• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2723 0

openly snubbed the French ambassador, Hédouville, at a court levee that was held the day after the news arrived in St Petersburg. The First Consul, however, was unmoved: Sweden was ignored; the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire bullied into submission; and Alexander rebuffed with a stinging dispatch in which Napoleon pointedly inquired whether the tsar would not have seized the murderers of his father if he had discovered that they were in hiding in some town just outside his own frontiers. With the French ambassador withdrawn for good measure, there could be but one response: the Russian chargé d’affaires in Paris was instructed to ask for his passports, while troops began to be massed in Poland and Galicia. It was a key moment: though war was still not inevitable, from now on Alexander was committed to curbing Napoleon’s power.

If Napoleon was serious in his desire to avoid a war with Russia, now was the moment to adopt a policy of moderation. On the contrary, on 18 May 1804 there came the declaration that France was henceforth a hereditary empire. For apologists for the French ruler, this step is easy enough to explain. Napoleon himself was anxious to ensure the permanency of his regime, while the French people were in favour of the change and even beginning to demand it. At the same time, the step was not so very great: after all, had not Rome continued to call itself a republic even when it had long been ruled by the caesars? But all this was so much casuistry: the growing clamour for the First Consul to become emperor was all too clearly manufactured by the administration - the plebiscite held to ratify the establishment of the empire in the autumn was little short of farce - while the mere fact of making the regime hereditary was not enough to scotch royalist conspiracy: aside from anything else, Napoleon and Josephine had yet to produce an heir. Once again what mattered was naked ambition: the First Consul wanted to be a ruler as other rulers, to enjoy the trappings of monarchy and, perhaps above all, to break down yet another of the barriers that hemmed him in. To quote Thibaudeau, ‘Each time that the question of securing the power of the executive was mooted, the word heredity came to the front, and for the last six months it had been openly talked about in society. Every day people wondered when the First Consul was going to complete the “stability” of his government. The discovery of the conspiracy of [Cadoudal] and Pichegru furnished an excellent pretext to carry out the execution of a plan which had been maturing for the past three years.’57 Also instructive, meanwhile, is Napoleon’s own comment on the change: ‘The people and the army are for me: anyone who did not know how to seize the throne in such a situation would be a real fool.’58

With French power as unrivalled as it was, the impact of this pronouncement should not be underestimated. That the Bourbons had been replaced by a new dynasty was not in itself a problem: very few statesmen were so committed to the cause of legitimism that they wanted Louis XVIII and nothing else. The issue was rather the imperial title, which suggested that the erstwhile First Consul was laying claim to the mantle of Charlemagne and, beyond him, the Roman Empire. Secure in her northern bailiwick, an area that had never fallen under the suzerainty of either the Caesars or Charlemagne, Prussia could respond to the change with equanimity and recognized Napoleon’s new title without demur. But for Austria and Russia it was a different matter. For both powers, the new dispensation threatened to exclude them from Germany, while neither the Habsburgs nor the Romanovs were happy about granting equal status to the Bonapartes. In consequence, Austria dragged her feet over the issue of recognition and, despite threats of war, did not give way until she had secured a promise that Francis would be acknowledged as hereditary emperor of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire granted precedence over France. As for Russia, she joined with Sweden in refusing Napoleon her recognition while at the same