It was a meritocratic army in which officers were commissioned and promoted for their talents, not their birth. It was a national army, not an army of peasant-conscripts in the service of a dynasty. It was a citizen army, not an army of subjects. In a sense, perhaps, the Grande Armée was the supreme achievement of the Revolution. General Mack surrenders to Napoleon at Ulm in October 1805.

Napoleon Bonaparte, crowned Emperor of the French the previous year, might yet be let down by his subordinates but he would not be openly defied by them, nor his orders countermanded by some other general or politician. Not only was there a single national field army almost 200,000 strong, but also a single will controlling it. Now it exists, and we shall see it in action.’ ‘We used to have the Army of Italy, of the Rhine, of Holland,’ explained Napoleon himself. Inside a month, the forward elements were crossing the river. Orders were issued on 26 August 1805 for the Grande Armée to abandon its cantonments on the Channel coast and march for the Rhine.

The formation of the Third Coalition had dissolved the immediate threat of a French invasion of Britain two months before Trafalgar settled the matter for good. It is not immediately clear whether the vantage-point is meant to be the Zurlan Plateau or the Pratzen Heights nonetheless, the reconstruction gives a fair impression of the density of a Napoleonic battle The scene shows the French Emperor with his staff on a hilltop surveying the battle.

The Battle of Austerlitz, 2 December 1805.

Masterpiece theatre the undisturbed