Alfred Thayer Mahan - The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812, Vol II

It will be observed that this collision occurred in the very midst of the negotiations between Austria and France, to which Great Britain claimed the right to be a party. The whole vexed question of neutral and belligerent rights was thus violently raised, at a moment most inauspicious to the allies and most favorable to Bonaparte. The latter, crowned with victory upon the Continent, found every neutral commercial state disposed to side with him in contesting positions considered by Great Britain to be vital to her safety. It was for him to foster this disposition and combine the separate powers into one great effort, before which the Mistress of the Seas should be compelled to recede and submit. The occasion here arose, as it were spontaneously, to realize what became the great dream of his life and ultimately led him to his ruin,—to unite the Continent against the British Islands and, as he phrased it, "to conquer the sea by the land." Circumstances, partly anterior to his rise to power, and partly contrived by his sagacious policy during the previous few months, particularly favored at this moment such a league, for which the affair of the Danish convoy supplied an impulse, and the prostration of Great Britain's ally, Austria, an opportunity. Bonaparte underestimated the vitality and influence of a state upon which centred a far-reaching commercial system, and in valuing naval power he did not appreciate that a mere mass of ships had not the weight he himself was able to impart to a mass of men. He never fully understood the maritime problems with which from time to time he had to deal; but he showed wonderful skill at this critical period in combining against his principal enemy an opposition, for which Prussia afforded the body and the hot temper of the Czar the animating soul.

Since 1795 Prussia had shut herself up to a rigorous neutrality, in which were embraced the North German states. Under this system, during the maritime war, the commerce of the larger part of the Continent poured in through these states—by the great German rivers, the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe—and through the cities of Hamburg and Bremen. The tonnage clearing from Great Britain alone to North Germany increased from 120,000 in 1792 to 389,000 in 1800; a traffic of which Prussia took the lion's share. To these advantages of neutral territory it was desirable to join the utmost freedom for neutral navigation. Upon this Great Britain bore heavily; but so large a proportion of the trade was done through her, and the sea was so entirely under the power of her navy, that prudence had so far dictated acquiescence in her claims, even when not admitted. This was particularly the case while Russia, under Catherine II., and in the first years of her son, tacitly or openly supported Great Britain; and while Austria, though badly beaten in the field, remained unshaken in power. The weaker maritime countries, Sweden, Denmark, and the United States of America, were determined by similar motives. They groaned under the British exactions; but the expansion of their commerce outweighed the injuries received, and submission was less hurtful than resistance in arms. Russia herself, though not strictly a maritime state, was a large producer of articles which were mainly carried by British ships and for which England was the chief customer. The material interests of Russia, and especially of the powerful nobles, were therefore bound up with peace with Great Britain; but an absolute monarch could disregard this fact, at least for a time. The furious, impulsive temper of Paul I., if aroused, was quite capable of overleaping all prudential considerations, of using the colossal power of his empire to support the other states, and even of compelling them to act in concert with him.

Such were the discordant elements which Bonaparte had to reconcile into a common effort: on the one hand, the strong though short-sighted mercantile interests, which to retain great present advantages would favor submission rather than resistance to the exactions of Great Britain. These were represented by the development of carrying trade in the neutral Baltic states, by the enlarged commerce of Prussia and North Germany,—which through their neutrality in a maritime war had become the highway of intercourse between the Continent and the outer world,—and by the productions of Russia, which formed the revenue of her great proprietors, and found their way to market wholly by sea. Bound together by the close relations which commerce breeds between states, and by the dependence of each upon the capital and mercantile system of Great Britain, these interests constituted the prosperity of nations, and could by no rulers be lightly disregarded. On the other hand stood the dignity of neutral flags and their permanent interests,—always contrary to those of belligerents,—the ambition of Prussia and her jealousy of Austria, and finally the chivalrous, reckless, half insane Paul I., seeking now with all the bitterness of personal feeling to gratify his resentment against his late allies.

Bonaparte had already begun to work upon the Czar as well as upon the neutral powers. Closely observing the political horizon from his first accession to office, he had noted every condition capable of raising embarrassments to Great Britain, whom his unerring military insight had long before recognized 12 12 See ante, p, 251. as the key to a military situation, in which his own object was the predominance of France, not only on the Continent but throughout the world. Sagacious a statesman as he was, and clearly as he recognized the power of moral and political motives, his ideal of control was essentially forcible, based upon superior armies and superior fleets; and consequently every political problem was by him viewed much as a campaign, in which forces were to be moved, combined, and finally massed upon the vital points of an enemy's position. The power of Great Britain was sea power in its widest sense, commercial and naval; against it, therefore, he aimed to effect such a combination as would both destroy her commerce and cripple her navy. The impotence of France and Spain, united, to injure the one or the other had been clearly shown by repeated defeats, and by the failure of the commerce-destroying so industriously carried on during seven years of war. Far from decaying or languishing, the commerce of Great Britain throve everywhere with redoubled vigor, and her fleets rode triumphant in all seas. There was, however, one quarter in which she had not hitherto been disturbed, except by the quickly extinguished efforts of the Dutch navy; and just there, in the Baltic and North Sea, was the point where, next to the British islands and seas themselves, she was most vulnerable. There was concentrated a great part of her shipping; there was the market for the colonial produce stored in her overflowing warehouses; there also were gathered three navies, whose united masses—manned by hardy seamen trained in a boisterous navigation and sheltered in an enclosed sea of perilous access—might overweight a force already strained to control the Mediterranean, to blockade the hostile arsenals, and to protect the merchant shipping which thronged over every ocean highway.

To close the north of Europe to British trade, and to combine the Baltic navies against that of Great Britain, became thenceforth the fixed ideas of Bonaparte's life. To conciliate Denmark he released a number of Danish ships, which had been arrested by the Directory for submitting to search by British cruisers. The extent of the czar's alienation from his former allies not being at first apparent, he next courted Prussia, the head of the North German neutrality, in whose power it was to arrest British trade both through her own territory and through Hamburg. Prussia was ambitious to play a leading part in Europe. The five years spent by Austria, France, and Great Britain in exhausting warfare, she had used to consolidate her power and husband her resources. She wished now to pose as a mediator, and looked for the time when the prostration of the combatants and her own restored strength would cause them to bend to her influence, and yield her points, through the simple exhibition of her force. The advances and flatteries of the first consul were graciously received, but the path Prussia had traced for herself was to involve no risks—only gains; she wished much, but would venture naught. It was a dangerous part to play, this waiting on opportunity, against such a man as swayed the destinies of the Continent during the next twelve years. From it arose a hesitating, selfish, and timid policy, fluctuating with every breath of danger or hope of advantage, dishonoring the national name, until it ended in Jena and the agonies of humiliation through which the country passed between that disaster and the overthrow of Napoleon. Such a spirit is prone to side with a strong combination and to yield to a masterful external impulse.