8

Quest for Glory

The peace signed at Amiens in the spring of 1802 was always fragile, and within a year Napoleon was once more at war with the country that he identified as his most determined and most dangerous enemy, Great Britain. There was little surprise when the peace was broken. Both governments recognised that nothing substantial had been resolved in the treaty, and that it had been a truce in hostilities rather than a resolution of differences. The British, in particular, were resentful that they had gained so little from their efforts. Colonies that had been taken by both sides were handed back, while France was left as the predominant land power in Western Europe, complementing the power of Russia in the east and effectively excluding Britain from influence on the continent. The French still controlled the states to their east, from Holland and Belgium to the plains of Lombardy and northern Italy. Austria had been weakened, perhaps terminally. Through the Family Compact they also had a defensive alliance with the Spanish throne. Napoleon could well feel fairly satisfied with his work, for, as Thierry Lentz notes, he had exceeded the most optimistic war aims and had realised the traditional foreign policy objectives of the kings of France.¹

Amiens, like the sister treaty which Napoleon signed with the Austrians at Lunéville, gave both sides a much-needed breathing space. France and Britain had been exhausted by war, both were in need of some economic rebuilding, and both clearly derived benefits from months of prosperity and good harvests. The Consulate even found the resources to develop the economy and expand the country’s industrial base, returning to a level of prosperity to which the French people had become unaccustomed. At the same time few doubted that the two governments were preparing for a renewal of hostilities. New ships were laid down, and large orders placed in iron foundries and arsenals. Yet peace was barely given a chance to flourish before Britain declared war in May 1803, having already responded to the growing tension in the spring of that year by calling out the militia to raise men for home defence.² The French quickly retaliated by sending troops into George III’s other state, Hanover, and ordering the arrest of the substantial numbers of British nationals who had taken advantage of the truce to visit France, many of them as tourists curious to view at first hand the results of the French Revolution. Why, it may be asked, did France and Britain return to the battlefield so precipitately, and at a time when the other continental powers remained, however uncertainly, at peace? The two neighbours, who had so regularly lined up on opposing sides across the eighteenth century, found it impossible, it seemed, to sustain the idea of peace.

For some historians the answer to this question is self-evident: Napoleon’s restless nature made it impossible for him to renounce war, while France’s military economy cried out for further campaigns, further territorial gains, and further conquests.

This view is especially held in Britain – the target of so much of Napoleon’s spleen – where the ‘Black Legend’, representing Bonaparte as a callous warmonger willing to send countless thousands of men to their deaths in the single-minded pursuit of his military ambitions, has proved particularly persistent. Indeed, persistent to the extent that some are inclined to discount his periodic attempts at diplomacy and attribute all the blame for the wars to him, and him alone.³ To Paul Schroeder, for instance, Napoleon’s peace manoeuvres were all about gaining advantage, ‘tactics of division and manipulation’, and had little to do with establishing a lasting peace. ‘The British went to war,’ Schroeder argues with a satisfying finality, ‘simply because they could not stand being further challenged and humiliated by Bonaparte; France went to war because Bonaparte could not stop doing it.’⁴

The terms of Amiens were themselves part of that ‘humiliation’; for peace to hold, Napoleon would have had to make concessions, and that went against many of his most basic instincts. Yet it was Britain that declared war, Britain that formally violated the treaty, and Britain which, during the months of the truce, interpreted Napoleon’s every move as an act of provocation. French troops were still stationed in ‘sister republics’ in Holland and Switzerland, and in Italy where the Cisalpine Republic was restructured, Piedmont and Elba were annexed, and Parma was invaded after the death of its duke – all initiatives which Britain denounced as contrary to the spirit of the treaty. And that was only in Europe. Throughout the Arab world, from Algiers and Tripoli to Damascus and Muscat, French agents were busily trying to seal pacts with native leaders, and Decaen sailed for India in 1803 with sufficient staff to establish sepoy regiments in French service.⁵ Britain was understandably fearful of French ambitions in India, and in response refused to honour its own obligation under the treaty to return Malta to the Knights of St John, a refusal which Napoleon seized upon as a telling instance of British bad faith.⁶ Each side regarded the other with distrust and sought to make the greatest propaganda gains at the other’s expense.

So how responsible was Napoleon for the renewal of the hostilities in 1803? It is very tempting to follow the example of the British press and British caricaturists of these years in labelling him as a warmonger and a usurper who put the security of Europe at risk. Certainly, Napoleon had made no secret of his expansionist ambitions, both in Europe and overseas, and had boasted of his willingness to shed the blood of his troops in pursuit of them. But war was for him a means to an end rather than an end in itself. His ambition was to create a Europe united under French hegemony, liberated from feudalism and absolutism by his armies, a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals with at its core the old Carolingian heartland of Lotharingia, that sliver of Central Europe stretching from the Rhineland across the Alps into northern Italy. Napoleon had not forgotten the lessons of the Enlightenment, nor turned his back on the humanism of the Revolution. He had steeped himself in classical authors and in European history, had studied the rise and fall of great empires, and did not hesitate to talk of himself as the new Charlemagne, a lawgiver and administrator bringing benefits to his people as much as he was a soldier and hero on the battlefield. For his coronation, indeed, he had replicas made of Charlemagne’s crown and sword when the Austrians refused to release the originals. The symbolism surely could not have been more transparent.⁷

There was another matter that pushed Napoleon towards a resumption of war with Britain, however, and that was his particular animosity towards the British and his desire to remove all vestiges of their influence from the European mainland. This persistent hatred could not but inflame the already strained relations between the two countries and, some feel, gave the new British Prime Minister, Henry Addington, little alternative but to go back to war. He also had done nothing to encourage trade between Britain and France, whose commercial advantage he resented and correctly identified as the major reason for her strength in war. For British merchants this was a key issue; they had hoped, at the very least, to force France to accept a free trade treaty along the lines of the Eden Treaty of 1786, which would have given their manufactures entry into France’s protected markets. These grievances had cut little ice with the First Consul, however. Napoleon never ceased to be a military man at heart; he understood the culture of the military and sought military solutions to international problems. His temperament remained that of a general on the battlefield, impatient for results and victories; impulsive at times, and with a tendency to anger that grew more pronounced with time.

But such personal characteristics alone do not explain the resumption of hostilities; nor was France alone guilty of stirring up the embers of war. The other European powers, Britain included, had shown themselves to be aggressive in their own foreign policy objectives, whether in opposing French ambitions, in exploiting the weakness of the Austrian Empire, or in expanding their commercial and colonial empires at one another’s expense. The French wars were not France’s alone; they were European and world wars, expanding across whole continents, to which David Bell and others have applied the twentieth-century descriptor of ‘total war’.⁸ And because of their character as national wars, these conflicts became closely entwined with wider processes of political and cultural nation-building across Europe.⁹

But in August 1804 these wider considerations were far from Napoleon’s mind. The newly crowned Emperor had once again turned his attention to his favoured target, a military invasion of Britain – the same mission that had been undermined by storms during the years of the Directory. He rightly recognised that Britain was his most single-minded and persistent enemy, and he saw that France’s continental interests were constantly blocked by British intransigence. And so, as in 1798, he dreamed of sending his army across the Channel to disembark on the beaches of Kent; though he would find that, as in 1798, that dream was again thwarted by the presence of the Royal Navy, with its bases at Portsmouth and Chatham. While the timing was not ideal for Britain, which had taken advantage of the truce to undertake a significant ship-building programme, there is no doubt that the French navy was in much worse shape, split among a number of dockyards along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and effectively restricted to port by the deployment of British squadrons. The French were shown to be impotent: over half their navy was still in the Caribbean, and what remained of the battle fleet was unable to offer any resistance; indeed, the British warships that blockaded Brest took two French ships as prizes.¹⁰

The problems were magnified, however, by Napoleon’s unbridled optimism, and his willingness to be diverted into other adventures – against Jamaica, for example, and other British islands in the West Indies. The real threat posed to Britain was tiny; yet the militia was put on standby, fortifications around the south coast were strengthened, and newspapers and print shops resounded to a cacophony of invasion scares. London enjoyed a new form of propaganda, the invasion squib, which poured scorn on the French, showing their ships blown off course by storms or sinking sedately into the mud of the Thames, or John Bull hurling defiance from atop the cliffs of Dover.¹¹ At the same time the British government pumped additional funds into anti-French propaganda, including savage personal attacks on Napoleon’s character. In 1803 they also helped to fund the vicious French-language press of right-wing émigré journalists like Regnier and Peltier, buying up bulk subscriptions and encouraging the expansion of the émigrépress across Europe.¹² Pro-French journalists, on the other hand, were expelled under the provisions of the Alien Act, which Napoleon viewed as further evidence of British hypocrisy and malevolence.¹³

But Napoleon’s military manoeuvres did not disintegrate into farce, as his British opponents liked to claim. It is true that he was forced to abandon his invasion plans in the face of British naval superiority, but he did take the opportunity to display his military might to the world. He assembled an army of around eighty thousand men – the Armée des Côtes de l’Océan, successor to the Army of England which the Directory had decreed in 1797 at the time of an earlier invasion plan – at the huge military camp which he set up at Boulogne, looking out over the Channel towards England. The spectacle of the Camp de Boulogne took its place in the mythology of Imperial France, and acted as a stark warning to the rest of Europe. For there, in August 1804, at a ceremony to distribute eagles to his legions and the coveted Legion of Honour to his officers, Napoleon held the most dazzling military festival of his entire reign. He decorated two thousand new members of the Legion, all but a dozen of them soldiers, in a timely reminder of the central importance of military values, of the place of honour and glory in war in the new polity, and in the society of the Empire.¹⁴ At the same time, the truce gave Napoleon, at his headquarters at Pont-de-Briques, the breathing space he needed to plan his next move. These months saw the genesis of the key military institution of the Napoleonic years, the Grande Armée which would soon march eastwards and take the war once again to the heart of Central Europe.¹⁵

For a time Napoleon also succeeded in seizing the diplomatic initiative to leave Britain isolated from the European mainland, an important step since Britain could never achieve her foreign policy objectives unaided. For Pitt and Addington the defeat of France was always the most urgent concern, the single cause to which everything must be subordinated; but the powers of Central and Eastern Europe, fresh from their struggles over the partition of Poland, saw things very differently. Their attention was not glued to a supposed French threat or blinded by the spectre of Napoleon, nor was fear of imminent French invasion their primary driving force. Prussia and Austria vied for predominance in Germany, and were fearful of any expansionist ambitions by Russia towards the west and south. As a result none of the three major states of the region, Austria, Prussia and Russia, was willing to concentrate on helping Britain against Napoleon when they had more pressing anxieties closer to home. Besides, they had no reason to trust Britain’s own motives in resuming the war against France. Like the maritime powers on the continent, they shared a suspicion of Britain’s commercial and colonial ambitions, and feared that London was prepared to shed their blood in war so as to secure a monopoly position in the Americas and India. In the eyes of many continental powers, Britain blatantly mixed military and commercial ambitions and used war, ruthlessly and selfishly, to further her own economic goals. They needed to be persuaded that they had an interest in supporting Britain’s cause.

Russia, in particular, harboured deep doubts about Britain’s commercial ambitions. In 1801, following the death of Catherine the Great, she adopted a new commercial policy, forming a Baltic Armed Neutrality to oppose Britain’s claim in the North. This served Napoleon’s interests well, as it both opened up points of tension between Britain and her potential allies and placed British diplomacy at a disadvantage when she tried – as she did between 1803 and 1805 – to construct a new coalition against France. The French, of course, played upon such tensions, often with consummate skill: France offered rewards and inducements to other states in the form of blocks of territory she had conquered, or raised fears of British maritime predominance in what Michael Duffy has identified as a ‘skilful game of divide and rule’.¹⁶

The war effectively resumed in May 1803, when the British Privy Council ordered the implementation of naval warfare against France and authorised the detention of French commercial vessels. But Britain was alone and vulnerable; the British government had to work hard between 1803 and 1805 to attract allies and establish a Third Coalition to pursue war on land as well as at sea. They had one argument in their favour that had not previously been available to them: the fact that France could no longer realistically present herself as an idealistic or revolutionary polity that could hope to attract sympathy from liberals across Europe or ignite rebellion in Britain itself. Napoleon was now unambiguously a conqueror, France a country with imperial ambitions; and Britain played on the fears of European rulers that what they were witnessing was the emergence of a new and more dangerous version of Louis XIV.¹⁷ There was some justice in this claim, especially as Napoleon could now call on Spain, and on the European states he had invaded, to provide additional forces to help oil his military machine. As was customary, the debate was not conducted exclusively by means of argument and propaganda. London was ready to pay substantial sums to buy the support of the allies Britain needed, though the negotiations with Russia, Prussia and Austria proved protracted and often acrimonious. When 1805 dawned, there was still no agreement and thus no formal alliance against France.

The Third Coalition that was eventually signed later that year owed less to British gold than to Napoleon’s bellicose behaviour. In April, Britain and Russia signed an agreement that committed Russia to war unless the French adhered to the terms of Amiens and Lunéville. Shortly afterwards, Austria was moved to join them after Napoleon had arbitrarily annexed the Italian city states of Genoa, Parma and Piacenza and had seized control of Lucca. His coronation as Emperor in 1804 had alerted some to his pretensions but, for Austria and many in Central Europe, it was his second coronation in March 1805, as King of Italy, that provoked the greater outrage. Held in Milan, that coronation bristled with imperial imagery, linking Napoleon – in the popular imagination – to the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne. But it was also a ceremony directed specifically at the Italians. To this end he had himself crowned with the historic iron crown of the Lombards, the crown that had been worn in Lombardy by every Holy Roman Emperor since Frederick Barbarossa.¹⁸ The symbolism was not lost on the Austrians, who took pride in the thousand-year history of the Holy Roman Empire, however much its effective authority had faded with the years. In the following year, after Napoleon’s victories at Ulm and Austerlitz, the Holy Roman Empire would be expunged from the map.¹⁹

In all there were five partners in the Third Coalition – Austria, Britain, Russia, Naples and Sweden – but it soon became apparent that not all had the same priorities. Several of the Allies laid down conditions for their entry into the war. The Swedes would not move unless the Prussians did so, while the Russians held back part of their army for use in the Balkans – which weakened both the Coalition’s resolve and its readiness for battle.²⁰ In the meantime Napoleon was still planning to lure the Royal Navy away from the English Channel in order to leave his army free to invade. The ruse, of course, failed, with the French fleet defeated twice by its British rival, first in a relatively minor engagement off Cape Finisterre in July, then, decisively, by Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar in October. The impact of Trafalgar proved crucial in several different ways. Internally, it helped to undo some of the damage done to naval strength by Lord St Vincent’s misguided reform of naval administration, reversing a process of attrition which had jeopardised Britain’s naval superiority over France. The battle, it should be noted, did not destroy French sea power or end the threat to Britain’s maritime supply routes, but it left the Royal Navy with effective command of the seas and enhanced Britain’s economic superiority without the need for further victories. Or as the leading naval historian of the period sees it, Trafalgar ‘restored what we might call the normal mechanism of British sea power, which secured home defence, protected trade and opened strategic possibilities all over the world outside Europe’. Napoleon, on the other hand, was unquestionably weakened. Trafalgar exposed France to naval attack, removed possibilities for trade and wealth generation, and restricted her ambitions outside the European sphere.²¹

Napoleon was also compelled to change his military priorities and to abandon dreams of invading Britain. Instead, as the Austrian army moved against neighbouring Bavaria, he was forced to turn eastwards, transferring around two hundred and ten thousand men at dramatic speed from their camp at Boulogne to positions in Central Europe. The Allies mounted offensives against him in Hanover, Lombardy, and on the Danube, which was where Napoleon himself concentrated his forces, while Murat and Lannes grouped their forces in the Black Forest, and Gouvion Saint-Cyr staged a diversion against Naples.²² His army was well prepared, with around two hundred thousand troops organised under seven seasoned commanders. Camped at Pfaffenhofen before engaging the main Austrian force, Napoleon reminded his men of the forced marches they had undergone, the sacrifices they had made, and the plans they had had to postpone. Without the intervention of the Austrian army they would now be in London, he insisted, and reminded them that ‘tomorrow you are fighting against the allies of England’. He called on them to inflict a great defeat, a total annihilation of the enemy, for which posterity would forever remember them – words of inspiration which, as always, he addressed directly to the soldiers.²³

The events of the following day amply justified his confidence. In a series of attacks from the north, south and west, the French army surrounded the Austrians at Ulm, cutting their supply lines to Vienna and their contact with their Russian allies. They forced the unfortunate Austrian commander, General Mack, to surrender with twenty-six thousand men, without firing a shot. Further disasters followed. Archduke Ferdinand, escaping towards Bohemia, was cut off and defeated by Murat, while a further six thousand Austrians surrendered to Soult in Memningen. Only the fifteen thousand troops who fled towards Kempten managed to escape capture.²⁴ Having destroyed the main Austrian force north of the Alps, Napoleon took the capital, Vienna, before turning against the advancing Russians. Ulm had been a spectacular strategic victory, a triumph of planning that inflicted defeat and humiliation in equal proportion. But it did not end the campaign. The Austrians quickly regrouped, the Russians received reinforcements, and the Allies, boosted by their numerical superiority, counter-attacked. Grouped around Olmutz, to the north-east of Vienna, the joint Austrian and Russian army numbered some ninety thousand men. Napoleon risked finding his army over-exposed.

The battle that followed, at Austerlitz, is judged by many to be the greatest of Napoleon’s military career. This time he was outnumbered, with only seventy-five thousand men lined up against the ninety thousand of Austria and Russia. His victory cannot be put down to good fortune – although he enjoyed an element of that – but to overall military superiority in battle. He took some inspired tactical decisions, showed superior battlefield deployment, had excellent corps commanders, and a well-honed corps system which he used to telling effect. The battlefield, just south of the town of Brünn (what is today Brno), had been selected by his opponents, who sought to turn the French right flank and cut them off from the main road to Vienna, which they saw as vital to French supply and communication.

But Napoleon, despite his smaller numbers, took advantage of speed of manoeuvre and deployed his men against specific units of the enemy, effectively cutting them off from the main body of their army to drive home his advantage. Around the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz the French marked one of their most remarkable victories, when some six thousand six hundred French troops held up the advance of nearly forty thousand Austrians, pinning them down and giving Napoleon the chance, as the sun rose and dispelled the morning mist, to attack the only high point on the battlefield, the plateau of Pratzen. By eleven in the morning Soult’s troops were masters of the plateau, defended with the cavalry of the Imperial Guard, which Napoleon had kept back for the purpose. Meanwhile, other units scattered the Russian army, driving them into the muddy terrain to the south of the battlefield. From that moment the battle was won. In the words of the French military historian Jacques Garnier, ‘The remainder of the battle was no more than a pursuit. The Russians retreated through the frozen lakes to the south of the battlefield. The ice broke, the gun carriages got stuck in the mud, and men drowned.’²⁵

While Napoleon may indeed have contributed to his victory by deceiving the Russian leaders into thinking that he planned to withdraw, this was a battle won by tactical acumen, not by deception; by quick thinking on the spur of the moment as much as by any grand advance planning. Just as he had done at Toulon and in Italy during the Wars of the Directory, at Austerlitz he proved his virtuosity as a military commander, something which his detractors would never be able to deny him.²⁶ It was also a decisive moment in the war, ensuring that Prussia did not send reinforcements and effectively ending the Third Coalition. The Treaty of Pressburg which followed allowed Napoleon to consolidate his position in Central Europe, most especially in Germany, where he took advantage of Austria’s humiliation to distribute largesse to his new allies, Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg, and bind them more closely to the Napoleonic system. Two rulers, in Bavaria and Württemberg, became kings, with Napoleon, not the Holy Roman Emperor, now guaranteeing their freedoms. Outside Germany the Treaty stripped Austria of territory in Italy, the Tyrol and Dalmatia, preparing the way for further restructuring in the following months. In 1806 Napoleon grouped a number of Rhineland states into a loose Confederation of the Rhine, again under his protection; while the extent of his control over Italy was enhanced by the invasion of Naples, also in 1806. With the extinction of the Holy Roman Empire in the same year, his dominance of Western and Central Europe seemed total, and his foreign policy objectives might appear to have been achieved.²⁷

Oddly, perhaps, the settlement was undermined less by Napoleon’s ambition than by Prussia’s impatience and sense of betrayal. In the course of his reconfiguration of Germany, Napoleon had offered Hanover to Britain as a goodwill gesture in return for peace, but Prussia also had claims to Hanover and resented having her interests ignored. Just as important was the reading of the international situation by the Prussian king, Frederick William. He had no wish to be relegated to the status of a French puppet-state, and, having reached an agreement with Russia and Britain, entered into a Fourth Coalition against Napoleon in 1806. Then, in October, he took the surprising initiative of declaring war on France at a time when his army was still in a poor state and he had received no commitments from his new allies. It proved a fateful blunder. Prussia was left to fight alone against France and suffered an overwhelming defeat in the linked battles of Jena and Auerstedt, due largely to deficient organisation and mediocre leadership. Recent scholarship suggests that the Prussian army was essentially sound, whatever the shortcomings in its training and preparation. There was no shame implied in being beaten by a formidable opponent. What was really humiliating was the collapse that followed as the French drove across Prussia, rounding up what remained of the army and forcing the surrender of towns and fortresses, leaving Napoleon ensconced in Berlin and master of all he surveyed. The defeat on the battlefield had turned into a rout because of the chaos of the days that followed, and the alarming demoralisation of both the soldiers and the civilian population.²⁸

Jena destroyed the Prussian army, but it did not end the war. Frederick William and the remnants of his army fell back into Poland where they joined up with the Tsar, and it was there, in February 1807, that Napoleon, in pursuit, engaged them once more at Eylau. It was a bloody and relentless battle, fought in a biting February blizzard by around seventy thousand men on each side. It was also, in spite of Napoleon’s attempts to claim it as a French victory, a grim stalemate. The French army sustained the highest losses of any battle in the war to that date – a reminder that glory in the mud-drenched fields of an eastern European winter could only be bought at a price. The soldiers who had fought and suffered at Eylau knew this too well to be deceived, and Napoleon’s military Bulletins, routinely so upbeat and triumphant, suddenly took on a more sombre tone. ‘After the Battle of Eylau,’ remarked the 64th bulletin on 2 March, ‘the Emperor passed several hours each day upon the battlefield, a horrible spectacle, but which duty rendered necessary. It required great labour to bury all the dead.’ The Bulletin, almost inevitably, placed the greatest emphasis on the Russian losses, and on Napoleon’s show of compassion. ‘Forty-eight hours after the battle, there were still upwards of 5,000 wounded Russians whom we had not been able to carry off. Brandy and bread were carried to them, and they were successively conveyed to the hospital.’²⁹ But the words could barely conceal the shock and depression that had hit the French, too, at the scale of deaths and injuries.

If Eylau was presented as a victory, it could only be a Pyrrhic victory, won at the cost of countless French lives. When the painter Antoine-Jean Gros consigned it to canvas, he outraged some in the Academy by showing the unmentionable in the very foreground of his work: the contorted corpses of dead soldiers, piled high before the eyes of the Emperor.³⁰ It was an image that could not fail to shock, or to cause offence. The same harrowing image is repeated in the eye-witness accounts of the battle in the letters and memoirs of soldiers who lived through that day. One of Napoleon’s surgeons-in-chief, Baron Percy, does not conceal the gloom he felt when he surveyed the scene. ‘At the back of the cemetery, towards the plain, blood had flowed in terrible quantities; it was the blood of the Russians. Around the church, in the town, in the courtyards, houses, everywhere you saw only bodies and dead horses; carriages pass over them; the artillery wagons mow them down, crushing their limbs and their skulls.’³¹ For the victors as much as the vanquished, the battle left a memory of loss and overwhelming sadness.

But a much greater victory lay beyond. Napoleon moved rapidly, seizing the cities of Danzig and Königsberg before engaging the Russians at Friedland on 14 June, where he split the Russian army in two and inflicted twenty thousand casualties. Following this defeat, the Tsar felt he had no choice but to negotiate. The two Emperors met at Tilsit, on a raft on the River Niemen, where they divided the continent into two spheres of influence, one French, the other Russian. Tilsit marked the zenith of Napoleon’s power, and hesavoured the moment, displaying his military strength to a bemused Europe. For once he did not impose harsh peace terms on a defeated enemy, preferring to flatter Alexander I and win his support for a future struggle against Britain. In return he accepted Russian expansion along the Danube and in Finland, while extending French influence in the region through a new Duchy of Warsaw. In contrast, Prussia suffered badly at Tilsit, being stripped of almost half its territory and forced to pay a heavy indemnity to the Emperor. After the humiliation of Jena, Prussia found its Great Power status seriously undermined. Napoleon’s diplomatic ambitions were now clear, and they impinged on German Central Europe, an area which Prussia regarded as her hemisphere. Having imposed his will on Austria the previous year, he had now defeated Prussia and established his authority in the north-east of the continent. To drive the point home, he went on in the autumn of 1807 to occupy Swedish Pomerania.³²

There remained, of course, in Napoleon’s eyes, one obstacle to his domination of the continent: Britain, whose commercial strength continued to pose a threat to his military ambitions and whose machinations he saw behind every act of treachery. Britain, he declared in 1806, had sought ‘to excite Prussia against France, to push the Emperor and France to the end’. And what was the outcome? ‘She has conducted Prussia to her ruin, procured the greatest glory for the Emperor and the greatest power to France.’ He went on to warn that France might declare England in a state of Continental blockade, asking ‘is it with blood that the English hoped to feed their commerce and revive their industry?’ ³³ After Trafalgar and the defeats inflicted on France and Spain at sea, the British navy looked to make gains elsewhere in Europe and in the colonies, turning its guns on a variety of targets from Copenhagen to Istanbul and Cape Town in an attempt to expand its commercial and colonial dominance. Then, from May 1806, Britain used her naval strength more directly against French trade and prosperity, imposing by a series of Orders in Council a blockade on the European coastline from the Elbe in the east to the Atlantic in the west, and threatening to place a stranglehold on French commerce and shipping.

Napoleon’s response – the establishment of the Continental System – was immediate: first in the Berlin Decree in 1806, then at Tilsit and in the Milan Decree of November 1807, he sought to close the whole continent of Europe to British goods in the hope that this would stifle Britain’s trade and force her to sue for peace. The Berlin Decree declared the British Isles to be under blockade, and forbade all trade and communication with them; it also provided Napoleon with a justification for imprisoning any British citizens, whether merchants, ships’ captains or simple tourists, who strayed on to the European continent. The Milan Decree turned the screw further by placing restrictions on neutral shipping. Any ship which put in to a British port was thenceforth considered to be stripped of its nationality and subject to seizure, as was any ship that complied with the British demand that it be searched by the Royal Navy.³⁴ It was a grand design to win the war with Britain by destroying her economy and turning the mercantile community, which was so powerful in the House of Commons, against Britain’s war policy.

The Continental System also had important domestic implications. With France already cut off from many overseas and colonial markets, Napoleon sought to create a wider domestic European market that France could control and dominate by keeping British goods out. Customs posts were built along the frontier of this greater Europe – three hundred customs men were posted along the banks of the Elbe alone in 1806.³⁵ This was more than a trade ban; it was a complex system of economic warfare designed to deny Britain access to neutral shipping, and hence to her markets, and thus to destroy the greatest mercantile economy of the day. And it did bring benefits to certain commercial and industrial sectors in France, which enjoyed a level of protection from cheaper British products that they had not seen since the Eden Treaty in 1786. Geoffrey Ellis explains how, in Alsace for example, the Continental System established a new entrepôt trade with Germany and encouraged new industrial enterprises, among the biggest of them in Mulhouse. It created what he terms ‘a French Continental market design’ that worked to the benefit of French manufacturers and traders. And he shows that it was far more than a blockade and more of an economic strategy, with ‘the Blockade decrees, the rough treatment of would-be neutrals, the proclamation of the closed market (marché réservé) in Italy, and the series of preferential trade treaties with client states’ all helping to ensure that, for French manufactures and for the industrial areas of the north and east, the benefits would be real and permanent.³⁶ Napoleon’s willingness to support industrial innovation and to fund technological change helped ensure that the economic impact was often favourable to those in the manufacturing sector, and that textile towns were among those that prospered most under the Empire.

But the success of the strategy must be qualified. If the Alsatian economy expanded, it was in part due to fraudulent trade and widespread smuggling, backdoor methods by which Frenchmen profited from the blockade. And, as in many eastern and northern areas of France, expansion was closely tied to the military market’s huge demand for armaments and textiles.³⁷ In other sectors the restrictions on trade caused great misery, especially in such port cities as Marseille, Nantes and Bordeaux, along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts. The Atlantic ports in particular, once so prosperous on the back of the wine trade, colonial produce and Caribbean slavery, had already seen their economies undermined in the 1790s by the Haitian revolution, and now slipped into a seemingly terminal decline.³⁸ Yet in 1806 the idea of waging economic warfare against Britain, a country more dependent than any other on its trade and commercial links with the world, did not seem absurd so long as French strategists continued to believe that they could use the blockade to destroy Britain’s political will to pursue the war. That they failed was partly due to the inherent strength of the British economy, but also to France’s inability to enforce its decrees on an often unwilling population. National frontiers proved porous, with smuggling and contraband undermining the power of the law and resulting in such breaches of the blockade that the Continental System was undermined from within.³⁹

In 1807 Napoleon can justifiably be seen at the peak of his success, with Tilsit the crowning moment. He had destroyed the military power of the great German states, Austria and Prussia, to the point where his empire stretched across half of Europe – far beyond the most fertile imaginings of Louis XIV, who thought only of natural frontiers along the Rhine. Yet he still was dissatisfied, using the Russian alliance to buy time rather than achieve a lasting peace, and determined, to the point of obsession, to defeat France’s perpetual enemy, Britain. In retrospect, the Continental System must be seen as a strategic error, a measure that ran counter to the interests of local communities, that aroused resistance, and that led to further measures of police repression across Europe. It was a crudely exploitative system that served to bully and alienate Napoleon’s allies, and it failed in its main objective of bringing Britain to her knees. By 1807 even Charles James Fox, who had been the most consistent of British politicians in his opposition to the war, accepted that Napoleon must be defeated if peace was to be achieved. In rejecting a Russian offer of mediation in 1807, the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, made it clear that in his government’s eyes the problem was Napoleon himself, since his excessive power and his overweening ambition excluded the possibility of securing a lasting settlement.

Canning explained this position in a private letter to the diplomat Lord Granville in October. ‘Could any peace settle Europe now,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘in a condition in which it could remain? Unquestionably not. But it would sanction and settle some dozen of green and tottering usurpations; and leave Bonaparte to begin anew.’ Peace, in other words, in the conditions of 1807, could serve only the interests of the French, and for that reason it had to be resisted. ‘Our interest is that till there can be a final settlement that shall last, everything should remain as unsettled as possible: that no usurper should feel sure of acknowledgement; no people confident of their new masters; no kingdom sure of its existence; no spoliator secure of his spoil; and even the plundered not acquiescent in their losses.’⁴⁰ War, in other words, had to go on, for any ultimate peace demanded it. And war did go on, relentlessly. Indeed, it was war that would determine the history of the remaining years of Napoleon’s reign.