Article 1 · Context
Madrid, December 1812: a king without news
A page of numbers kept in the French National Archives, presented since 1969 as a dispatch from Marshal Berthier, is in fact a letter from Spain. Who wrote it, to whom, and why it was enciphered.
Two brothers, two wars
In 1812 Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's elder brother, had been King of Spain since 1808. His kingdom was occupied by several French armies (“of the South”, “of the Centre”, “of Portugal”, “of the North”, “of Aragon”), whose marshals and generals corresponded with Paris as much as with him. Facing them were Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army and the Spanish guerrillas, who held the roads.
On 9 May 1812 Napoleon left Paris for Russia. During the summer Wellington defeated the Army of Portugal near Salamanca (22 July), entered Madrid, then besieged Burgos without success and fell back in the autumn. Joseph, joined by Marshal Soult's Army of the South, moved back towards Salamanca in November (his correspondence is dated from Salamanca on 20 November [7]), then returned to Madrid in early December.
At the same time the Grande Armée was retreating from Moscow. Napoleon left it on 5 December and reached Paris on the 18th [2]. News travelled badly between Spain and France: the road from Bayonne to Madrid crossed Navarre and Biscay, where Mina's bands attacked the couriers.
The letter
The page published in 1969 [1] is the third of a dispatch (“(3)”) and begins with “Sire,”. In the margin an archivist wrote “Duplicata · Chiffre du Prince de Neufchâtel” and “La Primata a été déchiffrée”: it is a duplicate, sent by another route than the original, which did arrive and was deciphered. Read with the Great Cipher of 1812 (see the method), the text says (our translation):
“Sire, I have had no news from Your Majesty since your departure from Paris; I have had no direct news from France since the letters of the Minister of War of the fifth of October.
I have never received any account, any report or any credible return of the state of the Army of the North of Spain, whatever my repeated requests in this regard. I have sent Your Imperial Majesty and the Minister of War in Paris quadruplicates of my dispatches from Salamanca, my last courier having been seized, with all the correspondence, near Valladolid.
Your Majesty will find enclosed a copy of a dispatch from General Reille, which seemed to me worth placing before you. It is the first document of this kind that I have received; it enlightens me on the situation of the northern provinces; I know well that it was not good, but I did not believe it so deplorable, and I did not think that it would require sacrifices as great as the concentration in question. I nevertheless believe in the truth of Count Reille's report and in the uprightness of his intentions. I understand that a remedy must be found, and here is what I propose to Your Majesty in the event that the war with Russia should continue and that Your Majesty…”
The page ends there; the rest of the letter has not been published. Word with a dotted underline: unconfirmed reading (see the letter line by line).
Who is writing?
The 1969 caption attributes the document to Marshal Berthier, Prince of Neuchâtel, Major-General of the Grande Armée [1], and it has been listed under that title ever since [2–4]. The text cannot be his: on 22 December 1812 Berthier was writing to the Emperor from Königsberg, where the remnants of the army of Russia were falling back [10]; he had left Paris with the Emperor and had neither “dispatches from Salamanca” nor requests addressed to the Army of the North of Spain.
Everything points to King Joseph, as Ilia Chirtulov was the first to suggest [3]. Volume IX of his Mémoires et correspondance, published in 1854 [7], contains a letter written the same day or the next to the Minister of War, the Duke of Feltre (Clarke), dated Madrid, 23 December 1812, which says the same things in almost the same words:
| Cipher letter, to the Emperor | Joseph to Clarke, Madrid, 23 December 1812 [7, pp. 121-126] |
|---|---|
| « Votre Majesté trouvera ci-joint copie d'une dépêche de Monsieur le général Reille » | « Ce général [d'Erlon] m'a apporté une lettre du comte Reille, dont copie est ci-jointe. » |
| « je sais bien qu'elle n'était pas bonne, mais je ne la croyais pas aussi déplorable » | « Je savais bien que les affaires dans le nord n'étaient pas en très-bonne situation, mais je ne les croyais pas en si mauvais état » |
| « Je n'ai jamais reçu ni […] ni rapport ni état de situation vraisemblable de l'armée du Nord de l'Espagne » | « il m'a été impossible d'obtenir du général Caffarelli des rapports fréquents et circonstanciés ; je n'ai même pas encore reçu d'états de situation de son armée » |
Already on 10 December Joseph had written to Clarke: “I have no letter from Paris since those I received at Valencia. I am sending a courier with the triplicates of the dispatches sent since then” [7]. The note “Chiffre du Prince de Neufchâtel” would therefore designate the cipher used, a great cipher issued by the Major-General, not the author of the letter. The exact date (22 December according to the 1969 caption, or the 23rd like the letter to Clarke) remains to be checked on the original.
What the letter adds
The letter to Clarke sets out Joseph's plan at length. The letter to the Emperor, in its published part, says something else, more personal: a king who has had no news from his brother for seven months, who multiplies the copies of his dispatches because his couriers are taken, and who learns from a report by Reille the real state of northern Spain. The last legible sentence, “in the event that the war with Russia should continue”, shows that he is already reasoning in terms of the war in the North. The page stops just as he is about to make his proposal.
What came next
On 4 January 1813 the Minister of War conveyed the Emperor's intention to Joseph: move his headquarters to Valladolid and turn his forces towards the northern provinces [7, 8]. On 9 February Napoleon had Clarke write to the king, “in cipher and in quadruplicate”, that he saw “with the greatest regret” that he had “lost two months as important as December and January”, and reproached him for not having kept up his communications with France [8, no. 19561]. The Great Cipher itself, which the British officer George Scovell had learned to read in 1812, fell into British hands in the summer of 1813, as Joseph wrote to Clarke on 27 June [2].