The War of Wars (3 page)

Biographies of Napoleon can be weighed by the hundredweight. Yet there are curiously few recent attempts at an entire history of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the colossal and protracted global struggle that convulsed all of Europe for nearly a quarter of a century. This book is an attempt to address that void: it is an unashamedly ‘general’ rather than scholastic work, written for a wide audience. A broad brush inevitably obscures detail, but no scholastic work could possibly do justice to that great struggle without running into a dozen volumes. My aim has been to provide a giant and vivid canvas on which to depict these globe-bestriding, world-changing events for the general reader, providing new insights and drawing on many widely neglected accounts. It is for the reader to judge whether I have succeeded.

According to Napoleon, history is a myth that men agree to believe. The revolutionary and Napoleonic wars are usually divided into two rich mythologies: the first is that of Napoleon the monster who inflicted years of suffering and slaughter across Europe, precursor to the worst tyrannies in the twentieth century; the second that of Napoleon the genius and modernizer who liberated Europe from decrepit feudal absolutism and endowed the continent with modern laws, national self-respect, and bourgeois progress. Both of these are predicated on the ultimate Napoleonic myth: his omnipotence, as powerful through the ages as the identification of Julius Caesar’s power with that of ancient Rome. Both owe as much to historical propaganda as to Napoleon’s vanity and his determination to write history solely in terms of his own extraordinary personality.

Napoleon’s is the dominant personality in the events of this book, primarily from 1799 to 1815. But the mythology is, to say the least, extravagant with the truth. The revolutionary wars from 1792 to 1802 were as significant and dangerous to Britain and Europe as the Napoleonic phase, from 1803 to 1815. Men like Dumouriez and Carnot, now largely forgotten, first created the military machine which Napoleon later piloted. Napoleon’s command over his generals, his ministers and France as a whole was more circumscribed than many people today believe. His military successes were often close-run and short-lived, and his hubris brought about defeat at Waterloo in 1815.

This book attempts to outline what really happened during the frenzied quarter of a century when Britain, having carved out a global empire and dazzled the world with its inventiveness and industrial revolution, seemed on the verge of being invaded and devastated, as so much of continental Europe had been already.

In 1788 Europe was peaceful and prosperous. There was little sign that anything would disturb the tranquility of the settled alliances between its seven great powers and the host of lesser princedoms. In Britain alone was the monarchy little more than a façade for rule by a parliament dominated by factions, commercial interests and, in the still-powerful House of Lords, the aristocracy. While the humdrum and egotistical George III had prestige and influence, he did not rule. Britain had recently suffered the grievous loss of its rebellious, although small and comparatively poor, North American colonies, but still presided over a far-flung and growing global empire.

Elsewhere in Europe, royal absolutism held sway, usually centralized around a royal court. The most powerful of these was the magnificent monarchy of France, where the tall, fair-haired, snub-nosed and acerbically intelligent King Louis XVI presided over fabulous Bourbon Versailles, with palaces so large that they bristled with whole villages of intriguing, cavorting and amorous courtiers. The King was married to a haughty Austrian princess, Marie Antoinette, cementing France’s alliance of convenience with the other greatest dynasty in Europe, that of Austria’s ruling Habsburgs. France was Britain’s great continental rival, having just lost the Seven Years War, then outwitted the
British during the American War of Independence. Although the two nations were currently at peace, Franco-British trade, naval and military rivalry continued to be played out across the globe, from India to the West Indies.

France’s greatest continental ally and rival was Austria-Hungary, a polyglot empire that dominated northern Italy, the Balkans, and most of eastern Europe. Its Emperor, presiding over a court at Vienna second only to France’s in its extravagance and beauty, was soon to be the indecisive, garrulous Francis II. To the north, completing the trio of great nations that dominated the central massif of the European continent was Prussia. A newly emergent and aggressive military power under Frederick the Great, threatening the host of German principalities and buffer states between itself and France, it was now at peace with its neighbours, and ruled by the weak and vacillating Frederick William.

To the south-east lay the declining power of the Turkish Ottoman empire, still ruling a vast swathe of the Middle East but long incapable of challenging a major European nation, hundreds of years after the great Saracen offensives had petered out. The Ottomans’ very weakness posed a threat to Europe simply by offering a tempting vacuum to others, in particular the quasi-barbarian power to the north, Catherine the Great’s Russia, which was embarked on a policy of imperial expansion that seemed to pose the greatest threat to European stability. This strong-willed, shrewd and capricious woman had long ruled with great firmness. Now her reign was coming to an end, and the paranoid, half-insane Tsar Paul was to provide an unhappy interregnum before the accession of his strange son and probable murderer, Alexander, a young man of almost feminine beauty who alternated visionary ideas with religious fanaticism.

Finally, to the south-west was the seventh great power, now in decline but possessed of an overseas empire of fabulous wealth. Over the centuries shipments of silver to Spain had served to corrode the country’s warrior ruling class. Spain was ruled by a decent but vacuous Bourbon king, Charles IV, his lascivious wife Maria Luisa and her opportunist lover, Manuel Godoy. The monarchs were to be succeeded by their brutal and reactionary son, Ferdinand VII.

These were the seven great powers of Europe, all of them absolute monarchies save one, Britain, which was a republican oligarchy in all but name. Three of them were strong and entrenched across the prosperous heartland of central Europe; the two in the south were in advanced stages of decline, while Russia in the east was regarded as primitive and potentially predatory to its Baltic neighbours in the north and the Ottoman empire in the south.

The rest of Europe was carved into a host of lesser monarchies, princelings and duchies. Sweden, Saxony, Bavaria, Portugal, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Parma and Piedmont were its most significant states, most of them satellites gravitating around the orbit of the greater powers. The Pope presided as Europe’s greatest spiritual prince, with his own fiefdom in central Italy, although Catholicism was under challenge from northern Protestantism. It seemed an apparently unbreakable façade of monarchical absolutism, locked in alliances, rivalries and dynastic marriages, presiding over a continent as peaceful and well ordered as at any time in its turbulent history.

In 1789 the very centrepiece of this intricate structure of peace and prosperity, Louis XVI’s court at Versailles, cracked and was soon shattered into a thousand pieces. In its place there emerged first an elitist struggle for power, then an uncontrolled mob, and then the massed formations of brutally disciplined armies the like and size of which had never been seen before to pour over France’s borders in a frenzy of uncontrolled warfare, initially in defence of the Revolution, then to promote its ideals, finally in torrents of outright aggression and conquest.

Within the space of a couple of years, Europe was plunged into one of the largest and longest wars of its history that was to last the best part of a quarter of a century and threaten to overturn the entire social order of monarchy and aristocratic rule and place the continent in the grip of a single militarist nation. With vast conscript armies moving at unprecedented speed and overwhelming force against the parade-ground armies of Europe with their aristocratic officers and traditional military tactics, it seemed that the militarist juggernaut would sweep all before it. The continent was plunged into a seemingly endless confrontation which ravaged whole countries from Spain and Italy in the south to
Belgium in the north-west, to Prussia and into Russia in the east, to Austria in the centre.

It was as though a volcano had erupted at the heart of Europe, belching out destruction and threatening everything in its path. It was to be perhaps the biggest bloodbath in European history, killing millions, levelling and looting, obliterating the livelihoods and homes of entire nations. This was the birth of the modern age of mass politics, revolution and total warfare, the foreshadower of the destructive wars of the twentieth century.

Although he was only a secondary player during the first phase of the revolutionary war until 1800, the carnage became associated eventually with the single man who to his friends and enemies alike seemed to incarnate the spirit of that unstoppable, relentless war machine, Napoleon Bonaparte. Throughout the war only one country stood almost continuously against him. It was the greatest challenge that the islands of Britain had faced since the Norman invasion and Spanish Armada. To the growing alarm of its leaders and people, as France’s neighbours were ruthlessly cut down one after another, the struggle soon appeared to be hopeless, inviting first economic strangulation and then a murderous invasion.

In the beginning there was a spark. That spark was the English Revolution of 1640–60. Flaring up fiercely and briefly, it left three embers smouldering: the rhetoric and republican ideals of its main instigators, at a time when it was virtual blasphemy to challenge the divine right of kings; the proof that social and economic forces could converge to knock even the embodiment of the power of the central state off its pedestal; and, last but not least, the elemental force that was forged from the fires of revolution, so necessary to advancing it, mastering it and ultimately destroying it – that of a powerful standing army. The English Revolution of course ended with the Restoration of 1660 but the underbrush continued to burn, re-emerging in the assertion of the rights of parliament that deposed James II and the eventual establishment of a virtually powerless monarchy under the Hanoverians.