Guard was supplemented in r8o6 by the Middle Guard, formed from
two fu silier regiments and added to in r812-13 by two regiments of
flankers, all crack shots. A third body, the Young Guards, was formed in
1809 from the choice recruits into the best regiments of light infantry,
voltigeurs and tirailleurs.
By 1814 the strength of the three sections of the Imperial Guard
totalled an incredible 112,482. The minimum entry qualification was five
years' service and two campaigns. Guardsmen were paid on a differential
scale: Guard privates were paid as ordinary sergeants, corporals as
ordinary sergeant-majors, and so on; special rations, equipment and even
special food completed the sense of being an elite formation. Until r8r3
the Emperor would never send this crack corps into battle, and even then
he held back his beloved Old Guard. Some said he thereby took the edge
off the fighting calibre of the Guard, so that when it was finally called on
to perform, it bore itself with lacklustre. Others complained that it was
absurd to hold a huge, overmanned body in permanent reserve when the
regiments doing the actual fighting had thereby been drained of their best
manpower.
Such was the Grande Armee that won Austerlitz. Many students of
Napoleon consider it a supreme irony that he should have brought his
armies to such a pitch of perfection at the very time a misguided foreign
policy meant that all their valour would ultimately be in vain. If there are
those who think Napoleon began to go wrong at Luneville and Amiens,
there are many more who think that Austerlitz was the turning point, the
moment when a traditional French fo reign policy became a purely
personal Napoleonic one. The key error was the construction of the
Confederation of the Rhine, which meant that a lasting settlement with
Austria and Prussia would never be possible. Sooner or later, given Czar
Alexander's conception of his position, Prussia, Austria and Russia were
bound to unite, in which case not even Napoleon would be able to resist
them. It is thus that we may appreciate the truth of Pieter Geyl's words:
'Napoleon's wars were his own wars, made inevitable by his measureless
greed for power, wars which never served the interest of France, wars for
which the deceived and all too patient nation paid with the blood of its
sons and in the end with the territorial gains won by the Republic.'
marcin
(Marcin)
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