CHAPTER 6

Changing the Face of the World

I am destined to change the face of the world; at least, I believe so.

NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1804¹

We must recollect . . . what it is we have at stake, what it is we have to contend for. It is for our property, it is for our liberty, it is for our independence, nay for our existence as a nation; it is for our character, it is for our very name as Englishmen; it is for everything dear and valuable to man on this side of the grave.

WILLIAM PITT in the Commons, 22 July 1803²

Napoleonic Visions

I wanted to rule the world – who wouldn’t have in my place?
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1815³

One single man was alive in Europe then; all other beings tried to fill their lungs with the air he had breathed.
ALFRED DE MUSSET

What a pity the man wasn’t lazy.
CHARLES MAURICE DE TALLEYRAND⁴

Napoleon Bonaparte is the last Frenchman to have transformed British and world history. He forced Britain into its greatest sustained effort in war, which would leave it the major global power for more than a century. His reign marked the apogee of the period in which France came close to becoming the hegemonic power of the European continent, and, potentially, of the planet. His admirers compared him to Alexander, Caesar and Charlemagne. We might prefer comparisons with more recent pretenders to world power, Hitler and Stalin, at least in that his rise from obscurity, deeds, misdeeds, and rejection of limit testify to an exceptional and flawed personality. But he was much more intelligent and creative than they, and vastly more competent, the army being a better school for dictators than beer-hall rallies and party committees. Though ruthless, a bully, and a ‘walking laboratory of complexes and neuroses’,⁵ he was far less cruel, and was capable of love, friendship, and forgiveness. He was too arrogant to be vain, and too disdainful to be vindictive – or so he liked to appear. But he was sensitive to criticism or mockery, blamed others for his failures, and had in full measure the Great Man’s self-righteousness and finally self-pity.⁶

His ideas were the commonplaces of the late eighteenth century, and more precisely, of a radical, authoritarian interpretation of the Enlightenment. He had imbibed the fashionable culture of his youth. For a time he worshipped Rousseau; he had a shot at an English-style gothic novel about the Earl of Essex; he adored Macpherson’s kitsch pseudo-bardic Ossian, and commissioned a huge, hallucinatory Dream of Ossian from Ingres for his never-occupied Roman palace. Like many philosophes, he idolized the philosopher-soldier-king Frederick the Great. He admired Abbé Raynal’s best-selling attack on European (and especially British) imperialism – ‘Englishmen, you have abused your victory. This is the moment for justice or for vengeance.’⁷ He liked to parade his intellectual interests – literally, for he had a mobile campaign library mounted on a gun carriage. Improving mankind by sweeping away the dross of the past was his platitudinous aim. But far from being in the grip of an ideology, he had no precise object, other than his own ever-widening power, in pursuit of what he believed was his historic destiny. He could act in a pragmatic and opportunist manner, with a mind ‘blunt, chancy, and wild’.⁸ But he had no fulfilment, and nowhere to stop. Deep down, he was aimless.

The Corsican patriotism of the young Nabuleone di Buonaparte and his detestation of the French – invaders who, in his words, were ‘spewed up on our coasts, drowning the throne of freedom in a tide of blood’ in 1769, the year he was born – were increased by his miserable experience from the ages of nine to fourteen at a military college at Brienne, in bleak Champagne, where he was lonely, aggressive, mocked and snubbed.⁹ This privilege of noble status, with a scholarship, was won by his father’s collaboration with the French, and, according to rumour, his mother’s horizontal collaboration with the French governor. His ambition to be a Corsican leader was squashed by political quarrels on the island in the 1790s which forced the Buonapartes, vilified as traitors, to seek refuge in Toulon, weeks before it called in the British in 1793. Napoleon found himself committed to the urban elite against the peasant masses, to Jacobinism against counter-revolution, and to France against England: ‘since one must take sides, one might as well choose the side which is victorious, the side which devastates, loots and burns . . . It is better to eat than be eaten.’¹⁰ His Corsican background may explain why his vision was never truly francocentric. France and the French were the expendable resources of European, Mediterranean and global ambitions. The axis of his Empire ran from Italy, via the Rhone and Rhine, to the Low Countries and north-western Germany, based on cities, often surrounded by a hostile countryside. It has often been pointed out – including by Napoleon himself – that this was Charlemagne’s Europe, as if to confer legitimacy on a collection of conquests. Recently, Napoleon has been hailed as a prophet of the European Union: ‘there is not enough sameness among the nations of Europe’.¹¹But this overlooks his maritime and imperial ambitions in the Middle East, the Americas, India and the Pacific.

There is a famous story that he led his fellow pupils at Brienne in a great snowball battle, thus demonstrating precocious military leadership. In fact, he was rather a swot, quiet and good at maths. Though he certainly possessed the qualities of a great general – accurately summing up his strengths as ‘will, character, application and daring’ – his early career as an artillery officer showed lack of interest in professional minutiae. He was rarely a military innovator, but an effective user of other people’s ideas.¹² The army was his instrument, not his passion. He was always a political soldier, and he tried to apply military methods to politics, society and economics: authority, regulation, efficiency and discipline were his watchwords. He was useless in normal politics, unable to organize and lead without overt coercion.¹³ He believed that, after the catastrophe of the revolution, Europe welcomed the imposition of law and order: ‘the world begged me to govern it’.¹⁴ Much of it did. But there was a high price: as well as being run like an army, Europe became a vast recruiting ground for an endless war. Enforcing conscription was the primary task of the Empire, and the main reason for extending its efficient bureaucracy.

Napoleon realized that the horrors of the 1790s had discredited democracy. But they had certainly not eradicated the revolution: its abolition of feudal privilege, sale of Church lands, guarantee of equality under the law, and rational administration created powerful economic and political interests that feared a return to anything like the Old Regime. Napoleon offered a seductive deal: both the ending and the consolidation of the revolution. ‘My policy is to govern men as most of them want to be governed. That, I think, is the way to recognize popular sovereignty.’¹⁵ His regime would be a meritocratic amalgamation of the old and new, rejecting the extremes of revolution and counter-revolution, and happy to offer careers to former revolutionaries and former royalists, with few questions asked. Though political rights were suppressed, individual liberties (especially those of property) were mostly respected. The empire was not a reign of terror: it held only about 2,500 political prisoners – vastly fewer than the Jacobin Republic. It demanded only obedience. Its strongest supporters, both in France and in the satellite states, were those who had done well out of the revolution: land buyers, certain business interests, career soldiers, professional administrators, ideological enemies of the old order, and religious minorities. Its strongest opponents were those for whom modernized government meant taxes, impoverishment, dispossession, sacrilege and above all the conscription of hundreds of thousands of men – the new serfs of the revolution.

The question of life and death for so many was why Napoleon never brought about the promised and longed-for peace. Critics have always blamed ‘the Corsican ogre’ personally: parvenu vanity and the intoxication of being hailed as one of the Great Men of history led him into insatiable aggrandizement, dethroning monarchs, crowning his relatives, proclaiming himself the heir of Charlemagne, remaking Europe and bringing kings, pope and princes to heel. Some of his closest collaborators, such as the ex-bishop Talleyrand and the ex-Terrorist Fouché, eventually concluded that he was out of control. Admirers of Napoleon – and he himself – claimed that he was forced into war to defend the revolution, above all against ‘the English merchant aristocracy’,¹⁶ avid for profit and willing to pay the forces of reaction to destroy the revolution and restore the iniquities of the Old Regime. ‘All my wars came from England.’ So a key to unlocking the Napoleonic period is his relationship with Britain. Who was the aggressor? What was the source of their deadly struggle?

Napoleon had a complex relationship with an imaginary Britain he never knew. Corsican patriots had hoped for British protection. One of Napoleon’s pieces of juvenile fiction is a Corsican adventure with an English hero. He studied British history, and furthermore learnt that of his own island from James Boswell’s Account of Corsica. He even considered a career in the Royal Navy (his military college considered that he would make ‘an excellent sailor’, presumably because of his brains and lack of social graces). But he did not learn any English until St Helena. He thought in the anglophobe (and occasionally anglophile) clichés built up over a century of rivalry. England and France together could ‘rule the world’; but otherwise the ‘tyrant of the seas’ had to be destroyed for the good of all. England was Carthage, a nation of shopkeepers (a phrase he picked up from Adam Smith), whose insatiable greed aimed to monopolize the globe. But its power, built on bluff and paper credit, was a house of cards. He enlivened these clichés with a venom of his own, but could also express conventional admiration for the ‘enlightened’ English people. François Crouzet points out that little of Napoleon’s own time and energy was focused directly on the struggle against Britain.¹⁷ After his final defeat in 1815 he hoped to settle in England as a country gentleman. These wavering notions give no insight into his actions.

Every would-be controller of Europe since the eighteenth century has sooner or later had to deal with the peripheral powers, Russia and Britain: to coexist, to exclude or to conquer. Russia, because of its vast territory and population. Britain, because of its ability to mobilize the world against the Continent. Napoleon tried to strike a deal with Russia; never with Britain. The time of decision, from which there was no turning back, was 1801 to 1803, the period of peace. The Treaty of Amiens (March 1802) – the sixth Franco-British peace since 1688 – is conventionally dismissed as a transparent subterfuge to allow the combatants to draw breath for the next bout. This is misleading, and it obscures responsibility for the renewal of war. Most of Europe – and most Frenchmen and Britons – had greeted peace with relief. France’s primacy from the Baltic to the Mediterranean was accepted. Austria had dropped out of the contest. Russia was willing to make a deal. Prussia and Bavaria were junior partners. The smaller states were satellites. Britain was ready to bow out of Europe for the foreseeable future, even abandoning the Low Countries, bloodily defended as a vital interest for centuries. Indian outposts and the strategic Cape of Good Hope were being handed back to France and its satellite Holland. In short, as Bonaparte realized, France had won.

He could have stopped there. Instead, he issued ‘a ceaseless, implacable river of orders’.¹⁸ He forced through a ‘massive territorial revolution’¹⁹ in Germany and remodelled Italy (with himself as president of the new Italian Republic). Instead of relaxing his grip on Switzerland and Holland, as the

Lonely and good at maths: the boy who would conquer Europe.

British thought he had agreed, new constitutions were imposed on both, confirming them as French dependencies. The aim seemed to be to exclude British influence and trade, and increase France’s political and military power: peace was breaking out, yet the satellite states were being militarized. French actions overseas were equally disquieting. An expedition was sent to reconquer Saint-Domingue, independent under the former slave Toussaint Louverture, with whom the British were about to conclude a treaty. He was captured and brought to France, where he died after ill-treatment. Slavery was again legalized. The intention to re-invade Egypt was openly announced, for ‘some unfathomable reason that made sense only to the First Consul’.²⁰ A small expedition was sent to India, with orders to prepare for a future conflict by building alliances with local rulers and recruiting Indian troops (there were seven generals and many NCOs in the party). Louisiana was regained from Spain. Territory (‘Napoleonland’, of course) was claimed in Australia. A naval building programme was ordered, with compulsory Spanish participation. Bonaparte further increased tension by a gratuitously aggressive and blustering style, which he ordered his diplomats to emulate. He insisted that the British government prevent criticism and satire aimed at him and his family in the press – a matter he took extremely seriously. As a sop, a leading émigré journalist, Jean-Gabriel Peltier, was prosecuted in London for criminal libel of the First Consul, and the judge directed the jury to convict him.²¹ This proved, thought the pugnacious journalist William Cobbett, that the British were ‘a beaten and a conquered people’.

Both sides did want to keep the peace, but they had a totally different understanding of what this required. The British thought it meant negotiating towards an acceptable general settlement. Bonaparte thought it meant insisting on the letter of the treaty while constantly manoeuvring to gain more – ‘he could not stop himself from cheating’.²² Gradually, the British decided that they would not allow this to continue. They had two sticking points: removing French troops from Holland, and keeping Malta, whose great fortified harbour was the key to the Mediterranean, out of French hands. These were sensitive strategic matters – the former for the security of Britain, the latter for that of Egypt and hence India – but they also became important as a test of intentions. Bonaparte had a two-hour talk with the ambassador Lord Whitworth on 21 February 1803, in which he ‘frequently [flew] from one subject to another’, and gave ‘very few opportunities for saying a word’. The gist was that he did not want another war because he had already won, but that he would make no concessions. Pitt read this as meaning that ‘we must soon accept avowedly to receive the law from him, or to encounter war’.²³

As a warning that they were serious, the British announced limited defensive measures. Napoleon accused them of preparing to renew the conflict, and on 13 March 1803 he publicly threatened Whitworth at a reception at the Tuileries: ‘The English want war, but if they are the first to draw the sword, I shall be the last to sheath it.’²⁴ Whitworth thought that this was not a serious threat, and that Bonaparte was just being boorish. But both sides were raising the stakes, and, dangerously, both had some reason to hope the other was bluffing. Whitworth reported that Bonaparte did not want war yet, and that everywhere there was ‘gloomy discontent and despondency’. He also noted that British visitors, ‘who disgrace the name and character of Englishmen’, were assuring the French that London’s warnings were mere bluster. The French ambassador in London was conveying a similar message.²⁵ Finally, in April 1803 London presented an ultimatum: it would accept recent French acts in Italy and Switzerland if Bonaparte withdrew his troops from Holland and agreed to a temporary British presence in Malta. Talleyrand tried to drag out discussions, but without conceding the British demands, and so Whitworth left Paris on 12 May. Britain declared war on the 18th, and that same day there were naval skirmishes off Brest.

The French blamed the British, accusing them of breaking the treaty over Malta. Many historians (especially French ones) still take that line. Recent studies agree that the responsibility was Bonaparte’s, because he had a choice: he was not being threatened and he could have opted for peace. Had he done so, Europe could have had ‘at least a decade or two’ of calm.²⁶ His motives remain an enigma. The arrogance of ‘new born Majesty’ – he was still only thirty-three? Ambitions of world empire? The impatience of ‘the last Enlightened Despot’ to modernize Europe? Obsessive anglophobia? All have been suggested. His defenders argue that he knew that a frustrated and insatiable Britain was bound to renew the war, and that he was merely preparing for the inevitable. Thus historians still chew over the polemics of the 1800s. Did Bonaparte not know that Britain had slashed military and naval spending, stood down the militia, laid off dockyard workers and discharged half its army and navy?²⁷ War came because his behaviour in 1803 exemplified a pattern followed to the end of his career: every advantage gained was a step towards the next escalation. He was the ultimate embodiment of eighteenth-century power politics, which the revolution had torn free of conventional restraints. He had literally no conception of a peaceful settlement. Whatever was going on in that capacious brain, the result is plain: ‘Just as 1939 was Hitler’s war . . . so all the wars after 1802 were Bonaparte’s wars.’²⁸

Earth’s Best Hopes? British Resistance, 1803–5

If for Greece, Egypt, India, Africa,
Aught good were destined, thou wouldst step between.
England! all nations in this charge agree:
But worse, more ignorant in love and hate,
Far – far more abject is thine Enemy:
Therefore the wise pray for thee, though the freight
Of thy offences be a heavy weight:
Oh grief that Earth’s best hopes rest all with Thee!
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, October 1803

The Channel is a ditch that will be crossed when someone has the boldness to try it.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, November 1803²⁹

England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.

WILLIAM PITT at the Guildhall, 9 November 1805,
three days after the news of Trafalgar³⁰

Britain’s declaration of war appalled ordinary people on both sides of the Channel, who foresaw years more of hunger, taxation, conscription and impressment. In Britain, seamen sought jobs in coalmines and quarries. Landsmen grumbled and sometimes rioted when ballots for militia service were ordered. In France, boys took the traditional desperate remedies of self-mutilation or flight. Many realized that both countries faced a deadly war of attrition. The prime minister, Addington, privately – and accurately – reckoned on another twelve years: Britain would remain on the defensive and control the seas; Napoleon would have to try to invade and would fail; and then Britain could create a new anti-French coalition – the usual scenario.³¹ British ministers were remarkably confident that France would crack first.

In neither country would the ordeal reignite the troubles of the 1790s. France was quiescent and well policed, and propaganda blamed the war on Britain. The military and bureaucratic machine did not require the turbulent enthusiasm of the 1790s. In Britain, opponents of war no longer pursued the mirage of revolution. French aggression, particularly the violation of Rousseau’s republican Switzerland, and atrocities carried out in Egypt, broke the spell, except for beleaguered radicals, celestial millenarians and palpitating power-worshippers. Wordsworth’s doleful conclusion that England, with all its faults, was the best hope led him to join the militia.

The renewal of war led to Napoleon being proclaimed Emperor of the French in 1804 in order to strengthen the regime. The new Caesar decided to follow the example of Julius and invade England, and was delighted when Roman coins were found near his camp. His was to be the most formidable of the many invasions France prepared.³² It was paid for by new taxes and the sale of Louisiana to the United States – the money coming in instalments through Barings of London, who were able to lend it to the British en route. Napoleon concentrated 165,000 men in six camps and seven harbours from Etaples to Antwerp, with the main force at Boulogne. Any point from Sussex to Suffolk was in striking distance. Before war broke out he had started building 2,500 gunboats and specially designed landing-craft for the beaches: ‘money is not a problem’.³³ Boatyards as far inland as Paris and Strasbourg were busy. Donations flooded in from a people eager to defeat the national enemy, and sponsor a boat carrying their name – a ramped gunboat for 110 men and two horses cost around 20,000 francs. Napoleon was characteristically attentive to detail. Magazines, barracks and hospitals were built. Guide-interpreters were recruited, many of them Irish. Former galley slaves were summoned to give advice on rowing at sea, and Napoleon, after having his Guard practise on the Seine, drew up a drill book: ‘paddle firm’, ‘ship oars’, ‘beach’. The troops rehearsed embarkation. There were morale-building ceremonies, for example a mass distribution of the Légion d’Honneur by the new emperor himself, on his birthday, 15 August 1804, with 60,000 men present. The effect was somewhat spoilt when British warships close to shore chased some French boats aground. The heavily armed landing-craft proved barely seaworthy. In July 1804 he overruled his admirals’ warnings and ordered embarkation practice in heavy weather. Thirty boats sank or were driven ashore. Exaggerated reports of the number drowned caused jubilation in England, but Napoleon was unabashed, and remained determined to invade before his coronation. The geographical problems that had hampered Richelieu sixty years before were worked on by Napoleon’s engineers. His main base, Boulogne – ‘the worst port in the Channel’ – became mud at low tide, leaving the boats high and dry. After months of building and practising, they managed to get only 100 boats to sea each high tide. So the boats had to be moored a mile offshore, exposed to the weather and the British, and laboriously protected by forts and horse artillery galloping along the strand.

‘The Coffin Expedition’: many of Napoleon’s naval officers feared precisely this.

Napoleon was never deterred by physical barriers – mountains, deserts, storms, heat, cold, distance. He saw crossing the Channel as essentially the same as crossing a wide river. He could actually see into England, ‘the houses and the bustle’, hence his famous remark about the ‘ditch’. He insisted it was possible, though risky, to cross without battleship cover in the small craft – a swarm of ‘flies with terrible stings’.³⁴ He assured the Prussian ambassador that ‘foggy weather and some luck will make me master of London, of parliament and of the Bank of England’.³⁵ There was no need for the balloons, tunnels or submarines that enthusiasts suggested. Napoleon disliked gadgets. The American inventor Fulton, whose mini-submarine was turned down by the French, went to hawk his ‘catamarans’ (torpedoes) to the British, who used them to attack the French invasion barges.

Experience proved that at least seven days of favourable weather would be needed to assemble the invasion fleet and get across,³⁶ not the single night during which Napoleon had originally hoped to attack by stealth. So in May 1804 he accepted that a covering force of big ships was desirable. As with every earlier scheme, this required a concentration of the navy to win temporary local superiority over a scattered British fleet. Napoleon thought up a series of rapidly changing schemes, all supposing considerable incompetence on the British side and an accumulation of luck on his. He finally decided that Admiral de Villeneuve’s Toulon fleet should escape from the Mediterranean, sail to meet other ships in the Caribbean, and then, assuming the British would be chasing them all over the Atlantic, speed back to rendezvous with the Spanish and the Brest fleets, ‘come up the Channel and appear before Boulogne’, and escort the army triumphantly to England. As always, the French assumed that if they could only land they would trample over any defence forces and take London quickly. Perhaps they were right. Yet the stakes were higher than in the past, when (as in 1745 or even 1779) the defencelessness of England meant that the French could consider an invasion with quite small forces. Now it meant gambling the best part of the army in a highly risky adventure, which Napoleon would have to command in person: ‘If you send [another general] and he succeeds, he will be greater and more powerful than you.’³⁷ But failure would destroy Napoleon and his regime, and leave France open to invasion from the east.

As with earlier projected invasions, there seems to have been no clear plan for Britain. Did Napoleon, as Pitt said, threaten ‘our existence as a nation’, ‘our character’, ‘our very name as Englishmen’? In literal terms, no: it was the smaller states on France’s borders – Switzerland, the Low Countries, Piedmont – that faced oblivion. England’s immediate danger was of a bloodbath, of which later events in Calabria, Spain and Russia suggest the possible extent. A hardened French army primed with anglophobe propaganda and with no means of retreat would have been opposed by a horde of largely amateur soldiers and a whole society determined to resist. All French invasion plans promised a quick military knock-out, but raised the problem of what to do afterwards. Napoleon asserted that ‘a declaration of democratic principles’ would create ‘a disunion sufficient to paralyse the rest of the nation’; he would be ‘a liberator, a new William of Orange’. Once London was taken, ‘a powerful political party would be created against the oligarchy’.³⁸ British resistance and the credit of the City would collapse, and Napoleon would dictate peace from Windsor Castle. But one of Napoleon’s more astute marshals warned that ‘victory will have no result unless you intend to imitate William the Conqueror’.³⁹ In other words, the conquest would have to be made permanent. This would have required extended occupation, the break-up of the United Kingdom, destruction of its naval power, annexation of colonies, diversion of trade, a huge indemnity, the consequent implosion of the Industrial Revolution and impoverishment of the rapidly growing population. Ireland might have become a favoured satellite, like Poland, administered by a Patriot junta under the authority of an imperial marshal or relative, and graciously allowed to lavish its blood and treasure on Napoleon’s cause. There would have been plenty of confiscated land to reward imperial dukes and princes. ‘England was . . . bound to become a mere appendix of France,’ Napoleon later reflected, ‘one of our islands, just like Oléron or Corsica.’⁴⁰

The palpable danger – on clear days French troops could be seen drilling, and panicky residents deserted Eastbourne and Colchester – caused a surge of activity unparalleled until 1914 and 1940. People were resolute, but not necessarily confident. Diaries show that some had nightmares about invasion, and rumours that the French had landed were frequent. Neighbours gathered ‘at their doors in the evening to talk over the rebellion of ’45, when the rebels reached Derby, and even listened at intervals to fancy they heard the French . . . cannon’. Coast-watching, beacon-building and spy-hunting multiplied.⁴¹ By 1804, 380,000 men had joined the Volunteers in the ‘greatest popular movement of the Hanoverian age’.⁴² It was largely a spontaneous local phenomenon, not something the government, doubting the capacities of volunteer units, had planned. But Pitt, returning to office, wanted to go along with the popular tide and demonstrate the breadth of support for national defence. Citizens had a right to bear arms, and this was taken as a sign of trust by the government. In some localities, every able-bodied man was drilling, some armed only with pikes. A Levy en Masse Act was passed, a clear sign of French influence, at least in terminology. But there was a fundamental difference: Britain was unique in relying largely on volunteers; there was never conscription into the regular army. Mass volunteering is certainly a proof of patriotic solidarity. But it was above all local patriotism, and was not wholly disinterested. In volunteer units, which were remarkably egalitarian and independent, men remained civilians in uniform, commanded by their neighbours, able to go home when they had had enough, and vocal in defence of their rights and their pay. The regular army was shunned by respectable English workers: between June and December 1803, recruiting sergeants scouring the country could induce only 3,481 men to enlist.⁴³ That so much manpower was engaged in home defence meant that the regular army was always far shorter of men than the French.

Still, the outcome is astonishing. By 1805, about 800,000 men were doing some form of armed service – 20 per cent of the active male population. This is comparable with the ‘total wars’ of the twentieth century, and was a far higher proportion than in any other country – the government calculated that France had only 7 per cent.⁴⁴ Organization depended on the ‘old regime’ system of amateur local government: lords lieutenant (at least one of whom relied on his wife as secretary), justices of the peace, parsons and parish officers. The system began to buckle under the strain, but its achievement testifies to the strength and initiative of local communities, which remained the bedrock of British governance until the 1930s. This low-key mobilization is often considered an archaic sign of weakness compared with the mass propaganda and compulsion of France’s ‘total war’ effort. It would be better seen as the deliberately ‘anti-total’ precursor of the way liberal states would fight in the twentieth century.

NO COMMON WAR

No common war we wage – our native land
Is menac’d by a murderous, ruthless band;
The Throne and Altar by their Chief o’erturned,
And at his feet one half the prostrate world!
‘Plunder, and Rape, and Death’s’ the hostile cry,
‘Fire to your towns – to Britons slavery!’

Britons, strike home! Avenge your Country’s cause,
Protect your KING, your LIBERTIES, and LAWS!⁴⁵

Certain themes were staples of a huge British propaganda campaign. The constitution protected the rights of rich and poor alike, whereas a Napoleonic conquest would deprive the poor of everything: roast beef and even bread and cheese would be replaced by black bread and soupe-maigre. French law and language would be imposed. The revolution, even under Napoleon, was an enemy of Christianity. Invasion would bring pillage and rape – a reiterated fear: ‘He promises to enrich his soldiers with our property: To glut their lust with our wives and daughters.’⁴⁶ Given the conduct of French armies in Hanover and Italy, this was, if lurid, scarcely fanciful. Napoleon’s own deeds in Egypt were emphasized: the massacre of 2,000 Turkish prisoners, and the poisoning of some of his own plague-stricken troops. Alarm was balanced by confidence: history presaged victory, as at Agincourt and Blenheim. Henry V played to excited audiences in London. Songs and cartoons portrayed Napoleon as both sinister and absurd, drawing on conventional francophobe mockery.

Across the Channel, a similar diet of songs, cartoons, poems and exhortations prepared for the effort of invasion. Amiens erected a triumphal arch proclaiming ‘The Road to England’. Napoleon had victory medals struck inscribed ‘made in London’. History here conjured up Joan of Arc and William the Conqueror – the Bayeux tapestry was displayed in Paris. Invasion would be easy – ‘It’s only a step from Calais to Dover.’ The English would be busy drinking tea. ‘The whole of Europe charges you, in the name of outraged humanity, with the punishment of that perfidious nation. You will wreak vengeance on England, in the heart of London.’⁴⁷

A central theme of wartime propaganda against Republican and Napoleonic France was that ordinary people had as much to lose as the ruling elite.

British planners, under the Duke of York, consulted the records of the 1588 defence against the Armada and produced a thorough scheme. A flotilla of small craft would intercept the invasion fleet. What the French nicknamed ‘Bulldogs’, the famous Martello towers (copied from an original the navy had found tough opposition at Mortella in Corsica), were planned to cause havoc on the beaches. Massive new fortifications were begun at Dover, including the Grand Shaft, a triple circular staircase down which troops could rush to the beaches. The Royal Military Canal, mostly dug by the summer of 1805, cut off the Romney Marshes. Warning would be given both by traditional beacons and a more sophisticated telegraph system connecting Plymouth, Portsmouth, Deal, Yarmouth and London. If the French broke inland, the horde of volunteers was to slow them down, while the country was ‘driven’ of animals, vehicles and supplies, and roads broken up by civilian pioneers. Non-combatants would be evacuated, taking with them ‘a change of linen, and one blanket for each person, wrapped up in the coverlid of your bed, and . . . all the food in your possession’.⁴⁸ Mobile forces would harass the invaders day and night. Meanwhile, 113,000 men would be hurrying from all over the country in wagons and carriages as well as on foot to ten rendezvous points north and west of London, the largest being Stilton and Northampton. Defence lines were planned south of London. Dams were built ready to flood the Lea Valley. Coal and flour stocks were gathered for a siege, and Pickfords were engaged to transport them. Plans were made to carry the Bank of England’s gold reserves to Worcester. If the worst came to the worst, the fight would carry on north of the capital. One small incident shows how primed the country was. In August 1805 someone mistakenly lit a warning beacon in Yorkshire: before the error was realized, the Rotherham Volunteers had mustered, gathered their wagons, and marched twenty miles towards the coast.⁴⁹

In March 1805 the French began to move. Villeneuve’s fleet successfully escaped from Toulon and feinted towards the Caribbean, with Nelson in pursuit as Napoleon had planned. They then raced back to rendezvous with their Spanish allies prior to sailing up the Channel to escort the invasion fleet. Napoleon, keyed up with excitement, went to Boulogne: ‘The English don’t know what they’re in for.’ The troops, after much practice, could supposedly embark in an hour and a half. On 26 July he tried to embue Villeneuve with his own determination: ‘I count on your zeal, your patriotism, your hatred for that power that has been oppressing us for forty generations . . . Your very arrival, without a doubt, makes us masters of England.’⁵⁰ The French and Spanish could have assembled a numerically superior fleet in the Channel in the second week of August, to cover Napoleon’s invasion. But this required not only good luck and weather, but also that the Allied fleets and the whole infrastructure should display the same speed and efficiency as the British. Villeneuve was first delayed in Spain by a shortage of supplies, and then lost his advantage in numbers as the British squadrons mustered. Besides, he was convinced, probably rightly, that ‘whatever I do I cannot expect to succeed . . . We manoeuvre badly, our ships are slow, our rigging crude and worn out’, while the British were ‘manoeuvrable, skilful, enterprising and full of confidence’. Napoleon was furious at Villeneuve’s hesitation when ‘the destiny of the world’ was in the balance: all France needed were ‘two or three admirals ready to die’. On 22 August he wrote to Villeneuve, ‘England is ours. We are all ready, everything is embarked. Get here within 48 hours and it’s all over.’⁵¹

Continental politics intervened. Russia, followed by Austria, was thinking of renewing the war in a ‘third coalition’ with Britain. If Napoleon’s army met serious resistance in England, they would certainly attack, though if he could take London quickly no Continental power would dare to challenge him. He quietly halted further troop movements towards the Channel, and on 23 August summarized the situation to Talleyrand:

J.M.W. Turner, ‘The Battle of Trafalgar’: the climax, though not the end, of more than a century of maritime conflict.

The more I think about the European situation, the more I see that decisive action is urgent . . . If [Villeneuve] follows his orders, joins the Brest fleet and comes into the Channel, there is still time: I am master of England. But if my admirals hesitate . . . my only course is to wait for winter and cross in the boats – a risky operation. In that case, I deal with the most urgent first; I break camp and, on 1st Vendémiaire I’m in Germany with 200,000 men.⁵²

Two days later he learned that Villeneuve had retreated to Cadiz: the invasion was off. Napoleon stayed in Boulogne until early September to conceal his change of plan. The Army of England, renamed the Grande Armée, was marching ‘to fight England in Germany’ as Napoleon put it, where it would win its most brilliant victories far from the White Cliffs. At Ulm, on 17 October 1805, free from the vagaries of winds, tides and admirals, he surrounded an Austrian army and forced its bemused commander to surrender. He entered Vienna, and attended the first night of Fidelio in the imperial box at the opera.

Four days after Ulm, Villeneuve and his Spanish allies, ordered back to the Mediterranean by Napoleon, were caught by the prowling Nelson off Cape Trafalgar. It was a one-sided battle, with two-thirds of the Franco-Spanish fleet of thirty-three ships of the line being captured or destroyed by the twenty-nine British at a cost of only 448 British lives – and Nelson’s own. His death at the moment of victory – similar to that of Wolfe at Quebec, and also painted by Benjamin West – created a model hero for the age, combining audacity, vulnerability and pathos. Nelson did not save England from imminent invasion: Napoleon was in Vienna. Feelings of salvation, however, inspired a grateful nation, and (though perhaps few of the participants know it) it still celebrates annually at the Last Night of the Proms.^* As Admiral St Vincent put it drily, ‘I do not say the French will not come. I only say they will not come by sea.’ Yet Napoleon returned to planning a surprise crossing in 1807 and again in 1811, and he developed Antwerp as a great arsenal and base, which provoked a disastrous British attack in 1809. So Britain continued to prepare for invasion: most of the new defences of the south coast – including seventy-four Martello towers and the massive fortifications of Dover – were built after Trafalgar, and many of the defences of the Thames estuary and London were still being built at the time of Waterloo.⁵³

Five weeks after Trafalgar, on 2 December, came Austerlitz. Napoleon with 73,000 men surrounded a combined Russo-Austrian army of 85,000, led by its two emperors, and killed, wounded or captured a third of them. It was his most complete victory and the most intimidating proof of French military dominance. The War of the Third Coalition was over as soon as it had begun.

There was a British casualty of Austerlitz. Pitt, ill for some time, largely owing to overwork and stress treated with port, died on 23 January 1806 at the age of forty-seven, having been prime minister for nearly eighteen years. Austerlitz, the ‘overthrow of all his hopes and labours for the rescue of Europe’, as his private secretary put it, hastened his death. He had formulated a comprehensive plan for the future of the Continent: ‘Roll up the map of Europe’, he is supposed to have said on hearing of Austerlitz. ‘It will not be wanted these ten years.’ The great French diplomat and historian Albert Sorel called Pitt ‘the one great opponent the French Revolution and Napoleon encountered’.⁵⁴ Yet although he inherited some of his father’s prestige, he was not a natural war leader. Many have thought him not even a good one. His ambitions were for political and financial reform, which war caused him to abandon. He tended, when faced with difficult wartime decisions, to reflect, procrastinate, and seek more information. He disliked upsetting close colleagues, and this too led to evasiveness and delay. ‘He was one of the most eloquent luminous blunderers with which any people was ever afflicted . . . At the close of every brilliant display [of oratory] an expedition failed or a Kingdom fell, and by the time his Style had gained the summit of perfection Europe was degraded to the lowest abyss of Misery.’⁵⁵ Not only in France, but also in Britain, ‘the shyest man alive’ was accused of diabolical conspiracies and lust for power. But his strengths outweighed his weaknesses. He was hard to cast as a fanatic or warmonger: he delayed war in 1792, favoured negotiation, and supported peace in 1802. Although prone to ups and downs, he had fundamental self-confidence. He was honest and selfless – he had no life outside politics – and inspired loyalty, even reverence, among his colleagues. And he expressed all this in compelling oratory founded on reason and conscience. In short, he was pretty well the opposite of Napoleon.

Were he and Wordsworth right in thinking that Britain, with all its faults, represented ‘Earth’s best hopes’ and, eventually, Europe’s salvation? We shall leave the value judgements until later. But after 1805 it was the sole barrier against French world hegemony.

RELICS OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

The Colonne de la Grande Armée, three miles from the centre of Boulogne on the road to Calais, commemorates a non-invasion. The marble column, fifty-three metres high, was begun as early as November 1804 amid the main camp of the Army of England, but – like many Napoleonic monuments – was finished only after the 1830 revolution brought many of his followers back to power. Badly damaged during the Second World War, it was restored by a subscription from members of the Légion d’Honneur. The top of the column affords a fine view of the cliffs of Dover.

The Royal Military Depot, Weedon, Northamptonshire, was begun in 1803. The site is on an ancient route through the heart of England, not far from the battlefields of Bosworth, Naseby and Edge Hill and close to what is now the Watford Gap service station on the M1 motorway. There Watling Street adjoins the Grand Junction Canal – the ancient Roman road meeting the modern link with the Black Country arms industry. A branch of the canal leads through portcullised guardhouses to a fortified arms depot, whose ranks of vast red-brick warehouses dwarf the cottages and pubs of the village. Weedon stored arms for 200,000 men, cannon, and 1,000 tons of gunpowder to sustain resistance if London fell. A small Royal Pavilion was built for George III and his family, proof of determination to fight on.⁵⁶ Weedon remained an ordnance depot for more than 150 years. The pavilion was demolished in 1972, the rest sold off in the 1980s as miscellaneous warehousing. The buildings, which have the functional elegance of their time, are now entirely anonymous. Closed to the public and ‘awaiting development’, Weedon’s oblivion is the perfect non-memorial to a world historic event that never happened.

Could it have happened? Napoleon’s 1805 plan had huge flaws, rooted in his deafness to professional advice, systematic underestimation of the enemy, and stubborn refusal to comprehend that sailing ships could not be manoeuvred like cavalry regiments. The naval historian N.A.M. Rodger comments witheringly that Napoleon ‘was unwilling to believe that Ganteaume [commander of the Brest fleet] could only sail . . . on a wind which would make it impossible for Villeneuve to come to him, or either of them to get up Channel. He was unwilling to believe that any wind which would move the battleships would be too much for the landing craft.’⁵⁷ Had Villeneuve risked everything, he would probably have met an earlier Trafalgar in the Channel. Even if he had somehow reached Boulogne, it is unsure that Napoleon could have got his army successfully across: many French sailors feared half the boats would founder, and British defences were formidable. So Villeneuve’s fears may have prevented a swift end to Napoleon’s career. The rational conclusion is that Napoleon’s plan was near impossible. Yet he was certainly ready to take the gamble. In his own words, ‘If we control the crossing for twelve hours, England is dead.’⁵⁸ Can we be completely sure he was wrong?

The Whale and the Elephant

The fates seem to have decided to prove to us that, if they have granted us hegemony of the land, they have made our rivals the rulers of the waves.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE⁵⁹

Napoleon could not reverse Trafalgar and the British had no answer to Austerlitz. Never before had each country managed such complete dominance in its respective sphere, with an aura of invincibility that was itself a potent weapon. In earlier wars, as we have seen, British armies fought with success in Germany and the Low Countries. As recently as 1779–81, the French navy had simultaneously threatened Britain and protected America. Yet the 1805 stalemate was the logical culmination of a century of conflict, and to examine it more closely sheds light not only on the Napoleonic wars but on the entire Franco-British struggle.

Gillray’s view of the global war between sea-power and land-power.

THE WHALE

We are a small spot in the ocean without territorial consequence, and our own power and dignity as well as the safety of Europe, rests on our being the paramount commercial and naval power of the world.
HENRY DUNDAS, Secretary of State for War⁶⁰

The Royal Navy had become by 1805 one of the most effective instruments of war there has ever been. During the whole period of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars it lost only ten ships (including one line-of-battle ship) to enemy action, against 377 enemy ships (including 139 line-of-battle ships) it captured or destroyed. So many captured vessels were incorporated into the Royal Navy – 245, including eighty-three battleships – that French naval historians have commented that Napoleon’s toiling shipyards were largely serving the Admiralty.⁶¹ The Royal Navy ceased to have rivals. This was not a matter of course. Only towards the end of the contest did British sea power become overwhelming, the consequence of ‘the largest, longest, most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society’, and which left few aspects of national life unaffected.⁶²

Unless Britain could dominate the surrounding sea it would be wide open to invasion. Geography gave certain advantages. England has better harbours in the Channel, able to shelter a fleet, while the French had no base adequate for an invasion fleet and no safe retreat from a battle or a storm – until the invention of reinforced concrete and steam dredging. On the other hand, France has easier access to the Atlantic, from Brest, and hence both to Ireland and beyond. Both sides worked to improve on nature. Britain forced the closure of Dunkirk and fought to keep the French away from the great harbours of the Low Countries. France has two coasts and hence a navy divided between Brest and Toulon. Admittedly, this cut both ways, for the British had to keep watch on the Toulon fleet to stop it breaking loose and taking them by surprise. The acquisition of Gibraltar in 1713 ‘overturned’ the strategic position by hampering the junction of the French fleets.⁶³ Britain’s precarious occupation of Minorca, brief acquisition of Corsica, and later possession of Malta – the spark to the final Anglo-French war – were all efforts to gain a Mediterranean fulcrum. The tussles for strategic harbours in North America, the West Indies and the Indian Ocean were essential steps to supremacy. Sailing fleets in distant seas required roomy, deep and sheltered anchorages, stores of spars, rope, sails and ammunition, and a large hinterland for fresh food and water. As France and her allies lost them, they lost the very possibility of naval action.

The supreme command of each navy differed fundamentally. French navy ministers were generally legally trained administrators. The Admiralty was at least partly controlled by naval officers, and there were also many in Parliament. French naval officers – and French historians – have stressed the superiority of the British system, even if perhaps exaggerating the efficacy of the Board of Admiralty. Nevertheless, the Admiralty did contrast with the general laxity of eighteenth-century administrations. As one job-seeker was firmly reminded, ‘Capacity is so little necessary for most employments that you seem to forget that there’s one where it is absolutely so – viz. the Admiralty.’⁶⁴ The French navy suffered from being controlled by landsmen. The worst example is Napoleon’s disastrous invasion strategy of 1805. His hectoring of Villeneuve before Trafalgar caused him to accept a doomed battle and later take his own life. Some French fleets were ordered into action with practically no training, and carrying a high proportion of landsmen or river boatmen. There was less danger of the British navy being given impossible missions. ‘War at sea was too serious a business to be left to politicians.’⁶⁵

The word ‘strategy’ did not yet exist, and naval operations were not based on general theory or staff planning. But there were ground rules, and innovations. Most of the British navy always remained in European waters to defend the islands from invasion, and control the routes connecting Europe with the rest of the world. Only the West Indies were important enough to bring the main fleets to fight across the ocean, and then only once: the battle of the Saints in 1782. In the 1740s, Admirals Anson and Hawke pioneered a Western Squadron based at Plymouth to dominate the Atlantic approaches by long patrols at sea, and this finally proved a decisive instrument of European and world power.⁶⁶ Blockades of French ports were gradually tightened. These methods required the British to remain constantly at sea – Admiral Collingwood did not set foot on shore for eight years. This depended on better health and better food for the crews. By the Napoleonic period, unrelenting blockade of French ports was so effective that it permanently reshaped the French economy. The French, between rare fleet offensives, usually to cover invasion attempts, resorted to the guerre de course, attacks on merchant shipping. As well as providing some of France’s most famous naval heroes, this inflicted damage on British trade. But it could not defeat Britain, which lost only 2 per cent of its merchant fleet during the Napoleonic wars. The French themselves suffered far more: in 1803 they had 1,500 merchant ships, but by 1812 only 179 – compared with Britain’s 24,000.⁶⁷

Both navies grew in each successive war: against Louis XIV the British navy had about 170 ships and 40,000 men; against Napoleon it had over 900 ships and 130,000 men. After the Glorious Revolution, the British always had more ships than the French. The French, like the British on land, needed allies: usually the Spanish (the other main colonial rivals of Britain), at times the Dutch, and occasionally smaller maritime powers such as the Danes and the Americans. In the 1780s, thanks to Choiseul, the allies had more ships than the British. The French kept building, and reached their maximum strength as late as 1796, when, with their allies, they considerably outnumbered the British. Moreover, the British navy was necessarily dispersed, protecting colonies and merchant shipping, blockading French ports, and guarding against a French attack, which increased wear and tear. The French could remain in port and choose their moment. As wooden ships needed frequent maintenance, the British needed more ships to ensure a margin of safety: roughly a quarter of the fleet was in dock around the turn of the century. After Trafalgar, Napoleon conscripted satellite countries into a naval race and tried to counteract the blockade of France’s ports by developing Antwerp, Genoa and Venice. Producing poor-quality ships in quantity could not threaten British dominance, though it proves that Napoleon’s global ambitions were no less than those of Choiseul and Castries.

A navy required elaborate and expensive organization. The Royal Navy was ‘the largest industrial unit of its day in the western world, and by far the most expensive and demanding of all the administrative responsibilities of the State’.⁶⁸ Most basically, vast quantities of seasoned timber were required. Although both sides had to struggle to secure it, the French were generally less successful, making this a ‘congenital weakness’.⁶⁹ A medium-sized battleship of 1,900 tons required 3,000 tons of raw timber – the equivalent of 3–4,000 mature trees.⁷⁰ The British navy in 1790 was built from well over half a million trees. Mature oaks of certain sizes and shapes (preferably from Sussex and Burgundy respectively) were needed for structural parts; elm for planking; conifers of a certain age and type for masts and spars; varieties of tree that would resist rot and worm, and which would not shatter too badly under cannon-fire – for wood splinters were the principal killer. Teak, otherwise excellent, produced deadly splinters. Britain and France maintained a large domestic supply of oak – Admiral Collingwood always carried a pocketful of acorns for planting in suitable spots, and some of his oak woods still survive. But special needs had to be met from the Baltic, the Mediterranean, North America, Asia and eventually Australasia (where a landing party were eaten by Maori in 1809 while loading kauri). Capturing or destroying enemy supplies was an important task. When Hood burned the mature timber stocks at Toulon in 1793 it was a ‘gigantic catastrophe’ for the French.⁷¹ The Pope’s willingness to sell oak from central Italy to the British was one reason for his confrontation with Napoleon; and an important reason for French annexation of Dalmatia was its forests of mountain oak, including large quantities already cut for the Royal Navy. Most precious were great conifers for masts. Pyrenean fir – hauled down vertiginous paths cut by galley slaves – was too dry, and broke. A French officer complained that the British could hoist more sail and risk getting closer to shore than the French, ‘intimidated by the quality of our masts’.⁷² Baltic pine was better but the supply was vulnerable; and British development of Canadian pine eventually gave great advantage. Each side used diplomacy, money and force to secure its own supplies and deny those of the enemy. The British bid up prices of Baltic timber and paid in cash. A French agent admitted that ‘of all European consumers, the English admiralty is the richest, the safest, the fairest’, thus ensuring preferential supply.⁷³Navies were gargantuan consumers: of hemp (ten tons for an average battleship), tar, linen (Aberdeen had a huge sail-making industry, later converted to linoleum), copper (which founded the wealth of Swansea), iron, and specialized food and drink, which had to be of guaranteed quality and capable of long storage. Failures here would be literally deadly, and spoilage had been practically eliminated by the Admiralty by the 1750s.⁷⁴ A system of naval dockyards, supplemented in Britain by private yards, and a highly skilled workforce laboured constantly to keep the fleets up to strength.

It is often said that French ships were better designed and built. This is broadly a myth. At certain periods the French built more powerful ships. Some were faster, but more fragile and leakier – the British commonly rebuilt and strengthened captured vessels. British ships were built sturdily for long voyages, storms, battles and blockades. They were ahead in important innovations. Copper-bottoming – ‘they are sheathed in copper and we in oysters’ said a French officer⁷⁵ – prevented rapid destruction by tropical shipworms and increased speeds by at least 20 per cent – a decisive tactical advantage. Bored iron cannon and large-calibre carronades increased firepower. Sustained espionage – abetted by unscrupulous British businessmen, including some of the most famous (see above, pages 83–4) – helped them learn crucial techniques, but they lacked the industrial infrastructure to exploit them. For example, the Wilkinson brothers legally provided coppering techniques in the 1780s, but the French could not make them work, and had to reuse old copper sheets, handled by convict labour because of the toxic dust. The Royal Navy pioneered mechanized mass production. Probably the world’s first assembly line made ships’ biscuits. Early machine tools made millions of light, low-friction pulley blocks for rigging, which saved manpower, weight and wear. It took the French, despite successful espionage, nearly forty years to copy them. By then the Royal Navy had moved on. Four years after the French naval engineer Marc Brunel arrived in Britain, his designs for block-making machines were accepted by the Admiralty. By 1806, forty steam-powered machines were operating. Only a developed and innovative society could manage this level of technology and organization. By the end of the century most states were dropping out of the race, the vestiges of their fleets rotting.

The costs of navies were immense, and when necessary Britain was willing and able to spend much more – about three times as much as the French at the height of the Seven Years War. During the wars against Louis XIV, the British navy cost £1.8 million per year; against Napoleon, over £15 million per year. Navies cost more than armies. A battleship was the most complex artefact in existence, and it needed constant maintenance. Over her lifetime, HMS Victory cost nearly £400,000 – the annual budget of a small state.⁷⁶ A modest naval squadron had more artillery than both sides at Austerlitz. Naval budgets had profound political consequences. From 1763 to 1783 the French navy built 700,000 tons of new ships, absorbing one-third of state spending, whereas the British slashed annual spending in the 1760s from £7 million to £1.8 million.⁷⁷ The consequence was American independence. The French continued to build rapidly until 1792: the strain contributed to the French revolution.

It was manpower, however, that most severely limited size and effectiveness. No country could afford a large standing navy, and all required a rapid influx of men in wartime. Given the skill and toughness demanded, they needed experienced seafarers to form the nucleus of crews. Warships needed big crews: 1,000 men for a line-of-battle ship, compared with twenty or thirty for an average merchant ship. So a navy required a large merchant marine to supply a pool of sailors, most of whom would be enlisted during a major war. This, as much as economic and financial considerations, is why rival states were so concerned to protect and increase their oceanic trade and fisheries. Access to the Newfoundland cod fishery, which employed 10,000 French sailors, was a contentious issue from the 1600s until the Entente Cordiale of 1904. The triangular trade based on slaves and sugar was also seen as a strategic interest: from the 1720s to the 1780s, the French share grew faster. Trade share and naval power were intimately connected: to lose one was to lose the other. France’s inability in the 1780s to become the main trading partner of its protégé the United States was an irremediable geopolitical failure. The pool of seamen available always numerically favoured the British. The French had some 50,000 seamen (about the same as Holland), the British 100,000. Yet the islands needed more sailors, and certainly had no surplus. For example, the coal trade from Newcastle to London (in which James Cook began his career) was an important source of men for the navy, but it was also vital to the economy. So the navy in wartime fought the merchant marine and privateers for men: the demand was two or three times the supply. Foreign sailors filled the gaps. Hence the Impress Service – the notorious ‘Press Gangs’ – were more often victims than perpetrators of violence. They were regularly attacked by mobs, and even imprisoned by local magistrates where there was a strong ship-owning interest, Liverpool being notorious. However, the often praised French system of maritime conscription was even less effective, and naval service was dreaded there.⁷⁸

Both sides (Britain more efficiently) seized enemy merchant ships and sailors at the start of every war – or even before, accused the indignant French. Two years into the Seven Years War the British had captured some 20,000 Frenchmen. By 1800 nearly all France’s pre-war sea-going population were dead or prisoners.⁷⁹ To the anger of the French (and their historians), the British kept sailors imprisoned rather than exchanging them, and, they alleged, in deliberately unhealthy conditions. However, the French navy itself was bad at protecting its precious sailors’ health, and the century was marked by a succession of sanitary disasters. The British, owing to greater sea-going experience, practised stringent hygiene, and improved nutrition and treatment. Fresh food was regularly issued to prevent scurvy, and lemon juice rations were introduced in the 1790s. French ships were notoriously filthy, and they lagged far behind in nutrition.

Quality of manpower was decisive, because the British rarely had numerical superiority in battle: Jervis was greatly outnumbered at Cape St Vincent; at the Nile, numbers were about equal, and at Trafalgar the Franco-Spanish were more numerous. A French naval historian has suggested that the officers of the two eighteenth-century navies were ‘among the most remarkable intellectual and political elites that Europe has ever produced’.⁸⁰ However, there was great difference in their effectiveness. The British officer corps was relatively meritocratic and highly experienced, often first going to sea in childhood. It produced a succession of outstanding commanders. From Anson to Nelson, they were capable of administering a fleet, navigating round the world, hauling on a rope and leading a boarding party. As a whole, French officers were less competent. Under the Bourbons they were excessively exclusive, with a high proportion of Provençal and Breton nobility (having wonderful names like Coëtnempren de Kersaint and Du Couédic de Kergoualen) and ridden by snobbery, faction and insubordination: ‘in the navy, they all hate each other’, concluded one navy minister.⁸¹ Some of the best commanders, including Grasse and Suffren, started early in the navy of the Knights of Malta. But many blue-blooded French officers were elderly yet inexperienced, negligent and incompetent, as shown by the frequency of accidents. One notorious captain rammed and severely damaged two of his own side in two successive days in April 1782, including the flagship – his fourteenth collision in a year. The resulting loss of speed – for Grasse considered that ‘the honour of the flag’ would not permit abandoning the damaged ships – brought on the disastrous battle of the Saints.⁸² Officer cadets, the Garde-Marine, were trained in the classroom. If their theoretical knowledge was superior to that of British midshipmen, they gained little sea-going experience. They learned dancing, but not swimming. The revolution changed the system, but for the worse. Of 1,600 officers, 1,200 resigned or were expelled, and they were never adequately replaced.

Good crews were made by practice. British sailors spent far more time at sea, and were able to train as ships’ companies and as squadrons. Popular traditions about appalling conditions in the British navy are largely mythical. Warships were safer, cleaner and less uncomfortable than merchant ships. Food and drink were good and plentiful – about 5,000 calories a day, including a pound of bread, a pound of meat and a gallon of beer. Discipline was tough, but excessive harshness was frowned upon by the Admiralty. Brutal officers and petty officers were beaten up on shore, met with nasty accidents, or were even sued by their men. As N.A.M. Rodger remarks, the navy’s successes are hard to explain if it was ‘a sort of floating concentration camp’.⁸³ Many seamen were volunteers, and good officers had loyal crews who followed them from ship to ship. There was widespread desertion, but largely because of high wartime pay offered by merchant masters and privateers. The navy, however, offered prize money. A witticism attributed to the famous corsair Surcouf remains proverbial in France. A British naval officer supposedly reproached him for fighting for money, unlike the British who fought for honour: ‘Each of us fights,’ he replied, ‘for what he lacks most.’ The story is highly improbable, for British sailors of all ranks were avid prize-seekers. The profit made some officers very rich, and was an incentive for all ranks to be alert, enterprising and aggressive, although it sometimes distracted them from less lucrative duties. ‘You can’t think how keen our men are,’ wrote Boscawen in 1756; ‘the hope of prize money makes them happy, a signal for a sail brings them all on deck’.⁸⁴

From mid-century – with 1776–82 an interlude – British confidence grew and that of the French waned. The latter became justifiably frightened of the Channel, and repeatedly backed away from invading Britain. Aggression became an imperative of British naval culture and policy, as the execution of Admiral Byng in 1757 for ‘failing to do his utmost to destroy the enemy’ (which carried a mandatory death sentence) made unmistakable. British admirals took risks to win crushing victories. In 1759 Hawke pursued the French fleet among the rocks of Quiberon Bay. At the battle of the Saints, in 1782, for the first time (perhaps accidentally, perhaps inspired by a new Essay on Naval Tactics) the British drove through the enemy battle line rather than sailing in parallel. This, which demanded calculated risk and skill, became the approved tactic. In 1798 Nelson sailed between the anchored French fleet and the shore at Aboukir Bay in ‘the first battle of annihilation’ the French navy had ever experienced.⁸⁵ Tactics were based on forcing close action, firing fast and inflicting maximum damage, which demanded discipline, practice and confidence. The adoption in the 1780s of the large-calibre short-range carronade reinforced this method. Stress was laid on gunnery practice, for speed of firing was decisive. There was much experimentation with firing mechanisms and gun-laying systems. The effective firepower of the British by the 1790s has been reckoned as two or three times that of the French. The French in the late 1770s adopted the opposite course of keeping a distance and firing high at masts and rigging – a defensive ploy to permit escape. They justified this by stressing the importance of completing the mission, rather than getting involved in messy battles, which, said the famous Admiral d’Estaing, ‘produce much more noise than profit’.

The outcome is shown by the grisly and unambiguous evidence of casualties: on average about six times as many men were killed on the French side. At Trafalgar, where many of the French and Spanish crews were barely trained, more than ten times as many were killed or drowned. The French Redoutable, engaged by the larger Victory and two other ships, had 571 of her 643 crew killed or wounded. Of 15,000 Frenchmen engaged, only 4,000 escaped.⁸⁶ French and Spanish sailors often abandoned their guns and lay down as British ships with fully loaded broadsides came within ‘pistol shot’ – sometimes as close as twenty feet. The prospect of being boarded was equally intimidating, as the Royal Navy were ‘by far the most formidable close-quarter fighters of any army or navy’.⁸⁷ French officers and men increasingly gave up the unequal contest: three-quarters of all losses under the Republic and even more under the Empire were surrenders. The only major French naval success after 1789 was won by the army, when during the terrible winter of 1795 a cavalry force captured the Dutch fleet trapped in the ice.

THE ELEPHANT

Suppose there should arise in Europe a people endowed with energy, with genius, with resources, with government; a people which combined the virtues of austerity with a national militia and which added to them a fixed plan of aggrandizement; knowing how to make war at small cost and subsist on its victories . . . We should see that people subdue its neighbours . . . Among men like these let there arise . . . some vast genius. He will . . . put himself at the head of the machine and give the impulse of its movement.
GEN. COMTE DE GUIBERT, 1772⁸⁸

French land power is the mirror image of British sea power. France had a large advantage in men, being during nearly all the eighteenth century the most populous state in Europe, and it could only be resisted by coalitions. Napoleon’s notorious quip on the numbers killed in one battle – ‘One Paris night will replace that lot’ – shows an indifference to manpower losses that was not confined to him.⁸⁹ France had built up arsenals and barracks, which enabled it to maintain a large standing army. Frontier adjustments and elaborate fortifications made invasion of its heartland almost unthinkable, and nearly all its wars were fought on foreign soil. The army, the principal service of the State, enjoyed prestige, and its officer corps, though it included courtly nonentities, always had men of outstanding ability too. The British army, in contrast, was always second to the navy, was regarded with ideological suspicion, and was always rapidly run down in peacetime. The need to rebuild almost from scratch at the start of every war – worse even than the fluctuating fortunes of the French navy – was its greatest handicap. It was never in the forefront of technical advances, and its officers were amateurish. It looked abroad for guidance, not least to France, where some of its most famous commanders were trained. French Protestants provided expertise during the first half of the century, most notably Jean-Louis (later Sir John and Earl) Ligonier, commander-in-chief in 1757 and one of the architects of the Seven Years War. When Arthur Wellesley was at the Angers academy in 1786, there were more than 100 other British pupils. In the 1800s the British were happy to take advice from the émigré General Dumouriez in planning defence against invasion.

The Seven Years War, however, was a disaster for the French army, too complacent in its pre-eminence. Defeat led to reflection, debate and reform during the 1770s, encouraged by Choiseul. The artillery was standardized and redesigned by Gribeauval, who created lighter, more mobile cannons able to manoeuvre on the battlefield in batteries and fire faster. Tactical experiments, switching infantry from columns for movement into lines for combat, were carried out and embodied in the 1788 drill book. Guibert, abrilliant example of that quintessentially French phenomenon, the intellectual soldier, developed the idea of forming an army into autonomous divisions to permit rapid movement and flexible manoeuvre. It was, however, the revolution, and then the Empire, that gave these ideas their true significance, and created the conditions that enabled the French army to conquer Europe. Traditional military tactics, based on long, slowly moving lines of men, required not just discipline but passivity: soldiers, and even most officers, were not paid to think. The new ideas required initiative and motivation at junior levels. The revolution made this conceivable, and it brought forward officers, including reformist nobles such as Guibert’s friend Dumouriez, and soldier-politicians such as the Jacobin minister of war Lazare Carnot, who were eager to put the ideas into practice. It also promoted a generation of young officers who had been brought up on these theories – including Bonaparte, who had studied them with characteristic intensity.⁹⁰

The revolution drew deeply on manpower reserves. The levies of the 1790s, impelled by emergency, ideological fervour and brute compulsion, produced an armed horde larger than any rival. Their way of fighting reflected their strengths and weaknesses. Undrilled soldiers went forward as skirmishers to take pot-shots at the immobile enemy. Unskilled masses with bayonets were crowded into columns, crude approximations of Guibert’s idea, and, at the cost of heavy losses – 20 per cent casualties was routine – trampled over an outnumbered enemy. Eighteenth-century armies, expensive and highly drilled, tended to avoid battle except in certain circumstances, and did not try to annihilate a beaten enemy. But the revolutionary armies sought to drown the enemy in blood: they were exhorted to ‘fall in masses, like the ancient Gauls’, and ‘annihilate, exterminate, destroy the enemy once and for all’.⁹¹ A lethal process of natural selection eliminated incompetent and half-hearted officers, including such famous names as La Fayette. Dozens of generals were guillotined, but the Bourbon army bequeathed reserves of ambitious and ruthless commanders, drawn from its junior officers, NCOs and soldiers.

Under Napoleon, this raw material was honed, much of the work being done while training to invade England. The Empire, unlike its enemies, was harnessed for war under a single directing mind. What survived of the revolutionary army was given a new ethos. Napoleon created an ‘army of honour’.⁹² Its officers and long-service conscripts, including non-Frenchmen, owed their first loyalties to the Emperor and to their unit, sustained by medals for all ranks and meritocratic promotion. The French professed distaste for the ferocious corporal punishments practised in other armies, such as the flogging that was routine in the British.

Napoleon despised innovation for its own sake – rockets, balloons etc. – but he was a systematizer and an exhaustive planner. The changes originated by Gribeauval and Guibert were practised and applied. The divisional system, to which Napoleon added thecorps d’armée (composed of several divisions), provided armies of several hundred thousand men with articulations enabling them to disperse over hundreds of miles to forage and march and then come together to execute a complex plan on the battlefield. Napoleon increased the number of cannon, organized them into mobile batteries, and threw them into the thick of the action. The French coordinated skirmishers, fast-moving columns, mobile artillery and cavalry, outclassing passive linear formations, especially when made up of poorly trained or intimidated troops. Napoleon’s strategy was not to seize territory or strategic positions, as in earlier warfare, but to smash the enemy army. The results were devastating: from 1805 to 1809 at Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena-Auerstadt, Friedland, Aspern-Essling and Wagram, Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies were crushed. The British were hardly in the running.

France’s military effort after 1792 depended on exploiting the wealth, labour and blood of as much of Europe as it could seize. As expanding overseas trade increased both revenue and manpower for the British navy, so Continental conquest did for the French army. This meant quartering armies on foreign soil and at foreign expense, levying huge indemnities, conscripting foreign troops, and requisitioning food, drink, clothing and money. Let us consider one small example. In November 1793 the French Army of the Moselle occupied the tiny duchy of Zweibrücken. All oats, hay, straw, brandy, leather and weapons, 3,000 pairs of shoes and 500 pairs of boots were immediately demanded; the following day, all horses, cattle, sheep and harness; within forty-eight hours all copper, lead, iron and church bells; all cloth was to be made into uniforms by the inhabitants at their expense; and all the booty was to be taken away in requisitioned carts, along with 2 million livres in cash. After Napoleon’s victories in 1805–9, Austria was forced to pay 125 million francs, and Saxony 25 million. Prussia, the worst treated, was stripped of wealth equal to over sixteen years’ taxation. The effects of this impoverishment were such that in Berlin 75 per cent of newborn babies died, and the suicide rate rose sharply. Portugal was to pay 100 million francs, but was saved by the Peninsular War.⁹³ The French Republic and Empire usually made a profit from war, as Guibert had foretold.

Between 1794 and 1812, the French swept the Continent. Britain, with its lesser population and small, poorly trained army, was powerless. Throughout the century, the Franco-British struggle was also, usually, a Franco-Austrian struggle. During the previous two centuries, France and Austria had been at war with each other for more years, and had fought more battles, than any other states.⁹⁴ Britain’s ascent, and even survival, depended on France being embroiled in Continental wars. Austria had been France’s enemy since 1792. Its willingness to accept defeat, by abandoning its Netherlands provinces, dissolving the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and marrying the Habsburg archduchess Marie-Louise to Napoleon in 1810, cut Britain adrift. Napoleon’s diplomacy was helped by universal jealousy of Britain’s ever-growing seapower and wealth. Britain, many believed, was using European wars as an opportunity to monopolize global trade. In 1807 Napoleon met Tsar Alexander I on a raft in the River Niemann and signed the Treaty of Tilsit, sharing out Europe between them. Their first exchange of courtesies was ‘I hate the English as much as you do.’ ‘Then peace between us is made.’

So Britain was excluded from most of Europe. It had only six diplomatic outposts on the whole Continent. France, in contrast, had lost all its major colonies and overseas bases, and the fleets of its potential allies had also been dealt with, most ruthlessly by the attack on Copenhagen in 1807. The war went on. Britain still strengthened its home defences. France tirelessly built more ships. However, there was a crucial difference between military and naval power. Prolonged land warfare destroyed men, and the most combative armies became increasingly reliant on fresh recruits. Prolonged naval warfare ruined ships, so without endless spending and maintenance, navies literally rotted away. But it killed far fewer men, and sea-service and combat improved the effectiveness of crews. So as war continued, the superiority of the French army decreased, while that of the British navy increased.

For the time being there was stalemate. In 1809, as French power reached its zenith, Westminster was more preoccupied with the doings of the Duke of York’s mistress. Schroeder comments that not only could Napoleon not bring the British down, he could not even gain their full attention. The two nations needed more effective ways of hurting each other.

The Continental System versus the
Cavalry of St George

I want to conquer the sea by the power of the land.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE⁹⁵

Another year! – another deadly blow!
Another mighty Empire overthrown!
And We are left, or shall be left, alone;
The last that dare to struggle with the Foe.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, ‘November 1806’

Foreign trade

In November 1806, having demolished the Prussian army at Jena and occupied its capital, Napoleon turned against the British economy. The Berlin Decree of 21 November 1806 prohibited all trade with Britain, declared all British subjects on the Continent prisoners of war, and ordered the seizure of all merchandise from Britain or its colonies. This would turn the tables on ‘Carthage’, which, to the rage of the French and the jealousy of most of Europe, had been doing well out of the war.

Since 1790, Britain’s overseas trade had expanded by nearly 60 per cent, and colonial re-exports, mainly sugar and coffee, by 187 per cent. The merchant navy had increased from 1.4 to 1.8 million tons.⁹⁶ Its population was growing quickly. Domestic demand was strong. Agriculture had a larger acreage under the plough than at any time between the Middle Ages and 1940. The war did not halt the Industrial Revolution, and Britain was widening its economic lead over the Continent. The City had received a flood of capital seeking security, and rival financial centres, notably Amsterdam and Frankfurt, have never recovered. A bigger Stock Exchange was built. Moreover, as the huge expansion of the Port of London showed, large sums were earned from shipping and related activities such as insurance, of which the war gave Britain increasing dominance.

Britain’s gain had been France’s loss. France too had been an important and successful colonial trader until the 1790s. What changed this were the revolution and its wars, which disrupted the domestic economy and wrecked overseas trade. To raise money for war, the French were forced into a succession of destructive expedients at home and in conquered territories – confiscation, hyper-inflation and extortion. The biggest single loss came from the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue, but the sugar trade, like the rest, would have been lost anyway to the Royal Navy, whose blockade blighted the economies of the richest industrial and agricultural regions: Normandy, the Bordelais and the Rhône valley. Shipping, manufacturing and services were all devastated. The ports, including Bordeaux, Nantes, Le Havre and Marseilles, lost employment, investments and population. Many did not recover until well into the nineteenth century; some never really did. Traders turned against the revolution and Napoleon and, even more than in Lancashire and Yorkshire, pleaded for peace. We shall look later at the long-term effects on the French economy, society, and culture.

The maritime and commercial war had one great positive consequence: the abolition of the slave trade. An unprecedented campaign against slavery had grown up in Britain since the 1770s, and to a much lesser extent in France. The revolution and subsequent wars had halted prospects for abolition in Britain, and accelerated them in France. But Napoleon re-established slavery in law, and attempted to do so by force in the Caribbean. British abolitionists seized the opportunity, supported by the government, to ban most of the trade in 1806 as an act of war: to deprive the enemy of new slaves. Once this was accepted, the true motives of the abolitionists, which were religious and humanitarian, extended this in 1807 to a total ban on the trade.⁹⁷ A wish to show that Britain was ‘the morning star that enlightened Europe, and whose boast and glory was to grant liberty and life’ was also important, for it justified victory.⁹⁸

The British state could pay lavishly for war by taxing the generally buoyant domestic and trading economy. Britain fought the Republic and Napoleon – as it had the Bourbons – by turning money into military power. As in the past, it had begun by raising loans in the City. Pitt realized in 1797 that credit was at last reaching its limit, and that this war would have to be paid for increasingly from taxation. The ability of British governments to tax as well as borrow had astonished friends and enemies alike: it seemed always to be reaching the bounds of the possible. But Pitt, followed by Addington, went further. In 1799, for the first time, he imposed a tax on incomes. It was just and politic, said Pitt, that in a war defending property, property should pay. Most of the extra revenue raised after 1803 came from the income tax – £142 million. By 1814, the government was spending six times its pre-war budget – £100 million a year. This undeniably caused financial, economic and political tensions palpable until the 1840s. That it was possible without political revolt or economic disaster shows the general acceptance of the need to defeat Napoleon. It also shows the strength of the economy: government spending peaked at only 16 per cent of national income, compared with 50 per cent of GDP during the First World War.⁹⁹

Money bought allies. The anti-French Coalition powers mistrusted each other and haggled about money. Whitehall did not wish to hand out taxpayers’ money to governments that seemed unreliable and likely to use it on aggressive schemes of their own. So money was only sparingly provided in emergencies. Austria, for example, in 1795, 1797 and 1799 was only offered loans to be repaid after the war. But Austria, Prussia and Russia, viciously jealous of each other, were also outraged at what they saw as British plans to scoop up world trade while they did the fighting, and they demanded more. Pitt, thanks to the income tax, could loosen the purse-strings, and pay anyone who would join the fight, with no suggestion of repayment, at a generous rate of roughly £1 per soldier per month – still vastly less than British armies cost.¹⁰⁰

As early as 1803, Napoleon promised his Council of State that they would ‘consolidate on the Continent’: he would ‘form a complete coastal system and England will end up weeping tears of blood’.¹⁰¹ In 1806 and 1807 his land blockade was extended to Russia, Scandinavia, Prussia, Austria, Holland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The British government retaliated with Orders in Council in November 1807 extending its own existing blockade by forbidding any ship from any country to trade with Napoleonic Europe unless it first passed through a British port and paid a 25 per cent duty. Napoleon then decreed the confiscation of every ship that obeyed these orders.

Napoleon planned to mobilize the Continent against the islands, which meant ultimate French political and economic control of Europe, including allies and neutrals. He counted on British unpopularity making his plan acceptable. It involved restructuring the whole Continental market, turning it away from the hostile ocean. The future lay along the Rhine, through Switzerland, into northern Italy, rich territories from Antwerp to Milan that had now become parts of ‘France’. With British imports excluded, French industries would have privileged access to all parts of Europe in a one-way Common Market. Prospects for jobs and profits in favoured regions and industries won support for Napoleon which lasted throughout his reign, and even afterwards. Other regions suffered, including Catalonia, Holland and Scandinavia, but they were as likely to blame Britain as Napoleon. This war was fought from the crow’s-nests of British blockaders and privateers, and in the offices of 27,000 French customs officials from Hamburg to Trieste. The British hoped to provoke Europe to rebel against France; the French, to force Europe to help defeat Britain. George Canning, foreign secretary, admitted ‘we must not hide the fact from ourselves – we are hated throughout Europe’.¹⁰² In 1808 British exports slumped, and Napoleon proclaimed victory:

England, punished in the very source of her cruel policies, sees her merchandise rejected by the whole of Europe, and her ships loaded with useless riches, wandering on the vast seas which they once purported to rule, seeking in vain from the Sound to the Hellespont a port open to receive them.¹⁰³

A French vision of the British government struck with terror at the Berlin Decree.

Europe’s ports remained more open than he expected, however. Consumers had an insatiable appetite for tobacco, cotton cloth, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, spices and manufactures, and once prohibition raised the black-market price, merchants and smugglers rushed to supply them. The French discovery of beet sugar (of which, two centuries later, they remain the largest producers) made no difference. In 1809, British exports bounced back. Huge entrepots for smuggling were set up on Heligoland, seized by Britain in 1807 to supply north Germany and Holland, and in Gibraltar, Malta, Sicily and Salonica to supply Spain, Italy and Austria. Goods landed at Trieste travelled by mule train through Serbia and Hungary to Vienna and on to southern Germany, Switzerland and even France. ‘Sometimes goods one bought in Calais, coming from England seven leagues away, had done a detour equivalent to twice round the globe.’¹⁰⁴ Hundreds of thousands of smugglers were busy. Respectable merchants and bankers took part, and a Cologne company offered insurance cover. Solid citizens speculated on the prices of smuggled goods as on stocks and shares. High-ranking French officers sold immunity – French troops even escorted smugglers and fired on their own customs men.¹⁰⁵ Napoleon decided to make an example. Frankfurt, one of the main contraband trading centres, was surrounded by troops in November 1810. Millions of francs’ worth of suspect goods were confiscated or publicly burnt, devastating Frankfurt’s economy. Other cities saw similar bonfires of precious contraband. The repercussions were grave, though a run of bad harvests may have been equally to blame by raising food prices and bringing down workers’ living standards. The British economy staggered for a couple of years. A banking crisis hit London. The textile industries of the north were badly hit, and in 1811–12 the first outbreaks of machine-breaking – ‘Luddism’ – took place in the east Midlands. Demonstrators raised barricades in London. Corn had to be imported from France, which Napoleon allowed because it would earn gold.

But the exports Napoleon laboured to exclude from France and northern Europe flowed increasingly into the Mediterranean, North and South America and Iberia. The Continental System had not ruined Britain, but it did damage the Continent. All over Germany, Italy and in France itself confidence collapsed, loans went unpaid and banking houses failed. Resentment of French rule grew. The slump affected industry in Paris, where 40 per cent were unemployed. Napoleon gave up trying to eliminate British trade from Europe. Rather, he decided to take the business over. Licences for trade to and from Britain were given to French ships and merchants, but not to those of any ally or satellite. The desperate Bordeaux wine growers were able again to export to England. French troops in Poland wore English boots, and greatcoats woven in Yorkshire. Napoleon’s plan was to become the monopoly purveyor of British and colonial goods to the Continent, with prices on a level with the black market, and the profits filling his war chest. Thus, the Continental System became an attempt to enrich France as much as impoverish Britain, with the costs being borne by the rest of Europe.

The only way Napoleon could make this work was by extending his grip over more of Europe’s coastline and inland communications. More of Switzerland was annexed to control Alpine passes. So in 1809 was more of central Italy, to close the papal port of Ancona. That same year Trieste and Dalmatia were annexed from Austria. In 1810, Napoleon’s brother was made to abdicate the Dutch crown, and Holland became part of France, as beyond it did the Frisian coast and the Hanseatic ports of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck. Spain and Portugal were ordered to heel. Pressure was put on Russia, whose elites were smarting from the loss of grain and timber exports to Britain, and whose state finances were tottering. This would eventually contribute to hostilities between Napoleon and Russia. On the other hand, Britain’s sea blockade caused the United States to enter the war in July 1812 and attempt ineffectually to conquer Canada.

During these years both Britain and France experienced serious economic and social strain. Though the Continental System was probably never capable of ruining the British economy, it did damage manufacturing industries. A peace campaign had widespread support. It drew on economic distress; on a belief, strongest among Dissenters (many of them businessmen) that the war was futile, immoral and unendurable; and on a lingering sympathy for the French among some of the Whig opposition and writers swooning over Napoleon’s ‘genius’. The prime minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812 by a deranged bankrupt businessman. In France, political disagreement could only be expressed in hushed tones among the elite, but respectful warnings to Napoleon by advisers trying to restrain his constant aggressiveness were ignored. The corrupt, sycophantic but intelligent arch-survivor Talleyrand had resigned (or been sacked) in 1807 – an early straw in the wind. Food riots broke out, especially in areas stripped to supply Paris, which Napoleon intended to keep happy.

Britain was spending a lot of money abroad: on importing timber, iron, hemp, etc., and on paying for armies, especially once war broke out in Portugal and Spain. There were also spiralling subsidies to allies: £66 million in all, £20 million in 1814–15 alone. By 1814–15, the transfer of funds abroad for war expenses was running at about £16 million per year, out of a total budget of £ 100 million. Funds had to be exported either in paper (banknotes, bills of exchange representing commercial debt, or ‘federal paper’ to be redeemed after the war) or in coin or bullion. All caused balance-of-payments problems, as paper depreciated and coinage and bullion reserves ran short. In emergency, the king authorized the illegal export of golden guineas to feed Wellington’s army in the Peninsula, which was costing some £10 million per year, much of it in hard cash. The Treasury used the Rothschild network to run a secret and complex system both to bring in and to pay out a variety of financial assets, including collecting French coins to finance Wellington’s eventual invasion of France. These unprecedented transfers were sustainable because Britain’s foreign earnings from goods and services almost balanced the outgoings, and made it possible to import South American bullion and coin – silver Mexicanpesos were a major international currency. Britain had built up large overseas credits, which – as during the twentieth-century world wars – were partly liquidated. Large shipments of cash from the East India Company, raised by trade and heavy taxation, played a vital role, and had long-term effects on Indian society. The final burst of spending was financed by selling British government bonds abroad – often in the very countries that then received the cash raised, and whose citizens were keener to lend to Britain than to their own governments.¹⁰⁶ Napoleon’s belief that the City of London was a house of cards was a fatal illusion.

‘Past – Present – Future’, Napoleon’s hope: to create a Continental blockade to reduce Albion from wealth to poverty.

When by 1813 the other Great Powers reluctantly concluded that Napoleon was insatiable and would have to be defeated, they needed British money to do it, and ‘the English covered Germany with blood and gold’.¹⁰⁷ Money and weapons flooded on to the Continent: £10 million and 1 million muskets were distributed in a year to thirty countries, and Russia, Prussia and Austria were enabled to field 700,000 men.¹⁰⁸ Britain now used the leverage this gave. All money for Portugal and Spain passed through Wellington, making him effectively supreme commander in the Peninsula. Spain and Portugal were induced to stop the slave trade. The foreign secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, went permanently to Allied headquarters in 1814 to distribute money. He used the influence this gave him to resuscitate Pitt’s 1805 ‘outline for the restoration of Europe’, which included re-establishing the rule of law, providing for the ‘internal happiness’ of states, and concluding a treaty to guarantee future collective security.¹⁰⁹

What would previously have seemed incredible had been done: £1,500 million was spent on finally defeating France. This left a national debt of £733 million, equal to over forty times pre-war state income, or £37 for every person in Britain – the total annual earnings of a London labourer. This long accumulated financial burden was proportionately several times that left by the First World War.¹¹⁰ The British government closed the subsidy and loan accounts of the Napoleonic wars in 1906¹¹¹ – eight years before the Cavalry of St George saddled up for another charge.

CAPTIVES

Unprecedented numbers of French and British men – and some women – came into contact with each other as captives and captors. In 1803, some 500 British subjects still in France after the Treaty of Amiens were detained in what seemed to them an act of vindictive illegality. A further 16,000 prisoners were subsequently taken, mainly merchant seamen and men of the Royal Navy or Marines whose blockading ships had been driven ashore. They formed a fraction of the multitude from across Europe captured by the French – some 500,000 in all. About 250,000 soldiers and naval and merchant seamen were prisoners in Britain at some time during the whole revolutionary and Napoleonic period.¹¹² The ordeal of the prisoners on both sides has been largely forgotten, except, perhaps, through the beautiful models of ships (and less beautiful guillotines) carved for sale by French prisoners from wood and meat-bones. But at the time and over succeeding generations, bitter accounts of cruelty left a shadow of mutual recrimination, and even hatred, especially in Brittany, where many French sailors originated.

Prisoners’ fates were grim. Routinely robbed and ill-treated, they faced a long captivity: nine years or more in some cases. Systems of prisoner exchange broke down after 1803, and the more ‘total’ nature of this struggle left ordinary prisoners with little protection, apart from some humanitarian efforts. The large numbers, and economic hardship within the captor countries, made treatment at best spartan. Crowded conditions inevitably meant disease. The British and French treated each other better than most. The British were the only nationality given ‘Class I’ status, seemingly because far more French prisoners were taken by Britain, and Paris feared reprisals. The annual death rate for both French and British prisoners was probably a little under 10 per cent.

French history books still condemn les pontons (the hulks) as ‘floating coffins’ into which French prisoners were crowded. In fact, most were held on land, in specially constructed prisons such as Dartmoor and the large temporary camp at Norman Cross, near Peterborough. British prisoners suffered too, not least from the long journeys they were forced to make on foot, though their lot was less bad than that of the wretched Austrians, Prussians and Russians. Ordinary soldiers and sailors were imprisoned in fortresses in northern and eastern France. Obedience to captors was officially encouraged. In a ‘Bridge over the River Meuse’ episode, British sailors struggled to repair a broken bridge near their camp so that Napoleon could cross – a dutiful act that was approved on both sides. According to legend, an appreciative Emperor passed his snuffbox round the deferential British tars, and graciously ordered their release.

Ordinary prisoners on both sides were allowed to take jobs. Officers were given parole and limited freedom. Several thousand French officers were scattered round some twenty small inland towns. The British were mainly concentrated in the fortress town of Verdun, where senior officers and wealthy civilian internees and their families led comfortable lives. Gambling, drinking, duelling, horse racing and sex provided something of a home from home. Shops and schools were established and Paris fashions could be obtained. Parole was a problem for the minority who wanted to escape. Although honourable military conventions had weakened, this one still applied, at least on the British side. Military authorities punished, and even handed back, British officers who escaped while on parole. Would-be escapers had to have their parole withdrawn for minor misdemeanours before they could make a break – even though this might mean having to escape from a cell. There are many piquant escape stories. One young officer, leaving large unpaid bills in Verdun, escaped in a carriage hiding under his French girlfriend’s skirts, to the horror of his superiors, who considered he had let the side down. Two of the French invaders who landed at Fishguard in 1797 were similarly helped in tunnelling out of ramshackle Pembroke prison by amorous local girls, whom they later married – one couple returning after the war to run a pub in Merthyr Tydfil. The French worried less about parole, and 674 officers escaped, most aided by English criminal gangs – helping escapers was only a minor offence, so the risk was small.”¹¹³

Most escapes from France were hard, anticipating exploits familiar from the Second World War: forging documents, making disguises, climbing and tunnelling. The notorious hilltop fortress of Bitche outdid Colditz as a punishment prison for the unruly, many being confined in underground bunkers cut into the rock. Unprotected by any equivalent of the Geneva Conventions, escapers risked galley slavery, and ringleaders death. The physical toughness normal in pre-industrial society meant that journeys of hundreds of miles on foot in winter weather and with little food were undertaken to reach either the Channel or Austria. Escapers were often mistaken for army deserters, which won them the sympathy and even the assistance of French peasants. They were helped even more by people in the Low Countries and Germany hostile to French rule. At least one informal escape network existed near Bruges, run by an innkeeper’s wife. The most irrepressible escapers were Royal Navy midshipmen, whose boyish recklessness and sea-going experience – including ropemaking and navigation – made them almost impossible to hold. One case may stand for many. In November 1808 Midshipman Boys and four friends wove a forty-five-foot cord to cross by night successive ramparts and moats of the fortress of Valenciennes. They then dug under a massive gate with their penknives. Escaping pursuit, resisting attack by brigands and evading arrest by gendarmes, they were recognized as British by friendly Flemings. They spent months being hidden by them while they tried to steal a boat, and finally they bought a passage home with a smuggler in May 1809.¹¹⁴

From the Tagus to the Berezina, 1807–12

The English declare that they will no longer respect neutrals at sea; I will no longer recognize them on land.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1807¹¹⁵

Any nation of Europe that starts up with a determination to oppose . . . the common enemy . . . becomes instantly our essential ally.
GEORGE CANNING, foreign secretary, 1808¹¹⁶

After his reconciliation with Tsar Alexander I at Tilsit, Napoleon dominated the Continent. This gave him the freedom to deal with ‘Carthage’ by more direct means than merely Continental blockade. Ideas included invasion of Sicily (Britain’s only remaining Mediterranean ally); partition of the Ottoman empire; Franco-Spanish attacks on Gibraltar, Egypt, the Cape and the East Indies; and a joint Franco-Russian attack on India: ‘An army of fifty thousand men – Russians, Frenchmen, perhaps even Austrians – marching by way of Constantinople into Asia . . . would make England tremble and bring her down on her knees.’¹¹⁷ Spain was as usual a necessary auxiliary because of its naval and colonial strength. Its Bourbon rulers were eager to placate Napoleon. Their first task was to help invade Britain’s impudent ally Portugal, which was ignoring the Berlin Decree. In July 1807 Portugal was ordered to close its ports to British ships, arrest all British subjects, confiscate all British merchandise, and declare war on Britain. French troops moved via Spain to invade Portugal. As they reached Lisbon, the whole royal family, the treasury, and much of the ruling elite embarked under British naval escort for their colony of Brazil. Napoleon confiscated their property, levied a large indemnity and imposed a new government.

His Spanish Bourbon allies had proved untrustworthy and factious, so he decided to get rid of them too. As elsewhere in Europe, he believed that a modernizing French administration would be welcomed by those who mattered: ‘Every reflecting person in Spain despises the government . . . As to the rabble, a few cannon shots will quickly disperse them.’ He calculated that a takeover would cost only 12,000 French soldiers’ lives, a worthwhile price for Spain, with the bullion of the Americas and a large if neglected navy. The royal family were summoned to Bayonne to hand over their throne to Napoleon, who gave it to his brother Joseph. In May 1808 ‘the rabble’ of Madrid did indeed show their anger at the removal of the royal family, and hundreds were shot down or summarily executed – the event immortalized in Goya’s famous painting. But they were not so easily ‘dispersed’. The uprising combined elements of social, religious and national revolt that proved impossible to suppress, and it encouraged anti-French resistance in Portugal too. Over the next five years this was to reduce the whole of the Iberian peninsula to bloody chaos and ruin. It would prove, in Napoleon’s famous phrase, an ‘ulcer’ draining French strength. It was not, as is often said, a sideshow: more than twice as many soldiers would die there as in the invasion of Russia in 1812.¹¹⁸

Napoleon’s problem was Britain’s opportunity. London immediately responded to requests for help from the Portuguese and the Spanish, sending a naval squadron to snatch from the coast of Denmark a Spanish army sent to fight for Napoleon, and landing men, arms and money at Lisbon and Gibraltar. Britain could thus return to the Continent, exploit its seapower round the coast of the peninsula, make best use of its small army in cooperation with the Spanish and the Portuguese, impress the Continental great powers, establish itself as the defender of freedom, and break the blockade of its exports. The British government was not counting on quick victory. Its aim was to perpetuate turmoil in Europe until the tide turned against Napoleon:

Our interest is that till there can be a final settlement that shall last, every thing should remain as unsettled as possible; that no usurper should feel sure of acknowledgement; no people confident in their new masters; no kingdom sure of its existence; no spoliator sure of his spoil; and even the plundered not acquiescent in their loss. All this touches not us: but in the midst of all this it is our business to shew what England, as England, is: . . . whenever the true balance of the world comes to be adjusted . . . it is only through us alone that they can look for secure and effectual tranquillity.¹¹⁹

British and French had fought each other in Spain in earlier wars, but this was to be a far bigger affair. There was an immediate British success: the French occupying force in Portugal surrendered. However, Napoleon – as he would show throughout the war – would make no concession in the Peninsula, which had become for him a matter of prestige. He came in person with 130,000 troops from Germany to stamp on opposition. The British commander, the bold and headstrong Sir John Moore, marched his 40,000 men into northern Spain to threaten French communications, hoping to distract them from immediate seizure of Madrid and Lisbon. When Napoleon realized that instead of taking to the boats the British were advancing into Castile, he turned north to capture them, making his troops link arms to march through blinding snowstorms. Moore, realizing that ‘the bubble had burst’, fled through the sleet and mud of the Galician mountains towards the port of Corunna (La Coruña). Both armies suffered terribly. French cavalry rode through exhausted British stragglers, ‘slashing among them as a schoolboy does among thistles’.¹²⁰ Civilians suffered worse. Supply broke down, so troops pillaged the wretched inhabitants. French, Spanish and British accounts agree that British discipline broke down – a recurring phenomenon – with mass drunkenness, looting, rape and even murder. The fleeing troops destroyed what they could not take to deny it to the French:

The English have burnt . . . a large warehouse of corn and flour . . . we have found in the town more than 200 horses they killed last night; all the time, people are bringing in Englishmen found in the cellars or dead drunk in the attics . . . they destroy everything, especially ovens and mills; they loot, burn, and mistreat the locals who, when they dare, take their revenge and are willingly bringing us English stragglers.¹²¹

Concluded a Spanish general, ‘the French themselves could not have found agents better calculated to whip up hate of the British than the army commanded by General Sir John Moore.’¹²² They reached Corunna on 12 January 1809, four days ahead of the French. After a rearguard action in which Moore was killed, the army sailed away, with 20 per cent of its men missing and a vast quantity of equipment lost, including by the huge explosion of 4,000 barrels of gunpowder. On the face of it, this was a political and military disaster. Only later was it clear that Moore’s foray had bought time by diverting Napoleon’s triumphant sweep through the Peninsula. Moore became a posthumous hero, the rushed retreat transmuted by Charles Wolfe into clipped pathos:

Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corpse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero lay buried.

Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone –
But we left him alone with his glory.

The war remained as atrocious throughout as it had begun. Spanish and Portuguese rebels turned to la guerrilla (a word that now became current in other languages). The French responded with burnings, massacres and summary executions, which were met in turn with killing and torture of prisoners: early on, a witness saw a French officer nailed upside down to a barn door with a fire lit under his head. Reprisals and counter-reprisals multiplied. The Spanish revolt was stoked by domestic hatred between conservatives and liberals, Catholics and anticlericals (some, but not all, supporters of the French – the hated afrancesados), and by the raw loathing of the poor for their masters. Many guerrilla bands were, or became, mere brigands, reinforced by deserters from every army, preying on rich and poor alike and increasingly detested. Both countries suffered famine, sometimes deliberately caused, in which hundreds of thousands died. All the armies – French, British, Spanish, Portuguese – became terrifying bands of predators, in part because the poverty of the country and bad communications meant that supply arrangements constantly failed, so soldiers and peasants fought each other for food. Some ashamed British thought their own men were worse than the French – certainly, ferocious drunkenness was a British speciality. But French brutality was a systematic counter-insurgency policy; and besides, there were far more of them.

The British and French had in common a growing detestation of the Spanish. The British saw them as treacherous, vain, and feckless, unwilling to help in their own liberation and denying their British allies the aid and supplies they were due. The French saw them as cruel, superstitious and perverse: they ‘rejected everything coming from us – even benefits’.¹²³ Both British and French saw themselves as culturally and politically superior. Many British felt ashamed to be defending a reactionary despotism. British Protestants and French anticlericals despised Spanish Catholicism and indulged in sacrilegious horseplay and vandalism. Both treated the civilian population as fair game, and each other with relative respect, even with a friendliness that infuriated their respective Iberian allies. One Ensign Wheatley put it bluntly: ‘I hate a Spaniard more than a Frenchman.’¹²⁴ This did not mean that they did not despise each other, at least at first. The British did not expect the speed, hardiness and ingenuity of the French armies. Many of the French – certainly Napoleon – despised Wellington and his men, and made serious blunders by underestimating them. Yet personal contact revealed remarkable lack of animus. The British adopted the revolutionary ‘Ça ira’ as a marching tune. The single combat to which cavalry officers often challenged each other displayed an archaic chivalrousness. There are many reports of men being ordered not to kill courageous opponents. Sentries did not fire at each other; there are stories that they took it in turns to stand guard. Outposts sometimes asked the other side to move further away to avoid trouble: ‘Retirez-vous, Monsieur l’Officier-là.’¹²⁵ They certainly gave each other warnings of imminent attacks – a practice that Wellington commended as sensibly humane. He might not have approved of the widespread commerce in food, tobacco and especially drink that went on: one rifle company clubbed together to buy French brandy, but their emissary got so drunk that the French had to send for his comrades to carry him back. Fraternization was common among all ranks. Letters and newspapers were delivered, drinks exchanged and the curious met to chat. The straying greyhounds of one British officer were politely returned, as was half of an escaped French bullock. It became accepted that prisoners and the wounded should be reasonably treated, and sources of food and water in no-man’s-land shared.¹²⁶ Some of the stories must be apocryphal, but they formed part of subsequent national folklore. Thus it was possible for a young British officer, examining the enemy through his telescope, to reflect that ‘the French people are our common enemy, yet I like them as a nation and I really am of the opinion every Englishman does the same in his heart’.¹²⁷

The pattern of the Peninsular War was that the French were by far the strongest military force – in 1812, they had 250,000 men to 60,000 British. But some three-quarters of their strength was tied down attempting to hold all of Spain against the Spanish armies and guerrilla bands. Napoleon, for political reasons, would not allow his subordinates to abandon territory. The British, based in Portugal, commanded from 1808 by General Sir Arthur Wellesley (whose victories successively made him viscount, marquess and duke of Wellington), could therefore periodically invade Spain; but the French would then concentrate enough of their forces to throw them back. This would give a breathing space to the hard-pressed Spanish, in Wellesley’s words ‘exposing [France’s] whole fabric in Spain to great risk’.¹²⁸ In short, the French could defeat each of their enemies separately, but not all of them simultaneously.

In 1810, Napoleon decided to finish the war by invading Portugal and defeating the British. The traditional Portuguese defence was a ‘scorched earth’ strategy, and this was again implemented under Wellington’s thorough direction. He had secretly constructed a twenty-nine-mile belt of fortifications covering Lisbon, the Lines of Torres Vedras. He planned that even if the French could cross the devastated wastes of central Portugal, they would be halted and forced to retreat. So it was. Marshal Masséna fought his way across the Portuguese ‘desert’ – ‘not a soul to be seen anywhere, everything abandoned’ – was astounded to come up against Wellington’s ‘lines’, and, after hanging on as long as he could, trudged back, having lost 25,000 men, more than half to disease and starvation. Wellington admired this French fortitude, which he was sure the British could not match. The main cost was born by the Portuguese. Ordered to abandon their homes, with everything they could not carry destroyed, the victims of looting and worse by British and French, those who managed to reach the shelter of the Allied lines spent the winter with scanty food and shelter. Those who had refused to flee were attacked by the famished French, who pillaged, murdered and tortured en masse to extort hidden food supplies. French depredations were succeeded by those of the pursuing British, even though some soldiers, shocked at the plight of the Portuguese, gave them some meagre rations. ‘Thousands must have died,’ wrote one British soldier, ‘and thousands more must perish, for there is no help at hand: rich and poor are all reduced to the same state.’¹²⁹ Perhaps 5–80,000 Portuguese died.

The fate of the Peninsula was decided beyond the Elbe. The Franco-Russian alliance proved illusory, as Russia refused, in Napoleon’s words, to ‘act as my second in my duel with England’.¹³⁰ The Continental System required economic and political subservience, which the Russians, for reasons of pride, ideology and interest, would not long concede. In December 1810 Russia left the System. Napoleon, deciding to strike the first blow, summoned his allies, satellites and former enemies for a great invasion. He also withdrew troops from Spain. In June 1812 over 600,000 men and 200,000 horses, the largest army ever assembled in Europe, invaded Russia. Meanwhile, Wellington had again marched into Spain, and on 22 July won a complete victory against an over-confident Marshal Marmont at Salamanca, proving to all except Napoleon that the man he dismissed as the ‘sepoy general’ had ability. This was the first time that a British army had proved that it could successfully attack a major French army, and the first time since 1799 that a French army in Europe had been trounced.¹³¹ Meanwhile Napoleon, his army decimated in the summer heat, could not induce the Russians to make peace, and was forced to retreat from the ruins of Moscow when winter set in. The Russian Marshal Kutuzov, sharing the general Continental suspicion of Britain, decided to let some French escape, pointedly telling a British observer that he was ‘by no means sure that the total destruction of the Emperor Napoleon and his army would be a benefit to the world’. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s army lost 370,000 dead and 200,000 prisoners, only half of whom survived.¹³² Even amid this catastrophe, the French in Spain were able to chase Wellington back into Portugal.

Now came the culmination of the European war, and with it the Franco-British struggle at its core. Napoleon proclaimed that he was defending Europe from Russian barbarism and English corruption, but admitted privately that ‘if I left Europe to its own devices it would throw itself into England’s arms’.¹³³ Austria and Prussia changed sides and joined Russia. Britain provided money and weapons. France’s twenty-year dominance had relied on the divisions of its enemies, most of whom had at some time tried to be its friends, or at least its accomplices, in a free-for-all from which ideology and principle had been absent. In 181–14, in the face of Napoleon’s limitless aggression, the European states began to cooperate and plan a durable peace. Castlereagh, the foreign minister, intended to show that Britain was not – or no longer – the irresponsible Carthaginian predator happy to leave the Continent in flames while it gathered in colonial spoils. He created a partnership among the coalition, intended to continue after the war. He negotiated the Treaty of Chaumont (1814) – ‘a British triumph, but not a triumph over foes or even over rivals’ – in which Britain promised to pay for another year of war if necessary, and the Allies pledged themselves to maintain peace for twenty years. It was a practical vision of a Europe of independent sovereign states, equal in rights, status and security.¹³⁴ Pitt’s ‘map of Europe’ had been unrolled.

Napoleon, to the dismay of his ministers and generals, refused all Allied offers for a negotiated peace. His intransigence helped Castlereagh to keep the coalition together and this sealed France’s fate. The Allies had to fight their way to Paris: 181–14 would be the bloodiest period of the whole war, costing some 900,000 lives – comparable with the worst months of 191–18.

Castlereagh: Britain’s greatest European? Despite his dashing aristocratic elegance, he came from a recently ennobled Ulster Presbyterian family. This was not untypical of the socially mobile elite that governed Britain during the Napoleonic wars. His Austrian counterpart Prince Metternich regarded his no-nonsense style as rather common.

Invasion, 1813–14

It is a very common error among those unacquainted with military affairs to believe that there are no limits to military success. After having driven the French from the frontiers of Portugal . . . it is generally expected that we shall invade France, and . . . be in Paris in a month.
DUKE OF WELLINGTON¹³⁵

A man like me has little regard for the death of a million men.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, 1813¹³⁶

The Russians, Prussians and Austrians were halted by Napoleon in Germany in May 1813 and forced to sign an armistice. Wellington marched with calculated boldness into northern Spain, threatening French communications. At Vitoria on 21 June, the French were routed and their possession of Spain effectively ended. This was the British soldiers’ dream victory: they captured not only all King Joseph Bonaparte’s artillery, but his whole baggage train. Pursuit was delayed if not forgotten as loot beckoned: millions of pesos in cash, jewellery and works of art lay around for the taking. Several hundred officers’ mistresses were captured. The king’s silver chamber pot was taken by the 14th Light Dragoons, and is still used by their successors to drink champagne in the mess. Wellington pressed on towards the Pyrenees, but cautiously in case Napoleon made peace with the eastern allies and turned on the British. On 9 September they besieged and captured San Sebastian, the closest port to the French frontier, with the usual bloody assault followed by the usual orgy of looting, drunkenness and rape. Wellington crossed the River Bidassoa, the French frontier, on 7 October 1813, eleven days before the huge battle of Leipzig – ‘the Battle of the Nations’ – forced Napoleon to abandon Germany.

The militarily decisive campaign was in the north-east, where throughout January, February and March 1814 Napoleon conducted a brilliant, futile defence against the invaders, who nevertheless reached Paris at the end of March. But France’s political future was decided by Wellington’s advance – the only major British invasion since the first Hundred Years War. He outmanoeuvred Marshal Soult: part of his army crossed the passes of the western Pyrenees, the rest followed the weakly guarded coast towards Bayonne. Wellington was determined not to arouse popular resistance. He held his Spanish troops back following early incidents of looting and rape, as he believed that they would seek vengeance for French atrocities in Spain. He threatened his own men, who had a dreadful reputation, with summary floggings and hangings for misbehaviour. The people of south-western France were tired of the war and of Napoleon. Official warnings that the ‘furious’ British were coming, ‘their steps marked by arson, devastation, murder and carnage’, fell flat. The locals found the British less ready to loot than their own troops: ‘the English, laden with guineas, pay for everything in cash’; ‘The contrast between the enemy’s conduct and that of our troops is having a deplorable effect.’ Wellington ordered band concerts, dances and parades to win hearts and minds. ‘The conduct of the English is extremely perfidious; they use every means to seduce the population and alas are succeeding only too well.’ French commanders were disgusted by the ‘state of stupor’ among the population: ‘populous villages surrender at the approach of three or four enemy horsemen’.¹³⁷ Ensign Wheatley was delighted that ‘the lasses are up with the sun’, picturesquely all dressed the same, unlike in England, ‘skipping along the road with milk and butter, singing and laughing as unconcernedly as if all was peace and tranquillity’, but ‘very shy of Englishmen’.¹³⁸ Towns cheered the British as liberators. Farmers, officials, merchants and shopkeepers were equally friendly. One land-owner, delighted at getting a good price for his cattle, ‘made us dance with his daughters, produced some of his best chateau margot [sic], sang half a dozen of his best songs, slobbered over us with his embraces, and was put to bed crying drunk’.¹³⁹ Lost or wounded soldiers were given shelter. Lord Fitzroy Somerset was hidden from French cavalry in a hiding hole previously used by priests fleeing the Jacobins; forty years later, as Lord Raglan, he commanded a British army as France’s ally in the Crimea.

Wellington left a division to besiege Bayonne, forced Soult’s army north-east towards Toulouse, and, urged by royalists, sent a force marching north across the barren Landes to Bordeaux. They were greeted on 12 March as liberators in a city that had ancient commercial links with Britain that it was desperate to re-establish, and which equated the Bourbon monarchy with peace. The mayor, Comte Lynch (of a Jacobite family from Galway), raised the royalist white standard. When the Bourbon Duc d’Angoulême arrived, exclaiming, ‘No more wars! No more conscription! No more oppressive taxes!’ he was cheered and a Te Deum sung in the cathedral. Two delegates hastened to England to pay homage to their new – or old – king, Louis XVIII. This was welcome news to the British government, which thought that a Bourbon restoration would give the best chance of a stable and peaceful France, but did not wish to impose it. The Russians and Austrians still favoured a Bonaparte, an Orléans, or even the slippery French Marshal Bernadotte, now adopted as Crown Prince of Sweden. But when the news from Bordeaux reached Allied headquarters, now at Dijon, all agreed that the Bourbons should be backed. Castlereagh and the Austrian chancellor Metternich drank a toast to Louis XVIII – and to mayor Lynch.¹⁴⁰ Soult, still battling on, was ‘ashamed . . . that a town of 100,000 souls . . . could get away with refusing to be defended and should greet a few thousand Englishmen with acclamation’. He met the same problem at equally royalist Toulouse: the defence works he ordered nearly caused a riot, as ‘practically the whole city is against being defended’.¹⁴¹ But defend it he did, and the battle of Toulouse on 10 April was the last real battle in the south, costing 4,500 Allied casualties and 2,700 French. Napoleon had already abdicated on 6 April. Soult marched away unpursued. The British were greeted by the mayor, the city guard, a band and a crowd of citizens all wearing the Bourbon white cockade, who gave them a banquet.

Louis XVIII and the Prince Regent, well-upholstered symbols of peace and plenty, entered London together amid joyful crowds who hauled their carriage through the streets: the Bourbons signified peace for Britain too. A popular song ran: ‘England no more your foe, will bring you aid/ When France shall welcome home the White Cockade.’ Louis declared that ‘it is to your Royal Highness’s councils, to this great country, and to the constancy of its people that I shall always ascribe, under Providence, the restoration of our House to the Throne of our Ancestors’. All over Britain people celebrated: ‘Bells Ringing Guns Firing and Tom Paines Quaking’. At Yarmouth, 8,000 people feasted on roast beef, plum pudding and beer at a table three-quarters of a mile long. Wellington congratulated his army for ‘their conciliating conduct towards the inhabitants of the country which, in almost equal degree with their discipline and gallantry in the field, have produced the fortunate circumstances that now hold forth to the world the prospect of genuine and permanent peace’. Ensign Wheatley did his bit for conciliation, finding Bordeaux ‘magnificent in the extreme. Every necessity of life is dogcheap’ – good claret 3d a bottle – ‘the people civil and kind [and] the Gascon ladies not inferior to the Parisians in vivacity . . . giggling when they meet anyone, [they] run as if to entice a pursuit. This is gaieté!!!’¹⁴²

LE CIMETIÈRE DES ANGLAIS

Faint traces can still be found of the British invasion: Soult’s earthworks on the slopes of the Pyrenees; occasional rusty cannonballs in the undergrowth; a war memorial in St Andrew’s church, Biarritz; soldiers’ lonely graves in Basque and Gascon churchyards – and a cimetière des Anglais, along an overgrown track through a steep oak wood at the end of a torpid suburban street on the northern fringe of Bayonne.

By mid-April 1814 the war seemed over. On 10 April the news arrived that the Allies had entered Paris and Napoleon had abdicated. But Vauban’s towering citadel at Bayonne held out, defended by 13,000 men, while a bored and cold British, Portuguese and Spanish army of 28,000 waited in the wet outside. ‘We have now been piquetting for two months before this infernal fortress endeavouring to starve them out, while we are in want of food ourselves. For nothing but herrings and brandy are come-attable. Our tents are pitched by a large swamp and the French pour in cannon shot and shells every ten minutes among us.’ News shouted across the lines informed the defenders of the emperor’s abdication, or so the British thought. It is unclear whether the commander, General Thouvenot, decided on a final defiant gesture – a baroud d’honneur – or whether, uninformed or sceptical of news from outside, he aimed simply to push back the siege lines. A deserter warned the British of an attack, but not many took it seriously. During the moonless night of 14 April, 3,000 men erupted into the British positions on the wooded hills north of the town, killing one of the British commanding generals and capturing the other.

The Cimetière des Anglais, Bayonne: the last clash on French soil.

I heard a pop, then another. I was on the point of again falling off, when more than five hundred reports burst upon our ears, a thunder of cannon followed . . . The air filled with stars and shells like a Vauxhall exhibition . . . every bush and hedge was spangled with flashing stars from the musketry, and the fields covered with blue lights shot from Bayonne to shew the men on the ramparts . . . where to direct their guns.

A confused and vicious mêlée in the dark ensued: ‘not a soul could be seen. Now and then a voice in the hedge would say ‘“Français ou Anglais?”’ and a thrust through the bush was the answer.’ At daybreak, the attackers withdrew and called a truce. ‘The French poured out from the town and a singular scene ensued – they picking up their dead and we ours. I . . . had a long chat with some French Officers who gave me some snuff. And as the French soldiers passed us with their dead comrades, we reflected on the miserable trade of war.’¹⁴³ There had been about 900 French and 600 Allied casualties. What to the French was a gallant gesture (commemorated in Bayonne’s Rue du 14 Avril and a grandiose imperial eagle monument erected in 1907) was to the British a futile waste of lives. There was no further fighting, and an official armistice was signed on 27 April.

The tiny cimetière des Anglais contains the graves of officers of the 3rd Foot Guards, a small obelisk and the cannon-shattered tree trunk that originally marked the spot. Embellished in the nineteenth century by their families and members of the local British community, it became a patriotic shrine, visited by vacationing royalty. But money ran out in the 1970s and it is now owned and maintained by Bayonne town council. The Bordeaux British Legion and their French counterparts, Le Souvenir Français, leave an annual wreath of poppies.¹⁴⁴ It is safe to say that few of the myriad British holiday-makers nearby know or care that here was the last Franco-British battle on French soil.

The End of the Hundred Years War, 1815

Britain has no greater obligation to any mortal on earth than to this ruffian [Bonaparte]. For through the events that he has brought about, England’s greatness, prosperity, and wealth have risen high. She is the mistress of the sea and neither in this dominion nor in world trade has she now a single rival to fear.
GENERAL VON GNEISENAU¹⁴⁵

The epic, of course, has a famous postscript. Napoleon soon tired of his little realm on the island of Elba, where spies reported he was putting on weight. He sailed with 900 men and landed near Cannes on 1 March 1815. He was acclaimed by the army and a large minority – perhaps one in three – of the country, especially the bureaucracy, workers suffering from the post-war slump, and those who feared losing what they had gained since 1789: rights, jobs and property. Louis XVIII fled to Belgium. France, like a battered wife, wanted to believe that this time Napoleon had changed. British radicals were even more gullible: ‘He is now a new man.’¹⁴⁶ Professing peaceful intentions, Napoleon prepared for a general war. As so often, he had no clear plan. Only one thing could have saved him: if Britain had been unwilling or unable to bear the cost of defeating him. But it promised another £9 million, and nearly a million Allied soldiers marched – far more than were actually needed. There was little chance that the Allies would give up. They had learnt that there was no point in negotiating with him. His police minister, Fouché, predicted that he would win two battles and lose the third. He did win – or partially win – two battles, at Ligny against the Prussians, and at Quatre Bras against Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch army. The third was Waterloo.

The most famous battle in modern history was fought on 18 June on sloping, rain-soaked fields astride the main road south from Brussels. Wellington’s men held a defensive line which Napoleon’s larger army had to smash through quickly, before Blücher’s Prussians could arrive and give the Allies overwhelming superiority. Both sides were therefore fighting in their characteristic fashion; and – partly because of French haste – there was no subtlety: ‘hard pounding, this, gentlemen; let us see who can pound the longest’. The battle became an archetype of the French attacking column against the British defensive line: the tactics of the revolution against those of the old regime, unleashed enthusiasm against disciplined stoicism, la furie française against le flegme britannique. This style of fighting influenced each nation’s self-image, its conceptions of masculinity and courage. The two commanders seemed to sum up, even caricature, these opposites: ‘On one side precision, foresight, geometry, prudence, stubborn sang-froid,’ wrote Victor Hugo. ‘On the other, intuition, guesswork, the unorthodox, superhuman instinct.’¹⁴⁷ The determination on both sides, and the restricted battlefield, created an intense concentration of violence. The French failed to break through. The Prussians arrived. The British advanced. Napoleon returned to Paris and, after briefly trying to rally resistance, abdicated again on 22 June. The rational importance of Waterloo is that by cutting short Napoleon’s adventure it kept ‘the problems of victory and peace manageable’, without throwing every agreement back into the melting pot; and, as principally a British victory, it gave Wellington and Castlereagh the influence to ‘settle France and Europe down as quickly as possible’.¹⁴⁸ Linda Colley comments that ‘Waterloo made the world safe for gentlemen again’.¹⁴⁹ So it did: also for workers, peasants, women and children.

Meanwhile, the Congress of Vienna, where sovereigns and statesmen met to decide the future of Europe, continued in session. How much had changed since 1688, when the Three Kingdoms had been hustled into European affairs as a minor auxiliary against Louis XIV! Now the United Kingdom was predominant in Europe, it was the sole global power, and it had become the prototype of economic transformation. France, still formidable, was no longer menacing. Though it took nearly another century for it to become entirely clear, the Franco-British war was over, and with it, the series of world wars it had spawned.

ECHOES OF WATERLOO

Waterloo! Waterloo! Waterloo! drear plain!
Cockpit of woods, of hills, of valleys
In which pale death stirred the dark battalions.
On one side was Europe, on the other France.
Bloody clash! and God forsook the heroes;
Victory, you deserted them, and the spell broke.
O Waterloo! I weep and there I halt, alas!
For these last soldiers of this last war
Were great; had vanquished all the earth,
Had put down twenty kings, crossed Alps and Rhine,
And their souls sang in the brazen bugles!
VICTOR HUGO, ‘L’Expiation’

The memory of defeat went deeper than the memory of victory. Which is not to say that this victory did not fill the British cup: how much less would have been the effect if Napoleon had surrendered to the Russians somewhere in Bavaria, with Britain merely paymaster-general. Wellington, commander, proconsul, ambassador, prime minister and national hero, would celebrate the day with selected old comrades at Apsley House (known as ‘No. 1 London’) for the rest of his life, amid the plaudits of Europe. Streets, stations, pubs and the workaday paraphernalia of British memory immortalize the day. One can point out that after the poetry of victory comes the prose of politics; that all political careers, especially those of heroes, end in failure; that Britain faced the usual post-war problems of slump, unemployment, poverty and dissension – well summed up in the sarcasm of the name ‘Peterloo’, given to the cavalry charge against an inoffensive crowd in Manchester’s St Peter’s Fields in 1818. But however one darkens the shadows, Waterloo was a permanent source of pride – usually vicarious, though the Prince Regent convinced himself after a good dinner that he had actually been there – and a confirmation that Britain, the British people, the British system, had triumphed. The playing fields of Eton produced invincible generals; the slums and hovels of Britain and Ireland produced invincible ruffians: as Wellington put it, ‘I don’t know what they do to the enemy but by God they frighten me!’ Winning the last battle, after losing so many, was reassuring. Yet Waterloo was not what most deeply stirred, and perhaps even now stirs, the British patriotic fibre. Struggles for survival when the ‘snug little Island, a right little, tight little Island’¹⁵⁰ was threatened and alone – the Armada, Trafalgar, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain – outweigh Waterloo.

Cambronne: the last word in defiance.

Which is why the memory of defeat went deeper, enriching what Jean-Marc Largeaud calls a ‘culture of defeat’ unique to France.¹⁵¹ The British often say that they themselves are the people who celebrate defeats. Not so: narrow escapes, yes; even slaughter. Defeat, never. The French, after Waterloo, did and do, if discreetly. Dwelling on ‘glorious defeat’ was a lesson in sacrifice and proof that France had survived and would rise again. Was it just coincidence that General de Gaulle, that most historically conscious of statesmen, made his first broadcast to the French people on the anniversary of Waterloo? Memories of Waterloo did not minimize the disaster: they laid on the tragedy, the doomed but defiant heroism. They also emphasized, quite wrongly, how near victory had been. Napoleon, who dwelt endlessly on the battle and said he should have died there, blamed his subordinates for blunders and treason, and drew up a list of reasons why Wellington should have lost. Victor Hugo, the bard of Waterloo, invented a hidden sunken lane into which the French cavalry fell just as they were about to conquer. Finally, there were the Prussians, turning up unsportingly to turn the tide – and serving as a way of denying that it was the British who had beaten them. Moral victory – seedbed of future hope – was claimed by the French.

All this is summed up in the famous mot de Cambronne, or rather his two mots, alternative expressions of heroic defiance. General Cambronne, one of Napoleon’s companions on Elba, commanded a brigade of the Imperial Guard, which, late in the battle, formed a square to cover the retreat. They were surrounded and suffering useless casualties, so a British general shouted to Cambronne to surrender. His reply: ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender!’ Or (in Hugo’s more famous version): ‘Merde!’ And, Hugo tells us, the Guard died, but Cambronne, for mocking fate, for ‘completing Leonidas with Rabelais’, was the true victor of Waterloo.¹⁵² Myth is more potent than prosaic truth: there is little evidence that Cambronne said either of his mots. The poetic version may have been a journalistic invention. He rejoined the army under Louis XVIII, who made him a viscount.¹⁵³

The French celebrate their defeats, but they are not keen on others doing so. When the British government – naïvely? – proposed a ceremony to mark the 150th anniversary of Waterloo, the French response was frosty, especially as Britain, whose application to join the Common Market de Gaulle had recently vetoed, envisaged a ‘European’ celebration. The French ambassador to Belgium was not amused by ‘festivities organized . . . by the descendants of the soldiers of Wellington and William of Orange’. So the ceremonies were scaled down, to the satisfaction of Le Monde: ‘they are almost having to apologize for having won’.¹⁵⁴

³ Sir Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs was first performed to commemorate the centenary of Trafalgar in 1905.