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
