Napoleon's Wars_ An International History, 1803-1815 - Charles Esdaile [41]
It is possible to go too far here. Peace might well have been obtained with Britain in 1797, but it can be argued that, so long as there was no willingness to set aside centuries of Anglo-French rivalry, it would have been inherently unstable. By the same token, meanwhile, limiting France’s ambitions to the Rhine frontier would not necessarily have bought peace in Germany. But that is by-the-by, the fact being that Fructidor and Campo Formio perpetuated the war with Britain, and made a resumption of conflict with Austria much more likely. Thanks in large part to Napoleon, the threat of active opposition also now began to emerge from still another direction. Hitherto Russia had in effect stayed out of the war with France. Though ruled by a monarch who was ferocious in her denunciation of the Revolution and theoretically a member of the First Coalition, she had done nothing: rather than fighting France, what mattered had been consolidating Moscow’s gains in Poland. In 1796, the bellicose and ruthlessly expansionist Catherine II died and was replaced by her son, Paul I, whose reputation as a military martinet cloaked a strong desire for a pacific foreign policy that would allow him to concentrate on domestic reform. In a variety of ways, however, Napoleon’s actions had seriously jeopardized this de facto neutrality. Simply by conquering northern Italy, he had greatly alarmed Catherine, who by had Poland completely under control, and it is highly probable that, had she lived, Russian troops would have been dispatched to the Alps or the Adriatic. From this problem Napoleon was saved by the demise of Catherine, but he continued to dice with the danger, not the least of the risks that he took here being to feign the role of a patron of Polish independence. Although the Directory had for obvious reasons set its face against such a scheme (the formation of some sort of army in exile had, in fact, been advocated on several occasions by Polish refugees who had reached Paris), in 1797 Napoleon recruited a large number of Polish prisoners of war into a special force which was put at the disposal of the Cisalpine Republic. Known as the Polish Auxiliary Legion, this soon became the size of a small division - at its greatest size it might have consisted of some 6,000 men - while, to add insult to injury, it was placed under the command of a hero of the revolt of named Dabrowski. Needless to say, Napoleon was utterly uninterested in liberating Poland - aside from gaining a few more men, his chief interest seems rather to have lain in providing the Cisalpine Republic with a disciplined force of veteran soldiers who could be relied upon to uphold the regime - but that did not stop him from allowing Dabrowski to issue a revolutionary manifesto calling all his fellow countrymen to arms. Moreover, the Legion adopted uniforms of a traditional Polish cut and were guaranteed the right to return to Poland in the event that their countrymen had need of them.
Having upset Russia in one direction, Napoleon now proceeded to do so in another. For a variety of reasons, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean had long been an area of Russian interest. Under the influence of Prince Grigori Potemkin, Catherine II had seriously considered establishing a satellite state in Greece on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. In the end this scheme had not been implemented, but it had not been fully set aside either: for the time being Greece might remain Turkish, but no one was in any doubt that, when the time came to expel the Turks from Europe, it would be Russia that had first claim on the Hellenic world. Napoleon, however, had other ideas. For reasons that are not quite clear, at some point during the Italian campaign the French commander’s eyes turned east. Egypt certainly crossed his mind as his next objective - he raised the idea