to the Roman republican qualities of thrift, austerity and asceticism.
Instead Napoleon spent millions on the fountains, waterfalls and frescoes
at the palace. The soldiers of the Consular Guard made a resplendent
show in the courtyard, but this initial impression of imperial splendour
was dwarfed by the great marble staircase within, where hung the great
propaganda masterpiece by David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps.
Napoleon's move to St-Cloud coincided with a downward spiral in
relations with Britain, which brought the two nations back to open
warfare by mid-r8o3. By December r8oz Napoleon had evacuated
Taranto, as required by the Treaty of Amiens, but the British were still
ensconced on Malta in blatant defiance of the same treaty. Moreover,
they had not evacuated Alexandria, also as required by the treaty. As their
ambassador to France, the British government had sent Lord Whitworth,
an arrogant, supercilious oligarch who made it plain that he thought
Napoleon was a low-born Corsican upstart. Meanwhile the British press
carried on a scurrilous campaign of defamation against the First Consul.
Something had to be done urgently.
Responsibility for the resumption of hostilities in r8o3 is usually laid at
Bonaparte's door, but the facts do not bear out this judgement. The fact
that the war party in England, led by Pitt but also including the other two
of the 'three Williams', Pitt's cousin Grenville and Windham, was out of
office, did not significantly alter the basically bellicose thrust of British
foreign policy. So powerful was the war party that the new prime
minister Addington had to appease it by appointing Whitworth, a known
opponent of the peace of Amiens, as ambassador to Paris. Whitworth
entertained a particular animus towards Napoleon, which Bonaparte
reciprocated. The mutual ideological and class-based antagonism was
reinforced at the personal and visceral level: there is a lot of
circumstantial evidence indicating that Napoleon resented the physical
presence of the six-foot tall Whitworth.
On zr February r8o3 Napoleon summoned Whitworth for a dressing
down. He told him he was very disappointed that the Treaty of Amiens
had not led to friendship between the two countries but had produced
'only continual and increasing jealousy and mistrust'. When he asked why
Malta and Alexandria had not been evacuated, Whitworth alluded to the
situation in Piedmont and Switzerland; in the former case France had
annexed the territory and in the latter they had imposed a new
constitution. Since it is often alleged that Napoleon's actions in these two
cases justified the eventual British declaration of war, it is worth
establishing what had happened.
In Piedmont Napoleon asked the exiled and ultra-Catholic king
marcin
(Marcin)
#1