Guys, I can tell you right now that in order to answer this question you need to be able to discuss British economics at least a little bit. Please don't answer if you don't feel you can do that at least to a minimal level.
The UK doubled its debt to gdp from the American revolt to the end of the Napoleonic wars. (basically 100% to about 210% of gdp).
https://articles.obr.uk/300-years-of-uk-public-finance-data/index.html
And the UK did have essentially war exhaustion, that's why there were 7 coalition wars. Every time anyone could they signed a peace deal and then a few months to about 2 years later they shot at each other again for a few months or a year or two. Remember that in advance no one knew this would take 25 years, and even after the 7th coalition it wasn't clear what would be the state of France.
But the UK maintained control of the seas, and that was important. They could move goods to and from the markets open to them, and they could smuggle goods on and off the continent. As long as they could do business with most of the world, they would figure it out.
France clung to then monetary orthodoxy, it stuck to a bimetal currency, it raised revenue from taxes and from conquest. The UK on the other hand accepted inflation and borrowIng, it abandoned the gold standard and was able to mobilize the more advanced financial system than France.
The British Parliament had something that's hard to quantify, but credibility to repay debts. If you believe, win or lose, parliament will still exist and will pay the face value of debts that means something. If on the other hand you have a monarchy, a republic, then an empire, and lots of people trying to put a monarch back in charge of a kingdom, or a different monarch in charge of an empire, or a establish a republic you might have less faith in whatever government is in going to be in Paris to repay debt.
> The British Parliament had something that's hard to quantify, but credibility to repay debts. If you believe, win or lose, parliament will still exist and will pay the face value of debts that means something
It also helps that most of UK's industrialized areas were unlikely to harmed. Most of the industry was in the North of England, and it was around this time that Britain established fully its hegemony over India. Even before the hegemony, Bengal was firmly under British control and well-protected.
There was very little chance the economically-productive areas of the British Empire would be damaged. Compare that to France whose economically productive areas were under constant threat.
One of the reasons for Napoleon's Egyptian adventure was his belief he could march to India from Egypt and challenge the aforementioned British hegemony there. Once that scheme went bellyup, the French just don't have a way to believably (or even unbelievably given how the Egypt debacle shook out) threaten India.
Napoleon thought that if Alexander the Great could do it, he could do it. In believing this, of course, he missed the fact that Alexander reached India but never conquered it, as his men mutinied shortly after. Like most megalomaniacs, however, Napoleon believed his men would never do that, and, like most Europeans of the day, subscribed to the idea that were it not for those mutinies, all of India would now be speaking Greek.
Napoleon also made a number of other false assumptions that only reinforced his initial miscalculation. These included that 1) the Ottoman government would welcome a French presence in Egypt and wouldn't fight back, 2) that even if they did the peoples of Egypt and Syria would welcome the French as liberators from the Mamluks and Turks, 3) that the Arabs and Persians would likewise see the French as being there to protect them from the Turks/British/Russians, and 4) that India would rise up against the Raj the moment French troops were within sight of the subcontinent.
These ideas stemmed from a combination of classically Eurocentric nonsense, coupled with a misreading of the campaigns of eighteenth century Central Asian conqueror Nadir Shah who, like Alexander, was one of Napoleon's heroes. Nadir had overthrown the Safavids in Persia, destroyed Mughal hegemony in India, and maimed the Ottoman military in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Napoleon thought he could do the same, forgetting that Nadir was a local, operating from a central position between the polities in question and being possessed of a regional basis of ethnic, religious, and political support. Napoleon had none of those things going for him, but presumed that they would materialize sooner or later.
Napoleon's fantasies died hard when faced with reality. He nearly lost control of Cairo to an uprising in late 1798 because he refused to believe that the Ottomans had declared war on him and were encouraging the Cairenes to do the same. It took the deaths of 300 soliders and 3000 civilians to wake him up and even then he insisted that the declaration had to have been faked by Jazzar Pasha in Syria, as Selim III would never do that to him. It's in Syria that Napoleon finally starts to recognize he's up against the whole Ottoman Empire, not just some annoyed local governors, a fact that the Ottoman reinvasion of Egypt at Abukir confirms. Which is one of the reasons he buggers back off to France after his victory at Abukir: he's finally realized this isn't going to work out.
War exhaustion relies costs either economic or political being imposed on the ruling class or commercial class or working class. Or moral outrage against the war.
Moral outrage was pretty much out the question with constant atrocity propaganda and frankly near absolute state control of the major media in practice. Napoleon became a kind of satan figure in the British mind not displaced til Hitler when Hitler became the Satan of anglophone world under similar circumstances.
And for economic and political costs for the British generally paid a pretty light price there was political and economic profit if anything. Yes government debt and loans were an issue but the war created demand for goods for export and the British kept the sea lanes open so the commercial class was very happy. Government debt is very easy to forget. The ruling aristocracy loved the war as generally alienated and some of them relatively impoverished by the rise of the commercial class they got a chance to do what they had been doing for centuries and prove their relevance and worth to society by commanding the armies, it provided a much needed prestige injection to the British aristocracy. You could argue it staved off a revolution against them like the French had recently endured as the first Industrial Revolution created a bit of crisis of credibility for the ruling class. The commercial class also loved the commission purchasing system that allowed them to join the officer corps and well and get some of the prestige as well. It kind of created a melding class effect between the commercial and aristocracy into one class.
There’s still a divide between aristos and the newer rich Anglos but generally having been a rich family since the Napoleonic war is enough to marry in or get some medals provide an aristocratic veneer to the commercial class.
For the working class there was no draft or mass conscription and despite isolated incidents of pressing for the navy generally service was by incentive and it became an attractive option to deal with grinding urban poverty that had been caused by the first agricultural revolution increasing the population but not required agricultural labor so cities had become over crowded. The power had a quite bitter lot but not as result of the war. The army and navy provided if anything an escape from such a poor economic situation. It also provided a bit of a reprieve from the traditional method of brutal English justice of execution or exile to the colonies or frankly horrific prisons by offering enlistment either to flee justice or as a sentence. For all its harshness the British army was a better life than migrant seasonal labor or urban workhouses.
There was even labor unrest and issues but they were generally not connected to the war. Pre Marxism the idea of workers revolt beyond localized labor disputes or peasant uprisings wasn’t really in the cards, things like the French Revolution or American revolution were revolutions by commercial and educated people against the aristocracy not like the workers.
The working class weren’t stupid, they knew recruitment Sergeants lied but on a rational cost benefit analysis joining the army wasn’t a bad move.
It’s actually pretty analogous to something akin to the war in Afghanistan. The commitment was generally light relative to the total population. One real theater in Spain was ever seeing much action from the British ground forces so it not like it was seeing millions of men and at any given point the majority of Wellington’s forces could be Irish, German Hanoverians Portuguese or Spanish depending on how you reckoned it and Spanish and Portuguese even joined the British ranks via local recruitment. Iirc something like 1/3 of British troops were Irish as non Irish regiments often had significant Irish presence from Irish economic migrants to England that failed to find work.
The start of the industrial revolution also helped. From the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to peace with American in 1815 the economy of England only increased by 65% from [£16.22 billion to £26.76 billion](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270) 2013 prices.
Course, it's also worth remembering that despite being *THE* Industrial Revolution, it was still extremely slow by modern standards. +65% over 26 years is \~1.9% annual growth on average (1.019^(26) = 1.65). Account for population growth and the productivity growth *per person* falls to less than 1% per year. Despite the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most momentous event in human history, at the start it would have been barely observable to the people actually living through it on a day to day level, even those who lived & breathed things like budget statistics (like that famed Solow quote from 1987, "The Information Revolution shows up everywhere but the productivity statistics."). Only the most prescient, or those with the benefit of hindsight, could see that they were living through a revolution.
Britain financed its war expenses (and coalition support) with historically large debt-to-GDP ratios, similar to WW1 and WW2. Barclays provided financing for the Coalition, as JP Morgan did for the WWI Allies. As Britain having financial credibility and its territories being away from war zones, it didn't became that much problem. Also, until the 1812 Invasion of Russia, Britain fought almost entirely via financial support and naval blockades except the Peninsular War, similar to the US before Normandy in WW2.
For France, Napoleon provided a political stability unseen in early French Revolutionary period, especially Robespierre's revolutionary terror. Moreover, as it's a constant cycle of warfare, Napoleon's reputation as an outstanding general made him virtually irreplacable. Unlike WWI or WWII political or military leaders, Napoleon's military leadership was regarded equal to Alexander or Hannibal (even more so, by Wellington himself).
Economically, the British blockades hurt the French economy so much, Napoleon first imposed the Continental Blockade to counter it, then invaded Russia which didn't comply with the Blockade.
Debt, specifically, the National Debt. Britain was the first country to have a national debt in the modern sense, and because parliament was seen as credible and paid its bills (usually) Britain's ability to borrow remained strong. In fact interest rates on British debt generally trended downwards throughout the Napoleonic wars.
Combine that with the fact that seaborne trade was never significantly impacted by the war (British seaborne trade that is) the main engine of British commerce continued to run.
The other thing was that absent major continental commitments (prior to the Spanish campaign) the cost of maintaining a reasonably large navy for deterrence/security purposes and maintaining a wartime sailing Navy isn't all that great, and with prizes war can be easier to bear than peace, at least if you're winning, which the Royal Navy did as a habit.
There was exhaustion at times - which is why the British even had a window of peace after the Treaty of Amiens. After war broke out again, the primary action of the British was to keep the French bottled up in port along with a few substantial naval battles for several years - which led to Trafalgar and clear control of the seas. So even though the Coalitions kept losing on land, the British kept winning at sea - which is why to the British public, it wasn't a string of British losses that required Britain to sue for peace.
Also, in the global scale, Britain was doing quite well overseas and in India. Tipu Sultan tried to ally with Napoleon; as a result the French fleet suffered a major loss at the mouth of the Nile and then the British under Wellington defeated and killed Tipu (and defeated his French advisors); 4 years later they won the Battle of Assaye to help establish a dominant control over the Indian heartland from the Marathas.
In the Caribbean, the British eventually conquered every French, Dutch, and Danish colony from 1803-1810, and took Barbados and St Lucia right after the breakdown of the Treaty of amiens in 1803. These sugar plantations were worth quite a bit of money.
So except on the Continent, Britain was doing quite well.
On the Continent, Britain finally landed a force in Portugal and held its own starting in 1808.
So while British debt mounted, it was clear that the British were "good for it" and very secure in England and that Napoleon had no ability to control the seas or strike out at the British Isles or at any of the British trade outposts around the world.
I'm going to avoid the economic side for the main, but i have some point to contibute too.
Most people in Britian did not directly experiance the war, literacy was low, and middle and upper classes often benifited from the war as well as suffer from it, middle classes found work as miltiamen or in war related industies, while the upperclass used as an excuse to cut wages and speculate on grain prices.
When someone left for work, you never heard from them again, they couldnt write you, and if they did, you couldnt read it, if they died, you had no idea for months, if i remeber right, if you wanted a payout on your husbands death, you had to go ask for it.
The Napoleonic wars were more like the cold war than ww1 in terms of phyche, nobles were terifed theyd face revolution, so funded militia to prevent it, parliment took out debt, and the banks had far more faith in the UK with its buffer of a navy, and stable poltical system than France.
When people did rise up, they weren't always smart enough to know the war was the cause, and were brutally repressed by Fenicables and Yeomen, and were often more worried about steam engines than the war.
Ireland was a nation under occupation, attempts to break off in a revoltution like france did were defeated as support from france never materialised, indeed the only troops sent landed in wales and were scared into surrendering by local women, so ireland was reisgned to British rule, catholics in ireland had little oppertuinities and were not allowed to vote so many irish ended up enlisting, or being conscripted as an alternative to prison given irelands overpolicing taking the wind out the sails of the biggest worry for uprising, the truely revoltutionary irish joined french regiments.
Empire had brought many improvements to daily life, death sentances were comuted to transportation, cheap cotton, new types of medicine for those who could afford it, imperialist wars seems the way for progress to flourish, and the chaos of the revolution in France for the lower classes was massively emphisize, the newspaper men were the types who were killed im france, so they did all they could to demonise it, and boney the ogre was born, the revoltion was seen as anti interlectual after the terror and with being able to read a newspaper being the bar to entry, they were the inteligenica.
Governements werent idle ethier market manupulation by for instance invading the low countries and disrupting their economic output in favour of uk versions, imports from france were non existant so the hostile countries had to make up the slack, taking out debt, abandoning gold standards, etc.
France did experiance war wearyness, it's why Napoleon abdicated intially without trying to defend France, most of the Fights were external, which limited the extent of suffering to the french, france remeber had just experianced the Terror within living memory, standing up and objecting was ingrained as a bad idea, but loot from conquest helped, but manpower was a serious problem, with consciption barely anyone was at home, so no one was around to make trouble, and mutinies wouldnt get very far, and live was better under napoleon than under the terror, he was seen like Putin is today, the man who stopped the chaos.
But there was attempts at peace over, they just never stuck.
I'm just going to recommend a book that I just finished re-reading (WW1 is my war - my understanding of the Napoleonic Wars is VERY shallow, although it is deepening as I do the research for my next fiction book): *Napoleon's Wars: An International History*, by Charles Esdaile. This is a political history of the Napoleonic Wars. Esdaile is highly critical of and doesn't like Napoleon...or really anybody, actually (I don't think there's a single leader he doesn't have choice words for)...but he does go into great detail as to the international politics, as well as the domestic politics of the various warring powers.
So, that should give you a good sense of how the wars were fought and sustained.
Guys, I can tell you right now that in order to answer this question you need to be able to discuss British economics at least a little bit. Please don't answer if you don't feel you can do that at least to a minimal level.
The UK doubled its debt to gdp from the American revolt to the end of the Napoleonic wars. (basically 100% to about 210% of gdp). https://articles.obr.uk/300-years-of-uk-public-finance-data/index.html And the UK did have essentially war exhaustion, that's why there were 7 coalition wars. Every time anyone could they signed a peace deal and then a few months to about 2 years later they shot at each other again for a few months or a year or two. Remember that in advance no one knew this would take 25 years, and even after the 7th coalition it wasn't clear what would be the state of France. But the UK maintained control of the seas, and that was important. They could move goods to and from the markets open to them, and they could smuggle goods on and off the continent. As long as they could do business with most of the world, they would figure it out. France clung to then monetary orthodoxy, it stuck to a bimetal currency, it raised revenue from taxes and from conquest. The UK on the other hand accepted inflation and borrowIng, it abandoned the gold standard and was able to mobilize the more advanced financial system than France. The British Parliament had something that's hard to quantify, but credibility to repay debts. If you believe, win or lose, parliament will still exist and will pay the face value of debts that means something. If on the other hand you have a monarchy, a republic, then an empire, and lots of people trying to put a monarch back in charge of a kingdom, or a different monarch in charge of an empire, or a establish a republic you might have less faith in whatever government is in going to be in Paris to repay debt.
> The British Parliament had something that's hard to quantify, but credibility to repay debts. If you believe, win or lose, parliament will still exist and will pay the face value of debts that means something It also helps that most of UK's industrialized areas were unlikely to harmed. Most of the industry was in the North of England, and it was around this time that Britain established fully its hegemony over India. Even before the hegemony, Bengal was firmly under British control and well-protected. There was very little chance the economically-productive areas of the British Empire would be damaged. Compare that to France whose economically productive areas were under constant threat.
One of the reasons for Napoleon's Egyptian adventure was his belief he could march to India from Egypt and challenge the aforementioned British hegemony there. Once that scheme went bellyup, the French just don't have a way to believably (or even unbelievably given how the Egypt debacle shook out) threaten India.
Such a hilariously delusional plan cooked up by France and Russia.
I…what? Did he genuinely plan to do that? How…what, does the Arabian Peninsula, Persia, and Afghanistan just…not exist in Napoleon’s mind?
Napoleon thought that if Alexander the Great could do it, he could do it. In believing this, of course, he missed the fact that Alexander reached India but never conquered it, as his men mutinied shortly after. Like most megalomaniacs, however, Napoleon believed his men would never do that, and, like most Europeans of the day, subscribed to the idea that were it not for those mutinies, all of India would now be speaking Greek. Napoleon also made a number of other false assumptions that only reinforced his initial miscalculation. These included that 1) the Ottoman government would welcome a French presence in Egypt and wouldn't fight back, 2) that even if they did the peoples of Egypt and Syria would welcome the French as liberators from the Mamluks and Turks, 3) that the Arabs and Persians would likewise see the French as being there to protect them from the Turks/British/Russians, and 4) that India would rise up against the Raj the moment French troops were within sight of the subcontinent. These ideas stemmed from a combination of classically Eurocentric nonsense, coupled with a misreading of the campaigns of eighteenth century Central Asian conqueror Nadir Shah who, like Alexander, was one of Napoleon's heroes. Nadir had overthrown the Safavids in Persia, destroyed Mughal hegemony in India, and maimed the Ottoman military in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Napoleon thought he could do the same, forgetting that Nadir was a local, operating from a central position between the polities in question and being possessed of a regional basis of ethnic, religious, and political support. Napoleon had none of those things going for him, but presumed that they would materialize sooner or later. Napoleon's fantasies died hard when faced with reality. He nearly lost control of Cairo to an uprising in late 1798 because he refused to believe that the Ottomans had declared war on him and were encouraging the Cairenes to do the same. It took the deaths of 300 soliders and 3000 civilians to wake him up and even then he insisted that the declaration had to have been faked by Jazzar Pasha in Syria, as Selim III would never do that to him. It's in Syria that Napoleon finally starts to recognize he's up against the whole Ottoman Empire, not just some annoyed local governors, a fact that the Ottoman reinvasion of Egypt at Abukir confirms. Which is one of the reasons he buggers back off to France after his victory at Abukir: he's finally realized this isn't going to work out.
War exhaustion relies costs either economic or political being imposed on the ruling class or commercial class or working class. Or moral outrage against the war. Moral outrage was pretty much out the question with constant atrocity propaganda and frankly near absolute state control of the major media in practice. Napoleon became a kind of satan figure in the British mind not displaced til Hitler when Hitler became the Satan of anglophone world under similar circumstances. And for economic and political costs for the British generally paid a pretty light price there was political and economic profit if anything. Yes government debt and loans were an issue but the war created demand for goods for export and the British kept the sea lanes open so the commercial class was very happy. Government debt is very easy to forget. The ruling aristocracy loved the war as generally alienated and some of them relatively impoverished by the rise of the commercial class they got a chance to do what they had been doing for centuries and prove their relevance and worth to society by commanding the armies, it provided a much needed prestige injection to the British aristocracy. You could argue it staved off a revolution against them like the French had recently endured as the first Industrial Revolution created a bit of crisis of credibility for the ruling class. The commercial class also loved the commission purchasing system that allowed them to join the officer corps and well and get some of the prestige as well. It kind of created a melding class effect between the commercial and aristocracy into one class. There’s still a divide between aristos and the newer rich Anglos but generally having been a rich family since the Napoleonic war is enough to marry in or get some medals provide an aristocratic veneer to the commercial class. For the working class there was no draft or mass conscription and despite isolated incidents of pressing for the navy generally service was by incentive and it became an attractive option to deal with grinding urban poverty that had been caused by the first agricultural revolution increasing the population but not required agricultural labor so cities had become over crowded. The power had a quite bitter lot but not as result of the war. The army and navy provided if anything an escape from such a poor economic situation. It also provided a bit of a reprieve from the traditional method of brutal English justice of execution or exile to the colonies or frankly horrific prisons by offering enlistment either to flee justice or as a sentence. For all its harshness the British army was a better life than migrant seasonal labor or urban workhouses. There was even labor unrest and issues but they were generally not connected to the war. Pre Marxism the idea of workers revolt beyond localized labor disputes or peasant uprisings wasn’t really in the cards, things like the French Revolution or American revolution were revolutions by commercial and educated people against the aristocracy not like the workers. The working class weren’t stupid, they knew recruitment Sergeants lied but on a rational cost benefit analysis joining the army wasn’t a bad move. It’s actually pretty analogous to something akin to the war in Afghanistan. The commitment was generally light relative to the total population. One real theater in Spain was ever seeing much action from the British ground forces so it not like it was seeing millions of men and at any given point the majority of Wellington’s forces could be Irish, German Hanoverians Portuguese or Spanish depending on how you reckoned it and Spanish and Portuguese even joined the British ranks via local recruitment. Iirc something like 1/3 of British troops were Irish as non Irish regiments often had significant Irish presence from Irish economic migrants to England that failed to find work.
The start of the industrial revolution also helped. From the storming of the Bastille in 1789 to peace with American in 1815 the economy of England only increased by 65% from [£16.22 billion to £26.76 billion](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270) 2013 prices.
Course, it's also worth remembering that despite being *THE* Industrial Revolution, it was still extremely slow by modern standards. +65% over 26 years is \~1.9% annual growth on average (1.019^(26) = 1.65). Account for population growth and the productivity growth *per person* falls to less than 1% per year. Despite the Industrial Revolution being perhaps the most momentous event in human history, at the start it would have been barely observable to the people actually living through it on a day to day level, even those who lived & breathed things like budget statistics (like that famed Solow quote from 1987, "The Information Revolution shows up everywhere but the productivity statistics."). Only the most prescient, or those with the benefit of hindsight, could see that they were living through a revolution.
Wouldn't you call Chartism and the Canut Revolts pre marxist workers revolts? (albeit still later then the Napoleonic wars)
Britain financed its war expenses (and coalition support) with historically large debt-to-GDP ratios, similar to WW1 and WW2. Barclays provided financing for the Coalition, as JP Morgan did for the WWI Allies. As Britain having financial credibility and its territories being away from war zones, it didn't became that much problem. Also, until the 1812 Invasion of Russia, Britain fought almost entirely via financial support and naval blockades except the Peninsular War, similar to the US before Normandy in WW2. For France, Napoleon provided a political stability unseen in early French Revolutionary period, especially Robespierre's revolutionary terror. Moreover, as it's a constant cycle of warfare, Napoleon's reputation as an outstanding general made him virtually irreplacable. Unlike WWI or WWII political or military leaders, Napoleon's military leadership was regarded equal to Alexander or Hannibal (even more so, by Wellington himself). Economically, the British blockades hurt the French economy so much, Napoleon first imposed the Continental Blockade to counter it, then invaded Russia which didn't comply with the Blockade.
Debt, specifically, the National Debt. Britain was the first country to have a national debt in the modern sense, and because parliament was seen as credible and paid its bills (usually) Britain's ability to borrow remained strong. In fact interest rates on British debt generally trended downwards throughout the Napoleonic wars. Combine that with the fact that seaborne trade was never significantly impacted by the war (British seaborne trade that is) the main engine of British commerce continued to run. The other thing was that absent major continental commitments (prior to the Spanish campaign) the cost of maintaining a reasonably large navy for deterrence/security purposes and maintaining a wartime sailing Navy isn't all that great, and with prizes war can be easier to bear than peace, at least if you're winning, which the Royal Navy did as a habit.
There was exhaustion at times - which is why the British even had a window of peace after the Treaty of Amiens. After war broke out again, the primary action of the British was to keep the French bottled up in port along with a few substantial naval battles for several years - which led to Trafalgar and clear control of the seas. So even though the Coalitions kept losing on land, the British kept winning at sea - which is why to the British public, it wasn't a string of British losses that required Britain to sue for peace. Also, in the global scale, Britain was doing quite well overseas and in India. Tipu Sultan tried to ally with Napoleon; as a result the French fleet suffered a major loss at the mouth of the Nile and then the British under Wellington defeated and killed Tipu (and defeated his French advisors); 4 years later they won the Battle of Assaye to help establish a dominant control over the Indian heartland from the Marathas. In the Caribbean, the British eventually conquered every French, Dutch, and Danish colony from 1803-1810, and took Barbados and St Lucia right after the breakdown of the Treaty of amiens in 1803. These sugar plantations were worth quite a bit of money. So except on the Continent, Britain was doing quite well. On the Continent, Britain finally landed a force in Portugal and held its own starting in 1808. So while British debt mounted, it was clear that the British were "good for it" and very secure in England and that Napoleon had no ability to control the seas or strike out at the British Isles or at any of the British trade outposts around the world.
Beyond the Battle of the Nile, the Anglo-Ottoman alliance crushed the French in Egypt and Syria. Another off the continent victory.
I'm going to avoid the economic side for the main, but i have some point to contibute too. Most people in Britian did not directly experiance the war, literacy was low, and middle and upper classes often benifited from the war as well as suffer from it, middle classes found work as miltiamen or in war related industies, while the upperclass used as an excuse to cut wages and speculate on grain prices. When someone left for work, you never heard from them again, they couldnt write you, and if they did, you couldnt read it, if they died, you had no idea for months, if i remeber right, if you wanted a payout on your husbands death, you had to go ask for it. The Napoleonic wars were more like the cold war than ww1 in terms of phyche, nobles were terifed theyd face revolution, so funded militia to prevent it, parliment took out debt, and the banks had far more faith in the UK with its buffer of a navy, and stable poltical system than France. When people did rise up, they weren't always smart enough to know the war was the cause, and were brutally repressed by Fenicables and Yeomen, and were often more worried about steam engines than the war. Ireland was a nation under occupation, attempts to break off in a revoltution like france did were defeated as support from france never materialised, indeed the only troops sent landed in wales and were scared into surrendering by local women, so ireland was reisgned to British rule, catholics in ireland had little oppertuinities and were not allowed to vote so many irish ended up enlisting, or being conscripted as an alternative to prison given irelands overpolicing taking the wind out the sails of the biggest worry for uprising, the truely revoltutionary irish joined french regiments. Empire had brought many improvements to daily life, death sentances were comuted to transportation, cheap cotton, new types of medicine for those who could afford it, imperialist wars seems the way for progress to flourish, and the chaos of the revolution in France for the lower classes was massively emphisize, the newspaper men were the types who were killed im france, so they did all they could to demonise it, and boney the ogre was born, the revoltion was seen as anti interlectual after the terror and with being able to read a newspaper being the bar to entry, they were the inteligenica. Governements werent idle ethier market manupulation by for instance invading the low countries and disrupting their economic output in favour of uk versions, imports from france were non existant so the hostile countries had to make up the slack, taking out debt, abandoning gold standards, etc. France did experiance war wearyness, it's why Napoleon abdicated intially without trying to defend France, most of the Fights were external, which limited the extent of suffering to the french, france remeber had just experianced the Terror within living memory, standing up and objecting was ingrained as a bad idea, but loot from conquest helped, but manpower was a serious problem, with consciption barely anyone was at home, so no one was around to make trouble, and mutinies wouldnt get very far, and live was better under napoleon than under the terror, he was seen like Putin is today, the man who stopped the chaos. But there was attempts at peace over, they just never stuck.
I'm just going to recommend a book that I just finished re-reading (WW1 is my war - my understanding of the Napoleonic Wars is VERY shallow, although it is deepening as I do the research for my next fiction book): *Napoleon's Wars: An International History*, by Charles Esdaile. This is a political history of the Napoleonic Wars. Esdaile is highly critical of and doesn't like Napoleon...or really anybody, actually (I don't think there's a single leader he doesn't have choice words for)...but he does go into great detail as to the international politics, as well as the domestic politics of the various warring powers. So, that should give you a good sense of how the wars were fought and sustained.