Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [306]
Before concluding this section it is worth saying something about the effect of the War of 1812 on Canada. For the time being her independence was safe enough, but she also emerged from the conflict as at least an embryonic nation. In 1812, well over half the population of Canada were of French origin, and Napoleon had dispatched a number of agents to whip up discontent at British rule. Yet, despite obvious sources of tension - the parliamentary institutions created in Canada in 1791, for example, did not accord the québécois the weight that their numbers suggested - these efforts at subversion came to nothing. The local Catholic hierarchy had been fierce in its denunciation of the French Revolution, and this, together with the policy of conciliation pursued by the British governor, ensured that the French population stayed loyal. Even among the population of Upper Canada, which was in large part drawn from American settlers, there was little trouble, and once war broke out the militia that constituted the bulk of the defence forces reported for duty with little resistance. Threatened from outside, in short, all sections of the populace came together, even if in doing so they were still defining themselves more as what they were not than as what they were.
What, though, of Europe? Here the chief effect of the outbreak of war between Britain and the United States had been to give Napoleon renewed hope. This was much needed. By the end of 1812 the emperor’s military prestige had taken a terrible battering. Setting aside the destruction of the grande armée and Wellington’s successes in Spain, in France the ability of the regime to maintain its authority had been called into question by the extraordinary Malet affair, which had seen an unknown officer of Jacobin sympathies, named Claude-François Malet, almost bring down the emperor by announcing that Napoleon had been killed in Russia. Not surprisingly, the result was stirrings of a sort that a few months before would have been quite unthinkable. Even less surprisingly, meanwhile, the rot began in Prussia. Of all the states that Napoleon had overcome, Prussia was the one that had come off worst. Stripped of much of her army, territory and population, and subjected not only to a heavy indemnity but also to the Continental Blockade and semi-permanent French occupation, Prussia had had to pay a heavy price for her earlier opportunism, while she had, as we have seen, played host since 1807 to a reform movement that many of its progenitors saw as a launch pad for a war of revenge and even a great pan-German uprising. And, finally, the concentration of the grande armée in East Prussia in the first six months of 1812 had been an experience that was even more traumatic than the campaigns of 1806-7 . In the latter, the Prussian experience of fighting had been relatively brief: the campaign of Jena and Auerstädt had been over in a matter of weeks and then the bulk of the French forces had moved on into territory that had until 1795 been Polish. Both Eylau and Friedland had taken place in East Prussia, but again the incursions involved had been relatively short-lived. In 1812, however, it had been very different. With the countryside completely swamped, we are told that, even before it had crossed the frontier, the grande armée ‘left a swathe of pillage and destruction in its wake’.43 Now a divisional commander, Dedem de Gelder later wrote with great candour of what had occurred: ‘We had crossed Prussia, not as an allied country, but rather as a conquered one. Ninety thousand horses had been seized from our last billets on the illusory condition that they would later be sent back. As for the order of the day laying down that we should gather in ten days’ worth of supplies, this had not been anything other than an authorization of pillage and violence.’44
When the survivors of the grande armée staggered back across the Niemen