THE FIRST EMPIRE In his foreign policy Napoleon was the slave of history—of the Carolingian legend as of the Capetian tradition, of the aggressive idealism of the Convention equally with the republican propaganda of the Directory. He inherited the natural frontiers of France and the mandate to preserve them, but the most precious conquest was the annexation of Belgium, which England had invariably opposed since the Hundred Years' War. Although he lacked a navy Napoleon hoped to make England consent to this point by his military victories. The old monarchy had exhausted itself in this struggle : Napoleon was to overturn the whole of Europe without better success. France shared the First Consul's illusion that the Peace of Amiens was a final one.
The First Consul hoped to establish his power by peace. He had himself proclaimed president of the Cisalpine republic, and annexed Piedmont ; and when he sup pressed, in Germany, the ecclesiastical states and free cities under the treaty of Luneville, the German princes, instead of protesting, gave a cynical assent ; he compelled Spain to cede Louisiana, be gan the conquest of San Domingo, and sent an expedition to annex southern and western Australia. At the same time a French report was published pointing out the simplicity of a recovery of Egypt for France. Alarmed by all these considerations, and excusing herself in particular because of the French seizure of Piedmont, England refused to evacuate Malta, in spite of her pledge to do so. This precipitated war. Napoleon immediately occupied Hanover and established a camp at Boulogne. He sought to strike at Eng land because he knew she was forming a coalition against him. Napoleon had no fleet, Pitt had no army. The disaster of Trafal gar (Oct. 20, 1805) revealed to Napoleon the impossibility of im provising a navy. The third Anglo-Austro-Russian coalition— which, nominally directed against a new Charlemagne was, in fact, aimed at a new France extending to the Rhine and Antwerp— provided Pitt with the army he required. Napoleon broke the coalition by his victories at Ulm and Austerlitz (Oct. 20 and Dec. 2, 1805). After this military triumph, he had two alternatives— to follow the policy of Louis XIV., Choiseul and Vergennes, and reconcile himself with Austria (who would henceforward be driven eastwards and opposed to Russia), or to regard his victories as valueless as long as England remained undefeated and to force her to capitulate by action in the east.
The treaty of Pressburg revealed Napoleon's determination to adopt the latter course. It marked a considerable extension of the Napoleonic empire towards the east. Napoleon had already been crowned in Milan with the iron crown of the Lombard kings. In place of the Bourbons, who were allies of England, he installed his brother Joseph at Naples. He took Venice from Austria, and all her old Adriatic possessions as far as Albania, and expelled her from Germany. He achieved the destruction of the old Holy Roman Empire : and of its fragments he built up in southern Ger many vassal kingdoms such as Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemberg and Hesse-Darmstadt, which he attached to France under the title of the Confederation of the Rhine. He carved out other kingdoms for the numerous members of his family. He made his brother Louis king of Holland, and he promised Hanover to the king of Prussia. So powerful did he seem in the early days of 1806 that Alexander of Russia and Pitt made a show of negotiating.
At this juncture a new adversary came on the scene in the person of Prussia. Ever since the days of Frederick the Great, France had obstinately considered Prussia as a faithful ally. Napoleon's reply to her challenge was the crushing victory of Jena (Oct. 18o6), which destroyed the army and the kingdom of Frederick William III. On the refusal of the latter to concur in his policy, Napoleon made of Prussia what he had already made of the Confederation of the Rhine—a depend ency of his empire, and he closed her ports to British ships. At Berlin on Nov. 21 he proclaimed that Continental blockade by which he intended to destroy his great rival.
But it was in fact a vicious circle. Ulm led to Austerlitz, and Austerlitz to Jena. Next he must seek the Russians still farther to the east. The slaughter at Eylau (Feb. 8, 180 7) did not bring peace. The victory of Friedland (June 14) compelled the tsar at Tilsit to desert Prussia and to shake off the maritime tyranny of England in return for the partition of Turkey. This treaty closed the entire Mediterranean to England and threatened her com munications with India. Napoleon thought that she would bow the knee (July 1807). But England displayed extraordinary en ergy. The blockade of the Baltic and the bombardment of Copen hagen shattered the illusions of the Franco-Russian alliance. Moreover, although it had been more stringently enacted at Milan, the Continental blockade, in order to be effective, required to be made complete (see CONTINENTAL SYSTEM). When the pope sought to remain neutral General Ridet occupied the Papal States, and when Portugal seemed unwilling to close her ports to British ships, Junot entered Lisbon—a step that involved alliance with the Spanish Bourbons. Why should not Napoleon, who had discovered in Berlin proof of their intrigues, treat them as he had treated the Neapolitan Bourbons by establishing in Madrid a Bonaparte, as Louis XIV. had established the duke of Anjou? The Peninsular War (1809-1813) .—After the ambush at Bayonne, Murat made himself master of Spain, subsequently taking the place of Joseph Bonaparte, who exchanged Naples for the Spanish throne. But Napoleon little knew how fierce a flame he was kindling : he thought that he might cut into the granite of Spain as into Italian mosaic, or "that big cake, Germany"; but he lacked the one essential—the assent of a people with a thousand years of history behind them. Their reply to him was a general insurrection. Spain became the grave of 300,000 of his picked soldiers (whom he had to replace by conscripts called up before their time), and a battle-ground for England. Dupont surrendered at Baylen and Junot at Cintra (1808) and, what was more serious, Europe thrilled at this first defeat of the im perial armies. The example of Spain was copied in Prussia, Tyrol and Dalmatia. Napoleon found himself called upon to reduce Spain and intimidate Austria, which was again arming. Through the treason of Talleyrand he was forced to yield to Alexander at Erfurt and to abandon the east in order to carry out the evacua tion of the Grand Army from Prussia and concentrate all his strength at Madrid (see PENINSULAR WAR).
Supported by generous subsidies from England and encouraged by the reserved attitude of the tsar and by Napoleon's difficulties in Spain, Austria sought to take him by surprise as in 1805, and nearly succeeded. Despite Davout's initial success at Eckmuhl, the struggle at Essling was severe, and the victory of Wagram expensive. Nevertheless Austria. at the Peace of Vienna or Schonbrunn (Dec. 14, 1809), lost her share of Poland (which was annexed to the Grand Duchy of Warsaw), Trieste and her Adriatic provinces. This peace marks the zenith of Napoleon's power ; for two years he was undisputed lord of an empire that stretched from Paris to Rome and Ham burg, and comprised 130 departments. The empire never ap peared so great, nor its future so brilliant, as in 1810 when Napoleon divorced Josephine because she had no child, and married an Austrian Archduchess ; a year later Marie Louise bore him a son, the king of Rome : the hereditary empire pos sessed an heir.
End.—Nevertheless the Tarpeian Rock never stood nearer to the Capitol. Already weaknesses inherent in his work, presaging his downfall, could be seen. The emperor's chief enemy, England, still survived to stir up and finance the rebellion of governors and governed, and he felt his impotence in face of the national rising in Spain. Men such as Stein, Hardenberg and Scharnhorst made ready in secret for Prussia's revenge. The material omnipotence of Napoleon was defeated by the moral resistance of the pope, his prisoner at Fontainebleau. The Russian alliance was gravely shaken by the threat of a restoration of Poland and by Napoleon's refusal to permit a Russian occupation of Constantinople. Even the men whom he had raised to power sought to oppose his plan. With the sole exception of Murat, all the Corsican dynasties be trayed him ; Caroline at Naples intrigued against her brother and her husband ; Louis, now Dutch in his sympathies, refused to maintain the blockade and to defend the Scheldt; debauched by his harem at Cassel, Jerome was removed from the surveillance of the coasts of the North sea; and Joseph, who was attempting a moral conquest of Spain, was continually insulted in Madrid. Treason among his officials was added to the intrigues of his own family and the national risings against Napoleon ; he was compelled to dismiss Talleyrand, who at Erfurt had revealed his plans to Metternich, and Fouche, who carried on a secret corre spondence with Austria and negotiated with Louis and with England. All who had profited by his power dreamed in their turn of becoming sovereigns. Bernadotte played fast and loose with him in order to place on his own head the crown of Sweden, while Soult, like Murat, coveted the crown of Spain after that of Portugal. Many hoped for an "accident" that would bring about a tragic end resembling that of Alexander the Great or of Caesar; moreover France, weary of sacrifice, though vain of her conquests, had had enough. "The cry of the mothers rose threateningly" against "the Ogre" and demanded peace. Finally, amidst the profound silence of the press and the assemblies, a protest was raised against the imperial despot by the literary world, against the excommunicated monarch by Catholicism, and against the instigator of the Continental blockade, by the com mercial class ruined in the crisis of 1811. Napoleon himself was no longer the General Bonaparte of his Italian campaign; physical decline had begun, and a falling off in his intellectual capacity showed itself in an unwonted irresolution. The army—that mar vellous instrument of his will—gradually lost its technique and moral, and all this at the precise moment when, behind the armies and the governments of the ancien regime, the spirit of nationality was rising. After two years and three campaigns, the end came.
The tsar gave the signal. His ver satile character, his Polish and Eastern ambitions, and the dis like of the Russians to cease trading with England, induced him to take up arms. To become sole master of the Mediterranean and the East and at length compel England to capitulate, Na poleon risked his whole fortune on a desperate throw. But Russia was as unconquerable as Spain (June, 1812) ; neither the victories of the grand armies at Smolensk and the Moskwa (Boro dino), nor the capture of Moscow itself, cowed the Russians or induced them to ask for peace. The disastrous retreat from Moscow followed at the moment when the seventh coalition was being formed.
Napoleon was forced back from bastion to bastion. After the action on the Beresina, he had to retreat to the frontiers of 1809; then, despite the victories at Lutzen and Bautzen, over the Russo-Prussian armies—when he rejected at Prague the treacherous peace which Austria, not yet ready to fight, proffered him—it meant falling back on the lines of 1805. Those of 1800 followed his defeat at Leipzig, where Bernadotte fired upon him, Moreau assisted the allies and the Bavarians and Saxons deserted. The retreat from Moscow had involved the evacuation of Germany ; Napoleon had to fall back still further, to the frontiers of 1795, after Wellington's conquest of Spain, the rebellion of Holland and the manifesto of Frank furt, by which the allies repeated the ruse of Prague and made promises without any intention of keeping them ; and further yet, within the frontiers of 1792—despite the brilliant campaign of 1814 across an invaded France in which the Bonaparte of 1796 came to life again and nearly wrung favour from adverse fortune. As England well knew, in a France that had been victorious for 18 years, no one was prepared for invasion. On March 3o, 1814, Paris capitulated : the "delenda Carthago" he had pronounced against England had returned upon Napoleon's own head. The great empire of east and west fell to pieces with the emperor's abdication at Fontainebleau (April 6, 1814), and on May 5 Louis XVIII. entered Paris as Napoleon disembarked at Elba.
