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By 1801, following a series of resounding victories, Bonaparte was able to force peace on all the powers of the European continent. France’s security was guaranteed by expanded frontiers and the creation of a series of theoretically autonomous republics in northern Italy, Switzerland and Holland which were in fact French provinces. In March 1802 Bonaparte even concluded the Peace of Amiens with Britain. But this was not likely to last.

To Britain, France’s hegemony in Europe was intolerable. To France, Britain’s superiority at sea was a constant threat. French designs on Malta, Egypt and India were a hazy but nevertheless haunting nightmare to Britain, while Britain’s ability to use allies on the European mainland to make war by proxy was a source of continuing anxiety to France. Hostilities between the two resumed in May 1803.

During the following year Bonaparte himself revived opposition to his rule throughout Europe. In March 1804 he ordered the young Bourbon Duc d’Enghien to be seized at Ettenheim in the state of Baden just outside the borders of France and brought to Paris. He was convinced that the Duke was involved in a conspiracy to overthrow him and restore the monarchy, and had him executed after a summary judgement. This violation of every accepted law and principle horrified Europe. It confirmed the opinion of those who saw Bonaparte as the devil incarnate, and reinforced the notion of a fight to the death between the sanctified order as embodied in the
ancien régime
and the forces of evil in the form of revolutionary France.

France was in fact no longer exporting revolution. She had become little more than a vehicle for the ambitions of Bonaparte, who a
couple of months later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French under the name of Napoleon I. What exactly these ambitions consisted of has perplexed and divided historians over two centuries, for Napoleon was never consistent in anything. His utterances can at best be taken to illustrate some of his thoughts and feelings, while his actions were often erratic and contradictory. He was intelligent and pragmatic, yet he allowed himself to indulge the most far-fetched fantasies; he was the ultimate opportunist, yet he could get caught up in his own dogma; he was a great cynic, yet he pursued romantic dreams. There was no grand idea or master project.

Napoleon was in large measure driven by nothing more complicated than the lust for power and domination over others. Attendant on this was an often childish set of reactions at being thwarted in any way. Having no sense of justice and no respect for the wishes of others, he took any objection to his actions as gratuitous rebellion, and responded with disproportionate vehemence. Instead of ignoring a minor setback or turning an obstacle, he would unleash bluster and force, which often involved him in unnecessarily costly head-on collisions.

He was also driven by a curious sense of destiny, a self-invented notion of a kind often affected by young men brought up on Romantic literature (his favourite reading had been the poems of Ossian and
The Sorrows of Young Werther)
, which he came to believe in himself. ‘Is there a man blind enough not to see,’ he had declared during his Egyptian campaign in 1798, ‘that destiny directs all my operations?’
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Napoleon was also a great admirer of the plays of Corneille, and there is reason to believe he saw himself as acting out some great tragedy in their mould.

This sense of living out a destiny was to lead him repeatedly into acting against his better judgement in pursuit of nebulous dreams. His triumphs in Italy, followed by his spectacular victories at Austerlitz and Jena, only confirmed him in this fantasy, which communicated itself to his troops. ‘The intoxication of our joyful and proud exaltation was at its height,’ wrote one young officer after
Napoleon’s triumph over Prussia. ‘One of our army corps proclaimed itself "the Tenth Legion of the New Caesar"!, another demanded that Napoleon should henceforth be known as "The Emperor of the West!"’
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But Napoleon was also the ruler of France. As such, he was inevitably driven by the same political, cultural and psychological motors which had dictated the policies of French rulers of the past such as François I and Louis XIV, who had striven for French hegemony over Europe in order to achieve lasting security.

France had always sought to impose a balance in central Europe that would prevent a major mobilisation of German forces against her, and she had achieved this by the Treaty of Westphalia back in 1648, in which she and Austria, jointly with a number of other powers, had put in place a whole series of checks and balances. This system had been undone in the second half of the eighteenth century by the rise of Prussian power and the emergence of Russia as a player in European affairs, manifested most critically in huge shifts of power in Germany, the partition and disappearance of Poland, and the race for control of the Balkans. In view of this, it was quite natural that Napoleon should seek to reassert French interests, and in doing so he was pursuing a traditional vision of a ‘French’ Europe as much as his own personal ambition. It was a vision that appeared to have history on its side.

In the eighteenth century France had become the cynosure of Europe in terms of culture and political thought. Her paramountcy in these spheres was consolidated by the revolution, whose fundamental message and ideas were admired and accepted by élites all over the Continent. The French political and military classes saw themselves as ‘
la Grande Nation
’, the first nation in Europe to have emancipated itself, and considered themselves to be armed with a mission to carry the benefits of what they had achieved to other peoples. This was the age of neo-Classicism, and they began to see France as the next Rome, the fount from which this new ideological civilisation radiated, the capital of the modern world.

Napoleon was not immune to the enthusiasms of his age. As befitted the most powerful individual since the days of the Caesars, he issued decrees ordering the cleaning of the Tiber and the Forum Romanum, and the preservation of its monuments. Shortly after the birth of the King of Rome, he set in motion plans for an imperial palace on the Capitol. But he also intended to build one for the Pope in Paris, arguing that this was where he should move, just as St Peter had moved to Rome from the Holy Land.
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As early as the mid-1790s, the French revolutionary armies began to bring home to Paris not only valuables and works of art, but also libraries, scientific instruments and entire archives. This epic bout of looting was not the product of mere greed. The idea was that everything most useful to the development of civilisation should be concentrated at the heart of the Empire, and not allowed to benefit only a few in outlying provinces. ‘The French Empire shall become the metropolis of all other sovereignties,’ Napoleon once said to a friend. ‘I want to force every king in Europe to build a large palace for his use in Paris. When an Emperor of the French is crowned, these kings shall come to Paris, and they shall adorn that imposing ceremony with their presence and salute it with their homage.’ It was not so much a question of France ‘
über alles
’. ‘European society needs a regeneration,’ Napoleon asserted in conversation in 1805. ‘There must be a superior power which dominates all the other powers, with enough authority to force them to live in harmony with one another – and France is the best placed for that purpose.’ He was, like many a tyrant, utopian in his ambitions. ‘We must have a European legal system, a European appeal court, a common currency, the same weights and measures, the same laws,’ Napoleon once said to Joseph Fouché. ‘I must make of all the peoples of Europe one people, and of Paris the capital of the world.’
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France’s claim to the mantle of Imperial Rome seemed to gain validation when, in 1810, Napoleon married Marie-Louise, daughter of the last Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. His father-in-law, now Emperor of Austria under the name of Francis I, appeared to
acquiesce in this transference of power. When Napoleon produced an heir, Francis ceded to the child the title of King of Rome, which had traditionally been that of the son of the Holy Roman Emperor.

France’s position on the Continent was by then one of unprecedented power; her political culture and the new system were imposed over vast areas of Europe. But to the average Frenchman this was of less interest than the benefits the past decade had brought him at home. All the most positive gains of the revolution had been salvaged, but order, prosperity and stability had been guaranteed, and a general amnesia if not amnesty had allowed those divided by the struggles of the revolution to put the more unpleasant aspects of the past behind them. Whether this new order would survive depended not only on Napoleon’s ability to defend it, but on his ability to guarantee its continuance by cancelling out the possibility of a Bourbon restoration. A return of the Bourbons would mean not only a return to the
ancien régime
; it would also raise the prospect of much score-settling.

In this respect, the birth of the King of Rome was crucial. Most of Napoleon’s subjects believed that their ruler, who had recently turned forty, would henceforth be inclined to spend more time with his family than with his armies, that Napoleon the Great would in time be succeeded by Napoleon II, and that the rest of Europe would accept that the Bourbons had been consigned to history. That was why they rejoiced. ‘People sincerely anticipated a period of profound peace; the idea of war and occupations of that sort were no longer entertained as being realistic,’ wrote Napoleon’s chief of police, General Savary, adding that the child appeared to all as the guarantor of political stability.
¹⁰

Napoleon himself rejoiced for much the same reasons. ‘Now begins the finest epoch of my reign,’ he exclaimed. He had always been keenly aware that a man who seizes the throne can never rest easy on it, and that he could only achieve security of tenure by means of the dynastic principle. ‘With the birth of my son, there is a future in my destiny,’ he told one of his diplomatic agents. ‘I am now founding
a legitimacy. Empires are created by the sword and are conserved by heredity.’
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But he was not yet ready to lay down his arms. He had managed to destroy the unity of purpose which had fed the coalitions against France for so long. Austria, Russia and Prussia were now as ready to fight each other as to fight France, the original repugnance to treat with ‘the Corsican upstart’ had largely evaporated, his imperial title was recognised across the Continent, and the Bourbon pretender Louis XVIII was beginning to look like an anachronism. Yet Napoleon was keenly aware of his continuing vulnerability, for nothing had been finally settled.

Over the past decade he had turned France into an empire which included the whole of Belgium, Holland and the North Sea coast up to Hamburg, the Rhineland, the whole of Switzerland, Piedmont, Liguria, Tuscany, the Papal States, Illyria and Catalonia, and ruled directly over some forty-five million people. The French Empire was surrounded by a number of dependent states – the Kingdom of Westphalia, the kingdoms of Saxony, Bavaria, Württemberg and other states grouped in the Confederation of the Rhine, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the kingdoms of Italy, Naples and Spain, ruled by Napoleon’s siblings, relatives or devoted allies. The only part of his vast imperium where there was open unrest was in Spain, where armed opposition to his brother King Joseph was being supported by a British army. This was not in itself a major problem, and could be dealt with by a concerted operation under his own direction.

The real problem facing Napoleon was how to achieve some kind of finality and to fit all his conquests into a system that would guarantee his and his successors’ position. While others regarded him as a megalomaniac bent on conquering all, he saw his wars as defensive, aimed at guaranteeing France’s security as well as his own. ‘To leave my throne to my heirs,’ he told one of his chamberlains, ‘I will have had to be master of all the capitals of Europe!’ In the written instructions to one of his diplomatic envoys, he explained that although France

was at the height of her power, ‘if she cannot fix the political constitution of Europe now, she may tomorrow lose all the advantages of her position and fail in her enterprises’.
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But a final settlement that would secure his gains for the future eluded him, partly because he kept expanding its scope, meaning it to be comprehensive, and partly because war was his element; he could not see his way to achieving his ends by other means. That was why all his treaties to date were no more than truces, and all his arrangements remained fluid pending the elusive ultimate peace settlement. The Empire was a work in progress.

At the time of the birth of his son, Napoleon was forty-two years old. He was five feet two inches tall, which was small even at the time, but he had a well-proportioned figure. ‘His complexion had never had much colour; his cheeks were of a matt white, giving him a full, pale face, but not of the kind of pallor that denotes a sick person,’ wrote his secretary Baron Fain. ‘His brown hair was cut short all over and lay flat over his head. His head was round, his forehead was large and high; his eyes were grey-blue, with a gentle look in them. He had a handsome nose, a graceful mouth and beautiful teeth.’ But he had recently begun to put on weight. His body filled out, his neck, which was short anyway, thickened, and he developed a paunch. Those close to him noted that his eyes grew less piercing. He spoke more slowly and took longer to make decisions. His phenomenal powers of concentration diminished, and those used to his fits of fury were surprised to find him growing more pensive and hesitant. Something was eating away at the vital force of this Promethean creature. It has been convincingly suggested that his pituitary gland failed as he reached the age of forty, causing dystrophia adiposogenitalis, a condition that leads to weight gain and loss of energy.
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