However, Napoleon's goal of a North American Empire collapsed with the failure of his army in Haiti, so he gave it up and sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

[3] The Democratic-Republican administration of President Thomas Jefferson used British banks to fund the Louisiana Purchase, reduced the American military budget, and partly dismantled the Hamiltonian Federalist financial program.

[4] However the isolationist foreign policy of the United States, which was hostile to both Britain and France, and strongly opposed by the Federalist minority in Congress, came under heavy pressure from all sides.

Because of the hardline stance of Grenville and Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, their distrust of Bonaparte and obvious defects in the proposals, they were rejected out of hand.

[7] Addington's foreign secretary, Robert Jenkinson, Lord Hawkesbury, immediately opened communications with Louis Guillaume Otto, the French commissary for prisoners of war in London through whom Bonaparte had made his earlier proposals.

Unhappy with the dialogue with Otto, Hawkesbury sent diplomat Anthony Merry to Paris, who opened a second line of communications with the French foreign minister, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord.

[8] The terms of the preliminary agreement required Britain to restore most of the French colonial possessions that it had captured since 1794, to evacuate Malta and to withdraw from other occupied Mediterranean ports.

"[12] The Batavian Republic, whose economy depended on trade that had been ruined by the war, appointed Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, its ambassador to France, to represent it in the peace negotiations.

[13] The Dutch role in the negotiations was marked by a lack of respect on the part of the French, who thought of them as a "vanquished and conquered" client whose present government "owed them everything".

[14] Schimmelpenninck and Cornwallis negotiated agreements on the status of Ceylon, which was to remain British; the Cape Colony, which was to be returned to the Dutch but to be open to all; and the indemnification of the deposed House of Orange-Nassau for its losses.

Writing from London, he informed Cornwallis that it "created the greatest alarm in this country, and there are many persons who were pacifically disposed and who since this event are desirous of renewing the war.

Bonaparte eventually proposed that the British were to withdraw within three months of signing, with control passed back to a recreated Order of St. John, whose sovereignty was to be guaranteed by all of the major European powers.

The Dutch and French representatives signed a separate convention, clarifying that the Batavian Republic was not to be financially responsible for the compensation paid to the House of Orange-Nassau.

According to the memoirs of his private secretary, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, Bonaparte "was, above all, delighted with the admiration the exhibition excited among the numerous foreigners who resorted to Paris during the peace.

"[25] For those who could not get there, Helmina von Chézy collected her impressions in a series of vignettes contributed to the journal Französische Miscellen,[26] and F. W. Blagdon[27] and John Carr[28] were among those who brought up to date curious English readers, who had felt starved for unbiased accounts of "a people under the influence [ ] of a political change, hitherto unparalleled.... During a separation of ten years, we have received very little account of this extraordinary people, which could be relied on," Carr noted in his Preface.

[31] Much as it had been at the start of the wars in 1793, Spain remained diplomatically caught between Britain and France, but in the period just after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, a number of actions on the part of the French government antagonised the Spanish.

Furthermore, Britons felt insulted when Napoleon stated that their country deserved no voice in European affairs, even though King George III was an elector of the Holy Roman Empire.

After the initial fervour, objections to the treaty quickly grew in Britain, where it seemed to the governing class that they were making all the concessions and ratifying recent developments.

Bonaparte met British protests over the action with belligerent statements, again denying Britain's right to be formally involved in matters on the continent and pointing out that Switzerland had been occupied by French troops when the treaty was signed.

[41] Bonaparte formally protested the continuing British occupations and, in January 1803, published a report by Horace Sebastiani that included observations on the ease with which France might capture Egypt, alarming most of the European powers.

[41][42] In an interview in February 1803 with Lord Whitworth, Britain's French ambassador, Bonaparte threatened war if Malta was not evacuated and implied that he could have already retaken Egypt.

In a public meeting with a group of diplomats the following month, Bonaparte again pressed Whitworth, implying that the British wanted war since they were not upholding their treaty obligations.

[45] Although Alexander wanted to avoid war, that news apparently forced his hand; he began collecting troops on the Baltic coast in late March.

[46] The Russian foreign minister wrote of the situation, "The intention already expressed by the First Consul of striking blows against England wherever he can, and under this pretext of sending his troops into Hanover [and] Northern Germany ... entirely transforms the nature of this war as it relates to our interests and obligations.

"[47] When France moved to occupy Switzerland, the British had issued orders for their military not to return Cape Colony to the Dutch, as stipulated in the Treaty of Amiens, only to countermand them when the Swiss failed to resist.

To cover up their deception, the ministry issued a sudden ultimatum to France, demanding an evacuation of Holland and Switzerland and British control of Malta for ten years.

Bonaparte made "every concession that could be considered as demanded or even imposed by the British government" by offering to guarantee the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, place Malta in the hands of a neutral third party and form a convention to satisfy Britain on other issues.

[50] Matters reached a diplomatic crisis point when the British rejected the idea of mediation by Tsar Alexander and, on 10 May, ordered Whitworth to withdraw from Paris if the French did not accede to their demands in 36 hours.

[53] On 17 May 1803, before the official declaration of war and without any warning, the Royal Navy captured all the French and Dutch merchant ships stationed in Britain or sailing around, seizing more than two million pounds of commodities and taking their crews as prisoners.

In response to that provocation, on 22 May (2 Prairial, year XI), the First Consul ordered the arrest of all British males between the ages of 18 and 60 in France and Italy, trapping many travelling civilians.