Citizen Emperor (41 page)

This was probably an empty threat. The annexation of the Italian Republic would have aroused Austria to action, and Napoleon knew it. His priority at this time was the invasion of England. In an attempt to placate Austria, Talleyrand suggested he offer the crown to his brother, Joseph. Joseph at first agreed and the affair seemed to have been concluded by 31 December 1804. There is no reason to doubt Napoleon’s sincerity in offering the throne to his brother, despite what some historians have said.
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In doing so, he appeared less threatening to Austria. He even sent a letter to Francis II announcing that his brother would be adopting the Italian mantle.
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However, when Joseph was informed that he would have to renounce his rights to the French throne, he baulked. Several meetings between the two brothers and their representatives were unable to overcome this stand-off.
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It is possible that Joseph declined not so much out of a desire to remain next in line as over the impossibility of reigning in Italy given the likelihood of Napoleon’s regular interference. Napoleon then asked his brother Louis (again) whether he could adopt his newborn son – Napoleon Louis Bonaparte – with the intention of making him King of Italy. Louis, however, refused and was so aggressively against the plan that Napoleon physically threw him out of his office.
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The Emperor even wrote to Lucien asking him to renounce Mme Jouberthon in favour of a throne.
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He received no reply. Napoleon then turned to his adopted son, Eugène de Beauharnais, and named him viceroy of Italy, but this only happened on 7 June. As far as one can tell, Eugène was simply informed about this, not consulted. The appointment left him cold; he was only twenty-three, more interested in having a good time, but in Paris, not Milan, which he did not much like. Suddenly jerked out of a life of pleasure and thrown into the political deep end where he was expected to govern in Napoleon’s name, he had to deal with finances, the administration, justice, religion, the Civil Code and everything involved with governing a country as diverse and heterogeneous as the Kingdom of Italy.
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Eugène, as it turned out, proved a very competent ruler, but his stepfather was very hands-on, controlling the smallest details even while he was away on campaign, virtually running the kingdom by proxy.
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The behaviour of Joseph and Louis under these circumstances, as we saw in the lead-up to the proclamation of the Empire, was not only impolitic but downright disastrous for French foreign policy. Neither of them was capable of thinking beyond his own personal interests. Napoleon’s adoption of the title of ‘King of Italy’, not particularly welcomed by Italian public opinion,
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considerably worsened relations between France and other European powers, particularly Russia and Austria, even though Napoleon attempted to placate Francis with a letter explaining that his intention was to ‘take from myself the crown of Italy and to separate it from the crown of France’.
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Considering that almost in the same breath Napoleon annexed Genoa and Liguria in June 1805 – thus creating three new departments that were added to the six already carved out of the former Kingdom of Piedmont – and that at the same time he created the Principality of Lucca and Piombino, which he then gave to his sister Elisa, his actions were hardly likely to appease Austria.
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Napoleon left Paris at the end of March 1805 and travelled to Milan across the Mont Cénis pass. He stopped at Marengo along the way to commemorate the battle and to inaugurate a monument to the dead. He arrived in Milan on 8 May for a ceremony that was to see him crowned King of Italy two weeks later. He was, according to some contemporary accounts, greeted with an enthusiasm that bordered on the hysterical.
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Women and children cried with joy, and some even threw themselves on their stomachs on the street over which his carriage was to pass, an act which was interpreted by the French as a desire to be crushed by its wheels after having had the pleasure of seeing the Emperor.

Just as Charlemagne was crowned King of Lombardy in 774, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy in the Duomo of Milan on 26 May 1805. It followed the same ceremony as in Notre Dame but was officiated instead by Cardinal Caprara, who though still papal legate to France had become Archbishop of Milan. The pope refused to attend, having since understood that Napoleon was using the Church for his own ends. Italian nobles, unimpressed by the creation of the kingdom, expressed their disapproval by staying away, often pleading poverty as an excuse.
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Again Napoleon crowned himself, using the Iron Crown of Lombardy (it was made of gold but supposedly contained a thin band of iron from the Cross). On this occasion he proclaimed, ‘Iddio me l’ha data, guai a chi la toccherà’ (God gave it to me, woe to anyone who touches it), the words traditionally spoken by all those who received the Lombard crown (and which have since become a common saying in Italy). The legend on his insignia read
Rex totius Italiae
(King of all Italy). This, as it turned out, was to have important repercussions, to the extent that one has to wonder whether Napoleon was entirely aware of what he was doing. Northern Italy was one of the regions where Austria and France had conflicting interests. Indeed, the area had been a bone of contention dating back to Francis I in the sixteenth century, and would remain so until the Austrian army’s ultimate defeat in Italy by the forces of Napoleon III in 1859.

Austria grudgingly accepted an Italian republic, and would even have accepted an Italian monarchy. It might have accepted Napoleon as King of Italy too. What it could not accept, however, was seeing him claim the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
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Napoleon’s incorporation of northern Italy into the French Empire was a violation of the Treaty of Lunéville, which clearly stated that Italy would remain independent of France.
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It was plain, therefore, that Napoleon had no regard for treaties and broke them whenever it suited him (yet he always complained when other powers did not uphold their treaty obligations). When Austria remonstrated with a diplomatically worded note pointing out its concerns – namely, that it would accept the transformation of the Italian Republic into a monarchy as long as it remained independent – it was criticized for sticking its nose in Italian affairs.

The foundation of the Empire, the merger of the French and Italian thrones and the increasing influence of the French in Germany all made the court of Vienna exceedingly apprehensive about its own future. Austria had been directly challenged in what were traditionally considered its geopolitical spheres of influence.
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Not only was Italian independence compromised, but there were rumours of an offensive–defensive alliance between France and Bavaria directed against Austria.
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As early as January 1805, Vienna began to mobilize troops on the Bavarian border on the pretext of setting up a cordon sanitaire against an outbreak of yellow fever. At the same time, a second army started taking up positions on the frontier with Italy, in the Tyrol. This activity was bound to be noticed in Paris, where Talleyrand made it known to his Austrian counterpart that the situation could hardly be tolerated. Although Napoleon did not believe that Austria wanted to go to war, he did the only thing he knew how – he opposed force with force.
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Andrea Appiani the Elder,
Napoleon I, roi d’Italie
(Napoleon I, King of Italy), 1805.

The Rebirth of the Coalition

It was Russia, and not Austria or Britain, at the centre of the new coalition against France, the third since the beginning of the revolutionary wars in 1792.
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The Tsar of Russia, Alexander I, had come to power in 1801 after the assassination of his father Paul. An idealist who was not always in touch with the harsh reality of Russian or European politics, Alexander spent the first few years of his reign consolidating his hold on power and attempting to reform the Russian state. It is traditionally argued that he turned his attention to foreign affairs only once his domestic policies had faltered and then collapsed, but it now seems clear that he was involved in forming a coalition against France well before those reforms were implemented.
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At first, Alexander, like a number of other European statesmen, admired the First Consul for putting an end to the Revolution, but, ironically considering that the Tsar was an absolutist monarch, doubts began to trouble him when Bonaparte declared himself Consul for life in 1802.
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The Tsar’s adviser Adam Czartoryski believed that ‘reason’ would eventually prevail and that Europe or Russia would be able to persuade Bonaparte to adopt more moderate and just principles.
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Czartoryski may very well have been one of the few in Europe to believe that Bonaparte would eventually moderate his ambition. Other Russian politicians, like Count Alexander Vorontsov, chancellor between 1802 and 1804, wrote of the need to stop ‘the perpetual encroachments of the French government whose views tend towards nothing less than destroying all other governments or of making them into allies and vassals’.
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Russia was, however, in much the same manner as Prussia and to a lesser extent Austria, prepared to accept Bonaparte, despite any reservations it may have had, and deal with France as practically as possible. That is why Alexander worked behind the scenes, for a while, to find some sort of solution between France and the other European powers for a general peace settlement.
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He was already thinking of a kind of European federation that would help construct a new European order. Secret negotiations took place between Russia and Britain that would enable Alexander to make a peace offer to Bonaparte that included the British giving up Malta. This would place the allies on the moral high ground. Britain, however, had no intention of giving up Malta and Alexander’s plans fell through. He was left with a poor opinion of Britain’s motives for continuing the war against France.
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But his opinion of Napoleon also deteriorated to the point where the Tsar began to consider him ‘one of the most famous tyrants that history has produced’.
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In June 1804, a few months after the execution of the Duc d’Enghien, Alexander sent an ultimatum to Napoleon demanding that he withdraw from northern Germany and Naples. Napoleon naturally rejected the ultimatum,
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which led to Alexander breaking off relations with France in September. As with much foreign policy during the period, it was a question of Napoleon acting and the other powers reacting.

Alexander was nevertheless hesitant about going to war. ‘The idea of a war weighs on him and torments him,’ wrote Czartoryski.
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The court of Petersburg around this time was divided into (at least) two factions: one, backed by the British and including a number of prominent men who may even have been on their payroll,
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was pushing hard for war; and a non-interventionist group wanted nothing to do with the West. By the end of 1803, the pro-war faction appears to have prevailed. Alexander sent diplomats to Vienna, Berlin and London to sound them out about the possibility of a renewed coalition. London eventually agreed to subsidize Russia to the tune of £1.2 million or the equivalent of fielding an army of about 100,000 men. Other alliance treaties were signed with Austria (November 1804), Sweden (January 1805), Naples (September 1805), the Ottoman Empire (September 1805) and Prussia (November 1805), although the latter was purely defensive.
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Russia was, therefore, the principal agent in a new European concert against France.