This project of descent which the directory had entertained after the peace of Campo-Formio, and the first consul, after the peace of Lunéville, had been resumed with much ardour since the new rupture. At the commencement of 1805, a flotilla of two thousand small vessels, manned by sixteen thousand sailors, carrying an army of one hundred and sixty thousand men, nine thousand horses, and a numerous artillery, had assembled in the ports of Boulogne, Etaples, Wimereux, Ambleteuse. and Calais. The emperor was hastening by his presence the execution of this project, when he learned that England, to avoid the descent with which it was threatened, had prevailed on Austria to come to a rupture with France, and that all the forces of the Austrian monarchy were in motion. Ninety thousand men, under the archduke Ferdinand and general Mack, had crossed the Jura, seized on Munich, and driven out the elector of Bavaria, the ally of France; thirty thousand, under the archduke John, occupied the Tyrol, and the archduke Charles, with one hundred thousand men, was advancing on the Adige. Two Russian armies were preparing to join the Austrians. Pitt had made the greatest efforts to organize this third coalition. The establishment of the kingdom of Italy, the annexation of Genoa and Piedmont to France, the open influence of the emperor over Holland and Switzerland, had again aroused Europe, which now dreaded the ambition of Napoleon as much as it had formerly feared the principles of the revolution. The treaty of alliance between the British ministry and the Russian cabinet had been signed on the 11th of April, 1805, and Austria had acceded to it on the 9th of August.
Napoleon left Boulogne, returned hastily to Paris, repaired to the senate on the 23rd of September, obtained a levy of eighty thousand men, and set out the next day to begin the campaign. He passed the Rhine on the 1st of October, and entered Bavaria on the 6th, with an army of a hundred and sixty thousand men. Masséna held back Prince Charles in Italy, and the emperor carried on the war in Germany at full speed. In a few days he passed the Danube, entered Munich, gained the victory of Wertingen, and forced general Mack to lay down his arms at Ulm. This capitulation disorganized the Austrian army. Napoleon pursued the course of his victories, entered Vienna on the 13th of November, and then marched into Moravia to meet the Russians, round whom the defeated troops had rallied.
On the 2nd of December, 1805, the anniversary of the coronation, the two armies met in the plains of Austerlitz. The enemy amounted to ninety-five thousand men, the French to eighty thousand. On both sides the artillery was formidable. The battle began at sunrise; these enormous masses began to move; the Russian infantry could not stand against the impetuosity of our troops and the manoeuvres of their general. The enemy's left was first cut off; the Russian imperial guard came up to re-establish the communication, and was entirely overwhelmed. The centre experienced the same fate, and at one o'clock in the afternoon the most decisive victory had completed this wonderful campaign. The following day the emperor congratulated the army in a proclamation on the field of battle itself: "Soldiers," said he, "I am satisfied with you. You have adorned your eagles with immortal glory. An army of a hundred thousand men, commanded by the emperors of Russia and Austria, in less than four days has been cut to pieces or dispersed; those who escaped your steel have been drowned in the lakes. Forty flags, the standards of the Russian imperial guard, a hundred and twenty pieces of cannon, twenty generals, more than thirty thousand prisoners, are the result of this ever memorable day. This infantry, so vaunted and so superior in numbers, could not resist your shock, and henceforth you have no more rivals to fear. Thus, in two months, this third coalition has been defeated and dissolved." A truce was concluded with Austria; and the Russians, who might have been cut to pieces, obtained permission to retire by fixed stages.
The peace of Pressburg followed the victories of Ulm and Austerlitz; it was signed on the 26th of December. The house of Austria, which had lost its external possessions, Holland and the Milanese, was now assailed in Germany itself. It gave up the provinces of Dalmatia and Albania to the kingdom of Italy; the territory of the Tyrol, the town of Augsburg, the principality of Eichstett, a part of the territory of Passau, and all its possessions in Swabia, Brisgau, and Ortenau to the electorates of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, which were transformed into kingdoms. The grand duchy of Baden also profited by its spoils. The treaty of Pressburg completed the humiliation of Austria, commenced by the treaty of Campo-Formio, and continued by that of Lunéville. The emperor, on his return to Paris, crowned with so much glory, became the object of such general and wild admiration, that he was himself carried away by the public enthusiasm and intoxicated at his fortune. The different bodies of the state contended among themselves in obedience and flatteries. He received the title of Great, and the senate passed a decree dedicating to him a triumphal monument.
Napoleon became more confirmed in the principle he had espoused. The victory of Marengo and the peace of Lunéville had sanctioned the consulate; the victory of Austerlitz and peace of Pressburg consecrated the empire. The last vestiges of the revolution were abandoned. On the 1st of January, 1806, the Gregorian calendar definitively replaced the republican calendar, after an existence of fourteen years. The Panthéon was again devoted to purposes of worship, and soon even the tribunate ceased to exist. But the emperor aimed especially at extending his dominion over the continent. Ferdinand, king of Naples, having, during the last war, violated the treaty of peace with France, had his states invaded; and Joseph Bonaparte on the 30th of March was declared king of the Two Sicilies. Soon after (June 5th, 1806), Holland was converted into a kingdom, and received as monarch Louis Bonaparte, another brother of the emperor. None of the republics created by the convention, or the directory, now existed. Napoleon, in nominating secondary kings, restored the military hierarchical system, and the titles of the middle ages. He erected Dalmatia, Istria, Friuli, Cadore, Belluno, Conegliano, Treviso, Feltra, Bassano, Vicenza, Padua, and Rovigo into duchies, great fiefs of the empire. Marshal Berthier was invested with the principality of Neufchâtel, the minister Talleyrand with that of Benevento. Prince Borghese and his wife with that of Guastalla, Murat with the grand-duchy of Berg and Clèves. Napoleon, not venturing to destroy the Swiss republic, styled himself its mediator, and completed the organization of his military empire by placing under his dependence the ancient Germanic body. On the 12th of July, 1806, fourteen princes of the south and west of Germany united themselves into the confederation of the Rhine, and recognized Napoleon as their protector. On the 1st of August, they signified to the diet of Ratisbon their separation from the Germanic body. The empire of Germany ceased to exist, and Francis II. abdicated the title by proclamation. By a convention signed at Vienna, on the 15th of December, Prussia exchanged the territories of Anspach, Clèves, and Neufchâtel for the electorate of Hanover. Napoleon had all the west under his power. Absolute master of France and Italy, as emperor and king, he was also master of Spain, by the dependence of that court; of Naples and Holland, by his two brothers; of Switzerland, by the act of mediation; and in Germany he had at his disposal the kings of Bavaria and Wurtemberg, and the confederation of the Rhine against Austria and Prussia. After the peace of Amiens, by supporting liberty he might have made himself the protector of France and the moderator of Europe; but having sought glory in domination, and made conquest the object of his life, he condemned himself to a long struggle, which would inevitably terminate in the dependence of the continent or in his own downfall.
This encroaching progress gave rise to the fourth coalition. Prussia, neutral since the peace of Basle, had, in the last campaign, been on the point of joining the Austro-Russian coalition. The rapidity of the emperor's victories had alone restrained her; but now, alarmed at the aggrandizement of the empire, and encouraged by the fine condition of her troops, she leagued with Russia to drive the French from Germany. The cabinet of Berlin required that the French troops should recross the Rhine, or war would be the consequence. At the same time, it sought to form in the north of Germany a league against the confederation of the south. The emperor, who was in the plenitude of his prosperity and of national enthusiasm, far from submitting to the ultimatum of Prussia, immediately marched against her.
The campaign opened early in October. Napoleon, as usual, overwhelmed the coalition by the promptitude of his marches and the vigour of his measures. On the 14th of October, he destroyed at Jena the military monarchy of Prussia, by a decisive victory; on the 16th, fourteen thousand Prussians threw down their arms at Erfurth; on the 25th, the French army entered Berlin, and the close of 1806 was employed in taking the Prussian fortresses and marching into Poland against the Russian army. The campaign in Poland was less rapid, but as brilliant as that of Prussia. Russia, for the third time, measured its strength with France. Conquered at Zurich and Austerlitz, it was also defeated at Eylau and Friedland. After these memorable battles, the emperor Alexander entered into a negotiation, and concluded at Tilsit, on the 21st of June, 1807, an armistice which was followed by a definitive treaty on the 7th of July.
The peace of Tilsit extended the French domination on the continent. Prussia was reduced to half its extent. In the south of Germany, Napoleon had instituted the two kingdoms of Bavaria and Wurtemberg against Austria; further to the north, he created the two feudatory kingdoms of Saxony and Westphalia against Prussia. That of Saxony, composed of the electorate of that name, and Prussian Poland, called the grand-duchy of Warsaw, was given to the king of Saxony; that of Westphalia comprehended the states of Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick, Fulde, Paderborn, and the greatest part of Hanover, and was given to Jerome Napoleon. The emperor Alexander, acceding to all these arrangements, evacuated Moldavia and Wallachia. Russia, however, though conquered, was the only power unencroached upon. Napoleon followed more than ever in the footsteps of Charlemagne; at his coronation, he had had the crown, sword, and sceptre, of the Frank king carried before him. A pope had crossed the Alps to consecrate his dynasty, and he modelled his states on the vast empire of that conqueror. The revolution sought the establishment of ancient liberty; Napoleon restored the military hierarchy of the middle ages. The former had made citizens, the latter made vassals. The one had changed Europe into republics, the other transformed it into fiefs. Great and powerful as he was, coming immediately after a shock which had exhausted the world by its violence, he was enabled to arrange it for a time according to his pleasure. The grand empire rose internally by its system of administration, which replaced the government of assemblies; its special courts, its lyceums, in which military education was substituted for the republican education of the central schools; its hereditary nobility, which in 1808 completed the establishment of inequality; its civil discipline, which rendered all France like an army obedient to the word of command; and externally by its secondary kingdoms, its confederate states, its great fiefs, and its supreme chief. Napoleon, no longer meeting resistance anywhere, could command from one end of the continent to the other.
At this period all the emperor's attention was directed to England, the only power that could secure itself from his attacks. Pitt had been dead a year, but the British cabinet followed with much ardour and pertinacity his plans with respect to France. After having vainly formed a third and a fourth coalition, it did not lay down arms. It was a war to the death. Great Britain had declared France in a state of blockade, and furnished the emperor with the means of cutting off its continental intercourse by a similar measure. The continental blockade, which began in 1807, was the second period of Bonaparte's system. In order to attain universal and uncontested supremacy, he made use of arms against the continent, and the cessation of commerce against England. But in forbidding to the continental states all communication with England, he was preparing new difficulties for himself, and soon added to the animosity of opinion excited by his despotism, and the hatred of states produced by his conquering domination, the exasperation of private interests and commercial suffering occasioned by the blockade.
Yet all the powers seemed united in the same design. England was placed under the ban of continental Europe, at the peace. Russia and Denmark in the Northern Seas; France, Spain, and Holland, in the Mediterranean and the ocean, were obliged to declare against it. This period was the height of the imperial sway. Napoleon employed all his activity and all his genius in creating maritime resources capable of counter-balancing the forces of England, which had then eleven hundred ships of war of every class. He caused ports to be constructed, coasts to be fortified, ships to be built and prepared, everything for combating in a few years upon this new battle-field. But before that moment arrived, he wished to secure the Spanish peninsula, and to found his dynasty there, for the purpose of introducing a firmer and more favourable policy. The expedition of Portugal in 1807, and the invasion of Spain in 1808, began for him and for Europe a new order of events.