With matters in this state Napoleon played straight into the
hands of his opponents. The coronation ceremony held in Paris on 2 December
1804 greatly reinforced the fears that his assumption of the imperial title had
already summoned up. The crown was a laurel wreath in the style of those
associated with the caesars, and the robe was not only the purple of imperial
Rome but also emblazoned with the bee, a creature that had a thousand years
before been the badge of Charlemagne. Presiding over the ceremony was Pope Pius
VII, whose presence Napoleon at one and the same time required as a means of
legitimizing his rule, expressing the supremacy of the temporal power and
reinforcing his claim to the mantle of Charlemagne, who had himself been
crowned by Pope Leo III over a millennium before. If Pius was treated with
scant courtesy by Napoleon, this generated little concern: Pius had been
elected at a conclave held in Venice in the very midst of the allied victories
of 1799 and had spent the first few months of his papacy as a de facto prisoner
of the Austrians, who coveted large parts of his domains and were no friends of
ultramontanism. But few could miss the significance of the new emperor’s
actions, while still more grim was the symbolism of the new regimental
standards awarded to the French army in a dramatic parade on the Champ de Mars:
in place of a spearhead, the pole was now topped by a bronze eagle on the lines
of that carried by the Roman legions. And all the time international law
continued to be trampled upon: on 25 October the British minister in Hamburg,
Sir George Rumbold, was arrested as a spy by a detachment of French troops,
subjected to considerable ill treatment, transported to Paris and imprisoned in
the Temple prison, where, as he later told the Earl of Malmesbury, his ‘first
idea . . . was that he was to perish by secret means, and that, in order to
attribute to him suicide, they would forge papers … to demonstrate the state
of despondency he was under’.
‘This fresh violation of the rights of nations,’ wrote
Fouché, ‘roused the whole of Europe.’ Yet, despite all this, as 1805 dawned a
new coalition was still far away. On 11 April Britain and Russia admittedly
succeeded in concluding a treaty of alliance that committed Russia to war
unless Napoleon agreed to conform to Amiens and Lunéville, and laid down the aim
of excluding the French from Holland, Switzerland and northern Italy. This was
the work of Novosiltsev, but when the terms reached St Petersburg there was
great dissatisfaction. Hampered by contradictory instructions, the Russian
envoy had been completely outmanoeuvred. The issue of Malta remained
unresolved; the proposed subsidy-£1.25 million per annum for every 100,000 men
deployed by the Russians – was nowhere near what Alexander expected; there was
no mention of the freedom of the seas; and it was intimated that both Austria
and Prussia would receive extensive territorial gains as part of the eventual
European peace settlement. In consequence, the treaty for some time remained
unratified. But Alexander’s displeasure was not the only problem. The alliance,
it was agreed, would only come into force in the event of Austria going to war;
more than that, Russia would not have to take up arms until Vienna had been at
war for at least four months. But this meant that the whole negotiation was
null and void, for Austria had no intention of taking part in an offensive war,
and still less so one in which she would clearly be expected to do the bulk of
the fighting. For the time being, then, there was neither a treaty, nor an
alliance nor even friendship: at few moments in the Napoleonic Wars, indeed,
were Anglo-Russian relations to hit such a low point. And – not that it
mattered very much without Russian involvement – Gustav IV’s eagerness for a
crusade against France had been greatly dissipated by fears for Swedish
Pomerania, the last remnant of the once great Swedish empire on the southern
and eastern shores of the Baltic. Thus Sweden would participate in a war,
certainly, but she would neither act without Russia nor move her army beyond
the Pomeranian frontier.
It is difficult to see where the Third Coalition would have
been without Napoleon. At the start of the year there had been some sign that
the French ruler was still at least prepared to pay lip-service to moderation.
Rumbold was released within a matter of days thanks to the intercession of
Frederick William III, and on January the new emperor had sent a further letter
to George III lamenting France’s continued war with Britain and inviting him to
make peace. Much in the style of the similar communication of December 1799,
this missive – which offered nothing in the way of concessions – was primarily
designed to embarrass Pitt, but the mere fact that it was written suggests some
recognition of the need to play the peacemaker. Within a matter of months, however,
the gauntlet was flung down once again. In May 1805 Napoleon descended on Milan
and crowned himself King of Italy amidst yet more pomp and ceremony. As yet the
only territories affected were those of the erstwhile Italian Republic, which
now became the Kingdom of Italy, and Napoleon did not take up the reins of
government in person, but instead installed his stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais,
as viceroy. This was meagre reassurance, however, for the French ruler’s new
title clearly implied a claim to the whole of the Italian peninsula. And, if
this was not enough, in early June Napoleon suddenly announced the annexation
of Genoa – the Ligurian Republic – Parma and Piacenza, and appropriated Lucca
as a principality for his younger sister, Elise. This was just too much. In
response, Britain and Russia resolved their differences and ratified the treaty
of 11 April. This, of course, left Austria, but she was not far behind and was
now prepared to take the offensive. Even Francis II and the Archduke Charles
could not tolerate French control of the whole of Italy, and the belief was
growing in Vienna that Napoleon was contemplating a direct attack on the
Habsburgs. At the same time, for once real support was on offer in the form of
a one-off bonus of a further £1,666,000, an annual subsidy of £4 million and a
Russian expeditionary force of 75,000 men (support, incidentally, that was not
likely to be on offer indefinitely: the Russians, in particular, made it very
clear that, unless the army they had massed on the frontiers of Galicia was set
in motion very soon, it would have to be withdrawn). The choice was either to
join a grand alliance now or fight alone later. Nor was Austria the only new
recruit. Having blown hot and cold on the issue of war for the previous year,
Gustav IV of Sweden now agreed to put 12,000 troops into the field in exchange
for the enormous subsidy of £150,000 per year, plus further one-off payments
amounting to £112,500.
Why had Napoleon acted as he did at this crucial moment?
Setting aside his own explanation that as emperor he could hardly be president
of a republic, one argument is that he always wanted to turn east, and was therefore
eager to create a pretext for such a move by forcing the eastern powers into
the open. A war in central Europe was certainly a possibility in Napoleon’s
mind as early as the summer of 1804, while it later suited him to claim that
Austria was always the real target of his war effort. As Metternich wrote:
In one of my longer conversations with Napoleon in the journey
to Cambrai, whither I accompanied the emperor in 1810, the conversation turned
upon the great military preparations he had made in the years 1803-1805 at
Boulogne. I frankly confessed to him that even at that time I could not regard
these offensive measures as directed against England. ‘You were very right,’
replied the emperor, smiling. ‘Never would I have been such a fool as to make a
descent upon England, unless indeed a revolution had taken place within that
country. The army assembled at Boulogne was always an army against Austria. I
could not place it anywhere else without giving offence, and, being obliged to
form it somewhere, I did so at Boulogne, where I could while collecting it also
disquiet England. The very day of an insurrection in England, I should have
sent over a detachment of my army to support the insurrection, [but] I should
not the less have fallen on you.’
But this is less than convincing: aside from anything else,
the argument is simply too convenient for the emperor. Nor is it helpful to
explain the imposition of French rule in the Italian Republic in rational terms
relating to reform or political control: so slavish was the devotion of Melzi
and his fellows to France that the emperor’s assumption of the throne made
little difference. Once again, then, one is reduced to the personal dimension:
Napoleon wanted simply to augment his own glory and, in particular, reinforce
his links with Charlemagne, who had himself worn the iron crown that was placed
on Napoleon’s head in Milan.
None of this means, however, that Napoleon was overly
concerned at the prospect of war with Austria and Russia. Thus, by the summer
of 1805, all was not well with the ‘Army of England’. Getting across the
Channel had always presented problems, and on 20 July 1804 a sudden squall that
sprang up in the midst of a grand review of its barges, sloops and pontoons not
only left 2,000 men dead, but convinced many observers that success was out of
the question. But not Napoleon: he spent most of the year that followed
devising ways and means of concentrating a vast naval force that could descend
on the Channel and clear the way for invasion. At first these schemes all came
to grief, but in March 1805 the Toulon fleet of Admiral Pierre Villeneuve
managed to slip out of port and, after a long voyage, reach the West Indies.
However, a rendezvous with a small squadron that had escaped from Rochefort
went wrong, while the Brest fleet of Admiral Honoré Ganteaume failed to break out
at all. At the point that Napoleon made his great démarche in Italy, Villeneuve
was still at large, and there was some faint hope that he might link up with
the Spanish squadron in El Ferrol and raise the blockade of Brest. However,
whether even the emperor believed such a scenario to be possible must be open
to doubt: one of the reasons why Ganteaume never escaped from Brest was that he
had received orders from Napoleon that he should on no account attempt directly
to confront the British ships on patrol outside. And at the same time one can
sense compulsion pure and simple: faced by the growing evidence that Napoleon
intended to transform the Italian Republic into a monarchy, Austria had
responded by indicating that she had no objections to such a course provided
that France’s Milanese satellite remained independent. But accepting such a
limitation would have implied that other powers had a say in what Napoleon
could and could not do. And to this there was but one answer: the Italian
Republic would not just become a kingdom, but also a kingdom ruled by the
emperor and all but surrounded by French territory.
Whatever the reason for Napoleon’s actions, there is no
doubt that by them he single-handedly created the Third Coalition. Yet, great
though the sense of shock was, Europe was still not completely united against
him. Opportunistic as ever, Prussia weighed up the advantages and disadvantages
of empire and coalition, and in fact put out feelers to both camps. From Russia
there came nothing more than the offer of a triple alliance with Austria and
Russia that would guarantee Germany against any further French encroachment,
whether political or military, but the French response was very different: to
obtain a Prussian alliance, Napoleon was prepared not just to promise Frederick
William that he would be given Hanover with the coming of peace, but also to
hand that state over to Prussian occupation straight away, while at the same
time guaranteeing the integrity of Germany and Switzerland. With Russia
becoming ever more menacing – news arrived not only of Russian troops massing
on the frontier, but also that a pro-Russian insurrection was being stirred up
in Prussian Poland – Potsdam veered very much in the direction of Paris: if
Napoleon engaged in any more serious acts of aggression in Germany or anywhere
else, argued Frederick William’s new chief minister, Karl August von
Hardenberg, then Prussia should probably join Britain and Russia, but, unless
and until that proved the case, she should seek to retain the emperor’s
friendship.
Another state playing a double game was Naples. At first
sight this is somewhat surprising. Unlike Frederick William III, Ferdinand IV
did not enjoy good relations with Napoleon. Setting aside the fact that he
regarded him as an upstart and a ‘Jacobin’, he had recently been faced by a
demand that the commander of the Neapolitan army, Roger de Damas, should
immediately be dismissed as an enemy of France, or, in other words, an emigré.
For good measure, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were also accused of planning a
new war. Now, as it happened, Damas was not an emigré – he had been in the
service of first Russia and then Naples since 1786- and the queen attempted to
keep the peace by writing a personal letter to Napoleon in which she sought to
calm his fears. The sequel, however, was all too predictable:
The style of the queen’s letter was firm, dignified and
friendly, and she had no doubt that, unless Bonaparte were seeking for a
pretext to break the peace, he would adopt a more reasonable and cordial tone .
. . But this hope was short-lived: Bonaparte’s answer . . . was full of rancour
and arrogance. He laid all the troubles of the past at her door, and made her
responsible for all that was yet to come, and he ended with . . . some impertinent
fatherly advice to the effect that she would do well to be careful lest she
should fall victim to her own actions and be reduced to begging for assistance
at the courts of her kinsfolk . . . These were his final and least harsh
expressions. The queen shed torrents of tears as she was reading this fatal
letter, and, if it had the effect of increasing her bitterness and hatred
towards this man, who could wonder?
To reinforce this message, Napoleon proceeded to rattle his
sabre: in the midst of the carnival celebrations for 1805, an ultimatum was
received from the commander of the French forces in Naples, Marshal Gouvion St
Cyr, announcing that he would march on the capital unless both Damas and
Elliot, the British ambassador, left the country within three days. In the end
a compromise was negotiated – Elliot was allowed to stay and Damas was removed
from command of the army and sent to Sicily – but it was clear that for
Napoleon the affair constituted unfinished business: for example, a Neapolitan
nobleman who attended the festivities surrounding the emperor’s coronation as
King of Italy was treated to a violent tirade ‘that culminated in an unseemly
and unbridled attack upon the queen’.
All this was very alarming, but the way forward was less
than clear. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina feared and hated Napoleon and longed
for his defeat, but with the country partially occupied by French troops they
could at best play a double game. On the one hand Napoleon was offered the
promise of neutrality if only he would respect Naples’s independence, while on
the other secret approaches were made to Russia which on September produced
what looked like an agreement to go to war. In exchange for the immediate
dispatch of an Anglo-Russian expeditionary force, Naples would resist both any
increase in the French forces stationed on her territory and any expansion of
the zone in which they were deployed. Yet the dissimulation continued: above
all, it was not made clear what ‘resistance’ actually meant. In the event, the
answer proved to be ‘not very much’. Almost before the ink on the agreement
with Russia had time to dry, Napoleon decided to reinforce St Cyr with an extra
6,000 troops; the Neapolitan response to this was not even to protest, let
alone take up arms, but rather to sign a treaty of alliance with France that
committed Naples to closing her ports to British ships and defending her
territory against any foreign incursions.
Although the Neapolitan government had clearly not wanted to
take this step – the king had to be bullied into signing the treaty by his
ministers, and hastened to tell the Russian ambassador that he considered it
null and void – there was a subtext. Ferdinand and Maria Carolina did not feel
in danger just from France, but also from Britain. In the midst of the quarrels
that beset Anglo-Russian relations in the easy summer of 1805, the Russian
ambassador to Naples had informed the king that the British were planning to
seize Sicily. Strictly speaking, this was true enough: in March 1805 Sir James
Craig was given 8,000 men and directed to occupy Sicily should Naples join
Napoleon or experience a complete French takeover. But this was only part of
the story: Craig was informed that the very strong preference of the British
government was that he should occupy Sicily with the permission of Ferdinand
IV. And, beyond that, it was not ruled out that the British expeditionary force
should engage in operations on the mainland in support of the Neapolitans in
company with the Russian troops currently occupying the Ionian islands. But
with plenty of observers in the Neapolitan court only too ready to believe the
worst of Britain, the damage could not be undone. Setting aside the unfortunate
impact which the affair had on Anglo-Russian cooperation in the Mediterranean,
the Neapolitan government excluded Elliot from the negotiations that led to the
September pact and ever afterwards adopted an air of suspicion and hostility.
The tangled story of Anglo-Sicilian relations is something to which we will
return, but for the time being let us simply cite the recollections of one of
Craig’s staff officers, Sir Henry Bunbury. When the British eventually arrived
at Messina, they were kept waiting in the harbour for four weeks before they
were given permission to disembark, and the governor ‘allowed us just what he
could not refuse to allies [and] threw everything in our way that he could
without giving open offence’; as for the queen, further incensed by the
eventual abandonment of the mainland without a fight, she is described as
‘boiling with rage against the . . . English, whom she seized every occasion of
stigmatizing by the most insane abuse’.
Prussia and Naples aside, however, by the middle of August
1805 the Third Coalition was taking shape. Britain, Austria, Russia and Sweden
all stood together, and also hoped to win the support of Naples and, just
possibly, although it now seemed most unlikely, Prussia. As summer drifted into
autumn, so Alexander also pursued the possibility of bringing in both Denmark
and Turkey. What, though, did the new league stand for? British observers have
generally tended to seize upon a famous memoir written by William Pitt for the
Russian government in January 1804. Billed as a plan for the reconstruction of
Europe, this specified that ideally the French should evacuate the Low
Countries, Italy and Germany and accept frontiers based on those of 1792 (there
was never any suggestion that the erstwhile papal enclaves of Avignon and
Orange should be taken away). The United Provinces, Switzerland, Tuscany,
Modena and Piedmont were all to be restored as independent states, while the
United Provinces, Piedmont, Austria and Prussia were all to receive substantial
new territories. The United Provinces would be given all of Belgium north of a
line stretching from Antwerp to Maastricht; Piedmont given Genoa and western
Lombardy; Austria the so-called ‘Legations’ (i.e. the district centred on
Bologna and Ferrara that constituted the northernmost province of the Papal
States) and what was left of Lombardy; and Prussia the southern part of the
Austrian Netherlands, Luxembourg and the left bank of the Rhine. As for the
resultant settlement, it would be guaranteed by Britain and Russia, bolstered
by a new code of international law, and further stiffened by German and Italian
defence unions of which the respective kingpins would be Prussia and Austria.
Albeit at the cost of the frontiers of 1789- for many minor states would either
be stripped of some of their land or erased altogether – France would be shut
in by an expanded Piedmont backed up by Austria in the south and an expanded
United Provinces backed up by Prussia in the north. Even better, meanwhile,
Pitt’s plan did away with the need for total victory. With a proper cordon
sanitaire in place along her frontiers, the Allies could rest easy as to what
should be done with France herself: while Pitt considered the restoration of
the Bourbons to be desirable and believed, indeed, that this object should be
promoted, he did not see it as necessarily a fundamental principle of allied
policy and, by extension, was prepared to allow Napoleon to remain on the
throne.
This scheme, it can be argued, was in essence a conversion
of the vague, misty and ill-thought-out views that Alexander I brought to the
coalition into a practical design for the future well-being of Europe. As
expressed by the instructions issued to his special emissary, Novosiltsev, in
the autumn of 1804, the tsar’s plans were certainly open to question. While
there was clearly much common ground – the restoration of the United Provinces,
Piedmont and Switzerland, and the evacuation of Germany and Italy – Alexander
wanted much else. Where Pitt envisaged the restoration of a modified form of
the Holy Roman Empire, Alexander wanted the ‘third Germany’ to become a
national federation; where Pitt had little interest in the details of the
political settlement to pertain in each state, Alexander believed that it was
essential to intervene in this respect; where Pitt looked on the whole to
states that were historic units, Alexander harboured dreams of a Europe built
on national units and natural frontiers; and, finally, while Pitt did not look
beyond a treaty by which the new dispensation could be guaranteed, Alexander
wanted a new system of collective security and a code of international law.
Inherent to all this were certain ideas which the British were inclined to
regard not just as harmlessly idealistic, but dangerous and even hostile. Thus
in the new Europe it would not only be France that would be placed under
constraint, but also Britain, for the tsar wanted her to agree to a general
freedom of the seas and envisaged concessions on other fronts as well. Much of
this Pitt dodged: his memorandum said nothing about maritime commerce, nothing
about Britain’s colonial gains, nothing about Malta (whose surrender had not
been mentioned by Novosiltsev, but certainly tied in with the spirit of the
tsar’s ideas) and nothing about Alexander’s ‘brave new world’. With regard to
the Low Countries, the British Prime Minister also failed to put forward the
far more logical course of action represented by giving Prussia the United
Provinces rather than the Austrian Netherlands, and making the latter a buffer
state ruled, say, by the House of Orange: to have done so would have been to
risk transforming Prussia into a dangerous naval rival. To cement the alliance,
Pitt was therefore in the end forced to meet Alexander halfway: Britain would
give up all her colonial conquests, open up the question of neutral rights to
discussion after the war, and consider evacuating Malta in exchange for
Menorca. But the Anglo-Russian treaty of 11 April 1805- the central pillar of
the Third Coalition – contained none of this; all that Pitt agreed to was that
the peoples of Switzerland and the United Provinces should be allowed to
determine their own mode of government, that the King of Piedmont should be
encouraged to grant his subjects a constitution, and that the powers of Europe
should consider the possibility of establishing some form of ‘league of
nations’ when peace was restored.
Was this scheme really the framework of a new order? Hardly.
There were, of course, many superficial resemblances to the Vienna settlement
of 1815, and all the more so as the treaty of 11 April backed away from some of
the odder features of Pitt’s schemes (such as, for example, the idea that most
of Belgium should be given to Prussia). But in practice Alexander’s vision of a
new Europe went by the board. If the West was to be ruled by a new model of
territorial arrangement in which military and strategic considerations were
allowed to outweigh the demands of legitimism, in the East all was much as
before. Thus, even if this was cloaked in some instances by the desire to
restore a Polish state, powerful elements within the Russian government wanted
fresh territory in Poland, and this meant that Austria and Prussia must be compensated
in their turn. And, if special interests operated in the case of Russia, so
they did in the case of Britain, except that here the goal was not territorial
gain but security from invasion and the right to rule the sea. Nor was this an
end to the differences that marked the two settlements. As Paul Schroeder has
pointed out, in essence what we have here is an attempt by Britain and Russia,
first, simply to impose their own agenda on the rest of Europe, and, second, to
get more or less powerful auxiliaries – the Austrians, the Prussians, the
Neapolitans, the Swedes and the Danes – to do the bulk of the fighting for them
(of the 400,000 men who were originally to be committed to the alliance, only
115,000 were Russian and fewer than 20,000 British). Hence his belief that the
treaty of 11 April 1805 was not progressive at all, but rather backward-looking
and thoroughly eighteenth-century.
So how did war actually break out? On 8 August 1805 Austria
finally acceded to the Third Coalition, and less than a month later sent a
large army under General Mack across the frontier into Bavaria. The ‘War of the
Third Coalition’ had begun. In just two years, Napoleon had converted an
Anglo-French war into one involving the whole of Europe. In May 1803 Britain
had not only stood alone, but had been regarded by the rest of Europe with
hostility and suspicion. By 1805, of the great powers only Prussia remained
outside her embrace. Far from buying foreign support with ‘Pitt’s gold’,
Britain had had little to do with this result, the chief pressure for the
formation of the Third Coalition having come from Russia. Just as the events of
1802-3 revealed to Britain that she had no option but to stand firm against
Napoleon, so those of 1804-5 showed Alexander I that he too had to fight. And
why was this the case? The answer was simply ‘Napoleon’. Warned by Fouché that
his conduct could not but provoke a wider war, the emperor’s response was: ‘I
must have battles and triumphs.’ The same observer recalled, ‘One day, upon my
objecting to him that he could not make war against England and against all
Europe, he replied, “I may fail by sea, but not by land; besides, I shall be
able to strike the blow before the old coalition machines are ready. The people
of the old school understand nothing about it, and . . . have neither activity
nor decision . . . I do not fear old Europe.” ’ Beyond this there was yet
another problem. To quote Claire de Rémusat, an observer who was very close to
him at this period, ‘The greatest error of Bonaparte, an error that stemmed
from his very character, was that he did not measure his conduct by anything
other than success . . . His innate pride could not support the idea of a
defeat of any sort.’ The emperor could not accept that there were limits, whether
military, political, diplomatic or moral, to what he could do, and over and
over again rammed home this same message. Madame de Rémusat, it will be
objected, was a witness hostile to the emperor, and therefore hardly someone to
be trusted. But precisely the same idea may be found in the words of men who
remained loyal admirers of Napoleon to the death. Commenting on the campaigns
of 1805-7, for example, Lavallette wrote, ‘It was not those two years of
triumphant battles that suggested to the emperor the idea of conquering Europe
in order to become its master . . . This idea arose naturally out of his own
genius and character, for these terrible world-conquerors all belong to the
same family: the first everywhere, or death.’
