CHAPTER ELEVENBy New Year's Day 18oo France and Napoleon desperately needed peace.
Throughout the nation there was a general war-weariness, and meanwhile
the flames of the Vendee still burned strongly in western France. The
sticking point was the fanatical hostility of the Austrian Baron Thugut to
Napoleon, and Pitt's equally intransigent refusal to make peace with
France while Belgium and Holland remained in French hands. The
theory was that the south coast of England which faced France was steep
and difficult to attack, but the flat east coast, together with an
unfavourable wind pattern, made it difficult for the defenders. The
abiding British fear was that an enemy could assemble large fleets of
transports in the estuaries of the Rhine, Scheidt and Maas, ready to cross
the North Sea in a trice; there was a particular British phobia about the
Scheidt estuary, because the port of Antwerp is inland and cannot be
observed by seaborne blockaders.
How legitimate were these fears? Austria, it is true, having recon
quered most of Italy, could scarcely be expected to return to the
Napoleonic terms of Campo Formio. But the British obsession with
the Low Countries bordered on the irrational, since throughout the
eighteenth century France had proved over and over again incapable of
mounting an invasion of England, with or without the Belgian and Dutch
ports. Moreover, the French revolutionary ideology of 'natural frontiers'
- which on the eastward side meant the Rhine - was as much an item of
faith, and entrenched in all post-1789 French constitutions, as a united
Ireland is in the constitution of Ireland today. It was the irresistible force
against the immovable object: either France would have to abandon
'natural frontiers' or the British would have to give up their traditional
concern with Belgium. Given that France was led by Napoleon and
England by Pitt, the prospects did not look bright.
The intransigence of Thugut and Pitt was a gift to Bonapartist
propaganda. French newspapers played up their implacable hostility,
while Napoleon made all the right moves, using Talleyrand as his agent.
On Christmas Day 1799 Talleyrand put out peace feelers to England,