involving new allies from among the European powers, who mostly preferred French to British leadership.
France had suffered more than Britain from the war. Apart from its losses on the battlefield, the French army was very badly hit by various diseases, mainly scurvy and typhus but also cholera, during the autumn and winter of 1855. The problems were similar to those of the British the previous winter: the situation of the two armies had been reversed. Where the British had drastically improved their sanitation and medical provision during the past year, the French had let their standards drop as more troops had arrived in the Crimea and they lacked the resources to cope with the increased demand.
In these circumstances it was impracticable for Napoleon to think of fighting on. He could suspend operations until the following spring, by which time his army might have recovered. But the soldiers were becoming dangerously demoralized, as their letters home made clear, and they would not stand for another winter in the Crimea. Writing on 13 October, Captain Charles Thoumas, for example, thought there was a danger of a revolt by the army if it was not brought back to France soon. Frederic Japy, a lieutenant in the Zouaves, also thought the soldiers would rise up against their officers; they were not prepared to go on with a war which they now felt had been for mainly British interests. Henri Loizillon was afraid a new campaign would draw the French into an endless war against a country that was too big to defeat – a lesson he believed they should have learned from 1812.48
Public opinion in France would not support the military campaign for much longer. The French economy had been badly affected by the war: trade was down; agriculture suffered labour shortages as a result of military conscriptions that had already taken 310,000 Frenchmen to the Crimea; and in the cities there were shortages of food which began to be widely felt in November 1855. According to the reports of the local prefects and procurators, there was a real danger of civil unrest if the war went on through the winter. Even the provincial press, which had led the calls for war in 1854, were now urging an end to it.49
Always sensitive to public pressure, Napoleon spent the autumn looking for a way to end the war without alienating the British. He was keen to make the most politically of the ‘glorious victory’ that the fall of Sevastopol symbolized, but did not want to endanger his alliance with Britain, which was the cornerstone of his foreign policy. Napoleon was not opposed in principle to the idea of a broader war. He was sympathetic to Palmerston’s vision of using the war against Russia to redraw the map of Europe, fostering national revolutions to break down the 1815 system and leave France in a dominant position on the Continent at the expense of Russia and the Holy Alliance. But he would not get involved in a campaign against Russia in the Caucasus and Asia Minor, where he felt that British interests were mainly served. As Napoleon saw it, the only way he could justify the continuation of a large- scale war against Russia would be if it achieved his grand dreams for the European continent. On 22 November Napoleon wrote to Queen Victoria suggesting three alternatives: a limited defensive war of attrition; peace negotiations on the basis of the Four Points; or an ‘appeal to all the nationalities, the re-establishment of Poland, the independence of Finland and of Hungary’. As Napoleon explained, he personally favoured peace, but offered to discuss this grand proposal for a broader European war, if Britain felt that peace was not acceptable on the Four Points. ‘I could comprehend a policy’, he wrote to Victoria, ‘which would have a certain grandeur and would put the results aimed at on a level with the sacrifices to be made.’
Napoleon’s proposal was almost certainly disingenuous, a clever ploy to force the British to join peace talks. He knew that the British were not prepared for a Napoleonic war of national liberation on the Continent. Yet there are hints that he might have been prepared to launch this broader war if Palmerston had called his bluff. In 1858 Napoleon would tell Cowley that France had wanted peace and that was why he had been forced to end the war; but equally, if he had been forced into a renewal of the war by Palmerston, he would have been determined ‘not to make peace until a better equilibrium [had been] secured for Europe’.50
Whatever the Emperor’s intentions, Walewski, his Foreign Minister, who strongly favoured an immediate peace, was evidently using the threat of Napoleon supporting a revolutionary war to bring Britain, Austria and Russia to peace negotiations on the basis of the Four Points. Napoleon took part in this game of threats. He wrote to Walewski for the attention of Clarendon:
I want peace. If Russia agrees to the neutralization of the Black Sea, I will make peace with them whatever the objections of England. But if, in the spring, it has come to nothing, I will appeal to the nationalities, above all to the nation of the Poles. The war will have as its principle, not the rights of Europe, but the interests of individual states.
If Napoleon’s threat of a revolutionary war was almost certainly empty, his threat of a separate peace with Russia certainly was not. Behind the establishment of direct contact with St Petersburg was the influential party led by the Emperor’s half-brother, the Duc de Morny, a railway speculator who saw in Russia ‘a mine to be exploited by France’. In October Morny had established contact with Prince Gorchakov, the Russian ambassador in Vienna and shortly to become the Foreign Minister, with the offer of a Franco-Russian deal.51
Alarmed by these French initiatives, the Austrians intervened. Count Buol, their Foreign Minister, approached Bourqueney, the French ambassador in Vienna, and together with Morny, who ascertained from Gorchakov what terms the Russians were likely to accept, they worked out a set of peace proposals to be imposed on Russia as an Austrian ultimatum with French and British support ‘for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’. The Franco-Austrian terms were essentially a rewording of the Four Points, though Russia was now to surrender part of Bessarabia so as to be separated altogether from the Danube, and the neutralization of the Black Sea was to be achieved through a Russo-Turkish convention rather than a general peace treaty. Although the Russians had already accepted the Four Points as a basis of negotiations, a fifth was now added reserving the right of the victorious powers to include further undefined conditions at the peace conference ‘in the interest of Europe’.52
The French and Austrian peace proposals arrived in London on 18 November. The British government, which had merely been informed of the progress of the Austro-French negotiation, was offended at the manner in which the agreement had been reached by the two Catholic powers, Palmerston suspecting that Russian influence had played a part in softening the proposed terms, which he was determined to reject. There was no mention of the Baltic, and no guarantee against Russian aggression in the Black Sea. ‘We stick to the great Principles of Settlement which are required for the future security of Europe,’ he wrote to Clarendon on 1 December. ‘If the French government change their opinion, responsibility will rest with them, and the People of the two countries will be told of it.’ Clarendon was more cautious, as ever. He feared that France might make a separate peace, and that, if it did so, Britain would be unable to fight alone. The Foreign Minister won some minor amendments to the terms – the neutralization of the Black Sea was to be agreed by a general treaty and the fifth point was to contain ‘particular conditions’ – but otherwise he favoured acceptance of the French and Austrians terms. With the help of the Queen, he persuaded Palmerston to go along with the plan, at least for the time being, to prevent a separate Franco- Russian peace, arguing that the Tsar was likely to reject the proposals in any case, allowing Britain to resume hostilities and press for harsher terms.53
Clarendon was almost right. The Tsar was in a warlike mood throughout that autumn. According to a senior Russian diplomat, he ‘was little disposed to make terms with our adversaries’ at a moment when they were about to experience the difficulties of a second winter in the Crimea. Napoleon’s desire for peace suggested to the Tsar that Russia might still have a chance to secure a better ending to the war, if it kept fighting long enough to bring the internal problems of France to a head. In a revealing letter to his commander-in-chief, Gorchakov, Alexander declared that he saw no hope of an early termination of hostilities. Russia would continue with the war until France was forced to sign a peace by the outbreak of disorders, caused by the bad harvest and the growing discontent of the lower classes:
Former revolutions always began in this manner and it may well be that a general revolution is not far away. This I regard as the most probable conclusion to the present war; neither from Napoleon nor from England do I expect a sincere desire for peace on terms compatible with our views and, as long as I live, I will accept no others.54
Nobody was able to persuade the Tsar to back down from his belligerent stance. Seebach came with a personal message from Napoleon urging him to accept
