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Not surprisingly, the response to Napoleon’s overtures was fiercely hostile, but this was exactly what the First Consul wanted. As he later wrote:

If France had made peace at that time under existing circumstances, she would have made it after a campaign of disasters; indeed, she would have drawn back in consequence of a single campaign. This would have been dishonourable, and would only have encouraged princes to form new coalitions against her. All the chances of the campaign of 1800 were in her favour: the Russian armies were leaving the theatre of war; the pacification of the Vendée placed a new army at the disposal of the Republic; in the interior, factions were overruled and the chief magistrate possessed the entire confidence of the nation. It behoved the Republic not to make peace until after restoring the equilibrium of Italy; she could not, without abandoning her destiny, consent to a peace less advantageous than . . . Campo Formio. At this period peace would have ruined the Republic: war was necessary to it for the maintenance of energy and union in the state, which was ill organized, whilst the people would have demanded a great reduction in taxes and the disbanding of the army; in consequence, after a peace of two years, France would have taken the field again under great disadvantages. War was necessary to me. The campaigns of Italy, the peace of Campo Formio, the campaigns of Egypt, the transactions of 18 Brumaire, the unanimous voices of the people for raising me to the supreme magistracy had undoubtedly placed me very high, but a treaty of peace derogatory to that of Campo Formio . . . would have destroyed my influence over the imaginations of the people and deprived me of the means of putting an end to the anarchy of the Revolution by establishing a definitive and permanent system.10

Napoleon, then, was not acting in good faith. Having thrown the responsibility for continuing the war upon his enemies, he could now seek further victories that would augment his glory and allow him to dictate peace on his own terms. To put it another way, in the words of a proclamation he had addressed to the army on 18 Brumaire, ‘Liberty, victory and peace will reinstate the French Republic in the rank which she held in Europe.’11

But was there any alternative to war? Amongst admirers of Napoleon, it is axiomatic that the picture he faced at the beginning of 1800 was one of universal foreign hostility and, further, that the powers of Europe were determined to restore the Bourbons and, with them, absolute monarchy. This view is misleading in the extreme. Britain and Austria, certainly, were inclined to continue the war, but they were not much interested in the cause of Louis XVIII, who had been treated by them with considerable disrespect. Ordered about from place to place and afforded only a precarious degree of financial support, his authority had never once been proclaimed on the infrequent occasions when the Allies found themselves in control of French territory. Getting the Bourbons back on the throne was certainly favoured by some British statesmen, but it was not the centrepiece of Britain’s war aims, for the simple reason that the territorial and maritime security on which they were centred could always be achieved by other means, and probably better ones at that. Britain had gone to war in 1793 to prevent France from riding roughshod over treaties and frontiers as she thought fit and, more particularly, taking over the whole of the Channel coast (a worry that in 1795 was greatly reinforced by the Republic’s conquest of Holland). She had made use of French royalism, certainly. Supporting the various insurgents and conspirators associated with the Bourbons was a useful diversion that on occasion tied down large numbers of troops and caused considerable disruption in Paris. At the very time that Napoleon came to power, British arms were being supplied to a major royalist insurrection that had just broken out in Brittany