Historical Notes: Urgent news - by gun, bell and semaphore

TWO HUNDRED years ago this month the British public was anxiously awaiting news of victory or defeat in the naval war against republican France. During the last days of July 1798 London had learnt that Bonaparte was sailing eastwards from Toulon with a huge expeditionary force, stopping to seize Malta as his stepping stone to the Orient. What was his destination? Alexandria? Syria? Even India, perhaps? No one knew. It was some comfort that Nelson was said to be in pursuit. The hunt was on: a 39-year-old admiral chasing a 28-year-old general.

For week after week nothing was heard in England of this great pursuit. All August and September rumour and speculation fed minds hovering uncertainly between eager expectation and despondency. Had Nelson sunk the French fleet or was Bonaparte master of the Levant? Not until Monday 1 October did the sloop HMS Mutine reach Portsmouth with Nelson's report of his triumph at the mouth of the Nile exactly two months previously: only two of 13 French ships of the line escaped destruction; Bonaparte's army was stranded in Egypt, with no hope of supplies or of a mass return to France. On Tuesday morning, gun salutes from Hyde Park and the Tower rocked London; bells rang out from St Paul's and all the city churches. Through Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday there were jubilant peals in towns and villages across the country. That still remained the most effective way of broadcasting good news, as the 18th century gave way to the 19th.

This time-lag of eight and a half weeks between the battle in Aboukir Bay and the victory celebrations illustrates a problem of government in the pre-telegraph age: how to formulate grand strategic plans without recent information on the fate of distant campaigns? To ministers in London it was a familiar question, arguably a cause of defeat in the War of the American Revolution; it was to be posed acutely once more in 1805 during the cat-and-mouse manoeuvres of Nelson and Villeneuve in the months preceding Trafalgar. But it became a problem, too, for Bonaparte: for more than six months in Egypt he received no reports from Paris; and in 1805, though London learnt of Trafalgar on 6 November, 17 days after the battle, the first reports did not reach Napoleon until 17 November, sent on to him by courier from Paris, as he was marching triumphantly on Vienna.

The news made little difference to his plans. The time-lag did, however, emphasise the need for contact between the political autocrat commanding a great army in the field and his executives in Paris. Semaphore stations linked the capital to the frontiers, from where flag relay posts were set up. But the greatest land empire since Charlemagne could not be governed by flag signals; fast couriers were essential.

The decisive crisis of political communication hit Napoleon in the Russian Campaign. Advanced staging posts at Vilna and Vitebsk enabled couriers to carry Napoleon's orders from Moscow to Paris in 15 days, but only so long as the weather held. With the early coming of winter in 1812 the system collapsed. Wild rumours sped across Europe. To the British public the absence of good and reliable news might be frustrating: to the French Empire it proved almost fatal. A madcap conspiracy in the capital raised the bogy of republicanism. "My presence in Paris is essential for France," Napoleon declared when he heard of the conspiracy, snowbound in Russia. A 1,100-mile journey by carriage and sledge brought him back to his capital in 13 days.

From then until the last days of the empire he never again risked isolating himself from Paris.

Alan Palmer is author of `An Encyclopaedia of Napoleon's Europe' and `Napoleon in Russia' (Constable, pounds 20 and pounds 18.95)