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ruthless fashion. This in turn destabilized the Addington administration, which was then forced to breach the Treaty of Amiens and demand concessions that in the last resort the First Consul’s pride would not allow him to accept. Finally, what it came down to was that Napoleon could not accept the notion that there should be curbs on his freedom of action. At the same time, however, Britain had no means of imposing those curbs except through war. With neither Britain nor France prepared to make fundamental concessions, there could in the end be but one outcome.

4

Towards the Third Coalition

In May 1803, the whale went to war with the elephant. Possessed of the most powerful navy in the world, Britain stood supreme at sea, but on land she was a comparative weakling capable of fielding only puny expeditionary forces of a few thousand men, drawn from an army that had in the 1790s been notorious for the poverty of its human and material resources. With France, however, the picture was completely reversed. Though by no means the invincible force of legend, the French army was an impressive military machine with many victories to its credit, whereas the French navy was in a truly pitiable condition and virtually incapable of putting to sea. How the two belligerents were to strike at one another was therefore most unclear. Particularly outside Europe, ways were naturally found of doing so, but in the end the resolution of the struggle would necessarily revolve around one issue and one issue alone. To overcome France, Britain had to put together a continental coalition that could overthrow Napoleon or, at the very least, bring him to the peace table, while to defeat Britain Napoleon had to frustrate these aims and mobilize a substantial part of Europe against London. Even then victory was not guaranteed for either side. As the events of 1805 would show, for example, such were France’s advantages on land that even the most powerful coalition was not necessarily proof against her, but in the short term the international relations of the war could be said to boil down to a contest for the support of Austria, Russia and Prussia. Meanwhile, the fact that there was such a contest is significant. With hindsight, it is possible to argue that it was a struggle that the French were always likely to lose, but the key issue here was not some irreconcilable fracture in European diplomacy but rather the tensions encapsulated by the figure of Napoleon Bonaparte. In Europe was not divided ipso facto between the ancien régime and some new and deadly ideological rival. On the contrary, traditional foreign policy interests had survived unchanged, while overtly political considerations were very much in abeyance, and all the more so as Napoleon initially appeared as just one more player of the diplomatic game and, secondly, very much in retreat from the Revolution.

The general view of Napoleon in the capitals of Europe has already been examined. However, the absence of any real ideological hostility towards him was not the only reason why the French seemed to have some chance of winning the race to build an overwhelming coalition. Setting aside the fact that Spain, the Batavian Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Helvetic Confederation and the south German states were all highly vulnerable to French pressure, if not actually pro-French, the British were hampered in their search for allies by a whole range of factors. Not the least of these was the influence of French propaganda. Even before hostilities had resumed, it had been a standard line in France that the chief culprit for Europe’s misfortunes was British greed and ambition, and this message now became one of the central rallying cries of the French war effort. Hardly had Napoleon marched against Austria in September 1805 than he was denouncing the Third Coalition as ‘this new league woven by the hatred and gold of England’, and threatening the destruction of ‘the Russian army which the gold of England has transported from the extremities of the universe’.1 As Madame de Staël recalled,