King Charles XIV John (Bernadotte): Marshal of France, King of Sweden

Of all Napoleon’s marshals, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte’s career was the most unusual. As a young soldier in the French Revolutionary Wars, he rapidly rose up the ranks before becoming part of Napoleon Bonaparte’s extended family. He fought in Napoleon’s great campaigns after 1805, but his tendency to question Napoleon’s orders caused him to fall out of favor. He was unexpectedly elected Crown Prince of Sweden in 1810 and commanded allied armies against Napoleon in 1813-14. He reigned as King Charles XIV John of Sweden from 1818 until his death in 1844.

In July 1810, an assembly of Swedish notables met at the city of Örebro to elect a successor to 61-year-old King Charles XIII. The previous crown prince, Prince Charles August of Denmark, had died suddenly at the end of May. Among the list of candidates was the 47-year-old French soldier Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, Marshal of the French Empire.

The previous year, Sweden had been defeated by the Russian Empire and was forced to cede Finland to Russia. As part of the peace agreement, Sweden was also obliged to the Continental System, Emperor Napoleon’s economic policy to ban trade between continental Europe and Britain. In June 1809, Swedish army officers overthrew King Gustav IV Adolf in a coup and placed his uncle Charles XIII on the throne, and Sweden switched to a pro-French foreign policy.

In this context, a large party of Swedish nobles favored a Frenchman to succeed their king. Not only was Bernadotte one of Napoleon’s marshals, but his wife Desirée was Napoleon’s sister-in-law, making him part of the extended imperial family. While Bernadotte was flattered by the approach, Napoleon was initially bemused as Bernadotte was out of favor. After some consideration, he saw the advantages of keeping Bernadotte at arm’s length and signaled his support for his candidacy. On August 21, the Örebro Diet elected Bernadotte as their crown prince with the name Carl Johan, or Charles John.

General of the Revolution

Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte was born in January 1763 at Pau in Gascony. He trained as a lawyer before joining the French Royal Army in 1780. He was soon promoted to sergeant and earned the nickname Sergeant Beau-jambes for his fine legs.

The French Revolution of 1789 allowed talented officers like Bernadotte to climb rapidly up the ranks. In early 1794, less than a year after seeing action in battle for the first time at Rulzheim in Germany, Bernadotte was promoted to colonel. At the Battle of Fleurus in June, Bernadotte distinguished himself and received a field promotion to brigadier general. Before the year was over, he was already a general of division.

In February 1797, Bernadotte was sent to reinforce General Napoleon Bonaparte’s Army of Italy, which had swept aside the Austrian armies in northern Italy and was approaching the Austrian border. On March 16, Bernadotte led the French vanguard in Bonaparte’s victory over Archduke Charles of Austria at the Battle of Tagliamento, and the following day his division cut off an Austrian column at Gradisca. Within a month, Bonaparte advanced to within 100 miles of Vienna and agreed on preliminary peace terms.

In early 1798, Bernadotte was sent to Vienna as ambassador, but his tenure proved short-lived after he provocatively flew the French tricolor outside his embassy, prompting a Viennese mob to attack the building. An indignant Bernadotte refused to accept Austrian apologies and returned to France.

Back in Paris for the summer, Bernadotte met the 20-year-old Desirée Clary, who had been engaged to Bonaparte before the latter chose to marry Josephine de Beauharnais instead. Since Desirée’s older sister Julie married Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, she remained close to the Bonaparte family. The pair duly married in August 1798, strengthening Bernadotte’s ties to Bonaparte, who was then away on campaign in Egypt.

While Napoleon was away in Egypt and Syria in 1799, the French armies in Europe were suffering a series of setbacks against Austrian and Russian armies in Germany and Italy. In July 1799, Bernadotte was appointed Minister of War by the Directory, the French Republic’s five-man executive body. However, Bernadotte lasted only a couple of months before the directors dismissed him from office, motivated by fears that he could leverage his popularity among the army to lead a coup.

In November 1799, the Directory was overthrown in the Coup of 18 Brumaire, led not by Bernadotte but by Bonaparte, who had returned to France after slipping away from Egypt in August. Bernadotte was firmly neutral during the coup and refused to support Napoleon.

Marshal of the Empire

After Napoleon seized power as First Consul of the Republic, he ordered Bernadotte to lead the suppression of Royalist rebels in the Vendée region of western France. This was not the most prestigious of appointments, and Napoleon soon learned that Bernadotte’s subordinates were plotting against him. It was only the intervention of the Clary sisters that prevented Bonaparte from shooting Bernadotte.

In 1802, Bonaparte offered Bernadotte the twin offices of Governor of French Louisiana and Ambassador to the United States. However, while Bernadotte was preparing to leave for his new posting in April, he learned that Napoleon had sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. This left Bernadotte as a mere ambassador, prompting him to resign the appointment.

Napoleon was infuriated by Bernadotte’s tendency to pick and choose his appointments, though Napoleon himself was responsible for such behavior as a young officer. Nevertheless, when Napoleon created his Marshal of the Empire in May 1804, Bernadotte was one of the generals elevated to the new dignity.

When Napoleon launched his campaign against Austria during the War of the Third Coalition in August 1805, Marshal Bernadotte commanded the I Corps on the French left, participating in the operation that resulted in the encirclement of General Karl Mack’s army at Ulm in October. At the Battle of Austerlitz on December 2, Bernadotte fought in the French center and helped to occupy the Pratzen Heights, though his contribution was not as brilliant as those of fellow marshals Davout and Soult.

During his march to Ulm in 1805, Bernadotte took a shortcut through Ansbach, which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. This violation of Prussian neutrality prompted a strong diplomatic protest, but it was not until the summer of 1806 that the Prussians were sufficiently alarmed by Napoleon’s German policy to go to war with France.

The Prussians began the campaign confidently, but morale was significantly dented after Marshal Jean Lannes crushed Prince Louis Ferdinand’s column at Saalfeld on October 10 and killed its popular commander in the process. The Prussian command was thrown into disarray, and Napoleon struggled to make sense of the movements of the two Prussian field armies.

By October 13, Napoleon believed that the main Prussian army was intending to assemble at the university town of Jena. Accordingly, he gave orders to his corps commanders to converge on Jena to surround the enemy.

On October 14, Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena with his main army. Around ten miles to the northeast, Marshal Davout’s III Corps ran into a sizable Prussian force, which turned out to be the Duke of Brunswick’s 65,000-strong Prussian main army. Heavily outnumbered, Davout sought assistance from Bernadotte, whose I Corps was closest to him. Bernadotte refused to march to Davout’s aid and instead followed Napoleon’s original orders to march towards Jena. An infuriated Davout managed to defeat Brunswick on his own, and by the time Bernadotte arrived at Jena, the battle was already over.

Insubordination

Bernadotte’s conduct on October 14 was heavily criticized by Napoleon, and he narrowly escaped a court martial. In an attempt to redeem himself, Bernadotte sprung forward with his fresh corps in pursuit of the Prussians, defeating a strong reserve force at Halle on October 17. He then pursued Prussian general Gebhard von Blücher to the port of Lübeck and forced his surrender on the Danish frontier. His lenient treatment of a Swedish contingent caught up in the situation was a factor in his later election as Crown Prince of Sweden.

In the winter of 1806-07, Bernadotte fought in isolated actions against General Bennigsen’s Russians but was absent from the major battles at Eylau and Friedland. After a stint as a governor of northern German cities, when Austria renewed hostilities in 1809, Bernadotte was given command of the Saxon Army, designated IX Corps in Napoleon’s Grande Armée.

At the climactic Battle of Wagram on July 5-6, Bernadotte’s Saxons occupied the French center. A costly frontal assault on the evening of the first day of battle severely dented morale, and the following day, Bernadotte’s men, whose white uniforms resembled those of the Austrians, were targeted by friendly fire. Bernadotte ordered his men to fall back from the village of Aderklaa, creating a dangerous gap in the French line, which Napoleon desperately sought to fill. Napoleon stripped Bernadotte of his command on the field and won the battle without him.

Bernadotte’s conduct at Wagram caused him to fall out of favor with Napoleon, though he performed more effectively at the head of the Army of Antwerp defending an ill-fated British invasion force that had landed at Walcheren in the Netherlands.

In September 1810, as Bernadotte prepared to depart for Stockholm, Napoleon formally released him from his obligations as marshal but advised him to pursue a pro-French policy. When Bernadotte replied that he intended to prioritize Swedish interests, Napoleon belatedly realized that Bernadotte was unwilling to be a French puppet, but by then, it was too late to withhold his consent.

Not long after his arrival in Sweden, Charles John began to take control of the government. He recognized that his adopted country was still lamenting the loss of Finland, but while the prospect of taking Finland back from Russia was remote, he set his eyes on Norway, part of the Danish crown.

Charles John also came to realize that cutting Sweden off from British trade would be disastrous for the Swedish economy, and continued to trade with Britain. When Napoleon responded by sending Marshal Davout to occupy Swedish Pomerania in northern Germany in 1811, Swedish foreign policy began to pivot towards Russia.

Although Napoleon still expected Bernadotte to support his invasion of Russia in 1812, the Crown Prince instead met Tsar Alexander I of Russia and signed a defensive treaty, while Alexander agreed to furnish Russian troops for a future Swedish invasion of Norway. This enabled Alexander to free his corps guarding Finland to strike at Napoleon’s northern flank.

Following Napoleon’s defeat in Russia, in early 1813, Russian and Prussian armies combined to liberate northern Germany. When Napoleon returned to the field in May and defeated the coalition at Lutzen and Bautzen, a panicked Tsar Alexander requested assistance from the Swedish crown prince. Although he preferred to go after Denmark and Norway, Bernadotte agreed to supply 30,000 men for the coalition subsidized by British money.

After an armistice in early summer, Austria joined the coalition against Napoleon. During allied strategic discussions, Charles John offered his insights into Napoleon’s strengths and weaknesses and contributed to the development of the Trachenberg Plan, whereby the coalition armies would avoid battle with Napoleon and attempt to bring his marshals to battle instead. Charles John was given command of the 90,000-strong Army of the North, consisting primarily of Russian and Prussian units, in addition to his Swedish army.

Although the coalition was defeated by Napoleon at Dresden in late August, Bernadotte’s Army of the North defeated Marshal Oudinot at Grossbeeren on August 23 and Marshal Ney at Dennewitz on September 6, securing northern Germany in the process. Charles John was reluctant to campaign too far south and had to be persuaded by his ally and former rival Marshal Blücher to join the Battle of Leipzig in October. Bernadotte arrived at Leipzig on October 18, the third day of battle, and his presence encouraged a Saxon contingent to defect to the allies.

King of Sweden & Norway

After Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig, Charles John marched his Swedes north to fight the Danes, who agreed to exchange Norway for Swedish Pomerania. He led his army into France in February 1814 but did not make it to Paris in time when the city surrendered to the coalition at the end of March.

By the time Charles John returned to Sweden in May, the Norwegian Parliament declared independence rather than become part of Sweden. In response, the crown prince led an army to defeat the Norwegians but granted them autonomy under the Swedish crown.

In 1818, following the death of Charles XIII, Bernadotte became King Charles XIV John of Sweden and Charles III John of Norway. As a constitutional monarch, he did not play a leading role in political affairs, but he remained generally popular, and the country’s economy prospered during his reign. As king, Charles John kept his realm at peace, and in 1834, he pre-emptively declared neutrality amidst tensions between Britain and Russia in the Near East, marking the beginning of Swedish neutrality.

King Charles XIV John of Sweden died in March 1844 at the age of 81, one year after celebrating his Silver Jubilee, and was succeeded by his son Oscar. The House of Bernadotte ruled Norway until its independence in 1905 and continues to occupy the Swedish throne to this day.