The Wars of Napoleon

Charles J Esdaile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429835483
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1995 to great critical acclaim, The Wars of Napoleon provides students with a comprehensive survey of the Napoleonic Wars around the central theme of the scale of French military power and its impact on other European states, from Portugal to Russia and from Scandinavia to Sicily.

The book introduces the reader to the rise of Napoleon and the wider diplomatic and political context before analysing such subjects as how France came to dominate Europe; the impact of French conquest and the spread of French ideas; the response of European powers; the experience of the conflicts of 1799–1815 on such areas of the world as the West Indies, India and South America; the reasons why Napoleon's triumph proved ephemeral; and the long-term impact of the period. This second edition has been revised throughout to include a completely re-written section on collaboration and resistance, a new chapter on the impact of the Napoleonic Wars in the wider world and material on the various ways in which women became involved in, or were affected by, the conflict.

Thoroughly updated and offering students a view of the subject that challenges many preconceived ideas, The Wars of Napoleon remains an essential resource for all students of the French Revolutionary Wars as well as students of European and military history during this period.

CHAPTER 1

The nature of the Napoleonic Wars

The wheat and the chaff

‘The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century’, writes Leo Tolstoy, ‘present the spectacle of an extraordinary movement of millions of men.’ As he continued, they left their habitual pursuits and rushed from one side of Europe to the other to plunder, slaughter one another, triumph and despair, the result being that the whole current of life was transformed. All this being the case, there arises a very obvious question. In Tolstoy’s words once again, ‘What was the cause of that activity, or from what laws did it arise?¹ What indeed? Were the Napoleonic Wars the fruit of the boundless ambition of a single man, or of a determination on the part of the powers of Europe to bring about his overthrow? Alternatively, were they the continuation of an ideological struggle between the French Revolution and the ancien régime? Yet again, were they the result of a struggle for economic supremacy between Britain and France? Contradictory as these explanations are, the first task of any survey of the Napoleonic Wars must be to address this debate.

Though each of these theories appears to have some merit, several of them may in fact be dismissed with relative ease. Let us take, for example, the claim that Napoleon was at heart a man of peace whose noble desires were constantly frustrated by the unremitting hostility of his opponents to the principles of the French Revolution. In this argument, of course, the claims of the emperor himself were crucial, his central complaint being that ‘Europe never ceased warring against France, against French principles and against me’.² However, perpetuated though such arguments have been by a veritable grande armée of apologists, in reality none of this holds good.³ If Europe was indeed plunged into an ideological war in 1792–3, many states either quickly forgot their aversion to the Revolution or only entered the war when their traditional interests were threatened. Thus, Russia remained primarily concerned with the partition of Poland, only becoming involved in the fighting when France impinged on the Balkans and the Levant; Prussia kept the bulk of her troops in the east so as to maximise her gains in Poland, and eventually came to an early settlement with France in 1795; and Spain not only made peace with France in 1795, but the following year joined her in an alliance against Britain. Finally, even Britain and Austria, the two powers most committed to resisting France, were not wholly eager to restore the Bourbons and never ruled out the possibility of a compromise peace. To quote George Rudé,

The war that broke out in 1792 . . . was not, and . . . never became, a straightforward crusade of the crowned heads of Europe against Revolutionary France . . . A general coalition of old Europe against the Revolution was hard to bring about, and, even when it appeared (as in 1793–95) to have been achieved, it was factors other than the purely ideological that played the major role.⁴

With France also moving away from the militant evangelism of 1792–3, there seems no reason to suppose that she could not have enjoyed a settled peace at any time. To attempt to explain the Napoleonic Wars in terms of a clash of ideologies is therefore futile, this being equally the case with the idea that they stemmed primarily from Anglo-French economic and commercial rivalry. Unlike the ideological explanation for the wars, such an argument does at least rest on plausible foundations. Napoleon’s most consistent opponent, Britain was a prime mover in many of the coalitions that were formed against him; during the Revolutionary and the Napoleonic Wars, Britain expended considerable energy on occupying the colonies of France and her allies, greatly extended her Indian empire, drove all her rivals from the seas and proved utterly ruthless in her drive for fresh markets, even going so far as effectively to foster the revolutions that broke out in Latin American possessions of her Spanish ally in 1810. Yet here again there are problems. If Britain was France’s most consistent opponent, an equally plausible explanation can be found in her desire for security in Europe, to which object she was in fact willing to make substantial colonial concessions. Meanwhile, to attribute all the conflicts of the Napoleonic period to her hostility is ridiculous. Far from being some sort of pan-European puppet master, Britain was actually widely distrusted, many countries having good reason to fear and resent her pretensions at least as much as they did those of France.⁵ With her naval strength securing both colonial expansion and commercial supremacy, her blockade wreaking havoc with the European economy and her armies, at least until 1812, playing little discernible role in the Continental struggle, suspicions grew that Britain’s war was being fought for the beggary of every other power. Such fears were naturally fanned by French propaganda, while matters were not improved by Britain’s inability to satisfy the financial demands of her potential allies and by the inadequacy of her diplomacy, which all too often was arrogant and sanctimonious. Britain’s actions, too, were utterly unscrupulous, as witness the surprise attacks she launched against Spain in 1804 and Denmark in 1807. If British enmity really had been the sole motor of the war, in short, then Britain would probably have fought alone. And, as for her colonial offensives and naval blockade, they were entirely consonant with a situation in which she had few other means of striking directly at France, offensives in the colonies in fact tending only to occur when opportunities for British intervention on the Continent were limited. In any case, not only did captured French colonies make excellent bargaining counters, but their seizure was necessary for defensive purposes given their potential as bases from which British colonies could be attacked and trade disrupted. And, if their acquisition benefited British trade, this can be argued to have been vital to the prosecution of the war.⁶

To argue, then, that the Napoleonic Wars were primarily an economic conflict between Britain and France makes no more sense than to argue that they were an ideological conflict between France and the ancien régime. This is not to say that without Napoleon the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century would have been a period of profound peace. France had emerged from the revolutionary decade with her territory greatly expanded by the annexation of Belgium, the left bank of the Rhine, Savoy and Nice, with a considerable degree of influence beyond even her new borders, with an army swollen by conscription and precluded from demobilisation by an extremely parlous economic situation, and with a régime whose increasingly narrow base at home made external belligerence the keystone of its revolutionary legitimacy. Concealed within her, meanwhile, was a powerful constituency whose interests had become bound up with war, this being centred upon a clique of young and ambitious generals for whom continued conflict offered virtually unlimited personal advantage and to whom the weakness of the Directory had given unwonted influence in Paris. War, then, was always very likely, but, even so, there can be no denying the enormous impact of the politics and personality of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The First Consul

Born in Corsica to a family of the petty nobility on 15 August 1769, the then Nabuleone Buonaparte had first come to France as an officer cadet. Poor, intense, physically unprepossessing and fiercely Corsican, he was a classic outsider for whom struggle was a psychological necessity – hence the personal ambition, love of martial glory, political radicalism and self-conscious romanticism that characterise his early writings. Whether it was the neglected child born to a mother who had suffered a difficult pregnancy, the scion of a family of inveterate social climbers, the second son engaged in endless rivalry with his elder brother, Joseph, the despised outsider at Brienne or the penniless young artillery officer teased by girls as ‘Puss in Boots’, a whole succession of Nabuleones combined to produce a Napoleon whose first instinct it was to see any and every situation as an opportunity to impose himself upon his fellows and establish his own superiority by every means available.⁷

Such was the young man who in 1789 found himself witnessing the turmoil of the Revolution. In these events he at first took little part, but, realising the direction that events were likely to take, the young officer quickly aligned himself with the Jacobins and, in between brief spells of service with his regiment, busied himself with fomenting radicalism in Corsica. At first he remained a Corsican patriot, but the association did not last: increasingly discontented with Republican rule, in 1793 Corsica rose in revolt, the Bonapartes being driven into exile. If there was any doubt in Napoleon’s mind that his future lay with France it was now dispelled. Caught up in the so-called ‘revolt of the provinces’ in the Midi in 1793, he published a denunciation of the rebels and played a prominent role in the reduction of Toulon. Surviving the successive upheavals that followed, by 1795 he had acquired both a considerable reputation as a staff officer and a number of useful political connections, the latter being reinforced by his suppression of the Vendémiaire rising in Paris in 1795 (by means of the famous ‘whiff of grapeshot’) and his subsequent marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, the erstwhile mistress of the important politician, Paul de Barras.⁸

At length these connections brought Napoleon the command of the Army of Italy, the result being that he suddenly soared to fame.⁹ Adopting an offensive strategy in the wake of the withdrawal of Prussia and Spain from the First Coalition in 1795, the Directory had intended to strike its main blows against Britain and Austria by means of a major invasion of Ireland and an offensive in southern Germany, but the first was turned back by a ‘Protestant wind’ and the second defeated by the Austrians. In Italy, however, matters were very different: striking across the frontier from its base at Nice in April 1796, within a few short months Napoleon’s ragged little army had forced Piedmont and the Papal States to make peace, over-run northern Italy and beaten a succession of Austrian armies, the following spring threatening Vienna itself with occupation.¹⁰ Badly shaken, the Austrians asked for an armistice, an initial peace settlement being signed on 18 April 1797. By this time, however, Napoleon had become much more than a simple general. Very early on in the campaign, success in battle, the devotion of his troops and a growing sense of his own power convinced him that he was ‘a man called upon to influence the destiny of the people’.¹¹ At the same time, French failures elsewhere, to which his own victories provided a vivid contrast, reinforced his importance to the Directory and thus his political independence. Stimulated by the need to provide his small army with a secure base for its operations, Napoleon therefore deliberately encouraged republican feeling, the result being the formation of the Milan-based Cisalpine Republic in June 1797. With the initiative firmly in his hands, Napoleon was also effectively left to offer the Austrians peace terms of his own making, these finally being agreed in the Treaty of Campo Formio of 17 October 1797.¹²

Yet, though Austria did remarkably well out of it, gaining Salzburg, large parts of the old Venetian Republic, which was partitioned between her, the Cisalpine Republic and France (who took the Ionian Islands) in exchange for no more than recognition of the Cisalpine Republic (and, with this, acceptance of the loss of the Habsburg-ruled Duchy of Modena), the Austrian Netherlands, Lombardy and various minor territories in southern Germany, as well as a promise to support France’s claims to the left bank of the Rhine in a subsequent conference of all the states of the Holy Roman Empire, this settlement achieved nothing, not least because the Directory had wanted Napoleon to impose much harsher terms. As de facto ruler of the Cisalpine Republic, meanwhile, the commander of the Army of Italy had acquired a taste for political power, remarking, ‘I have tasted supremacy and I can no longer renounce it.’¹³ Giving himself the airs of a hereditary prince, he allowed himself to indulge in flights of fancy that were ever more unbridled. Thus: ‘What I have done so far is nothing. I am only at the beginning of the course that I must run. Do you think that I am triumphing in Italy merely to . . . found a republic?’¹⁴ By the end of 1797, in fact, Napoleon was already thinking of seizing control of the French government: he openly spoke of not wanting to leave Italy unless it was to play ‘a role in France resembling the one I have here’, and further remarked: ‘The Parisian lawyers who have been put in charge of the Directory understand nothing of government. They are mean-minded men . . . I very much doubt that we can remain in agreement much longer.’¹⁵

For this, however, he admitted that the time was not yet ripe, the inference being that he must embark on a search for still more glory. Action, in fact, was essential: when he did r...