Meantime Moreau, after learning the successful crossing of the St. Bernard, had resumed the offensive. Moving to the eastward, he crossed the Danube below Ulm with part of his force on the 19th of June, threatening Kray's communications with Bohemia. A partial encounter on that day left five thousand prisoners in the hands of the French, who maintained the position they had gained. The same night Kray evacuated Ulm, moving rapidly off by a road to the northward and so effecting his escape. Moreau, unable to intercept, followed for some distance and then stopped a pursuit which promised small results. He was still ignorant of the battle of Marengo, of which the Austrians now had news; and the latter, while concealing the victory, announced to him the suspension of arms, and suggested a similar arrangement in Germany. Convinced that events favorable to France lay behind this proposition, Moreau would come to no agreement; but on the contrary decided at once to secure for his victorious army the most advantageous conditions with which to enter upon negotiations. Closely investing the important fortresses of Ulm and Ingolstadt on the Danube, with part of his force, he recrossed the river with the remainder and advanced into Bavaria. On the 28th of June he entered Munich; and near there was signed on the 15th of July an armistice, closely corresponding with that concluded by Bonaparte in Italy just one month before. The two belligerents retired behind appointed lines, not again to engage in hostilities without twelve days' notice. During this suspension of arms the blockaded Austrian fortresses should receive every fortnight provisions proportioned to their consumption, so that in case of renewed operations they would be in the same condition as when the truce began. The two great French armies were now encamped in the fertile plains of Italy and Germany, living in quiet off districts external to France, which was thus relieved of the larger part of their expense.
The effect of this short and brilliant campaign of unbroken French successes was to dispose to peace both members of the coalition. Neither, however, was yet reduced to negotiate apart from its ally. On the very day the news of Marengo was received at Vienna, but before the last reverses in Germany, Austria had renewed her engagements with Great Britain, both powers stipulating not to treat singly. The first consul, on the other hand, was distinctly opposed to joint discussions, his constant policy in the cabinet as in the field being to separate his opponents. As Austria's great need was to gain time, she sent to Paris an envoy empowered to exchange views with the French government but to conclude nothing. The emperor also intimated his wish for a general pacification, and on the 9th of August the British minister at Vienna notified to that court the willingness of his own to enter into negotiations for a general peace.
With this began an encounter of wits, in which Bonaparte showed himself as astute at a bargain as he was wily in the field. Austria, if not given too much time, was at his mercy; but Great Britain held over him a like advantage in her control of the sea, which was strangling the colonial empire he passionately wished to restore. Haïti had escaped from all but nominal control; Martinique, the gem of the Antilles, was in British hands; Malta and Egypt, the trophies of his own enterprise, were slowly but surely expiring. For these he too needed time; for with it there was good prospect of soon playing a card which should reverse, or at least seriously modify, the state of the game, by bringing Russia and the Baltic navies into the combination against Great Britain. In this support, and in the extremity to which he might reduce Austria, lay his only chances to check the great opponent of France; for, while almost supreme on the Continent, he could not from the coast project his power beyond the range of a cannon's ball. His correspondence throughout this period abounds with instructions and exhortations to fit out the fleets, to take the sea, to relieve Malta and Egypt, to seize Sardinia by an expedition from Corsica, and Mahon by a squadron from Brest. All fell fruitless before the exhaustion of French sea power, as did also his plan for an extensive cruise on a grand scale against British commerce in many quarters of the world. "I see with regret," wrote he to the minister of Marine, "that the armament of the fleet has been sacrificed to that of a great number of small vessels;" but in truth there was nothing else to do. His ablest admirals failed to equip ships from which every resource was cut off by the omnipresent cruisers of the enemy. "We can never take Mahon," he writes to the court of Spain, in the full swing of his triumphs after Marengo; "therefore make war on Portugal and take her provinces, so as to enter negotiations for peace with your hands as full as possible of equivalents."
The Czar Paul had joined the second coalition full of ardor against the French revolution and determined to restore the princes who had lost their thrones. He had been bitterly mortified by the reverses to his troops in 1799, and especially by the disaster to Suwarrow, for which he not unjustly blamed Austria. He was also dissatisfied to find in his allies less of zeal for unfortunate sovereigns than of desire to reduce the power of France, to whose system they attributed the misfortunes of Europe. Disappointment in his unbalanced mind turned soon to coolness and was rapidly passing to hostility. The transition was assisted, and a pretext for a breach with Great Britain afforded, by a fresh outbreak of the old dispute between her and the Baltic powers concerning the rights of neutrals. Denmark in 1799 adopted the policy of convoying her merchant vessels by ships of war, and claimed that a statement from the senior naval officer, that the cargoes contained nothing forbidden by the law of nations, exempted the convoy from the belligerent right of search. British statesmen denied that this conceded belligerent right could be nullified by any rule adopted by a neutral; to which they were the more impelled as the Danes and themselves differed radically in the definition of contraband. Danish naval officers being instructed to resist the search of their convoys, two hostile encounters took place; one in December, 1799, and the other in July, 1800. In the latter several were killed on both sides, and the Danish frigate was carried into the Downs. Seeing the threatening character of affairs, the British ministry took immediate steps to bring them to an issue. An ambassador was sent to Copenhagen supported by nine ships-of-the-line and several bomb-vessels; and on the 29th of August, barely a month after the affray, a convention was signed by which the general subject of searching ships under convoy was referred to future discussion, but Denmark consented to suspend her convoys until a definitive treaty was made. The Danish frigate was at once released.
It will be observed that this collision occurred in the very midst of the negotiations between Austria and France, to which Great Britain claimed the right to be a party. The whole vexed question of neutral and belligerent rights was thus violently raised, at a moment most inauspicious to the allies and most favorable to Bonaparte. The latter, crowned with victory upon the Continent, found every neutral commercial state disposed to side with him in contesting positions considered by Great Britain to be vital to her safety. It was for him to foster this disposition and combine the separate powers into one great effort, before which the Mistress of the Seas should be compelled to recede and submit. The occasion here arose, as it were spontaneously, to realize what became the great dream of his life and ultimately led him to his ruin,—to unite the Continent against the British Islands and, as he phrased it, "to conquer the sea by the land." Circumstances, partly anterior to his rise to power, and partly contrived by his sagacious policy during the previous few months, particularly favored at this moment such a league, for which the affair of the Danish convoy supplied an impulse, and the prostration of Great Britain's ally, Austria, an opportunity. Bonaparte underestimated the vitality and influence of a state upon which centred a far-reaching commercial system, and in valuing naval power he did not appreciate that a mere mass of ships had not the weight he himself was able to impart to a mass of men. He never fully understood the maritime problems with which from time to time he had to deal; but he showed wonderful skill at this critical period in combining against his principal enemy an opposition, for which Prussia afforded the body and the hot temper of the Czar the animating soul.
Since 1795 Prussia had shut herself up to a rigorous neutrality, in which were embraced the North German states. Under this system, during the maritime war, the commerce of the larger part of the Continent poured in through these states—by the great German rivers, the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe—and through the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. The tonnage clearing from Great Britain alone to North Germany increased from 120,000 in 1792 to 389,000 in 1800; a traffic of which Prussia took the lion's share. To these advantages of neutral territory it was desirable to join the utmost freedom for neutral navigation. Upon this Great Britain bore heavily; but so large a proportion of the trade was done through her, and the sea was so entirely under the power of her navy, that prudence had so far dictated acquiescence in her claims, even when not admitted. This was particularly the case while Russia, under Catherine II., and in the first years of her son, tacitly or openly supported Great Britain; and while Austria, though badly beaten in the field, remained unshaken in power. The weaker maritime countries, Sweden, Denmark, and the United States of America, were determined by similar motives. They groaned under the British exactions; but the expansion of their commerce outweighed the injuries received, and submission was less hurtful than resistance in arms. Russia herself, though not strictly a maritime state, was a large producer of articles which were mainly carried by British ships and for which England was the chief customer. The material interests of Russia, and especially of the powerful nobles, were therefore bound up with peace with Great Britain; but an absolute monarch could disregard this fact, at least for a time. The furious, impulsive temper of Paul I., if aroused, was quite capable of overleaping all prudential considerations, of using the colossal power of his empire to support the other states, and even of compelling them to act in concert with him.
Such were the discordant elements which Bonaparte had to reconcile into a common effort: on the one hand, the strong though short-sighted mercantile interests, which to retain great present advantages would favor submission rather than resistance to the exactions of Great Britain. These were represented by the development of carrying trade in the neutral Baltic states, by the enlarged commerce of Prussia and North Germany,—which through their neutrality in a maritime war had become the highway of intercourse between the Continent and the outer world,—and by the productions of Russia, which formed the revenue of her great proprietors, and found their way to market wholly by sea. Bound together by the close relations which commerce breeds between states, and by the dependence of each upon the capital and mercantile system of Great Britain, these interests constituted the prosperity of nations, and could by no rulers be lightly disregarded. On the other hand stood the dignity of neutral flags and their permanent interests,—always contrary to those of belligerents,—the ambition of Prussia and her jealousy of Austria, and finally the chivalrous, reckless, half insane Paul I., seeking now with all the bitterness of personal feeling to gratify his resentment against his late allies.
Bonaparte had already begun to work upon the Czar as well as upon the neutral powers. Closely observing the political horizon from his first accession to office, he had noted every condition capable of raising embarrassments to Great Britain, whom his unerring military insight had long before recognized [12] as the key to a military situation, in which his own object was the predominance of France, not only on the Continent but throughout the world. Sagacious a statesman as he was, and clearly as he recognized the power of moral and political motives, his ideal of control was essentially forcible, based upon superior armies and superior fleets; and consequently every political problem was by him viewed much as a campaign, in which forces were to be moved, combined, and finally massed upon the vital points of an enemy's position. The power of Great Britain was sea power in its widest sense, commercial and naval; against it, therefore, he aimed to effect such a combination as would both destroy her commerce and cripple her navy. The impotence of France and Spain, united, to injure the one or the other had been clearly shown by repeated defeats, and by the failure of the commerce-destroying so industriously carried on during seven years of war. Far from decaying or languishing, the commerce of Great Britain throve everywhere with redoubled vigor, and her fleets rode triumphant in all seas. There was, however, one quarter in which she had not hitherto been disturbed, except by the quickly extinguished efforts of the Dutch navy; and just there, in the Baltic and North Sea, was the point where, next to the British islands and seas themselves, she was most vulnerable. There was concentrated a great part of her shipping; there was the market for the colonial produce stored in her overflowing warehouses; there also were gathered three navies, whose united masses—manned by hardy seamen trained in a boisterous navigation and sheltered in an enclosed sea of perilous access—might overweight a force already strained to control the Mediterranean, to blockade the hostile arsenals, and to protect the merchant shipping which thronged over every ocean highway.
To close the north of Europe to British trade, and to combine the Baltic navies against that of Great Britain, became thenceforth the fixed ideas of Bonaparte's life. To conciliate Denmark he released a number of Danish ships, which had been arrested by the Directory for submitting to search by British cruisers. The extent of the czar's alienation from his former allies not being at first apparent, he next courted Prussia, the head of the North German neutrality, in whose power it was to arrest British trade both through her own territory and through Hamburg. Prussia was ambitious to play a leading part in Europe. The five years spent by Austria, France, and Great Britain in exhausting warfare, she had used to consolidate her power and husband her resources. She wished now to pose as a mediator, and looked for the time when the prostration of the combatants and her own restored strength would cause them to bend to her influence, and yield her points, through the simple exhibition of her force. The advances and flatteries of the first consul were graciously received, but the path Prussia had traced for herself was to involve no risks—only gains; she wished much, but would venture naught. It was a dangerous part to play, this waiting on opportunity, against such a man as swayed the destinies of the Continent during the next twelve years. From it arose a hesitating, selfish, and timid policy, fluctuating with every breath of danger or hope of advantage, dishonoring the national name, until it ended in Jena and the agonies of humiliation through which the country passed between that disaster and the overthrow of Napoleon. Such a spirit is prone to side with a strong combination and to yield to a masterful external impulse.
Under this Bonaparte next sought to bring her. "We shall make nothing out of Prussia," he writes to Talleyrand on the first of June, 1800, on his way to Marengo; and he adds, "If the news from Egypt [apparently the defeat of the Turks by Kleber] is confirmed, it will become important to have some one in Russia. The Ottoman Empire cannot exist much longer, and if Paul I. turns his looks in that direction our interests become common." [13] Bonaparte was at no pains to reconcile this view with an assurance made a month later to Turkey that "no anxiety need be felt about Egypt, which will be restored as soon as the Porte shall resume its former relations with France." [14] On the 4th of June he recommends general and flattering overtures to the czar, accompanied by special marks of consideration. The latter was fully prepared to be won by compliments from the man for whose military glory he had come to feel a profound enthusiasm. On the 4th of July Bonaparte's general advances took form in a definite proposal to surrender to Russian troops Malta, whose speedy loss by himself he saw to be inevitable; an offer calculated not only to charm the Czar, who delighted to fancy himself the head and protector of an ancient order of knights, but also to sow discord between him and Great Britain, if, as was probable, the latter declined to yield her prey to a friend who at a critical moment had forsaken her. The letter sketched by the first consul was carefully worded to quicken the ready vanity of its recipient. "Desiring to give a proof of personal consideration to the emperor of Russia and to distinguish him from the other enemies of the republic, who fight from a vile love of gain, the first consul wishes, if the garrison of Malta is constrained by famine to evacuate the place, to restore it to the hands of the czar as grand master of the order; and although the first consul is certain that Malta has provisions for several months, [15] he wishes his Majesty to inform him what conventions he would wish to make, and what measures to take, so that, if the case arise, his troops may enter that place." [16] This was shortly followed by the release of the Russian prisoners in France, in number between seven and eight thousand, whom Bonaparte clad and dismissed with their colors and their officers to return into Russia; suggesting that, if the czar thought proper, he "might demand of the English to release an equal number of French prisoners; but if not, the first consul hoped he would accept his troops as an especial mark of the esteem felt for the brave Russian armies." [17]