Who, in the end, defeated Napoleon Bonaparte? This is the question that Robert Harvey, journalist and former MP, asks at the end of his most comprehensive account of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It is pertinent, as he points out, since all the coalition members at one time or another lay claim to the honours:
Dogged Austria deserves a large share of the credit for rising from defeat again and again. Prussia, after its lamentable initial performance, renewed some of its national pride at the end. Russia can claim credit for the 1812 campaign, in which although there was no great feat of Russian arms, the French were completely routed.
Harvey’s final verdict is, however, unequivocal: ‘the lion’s share must surely go to Britain’. Pitt’s and then Grenville’s continental coalition-building, the Royal Navy’s ‘astounding feats’ under Nelson and others like him, and Wellington’s ‘relentless performance’ in the Peninsula; these were the pillars of victory.
It was the failure of France to invade or strangle Britain economically that first frustrated revolutionary and Napoleonic France when continental Europe lay prostrate at his feet; and it was the Peninsular War that first exposed France’s weakness and tied down huge French armies, encouraging first Russia and then Austria and Prussia back into the war.
Indeed, he might even have praised British ministers further for their impressive economic organisation, British gold in large measure subsidising these coalition comebacks, and for the remarkable mobilisation of British and Irish manpower (proportionately, Britain had more men under arms than ever the levée en masse managed).
But it is not uncritical praise. Harvey faults Pitt and Grenville for rising to the French challenge too slowly, and then Castlereagh and Liverpool for ignoring the possibility of peace with France (while, of course, praising the ‘implacable commitment’ with which the defeat of Bonaparte was pursued, ministers being convinced that ‘Napoleon would learn nothing except by defeat’).
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