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.