Throughout the autumn of 1855 Palmerston supported the idea of preparing for a continuation of the war the following spring, if only as a means of keeping up the pressure on the Russians to accept the punitive peace terms he had in mind. He was furious with the French and the Austrians for opening direct talks with the Russians, and for considering relatively moderate terms based on the Four Points. He was convinced, as he wrote to Clarendon on 9 October, that ‘Nesselrode and his spies’ were ‘working on the French in Paris and Brussels’, and that, ‘with the Austrians and Prussians cooperating in Nesselrode’s endeavours’, it would require ‘all our steadiness and skill to avoid being drawn into a peace which would disappoint the first expectations of the country and leave unaccomplished the real objects of the war’. In the same note Palmerston outlined what he saw as the minimum conditions of a settlement: Russia was to end its interference in the Danubian principalities, where the Sultan was to ‘give the princes a good constitution to be previously agreed to by England and France’; the Danube delta was to be given up by Russia to Turkey; and the Russians were to lose all their naval bases in the Black Sea, along with any ‘portions of territory which are in their hands rallying places for attacks upon her neighbours’, territories among which he included the Crimea and the Caucasus. As for Poland, Palmerston was no longer sure whether Britain could support a war of independence, but he thought the French should run with the idea, which had been advanced by Walewski, to put further pressure on the Russians to accept a diminution of their power in the world.47
But the French were less enthusiastic. Having done most of the fighting, their views carried at least as much weight as Palmerston’s. Without the support of France, Britain could not think of continuing the war, let alone 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. Frédéric 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