Napoleon now wanted peace with Britain, hoping that London would be satisfied with its world empire while he dominated Europe, but it was British policy, starting with William III and continuing into the twenty-first century, to challenge any single power dominating Europe. In May 1804, Pitt, now forty-five, returned to power, after a short hiatus. Power had aged him: he had achieved much, including in 1801 the addition of Ireland to join England and Scotland in the United Kingdom. Now an alcoholic, nicknamed the Three-Bottle Man for his port compulsion, prescribed by his doctor, he was determined to stop Napoleon, funding Austrian, Prussian and Russian armies on land and deploying the Royal Navy at sea. Napoleon decided to invade – ‘it is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only and England will have ceased to exist’ – and ordered his Franco-Spanish fleet to smash the Royal Navy.
When Austria joined the third coalition, Napoleon performed what he called a ‘pirouette’ and dispatched his
Yet just as he won European hegemony by land, his fleet was routed at Trafalgar by Nelson, who was himself killed in the battle. The British victory limited the sustainability of Napoleon’s empire and established British naval dominance for a century. At a dinner in London, Pitt, exhausted and ailing, responded to acclamation as ‘saviour of Europe’ with laconic eloquence: ‘Europe is not to be saved by any single man. England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.’ But when he heard of Austerlitz he realized the momentum lay with Napoleon: ‘Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years.’
The day after Austerlitz, Napoleon met the Habsburg emperor Franz, grandson of Maria Theresa, whose Habsburg wholesomeness amused the peripatetic Corsican. He was ‘so moral’, laughed Napoleon, ‘he never made love to anyone but this wife’. Trained by his ‘second father’ Emperor Joseph, who thought him dutiful but unimaginative, Franz spoke Viennese German, as well as Czech and Italian, cultivating a style of folksy familiarity and giving general audiences (open to the public) twice a week while wearing a plain military coat, Joseph-style. But he was also suspicious and jealous of his brothers, particularly the fine commander Karl, whom he spied on. He was almost capable of wit: when told of a Tyrolese patriot fighting the French, he replied, ‘I know he’s a patriot – but is he a patriot for me?’ He preferred uxorious life with his wives – he married four times – and toffee-making to detailed politics. Horrified by the swaggering conqueror but agonizingly polite, Franz bitterly acquiesced in Napoleon’s reordering of Europe: the Roman empire was replaced by a Rhine Confederation led by Napoleon. Franz had already changed his own title to emperor of Austria.
On 23 January 1806, Pitt died aged forty-six of a burst ulcer (saying either ‘Oh my country’ or ‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s porkpies’), succeeded by his cousin Grenville, the first of a succession of ‘friends of Mister Pitt’ who were all determined to destroy Napoleon.* The emperor designed a blockade to cut off the income of the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ while he remained at war with the Russian tsar, who was joined by Prussia. ‘Your Majesty’, Napoleon warned the Prussian king, ‘will be defeated.’ In October 1806, Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena (where Hegel, seeing him riding past, marvelled at witnessing ‘the World-Spirit ride out of town … an individual on horseback raising his arm over the world and ruling it’), then the Russians at Eylau and Friedland. ‘And what are two thousand men killed in a great battle?’ mused Napoleon.
The victories forced Russia to negotiate. On a raft at Tilsit, the emperor was charmed by the strapping, blue-eyed and fair-haired Tsar Alexander, an inscrutable master of duplicity who had survived the courts of his grandmother Catherine the Great and his tyrannical father Paul the Mad, in whose murder he had colluded. Now the chastened Romanov collaborated with the Corsican Ogre in a carve-up of Europe, gaining Finland among other territories.
