The war that broke out in North America in 1812 had its roots an ocean away in Europe. For more than a generation, France and Great Britain had struggled for supremacy on the continent, waging war on both sea and land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, their struggle began to change—in ways that would eventually draw the young United States into the conflict.
Two significant battles in Europe at the end of 1805 began to change the strategic picture between France and Great Britain. In October, the English admiral Horatio Nelson’s decisive naval victory at Trafalgar confirmed Britain’s undisputed dominance at sea, and ended French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte’s hopes for a cross-channel invasion. The following December, Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz cemented the French Army’s dominance of the European continent. With the British ruling the waves and France ascendant on land, their struggle had reach a military impasse. Both sides turned to economic warfare in the hopes of breaking the deadlock.
That economic warfare between the two great powers reached across the Atlantic to the United States. From about 1793 to 1805, Americans had benefited from the struggle between the two rivals. As one of the world’s major neutral shippers, the United States profited from the military struggles between the European powers by servicing both sides. With the military struggle deadlocked, however, France and Great Britain became unwilling to allow neutral shippers. Both powers passed economic measures and counter-measures designed to prevent neutrals from aiding their opponent.
Thomas Jefferson’s administration attempted to respond to these European measures with peaceful coercion using the “restrictive system”. Jefferson intended to apply economic pressure by restricting trade with both nations, avoiding the necessity of military action. But Jefferson’s economic measures failed—and that failure convinced many Americans that the nation could only respond to Britain’s economic warfare with military force.
For most Americans, the War of 1812 appeared principally a struggle between their young government and their old imperial power, a kind of “Second American Revolution.” From a more global perspective, however, the fighting in North America was another outgrowth of the longstanding struggle between France and Great Britain for domination in Europe.
[Reuters] - French President Nicolas Sarkozy was greeted with pomp by the Queen on Wednesday for the first French state visit in more than a decade.
Here are some highlights of relations since 1066, the last time England was invaded.
1066 - William, Duke of Normandy, invades England. His decisive victory at the Battle of Hastings and subsequent crowning as William I resulted in profound political, administrative, and social changes in England.
1337 - The Hundred Years war between England and France started mainly over a dispute about succession to the French crown. The struggle involving several generations of English and French claimants to the crown ended in 1453, with England retaining only Calais on the continent.
1558 - Francois de Lorraine, second duke of Guise, took Calais from the English.
1701 - Conflict between England and France over succession to Spanish throne. The treaties of Utrecht, which ended the conflict, marked the rise of the British colonial empire at the expense of both France and Spain.
1751 - Engineer Nicolas Desmarets suggested the idea of digging a tunnel under the English Channel.
1756 - The Seven Years War started, involving all great powers of Europe, with France and Britain as foes. Britain won North America and India in the Franco-British Treaty of Paris in 1763 and became undisputed leader in overseas colonisation.
1802 - Napoleon Bonaparte backed a scheme for a tunnel for horse-drawn carriages under the Channel.
1805 - A Franco-Spanish fleet under was vanquished west of Cape Trafalgar, Spain, by a British fleet under Admiral Horatio Nelson, shattering forever Napoleon’s plans to invade England.
1815 - Napoleon was defeated after 23 years of recurrent warfare between France and other European powers. Duke of Wellington’s allied army comprising British, Dutch, Belgian, and German troops defeated Napoleon at Waterloo south of Brussels.
1880 - Colonel Ernest Beaumont made the first serious attempt to build a tunnel under the Channel. Britain later stopped the project on defence grounds. Britain lifted its ban on a Channel Tunnel in 1955.
1898 - A series of territorial disputes in Africa between Britain and France climaxed at Fashoda, then Egyptian Sudan. France and Britain eventually agreed that the watershed of the Nile and the Congo rivers should mark the frontier between their respective spheres of influence.
1904 - England and France end antagonisms with the “Entente Cordiale” paving the way for their diplomatic cooperation against German pressures in the decade preceding World War One.
1994 - French President Francois Mitterrand and the Queen formally open the Channel Tunnel rail link.