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By Root 2511 0

dreams of a Europe built on national units and natural frontiers; and, finally, while Pitt did not look beyond a treaty by which the new dispensation could be guaranteed, Alexander wanted a new system of collective security and a code of international law. Inherent to all this were certain ideas which the British were inclined to regard not just as harmlessly idealistic, but dangerous and even hostile. Thus in the new Europe it would not only be France that would be placed under constraint, but also Britain, for the tsar wanted her to agree to a general freedom of the seas and envisaged concessions on other fronts as well. Much of this Pitt dodged: his memorandum said nothing about maritime commerce, nothing about Britain’s colonial gains, nothing about Malta (whose surrender had not been mentioned by Novosiltsev, but certainly tied in with the spirit of the tsar’s ideas) and nothing about Alexander’s ‘brave new world’. With regard to the Low Countries, the British Prime Minister also failed to put forward the far more logical course of action represented by giving Prussia the United Provinces rather than the Austrian Netherlands, and making the latter a buffer state ruled, say, by the House of Orange: to have done so would have been to risk transforming Prussia into a dangerous naval rival. To cement the alliance, Pitt was therefore in the end forced to meet Alexander halfway: Britain would give up all her colonial conquests, open up the question of neutral rights to discussion after the war, and consider evacuating Malta in exchange for Menorca. But the Anglo-Russian treaty of 11 April 1805- the central pillar of the Third Coalition - contained none of this; all that Pitt agreed to was that the peoples of Switzerland and the United Provinces should be allowed to determine their own mode of government, that the King of Piedmont should be encouraged to grant his subjects a constitution, and that the powers of Europe should consider the possibility of establishing some form of ‘league of nations’ when peace was restored.

Was this scheme really the framework of a new order? Hardly. There were, of course, many superficial resemblances to the Vienna settlement of 1815, and all the more so as the treaty of 11 April backed away from some of the odder features of Pitt’s schemes (such as, for example, the idea that most of Belgium should be given to Prussia). But in practice Alexander’s vision of a new Europe went by the board. If the West was to be ruled by a new model of territorial arrangement in which military and strategic considerations were allowed to outweigh the demands of legitimism, in the East all was much as before. Thus, even if this was cloaked in some instances by the desire to restore a Polish state, powerful elements within the Russian government wanted fresh territory in Poland, and this meant that Austria and Prussia must be compensated in their turn. And, if special interests operated in the case of Russia, so they did in the case of Britain, except that here the goal was not territorial gain but security from invasion and the right to rule the sea. Nor was this an end to the differences that marked the two settlements. As Paul Schroeder has pointed out, in essence what we have here is an attempt by Britain and Russia, first, simply to impose their own agenda on the rest of Europe, and, second, to get more or less powerful auxiliaries - the Austrians, the Prussians, the Neapolitans, the Swedes and the Danes - to do the bulk of the fighting for them (of the 400,000 men who were originally to be committed to the alliance, only 115,000 were Russian and fewer than 20,000 British). Hence his belief that the treaty of

11 April 1805 was not progressive at all, but rather backward-looking and thoroughly eighteenth-century.

So how did war actually break out? On 8 August 1805 Austria finally acceded to the Third Coalition, and less than a month later sent a large army under General Mack across the frontier into Bavaria. The ‘War of the Third Coalition’ had begun. In just two years, Napoleon had converted an Anglo-French