Napoleon by Vincent Cronin

Author:Vincent Cronin [Vincent Cronin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007394951
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Napoleon’s Empire

IN the five years after his coronation Napoleon created a European Empire more extensive than any since the days of Rome. What exactly was this Empire? Where did its frontiers lie? How many people did it number? Who ruled it? What was the guiding purpose behind it? And, first of all, how did it come into being?

The situation from which the Empire emerged began to take shape during Napoleon’s boyhood. At a time when Frenchmen were dallying with their mistresses at fêtes champêtres and masked balls, two remarkable rulers, Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick the Great of Prussia, were pursuing an iron policy of conquest. In 1772, in alliance with Austria, they conquered and dismembered Poland, a kingdom more ancient than either Prussia or Russia, and one that had long served France as a buffer state. In 1795 Poland disappeared completely from the map. This was a profoundly important event: it shifted the centre of political gravity in Europe much farther west, and brought Russia and Prussia, both in full expansion, into potential conflict with France.

This was one fact Napoleon found on coming to power; the other was the hostility of the courts of Europe. The noblemen at these courts, and even more their wives, detested the Revolution which had guillotined or ruined their opposite numbers in France and, as Crabb Robinson wrote from Jena in 1805: ‘The court here is openly what all courts are privately – the enemy of Bonaparte.’ It was the court families who almost without exception controlled foreign policy in St Petersburg and Berlin, in Vienna and London, in Copenhagen and Stockholm, in Naples and Madrid.

In 1801 Catherine the Great’s young grandson Alexander became Tsar of Russia. It was she who had chosen his name, she who brought him up, she who taught him that he must one day be a new Alexander and win more lands for Russia. Besides Catherine’s example and teaching, and the influence of the court, there were three reasons why Alexander should soon come into conflict with France. First, his Foreign Minister, Czartoryski, by birth a Polish prince, dreamed of founding a great Panslavic state whereby Russia would control all central Europe. Secondly, almost all Russia’s trade was in the hands of 4,000 English merchants in St Petersburg, and they naturally used their influence against France. Finally, there was the example of Napoleon’s spectacular victories. Why, asked young Alexander, should I too not win glory by feats of arms?

In 1804 Czartoryski was secretly informed by d’Antraigues, French royalist spy, that Napoleon was planning to invade Greece and Albania. This plan was non-existent outside d’Antraigues’s fertile brain, but Czartoryski believed it and persuaded Alexander to believe it too. They began sounding out England, already at war with France, with a view to concerted action against France. Pitt, who had returned to power, met Czartoryski more than half way with an offer of £11/4 million for every 100,000 troops Russia put into the field. The Third Coalition began to take shape.

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