personal feelings also entered into play: Pitt was involved in an anti
Bonaparte crusade, Czar Alexander was moved by megalomania and
jealousy of Napoleon; and the Austrian aristocracy by a patrician distaste
for the new upstart empire and its bogus nobility.
The overt aims of the Third Coalition, which was soon supplemented
by Sweden and the Kingdom of Naples, were to expel France fr om
Hanover, Holland and North Germany, to clear the French out of
Switzerland, northern Italy and Naples. The covert aims, divulged only
in secret clauses of the treaty of alliance, were to deny France the 'natural
frontiers' and to restrict her to the borders as in 1791: the ultimate aim of
course was to return Europe to the pre-1789 world of the ancien regime.
On paper Napoleon faced a formidable array of enemies, since the
Austrian army was 250,000 strong, the Russians were expected to put
another 2oo,ooo in the field; and incursions in peripheral roles could be
expected from the Swedes, Neapolitans and British, perhaps providing
another 50,000 troops in all.
Qu ite undaunted by the odds, Napoleon revelled in the prospect of
new battles. On 25 August he sent Murat to Germany on a secret
reconnaissance mission and the same day wrote to Talleyrand: 'The die is
cast. The operation has begun. On the 17th I will be in Germany with
20o,ooo men.' But he had jumped the gun, for there were factors he had
overlooked. The outbreak of a general European war provoked a crisis at
the Bank of France. Rumours were rife that Napoleon had emptied the
bank's coffers when he left on campaign. The ensuing panic increased the
embarrassment of a bank which had already been compromised by an
unwise speculation in Mexican piastres by the Ministry for the Treasury.
A low tax yield in r8o4 left the State unprepared for the heavy expenses
of the Grand Army on active campaign. Moreover, the r8o6 economic
depression in France was widely blamed on the general crisis of
confidence arising from the unpopular return to large-scale continental
hostilities (the two-year struggle against England often seemed from
France to be a mere 'phoney war').
Napoleon was caught in a dilemma between needing a quick military
victory to restore public confidence and needing to return to Paris to put
the economy on a proper footing before he could begin campaigning. He
had an additional technical problem about conscription, since he intended
to call up 8o,ooo men in advance of the legal age of twenty. Leaving
Boulogne on 3 September, he arrived in Paris two days later and was
obliged to spend three weeks there, passing emergency measures that
would enable his military plans to mature. His conscription proposals
were intensely unpopular both with the public and the Legislature and to
marcin
(Marcin)
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