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a long memorandum in which he argued that France’s best interest lay in making Austria an ally. Serious territorial losses were pressed for, certainly, but it was at least realized that the pill had to be sweetened by a little sugar. In consequence, Austria was not just to be stripped of her western marches, but also given a place in Napoleonic Europe by means of an Austro-French alliance against Russia, and hints that Vienna might seek compensation in the Balkans. After Austerlitz, indeed, Talleyrand went still further: Austria, he held ‘was indispensable to the future safety of the civilized world’.35 There was a great deal of sense in this: given that there were certainly elements in the Habsburg court, including, not least, the Archduke Charles, who saw territorial acquisitions in the Balkans as the best way out for Vienna, it was not too much to hope that Francis might be persuaded to turn east. Without a powerful state centred in the southern part of east-central Europe, the region would remain a perennial bone of contention as France and Russia vied with one another for control. And, finally, it was well understood that lasting peace settlements needed a readiness to compromise and to give all parties a stake in the new arrangement. But Napoleon could see none of this. Campo Formio, Amiens and Lunéville had all been compromise peaces, and had, by extension, set limits on French power. Although Napoleon had undermined all three of them in the months after they had been signed, such was the military situation at the time when they were negotiated that he had had no option but to pay lip-service to the principle of reciprocity. In the aftermath of Austerlitz, however, things were very different. For the first time truly possessed of the whip hand, Napoleon shrugged off moderation in favour of the complete humiliation of his opponent, and in doing so ensured that Austerlitz had settled nothing.

For the time being, however, in central Europe the guns fell silent. Indeed, as the Swedes remained quietly within their enclave at Stralsund, it was only in the Mediterranean and the wider world that the fighting could continue. In the former theatre, as we have seen, Naples had been occupied by the Anglo-Russian expeditionary force, which, together with the Neapolitan army, was now manning her northern frontier, but the Allies were short of supplies and increasingly at odds with one another. Realizing that their position was hopeless, in January 1806 the British and Russians retired to the respective havens of Sicily and Corfu. Hard on their heels, nearly 40,000 French troops marched across the frontier, defeating the Neapolitan army at Campo Tenese and besieging Gaeta. Left with no option but to flee, the royal family took ship for Sicily, their place being taken by Joseph Bonaparte. Since it was at this time, too, that Holland was transformed into a kingdom under Louis Bonaparte, this constitutes a convenient moment to discuss the role played by notions of family in Napoleon’s foreign policy. According to the many apologists for the emperor, the rise of the family courts is to be attributed either to his devotion to his family, or to the demands of the long struggle against Britain. Of these, the first argument, which is particularly associated with the fin-de-siècle French historian, Frédéric Masson, holds that it was Corsican clan loyalty that fuelled Napoleon’s ambition, and Corsican clan loyalty that led Napoleon to shower kingdoms and principalities on his brothers and sisters. What we see is therefore not Napoleon the conqueror but Napoleon the family man, whilst the theory also provides admirers of the emperor with a useful apologium for the empire’s ultimate collapse: it was not Napoleon who was to blame, but rather Joseph, Louis, Caroline and the rest, on all of whom Masson heaped contempt as ambitious ingrates who were as incompetent as they were self-serving. As for the second argument, of which a modern exponent is Vincent Cronin, this claims that the enthronement of Napoleon’s siblings was essentially a defensive