire became king of two countries he had no connection to, kept his dynasty going on to this day and is the ancestor of most reigning European royal family members nowadays. I am not making this up. It is one of the most successful nearly-rags-to-riches story that actually happened.
[4] All of this, up to Metternich’s dislike for Karl Johan’s plan of conquering Norway, is OTL.
[5] Here is the POD: Metternich is able to bring Aleksandr I and Friedrich Wilhelm III to his side, thus unwittingly setting himself up for a very big fall.
[6] Still not making this up. This was an offer the Tsar made to the Crown Prince in 1812. Aleksandr and Karl Johan seemed to have had a bit of a bromance going on.
[7] Although Marshal Bernadotte did not involve himself in either the battle of Jena or the battle of Auerstaedt despite behind close to both battlefields (and got upbraided for it very vividly by Napoléon), he took part in the headlong pursuit that followed and captured many, many Prussian soldiers. Karl Johan’s choice of pronouns is also a very stark reminder of just who he had served up until he relocated to Sweden.
[8] The Hohenzollerns had long been Electors of Brandenburg. Starting in the early 18th century, they called themselves Kings in Prussia, i.e. they were kings in their domains outside of the Empire. Frederick II titled himself King of Prussia after he annexed part of Poland and had successfully defeated the Austrians several times in a display of his power.
[9] The Congress in Prague occured OTL and came to nothing – just as Metternich intended. But now butterflies have started to take wing…
[10] Napoléon is coming back to his army a bit sooner than OTL, feeling he needs to prepare more and that further negotiations are pointless. The armistice expired on that date OTL too. Interestingly, Blücher had already resumed offensive actions in the East.
[11] OTL, there was no reason to hold back and Oudinot had to deal both with commanding the army and his own XII Corps. It led to the defeat at Großbeeren, a bad retreat and a further defeat under Ney at Dennewitz. Here, with very specific orders, Oudinot is able to concentrate more on his army than on his corps. In Oudinot’s defence, he knew about his shortcomings as an army commander and made it known to Napoléon but the latter suffered from of a dearth of good independent army commanders in 1813, especially with some of them trying to hold to the last pieces of Spanish territory.
[12] By that time, the baron d’Alquier had secured the Danish alliance to France and was of no further use to Napoléon. Thus, ITTL, he is reassigned to a Dutch département of the Empire where there was a frequent turnover of préfets. He’ll be in line for nice rewards, such as a high rank in the Légion d’Honneur, though.
[13] Napoléon probably cannot afford that kind of money and Karl Johan isn’t exactly expecting him to pay up. Still, it will generate some good-will with the merchant classes and might make for a claim of compensation when the peace treaties have to be drafted.
[14] Napoléon is offering a lot of territory, most of which he does not control. But he is counting on his former marshal to exert himself to secure as much land as he can so, at this point, he is throwing everything, kitchen sink included, to see if anything sticks, because he feels this could work wonders for him.
[15] Désirée Clary was sister to Julie Clary. Joseph Bonaparte courted Désirée first in the 1790s, but his younger brother Napoléon more or less convinced him to marry Julie instead while he got engaged to Désirée. He later renounced the engagement with her permission to go on to marry Joséphine de Beauharnais (and even later Marie-Louise of Austria). Désirée bore no ill will to Napoléon himself, but she deeply resented Joséphine who she never called anything else than ‘the old woman’. Désirée also did not like the cold winters of Sweden and spent as much time as possible in warmer climes. While Bernadotte was marshal, she is supposed to have pleaded several times for his life in front of Napoléon by playing on the affection the emperor still bore her. During Karl Johan’s regency, she was able to pour some oil on the turbulent waters between her husband and her former fiancé. Again, I am not making any of this up.
[16] I am indebted to @Makemakean for his help in translating the Instrument of Government from 1809 and finding the relevant passages under which Crown Prince Karl Johan could pull this off. I've now edited that passage a bit after he made additional suggestions, which were very sensible.
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