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Seconded by his intimate councillors, Napoleon employed every artifice calculated to palliate our disasters and conceal from us their inevitable consequences. He assembled the whole phalanx of his flatterers, now become the organs of his will . . . and all, with one voice, attributed the loss of our army . . . solely to the rigour of the elements. By the aid of deception of every kind, they succeeded in making it be believed that all might be repaired if the nation did but show itself great and generous, that fresh sacrifices could not cost her anything when weighed against the preservation of its independence and glory.56

With the administration of conscription still intact, the men came in well enough, while France’s arsenals and workshops were able to supply plenty of muskets and cannon, as well as at least a semblance of uniform. Still loyal at this stage, the Confederation of the Rhine also produced considerable numbers of fresh troops. By these means, then, within four months of Napoleon’s arrival in Paris, 170,000 men had been assembled on the river Main in south-central Germany. With his new grande armée, the emperor was confirmed in his determination not to bow down before Russia. The sheer mass of men he commanded, however, blinded him to serious problems. Far too many of his soldiers were raw recruits who lacked experience and were not physically strong enough to cope with the rigours of campaign life. Experienced officers and non-commissioned officers were lacking, and the cavalry could not easily be re-equipped with decent horses. And back in France the call-up of 250,000 men on top of the 150,000 men taken in September 1812 and the 120,000 men taken in December 1811 had placed a huge strain on the willingness of the population to cooperate. To push this further would invite disaster. Among the poorer classes, wrote Marbot, ‘there was some grumbling, especially in the south and west, but so great was the habit of obedience that nearly all the contingent went on duty’. The real trouble, however, came from groups with more resources:

After having made men serve whom the ballot had exempted, they compelled those who had quite lawfully obtained substitutes to shoulder their muskets all the same. Many families had embarrassed and even ruined themselves to keep their sons at home, for a substitute cost from 12,000 to 20,000 francs at that time, and this had to be paid down. There were some young men who had obtained substitutes three times over, and were none the less compelled to go; cases even occurred in which they had to serve in the same company with the man whom they had paid to take their place.57

Commitment, then, was limited. As Fouché says, ‘the reason why France willingly made the greatest sacrifices to support a man whose only success had been to tread the ashes of Moscow’ was that the populace thought that ‘their chief, chastened by misfortune, was ready to seize the first favourable opportunity of bringing back peace’.58

The stakes were therefore very high: whether any further levy on the lines of that of January 1813 could be made to take effect was open to serious doubt, especially as the security forces that had been the real mainstay of the whole system had themselves been stripped to reinforce the new grande armée. The fact was that the whole campaign was a desperate gamble and, still worse, one in which the odds against Napoleon were worsened by his own pride and over-confidence. Even as his forces evacuated East Prussia and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, they were directed to drop off garrisons in all the region’s fortresses. In the end, some ,50 000men were tied up in such places, and, occupy though they did plenty of enemy troops, they could perhaps have been put to better use fighting on the battlefields of Lützen, Bautzen, Dresden and Leipzig. To have evacuated Danzig, Thorn and the rest, however, would have been to acknowledge a shrinkage of the empire, and this the emperor would not do. Rather he would