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After six months Arago and Biot located the triangulation point on the mountain
of Campvey. They celebrated and only then did Biot show his companion a letter
written by Méchain, found among his papers, in which he expressed his doubts that
accurate triangulation to the Balearic Islands would be possible. “Even supposing
that it is possible,” he wrote, “the time it would take is so long that it could over-
whelm me, kill me... This unhappy commission whose success is so prolonged,
much more, so uncertain, will be more than likely my failure.”
Arago's youthful exuberance and, one imagines, indiscretion, drew him into
exhilarating adventures. During a tourist visit to Murviedro he met a young señorita
who invited him to her grandmother's for refreshments. Upon leaving her house,
Arago hired a mule-drawn carriage and the services of the mule-driver, Isidro, but
unfortunately the carriage was attacked by her jealous fiancé and an accomplice,
one of whom died when trampled by the mule and run over by the carriage wheels
in the mêlée. The next day, wrote Arago in his own account, the Spanish Captain
General told him that a man had been found crushed on the road to Murviedro: “I
gave him an account of the prowess of Isidro's mule, and no more was said.”
Arago conceived a plan to install a new station on a mountain near Cullera which
was home to bandits; at this time, Spain was descending into anarchy and chaos
through its insurrection against Napoleonic rulers. When Arago had taken up his
post in Paris, Napoleon was at the height of his powers, crowned by Pope Pius VII
as Emperor in the church of Notre Dame in Paris on 2 December, 1804. At barely
thirty years old, he had become First Consul of France in November 1799 and de
facto ruler of the First Republic. Napoleon set about suppressing the democratic
institutions that had been created by the Revolution and developing the centralist
principles which remain in some aspects of French government to this day. In 1804,
he published the
Code Napoléon
, which swept away the remaining privileges of the
ancien régime
in the codification of French laws and increased the power of the
French state. He created the gendarmerie as a para-military police force to suppress
opposition and ruled some of the neighboring countries in the Empire directly from
Paris (the Netherlands and the Low Countries, the Illyrian Province of the eastern
Adriatic coast, western Italy and Catalonia in Spain). In others he installed family
members as rulers - Westphalia in northern Germany, the Kingdoms of Italy and of
Naples, and Spain.
Napoleon's power to the west of Europe was limited by Portugal and by the sea
power of Britain, which won a historic victory over the French navy at Trafalgar
(near Gibraltar) in 1805, but to the east his influence spread into modern Germany.
In 1805 as Arago was planning his journey to Spain, Napoleon was expanding his
Empire further east still with the defeat of the Russian and Austrian armies at
Austerlitz. Prussia was defeated at Jena in 1806, and Russia was defeated again in
February 1807 at Eylau, its army slaughtered. As a consequence Napoleon was able
to create another puppet rule in Poland called the Grand Duchy of Warsaw.
In an attempt to bankrupt and starve his enemy, Napoleon denied the use of
continental ports for trade with Britain. In retaliation the British Royal Navy block-
aded French and other Napoleonic ports on the west coast of Europe and in the
Mediterranean Sea, denying imports from friendly and neutral countries, which
