But there is evidence of still deeper currents of irrationality and of selfdestructive behaviour.

It is
unexpected to find, so late in his reign, the resurgence of the 'Oriental complex' yet it is clearly on show
in the bizarre remarks made to the comte de Narbonne early in 1812 - an eccentric piece of behaviour
explicable only because Narbonne was himself an oddity: a great noble, reputedly the illegitimate son of
Louis XV and one time (1792) war minister to Louis XVI, who had fallen under the Bonaparte spell. This is
Napoleon: The end of the road is India. Alexander was as far as from Moscow when he marched to the
Ganges. I have said this to myself ever since St Jean d'Acre. . .. Just imagine, Moscow taken, Russia
defeated, the Czar made over or assassinated in a palace plot. . .. and then tell me that it is impossible
for a large army of Frenchmen and their allies to leave Tiflis and reach the Ganges. Essentially all that is
needed is a swift stroke of a French sword for the entire British mercantile apparatus in the East to
collapse. Narbonne's private comment on this was: 'What a man! What ideas! What dreams! Where is
the keeper of this genius. It was half-way between Bedlam and the Pantheon.' The 'Oriental complex'
was only one of many centrifugal fragments indicating a core personality under great strain, suggesting
perhaps that things were falling apart and the Napoleonic centre could not hold. A host of psychological
interpretations have been offered for Napoleon's state of mind on the eve of 1812. Those who see
Bonaparte as the existentialist defying fate and declaring that nothing is written stress the way he liked
to reinforce his identity through action and the challenge of an impossible adventure. This is plausible
given that Napoleon himself admitted he had had a visitation from his familiar 'Red Man' who warned
him not to invade Russia; to defy the Red Man would reveal the Emperor as a Prometheus, refusing to
be bound by the iron laws of determinism. Others see Napoleon as a self-doubting neurotic posing as a
conqueror and trying to prove that his worst fears about himself were not true. In a similar vein Freud
argued that 1812 was the ultimate self-destructive act in which Bonaparte, guilty for jettisoning
Josephine, compassed his own 499 downfall; consciously the divorce of Josephine signified to the
superstitious Emperor the loss of his luck, and unconsciously triggered a need to be punished. It is
tempting to dismiss this as fanciful, but there is the curious fact that, after a two-year absence,
Napoleon suddenly visited Josephine at Malmaison on 30 June 1812, just days before setting out on
campatgn. Certainly the thesis of keeping depression at bay can be sustained circumstantially from the
following remarks quoted by Roederer: I care nothing for St-Cloud or the Tuileries. It would matter little
to me if they were burned down. I count my houses as nothing, women as nothing, my son as not very
much. I leave one place, I go to another. I leave St-Cloud and I go to Moscow, not out of inclination or to
gratify myself, but out of dry calculation. If the disastrous decision to go to war with Russia was in some
sense a symptom of Napoleon's declining psychological well-being, his physical health was also
declining. 'After all, forty is forty,' was one of the Emperor's authentic remarks, perhaps indicating some
alarm at his own rapid and premature decline. Those who had close contact with him in 1812 reported
that he was woefully unfit and had grown fat from daily four-course meals. Meneval spoke of
hypertrophy of the upper body, with a great head on massive shoulders, but small arms, no neck, a
pronounced paunch and a lower body that seemed too slender to support the torso. One of the hidden
factors working against the success of the 1812 campaign was the Emperor's ill-health. Loath to leave his
carriage, he spent many hours on his couch undressed and came down just before the decisive battle of
the war with a bad cold and dysuria. Throughout September he was like a skeleton on horseback,
nursing a temperature, a constant cough, breathing difficulties and an irregular pulse, and suffering
acute pain in emptying his bladder. From early 1812 the drift to war was all but inevitable. Realizing that
this time his forces would not be able to live off the land, on 13 January he ordered Lacue, his Director of
War Administration, to supply enough provisions for an army of 40o,ooo men for fifty days. The basic
provision was supposed to be twenty million rations of bread and the same of rice; additionally, 6,ooo
wagons, either horse or ox-drawn, were to carry enough flour for 200,000 men for two months, and for
the horses two million bushels of oats, enough to feed fifty mounts for fifty days, were to be supplied.
Needless to say, the Emperor did not say how such a vast commissariat was to be assembled in time for
a spring campaign and 500 seems almost to have believed that the resources could be conjured out of
thin air. Meanwhile the flower of the Grande Armee was earmarked for the coming campaign. The elite
French battalions were all in I, II and III Corps, commanded respectively by Davout, Oudinot and Ney;
together with the Guard and Murat's cavalry this made up the 25o,ooo-strong First Army Group. Second
and Third Army Groups ( r so,ooo and r 6s,ooo strong respectively) were to guard frontiers and lines of
communication and provide reinforcements. IV Corps under Eugene de Beauharnais was basically the
Army of Italy with a stiffening of French and Spanish regiments; the faithful Poniatowski led his Poles in
V Corps while Reynier led the Saxons in VII Corps. Command of VI Corps went to Gouvion St-Cyr who,
after near-disgrace in Spain, made a remarkable comeback in r8r2 and ended with a marshal's baton;
Victor, commanding mixed battalions of French, Germans and Poles in IX Corps, was another reprieved
after less than satisfactory service in Spain. Yet another mixed corps (French, Italians and Germans)
served under Augereau in XI Corps, while the Westphalians and Hessians in VIII Corps had Vandamme as
their taskmaster. This by no means exhausted the units detailed for service in Russia, for there were also
four cavalry corps, two of them led by Murat and a second Support Army under Jerome. Finally,
Napoleon himself would command the so,ooo 'immortals' of the Old and Young Guards. The Corps were
of widely differing manpower: Oudinot's had 37,000 men but Davout's was nearly twice as large with
72,000. While these massive military preparations went on, a complicated game of diplomatic
manoeuvring continued, in which Alexander won every round on points. On 26 February r8r2 Napoleon
sent the Czar's special envoy Tchentchev back to Russia with a threatening message for Alexander, but a
police raid on Tchentchev's apartments threw up the alarming intelligence that the Russians had all
along had a well-placed mole at the heart of Bonapartist decision-making, who had revealed all the most
important intelligence about French military strength and troop movements. This development seriously
harmed the valiant attempts of Caulaincourt to cobble together a compromise peace; caught between
the giant egos of Napoleon and Alexander, he was the true unsung hero of r8r2. In any case, the Czar
was intransigent in his reply on 27 April. His terms for Russia's return to the Continental System were
impossibly steep: French evacuation of Prussia, compensation for the loss of the Duchy of Oldenburg
and the creation of a neutral buffer zone between 501 the two power blocs. Napoleon regarded the
answer as more of an insult than serious diplomacy. Some historians have claimed that, since Alexander
was prepared to revoke his ban on French luxury goods, reimpose the blockade on British ships and
withdraw his protest about the Duchy of Oldenburg, Napoleon was not justified in regarding the note as
a casus belli, but this is naive. Alexander had no qualms about war, for he thought he could win. The
screws were turned on the Prussians and Austrians to provide fighting men for the Russian front. They
acquiesced and a 30,000-strong Austrian army under Schwarzenburg actually fought in the campaign
after Metternich advised the Austrian Emperor that he had no choice but to comply. Frederick William
of Prussia was forced to provide zo,ooo troops and huge quantities of stores or face the occupation of
Berlin by the French. But the Austrians and Prussians also secretly advised Alexander that they were
simply acting under duress and would bide their time until they could openly proclaim an alliance with
Russia. Napoleon's overtures to Britain also ran into the sand. He proposed peace in Spain on the basis
that Portugal would be restored to the Braganzas and Sicily given to Ferdinand, ex-King of Naples,
provided Joseph remained as King of Spain. Since the British already held Portugal and Sicily, they could
not understand what was supposed to be in the deal for them, and replied firmly that Ferdinand must
be restored at once as King of Spain before negotiations could even begin. The truth is that they were
beginning to grow confident that they could win the Peninsular War anyway, especially if Napoleon was
busy in Russia.