The first consul spent the winter and spring of 1799–1800 reorganizing the army and preparing for an attack on Austria alone, Russia having withdrawn from the anti-French coalition. With his usual quick assessment of the situation, he saw the strategic importance of the Swiss Confederation, from which he would be free to outflank the Austrian armies either in Germany or in Italy as he might see fit. His past successes made him choose Italy. Taking his army across the Great St. Bernard Pass before the snow melted, he appeared unexpectedly behind the Austrian army besieging Genoa. The Battle of Marengo in June gave the French command of the Po valley as far as the Adige, and in December another French army defeated the Austrians in Germany. Austria was forced to sign the Treaty of Lunéville of February 1801, whereby France’s right to the natural frontiers that Julius Caesar had given to Gaul—namely, the Rhine, the Alps, and the Pyrenees—was recognized.

Great Britain alone remained at war with France, but it soon tired of the struggle. Preliminaries of peace, concluded in London in October 1801, put an end to hostilities, and peace was signed at Amiens on March 27, 1802.

General peace was reestablished in Europe. The first consul’s prestige increased still more, and his friends—at his suggestion—proposed that a “token of national gratitude” should be offered to him. In May 1802 it was decided that the French people should vote in referendum on the following question: “Shall Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?” In August an overwhelming vote granted him the prolongation of his consulate as well as the right to designate his successor.

Bonaparte’s conception of international peace differed from that of the British, for whom the Treaty of Amiens represented an absolute limit beyond which they were under no circumstances prepared to go. The British even hoped to take back some of the concessions they had been forced to make. For Bonaparte, on the other hand, the Treaty of Amiens marked the starting point for a new French ascendancy. He was, first of all, intent on reserving half of Europe as a market for France without lowering customs duties—to the indignation of British merchants. To revive France’s expansion overseas, he also intended to recover Saint-Domingue (Haiti; governed from 1798 by the black leader Toussaint Louverture), to occupy Louisiana (ceded to France by Spain in 1800), perhaps to reconquer Egypt, and at any rate to extend French influence in the Mediterranean and in the Indian Ocean. In continental Europe he advanced beyond France’s natural frontiers, incorporating Piedmont into France, imposing a more centralized government on the Swiss Confederation, and in Germany compensating the princes dispossessed of territory on the Rhine under the Treaty of Lunéville with shares of the secularized ecclesiastical states.

Great Britain was alarmed by this expansion of France in peacetime and found it scarcely tolerable that one state should command the coastline of the Continent from Genoa to Antwerp. The immediate occasion of Franco-British rupture, however, was the problem of Malta. According to the Treaty of Amiens, the British, who had taken the island on the collapse of the French occupation, should have restored it to the Hospitallers; but the British, on the pretext that the French had not yet evacuated certain Neapolitan ports, refused to leave the island. Franco-British relations became strained, and in May 1803 the British declared war.

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Founding the empire

In the hope of consolidating his own position, Fouché now suggested to Bonaparte that the best way to discourage conspiracy would be to transform the life consulate into a hereditary empire, which, because of the fact that there would be an heir, would remove all hope of changing the regime by assassination. Bonaparte readily accepted the suggestion, and on May 18, 1804, the empire was proclaimed.

Though there was little change in the organization of the government of France, Napoleon as emperor revived a number of institutions similar to those of the ancien régime. In the first place, he wanted to be consecrated by the pope himself, so that his coronation should be even more impressive than that of the kings of France. Pius VII agreed to come to Paris, and the ceremony, which seemed equally outrageous to royalists and to the old soldiers of the Revolution, took place in Notre-Dame on December 2, 1804. At the last moment, the emperor took the crown from the pope and set it on his own head himself.

The imperial regime also instituted its symbols and titles. Princely titles were brought back for the members of Napoleon’s family in 1804, and an imperial nobility was created in 1808. As opposition was still lively, Napoleon intensified his propaganda and imposed an increasingly strict censorship on the press. A dictatorial regime allowed him to carry on his wars for years without worrying about French public opinion. Having been president of the Italian Republic (as the Cisalpine Republic was renamed) since January 1802, Napoleon in March 1805 was proclaimed king of Italy and crowned in Milan in May.