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also been eschewed (so that Saragossa, for example, is rendered ‘Zaragoza’, Leghorn ‘Livorno’ and Gothenburg ‘Göteborg’). By contrast, in the many instances in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans where foreign names have changed in the wake of twentieth-century shifts in frontiers, ethnicities and political allegiances, foreign names have for the most part been left in the form most likely to be familiar to readers of Napoleonic history: for the modern form, please see the glossary at the end of the book. There are, however, a few exceptions. To refer to Alexandria, Prague, Warsaw and Moscow by any other names would be both affected and unhelpful, whilst one or two very small places have completely defeated all efforts to discover the modern version. One such is Pläswitz, the Silesian village where an armistice was agreed between Napoleon and his Russian and Prussian opponents in June 1813: indeed, there is no agreement even on the German name for this place: ‘Pläswitz’ is only the most common element in a list which includes Parchwitz, Plaeswitz, Pleiswitz, Plasswitz and Pleschwitz. For all such inadequacies and inconsistencies, not to mention the factual errors - all my own - that the text may contain, I can only offer my apologies.

Charles Esdaile Liverpool 2 July 2006

Europe, January 1799

Napoleon’s Reorganization of Germany, 1803

Europe, July 1803

Europe, September 1806

Central Europe, September 1809

Europe, March 1810

Europe, May 1812

Europe after the Congress of Vienna

Introduction The Napoleonic Wars in Historical Perspective

Writing of the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars in 1803, John Holland Rose once remarked, ‘The history of Napoleon now becomes, for twelve momentous years, the history of mankind.’1 Such a remark today seems like a relic of a bygone era. At the time that Britain and France were coming to blows, Robert Fulton was inventing the steamship, Richard Trevithick building the first steam locomotive, and William Jessop engineering the first public railway in the world. In North America, Lewis and Clark were on the brink of becoming the first white men to make it all the way from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Ocean; in Africa the Sokoto caliphate was in the process of islamicizing the Hausa people of what is today northern Nigeria; and in China the so-called ‘White Lotus’ sect was leading a series of anti-Manchu revolts that discredited the ruling Qing dynasty and helped pave the way for its subsequent disintegration. As for the world of ideas, new currents were starting to emerge that would have horrified most of the men of 1789 (let alone Napoleon): while Saint-Simon was at work on the ideas of proto-socialism, Madame de Staël, Mary Wollstonecroft and a number of other writers were explicitly raising the banner of female emancipation. The history of Napoleon, then, was never the history of the world. Was it, though, the history of Europe? It is this question that this book seeks to answer, at least from the perspective of international relations. Was the French ruler a prime mover in events? Was Napoleonic Europe, in short, proof of the ‘great-man’ theory of history? Or was he rather caught up in processes that had been set in train without any intervention on his part? The emperor himself seems to have been in two minds. At one time he remarked, ‘I have always commanded; from the moment that my life began I was filled with power, and such were my circumstances and my strength alike that from the moment that I came to prominence I recognized neither masters nor laws.’2 Yet at another what occurred in Europe between 1803 and 1815 he put down to something very different: ‘I have never really been my own master; I have always been governed by circumstances.’3 Whatever the truth, one thing is clear: the France of Napoleon was not acting in a vacuum. Even if the course of international relations does prove to have been bent to his will, the other powers in Europe had strategic and diplomatic goals that long predated Napoleon, and did not cease