ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the military and diplomatic events that constituted each of these 'acts'. It discusses the widening impact of the Napoleonic offensive on an entire civilization and, distinguishes the variety of responses, country by country, which in due course will help to explain the new map, the new Europe of 1815. In March 1801 the king of Naples came to terms, promising to close his ports to British ships and to maintain 15,000 French troops in several southern Italian towns until peace was fully restored. The 'pacification of Tilsit', stately in appearance but superficial in fact, opened a five-year period during which the Napoleonic Empire continued to wage war on many fronts, but without having to face any simultaneous array of forces comparable to the Third Coalition of 1805-7. Allied forces immediately available totalled almost three-quarters of a million men, some 225,000 of them already poised in the Netherlands.
