The War of Wars

by Robert Harvey

  This was the ‘imperial family’ that Napoleon installed at the pinnacle of French society – a Corsican clan which had suddenly ascended to supreme power, and behaved with the inner jealousies and abandon of those suddenly elevated to status and wealth. Beneath them were Napoleon’s ministers, of which Talleyrand and Fouché, bitter rivals, were the most prominent.

  Beneath them Napoleon created a whole new imperial ‘nobility’ which was largely drawn from the ranks of his low-born army. These were made marshals, and given huge incomes. In May 1804 Napoleon appointed eighteen marshals (in later years he appointed as many again). They included his closest military cronies: Murat, inevitably, the ever-loyal chief of staff Berthier, Lannes, Masséna and Augereau. To these were added able commanders not personally loyal to him, including Jourdan, Soult, Ney and the thirty-four-year-old Davout, already a brilliant soldier. It was a superb stratagem which bought off those most likely to pose a challenge to his rule. Such men were later rewarded with grand titles. Massena became Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling. Ney became Duke of Elchirgen and Prince of Moskva. Only two of Napoleon’s closest cronies, Junot and Suchet, were at this stage left out.

  Below this inner circle of ‘aristocracy’, Napoleon created no fewer than twenty-three dukes, (swollen to thirty-one by the end of the reign), 193 counts (450), 648 barons (1,500) and 117 knights (1,500). Napoleon said with breath-taking hypocrisy: ‘The institution of a national nobility is not contrary to the idea of equality, and is necessary to the maintenance of social order.’ It was a colossal system of honours, spoils and patronage designed to ensure loyalty to the upstart Empire. His senior 800 generals were awarded some 16 million francs in subsidies.

  The French Revolution had turned full circle. A man who still professed himself to be a republican had created an upper class based on cronyism and military power that far surpassed that of Louis XVI. What was even more remarkable was that Napoleon was still a comparatively young man of thirty-five and possessed by no means the most distinguished record in the French army. His first campaign in Italy had been brilliant but small-scale, his second in Egypt had been disastrous after two initial one-sided victories, and he had only narrowly won the middle-sized battle of Marengo.

  Napoleon’s greatest military achievement to date had been in a putsch. Yet within four years he had established himself as Emperor, created a dynasty, a new aristocracy and a formidably centralized and overwhelmingly powerful system of control, which would have been totalitarian had he possessed twentieth-century means of mass manipulation. He had set himself up as a great military leader only to himself and to a few of his cronies, yet he laid claim to be the greatest man in Europe and to be the pinnacle of his entire country’s social structure. He regarded himself as master of Europe – with Britain having bowed to his peace terms, with Austria accepting subordinate status, with Prussia an ally and Russia cowed.

  Yet beneath the strutting, chest-puffing vanity, was he in fact a realist, a man with whom Britain could live at peace? Addington certainly thought so when he concluded the Treaty of Amiens in 1802. In an astonishingly short space of time, however, the British were to change their opinion. Who was to blame? On the face of it, the British, who by the spring of 1803 seemed intent on renewing hostilities. A surprising number of scholars share this view. Yet the year of phoney peace deserves close examination – as do Napoleon’s own motives.

  Napoleon in 1803, shortly before the conspiracy that was to provide the pretext for his assuming the imperial mantle, viewed the world with a characteristic mixture of ambition, confidence and insecurity. His greatest enemy, Britain, had just made peace on humiliating terms. To the French leader this seemed a great victory: the British were apparently exhausted by war and were fearful of having to fight alone against the French. The victory against Nelson at Boulogne confirmed the view of France’s new ruler that he now had his adversary beaten, even that their fabled sea-power was now held in check.

  Looking to the east, France had regained control of most of the Italian peninsula. Looking to the north, Russia, the most dangerous power fifteen years before, no longer posed an immediate threat, while Austria, repeatedly though not decisively defeated, was intent on peace. Prussia, once a threat, was governed by the indecisive Frederick William who had not made up his mind whether France or Russia posed the greater threat. (He was to change his mind six times between 1803 and 1806.) France, therefore, was the undisputed master of the continent.

  In some respects this was frustrating. France had control of the Low Countries (although under the treaty France had proceeded to dismember Holland), its borders were secure on the Pyrenees, up to the Rhine and across the Alps. There was nowhere else to go. This presented problems; for France’s army required territory it could live off. France alone could not sustain it, and the army was the backbone of Napoleon’s power. He hardly had the option of reducing it to normal levels.

  For Napoleon to remain unchallenged and imperial, he had to be more than just the ruler of a greater France. The way in Europe was blocked unless he occupied the territory of other great powers and precipitated a new general war. There were two alternative arenas for the projection of military power: one was to found an empire in the west; and the other was to expand in the east. Either of them entailed rivalry, friction and even war with Britain. For Albion was not a continental power, but a mercantile one with empires in both directions. Napoleon had briefly flirted with the idea of a joint expedition with Russia across Persia and into India – an idea aborted with the assassination of the friendly Tsar Paul.

  Napoleon had also toyed with the idea of establishing an empire in the Americas. In a sense this was decided for him. Following the slave uprisings which had caused such appalling suffering to the British, Toussaint l’Ouverture shared out Haiti with the French commander, Rigaud. When the latter was recalled to France by Napoleon, Toussaint became increasingly assertive and in 1801 declared the island’s independence – which threatened the interests of the French planters there. Napoleon could not assent to this, and despatched Leclerc, along with Pauline, and an army of 25,000, supported by the Rochefort Squadron under Admiral Latouche-Tréville. The squadron arrived at Cap Haitien in February 1802 to find the island in the hands of Toussaint’s designated successor, the rabidly anti-French Christophe. When the French landed farther down the coast and advanced on the town, it was burnt by Christophe, leaving only a hundred houses intact. Leclerc, installing Pauline in one of them, engaged Toussaint’s army the following month and captured the legendary black leader, sending him in chains to France, where he died miserably soon afterwards in prison.

  In the summer months the French, like the British before them, succumbed to yellow fever. Pauline, to her great credit, visited the sick and bravely held receptions and concerts in the governor’s mansion, the band playing on even as one of its members collapsed with the dreaded disease. Within a year 12,000 French soldiers were infected and 2,000 had died of yellow fever. Leclerc’s garrison was reduced to 2,000 men.

  Christophe led a growing insurgency. Leclerc ordered Pauline aboard ship while he set off to fight, and won. But within a week of his victory he too was dead from yellow fever and in November 1802, the widowed Pauline, still aged only twenty-two, set sail for home with her small son. The United States had vigorously protested when, under pressure from the French, the Spanish had closed off the lower Mississippi to American shipping. Faced by the wipeout of his forces in the West Indies, Napoleon’s hopes of imperial expansion in the Americas were at an end.

  He looked with renewed longing towards the east for expansion. In Europe that meant consolidating his hold upon Italy, which he calculated the Austrians were not strong enough to defend; and further afield that meant reviving his oriental dream of chasing the British out of India. The former was a short-term objective, the second based in the long run on expanding French power to a point where the British would inevitably have to acknowledge French supremacy. So for Napoleon the peace wa
s just a lull before the next leap forward in French power, as much to consolidate his own domestic regime as to advance France’s interests abroad. Accordingly he began a ship-building programme intended to construct twenty-five ships of the line a year, to give him a fleet of some 200. He also appointed General Decaen as captain-general in India, with instructions to negotiate with the Indian princes to launch a general war on the British. On his voyage to India, Decaen stopped to consult with the French-controlled Dutch authorities who had taken over the Cape Colony so recently abandoned by the British.

  French emissaries were despatched to Algeria and to the Ionian Islands to look for possible bases. The British ambassador in Naples observed that the French were surveying the Italian coast from Ancona to Taranto. ‘This may be very useful to them and facilitate their progress eastwards, the idea of which they have never abandoned any more than they have forgotten for a moment their views upon Italy.’ Lord Keith in the Mediterranean warned of a possible French occupation of Corfu and Sardinia. In Constantinople and Alexandria there were rumours that Napoleon was seeking to partition the Ottoman empire with Russia. The British consul in Baghdad reported the passage of French envoys to Persia and Afghanistan.

  Sheridan summed up the situation in a brilliant speech in parliament: ‘I see in the physical situation and composition of the power of Bonaparte a physical necessity for him to go on in this barter with his subjects and to promise to make them the masters of the world if they will consent to be his slaves. [Conquering England] . . . is the first vision that breaks upon him through the gleam of morning; that is his last prayer at night, to whatever deity he may address it, whether to Jupiter or to Mahomet, to the Goddess of Battles or to the Goddess of Reason.’ All of these French aspirations in the east were for the moment vague and evanescent, but one thing was essential to French ambitions there: the British evacuation of Malta, which otherwise would threaten French domination of the Mediterranean and any expansion to the east, and which had been agreed upon in the peace treaty.

  It was not Malta, however, which was the first bone of contention between the two old enemies. The British were galvanized by two places which were quite outside their sphere of interest – to Napoleon’s great bewilderment and irritation – for Britain was about to pass through one of its periodic fits of moral indignation.

  The first issue was Napoleon’s cavalier treatment of Italy. Breaking his promise to recognize the autonomy of the Cisalpine Republic, he first attempted to secure the election of his brother Joseph as president; the latter, however, refused, because he sought to become Napoleon’s heir, something Napoleon hesitated to make him because Joseph had no heirs himself. So Napoleon browbeat the Republic’s deputies to elect him president of the state. He used this as a precedent for seeking to make the other Italian states overturn their rulers and set up puppet states. Piedmont and Elba were incorporated as French dependencies, followed swiftly by Liguria and Parma. Colonel Dyott, visiting Bologna and Turin, found ‘everything Frenchified, including the guillotines and the trees of liberty in the squares, the inns packed with French officers, the ballroom an obscene, bawdy display of naked women’, the palaces, gardens and convents destroyed and looted.

  This was distressing enough, but the French occupation of Switzerland aroused even greater indignation. Here Napoleon had seized a canton so that he could control the Great St Bernard and Simplon Passes (by taking Piedmont he had secured the Mont Cenis Pass). His defence was that this was not specifically prohibited by the Treaties of Luneville and Amiens. The treaty did however specify that he withdraw his garrison from Switzerland. When the main towns rose up in opposition Napoleon sent in Marshal Ney to take over the country, claiming that the Swiss were incapable of running their own affairs, although they had peacefully and liberally done so for a millennium.

  The Swiss appealed to the British for help, and Addington offered arms and money. Furiously Napoleon insisted that the British had no part to play in continental affairs and were not adhering to the Treaty of Amiens. As no continental power went to the help of the British, Addington had to abandon his efforts and look ridiculous, while the mountain state was annexed and the Swiss leader imprisoned in the Castle of Chillon.

  Meanwhile French troops still remained in possession of Holland, which under the Treaty of Amiens they had agreed to evacuate, threatening British ports. This had been the prime cause of the war of 1792. Another serious British complaint arose from the discovery of an edict issued by the French to seize every vessel under 100 tons in weight carrying British goods which came within four leagues of the French coast, even ships seeking shelter from bad weather. One ship in the Charent estuary was seized because its cargo was of British manufacture: in effect, the blockade was still in force.

  On a more emotional level, Napoleon was incensed by the lampoons against him in the British press, and demanded that they be suppressed, refusing to accept the government’s embarrassed explanation that it had no power to do so. Lady Bessborough remarked: ‘If Bonaparte chooses to go to war for the newspapers à son loisir, we must fight through thick and thin; but do not let us imitate Le Moniteur and begin a war because the French newspapers are impertinent.’

  The inert government of Addington, although strengthened by the addition of the young Lord Castlereagh, who harboured few illusions about Napoleon, came under increasing ridicule. It was bitterly opposed by the Grenville and Buckingham factions and by Windham, Pitt’s former protégé. Now George Canning applied his mordant wit and gift for verse to the ‘wretched pusillanimous toadying administration’:

  ’Tis thro’ Addington’s Peace that fair plenty is ours;

  Peace brightens the sunshine, Peace softens the showers;

  What yellow’d the cornfields? What ripen’d the hay?

  But the Peace that was settled last Michaelmas Day?

  And shall not such statues to Addington rise

  For service most timely – for warning most wise –

  For a treaty which snatch’d us from ruin away,

  When sign’d with a quill from the Bird of To-day.

  Long may Addington live to keep peace thro’ our borders –

  May each House still be true to its forms and its orders –

  So shall Britain, tho’ destined by Gaul for her prey

  Be saved as old Rome by the Bird of To-day!

  Misreading Addington’s vacillations as a sign of terminal British weakness, Napoleon nevertheless wanted to avoid war at all costs while his programme of ship-construction was under way and while he built the French army into an overpowering force. He decided to use threats to prevent Britain going to war. He declared at the end of January 1803 in his most bullying manner that he would sacrifice 100,000 men rather than allow the British to interfere in Swiss affairs.

  He also published a report by Colonel Sebastiani, one of his spies, suggesting that the departing British troops at Alexandria had performed feebly and that as soon as the British had gone France should reoccupy Egypt. The British, by now thoroughly alarmed, decided it would be unwise to evacuate Malta, as Napoleon appeared to be considering another Egyptian expedition.

  The British ambassador in Paris, Lord Whitworth, after receiving Napoleon’s frontal blast, told him that the British withdrawal from Egypt would proceed as agreed. The evacuation from Malta would also proceed if Napoleon promised not to attack the Turkish empire, in particular Egypt, paid compensation for his unauthorized annexation of Switzerland and Piedmont, and if he would guarantee Malta’s independence, which would also have to be underwritten by other great powers. Meanwhile the British raised 10,000 men to reverse cuts in their navy after Amiens and protested at the invasion by French agents, supposedly commercial, who provided Napoleon with details of British harbours and defences.

  If Addington thought he could appease Napoleon through sweet reasonableness, he was sorely mistaken. Napoleon, accustomed to getting his own way through fearsome displays of childish pique, was astonished when the Briti
sh showed no sign of conceding Malta and even raised the stakes by demanding a speedy French withdrawal from Holland, as they were obliged to do under the Peace of Amiens, as well as from Switzerland. In exchange the British offered to recognize the new Etrurian kingdom and even the Italian and Ligurian Republics. Talleyrand tried to flannel: he proffered a guarantee of Malta’s neutrality. The British responded by demanding a ten-year lease of the island.

  The nation’s mood had enormously changed in the space of six months since the halcyon summer of 1802. Napoleon’s casual annexation of Switzerland and much of Italy, his continuing preparations for war, and his expedition to the West Indies followed by a renewal of his threat to the east had convinced most British policymakers of his insincerity. Thomas Campbell captured the mood: ‘The very front and picture of society would grow haggard if that angry little savage, Bonaparte, should obtain his wishes. I think I see our countrymen trampled under by his military like the blacks of San Domingo on their own fields! – our very language abolished for that of the conqueror, America and all the world lost for want of our protection, and the fine spirit of our political economy changed into the politics of a drill sergeant.’

  Lord Auckland remarked laconically, ‘Had he amused us a year or two, our disarming would have been complete and we should not have had a chance of effectual resistance.’ It has been widely asserted that both sides viewed the Treaty of Amiens as no more than an interlude in the war. This is mistaken: the British had earnestly believed and hoped that it was the beginning of a lasting peace, while Napoleon intended to use it to build-up his forces in an attempt to intimidate the British out of any further war or, if necessary, to defeat them. Now the British had belatedly awoken to the prospect that Napoleon did not envisage a settlement of Europe except under his total domination. He had overplayed his hand and had aroused his enemy long before he intended to, while his plans for rebuilding his navy were in their infancy.