Citizen Emperor (16 page)

Britain was now the only power left at war with France. After peace had been signed with Austria, Bonaparte, giving in to Talleyrand’s repeated urgings, once again made peace overtures to Britain in March 1801. In fact, Talleyrand had not waited for Bonaparte to come around to his way of thinking and had already put out feelers by sending an envoy, Casimir, Comte de Montrond, to London in January 1801. Montrond, who spoke English well after having spent time in London as an émigré and was a popular figure there, was to discover whether public opinion in England would be favourable to negotiations with the new regime. He learnt that the new prime minister, Henry Addington, and the new secretary of state for foreign affairs, Lord Hawkesbury, were both eager to begin discussions. With Bonaparte’s permission, negotiations were formally begun and continued over a period of six months.

This was possible largely because the man who most opposed revolutionary France in Britain, at least in the government, William Pitt, had fallen from grace after seventeen years in power. The sore point had, ostensibly, been Catholic Emancipation – Pitt had promised it to the Irish as the price for union with Britain, but George III had rejected the notion and refused to compromise – but really a combination of factors led to Pitt resigning in February 1801, including disagreements over how and whether to pursue the war, and his own ill-health.
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Addington, the speaker of the House of Commons, replaced Pitt. The ‘Ministry of All Talents’, as the new British government became known, felt the need for peace.
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Addington did not see much point in continuing, alone, a war that had been going on since 1793. Apart from the fact that there was trouble brewing in Ireland,
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Britain had incurred a vast national debt – of the order of £537 million – and did not have the means to attack the French. Furthermore, poor harvests and the disruption to overseas trade had led to dramatic rises in the price of food within Britain and to enough social unrest to justify fears of revolution.
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The new foreign secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, a man so nervous he was referred to as the ‘grand figitatis’, decided that talks with Bonaparte were called for, and wrote to the French ambassador in London, Louis-Guillaume Otto, to say he was ready to parley.
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It was the beginning of a long, tortuous and complicated negotiation, full of tricks, deceit, complaints, prevarication and what the French call
mauvais foi
(bad faith), in which each side tried to gain a territorial advantage before finally signing preliminaries on 1 October 1801. It was easier to agree on the principles than to spell out the details.
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Paris exploded with joy; shops and boutiques closed while crowds gathered in the streets and gardens; others ran through the Tuileries garden shouting ‘Vive la République! Vive le Premier Consul!’
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The same reaction occurred in England the day the preliminaries were announced in the
London
Gazette
; the people of London celebrated for days.
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‘The world are delighted with the Peace being heartily tired of the War,’ wrote Lord Braybrooke, ‘and none of the people have as yet thought a moment of the terms.’
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A crowd gathered at Otto’s house where he had the word ‘Concord’ illuminated, but it was mistaken by an illiterate mob for the word ‘Conquered’ and caused a disturbance. Otto replaced it with the word ‘Amity’.
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Mail coaches were decorated with laurels and signs reading ‘Peace with France’. The windows on the house of the English pamphleteer and journalist William Cobbett were broken by the crowd because he refused to illuminate them. Similar reactions occurred in other parts of the country. In Durham, a statue of Britannia was crowned with a Phrygian bonnet and a placard announcing ‘No Income Tax’. That, in effect, is how most people interpreted the positive benefits of peace – no troops, no taxes, lower prices.
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When the French envoy, General Lauriston, arrived in London ten days later with his government’s ratification of the preliminaries, and the crowd mistook him for Bonaparte’s brother, they unhitched the horses from his carriage and pulled him along in triumph through the streets from Oxford Road, down the Mall, a street that was exclusively reserved for the royal family, to the residence of the French ambassador in Hertford Street.
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The preliminaries were meant to serve as a guideline and were to be consolidated by talks involving most of the countries that had taken part in the War of the Second Coalition (France, England, Spain, Holland, Portugal and the Ottoman Empire). Both sides expected the details to be worked out quickly, but they dragged on for another six months, during which time the British would be pushed to the brink of war. Indeed, what little goodwill there was among the British public appears to have been exhausted by January 1802 in the face of prolonged negotiations. By that stage, the Cabinet had decided that, if they were not concluded soon, Britain would have to resume war.
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The city of Amiens, a provincial capital of around 40,000 inhabitants, was chosen as the town in which the negotiations were to take place because it was reasonably close to both London and Paris (about 320 kilometres from London and 130 kilometres from Paris). Lord Cornwallis, the same defeated at Yorktown during the American Revolution in 1781, represented the British at Amiens. Halfway through the negotiations, Bonaparte started to interfere, as he had done with Lunéville, sending Joseph to negotiate on his behalf. Cornwallis described Joseph as ‘a well meaning, although not a very able, man’.
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Joseph’s relative inexperience, and Bonaparte’s meddling, probably dragged things on longer than necessary. Cornwallis, on the other hand, sixty-four years of age and therefore Joseph’s senior by three decades, had years of administration, as well as his service in the military, behind him.
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Even so, he was not helped in this task by a number of people in the British delegation who come across as insufferable snobs. Colonel Nightingall, for example, considered all Frenchmen he came into contact with to be ‘rogues’. He described Joseph, although ‘rather the best among them’, as not at all having the ‘manners of a gentleman’, even if he meant well and was civil. Joseph’s wife, Julie, was described as a ‘very short, very thin, very ugly, and very vulgar little woman’.
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The prefect of the department, whom the colonel’s servant insisted on calling the ‘Perfect’, was described as a ‘very ill-looking scoundrel’. Joseph and the French were much more discreet. We don’t really know what Joseph thought of the English, although he was at pains to portray Cornwallis in his memoirs as a hale and hearty fellow who wanted to do away with etiquette and negotiate frankly and in good faith.
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The negotiations nevertheless progressed in an atmosphere of mutual distrust and some disdain, and in conditions that were less than ideal.

We can forgo the tedious details surrounding the prolonged negotiations.
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Of more interest is the final treaty as well as the reaction to the announcement of the peace preliminaries. By the Peace of Amiens the British government was, effectively, recognizing French hegemony on the Continent, and this did not sit well with a largely Francophobe English political elite. The peace terms were thus universally condemned in Britain. Much of the venom was directed at Henry Addington, and British historians since then have attacked the government as largely weak and ineffective, often citing as proof the fact that the French capitulation in Egypt arrived in London one day after the signing of the preliminaries. There was, in fact, a general willingness on the part of many members of parliament to continue the war and the capitulation in Egypt would have given them the excuse needed to do so. Hawkesbury was relieved that the news arrived when it did, too late to influence the outcome of the negotiations.
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Some, such as Lord Auckland, claimed to have been ashamed of the terms, while former government ministers like William Windham exaggeratedly called the preliminaries ‘the death-blow to the country’.
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Lord Grenville disapproved on the grounds that the government of France ‘knew no bounds, either moral or civil’, and was ‘ruled by no principles’, and that under the circumstances to argue that Bonaparte’s ambition had been circumscribed was ‘criminal nonsense’.
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Lord Malmesbury ‘disapproved’ of the treaty and thought that it would not last long.
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Lord Minto wrote that, among the educated, ‘dissatisfaction with the peace is the prevailing sentiment’.
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George III referred to it as an ‘experimental peace’.
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Admittedly, most of these men were ‘ultra’ royalists who hated Addington and who saw the clash with France in terms of ideology.
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But even members of the Whig opposition, in favour of peace with France, found the terms unacceptable. Politicians, however, do not always represent the views of the people.

If Britain had given up everything, nothing it gave up had belonged to it in the first place. Besides, Britain was, realistically, in no position to continue the struggle alone. Its only allies – Portugal, Naples and the Ottoman Empire – were ineffectual. Bonaparte had ordered Spanish troops into Portugal to block the ports there to British shipping, a foretaste of his Iberian policy in years to come. An added impetus to concluding peace was given by the condition of the British economy (exacerbated by crop failures in 1799 and 1800, and the ban on British exports imposed by the League of Armed Neutrality), the state of the country’s finances and the rioting that was taking place at home as a result of high food prices. To some, this looked like the French Revolution all over again.
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As with Lunéville, news of peace with Britain resulted in an outpouring of affection for Bonaparte. The populations of Paris and the northern departments, not to mention the large commercial ports that had suffered considerably during the war, were elated.
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Celebrations took place in Bordeaux and Rouen.
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This time, however, the affection was not merely official. People from all walks of life felt the need to write to Bonaparte to express their gratitude and admiration.
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Admittedly, some of these letters were self-interested, like that from an octogenarian officer, former general of a division. He wrote to add his congratulations ‘to those of all good Frenchmen on the occasion of the definitive peace, due to your great spirit, and that is the greatest achievement of your immortal glory’, but then he went on to ask Bonaparte to help his family.
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Most, however, were completely altruistic, such as the letter from a commissary in Bordeaux, who wrote, ‘To the well deserved title of victor and magnanimous conqueror is joined that of universal peacemaker. Blessed be the titulary God of France who in his goodness gave us in your person such a rare gift.’
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One gets the impression reading these letters that people expected peace to be permanent, which is why they were so ecstatic. One cannot underestimate the impact Amiens made on the people of France.

Talleyrand conceded, ‘One can say without the slightest exaggeration that at the time of the Peace of Amiens, France enjoyed, in foreign relations, a power, a glory, and an influence beyond any the most ambitious mind could have desired for her. And what rendered this situation even more wonderful was the rapidity with which it had been accomplished.’
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In effect, in the space of about two and a half years, between November 1799 when Bonaparte came to power and June 1802 when the Consular regime signed a peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, France ensured that it was not at war with anyone for the first time since April 1792. Bonaparte was consequently referred to as the ‘august pacifier of the world’.
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To bring the point home, the festivities celebrating Amiens were timed to coincide with the second anniversary of the coup of Brumaire, confirming the trust that many people placed in Bonaparte; he had ushered in a period of peace in which the peoples of Europe were now ‘united in one single family’.
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Some contemporaries at least believed Amiens to be not only the end of the war, but also the end of the Revolution.
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