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The Indian March of Paul was a secret project of a planned allied Russo-French expedition against the British dominions in India. It was scuttled following the assassination of Emperor Paul I of Russia in March 1801. Russia and Britain were allied during the French Revolutionary Wars of the 1790s. The failure of their joint invasion of the Netherlands in 1799 precipitated a change in attitudes. Britain's occupation of Malta in October 1800 incensed Emperor Paul in his capacity of Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller. He hastily broke with Britain and allied himself with Napoleon who came up with an extravagant plan of a Russo-French expedition to attack the British possessions in India. == Secret plans == The secret plan of the expedition, as preserved in the Russian archives, envisaged the joint operations of two infantry corps, one French (with artillery support) and one Russian. Each infantry corps had 35,000 men, the total force thus containing 70,000 men, plus artillery and a large contingent of Cossack cavalry. Napoleon insisted that the command of the French corps be entrusted to General André Masséna. The route of advance schedule for the French corps started in May 1801 via the Danube and the Black Sea through southern Russia via Taganrog, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan. At the Volga estuary, the French were supposed to be joined by Russian forces. Then the joint Russo-French corps was to cross the Caspian Sea and land at the Iranian port of Astrabad. The whole trip from France to Astrabad was calculated to take eighty days. Further advance would take another fifty days via Herat and Kandahar before reaching the main areas of India in September of the same year. The Indian March was designed to look very much like Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, with engineers, painters and scientists taking part. Also meticulously devised (one can see in it Paul's passion for details) was the public relations side of the Indian expedition. For example, the instructions for trade with the local peoples included the recommendation to sell the cloths "of the colorings most liked by the Asians". The expeditionary force was to have in stock a reserve of fireworks for festive illuminations. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Indian March of Paul」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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