Talleyrand advised Napoleon to take the opportunity to turn Austria into an ally and ‘a sufficient and necessary rampart against the barbarians’, meaning the Russians.8 Napoleon rejected this, believing that while Italy remained French, Austria would always be bellicose and resentful. As a friend of General Thiébault’s said of him that year: ‘He can subdue, but he cannot reconcile.’9
Soon after the battle, Napoleon decreed that the widow of every soldier killed at Austerlitz would receive an annual pension of 200 francs for life, with the widows of generals receiving 6,000 francs. He also undertook to find employment for the sons of every fallen soldier, and allowed them to add ‘Napoleon’ to their baptismal names. He could afford this, and much else besides, thanks to the return of financial confidence that swept the country as government bonds leaped from 45 to 66 per cent of their face value on the news of the victory.10 He nonetheless didn’t forgive the bankers who had shown insufficient confidence in him during the early part of the campaign. State Councillor Joseph Pelet de la Lozère noted ‘the bitterness with which he invariably expressed himself when speaking of the bankers’ and what he called ‘the bankers’ faction’.11
On December 15 Count von Haugwitz was presented with the Franco-Prussian Treaty of Schönbrunn, which promised that Hanover, the ancestral territory of the British monarchs, would go to Prussia in exchange for the much smaller Anspach, Neuchâtel and Cleves. It was such an attractive offer that Haugwitz signed it immediately on his own authority. Prussia therefore ended her commitments to Britain under the Treaty of Potsdam, which she had made only the month before, and Napoleon drove an effective wedge between her and her former ally. Schönbrunn also committed Prussia to close her ports to British shipping. ‘France is all-powerful and Napoleon is the man of the century,’ Haugwitz wrote in the summer of 1806, having forced the resignation of his rival Karl von Hardenberg as Prussia’s foreign minister in March. ‘What have we to fear if united with him?’12 Yet Hardenberg was kept on in secret government service by King Frederick William and his fiercely anti-Napoleonic wife, the beautiful and independent-minded Queen Louise, daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg, not least in order to keep diplomatic channels open to Russia.
Napoleon was irritated by the way that French papers such as the Journal de Paris were writing loosely about the blessings of peace. ‘It is not peace that is important but the conditions of peace,’ he told Joseph, ‘and it’s too complicated for the comprehension of a Paris citizen. I am not accustomed to shape my policy after the discourses of Paris loungers.’13 Unusually superstitious, he told Talleyrand that he wanted to wait until the new year before signing the treaty with Austria, ‘for I have a few prejudices, and I should like peace to date from the renewal of the Gregorian calendar, which presages, I hope, as much happiness for my reign as the old one’.14 Not receiving the letter in time, Talleyrand signed the Treaty of Pressburg in the ancient capital of Hungary on December 27, 1805, so ending the War of the Third Coalition.
The treaty confirmed Napoleon’s sister Elisa in the principalities of Lucca and Piombino; transferred what Austria had previously received from Venice (mainly Istria and Dalmatia) to the Kingdom of Italy; passed the Tyrol, Franconia and Vorarlberg to Bavaria, which was recognized as a new kingdom; and incorporated five Danubian cities, a county, a landgravate and a prefecture into Württemberg, which also became a kingdom. Baden became a grand duchy with yet more Austrian territory. Francis was forced to recognize Napoleon as king of Italy, pay 40 million francs in reparations, and promise that there would be ‘peace and friendship’ between him and Napoleon ‘for ever’.15 The Austrian Emperor had lost over 2.5 million subjects and one-sixth of his revenues overnight, as well as lands that the Habsburgs had held for centuries, making the likelihood of eternal friendship very unlikely.16 Meanwhile, Napoleon recognized the ‘independence’ of Switzerland and Holland, guaranteed the integrity of the rest of the Austrian Empire and promised to separate the crowns of France and Italy after his death – none of which meant or cost him anything.17
When Vivant Denon presented Napoleon with a series of gold medals commemorating Austerlitz, one of which showed the French eagle holding the British lion in its talons, Napoleon threw it ‘with violence to the end of the chamber’, saying: ‘Vile flatterer! How dare you say the French eagle stifles the English lion? I cannot launch upon the sea a single petty fishing boat but she’s captured by the English. In reality it’s the lion that stifles the French eagle. Cast the medal into the foundry, and never bring me another!’18 He told Denon to melt down the other Austerlitz medals, too, and come up with a far less grandiose design, which Denon did (it had Francis and Frederick William’s heads on the reverse). There was a modicum of modesty still left in Napoleon in 1805; he also turned down Kellermann’s proposal for a permanent monument to his glory and had David destroy an over-flattering gilt model of him.
The Treaty of Pressburg made no mention of Naples, which had joined the Third Coalition despite Napoleon’s very clear warnings to Queen Maria Carolina in January, and despite the treaty of neutrality it had signed thereafter. The Bourbons had welcomed a Russo-British landing of 19,000 troops in Naples on November 20, though the troops had left again on receipt of the news of Austerlitz. Maria Carolina was quoted as calling Napoleon ‘That ferocious beast … that Corsican bastard, that parvenu, that dog!’19 So on December 27 Napoleon simply announced: ‘The dynasty of Naples has ceased to reign; its existence is incompatible with the peace of Europe and the honour of my crown.’ Maria Carolina’s disingenuous declarations that the Allied landings had been a surprise were rebuffed. ‘I will finally punish that whore,’ Napoleon supposedly told Talleyrand, demonstrating a capacity for invective quite as colourful as the queen’s.20
Although Masséna – marching down from Milan – quickly conquered most of Naples, hanging the bandit leader Michele Pezza (known as Brother Devil) in November 1806, the Bourbons escaped to Sicily and a dirty war developed in the mountains of Calabria, where peasant guerrillas fought against the French for years in a conflict characterized by vicious reprisals, especially after Napoleon appointed General Charles Manhès military governor there in 1810. The guerrilla war sapped French energy, manpower and morale, while devastating Calabria and its population. Although the British helped on occasion – landing a small force which won the battle of Maida in July 1806 – their main contribution was in guarding the Straits of Messina. ‘Had Sicily been closer and had I been with the vanguard,’ Napoleon told Joseph that month, ‘I would do it; my experience of war would mean that with 9,000 men I would defeat 30,000 English troops.’21 Here was another indication of his disastrous underestimation of the British, whom he was not personally to face across a battlefield until Waterloo.
In order to cement France’s alliance with Bavaria, Napoleon asked its newly minted monarch, King Maximilian I (who had ruled Bavaria under the title Elector Maximilian-Joseph IV of the Palatinate since 1799), that Princess Augusta, his eldest daughter, should marry Eugène, despite the fact that she was engaged to Prince Karl Ludwig of Baden and Eugène was in love with someone else. He sent Eugène a cup with her picture on it, assuring him that she was ‘much better’ looking in real life.22 They married on January 14, 1806, and it turned out to be a far more successful marriage than some of the others that Napoleon insisted upon in order to lend his court respectability, such as the disastrous marriages he imposed on Rapp and Talleyrand. ‘Make sure you do not give us a girl,’ Napoleon only half joked to Augusta when she became pregnant, suggesting she ‘drink a little bit of undiluted wine every day’ as a way of avoiding that unfortunate outcome.23 When, in March 1807, Augusta gave birth to a daughter, whom Napoleon ordered to be called Josephine, he wrote to Eugène to congratulate him: ‘All that now remains for you to do is to make sure that next year you have a boy.’24 (They had another girl.)
Napoleon had other plans for the nineteen-year-old Karl Ludwig of Baden, and on April 8, 1806 he was married to Josephine’s cousin,
Stéphanie de Beauharnais, although they lived separately until he became Grand Duke in June 1811, whereupon they had five children over the course of seven years. And when he finally divorced his pretty American wife, Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore, Jérôme wedded Princess Catarina of Württemberg in August 1807. Napoleon had therefore married members of his family into the ruling houses of all three of the key buffer states between the Rhine and the Danube in the course of only nineteen months, a move intended to legitimize his dynasty as well as to create strategically important political and military alliances.
A report from the Grande Armée’s receiver-general in January 1806 showed just how profitable the victory at Austerlitz had been for France.25 Some 18 million francs had been collected from Swabia as well as the 40 million francs demanded from Austria by the Pressburg treaty. British merchandise was seized and sold across all the newly conquered territories. In all, revenue amounted to about 75 million francs, which, after deducting costs and French debts to the German states, left France nearly 50 million francs in profit.26 Although Napoleon constantly told his brothers that paying the army was the primary duty of government, troops were typically paid at the end of campaigns, as a disincentive to desertion and because those killed and captured needn’t be paid at all.27 ‘War must pay for war,’ Napoleon was to write to both Joseph and Soult on July 14, 1810. He used three methods in a bid to achieve this end: straightforward seizure of cash and property from enemies (known as ‘ordinary contributions’); payments from enemy treasuries agreed in peace treaties (‘extraordinary contributions’), and the billeting and maintenance of French troops at foreign or allies’ expense. France would train, equip and clothe her armies, after that they were expected to be largely self-financing.28
Ordinary and extraordinary contributions produced 35 million francs in the War of the Third Coalition, 253 million francs in the War of the Fourth Coalition, 90 million francs of requisitions in kind from Prussia in 1807, 79 million francs from Austria in 1809, a huge 350 million francs from Spain between 1808 and 1813, 308 million francs from Italy, 10 million francs in goods seized from Holland in 1810 and a special ‘contribution’ from Hamburg of 10 million francs the same year.29 The savings made by the use of allied military contingents (253 million francs) and by despatching French troops to be billeted on satellite states (129 million francs), as well as a total of 807 million francs in ‘ordinary contributions’ and 607 million francs in ‘extraordinary contributions’ over more than a decade brought in a total of nearly 1.8 billion francs. Yet still it wasn’t enough, because between the breakdown of Amiens and 1814 no less than 3 billion francs was required to finance Napoleon’s campaigns.30 To make up the difference, he needed to raise over 1.2 billion francs, of which 80 million came from taxation (including in 1806, now secure on his throne, deeply unpopular Ancien Régime droits réunis taxes on tobacco, alcohol and salt), 137 million in customs duties and 232 million in sales of national and communal property (biens nationaux), as well as by taking loans from the Bank of France. Officers of the state (including Napoleon himself) donated a further 59 million francs.31 ‘We must take care not to overload our donkey,’ Napoleon told his Conseil.
So the war did not pay for the war, but only for 60 per cent of it, with the remaining 40 per cent being picked up by the French people in various other ways. Yet these did not include the imposition of direct taxes on Napoleon’s strongest supporters – French tradesmen, merchants, professionals and the peasantry – except for the discretionary taxes on drinkers and smokers. Nor did it involve any direct taxes on middle- and upper-class incomes, even though Britain levied income tax at 10 per cent on all incomes over £200 per annum, an unheard-of imposition at the time. By the time of Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, French public debt was down to only 60 million francs when income from taxes and other levies were bringing in between 430 million francs and 500 million francs per annum.32 It was an impressive feat to finance fifteen years of warfare without imposing any income taxes, especially considering that the Ancien Régime had been destroyed in part as a result of its far smaller outlays helping the American Revolution. ‘When I have overthrown England, I will take off 200 million francs of taxes,’ Napoleon promised the Conseil in May 1806.33 It was never to happen, but that is no reason to doubt he would have done it.
In January 1806 Napoleon made his first really significant error of statesmanship, when he offered his brother Joseph the throne of Naples, saying: ‘It will become, like Italy, Switzerland, Holland and the three kingdoms of Germany, my federal states, or, truly, the French Empire.’34 Joseph was crowned king on March 30, and Louis became king of Holland in June. This reversion to the pre-revolutionary system of governance struck at the meritocratic system for which Napoleon had initially stood, installed largely inadequate brothers in key positions and stoked up problems for the future. In December 1805 Napoleon was writing to Joseph of Jérôme: ‘My very positive intention is to let him go to prison for debt if his allowance isn’t enough … It’s inconceivable what this young man costs me for causing nothing but inconvenience, and being useless to my system.’35 Yet within two years he had made the utterly unchanged Jérôme king of Westphalia. There were plenty of local pro-French reformers whom he could have installed in power – Melzi in Italy, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck in Holland, Karl Dalberg in Germany, Prince Poniatowski in Poland, for example, even Crown Prince Ferdinand in Spain – who would have done a far better job than most Frenchmen, let alone squabbling, vain, disloyal and often incompetent members of the Bonaparte family.
Although Napoleon wrote scores of rude and exasperated letters admonishing Joseph over his manner of ruling – ‘You must be a king and talk like a king’ – nonetheless his love for his elder brother was profound and genuine.36 When Joseph complained that he was no longer the brother he once knew, Napoleon wrote to him from his hunting chateau at Rambouillet in August 1806, telling him he was upset that he felt that way, for – adopting Joseph’s grammar of writing about Napoleon in the third person – ‘It’s normal that he should not have, at forty, the same feelings towards you he had when he was twelve. But he has more real and much stronger feelings for you. His friendship bears the hallmarks of his soul.’37
Holland had astonished the world in its heyday, defying Imperial Spain, moving its Stadtholder, William of Orange, to become king of England, founding a global empire, buying Manhattan, inventing capitalism and glorying in the golden age of Grotius, Spinoza, Rembrandt and Vermeer. Yet by the late eighteenth century, Britain had taken over most of Holland’s colonies, often without a fight, her shipping and overseas trading systems were all but destroyed, her cities were declining in population (in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe), and in manufacturing only gin production was doing well.38 By appointing Louis king (which the Dutch didn’t oppose) Napoleon administered the coup de grâce to Holland’s sovereignty. In many ways Louis was a good monarch, continuing the unification of the country from federated provinces, a process that had already started under her blind veteran Grand Pensionary Schimmelpenninck, who was beginning to reverse the long national decline. Local government reforms stripped the departments and local elites of influence in 1807; the ancient guilds were abolished in 1808; the justice system was rationalized in 1809. Louis moved his court from The Hague, via Utrecht, to Amsterdam, where the city council vacated its town hall so that it could become the royal palace.39
‘From the moment I set foot on Dutch soil I became Dutch,’ Louis told the legislature, which explained in a sentence the problem Napoleon was to have with him over the next four increasingly unhappy years.40 Napoleon inundated Louis with immensely rude letters throughout his reign, complaining that he was too ‘good-natured’ to be the kind of tough, uncompromising monarch that he needed. A typical letter would read:
If you continue to govern by whingeing, if you allow yourself to be bullied you will … be even less use to me than the Grand Duke of Baden is … You tire me needlessly … Your ideas are nar
row and you have little interest in the common cause … Don’t come and plead poverty anymore; I know the Dutch well … Only women cry and complain; men take action … If you are not more energetic, you will end up in a situation that will make you regret your weakness … More energy, more energy!41
The only surprise is that Louis stayed on his throne for as long as he did. He received little support from his wife Hortense, who although she carried out her regal duties conscientiously, and was relatively popular with the Dutch, cordially hated Louis and was soon to start conducting an affair with Talleyrand’s illegitimate son, the dashing Comte Charles de Flahaut, by whom she had a son in 1811, the Duc de Morny.
Napoleon was to spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about his brothers, and would even joke of one, ‘It’s really unfortunate he’s not illegitimate’, but he kept them on long after their failures were clear.42 One immediate problem was that the Pope refused to recognize Joseph as king of Naples, which together with his designation of Jérôme’s wedding as against canon law began an entirely unnecessary quarrel between Napoleon and Pius VII that was to lead to the seizure of papal lands in June 1809 and Napoleon’s excommunication. Napoleon felt he could trust his siblings more than others outside his family – although that was not borne out by events – and he wished to ape the dynastic aggrandizement of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Hanoverians. ‘My brothers have done me a great deal of harm,’ Napoleon admitted years later in a characteristic bout of honest self-evaluation, but by then it was far too late.43
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