All We Are Saying...
Author: John BarhamPublished on: Feb 6, 2004
The search for peace had in fact never officially been suspended throughout the war. In the article Back at Home, we saw how Lord John Russell had felt close to brokering acceptable terms in the summer of 1855. But it certainly looked in the aftermath of the fall of Sevastopol as if a peacy treaty was as far off as it had ever been.
In the first place, however much Tsar Alexander wanted an end to the war, he was in no mood to sue for peace. He was happy to present the fall as the loss of a campaign, but not of a war. He made this clear in a letter to Prince Gorchakov, now Russian Ambassador to Austria: "Remember 1812.... Sevastopol isn't Moscow. The Crimea isn't Russia. Two years after Moscow burned our troops were making their victorious entrance to Paris." And of course the position on the ground was not so bad. There were still 150,000 Russian troops in the Crimea, most of them well dug in in good strategically placed defensive positions. The Allies had 230,000, but were clearly undecided on how to use them to exploit their victory. Unsurprising, as there was no obvious 'jugular' to go for in Southern Russia - The Tsar was right; 'Sevastopol wasn't Moscow.' For him on the contrary, with Kars in Russian hands, and the rebel threat to his rear neutralised, Mouaviev was poised to launch an attack towards Constantinople through Anatolia.
Equally the British were not about to suggest negotiating, but the difference was that they had no desire for peace. For them, the fighting so far had ended with a disaster which they wanted to see avenged. True to form, because of the diverse controlling factions in their armed forces, they had started slowly, but after two years they were now reaching a peak as an efficient fighting machine. Plans were afoot to undertake a major combined operation in the Baltic in 1856, aimed at taking Kronstadt and hence St Petersburg. To the British government, the issues were simple. To achieve their war aims of keeping Russia out of the Mediterranean and maintaining Turkey as an effective buffer against Russian expansion, Russian military power had to be crushed.
On the face of it, France shared the British position. The June negotiations in Vienna had broken down because no agreement could be reached on the neutralisation of the Black Sea. Both powers feared a Russian coup - a lightning strike to capture Constantinople before anyone had the time to react - and Russian naval teeth had to be effectively drawn to prevent this. Also Napoleon had genuinely wished to follow up the Sevastopol success with a general offensive.
But this was not forthcoming. Dribs and drabs, successes at Eupatoria and Kinburn, were not at all what the Emperor had in mind. The suspicion was that they had been offered up by the commanders to ease off the political pressure for a big push. Then hard on the heels of the realisation that there would be no offensive before the spring came the disastrous typhus epidemic. Ministers were muttering that France was bearing by far the largest share of the allied war effort, but the war was now being pursued exclusively to further Britain's foreign policy aims. Louis' position was far from being secure enough to be able to disregard such popular growing sentiment. So he decided to go all out to engineer an end to the war.
The problem was - how to go about it without antagonising an already deeply suspicious Britain? Palmerston had written to his brother as early as 25th August that after the fall of Sevastopol "a danger would arise, a danger of peace, not of war. Austria would try to gain acceptance for an inadequate peace."
Indeed Napoleon too realised that Austrian initiative would be the key. Austria's uneasiness that any conceivable combination of results of the War would upset the delicate political balance which preserved her interests had prevailed throughout its length and had fuelled her efforts to try to arrange a peace. The worst case scenario that France and Russia would make a separate peace and emerge as the main powers axis in the area haunted both the Hapsburg Emperor Franz-Joseph and his Foreign Minister the Count von Buol.
As a result when the French Ambassador to Austria Comte de Bourqueney put out feelers as to whether the Austrians were prepared to act as brokers for a peace treaty, they responded enthusiastically. All the allies had to do was let them know what their terms were, and they would guarantee to lean on the Russians with sufficient force to gain their acceptance. 'Force of arms?' enquired Bourqueney, eyebrows probably twin arc de triomphes. Buol would not say as much but did engage to go as far as an ultimatum if necessary. In return they would want the allied demands to include Russia ceding a slice of Bessarabia to Moldavia, denying direct Russian access to the Danube.
This exchange went down well in Paris and the feeling was that Russian acceptance of the good old four points would be enough to get everyone round a table to hammer out the detail. To save having to hark back to previous articles , I'll summarise them again here.
1. Russia to give up her protectorate over the Danube principalities, to be replaced by a collective guarantee from the Great Powers.
2. Russia to refrain from obstructing free navigation anywhere along the Danube, including its mouth.
3. Russia and Turkey to accept the banning of warships from the Black Sea and the dismantlement of all military or warlike installations along its shores.
4. Russia to renounce any rights of governance over the Christians in the Ottoman Empire, in return for a guarantee from the Sultan to respect Christian rights.
The next step the crucial one, was to get the British 'on side'. As we have seen clearly, peace overtures were nowhere on the agenda of the British cabinet, but politically they had to be seen to giving the proposals 'serious consideration'. Finally the agreed strategy was a cautious welcome to the Austrian approach, but adding a fifth point - the right for the allies to add additional conditions during the Peace Conference.
Have you ever had a Job Description rendered meaningless by the final point on the list of responsibilities 'Any other duties as may be assigned by the Managing Director'? Precisely. The British Government's confident prediction was that the Russians would find their fifth point unacceptable, and the peace plan would be well and truly scuppered.
When France and the Austrians agreed to add the 5th point to the ultimatum, the British tossed a few extra potentially poisonous mushrooms into the soup. The Sea of Azov should be neutralised as well as the Black Sea. The Circassians - the dissident tribe which was semi-autonomous in the Caucasus and other tribes in the region should be given their independence, and the fifth point should include the neutralisation of the Aland Islands in the Baltic.
What they had not bargained for was that the French foreign minister, Count Walevsky was prepared to ignore the British demands and told the Austrians that they could go ahead and present the ultimatum with the five points with full allied backing. Predictably enough, when known this infuriated the British. They felt almost as hostile to the Austrians as they did to the Russians. In spite of strong allied entreaties two years before, Austria had stubbornly declined to join the coalition in the War - now it seemed they were after the gains which they might have won through participation without lifting a finger. Also their recent attitude towards British interests showed a barely concealed hostility - an Austrian national, Colonel Turr, who had been serving with distinction in the British Army before returning home, was being summarily court-martialled for desertion. A further cause for indignation was the ludicrous arrest of the British Vice-Consul in Fiume on a trumped up charge of theft. It was transparently clear that the Austrians were seeking to drive a wedge between the French and the British, to avoid the danger of a joint threat to their primary position in Eastern Europe.
But Louis Napoleon was not ready to abandon a relationship which he had been at such pains to cultivate. He wrote to his close friend Queen Victoria asking her why hjer government kept putting obstacles in the way of peace. The Queen was obliged to take government advice, after which she wrote back that Britain would not be bound by any proposals put forward by the Austrians, nor would she entertain any counter-proposals from the Russians. Had she been clairvoyant she might have added in the same spirit that there was no way the British would join the euro either.
The Prince Consort on the other had was looking to peace negotiations for an opportunity to advance the influence of the German states in central Europe at the expense of Austria. His dream, promised reality after the events of 1848, had been for unification under democratic rule. Sadly the trend showed regression into traditional Prussian dictatorship. As he explained to his future son in law later Kaiser Friedrich III "The German stands in the centre between England and Russia; his high culture and his philosophic love of truth drive him towards the English conception, his military discipline, his admiration of the Asiatic greatness...which is achieved by the merging of the individual into the whole, drives him in the other direction."
The Prince's German connections provided potentially useful intelligence somewhat bizarrely, when on the evening of 16th January a message arrived for Victoria from the eccentric Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, explaining that on the best authority, the Russians were desperate for peace as the country was totally exhausted by the War. He also insisted that his message be treated with utmost discretion and secrecy, which was slightly odd, since he had sent it over the telegraph in clear.
Nor was Louis averse to running parallel talks in so-called secret with the Germans. Saxony, Wurtemberg and Bavaria had come out, hoping that it would be at the expense of Prussia, in urging the Russians to make peace. The Saxon Ambassador in Paris, Baron von Seebach, was well respected by the Emperor, who used him as a go-between with the Russian Chancellor, Count Karl Robert Nesselrode. The message was that although France wanted peace, they were unable to initiate moves when their ally Britain was making continued warlike noises. The first move must come from Russia. Also his pro-Russian half brother, the Duc de Morny had been in direct contact with Prince Gorchakov in Austria. Morny had made no secret that he preferred a 'conservative alliance' with Russia to a 'risky alliance' with Britain. He gave unauthorised assurance that France would see that Russia was let down lightly at the Peace Conference,and hinted that France would not intervene if Russia subsequently broke the treaty undertakings.
As these various approaches from the French filtered through, Tsar Alexander took them as signs of weakness. Also the news of the resounding Russian victory at Kars was still fresh in his mind. So when the Austrian ultimatum was presented to him on 28th December, he was in no mood to comply with the terms. The reply went back to Vienna that the four points were accepted with some modifications but the fifth point, as the British had expected, was totally unacceptable.
This called the Austrian bluff - this was not part of the envisaged scenario, and they had no intention of entering the war when they could obtain so much by remaining on he sidelines, as the British had realised and understandably resented. However since their ultimatum had stated that in case of rejection a state of war would exist between the two countries on 18th January 1856, they had no alternative but to show Gorchakov the door. To save the situation the Austrian envoy, Count Valentin Esterhazy, climbed down to the extent of saying that it was the Allies who had put in point five, and that it was not an Austrian condition to acceptance of their ultimatum. Given this concession, and in the face of Prussian pressure and internal unrest, the Tsar agreed to go to the conference table.
The British were already insensed by the Austrian initiative, which purported to be on their behalf, but was without any official agreement or authorisation. The problem was that the peace initiative was popular with the British public, and that any protests against it would provoke a negative reaction from the electorate. Palmerston and to a lesser extent the remainder of the British Government fumed, feeling that they had been outmanoevred. Which indeed they had.
Sources
Trevor Royle (1999) Crimea Little, Brown & Co
Alain Gouttman (1995) La Guerre de Crimée Editions S.P.M Paris
Fenton Bresler (1999) Napoleon III - A Life HarperCollins London
Stanley Weintraub (1997) Albert - Uncrowned King John Murray London
Sir Llewellyn Woodward (1962) Oxford History of England Vol 13 The Clarendon Press
William H.C.Smith (1985) Second Empire and Commune: France 1848-1871 London Longmans
Michael Byrne (1998) Britain and the European Powers 1815-65 London Hodder & Stoughton