In 1807, Charles Williams, who, under the pseudonym Ansell, was one of the leading caricaturists of his age, responded to the Battle of Eylau with an unusual satire (Figure 5.1). The composition played on tropes of British caricature with, at its core, a belittled emperor trapped in the clutches of the Russian bear, desperate to save face through propagandist bulletins, yet hardly concealing his ambition to conquer the East. Unusually, his army’s ‘winter quarters’ featured a space rarely represented in caricatures of the period: a prison. This depiction is revealing and raises questions about the significance of captivity during the conflict. Here, the prisoners are not subject to derision. Only the façade of a jail is to be seen. Inscribed ‘Prisoners of War’ and surmounted by a Russian Eagle, the building confines a mass of indistinct faces pressed against heavily barred windows. These are presumably the ‘7,000 Prisoners’ from Napoleon’s legions mentioned in the darkening cloud of news that Talleyrand is muffling with a dispatch trumpeting the Emperor’s victory to Paris.

Heroism is a category that seems integral to our understanding of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, as indeed it was for those who participated in them, whether on the battlefield or as more distant denizens of what Mary Favret has termed ‘war-time’, the unique temporal sensorium that connected far-flung individuals to a broader concept of total war.1 Central to this category was, of course, the figure of Napoleon himself. The Emperor was, as Thomas Carlyle memorably dubbed him in his May 1840 lectures, published a year later as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ‘our last Great Man!’2 Yet despite his paradigmatic status, for Carlyle Napoleon’s undoing could be found in his precipitous shift away from Enlightened rationalism. Grounding his power in charismatic sincerity combined with numinous sensory overload, the Emperor increasingly embraced spectacular effects, making them part of his personal mythology; ‘Napoleon has words in him which are like Austerlitz Battles’, wrote Carlyle. The end result was, for Carlyle, a free-floating approach to truth, and the promulgation of a belief in what might now be termed ‘fake news’. This myth-making process could be discerned most explicitly in the diverse visual culture of the Napoleonic period that produced and circulated concepts of heroism. Whether addressed by way of overtly propagandistic images that sought to reframe, divert, or amplify authentic military testimony, or through attempts to profit from war in works that appealed directly to the whims of the market, heroism was a highly emotive yet fundamentally unstable category. Although his own writing was itself deeply imagistic, Carlyle did not make this point overtly.

The Napoleonic Wars marked one of the deepest crises in the history of the Roman Church throughout Europe. For Catholicism, the experiences of the 1790s were cataclysmic. In France, Gallicanism was riven by a schism between those clerics who supported the Revolution of 1789 and those who had remained loyal to Rome. In the west of France, such tensions precipitated civil war. Across the Rhine, the destruction of the ecclesiastical principalities, which had been a staple of the Holy Roman Empire’s complex system of governance, had thrown the Germanic Church into chaos. Beyond the Alps, the invasion of Italy had led to the arrest of Pius VI, who died in Valence in 1799 a French captive. This list of disasters made the future of the Roman Church precarious.

Ecclesiastical historiography has been polarised when it comes to the French imperium’s impact on Catholicism. Napoleon is reincarnated as an Attila the Hun who ushered a new Babylonian captivity for Christendom.

As has often been mentioned in these volumes, experience of war was the overriding common denominator for people living in Europe in the period from 1789 to 1815. Not surprisingly, a popular genre in the music of the period also mirrors (and acts as a prism for) this protracted period of warfare. Two accidents accompanied this: first, the advent of the new, relatively affordable keyboard instrument, expressive par excellence, the fortepiano, which (unlike the harpsichord) could play both loud AND soft (as the name implied); and second, the growth in the interest in music, an interest shared across all social classes. Add to this mix a taste for sublime events expressing strong emotions (firework displays, balloon ascents, violent storms, waterfalls …), and the terrain was ready for the fad in France for descriptive music in general and the ‘pièce militaire et historique’ or musical ‘bataille’ for fortepiano in particular. The subject has been systematically rejected as worthy of study by writers on music history, both at the time and now, because this sort of music was deemed ‘fatuous’, written for an unmusical amateur musician, mostly female.1 But, so popular were these fortepiano battle pieces composed at the end of the eighteenth century that they were still being performed at the end of the nineteenth. This form of ‘political’ music had an influence way beyond its supposed musical shortcomings, bringing the battle into the drawing room. This essay charts the rise of the programmatic keyboard battle piece, with its specific (and novel) baggage of accompanying texts, and its presence in French home music, though it should be noted that the same phenomenon could be charted in Britain and Germany.

The organisation of judicial system and the Napoleonic Wars evolved hand in hand.1 Indeed, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars unfolded while massive and rapid reforms were transforming France’s legal and judicial system from that of the ancien régime. These reforms upended earlier legal norms and thoroughly remodelled human and institutional judicial structures, as well as practices of conflict regulation, law and order, and repression. This unprecedented revolution in judicial, penal and policing frameworks was later extended to territories conquered by the armies of the Republic and the Empire, particularly territories in Italy, Belgium and the Rhineland, and up to fifty departments of the ‘Grand Empire’ at the height of its expansion in 1811–12, including parts of the Netherlands, northern Germany, Switzerland and Dalmatia. Satellite states also came under the influence of this revolution, and its imprint on Western Europe lasted well into the mid-nineteenth century.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Scandinavia consisted of the two composite states of Denmark and Sweden.1 The Danish state comprised the Kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the Danish Duchy of Schleswig, the German Duchy of Holstein, the North Atlantic dependencies of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, and overseas colonies in the West Indies, the East Indies and the Gold Coast. In total, a population of 2.5 million people. The Swedish state consisted of Sweden proper, Finland, the Duchy of Swedish Pomerania in Germany, the Hansa town of Wismar, and Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean. All in all, a total population of 3.3 people (Map 21.1).

Until relatively recently histories of the Napoleonic Wars were very often written from a French perspective, focusing primarily on the military campaigns conducted by Napoleon between 1803 and 1815 and on the coalitions of European states that were formed to repel him. The Wars were generally seen as Napoleon’s attempt to overturn the existing diplomatic and political order and create a new world empire in his own image. Napoleon must, of course, shoulder much of the responsibility for these years of endless conflict and for the deaths of so many men and women, both soldiers and civilians, that it caused; no amount of revisionism can absolve him of that. Besides, he is undeniably the dominant figure of the era. But it is important, nevertheless, to draw a clear distinction between the history of the Napoleonic Wars and that of the Empire or of Napoleon’s personal trajectory.

One thing is certain about the French Revolutionary Wars, 1792–9: their effects far outran anything predictable from their causes. A war that everyone expected to end quickly dragged on with constantly changing combatants. The French started the war in a spirit of self-defence that rapidly morphed into a war of liberation and then a war of conquest and occupation. The other European powers entered the war to hold back the tide of revolution and soon found themselves defending their very existence as they watched the revolutionary tide flow and ebb and flow again, eroding every previous assumption made about the organisation of states and armies.

The aims of French foreign policy at the end of the Directory and the beginning of the Consulate no longer had much in common with those proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly when war was declared in April 1792. Their ambitions in both territorial and philosophical terms – in the former case securing the natural limits represented by the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees, in the latter the application everywhere else of the right of peoples to self-determination1 – were soon relegated to statements of intent. They were also of course in some respects contradictory: the rights of peoples in regions destined for annexation were by definition denied. Without entirely dismissing these generous, albeit now secondary aims, the revolutionary crusade had metamorphosed into an expansionism that mirrored more traditional economic and strategic interests.

Bonapartism arose in response to disorders unleashed in France by incessant struggle between forces associated with the Revolution of 1789 and counter-revolutionary forces associated with the ancien régime. If they are to endure, all ‘isms’ must subsequently evolve as circumstances alter, and Bonapartism was no exception. As a political movement directed towards the acquisition or retention of power, Bonapartism began to emerge only after the first fall of Napoleon in 1814, and even then it lacked organisation and doctrinal clarity until the 1840s. While they helped prepare a receptive audience for the organisation of a distinct movement, neither the cult nor the legend of Napoleon fully constituted Bonapartism and, for that matter, they both outlived it.

This vision of centralised, top-down administrative efficiency is commonly regarded as quintessentially Napoleonic. It seems far removed from the idealism and indeed localism of 1789. The evolution of French legal thinking on the ideal relationship between the administration and people can be tracked at the most fundamental level in the constitutions of 1791, 1793, 1795 and 1799.2 The 1791 constitution envisages administrators as essentially private citizens elected temporarily to perform precisely defined and limited public functions, all under the supervision of a king demoted by the same constitution from divinely ordained sovereign to bureaucrat-in-chief. The ‘Jacobin’ 1793 constitution, unsurprisingly, strengthens the themes of equality and disinterested duty, but adds a paranoid tone in its implication that the administration might at any point be corrupted and turn into an oppressive instrument. The 1795 constitution avoids the hysterical rhetoric, but nonetheless shows a concern that at the very least administrative bodies are prone to nepotism and petty place seeking.

The customary chronology in the discussion of war and its causes was that of a decline in ideological factors between the ‘Wars of Religion’ and the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars in 1792, although bellicosity remained a key factor. However, this is very much an agenda that is set by Western concerns and developments. In that, it focuses not only on the Western interest in Western history, but also on a teleological focus on a state system supposedly created by the ‘Westphalian Settlement’, the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that brought to an end the Thirty Years War. That settlement is commonly presented as a triumph of reason and restraint, in the shape of an agreement to operate an international system based on the mutual respect of sovereign powers and, in particular, an agreement to accept confessional plurality, at least in the form of different types of Christianity, as sole state religions.

Perhaps no other part of Europe was transformed more by the Napoleonic whirlwind than German-speaking Central Europe. Years of war destroyed the venerable Holy Roman Empire and almost all the states within it, while radically altering the shape and socio-economic systems of those that remained. Although the German Habsburgs managed to survive they, too, were compelled to adjust to the new realities of the revolutionary age. Even before the first shots were fired, they lost the security they had derived from their admittedly tepid alliance with Bourbon France. Whereas they lost the rich Austrian Netherlands barely a year into the conflict, the revolution in military and diplomatic tactics that Napoleon Bonaparte employed inflicted far worse damage over the ensuing two decades.

After 18 Brumaire, Napoleon Bonaparte judged the Iberian Peninsula’s two kingdoms differently. Given Portugal’s close, long-standing ties with Britain, he counted the Portuguese among France’s enemies, while he treated Spain, at least formally, as an ally (the alliance between Spain and France that was drawn up in 1796 remained unchanged until 1808). As a result, his plans for the two countries were different: Portugal was to be subjugated, by force if need be, in order to cut it off from British influence; as for Spain, it was only necessary to exercise enough control over its leaders to ensure that the country would be a docile accessory to French policy. In practice, however, Napoleon linked the destinies of the two kingdoms and, as had been the case during the Directory, he planned actions against the enemy nation with the expectation of the support of his ally. In other words, he involved Spain every time he intervened in Portugal.

‘It is not our business to collect trophies, but to try … [to] bring back the world to peaceful habits’, remarked Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo.1 Castlereagh’s image of his country as an impartial arbiter was not shared by other European powers, with whom Britain had formed seven coalitions during the twenty-two years of the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. Great Britain was more often impugned by them as ‘Perfidious Albion’, with a grasping imperial and commercial policy and a divide-and-rule approach to its nearest neighbours. Nonetheless, Castlereagh’s claim did convey certain realities about the position adopted by the British state throughout the two final coalitions against Napoleonic France. With the significant exception of Hanover (of direct concern to King George III in his capacity as hereditary elector) and strategic outposts in the Mediterranean, Britain did not have any major European territorial demands in the war, or the peace that followed.

For many decades, the Napoleonic Wars were among the most popular subjects of historical films. In its approximately 125 years of existence, European cinema brought these wars, and their various historical figures and facets, back to life on the screen in more than 250 feature films.1 And Napoleon Bonaparte, the chief protagonist of these events, is one of the most frequently filmed historical figures ever.2 A major cause for this popularity, and for the high number of films produced, was the enormous, pan-European dimension of the historical events depicted. Filmgoers from Lisbon to Moscow saw stories that not only dealt with decisive turning points in the lives of Napoleon’s contemporaries but also resulted in social and political upheavals reaching to the remotest corners of the continent. The Napoleonic Wars represented an epochal threshold that permanently changed the everyday lives and imaginations of millions of contemporaries and had an enduring impact up until the era of the picture palaces of modern Europe in the twentieth century.