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Let's review a little bit of what Napoleon was up to going
into the war of the Third Coalition, which really does
establish Napoleon as the dominant figure in Europe.
So in 1799, he takes power.
First with two other consuls, but then he declares himself
First Consul.
So he takes power.
He becomes First-- let me put that in capital letters--
First Consul.
Then in 1802, actually before I get to 1802.
Let me say what he did in 1800.
Remember when he took power, we were still in the war of
the Second Coalition.
We talked about that a little bit.
France had lost ground, they had lost a lot of what they
had gained in the First Coalition in Italy.
The Austrians had taken it back.
So Napoleon decides to take charge, cross the Alps.
This is a picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps.
Leading the troops into the Alps to take back what he felt
needed to be taken back from Austria.
And then we learned in the last video that that
essentially is what ended the First Coalition.
So in 1800 he takes back or leaves to take back Italy.
And when we talk about Italy, we're really talking about the
Kingdom of Italy, which was northern Italy.
We're not talking about the Kingdom of Naples, which was
southern Italy.
Or the Papal States.
Actually let me show you that.
If we go all the way down here.
You'll see when people talk about the Kingdom of Italy in
this period of time, they're really talking about this
region up here, which is really northern Italy.
The Papal States are right here.
And you had your Kingdom of Naples down there.
Compared to modern Europe, the two countries that we
associate with Europe today that really didn't exist in a
unified form in the early 1800s were Italy and Germany.
They were really just broken up into a bunch of kingdoms.
And as I mentioned before, Germany at this point, that
confederation of kingdoms was kind of referred to as the
Holy Roman Empire where the King of Austria had the title
of Holy Roman Emperor.
But he didn't control the Holy Roman Empire in a very
centralized fashion.
It was actually controlled by a bunch of smaller kings.
But anyway, let's go back to Napoleon.
So that's him crossing the Alps in 1800.
That ends when he takes it back.
He defeats Austria.
That is essentially the end of the Second Coalition.
We learned that in the last video.
1801.
You had your Treaty of Luneville.
End of Second Coalition.
They don't have a treaty with Great Britain until the next
year, really just out of attrition.
But that doesn't matter, it was a very short-lived treaty.
And then in 1802, before we start talking about the Third
Coalition, Napoleon gets the Constitution
of the Year X passed.
And why do you say year 10?
Remember, they had this whole revolutionary calendar going.
So in the revolutionary calendar this was the 10th
year of the Revolution.
But what's really relevant from Napoleon's point of view
is article one.
It says, the French people name and the senate proclaims
Napoleon Bonaparte First Consul for life.
So, if you want to view this is kind of legally giving
Napoleon almost a king-like status, it writes it in words
that he will rule France for the rest of his life.
Then we get to 1803.
And actually, before I get to 1803, remember what's
happening at the same time here.
You had your Revolution in Haiti, which, if you remember
from those videos, Haiti was the most profitable slave
colony in the world.
Once the slaves revolted, got their freedom, all of a sudden
not as profitable to France as it was before.
And remember, the whole French Revolution started off because
France was broke.
So Napoleon tries to reinstate slavery.
That essentially backfires on him.
Dessalines catches wind of it, him and the other
revolutionaries.
So they essentially start antagonizing
Leclerc even more.
Leclerc and the French occupiers get ravaged by
yellow fever.
And Dessalines is a very aggressive general.
So he starts losing Haiti.
You have Rochambeau, if you remember from those videos,
he's this hugely brutal figure who takes over after Leclerc.
But we have this revolution in Haiti.
And you can kind of say they're
starting to lose Haiti.
And at the same time, and this is 1802, and as we're entering
into 1803, Napoleon begins to realize that Great Britain
controls the seas.
Great Britain dominant navy.
And because they're losing Haiti, which is really their
main profit center, and Great Britain is dominant, Napoleon
essentially gives up on North America.
So outside of Haiti, which was this major profit center for
the French Empire, they also had the territory of
Louisiana, which is essentially the middle 1/3 of
what we now consider to be the United States.
And Napoleon figures out, gee, Great Britain
has a dominant navy.
I'm giving up on Haiti.
I'm probably going to lose it anyway to Dessalines.
Let me just give up on the entire continent.
If I don't sell Louisiana, either Great Britain or the
United States will probably be in a good position to
take it from me.
So he decides to sell Louisiana.
So just as someone, or as an American, and especially an
American who was born in Louisiana, it's fascinating
the chain of events that led up to this.
Because when you learn it from an American history point of
view, you just say hey Thomas Jefferson, he was able to get
Louisiana for $15 million.
Why would someone sell, all of a sudden, this
huge amount of territory?
And the reason is because Napoleon figured he was going
to lose it no matter what.
Great Britain had this dominant navy.
And at the same time, he had nothing else to
protect in the area.
The other major valuable asset there was Haiti.
So a combination of Great Britain having this navy and
of the slave revolt in Haiti ends up within the United
States being able to acquire what's now the middle 1/3 of
the continent.
You can kind of wonder, if they never did that, would
they have ever a gone on to capture the entire west coast?
So these small little things in history.
And I wouldn't necessarily call these little things, but
they lead to very tremendous changes in our modern world.
Anyway, enough about that.
So he sells Louisiana.
Great Britain has a dominant navy.
At first, Napoleon was amassing troops up here, he
was thinking about an invasion of Great Britain.
But more and more it dawns on him that Great Britain has a
dominant navy.
Great Britain, I think, starts to feel a little
self-confident.
And they don't like all of the gains that Napoleon has gotten
in the last two wars.
So, Great Britain declares war in 1803, in May 1803.
Or I could say United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,
the same thing.
U.K.
declares war.
And you could view this as the beginning of the war of the
Third Coalition.
But it's not a coalition yet.
It's just the United Kingdom.
Or it's just Great Britain.
And it really gets heated in 1805.
Everyone else jumps in.
And now we're talking about a real coalition.
Now Great Britain is joined by Austria and Russia.
And Austria, all the time in every one of these coalitions,
they lose territory to France and especially Napoleon.
They just want to get revenge.
United Kingdom kind of senses that they control the water,
they want to get revenge.
Russia doesn't like this upstart Napoleon.
And so they all jump in.
And so there's two interesting angles of the War
of the Third Coalition.
Let me write this right here.
This is the Third Coalition.
And there were other people who jumped in, but these were
the major powers.
So this right here is the Third Coalition.
So the first thing that happens, or really the two
almost happen simultaneously.
In October of 1805, the French navy gets destroyed by the
British in the Battle of Trafalgar.
This is Trafalgar, it's actually written here.
And they get destroyed by Napoleon's good old friend,
Admiral Horatio Nelson.
So this guy was definitely a thorn in Napoleon's side.
He destroyed Napoleon's ships in the Battle of the Nile that
stranded their troops in Egypt.
And now he comes and essentially destroys the
French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar.
And this is an image of it.
And I guess the only redeeming fact of this battle for
Napoleon was that near the end of the battle, Horatio Nelson
actually gets stricken by a bullet
and he dies at Trafalgar.
So the Royal Navy, the British navy was already dominant,
destroying the French navy, which was the only navy that
could in some way compete on any level.
Destroying them at Trafalgar really established British
domination of the seas.
This is actually an image of the Battle of Trafalgar.
This is the battle right there.
A bunch of ships just shooting at each other, you can't
really make out what's happening.
And just to connect that to modern day Great Britain, or
the modern day London, this right here is an image of
Trafalgar Square.
It is named after the Battle of Trafalgar, which
established Britain is dominant in the seas.
That is Trafalgar Square in London.
And if you go there, you will see Nelson's column.
This is Nelson's column right there, named
after Horatio Nelson.
And at the very top of it, there's a little figure, or
it's probably pretty large, but little relative to the
column, of Horatio Nelson himself.
So that was a bit of an aside, but this occurred during the
war of the Third Coalition.
So Napoleon's navy is destroyed.
But he doesn't give up.
He's just like, OK, oh well, I can't do much beyond Europe,
but in Europe I can still do a lot of damage.
So what he does is he takes his troops.
He had given up on actually attacking Britain by sea.
He realized that he could never realistically do that.
Let me show you the troop movements that were going on
at this time.
So he had troops here that he had given up on actually
attacking Great Britain.
And what he does is he meets the Austrians.
So the Austrians are amassing their troops here.
They actually thought that there was a possibility that
the main campaign would go in Italy.
So they actually focused most of their troops there, that
we'll see as a major mistake.
But they have troops in what is now southern Germany near
the Black Forest. And then they also amassed some troops
near Italy.
And then the Russians were coming up behind.
They weren't able to meet.
And we're dealing with the fall, this is now September,
October of 1805.
And the Russians were back here trying to bring their
troops to assist the Austrians in meeting Napoleon.
And all of these, it's always unclear on how much of it was
tactical genius versus pure luck.
Because they didn't have satellites, they didn't know
where the other troops were.
They didn't necessarily know exactly what's happening on a
minute-by-minute basis, like armies do today.
But what happened, and it's one of the pivotal battles in
European history, is that Napoleon meets the
Austrians at Ulm.
Let me draw it on this map right here.
So on this map they just do a very general-- This is
Napoleon meeting the Austrians right here at Ulm.
There's actually a whole campaign of
Ulm, several battles.
But it was a decisive victory at Ulm.
And the crux of that victory was that Napoleon was able to
fool the Austrians.
So this is a zoomed-in version of what was going on here.
This is France.
This is the Black Forest. This is Austria right there.
Blue is Napoleon troops, red are the Austrian troops.
And you saw, Austria had amassed most of their troops
on the Italian front.
So here in Black Forest, you have your Austrian troops.
What Napoleon did is he had General Marat make it look
like the main force of the French were coming straight
from the West. And they did that by having cavalry
essentially giving the appearance of a major force
coming in from here.
So the Austrians were thinking, OK, this is the
direction that we're going to face our main antagonism from.
But at the same time, the bulk of the Napoleon's army--
remember he doesn't see exactly how many people are
here, they just made it look like this is
the bulk of the army.
But the bulk of the army actually did what they call a
wheeling manoeuvre, where they went around the Austrian army.
And they were able to do it much faster and in a much more
nimble way than anyone would have predicted.
Because they essentially didn't have to
carry as many supplies.
They were doing this during the harvest season.
And this was by design.
If you capture enemy territory during the harvest season, and
these are things that you usually don't think about when
you learn about military battles.
But you've got troops, you've got to feed the troops.
If they can't capture food from the land, then you've got
to carry supplies with you.
And supplies are heavy it slows down your army.
But if you do the attack during the harvest season, you
don't have to carry food.
You can just take it from the farmers that you pass by.
They're harvesting food as you pass by, you just take it, you
can be fast and nimble.
And he essentially went around the army and was able to
attack the Austrians from this direction.
And then essentially destroy them.
And this is why I hinted in the last video that Napoleon
starts to view himself as invincible.
And this was before the Russians could come to
actually reinforce the Austrians.
So they did it-- by being able to do it so quickly, they were
able to just only tackle the Austrians.
So it was a decisive victory at Ulm.
Let me go to the painting right there.
This is a painting of the surrender at Ulm.
And then the combined Russian and Austrian forces, they
essentially regrouped, but they re-met Napoleon's
forces after Ulm.
In another several weeks, at Austerlitz.
And once again, Napoleon just routed them.
And there's always a debate.
Some of it might have been tactical genius, some of it
might have been pure luck.
But after routing them at Austerlitz-- so this is
Austerlitz-- and taking so much I guess both in terms of
casualties and prisoners from the enemy without incurring so
much themselves, this really was the high point in terms of
a battle for Napoleon.
Austerlitz is what really convinced Napoleon that he is
truly, truly a military genius.
And that's not saying that he's not.
But it was such a route that he started to imagine that
he's on some level invincible.
And so the outcome, this essentially ends the war of
the Third Coalition.
And with that ending, Austria had to give its territory that
it had gotten in Italy.
So Austria had to cede the territory that it had in
Italy, some of the territory that it had in Bavaria.
And from, I guess just a general point of view, this
was historically significant.
Because until this point in time, this whole area was
called the Holy Roman Empire, with the King of Austria
calling himself the Holy Roman Emperor.
Even though he didn't have direct control over all of
these Germanic regions.
Let me go back up here.
This is in 1805, or we can even say we're entering 1806,
but in late 1805, with the end of the Third Coalition, now
the Austrian King no longer calls himself
the Holy Roman Emperor.
He gives up the title.
And this region right here is no longer called the Holy
Roman Empire.
It is called the Confederation of the Rhine.
And it's essentially under the protection of Napoleon.
And this is the first time-- we're starting to get to a
point, Germany won't be unified for
another 60 or 70 years.
But we're starting to get to the point that the German
nation is escaping from the bounds of being
the Holy Roman Empire.
And so it's getting in that direction.
So the Holy Roman Empire is gone.
France gets significant territory from
Austria, once again.
Russia on some level is just humbled a little bit.
And then we end in 1806, or at the end of
1805, with France dominant.
And while all of that was happening, it was really in
1804 when France was only at war with Great Britain.
The whole alliance hadn't formed yet.
It 1804, in December-- and this is relevant that it's a
peek into his ego.
So this is the year before Austerlitz.
In 1804, Napoleon declares himself, or he
crowns himself Emperor.
And this is a picture of him as Emperor.
And after this point, instead of being called Napoleon
Bonaparte, he is called Napoleon I.
And the idea of crowning yourself Emperor, you might
say, what's the point?
You already were Consul for life, you have power for your
whole life.
But other than you get this neat title emperor, which
probably feeds your ego quite well, but beyond that, this
essentially establishes a dynasty.
It now says, I'm not just a First
Consul, I am the emperor.
I'm Napoleon I.
And it implies that his descendants will continue to
reign over the French Empire.
So on some level, he kind of destroys
the notion of a republic.
So we're ending the Third Coalition with France is
dominant in Europe.
It has gotten all of this territory mainly from Austria.
The Holy Roman Empire no longer exists.
It's now the Confederation of the Rhine.
Napoleon, after Austerlitz, thinks that he is invincible.
And he also is now Emperor.
So all of his visions of grandeur are coming true.