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By Root 2660 0

out of port and, after a long voyage, reach the West Indies. However, a rendezvous with a small squadron that had escaped from Rochefort went wrong, while the Brest fleet of Admiral Honoré Ganteaume failed to break out at all. At the point that Napoleon made his great démarche in Italy, Villeneuve was still at large, and there was some faint hope that he might link up with the Spanish squadron in El Ferrol and raise the blockade of Brest. However, whether even the emperor believed such a scenario to be possible must be open to doubt: one of the reasons why Ganteaume never escaped from Brest was that he had received orders from Napoleon that he should on no account attempt directly to confront the British ships on patrol outside. And at the same time one can sense compulsion pure and simple: faced by the growing evidence that Napoleon intended to transform the Italian Republic into a monarchy, Austria had responded by indicating that she had no objections to such a course provided that France’s Milanese satellite remained independent. But accepting such a limitation would have implied that other powers had a say in what Napoleon could and could not do. And to this there was but one answer: the Italian Republic would not just become a kingdom, but also a kingdom ruled by the emperor and all but surrounded by French territory.

Whatever the reason for Napoleon’s actions, there is no doubt that by them he single-handedly created the Third Coalition. Yet, great though the sense of shock was, Europe was still not completely united against him. Opportunistic as ever, Prussia weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of empire and coalition, and in fact put out feelers to both camps. From Russia there came nothing more than the offer of a triple alliance with Austria and Russia that would guarantee Germany against any further French encroachment, whether political or military, but the French response was very different: to obtain a Prussian alliance, Napoleon was prepared not just to promise Frederick William that he would be given Hanover with the coming of peace, but also to hand that state over to Prussian occupation straight away, while at the same time guaranteeing the integrity of Germany and Switzerland. With Russia becoming ever more menacing - news arrived not only of Russian troops massing on the frontier, but also that a pro-Russian insurrection was being stirred up in Prussian Poland - Potsdam veered very much in the direction of Paris: if Napoleon engaged in any more serious acts of aggression in Germany or anywhere else, argued Frederick William’s new chief minister, Karl August von Hardenberg, then Prussia should probably join Britain and Russia, but, unless and until that proved the case, she should seek to retain the emperor’s friendship.

Another state playing a double game was Naples. At first sight this is somewhat surprising. Unlike Frederick William III, Ferdinand IV did not enjoy good relations with Napoleon. Setting aside the fact that he regarded him as an upstart and a ‘Jacobin’, he had recently been faced by a demand that the commander of the Neapolitan army, Roger de Damas, should immediately be dismissed as an enemy of France, or, in other words, an emigré. For good measure, Ferdinand and Maria Carolina were also accused of planning a new war. Now, as it happened, Damas was not an emigré - he had been in the service of first Russia and then Naples since 1786- and the queen attempted to keep the peace by writing a personal letter to Napoleon in which she sought to calm his fears. The sequel, however, was all too predictable:

The style of the queen’s letter was firm, dignified and friendly, and she had no doubt that, unless Bonaparte were seeking for a pretext to break the peace, he would adopt a more reasonable and cordial tone . . . But this hope was short-lived: Bonaparte’s answer . . . was full of rancour and arrogance. He laid all the troubles of the past at her door, and made her responsible for all that was yet to come, and he ended with . . . some impertinent fatherly advice to the effect