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By Root 2428 0

way to Napoleon may well be true, but only at the cost of accepting the legitimacy of an imperium that Europe had not seen since Roman times, and of expecting Britain and the rest to surrender not only their most cherished foreign-policy interests, but also many of the notions - above all, that of the balance of power - that underpinned the very survival of the European states system as it was understood in 1800 However, the Napoleonic Wars cannot just be understood in terms of Napoleon himself. One of the reasons why the emperor survived for so long was that there was no great ideological crusade against France. On the contrary, most of the powers of Europe continued to pursue traditional foreign policy objectives long after Napoleon had emerged as a far greater challenge to the international order than the French Revolution had ever been. In doing so, Russia, in particular, unleashed a series of campaigns that, while intimately connected with the story of Napoleon, would in all probability have happened without his influence, just as we may say that, even had the then First Consul been killed at Marengo, the first decade of the nineteenth century would almost certainly still have witnessed a period of general international conflict. What Napoleon eventually did, however, was to pose such a challenge to the powers that the normal working of international relations had to be suspended and even, in the end, reconsidered altogether. There were exceptions - the chief example is the Sweden of Marshal Bernadotte - but by the end of 1813 specific national interest had almost entirely been set aside in favour of a common cause that was genuinely seen as being that of the whole of Europe. With the coming of peace, that brief moment of unity and self-abnegation was lost, but even so the general principle that there was a common cause was not forgotten, and from this there emerged the embryonic system of collective security and crisis management agreed at Vienna.

To return to the quote from John Holland Rose which began this book, the history of Napoleon did not constitute the history of the world, or indeed, even Europe, between 1803 and 1815. That said, however, it may be said to have foreshadowed the history of the world. In the end, the peace-keeping arrangements evolved at the close of the Napoleonic Wars did not work and, after a long period in which conflict in Europe was both short-lived and confined to relatively limited theatres of war, in 1914 and then again in 1939 first Europe and then the world were plunged into general conflict. In these twentieth-century wars, there were many issues at stake, and the presence of a historiography nearly as copious as that generated by Napoleon should serve as a warning against facile generalizations. Yet the situation that faced Europe in 1914 and 1939 was exactly the same as that which it had faced in 1803, in that it was confronted by a power that united unbridled militarism with military, financial and demographic resources that could not in the short term be matched by any of its rivals - by a power, indeed, that, like Napoleon, aimed, whether from the beginning or at some later moment, to establish what amounted to a colonial empire inside Europe. To this, the answer was much the same as it had been in the Napoleonic era, namely the construction of a grand alliance that was increasingly armed, financed and supplied from the resources of the wider world, while with the coming of peace there were again moves in the direction of collective security and crisis management, although only after 1945 did these secure significant results. Within Europe, meanwhile, the European Community is bidding fair finally to abolish war between states altogether, and this in turn leads us back to Napoleon. On St Helena one of his constant refrains was that he had wanted to build a new Europe in which all its various peoples would enjoy unity and self-government and be united in a great confederation. Since the emperor lost his wars and ended up chained Prometheus-like to a rock in the South Atlantic,