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By Root 2742 0

figure of Napoleon Bonaparte served as a constant beacon for all those who dreamed of glory, were excluded by the Restoration system, or were genuinely fired by the ideology of liberation. With progressive political movements further persuaded that the people had only to take to the barricades to defeat the cause of reaction, 1815 appears very much the dawn of an age of turmoil. To political ferment was added economic development. Thanks to the French Wars, the dominant centres of trade and manufacture were forcibly shifted away from the maritime littoral to such inland areas as Saxony and the Ruhr. With its ports blockaded by the British, it might even be argued that continental Europe was turned from commerce to industry, while it is certainly the case that it was the era of relative peace which followed that allowed it to give full play to its considerable economic advantages. Change, then, seemed very likely, and yet the Vienna settlement was postulated upon the state of affairs that pertained in 1815 remaining unchanged for ever. In short, the stability brought by the Vienna settlement was apparent only - the factors that staved off a general conflict for so long being, first, the association of war with revolution, and, second, the political, social and economic cost of maintaining armies of the size that had fought at Wagram, Borodino and Leipzig.

If Europe faced an age of instability, she did so as a very different entity than she had been in 1803. On the peripheries of the Continent, Sweden had finally lost her long struggle with Russia for control of the Baltic and literally been pushed out of mainstream international relations; Spain had been stripped of most of her empire and reduced to bankruptcy; Denmark and Holland had been neutralized as naval powers; and the Ottoman Empire had been subjected to a series of challenges that may be said to have set it on the road to its eventual disintegration. Another loser had been Austria, which had not only seen herself shorn of the control she had once enjoyed of Germany through the Holy Roman Empire, but also been revealed as a state too weak to realize its pretensions. Britain, Prussia and Russia, by contrast, had all been massively strengthened, the first by the acquisition of fresh colonies, the extension of her rule in India, and the confirmation of her naval superiority; the second by the acquisition of territories in western Germany and Saxony that had the capacity to make her the powerhouse of German industry; and the third by the expansion of her power not only westwards but south-eastwards to the frontiers of central Asia. Inherent in all this lay the origins of fresh struggles - between Britain and Russia in Afghanistan and between Prussia and Austria in Germany - but the most dramatic change of all was to be found in the position of France. In 1800, as in 1700, she had been the greatest power in continental Europe, but under Napoleon she had been tested to destruction. Nor did she ever regain her lead. As the process of social and economic change that we have outlined above set in, so she slipped ever further from the pinnacle of power which she had occupied in 1807.

Not all of this was the fault of Napoleon. His responsibility, for example, for the decline in the birthrate that France experienced in the nineteenth century is tenuous at best. However, it does serve as a convenient moment at which once again to consider the question which opened this book. Were the wars all the doing of the emperor? On one level, of course, this question must be answered in the affirmative. As the present author has argued elsewhere, the wars that beset Europe between 1803 and 1815 were truly ‘Napoleonic’. Time and again it was Napoleon who either drove other powers to go to war with France, took the initiative in attacking them himself, engaged in actions that augmented the number of his enemies and increased the chances of war in fresh theatres of conflict, or spurned the possibility of a compromise peace. To argue that peace could have been assured at any time by giving