TENSION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE[26]
[Footnote 26: In addition to the authorities given with the
last chapter there are Garden: Traites. Leclercq: Collection
des Lois. Lefebvre: Cabinets de l'Europe. Du Casse:
Negociations relatives au Traite d'Amiens, Negociations de
Luneville; Jurien de la Graviere: Guerres Maritimes. Lettres
inedites de Talleyrand a Napoleon. Stern: Briefe von Gentz in
Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung, Vol. XXI. Bailleu:
Correspondance inedite du roi Frederic-Guillaume et la reine
Louise avec l'empereur Alexandre I. Himly: Histoire de la
formation territoriale des Etats de l'Europe centrale.
Holtzhausen: Der erste Consul und seine deutschen Besucher.
Reichardt: Un Hiver a Paris sous le Consulat. Browning:
England and Napoleon in 1803. Stanhope: William Pitt;
Denkwuerdigkeiten des Grafen de Bray.]
Reciprocal Impressions -- Imminence of War -- State of England --
Bonaparte as a French Burgher -- The Democracy of the Tuileries
-- Private Interview of Bonaparte and Whitworth -- The English
Militia Mobilized -- Hot Words at Bonaparte's Reception --
Explanation of the Scene -- France Still Pacific -- England
Immovable -- Declaration of War.
[Sidenote: 1803]
A trustworthy estimate has fixed the number of strangers who flocked
to France during 1802 at twenty thousand, of whom four fifths were
Britons--Fox and Lord Holland among the number. The impressions of the
sympathetic English were not merely favorable, their senses were
stunned. Like Great Britain herself, France seemed rejuvenated by her
successive revolutions, the national life getting new vigor from
movement and change. It was clear to them that the new France would be
a foe vastly more redoubtable than either the recent or the former
one. Pleasure-seekers found nothing of what they desired, neither
reckless vice nor flippant gaiety. Paris was serious, settled, almost
reserved. The country was busy and peaceful, agriculture prosperous,
the church restored, life and goods safe, the highways improved,
social and mercantile relations regular and dignified. The person of
Bonaparte impressed them as that of a sagacious statesman; a
commingling, they thought and feared, of Cromwell and Washington. Of
anything like their own industrial revival they saw nothing; the
ruler, they could see, was not a great financier, not even a fair
economist. But he was equally great as a warrior and a civilian, so
they returned to report to deaf ears that peace must be maintained
even at great sacrifice. Liberal and sympathetic Germans made similar
observations, and they marked with interest the simple life and plain
ways which prevailed in the Tuileries as the example given to the men
of power who had risen to replace the theorists of the Revolution. The
France that would offer itself in expiation of monarchical crimes, the
regenerator of peoples, the expounder of Utopias, was no more. Firm
and erect as her ruler, she appeared no longer as an enchantress, but
as a Bellona; herself regenerate, she was defiant of the unregenerate
dynasties, which retained but a single high quality: they were the
only outward expression of continental nationality.
[Illustration: In the Museum at Liege, Belgium
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, FIRST CONSUL
From the painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Presented to the
city of Liege by Napoleon in 1806. This is claimed to be one of the
few portraits for which Bonaparte posed.]
These strained relations between the two great Western powers were the
natural consequence of their antipodal interests, and of the fact that
neither was yet exhausted by war. Speaking of the treaty of Amiens
soon after it was signed, George III said, "I call this an
experimental peace; it is nothing else." It was a double experiment.
How far would Bonaparte curb his ambition? How far would England
surrender her control of European commerce? It soon became clear that
a conciliatory temper existed on neither side, and that the
so-called peace was merely a truce. Moreover, Bonaparte, not long
after the arrival of Lord Whitworth, came to feel that the truce would
be a short one. Accordingly he recalled from London the too pacific
Otto, replacing him in December by General Andreossy. His conviction
was assured by the language which the English ambassador used to
Talleyrand in January. The interval of peace, short as it was, had so
confirmed Bonaparte in the good graces of the French that he likewise
felt able to dismiss three other public servants who seemed unwilling
to accept the new state of absolute control by the First Consul. These
were Fouche, Roederer, and Bourrienne: the first a shrewd,
unscrupulous, self-seeking Jacobin; the second a wise, devoted, but
fearless and sometimes troublesome adviser; the third a venal,
light-headed, and often untruthful secretary, who presumed too much on
early associations in order to continue an annoying intimacy. Almost
at the same time Lannes was restored to favor, and the consular guard
was strengthened. At the opening of what bade fair to be a struggle
for life, the protagonist seemed determined to cast off every weight,
to discard even his true friends when troublesome.
The landed aristocracy of Great Britain saw all its prestige
endangered by Bonaparte's successes; its control of Parliament, its
influence in the local governments, its hierarchy in church and state,
its absurd control of the suffrage, all stood in glaring contrast to
the reforms of diametrically opposed tendency established in France,
where burghers and peasants had come to their own and flaunted their
rights and powers before all Europe. A British revolution was
imminent. The great masters of industry were equally savage and
determined. There was a sudden union of all important interests. If
Piedmont were annexed, Switzerland made a protectorate, (p.~278)
Italy brought to terms, the lands of the valley and mouths of the
Rhine intimidated or won to sympathetic subservience, and the treaty
of Luneville made operative, the island kingdom was isolated indeed.
Such a continental combination would close the door in the face of
British commerce. Yet there was a greater world than the Continent and
markets quite as important. So a continental coalition would open the
highways of the ocean, not one of the powers, great or small, being
able to maintain an efficient army with an efficient fleet. The policy
of alliances and subsidies was ever at hand, and to this again the
English ministry recurred. Neither Austria, Russia, nor Prussia,
antiquated as were their systems and policies, unstable as were their
governments and finances, uncertain as were their very boundaries and
the loyalty of their subjects; patched, darned, and frayed as were
their dynastic relations; not one of them was content, nor easy, nor
secure. The material was at hand for a new coalition, quite as rotten
as others since the dynastic cloth was old on the garment, the growing
and novel sense of nationality. To the labor of renovation George and
his ministers put their hands; renovation of old stuff, old patterns,
old fashions, all of which should have been thrown into the rag-bag.
The war which was imminent would in no proper sense be a war between
England and France, but rather an appeal to arms concerning
Bonaparte's expansion of the revolutionary system for his own
purposes. Well aware that if war was inevitable it should for his own
sake come quickly, Bonaparte determined to learn whether it was
inevitable, and to do so in such a way as further to endear him to
that class of the French people which now appeared to be his strongest
support--the great middle class, or bourgeoisie. Whether general,
diplomatist, or statesman, he had never since his entrance on French
public life permitted them to forget that he was one of them.
Incidentally it may be remarked that his determination to gratify the
middle class whenever possible played a considerable role in the
grandiose scheme of public works conceived and partly achieved by him.
The building of great canals, the perfection of highways, the lavish
expenditure of public moneys for the administrative buildings which
beautified the provincial towns while distributing the appropriations
for these works among the inhabitants, the general control of these
enterprises from Paris--all this enormously strengthened the hold
which the chief magistrate had upon the country at large. He dressed,
behaved, and talked, as far as in him lay, like a French burgher,
scornfully and ostentatiously using the forms of society and diplomacy
as baubles necessary just so long as they were useful, but holding
them up to public contempt whenever that course served his purpose.
Much of the same policy was displayed in the official receptions held
in the Tuileries. In the first place, the domestic life of the
Bonapartes was carefully accented by the presence of the First
Consul's wife and of his sisters with their families. No mistresses
were ever allowed to flaunt themselves in public under either the
Consulate or the Empire. The same standards of conjugal fidelity were
to be supposed valid in the first family of the land as in those of
the masses. Then, too, there was displayed a genial familiarity,
sometimes even brusque and rude, like that prevalent among the middle
class--the good-fellowship which they admired above every other
quality. On high occasions the great officers of state with the
diplomatic corps were arrayed in a circle like that customary in
courts from immemorial times; but grand as they were, they had to put
up with much the same treatment from the First Consul while (p.~280)
making his rounds as that which his relatives, his civil and military
officials, and the plain people of France generally received at his
hands. These unceremonious ways afforded Bonaparte exactly the chance
he needed to bring England to an explanation. On Sunday, March
thirteenth, 1803, there was held a consular levee at the Tuileries. No
one apparently thought it likely to be different from any other, and
there was the usual attendance, Lord Whitworth being present to
introduce some English ladies and gentlemen to Mme. Bonaparte. But the
occasion was destined to be of the first importance historically, and
what occurred has been the subject of more misrepresentation and
turgid rhetoric than any single event in the life of Napoleon.
For some weeks previous, France had continued to fit out armaments in
her ports, destined, it was declared, and probably with truth, to
confirm her colonial power in the West Indies and America, and to make
good her commercial standing in the Levant and farther Orient. These
movements, as well as those of her troops, were declared by the
English to be preparations solely intended for the renewal of the war.
On Friday, February seventeenth, Whitworth, contrary to all diplomatic
precedent, had been summoned to the Tuileries, where he was received
by Bonaparte with "tolerable cordiality," to use the ambassador's own
words, and seated on one side of the First Consul's table in his
private cabinet, while the chief of state dropped into a chair on the
other, and began without ceremony to state his views concerning the
situation. Acknowledging his irritation at the mistrust shown by
England in interpreting the treaty of Amiens, he categorically refused
to acquiesce in the continued occupation of Malta and Alexandria by
her, but disclaimed any intention of either seizing Egypt or going to
war. Expatiating on the respective forces of England and France, he
strove to prove that neither could gain anything by going to war. On
many occasions antecedent to this Bonaparte had emphatically stated
his conviction that the Western world was a unit, face to face with
the other unit, the Oriental world. Their reciprocity is the life of
the globe. On this occasion he flatly asked why the two Western powers
of the first magnitude, one mistress of the seas, the other mistress
of the land, should not arrange to cooeperate and govern the world. But
Whitworth was no philosopher, and, mindful of his instructions, he
gave no sign of taking notice. In conclusion, therefore, the First
Consul demanded the speedy evacuation of Malta as the event on which
must turn peace or war. If he had really desired war, he said, he
could have seized Egypt a month earlier without difficulty. Whitworth
made the rejoinders which had been used all along, and when about to
instance the territories and influence gained by France was
interrupted by Bonaparte with apparent temper. "I suppose you mean
Piedmont and Switzerland. Those are trifles,"--"The expression he made
use of," Whitworth interrupts the quotation to say, "was too trivial
and vulgar to find a place in a despatch, or anywhere but in the mouth
of a hackney-coachman,"--"and it must have been foreseen," continued
Bonaparte, "while the negotiation was pending. Vous n'avez pas le
droit d'en parler a cette heure." ["Now you have no right to speak of
it."] Napoleon said of his own temper that it never went below his
neck; and as to his vulgar expression, any French scholar can supply
it and see that Whitworth did right not to report it; for to translate
it would have been to distort the proportions of its significance.
Moreover, the English diplomat must have felt the truth of Bonaparte's
reasoning, for he at once turned to the matter of English claims on
France, and the First Consul excused the delay by disclaiming all
wrong intention. Whitworth expressly states that he brought away no
other impression than that Bonaparte intended "to frighten and bully."
Under this impression the English ministry determined to meet bluster
with bluster. There was, in spite of all Fox's efforts, a substantial
unanimity of anti-French sentiment in Parliament. This the government
inflamed by a royal message sent to that body on March eighth, which
exaggerated the military preparations in the ports of France and
Holland out of all proportion by stating them as a reason why
additional measures should be taken for the security of England. On
March tenth the militia was called out. News of the message reached
Paris on March twelfth. Duroc was in Prussia on a special embassy. The
paper was forwarded to him at once, with instructions to say to
Frederick William that, if war was declared, France would occupy
Hanover--a menace intended to make that monarch active in preserving
peace. It was beyond peradventure part of this same system of bluster
which made Bonaparte prepare the scene of March thirteenth, before the
news of England's arming her militia could have reached him.
While the court was assembling the First Consul passed the time in
chatting with the ladies of his family and familiarly joking with
their attendants, in particular playing with his nephew, the little
Napoleon, son of Louis. His air was unaffected, and he was even merry.
Being told that the circle was formed, his manner changed, and he
advanced to make his round. Whitworth and Markoff were standing side
by side. Asking the former if he had news from England, and receiving
an affirmative reply, he said, as Whitworth reported, "'So you are
determined to go to war.' 'No, First Consul,' I replied; 'we are too
sensible of the advantages of peace.' 'We have,' said he, 'been at
war already for fifteen years.' As he seemed to wait for an answer, I
observed, 'That is already too long.' 'But,' said he, 'you want war
for another fifteen years, and you force me to it.' I told him that
was very far from his Majesty's intentions. He then proceeded to Count
Markoff and the Chevalier Azara, who were standing at a little
distance from me, and said to them, 'The English desire war, but if
they are the first to draw the sword I shall be the last to sheathe
it. They pay no respect to treaties. It will be necessary henceforth
to cover them with black crape.' I suppose he meant the treaties. He
then went his round, and was thought by all those to whom he addressed
himself to betray great signs of irritation. In a few minutes he came
back to me, to my great annoyance, and resumed the conversation, if
such it can be called, by something personally civil to me. [The
reader will note the words "personally civil."] He then began again:
'Why such armaments? Against whom such measures of precaution? I have
not a single vessel of the line in the harbors of France: but if you
wish to arm, I shall arm also; if you wish to fight, I shall fight
also. You could perhaps destroy France, but never intimidate her.' 'No
one would desire,' said I, 'the one or the other. The world would like
to live on good terms with her.' 'Then treaties must be respected,'
replied he. 'Woe to them who do not respect treaties! They shall be
answerable for it to all Europe.' He was too agitated to make it
advisable to prolong the conversation. I therefore made no answer, and
he retired to his apartment repeating the last phrase.... I am
persuaded that there was not a single person who did not feel the
extreme impropriety of his conduct, and the total want of dignity as
well as of decency on the occasion." Such is Lord (p.~284)
Whitworth's own account. That it is substantially accurate is proved
by Bonaparte's despatch to Andreossy, dated the same night, in which
the words used by the First Consul are given in almost identical form.
This is the much discussed "insult to the British ambassador," the
scene in which Bonaparte has been represented as threatening to strike
Whitworth, "the violent harangue," etc., which has been given as the
reason why England broke the treaty of Amiens. As a matter of fact,
the whole picture speaks for itself. Bonaparte's behavior was not
courtly, and his conduct was a piece of bluster; for the rest, the
scene was not merely, as Talleyrand explained it, the First Consul's
method of calling the attention of all Europe to the political
situation: it was both a means of warning England in the interest of
peace and of warning France in the interest of war, if war there must
be.
Five days later Whitworth himself wrote that his agent had seen
nothing at Havre "which can be construed into an armament; and," adds
the ambassador, "I verily believe this is the case in every port of
France." He also declared that, judging from Talleyrand's note to the
French envoy in London, France was not ready to declare war. The
United States minister in Paris was of the same opinion. When next
Bonaparte received the diplomatic corps, on April fourth, Whitworth
reported that he had every reason to be satisfied with his treatment.
But the despatches of Lord Whitworth were not published in England as
they were written and transmitted. They were printed with such
omissions and changes as to make them serve the purpose of the
ministry, which was to inflame public opinion. Negotiations were kept
up for a few weeks, but without sincerity. England, refusing admission
within the fortifications of Malta to the Neapolitan garrison which
had been stipulated for, on the ground that it could not be trusted,
suggested that she should keep the island until the transfer could
safely be made. Bonaparte then suggested either an Austrian or a
Russian occupation, for a term of years, but this England rejected.
France then proposed a joint French and English occupation, but this
was likewise rejected, and Whitworth was instructed to stand on the
ultimatum of a ten years' occupancy by England.
On May tenth the diplomatic rupture occurred, and on May sixteenth
England formally declared war. Wilberforce asserted in opposition to
the act that "the language of Bonaparte in the later stages of the
negotiations" afforded reason to believe that he would have acquiesced
in the independence of Malta, or even in the English retention of it
for ten years. Whitworth's attitude was felt by moderate and liberal
Englishmen to have been far from conciliatory.
The first appearance of William Pitt in the House of Commons after a
serious illness brought together on the twenty-third a brilliant
audience. It was with breathless interest that they heard him gasp
forth the eloquent periods in which he denounced the lambent flame of
Jacobinism embodied in Bonaparte, and satirized the Whigs who pleaded
the cause of a devastator. The triple round of applause, unprecedented
at Westminster, with which his speech was cheered at its close was
ominous for those who were to follow. Not even Fox, whose polished
oratory was heard with respectful attention, could diminish by a jot
or tittle the enthusiasm for war. So therefore the struggle of
centuries between France and England, orderly conservatism undismayed
and turbulent liberalism afire with zeal, was again renewed. The
continental powers were the pawns on the board, the players were Pitt
and Bonaparte.