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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Bonaparte One area of history that I have always been fascinated in is what might rightly be described as the first real world war, the long struggle of what started out as the French revolutionary wars, which then became the Napoleonic War. Roughly lasting (with the one exhausted pause of the 1801-1803 Peace of Amiens) from 1792 to 1815, this was the period when France made one last try to become, in the immortal words of the mock-history book “1066 And All That”, Top Nation. It failed. And the butcher’s bill was horrific. When the war came to an end in 1815 (properly speaking 1814, but Waterloo was something of an oddity) a swathe of Europe running almost from the outskirts of Lisbon to the burnt-out shell that was Moscow had been fought over, a large chunk of Germany was a mess, the political status quo had been smashed to pieces and millions of people were dead or maimed for life. Proportionally speaking, when you take into account the numbers of dead against what was a far smaller population, the war period was as bad as, possibly worse than, the First World War. Add on the subsidiary wars that clung to the period, such as the War of 1812, the fighting in India and the start of the South American Wars of Liberation, and you have one hell of a party for the Devil. So, is it possible to reduce the butcher’s bill? With alternate history anything is possible, but I’d like to mention two of the points that have always fascinated me. Both are related to just one man, Napoleon Bonaparte. This is a man whose physical size bears no relation to his mental abilities and military genius. Not to mention his horrific arrogance. One can admire him only up to a point. This was a man whose belief in his “star”, along with his ambition, drove him to commit the most appalling acts in the name of France. David Chandler put it well, when he said that he was a “great, bad, man.” Take him out of the picture and you have no Napoleonic Wars, or at least no war that stretches on as far and as long. The first point where we could see a divergence into an ATL comes in 1798. Nelson and Bonaparte never met, but there was one day when they came very close to literally crossing swords. Young General Bonaparte had returned to France the previous year from his great victories in Italy, where he swept the bewildered armies of Savoy and Austria to one side, before comprehensively looting northern Italy and sending enough money back to Paris for the Directory Government to actually make an attempt at paying its ragged troops. The Directory, being politically shaky, welcomed him with open arms and then put him in command of the Army in England, a force that was supposed to cross the Channel and invade Britain. That should keep the ominously popular Corsican out of the way. Bonaparte goes to the Pas-de-Calais area, inspects the troops, issues lots of orders and realises that there isn’t snowball’s chance in hell of getting his men over at the moment. He has a better idea. Why not get at Britain by attacking Egypt and then marching over to India? Great idea, say the Directory, if he wants to lose himself in the snakes and scorpions of the Egypt, then he can go right ahead. Plus the further away that army of his is, the less money they’ll need to be paid. Bonaparte now flashes down to the great naval base of Toulon and starts issuing orders like mad again. Over the next ten weeks an army and a fleet come together in the ports of southern France and northern Italy. All told, Bonaparte has an army of about 38,000 infantry, artillery and cavalry, along with 17,000 sailors. In May 1798, off they go. The fleet is commanded by Admiral Brueys, who is more than a little worried about bumping into the Royal Navy, whose Mediterranean fleet is commanded by Nelson. Brueys knew very well that the Royal Navy was highly experienced, was seasoned by almost continued exposure to the elements and was officered by some of the best naval officers of the day. Compared to the RN, the French fleet was a shambles. Many of the sailors hadn’t been to sea in years due to the strong British naval blockade of France, the officers were inexperienced and if the RN turned up in any force, the French fleet would lose, in which case the highly vulnerable transports carrying Bonaparte’s soldiers would be slaughtered. Oddly enough Bonaparte wasn’t that worried about Nelson turning up. He thought that the presence of so many experienced soldiers meant that all that the French fleet had to do was just put their ships alongside the British and board them. He had never seen a naval battle, did not understand naval tactics (as his shambolic dispositions were to show in the run-up to Trafalgar) and didn’t have a clue about the kind of damage that a 36-lb cannon ball could do. Having taken Malta in June from the Knights of St John (an odd hangover from the Middle Ages), Bonaparte’s fleet set sail for Egypt on June 19th. This is where things get interesting from an AH point of view. Nelson knew that Bonaparte was at sea and knew that he was heading eastwards, possibly for Egypt. By now the Mediterranean fleet had been reinforced up to a strength of 13 ships of the line, but Nelson was desperately short of frigates, which were needed as the eyes of the fleet. On June 21st the British fleet discovered a ship from Genoa, whose captain told the British that Bonaparte had left Malta on the 16th. Thinking that the French had a six-day lead, as opposed to their actual three-day lead, Nelson rushed away to Egypt. As he had no transports to escort he was far faster than the French fleet. The paths of the two forces came very close to crossing on the night of June 22-23, when the French actually heard the bells of the British ships as they marked the time, but by dawn the British were far ahead and Brueys was taking a very deep breath at such a narrow squeak. The two fleets did not meet again until August 1, when Nelson discovered the French in Aboukir Bay and then proceeded to almost totally destroy them. Sadly Bonaparte was ashore by then, and was busily smashing the Mameluke army at the Battle of the Pyramids. Let’s take a step back and see what a little tinkering can do. You don’t need ASBs to change things here. We don’t know why that Genoese captain got his dates mixed up about the sailing of the French fleet, so let’s suppose it was a bad translation instead. As the RN was more a force full of Jack Aubreys than Captain Blighs, a seaman who speaks some Italian pipes up at the crucial moment and says that, begging the Admiral’s pardon, but he heard the Genoese captain say the 19th, not the 16th. Aha, says Nelson, we have the rogues. With a better idea of how fast the French fleet is moving and the right accounting of time, let’s say that when the morning of June 23rd dawns Brueys is horrified to see the ominous shapes of 13 ships of the line bearing down fast on his fleet, led by Vanguard with a short man with one arm and an odd cast to one eye standing on the quarterdeck. On paper the advantage lies with the French as they have the bigger fleet. In practice it wouldn’t have been much of a contest. The British sailors are far more experienced and better trained than the French, and moreover they are able to handle their guns far more quickly. Let’s say that Nelson handles his fleet as normal, divides it into two divisions and crosses the French line in two places, fending off one part of it as he takes the other between two fires. The result would be an at-sea repeat of what actually happens at Aboukir Bay. The giant French battleship L’Orient blows up, Brueys gets cut in half by a cannonball and years later someone writes a poem about a boy standing on a burning deck after hearing about an incident in the battle. The French battleships are either destroyed, captured or forced to flee’ We can almost imagine what Bonaparte and his staff would have thought about the battle – they would have been totally helpless and probably appalled by the carnage around them. Knowing Bonaparte’s tendency to try and take command, we can also imagine that he would have made matters worse, not better. Any French soldiers on the battleships might have tried to fight, but in such an alien, moving, environment, they wouldn’t have had much of an impact (although the blood freezes at the thought of a brave but idiotic man like Murat throwing his weight around and trying to charge into the fray). As for the transports, we can only imagine what havoc the British frigates would have played amongst them. In other words Bonaparte would have quickly realised that his plan to board the British fleet was nonsense and that perhaps he should have listened to Brueys after all. Not that he would have admitted it – all through his life he blamed other people for his own mistakes. So, at say mid-afternoon, the Battle of the Adriatic (that’s the nearest geographical location I can pin it to) would have ended in a thumping British victory and Bonaparte would either have been a prisoner of Nelson or would have been dead. The French army, which would have grown eventually into the Grande Armee, would also either be dead or taken prisoner. Bonaparte’s star would have led him to a watery ending. Such a total, double, victory would have had an immense impact on Europe. The Directory would have breathed a quiet sigh of relief about the end of this troubling man’s potentially dangerous career and gone on their immensely corrupt way. The Austrians might have realised that now was the time to really have a go at France. And the impact of what he had done would have propelled Nelson to new heights. He was wounded (probably slightly concussed) at the Battle of the Nile, after which he met Emma Hamilton, with a corresponding drop off in his career. Let’s say that he remains unwounded after the Battle of the Adriatic. Buzzing with energy he sends his apologies to the Hamiltons, whom he never meets and proceeds to put some backbone into the Aulic Council, which is running the war in Italy from an Austrian/Italian perspective. 1799 was said to be the great missed chance of the war, the year when the Second Coalition of Austria, Russia, Britain and the Italian States could have crushed Massena in Switzerland and pushed the French revolutionary armies behind the Rhine. With all these possibilities the British expedition to the Helder never happens and instead the men go the Mediterranean where, commanded by someone like Abercromby or Stuart (two of the most promising British generals of the time, Arthur Wellesley being off in India at the Siege of Seringapatam) they have an immediate impact. The Directory eventually sues for peace and some sort of coalition comes in, promising to clean up French Government. And a forgotten officer from Corsica called ex-General Bonaparte ends up on the beach on half-pay. The second possibility of ending the wars by removing Bonaparte from the board is the more intriguing. When he was young his father, who was a notable Corsican patriot, had the unenviable decision of working out what career path to send his sons down. At one point he wrote off to the Royal Navy, asking if it was possible to send young Napoleon off to become a midshipman. His letter went unanswered and instead Napoleon was sent off to learn French at Autun, before going to the French Military College at Brienne. No one knows what happened to the missing letter. But what if it was found, redirected, and an answer came back for young Bonaparte to appear before a captain at Gibraltar? He was a brilliant student whose love of mathematics would have been perfect for the Royal Navy. We can imagine him passing for Midshipman, then working his way up to a Lieutenancy, acquiring excellent English and a feel for naval tactics on the way. We can even imagine him meeting Nelson, who would have recognised another impatient man of action in this naval officer with accented English. Napoleon as one of Nelson’s Band of Brothers? It’s possible. And you don’t need ASBs.
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