Conquests

Rupture of the peace of Amiens in May 1803 until the fall of the Empire in 1814 and the interlude of the Hundred Days in 1815, the war was continual. The historians are in disagreement on the causes of this permanent war. Some accuse the insatiable ambition of the emperor: new Alexandre, it believed himself intended to dominate the world; for others, its ambition was restricted to organize new Europe dominated by France.

Others still point out the heritage of the Revolution: Napoleon was to defend the natural borders that its adversaries and especially Great Britain did not want to recognize in France. Noticing that Great Britain was present in all the successive coalitions directed against France, others reflect ahead the role of the British imperialism, which could not accept the Napoleonean attempts to compete with it in the economic domain: even when it wished peace, Napoleon ran up against the British opposition.

One also could show the logical bond, after 1807, between the continental Blockade and the interventions in Italy, in the Baltic, in the Iberian peninsula and, in 1812, in Russia: it was necessary, so that the blockade was effective, to control all the shores by where the British goods had been able to unload, to oblige the tsar, the old ally, to respect its engagements.

There is in all these explanations a share of truth, but none can with it only claim to incarnate it. One could also add the hatred of the aristocracies against that which they presented like the parvenu of the Revolution, the hatred of the people which forged in the suffering of oppression the national feeling which will raise them in 1813.

Starting from a certain level of conquests, Napoleon was taken in gears which continuously threw it in an escape ahead perhaps which it did not wish always: it was inevitably to find its term.