The transition from war to peace had been curiously uneven, mediated as it had been by the long negotiations to convert the Preliminaries of October 1801 to the definitive Treaty of Amiens six months later. In the same way the succeeding period of peace, after March 1802, was as uncomfortable and confusing as the near-peace of the half-year preceding.

As soon as the Preliminaries were announced some opportunists had headed across the Channel to France, but the main flow of visitors came after the final treaty. The conclusion of the definitive Treaty of Peace, in fact, came as something of an anti-climax to the people of both countries, not surprisingly given the celebrations which had greeted the Peace Preliminaries six months before. The French government dutifully fired guns and illuminated the Tuileries and other government buildings, and the text was published at once. But J.G. Lemaistre, who was in Paris at the time compiling a guide book, found that the treaty was scarcely mentioned at all in conversation, an impression gained also by Miss Berry, who was dining with Minister Jackson at the time: ‘the news in no way occupied any part of the conversation or attention of the rest of the company’. The long, slow grind to a final treaty had demonstrated clearly enough that neither side trusted the other, and the obvious difficulty both governments had experienced in making any concessions at all made it clear that the peace was unlikely to be permanent. The contrast with the Lunéville treaty, where France could use its military victories to exert powerful diplomatic pressure, was strong. And the first consul’s comment on the Amiens treaty, that ‘as far as it depends on me it will be permanent’, was as clear a statement of distrust for Britain as could be made.

This conclusion was, of course, based on more than the perception of the difficulty in reaching a single agreement. It was based rather more profoundly on the history of the previous century and more. The peace treaty of 1802 was the sixth treaty of peace between Britain and France since 1697, and only one of the previous five had lasted more than a decade.