I.

Introduction

Napoleonic Wars, name given to the series of military campaigns that gripped most of Europe between 1803 and 1815. As the name implies, the central figure in this conflict was Napoleon Bonaparte, who became the ruler of France in November 1799. Following the lead given by Napoleon himself in the course both of the war and his subsequent imprisonment on St Helena, many historians have argued that the war was due to ideological hostility to the French Revolution, in whose colours Napoleon was always wont to drape himself, or the determination of the British to eliminate France as an economic and commercial rival. For a variety of reasons, however, such theories have been increasingly discredited. War, it is recognized, would almost certainly have characterized the first two decades of the 19th century even had he never been born, but academic historians are now all but united in underlining Napoleon's personal responsibility for the conflict. Not one of France's opponents ever entertained a return to the ancien régime as one of their war aims, while all of them tried détente and even alliance as a means of responding to the new France. Similarly, for a power supposedly fighting for economic and commercial aims, Britain was surprisingly willing to make concessions on these issues, her central concern being all too clearly security in Europe.

Napoleon, then, was hardly a man of peace forced into war against his will. Having first done much to perpetuate conflict in the 1790s (by going beyond the wishes of the Directory in challenging fundamental Austrian and Russian interests in Italy and the Balkans) and then sabotaged the peace that brought the French Revolutionary Wars to an end, from 1803 onwards his actions were such as to drive power after power to take up arms against him when in fact they wanted peace or even alliance. At first, the continental powers fought in isolation or in partial combinations whose members frequently could not even trust one another to stand firm, and in consequence Napoleon was able to prevail. In 1812, however, the tide turned and by the autumn of 1813 Napoleon was facing a constellation of opponents that was so large as to be unbeatable. Unable to bring himself to settle for compromise terms that would have enabled him at least to stay on the throne of France, Napoleon continued to fight on in the hope of splitting the alliance, but such hopes were all in vain, April 1814 seeing him left with no option but to abdicate. Sent into exile on Elba, he made a dramatic attempt to regain power, but this, too, was utterly futile, and the sometime emperor therefore ended his days as a prisoner on the lonely Atlantic island of St Helena.

II.

Background to Conflict, 1799-1803

At all times, then, it was Napoleon who was the chief focus of conflict. Ironically, however, he came to power as a peacemaker. Virtually all shades of French opinion were heartily sick of war by 1799, the new First Consul's great advantage being that he seemed to be able to combine peace with the protection of the Revolutionary settlement. As he rode into Paris immediately following the coup, indeed, his path was lined by cheering crowds. Virtually the first action of Consular diplomacy was therefore the despatch of appeals to both George III of England and Francis II of Austria for an end to the War of the Second Coalition (strictly speaking, Francis was at this time Francis II of the Holy Roman Empire; however, when this collapsed, he took the title “Emperor of Austria”, becoming Francis I). These, however, were hardly serious. As Napoleon well knew, France's current opponents—Britain, Turkey, Austria, and Naples—were in too good a position to be likely to accept them. The war, then, went on, but this was almost certainly exactly what the First Consul wanted, for, having thrown the responsibility for continuing the war on his enemies, he could now seek further victories that would augment his glory and allow him to dictate peace on his own terms.

There followed the campaign of 1800. Seizing the initiative, the Austrians attacked in Italy, drove back the outnumbered French and besieged Genoa, which, defended with great courage, held out till June 4. Despite the fact that he had been taken by surprise, Napoleon's response was dramatic: while forces under the command of General Jean Victor Moreau crossed the Rhine and defeated the Austrians at Stockach on May 3, the First Consul led the newly created Army of Reserve across the Alps and descended on the Austrian rear, winning a very narrow victory at Marengo on June 14. Although the campaign was badly bungled by Napoleon's standards, sufficient damage had been done to the Austrians to force them to evacuate their Italian conquests and persuade Francis II to open peace negotiations at Lunéville. However it took a further defeat at Hohenlinden for Francis to accept the French terms, Austria being forced to accept France's annexation of Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine, to recognize the independence of the various French satellite states that had been established in the 1790s, and to give up the Habsburg-ruled duchies of Modena and Tuscany, together with part of recently acquired Venetia.

With Austria completely humbled, there yet remained the Ottoman Empire, Naples, and Britain. Of these, however, the Turks took no further part in the war after the reconquest of Egypt (which had been invaded by Napoleon in 1798) in August 1801, while the Neapolitans were persuaded to sue for peace by a defeat at Siena. At the same time, even British commitment to the war was rapidly falling away. Left to herself, Britain's military prospects were limited, while at home there was a growing economic crisis, and the new administration of Henry Addington therefore announced that it was ready to come to terms. In keeping with his image as the reluctant warrior, Napoleon was content to entertain these overtures, and all the more so as he had problems of his own and saw peace as an opportunity to strengthen his power at home, rebuild the battered French navy and bring Germany further under France's sway.

The result was the Treaty of Amiens of March 25, 1802. This, however, was never likely to lead to a lasting peace. Though Britain and France had been prepared to come to terms, the former still desired security in Europe and the latter to preserve French hegemony, the two goals soon proving to be incompatible. Nor were matters helped by the fact that the settlement was essentially an unequal one. In order to obtain peace, Britain had been prepared to offer conditions that were extremely generous. France's natural frontiers were recognized, along with the various satellite republics, and almost all Britain's many conquests restored to their original owners. All that Napoleon had to do in exchange being to withdraw all his forces from his satellites and treat them as independent states. For peace to last, therefore, much would depend upon Napoleon. At the very least, the First Consul would have to withdraw his troops from Holland, Switzerland, and Italy, respect the integrity and independence of the Cisalpine, Ligurian, Helvetic, and Batavian Republics, and generally restrain his actions in Europe. A liberal policy towards British trade would also have been advisable, along with an end to French expansion in the wider world.

Given Napoleon's character, however, all this was most unlikely, and the only sign of movement—the abandonment of France's colonial ambitions in the western hemisphere represented by the sale of Louisiana to the United States—was negated by massive naval construction and evidence of fresh designs on Egypt. In consequence, Britain went back to war as early as May 18, 1803. The France of 1803, however, was infinitely more powerful than the France of 1799. Thus, in the four years since he had come to power, Napoleon had ended the chaos that had characterized the domestic situation ever since the Revolution. Major concessions to the Church and improved security arrangements had broken the back of popular resistance and opened the way for taxation and conscription to function effectively. A new system of local government centred on the prefect had greatly increased the power of the state. And the all-important notables—the propertied groups who were the backbone of the French system of government—had been conciliated by the promulgation of a new legal code that in a variety of ways consolidated their position in society. Not only was the war effort secure from domestic disruption, meanwhile, but it also had access to greater resources. Massive naval construction, for example, had in part replaced the terrible losses of the Revolutionary Wars between 1792 and 1802, while a French-orchestrated re-organization of the Holy Roman Empire (a necessary consequence of Austria's surrender of the left bank of the Rhine) had won for France a range of new collaborators in Germany in the form of the much-enlarged states of Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg.

III.

The War of the Third Coalition, 1803-1805

Forced to fight alone—in 1803 neither Austria, nor Prussia nor Russia had the slightest desire to go to war with Napoleon—Britain therefore faced a major challenge. All the more was this the case as the reduced size of her regular army meant that her chief weapons in any war with France must normally be colonial operations and naval blockades, the trouble with these being that they were inclined to reduce her chances of obtaining the allies she needed in continental Europe. What saved Britain, of course, was the fact that she was an island. Other than harassing Britain's trade by occupying certain strategic ports in Germany and Italy and seizing the German state of Hanover, whose ruler was George III, the only thing that Napoleon could do was to mass a large army at Boulogne in the hope that he would be able to get it across the Channel. Taken seriously by the British though the threat was—enormous home defence forces were mobilized and elaborate defences constructed along the coast of Kent and Sussex—so long as a strong fleet was kept in the vicinity there was no chance of this whatsoever, and there therefore ensued a prolonged stalemate.

On the military front, the months that followed were chiefly marked by repeated efforts to divert the Channel fleet for long enough for Napoleon's army to get on board ship and reach the coast. More important by far, however, was the changing diplomatic situation. In brief, this was transformed in that Britain had by the middle of 1805 become the centre of a powerful “third coalition”. Much weight is often given here to the kidnapping and execution of the Duc d'Enghien, a distant connection of the French royal family, on suspicion of involvement in a royalist conspiracy, but only in Sweden did this affair have the effect of a casus belli, or pretext for starting a war. To understand the origins of the Third Coalition we must rather turn to the war against England. For all the eastern powers Napoleon's early moves on the Continent were at the very least alarming and in some cases actually injurious, although it was, in fact, initially only Russia that hit back. Alexander I, having for various reasons been particularly annoyed by Napoleon's highhandedness, augmented conscription, sent an amphibious force to the Mediterranean, and gave the British government to understand that he was prepared to negotiate a defensive alliance against Napoleon. Then, on May 18, 1804, there came the declaration that France was to become a hereditary empire. With French power as unrivalled as it was, this was not to be endured, for, by enabling Napoleon to lay claim to the mantle of Charlemagne, it opened the way for him formally to supplant the Holy Roman Emperor as overlord of Germany, and in consequence Russia began to work for a new coalition that would drive Napoleon back at least to the limits he had agreed upon at Lunéville and Amiens, obtaining for this purpose the promise of substantial British subsidies. Meanwhile, an ultimatum was sent to Napoleon demanding that he evacuate Hanover and Naples, the French ruler's predictable refusal to comply leading Russia to break off diplomatic relations in September 1804.

Even now, however, a general war seemed a long way off. Anglo-Russian relations were disrupted by serious quarrels over Malta, while Austria would agree to no more than a defensive alliance with Russia. As for Prussia, fears that Napoleon might launch a surprise attack upon her were countered by suspicions of Austria, Russia, and Sweden that led her actually to explore the possibility of an alliance with France. At the beginning of 1805, then, the Third Coalition was really no closer than before. Yet again, however, what changed the situation was the behaviour of Napoleon. Early in 1805 he announced that he was to take the title of King of Italy, the ci-devant Italian Republic now being restyled as a kingdom with his step-son, Eugène de Beauharnais, as its viceroy. Nor was Napoleon finished: formally placing the new crown on his own head in Milan on May 26, in early June he announced the annexation of Genoa, Parma, and Piacenza, and appropriated Lucca as a principality for his younger sister, Elise. As a result on April 11 Britain and Russia signed a treaty of alliance that committed the latter to war unless Napoleon agreed to conform to the terms of the treaties of Amiens and Lunéville. With Russia committed to war, Vienna had to follow suit. Either Austria renounced all thought of recovering her influence in Italy, deserted her only ally, and risked fighting alone later, or she took up arms. On August 9, 1805, then, Austria formally joined the Third Coalition, this soon being further swelled by Sweden, and, after some hesitation, Naples, which the French had hastily evacuated for fear that their forces would be overwhelmed.

With Austrian forces moving into Bavaria and northern Italy, a Russo-Swedish army concentrating at Stralsund, British troops preparing to invade Hanover, an Anglo-Russian force landing at Naples, and 95,000 more Russians marching for the Danube, the coalition desired by the British since 1803 was now a fait accompli. Only the Prussians remained aloof, kept neutral by their distrust of the other eastern powers, guarantees that their neutrality would be respected, and hopes of obtaining Hanover (which they had long coveted) and an alliance with France. In reality, however, Napoleon had little to fear. Having spent its time on the Channel coast engaging in intensive training, the army that he now set in motion was at the peak of its abilities, while its mobility and striking power had been greatly enhanced by the introduction of the so-called corps system (the organization of the French army into independent forces of all arms). At all events, the campaign was a triumph. In brief, the Austrians were crushed at Ulm, Vienna occupied, and the Russians defeated at Austerlitz. For good measure, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina of Naples were forced to flee to Sicily, and Joseph Bonaparte placed upon the throne. As it happened, these crushing blows, for which the British naval victory at Trafalgar was little or no compensation, did not bring peace, but for some months it appeared that they might do so. Austria was forced to surrender, being stripped in the process of much of its territory in Germany and Italy, not to mention an indemnity of 40,000,000 francs, while Russia and Britain, too, were inclined to seek a settlement and opened peace negotiations.

IV.

The Zenith of French Power, 1805-1807

Despite the fact that Britain in particular was once again prepared to offer generous terms, these came to naught, although the year 1806 passed with only clashes between the British and the Russians on the one hand and the French on the other. In part, this was because it was now the turn of Prussia to experience Napoleon's attentions. On December 15, 1805, she had gained her treaty of alliance with France, but this proved such a disaster that in September 1806 Berlin declared war (in brief, the Prussians found that alliance with France meant economic ruin and diplomatic humiliation). Fighting all but alone when a year before she might have done so in the company of both Austria and Russia, Prussia was now crushed: with her army broken at the double disaster of the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, most of the country was occupied and King Frederick William forced to flee to Königsberg. Joined in East Prussia by large Russian forces, the Prussians fought on, and on February 7-8, 1807, the French were held to an extremely bloody draw at Eylau. However, on June 14 the Russians were overwhelmed at Friedland, Alexander now being persuaded not only to sue for peace, but to seek an alliance with Napoleon (deeply mistrustful of Britain, the tsar also hoped to gain French help in the Balkans, where he was currently engaged in a bitter war with Turkey). Anxious for Russian support in the implementation of his new policy of defeating Britain by excluding all her exports from Europe—the so-called Continental Blockade—Napoleon welcomed this approach, and the result was the Treaty of Tilsit, whereby Alexander obtained a substantial portion of Prussian Poland and promises of French support against Turkey in exchange for recognizing the new frontiers that had resulted from the campaigns of 1805, pressurizing Britain and her remaining allies to make peace, and, if necessary, going to war against them (Prussia, by contrast, was forced to pay a heavy indemnity, reduce her army by seven eighths, maintain a large French garrison, and accept the loss of half her territory).

V.

Blockade, Entanglement, and Defeat, 1807-1812

As a result of Tilsit, if one disregards a weak and isolated Sweden that was soon to be broken by Russian invasion, Napoleon had once again secured a general peace on the Continent. The emperor, however, proved incapable of turning this situation to account. Rather than simply waiting for the Continental Blockade to crush Britain (and there is considerable evidence that, but for subsequent events, it would have done so, the period 1807 to 1808 being a time of great hardship), in the autumn of 1807 a variety of factors impelled him to intervene in Portugal and Spain, the second of these states eventually being given his brother, Joseph, to be its new king. This, however, was a disaster, for both countries. They became the scene of major revolts that proved impossible to suppress, the Iberian insurgents receiving the support of larger and larger numbers of British troops in a conflict that became known as the Peninsular War. In the end Napoleon might still have triumphed even in the Peninsula, while an attempt on the part of Austria to reverse the defeat of 1805 was smashed at Wagram in July 1809, but the effect of his adoption of the Continental Blockade was to force him to annexe more and more territory in Germany and Italy, this being the only means by which the policy could be made effective. The result of this being to alienate Alexander I, Napoleon resolved on the invasion of Russia. The effect of this move, which was initiated in June 1812, was completely to destabilize the French position in Spain, but, had victory been obtained in Russia this need not have mattered, for it is clear that the emperor could then have swept back across the Pyrenees and forced the Allies to retreat.

Victory, however, was not obtained in Russia. On paper the chances of success seemed very high when war broke out on June 24. In all, Napoleon had some 600,000 men, against whom the Russians could initially field only 175,000, while even these troops were in a very difficult situation. Yet, hampered by poor roads, inadequate reconnaissance, commanders who were out of their depth, and its sheer size, the grande armée moved with none of its customary celerity. Meanwhile, increasingly corpulent and rather unwell, Napoleon himself was no longer the dynamic leader of earlier years. In consequence, the Russians succeeded in falling back on Moscow, leaving the grande armée to lumber slowly along in their wake. Meanwhile, so many men died of exhaustion or disease or had to be dropped off to protect the road to the frontier, that when the Russians finally gave battle at Borodino some 70 miles west of Moscow on September 5, the emperor was left with too few men to obtain a decisive victory. After a terrible struggle that was very badly handled by Napoleon, Moscow was eventually occupied, but, secure in the knowledge that his army was still in one piece, Alexander refused to negotiate, the emperor eventually being left with no option but to retreat. Leaving Moscow on November 19, the grande armée soon found itself plunged into the horrors of the Russian winter. Thousands of men died of cold or starvation, while still others were picked off by Cossack raids or killed fighting off the new armies that the Russians had sent to cut their line of retreat. In all, some 120,000 of the 140,000 troops involved perished in the disaster.

VI.

The Overthrow of Napoleon, 1813-1814

In the end, no more than 20,000 men escaped across the frontier into East Prussia, which, left with too few troops to halt the oncoming Russians, the French were forced to evacuate, along with the satellite state known as the Grand Duchy of Warsaw that Napoleon had established in Poland in 1807. Meanwhile, Austria abandoned the alliance that she had made with France as the only means of surviving after Wagram, while Prussia after some hesitation elected to join the Russians (rather than stopping at the frontier, Alexander had decided that his armies should push on westwards). With some difficulty Napoleon succeeded in scraping together a new grande armée, and with these troops gained sufficient success to force Alexander and Frederick William to accept an armistice in June 1813.

We now come to the turning point of the campaign. Thus far still neutral, Austria was desperate to maintain a balance between France and Russia, conceiving that an outright victory for either could not but spell disaster for the Habsburgs, and greatly fearing the nationalistic effervescence that the campaign had started to provoke in Germany. In these circumstances the only hope was a compromise peace, and the Austrian chancellor, Metternich, therefore proffered his services as a mediator. Ratified in the convention of Reichenbach of June 27, 1813, the result of his discussions with the Allies was that, unless Napoleon agreed to give up all of Germany, Poland, and present-day Slovenia and Croatia, which he had taken from Austria in 1809, Vienna would enter the war on July 20. Confronted with these terms (which were most favourable, for he would have retained not only his throne but Belgium, Holland, the left bank of the Rhine and much of Italy), however, Napoleon brushed aside Metternich's attempts to present them in a favourable light and even soften them still further, and swore to fight on, the implication being that he was gambling on total victory.

This, however, was foolish in the extreme. Confronted by the odds that he now faced, even Napoleon would have been hard put to survive. Counting the troops of his remaining allies, he could muster some 335,000 men in the main theatre of operations in Saxony. However, once the Austrians had duly joined the Allies, facing him were a minimum of 515,000 troops. Dividing his forces so that he could strike out in several directions at once, he succeeded for a short period in staving off disaster, but in the middle of October he was all but surrounded at Leipzig. Driven to accept battle for reasons of prestige alone, the outnumbered French were crushed, Napoleonic control of central and northern Europe then proceeding to evaporate overnight.

With the grande armée fleeing for the Rhine, and with those German states that had not already come over to the Allies either collapsing or changing sides, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland being over-run, and Allied forces invading northern Italy and pushing across the Pyrenees from a liberated Spain and Portugal, it might have been thought that Napoleon would have decided to admit defeat. Yet, offered terms that would have granted him first France's natural frontiers and then the frontiers of 1792, he again elected to fight on. This time, however, it really was all over. Asked for yet more troops, France, which had already been bled dry and forced to endure a prolonged economic slump, refused to back the emperor. With local government falling apart and populace and notables alike in a state of near revolt, on April 6 Napoleon was forced by his own generals to abdicate and was sent into exile. Just over a year later there followed the “glorious irrelevance” of the Hundred Days, in which Napoleon escaped from Elba, secured power with the aid of the deeply disaffected army, and went down to defeat at Waterloo, but to all intents and purposes the Napoleonic Wars were over.

In September 1814, meanwhile, the business of remaking Europe had begun at a major congress of Europe's statesmen in Vienna. This almost produced further conflict, Austria and Prussia colliding violently over the question of Saxony, but in the end a peace settlement was reached whose chief feature was the creation of a series of safeguards against future French aggression, considerable Prussian expansion in Germany, the establishment of Austrian control in northern Italy, and the renewed obliteration of Polish independence.

VII.

The Impact of the Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars had a considerable impact on 19th-century Europe. In political terms, their chief contribution was to give birth to an age of nationalism. In Austria and Germany the period from 1805 to 1814 had witnessed the emergence of a pan-German nationalist movement that saw unification and popular mobilization as the obvious answers to French aggression: Napoleon, it was argued, must be driven out by a great people's revolt, and France prevented from any further invasion of German territory by the creation of a new nation state. In the course of the wars themselves, this school of thought had far less impact than has often been imagined: revolt in Germany was at best sporadic, while the so-called “War of Liberation” of 1813 to 1814 was far more a matter of kings and princes than it was of peoples. After the return of peace, however, it was a different matter. In Germany, Austria, and Italy (where the wars had seen the emergence of a movement similar to that of Germany), nationalists were dissatisfied with the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, while in Belgium practical problems related to enforced union with Holland created further agitation. If it was not the only factor in doing so—it did not help, for example, that the wars gave military heroism a certain aura of romance, or that in Spain they gave rise to repeated civil wars and a tradition of military intervention in politics—all this helped make the period 1815 to 1848 an “age of revolutions”. That said, however, it was also on the whole an era of comparative stability in international relations: fearing war's political dynamic, the powers strove to avoid it and at first tried to manage their dealings with one another through a system of congress diplomacy.

In economic and social terms, the picture is more mixed. Demographically, the heavy losses of the wars—estimates range between 5,000,000 and 7,000,000—did little or nothing to check the steady rise in population. However, there seems little doubt that the general effect of the conflict was somewhat to retard the industrialization of Continental Europe. While Britain soared ahead thanks to her control of the seas, French protectionism and the shortage of raw materials that resulted from the Continental Blockade inflicted considerable damage on the industries of such areas as the Ruhr, while even French industry lost out thanks to its inability to keep in touch with the latest technological developments in Britain. Yet even here the picture is mixed, for the blockade of such ports as Bordeaux, Nantes, Antwerp, and Hamburg encouraged a shift from commerce to industry, for example, while the wars also stimulated the industrialization of certain areas that had hitherto been untouched by this development, a good example being Saxony.

The greatest contribution of the Napoleonic Wars to the history of Europe, however, lies in the development of the state. By 1814 war had come to involve an exercise of power that can only be described as prodigious by the standards of the 18th century. To fight the sort of wars that threatened in the future, all states would need to maintain powerful war machines of a sort that could simply not be fed, clothed, armed and administered by the resources of the ancien régime. For this reason, if for no other, there could be no return to 1789, most of Europe therefore seeing the retention of Napoleonic patterns of taxation, administration, policing, and military organization. In short, the modern state had arrived.