'Bliss was it in that day to be alive, but very heaven to be young'

By the time Napoleon comes to power, William Wordsworth has long since abandoned his early enthusiasm for the French Revolution and the ideas that inspired it. As he gets older, he will become, by all accounts, a rather unpleasant old man, fulminating against democratic reform, the abolition of slavery and even restrictions on cruelty to animals.

The new Romantics
But Wordsworth's works – together with that of his fellow Romantics: Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats and Byron – is creating a golden age of English poetry: catch it while you can! Wordsworth, like his friend Coleridge, is living in the English Lake District. But anyone planning a visit is warned to watch out for the laudanum (opium): Coleridge is said to be a bit too besotted with the stuff, although he says that he wrote his great poem 'Kubla Khan' in one sitting after it came to him in an opium dream.

Coleridge is also busy introducing the works of the German Romantics into England. These include the likes of Johann Fichte, who has come up with the idea of the ego; Friedrich von Schelling, who sees nature as the 'earth's soul'; Ernst Hoffman, the fantasy-tale writer; and Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust, published in 1808. The Germans, having discovered a new sense of nationalism, are rebelling against all things French, including the French preference for the more ordered and mechanical arts of the Enlightenment. The power of reason, they argue, is nothing compared to the power of the imagination.

At any rate, this is a phenomenally creative period right across the German arts. The Grimm brothers are collating their folk tales. Hegel and Kant are pre-eminent in philosophy. Friedrich Schiller's play, William Tell, which opens in 1804, will become an internationally known parable of a people struggling for liberty.

Virtuoso music
In music, Joseph Haydn, composer of more than 100 symphonies, six masses and two oratorios, is still active up to his death in 1809. And his ex-pupil, Ludwig van Beethoven, although going deaf, is producing some of his greatest work. If you're in Vienna, you can catch the first performances of the Eroica (his third symphony) on 7 April 1805 and of his Fifth Symphony and his Pastoral (his sixth symphony) on 22 December 1808. The Eroica is originally called Bonaparte, but Beethoven erases this title on hearing that Napoleon has proclaimed himself emperor. The full new title – which, in Italian, is Sinfonia Eroica, composta per festeggiare il Sovvenire di un grand Uomo – is 'Heroic Symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man'. Franz Schubert, meanwhile, is composing some of his 500 German lieder, or 'art songs'. And in England, Jane Taylor's Twinkle Twinkle Little Star lays claim to being the first pop song when it comes out in 1810.

In Italy, the work of Gioacchino Antonio Rossini is not to be missed – most notably the first performance of The Barber of Seville, staged in Rome in 1816. Try also to see the violin virtuoso, Niccolò Paganini, whose techniques are revolutionising the use of the instrument and attracting large crowds.

Revolutionary art
Some of the exhibitions worth seeking out around this time include the first appearance of J M W Turner's Calais Pier, at the Royal Academy in London in 1803. (John Constable is also painting throughout this period.) In Paris in 1799, Jacques-Louis David re-establishes his reputation with The Sabine Women. And in the same year in Spain, you can see Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos ('The Caprices'). You'll have to be quick to catch Goya's work, though, because he quickly withdraws these etchings – which attack a corrupt and backward society and Church – for fear of the Inquisition.

David, whose status as a revolutionary painter led to him being jailed for a time after the death of Robespierre, is undoubtedly the leading artist of his day. This is due in part to the patronage of Napoleon, who, after seeing The Sabine Women, makes him his official artist; in this role, he paints Napoleon's coronation in 1804. David's earlier work includes such paintings as The Oath of the Horatii (1785) and The Death of Marat (1793).

As well patronising the arts, Napoleon is not averse to looting them. The French have brought many of the greatest treasures of European art back to Paris as spoils of war. In July 1798, huge quantities of looted art are paraded through the streets of Paris – sculptures, statues, books, documents, rare manuscripts and paintings by artists such as Raphael and Correggio. In 1802, during the brief peace that follows the Treaty of Amiens, Turner travels across the Channel to see an exhibition of these works.

Other treasures – some looted, some not – have come from Egypt, where a side-effect of British-French fighting in 1799-1801 is an upsurge of interest in the ancient history of that country. The Rosetta Stone, whose three scripts will eventually provide the key to unlocking the mystery of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is found in 1799. Other ancient secrets, meanwhile, are being uncovered at Pompeii. During the French occupation of Italy, more excavations are carried out there than in the previous 50 years.

Mass-market literature
Literacy is increasing throughout Europe – especially, because of Napoleon's education reforms, in those parts under his rule. New methods of printing are developed to cope with the growing demand for books. The German, Alois Senefelder, devises lithography – a way of printing pictures without having to engrave them by hand – while in France, the new 'stereotype' printing system employs typographic characters that can be used again and again without loss of quality. Costs of publishing come down and new mass markets are explored.

For reading on those long journeys, why not try Jane Austen's novels Sense and Sensibility, which comes out in 1811, and Pride and Prejudice (1813)? Certainly, they can't be bettered for pure escapism: except for noting the presence of soldiers, these new 'novels of manners' totally ignore the war and tumult raging throughout Europe to focus on the English minor gentry.

An alternative female writer can be found in Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (see Liberté, égalité, fraternité). Her less-well-known book, A Short Residence, based on a series of personal letters, tells how, in 1795, she travelled to Sweden, accompanied by her two-year-old daughter and a maid. Part travelogue, part political commentary and part love story about her unfaithful lover, it's a good one if you're heading that way.

But if your preference is for the Private Eye of the day, look out for the work of the caricaturist James Gillray. Be careful about taking it into France, though. One of Gillray's most famous caricatures portrays Napoleon as the 'little Corsican gardener' planting his own family as the newly crowned heads of Europe. In it, Napoleon is described as 'one of the most pernicious and most harmful reptiles crawling on the face of this earth'.

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