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By Root 2733 0

it seemed that there was little need to do so: ‘At Posen . . . the grandees of Poland came to do homage to the emperor in their oriental costumes.’38 Still smarting from the events of 1794, when a Russian army under Suvorov had stormed the eastern suburb of Praga and massacred a large part of the inhabitants, the Poles ‘received us with enthusiasm as brothers and liberators’.39 Chief among the collaborators was Prince Josef Poniatowski, a leading aristocrat who had been a hero of the war of 1794 but had latterly been courted by Frederick William III and appointed governor of Prussian-ruled Warsaw. But beyond that, Napoleon was disappointed: much of the aristocracy remained hostile and many Polish revolutionaries were convinced ‘Jacobins’. Indeed, the leader of the insurrection of 1794, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, refused every blandishment to become involved, for, as the nationalist nobleman Oginski remarks, ‘Whilst he respected Napoleon’s military talents, he saw in him a conqueror consumed by ambition and a despot.’40 Indeed, few of the elites were anything other than sceptical:

The friends of liberty asked themselves if one could expect the restoration of the republic of Poland from the hands of a man who had destroyed the liberty of his own country, and the wisest feared that Napoleon only saw the exaltation of the Poles as a means of obtaining men and subsidies for the execution of his ulterior projects.41

As for the common people, they were simply indifferent to the nationalist appeal (in this respect the famous legions that had fought for the French in the 1790s were but a flash in the pan, only about one fifth of the men involved actually being genuine Poles). As Marbot complained, ‘The emperor . . . had hoped that the whole population of the country would now rise as one man at the approach of the French armies. But no one stirred.’42 According to Marbot, this was because the French ruler would not openly declare the re-establishment of a Polish state, but the simple fact was that amongst the bulk of the population of Eastern Europe nationalism was nothing like a major force. Nor could Napoleon risk attempting to broaden the appeal of his regime by immediately decreeing, say, the abolition of feudalism, for to do so would have been to alienate the local nobility: if Poniatowski, for example, had rallied to the French, it was only because he wished to ensure that the control of affairs did not fall into the hands of radicals such as the commander of the Polish legions of the 1790s, General Dabrowski. In the event, sufficient men were found to raise three legions of 9,000 men apiece, but the whole affair has been much mythologized. Such recruitment as took place was in large part the fruit of poverty and despair, the fact being that the Polish ‘war of liberation’ of 1870 was to be no more a national war than its later German counterpart.

To return to the war with Russia, Napoleon did not follow up the occupation of Warsaw as rapidly as might have been expected, much time being needed to rest and re-equip the grande armée and gather the magazines needed for a winter campaign in an area of Europe that was particularly poor. Despite the fact that the Russian army was now concentrated only fifty miles to the north of Warsaw, it was not until 22 December that the French moved forward again, the plan being to envelop the Russian army in its positions between the rivers Ukra and Narew. However, the advance was slowed by atrocious weather, while the Russians bought time with a number of fierce delaying actions. Within a few days, indeed, it was clear that the Russians had got clean away and a frustrated emperor had no option but to order his exhausted and hungry troops to break off the pursuit and return to Warsaw. Sadly for the exhausted grande armée, the respite proved short-lived. Following the so-called ‘manoeuvre on the Narew’, the Russian army had acquired a new and much more aggressive commander in General Levin August von Bennigsen, and after less than a month he launched a sudden counter-offensive against the French