The Xenophile Historian

A History of Europe

1772 to 1815

	It All Started in America
	The First French Revolution
	The Reign of Terror
	The Directory
	The End of Poland--For Now
	Enter Napoleon Bonaparte
	The United Irishmen's Revolt
	The First Consul Takes on the Second Coalition
	The First French Empire
	Napoleon at the Height of Power
	From Moscow to Elba
	The Hundred Days
	Population and Economics at the End of the Revolutionary Era
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All this may seem trivial to our point of view, but take note of this: if the people see a king's authority as coming from themselves, rather than from God, it's a small step to consider running a nation with no king at all! With a cynical eye common citizens looked at the way kings went along wheeling and dealing, acting treacherously when they could get away with it, caring little for the welfare of their subjects, and trading pieces of land (with the inhabitants on them) as if they were shares of stock. What the kings did not realize was that a generation was growing up that would refuse to play this game. They first showed themselves among a group of people who had already left the homes of their ancestors to make a clean break with the past--the settlers of the British colonies in America. A wave of monarchist refugees fled across the Atlantic when the victors in the English Civil War executed Charles I; they were joined not long after that by Cromwell's supporters when the monarchists returned to power; consequently the Americans had some vivid revolutionary memories to go on. And if that wasn't enough, one could also look to the republics of Switzerland and the Netherlands to see what ordinary people can achieve when freed of the shackles imposed by kings.

During the Seven Years War the cost of driving the French and Spaniards from the Atlantic seaboard of North America was met by the British taxpayer. The American colonists did not contribute a penny beyond what normally went to their militias. After the war the home government, coming under the usual pressure to reduce spending, decided that the time had come for the Americans to pay for their own defense. The money was to be raised from stamps that the colonists would be required to put on all legal documents, a form of taxation that already existed in England. The colonists decided that they were having none of this. They argued that Parliament did not have the right to tax those subjects who have no voting representatives in the House of Commons, which would have been impractical anyway, given the amount of time it took to communicate across the Atlantic. Vigorous demonstrations followed. The British government, recognizing that it was not worth risking a civil war to force the issue, took only a few months to change its mind and drop the idea (1765).

The truth was that the thirteen colonies between Canada and Florida had grown up. While the British flattered themselves by thinking that their red-coated soldiers had saved the colonists from the threat of destruction by Indian, Spaniard, or Frenchman, the truth was that steady multiplication had carried the American population to a level where only the mother country's government could be a threat.

For a few years after the stamp act the situation was reasonably calm; the colonists were apparently satisfied with de facto independence; Britain was aware that it could lose a captive market if it insisted on more than token legislation to prove it was still sovereign. One of these token acts was the granting of a tea monopoly to the British East India Company. The radicals of New England considered even this a form of tyranny and organized a tea boycott. It was an immediate success; in Boston the authorities lost power completely and the colonists dumped a consignment of tea into the harbor (1773). The episode clearly showed that in New England a majority of the colonists now considered themselves Americans first and Englishmen second. Skirmishes between the British army and local militia in and around Boston grew into a full-scale war and persuaded the colonial leaders to write the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

The war that followed was small in casualties and destruction, but awesome in its effects on future history. The American navy was limited to a few privateers like John Paul Jones, meaning that they could not stop the British from landing wherever they wished. On the other hand, the British did not have an army large enough to conquer and subjugate the whole continent. The result was a few British garrisons occupying key points like New York City and making occasional forays into the interior. The battles this caused were not expensive enough to make London seek a negotiated solution. Not until 1779 did the Redcoats come up with a consistent strategy--once an area was conquered, recruit loyalists from the local population to manage and defend it, then move on. This worked in Georgia and South Carolina, which had a larger percentage of loyalists than the north. Then in 1781 the French fleet blockaded Chesapeake Bay, allowing the American forces to trap and force the surrender of a British army at Yorktown. More than anything else, this caused the British to realize the futility of the conflict. Fighting ceased on the mainland and in 1783 a formal peace treaty was signed in Paris between France, Britain and the American republic.

France acted with vigor when it entered the war on the American side. Animated by their total humiliation in the Seven Years War and now free of the European preoccupations that normally limited French global strategy, the French mounted a more impressive naval offensive than anyone expected. Least of all the British, who in foolish confidence had allowed their navy to dwindle until it was just a little bit larger than that of the French. The British failed to strike the decisive blow that they needed in the first clash involving the French (the naval battle of Ushant, 1778); thereafter London started fighting defensively and split the fleet into squadrons to protect the British Empire in India, North America, and the Caribbean. When France persuaded Spain (1779) and the Netherlands (1780) to join in, the British found themselves overstretched. The battle of Yorktown was the result--and also the turning point. In a one-on-one sea battle the British still had the edge over their opponents, and now that America had been dropped from strategic considerations the Royal Navy was able to concentrate against the French in the Caribbean. A victory here in 1782 jeopardized the few gains Spain and France had made. When the war ended, the French got one Caribbean island (Tobago) and were returned one of their West African slaving posts (St. Louis)--small rewards for all their efforts. Spain got back Florida and the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua; the Dutch got nothing at all. All things considered, the British felt they had weathered the crisis remarkably well.

The Americans won their freedom without compromising any of their principles. Even in the darkest days of the struggle they had refused to pay taxes to anyone. Paper money, devalued until it was nearly worthless, paid for the armies of the revolution.

The First French Revolution

When the French elite got together, Calonne proposed a tax on their property. This enraged the nobility--they never had to pay their share of the country's taxes before--and they immediately opposed the idea. The king dismissed Calonne, but his successor also suggested a property tax and likewise got nowhere. Then the nobles and king agreed to convene the Estates General, the closest thing to a Parliament or Congress that existed in France. This was a momentous decision and everyone knew it; the Estates General had not met since 1614. Inquiries were sent to the royal archives to find out how the meetings were conducted last time. Nor was there a formal meeting place; for lack of a better spot it convened in little-used parts of Versailles like orangeries and tennis courts, so it wouldn't get in the way of the royal family's social life. Nobody had any idea what would come out of such a convention, but after seeing what representative government had done to England and America, expectations were high.

It took until May 1789 to choose the delegates. The Estates General met in three bodies, representing the nobility, clergy, and middle class, symbolizing the three main social classes in French society. Since the middle class, or "Third Estate," represented the largest number of people, the king allowed them to have the most members. The total membership in each estate was as follows:

Clergy = 308
Nobility = 285
Middle Class = 621

Unfortunately the arrangement fell apart over the question of how voting would take place. The Third Estate held forth for a "one man, one vote" principle, which would have given it a slight majority over the other two. The upper classes, on the other hand, felt that each body should have only one vote, giving the nobility and clergy the power to veto any Third Estate action by a 2 to 1 majority. For six weeks the convention was deadlocked over this issue, until the Third Estate changed its name to the National Assembly and declared that it alone represented the nation; henceforth no taxation could take place without its consent. The king didn't like this turn of events and closed the hall where the National Assembly was meeting, a strong hint that it was time to go home. Instead the delegates (which included a few sympathetic members of the other two estates) got together in a covered tennis court and took the famous Tennis Court Oath, promising not to dissolve until they had passed a constitution for France. Three days later the king appeared, demanding that the members of each estate meet separately. After he left, a royal official came to disperse the Assembly and got this reply from its spokesman, the Comte de Mirabeau: "We are here by the will of the people and . . . we shall not stir from our seats unless by force, at the point of a bayonet."

The king attempted to use force, only to find that many of his soldiers refused to act; their sympathies were with the Assembly. He gave in suddenly and allowed the Assembly to begin its program for France, while secretly gathering troops from the provinces and from foreign regiments in the French service. Word got out that the king was about to go back on his word, and Paris revolted. Acting with sudden unity, the Parisians set up a provisional city government and organized a military force of their own, the National Guard.⁽²⁾

In Paris stood the Bastille, a grim fortress-turned-prison and hated symbol of the old regime, so it became the first target. On July 14, 1789, the mob of Paris stormed the Bastille and slew its defenders. There were only seven prisoners in it on that fateful day (four counterfeiters, a drunkard and two lunatics) but its capture and destruction was ingrained so powerfully in the memory of France that its anniversary soon became a national holiday, marking the real beginning of the French Revolution. From there the insurrection spread rapidly to the rest of France. Many chateaux belonging to the nobility were burned by the peasants, who also carefully destroyed the title-deeds to the land, and the original owners were killed or driven away. The next few months saw the collapse of the Ancien Regime, as many leading aristocrats fled abroad and the National Assembly stepped in to begin a new age for France.

A lot got done during the next two years; the Assembly passed more than two thousand laws, making it the most productive legislative body to ever convene. During this time the French government acted a lot like its British counterpart, a limited monarchy. Aristocratic and clerical privileges were abolished, and the government was reorganized top to bottom, while confiscations of church-owned land gave the treasury a shot in the arm. The old provinces were completely swept away, to replaced by eighty-three territories about the same size known as "departments," each run by an elected council and defended by a unit of the National Guard.⁽³⁾ A constitution was drawn up, with its main feature being a Bill of Rights known as the "Rights of Man"; appropriately, the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was the United States ambassador to France at the time, and the Assembly frequently called upon him for advice.

At this point the king frequently seemed to embrace the cause of the revolution, and attracted wild support for doing so, but afterwards he always found a way to dispel the good will he had generated. In this way he showed he was just as ignorant of politics as he was of money; for the day that the Bastille was taken, all he put in his diary was "Rien" (nothing). More and more he came to be equated with France's foreign enemies, an impression reinforced by unwise communications with those who had emigrated and the constant reminder of his foreign-born queen.

There were other problems that helped to insure that the French Revolution would not be the complete success that the American Revolution had been. First of all, the United States had much of the western hemisphere to itself, where only the British actively tried to interfere. Because most of North America was still not settled, the Americans were blessed with a seemingly endless supply of undeveloped resources to pay off the national debt with. The institutions of American society were relatively weak, and generally friendly to what the founding fathers were doing. The French, on the other hand, were surrounded by aggressive neighbors with Machiavellian ideas, and it always seemed that king, court and church were out to make mischief upon the new regime. Most important of all was the background of the main participants. Nearly all of the American Revolution's founding fathers had been born and raised as Christians, and though many of them no longer believed in the teachings of traditional Christianity⁽⁴⁾, it was still a powerful moral influence on them all. In France, however, the writer-philosopher who was all the rage at the time was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who saw any social organization as a form of oppression. To Rousseau man has the potential to be perfect, a "noble savage," but everywhere society puts chains on him. In response he declared that delinquency on debts, sexual misconduct, and the rejection of institutions like the church and schools were nothing more than displays of "natural virtue." His advocacy of personal rebellion became immensely popular among those inclined to ideas like "if it feels good do it," and by the 1790s an entire generation had grown up reading his works, making them respectable. What this meant was that the French lacked the moral backbone to tell them when to stop.

In Mirabeau the National Assembly had a real statesman, and his death in 1791 went a long way toward negating attempts to reach a compromise between royalists and republicans. Then the royal family did something that confirmed the worst suspicions of those who wanted to abolish the monarchy--they ran away. One June night after 11:00 P.M. the king, queen and their two children disguised themselves, slipped out of the Tuileries palace of Paris, walked north to the outskirts of the city, and circled to the east side of town, where a traveling carriage was waiting for them. They were fleeing to join the army of the east, whose officers were still loyal to the crown. They might have made it, but at an inn Louis followed his old habits; he took three hours for lunch, and the innkeeper recognized him when he tried to pay the bill with a gold coin. They were nabbed by republican troops just a few miles down the road, at Varennes. Their return was watched by a silent, hostile crowd lining the streets of Paris. The events that followed had much in common with the events leading up to the execution of Charles I in England; both kings were seen as dangerous men who could not be trusted. After that Louis XVI was little more than a prisoner in the Tuileries, and in October 1791 new elections created a more radical National Assembly, one whose leaders would have been dismissed as impossible extremists in less troubled times.

Chief among the parties of the new Assembly were the Girondins, so called because they came from Gironde (the department around the city of Bordeaux), and the Jacobins, who got their name from their original meeting place, a former Jacobite monastery. The Girondins led the way when it came to abolishing the monarchy, but the Jacobins grew fastest, and turned out to be more important in the long run. The three most important Jacobins were Jean-Paul Marat, Georges-Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. Their strength came from the fact that unlike the royalists and moderates, they were poor men, unencumbered by tradition and feeling that they have nothing to lose. Robespierre was a former lawyer and judge from Arras, who dressed impeccably and gained a reputation for being incorruptible and nearly emotionless; that and his faith in Rousseau made him the brains behind the second French Revolution. Danton was a scarcely more wealthy barrister from Paris, a big sensual man who loved women and good food, and was unmatched when it came to making bold speeches. The Swiss-born Marat was a fiery writer, and had been a successful doctor and scientist before 1789, but was equally unembarrassed by possessions. France would need all of their talents before long.

The Reign of Terror

At home the food shortages and inflation brought on by the war nearly wrecked the economy. Fear of the advancing invaders led to paranoia, and paranoia led to terrorism. Traitors and "enemies of the people" came to be seen everywhere. A heavily armed crowd of 20,000 broke into the Tuileries and slaughtered the king's 500-man Swiss guard, and illegal mass roundups of suspects filled the prisons. Other revolutionaries, not satisfied to see their enemies behind bars, broke in and massacred more than 1,000 prisoners during the summer of 1792. In the Vendée department (near Nantes) an outright rebellion by peasants and royalists broke out.

War abroad and anarchy at home caused the Assembly to dissolve itself. It was in session while the king's palace was attacked, but most of the conservative and many moderate deputies chose to stay away, fearful of the mob. That gave the radicals the majority they needed to vote for an end to the Assembly's deliberations. In its place they called for a new election, one which produced a Jacobin-dominated body called the National Convention. On the same day as the battle of Valmy, the National Convention held its first meeting. Two days later the monarchy was abolished, and Danton became the dictator of France.

This marked the beginning of a more complete reorganization of French society. The old money system was swept away, and the decimal metric system was invented, doing away with the confusing system of weights and measures that the Ancien Regime had used. Everything that smacked of royalty or privilege was discarded. For example, knee breeches, the short pants worn by 18th-century aristocrats, were declared unpatriotic, and replaced by long trousers called sans-culottes, which "made all legs equal by concealment." Wigs and powdered hair went out of fashion; mustaches came into style as a symbol of patriotism as well as virility. Jewelry became unpatriotic, save for brooches representing symbols of the revolution like the Bastille or the head of Marat. Titles of nobility disappeared, to be replaced by the terms "citizen" and "citizeness." New decks of playing cards showed symbols of virtues like liberty, equality, and so on, instead of kings, queens, jacks and jokers. Popular souvenirs were paperweights made from stones of the Bastille, and miniature toy guillotines for children. Men changed their names, especially if their pre-1792 name was Louis. Even the name of the queen bee was changed to "laying bee."

The old calendar was also scrapped. September 22, 1792, the date of the monarchy's abolition, became the first day of Year 1 of Liberty. The calendar of the Revolution had twelve months, each divided into three "decades" of ten days each. The months themselves were given poetic names recalling the prevailing weather or events in the agricultural cycle. For instance, late July-early August became the month of Thermidor, because it is the hottest time of the year, and August-September was called Fructidor, meaning the month of fruits.

There still remained the problem of what to do with the deposed Louis XVI, now called Citizen Capet, after his tenth-century ancestor Hugh Capet. Once again the activities of himself and Marie Antoinette decided the matter. In November a secret iron closet containing their correspondence with foreign monarchs and French aristocrats in exile was discovered in a wall of the Tuileries. The letters themselves were mostly harmless, but the fact that they were addressed to known enemies of the Revolution, and hidden as well, gave the radicals cause to accuse Citizen Capet of treason. The ex-king was put on trial and by almost unanimous vote, found guilty. The Girondins wanted to delay the next logical step until after the war, so that it wouldn't provoke their foreign enemies, but the Jacobins overruled them and sentenced the king to immediate execution. On January 21, 1793, Louis was taken to the guillotine, a new beheading machine introduced five months earlier as a merciful and scientific alternative to the tortures that criminals were still frequently punished with. The grim blade did its work, and Danton explained in his leonine way that this was done to show that the Revolution would defend itself: "The kings of Europe would challenge us. We throw them the head of a king!"

The Terror had come to save the Revolution.

To meet the challenge from inside and from without, the government of the National Convention gave unlimited power to its security apparatus, the Committee of Public Safety, in early 1793. Under the committee were two subsidiary bodies, the Committee of General Security and the Revolutionary Tribunal. The task of the former was to ferret out traitors, while the latter judged and executed them at the hands of "Madame Guillotine." Soon the Committee of Public Safety became the most powerful branch of the government; the driving force behind its ruthless war against the enemies of the Revolution, Robespierre, became the real ruler of France.

In some ways Robespierre is a difficult man to judge. Timid and fastidious in his early years, he gave up being a judge because he was too squeamish to issue death sentences (He got over that quickly!). But he was more honest than just about any other ruler in French history, and he had absolute faith in the rightness of everything he did; those assets carried him over all hurdles. He dedicated himself to saving the Republic, acting as if nobody else could do the job. His dream was a "republic of virtue," a utopia in which every vice of man would be purged; to him the guillotine seemed like the quickest tool for purging. As another Jacobin put it: "What constitutes the Republic is the complete destruction of everything that is opposed to it."

When not working overtime to crush subversion, revolutionaries experimented with creating a proper republican religion. The movement started with simple anti-Christian prejudice. Churches were closed and images destroyed; clerics earned the label "enemies of the people" if they did not take their pay and direction from Paris (instead of Rome). In November 1793 revolutionaries wearing floppy red liberty caps marched into Notre Dame Cathedral and converted it into a temple of reason, enthroning a pretty actress there to represent the goddess of reason. For Robespierre this was going too far. He was a Deist, not an atheist; he felt that atheism was a pitiful mental exercise invented by aristocrats to justify their sins. Instead he felt that an impersonal force, which he called the Supreme Being, guided the consciences of men in the direction of virtue. In June 1794 he celebrated this new creed with a festival to the Supreme Being; at the high point he ignited a paper-mache monument built to represent evil, and out of its ashes sprang a scantily clad actress representing wisdom, who invited everyone to pay homage to the "Author of Nature."

After Valmy the war news coming back to Paris was good, so at some point Robespierre should have called off the Terror and eased up the pressure he was putting on the country. Instead, the slaughter got worse every month. Suspected royalists were rounded up, given quick trials, and thrown into carts called tumbrels to be taken to the guillotine in the town square. From May 1793 to June 1794 there were 1,220 executions in Paris; the following seven weeks saw 1,376.⁽⁵⁾ Other waves of executions took place in the countryside, most of them rebel peasants. In a few cases, rural tribunes resorted to drowning their victims or mowing them down with cannon fire, when it would take too long to guillotine them all. All in all, the Terror claimed nearly 40,000 lives. The reign of Robespierre seemed to live on blood, and needed more of it all the time, the way a drug addict needs more and more dope. Most frightening, the attitude behind the Terror could be catching. One story tells of a gentleman walking out of a Paris theater not far from where the guillotine was in action; he noticed a trickle of blood at his feet, dipped a finger in it, held it up and exclaimed, "How beautiful this is!"

The first and most obvious targets were those aristocrats who were unlucky enough to still be in the country, and generals who lost battles. Marie Antoinette was guillotined, and so was the mistress of Louis XV, Madame du Barry. As the supply of royalist victims ran out, the Tribunal's definition of a counterrevolutionary grew vague and undiscriminating. For example, Antoine Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, was guillotined because the income that paid for his research came from tax farming. Then in early 1794 the creators of the Terror found to their surprise that it could consume them as well. Girondins were guillotined; atheists who did not believe in Robespierre's Supreme Being were guillotined; Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine. When his turn came, Danton acted bravely to the end. "Show my head to the people," he told the executioner. "They don't see one like it every day."⁽⁶⁾

The Directory

The Jacobins were replaced by a council of five, known as the Directory. The Directors were colorless men, more interested in personal gain than in social experiments. To revolution-exhausted France their rise to power was seen as a relief; all the Directors wanted to do was preserve the gains the Revolution had made. But they soon realized that revolutions cannot simply be turned off like a water faucet. In southern France a conservative "white terror" used the new era as an excuse for disorganized brutality against Jacobins and other supporters of the Revolution; it lasted well over a decade. In Paris itself gangs of royalists and Jacobins roamed around, looking for a chance to start a riot; food shortages and inflation threatened to swell their ranks with the desperately poor. In 1795 the Directory issued the third constitution for France in four years, and it was so unpopular that a royalist mob attempted to take over the National Assembly. Fortunately for the government, one of the Directors entrusted the defending artillery to a young ex-Jacobin general named Napoleon Bonaparte. Using "a whiff of grapeshot," Bonaparte dispersed the mob with a volley that left 200 dead--ensuring a future for both the Directory and himself.⁽⁷⁾

On the war fronts the Austrians and Prussians realized belatedly that they had stirred up a hornet's nest. Victory at Valmy inspired the National Convention to call for a grand offensive that would give France the "natural frontiers" of the Rhine and Alps. The end of 1792 saw the French surging forward to the east; one army overran Belgium, another moved north from Alsace to clear the entire west bank of the Rhine, and a third conquered most of Savoy. This onslaught by forces that had been thought incapable of defense amazed and alarmed Europe. As the French were now eager to spread their gospel of revolution to every state around them, 1793 saw the formation of an anti-French coalition that included just about everyone. The British and Dutch joined the Austrians and Prussians on the lower Rhine. Austria and most of the Italian states sent support to the Savoyards still fighting in the Alps. Spain launched an attack over the eastern Pyrenees. Far away from the action, Russia announced that it would be willing to give aid if needed. In the course of the 1793 campaign the Coalition's armies forced the French back within their prewar frontiers but the allies were too eager to pick up the spoils of victory to finish the job. The French armies were rapidly rebuilt as Minister Carnot, "the organizer of war," introduced universal conscription and supplied men and munitions at a truly revolutionary rate, producing a force that numbered 770,000 men. As he sent nothing but men and guns, the French had to attack constantly to keep alive; their numbers, zeal and desperation more than made up for their lack of supplies as they threw themselves repeatedly against the small professional armies of the Coalition. In late 1794 a second surge began which once again bundled the allies back across the Rhine. This time neither the river nor winter stopped the French. A cavalry charge across the frozen Scheldt River captured the icebound Dutch fleet; the Netherlands surrendered and became a puppet state called the "Batavian Republic," allied to France and paying French taxes. Spain and Prussia left the war in the spring of 1795. Almost as discouraged, the Austrians agreed to a six-month truce on the Rhine; they kept the war going in Savoy, however.

The End of Poland--For Now

Tragically the Poles did not learn how to play their enemies against each other. To stop the enemy they hated the most, the Russians, they would have needed the support of Prussia or Austria, preferably both. Instead they rejected the Prussians' price for such an alliance (the enclaves of Danzig and Thorn) and proclaimed a new constitution which amounted to an anti-Russian manifesto. The Russians and Prussians gave one another the nod, moved in and occupied the country (1793). Before they left they forced the Poles to cede half the land remaining to them. But as soon as the second partition was complete, the Poles began a fierce nationalist struggle in the Prussian-occupied area, and found a brave leader in Tadeusz Kosciusko, a veteran of the American Revolution. Kosciusko won the first battles, but the rebellion was put down anyway, and in 1795 Russia, Austria and Prussia agreed to a final division of the kingdom. Simply and without fuss, Poland was removed from the map of Europe.

At that point it must have seemed like another threat to monarchy had been eliminated. But the patriotism of the Poles grew stronger and louder, the longer they were suppressed. For more than 120 years Poland struggled like a submerged creature against the political and military net that had been made to hold her down. She would rise again at the end of World War I.

Enter Napoleon Bonaparte

Bonaparte arrived in March to find his men creeping along the coast toward Genoa to keep themselves fed, and the Austrians beginning an attack on the leading French corps. He immediately thrust northwards, separating the Savoyards from their Italian allies, then turned upon the Savoyards and drove them back to Turin in disorder. At the end of April, Savoy surrendered to a French occupation force. Turning east, Bonaparte chased the Austrians out of Milan and by June had the remnants of their army locked up in Mantua. The minor Italian states quickly offered to buy peace from the conqueror; the terms he imposed brought tears to their eyes.

The armistice on the Rhine expired in June; Bonaparte was counting on General Moreau, the French commander on the Rhine front and conqueror of Holland, to keep the Austrians from sending reinforcements to Italy. However, Moreau moved slowly and when he did move, was defeated. Thus the exhausted Army of Italy found itself facing a fresh Austrian force, which after various excursions was also shut up in Mantua. At the end of the year Bonaparte turned back a second relieving force; in January 1797 he destroyed it at Rivoli, and in February he received the surrender of Mantua. Then he invaded Austria and was only seventy-five miles from Vienna when the despairing Austrians agreed to a truce.

Napoleon Bonaparte at Rivoli.

Except for Great Britain, every enemy of France had now been defeated. Of all the campaigns, Bonaparte's were undoubtedly the most spectacular. That his success had brought him power as well as glory became evident when he ignored the wishes of the Directory and dictated the peace treaty all by himself. Most of northern Italy now became a protectorate of France. To placate the Austrians he dismembered the Republic of Venice and gave two thirds of it (Venetia and Dalmatia) to Austria, while retaining Lombardy and the Ionian Isles for France. This showed that Bonaparte could be as aggressive in his politics as he was in his generalship. It was now Year 6 of the Revolutionary era; France possessed the sort of frontiers that her kings had always dreamed of, and gladly hailed the new Caesar.⁽⁸⁾

The United Irishmen's Revolt

Tensions rose in the late eighteenth century, as London withdrew many soldiers to fight the French and Americans overseas, leaving only second-rate troops to garrison the Emerald Isle. Before violence broke out, however, the Irish Parliament passed the Relief Act, removing some of the most oppressive disabilities (1778). Meanwhile the Irish Protestants, under the pretext of defending the country from a potential French invasion, formed volunteer militias, which grew to a combined membership of 80,000. Because the Crown had less than 10,000 regular infantry in all of Great Britain, the militias became a bigger threat than any foreign power could be, and they saw in the American Patriots an example to follow. Soon a movement arose that demanded the right for Ireland to make its own laws, led by a lawyer named Henry Grattan. At this point the British had their hands full with the American Revolution, so in 1782 they granted legislative powers to the Irish Parliament. However, most of the parliament's members were Protestants--Presbyterians to be exact--and while they had been subject to discrimination because they weren't part of the Church of England, they had little sympathy for the Catholic majority. Thus, the Catholics saw this concession as nothing more than a changing of their masters.

The success of the American and French Revolutions encouraged Irish nationalists to demand more, and during the next few years a more radical movement arose, the Society of United Irishmen. Again most of the members were Presbyterians; Catholic nationalism wouldn't appear until after 1800. The most important leader was Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), who first tried to get what he wanted peacefully, until he was forced to flee. He took refuge in France, and the French were happy to promise soldiers to his cause, which would open up a second front against the hated British. In December 1796 Wolfe Tone returned with a fleet of thirty-six French warships, carrying 15,000 men. If this force had successfully linked up with the Irish militias, it would have been all over for the British, but nature intervened to prevent it. When the fleet dropped anchor in Bantry Bay, on the southwest coast, the flagship and the commander, General Hoche, were not there--they had gotten separated from the rest of the flotilla on the way. Thus, everyone waited for Hoche instead of disembarking; later Wolfe Tone lamented that he was close enough to shore to throw a biscuit to it from his ship. Hoche never arrived, and on the second day a strong east wind arose, keeping the ships from sailing the final few yards to shore. Some of the ships went back to sea immediately; others stayed, waiting for the wind to change; instead it grew to gale force and blew the rest of the fleet away by the seventh day.

After this fiasco, the French promised to make a second landing; in the meantime, the United Irishmen made extremely well-organized plans to contain the British army in Dublin when the revolution began. Unfortunately for them, there were also government informers at their meetings. On March 11, 1798, the police swooped down on a house in Dublin and arrested most of the United Irishmen's leaders. Then the government declared martial law, and the soldiers used their searches for hidden arms as an excuse to inflict horrifying tortures on the general population. This convinced the masses that they had nothing to lose by revolting, so a desperate, unorganized uprising erupted on May 24.

The British found themselves not only outnumbered, but facing an opponent who attacked with reckless courage, no matter how high the losses. The British viceroy, Lord Camden, thought every Irishman was against him, and declared that "The organizing of this Treason is universal." Superior discipline allowed the British to win battles, but because they had removed the head of the movement, there was nobody left for them to negotiate a peaceful settlement with. In the southeastern town of Wexford the rebels proclaimed a republic; it lasted until the British crushed its militia in a decisive battle, at Vinegar Hill on June 21. Now London replaced Lord Camden with someone experienced in dealing with rebellious colonies--Lord Cornwallis. Here Cornwallis did better than he had done against George Washington; in August he offered a general amnesty, and most of the fighting petered out.

That would have been the end of the matter if the French had not returned at that moment. On August 23, 1798, 1,099 French soldiers landed in an area that had previously escaped violence, Killala in the northwest. Wolfe Tone was with them again, and 5,000 more French were expected to come later. They had arrived too late to help the revolution, but 7,000 Irish rallied to join them anyway. Together they occupied most of County Mayo and marched inland, only to fail in their first encounter with the British. The Irish were defeated at the battle of Granard; at nearby Ballinamuck, 850 French fought 5,000 British for half an hour before surrendering. The French ended up imprisoned in Dublin, while the Irish were hanged or deported to Australia (Wolfe Tone committed suicide before the British could execute him).

The British prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, thought that the legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland, combined with Roman Catholic emancipation, was the only remedy for Ireland's problems. By a lavish use of money and distribution of patronage, he induced the Irish Parliament to pass the Act of Union, and on January 1, 1801, the union was formally proclaimed. He couldn't keep his promise of emancipation for Roman Catholics, though, due to the opposition of King George III. Now Britain could turn its attention back to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The First Consul Takes on the Second Coalition

France did need him. The advances of 1798 had provoked Britain into forming a second all-European coalition which, thanks to a Russian force commanded by General Alexander Suvorov, had more bite than the first. While the Austrians returned to the banks of the Rhine, Suvorov destroyed the Cisalpine Republic and cleared the French out of Italy except for Genoa. A Russian fleet sailed out of the Black Sea and took the Ionian Islands. The Directory had caused unrest at home by nullifying both the 1798 and 1799 elections because they had produced an Assembly too republican for their taste. By the time Bonaparte returned, he found the French government had gone bankrupt--both financially and morally--and had lost its ability to control affairs.

It didn't take Bonaparte long to size up the situation and take command. On Brumaire 18 (November 9, for those of you who insist on using the traditional calendar), he engineered a coup by persuading three of the Directors to support him in whatever he did. The next day those three resigned and the other two were arrested. Then Bonaparte appeared before the Assembly and told them that the Jacobins were planning a revolt, and asked them to give him the powers needed to save the republic, since the Directory no longer existed. Instead the deputies demanded evidence of the Jacobin plot, shouted "Outlaw him" when none was produced, and swarmed toward him with unsheathed daggers and flowing togas. Bonaparte's brother Lucien, who presided over the Assembly, rescued the general, who quickly returned with soldiers to clear the squabbling lawyers from the hall at bayonet point. Now Bonaparte set up a "consulate," led by himself and two of the friendly ex-Directors; nobody had any doubt that the "First Consul" (Bonaparte) called the shots from the start. At the dawn of the nineteenth century he wrote yet another constitution which made everything he did legal and gave himself nearly unlimited power; when he submitted it to the country, the voters overwhelmingly approved it (3,011,007 votes for, 1,562 against). This dictatorship soon proved to be an efficient and welcome alternative to the muddles of recent years. The dedication to military glory that went with the efficiency seemed like a necessary virtue at the time; its limitless extent became apparent only gradually.

Bonaparte found the military situation in 1800 to be better than he might have expected. The Russians were offended when the Austrians did not join them in an attack on Switzerland, and recalled Suvorov's army. That left the Austrians with a weak position in Italy, but they put Genoa under siege anyway. The French Rhine army under Moreau advanced into Germany, and the First Consul called up the reserve troops, led them into Switzerland, then down onto the plain of Lombardy behind the Austrians. It was a fine strategy and a well-executed maneuver, but this time Bonaparte seemed to be his own worst enemy. Fearful lest the Austrians escape, he spread his net too wide; the Austrians concentrated their forces and struck at the French center. Only the fighting quality of the French army and the quick reflexes of its corps commanders prevented a nasty defeat. One day after this battle (at Marengo) the Austrians offered to withdraw from Piedmont and Genoa, keeping just Lombardy and Venetia; Bonaparte, who had originally planned on annihilating them, was happy to let them walk away with their banners and guns. At least he could claim that he had restored the French position in Italy in one dramatic move.

A much more convincing victory came at the end of the year when Moreau trapped and destroyed the main Austrian army at Hohenlinden. Moreau then advanced to the gates of Vienna, the Austrian emperor sued for peace, and in 1801 the War of the Second Coalition ended as the belligerent powers came to terms.

The territorial adjustments made in 1801-03 were mostly in France's favor, of course. The German states who lost territory to France on the Rhine's west bank were compensated with gains on the east bank; at the same time the French began to simplify the German jigsaw puzzle. In line with the secular trend of the day many of the changes were made at the expense of Germany's ecclesiastical leaders; for example, the Bishopric of Salzburg became just another duchy.

The First French Empire

Napoleon's Coronation. The pope is reduced to being a spectator while the new emperor puts a crown on Josephine.

Confident in their command of the sea, the British had the least to fear from Napoleon, and when he broke his promise to withdraw from Holland they declared war (1803). Next they imposed a naval blockade on all French ports on the Continent, and used diplomacy and subsidies to make Napoleon's continental enemies challenge him on land. Napoleon reacted vigorously, assembling his Grande Armeé for an invasion of England. A few rehearsals showed that he couldn't just slip across the Channel; an invasion required control of the sea between France and the British Isles for at least two weeks. By persuading Spain to join him, the emperor obtained a fleet that was, on paper, as big as Britain's.

The trick was to get the French and Spanish warships out of half a dozen Atlantic and Mediterranean ports, where they were blockaded, and concentrate them in a force big enough to defeat the British fleet. Napoleon's plan called for the squadrons to sneak away when the British weren't looking, meet in the West Indies and then double back across the Atlantic to the Channel. Perhaps the British Channel fleet would pursue the French and Spanish to the West Indies, in which case the game was won; any battle fought here would be on equal terms. Even if the British won in the Caribbean, the French would have time to ferry their army across the Channel in small boats and capture London before the Royal Navy returned. In early 1805 the emperor gave the order. Two French squadrons and a Spanish one (from Toulon, Rochefort, and Cadiz) managed to break out and reach the Caribbean, but the Rochefort squadron returned home without ever finding the others; then the Toulon and Cadiz squadrons sailed for Spain instead of the Channel. Admiral Nelson headed for the West Indies with the British Mediterranean fleet, which made Napoleon's plan look better than it was, but the critical point was that the Channel fleet never budged. On the way back the Franco-Spanish fleet of twenty ships was intercepted by fifteen British ships. Admiral Calder, the British commander, lacked Nelson's touch but still managed to take two of the Spaniards.

Napoleon realized that attempting to win control of the Channel was hopeless and decided to try for control of the Mediterranean instead. He gave the order for a new series of escape-and-concentrate maneuvers. This time they were successful; by August he had thirty-three French and Spanish battleships in Cadiz. In October Nelson caught them off Cape Trafalgar, just before they could enter the Mediterranean; and his twenty-seven ships took twenty of the enemy. The victory cost Nelson his life, but his work was done. For the rest of the war--and until World War I--no one in Europe challenged British sea power again.

The battle of Trafalgar.

Two months before Trafalgar Napoleon gave up his plans for the navy and began to march the Grande Armeé east across France. The Austrians, promised support by Russia, decided to try their luck again. They concentrated at Ulm on the Upper Danube, expecting the French to cross the Upper Rhine nearby. Instead Napoleon crossed the Rhine several miles to the north, then passed the Austrians and turned south to reach the Danube in their rear. It was the Marengo game again, and this time it worked perfectly. Most of the Austrians capitulated at Ulm (October 1805); the forces that escaped the trap disintegrated during the pursuit.

At this point the nearest Russian corps was still 100 miles to the east. Since they were too weak to stop the Grande Armeé, the allies abandoned Vienna and concentrated their forces to the north. Napoleon hustled and caught up with them in November, near the village of Austerlitz. The French took up a defensive position at first; the Austro-Russian plan--to hit the French on their right flank and cut off communications with Vienna--was so obvious that Napoleon told his troops what to expect on the eve of battle. He also told them what he was going to do about it. He let the allies get fully committed to the attack, and watched the line get stretched thin between the forces making the attack and those assigned to hold the French center. Then he struck hard for the high ground between the two main parts of the Austro-Russian army. Sure enough, the allied army was split in two and the rest of the day was spent pounding the southern half of it to bits. Two days after this, Napoleon's most brilliant victory, the Austrians sued for peace. The Russians sullenly withdrew what was left of their expeditionary force.

For all of 1805 the Prussians wondered which side in the conflict they should take. At first Napoleon bought their support by occupying Hanover and giving it to them, but later they were frightened off by the news of Ulm and Austerlitz. Then in 1806 Austria's Francis I dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, to keep Napoleon from getting the imperial crown. In the Empire's place Napoleon set up a "Confederation of the Rhine," made up of German states (excluding Prussia and Austria) that were larger, fewer, and under French protection. The Prussians decided they had to draw the line somewhere; to keep Saxony out of the French orbit they occupied it. Napoleon responded by declaring war (September 1806). The Grande Armeé had been camping in Bavaria since it pulled out of Austria; now it made a beeline directly to Berlin. The speed of Napoleon's advance was too much for the Prussian generals' nerves; when they heard he was coming they started a phased withdrawal from their prepared position at Jena, in southwestern Saxony. Napoleon arrived while nearly half of the Prussians were still there, and overwhelmed them on the spot. He sent another corps under Marshal Louis Davout to catch the rest of the Prussians at Auerstadt, fifteen miles away. The Grande Armeé was superior to its opponents even when Napoleon wasn't with it; Davout's 26,000 men had attacked, enveloped and destroyed a force of 63,000 Prussians.

The pursuit after Jena and Auerstadt was ruthless. Davout was at the gates of Berlin only ten days after his battle and the remnant of the Prussian army was expertly shepherded west (to keep it away from the Russians) and forced to surrender. The last Prussian formation, that of Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, fought all the way to Lübeck before surrendering in early November.

The king of Prussia was now without an army, but another Russian one was on the way. It got as far as Warsaw before Napoleon threw it back. Then the Grande Armeé crossed the Vistula and went into winter quarters. In January 1807 the Russians launched a surprise offensive; the French repulsed it and pursued the Russians north into East Prussia. The battle of Eylau was fought in a snowstorm; a combination of dogged courage and tactical luck on the part of the Russians made it a draw and gave the Grande Armeé its first really heavy casualty list. It made Napoleon more careful--and the Russians overconfident. When fighting started again in the spring, the Russians took a chance by attacking what appeared to be an isolated French corps at Friedland. To do this they had to fight with their backs to a river, meaning that if Napoleon could get his main force there in time, the Russians would be surrounded and massacred. He did, and they were.

The Grande Armeés sweep through Europe eliminated every opponent of Napoleon except Britain and Russia, and after Friedland Tsar Alexander I was too discouraged to fight anymore. What's more, Napoleon now offered him what looked like a partnership; he gave Alexander a slice of Prussian-held Poland and took nothing in return except the Ionian Isles (Treaty of Tilsit, 1807).

On the conquered Austrians and Prussians Napoleon imposed pitiless terms. Austria was forced to cede the whole Tyrol to Bavaria, Venetia to the Kingdom of Italy, and Dalmatia (soon to be called by its classical name of Illyria) to the French Empire. Prussia lost everything west of the Elbe, the land it took from Poland in the 1793 and 1795 partitions, and Danzig. Danzig was declared a free city; the Polish lands were reassembled into a "Duchy of Warsaw" which was ruled by another French puppet, the elector of Saxony.

Behind Napoleon's armies marched Napoleon's family. This was nepotism on a scale rarely seen before or since; it was also the thing one might expect the head of a Corsican clan to do, since these were very ordinary men and women. In 1806 the king of Naples was chased off the Italian mainland and Napoleon's brother, Joseph Bonaparte, took his throne. The Batavian Republic was turned into a Dutch kingdom for brother Louis in the same year. Brother Jerome got Westphalia, a new kingdom formed by adding a few central German states to occupied Hanover. Sisters Eliza and Pauline got ministates in Italy; Eliza enlarged hers by marrying the ruler of Etruria. Another sister, Caroline, married Marshal Joachim Murat, who in 1808 succeeded Joseph as king of Naples. Stepson Eugene de Beauharnais (a son from Empress Josephine's first marriage) became the viceroy of the Kingdom of Italy. All of the relatives changed their last name from Bonaparte to Napoleon so that nobody would forget whose family they were in.

Also available, but never allotted, was the crown of Portugal. The Portuguese showed so little enthusiasm for the Napoleonic system that the emperor marched through Spain and occupied their country in 1807. British sea power preserved Sicily for the ex-king of Naples, and Sardinia for the ex-king of Savoy, but the king of Portugal wasn't so fortunate; he had to take refuge in Brazil.

Napoleon at the Height of Power

Troubles on the other end of Europe forced Napoleon to save his eastern plans for later. Spain's King Charles IV was an irritating ally; from every point of view Joseph Napoleon, the king of Naples, would be a better ruler. In March 1808 some units left the army of occupation in Portugal, joined a couple of corps sent to Spain disguised as reinforcements, and carried out a bloodless coup. In May Marshal Murat helped the Spanish Parliament discover a yearning for Joseph which it did not know it had. The whole operation was fast and smooth--and blown to pieces by a national uprising which took place at the end of the month. Joseph arrived to find that his new kingdom consisted of little more than Madrid. Joseph might have been able to get the upper hand against the rebels had they fought alone, but in July they were joined by a British expeditionary force under Sir Arthur Wellesley (soon to be known as the Duke of Wellington), who liberated Portugal. Furious, Napoleon rushed into Spain with 300,000 men. He crushed the Spaniards, annexed Catalonia as payment for his troubles, and chased the British out of Spain (though not out of Portugal). Then he left; two months was all he could spare for Joseph's problems, for the Austrians were making another attempt to break the French grip on Europe.⁽⁹⁾

The Austrian declaration of war in 1809 was caused by a wave of anti-French feeling similar to the Spanish fury Joseph was experiencing in Spain. On a cool analysis no one could expect the reformed, enlarged Austrian army to defeat the larger, perennially victorious forces of the French Empire. Nevertheless, Napoleon reacted with overconfidence. When he attempted to direct the war from Paris he failed to get Davout's corps concentrated in Bavaria and nearly lost it as a result. He arrived on the battlefield of Ratisbon in time to save the day, but it was not one of his best victories. The Austrians, bruised but intact, retreated north of the Danube; the French moved along the south bank and occupied Vienna. Five miles to the east, at Aspern, Napoleon decided to cross to the north bank. What he did not know was that the Austrians were already there. The first two French corps across found themselves under attack by the whole Austrian army. They barely held out, allowing Napoleon to come across with his personal guards and another corps that night. Davout was to follow the next day. But now came real trouble. The Austrians launched barges down the river to break the pontoon bridge erected by the French. Early on the morning of the second day a big barge hit the bridge and smashed it completely. The French on the far bank were too weak to prevail against the Austrians and began taking heavy losses. Napoleon had to concede his first defeat since Egypt and evacuate the bridgehead by boat under cover of darkness.

If he had still been just a general, Napoleon might have tried a new plan; as emperor he had to prove he was unstoppable. Orders went out for every man and gun the empire could spare and six weeks after the battle of Aspern the French army crossed the Danube again--at the same place but with twice the strength. The Austrians were holding a position a few miles back, at Wagram. Both sides ran into each other head-on; when it looked like a stalemate Napoleon committed his 10,000-man reserve force in the form of a huge square and aimed it right at the Austrian center. It didn't break through but it did break the Austrian commander's nerve. He ordered a retreat and advised the government to sue for peace.

Two paintings of the battle of Wagram.

Though Wagram was Napoleon's least elegant victory to date, it impressed Europe more than any other. Where previously there had been the hope that Napoleon could be beaten by good generalship and a bit of luck, now it seemed that his energy, ruthlessness and big battalions could carry him over any obstacle. The image of the great square marching forward at Wagram created a new image of Napoleon, not one of genius but of sheer power; the trail of blood it left behind also started to turn the French against their emperor.

After 1809 Napoleon seemed to become a good example of the Peter Principle, the modern maxim that says society is imperfect because everyone rises/gets promoted until he reaches his level of incompetence. He overburdened himself by personally managing more details of his growing empire every year; now the decisions he made turned out to be wrong more often than right. All Europe got tired of him; in the campaigns that followed Napoleon found himself fighting not just the kings of Europe, but whole peoples. Kings, clergymen and radicals were all in agreement that he must go. Spain had turned into a no-win situation, very much like Vietnam would be for France and the United States in the twentieth century; it blazed with a spirit that a Corsican should have understood. Meanwhile, the Prussians worked with remarkable unity of purpose to put their house in order. In the four years after Jena they had abolished both privilege and serfdom, while organizing popular education and popular patriotism; in a nutshell it was a nonviolent revolution. By 1810 a new Prussia existed, the nucleus for a new Germany. Napoleon had limited the Prussian army to 42,000 men, but they bent this rule by putting their soldiers in reserve and conscripting new ones as soon as training was finished, giving them a potential force of 270,000. And now the mystical Tsar Alexander I was portraying himself as the friend of liberty, since at this point free men were more inclined to support him than the French emperor.

Meanwhile Napoleon spent much personal energy trying to make the Bonaparte dynasty as legitimate as the Hapsburgs, Romanovs, and Hohenzollerns. In 1810 he divorced his old helper Josephine, on charges of infidelity and failure to produce an heir. He wanted to marry a Russian princess, a real princess, but Alexander snubbed him, so he settled for an Austrian archduchess, Marie Louise. One year later he got the son he wanted (named Napoleon II, of course); he immediately took Rome from the pope and held it in reserve as a kingdom for the infant prince. The Austrians read him right. He might have been the creator of a new world, but he couldn't pass up an opportunity to become the son-in-law of the old.

From Moscow to Elba

For reasons unclear to the author, Napoleon chose to strike at the heart of Russia (Moscow), rather than the head (St. Petersburg). This time his forces couldn't live off the land--Russian scorched-earth tactics made sure of that--so for the first time a carefully organized supply train fed the French. But this meant that the Grande Armeé could no longer use its greatest asset--speed. The Russians retreated into near-limitless space, concentrating their army as they did so. By mid-August the French were stretched out along a front line nearly 700 miles long, with the main spearhead reduced to 155,000 men. Not until now did the Russians offer battle (at Smolensk), which the French won easily. The Tsar then entrusted the defense of Moscow to the uncouth but clever Mikhail Kutusov. He prepared a defensive position at Borodino, seventy miles west of Moscow, but Napoleon knocked him out with a Wagram-style battle in early September. Kutusov withdrew, still with an organized army of 90,000 men, while Napoleon occupied Moscow with a barely larger force of 95,000.

The French got small pleasure from their prize. Alexander ignored the news of French victories and simply refused to talk peace, all the while gathering reinforcements for Kutusov from the far reaches of the Russian empire. Then some Russian diehards flushed Napoleon out of the Kremlin by setting Moscow on fire. The French put out the blaze before it destroyed the whole city, but this was too much even for Napoleon. On October 18--33 days after he arrived--he gave the order to retreat. This time Kutusov avoided battle, but he forced the French to retreat along the ravaged route of their summer advance, ensuring that they would feel the pangs of hunger. Then the notorious Russian winter set in. Discipline broke down, and by the time they reached Smolensk both men and horses were starving, their effective strength down to 50,000, with Russian forces twice as large on their flanks. Both sides raced for the Berezina River, the last physical barrier on the way to Poland and safety; the Russians got there first and destroyed the bridges across it, but a brilliant rearguard action led by Napoleon himself held off the Russians long enough to build a pontoon bridge and get what was left of the Grande Armeé across it. In December the French arrived in Poland; less than 30,000 of the original army remained as it straggled across the frontier in small groups. Ominously, not all of the casualties were dead or captured; the 20,000-strong Prussian corps had switched sides when it got the chance. Handing over command to Murat, Napoleon raced for Paris, where rumors of his death were already circulating. The shattered regiments he left behind couldn't prevent the Russians from liberating Prussia (March 1813).

Astonishingly, Napoleon recruited a barely trained force of half a million men to serve in his army for 1813. Horses were a bigger problem--they couldn't be replaced without crippling the agriculture of half a continent--so the result was a clumsy, slower army than the ones Napoleon had led before. Nevertheless, he charged into Saxony and for a moment seemed to have recovered his old skill. He beat back the Prussians and Russians in the first encounters and when the Austrians and Swedes joined the alliance against him, he bloodied the noses of the Austrians again, this time at Dresden. But his raw recruits couldn't stand the pace; his marshals were old and the allies steadily grew in strength. Gradually he was crowded back into Leipzig. The evacuation of that city--a serious defeat in itself--became a disaster when the only bridge was blown up prematurely, leaving a quarter of the army behind to be captured. "The Battle of the Nations," as Leipzig was termed, was not an impressive show of tactics, but it was decisive. All of Germany was now free; the Confederation of the Rhine was dissolved, and both sides prepared for an invasion of France in 1814. Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sweden assembled for a joint attack across the Rhine, while Wellington's victorious Peninsular Army moved out of Spain and took the nearest town in southwestern France, Toulouse.

Once more Napoleon created a fresh army from almost nothing. He displayed the energy and skill of a demon, but there were too many invaders. Eventually they simply went past him and occupied Paris. Napoleon, at nearby Fontainebleau, did not admit defeat until his own marshals refused to follow him anymore. He abdicated in exchange for rulership over the tiny island of Elba, 86 square miles of scrub-covered mountains between Corsica and the Italian mainland. With the island came a small army of 700 men and a pension of two million francs per year. The Hapsburgs took his Austrian empress and son to Vienna; he never saw them again.⁽¹¹⁾

The Hundred Days

Eleven months after he went to Elba, Napoleon judged that France was sick and tired of the Bourbons, and escaped with 1,000 loyal men at his side. He landed at Cannes on the Riviera (March 1815), and went to Paris at the head of a triumphal procession. The French were not yet ready to abandon their dream of having an empire; the veterans of the Grande Armeé had no wish for peace. The king fled and the emperor was restored. Napoleon promised that he would be a constitutional monarch, not a dictator; he also promised peace. But this time, as Victor Hugo put it, "God was bored by him." The allies would not hear of any alternatives to Bourbon rule in France and immediately declared war.

Sixty days after he had landed in the south, forty days after he had entered Paris, the emperor was on the Belgian frontier with 150,000 men. Because the Russians and Austrians were too far away to help, the British and Prussian commanders, Wellington and Blücher, would have to stop Napoleon by themselves. Their armies, ten miles apart, had no idea that Napoleon was near, giving him the advantage of surprise. While the French left wing held off the British at Quatre Bras, the emperor trounced the Prussians at Ligny. Wellington and Blücher were forced to retreat by parallel roads to Brussels. Napoleon now shifted his main force to the British front, but because of Blücher's assurance that he could get to him if he was attacked, Wellington decided to stand at Waterloo. Napoleon's frontal assault was a bloody failure. When Blücher arrived (very late), the French began a retreat which quickly turned into a rout. Napoleon's final gamble, the Hundred Days, was over.⁽¹²⁾

His army destroyed, Napoleon returned to Paris and abdicated again. Everyone who had joined him in the previous weeks now wanted to get rid of him, as if to atone for their mistake. A provisional government in Paris told him to leave the country; he fled to Rochefort with an uncomfortably royalist France in hot pursuit. He boarded a British frigate in the harbor, the Bellerophon, and asked to be taken to America as a refugee, but they treated him as a prisoner instead. This time the allies would not let him pretend to be a king; they sent him to St. Helena, the most remote island in the south Atlantic. Then they returned to their deliberations at Vienna, the results of which will begin the next chapter.

Napoleon spent his time in exile writing memoirs, until his death in 1821 (officially by throat cancer, but a rumor of poisoning persists to this day). Those memoirs, and the nature of European society in the reactionary years following Waterloo, generated a considerable amount of sentiment for the age when Napoleon ruled. As a result, the French government had to wait until 1840 before it was safe to bring Napoleon's body back to Paris for a proper burial. But the French emperor's enemies found his legacy too useful to do away with entirely. His Civil Code and his centralized, efficient administration, in both France and conquered countries, was retained and even imitated where it did not yet exist. And the tactic of stirring up civilian populations against their ruler gave the ordinary man a lesson he would not soon forget; to defeat Napoleon, the monarchs unwittingly planted the seeds of modern nationalism.

Population and Economics at the End of the Revolutionary Era

Before Europe began importing food from other continents (which only began to be important after 1850), a rise in population required a rise in agricultural output. There were three ways to do this: bring more land under cultivation, put more workers on the land, or improve agricultural technology. We can label these solutions "extensive," "intensive," and "technical."

A perfect example of the extensive solution is the movement of peasants onto the Russian steppe, after the Mongols vacated it. The growth of the Ukraine in the eighteenth century was from 5 to 20 million, or 400%; Russia as a whole grew 100%, and also added people from conquered areas like Poland. The Austrians did nearly as well when they evicted the Turks and moved into Hungary; there the growth rate was 300%. These figures are impressive, but while extensive growth increased revenue for the state, it did little to help the income of the typical farmer.

Ireland is the textbook example of the intensive solution. Subdivision of existing farms until they were the size of garden plots, with yields as big as ever thanks to the potato, allowed an increase of 150% in the population working the land. Here too, per capita income either remained constant or declined.

For the technical solution England is the prototype. Here the same size labor force worked the land throughout the eighteenth century and produced a steadily increasing amount of food. At first there was a sizeable surplus to export; later a rise in total population absorbed the extra. The point was that a 100% increase in labor productivity had greatly increased the wealth of the farmer, unlike what had happened in Russia and Ireland. This was the achievement of a society that consciously chose to increase yields by upgrading seed, livestock, machinery and land, and was prepared to invest the money required to do so.

The terms "Enlightenment" and "Age of Reason" suggest a complete victory of humanism over superstition, but it wasn't complete in the eighteenth century. For one thing, the area "enlightened" was restricted to France and the Protestant countries of northern Europe. There was a widening split between this area and the rest of the continent and in the latter the Enlightenment got almost no attention. The Catholic church lost little of its authority, and its overall decline in strength was due largely to slower population growth in the Catholic countries (50%, compared to 75% among the Protestants). Even in the north, which was increasingly aware that progress of human knowledge and skills was something worth encouraging, it was a matter of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel rather than bursting out into daylight. The only nation that made a complete break with the past in this sense was the United States. There the ideas of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers were put down in writing in the US Constitution of 1787. The concepts of political responsibility on the part of its citizens, separation of church and state, and liberty protected by law became the foundations of the new republic, and the birthright of all its citizens.

Old Europe had the more difficult task of changing an already existing society. The French Revolution was strong on making a secular, classless society, but weak on democracy and limited government; its evolution into a military dictatorship, and the final overthrow of this, led people to think that all of their political gains had been lost. But ideas are like baby chickens--they are hard to put back in the egg once they've hatched--and the propaganda of the Revolution proved to be stronger than the Revolution itself. Slogans like "Liberté, egalité, fraternité" stayed in men's minds and the examples of England and America showed that democracy did not have to slide into anarchy or tyranny.⁽¹³⁾

Towns grew fast in the eighteenth century. The urban center that led the way was London, which became the first European city since ancient Rome to reach the 1 million mark. In percentage of the total population, figures are smaller but growing nonetheless. The figure for Western Europe as a whole is 10% urban-dwelling. The Low Countries were still better than average, but at 15% showed no gain from a century earlier. France and Spain lagged behind at 5 to 6%, while Great Britain became the leader with 20%.

The rapid urbanization of England and Scotland is a direct consequence of the industrial revolution, which began here in the middle of the eighteenth century. Before this period the British economy depended mainly on agriculture and trade, though the output from the mines steadily increased; between 1715 and 1760 annual iron consumption (mostly for agricultural use) rose from 30,000 tons to 60,000, while annual coal production (mostly for home fireplaces) went from 3 million to 6 million tons. By 1760 the United Kingdom had replaced the Dutch Republic with the highest per capita income. Imports (of Swedish and Russian iron and of the Baltic timber needed for shipbuilding) were paid for by selling English wool and grain, and by re-exporting Asian and American goods (cotton from India, tea from China, sugar from the Caribbean and tobacco from North America).

In this confident, expanding society were men full of ideas with capital to invest. One such entrepreneur spent a quarter of a million pounds to dig a canal from his coal mines to the growing towns of Manchester and Liverpool; the savings in transport allowed him to sell his coal for half the price of the competition, vastly increasing sales. A wave of canal building followed. Probably half of the 1,000 miles of canals built in the fifty years preceding the invention of the railroad never really repaid their cost. What the canal mania showed was that investors had plenty of resources, and were willing to use them.

An obvious place to invest in research was the iron industry. With home production crippled by the shortage of charcoal, Britain had to import as much iron as she could make. Abraham Darby had shown that coke-smelting of iron ore was possible, but a series of complementary innovations were needed to make a coal-based industry practical; the end product had to be as good as Swedish iron and as cheap as Russian iron. The final links in the chain were completed in the 1780s. The result was a production rise to 125,000 tons by 1800, while iron imports fell to zero. But even more startling gains were made in the opening years of the nineteenth century. By 1815 Britain was forging a million tons per year--more than the rest of Europe put together. At the same time coal production rose to 15 million tons per year--more than five times that of the rest of Europe.

Britain's oldest manufacturing industry, the textile trade, grew alongside the iron and coal production. Wool had long been near the limits of what the market could handle, so cotton was the fiber that fed the boom. In 1775 cotton represented 5% of the British textile business and almost none of it was exported. In 1800 exports of cotton goods were worth as much as exports of woolens. By 1815 they were worth three times as much. In technology the breakthrough came from spinning; cotton offered no advantage over wool until it could be spun as cheaply. With the introduction of the Hargreaves eight-spindle machine in 1767 the productivity of the average worker immediately increased eight times. By 1790 water-driven eighty-spindle machines were in use, the quality of machine-spun yarn had improved by orders of magnitude and its cost had fallen to a tenth of the homespun equivalent.

An unfortunate consequence of the new machines was that by using them, each factory could do the same amount of work with fewer people. The labor movement of the modern era, in fact, got started by laid-off workers who refused to get out of the way quietly. On March 11, 1811, some unemployed knitters broke into a factory in Arnold, a small town near Nottingham, and smashed the wooden frames of the machinery, rendering it useless. The leader of this group was a man named Ned Lud, and since then people who have opposed progress have earned for themselves the epithet Luddites.

The growth in agriculture and industry made the British government filthy rich. In 1815 British tax collectors brought in $7 billion (measured in 1994 US dollars); France had less than half as much, at $3.2 billion. Far behind were Russia and Austria ($1 billion each), Prussia ($700 million), the Netherlands ($600 million), and Spain and Naples ($350 million each). Bavaria, Denmark, the Papal State, Portugal, Savoy, Saxony, Sweden, Turkey and Baden-Wurttemberg had between $100 and $200 million each.⁽¹⁴⁾

The rate of economic change in Britain during the period covered by this chapter is so rapid and obvious that many historians overstress the amount of industrialization that existed in 1815. Britain did have more factory workers and traders than any other nation, but 40% of the population still worked the land. Though this was less than the 80% that was still the norm on the Continent, it was still too big a segment of society to ignore. Even more seductive is the appeal of the machines themselves. James Watt began improving the old Newcomen steam engine, long used for pumping water out of mines, in 1769; by 1785 he had invented one that delivered rotary power. In this form he sold it to the largest and most enterprising textile mills. At the same time mine owners were speeding up the bulk handling of ore by laying railroad tracks for the horsedrawn carts that shuttled to and from the mines. By 1815 there were 150 miles of tracks in the country. A rotary steam engine and railroad tracks are a compatible team, and Richard Trevithick, who built the first steam-driven car in 1801, built one that ran successfully on the tracks in 1804. Ten years later George Stephenson had a practical locomotive running. To the ordinary person the age of the railroad--and with it the whole machine age--began with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington line in 1825.⁽¹⁵⁾ In 1815 England still had more green fields than satanic mills; the Royal Navy ruled the waves with ships not much different from those of a century earlier, and only the most farsighted could see that coal, iron and steam were going to change the world.

1. The British government, by contrast, was so credit-worthy that it paid only 4% interest on its loans during the same period.

2. The National Guard was put together and led by the Marquis de Lafayette, George Washington's French advisor during the American Revolution.

3. The provinces have been gone for more than two centuries, but the old geography is still vivid to a modern Frenchman. Ask him what part of France he is from and he may answer that he is a native of Normandy, for example, rather than mention which of Normandy's five departments he lives in.

4. Many American leaders at this time embraced Deism, which declared God to be an impersonal force that is no longer active in the universe. The model for their theory was the watch, which was created and wound up in the beginning, but has been running down without outside interference ever since.

5. Part of the reason for the number of deaths near the end was because in June Robespierre had a law passed forcing the Revolutionary Tribunals to choose between two sentences for everyone they tried under the nearly nonexistent system of justice: death or acquittal.

6. Marat probably would have also fallen victim around this time, had he lived. Instead, he was knifed in a bathtub the year before by a Girondin supporter. The scene of Marat's body leaning over the edge of the tub inspired a famous painting and the most celebrated tableau in Madame Tussaud's Waxworks; he instantly became the official martyr of the revolution.

7. Bonaparte showed so much promise in military school that he rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming a general in 1793, at the tender age of twenty-four. In the same year he led an artillery attack that took back Toulon, after royalists had handed it over to the British navy. After the Thermidor reaction the Corsican was imprisoned and in danger of the guillotine for a time; fortunately for him, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him of anything.

8. Trans-Alpine Savoy and Nice became part of France, leaving only Piedmont and Sardinia to the Savoyards. Lombardy was united with Modena and Romagna, the northernmost province of the Papal State, to form a puppet state called the "Cisalpine Republic." Genoa became the equally dependent "Ligurian Republic." The Swiss had lost Basel to France in 1793 and now their Italian-speaking Valtelline canton was detached and given to the Cisalpine Republic. When Bonaparte conquered the rest of Switzerland in 1798, he renamed it the Helvetian Republic, detached the canton of Valais, and made it into another dependent republic.
Batavian, Cisalpine, Ligurian and Helvetian are geographical names that the ancient Romans had used; the neo-classical movement in art and literature peaked in the 1790s and Europeans couldn't get enough of anything that was Greco-Roman. In 1798 Tuscany would be renamed Etruria for the same reason. Similarly, the main result of Bonaparte's Egyptian campaign was to create a fad for Egyptian stuff at home.

9. The war in Spain (1808-14, now called the Peninsular War) gave two contributions to modern civilization. One was Francisco Goya, whose sketches and paintings portray the horrors of war in a way few artists and writers have been able to match. The other was the irregular tactics of the Spanish rebels, who fought without uniforms and formations and looked for any opportunity to pick off French soldiers who strayed from the main body of the army. The Spaniards called their soldiers guerrillas, meaning "little warriors."

Goya's firing squad scene, The Third of May.

10. Adolf Hitler would make the same prediction when he invaded Russia, exactly 129 years later.

11. Napoleon habitually carried a vial of poison around his neck, so he could commit suicide if his enemies captured him. He decided that death was a better fate than exile to a place that allowed no outlet for his energy and ambition, so he took the poison at Fontainebleau. It quickly caused violent convulsions and vomiting; as his trusted advisor Armand de Caulaincourt held his hand, Napoleon cried out, "How difficult it is to die!" However, the poison had lost its potency over the years, and a few hours later he began to recover.

12. Marshal Blücher was definitely an eccentric fellow. Once he confided to Wellington that he was pregnant and about to give birth to an elephant, because he had been raped by a French soldier. After Waterloo he was invited to England to tell about his part in that victory, and because London was bigger and wealthier than any other city he had seen, he remarked, "What a town to loot!" I suppose that was a natural thought for a Prussian officer.

13. At this point about 1 Englishman in 8 had the vote. Before 1776 the proportion of voters in the American colonies was 1 in 4; after independence every free, white adult male was automatically a voter.

14. In 1815 the United States had an annual revenue of $15 million, worth about $400 million today.
At first, independence was not an economic success for the Americans; they were forced into self-sufficiency by their remote location and because Britain shut them out of the world's most important commercial network. Things turned around during the Napoleonic wars, when the Americans alternated between an embargo of both sides (President Jefferson mistakenly thought that Europe needed American resources and products too badly to fight without them) and smuggling the trade goods of the world to beleaguered continental Europe. Inevitably there was friction with the British, leading to the War of 1812. This small conflict was rather pointless, but it did discredit the war party in the US Congress, which thought it could annex Canada. The Americans never wanted anything to do with Napoleon, though he was Britain's enemy, so there was never any question of a Franco-American alliance against Britain. Afterwards the peace between America and Britain became permanent, helped by the growing British demand for American cotton; against all odds Canada developed into a prosperous, independent nation.

15. Experiments with steam-driven boats began in the last years of the eighteenth century. The first practical one was built by an American named Robert Fulton in 1807; another American steamship became the first to cross the Atlantic in 1819.

© Copyright 2001 Charles Kimball