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not destroyed.57 In the course of five days’ fighting Blücher’s army had lost almost one-third of its men. Napoleon was ecstatic. Already on the evening of 11 February he was writing to his brother Joseph, ‘this army of Silesia was the allies’ best army’, which was true enough. Much less truthfully, he added: ‘The enemy army of Silesia no longer exists: I have totally routed it.’ Even a week later, when there had been time to weigh the true results of the battle, he claimed in a letter to Eugène de Beauharnais to have taken more than 30,000 prisoners, which meant that ‘I have destroyed the Army of Silesia’. The reality was very different. On 18 February, the day after Napoleon wrote this letter, 8,000 men of Langeron’s Army Corps arrived to reinforce Blücher and there were many more Russian and Prussian units of the Army of Silesia, now relieved from blockading fortresses, on the march. Hundreds of prisoners of war were recaptured and many missing men returned to the ranks in the days immediately after the battle. Within a matter of days, Blücher’s army was again as strong as it had been on 10 February.58

Ironically, in the end it was Napoleon himself who suffered most from his victories against Blücher. After the battle of La Rothière Napoleon very grudgingly granted Caulaincourt full powers to accept the allied peace conditions. On 5 February the foreign minister was told that ‘His Majesty gives you carte blanche to bring the negotiations to a happy end, to save the capital and to avoid a battle on which the last hopes of the nation would rest’. Caulaincourt was bewildered by these instructions and asked for clarification, enquiring whether he was supposed to concede all the allied demands immediately or whether he still had some time for negotiation. Before there was time to reply, Napoleon had defeated Blücher and his tone had changed completely.59

On 17 February he revoked Caulaincourt’s full powers and instructed him to accept nothing less than the so-called Frankfurt conditions, in other words France’s natural frontiers. He justified his stance by saying that he had been prepared to accept the allied terms in order to avoid risking everything on a battle. Since he had faced that risk and taken more than 30,000 allied prisoners, the situation had changed entirely. He had smashed the Army of Silesia and now was marching to destroy Schwarzenberg’s army before it could escape across the French border. Four days later he wrote an arrogant letter to Francis II, stating that he would never settle for anything less than France’s natural frontiers. He added that even if the allies had succeeded in imposing the 1792 frontiers, such a humiliating peace could never have endured. To his brother Joseph he was even more explicit: ‘If I had accepted the historical borders I would have taken up arms again two years later, and I would have said to the nation that this was not a peace that I had signed but a forced capitulation.’ In fact the heady smell of victory made Napoleon now aspire to more even than France’s natural frontiers. To Eugène de Beauharnais he wrote that France might now be able to hold on to Italy. Napoleon’s words and actions in these days played directly into Alexander’s hands and justified everything the Russian emperor had said to his allies. It is true that to some extent the French and Russian monarchs were pursuing the same strategy of allowing military operations to determine the peace settlement. But Alexander was more realistic about the true balance of military power and the likely outcome of the campaign. Above all, he had some sense of limits and compromise, and a far more sensitive grasp of the connections between diplomacy and war.60

None of this was yet clear to the allies in mid-February 1814, however, when their cause was at its lowest ebb. After defeating Blücher Napoleon raced south to deal with Schwarzenberg. This was the Napoleon of old whose speed and boldness stunned opponents, rather than the commander who in 1812–13 had been more inclined to rely on sheer numbers of men and weight of concentrated