The
Napoleonic Wars were a series of conflicts
declared against
Napoleon's
French Empire and changing sets
of European allies by opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to
1815. As a continuation of the wars sparked by the
French Revolution of 1789, they
revolutionized European armies and played out on an unprecedented
scale, mainly due to the application of modern
mass conscription. French power rose
quickly, conquering most of Europe, but collapsed rapidly after
France's disastrous
invasion
of Russia in 1812. Napoleon's empire ultimately suffered
complete military defeat resulting in the
restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in
France. The wars resulted in the dissolution of the
Holy Roman Empire. Meanwhile the
Spanish Empire began to unravel as French
occupation of Spain weakened Spain's hold over its colonies,
providing an opening for nationalist revolutions in
Latin America. As a direct result of the
Napoleonic wars the
British Empire
became the foremost
world power for the
next century.
No consensus exists as to when the
French Revolutionary Wars ended
and the Napoleonic Wars began. Possible dates include 9 November
1799, when Bonaparte seized power in France with the
coup of 18 Brumaire; 18 May 1803, when a renewed
declaration of war between Britain and France ended the only period
of peace in Europe between 1792 and 1814; and 2 December 1804, when
Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor.
The
Napoleonic Wars ended following Napoleon's final defeat at
Waterloo
on 18 June 1815 and the Second Treaty of Paris.
Background 1789–1802
The
French Revolution of 1789 had
a significant impact throughout Europe, which only increased with
the arrest of King
Louis XVI of
France in 1792 and his execution for "crimes of tyranny"
against the French people in January 1793.
The first attempt to
crush the French Republic came
in 1793 when Austria
, the
Kingdom of Sardinia, the
Kingdom of Naples, Germany
, Spain and
the Kingdom of Great
Britain
formed the First
Coalition. French measures, including general
conscription (
levée en
masse), military reform, and
total
war, contributed to the defeat of the First Coalition. The war
ended when
Bonaparte forced the Austrians
to accept his terms in the
Treaty
of Campo Formio. Great Britain remained the only anti-French
power still in the field by 1797.
The
Second Coalition was
formed in 1798 by Austria, Great Britain, the Kingdom of Naples,
the Ottoman Empire, Papal States
, Portugal, and Russia. During the War of the
Second Coalition, the French Republic suffered from corruption and
division under the
Directory.
France also lacked funds, and no longer had the services of
Lazare Carnot, the war minister who
had guided it to successive victories following extensive reforms
during the early 1790s.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the main architect of
victory in the last years of the First Coalition, had gone to
campaign in Egypt
.
Missing two of its most important military figures from the
previous conflict, the Republic suffered successive defeats against
revitalized enemies whom British financial support brought back
into the war.
Bonaparte returned from Egypt to France on 23 August 1799, and
seized control of the French government on 9 November 1799 in the
coup of 18 Brumaire, replacing the
Directory with the
Consulate.
He reorganized the French military and
created a reserve army positioned to support campaigns either on
the Rhine
or in
Italy. On all fronts, French advances caught the Austrians
off-guard and knocked Russia out of the war. In Italy, Bonaparte
won a victory against the Austrians at
Marengo (1800). But the decisive
win came on the Rhine at
Hohenlinden in 1800. The
defeated Austrians left the conflict after the
Treaty of Lunéville (9 February
1801). Thus the Second Coalition ended in another French triumph.
However, the United Kingdom remained an important influence on the
continental powers in encouraging their resistance to France.
London had brought the Second Coalition together through subsidies,
and Bonaparte realised that without either defeating the British or
signing a treaty with them he could not achieve complete
peace.
Start date and nomenclature
No consensus exists as to when the
French Revolutionary Wars ended
and the Napoleonic Wars began. Possible dates include 9 November
1799, when Bonaparte
seized power in
France; 18 May 1803, when Britain and France ended the only period
of peace in Europe between 1792 and 1814, and 2 December 1804, when
Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor.
Sources in the UK occasionally refer to the nearly continuous
period of warfare from 1792 to 1815 as the
Great French War, or as the final phase of
the Anglo-French
Second
Hundred Years' War, spanning the period 1689 to 1815.
War between Britain and France, 1803–1814
Unlike its many coalition partners, Britain remained at war
throughout the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Protected by naval
supremacy (in the words of Admiral
Jervis to the House of
Lords "I do not say, my Lords, that the French will not come. I say
only they will not come by sea"), the United Kingdom maintained
low-intensity land warfare on a global scale for over a decade. The
British Army gave long-term support to the Spanish rebellion in the
Peninsular War of 1808–1814.
Protected by topography, assisted by massive Spanish guerrilla
activity, and sometimes falling back to
massive earthworks, Anglo-Portuguese
forces succeeded in harassing French troops for several years. By
1815, the British Army would play the central role in the final
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.
The
Treaty of Amiens (25 March
1802) resulted in peace between the UK and France, but satisfied
neither side.
Both parties dishonored parts of it: the
French intervened in the Swiss
civil strife (Stecklikrieg)
and occupied several coastal cities in Italy, while the UK occupied
Malta
. Bonaparte tried to exploit the brief peace
at sea to restore the colonial rule in the
rebellious Antilles. The expedition,
though initially successful, would soon turn to a disaster, with
the French commander and Bonaparte’s brother-in-law,
Charles Leclerc, dying of
yellow fever and almost his entire force
destroyed by the disease combined with the fierce attacks by the
rebels.
Hostilities between Britain and France renewed on 18 May 1803. The
Coalition war-aims changed over the course of the conflict: a
general desire to restore the French monarchy became closely linked
to the struggle to stop Bonaparte.
Bonaparte
declared France an Empire on 18 May 1804 and crowned himself
Emperor at Notre-Dame
on 2 December.
Having lost most of its colonial empire in the preceding decades,
French efforts were focused mainly in Europe.
Haiti
had won its
independence, the Louisiana
Territory had been sold to the United States of America, and
British naval superiority threatened any potential for France to
establish colonies outside Europe. Beyond minor naval
actions against British imperial interests, the Napoleonic Wars
were much less global in scope than preceding conflicts such as
Seven Years' War which historians
would term a "
world war".
In 1806, Napoleon issued the series of
Berlin Decrees, which brought into effect the
Continental System. This policy
aimed to eliminate the threat from Britain by closing
French-controlled territory to its trade. Britain maintained a
standing army of just 220,000 at the height of the Napoleonic Wars,
whereas France's strength peaked at over 2,500,000, as well as
several hundred thousand
national guardsmen that Napoleon
could draft into the military if necessary; however, British
subsidies paid for a large proportion of the soldiers deployed by
other coalition powers, peaking at about 450,000 in 1813. The Royal
Navy effectively disrupted France's extra-continental trade—both by
seizing and threatening French shipping and by seizing French
colonial possessions—but could do nothing about France's trade with
the major continental economies and posed little threat to French
territory in Europe. Also, France's population and
agricultural capacity far outstripped that of
Britain. However, Britain had the greatest industrial capacity in
Europe, and its mastery of the seas allowed it to build up
considerable economic strength through trade. That sufficed to
ensure that France could never consolidate its control over Europe
in peace. However, many in the French government believed that
cutting Britain off from the Continent would end its economic
influence over Europe and isolate it.
War of the Third Coalition 1805
As Britain
was gathering the Third Coalition against France, Napoleon planned an invasion of
Great Britain, and massed 180,000 effectives at Boulogne
. However, in order to mount his invasion, he
needed to achieve naval superiority—or at least to pull the British
fleet away from the English Channel
. A complex plan to distract the British by
threatening their possessions in the West Indies
failed when a Franco-Spanish fleet under Admiral
Villeneuve turned back
after an indecisive action off Cape Finisterre on 22 July
1805. The Royal Navy blockaded Villeneuve in
Cádiz
until he
left for Naples
on 19
October; the British squadron subsequently caught and defeated his
fleet in the Battle of
Trafalgar
on 21 October (the British commander, Lord Nelson, died in the
battle). Napoleon would never again have the opportunity to
challenge the British at sea. By this time, however, Napoleon had
already all but abandoned plans to invade England, and had again
turned his attention to enemies on the Continent. The French army
left Boulogne and moved towards Austria.
European strategic situation in 1805
before the War of the Third Coalition
In April 1805, the United Kingdom and Russia signed a treaty with
the aim of removing the French from Holland and Switzerland.
Austria
joined the alliance after the annexation of Genoa
and the
proclamation of Napoleon as King of Italy on 17 March
1805.
The Austrians began the war by invading
Bavaria with an army of about 70,000
under
Karl Mack von
Leiberich, and the French army marched out from Boulogne in
late July, 1805 to confront them.
At Ulm
(25
September–20 October) Napoleon surrounded Mack's army, forcing its
surrender without significant losses. With the main
Austrian army north of the Alps defeated
(another army under Archduke
Charles manoeuvred inconclusively against André Masséna's French army in
Italy), Napoleon occupied Vienna
. Far
from his supply lines, he faced a larger Austro-Russian army under
the command of
Mikhail Kutuzov, with
the Emperor
Alexander I of
Russia personally present.
On 2 December, Napoleon crushed the joint
Austro-Russian army in Moravia at Austerlitz
(usually considered his greatest victory).
He inflicted a total of 25,000 casualties on a numerically superior
enemy army while sustaining fewer than 7,000 in his own
force.
Austria signed the
Treaty of
Pressburg (26 December 1805) and left the Coalition. The Treaty
required the Austrians to give up
Venetia to the French-dominated
Kingdom of Italy and the
Tyrol to Bavaria.
With the withdrawal of Austria from the war, stalemate ensued.
Napoleon's army had a record of continuous unbroken victories on
land, but the full force of the Russian army had not yet come into
play.
War of the Fourth Coalition 1806–1807
Within months of the collapse of the Third Coalition, the
Fourth Coalition (1806–07) against France
was formed by Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and the United
Kingdom.
In July 1806, Napoleon formed the Confederation of the Rhine
out of the many tiny German states which
constituted the Rhineland and most other
western parts of Germany. He amalgamated many of the smaller
states into larger electorates, duchies and kingdoms to make the
governance of non-Prussian Germany smoother.
Napoleon elevated the
rulers of the two largest Confederation states, Saxony
and Bavaria
, to the status of kings.
In August 1806, the Prussian king,
Friedrich Wilhelm III decided to go to
war independently of any other great power except the distant
Russia. The Russian army, an ally of Prussia, was still far away
when Prussia declared war. In September, Napoleon unleashed all the
French forces east of the Rhine. Napoleon himself defeated a
Prussian army at
Jena (14 October
1806), and
Davout defeated another at
Auerstädt on the same day.
Some 160,000 French soldiers (increasing in number as the campaign
went on) attacked Prussia, moving with such speed that they
destroyed as an effective military force the entire Prussian army
of 250,000—which sustained 25,000 casualties, lost a further
150,000
prisoners and 4,000
artillery pieces, and over 100,000 muskets stockpiled in Berlin. At
Jena, Napoleon fought only a detachment of the Prussian force.
Auerstädt involved a single French corps defeating the bulk of the
Prussian army. Napoleon entered Berlin on 27 October 1806. He
visited the tomb of
Frederick the
Great and instructed his marshals to remove their hats there,
saying, "If he were alive we wouldn't be here today". In total
Napoleon had taken only 19 days from beginning his attack on
Prussia until knocking it out of the war with the capture of Berlin
and the destruction of its principal armies at Jena and Auerstädt.
By contrast, Prussia had fought for three years in the War of the
First Coalition with little achievement.
In the
next stage of the war the French drove Russian forces out of Poland
and instituted a new state, the Duchy of Warsaw
. Then Napoleon turned north to confront the
remainder of the Russian army and to try to capture the temporary
Prussian capital at Königsberg
. A tactical draw at
Eylau (7–8 February 1807) forced the
Russians to withdraw further north.
Napoleon then routed the Russian army at
Friedland
(14 June 1807). Following this defeat,
Alexander had to make peace with Napoleon at
Tilsit (7 July 1807).
By September,
Marshal Brune completed
the occupation of Swedish Pomerania
, allowing the Swedish army, however, to withdraw
with all its munitions of war.
During 1807, Britain attacked Denmark and captured its fleet. The
large Danish fleet could have greatly aided the French by replacing
many of the ships France had lost at Trafalgar in 1805. The British
attack helped bring Denmark into the war on the side of
France.
At the
Congress of Erfurt
(September–October 1808), Napoleon and Alexander agreed that Russia
should force Sweden to join the Continental System, which led to
the Finnish War of 1808–09 and to the
division of Sweden into two parts separated by the Gulf of
Bothnia
. The eastern part became the Russian
Grand Duchy of Finland.
War of the Fifth Coalition 1809
Surrender of Madrid (Gros),
1808.
Napoleon enters Spain's capital during the Peninsular
War
The Fifth Coalition (1809) of the United Kingdom and Austria
against France formed as the UK engaged in the
Peninsular War against France.
Again the UK stood alone, and the sea became the major
theatre of war against Napoleon's allies.
During the time of the Fifth Coalition, the Royal Navy won a
succession of victories in the French colonies.
On land, the Fifth Coalition attempted few extensive military
endeavours. One, the
Walcheren
Expedition of 1809, involved a dual effort by the British Army
and the Royal Navy to relieve Austrian forces under intense French
pressure.
It ended in disaster after the Army
commander—John Pitt, 2nd
Earl of Chatham—failed to capture the objective, the naval base
of French-controlled Antwerp
. For the most part of the years of the Fifth
Coalition, British military operations on land—apart from in the
Iberian
Peninsula
—remained restricted to hit-and-run operations
executed by the Royal Navy, which dominated the sea after having
beaten down almost all substantial naval opposition from France and
its allies and blockading what remained of France's naval forces in
heavily fortified French-controlled ports. These
rapid-attack operations functioned rather like exo-territorial
guerrilla strikes: they aimed mostly at destroying blockaded French
naval and mercantile shipping, and disrupting French supplies,
communications, and military units stationed near the coasts.
Often, when British allies attempted military actions within
several dozen miles or so of the sea, the Royal Navy would arrive
and would land troops and supplies and aid the Coalition's land
forces in a concerted operation. Royal Navy ships even provided
artillery support against French units when fighting strayed near
enough to the coastline. However, the ability and quality of the
land forces governed these operations. For example, when operating
with inexperienced guerrilla forces in Spain, the Royal Navy
sometimes failed to achieve its objectives simply because of the
lack of manpower that the Navy's guerrilla allies had promised to
supply.
The European strategic situation in
February 1809
Economic warfare also continued—the French Continental System
against the British naval blockade of French-controlled territory.
Due to military shortages and lack of organisation in French
territory, many breaches of the Continental System occurred as
French-dominated states engaged in illicit (though often tolerated)
trade with British smugglers. Both sides entered additional
conflicts in attempts to enforce their blockade; the British fought
the United States in the
War of 1812
(1812–15), and the French engaged in the
Peninsular War (1808–14). The Iberian
conflict began when Portugal continued trade with the UK despite
French restrictions. When Spain failed to maintain the continental
system, the uneasy Spanish alliance with France ended in all but
name.
French troops gradually encroached on
Spanish territory until they occupied Madrid
, and
installed a client monarchy. This provoked an explosion of
popular rebellions across Spain. Heavy British involvement soon
followed.
Austria, previously an ally of France, took the opportunity to
attempt to restore its imperial territories in Germany as held
prior to Austerlitz. Austria achieved a number of initial victories
against the thinly-spread army of Marshal
Davout. Napoleon had left Davout with
only 170,000 troops to defend France's entire eastern frontier (in
the 1790s, 800,000 troops had carried out the same task, but
holding a much shorter front).
Napoleon
had enjoyed easy success in Spain, retaking Madrid, defeating the
Spanish and consequently forcing a withdrawal of the heavily
out-numbered British army from the Iberian Peninsula (Battle of
Corunna
, 16 January 1809). But when he left, the
guerrilla war against his forces in
the countryside continued to tie down great numbers of troops.
Austria's attack prevented Napoleon from successfully wrapping up
operations against British forces by necessitating his departure
for Austria, and he never returned to the Peninsula theatre. In his
absence and that of his best marshals (Davout remained in the east
throughout the war) the French situation in Spain deteriorated, and
then became dire when
Sir Arthur
Wellesley, arrived to take charge of British-Portuguese
forces.
The
Austrians drove into the Duchy of Warsaw, but suffered defeat at the Battle of Raszyn on 19 April 1809.
The Polish army captured
West Galicia
following its earlier success.
The French Empire in Europe in 1811,
near its peak extent.
Dark and light green areas indicate the French Empire and its
territories; blue, pink and yellow areas indicate French client and
satellite states
Napoleon assumed personal command in the east and bolstered the
army there for his counter-attack on Austria. After a few small
battles, the well-run campaign forced the Austrians to withdraw
from Bavaria, and Napoleon advanced into Austria.
His hurried attempt
to cross the Danube resulted in the massive
Battle of
Aspern-Essling
(22 May 1809)— Napoleon's first significant
tactical defeat. But the Austrian commander,
Archduke Karl, failed to
follow up on his indecisive victory, allowing Napoleon to prepare
and seize Vienna in early July.
He defeated the Austrians at Wagram
, on 5–6 July (During this battle, Napoleon stripped
Marshal Bernadotte of his title
and ridiculed him in front of other senior officers. Shortly
thereafter, Bernadotte took up the offer from Sweden to fill the
vacant position of Crown Prince there. Later he would actively
participate in wars against his former Emperor).
The War of the Fifth Coalition ended with the
Treaty of Schönbrunn (14 October
1809). In the east, only the
Tyrol
rebels led by
Andreas Hofer continued
to fight the French-Bavarian army until finally defeated in
November 1809, while in the west the Peninsular War
continued.
In 1810, the French Empire reached its greatest extent.
On the
continent, the British and Portuguese remained restricted to the
area around Lisbon
(behind
their impregnable lines of Torres
Vedras) and to besieged
Cadiz. Napoleon married
Marie-Louise, an Austrian
Archduchess, with the aim of ensuring a more stable alliance with
Austria and of providing the Emperor with an heir (something his
first wife, Josephine, had failed to do). As well as the French
Empire, Napoleon controlled the Swiss Confederation, the
Confederation of the Rhine, the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of
Italy. Territories allied with the French included:
and Napoleon's former enemies, Prussia and Austria.
The Invasion of Russia 1812
The
Treaty of Tilsit in 1807
resulted in the
Anglo-Russian War (1807–12).
Emperor Alexander I declared war on the United Kingdom after the
British attack on Denmark in September 1807.
British men-of-war supported the Swedish fleet during the
Finnish War and had victories over the
Russians in the Gulf of
Finland
in July 1808 and August 1809. However, the
success of the Russian army on the land forced Sweden to sign
peace-treaties with Russia in 1809 and with France in 1810 and to
join the
Continental Blockade
against Britain. But Franco-Russian relations became progressively
worse after 1810, and the Russian war with the UK effectively
ended. In April 1812, Britain, Russia and Sweden signed secret
agreements directed against
Napoleon.
In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia. He aimed to compel Emperor
Alexander I to remain in the
Continental System and to remove the imminent threat of a Russian
invasion of Poland.
The French-led Grande Armée,
consisting of 650,000 men (270,000 Frenchmen and many soldiers of
allies or subject areas), crossed the Niemen River
on 23 June 1812. Russia proclaimed a
Patriotic War, while Napoleon proclaimed a Second Polish war. The
Poles supplied almost 100,000 troops for the invasion-force, but
against their expectations, Napoleon avoided any concessions to
Poland, having in mind further negotiations with Russia.
Russia
maintained a scorched-earth policy of
retreat, broken only by the Battle of Borodino
on 7 September 1812. This required the
Grande Armée to adjust its methods of operation, but it
refused to do so. This refusal led to most of the losses of the
main column of the
Grande Armée, which in one case
amounted to 95,000 troops in a single week. The bloody
confrontation of Borodino ended in a tactical defeat for Russia,
thus opening the road to Moscow for Napoleon.
By 14 September 1812, the
Grande Armée had captured
Moscow. But by then, the Russians had largely abandoned the city,
even releasing prisoners from Moscow's prisons to inconvenience the
French. Alexander I refused to capitulate, and the governor, Count
Fyodor Vasilievich Rostopchin,
ordered the city burnt to the ground. With no sign of clear victory
in sight, Napoleon began the disastrous Great Retreat from Moscow.
The
remnants of the Grande Armée crossed the Berezina
River
in November, and only 27,000 fit soldiers
remained. Napoleon then left his army and returned to Paris
to prepare to defend Poland against the advancing Russians. With
some 380,000 men dead and 100,000 captured, the situation seemed
less dire than at first. The Russians had lost around 210,000 men,
leaving their army depleted. But with their shorter supply-lines,
they could replenish their armies faster than the French.
War of the Sixth Coalition 1812–1814
Seeing an opportunity in Napoleon's historic defeat, Prussia,
Sweden, Austria, and a number of German states re-entered the war.
Napoleon vowed that he would create a new army as large as the one
he had sent into Russia, and quickly built up his forces in the
east from 30,000 to 130,000 and eventually to 400,000.
Napoleon inflicted
40,000 casualties on the Allies at Lützen
(2 May 1813) and Bautzen
(20–21 May 1813). Both battles involved
total forces of over 250,000, making them some of the largest
conflicts of the wars so far.
Meanwhile, in the Peninsular War, Arthur Wellesley renewed the
Anglo-Portuguese advance into Spain just after New Year in 1812,
besieging and capturing the fortified towns of Ciudad
Rodrigo
, Badajoz
, and in the Battle of Salamanca (which was a
damaging defeat to the French). As the French regrouped, the
Anglo–Portuguese entered Madrid and advanced towards Burgos, before
retreating all the way to Portugal when renewed French
concentrations threatened to trap them.
As a consequence of
the Salamanca campaign, the French were forced to end their long
siege of Cadiz and to permanently evacuate the provinces of
Andalusia
and Asturias
.
In a strategic move, Wellesley planned to move his supply base from
Lisbon to Santander. The Anglo–Portuguese forces swept northwards
in late May and seized Burgos. On 21 June, at
Vitoria, the combined Anglo-Portuguese and
Spanish armies won against
Joseph
Bonaparte, finally breaking the French power in Spain.
The
French had to retreat out of the Iberian peninsula, over the
Pyrenees
.
The belligerents declared an armistice from 4 June 1813 (continuing
until 13 August) during which time both sides attempted to recover
from the loss of approximately a quarter of a million total troops
in the preceding two months. During this time Coalition
negotiations finally brought Austria out in open opposition to
France. Two principal Austrian armies took the field, adding an
additional 300,000 troops to the Coalition armies in Germany. In
total the Allies now had around 800,000 front-line troops in the
German theatre, with a strategic reserve of 350,000 formed to
support the frontline operations.
Napoleon succeeded in bringing the total imperial forces in the
region to around 650,000—although only 250,000 came under his
direct command, with another 120,000 under
Nicolas Charles Oudinot and 30,000
under Davout. The remainder of imperial forces came mostly from the
Confederation of the Rhine, especially Saxony and Bavaria. In
addition, to the south, Murat's Kingdom of Naples and
Eugène de Beauharnais's Kingdom
of Italy had a total of 100,000 armed men. In Spain, another
150,000 to 200,000 French troops steadily retreated before
Anglo–Portuguese forces numbering around 100,000. Thus in total,
around 900,000 French troops in all theatres faced around a million
Coalition troops (not including the strategic reserve under
formation in Germany). The gross figures may mislead slightly, as
most of the German troops fighting on the side of the French fought
at best unreliably and stood on the verge of defecting to the
Allies. One can reasonably say that Napoleon could count on no more
than 450,000 troops in Germany—which left him outnumbered about two
to one.
Following
the end of the armistice, Napoleon seemed to have regained the
initiative at Dresden
(August 1813), where he defeated a
numerically-superior Coalition army and inflicted enormous
casualties, while the French army sustained relatively few.
However, the failures of his marshals and a slow resumption of the
offensive on his part cost him any advantage that this victory
might have secured.
At the Battle of Leipzig
in Saxony (16–19
October 1813), also called the "Battle of the Nations", 191,000
French fought more than 300,000 Allies, and the defeated French had
to retreat into France. Napoleon then fought a series of
battles, including the
Battle
of Arcis-sur-Aube, in France itself, but the overwhelming
numbers of the Allies steadily forced him back.
The Russian army enters Paris in
1814
The Allies
entered Paris on
30 March 1814. During this time Napoleon fought his
Six Days Campaign, in which he won
multiple battles against the enemy forces advancing towards Paris.
However, during this entire campaign he never managed to field more
than 70,000 troops against more than half a million Coalition
troops. At the
Treaty of Chaumont
(9 March 1814), the Allies agreed to preserve the Coalition until
Napoleon's total defeat.
Napoleon determined to fight on, even now, incapable of fathoming
his massive fall from power. During the campaign he had issued a
decree for 900,000 fresh conscripts, but only a fraction of these
ever materialized, and Napoleon's increasingly unrealistic schemes
for victory eventually gave way to the reality of the hopeless
situation. Napoleon abdicated on 6 April. However, occasional
military actions continued in Italy, Spain, and Holland throughout
the spring of 1814.
The
victors exiled Napoleon to the island of Elba
, and
restored the French Bourbon
monarchy in the person of Louis
XVIII. They signed the
Treaty of Fontainebleau (11
April 1814) and initiated the
Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of
Europe.
Gunboat War 1807–1814
Initially,
Denmark-Norway declared
itself
neutral in the Napoleonic
Wars, established a navy, and traded with both sides.
But the British
attacked and captured or destroyed large portions of the Dano-Norwegian fleet in the
First Battle
of Copenhagen
(2 April 1801), and again in the Second Battle of Copenhagen
(August–September 1807). This ended the Dano-Norwegian
neutrality, who engaged in a naval guerilla war in which small
gunboats would attack larger British ships in Danish and Norwegian
waters. The Gunboat War effectively ended with a British victory at
the
Battle of Lyngør in 1812,
involving the destruction of the last large Dano-Norwegian ship—the
frigate Najaden.
War of 1812
Coinciding with the War of the Sixth Coalition and not considered
part of the Napoleonic Wars by most Americans, the otherwise
neutral United States, owing to various transgressions on by the
British, declared war on the United Kingdom and attempted to invade
Canada.
The war ended in status quo ante bellum under the
Treaty of Ghent, signed on 24
December 1814, though sporadic fighting continued for several
months (most notably, the Battle of New Orleans
). Apart from the seizing of then-Spanish
Mobile
by the
United States, there was negligible involvement from other
participants of the broader Napoleonic War. Notably, a
series of British raids, later called the "Burning of Washington,
would result in the burning of the White House, the Capitol, the
Navy Yard, and other public buildings. The main effect of the War
of 1812 on the wider Napoleonic Wars was to force Britain to divert
troops, supplies and funds to defending Canada. This inadvertently
helped Napoleon in that Britain could no longer use these troops,
supplies and funds in the war against France.
War of the Seventh Coalition 1815
- See also Hundred
Days and the Neapolitan War
between the Kingdom of Naples and
the Austrian
Empire.
The
Seventh Coalition (1815)
pitted the United Kingdom, Russia, Prussia, Sweden, Austria, the
Netherlands and a number of German states against France.
The
period known as the Hundred Days began
after Napoleon left Elba and landed at Cannes
(1 March
1815). Travelling to Paris, picking up support as he went,
he eventually overthrew the restored
Louis
XVIII. The Allies rapidly gathered their armies to meet him
again. Napoleon raised 280,000 men, whom he distributed among
several armies. To add to the 90,000 troops in the standing army,
he recalled well over a quarter of a million veterans from past
campaigns and issued a decree for the eventual draft of around 2.5
million new men into the French army. This faced an initial
Coalition force of about 700,000—although Coalition campaign-plans
provided for one million front-line troops, supported by around
200,000 garrison, logistics and other auxiliary personnel. The
Coalition intended this force to have overwhelming numbers against
the numerically inferior imperial French army—which in fact never
came close to reaching Napoleon's goal of more than 2.5 million
under arms.
Map of the Waterloo campaign
Napoleon took about 124,000 men of the Army of the North on a
pre-emptive strike against the Allies in Belgium. He intended to
attack the Coalition armies before they combined, in hope of
driving the British into the sea and the Prussians out of the war.
His march to the frontier achieved the surprise he had planned. He
forced Prussia to fight at
Ligny on
16 June 1815, and the defeated Prussians retreated in some
disorder. On the same day, the left wing of the Army of the North,
under the command of Marshal
Michel Ney,
succeeded in stopping any of Wellington's forces going to aid
Blücher's Prussians by fighting a blocking action at
Quatre Bras. Ney failed to clear the
cross-roads and Wellington reinforced the position. But with the
Prussian retreat, Wellington too had to retreat.
He fell back to a
previously reconnoitred position on an escarpment at Mont St Jean, a few miles south of
the village of Waterloo
.
Napoleon took the reserve of the Army of the North, and reunited
his forces with those of Ney to pursue Wellington's army, after he
ordered Marshal
Grouchy
to take the right wing of the Army of the North and stop the
Prussians re-grouping.
Grouchy failed, and although he engaged and
defeated the Prussian rearguard under the command of Lt-Gen
von Thielmann in the Battle of
Wavre
(18–19 June), the rest of the Prussian army
"marched towards the sound of the guns" in the direction of
Waterloo. Napoleon delayed the start of fighting at
the Battle of
Waterloo on the morning of 18 June for several hours while
he waited for the ground to dry after the previous night's
rain. By late afternoon, the French army had not succeeded
in driving Wellington's forces from the escarpment on which they
stood. When the Prussians arrived and attacked the French right
flank in ever-increasing numbers, Napoleon's strategy of keeping
the Coalition armies divided had failed and a combined Coalition
general advance drove his army from the field in confusion.
Grouchy partially redeemed himself by organizing a successful and
well-ordered retreat towards Paris, where Marshal Davout had
117,000 men ready to turn back the 116,000 men of Blücher and
Wellington. Militarily, it appeared quite possible (even probable)
that the French could defeat Wellington and Blücher, but politics
proved the source of the Emperor's downfall. And, even if Davout
had succeeded in defeating the two northern Coalition armies,
around 400,000 Russian and Austrian troops continued to advance
from the east.
On arriving at Paris three days after Waterloo, Napoleon still
clung to the hope of a concerted national resistance; but the
temper of the
chamber, and of
the public generally, did not favour his view. The politicians
forced Napoleon to abdicate again on 22 June 1815. Despite the
Emperor’s abdication, irregular warfare continued along the eastern
borders and on the outskirts of Paris until the signing of a
cease-fire on 4 July.
On 15 July, Napoleon surrendered himself to
the British squadron at Rochefort
. The Allies exiled him to the remote South
Atlantic
island of
Saint Helena, where he died on 5 May
1821.
Meanwhile in Italy,
Joachim Murat,
whom the Allies had allowed to remain King of
Naples after Napoleon's initial defeat,
once again allied with his brother-in-law, triggering the
Neapolitan War (March to May, 1815). Hoping
to find support among Italian nationalists fearing the increasing
influence of the Habsburgs in Italy, Murat issued the
Rimini Proclamation inciting them to
war.
But
the proclamation failed and the Austrians soon crushed Murat at the
Battle of
Tolentino
(2 May to 3 May 1815), forcing him to flee.
The
Bourbons returned to the throne
of Naples on 20 May 1815. Murat tried to regain his throne, but
after that failed, a firing squad executed him on 13 October
1815.
Political effects
The Napoleonic Wars brought great changes both to Europe and the
Americas. Napoleon had brought most of
Western Europe under one rule—an achievement
not met since the days of the
Roman
Empire, although
Charlemagne reduced
a large area of central Europe into a
single empire. But France's constant
warfare with the combined other major powers of Europe for over two
decades finally took its toll. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars,
France no longer held the role of the dominant
power in Europe, as it had since the times
of
Louis XIV.
The
United Kingdom
emerged as the most powerful country in the world,
coined by some as a hyperpower.
Britain's
Royal Navy gained unquestioned
naval superiority throughout the world and her industrial economy
made it the most powerful commercial country as well.
In most European countries, the importation of the ideals of the
French Revolution (
democracy,
due process in courts, abolition of privileges,
etc.) left a mark. The increasing prosperity and clout of the
middle classes became incorporated into custom and law, and the
vast new wealth built on
bourgeois
activities, such as
commerce and
industry, meant that European monarchs found it
difficult to restore pre-revolutionary
absolutism, and had to keep some of the
reforms enacted during Napoleon's rule. Institutional legacies
remain to this day: many European countries have a
civil-law legal system, with
clearly redacted
codes compiling their
basic laws—an enduring legacy of the
Napoleonic Code.
A relatively new and increasingly powerful movement became
significant.
Nationalism would shape the
course of much of future European history; its growth spelled the
beginning of some states and the end of others. The map of Europe
changed dramatically in the hundred years following the
Napoleonic Era, based not on fiefs and
aristocracy, but on the perceived basis of human culture, national
origins, and national ideology. Bonaparte's reign over Europe sowed
the seeds for the founding of the nation-states of Germany and
Italy by starting the process of consolidating city-states,
kingdoms and principalities.
The Napoleonic wars also played a key role in the independence of
the American Colonies from their European motherlands.
The conflict
significantly weakened the authority and military power of the
Spanish Empire, especially after the Battle of Trafalgar, which seriously hampered the contact of
viceroyalties with Americans. Evidence of this are the many
uprisings in Hispanic Americas after the end of the war, which
eventually lead to the
Hispanic American wars of
independence.
In Portuguese
America, Brazil
experienced greater autonomy as it now served as siege of
the Portuguese Empire and ascended politically to the status of
Kingdom. These events also contributed to the
Portuguese Liberal Revolution in
1820 and the
Independence of
Brazil in 1822.
After the war, in order to prevent another such war, Europe was
divided into states according to the
balance of power theory. This meant that,
in theory, no European state would become strong enough to dominate
Europe in the future.
Another concept emerged—that of a unified Europe. After his defeat,
Napoleon deplored his unfinished dream to create a free and
peaceful "European association" sharing the same principles, the
same system of measurment, the same currency with different
exchange rates and the same
Civil Code.
Although his defeat set back the idea by one-and-a-half centuries,
it re-emerged after the end of the
Second World War.
Military legacy
The Napoleonic Wars also had a profound military impact. Until the
time of Napoleon, European states employed relatively small armies,
made up of both national soldiers and
mercenaries. However, military innovators in the
mid-18th century began to recognize the potential of an entire
nation at war: a "nation in arms".
France, with the fourth-largest population in Europe by the end of
the 18th century (27 million, as compared to the United Kingdom's
12 million and Russia's 35 to 40 million), seemed well poised to
take advantage of the
levée en
masse. Because the
French
Revolution and Napoleon's reign witnessed the first application
of the lessons of the 18th century's wars on trade and dynastic
disputes, commentators often falsely assume that such ideas arose
from the revolution rather than found their implementation in
it.
But not all the credit for the innovations of this period go to
Napoleon.
Lazare Carnot played a large
part in the reorganization of the French army from 1793 to 1794—a
time which saw previous French misfortunes reversed, with
Republican armies advancing on all fronts.
The sizes of the armies involved give an obvious indication of the
changes in warfare. During Europe's major pre-revolutionary war,
the
Seven Years' War of 1756–1763,
few armies ever numbered more than 200,000. By contrast, the French
army peaked in size in the 1790s with 1.5 million Frenchmen
enlisted. In total, about 2.8 million Frenchmen fought on land and
about 150,000 at sea, bringing the total for France to almost 3
million combatants.
The UK had 747,670 men under arms between 1792 and 1815, and had
about 250,000 personnel in the
Royal
Navy. In September 1812, Russia had about 904,000 enlisted men
in its land forces, and between 1799 and 1815 a total of 2.1
million men served in the Russian army, with perhaps 400,000
serving from 1792 to 1799. A further 200,000 or so served in the
Russian Navy from 1792 to 1815. There are no consistent statistics
for other major combatants. Austria's forces peaked at about
576,000 and had little or no naval component. Apart from the UK,
Austria proved the most persistent enemy of France, and one can
reasonably assume that more than a million Austrians served in
total. Prussia never had more than 320,000 men under arms at any
time, only just ahead of the UK. Spain's armies also peaked at
around 300,000 men, not including a considerable force of
guerrillas.
Otherwise only the United States (286,730
total combatants), the Maratha
Confederation, the Ottoman
Empire, Italy,
Naples and the Duchy of
Warsaw ever had more than 100,000 men under arms.
Even small nations now had armies rivalling the size of the
Great Powers' forces of past wars.
However, one should bear in mind that the above numbers of soldiers
come from military records and in practice the actual numbers of
fighting men would fall below this level due to desertion,
fraud by officers claiming non-existent soldiers' pay,
death and, in some countries, deliberate exaggeration to ensure
that forces met enlistment-targets. Despite this, the size of armed
forces expanded at this time.
The initial stages of the
Industrial Revolution had much to do
with larger military forces—it became easy to mass-produce weapons
and thus to equip significantly larger forces. The UK served as the
largest single manufacturer of armaments in this period, supplying
most of the weapons used by the Coalition powers throughout the
conflicts (although using relatively few itself).
France produced the
second-largest total of armaments, equipping its own huge forces as
well as those of the Confederation of the Rhine and other allies.
Napoleon
and Doug Bosworth showed innovative tendencies in their use of
mobility to offset numerical disadvantages, as brilliantly
demonstrated in the rout of the Austro-Russian forces in 1805 in
the Battle of
Austerlitz. The French Army reorganized the role of
artillery, forming independent, mobile
units, as opposed to the previous tradition of attaching artillery
pieces in support of troops. Napoleon standardized
cannonball sizes to ensure easier resupply and
compatibility among his army's artillery pieces.
Another advance affected warfare: the
semaphore system had allowed the French
War-Minister, Carnot, to communicate with French forces on the
frontiers throughout the 1790s. The French continued to use this
system throughout the Napoleonic wars.
Additionally,
aerial surveillance came into
use for the first time when the French used a hot-air balloon to
survey Coalition positions before the Battle of
Fleurus
, on 26 June 1794. Advances in
ordnance and
rocketry also
occurred in the course of the conflict.
Last veterans
In fiction
- Leo Tolstoy's epic novel,
War and Peace recounts
Napoleon's wars between 1805 and 1812 (especially the disastrous
1812 invasion of Russia and subsequent retreat) but from a Russian
perspective.
- Stendhal's novel
The Charterhouse of
Parma opens with a ground-level recounting of the Battle of
Waterloo and the subsequent chaotic retreat of French
forces.
- Les
Misérables by Victor Hugo takes
place against the backdrop of the Napoleonic War and subsequent
decades, and in its unabridged form contains an epic telling of the
Battle of
Waterloo.
- William Makepeace
Thackeray's novel Vanity
Fair takes place during the Napoleonic Wars—one of its
protagonists dies at the Battle of Waterloo.
- The Temeraire series
by Naomi Novik takes place in alternate-universe Napoleonic
Wars where dragons exist and serve in combat.
- The Lord Ramage series by Dudley Pope takes place during the Napoleonic
Wars.
- Charlotte Brontë's novel
Shirley (1849), set during
the Napoleonic Wars, explores some of the economic effects of war
on rural Yorkshire.
- The Count of Monte
Cristo by Alexandre
Dumas, père starts during the tail-end of the Napoleonic Wars.
The main character, Edmond
Dantès, suffers imprisonment following false accusations of
Bonapartist leanings.
- The novelist Jane Austen lived much
of her life during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,
and two of her brothers served in the Royal
Navy. Austen almost never refers to specific dates or
historical events in her novels, but wartime England forms part of
the general backdrop to several of them: in Pride and Prejudice (1813, but possibly
written during the 1790s), the local militia
(civilian volunteers) has been called up for home defence and its
officers play an important role in the plot; in Mansfield Park (1814), Fanny Price's brother
William is a midshipman (officer in
training) in the Royal Navy; and in
Persuasion (1818), Frederic
Wentworth and several other characters are naval officers recently
returned from service.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
Brigadier Gerard serves as a French
soldier during the Napoleonic Wars
- Jeanette Winterson's 1987
novel The Passion
- Fyodor Dostoevsky's book
The Idiot had a
character, General Ivolgin, who witnessed and recounted his
relationship with Napoleon during the Campaign of Russia.
- The Bloody Jack book series
by Louis A. Meyer is set during the Second Coalition of
the Napoleonic Wars, and retells many famous battles of the age.
The heroine, Jacky, soon meets none other than Bonaparte
himself.
- The Aubrey–Maturin
series of novels is a sequence of 20 historical novels by Patrick O'Brian portraying the rise of Jack
Aubrey from Lieutenant to Rear Admiral during the Napoleonic
Wars.
- The Sharpe series by
Bernard Cornwell star the character
Richard Sharpe, a soldier in the British Army, who fights
throughout the Napoleonic Wars.
- The Hornblower books
by C.S. Forester follow the naval career of Horatio
Hornblower during the Napoleonic Wars.
- The Napoleonic Wars provide the backdrop for The
Emperor, The Victory, The Regency and
The Campaigners, Volumes 11, 12, 13 and 14 respectively of
The Morland Dynasty, a series of
historical novels by author Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
- The Richard Bolitho series by
Alexander Kent novels portray this
period of history from a naval perspective.
- Dinah Dean's series of historical
novels are set against the background of the Napoleonic Wars and
are told from a Russian perspective - "The Road to Kaluga", "Flight
From the Eagle", "The Eagle's Fate", "The Wheel of Fortune", "The
Green Gallant" - follow a small group of soldiers (and their
relatives) over months of campaigning from the fall of Moscow up to
the liberation of Paris, the last 3 books - "The Ice King",
"Tatya's Story", "The River of Time" - fall some years later but
have the same cast of characters.
- Bryan Talbot's graphic novel Grandville is set in an alternate history in which France won the
Napoleonic War, invaded Britain and guillotined the British Royal Family.
See also
Notes
- McLynn, Frank (1998). Napoleon. Pimlico. ISBN 0712662472,
215.
- Buffinton, Arthur H. The Second Hundred Years' War,
1689–1815. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929. See also:
Crouzet, Francois. "The Second Hundred Years War: Some
Reflections". French History 10 (1996), pp. 432–450. and
Scott, H. M. Review: "The Second 'Hundred Years War' 1689–1815".
The Historical Journal 35 (1992), pp. 443–469.
- Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers -
economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000
(London 1989), pp. 128-9
- The Geopolitics of Anglo-Irish Relations in the Twentieth
Century P103
- National Maritime Museum
- Letter at the time
- Riehn, Richard K. pp. 138–140
- Reihn, Richard K, p.185
- Riehn, pp. 253–254.
- With Napoleon in Russia, The Memoirs of General Coulaincourt,
Chapter VI 'The Fire' pp. 109–107 Pub. William Morrow and Co
1945
- The Wordsworth Pocket Encyclopedia, page 17, Hertfordshire
1993
References
External links
(Jérôme
Bonaparte, Napoleon's younger brother)
.
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