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By Root 2513 0

would have been nothing without war and conquest - but he was never capable of setting the same limits on himself as the rulers and statesmen who had waged the conflicts of the eighteenth century. There are those who would argue that this was not of his doing - that he was in effect impelled to embark on the road of universal conquest because of the refusal of Great Britain, especially, to allow France her just deserts. This is another debate, but it seems most unlikely that the ‘Sun King’ would ever have gone down such a path. In any case, the matter is irrelevant: however the Napoleonic Wars are explained, it was the emperor’s determination to eschew compromise, to flex his muscles on every possible occasion and to push matters to extremes that made them what they were.

Whatever the causes of the Napoleonic Wars, they left in their wake both a very different Europe and a very different world. Prior to 1789 France had been unquestionably the strongest of the great powers. Though temporarily in eclipse thanks to defeat in the Seven Years War and the financial difficulties that stemmed from her support of the thirteen colonies in the War of American Independence, she was still wealthier than any of her continental competitors and possessed of the best army in Europe. Meanwhile, in alliance with Spain, she was able to exert at least a partial curb on British domination of the wider world and at the same time to participate in the benefits of the colonial trade. By 1815, however, all this had been swept aside. France’s domestic resources remained very great, but the establishment of a new German confederation - the creation, it may be said, of a German nation - had ensured that the capacity to dominate the ‘third Germany’ that had been central to the Napoleonic imperium (and had in fact been Louis XIV’s only hope of winning the War of the Spanish Succession) was no more. Across the seas, meanwhile, much of France’s colonial empire had been swept away, together with Spanish control of the mainland of Central and South America. Ironically, then, the greatest hero in French history had presided over nothing less than a total collapse in France’s international position, leaving Britannia to rule the waves and the rest of Europe to contend with the emergence of what would ultimately become an even greater threat to its security than France had been. In short, the year 1815 was both an end and a beginning.

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The Origins of the Napoleonic Wars

It has already been made clear that this work is not a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte. For this there are a number of very good reasons. As was hinted at in the preface, the story of the life of this most famous of French rulers has generally not been told in a helpful way. A sense of chronology is established, certainly, but most of the authors are so concerned to rush from one battle or love interest to the next that they leave themselves with little space to place the battle of Austerlitz or Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise in their full political and diplomatic context. Still worse, as biography of Napoleon succeeds biography of Napoleon, very few advance understanding or even the historical record. With such works often highly derivative, we are left with the same old story, and what is more, a story in which a single highly coloured figure stands out against a background of murky monochromists. There are, it is true, rival works that take the opposite view and demonize Napoleon, but these too do little to explore the complexities of the situation in which he operated and tend rather to concentrate on the flaws of his character and the iniquities of his behaviour. This is not, however, the way to expound the story of Napoleon. Even if it is the case that the history of Europe between 1803 and 1815 could be reduced to such personal dimensions (which it cannot), the other actors and perspectives in the drama must needs be explored in their own right rather than simply existing as foils for the hero or villain. Biography still has its place, but it is noticeable that those