| Copyright | ||
|
Home The Napoleonic War, 1803-1815 The Peninsular War and the Fall of Napoleon, 1809-1814 1809-1814; Part 5 |
1809-1814; Part 5With 1814 the end came. Soult with an army of fifty thousand - for Napoleon could spare him no more - retreated eastward so as to be able to threaten Wellington's flank if he went north, or to draw him away from his true base, the sea, if he followed. Wellington chose the latter course, and won the battles of Orthez and Toulouse, But before Toulouse was fought, the war was really over, as the allies, invading France in overwhelming numbers, had advanced upon Paris and had forced Napoleon to abdicate. The Peninsular War had been of inestimable importance. It cost Napoleon, according to Wellington's calculations, not far short of half a million men; Napoleon himself called it a "running sore" - a constant drain of money and men which proved fatal to his ambitions. It re-established the prestige of the British army, and it gave Spain the opportunity of showing that no despot, however powerful, can trample upon the independence of a proud nation.So after close on twenty years of war France was beaten back to her own borders. The reasons of her success for the time and her eventual failure lie deeper than the genius of Napoleon and the counterbalancing dogged accuracy of WellingÂton - the compensation which Fate gave us (Both generals were born in 1769. "Fate owed us that compensation" was the comment subsequently made; Wellington was, however, born first) - they lie in what is greater than great men, namely great ideas. At the beginning France stood as the champion of Liberty, and Europe generally was longing for more liberty. Hence, wherever the invading French went, they were more or less welcomed as liberators by the people. This was so in Italy, and Holland, and Germany. Thus the resistance in these countries was often half-hearted, Briefly, it was the new ideas of the Revolution fighting against kings and princes, representatives of the old despotism - and the kings were beaten. As time went on, however, it was revealed that the French did not practise what they preached. They made " war support war": they lived at free quarters in the countries they nominally came to set free, and a taste of this soon lost the favour they had at first won. Napoleon made the change plain. A despot himself, his armies rapidly became the oppressors of Europe instead of its liberators, and this soon bred a national hostility to him. It could not work at once, because his armies were so enormously superior. |
Chronology |
| copyright by www.uuo-ununoctium.info |