now took the second alternative. On or about the 25th–27th of August he resolved to strike at Austria. He did so with masterly skill and swiftness, and the triumphs of Ulm and Austerlitz hid from View the disaster of Trafalgar; and the only official reference to that crushing defeat was couched in these terms: “Storms caused us to lose some ships of the line after a fight imprudently engaged” (speech to the Legislature, 2nd of March 1806).
The glamour of Austerlitz had very naturally dazzled all Frenchmen. Its results indeed were not only astounding at the time, but were such as to lead up to a new cycle of wars. By the peace of Presburg (26th of December 1805) Napoleon compelled Austria to recognize all the recent changes in Italy, and further to cede Venetia, Istria and Dalmatia to the new kingdom of Italy. The Swabian lands of the Habsburgs went to the South German states (allies of Napoleon), while Bavaria also received Tirol and Vorarlberg. The Electors of Bavaria and Württemberg were recognized as kings.
Nor was this all. Napoleon pressed almost equally hard upon Prussia. That power had been on the point of offering her armed mediation in revenge for his violation of her territory of Anspach; but she was fain to accept the terms which he offered at the sword’s point. When modified in February 1806, after Prussia’s demobilization, they comprised the occupation of Hanover by Prussia, with the proviso, however, that she should exclude British ships and goods from the whole of the north-west coast of Germany. To this demand (the real commencement of the “Continental System”) the Berlin government had to accede, though at the cost of a naval war with England, and the ruin of its maritime trade. Anspach and Bayreuth were also to be handed over to Bavaria, it now being the aim of Napoleon to aggrandize the South German princes who had fought on his side in the late war. In order to strengthen this compact, he arranged a marriage between the daughter of the king of Bavaria and Eugene Beauharnais; and he united the daughter of the Elector of Württemberg in marriage to Jerome Bonaparte, who had now divorced his wife, formerly Miss Paterson of Baltimore, at his brother’s behests. Stéphanie de Beauharnais, niece of Josephine, was also betrothed to the son of the duke (now grand duke) of Baden. By these alliances the new Charlemagne seemed to have founded his supremacy in South Germany on sure foundations.
Equally striking was his success in Italy. The Bourbons of Naples had broken their treaty engagements with Napoleon, though in this matter they were perhaps as much sinned against as sinning. After Austerlitz the conqueror fulminated against them, and sent southwards a strong column which compelled an Anglo-Russian force to sail away and brought about the flight of the Bourbons to Sicily (February 1806). This event opened a new and curious chapter in the history of Europe, that of the fortunes of the Napoléonides. True to his Corsican instinct of attachment to the family, and contempt for legal and dynastic claims, he now began to plant his brothers and other relatives in what had been republics established by the French Jacobins. Eugene Beauharnais had been established at Milan. Joseph Bonaparte was now advised to take the throne of Naples, and without any undue haggling as to terms, for “those who will not rise with me shall no longer be of my family. I am making a family of kings attached to my federative system.” At the end of March 1806 Joseph became king of the Two Sicilies. A little later the emperor bestowed the two papal enclaves of Benevento and Ponte-Corvo on Talleyrand and Bernadotte respectively, an act which emphasized the hostility which had been growing between Napoleon and the papacy. Because Pius VII. declined to exclude British goods from the Papal States, Napoleon threatened to reduce the pope to the level merely of bishop of Rome. He occupied Ancona and seemed about to annex the Papal States outright. That doom was postponed; but Catholics everywhere saw with pain the harsh treatment accorded to a defenceless old man. The prestige which the First Consul had gained by the Concordat was now lost by the overweening emperor.
But it was on the banks of the Rhine that the Napoleonic system received its most signal developments. The duchy of Berg, along with the eastern part of Clèves and other annexes, now went to Murat, brother-in-law of Napoleon (March 1806); and that melodramatic soldier at once began to round off his eastern boundary in a way highly offensive to Prussia. She was equally concerned by Napoleon’s behaviour in the Dutch Netherlands, where her influence used to be supreme. On the 5th of June 1806 the Batavian republic completed its chrysalis-like transformations by becoming a kingdom for Louis Bonaparte. “Never cease to be a Frenchman” was the pregnant advice which he gave to his younger brother in announcing the new dignity to him. In that sentence lay the secret of all the disagreements between the two brothers. Louis resolved to govern for the good of his subjects. Napoleon determined that he, like all the Bonapartist rulers, should act merely as a Napoleonic satrap. They were to be to him what the counts of the marches were to Charlemagne, warlike feudatories defending the empire or overawing its prospective foes.
Far more was to follow. On the 17th of July Napoleon signed at Paris a decree that reduced to subservience the Germanic System, the chaotic weakness of which he had in 1797 foreseen to be highly favourable to France. He now grouped together the princes of south and central Germany in the Confederation of the Rhine, of which he was the protector and practically the ruler in all important affairs. The logical outcome of this proceeding appeared on the 1st of August, when Napoleon declared that he no longer recognized the existence of the Holy Roman Empire. The head of that venerable organism, the emperor Francis II., bowed to the inevitable and announced that he thenceforth confined himself to his functions as Francis I., hereditary emperor of Austria, a title which he had taken just two years previously. This tame acquiescence of the House of Habsburg in the reorganization of Germany seemed to set the seal on Napoleon’s work. He controlled all the lands from the Elbe to the Pyrenees, and had Spain and Italy at his beck and call. Power such as this was never wielded by his prototype, Charlemagne. But now came a series of events which transcended all that the mind of man had conceived. As the summer of 1806 wore on, his policy perceptibly hardened. Negotiations with England and Russia served to show the extent of his ambition. Sicily he was determined to have, and that too despite of all the efforts of the Fox-Grenville cabinet to satisfy him in every other direction. In his belief that he could ensnare the courts of London and St Petersburg into separate and proportionately disadvantageous treaties, he overreached himself. The tsar indignantly repudiated a treaty which his envoy, Oubril, had been tricked into signing at Paris; and the Fox-Grenville cabinet (as also its successor) refused to bargain away Sicily. War, therefore, went on. What was more, Prussia, finding that Napoleon had secretly offered to the British Hanover (that gilded hook by which he caught her early in the year), now resolved to avenge this, the last of several insults. Napoleon was surprised by the news of Prussia’s mobilization; he had come to regard her as a negligible quantity, and now he found that her unexpected sensitiveness on points of honour was about to revivify the Third Coalition against France.
The war which broke out early in October 1806 (sometimes known as the war of the Fourth Coalition) ran a course curiously like that of 1805 in its main outlines. For Austria we may read Prussia; for Ulm, Jena-Auerstädt; for the occupation of Vienna, that of Berlin; for Austerlitz, Friedland, which again disposed of the belated succour given by Russia. The parallel extends even to the secret negotiations; for, if Austria could have been induced in May 1807 to send an army against Napoleon’s communications, his position would have been fully as dangerous as before Austerlitz if Prussia had taken a similar step. Once more he triumphed owing to the timidity of the central power which had the game in its hands; and the folly which marked the Russian tactics at Friedland (14th of June 1807), as at Austerlitz, enabled him to close the campaign in a blaze of glory and shiver the coalition in pieces.
