Revolutionary Europe, 1789-1815

by H. Morse Stephens

When Bonaparte first entered office he recognised that England was a more formidable, because a less approachable, enemy than Austria. Knowing that the French navy was unable to meet the English, he hoped to counterbalance the maritime preponderance of England by a league against her commerce. Owing to the long period of war, nothing was to be gained by solemn decrees forbidding the importation of goods into France, it was necessary to strike through the neutral nations. The three great commercial seats of English trade were the Levant, the Baltic, and Portugal. The failure of the expedition to Egypt proved that it was impossible to destroy the English trade in the Levant, and Bonaparte therefore resolved to strike in the other two directions. Acting mainly through the Emperor Paul, the Armed Neutrality of the North, or the Neutral League of 1780, was re-established between the Baltic powers of Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark. The real intention of Paul and of Bonaparte was to exclude English commerce entirely from the Baltic; but for the second time the Baltic powers nominally made themselves the guarantors of the rights of neutrals. They protested against the right assumed by England to search neutral ships, and to confiscate as contraband of war all the goods of belligerent powers found in them, and also against the prohibition against neutral ships trading between different enemies’ ports. The Emperor Paul, like the Empress Catherine twenty years before, made himself the patron of the Neutral League.

Battle of Copenhagen. 2d April 1801.

The English government naturally refused to accede to the demands of the Neutral League, and when the Baltic was closed to them an English fleet was ordered to force the blockade. This fleet was placed under the command of Sir Hyde Parker, with Nelson as second in command. On the 30th of March 1801 the fleet sailed down the Sound, in spite of the Danish batteries at Elsinore, and on the 2d of April Copenhagen was bombarded and a large part of the Danish fleet destroyed. This victory, and still more the death of the Emperor Paul, caused the dissolution of the Neutral League of the North, and Bonaparte had to adjourn for some years his schemes for the annihilation of English commerce.

Spain and Portugal. 1800–1.

Treaty of Badajoz.

In the Iberian peninsula the designs of Bonaparte against English trade were more successful. Spain still remained the ally of France in spite of the sufferings that alliance had brought upon her, but Portugal had hitherto continued the faithful friend of England. Through Portugal English goods entered Spain and the south of France, and Bonaparte resolved to put an end to the neutrality of Portugal. For this purpose, in the year 1800, he despatched his ablest brother, Lucien Bonaparte, as ambassador to Madrid, with orders to negotiate with the Prince Regent of Portugal. The terms offered were that the Portuguese ports were to be closed to English trade, that special commercial advantages were to be given to French merchants, that French Guiana was to be extended to the river Amazon, and that a portion of Portuguese territory was to be ceded to Spain until Trinidad and Minorca were recovered by the latter power. The Prince Regent of Portugal rejected these hard terms; Spain declared war in the beginning of 1801, and 22,000 veteran French soldiers, under the command of General Leclerc, Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, were sent to the assistance of Spain. The campaign was a very short one. The French troops never came into action; but the Portuguese were twice defeated in pitched battles, and lost some of their fortresses. The Prince Regent sued for peace, and a treaty was signed between Spain and Portugal at Badajoz on the 6th of June 1801. By this treaty the city and district of Olivenza were ceded to Spain, and, by a subsequent arrangement, the limits of French Guiana were extended to the river Amazon. Bonaparte was much disgusted with these treaties, and especially with the continued refusal of Portugal to close her ports to English commerce, and it was many months before he consented to ratify them. England refused to recognise Portugal as an enemy; but an English force occupied the island of Madeira, and the East India Company’s troops garrisoned Goa.

Campaign in Egypt. 1800–1.

When Bonaparte left Egypt he was unable, owing to the stringency of the blockade maintained by the English fleet, to take more than a few companions with him. Kléber, who, as has been said, succeeded him in the command of the French army, soon found himself confronted by a powerful Turkish and Mameluke army. This army he defeated at the battle of Heliopolis on the 20th of March 1800, after which success Egypt again submitted to French rule. On the 14th of June 1800, the very day on which his former comrade Desaix met a soldier’s death at the battle of Marengo, Kléber was assassinated by a Muhammadan fanatic in Cairo. Menou, the new French general in Egypt, was in every way Kléber’s inferior, and concentrated the French troops in the two cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Isolated entirely from the mother country, and unable to receive reinforcements or ammunition, the English government regarded the French in Egypt as an easy prey. On the 19th of March 1801 a powerful English army disembarked at Aboukir, under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby, and defeated the French before Alexandria two days later in a pitched battle, in which Abercromby was killed. Siege was then laid to Alexandria and Cairo, and both cities surrendered to the English general, Lord Hutchinson, before the arrival of a division from India, which, under the command of Sir David Baird, had sailed up the Red Sea, marched across the Soudan desert, and descended the Nile to Cairo in boats. As a result of these operations, a convention was signed between the French and English generals in Egypt on the 2d of September 1801, by which the French garrisons evacuated all remaining posts, and were conveyed to France in English ships.

The Peace of Amiens. 25th March 1802.

Though neither Bonaparte nor the leaders of English political opinion believed it possible for a permanent peace to be agreed to in the interests of their respective countries, the outcry of both the English and the French people against the prolonged war made it necessary for their rulers to conclude some kind of a truce. Pitt had in 1801 gone out of office, and his successor Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, declared in favour of a peace policy. The treaty, which is known as the Peace of Amiens, was really nothing more than a truce. Only a very general agreement was come to, and many essential points were left undecided. Both nations needed a rest, and neither government looked upon the Peace of Amiens as affording a permanent solution of their differences. Many loopholes were left, which were certain to afford pretexts for renewing the war to both contracting powers, and of these the most notable was the question of the possession of Malta.