The Crimean War полностью

There were three main reasons behind his decision to mobilize the fleet. First, as Persigny had intimated, there were rumours of a plot against Napoleon in the army, and a show of force was a good way to nip this in the bud. ‘I must tell you’, Napoleon wrote to Empress Eugénie in the winter of 1852, ‘that serious plots are afoot in the army. I am keeping my eye on all this, and I reckon that by one means or another, I can prevent any outbreak: perhaps by means of a war.’ Secondly, Napoleon was anxious to restore France as a naval power in the Mediterranean – for everybody knew, in the words of Horace de Viel-Castel, the director of the Louvre, that ‘the day when the Mediterranean is partitioned between Russia and England, France will no longer be counted among the great powers’. In a conversation with Stratford Canning, who passed through Paris on his way from London to Constantinople, Napoleon was concerned to highlight France’s interests in the Mediterranean. Stratford wrote this memorandum of their conversation on 10 March:

He said that he had no wish to make the Mediterranean a French lake – to use a well-known expression – but that he should like to see it made a European one. He did not explain the meaning of this phrase. If he meant that the shores of the Mediterranean should be exclusively in the hands of Christendom, the dream is rather colossal … . The impression left upon my mind … is that Louis Napoleon, meaning to be well with us, at least for the present, is ready to act politically in concert with England at Constantinople; but it remains to be seen whether he looks to the restoration of Turkish power, or merely to the consequences of its decay, preparing to avail himself of them hereafter in the interests of France.

But above all, it was Napoleon’s desire to ‘act … in concert with England’ and establish an Anglo-French alliance that led him to mobilize the fleet. ‘Persigny is right,’ he told his ministers on 19 March. ‘If we send our fleet to Salamis, England will be forced to do as much, and the union of the two fleets will lead to the union of the two nations against Russia.’ According to Persigny, the Emperor reasoned that the dispatch of the fleet would appeal to British Russophobia, win support from the bourgeois press and force the hand of the more cautious Aberdeen government to join France.¹⁷

In fact, the British fleet remained at Malta while the French sailed from Toulon on 22 March. The British were furious with the French for escalating the crisis, and urged them not to advance beyond Naples, giving Stratford time to get to Constantinople and arrange a settlement, before moving their gunboats into the Aegean Sea. Stratford arrived in the Turkish capital on 5 April. He found the Turks already in a mood to stand up to Menshikov – nationalist and religious emotions had become highly charged – although there were divisions about how far they should go and how long they should wait for the military backing of the West. These arguments became entangled in the long-standing personal rivalry between the Grand Vizier Mehmet Ali and Reshid, Stratford’s old ally, who was then out of power. Hearing that Mehmet Ali was about to make a compromise with Menshikov, Stratford urged him to stand firm against the Russians, assuring him (on his own authority) that the British fleet would back him if need be. The key thing, he advised, was to separate the conflict in the Holy Lands (where Russia had a legitimate claim for the restoration of its treaty rights) and the broader demands of the draft sened that had to be rejected to maintain Turkish sovereignty. It was vital for the Sultan to grant religious rights by direct sovereign authority rather than by any mechanism dictated by Russia. In Stratford’s view, the Tsar’s real intention was to use his protection of the Greek Church as a Trojan horse for the penetration and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.¹⁸