Napoleon: A Life

by Andrew Roberts

At the same time the celebration of the fall of the Bastille and the execution of Louis XVI were carefully and gradually downgraded as the First Consul came closer to declaring himself a monarch.

‘There are no people more impudent or more demanding than the Swiss,’ he was later to say. ‘Their country is about as big as a man’s hand, and they have the most extraordinary pretensions.’

‘The possession of Valais is one of the matters closest to my heart,’

The Peace of Amiens gave Napoleon a breathing space to pursue plans to stimulate economic growth through state intervention and protectionism, a policy originally pioneered by Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.

Yet by the end of his reign, France had reached only the level of industrialization that Britain had enjoyed in 1780, an indictment of revolutionary, Directory and Napoleonic economic policy and the Colbertism they all followed.

Napoleon had managed greatly to increase confidence in France’s finances and in her ability to honour her government’s bonds, but even so they never managed to match Britain’s in this period. At his best, he was forced to borrow at higher rates than Britain at its worst.*

Hawkesbury told Otto repeatedly that Britain could do nothing to curtail ‘the liberty of the press as secured by the constitution of this country’, but Otto pointed out that under the 1793 Alien Act there were provisions for the deportation of seditious foreign writers such as Peltier.

That Napoleon suspected that the Amiens peace might be short lived is clear from his orders to General Mathieu Decaen, whom he sent to India with four men-of-war and 1,800 sailors in March 1803 to ‘communicate with the peoples or princes who are most impatient under the yoke of the English [that is, East India] Company’.

all of those might have been resolved given trust and goodwill, but there wasn’t any on either side.

With his customary good sense – at least when he was sane – George III described the peace as ‘experimental’, which is all the British government ever considered it to be, and for Britain it soon became apparent that the experiment had failed.

January 30, 1803

a partnership whereby the world’s future could be decided between Britain dominating a vast overseas empire and France dominating Europe

The next day the British handed over Cape Town to the Dutch East India Company, but no blandishments or threats would persuade them to honour their commitments over Malta and Alexandria.

On March 8, 1803 George III delivered a King’s Speech asking parliament for war supplies and mobilizing Britain’s militia, blaming the French for making major military preparations in French and Dutch ports, even though a despatch from Whitworth afterwards made it clear that the French weren’t doing anything of the sort.

This exchange was heard by as many as two hundred people, all of whom, according to Whitworth, felt ‘the extreme impropriety of his conduct, and the total want of dignity as well as of decency on the occasion’.

On April 23, Britain demanded the retention of Malta for another seven years, the ceding of the lightly populated Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, 70 miles from Tunisia, as a naval base, the evacuation of Holland by France, and for compensation to be paid to the Sardinians for Piedmont.

To avoid the (in fact non-existent) danger of Napoleon accepting her demands, Britain formally declared war on May 18, 1803.

At the Treaty of San Ildefonso, Napoleon had promised Spain not to sell Louisiana to a third party, a commitment he now decided to ignore.

Instead, by helping the United States to continental greatness, and enriching the French treasury in the process, Napoleon was able to prophesy: ‘I have just given to England a maritime rival that sooner or later will humble her pride.’

Within a decade, the United States was at war with Britain rather than with France, and the War of 1812 was to draw off British forces that were still fighting in February 1815, and which might otherwise have been present at Waterloo.

Barings were paying Napoleon 2 million francs a month even when Britain was at war with France.

‘We have lived long,’ said Livingston when the deal was concluded, ‘but this is the noblest work of our whole lives. The treaty which we have just signed has not been obtained by art or dictated by force; equally advantageous to the two contracting parties, it will change vast solitudes into flourishing districts. From this day the United States take their place among the powers of first rank.’

France invaded George III’s ancestral electorate of Hanover at the end of the month,

put the Bayeaux Tapestry on display in the Louvre

there were sound logistical reasons why England hadn’t been successfully invaded since the fifteenth century

Napoleon began negotiations with the leaders of the United Irishmen in Paris in August, hoping that 20,000 Irish rebels would support the French army if he landed in Ireland.

Eight hours of night in our favour would decide the fate of the universe.’

We have six centuries of insults to avenge.’

he described the Channel as ‘a ditch which will be crossed when we have the audacity to try’.

January 24, 1804

That month Napoleon even tried to draw the Pope into supporting the operation, writing to him of the ‘intolerable … oppression’ of Irish Catholics. There was no response from Rome.

He believed he could have ‘arrived in London in three days’, just at the moment that Nelson would have returned from the West Indies from chasing another French fleet, too late to save his country.

Britain had undertaken intense preparations to repel an invasion from 1803 onwards:

Seventy-three small ‘Martello’ beacon towers were built along the south coast

Napoleon did have a corporal and two soldiers shot who stole sacred vases from a church, which in his own mind was not comparable to his own removal of much of northern Italy’s Renaissance art treasures from churches and palaces. French generals regularly enriched themselves at the expense of the conquered,

was common practice at that period for commanders to reward themselves handsomely: Wellington returned from his campaigns in India having paid off all his debts and amassed a fortune of £42,000, the equivalent of over 1 million francs, all of it perfectly legally

* It was hardly an ideal totem; Pompey had been murdered on stepping ashore in Egypt in 48 BC. Of the 150 men mentioned by Boyer, only 40 were killed; the rest were wounded.