Hello, and welcome to Western civ Episode five hundred and seven. France ascendant. By eighteen o six, Napoleon Bonaparte stood at the height of his power. Europe bowed before him or he had been rearranging it by his own hand into new kingdoms, new alliances, and new destinies. From Paris, the Emperor of the French presided over what he now called a quote continental system of order end quote. But around Europe the whispers were nothing short of Roman imperial domination.
The French revolutions ideals of liberty and equality had now long since been transmuted into the language of empire. Napoleon saw himself as a modern day Charlemagne, destined to unify Europe under enlightened administration, guided by his genius, and if he couldn't persuade them by the bayonets of his troops. On March thirtieth, eighteen oh six, Napoleon demonstrated that his family would be the dynasty of a new Europe. He named his older brother Joseph Bonaparte, King of Naples, replacing
the Bourbon rulers who had fled to Sicily. He said, quote, I desire that my brothers will learn to rule end quote, though few doubted that it was Napoleon himself who would continue to rule through them. Others of Napoleon's relatives were equally rewarded. Luis Buonaparte was placed on the throne of Holland, Caroline Bonaparte married the brilliant Marshal Jean Kim Murat, and even the Emperor's stepson, Eugene de Bahnice, was made the Viceroy of Italy. Indeed, it looked like the map of
Europe was being transformed into a Bonaparte family tree. By July the twelfth, eighteen oh six, Napoleon's vision took on an even grander form with the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine, a federation of sixteen German states bound by alliance to France and recognizing Napoleon as their quote unquote protector. One by one, other states Saxony, Westphalia, Bavaria,
Wittenberg all joined. This act effectively shattered the old feudal framework of Central Europe that had been existing since the fall of the Roman Empire. Just a few weeks later, on August the sixth, eighteen oh six, the Holy Roman Empire that thousand year old relic of medieval Christendom was finally informally abolished. The last Emperor, Francis the Second of Austria, laid down the ancient crown and styled himself instead the
Emperor of Austria. Voltaire's old quip that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire had actually finally come true. Europe had been reborn in Napoleon's image at this point, but it was clear that not everyone intended to live under it now. The Kingdom of Prussia, long proud of its military tradition, had watched France's rise with growing alarm. The victories over Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in eighteen oh five had left Napoleon's power on
the continent basically unchecked. Prussian officers fumed. Their young Queen Luis of Mekenberg Streichlitz urged King Frederick Wilhelm the Third to stand up for Germany's honor, and so on September fifteenth, eighteen oh six, Prussia joined Britain and Russia in a new coalition against Napoleon. The Prussian army marched confidently westward, remembering the days of Frederic the Great, but what they
met instead was a master of modern war. On October fourteenth, eighteen oh six, two great battles were fought, both on the same day, Jena and Auerstadt. These were both resounding French victories. At Jena, Napoleon personally led ninety thousand men against the main Prussian force. His troops fought with the precision and speed that had become the hallmark of his Grand army. March divided, fight united, he had said, and
his core system allowed him to do just that. Meanwhile, to the north at Auerstad, Marshal Luis Nicolas, Devout, commanding only twenty seven thousand men, encountered the main Prussian arms under the Duke of Brunswick, nearly twice his size. In one of the most astonishing defeats in military history, Devouts courts utterly destroyed them, The Duke was mortally wounded, and the Prussian army disintegrated in confusion. Within weeks, Napoleon's troops
marched triumphantly into Berlin, Prussia. Once the military terror of Europe was shattered, but Napoleon was not satisfied with battlefield glory. Britain remained the one power that refused to submit, its fleets, ruling the seas, and its gold financing every Continental coalition. Unable to invade the island after the Battle of Trafalgar,
Napoleon instead turned to economic warfare. On November the twenty first, eighteen o six, from the heart of conquered Berlin, he issued the Berlin Decree, declaring that the British Isles were now in a state of blockade. No European port under French influence was legally allowed to trade with Great Britain. It was the beginning of what would become known as the Continental System. The Continental System was nothing more than an attempt to strangle Britain's commerce and then force its
surrender through economic isolation. In theory, of course, it was absolutely brilliant, but in practice the Continental System was just about completely unenforceable. Smugglers thrived, British goods found their way into Europe through neutral ports, and resentments spread among merchants who suddenly found their livelihoods destroyed. But in eighteen oh six Napoleon believed he was building a new economic order, one that would make Europe self sufficient and forever free
from British influence. Now winter eventually came in a nineteen oh seven, and with it the Russian army. Napoleon pursued his remaining enemies across the snowy fields of Poland. The campaign of eighteen oh seven was brutal and slow, fought
through mud, ice and exhaustion. On February the eighth, eighteen oh seven, near the small East Prussian town of Elieu, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, the French and Russian armies clashed in one of the bloodiest that I've seen in most indecisive battles of all of the Napoleonic Wars. Snow fell so thickly that soldiers could barely see ten yards ahead. The dead and dying were frozen in grotesque stillness by the morning light. Marshal Adureau was
nearly annihilated. Whole divisions were lost in the winter storm, yet Napoleon refused to yield. The arrival of Marshal Ni's corps late in the same day saved the French army from total disaster. This is the most terrible of my battles, Napoleon confessed afterwards. But the French proved themselves worthy to be invincible. End quote. Now. Months later, on June the fourteenth, eighteen oh seven, he redeemed what was nothing less than just a grim draw with a decisive victory at Friedland.
There his forces crushed the Russians under General ben Nizzen, driving them back to the river. It was a triumph reminiscent of Austerlitz, and it forced Czar Alexander the first to the negotiating table. On June the twenty fifth, eighteen oh seven, Napoleon and Alexander met dramatically on a raft moored in the middle of the River Nimen between their two armies. Why should we be enemies, Napoleon reportedly asked
the young Czar. Together, we can divide the world. The Treaty of Tiltsit ended hostilities between France and Russia and redrew the map of Europe. Once more. Prussia was humiliated, losing half of its territory. Russia accepted Napoleon's continental system, but in return, Napoleon acknowledged Russia's interests in Finland and all the way to the east. The two emperors embraced for the cameras of history, but honestly neither trusted the other.
For the moment Napoleon's mastery of Europe seemed defeat, with only Britain remaining defiant, but this would be for a moment at the most. Now, the Continental system did require every European port to close its doors to British trade, but one defiant country still refused, Portugal. The Portuguese royal family had centuries old tides to Great Britain and relied heavily on British trade, and so to deal with them,
Napoleon turned to diplomacy cloaked in secrecy. On the twenty seventh of October eighteen oh seven, he signed the Treaty of Fontainebleau with Spain, agreeing to a plan to invade in partition Poland. Spain would take the southern provinces, France would take the north, and the Portuguese monarchy would be driven overseas. But this agreement opened the door to something Napoleon couldn't foresee and couldn't control, the unraveling of his
empire from within. Now. While all this was going on, while Napoleon reorganized Europe's governments, he also turned his mind to education and science. On March seventeenth, eighteen oh eight, he founded the Imperial University, a centralized institution to oversee all higher learning in France. He wrote, it is not enough to conquer, we must educate. The emperor saw himself not just as a general, but as an architect of civilization.
Yet while all the universities were being founded that same spring, his empire started to show signs of crack. The French army had entered Spain ostensibly to enforce the Treaty of Fontainebleau, but soon occupied the country outright. Napoleon's marshals began to treat Spanish towns as conquered territory, and the Spanish court fell into chaos. Napoleon bullied, as one contemporary put it,
the Spanish royal family into abdicating. He then placed his brother Joseph Bonaparte, already the King of Naples, on the throne of Spain, but this time the people refused to accept a Bonaparte as their king. On May the second, eighteen o eight, the citizens of Madrid rose up in spontaneous revolt against the French occupiers. Armed with knives, stones, and just simple fury, they attacked the French patrols wherever they found them in the streets, the Dos de Mayo uprising,
as it became known, was very short, but it was furious. Women, priests, and even some children had joined in the rebellion. It was a sign of things to come, and in response, Napoleon's troops responded with ruthless violence. On the following day, May the third, hundreds of Spanish civilians were executed in reprisal,
whether or not they had participated in the revolt. The Spanish painter Goya later immortalized this horror in his masterpiece The Third of May eighteen oh eight, a stark vision of men facing the rifles of faceless soldiers lit by a single candle of mercy that simply never came. But this didn't end the revolt. In fact, it spread like wildfire across the Iberian Peninsula. Entire provinces rose against French occupation.
Peasants ambushed convoys, priests, blessed insurgents, and local militias took up arms in defense of their homeland. In July eighteen oh eight, as Napoleon formally crowned Joseph Bonaparte, king of Spain, the resistance had already turned into a full scale war. Five French armies advanced into Spain and Portugal to enforce the Emperor's will. But they found themselves not fighting regular soldiers on a pitched battlefield, they found themselves fighting an
entire people. From July sixteenth to July the nineteenth, at the Battle of Bailin, the impossible happened. A French army under General DuPont surrendered to Spanish forces commanded by General Castillanos. It was the first major defeat of a Napoleonic army in open battle. The new shocked Europe. Across the continent. Whispers spread that Napoleon could actually be beaten, that his soldiers were not invincible, and that nations, maybe if they
stood together, could throw off the French yoke. By the end of eighteen oh eight, Napoleon's empire was vast, that's true, its armies seemingly unstoppable, its laws and institutions quickly spreading from the Pyrenees all the way to the border with Russia. But beneath that surface, it was clear that cracks were forming. The Peninsular War, as we'll get into next time, would
drain France's strength for years to come. The alliance with Russia is going to crumble into mistrust, and the continental system will bankrupt allies much faster than it will hurt Great Britain. The Emperor's grand design to unify Europe would begin to unravel under the weight of a variety of contradictions. Napoleon's star in fact burned bright, but by eighteen oh eight it was clear that its descent had already begun. By the beginning of eighteen oh nine, Napoleon looked virtually unbeatable.
His empire stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Vistula River, from the sands of southern Italy all the way to the shores of the North Sea. Old dynasties that had ruled Europe for centuries bowed before him. New kings, a lot of them bonapartes, took their seats on thrones made out of the remains of ancient regimes. But even at this moment of what looked like total supremacy, there were clear that there were cracks in the foundation of this empire.
Between eighteen o nine and eighteen eleven, Napoleon would experience, in very rapid succession triumphs so dazzling that they seemed to confirm his invincibility and reversals that were simultaneously seemingly so small, so subtle, and so unmistakable, that the arc
of his power would quietly begin to descend. And this is at the last part of this episode, the story of those years, the last great expansion, the slow tightening of the continental system, and the rising resistance movement of Europe. So we get to begin by talking about Austria. Austria had been humiliated in eighteen oh five at the Battle of Austerlitz. It was dismantled effectively in eighteen oh six and now completely overshadowed. But Emperor Francis and his advisors
weren't ready to simply disappear. By early eighteen oh nine, they thought that they saw something a moment of French weakness. Napoleon was bogged down in Spain, his armies were dispersed across Europe, and nationalism, still in its infancy, stirred both inside and outside the Empire. And so in the autumn of eighteen oh eight, Austrian diplomats began making the rounds around Europe to test the waters for the idea of a resistance movement, and on April tenth, eighteen o nine,
Austria decided to make a move. Archduke Charles led one of the most professional armies on the continent across the Inn River. Vienna once again was preparing for war, but Napoleon, ever also the rapid strategist, sprang into motion. Within weeks he was on the German frontier, gathering the Grand Army like a general, rearranging lightning poltse. He struck the Austrians at a place called Ekmux on April the twenty second.
The battle itself was chaotic, marked by swirling cavalry charges and defensive squares holding like stone pillars as the storm raged around them, but the French once again won decisively, pushing Charles back towards Bohemia. By the eleventh of May, Napoleon was back in Vienna for the second time in
four years. Charles had not been beaten. He had actually regrouped his army north of the Danube, daring Napoleon to cross, and Napoleon accepted the dare and asper essing battle fought between May the twenty first and made the twenty second. In the year eighteen o nine, the Emperor finally faced his first ever major defeat. French soldiers clung to the villages of Aspern and Essling, while the Danube swollen devoured the bridges that Napoleon had desperately needed. Charles's artillery, on
the other hand, thundered across the river banks. Marshall Lane's Napoleon's close friend, was mortally wounded. In the end, a combination of bad timing in bad weather doomed the French Army to its first ever tactical defeat for the first time in his career. Napoleon had his power checked, and he had been bloodied. But Napoleon did what he always did.
He returned. And so on July the fifth and sixth that Wogram, these exact two armies collided again, this time on a vast open plane, something ideally suited for Napoleonic tactics and for the exact kind of situation that the Grand Army and his Corps divisions were designed to fight on. The heat shimmered. It was a hot July above the wheat fields, and the itillery fire crashed so continuously that afterwards veterans would write back that the earth itself buzzed.
Napoleon unleashed a massive central assault late on the second Day, which buckled the Austrian line and forced the Austrian army into a retreat. It hadn't been a glorious victory, was an austerlitz. It was a tactical victory, and the losses on both sides were massive, but it was enough. It forced the Austrians back to the table and they sued for peace. The Treaty of Schoen, brought signed in October
of eighteen oh nine, punished Vienna harshly. Its territories were taken, its armies reduced, and of course its pride had been broken. Yet in those punitive terms of the treaty, this is a lesson that we're going to learn a lot. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, resentment was built in and years later that resentment would return with terrible force. Now there were other things going on, because in eighteen ten, Napoleon was forty years old and he had no legitimate heir.
His marriage to his wife, Josephine the Empress, once a love story of revolutionary France, had now become unfortunately a politically inconvenient bond. France needed a dynasty, and Napoleon needed a son, and so on, A winter evening, he gathered his family and announced what many suspected, he was going to divorce his wife, Josephine. The official ceremony was stoic Josephine reading a statement of consent through tears. Napoleon rigid
and impassive, but the emotional rupture was unmistakable. The letters from the period, actually written in Napoleon's own hand, show a man who is torn between affection for a wife that he clearly loved and his ambition. It was the latter that would win out, But the question was, then, with a divorce done, what to do with the opening.
So he sought a marriage that would weld his empire into European legitimacy, and he found it in the Habsburg dynasty, the very family that he had repeatedly and recently defeated. After only minor hesitation from Emperor Francis, Austria agreed to give him his young daughter, the Archduchess Marie Luis, who was just eighteen years old. The wedding in April of eighteen ten marked what many see as this simpbolic apex
of Napoleon's power. The former artillery officer from Corsica had now married into one of the oldest royal houses in Europe. Paris celebrated in fountains of light, and diplomats whispered about quote a new Carolingian Empire end quote. But not everybody agreed. Frankly, for a lot of Europeans, this marriage was chilling at best.
It was a signal that Napoleon wanted to enmesh Europe, not just in French administration, but in the French bloodline itself, and this was an era where that still very much mattered, and it didn't take long for the marriage to bear fruit. On March the twentieth, eighteen eleven, in the Tuileries Palace, a child Napoleon the second, the King of Rome, was born. Canons fired exactly one hundred and one times. Crowds packed
the boulevards. The Emperor, holding his infant son, looked out upon his adoring throngs, believing that his dynasty was in fact secure, and politically that's true. The Empire had never been larger. The Confederation of the Rhine stretched across Germany. Italy was firmly under French control, The Dutch Kingdom was effectively annexed. Much of Portugal had been resurrected in the Duchy of Warsaw. Even Spain, though engulfed in rebellion, remained
legally under French occupation. And yet beneath the glittering surface, there was something darker going on the continental system. Napoleon's economic war against Great Britain was strangling European trade. Smugglers had become folk heroes. Cities like Hamburg, once central to European markets, withered. Even Napoleon's allies grew resentful of French economic interference. And then there was Spain and Portugal. There the Peninsular War dragged into its third, fourth and fifth year.
Guerrilla fighters kept ambushing French patrols. British troops under the Duke of Wellington strengthened a foothold in the north. The French marshals complained, newspapers mocked the Emperor's Spanish ulcer, and the war consumed tens of thousands of men, and Russia too was restless. Zara Alexander the First had grown weary of the continental system, and he was suspicious of French intentions to expand into Poland. Diplomats recorded coldness between the
two emperors. A quote unquote icy courtesy that foreshadowed the war to come. Napoleon lean meanwhile, believed that time itself was working against him. He saw around him only conspiracies and hesitation, and so he began quietly and methodically to do what he viewed as a necessary correction to his strategies, a campaign that would fore Russia back into obedience. No one knew it yet, but the path from the cradle of the newborn air would lead directly to the snows
of eighteen twelve. Now, during eighteen eleven, Napoleon also reorganized his empire with relentless energy. Taxation was expanded, censorship intensified, military conscription dug deeper into the youth of Europe. French administrators kept working on the French imperial machinery until it
was perfect and way too big. Everywhere. The Emperor wanted control, control, control, and the Catholic Church felt this, perhaps most sharply, when Pious the seventh refused to recognize Napoleon's territorial reorganizations in Italy. The Emperor simply had him arrested and moved to France. This hadn't happened, of course, since the Babylonian captivity of the Late Middle Ages. Napoleon simply expected that the world would adapt to his will, and for a time it did.
But reactions were starting to shift. Nobles in Vienna were again talking about rebellion, Russian officers were growing concerned that France was right on its doorstep, and British newspapers were starting to predict the Empire's eventual collapse. Even in Paris, there were some whispers that the emperor's reach was starting to outgrow his grasp. Between eighteen oh nine and eighteen eleven,
Napoleon truly reached the peak of his authority. He had married into the oldest monarchy in Europe, he crushed Austria again, and he welcomed the birth of a son who seemed to promise a century of Bonaparte rule. But these were also the years from within which the Empire began to hollow out. The war in Spain stretched like a wound that couldn't close, The continental system alienated even in France's
closest allies. Russia started to drift away, and Napoleon's own governing style grew harder, more brittle, and more dependent on fear than loyalty, And we will return to this story, but not next time. Next time we have to jump back across the pond catch up with the United States, because the United States is actually going to join briefly, these Napoleonic Wars, and we have to set the stage
for that so quickly. We've got to jump back, talk about Thomas Jefferson, and bring ourselves back up to speed.