Having thrown away his fleet, Napoleon had no direct means of attacking a maritime and commercial power such as that of Britain, and he was forced to resort to economic warfare. Their interpretation has been that British sea power, though certainly necessary for survival in the face of aggression from France, was not sufficient for victory over Napoleon, and that ultimately it was Wellington and the British army, fighting alongside a great coalition of military powers in 1814 and 1815, that secured Britain's triumph. The Battle of Trafalgar. An eight-year struggle with revolutionary France had ended in 1802 but war had broken out again in 1803. The Battle of Trafalgar heralded the rise of Britain's Imperial power. The Royal Navy urgently needed a crushing victory to retrieve its position. On October 19–20 his fleet slipped out of Cádiz, hoping to get into the Mediterranean Sea without giving battle. Cavalry Journal. The Battle of Trafalgar took place on 21 October 1805 during the Napoleonic War of the Third Coalition. British seapower, by contrast, preserved the country from invasion and guaranteed peace and prosperity at home, up to the time of Trafalgar and beyond. This did not concern him, as he had no opinion of the usefulness of merchants, especially as many of them were not even French.  © BBC © 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Major George S. Patton, Jr., Cavalry. His revenues never covered the expense of government. To feed his armies, to endow the new military aristocracy which guarded his throne, he needed continual conquests. October 20, 2020 at 1:40 pm Trafalgar was fought against a background of fear. He spent the rest of his reign in a futile and immensely costly attempt to reconstruct his lost battle-fleet. This is the populalr mythology of the 1805 campaign but it is not really supported by the evidence. He refused them all, however, and this in the end persuaded them that for their own survival they had to crush him, and force his consent to a peace treaty - the Congress of Vienna, 1815 - that secured Britain unchallenged naval supremacy. Find out more about how the BBC is covering the. He believed in the orthodox French economics of his youth, according to which real wealth derived from land and people, while trade was essentially parasitic, and government borrowing was a system of fraud. With naval power he might have done it - but at Trafalgar he lost that option. Nicholas Pocock's painting of the closing stages of the action at the battle of Trafalgar. Distinguished French scholars such as Jean Tulard, the great authority on Napoleon, agree that, '... after Trafalgar the emperor was beaten, though he did not yet know it.'. Recent French scholars have concluded that the order can only be explained in psychological terms, as the subconscious desire of wounded vanity to punish the hated navy for its failure to contribute to his glory. Without a battle-fleet Napoleon was condemned to an indirect strategy against his enemies, just as the British were. Everywhere in his empire merchants kept up their trade as much as they could, with the aid of bribery and false papers. The gloss of the victory was taken off for the British ships with the news of Nelsons death. Barely escaping on auxiliary power, its crew later finished upgrading the ship in record time after meeting Alliance forces. Just as in World War Two, sea power had to win its war first, if the country was to survive and the soldiers were to have their chance. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. As the Prussian Field-Marshal August Gneisenau declared, in 1815: 'There is no mortal to whom Great Britain has greater obligations than this blackguard ... for it is the events which he has brought about which have raised England's greatness, security and wealth so high.'. A fleet of 33 ships (18 French and 15 Spanish) under Admiral Pierre de Villeneuve fought a British fleet of 27 ships under Admiral Horatio Nelson. Similarly, Napoleon's defeat at Trafalgar made it impossible for him to intervene in the other decisive theatre of war, at sea. Beyond the fall of Napoleon, the achievement of Trafalgar was to settle Britain's security for a century. He thought a country like Britain, whose wealth derived from overseas trade and whose government waged war on credit, was nothing but a house of cards - which one good blow would bring down. 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