Few persons in England now cherished any doubts as to the First Consul's hatred of the nation which stood between him and his oriental designs. Ministers alone knew the extent of those plans: but every ploughboy could feel the malice of an act which cooped up innocent travellers on the flimsiest of pretexts. National ardour, and, alas, national hatred were deeply stirred.[[258]] The[pg.427] Whigs, who had paraded the clemency of Napoleon, were at once helpless, and found themselves reduced to impotence for wellnigh a generation; and the Tories, who seemed the exponents of a national policy, were left in power until the stream of democracy, dammed up by war in 1793 and again in 1803, asserted its full force in the later movement for reform.
Yet the opinion often expressed by pamphleteers, that the war of 1803 was undertaken to compel France to abandon her republican principles, is devoid of a shred of evidence in its favour. After 1802 there were no French republican principles to be combated; they had already been jettisoned; and, since Bonaparte had crushed the Jacobins, his personal claims were favourably regarded at Whitehall, Addington even assuring the French envoy that he would welcome the establishment of hereditary succession in the First Consul's family.[[259]] But while Bonaparte's own conduct served to refute the notion that the war of 1803 was a war of principles, his masterful policy in Europe and the Levant convinced every well-informed man that peace was impossible; and the rupture was accompanied by acts and insults to the "nation of shopkeepers" that could be avenged only by torrents of blood. Diatribes against perfidious Albion filled the French Press and overflowed into splenetic pamphlets, one of which bade odious England tremble under the consciousness of her bad faith and the expectation of swift and condign chastisement. Such was the spirit in which these nations rushed to arms; and the conflict was scarcely to cease until Napoleon was flung out into the solitudes of the southern Atlantic.
The importance of the rupture of the Peace of Amiens will be realized if we briefly survey Bonaparte's position[pg.428] after that treaty was signed. He had regained for his adopted country a colonial empire and had given away not a single French island. France was raised to a position of assured strength far preferable to the perilous heights attained later on at Tilsit. In Australia there was a prospect that the tricolour would wave over areas as great and settlements as prosperous as those of New South Wales and the infant town of Sydney. From the Ile de France and the Cape of Good Hope as convenient bases of operations, British India could easily be assailed; and a Franco-Mahratta alliance promised to yield a victory over the troops of the East India Company. In Europe the imminent collapse of the Turkish Empire invited a partition, whence France might hope to gain Egypt and the Morea. The Ionian Isles were ready to accept French annexation; and, if England withdrew her troops from Malta, the fate of the weak Order of St. John could scarcely be a matter of doubt.
For the fulfilment of these bright hopes one thing alone was needed, a policy of peace and naval preparation. As yet Napoleon's navy was comparatively weak. In March, 1803, he had only forty-three line-of-battle ships, ten of which were on distant stations; but he had ordered twenty-three more to be built—ten of them in Holland; and, with the harbours of France, Holland, Flanders, and Northern Italy at his disposal, he might hope, at the close of 1804, to confront the flag of St. George with a superiority of force. That was the time which his secret instructions to Decaen marked out for the outbreak of the war that would yield to the tricolour a world-wide supremacy.
These schemes miscarried owing to the impetuosity of their contriver. Hustled out of the arena of European politics, and threatened with French supremacy in the other Continents, England forthwith drew the sword; and her action, cutting athwart the far-reaching web of the Napoleonic intrigues, forced France to forego her oceanic plans, to muster her forces on the Straits of Dover, and thereby to yield to the English race the [pg.429] supremacy in Louisiana, India, and Australia, leaving also the destinies of Egypt to be decided in a later age. Viewed from the standpoint of racial expansion, the renewal of war in 1803 is the greatest event of the century.
[Since this chapter was printed, articles on the same subject have appeared in the "Revue Historique" (March-June, 1901) by M. Philippson, which take almost the same view as that here presented. I cannot, however, agree with the learned writer that Napoleon wanted war. I think he did not, until his navy was ready; but it was not in him to give way.]
NOTE TO THE FIFTH EDITION
M. Coquelle, in a work which has been translated into English by Mr. Gordon D. Knox (G. Bell and Sons, Ltd.), has shown clearly that the non-evacuation of Holland by Napoleon's troops and the subjection of that Republic to French influence formed the chief causes of war. I refer my readers to that work for details of the negotiations in their final stages.